    
News Release - September 26, 2006 Contact: Marc Porter Magee Achievement Gap Identified as State’s Top Education Challenge, Schools Making the Greatest Gains in Closing Gap Highlighted. Connecticut is home to a number of high performing public schools that have made tremendous progress in raising student achievement over the past year, but also a growing achievement gap that has emerged as the nation’s largest, a newly released report by the Connecticut Coalition for Achievement Now (ConnCAN) finds. ConnCAN’s research report, The State of Connecticut Public Education, also revealed that while low-poverty middle schools in Connecticut are succeeding in reaching students who have fallen behind, the percentage of students meeting the state goal actually declines between the 6th and 7th grade in Connecticut’s high poverty schools. Alongside this new report, ConnCAN launched a free online tool that provides report cards with letter grades for 160 school districts and over 1,000 public schools across four key performance indicators: Overall Performance, Subgroup Performance, Achievement Gap, and Performance Gains. (The report cards are available for free at www.conncan.org). “We created the report cards to help parents understand how well their public school is meeting the needs of all its students, and to help spread the good news about those public schools around the state making the greatest strides in closing the achievement gap,” says ConnCAN executive director Alex Johnston. Accompanying the report cards on ConnCAN’s website are Top 10 lists of the highest performing schools and districts across the four performance indicators and a measure of overall improvement. While Connecticut’s largest school districts have low average levels of student achievement, the report cards reveal that they also have a number of individual schools producing very strong results. In fact, seven of the state’s larger districts– New Haven, Bridgeport, Hartford, Stamford, Waterbury, Norwalk, and Bloomfield—contain 51 percent of the schools on the Top 10 Schools lists. Both magnet schools and public charter schools were disproportionately represented on the top 10 lists of high-performing schools. While magnet schools make up just 4.4 percent of all schools, they held 20 percent of the spots on the Top 10 lists. Charter schools, which make up just 1.2 percent of all schools, held 13 percent of the spots including 25 percent of the number 1 or 2 spots on each list—20 times more than their numbers would suggest.
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