Plan proposes $1.35 billion to address school achievement gaps
By Christine McCluskey, Journal Inquirer, January 25, 2007

A new plan to close the achievement gaps between students of different racial and economic backgrounds in Connecticut proposes an investment of $1.35 billion over the next six years in preschool, charter and magnet schools, and other initiatives.

The plan has the support of House Speaker James A. Amann, D-Milford, and the Education Committee's House chairman, Andrew M. Fleischmann, D-West Hartford, who joined the plan's authors Wednesday to announce its major points at the Capitol. The proposal was written by the Connecticut Coalition for Achievement Now, a 2-year-old nonprofit organization that aims to close the state's achievement gap and promotes charter schools as one way of improving education.

The size of the gap between the academic performance of poor students, black students, and Hispanic students and the performance of wealthier and white students is greater in Connecticut than in any other state, ConnCAN Executive Director Alex Johnston said.

ConnCAN's proposal, "Great Schools for All: A Plan Big Enough to Close America's Largest Achievement Gap," suggests spending $510 million on preschool between 2008 and 2013.

The state should increase preschool funding so that every child whose family's income is 185 percent of the federal poverty level or less - in other words, $30,710 or less for a family of three - can attend a high-quality program for free, the proposal states.

This alone would cost $468 million over the next six years. It was a proposal also made by the council Gov. M. Jodi Rell created to plan the expansion of early childhood education in Connecticut.

ConnCAN's plan also includes $612 million for new schools, $345 million of it for charter schools.

The plan says investments also should be made in magnet schools, smaller high schools, and "pilot schools," which are public schools that operate with some of the flexibility of public charter schools.

Recruiting principal and teacher "all-stars" into urban school systems, making it easier for schools to share improvement methods, and making achievement data more transparent - which would include developing a system for rating schools - round out ConnCAN's list of proposals.

"ConnCAN in my opinion has all the right emphases," Fleischmann said.

He and Amann criticized a Tuesday report from the state's largest teachers union, the Connecticut Education Association, that said the top-10 lists of schools publicized in a ConnCAN report from this fall should not be used by state lawmakers or others to make decisions about education.

"I don't need to see more data on the achievement gap," Fleischmann said. "The achievement gap is unacceptable."

"Do not be distracted by the naysayers," who are simply challenging who gets "the almighty dollar," Amann said.
Amann said later that the CEA is overly concerned with how much the legislature budgets for charter schools.

If charter schools are producing positive results, they should be supported, Amann said.

"They sound a little jealous," Amann said of the CEA.

The fall ConnCAN report the CEA criticized, "The State of Connecticut Public Education: A 2006 Report Card for Elementary and Middle Schools," gave schools and school systems grades and rankings based on their improvement, overall and within specific student groups, on the Connecticut Mastery Test from 2004 to 2006.

Local school administrators whose schools showed up on the top-10 lists proudly publicized the information this fall.

But University of Connecticut researchers Peter Behuniak and Jessica Goldstein wrote in Tuesday's report that the lists failed to take into account the significant factors of student mobility, schools' initial achievement status, variation in school size, and very small differences in achievement between schools that mean many rankings could have been changed by the performance of one or two students.

Behuniak is a former director of the CMT program, which as of 2006 tests students in grades 3 through 8.

The CEA said that while it commissioned and publicized the report the conclusions drawn in it are solely those of Behuniak and Goldstein.

"The importance of this report is to bring a new perspective to the legislative debate," CEA President Phil Apruzzese said Tuesday.

ConnCAN's report found charter and magnet schools to be disproportionately represented on the top-10 lists.

But "the achievement levels, improvement and performance gains displayed by magnet and charter schools are approximately as varied as are those displayed by traditional schools," Behuniak and Goldstein write.

And they wrote that the top-10 lists are "unjustified" given that most schools' subgroup data were unavailable because there were fewer than 20 students in the subgroups at those schools.

Behuniak said Tuesday that the numbers ConnCAN used were accurate but its interpretations of those numbers were not justified, he said.

He said he does not believe the lists can help policymakers and parents make decisions about education and that it would be better for them to go directly to the state Department of Education for information not just about test scores but also class size, curriculum, and other factors.

ConnCAN Director of Communications and Research Marc Porter Magee said Tuesday that his report gathered data from the Department of Education, so the gaps in subgroup information in ConnCAN's report are the same gaps that would be found by going to the state for information.

And Magee said that when it comes to the achievement gap, ConnCAN is more concerned with schools where there are significant numbers of students in the racial subgroups anyway.

He said ConnCAN was surprised to find so many charter and magnet schools on its top-10 lists.