The State of Connecticut Public Education: A 2006 Report Card for Elementary and Middle Schools

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Preface by Alex Johnston, Ph.D.

September is back-to-school month across Connecticut. This year ConnCAN is marking this back-to-school time by introducing its inaugural edition of a new report, The State of Connecticut Public Education.

The goal is to provide an informative look at how well our public schools are meeting the needs of all students, and to shine a spotlight on those schools and districts that are demonstrating that all kids can succeed. We hope that it will serve as an important resource for state and district leaders, policymakers, journalists, and parents.

This research report is part of ConnCAN’s unique series of Connecticut-specific reports, issue briefs, success stories, and research projects (such as the online School and District Report Cards)—research that aims to shed light on the challenges facing Connecticut’s public schools, while building support for the practical solutions needed to ensure that every child in Connecticut has access to a great public school.

ConnCAN’s mission is to close Connecticut’s achievement gap, the largest gap between rich and poor students of any public school system in the nation. To advance these goals ConnCAN’s research both draws upon and helps inform our other efforts including community outreach, awareness raising activities, and public policy advocacy.

I hope you find this report helpful in developing a more complete understanding of the state of Connecticut education and I invite you to visit us online at www.conncan.org to learn more about our work in Connecticut’s communities.

Introduction by Marc Porter Magee, Ph.D.

In the search for a better understanding of how well our public education system is serving its students, results from standardized tests have emerged as a key yardstick for measuring our strengths, weaknesses, successes and setbacks. But, as the amount of testing data increases, it will take more than just the collection and dissemination of these results to expand our insight into the state of Connecticut education.

The goal of ConnCAN’s The State of Connecticut Public Education report – and the accompanying online report cards on more than 160 public school districts and 1,000 public schools – is to help parents, policymakers and the public make sense of these results by organizing them into key indicators of performance, applying an easy-to-understand grade scale, and providing insight and analysis about what the data tell us about the challenge of raising the achievement levels of all students.

Clearly there are many factors in addition to standardized test results that Connecticut’s citizens take into account when evaluating the performance of their public schools. But while opinions about the overall performance of Connecticut’s public schools may vary, assessments of student achievement provide support for two basic facts. First, Connecticut ranks among the best states in the nation when it comes to the overall level of elementary student achievement in our public schools, and in the middle of the pack when it comes to middle and high school student achievement. Second, Connecticut scores virtually dead-last in terms of the gap in the educational performance between our state’s low-income and minority students and their white, middle-class peers.

More than any other state, standardized test results in Connecticut point to one challenge above all others in our public education system: closing the achievement gap.

National assessments administered to students across all 50 states provide one important perspective on the problem. For example, the U.S. Department of Education’s 2005 National Assessment of Educational Progress reported that Connecticut’s public education system had the largest achievement gap between rich and poor students in the nation.  However, it is Connecticut’s own student assessments that provide the school and district-level results needed for a more complete picture. These annual tests make it possible to provide not only year-to-year state progress reports but also analysis of which schools and districts are making the greatest gains with their students, and which are making the most progress in closing the achievement gap.

Drawing on the results from the 2006 Connecticut Mastery Test,  given to all Connecticut public schools students in grades three through eight, ConnCAN provides letter grades for the state of Connecticut, its districts and its schools across four key performance indicators:

• Students within Goal Range. The average percentage of students at or above the state goal on the 4th grade reading, writing and math tests (for elementary school) and 8th grade tests (for middle schools).
• Subgroups within Goal Range. The average percentage of African American, Hispanic and low-income students within goal range on the 4th grade reading, writing and math tests (for elementary school) and 8th grade tests (for middle schools).
• Gap between Subgroups. The difference in the average percentage of students within goal range between African Americans and whites, Hispanics and whites, and non-poor and poor students.
• Performance Gains. The growth or decline in the average percentage of students within goal range between their fall 2004 4th grade tests and their spring 2006 5th grade tests (for elementary schools) or their 6th and 7th grade tests (for middle schools).

The complete results for each school and school district—along with student demographics, grade levels, size, contact information and per pupil spending—are available for free by registering at www.conncan.org. The methodology and grading tables can be found online or in the Appendix of this report.

In the sections that follow, this research report builds on ConnCAN’s school and district report cards to provide analysis and key findings for Connecticut, its top districts and its top schools. Results from this 2006 analysis include:

• Statewide. In general, Connecticut’s elementary schools are outperforming its middle schools. This is seen most clearly in the area of performance gains, where elementary schools on average secure a 5 point increase over the course of the year in the percentage of students within goal range, compared to a zero point gain for middle schools. Both elementary and middle schools received their lowest grades for their achievement gaps, which—despite already being the largest in the nation—increased slightly over the past year.
• Districts. The consistently highest performing districts across the four performance measures were Trumbull, Windsor, Bethel, Milford, and Voluntown. In general, the top districts do not stand out from state averages in terms of district size or per pupil spending levels. But the students served by these districts are on average less likely to be low-income or Hispanic, which lessens the impact of these districts on closing Connecticut’s achievement gap. 
• Schools. Both magnet schools and public charter schools were disproportionately represented on the Top 10 Schools lists. 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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