Connecticut Local Politics

The Department of Education has released data on the latest round of mastery tests, and here’s some standout facts:

Gains in most grades in mathematics and
writing performance statewide, as measured by the percentage of students scoring at or above the proficient and goal levels;

Modest declines overall in reading scores statewide (percentages at or above proficient and goal levels);

A moderate gender gap in reading and a large gender gap in writing performance with boys scoring substantially lower than girls;

Females consistently outperform males by about five percentage points in reading and by at least ten percentage points in writing;

No gender gap in mathematics with girls scoring at about the same level as boys;

Large gaps continue to persist in performance between minority and white students and between high poverty and low poverty students across all grades in math, reading and writing as measured by proficient and goal levels;

See the full report (PDF).

While it’s good to see that the gender gap in science and math has closed, the widening gap between girls and boys in reading is very serious indeed. This is nothing new–this gap started to become apparent on CAPT scores when I was teaching high school in the early years of this decade. The gap is huge. I’m talking differences of 20% or more. There are a lot of possible reasons why this could be happening (boys think reading is stupid, societal issues, developmental reasons, few male role models in English education) but they just don’t add up for me.

Of course the most worrisome gaps are the most persistent: the differences between white and minority, and rich and poor. Wasn’t this just the gap that NCLB was intended to fix? Apparently, “holding schools accountable” by cutting off funding or scaring the crap out of them doesn’t work as well as that legislation’s backers had hoped.

It’s becoming more and more painfully obvious that there are very few people indeed who have any idea of how to fix these problems. The report gives some great examples of standout schools, but they are few and far between. Are more magnet schools the answer? Is regionalism the way to go? The Department is suggesting more training for new teachers, reworked curriculum, more professional development, support for certain benchmarks and parental training. The last is the only one that is likely to have any noticeable impact–if they can get parents to go along.

The achievement gap isn’t an education problem alone. It’s a part of a massive, interconnected web of severe social and economic problems plaguing our cities, ranging from issues of health and wellness to economic blight to poor education to crime and violence. They’re all connected.

We won’t fix any of these problems permanently until we can somehow address them all. My own thought is that it’s time to stop treating our cities like islands, and foster the sharing of resources between cities and suburbs. But even that isn’t anywhere near the whole solution.

In the meantime, the Department of Education acts to fix what problems it can.