Teachers Are Scapegoats In Malloy's School Reform
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The problem with education in Connecticut is income inequality, not teacher quality. Unfortunately, the plans Gov. Dannel P. Malloy has outlined for education reform — for the most part — take us in entirely the wrong direction.
Education in Connecticut is a paradox. Though the National Assessment of Educational Progress consistently ranks the state among the highest scoring for student achievement, we also suffer from the highest black/white and poor/non-poor achievement gaps in the country.
For example, look at 2011 Connecticut Mastery Test data for eighth-graders. There is a dramatic difference in the percent of students testing at goal in mathematics in the wealthy towns of Westport, Darien and Ridgefield— 96, 94 and 92 percent, respectively — as compared with less wealthy Waterbury, New Britain and New London — 28.5, 21 and 19 percent, respectively. Almost every town in Connecticut follows this strong correlation between income and achievement scores.
If schools were primarily responsible for the achievement gap, we would expect the gap to increase as students progressed through grade school. Yet the gap is almost unchanged from third to eighth grade, as evidenced by results of the 2011 CMTs. The inequalities
