Where We Live: Closing the Achievement Gap

achievement gap

I work in a Hartford area High School. I am retired military and did teacher training in Texas, including a Masters program in Special Ed. Though not certified in Ct I go to work everyday in a challenging environment. I follow closely the news about NCLB and Race to the Top. Very little focus in on student accountability. For the business people on this committee I ask them to think about production. Production(test scores) is done by the kids, not the teachers(I am a substitute so no institutional bias here). If a child refuses to read the book or do the homework, for whatever the reason, little or no learning occurs. Schools are about learning, not teaching. Please ask a teacher about how much time is spent on classroom behavior. My special ed training taught me that no learning occurs until behavior is under control. I have stood in front of a ninth grade classroom for the full fifty minutes and never once did the kids get silent and turn their attention to me. This happened when I was a long term sub and had been in that classroom for the previous 3 weeks so the kids and I knew one another. On the last day of regular class this year I had a senior girl call me a fucking asshole. Got the picture now?

E-mail from Richard

your program on the achievement gap was spectacularly revealing and valuable.

Request: We need another session on this same subject as the coverage did not exhaust the needed discussion of the issue. Also, the text of the program should be made available to the Governor’s Commission and to others for study.

Comments:

The primary issue concerned is how do we pay for improving education in the State of Connecticut; more challenging, the lowest achieving schools are located in the places that can least afford to spend more. Those same schools and their communities are also the most costly environments in which to teach and to learn.
As you correctly remarked, in low income-located schools with kids with problems, class size needs to be much smaller than in high income areas.
Teachers are very hard to retain in low income-located schools because of problems with discipline, more learning disabilities, and poor parental support. Many good teachers burn out quickly. High teacher turnover in a school not only results in a lower quality of teaching, but it is much more expensive due to the cost of recruiting and training.
Living environments of kids in very low income areas are terrible places for kids to do homework, to get rested up, and to develop a positive outlook on life. How can kids survive and thrive in a living environment where they are surrounded by drugs, violence, high noise levels, poor nutrition, etc.?
Good mentoring programs for kids ( from within the school and from the community ) are difficult to develop and sustain. Mentoring is one excellent way to inspire kids to attempt to push ahead in school and to create hope. Mentoring is time consuming, takes the right people, and good mentors are often difficult to find in very low income communities.
Raising the education level of parents is very important. It is a key, perhaps “the” key to raising income levels and improving parenting.
The commission studying the achievement gap issue is well intentioned, but in the State’s current budget situation, finding the funds to pay for better secondary school education seems to be an impossibility unless productivity in government is improved, and taxes increased, and the local economies boosted appreciably.

Thanks again for the great discussion about the achievement gap on Where We Live.

E-mail from Ted

I was listening to the program this morning and was stunned, but then, not at all surprised that, within the discussion regarding Pre K and elementary education, with your panel of educators and high commissioners of education present, no one, no one, not even once mentioned the role of public libraries have and continue to play in the education of our states children.

In Windham the Willimantic Public Library has been involved in family literacy and the Birth to Three for at least fifteen years. For a number of years we had a full time day care coordinator bringing materials and literacy into our town’s child care center. That position was cut. We continue to reach out to families. Families have to come to the library.

Many of the state’s public libraries are very much involved in this area, yet do not receive any funding whatsoever. Boards of Education are very jealous of their funding and do not embrace outside agencies in this effort.