Commentary—

It’s Cheaper To Test Than To Teach

By William A. Collins

Help or punish?  

What’s our rule?

How to treat,

A failing school.

Political polling consistently shows that education is tops among citizen concerns. Right up there with crime and taxes. Thus politicians are always eager to pretend that they’re doing something about it.

The latest craze is testing. Testing feels comfy because it actually produces numbers. These provide a seemingly objective tool for clucking at central cities and lauding well-appointed suburbs. High numbers help suburbanites nudge up their already inflated property values. Thus Republicans especially love to test. Their hot new proposal is a high school graduation exam. Flunkers wouldn’t get their diplomas. These lawmakers seem undeterred by national experience, which shows that such exams multiply the drop-out rate.

Not that Connecticut kids aren’t awash in tests already. They are. Unfortunately these exams are used more to evaluate local superintendents than to pinpoint troubled students. Above all, they have recently been used to spotlight 28 “failing” schools. You won’t be astonished to learn that these “Connecticut 28” are all in our poorest cities.

The GOP, following its genetic code, seeks to hold officials in those towns accountable. It proposes to award vouchers to the least poor at the offending institutions, so that they can escape to nearby parochial schools. That’s assuming empty seats can be found for them. Democrats, nearly as genetic, propose instead to remove the hateful cap currently placed on funding for these impoverished schools. The existing state formula, once uncapped, would indeed give more bucks to poor towns.

So why, one might ask, don’t the Dems just go ahead and remove it? They control both houses. Well, presumably they fear that the governor would then veto the bill, labeling them as spendthrifts. Thus, overall, not much good ever happens. National evaluators continue to award Connecticut high marks for its average test scores, but low marks on correcting its unbalanced scores between rich and poor. So what else is new?

Well, surely nothing concerning integration. Despite the NAACP’s hollow victory in the Supreme Court, statewide our schools are still growing more segregated each day. And since race correlates so closely with poverty, it’s no surprise that all those failing schools are mostly black and Latino.

There simply aren’t enough votes in the General Assembly to help those kids. Which just goes to illustrate why Martin Luther King was so fierce about school integration. He knew that the only way for his kids to get an equal education was to be sitting next to white kids. Connecticut has proved him right.

Not to say that no good things are happening. Some are, like Hartford’s plummeting dropout rate. A lot of work has gone into that. Preschool, too, is gradually growing across the state. That helps compensate a trifle for the devastating educational shortfall suffered by so many deprived toddlers. Now if we can just enjoy a good solid recession for a few years, we may even scoop up enough quality staffers willing to work at those preschool wages.

But mostly, Nutmeg education is still a family responsibility. Families scrimp for their kids as best they can, move to the best school districts they can afford, and lobby for decent budgets. Wealthy families generally succeed, poor families generally fail. Meanwhile the basic building blocks of good education lie ignored. These include prenatal care, good nutrition, decent housing, skilled child care, clean environment, universal health care, integration, etc.

Each of these items is a costly nuisance to provide. But each would do a whole lot more good than additional testing.

(Columnist William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of Norwalk.)