New state system uses one number to rank schools

As published in the Record Journal Monday December 24, 2012

By Russell Blair
Record-Journal staff
rblair@record-journal.com
(203) 317-2225

The state Department of Education released a new metric for student achievement this month, ranking each school on a scale of 0 to 100 with the new Student Performance Index.

Scores from the Connecticut Mastery Test and the Connecticut Academic Performance Test have been publicly available for years, but the new index averages the numbers over the past three years, taking into account all subjects and grades to create a single figure.

“The state’s new school accountability and support framework enables more precise, more helpful snapshots of school performance,” Commissioner of Education Stefan Pryor said in a statement. “By heralding schools making significant progress and highlighting schools in need of greater support, the system will also help districts and the state focus our efforts where they are needed most.”

Unlike metrics under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, the new system takes into account graduation rates and student growth in scores, even if they don’t reach a predetermined goal.

State officials have set a goal of all schools eventually reaching a score of 88, which means most students scored at or above the goal level on the CMT and the CAPT. A score of 67 or higher means most students scored at the proficient level on the tests.

Locally, scores in Cheshire and Southington, on average, surpassed 88.

Southington School Superintendent Joseph V. Erardi Jr. said he was “pleasantly surprised” by the district’s scores. “What we thought was happening in the schools equated to a fine performance,” he said.

But Erardi said he has concerns about how the new metric will be rolled out over the next few years. The measurement will play a significant role in new teacher evaluations that are a part of the state’s sweeping education reform legislation.

Cheshire School Superintendent Greg Florio said he wasn’t surprised by the district’s results.

“We’ve been monitoring our test results forever and I knew our scores would be fairly strong,” he said.

In Wallingford, all elementary schools were within a point or two of the state goal, except for Parker Farms School, which scored 76.8. The middle schools scored in the high 80s, while Lyman Hall High School posted a 78.9 and Sheehan High School posted an 81.4.

Wallingford School Superintendent Salvatore Menzo said he was pleased that there wasn’t a large gap in scores among the district’s schools.

“We don’t have pockets of excellence or pockets of need,” he said. “We don’t have a lot of disparity.”

Meriden schools performed the lowest locally, with only three schools scoring higher than 67: Israel Putnam, Thomas Hooker and Lincoln Middle. Hooker scored the highest, at 86.1.

But Meriden Superintendent Mark D. Benigni said it was important parents and others “don’t get too caught up in the test scores.” Several city schools, including Hanover and Casmir Pulaski, were recognized for the growth students had made in their scores. Benigni said the scores help school officials to know where to allocate resources such as reading specialists, but a higher number doesn’t mean one school is better than another.

“It’s not just scores,” he said. “You have to look at parent involvement, climate, culture and the extracurricular opportunities the school provides.”

Joseph Cirasuolo, executive director of the Connecticut Association of Public School Superintendents and a former Wallingford school superintendent, said the new number is a “step in the right direction,” but parents shouldn’t make snap decisions about schools using the figure.

“You can’t make final judgments based on that number,” he said. “You need to look at what’s behind it.”

Program to add classroom time in effort to boost achievement

As published in the Record Journal Monday December 3, 2012

By Josh Lederman

Associated Press

WASHINGTON — Open your notebooks and sharpen your pencils. School for thousands of public school students is about to get quite a bit longer.

Connecticut and four other states are planning to announce today that they will add at least 300 hours of learning time to the calendar in some schools starting in 2013. Colorado, Massachusetts, New York and Tennessee will also take part in the initiative, which is intended to boost student achievement and make U.S. schools more competitive on a global level.

The three-year pilot program will affect almost 20,000 students in 40 schools, with long term hopes of expanding the program to include additional schools — especially those that serve low-income communities. Schools, working in concert with districts, parents and teachers, will decide whether to make the school day longer, add more days to the school year or both.

A mix of federal, state and district funds will cover the costs of expanded learning time, with the Ford Foundation and the National Center on Time & Learning also chipping in resources. In Massachusetts, the program builds on the state’s existing expanded learning program. In Connecticut, Gov. Dannel Malloy is hailing it as a natural outgrowth of an education reform law the state passed in May that included about $100 million in new funding, much of it to help the neediest schools.

Spending more time in the classroom, education officials said, will give students access to a more well-rounded curriculum that includes arts and music, individualized help for students who fall behind and opportunities to reinforce critical math and science skills.

“Whether educators have more time to enrich instruction or students have more time to learn how to play an instrument and write computer code,adding meaningful in-school hours is a critical investment that better prepares children to be successful in the 21st century,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a statement.

The project comes as educators across the U.S. struggle to identify the best ways to strengthen a public education system that many fear has fallen behind other nations. Student testing, teacher evaluations, charter schools and voucher programs join longer school days on the list of reforms that have been put forward with varying degrees of success.

The report from the center, which advocates for extending instruction time, cites research suggesting students who spend more hours learning perform better. One such study, from Harvard economist Roland Fryer, argues that of all the factors affecting educational outcomes, two are the best predictors of success: intensive tutoring and adding at least 300 hours to the standard school calendar.

More classroom time has long been a priority for Duncan, who warned a congressional committee in May 2009 — just months after becoming education secretary — that American students were at a disadvantage compared to their peers in India and China. That same year, he suggested schools should be open six or seven days per week and should run 11 or 12 months out of the year.

But not everyone agrees that shorter school days are to blame. A report last year from the National School Boards Association’s Center for Public Education disputed the notion that American schools have fallen behind in classroom time, pointing out that students in high-performing countries like South Korea, Finland and Japan actually spend less time in school than most U.S. students.

The broader push to extend classroom time could also run up against concerns from teachers unions. Longer school days became a major sticking point in a seven-day teachers strike in September in Chicago. Mayor Rahm Emanuel eventually won an extension of the school day but paid the price in other concessions granted to teachers.

Just over 1,000 U.S. schools already operate on expanded schedules, an increase of 53 percent over 2009, according to a report being released today by the National Center on Time & Learning. The nonprofit group said more schools should follow suit but stressed that expanded learning time isn’t the right strategy for every school.

Some of the funds required to add 300 or more hours to the school calendar will come from shifting resources from existing programs, making use of the flexibility granted by waivers to No Child Left Behind.