Opposition from teachers to the state Education Department’s new Smarter Balanced standardized test for grades three to eight and 11 is understandable enough. Student performance on the test soon may be used in teacher evaluations even as the department is changing school curriculums, and teachers figure that the changes will rattle students and diminish their performance, reflecting unfairly on teachers.
Meanwhile some parents are trying to get their children exempted from the new test on the grounds that it may be too tough and that giving it on a computer may make it tougher. This is nonsense, and not just because kids generally are more adept with computers than adults. No, it’s nonsense mostly because no test given in any Connecticut public school, from the statewide standardized test down to a snap quiz in geometry class, means anything to students at all.
For while many students — half or more in some schools — fail to perform on standardized tests at what the Education Department considers “grade level,” nearly all are promoted to the next grade anyway. Students can score perfectly or zero on the statewide test or even refuse to take it at all and it has no bearing on their promotion.
That’s because Connecticut has no minimum academic achievement requirement for promotion. To the contrary, the state’s unwritten policy is to promote everyone who can find his own way down the corridor to the next grade, on the premise that holding students back, embarrassing them and increasing the risk that they will drop out of high school, is worse than pretending that they have learned something and graduating them ignorant and without job skills.
The state’s unwritten policy is even worse than that. It is also that every student deserves a college education even if he has failed high school. That was the revelation four years ago from a survey of state university system and community college freshmen. It found that more than two-thirds were so unprepared for college that they had required remedial math or English classes or both — that their high school diplomas were essentially frauds.
State government’s response to the survey was only to outlaw remedial classes and require college teachers to handle remediation individually, within regular classes, so there never again would be a survey exposing social promotion and calling it into question.
Connecticut’s teachers long quietly condoned all this social promotion while they got regular raises, escaped serious evaluation, and enjoyed exemption from the right-to-know law for their evaluation records. Only now that they might be held somewhat accountable for the failure of their students through more serious evaluation are teachers getting upset about the many slackers in their classrooms.
Still, the teachers have a point, though they are catastrophically late with it and don’t make it explicitly: How can Connecticut presume to judge its teachers by the performance of their students when the state doesn’t dare to judge the performance of those students themselves?
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Years of prattle about the needy at the state Capitol have not only left Connecticut more impoverished but also have ignored some of the neediest — mentally handicapped people who should be living in state-financed group homes but instead remain heavy burdens on their aging parents at home.
While state government always has money to increase the salaries of unionized state and municipal government employees, the Malloy administration has reduced the budget of the Department of Developmental Services, which now can place many of the mentally handicapped in group homes or other care only in emergencies. Last month hundreds of families of the mentally handicapped came to the Capitol to protest. Many told sad and disgraceful stories of state government’s indifference to their plight.
This neglected need is far more compelling than busways, mouse factories, burrito restaurants, and a dozen other expensive fetishes of the Malloy administration. If it set even slightly better priorities, state government easily could end this disgrace now.
Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.