When a Connecticut judge threw out the state’s school financing system as unconstitutional this week, his unsparing 90-page ruling read and resonated like a cry from the heart on the failings of American public education.
Judge Thomas G. Moukawsher of State Superior Court in Hartford was scathing: He criticized “uselessly perfect teacher evaluations” that found “virtually every teacher in the state” proficient or exemplary, while a third of students in many of the poorest communities cannot read even at basic levels. He attacked a task force charged with setting meaningful high school graduation requirements for how its “biggest thought on how to fix the problem turned out to be another task force,” and called it “a kind of a spoof.”
Though his ruling was about Connecticut, he spoke to a larger nationwide truth: After the decades of lawsuits about equity and adequacy in education financing, after federal efforts like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, after fights over the Common Core standards and high-stakes testing and the tug of war between charter schools and community schools, the stubborn achievement gaps between rich and poor, minority and white students persist.
Too many American high school graduates are “let down by patronizing and illusory degrees,” Judge Moukawsher wrote. And too many decisions and too much debate about schools seem, as he wrote, “completely disconnected to the teaching of children.”
Judge Moukawsher’s decision in the case, Connecticut Coalition for Justice in Education Funding v. Rell, which has been making its way through the courts for more than a decade, did not say money does not matter. But it was a strikingly blunt way of saying what many people feel: The system is broken.
“The frustration of the court matches the policy movements across the states and across the federal government over the same time,” said Eric A. Hanushek, a fellow in education at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, who testified for the State of Connecticut in defending what it spends on schools. “It’s not that the states or the federal government has said ‘We’re not going to do anything about schools.’ In fact, there’s been a concerted effort to try to improve things, but it is rather faddish and we do what people currently think is in vogue, and it just hasn’t worked.”
He added, “Just doing more of the same is unlikely to lead to a different result.”
Rather than tell the General Assembly to figure out a way to even out the gap in resources — which is what most courts in similar cases have done — the judge called for a radical reimagining that starts with the question of what schools should do: What are the goals for elementary students, or high school graduates? Then, he said, the state should decide how much money schools require so that all students, rich and poor, reach those goals. In the kind of rational system the judge proposes, you determine what you are trying to do before you decide what you are going to spend.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/09/nyregion/crux-of-connecticut-judges-grim-ruling-schools-are-broken.html?_r=0
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