Connecticut Education Scores Hide Latino Gap

You know the old clichéd saying that not all that glitters is gold. Case in point is Connecticut’s bandied and vaulted education achievement scores. For a very long time that State has been praised for its high marks in standardized testing across the subject board in most all grades.  Connecticut has consistently been in the top 5 states ranked according to educational achievement. But what’s that other cliché? Where there’s light there’s also a shadow.

The stamfordadvocate.com reports

The achievement gap between low-income and non-low-income students in Connecticut is the largest in the nation, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics.

That’s right, children living in poverty in Connecticut, mostly Latinos and blacks, perform considerably worse than their white counterparts.

In 2009, the most recent year for which data is available, the gap between Connecticut’s low-income and non-low-income students was the largest in the United States among eighth grade math and reading students, where non-low income students outscored their low-income classmates by 34 points and 28 points, respectively.
The difference in achievement between the two groups at the fourth-grade level was 30 points in reading and 28 points in math, the sixth and second largest gaps, respectively.

Oops? Here’s the thing, the poor kids in that state had gone unnoticed because the other kids were doing so well. At least that’s their story. Tom Murphy, spokesman for the state Department of Education told the Stamford Advocate “the gap in Connecticut is more pronounced than in other states because white, non-low-income students are outperforming their peers across the nation.”

They’re just that good.

He followed with this:

“Probably the most important issue we have in Connecticut is, how do we address the achievement gap and how do we improve the performance of black and Hispanic students in our state, and close the gap not by reducing performance of white students, but seeing everybody’s scores go forward?”

So rich kids are achieving despite the poor kids, and they want to make sure that they don’t affect the rich by helping the poor, in a nutshell?

On the other hand, the affluent kids were doing so well that the not-so-affluent ones weren’t noticed. Right?

An answer to the problem has been to propose longer school days for Latinos and blacks, but that means teachers would have to be paid overtime. There’s no resolution on that yet.