Commentary –

Still Nervous About Our Schools

By William A. Collins

Lovely surplus,

Bucks to burn;

What’s the good,

If kids don’t learn.

It’s comforting to know that as of 1997, Connecticut was still among the top four states in school spending. We plunked down about $8,000 per kid. The Department of Education also comforts us that we still lead in teacher pay and test score performance as well.

Why is it, then, that many of us feel uneasy? Foremost, perhaps, is the sense that while Connecticut may be best, the best is none too good.

Our kids don’t shine when lined up against Europeans or Japanese. As in everything else, we crave being tops in the world in education. We also perceive that many sore points can lurk within a pile of pretty averages. Averages can be highly skewed by a few wealthy suburbs.

These pay plenty for their fine schools, which means that the rest of us lie somewhere deeper in the heap. Happily, one bright side of all these averages, and it is very bright indeed, is that a higher percentage of Nutmeg kids actually take standardized tests than do kids in any other state. Elsewhere, the bottom performers are often excluded from the exams. That means that our children, all of them, are truly performing better than the averages show.

But that doesn’t mean that we don’t still have a lot to learn from others. We do. One fine model is Georgia. We’ve taken steps to emulate them, but we still fall short. In Georgia, you see, every 4-year-old is entitled to free pre-school, paid for by the state. That makes pre-school a lot like public school, since rich and poor alike are eligible. Parents have come to see it as a universal right. Thus they mostly sign up, and the state regulates most of the programs.

In Connecticut, pre-school is still much more haphazard. We pay for poor kids only, and many parents don’t even know or bother to sign up. Towns are even giving state money back. Vast numbers of youngsters thus end up warehoused in somebody’s living room, rather than absorbing the basic learning skills and socialization that we would love them to be armed with when they enter kindergarten. Most agree that a bad start to kindergarten harms kids throughout their school careers. As the nation’s biggest spending state, we haven’t really put our backs into this problem yet.

And in blessed Bloomfield, the Board of Education recently threatened to end all-day kindergarten itself, rather than sports, if the town didn’t pony up its budget. Give me a break!

Wisconsin is another state to watch, though not all for the good. Its Supreme Court just OK’d funding of local school districts equally, without regard to how rich or poor the separate towns are. Sounds like the Middle Ages. We’re way ahead of that. But wait! It turns out that Wisconsin pays two-thirds of all public school costs. Connecticut pays only 40 percent. To each his own Renaissance.

In the end, the thread that runs through these, and most education, issues is income disparity. Georgia has transcended it, at least for pre-school. Wisconsin wallows in it. We wallow too. Whether it’s teacher salaries, building maintenance, class size, school supplies, counselors, or pre-school, the wealthy towns zoom, while the poor towns limp. Our standardized tests, too, are often of less interest for helping Johnny learn than for helping us decide which town to move to.

But most of us live in neither swank suburb nor fetid slum. We just want the state to step up to the plate and assure that all Connecticut kids get the basic tools needed to make a good life. Today many still don’t. They remain lost in the averages.

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