The convocation on Monday of educators and school district staff at Newtown High School was true to its name, which according to its Latin root (convocare) is a great calling together. The Board of Education, Legislative Council, selectmen, finance board members, school administrators, teachers, and professional and skilled staff members gathered to acknowledge the start of a new school year and to appreciate the portents in this moment of their togetherness. It was a group familiar with contention and negotiation, often with each other, in the cause of the district and its nearly 7,000 students. There was no disagreeing with First Selectman Pat Llodra’s observation, however, that “excellence in education stands paramount with all the core values in Newtown that we hold so dear.”

So it was that the teachers’ union president, the superintendent, political leaders, educators, clerical staff, bus drivers, school nurses, custodians, cafeteria workers, and every facilitating person of the thousand or so professionals who go to work every day to make education happen in Newtown were called together and acknowledged in full view of each other and the community. There is no better time than the beginning of a school year to remind ourselves that if home rule is good for anything, it is good for education. “I believe that everything, absolutely everything, is doable with a thoughtful approach and hard work,” Superintendent of Schools Joseph V. Erardi, Jr, told the group. When even passionate adversaries share the essential hopes of their own community for educational excellence and success for children, Dr Erardi’s belief becomes quite compelling.

The superintendent may have a better idea than the rest of us of just how hard that work is going to be. He now has access to the school district’s scores on the 2015 Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) exam. He has also been instructed by the state Department of Education not to share those results with anyone just yet. The SBAC test is the assessment for the controversial Common Core standards. One thing we do know, however, is that the consortium purposely aimed high in setting proficiency standards for the test.

Late last year, SBAC released data showing how high. It projected that most students taking the 2015 test would fail to meet the benchmark grade-level skills. SBAC projected that just 41 percent of the 11th graders taking the test will show proficiency in English/language arts, and just 33 percent in math. The stress this assessment will cause across Connecticut and the 22 other states in the consortium promises to be both academic and political.

The problem with state and federal assessments like this is that the baked-in rate of failure provokes knee-jerk state and federal “solutions.” Top-down educational reform is not a calling together of supportive communities. It is a calling out, a conjuring of culpability, and then a mess of mandates. Setting standards of success in those assessments that fairly assure failure for so many school districts makes it more political ploy than educational reform. Whatever leavening there is of the educational process as a result of home rule and the community spirit of convocation can be quickly flattened when the innovators-on-high in Hartford and Washington make their predictable show of putting their foot down.