Villar on the MJLU EER

Here is the link:  http://www.windsorct.org/pages/Windsor_Public_Schools/District/Superintendent_s_Corner 

Someone told me that this was out there.  So here is the cut and PASTE (I will read it tonight).

News from the Superintendent EER Study Results: We All Have Skin In The Game

The Windsor Board of Education received the final results of the Excellence and Equity review conducted by Loyola University on August 29, 2013, during a special meeting of the Board of Education. The results were also shared with the community in a public forum immediately following the Board of Education meeting. Both meetings were well attended and interested members of the public weighed in on the subject during public comment and during the public presentation. You can find a copy of this report on the home page of the Windsor Public Schools website www.windsorct.org.

The study has been a source of conflict from the very beginning and I believe much of it centers on the core values and beliefs that we each hold and the intersection of these beliefs with the frank reality of the chronic low performance of economically disadvantaged, Black, African-American, and Latino students within public schools across our state in general and within the Windsor Public Schools in particular.

It is irrefutable that the performance of the Windsor Public Schools as measured by the Connecticut Mastery Tests (CMTs) when taken as a whole leaves much room for improvement. After all, Windsor has the dubious distinction of being ranked near the top of the thirty lowest performing districts in Connecticut.   Let me be clear, this is not to say that we do not have examples of students who personally have obtained a great deal of success as a result of their experience and their learning while attending school in Windsor. On the contrary, we in fact have many examples of students who are achieving at very high levels and have experienced tremendous success in our schools. Unfortunately, these are increasingly the exception rather than the norm.

The challenge presented to the Windsor Board of Education and the greater Windsor community is the fact that many of our students are not experiencing success within our schools. Evidence of this lack of achievement is not only highlighted in the results of the Equity and Excellence study but can also be found in the Connecticut Mastery Test (CMT) results.  For example, our most recent CMT results show that 56.1% of Windsor grade three students scored goal on the mathematics test (5.5% below state average). Delving deeper into the data reveals that 36.9% (2.6% higher than state average) of black students in Windsor met goal on the test while 81.7 (7.8% higher than state average) of white students reached goal. Simple math reveals a 44.8% gap in the performance between the two groups. The debate begins when we ask why. I believe all kids can learn to high levels regardless of race, ethnicity, social economic status, etc. so from my perspective, this is simply unacceptable and explanations don’t help resolve the problem.

There are those who feel everything starts at the home and parents are to blame. Others place full responsibility on the institution of the public schools, administrators, teachers, cultural competence, assessments, and the list goes on. The achievement gap, like education, is a multivariate construct that means we may never find causality but rather we can only identify relationships. For example, we know there is a relationship between poverty and poor performance in school. This means that when there is poverty we often find lower performance in school. We can, however, also find high performance in school in the presence of poverty. That is to say poverty does not always result in poor performance in school. While the two variables are related, one does not necessarily cause the other. In fact this also means there are circumstances that somehow counter the impact of poverty on achievement, demonstrating that changes in our educational system can have a dramatic impact on the outcomes of our system (improve student learning). Rather than condemning poor or diverse children to low performance in schools, I believe we must look to change our system for educating children to ensure better outcomes for all children.

I believe that as a town, a state, and ultimately a nation, we cannot accept that a large portion of our children are underachieving in our schools year after year after year. Our nation is rapidly diversifying and we are failing to educate large numbers of diverse children. This is an unsustainable course and we must find solutions to this problem. Spending valuable time, energy, and resources arguing from ideological positions about the cause of the problem has not helped.  

I would suggest that the district's recent effort to boost minority enrollment in Advanced Placement (AP) courses (rigorous courses that are college equivalents taken during high school) from 11% to over 50% may be a road map that we should consider in order to close these gaps. The district was successful in its efforts to better diversify the AP classes because it not only encouraged minority enrollment in the courses but it also ensured that all students enrolled were given all of the support necessary to succeed.  In fact, the pass rate for students enrolled in AP on the end of course exam is 73% or 12% higher than the GLOBAL pass rate. The program is producing excellent results while maintaining high standards for all learners. While this approach alone is surely not enough to close our achievement gaps, it certainly is an excellent first step and we have the data to prove it.

Regardless of your beliefs as to why students are struggling in our schools, solving the problem matters to all of us. We know what our institutions of old and current practices can and have accomplished. The time has come to make a change in direction and reshape our institutions. Whether you like it or not, we are all in this together: we all have skin in the game.

September 5, 2013

Jeffrey A. Villar, Ph.D.