School Board Minority Leader Calls for Controversial Study to be Ended Friday

The following was written by Windsor Board of Education Minority Leader Paul Panos:

In recent public comments in the Hartford Courant and the Windsor Patch Windsor Board of Ed President Richardson asserts that it is inappropriate to consider cancellation of the Equity and Excellence (E & E) Review Study by Dr. Marlon James and Loyola University.

The resounding referendum vote suggests otherwise.  Attempts  to dismiss the E & E study as a nonfactor in that referendum simply do not square with reality. The proposed BoE increase was not very high, and its effect on taxes was even less.  Perhaps the Dollar Tree distribution center was a factor up by Rainbow road, but that does not explain the rest of the town. 

Attempts to blame it on “politics” are meaningless – the budget is obviously political.  Those of us on the Board who opposed the E & E Study did not make an issue of it during the budget deliberations.  So the budget was not rejected because a few minority party members of the Board opposed its magnitude of increase.  It went down in large part because many citizens who normally vote “Yes” in the referendum were angered by the one-sided manner in which it was introduced,  the  injustice of presuming that poor academic performance of minorities can be assigned to a group of teachers by race, the complete lack of evidence that Dr. James can improve  academic performance of minorities,  the conferring of an easy (no performance guarantees tied to student improvement) contract upon a single favored vendor without inviting others to compete, the later removal of items from the state grant to on the BoE budget in order to place the Dr. James contract on the grant just to say that the study is “paid for by the state, “ etc.

Let’s be clear. Dr. James has never taught at a High School, Middle school, or Elementary school.  So no matter what advice he gives to “close the gap”, he has never done so himself.  

Furthermore, Dr. James cannot produce the name of a single school system or school or classroom that took his advice and reduced the achievement gap. In fact, Dr. James himself has refused to give any guarantee that if the Windsor Public Schools follows his advice, we will reduce the gap.  

Watch the video of the September meeting, during the questions and answer period, when Dr. James explicitly states that he will give no such guarantee.   Finally, his contract has no such guarantee. He obviously realizes he cannot reduce the gap. 

Why, then, do members of our Town Council and Board of Education and some people in the public continue to believe that he is here to show us how to eliminate or reduce the gap?  

Dr. James obviously has a charming speech-making manner about him, by which he implies that he can do something, without ever saying he is going to do it. People fill in the rest by implication.  

So why not just try him out, anyway? Because to accept advice as a leap of faith from someone who cannot demonstrate a single success at something he claims to be able to do, even in a simple instance, is to court failure.  There are far more ways of failing than succeeding.  

It is not a valid argument to say that we cannot end the Loyola contract because the state requires the 

E & E in the grant. The state had initially accepted our Alliance Grant application without Dr. James’s  E & E study. Dr. Villar later amended the application to switch items that were in the grant for the Loyola study. He can simply reverse that process, and we can end the contract for next year.  

To say that we have a contract we cannot break would also be incorrect. The contract has a provision to cancel should the project be terminated.

The Loyola contract should be voted upon in the special meeting, and ended. We cannot afford to risk another rejection of the budget at the polls. We stand to have valuable teachers dismissed just to salvage the deeply flawed E & E Study.