New Haven Independent

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Teachers have a responsibility to create a disciplined atmosphere in the classroom and to foster a love of learning. But even the best teachers have hard time doing that in the face of arbitrary testing and a lack of resources for schools.
That sentiment came across loud and clear this weekend in a wide-ranging “citizens summit” on the state of education and the achievement gap. More than 150 people from different backgrounds gathered to hash out those issues at Gateway Community College Saturday as part of a nationwide grassroots discussion to be aired on public television.
“We call [No Child Left Behind] No Child’s Behind Left,” said participant Mary Quinn-Devine, a former nun and Catholic school teacher who now teaches in North Haven’s schools. “If you want to know what sin is, what depravity is, it’s the federal insistence that disabled kids be tested on grade level. … Last year, these kids had to take 8th grade tests. Intellectually, they’re functioning on a 3rd, 4th, maybe 5th grade level. It was just a practice test, and these kids sat there, and one kid started to cry and break down.”
Nancy Coleman, who works as a teacher’s aide, had the same complaint. “I proctored a kid in high school who was taking his SAT. He had special needs. And he sat there and said, ‘I don’t know what the answer is, Ms. Coleman.’ He finally just started circling and answering whatever.”
The only thing the 150 people who gathered in the library at Gateway Saturday had in common was that as participants in earlier Greater New Haven Citizens Forums, they had been chosen randomly to participate in “By The People,” a series of 16 deliberations on education and the achievement gap filmed over the course of a week for a Nov. 10 edition of the Newshour with Jim Lehrer.
Not all of them were advocates, though local and state politicians, including New Haven Alderwoman Dolores Colón, State Rep. Toni Walker, and State Sen. Toni Harp turned out to watch them debate in small groups and grill a panel of educational experts. Explained Cynthia Farrar, a Yale professor of political science and member of the Forum’s advisory committee, “We identify folks randomly so you get more than the usual suspects. The hope is to get a really mixed set of folks with different perspectives.”
Participants came for different reasons. The group I joined included a businessman, two concerned parents, a public school early-education teacher, a former nun who has taught both Catholic and public school, and a newly certified teacher’s aide. It quickly became clear that they shared deep concerns about improving education in Connecticut and the ways in which current policies, especially No Child Left Behind, are failing the children they care about.
Ray Munroe, a New Haven parent, said he felt responsible for the long-term impact education would have on his children. “The ultimate result [of a good education] is a good job if you’re older,” he said. “If you don’t get into a good college, chances are you’re not going to be the one chosen for a good job. You want your child to be in a good position.” His fellow participants agreed that parental involvement is critical to educational achievement, but they couldn’t identify a solution for parent disengagement. That held true not just in the city, but in more affluent and educated suburban communities.
Mary Hepler, whose children go to school in Cheshire, said at one PTA meeting she attended, “they got a total of 20 parents. They’ve got over 800 children [at the school]. That was the biggest PTA meeting we’ve had in years. These people are educated. They’re not involved.”
Munroe was particularly upset about what he saw as a consistent and continuing refusal to set high standards for achievement and to make education meaningful. “They don’t meet the standard because they’re not taught,” he insisted. “When I took the SAT, there were so many words that I didn’t know. I thought I was a good English student, but when I got back my first paper in college, it looked like someone died all over it. It seemed like I went through high school just as a process.”
Munroe said he was shocked at the difference in available resources when one of his children left Catholic school and started public school. “At the Catholic school, our kids have the backpacks that roll because the books were too heavy. In public school, all they have is a backpack with a folder in it. There are no books that they can take home and go ahead of where the teacher is.” Coleman cited the inability of public schools to hire more teachers and teachers’ aides to minimize the effect of packed classrooms.
They were not alone in their frustration. During the afternoon’s panel discussion, Natasha Smith, a lifelong New Haven resident with one child in school in Hamden through Project Choice and two more beginning school in New Haven schools, confronted the panelists about the failure to fix a broken system. “I don’t see why it’s so hard or such a struggle to copy those schools,” she told them. “I don’t see why that’s so difficult.”
“I was sitting there thinking these issues are very complex,” Sen. Harp said, citing one panelist’s repeated criticism of Connecticut’s teachers’ unions. “To blame one group is unfair. Teachers need to have unions, so I think that’s a copout that’s been used for the past 20-30 years.”
Their deliberations may not have produced a comprehensive solution to Connecticut’s educational problems, but the participants said they still felt that the day was worthwhile. Babz Rawls-Ivy, an alderwoman from New Haven’s Beaver Hills neighborhood, said she felt her group members were “very energized, very concerned, very diverse in their discussions of what needs to happen around education. We have more in common than not, more people who realized we have a gap around race and class and are willing to talk about it.” Lisa Cobham said it was a relief to know that she was not alone in her attempts to navigate a sometimes unfriendly and unhelpful school system to get the best education possible for her daughters.
Smith told me she had been inspired by the discussions to turn to political advocacy for her children. As part of the attempt to keep participants involved in education reform, the New Haven Public Library will host a non-partisan event on Nov.r 16 to help pair members of the Greater New Haven community with the advocacy groups that address their most pressing concerns.
If one consensus emerged from the deliberations, it was this: Education is a national and community responsibility, but communities cannot succeed in the absence of workable federal policies and levels of funding.
Quinn-Devine’s comments summed up most people’s feelings: “Basically, education is about kids. I can do as much as I can, and I do try with parents, but my job is to do the best job I can possibly do within those six hours with education meaning moral education, common amenities, social justice issues, social responsibility as well as all the academics. Kids don’t have a choice to whom they were born. Sometimes geography is destiny. Sometimes economics is destiny. … Kids come in at all different levels of intelligence, all different levels of preparedness. It’s not a level playing field for every single kid starting in an educational system. If Bush and his goons want to do anything, they should put a lot of federal money into free, exemplary preschool programs for everybody. And pay qualified people to do the job.”