Connecticut's High School Science Teacher Certification Found Wanting

A recently published report by the National Council on Teacher Quality gives us more disturbing news about the quality of the teachers put in front of high school science classrooms. Some States, including Connecticut, have set the bar very low -- expecting little specific knowledge about the different science disciplines before being permitted to teach some of the most demanding and important high school subjects.

Connecticut received the lowest possible score in this report -- a RED light. Here are some pulls:

The US suffers not only because of the math and science teachers we don't have -- in many cases we also set unacceptably low expectations for the STEM teachers we do have.

[M]any states fail to guarantee that biology, chemistry and physics teachers have mastered the content they teach. . . . The bottom line is that the so-called flexibility of the "broad field" science teacher is a fantasy. In reality, the concept of the all-purpose science teacher not only masks but perpetuates the STEM crisis, and does so at the expense of students.

[Connecticut's] approach does not guarantee adequate knowledge in particular areas of science. Candidates are only required to pass the Praxis 2 General Science (and content essay) test. These combination assessments fail to note performance in any specific science discipline, and a candidate could answer many questions wrong in one area yet still pass the test.

New High School Graduation Requirements -- Should they be Voluntary?

The State has just realized that it is broke and really can't afford to pay for the sweeping new high school graduation requirements they passed last year into law. This new law will apply to kids that are currently in the fifth grade -- the class of 2018. To graduate from a public high school in CT, students will have to pass state tests in the subjects of english, math, science, and history, get at least a credit in a foreign language, and do a "capstone" project.

In the next 7 years, the State expected to do a lot of the prep work for implementing these standards -- things like deciding what would actually be on those exams, writing model curriculum, and defining what would be a capstone project. The State had counted on using all those federal dollars dangling out there in Race to the Top to pay for the new requirements.

The federal dollars never materialized. Connecticut's application for $175 million was rejected. Since then, other events have taken center stage. With the looming budget crisis, legislators appear to have noticed that all those laws they passed last year are still on the books, but there's no money to make them a reality.

One idea is to delay the requirements even later than 2018. Another is to do nothing and let the towns figure out how to pay for all the new things they'll have to do.

Here's a third idea -- make them voluntary. Some of the new high school graduation requirements are unproven with no research base behind them -- particularly former Commissioner McQuillan's "capstone" project. I've been uncomfortable with the whole capstone project requirement, even when it seemed possible that someone else (my federal tax dollars rather than my state or local property tax dollars) would pay for it.

But I've got some serious misgivings about the whole capstone project as it is. It might be a good idea, but there's little evidence at this point that it would do anything at all to prepare students for life after high school. So, keeping an open mind -- how about we make the new requirements voluntary and ask school districts to provide feedback instead.

Ask districts in their yearly reports to include a short description of whether they voluntarily implemented any of the new requirements and to describe their experiences.

I start with an assumption that the vast majority of citizens and towns would like to graduate students well prepared to achieve after high school. If they think this new capstone project is a good idea, some will try it. The towns that don't like it or can't afford it, can watch the experience of other towns. It could be a great big collaborative project where towns share their experiences and give each other feedback before we mandate it across the state.

LYNN: McQuillan Resigns Citing "Stress"

With the abrupt resignation of Education Commissioner Mark McQuillan on Dec 21, Connecticut will have a new leader at the Department of Education for the first time in four years, and the first to be appointed by a Democratic Governor in 24 years.  The CT Mirror carried a fascinating account of the resignation, which gives the impression that McQuillan's decision was made on the spur of the moment, surprising everyone at the State Board, Governor's transition team, and himself. In other words, McQuillan snapped. If the CT Mirror is to be believed, our Commissioner was miffed that the Malloy transition team called a meeting at the same time as McQuillan's school finance panel meeting, that McQuillan's meeting had to start late as a result, that members of the school finance panel came up with (get this) THEIR OWN IDEAS on how to reform school finance, and that the School Board Chair had the audacity to try to control the meeting. At which point McQuillan adjourns the meeting and storms out. The next day he quit.

Up to that point, the Malloy team had considered McQuillan a strong contender for reappointment  to be Commissioner. Probably not so much anymore.

The State Board of Education will meet tomorrow, January 5, to appoint an interim commissioner until the Malloy team can pick a permanent replacement.

WNPR, CT's public radio station, did a soft news retrospective on the legacy of McQuillan. According to the WNPR story, McQuillan's biggest two accomplishments were a scaled-back high school reform law and getting a parent on the HS reform task force. That sounds about right to me. McQuillan has been an enormous disappointment over his four years running the education department.

Personally, I had high hopes for him. He came from Massachusetts and had served that state (as a mid-level deputy) during the time that MA underwent one of the most remarkable transformations of any state education system. MA now boasts some of the most robust and extensive achievement in the nation. Taken on its own, MA students perform near the top when compared with international students. The US as a whole has done dismally on international comparisons for decades.

One could have hoped that McQuillan would bring the MA model to Southern New England. But he did no such thing. Instead, McQuillan seemed bent on re-making CT's high schools from scratch. Rather than look at what had worked in other states or other nations, McQuillan chose to simply change everything.  What he ended up proposing had no basis in research and would have imposed a model of radical experimentation on CT schools. The legislature was right to reject it. In the end, the only change McQuillan got through was to require high school graduates to do a "project" before they graduate. Wow.

Meanwhile, what happened to the State's education system under McQuillan? I'll have to dig up some hard numbers for a future post, but basically, CT continued its downward spiral in all categories except one -- we spend a lot on teacher salaries. In fact, I believe that CT has the highest teacher salaries in the nation. But every measure of performance has shown a steady decline in achievement -- graduation rates are terrible, SAT scores (of the few that do graduate) are flat, college remediation rates are soaring (as high as 40% in a recent study), and the State continues to have the biggest achievement gap in the nation.

CT was once considered to have the best schools in the nation. Now the undisputed leader is Massachusetts. CT's position has slipped on every measure. As McQuillan departs, the new Commissioner will have all of those problems to deal with, plus a budget crisis as the federal stimulus money ends, and a dysfunctional state education department.