In attempting to transform Connecticut”™s schools, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy is willing to borrow the best ideas from just about anywhere, including some promoted by a powerhouse think tank thick with Fairfield County people.
The Connecticut Coalition for Achievement Now is now exporting those ideas to the nation ”“ perhaps one day even to Massachusetts to which Malloy and his aides have cast an envious eye for its own approaches to education.
After Malloy unveiled his plan to recover Connecticut”™s once-pristine image in public education, ConnCAN lauded the governor, including his aim for a limited “money follows the child” component ConnCAN sought in previous years.
If signed into law, the new rules would require school districts to pay charter schools $1,000 for each student that enrolls in a charter school from a district”™s territory ”“ raising the hackles of public school advocates who see taking any money from districts as making a bad situation worse.
Longer term, ConnCAN hopes to prod the state into a complete revamp of how it apportions money through the education-cost sharing (ECS) formula, which in 2010 redistributed $1.9 billion in funding ”“ 10 percent of the state”™s budget, according to Connecticut Voices for Children ”“ between schools depending on their municipality”™s economic profile.
Malloy formed a task force last August to study ECS.
As it continues its push for school reform in Connecticut, ConnCAN affiliate 50CAN is fast starting up affiliates in other states to prod policymakers into action, including in New York where 50CAN is based.
ConnCAN”™s dozen-strong board of directors is stocked with financiers who live or work in New York City and Fairfield County, but its larger advisory board is far more representative of the state, a mix of representatives from community, education and business groups with a few national names sprinkled in for good measure such as film director Ron Howard and Tom Vander Ark, the first director of education for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
ConnCAN is watching Massachusetts on how it has addressed education reform, both statewide and in trouble spots like the big-city Boston Public Schools or smaller cities like Brockton.
“Over the last decade Massachusetts has taken a strong stance (on school reform), but Connecticut has coasted,” said Patrick Riccards, CEO of New Haven-based ConnCAN. “Right now when we talk about adopting strong standards, Massachusetts is the model.”
In a speech at Harvard University, U.S. Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan echoed those thoughts, even as states adopt common core standards that will hold kids in Mississippi to the same standard as those in Massachusetts.
Massachusetts “addressed out-of-school factors that impede student learning,” Duncan said. “It has invested in creating the largest extended learning-time experiment in the country. It has one of the best-coordinated early learning systems in the nation. In 2010, the Massachusetts legislature passed a law that calls for chronically underperforming schools to have a significant health and social services components in their turnaround plans.”
Stefan Pryor, Connecticut”™s new education commissioner, is already reorganizing his department to emphasize strategic priorities rather than compliance.
And Pryor will run a “commissioner”™s network,” a system of state supports and interventions to improve chronically low-performing schools. Those interventions range from extending classroom hours or the school year itself to parachuting outstanding teachers into an underperforming school to taking over whole schools in an effort to turn them around.
