Last month, an article was published in the Connecticut Mirror detailing the story of a recent Hartford Public School graduate who was never taught to read or write. This student, Aleysha Ortiz, first came to Connecticut from Puerto Rico and started attending Hartford schools when she was 6 years old. She testified in front of Hartford City Council about years of systemic neglect, being forcibly pushed through the system and a “stolen” education. This story managed to reach the floor of the state legislature, horrifying elected officials and spurring them into a frenzy of discussion over solutions, such as replacing the leadership of Hartford Public Schools and increasing financial oversight of the district. Yet, the discussions currently held in the legislature fundamentally miss the real systemic issue at play here. If Connecticut wants to fix its educational failings, the first step has to be addressing the current state of racial segregation in schools.
Connecticut is, and historically has been, one of the most racially segregated states in the entire nation, according to a new state-funded study. Although often unseen because of the Northeast’s liberal nature, there exists a subtle, but no less harmful, form of discrimination that has dominated the lives of minorities in Connecticut to this day. Since about 1910, economically and racially restrictive covenants were created in many towns across CT to exclude the sale of property to minority buyers, with some surviving until as recently as 1972. As time passed though, this type of explicit discrimination fell out of favor. Instead, starting in the 1950s, towns began to try more subtly to prevent minorities from joining the white flight out of cities by establishing exclusive zoning policies that prevented low income housing and established high minimum sizes for single family housing. The consequences of this are still felt today by communities. The extreme differences in life span, poverty rate, home value and income between towns like Hartford and Greenwich, for example, are still apparent and require significant action to fix.
This has everything to with education policy because segregation in one inherently leads to segregation in another. Schools are funded by a town’s property tax base, leading to a positive feedback loop wherein poor towns can’t fund their schools, which leads to worse educational outcomes for students, and only exacerbates existing inequalities by preventing them from achieving at a higher level. In Connecticut, a majority of students attend a school which is either greater than 75 percent white or greater than 75 percent BIPOC as of 2020. The schools that are majority students of color are more likely to be underfunded. Plus, these students are more likely to be English language learners, have disabilities or generally have “greater learning needs.” This presents as a stark contrast to more affluent school districts, which are the exact opposites, having students who have more outside support, less learning needs, and equal or greater spending per student. On the other side of the classroom, averages in teacher pay and class size are both worse off in school districts with a higher concentration of students in poverty, which makes it an unattractive destination from a staffing perspective as well.
The impact of all these factors on schools and students is clear. Lower income school districts are more likely to have greater need, and greater lack, of guidance counselors, social workers, psychologists and special education teachers per student, which was clearly demonstrated in Ortiz’s case. As for the students, the majority of students from low-income families have far lower standardized test scores on reading and math than they should given their age. Stanford researchers have shown that the difference between wealthy students and poorer students in terms of test scores has not just stayed consistent due to historical factors, but rather it has grown substantially in recent decades.
In the broader context of the entire American education system, Connecticut actually sticks out regarding how bad this problem is. When comparing the achievement of specific groups here in Connecticut to the national average performance of those groups, black students, English language learners, Hispanic students and students eligible for free or reduced lunch are largely worse off in Connecticut. On the other hand, white students are by far better situated than white students in other states. This shows the great education that Ortiz’s parents came to this state for is real, it’s just not afforded to minority students because of a century of racial and economic discrimination that has kept them very far away from obtaining it.
It is no mistake that this story came out of Hartford Public Schools or that the student in question is a Latina immigrant with learning disabilities whose parents chose to come here for better opportunity. The odds are so heavily stacked in favor of more affluent students that an outcome like this would never come from Greenwich or West Hartford. This is a systemic failure that can’t simply be fixed by increased funding or replacing the individuals currently at the helm of Hartford Public Schools. This is Connecticut’s history, but it is also its present and has to be properly reckoned with if any substantive change is going to be made.
Yet the answers are pretty much right in front of us. Just do what other successful places do. In this case the Commonwealth of Mass has the Metco program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/METCO A similar system would have hartford students going to west hartford and glastonbury etc.
Then add in the lack of development due to the surface act, a lack of a Dover amendment etc. CT does not run as a state it runs as a confederacy of towns. State laws are quite weak and frankly there is no real investigative arm to keep things in check.
I think this already exists, it’s called Open Choice and Glastonbury and West Hartford both participate in it.
The Latina superintendent for Hartford Public Schools over the last eight years spends more than 3 times what her neighbors spend in central office administration, add that money to the per pupil money spent on education and HPS would be spending on par what Hartford’s neighbors are spending. With Open Choice, HPS kids are choosing to attend neighboring white districts, but desegregating HPS schools, which was suppose to happen with the Sheff v. Oneil case hasn’t happend as suburban kids coming to Hartford magnet schools have declined and HPS enrollment has been falling for several consecutive years, which has kept tuition money from coming to HPS. General funding from the state to local school districts takes into account demographics and student needs, and there is a separate state program which reimburses districts for special education costs (unfortunately, not fully). Superintendents and their third-party non-profit partners take financial advantage of the system you describe and there is no accountability over spending or academics, whether it be from governmental watchdogs or community bulldogs, thus the message is always one of race and funding. That is not the whole story.