Hartford Schools’ Superintendent Beth Schiavino-Narvaez last week advised the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights on closing the nation’s achievement gap between low-income and affluent students.  Segregation by race and income, immigration across more than 80 language groups, locating a launch pad for jobs in the global economy – and other equally serious issues – are banging on the door.  How can society responsibly answer?

Unraveling the snarled data matrices of public school financing is complicated, but two thoughtful analyses before the Commission last Friday promoted understanding of the issues:

®     Dr. Narvaez, speaking about “Public Education Funding Inequality in an Era of Increasing Concentration of Poverty and Re-segregation,” brought forward the central challenge facing city schools: 85 percent of the District’s students are eligible for free or reduced-price meals (a key indicator of poverty).  Hartford families also live at three times the state poverty rate – 25 times greater than that found in some of the wealthiest CT towns.

By seeking to establish that every student thrives and every school is high performing, Dr. Narvaez elaborated, the District now is emphasizing student-centered learning and developing school leaders.

It is clear, she said of the local situation, that “the challenges faced in cities like Hartford are quite substantial and … require a greater amount of resources to be able to tackle our work while producing more equitable results.”  Without question, this is the fight that must be waged for Hartford children.

The magnet school approach in Hartford has been valuable, Dr. Narvaez also told the Commission, but it’s not that simple:

… While we have been successful in driving these new theme schools in favor of our student population, the unintentional outcome has been a concentration of needs in those schools not affected by Sheff.  While magnet schools get new buildings and increasing budgets, our historical neighborhood and community schools are lacking in similar investments.

Primary and secondary public education in Hartford reveals a tale of two cities, one for those lucky ones whose number is called for enrollment at their preferred school and another for the rest who must make do with limited options.

Money is an important part of the equation to achieve equity, but we must not forget that providing support and political capital will help us avoid the redundancies and pitfalls experienced in the city of Hartford.

®     Phil Tegeler, president/executive director of the Poverty & Race Research Action Council – and a former CT ACLU legal director involved in desegregation cases.  Speaking on a separate panel at the Civil Rights Commission, he emphasized that housing and school policy must be dealt with simultaneously if progress is to be made on educational equity.  Nationally, the number of families living in concentrated poverty almost doubled from 2000 to 2013, he said – and one-fourth of African American families live in concentrated poverty neighborhoods, according to a new study.  However, the number of schools with plus-90 percent non-white enrollments more than tripled from 1988 to 2013, he pointed out.

This is important because attendance in racially and economically isolated schools is linked to a wide range of negative educational outcomes, including lower student achievement results, higher dropout rates, lower college completion rates, less qualified teachers, high rates of teacher turnover, less challenging curriculum, and higher rates of student discipline, Attorney Tegeler said, citing longstanding research.

That message was amplified this week by a federal report on school segregation, which found that students in predominately poor, predominately minority schools had less access to Advanced Placement classes and gifted and talented programs, were exposed to elevated discipline rates, and were suspended and expelled at disproportionately higher rates than students at all other schools.

The Bottom Line.  The testimony that Dr. Narvaez and Attorney Tegeler delivered this past Friday reflected the important evidence-based discussion American cities need to have if we are ever to improve schools for the most disadvantaged students.  But it can’t be the cities talking alone; the entire metropolitan region and the State need to be having this conversation if we’re going to figure out how to close the achievement gap and also win the war against poverty.  We’d like to think that when you’re as small a city as Hartford, it can be done.  But not without some really tough conversations being led by our Mayor and other key leaders. And not without solutions to the problem being clearly articulated, advocated for, and debated. We all know the problem; the question is: What should be done about it?

It bears mentioning that segregation and disparate resources in the U.S. continue to characterize institutional racism at its core.  Perhaps no one institution, policy, or person is to blame, yet the problems get worse and worse, and slowly the pain felt by some becomes pain felt by many.  In CT, this pain is becoming all too real for way too many.

As the State and City deplete rainy-day funds and chop key services to balance their budgets for the 2017 fiscal year that begins July 1^st, the grim reaping leading to layoffs gets the headlines (and appropriately so, as emergent budget crises do trickle down to employees).  But it might be helpful now to begin looking ahead to Fiscal 2018, when, after having surgically sliced the muscle, officials next year will probably have to cut into the bone.

Today we are taking a look at a particular line item in the budget on page 240: transportation.  It’s a $20,738,822 million proposition now … and who knows when all the influential factors will cause it to spike up again.

Three years ago, Hartford school administrators saw that, at a cost of more than $400 per day, per bus, they needed to vigorously investigate street connections and traffic times, fully utilize the GPS on all the buses, get a few wins in contract negotiations, and thereby lower costs.  They have dropped the student transportation expenditure by $3 million since 2009, despite transporting many more children.

he 98 buses running three years ago have been reduced to 90; collaboration across school districts to lower costs is being pursued, and the possibilities for adjusting bell times or taking other measures to further lower costs are always on the table, HPS Chief Operating Officer Donald Slater said in an interview this week.

At the same time, the District has increased regular ridership from 5,000 to 9,000 and special education serviced passengers from 1,300 to 1,450 over the past six years, all the while using logistical improvements to decrease costs.

Some $13 million of the $20.7 million in current HPS transportation costs goes toward out-of-district buses for students with disabilities, which require door-to-door service with monitors on board.  Going forward, creative, regional cross-district approaches could bring those costs down even further, Dr. Slater said.

The Bottom Line.  Hartford certainly did not need another firestorm right now and so the thought of increasing student walking distances to reduce high-cost bus routes was put out of mind… for now.  But Chief Communications and Public Policy Officer Kelvin Roldan warned, in a recent Board of Education committee meeting, budget constraints next year likely will require the re-thinking of student transportation and walking distances. This and other painful conversations are set to take place during next year’s budget process.

When George Mehaffy described his “Re-imagining Freshman Year” Project to college educators at Goodwin College April 29^th, audience members were impressed that this effort to reform higher education is under way on 44 campuses.  What they didn’t expect was that he would say colleges are not only generally passive about reforms … but “co-conspirators” in maintaining the status quo.

Following more than 20 years of teaching and administrative experience in higher education in Texas, New Mexico and California, Mr. Mehaffy serves as vice president for academic leadership for the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU).  That organization represents 420 public colleges and universities.

As the keynoter for the Center for Higher Education Retention and Excellence (CHERE) conference April 29^th, Mr. Mehaffy brought a compilation of data and insights to an audience of Greater Hartford higher education professionals and college students at Goodwin College.

More and more students are straining to go to college – some 71 percent of 2014 college graduates left with debt, he said, and it averaged $29,000.  While a Georgetown University report has termed the higher education system “more and more complicit as a passive agent in the systematic reproduction of white racial privilege across generations,” Vice President Mehaffy sees it differently.  Higher education staff not engaged in undergraduate education reform are not just witnesses but co-conspirators to failure, he warned.

Whereas the common parlance now concerns whether students are college and career ready, he told local educators, “I have another question for you:  Are colleges student-ready?  And the answer is, not even close.”

Here are just a few of the additional trends and trouble spots that Vice President Mehaffy underscored:

• Freshman college students are expected to grow into decision-making adults between high school graduation and college enrollment (“We treat first-year students as fourth years,” he observed);
•  At the same time, one school has shown that more freshman students earn full college credits after simply watching a 45-minute video of college seniors talking about how to succeed (“We know a lot about what works; what we don’t do is do it”);
• Household income between 2006 and 2011 went down 7 percent while college costs rose by 18 percent; forty-seven states are spending less on higher education than they were before 2008;
• Low-income Black and Latino students have higher loan balances and are more prone to drop out without receiving a credential;
• Ed Trust reports that persistent racial gaps in graduation rates will remain for the rest of this century; and
• In 50 years, if not sooner, one analyst predicts, half of America’s 4,500 colleges and universities will have ceased to exist.

The enormous impact of technology – on journalism, photography, and the music and book publishing/bookstore businesses, as examples – is already influencing higher education and that impact is bound to grow.  Access to information, including videos that support personalized learning, is making location less relevant to the delivery of education.

In the three-year project to re-imagine the first year of college, such success stories as special interventions for at-risk freshmen, extra class hours, mentors, and high expectations will be examined – but a key idea is that innovation must be done at scale – not another pilot, Vice President Mehaffy said.

Indeed, higher education professionals need to commit to standards of care, just as in the medical profession, he emphasized.  “If you don’t, you’re guilty of contributory negligence.”

Here is a description Dr. Mehaffy delivered in February regarding the re-imagining freshman year project; here is his full presentation as delivered at the CHERE conference.

The Bottom Line.  One student attendee at the CHERE conference made a scintillating point about college, comparing her experience to having a bad cable TV plan, having to pay for courses neither appealing nor useful.  Addressing that disconnect – as well as the equity concerns raised by Vice President Mehaffy – will be crucial not just for the futures of students but those of colleges as well.