by Allan Appel
Over his long career as a teacher, principal, and now superintendent of schools in Hamden, Gary Highsmith has seen time and time again little kids starting kindergarten without knowing the difference between a letter and a number; without being able to identify primary colors. Meanwhile, other kids the same age nearby on the carpet are already reading books.
That’s why, if he ruled the education world and could have his fondest wish, it would be quality universal pre-K for every child.
That idealist vision emerged Monday night at a panel event exploring the structural inequality in public education convened at Albertus Magnus College’s Eckhart Center.
In addition to Highsmith, who was the featured speaker, respondents included his mentor Dr. Leroy Williams, a long-time New Haven educator; Dr. Kelly O’Leary, who is the principal of the independent Catholic St. Martin de Porres Academy in the Hill neighborhood; Donna Pallanti, who is the supervisor of education programs at Albertus; and Gladys Washington, who is studying at Albertus in preparation for a second career as a nurse.
There was little disagreement among the panelists on the structural causes of such gaps in learning: mainly the problems of poverty, which can often be generational, and correlate with poverty’s grim cousins, racial, economic, and housing segregation.
Or as Highsmith put it earlier in his remarks: “The Connecticut Metro areas are among the most segregated by race, poverty, and income inequality.”
Gladys Washington, Dr. Kelley O’Leary, Gary Highsmith, Dr. Robert Bourgeois, the moderator, Dr. Leroy Williams, Donna Pallanti
Donna Pallanti highlighted the glaring gaps among groups that result from a funding structure for education that, to a fault, is based on local taxation. The result: “The neediest districts have students who have the most needs,” she said.
And the least resources to close those gaps.
And all of this, of course, snowballs from year to year, generation to generation. Among the welter of statistics panelists cited — like $27,000 per pupil spending in Fairfield County versus $20,000 in New Haven — Pallanti, a teacher trainer, pointed out that currently Fairfield County’s schools have six teacher vacancies whereas New Haven currently has 48. All those students who every day face a rotating or changing cast of often ill-prepared substitutes are not going to get needs met, gaps filled.
But there is hope and Highsmith suggested the past might be a guide. In the if-there’s-a-will-there’s-a-way department, he cited the success of the G.I.Bill in addressing the educational and housing needs of ten million American soldiers returning from World War II, which paved the way for the generational wealth that made the expansive economy of the 1950s and 1960s possible.
“Except,” he added, “Black vets were systematically denied those benefits. The same problems Connecticut had in 1944 we have today, that is, a structural inequality that could have been eliminated.”
Highsmith and the other panelists, however, were not entirely Jeremiahs as the past also offered points of light.
“In 1998,” Highsmith said, “Connecticut’s fourth and eighth graders were tops in the nation in reading and math, and for years after that Black and Latino student achievement performed so well, the achievement gap decreased until about 2007,” he reported.
“So how did little Connecticut do this?” HIghsmith asked.
The answers: Teacher standards and salaries were raised dramatically between 1986 and 1991; professional development for teachers became mandatory; and early reading and literacy experts were introduced.
His conclusion: “We should revisit the success of the past to move forward with current structural inequalities.”
The brief Q & A from the audience was more or less an exercise in concurrence. One Albertus English professor said, “As long as we fund locally with property taxes, we will always have structural inequality baked in, no?”
Yes, Highsmith agreed. “No other industrial country in the world funds the way we do.”
That localized property tax-based funding model is now exacerbated by the gutting of the federal Department of Education and all its grants, and no one was optimistic about when that would be reversed.
“Every system is perfectly designed to get what it’s designed for. A system with disparities will create results that are disparate,” Highsmith said.
“Given our inability to make financial changes now,” asked another audience member, “why can’t we restructure things that we know can make a difference, like parent involvement?”
“It will take myriad ways,” said Dr. Williams, “to get parents involved. Some parents never see their child’s report card.”
The questioner — who described herself as growing up poor in the projects but with the advantage of having two parents at home and involved, so that now she is the holder of a doctorate — suggested state-required regulation of some kind for parent involvement.
While Williams shied away from such prescriptive enforcement, Sister Ann Kilbride, who supervises cultural and religious life at Albertus, endorsed Highsmith’s idea about universal quality pre-K and suggested an add-on to that: that in an ideal educational world an accompanying feature of universal quality pre-K might be a unit to educate the parents and grandparents of the kids in daycare.
As the immediate prospects for positive structural change in education are bleak, and the panel did not shy away from enumerating them, you might say the panel percolated with some notes of, if not despair, then great skepticism about the immediate period ahead.
Still there are classrooms full of kids out there and teachers facing them every day. Highsmith therefore ended his remarks with a call for teachers nevertheless to “maintain high expectations for every student regardless of conditions at home. Don’t let that lower it.
“This is my advice,” Highsmith said, “for all future teachers.”