Commissioner Betty Sternberg, Connecticut Department of Education; Learning Initiatives for Excellence: Superintendents' Back-to-School Address; August 17, 20004.

Fred DeLuca wasn’t crazy. He just had what The Hartford Courant last December described as “an absurd, ridiculous, pie-in-the-sky, what-are-you-nuts goal – and then exceeded it.” This Connecticut native took a single, money-losing sandwich shop and turned it into Subway – the largest restaurant chain in the country. Yes, larger than McDonald’s.

Unlike Fred DeLuca, you and I aren’t in the business of feeding the masses. Well, on second thought, maybe some of you are in that business with your school lunch programs. But one thing is certain; we are in the business of nourishing the minds, as well as the physical, emotional and psychological well-being of Connecticut’s children. Like Fred DeLuca, we must believe in what some would term “absurd, ridiculous, pie-in-the-sky” goals. Like Fred DeLuca, we must feel in our hearts and know in our minds that our goal – closing the achievement gaps between students who are wealthier and poorer, minority and nonminority, disabled and nondisabled – can be not only met, but exceeded.

Truth is, here we are – nearly half a decade into the 21st century – and more than one quarter of our students are still achieving at unacceptably low levels. We must acknowledge that there are big – no, huge – differences in achievement among groups, and relentlessly pursue changing that reality. It is simply unacceptable to have two communities sitting right next to each other, one in which roughly 85 percent of the students meet goal on the Connecticut Mastery Test (CMT), and the other in which only 24 percent do.

And yet there are islands of excellence that educate poor, minority youngsters to perform equal to or better than their wealthier, nonminority counterparts. In these schools all the players – the students, their parents, their teachers, their principal and the community at large – celebrate and live the reality that, as Colin Powell said, “excellence is not an exception, it is the prevailing attitude.”

We live in an increasingly diverse world. The U.S. Department of Commerce (September 1999 Report on Minority Growth) projected a 28 percent minority population in 2000 growing to 47 percent in 2050. So our differences must diminish, but they will only diminish through the achievement of excellence not just by some, but by all. Excellence is part and parcel of equity, and equity is part and parcel of excellence. That is the world of our future.

So how do we tackle this nationwide, decades-old achievement gap? After all, we have attempted to do so with a variety of programs – after school, summer school, preschool for example – bits and pieces of the puzzle without the entire picture. We need a truly comprehensive approach to what has been an intractable problem. Initiatives that I will propose to the State Board of Education, the Governor and the legislature will be just that – comprehensive, challenging, attainable and well overdue.

Let’s all be very clear about our goal: We have to narrow the gaps between our highest and lowest-achieving students while the achievement of all our students gets even better. To its credit, Connecticut has always chosen this difficult path. The time has come to renew and invigorate this work.

To this end, the State Board of Education has asked me to develop a comprehensive approach in four key areas:

• Who are we teaching?
• What and how are we teaching?
• Who is teaching?
• How well are we teaching?

Who Are We Teaching?
For some years now, public schools have accepted the responsibility to teach children from the age of 5 on. However, the research is in and time is well past for public education to fully acknowledge and accept the responsibility to teach not just 5-year-olds for a full day, but 3- and 4-year-olds, too.

As you well know, the knowledge and skills children – particularly economically disadvantaged children – acquire from a high-quality preschool are arguably the most important factors in a child’s success in school. Without them, a child starts kindergarten behind others who have had that advantage, and hardly ever catches up.

I can never forget how I, a new, young teacher in San Jose, California, straight out of student teaching in upper-middle class Lexington, Massachusetts, was surprised to find that most of my kindergarteners – except those who had attended Head Start – did not know how to play basic board games like Chutes and Ladders and Candy Land. They could not play these games because they could not accurately count. They had walked through that kindergarten door without the knowledge of one-to-one correspondence, a foundation not only of math, but also of language literacy. These youngsters in San Jose entered kindergarten at a distinct disadvantage compared to those I had encountered in Lexington. So we must make sure that every child whose family can’t afford preschool has the opportunity to attend – and that the program every child attends is high quality in every way. This means offering experiences and services appropriate for the child’s age and stage of development, in partnership with the child’s family. I believe, and I venture to say that all of you do, too, that offering a high-quality preschool experience to all who need it is the foundation of a comprehensive approach to closing the achievement gaps.

We can’t wait. There must be a sense of urgency here, on behalf of our neediest children. So I will ask the State Board to approve a budget option that, at the least, will fund enough preschool seats for all 3- and 4-year-olds in Bridgeport, Hartford, New Britain, New Haven, New London, Waterbury and Windham by the end of the next school year. To do this will require adequate facilities, and I will request funding for these in both school and community settings.

I know that there are children who live in poverty outside of these communities, and I will cost out and make clear what it will take over the next several years to provide high-quality preschool programs to all of them, no matter where they reside.

But state-funded preschool seats are not enough. We need to ensure that children sitting in them are having high-quality experiences. Requiring the use of the Connecticut Preschool Curriculum Framework and the Connecticut Preschool Assessment, requiring communication between preschool and kindergarten programs about each child’s specific skills, and providing new, direct support of prospective and current preschool teachers for their education will all be part of this effort.

We all well know that school personnel alone cannot succeed without family and community support. The best results happen when all three work together – the school, the family and the community in partnership. We will propose an initiative to support these partnerships throughout Connecticut. A unit at the Department is already dedicated to this mission, and its efforts will be redoubled.

Another family-oriented effort that we already know is effective are school-based Family Resource Centers, which provide a wide range of child-care and child- and family-support services from birth. Early services are essential and can prevent the development of many problems that might keep a child from achieving in school. We currently fund 62 Family Resource Centers throughout the state, and I will ask the State Board of Education to request funding for one in every elementary school in Bridgeport, Hartford, New Britain, New Haven, New London, Waterbury and Windham, and in specific schools in other districts in which the number of children in poverty has greatly increased.

In addition, we cannot ignore the mental health problems that are increasingly evident in the behavior of our children – even the youngest of them. These children face impediments to their own learning and often interfere with the learning of others. Our responsibility is to the whole child; to his or her academic, physical, emotional and psychological well-being. So I will propose initiatives that will help parents and teachers do a better job of meeting that responsibility early on.

In addressing the needs, abilities, talents and potential of each student, we need to focus not on each child in isolation, but on all students together. We must be firm in our commitment to the integration of all children across all barriers . . . color, ability, disability, economic background, gender and so on.

Our attention to fostering not just positive behavior, but moral and ethical behavior, in our students is basic to all that we do. Success in academics, sports or the arts means little if our students are not responsible and responsive to the needs of each other. Being honest, honorable and kind, being courageous and choosing the right path when peer pressure would have them do otherwise – loving when someone is trying to get them to act with hate – these are the moral and ethical behaviors we need to instill in our children.

Unfortunately, students have seen too many examples of poor moral and ethical behavior in too many walks of life. But every adult in every school can and must be an example of the best in human behavior. From the teacher to the custodian, from the principal to the food service worker, every adult in our schools must be a model of good citizenship, good conduct, and the most fundamental humanity. All of us must know and do what is right, simply because it is right.

All of us involved in the Sheff v. O’Neill case must do the same. We must provide our students with an excellent education in integrated settings because it is the moral and ethical thing to do. I need to be involved, you need to be involved, your districts need to be involved. Not because there is a court case and an agreement that came out of it, but because it is right. Support Open Choice; support participation in our urban-suburban magnet schools. Remember that Sheff v. O’Neill is not a penalty; it is an opportunity to do the right thing – to affirm the values and the behavior we seek to foster in our students.

What And How Are We Teaching?
Today technology is very much a part of the fabric of our world – basic to how we communicate, learn and produce. Let’s admit it: This is not so in the school world. One of our major initiatives will weave technology into the fabric of the high school world.

I will ask the State Board to propose a budget option for a laptop computer initiative to be launched in school year 2005-06. Every teacher of English and social studies who teaches ninth and tenth graders will receive a laptop and learn to integrate it into his or her instructional program. Then in 2006-07, each high school in our state will receive enough laptops for each English and social studies ninth and tenth grade class. The objective is for the computer to become as common a teaching and learning tool as a pencil or a book. This initiative also will provide teachers and students with the training and experience needed to be prepared for the third generation of the Connecticut Academic Performance Test (CAPT), which will be administered online in reading and writing in 2008-09. The initiative will include hardware, software, professional development, and focused support for our priority districts. Once the computer becomes a basic instructional tool for every student, how and what we teach will have been fundamentally changed.

While embracing the technological future today, we still need to pay attention to that which is classic and timeless. In an editorial this past Sunday, The Hartford Courant wrote about the steady decline among Americans in the reading of literature (novels, short stories, poems and plays). It spoke of adults having to be models for children, and said that schools play a role, too. It even quoted one publisher as suggesting “that with so much emphasis on standardized testing, ‘we are forgetting to introduce our children to the joys of reading.’” I guarantee we don’t and won’t let that happen in Connecticut. We encourage our children and young adults to be excellent, independent readers who read for information, wisdom and unabashed joy, from Robert Louis Stevenson to Langston Hughes, from Gabriel Garcia Marquez to Toni Morrison.

There is joy, by the way, to be found in everything we teach, from what moves us in all the arts to the magnificence of history; from the beauty of the Romance languages to the elegance of a classic theorem. One of our challenges as educators is to teach the “stuff,” convey it with passion and spread the joy.

Another challenge is to meet the real world head-on. Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich and others have predicted what jobs of the future will require. Increasingly, workers at all levels will need good oral and written communication skills, the ability to synthesize and analyze information in order to generate important questions, the ability to understand and interpret data, and the ability to be technologically literate. Jobs that involve manipulating symbols, working in teams, identifying and solving problems will no longer be just for the elite – they will be for almost everyone. While there will be jobs that come under the umbrella of local personal service work (retail, hospitality, child and eldercare, for example), the rest of the job picture looks decidedly different from these.

Are we educating all our young people for this complex work? I don’t think so. About four years ago, a group of you and other educators helped produce a monograph entitled Re-Conceptualizing Connecticut’s High Schools: A Blueprint for Continuous Change, which called for a dramatic re-making of our high schools, from curriculum and instruction to school culture and organizational climate. It called for increased and more rigorous choices for our students from the time they enter high school through their senior year. It called for a culminating, self-directed learning experience (independent study, work experience or community service, for example) as one requirement for graduation. It called for the curriculum of the high school to be competency based and to allow students to earn credits by demonstrating competency, not amassing credits based on time spent in class.

It called for requiring local school boards to regularly review their high school curricula to make sure the instruction is rigorous and that more courses are interdisciplinary and have clear connections to real-world issues, problems, questions and work. It called for our high schools to provide a safe, positive environment that supports students’ growth, not only academically, but also socially, emotionally and physically. It called for ensuring that every student has one adult in the school acting as his or her mentor, providing advice and guidance through a challenging time that is nonetheless filled with extraordinary potential. I will be calling on you to help me review and update the report and propose legislation to implement its recommendations.

Particular attention must also be paid to the curriculum being offered in Connecticut’s priority districts. Districts cannot be successful unless they implement high-quality, rigorous, uniform curriculum throughout their schools. The best teachers in the world can’t be effective if they are teaching curriculum that is old, out of step or clearly unsuccessful. A proposed initiative will support Connecticut’s priority school districts as they improve their curriculums, working in concert with the State Department of Education and focusing on both proven success and opportunities for innovation.

Extraordinary things happen in many Connecticut classrooms because of some extraordinary teachers who take existing curriculum – as good as it is – and work magic with it. The details are to be worked out, but we will propose an initiative that will award grants for innovative ideas to individual teachers across the state. And we won’t keep these ideas secret. Once again we will Celebrate the Excellence of our teachers and their best practices.

Who Is Teaching?
Connecticut has roughly 50,500 full-time public school educators, more than half of whom are 45 years of age or older.

While currently there is not an overall shortage of educators statewide, there are problems in attracting and retaining high-quality teachers and administrators in our urban and priority districts and in particular subject areas – bilingual education, special education, English, mathematics, music, science, speech and language pathology, technology education and world languages. High-quality educators are critical to improving student achievement and reducing the achievement gaps. Our data show a trend toward migration of urban educators to non-urban districts due to differentials in salary (particularly for midcareer teachers) and less favorable working conditions in the cities.

How do we meet this challenge? By being creative. We have a number of proposals to attract and retain high-quality teachers in urban and priority school districts and shortage areas; let me describe three about which I am particularly excited.

In order to promote an exchange of ideas and the stimulation that comes from trying new techniques in new settings, we will establish a Connecticut Teacher Leadership Exchange Corps. This program will provide incentives to allow urban teachers to teach in non-urban settings and, conversely, teachers in suburban or rural settings to teach in urban settings for a two-year period without any penalty in their home districts. If we can promote teacher exchanges with districts across the Atlantic, we can certainly promote exchanges between the Farmingtons and Hartfords of Connecticut.

We will propose incentives to keep outstanding urban teachers who teach in state-designated shortage areas in their districts. Teachers who have demonstrated that they have promoted student success, as determined by multiple measures, will be given bonuses and a multiyear contract to stay in their district.

We also expect to seek amendments to relevant state statutes to allow former teachers receiving retirement benefits to be reemployed at full salary in urban and priority districts in any classroom position – not just “shortage areas” – for up to two school years.

We all know that one of the key elements of a successful school is the leadership of the principal. In Connecticut, there are literally hundreds of educators who hold certification that would allow them to become principals. In the main, however, they do not apply for open principalships. We will propose initiatives that will change that trend and encourage these talented educators to seek leadership positions in our schools. One such program will allow individuals who recently completed or are currently enrolled in a sixth-year program in administration – and who within two years of receiving the administrator endorsement serve in an administrative role in a priority district – to receive tuition reimbursement payable over a three-year period.

While these proposals are designed to address the current supply and demand issues, it is important, given the aging of our profession and the population in general, that we think ahead and form recommendations to deal with the impending retirements of the baby boom generation. To that end, we will convene a Distinguished Citizens Task Force whose charge will be to analyze supply and demand trends over the next 10 years and make recommendations to address the future need for educators.

Education is the greatest profession. After all, where else could a young teacher named Miss Levin – me – get a Valentine that said, “Dear Miss Lemon, I Love You”? We must convey the joy and fulfillment possible from these priceless moments to those behind us who might become teachers.

We must be determined, persistent and creative in ensuring that Connecticut continues to have the best teachers and administrators anywhere in the country. And I ask you to join me in developing a comprehensive strategy to do just that.

How Well Are We Teaching?
Connecticut is touted across the nation for the accountability system we have had in place for almost 20 years. We do not need to test more – we just need to test better. We do not need to test more – we just need to have a better way to track a student’s progress over time. We do not need to test more – we need to provide a cohort analysis tracking all students’ achievement over time.

To truly understand how well we are teaching – and then to make sound decisions based on that understanding – we need comprehensive, consistent, trustworthy, secure data that are easy for students, parents, teachers and administrators to access and understand. We need state-of-the-art data warehousing and analysis. This will jumpstart implementation of our commitment to making important data-based decisions for both students and teachers. We’ll use data – accurate, meaningful, user-friendly, timely data – to inform decisions about student learning and teacher instruction. This is a complex project, critical for a true understanding of how well we are teaching our students.

We also need to assess and evaluate the achievement of special populations in ways we never have before. These populations include preschool students, English-language learners and students with special education needs. If we genuinely believe that all students can achieve at high levels, then we must rigorously evaluate the programs serving special populations and the achievement of these students. We must, and will, find appropriate assessments that are different from – but not less rigorous than – assessments of other students.

Finally, we need to be clear in our commitment to providing high-quality, timely assessments that test important, reasonable and challenging skills for all of our students.

The Roots and Wings of Change
Soon I will be bringing forward to the State Board of Education, the Governor and the legislature these initiatives and more. You will hear and read about them in the weeks to come, and will be asked to help fashion the particulars that will make them work. I hope that I’ve given you the sense that change is afoot, because it is – big time.

Change is the hallmark of our future, just as it has been in the past. When some of us were kids, a televised tin-can Robbie the Robot got us very excited; today, robots are traveling the sands of Mars, sending us photographs of another world in real time. Yet change during our lifetime has come at a snail’s pace when compared to what it has been for our children, and what it will be for their children.

In order for us to educate them, we must follow their lead. We must open the door to a future that we undoubtedly find harder to visualize than they do. They are the creators of the future, and we are the encouragers of the innovation, creativity and belief in the impossible that they will need to make it happen. As Nelson Mandela said, “education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”

Can we make it so that ALL – truly ALL – students learn at high levels and fully participate in creating that incredible, barely imaginable future world?

You bet we can.

Welcome to the new school year!