EH Politicians 1, EH Taxpayers 0

Despite some of the lowest CAPT and CMT scores this side of Bridgeport, the East Haven Board of Education voted to give Superintendent Tony Serio a contract extension and raise this evening. As the man responsible for the test score disaster it is mind boggling he would be rewarded. The only no votes were Tia DePalma and Christine Miasano. Nick Palladino recused himself from voting but still took part in the Executive Session where the contract extension and raise were discussed and did not recuse himself until just before the voting when he knew how it was going to turn out.

This Board is just a walking, talking conflict of interest. Two of the Board members have spouses that work for the school system. One Board member has a son that works for the school system. The Chairman works with Tony Serio's son.

I'm not sure about the readers but I'm getting sick and tired of the politicians in this town using my tax dollars to reward suboptimal results. My anger at this vote and the BOE members that voted yes borders on blind rage. How is the school system ever going to improve if you don't hold the Administrators accountable for their job performance?

I have contacted the Democratic Town Chairman and the Maturo campaign looking for comment on this development. I will post their responses, if any.

How Low Can You Go?

It is that time of year again: CAPT/CMT results time. The time when Administrators at the Board of Education try to come up with words which sugar coat, obfuscate, and muddle the results of the tests taken in March. It must be a very hard job for our Administrators. The results are released in July and they do not make a presentation until the fall. I have seen the results and predict this year they are going to have a very hard time hiding the disaster of our test results. Nonetheless, I look forward to their performance on October 4th at the Curriculum Subcommittee meeting. This performance will be well worth taping.

Although I will be spending more time going into depth on the scores over the next month, the one word I will use to describe the scores right now is terrible. For years I looked at the results of our District Reference Group ("DRG"), which is composed of school districts similar to East Haven in demographics and economic background. I compared East Haven results to the other districts in our DRG. We came in near the bottom of the DRG but, at least, our scores were in shouting distance of the bottom rung of the other districts in the group. When I looked at this year's results I realized that the East Haven results were more like the results of the inner city school districts such as New Haven.

As a quick refresher, the results for the CAPT and CMT are put into 5 categories:

Below Basic
Basic
Proficient
Goal
Advanced

Below basic and basic are kind of like Ds and Fs. You never want any students to fall into either of these categories. The No Child Left Behind law wants all school districts to get 100% of their students into the proficient, goal and advanced categories by 2014. Proficient is kind of like a grade of C. It is just getting by and something our school administrators seem perfectly willing to shoot for. Shooting for a C in today's competitive marketplace is not even coming close to preparing our students for life after school.

Here are a couple of charts which illustrate our problem in stark terms. I created graphs of our scores compared to the State of Connecticut and New Haven at the Advanced level. This shows how we are doing at teaching our best students. One thing you will notice about these 2 charts is that (1) East Haven comes no where near the state average; (2) New Haven is on an upward trend while East Haven is on a downward trend; and (3) New Haven scores have passed the East Haven scores in the last year or 2. Here are the charts of the results from 3rd grade math and 5th grade reading. The charts show the percentage of students scoring Advanced for the State of Connecticut (blue), East Haven (red) and New Haven (green).

The depressing thing about this is how uniform these trends are across all the grades for reading and math. New Haven is going up and nearing, or passing, East Haven while our scores are tanking. Last Thursday I had Tia DePalma, the Chair of the Curriculum Subcommittee come on EH News with Marilyn Vitale for a discussion of the test scores. Watch the show and look for more on test scores over the next couple of weeks. When BOE candidates come looking for your vote don't let them leave until they can give you a concrete answer on how they are going to fix the test results disaster.

Oni Sioson Announcement

Oni Sioson came into the studio last night to tape his announcement to be a write in candidate for Mayor. Here is his announcement video:

Oni Sioson Announcement from Edward Foley on Vimeo.

PZC Public Hearing - Quarry Rock Crushing

The Planning and Zoning Commission will have a public hearing on continuing the permit to crush rock at the quarry in Foxon next Wednesday. The agenda is here. I expect a good turnout and will definitely be there to video the meeting absent some catastrophic event.

And here is the promised video:

20110907180355 from Edward Foley on Vimeo.