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Fixing Connecticut's Schools

February 14th, 2013

FIXING CONNECTICUT'S SCHOOLS
TO BEGIN: SIMPLIFY THE SYSTEM
By Richard Urban

Even after all the debate and political maneuvering last year, public school reform in Connecticut remains an elusive exercise, especially since it’s trying to impose a 21st-century solution on a 17th-century structure. For it can be argued that the greatest impediment to reform is not the intransigence of teacher unions, the weakness of politicians beholden to those unions, the over-reliance on property taxes to fund our children’s learning, achievement disparities among urban and suburban schools, or a whole host of social issues over which no system can exert control.

Rather, it’s our steady-habit refusal to change the inefficient, centuries-old, highly localized organizational structure under which we operate our public education system.

It sometimes seems as if everyone has an opinion on what’s ailing Connecticut public schools, and how to fix them. Accordingly, we’d like to point out what seems to be an obvious problem: Connecticut has way too many school districts. The system is expensive, overpopulated with administrators and filled with redundancies.

Isn’t it time we started acting like a state instead of a group of cities and towns?

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Fixing Connecticut's Schools