Advocates Seek Justice for Connecticut Families

As Connecticut’s controversial lawsuit challenging the No Child Left Behind Act has pulled the small state’s education system into the national spotlight, local advocates are working to raise awareness of the need to close Connecticut’s achievement gap. Connecticut Voices for Children, a “research-based public education and advocacy organization,” focuses on many issues that impact children and their families, including health, juvenile justice, economic security, and tax and budget issues. The group, which issues research reports on these topics and advocates for improved policies in the state legislature and amongst state agencies, is now using their broad experience with Connecticut policy to begin impacting the state’s education system.

Goals

The primary mission of Connecticut Voices, according to President Shelley Geballe, is to serve as a public, non-provider voice for children and their families, and to make sure that voice is heard by lawmakers and state agency directors as they formulate public policy. Often, especially in education, unions and some public organizations are more influential in shaping policies than those children and families whom the policies are primarily designed to assist or support. By doing thorough, careful research and maintaining a focus only on the needs of Connecticut children, Connecticut Voices hopes to raise awareness of the realities facing those children, and the best methods by which their challenges can be addressed.

Connecticut Voices’ long experience in issues such as juvenile justice, child poverty, and other major issues allows them to bring a wide perspective to the issue of K-12 education, a relatively new focus for the 11-year-old organization. The group is focused on several primary issues facing Connecticut’s education system, which is one of the highest-achieving education systems in the country. Despite this notable success, the divide between schools in Connecticut’s wealthiest and poorest communities is stark, a problem that the group would like to solve through broad-based public solutions that close the income gap, provide adequate healthcare and housing,increase the state’s share in funding of K-12 education, and assure that all necessary resources exist in each and every school, regardless of community wealth. Currently, Connecticut’s state and local spending on education, as a percentage of its percentage of personal income, is one of the lowest in the country. These goals are especially important given the continuing and projected influx into Connecticut of immigrant school children, many of whom wind up in Connecticut’s lowest-performing districts.

Activities

Connecticut Voices hopes to close the gap between Connecticut’s strongest and weakest schools, and to ensure a quality education for all students in the state. Its strategy for achieving this goal is multifaceted, and is closely tied to their broad range of research and advocacy activities. Typically, according to Geballe, the organization focuses on comprehensive research in the summer and fall and then turns towards legislative advocacy as the legislative session heats up in the spring. Each year the organization distills its research into a legislative guidebook, an oft-consulted compilation of research summaries and policy recommendations that is hand-delivered to every lawmaker in the state, as well as to agency commissioners and key media figures.

This year the focus of the organization’s education efforts is on the state’s passage of a law that would require the gathering and reporting of more complete and accurate school data, and also that all data be made available, through the website of the State Department of Education, in a form that allows it to be downloaded and analyzed by others. By focusing on improving the quality and accessibily of data now, Connecticut Voices hopes to use it to delve deeper into other areas of education in the coming years. They hope that by convincing the legislature to fund the development of more advanced and accessible data on students and schools, this information can become a tool that can be used to mobilize public support around education reform and increased educational equity in the state.

In an effort to expand the circle of organizations that are well informed about education issues, , Connecticut Voices has also formed several powerful statewide partnerships: they co-founded the Early Care Alliance, a coalition of multiple provider and non-provider groups pushing for universal, high-quality preschool, and they helped to found One Connecticut, a coalition of groups working to reduce inequities in education, economic security, and other essential areas. They are also working with Yale Law School’s Legislative Advocacy Clinic, which has done legal research on the state’s education system and has testified on Voices’ behalf at legislative hearings.

Disseminating Research

Although its work in this area is just beginning, CT Voices has begun the development of a citizens’ primer on the state’s Education Cost Sharing Grant, a major element of the state’s school funding system that is very difficult to understand. They have issued policy reports on the huge returns to investments in public education and on the need to improve the state’s worst schools in order to achieve further economic growth. They are also looking carefully at the way the state spends its education funds, and will use this information in combination with improved data in order to create a more accurate portrait of the state of Connecticut’s schools and districts. Ultimately, the group hopes to achieve a more equitable education system in the state, an undertaking that will require increased state financial support for education and improved equity in housing, healthcare, and economic stability for the families raising Connecticut’s students.

Prepared by Nelly Ward, April 10, 2006