09/21/08 Greenwich Educationline: Greenwich Time Cub Reporter Colin Gustafson Can't See That Failed Aministrators Are Causing Low Test Scores

Did Greenwich Education Reporter Colin Gustafson's Previously Work For This Newspaper?

Quotes From Horribly Confused School Administrators:

"It's perplexing," Susan Ellis,a Board of Education member, said at the board's Aug. 28 meeting.

"To have that juxtaposition, where writing is at a five-year high and reading a five-year low - it just doesn't compute," GHS headmaster Al Capasso said recently. "You have to do a considerable amount of reading and comprehension to be proficient at the writing section."

Previously Colin Gustafonson Filed This Report On The Failed Greenwich School Administrators:

Test scores offer mixed picture

By Colin Gustafson

Staff Writer

Article Launched: 08/26/2008 01:00:00 AM EDT

Middle-school reading scores reached five-year highs in the 2007-08 school year, while the portion of high school students proficient in writing increased by impressive margins.... blah... blah... blah..... I just write what school district administrator John Curtin tells me.... blah.... blah.... blah

And Greenwich Roundup Set The Record Straight By Reporting:

Only a fool would call these results mixed. Here's the truth. That giant sucking sound that taxpayers and parents hear is the sound of failed school administrators flushing their children down the drain.

Here is the failed report cards of our high paid school administrators.....

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  The Department Of Justice may soon visit the school district, because of the school administrator's failure to start to close the growing the achievement gap between white students and lower-income minorities.


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  The Greenwich School Administrators are repeatedly failing to address the longtime "gender gap" between boys and girls in math. and English.


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  Greenwich School Administrators allowed elementary and middle-school writing scores to fall for a second year on the Connecticut Mastery Test. (The percentage of students at goal tumbled from 81.2 in 2006, to 79.8 in 2007, to 77.2 in 2008. The "goal" to be satisfactory performance. That means that 23% of Greenwich elementary and middle-school students can not satisfactorily pass the State Of Connecticut's writing test.)


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  Elementary scores were a disaster. Only North Mianus School was a success story, as it was the only elementary program in the district where proficiency levels increased on the math, reading and writing portions of the CMT.


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  In 2007-08, Hamilton Avenue School posted the lowest proficiency levels of all elementary schools on every CMT test. It also saw the biggest year-to-year declines in proficiency, with the percentage of at goal students in the writing CMT plummeting from 72.7 percent to 48.1 percent between 2007 and 2008.


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  The number of black students reaching goal in that test dropped to 32.3 percent in 2008, lower than the at-goal percentages of Hispanics (54.2), whites (82.8) and Asians (87.9).
  The poorest and most disadvantaged members of Greenwich Society are being screwed over as failed school administrators cash big fat paychecks.

Now Colin Files This Report On The Failed Greenwich School Administrators:

Low scores perplex educators

Greenwich school officials were incredulous when they saw how sharply 10th-grade reading scores had dropped on the most recent sitting of the state's Connecticut Academic Performance Test.

The drop was so sharp - down from 71.6 percent reaching "goal" in 2007 to 61.3 percent this year, more than a 10-point decline and a five-year low - that one school district administrator, John Curtin, initially suspected there had been an error in scoring the exams of Greenwich students.

There had not.

If not an error, perhaps other districts with a similar demographic make-up had fared similarly, he thought. Almost none had.

"We haven't found a smoking gun," Curtin said recently. "We were an anomaly."

The decline comes on the heels of slow-and-steady progress in the number of GHS students achieving goal, which, in the four years from 2004 to 2007, jumped from 67.3, to 69, to 71 and 71.6.

There was also a sharp drop in the percentage of 10th-graders scoring at the "advanced" level, which fell more than 13 points, to 28.2 percent this year, from 41.4 percent last year. Students scoring at the "proficient" level also dropped, though by a smaller margin, from 94.1 to 91.1.

The decline in performance is in sharper focus now that the state Department of Education has cited the district for failing to make "adequate yearly progress," in part, due to lackluster reading results at Greenwich High and Central Middle schools.....

.....the district's English coordinator will work closely with GHS faculty this year to ensure that "they're covering all their bases" in English instruction, Curtin said.

There will be no overhaul to the curriculum, however, in response to what could be a one-year blip in reading performance, he added. "Sometimes anomalous things happen one year that don't happen again the next."

The Board of Education will meet Oct. 23 to discuss a yet-to-be-released "monitoring report" on reading scores

Please ReadThe Full Greenwich Time Story And Tell Me If , Wet Behind The Ears Education Reporter Talked To Or Quoted One Parent, One Idependent Testing Expert Or A Single Family Home Owner Who Is Forced To Pay For These Failed Administrators.

Let me save you some time. Ametuer Education Reporter Colin Gustafonson only talked to failed school leaders about their poor performance in his one sided and biased article.

Please See:

08/27/08 Greenwich Time News Links

08/27/08 GREENWICH ROUNDUP READER RESPONDS: Greenwich School's Test Scores

08/29/08 Is Michael Bodson Parading Colin Gustafson Around With A Nose Ring?

09/01/08 Why Are Betty Sternberg, Susan Wallerstein And Anthony Byrne Still Collecting Board Of Education Paychecks????

09/07/08 Multi-Million-Dollar School Administration Failures Have Now Led To Town Service Cut Backs

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