New ways of tracking students in Connecticut?
If every state had a high-quality pre-kindergarten program, it would not be difficult to gather and record information about a child’s progress beginning at an early age. A renewed emphasis on the progress both children and their teachers are making throughout their education is all in vogue at the moment, as states scramble to revamp their applications for the second round of Race to the Top, the Obama administration’s $4.3 billion competitive grant program.
So it was interesting to read the suggestions of economist Fred Carstensen in the CT Mirror, a new source for news and information about the state. Cartensen, head of the Connecticut Center for Economic Analysis, wants to help Connecticut fill in key gaps in its education data system. The system should include a wide variety of data, “beginning with the [student's] earliest contact with the educational system,” including pre-kindergarten programs, and continuing through college,” he told the Mirror.
Connecticut cannot match student data to individual teachers and cannot link data from elementary and secondary schools to higher education, the Mirror noted. Only Tennessee and Delaware won awards in the first round, and Tennessee has been widely praised for its detailed data collection to monitor student progress.
Lessons from the two winning states can be seen here. Cartesen, meanwhile, wants Connecticut to consider a research model his center developed two years ago.