Coviello Challenges Ramos

From Democratic mayoral candidate Charlie Coviello:

SCHOOLS ISSUE FALSE STATISTICS

A recent study released by the Alliance for Excellent Education showed that cutting the dropout rate in high schools made an immediate positive impact on the local economy. The Bridgeport Superintendent of Schools, John Ramos, published an article that he wanted to poll the community to get advice on how to address the dropout problem. This should have been his position 6 years ago when he took the job.

Ramos made an impassioned plea for the people to get aboard the train to success. Here we are paying him $300,000 per year to fix our problems and he tells us he doesn’t understand the problems. A mayor who is there for the people would replace Ramos, not give him a raise as Mayor Finch did. Rewards should be for distinguished service, not total failure.

It is unfortunate that Ramos has individually derailed the train a long time ago and his disastrous mismanagement of the Bridgeport education process is far beyond his feeble attempt to find solutions to the schools problems.

When he had a home-grown solution to the dropout issue with the Leadership Group’s, Peer to Peer program, he systematically orchestrated the untimely demise of this effective 6-year-old program that didn’t cost the city one penny and helped hundreds of children to get off the drugs and actually become productive students. The Peer Program cut dropouts in half. If it wasn’t for a lack of money, why did Ramos shut it down?

Whatever Ramos’s motivation was to dismantle the Leadership Program that had 500 children at Central High School on the way to straighten out their lives, it was totally contrary to the responsibility he has to educate our children.

Where our education officials were hired to improve all of our children’s achievement levels, they implemented a policy that is currently failing over 55% of our kids and pushed out most of the kids who are not performing well. The after school program at Central and in our jails are their answer to a GED education degree for our children.

Let us take Harding High School as an example. At the beginning of this school year, the Harding enrollment was 1700 children. It is currently less than 1400 and dropping. What happened to the missing 400 children? Listening to Ramos, Harding High School, and our other High Schools, are all performing beautifully. After 8 continuous years of declining achievements, when do we say enough?

Ramos and his administrators publish devious statistics about the graduation rates which do not reflect the number of children who have left the regular school system. Factoring the dropout rate into the real number shows an actual graduation rate of less than 40% compared to their published rate of 89%. Numbers are easy to manipulate if the intention is to deceive the community.

A real number that was just released by Housatonic Community College shows that they are graduating only 5% of their student body with a 2-year degree. Considering that most of the children who attend Housatonic are graduates of the Bridgeport school system, this statistic proves that even those Bridgeport children who get their High School degree are unprepared for a Junior College environment since they have not acquired sufficient skills to achieve at a less-demanding college level.

It is the responsibility of our elected officials to assure that the people we hire to educate our children are performing their duties. The Mayor, Bill Finch has been a major supporter of the dysfunctional school officials. Finch obviously doesn’t care about the interests of our children as he is protecting the school administrators who have their own agenda.

As your Mayor, I will move to reorganize the entire education process including the Board of Education. The education system is under full control of the political leadership here in Bridgeport and the only way to fix the problem is to make major changes in the oversight of our schools. The “professional educators” have proven they are incapable of helping our kids. They have to go. Making these adjustments will be difficult but I am resigned to stay the course.

Besides the lives and futures of our children, our entire economy is directly affected when our children don’t know how to read or write.