Student Progress

Outcome Area:

Decreased barriers to student progress for students in the region's highest-need districts

WHY THIS IS A PRIORITY

All children should receive a high-quality education. The Hartford Foundation has a decades-long tradition of making educational investments and partnering with local school districts. Moving forward, we will work to decrease barriers to student progress in our highest-need districts by focusing on disparities by Race, Place and Income.

Students in Greater Hartford’s seven highest-need districts – Bloomfield, East Hartford, Hartford, Manchester, Vernon, Windsor and Windsor Locks – face a disproportionate number of barriers to success, including higher rates of chronic absenteeism. In Hartford, these disparities are especially pronounced, with absenteeism rates twice that of the other highest-need districts.

12% of all students in Greater Hartford were chronically absent. Those rates were substantially higher for Black and Latinx students compared to their white peers.¹
- Latinx students: 22%
- Black students: 15%
- White students: 7%
Chronic absenteeism rates of students from low-income households are more than 4x higher than their peers from higher-income households.²
The rate of chronic absenteeism is considerably higher in Harford than inner and outer ring suburbs.³
- Hartford: 25%
- Inner ring suburbs: 10%
- Outer ring suburbs: 6%
Black and Latinx students face further disconnection to school as a result of being disciplined in school more frequently than their white peers.⁴ Rates of students suspended or expelled at least once during the school year:
- Black students: 14%
- Latinx students: 11%
- White students: 4%

WHAT WE’RE DOING

The Foundation, using our resources and working closely with school district leaders, our nonprofit partners and other stakeholders, will prioritize activities that:

Assess and address disparities by race/ethnicity, place and income that impact student progress.
Collaborate with districts to support family, school and community partnerships that address barriers to student progress.

Efforts we support include:

Support to Hartford Community Schools and a Retrospective Study to analyze the impact and implementation of Hartford Community Schools over the past decade.
Creation of Offices of Family, School and Community Partnership in the highest-need districts in our region.
Research to inform strategies to address community-based drivers of chronic absenteeism.

SOURCE:

1. DataHaven (2019) Greater Hartford Community Wellbeing Index. DataHaven analysis (2019) of SY2017-18 data from the Connecticut State Department of Education, accessed via EdSight at http://edsight.ct.gov

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. DataHaven (2019) Greater Hartford Community Wellbeing Index. DataHaven analysis (2019) of SY2017-18 discipline data from the Connecticut State Department of Education, accessed via EdSight at http://edsight.ct.gov (with numbers representing the share of students who have been suspended – in-school or out-of-school – or expelled in the past school year, not deduplicated suspension rates).