Clarence Hayes is a former Representative Town Meeting (RTM) member, with grandchildren in the Westport public schools. He writes:
Our district spends a lot of energy telling us how great our schools are. But are our schools actually adding anything beyond what our families bring through the door?
Across 126 Connecticut towns with their own school district, the best predictor of
performance is the percentage of adults holding a bachelor’s degree.
It is not income, race or per pupil expenditures. It’s the parents, stupid.
The top performers are small, fairly homogeneous towns where most adults hold a college degree, and most children attend the local public school.
Westport fits that profile: 80% of our adults hold a bachelor’s degree or more.
The state maintains District Reference Groups. Westport is part of DRG A, the top group, with 7 other towns: New Canaan, Easton/Redding, Weston, Darien, Ridgefield, Wilton and District 9.
Are we doing better or worse than our peers?
In 2026, Westport was ranked 6th out of 8 in DRG A — below average — for both reading and math, on the 3rd grade state evaluation. Only 72.8% of Westport 3rd graders met the state reading standard, down from 80.7% in 2025.
Given Westport parents’ educational profile, the predicted value is about 82%. We fell more than 9 points short: 27% of our third graders did not meet the standard.
In a town with our advantages, that is an indictment of the schools.
Among our neighbors, New Canaan is the most telling. In June 2024 the state named 5 districts not on track to comply with its Right to Read law — Westport and New Canaan among them.
New Canaan then fell in line, and adopted a state-approved phonics-based program. Westport has not.
This year, New Canaan’s special education 3rd graders rose from 58 to 71% meeting the standard. Westport’s fell from 45 to 26%.
Darien is Westport’s mirror image. It has the most college-educated adults of any town, and all of its elementary schools were Teachers College partners, using the “Units of Study” balanced literacy program.
Darien also scores 7 points below prediction, and slipped from 81.7 to 79.9% this year.
The difference: Darien last year began to replace that program in kindergarten through 3rd grade. Westport has not.
Westport fought the state, was denied a waiver, and still lists Teachers College Units of Study on its website as core to its reading program — one the state rejected for teaching children to guess at words from pictures and context.
Who pays for that? Not the children whose parents can hire a tutor. It is the children who most need explicit, systematic phonics: students with dyslexia and others on IEPs.
Among all high-needs Westport 3rd graders, just 27.8% met the standard — the
same as the statewide (not DRG A) rate for high needs students. That is a shocking result for one of the wealthiest towns in America.
I have seen the difference in my own family. Two of my grandchildren went through Westport’s balanced literacy program.
Three attend a state school in the UK that uses a government-validated phonics program. Children there are assessed every 6 weeks.Parents know exactly where their child stands. Any child who falls behind gets daily “keep-up” sessions as soon as the assessment is done.
My grandchildren in England learned to read easily. My granddaughter here struggled until I taught her phonics myself, every night for 6 months.
Not every Westport child has someone at home who can do that.
England also gives every 6-year-old a national Phonics Screening Check.
Connecticut has no common check whose results parents can see and compare.
The books tell the same story. Westport prizes its classroom libraries of graded readers.
Reading them with my granddaughter, I found a hodgepodge from many publishers which were ranked by how “easy” a book looks — big type, pictures, few words – not by a standard phoneme progression following the letter-sound patterns a child has been taught.
In England, every early reader matches the sounds the child has mastered, so
she can decode every word. This is a hallmark of the CT Right to Read approved
programs.
Westport defends its approach as building a love of reading, and its administrators argue the state’s programs would hold children back.
That gets it backwards: children cannot love books they cannot read.
English schools keep the two apart. Phonics lessons and matched books build the skill, and teachers reading stories and poetry aloud build the love.
Westport blends them, and shortchanges both.
Westport parents are doing their part. It is time our schools did theirs: Adopt a state- approved phonics program in full; tell parents what is actually taught in each classroom; report every child’s phonics progress with a standard Phonics Screening Check, and pat ourselves on the back only if we repeatedly outperform our peers.
Not when our superintendent gets an award.
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