Teachers unions and education officials will soon begin butting heads as the Malloy administration tries to reform teacher tenure and other laws the unions have worked hard to protect.
But Tuesday was a day of niceties, as -- at a meeting that included Education Commissioner Stefan Pryor and Senate President Donald E. Williams -- the union representing more than 41,000 teachers unveiled the reforms they would like to see this year.
"To be sure we don't agree on everything," Pryor told the roomful of education advocates and officials at the Legislative Office Building, "but we agree on more than we don't ... [Let's] focus on ideas that we can come together around rather than on wedge issues that separate us."
Those wedge issue are likely to include how teachers are evaluated and then dismissed if they are determined to be failing.
Previous attempts to speed up the process for firing or laying off the worst teachers have fallen flat since few school districts in the state have evaluation systems to measure teacher performance.
In a review of more than half the districts in the state, CEA told lawmakers earlier this year few districts use seniority as the sole factor when making layoff decisions. In a follow-up review of almost all their contracts, CEA reports 18 percent use seniority as the sole factor when making layoff decisions and another 52 percent include seniority as a primary factor. Two years ago legislators created a panel to develop a model teacher evaluation for districts to use. Districts are still waiting for those recommendations.
"We want our teachers to be evaluated," said Mary Loftus Levine, executive director of the CEA.
The CEA is proposing that teachers be graded annually based on the rigor of their lesson plans, organization, peer interaction and participation in professional development. "We believe it shouldn't be all about test scores ... We think that everything should count," Levine said Tuesday.
Thirteen states require teacher evaluations to be tied to student achievement, and 19 allow teachers to be dismissed based on those evaluations, according to a recent report by the National Council of Teacher Quality. Connecticut does neither.
ConnCAN, a New-Haven based school reform group and an adversary of the CEA, broke away from the harmony that everyone else was touting Tuesday. The group sent an email blast to their followers criticizing the CEA's plans to not use student achievement as a primary factor in teacher evaluations.
"How our kids perform should be the primary indicator. Ultimately, the success of our state, our schools, our teachers, and our kids is based on performance and student outcomes. We must not lose sight of that as we build a truly effective teacher evaluation model," ConnCAN leader Pat Riccards wrote.
Gov. Dannel P. Malloy and Pryor both say the state needs to retain its best teachers, not just those with seniority and tenure. But Levine says her union is not ready to retreat from its position that after four years on the job, teachers earn lifelong tenure. The state's superintendent association has proposed replacing lifelong tenure with a routine teacher evaluation every five years.
"Right now the current amount of time is four years, and we have not discussed changing that," Levine said. Rather, the evaluations will ensure that teachers are effectively evaluated and "counseled out" of the profession or fired before they ever get tenure.
Once the evaluations are adopted, the CEA proposes using them to speed up dismissal proceedings from 120 to about 85 days.
And while the "common ground" on Tuesday's theme, highlighted by Pryor, the CEA and the Connecticut Council for Education Reform, a business-backed group, the real battles are just heating up.
"The momentum is truly building for meaningful education reform in Connecticut," the council for education reform wrote in an emailed statement later in the day.
ConnCAN is surprisingly uninformed in their lobbying efforts for an organization that specializes in education. The use of student performance as a universal measure of student success is simply not realistic.
The CAPT test is given the sophomore year and only covers English, math and science. Teachers in other content areas or who teach juniors and seniors do not have test scores that can reflect upon them.
Then consider teachers who do. If a sophomore English teacher has students from September to February and has several students who enter their sophomore year 3 years behind in reading ability
Read MoreRemember Pryor comes from New York.You teachers better wake up.Soon you will be here like the teachers in New York Were. The Rubber room
http://www.rubberroommovie.com/
Every year there is a "crisis" in education despite the government spending $70 billion a year for the Department of Education. Things have only gotten worse since the inception of the DOE and things seem only to get worse each year despite all the increases in education budgets everywhere.
Throwing more money at this problem is NOT the answer, but that will be the only solution proposed by the unions.
As it is obvious that the more money we throw at education the worse things get, it's time to reverse that trend.
It doesn't take more money to evaluate teachers based on student performance, with the proviso that a failure among ALL of that student's teachers to reach him or her will discount that failure from the evaluative mix, thus freeing all teachers from being held hostage to a kid's cognitive disability, language barrier, or substandard home life. This will also unite a school's teachers against grade inflation by one colleague or another, a practice that has enticed criminal behavior from the highest administrative ranks.
It doesn't take more money to teach to a kid's learning style, enhancing functional education when pure
Read MoreI agree with "drjohn" 110%!
Parents are 2012 contenders this legislative session because OUR children have the most to lose when schools lack fiscal and best practice accountability!
It will take shared accountability to reform education in Connecticut.It's not just teacherUnions or educational officials and businesses that should continue to have the "only" say over the educational well being of our children.
Stay tuned for the "unveiling" of the Parent's legislative agenda that has some alignment with teacher unions and some areas that will clearly "butt" heads with teacher unions and elected officials because we the parents, unlike many, put the educational well being of
"Things have only gotten worse"..."obvious that the more money we throw at education the worse things get" - drjohn
On what statistics are you basing this? SAT scores? The average SAT scores in 1980 when the ED started was around 997 and now it is 1014. When you were in high school I bet you had very limited opportunities to earn college credit. In the mid 80s around 250k students took AP exams now almost 2 million students take at least one. In the 1980 Census it was reported that 66% of people 25 years or older had a hs
Read MoreSammy Clemens admits that educational opportunities increased to minorities from 1970, by increased funding year after year. The money spent on such educational opportunities has increased five to six fold (running into hundreds of billion and trillion dollars), in the last forty years for every silly cockamamie theory and excuse. It was forty (40) years ago or two generations before that these welfare and entitlement programs started. Enough time and opportunities lasted by now. It is time to do away with all such free doles. However, Sammy Clemens seems to champion these extravaganza entitlements and welfare to continue for ever.
Read Morerealkook, students with intellectual impairments, autism, vision impairments etc. who receive special education services are simply on the dole? Really?
If the State is serious about education reform- and everything is on the table- then the issue of teaching to the test which started in the 80's has to be addressed.
In a nutshell, teaching to the test has driven education policy and legislation in the State. Everything is aligned to this concept which students and teachers are forced to endure: a repetitious curriculum, teacher training, and continuous assessments.
With this approach equal opportunity for our students is replaced with mediocre outcomes for all. One size fits all is the norm in regards to achievement in the classroom.
Read MoreIf the State is serious about education reform- and everything is on the table- then the issue of teaching to the test which started in the 80's has to be addressed.
In a nutshell, teaching to the test has driven education policy and legislation in the State. Everything is aligned to this concept which students and teachers are forced to endure: a repetitious curriculum, teacher training, and continuous assessments.
With this approach equal opportunity for our students is replaced with mediocre outcomes for all. One size fits all is the norm in regards to achievement in the classroom.
Read MoreSusan Bysiewicz, Democractic candidate for U.S. Senate, during a debate with U.S. Rep. Chris Murphy.
"Susan has been using this tired line of attack for the last year and a half, and it hasn't worked."
Chris Murphy
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