Malloy is selling, but teachers aren't buying

It has been at least 25 yrs since Conn was a good state for private sector employment even by people with engineering or pharma type degrees. I am sad to say that since 1986(start of ed enhancement act) if you get a degrees from Southern, Eastern,etc., wait until a job opens(you may have to move a little) by pregnancy, etc..get lucky to go permanent, make your 4 years tenure, in 31 more years (about age 60) you will be able to retire at about 90K, get a pension of 70% of that(35 yrs x 2%/yr) which has an annuity value of 800k, and never work a July/early Aug day in your life. The gov's point about a master's is well taken, most in business/tech have a Masters these days it seems to keep their job..not make more money. I know many urban teachers and they dont seem too upset about outcomes..they would like them to be better but that doesnt seem to stop them from flooding the golf /tennis facilities in the Conn shoreline every summer(look at the Hartford area board of ed bumper stickers at any golf /tennis place on the Shoreline in the summer. This is a much better deal than a UTC engineer gets..lucky to get to 100K and a 30%pension while looking over shoulder for outsourcing of work,etc. Not good but very entrenched now.

Some teachers late in their careers earning a comfortable salary or those who have a spouse in a more cost-effective profession may have the money to “never work a day” in July or August and hang out at the beach as Artythesmarty stated earlier, but that is not the case for many of us. I have been teaching for nine years and have a Master’s degree and my husband is also a tenured educator working on his Masters. We have children, and take turns working after school jobs 5 days a week in order to scrape by and save a little. My husband also works Saturdays 6 months out of the year. We both work for all but 3 weeks in the summer. One or more of those weeks of “vacation” is spent attending meetings at our schools, setting up our classrooms and taking intensive summer graduate courses. This is typical for our teacher friends. My mother was one of those lucky teachers who married a lawyer, lives comfortably and takes summers off, but if two teachers in their thirties are still squeaking by- is it really such a fabulous financial deal? True, many of our friends in the business and tech world have master’s degrees and are not paid more for it- but their salaries are significantly higher than ours. Most can afford to have their wives stay home and they still live much more comfortably than we do. We work late in our classrooms, take work home with us, spend late nights answering parent emails and now- we get to defend the work that we do and have to feel like unworthy criminals because of the governor’s thoughtless words and broad generalizations about those in our profession. We dealt with the low pay and small yearly increases. We save our pennies so we can go back to school, learn how to refine our teaching, and earn a little more in hopes of being able to send our children to college without piles of loans. Now we risk not only losing our job security, but we are in jeopardy of having our pay reduced. Even with the high evaluations from administrators and praise from parents and students over the years- the power of this bill IS SCARY. The more I read this bill I find that it is not for the benefit of students. It is a cost saving tactic that can put even high quality teachers on the chopping block.

Tom Burns,

I am not one of the "bashers" who think teachers have it easy. I am married to an educator and understand the stresses.

But no one first has to walk in your shoes in order to comment. The system is a public government run system funded by taxpayers. It is also a monopoly. Consequently there are no real choices for parents, students, or taxpayers. And we don't have a real money-follows-the-child-system primarily because of the power of the union lobby.

So without the ability to make choices, the people who use and pay for the system are left without any option but to comment. And comment we will until we are afforded the opportunity to take our children and our funds to alternative schools.

So if you don't like the comments, and consider them to be "bashing", then stop lobbying against allowing people to vote with their feet. I guarantee you that it will get a lot quieter for you when that happens.

Malloy is bullying the teachers, and small business owners such as the wine retailers. I guess these groups don't have the deep pockets to support his future goals in politics.

I wish the teachers luck. Many parents support the teachers and the good job they do. Many parents aren't supportive nor are they of their own kids education, those are the ones that fail. Teachers need parents to be supportive of education. Education is the only way out for these low income areas. Imagine going to a job everyday and knowing some parents don't take an interest in their childs schoolwork. Not an easy profession, teacher have a lot of challenges. Now we have a governor thats not supportive.

Good luck to our educators. I hope we have enought of checks and balances in our system to block Malloy. I hope we have some government officials that will protect us from this type of bullying behavior and deal making on bad faith.