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In the News
May 18, 2012
Fairfield County Business Journal

With new federal data showing continued, middle-of-the-pack performance by Connecticut schools, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy found the middle ground among competing interests for a landmark education law.

For once, teachers were not front and center in the debate.

May 8, 2012
Wall Street Journal

HARTFORD—In a sweeping education deal with lawmakers and teacher unions here, Gov. Dannel Malloy gave ground on some of his farthest-reaching proposals but contended the compromise was still a historic overhaul of public-school policy in a state that has proved resistant to change.

May 8, 2012
Hartford Courant

Gov. Dannel P. Malloy said Monday night that his administration and lawmakers had reached an agreement on "meaningful education reform" — an agreement that he said adds nearly $100 million in new education spending and will help the state regain its competitive edge.

May 8, 2012
CT News Junkie

Gov. Dannel P. Malloy and Democratic legislative leaders celebrated what they called an “historic” agreement on a sweeping education reform proposal that believe will help Connecticut erase its largest-in-the-nation achievement gap.

At a 10 p.m. press conference, Malloy told a packed room of reformers and leaders of at least one of the state’s teacher unions that the bill the Senate is expected to take up later this evening is just a beginning.

May 7, 2012
The Hanging Shad

Say this for Gov. Dannel Malloy, love his policies or hate them, he has largely gotten what he wants in his first year and a half in office. He pushed through the largest tax increase in state history after inheriting a $3 billion-plus disaster of a state budget; he was able to wring desperately needed concessions out of the state employee unions (after first failing); he instituted the “First Five” job-creation program; and won hard-fought approval for the Jackson Labs economic development project..

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The ConnCAN Blog

Getting on board with better teacher evaluations

Posted August 18, 2010 at 4:16pm
 in

We’ve known for a long time that variation in teacher effectiveness is one of the biggest perpetrators of the achievement gap. The national conversation about teacher effectiveness took another twist this past Sunday, when the Los Angeles Times released an attention-grabbing article on its analysis of teacher effectiveness in terms of student achievement data in the L.A. Unified School District. The study is yet another important step forward in the conversation on how we can distinguish between effective and ineffective teachers.

The Times used seven years’ worth of math and English test scores to estimate the impact of L.A. teachers on their students’ performance, something the district itself has not done. The findings surprised parents, administrators, and teachers alike, showing just how strongly student achievement data can challenge perceptions of teacher effectiveness and demonstrate the chasm between excellent and ineffective teachers. We weren’t all that surprised, though – we know that there is a huge disparity, and that there are just too many teachers who are producing absolutely unacceptable results for kids.

The genie is out of the bottle, and we need to embrace a productive discourse about teacher evaluations being tied to student performance rather than continuing to hope that it doesn’t really come to that. We need to acknowledge that teachers are not interchangeable (see the New Teacher Project’s great report, “The Widget Effect,” for more on this) and work swiftly to find meaningful ways of drawing those distinctions. There is variation among teachers’ abilities, and the sooner we figure out how to get a handle on that, the sooner we can make sure the right teachers are in the right classrooms.

In Connecticut and across the country, the most important thing we can do once we start to collect this data is harness it to get better outcomes for students. To be sure, it will require a degree of nuance to turn this data into the kind of information we need to make informed staffing decisions – but we have already waited too long and let too many students go through years of school with ineffective teachers. We’ve been waiting for this moment – the public is now talking about how we evaluate teacher effectiveness. We need to jump on this energy and make sure we channel it into meaningful change so that we can start improving outcomes for students.

 

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