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Returning to New Haven to pitch school reform, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy extended and received an olive branch from a teachers union — though neither side budged on core disagreements coming to a head in Hartford.
A week after teachers booed him at a raucous town hall meeting on school reform at Wilbur Cross High, Malloy returned to the city Thursday to keynote the Yale School of Management Education Leadership Conference at the Omni Hotel.
His visit came just days before his main vehicle for sweeping education reforms, Senate Bill 24, faces its first test: The joint legislative Education Committee is set to vote on the bill on Monday. Reforms in the 163-page bill include boosting funding for charter schools as well as struggling school districts, adding pre‑K seats, and turning around the state’s 25 lowest-performing schools. Click here to read more.
The most controversial parts of the bill — the parts that spurred teachers to drown out the governor with “boos” last week — are Malloy’s proposals to make teachers earn and re-earn tenure, as well as teacher certifications, through new job evaluations based on student performance. Leaders of the state’s two teachers unions have already agreed to the framework of the evaluations. They differ with Malloy on how those evaluations should be used, and whether the plan overemphasizes standardized test scores at the expense of innovation and critical thinking and recognition of the achievement gap’s root causes. The teachers also accuse Malloy of misrepresenting “tenure” to the public: They say it merely means giving teachers due process rights when facing firing; it’s not a lifetime job guarantee as in higher education. New union TV ads blast Malloy’s plan. (Click on the play arrow to watch.)
Between visits to New Haven, Malloy offered teachers an olive branch of sorts: In an op – ed printed in the Journal-Inquirer Wednesday, he backed away from an explosive remark he made during his State of the State address, when he said all teachers have to do to get tenure is “show up” for four years.
“I used some words to describe tenure which, taken in isolation, did not do a good job of describing my feelings on the subject,” Malloy wrote. “So let me describe my position in a better, broader context.”
He said the current system, in which a tenured teacher can be fired only if he or she is proven “incompetent,” sets “too low a bar for our children.” Malloy is calling for replacing this “binary” system — in which teachers are judged competent or incompetent — with a five-runged scale. Teachers could be removed for “ineffectiveness” based on one flunking mark on the job evaluations. Under Malloy’s proposal, teachers would have to earn and re-earn tenure by keeping up good grades.
In a 20-minute speech at the Omni Thursday, Malloy stuck to his guns, yet continued with the more harmonious tone set by his op-ed. He outlined his six principles of reform, which include ensuring the quality of teachers and principals.
The binary teacher evaluation system, he said, “has got to give. We can’t support as a goal, that you simply be more than incompetent.” He said the state needs to move to a system that doesn’t avoid seriously evaluating teachers after four years.
He added a rebuttal of one theme he’s heard at town hall meetings, which he said he continues to hold “because I don’t know any better.”
Poverty No Excuse
“One of the great frustrations is when I hear that it is poverty,” Malloy said — that kids aren’t learning because they’re poor.
Malloy said the state is tackling poverty by introducing a statewide Earned Income Tax Credit that gives money to the working poor, and by allotting $500 million for affordable housing, the “first major commitment since 1990.”
“I think poverty makes things a lot tougher,” but it’s no excuse, he said.
A recent poll showed even as many teachers revile him, other voters favor his tenure reforms.
“I am neither a hero nor a demon,” he said in closing remarks. Instead, he’s a man who “grew up with fairly substantial learning disabilities and physical impairments. Because of a mother who wouldn’t give up and teachers who wouldn’t give up, I’m here today as governor of Connecticut.”
He drew applause from the ballroom with a call to end the state’s achievement gap, which is the worst in the nation.
In a panel discussion that followed Malloy’s speech after he left the room, Paul Vallas, Bridgeport’s schools superintendent, called for peace between Malloy and the teachers.
Vallas (pictured) said governor Malloy has been “reasonable,” yet he has been “shouted at as though he’s been some sort of barbaric.”
On the other hand, he said, “we need to be really wary and really careful about denigrating teachers and attacking educators.”
“We need to come together — on both sides — rather than engage in the kind of rhetoric that rips people apart,” Vallas said.
Mary Loftus Levine (pictured), head of the Connecticut Education Association, one of the state’s two largest teachers unions, agreed.
“It appears to teachers that they’ve been blamed” and scapegoated, she said. “The morale of teachers right now couldn’t be much lower.” She said she has a responsibility to stand up for teachers — but also to lead the discussion in a “respectful” way.
As for the boisterous town hall meetings, Levine said “we have urged people not to go. We do not think it’s productive” to negotiate the 163-page bill in that forum and “have screaming matches.”
Levine said despite the much-publicized disputes, “we’re happy to have a president — and a governor — who have taken on public education. Many of us are very excited about what’s going on. In fact we have been crying out for this kind of help.”
Levine said as she listened to Malloy’s six principles of education, “there isn’t one point that I would disagree with.” She said she agrees on 80 percent of Malloy’s bill, and she hopes to see legislation pass that represents a consensus.
“I think we’re going to get there. I feel optimistic. When all is said and done, we have to make this work and we have to do this together.”
Meanwhile, her union took out the new TV ads this week savaging the plan. (Click here to read the Courant’s Rick Green’s take on the state of the debate.)