A Look at Key Elements of Connecticut’s Education Reform Bill
Connecticut’s Year of Education Reform produced a landmark education reform bill. Senate Bill 458 mandates the type of integrated changes that will help Connecticut to close its achievement gap while raising academic outcomes for all students.
A summary of key elements of Senate Bill 458 is below. The full bill can be found here and an analysis of the bill by the Office of Legislative Research can be found here.
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Turning Around Low-Achieving Districts and Schools
S.B. 458 establishes a tiered framework for monitoring the performance of all districts and schools and for identifying the lowest-achieving schools in the state. Under this plan, districts and schools are classified into five categories based on district and school performance indexes that uses student achievement data to identify their respective levels of achievement. The plan establishes a differentiated framework for intervention, and provides the State Department of Education and Commissioner of Education with greater authority to intervene
Connecticut General Assembly Passes Landmark Education Reform Bill
"We have achieved change, and our children will benefit." - Governor Dannel P. Malloy
The Connecticut Council for Education Reform applauds Governor Malloy for his leadership in delivering on his six education reform principles that were outlined in December, and for truly making 2012 the year of education reform. Due to the tireless efforts and leadership of Governor Malloy, Commissioner Pryor and Connecticut legislators, an education reform bill that will support teachers’ development and provide students with effective teachers, increase Pre-K slots, build a framework for meaningful intervention in our lowest-achieving schools, and establish a statewide common chart of accounts, was passed by the General Assembly tonight.
Governor Malloy and Commissioner Pryor deserve tremendous credit for leading the charge on this legislation. The immediate beneficiaries of this landmark education reform package will be the more than 550,000 Connecticut students.
Connecticut should be proud that its legislators and citizens have exhibited such a firm commitment to, and unwavering support of, the best interests of Connecticut’s students. These bold reforms will also make significant strides towards putting Connecticut back on track to being nationally recognized for its educational leadership and innovation, and will also increase Connecticut’s economic competitiveness on a national and global scale.
We applaud Governor Malloy, Commissioner Pryor and Connecticut’s legislators for recognizing that our students’ families and communities deserve nothing less than excellence, and for taking bold action on their behalf.
The Collective Call for Education Reform in Connecticut
As Connecticut’s 2012 legislative session enters the homestretch, a surprising amount of vitriol has been injected into the public discourse on school reform. In recent days, supporters of Senate Bill 24 have been painted as “special interest groups” with designs to “privatize public education.” Groups that support the Governor’s version of SB 24 do not represent “anti-education” special interests. Rather, these groups represent Connecticut’s principals, superintendents, local boards of education, the State Board of Education, university leaders, municipal leaders, chambers of commerce, and business leaders. Teachers, teachers-in-training and students have also added their voice to the collective call for reform. The only “special interest” common to this diverse group of stakeholders is ensuring that every child in Connecticut receives a high-quality education, and that our state is taking every action possible to make certain that it happens.
Those supportive of reforming Connecticut’s schools are not working to punish teachers or silence their collective voice. We should all recognize that public education is a community issue. We cannot effectively address the challenges within our current system until all stakeholders – educators, parents, employers, civic groups and government leaders – come together for a constructive, mutually-beneficial dialogue on how to do what’s best for all children.
We have a unique opportunity and a shared responsibility to use these last days of the legislative session to focus on how we can improve the educational opportunities and academic outcomes for all of Connecticut’s public school students. We cannot allow this opportunity to slip through our fingers. In the final weeks of the “Education Session,” we must put aside the vitriol. Connecticut’s students, families and communities deserve better. We can still pass comprehensive school reform this year. The time is now to commit to the necessary changes that will benefit all of Connecticut’s students.
Why Education Reform Matters To Business Leaders
Maintaining the status quo in today’s education system has moral and economic consequences, which impact all of Connecticut’s residents - including business leaders. These issues don’t only matter to those who work inside the education system, and no voice in this discussion should be dismissed as irrelevant, or maligned as being selfishly motivated. Sadly, the tone of today’s public discourse has made it easy for some stakeholders to misinterpret the goals and messages of business organizations like the Connecticut Council for Education Reform. We are committed to education reform because we care about the future wellbeing of Connecticut’s students, communities and economy.
“Committed to Closing Achievement Gap”
-Stamford Advocate
On April 11, 2012, Rae Ann Knopf, executive director of the Connecticut Council for Education Reform (CCER), wrote the letter below in response to a column in The Stamford Advocate that misrepresented CCER's work.
To the editor:
A column in The Advocate Sunday misrepresented the work of our organization, the CT Council for Education Reform (CCER).
Lessons from a Successful State
Recently, we observed that despite having similar demographics to Connecticut - Massachusetts has both a narrower achievement gap and a low-income population that outperforms Connecticut’s on some key national assessments. Furthermore, Massachusetts’ non low-income students rank first in the nation on many national assessments. So, how has Massachusetts managed to achieve these enviable gains in student performance for both low-income and non low-income students?
What Massachusetts Has Been Doing Right:
In 1993, Massachusetts passed an Education Reform Act, a major reform package, the implementation of which focused on (amongst other things):
- improving educator quality by developing professional expectations for teachers and school leaders, and linking these expectations to recertification;
- increasing state assistance in turning around “underperforming schools”, and increased intervention authority for “chronically underperforming schools”; and
- increasing funding for the neediest schools by creating a “foundation budget”, which defined adequate funding for districts based on standards about how a school should function; this budget rose and fell with changes in the student population, and with percentages of low-income students. The foundation budget was also gradually increased over time, and had almost doubled by 2007.
CT’s Students Decline in National Rankings:
High Student Performance is Not the Cause of Connecticut's Achievement Gap
Last week saw the revival of a myth that attributes the cause of Connecticut’s achievement gap, which is the largest in the nation, to the high performance of our non low-income students. It is this kind of misinformation that makes it sound like the achievement gap is an accomplishment that Connecticut should be proud of – as though it is due to particularly high levels of achievement for a group of Connecticut students. Not so.
In fact, educational assessments from the past decade demonstrate that Connecticut’s achievement gap cannot be simply attributed to the 
high performance of our non low-income students.
Reason #1. Connecticut’s non low-income students, while performing relatively well compared to the nation at large, have actually been losing ground over the last decade. For example, Connecticut’s non low-income 8th and 4th graders scored first and second in the nation on national math assessments in 2000. By 2011, these same tests ranked our non low-income students as twelfth in the nation in 4th grade math, and eighteenth in the nation in 8th grade math.
In other words, our non low-income students’ national ranking in math has actually fallen in the last eleven years by ten and sixteen places (depending on the grade you look at).