Legislative leaders spent the afternoon behind closed doors negotiating which education reforms will move forward, while state legislators and lobbyists outside continued to speculate that the session will draw to a close in three weeks with no agreement.

“We are making progress,” Senate Majority Leader Martin Looney, D-New Haven, said as he headed into a meeting at the State Capitol. “I think we’ll reach some agreement.”

The meeting Tuesday is the third in five days between the Malloy administration and top legislative leaders. Tuesday’s meeting was between Gov. Dannel P. Malloy’s chief of staff Mark Ojakian, the co-chairs of the education and appropriations committees and other top legislative leaders.

The major holdup between the bills approved by the appropriations and education committees and what Gov. Dannel P. Malloy has proposed is whether teacher performance evaluations should help determine tenure and salary decisions. Leadership also will need to determine what authority the state’s education commissioner will have in intervening in the state’s lowest-performing schools.

Jacqueline was CT Mirror’s Education and Housing Reporter, and an original member of the CT Mirror staff, joining shortly before our January 2010 launch. Her awards include the best-of-show Theodore A. Driscoll Investigative Award from the Connecticut Society of Professional Journalists in 2019 for reporting on inadequate inmate health care, first-place for investigative reporting from the New England Newspaper and Press Association in 2020 for reporting on housing segregation, and two first-place awards from the National Education Writers Association in 2012. She was selected for a prestigious, year-long Propublica Local Reporting Network grant in 2019, exploring a range of affordable and low-income housing issues. Before joining CT Mirror, Jacqueline was a reporter, online editor and website developer for The Washington Post Co.’s Maryland newspaper chains. Jacqueline received an undergraduate degree in journalism from Bowling Green State University and a master’s in public policy from Trinity College.

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