Education

First, the good news. Enrollment in the state’s publicly funded preschools has slightly increased since 2010 and funding has remained steady. Most other states weren’t as fortunate, as they gutted funding and shrank enrollment. Now, the bad news. Only 10 percent of the state’s 3- and 4-year-olds were enrolled in the state’s School Readiness or […]

Cheryl Norton, the former president of Southern Connecticut State University who lost her job last year, has landed a new gig as the president of Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania. Norton’s controversial dismissal by the former chancellor of the Connecticut State University System led to state legislators, former Gov. M. Jodi Rell and the attorney general’s chastising […]

Asked if he would sign an education reform package if it doesn’t include changes to how teachers earn tenure, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy was blunt. “No,” he said. Whether that means tying teacher evaluations to earning tenure or speeding up how long it takes to fire a tenured teacher, both which the governor has proposed, […]

What does the state’s teacher of the year think of Gov. Dannel P. Malloy’s plans to shakeup education? David Bosso’s comments to the governor during a forum in Berlin seemed to be pretty straightforward, but it has sparked a fierce online back-and-forth between the state’s largest teachers union and the administration. The headline to the […]

Gov. Dannel P. Malloy made clear in a letter to state legislators Wednesday afternoon that he is not interested in a one-year study period on the education reforms he is pushing. He’s also calling on lawmakers not to allow special interest groups to dictate their vote. “I am concerned that some people think we can wait […]

The state’s largest teachers unions may be encouraging their members to no longer attend the governor’s town hall meetings, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be able to get a live recount of what’s happending. The Connecticut Education Association for the first time began live tweeting during Wednesday’s forum in Berlin. And it seems the Malloy […]

Gov. Dannel P. Malloy isn’t the only governor attempting to use his political capital to get some major changes to education. Education Week has a nice rundown on how governors from other states are doing as their legislative sessions near their end. The headline for the Nutmeg State’s section reads, “Backlash in Connecticut.”

Just a few months on the job as the first president of the recently merged state and community college systems, Robert A. Kennedy told the governor Tuesday it’s like working in a cemetery. “You have a lot of people under you but nobody is listening,” he joked during the monthly state commissioners meeting with Gov. […]

The Republican minority leaders complained Friday their party is shut out of the education-reform negotiations being conducted by the legislature’s Education Committee, which is hoping to report the bill out of committee Monday. Rep. Lawrence F. Cafero Jr. of Norwalk and Sen. John McKinney of Fairfield put the blame on the Democratic co-chairs, Rep. Andrew […]

Do school boards have to ask their teachers’ unions for permission before switching over to computer-based reporting? The Connecticut Education Association filed a complaint with the state’s Board of Labor Relations alleging that the Milford Board of Education violated its contract with the union when it began requiring their special education teachers to use the […]

It turned out to be a short stay in Illinois for Michael Hogan, the former UConn president.

It’s been 29 years since the federal government released the landmark “Nation at Risk” report that said, “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.” Three decades later, we are still a nation at […]

Gov. Dannel P. Malloy on Wednesday offered a more polite take on how teachers earn tenure. His previous comment seemed to scold the profession, by saying all teachers in the state have to do to keep their job is show up. “In my state of the state speech I used some words to describe tenure […]

State Education Commissioner Stefan Pryor was huddled at lunch in the Legislative Office Building cafeteria today with the leadership of the Connecticut Education Association and a senior aide to House Speaker Christopher G. Donovan. They did not appear to be reviewing their NCAA brackets. The mood was light, despite the increasingly rancorous tone of Gov. […]

Senate Bill 24, the education reform bill put forward by Governor Malloy, is now under consideration in the Education Committee. Plenty of folks around the state have weighed in with their opinions about where the bill doesn’t go far enough, where it goes too far, and everything in between. We know that Connecticut residents – […]