Posted inEducation

Education reform: Feds find Connecticut’s plans lacking

Reviewers at the federal education department found the way Connecticut measures the performance of its public schools lacking and its plans to begin tracking the achievement of English learners vague. State officials must now decide whether they want to revise or defend Connecticut’s plan for complying with federal law before U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos officially considers whether to approve or reject it.

Posted inCT Viewpoints

Providing exceptional education to all students requires more accountability, not less

The release of Connecticut’s teacher evaluation results in a school-funding trial has revealed that only 1 percent of teachers were evaluated as either “below standard” or “developing.” Recently, a CT Mirror story covered a discussion among members of the Connecticut Performance Evaluation Advisory Council (PEAC) about whether and how to amend the teacher evaluation process. In that story, Connecticut unions represented that the inclusion of a state assessment in the evaluation process is unfair to teachers. But, as a former teacher, principal, and superintendent, and a father of six Connecticut children—it strikes me as somewhat obvious that, quite to the contrary, these results indicate a strong, existing bias in favor of protecting teachers from data.