As current and former teachers, we recognize the urgent need for education reform in the state of Connecticut.  We believe that a quality public education is a civil right and we support the provisions of SB 24 that will empower educators to provide the children of Connecticut with the education they deserve.

An excellent teacher can alter the life path of a child.  Recent studies confirm what we have known anecdotally for years: teachers have a dramatic effect on the quality of a child’s education.  An excellent teacher can teach twice as much content as an ineffective teacher in a given academic year.  Effective teachers increase student achievement more than any other variable, including the amount of money spent per pupil and class size.  For students who are already behind, this means that an excellent teacher can be the difference between graduating high school and dropping out.  Effective teachers work tirelessly for their students to ensure their success.  We believe excellent teachers should be commended for their work and we support Governor Malloy’s proposed reforms of the teacher evaluation process that will reward these teachers.

Assessments used to measure student achievement must be rigorous, evidence based, and objective.  As educators, many of us have witnessed the unfortunate collateral damage of education reforms that measure student learning according to standardized tests.  Rather than increasing student achievement, legislation such as No Child Left Behind has encouraged administrators to adopt stopgap strategies that replace substantive learning with test prep.  Tests that are predominately multiple-choice, tests that measure factual recall rather than critical thinking, and tests that are culturally biased are not valid indicators of student learning.  Students’ performance on these tests should not be used to measure teacher effectiveness and should not be the basis for deciding whether or not teachers are awarded tenure.  We support the inclusion of provisions in SB 24 that encourage the use of data to measure student achievement and teacher effectiveness, given that the assessments used to collect this data are rigorous and reliable.

Poverty is a significant obstacle to student achievement but it is not determinative.  Teachers who work in schools in economically under-resourced areas face significant challenges.  Many opponents of the governor’s bill argue that the public education system cannot be fixed until poverty is fixed.  As teachers who have worked in under-resourced communities, we know that our students are often at a severe disadvantage compared to their peers in more affluent areas.  By the time students in low-income communities start school, they may already have fallen behind their peers due to lack of resources such as access to books and early education programs.  We support the proposed expansion of the provisions of SB 24 that provide funding to increase students’ access to early education programs and empower non-profit organizations support teachers in under-resourced communities who face additional challenges.

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