Also check out article below captioned: CT News Junkie | Education Reform
Passes Senate Early Tuesday ...
by Christine
Stuart | May 16, 2012 12:50pm
Posted to: Courts | Education
Gov. Dannel P. Malloy may have signed what supporters are
calling a sweeping education reform bill Tuesday, but its 185-pages don’t begin
to touch upon how the state finances all of its public schools.
That thorny
issue is expected to be dealt with by the legislature next year or a court in
2014, the year the education adequacy lawsuit is scheduled to go back to trial.
The
Connecticut Coalition for Justice in Education Funding sued the state back in
2005 alleging that under the state’s Constitution, not only are students
entitled to a public education but they also are entitled to one that works,
one that assures them, at minimum, an adequate education. The state Supreme
Court agreed in a 4-3 decision in 2010, which sent the case back to
the trial court.
In an effort
to convince the state of Connecticut to settle
the lawsuit out of court, the Connecticut
Coalition for Justice in Education Funding has upped the ante by acquiring the
pro bono services of a prestigious New
York law firm with deep pockets.
Earlier this
week, the organization announced that Debevoise & Plimpton LLP
will take over as chief legal counsel. Yale Law School’s Education Adequacy
Project will continue its pro bono involvement with the case, but instead of
being the lead law firm it continue in a supporting role.
And, after
guiding the case to a Supreme Court victory, Yale doesn’t mind taking a back
seat.
“We are
delighted that Debevoise & Plimpton,
one of the nation’s leading law firms, has agreed to join this vital lawsuit,” Yale Law
School Dean Robert C.
Post said. “The students of the law school’s Education Adequacy Project have
litigated this case since it was filed in 2005, and we are grateful for the
participation of Debevoise as the case moves into the
trial stage.”
One of Debevoise & Plimpton’s most talented litigators, Helen Cantwell, a
graduate of Harvard
Law School,
asked her firm for the case.
“I am
extremely excited about this opportunity to lead such an important case,”
Cantwell, a Greenwich
native, said in a press release. “The CCJEF lawsuit will allow us to fight for
the improved capacity of Connecticut’s
public schools to ensure equal educational opportunity for all students,
whether poor, minority, immigrant, handicapped, or gifted.”
The Attorney
General’s Office, which is defending the state, welcomed the new firm.
“We welcome Debevoise & Plimpton to this
important case and look forward to a constructive and cordial working
relationship,” the office said in an email.
But Dianne
Kaplan deVries, executive director of the Connecticut Coalition of
Justice in Education Funding, called it a “huge new development” in the case.
“With the
formidable resources and litigation expertise of Debevoise
& Plimpton and the continuing invaluable work of
the Yale Law School
Education Adequacy Project students, CCJEF now has the Dream Team,” deVries said. “The timing is perfect. The state’s broken
school finance system is widely acknowledged by state and local policymakers,
yet it remains unfixed.”
In the
meantime, the Education Cost Sharing Task Force created by
Malloy, who was one of the first plaintiffs in the lawsuit when he was mayor of
Stamford, is
expected to make their recommendations on how to change the formula in October.
The group was formed back in 2011.
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CT News Junkie | Education Reform
Passes Senate Early Tuesday ...
by Christine
Stuart | May 8, 2012 3:51am
(11) Comments | Log in to Post a Comment
Posted to: Education
The 185-page
education reform bill was praised by Democratic Senators and panned by
Republicans, who didn’t have any time to read the bill before debate began
shortly before 1:30 a.m. Tuesday.
The bill, which was negotiated for the better part of
the past month by lawmakers and Gov. Dannel P.
Malloy’s staff, passed the Senate 28-7 at 3:30 a.m. Tuesday morning. Many of
the Republicans voiced their displeasure with the process, but ended up voting
for the legislation.
“This is
vampire legislation,” Sen. Joseph Markley, R-Southington, said. “A bill emerges
out of a backroom after midnight and it passes through the Senate before dawn
and the debate never sees the light of day.”
Markley said
he decided he wasn’t going to support the bill because once he saw it, he
wasn’t going to have time to read it or understand it.
Republicans
suggested they be given time to go back and talk to their constituents about
the contents of the bill, but after protests about the process more than half
the Republicans voted for the measure.
Markley said
they won’t do that because “it’s a house of cards and it will fall over with
the first small breeze that hits it.”
At a 10 p.m.
press conference, Malloy admitted that people have been negotiating for a long
time, especially during the last few days, “so there’s a chance we missed
something.”
But with
Sen. Steven Cassano, D-Manchester, said lawmakers
need to trust their leaders who negotiated the bill. He said it’s difficult not
to be part of the process, but that’s just the way the building works.
“The system
of public education will continue to be the major way children will learn in Connecticut,” Cassano said in a statement. “Charter and magnet schools
will continue to function with additional funding, but draconian changes
proposed over the last few months will not happen.”
Sen. Toni Harp, D-New Haven, praised the bill for addressing
the achievement gap once and for all.
She said
there were versions of this bill that would have had the General Assembly take
one percent of the dollars and “pretty much privatize” education and forget
about the other 99 percent of children who attend public schools.
“What this
bill does is say ‘we’re going to think about everyone, and we’re going to face
the fact that we live in a knowledge-based economy,’” Harp said.
Two of the
most difficult issues for lawmakers were in figuring out where charter schools
fit into the state’s education picture and how teacher tenure is handled under
a newly developed evaluation system.
Charter
school funding was boosted in the bill passed by the Senate on Tuesday morning,
but it wasn’t funded to the extent that Malloy had requested. Funding for
charter schools was increased from $9,400 to $10,500 in the first year, $11,000
in the second, and $11,500 in the third. It also allows nonprofits to operate
six of the 25 schools identified as turnaround schools, in effect prohibiting
for-profit companies from doing so.
As far as
teacher tenure goes, Sen. Andrea Stillman, co-chair
of the Education Committee, said a teacher after four years of good evaluations
should be granted tenure in their fifth year.
“Tenure, as
you know, is due process,” Stillman said. “If a
teacher has tenure and their evaluations fall off then the administrator can
step in and help mentor that teacher.”
If that
teacher doesn’t improve, then a termination process can begin, Stillman said.
“What we’ve
done in this bill is shorten that length of time,” she added. The bill also
calls for the new evaluation system developed by the Performance Evaluation and
Advisory Council to be piloted in 10 schools.
The bill
allows for teacher unions to use impact bargaining to
negotiate working condition changes in the low-performing schools, which
become part of the Education Commissioner’s network.
Sen.
Minority Leader John McKinney, R-Fairfield, said he has to admit he hasn’t read
every word of the legislation and isn’t happy with the process, but he praised
the inclusion of a reading proficiency measure initially proposed by Rep. Gary
Holder-Winfield of New Haven.
The bill
includes a pilot program to enhance literacy for kindergarten through third
grade students. It also creates 1,000 new preschool slots, mostly for
low-income communities.
Click here to read more about the press
conference announcing the education compromise.
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