The Narrow Path To Educational Excellence

Now that the Board of Education has assembled a complex $70 million budget to run Newtown’s schools in 2012-2013, the town’s finance authorities — the Board of Finance and the Legislative Council — have an equally challenging task: figuring out how to pay for it. Budgetmakers on the local level have the advantage, or disadvantage, depending on one’s perspective, of having to do their work under the careful watch of those having to bear the brunt of the cost — property taxpayers.

It is easy to do the job badly by pinching pennies, cutting corners and eroding educational quality, or by gold plating school curricula and programs and taxing the town into indigence. The political path between parsimony and penury is a narrow one, especially in a state like Connecticut with high educational standards and high taxes. And it is not a problem Newtown faces alone.

This week the legislature convened a session dedicated to education reform and funding issues, motivated in part by an approaching deadline to secure waivers to the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. Like 38 other states seeking waivers, Connecticut hopes to avoid restrictions on how the state’s underachieving school districts can spend federal funds while, at the same time, using the conditions for those waivers — raising common core standards and more rigorous teacher performance evaluations — as leverage toward the kind of significant educational reforms that will put hundreds of millions of dollars in federal Race to the Top funding within reach. In the “race” for these funds, Connecticut has, embarrassingly, fallen short of the “top” every time it has applied.

This legislative gambit is fraught all the political pitfalls that commonly open up whenever major policy changes collide with institutional prerogatives. But this time just may be different. Late last month, Education Commissioner Stefan Pryor told the Performance Evaluation Advisory Council that state educators, including teachers’ unions and groups representing administrators and school boards, had agreed on a system of teacher evaluation that would unseat longevity and tenure as the sole or prime factors in making staffing and layoff decisions. Under the plan, which still needs State Board of Education approval, those considerations would be replaced by assessments of student learning, school performance evaluations, teacher observations, and, for the first time, peer and parent surveys. Having educators behind these teacher evaluation changes is a huge step, since similar reforms in other states routinely face labor opposition and lawsuits.

Declaring Connecticut as a true educational meritocracy for both educators and students is the kind of reform that should propel Connecticut into the lead pack in the Race to the Top. The extra federal funds will help in the state’s efforts at property tax relief, yet the biggest dividends of reform will come from identifying and promoting excellence among our educators and weeding out or retraining those who are ineffective in the classroom.

Student achievement has always been the best measure of our success as a society that values educational excellence. To calibrate our policies and spending priorities on any other scale is an exercise in self-delusion.