When the legislature convened last month for a session dedicated to education reform and funding issues, Governor Dannel P. Malloy, state legislators, and even Connecticut’s teachers unions were sanguine about finally addressing the state’s notorious “achievement gap” between the state’s poorest school districts in urban areas and its more affluent districts in the suburbs and rural areas. The state Education Commissioner Stefan Pryor believed he had reached an accord between groups representing local school boards, administrators, and teachers’ unions on a system of teacher evaluation that would introduce considerations of merit into decisions affecting staffing and layoffs, rather than relying solely on the limited qualifications of longevity and tenure. This week, most of that upbeat expectation was smothered by the legislative process.

Many of the reforms proposed by the governor were modified and dissipated in the Legislature’s Education Committee, including provisions on teacher evaluation and tenure, which were consigned to another year of “study.” State lawmakers had been pressured in recent weeks by teachers unions, who in an apparent spell of buyer’s remorse, were having second thoughts about subjecting their own evaluations and tenure privileges to largely undefined and untried assessment methods. The spokesman for the American Federation of Teachers Connecticut conceded to The Hartford Courant last week, “… we just can’t say no. The status quo is not working,” adding, “We have to be part of the solution.” However, the Connecticut Education Association was less conciliatory.

The CEA launched a television advertising campaign in the ominous and exaggerated style of most negative political advertising these days, including warnings that the governor plans to usurp local control of public schools and to divert funds from public school districts and charter schools. (Of the 1,166 public schools in the state, Gov Malloy has identified about two dozen chronically failing schools that should be removed from local control.) Unfortunately, the governor’s struggle with the teachers unions, as played out in the Legislature’s Education Committee and on the airwaves, has once again shifted the focus from student achievement to teacher perquisites. Education reform is not all about the teachers, but clearly their role in student achievement is key. We have to ask ourselves just how well do we expect a student to perform in class if the teacher is performing poorly? In a survey of school superintendents released by Commissioner Pryor in January, 87 percent of the respondents said they lacked the ability to remove ineffective teachers.

In a Quinnipiac University poll released last week, voters said by a two-to-one margin that it should be easier to fire a teacher, and a majority backed the governor’s attempt to modify and limit teacher tenure. That same poll, however, suggests that most people do not think education in Connecticut is in a state of crisis. It found, for example, that public school teachers are more popular than the governor, and fully 85 percent judged the schools in their community to be either fairly good or very good. So by the yardstick of the political marketplace, the changes that would be wrought by making the teaching profession in our state a meritocracy would be incremental rather than wholesale. Performance reviews and tenure qualifications would be of concern only to that small cohort of teachers who should probably be pursuing some other career anyway.

It is unfortunate that the teachers unions and the legislators they clearly influence have gotten hung up on professional protections that in the end turn out to be of the greatest value to those few educators who offer the least to Connecticut’s students — poorly performing teachers.