New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
Turns out teachers were right all along
The outset of COVID-19 saw an outpouring of support for what were termed essential workers, and high on the list were teachers. With no experience teaching remotely, an entire profession was forced to adapt on the fly and come up with ways to keep students learning and engaged from a distance. There were plenty of hiccups, but somehow, they managed to do this.
Two years in, some of those good feelings started to sour. Amid yet another coronavirus wave, teachers were seen in some quarters as too reluctant to return to full, in-person classrooms.
What was really happening was reasonable. Even with vaccines available and safety measures in place, COVID danger has not disappeared. Teachers were looking for assurances that as much as possible was being done to keep them safe from a deadly disease. The belief that there was more to be done turned out to be justified.
An investigation by Connecticut Public Radio last month found that onethird of school districts in the state did not have enough money to maintain or improve school air quality, and about 20 percent did not even have a program in place to make that determination. Given what we’ve learned about COVID and how much money has poured in to cover just these kinds of issues, it was a shocking finding.
Teachers were saying their workplaces weren’t as safe as they should be, and the stats backed them up. It wasn’t the first time in recent memory they were proven right on a major public policy issue.
It’s been a decade since Connecticut became the focus of a school reform effort that swept the nation, with charter schools and standardized tests debated in the Legislature as thenGov. Dannel P. Malloy pushed major changes. It was always a little odd, since Connecticut is consistently named as home to some of the best public schools in America. But not everything about school reform was really about better schools.
It’s helpful to go back and remember how this started, at least the modern version of it. When George W. Bush took office after the turn of the century, one of his major initiatives besides cutting taxes for rich people was a bipartisan education reform known as No Child Left Behind. This was an example of two parties in Washington setting aside their differences and enacting some truly terrible public policy.
The law established new benchmarks for standardized testing, which were to progressively rise over the years. Eventually, as the law was written, schools were supposed to reach 100 percent proficiency on standardized tests. This was never going to happen, as everyone knew. Still, it gave lawmakers a chance to feel like they were holding people accountable.
When Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, took office, he inherited a mess of a federal education policy and somehow made it worse. To get a waiver from No Child Left Behind, the federal government required states to, among other things, adopt systems linking teacher job prospects to test scores.
That led to Malloy’s reform efforts, and a furious, ultimately successful pushback by teachers and their unions. The final law included few of the problematic proposals Malloy introduced, and seemed to make teachers happy. The controversy then faded for a while.
Underlying all this are legitimate issues. It was never fair to call urban schools “failing,” as happened often during the reform debate, but there is a major resource shortfall, and an accompanying achievement gap. What never made sense was linking these facts to teachers’ job security, since unions are just as much a factor in “failing” districts as they are in rich towns where public schools are among the prime attractions.
Now there are numbers backing up teachers’ assertions during the Malloy controversy. Because similar reforms were enacted in states across the country at different intervals, it’s possible to
compare what happened in their wake, and the quick answer is — nothing. A study from the Annenberg Institute at Brown University finds that the “massive effort to institute new high-stakes teacher evaluation systems” had no measurable impact on student outcomes, including test scores and graduation rates.
The reforms that did pass in Connecticut mostly involved intensified help for school systems that needed it most, which is something that could have happened without much controversy, as well as increasing access to preschool. On the big issues, the teachers’ arguments held up.
Why does this matter in 2022, a full decade after the worst of the school reform fights in Connecticut? Because this stuff never goes away. It’s always lurking, and it came the surface over the past year during the debates about COVID and school closures. Partly because they’re public employees and partly because they’re so heavily unionized, teachers will always be in someone’s cross hairs.
Of course some districts need help, and there’s much more that could be done to provide a better education to everyone in Connecticut. But targeting teachers never made any sense. Public schools are one of the things that mostly work in Connecticut. We should keep it that way.
A study finds that the “massive effort to institute new high-stakes teacher evaluation systems” had no measurable impact on student outcomes, including test scores and graduation rates.