Asking for boldness and big ideas, Gov. Dannel Malloy urged lawmakers and business owners Wednesday to come together and commit to “nothing less than a full-scale economic revival.”
One of the main elements of Malloy’s plan involves reforming schools to allow incentives for the best teachers, to restructure tenure so that it has to be continually earned and to provide more money to troubled schools
“Today tenure is too easy to get and too hard to take away,” Malloy said in his State of the State address. “I propose we do it a different way. I propose we hold every teacher to a standard of excellence.”
Under his proposed $128 million education agenda, most would go to the lowest-performing districts. For the schools to get the money, districts would have to “embrace key reforms,” with tenure changes being one of them.
"I propose we hold every teacher to a standard of excellence," Malloy said. "Under my proposal, tenure will have to be earned and re-earned. Not earned simply by showing up for work – earned by meeting certain objective performance standards, including student performance, school performance, and parent and peer reviews.
“We cannot and will not fix what’s broken in our schools by scapegoating teachers. But nor can we fix it if we do not have the ability to remove teachers who don’t perform well in the classroom in a timely fashion,” he said. “In this new system, tenure will be a privilege, not a right. It will be earned and retained through effective teaching, not by counting years of service.”
Malloy has also proposed that students seeking to enter a teaching program have a minimum GPA of B-plus, instead of the present GPA requirement of a B-minus.
In ten years, Malloy said, he sees Connecticut as a leader in biosciences, precision manufacturing and a “Mecca for digital and sports entertainment.”
He acknowledged detractors in his closing comments, saying that cooperation is necessary.
“Some people will surely say an economic revival is beyond our grasp, that I’m asking too much, that I’m setting an expectation that is too high. They’ll say we should be content to just make progress,” Malloy said. “I say those people are dead wrong.”
Unemployment continues to be staggeringly high, esp. when you consider that it's recent decline has more to do with the 99rs running out of time than people going back to work. More funding to an over-paid cadre of educators and administrators may give them a better life, help them get bigger houses, nicer cars, the latest iphone, and that winter vacation in Stowe, but the unemployed factory, office and retail workers are the broader base impacting the economy. Get them back to work and paid well, Danny-boy, and you will have accomplished a ton!
The other mistake is to assume all other business can just wait, for months or years, while we focus on one problem. It can't. I don't necessarily care for Malloy or any pol's efforts, but they clearly understand what the hecklers in the cheap seats don't: regular life and the overall infrastructure MUST continue to be maintained and sustained while repairs elsewhere are in progress.
See attached article: http://www.ctmirror.com/story/15408/education-reform-focus-turns-improving-principals
In the longer run, though, stronger schools are a boost to the economy. Since we can't just slash taxes and make gummint go 'way, returning something for the tax levels here is a way to attract and retain quality residents.
jobs in CT so they move to another state. That's what I call RETURN ON INVESTMENT. Understand that the manufacturing infrastructure in CT has been dismantled. Those left, ie. UTC, are moving out. The UTC / Goodrich deal WILL cost CT jobs and be used as a lever to pry more $'s from Malloy. Another great ROI. Can an economy be healthy based on Government (public sector service) employment, service businesses and retail? I don't think so. Voters better wake up fast. John D
Perhaps we do not really have an economic problem in this state. Perhaps what we really have is a values problem: parents who don't value education; employers who are willing to sacrifice the welfare of their employees to generate ever higher profits for themselves and their shareholders; public sector employees who feel they can overreach and game the system when it comes to pensions and other benefits; politicians who retire with nice pensions and enter the revolving door to work for the private sector; politicians who decide to give land specifically set aside as open space for the public good to private developers.
Ooh, you're in for it now. :) Duck. I'd agree to a large extent - CT escaped most of the economic crisis of the last five years and was among the least-affected states. No, it's not fun and it's not trivial and it's not easily fixable... but as I've said in other threads, folks here are complaining bitterly about wet shoes when a good part of the rest of the US is drowning. The blinkered assumption that none of that affected us here and that all is the fault of Malloy et al. and that all is 'orribly 'orrible here would crack me up if it weren't so appallingly and counterproductively, well, horrifying.
Pretty good illustration of the mindsets of the political division: For the righty-tighties, there is their way and everything else, which is wrong. For the lefty-loosies, there are a number of ways, one of which seems best. But then, living with two-valued logic is so... comforting, isn't it? Nothing like that scary multi-valued logic that's been in use since the Reformation.
You're just... one of THEM. And we all know it.
Kind of like passing an exam to receive an educational diploma, or successfully completing some sort of screening in order to obtain employment, posters on this site should be required to display some basic knowledge of the subject matter being discussed.
Governments state and federal have been over-fed by career politicians who have added employees, departments, commissions, agencies, laws and more and more burdensome "regulations" and TAXES to pay for their insatiable appetites for control and influence! These un-Constitutional usurpations of power have turned Hartford and Washington into hungry, greedy and bloated bureaucracies that are feckless to do much beyond gorging themselves upon more and more of the dollars earned by the HALF of Americans who still pay income taxes--to support the other half who don't! We common sense folks like John and Michael recognize that proposing to SPEND MORE $$$ that aren't being earned, let alone coming in to the CT Dept of Revenue, on new "programs" is an exercise in futility. Instead, more of the productive people who work hard, create businesses and jobs, or whose jobs have been destroyed, will continue to LEAVE CT.
The Clueless live among us.