New Opportunities For A New School Year
Virginia Woolf famously wrote that “on or about December 1910, human character changed,†referring to the shift toward Modernism.
I’m not going to make nearly so grandiose a pronouncement, but we enter this new school year with many changes—some of them dramatic—to the educational landscape, especially here in Connecticut but also across the US.
For one thing, we have a new Commissioner of Education, Dianna Wentzell, who, although she served under Stefan Pryor in the Malloy administration, does have the advantage of having actually been an educator. In fact, she spent more than a decade teaching, and even taught in an urban district.
It’s unfortunate that widely supported legislation to make teaching experience a requirement for the position of Commissioner of Education was vetoed by Governor Malloy and that the democrats in the legislature lacked the political will and courage to override his veto, but this is at least a start and perhaps sets (or re-establishes) a animo for future administrations.
Connecticut has also been given approval by the US Department of Education to jettison the new (and expensive and controversial) SBAC test for eleventh graders, and instead will be allowed to use the SAT. Furthermore, the state will be picking up the tab for everyone to take the SAT, as it had done for the SBAC and the CAPT before this.
And of course the SBAC results were finally released, offering nothing we didn’t already know. Students in wealthy districts did fairly well; students in high need districts did not do as well. Now comes the push back to reduce the testing from yearly in grades three through eight to every other year.
The USDE also approved a school rating system for Connecticut that factors in more than just test scores. The new system is not without controversy or objection, particularly to its five point system that many fear will look too much like an A through F grade scale, but at the very least the new system will take into account factors including attendance, physical fitness, and access to the arts, among others.
In the meantime, the teacher evaluation system (SEED) enters its second year of a two-year moratorium on the use of state test data while the SDE figures out what changes to make to its initial plan. Still no word, however, on what will replace the old CEU system! Just a few years ago, I renewed my 7-12 certification (I maintained it even though I am at UConn) and it was just some paperwork to fill out, nothing more.
On the national level, we look to finally be inching toward reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which would finally eliminate some of the onerous provisions of the Bush-era No Child Left Behind version of ESEA, and which might also send the Obama-administration’s Race To the Top aktivitas riding off into the sunset.
The Senate has approved a reauthorization bill called the Every Child Achieves Act, and the House has passed a similar bill called the Student Success Act. These two bills still have to be reconciled and signed into law, but the prospects for passage look good. The ECAA is particularly responsive to the wishes of most educators. For one thing, it replaces AYP with a version of something the NEA calls an Opportunity Dashboard, which includes factors like access to the arts and phys ed, the presence of counselors and nurses, advanced course offerings, and the like. (It’s consistent with the new school rating system the USDE approved for CT). It also rejects additional funding for vouchers, and several amendments to try to embed vouchers in the new bill were voted down.
Here at UConn, as you may have read, we have the largest freshman class ever, which includes a dramatic increase in various populations of students, including 140 valedictorians and salutatorians admitted into the ever-growing honors program, and many, many more international students.
As a result of this increase in international students, my wife Amy and I are working together again for the first time in nine years. She’s teaching English for Non-Native Speakers as an adjunct professor and has a class of students from China and Korea.
On a much smaller scale, I’m excited that after nine years in the CWP’s office suite (a generous description!) I finally got new shelving and a desk and chair for the combination supply closet/library/copy center/kitchenette, which dramatically cleans up the area and makes more work space for my bevy of interns and the CWP’s new graduate assistant.
We made room for Amy, too.
Best wishes to everyone for a productive year!
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