By Ben Velderman
EAGnews.org

MERIDEN, Conn. – Connecticut’s lawmakers are still high-fiving each other over the “historic” and “sweeping” education reform bill that sailed through the General Assembly last week, just hours before the legislative session was set to expire.

The self-congratulatory mood is shared by Gov. Dannel Malloy, who hails the bill as setting “the table … for real and fundamental reform of our public schools.” Those words suggest that the governor understands that the bill that passed was not real reform, but he’s willing to pretend for political reasons.

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The state’s largest teachers’ unions – the Connecticut Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers Connecticut – are both taking a victory lap, but not before they issued glowing tributes to lawmakers for “collaborating” with educators on the reforms.

(One union leader accidentally had an honest moment when she told a reporter, “We’re really the only state that has stopped this.” She was referring to serious education reform.)

And the state’s largest newspaper, the Hartford Courant, issued an editorial that lavished praise on Malloy and lawmakers for producing a bill “that should help ameliorate Connecticut’s worst-in-the-nation achievement gap and improve the quality of all of its public schools.”

But Connecticut Parents Union President Gwen Samuel isn’t joining the celebration.

“All this ‘goodwill towards men’ – I’m just not there,” Samuel tells EAGnews.org. “Everybody’s acting like this is new stuff, but it’s all been tried before,” with little success, she says.

According to Samuel, the so-called reforms don’t make meaningful changes to tenure and seniority protections for teachers, and they do nothing to address collective bargaining, which gives teacher unions all their power in the first place.

“Teacher unions are the biggest winners here,” Samuel says. “As long as collective bargaining exists, nothing will really change. Fundamentally, things are still the same.”

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A tacit admission of failure

A central feature of the K-12 reform bill is a new teacher evaluation process. The CT Mirror reports that teachers will be rated as “effective” or “ineffective,” though the evaluation process is still being fleshed out before it is implemented statewide for the 2013-14 school year.

Samuel believes the unions will use their immense influence to tweak and water down the evaluation process until it’s virtually meaningless.

She also notes that by agreeing to an evaluation process, the teacher unions are tacitly admitting that teacher quality has gone unmeasured until now.

“I won’t applaud (lawmakers) for getting teachers to do what they should have been doing all along,” says Samuel.

She’s also skeptical of the $6.8 million proposal to create 1,000 new slots in Connecticut’s preschool program. While she supports early childhood education, her recent experiences with a local Head Start program taught her the state’s preschool programs suffer from a lack of oversight.

“I’m concerned about pouring more money into a system that we don’t have checks and balances for. There’s no accountability – nobody’s measuring for effectiveness,” Samuel notes.

In other words, lawmakers have committed to throwing more money down the PreK-12 rat hole, all in the name of supposed reform.

Looking ahead

Connecticut lawmakers may feel the new law takes education reform off the legislative radar, but Samuel isn’t going to stop working for genuine reform.

Some union leaders may have thought they were rid of Samuel when she was mysteriously fired from her job with a local Head Start program earlier this spring. That occurred after she hosted an education reform rally featuring former D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, a hated figure in union circles.

But the unexplained loss of her job only made Samuel more determined. And the toothless “reforms” adopted last week have her ready to return to battle.

She says her job as parent union president is to keep families from being swayed by the favorable media coverage the reform bill is getting. She doesn’t want parents to think the battle for quality education is over.

“I’m going to remind them that their job is to protect their child, and to hold teachers and principals accountable,” Samuel says.

Her Connecticut Parents Union is currently challenging the state’s school residency laws – which trap students into failing school districts based on nothing more than their zip code – in a federal court. Samuel says a favorable ruling could have “a ripple effect” on school residency laws across the country, and open up the field for increased school choice.

She also plans on targeting lawmakers who supported the education reform bill, even after it became clear the unions were commandeering the legislative process by holding closed door sessions with friendly lawmakers.

“Election time is coming, and I will be doing a V4OG – vote for the other guy – campaign,” Samuel says. “It’s time for Round 2.”