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SPEND SMART: FIX OUR BROKEN SCHOOL FINANCE SYSTEM
STAFF SMART: KEEP THE BEST TEACHERS IN THE CLASSROOM
Education is the most important investment we make for our kids and our state’s future, but it’s where we’re getting the worst return on our money. Despite the fact that we spend more per student than all but three other states and D.C., our highest performing students are up to a year behind students in neighboring Massachusetts, and even worse, our low-income students are further behind in Connecticut than in every other state. Our funding formula—the Education Cost Sharing formula— is an illusion that profoundly fails to fulfill its intent of providing adequate, needs-based funding for all public school students throughout the state. Connecticut needs a smarter funding system driven by student need that distributes funding consistently to the schools students actually attend.
The well-documented shortages in Connecticut’s education budget will almost certainly result in unprecedented teacher layoffs this spring. We should make sure that in the context of teacher layoffs, we minimize the damage to students—and that means recognizing that there is a range of effectiveness in teaching, and therefore doing whatever we can to keep the best teachers in the classroom despite budget challenges. If layoffs proceed without state intervention, they will be “quality blind,” which would hurt students in districts across the state, and would hurt our most vulnerable students the most. Districts will be forced to lay off the newest teachers without regard for how well they educate students, a policy commonly referred to as “last-in,first-out.” This approach could knock excellent teachers out while leaving ineffective ones in the classroom, and would cause us to lay off more teachers than we need to. In this time of fiscal crisis, we need a smarter way to approach layoffs that ends the policy of “last-in,first-out” and begins reforming binding arbitration so that future collective bargaining agreements better account for the interests of children.