By Chris Powell
In Connecticut it’s nearly impossible for municipal school boards to fire teachers, and Democratic state legislators have set about to make it even harder.
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The Connecticut Mirror’s Jessika Harkay reports that the Democrats have pushed through the state Senate a bill that would require school boards to show “just cause” for firing a teacher, a provision that would allow any appeal procedure to substitute someone else’s judgment for the board’s. The bill also would transfer to a supposedly impartial arbiter the ultimate power of firing.
In effect, school boards and superintendents would no longer be even technically in charge of the most basic personnel management of school systems. Unelected arbiters would be in charge.
The reasons given for the legislation are just pretexts.
The bill’s foremost advocate, Sen. Julie Kushner, D-Danbury, says, “We have teachers who could be terminated by a decision of a board of education, and in these very politicized times, that might not be neutral, and impartial, and a fair process.”
But school boards, elected by the voters of their towns, always have had the power to fire their employees. People always may disagree about what’s fair, but having elected officials make decisions is democracy. If a school board should be disempowered because an employee might disagree with it, democracy would be abolished.
The Democratic majority leader in the Senate, Bob Duff of Norwalk, says teachers are “under assault” these days. But while controversy involving teachers has increased, this doesn’t mean that teachers who are criticized are always right and their critics always wrong. Indeed, despite recent criticism of teachers, proponents of the legislation offer no evidence that it has resulted in any firings of teachers in Connecticut. Indeed, teachers in the state qualify for tenure after four years on the job, whereupon as a practical matter they can’t be fired for anything short of rape or murder.
As always the big problem with public education in Connecticut is that it really isn’t public at all. It is run mainly for the benefit of its own unionized employees, because those employees constitute the political army of the majority party, whose objective is to stamp out public administration.
NEXT CHANCELLOR CONTRACT: The Republican minority in the state Senate, most of whose members opposed the legislation to make firing teachers virtually impossible, is striving to restore a little public administration to the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities System, which recently was scandalized by the expense account abuse committed by its grossly overpaid chancellor, Terrence Cheng, abuse that wasn’t caught by the system’s Board of Regents.
The college system is now doubly scandalized because, while the regents recently wanted to dismiss Cheng, they decided that his contract prevented his dismissal until June next year. So the regents made a deal to move Cheng out of the chancellor’s job but keep him on the payroll as a “strategic adviser” for another year at his current salary, $450,000. The regents haven’t yet figured out what their “strategic adviser” is to do besides collect his spectacular severance pay.
Since the regents are so incompetent, four Republican senators — Stephen Harding, Henri Martin, Heather Somers, and Rob Sampson — have asked the regents for a little protection against more incompetence. The senators want the regents to publicize, before it is ratified, a draft of the contract they propose to give the next chancellor, so the public can review and comment on it.
The Republican senators proposed this idea as legislation a few weeks ago but the Democratic majority in the Senate objected. The Democrats don’t want the public to see state government’s extravagance until it’s too late to do anything about it.
Will the contract for the new chancellor bring the position’s salary down from outer space? Will it liberate the regents to replace the new chancellor at any time for a simple loss of confidence without extra expense?
It should. If the regents want to regain some respect and make amends, they should promise the transparency the Republican senators have asked for.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
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Chris Powell column 