Senator Slossberg Continues Listening Tour With Teachers From Orange

From Senator Slossberg's Office:

ORANGE, CT – This week, Senator Gayle Slossberg (D-Milford), Senate Chair of the Education Committee, continued her local teacher listening tour with a meeting in Orange. She has met with dozens of teachers from Milford, Orange, West Haven and surrounding towns to talk with them about the state of public education in Connecticut and how she can work with them to make it better.

“Evidence has shown that an over-reliance on standardized tests, particularly the SBAC, is not improving the education of Connecticut’s students and may even be detracting from it,” said Senator Slossberg, Senate Chair of the Education Committee. “Few people have better insight on what is going on in our classrooms than the teachers who are on the front lines of public education. I will continue meeting with and working alongside our state’s educators to improve our state’s relationship with our teachers and improve the educational future for all Connecticut students.”

Teachers were eager to thank Senator Slossberg for working to pass Senate Bill 380, which would decouple Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) test scores from teacher evaluations. Educators from across Connecticut have pointed to mounting evidence that using SBAC scores in teacher evaluations detracts from classroom learning and does not improve student educations. Senate Bill 380 passed out of the General Assembly’s Education Committee 23-10, and now awaits action by the state senate.

Another subject of conversation was a law passed by Slossberg last year, which eliminates the requirement that 11th-grade students take the SBAC test and require instead that they take a nationally recognized college placement test such as the SAT at no cost to the students and their families.

This law was crafted based on a survey of more than 1,100 K-12 teachers in Connecticut taken between May 8-May 15 finding that more than 90 percent of participating teachers felt “the time it took to complete the SBAC test caused student frustration and apathy,” and just under 90 percent agreed that SBAC test preparation “takes away significant time and resources from teaching and learning in my classroom.” Over 97 percent of participating teachers did not agree that SBAC is a useful indicator of school effectiveness, and over 96 percent agreed with the statement, “I generally view the SBAC as an obstacle for my students to overcome.”