With the abrupt resignation of Education Commissioner Mark McQuillan on Dec 21, Connecticut will have a new leader at the Department of Education for the first time in four years, and the first to be appointed by a Democratic Governor in 24 years. The CT Mirror carried a fascinating account of the resignation, which gives the impression that McQuillan's decision was made on the spur of the moment, surprising everyone at the State Board, Governor's transition team, and himself. In other words, McQuillan snapped. If the CT Mirror is to be believed, our Commissioner was miffed that the Malloy transition team called a meeting at the same time as McQuillan's school finance panel meeting, that McQuillan's meeting had to start late as a result, that members of the school finance panel came up with (get this) THEIR OWN IDEAS on how to reform school finance, and that the School Board Chair had the audacity to try to control the meeting. At which point McQuillan adjourns the meeting and storms out. The next day he quit.
Up to that point, the Malloy team had considered McQuillan a strong contender for reappointment to be Commissioner. Probably not so much anymore.
The State Board of Education will meet tomorrow, January 5, to appoint an interim commissioner until the Malloy team can pick a permanent replacement.
WNPR, CT's public radio station, did a soft news retrospective on the legacy of McQuillan. According to the WNPR story, McQuillan's biggest two accomplishments were a scaled-back high school reform law and getting a parent on the HS reform task force. That sounds about right to me. McQuillan has been an enormous disappointment over his four years running the education department.
Personally, I had high hopes for him. He came from Massachusetts and had served that state (as a mid-level deputy) during the time that MA underwent one of the most remarkable transformations of any state education system. MA now boasts some of the most robust and extensive achievement in the nation. Taken on its own, MA students perform near the top when compared with international students. The US as a whole has done dismally on international comparisons for decades.
One could have hoped that McQuillan would bring the MA model to Southern New England. But he did no such thing. Instead, McQuillan seemed bent on re-making CT's high schools from scratch. Rather than look at what had worked in other states or other nations, McQuillan chose to simply change everything. What he ended up proposing had no basis in research and would have imposed a model of radical experimentation on CT schools. The legislature was right to reject it. In the end, the only change McQuillan got through was to require high school graduates to do a "project" before they graduate. Wow.
Meanwhile, what happened to the State's education system under McQuillan? I'll have to dig up some hard numbers for a future post, but basically, CT continued its downward spiral in all categories except one -- we spend a lot on teacher salaries. In fact, I believe that CT has the highest teacher salaries in the nation. But every measure of performance has shown a steady decline in achievement -- graduation rates are terrible, SAT scores (of the few that do graduate) are flat, college remediation rates are soaring (as high as 40% in a recent study), and the State continues to have the biggest achievement gap in the nation.
CT was once considered to have the best schools in the nation. Now the undisputed leader is Massachusetts. CT's position has slipped on every measure. As McQuillan departs, the new Commissioner will have all of those problems to deal with, plus a budget crisis as the federal stimulus money ends, and a dysfunctional state education department.
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