By Mark Pazniokas
Attorney General George Jepsen’s office today filed an appeal asking the Connecticut Supreme Court to conclude that a trial judge embarked on “an uncharted and legally unsupported path” last week in asserting authority over how the state distributes education aid and sets standards for graduating from high school, serving special-needs students and evaluating teachers.
“This decision would wrest educational policy from the representative branches of state government, limit public education for some students with special needs, create additional municipal mandates concerning graduation and other standards, and alter the basic terms of educators’ employment – and entrust all of those matters to the discretion of a single, unelected judge,” Jepsen said.
Jepsen lightly approached the question of where Judge Thomas Moukawsher’s broad indictment of public K-12 education was right or wrong as a matter of policy, but the appeal sharply attacks his legal basis for ruling that shortcomings he identified violate students’ rights under the state Constitution to a free and adequate education.
In a ruling that drew national attention, with The New York Times likening it to “a cry from the heart on the failings of American public education,” Moukawsher concluded the state has a duty to ensure that education aid and other education polices be “rationally, substantially, and verifiably” connected to educational need.
Rather than going on the defensive, Jepsen would serve the folks who pay his rather high salary far better were he to accept Moukawsher’s thoughtful, exhaustive and accurate critique and see that the state initiates and enforces the changes suggested.
Especially curious, is the judge’s finding that teachers get almost universally positive evaluations, yet turn out students who are poorly educated.
To fight such startling findings rather than embrace them is, in this case, malfeasance on Jepsen’s part.