CEA Allegations Completely False

New Haven, Connecticut – Today, the Connecticut Education Association (CEA) released a press statement containing false allegations about the Connecticut Council for Education Reform (CCER). In response, Jeffrey Villar, Executive Director of CCER, made the following statement:

“It is a shame that the CEA is so determined to protect adults and the status quo that it would work against our efforts to make schools better for kids. Worse, the statements released by the CEA are factually incorrect, and they know it. It is completely irresponsible for them to make these false and inflammatory statements. Although this is going to sound harsh, they ought to be ashamed of themselves.

“CCER does not and has never collected personally identifiable student data from public school districts. We have no interest in that level of data, and we would never seek to profit off of the free services that we provide to districts.

“The data that we collected from Hamden was both anonymous and subject to a confidentiality clause. It neither contains identifiable student data nor is something that we could sell to a third party. The reason that we collected this anonymous information was to provide a free service to Hamden. We helped the district to compare the way it allocates its resources with the way other districts do so, in an effort to improve efficiency. We spent about $100,000 on this project because we care deeply about Hamden’s students, and we want to help all Connecticut districts to improve.”

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