Child protection agency will never fix a society that’s disintegrating

By CHRIS POWELL

Connecticut doesn’t seem to have been bothered much by last week’s especially horrible fatality, that of a 3-year-old girl who was struck by a car and killed while crossing a street in Manchester, apparently unaccompanied, at 4:30 in the morning, 45 minutes before sunrise. The state Department of Children and Families quickly acknowledged that it had been investigating two complaints made a week earlier about a lack of supervision in the child’s home.

Governor punts ‘telework’ issue safely past November’s election

State will never get to education if it keeps detouring to poverty

Empaneling anonymous jurors, judge demolishes due process

Some people in Manchester felt punched in the stomach by the incident, since a doorbell camera showed the child trying to open a neighbor’s door, presumably for help, without awakening the occupants, and then hurrying back toward the street. 

At least the state Senate’s minority Republican caucus noticed with a statement, citing two other recent deaths of children in households that had been under DCF review.     

The incident, the Republicans said, “underscores how DCF is a train wreck. DCF cannot handle the cases they are already monitoring, and they are making catastrophic mistakes.”

That criticism may have been hasty, since the details of the Manchester fatality remain unclear. Very young children sometimes manage to leave their homes without their ordinarily attentive parents noticing. Were this child’s parent or parents awake, sleeping, intoxicated, or drugged? Was the child hungry and seeking food? What exactly did those complaints say about lack of supervision? They were only days old, so how much could DCF have resolved by then?

Presumably the police and DCF itself will answer soon.

But what Connecticut does or should know is more compelling, and goes far beyond DCF.

If, as it seems, DCF is understaffed and suffers debilitating turnover, it is not so much because the agency is badly managed as because child neglect is an overwhelming problem, probably the worst facing both the state and the country. Millions of children have only one parent, if that, receive much less parenting than they need, and live in poverty — largely because welfare policy presumes that fathers are no longer needed in their children’s homes and that childbearing outside marriage is so good that it should be subsidized heavily. 

Inflation and drug and alcohol abuse keep handicapping such households even more, and 17% of Connecticut’s public school students are chronically absent, the rate reaching 25% or more in the cities, where poverty is concentrated.

A third or more of the state’s high school students graduate without proficiency in English or math. Some even are graduated illiterate. These young people are sent into adulthood qualified only for menial jobs and primed for demoralization in which a life of childbearing outside marriage and welfare dependence can seem like their most practical option.

Even the best-managed child protection agency could not keep up with child neglect on this scale. Indeed, it would be no surprise if child protection employees are so appalled and themselves demoralized by the worsening social disintegration they see on the job that they soon look for other work. 

Most children who come to DCF’s attention might do much better in another household, but the agency is damned if it leaves the children in place and damned if it tries to remove them. Since foster parents are in short supply, there will never be as many removals as might be justified. As a result many child-protection cases will always have bad outcomes.

Democrats and Republican legislators alike probably will join Governor Lamont and respond to the child protection problem by throwing more money at it — including by increasing welfare benefits. That is, more of the same. But the iron rule of economics will continue to operate: Whatever you subsidize you’ll get more of.

What is needed is policy change that compels people to take more responsibility for themselves: to pursue education seriously, go to work, learn skills, advance on the job, and not have children before marriage and gaining the capacity to support a family.  

All this used to be obvious. Then government began paying people not to be responsible.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

Governor punts ‘telework’ issue safely past November’s election

By CHRIS POWELL

No one in journalism in Connecticut seems to have noted it except for Hartford Business Journal Editor Greg Bordonaro, but Governor Lamont defaulted this year on an issue he repeatedly said he wanted to address: the need to get state government employees back to work in their offices and reduce the time they spend claiming to work from home.

Taxes in Connecticut can’t be cut while personnel costs stay exempt

State will never get to education if it keeps detouring to poverty

Empaneling anonymous jurors, judge demolishes due process

Somehow working from home has secured a place in the long list of state employee rights and can’t be changed by ordinary public administration, only through arbitration or a new master state employee union contract. The governor negotiated another contract this year, with generous raises for a workforce that was already extremely well paid, but it changed nothing about the right of state employees to work from home via the internet, e-mail, and telephone.

That they might do better work in the company of their colleagues and in sight of their supervisors is not yet of much official concern.

Instead the governor and the state employee union coalition agreed to create a committee to study the issue and make recommendations early next year — that is, safely after the state election in November, when the governor, a Democrat, and the big Democratic majority in the General Assembly will be relying on state employee union members for their usual pluralities.

Voters surely will forget about the “telework” issue during the campaign ahead unless some candidates or other news organizations remind them.

Will the Republican nominee for governor, Greenwich state Sen. Ryan Fazio, find the courage to do that?

The other day Fazio mocked the governor’s proposals for legislation that might help bring electricity prices down. The proposals deserved a little mockery, since they are in large part philosophical stuff for which the state Public Utilities Regulatory Authority would need to develop specifics. Maybe that will work out, especially since the governor recently reconstituted the authority, his previous appointees having been rather ineffectual and, in the case of the chairwoman, so dishonest and corrupt that the state’s largest electric utility, Eversource, defeated the agency in important litigation this year.

But candid discussion of electric utility issues is probably impossible anyway, most people being furious about electricity prices, and about prices generally, and being so susceptible to demagoguery by politicians against large corporations. Few people notice that government itself is far worse about controlling its costs than utilities are, and few politicians remind them about that either.

A spokesman for the governor’s re-election campaign shot back, somewhat fairly, at Fazio’s criticism of the governor’s electricity proposals.   

The spokesman said Fazio and other Republican senators have only one idea about electricity — eliminate the public benefits charge on electricity bills — “and it doesn’t even work. It moves costs from your electric bill to your tax bill. That’s it.”

Almost but not quite. For moving the public benefits charge and its constituent parts from the obscurity of electricity bills to the relative sunlight of the state budget would force the governor and state legislators to appropriate and tax plainly for them. It would force everything financed by the public benefits charge to compete for appropriations against everything else in the state budget. That might spark a debate about, for example, just how much electricity should continue to be a component of welfare benefits and whether various environmental programs are worthwhile.

Of course Republican legislators might not want to face such questions any more than Democratic legislators and the governor do. When it comes to supervising state government spending, most Republican legislators are less like junkyard dogs than cuddly bunnies. And why bother being more conscientious? Taxpayers pay less attention to government than its employees and special interests do, and they don’t get as angry when crossed. 

But ending the taxation of electricity, a necessity of life, would be progress, and even liberal Democrats might realize this if they didn’t prefer raising money for government by any means, so spending can be increased, to the more progressive taxation they purport to favor.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

Taxes in Connecticut can’t be cut while personnel costs stay exempt

By CHRIS POWELL

For the second straight year hundreds of people in Bloomfield are sore that while their side prevailed overwhelmingly in a referendum on the town budget, which they opposed, they still lost and the budget again has been deemed approved, this time with a 3% tax increase. Some property owners will end up facing a tax increase approaching 11% because the town is still implementing updated property valuations, which have soared with inflation. 

State will never get to education if it keeps detouring to poverty

Empaneling anonymous jurors, judge demolishes due process

Housing achieves integration better than regional schools

According to the Hartford Courant, the vote was 1,959 against the budget to 305 for it, a margin of 6½ to 1. But the protest failed because Bloomfield has an ordinance requiring budget referendums to gain the participation of 15% of the town’s voters. To meet that requirement another 2,287 people would have had to vote.

Bloomfield’s ordinance isn’t unique. Other towns have similar provisions. They are based on the old presumption that silence implies consent, which is especially undemocratic in the context of elections and referendums, since many townspeople who didn’t vote could have opposed the budget’s tax increase if they had bothered to think about it. Maybe they’ll think about it when their next tax bills arrive, but it will be too late. 

The ordinance’s presumption is also that elected officials who go through the trouble of developing a budget deserve some deference and shouldn’t be stymied by a small minority of voters. After all, those officials won their own elections with more votes than were cast against the budget.

Presuming that silence signifies consent, Bloomfield Mayor Anthony Harrington told the Courant that people who didn’t vote realized that the budget was a lean as it could be.

The mayor asked: “Where would the budget reductions come from? Would the Board of Education, town services for seniors, human services, leisure services, our new Prosser Library, the Department of Public Works, or Town Hall be impacted negatively by these changes?”

Indeed, perpetrating what are called the Washington Monument and Punish the Public syndromes, the town manager’s budget initially had proposed saving money by eliminating municipal trash collection and closing the town swimming pool.

But while the mayor’s question may have been rhetorical, it deserves a serious answer, especially since the question is often posed elsewhere and never gets one.

Yes, Bloomfield’s budget could have been reduced in all the aspects cited by the mayor, as well as many others, without devastating services to the public. For the biggest single expense in government in Connecticut is personnel, and with laws requiring unionization of state and municipal government employees, binding arbitration of their union contracts, and insulation for government employees against discipline for misconduct or negligence, state government has essentially put the costs of government personnel beyond economizing. 

All together these laws result in compensation for government employees that is far more generous than what is received by private-sector employees in comparable jobs.

That is what state and municipal elected and budget officials are hinting at when they shrug and say their budgeting options are limited by “fixed costs.” 

You can eliminate trash collection, but you can’t readily freeze or reduce government employee salaries. 

You can close the town pool but you can’t require government employees to give up their paid day off purportedly honoring Columbus. 

You can suspend an employee for a day or two for being intoxicated on the job but you can’t fire him.

So practically every year brings property tax increases on the municipal level and, on the state level, direct tax increases or tax increases hidden in consumer prices or financed by de-facto borrowing from the state pension funds, which increases state government’s liabilities.

The solution is obvious but always unspoken: To freeze or reduce taxes, you have to unfix the “fixed costs.” 

Those costs weren’t fixed by God but by legislators and governors who long have been subservient to a particular special interest — a special interest that has come to control an entire political party, a special interest that the other major party is usually too timid to challenge.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

State will never get to education if it keeps detouring to poverty

By CHRIS POWELL

If you want to see where Connecticut’s cities are, you don’t need a road map with their names on it and the densely populated areas highlighted in yellow. A report the other day in Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers carried a map of the state with orange dots signifying schools with good scores and blue dots signifying schools with bad scores on the recent proficiency tests issued by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. 

Empaneling anonymous jurors, judge demolishes due process

Housing achieves integration better than regional schools

Larson’s best case against Bronin is the flip side of the age issue

The sad blue dots correlated perfectly with the impoverished cities and some of their inner suburbs — including Hartford, East Hartford, Bloomfield, New Britain, Waterbury, Danbury, New Haven, Hamden, Ansonia, Bridgeport, Stratford, Windham, Norwich, and New London. 

The happy orange dots were almost uniformly elsewhere.

For those who didn’t immediately grasp the correlation, the map also included the percentage of each municipality’s students who qualify for free or reduced-price school meals, with high percentages signifying poverty. That helpful data won’t be available much longer now that, with poverty worsening, state government is making school meals free for all students in all towns.

But even now the free-meals data isn’t necessary to understand what long has been going on in Connecticut’s schools — why students in wealthier municipalities score much higher than national averages and students in the poor municipalities score much lower, with some of the latter scores showing that Connecticut has students who are several grades behind where they should be.

Decades ago at the outset of the computer age the Connecticut bureau of the Associated Press gathered all sorts of data about the state’s schools and found that the academic performance of students correlated only with the property wealth of their parents — not with school spending, teacher salaries, or teacher experience. 

That is, educational success was and remains mainly what it has always been, a matter of parenting.

As Connecticut might have learned by now from the chronic student absenteeism in the schools of its poorest municipalities, it’s hard to educate children whose parents don’t reliably get them to school. 

Chronic absenteeism is an overwhelming clue about the essential problem of education. But this clue has not yet been heeded by the state’s elected officials and school administrators, insofar as they have yet even to wonder aloud if their policy of advancing students from grade to grade and graduating them from high school regardless of their academic performance might be breeding contempt for education.   

Since the correlation of poverty with terrible academic performance is so great, it would seem that education could be improved greatly if government set about to try to understand poverty’s causes and to distinguish policies that tend to eliminate poverty and promote self-sufficiency from policies that tend to perpetuate poverty and dependence on welfare.

Since most children in the impoverished cities and inner suburbs are growing up with only one parent and thus with only half the parenting that, within living memory, was the natural order of things, the collapse of the family would seem to deserve urgent review. What has made people and government think that two parents aren’t really necessary and that unearned self-esteem beats self-reliance?

But so far state government’s response to poverty has been only to throw money at it without regard to results. 

Along these lines, the Yankee Institute’s Meghan Portfolio recently reported that while Connecticut has been increasing its minimum wage annually for seven years, the state’s poverty rate has barely changed, declining only slightly from 10.5% to 10.2%, even as enrollment in Medicaid, free medical insurance for the poor, has risen substantially. 

This suggests that there is far more to earning power than indexing the minimum wage — that the decline in living standards, a decline in wage-earning power, is also a matter of the decline in education, which in turn is a matter of the decline in parenting.

In any case, while spending more in the name of education buys the votes of teacher unions, it doesn’t buy education. Poor kids in Connecticut don’t matter that much yet.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

Empaneling anonymous jurors, judge demolishes due process

By CHRIS POWELL

Even the Trump administration hasn’t yet tried to mangle the criminal-justice system and civil liberties as much as a judge in Meriden Superior Court is trying to do. Where are Connecticut’s “No Kings” people when they’re needed close to home?

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Larson’s best case against Bronin is the flip side of the age issue

Yale’s new mission statement may be a little too pedestrian

In what seems unprecedented, at least outside of totalitarian jurisdictions, the judge, Maria del Pilar Gonzalez, has decided to empanel a jury in a murder case while concealing the identities of juror candidates from the defense and the public.

Judge Gonzalez isn’t doing it for fun. She aims to keep the defense and the public ignorant of juror identities because the prosecution has accused the defendant of conspiring to threaten jurors during his first prosecution for murder, which ended in a mistrial in 2024. The accusation arose from a statement given by a man who was imprisoned with the defendant, but the defendant has not yet been tried on the charge and there seems to be no evidence that any juror was threatened.

So with little evidence the judge presumes that the defendant is probably guilty of jury tampering and she wants to guard against it happening again.

But the judge would be wrong even if the defendant had tried to corrupt his first jury. For the identification of jurors to the defense and the public in criminal cases is basic to due process of law. Jurors must be screened against prejudice and improper motives, and they must be accountable for their service. That can’t be achieved if their identities and backgrounds are concealed when jury candidates are examined by the court. If Judge Gonzalez’s decision stands, the jury in the murder case she is trying could be rigged against the defendant and no one besides the judge and prosecutor might know.

If there is a credible threat to a jury’s integrity, the court can guard against it by other means, as by surveying jurors individually in private or even giving them police protection. Empaneling anonymous jurors compromises justice as much as threatening, blackmailing, or bribing jurors does.

The murder defendant’s lawyer has filed an emergency appeal with the state Supreme Court. Meanwhile Judge Gonzalez plans to continue selecting jurors without identifying them. The Supreme Court urgently should undo this secrecy rather than risk the time and expense of appeals that surely will follow a verdict rendered by an anonymous jury. It would be astonishing — and terrifying — if eventually a state or federal appeals court didn’t punt Judge Gonzalez’s decision back to medieval times.

* * *  

A NEEDLESS EXPERIMENT: With Governor Lamont’s signature on the legislation last month, Connecticut began its experiment with what has been called “no-excuse absentee voting.” People now may vote by mail for simple convenience; they no longer need to assert a reason like illness, disability, religious observance, military service, or absence from the state.

The more absentee voting there is — the more that people are separated from the direct casting of their ballots, the more that people other than election workers handle their ballots — the greater will be the risk of election fraud. But the governor and General Assembly have decided that the risk is small and worth taking.

Another risk has gotten less consideration — the risk that opening tens of thousands of additional mailed ballots and running them through tabulation machines will delay the calculation and announcement of results and present opportunities for adjusting the results in political emergencies. Even now Hartford and Bridgeport, always the repositories of huge Democratic pluralities, seem unable to report their final results by dawn the day after the election.

With luck “no-excuse absentee voting” will start slow. People have to apply for absentee ballots in person at town hall or by mail, and then complete and mail the ballot, and for some people that may be more trouble than going to their polling places, especially since Connecticut now provides 14 days of early voting in person so Election Day crowds can be avoided. That’s all the convenience and security an election needs.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

Housing achieves integration better than regional schools

By CHRIS POWELL

Some years ago racial integration in education used to be at least a nominal objective in Connecticut. Not so much anymore.

Larson’s best case against Bronin is the flip side of the age issue

Yale’s new mission statement may be a little too pedestrian

School finance study committee is rigged in favor of educators

The state’s law against racially imbalanced schools — schools whose student racial composition is far out of proportion to the racial composition of their municipality — has been disregarded for years by two schools in Greenwich, one in Fairfield, and two in West Hartford. A recent count says 16 more schools — including more in Greenwich and West Hartford as well as some in Bloomfield, Branford, Hamden, Milford, and Montville — are about to slip into imbalance.

Of course many schools in Connecticut’s cities, including Hartford, New Haven, and Bridgeport, have student populations that are overwhelmingly from racial and ethnic minorities, without the slightest racial balance at all, just as many other school systems in the suburbs and rural areas are overwhelmingly white. But under the law that’s OK, since the law requires racial balance in schools only within a municipality, not racial balance on a regional basis.

Racial residential patterns are such that substantial integration in schools could be achieved only by massive transfers of students, which would be educationally and financially impractical and impossible politically. 

The state Education Department hasn’t been pressing for action on racially imbalanced schools and is unlikely even to acknowledge the issue in a state election year. While municipalities might racially balance their schools fairly easily with little expense by redrawing school districts, redistricting always aggravates parents and students, especially when resources don’t differ much between schools and most townspeople don’t care much about racial balance, though society would be better for more integration.

These days there are second thoughts about racial integration in Hartford itself, where the push for integrated schools began more than 60 years ago with a small, voluntary program of busing minority students to the white suburbs, Project Concern. In recent years that push culminated with the Sheff v. O’Neill integration lawsuit.

The lawsuit led state government to establish three dozen regional schools in Hartford and its suburbs, and to the promise made in the lawsuit’s settlement that there will always be room for any Hartford student who wants to enroll outside the city school system. As a result many students have entered the regional schools, leading unfortunately to still more racial concentration in Hartford’s neighborhood schools and to what the city’s Board of Education considers extra expense, since when students leave the city school system, it loses state money while incurring extra tuition and transportation costs.

So the board is hiring a public relations company to try to lure some regional school students back to city schools. This has angered the Sheff case advocates, who see any strengthening of the city’s schools as undermining the settlement of their lawsuit.

While the PR campaign may indeed reduce integration, it wouldn’t violate the Sheff settlement as long as any Hartford student could still get into a regional school. Besides, it’s fair to wonder whether the limited amount of integration achieved by the regional schools is worth the hundreds of millions of dollars they have cost.

In pursuit of integration it might be better to examine why some of Hartford’s inner suburbs that a few decades ago were overwhelmingly white — like Bloomfield, East Hartford, Manchester, and Windsor — have become thoroughly integrated racially with integrated schools. These towns suggest that integration is mainly a matter of a variety of housing options and economic gains for minorities.

Of course new housing can be controversial but to assist integration it doesn’t have to be housing for the poor — just market-rate apartments and condominiums.

Not everything retrograde in race relations in Connecticut comes from white suburbanites. 

Black civic leaders in New Haven want the city to establish a satellite campus of a “historically Black college” to help Black students in the city feel more comfortable about higher education. But that would be more racial separatism, which seems to be politically correct lately. Black students must understand that they can and indeed must succeed without it.  

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

Larson’s best case vs. Bronin is the flip side of the age issue

By CHRIS POWELL

Is the Democratic Party in Connecticut’s 1st Congressional District really as nuts as it seems from the primary campaign between U.S. Rep. John B. Larson and former Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin?   

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Bronin’s only issue is Larson’s age, 77. Bronin doesn’t seem to be bothered by the ages of some other members of the Connecticut delegation in Congress who would be his colleagues if he is elected, two of whom are in their 80s, one in his 70s, all fellow Democrats. Bronin may get away with this omission because news organizations don’t press him about it.

Bronin says Democrats in Congress have to try something different to succeed against the narrow Republican majorities and President Trump. But different how exactly? If Bronin means only that Democrats should be more energetic, the Democratic minority in Congress, including Larson, already clamors and screeches against the Trumpeters to ever-greater extremes every day to little avail. Does Bronin think that more clamoring and screeching will help, or that trying to make nice with the Trumpeters will help?

Might adjusting the Democratic Party’s issues help instead? If Bronin thinks reducing the party’s support for open borders, abortion, and transgenderism might make it more effective in Washington, he hasn’t said so. In any case he and Larson don’t disagree on any substantial policy issue.

Connecticut’s current members of Congress have never lost a congressional election. Whatever their faults, unelectability is not one of them. Indeed, if Larson wins the primary, he is sure to win what would be his 15th term, the 1st District being overwhelmingly Democratic, just as Bronin would be sure to win the election if he wins the primary.

That leaves Bronin with little going for him against Larson apart from his raw ambition.

As for Larson, his sense of the party’s likely primary voters in the 1st District grows less flattering every day. Figuring that most primary voters will be from the far left, Larson has taken to denouncing Bronin as a “centrist,” as if Congress needs more extremism.

Emphasizing his support for and from unions, Larson is condemning Bronin for having sought concessions from Hartford’s city employee unions when he was mayor. But back then the city was bankrupt and ended up being rescued only by a spectacular bailout from state government, which assumed the city’s bonded debt, approving city government’s longstanding recklessness. 

By contrast, in Washington money is no object, since the federal government can create or borrow infinite amounts, relying on inflation to tax the public’s prosperity away largely surreptitiously. States and municipalities can’t do that; they have to get real about their costs, the largest being that of government employees.

So instead of trying to economize with Hartford city government’s biggest expense, should Bronin have insisted on raising the city’s already insanely high property tax rate to keep the city employee unions happy? Are government employees the only members of the working class worth the Democratic Party’s representation? That’s Larson’s implication and the longstanding implication of the party in Connecticut generally.

But when the trivia and nonsense are swept away, Larson’s best claim to another term is the flip side of the age issue: his seniority in Congress and the pull this gives him with federal patronage for the 1st District and the state, as well as his leadership of the campaign for legislation to strengthen Social Security, guarantee its financing by eliminating the cap on Social Security taxes so the wealthy pay more, and increasing benefits for lower-income workers. If, as seems likely, the Democrats gain a majority in the House, Larson’s legislation will have the party leadership’s support.

That legislation is real liberalism, the old sort of liberalism — not identity politics, crazy social engineering, and politically correct posturing but the improvement of living conditions for the great majority, a reward for working people, a better earned pension, and better insurance for people against being unable to work.    

Doing the right thing is more important than the age at which one does it. 

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

Yale’s new mission statement may be a little too pedestrian

By CHRIS POWELL

With the Trump administration beating up on higher education and especially colleges and universities with the biggest endowments, which are now to be brutally taxed by the federal government, Yale University seems to have decided to guard against being seen as pretentious. 

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Not that Yale isn’t entitled to think well of itself. It is often considered among the 10 best universities in the world, its endowment exceeds $44 billion, five U.S. presidents have earned degrees there, and almost singlehandedly it keeps otherwise impoverished New Haven from slipping into Long Island Sound. The university’s economic and cultural impact on Connecticut is enormous.

Quite apart from that the Yale campus is beautiful.

But Yale is also politically skewed so far to the left, to Democratic Party partisanship, and to political correctness that it practically dares any national Republican administration to cut off its federal patronage. These days there are so few Republicans and conservatives on Yale’s faculty and in the university’s management and so few connected to the university generally that one is most likely to be found on campus in the university’s Peabody Museum along with the skeletons of other extinct creatures.

So, according to the Yale Daily News, a faculty committee recently recommended that the university try to rebuild public trust, and part of that may be to humble itself a little. For starters, Yale has simplified its mission statement. 

The statement that has been replaced was grandiose and conceited to the point of chest-thumping: “Yale is committed to improving the world today and for future generations through outstanding research and scholarship, education, preservation, and practice. Yale educates aspiring leaders worldwide who serve all sectors of society. We carry out this mission through the free exchange of ideas in an ethical, interdependent, and diverse community of faculty, staff, students, and alumni.”

Of course the “free exchange of ideas” in any institution is a lot easier when nearly everyone there, despite differences in race, ethnicity, religion, national origin, and age, thinks the same way about politics, as long has been the case at Yale.   

But the new mission statement is spare, modest, and politically unobtrusive almost to the point of timidity: “Yale’s core mission is to create, disseminate, and preserve knowledge through research and teaching.” 

This might be the mission statement of any community college. Indeed, it’s barely a step ahead of the motto of the imaginary college that was depicted in the hilarious 1978 movie that exploded the pomposity of higher education, “Animal House.” That college, named for its founder, Emil Faber, purportedly the pencil magnate, erected a statue of him inscribed: “Knowledge is good.”

So it is, and so is Yale, especially if it realizes that with some political diversity and the critical thinking that tends to come with it, the university might be better still and never lack the public’s trust.

Because of its international prestige and its generous financial grants to students — among the benefits of a huge endowment — Yale isn’t going to get many complaints that its degrees are overpriced. But that is a big problem with higher education generally.

Bloomberg Businessweek reported the other day that as of last December 43% of U.S. college graduates between 22 and 27 are “stuck in a job that doesn’t require the degree they earned.” That’s a 3% increase from the previous year.         

It’s a longstanding problem. While lower education tends to presume that everyone should go to college, it fails to prepare most of its students adequately, and even then many of the jobs being created by the always evolving economy don’t require a college degree. So millions of students graduate from college carrying heavy debt from college loans and end up with uncomplicated work that leaves them poor after they make their loan payments.

That doesn’t mean college is useless for people whose jobs won’t require a college degree. College can introduce them to many life-enhancing things. It just means that college is usually too expensive, benefiting educators more than students.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

School finance study committee is rigged in favor of educators

By CHRIS POWELL

A 23-member committee appointed by Governor Lamont and legislative leaders will convene next week to start devising what the governor wants to be “a top-to-bottom overhaul of how the state funds its public schools.”

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Methods of school financing are always questionable as to fairness and effectiveness. But just as you shouldn’t ask the barber if you need a haircut, you shouldn’t ask educators how schools should be financed, for they always will want to get more money by any means, especially means that make the money harder to track, results harder to measure, and accountability harder to achieve.

Unfortunately the governor and legislative leaders have arranged for educators to dominate the committee, though reforming school finance is not a matter of educational practice at all but one of tax fairness and effectiveness.

The inclinations of 17 of the committee’s 23 members can be fairly presumed. 

Twelve, including the state education commissioner, are employed by school systems or other education agencies. Then there are the president of the state’s largest teacher union, a state legislator who is a labor union official, and a legislator who used to be one. Another committee member leads a group that advocates more school spending. The committee’s chairman, the governor’s deputy chief of staff, used to be the Education Department’s legal director.

Only six of the 23 committee members are from outside the education establishment and might feel free to provide analysis independent of the education establishment’s desire to raise and spend more money — not that they will.

That is, the committee is ridiculously rigged.

At least in announcing the committee appointments, the governor briefly referred to the greatest failure of public education in the state: “We need to take another look at how we’re maximizing student outcomes.”

Another look? 

When was the last time state government measured student performance against school spending and held anyone to account for results? 

What exactly are the mechanisms of accountability in public education in Connecticut? When has anyone in authority been challenged about student performance? 

Chronic absenteeism is a big problem in many school systems, but when have parents been held to account for it?

In fact, public education in Connecticut is built on prohibiting accountability.

That’s what binding arbitration of teacher union contracts is about: hobbling public administration, making the union interest equal or superior to the public interest. Binding arbitration prevents elected school boards from running school systems on behalf of democracy even if they want to, which they seldom do.

That’s what tenure for teachers is about, making it nearly impossible for schools to fire teachers for anything short of murder. 

That’s what the exemption of teacher evaluations from the state’s open-records law is about.

That’s what the minimum school budget requirement is about, making it nearly impossible for school boards to control spending even if student enrollment falls substantially. 

That’s what state government’s refusal to require proficiency tests for student advancement from grade to grade is about. Social promotion is the ultimate prohibition of accountability in education.

Who in the education establishment wants accountability enough to undo those things? No one.

The main problem of public education in Connecticut is that it’s not really public at all.

State government can tinker forever with school funding systems in pursuit of fairness. Financing schools entirely from state government, as with a statewide property tax, is an obvious option. But no tinkering with funding formulas will improve school performance, and tax fairness can be increased only by diminishing local control. Good luck with that.

One blow for fairness might be struck easily. State government could assume all costs of “special education,” which would relieve poor municipalities of a hugely disproportionate tax burden, a social cost that should be borne widely. The governor recently mused aloud about this.

Indeed, it could have been done this year. But it’s an election year, so the governor and legislators instead put extra money into another round of raises for teachers, euphemizing it again as “aid to local education.”

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

Democrats howl at enforcement of 20-year-old deportation order

By CHRIS POWELL

Some Democratic elected officials in Connecticut say there was an immigration law enforcement atrocity in Bridgeport this month.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested a man as he waited in his car with his son at a bus stop for the boy’s ride to high school in New Haven. The man was taken away for deportation.

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U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal said he was “deeply disturbed” by the incident, adding: “I am just absolutely aghast that once again children have been victimized and traumatized by ICE’s brutality and abject cruelty.”

State Attorney General William Tong said: “No child should be separated from his parent while waiting for a school bus. These kinds of reckless and indiscriminate arrests traumatize kids and do nothing to make our communities safer.”

Bridgeport state Sen. Herron Gaston concurred: “No child should ever have to watch his father be taken away. This man is a law-abiding resident.”

Bridgeport state Rep. Christopher Rosario also called the arrest “traumatizing.”

Unfortunately the officials were not challenged to defend their outrage in the face of the facts of the arrest.

According to ICE, the arrested man is from El Salvador, entered the United States illegally on May 9, 2005, and was ordered deported by an immigration court on Oct. 6 that year. All that was more than 20 years ago.

Since the man’s son is only 16, the man seems to have been indifferent to the danger of starting a family without obtaining authorization to be in the country. Of course like millions of other illegal immigrants he fairly had the impression that the United States was usually negligent about enforcing immigration law. Even so, having been ordered removed five years earlier, he knew his presence in the country was illegal when his son was conceived.

It’s not as if the ICE agents ripped the man out of his car and left the boy there alone. The agency said officers let the man call his wife to collect their son and stayed with the boy until she arrived.

This isn’t what Senator Blumenthal calls “brutality and abject cruelty.” It’s more like decent, responsible behavior.

Attorney General Tong and Senator Gaston say no child should ever have to watch his parent being taken away. But such arrests often happen in Connecticut in cases involving state law. Hundreds of men in prison in Connecticut have children. Apparently Tong and Gaston haven’t noticed that accompaniment by a child is no exemption from arrest. Will they propose such an exemption when the General Assembly reconvenes next year? 

Senator Gaston says the illegal immigrant was “law-abiding.” But he had been ordered removed 21 years ago precisely because he was not law-abiding.

Representative Rosario is right that such incidents can be “traumatizing,” but then all lawbreaking and law enforcement can be. A good way to avoid such trauma is not to break the law.

Unfortunately no news organizations seem to have asked the elected officials who deplored the Bridgeport incident to explain exactly what should be done with an illegal immigrant who defies a removal order for 20 years. Should such people be automatically pardoned, at least if they have created a family?

Should such a standard apply in cases of other kinds of lawbreaking or just immigration lawbreaking?

Of course millions more illegal immigrants remain in the country. Should they all be amnestied with the euphemism Democrats call “a path to citizenship”? 

Should there be no limit on the number of people to be admitted to or allowed to stay in the country without ever being examined for safety and suitability? 

While every day brings murders and other serious crimes committed by illegal immigrants, should they be excused because illegal immigrants on average may be more law-abiding than the native-born? Should that average really be consolation to those who have lost loved ones?

Deploring painful situations is easy. Getting real about them can be hard, and elected officials won’t have to get real about them if journalism doesn’t press them to. 

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)