A federal judge’s negligence highlights Connecticut’s own

By CHRIS POWELL

Escaping the country on the eve of his sentencing for corruption in state government didn’t require much cleverness from former state representative and deputy state budget director Konstantinos Diamantis. Instead it required much negligence by U.S. District Judge Stefan Underhill and Connecticut’s U.S. attorney’s office.

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A jury convicted Diamantis of 21 federal charges involving extortion, bribery, conspiracy, and making false statements. The court and the U.S. attorney’s office knew Diamantis had both U.S. and Greek passports and presumably had or was entitled to Greek citizenship by descent, and before his sentencing he asked for permission to go to his ancestral homeland, purportedly to attend to family business. The judge denied the request. 

As a condition of granting him bond of $500,000 the court had required Diamantis to surrender his U.S. passport, which he did. But he claimed that he couldn’t surrender his Greek passport because he had sent it to Greece so family business could be processed in his absence. 

That story was laughable. After all, why wouldn’t a notarized copy of the data page of his Greek passport suffice?

But the judge and the U.S. attorney’s office accepted the story when the judge immediately should have revoked Diamantis’ bond and sent him to prison until he produced the missing passport.

Instead, his bond was continued and Diamantis scrammed with the passport, perhaps laughing all the way, since, while Greece has an extradition treaty with the United States, it generally refuses to extradite its citizens.

After his corruption racket and his passport racket Diamantis has undertaken another one. He left behind for publication a long memorandum claiming that his conviction resulted from a scheme by Governor Lamont, his wife, and her business associates to frame him. This was as ridiculous as Diamantis’ contention during trial that the payments he received from school building contractors weren’t bribes and extortion payments but consulting fees. That is, he admitted taking money from people with whom he was conducting state business.

But while Diamantis is a Democrat, he apparently hopes his claim of persecution by a Democratic governor will prompt President Trump, a Republican, to grant his application for a pardon, given Trump’s obsession with taking revenge against Democrats. Trump, a grifter himself, isn’t stupid enough to fall for Diamantis’ story but he might be reckless and hateful enough to play along with it.

While Governor Lamont placed Diamantis in the state budget office and trusted him to handle school construction grants, the governor was never complicit in any wrongdoing. He removed Diamantis when his corruption was exposed.

But this is another case of the governor’s being ill-served by subordinates in high positions, and it comes amid many other indications that competence and decency are not as strong in the Lamont administration as they should be. 

After all, complacency and opportunism are inherent in the one-party government Connecticut long has voted for.

But would a Republican administration be any better with personnel?

Connecticut’s last Republican administration ended 15 years ago, the Republican contingent in the General Assembly is small, and no major city in the state has a Republican chief executive. So the field of people experienced in government from which a Republican governor ordinarily might draw his department heads is limited. 

Of course no law requires governors to staff their administrations only with members of their own party — Governor Lamont’s tax commissioner is a Republican — but the Republican nominee for governor, Greenwich state Sen. Ryan Fazio, has been in the General Assembly only five years and is only 36. Capable as he may be, it is fair to wonder if he knows enough people with integrity who are qualified to help him run something as big, hidebound, and self-serving as state government, which has little real management, since nearly everyone in it is unionized.

Power corrupts everyone, not just Democrats. But then Republicans could argue that becoming corrupt usually takes time and that, having been out of power so long, they might be trusted for a few months anyway.

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

Despite her $500,000 compensation, university boss is unaccountable

By CHRIS POWELL

Do Governor Lamont, state legislators, and people who care about Connecticut’s public life watch local television newscasts? Maybe that is part of trying to be good citizen even as most of local TV news is tedious stuff about which no one except the people immediately involved will or can do anything. 

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A fire 30 miles away, murders in impoverished Bridgeport, a car crash 40 miles away, murders in impoverished Hartford, a bank robbery 50 miles away, murders in impoverished Waterbury, a drug bust in impoverished New London, multi-million-dollar awards for mistaken murder convictions in impoverished New Haven — such reports may be relieved only by reports about clever and hungry bears burglarizing houses.

But occasionally local TV news captures something serious about which somebody in authority could do something, even if elected officials will not respond to it any more than they respond to the ordinary daily horrors. Such was the case last week when a reporter for WFSB-TV3 in Hartford, Cassidy Williams, tried following up on the numerous public allegations of unprofessional and even unhinged behavior by the president of Central Connecticut State University in New Britain, Zulma Toro.

Williams repeatedly had sought to question Toro about the allegations but couldn’t get through by telephone. So the reporter went looking for Toro in person at the university and encountered her in a parking lot. Video broadcast on WFSB showed the reporter trying to ask Toro a question as the university president breezed by, got in her car, and abruptly drove off, though a polite “I have no comment today” would not have delayed her excellency’s dinner.

In addition to being courteous, presidents of public universities are obliged to account to the public for their conduct in government office, though Toro’s brazen refusal to account for herself seems to have evoked no dismay from anyone in state government. Indeed, if Toro can’t account to the public for her conduct on the job, she is not fit to lead a public university, especially since, as the Connecticut Examiner reported, her annual salary is $453,533 and additionally she enjoys stipends of $25,000 for housing and $18,000 for a car. Add her retirement benefits and Toro’s annual compensation well exceeds $500,000. But not even that much money buys a little accountability from her.

Fair questions about Toro go beyond the complaints of unprofessional conduct. 

The Examiner reports that Toro is the only one of the four regional state university presidents not to have a written employment contract. This looks like an oversight and has not been clearly explained by the Connecticut State Colleges and University system. While Toro is registered to vote in Burlington, she is driving a car registered and plated in Florida, which imposes no property taxes on cars, and has not paid property taxes on it in Connecticut.

Many former Connecticut residents who have moved their primary residence to Florida return to Connecticut in the summer driving cars with Florida plates. That’s legal. But to evade property taxes many Connecticut residents have registered their cars in other states without really living there. The racket is notorious and some towns have cracked down on it. Apparently Toro hasn’t noticed or cared. 

In the last 14 months the two previous heads of the university system, the “chancellors,” left office because of scandal — one financial, the other sexual harassment — and the chairman of the system’s Board of Regents, exposed as inept, resigned in May a month after the second “chancellor” departed. Now the university system says it is investigating Toro. Of course she is entitled to due process, which includes facing her accusers. But the video of her sullenly scurrying away from accountability may be all the public needs to know about her.

The governor got off easy with the first three major recent departures from the CSCU system. So maybe someone in the state Capitol press corps could ask him what he thinks about Toro’s unaccountability. He could look like he pays attention and sets standards.

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

State pension fund’s gains do little for the private sector

By CHRIS POWELL

Connecticut state government’s pension fund increased in value by 15% during the fiscal year just ended, state Treasurer Erick Russell announced the other day, and its unfunded liabilities, while still in the billions of dollars, are being reduced steadily, even though its total liability still increases with the generous raises the Democratic state administration keeps bestowing on unionized state employees, the party’s army.

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Altogether this is progress for which Governor Lamont, the General Assembly, and the treasurer can take credit, especially since many Democratic legislators are starting to resent it and want to put less money into the pension fund so more can be spent on social programs.

But not everything here is worth celebrating. 

For while the improving solvency of the pension fund is a mark of better public administration, the fund itself provides no benefit to the public. It’s a benefit only to state government employees and retirees — and to the politicians who rely on them at election time. 

State government began offering pensions to its employees decades ago in large part to compensate them for salaries that were low compared to those in the private sector. Today’s state employees are substantially better compensated than private-sector employees when wages, insurance benefits, paid time off, pensions, and job security are calculated. 

Few people outside government in Connecticut would assign state employee pensions the priority they get. Most people would give a higher ranking to things like transportation, education, and public health. But there have been no improvements in those areas that can match the improvement in the state pension fund’s solvency. With Connecticut’s agenda the contentment of government’s own employees comes first.

Most private-sector employers in the state manage to assemble adequate workforces by offering ordinary 401-k and individual retirement account pensions — “defined contribution” plans in which employees rely on their own investment skill or that of advisers for the benefits they receive. By contrast, state government’s pensions are mostly “defined benefit” plans carrying a state guarantee of benefits.

Fairness would put everyone in the same class, but politics in Connecticut requires a privileged class. State employees have earned their privilege not with the special value of their work, though some is indeed special, but with their political activism as a special interest. The public is taxed to pay for this privileged class — taxed to pay for a benefit it will never itself receive — because, as the journalist James Reston wrote, the first rule of politics is the indifference of the majority. Most people pay little attention to government and so pay more for it.

Another reason for not celebrating too much about the improvement in the pension fund is that it results largely from inflation. With the federal government creating money like crazy through deficit spending, the value of most assets has increased far faster than private-sector wages have increased. 

While it is not widely understood, inflation is government policy, not some force of nature — policy that profits the owners of property, like real estate, stocks, and businesses, and penalizes mere wage earners and especially young people trying to establish themselves.

Last month Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers reported that “starter” homes in the state — homes in the bottom third of prices — now have a median price of $300,000 and that their prices have risen three times more than median incomes in the last decade. Homeowners and landlords love the unearned capital gains but they come at a big cost to others.

The new annual “ALICE” report from Connecticut’s United Way organization — a report about people who are “asset-limited, income-constrained, yet employed” — says about 40% of the state’s residents, 570,000 households, are financially unstable and unable to afford essentials like housing, food, transportation, and child care.

Not that they’ll put it all together as they struggle to make ends meet, but how should the ALICE people react to the celebration of the state employee pension fund and the rising costs of housing and local education that result from state government’s encouragement of illegal immigration?

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

Connecticut doesn’t yet realize good careers start with literacy

By CHRIS POWELL

Governor Lamont’s creation of a $250,000 political patronage job for former U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona as a consultant to the Connecticut Career Pathways Commission, which the governor created by executive order in April, isn’t the silliest thing about the commission.

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The governor wants the commission, comprised of volunteers, to devise a five-year plan “to ensure that Connecticut has a modernized career pathways system incorporating all the latest innovations in artificial intelligence, automation, and global competition,” thereby providing students and jobseekers “with the tools needed to obtain good-paying, long-lasting careers” and enabling them to “quickly adapt as state-of-the-art innovations are developed.”

That wordy mission statement might be summarized to say simply that young people should get a good education so they can prosper in a changing economy. No one is likely to disagree with that — not in principle anyway.

But practice is something else. For even as the governor’s gift to Cardona was ferreted out by the Connecticut Mirror — the governor’s office never announced it, since it was likely to prove embarrassing — the state Education Department announced the usual set of dismal proficiency test results for students in Grades 3 through 8 in Connecticut’s schools. 

The test found that among students from poor households, only 33% are proficient for their grade level in English and only 27% proficient in math. Among students from households that are not poor, only 66% are proficient in English and only 63% proficient in math.

That is, more than two thirds of Connecticut’s students from poor households are far behind where they should be, and more than a third of students for whom poverty is not an excuse are far behind as well.

Nevertheless, in accordance with longstanding educational practice in Connecticut, all unproficient students will be advanced to the next grade, reassuring them that they needn’t learn anything in school and that there is no embarrassment in ignorance.

To people outside government, the first steps on the “modernized career pathways” the governor wants might seem to be proficiency in literacy and numeracy. But maybe the education bureaucracy, the governor, and the former education secretary believe that, in the near future, artificial intelligence and automation will make literacy and numeracy obsolete for humans and those skills can be left to robots.

Connecticut doesn’t need a Career Pathways Commission. It needs a commission, a legislative committee, a state education commissioner, or anyone in authority to investigate what happened to standards in public education and to figure out what must be done to bring them back before the robots take over and snicker at all the people wondering what happened.

But since he is campaigning for re-election the governor moves on to other things quickly every day. Last week he announced that in October state government’s CT Rail operation will add four weekday trains to its Shore Line East service between New Haven and New London.

State government’s expansion of passenger train service to connect the Metro-North railroad hub in New Haven with Hartford, Springfield, and New London has been nice, and adding trains between New Haven and New London should make the service more useful and increase patronage. 

But the governor’s happy announcement neglected to note that while all passenger rail service is subsidized by government, just as all automobile travel is subsidized, at last report every Shore Line East passenger was being subsidized spectacularly by state government: $184 per ride. The Hartford Line’s per-passenger subsidy is spectacular too at $78, while the Metro-North railroad, being the busiest commuter railroad in the country, holds its per-passenger subsidy down to $6.48.

The area between New Haven and New London is largely rural and New London is only a small city, so it’s hard to imagine how any increased service on the Shore Line East line will draw enough additional passengers to bring the subsidy below $100 per passenger. But election campaigns are for taking people for a ride, and the unhappy calculations behind it can wait until the election is safely past.

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

Blumenthal sees no justification for immigration law enforcement

By CHRIS POWELL

Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal went to Danbury the other day to meet privately with people whose relatives had been arrested in the recent sweep through the city and nearby towns by federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. About a hundred people were arrested. The senator also held a public meeting to hear complaints about the arrests from municipal officials and advocates for illegal immigrants.

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Deploring the arrests, Blumenthal said: “Cruelty is the point. Fear and terror are the goal. I don’t recognize America in what I saw in Danbury.”

Cruelty, fear, and terror? Holding people to account for any lawbreaking often seems cruel to them and their relatives and causes fear and terror. Most law conveys the fear of breaking it; otherwise it would be meaningless.

But the arrests in the Danbury area had a bigger objective than cruelty even if it wasn’t obvious to the senator. It was to apprehend and remove people in the country illegally. 

After all, if the objective had been only cruelty, the ICE agents could have arrested anyone.

G.K. Chesterton recognized the sort of problem here. “As is common in most modern discussions,” he wrote in 1910, “the unmentionable thing is the pivot of the whole discussion.” 

What is unmentionable by the senator and the advocates for the people arrested by ICE — what is the pivot of the discussion — is simply whether the arrested people were in the country illegally, and, if so, whether the law should be enforced against them. 

Fortunately for the senator and the advocates for the people arrested by ICE, most journalists don’t consider those points to be worth addressing either. Most journalists are interested only in publicizing what seems like the cruelty of enforcing law they dislike.

Addressing the central points from the start would change the subject from the profound sadness felt by the people who recklessly gambled that the United States would never enforce immigration law against them — people who bet their lives and even those of the spouses they acquired and the children they had after entering illegally and who lost that bet.

Connecticut is full of little groups working furiously to obstruct and sabotage immigration law enforcement — engaged in a form of nullification and secession that is essentially treason — but at least they are candid about wanting open borders and forgiveness of all immigration violations. 

By contrast Blumenthal and other Democratic officials in the state, especially Governor Lamont and Attorney General William Tong, seem to want to fudge the issue — to leave illegal immigrants in a netherworld, some with flimsy or temporary exemptions from enforcement, or to put them on “a path to citizenship,” the euphemism for a mass amnesty for their lawbreaking. For with an estimated 14 million illegal immigrants in the country, any normal review of their suitability for regular legal admission would take decades.

Blumenthal and other Democrats acknowledge that the immigration system is “broken” but don’t acknowledge that repairing it — giving normal review to everyone seeking admission — is impossible without deporting most illegal immigrants and telling them to get back in line because there can be no reward for breaking the law.

Nor do the senator and other Democrats address the question of who broke the immigration system and why. 

For the system was broken during a Democratic national administration, an administration that just shrugged and claimed falsely that controlling the border was impossible, when it actually didn’t want the border controlled at all but wanted instead for illegal immigrants to locate in Democratic “sanctuary” cities and states, where, as constitutionally required, the census would count them for purposes of congressional and state legislative districting. That would increase the number of safely Democratic districts and alter the country’s political composition in favor of the party that broke the system — all without letting illegal immigrants vote. Their mere presence would change everything.

If Blumenthal didn’t recognize America in Danbury amid the recent immigration law enforcement there, it’s because his party’s idea of America is no immigration enforcement at all.

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

‘Diversity, equity, and inclusion’ don’t substitute for achievement

By CHRIS POWELL

In recent years American higher education has made a fetish of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” which has succeeded “affirmative action” as the euphemism for racial preferences in hiring and the award of other benefits. Since higher education is the fortress of what styles itself as liberalism — that is, political correctness — the Trump administration delights in attacking it, and now is proposing to revoke tax-exempt status for colleges whose policies benefit students according to their race. Many colleges have such policies to help Black, Hispanic, and other minority students specifically.

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In the strict legal and moral senses the administration is right. Government should be color-blind in dealing with individuals. That’s equality under the law. 

But of course the country continues to suffer vast economic and social inequality, especially regarding race and class, which should be just as intolerable as racial preferences. Social harmony and justice won’t be achieved until opportunity is more equal.

Racial preferences sabotage their purported objective, for they instill suspicion and resentment, impugn the qualifications of their beneficiaries, and confer a false sense of achievement.

But getting rid of racial preferences and curbing the arrogance of higher education, nice as that would be, will do little to democratize opportunity.

Fortunately democratizing opportunity doesn’t require treating people according to race or ethnicity, since economic and social inequality are matters of poverty more than race and ethnicity. Higher education implicitly acknowledges this with scholarships and tuition discounts for students who are from poor families or who face other disadvantages. Favoring applicants from minority groups when all other aspects of applicants are equal is fair and won’t cause trouble or resentment.

Otherwise racial preferences are clumsy and unintelligent substitutes for fairness and the country doesn’t need them to elevate the poor and disadvantaged.

College scholarship programs like those run by the school systems in Hartford, New Haven, and Waterbury,  cities with much poverty, elevate students without regard to race even as most of their beneficiaries come from minority groups. Under those programs students who attend school consistently, behave well, and get high grades are guaranteed substantial financial aid for higher education. The money comes from private donors, charitable foundations, colleges, and government. The program in New Haven is largely funded by Yale University, which additionally covers tuition for its own students of limited means.

Colleges today crave outstanding minority students, as they should, since the country needs them badly.

But higher education is only a secondary mechanism of elevating the poor. Indeed, much of higher education is fluff of little value. 

The primary mechanisms of elevating the poor are lower education and parenting, areas in which Connecticut, while a rich state, fails terribly.  

Most poor children in Connecticut are poor because they have only one parent and because the state’s welfare system rewards and incentivizes childbearing outside marriage and thus impairs family formation. 

Many of these children never advance far educationally because the state’s schools operate by social promotion. Connecticut’s schools have no requirement for students to earn advancement from grade to grade and graduation from high school by learning. As a practical matter there is no requirement for students even to attend elementary and high school, since the requirement is not enforced seriously. 

So it’s no wonder that chronic absenteeism is so high among students in Connecticut’s poor cities — 33% in Hartford, 30% in Bridgeport and New Britain, 28% in New Haven, 25% in Norwich and New London, and 22% in Waterbury. Children who can’t reliably get to elementary and high school are not likely to get to college or even learn enough to qualify for more than menial jobs.

The indifference of elected and school officials to the pernicious results of welfare and educational policies underlies Connecticut’s longstanding and disgraceful educational performance gap between white and minority students and the state’s continuing failure to elevate the poor. 

The country needs diversity, equity, and inclusion. But rewarding people for their race is mere discrimination, political patronage, and evasion, not education and achievement. 

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

Exposing the poverty business; and will property taxes shift?

By CHRIS POWELL

Poverty is a big and profitable business in Connecticut and throughout the country and yet poverty keeps worsening. Part of that is caused by high inflation, whereby government grows without the formal taxation needed to pay for it, inflation being informal taxation and poorly understood. But part of it is also caused by the failure of the programs and policies government undertakes to ameliorate poverty.

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Last week Connecticut got a good look at that failure from the Connecticut Mirror, which reported that an independent audit commissioned by the state Department of Economic and Community Development of the late Blue Hills Civic Association in Hartford could find no documentation for $2.4 million of state government money given to the association for distribution to what were said to be community-service organizations. Some recipients refused to cooperate with the audit.

The audit was commissioned in response to last year’s scandal about the “earmarking” of millions of dollars in state grants to organizations selected by Democratic state legislators — patronage pork — and particularly about the grants arranged by Hartford state Sen. Douglas McCrory, which he routed through a close friend. Partly because of the scandal, McCrory was defeated last month in a primary for renomination by the Democrats.

Hartford remains desperately poor but as the scandal showed, the poverty business there continues to do well.

Embarrassed by the scandal, the General Assembly and Governor Lamont enacted a new policy requiring patronage grant recipients to report more about what they do generally as well as how they spent their state money. But being in the majority, Democratic legislators will continue to arrange patronage grants, and requiring recipients to submit more documentation won’t necessarily mean that their grants accomplish anything of value for the public. For there is no guarantee that anyone will check on what was actually done.

Indeed, six decades of the “war on poverty” in Connecticut suggest that the only result that matters is the political support generated from the poverty business.

Why are Connecticut’s cities still so poor and dysfunctional? It’s not because of Donald Trump, nor even because so much money has been siphoned away into the graft and waste of poverty pimping, as with the Blue Hills Civic Association. The cities remain so poor and dysfunctional because, as the patronage scandal merely reiterates, no one in authority really cares about the results of poverty policy as long as the poverty business itself thrives.

* * * 

In a few weeks the hundred-member “Citizens Assembly” convened by the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities plans to release recommendations from its study of municipal property taxes. But the study isn’t likely to tell the governor and legislators anything they don’t know. CCM is just trying to motivate them to transfer the burden of property taxes elsewhere.

The property tax is the state’s largest, collecting about $13 billion a year, a little more than the state income tax collects. But the property tax may be more bothersome politically since most income taxes are paid by the wealthiest few while property taxes are borne widely by the homeowning middle and upper classes. While property taxes are said to be regressive, in fact they are to a great extent taxes on unearned wealth, especially now that inflation and restrictive zoning have produced huge unrealized capital gains for homeowners.

Maybe the most obvious mechanism of property tax relief and fairness would be to have state government assume all costs of “special education,” which should be an expense of general social welfare, not municipal government. Another obvious possibility would be to enact a limited homestead exemption.

But where is the money for such a tax shift to come from? Proposing tax cuts is easy; replacing the revenue is hard.     

The Citizens Assembly almost certainly will not propose seriously economizing in municipal government and particularly in local education, the biggest municipal expense. School enrollments keep falling while school costs keep rising, but no one in politics in Connecticut can acknowledge the irony or stand up to the teacher unions. 

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

Student scores rise marginally but remain the usual disaster

By CHRIS POWELL

Whoopee! Last week the state Education Department cheerfully announced that Connecticut public school students in Grades 3 through 8 showed marginal improvements on the most recent state proficiency tests in English and math. 

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Students from poor households, who constitute 44% of the student population, had an increase of seven-tenths of a percent in English and four-tenths of a percent in math. Students from non-poor households increased their proficiency by four-tenths of a percent in both English and math.

There were similar marginal gains for Black and Hispanic students but the performance gaps between them and white students remain huge.

The Education Department’s chief performance officer, Ajit Gopalakrishnan, said that while the improvements seem small, “they translate to thousands of students statewide who are performing at a higher level.”  

But celebrating these marginal improvements just distracts from the disaster that the new proficiency levels are. 

For among the students from poor households, only 32.5% now meet grade-level proficiency in English and only 27% are proficient in math. 

Even among the non-poor students, only 66% are deemed proficient in English and only 62.5% in math. That is, even among the non-poor students, more than a third are not proficient in either subject.

Of course this is a distressingly old story and explains why state government administers so few proficiency tests to students. National tests sometimes given to Connecticut students report similarly appalling results — that most students are proficient in neither English nor math even when they graduate from high school. 

The closing of the state’s schools during the Covid-19 virus epidemic in 2020 is widely blamed for the decline in educational performance since then, though performance was declining much earlier. 

“Covid was such a gut punch for a lot of these kids,” the president of the state’s largest teachers union, the Connecticut Education Association, Kate Dias, said in response to the new test scores. “They came out of Covid a little more cynical about their education.”

Indeed, and why shouldn’t they have become more cynical about education? For if they hadn’t already discerned it, the closing of schools during the epidemic emphasized that they didn’t have to go to school to keep being advanced from grade to grade and graduate from high school even if they were generally ignorant. That policy — social promotion — was in force in Connecticut long before the epidemic and it remains in force. 

Chronic absenteeism of students from school in Connecticut recently was reported to be down to an average of 16%, and Dias predicts that proficiency test scores will rise if chronic absenteeism continues to fall. But correlating with household poverty, chronic absenteeism remains far higher in the cities — between 25% and 33% there — probably in large part because social promotion remains policy and demoralizes children and parents into doubting the idea of going to school at all.

The marginal increase in test scores prompted performance officer Gopalakrishnan to declare: “Success is possible in any district and for any child. All students should be achieving these standards.” 

He wasn’t asked: So why do most students not meet proficiency standards, and why don’t schools require them to meet those standards as a condition of grade advancement and graduation? What is the policy incentive for students to meet proficiency standards and for their parents to get them to school and value their education?

If even the state Education Department has so little regard for its product and its results are so marginal, why does the product cost so much and keep costing more every year?

For the money keeps flowing in. Last week Governor Lamont and Education Commissioner Charlene Russell-Tucker announced the state’s receipt of a $10 million federal grant to train teachers to teach reading better in kindergarten through third grade. The grant’s implication is that the teachers aren’t so good at it now because they use mistaken techniques. 

The awful new proficiency test results suggest that one of those mistaken techniques is simply social promotion.

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

Most in poll disapprove Lamont; could election be competitive?

By CHRIS POWELL

Maybe Connecticut isn’t yet in the mood for competitive politics, but the most recent Nutmeg State Poll from the University of New Hampshire’s Survey Center reports enough political dissatisfaction that, if it continues, might  be the precursor of change.

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For the first time in years, according to the poll, more respondents disapprove than approve of Governor Lamont’s performance in office — 44% approving and 52% disapproving. With a large sample, 917 participants, the poll is plausible, as are the issues on which respondents say they are most dissatisfied with the governor: the state’s high cost of living, its high taxes, its weak economy, and expensive housing.

The decline in the governor’s standing might be partly a consequence of the rough primary he nevertheless won overwhelmingly for renomination by the Democrats just a few days before the poll was taken. Lamont’s challenger, far-left Hamden state Rep. Josh Elliott, spent heavily on advertising depicting the governor as the plutocratic “King Ned” striving to protect “the rich” against “fair share” taxes. Despite what has seemed like the Democratic Party’s frantic rush to the left, Elliott’s appeal to class war won him less than a third of the primary vote. But it also may have helped to legitimize grievances against state government generally.

The new poll still shows the governor with a substantial lead over his Republican challenger, Greenwich state Sen. Ryan Fazio, 52-37%. But Fazio has just started running television commercials, and the traditional Republican vote in recent elections for governor has been closer to 45%. 

Of course the megalomania of President Trump, a Republican, will weigh heavily on the party’s candidates in Connecticut. But if, as the poll suggests, people are blaming not just Trump but also the governor for the high cost of living, Fazio may have a few things to talk to them about.

In any case the governor is seeking a third term at age 72 amid signs that many people want change. Not that change is always good, but what if people ever realize that it is seldom accomplished by re-electing people?

RAW PATRONAGE PORK: With a personal fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars to draw on for his campaign, which he again is financing all by himself, and with Connecticut remaining a heavily Democratic state, the governor probably isn’t worried much about his prospects. 

A sign of that confidence, if not arrogance, may have been the governor’s unannounced hiring of Miguel Cardona, the former state education commissioner and former U.S. education secretary, to be a highly paid consultant to an advisory commission the governor created this year to devise new ways of helping people find jobs in a changing economy. Cardona will chair the group as well as get paid to consult for it.

Since, upon his departure from the Biden administration, Cardona was widely regarded as the worst Education Department secretary in history, he may have needed help finding a job himself. The Connecticut Mirror reports that the Lamont administration will pay him $250,000 for consulting and that no other applicants were sought.

Cardona’s soft landing is the rawest patronage pork, confirmed by the governor’s attempt to hide its cost. 

WORK, NOT WELFARE: Hysteria is sweeping the welfare and hospital business in Connecticut now that the federal government has directed state governments to enforce work requirements on Medicaid recipients who are able-bodied adults without dependents. They could lose their medical insurance unless they work at least part-time — 80 hours per month — or pursue job training.

State welfare and hospital officials fear that many Medicaid recipients won’t comply with the new policy and instead will crowd hospital emergency rooms when they lose their insurance, with their unpaid bills classified as “uncompensated care” having to be paid by state government or insured patients.

But the new requirements are reasonable. For as Theodore Roosevelt said, the first duty of a citizen is to pull his own weight. With the federal government $40 trillion in debt, able-bodied adults without dependents should pull their own weight and then some.

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

Outrage about Danbury arrests shows Democrats want open borders

By CHRIS POWELL

Dozens of immigration arrests in the Danbury area last week sent Connecticut’s Democratic leaders into fits of hysteria and hypocrisy.

Governor Lamont complained that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents “are not trying to coordinate with us. They’re just picking people up.” 

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The governor seemed to have forgotten that with his support the state enacted a law forbidding its police officers from cooperating with ordinary immigration enforcement.

The governor issued a statement detailing the rights of illegal immigrants and how they should act if arrested. He has yet to issue a statement saying they should obey immigration law, nor a statement informing them that the federal government will pay them $3,000 and arrange their transportation if they deport themselves. Deportation doesn’t have to be cruel and abrupt for those who want to obey the law.

State and municipal officials and opponents of immigration law enforcement complained that illegal immigrants were scared by the arrests. But why shouldn’t people be scared of breaking the law?

Danbury Mayor Roberto L. Alves, who is also Democratic state chairman, said he and other Democrats were “demanding accountability” from ICE and wanted to know what it was doing in the Danbury area. But they knew very well what was going on. ICE was “demanding accountability” from people in the country illegally.

The governor and other Democrats also complained that ICE was not limiting immigration enforcement to “violent criminals.” This complaint approached the heart of the matter.

For while the governor and other Democrats will never put it plainly, their position is that people who enter the country illegally and reach Connecticut should be forgiven their lawbreaking and left alone unless they are caught committing another crime. State government’s position to that effect is well known — thanks to state government’s granting driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants and its law forbidding state and municipal police from assisting ordinary immigration enforcement. So Connecticut is understood to be a “sanctuary state.” 

That is the origin of the cruelty being complained about. For Connecticut invites people to take their chances breaking immigration law rather than to try to enter the country through the normal legal procedures. Connecticut invites them to gamble that eventually the federal government will lose its will to defend the country and instead will grant a mass amnesty to illegal immigrants — that it will open the borders retroactively.

ICE has serious defects. Among them, its officers are not identified by name and badge number and the agency fails to provide prompt public identification of those it has arrested.

But those defects are not why the governor, Mayor Alves, and other leading Democrats are so upset with the agency. They are upset most because they don’t want any ordinary illegal immigrants deported, as they make clear frequently when they say they welcome all immigrants, always failing to distinguish between the legal and illegal, and as they made clear in July when they objected to the arrest in West Hartford of an illegal immigrant who had violated a final order of removal for many years of repeated lawbreaking.

Ordinary immigration law enforcement like last week’s in the Danbury area will impair the national Democratic scheme to use illegal immigrants to rig federal and state legislative districting in the party’s favor. The problem is not, as President Trump hallucinates, that illegal immigrants are likely to try voting in great numbers soon. The problem is that most illegal immigrants are drawn to the “sanctuary” jurisdictions Democrats have established for them and will be counted in the federal censuses on which congressional and state legislative districting is based, thereby increasing the number of solidly Democratic districts at the expense of Republican and competitive districts. 

There is also cruelty here to legal Connecticut residents — great financial costs, especially in housing, already in short supply and high in price, and in the education of thousands of children who don’t speak English. The Democrats never frankly appropriated for these costs, for that would have required being honest about them.

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