By Chris Powell
While Bridgeport’s troubled schools, filled with students neglected at home, perform terribly, the city’s Board of Education has put another holiday on its school calendar: Islam’s Eid al-Fitr, which marks the end of Ramadan.
The board did so in the name of diversity and religious and ethnic tolerance at the request of students from Park City Magnet School, as if students everywhere really need some noble reason to want another day off. The board didn’t even wait to find out how many city students come from families who strongly desire the holiday. The request was politically correct, and that was enough.
School systems around Connecticut have been doing or considering the same sort of thing lately, particularly with the Hindu festival of Dawali, even though the number of students observing that holiday is small.
Because of the virus epidemic Connecticut’s schools have just come through two years of great disruption in education, during which “remote learning” — schooling from home via the internet — meant no learning at all for many students. On average Connecticut students have probably lost a full year of education because of the epidemic. But the holidaymakers don’t care.
The holidaymakers may note that state law still requires municipalities to offer 180 days of school each year. But to give schools flexibility for returning to normal, the General Assembly and Governor Lamont may reduce that mandate by several days, which will mean still more school time lost.
Even if the 180-day requirement is maintained, more holidays mean more interruptions to learning.
If Connecticut took seriously the educational disaster of the last two years, the state would be urgently reducing school holidays, not increasing them. A week of schooling might be recovered by eliminating five or six lesser holidays observed by many school systems: Columbus Day or Indigenous People’s Day, Veterans Day, Martin Luther King Day, Presidents Day, Good Friday, and, in some towns, Juneteenth, when students are taught erroneously that the proclamation of the end of slavery in Texas at the conclusion of the Civil War marked the end of slavery throughout the country. (In fact slavery continued in several states for another six months until adoption of the 13th Amendment.)
Few students and families do anything special on those holidays. For nearly everyone they are just an ordinary day off.
The school holiday craze is a lot of posturing. It is anti-education, and the tolerance it displays most is tolerance of worsening student performance.
EMERGENCY BIKE PATH: It would be hard for any municipality in Connecticut to do worse than West Haven has done with the emergency federal financial aid it has been given to compensate for the virus epidemic. A state audit has found that the city misspent more than three-quarters of the $1.1 million it received at the end of 2020.
But some malfeasance must be suspected elsewhere. For example, the other day Enfield decided to use $80,000 of its emergency federal money to extend a bicycle path.
If that was really the most urgent need in Enfield, the town would seem to be doing well. But while Enfield was making an emergency of the bike path, the state Education Department announced that the town’s schools are now among the poorest-performing in the state and designated them an “alliance district,” a sort of probation with state supervision and potentially extra state financial aid.
Spending doesn’t correlate well with student performance, but the $80,000 for the bike path might have paid for some tutoring.
BRUNO’S BREAKDOWN: Connecticut’s Supreme Court has begun an investigation of Superior Court Judge Alice Bruno, who has not shown up for work for more than two years but has been paid $400,000 anyway. Bruno’s excuse suggests that she has had a mental breakdown and is incapable of doing her job.
That is, Bruno has declared that she needs a stress-free work environment. (Wouldn’t everybody like one?) But courts are in the business of conflict resolution, which means stress. Could Bruno really not have known this when she applied for a judgeship?
Having let the Bruno disaster continue so long, the Judicial Department itself has seemed unable to handle stress.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.
Chris Powell column 