By Chris Powell
Woke-ism now extends to Connecticut’s state budget. A new law requires future governors to attach to their budget proposals a statement describing how their taxing and spending plans address racial and economic inequities.
Such a statement by the governor may be full of insight or, more likely, it may be only meaningless generalities and even falsehoods, for which there will be no penalty. In any case conscientious elected state officials might be expected [ITALICS] always [END ITALICS] to be considering racial and economic inequities, quite without the new mandate.
Of course the real objective of the new law is only to lend a little more heft to the usual clamor for more appropriations for one thing or another claiming to pursue “equity,” which long has been an empty cliche in state politics. No new law is needed here, for state government already can examine and act on racial and economic inequities any time it wants to do more than spend more, any time it wants to look critically at the policies already in force.
There is a big issue of racial equity in education, where the gap between the performance of white and minority students is old and mortifying. But government has been spending substantially more in the name of educational equity for 45 years, ever since the state Supreme Court decision in Horton v. Meskill in 1977, without either closing the gap or inquiring into the failure of more spending to close it.
Connecticut may laugh smugly at the latest educational scandal in Baltimore, where investigation last month found that since 2016 the class scores of thousands of high school students have been falsified to qualify them for graduation. But as a practical matter Connecticut has no student performance standards for high school graduation beyond simple attendance, and, starting in kindergarten, no performance standards for promotion from grade to grade. While education in Connecticut is full of rules, required course offerings, and pretension, its only firm policy is social promotion.
No official inquiry into the “equity” of social promotion has ever been undertaken, though anyone sincerely concerned about the racial performance gap in education might ask how condoning ignorance and lack of effort helps students from racial minorities.
Many of those students come from single-parent households without fathers, a circumstance overwhelmingly correlated not just with educational failure but also with physical and mental illness, poverty, crime, alienation, and general unhappiness in life. So what has caused the explosion in fatherlessness in the last 50 years?
Is it something in the air or water, or might it be connected with government’s welfare policies, which eliminate the financial need for a father to live with and support his children and their mother? Anyone sincerely concerned with “equity” might want state government to inquire here. But no one in authority has asked the question.
Crime greatly worsens living conditions in the cities, where most of Connecticut’s minority population resides. But much serious crime in the state is committed by repeat offenders even as the state lacks an incorrigibility law and the governor boasts about the decline in the prison population. How does leniency for repeat offenders provide “equity” for members of racial minorities, who are disproportionately the victims of crime? This question also is yet to be officially asked.
Indeed, both state government and the federal government increasingly seem to have given up on making people self-supporting. Instead government keeps creating programs to give stuff to certain people, sometimes frankly on a basis of political patronage, like the new state program that will cover housing purchase down payments for a favored few but not everyone who qualifies by objective criteria.
More housing is badly needed, as housing prices have never been higher relative to incomes. But prices should be brought down by encouraging supply while facilitating ownership for [ITALICS] everyone [END ITALICS] who wants to own. Giving down payments to a favored few so they can relocate to what government calls “high-opportunity zones” is a distraction from the many who remain in “low-opportunity zones,” euphemism for the poverty factories of the cities.
Spending more on policies that don’t work is not the path to “equity.” Auditing those policies is.
—–
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.
-END-
Chris Powell column 