By Chris Powell
While Governor Lamont and Connecticut’s members of Congress seek re-election by touring the state distributing money for supposedly wonderful new projects and programs, what was already a catastrophe is getting worse and hardly being noticed.
It’s the failure of education in the cities and especially New Haven, whose Board of Education last week reviewed appalling new student proficiency test and attendance data.
Only 12% of New Haven students are performing at grade level in math and only 28% in English.
The city’s schools also have a 54% rate of chronic absenteeism, students who miss more than 10% of their classes. It is the highest rate of absenteeism ever recorded by the city’s schools.
As for what to do about it, the school board seemed unable to get past the local controversy over the best way of teaching reading. But others in the city keep clamoring for more spending on education and higher salaries for teachers, as if Connecticut hasn’t pursued such policies since the state Supreme Court’s decision in the school financing case of Horton v. Meskill in 1977, 45 years ago. Decades of spending more on schools and raising teacher salaries have made teachers happy but not improved student performance.
The cause of the problem is elsewhere: not teaching methods or money but more than a half century of social disintegration, child neglect resulting from the policy-induced destruction of the family among poor people.
Of course New Haven’s elected officials aren’t eager to acknowledge that the problem is their own constituents. Nor are the state’s top elected officials. They are all Democrats and long have farmed New Haven for their party’s biggest pluralities in state elections.
Even so, a student’s educational performance is mostly a matter of parenting. Teachers and school administrators often try heroically and sometimes inspire students enough to overcome their handicaps at home. But for most children the prerequisite of a decent education is conscientious parents. At bottom the educational catastrophe in New Haven and other cities and inner suburbs is the lack of conscientious parenting — and it can’t even be acknowledged and discussed officially in Connecticut, much less solved.
As a result many children are being doomed to lives of menial labor, poverty, crime, unhappiness, and dependence on handouts from government — which sometimes seems to be the idea. At least the perpetual poverty of the cities long has sustained those Democratic pluralities. So it is never questioned.
But perpetual poverty will not sustain democracy and liberty. Only a self-supporting and well-educated middle class will.
As the governor and members of Congress pass out the goodies in pursuit of re-election, it’s as if they are shopping for new curtains while the house burns down.
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NEW PARTY TIME: Polls suggest that most Americans are dissatisfied enough with both the Democrats and the Republicans that they would like the country to have a third major political party, especially if the Democrats are to renominate President Biden or substitute Vice President Kamala Harris for him and the Republicans are to renominate former President Donald Trump. So last week a few dozen prominent former Democrats and Republicans announced they are forming a party that is to be called Forward.
Forward is being led by businessman Andrew Yang, a very liberal Democrat who recently ran unsuccessfully for president and mayor of New York City, and former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, a moderate Republican. Both seem more competent and suitable for leadership than the president and the former president.
Third parties did surprisingly well in the presidential elections in 1980 and 1992. In 1980 U.S. Rep. John Anderson got 6.6% of the vote against President Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, while in 1992 zillionaire Ross Perot got 19% against President George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton.
But Anderson and Perot clearly stood for something — Anderson for moderate opposition to Carter’s liberal haplessness and Reagan’s conservatism, Perot for slashing the national debt.
What will Forward stand for? Even its organizers don’t know yet, but just not being Biden and crazy left and not being Trump and plain crazy may be enough for getting started.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.
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Chris Powell column 