By Chris Powell
New Haven’s school system is a catastrophe and getting worse, according to presentations made at a Dec. 20 meeting in the city that was called by state legislators and featured analysis from the state Education Department.
The meeting’s nominal purpose was to let the city’s Board of Education know that the state department is available to help, as if anybody didn’t know that already. The meeting’s real purpose seems to have been to tell the city school board that the catastrophe over which it has been presiding is getting harder for state government to overlook.
According to a report in the New Haven Independent, the state education officials said the proficiency of New Haven students used to be better than that of students in Connecticut’s other cities but now is the worst, and that the rate of chronic absenteeism of students in New Haven’s schools stands at 45%.
As many as 80% of New Haven’s students perform below grade level in either English or math or both, a polite way of saying that social promotion, a policy decision, has corrupted the entire school system.
Do school administrators not understand that this policy tells students there is no [ITALICS] need [END ITALICS] for them to perform or even attend — that they will be promoted from grade to grade and graduated from high school even if they learn nothing?
The meeting discussed the causes of chronic absenteeism without ever acknowledging social promotion’s powerful disincentive to go to school, and hardly noticed that the overwhelming cause of chronic absenteeism is simply the failure of parents, so-called, to ensure that their children show up.
That is, chronic absenteeism is just another pathology of government-subsidized poverty. So New Haven’s schools may hire more “drop-out prevention specialists” to coax the chronic absentees to come back. No penalties for negligent parents are contemplated, though many are on welfare.
But the meeting also produced a glimmer of hope. New Haven state Sen. Martin M. Looney, the Senate’s president pro tem, implied a growing suspicion even among liberals that throwing ever-more money at New Haven’s schools has failed to produce education.
Speaking for the city’s state legislative delegation, Looney said: “We’re concerned about making sure there’s transparency and a general understanding about the amounts of money New Haven has been receiving over the past few years. To be in a strong position to continue our advocacy for our own schools, we need to have a strong sense of exactly where we are going” when the new legislative session begins.
Meanwhile, the Independent reported, the city’s schools are sitting on more than $67 million in emergency aid from the federal government. If past is prologue, all of it will be spent without improving student performance, used instead just to give the impression that government is doing something about the catastrophe when all it is doing is helping itself avoid the awful truth: that education’s prerequisite is not money at all but parenting, which is collapsing everywhere, if more so in the cities, and that the most urgent reform for all schools is to discern why.
Chronic absenteeism in New Haven’s schools isn’t entirely a problem of students. The Dec. 20 meeting was told that the schools have about 130 vacant “classroom-facing” staff positions that are proving extremely difficult to fill. While the schools are planning to raise teacher salaries substantially under a new union contract, will it be enough to entice people to take a job with so many students who, neglected at home, are alienated and disengaged?
Social disintegration is causing similar problems with the state police and municipal police departments in Connecticut. Who wants to be a cop amid this disintegration?
The new state police contract is sharply increasing starting pay in the hope of boosting recruitment, especially from municipal departments. But city departments already have been losing officers to departments in suburbs where pay is higher and crime lower.
The new contract may rescue the state police at additional damage to city police departments. Then what?
Maybe state government should take over both city school systems and police departments. At least then political responsibility and blame would fall where it belongs, at the top.
Chris Powell (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com) is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut.
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Chris Powell column 