By Chris Powell
Lincoln wrote that government should do what the people can’t do for themselves at all or very well. By that standard Connecticut state government’s program to provide paid leave for private-sector workers should be eliminated, doubly so because, as Connecticut Public reported the other day, a third of program applicants are being denied what is really only the return of their own money.
The program is financed by a special half-percent tax on income. Successful applicants can receive as much as 12 weeks of paid leave for parenting newborns, recovering from illness, and taking care of loved ones. But of course those are hardly all of life’s emergencies. Indeed, if your home burns down or your car is wrecked, you may have a financial problem bigger than your uncle’s back injury, but the money you have sunk into the paid leave program won’t help you.
Why are a third of applicants being rejected?
Paperwork and confusing rules are blamed, and the Connecticut Paid Leave Authority is said to be working on that. But even if those problems are fixed, people in financial distress will be denied because of the law’s mistaken premises — that only care-giving emergencies should be covered and that only government can adjudicate and administer coverage.
Discarding those mistaken premises would allow coverage to be vastly increased. State government could put worker contributions to the paid leave fund in individual escrow accounts, or require workers to make monthly contributions to special savings accounts in their own names at banks, and then be allowed access to the money, [ITALICS] for any reason, [END ITALICS] during a short period at the start of each year.
People always would be saving a half percent of their income, people with non-caregiving emergencies would not be exploited for the benefit of people with caregiving emergencies, all emergencies would be covered, government would not be interfering so much in personal lives, and all people would get all their money back eventually.
Even if the Paid Leave Authority reduces its rejection rate, it still will be turning its back on countless emergencies it is not even registering. The objective should be not just to make the program more efficient but to transform it to serve [ITALICS] everyone. [END ITALICS]
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School administrators, the state Education Department, state legislators, and others are trying to figure out why the chronic absenteeism rate in Connecticut’s public elementary and high schools has been rising even though the virus epidemic is long over.
The chronic absenteeism rate for the state as a whole stands at 25%. That is, a quarter of Connecticut students are missing 10% or more of instruction time. For the schools in the most impoverished municipalities the rate is as much as twice that.
Some school systems are surveying the parents of the often-missing kids to ask what the problem is. Financial stress? Lack of transportation? Family illness, conflict, or dysfunction? Language barriers? Bullying? Something else?
Those things may explain some cases. But there is probably a bigger reason, a reason parents and students don’t want to divulge and educators and legislators don’t want to know about.
That is, some parents and students well may see no [ITALICS] necessity [END ITALICS] in attending school. After all, if chronic absenteeism carried a prison sentence for parents and students alike, the chronic absenteeism rate would fall sharply. But many parents and students easily may figure that education isn’t that important — that people can get by in Connecticut without an education.
Surely by now these kids and their parents have perceived Connecticut’s main educational policy — social promotion — and have seen that no student in the state needs to learn anything to advance from grade to grade and be given a high school diploma. Meanwhile many if not most chronically absent students live in households receiving all sorts of welfare benefits and subsidies — for housing, food, medical care, electricity, and so forth — all awarded without regard to school attendance and educational achievement.
Do social promotion and comprehensive and unconditional welfare benefits strengthen or destroy education’s appeal? The evidence is out in the open but educators have yet to tabulate it.
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Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com)
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Chris Powell column 