By Chris Powell
Flash! Having surveyed its members, the Connecticut Education Association, the state’s largest teacher union, reports that they are unhappy with their jobs and want higher pay and less accountability. A survey last year got the same results, and future surveys well may get the same results forever.
Ho-hum. For this unhappiness has been manifested for many months as teachers have left the profession for other jobs, retired early, or transferred to less troubled school systems, and inadequate compensation probably isn’t the big reason teachers are unhappy.
Rather than compensation, the big problem for teachers is working conditions.
While the survey found teachers complaining about “school and classroom decisions made by politicians and non-educators,” that is just their usual resentment of democracy. If schools are public, teachers must answer for themselves to outsiders, especially since school performance in Connecticut has been crashing for years.
More revealing in the survey were the complaints about lack of respect for teachers among students, the weakening of student discipline, and the increasing mental illness of students. Indeed, from the clamor around the state for mental health clinics in schools and outpatient mental health clinics for children generally, it may be a wonder that Connecticut still has any education at all.
Worsening working conditions and a decline in respect are also driving people out of police work, particularly in Connecticut’s cities, where mayhem and social dysfunction are rampant despite state government’s insistence that crime is going down. Crazy as it is, police officers often can be paid more to work in relatively safe suburbs than in dangerous cities. State government long has spent plenty of money for raising teacher salaries in cities but not for raising police salaries there. Maybe that should change.
School performance seldom has been an issue in municipal elections but it has become one in a few towns this year. This year Republicans in heavily Democratic Manchester actually have something to say, focusing on what they call the town’s “failing” schools.
Lower performance in schools became almost inevitable as Manchester, like other inner suburbs, opened itself to multi-family housing in recent decades, reducing average household income and increasing the number of students from single-parent households. Acknowledging the education problem as the Republicans are doing is a start, but exactly what can school boards do about declining performance? The campaign signs don’t say.
Something can be done even in schools with many disadvantaged students, like tightening discipline and putting an overwhelming focus on the basics — English and math — while scrapping the politically correct nonsense state government likes to emphasize to distract from worsening academic performance.
But education is first a matter of parenting, and lately in many school systems a quarter or more of students are chronically absent. Schools can’t educate kids who don’t show up reliably, and getting kids to school is the obligation of parents.
That is, Connecticut’s schools aren’t failing as much as its parents are, and what candidate for office dares to tell his own constituents that “failing” schools are their own fault?
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The political left in Connecticut refuses to see that welfare policy’s destruction of the family and education policy’s elimination of academic standards are causing poverty and social disintegration, as well as sparking opposition to housing construction in the suburbs. For people made poor by welfare and education policy are civic burdens.
Meanwhile the political right in Connecticut refuses to see that its opposition to housing construction in the suburbs creates poverty too, increasing the cost of housing beyond what even decent and productive working people can afford and pushing the poor deeper into destitution.
The result is political gridlock on housing.
Could there be some compromise, whereby government stopped manufacturing poverty and social disintegration and facilitated housing construction everywhere, especially inexpensive housing with government finance to help people become homeowners?
Not so long ago both the left and the right understood that society was healthier and more stable and property more secure when everyone had some.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
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Chris Powell column 