By Chris Powell
News reports say the General Assembly’s Finance Committee has approved legislation “designed to eradicate concentrated poverty” — that is, the poverty of U.S. census districts in Connecticut where 30% or more of the households have incomes below the federal poverty level.
But the legislation, whose leading advocate is state Sen. John Fonfara, D-Hartford, won’t eradicate any poverty. It will only establish another bureaucracy, the Office of Neighborhood Investment and Community Engagement in the state Department of Economic and Community Development. The new bureaucracy would be assigned to write a 10-year plan for eliminating the “concentrated poverty.”
The ranking Republican on the Finance Committee, Rep. Holly Cheeseman of East Lyme, is skeptical. How, she asks, would the economic development department find the right people to run the new office?
But of course the department will have no trouble finding politically connected Democrats in the state’s impoverished cities to take the cushy new patronage jobs, whose work will consist mainly of distributing more state patronage to other Democrats in the name of alleviating urban poverty, even as no poverty will be alleviated except for the Democrats getting the jobs.
It has been decades since urban poverty was a mystery. There is plenty of social science showing it is mainly a matter of the childbearing outside marriage and fatherlessness induced by the welfare system and the resulting educational failure that disproportionately afflicts children of single-parent households.
Of course poverty might be much reduced if government stopped inflation and dramatically increased the housing supply. But no special study, 10-year plan, and patronage appointments are needed to solve those problems either. The “concentrated poverty” legislation is just another dodge.
Find the kids some fathers and make sure they take their schooling seriously and poverty will be sharply reduced even before the new employees of the Office of Neighborhood Investment and Community Engagement in the state Department of Economic and Community Development qualify for the generous state pensions that are believed to be every active Democrat’s birthright.
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Nor should it be such a mystery why the chronic absenteeism rate of Connecticut’s public school students remained stubbornly high at 20% during the 2022-23 school year, according to the latest data from the state Education Department.
The rate is lower than the previous year’s but still above the rate before the recent virus epidemic. Students are classified as chronically absent if they miss 10% or more of their school days.
The worsening of poverty by inflation and housing scarcity is part of the problem, but education policy probably has a lot to do with it as well.
After all, exactly what is the rationale for conscientiously attending school in Connecticut these days when students and their parents — such as they are — know very well that the only hard rule of public education in the state is social promotion? That is, they know that students will be promoted from grade to grade and awarded a high school diploma regardless of whether they attend school and learn anything. Indeed, even if they have failed to master high school work, many will be admitted to public institutions calling themselves colleges and universities.
There aren’t truant officers anymore and there are no penalties for students or parents for chronically missing school, just some hand-holding with social workers, tedious as that may be. Schools no longer demand anything of students and parents, who may be confident that eventually — with food, housing, medical insurance, and other subsidies — government will take care of everyone who fails to bestir himself.
Maybe restoring standards all at once in public education would be impossible politically in Connecticut. But one small change in policy might help — requiring high school students to take a graduation test whose score would be imprinted on diplomas. Prospective employers could be encouraged to require job applicants to produce their diplomas for review.
Of course even without diplomas scored this way employers easily could distinguish the dunces from the educated. But at least the procedure would remind the dunces and their parents of their negligence.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
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Chris Powell column 