Throwing money at schools is a policy needing an audit

By Chris Powell

Like public education in most American cities, public education in Connecticut’s cities has been chaotic and ineffective for decades. Ever since the enactment of the Education Enhancement Act in 1986 the state’s response to this failure has been to throw money at schools and particularly at teacher salaries, on the premise that teacher salaries and student performance are correlated. 

But student performance has not improved. Indeed, as measured by standardized tests, student performance has steadily worsened, to the point where many educators now want to eliminate standardized testing, claiming that it is somehow racist, though then there would be no measurement of results and no chance of accountability for both students and schools.

So educators and the elected officials who defer to them keep clamoring for more money, as New Haven’s did this week at “September Surge” rallies held at three schools in the city. Though New Haven’s schools received $127 million in emergency funding from the federal government during the recent virus epidemic, city educators and Mayor Justin Elicker said the schools need many millions more. They demanded that schools be “fully funded.”

What exactly does “fully funded” mean? No clear numerical answer has ever been offered. As a practical matter it means only a lot more, every year forever.

Mayor Elicker said New Haven has been doing its part, having increased its school appropriation by 42% over the last five years. He contended that the city should get more education aid from the state and federal governments because it spends slightly less per pupil than the state average even as the city’s students have greater needs, 75% coming from poor households and many not speaking English well or at all.

Many New Haven students have been traumatized by unstable upbringing, and many are immigrants, legal and illegal. To hear educators tell it, nearly every student in New Haven needs his own social worker, “paraprofessional” (that is, assistant teacher), psychologist, and English tutor — and maybe a nanny and chauffeur as well, since the chronic absenteeism rate of students in New Haven’s schools is 37.5%, highest in the state. (How extra services will improve education for children whose parents can’t or won’t get them to school is also yet to be explained.)

Besides, to some extent the greater need of the city’s students is New Haven’s own fault, since the city long has declared itself a “sanctuary city,” a brazen nullifier of federal immigration law.

In any case Connecticut has a right to resent the theater some New Haven teachers attempted during this week’s rallies as they marched through one of the targeted schools. According to the New Haven Independent, the teachers crouched, held up their hands, rubbed their thumbs and forefingers together as if holding dollar bills, and shouted: “Show me the money!”

A skeptical reader of the Independent responded incisively: “Show me the education.” He might have added: “Show me what is causing all this expensive and everlasting poverty, and how, amid this poverty, decades of throwing money at schools have improved student achievement.”

If only a similar demand came from anyone in authority — the governor, state legislators, mayors and municipal school board and council members, and state Education Department officials. If only state residents generally wanted to know why student performance falls as spending rises. Throwing money may salve the public’s conscience about chronic educational failure, but since that policy doesn’t work, uneducated kids will still be destined for lives of menial labor, financial hardship, unhappiness, poor health, drug abuse, crime — and more poverty. 

New Haven’s schools may be the most badly administered in the state, but similar problems plague schools in Hartford, Bridgeport, Waterbury, Meriden, and other poor cities and towns.

So Connecticut’s policy of throwing money at education and hoping for the best needs to be audited. Is auditing never attempted because most children not being educated are members of racial or ethnic minorities? Is it because an audit might threaten the careers of thousands of government employees? Is it both?

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net) 

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