By Chris Powell
Rising homelessness. Growing demand at food and diaper banks. Chronic absenteeism at schools. Brawls at high school football games. Schools closed by threats of violence. Street takeovers and car thefts by young hooligans. More drug abuse, mentally ill children, teen suicides, and abandoned pets.
Such news reports indicating worsening poverty and social disintegration in Connecticut may be dismissed as anecdotal or sensationalist. But last week the state’s United Way organization published a report documenting the increase of poverty in the state and estimating that as many as 39% of its households live in poverty.
High inflation is much to blame, since wages for many have not kept up with prices, especially for necessities.
Also last week the Hartford Courant reported that more than half Connecticut’s students have “high needs.” That is, they qualify for free or discounted school meals, have disabilities, or are unable to speak English.
Three weeks ago the Connecticut Mirror reported about a girl who recently graduated from high school in Hartford and has been admitted to the University of Connecticut though she can’t read or write.
And last week the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities (CCM) issued a report on a study it undertook with Dalio Education about the state’s estimated 119,000 “disconnected” young people. The report called for spending another $700 million on primary education.
Unfortunately the study expressed no interest in the causes of worsening poverty. It sought only to remediate problems poverty causes for young people.
Thus the study was trying mainly just to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic, as with its proposal to refine high school graduation requirements, which are and would remain a polite fiction, having long ago been nullified by social promotion, Connecticut’s primary policy of public education. Social promotion explains not just the illiterate Hartford graduate but also the longstanding failure of most state students to perform at grade level throughout their schooling. It explains their lack of qualification for more than menial work after graduation.
Where is all this poverty, alienation, and social disintegration coming from?
The response from officialdom has been not to ask about the causes of these problems but just to throw more money at their symptoms.
Don’t ask where inflation comes from; just give the poor more welfare.
Don’t ask why most students are never really educated but given diplomas anyway; just keep pretending that education correlates with teacher salaries.
And don’t be horrified about the illiterate Hartford graduate. Indeed, only two state legislators seem to have responded with any relevance to that story. Other legislators and educators construed the story as demonstrating only a lack of spending and transparency in spending. So there will be no risk of accountability for anyone in Hartford’s schools and city government, nor in state government.
The crucial lack of transparency is with results. Connecticut has no proficiency tests for advancement from grade to grade and graduation. Educators and legislators don’t want the public to know the results of their education spending, for that would be even more horrifying.
Educational failure and social disintegration have less to do with schooling and more with a lack of parents and parenting — that is, more to do with child neglect. A third of Connecticut’s children live with only one parent, yet the CCM study doesn’t even mention parenting.
What has broken the family, and why is this breakdown assumed to be the natural order of things? No one in authority asks.
Social promotion doesn’t improve education and job skills; it destroys the incentive for children to go to school at all and the incentive for parents to get them there. Seventeen percent of Connecticut students are chronically absent; in the cities it approaches and sometimes exceeds 30%.
Those who would remediate these problems don’t mean to solve them but just to find a more comfortable way of living with them — with bigger and more expensive government, of course. Connecticut has been doing it for decades and it hasn’t worked yet.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
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Chris Powell column 