By Chris Powell
School officials in Meriden are sore that this column recently included the city in a list of Connecticut cities whose schools have serious problems, a list with New Haven, Hartford, Waterbury, and Bridgeport. These problems include chronic absenteeism, an influx of immigrant students who don’t speak English, parental neglect, and other pathologies of poverty.
While the column was correct, Meriden educators construed it to imply that their schools perform as poorly as those of the other cities listed. Other readers may have construed it the same way. After all, maybe only the schools of Baltimore, Chicago, and Philadelphia might not feel insulted to be cited in the same sentence with the schools of New Haven, Hartford, Bridgeport, and Waterbury.
But in recent years Meriden’s schools have made progress. While the city’s student test scores are still low, they are significantly higher than scores in New Haven, Hartford, Bridgeport, and Waterbury. Scores in Meriden’s lower grades have been rising, and five city schools recently won awards.
School administration is often terrible, especially in cities, but then all school systems have to play the hands they are dealt. Education is mostly a matter of parenting, and all Connecticut school systems with awful student performance have awful demographics — many poor households with fatherless and neglected children and growing numbers of immigrant children who don’t speak English.
If the student populations of Connecticut’s impoverished cities were exchanged with the student populations of the state’s middle-class or wealthy suburbs, suddenly the cities would have the best-performing schools and the suburbs the worst, regardless of administration.
Connecticut policy long has been to concentrate poverty in the cities and — with social promotion, tenure, and binding arbitration of union contracts — to prohibit accountability for educators, students, and parents alike. Meanwhile under the Biden-Harris administration federal policy has presumed cruelly that the increase in poverty that has been caused by high inflation is acceptable, and that, quite without substantial expansion, the country’s schools, hospitals, and housing should accommodate millions more impoverished immigrants every year so Democrats can gain control of more congressional districts.
Under these circumstances little educational success can be expected.
Of course it might be nice if school administrators, teachers, and their unions complained loudly — or at all — about these destructive policies and weren’t so easily quieted by the usual pay raises. But then everybody has to make a living, even if it’s hard to imagine how journalists will make a living when public education leaves most of the population illiterate.
LOGAN’S TIMIDITY: In his debate the other day with Democratic U.S. Rep. Jahana Hayes, who is seeking re-election in Connecticut’s 5th Congressional District, Republican nominee George Logan demonstrated that he still hasn’t mastered the basic question about Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
Pressed by Hayes about whether he supports Trump, Logan couldn’t speak Trump’s name. Instead Logan said he supports his party’s ticket.
Logan seems to think that voters don’t know about Trump’s troublesome character and demeanor. So Logan won’t acknowledge them, won’t assert that in this election policy issues are much more important than character and demeanor, and won’t note that elections often pose the challenge of determining the lesser of two evils.
Would Trump’s supporters really vote for Hayes, an extreme-left Democrat, to punish Logan for acknowledging what most of them already know?
REGULATORS WON’T EXPLAIN: If, as the Public Utilities Regulatory Authority likes to suggest, electricity prices in Connecticut are too high because of the greed of the big, bad electric utilities — Eversource and United Illuminating — why are no power generators offering to sell electricity any cheaper in the state?
According to the list posted on the internet by state government, no generator comes even close to undercutting the “standard offer” price for which Eversource and UI provide electricity. Apparently Eversource and UI are actually Connecticut’s least expensive electricity providers.
Last week a PURA publicist refused to answer this writer’s questions about this situation or make the agency’s chairwoman available to answer them. Legislators should try to get an explanation.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
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Chris Powell column 