Connecticut’s social promotion makes public education a costly fraud

By Chris Powell

Social promotion in Connecticut’s schools isn’t just informal policy and practice, implemented by winks and nods. This week Marc E. Fitch of the Yankee Institute’s Connecticut Inside Investigator reported that many school systems, including those in Hartford, New Haven, Waterbury, and Middletown, follow written policies virtually prohibiting giving students failing grades. 

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The policy is called “Minimum 50” and it requires teachers to give passing grades to all students, including those who have learned little if anything and even those who never showed up. Such practices and policies have destroyed educational standards.

“Minimum 50” ensures that uneducated students are advanced from grade to grade and then given high school diplomas even if they are illiterate or essentially so, like the recent Hartford Public High School graduate who last September sensationally confessed to the Connecticut Mirror that she still couldn’t read or write. Now she is suing the city for $3 million in damages.

Educational standards have been destroyed this way to increase high school graduation rates and conceal the massive fraud that public education has become, especially in impoverished cities.

Fitch reports that the Hartford school system last year claimed a graduation rate of more than 78%, its highest in a decade, even as 27% of its students were chronically absent, with Hartford Public and Bulkeley high schools having chronic absenteeism rates above 50%. Rising chronic absenteeism rates can correlate with rising graduation rates only where educators are corrupt.

But the massive fraud in public education also helps conceal Connecticut’s worsening social disintegration.

After all, a student doesn’t remain illiterate through 12 or 13 years of schooling, like the Hartford girl, without having indifferent or incompetent parents or no parents at all. There are many such households. This is an angle that journalism about the Hartford girl’s case has studiously overlooked.

Educators enable parental irresponsibility by accepting and rationalizing it.

Hartford’s school system has put its social promotion policy in writing for seven years but only recently have a few teachers begun complaining about it in public. In other school systems in Connecticut there seem to be even fewer complaints from teachers about social promotion. Instead teacher unions lately have been demanding hefty raises — like those recently awarded in Hartford — because student misconduct and terrible performance have become insufferable and are driving teachers out of the worst school systems and even out of the profession. 

This is another sign of social disintegration, but social disintegration has yet to make the agenda of Governor Lamont and state legislators, perhaps because any serious inquiry would implicate a similar destruction of standards by state law and policy — standards of personal behavior.

Educators and elected officials treat chronic absenteeism of students as a bit of a mystery but it isn’t. When students and their negligent parents realize that promotion and graduation are assured without learning and without even attending school, and that there are no “truant officers” anymore, no consequences, why bother attending? 

Indeed, why should Connecticut maintain its mandatory attendance law when it isn’t enforced and attendance and learning aren’t needed for graduation? Indeed, why not offer public education only to those students who want to attend and save the billions of dollars social promotion wastes on the pretense of education? Why not just distribute high school diplomas with birth certificates?

Apart from the disaster of an ignorant population, the social promotion scandal risks financial disaster. For what if the illiterate Hartford girl wins her lawsuit against the city and collects millions in damages? Thousands of other illiterate graduates could follow with their own lawsuits and get rich at tax expense.

But at least the scandal has given Connecticut a searing look at the cruel, costly, and cynical operation of the poverty factories its cities have become. 

Meanwhile Connecticut Democrats are upset that wrestling entrepreneur Linda McMahon will be President-elect Trump’s education secretary, not upset that students can get diplomas without learning anything or even attending school. For the poverty factories are the Democrats’ cash cows.

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

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