By Chris Powell
Last week Governor Lamont and his education commissioner, Charlene Russell-Tucker, went to Bridgeport to discuss what news organizations described as state government’s “intervention” in the impoverished city’s horribly performing schools. But the “intervention” was mainly for show.
For the State Board of Education’s three-part plan for the city’s schools practically proclaims that improvement is impossible.
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The state board will appoint a “technical assistance team” to supervise the school system’s “special education” efforts with its most disadvantaged and handicapped students. That is, the school system is incompetent with “special education.”
The state board will provide training in proper behavior to members of the city’s Board of Education, which is notorious for incompetence and fractiousness.
And since Bridgeport has gone through five school superintendents in the last seven years and now is looking for another one, Commissioner Russell-Tucker will have power to approve or reject the city board’s next choice. That is, the board can’t be trusted with its most important hiring decision.
Pandering to the teachers in his audience, the governor said he wanted the city’s schools to spend their money on what happens in the classroom, not on administration. But his commissioner’s plan signifies that Bridgeport’s schools grossly lack administration, and most of the money they spend is already spent in classrooms — that is, on teacher compensation.
It seems that the Bridgeport school system problem that has gotten the attention of the governor and commissioner is just the system’s $32 million deficit, which had begun to prompt budget cuts when the latest superintendent put herself on leave. Spending cuts are not allowed in Connecticut schools, since that would enrage the teacher unions, a big part of the regime’s political army.
Being so superficial, the commissioner’s plan for Bridgeport’s schools seems meant mostly to provide political cover for a financial bailout by state government. For the big false premise of education in Connecticut remains in force — that student learning correlates with spending, even though learning actually has been declining as more money is spent and correlates mainly with how much parenting students get and how financially secure their parents are.
Really, what could even the best school superintendent and the best teachers in the world do with a student population like Bridgeport’s?
Bridgeport’s schools have almost 20,000 students and 92% are classified as “high needs” — that is, they live in poverty at home or are homeless; they have only one parent, if that; they have physical, mental, or learning disabilities; and they don’t speak English well if at all. Nearly a third of all Bridgeport students are chronically absent; nearly half of high school students are. Only 20% perform at grade level in reading and only 12% in math.
Last week Commissioner Russell-Tucker said the situation with Bridgeport’s schools is urgent. Nonsense — it is routine, the same catastrophe it has been for years, like the longstanding catastrophes of the schools in Connecticut’s other cities. All Connecticut’s cities are poverty factories by design. If not for the recent administrative chaos in Bridgeport’s schools, no one in authority in state government would have noticed even now.
School systems so overwhelmed with neglected children should be broken up and their students distributed to less overwhelmed systems, and state government should figure out where all the child neglect is coming from.
A few weeks ago two Republican state senators, Stephen Harding of Brookfield and Eric Berthel of Watertown, asked Commissioner Russell-Tucker what she thought about the formal social promotion policies of many city school systems, including Hartford’s, school systems that were recently exposed as prohibiting teachers from giving failing grades to students even if they never learn anything and never show up for class. Last September a recent graduate of Hartford Public High School sensationally confessed that she is illiterate, and now she is suing for $3 million in damages.
The commissioner replied that her department has a committee studying school grading practices and it plans to report to the legislature … next January. By then another year of education will have been lost. So much for urgency.
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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
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Chris Powell column 