Connecticut’s racial gap in education is actually a welfare problem

By Chris Powell

Connecticut long has been notorious for its big racial performance gap in education. State government should be equally notorious for not having figured out what to do about it even as the solution has been obvious to anyone taking the trouble to look at the failing students.  

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State government has had two primary responses to the gap. 

First, the state has established dozens of regional “magnet” schools that, while created for racial integration, were also seen as mechanisms for improving education for racial minorities. But the regional schools seem mainly to have stripped city neighborhood schools of their better students. They haven’t reduced the gap.

Second, the state has appropriated a lot more money for education in the mistaken belief, arising from the Education Enhancement Act of 1986, that student performance is a mainly matter of per-pupil spending and teacher salaries. This hasn’t reduced the gap either, though at some point there must be a link between teacher salaries and student performance in impoverished cities whose schools always have many staff vacancies because teachers don’t want to deal with so many poor students.

The problem always has been not per-pupil spending but per-pupil parenting. Teachers of the youngest students in poor areas quickly perceive this. Many students come to school without knowing letters, numbers, and colors, have limited vocabularies, and don’t know how to behave. Even in kindergarten many of them are already grades behind. 

Programs like Head Start and the universal pre-school for which Connecticut has started to save money alleviate these deficits but not for long when the kids keep returning to neglectful homes. The biggest advantage of these programs seems to be political, insofar as they are only remedial. Since the programs increase government spending and employment without solving the problem, they become self-perpetuating — perfect for those who run them. 

Decades of social science have shown that children generally do best after being raised in a two-parent household. But this month the great superiority of intact families for education was driven home by a study that was organized by the University of Virginia and drew participation from politically diverse organizations.

The study, “Good Fathers, Flourishing Kids — The Importance of Fatherhood in Virginia,” found that children tend to do much better in school when their fathers live with them and their mothers or at least are heavily involved in their lives.

Writing at the education news internet site The74Million.org, Robert Pondiscio, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a former teacher, noted that the study addressed the racial performance gap particularly.

“Most striking,” Pondiscio wrote, “is the report’s finding that there is no meaningful difference in school grades among demographically diverse children raised in intact families. Black and white students living with their fathers get mostly A’s at roughly equal rates — more than 85% — and are equally unlikely to experience school behavior problems. 

“In other words, the achievement gap appears to be less about race and more about the structure and stability of the family.”

That is, the achievement gap in school has little to do with school.

Unfortunately the study’s recommendations are not strong. Among them are to adjust education to include more elements appealing to boys, to hire more male teachers to provide role models, to increase school recess and physical education time, and to teach the “Success Sequence” of life — get a good education, get a decent job, and marry before having children.

While the “Success Sequence” is at the heart of the education problem, for many students teaching about it in school may be undone by the example set for them when they get home. 

The challenge of the racial performance gap in education isn’t to keep raising spending and placating the teacher unions. It is to discern and eliminate, over time, what encourages, facilitates, and subsidizes childbearing outside marriage: the guaranteed income government provides for harmful behavior. 

That is, the racial performance gap is mainly a welfare and culture problem, not an educational one.   

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