Teachers aren’t trying to stop the collapse of education

By CHRIS POWELL

Connecticut’s public school teachers are feeling resentful again. The other day their biggest union, the deceptively named Connecticut Education Association, reported a poll of its members that was full of the usual findings: Teachers feel overworked, underpaid, and disrespected.

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Even so, teacher unions remain the most influential and pernicious special interest in state and municipal politics, enjoying, among other things, unique exemption from freedom-of-information law, which requires disclosure of the job evaluations of all other state and municipal government employees but not those of teachers, lest they have to face similar accountability to the public. Along with the state’s teacher tenure law, this exemption gives teachers nearly absolute job security.

But the CEA’s poll made one crucial point: the disrespect teachers suffer, the increasing misconduct of students, and the failure of so many parents to get their children to school, what with chronic absenteeism affecting 25% or more of students in some school systems.

Whatever their faults, teachers have to play the hands they are dealt. They see social disintegration close-up and comprehensively, and so they are better positioned than anyone else to do something about it. 

But they don’t. They lack the courage, or they don’t care.

By now teachers should understand that political correctness has nearly destroyed behavioral and educational standards in Connecticut’s schools. Scores on the few academic proficiency tests still permitted to be administered have been falling for years, causing some alarm but little action.

Declining educational performance should be no surprise in the school environment now prevailing: social promotion. The incentive to learn has been removed; students whose parenting is mediocre know that they will be given a high school diploma without ever having to learn anything or even behave decently. So why learn or behave decently?

Educators in Connecticut sometimes boast about higher graduation rates but this is just propaganda when so many students haven’t learned much.

So teachers should be swarming school board meetings and General Assembly hearings to complain about the lack of respect and discipline and the abandonment of educational standards and to demand that something be done.

Reform might not be complicated. Parents could be penalized for the truancy of their children. Student academic performance scores for each year of high school could be imprinted on diplomas, signifying that for many students diplomas are really only certificates of occasional attendance. Employers could be encouraged to direct young job applicants to attach a copy of their diploma to their application and to question them about their school performance.

“We call our schools free,” Robert Frost wrote, “because we are not free to stay away from them till we are 16 years of age.” Indeed, while to students they seem free, schools aren’t free at all. They are the largest public expense in every community, and the failure of students to learn, a failure engendered by social promotion, is institutionalized waste.

So it might be good to change Connecticut’s compulsory school attendance law and drop the permissible withdrawal age from 18 to 16 or 15. This would signify that children and parents who want to use school only for babysitting should find another babysitter.

An earlier introduction to having to work for a living — especially menial work, the only work for which most uneducated teens are qualified — might teach demoralized and indifferent young people a powerful lesson about the value of education.

That’s why Connecticut U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal and U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro are mistaken with their politically correct legislative proposal, supposedly based on a fear of pesticides, to prohibit teens from working on tobacco farms. A few decades ago thousands of teens got summer jobs on tobacco farms in the Connecticut Valley. The work tended to be exhausting, dirty, sweaty, boring, and low-paid, but it quickly showed those who did it that if they wanted something better in life they should take school seriously.

Unfortunately there are few tobacco farms left in Connecticut, but the lesson they taught their young employees is needed more than ever.

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