By CHRIS POWELL
In 2023 computer hackers stole $6 million from the New Haven school system and city government fired the system’s information technology director over it. Eventually a little more than $5 million was recovered, and the other day an arbiter ruled that the theft wasn’t the fault of the information technology director and that she must be returned to her job with back pay, which may amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
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Mayor Justin Elicker said he was “disappointed” by the arbiter’s decision and still believes that the firing was justified.
But the mayor can’t be too disappointed. If he really thought the employee is culpable and her reinstatement is wrong, he might be questioning the state law and the city’s contracts with its unions that give government employees the right to binding arbitration of personnel decisions and well as binding arbitration of union contracts themselves.
After all, the public elects mayors and school board members to administer the government. The public doesn’t elect arbiters. Where is the democracy in letting an unelected arbiter make personnel decisions involving enormous cost, overriding an elected official?
Of course elected officials can be mistaken, but then who believes arbiters are always right? So why shouldn’t elected officials prevail in these matters of ordinary public administration, take the political responsibility, and let voters judge them in the next election?
The answer is that democracy in Connecticut has been gravely subverted by the control that the government employee unions have achieved over the majority political party, the Democrats. Binding arbitration for unionized municipal government employees was enacted in Connecticut in the 1970s not to advance the public interest but so elected officials could escape political responsibility for government’s biggest costs, the cost of its employees. On such a sensitive issue few elected officials wanted to be caught between the public, on one hand, and the unions on the other.
So the General Assembly and Gov. Ella T. Grasso abdicated and put arbiters in charge of labor disagreements, and now elected municipal officials can just shrug in the face of what might seem to be expensive mistakes — like reinstatement of negligent employees or excessive wages and benefits in union contracts – and say an arbiter made them do it.
Mayor Elicker is a liberal Democrat, and if he was really “disappointed” in the arbiter’s reinstatement of the information technology director and ever acted on that disappointment by, say, proposing to restore democracy by removing arbitration provisions from city government’s contracts with unions and from state law, the city government’s unions would make sure he never got another Democratic nomination. That might disappoint him a lot more than the huge cost of that firing.
WHY GO TO SCHOOL? A report from the educational research and advocacy organization EdTrust says that while Connecticut is making progress in reducing chronic absenteeism in its schools, the state is not on track to meet its pledge to reduce chronic absenteeism by 50% from the 2021 level by 2027. The state’s target rate for chronic absenteeism is 9% but the current rate is still around 17%. In some cities it’s above 25%.
To improve attendance schools are doing a lot of begging, pleading, and social work to persuade parents and students about the importance of education, but it’s not always effective, maybe because schools contradict themselves on the point every day.
Students and their parents may be ignorant and careless but they’re not always stupid. Why should they believe the teachers, administrators, and social workers about the importance of education when they know a few things from experience?
They know, first, that students will be promoted from grade to grade and given a high school diploma even if they learn nothing.
Second, that Connecticut will never hold parents responsible for their children’s misbehavior.
And third, that educators and state legislators care about achieving a high graduation rate only to conceal a low rate of actual education.
The result is generational poverty, and it is largely government policy.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
Chris Powell column 