By CHRIS POWELL
While Governor Lamont has proposed a state budget that would increase spending by $1.2 billion or 4.4%, it has prompted furious if predictable complaints from municipal school systems, higher educators, hospitals, social service agencies, and others. They say the governor’s budget isn’t nearly enough, even though the his proposal comes within a mere million dollars of overrunning what is called the state spending cap.
Hartford’s new curriculum: toilet training and diapers
Fault in paralyzed man’s case is more fairly settled at last
Is there any policy reason not to renominate Larson?
Yes, state government still neglects certain compelling needs. For example, because of Connecticut’s lack of mental hospitals and shelters for the homeless, the state’s primary treatment for mental illness is fresh air. But even as opportunities to economize in state government abound, there is little discussion of them. Legislators in the Republican minority are eager to review the social-service spending “earmarks” Democratic senators stuffed into the previous state budget as raw patronage for their friends and lovers, spending that is never evaluated for results, but that’s about it for economizing.
Auditing major government policies for results is never undertaken either, though what might be the fattest target was indicated the other day by a report from Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers. That is, public school enrollment in the state is lower than it has been for at least 20 years, having fallen by more than 10,000 students from 2024 to 2025, a decline of 2.1% in just one year, and enrollment is projected to continue to fall substantially for the next five years.
Yet school systems keep spending more while the few proficiency tests state government allows show learning is declining too. Spending increases are not purchasing better education, but this is not questioned by the state Education Department or any legislative committee.
Maybe that is because any inquiry into the anomaly might notice that 19% of Connecticut’s public school students are now classified as requiring “special education.” That is, they have serious learning disabilities. This indicates the worsening neglect of children in their own homes and may indict welfare policy’s destruction of the family.
These trends would be terrifying if anyone in authority insisted on examining them. But elected officials seem to be more terrified of finding out that the critical factor in education is not what the people on the payroll claim — per-pupil spending — but per-pupil parenting. Such a realization might be explosive. So everyone in authority figures it’s better just to throw more money at educators so they will go away for another year.
But the underlying problem — the social disintegration caused by government policy — won’t go away. There was another hint of it last week in the Yale Daily News. The paper reported that New Haven students are not the only ones chronically absent from the city’s schools, with a third of them having missed 10% or more of their school days in the last school year. Last year nearly a third of the city’s own teachers also met the chronically absent standard, being absent for illness or personal time on 10% or more of their workdays. On average 12% of New Haven’s teachers are absent every day.
It’s probably not because they are such slackers. More likely it’s because teaching a student population that is overwhelmingly poor, fatherless, and demoralized is extremely difficult, burns teachers out, and causes them to seek jobs in school systems with better salaries and demographics.
An English teacher at a city “magnet” school explained, “When I get home I am mentally and physically exhausted from babysitting, not teaching.” He said he spends only 30 minutes of a 90-minute class doing actual teaching, the rest managing student misbehavior.
But misbehaving students in Connecticut no longer can be expelled from school. Political correctness requires that they be permitted to impair the education of their classmates. After all, which elected officials dare to tell their constituents that they are failing as parents and raising incorrigible kids?
So government in Connecticut will do nothing about the collapse of education, and the only thing conscientious parents can do about it is try to move away from the poverty factory.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
Chris Powell column 