By CHRIS POWELL
Eight years ago Gov. Dannel P. Malloy induced a sleepwalking General Assembly to approve a bailout of $550 million for Hartford’s incompetent city government. This week nothing seemed to have changed, with the Hartford Courant reporting that the city’s school system is operating with a likely deficit of $70 million and is asking Mayor Arunan Arulampalam for the $48 million in city government’s emergency fund.
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Rejecting the request, the mayor noted that it would buy the school system only a six-month reprieve, whereupon the system would be insolvent again unless it made major changes. Unfortunately such changes seem impossible politically at the city level. At the state level, if a $550 million bailout couldn’t make Hartford city government solvent and competent eight years ago, there is not much to be said for another one.
The biggest part of the problem may be that Hartford, overwhelmed by its impoverished population, lacks the self-sufficient, independent, and property-tax-conscious middle class necessary for competent self-government, just as Bridgeport and New Haven lack it. This isn’t the fault of the cities themselves. They are what decades of mistaken, poverty-inducing, and poverty-concentrating state policy have made them.
More than a quarter of Hartford’s students are learning-disabled enough to be classified as needing “special education.” About 40% of the city’s students — most of them the better-parented ones — attend regional schools instead of the city’s own.
This is the consequence of state policy arising from the state Supreme Court’s 1996 decision in the school segregation case of Sheff v. O’Neill. The policy sought to transfer out of the city’s schools as many students who wanted to get out, instead of making the schools better. The concentration in those schools of less-parented and learning-disabled students may make it almost impossible for them to improve, but as long as the most motivated students can get out, nobody cares now. Hail the majesty of civil-rights law!
As a matter of fairness, state government should have assumed all “special education” costs in all school systems long ago. These are general social costs of poverty and disability, and sticking municipalities with them is virtually a proclamation that state government means to concentrate poverty in the cities.
But the problems of Hartford’s schools are largely offset by the hugely disproportionate state financial aid they get, which allows them to spend about $30,000 per student per year, far above the state average. The failure to get good results from all this spending indicates poor administration on top of the usual obstructions to management inflicted by state labor law and union contract.
The situations in Bridgeport’s and New Haven’s schools are similar. Because of some serious embarrassments that were publicized statewide in the last two years, Bridgeport’s school system lately has been getting extra supervision from the state Education Department. But except for the additional work for the department, it’s hard to see why it shouldn’t be providing similar supervision to Hartford and New Haven as well.
Indeed, the three city school systems have been failing for so long that it’s hard to see why state government hasn’t acknowledged its obligation to take them under its own direct management, except that state government doesn’t know what to do about the bigger problem — worsening poverty — other than to throw more money at it, which hasn’t improved education but at least buys off politically active local people and can be construed as concern.
But how Connecticut’s elected officials still prattle piously about education! At the moment legislators are again rummaging through state government’s finances in search of another $150 million to be marked “education” and funneled to municipalities, though there is no inquiry in the legislature about the results being produced by education spending.
A serious legislative inquiry about results — student learning — might discover that higher education spending in Connecticut correlates mainly with the quality of the cars driven by teachers and school administrators, while student learning correlates not with per-pupil spending but per-pupil parenting.
Maybe that’s why there is never an inquiry about results.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
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Chris Powell column 