By CHRIS POWELL
U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon at last has found a school in Connecticut willing to listen to her.
McMahon’s visit to speak at a civics program at an elementary school in Fairfield in January was canceled when parents objected and the school administration decided that public education’s usual exaltation of “diversity” doesn’t apply to political views.
Democrats’ legislation would turn Connecticut into a people’s republic
Another bailout won’t reveal why Hartford’s schools fail
Overlong legislative hearings are for venting, not persuading
Her visit to Thomaston High School for a similar program this month was canceled when school officials worried that they couldn’t provide a safe and orderly environment. The Thomaston police department has only about 15 officers and so presumably might be overwhelmed by the local anti-fascist brigade.
But now the Buckley Institute at Yale University in New Haven will welcome McMahon on April 16 to speak about “the roadmap for restoring American education.” The institute, named for the late Yale graduate and conservative writer William F. Buckley Jr., was founded 15 years ago by people at Yale who had tired of the university’s stifling leftism, and, lest it risk proving their complaint, the university doesn’t get in the institute’s way.
New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker, a liberal Democrat who holds two master’s degrees from Yale, doesn’t object to McMahon’s appearance but says she and President Trump “don’t have a ‘roadmap to restore education’ and, conversely, seem to be hell-bent on undermining public education for our most vulnerable students.”
Yes, Trump pledged to eliminate or at least hobble the U.S. Education Department, and McMahon accepted his appointment for that purpose. But then the department was established 46 years ago mainly as a reward to the national teacher unions for their support of the Democratic Party. The premise was that the unions would control the department and it would spend much more federal money that would find its way to union members.
Of course indications are that education in the United States has declined substantially since the department was established. For indeed the department is most of all a source of educator patronage and leftist ideology, so Republicans have a case for getting rid of it. They also can argue that Democrats, especially in Connecticut, including Mayor Elicker, who is also a member of his city’s school board, don’t have much of an educational record to defend.
It’s not the fault of Trump and McMahon that about a third of New Haven’s students and teachers alike are chronically absent, missing 10% or more of their classes, and that, when they do manage to show up, so many students chronically misbehave, causing their teachers to burn out faster. Nor is it the fault of Trump and McMahon that New Haven’s students, like those in Connecticut’s other cities, perform so poorly on the few proficiency tests the state dares to give them even as education spending keeps rising while enrollments fall.
Those failures are part of a bigger societal problem — the explosion of poverty, the welfare system’s destruction of the family, and government’s growing reluctance to enforce standards generally.
McMahon, the zillionaire co-founder of a wrestling entertainment business, may not be the ideal exponent of a “roadmap for restoring American education.” But such a map would be compelling if it ever went beyond the map now in use by the education establishment: Throw more money, never hold anyone accountable — not students, parents, teachers, or administrators — socially promote everyone, even the illiterate, and make sure that results are not measured and publicized much.
If McMahon wants to be really outrageous at Yale, she could remark on the stunning recent improvements in the education of the poorest and most disadvantaged students in the schools of darkest Mississippi and other Southern states — the result of a new concentration on phonics to teach reading and the refusal to promote students past Grade 3 unless they are competent readers. This promises, or threatens, to be the end of social promotion and the beginning of accountability.
But will Yale and New Haven have enough police on duty to allow such a reformist message to be heard in the citadel of political correctness?
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
Chris Powell column 