By CHRIS POWELL
Connecticut’s largest teacher union, the Connecticut Education Association, has endorsed Governor Lamont for renomination in the Democratic primary and re-election in November. “Governor Lamont’s partnership with the education community has strengthened our schools and our profession,” CEA President Kate Dias says.
Primary campaign shows Lamont frantically pandering to leftists
Can eastern Connecticut get ready in time for its future?
Will state ever reduce poverty or just keep manufacturing it?
Connecticut’s schools are always getting more money from state government. But whether that has “strengthened” them or just the teacher unions is a fair question, since in recent years student proficiency has correlated inversely with rising school spending and teacher compensation.
The dirty little secret of education in Connecticut remains that student proficiency is mostly a matter of parenting and enforcement of academic standards, and no one who reveals the secret stands a chance in politics, since that would set both the teacher unions and parents against him. The governor won’t be revealing the secret, especially not while being challenged from his party’s extreme left by Hamden state Rep. Josh Elliott, who promises salvation to the government class — a lot more taxation and spending.
Indeed, most CEA members who are Democrats might vote for Elliott despite their union’s endorsement of the governor.
The New Haven teachers union, an affiliate of the state’s second largest teachers union, the American Federation of Teachers, has endorsed Elliott in the delusion that the city’s schools perform so terribly because of a lack of spending.
But nearly a third of New Haven’s students are chronically absent from school and about half are living in single-parent households, so their academic performance would not improve even if their teachers each were paid a million dollars per year. Elliott wants them to keep dreaming that student proficiency is just a money problem, state government’s failure to liquidate Connecticut’s 19 billionaires.
All this is especially unfortunate, since teachers see the state’s social disintegration more intimately than anyone else except maybe police officers and social workers for the state Department of Children and Families. Teachers may be not only best-positioned but also most trusted to tell state residents what’s really going on, not just in schools but in homes and on streets, and to pose questions like: Why should kids go to school and why should parents bother to get them there when they will be promoted from grade to grade and given a high school diploma even if they learn nothing?
You can keep telling parents that, as in Lake Wobegon, all their children are above average, but the more that parents are told this, the more of a shock awaits everyone when the kids reach adulthood and the real world.
But then with binding arbitration of their union contracts, tenure, and exemption of their evaluations from disclosure under the state’s freedom-of-information law, Connecticut’s teachers are as removed from accountability as students and parents are. Teachers have no incentive to change that for anyone.
Elsewhere on the social disintegration front, a member of the Hartford City Council, Alex Thomas, a former youth pastor, recently pleaded guilty to stealing $15,000 from his church and laundering the money. But he plans to remain on the council anyway.
The judge suspended Thomas’ prison sentence, so he won’t have to miss any council meetings, and there is no clamor in the city for him to resign.
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AUDIT FOR ILLEGAL VOTERS: Not that anyone in authority wants to find out, but there might be a simple way of discovering whether illegal immigrants have registered to vote in Connecticut.
Secretary of the State Stephanie Thomas could commission an audit of the more than 60,000 “drive-only” licenses issued by Motor Vehicles Department to people who chose not to affirm that they are citizens. The audit would check the names and addresses on the licenses against the voter rolls.
The same could be done with the more than 10,000 identification cards New Haven city government has issued to help illegal residents pose as legal. This audit might be more difficult, since city government keeps the ID card list secret to protect lawbreakers, but maybe it could be subpoenaed.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
Chris Powell column 