By CHRIS POWELL
Governor Lamont’s creation of a $250,000 political patronage job for former U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona as a consultant to the Connecticut Career Pathways Commission, which the governor created by executive order in April, isn’t the silliest thing about the commission.
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The governor wants the commission, comprised of volunteers, to devise a five-year plan “to ensure that Connecticut has a modernized career pathways system incorporating all the latest innovations in artificial intelligence, automation, and global competition,” thereby providing students and jobseekers “with the tools needed to obtain good-paying, long-lasting careers” and enabling them to “quickly adapt as state-of-the-art innovations are developed.”
That wordy mission statement might be summarized to say simply that young people should get a good education so they can prosper in a changing economy. No one is likely to disagree with that — not in principle anyway.
But practice is something else. For even as the governor’s gift to Cardona was ferreted out by the Connecticut Mirror — the governor’s office never announced it, since it was likely to prove embarrassing — the state Education Department announced the usual set of dismal proficiency test results for students in Grades 3 through 8 in Connecticut’s schools.
The test found that among students from poor households, only 33% are proficient for their grade level in English and only 27% proficient in math. Among students from households that are not poor, only 66% are proficient in English and only 63% proficient in math.
That is, more than two thirds of Connecticut’s students from poor households are far behind where they should be, and more than a third of students for whom poverty is not an excuse are far behind as well.
Nevertheless, in accordance with longstanding educational practice in Connecticut, all unproficient students will be advanced to the next grade, reassuring them that they needn’t learn anything in school and that there is no embarrassment in ignorance.
To people outside government, the first steps on the “modernized career pathways” the governor wants might seem to be proficiency in literacy and numeracy. But maybe the education bureaucracy, the governor, and the former education secretary believe that, in the near future, artificial intelligence and automation will make literacy and numeracy obsolete for humans and those skills can be left to robots.
Connecticut doesn’t need a Career Pathways Commission. It needs a commission, a legislative committee, a state education commissioner, or anyone in authority to investigate what happened to standards in public education and to figure out what must be done to bring them back before the robots take over and snicker at all the people wondering what happened.
But since he is campaigning for re-election the governor moves on to other things quickly every day. Last week he announced that in October state government’s CT Rail operation will add four weekday trains to its Shore Line East service between New Haven and New London.
State government’s expansion of passenger train service to connect the Metro-North railroad hub in New Haven with Hartford, Springfield, and New London has been nice, and adding trains between New Haven and New London should make the service more useful and increase patronage.
But the governor’s happy announcement neglected to note that while all passenger rail service is subsidized by government, just as all automobile travel is subsidized, at last report every Shore Line East passenger was being subsidized spectacularly by state government: $184 per ride. The Hartford Line’s per-passenger subsidy is spectacular too at $78, while the Metro-North railroad, being the busiest commuter railroad in the country, holds its per-passenger subsidy down to $6.48.
The area between New Haven and New London is largely rural and New London is only a small city, so it’s hard to imagine how any increased service on the Shore Line East line will draw enough additional passengers to bring the subsidy below $100 per passenger. But election campaigns are for taking people for a ride, and the unhappy calculations behind it can wait until the election is safely past.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
Chris Powell column 