By CHRIS POWELL
Election campaigns are supposed to cause candidates to clarify where they stand on important issues. But nothing seems likely to induce Governor Lamont to take a position before the election on a particularly controversial issues. It’s whether Connecticut will participate in the new federal program giving tax credits to people who donate to charitable organizations awarding private-school scholarships to students in kindergarten through high school. Federal law leaves Connecticut’s decision to the governor.
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But the program would create competition with Connecticut’s “public schools,” the euphemism for schools controlled by teacher unions. That is, the schools subject to the state law requiring binding arbitration for teacher union contracts, the state law prohibiting municipalities from reducing school budgets, and the state law prohibiting disclosure of teacher evaluations.
So Connecticut’s teacher unions, part of the Democratic Party’s army, are hysterically opposed to the program, and the governor, a Democrat, is broadcasting campaign commercials boasting of the “record funding” he has arranged for “education,” which in Connecticut is itself a euphemism for teacher unions.
Still, while the governor never mentions it, he probably has noticed what others increasingly notice — that “record funding” has no connection with student learning and that schools in Connecticut’s cities continue to perform terribly, with high chronic absenteeism, appalling test scores, and deteriorating facilities.
Many students would benefit by escaping those schools. Indeed, the last half-century’s flight of the middle class from the cities to the suburbs was in large part a manifestation of the desire for school choice — a desire to get away from the burgeoning urban underclass that “Great Society” welfare programs generate by destroying the two-parent family.
Connecticut’s establishment of dozens of public regional schools in the last 20 years was another manifestation of the desire for choice — a desire for choice particularly among racial minority households in the cities, parents who wanted their children to get out of schools with children who, because of neglect at home, were already two or three grades behind when they entered kindergarten.
Of course the best solution would be to stop destroying the family and manufacturing poverty. But the poverty business is huge and profitable and there is no political will to re-orient it toward self-sufficiency. Nor is there any political will to restore standards in public education in Connecticut by eliminating social promotion.
So most city schools and their teachers may be stuck indefinitely with most of the underclass kids. Those kids are expendable, since Connecticut’s de-facto educational policy is sauve qui peut.
Hence the federal scholarship program, since sauve qui peut is better than saving no one. The program would help a few children to get into schools with higher standards and better fellow students whose parents want higher standards.
The program is hardly revolutionary. It would give a federal tax credit of up to $1,700 to people who donate to a charitable scholarship organization, and those scholarships could be awarded to students seeking to attend all sorts of schools, including religious ones.
Like most of what the federal government does, the program would increase the federal deficit, but it would not take any funding away from “public” schools. Insofar as the program would move students out of those schools while the Connecticut’s minimum budget requirement law remained in place, the program might actually facilitate an increase in school spending.
The teacher unions complain that the program would profit “the rich,” since most scholarship fund donors probably would not need a tax credit. But most scholarship recipients probably would be relatively poor. No matter — to the unions, competition in education is worse than ignorance.
It’s strange that the governor keeps postponing a decision on Connecticut’s participation in the program. It would seem that if he wanted to keep pandering to the unions as he does in his commercials, he would have rejected the program by now. Might he authorize it after the election, deciding the issue on the merits instead of politics?
Maybe that’s what is making the unions so hysterical.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
