Murphy sees Democrats’ problem but not that he’s part of it

By Chris Powell

Speaking the other day to a friendly liberal audience in Washington at the Center for American Progress, Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy put aside his usual bombast about President Trump and offered some candor.

Connecticut’s best schools aren’t those getting credit

Much poverty in Connecticut arises from bad state policy

Clash on school library books shows Connecticut Democrats hate democracy

“When we talk about Trump’s corruption,” Murphy said of fellow Democrats, “we’re not terribly credible, because the public looks at Democrats and assumes that we’re just as corrupt. And we obviously have had some pretty high-profile problems in our party in the last decade. …

“I think young people believe that the Democratic Party is just as corrupt as the Republican Party is, and so while they’re noticing Trump’s corruption, they don’t see it as a reason to come out on the streets, because the alternative doesn’t look much better.”

Indeed. But Murphy himself is a reason Democrats don’t look much better. 

Last month the senator admitted to Politico that there is “no doubt” that President Biden’s mental faculties declined in office. Unfortunately Murphy, like most Democratic leaders, could not bring himself to acknowledge Biden’s mental decline before last November’s election or the Democratic National Convention last August. Nor could the senator and most other Democratic leaders acknowledge back then the corruption of the Biden family’s influence-peddling business.

Of course it would have been plausible to argue that Biden’s senility and his family’s influence peddling were preferable to Trump’s intemperance, character, and business practices. Elections for major offices usually require ascertaining the lesser of two evils. 

But Murphy did not acknowledge this when it counted. He could acknowledge his president’s flaws only once the public took them for granted. He didn’t dare to level with the public when it might have made a difference. 

Now, in the hope of becoming the leader of the party’s far left, the senator is touring the country trying to rile up Democrats who are already foaming at the mouth, precisely when, to increase its appeal, the party needs reflection, rationality, moderation, and civility, not leftist Trumpism.

From a Connecticut perspective, it’s hard to imagine moderation returning to the Democratic Party. Its majority in the General Assembly has just approved unemployment compensation for strikers. While he is a Democrat, Governor Lamont says he will veto the bill as he did once before. 

Connecticut’s other U.S. senator, Democrat Richard Blumenthal, is riding the same bandwagon to the far left. He has just proposed legislation to prohibit employers from suspending medical insurance for striking employees, as Pratt & Whitney did during the recent strike there by the machinists’ union. 

Blumenthal says it was “cruel and callous” for the company to stop compensating employees who had stopped working. If so, then the world is cruel and callous for not owing people a living. 

Among the state’s Democrats only the governor seems to have noticed that Pratt & Whitney, which was founded in Connecticut a century ago this July, has only half as many employees in the state as it once had, because the company long has been expanding elsewhere — in places where taxes and living costs are lower, government is smaller and less intrusive, and striking is not an entitlement to unemployment compensation and medical insurance financed by the employer being struck.  

But opposition to unemployment compensation for strikers is about the extent of Lamont’s moderation. 

While the illegal immigration controversy is raging in the state and around the country and the people rioting in California to obstruct immigration law enforcement are waving the flags of Mexico, other Latin American countries, and Palestine, not the flag of the country they are rioting in, Lamont still maintains that legal and illegal immigration are the same. 

The governor says he wants all immigrants, legal and illegal, well-intentioned and ill-intentioned, to be welcome in Connecticut — which is to say that the borders should be open again as they were under the Biden administration and that people living here don’t need any loyalty to the country.

Even coming from calm and cordial Ned Lamont, that is national suicide.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

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Connecticut’s best schools aren’t those getting credit

By Chris Powell

Anyone asked to guess the 10 best public high schools in Connecticut would probably select some of those chosen by the internet site Niche, which connects high school graduates with colleges.

Much poverty in Connecticut arises from bad state policy

Clash on school library books shows Connecticut Democrats hate democracy

Rowland’s pardon means little; and Looney cites bad parenting

Nine of the 10 high schools chosen by Niche are in Westport, New Canaan, Darien, Greenwich, Wilton, Ridgefield, Avon, Farmington, Glastonbury, and Norwalk. All but Norwalk are prosperous communities that spend a lot of money on their schools and get good results. The high school in Norwalk cited by Niche is a regional school drawing especially motivated students, many from outside the city.

According to Niche, all 10 of the best public elementary schools in the state are in three of the towns with the best high schools — Greenwich, New Canaan, and Westport — and nine of the 10 best middle schools are in the towns with the best high schools.

Of course educators will conclude from these rankings that per-pupil spending correlates with student performance — spending up, education up. This is self-serving and completely wrong.

For while not everyone in the towns with the supposedly best schools is rich, most people there are at least middle class and most children there have two parents, either living with them or involved in their lives. Their parents spend time with them. Most know their letters, numbers, and colors when they first arrive in school. They know how to behave. They have some interest in learning. Their attendance is good because their parents see to it.

Most such children are easy to teach — not because per-pupil spending is high but because per-pupil parenting is.

Of course circumstances are much different in high schools in municipalities with terrible demographics, municipalities with high poverty and low parenting. Here many children live in fatherless homes, homes with only one wage earner and a smattering of welfare benefits, homes over which a stressed, exasperated, and sometimes addicted mother presides. These children get much less attention and many are frequently absent from school. 

In New Haven, the city that is always lecturing Connecticut about how to live, high schools have a chronic absenteeism rate of 50%, highest in the state. Good luck to teachers and administrators trying to educate children who frequently don’t show up and, when they do, often disrupt classes, get into fights, or suffer mental breakdowns, but whose general discipline or expulsion is forbidden.

That’s why the Niche school rankings are so misleading. 

For schools and teachers play the hands they are dealt by community demographics. 

Any school dealt four aces is almost certain to win regardless of its resources and the competence of its staff. Any school dealt mostly jokers will resort to clamoring at the state Capitol for more money, as if the great increase in state financial aid to schools since the Education Enhancement Act was passed in 1986 has made any difference in educational results, and as if the clamor for more money isn’t just an excuse for ignoring the parenting problem, which seldom can be discussed in polite political company.

Connecticut’s best schools are actually the ones that get the best results from the students who are hard to teach — the students neglected at home — not those who are easy to teach. Nobody seems to compile such data, perhaps because it would impugn the premise of education in Connecticut — that only spending and teacher salaries count and educational results are irrelevant.

For many years in Connecticut the only honest justification for raising teacher salaries has been to induce teachers to stick around with the demoralized, indifferent, and misbehaving kids about whom nothing can be done until government finds the courage to restore academic and behavioral standards. These days teachers are given raises mainly to secure labor peace and union support for the Democratic Party.

It’s the same with police departments. Cities, where poverty is worst, struggle to keep officers not so much because suburbs often pay better but because, like city teachers, city cops increasingly want to escape the worsening social disintegration and depravity around them.

 Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

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Much poverty in Connecticut arises from bad state policy

By Chris Powell

Poverty has three causes. First is bad luck, like diseases and accidents that are not the fault of the sufferer. Second is bad personal conduct. Third is public policy that incentivizes bad conduct.

Clash on school library books shows Connecticut Democrats hate democracy

Rowland’s pardon means little; and Looney cites bad parenting

Connecticut devalues education while throwing more money at it

But nothing about poverty will be examined by the study state legislators want to commission on whether Connecticut should enact a program of universal basic income.

The idea is nutty, doubly so on the state level. For any state with such a program would risk drawing thousands of shiftless people from states without universal basic income.

The idea is also nutty insofar as Connecticut and most states have many social-welfare programs that, together with federal programs, already constitute universal basic income — welfare stipends for the indigent, Medicaid medical insurance, food and housing subsidies, and unemployment compensation

These programs aren’t perfect or comprehensive. But Connecticut could do much more for its poor people simply by increasing rates paid to providers of medical care under Medicaid, rates so eroded by inflation that many people on Medicaid have trouble finding doctors. Improving Medicaid to improve life for the poor would require legislators to find a lot of money, while authorizing a study on a grand concept like universal basic income lets legislators strike a lovely pose while expending and accomplishing little. 

Some state legislators and members of Congress are open to the idea of consolidating welfare programs into a universal basic income stipend. But that would be troublesome, since many poor people can’t manage their own affairs. If government didn’t send their welfare money directly into medical care, housing, and food, many people would waste it and become poorer.

But many poor people are competent to manage their own affairs, or would be if government insisted. That’s why the slim Republican majority in Congress wants to impose modest work requirements on able-bodied, childless Medicaid recipients between 18 and 64 years old. 

Everyone receiving financial benefits from the government owes something in return. For as a great liberal, Theodore Roosevelt, said a century ago, the first duty of the citizen is to pull his own weight.

Congressional Republicans also think work requirements for able-bodied Medicaid recipients would reduce fraud in the program, of which there is a lot, as Connecticut should acknowledge. 

In February an eye doctor in Bristol, Helen Zervas, pleaded guilty to federal charges of defrauding Medicaid and Medicare. Governor Lamont’s former deputy budget director, Konstantinos Diamantis, and former Bristol state Rep. Christopher Ziogas have been indicted in connection with a $100,000 bribe allegedly paid to Diamantis to persuade the state Department of Social Services to cancel an audit of the eye doctor upon her repayment of $600,000 she had overcharged the state. The department’s commissioner, Deidre Gifford, recently retired when it became known that she had presided over the audit’s cancellation.

Of course the Republican administration in Washington may not be any more competent to root out Medicaid fraud than Connecticut’s Democratic administration is. But until there is much more pressure on Medicaid spending, few people will bother looking.

Connecticut has plenty of self-inflicted poverty facilitated by bad state policy.

About 40% of births in the state are to women on Medicaid — that is, women who cannot support themselves but choose to have children anyway. In the era of government-funded contraception and abortion, these pregnancies are not accidents. Most would not happen without the promise of government medical insurance and welfare stipends.

Indeed, nearly every news report on the shortage and expense of housing in Connecticut ridiculously takes as an example of the problem an unmarried, low-skilled woman with three or more children by different men complaining that her life is too hard and her landlord is to blame.

Life in Connecticut is too hard, insofar as government has fueled high inflation, obstructed housing construction, and demolished public education and personal responsibility with social promotion and welfare for childbearing outside marriage, and then taxes electricity, a necessity of life. And still government proceeds on the premise that the solution to poverty is more of the same. 

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

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Clash on school library books shows Connecticut Democrats hate democracy

By Chris Powell

What is both most laughable and scariest about the Democratic Party in Connecticut is its hatred for democracy, which came up this week as the state House of Representatives debated the state budget written by the Democratic majority’s caucus.

Rowland’s pardon means little; and Looney cites bad parenting

Connecticut devalues education while throwing more money at it

Distinguish among immigrants; and Pratt’s gradual departure

To avoid debate on their bill to obstruct challenges to sexually themed, vulgar, and graphic books in public school libraries, the Democrats had tried to hide it in their budget bill. Rep. Anne Dauphinais, a conservative Republican from Killingly, wasn’t fooled. She rose to complain about such books and began quoting sexually vulgar dialogue from one, “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl,” a book that became controversial in Guilford’s school system two years ago. 

Deputy House Speaker Juan Candelaria, D-New Haven, who was presiding, interrupted Dauphinais and asked her to make her point without words that shouldn’t be used around faint-hearted people and children such as those present in the Hall of the House or watching on television.

If Dauphinais had meant to bait Candelaria, he quickly fell into her trap, making her point for her by trying to shut her up. She replied by noting that the sexual vulgarity she had read aloud and to which Candelaria had objected was the same sexual vulgarity that school librarians in Connecticut were already providing to children of all ages. If this was objectionable in the House, how could it be less objectionable in school?

For years similarly ironic incidents have been happening around the country at school board meetings as parents have objected to sexually explicit, vulgar, and graphic books stocked in school libraries. It’s a perfectly fair issue: Exactly what sexual content is appropriate for what ages, and who decides?

Of course there is a big difference between reading silently and reading aloud, as Dauphinais did. But that wasn’t the objection Deputy Speaker Candelaria made. He declared the words objectionable in themselves for young audiences, though Dauphinais had no other effective way of sharing them with the House and the public.

Even so, conservatives should acknowledge that sexual and even racist language may have a place in literature, especially “coming of age” literature for older children. 

Indeed, what may be the most moving passage in American literature, from Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn,” involves the “N word” even as the character uttering it repudiates racism. Yet some people who consider themselves politically liberal want “Huckleberry Finn” removed from school libraries as much as some conservatives want “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” removed.

The stocking of libraries is a matter of judgment. The issue lately before the General Assembly has been something else: Whether the public should have the right to influence such judgments, either directly or through elected school boards, or whether school librarians should be formally declared unchallengeable experts, answering to no one, as Democrats wanted to arrange with their legislation.

The Democratic bill signified the party’s hatred of democracy. Drunk with arrogance in their one-party state, the Democrats want to stifle political incorrectness everywhere just as Deputy Speaker Candelaria did with Representative Dauphinais.

If democracy is to be sustained in a big federal republic like the United States, some school libraries will stock not just “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” but also homosexuality manuals and paeans to transgenderism, and some won’t. Meanwhile, in another irony missed by Democratic legislators, the biggest censors or “book banners” aren’t people who complain about particular books but librarians themselves.

For librarians have limited space on their shelves while the number of books is practically infinite. So librarians have to choose, and a librarian’s choosing which books to exclude is no different from a parent’s objecting to a sexually explicit, vulgar, and graphic book that might get into the hands of a 6-year-old. School and public libraries should answer for their choices. 

Librarians may have degrees in library science and may be members of the American Library Association, but, in the end, as George Bernard Shaw said, all professions are conspiracies against the laity — that is, against democracy. 

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

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Rowland’s pardon means little; and Looney cites bad parenting

By Chris Powell

As a practical matter President Trump’s pardon of Connecticut’s disgraced former governor, John G. Rowland, means little beyond restoring his right to possess firearms. 

Connecticut devalues education while throwing more money at it

Distinguish among immigrants; and Pratt’s gradual departure

CT Public’s wild salaries; and make schools answer

Rowland already completed his two federal criminal sentences for various acts of political corruption and faced no additional punishment that could be rescinded. Having been released, he already had regained his right to vote in Connecticut, and since he is an elector again, the state Constitution would qualify him to hold any elective office in the state, though the state Supreme Court, contrary to the state Constitution, pretends that only lawyers who have practiced law for 10 years can serve as attorney general.

While Rowland remains popular in his hometown, Waterbury, and it’s not impossible to imagine the city electing him mayor, he has moved to Clinton and it is  impossible to imagine Connecticut electing him to state office again.

Of course the pardon can’t restore to Rowland the more than three years he spent behind bars. It can’t make anyone forget his offenses, or remove from the historical record the disgrace he inflicted on Connecticut as the state’s first governor to be convicted for offenses in office. 

The pardon is just a proclamation of forgiveness by the federal government under the administration of a president who may be even more challenged ethically than Rowland was. Presumably Rowland’s pardon, like the many other questionable pardons Trump has issued in the first few months of his second term, makes the president feel powerful and magnanimous and will make Rowland feel better about himself, though there was nothing unfair about his convictions and he didn’t deserve the formal forgiveness of a pardon more than any other former offender.

That is, Trump pardons people not so much because they deserve it but because he can. 

Trump isn’t the first president to use his pardon power for political patronage rather than for redressing injustice. In recent decades presidents of both parties increasingly have turned pardons into patronage. After repeatedly promising he wouldn’t do it, Trump’s immediate predecessor, Joe Biden,  notoriously pardoned his dissolute son, Hunter, the central figure in the Biden family’s corrupt influence-peddling business. 

This bipartisanship in pardons doesn’t make them right; it just further disgraces the people for electing such grifters to the country’s highest office.    

Nor will the pardon relieve Rowland of having to live with himself. But he is a healthy 68 and still has time to earn more forgiveness than Trump’s pardon can convey, even if few Democrats in Connecticut will forgive anyone these days simply for being a Republican.

More charitable people will not hector Rowland but instead will wish him luck in avoiding a third conviction and prison term.

*

Shepherding another big and expensive social-services bill to passage in the state Senate last week, Senate President Pro Tem Martin M. Looney, D-New Haven, made an acknowledgment that was stunning coming from a Democrat: that neglect of children at home is the primary cause of educational failure.

“Five-year-olds who come to school without adequate preparation,” Looney said, “are in effect isolated and doomed to failure except in a few rare cases where there may be an intervention in their behalf that might help them catch up. It’s a terrible thing to see.” 

He added: “My daughter-in-law and my niece both teach in inner-city schools and they have seen heartbreaking cases of young children whose preparation is so deficient, coming from homes where there is inadequate parenting.” 

This was Looney’s argument for big new state appropriations for pre-school and “special education.”

Of course Democrats see every social problem as a reason for enlarging government rather than correcting mistaken policies. But the legislation Looney was advocating is at best remedial. It doesn’t get to the cause of the problem, the cause the senator acknowledged: inadequate parenting.

So what is the cause of inadequate parenting? And since, as Looney says, “it’s a terrible thing,” why doesn’t government treat it as child neglect or abuse? 

It wouldn’t have cost anything to ask — and maybe that’s why it wasn’t asked.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

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Connecticut devalues education while throwing more money at it

By Chris Powell

Except to the teacher unions, Connecticut’s Linda McMahon is a big relief as secretary of the U.S. Education Department, mainly because her predecessor, Connecticut’s Miguel Cardona, was such a disaster.

Distinguish among immigrants; and Pratt’s gradual departure

CT Public’s wild salaries; and make schools answer

Democrats would abolish public control of Connecticut’s schools

Cardona spent most of his time pandering to the unions. In contrast, the other day McMahon celebrated National Charter Schools Week, applauding competition among schools and the reduction of union influence, which has dumbed down education while inflating its costs.

As long as the teacher unions control a major political party and are the foremost special interest in politics in most states, as in Connecticut, there’s no chance of saving public education, and alternative schools may be the only way of preserving any education at all.

Still, it would be nice if somebody tried to restore public education. For public education often used to accomplish what private education seldom could and usually didn’t even try to do: integrate society comprehensively — racially, ethnically, religiously, economically, and by all levels of student intelligence. 

Of course children would and will always be bratty, snobby, cruel, and cliquish much of the time, but even then public schools still can introduce them to different kinds of people and force them to deal with differences and thereby get a hint of the need to unify the country.

Regional “magnet” schools in Connecticut and elsewhere were meant to increase racial integration by putting city and suburban students together across municipal boundaries. But there aren’t enough “magnet” schools to achieve much integration, and, as Hartford’s experience has shown, the integration achieved by “magnet” schools has led to greater segregation of the urban underclass. For the “magnet” schools have drawn the more parented and engaged students out of neighborhood schools in the city, leaving the students in those schools even more indifferent and demoralized.

The urban underclass is the essence of the education problem. Many people naturally want to escape it and place their children in schools that aren’t dragged down by their demographics. That means “magnet” or charter schools or, most of all, fleeing the city for the suburbs, not that all suburban schools are so much better.

The only way to recover the integrative influence of public education may be to try to improve public education everywhere at once, first by recognizing that student learning correlates far more with parenting than with school spending. Parenting has declined not just because welfare policy is so pernicious, subsidizing fatherlessness and child neglect, but also because government and schools have let parenting decline by eliminating behavioral and academic standards for both parents and students.

There are no penalties for parents who fail to see that their children get to school reliably. There are no penalties for parents who avoid contact with their children’s teachers when something is wrong. There are no penalties for parents or students when students fail to learn. 

Indeed, Connecticut’s only comprehensive policy of public education — social promotion — destroys behavioral and academic standards. It proclaims to parents and students alike that there is no need to learn and that school isn’t important. Thus Connecticut devalues education even while increasing its cost. 

Connecticut’s underclass has figured this out. The underclass knows that no student needs to earn a high school diploma, and that people who have children they are unprepared to support will be subsidized extensively by the government in a fatherless home — subsidized enough to avoid starvation but not enough to get a proper upbringing.

But if even ignorant students must be graduated from high school, at least their dismal academic records could be printed on their diplomas so a diploma might mean something again, if only a horror story. 

Making failing students repeat grades, as was done before self-esteem trumped learning, would have even more impact. Limiting students to two repeated grades before graduating them early but ignorant would have still more.

Until society forcefully demonstrates its respect for education and realizes that just throwing more money at it doesn’t work, the underclass won’t respect it either.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

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Distinguish among immigrants; and Pratt’s gradual departure

By Chris Powell

Leftist research and social-service groups are working with news organizations to blur the distinction between legal and illegal immigration. 

It happened again last week as Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers touted a report from Data Haven and the Connecticut Immigrant Support Network about the contributions of immigrants, legal and illegal alike, to the state’s economy.

CT Public’s wild salaries; and make schools answer

Democrats would abolish public control of Connecticut’s schools

‘Rule of law’ advocates have many blind spots

The report says: “Policies that deter immigration, including those targeted at people who are legally authorized to work in the U.S., will harm the Connecticut economy. In particular, deporting undocumented immigrants, who comprise 3% of Connecticut’s total population (about 117,000 people), would potentially wipe out tens of thousands of jobs, given that 87% of these immigrants are working age.”

This is triply misleading. 

First, the report falsely suggests that there is clamor in Connecticut to expel legal immigrants. To the contrary, Connecticut is happily full of citizens and legal residents of all sorts of foreign ancestry. 

Second, the jobs held by illegal immigrants in Connecticut would not necessarily disappear if illegal immigrants disappeared. That’s because the labor participation rate in Connecticut — the percentage of the adult population in the workforce — has been declining for decades, from 71% in 1991 to 65% as of April, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That is, there is slack in the state’s workforce, and while many state residents are not highly skilled, a labor shortage might raise wages and draw unemployed people back into the workforce.     

Third, the report holds that, insofar as they are working, legal and illegal immigrants are and should be considered the same.

But they’re not the same. 

Legal immigrants have been reviewed by immigration authorities for suitability to enter the country — reviewed in regard to their intentions, behavior, health, ability to support themselves financially, associations, and any past immigration law violations.

But illegal immigrants typically have not been reviewed at all. Some probably have heard that state government in Connecticut obstructs and tries to nullify federal immigration law and provides financial and other benefits to illegal immigrants — that the state believes that anyone who breaks into the United States illegally and reaches Connecticut should be exempt from immigration law.

That is the big issue here — not the supposed economic benefits to the state from having a class of unenfranchised serfs working under the table, lowering wages for unskilled labor, but whether everyone entering the United States should be vetted and immigration law enforced or whether the borders should be open again as they were during the Biden administration.

But in debate in the state House of Representatives the other day, Democratic Majority Leader Jason Rojas argued that no distinction should be made between legal and illegal immigrants. “We should reject referring to them as illegal,” he said.

Journalists covering the immigration issue in Connecticut seem to agree. They never put the question of undifferentiated immigration to its advocates — not even to the governor, members of Congress, and Rojas and other state legislators.

*

During the recent strike at Pratt & Whitney, a member of the machinists union wrote to the Waterbury Republican-American complaining that the company has been transferring jet engine parts manufacturing work out of Connecticut to a new factory in North Carolina, threatening job security for the company’s workers here. 

This is actually an old story. Sixty years ago Pratt & Whitney had more than 20,000 employees in Connecticut. Today it has only half as many in the state but 43,000 around the country and worldwide.

Expanding elsewhere has been the company’s policy for decades. Part of it is economizing, since labor is usually cheaper and taxes lower outside Connecticut. But the bigger part of it is the politics of being a major military contractor needing to build congressional support throughout the country. Whether a weapons system works well can be less important than which states profit from it.

Loyalty to one’s origins doesn’t mean much in big business anymore. It doesn’t help that state government, ever oblivious, keeps making Connecticut more expensive. 

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

-END-

CT Public’s wild salaries; and make school answer

By Chris Powell

This column’s recent criticism of the Connecticut Public radio and television organization for repeatedly refusing to respond to inquiries about its executive salaries and federal tax return induced the organization to come out of hiding.

Democrats would abolish public control of Connecticut’s schools

‘Rule of law’ advocates have many blind spots

Connecticut Public isn’t public about its salaries

Insisting that Connecticut Public is really transparent and accountable, the organization’s chief financial officer last week provided an internet link to its 2024 return. The return is not at Connecticut Public’s internet site at all but at National Public Radio’s. It can be accessed from Connecticut Public’s site but is well concealed, since searches on Connecticut Public’s site for “tax return” or “Form 990” don’t produce it.

The salary information in the return may explain why the return is not easily located. It shows that Connecticut Public’s chief executive officer, Mark G. Contreras, was paid $614,759, that 10 other officers and executives were paid between $204,000 and $321,000, and that seven of those received more than $240,000.

No wonder Connecticut Public needs so much money from the state and federal governments and is always asking viewers and corporations for more.

CEO Contreras’ salary exceeds by about $150,000 the salary of the (sort of) departing chancellor of the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities System, Terrence Cheng, who abused a whopping expense account besides. But Connecticut Public employs fewer than 200 people, the college system more than 14,000.

Since Connecticut Public is “regime media,” a news organization whose politics aligns closely with that of the party controlling state government, state government is spending $3.1 million to renovate the organization’s headquarters in Hartford. Meanwhile some private-sector news organizations in Connecticut can’t afford offices anymore. Their employees work from home.

In a recent essay published by newspapers in the state, Contreras appealed to the General Assembly to preserve state tax credits that bring Connecticut Public as much as $800,000 per year. The newspapers that published Contreras’ essay have not yet questioned state government’s financial support for an organization that, while purporting to serve the public, pays its executives so extravagantly.

In any case, if Governor Lamont and the Democratic majority in the General Assembly ever want to reconsider their principles for writing a state budget — that everything on which state money is spent is essential forever, that no expenses ever can be reduced, and that nothing can be audited for results — Connecticut Public’s tax return might be a good place to start.

*

If the worst non-sequitur in government in Connecticut is that something can’t be discussed because it’s a personnel matter, the second worst is that something can’t be discussed because there’s a lawsuit about it. For nearly everything in government involves a personnel matter or a lawsuit.

The lawsuit excuse for unaccountability was the response of East Hartford town government to a report last week by WTNH-TV8’s Kathryn Hauser about an East Hartford school’s repeated abuse of a young autistic student. Supported by many surveillance videos taken in the school, WTNH reported that while the boy didn’t seem to be unruly or misbehaving, in December and January school staffers repeatedly dragged and manhandled him and pinned him up against the wall of a seclusion room.

With politically correct euphemism, the school calls the seclusion room its Mindfulness Center. People who are actually mindful call such places “rubber rooms.”

WTNH said an investigation by the state Department of Children and Families substantiated misconduct against the boy by six school employees and one was fired, two resigned under investigation, and the others were demoted, reassigned, or placed on leave. But because the boy’s mother is suing the town, East Hartford Mayor Connor Martin and School Superintendent Thomas Anderson refused to answer questions about the misconduct.

This is a scandal requiring urgent accountability to the public, not just to the abused boy and his mother. Having already acted against the staff members involved, the school administration knows what happened and should have nothing to hide. East Hartford’s Board of Education should insist on accountability. It’s just custom, not law, that school boards in Connecticut are secretive, cowardly, and feckless.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net) 

-END-

Democrats would abolish public control of schools

By Chris Powell

In Connecticut it’s nearly impossible for municipal school boards to fire teachers, and Democratic state legislators have set about to make it even harder.

‘Rule of law’ advocates have many blind spots

Connecticut Public isn’t public about its salaries

Connecticut fails to notice that poverty is exploding

The Connecticut Mirror’s Jessika Harkay reports that the Democrats have pushed through the state Senate a bill that would require school boards to show “just cause” for firing a teacher, a provision that would allow any appeal procedure to substitute someone else’s judgment for the board’s. The bill also would transfer to a supposedly impartial arbiter the ultimate power of firing.

In effect, school boards and superintendents would no longer be even technically in charge of the most basic personnel management of school systems. Unelected arbiters would be in charge. 

The reasons given for the legislation are just pretexts. 

The bill’s foremost advocate, Sen. Julie Kushner, D-Danbury, says, “We have teachers who could be terminated by a decision of a board of education, and in these very politicized times, that might not be neutral, and impartial, and a fair process.”

But school boards, elected by the voters of their towns, always have had the power to fire their employees. People always may disagree about what’s fair, but having elected officials make decisions is democracy. If a school board should be disempowered because an employee might disagree with it, democracy would be abolished.

The Democratic majority leader in the Senate, Bob Duff of Norwalk, says teachers are “under assault” these days. But while controversy involving teachers has increased, this doesn’t mean that teachers who are criticized are always right and their critics always wrong. Indeed, despite recent criticism of teachers, proponents of the legislation offer no evidence that it has resulted in any firings of teachers in Connecticut. Indeed, teachers in the state qualify for tenure after four years on the job, whereupon as a practical matter they can’t be fired for anything short of rape or murder.

As always the big problem with public education in Connecticut is that it really isn’t public at all. It is run mainly for the benefit of its own unionized employees, because those employees constitute the political army of the majority party, whose objective is to stamp out public administration.

NEXT CHANCELLOR CONTRACT: The Republican minority in the state Senate, most of whose members opposed the legislation to make firing teachers virtually impossible, is striving to restore a little public administration to the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities System, which recently was scandalized by the expense account abuse committed by its grossly overpaid chancellor, Terrence Cheng, abuse that wasn’t caught by the system’s Board of Regents.

The college system is now doubly scandalized because, while the regents recently wanted to dismiss Cheng, they decided that his contract prevented his dismissal until June next year. So the regents made a deal to move Cheng out of the chancellor’s job but keep him on the payroll as a “strategic adviser” for another year at his current salary, $450,000. The regents haven’t yet figured out what their “strategic adviser” is to do besides collect his spectacular severance pay.

Since the regents are so incompetent, four Republican senators — Stephen Harding, Henri Martin, Heather Somers, and Rob Sampson — have asked the regents for a little protection against more incompetence. The senators want the regents to publicize, before it is ratified, a draft of the contract they propose to give the next chancellor, so the public can review and comment on it.

The Republican senators proposed this idea as legislation a few weeks ago but the Democratic majority in the Senate objected. The Democrats don’t want the public to see state government’s extravagance until it’s too late to do anything about it.

Will the contract for the new chancellor bring the position’s salary down from outer space? Will it liberate the regents to replace the new chancellor at any time for a simple loss of confidence without extra expense?

It should. If the regents want to regain some respect and make amends, they should promise the transparency the Republican senators have asked for. 

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

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‘Rule of law’ advocates have many blind spots

By Chris Powell

Hooray for the 500 lawyers who this month formed the Connecticut Rule of Law Committee, reprimanded President Trump, without quite naming him, for his recklessness about due process and his bullying of the judiciary, and righteously recommitted themselves to the rule of law. Trump often deserves scolding, even if it has yet to do much good.

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But the chest-thumping of the lawyers might have seemed a bit hollow to those who can see other problems.

It might have been nice for the state to have had a rule of law committee when President Biden stopped enforcing immigration law and opened the borders, flooding the country with millions of illegal immigrants, many of whom came to Connecticut. Much of the financial emergency just declared by Governor Lamont, a deficit of nearly $300 million in the state’s Medicare program, involves coverage for illegals, for whose medical care and housing government made no provision.

It might have been nice for Connecticut to have had a rule of law committee when political correctness took over and caused state government and many municipalities to adopt “sanctuary” policies obstructing enforcement of federal immigration law — a form of nullification.

It might have been nice for Connecticut to have had a rule of law committee when the state didn’t just repeal its criminal penalties for possession of marijuana but also thrust state government into the marijuana business, though the drug remains prohibited by federal law — more nullification.    

Unfortunately there was no rule of law committee when the Connecticut Supreme Court, partly on the absurd basis of opinion polls, declared capital punishment unconstitutional though both the state and national constitutions expressly authorized it and continue to do so — still more nullification.

Even now the General Assembly is preparing legislation to postpone for another four years enforcement of Connecticut’s law requiring a little racial integration of schools. Supposedly racial integration of schools has been constitutionally required since 1954. The Rule of Law Committee hasn’t gotten around to this one yet either.  

All these issues are controversial, and lawyers throughout the state were involved with them, but none seems to have perceived their relation to the rule of law.

Quite apart from its many blind spots, there’s a self-serving element to the Connecticut Rule of Law Committee. Explaining the committee, one of its founders, James Glasser, cited “our desire to make sure people know that especially here in Connecticut, we’re particularly blessed with an outstanding judiciary.”

Well, maybe. But then how can a lawyer who makes his living by practicing before Connecticut’s judges characterize those judges — in public, anyway — as anything less than “outstanding”? A lawyer’s candor about the shortcomings of the judges before whom he practices might be bad for business. Indeed, expect the Rule of Law Committee to issue a thousand more reprimands of Trump before its first public criticism of a Connecticut judge.

PARENTING, NOT SPENDING: As usual Bridgeport’s schools are failing and short of money, and the other day the vice president of the city’s Board of Education, Joe Sokolovic, remarked that the school system would need tens of millions of dollars more to match the per-pupil spending of the wealthy towns nearby, like Greenwich. 

But as long as disparities in per-pupil spending remain part of the discussion of school performance in Connecticut, schools will never improve. For Greenwich could cut its per-pupil spending in half, or state government could force Greenwich’s schools to do that, and Greenwich’s students would still far outperform Bridgeport’s. That’s because, unlike Bridgeport’s students, most students in Greenwich have parents who can support their children adequately.

Connecticut should have realized decades ago that the education problem isn’t per-pupil spending but per-pupil parenting. Elected officials press the spending issue precisely to avoid the parenting issue.

CORRECTION: Endorsing legislative testimony by former South Windsor Police Chief Matthew Reed on a freedom-of-information issue, this column recently also identified him as a lawyer for the state Freedom of Information Commission. Reed has moved on from that position and is now Ellington’s town administrator.  

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

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