Alphabet people needn’t be so terrified in Connecticut

By CHRIS POWELL

Many people are terrified by Donald Trump’s return to the presidency, but perhaps none more so than members of sexual minorities, who lately have commandeered nine letters — a third of the alphabet — to construct an acronym with which to represent themselves. The other day an activist among Connecticut’s alphabet people told the Hartford Courant that the political climate “continuously demonizes and degrades us” and that Trump wants “to legislatively and socially erase our community.”

Could Lamont ask Trump for help with electricity prices?

Connecticut’s Democrats don’t understand their working-class problem

City mayors and educators seek more money for what keeps failing

Really? Is there evidence for such claims, or do they just manifest paranoia, neurosis, hysteria, and self-absorption?

For Connecticut isn’t darkest South Carolina. To the contrary, it long has been quite libertarian about sexual identity. 

In 1971 the state was among the first to repeal its ancient law criminalizing homosexuality, a law that hadn’t been enforced for many years. To get rid of it little political courage was required from legislators. 

In 1991 the state prohibited discrimination based on sexual orientation. 

In 2005 the state legalized same-sex “civil unions” and in 2008 same-sex marriage. 

While some towns decline requests to fly the “pride flag” at town hall, it’s because the flag constitutes propagandizing for causes government hasn’t endorsed and most people oppose. This is not oppression.

As for Trump, while he, like most people, is against letting men who think of themselves as women participate in women’s sports, he has not proposed anything to prevent people from presenting themselves as being of a gender that doesn’t match their anatomy. Indeed, though Trump has gotten no credit for it, as a Democratic president would have gotten, his choice for treasury secretary, investment fund manager Scott Bessent, is a gay man married to another gay man, and they have two children. 

They live in darkest South Carolina and have yet to be assassinated, and there have been no shrieks of outrage about Bessent from the MAGA crowd.

Trump will prohibit confining in women’s prisons men who think of themselves as women, since such practice facilitates rape. But this isn’t oppression either; it’s safety for women prisoners.

Presumably Trump will oppose letting men use women’s restrooms and vice versa, but this traditional policy for gender privacy doesn’t obstruct anyone’s access to a restroom. When you have to go, you have to go, and you always will be able to. 

Amid Connecticut’s political correctness, the restroom issue has gone nutty here, with the General Assembly having required all public schools to put feminine hygiene products in at least one male restroom. But even without that law, those products would be available in the school nurse’s office, and furiously busy as the new president is, it may be a while before he worries about school restrooms in Connecticut.

The alphabet people profess to be terrified that Trump will get Congress to prohibit irreversible sex-change therapy for young people who suffer gender dysphoria. Of course many other people are terrified that some states still don’t prohibit such therapy. But objection to it is not oppression but adherence to the principle that minors are not competent to make life-changing decisions. Nor should minors be pressured into such decisions by adults. 

Besides, most young people seem to outgrow their gender dysphoria and many others come to regret their irreversible sex-change therapy. Such therapy should wait until young people turn 18.

So what’s left to terrify the alphabet people? 

They often hold public rallies complaining of oppression and demanding respect, but the supposed oppressors never show up and nobody gets hurt. Nearly everyone who encounters the rallies passes by in libertarian indifference, the highest form of respect. The demonstrators are in more danger of getting hit by a drunken driver than a “homophobe,” a “transphobe,” or a hysteria-phobe.

So the alphabet people should take the chips off their shoulders and live their lives as best they can. While some people could do without their braying, fewer people wish them harm than wish harm to Trump, and the alphabet offers another 17 letters with which they can continue searching for their authentic selves.    

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

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Could Lamont ask Trump for help with electricity prices?

By Chris Powell

When the General Assembly reconvened two weeks ago, Governor Lamont spoke at length about Connecticut’s outrageously high electricity prices and said that to bring electricity prices down the state needed access to more natural gas and more Canadian hydro-electric power.

Connecticut’s Democrats don’t understand their working-class problem

City mayors and educators seek more money for what keeps failing

To regrow Connecticut’s cities, first understand their decline

The country has plenty of natural gas but Connecticut can’t get it because it comes from states to our west and New York State won’t allow construction of the pipelines needed to deliver it. Similarly, opposition in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont is impeding construction of the transmission lines needed to bring hydro-electric power to Connecticut from Quebec.   

In his inaugural address this week President Trump stressed his aim to unleash production of oil and gas in the country so the United States can become the foremost supplier of energy to the world. Trump merrily repeated what was practically his campaign slogan: “Drill, baby, drill!”

Fortunately Lamont was present for the address, one of only two Democratic governors in the audience. While he may alarm the far-leftists in his party who want to obstruct the new administration at every turn, the governor said he was ready to put partisanship aside where he and the new administration agree and can work together. 

Does the governor see the opportunity? For federal law could override state obstruction of natural gas pipelines and electricity transmission lines. 

Would a Republican national administration help a Democratic state like Connecticut achieve energy security and lower electricity prices? 

Would a Democratic governor ask a Republican president for such help?

Why not?

In his inaugural address Trump delighted in reversing the policies of the previous administration and made a show of signing dozens of such executive orders, including orders pertaining to energy. He might be equally delighted to emphasize how Democratic energy policy in Washington and New York State has been costly to the working class of the Democratic state next door.

As for Lamont, he is contemplating seeking a third term as governor next year and electricity prices may be his biggest political liability. His partiality to natural gas and hydropower has drawn criticism from the environmental extremists on the far left of his party, but their shrieking would be drowned out by the cheers of state residents being given hope that something at last might be done about their electricity bills.

Connecticut’s congressional delegation, all far-left Democrats, might resent the governor’s asking them to work with the Devil himself, even on federal legislation to achieve something so tangible for their constituents. But the members of Congress might not want to be seen as obstructing lower electricity prices.

Indeed, criticism of Lamont for seeking the Devil’s help to reduce Connecticut’s electricity prices might work to his advantage with voters. Would even the environmental extremists in Connecticut vote for a Republican, a member of the Devil’s own party, against Lamont just because he sought the Devil’s help to bring electricity prices down? Unlikely.

In any case the governor’s approval rating is high enough that he can afford to risk some criticism in pursuit of the public interest.

It’s a little strange that the environmental extremists are so agitated about natural gas while they let nuclear power be depicted as so environmentally benign. Nearly everyone in politics in Connecticut goes along with this pose.

Yes, nuclear power doesn’t have the carbon emissions of natural gas, but it still is capable of producing far deadlier pollution: radiation from the fuel rods of nuclear reactors. 

Reactors are not immune to fuel-rod accidents, and spent fuel rods are stored in water pools and concrete casks at nuclear power stations around the country, including Connecticut’s Millstone station, because Congress has been deadlocked politically for decades over creating a secure repository for the rods, which remain dangerously radioactive for thousands of years and are tempting targets for terrorists. 

Millstone produces a third of Connecticut’s electricity and has a good record but it doesn’t deserve quite as much enthusiasm as it gets.

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

Connecticut’s Democrats don’t understand their working-class problem

By Chris Powell

With their party having lost much support from the working class in last November’s election, many Democratic state legislators in Connecticut think that a good way of making amends is to give unemployment compensation to strikers. 

City mayors and educators seek more money for what keeps failing

To regrow Connecticut’s cities, first understand their decline

Tong seeks a new euphemism for nullifying immigration law

Last year Democrats introduced such legislation and disgracefully and stupidly tried to keep it secret, to pass it without anyone outside their caucus discovering what the bill would do. The bill was exposed but passed anyway, whereupon Governor Lamont vetoed it. He still opposes the idea, since government’s subsidizing strikers would scare businesses away, but Senate Democratic leader Martin M. Looney hopes to change Lamont’s mind.

Democratic legislators also hope to enact new restrictions on residential landlords, as if that won’t discourage construction of apartments to ease the state’s housing shortage. 

The Democratic objective isn’t to strengthen Connecticut’s economy, reduce housing costs, and make the state affordable as much as to harm business and strike leftist poses.

Unemployment compensation for strikers will do little for the working class. Fewer than 7% of Connecticut’s private-sector workers are unionized and strikes are rare. They seem most frequent in the nursing home industry, whose employees indeed tend to be low-paid. But since most nursing home patients are government’s charges, increases in nursing home costs fall mainly on taxpayers.

The Democrats’ problems with the working class are much different.

First is the inflation the federal government unleashed through its spectacular spending increases of recent years, for which the virus epidemic was cited as license. Much of this spending was given as cash grants to states. But it all was financed by borrowing that was essentially money creation, and it was so extreme that it caused severe inflation worldwide.

The Democrats’ second problem with the working class is the downward pressure the federal government put on wages by admitting millions of low-skilled illegal immigrants. Meanwhile their housing and welfare expenses, underwritten by government, fueled inflation as well.

As a result most of the good things Democrats think they have done in recent years have been nullified by rising prices. The working class didn’t start defecting to Donald Trump because he is a great humanitarian but because the Democratic national administration smashed their standard of living. 

More government spending financed by deficits and borrowing are likely only to keep boosting inflation. While the new president considers himself a genius, he’ll need more than that to improve living standards while the country is already living at least 25% beyond its means.

Nevertheless Connecticut’s political left will push state legislators to induce state government to experiment with what may be the holy grail of their something-for-nothing philosophy — formally guaranteed annual incomes for the poor.

Frustration with government’s long failure to eliminate generational poverty is understandable. It is fair to wonder whether the poor might be rich today if the billions spent during the last 60 years in the name of elevating them had simply been given to them in cash.

But philanthropy-based experiments with guaranteed income have shown little success in enabling poor people to support themselves, and the danger is obvious in encouraging people to think the world owes them a living. Indeed, Connecticut’s welfare system is already a system of guaranteed income that has given tens of thousands of people the impression that they are not obliged to support their own children since the government will do it for them. So their children are often neglected and badly disadvantaged when they reach adulthood.

Guaranteed incomes, along with guaranteed jobs, job training, basic housing, and medical insurance, are necessary in one respect: for people being released after serving substantial prison terms. 

Most former convicts are employable only for menial work and are destitute upon their release and unable to support themselves. Predictably enough, half are back in prison in two or three years.

If government can’t ensure that the lives of parolees are being rebuilt decently, there’s no point in releasing them. Every prison sentence might as well be a life sentence.

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

City mayors and educators seek more money for what keeps failing

By Chris Powell

Governor Lamont welcomed the General Assembly back to work two weeks ago with a remarkable exhortation.

“We have a longer legislative session this cycle,” the governor said, “giving us an opportunity to get in the weeds, lift up the hood — not always arguing about more money but better results.”

To regrow Connecticut’s cities, first understand their decline

Tong seeks a new euphemism for nullifying immigration law

Connecticut’s prosperity depends on more housing

Five days later the mayors and school superintendents of Connecticut’s five largest cities — Hartford, Bridgeport, New Haven, Stamford, and Waterbury — gathered at the Capitol and showed that they hadn’t heard what the governor said, or, if they had, didn’t think he meant it.

For the mayors and superintendents urged state government to increase financial support to city schools by $545 million, as if spending more in the name of education, especially in the cities, isn’t what Connecticut has been doing without ever improving student performance since the Education Enhancement Act was passed in 1986.

In recent years the cities haven’t been able even to get their children to school reliably, with a quarter to half of them being chronically absent. How is another $545 million per biennium going to get them to school? Will the money hire parents and chauffeurs for the kids? No one put that question to the mayors and superintendents.

Journalism last September about the recent Hartford Public High School graduate who confessed her illiteracy and is suing her school system for damages recently prompted journalism showing that city school systems have formal policies enforcing their longstanding practice of social promotion. That is, the school systems, in writing, explicitly forbid teachers from giving failing grades to students even if they learn nothing and don’t show up for class. 

How will giving another $545 million per biennium for those school systems stop this fraud? No one put that question to the mayors and superintendents either.

Four decades of throwing more money at schools in Connecticut have proven that more spending in the name of education lacks any correlation with student performance. More “education” spending correlates only with the quality of the cars driven by teachers and administrators, the recipients of most “education” spending.

The governor and state legislators have yet to recognize — or don’t yet dare acknowledge — that social promotion policy is an admission of permanent failure, an admission that educators have given up on educating. It is also an admission that 95% of education is a matter of parenting. 

About a quarter of Connecticut’s children are growing up in a home with only one parent. In the cities most children have only one parent at home, if that many. Such children suffer much neglect, and their parents know that their children will be promoted and graduated without learning anything or even attending and that their schools rationalize and accept this neglect. 

This is a disaster and paying teachers and school administrators more hasn’t fixed it and won’t fix it.

But there is good cause for increasing state government spending on local education in one respect: “special education.” That’s the extra schooling and programming provided to the most neglected, disturbed, and handicapped children. 

Since it is a matter of social welfare, “special education” should be financed entirely by the state, but most of its expense is borne by the schools attended by “special education” students. The expense is heaviest in the impoverished cities, where most such children live. 

State government should have assumed all “special education” costs many years ago as a matter of fairness to property taxpayers in the cities, where such taxes are oppressive. But state financing for general school purposes should not be increased in the cities and anywhere else until it can be shown to make any difference apart from the cars school employees drive.

FLAMING HYPOCRISY: Last week’s award for hypocrisy in Connecticut goes to state Attorney General William Tong who, speaking in New London at a forum for immigrants, denounced the incoming national administration of Donald Trump. “They don’t care about the rule of law or precedent,” Tong said even as he promised to try to nullify federal immigration law and precedent himself.

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

To regrow Connecticut’s cities, first understand their decline

By Chris Powell

Back in the 1950s many Connecticut cities had populations about 50% larger than they are today. In his address to the General Assembly as it reconvened this month, Governor Lamont said he wants them to grow back to their old size.

He’s right that the cities are where most of any population growth in the state should go, since infrastructure is already in place there. Such growth would diminish controversy about exclusive zoning in the suburbs. 

Tong seeks a new euphemism for nullifying immigration law

Connecticut’s prosperity depends on more housing

Connecticut’s social promotion makes public education a costly fraud

Of course there will be no solving Connecticut’s housing shortage unless the Trump administration stops the flood of illegal immigration engineered by the Biden administration and assisted by the Democrats who control state government. Having supported the flood for so long, Connecticut’s Democratic regime carefully overlooks the connection between illegal immigration and the housing shortage. Without illegal immigration, the shortage might be only half as severe.

But before much can be done to regrow the cities, state government will have to understand the causes of their decline — in both population and quality of life.

To some extent the decline resulted from the increasing ownership of automobiles and then construction of the interstate highway system, which, necessary as it may have been for commerce and national defense, turned out to be used as much for increasing the distance people were willing to travel between their homes and their jobs. Cars and highways redirected housing construction away from the cities.

But in recent years technology also has redirected employment away from the cities. Many office workers now can work from home almost anywhere, and basic manufacturing has moved to countries with lower wages.  

While city life retains its old attractions — civic, cultural, educational, medical, theatrical, and sports institutions — its disadvantages are worse than ever: the poverty of most city residents and the resulting terrible performance of city schools, crime, the incompetence and inefficiency of city government, and horribly high property taxes.

Regional “magnet” schools offer some escape from city schools that are overwhelmed by disadvantaged children, but getting middle-class families to return to the cities is unlikely until their demographics improve. In recent years the cities have drawn new middle-class residents mainly from same-sex couples and “empty nesters,” not so much from couples with school-age children.

Stamford seems to be the exception among Connecticut’s cities. It has some poverty but is not swamped by it like the others, because its nearness to New York City and its commuter service from the Metro-North Railroad have driven up the city’s housing prices and rents and kept them at Fairfield County levels. That is, Stamford’s demographics are strong in large part because it does not have that much of what the rest of the state badly needs — “affordable” housing.

If Connecticut’s housing shortage gets desperate enough, new market-rate housing in the cities might draw some middle-class people back, at least for a while. But for the long term there is probably not much chance of making the cities attractive to a wide range of people without elevating or dispersing the poor, and the suburbs won’t voluntarily take many of them and even most Democratic legislators are not inclined to force them to. 

Government’s long failure to elevate the poor is Connecticut’s biggest problem and the cause of some of its other big problems. 

If substantially more housing is built in Connecticut without more illegal immigration, the state’s cost of living could be reduced, which would help the poor along with everyone else. 

But what keeps the poor down most are the state’s main policies toward them particularly — the welfare policies whose perverse incentives encourage childbearing outside marriage, perpetuate generational poverty, and lead to child neglect, and the educational policies that have destroyed academic standards in the schools poor children attend, schools that send many of them into the world prepared only for menial work.

Until the damage done by these policies is acknowledged officially, cities will find it hard to restore themselves.

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

Tong seeks a new euphemism for nullifying immigration law

By Chris Powell

Describing Connecticut as a “sanctuary” state and its cities as “sanctuary” cities isn’t helping illegal immigrants anymore, Attorney General William Tong told a forum at the University of Bridgeport last week. “Sanctuary” has no particular meaning in law, the attorney general said, and has started to “inflame” the public. He would prefer some other term, something meaning that “we’re going to look out for each other.”

Connecticut’s prosperity depends on more housing

Connecticut’s social promotion makes public education a costly fraud

Hartford schools obstruct investigation of graduate’s illiteracy

But while it may not be a legal term, “sanctuary” is a simple word plainly understood. It means a place of safety or refuge, so its connotation is favorable, which is why advocates of disregarding federal immigration law long have used it to identify jurisdictions they control.

The problem is that most people at last seem to have realized that in regard to immigration “sanctuary” is a euphemism, a word that disguises and misleads, and that “sanctuary” states like Connecticut and “sanctuary” cities like New Haven are actually engaged in subversion of federal law and national security. They forbid their police from assisting federal immigration officers and even issue driver’s licenses and other identification documents to illegal immigrants to facilitate their lawbreaking.

More accurate terms would be “nullification” or “insurrectionary” states and cities, though the attorney general’s remarks in Bridgeport suggested that he would prefer still another euphemism: “welcoming.” This euphemism would try to disguise the same subversion, by “welcoming” everyone — not just harmless, unoffending people but also criminals, terrorists, and spies — without any inquiry into their background, intentions, ability to support themselves, and desire to contribute to the country and maintain it as a secular democracy.

Tong contends that such “welcoming” is OK because federal law does not require state and municipal police to help enforce immigration law. Even so, Connecticut’s “TRUST Act,” driver’s licenses and identification cards for illegal immigrants, and Tong’s euphemizing still subvert immigration law and national security and, as the nullifying Southern segregationist governors did in the last century, they devalue citizenship.

Of course the attorney general isn’t the only one engaged in strategic euphemizing. Many other government officials do it as well, and most news organizations join them with their own propaganda. 

It began a half century ago when stinky racial preferences in hiring and college admissions were perfumed as “affirmative action.” It continues today as “illegal” immigrants are whitewashed as “undocumented,” as if they merely misplaced their visas, and as “sex-change therapy” is hailed as “gender-affirming care.” 

“Shills” have become “influencers.” And now that the federal government is insolvent and state government isn’t far behind, what used to be “spending” is called “investment,” though the actual gains and losses from “investment” are seldom calculated. 

Indeed, as shown by the recent investigative reporting of the Connecticut Mirror and the Yankee Institute’s Connecticut Inside Investigator, education itself now is pretty much a euphemism, since nearly all public school students in the state are promoted from grade to grade and given high school diplomas without ever having to show that they have learned anything or even attended school much. 

If state legislators weren’t already dedicated “influencers” for the teacher unions, they could have a little fun in debate on the next budget by demanding more “investment” in social promotion.

ANOTHER EXCESSIVE PAID LEAVE: State government lately has seemed full of exceedingly long paid leaves, and another was disclosed last week.

The director of diversity, equity, and inclusion for the state Public Defender Services Commission, Daryl McGraw, was demoted on account of a vulgar and misogynistic posting he made on social media in 2023 — after more than a year of paid leave with salary and benefits totaling more than $180,000.

The commission itself was already a laughingstock last June upon the firing of the chief public defender after insubordination played out in public for months. Not surprisingly in light of his title, McGraw doesn’t seem to have been missed during his leave, but it would be nice if someone in authority in state government noticed all the money he was paid for not working.

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

Connecticut’s prosperity depends on more housing

By Chris Powell

Will Governor Lamont and the new session of the General Assembly do much about the state’s severe shortage of housing? The governor and legislators say they want to bring down the state’s high cost of living and make the state more affordable, and housing expense may be the biggest part of the problem.

Connecticut’s social promotion makes public education a costly fraud

Hartford schools obstruct investigation of graduate’s illiteracy

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For years the housing issue in Connecticut has been mainly a controversy over exclusive zoning in the suburbs and a state law that allows developers of less-expensive housing to go to court to get around such zoning. Opponents of the law insist on preserving local control to maintain the “character” of suburban and rural towns. By “character” they mean in large part the exclusion of the poor.

Unjust as such opposition seems in general, it arises from fair concerns. For the poor can impose much expense on a municipality and diminish its quality of life. They usually consume more in government services than they pay in taxes, and their children are often neglected, commit crime, and weaken schools. 

Poverty is no fun, and having turned most of Connecticut’s cities into poverty factories, government’s failure has cautioned suburbs not to let more poor people in. 

But to exclude the poor, towns end up zoning out their own middle-class children starting out in life, as well as their own parents needing to downsize in retirement. 

While so much more housing is needed, there is a big risk in pushing too much of it into the suburbs: land-gobbling sprawl and the need to build expensive infrastructure like roads, schools, sewers, and sewage-treatment facilities. Such expenses worsen the zoning controversy.

The political left may keep advocating zoning overrides in pursuit of social justice, but moderate Democratic legislators have been reluctant to risk offending their constituents with more poor people, and most Republican legislators proclaim devotion to local control. 

As he considers a third term, the governor also seems to want to avoid the zoning issue. He notes his administration has been financing or otherwise facilitating much housing construction, if not enough.

But if more zoning overrides are a dead end politically, there is still plenty of opportunity for more housing in Connecticut, exactly where less expensive housing —  that is, multi-family housing — would be best placed: in the cities and older inner suburbs. For these places have many abandoned industrial and commercial sites as well as utility lines and public transportation already in place. These locations could also accommodate the businesses that would be needed by new or revived neighborhoods — shops, supermarkets, restaurants, professional offices, and such.

City government in New Haven is making good progress in facilitating new housing in the downtown area. Hartford and Bridgeport are striving to catch up. Bridgeport, which once styled itself the industrial capital of Connecticut, has much abandoned factory property and run-down housing that could use redevelopment.

Getting state and city governments to work together with developers isn’t always easy. While city residents aren’t as snobbish as suburbanites, they too can resent change in their neighborhoods, and, living among so much poverty already, they are right not to want more nearby. 

That’s why new housing shouldn’t be too affordable. Most should be aimed at people who can support themselves and who could become homeowners with government-subsidized mortgages, just as government-subsidized mortgages helped build the middle class in the suburbs decades ago, helping millions of people become middle-class with equity in their homes.

Catholic philosophers of old argued that the best way to extend prosperity and protect property is to ensure that everyone owns some. Indeed, it has been done. 

If only the United States could develop a housing policy more like Singapore’s, where the government directly builds housing and finances homeownership for all who want it and where, as a result of this policy and high educational standards — not the social promotion destroying education in the United States — society is integrated and productive, enjoys a high standard of living, and suffers little poverty and crime.

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

Connecticut’s social promotion makes public education a costly fraud

By Chris Powell

Social promotion in Connecticut’s schools isn’t just informal policy and practice, implemented by winks and nods. This week Marc E. Fitch of the Yankee Institute’s Connecticut Inside Investigator reported that many school systems, including those in Hartford, New Haven, Waterbury, and Middletown, follow written policies virtually prohibiting giving students failing grades. 

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The policy is called “Minimum 50” and it requires teachers to give passing grades to all students, including those who have learned little if anything and even those who never showed up. Such practices and policies have destroyed educational standards.

“Minimum 50” ensures that uneducated students are advanced from grade to grade and then given high school diplomas even if they are illiterate or essentially so, like the recent Hartford Public High School graduate who last September sensationally confessed to the Connecticut Mirror that she still couldn’t read or write. Now she is suing the city for $3 million in damages.

Educational standards have been destroyed this way to increase high school graduation rates and conceal the massive fraud that public education has become, especially in impoverished cities.

Fitch reports that the Hartford school system last year claimed a graduation rate of more than 78%, its highest in a decade, even as 27% of its students were chronically absent, with Hartford Public and Bulkeley high schools having chronic absenteeism rates above 50%. Rising chronic absenteeism rates can correlate with rising graduation rates only where educators are corrupt.

But the massive fraud in public education also helps conceal Connecticut’s worsening social disintegration.

After all, a student doesn’t remain illiterate through 12 or 13 years of schooling, like the Hartford girl, without having indifferent or incompetent parents or no parents at all. There are many such households. This is an angle that journalism about the Hartford girl’s case has studiously overlooked.

Educators enable parental irresponsibility by accepting and rationalizing it.

Hartford’s school system has put its social promotion policy in writing for seven years but only recently have a few teachers begun complaining about it in public. In other school systems in Connecticut there seem to be even fewer complaints from teachers about social promotion. Instead teacher unions lately have been demanding hefty raises — like those recently awarded in Hartford — because student misconduct and terrible performance have become insufferable and are driving teachers out of the worst school systems and even out of the profession. 

This is another sign of social disintegration, but social disintegration has yet to make the agenda of Governor Lamont and state legislators, perhaps because any serious inquiry would implicate a similar destruction of standards by state law and policy — standards of personal behavior.

Educators and elected officials treat chronic absenteeism of students as a bit of a mystery but it isn’t. When students and their negligent parents realize that promotion and graduation are assured without learning and without even attending school, and that there are no “truant officers” anymore, no consequences, why bother attending? 

Indeed, why should Connecticut maintain its mandatory attendance law when it isn’t enforced and attendance and learning aren’t needed for graduation? Indeed, why not offer public education only to those students who want to attend and save the billions of dollars social promotion wastes on the pretense of education? Why not just distribute high school diplomas with birth certificates?

Apart from the disaster of an ignorant population, the social promotion scandal risks financial disaster. For what if the illiterate Hartford girl wins her lawsuit against the city and collects millions in damages? Thousands of other illiterate graduates could follow with their own lawsuits and get rich at tax expense.

But at least the scandal has given Connecticut a searing look at the cruel, costly, and cynical operation of the poverty factories its cities have become. 

Meanwhile Connecticut Democrats are upset that wrestling entrepreneur Linda McMahon will be President-elect Trump’s education secretary, not upset that students can get diplomas without learning anything or even attending school. For the poverty factories are the Democrats’ cash cows.

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

-END-

Hartford schools obstruct investigation of graduate’s illiteracy

By Chris Powell

Fifty years ago, during the bad old days of the state Department of Children and Families, when it was called the Department of Children and Youth Services, a clumsy mechanism of unaccountability was used by the political hacks who ran the agency. (For years the only qualification of the department’s commissioner was his service as Democratic chairman in Westport and participation in Democratic campaigns.) 

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Child neglect and abuse were exploding in Connecticut and the department’s negligence and incompetence kept being suggested by appalling news reports drawn from police investigations of the abuse of children in households supposedly being monitored by the department’s social workers. The department frequently refused to provide explanation, claiming that accountability would violate the privacy of the abusive households. 

Of course the department sought only to protect itself against bad publicity.

This began to change in 1991 with the settlement of a federal class-action lawsuit against the department charging incompetence. In 1993 the department’s name was changed to the current one, and the department itself began to change with John G. Rowland’s election as governor. Since some news organizations were starting to pay attention to the department, Rowland knew that more child welfare agency scandals would reflect badly on him. 

Chastened by the department’s awful reputation, Rowland and the General Assembly created the office of child advocate to investigate and report publicly about child welfare scandals, and Rowland chose new commissioners with relevant qualifications who repudiated their predecessors’ unaccountability. 

Of course Connecticut still has child welfare disasters, but few involve blatant unaccountability, and there is more understanding of the difficulty of the department’s work as social disintegration worsens in the state.

So these days the bigger problem of unaccountability in government in Connecticut involves education.

Last September the Connecticut Mirror reported about a young woman who had just graduated from Hartford Public High School unable to read and write. Many other such cases are suspected, since Connecticut’s main education policy is social promotion.

Hartford’s school superintendent, Leslie Torres-Rodriguez, pledged to investigate the illiterate graduate’s case but has reported nothing, apparently hoping it will fade away. 

The state education commissioner, Charlene M. Russell-Tucker, also pledged to investigate, and last week, in a letter to two Republican state senators who had prodded her about the case — Stephen Harding of Brookfield and Eric Berthel of Watertown — she reported that Hartford’s school administration is obstructing her investigation.

The Education Department wants to see the Hartford school system’s records on the student but the school system refuses to provide them on the grounds that sharing the records “could complicate the parties’ resolution” of the student’s lawsuit.

The student’s privacy rights are not at issue. As a practical matter she waived them by giving her sensational interview to the Mirror and by bringing suit. 

Nor is it an excuse that the Hartford school system thinks it would be easier to settle the suit if no one can ever find out what happened during the student’s “education.” The Education Department has supervisory authority over municipal schools, and the public interest in accountability is far more compelling than a school system’s interest in concealing a scandal through a confidential settlement of a lawsuit.

But that’s public education in Connecticut for you. It’s like the child welfare agency of old. 

So which teachers “taught” the illiterate girl? Which administrators advanced her from grade to grade and to graduation despite her illiteracy? Do Hartford’s schools have any standards for advancement?

How widespread is the problem of gross under-education of high school graduates in Connecticut? Why does the state have no proficiency tests for advancement and graduation? Why is social promotion deemed superior?

Two Republican senators seem interested in these questions. The 185 other legislators and the governor don’t seem to be. After all, the answers might be horrifying. 

For as it was 50 years ago, the scariest word in state government remains “accountability,” and there’s no “child advocate” to investigate education’s failures, just advocates for more raises for school employees.

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

   

Connecticut mustn’t worry about illegal immigrants until they kill

By Chris Powell

Charged with the horrifying immolation murder of a woman sleeping on a subway car in Brooklyn on Dec. 22 is a man from Guatemala who entered the country illegally and was deported in 2018 but who entered illegally again and found his way to New York, where subsidies for illegal immigrants are especially attractive.

Since prior to the murder the man appears not to have been charged with any serious crime, Connecticut Attorney General William Tong and most other state Democratic leaders would have defended his right to violate immigration law if he had been in Connecticut prior to Dec. 22. Indeed, that’s the state Democratic position on all illegal immigrants — that people who enter the country illegally and reach Connecticut should be exempt from immigration law until they commit a serious crime.

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But under the Democratic national administration’s policy of open borders, supported by Tong and most leading Connecticut Democrats, the government can’t know much if anything about people who enter illegally until they do something terrible here and are apprehended. No matter if they were criminals in their home country; once they get here we’re not supposed to know. 

Protecting the country against those who have bad intent and are unable to support themselves honestly is the main purpose of immigration law. Or it was the main purpose prior to the Democratic Party’s realization that it could gain permanent control of the U.S. House of Representatives by packing Democratic-leaning metropolitan areas with millions of illegal immigrants who, even if barred from voting, still would be counted in the federal census and cause creation of many more solidly Democratic congressional districts at the expense of competitive and Republican districts.

The Democratic response to the objection to admitting millions of people without individual evaluation is that most illegal immigrants won’t commit crimes and that illegal immigrants generally are less likely to commit crimes than the native-born. 

That is, Democrats maintain that since 51% of illegal immigrants probably won’t commit crimes, there’s no need to worry about the other 49% — no need to fear that some who have entered the country illegally may be awaiting instructions from hostile powers and scouting the country’s thousands of soft targets, like a street crowded with revelers in New Orleans and the Trump hotel in Las Vegas, last week’s scenes of mayhem.

The Democratic rationalization for open borders is ridiculous but it may keep working politically until news organizations end their complicity and challenge those who make it.

The Brooklyn murder case highlights another major problem caused by open borders policy that Connecticut Democrats overlook. Both the woman murdered on the subway car in Brooklyn, who was a U.S. citizen, and the illegal immigrant charged with burning her to death appear to have been living in homeless shelters. 

The cost of housing has soared in the last few years, a subsidiary cost of open borders, since government made no provision for the millions who entered the country illegally and were exempted from deportation. Over the last year homelessness is estimated to be up 18% nationally and 13% in Connecticut. 

It’s not just the increase in homelessness. Rising housing costs have reduced living standards for millions of working-class people.

Many Democrats in Connecticut prattle about the housing shortage while overlooking their party’s responsibility for it with open borders and obstructing deportations except for serious criminals. The state is estimated to have well more than 100,000 illegal immigrants, many receiving state government medical insurance and driving down the wage base by working illegally at substandard wages.

Ironically the country easily could afford liberal immigration policy if it required immigrants to show familiarity with American history, fluency in English, and commitment to a democratic and secular culture, and to forswear welfare benefits for 10 years. 

In that case the United States might have a better class of immigrants than the native-born, who increasingly are uneducated and unskilled and take their country for granted. But that’s a different government policy failure.

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

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