Case of illiterate Hartford girl should become a national scandal

By Chris Powell

Hartford’s school superintendent, Leslie Torres-Rodriguez, says she’ll investigate the case of the girl who, the Connecticut Mirror reported a few weeks ago, graduated this year from Hartford Public High School without being able to read or write or do more than rudimentary addition and who then somehow was admitted to the University of Connecticut.

No investigations of the girl’s case seem to be forthcoming from the state Education Department and the General Assembly, whose carefree allocations of state money finance most of Hartford’s school system. Such investigations would risk breaking open a scandal: public education’s longstanding failure not just in Hartford but throughout the state.

Why can’t people support their own children anymore?

Journalistic endorsements now come in news coverage

How is college boss Cheng worth that huge salary and perks?

Torres-Rodriguez told the Hartford Courant that the school system is “deeply concerned” about the case, will examine its “entire chronology,” and address any mistakes. “We have an expectation that if anyone sees something of concern, you say something,” the superintendent said.

But the president of the Hartford teachers union, Carol Gale, says the girl’s failure to learn wasn’t the fault of union members. “Teachers advocated for this student all along her journey,” Gale says. According to Gale, the problem is — you guessed it — a lack of money.

How tedious the superintendent and the teachers union president are.

Hartford’s schools are full of employees receiving more than $150,000 annually in salary and benefits. In the last 12 years could no money be found for tutoring for the girl?

Could no one have noticed by even seventh or eighth grade that she couldn’t read and write and then do something about it? And if, as the teachers union president says, teachers did notice and were really “advocating” for the girl against an indifferent administration, why did no one start screaming to the school board and press?

Will the superintendent’s investigation identify all staff members who had contact with the girl throughout her years in school, detail what they did or didn’t do about her illiteracy, fix responsibility, and hold staff members to account?

Of course not. For the girl’s case is different only in degree, not principle, from the cases of most public school students in Connecticut, who are advanced from grade to grade and given high school diplomas without ever performing at grade level — a policy of social promotion. 

Connecticut just doesn’t want to know. That’s why the state has no proficiency testing to determine advancement from grade to grade and graduation.

Three weeks ago the Danbury News-Times reported that 70% of the city’s students in Grades 3 through 8 are not performing at grade level. The report went unnoticed outside the city, and why not? The student proficiency disaster is similar nearly everywhere else, and deliberately ignored.

That is, even journalism shares responsibility by treating the failure of public education as the natural order of things, along with the especially disgraceful racial performance gap among Connecticut’s students, even as government throws more and more money at education without ever making any difference. 

Even without being formally articulated, the message Connecticut sends throughout schools and society is still powerful: Educational results don’t matter.  Students mustn’t be required to learn anything and will suffer no consequences if they don’t — no consequences in school anyway. There will be consequences when they must start to earn a living, but even then what matters most in public education will be only to keep the people on its payroll happy.

Ending educational failure and the social promotion that guarantees it couldn’t be done overnight. That would empty the upper grades and stuff the lower ones. 

But gradual reform might begin with proficiency tests given in every grade at the end of every school year, with the scores entered on the permanent records of all students and then affixed to their high school diplomas. Potential employers could be encouraged to ask to see an applicant’s diploma with its yearly test scores. 

Eventually word would get around that education was starting to matter again, and maybe after 15 years or so ordinary grade-level proficiency could start to be required for advancement and graduation.

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

Why can’t people support their own children anymore?

By Chris Powell

Government, the French economist and parliamentarian Frederic Bastiat wrote two centuries ago, is the great fiction by which everybody tries to live at the expense of everybody else. Though there wasn’t much of a “social safety net” back then, Bastiat was correct about human selfishness and desire for power and privilege.

Bastiat’s old insight is understatement today. According to a recent study by the Economic Innovation Group, a policy research organization in Washington, Americans have never been more dependent on transfer payments from government — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food subsidies, unemployment and disability stipends, and such. The study says transfer payments now constitute 18% of the national income, up from 8% in 1970, $4.3 trillion annually now compared to $70 billion in 1970.

Journalistic endorsements now come in news coverage

How is college boss Cheng worth that huge salary and perks?

Ending both political plagues will take at least four years

Nevertheless, the current national election campaign suggests that many if not most people still can’t support themselves, not even in Connecticut, supposedly a rich state. Most Democratic candidates here and throughout the country are clamoring for more income supports from government, especially regarding children. A centerpiece of the Democratic campaign is a federal “child tax credit,” which would send big monthly checks to households with children.  

Connecticut’s only member of Congress facing serious competition, 5th District Democratic U.S. Rep. Jahana Hayes, has joined this clamor with a campaign commercial touting her efforts “getting our babies fed.”

So why can’t people support their children anymore? 

While the question is seldom asked by anyone in authority, the other day U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-3rd District, addressed it in a newspaper essay. Unfortunately she was dishonest about it, acknowledging one cause of the problem, the recent ruinous inflation in the price of necessities — food, fuel, electricity, medicine, and housing — but blaming it on “price gouging by large corporations.” To hear DeLauro tell it, the government’s spectacular recent increase in money creation, deficit spending, and transfer programs has nothing to do with inflation.

“Price gouging” can occur only in uncompetitive markets, and the United States does have some markets that should be more competitive. But that’s what anti-trust law is for, and recent national administrations, including the one DeLauro supports, have failed to enforce it vigorously. DeLauro and other members of Congress from Connecticut might even be glad about this lack of enforcement, since the state depends heavily on industries that could use more competition, like military contracting, insurance, and government itself.

But there is another cause of the inability of people to support their children — their own irresponsibility. Many people have more children than they are prepared to support, though this is the age of virtually free contraception and abortion. It is also the age of self-impoverishment — social promotion in school, childbearing outside marriage, and single-parenting — and the age of government subsidies for self-impoverishment. 

Are people even morally obliged to support their own children anymore? Few elected officials and candidates seem to think so.

A century ago Theodore Roosevelt, the country’s most liberal president up to that time, declared that the first duty of a citizen is to pull his own weight. Four decades later another liberal president, John F. Kennedy, told Americans not to ask what their country could do for them but to ask what they could do for their country. How quaint that seems now. 

If Roosevelt and Kennedy were around today, surveying the clamor for more transfer payments, might they admit to Bastiat that he was right and they were wrong?

BETTER TO WORRY: As Connecticut entered its 14 days of early voting state leaders and journalists declared that every vote counts and noted some recent elections that were decided by a single vote.

Meanwhile, despite the recent election scandals in Bridgeport and Stamford, the country’s admission of millions of illegal immigrants, Connecticut’s functioning as a “sanctuary state,” and its failure to maintain accuracy in voter rolls, these same people also have been declaring that no one should worry about voter fraud because it’s rare.  

Maybe it is rare but it seems likely to become less so.

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

Journalistic endorsements now come in news coverage

By Chris Powell

Journalists around the country are outraged that the publishers of the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times decided at the last minute to prevent their newspapers from publishing editorial-page endorsements of Democrat Kamala Harris for president. A few journalists at the papers have resigned over it.

The writers union at the Post complains that the paper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, founder of internet retailer Amazon, “interfered” with the editorial page. The union seems not to have heard that, as press critic A.J. Liebling wrote, freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one. The Post’s writers don’t seem inclined to concede Bezos any discretion even though he is covering the newspaper’s big financial losses, which approach $100 million a year.

How is college boss Cheng worth that huge salary and perks?

Ending both political plagues will take at least four years

Hayes and Logan campaign ads mislead and misrepresent

Of course the Post management’s first explanation of the decision against endorsing Harris or anyone was weak — that the newspaper was reverting to its old policy of not endorsing candidates. So it was suspected that Bezos figured that Republican nominee Donald Trump, considered by most journalists to be the incarnation of evil, well may be elected and then could make trouble for Amazon, which, because of its size, is always bumping into legal and regulatory issues. Indeed, if the owner of a news organization has other business interests, they can conflict with providing independent news and commentary.

But then few journalists complained when Bezos bought the Post as it and the rest of the newspaper industry were weakening. Journalists then were glad that the new owner could afford to lose some money. 

In an essay in the Post this week Bezos acknowledged his potential for conflict of interest but offered better justification for avoiding endorsements: that they may reduce confidence in the paper’s fairness even as confidence in journalism generally is collapsing. Besides, Bezos argued, endorsements persuade few people anyway.

The situation is a bit different with the L.A. Times. Its owner, medical billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, says the paper’s decision not to endorse for president is for this year only and is based on the belief that endorsing would just worsen the country’s bitter political division. 

This explanation isn’t so persuasive either, since it’s hard to see how that division could be much worse than it is, and since California is so Democratic that no newspaper endorsement can make much difference. Maybe Soon-Shiong also has some business interests that the next president could mess with, though they may not be as obvious as those of Bezos.

In any case no endorsement may be persuasive if it comes from news organizations that are as politically partisan year-round as the Washington Post and most other major news organizations have been lately, and the endorsements from such organizations may serve mainly to make editorialists feel more relevant. 

Indeed, since most major news organizations suffer Trump Derangement Syndrome and have gotten rabidly partisan this year, their constant slanting of the news already has provided de-facto endorsements nearly every day. Most major news organizations have reported in great detail the many scandals involving Trump while ignoring or discounting the many involving President Biden and his administration, starting notoriously with the influence-peddling business long operated by his son Hunter and the incriminating evidence recorded on his laptop computer, which turned out not to be the Russian disinformation major news organizations sought to make it. 

There’s no separating journalism from politics. The selection of every news story and commentary is a political act — not necessarily a partisan one but still an act arising from the world view of journalists, politics in a broad sense. But whatever their political views journalists should strive for fairness. 

Instead last weekend some journalists likened Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden in New York to the rally held there in February 1939 by the pro-Nazi German-American Bund, as if many other political events have not also been held there over the years, including the 1992 Democratic National Convention, and as if Trump’s vulgarity isn’t often matched by that of his adversaries, who now are calling him a fascist and another Hitler.

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

-END-

How is college boss Cheng worth that huge salary and perks?

By Chris Powell

At last Terrence Cheng, chancellor of the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities System — “president” not being pretentious enough — has managed to embarrass Governor Lamont and Democratic leaders in the General Assembly. Cheng did it with his expense-account extravagance reported last week by Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers. 

Now journalism should embarrass the governor and legislators a little more.

Ending both political plagues will take at least four years

Hayes and Logan campaign ads mislead and misrepresent

Voter fraud may be rare, so Connecticut Democrats want more

The Hearst report told of dozens of luxurious meals charged to the college system by Cheng, along with a chauffeur improperly hired to drive his state-provided car, and a monthly housing allowance of $2,100 on top of his salary of $442,000 and more than $41,000 in fringe benefits. Also exposed were a long delay in releasing some of Cheng’s expense records and his continuing refusal to provide others, though their disclosure is almost certainly required by law. 

All this extravagance was enjoyed while Cheng was pleading the college system’s poverty to the General Assembly, students, and faculty and while the system was raising tuition.

Cheng’s stratospheric salary isn’t new. Neither is his arrogance. They have just been ignored. 

What’s new is Cheng’s mock humility upon receiving criticism from legislative leaders, who resent that a corruption scandal has erupted just a few days before a legislative election.

“This is one of those moments where you learn as you’re doing your job,” Cheng told the Hearst papers. “Just because we’re allowed to do something doesn’t mean we should do it.” 

Cheng is awfully late to figure this out, since he has held academic and administrative positions in public higher education for many years. But then public higher education doesn’t have much respect for the public.

In any case Governor Lamont and legislative leaders are demanding quick release of the missing expense records and promising an investigation, and the college system’s board has taken Cheng’s credit card away, at least temporarily. 

That’s a start, but journalism now should ask the governor, Cheng’s board, and the legislators why they thought Cheng was worth all that money in the first place and whether they still think he is. What has made someone who is so hypocritical and arrogant so special? 

After answering those questions, the governor and legislators might continue to pursue the public interest by noticing that state government has dozens of administrative positions, many of them with nebulous responsibilities, paying salaries above $200,000, and by wondering whether Connecticut is getting all the value it should get from them.

The Cheng scandal comes just weeks after a report from the state auditors described comprehensive financial mismanagement in the Correction Department, including, sensationally, two years of mistaken double salary payments to a prison lieutenant who declined to report the mistake and now has been guaranteed another five years of employment with the department so she can repay the misappropriated money out of her future salary.

Connecticut state government is not a place of ruthless efficiency. It’s not even a place of ordinary financial controls. Yet years ago the General Assembly eliminated its Program Review and Investigations Committee, thereby virtually proclaiming that it didn’t really want to know too much about wasted money and failing programs and policies. 

Has this lack of interest resulted from the aspiration of legislators to positions like Cheng’s in the executive branch of government once they serve enough time in legislative office to qualify for a state pension that will be boosted enormously by a few years receiving a Cheng-like salary?

WHY RISK MORE FRAUD?: State Sen. Rob Sampson, R-Wolcott, is being criticized by Democrats for insisting that there is voter fraud in Connecticut. While recent notorious cases in Bridgeport and Stamford show there indeed has been some, Sampson’s critics claim there isn’t enough to worry about.

However much there is, a question is implicitly raised by the state constitutional amendment on the ballot Nov. 5, an amendment that would allow unlimited voting by absentee ballot: Why risk more voter fraud? Early voting in person now provides much more convenience in voting, but the more people vote through intermediaries by absentee ballot rather than directly, in person, the more fraud there will be.

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

Ending both political plagues will take at least four years

By Chris Powell

Full of enthusiasm for the prospect, a Torrington resident writes to the Waterbury Republican-American that the forthcoming presidential election “is a chance to end the plague of Donald Trump.” Indeed, since Trump, the Republican presidential nominee for a third time, is 78, if he loses next month he almost surely won’t run again.

But for many people who deplore Trump’s character and demeanor, the problem with getting rid of his “plague” on Nov. 5 is that it will produce four more years of the current plague, the Democratic administration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. 

What are voters to do if they deplore not only Trump personally but also the policies of the current administration, policies the Democratic presidential nominee, Harris, probably will continue?

Ordinarily someone of Trump’s character and demeanor would have no chance of election. But his adversaries still don’t realize that his support is largely a reaction to them.  

There are many causes of this reaction. Among them are ruinous inflation; worsening poverty and crime; open borders and unfettered illegal immigration; the proxy war in Ukraine; the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan; government censorship; the promotion of transgenderism; lies told about the virus epidemic, President Biden’s mental competence, and economic and crime data; a Supreme Court nominee who purported not to know what a woman is; the official culture of victimhood; racial preferences; and so on — all of it supported, excused, or concealed by propagandistic news organizations.

Such complaints aren’t Republican contrivance. Polls show that most people think the country was better off when Trump was president and that even most Democrats think the country is going in the wrong direction. Republicans would win the election overwhelmingly if they had not nominated such a troublesome personality and the election was decided on policy instead. 

Even Harris seems to recognize the great desire to repudiate her administration, for her campaign slogan is “a new way forward,” her administration’s way having failed.

With his grotesque faults, recklessness, crudeness, and buffoonery, Trump embodies and gives voice to the contempt of government and politics felt by many and maybe most Americans. That is, Trump is a product not just of his foes but of democracy itself.

Yes, the country needs to get rid of Trump. But more urgently it also needs to repudiate the Biden-Harris administration. Unfortunately this will take at least four years, since it can be accomplished only by electing Trump and then letting the Constitution and age disqualify him from a third term.  

BEYOND THE FRINGE: Even as its capture by its nutty leftist fringe is threatening to take the Democratic Party down nationally, Connecticut’s own nutty leftist fringe is trying to push the party over the edge.

That fringe is the Working Families Party, created to blackmail Democrats out of appealing to the political center. The party provides a second line on the ballot to Democrats pursuing a leftist agenda, and it threatens to run its own candidates against Democrats who aren’t leftist enough, thereby taking votes from them and giving Republicans a better chance to win.

The WFP’s questionnaire for state legislative candidates seeking the party’s endorsement is a treat. It asks candidates to identify their socio-economic class (“poor, working class, middle class, upper-middle class, upper class”); gender (“agender, gender nonconforming, genderqueer, man, non-binary, woman, questioning, two-spirit, other”); and race (“Asian-American, Pacific islander, Black, African-American, African descent, Latino/Latina/Latine/Hispanic/Mestizo, Middle Eastern, Native American/Alaskan native/indigenous person”).

At least the questionnaire doesn’t ask candidates to disclose their religion, favorite sports team, and biggest regret in life.

The rest of the questionnaire seeks assurances that a candidate will raise taxes and spending, give unemployment benefits to strikers, preserve government employee union control over public finance, prevent competition with public schools, extend government medical insurance to illegal immigrants, continue to forbid police from cooperating with immigration authorities, weaken the private sector, and promise not to join the Moderate Caucus.

Any Democrat in Connecticut who gets on the Working Families Party’s line may be assumed to have enlisted for most of this. 

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

-END-

Hayes and Logan campaign ads mislead and misrepresent

By Chris Powell

Connecticut can be glad that it has at least one seriously competitive campaign for a major office in November’s election — the campaign for U.S. representative in the 5th Congressional District, where U.S. Rep. Jahana Hayes, a Democrat, is being challenged by former state Sen. George Logan, a Republican who almost defeated her two years ago.

But these days competitive campaigns are usually accompanied by ugly television commercials almost totalitarian in their lies or half-truths. The worst of them are usually sponsored by a national political action committee so the candidates they are trying to help don’t get quite as tainted as they should be.

In Connecticut Republicans have been broadcasting a commercial denouncing Hayes for being the only member of Connecticut’s congressional delegation who voted against legislation to classify fentanyl as a most dangerous drug. The commercial has video of Hayes smiling and laughing as if she is thinking about deadly drugs.

The commercial means to give the impression that Hayes is indifferent to the drug problem or maybe even a drug dealer herself. It presumes, probably correctly, that most viewers won’t stop a moment to think that the congresswoman must have had a better reason for opposing the bill.

So the Hartford Courant inquired of Hayes and found that better reason. 

The legislation, Hayes said, imposed mandatory minimum prison sentences for possession of any amount of fentanyl, not distinguishing between traffickers and teenagers possessing small amounts or some substance containing fentanyl. According to Hayes, the bill also allowed judges no discretion in sentencing and lacked appropriations for drug treatment or law enforcement. While she was indeed the only member of Congress from Connecticut to oppose the bill, 130 Democrats from other states did.

Agree with it or not, this was a reasonable explanation.

Meanwhile Hayes and the Democrats are doing the same kind of thing to Logan, only worse.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is broadcasting a commercial noting that Logan has said he would not vote to put into federal law the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the abortion rights case of Roe v. Wade. The commercial construes this to mean that Logan will vote with “Donald Trump and his extreme MAGA movement … to outlaw all abortions, even here in Connecticut.”

The commercial concludes: “A vote for George Logan is a vote to ban abortion.”

While the Republican anti-Hayes commercial is only misleading, the Democratic anti-Logan commercial is complete misrepresentation. Logan repeatedly has committed himself to defending Connecticut’s abortion law, which incorporates Roe v. Wade policy, and Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, doesn’t support outlawing abortion federally but favors leaving the issue to the states. 

In any case, even a Congress with a Republican majority would not have the votes to outlaw abortion nationally.

Ironically, when it comes to abortion, Hayes and most Democrats in Congress are the extremists, not Logan, Trump, and the Republicans. The Democrats support what they call the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would prohibit any government regulation of abortion. 

That is, a vote for Hayes is a vote for the abortion of viable fetuses and even for leaving born-alive children, bleeding and gasping for breath, to die on surgical tables. 

Hayes, most other Democrats in Congress, and many elsewhere don’t really want to restore Roe v. Wade. That case held that abortion prior to fetal viability was an individual right but that after viability government properly could regulate or even prohibit abortion. As constitutional law this was questionable but as politics and policy it balanced the interests at stake and gave protection to the developed fetus. 

Over the next decade or so even most anti-abortion states may incorporate Roe v. Wade policy into their law as Connecticut has done. But as the Women’s Health Protection Act shows and as the more candid among them acknowledge, Democrats want to “go beyond Roe” and give the country all abortions all the time. Strangely, the only moderates left in congressional politics on the abortion issue are Republicans.   

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

Voter fraud may be rare, so Connecticut Democrats want more

By Chris Powell

Fourteen days of early voting began this week in Connecticut for the Nov. 5 federal and state elections, and since this early voting must be done in person, there’s nothing really objectionable about it. Early voters risk being unable to respond to late developments in election campaigns, but they may avoid long lines at their regular polling places on Election Day — if municipalities adequately staff their early-voting places and don’t cause long lines there too.

While early voting was used for primary elections a few weeks ago, participation was minimal and so the procedure remains experimental. So election officials will adjust it as seems appropriate.

But early voting could be the preface to much greater risk, a risk that voters are being asked to approve in this election: a proposed state constitutional amendment that is on the ballot. The amendment would empower the General Assembly to authorize everyone to vote by absentee ballot, eliminating current restrictions, which allow absentee balloting only for people who on Election Day are on active military duty or expect to be out of town or confined by sickness, disability, or religion.

That is, the absentee ballot amendment will invite the legislature to tell voters that there is no compelling reason for them to vote in person. 

This couldn’t be more mistaken.

Of course many people will be glad to accept the convenience of voting without having to appear anywhere. But Connecticut’s Constitution has had a good reason for restricting absentee ballots: election security. 

Elections are most secure when voters appear in person, show identification, and cast their vote directly. Their completed ballot never leaves their hands before it is cast. Absentee voting — which is mostly voting by U.S. mail or insecure drop boxes — separates voters from the casting of their ballots and potentially puts those ballots in the hands of any number of intermediaries. Absentee voting also allows political people to solicit and cajole ballots from the frail, indifferent, and politically vulnerable.

Practically every recent election in impoverished and corrupt Bridgeport has had absentee ballot fraud or improprieties. In the city’s most recent mayoral election there was evidence that the campaign of Mayor Joe Ganim sought to get a list of residents of city-subsidized housing for use in obtaining absentee ballot applications — a list of people who could be told that voting for the mayor would help them keep their apartments.

Sure enough, though Ganim served seven years in federal prison for corruption committed during his first stint as mayor, his second stint has been achieved repeatedly by big pluralities in absentee ballots.

The danger isn’t just in Bridgeport. In 2022 the former chairman of Stamford’s Democratic City Committee was convicted on 14 counts of forgery and making a false statement involving absentee ballot fraud in a city election.

An opponent of the constitutional amendment, Southington state Rep. Gale Mastrofrancesco, the ranking House Republican member of the General Assembly’s Government Administration and Elections Committee, notes that the mass mailing of absentee ballot applications during the recent virus epidemic showed that Connecticut’s voter rolls are poorly maintained and excessively vulnerable to fraud. That’s because 184,000 applications were undeliverable through the mail and more than 50,000 absentee ballots that were sent were never returned. 

“Our voter rolls are a mess,” Mastrofranceso says. “Our voter rolls are not updated.”

Most advocacy of the amendment for unrestricted absentee voting comes from Democrats, who contend that voter fraud is rare. Maybe it is, but Democrats seem to want it to become common. For Democrats are the party of massive illegal immigration, open borders, and “sanctuary cities” that nullify federal immigration law — cities including New Haven and Hartford, which, like Bridgeport, provide huge Democratic pluralities. 

The Democrats are also the party that opposes requiring voters to show identification, and many urban Democrats want to allow non-citizens to vote. 

The Democrats are against election security. 

Connecticut’s early voting provides more than enough additional convenience in voting. The proposed constitutional amendment risks corruption and should be defeated.

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

-END-

Even awful school systems must play the hand they’re dealt

By Chris Powell

School officials in Meriden are sore that this column recently included the city in a list of Connecticut cities whose schools have serious problems, a list with New Haven, Hartford, Waterbury, and Bridgeport. These problems include chronic absenteeism, an influx of immigrant students who don’t speak English, parental neglect, and other pathologies of poverty. 

While the column was correct, Meriden educators construed it to imply that their schools perform as poorly as those of the other cities listed. Other readers may have construed it the same way. After all, maybe only the schools of Baltimore, Chicago, and Philadelphia might not feel insulted to be cited in the same sentence with the schools of New Haven, Hartford, Bridgeport, and Waterbury.

But in recent years Meriden’s schools have made progress. While the city’s student test scores are still low, they are significantly higher than scores in New Haven, Hartford, Bridgeport, and Waterbury. Scores in Meriden’s lower grades have been rising, and five city schools recently won awards.

School administration is often terrible, especially in cities, but then all school systems have to play the hands they are dealt. Education is mostly a matter of parenting, and all Connecticut school systems with awful student performance have awful demographics — many poor households with fatherless and neglected children and growing numbers of immigrant children who don’t speak English.

If the student populations of Connecticut’s impoverished cities were exchanged with the student populations of the state’s middle-class or wealthy suburbs, suddenly the cities would have the best-performing schools and the suburbs the worst, regardless of administration.  

Connecticut policy long has been to concentrate poverty in the cities and — with social promotion, tenure, and binding arbitration of union contracts — to prohibit accountability for educators, students, and parents alike. Meanwhile under the Biden-Harris administration federal policy has presumed cruelly that the increase in poverty that has been caused by high inflation is acceptable, and that, quite without substantial expansion, the country’s schools, hospitals, and housing should accommodate millions more impoverished immigrants every year so Democrats can gain control of more congressional districts.

Under these circumstances little educational success can be expected.

Of course it might be nice if school administrators, teachers, and their unions complained loudly — or at all — about these destructive policies and weren’t so easily quieted by the usual pay raises. But then everybody has to make a living, even if it’s hard to imagine how journalists will make a living when public education leaves most of the population illiterate.

LOGAN’S TIMIDITY: In his debate the other day with Democratic U.S. Rep. Jahana Hayes, who is seeking re-election in Connecticut’s 5th Congressional District, Republican nominee George Logan demonstrated that he still hasn’t mastered the basic question about Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.

Pressed by Hayes about whether he supports Trump, Logan couldn’t speak Trump’s name. Instead Logan said he supports his party’s ticket.

Logan seems to think that voters don’t know about Trump’s troublesome character and demeanor. So Logan won’t acknowledge them, won’t assert that in this election policy issues are much more important than character and demeanor, and won’t note that elections often pose the challenge of determining the lesser of two evils.

Would Trump’s supporters really vote for Hayes, an extreme-left Democrat, to punish Logan for acknowledging what most of them already know?

REGULATORS WON’T EXPLAIN: If, as the Public Utilities Regulatory Authority likes to suggest, electricity prices in Connecticut are too high because of the greed of the big, bad electric utilities — Eversource and United Illuminating — why are no power generators offering to sell electricity any cheaper in the state? 

According to the list posted on the internet by state government, no generator comes even close to undercutting the “standard offer” price for which Eversource and UI provide electricity. Apparently Eversource and UI are actually Connecticut’s least expensive electricity providers.

Last week a PURA publicist refused to answer this writer’s questions about this situation or make the agency’s chairwoman available to answer them. Legislators should try to get an explanation.

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

-END-

Poverty devours Connecticut but who will ask its cause?

By Chris Powell

Rising homelessness. Growing demand at food and diaper banks. Chronic absenteeism at schools. Brawls at high school football games. Schools closed by threats of violence. Street takeovers and car thefts by young hooligans. More drug abuse, mentally ill children, teen suicides, and abandoned pets.

Such news reports indicating worsening poverty and social disintegration in Connecticut may be dismissed as anecdotal or sensationalist. But last week the state’s United Way organization published a report documenting the increase of poverty in the state and estimating that as many as 39% of its households live in poverty.

High inflation is much to blame, since wages for many have not kept up with prices, especially for necessities.    

Also last week the Hartford Courant reported that more than half Connecticut’s students have “high needs.” That is, they qualify for free or discounted school meals, have disabilities, or are unable to speak English.

Three weeks ago the Connecticut Mirror reported about a girl who recently graduated from high school in Hartford and has been admitted to the University of Connecticut though she can’t read or write. 

And last week the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities (CCM) issued a report on a study it undertook with Dalio Education about the state’s estimated 119,000 “disconnected” young people. The report called for spending another $700 million on primary education.

Unfortunately the study expressed no interest in the causes of worsening poverty. It sought only to remediate problems poverty causes for young people. 

Thus the study was trying mainly just to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic, as with its proposal to refine high school graduation requirements, which are and would remain a polite fiction, having long ago been nullified by social promotion, Connecticut’s primary policy of public education. Social promotion explains not just the illiterate Hartford graduate but also the longstanding failure of most state students to perform at grade level throughout their schooling. It explains their lack of qualification for more than menial work after graduation.

Where is all this poverty, alienation, and social disintegration coming from?

The response from officialdom has been not to ask about the causes of these problems but just to throw more money at their symptoms. 

Don’t ask where inflation comes from; just give the poor more welfare. 

Don’t ask why most students are never really educated but given diplomas anyway; just keep pretending that education correlates with teacher salaries.

And don’t be horrified about the illiterate Hartford graduate. Indeed, only two state legislators seem to have responded with any relevance to that story. Other legislators and educators construed the story as demonstrating only a lack of spending and transparency in spending. So there will be no risk of accountability for anyone in Hartford’s schools and city government, nor in state government.

The crucial lack of transparency is with results. Connecticut has no proficiency tests for advancement from grade to grade and graduation. Educators and legislators don’t want the public to know the results of their education spending, for that would be even more horrifying.

Educational failure and social disintegration have less to do with schooling and more with a lack of parents and parenting — that is, more to do with child neglect. A third of Connecticut’s children live with only one parent, yet the CCM study doesn’t even mention parenting. 

What has broken the family, and why is this breakdown assumed to be the natural order of things? No one in authority asks.

Social promotion doesn’t improve education and job skills; it destroys the incentive for children to go to school at all and the incentive for parents to get them there. Seventeen percent of Connecticut students are chronically absent; in the cities it approaches and sometimes exceeds 30%.

Those who would remediate these problems don’t mean to solve them but just to find a more comfortable way of living with them — with bigger and more expensive government, of course. Connecticut has been doing it for decades and it hasn’t worked yet.

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

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Mistakenly doubled salary explains state government

By Chris Powell

Miracle of miracles, Connecticut’s Correction Department has arranged to recover a total of nearly $164,000 spent in 54 mistaken salary overpayments to an employee who was the highlight of a report by the state auditors in August. 

Correction Commissioner Angel Quiros disclosed the repayment plan the other day in a letter to two state legislators who had inquired about the embarrassing case: the Senate Republican minority leader, Brookfield’s Stephen Harding, and Sen. John A. Kissel of Enfield, the ranking Republican senator on the General Assembly’s Judiciary Committee.

The commissioner said the overpaid employee, Lt. Devone Bishop, already has repaid $42,000 with about $122,000 still due and to be repaid in payroll deductions. The deductions began last year and are to continue for another five years.

Of course there always will be occasional mistakes with payroll in any organization as large as the Correction Department, but the auditors’ report said the department has much more trouble with money than it should. In his letter to the senators, Commissioner Quiros blamed the overpayments on complicated collective bargaining agreements covering many bargaining units, high turnover in payroll positions, and the classification of those positions as merely entry level.

But there are many unspoken problems here too. 

1) The overpayments to the lieutenant, each more than $3,000, were made in 54 bi-weekly checks, which means they extended over nearly two years before they were caught. This suggests not only negligent payroll handling but also negligent budgeting. In effect for two years the department was paying for an extra employee who didn’t exist.

2) The lieutenant took the mistaken money for nearly two years without reporting it to a supervisor. The mistaken money nearly doubled her salary, so she couldn’t have been unaware of the problem. As a lieutenant she was and — in what may be a wonder of collective bargaining — remains a supervisor herself. How can the commissioner and Governor Lamont still have confidence in the integrity of such an employee?

3) The commissioner’s letter to the senators hints that he doesn’t need to have such confidence — that even if he didn’t have confidence in the lieutenant, given the restrictions of collective bargaining, he couldn’t fire her anyway. Indeed, the situation is more absurd insofar as the lieutenant, in what may be another wonder of collective bargaining, appears to have been given a raise even after her taking the mistaken money was discovered, and to recover the money she dishonestly accepted for two years the department has guaranteed her employment for another five.

4) What exactly did the lieutenant do with all that money that has prevented her from repaying more of it by now? 

5) Things this wild would not happen and just be shrugged off in any organization trying to be efficient. In an organization trying to be efficient there would be consequences. But the commissioner told the senators that, apart from the lieutenant’s six-year repayment plan, the only consequences in this case were that some payroll personnel were “counseled and retrained” — not fired, demoted, penalized financially, or even merely reprimanded. 

This failure of accountability is apparently another result of collective bargaining, since any actual discipline could be appealed to the state Board of Mediation and Arbitration, whose purpose usually seems to be to ensure that no unionized state government employee is ever held accountable for misconduct or incompetence.

6) Finally, the case of the sticky-fingered lieutenant was only the most sensational part of the audit of the Correction Department. The audit also found that financial mismanagement in the department is pervasive, involving payments for compensatory time, overtime, workers’ compensation, union leave, and raises awarded prior to evaluations. But the audit has passed without any acknowledgment or comment from the governor, a Democrat, or from Democratic state legislators, who overwhelmingly control the General Assembly. 

That is, even the grossest mismanagement in state government seems to bother only a couple of Republican legislators. When mismanagement benefits unionized state employees, a politically active and pernicious special interest, most elected officials in Connecticut wave the public interest goodbye. 

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

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