Buying teacher union support doesn’t make schools better

By CHRIS POWELL

Connecticut is a case study of the fallacy that spending on public schools correlates with student learning. The state has been increasing spending in the name of education since the state Supreme Court’s 1977 decision in the school financing case of Horton v. Meskill, which prompted state government to increase financial grants to municipal schools, and again with passage of the Education Enhancement Act of 1986, which subsidized municipal governments for raising teacher salaries.

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Let the Sun set elsewhere; we have enough basketball

Postal service remains too quaint in Connecticut

Ever since then student proficiency has declined or been stagnant. Indeed, education spending in Connecticut has correlated only with mediocrity and the support given to the majority political party by the teacher unions, the most influential special interest in the state. The political correlation, not the educational correlation, is what keeps education spending going up. For no one in authority in Connecticut cares much about educational results.

But the unions still seem terrified that maybe someday someone in authority will care.

The other day there was more evidence of what doesn’t work when Open the Books, a nonprofit government transparency organization based in Illinois, reported, after examining the spending of more than 12,000 school districts throughout the country, that there is a “mild inverse correlation” between spending increases and each state’s performance on the National Assessment of Education Progress, a test administered by the U.S. Education Department to measure the reading and math skills of students in fourth and eighth grades. 

That is, Open the Books found that higher school spending is associated with lower test scores.

Of course that doesn’t mean that spending increases themselves cause student performance to decline. The study just suggests that other factors have far more bearing on student performance.

In June a study organized by the University of Virginia, titled “Good Fathers, Flourishing Kids,” found that the academic performance gap between white and Black students, a wide gap that is especially disgraceful in Connecticut, is completely closed when the fatherhood gap is closed. That is, the study found that Black students do just as well in school as white students when their fathers live with them or are deeply involved in their lives.

Elected officials who cared more about educational results than supplicating the teacher unions might examine the correlations and lack of correlations here. The evidence is that the household poverty of students has far more bearing on their learning than school employee salaries. For raising school salaries doesn’t raise students out of poverty or bring their fathers into their lives. 

But maybe things would change if elected officials ever became more interested in per-pupil parenting than per-pupil spending.

Of course such a change isn’t likely as long as teacher unions are more involved in politics than the public is. That’s why it increasingly seems that the only way to restore basic education is to break government’s near monopoly on it.

The private-school scholarship legislation recently enacted by the Republican majority in Congress and President Trump creates a mechanism for breaking that monopoly. The new law would give dollar-for-dollar tax credits to people donating up to $1,700 to private schools that use the donations for student scholarships. 

But taxpayers in Connecticut can’t participate unless Governor Lamont or the General Assembly signify formal approval, and the teacher unions are furiously opposed.

The teacher unions complain falsely that the scholarship tax credits would take money from public schools. But the tax credits would come only from the federal government, not state or municipal government. 

Indeed, the tax credits stand to put more money into basic education altogether while reducing public school expenses by moving students into private schools even as the public schools might keep getting just as much money from state and municipal government as their enrollment declined. Enrollment has been declining gradually in Connecticut but state law actually forbids schools from reducing spending even then. 

What the unions really object to with the scholarship tax credits is greater parental choice and more competition with the schools the unions control.

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

Trump aids Larson’s campaign; and Lamont’s disaster at PURA

By CHRIS POWELL

Barring some accident, scandal, or health problem, U.S. Rep. John B. Larson probably can count on President Trump to carry him through next year’s Democratic primary in Connecticut’s 1st Congressional District.

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Larson well could have figured that any Democrat who complains angrily enough about the president can induce Trump to put him on a sort of enemies list, and it happened the other day. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security accused 29 Democratic elected officials of fomenting violence against federal immigration agents. Larson was one of them for remarks he bellowed at a rally in Newington in August likening immigration agents or their tactics — it wasn’t clear — to the Nazi SS and Gestapo.

Larson is being challenged for renomination from the extreme left of his party. First there is former Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin, who, after the George Floyd incident in Minneapolis, capitulated to demands to defund Hartford’s police and complains that Larson, at 77, is too old. Then there is West Hartford state Rep. Jillian Gilchrest, who advocates legalizing late-term abortion and says there is an “infinite” number of genders.

Defunding the police, maximizing abortion, and glorifying gender dysphoria are major objectives on the Democratic left, and Larson has neglected them, but disparaging Trump tops them all. Trump won’t be denouncing Bronin and Gilchrest; he probably has never heard of them. But in effect Trump already has crowned Larson as the only Democrat in the 1st District who is a threat to the administration, and Larson seems ready to bellow every day until the primary to dispel Bronin’s insinuations that he’s about to keel over.

The problem with Larson’s strategy to win a Democratic primary by running against Trump is that it undermines the main argument for giving him a 15th term: enacting his comprehensive legislation to strengthen and expand Social Security, which is, he notes, the country’s foremost anti-poverty program — not welfare but pension and insurance benefits earned by working.

The political margin in the U.S. House of Representatives is small and if the historical pattern holds, the Democrats will regain the majority in next year’s election and be in position to pass Larson’s bill or something like it. The Senate may remain narrowly Republican but Republican senators might not want to seem to oppose saving and improving Social Security. 

While the president has proclaimed his desire to improve Social Security, he has done nothing about it. What would he think of Social Security legislation whose enactment would be a triumph for a congressman who had saved himself politically by disparaging him? Would Trump put the national interest first and personal resentment aside?

Building a legislative majority in a bitterly divided country isn’t likely to be done by screaming, no matter how much it helps win primary elections and how righteous it makes one feel. Do 1st District Democrats want substantial results or vituperation? 

*

Maybe Governor Lamont can put the Public Utilities Regulatory Authority back together before many people understand how disgracefully it exploded after compromising the state’s electrical grid and inflating electricity rates. But the disaster is his own fault.

First the governor let the conflict between his chairwoman of the authority, Marissa Gillett, and the state’s two major electric companies, Eversource and United Illuminating, become a war of lawsuits and recriminations.

Then he reappointed Gillett despite indications she was dissembling about her management of the agency. The other day she and her chief of staff were exposed as having lied to the legislature and the public about their scheme to freeze the authority’s two other members out of authority business. So Gillett resigned abruptly and posed as a victim. Her chief of staff remains in office.

Now the authority has only two of the five members it is supposed to have, since the governor long refused to fill two vacancies, maybe because Gillett didn’t want more people looking over her shoulder.

Can the governor find three nominees of greater integrity, and in a hurry, so the agency can work in the proper way?  

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

-END-

Let the Sun set elsewhere; we have enough basketball

By CHRIS POWELL

Why are Governor Lamont and state Treasurer Erick Russell so enthusiastic about using state pension money to make state government a minority owner of the Mohegan tribe’s Connecticut Sun women’s basketball team and move it to Hartford from the tribe’s reservation in rural eastern Connecticut?

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Though questions abound, the governor and the treasurer don’t seem to have conducted even a basic analysis of the team’s current and likely future finances.

On the Mohegan reservation the Sun plays for free at the tribe’s beautiful arena. Do the governor and treasurer suppose that the team also could play for free at the People’s Bank Arena in Hartford, which is overseen by the Capital Region Development Authority? Has the authority been asked if it would forego revenue and incur only expenses from a major new tenant?

Playing in Hartford, the Sun would face intense competition from the University of Connecticut men’s and women’s basketball teams, which play most of their games at the People’s Bank Arena, not on campus in rural Storrs. Such competition almost certainly would impair the profitability of all three teams. Have the governor and treasurer factored this into whatever informal calculations they have made?

For eight years Hartford has had a beautiful minor-league baseball stadium downtown. Yet the stadium is still making only financial losses for the city, and the city is heavily subsidized by state government. Does state government want to subsidize the city indefinitely for another big entertainment project?

The Hartford office-building project called Constitution Plaza was built in the early 1960s in the hope of reviving downtown and the city generally. It didn’t. Today Constitution Plaza is sleepy.

The same aspiration was behind the predecessor of the People’s Bank Arena, the Hartford Civic Center, which opened in 1975. The civic center came with a shopping mall. But Hartford continued its decline demographically and economically anyway, and with few customers the shopping mall went out of business.

Twenty years ago state government decided to push downtown Hartford around for the third time in 40 years with the Adriaen’s Landing project — a convention hall, hotel, museum, and restaurant district. But it too is sleepy and has yet to do much for the city.

Indeed, a decade ago the Hartford area’s shopping, restaurant, and entertainment focus shifted to West Hartford because of the better demographics there and the greater amount of housing nearby.

The arena in downtown Hartford has served a great purpose for Connecticut, in large part because the UConn teams have played there so often, much closer to the state’s center of population than Gampel Pavilion.

But does anyone really believe that the big problem of the Hartford area is the lack of a professional women’s basketball team when there is already so much great basketball and some good minor-league baseball in the city?

A century ago Hartford was believed to be the richest city in the country. Today it is among the poorest. Why it changed is yet to be examined officially, but all the games played at the downtown arena and the baseball stadium haven’t yet persuaded middle-class people to return to the city to live. Most people at the games go home to the suburbs.

Only more middle-class housing and middle-class schools are likely to restore the city — schools with academic tests for admission and advancement, not schools like Hartford’s, which happily advance and graduate illiterates without apology. All other undertakings in the name of reviving Hartford are mere distractions.

With luck the Women’s National Basketball Association will disabuse the governor, the treasurer, and state legislators out of using pension money to become a powerless minority owner — a prisoner — of an undertaking that risks becoming a long-term loss. The league and the Mohegans know that Connecticut is a much smaller market than Boston and Houston and a team in those cities would be much more profitable. The league and the Mohegans want only to make money, which is fine, especially since state government often seems to want only to lose it.

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

-END-

U.S. Postal Service remains too quaint in Connecticut

By CHRIS POWELL

Within living memory there were five post offices in East Windsor, one in each of the town’s villages — Warehouse Point, Scantic, Broad Brook, Melrose, and Windsorville. But there was no East Windsor post office in East Windsor. The only post office with East Windsor in its name, East Windsor Hill, was in South Windsor.

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Of course those days were slower and somehow the postal system made it work. Time and growth have consolidated postal things in East Windsor. The villages retain their identity on the U.S. Postal Service’s delivery lists but now there are only two physical post offices in town: East Windsor in the Warehouse Point village on the west side of town, and Broad Brook, for the eastern half of town. Perhaps to prevent things from getting too simple, the postal service maintains its East Windsor Hill office in South Windsor.

But quaintness is no fun anymore over in little Scotland in the eastern part of Connecticut, which, while it has fewer than 1,600 residents and 625 households, is served by six post offices and their ZIP codes. Only about 225 of Scotland’s households have a Scotland postal address. The rest have been given addresses in Baltic, Canterbury, Hampton, North Windham, and Windham Center. 

This long has caused Scotland residents great confusion and inconvenience, the more so since the names of some roads in Scotland are the same as the names of roads in neighboring towns. Commerce by mail and private courier in Scotland is often misdirected or delayed because a recipient’s address doesn’t exist in postal and commercial databases. Tax payments, prescription medications, and absentee ballots have gone astray. 

One might think that a telephone call or letter from Scotland’s first selectman or members of Congress could have gotten this straightened out — but no. For years the postal service has pleaded “operational” problems and has pledged to study the matter but has done nothing about it. 

Scotland’s U.S. representative, the even-tempered Joe Courtney, has tired of the postal bureaucracy. Courtney and Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy recently had enough and introduced legislation with other members of Congress to force the postal service to provide a single town address and ZIP code to everyone in Scotland, as well as to 13 other communities across the country with similar problems. 

A few months ago the legislation was approved by the House for a second time and again awaits action in the Senate, which failed to act on it during the last session of Congress. Courtney says he hopes the Senate will cooperate soon “to fix this dysfunctional system that is completely self-inflicted by unacceptable disorganization at the post office.”

Can the Senate, which may be, like the House, more riven by partisanship than at any time since the Civil War, unite at least on this basic matter of improving government administration?

Courtney, who has spent much of his 18 years in Congress mastering the complex details of the nuclear submarines built in Groton in his district, says dealing with the Navy is a breeze compared to dealing with the postal service. The postal service should be mortified that it requires special legislation to ensure that the mail gets to where it needs to go. But maybe Congress should be providing the postal service with as much scrutiny as it gives the military. When your mail doesn’t go through, quaintness is no excuse.

THE QUIET PART OUT LOUD: Massive illegal immigration may not have originated as the political left’s scheme to change the country’s political demographics by increasing the number of Democratic-leaning districts in the U.S. House of Representatives, but the scheme’s potential for doing that is very much recognized among Democratic leaders.

Comments made last year by U.S. Rep. Yvette Clarke, a Democrat from Brooklyn, were recently discovered on video and publicized nationally. Talking about “migrants,” Clarke said, “I need more people in my district just for redistricting purposes,” adding that migrants “could clearly fit here.” 

That’s what’s called saying the quiet part out loud.   

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

-END-

Build housing without sprawl; and are schools sanctuaries?

By CHRIS POWELL

Supposedly there was going to be a special session of the General Assembly in the fall to arrange a compromise on the housing legislation passed by liberal Democratic legislators during this year’s regular session but vetoed by Governor Lamont. Fall is here but neither the governor nor the legislature has issued such a call. It’s not clear what’s happening.

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But in commentary the other day the Yankee Institute’s Meghan Portfolio argued that a special session would not be good for democracy. “Special sessions often operate in the shadows,” she wrote. “Bills frequently don’t appear until the very day of the vote, sometimes only hours before. Towns, taxpayers, and even rank-and-file legislators are left in the dark. This isn’t policymaking. It’s ambush politics.”

Indeed, special-session legislation can get written by a few leaders without public participation and review. Only after its enactment are the “rats” in the legislation discovered — provisions that never would have been approved if adequately publicized.

Connecticut’s housing shortage is an urgent problem, the biggest factor in the state’s outrageously high cost of living. But the thrust of the vetoed legislation — reducing the obstructive influence of suburban zoning and imposing more rent control — was never going to get much housing built quickly. Mainly the legislation would have let liberals feel better about themselves even as it made them hypocrites on environmental protection.

Many towns that have used zoning to exclude the middle and lower classes don’t have the infrastructure necessary for higher-density housing — water, sewer, and electrical systems, wide roads, and school capacity. Of course their exclusive zoning was meant to keep things that way. But tearing up the countryside with more suburban sprawl to spite the bigoted snobs will have more disadvantages than it’s worth when there is a much faster and more efficient way to build housing.

Connecticut’s cities and inner suburbs are full of abandoned industrial property, decrepit tenements, and vacant or half-empty shopping centers. Many are eyesores. Additionally, much office space in the cities is vacant. All these properties are already served by the necessary infrastructure and redeveloping it as housing would do no environmental damage. Most of their neighbors might be glad if something shiny and new replaced the eyesores.

This is where Connecticut’s urgent housing effort should concentrate, and that effort should be managed by a state housing development board, empowered to condemn decrepit or underused properties, take others by eminent domain, and option the properties to developers for market-rate housing, with the options withdrawn if developers fail to make quick progress.

A state whose leaders seem to think the government has enough money to buy a professional basketball team when the state already has two nationally ranked public university teams should have no trouble finding the money to build thousands of units of housing in a hurry. Or the state could skip the basketball team purchase and just build the housing instead.

*

Governor Lamont is right to want federal immigration agents to stop wearing masks and to start wearing badges and clothing identifying them as government agents when they make arrests. Masked and unidentified and looking like gangsters, the agents invite getting shot or stabbed by their targets or bystanders. U.S. Rep. John B. Larson has introduced legislation in Congress to stop the gangsterism.

But the governor recently went far beyond the sensible. He held a press conference with school superintendents to discourage immigration agents from making arrests at schools, though there seem to have been no such arrests in Connecticut. The governor said he wants everyone to “feel safe” in school.

Why should people “feel safe” anywhere in the country if their presence is illegal? Why should immigration law not apply inside a school? If, as the governor, Attorney General William Tong, and many state legislators keep insisting — that Connecticut is not a “sanctuary state” — what would the governor make schools if not a sanctuary?

Of course journalists spared the governor the trouble of explaining. When obvious questions are politically incorrect, they can’t be asked. 

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

Teachers aren’t trying to stop the collapse of education

By CHRIS POWELL

Connecticut’s public school teachers are feeling resentful again. The other day their biggest union, the deceptively named Connecticut Education Association, reported a poll of its members that was full of the usual findings: Teachers feel overworked, underpaid, and disrespected.

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Even so, teacher unions remain the most influential and pernicious special interest in state and municipal politics, enjoying, among other things, unique exemption from freedom-of-information law, which requires disclosure of the job evaluations of all other state and municipal government employees but not those of teachers, lest they have to face similar accountability to the public. Along with the state’s teacher tenure law, this exemption gives teachers nearly absolute job security.

But the CEA’s poll made one crucial point: the disrespect teachers suffer, the increasing misconduct of students, and the failure of so many parents to get their children to school, what with chronic absenteeism affecting 25% or more of students in some school systems.

Whatever their faults, teachers have to play the hands they are dealt. They see social disintegration close-up and comprehensively, and so they are better positioned than anyone else to do something about it. 

But they don’t. They lack the courage, or they don’t care.

By now teachers should understand that political correctness has nearly destroyed behavioral and educational standards in Connecticut’s schools. Scores on the few academic proficiency tests still permitted to be administered have been falling for years, causing some alarm but little action.

Declining educational performance should be no surprise in the school environment now prevailing: social promotion. The incentive to learn has been removed; students whose parenting is mediocre know that they will be given a high school diploma without ever having to learn anything or even behave decently. So why learn or behave decently?

Educators in Connecticut sometimes boast about higher graduation rates but this is just propaganda when so many students haven’t learned much.

So teachers should be swarming school board meetings and General Assembly hearings to complain about the lack of respect and discipline and the abandonment of educational standards and to demand that something be done.

Reform might not be complicated. Parents could be penalized for the truancy of their children. Student academic performance scores for each year of high school could be imprinted on diplomas, signifying that for many students diplomas are really only certificates of occasional attendance. Employers could be encouraged to direct young job applicants to attach a copy of their diploma to their application and to question them about their school performance.

“We call our schools free,” Robert Frost wrote, “because we are not free to stay away from them till we are 16 years of age.” Indeed, while to students they seem free, schools aren’t free at all. They are the largest public expense in every community, and the failure of students to learn, a failure engendered by social promotion, is institutionalized waste.

So it might be good to change Connecticut’s compulsory school attendance law and drop the permissible withdrawal age from 18 to 16 or 15. This would signify that children and parents who want to use school only for babysitting should find another babysitter.

An earlier introduction to having to work for a living — especially menial work, the only work for which most uneducated teens are qualified — might teach demoralized and indifferent young people a powerful lesson about the value of education.

That’s why Connecticut U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal and U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro are mistaken with their politically correct legislative proposal, supposedly based on a fear of pesticides, to prohibit teens from working on tobacco farms. A few decades ago thousands of teens got summer jobs on tobacco farms in the Connecticut Valley. The work tended to be exhausting, dirty, sweaty, boring, and low-paid, but it quickly showed those who did it that if they wanted something better in life they should take school seriously.

Unfortunately there are few tobacco farms left in Connecticut, but the lesson they taught their young employees is needed more than ever.

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

Utility regulator, caught lying, blames her adversaries

By CHRIS POWELL

Just hours after she was caught lying to state legislators, the chairwoman of Connecticut’s Public Utilities Regulatory Authority, Marissa P. Gillett, resigned last week, blaming her vindicated critics for making her life harder than she could bear.

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For weeks Gillett and her office had been denying that other members of the authority had been instructed by e-mail to avoid contacting authority staff directly to get information about the authority’s work. Gillett and her office insisted that extensive searches had found no evidence of the e-mail, though witnesses insisted such e-mail had been sent. 

The underlying suspicion was that the chairwoman had commandeered the authority and was trying to freeze out its other members. 

With questions and doubts intensifying, especially among members of the Republican minority in the General Assembly, and with lawsuits by the utility companies progressing, increasing the chance that any concealment would be undone, last Wednesday the authority announced that it had found the disputed e-mail after all and it indeed had come from Gillett’s chief of staff. 

So on Friday Gillett resigned, presumably hoping to foreclose the investigation of her lying that the legislature might have been obliged to undertake if it had any self-respect.

Gillett and the authority long have been feuding with Connecticut’s two major electric utilities, Eversource and United Illuminating, over their rates and performance. The companies didn’t like the greater scrutiny they were getting under Gillett’s regime. 

But then the companies long have been scapegoated for state government’s own deceitful inflation of Connecticut’s electricity prices, which are nearly the highest in the country in part because state government, through the regulatory authority, was stuffing electric bills with hidden taxes, now infamous as “public benefits charges.”

The deceitfulness of the “public benefits charges” has always impugned utility regulation, especially since regulation’s pose of seeking efficiency from the electric companies contrasts so laughably with state government’s extravagance, negligence, and indifference with its own operations.

Who has been more justified in the feud between the regulatory agency and the companies? Maybe a more honest and collegial agency under a new leader can regain credibility and find out.

In her letter of resignation to Governor Lamont, Gillett wrote that her conflict with the electric companies was distracting from the regulatory authority’s work “and has exacted a real emotional toll both for me personally, as well as my family, and for my team. … There is only so much that one individual can reasonably endure, or ask of their family, while doing their best to serve our state.”

But the electric companies didn’t make Gillett lie, and if she hadn’t been caught lying, she would have continued to build her empire and wouldn’t have resigned so fast.

MAYORS CAN’T STOP CRIME: Having become a one-party city — Democratic, of course — New Haven is fortunate to have a vigorous Republican challenger to Mayor Justin Elicker in this year’s election: Steve Orosco. 

It’s Orosco’s job to find fault with Elicker’s administration, and the other day he did so by raising the issue of crime in the city. “Pain and fear remain on every block,” Orosco said.

But violent crime in New Haven, as in Connecticut’s other impoverished cities, goes up and down, sometimes with the weather, and its level in New Haven this year isn’t so different from the average. Further, no mayor of New Haven or other impoverished city in the state could affect crime very much without something like President Trump’s placing an armed National Guard soldier on every corner, as he did in Washington, D.C. Connecticut’s policy isn’t to reduce crime as much as to confine it to the cities.

Urban crime is a matter of demographics created by long-failing state and national policies that have turned cities into poverty factories. No city mayor can bring the fathers home to help raise the children they abandoned. The most a mayor can do is try to restrain the looting done by the government employee unions, and politically the unions are more fearsome than the criminals.

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

Overimpressed by college, Democrats get arrogant

By CHRIS POWELL

Surely state Rep. Eleni Kavros DeGraw, D-Avon, doesn’t represent the entirety of Connecticut’s Democratic Party. But she is evidence of the party’s transition from the party of the working class to the party of the arrogant elites.

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Kavros DeGraw revealed herself last month with comments at a meeting of a General Assembly committee studying relief for college student debt. The Yankee Institute’s Meghan Portfolio reports that Kavros DeGraw said “the most important thing is to go to college … to have long-term earning power and to be able to start building generational wealth and to succeed.”

Kavros DeGraw added: “If folks aren’t going to college and getting the jobs that college educations fill, what jobs are they ending up in? They’re ending up in jobs that do not pay them enough. And then they do become, quote, unquote, a burden on everyone else because of the services they might need.”

That’s not only a mistaken view of the lives of people without college degrees, many of whom make good livings and do jobs vital to society, but also a mistaken view of the lives of people with college degrees, many of whom are in debt and stuck in dead-end jobs after earning degrees of little financial value while many others make great incomes doing little good for society.

The higher education that so impresses Kavros DeGraw is full of such ironies. 

The new president of the community colleges in Manchester, Enfield, and Middletown touts his degree in “LGBT studies,” which may get his political correctness ticket punched but won’t help him convey much useful learning to students.

Meanwhile the former chancellor of the Connecticut Colleges and Universities System, Terrence Cheng, now a “strategic adviser” to the system’s Board of Regents, which pushed him out of the chancellorship because of an expense account scandal, is even more of a “burden on everyone else,” since he is being paid just as much for doing nothing much. Cheng has degrees in English and, not so ironically, fiction. 

The Cheng scandal has been continuing for more than a year but Kavros DeGraw seems to have said nothing about that burden on society.

Indeed, many pompous higher-ed types strut around calling each other “Doctor” but to replace a lightbulb they have to call someone who knows how to use a ladder.

The problem with college student debt, as state Rep. Tammy Nuccio, R-Tolland, explained to the study committee, is simply that college is overpriced. It costs more than it’s worth. 

This doesn’t mean that college degrees are worthless, nor that all college courses should facilitate entry to lucrative careers. College should not only teach work skills but also broaden appreciation of life in all respects. 

But the bigger education problem in Connecticut and throughout the country is lower education. Standards in lower education have been eliminated. Half of high school graduates never master what used to be considered high school work, and they enter adulthood qualified only for menial jobs. The drag on society is not the lack of college education but the lack of primary education, and unfortunately it’s too terrifying for elected officials like Kavros DeGraw to acknowledge, so it will get worse.

WAR, NOT DEFENSE: President Trump, who claimed a dubious medical exemption — bone spurs — to escape the military draft during the Vietnam War, wants to look tough and to make the country look tougher. Hence his plan to return the Defense Department to its original name, the War Department. Again he is right for the wrong reasons.

The country doesn’t need more military toughness as much as it needs more military smarts. Its most recent wars — Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan — weren’t defense. They were stupid imperial adventures. The country would have been far better off without them.  

The same goes for “defense” contractors. They’re really military contractors, including Connecticut’s home team — Pratt & Whitney, Electric Boat, and Sikorsky Aircraft. Journalism should stop playing along with the charade.

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

Senator Winfield and other Democrats want open borders again

By CHRIS POWELL

In a recent newspaper essay, state Sen. Gary Winfield, D-New Haven, laid out clearly the position of most Democratic officials in Connecticut on illegal immigration.

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It’s that while illegal immigrants who are caught committing serious crimes should be deported, all illegal immigrants who have not been caught committing serious crimes should be exempt from immigration law. Simple violation of immigration law should be ignored, Winfield wrote, because for every illegal immigrant being caught, detained, and deported for serious crimes under the Trump administration, “there are 15 car wash employees, landscapers, dishwashers, construction workers, and high school students” also being caught, detained, and deported.

It must be hoped that Winfield and the Democrats haven’t thought this through. It would be scary if they have thought it through.

For the policy advocated by Winfield and the Democrats would reopen the invitation given to the world by the Biden administration’s open-borders policy. 

The Winfield policy would be a proclamation that anyone can enter the United States at any time and come to Connecticut and stay until he is caught committing a serious crime — that there is no need to examine anyone entering the country illegally, no need to review any entrant’s character, intentions, and risk of becoming a public charge.

This policy also would be a proclamation that Connecticut thinks it can afford an unlimited number of illegal and unvetted immigrants, even though many illegal immigrants have become public charges in one way or another, especially in regard to children who don’t speak English and need extensive remedial education, and even though the state has a desperate shortage of housing for its legal residents and isn’t hurrying to build much more.

President Trump has said reckless, stupid, and hateful things regarding the immigration problem. But that’s no excuse for someone else’s bad policy.

Everyone who enters the United States illegally and is allowed to stay as if the law doesn’t apply to him is an incentive for others to enter illegally, and while most illegal immigrants may have good intentions and behave well, many do not, including many who have come to Connecticut. Just last week a man charged with the sexual assault of a jogger in New Haven was identified as an illegal immigrant from Guatemala who already had been deported twice. He is three times an illegal immigrant.

Millions of inoffensive illegal immigrants don’t justify even one criminal illegal immigrant, and there are thousands of them.

Winfield wrote that he favors a “path to citizenship” for illegal immigrants. But the United States has nearly the most liberal immigration policy in the world and already offers such a path. It begins with legal and properly vetted entry to the country.

Of course none of this matters if Winfield and the Democrats make excuses for open borders because most illegal immigrants concentrate in Democratic urban areas and lead to the creation of more safely Democratic congressional districts at the expense of politically competitive and Republican districts. 

In that case Winfield and the Democrats have thought their policy through and it’s not really humane at all. It’s a political racket.

NOT A NATIONAL HERO: Charlie Kirk was a brave advocate of free speech and conservative policies who sought to engage honestly with his adversaries, many of whom are disgraceful perpetrators of cancel culture.

But Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, never held public office and, being a political partisan, was not a national hero at the time of his murder. President Trump’s ordering the national flag to be flown at half staff to honor Kirk was a partisan gesture, accompanied by the president’s denunciation of his adversaries on the political left.

Brave as Kirk was, millions did not think well of him. Indeed, many people are even celebrating Kirk’s murder.

This political division is why the flag should not have been lowered for Kirk — and now this lowering may be taken as precedent by a future administration for bestowing honors on some mere partisan on the political left.      

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

Charlie Kirk’s murder shows where cancel culture leads

By CHRIS POWELL

Over the last century in the United States what has become known as cancel culture has moved from the political right to the political left.

The Red scares of the 1920s and 1950s were a conservative phenomenon that blacklisted, deported, and even imprisoned people for real or suspected leftist political views that were equated, often wrongly, with treason and disloyalty.

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Today cancel culture is a leftist phenomenon that contrives no pretense about treason and disloyalty. It seeks to silence conservatives simply because they are politically objectionable. Whoever last week assassinated Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, the conservative advocate of free speech and sincere dialogue with the other side, was the exemplar of cancel culture, illuminating where it will take the country.

Being allied with cancel culture, most Democratic officials don’t want to examine the Kirk assassination too closely. Democrats, including Connecticut’s U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy and U.S. Reps. John B. Larson and Jahana Hayes, seem to prefer to attribute the assassination to the country’s gun problem, so as to put Republicans, defenders of Second Amendment rights, on the defensive. During an angry confrontation on the floor of the House of Representatives last week, Hayes objected to a call for prayers for Kirk and his family, shrieking, “Pass some gun laws!”

There may be room for more gun laws on the federal level, but the assassination of Kirk is not an argument for them. Kirk appears to have been killed by an ordinary bolt-action hunting rifle, not the sort of semi-automatic rifles Democrats delight in mislabeling as “assault weapons” as they seek to outlaw them. Is the country now to outlaw even rudimentary rifles while nearly all gun crime is committed with handguns?

Connecticut’s gun laws already are nearly the most restrictive in the country and the state’s problem is not that it lacks laws but enforcement. Two years ago the state Office of Legislative Research reported that nearly two-thirds of criminal charges involving guns in Connecticut were routinely dropped in plea bargaining to get convictions on related charges considered more serious, like robbery.

If Connecticut ever took gun crime seriously it would make the gun charges the most serious and upon conviction impose mandatory sentences of life without parole. But then most new imprisonments would involve impoverished members of racial minorities, and legislators might be asked where all the poverty keeps coming from despite all the money they spend in the name of reducing it.

While from the beginning American political rhetoric often has been venomous, it never has been as venomous as it is today.

President Trump is a major perpetrator of it but he is far outnumbered by its perpetrators among the Democratic Party’s looney left in government and academia, and at least Trump hasn’t turned his office into an agency of cancel culture. His many firings of executive branch Democrats are matters of political patronage, explained by the great insight of Kentucky Sen. Alben Barkley, a Democrat, during the 1948 presidential campaign: “What is a ‘bureaucrat’? A ‘bureaucrat’ is a Democrat who holds an office some Republican wants.”

What can stop cancel culture from getting even more murderous and totalitarian? Only a return to what Judge Learned Hand called the spirit of liberty:

“The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure it is right. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias. The spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded. The spirit of liberty is the spirit of Him who, near 2,000 years ago, taught mankind the lesson it has never learned but never quite forgotten: that there may be a kingdom where the least shall be heard and considered side by side with the greatest.”

Charlie Kirk pursued the spirit of liberty. May others still dare to follow him.

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