Chris Powell column

By Chris Powell

Call it an opportunistic feint in the “culture war” if you want, but the “Parental Bill of Rights” proposed last week by the Republican nominees for governor and lieutenant governor, Bob Stefanowski and state Rep. Laura Devlin, raises important issues Connecticut should stop evading.

Several of the Republican proposals are vague. The Republicans say they oppose presenting sexual topics to the youngest students but don’t specify an age or grade at which sex education in school becomes appropriate. Of course this vagueness is not likely to protect the Republicans from the Democratic demagoguery that in Florida misrepresents the state’s fourth-grade threshold as a “Don’t Say Gay” law.

The Republicans oppose student masking and vaccination requirements that deny parents “any recourse to object,” but that recourse isn’t defined either. Should Connecticut reinstate a religious exemption from vaccination of students for the basic childhood diseases? The Republicans don’t say.

The Republicans call for expanding school choice for students in underperforming schools and endorse vouchers in principle. Would church schools qualify for these initiatives with government money?

While the long decline in public education’s performance argues strongly for making church schools eligible, especially in the cities, again the Republican candidates aren’t clear. Governor Lamont contends that state government’s system of magnet schools provides sufficient choice, but in a recent court settlement his administration admitted that the system is [ITALICS] not [END ITALICS] sufficient, that it is unable to meet demand for escape from many failing schools and should expand. Meanwhile Catholic schools have been closing even as the need for their old competence and economy has exploded.

The Republicans propose spending a lot more money on tutoring students whose education was set back the most by the closing of in-person schooling during the virus epidemic. The Republicans also propose spending more to secure schools against attack. The Republicans don’t say exactly where the money should come from, but then as state government rolls in billions of dollars of free federal money, the Democrats don’t care much about where money is to come from either.

At least the Republicans [ITALICS] are [END ITALICS] specific in calling to prohibit biological males from competing in girls sports in public schools. But the Republicans frame this as a matter of safety when it is really a matter of fairness, of preserving equal opportunity for girls under Title IX of federal civil rights law.

No matter, since Democratic demagoguery here will accuse the Republicans of “transphobia” and worse, even as Governor Lamont is trying to dodge the issue by contending that policy on transgender athletes should be left to local option — that is, that the rights of female students should vary among school systems, even as many high school sports events involve two or more towns that could have contradictory policies.

The Republicans dodge a little here too, saying that some mechanism should be developed so that boys wanting to be girls can keep competing. But of course they already can compete in events for their biological sex.

Unfortunately omitted from the Republican proposals is any reference to the policies of deception already adopted by school systems in Hartford, New Haven, and other places in regard to students with gender dysphoria. Such policies forbid schools from notifying parents if their children are getting their school’s help in changing their gender identity and names, unless the children approve of informing their parents.

Such policies usurp parental custody, may prevent parents from controlling the medical treatment of their children, and may cause critical delays in treatment before irreversible harm is done.

While such policies have been adopted nominally in the open, at public meetings, they have not been widely publicized and, at least in Hartford and New Haven, not directly publicized to parents at all. That’s because any school that made sure that parents fully understood that they will be kept ignorant about the health of their children might face much angry objection.

Of all the rights parents have or should have, none is greater than the right to know exactly what schools are doing with the health and very identities of their children.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

By Chris Powell

Interviewed Sept. 4 by Dennis House on WTNH-TV8’s “This Week in Connecticut,” U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, an advocate of unrestricted abortion, got away with a big fib.

House asked: “What do you say to a pro-life voter who may be turned off by your stance and may say, ‘Why can’t we have some protections for the unborn?'”

Blumenthal replied that the Women’s Health Protection Act, which he authored but did not pass the Senate, did provide protections for the unborn. “All the Women’s Health Protection Act does,” Blumenthal said, “is to codify Roe v. Wade as we did in Connecticut.”

The senator’s assertion is contradicted by the Congressional Research Service’s summary of his bill.

The Supreme Court’s decision in the Roe case in 1973 established a [ITALICS] limited [END ITALICS] constitutional right to abortion. It held that government could restrict abortion after fetal viability.

But Blumenthal’s legislation goes far beyond that. The Congressional Research Service’s summary says: “This bill prohibits governmental restrictions on the provision of, and access to, abortion services. Specifically, governments may not limit a provider’s ability to provide certain drugs, offer abortion services via telemedicine, or immediately provide abortion services when the provider determines a delay risks the patient’s health.”

Thus under Blumenthal’s bill, abortion providers themselves, not state laws, would decide whether an abortion is permissible — even at the moment of birth. Blumenthal’s bill was essentially a sneaky mechanism for legalizing late-term, post-viability abortion throughout the country without being explicit about it.

Horrifying as late-term abortion is, some people openly advocate a right to it. They are honest about it and some are willing to argue their position. On that TV program Blumenthal was not honest about it but wasn’t challenged.

Blumenthal also is getting off easy with a television commercial for his re-election campaign in which he is thanked by the widow of a U.S. soldier who served in Afghanistan and died of cancer he believed was caused by toxic smoke there. The widow says the senator helped her husband get assistance from the Veterans Administration after being denied.

Creditable as this was, it was only the ordinary constituent service most congressmen provide every day. Blumenthal’s commercial is more important for implicitly, if inadvertently, raising the issue of his support for the 20-year “nation-building” adventure in Afghanistan during his two terms in the Senate.

The United States continued this adventure long after nearly everyone could see that Afghanistan really isn’t a country at all but only a collection of primitive tribes that aren’t interested in what foreigners consider democracy and civilization. The disproof of Blumenthal’s long support for the war was the instant collapse of the Afghan “government” upon President Biden’s abrupt and incompetent withdrawal of U.S. forces a year ago.

Despite the thousands of military and civilian casualties and the hundreds of billions of dollars wasted there, Afghanistan already seems to have been forgotten in U.S. politics.

Blumenthal would not be airing the commercial about the soldier if he wasn’t confident that no one will ever ask about his share of responsibility for the soldier’s death.

Of course Blumenthal’s responsibility is no greater than that of hundreds of members of Congress, four presidents, and dozens of generals. But the responsibility is real all the same, and the adventure in Afghanistan will be more shameful still if this election passes without efforts for accountability.

As the campaign intensifies, all sorts of sinister-sounding TV and radio commercials are descending on Connecticut, some financed by the candidates themselves, others by shady committees. Some will be true, some half true and not entirely fair, and some worse. But this might not be the only way to campaign.

Federal law could require broadcasters to make ample free time available to candidates for federal office, provided the time was used exclusively for commercials in which the candidates themselves are the only ones to appear and speak.

Such commercials might not always be truthful and fair, but if candidates had to take that much responsibility, they might improve their messages.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

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By Chris Powell

How racist is Enfield? Town government’s overreaction to a recent disgraceful but trivial incident is giving the impression that the town has become the northern headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan, even though the incident could have happened anywhere.

It occurred as members of the Enfield High School football team were knocking on doors soliciting financial donations. At one door a Black player was scorned and sent away with a racial epithet from the resident. Police investigated but determined that, abhorrent as the resident’s conduct was, there was no cause for arrest.

Whereupon town government convened another of those “community conversations on race,” as if the whole town needed to be lectured on decent behavior.

Maybe Enfield really is that hateful. But if so, specific evidence of anything seriously wrong in town regarding race has not been reported and was not produced at the first “community conversation,” which drew 200 people to Enfield High School. Instead the moderator urged people to examine their own consciences about race, as if some might be obliged to make confession.

In the absence of evidence apart from a single small incident, summoning a “community conversation” was presumptuous, if politically correct.

Enfield and other towns [ITALICS] should [END ITALICS] have a “community conversation” on race, but of a different sort — regular hearings to air specific complaints about racism in town and to investigate them.

The perpetrator of the insult to the high school football player is known to police, the player, and others and should be invited to the first such hearing along with the insulted player for questioning and discussion. Other witnesses to what they consider racism in town should come forward too and their complaints should be followed up at future hearings, with the accused people and institutions invited. Town officials and residents then could discuss what if anything should be done.

Such procedure would generate real and relevant conversations, not the pious and irrelevant handwringing of the first “community conversation.” Far more than such handwringing, a hearing on specifics might deter racists, warning them that they might be held accountable in public for their hatefulness.

More likely, of course, such a procedure would generate few if any complaints of racism in Enfield. Maybe then the town could begin to get its good name back and, along with Connecticut generally, might pay less attention to the occasional and trivial misconduct of jerks on their own doorsteps and more attention to the state’s longstanding racial disparities.

Those disparities include the racial performance gap in education, zoning’s obstruction of racial and economic integration, and welfare policy’s destruction of the family and creation of a racial underclass. Obsessing about occasional racist epithets uttered by nobodies is a pathetic copout.

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SOCIAL SECURITY’S ENEMY: As they campaign for re-election, Democrats on the national and state level are touting lots of new programs created in the name of alleviating poverty, even as soaring inflation, caused in part by the explosion of those programs and other government spending, erases the programs’ benefits.

Meanwhile the nation’s most comprehensive anti-poverty program, Social Security, is eroding under that inflation even as Connecticut’s own U.S. Rep. John B. Larson, D-1st District, bravely keeps pressing legislation to improve the system’s benefits and finances.

But according to a recent report in Politico, Larson’s Social Security bill is being blocked not by the usual retrograde Republicans in Congress but by the Democratic leader in the House of Representatives, Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Larson’s bill isn’t another giveaway to be financed by debt and inflation. It would be financed largely by eliminating the limit on Social Security taxes paid by high earners, whose Social Security taxes now are capped at the first $400,000 of annual income.

Pelosi and her husband have gotten rich trading stocks whose values are heavily affected by the federal legislation she steers and votes on. Her party should push her out of the way and pass Larson’s Social Security bill while the Democrats still have a majority in Congress and a president who would sign it.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

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By Chris Powell

Reactions last week to the inadvertent confession of the Greenwich assistant principal who admitted hiring only young and liberal teachers and excluding Catholics, the better to propagandize students and induce them to grow up voting Democratic, have been just as revealing as the confession itself.

State Attorney General William Tong seemed more upset about what he called the “vigilante journalism” of Project Veritas, which surreptitiously recorded the assistant principal’s incriminating comments, than he was about the illegal discrimination itself.

“Journalism should be left to journalists,” Tong said. “I think there’s something really wrong with vigilante journalism, and I don’t think it should be celebrated. There are no rules when somebody engages in Wild West vigilante journalism and tries to entrap somebody.”

But while Project Veritas may have used false pretenses to induce the assistant principal to speak, it didn’t “entrap” him. No crime was committed or plotted. Further, journalism is a constitutional right belonging to everyone. Anyone can be a journalist at any time, no training or credential required.

If, as Tong seems to wish, the Greenwich story had been left to respectable news organizations, it almost certainly never would have been obtained, which might have been OK with the attorney general, since public education is an adjunct of his party, the Democrats.

Nevertheless, Tong said his office, which recently was given civil rights enforcement authority, “will conduct a thorough investigation and review and analyze all the evidence.” But he added: “This will not happen overnight,” which may have been assurance to everyone tainted by the Greenwich scandal that the attorney general’s report will not be issued until after the state election in November.

The reaction from Connecticut’s biggest teacher union, the Connecticut Education Association, was even more resentful than Tong’s.

According to National Review, CEA President Kate Dias sent an email to union leaders instructing them not to speak to journalists who “have not been vetted” and indeed not to comment on the Greenwich scandal at all.

Dias’ message, National Review said, also told union leaders to warn their colleagues that undercover journalists are “lurking.” She wrote: “Keep meetings closed and ensure your members are the only people present. Remind your members that they could be the next victim of a hit piece if they aren’t fully aware of whom they make comments to and what they say.”

In directing union members to deal only with “vetted” journalists, Dias sounded like Tong in wanting to confine the news to organizations that can be trusted not to embarrass anyone in authority. This is hardly to the credit of those organizations, since it signifies that they are much appreciated for long having minimized or ignored the political skewing of public education.

Adhering to its self-serving conception of “public” education, the CEA refused to respond to an inquiry seeking to confirm the authenticity of the statement National Review attributed to Dias.

Tong and Dias, political liberals, demonstrated that state and local government generally and public education particularly have much to hide. But not so long ago it was liberalism that celebrated and relied on “vigilante journalism” and conservatism that deplored it and even condemned it as unpatriotic.

Most respectable institutions of journalism supported the Vietnam War for many years and recited the U.S. government’s misleading or false communiques without critical examination, just as they overlooked the government’s spying on war protesters and civil rights advocates who were breaking no laws. Exposing the government’s lies about the war required the vigilante journalism of Daniel Ellsberg, the Defense Department consultant who stole and leaked the Pentagon Papers.

The essence of most journalism in that era was captured perfectly by the great liberal political cartoonist Jules Feiffer. One of his cartoon panels concluded: “If you want lies, you go to a government press conference. If you want truth, you steal it.”

Or, as the Project Veritas corollary goes, if you want truth, you also can trick those who conceal it into revealing it innocently, leaving them and their co-conspirators sputtering impotently when they are exposed.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

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By Chris Powell

News organizations in Connecticut lately have turned their attention to the shortage of housing in the state, which is especially oppressive to the poor as rents rise not only because of the shortage but also because of inflation. People increasingly are confined in small, uncomfortable, and even unsanitary apartments in unsafe neighborhoods.

Exclusive zoning is part of the problem. So is the failure of federal housing subsidies for the poor — Section 8 vouchers — to keep up with inflation. Irresponsible landlords are part of the problem too.

But the news organizations always fail to acknowledge and explore the biggest part of the housing problem, even when it stares them in the face, as it did recently in the pages of the Waterbury Republican-American and The Day of New London.

That is, the biggest part of the housing problem is the irresponsibility of hapless tenants themselves.

The Republican-American related the experience of a single woman with six children who wants to leave her three-bedroom apartment in Waterbury for a safer neighborhood somewhere but can’t afford to because her Section 8 voucher won’t pay enough.

The Day featured a single woman with four children living in a two-bedroom trailer in Groton. She needs a larger home but long has been out of work and will take a job only if it has flexible hours allowing her to look after her kids.

Of course no husbands or boyfriends sharing responsibility for the children could be found in the news reports. Instead these reports, like all such reports, seemed to assume that children are as accidental as the weather and their expense cannot be anticipated.

The reports also seemed to assume that people who live in the decent way — first acquiring an education and job skills, then establishing themselves financially, and then choosing a reliable partner before undertaking the responsibility of children — are chumps who should pay extra for those who live irresponsibly.

Yes, government must take responsibility for the children whose parents fail to. But government should examine how much its methods of support for such kids is facilitating irresponsibility and indeed destroying the family, as indicated by the spectacular increase in child neglect in the last half century.

For the country’s sake as well as their own, the chumps should wise up. For housing is ever more expensive for the chumps as well, and the more the country subsidizes irresponsibility, the more irresponsibility it will get. Theodore Roosevelt’s maxim seems to have been forgotten: The first duty of a citizen is to pull his own weight.

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HOW TO REVIVE HARTFORD: Government in Connecticut doesn’t seem to have much of a housing policy besides leaving builders to deal with demand and zoning. That policy isn’t accomplishing much. But Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin sees the opportunity to do much more without displacing or aggravating anyone.

Hartford’s downtown office buildings are being emptied by the transfer of office work to work at home via the internet, and Bronin notes that space in those buildings might be converted to housing. For some years now Hartford city government has recognized that housing is what downtown needs most to become a vibrant neighborhood, and, encouraged by city government, apartments have been going up, if slowly.

But amenities like supermarkets and household services downtown are still lacking. It’s a chicken-and-egg situation. Getting markets is hard without the housing, and getting housing is hard without the markets.

The answer, Bronin says, may be to get mixed use out of the office buildings where businesses are giving up space — reconfiguring them with shops at street level and offices and housing upstairs. Supplemented with several schools nearby, this could produce a vibrant, middle-class neighborhood where people could live without cars, walking or taking a short bus ride to whatever they need in daily life.

Because of the multiplicity of building ownership, fulfilling such design will be a challenge, requiring great coordination. But the whole state would benefit from such new housing in downtown Hartford, and Connecticut might be delighted to discover that there can be more to city life than drug dealing, panhandlers, and shootings.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

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By Chris Powell

No one who closely follows “public” education — with its secrecy, deception, political correctness, pretension, contempt for parents, unaccountability, declining standards, financial excess, and steadily worsening performance — can be surprised by the confession of Greenwich elementary school vice principal Jeremy Boland, surreptitiously video-recorded by a seductress working for Project Veritas.

Boland’s confession, posted on the internet this week, was so candid and brutal that even leading Democrats in Connecticut, including Governor Lamont, U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, and state legislators, had to profess to be appalled by it, though the political indoctrination of students described by Boland is only what the Democrats preside over.

The Democrats’ criticism of Boland’s confession emphasized instead his determination not to hire Catholics as teachers. If applicants are Catholics, he says, “You don’t hire them. … Honestly, I don’t want to.”

But Boland’s bias against hiring Catholics isn’t religious but political, and it is perfectly rational in pursuit of his objective, which he describes as indoctrinating students with liberalism so that they are more likely to vote Democratic when they grow up. Boland notes that Catholics and applicants older than 30, whom he also refuses to hire, are more likely to be conservative.

That is, Boland isn’t against Catholics as teachers because of their religion itself but because of the conservative leanings their faith may give them.

Of course religious and age discrimination in employment long have been illegal, and surely Boland knows this. But he sees political indoctrination of students as his patriotic duty.

Boland stresses that he must be “subtle” as he injects politics into the curriculum. He explains that while he cannot explicitly put political issues to applicants for teaching jobs, he has developed questions that are likely to elicit indications of an applicant’s political incorrectness.

For example, Boland says, if applicants say they would side with parents on a curriculum question, “They don’t get the job.” And if applicants say students are not informed enough to make their own decisions about their gender identity, they will be disqualified too.

If applicants “were raised hardcore Catholic,” Boland explains, “it’s like they’re brainwashed. You can never change their mindset. … They’re just stuck real rigid.”

Maybe so, but then, oblivious to the irony thundering around him, Boland himself aims to “brainwash” his students so they will be just as “rigid” in a different political direction.

“The open-minded, more progressive teachers,” Boland says, “are actually more savvy about delivering a Democratic message without really ever having to mention their politics.”

His interviewer asks: “So it’s like you present everything in a way that’s subconsciously influencing the kids to vote liberal but not doing it in such an explicit way where the parents can actually get mad at you for it?”

Boland replies: “Right.”

While his perversion of the teacher hiring process may have put Greenwich in legal jeopardy, Boland probably hasn’t done much actual damage. He indicates that he has hired only four or five teachers, and since, upon disclosure of his comments, he was immediately placed on leave pending investigation, he is unlikely to do more hiring any time soon.

The much bigger question is how much the administration of the rest of public education reflects Boland’s outlook and pursues his objective. While there are some conservative school systems in the South, Midwest, and mountain West, in Connecticut and the rest of the country it is hard to find a school system that isn’t already pressing students with “social-emotional learning,” invitations to transgenderism, and various degrees of political propaganda.

After all, there is a reason why teacher union members always constitute the biggest bloc of delegates at Democratic conventions and a reason why Connecticut law exempts teacher performance evaluations from disclosure, alone among all performance evaluations of government employees.

This reason is not a desire for impartiality and accountability. It is the effectiveness of schools for propagandizing. Even if he is fired Boland will deserve a medal for making this plain.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

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By Chris Powell

During his travels around the state distributing goodies in pursuit of re-election in November, Governor Lamont might perform a valuable service by pausing for a moment here and there to examine the performance of ordinary management in state government.

Two weeks ago the big failures were in education, where a state technical school teacher who had been fired for abusing minority students was reinstated to her job with $225,000 in back pay. An arbiter ruled that since the technical school system hardly ever fires anyone, it couldn’t fire this teacher either.

Then, under pressure of a gender discrimination lawsuit, the state Board of Regents for Higher Education reinstated a community college president and paid her $775,000.

Meanwhile the parade of misconduct in the state police continued. First eight state trooper recruits were dismissed for cheating on an examination at the police academy. Then over several weeks five troopers were suspended on various charges, including theft, sexual assault, hit-and-run driving, and domestic violence.

Then Bill Cummings of Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers produced a more shocking report: that four more troopers had escaped discipline after being caught creating hundreds of fake traffic tickets to try to gain favor from their superiors — and that state police headquarters could not explain why the four were let off so easily.

According to the Connecticut Examiner’s Steve Jensen, at least the commanding officer of the state police, Col. Stavros Mellekas, issued a note of caution to his department. “These incidents do not define us,” the colonel wrote, “but we need to step up and lock down behavior.”

And then a case worker for the state Department of Children and Families was charged criminally with helping a client evade arrest for child sex trafficking.

The governor, a Democrat, had nothing to say about these incidents of misconduct. Republicans didn’t call attention to them either. After all, most of the state employees involved are members of unions whose endorsements are coveted.

But even if no one in authority is curious about these cases, they still suggest that state government is not operating well for the public and, worse, that Connecticut’s politicians are too scared to try to change that.

If competence and integrity seem hard to achieve in state government, developments last week in Bridgeport suggested that achieving competence and integrity in government in Connecticut’s cities may be impossible.

Mayor Joe Ganim, whose first administration was a criminal enterprise that sent him to prison for seven years, last week hired as the city’s senior labor relations official a former Newtown police officer who was convicted 10 years ago of embezzling $95,000 from the town’s police union while he was its treasurer. Of course in Bridgeport city government a background in embezzlement may be considered valuable experience.

And a month after agreeing to a three-year extension of his contract, Bridgeport school Superintendent Michael Testani announced that he would leave in November anyway to become superintendent in neighboring Fairfield. But since Bridgeport may be Connecticut’s leading poverty factory, it is hard to blame anyone in public education for departing for a place where most students come to school prepared to learn — or where the kids come to school at all. (Last week Hartford’s superintendent acknowledged that 44% of that city’s students are chronically absent.)

As with the recent distressing incidents in state government, last week’s developments in Bridgeport should have caught the attention of Connecticut’s political leaders but didn’t, even as it is a fair question whether, amid their worsening poverty, the cities are capable of self-government at all. Throwing lots of money at them as state government long has done may alleviate political pressures but it has not improved living conditions, especially not for the many fatherless and neglected children in the cities.

The state and federal governments have been doing the poverty thing for almost 60 years. Will another 60 years have to pass before anyone in authority in Connecticut notices that it’s not working?

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

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By Chris Powell

Another protected species made news in Connecticut last week when a venomous timber rattlesnake attacked two dogs in their yard in Glastonbury. Their owner rushed the dogs to the Pieper Veterinary clinic in Middletown just in time for them to be saved with snakebite antidote, what is called antivenin. The dog owner is lucky he wasn’t bitten too.

Connecticut once treated rattlesnakes as the dangerous nuisances they are. They were widespread and it was open season on them. But now that their habitat is limited to the northwest corner of the state and Glastonbury, East Hampton, Marlborough, and Portland, state government has made killing them illegal, as if Connecticut couldn’t live without them.

State law feels the same way about bears and bobcats, other predators that attack domestic animals.

As a result the habitat of the predators is expanding. While zoning often is used by suburban and rural towns to exclude housing that might be inhabited by unrich people, it is considered environmentally sound and high-minded to expand the habitat of the predatory animals.

The predators even have their own lobby at the state Capitol, environmental extremists who frighten the state’s timid legislators more than the predators themselves do.

So Connecticut residents should ask their legislators how many more rattlesnakes, bears, and bobcats state government plans to accommodate, and hospitals and veterinary clinics should stock up on antivenin.

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HIDING MORE WELFARE: Hospital and medical insurance bills are not the only places where state government has been hiding social welfare costs from taxpayers. Such costs long have been hidden in electric and gas utility bills as well.

The Connecticut Examiner’s Brendan Crowley reports that 25,000 utility users haven’t been paying their bills for many months, some since as far back as October 2019, on account of state government’s seasonal restrictions on disconnection and the disconnection moratorium imposed on electric and gas utilities when the virus epidemic started.

Eversource says it is carrying $171 million in bills overdue for 60 days or more. The company and United Illuminating have asked the Public Utilities Regulatory Authority to let them start disconnecting delinquents in September.

Eventually the expense of the unpaid bills is transferred to paying customers through higher rates.

Why should paying customers particularly have to pay the electricity and gas bills of customers who don’t pay? For the same reason paying customers of hospitals and medical insurers are forced to pay for people who don’t pay for their own treatment in Connecticut’s hospitals. This is done because transferring social welfare costs out of state government through intermediaries lets state government escape political responsibility for them. So hospitals, medical insurers, and utility companies are wrongly blamed for price increases caused by government.

This doesn’t mean that state government shouldn’t assist with medical and utility costs for the indigent. It means that state government should cover those costs directly and honestly, through regular and general taxes.

But honesty would show that the cost of state government is far higher than people think, increasing the public’s desire for efficiency in government and jeopardizing government’s many less compelling expenses.

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COPS COULD BE WORSE: In June police in New Haven were disgraced by their callous treatment of a man who had seemed drunk when arrested on a complaint that he was brandishing a gun at a block party. He was handcuffed and put in a van without seatbelts. Video showed his head smashing into the wall of the van when it stopped abruptly. More video showed him being dragged out of the van at headquarters when officers didn’t believe his claim to be injured. At last report he was paralyzed.

But this month police video showed three New Haven officers hastening to rescue a young woman about to jump from the roof of a parking garage. The officers functioned not only as saviors but also as social workers.

The country is going nuts all around the police, so as tired of it and flawed as they may be, it’s a wonder that they cope with it as well as they do.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

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By Chris Powell

August’s Titanic Deck Chairs Rearrangement Award seems likely to be won by the Education Committee of New Haven’s Board of Alders (aka the city council), which, according to the New Haven Independent, in the face of catastrophic student performance data, spent much of its last meeting debating reading instruction techniques even as 58% of the city’s public school students are classified as chronically absent.

At least the meeting produced admissions from Superintendent Ilene Tracy that for two years student mental health and “social-emotional learning” have displaced academic instruction and that student behavior is now “atrocious.”

So it may not be surprising that the shortage of teachers, a national problem, is especially bad in New Haven’s schools, which have about 300 unfilled positions amid a steady drain of teachers to school systems where salaries and students are better.

Of course while their political correctness doesn’t help, New Haven’s educators are mainly just playing the hand they have been dealt. They can’t choose their students or the parents of their students.

But the disaster of education in New Haven and Connecticut’s other cities has continued long enough that the Board of Alders, city legislators (including the influential New Haven Democrat Martin M. Looney, president pro tem of the state Senate), the state education bureaucracy, and Governor Lamont should have noticed by now that it is entirely a matter of demographics, the perpetual poverty arising from child neglect at home.

Instead these leaders keep clamoring for more programs to remediate the neglect rather than to address its cause and thereby prevent it — and these programs keep failing spectacularly and expensively.

It is all an old of story of public education, documented in 1966 by the sociologist James S. Coleman of Johns Hopkins University, who was assigned by the U.S. Office of Education to interpret the mass of school data collected at the direction of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Coleman’s most important conclusion was recounted this month by the writer Ian V. Rowe in National Review magazine. Coleman wrote:

“One implication stands out above all: That schools bring little influence to bear on a child’s achievement that is independent of his background and general social context; and that this very lack of an independent effect means that the inequalities imposed on children by their home, neighborhood, and peer environment are carried along to become the inequalities with which they confront adult life at the end of school.”

Coleman did [ITALICS] not [END ITALICS] conclude that schools themselves don’t matter at all. To the contrary, he found that disadvantaged children perform better in schools with better students, where standards are higher and peers set better examples. But that too was a matter of getting the children away from the bad influences of their home life.

In this respect the Coleman report echoed the findings of the report a year earlier by another sociologist, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was then assistant U.S. labor secretary and who became a great U.S. senator. Moynihan blamed severe poverty and urban chaos on the breakdown of the family.

Indeed, the chronic absenteeism in New Haven’s and other city school systems practically screams neglect of children by their parents, without even a whisper about teaching techniques.

If simply acknowledging the real problem in urban education in Connecticut is hard, it is harder still to imagine how politics would allow it to be addressed.

City officials and legislators cannot examine the causes of child neglect and educational failure without indicting their own constituents.

State officials can’t examine the causes without indicting themselves for a welfare system that destroys the family while putting thousands of unionized and politically active “helpers” on the government payroll.

Educators, also numerous, unionized, and politically active, can’t do it without calling more attention to their irrelevance and impugning their employment.

Academics like Coleman and Moynihan did it and some keep doing it, and journalism can call attention to their work. But if the trend toward illiteracy and ignorance keeps accelerating, there will be no one left to read it, much less act on it.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

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By Chris Powell

More than a million dollars were lost this month in a couple of incidents of state government’s mismanagement, and in full view. But, from the governor on down, no one in authority took notice. There wasn’t a peep or even a shrug.

First, Connecticut Public, the broadcasting outfit, reported that a teacher at Platt Technical High School in Milford, fired three years ago for baiting minority students with racist stereotypes and racial epithets, was reinstated to her $98,000-a-year job with $250,000 in back pay. Now she wants reimbursement for legal expenses as well.

It’s not that the teacher, Nancy Avon, was cleared of misconduct. Instead the arbiter deciding her appeal concluded that firing her was excessive because the state technical school system seldom fires anyone and because there was no “progressive discipline” for the teacher — that discipline began with the ultimate punishment rather than a reprimand or temporary suspension.

Then the Journal Inquirer reported that the State Board of Regents for Higher Education had agreed to rehire Nicole Esposito as chief executive of Manchester Community College to settle her lawsuit claiming that she was let go because of gender discrimination and retaliation by college executives.

Esposito is to receive $775,000 — $100,000 in back pay, $400,000 in damages, and $275,000 in legal fees.

The outcome of the technical school case suggests the usual about state government — that the inmates are running the asylum and that labor rules and union contracts continue to nullify basic management and the public interest.

But people who follow government in Connecticut already knew that, and presumably technical school administrators did too. So why wasn’t “progressive discipline” attempted?

Why hasn’t anyone in the Lamont administration — or its predecessors, for that matter — ever attempted to restore management’s prerogatives in government employee labor law and union contracts?

And exactly who in the technical school system administration will take responsibility for the failure and expense here? No one has volunteered, and journalism hasn’t asked.

In the community college case, the abject and expensive capitulation by State Board of Regents for Higher Education implies that something indeed was gravely wrong about the college president’s removal. So exactly what happened and who was responsible?

The board has provided no explanation.

While there is a state election in 10 weeks, it would be unusual if anyone in Connecticut’s minority party, the Republicans, pressed these issues, since relevance is not their style.

Of course these two cases are not rarities in government in Connecticut. They are just what happened to be discovered and noted this month by the state’s ever-diminishing cadre of journalists. Any close examination of such cases over time discloses that, because of negligent or enfeebled management, state government and municipal government have become generators of huge financial liability for the public, about which nothing is ever done.

A few months ago state government paid $9 million to settle the damage lawsuit of a patient at the state hospital for the criminally insane, Whiting Forensic Institute in Middletown, who had been assaulted and otherwise abused by hospital employees over a long period, the misconduct being captured on video. So their silence about the technical school and community college awards suggests that the governor and legislators figure that a measly $1 million in mismanagement is chump change.

But the chumps — those who pay taxes — might want to ask about it.

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PARENTS BETRAYED: Last week Connecticut journalism missed the bigger part of a story it reported with vacuous celebration — the Hartford school system’s adoption of a policy on students with gender dysphoria. That is, transgender students.

While the news reports emphasized that the policy aims to make transgender students comfortable, they omitted that the policy orders school employees to keep the gender dysphoria of students secret from their own parents.

As in New Haven’s and some other schools, now Hartford’s schools, not parents, will decide how a student’s gender dysphoria is to be handled.

Such policies may be politically correct but they are beyond arrogant, which is why they are prompting lawsuits throughout the country.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.