School policy audit: Billions have bought failure

Congratulations, Connecticut, and congratulations particularly to Connecticut’s liberals. The verdict on three decades of state educational policy — from the state Supreme Court’s 1977 decision in the school financing case of Horton vs. Meskill, to the teacher salary-raising Education Enhancement Act of 1986, to the 1996 state Supreme Court decision in the school integration case of Sheff vs. O’Neill — was rendered recently by the Connecticut Commission on Educational Achievement.

Connecticut, the commission announced, now has the country’s worst “achievement gap� between middle-class and affluent students, on the one hand, and students from poor families on the other.

That is, the billions spent over three decades in the name of school equalization and integration have accomplished nothing or even made things worse — for students anyway. Only teachers, to whom most of the money was given, may consider this educational policy to have been a success.

Perhaps sensing that its findings risk sparking surly questions, the educational achievement commission’s chairman, Greenwich business executive Steven J. Simmons, said the commission’s recommendations, expected to be published in October, likely would include reorganizing educational spending, moving it around rather than increasing it.

“Perhaps the most important thing affecting educational achievement,� Simmons said, “is having better teaching.�

Of course better teaching is always possible and valuable but it is far from the most important way of addressing the achievement gap. As Connecticut no longer has any excuse not to realize, billions in increased spending now having been shown to have accomplished nothing for students, schools themselves actually have very little to do with the achievement gap. Most of it is simply poverty itself, and most of that results particularly from childbearing outside marriage, fatherlessness correlating overwhelmingly with failure in school and destructive conduct throughout life.

Unfortunately, reorganizing school spending means more coddling and remediation of the anti-social behavior at the root of the achievement gap — more special attention to neglected children at the expense of the children of responsible parents, more dumbing down and slowing down of education generally, as if education in Connecticut hasn’t already been dumbed and slowed down enough.

Reducing Connecticut’s rate of childbearing outside marriage by even 10 percent would do more to close the achievement gap than spending again all the money spent since Horton vs. Meskill in the name of equalizing education.

Liberals used to be ardent about addressing the causes of social problems rather than the symptoms. But that was before there were great professional careers in government in remediation — not just in education but also in social work, babysitting those fatherless and often neglectful and abusive households, and in prisons, where so many products of those households end up.

Nobody would ever gain from eliminating poverty except the poor themselves, even as many affluent people would lose out.

The Republican nominee for governor, Tom Foley, has criticized the Democratic nominee, Dan Malloy, for walking the picket line with striking nursing home workers a few weeks ago. Malloy, Foley charges, has made a deal with unions.

But it’s not a deal; Malloy has just demonstrated sympathy, a bit of posturing, even as he also acknowledges that state government’s finances are desperate and it has to economize.

The interesting thing here is that the nursing home workers are not public employees and are not represented by those over-influential public employee unions, even as they are entirely dependent on state appropriations, most nursing home payments coming from government because most nursing home patients are at least technically indigent and underwritten by Medicaid.

Democratic candidates for state office usually express support for nursing home workers but seldom at appropriations time, when state government takes good care of state and municipal employees while telling nursing homes that there’s no extra money for them and thus no money for raises for their workers.

Nursing home work doesn’t require a lot of education and training, so labor for it is always abundant even as hard times have made labor even more abundant. Malloy noted that some of those striking nursing home workers are earning only $12 or $14 per hour even after 20 years on the job. But the next Democrat who says public employees should sacrifice so nursing home workers can be elevated a little will be the first.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.