The 19th Century public school, since demolished, as it appeared on a 1911 postcard.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
There’s so much wrong with public education in Connecticut generally and with the
school system particularly that criticizing them doesn’t require making up stories. But that’s what the U.S. education secretary, Connecticut’s own Linda McMahon, did the other day to try to score a political point.
McMahon said the infamous case of the Hartford Public High School girl who was graduated illiterate and innumerate two years ago was the result of the school system's spending too much on "diversity, equity, and inclusion" initiatives, political correctness the Trump administration has been trying to stamp out.
McMahon's accusation is nonsense. Hartford did spend a little money on those things while the girl was going to high school but that wasn’t why she was graduated uneducated.
First, she was graduated uneducated because schools in Connecticut advance and graduate students uneducated as a matter of policy, social promotion. Schools in Connecticut have no academic proficiency requirements.
Second, school management in Hartford was incompetent and indifferent.
And third, the girl's parent didn’t make a public stink about her daughter's lack of education until she was given a high school diploma and there was money to be made with a lawsuit against the school system.
Of course school and union officials attribute the girl’s ignorance to a lack of money in Hartford’s school system. Yes, the system has thousands of "high needs" students who are more expensive to educate. But the school system also has been badly managed, as the Yankee Institute showed last year with its report about a "paraeducator" who is also president of the local paraeducators union and secretary-treasurer of the Connecticut AFL-CIO and who took nearly a full year of days off in her previous three years of employment, many of the days with pay for doing union political work, not school work.
Instead of making up a story about "diversity, equity, and inclusion," McMahon could have done some good by noting the school system's negligence and incompetence and the union official so frequently absent from her school job.
McMahon also could have noted that when the scandal about the uneducated girl broke in the press, the state education commissioner and the Hartford school superintendent promised to investigate and report about the case. They may have investigated but they never reported to the public and no one has ever been held accountable.
Gov. Ned Lamont, whose re-election campaign broadcasts commercials boasting that Connecticut has "the best schools in America," never demanded an explanation about the uneducated Hartford graduate, nor has he amended his commercials to acknowledge that Connecticut also has some of the worst schools in America.
Secretary McMahon could have pushed the governor, the state Education Department, and the Hartford school system to account for what happened with the uneducated graduate, who is hardly the only Connecticut student who has been graduated uneducated in recent years. Indeed, many if not most Connecticut students emerge from high school without high school-level proficiency, and that has nothing to do with DEI either. It’s state government’s lack of political will to enforce educational standards and require parents to take more responsibility for their children.
Expect More and Get More
Most educational achievement in Connecticut, as elsewhere, is a matter of parenting and household wealth. If children have two parents whose income can support their home without much stress, the kids will tend to get more upbringing, be healthier mentally and physically, and be more engaged in school.
Where children are raised by a single parent in poverty and live more neglected under financial and emotional stress, they tend to be indifferent students or, worse, demoralized, troubled, and disruptive. That is what is signified by the catastrophically low proficiency test scores and high chronic student absenteeism in the schools of the poorest municipalities.
The results of the few proficiency tests Connecticut administers to its public school students long have shown income and the extent of parenting as clearly as federal census data can. State government has long cynically misinterpreted the data to mean that the problems of poverty and inadequate parenting can be solved by throwing more money at schools and their unionized and politically active employees, though little if anything ever changes educationally. As a result most Connecticut students are not proficient in English and math when they graduate from high school, but school employees can afford nicer cars and remain loyal to the political regime.
Two months ago, in response to marginal improvements in the latest state proficiency test scores, the state Education Department's chief performance officer, Ajit Gopalakrishnan, offered one of the department's empty pieties. "Success is possible in any district and for any child," he said. "All students should be achieving these standards."
No one at the state Capitol asked: So why aren't they?
Pursuing that question would be too sensitive politically. It would indict neglectful parents and government policy that encourages neglect. It would call attention to all the money spent without educational improvement. It might even prompt people to wonder how the country can survive as a democracy amid ever-worsening literacy and ignorance.
But this doesn't mean that since the state education bureaucracy is timid and ineffectual, schools with impoverished students are helpless. To the contrary, an excellent account published two weeks ago by Connecticut's Hearst newspapers, written by a member of the Report for America organization, Colin Tiernan, provided insight about how East Hartford's schools have begun to improve proficiency despite a student population poverty rate of 60 percent.
In 10 years East Hartford's student proficiency in English has risen to 40 percent from 30 percent while proficiency in math has risen from to 34 percent from 17 percent. While these rates remain below the state average, they are markedly better than those in Connecticut's cities.
School Superintendent Thomas Anderson says "there is no magic" about it, no single factor. But the Hearst report found important hints.
East Hartford's immediate past superintendent, Nathan Quesnel, who ran the system from 2012 to 2023, says, "When we expect more, we get more from kids." Teachers echo the theme of expecting more and holding all students to a higher standard.
East Hartford state Rep. Jason Rojas, the House Democratic majority leader, thinks the unusual stability and longer tenure in the system's superintendent position in recent years has helped. Many superintendents in Connecticut are relatively short-termers.
East Hartford teachers say they are involving students more in class exercises, requiring them to work with classmates to find correct answers, which keeps them attentive, and teachers try not to go easy on students. But some students are troubled and sometimes need to be handled gently lest school lose them.
One student, a teacher said, "comes to me every morning not wanting to be here. I say, 'Thank God you're here. I would be so upset if you weren't here.' It's the hardest thing for her to have gotten here today, and here I am loading her down with fractions."
But, the teacher added, "If they know you love them, they'll do anything for you."
In that respect teachers, as always, often make up for what many children don't get at home -- the problem government can't bring itself to address: expecting more from parents.
MORE OMBUDSMEN, PLEASE: Recent days have shown Connecticut that it needs many more independent monitors of state government agencies and programs.
First the Correction Department’s ombudsman, DeVaughn Ward, exposed an abusive, incompetent, and unqualified prison doctor who had been chased away from medical jobs in two states before being hired to treat Connecticut’s prisoners. With an annual salary of $260,000, the doctor has been placed on paid administrative leave, presumably forever.
Then Mairead Painter of the nursing home ombudsman program in the state Department of Aging and Disability Services exposed a nursing home in East Windsor for having left the wound on a patient’s head swarming with maggots. Now he’ll probably need skin grafts. The failure was blamed on a lack of staffing, a problem at many nursing homes.
What might more ombudsmen might find in and around state government?
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government, politics and culture for many years (CPowell@cox.net).