Triumphs over the Malloy administration are being proclaimed by a couple of Republican state legislators.
State Sen. Toni Boucher of Wilton, a candidate for governor, exults that she compelled the state police to disclose that they spent almost $14,000 to send three state troopers with Gov. Malloy on a political fundraising trip to California.
And state Rep. Penny Bacchiochi of Stafford, a candidate for lieutenant governor, drawing on investigative reporting by the Yankee Institute, notes that state government’s medical insurance exchange, Access Health CT, spent $79,000 on three murals for its offices.
But these days a governor hardly can go to the bathroom without a guard. And while those murals are in the totalitarian and didactic style beloved of the political left and are certainly extravagances, complaints about them would be more persuasive coming from a party that embraced the principle of getting everyone insured.
Besides, even as Boucher and Bacchiochi were complaining about state spending of less than $100,000, the governor was announcing another expensive modification of state government’s settlement of the Sheff vs. O’Neill school integration lawsuit.
The modification is state government’s pledge to move about 1,900 more Hartford students into racially integrated settings in the next school year. This may raise the percentage of Hartford students in integrated schools by 2% to 44%.
The Sheff settlement continues to mock the state Supreme Court’s decision in the case 17 years ago, even if that decision deserves mockery, since it held that every student in Connecticut has a state constitutional right to an integrated education, a right impossible to secure without racial assignment of students that would be unconstitutional federally and without massive transfers of students in every town that would bankrupt the state. This supposed constitutional right of all students is being applied to less than half the students in only one town, so it’s really not a constitutional right at all.
Indeed, it’s the governor, a Democrat, rather than Republicans who is beginning to talk, if delicately, about the futility of the Sheff approach to education. Announcing the settlement modification, Malloy noted that state government’s response to the Sheff case — school choice programs and regional “magnet” schools — already has cost $2.5 billion.
“Over the next year,” the governor said, “it will be important to take a hard look at what’s changed since this case was decided — to listen to parents, students, and the community; to acknowledge the complex demographic changes in the region; and to focus, first and foremost, on making a quality education available to every child.”
While the Supreme Court’s Sheff decision did not purport to require a “quality” education for every child but rather a racially integrated one, not even the Sheff plaintiffs take that seriously anymore. Indeed, some parents in Hartford complain that Sheff policy is hurting most city schools and students, removing better students to the regional schools and leaving the remaining schools with a larger share of terrible students, neglected kids from broken homes, who have to go somewhere and drag schools down wherever they go.
That’s really why regional schools have been tolerated politically throughout the state: They are primarily mechanisms not for racial integration at all but for allowing more conscientious parents to get their kids away from the kids who drag schools down.
Meanwhile standardized tests keep showing that in many Connecticut schools half the students do not perform at grade level but are still promoted and eventually given high school diplomas anyway. The billions in Sheff spending have purchased no more learning than integration.
Education in Connecticut is a far bigger issue — a catastrophe, really — than the governor’s travel and a few Stalinist murals. Much bigger, it seems, than Republican minds can comprehend.
Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.