The good news is that the flu virus in Connecticut is on the
wane, a bitter winter is hobbling off stage, birds are singing, and the sap is
rising in the trees. Spring has sprung.
The bad news, according to Donald Klepper-Smith, chief economist at Data Corp. Partners Inc., is that Connecticut has yet to
recover from a recession that ended elsewhere in the nation in February 2010,
nearly eight years ago. Since that time, the nation has more than doubled the
number of jobs lost during the recession, while Connecticut has recovered only
80 percent of its lost jobs.
Connecticut is suffering from a malingering economic flu.
“We see that the state’s economy is not likely to see full job recovery until
sometime in late 2019/2020,” Klepper-Smith predicts and, he adds ominously,
“odds are we’re likely to see a full blown U.S. recession before that time, if
history is any indication.”
Since Connecticut, always inattentive to spending, added an
income tax to its revenue stream in 1990, recessions in the state have lasted
about ten years. The back-to back national recession Klepper-Smith foresees in
Connecticut would mean that the state will have been in recession, with interment
intervals of spotty recovery, for three decades. And the life or death question
for future governors and legislators is this: What must be done to make Connecticut
recession-competitive with other states?
The obvious answer to the question is: The state must produce more jobs and jack up
its business activity, so that the economic sap once again will rise in its
vitals, the chill of lingering recessions will be dispelled, and the long
winter of our discontent will give way to a protracted economic spring.
The architects of our state’s dissolution, mostly
progressive politicians, must either accept responsibility for the wreckage or
be voted out of office. Living in the wreckage, it becomes difficult for anyone
with an eye to his own best interests to tolerate with equanimity the arsonist
running for office who has just set fire to his house. And there is the trick:
How do you convince the electorate to act rationally in its own best interest?
In some major cities, our public schools hardy function at
all—other than as holding pens for students who have not been taught by their
teachers how to read, write and do simple figures by the fourth grade. Many of
these “graduates” are now routinely passed along to colleges heavily fortified
with remedial instructors who pamper the students until they receive their
sheepskins and are tossed out to fall on the horns of an unforgiving business
world. This objection usually is met,
somewhat indignantly, by those who argue plausibly that Connecticut schools are
not all equally bad; there are some very good teachers in the worst schools,
which happen to be located, astoundingly, in fatherless urban ghettoes, where
young thirteen-year-old boys are shooting other thirteen-year-olds with guns
that have not yet been outlawed by Senators Dick Blumenthal and Chris Murphy.
Indeed, there are good teachers in bad schools. And there
are good schools in pedagogically depressed inner cities.
The Amistad Academy in New Haven,
the mother-school of Achievement First, a network of 32 public charter schools
in Connecticut, New York and Rhode Island serving students in grades K-12, are
rare miracles. Imagine – in these institutions, students do master basic
skills. One hundred percent of the students enrolled in an Achievement First
public charter school will gain acceptance to a college or university; 97
percent will matriculate; 50 percent are projected to graduate from
college. While this last figure may seem slight to some, the percentage is
larger than that of college graduates who had attended school at some of
Connecticut's most prestigious and successful high schools. Nor does the school
skim the crème de la crème of students from the public education system. Access
to Achievement First schools is non-discriminatory and much the same as that of
public schools.
In a rational world in which the best interests of urban
residents were met by urban politicians – nearly all progressive Democrats –
every underperforming public school would be dissolved and replaced with an
Achievement First school. But this will not happen, and the miracles cannot be
replicated.
In Connecticut – but significantly not in New York and Rhode
Island – state financing for charter schools is set about 17
percent lower than public school financing. And that is why
Achievement First, expanding in New York and Rhode Island, has been nipped in
the bud in Connecticut. This underfunding was hard-wired into the legislation
that launched charter schools by politicians who, slavishly devoted to powerful
union interests, poisoned at the root the successes of Connecticut’s most
successful urban pedagogical experiment. But we can be sure these same
politicians feel for urban kids locked into failing schools. Compassion
dripping from their lips, they feel – they really do. Why else would they
support remedial education in colleges and pass-along education in which
students emerging from colleges in Connecticut have been schooled but not
educated?
And so Connecticut’s remorseless political machine, stonily indifferent to
real problems, successful solutions and the greater good of its population,
continues to crank out false solutions and plastic tears -- mostly because, when push comes to shove,
the people of Connecticut do NOT act in their own best interests, but are
instead continually bewitched by political fantasies, glowing apparitions and the lure of past successful strategies that now worsen our conditions.
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