Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Learning in K-12 is not improving. Announced last week are the latest NAEP reading scores for 4th grade--they remain unchanged—and for the 8th grade—up only one point in a year. For both subjects, scores are up only 4 points since 1992. The scores are bad news for the long-term growth of our economy. Learning is not going up but spending is. Education spending in the U.S. on K-12 has gone up from $375 per pupil to $9,305 between 1960 to 2005. It has been established for decades that more money does not mean more learning. More money is also not the solution for poor-performing schools. In the Kansas City District, judicial mandates forced Missouri state taxpayers to finance the schools well above the national average. There were Olympic-size swimming pools, Montessori schools, and performing arts schools to attract students from the suburbs. But in ten years enrollment was down by half as 18,000 students dropped out for charter schools and the suburbs. The buildings are half em...

Edith Prague, D-Columbia, the co-chairwoman of the legislature’s labor and public employees committee, is to unions, roughly, what Robespierre and the sans culottes were to the French Revolution. It was only a matter of time before the destructors-elect of urban public education should turn their eyes towards the further destruction of Catholic and private education in Connecticut. Prague is the author of a stupid bill that would, according to most news accounts, “empower Catholic school teachers to bargain collectively.” No doubt that is how the bill was described in the press release media outlets uncritically reproduce in their stories. The bill would unionize Catholic school teachers. If Prague’s bill is enacted by the legislature, it would in fact drive up costs, largely by increasing the salaries of Catholic school teachers to such a point as to cause the closure of yet more urban parochial schools that are an embarrassment to public schools -- because Catholic schools provide a ...