Commentary—

Ignoring The Real School Problem

By William A. Collins

Slashing preschools,

Surely fatal;

Education,

Starts prenatal.

Well, the long awaited and much disputed Mastery Test scores are finally in. So what do they show? Nothing much. They’re a lot like the last batch. A tweak of improvement here; a twinge of disappointment there. School boards, staff, and politicians everywhere are busy groping for some little spin to put a good face on their town’s numbers.

But despite all the spin, despite all the teaching to the test, despite Connecticut’s wealth and emphasis on education, despite the phony concerns of the No Child Left Behind Act, our schools remain pretty much the same year after year. Scores in the white suburbs still soar, while the minority cities still scrape along the bottom. In the tween-towns social battles fester over declining schools, as minority enrollments grow and more white parents move out.

All this tension carries a certain air of inevitability. As white birth rates decline, we invite ever more Latinos in to do our dirty work. They in turn have kids who get dumped as much as possible into increasingly segregated schools, along with the blacks who are already there. Nonetheless, some “leakage” of poor kids inevitably occurs into all but the most tightly restricted suburbs.

Then, in the face of growing numbers of “troubled” schools, white parents who can afford to, vote with their feet. Minority parents, in turn, mostly don’t vote at all, not that it would matter much. The legislature will stay controlled by the suburbs in any case.

The results of this scenario are dreary. Preschool and child care money from the state, programs that really could make a difference, often get cut. Budget shortfall, they say. Whenever the going gets tough, you know whose interests get slashed. This plutocratic system is surely no mystery to minority parents, but their needs are of little consequence to lawmakers or the media. Less yet to the president.

As cover for their inaction, the state and Washington further burden the schools with monstrosities like the Mastery Test and No Child Left Behind. These offer only a pretense of improving education. In reality they just shift resources from one pocket to another, and balloon suburban real estate values. But the media and the public do love numbers, meaningful or not, so that’s what we get. They’re cheaper than real change.

So what is it then that would actually bring about real change? Parents of rich kids know. They already sign up for the best prenatal care, the best child care, the best preschool, the best after-school, and the best nutrition. Who wouldn’t, if they could afford it? Those kids often go far in life, and if they don’t, they hear about it.

Then wouldn’t the smart thing to do politically be to provide all kids with at least decent prenatal care, child care, preschool, after-school, and nutrition. Well, no. The biggest beneficiaries of that scheme would be low-income folks, and higher income folks aren’t keen to see their tax dollars spent that way. Even if it meant that school performance would improve and they wouldn’t feel as impelled to move out of town. Besides, the kids of those richer taxpayers would already be graduated by the time any such reform had an impact.

Thus we continue, year after year, living in a world of pretense. Perhaps we think testing will somehow help, or that vouchers will do the job. Perhaps keeping slackers back a year will work. Worse luck, such simplistic tactics are never a cure. They simply provide policymakers with topics to maunder about, while quietly avoiding the fundamental issues of educational improvement.

(Columnist William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of Norwalk.)