Chris Powell: Education disaster begins with parental neglect

Possible ways for such adverse childhood experiences as abuse and neglect to influence well-being through the lifespan, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

MANCHESTER, Conn.

August's Titanic Deck Chairs Rearrangement Award seems likely to be won by the Education Committee of New Haven's Board of Alders (aka the city council), which, according to the New Haven Independent, in the face of catastrophic student performance data, spent much of its last meeting debating reading-instruction techniques even as 58 percent of the city's public school students are classified as chronically absent.

At least the meeting produced admissions from Supt. Ilene Tracy that for two years student mental health and "social-emotional learning" have displaced academic instruction and that student behavior is now "atrocious."

So it may not be surprising that the shortage of teachers, a national problem, is especially bad in New Haven's schools, which have about 300 unfilled positions amid a steady drain of teachers to school systems where salaries and students are better.

Of course while their political correctness doesn't help, New Haven's educators are mainly just playing the hand they have been dealt. They can't choose their students or the parents of their students.

But the disaster of education in New Haven and Connecticut's other cities has continued long enough that the Board of Alders, city legislators (including the influential New Haven Democrat Martin M. Looney, president pro tem of the state Senate), the state education bureaucracy, and Governor Lamont should have noticed by now that it is entirely a matter of demographics, the perpetual poverty arising from child neglect at home.

Instead these leaders keep clamoring for more programs to remediate the neglect rather than to address its cause and thereby prevent it -- and these programs keep failing spectacularly and expensively.

It is all an old of story of public education, documented in 1966 by the sociologist James S. Coleman, of Johns Hopkins University, who was assigned by the U.S. Office of Education to interpret the mass of school data collected at the direction of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Coleman's most important conclusion was recounted this month by the writer Ian V. Rowe in National Review magazine. Coleman wrote:

“One implication stands out above all: That schools bring little influence to bear on a child's achievement that is independent of his background and general social context; and that this very lack of an independent effect means that the inequalities imposed on children by their home, neighborhood, and peer environment are carried along to become the inequalities with which they confront adult life at the end of school.”

Coleman did not conclude that schools themselves don't matter at all. To the contrary, he found that disadvantaged children perform better in schools with better students, where standards are higher and peers set better examples. But that too was a matter of getting the children away from the bad influences of their home life.

In this respect the Coleman report echoed the findings of the report a year earlier by another sociologist, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was then assistant U.S. labor secretary and who became a great U.S. senator. Moynihan blamed severe poverty and urban chaos on the breakdown of the family.

Indeed, the chronic absenteeism in New Haven's and other city school systems practically screams neglect of children by their parents, without even a whisper about teaching techniques.

If simply acknowledging the real problem in urban education in Connecticut is hard, it is harder still to imagine how politics would allow it to be addressed.

City officials and legislators cannot examine the causes of child neglect and educational failure without indicting their own constituents.

State officials can't examine the causes without indicting themselves for a welfare system that destroys the family while putting thousands of unionized and politically active "helpers" on the government payroll.

Educators, also numerous, unionized, and politically active, can't do it without calling more attention to their irrelevance and impugning their employment.

Academics like Coleman and Moynihan did it and some keep doing it, and journalism can call attention to their work. But if the trend toward illiteracy and ignorance keeps accelerating, there will be no one left to read it, much less act on it.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester. He can be reached at CPowell@JournalInquirer.com.