Chris Powell: Of a Confederate flag and a corrupt former mayor
MANCHESTER, Conn. For a few days last month Connecticut’s Democratic state headquarters tried to make a scandal out of the Confederate flag being flown by a member of the Republican State Central Committee at his home in Berlin.
The man maintained that he flew the flag as a protest against political correctness, not as support of racial oppression. But Senate Republican Minority Leader Len Fasano, Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton, and Trumbull First Selectman Tim Herbst, among other leading Republicans, quickly condemned the gesture.
It was a tempest in a teacup, or a thimble, really, since a single member of the state committee of a political party that holds no statewide or congressional offices is of little consequence. The issue was just an excuse for Democratic headquarters to proclaim that since it had located a nutty Republican, all Republicans in Connecticut are nutty -- as if the state has no nutty Democrats.
Infinitely more remarkable is the silence surrounding former Bridgeport Mayor Joseph Ganim's candidacy for mayor again despite his extensive corruption in office, for which he served seven years in federal prison before his release in 2010.
Of course Bridgeport Mayor Bill Finch, facing Ganim in the Democratic primary in September, argues that his challenger's corruption should disqualify him. But all other leading Democrats in the state seem to be silent about Ganim. Thus the Democratic Party is suggesting that a bitter old crank's flying the Confederate flag is more of a disgrace to his party and more of a threat to society than someone who took bribes and kickbacks while presiding over the state's largest city and who may get the chance to do it again.
Last week, in a distressing irony, the ex-convict candidate was endorsed by Bridgeport's police union, apparently in the expectation that as mayor again Ganim would go easier on city employees than the incumbent.
Gov. Dan Malloy could quickly resolve the Bridgeport issue in favor of integrity in government by announcing that his administration would not cooperate with a Ganim administration and that if Bridgeport holds so little respect for itself and the state, it will be on its own. The governor's "second-chance society" initiative to rehabilitate nonviolent offenders, welcome as it is, doesn't rationalize degrading public office.
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A Connecticut Superior Court judge is being criticized for declining to issue a protective order to a woman whose boyfriend later threw their baby to his death from the Arrigoni Bridge, in Middletown. At a hearing the judge concluded that the evidence presented to him didn't support the request -- that the evidence showed that the couple's relationship was "chaotic" but not imminently threatening.
Maybe the judge was wrong about the evidence, but at least he reviewed it, while no one bothered to review it before criticizing him. Rather, the advocates of women against their crazy boyfriends and husbands simply presumed, as they always do, that a woman's accusation should be considered valid without any inquiry at all.
Lately these advocates have been making this argument in regard to guns owned by men against whom wives or girlfriends seek a protective order -- that such men should be required to surrender their guns before any hearing and finding, that simple accusation means guilt, and that ordinary due process of law is dispensable.
In the recent hysteria over gun crimes, even the governor and many state legislators, while sworn to uphold our constitutions, have also supported discarding due process.
But Connecticut can have due process and public safety in the normal way -- with formal criminal accusation, arrest, and speedy trials. Until Connecticut provides speedy trials in domestic cases, the state will be left with these calls for "Alice in Wonderland" justice: sentence first, verdict afterwards.
Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Conn.
Chris Powell: 'High-stakes tests' for high-stakes life
MANCHESTER, Conn. Connecticut's biggest teachers union, the Connecticut Education Association, is increasing its clamor against what it calls "high-stakes" testing of students and against the "Smarter Balanced" test in use by the state Education Department.
The union has complained that the test has technical problems. The union’s bigger objection is that there is too much standardized testing and that test preparation distracts from learning. But the union's definition of "high-stakes" testing shows that improving learning is not its objective at all.
As the union's executive director, Mark Waxenberg, explains it, a test is "high stakes" if its results can be compared and construed to mean that a student, teacher, or school is not proficient or, worse, is a failure, or if its results can jeopardize a school's funding.
By that definition any standardized test whose results are made public is a "high-stakes" test and the union can accept only tests whose results are secret. That is, the union's objective is, predictably enough, to deprive the public and its elected representatives of any independent measures of student, teacher, and school performance, making public only unstandardized and uncomparable measures provided by teachers and school administrators. In the CEA's system, all students and teachers, as in Lake Woebegon, will be above average.
As a practical matter there is no "high-stakes" testing in Connecticut's schools -- no testing whose results have serious consequences, none that determines student advancement from grade to grade and graduation from high school, none that figures in teacher evaluation, and none that determines school funding.
Instead, Connecticut's schools practice the social promotion of students. Nearly every student who shows up is given a high school diploma even if he has learned little.
While Gov. Dan Malloy once thought that student performance should be a factor in teacher evaluations, criticism from teacher unions caused him to back off. With its clamor against "high-stakes" testing -- that is, against any testing from which the public might draw meaningful conclusions -- the union seeks mainly to keep student performance out of teacher evaluations.
As for test results and school funding, the union has nothing to worry about. For state government's thinking long has been that the worse a school performs, the more funding it should get, on the mistaken premise that the main problem of education is schools rather than the growing neglect of children by their parents.
While the CEA's dissembling is tedious, teachers can't be blamed for not wanting to be judged by the performance of their students on tests when students themselves are not judged. Instead teachers can and must be blamed for not protesting the abandonment of academic standards, the results of which the CEA now strives to conceal lest they reflect unfairly on teachers.
For while there is no "high-stakes" testing of students in Connecticut, the stakes for the state itself could not be higher: Will we have an educated, self-sufficient, and civic-minded population or an increasingly ignorant proletariat unable to compete economically with the rest of the world, dependent on government income supports, and recognizing no obligation to sustain democratic institutions?
The costly consequences of Connecticut's abandonment of education standards are easy to see if hard to look at -- the failure of most students to master high school work before graduating and the growing number of unqualified students admitted to the state university system, which has institutionalized remediation. Connecticut now pays for 16 years of education but gets less than 12.
"High-stakes" testing in school is nothing to be disparaged. To the contrary, it will be crucial as long as life itself is for high stakes.
Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.
Don Pesci: Don't mess with New Britain
Don Pesci (donpesci@att.net) is a writer who lives in Vernon.