Chris Powell: To fix higher education, fix lower education

Got any ideas that public schools could use to engage alienated students who are at risk of never getting much of an education or dropping out of high school? The Partnership for Connecticut, the organization created by billionaire couple Ray and Barbara Dalio and state government, wants to hear from you. The partnership especially wants to hear from schools about any programs and practices they use that really work.

Of course the inquiry is good but it's a little strange that it didn't start with the state Education Department and the General Assembly's Education Committee. For the problem of alienated students is an old one. But then maybe the partnership realizes that the Education Department and state legislators see education as mainly a matter of appropriating more money every year with most of it used only to increase staff compensation. At least the Education Department and legislators don't seem to have offered any more relevant ideas yet.

It's also a little strange that the Dalios would pledge $100 million over five years and state government would match it without knowing exactly how it would be spent. Could not inquiries about what works with disengaged students have been made and some conclusions drawn before appropriating all that money? Couldn't a few hearings have been held first?

Or was part of the idea of the Partnership for Connecticut to give educators more visions of sugarplums during the holidays?

Instead of searching for ways of remediating the failure of education with alienated students, the partnership might better start by investigating the causes of that alienation. After all, alienation extends far beyond students at special risk of dropping out of high school, since fully half of Connecticut's students graduate without ever mastering the basics.

Indeed, at this month's meeting of the partnership's board of directors, a few members mused about the main cause of educational failure -- that many students lack parents and a stable home life. Looking into this might be worth spending some money as long as the Education Department and the legislature won't do it.

While some teachers and school administrators may be mediocre, as some people in all occupations are, what if this widespread failure in education actually has little to do with education itself?

As the Partnership for Connecticut was announcing its search for ideas to engage alienated students, the Board of Regents for the state colleges and university system was implementing its own idea for improving education: free community college. Free for students anyway.

But free community college may not be as good for students as the board thinks, and at least the board admitted that the plan is also meant to stop the community college system's decline in enrollment and thereby preserve the jobs and compensation of its employees.

The problem with public higher education in Connecticut is lower education. Most students in public higher education must take remedial high school courses because of their social promotion. Their primary education was free and they did not value it, perhaps because schools long ago stopped requiring students to value it by taking it seriously, advancing them even as they showed contempt for it.

"What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly," Tom Paine wrote to exhort his countrymen to civic virtue 2½ centuries ago. "It is dearness only that gives everything its value."

So how much value should students ascribe to free community college when so much of it is only remedial free high school and elementary school

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

Chris Powell: No state is big enough to hold back a big business

Headquarters of United Technologies Pratt & Whitney unit, in East Hartford, Conn.

Connecticut has been more surprised than it should have been by the announcement from United Technologies Corp. that upon its merger with Raytheon Co. it will move its headquarters from Farmington to Raytheon's outside Boston, in Waltham.

As much as some politicians feared and others hoped that the move was prompted by the state's awful economic conditions, it wasn't. Rather the move was just another natural step in the evolution of a company that began a century ago as the Pratt & Whitney machine tool shop in Hartford.

The tool shop became a manufacturer of aircraft engines, merged with the predecessor of Boeing to become United Aircraft and Transport Corp., started making airplanes as well as their engines, was broken up by New Deal-era antitrust legislation, kept growing anyway, and became a conglomerate -- United Technologies -- that was heavily dependent on government contracts. As such UTC came to need political support outside Connecticut, so it diversified operations into other states and even other countries.

As a result UTC's employment in Connecticut, around 19,000, has declined to a fraction of what it was a few decades ago, and state government could have done little to prevent it. For these days no conglomerates and big government contractors are going to stick to one state. It's not just their need for national political influence for securing federal government business. It's also to avoid becoming hostage to any one predatory state government.

So Connecticut's economic future does not depend on the big companies already here. For the same reasons motivating UTC, they are more likely to expand out of state. Instead Connecticut's economic future depends on growth by smaller companies already here and entry here by companies elsewhere.

But good luck drawing or keeping anyone here while the most important thing state government has to offer anyone is the duty to share the burden of $70 billion or so in unfunded state and municipal employee retirement obligations -- that is, the duty to pay more in taxes every year [ITALICS] forever [END ITALICS] to sustain a pension-and-benefit society.

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SLUSH FUND MAY EXPLAIN IT: Maybe there's a good case for giving an exemption from state freedom-of-information and ethics laws to the Partnership for Connecticut, the entity just created by billionaires Ray and Barbara Dalio and state government in the name of improving public education. The Dalios are donating $100 million, state government is appropriating an equal amount, and more donations will be sought from other wealthy people.

But if there is a good case for the exemption, nobody is making it.

Spokeswomen for Governor Lamont and the Dalios insist that the partnership should be exempt from the accountability laws because it's not really a state agency. But it was created and funded by the new state budget, a majority of its board will be state officials, and it will dispense public money to public schools. Private entities don't need any provision in the state budget exempting them from FOI and ethics laws, since those laws apply only to government agencies.

So the budget writers thought the partnership would be considered a state agency subject to the accountability laws unless another law asserted, against the evidence, that it wasn’t a state agency.

Why did the budget bestow such an exemption and exactly who asked for it and why? The spokeswomen for the governor and the Dalios were asked about this more than a week ago but have declined to provide an answer. So here's a guess: The partnership will make a great slush fund.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.