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.
