Chris Powell: Immigration exceeds assimilation

According to the Center for Immigration Studies, 20 percent of this country's population now speaks at home a language other than English, up 34 percent since 1990. This indicates that immigration is exceeding the country's ability to assimilate immigrants into its culture. 

Another indication was the recent  terrorist attack in New York, where an immigrant from Uzbekistan is reported to have shouted “God is great” in Arabic after driving a truck over a score of people, killing eight and injuring many more.

A  recent rally in Hartford  in support of an illegal immigrant whose deportation order is close to being enforced also suggested that immigration is out of control. That's because the crowd chanted, "Undocumented! Unafraid!" 

Of course, illegal immigrants are afraid. But to pretend that they are not afraid is to suggest that no immigration law should be enforced and that the country should have no borders. That would be the end of the country, and if illegal immigrants want that to seem to be their objective, they will encourage more deportations.

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Bridgeport, most of whose students graduate from high school without ever mastering English and math, many of them getting diplomas though they are functionally illiterate, has decided to make them take a course in African-American studies, Caribbean and Latin American studies, or "Perspectives on Race."

"It is going to make a great deal of difference to our children and families," the vice chairwoman of the city's Board of Education, Sauda Baraka, told the Connecticut Post. "It will really help us with the learning process. Cultural competency has been shown to change the direction of young people and make them more interested in learning."

Connecticut can only hope so, since if anything done in public schools substantially improves the motivation of the disadvantaged, neglected and fatherless children of the cities, it does not seem to have been attempted yet.

Of course, to some extent the new courses represent political pandering, since Bridgeport's students and their parents are overwhelmingly from racial and ethnic minorities, about half Hispanic and a third black. But political tampering in education isn't peculiar to the city. A couple of decades ago a law was passed to require the state Education Department to prepare and offer to local schools curriculums in not just African-American and Puerto Rican history but also the Irish potato famine, since some politically influential people of Irish descent still carried a grudge about it.

The sad thing is that if the education of poor city kids was ever likely, and if education elsewhere in Connecticut was ever more serious (student performance in most towns isn't so much better than in Bridgeport), the histories of the country's minority groups would be crucial additions for students of  all backgrounds. (The Asians should be included too, even though they don't whine as much politically.)

For inevitably the teaching of history has been skewed toward the ethnic majority, even though what most redeems the country is its heroic if uneven trudge toward democracy, equality and inclusion.

Will Bridgeport teach the history of racial and ethnic minorities as more cause for perpetual grievance, resentment, and dependence -- that is, teach it as mere political pandering? 

Or will this history be taught as cause for inspiration, achievement, and respect for those whose sacrifice and persistence amid adversity made the country better not just for their own groups but for everyone else too -- made it, indeed, the hope of the world?

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The state's biggest teacher union, the Connecticut Education Association, is back on television with a 30-second commercial asserting that "well-resourced public schools and dedicated teachers unlock our children's potential."

This treacle may invite viewers to recall the engraving on the statue of college founder Emil Faber in the movie Animal House: "Knowledge is good."

But apparently the CEA wants viewers to construe it to mean that even as Connecticut's economic and demographic decline worsens and sacrifices begin to be extracted throughout government, including sacrifices from the most innocent needy, teacher unions should be given whatever they want -- for the sake of the children, of course.

Yes, teachers and knowledge are good, but their price has to be weighed like everything else and it's possible even for them to cost too much, no matter how much political influence the union exerts in every town and how much advertising it can afford.

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.

Chris Powell: Connecticut's no-stakes testing

Connecticut's biggest and, after the liquor stores, most venal special interest, the Connecticut Education Association, the teachers union, is spending $250,000 on a television advertising campaign urging elimination of "high-stakes" testing of students in the state's public schools.

By "high-stakes testing" the union means any testing that might have consequences for students and especially for teachers. The union argues that there's now so much testing that it severely distracts from teaching and learning. The union wants to replace "high-stakes" testing with what it calls "progress tests" whose scoring would diminish right and wrong answers -- measures of knowledge -- and instead measure things like how students get along with others.

That is, tests would not be standardized, their results would not be comparable across schools and school systems, scoring would be arbitrary, teachers would be in charge of it and in charge of determining how the performance of their students was presented, test data would become meaningless or misleading, and what remains of accountability in public education in Connecticut would be destroyed.

Still, the union is right about "high-stakes" testing but for the wrong reason.

For despite the CEA's complaints, there really isn't that much federally or state-mandated standardized testing in Connecticut's schools, just one annual test for grades 3 through 8 and then just one test in high school. While high school also involves college admission tests, these are discretionary and not numerous anyway.

If a single "high-stakes" test every year is convulsing Connecticut's schools, it may be because students are not learning much. In 2010 a state study found that two-thirds of the freshmen in the state community college and university systems were being required to take remedial English or math or both. Last year a test of Connecticut high school seniors, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, reached a similar conclusion -- that half had not mastered high school English and two-thirds had not mastered high school math. Yet nearly everyone was given a high school diploma anyway.

That's because the unacknowledged policy of public education in Connecticut is never to hold students to standards but to promote them from grade to grade even if they fail to learn and to keep them in school even if they are disruptive or dangerous. (Educators lately have been celebrating a decline in arrests of students in school as if this equates to a decline in disruption rather than its acceptance.) Educators have decided that eliminating standards and dumbing down everything is better than hurting anyone's feelings, that awarding diplomas that are only embossed lies is better than education.

Students know this -- know that their learning has no bearing on their advancement in school, that their tests are polite fictions, and that they will be graduated no matter what they do short of manslaughter.

Teachers know this as well and don't want to be judged by the performance of their students when students themselves can't be judged by it. But teachers lack the courage to protest the destruction of standards. Instead with its new advertising campaign the CEA proposes concealment of the disaster.

Connecticut's "high-stakes" testing system should be scrapped not because it is too much of a burden on students and teachers, as the CEA pretends, and not because teachers object to serious and independent evaluation, but because it is a deception, implying standards that were discarded long ago.

Of course state and federal law will still require administering to students every year something posing as a test, but teachers could be assured, as students already are, that the results will not be held against them. Education in Connecticut then can remain what it has become, the problem of employers -- if any stick around. Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

Chris Powell: They're happy to flee family on Thanksgiving

MANCHESTER, Conn.Thanksgiving, some  Connecticut Democratic state legislators said at a press conference the 
other day, is when Americans should be with their families, and so state law 
should require retailers open on the holiday to pay their employees a punitive 
doubletime and a half. 

The sentiment is lovely but it's a hallucination -- because for every big-box 
retail store employee who wishes that he didn't have to work on Thanksgiving 
there are a thousand people clogging the aisles of his store thrilled to have 
gotten  away from their families, many of them having 
already attended a high-school football game and many others planning to go to 
the movies afterward. 

Who will introduce the legislation requiring the shoppers to stay home so  that the 
retail employees can stay home too? By what necessity does the government get so 
intrusive in people's personal lives? 

General working conditions have been government's domain for decades, but the 
country already has minimum-wage and overtime laws. With more people shopping 
than working in retailing on Thanksgiving, why obstruct democracy? 

Further, why, with a doubletime-and-a-half law, drive up the costs of 
bricks-and-mortar retailing, which pays plenty of state sales and local property 
taxes, and thereby give more advantage to Internet retailing, which doesn't? 

The Thanksgiving doubletime proposal is just more pious pandering to a special 
interest at the expense of the public interest. 

But pandering to special interests pays well in Connecticut politics, as 
suggested by the announcement this week from the Connecticut Education 
Association, the state's biggest teachers union, that it will hire Senate 
President Pro Tem Donald E. Williams Jr. as its deputy policy director when he 
leaves office in January. 

"Don is a strong advocate for public education and teachers," CEA President 
Sheila Cohen declared, which was to say that during his 22 years in the General 
Assembly Williams has been a reliable vote for the union. While state law 
forbids Williams from accepting money for lobbying state government until he has 
been out of office for a year, nothing prevents him from advising the union's 
lobbyists until the revolving door is unlocked. 

But if Williams has been a tool of the teachers, most Democratic legislators 
are, and if this ever bothered his constituents, they could have replaced him -- 
at least if newspapers and rival candidates had dared to make the point. 
Further, government in Connecticut is now so pervasive and legislative salaries 
so low that almost any employment undertaken by a legislator may present 
opportunities to exploit his office and increase his incentive to be a tool for 
somebody. 

Still, it's a matter of degree, and since no special interest is bigger than the 
CEA, Williams's new job can't help smelling like a payoff, especially since he 
does not seem to have been eager to pursue a career in private industry -- not 
that there is much private industry left in his part of 
the state, northeastern Connecticut. 

A few months ago Williams applied for the presidency of Quinebaug Valley 
Community College, in Killingly, near his home in Thompson on the Rhode Island 
border. Every cynic in the state was stunned that this  
payoff didn't come through, stunned that the community college board hired 
someone else, someone with a background in education -- though of course even a 
former politician might have a better grasp of the real world than a career 
educator. 

But at least the Senate Democrats have found a sinecure for Williams. Now they 
have to figure out what to do with state Sen. Andrew Maynard, of Stonington, 
hospitalized incommunicado for months with a serious brain injury two years 
short of his state pension qualification. How much really can be asked of the 
CEA? 

So could any of the big corporations that have received millions in "economic 
development" money from the Democratic state administration just to stick around 
use a deputy policy director? 

 
Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.