Back to the marshes
“Sunlight and Shadow: The Newbury (Mass.) Marshes” (oil on canvas), by Martin Johnson Heade (1819-1904).
'Tis May now in New England
And through the open door
I see the creamy breakers,
I hear the hollow roar.
Back to the golden marshes
Comes summer at full tide,
But not the golden comrade
Who was the summer's pride.
— “Tis May Now in New England,’’ by Bliss Carman (1861-1929), Canadian poet who lived most of his life in the United States.
Sincerity demanded?
“New England is different; its literature is different. For instance, it is an American trait not to be as sensitive, socially and culturally, as New England is. Yankees are terrified of being snubbed or, worse, patronized. Sincerity is not merely appreciated, it is demanded. In a famous example given I think by {historian} Bernard DeVoto, the lost tourist leans from his car window and says, with the gruffness, possibly, of embarrassment, ‘I want to get to St. Johnsbury! {Vt.}’
“After a pause, one of the men sitting on the {general} store steps says, mildly, ‘We’ve no objection.’’’
— From Thomas Williams’s forward to New Fiction from New England (1986)
Beasts abound
Copy of English map of the Piscataqua River; on the border of Maine and New Hampshire, c. 1670
Chris Powell: Illegal-immigration backers ignore its enormous costs
Net migration rates per 1,000 people in 2023, showing flows to more affluent nations, in blue, from poorer nations.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Last week two groups supporting illegal immigration, Connecticut Voices for Children and the Immigration Research Initiative, issued a report warning that mass deportation of the state's illegal-immigrant population -- estimated at as many as 150,000 people -- would be disastrous for the state's economy and state government. The report claimed that illegal immigrants pay more than $400 million in state taxes each year.
This was at best a dodgy estimate. Many illegal immigrants are children and are not employed. The adults among them cannot work legally and so most of their earnings cannot be tracked. While anyone who spends money in Connecticut is likely to pay sales taxes, the report acknowledges that nearly all illegal immigrants who work in Connecticut hold low-wage jobs.
So what they buy is mainly for subsistence, like food, which is exempt from sales tax.
But the bigger flaw in the report is that it omits anything about the costs of illegal immigration in Connecticut, which are huge and increasing, particularly on account of the state government medical insurance being extended to them and the education of their children, most of whom don't speak English and enter the state's schools without providing any record of their education elsewhere and so need to be laboriously evaluated for placement. These students have exploded expenses in the schools of Connecticut's “sanctuary cities," which in turn seek much more financial support from state government.
In February the Yankee Institute, drawing on estimates from the Federation for American Immigration Reform, contended that illegal immigration costs Connecticut more than $1 billion a year.
Whatever the true cost, that it likely weighs heavily against illegal immigration became clear when Governor Lamont, a supporter of the state's “sanctuary’’ policies, disputed the Yankee Institute estimate even as he conceded to a journalist that he had no idea what illegal immigrants cost state government. The governor referred the journalist to the state budget office, which said it had no idea of the cost either and wasn't going to find out.
That is, advocates and apologists for illegal immigration in Connecticut don't want to know its costs, and, worse, don't want the public to know either.
The report from Connecticut Voices for Children and the Immigration Research Initiative is defective in other ways. It asserts that if Connecticut lacked illegal immigrants it would experience a severe shortage of workers for the low-wage jobs they hold -- especially in construction, restaurants, agriculture, janitorial work, and beauty shops.
This is the cliche that illegal immigrants do jobs citizens won't do, and it is nonsense.
Citizens will do almost any job if wages are high enough and can compete with the welfare benefits available to them. Indeed, the jobs held by illegal immigrants are so poorly paid in large part precisely because illegal immigrants are available to do them without the wage,
benefit and labor protections required for citizens. Raise agricultural salaries enough and even some teachers, charity organization workers, and journalists in Connecticut may be tempted to return to picking shade tobacco as many did as teenagers.
Connecticut is full of low-skilled citizen labor. With its social-promotion policy, public education makes sure of that.
For years the state's manufacturers have lamented that they can't find skilled workers for tens of thousands of openings. Meanwhile, middle-aged single mothers are not working at fast-food drive-through windows because they are so highly skilled. But jobs requiring lesser skills are where young people are supposed to start, not remain as adults.
So Connecticut doesn't need to import more low-skilled workers, especially since the state has failed so badly with its housing supply. The state needs to find ways of raising skills and wages and reducing the cost of living, especially the cost of housing, for its legal residents.
But the report from the apologists for illegal immigration sees the path to prosperity as a matter of legalizing all illegal immigrants, in effect reopening the borders. It didn't work the first time.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Nature in Your Dreams
Pastel by Steve Chase, in show “Steve Chase: A Singular Vision,’’ at Ava Gallery and Art Center, Lebanon, N.H., through June 6.
Subject them to ‘Good Principles’
Noah Webster in 1833.
“To the Friends of Literature in the United States,” Webster's prospectus for his first dictionary of the English language, 1807-1808.
“The foundation of all free government and all social order must be laid in families and in the discipline of youth. Young persons must not only be furnished with knowledge, but they must be accustomed to subordination and subjected to the authority and influence of good principles. It will avail little that youths are made to understand truth and correct principles, unless they are accustomed to submit to be governed by them.”
—Noah Webster (1758-1843), of Connecticut, lexiographer (of dictionary fame), early textbook developer, political writer and author.
People over time
“Dinner Series: Lights Out, Chilmark, MA, July 5, 1998” (pigment print), by Stephen DiRado, in his show “Better Together: Four Decades of Photographs,’’ at the Fitchburg (Mass.) Art Museum, through June 1.
— Courtesy of the artist.
The museum says:
“Throughout his career, DiRado has worked in series, usually spanning many years and involving thousands of images, creating and representing communities of people in Worcester and Martha’s Vineyard. His photographic practice is intimately intertwined with his life – DiRado carries a camera everywhere and makes photographs every day. He operates within many of the great art historical traditions – portraiture, landscape, still life, and the nude. Through an aesthetic that combines realism and symbolism, he evokes deep human emotions like joy, melancholy, boredom, sensuality, vulnerability, compassion, and most of all, love. DiRado also creates images of the night sky, connecting celestial events with human culture.’’
Remembering Hillbilly Ranch
— Photo courtesy of the Boston Landmarks Commission
Edited from a Boston Guardian article
(New England Diary’s editor, Robert Whitcomb, is chairman of The Boston Guardian.)
Boston may be the hub of the universe, but it’s a thousand miles north of Nashville’s Grand Old Opry.
In the 1960s and 1970s, however, Park Square’s Hillbilly Ranch brought live country and western music to the city and helped Boston make its modest mark on the country- music landscape.
From 1960 to 1980, the Hillbilly Ranch was the only venue in Boston devoted to country music.
Something of a landmark with its stockade fence façade, the bar’s patrons could hear live country, western and bluegrass five nights a week. The bulk of the entertainers were locally based acts transplanted from across the south, but the bar also hosted performances by legends like Johnny Cash and Loretta Lynn.
The Hillbilly Ranch found success from the moment it opened its doors, tapping into two trends rapidly changing the face of the city. In the 1940s and 1950s, Americans from rural areas poured into cities where jobs were more plentiful. Boston was no exception, particularly in the wake of World War II and the Korean War. Boston, after all, was a major military center and (albeit declining) industrial center. These transplants had nowhere in Boston to hear the music they grew up on.
“In Boston, there were the shipyards in Charlestown and Quincy and factories all over town,” said photographer Henry Horenstein, a documentarian of country music history. “People came here for work, but at night they wanted a place to go out and hear their music.”
Soon after the Hillbilly Ranch opened its doors, Boston began demolishing Scollay Square, pushing the red-light district into the Combat Zone. Situated where the State Transportation Building now stands, the Hillbilly Ranch found an immediate clientele in the soldiers and sailors who frequented the area.
The bar was enough of a fixture on country’s national touring circuit that it was immortalized in a John Lincoln Wright song following its closure in 1980:
They tore down the Hillbilly Ranch The wrecking ball blew it away
They put up a government building The Hillbilly’s gone away.
Yet the Hillbilly’s influence on American music has not gone away. While New England has never been a fertile breeding ground for country musicians, the bar provided a home for the city’s small country scene throughout the 60s and 70s. These artists profoundly influenced Boston’s exploding folk revival scene in the 60s, and many of those musicians began mixing bluegrass and other rural American styles into their sound.
Two friends from Massachusetts founded Rounder Records in 1970 to give those artists a platform, launching the style that would eventually be known as “roots” or “Americana,” along with the careers of artists from George Thorogood and Bela Fleck to Alison Krauss.
“They discovered these folk singers that connected country and old time mountain music and bluegrass music,” said Horenstein. “They saved that music for posterity.”
William Morgan: Haunting Stories from Cemetery in Bucolic Connecticut town
Scotland, a small town in northeastern Connecticut, was terra incognita until my wife, Carolyn, and I discovered it on a recent Sunday drive. Perhaps not the Edenic remembrance of first settler Isaac Magoon’s native Caledonia, but some time spent in the Windham County farming community revealed a modest treasure.
Set amongst some of the most bucolic topography of New England, with rolling hills, working farms, and an exceptional array of Cape Cod cottages, as well as Colonial and Greek Revival domestic architecture. The highlight of this gentle landscape was the steep hillside burial ground that contains two centuries of the town’s dead.
Old Scotland Cemetery North on Devotion Road. (There is a newer cemetery half a mile south.)
One stone from the late 18th Century is identified as a cenotaph, that is, a marker for someone who’s body is buried elsewhere, in the this case, the Caribbean Island of St. Lucia. Scotland may have been isolated, but it was not provincial. There are three standard Civil War graves stones, but surely these, too, lack the physical remains of the young men they memorialize.
During the first half of 1862, Union General (and Rhode Islander) Ambrose Burnside, employing New England regiments, tried to shut down Confederate blockade-running operations along the Outer Banks. Amos Weaver was presumably wounded in the Battle for Roanoke Island, dying of his wounds five days later.
The government-issue marble stones are the exception in Old Scotland. Most of the dead here lie beneath sandstone, a rarity when one recalls the typical slate steles of 18th-Century New England. Scotland had more than one artisanal stone carver. Joseph Manning and his sons Rockwell and Frederick contributed tombstones to the area for over six decades. It was John Walden, however, who provided Scotland with unique round faces.
Thomas, aged 1 year and 8 months, Anne lived but 2 hours, and Eunice expired at less than 3 months, 1795-99.
“Those little wondrous miniatures of man.
Form’d by unerring wisdom of perfect plan.
Those little strangers from eternal night.
Emerging from life’s immortal light.”
Mother of Thomas, Anna, and Eunice, 1805. Walden’s signature circular visage is almost subsumed by a weeping tree, and illuminated by a ghost-like lamp. Note the stylized wings of the departed.
“Mrs Bethiah, Consort to Capt Saml Morgan. Departed this Life Feb. 2d 1800, in the 61st Year of her age.
Left numerous offspring to Lament their loss.” Walden’s angel wings roll around the semicircle as decorative curtains.
Lydia Ripley was 79 when she departed this life in 1784. Primitive, unsophisticated, but powerful.
Providence-based writer and photographer William Morgan has written extensively about New England architecture and other art, townscape and landscape. His latest book is The Cape Cod Cottage (Abbeville Press).
Old Scotland Cemetery North
Scotland, a small town in northeastern Connecticut was terra incognita until Carolyn and
I discovered it on a recent Sunday drive. Perhaps not the Edenic remembrance of first settler
Isaac Magoon’s native Caledonia, but some time spent in the Windham County farming
community revealed a modest treasure. Set amongst some of the most bucolic topography of
New England, with rolling hills, working farms, and an exceptional array of Cape Cod cottages,
as well as Colonial and Greek Revival domestic architecture. The highlight of this gentle
landscape was the steep hillside burial ground that contains two centuries of the town’s dead.
Old Scotland Cemetery North on Devotion Road. (There is a newer cemetery half a mile south.)
One stone from the late 18 th century is identified as a cenotaph, that is, a marker for
someone who’s body is buried elsewhere, in the this case, the Caribbean Island of St. Lucia.
Scotland may have been isolated, but it was not provincial. There are three standard Civil War
graves stones, but surely these, too, lack the physical remains of the young men they
memorialize.
During the first half of 1862, Union General (and Rhode Islander) Ambrose Burnside, employing New England regiments,
attempted to shut down blockade-running operations along the Outer Banks. Amos Weaver was
presumably wounded in the Battle for Roanoke Island, dying of his wounds five days later.England regiments,
attempted to shut down blockade-running operations along the Outer Banks. Amos Weaver was
presumably wounded in the Battle for Roanoke Island, dying of his wounds five days later.
The government-issue marble stones are the exception in Old Scotland. Most of the dead
here lie beneath sandstone, a rarity when one recalls the typical slate steles of 18 th -century New
England. Scotland had more than one artisanal stone carver. Joseph Manning and his sons
Rockwell and Frederick contributed tombstones to the area for over six decades. It was John
Walden, however, who provided Scotland with unique round faces.
Thomas, aged 1 year and 8 months, Anne lived but 2 hours, and Eunice expired at less than 3 months,
1795-99.
Those little wondrous miniatures of man.
Form’d by unerring wisdom of perfect plan.
Those little strangers from eternal night.
Emerging from life’s immortal light.
Mother of Thomas, Anna, and Eunice, 1805. Walden’s signature circular visage is almost subsumed by a
weeping tree,
illuminated by a ghost-liked lamp. Note the stylized wings of the departed.
“Mrs Bethiah, Consort to Capt Saml Morgan. Departed this Life Feb. 2d 1800, in the 61 st Year of
her age.
Left numerous offspring to Lament their loss.” Walden’s angel wings roll around the semicircle as
decorative curtains.
Lydia Ripley was 79 when she departed this life in 1784. Primitive, unsophisticated, but
powerful.
Providence-based writer and photographer, William Morgan, has written extensively about New
England architecture and art, townscape and landscape. His latest book is The Cape Cod Cottage
‘Quiet disruption’
“Peace Offering III’’ (mixed fabricated and foraged materials on canvas), by Luanne E. Witkowski, in her show “Quiet Disruption,’’ at Kingston Gallery, Boston, June 1-30.
She says:
“This is my peace offering, a quiet distraction, amidst the constant noise and chaos…
“There is so much beauty in this world that these works invite us all to live and fight for. My work combines my love for nature’s endless transitions and transformations, of changing color, temperature, drama with the practice of being in the studio with my assorted materials and wild foraged collections.’’
“It is a message of quiet disruption; a respite amidst the whirling storm raging all around that remembers ‘I am here.”’
Michael Anteby: In praise of Bureaucracy
Michel Anteby is a professor of management and organizations and sociology at Questrom School of Business & College of Arts and Sciences at Boston University.
Michel Anteby was during a decade a member of the Massachusetts Commission on LGBTQ Youth and a former Vice-Chair, and then Chair of the Commission.
From The Conversation (except for image above)
BOSTON
It’s telling that U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration wants to fire bureaucrats. In its view, bureaucrats stand for everything that’s wrong with the United States: overregulation, inefficiency and even the nation’s deficit, since they draw salaries from taxpayers.
But bureaucrats have historically stood for something else entirely. As the sociologist Max Weber argued in his 1921 classic “Economy and Society,” bureaucrats represent a set of critical ideals: upholding expert knowledge, promoting equal treatment and serving others. While they may not live up to those ideals everywhere and every day, the description does ring largely true in democratic societies.
I know this firsthand, because as a sociologist of work I’ve studied federal, state and local bureaucrats for more than two decades. I’ve watched them oversee the handling of human remains, screen travelers for security threats as well as promote primary and secondary education. And over and over again, I’ve seen bureaucrats stand for Weber’s ideals while conducting their often-hidden work.
Bureaucrats as experts and equalizers
Weber defined bureaucrats as people who work within systems governed by rules and procedures aimed at rational action. He emphasized bureaucrats’ reliance on expert training, noting: “The choice is only that between ‘bureaucratisation’ and ‘dilettantism.’” The choice between a bureaucrat and a dilettante to run an army − in his days, like in ours − seems like an obvious one. Weber saw that bureaucrats’ strength lies in their mastery of specialized knowledge.
I couldn’t agree more. When I studied the procurement of whole body donations for medical research, for example, the state bureaucrats I spoke with were among the most knowledgeable professionals I encountered. Whether directors of anatomical services or chief medical examiners, they knew precisely how to properly secure, handle and transfer human cadavers so physicians could get trained. I felt greatly reassured that they were overseeing the donated bodies of loved ones.
The sociologist Max Weber, pictured here circa 1917, wrote extensively about bureaucracy. Archiv Gerstenberg/ullstein bild via Getty Images
Weber also described bureaucrats as people who don’t make decisions based on favors. In other forms of rule, he noted, “the ruler is free to grant or withhold clemency” based on “personal preference,” but in bureaucracies, decisions are reached impersonally. By “impersonal,” Weber meant “without hatred or passion” and without “love and enthusiasm.” Put otherwise, the bureaucrats fulfill their work without regard to the person: “Everyone is treated with formal equality.”
The federal Transportation Security Administration officers who perform their duties to ensure that we all travel safely epitomize this ideal. While interviewing and observing them, I felt grateful to see them not speculate about loving or hating anyone but treating all travelers as potential threats. The standard operating procedures they followed often proved tedious, but they were applied across the board. Doing any favors here would create immense security risks, as the recent Netflix action film “Carry-On” − about an officer blackmailed into allowing a terrorist to board a plane − illustrates.
Advancing the public’s interests
Finally, Weber highlighted bureaucrats’ commitment to serving the public. He stressed their tendency to act “in the interests of the welfare of those subjects over whom they rule.” Bureaucrats’ expertise and adherence to impersonal rules are meant to advance the common interest: for young and old, rural and urban dwellers alike, and many more.
The state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education staff that I partnered with for years at the Massachusetts Commission on LGBTQ Youth exemplified this ethic. They always impressed me by the huge sense of responsibility they felt toward all state residents. Even when local resources varied, they worked to ensure that all young people in the state − regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity − could thrive. Based on my personal experience, while they didn’t always get everything right, they were consistently committed to serving others.
Today, bureaucrats are often framed by the administration and its supporters as the root of all problems. Yet if Weber’s insights and my observations are any guide, bureaucrats are also the safeguards that stand between the public and dilettantism, favoritism and selfishness. The overwhelming majority of bureaucrats whom I have studied and worked with deeply care about upholding expertise, treating everyone equally and ensuring the welfare of all.
Yes, bureaucrats can slow things down and seem inefficient or costly at times. Sure, they can also be co-opted by totalitarian regimes and end up complicit in unimaginable tragedies. But with the right accountability mechanisms, democratic control and sufficient resources for them to perform their tasks, bureaucrats typically uphold critical ideals.
In an era of growing hostility, it’s key to remember what bureaucrats have long stood for − and, let’s hope, still do.
Paula Span: When they don’t recognize you Anymore
—Photo by Diego Grez Cañete
From Kaiser Family Foundation Health News (except for image above)
It happened more than a decade ago, but the moment remains with her.
Sara Stewart was talking at the dining room table with her mother, Barbara Cole, 86 at the time, in Bar Harbor, Maine. Stewart, then 59, a lawyer, was making one of her extended visits from out of state.
Two or three years earlier, Cole had begun showing troubling signs of dementia, probably from a series of small strokes. “I didn’t want to yank her out of her home,” Stewart said.
So with a squadron of helpers — a housekeeper, regular family visitors, a watchful neighbor, and a meal delivery service — Cole remained in the house she and her late husband had built 30-odd years earlier.
She was managing, and she usually seemed cheerful and chatty. But this conversation in 2014 took a different turn.
“She said to me: ‘Now, where is it we know each other from? Was it from school?’” her daughter and firstborn recalled. “I felt like I’d been kicked.”
Stewart remembers thinking, “In the natural course of things, you were supposed to die before me. But you were never supposed to forget who I am.” Later, alone, she wept.
People with advancing dementia do regularly fail to recognize beloved spouses, partners, children, and siblings. By the time Stewart and her youngest brother moved Cole into a memory-care facility a year later, she had almost completely lost the ability to remember their names or their relationship to her.
“It’s pretty universal at the later stages” of the disease, said Alison Lynn, director of social work at the Penn Memory Center, who has led support groups for dementia caregivers for a decade.
She has heard many variations of this account, a moment described with grief, anger, frustration, relief, or some combination thereof.
These caregivers “see a lot of losses, reverse milestones, and this is one of those benchmarks, a fundamental shift” in a close relationship, she said. “It can throw people into an existential crisis.”
It’s hard to determine what people with dementia — a category that includes Alzheimer’s disease and many other cognitive disorders — know or feel. “We don’t have a way of asking the person or looking at an MRI,” Lynn noted. “It’s all deductive.”
But researchers are starting to investigate how family members respond when a loved one no longer appears to know them. A qualitative study recently published in the journal Dementia analyzed in-depth interviews with adult children caring for mothers with dementia who, at least once, did not recognize them.
“It’s very destabilizing,” said Kristie Wood, a clinical research psychologist at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus and co-author of the study. “Recognition affirms identity, and when it’s gone, people feel like they’ve lost part of themselves.”
Although they understood that nonrecognition was not rejection but a symptom of their mothers’ disease, she added, some adult children nevertheless blamed themselves.
“They questioned their role. ‘Was I not important enough to remember?’” Wood said. They might withdraw or visit less often.
Pauline Boss, the family therapist who developed the theory of “ambiguous loss” decades ago, points out that it can involve physical absence — as when a soldier is missing in action — or psychological absence, including nonrecognition because of dementia.
Society has no way to acknowledge the transition when “a person is physically present but psychologically absent,” Boss said. There is “no death certificate, no ritual where friends and neighbors come sit with you and comfort you.”
“People feel guilty if they grieve for someone who’s still alive,” she continued. “But while it’s not the same as a verified death, it is a real loss and it just keeps coming.”
Nonrecognition takes different forms. Some relatives report that while a loved one with dementia can no longer retrieve a name or an exact relationship, they still seem happy to see them.
“She stopped knowing who I was in the narrative sense, that I was her daughter Janet,” Janet Keller, 69, an actress in Port Townsend, Washington, said in an email about her late mother, diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. “But she always knew that I was someone she liked and wanted to laugh with and hold hands with.”
It comforts caregivers to still feel a sense of connection. But one of the respondents in the dementia study reported that her mother felt like a stranger and that the relationship no longer provided any emotional reward.
“I might as well be visiting the mailman,” she told the interviewer.
Larry Levine, 67, a retired health-care administrator in Rockville, Maryland, watched his husband’s ability to recognize him shift unpredictably.
He and Arthur Windreich, a couple for 43 years, had married when Washington, D.C., legalized same-sex marriage in 2010. The following year, Windreich received a diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer’s.
Levine became his caregiver until his death, at 70, in late 2023.
“His condition sort of zigzagged,” Levine said. Windreich had moved into a memory-care unit. “One day, he’d call me ‘the nice man who comes to visit’,” Levine said. “The next day he’d call me by name.”
Even in his final years when, like many dementia patients, Windreich became largely nonverbal, “there was some acknowledgment,” his husband said. “Sometimes you could see it in his eyes, this sparkle instead of the blank expression he usually wore.”
At other times, however, “there was no affect at all.” Levine often left the facility in tears.
He sought help from his therapist and his sisters, and recently joined a support group for LGBTQ+ dementia caregivers even though his husband has died. Support groups, in person or online, “are medicine for the caregiver,” Boss said. “It’s important not to stay isolated.”
Lynn encourages participants in her groups to also find personal rituals to mark the loss of recognition and other reverse milestones. “Maybe they light a candle. Maybe they say a prayer,” she said.
Someone who would sit shiva, part of the Jewish mourning ritual, might gather a small group of friends or family to reminisce and share stories, even though the loved one with dementia hasn’t died.
“To have someone else participate can be very validating,” Lynn said. “It says, ‘I see the pain you’re going through.’”
Once in a while, the fog of dementia seems to lift briefly.
Researchers at Penn and elsewhere have pointed to a startling phenomenon called “paradoxical lucidity.”
Someone with severe dementia, after being noncommunicative for months or years, suddenly regains alertness and may come up with a name, say a few appropriate words, crack a joke, make eye contact, or sing along with a radio.
Though common, these episodes generally last only seconds and don’t mark a real change in the person’s decline. Efforts to recreate the experiences tend to fail.
“It’s a blip,” Lynn said. But caregivers often respond with shock and joy; some interpret the episode as evidence that despite deepening dementia, they are not truly forgotten.
Stewart encountered such a blip a few months before her mother died. She was in her mother’s apartment when a nurse asked her to come down the hall.
“As I left the room, my mother called out my name,” she said. Though Cole usually seemed pleased to see her, “she hadn’t used my name for as long as I could remember.”
It didn’t happen again, but that didn’t matter. “It was wonderful,” Stewart said.
Paula Span is a Kaiser Family Foundation Health News reporter.
Chris Powell: Trump isn’t what’s wrong with Conn. public education
1839 caricature by George Cruikshank of a school flogging.
The Hartford High School building constructed in the early 1880’s and, sadly, demolished in the 1960’s. (This is a 1911 postcard.) Public secondary education in Hartford started in 1638, the second-oldest equivalent of a high school in America. The first is the Boston Latin School, founded in 1635.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont and state Education Commissioner Charlene Russell-Tucker are being cheered for refusing to certify to the U.S. Education Department that state government is in compliance with the Trump administration's view of civil-rights law. The administration's view is that ‘‘diversity, equity, and inclusion," the slogan of what I see as leftist education, is unconstitutional because it means that government is enforcing racial preferences in schools.
Exactly what racial preferences are Connecticut's schools enforcing? The Trump administration's letter to the state Education Department didn't say. The Education Department's reply said the state, with its "diversity, equity, and inclusion," is following federal law. So now, for not nodding politely at the Trump administration, Connecticut is at risk of losing millions of dollars in federal education grants, and millions may be spent in litigation to determine what, if anything, it all means.
The governor and education commissioner should have provided the certification the Trump administration sought and left it to the administration to cite specific reasons for canceling grants to the state. But no -- the governor, the commissioner, and Democratic state legislators want to be seen fighting Trump and to look like they're standing up for education.
The governor grandly proclaimed: “In Connecticut we're proud to support the incredible diversity of our schools and work tirelessly to ensure that every child, regardless of background, has access to a quality education and the best opportunity at the starting line in life. From our educators, who are mentoring and inspiring the next generation of young people, to our curriculum, our commitment to education is what has made our schools nationally recognized, and we plan to continue doing what makes our students, teachers, and schools successful."
Oh, really?
It's not because of Trump that, despite all that “diversity, equity, and inclusion," Connecticut's schools are still heavily segregated racially.
It's not because of Trump that Connecticut's schools long have had a mortifying racial performance gap.
It's not because of Trump that, according to the little standardized testing state government dares to permit, student proficiency has been declining for decades even as per-pupil spending has risen sharply.
It's not because of Trump that Connecticut legislators and educators have decided opportunistically to pretend that more spending equals more education even as decades of test results contradict them.
It's not because of Trump that Hartford's and Bridgeport's school systems are dysfunctional educationally, administratively, and financially and are undergoing audits by the state Education Department even as state government refuses to accept responsibility for their longstanding catastrophic failure and take control of both.
Nor is Trump to blame for the Hartford school system's graduating an illiterate student last year, and presumably many others, nor for the refusal of the city's school superintendent and the state education commissioner to investigate and report about the case.
Trump isn't why the foremost policy of public education in Connecticut is social promotion, which crushes the incentive of students to learn, especially when they lack parenting, as many do.
Racial preferences in government are unconstitutional and unjust, though the country got used to them for many years when they were euphemized as “affirmative action." As a practical matter “diversity, equity, and inclusion" is just a righteous slogan available to euphemize more racial preferences and to distract from the continuing failure of so much of public education.
But if “diversity, equity, and inclusion" ever meant what they should mean -- integration and more equal opportunity -- they might be worth something. The country never will be prosperous, healthy, harmonious, and safe while it keeps creating and sustaining an impoverished and uneducated underclass.
Schools and teachers play the hands they are dealt -- the demographics of their communities. Some schools and teachers are extraordinary but in the end, all together, they will be only average, and, on average, demographics will rule.
So the education problem is far bigger than education itself. It's more a matter of how Connecticut can get more of its children ready and eager to learn in school. It won't be with empty slogans and political posturing.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
‘Evil but calming’
Banner promoting John Kenn Mortensen’s show “Dream Homes,” at the Brattleboro (Vt.) Museum and Art Center, through Nov. 1
The curator of the show, Brattleboro Museum Director Danny Lichtenfeld, says:
“I can’t remember what I was searching for—or what the algorithm had me chasing—one sleepless night, when I stumbled into the exquisitely creepy world of John Kenn Mortensen’s “Sticky Monsters’’. I was immediately smitten by the oversized, shaggy, more-cuddly-than-scary beasts. As one online commenter has noted, “They’re evil, but also calming. And there’s something very kind about them.
“Based in Denmark, Mortensen is a writer and director of children’s TV shows and the father of twins. The humans in his drawings tend to be children, but they rarely appear scared of the monsters around them. More often, they seem to be getting on as owner and pet, or as friends on a meandering adventure together.’’
Even in the somewhat libertarian Granite state
Apartment building in Manchester, N.H., built in 1864 to house workers in the city’s once-huge textile industry.
Adapted from an item in Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com.
We might do well to watch New Hampshire, where conservative Republicans are joining with Democrats to change communities’ zoning ordinances that, by mandating such things as big minimum-lot sizes (aka “snob zoning”), blocking housing in commercially zoned areas, and very long permitting times have made it very difficult for many places to add to the housing supply.
The Granite State (where I used to live) has long worshipped the glories of local government control, but spiraling housing costs have become enough of a crisis that many state officials increasingly realize that the state must step in to overrule localities’ long-entrenched rules.
Colonists’ Jarring climate surprise
The yellow and green have been moving north.
From The Colonial Society of Massachusetts
“Of all the preconceptions English people brought with them to New England, perhaps none was so important or so mistaken as that about the American climate.
Colonists came with the common sense idea that climate would be constant in any given latitude around the world. New England, whose latitude is the low forties, was expected to have the climate of Spain or southern France. The debilitating effect of excessive summer heat on English character was the promoters’ main fear in the early years.
What they found, of course, was that New England was in fact very hot in summer but that it was also extremely cold, much colder than England, in winter. Colonists were forced to make sense of their actual experience of America’s climate, explaining why New England deviated from the ‘normal’ European climate, as well as trying to understand what would grow and how life should be constituted here.’’
