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

VERNON,  Conn.

You’ll walk the floor, the way I do

You’re cheating heart will tell on you --

-- Ray Charles

If it had been Christmas, Josh Solomon, the owner of the New Britain Rock Cats – soon to be renamed the Hartford Rock Cats – might have found a lump of coal in his stocking. But it’s August, and the fiercely patriotic mayor of New Britain, Erin Stewart, contented herself with a “Dear John” letter requesting a payment of back taxes owed and announcing the end of a once great romance.

 The back taxes in the amount of $164,569.26 actually are owed to Berlin, Conn., but the tax bill was paid by New Britain to avoid an interest accrual of $4,937.08.” The Rock Cats stadium straddles the New Britain-Berlin town line.

Ms. Stewart’s letter is a study in smoldering rage. She begins in a business-like manner by advising: “The lease agreement between New Britain and the Rock Cats is clear that they are responsible for these taxes. ... But, if the Solomons continue their refusal to pay their taxes, Berlin can hold New Britain responsible for this payment since we are the property owners. I am not about to let them rack up late fees on the backs of our taxpayers.”

Then comes the hammer: “I am deeply disturbed by the pattern of utter disrespect that this ownership group has shown to their home city over the past few months. In June, they went public with their dalliance with Hartford, which hasn’t turned out to be quite the “done deal” that some made it out to be. Since then, they have continued their radio silence with New Britain. Now they are stiffing the taxpayers of Berlin and New Britain on their tax bill.”

The breakup between New Britain and the Rock Cats, a Double-A minor league baseball club, has not been amicable. Worse, it was first a hidden then a very public divorce. And New Britain, it is clear, does not like being jilted by money grubbing baseball gigolos.

Consider the history of the Rock Cats' many “dalliances.” The franchise began in Pittsfield, Mass.,  (1965-1969)  and then moved to Pawtucket, R.I.,  where it dallied for three years. The franchise then moved to Bristol, Conn., and played at Muzzy Field for 10 seasons (1973-1982).

In 1983, owner Joe Buzas moved the team, the New Britain Red Sox, to New Britain. When Beehive Field in New Britain began to show signs of age, the owner of the franchise toyed with the idea of moving the team to Springfield, Mass., but his heart remained with New Britain; whereupon the Red Sox re-affiliated with the Trenton Thunder, in New Jersey, and owner Buzas signed a new development agreement with the Minnesota Twins. New Britain Stadium opened in 1996, and the team name changed in 1997 to the current New Britain Rock Cats.

There are, it will be noticed, lots of musical chairs on the good ship “Rock Cats” – lots of petting and pawing and romancing and cheating and broken hearts and wailing by rudely rejected politicians. Ms. Stewart is by no means the first politician to whom the owners of the Rock Cats have pledged their troth. Nor, judging from the flighty franchise record, will she be the last.

When the Rock Cats, following months of closed-door negotiations, officially announced that the team was straying from New Britain to Hartford, the good people of Hartford vented their disapproval at a town meeting.

Why was Hartford so  eager  to divert to this new venture tax money that might have been used to repair roads, improve schools, stock libraries with books, purchase the service of more police to monitor gang activity in the city and provide the amenities that any livable city should afford their citizens? A lonely rebel at the town meeting – not a politician, of course – wondered aloud whether the Hartford-Rock Cats deal ever could turn a profit.  It was a raucous meeting.

One casualty of the political crunch, lately endorsed in a Democratic primary run for the State Senate by The Hartford Courant, was Hartford City Council President Shawn Wooden, who appeared early on to approve the Rock Cats move to Hartford. Much later, after the town meeting dust-up, Mr. Wooden qualified his endorsement of the move: He still supports the relocation effort, but he’d like someone other than Hartford to assume the bulk of the resettlement costs.

At the present time, it looks like Ms. Stewart is one of the few politicians blighted by the Rock Cats’ cheating heart who still has her head above water. Most of the rest of them – with the exception of  Gov.  Dan Malloy, who wisely decided to step away from all the smooching and petting – are blowing bubbles.

 Don Pesci (donpesci@att.net)  is a writer who lives in Vernon.