Tinkering with Hartford's schools won't work
State should run them directly, do its best

There seems to be consensus at the state Capitol that something has to be done, or at least be seen to be done, about the Hartford school system. This is partly because of the pressure of the state Supreme Court's decision in the case of Sheff vs. O'Neill, which, while muddleheadedly linking educational failure with racial disproportion in enrollment, at least told state government that it had to take responsibility. And it is partly because of the embarrassments still coming regularly out of the Hartford schools, the most recent being the threat to the accreditation of Hartford Public High School, said to be in need of $20 million in repairs with only $6 million available.

Getting the state to acknowledge responsibility would be a start. While the state Constitution always has established public education as a basic right, and while for 20 years the courts have said state government must enforce that right, Connecticut still has no statute authorizing the state Education Department to take over a failing school system. The necessity of such legislation now may be agreed on in principle; the questions are the details of a state takeover -- what will offer improvement rather than just add another layer of bureaucracy. And once these questions are answered, the state finally may have to face up to the more relevant question: just how much any school system can do with the children of societal collapse, the children of unfit or absent parents.

At the moment the legislative idea is for the state to appoint what would be essentially a substitute school board for Hartford and to relieve it of some of the anti-democratic impediments of state law, giving the board particularly the power to undo or renegotiate the city's expensive and restrictive contracts with school employee unions, foremost among these the teachers union. But this would acknowledge the state's own complicity in the unruliness of Hartford's schools, and so it has raised the question of why the state should not first have given Hartford's own elected school board a chance to show whether, with such relief, it could improve them.

Fractious as that board has been, it lately has tried here and there to resist the unions, most notably in the hiring of an outside management company, even if the board's relationship with the company quickly broke down. The board's new chairman, Donald Romanik, has asked the General Assembly for legislation exempting the board from having to negotiate work rules and benefits with the unions, leaving only wages to be negotiated.

There is no evidence that Hartford's teachers are especially to blame for poor student performance, and they complain of being scapegoated. But the teachers clearly are to blame for the price of failure in Hartford. Hartford's teachers are among the best compensated not just in the state but in the country as well. Hartford spends far more per student than the average expense in Connecticut, and state aid finances 80 percent of Hartford's schools against a state average of about 40 percent, so there is no question of lack of financial support or support from state government. Yet Hartford's schools also spend on classroom instructional materials a small fraction of what is spent on teacher retirement benefits and, as the high school accreditation problem indicates, Hartford's schools long have had little money for basic maintenance of facilities.

What has happened in Hartford is unique in degree but not in principle; it is the result of the pernicious trend that has operated in public education throughout Connecticut ever since collective bargaining for public employees and binding arbitration of their union contracts were enacted, thereby removing the bulk of public expense from democracy. Instructional materials and maintenance have been neglected in most schools since then because they have been the only areas in which it has been legal for school boards to economize. So it would be a mistake for the legislature to enter upon reforming Hartford's schools without looking itself in the mirror and asking who is responsible for the impediments to public administration in the city.

The problem in Hartford is mainly that, with so much less of a politically involved, taxpaying middle class, the city is much less able than other jurisdictions to overcome these impediments.

On the other hand, confidence was not inspired when, even as the legislature was holding a hearing on Hartford's schools the other day, the city's new school superintendent, Patricia Daniel, arrived from Rhode Island and said she did not expect the discussions at the Capitol to have much impact on her job. If changing the board to which the superintendent reports and the basic rules by which she administers the schools would not have an impact on her job, she either knows something unknown to everyone more familiar with those schools or she is planning to be irrelevant.

And giving the new superintendent and the current board a chance and respecting local democracy and local control are surely not as compelling as salvaging the education of 25,000 children who, test scores indicate, have been getting little. And since Hartford's own money is financing only 20 percent of its schools, there might not be much unfairness in state government's taking over completely a system it has been largely paying for even it has been failing to guarantee the constitutional right to education.

Hartford's schools -- and Bridgeport's and New Haven's too -- don't need another layer of bureaucracy, but nor do they need a lot more money. They need management from the top of state government, openly answerable to the whole state and not in the least impeded by selfish unions, negligent parents, delinquent students, and local politicians torn, as they must be, between those groups. That is, failing school systems need direct administration by the state with no impediments permitted, and thus no excuses, to ensure that disadvantaged children get the best Connecticut can give them.

This wouldn't have to be so expensive, even with a full complement of "early childhood education" -- that is, day care. For the state's assumption of the minority share of school costs being paid by the distressed cities themselves could be financed out of the property tax relief expected to be legislated this year -- and it would be property tax relief.

The real question here is whether state government wants the responsibility or whether it just wants to keep tinkering ineffectually and criticizing people who don't have the power, resources, or capacity to succeed.