New school year brings less joy, more anxiety

By Chris Powell

Hope and happy excitement bubbled up in Connecticut this week as children began a new school year, though of course children going to school for the first time were apprehensive, along with their parents, many of whom were yielding custody of their kids to outsiders for the first time. 

The luckiest children were those looking forward to their return to school, since they were already much engaged with learning and enjoying social contact with their peers, and have had well-behaved classmates and competent and caring teachers.

But this year everyone — students, parents, teachers, and school officials alike — also has reason to be apprehensive about school, since the disruption caused by the mistaken closing of schools during the epidemic is being followed by even more difficult problems.

Mental illness and misbehavior among schoolchildren were rising even before the epidemic but now have exploded. Disrespect, disruption, and violence committed by students have pushed many teachers into early retirement and have discouraged interest in teaching careers. 

Many school systems, especially in cities, cannot fill teaching jobs and other positions working directly with students and are forced to rely on temporary substitutes. Instruction will suffer for all students, especially for students with disabilities.

Chronic absenteeism among students — students missing 10% or more of their school days — has exploded as well. Last year nearly a quarter of Connecticut’s students were classified as chronically absent, and rates in some cities were around 50%. Chronic absenteeism impairs the education of all other students as well, since teachers are distracted by having to help the absentees catch up.

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Student performance in Connecticut was declining long before the epidemic clobbered it, and restoring it may take a long time. Many Connecticut students were and still are being graduated from high school without mastering English and math. While state government administers occasional proficiency tests in various grades, there are no proficiency requirements for students to advance or graduate. 

While chronic absenteeism may result mainly from the decline of parenting and the worsening of household poverty, Connecticut education officials have not yet explained how social promotion — advancing students even when they haven’t learned — gives them any incentive to go to school in the first place and gives parents any incentive to get them there. Students and parents discerned long ago that Connecticut’s schools demand little of them. 

In turn educators and elected officials might have discerned and acknowledged by now that parenting, not higher pay for educators, is the prerequisite for educational success.

Indeed, since school spending doesn’t seem to correlate with learning, the most compelling reason for raising teacher pay today is not that learning will improve but rather that teachers must to be paid more just to keep coming to work with disrespectful and disruptive students.       

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Compounding Connecticut’s longstanding failure with the basics of education are the obliviousness and political pandering of the General Assembly, which lately has required schools to include curriculums on climate change, Native American studies, Asian American and Pacific Islander studies, and financial literacy. 

This is all just for show, since there will be no requirements for students to demonstrate learning in the new subjects just as there are no requirements for students to demonstrate learning in the basics.

That is, financial literacy will be taught to students lacking literacy in English and math, and again schools will be distracted from fixing the crucial failures.

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Anyone who has ever tried to put critical questions to school officials may have sensed that public education often resents accountability to the public. Some school systems in Connecticut and throughout the country have begun concealing from parents the gender dysphoria of their own children if the children don’t want their parents to know about their gender switching in school.

Disgraceful as this lack of accountability is, it’s not education’s biggest problem. Students perform poorly and are chronically absent mainly because of a lack of accountability at home, and government lacks the courage to tell parents they’re failing their kids. 

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)