Politicians understand the magic of appointing a ‘task force.’
First, of course, there is something authoritative about ‘appointing’ almost anyone to do anything. It suggests that you have the power to trick others into doing some grim, sweaty work that you probably don’t have to pay them to perform.
Next, of course, the task force members will march off to some board room and close the door, at which point the unpleasant subject with which they have been ‘tasked’ disappears from the public consciousness. Don’t worry. The task force is dealing with it.
If you are a clever politician, you can assemble a task force with a respectable collection of resumes, sufficient to deflect any doubt about the task force conclusions. And, if you are truly clever, you will assemble the kind of high-end folks who will actually delude themselves into believing that the task force membership will further pretty up their resumes — guaranteeing them a three-bedroom, luxury condo in Heaven, to match the one they have down here on Earth.
And so it was, when Connecticut Gov. M. Jodi Rell tired of reading yet another 15 studies or so, indicating that the ‘achievement gap’ between rich kids and poor kids in public schools was worse in Connecticut than perhaps anywhere outside of the Third World, she appointed a task force — the Connecticut Commission on Educational Achievement — to study the matter.
The task force of ‘business leaders,’ being, of course, ‘business leaders,’ did muster the courage to mumble something about measuring teacher performance and, perhaps, just maybe, linking results to compensation — with the understanding that such a thing won’t happen in teacher-union-coddling Connecticut.
But the key to the study recommendations are about what one would have expected if the task force had been made up of a collection of soccer moms running to be president of the local PTA.
Who would have thought? The task force believes that the most important step we can take to reduce the achievement gap is to spend more money on education. Of course. No one in Connecticut ever thought of that one before.
The business folks on the commission know better than most that ‘money talks,’ and if they were going to recommend spending more of it, they should have been more honest talking about why they wanted to spend it.
Targeting ‘low-income’ families, the task force recommended ‘investing’ bags of gold in such stuff as subsidies for pre-school admission; an extended school year; longer school days; and all-day kindergarten.
Well, all right. This kind of scenario has been the heart and soul of a conspiracy of non-profit foundations for decades now, even if the assessment results are mixed at best.
But, if a collection of business people is going to recommend such stuff, let them be honest about the reasons why. The theme of full-day kindergarten and longer school days and the longer school year for the poor kids seems clear enough: the ‘achievement gap’ can be attributed in large part to living in basket-case families, in lousy neighborhoods, surrounded by unsavory peers who drag you down to their level.
Even if nothing else changes in the change-resistant world of union-dominated public education, if you can lock the kids up indefinitely in ‘school,’ removed from parents and neighborhood creeps and scary surroundings that don’t spawn Shakespeare scholars, the test scores will magically rise.
A bit blunt? Perhaps. But it would have dressed up a task force study that recommends what every other task force report on education in Connecticut always recommends: spend more money.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
