As a clever political rhetorical device, “No Child Left Behind” was successful in slapping the nation across the face and demanding some quantitative analysis of what the schools do, how they do it and whether anyone gives a hoot if the numbers look bad.
Putting aside the boring blather about whether “teaching to the test,” in a NCLB kind of way, was going to lead to a nation bereft of poets and overloaded with actuaries. The unsettling piece of NCLB, especially for a jurisdiction such as Connecticut, is that, well, of course, we want to leave some kids behind.
Our local governance, our residential pricing, our patterns of population dispersal, have as the subtext, if not the basic premise, Connecticut’s firm commitment to leaving some kids behind.
Connecticut’s 169 principalities are empowered to invite you in to live, based on whatever idiosyncrasies might be most compelling.
Low taxes, no police department, a volunteer fire department, and a referendum on every government purchase over $12? We can do that. “Strong mayors,” lots of patronage, high taxes, mediocre-but-plentiful city services? We can do that. A ceremonial mayor, a sleepy council, a professional city-manager type, and a Senior Center that services Chicken Kiev for lunch? Sure, why not?
Of course, it is the school systems that tend to offer up the most compelling differentiators in a state that you can drive across in 2 ½ hours. Use the testing data, use the SAT scores, use the graduation rates, use the percentage of kids that graduate and drive their pickup trucks down the street to the community college, as opposed to being shipped down I-91 to Yale. And, of course, the deep dark, dirty little secret: ask around and get a sense of what percentage of the student body is minority.
While a significant percentage of the middle-class drift from the central cities can be attributed to the allure of big lawns and the like, at the heart of much of the Connecticut urban escape is the desire to, yes, leave some children behind. Ah, that search for the “best schools for my kid” includes in the equation as escape from urban schools that are perceived to be dangerous and bogged down with remediation or our black and Hispanic brothers and sisters. God speed, people of color, but in the short term, we are choosing to call the furniture moving van and leave you behind.
Census figures suggest that blacks are now moving to the suburbs in record numbers — a sort of good-news-bad news scenario that suggests the rise of the black middle class, empowered to leave other children behind.
Especially in Connecticut’s snobby suburbs and smaller towns, real estate taxes and housing prices reflect the demand for “good schools,” enforced by residency requirements and pricing sufficiently high to discourage the “other” from moving in. “Some Children Left Behind.”
Regional magnet schools in the Hartford area are designed to take some of those left-behind kids and plop them down next to a white, middle-class, high achiever, is a clumsy response to court-ordered “desegregation,” but it has its marginal charm.
The entire embarrassing infrastructure has received a national viewing of late, with the arrest of a homeless mom in Bridgeport for sneaking her kid into the Norwalk school system.
We can mull the implications of Some Children Left Behind, right out of central casting. Mom is homeless; mom is black; mom and kid sort-of-live in Bridgeport. When mom comes knocking at our door, looking for a better school? Sorry, Mom, your kid is most definitely intended to be left behind.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
