There is a move afoot by Connecticut educators to banish Cohen the Columnist from the state; to pull his passport and send him far away.
What sin has Cohen committed?
He’s too good a Hartford Business Journal columnist. Despite the low pay, dim lights, Royal manual typewriter, watered-down barrel of rum on his too-small desk and the unsharpened pencils, Cohen is a shining light of business opinion journalism. And that’s the problem.
Connecticut insists that, at least when it comes to public education (and, by extension, column writing), those of us who don’t receive suitable and substantially equal resources — which, of course, would provide a substantially equal opportunity to be real smart and write great columns — run the risk of being not-so-smart and writing not-so-great columns, compared to other lucky students and columnists.
Cohen is the problem because he excels, despite his lack of equal opportunity. Those in charge of education in Connecticut say that things are enough of a mess without Cohen setting a bad example.
The state Supreme Court — which plays a little practical joke on the General Assembly every few years with rulings about “equal” education for everyone, or sort-of-similar education for everyone, or “substantially” equal in a sort-of-equal kind of education — did it again in late March.
That funny business in the state Constitution that sort of hints that we’ll all get a public, sort-of-free education, also requires the education to be suitable and sort-of-equal, the high court ruled in a decision that came down suspiciously close to April Fool’s Day.
Holding their noses and stifling their giggles, the justices, on a 4-3 vote, sent the case back down to Superior Court, where all involved will have to pretend that the case is about law, rather than murky politics and economics.
The litigants will fumble and mumble about how to achieve the magic of suitable education that’s equal, or equal education that’s suitable, or suitably equal education that somehow isn’t impacted by family background, and by legitimate decisions made by local school boards, and, of course, by terminology that is more opaque than your trigonometry homework.
Connecticut is not alone. In various forms, these cases have popped up across the country, as courts, legislatures and educators pretend to “solve” the mysteries of an educational system that theoretically treats everyone at a level of equality and “suitability” known only on Mars.
My personal favorite is Montana, where the Montana Supreme Court decided it would be a really good idea for the legislature to define a “quality” education, so it could then fix the state’s flawed school funding system — which, of course, wasn’t equal or equitable or something.
There was a time when many of these lawsuits were “friendly,” with both sides winking and nodding and hoping that the judges would order that additional bags of gold be thrown at school systems — a tax expenditure that wouldn’t be anyone’s fault, except for the big, bad judges.
Now, the cases become embarrassing in tough economic times — quite aside from the reality that many of the districts that spend the most per-pupil dollars often produce the very worst results.
In most markets, especially the constipated, defective, monopolistic market in public education, serving diverse customers is a messy business that doesn’t respond well to top-down directives that have little to do with consumer choice.
The Connecticut case, like so many of the others, will drag on forever, because there are always more dollars to be garnered — and notions of equal and suitable and quality education are intended to be purposely imprecise. The co-conspirators like it that way.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
