Some state legislators have noticed that the settlement of the Hartford school integration lawsuit is a sham. Tens of millions of dollars have been spent building and operating “magnet” schools and busing students around the Hartford area but the city’s schools are less integrated than they were when the settlement was reached four years ago, and the performance of city students is no better either.
Of course the settlement was meant to be a sham—meant to do a lot of spending and to conjure a lot of furious motion to satisfy the courts and the plaintiffs without actually integrating anything. For the kind of integration nominally required by the state Supreme Court’s bizarre 1996 decision in the case of Sheff v. O’Neill—integration in which every school in every town matches the racial composition of the state as a whole—could be accomplished only by assigning all students to school according to their race and putting most students on 90-minute bus rides twice a day.
But now that four years of spending tens of millions of dollars have been shown to accomplish nothing, the Sheff plaintiffs are pressing in court for more, and state government is proposing to give them $112 million more over five years—more of the same.
New Aim
At a hearing of the General Assembly’s Education Committee the other day, the committee’s Senate chairman, Thomas P. Gaffey, D-Meriden, remarked that he and his legislative colleagues cannot see how more of the same is likely to have a different result.
Maybe so, the lawyer for the Sheff plaintiffs, Wesley Horton, replied, but any failure by state government and the plaintiffs to agree on revising the settlement will send the case back to court. Horton meant this as a warning but it is exactly what Connecticut should aim for.
In the first place, another few years of litigation will cost a fraction of that otherwise-to-be-wasted $112 million.
Second, since the school integration the state Supreme Court imagines the state Constitution to require is far beyond any practicality and since public policy long ago turned Hartford into a prison for parentless and incorrigible children, the Sheff case should be turned back to the courts so that they may take direct responsibility for the consequences of their constitutional interpretation.
Third, the General Assembly should not wait for the popular revolt and exodus from the public schools that will result when a court finally takes the Sheff decision seriously and orders Hartford students to be bused 40 miles to integrate Salisbury’s schools and vice-versa, along with dozens of similar orders around the state. Anticipating such court orders, the legislature should begin immediately to advance a state constitutional amendment to correct the Sheff decision—to establish that the state Constitution does not consider racial disparities resulting merely from voluntary patterns of residency to be actionable racial discrimination by the government.
None of this should be to give up on racial integration. Rather it should be to realize that Connecticut’s urban and social policies of the last 40 years have been catastrophic mistakes.
Too Costly
Connecticut’s capital city, Hartford, collapsing into violence, depravity, and incompetence and emptying out after 40 years of these policies, is their greatest achievement. But these policies have had similar results in Bridgeport, New Haven, Waterbury, and smaller cities. Any policy that continues for so long in ever-worsening failure can be only an employment scheme.
Indeed, the greater cost here is social: first to the tens of thousands of children the government has encouraged to be raised without parents, and second to nearly everyone else in the state, for whom getting as far away as possible from the parentless, predatory, and ignorant has become the main determinant of residency.
This long ago stopped having much to do with race. For years now the flight to the suburbs has consisted mainly of people from racial minorities themselves who seek to escape urban violence and send their children to schools that are not so dragged down by parentless kids who in kindergarten are already three grades behind.
Nothing about the Sheff business and nothing else yet undertaken by state government addresses this, the real city problem, which is why dropping the Sheff business is so urgent. It is an overwhelming distraction that must be gotten out of the way.
Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.
