Shortly after the election and right before it was announced that a grand jury is looking into the dealings of Hartford Mayor Eddie Perez, the mayor put forward a compelling idea for the reorganization of the education system. The plan would create a single school district, funded by the state, encompassing every town in Hartford County.
The idea is not entirely new, but coming from a hard core Democrat it is remarkable, because to consider the argument you must accept as fact that the Hartford school system is failing, that efforts to desegregate the school system have failed, and that the protection of the current system, its administration and its employees must end.
From time to time, someone brings up the idea of declaring Hartford a failure — as a whole — and splitting it up into a number of parts. Based on the Washington D.C. model, downtown and the area around the Capitol, where many state agencies are headquartered, would be a government district administered by the state. The rest of the city would be divided up between West Hartford, Wethersfield and Bloomfield. The idea is usually dropped quickly.
Radical Plan
The Perez idea, to abandon the Hartford school system in favor of a 29-town district probably won’t get far either, but the debate might lead us to something better. In short, Perez has proposed eliminating 29 school administrations, closing down failing schools, sending the entire bill to the state of Connecticut and relying on cities and towns to use their regular education budgets to pay for massive property tax cuts of 50 percent or more.
The mayor’s plan is borne out of the realization that after ten years and hundreds of millions of dollars, the court-ordered effort to desegregate Hartford’s schools has not worked at all. It was doomed to failure. When the courts told the state Legislature to “do something — anything,” we all should have known that the only political response would be to throw money at the problem. In government terms, success is measured by how much money you spend, not necessarily on the policies the money supports.
Although the problem of segregation in the Hartford schools is more an economic problem than an educational problem, the only way the system has of addressing the issue is through education spending. Now the measurements are in and the grade is F.
Theoretically, the Perez plan to desegregate the Hartford schools could work. Most of the under-performing schools in the 29-town district are in Hartford. If they were closed, the students would be dispersed throughout the district leading to a better racial mix.
In practice however, it would probably be impossible to get state government and the other 28 towns to go along. There would be opposition from the teachers’ union and some local PTAs. Finally, the tax implications are huge. State taxes would have to be raised to offset local tax reductions and a law would have to be put into place to ensure that local property taxes currently assigned to education spending would indeed go to local tax cuts.
The Perez proposal tosses current reality out the window, but may set the parameters for a new debate in Connecticut over education and the property tax system. It acknowledges that the economic disparity between the state’s large cities and small towns helps drive results in education and it says if we are to end our over reliance on property taxes at the local level, other taxes — probably at the state level — will have to be increased. Maybe it takes a politician who is under investigation to raise these issues and remedies publicly.
Dean Pagani is a former gubernatorial advisor. He is V.P. of Public Affairs for Cashman and Katz Integrated Communications in Glastonbury.
