When the corporate CEO explains that “our employees are our most important asset,” even as the bodies of the laid-off and early-retired are strewn across the landscape, we understand the disconnect. The motives are clear; the “spin” is understandable, even as it might be objectionable.
When Cohen claims to be God’s gift to opinion writing, with prose that makes the angels weep with joy, we understand the slight bit of exaggeration, even as we recognize the core truth of the premise.
Business, journalism, politics — we may conjure up a bit of shock, of disappointment about prevarication from the practitioners. But at the end of the day, we sigh the knowing sigh and discount for a bit of fibbing.
Where the scenario fails to work is the Hartford school desegregation case, Sheff v. O’Neill, which was conceived with a wink and a nod — and dedicated to the proposition that the truth would be buried so deep beneath the rhetoric that no one would ever acknowledge it.
It has been 11 years now since the state Supreme Court justices held their collective noses and told the General Assembly to do something, to do almost anything, to manufacture desegregated schools in a city from which the white middle class had long deserted for greener lawns — or, at least, better schools.
The politicians were given relatively free rein to come up with a plan, because the plaintiffs in the case asked for no specific “remedy.”
This was crafty business, for what remedy under law would desegregate Hartford schools and transform the minority student population into scholars?
In truth, short of dragging the horrified young people of Simsbury and Glastonbury and Avon and environs into city schools, desegregation wasn’t going to happen. And “forced busing” wasn’t politically feasible..
The remedy decided upon to contain the angry beast was magnet schools — specialized little havens so alluring that black and white and brown would voluntarily come together as one to taste of the fruits of innovative educational opportunity.
In the ensuing years, there have been tiny little pockets of magnet school “success,” but in the aggregate, the results are what one might have expected. The city schools are still segregated, the city test scores are still abysmal – and the ticking time bomb of the Sheff case is still alive and back in court for review.
A proposal for yet more money for even more magnet schools has gone nowhere. Not only are the magnet schools expensive to operate, but, in some cases, instead of attracting the eager young white-kid scholars from the suburbs, the magnet schools have sucked up many of the best students from existing city schools — and attracted some of the black kids who had escaped to the suburbs.
In recent years, there has been a low-key, private voucher program at work to offer a few hundred city kids the tuition money they need to go private and/or get out of town. Hartford Mayor Eddie Perez has bludgeoned the fancy prep schools into accepting a few city kids, as well.
But the messy business of what to do with hundreds and hundreds of minority kids with test scores so low as to be frightening to the middle class of every race, color and creed, won’t be solved by nibbling at the margin.
In Milwaukee, in Cleveland, in Utah, in Florida — and slowly popping up in other jurisdictions as well —a big, messy market solution has popped up to deal with the big, messy problem of urban education. Government-funded vouchers generate competition that awakens somnolent urban public schools — and empowers urban families who can’t wait for another generation of desegregation lawsuits to rescue their children from disaster.
The public school teachers’ unions can’t tolerate vouchers; they smell like competition for the monopoly in which they thrive. The union opposition is enough to kill it in Connecticut’s gutless legislature — unless a Sheff court concludes that vouchers are the only legitimate alternative to busing the suburban white kids to mandatory seats in Hartford public schools.
Of course, all sides could simply admit that “desegregation” in city schools is code for more money, with no accountability for results. We could understand that game. Employees are our most important assets. And that Cohen can really write.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
