Weicker watch - Connecticut Governor Lowell Weicker's plan to integrate schools across the state

National Review, March 15, 1993 by Jeffrey Christensen

When Lowell Weicker campaigned as an independent in Connecticut's three-way race for Governor in 1990, his slogan was "Nobody's man but his own." That was precisely what the 60 per cent who did not vote for him feared. He proved to be a man of his word when he forced a very unpopular income tax through the legislature. Now he proposes to integrate schools statewide by creating six educational soviets. Though Weicker denies it's a busing plan, suburban residents smell a rat.

The urgency, if not the impetus, behind the initiative is owing to a lawsuit, Sheff v. O'Neill, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of 19 school children from Hartford. Hartford is the poorest city in Connecticut, and the public schools there, which are 93.1 per cent black and Hispanic, receive the lowest scores in the state's Mastery Tests. Nearby schools in wealthier, predominantly white suburbs score higher. The plaintiffs call for desegregation to satisfy the state constitution's guarantee of equal educational opportunity.

The state maintains that segregation is an unintended consequence of town boundaries and school districts created when the state was 98.5 per cent white. But in his State of the State speech Weicker endorsed the premise of the plaintiffs' case: "If you are poor, if you are a minority, and if you live in one of our cities, you start the game at a disadvantage." In the governor's plan, "local school districts will reflect the racial mixture of the region" and "deal with the integration of education with health and human-service agencies." Centralized authority, educational social workers, quotas, and forced busing, to be announced. To help pay for his $85 million public-school plan, Weicker proposed ending the 36-year-old subsidy for parochial-school busing.

Weicker failed to address the fundamental disincentives that have exacerbated the squalor of Connecticut's cities. In Hartford in 1960, crime rates were low and less than 10 per cent of children were born to unwed mothers. The public schools were over 70 per cent white and only 32 per cent of high school freshmen dropped out or graduated elsewhere.

Then the reforms of the Sixties supplanted the civic glue of traditional values with social welfare programs. Welfare, AFDC, public housing, and the like institutionalized poverty as an entitled way of life. Connecticut's average welfare benefits rank sixth-highest in the nation, $1200 more per year for an AFDC "family" of three than in New York City and $6,000 more than in Puerto Rico, the origin of 90 per cent of Hartford's Hispanics.

Consequently, Connecticut's cities are classic cases of urban flight and welfare migration. In 1970 the city of Hartford was 71 per cent white, 28 per cent black, and 2 per cent other. By 1990 the numbers were reversed: 30 per cent non-Hispanic white, 36 per cent black, and 32 per cent Hispanic. Only 11 per cent of Hartford's residents under 18 years old are non-Hispanic white. As of 1988, 67 per cent of Hartford's children were born to unwed mothers. Crime and fertility rates are skyrocketing. One quarter of families live below the poverty line and one third of Hartford's residents receive housing assistance or live in public housing. And for all this you also get the highest property taxes in the region.

Black and white suburban residents balk at sending their children into the midst of these failed social experiments. Governor Weicker doesn't send his kids to public school. Why should he? In a recent survey of Hartford-area residents by Professor Christine Rossell of Boston University, 51 per cent of whites said they would move or resort to a private school if the desegregation plan assigned their child to a city school.

According to the Hartford school superintendent's office, almost 65 per cent of the funding for Hartford public schools comes from "sources outside of the city's taxpayers"---mostly federal and state grants. Per pupil spending in Hartford was $7,746 last year, $904 more than the state average. Hartford teachers receive about $5,000 more than the state average and studentteacher ratios are low. Yet 55 per cent of high-school freshmen drop out or graduate elsewhere. Teenage pregnancy is high and drugs are ubiquitous. More than half of the students are from AFDC homes and 60 per cent are from single-parent homes. Even suburban liberals who thought high taxes would absolve them of their civic responsibilities can't reconcile their beliefs with their politically incorrect apprehensions.

But "the two Connecticuts" that Weicker referred to in his speech are not "separated by racial and economic divisions" as he believes. Race and income are the symptoms, not the causes, of a more profound division. In a recent speech, New York City Board of Education member Irene Impellizzeri sumed it up: "In the city where we work, there is little or no community anymore. There is aggregation--the forming of groups. And the difference is profound. Communities have consciences. Aggregations have programs. Communities work by civility. Aggregations get their way by stridency. ... The fundamental difference between a community and an aggregation is really the difference between what is in one's interest and what one desires--between one's hopes and one's appetites." But Governor Weicker doesn't get it, because he is part of the problem. A self proclaimed "liberal Republican" who had to form his own party when Republicans wouldn't have him, he is blind to the debilitating effects of public policy and moral retreat.