Fifty years ago, during the bad old days of the state Department of Children and Families, when it was called the Department of Children and Youth Services, a clumsy mechanism of unaccountability was used by the political hacks who ran the agency. (For years the only qualification of the department’s commissioner was his service as Democratic chairman in Westport and participation in Democratic campaigns.)
Child neglect and abuse were exploding in Connecticut and the department’s negligence and incompetence kept being suggested by appalling news reports drawn from police investigations of the abuse of children in households supposedly being monitored by the department’s social workers. The department frequently refused to provide explanation, claiming that accountability would violate the privacy of the abusive households.
Of course the department sought only to protect itself against bad publicity.
This began to change in 1991 with the settlement of a federal class-action lawsuit against the department charging incompetence. In 1993 the department’s name was changed to the current one, and the department itself began to change with John G. Rowland’s election as governor. Since some news organizations were starting to pay attention to the department, Rowland knew that more child welfare agency scandals would reflect badly on him.
Chastened by the department’s awful reputation, Rowland and the General Assembly created the Office of Child Advocate to investigate and report publicly about child welfare scandals, and Rowland chose new commissioners with relevant qualifications who repudiated their predecessors’ unaccountability.
Of course Connecticut still has child welfare disasters, but few involve blatant unaccountability, and there is more understanding of the difficulty of the department’s work as social disintegration worsens in the state.
So these days the bigger problem of unaccountability in government in Connecticut involves education.
Last September the Connecticut Mirror reported about a young woman who had just graduated from Hartford Public High School unable to read and write. Many other such cases are suspected, since Connecticut’s main education policy is social promotion.
Hartford’s school superintendent, Leslie Torres-Rodriguez, pledged to investigate the illiterate graduate’s case and but has reported nothing, apparently hoping it will fade away.
The state education commissioner, Charlene M. Russell-Tucker, also pledged to investigate, and last week, in a letter to two Republican state senators who had prodded her about the case — Stephen Harding of Brookfield and Eric Berthel of Watertown — she reported that Hartford’s school administration is obstructing her investigation.
The Education Department wants to see the Hartford school system’s records on the student but the school system refuses to provide them on the grounds that sharing the records “could complicate the parties’ resolution” of the student’s lawsuit.
The student’s privacy rights are not at issue. As a practical matter she waived them by giving her sensational interview to the CT Mirror and by bringing suit.
Nor is it an excuse that the Hartford school system thinks it would be easier to settle the suit if no one can ever find out what happened during the student’s “education.” The Education Department has supervisory authority over municipal schools, and the public interest in accountability is far more compelling than a school system’s interest in concealing a scandal through a confidential settlement of a lawsuit.
But that’s public education in Connecticut for you. It’s like the child welfare agency of old.
So which teachers “taught” the illiterate girl? Which administrators advanced her from grade to grade and to graduation despite her illiteracy? Do Hartford’s schools have any standards for advancement?
How widespread is the problem of gross under-education of high school graduates in Connecticut? Why does the state have no proficiency tests for advancement and graduation? Why is social promotion deemed superior?
Two Republican senators seem interested in these questions. The 185 other legislators and the governor don’t seem to be. After all, the answers might be horrifying.
For as it was 50 years ago, the scariest word in state government remains “accountability,” and there’s no “child advocate” to investigate education’s failures, just advocates for more raises for school employees.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.