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A Dangerous Compromise in the Making?
This piece appeared in The Hartford Courant on October 2, 2002.
On July 13, readers of the Courant learned that, for the first time in the thirteen year history of the Sheff vs. O'Neill case, lawyers for both sides were holding serious negotiations aimed at settling their differences. Hoping the talks might produce a compromise acceptable to both sides, Superior Court Judge Julia L. Aurigemma agreed to postpone the trial until the middle of this month.
As the deadline approaches for the negotiators to show progress, many parents across Connecticut undoubtedly have their fingers crossed. In recent years, the legislature's response to the academic deficiencies motivating the Sheff case has been to avoid pressing the teachers' union for needed reform of the Hartford public schools and instead to turn an educational crisis in the capitol city into a broad statewide desegregation plan. A law was passed to bus a quota of poor minority students from Hartford to the surrounding suburbs, while at the same time building urban magnet schools to lure white children in the opposite direction. Similar programs were mandated for the regions surrounding both Bridgeport and New Haven.
Given that the remedy sought by the Sheff plaintiffs is a dramatic expansion of the current busing law, with an estimated $87 million dollars to be spent on new magnet schools in Hartford alone, taxpayers can be forgiven for thinking that any compromise has to be good -- if for no other reason than to reduce expenditures at a time of exploding budget deficits. Yet a settlement which simply splits the difference on expenses while retaining the essential character of a desegregation plan would prove to be a legal, financial, and educational disaster that could haunt the state for decades to come.
As a March memo prepared by the prominent Washington, D.C., law firm of Cooper & Kirk rightly observed, any desegregation outcome in the Sheff case would be a "precedent to courts throughout Connecticut that must follow the Connecticut Supreme Court’s mandate," inspiring desegregation lawsuits against any suburb within busing distance of a failing urban school system. Even the most remote farming communities would suffer, according to the memo, as "the potentially enormous price" of various desegregation remedies would have to be born by the state as a whole.
Furthermore, Sheff is not the only case seeking to improve poorly performing Connecticut schools by means others than honest academic reform. In Johnson v. Rowland, which is scheduled to go to trial next spring, a group of towns, including Bridgeport, Hamden, New Britain, and Seymour, are seeking to abolish the state’s formula for supplementing the budgets of poorer school districts and to replace it with a mandate that simply equalizes per pupil funding statewide -- effectively abolishing local financial control over schools. Although recent press reports suggest that some of the Johnson plaintiffs have become discouraged, a victory by the Sheff plaintiffs in negotiating a non-academic approach to Hartford school reform would undoubtedly create momentum for Johnson’s own non-academic remedy.
Finally, there is no guarantee that, just because the plaintiffs and the Attorney General can agree on a desegregation plan, the legal wrangling would end there. The Sheff case has dragged out long as it has, because in 1996 the state’s Supreme Court upheld a race-based remedy for Hartford’s poorly performing schools, even though the Equal Protection clause of the U.S. Constitution prohibits such remedies in the absence of a history of legislated, or de jure, segregation. The membership of high Court has changed significantly in the last six years; and a compromise on Sheff, which features any desegregation plan, would likely be challenged by third parties.
Of course, it would be worth ignoring any of these reservations, if there were the slightest connection between desegregation and minority achievement; but, as our own Department of Education’s data already show, there is no relationship between minority test scores and levels of integration in any of our state’s towns. At a time when troubles at companies like Worldcom and Tyco show us the importance of integrity in the governance of our institutions, wouldn’t it be nice if the defense could resist the temptation to join in scapegoating race and put the blame for Hartford’s school where it really belongs: on an education monopoly that doggedly resists accountability.
Dr. Lewis M. Andrews is Executive Director of the Yankee Institute for Public Policy Inc. at Trinity College, a Connecticut research and educational institute.
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The Yankee Institute for Public Policy, Inc. is a nonpartisan educational and research organization founded more than two decades ago. Today, the Yankee Institute's mission is to "promote economic opportunity through lower taxes and new ideas for better government in Connecticut." The Yankee Institute for Public Policy, Inc. is classified by the IRS as a 501 (c) (3) public charity. Contributions are deductible to the extent allowed by law.
