POWELL On Public Schools

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
The Vine Project love It. Let's go back to the
Project Hotline. Welcome back to the show, Chris Powell. I
appreciate you taking the time to come on whenever you do.
I've been enjoying your last batch of columns. I catch
up sometimes, you know, they they'll pile up, Chris, So

(00:31):
I'll have a Powell pile. You know, there'll be three
or four of the particularly this one from last Wednesday.
And I don't know if there's a specific one you
want to single out to. I'm fine with that. But
this is something that actually I've covered here on the
show and has led to an interesting conversation that I'm
having right now on TikTok of all places. And I

(00:53):
don't know if you bother with such things.

Speaker 2 (00:57):
Well, it's good to be here with you. Any TikTok.
I can spell it, but that's about it.

Speaker 1 (01:02):
Yeah, yeah, no, And I probably be the same too.
And there was like an iHeartRadio mandate about two years ago.
It's ada you all have to create TikTok. I kind
of was kicking and screaming. Now I am having conversations
though with people across the country who it's interesting to
see non Connecticut residents react to stories taking place into

(01:27):
in Connecticut, you know, and their views on it, and
one of them was the story. So you've got to
calumn out most child neglect actually involves public schooled children,
as it pertains to this big conversation about homeschooling and
bills that are looking to be past, et cetera, et cetera.
But before we get into that column, I had talked

(01:47):
about the story out of Granby late last week on
my show, about the Granby middle schooler who had gotten
so repeatedly harassed and bullied by boy and his buddies
that and the school did nothing. There was such complete
neglect there that the parents yanked her out of the school,

(02:08):
put her in a private school. They're not paying for
her education, and they're suing the school and the school
district for just letting this you know, this guy like
eight times there was there were eight incidents that have
been documented, and I find myself, Chris, so I did
a little rant on TikTok and the way I'm supposed to,
you know, the way the job, the radio host job demands.

(02:30):
Now and I'm hearing from uh school age middle school girls,
high school girls here in Connecticut, but beyond saying public
public schools are completely failing us. Like yesterday, one girl
kind of broke my heart. She was a young girl
who and I think a Connecticut one who's like, I

(02:51):
just watched your clip here and I've got a horrible
story of my own. Our public schools here are completely
failing us. And here's like a you know, a sixteen
your old girl telling me this. I don't even know
how to reply to where I haven't yet.

Speaker 2 (03:04):
Well, look, I'm not familiar with any particular case, but
I know that the bullying problem has been around and
getting worse for for years, and it just, you know,
it seems to be a failure of educational administration. I
suspect that educators school administrators are reluctant to act against

(03:30):
bullying because if you discipline or you expel anybody, you know,
the parents come down on you. And it's it's virtually
illegal to expel a kid from school these days, so
you know, the administrators feel like their hands are tied.
And if you do expel somebody, there's you know, always

(03:51):
a big, a big protest, and all the liberals will
come out saying that you're you know, you're going to
after the minority kids because the minority kids are poorer
and more prone to misbehavior in school. And you know,
nobody wants to address the problem. But you know, tell
that to the kids who were bullied, Tell that to

(04:11):
the parents whose kids are bullied. I think there's just
there is a general problem in Connecticut of the lack
of standards in public education. Probably the worst or the
best example of it, really is our system of social promotion.
We promote kids from grade to grade and give them
high school diplomas regardless of whether they've they've learned anything,

(04:35):
and then we throw them into the world as young adults,
expecting that they're going to be able to fend for themselves,
and they can't even read and write.

Speaker 1 (04:46):
You know, it's interesting to hear you bring up expulsion,
because that was just something that's so hung over my
head as God was constantly threatened with that. I'm fifty
eight years old. I was constantly threatened with that, and
I was just mischievous ranster. You know, I certainly wasn't
getting into fights, but I had classmates who there was

(05:07):
a guy I went to school with for years. He
got expelled for mischief for pranks for fireworks in a bathroom,
and we weren't even public school. They were willing to
forego tuition to rid themselves of this problem child. He
had a three strike policy. That was his third strike.

(05:27):
He was out of here, and they lost that money
that they were getting every year, those precious you know,
twoition dollars. So there's even that aspect of it today.

Speaker 2 (05:38):
Well, you know, I think in the end we have
to have a fairly solid program of adult education. So
when the kids who could not behave in school discover
in adulthood that they need some education and they presumably
learned how to behave, they can come back and go

(06:00):
to adult school. But our policy right now is really
to let the misbehaving kids ruin education for everybody else.

Speaker 1 (06:10):
And again rom with Chris Powell and got to check
out his columns, the really informative and particularly you touched
upon in this column a story I thought I covered
quite well here on my show. A horrible story last week,
and I even spoke with the mayor in new Haven
who's seeking reelection about the fact that it was a

(06:33):
thirteen year old boy who shot and killed that fifteen
year old boy in new Haven. The new Haven PD.
You know, they got their quote unquote, man, he just
wound up being thirteen.

Speaker 2 (06:44):
But I am sure that if he had been homeschooled,
I think all the liberals in Connecticut would be, you know,
pointing to this as another failure of homeschooling. The case
that has gotten all the attention lately the murder of
the eleven year old girl who was living in Farmington

(07:05):
and then her family moved to New Britain and she
was found, you know, dead in the box next to
her house. Originally, that girl was reported to have been homeschooled,
or at least her her mother had claimed the right
to homeschooler. There was a review of the police records

(07:28):
the other day by the founder of a national homeschooling group,
and she reviewed the police records. It appears to her
now that the girl was killed when she was still
enrolled as a public school student, and that the filing

(07:48):
for her to be homeschooled came after she was murdered,
presumably so that nobody would would be looking for So
I think this the second case of abuse a supposed
homeschool student is not correct. Nevertheless, I mean this is
a problem. It's a problem with homeschooled students. They certainly

(08:10):
ought to be required to come forward for an interview
with school or child protection authorities once a year, especially
those kids whose families have already been under review by
the Department of Children and Families. But the point of
my column is the overwhelming majority of child neglect and

(08:36):
abuse in Connecticut involves public school students. It doesn't involve
homeschool students. The homeschooled students largely are coming from families
that have pretty good incomes and can spare a parent
from working outside the home to do the schooling at home,
whereas most of the family single parent kids in Connecticut,

(09:03):
the ones who are most subject to abuse and neglect
are public school and we know from the limited proficiency
test results we have that the public school students who
fail in school, nobody's really looking after them. We have
social promotion. If you don't learn in Connecticut. Look every

(09:27):
every kid in Connecticut public schools, and I'm sure most
of their parents know that there's no need to attend school.
You know, we have a seventeen percent chronic absenteeism rate
in the public schools in Connecticut. The chronic absenteeism rate
in the cities, you know, Hartford, New Haven, Bridgeport is
twenty five percent and above. Why is that? It's because

(09:52):
parents and the kids themselves know there's no need to
go to school. They're going to get promoted from grade
to grade and give it a high school diploma whether
that they learn, so why should they go to school?
And that is the worst child neglect and abuse And
that is policy in Connecticut. It's not homeschooling, it's lack

(10:13):
of seriousness and education in Connecticut.

Speaker 1 (10:16):
Well, and what is also cited in your column where
you write about a third of Connecticut's children live without
a father in their home in the cities, it's most
children and fatherlessness correlate strongly with poverty, educational failure, etc.
When we look at the story of this eleven year
old girl, we've got a father there who went two
years without seeing her and said every time he tried

(10:39):
to FaceTime her mother said she was busy, I mean
drive over. There are varying degrees of fatherlessness. Yes, you
could be outside the home, but you could also be
completely inaccessible and not give a damn too. And there's
a lot of that.

Speaker 2 (10:56):
Yeah, this I think really is the root of child abuse.
And neglect in the country. We have decided that it's
cheaper to you know, subsidize people for having children they
can't afford and to put them through the danger of
neglect and a single parent household. And it would be

(11:16):
to insist in policy and custom that children have two parents.
And that's really where you know, so much of the
educational failure and physical and mental illness and demoralization are
coming from. It's from the number of children we have

(11:41):
growing up without a father in the home. Is a
study at the University of Virginia earlier this year found
that the racial performance gap among students, which is notoriously
horrible here in Connecticut between black and white kids in
the public schools, is a race when you bring the
father back into the home. It was a really profound

(12:03):
study supervised by the University of Virginia, but it found
that a father in the home makes all the difference
to education.

Speaker 1 (12:15):
Always felt that way, and it's got to be a father.
Unlike in this story here one who just say, oh,
she can't come to the phone. Okay, it's been two years.
I'll accept that. It's got to be a father who
you know, I don't want to keep sounding so old
school here, but just there's a healthy dose of fear.

(12:35):
There's rules, there's a hammer that's going to come down,
there's homework that's got to get done. I mean, the
father ultimately, especially in the homeschool scenario, is the principle too.
You know, Chris Paula always appreciate you taking the time
to come on and writing about Connecticut government and politics
for many years. Make sure you're checking out his column

(12:56):
easily enough to get on that e blast the Chris
Powell column several times a week and it's always compelling stuff.
We'll see what happens with that legislation as it pertains
to homeschooling too. In the meantime, when a bit long there,
we'll take a break and be right back