On consolidation, don’t go halfway

It’s probably not a coincidence that Fairfield County, among the richest places in the nation, is the center of opposition to school consolidation.

Others have concerns, but hundreds of people from places like Wilton, New Canaan and Ridgefield have been loudest in their rage about any of the plans currently up for debate. They have a good thing and don’t want to give it up.

“It obviously struck a nerve,” one Wilton parent said.

The consolidation debate is really about three or four different things — cost savings, local control, educational quality, etc. — and most people appear to be talking past each other. And Gov. Ned Lamont, for one, isn’t helping clear things up.

His budget takes a tough line: “Small local school districts that choose to have inefficient governance structures and too many expensive superintendents can no longer expect the state to bear the costs of these decisions.”

But after a meeting with Fairfield County leaders, Lamont was more conciliatory. “I am not using anything to force any of the folks here to give up local control they have over their own schools.”

Later, he alluded to the idea of combining city and suburban districts. “If some (suburban) schools took in students from Waterbury, which is overcrowded,” Lamont said, he would look upon them more favorably.

It’s that idea of a city-suburb combination that is causing such an uproar, even though nothing currently proposed would do that.

Just the same, opponents have been clear about what they don’t want, and in the past week we saw a state senator and the incumbent he defeated a few months ago make virtually identical arguments against consolidation. Will Haskell and Toni Boucher, the winner and loser in in the 26th District last fall, both say, essentially, we’ve got great schools here, so hands off.

It’s almost impressive how thoroughly they manage to miss the point.

Because while the 26th District surely has many great teachers, it’s not coincidentally comprised of extremely wealthy towns, and students from well-off families do substantially better on school tests than children from poor families. This gap has only been growing, and is at the heart of the consolidation debate the state could be having but isn’t.

Students from rich and poor districts are equally capable of learning, but they do not have equal resources, which is not the same thing as per-pupil spending. True integration of schools could help change that. Today, Connecticut fares poorly when it comes to public school integration, ranking 13th for most segregation of its black students and 14th for Hispanic students.

While some suburban districts have grown more diverse, the cities have gone the other way. According to data in the CT Mirror, “Bridgeport’s percentage of minority students in public schools has risen from 51 percent in 1968, to 84 percent in 1988, to 86 percent (in 2017).”

Officials are insisting this is all about costs. But what no one has done yet is present the view that integrating schools is a worthwhile goal in and of itself. It’s worth doing to bring some of the wealth and wherewithal in rich communities into high-poverty schools. It’s worthwhile to bring children of different races and backgrounds into regular contact with each other. It worth doing to help eliminate some of the disparities caused by a system where property taxes play an outsize role in determining a district’s success.

That’s the debate we’re not having, at least not in public. Angry opponents are reacting to what hasn’t even been proposed.

Ned Lamont is still brand-new in office and hasn’t yet caused half the state to resent his existence, though that’s probably coming. He has a one-time chance to push for something big, something that would do more than make changes around the edges and start to ease some of Connecticut’s worst-in-the-nation inequality.

I would guess Lamont didn’t run for governor to tinker with back-office school functions. This is his chance to go big. Give it a try. Tell people in Wilton and Branford and Farmington why we should integrate our schools. Make the case; don’t hint at it.

It’s now or, once the tolls pass and the backlash starts, never.