Hartford’s got issues.
Most places do.
But when a city has got issues, it seems that all sorts of classist and racist attitudes come leaking out the woodwork. Since the collapse of industrial work, the development of a car culture, and welfare to create suburbs (FHA), white Americans have emptied out of cities, leaving mostly racial minorities in areas of concentrated poverty. In areas where there is a smaller tax base (poverty=not getting to own a home many times), there is less funding available for education. The kids get sub par educations, can’t get into decent colleges, and have far more obstacles to overcome from the start than their suburban counterparts.
A few weeks ago I played a game with my college students. I read a few statements and asked them to make educated guesses as to whether the statement I just read was fact or opinion. Now, most of the students are coming from private schools or good public schools. Very few could tell what was fact and what was opinion, and these were not trick questions.
Knowing this must indicate some kind of trend, I should not be surprised when I see people respond the Hartford’s problems in a way that ignores facts.
There was a letter to the editor in the paper today with a sentence that made me stop, in awe, of the various ways that Hartford can be labeled a cesspool:
Perhaps the city already has a good school system, but defective and unruly students.
Unruly students? Well, yeah, if you have overcrowded classrooms to the point that education becomes a joke, then I’m sure they do become unruly. Defective? Let’s think about that.
Dictionary.com provides one definition of defective as:
characterized by subnormal intelligence or behavior
I want to give the author the benefit of the doubt. Sometimes the Courant does creative editing that changes words or context, but my understanding is that in the past year or so, they have actually gotten away from that. So, saying that Hartford’s children have subnormal intelligence just reeks of The Bell Curve— the philosophy that essentially says that if a population are naturally of lower intelligence, there is no point in trying to educate them.
While the public school system in Hartford is undergoing massive changes that are controversial because of what is involved (making all teachers re-apply for their jobs, even if they have been working there for decades, relying on a magnet school model, etc.), there are people out in rural Ellington like the letter’s author, and people in suburban parts of the state, and people who because of their economic situations have never found their own kids wilting in overcrowded, problem public school systems. And certainly, their kids have not been deemed defective.