YANKEE INSTITUTE FOR PUBLIC POLICY STUDIES
Many conservatives tend to view New England, outside of New Hampshire, as barren soil for limited-government, free-market ideas, and even traditional morality. But the state of Connecticut, one of the nation’s smallest but oldest and most elite states, has the Yankee Institute for Public Policy Studies within its borders, trying hard to cause trouble for the Constitution State’s devotedly liberal political class.
"I compare the Yankee Institute’s role in Connecticut to Doolittle’s raid over Tokyo," said Yankee Institute Executive Director Dr. Lewis Andrews. "No place is safe." A few months after Pearl Harbor, Lt. Col. James Doolittle led a dangerous air raid over Tokyo and other cities to prove to the Japanese that America had the will and ability to attack their homeland-and to boost American morale.
The Yankee Institute has chosen to launch its latest raid on what it perceives as a weak point of the enemy, education reform. With the slump in the national economy, Connecticut faces an unbalanced budget. "Affluent towns are now turning down big education budgets," Andrews said. This has created a greater receptivity, he said, to cost-saving education reform plans in affluent areas with good schools. The Yankee Institute is trying to forge an alliance between elements there and those concerned with the plight of children languishing in failed special education programs, he said.
Connecticut, "a suburban state," ranks high in state-by-state comparisons of educational achievement, but has dilapidated pockets of urban decay-particularly Hartford, Bridgeport, and New Haven-that are in bad shape, said Andrews. "If you look just at Hartford, it’s a Third World educational system," he said. "And even the suburban towns are not getting their money’s worth." Tuition vouchers, he said, could be cheaper than public education.
So the Yankee Institute is pressing for school choice, starting with special education kids but with the hope of expansion. "[Connecticut Gov. John] Rowland is the only governor in New England who is on record as being in favor of school choice. . .," said Andrews. "We put it in terms of giving parents a grant. What towns are legally empowered to do is give grants or scholarships. . . . We have black and Hispanic parents who want choice for special education kids. We had a conference two weeks ago. There are a lot of kids in urban areas who never learn how to read properly and get labeled special education."
What schools do, he said, is fail to teach young children to read and then label them "special education," blaming the children for the failures of their teachers and administrators.
In an article on the Yankee Institute’s website that he co-authored with Dr. Matthew Ladner of Children First America, Andrews reported, "In 2001, the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and the Progressive Policy Institute teamed to release a collection of studies titled Rethinking Special Education for a New Century, and the findings are staggering. . . . Among the conclusions of the report: parents with learning disabled children are broadly dissatisfied with special education programs in the public schools. . .thousands of children have been labeled learning disabled merely because public schools have failed to teach them to read properly. . .and minority students are significantly more likely to be placed into special education programs in both white and non-white public school districts."
Wrote Andrews and Ladner, "A team of medical doctors led by Reid Lyon of the National Institute for Health found that many special education placements result from the failure to master basic reading skills at a young age. . . . Dr. Lyon’s research demonstrates that intensive remedial reading instruction delivered at a young age could prevent 70% of learning disabilities. Nationwide, Dr. Lyon’s team estimates that nearly two million children have been classified as having learning disabilities that could have been either prevented or remediated with proper, rigorous early reading instruction." (Emphasis in original.)
The Yankee Institute describes Florida’s solution to the special education problem: "According to the new law, now known as the McKay Scholarship Program, private schools taking on a special needs child could recover from the government between $6,000 and $20,000, depending on the severity of the child’s disability."
In general, Andrews said, Connecticut suffers from a liberal-created malaise that cries out for liberty-based solutions to more than just educational deficiencies. Taxes are too high, said Andrews. "Property taxes in Connecticut have soared," he said. "People and jobs are leaving. We just lost a congressman [to reapportionment] this year. Young people do not stay in the state."
