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There’s so much wrong with public education in Connecticut generally and with the Hartford school system particularly that criticizing them doesn’t require making up stories. But that’s what the U.S. education secretary, Connecticut’s own Linda McMahon, did the other day to try to score a political point.

McMahon said the infamous case of the Hartford Public High School girl who was graduated illiterate and innumerate two years ago was the result of the school system's spending too much on "diversity, equity, and inclusion" initiatives, political correctness the Trump administration has been trying to stamp out.

McMahon's accusation is nonsense. Hartford did spend a little money on those things while the girl was going to high school but that wasn’t why she was graduated uneducated. 

First, she was graduated uneducated because schools in Connecticut advance and graduate students uneducated as a matter of policy, social promotion. Schools in Connecticut have no academic proficiency requirements.

Second, school management in Hartford was incompetent and indifferent. 

And third, the girl's parent didn’t make a public stink about her daughter's lack of education until she was given a high school diploma and there was money to be made with a lawsuit against the school system.

Of course school and union officials attribute the girl’s ignorance to a lack of money in Hartford’s school system. Yes, the system has thousands of "high needs" students who are more expensive to educate. But the school system also has been badly managed, as the Yankee Institute showed last year with its report about a "paraeducator" who is also president of the local paraeducators union and secretary-treasurer of the Connecticut AFL-CIO and who took nearly a full year of days off in her previous three years of employment, many of the days with pay for doing union political work, not school work. 

Instead of making up a story about "diversity, equity, and inclusion," McMahon could have done some good by noting the school system's negligence and incompetence and the union official so frequently absent from her school job.  

McMahon also could have noted that when the scandal about the uneducated girl broke in the press, the state education commissioner and the Hartford school superintendent promised to investigate and report about the case. They may have investigated but they never reported to the public and no one has ever been held accountable. 

Governor Lamont, whose re-election campaign broadcasts commercials boasting that Connecticut has "the best schools in America," never demanded an explanation about the uneducated Hartford graduate, nor has he amended his commercials to acknowledge that Connecticut also has some of the worst schools in America.

Secretary McMahon could have pushed the governor, the state Education Department, and the Hartford school system to account for what happened with the uneducated graduate, who is hardly the only Connecticut student who has been graduated uneducated in recent years. Indeed, many if not most Connecticut students emerge from high school without high school-level proficiency, and that has nothing to do with DEI either. It’s state government’s lack of political will to enforce educational standards and require parents to take more responsibility for their children.

MORE OMBUDSMEN, PLEASE: Recent days have shown Connecticut that it needs many more independent monitors of state government agencies and programs.

First the Correction Department’s ombudsman, DeVaughn Ward, exposed an abusive, incompetent, and unqualified prison doctor who had been chased away from medical jobs in two states before being hired to treat Connecticut’s prisoners. With an annual salary of $260,000, the doctor has been placed on paid administrative leave, presumably forever.

Then Mairead Painter of the nursing home ombudsman program in the state Department of Aging and Disability Services exposed a nursing home in East Windsor for having left the wound on a patient’s head swarming with maggots. Now he’ll probably need skin grafts. The failure was blamed on a lack of staffing, a problem at many nursing homes.

What might more ombudsmen might find in and around state government?

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