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Anyone who still wants to call Connecticut's biggest government expense "public" education should take a look at New Haven's "public" schools.

It's bad enough that in Connecticut all "public" school teacher evaluations are secret. Now New Haven's Board of Education has just begun its annual evaluation of School Superintendent Madeline Negron and is deliberating about whether this year's evaluation should be conducted in secret as last year's was, or whether this time the board should commit the evaluation's details to writing, which would create a record subject to disclosure under Connecticut's freedom-of-information law. Thus the public might know how the superintendent is doing.

Last year the board evaluated the superintendent's work entirely by discussion in meetings from which the public was excluded, as the law allows a government agency to do for discussion of an employee's performance unless the employee insists on public proceedings. Nothing emerged from last year's evaluation of the superintendent other than comments from board members that they were generally happy with her work. Particular areas of performance were not detailed.

The argument made last year by Mayor Justin Elicker, a member of the board, and by other members was that a secret evaluation allows more candor. Of course that is true only if the elected officials conducting the evaluation lack the courage to be candid with and accountable to their constituents.

But maybe that will change. After the board began discussing how to do its evaluation the other day, two board members told the New Haven Independent that they may put their own evaluations of the superintendent in writing.

That New Haven's schools are terrible -- high chronic absenteeism among students and teachers alike, shockingly low student academic performance, and decrepit facilities -- is a powerful argument in favor of a public evaluation of the superintendent. 

Of course all that's wrong in New Haven's schools is not necessarily the superintendent's fault. As in most school systems, the poverty and parental neglect of the student population are the main causes of academic failure. School systems and their superintendents have to play the hands they are dealt. But how well they do with particular issues is of great public interest. So is what school board members ask of superintendents.

On top of that, New Haven's schools are always seeking more money from state government, and state legislators and the governor can't judge such requests conscientiously if they, like the public, are prevented from knowing what is and isn't being done well by the superintendent -- not that the legislators and the governor want to know, since they are always inclined instead just to throw more money at failure if it clamors enough.

Secrecy hasn't been making New Haven's schools any better. Openness and candor might be more productive.

* * *

Some leading liberal Democrats, including U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., have been saying that there shouldn't be any billionaires. There is an argument for that, just not the one they offer. 

The case against billionaires doesn't involve their supposed greed or evasion of antitrust law but rather the federal government's frantic creation of money, money that always reaches people and institutions that already have plenty of money and influence long before it reaches people of ordinary means. The phenomenon is called the Cantillon Effect.

But the liberals don't mind billionaires who are themselves liberals and donate heavily to Democratic candidates and causes -- billionaires like George Soros, Michael Bloomberg, Reid Hoffman, Dustin Moskowitz, and Steven Spielberg. Those billionaires are just fine with the liberal Democrats.

Yale University reported last week that its endowment rose this year by more than $10 billion to $54.5 billion, but this news passed without protest from Democratic liberals. That's because the fantastically wealthy university is a nursery for liberalism and political correctness and most of the university's professors and executives are liberal Democrats -- which is why President Trump and the outgoing Republican majority in Congress have begun imposing confiscatory taxes on Yale's endowment and other huge endowments of liberal universities.

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