Money well spent

I caught a piece on NPR this morning, regarding Governor Dannel Malloy’s proposed educational budget for Connecticut. Most of it was the normal policy discussion, but there was a part of it where they discussed increasing funding in some of the neediest municipalities in Connecticut. There, it was revealed that Litchfield had expressed concern with the governor’s plan to deallocate money which was designed to bring their students together with other kids for the purposes of “racial diversity”, citing that it wouldn’t foster “racial understanding”. The total program budget was around 11 million dollars, of which the governor had wanted to deallocate 5 million. (For those who don’t know about Litchfield County, it’s 95 % white, and pretty damn conservative and well off. It was the only county in Southern New England that went to Bush the Younger in the 2004 presidential contest.)

So, just to make sure that I’ve got this down properly: a bunch of overprivileged, racially segregated rich people want their overprivileged, racially segregated children to meet poor non-white people, and want to deprive those same poor non-white people and their communities of much-needed educational funds to do so. (To understand that last part, Connecticut derives the majority of the money to fund its municipal school programs from property taxes — which means that schools are generally funded in proportion to the affluence of their communities.)

I don’t even know what to say about that. If you can’t see something wrong with it, there’s probably something wrong with you.

(Note: Please don’t read this as an endorsement of Governor Malloy. After the Adamowski debacle, I don’t think I’m going to be liking him very much, thank you.)