When Connecticut’s Supreme Court issued its first school financing decision — 39 years ago in Horton v. Meskill — its conclusion of unconstitutionality was that the poorest municipalities were not able to provide adequate education because their per-capita property wealth was low and local education was financed mostly by local property taxes.

Since then Connecticut has completely changed its school financing system. Now the poorest municipalities get most of their school funding from the state and their per-pupil spending has increased sharply.

But educational results have not changed. They still correlate almost entirely with per-capita property values, not spending. That is, educational results are determined by demographics — the wealth and parenting capacity of student households. Schools in the cities and inner suburbs, whose demographics are poor, produce poor results. Schools where demographics are good produce good results.

While the changes in the school financing system may have made it fairer to taxpayers, little has been gained educationally by shifting the school tax burden from city property taxes to state government and spending more. As Superior Court Judge Thomas Moukawsher wrote the other day in his decision in the latest school financing lawsuit, poor cities and towns are awarding high school diplomas to students who are “functionally illiterate.”

The premise of the last four decades of educational policy in Connecticut has been that more spending can overcome poverty and that the state Constitution requires a lot more spending. This is what the plaintiffs in the latest lawsuit — educators, academics, city officials, and leftist ideologues — have wanted to hear and what they expected Judge Moukawsher to conclude.

But he didn’t. Instead, Moukawsher concluded that the state Constitution requires more “rationality” in spending — different policies — rather than more spending by itself.

So the plaintiffs, much disappointed, seem likely to appeal the decision in pursuit of more money, while the attorney general is appealing to try to minimize judicial interference with schools — to avoid the judge’s orders to write a new school aid formula and address social promotion, teacher evaluation and tenure, and the wastefulness of special education. While the judge’s criticisms are valid, it’s a stretch to claim that the Constitution requires the governor and legislature to do exactly what he recommends.

As a result more years of fruitless litigation may be ahead, even as Moukawsher’s decision is implicitly an invitation for state government to reconsider poverty policy as much as education policy.

With cash and stipends for housing, food, and medical insurance, state government long has subsidized childbearing outside marriage by young women who are uneducated, unskilled, and unable to support themselves, much less a family. This lifestyle is not just depraved; it is catastrophic for society as well as its participants.

Government subsidies alone make this depraved lifestyle possible. It would not happen otherwise, since, in the age of contraception and abortion, childbearing is entirely a choice.

At home many children of this lifestyle are neglected and even abused. Entering kindergarten, they are already in effect three grades behind, and teachers attempting to remediate the disadvantages of the lack of parenting seldom get any help from the deficient parents, many of whom are drug addicts or mentally ill.

Little is remediated. Worse, the more that remediation is attempted, the more depravity is subsidized and the more that it produces requiring remediation, just as, in education policy, the more a school system fails because of impossible demographics, the more claim it has for more money from the state. All incentives are for failure.

So instead of more school financing litigation, Connecticut should just try turning off its child neglect machine.