Why is student performance so poor among students from racial minorities in Connecticut's cities? A state law enacted last year suggests it's because city schools don't have enough teachers from racial minorities.

Connecticut's Hearst newspapers reported the other day that while the state's schools have increased their share of minority teachers to 11.7%, up from 7.8% in 2009, that gain has been far outpaced by the increase in students from minority groups, up from 36.2% to 53.8% in the same period.

So the new law requires school boards to devise plans for recruiting, hiring and keeping minority teachers and, upon the state Education Department's approval, to implement them.

But it is hard for schools to achieve more racial diversity in staff when the supply of qualified minority candidates falls far short of demand. Worse, neither the law nor the Education Department specifies very well what a school board should do to recruit, hire and keep minority teachers, perhaps because getting too specific would risk committing illegal racial discrimination.

After all, a school board can't favor job applicants because of their race, as the law suggests they should do, without also discriminating against other applicants because of their race. An advisory from the Education Department approaches the offensive when it implies that non-minority teachers can't teach minority students well.

“Students of color," the advisory says, "benefit from having teachers from their own racial and ethnic group who can serve as successful role models, have the potential to possess a greater knowledge of their heritage and culture, and tend to have higher academic expectations of them.”

Couldn't school personnel recruiters evaluate non-minority applicants individually about their knowledge of and sympathy for minority students without resorting to such stereotyping and racial discrimination?

White students as well as minority students would benefit from a more racially integrated teaching staff, for social cohesion even if not so much for educational performance. But would hiring some people and not hiring others because of race be fairer than hiring people without regard to race? Rejected applicants won't think so, and they will be right.

In any case the racial composition of teaching staffs isn't a major cause of Connecticut's infamous racial performance gap among students. The major cause for the underperformance of minority students is the poverty that results in large part from the breakdown of the family under the pressure of the welfare system.

But the major cause of the racial performance gap is too sensitive politically to address. So emphasizing racial diversity on teaching staffs will serve as a convenient distraction from the big problem — at least until teacher unions start protesting the suggestion that their white members don't care about and aren't qualified to teach minority students.

Layoffs amid raises

Big layoffs are threatening teachers and other school employees in Hartford and Enfield because of budget shortages. Those employees and many parents complain that students will be cheated out of much of their education. But the complaint is not persuasive, since school spending in both Hartford and Enfield has risen steadily over the years without improving student performance. It's hard to see that variations in school spending make any difference in educational results.

But layoffs, municipal property tax increases or extra appropriations of state financial aid should not be the only options for squaring a school system's financial books. For there may be a better option: getting financial concessions from unionized school employees.

Indeed, even as Enfield's schools are laying off people, they are also paying raises required under union contracts. The school system is cannibalizing itself.

Of course addressing government's financial problems by reducing salaries and benefits for government employees never happens in Connecticut. Economizing with personnel compensation is left to the private sector, where businesses do not have the power to dictate prices to their customers as government does through taxes.

Elected officials in Connecticut would never think about asking for concessions from school employees, only from taxpayers, who are frequently asked for concessions as property taxes rise. Why can't school employees make the concessions once in a while?

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. He can be reached at CPowell@cox.net.