Horse Latitudes

When voyagers during the Age of Exploration traveled to the New World they'd occasionally and accidentally navigate courses close to the center of the Atlantic Ocean and become becalmed by weather where the winds lifted off the water instead of blowing across it, resulting in very little current. At such a moment, true sailing is dead.

Ships could be slowed for days or weeks at a time in what was already a long and perilous voyage because of the lack of propulsion. To conserve and preserve rations, most especially of water, ships' crews would often throw horses overboard, lightening the load by reducing the ship's weight and increasing the speed the ship might make in even the lightest winds. Of course, the sailors needed the horses when they reached the New World (why else would they have taken them?) so the choice really was about sacrificing a future in order to continue to have a present.

We are, depending on the circumstances, often those same Sailors and, some are the horses, especially when it's Hard Times in the Land of Plenty. Here at the Western World, we've had success in the past with a 'money fixes everything approach' (it certainly seems to fix most elections, doesn't it? Have some more sausage and beer). While Connecticut is located on the Eastern Seaboard, it is very much part of the western world and (about) a decade ago, to address flagging reading and comprehension scores on standardized testing of grade school children, our legislators in Hartford working with the State Department of Education created and funded the Early Reading Success Grant program.

The program was designed to assist school districts to fund full-day kindergarten, reduce the number of children in the lower grades (K through 3rd) and hire literacy coaches and tutors. In my part of Connecticut (and there are parts, my friend, whether you're from here or not; you'd recognize Fairfield and Litchfield Counties are different states (of mind) from Hartford and when you cross over the Connecticut River heading up the coast, it is a very different, and poorer, state, indeed.), where traditionally we've had more will than wallet, both New London and Norwich schools, challenged to successfully meet the performance benchmarks of No Child Left Behind law, are both recipients of Early Reading Success Grants. New London saw a bit more than $370,000, and Norwich slightly more than half a million dollars in last year's state budget (total program costs were almost twenty million dollars) from the program. That will not, it seems, happen again.

The same legislators who gave CT residents a graduated driver licensing law that so far hasn't reduced teenage driving fatalities, an unenforceable and unenforced hands-free cellphone driving mandate and who blew through a quarter of a billion dollar settlement from Big Tobacco on a plethora of programs that had nothing to do with smoking cessation or health issues of any kind, concluded, despite excellent intentions and sincere efforts, the Early Reading Success Grants weren't having a positive impact on testing scores.

Newspapers report the legislators had removed the program from the new state budget with the aim of developing a better means to track its impact on student achievement, but then potential state deficits and concerns about the worsening economic condition overtook the improvement plan. For the budget year that begins 1 July, the program has been 'defunded' which is a word whose meaning most of the children in need of the program could never guess but I imagine they could define the difference between a bang and a whimper. So from a well-intentioned program with poorly measured achievements to address a real and growing dilemma, we're now becalmed in a sea of red ink and surprised at whom we are jettisoning.
"Legs furiously pumping. Their stiff green gallop. And heads bob up. Poise. Delicate. Pause. Consent. In mute nostril agony. Carefully refined and sealed over."
-bill kenny