politicalcivility.com Blog

A bill up at the state legislature currently proposes to change the makeup of the state school board, which I favor.  The current bill is not one that will work for a variety of reasons not the least of which is the sheer size of the board, which will create an unruly body.

What about the following changes to the board?

1. Keep the same amount of board members at 13. 
2. Create four governor appointed members who rotate as chairman for 1-year each; these members will serve a four year term
3. Establish appointed members qualifications as follows: 1 member from the homeschool community, 1 member from the charter community, 1 member from the public school community, and 1 member from the private school community.
4. Create 9 generally elected members based on districts drawn up by school-district boundaries, meaning you couldn’t split a school district; these members will serve a two year term.

Just my thoughts on the issue.

“You just can’t have a system that is all Republican or all Democrat,” Wayne Crabb said. “There is a reason the government has been set up the way it has with both Democrats and Republicans.”

(http://deseretnews.com/article/1,5143,695242527,00.html)

I’d like to ask Mr. Crabb to show me where in the constitution of our country or of any state that has been set up for two parties.  I can’t seem to find that “check” in the document.  What’s more is that many of the founders actually warned about the problems the country could face if we had a two-party system.  Mr. Crabb’s comments are just one more example of the impact of an education system that is failing to teach and prepare citizens to participate effectively in our society.

There’s no such thing as a free lunch, especially with the federal government.  So it’s time education folks here in the state stop complaining about NCLB.  As long as we are willing to accept the money, we should accept the myriad of strings attached to those dollars.  If we want real educational freedom for our public schools, lets push our state office of education to stop accepting federal dollars.  When push comes to shove, my guess is that while the state office of education hates NCLB, they don’t hate it enough to turn away the dollars and in the end its our children who end up paying the price

I have to say that more and more I look forward to reading the monthly Imprimis newsletter from Hillsdale College.  November was no exception.  While reading the column by Larry Arnn, I was reminded of two fundamental questions we need to be talking about more in the education reform debate:

1. What is the purpose of education?
2. Whose fundamental role is it to educate?

THE PURPOSE OF EDUCATION 

I love what Arnn has to say about this and I think his definition is the correct one:

The purpose of education, and especially higher education, is to come to know and contemplate these [religion, morality and knowledge] higher things. 

Speaking of the mission and purpose of Hillsdale, Arnn continues:

Our own college…was built in service of the blessings of “civil and religious liberty and intelligent piety”…To secure these blessings, we promise and education that will “develop the minds and improve the hearts” of our students.  In other words, the purpose of education has both an intellectual and a moral compenent, and these are connected essentially.

Arnn then summarizes the Bush andministration’s definition of education (which seems to be the more commonly espoused definition of education):

The report of the National Commission on the Future of Higher Education reduces education to the purpose of preparing young people for a job and of making the nation powerful and successful in itis economic competition with other nations.

By comparing these two definitions, is it any wonder that education continues to decline.  The latter definition is straight from the industrial mode of production of commodities versus the development of human beings.

FUNDAMENTAL ROLE TO EDUCATE

Reagan perhaps gave the greatest one paragraph summation on what I believe to be the correct principle regarding this most fundamental role to a free society.

Our leaders must remember that education doesn’t begin with some isolated bureaucrat in Washington.  It doesn’t even begin with State or local officials.  Education begins in the home, where it’s a parental right and responsibility.  Both our public and our private schools exist to aid our families in the instruction of our children, and it’s time some people back in Washington stopped acting as if family wishes were only getting in the way.

When I voted for our current president, this is the type of leadership I was hoping to support.  Bush ran as a Reagan Republican, but his policies and the growth of the Department of Education show that he is more of a Johnson liberal stuck in the Great Society mold.

I know parents aren’t perfect.  I am a parent and I fully admit to making my share of mistakes, but I object to those who give big government the benefit of the doubt as to their caring about my child and assume the worst on my part.  When was the last time they changed a stinky diaper, stayed up late into the night comforting one of my sick children, or did without a new pair of shoes so my son could play soccer?  Answer: never.  And yet, we (the public) in general seem to always trust the government to fix something more complicated than cleaning up New Orleans after Katrina. 

Let’s stop trusting government and put the education back where it belongs and is best held up: on the shoulders of this nations great and loving parents.

Let’s cut through all the garbage in the education debate and let’s focus on one factor: parental involvement.  This is the only variable we can consistently point to as a means to improve educational achievement.  More money is not the answer.  Better student teacher ratios are not the answer.  Fancy computers, facilities and brand new books are not the answer either.  But year after year the educational establishment trots out these issues as the cure all for what ails public education, and year after year they get what they want, by in large. 

It’s time to stop the madness.  It is time to put parents back in charge of education.  It is time to trust parents again. 

This is going to take more than an effort at the legislature.  There needs to be a change of direction from the men in black robes, who in the 9th circuit court recently ruled that parental rights stop at the school gates.  This verbage is in reference to a group of parents attempting to influence cirriculum at their school, which they found objectionable. 

This type of mentality is also pervasive among education experts, in Utah and elsewhere.  Parents are often a necessary evil and are tolerated but not accepted.  Is it any wonder that parents are removing themselves, and where funds permit, their children from the system.  Public schools have a bias toward parental exclusion and toward blanket prescription.  This type of activity breeds cynicism and parental inactivity, the very tool that will help government funded schools achieve successful results.

While vouchers are not the end all be all, they help in turning government funded education back to parents and to treating them as partners and consumers rather than the people who babysit the schools’ children from 3:00 in the afternoon until 8:00 in the morning.

I’ve spent the last couple of months participating in a committee that is reviewing what recommendations can/should be made to NCLB to make it “better.” As these meetings have gone on, I keep thinking about Peter Drucker’s comment, “We should stop trying to do better what we shouldn’t be doing at all.”

I think it is important to understand that our current eduction system is modeled after the early 1900’s factory model (i.e., standarization in mass quantity or in other words you can have any car/education you want as long as it’s black.)  This effort has led to unionized labor, large inefficient bureaucracies, little or no innovation and the inability to make quick adjustments to changing demographic and workplace readiness needs. Then you add the small problem that children are not inatimate objects where a certain set of inputs will always result in the same set of outputs.

So now we have this lovely sounding law “no child left behind” be sold to us by an organization type that simply is not capable of delivering upon the promise.  This is not because teachers don’t want to see all children succeed.  The reason why failure is assured is that the business model around which the public ed system is structured means that it simply cannot account for each child, because education is a batch system, and if it tried to be a specialized system the costs would be astronomical (given the current system, labor relations, dept. of education, capital asset structure, etc.)

The only way for us to have real transformational change in education is for a ‘disruptive technology’ (Clayton Christensen, Harvard) to come along in education, which will eventually completely replace the system we have today.  In a large way this is a key reason to fund vouchers.  Vouchers can now act as an investment in education innovation and experimentation, where the best can rise to the top and provide new means, methods, and models for the 21st century education of our children.