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Monday, February 16, 2009
Georgia’s public schools on the right course
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Back off. Don’t touch it. Please.
A word now to everybody running for governor in 2010. It’s not necessary, not even helpful, to have an education platform that involves any blue-ribbon commission, any bright ideas for overhaul of schools, curriculum or classrooms, or any new fix-it brainstorms that involve reinventing anything. Got it?
The picture’s clear. There’s nothing Georgia’s likely to do in public education that offers any more hope of success than what it’s already doing. Just leave ‘em alone. Give the current approach time to work — time that may amount to another eight to 10 years. There’s no quicker fix.
Listening five years ago to legislators debate whether to truly make the HOPE stipend a true merit-based scholarship, it was readily evident that high-school grades were virtually meaningless.
Teachers gave Bs to placate parents and to qualify favored dullards for HOPE. While HOPE required B averages, 32 percent of HOPE scholars had grade-point averages below B. What’s more, because of a loosey-goosey curriculum statewide, algebra here and algebra there could range from “Fun Numbers for Big Dummies” to college-level course work, depending on the teacher, the school and the system. HOPE eligibility was tightened.
Essential to any effort to upgrade public education was a requirement to equalize curriculum and grades, so that a B is not academic welfare but a true indicator of what students know and how they are likely to perform in a more rigorous college setting.
That’s what State School Supt. Kathy Cox and the state school board have been doing.
Gov. Sonny Perdue, meanwhile, has been pursuing another crucial piece of the puzzle. One is to find a way to push authority down to the local level. Local systems promise results — in higher graduation rates, for example — in return for freedom from some regulation.
Another is to attempt to come up with a dollar amount that should be a fair price for which parents and taxpayers are able to buy a decent education from the local system.
A free-market price ought to exist; it’s just a matter of striking the right balance. The problem now is that all attempts to find the precise formula are akin to efforts to predict global warming a thousand years from now. It’s a constant, never-adequate, never-accountable, funding-formula game.
In any event, the first long-term requirement to upgrade public education is to get all Georgia on the same curriculum and grading standard.
For that reason, alignment of the End of Course Tests and classroom grades, pointing to systems and schools and specific teachers who award feel-good grades or fail to teach the material, represents exciting progress.
Standardize the curriculum, test to make certain that students are getting it regardless of where they live in Georgia, and then — over time — upgrade standards. Please, don’t elect a new governor who alters the course.
Set and then upgrade standards.
Provide a sum that, if given to competent school administrators, should allow them, or any willing and capable provider, to produce a child educated to state standards. And hold them accountable for results, not for intent and not for sums spent.
And, for goodness sakes, pray that Georgia can cultivate a judiciary without activist judges tempted to come up with education funding formulas on their own.
Work for a judiciary that respects the rights and prerogatives of elected officials in the legislative and executive branches to work this through. No judge could possibly know whether Georgia spends too much or too little on education services. Their opinions are no more valid than those of any reasonably informed spectator.
Georgia is on the right course to upgrade public education. Even though I fervently believe that parents should be able to take the money that taxpayers allocate for the education of their children and buy the schooling they think best, the state still has to concentrate on improving public education.
Georgia’s doing that. Don’t go wimpy. And, for goodness sakes, don’t launch off in a new direction — especially a new direction involving the same failed model.
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