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Bearing false witness

Ohanian Comment: Here is a snippet the Republican Governors Association posts on its website.




The crowd of more than 5,000 gathered under a sweltering Western Kentucky sun for the 127th annual Fancy Farm picnic on Saturday as Democrats and Republicans took turns on stage taunting each other with mocking skits and sarcastic speeches.

Republicans sent a man dressed as Moses into the audience looking for the Ten Commandments, which they said Democrats took out of the schools and courthouses. Democrats started a chain gang marching alongside the stage to poke fun at a hiring scandal and a series of indictments that clouded much of the Republican governor’s first term.



In checking "headlines" at the website, I didn't find anything about NCLB. On the Democratic Governors site there is a lot about veterans, some about children's health care, but nothing about NCLB.

Why?

by Mark Neikirk, Managing Editor

May I continue?

Last week, I was just getting started on the Kentucky Education Reform Act, otherwise known as KERA, the landmark law passed in 1990 and hung out to dry in the years since.

This being an election year, Kentuckians can send a message to Frankfort that we want better schools, that we'll pay for them, with or without casino gambling, and that we don't find the key to better schools in that silly, new mailer from the Republican Governors Association that says Steve Beshear, the Democratic candidate, "turned his back on Kentucky children" when, as the state attorney general years ago, he didn't let schools post the Ten Commandments in defiance of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Apparently, the Republican Governors Association and the candidate they want re-elected, their colleague Ernie Fletcher, have such a low opinion of voter intelligence as to believe we will be persuaded by a two-bit mailer with campy, cut-and-paste graphics in which the dominant image is a stone tablet counseling against bearing false witness, even as the mailer's substance bears false witness.

It's all a distraction.

What governors, whether Republican or Democratic, should be thinking about is how to arouse passions for improved public schools. They should be asking what improvements matter. The Ten Commandants don't make my list. These things do:

Preschool. Fletcher can't run on his whole record because his whole record includes the hiring scandal. But one piece of his record he could tout is an added investment in preschool. He boosted funding to make more 4-year-olds from low-income families eligible. It was a decent enough start, and he could say in this campaign "I've started, and I'll finish."

Instead we get, "Thou shalt not commit adultery." Turns out, most 4-year-olds don't.

Testing. This is what a Northern Kentucky school teacher said to me the other day about mandated testing: "In April, we don't teach. We test." Hyperbole, perhaps, but an insatiable appetite for testing is eating up the school calendar. Where is the candidate who, without dismantling accountability, will insist on testing but also on a testing schedule proportional to the need to keep track without overwhelming instruction?

Test scores. The Commonwealth Accountability Testing System, or CATS, is supposed to keep the public in tune with how schools are doing. Instead, CATS can confuse all comers, partly because achievement is reported on a scale of zero to 140. A school can make an 80 sound pretty good. But 80 out of 140 is a 57 if the scale is zero to 100. Can CATS reporting be simplified? And regardless of how you scale it, scores at some schools are shocking low - below 40 even. Somebody send in the Marines.

About those Marines. The 1990 reforms envisioned carrots and sticks. Districts scoring well on CATS would get bonus money. Those scoring poorly would get a visit from a fix-it team, the KERA Marines.

The rewards remain on the books but haven't been funded since 2002 - that is, since the last governor. Fletcher let the rewards wither. Beshear is non-committal. "The incentive program is something Beshear will certainly consider looking into as governor," his campaign replied to my query.

Maybe, as many argue, the rewards were more trouble than they were worth. Still, it's odd how they died without any real analysis of whether they worked.

A more serious affront to KERA is what happened to the stick. In the years before the reform law, Kentucky experimented with academic bankruptcy laws forcing a state takeover if a school district failed to educate its children. Nice idea but it didn't function. Failing districts always seemed to fend off Frankfort.

KERA took the more practical approach of setting up response teams to target districts in danger of failing. The teams work, but the money is not there to fund enough teams. Furthermore, the strike teams need resources. If, for example, they say a failing district needs a lower student/teacher ratio, then money should be there to do so. It isn't.

There you have it. Fixing the public schools isn't as easy as posting a chapter of the Old Testament. Think about it: If a child can't read, what good are words on the wall? Why, such a child would grow up to be so uneducated as to believe campaign mailers.



— Mark Neikirk
Cincinnati Post
2007-09-15
http://news.cincypost.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070915/EDIT/709150304/1003/EDIT

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