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During
this year’s General Assembly session, our Governor
and legislators told us there was a c-r-i-s-i-s
in education in Virginia. We were told
that only massive tax increases could address the
looming disaster. The
answer: The commonwealth’s budget grew by 14
percent in one biennial budget cycle.
Now,
quick: What
did we get for this enormous increase in spending?
What measurable goals were articulated to the
taxpayer? Over
what period of time will those goals be achieved?
What control procedures are in place should
we determine that resources are being allocated with
no discernable improvement in education?
Who will be held accountable in the case of
failure?
Of
course, there are no answers to these questions, as
the questions themselves were never posed.
But what about the Standards of Learning (SOLs)?
Aren’t those measurable goals that were
supposed to be achieved over some period of time?
That
was the original idea.
However, since the SOLs were first put in
place, the passing rates continue to be altered.
Today, to pass the science SOL for Grade 5,
one needs to get 57 percent of the answers correct.
To pass the history/social science test for
Grade 8, one needs to score 56 percent. Science for
Grade 8, a passing score of 58 percent.
High school end-of-course exams for reading,
literature and research, 57 percent; mathematics, 54
percent; world history I, 54 percent; world history
II, 57 percent; geography, 51 percent; U.S. history,
56 percent; world geography, 47 percent; biology, 52
percent; chemistry, 54 percent.
(Source:
Virginia
Department
of Education).
It
is truly amazing the progress our children are
making in being brought “up” to SOL benchmarks.
Unfortunately, much of the “progress”
results not from our children doing better but from
lower passing scores.
If we lower the rates enough, all of
our children can be above average!
Seriously,
if there are no goals and no assigned times for
achieving those goals, how will we know if our tax
dollars are well spent?
And what was the real purpose for increasing
the education budget in the first place?
Lil
Tuttle, the education director of the Clare Boothe
Luce Policy Institute, explains:
The
state is obligated to assume responsibility for a
portion of the salaries and fringe benefits of all
local school employees it mandates in the Standards
of Quality (SOQ).
By
its own estimates, the Board of Education’s 2004
SOQ revisions add 12,172 new state-mandated local
school staff at an estimated cost of $323.8 million
to the state and $258.7 million to localities, and
that’s only the first year.
The
Virginia Education Association lists these two top
priorities, both of which will add significantly to
its list of prospective dues-paying members:
-
Elementary
Resource Teacher:
The SOQ revisions add K-5 art, music, and
physical education teachers to a long list of
state-mandated local staff.
At a rate of three class periods per week,
24:1 pupil-teacher ratio (about 5 new staff
positions for every 1,000 K-5 students), it
translates to 2,762 new state-mandated staff
positions at an estimated first year cost of
$67.2 million state and $54.9 million local.
-
Secondary
Planning Time:
The new SOQ require local public schools
to give high school teachers one class period
each day free of students and teaching.
To accomplish that, the SOQ mandate a
reduction in the high school pupil-teacher ratio
from 25:1 to 21:1, which translates to 4,476
new state-supported local high school teachers
at an estimated cost in FY04 of $116.8 million
to the state and $95.5 million to localities.
(Two hundred million dollars a year is a
lot of money to pay teachers to not teach.)
Before
we spend another billion or two on education in Virginia, perhaps we should first decide what the goal of
education is, and what it is not.
The goal of education is teaching
children the right rule of reason.
The goal of education is inculcating
citizen understanding of what is taking place in the
world today, informed by a knowledge of what took place
yesterday. This may
come as a shock to some, but the goal of education and the
raison d’être of our children is not
expanding the number of dues-paying members of the
teachers’ union.
--
July 26, 2004
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