A side step

Published March 11, 2014

By Carter Wrenn, Talking About Politics, March 10, 2014.

It’s tough to stay a step ahead of a smart bureaucrat.   

About a week ago I wrote an article explaining how what a bureaucrat wants (for himself) and what’s best for public education isn’t always the same thing – and used Senator Phil Berger’s ‘Read to Achieve’ bill as an example.

 

What Senator Berger wanted was to teach third graders to read – so he passed a bill to end social promotions, saying a third grader had to learn to read before being promoted to fourth grade. Which sounded simple. But didn’t sit too well with the bureaucrats who run education. 

 

Because what bureaucrats love is job security – which means they avoid making controversial decisions like the plague.  And Senator Berger’s bill said one thing loud and clear: They were going to have to make a lot of tough decisions – like making third graders attend summer reading boot camps.

 

Well, the bureaucrats side-stepped the whole problem.   It was sheer brilliance.  They couldn’t repeal Senator Berger’s law – so they gutted it. By simply making the tests easier.

 

As a result, overnight, 11,000 third graders – who couldn’t read under the old standard – can now read!

 

Tammy Howard, the head of testing at the Department of Public Instruction, even told newspaper reporters with a straight face “This is not lowering standards.”

 

Of course, that’s a non-sequitur. But, still, it’s worth remembering the next time the bureaucrats at DPI troop over to the legislature asking for more money.

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March 11, 2014 at 1:25 pm
Richard Bunce says:

The government education industrial complex never gives up... the majority of government school students not proficient at basic skills is the proof.

March 12, 2014 at 8:52 am
Rip Arrowood says:

You keep hammering on this proficiency issue, yet you can only provide one cherry-picked statistic from one report as proof. Our public school students' proficiency is almost dead average compared to the rest of the country. There is room for improvement, but to say they are not proficient at basic skills is intentionally misleading.

March 12, 2014 at 6:50 pm
Richard Bunce says:

Look at just about any assessment of government school performance over the last several decades... and yes all government school systems suffer from the influence of the government education industrial complex, not just NC. Sadly the government school worshipers are only content to allow the relatively wealthy to have real education system choice and fight tooth and nail any effort to make real education system choice available to relatively poor parents. That government schools anywhere performed this dismally for any students at any point in time should be a complete embarrassment to the government education establishment... but it is not.