Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
A Times Editorial
President Bush says he wants to help children become educated through local control, but his proposals place much of the control with the federal government.
© St. Petersburg Times, published January 30, 2001
President Bush has used the nation's highest office to set a goal that should be among our society's most compelling: to "make sure every child is educated." But his strategy bears some familiar political markings, including new federal mandates for testing and private school vouchers, which are far removed from the local classrooms in which every child is seated.
The president wants to borrow less from his Texas experience than from the playbook of his brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who in two short years has managed to get every student and teacher in the state obsessed with one annual standardized test. The president's plan is to require every student to be tested every year in grades 3 to 8, and then to use the results of that test to determine whether a school itself is passing or failing. If the school is deemed failing, then the child would be given a federal voucher to a private school. That's what Jeb Bush calls the A+
Plan.
The philosophy is sound. We should want a careful measure of the improvement, or lack of same, of every student, and we should find ways to hold teachers and principals and schools accountable. But as Floridians have seen, the practice doesn't square with the theory. The methodology is simplistic and sometimes out of political expediency.
Let's look at the rhetorical shorthand for a moment.
When Bush says that "American children must not be left in persistently dangerous or failing schools," what does he mean? In Florida, a "failing" school is defined as one whose students did poorly on reading, mathematics and writing on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, which is administered each spring. But does that really mean, as the president put it, that the school "does not teach and will not change"? Or does it mean its students face more learning obstacles than students at other schools that scored higher?
When Bush says students at such a "failing school" should be given vouchers to "transfer to a higher performing public or private school," what does he mean? In Florida, "higher performing" in most cases is simply translated to mean "private school." But the private school is not tested or held accountable for the tax money being spent on education there, so there is no way to assess whether, in fact, it is higher performing.
The George Bush plan, like the Jeb Bush plan, revolves around standardized tests, which in general are an appropriate tool of education. Standardized tests can help mark the individual progress of students and guide students and teachers toward improvement. But the testing the president's plan envisions involves the kind of high-stakes evaluations that tend only to distort the process of education, not to inform it.
In Florida, so much rides on the FCAT that school districts have changed their calendars to give themselves more days to prepare for it. Elementary school teachers have dropped subjects that are not tested. Pep rallies are held to generate student enthusiasm for the test. Teachers spend as much time teaching testing rigor as they do course content.
Last year, in just the second year of the A+
plan, only four of Florida's 2,444 schools "failed" the FCAT. Did teaching and learning improve that dramatically, or did test-taking?
The president's decision to make education a national priority is inspiring, and his motives seem sincere. But the extremists in his own Republican Party who in the past have called for dismantling the U.S. Department of Education do make at least one relevant point. Teachers and principals and classrooms are the province of local communities. They are built with local tax dollars and operated by local boards of education, and the role of the federal government is decidedly narrow. No matter how much Bush professes to believe in local control, new federal rules will bring new federal control. And his version of federal control will bring, mostly, more tests.