BayouVixen's Blog

About a decade ago, during the rewrite of the state's education standards by then-Gov. George W. Bush's administration, Bush turned his personal hatchet-man, Karl Rove, loose on several conservative Republican State Board of Education members who opposed his agenda -- an agenda which, it had been proven in print, was lifted almost verbatim from the touchy-feely "New Standards" implemented in Arkansas by Hillary Clinton. Rove used the New York Times to paint the conservatives' objections  as religious extremism, telling the Times: "... in the carnival of life, they are in a far, far booth."

Interesting, isn't it, how time has proven that while State Board fo Education members like Bob Offutt, David Bradley, Donna Ballard and others might have been in a "far, far booth," theirs was the only booth that wasn't fleecing Texas taxpayers for billions of dollars for a few cheap prizes?

After using his popularity as Texas' "education governor" to win the Oval Office, aided by wide support among conservatives who had no idea what he'd done to the conservatives in his own party in Texas, Bush pushed his education agenda through Congress and we wound up with the No Child Left Behind Act. Only a few short years later, the clods who bought that bundle of cheap carnival tricks are realizing just how badly they got burned.  In 17 of the nation's 50 largest cities, graduation rates are now below 50 percent -- hardly the long-hoped-for reversal of fortunes for our struggling urban students. In Texas, the largest school districts are now averaging nearly a 30-percent dropout rate, and some "honor garaduates" still can't make change at a cash register (I know, I fired them!).

It would be temping to dip into my cliche box and point out that we told you so, but I've been part of this debate long enough to realize that the soccer mommies and insurance agents who run Texas still aren't going to listen.

As a newspaperman, I tried to tell folks 10 years ago where the standards being proposed by the Texas Education Agency were coming from, and what the problems with them were -- a complete lack of academic rigor and a focus on "job training" and affective (values and feelings)  skills. Others in the movement imported academic experts from Harvard, from Mathematically Correct and elsewhere to attempt to convey the message. The school administrators called us "enemies of education" and used the Delphi Technique in statewide and local forums to convince the general public that all of this "reform" was stuff thought up by Texans and demanded by the selfsame soccer mommies and insurance agents.

Once the new standards were implemented, we pointed out that something was immediately wrong: high schools which had 600-plus freshmen one year had only 347 graduating seniors four years later but were reporting a dropout rate of "less than one percent." There seemed to be a sudden push to label students as "learning disabled" immediately preceding the high-stakes state tests, and there also appeared to be a high absentee rate on test day. Only in the last couple of years have the state's mainstream media outlets finally realized what was going on and actually started to challenge the education establishment's PR view of the situation: administrators have been caught cheating in district after district.

Now I hear the buzz that once again, we're going to have to "fix" public education -- no doubt at huge taxpayer expense -- one more time. How many waves of "education reform" has Texas and the U.S. exprienced since the federalization of education in 1968?

I wonder: will the public once again leave the issue of "education reform" in the hands of the same educational bureaucrats who screwed it up in the first place? 

Sadly, those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it. Again and again.