Practically everyone understands that Connecticut needs property tax reform. The single biggest expenditure of local municipalities is education. So naturally you’d think there’s some support for state run education. Think again. There’s an interesting article in The Atlantic, which I’ll excerpt a bit of below, but first a quote:
“In the first place, God made idiots,” Mark Twain once wrote. “This was for practice. Then He made School Boards.”
You can guess why I grew very fond, very fast of this article. Of course what is being advocated here is the idea of a national educational program. Sort of along the lines of the anti-thesis for conservative dogma since the days of the Reagan revolution which sought to dismantle the federal Department of Education.
The argument, and history of how we got here is articulated well:
Because of Progressive-era reforms meant to get school boards out of “politics,” most urban school districts are independent, beyond the reach of mayors and city councils. Usually elected in off-year races that few people vote in or even notice, school boards are, in effect, accountable to no one.
There’s that accountability issue, again, this time splayed out to cover the problem from a national perspective.
I asked Marc Tucker, the head of the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce (a 2006 bipartisan panel that called for an overhaul of the education system), how he convinces people that local control is hobbling our schools. He said he asks a simple question: If we have the second-most-expensive K–12 system of all those measured by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, but consistently perform between the middle and the bottom of the pack, shouldn’t we examine the systems of countries that spend less and get better results? “I then point out that the system of local control that we have is almost unique,” Tucker says. “One then has to defend a practice that is uncharacteristic of the countries with the best performance.
“It’s an industrial-benchmarking argument,” he adds.
The proposal suggested is pretty radical, but given the current climate of education here in Norwalk one worth considering.
What of school boards? In an ideal world, we would scrap them—especially in big cities, where most poor children live. That’s the impulse behind a growing drive for mayoral control of schools. New York and Boston have used mayoral authority to sustain what are among the most far-reaching reform agendas in the country, including more-rigorous curricula and a focus on better teaching and school leadership. Of course, the chances of eliminating school boards anytime soon are nil. But we can at least recast and limit their role.
If the Norwalk charter gets revised, maybe its also time to look at really reforming education. Certainly the BOE hasn’t delivered anything more than political wrangling, so maybe its time for real fiduciary reform.
source: The Atlantic, First, Kill All the School Boards, by Matt Miller, January 2008
