To Protect Oklahoma Kids Statute Of Limitation Laws Must Be Changed - V1SUT Vantage; ROPE Report Live

During our regular third Wednesday podcast with our friend and V1SUT Vantage blogger, 'Mary', we talked about how Oklahoma can't protect its students until we change the Statute of Limitations on sex crimes. Watch the short video to see how and why these need to be changed to protect Oklahoma kids.

Oklahoma Conservative PAC Arguments For "Money Follows The Kid" (Voucher) 'School Choice' Option Are Wrong-Headed and NOT CONSERVATIVE

Being a conservative is often a lonely position. Asking people to take responsibility for THEMSELVES to prevent government intervention is not an easy sell in a world where all the creature comforts of human existence are but a moment away. After being attacked personally by OCPAC for an opinion Reclaim Oklahoma Parent Empowerment corporately holds, a rebuttal is in order. It follows below.

Oklahoma Republican Legislators Enacted President Obama's Education Agenda During 2010 Creating Many Of The Problems We're Seeing In Public Education TODAY

As a pre-Halloween trick, this article was released in the Tulsa World - Teacher shortage milestone: New record set for nonaccredited teachers given emergency certification in Oklahoma.

Factors Creating Failing Public (Government) Schools

For decades education reformers have attempted to 'restore' luster to the eroding results of government run schools that began in the 1960's with the first federal involvement in state and local education programs (Elementary and Secondary Education Act, 1964, Lyndon Johnson). Just as we've seen of late with the Common Core State Standards Initiative, individual programs have been instituted at various times over the years toward this end, yet all have resulted in lackluster or poor outcomes for the money, training and resources provided.

Why? Because none of the issues effecting government run schools today can be solved by a single initiative, or by throwing money at one or two issues like spaghetti at a wall.

Below, I've attempted to identify a number of items - some of which I've witnessed personally, as a former teacher and parent - that must be addressed in order to return to the pre-60's educational excellence seen here in America for hundreds of years.

Changes to schools and instruments of schooling must come from the local level.

• Urban schools and rural schools aren't similar in socio-economic composition or community needs, yet laws created at the state or federal level force change on all schools.
• Traditionally, school boards allow parents the ability to assist in directing their children’s educations – shifting the responsibility from parents to the state conditions parents to become further removed from the process of educating their children.
• Parenting failures cannot be legislated as these tend to result from lack of values training best addressed by programs provided via churches and charities.

Laws created to address failing schools rarely address the fundamental issues behind the failures.

• Systemic failure results as one ineffective/unproductive law is replaced or augmented by another and then another – in attempt to bring about results largely unattainable via legislative means.

Teacher/Superintendent/School Board organizations are used to draft public school legislation which favors the needs of the educational ‘system’ and not the student and/or parent.

Education legislation and programming features a paucity of education history and research, instead focusing on the newest ‘trends’/programs in education.

• Integrating technology (computers/ipads, etc.) into elementary classrooms actually produce results antithetical to those desired, yet are utilized with consistency and touted as ‘cutting-edge’, which, also, ironically creates a nonexistent need for more funding.
• Replacing veteran teachers with Teach for America teachers replaces tried and true teaching methodologies with unproven methods utilized by skimpily-trained young people.

Today’s education focus is completely wrong-headed.

• Students should not be educated ‘for’ college or the ‘workforce’.
• Classically-based education programs featuring broad-based studies in United States and world history, science, classical literature, the arts and music, have, historically, created students ready and able to take on any challenge presented them.

Though taxpayers should work to create accountability in government, education is not a government function; education is a function of the individual first and community second.
American public education was created from an ideal articulated by both Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.

• Both men believed schools should be created to teach students unable to afford the private tutoring system primarily utilized in their day.
• They believed schools should teach the Bible (the model upon which our Republican form of government was created), America’s very particular system of 3-branch government and free-market economy, and the history of America’s founding.
• Schools were to be created by and through churches or individual community organizations – not as a function of government.

Government has assumed the role of educating its citizens, creating numerous problems.

• Funding:  Each school receives the same amount of money for each student in a seat. This invalidates the principles of America’s free-market economy and creates a system in which mediocrity flourishes because excellence is neither expected nor demanded by those paying for its services.
• Partisanship:  Once education becomes a function of government, it begins to utilize tenets ascribed to government by popular culture, such as “political correctness”.

• This gives rise to a culture lacking in personal responsibility where administration and teachers refuse to make students responsible for their work and grades rather than deal with difficult parents.

• This situation also produces a lack of willingness to hold students responsible for their behavior, creating school climates in which bullying of students and teachers is unchecked.

• Usurpation of parental rights and responsibilities:

• Moving the responsibility for education to the state (and often federal) level relieved parents of their duties to provide for the education of their children by replacing their authority with that of a government official.

• State-empowered school officials necessarily had to create the notion that parents were inadequate to direct the education of their children in order to justify a government wage.

• Parents quickly became trained to see public school as a babysitter rather than a partner in the education of their children as the authority of school officials grew with government funding.

• Usurpation of student rights and responsibilities:

• Once government became responsible for education, education became relegated to a series of hoops (tests) through which a student must jump in order to complete their next task: move to a next grade, graduate, get a job.

• Students are never shown the value of obtaining an education for themselves so education becomes something a student does to please others, not to make their lives better.

• Susceptibility to educational ‘trends’ including:

• Common Core State Standards vs those tailored to meet the educational priorities of parents/students at the local/state level.

• Whole word language assimilation vs reading taught by phonics and an understanding of English phonemes.

• Reformist, community-inspired, explanatory math vs learning traditional, fact-based algorithms and skills.

• World history vs American history

• American history from 1877 to the Present vs American history from the Pilgrims and Founding, to present

• Civics taught in high school vs developmental civics across each grade and stage

Federal government intervention has further usurped the influence of the state, local community and parents, and is now itself responsible for many of the ills plaguing public education today such as:

• Lack of student privacy:

• More and more personal student data must be collected by schools to satisfy the compacts of states with the federal government.

• Digital records are nearly impossible to redact, leaving student records exposed to future employers and educational prospects.

• A perceived need for increased funding:

• The more federal initiatives for which states apply (or are foisted onto them) the more personnel are required to fill out the ever-increasing paperwork necessary to keep the initiative, leading to loss of funds for teachers and needed materials that directly affect the classroom.

• Less flexibility to teach with proven methods and personnel:

• The federal Civil Rights in Education initiative for Teacher Equity forced onto all public school districts for example, is coercing teachers to move among schools dependent upon a set of federal race guidelines set for teachers in relation to student populations, violating the Civil Rights of teachers/students and causing many older teachers to quit the teaching profession.

NON-GOVERNMENT SOLUTIONS:

Private organizations in every city can help to create educational excellence by addressing the foundational pillars underlying education failure (as previously described) by devoting resources and funds toward any or all of the following ends:

• Support the ideal that state/federal legislation is not the way to move the needle on educational excellence – that partnering with local charities, churches and non-profits can produce results one-size-must-fit-all legislation cannot

• Community based adult and student English and financial literacy programs are an excellent example of successful business/community partnerships

• Support legislation (or repealer legislation) that:

• Stresses local control of education and prevents intrusion by the federal Department of Education at the state and district levels

• Supports parental rights and responsibilities

• Seeks to move accountability for education from the state/federal level back to the parent/local level 

• Resists the urge to narrow curricula and standards – allowing for classical studies and schools to bloom

• Creation of individual and/or community programs that:

• Develop bridge relationships among schools and businesses to create mentoring/intern opportunities

• Delivers business/vocational leaders who can speak to classes, or in assemblies and share their experiences with students on their level

• Provide scholarship opportunities in areas such as engineering

• Partner with job training programs to identify vocational skills gaps and educate students who desire the training, on how to attain these skills

• Identify private programs that produce educational excellence and partner them with businesses willing to mentor/intern students

• Empower parents to advocate for their children via tuition breaks or educational/job opportunities not available to the general population

Education for those who cannot afford private, individual education (or desire not to utilize a private system) should be provided in America. It should not be paid for in perpetuity via taxpayers, but by parents - whether they are allowed to keep their money for themselves (no earmarked taxes for education) or returned earmarked funds to spend in whatever manner is best for their child. Until parents are allowed (and returned) responsibility for the education of their children, status quo will remain and poor educational outcomes should be expected.

Is Common Core MEANT to Blow Up the American Educational System?

It is no secret that, for years, public education has suffered poor outcomes.  It is also no real secret as to why, yet this is rarely ever written about.

Let's start by examining ACT scores.  It is easy to see that verbal scores began to plummet during the early 1970's and never recovered.

http://professionals.collegeboard.com/profdownload/CBS%2096%20National.PDF

It's also easy to see the lack of substantial gains in reading during a similar time period according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) -

http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pubs/main2008/2009479.asp

Let's think.  What was happening during the early 1970's other than bell bottoms and muttonchops?  Most probably, the falloff of something that happened in 1965 when the first Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) was signed into law by LBJ.

Because government never shrinks, the ESEA of 1965 that took up only about 30 pages in a typewritten journal and contained 'only' 605 sections, has increased to literally hundreds of electronic web pages and over 9,601 sections today.

What does this situation have to do with education 'reform'?  According to "Federal Compliance Works Against Education Policy Goals"

"...fiscal and administrative requirements often lead to expensive and time-consuming compliance processes that are not related to improving student achievement or school success."

Lindsay Burke reports in "The Dead Hand of Education Reform", that,

"...while the feds provided just 7% of education funding, they accounted for 41% of the paperwork burden imposed on the states..."  

In fact, according to a personal communication from Representative Scott Martin, the House Appropriations and Budget Chair, Oklahoma's federal Title 1 funding amounts to the figures below.

Program Title                                    FY-14 Federal Award

Title I                                                     $148,119,558

Migrant Education                                        13,204

Migrant Education                                  1,507,155

Neglected and Delinquent                      334,901

Migrant Consortium                                    60,000

Title I School Improvement                    247,691

              Total                                                      $150,282,509

And these are just dollars that go to satisfying compliance with ESEA.  What about federal funding applied for and accepted by our State Department of Education (OSDE) for various federal grants and programs - money that grows the OSDE but does not put money into classrooms?  Well, since the State Department of Education is not in compliance with the State's Sunshine Law, it is hard to report a verifiable amount, however I wrote this last year:

The day the A-F rules disapproval passed the Administrative Rules and Government Oversight Committee, Governor Fallin issued a press release supporting the rules and the SDE touted their receipt of nearly 7 million dollars in School Improvement Grants (SIG) to be used for "turning around" schools graded as 'failing' under the NCLB Waiver-prescribed A-F grading system.

Did that money go into the classroom?  No, it went to satisfy the mechanics of a program (SIG) demanded by the Obama Administration in the Waiver - one of the Four Pillars of Education reform we have outlined before.  In addition, Dr. Barresi also applied for and accepted a State Longitudinal Database grant in order to satisfy another of the Pillars.

Obviously, our state (like many in the nation) spent a lot of time writing and administrating federal grants to help subscribe to the federal government's notion of what state education should be.  So heavy handed has the federal government become in Education, that U.S. Senator Lamar Alexander recently lamented,

...the United States Department of Education has become so congested with federal mandates that it has actually become, in effect, a national school board.  States must come to Washington for approval of their plans to educate their students.

Part of this phenomena is simply 'big government creep', however, I have begun to believe this is more serious.

Though many do not like to compare Health Care Reform with Education Reform, there are several parallels:

• Health Care Reform was a completely top down, univited usurpation of one's individual right to choose how best to medically care for themselves via a federal law full of moving parts.
• Education Reform (Common Core, School Turnaround, Teacher-Leader Effectiveness, State Longitudinal Database System) was a completely top down usurpation of parental rights to choose the education best for their children via state-invited federal interventions such as No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, No Child Left Behind Waivers and State Fiscal Stabilization grants.
• Health Care Reform requires lots and lots and lots of data.
• Education Reform requires lots and lots and lots of data.

That said, there are those who believe "ObamaCare" was made to be so difficult to navigate in an effort to crash America's current health care system.  The thought here is that if it becomes too hard to get health insurance, the public will clamor for SINGLE PAYER and just let the government handle the whole ball of wax - none of these silly exchanges - no, we'll just move America over to the same side of the abacus as England and Canada and nationalize health care.  After all, we're of socialist stock (eye roll).

I believe this is exactly what is happening to public education in America today when I look at the recent history of education 'reform'.

• First; you claim America education is failing.
• Second; from the start, you act as the hand of benevolence by reaching out to states in their time of monetary need with 'free' money to keep education programs running (State Fiscal Stabilization Funds) where you hook states into a four pillared education reform system that includes national standards and state longitudinal databases.
• Third; you play on America's competitive spirit by offering states a grant where you can Race to the Top of education accountability and results, providing money through a program that continues to perpetuate the four pillars of education reform.
• Fourth; you do NOT re-authorize the existing ESEA, but instead, go around Congress completely to create waivers for the worst parts of the law (such as the part where ALL children must be 'proficient' in English/LA and Math by 2014).  This, in essences creates your own ala cart law menu that keeps states hooked into the all-important four pillars, but also adds something called "accountability measures" for schools such as Third Grade Reading Retention programs, A-F grading scales and teacher accountability measures.
• Fifth; you spend 6 years selling the plan to legislators while managing the whole scheme from behind the curtain of private, non-profit organizations within which taxpayers have no representation, propping up the system with huge infusions of cash from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and big business such as Exxon/Mobile and 'happy to help' players such as the US Chamber of Commerce.
• Sixth; after you have states on their nationalized educational track through your promoted "pillars", you scare states into keeping all their 'accountability' measures by threatening their Title 1 funding.  Though states/districts have no idea what will really happen to them if they don't go along, states take the waivers and in exacting the instructions, districts self-destruct trying to figure out how to keep pressing the bar for their money like a lab rat for its pellet. *Teachers are afraid of having test scores held against them to the point of losing their jobs so they turn on administration.  *Administrators turn on parents who are told they must implement 'reform' measures and that they can't opt out of state tests the A-F grading system utilizes scores to create school grades (page 9) without forcing complete ruination of their school; 

• Schools are expected to test 100 percent of eligible students enrolled in that school during the testing window for every OSTP exam for which they are eligible, regardless of FAY status. 
• Schools that do not test a sufficient percentage of eligible students will be penalized as follows (all percentages are rounded to the nearest whole number): 
• The school’s Overall Letter Grade will be reduced by one whole letter grade if fewer than 95 percent of all eligible test records have valid scores. 
• The school’s Overall Letter Grade will automatically be reduced to an “F” if fewer than 90 percent of all eligible test records have valid scores.

• Seventh; you collect lots and lots of data by digitizing the Common Core State Standards states had to take to get an RTT or Waiver, then, you pay two testing "consortia" to create digital online test questions that will align so perfectly that everyone who looks at the scores will be able to tell which standard the students got right and wrong on their exam.  Since we so admire the European system of everything including schooling, can't you believe this will imagine an end result that sounds like, "Sorry Johnny, you can't be an engineer because you missed several math-related test questions indicating you are not engineer material."  You also collect all kinds of miscellaneous data for federal programming such as the "Safe and Drug Free Schools" that includes very detailed information on discipline incidents (that, by the way, don't just fall off the internet when your child needs a clean record for college and career applications!).  You then use this information against schools when they decide they are dumb enough to come crawling back for more money and or 'waivers' from existing unconstitutional federal education laws to further put the screws on them to get what you want.

Unfortunately, we are now so fully entrenched in the idea that the federal Department of Education has power over the states that the Secretary of Education seems to believe it too - pulling Washington state's NCLB waiver as though he had the power to create a waiver from existing law in the first place - as though he wasn't somehow picking and choosing among states to beat first with his government stick.  

Until enough participants in the House and Senate decide they've had enough of unconstitutional government, this won't change soon.  Maybe that's why homeschool is growing by leaps and bounds.

Common Core - An Exercise in Government Expansion

I wrote the following editorial two years ago now, but I feel it still applies. No matter how the Oklahoma Department of Education likes to spin it - Common Core was NOT local at its inception, and will NEVER serve taxpayers and parents at a local level.  It is a construct of business leaders and the nation's governors who felt that schools were creating a crisis in education for the nation simply because business leaders did not want to pay for on the job training - they wanted STATES to pay for it for them in public/private partnership deals and tax credits.  These people did not believe - nor will they ever believe - that parents and communities can solve education issues on their own.  They will always believe they know better than those being served by the institutions they desire to usurp from local control and run for themselves.  To them, taxpayers, parents and education officials are the little people - too stooopid to do it themselves. Sadly, many of us have decided this is the case and simply abdicate our personal and parental authority to the government now on a regular basis - acting like the babies the elites believe we are.

The longer we go into this Common Core exercise, the more we realize how right Thomas Jefferson was when he penned, "A government big enough to give you everything you want is strong enough to take everything you have."  And so in that spirit...

A number of recent Oklahoman editorials have disparaged those NOT backing  ACE tests and the A-F grading system.  Apparently, those of us begging to differ with these complicated, federally-derived, accountability systems want dumbed down standards that will graduate scores of unemployable public school students all across Oklahoma. 

Not to dodge credit, but that trend likely began in 1965 when the first 31 page, 605 section Elementary and Secondary Education Act (now No Child Left Behind – NCLB) unleashed a tidal wave of federal regulations upon local schools and established the ‘pay for play’ scheme that keeps states towing the line.  Today’s NCLB is 9,601 sections and an untold number of actual printed pages.

Could unchecked growth of federal control over public education be why NAEP reading scores for 17-year olds have increased only one point since 1971 and NAEP math scores for 17-year-olds have increased only two points – over 41 years?  Why have SAT scores in the verbal category dropped 25 points since 1972 and math scores increased by only one?

According to Federal Compliance Works Against Education Policy Goals, “…fiscal and administrative requirements often lead to expensive and time-consuming compliance processes that are not related to improving student achievement or school success.”  Lindsay Burke reports in The Dead Hand of Education Reform that, “…while the feds provided just 7% of education funding, they accounted for 41% of the paperwork burden imposed on the states…”

Santa Fe South High School in Oklahoma City personified this thesis recently when they submitted their NCLB waiver (A-F) paperwork to the SDE only to find out that, while their test scores were fine, they were placed on the failing school list because their paperwork wasn’t filled out properly. 

The day the A-F rules disapproval passed the Administrative Rules and Government Oversight Committee, Governor Fallin issued a press release supporting the rules and the SDE touted their receipt of nearly 7 million dollars in School Improvement Grants to be used for “turning around” schools graded as ‘failing’ under the NCLB-prescribed A-F grading system.  

My son, in first grade at our local public elementary, doesn’t know his basic math facts or parts of speech, but has had week long units on Global Warming and Rainforest Ecology between his 2 days a week of Art (his is an Arts Integration school).  Recently, his teacher told me she just “doesn’t have time to teach [math facts] to mastery” because she has to teach to the test – the results of which will soon determine whether she keeps her job.

Vilifying those of us who believe education is a local issue best dealt with by parents, district school boards and education officials rather than nameless faceless bureaucrats at the federal – or even state level – will not change the fact that a layered top down bureaucracy will never solve governance problems like a locality.  Government closest to the people (parents) is always best because it is nearest the needs of the people (students/parents) being served and paying for the services (parents). 

 

Parents Need To Take A Greater Role in the Education of Your Children, But You Can't Because _______ (fill in the blank)

I've been meaning to write a post for a number of months now on a favorite soapbox topic of mine - Education Reform and the Role of the Parent.

When I first set out to try and 'right' perceived wrongs perpetrated on decent taxpaying citizens and parents through the public school system, I thought I was going to make quick headway.  I thought, if I talked long and hard enough (I guess), I could make people see how easily and simply all today's educational issues could be solved by moving education back to the local level.  Who, after all, more than a parent would want to see their student thrive in their education? 

I have been wrong about myriad things in my life, but about fewer things have I been more wrong.

I remember one of the first times I discussed a bill with a legislator and said something akin to, "Parents don't want that.", and I was told, "Parents don't know what they want."

I've also been told, "Too many parents out there today are doing a terrible job - someone has to take care of those kids."  "We all talk about local control - but local school boards are doing a terrible job." 

There was even a legislator this session who wanted to make ALL home schoolers provide their lesson plans and curricula to the state because she knew A family who was 'home schooling' their children because they couldn't manage to get the kids to school on time due to the fact that their crack habit created somewhat irregular hours. 

There is an old Chinese proverb that says, "If you give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day.  If you TEACH a man to fish, he'll eat for a lifetime." 

Sadly, we have no idea how in the world to decipher this proverb anymore because humans have finally come to the point in history where legislation is written at EVERY level about EVERYTHING to protect EVERYONE from THEMSELVES.

No, there are no responsible home schoolers out there home schooling because there is ONE that isn't.  No, there are no school boards out there doing the right thing because there are a number that AREN'T.

We don't write legislation, regulations and mandates TO PROTECT THE PEOPLE doing the right thing in society anymore, we create laws to try and force those that aren't into doing so.  This ideology exists in direct opposition to that of the Constitution and the Founders' vision of our Republic.  According to the Founders, government wasn't instituted among men to protect men from THEMSELVES, but to protect THEM from the government (over-regulation).

Yes, I feel that MANY parents today (maybe even a majority) have abandoned their children on a number of levels (emotionally, physically, economically, behaviorally).

I know good Christian parents who just can't bear to be honest with their children and reproach them for bad behavior because "We must speak life" into our children and "shaming or confronting" them will only make them feel worse about themselves.  They 'helicopter' around their children's activities and schools because they never want to be out of the picture, but their eyes remain blissfully closed to anything other than perfection.

I know parents who need to have a house in Oak Tree but can only afford it on two incomes so they drop their kids off at school in the morning, allow them to let themselves into the house after school and remain unsupervised until they come home from work, pick them up and then cart them to 20 or 30 after school activities because they feel guilty about not spending time with them.

I know parents who have been left by a spouse (or whose other half is serving overseas in the military) and are having to be two people all the time and are simply too worn out to do as much as they'd like and as much as their children need.

I know parents who simply don't care a whit about their kids excepting the gubbmt check they get to feed and clothe them.

But let's "what if" a minute....
What if there weren't gubbmt checks to provide a 'safety net' for those who simply don't know how to survive because they've been getting a gubbmt check all their lives?
What if, instead of in-house suspension, a parent had to come up to the school and babysit their own misbehaving child, or be forced to take them to work with them?
What if a child was humanely and calmly given a swat with a paddle on their back end when they created an issue in the classroom that prevented others from learning? (I had a NUMBER of those and I turned out okay with no lasting emotional or physical scars!)
What if churches actually taught Biblical parenting, accountability and responsibility from their pews instead of the "speaking life" to "prosperity" gospel?
What if principals backed up teachers and told parents they had better make their kid tow the line or they'd get tossed into the street?

.....What if the federal, state and local governments, schools and districts, weren't providing a MYRIAD of ways for parents to avoid having to take personal responsibility for their kids?
.....What if the federal and state government stayed out of the mechanics of education entirely and schools and districts simply gave parents no choice but to have the responsibility for their children they should have assumed once they gave birth to them?

Yes, unfortunately for all of society, Leave It To Beaver is basically only a television show providing a glimpse of what family used to be and may never be again here in America as American values and morals drift further and further outside the scope of those of the '50's.

That doesn't negate the fact that, today, the education establishment, and government at all levels, take power away from parents on a long term and DAILY basis, only to then attack them for not doing 'enough'.

Guess what?  Prophesies are often self-fulfilling and your straw man is on fire.

Education Accountability Must Originate At The Local Level

 

A number of recent Oklahoman editorials have disparaged those NOT backing  ACE tests and the A-F grading system.  Apparently, those of us begging to differ with these complicated, federally-derived, accountability systems want dumbed-down standards that will graduate scores of unemployable public school students all across Oklahoma. 

Not to dodge credit, but that trend likely began in 1965 when the first 31 page, 605 section Elementary and Secondary Education Act (now No Child Left Behind – NCLB) unleashed a tidal wave of federal regulations upon local schools and established the ‘pay for play’ scheme that keeps states towing the line (according to the feds, "Here schools, do what we tell you to do, and if you do, we'll give you back some of the money we steal from your state's taxpayers to make you do what we want you to do.")  

Today’s NCLB is 9,601 sections and an untold number of actual printed pages.   

This in stark contrast to the philosophy of America’s Founders who believed that free public grammar school should be supplied by every township containing 50 families or more to teach the fundamentals of reading, writing, ciphering, history, geography and Bible study, with control and oversight directed by local school boards – a system which by 1776 had produced a higher literacy rate than we have today.

Could unchecked growth of federal control over public education be why NAEP reading scores for 17-year-olds have increased only one point since 1971 and NAEP math scores for 17-year-olds have increased only two points – over 41 years?  Why have SAT scores in the verbal category dropped 25 points since 1972 and math scores increased by only one?

According to the American Enterprise Institute, who released a paper entitled, Federal Compliance Works Against Education Policy Goals, “…fiscal and administrative requirements often lead to expensive and time-consuming compliance processes that are not related to improving student achievement or school success.”  Lindsay Burke, writing for the Heritage Foundation in The Dead Hand of Education Reform also reports that, “…while the feds provided just 7% of education funding, they accounted for 41% of the paperwork burden imposed on the states…”

Santa Fe South High School in Oklahoma City personified this thesis recently when they submitted their NCLB waiver (A-F) paperwork to the SDE only to find out that, while their test scores were fine, they were placed on the failing school list because their paperwork wasn’t filled out properly. 

The same day the disapproval of the A-F rules passed the Administrative Rules and Government Oversight Committee, Governor Fallin issued a press release indicating her support of the rules and the SDE issued a press release touting their receipt of nearly 7 million dollars in School Improvement Grants to be used for “turning around” schools determined to be ‘failing’ under the NCLB-prescribed A-F grading system.  

My son, in first grade at our local public elementary, doesn’t know his basic math facts or parts of speech, but has had week long units on Global Warming and Rainforest Ecology between his 2 days a week of Art (his is an Arts Integration school).  Recently, his teacher told me she just “doesn’t have time to teach [math facts] to mastery” because she has to teach to the test – the results of which will soon determine whether she keeps her job.

Not only are regulations and/or mandates confusing and generally counterproductive, they are expensive.  In a paper just released by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, the authors show how regulations drive up costs and reduce competition.  In public education, the case can be made that mandates and regulations force money to be spent OUTSIDE the classroom on administrative and compliance processes that do not affect student learning, making it impossible for actual school choice to occur by reducing competition.  Why take your child to another public school when that school will be subjected to all the same federal mandates and regulations as all other public schools?  The authors also discuss the adverse incentives rife at the federal level to continue this trend ad infinitum. 

In the Competitive Enterprise Institute's yearly publication, "Ten Thousand Commandments 2012", the authors put an actual number to the cost of overall federal regulation.  They report, "Regulatory compliance costs dwarf corporate income taxes of $198 billion, and exceed individual income taxes and even pre-tax corporate profits."  We should absolutely take umbrage with this notion - especially when it applies to those institutions supposedly teaching our children the basic skills needed to succeed in life.

Vilifying those of us who believe education is a local issue best dealt with by parents, district school boards and education officials rather than nameless faceless bureaucrats at the federal – or even state level – will not change the fact that a layered, top-down bureaucracy will never solve governance problems like a locality.  Government closest to the people (parents) is always best because it is nearest the needs of the people being served (students/parents) and paying for the services (parents/taxpayers).