The Education President

August 19th, 2004

Not since Dan Quayle and the famous “tomatoe,” has a public official badly battered our language as our current president. My favorite is, “We can’t let terrorists and rogue nations hold the nation hostile or hold our allies hostile.” Further examples are found in the poem set out below. All the lines are by George himself:

MAKE THE PIE HIGHER
by George W. Bush

I think we all agree, the past is over.
This is still a dangerous world.
It's a world of madmen and uncertainty
and potential mental losses.

Rarely is the question asked
Is our children learning?
Will the highways of the Internet become more few?
How many hands have I shaked?

They misunderestimate me.
I am a pitbull on the pantleg of opportunity.
I know that the human being and the fish can coexist.
Families is where our nation finds hope, where our wings take dream.

Put food on your family!
Knock down the tollbooth!
Vulcanize society!

The problem with this kind of stuff is not the embarrassment of having a leader who can’t use the language. Indeed, it must be confessed that many of us misspell or misspeak on occasions. Were it not for my spell checker, I would be characterized as a veritable idiot although I am characterized that way in some quarters anyhow. But someone who does that with the regularity of GW tells us at the very least he is not a very precise thinker. Thinking, you might think (ok, I accept the pun), is a requirement of the office. It is not good enough to charge the enemy without thinking through the consequences. That resulted in all sorts of military disasters including Hitler’s two front war, The Charge of the Light Brigade, and Lee’s disastrous charge on the last day of the battle of Gettysburg.
One of the foggy things in GW’s mind is the whole problem of education. Surely all agree that education needs to be improved in this country. Our survival as a nation literally depends upon it. And so one can applaud the impetus behind No Child Left Behind. The problem with that act is not the intention. It is the way the act is designed. It establishes mandates without providing the funds to undertake them. And worst, it penalizes schools which it judges as falling behind—a judgment based on standards that are quite foolish—by lowering their funding rather than providing them with additional help. Punishing schools for “failing” is to treat them as if they were defense contractors, only the treatment of defense contractors who fail is much more generous.
Another educational fog wafting around in Bush’s head is his support of charter schools. The administration has seen charter schools as an educational cure-all. The fact that charter schools have had a disastrous effect on public school funding seems to have concerned no one. School districts, at least in Pennsylvania, are required to pay charter schools attended by students from within their districts, an amount equal to the daily cost of education (with some exceptions) and also, in many cases, provide transportation to and from their students’ homes within the district to the charter schools even if they are located outside the district. Nonetheless, the public school districts cannot save money by not having to educate the students going to charter schools from their districts because they have to be prepared to accept every charter school student residing in the district whenever that student applies. A district cannot hire fewer teachers or tear down classrooms already built with district bond borrowings just because some of its students are in charter schools at the moment.

Well, you might say, could the districts at least assume some sort of average attendance at charter schools in order to limit new hires or building? Perhaps that would be possible, but now for the really bad news. According to the New York Times this morning (August 17), “The first national comparison of test scores among children in charter schools and regular public schools show charter school students often doing worse than comparable students in regular public schools.”

The Times reports that the finds were buried in mountains of data the Federal Education department released without public announcement and “dealt a blow to supports of the charter school movement, including the Bush administration.” The Times quoted Chester E. Finn Jr. A supporter of charters and president of the Tomas B. Fordham Foundation as saying, “The scores are low, dismayingly low.” Federal officials, of course, denied any intention to hide the performance of charter schools or any political motivation for failing to publicly disclose the data that was available. Indeed, the Times mentions other evidence of intention to deceive. However, in the old saw, if it quacks like a duck it probably is.

Professor Amy Stuart Wells of Columbia University Teachers College reportedly called the new data “really, really important.” “It confirms,’ she went on, “what a lot of people who study charter schools have been worried about. There is a lack of accountability. They’re really uneven in terms of quality.”

Alas, if this was the only case in which Bush and his administration have failed and covered up, it might be forgiven. Unhappily, it is not even the first among equals.