As a former school superintendent, one of my most important, difficult and frustrating responsibilities was trying to stay abreast of state and federal laws governing education. It was during this time that I had my eyes opened to how politics at the state and federal level really works. Suffice it to say that what I learned was disturbing.
First of all, to this day, the sheer number of proposed and/or passed bills makes the task of staying current nearly impossible. I imagine this is a political strategy meant to keep people as confused and overwhelmed as possible. The number of laws that made no sense and were sold to the public with misinformation and lies was staggering.
I felt perpetually conflicted about being forced to implement mandates that were, frankly, bad for kids. The irony is how often the very politicians who denounce bullying use their power to beat adults into submission with their ill-conceived laws. In education, they do this through threats of financial penalty against districts that dare disobey them, by threatening the professional licensure of educators who don’t do as they are told, and/or through character assassination of those who dare question them.
For at least three decades, politicians have claimed their goal has been to close the achievement gap between children who are successful in school and those who are not, and, by their own admission, their laws haven’t worked. They have failed while wasting billions of our tax dollars.
In the early 1990s, politicians told us that if they could force all schools to follow the same academic standards, the achievement gap would be eliminated. But, the gap still exists.
Similarly, politicians promised us that forcing kids to take state approved tests, with schools, teachers and principals being “held accountable” for their students’ performance, the achievement gap would be eliminated. But, the gap still exists.
The public was also assured that if laws were enacted “guaranteeing” that every child must achieve a politically determined level of achievement, all children would be successful. But, the gap still exists.
Politicians even justified their intrusion into how students could or couldn’t be disciplined by saying that the unfair application of punishments was robbing certain students of opportunities, and if that was fixed, the achievement gap would be eliminated. But, the gap still exists.
These are but a few of the hundreds of times we were promised that a law would fix the achievement gap problem. But, the gap still exists. In other words, they lied. Every. Single. Time.
They lied, because none of these factors are primarily responsible for the gap.
One of their most egregious lies has been that the lack of competition in public education has been the culprit. People pushing this narrative actually pretended as if competition didn’t already exist. But, of course, it did through private and home school options, not to mention other opportunities, such as boarding schools. But, that fact interfered with their narrative, so they ignored it.
We were told that just a little more competition would generate new, more successful learning environments in which kids who were failing could flourish. It would also, we were assured, force the public schools to improve.
Early on, this expansion of competition was in the form of charter schools. Politicians told us kids deserved them, because they would no longer be “trapped” in poor public schools. Of course, they failed to mention that many of these charter schools were owned by large campaign contributors who were becoming quite wealthy on the backs of our neediest kids.
These same politicians remained strangely silent when the test data that they worship clearly showed that kids were often leaving higher performing public schools to attend lower performing charter schools. In other words, what they said would happen wasn’t happening.
But, ignoring that fact, politicians continued to expand school choice options to allow parents to use tax dollars to attend private schools. This was done through the Education Choice Scholarship (EdChoice) Program. The Ohio Department of Education website claims that EdChoice “provides students from underperforming public schools the opportunity to attend participating private schools.”
The problem with this justification is that it isn’t true. The criteria for “underperforming” is written in such a way that even the highest performing public schools can be defined as such. In other words, the law allows parents to use tax dollars to fund their children’s private school education while “escaping” very high performing schools. This exact scenario has occurred in one of the top scoring school districts in the state, the Solon schools.
When their scam was exposed, Senate Education Chair Peggy Lehner followed the normal, hypocritical political script by demonstrating faux consternation and surprise. She even proclaimed that it is “crazy” that high performing schools are being “dinged” by the very law she and her cronies have authored.
The rest of us are supposed to naively believe that this dismantling of public education through lies and deception wasn’t the plan all along.
Because that’s just how stupid they think we are.
Tom Dunn is the former superintendent of the Miami County Educational Service Center.
