Shame on you, South Carolina! You have high academic standards
compared to other states, and it’s making you look bad under the No
Child Left Behind Act. It’s time to get on the ball, dumb-down
“proficiency,” and join everyone else in the race to save face!
Indeed, your House of Representatives already got the message,
passing recent legislation to let you keep down with the
Joneses.
H.R. 4662 — the legislative hero coming to rescue you from
relatively meaningful standards — would amend the Educational
Accountability Act of 1998 and end the hated Palmetto Achievement
Challenge Tests. It would replace PACT with assessments that would
supposedly give more timely, diagnostic results, but it would also
redesignate outcomes now called “proficient” — the state-defined
achievement level NCLB requires all students to hit by 2014 — as
“exemplary,” and render so-called proficiency a deceptively lame
goal.
This might sound bad to parents who care more about their
child’s education than government officials looking good by
labeling lots of kids proficient, but they needn’t worry. Last week
Rep. Bob Walker (R-Landrum), chairman of the House Education and
Public Works Committee, promised that the state isn’t lowering
standards. It’s just that “you will see a dramatic increase in your
level of proficiency” without any actual boost in student
knowledge.
To be fair, South Carolina does have some of the highest
proficiency standards in the country. According to a recent U.S.
Department of Education comparison of state tests, South Carolina’s
standards were more rigorous than all but 1 of 32 states on 4th
grade reading; 1 of 34 states on 8th grade reading; 3 of 33 states
on 4th grade mathematics; and 1 of 36 states on 8th grade
mathematics.
The problem is that only on 8th grade mathematics did South
Carolina peg proficiency as high as the federal National Assessment
of Educational Progress, and NAEP proficiency supposedly signifies
appropriate grade-level knowledge. So in all but 8th grade
mathematics South Carolina is saying kids are at grade-level when
they’re not (at least according to NAEP), and this would only get
worse under H.R. 4662.
Sadly, this is what you get when government controls the schools
and parents have no power. The system protects the politicians,
teachers, and administrators who run it — everything is distorted,
swept under the rug, or simply “made more fair” — and the children
suffer. Such trickery and political wagon-circling has been the
nationwide response to NCLB, and academic assessments show that
it’s been the name of the game at state and local levels for
decades.
Thankfully, the solution to the problem is obvious.
First, Washington must eliminate NCLB, which supposedly demands
excellence but really drives states to set the lowest, most easily
cleared bars possible.
There is some good news on that front. While little will
probably be done before the presidential election, two bills would
let states out of NCLB without losing taxpayer money. The Academic
Partnerships Lead Us to Success Act would give states that asked
for it more or less free rein over federal education dollars, and
the Local Education Authority Returns Now Act would give money
directly back to state taxpayers — not bureaucrats — through
federal tax credits.
But getting Washington out of education is only the first step.
The second is to fundamentally change who has the power in
education by taking it away from self-serving state and local
officials and giving it to parents. We must implement inescapable
accountability by letting parents take the funds intended to
educate their children out of schools that don’t satisfy them and
put them into schools that do, public or private, home or
otherwise.
This does not mean just public school choice, as Superintendent
of Education Jim Rex has proffered. That’s intended mainly to
placate those who want anything other than what they’ve been stuck
with, while keeping power with the people who’ve done the sticking.
And remember, whether East Germans could choose a two- or four-door
Trabant, without choice of other providers, they were still stuck
with a plastic-and-cotton car.
South Carolina joining the race to save face demonstrates once
again what achievement data have shown for decades: Public
schooling works for the people it employs, not parents and
children. To change this, parents must have full school choice, and
it’s time to stop taking no for an answer.
Neal McCluskey is associate director of the Cato Institute’s Center
for Educational Freedom and author of Feds in the Classroom:
How Big Government Corrupts, Cripples, and Compromises American
Education.
