Another mandate won’t fix schools

By The News Virginian Staff

Published: July 29, 2008

Treading along a conceptual trail worn to a furrow by bureaucracy’s thundering hooves, Virginia educrats endeavor to gallop where others have stumbled. The state Department of Education wants to increase high school graduation rates by linking them to accreditation, adding teeth to mandate by employing a data management system that tracks students from prekindergarten to 12th grade, or from educational cradle to compulsory grave.

Government and its watchers long have fretted over graduation rates, both over how to measure the statistic – manipulation of which some schools have turned to art – and how to grow the ranks of graduates. Give Virginia its due on the former. State numbers should be reliable and cogent, rare qualities in dropout statistics.

Still, questions persist. The Education Department’s plan would give schools 100 points for high school students who graduate in four years and 75 for those who obtain a General Educational Development diploma. Schools with graduation classes that record less than 80 percentage points would be provisionally accredited and required to reach benchmarks in succeeding years to gain full accreditation.

Establishing clear, quantifiable criteria and accountability in public education is a noble goal and a needed one. Since the federal Education Department’s creation three decades ago under the Carter administration, life in public schools largely has revolved around the surging power of teachers unions. Billions of taxpayer dollars and thousands of new teachers have flowed into the system as a result. Such trends have coincided with the steady erosion of academic performance.

So whom to blame? Critics point to schools and teachers. Some teachers and school officials point toward home. “If parents don’t value education, if parents don’t try to make their kids do the work they’re supposed to do, how then can you hold the teacher, principals and administrators responsible ... ?” Chesterfield County School Board member Marshall W. Trammell Jr. told the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

True enough, as students increasingly have struggled in the classroom, family life in America has crumbled. More than a third of all children today are born out of wedlock. Expecting parents who do not value families to value the education of their children equates to hoping for the miraculous, which is seldom seen in classrooms or elsewhere.

Assaults on family values, a phrasing the left considers the residual phenomenon of cave dwelling, have not helped. The question is not so much about what society considers acceptable on sensitive subjects such as sexuality but whether families retain the right to morally guide their children without state interference. Too frequently, schools have drifted from academic rudiments into realms that ought to remain exclusively parental.

Similarly, by pulling children into the public education system earlier and expanding that system to assume the role of parent – providing children their two and sometimes three squares a day as well as educating them in state values – government in America has helped chisel away the splintering institution of the family. In many cases, the intentions are admirable since they are aimed at fulfilling duties some parents shirk. But as those parents embrace government-aided irresponsibility, the problem deepens.

Students should also bear some responsibility for their efforts, or their lack. Schools should be expected to educate, not motivate those who decline or refuse to be inspired.

Neither congressional nor bureaucratic fiat can repair American education. Only strong families, committed educators and dedicated students can. America’s problem is that we have forgotten the value and necessity of each.