Lawson for Congress

North Carolina’s educational system is in serious trouble, including within our Fourth District. Both as a parent and Congressional candidate, education is an critical issue.

We have firsthand experience with education from many perspectives. My wife taught elementary school in Durham while I was in medical school, with four of those years at E.K. Powe on Ninth Street. Even in those days, Powe had a challenging student population. We gradually learned that despite her best efforts to help her children, what happened at home was even more important than what happened in school. There are excellent examples of local programs and schools that do make a difference through a more holistic approach, but traditional public schools alone are insufficient to address the challenges faced by our most threatened children.

Today, our children attend public school in Wake County, where we’ve seen firsthand the damage wrought by the death of neighborhood schools and ever-increasing bureaucracy. At the same time, we’ve seen a growing trend towards greater centralized control and reduced local freedom. Some would suggest that centralized control provides better accountability and assessments. In North Carolina, however, our educational bureaucracy has been more interested in protecting itself and pretending it’s making progress than actually dealing with the difficult problems facing our children.

The problems of education must be addressed at every level of government: federal, state, and local. At the federal level, many applaud No Child Left Behind (NCLB) for providing accountability based upon standardized tests. Others applaud it for its inexplicable logo, also clearly left behind.

While there is value in states keeping themselves accountable, federal supervision is not the answer — the requirements of NCLB have perverse consequences that work against our children.

For example, take Wake County’s constant redistricting dilemma. In discussions with folks within the Wake County Public School System (WCPSS), it’s clear that the county wants to prevent schools from missing their NCLB performance goals at all costs. Since federal funds only account for about 10% of our state’s educational budget, and 6% of the budget in Wake County, the heavy-handed punishments and school “takeovers” required by Washington make NCLB a much bigger stick than a carrot.

But in response to that stick, when the county faces children with serious educational needs, it pursues short-term punishment-avoidance strategies. Instead of focusing the energy and resources on holistically addressing those needs, the county uses the smokescreen of “diversity” to justify busing that spreads children across the county, diluting the “problems” and allowing schools, on average, to hit their targets.

From my medical background, I consider this behavior malpractice. Think about it — when you have really sick patients who need focused attention, you put them in an intensive care unit. Would it make sense to spread the sickest patients throughout the hospital so, on average, everyone appears to be doing “ok”? That would be a recipe for disaster, as it is in our schools. Not only is an hour-long bus ride a tremendous waste of time, it’s also bad for the budget and the environment. Finally, parental involvement and school volunteerism are eliminated when schools are across the county instead of across the street.

So at the federal level, NCLB and the Department of Education have got to go. Ultimately, federal involvement only gives us unfunded mandates and unintended consequences. The Department of Education consumed $62 billion last year, which is money that never should have left the states in the first place. When you consider we only received about $1 billion in federal educational funds along with the strings of federal control, we would have been much better off keeping our tax dollars here for our children.

At the state level, we need to insist on transparency and accountability in our state’s educational system. Even though NCLB requires statewide tests, our state has created tests that are not nationally normed, and are actually “dumbed down” so that students “at grade level” in North Carolina are below those in South Carolina:

In addition, states with already low standards have done nothing to raise them. Oklahoma and Tennessee once again share the cream puff award, with both states earning Fs because their self-reported performance is much higher than can be justified by the NAEP results. States with nearly equally embarrassing D minuses included Mississippi, Georgia, and North Carolina. Once again, we discover that Suzy could be a good reader in North Carolina, where standards are low, but a failure in neighboring South Carolina, where standards are higher.

How useful is that? Since we’ve proven ourselves incapable of holding ourselves accountable even with a federal mandate, we need to take control of our state’s educational bureaucracy so that we can have an honest assessment and deal with the consequences. Instead of “rolling our own” with respect to tests, why not just use the nationally-normed Iowa Test of Basic Skills?

We also need to break the state’s monopoly on providing educational services. Monopolies in any industry provide poor service, high costs, and low quality. Education is no different, and our parents and children of all socioeconomic backgrounds deserve freedom of choice with educational dollars. Choice must include freedom to “opt out” and home school, as well.

At the local level, we need school board representatives to be accountable across the county through “at-large” elections, as opposed to just representing the interests of their district. Unfortunately, since North Carolina leaves so little local control to the counties and municipal governments, making this change requires legislation in Raleigh. Please contact your local representatives and evaluate potential candidates based upon their supporting At-Large Elections for WCPSS Board of Education. Also, please sign this electronic petition in support of this legislative initiative.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 10th, 2008 at 4:48 pm and is filed under educational freedom. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.