Molly Ivins September 23AUSTIN — Perhaps the most discouraging thing about the skunk-off over national education testing is that you can only conclude that it never would have become an issue at all if President Clinton hadn't proposed it. Truly, don't you think that if Steve Forbes or some other Republican figure had come up with this notion, they all would have signed on happily? The problem here is not the idea of national education testing, which is about as controversial as apple pie. The problem is the partisanship that is infesting all kinds of areas where it has no business, including and especially education. Here are two silly things about this silly debate: Numero Uno, the R's object to a voluntary national test to check fourth-graders for reading skills and eighth-graders for math skills because, they say, it is a dreadful federal intrusion into the schools, which should remain under local control at all costs — local control being the be-all and end-all of school politics. These are the same people who tell us that our public schools, under local control, are an utter failure, a complete disaster area, and are not educating our kids, causing us to fall behind the rest of the industrialized world. Do we see a contradiction here? Numero Two-o, the objection that our kids are already being tested by a variety of state and private programs is quite true. On the other hand, there is no reason not to drop one or more of the other tests when a national test becomes available, is there? Is that real complicated? Some minority representatives have taken against the idea of national testing on the theory that it will show their kids aren't doing well. Very likely. According to the National Education Association, "The income level of a child's family is still the major determinate of the quality and quantity of the education a child receives. The average child from a bottom-quarter income family receives four fewer years of education than a child from the top-quarter income family." Is this because, as Professor Lino Graglia recently suggested, African-American and Mexican-American cultures do not regard failure as "a disgrace"? Talk about blaming the victim.
— Many districts allocate fewer resources to schools in poor neighborhoods than to schools that serve primarily middle- and upper-income-level students. — Teachers alter expectations on the basis of a student's social class (see the aforementioned Professor Graglia). Even harsher disparities occur between districts and states in per-pupil spending because of the weird way we fund public schools. Despite a 30-year effort to equalize school funding, often under court order, Texas schools are still heavily dependent on local property taxes. The poorer the school district, the poorer the schools, despite the fact that poor districts often tax at a higher rate than rich ones. No, I am not arguing that money makes all the difference. On the other hand, it ain't chopped liver, either. We all know, or have heard of, extraordinary teachers who accomplish amazing things in very poor schools. But short of cloning extraordinary teachers, the next best way to get good schools appears to be spending some money on them. The amount of money spent per pupil does not exactly track the educational achievements of the kids — it just tracks very, very closely. So, when you're Mississippi, spending $3,666 per pupil per year (from the National Center for Education Statistics), it's a safe bet that your kids will not be doing as well as those in Alaska, where they spend $8,963 a year. And you get variations within states; in Texas, where we've been trying to equalize school spending since Patton was a private, there are still differences in expenditures. In Dallas County, the Garland school district spent $3,992 per pupil last school year, while the Highland Park school district spent $5,119 per student. I sometimes think the best thing we could do for our schools is to pass a law saying: "Politicians, keep out." Granted, the educational bureaucracy is slow, cumbersome (that good old local control) and given to speaking in horrible gobbledygook. But on the whole, I'd rather leave the schools to educators than to politicians. At least the educators aren't looking to score votes with simplistic solutions. The purpose of national tests is to see where the schools are working and where they aren't — and then to apply what works where it's needed. That is not a terrible idea. *** Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. COPYRIGHT 1997 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
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