Political Re-education

Counting beans in California schools:

School's out for summer -- except for hundreds of children in western San Bernardino County who, because of an administrative snafu, must make up 34 days of school this summer.

"Oh, mannnnn," [said 10-year-old Sean Cornish], adding that the subject has been a frequent topic of conversation among his classmates. "They think it's dumb, that they have to go to school for these extra days because some lady messed up."

School officials are sympathetic.

"We made an error on the minimum days of about five minutes," said Dickson Principal Sue Pederson. "Realistically, that's our accounting mistake as adults. We're unfortunately making the children pay for it by making them give up their summer."

"Yes, we screwed up! And you're gonna pay for it!" That's some rough sympathy.

How, you may ask, did this happen? Oh, that's simple:

Students at each school exceeded the state's requirement of at least 54,000 minutes of annual classroom time, but the problem arose in the district's minimum days. Schools typically have one shortened day per week, allowing teachers to use the remaining time for planning and parent conferences. Under state law, these days must be at least 180 minutes, and the daily average classroom time over 10 consecutive days must be 240 minutes.

An internal audit in early May discovered that 34 minimum days had been 175 minutes at Dickson and 170 at Rolling Ridge, said district spokeswoman Julie Gobin. That adds up to a shortage of 170 and 340 minutes, respectively, which could be made up in one or two school days. But under state law, these too-short days do not count at all, meaning that all 34 must be made up to avoid a state penalty of more than $7 million.

See? Clear as mud.

This is what happens when you put politicians and bureaucrats in charge of education -- nor is it confined to the Giant Granola Bar. This problem is pervasive throughout the United States.

Teaching is an art, not an exercise in accounting. The school systems are not failing because of incompetent teachers or over-zealous administrators, and certainly not because of bad kids. Kids are as kids have always been. What's changed in the last thirty years is that we've enabled the politicians to take over the educational system by allowing them to steal the key to the tax strongbox. Among their instruments of controlling that money are the standardized test and minute-to-minute quantification of classroom time. Anyone who has ever striven to improve productivity among a staff of workers (*raises hand*) knows that quality of work is what you have to change to become more profitable. Measuring how long someone is sitting in their office each day is utterly irrelevant and ultimately aggravates the problem.

That, however, is precisely the trap we've fallen into with our schools. Modern public education isn't about helping children define their world by allowing teachers to instruct in the way best suited to the material and personalities involved, it's about stacking coins and shuffling paper. And the kids? Well, they just get in the way, as this article clearly shows.

You may remember that we tried to fight a war this way -- by balance book -- under the drooling tutelage of The Secretary of Munitions Accounting, Doctor StrangeDollar, the King Bean-Counter Himself, Robert S. McNamara. You may also remember that events didn't turn out so well for us under that plan. Some tasks are improved by tightly centralized financial control; self-evidently, fighting wars and teaching children are not among them.

Do you want your kids to receive a useful education in exchange for your tax money? If so, don't get mad at the teachers; they hate what has become of the system even more than you do. Instead, take your schools back from the politicians. Demand that all funding be controlled locally. Demand that your school board and superintendent decide what is best for your district, not some doltish career politico and his staff of half-wit bureaucrats in the state capital. Demand that standardized testing, the real monster in the closet, be banished back to the foul pit of Hell that spawned it. You can hold the politicians' feet to the fire; no one else can do it for you.

They're your kids... Don't let the state screw them up before they even have a chance to succeed.