Robert Pratt
“Dallas ISD has touted its soaring high school graduation rate, but a new district investigation raises questions about whether some seniors — up to a quarter of the Class of 2013 — should have earned diplomas. An internal audit found 1,821 of that year’s 7,302 graduates missed too many classes. Yet there’s little documentation to show they made up class time as required by state law,” reported the Dallas Morning News.
Over the last many years there has been a movement not to simply tamp-down excesses of public school accountability systems in Texas but, to end such relying only on local control. But the Dallas ISD story on graduation rates should be a reminder that as taxpayers who pay for all public schools in Texas, not just those in our local area, we cannot trust local control alone to ensure our money is wisely spent.
When the movement toward strong statewide accountability systems, including testing, came to a head, Democrats still ran the Legislature and the GOP kept moving forward with such because all remembered how districts large and small, were handing out diplomas to thousands each year who couldn’t even read at a fourth or sixth grade level. The recent discovery of Dallas ISD still finding a way to graduate people who shouldn’t, is a reminder that without close scrutiny, our tax dollars will be wasted and our society deeply wounded by illiteracy without tough accountability systems. Improve the systems, don’t scale them back.
People have short memories but natures that endure forever. Acknowledging such is a major feature of conservatism in which we accept that systems must take into account human nature and not act as if such didn’t exist – which on the flip-side is the central flaw of progressivism. None of us should forget that ultimately each bureaucracy will work for its preservation and best interest, not the best interest of the public it was founded to serve. We should demand close scrutiny and measurement of performance lest we fall back to the age of educational deceit upon the Texas public – of which the recent Dallas ISD discovery reminds.
I believe that local control is still the better way to go, but realistically, of course it won’t work without oversight by people who expect real results. I just think those people should be the local citizens. No system is perfect, no matter who is in charge of schools there are going to be abuses, but looking at the results of the present system, I have to say we can do better than we are now. Local control may not produce better overall results, but I honestly don’t think it could do any worse. The current state of public education in this country, including Texas, is a blight on our society, and an insult to the intelligence of our youth.
That would be fine if we were still at a time when almost all the public school bill was paid by local taxpayers but, it’s not. We are all paying much for districts long away and their failures affect the entire state.
I agree that local control won’t solve all the problems, but micro-managing from the state and feds is making it worse, not better. Ideally, we would let school districts be completely exposed to success or failure on their own merits, which of course won’t happen. I just think local control would be a better system, even with all of its faults, than we have now. Another thing that local control would do would be to remove the excuse a lot of school districts use, including the one where I live, of “the state/feds made us do it”. I notice that with the way things are now, we’re still paying for non-performing districts. At least with local control, we’d have a better chance of figuring out who to blame when that happens. Shifting control of our school districts away from ourselves to a centralized government bureaucracy, while telling ourselves this is the way it has to be, is merely one more instance of how we often don’t take responsibility for things we should,.