Harper and Education

Whether or not he’s successful in his race to edge out Governor Fletcher in the primary next May, Billy Harper is using the always-safe subject of education to put forth his candidacy. There’s nothing wrong with that since education affairs in this state have comprised a “too little, too late” matter for a while now. If Harper wants to take credit for the Kentucky Education Reform Act of 1990, he needs to go slowly on the subject, since that wretched legislation, much of which has been rescinded, has hurt the schools immeasurably.

In the latest Harper release, the lament is that Kentucky’s math students’ scores in grades four and eight are far behind the averages of the nation. This comes fifteen years after KERA-1990, when the legislators combined a pork-barrel orgy with – of all things – mandating pedagogy, an area so far removed from their expertise that they became laughable. One of the results was K-3, with the predictable result of failing grades in reading by grade four. That part of the act was rescinded years ago, thankfully, with the result that readers in grades four and eight are average – not excellent or even proficient, but average. Actually, teachers had already begun disregarding K-3, in violation of the law, simply because it didn’t work. How much sense did it make to do away with one-room schools and then reintroduce the concept in grades K-3?

From the latest Harper release: “Billy Harper brought together business leaders, school administrators and teachers to come up with 52 recommendations to create the Harper Report to make Kentucky schools better. Among these are funding for full day kindergarten, requiring school councils to collaborate with superintendants [sic] on hiring principals and allowing for regular business review of educational standards. Billy Harper is also a strong advocate of giving parents authority over their children’s educational future.”

Full-day kindergarten is probably a bad idea. Five-year-olds are not ready for full-day effort, so funding it fulltime, if at all, has more to do with baby-sitting or childcare than anything else. This is not the business of public schools, though both parents in so many households work that the schools are stuck with the problem.

It seems silly to have to request that school councils allow elected superintendents to have a say in the hiring of principals. The school councils should have no say whatsoever; yet KERA mandated that school councils (principal, two parents, three teachers) have the final say on everything, including curriculum. This has been upheld by the Kentucky Supreme Court. This created a pedagogic nightmare, and Harper – or anyone running for the office – would do well to promise the rescinding of school councils. The councils militate against standardization, both system-wide and statewide, meaning that students arrive in both middle schools and high schools with dissimilar backgrounds. A check of the scoring in both the middle schools and the high schools indicates much worse problems there than in the elementary schools.

Business review of educational standards? Perhaps there needs to be a business review of educational spending…but standards? That’s sort of like the legislature mandating pedagogy in 1990 – handling something for which it has no expertise. Parents already have as much authority over education as they can hope to have by electing their superintendents and school-boards. The fact that the superintendents are virtually powerless means that the parents are powerless, also. Indeed, especially in a release concerning education, one hopes that the misspelling of superintendent by the Harper staff (see above) was due simply to a typo.

Concerning a Harper program promoting attendance is this claim in the latest release: “Every participating middle school reports that the number of children in attendance per day has increased from five percent to 50 percent.” Taken literally, does this mean that the absentee rate was reduced from 95% of enrolment to 50%? Yes, it does, so, obviously, that’s not what the statement means. What it does mean is unclear.

This is not a liberal rant, but the thoughts of a conservative on how Harper would approach education. The programs of other candidates will also be scrutinized. Hopefully, someone will step forward – logically a conservative – and actually address the problem. An entire generation has passed through the school system since KERA was enacted, and that generation has been shortchanged in many ways.

And so it goes.

Jim Clark