Current legislator John Draud is the new public-education czar in Kentucky, though, no matter his credentials, which are substantial, at age 69 he seems rather old to take on the job. This has nothing to do with brainpower, but with the energy required to grasp and maintain solid leadership over the system. His legislative experience can work either way – for good or ill – in his approach to the job, depending on his legislative enemies and friends.
Governor-elect Beshear has already put in his two-cents-worth in attempting to “counsel” the state board in behalf of spending more tens of thousands uselessly in some sort of national search, notwithstanding the fiasco just initiated by the last “search” conglomeration, perhaps better described as a “big con.” The fact that Draud is a republican and has been well advertised in the current job-search didn’t have anything to do with Mr. Beshear’s “counsel,” of course.
Year 2014 is the target for having all the students operating on the proficiency level, at least with respect to the Commonwealth Accountability Testing System, a questionable standard at best, especially since it can be routinely changed. That year is the end of the 25-year window of opportunity (actually mandate) provided in the Kentucky Education Reform Act (KERA) of 1990. According to Kentucky Board of Education chairman Joe Brothers, a high percentage of elementary students (actually their schools) are on track for proficiency rating by 2014, but by only 25% and 12% of middle-schoolers and high-schoolers, respectively. This is after 16 years of KERA, obviously a system so failed as to be practically criminal.
Draud, according to the Lexington Herald-Leader, has said he wouldn’t have taken the job if he thought this goal of proficiency was unattainable, but qualified that position by remarking its attainment as a “very, very difficult challenge.” Having been in education for a long time, he knows better than most people that it is virtually unattainable under KERA, structured as a social-engineering program with building self-esteem as a primary, if not the most important, objective.
Draud hopes to enlist the state Chamber of Commerce in an effort to convince people of the urgency to address the education problem. This is ho-hum stuff. First, he needs to see that KERA is totally dismantled, especially with regard to the school-based councils. He needs to prepare immediately to confront the legislature in its “long” meeting next year, though that body will need more than three months to address anything more complicated than how to figure the next enhancement of legislative perks.
According to the L-H, Draud said, “We can’t do it [sense of urgency] just with teachers and administrators and school superintendents.” The fact is that if anything is done it will be done by those folks, and that the key to success is parental involvement and ridding the schools of curricula that is unnecessary and time-consuming. Putting some discipline back into the system is vital, one element of which is flunking students who don’t pass, as well as making it easier for students who lack enough work ethic for success to be discharged from the system. Allotting state money to local systems on the basis of enrolment instead of attendance is a good place to start in meeting this suggestion.
The element of academic proficiency as an individual school matter is too unrealistic to consider, particularly when self-esteem is the objective. Demographics and the breakdown of high moral standards in the students’ homes already damn the schools, and until KERA is banished and parents get off the hippy-dippy 60s-70s “anything goes” craze, in which they came of age and which has damned a whole generation and a half, little will be accomplished.
At $220,000 a year to start ($230,000 the first year) plus all the perks that go with the job, Draud will be expected to do great things. His problem is that he must depend on somebody(ies) else for everything, and so his main task is to try to whip the system in shape much as a platoon sergeant would…no ifs, ands, or buts…just results.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
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