Elementary and Postsecondary Campus Report

Showing yet again how out of touch they are with the students and parents whom they claim to serve, the nation’s largest teacher’s union is still blocking attempts of the poor to escape public schools.

“Anything that takes away from our ability to better our public schools is wrong,” National Education Association president Reg Weaver said of vouchers, as reported by Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council. Vouchers would allow the indigent to redirect a portion of public school per-pupil spending to the private school of their choice.

“In Oklahoma, the situation is so serious that a recent statewide poll of registered voters conducted for OCPA found that more than half of all survey respondents with children at home would remove their children from the state’s public schools if they were financially able to do so,” Grant Gulibon of the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs [OCPA] reports.

No Exit?

Another innovation the higher education establishment is less than thrilled about is the high school exit exam. “Proponents of exit exams say they improve learning and future employment by giving both students and school districts better incentives to succeed,” David Glenn reports in the Chronicle of Higher Education. “Skeptics say the exams needlessly prevent students who have otherwise completed all their course work from receiving diplomas,”

“They also warn that the exams could prompt some students to drop out of high school as early as the 10th or 11th grade, if they think they will fail the tests.” Local school districts are already giving fuzzy dropout rates, policy analysts find.

“Most states and school districts significantly understate the problem of students failing to graduate from high school,” Brian J. Gottlob of the Milton and Rose Friedman Foundation reports in The High Cost of Failing to Reform Public Education in Missouri. “Independent estimates by the Urban Institute, the National Center for Education Statistics of the U. S. Department of Education, the Education Trust, and our own review of enrollment and graduation data indicate that the number of dropouts is much higher in Missouri than is reported.”

“These independent estimates of high school dropouts in Missouri place the state’s overall graduation rate at from 73 to 76 percent rather than the 85.7 percent reported in 2005.”

Green Mountain of Education Spending

“Rising real-estate values and declining enrollments since 2000 have escalated rural Vermont’s per-pupil spending with little to show for the expense, according to an analysis released in April,” Ben DeGrow writes in the School Reform News. “In three years, Vermont’s average public school students received a 27.8 percent funding increase, as the state climbed past Alaska and New England neighbors Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Connecticut in the national rankings of per-pupil spending.”

Meanwhile, “According to the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) test, the state’s students haven’t greatly improved in reading since 2002 or math since 2000, despite the increased spending.”

Government School Gone Awry

Federal control has yielded such abysmal results on tribal lands, such as record-breaking rates of alcoholism and welfare dependency, many tribes literally gambled on casinos as a means out of the government’s clutches. Recently, the Washington Post reported on an example of how the cradle-to-grave policy resulted in a tragically hasty transition from the former to the latter.

“The failure of the Bureau of Indian Affairs officials to act on long-standing safety concerns at an Indian boarding school in Oregon was a ‘significant factor’ in the death of a 16-year-old student there, federal investigators said in a report made public last week,” Christopher Lee reported on July 26th. “Interior Department Inspector General Earl E. Devaney found that a ‘historical pattern of inaction and disregard for human health and safety’ contributed to the death of Cindy Gilbert (also known as Cindy Gilbert Sohappy) in a detention cell at the Chemawa Indian School in Salem, Ore., on Dec. 6, 2003.”

“Devaney found that inaction by officials in BIA’s Office of Indian Education Programs and Office of Law Enforcement Services ‘resulted in the failure to maintain a safe environment at the detention facility and ultimately became a significant factor in Gilbert’s death,’ according to the report, obtained by The Washington Post through a Freedom of Information Act request.”

Miss Gilbert was taken to the holding cell when her blood alcohol level registered at 0.192. By way of comparison, Mel Gibson’s blood alcohol level at the time of his unfortunate encounter with the LAPD was less than that.

The school, the report found, had been using the using the detention center to detain about 240 students a year.

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.