Morning Rant Revisited

This morning I made a quick entry as much a reminder to me about the story on Morning Edition as anything else. So here I am 13 hours later with a little more detail.

The story that is linked in the previous post focuses on the fact that some schools have been rated as not making Adequate Yearly Progress in part due to the fact that students and tests could not be matched up. As a result the tests that couldn't be connected to students don't count. Most of the schools in the report received the rating due to insufficient participation. In one case the school was certain it had 96% participation, 95% is the threshold, but after all the dust settled they were told they didn't have enough students. One of the people quoted in the story mentioned that they received the list of errors earlier this summer. Corrected the errors. When the final report came it cited errors that had not previously been reported that the school had no chance to correct. Go read/listen to the story for all the details. So why did this trigger a need to rant?

The whole testing, AYP, NCLB thing smells like the work of a mediocre MBA. Trust me I've worked with/for several. They always want something that can be measured even when quantitative analysis is not really viable. But I promised the reason in the previous post and here it is. Vouchers. There is a cadre on the right that thinks all the woes of education can be solved by the market system. I mean look what its done for health care! Parents should have the right to take their money and spend where they want. Sounds good doesn't it. But the problem is if all the money that goes to a school for a given student is put into a voucher, then those parents are spending my money too. And I don't want them to! If we really want to provide the option of not having families pay twice for education then provide a tax credit. Then they can get their money back and not get my money. You see I pay taxes, state and property, that help fund the schools. We have no kids, so we have never been users of the school system. I don't demand a credit because I know its part of the public good that we as a society need to provide. But if you don't like the school system you pass laws and rules that make it look like the schools are failing, mostly because the paperwork has been screwed up and not necessarily by the schools.

Okay rant over. If you have something to say comment on it.