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State board overreaches in good cause (Dayton Daily News editorial 5/14/97) Two policy fashions are clashing in Ohio. One fashion holds that Washington and the states ought to stop telling localities what to do when their advice isn't necessary, and especially when the higher levels of government are not providing the money to help the localities follow the instructions from on high. Another trend holds that schools and students must be held to higher, more measurable standards. So here we are: The state board of education wants to require local schools to hold students to a certain level of proficiency in 10 different subjects, ranging from such basics as math to languages and art and even to physical education, consumer and family matters and business. Predictably, some school superintendents and local school-board members are asking whatever happened to the idea of local control. and where is the money gong to come from? Although the state has always had a role in the realm of curriculum development, make no mistake: This proposal does stake out new territory, mainly in requiring demonstrations of competence where until now it has only required certain amounts of teaching time. "There are a lot of new things this requires us to do," said John Varis, superintendent of the suburban Reading school system, near Cincinnati, "It's pretty scary that no one had costed out what it would take to do all this." But Dwight Hibbard, a member of the state school board and a retired chairman of Cincinnati Bell, Inc., apparently isn't troubled much about imposing a new "unfounded mandate." "The real issue," he says, with the kind of blithe certitude of somebody who has never tried to balance a school-district budget, "is how do you manage the money you have." This is also the kind of blithe certitude that has given centralized government a bad name. The state's proposal is too sweeping. Reasonably people can disagree about whether a high school student should have to demonstrate competence in art or phys. education or consumer matters. Millions of adult Americans who are functioning fairly well never had to do that, after all. Good schools already cover these areas, but if a community in which people don't want to pay any higher taxes and in which classes are already crowded wants to cut back in a couple of academic areas in order to concentrate more resources on the basics or on job skills or whatever, it ought to have that right, if the idea of local control of the schools is to have any meaning. This is no call for absolutism in local control. the state has plenty of legitimate roles. It has played a useful new role in fostering competency tests on the basics in recent years. But the new plan has the look of a piece of legislation that has been designed with the goal of satisfying various constituencies in order to get them on board: something for the gym people, something for the art people. this is not an approach that the state or the communities of Ohio can afford to take to education anymore. |
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