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Controlling our kids from afar
State Board of Education member Joseph Roman wants the people of Ohio to know that I was wrong a couple of weeks ago when I "implied" that the board would approve new competency-based standards for the state's public schools without knowing what it was doing. The board most certainly did know what it was doing, he tells me, thereby demolishing the board's chance to plead ignorance. And to be fair, my prediction was a little bit too sweeping. Four members of the board knew precisely what they were doing when they voted against the standards: Oliver Ocasek of Northfield, Charles Byrne of Cleveland Heights, William Moore of Monroe County and Diana Fessler of Clark County. Good for them: If the lack of anything resembling a definition of "competency" in these competency-based standards isn't troubling enough, what is written in the standards is at least as worrisome. Vocational education for all: From kindergarten through 12th grade, the standards say, school districts must provide "all learners . . . opportunities to achieve competencies in English language arts; mathematics; science; social studies; vocational education; arts; foreign languages; health and physical education; business; career planning . . ." Vocational education as a requirement for every student? Why? A demonstration of "competent" career planning by a 17-year-old or no diploma? What if teacher and student disagree on the student's career choice? For that matter, what business of the teacher's are the student's career plans? The state triumphant: The standards abandon even the fiction of local control of curriculum, requiring that each district structure curriculum according to "Ohio's state-adopted model competency-based education programs, or comparable curricular models, and learning objectives from the state proficiency tests." That's a nice, bureaucratic way for the Ohio Department of Education to say, "You can do whatever you want, as long as it's what we want." No escape for private or parochial schools: State-chartered nonpublic schools must choose curricula that . . . the state . . .(unreadable fax transmission) and begin administering the state's fourth-, sixth- and 12th-grade proficiency tests (the state already makes them give the ninth-grade test). Or they can be accredited by an outfit that meets the approval of the State Board of Education. State approval of both curricula and testing will make it awfully hard to argue that private state-chartered schools have any autonomy that matters. New "educational" services: Every school district will be required to develop "a coordinated districtwide pupil services program to facilitate learner achievement that includes such services an intervention, assessment, diagnosis, counseling, guidance, therapy, and health." Do we want schools - not "special" schools for disabled kids, but plain, old, run-of-the mill grade schools - in the business of diagnosis and therapy? And isn't it interesting that the standards make no provision for parental notification of or participation in the decisions of school-based diagnosticians and therapists? The demographic approach to power-grabbing: The standards include the long-expected rules that would allow the state to declare a school system either "excellent" or "deficient." To avoid being "deficient" - a declaration that would give the state the authority to ride into town and start giving orders - a local district and each school building within it must achieve at least 75 percent passage on all proficiency tests, not just overall, but also according to race, sex, and economic status. Each school in each district also would have to maintain a 90 percent graduation rate, a 93 percent attendance rate, and "a vocational education placement rate as approved by the State Board of Education." Which leads us to The hammer: The standards require that each school district "implement a process that provides each learner the opportunity to complete an exit credential, such as a career passport." The educrats would love to get colleges' and businesses' pledge to turn away any applicant who lacks a piece of paper saying the public education apparatus certifies him as worthy of a job or a university education. That's what [unreadable text] a career passport. Such power without accountability would be a dream come true for the educationists who want to remake society through the central control of schoolchildren. |
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