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Keeping up appearances
Why education "for the children" isn't
Gov. Mike Easley, in a hurry to cement his legacy before his term ends, is demanding another $60 million for his More at Four program. More at Four, which so far has cost the state more than $100 million dollars, is supposed to help low-income kids achieve in school by enrolling them a year early and preparing them for kindergarten.
Like many similar programs across the country, it hasn't posted impressive results. Kids who go through More at Four score better in kindergarten than their peers from the same socioeconomic background who don't. But within a few years, studies have shown, they fall behind and wind up with scores that are indistinguishable from kids who didn't go through the program.
So essentially, it's little more than a high-priced government day care program. After seven years of operation, More at Four has become not an education program, but a jobs program. But no one would dare suggest doing away with it, and Easley will get his extra $60 million to enroll more kids. If they cut it, educators who got special training to work in More at Four might be out of a job. Cutting it would also be embarrassing because it would be an admission that millions of dollars have been wasted. And nobody wants to commit political suicide by appearing to be against the children. So the program rolls on and grows.
Ditto for a statewide dropout prevention grant program that last year cost $7 million to run. State legislators just increased funding for it by $15 million without bothering to assess whether it is working. A study by the John Locke Foundation, a Raleigh think tank that advocates small government, found that 70 percent of school districts that received the grant money saw their graduation rates decline instead of rise last year. Not that that will matter. Dropout prevention is hot right now because North Carolina is posting abysmally low graduation rates. Politicians need dropout prevention programs to point to. And of course, now that the dropout program is in full gear, there are jobs to protect.
Look for this one to grow into a sprawling bureaucracy of questionable use as well. Then in five to seven years, after some enterprising reporter does a three-part series on the failure of the dropout prevention bureaucracy to achieve results and the gross waste of funds spent along the way, everyone will feign shock and no one will remember that the politicians who created the dropout grant program were never interested in measuring its results to begin with.
Then there is the so-called high school challenge. The plan was for the Mecklenburg County Commission to give the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools $6 million a year for three years to help three struggling high schools. Eighteen million dollars and millions more in additional spending later, the schools in question are either posting lower scores and graduation rates than they were before the high school challenge began or they've failed to meet their goals. Taxpayers have spent almost as much educating the students in the schools over that period as it would have cost to send each one to Charlotte Latin.
I could fill half a dozen columns with example after example just like these as state and national experts scratch their heads over the state of American education. But no one will ask the hard questions of our politicians.
If your actual goal is to help low-income four-year-olds, at-risk kids and underachieving high schoolers, rather than to just take credit for appearing to help them, wouldn't you disband these programs and others like them and put the money elsewhere? Every dollar that is spent on these programs to avoid the political discomfort of shutting them down is a dollar that could be spent on something that works, or trying new innovative approaches that might work.
Instead, these same politicians whine that they don't have enough money for education when it is their gross fiscal irresponsibility that is ultimately costing children the opportunity for a better education. The education problem in America, in North Carolina and in Mecklenburg County is philosophical and political, not educational. When you could send just shy of two students to a Catholic elementary school for what we spend to educate one on average in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg system, something has gone terribly wrong.
If education were really "for the kids," someone would be asking tough questions about what that is.
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