Editorial: Wasted dollars waste young lives

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BALTIMORE (Map, News) - After five years and almost $2.2 billion spent on trying to boost student performance, only one conclusion emerges. Maryland’s Thornton has failed.

Educators supposedly spent the money on programs to help special needs, low-income and other lagging students. It gets worse. The total wasted by fiscal year end will reach $3.5 billion.

It’s all about The Bridge to Excellence in Public Schools Act of 2002, known as Thornton, the supposed magic spell to conjure up at least adequate education for the neediest students.

If the money helped to teach students things they need to know to be successful adults, it would be a worthy cause. Unfortunately, it’s not. Even Alvin Thornton, who chaired the commission leading to the law, now admits it is not working.

Data show students generally are no more proficient today than they were before the state started sucking more money out of taxpayers pockets and pumping it into schools based on National Assessment of Educational Progress scores.

NAEP is the only nationally representative test of what students across the country know in core subject areas since only those applying to college take college aptitude tests. Since 1990, scores for most assessments have been available for individual states.

Maryland students’ state test scores keep rising — some dramatically and suspiciously — while the same students’ averages on NAEP remain even and in some cases fall. (Visit examiner.com for a full breakdown of test results.) And in the state just recognized as having the highest median household income, Maryland's NAEP scores only mirror national averages.

State Department of Education officials dismiss the NAEP results, saying they represent an “ideal standard.” They point to rising state results as the real measure of success and the only one required to show progress under the 2001 federal No Child Left Behind legislation.

But Paul E. Peterson and Frederick M. Hess wrote in the journal Education Next that if parents in five states, including Maryland, “read that students are making great strides on state proficiency tests, they would be advised to consider the tests with a healthy dose of skepticism. At least some of the reported gains appear to be the product of gamesmanship.”

They argue, along with many scholars on all sides of the political spectrum, that NCLB led many states to dumb down standards in order to meet “proficiency” goals — a requirement to receive federal dollars.

That’s something even the state doesn’t fully deny. According to Ann Chafin, the Assistant State Superintendent for the Division of Student, Family, and School Support, Maryland School Assessments and High School Assessments measure “the level of achievement reasonable for all kids.”

In other words, they measure an arbitrary floor that in no way corresponds to the demands of college, workplace or, for that matter, reality.

As William Kirwan, the Chancellor of the University System of Maryland said recently, “exit requirements [for high school] are not at all aligned with entrance requirements of college.”

If that is the case, what has the Thornton money achieved for Maryland taxpayers or any student -- especially those underachievers designed to benefit the most from it? A gold star?

As Bob in “The Incredibles” tells his wife Helen, he won’t go to his son’s “graduation” from fourth to fifth grade because it means nothing, and he's tired of “celebrating mediocrity” and discouraging excellence.

As a state we must stop celebrating mediocrity by funding education “reforms” that do not work — especially when we cannot afford to pay for them.

Inflation adjustments alone for school aid will cost the state $153 million in fiscal 2009. And state legislators threaten to raise the sales tax and/or others because they are afraid to deal with a $1.5 billion “structural” deficit.

Before state legislators give schools any more of our money they must decide what “proficient” for life means and the best way to measure it. Not doing so will only handicap students and Maryland's economic future, which depends on a highly qualified work force. In Chancellor Kirwan’s words, without major academic improvement we're headed for “unbelievable problems” as a state and a country.

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