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The Gutting Of Academic “Accountability” In South Carolina

REX, REPUBLICANS CONSPIRING TO DUMB DOWN PUBLIC EDUCATION

FITSNews - January 31, 2008 - When you’ve got the absolute worst public education system in America, you’d think the idea would be to smarten it up, not dumb it down any worse than it already is. Unfortunately, this is South Carolina, where getting politicians elected and reelected behind a bunch of smoke and mirrors is much more important than actually accomplishing anything.

Without question, the master magician in this increasingly-expensive charade is State Superintendent of Education Jim Rex. For the last year, Rex has been playing the state’s sympathetic mainstream press like a fiddle, posing as an agent of real change despite the fact that most of his proposed reforms are all about preserving his failed monopoly over our kids’ futures.

The latest “misdiRex-ion,” as we like to call the Superintendent’s clever little ploys, is an unprecedented attempt to gut South Carolina’s Education Oversight Committee so that his own Department of Education can become the sole author, administrator, reporting agent and so-called “reformer” of our state’s academic assessment tools. But wait, there’s a lot more to this little bag of tricks …

Under Rex’s proposal, which is codified in a bill that was supposed to have been introduced over a week ago by House Education Chairman Bob Walker, all “unsatisfactory” schools in South Carolina would magically disappear, presumably with a great big “Poof!” Instead we would call these institutions “schools of academic priority,” whatever the hell that means.

Additionally, the proposal would shrink our social studies and science curriculums, ditch our high school exit exam in favor of less difficult “end of course tests,” artificially inflate graduation rates, create a whole new battery of state-run assessments for our already under-taught and over-tested students, and (at least in the bill’s initial draft) expand the reach of our failed K-12 system into South Carolina’s pre-schools.

In a nutshell, this is probably the most anti-reform “reform bill” we’ve ever heard of.

Rex and his Republican allies, including Speaker Bobby Harrell, are hinging this bureacracy-expanding, dumbing-down of our kids on one thing - the widespread contempt parents and teachers have for the state’s current measurement of academic progress, the Palmetto Achievement Challenge Test (PACT).

PACT is hated in the education community because it is not a “diagnostic” test, meaning it fails to provide parents and teachers with real-time results of their children’s academic progress. It also fails to meet federal No Child Left Behind reporting standards because it doesn’t let administrators accurately compare our children’s academic progress with the progress of kids in other states.

On top of all that, PACT is one of the country’s most expensive assessment tests, forcing South Carolina taxpayers to spend three to four times what other states spend per child on testing.

So yeah, South Carolina is once again spending a whole lot more to get a whole lot less, which is why PACT is long-overdue to take its place on the ashheap of failed government programs.

In fact, that probably would have happened years ago had the company that administers PACT not been represented in the General Assembly by one of the state’s most powerful lobbyists, J. Warren Tompkins.

According to February 2007 report by the South Carolina Policy Council, “PACT has served as a cloak behind which major failures are hidden,” offering parents and teachers “a distorted view of educational progress.” The report also stated that PACT “has not provided the context for (state-to-state) comparison, nor can it prescribe the details needed to construct a plan for instructional reform.”

Yet in a classic case of the fox guarding the hen house, Minnesota-based Data Recognition Corporation - which has made tens of millions of dollars over the past decade administering this utterly worthless test - was awarded an $825,000 contract last year to propose changes to PACT.

Nice work, Mr. Tompkins.

Frankly, we think that success of yours is emblematic of South Carolina’s failed approach to education - the same people responsible for producing a crappy product keep getting paid to perpetuate the problem.

All of this leads us to Rex’s recently-issued “requests for proposals” regarding PACT and other state assessments, which were issued based in large part on Data Recognition Corporation’s recommendations - and which Data Recognition Corporation is in all likelihood bidding on.

Anyway, instead of simply throwing out an expensive, unpopular and fundamentally-flawed test (and replacing it with one that works), Rex seems bent on gaming the system to get the test that he wants - as well as total control over its administration and results.

So why is all of this happening now?

Well, it’s no secret that Superintendent Rex (and Speaker Harrell, for that matter) are both interested in becoming governor in a few years. For either one of them to have a chance, however, South Carolina has to show more than what Rex himself has called “incremental gains” in educating our children.

Ranking last in the nation in every academic measurement that matters (despite spending a billion dollars in new money over the last four years) just won’t cut it, people.

That coveted progress comes about in one of two ways - either students actually achieve those gains, or politicians like Rex and Harrell must dumb-down the assessments to make it look like they have.

Sadly, Rex’s “requests for proposals” concerning these new assessment tests have been removed from the state’s procurement website and cannot be viewed online, but the contract awards were supposed to have been issued on January 21, 2008 - which, coincidentally, is the date that Walker’s massive accountability-gutting education bill was originally set to have been introduced.

Fortunately, though, something appears to have gummed up the works … at least temporarily.

Numerous state legislators have told FITSNews that Chairman Walker was forced to pull the massive pre-school testing component of his bill after he was caught signing up co-sponsors under false pretenses, namely promising them that there was no pre-school testing component included in the bill (which he must have just assumed they weren’t going to read).

Now, many of those same legislators are discovering that far from being the straight-up PACT reform proposal they’d hoped for, Walker’s bill is essentially a Trojan Horse - a vehicle for Superintendent Rex to systematically dismantle the Education Oversight Commission and further dilute our state’s already suspect accountability standards.

Pouring additional gas on this trainwreck are several as-yet unproven accusations of pay-to-play collusion, which FITSNews will be investigating in future posts.

Oh, and we’d be remiss if we didn’t remind you that there’s absolutely nothing in Rex’s Orwellian “overlord of accountability” proposal that would expand educational options for the tens of thousands of kids stuck in failing schools in our state. Which makes it a lot like his “school choice” plan.

Of course, we’re sure that calling them “schools of academic priority” will make the bureaucrats who work in these dropout factories feel a little bit better about themselves. After all, it’s a helluva lot easier to fund an “academic priority” than something that’s “unsatisfactory,” isn’t it?

Developing …

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