Man Bites Dog

, Malcolm A. Kline, Leave a comment

Believe it or not, in the Dominion state, a Democratic governor is trying to cut education spending while Republicans in the state assembly fight those cuts. “In response to Governor Kaine’s proposal to address the $2 billion budget shortfall between fiscal years 2008 and 2010 by eliminating over $220 million in dedicated General Fund support for local school divisions, House Republican members of the conference committee on the state budget expressed deep concern over the negative impact on the Governor’s proposed cuts,” read a Valentine’s Day press release from Virginia State Delegate Jeff Frederick.

“The Governor’s cuts to education would mean over $12 million less funding going to the Prince William County school system,” said Frederick, a Republican. “With our local communities struggling to deal with budgets relying on property taxes, it is ill-advised and the Commonwealth can ill-afford to pull the carpet out from under our schools.”

“Governor Kaine’s cuts would do just that.” As you might guess, Frederick represents Prince William County. In light of some of the innovations the county schools are introducing, those cuts might not be such a bad idea.

One would think that a putative conservative would want to identify with tax-paying parents rather than government-subsidized school officials. Thus, he might want to question not how the schools should be funded but whether such subsidies either from the state’s or the county’s taxpayers are worth it.

“In Prince William and elsewhere in the country, a math textbook series has fomented upheaval among some parents and teachers who say its methods are convoluted and fail to help children master basic math skills and facts,” Ian Shapira reported in The Washington Post on February 19. “Educators who favor the series say it helps young students learn math in a deeper way as they prepare for the rigors of algebra.”

“The debate over ‘Investigations in Number, Data, and Space,’ a Pearson School series used in thousands of elementary classrooms, including some in Arlington, Fairfax, Loudoun and Howard counties, is one of the newer fronts in the math wars.” The curriculum was developed with the aid of the National Science Foundation, Shapira reports.

Used in first through third grade as well as in kindergarten, it cost the PWC school board (read; taxpayers) $1 million. “The program de-emphasizes memorization and drills and pushes students to use more creative ways to find answers, such as drawing pictures, playing games and using objects,” Shapira writes.

Despite such efforts, schools in Prince William County are falling behind in passing on computational skills. Quoting a school official, Shapira writes that “Prince William revamped its elementary math in part to raise ‘embarrassing’ SAT scores that were below national and state averages last year.”

Neither Frederick nor Shapira mention that, even before Governor Kaine’s “cuts” and “Investigations” were introduced, Prince William County, which actually has some pretty good public schools, was suffering from administrative overload and getting away from basic math instruction. In possibly the most streamlined school in the county it is not unusual to find that of 200 employees on the payroll, 100 are teachers.

As with most public schools, the remainder, beyond cooks, crossing guards and counselors (at least one per grade) are, ironically, people hired to save the district money—either lawyers whose job is to troubleshoot lawsuits before they are filed, or administrators tasked with making the delivery of education more efficient. These efficiency experts, by the way, tend to be about the best-paid workers in the system.

Meanwhile, in the highest scoring school in the county, which might, perhaps not coincidentally, be the same unnamed one described above that is much more than hypothetical, the times tables are frequently taught for a grand total of three weeks in the first three grades. This happens, by the way, even when dedicated teachers would like to devote more time to multiplication.

The reason: Pressure from on high, secularly speaking, to drill students to pass the lowest common denominator tests given by the county, the results of which will free up federal funds to the school under the No Child Left Behind law. At the same time, property taxes which fund the schools, as Delegate Frederick hinted, have gone through the roof.

So has spending on public schools.

A resident of Prince William County, Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.