Things got downright testy at the state school board meeting on Tuesday. You know, the one where the board voted, 7-4, to keep the High School Assessment test as a requirement for graduating seniors in the class of 2009.
There were lamentations aplenty, about how the HSA is unfair to “special needs” students and immigrant students struggling to learn English. At one point a couple of board members, Blair Ewing and Dunbar Brooks, got into a “Who Loves Negroes the Most” debate.
I read two different newspaper accounts and listened to several televised news accounts of this lively discussion, and I swear I never heard it mentioned that the HSAs are needed as a way of making the public education system accountable to taxpayers.
What?! You really thought YOU counted?
Let me remind you of where you live. That would be in Maryland, a state where liberal Democrats have run roughshod over taxpayers for decades. A state so blue that Jesus Christ running on a presidential or gubernatorial ticket would be a liability, not an asset. A state that will, in six short days, help elect Sen. Barack Obama president.
And you know the answer Obama gave in his last debate with Sen. John McCain about education, don’t you? After moderator Bob Schieffer reminded both candidates that the United States spends more money per capita on education than many industrialized countries whose students routinely outperform ours, Obama peered into the camera and said that, yes, while that may be true, I still plan to waste more of your federal tax dollars trying to improve what it’s been shown federal tax dollars haven’t substantially improved.
How do elected officials get away with such chicanery? Why, by playing the “It’s for the children” card, of course. So let me be clear right now: I have six grandchildren who either are or soon will be students in Maryland public schools. And I don’t give a tinker’s dam about “the children.”
This is about my tax money. And it’s about elected and appointed officials who, for years, have been picking my pocket and wasting my tax money for public education — “for the children” — that has been very public but, at best, rather spotty on the education.
A brief example: Several years ago, when Baltimore’s Southern High School was still Southern rather than Digital Harbor High School, there existed in the building a place known as the “level of death,” where all the thugs and miscreants hung out. Teachers and students feared to venture to the level of death. Little “education” went on at Southern then, but elected and appointed officials have yet to explain why taxpayer money funded this travesty.
I have a message for all those whiners and naysayers who want to delay the HSA requirement. (Brooks said those opponents really want to abolish graduation requirements, and I think he’s on to something.)
As long as you are taking my tax dollars in the name of public education, there had darn sight better be some educating going on.
And yes, there will be a test or a standard or some other mechanism to make sure that such education is taking place.
To do less amounts to outright theft of taxpayer money. If government officials take our tax dollars and tell us they’re going to build a bridge, and then don’t build the bridge but instead squander and waste the money, that’s theft.
When they take our tax money and tell us it’s for public education and then students don’t get educated, that’s theft. When only 27 percent of seniors at Frederick Douglass High School — apparently still seeing hard times several months after the HBO documentary “Hard Times At Douglass High” premiered — have met all HSA requirements, then some educating hasn’t been going on.
Rather than blame the assessment test or other “high stakes” tests, HSA detractors need to ask why that educating didn’t get done.
Because here’s the bottom line: In today’s global economy, any job worth having will probably require some kind of test. That’s not just about education; it’s about survival.
And the stakes don’t get any higher than that.
Gregory Kane is a columnist who has been writing about Baltimore and Maryland for more than 15 years. Look for his columns in the editorial section every Thursday and Sunday. Reach him at [email protected].
