Texas School Business: Young's Inbox

We don’t know what the average policy maker thinks of women’s strength in Texas or men’s looks. We do know that each child has been mandated to be at or above average, nothing less. If more, don’t expect the state to help.

The “Lake Wobegon” education model, as I’ll call it, is a convenient template and very self-assuring.

It’s also ridiculous.

Consider that the state, though it gives weighted funding to gifted and talented students, sets a cap of five percent of its students to do so. That means a lot of school districts limit enrollment in G-T programs to only what the state will fund. A lot of gifted children are left to let their minds wander in the land of the average or the slightly above.

Name your challenge — bilingual, ESL, special education; the state is very grudging in acknowledging that not all students learn at the same pace. And policy makers in Austin have little curiosity — and hence, little understanding — of the actual costs of meeting each child’s needs. OK, they just don’t want to know. That’s because in the case of funding, all is built around biennial no-new-taxes promises, rather than educating children.

To penurious constraints in a state of plenty, add the straightjacket restraints that come under “accountability.” Consider the federal zoot suit that education professionals know as NCLB. It also could have been coined TNPJ — for Trust No Professional’s Judgment. For instance, because No Child Left Behind (NCLB) places onerous restraints on how many children can be classified special education for testing purposes, teachers find themselves pleading cases they never would have had to make before acronyms started raining all over the educational landscape.

A reasonably sculpted vehicle for assessing student skills in Texas was overridden by the big-wheel Humvee of NCLB. It doesn’t matter how many students actually have mental retardation, autism or severe learning disabilities; school districts are allowed only so many per capita under “accountability.” The rest are counted against that district’s definition of “above average.”

What that means is that some children with serious learning problems end up under the gun to perform on state tests because the school’s good name rides on it. This is so that someone time zones away can say he mandated that “all third graders will read at grade level” — or else. But is that third grader really reading at a third grade level? Or is he still in first in every way but the physical way?

Lest we spend too much attention on the bottom learners — one of the curses of the “accountability” age — let’s contemplate those children whose skills and interests far exceed their grade levels. They are the scientists and innovators to whom our policy makers have pinned our global competitiveness. Do policy makers match that rhetoric with funding or policies that truly encourage the brightest students to push the envelope? No.

First, they only grudgingly fund programs for exceptional students. Second, they hold back the fastest learners by gearing instruction to criteria-based assessments that don’t challenge them.

Life in the town of Lake Wobegon is self-assuring. And why not? All the children are above average. If not, the townspeople will elect someone to insist on it.

JOHN YOUNG is the opinion editor and a columnist for the Waco Tribune-Herald. He also is the author of “Ghosts of Liberals Past.” He can be reached at jyoung@wacotrib.com.