Radical Right Reality Check

The far right's latest bungling attacks on the public schools

One doesn't have to do much digging to be reminded of how uninformed and ideological the far right can be when it comes to the public education. This week's remarkable events in Wake County (in which a newly elected group of school board members conducted a kind of kangaroo session that would have embarrassed the average group of banana republic coup plotters) stand in stark testimony. 

Open meetings laws, basic legislative process, notice and a right to comment, transparency, fealty to one's campaign promises, and plain old human courtesy were all tossed out the window in just a few amateurish and embarrassing hours.

What happens next is not yet clear, but it is clear that newly installed Board Chair Ron Margiotta and at least some of his allies are more than happy to speedily run the system into the ditch. As the former Ridgefield Park, New Jersey school board member told WRAL-TV when asked about members who might differ with his plans to dismantle a nationally acclaimed system that was crafted through decades of painstaking work and compromise:

"If they [the other school board members] don't come on board, then get out of the way, as far as I'm concerned."

The source

Ideologues with an agenda like Margiotta rarely materialize out of thin air. As has come to be the case with so many political bullies of his ilk, Margiotta, his cronies, and his plan can be traced to the same well-fertilized, anti-government soil that completely dominates conservative political circles these days.

Here in North Carolina, that means the right-wing think tanks funded by millionaire activist, Art Pope. For several years now, Pope's think tanks (the Locke Foundation, the Pope Civitas Institute and Americans for Prosperity) have, in close coordination with the Republican Party, been spewing a steady stream of anti-public education invective.

The invariable theme of their "reports" and opinion pieces: public schools are disastrous failures while private schools (and their sometimes acceptable cousins, charter schools) are good and heroic underdogs.

In the Pope think tank world, anything that makes schools accord more closely with the market fundamentalist vision (in which essentially all public structures and systems are privatized or turned into fee-for-service, "market driven" institutions) is to be celebrated. Conversely, anything that undermines public schools, casts them in an unflattering light, or plays to popular fears and baser instincts in such a way as to abet this goal, is a tactic that is to be used at every turn.

"Parent-friendly" schools

Consider, for instance, the latest natural fertilizer spread about the North Carolina public schools this past week by the Locke Foundation - a shallow and deceptive, but cleverly packaged "Spotlight" report entitled "Parent-Friendly Schools 2009: How ‘parent friendly' are school districts in North Carolina?"  

In it, the author purports to offer a data-driven assessment of how each of the state's 115 school districts performs when it comes to being "parent friendly." Hmmm, that sounds at first blush like a worthy goal. Even the most ardent defenders of the public schools would concede that things like race and class issues, bureaucracy and inadequate funding and personnel can conspire to leave many schools doing a less than optimal job of communicating with parents. It would be interesting to see where parents are happiest with the job their schools are doing.

The only problem is, that's not what the report actually examines. In fact, there is zero input from any parents in the "parent-friendly" study at all. None. Zilch. Nada. What the report actually consists of is the author's assessment of several categories in which he has decided what will be the proxy for "parent-friendliness."

To make matters worse, the report trumpets and constantly refers to a national report with a very similar name that actually did collect data from parents (the Parent and Family Involvement in Education Report or "PFIE" conducted by the U.S. Department of Education). The Locke report, however, uses no such information. It merely borrows (sort of, anyway) some of the categories from the PFIE report.

Ironically, one of the categories from the PFIE report that he chooses not to borrow is: "overall satisfaction with the school." According to the author, this is due to "data limitations." 

Got that? In a report that purports to be about which schools are most "parent friendly," the author begins by admitting that he has no good data (or at least data that he cares to share) for parental satisfaction with the schools. He then goes out of his way to constantly refer to a national study that made just such findings - apparently, so that he can garner a little credibility by seeming association. Give us a break!

And so it goes. The author assesses "parent-friendliness" under the broad category of "administrators" by looking at: a) teacher attitudes toward administrators, and b) the percentage of non-teaching staff a school has. In other words, schools get downgraded for having too many librarians, counselors, custodians and audio visual consultants. Huh? How is it "parent-friendly" not to have counselors to talk to? The author concludes this section by making the completely unsubstantiated assertion that:

"As a rule, large school and district bureaucracies typically make it difficult for concerned parents to obtain necessary information or discuss concerns with decision makers."

But wait, there's more. The author then proceeds to give "grades" on each of his four factors: "administrators," "teachers" (measured only by teacher turnover and vacancies), "safety" (measured only by the number of reported acts of school crime and violence), and "academic achievement" (measured by selected test scores and graduation rates).

Lame enough, but it gets worse.

When he gets around to giving out letter grades, the author falls back on the old, lazy teacher tactic of grading on a curve. In each category, the author simply gives 10% of the districts an "A," 20% a "B," 40% a "C," 20% a "D," and 10% and "F." What is this, College Psych 101?

As one education policy expert explained to N.C. Policy Watch:

"No matter how well or poorly districts actually do against objective measures, they're going to be reclassified according to a bell curve. Even if these specious "scores" are very tightly aligned, a district with one score could get a B and one with a very slightly lower score could get a D or F, just because of bell curve distribution. 

Indeed, all of them could be doing really well (or poorly) and you'd get this same distribution. Talk about stacking the deck. And then average those scores over and over again and guess what you get: an even more centralized representation of scores. Like flipping a coin over and over. The results bear this out: his overall rankings give 0% A's, about 15% B's, 70% C's, 10% D's and 5% F's. It's crazy and stupid and meaningless."

Not surprisingly, the author concludes that things are grim and that "North Carolina's school districts are not parent-friendly organizations."

Reality check

Here's the sad reality in all of this: At one level, ideologues like Ron Margiotta and the people who inhabit the Pope Empire are right: our public schools are flawed and often parent-unfriendly. One need only ask some of the poor and minority parents with whom advocates at the North Carolina Justice Center have worked over the years to learn this. These moms and dads will confirm that most school systems need a lot of reform, better teachers and principals, and a lot more services and resources.

But they will also confirm that our schools do not need to be privatized, broken up into hundreds upon hundreds of small and segregated districts (a la New Jersey and other northern states), radically transformed overnight during rump school board sessions or maliciously denigrated in bogus, ideologically-driven "studies."

Let's hope that the light of day exposes these harebrained, "ends justify the means" ideas and tactics (and the ideologues who tout them) to the public derision and rejection that they so richly deserve.  

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This entry was posted on Saturday, December 5th, 2009 at 11:56 am and is filed under Radical Right Reality Check. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.