Parents know that if you don’t let a little boy play with a toy gun, he’ll make anything into a pretend gun. That happened in Suffolk, Virginia, where two seven-year-old boys pointed pencils at one another and made shooting sounds with their mouths, as boys have done for generations. Only in this generation, it got them both suspended from Driver Elementary School. Officials say it violated the zero-tolerance policy because a pencil is considered a weapon if it’s pointed in a threatening way [Washington.CBSLocal.com. “2 Va. Boys Suspended for Using Pencils as Guns,” May 7, 2013] and gun noises are made. That also applies to pointing your finger. Funny, I thought fingers and pencils were only dangerous weapons when you use those fingers to pick up a pencil and write idiotic school policies.
But it isn’t just imaginary weapons that make some school officials overreact. They get the vapors over love bombs, too. Hunter Yelton is a student at Lincoln School of Science and Technology in Canon City, Colorado. He likes a girl in his class, and she likes him back. So one day, he kissed her on the hand. Big mistake. He was accused of sexual harassment. He got off with a warning once. But Hunter is a repeat offender. He gave his crush a peck on the cheek. For that, he was charged with unwanted touching under the school’s zero-tolerance policy on bullying and sexual harassment, and suspended for several days. He’s back now, but asking a lot of uncomfortable questions. Questions like, “What is ‘sex,’ mommy?” You see, Hunter Yelton—that unrepentant serial harasser, who forced his lips onto both his girlfriend’s hand and her cheek—is six years old. He’s in the first grade. He doesn’t know yet that expressing love is bad. But it sounds like that’s one thing our schools are determined to teach.
On another front, New York City education bureaucrats have taken political correctness to new heights by banning dozens of words and topics from appearing on city-issued tests. For instance, dinosaurs can’t be mentioned because it might upset fundamentalists. “Halloween” is banned because it suggests paganism. “Birthdays” are forbidden because Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t celebrate them. Even “dancing” is banned because some religions bar dancing, although it’s still okay to mention ballet. The edict states that these and other subjects must be avoided because they could evoke “unpleasant emotions” in the students [The Huffington Post, “New York City Bans References to Dinosaurs, Birthdays, Halloween, Dancing in Standardized Tests,” March 26, 2012].
Keep in mind that those are just crazy instances (and there are thousands of them) of some of the social aspects of modern school life. We haven’t even started touching on the academic atmosphere of our schools today or the paranoia in many public schools that someone might hear something about God and die from it.
Despite nutty policies about the shapes of chewed Pop-Tarts, or forbidding the combination of green and red colors in clothing during December for fear that it might cause someone to “think” about Christmas (yes, this actually happened in December 2013 in an elementary school in Frisco, Texas, a suburb of Dallas [“School Bans Christmas Trees, the Colors Red and Green,” Fox News, December 5, 2013]), the main reason that children go to school is to receive an education and to learn basic facts about history, math, language, science, art, and music. When parents lose confidence that their children will even be exposed to and participate in rigorous academic pursuits, they will run for the exits and find alternatives. And that’s exactly what they are doing.
A generation ago, parents who homeschooled their children were probably considered religious extremists or leftover hippies from the sixties. “Normal” people just didn’t do such things. Why, what kind of education would children get if they didn’t sit for six hours a days in a classroom listening to a teacher and watching the teacher write with chalk on a big green board at the front of the room? Turns out, a pretty good education could be had at home!
The first-ever perfect score on the SAT exam up through my tenure as Arkansas governor was achieved by a young lady who was homeschooled. (Her dad, in fact, worked for me in our Department of Human Services.) It was a source of great pride to her parents, but a source of great embarrassment for the educational establishment.
While there have always been private prep schools and parochial schools, the rapid growth of the homeschool movement is nothing short of stunning. Just how many students are being homeschooled is a difficult number to pin down. The National Center for Educational Statistics says this:
Approximately 3 percent of the school-age population was homeschooled in the 2011 to 2012 school year. Among children who were homeschooled, a higher percentage were White (68 percent) than Black (8 percent), Hispanic (15 percent), or Asian or Pacific Islander (4 percent).
Parents gave a number of different reasons for homeschooling their children. In the 2011 to 2012 school year, 91 percent of homeschooled students had parents who said that a concern about the environment of other schools was an important reason for homeschooling their child, which was a higher percentage than other reasons listed.
Education News reported almost 2.4 million homeschooled children in the United States as of 2011, with the number growing between 7 percent and 15 percent per year. Since 1999, the number of children who are homeschooled has increased by 75 percent, and the number of children whose parents decide to homeschool is growing at an astonishing rate, seven times faster than the number of children who attend K-12 of public schools.
Some of our close friends began homeschooling their children when doing so was still fairly rare. Many factors contributed to their decision, one of which was indeed wanting to be able to undergird their family’s faith rather than have the public schools undermine it. But there were other practical reasons, such as being able to have flexibility in the school calendar to accommodate their desires to travel and tailor their school lives around their family rather than have their family life built around the school schedule. And the argument that kids who were homeschooled don’t get enough socialization is laughable for those of us who personally know homeschool families, because their children are typically very involved in numerous activities, from sports to music to theater to forensic debate. And in at least one recent year, both the winner and runner up in the National Spelling Bee were homeschooled kids.
My first appointment to the Arkansas State Board of Education was a homeschooling parent. She was the first homeschooling parent in the United States to be appointed to a State Board of Education. The teachers union was apoplectic as was the rest of the board, all of whom had been appointed by my Democrat predecessors Bill Clinton and Jim Guy Tucker. The very idea that one of those “homeschool moms” would be allowed to sit on the State Board of Education!
But the educational establishment never thought it inappropriate for them to regulate homeschooling, so why would they be so afraid that one out of seven members of the state board would be one of “those people?” She was incredibly effective, fair-minded, and within two years, was highly respected and regarded for her contribution to the board.
Per pupil expenditure continues to soar even as standardized test results languish or decline. Some states and school districts spend more per year on K-12 students than other states spend for a year in a university! New York averages over $19,000 per student; Alaska, $17,390; New Jersey, $17,266; and Vermont, $16,039 [USA Today, “States Spending the Most on Education,” June 7, 2014].
As outrageous as that sounds, a 2010 report by the Cato Institute argued that the costs of public schools are vastly underreported. The study looked at the five largest U.S. metro areas plus the District of Columbia and found that on average, public school spending was 44 percent higher than officially reported. The highest was in New York, where per-student spending actually reached $27,000. The study found that public schools were spending an average of 93 percent more than the estimated median private school in the same area.
But wait: Cato researcher Andrew Coulson later found that they’d overlooked some line items in the D.C. budget, and in fact, public schools there spend a mind-boggling a
verage of $29,409 per pupil per year.
For that mountain of money, Washington, D.C., public school students get one of the worst educational experiences in America. Crime, drugs, gang violence, and depressing, dilapidated facilities. The district has been trying to correct the latter by building and refurbishing schools, like a $130 million makeover for Cardozo High School. But even with the much-improved facilities, sophomores’ reading proficiency in 2013 was under 20 percent, a drop of nearly 6 percentage points from 2012. D.C.’s public schools have been so bad for so long, and so resistant to reform, that even The Washington Post did a series of articles exposing the decline.
My favorite story from the Post concerns a couple of D.C. school officials who worked for D.C. Afterschool for All, a program that provides extra instruction and afternoon supervision for thousands of impoverished children. Over a two-year period, they spent over $13,000 on expensive meals and drinks (including $82 bottles of wine at an upscale Italian restaurant) and entertainment (including a $225 tab at the Camelot Show Bar, one of D.C.’s fanciest strip clubs, expensed as a “school planning meeting”) and charged it all to the Shaw Junior High School activity fund.
It’s no wonder that D.C.’s public elementary and high schools are under capacity and its middle schools are literally half-empty (52 percent utilization of facilities). Much of that is due to birth rates and changing demographics, but I have to assume that fleeing also plays a major role.
Say, here’s a suggestion for getting the D.C. public school population back up! Why don’t all the liberal politicians who champion public schools (or more precisely, public schoolteachers’ unions) and fight tooth and claw against vouchers or any other idea to give parents more control and kids a better education and hopes for a better life, take their own kids out of private schools like Sidwell Friends and put them into D.C.’s public schools? That would fill a lot of empty desks!
It doesn’t help at all that some of the attempts to improve public education get hijacked by those with agendas that are not about the students. It’s what Ray Simon, who was State Director of Education during a good part of my tenure as governor, used to call the difference between “school people” and “kid people.” I came to realize that some people are about protecting the school as an institution and those who are employed by it. Sadly, much of the money and energy are gobbled up by the school people. Too little is done to actually benefit the kids.
A great example of a good idea gone bad is Common Core, which has become the whipping boy of the left and the right. I’m not sure who hates it the most, but the very mention of it gets the veins on people’s necks bulging. If there is anything less than a primal scream demanding that anyone who does or who has ever supported Common Core should be burned at the stake, then that person is the same as a Communist sympathizer or child molester, not worthy of his or her next breath of air.
Common Core is dead, and because of what it has become in most states should be. But the origins were pretty simple and straightforward and were actually launched by conservatives to keep education standards under the control of local school boards and states and out of the hands of the federal government.
The concept grew from an effort that conservative Republican governors like Jeb Bush of Florida, Tommy Thompson (Wisconsin governor who pioneered school vouchers in Milwaukee), John Engler of Michigan, and I all supported. It was an initiative called “Achieve,” and an effort of the National Governors Association to do three things: raise academic standards to be rigorous and consistent; measure the performance of students to determine how well they were doing against those standards; and hold the stakeholders (teachers, administrators, students, and yes, even politicians) responsible for the results.
Many of us feared an increasing role of the federal government in education mandates and were strenuously opposed to that both on constitutional grounds and practical ones. The federal government has no role to play in education. It’s the purview of the states and the local communities through their elected school boards. Further, most every governor I’ve known believes as did the Founders that states are the laboratory of democracy where ideas and innovations get created and tested. If they work, other states will adopt them. If they don’t work, we don’t end up making a fifty-state mistake. Experience had also been a cruel teacher to governors as to what happens when the federal government wants to get in the middle of local school decisions. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) hatched in the 1970s proved to be a financial trap for states who were promised money by the feds to pay for fully integrating all persons, including those with developmental disabilities, into the regular classrooms, replacing the traditional “special education” model. The states have been left holding the bag ever since and the federal government never fulfilled even a fraction of its commitment to fully fund it. It’s why those of us who went through that nightmare in the 1990s were adamantly opposed to Obamacare mandates for Medicaid, despite big assurances that the federal government would cover the cost for the first three years. We’d all heard that song before. And it ends on a very sour note!
Common Core was the natural outgrowth of the standards sought from back in the late 1990s. It was pushed by the National Governors Association, and forty-four states initially signed on because it would keep authority and control at the state level but would establish a cooperative set of standards for two (and only two) subjects: math and language arts. There was not one bit regarding curriculum, data collection on students or schools that would go to the federal government, and nothing with Common Core would involve science, history, the arts, or any area of study other than math and language arts, period.
As I tried unsuccessfully to explain to parents the intent (not, however, the outcome), I used a sports analogy. If an eighth grader plays on a basketball team in Oregon, and moves to South Carolina, he should have a reasonable expectation that the basic rules of the game will be the same. The rim of the goal will be ten feet from the floor; the court will measure eighty-four feet long by fifty feet wide, and the free throw line will be fifteen feet from the point on the floor directly beneath the backboard. If every state, every district, and every team could make up its own standards, imagine the chaos in a state tournament when one team shot the ball toward a goal ten feet off the floor, while another played on a court where the goal was only seven feet off the floor. Those boys used to a seven-foot goal probably thought they were all pretty amazing players to be able to slam dunk the ball at will, but they will be creamed when they play the team that is used to playing with much more rigorous standards.
No matter how many times I’ve repeated that analogy, I am utterly frustrated that what was supposed to be state-controlled standards in two areas has morphed into a federal behemoth. Even now I get e-mails and posts on my Web site that say, “Mike Huckabee supports Common Core; I’ll never vote for him or even listen to him, ever!” Okay, that’s your prerogative, but while I agree that Common Core has become an unmanageable Frankenstandard kidnapped by the federal government, please tell me that you do insist on standards to be clear, that measurements should be taken to see if we’re achieving them, and that if the enormous amount of money we’re spending isn’t effective, we’ll fire people, hire new ones, and get the job done.
The controversy over Common Core may have had an unintended benefit for those of us who believe that education decisions should be made by Mom and Dad, not Uncle Sam. If it’s further driven a wedge between the freedom of parents and the force of the federal government, then good! We need to keep the federal fingers off our kids.
It’s increasingly evident that parents throughout America are no longer willing to drive up to the school each day, drop off their children, and assume that everything will turn out all right. Parents are voting with their feet and taking their children out of government-run schools. While affluent families have had and have exercised that option for years, working-class families know that for their children to have a shot at mak
ing it to the next rung on the ladder, they have to have schools that are run by “kid people.”
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Regulation + Taxation + Litigation = Job Migration
ONE OF THE CHERISHED BELIEFS of so-called “progressives” is that their policies don’t cause economic stagnation because businesses and individuals will simply lie there and absorb whatever new taxes and regulations are dumped on them (“Please, sir, may I have another?”), and won’t take any evasive action. You can see a good example of that mind-set in their claims that there’s no evidence that many businesses are cutting workers to part-time and holding down their staffs to under fifty employees to avoid the Obamacare mandates. I hear they also have a plan to pay off the national debt with Tooth Fairy money and rides on unicorns.
Outside of Bubble-ville, where the rest of us have to deal with the reality of their misbegotten policies, the migration of businesses from highly taxed and regulated states and nations to those that offer lower taxes and more freedom is as obvious and predictable as the migration of mallard ducks from Canada to the rice fields in east Arkansas.
It’s said that most new trends start in California and spread eastward, and California has been leading the nation for years in electing far-left politicians who love raising taxes, growing government, prosecuting and suing entire industries, and turning every crackpot suggestion for how to improve the world into a state regulation. There are many people across the United States who think the “progressive” model of California should be adopted by other states in the same way that the federal government has been embracing it. So, to paraphrase that great philosopher, Dr. Phil, “How’s that workin’ out for them?”
In 2014, California achieved the dubious distinction of being named by Chief Executive magazine as the worst state in America to do business for the tenth year in a row. It was followed by New York and Illinois. (Hmm … what do these states have in common?) California’s chief rival, Texas, was ranked the best state to open or run a business for the tenth straight year, although Florida was nipping at its heels, largely by copying Texas’s winning formula of cutting taxes and actively promoting itself as a corporate relocation destination.
God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy Page 19