Executive Director's note: Musings of an outraged moderate
By:
Scott P. Plotkin
Many years ago when I was a student assistant in the Political Science Department at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, I helped grade papers and tutor some of the younger students. Most of my work was during the period of the unfolding Watergate scandal; daily revelations during Senate hearings in the summer of 1973 stunned the country, right up to the imminent impeachment of President Nixon and his resignation in August 1974. As a result, the tests and essays prepared by the professor I worked for, Richard Kranzdorf, were heavily laden with questions about Watergate, commingled with questions about “pluralism” and “majoritarianism participatory” forms of government mixed with questions about Archibald Cox and G. Gordon Liddy and Elliot Richardson and Sam Ervin and many of the other notables who had some role to play in the controversy of the day.
My professor and I had many long talks in those days about the nature of government and how things could have gone so wrong. Many of us will recall that in 1972 President Nixon was cruising to a landslide re-election, while the Democrats under the banner of George McGovern were going down in flames. In my naive, youthful state I was flabbergasted that adults – otherwise well known for their smarts and political instincts – could make so many major mistakes and miscalculations, with such dire consequences.
After one of those “how could this be happening” conversations, Professor Kranzdorf proclaimed me to be a subset of the Silent Majority, a group he called the “Outraged Moderates.” In other words, we may be typical middle-of-the-road observers of the human condition who just expect our elected leaders to be sensible and thoughtful and who want government to work better, and react badly when our faith is so shaken.
Well, there is plenty to be outraged about these days, now that I have moved well into the world of 50-somethings who supposedly have been given the responsibility to run things handed down by our parents. Those of us in the school business know exactly what I’m talking about.
We are beset by overt political agendas under the guise of “school reform” that have little to do with what goes on in the real life of kids and schools. One need look no further than the irreconcilable conflicts between the state’s accountability system embodied in the Academic Performance Index – a growth model – and the requirements of No Child Left Behind with its absurd static model for “adequate yearly progress.” We send mixed messages to parents and opinion leaders when we applaud schools that have shown great progress after starting from a very bad place and yet are classified as “failing,” becoming Program Improvement schools because they don’t meet unrealistic targets for AYP. Or, even worse, schools go into Program Improvement because too many parents opted their children out of the testing program and therefore the feds think that somehow we’re “hiding” kids!
Somewhere along the line, the absolutely proper notion of making academic achievement matter through accountability has become bastardized by the worship of inputs, rather than an analysis of the outcomes of a kid’s education, and understanding the underlying cause of academic failure. And our political leaders run for cover as they try to address this weird contradiction when some self-appointed expert accuses them of dumbing down our standards in order to excuse the school system for its real or imagined failures. No one questions the importance of setting goals and parameters that insure equity and access, but we have long since been pushed down the rabbit hole of fantasy land with the adherence to prescriptive requirements that make no sense in the real world.
Well, my friends, the “outraged moderate” in me continues to live and breathe, and we have to do a better job of letting our leaders know that the Rubik’s Cube they have trapped us in is becoming more and more difficult to solve. How else are we to meet the highest academic standards in the country and the at times contradictory requirements of No Child Left Behind while being near the bottom in the nation in per-pupil funding?
The California School Boards Association will continue to fight this good fight for common sense and a commitment to our uniquely American form of government – embodied in the elected school board – and we will do everything we can to focus on the need for an academic program that meets the needs of all kids in the 21st century and on the funding to support those needs. With your help, we will survive the latest “reform” movement led by those with overtly political agendas, and preserve and protect one of the great institutions of our society – the American common school.