Results Don’t Add up for Obscure Math Committee
By Jim Waters
LEXINGTON - Perhaps President Ronald Reagan was
thinking about America's huge education bureaucracy when he said:
"Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually a
government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see
on this earth."
Heaven help any political leader in
Kentucky who attempts to shrink the bureaucracy or at least make it
more responsive – even if the agencies being reconstituted have
proven worthless.
Take, for example, the obscure
Committee for Mathematics Achievement.
The agency was created in 2005 to,
according to its enabling statute, develop a plan to "improve
student achievement in mathematics" and which would result in
"closing the student achievement gap among various student
subpopulations."
Since that hasn't happened – at least
not on a reasonable scale and timetable – Gov. Matt Bevin disbanded
and reconstituted the committee, along with several other ineffective
bureaucracies in an executive order earlier this summer.
Ryan Davis, a Jefferson County Public
Schools teacher who chaired the CMA, isn't happy.
"Bevin's dissolution and
reconstitution of this committee is a setback to the worthwhile work
it was doing to help students in Kentucky," Davis writes in a
recent op-ed.
Yet Davis fails to provide a single
example of how students are aided by this bureaucracy.
Admittedly, it's hard to find such
examples, especially when less than one-third of Kentucky white
eighth-grade students demonstrate proficiency in math and trail the
rest of the nation by double-digits in their performance and only 9%
of the commonwealth's black eighth-graders were deemed proficient in
the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress.
It's much easier to attack Bevin, as
Davis does, for changing the committee's makeup and appointments than
bemoaning how academic-achievement gaps have failed to close
sufficiently and in some cases have actually widened – thus
indicating a failure by this committee to achieve the purpose for
which lawmakers created it.
Another head-scratcher is how this
committee could fail to oppose the state's ill-advised plan to drop
Algebra II as a required course for high-school graduation.
"It didn't take a stance,"
reported the left-leaning Kentucky Forward.
If this committee is about pushing for
better math performance and closing gaps, wouldn't the fact that it
caved to the pressure to lower the standards rather than plant a flag
in favor of challenging our students to achieve at a higher level
offer reason enough to disband it and try something different?
Apparently Davis feels he'll get more
attaboys for attacking Bevin for his "disdain for democracy,"
"abuse of power" and how he "subverts the voice of the
people" than by noting how the math performance for Kentucky's
black students in both fourth and eighth-grades – the years NAEP is
administered to elementary school students – declined in the most
recent years.
Just two weeks before Bevin's executive
order reconstituting this committee, the Supreme Court unanimously
upheld – in response to a lawsuit filed by attorney general and
Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andy Beshear – the governor's
constitutional authority to overhaul several state education boards.
The court has ruled similarly in the
past for governors of both political parties.
What Davis seems most upset about is
that Bevin would dare confront an ineffective bureaucracy and those
who view it as their personal fiefdom for pushing an ideology that
focuses on turf wars and adult complaints rather than on improving
students' performance, which is what legislators intended when they
created the education system as a whole and its committees in
particular.
Reagan also observed: "You can't
be for big government, big taxes and big bureaucracy and still be for
the little guy."
A relevant paraphrased version for
Davis might be: "You can't be for big education bureaucracy and
still claim to put students first."
Jim Waters is president and CEO of the Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy Solutions, Kentucky's free-market think tank. Read previous columns at www.bipps.org. He can be reached at jwaters@freedomkentucky.com and @bipps on Twitter.