High costs and no accountability

By Bill Moloney

Published December 1, 2007 at 12:05 a.m.

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One of the truly remarkable historical developments of the last 60 years has been the dramatic expansion of the Empire of the Academy in the United States. From a nation that once thought an eighth-grade education sufficed for anyone but clergymen, we morphed into high school for all, preschool and college for most, and now some would add the graduate level as well. Cheerleaders for these developments are quite fond of the phrase "a seamless web from pre-school to graduate school."

At the very same time we saw this extraordinary growth of educational quantity we have witnessed a steady decline in quality along with an exponential growth in cost.

The newest instrument of this massive American social engineering project is something called P-20, a phenomenon that has popped up in several states invariably with the strong support of those special interests who have the most to gain in terms of membership, money and political clout.

The usual drill goes like this: A task force is formed with a very carefully selected membership, meetings are held, reports are written, recommendations are made, and the governor and legislature are urged to make all this good stuff happen. Along the way, those who dare to seriously criticize are decried as selfish, uncaring or perhaps people who just don't like children. Uneasy taxpayers are assured that the new, improved society that will result from all this will be cheaper in the long run.

So, what can be said about the recent recommendations of Gov. Bill Ritter's P-20 Council? Being charitable, if one can overlook exploding costs and murdered accountability, there's not much that's objectionable.

The language of the report skillfully conceals true cost. Even though the format requires an answer to the question "Will this recommendation carry a fiscal impact?" the repeated responses are things like "has not been determined" or "difficult to estimate at this time." Only in the fine print do we find telltale phrases such as "significant increases in base pay" buried at the end of the oddly titled "Alternative Compensation Systems." Even where a dollar estimate is unavoidable (e.g., $229 million for full-day kindergarten) the real state and local costs are dramatically underestimated.

The sections on accountability show a similar taste for euphemism and hiding real intent. Here are two examples with a more accurate first word in brackets: "Streamlining [Eliminating] K-12 Accountability" and "Modification [Demolition] of State Educational Assessments."

In the fine print we discover that the real problem with our accountability system is "unreasonable proficiency measures such as the level of cut [i.e., passing] scores." Now admittedly, fiddling with these items is the fastest road to raising test scores and making everyone look good. However this ignores the fact that Colorado's CSAP proficiency measures and cut scores are already distinctly weaker than those of the National Assessment of Educational Progress which has long been the gold standard of honest assessment.

In fairness, those involved in this initiative are collectively sincere and well-intentioned. The problems they address - dropout prevention, early childhood education, better data systems, and overlapping local, state and federal accountability systems - are very real and deserve urgent attention. However, proposed remedies are too often wildly at variance with needed solutions, and quantity of process repeatedly overwhelms quality of product. Finally, the inclusion of "earmark"-like special-interest agendas threatens the credibility of the entire enterprise.

Advocates of real reform must hope that the governor and legislature will insist on a balanced bipartisan scrutiny of this deeply flawed report that will include those views and voices so far excluded.

Bill Moloney was Colorado education commissioner from 1997-2007.

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