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As
Gov. Mark R. Warner prepares to ride off into the
sunset, he has pointed to his education record as
among his proudest accomplishments.
Speaking
last week both on WTOP-Radio’s call-in talk show
and before a Northern Virginia education luncheon,
he touted a record that included large increases
in math SAT scores and in the number of accredited
schools. So it's fair game to look at the totality
of Warner’s record on education.
On
the positive side, he must be credited with
holding to Virginia’s Standards of Learning.
It’s hard to remember how badly George Allen and
Jim Gilmore were vilified by the Democratic Left
over Virginia’s Standards of Learning exams –
hard, perhaps, because Democrat Mark Warner
ignored the weak-kneed partisans in his party and
kept the SOLs in place. He maintained the SOL
timetable, and the result was an increase in the
number of fully accredited schools from 40 percent
the year before he took office to 92 percent. Not
a bad accomplishment.
Still,
there’s a nagging doubt that maybe the SOLs have
been watered down over those years. The federal No
Child Left Behind Act “benchmarks” each
state’s exams (like the SOLs) against the
National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)
exams, considered for years as “the Nation’s
Report Card.” Virginia scores above the
national average in NAEP scores. But while SOL
scores have jumped recently, our NAEP scores
remained flat or even dropped slightly.
That
shouldn’t happen – they should track in the
same direction – and it raises the question: Is
Virginia lowering its standards, making it easier
to pass our tests, or is there another reason?
It’s a cipher the next governor needs to answer.
Warner
is justifiably proud of his push to help
vocational students obtain an industry license,
pay the cost of college classes to do it, and
increase the number of high school students taking
Advanced Placement courses for college credit.
Good school divisions have always exercised these
options, but Warner pushed the issue state-wide,
providing new opportunities for kids in
traditional public schools, and their lives will
be better for it.
The
Governor also created new opportunities for adults.
He helped push through a 40 percent increase in
the number of adults obtaining high school
equivalency diplomas, or General Equivalency
Diplomas (GEDs). Obtaining more education is a
good thing, but the Governor overstates te
importance of the GED. The average GED recipient
passes the test after about 30 hours of class
time, and Department of Labor statistics indicate
that, financially, GED holders do only slightly
better than drop-outs, and not as well as regular
high school graduates, who make about 50 percent
of a college graduate. Still, Warner’s effort
was aimed at adults, and a large part of it was to
reinforce a culture of education where it may not
have previously existed. That's important, and
worth bragging about.
But
there are areas in education where Warner fell
short.
He’s
ignoring the real drop-out rate. The Governor
has made much of Virginia’s rise in the
graduation rate – from 94.2 percent last year to
94.6 percent this year. But he ignored
concerns about the drop-out rate: 26.4
percent of the students who started in ninth grade
disappeared before 12th grade graduation. The
Governor dismisses those concerns by noting that
when a student leaves for private school, or is
home-schooled, or leaves the state, they are
counted as a “drop-out.” True enough. But he
overlooks the influx of students moving into
Virginia, and that there are fewer
private-and home-schooled high school students
than private- and home-schooled middle school
students. These factors can't
begin to account for the 25 percent loss in the
number of students through high school.
Refusing
to examine the disappearance of one quarter of the
student population isn't something that businessman
Mark Warner wouldn't do. Gov. Warner shouldn’t
either.
He
failed to expand innovative schools. Although
known as an advocate of charter schools –-
public schools that should be given the freedom to
innovate –- the Governor failed to step up to
the plate to either save existing charter schools
or create new ones. He appointed one of the
nation’s premier charter advocates to the State
Board of Elections (who actually helped write the
charter law in the Clinton White House), but the
Warner-appointed Board failed to appoint this top
expert to the charter school review committee, and
the number of charter schools has actually declined
under this administration.
He’s
setting the stage for an expensive new entitlement
program. The Governor plans to put funding for
a state pre-k program into his final budget,
having been “persuaded” by former North
Carolina Gov. James Hunt of the value of universal
Pre-K. If so, it was persuasion without evidence.
There have been only two studies showing long-term
educational effectiveness – both of them small
(fewer than 125 children), both of at-risk
populations and, in one case, starting with kids
entering the program at 4.4 months of age. The
experience has more often been like Georgia’s:
After ten years, its preschool program has served
more than 300,000 children at a cost of $1.15
billion, and children’s test scores have
remained the same. Mark Warner, the businessman,
would demand better metrics than that.
During
his term-limited tenure, Mark Warner has improved
the focus and management of public schools, but
failed to step up to the plate at times when
additional leadership might have counted.
In
the end, his report card will read what every governor
gets when he has less than four full years to
create policy change: Incomplete.
--
October 31, 2005
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