I feel churlish for making this post. With the best of intentions, Lieutentant Governor Bill Bolling is traversing the state, meeting with people in “town hall idea raisers” to generate new ideas for dealing with education, transportation, health care, the environment and other pressing issues. His goal is a worthy one: to make the Republican Party “the party of issues and ideas,” and to “offer a positive vision for the future of our state.” But, judging by the ideas highlighted in the Lt. Gov.’s snazzy new website, the future of the Virginia looks pretty dim.
There are depressingly few new ideas in the bunch. A distressing number call for launching new government programs and spending new money. Not every idea calls for mo’ money, but most of those that don’t either have been around a long time and have gotten absolutely nowhere, or are so vague as to be meaningless.
A sampling from just the ideas about education:
- Higher academic standards – more opportunities for AP, IB and dual enrollment courses to better prepare college-bound students. Translation: Mo’ money.
- Increase opportunities for vocational education. Translation: Mo’ money.
- Raise teacher pay to the national average. Translation: Mo’ money.
- More money for colleges and universities. The title says it all: Mo’ money.
- Freeze tuition for in-state students. Translation: Mo’ money.
Then there are the ideas that sound good but are actually meaningless or based on false premises.
- Limit the number of out-of-state students. A false economy. Out-of-state students pay their own way through higher tuitions.
- More accountability in higher ed. Demand performance standards and accountability in higher ed. Sounds good, but it’s vapid. What kinds of performance do we measure? What do we hold universities accountable for?
In fairness, contributors did proffer some ideas for making schools work more effectively.
- More money in the classroom/less in the central office. Only 60 percent of Virginia’s educational dollars end up in the classroom – raise the bar to 65 percent. At least we’re talking about spending existing dollars more efficiently.
- Discipline in the classroom. Specific suggestions include removing disruptive students from the classroom, expanding alternative schools for students with recurrent disciplinary problems, requiring students to wear school uniforms, reinstituting corporal punishment, and increasing the number of “school resource officers.” Mostly good ideas, but let’s see how far they get before they’re shredded in the courts.
- School Choice. Provide tax credits or vouchers for parents who send their kids to private schools. I’m a huge believer in creating a true educational marketplace. But let’s see the details. How do we overcome massive institutional resistance to this idea?
- Competency testing for teachers and repeal of teacher tenure laws. Now we’re talking about real change — subjecting teachers to the same performance expectations as employees in the private sector. But just try to get this past the Virginia Education Association.
Other than school choice and repeal of teacher tenure, most of these ideas would fine-tune the status quo. What they don’t acknowledge is that the public education system is an artifact of the 19th-century industrial era and needs to be reinvented for a 21st-century knowledge-based economy. We won’t achieve that aim by throwing more money at the system, and we won’t even achieve it by removing a handful of disruptive students, putting pupils in uniforms or moving a few thousand kids from public schools to private.
Almost across topics covered, the ideas are mostly superficial, reflecting a superficial understanding of the nature of the problems we confront. Not one of the ideas about transportation touches upon the relationships between traffic congestion and land use. Not one of the ideas about health care acknowledges how state laws impede the efficient working of the medical marketplace. Instead of soliciting the same warmed-over ideas from an inadequately informed public, Bolling needs to study the issues himself, devise his own bold solutions, and then go out and sell them.
Postscript: Has anyone heard a peep out of the Attorney General’s office regarding the initiative to cut government rules and regulations?