Federal education policy: flog Maine, bus frogs

This id a typo.

To most of us, a typo is a small thing – a slip of the finger, an errant keystroke, a minor mistake that, in these days of word processors and spell checkers, is usually caught and easily fixed.

To the United States Department of Education, a typo is a much grander thing, as one might expect from an agency itself so grand. In the absence of a precise definition, here’s an example.

On Tuesday, June 11, USDOE released a report called, “Meeting the Highly Qualified Teachers Challenge.” This event marked the department’s first major initiative under the No Child Left Behind Act passed in February that will put the full might and resources of the federal government to work helping states and local school districts improve K-12 education, largely through the bureaucratic equivalent of public flogging. (Any act that has George W. Bush and Ted Kennedy back-slapping each other like frat boys at closing time should have raised eyebrows, but what’s done is done.)

The gist of the report is that states, almost without exception, do an absolutely dreadful job of meeting this challenge; any organism that walks upright and isn’t prone to excessive drooling can get certified to teach school. In the report – printed copies were delivered that day to members of Congress and it was posted online for everyone else – and in remarks Education Secretary Rodney Paige delivered to a national conference of educators that same day, Maine was singled out as being especially dreadful. Of the 29 states that give administer a Pre-Professional Skills Test to potential teachers, Maine ranked a mediocre 14th in reading and 16th in math, and – apparently adopting a particularly lax drool standard – 29th, last place, in writing.

This is not true. In compiling these rankings, USDOE used for 28 states the test scores of those pursuing four-year academic degrees in education. For Maine, it mistakenly used the test scores for vocational teachers – plumbers, electricians, mechanics and such – seeking certification to teach those trades, and those trades only, in secondary vocational/technical programs. Had the correct data been used, Maine would rank third for reading, fourth for math and a drool-free second in writing.

This – using wrong data, reaching wrong conclusions and holding the innocent victim up for ridicule – a USDOE spokesman told the Lewiston Sun Journal after the mistake was caught, is “like a typo.”

The typo was caught not by America’s Department of Education, but by Maine’s. After seeing the report on the federal Web site that Tuesday, state education officials promptly brought the error to federal attention. Rep. John Baldacci jumped on the case, making it clear that a quick and complete correction was expected.

And, with USDOE moving at the speed of government, it was. By Friday afternoon, a mere three days after giving Maine an undeserved public flogging, the on-line version of the report was fixed. Sec. Paige’s excoriating remarks were expunged from the Web posting of his speech as though they’d never occurred. As for all the printed versions, a single-page erratum sheet was prepared early this week that will be inserted in future distributions.

The question, of course, is of damage already done. Reports such as this make their biggest splash the day they’re launched, so I called the USDOE this week – twice, in fact – to find out what was being done to restore Maine’s good name. While on hold, I wondered why the same federal agency that regularly heralds Maine’s nation-leading assessment test scores for students did not see something amiss when it asserted that these smart students were being taught by dopes.

The first person I talk to reassures me that the printed report was not delivered to the entire Congress, but “only to key leaders.” Whew, that’s a relief. The second offered further reassurance – the printed reports weren’t actually sent to key leaders, but to their aides. If I’d called a third time, I probably would have been told the reports actually were sent to the college interns who fetch the mail for the aides of key leaders.

How many erroneous reports were printed, how many delivered? How many times had the erroneous report been downloaded from the Web site before it was fixed last Friday? No one knew. I was assured, however, that Sec. Paige’s scolding of Maine had not received any major news coverage.

So then I talk to the Dallas Morning News reporter who had a story in that major publication on June 12 in which Secretary Paige’s scolding of Maine was covered. Although any competent search engine would have found this story, he told me he had not, a full week later, been advised by USDOE that their error had led to his. Further, he told me he had discovered another error – Texas is listed among the 29 states that use that certain screening test when, in fact, it has never used that test. Since Secretary Paige was previously superintendent of schools in Houston, we wondered whether he made a lot of bad hiring decisions back then or just hadn’t read this report now.

Why, other than a state’s pride and it’s ability to attract economic development based upon having fine public schools and not giving an unwarranted black eye to some of the hardest-working folks around and keeping stressed-out taxpayers from blowing a fuse, is this important? One reason is that under the “No Child” Act, the USDOE will have extraordinary influence upon local schools. For example, under a provision kicking in this fall, districts with high schools deemed by the feds as “failing” based upon low achievement-test scores will have to bus students to other schools in the district. According to a June 11 story in The Boston Globe, 259 districts in Massachusetts will be forced to do this come September. Given the USDOE’s record in assessing data, you have to wonder if at least some of schools aren’t really failing. Like maybe, instead of assessing the test scores of 11th-grade students, the department assessed the test scores of the frogs those students dissect in biology lab.

There is, happy to note, some good news in this. Remember those vocational-teacher test scores? What they tell us is that Maine’s plumbers, electricians and mechanics, despite having been out of school for years, scored right in the middle of a pack of people pursuing four-year academic degrees. Not too shabby. As for the writing score – hey, writing’s harf.

Bruce Kyle is the assistant editorial page editor for the Bangor Daily News.