Ed board should look beyond gathering data

Data gathering in education is like a dog chasing a car — what do you do with it after you get it?

It doesn't matter, because for the State Board of Education, collecting data is the end game. It seems the main purpose for collecting data is to justify its existence and to comply with the Legislature's endless demands for accountability. Successful organizations are those that collect information to make sure they put out a quality product and get a return on their investment.

The State Board of Education, however, appears to be content to monitor only the process of what it does, i.e. ongoing testing, compliance with regulations, teacher certification, and measuring success as to how students test, rather than the return on their investment — how successful students are in leaving high school and going on to higher education or finding meaningful employment.

The No Child Left Behind law is simply another government program touted as the snakebite medicine that will cure what ails education. Past salesmen told us they were going to do the same with their America 2000, Goals 2000 and Centennial Schools. This new remedy, however, is more costly and deceiving because it is raising the hopes of minorities that this will solve their problems. But it won't.

The debate about whether to aggregate minorities by groups of 10 or 40 doesn't make any difference. In fact, it only hurts poor kids, many of whom are minorities, because the focus is on a group rather than the individual. Parents can leave the bad schools and go to better ones found in middle- and upper-class neighborhoods. The result is that schools in poor neighborhoods are dismantled.

So much for helping poor kids.

Perhaps most devastating is the "one-size-fits-all" way of educating students. The beltway experts must have modeled No Child Left Behind after the fast food chains that put out hamburgers on an assembly line; and, while fast-food chains monitor the process, they also measure how well their product is selling and the return on their investment — something the state board and No Child Left Behind do not. Furthermore, our teachers have become assembly line workers, where following the regulations is more important than the quality of the education the student receives.