An Industry of Liars and Cheats
I keep on harping on a few themes, and one I harp on more than anything is the the Education Bureaucracy is an industry. Further, unlike the Big Oil and Big Tobacco Industries, it is immune from oversight or accountability because it has spent lavishly on political protection.
I also argue (with strong support from daily headlines) that one can’t go much more than a day without another story of either corruption, waste, or failure on the part of Ed-Mart (always the high price - always).
Here is another wonderful example, this time from one of my compatriots in the fight to free Illinois children and taxpayers from this. He sends this e-mail to our list, soliciting help in breaking the wall of silence of yet another “rich” suburban school district failure.
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I need some help from the team out there.
After the most recent ISAT results were released, it became clear that there was no way to use them to measure academic progress and improvement due to lowering standards and “dumbing down” the tests, so I requested by FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) my district’s Iowa test results for the last three years, and any analytical reports from the administration regarding the tests.
The district refused to provide any documents, stating that the results were exempt from FOIA because it might violate someone’s “student privacy”, and because the request didn’t “name specific documents”.
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Taxpayers should never need to FOIA ANY such documents. They should be posted on-line IMMEDIATELY upon compiliation, with students names removed. None of this is hard, or even controversial - unless of course, you wish to hide how ineffective your protected and corrupt industry truly is.
As for the lame excuse that such compilation and posting takes time and money, the fact is that every district in Illinois is saddled with enough bureaucratic deadwood that they could easily add this task to one of their more sedentary members.
April 24th, 2007 at 8:35 am
Great post. I haven’t been writing about school districts for long and I don’t seem to be on any email lists like the one you mention yet.
But, it seems to me that those of us who care about and write about school transparency and accountability could come up with some kind of list of transparency reforms for school districts.
Your idea that it should be automatic for school academic performance scores to be posted on the district website (rather than citizens having to beg for the information) sounds like a good start.
April 24th, 2007 at 2:47 pm
Cinny,
Thanks for posting.
One thing I keep reminding people about on my radio show is how much of a scam the entire FOIA regime is.
The fact is that EVERY bit of government business (schools, towns, cities, etc.) should be out in the open (on the web) 24 hours after it happens.
FOIA was a lie, in that it took data the you already had a right to see, and hid it behind a process.
Now, since you have to specificially request something, the crooks and liars that have taken over Illinois’ governmental offices (at every level and in every entity) can “see you coming” and start the CYA/papershredding process.
Corruption is so metastized that no one even notices anymore.
Illinois needs a new Constitution, and one of the most important clauses should be the one forcing the cockroaches & slugs out from under their “FOIA” rocks.