Why are legislators ignoring us on education reform?

March 28, 2011

By Bob Hudson
I keep telling myself I shouldn’t care. In a sense I don’t have a dog in this fight. My children are raised. My grandchildren attend schools in Utah and Washington,
but I pay taxes in Idaho. And I care what happens to our home in the future.
So, too, do Governor C.L. “Butch” Otter, Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Luna and all the members of the Idaho Legislature.
Included among those who care are the teachers and administrators in our public schools and the parents of the children in their charge.
But there’s a disconnect somewhere.
Mr. Luna’s Students Come First education reform package, two-thirds of which is now law, demonizes educators. It makes them the bad guys as the state tries to stretch its tax dollars. Votes in favor of its passage ignore the wishes of large numbers of the people who elected him, the governor and the legislators.
His plan does away with tenure for teachers, institutes merit pay for individuals who take hard-to-fill positions or who excel in their craft and mandates the completion of a certain number of online classes during a student’s high school career. Oh, and it originally would have given laptops to high school freshmen to help them in completing those classes.
Unfortunately, the bill regarding merit pay doesn’t include funding. School district trustees will be required to come up with their own ways to pay for that.
Since I don’t have tenure in my newspaper job, I don’t have as much heartburn about that new law as some teachers may.
Does education need reform? Yes. Do the players agree what form that reform should take? No.
Rather than passing the legislation on a party line vote (with a couple of exceptions), our lawmakers should be carefully considering why there’s so much opposition to Mr. Luna’s plan.
Our Bingham County legislators should be weighing the effects of its passage on our public schools here in Aberdeen, Blackfoot, Shelley, Firth and the Snake River school districts.
They assure us that they have. Yet, despite telling us that their emails were 5-1 in opposition before the first two bills were voted upon, they ignored the will of the people and cast “yea” votes.
What was their response when the U.S. Congress did that same sort of thing with the healthcare bill? They were aghast, just as the rest of us in Idaho were.
What makes this situation any different? Weren’t you gentlemen elected to do the will of the people?
Students do come first for Idaho’s teachers, with few exceptions. They did nearly 40 years ago when I did my student teaching at O.E. Bell Junior High School in Idaho Falls. They still come first throughout Idaho.
Fortunately, none of the provisions of Mr. Luna’s education reform package take effect immediately. Our legislators should mandate fixes to the education system, shepherding our school administrators’ use of our scarce tax dollars. But they should listen to the people who say this plan will damage Idaho’s schools for years to come. Rather than ramming this thing through, then asking the school boards to be the bad guys when it comes to deciding how the mandates regarding technology and merit pay will be funded, they should ask Mr. Luna and his people to sit down with school administrators from around the state — from Sandpoint to Malad, from Payette to Soda Springs and Ashton and all points between— and hammer out a plan that makes sense for Idaho.
As I watch the Go On! commercials noting Idaho’s position as the No. 1 state in students who drop out of college, I wonder what damage the education reform plan will do to our state.
Rather than accepting the governor’s assurances and those of Mr. Luna that these moves will do nothing to damage the state’s public education system, they should be exploring alternatives that the public can accept. They should reject this destructive legislation and ask Mr. Luna to start over.
They owe the people who elected them that much.

Bob Hudson is managing editor of the Morning News.