It would be hard to think of a faster way to lower the standards of higher education in this state than the one vaguely devised by our betters in the education establishment and sometimes outside of it. Now this plan has been officially presented to the Legislature and people of Arkansas as House Bill 1209, which is sponsored by state Representative Mark Lowery of Maumelle and blessed by the Hon. Asa Hutchinson.
This plan leaves no stone unturned in its near-encyclopedic search for a way to miseducate our children. In a field dominated by high-sounding gobbledygook, it takes the cake. Which comes with a scoop of ice cream on top and paper hats for all--in the shape of mortarboards, of course. Seldom has pretension been promoted so assiduously, or confused so thoroughly with accomplishment. For this foggy plan combines incentives for grade inflation, purely paper certification, and hopes of rewarding busy work by calling it research. It's a casebook example of mickey-mouse requirements presented as progress when no solid evidence of it can be shown.
(The one ray of hope in all this murk is something christened an efficiency gauge that would compare the salaries of those who do the real teaching on any campus, the faculty, with the pay of administrators and rewarding those who pay the teachers more and administrators less.)
"The ideal college," said a president of the United States named James A. Garfield, before he became a victim of ill-educated physicians, "is Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other." But it's doubtful that today's educrats would accept a strategy so simple and so effective. Instead, the people of Arkansas are supposed to trust those who put innumerable blocks in the way of those innocents blinded by the glitter of advanced degrees. And enchanted by their fluency in eduspeak, a species of gibberish no one dare call nonsense. No matter however little sense it may make in theory or practice. And so the innocent college students of Arkansas may be left to the not-so-tender mercies of those who construct models of education as complicated as they are incomprehensible.
But hope still raises its head even when a confederacy of dunces is being organized to thwart it. Kudos to state Representative Jana Della Rosa of Rogers, for with the grace and simplicity of the child who pointed out that the emperor isn't wearing any clothes, she dared put this issue into plain English: "We don't have the model [this new funding idea] right now but yet we're referencing what the model is going to do. Is there a model or is there not at this point in time? Where are we in the development of this, because you're speaking like there is a model and it's going to do this and this and this, but yet we don't have a model to look at." And if and when we get one, rest assured, Gentle Reader, it would soon be succeeded by another just as theoretical in form.
Ms. Della Rosa makes no secret of her and her constituents' own interests in whatever the Legislature decides about education--if it ever does. Or as she candidly describes this glob of a plan: "It's going to switch funding from certain schools to other schools so there are going to be winners and losers. I have schools in my district [that] actually, right now, are underfunded so I want to make sure that they aren't hurt even more." What a refreshment to hear someone speak in that archaic language in educational circles known as plain English.
It seems to some of us the idea of rewarding colleges, financially, based on how many degrees they hand out, or how many certificates they print, or how many widgets they push through the classroom, is exactly the formula for creating (1) grade inflation, (2) not worthless but only worth-less degrees, and (3) fewer educated students, if the definition of educated is the pre-2017 version. Which means not just a degree in hand, but some ideas in head.
Will more people running around in Arkansas with certificates of some sort mean a necessarily more educated populace? Some of us think not.
Instead, why not fund higher education, not just adequately but fully, give professors room (and high enough paychecks) to do their jobs, and hold students to the highest standards, make degrees from Arkansas colleges and universities difficult to get, as always has been the case, therefore business folks know a good prospect when they interview one, and education is real education? Or is that old-fashioned?
Old-fashioned it may be. It shouldn't have to be said, but probably must be: New isn't a synonym for better.
Editorial on 01/29/2017