Honesty is the [?] Policy

Yesterday, I mentioned that the newly calculated graduation rate for Richmond Community Schools was up at the state government site, and the posted rate was just over 50%. Today this stunning statistic gets play in the Pal-Item, as expected.

What I did not expect was that the paper would get a comment from the school superintendent, Allen Bourff. He told the paper that:

1. The graduation rate was “intolerable.”
2. He hopes to enlist the entire community to support improving it. and
3. “What we’ve been doing is checking those figures for accuracy.”

I wonder how much time they will be spending on checking the figure versus trying to improve the rate. What is amazing to me about this reaction by the superintendent is that these numbers on the graduation rate are not new: The state did not come up with a new way of tracking kids through the system, the came up with a new formula for calculating the graduation rate.

The data used to derive the graduation rate is the same old data the school has been turning into the state for years. Only the formula used to  report the graduation rate to the public has been altered.

The truth here is that the school, including Mr. Bourff, has known for years what the actual success rate was for the system. They would talk about it in hushed tones, and never acknowledge it in public, but they knew it. Why keep it secret? Well, the stated reason was for economic development.

That’s right, there could be no public acknowledgement that the school system was failing because it would scare potential employers away from the community. This is the same reason the adult literacy rate for the local community was buried as well: Who wants to set up a factory or office park or even a warehouse in a town where only a third of the adults can even read the local newspaper and the school can only manage to graduate about 1 out of every 2 kids?

So if the numbers are not new, what is Mr. Bourff reacting to? It’s called public accountability.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 3rd, 2007 at 11:04 am and is filed under Local Items. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.