SHOULD WE TRUST THE
SBOE?
Governor
Otter has turned over the job of gathering information on how to improve
Idaho’s educational system to the State Board of Education (SBOE). The SBOE is, indeed, a logical choice
to undertake the task, in that it has official oversight of the state’s
educational system and its mission is to promote the cause of learning. Unfortunately, there are several good
reasons to believe that the SBOE cannot be trusted to do this job well.
It is a
polite fiction that the SBOE is aloof from politics. All its members are appointees of the governor, share his
political convictions, and invariably follow his lead on policies. The SBOE officially endorsed all of
Luna’s laws and even enacted a policy requiring on-line course work (which it
revoked after the November vote).
Luna is, of course, a member of the Board (albeit ex-officio) and apparently
able to hold sway over it with regard to K-12 policy.
The resumes
of the eight SBOE members do not suggest that Otter has sought out candidates
with extensive backgrounds in education.
Only one of the eight has an advanced degree in education and only two
appear to have had teaching experience.
Most members are businesspersons and their advanced degrees, if any, are
professional ones. (Luna,
famously, has no conventional college degree at all.) Two members were career military men. The interests that members represent,
aside from Micron, the Flying A Ranch, and DeBest Plumbing & Mechanical, are
regional and/or those of specific universities, viz. BSU and the U. of Idaho.
Over the
past several years, major SBOE projects to improve Idaho’s educational system
make it clear that the Board subscribes to what might be called the
“Industrial” model of education.
It conceives of education as essentially a factory that produces
products called workers. In 2011
the Board president told the Lewiston
Morning Tribune that Idaho’s colleges and universities would have to “…
produce a lot more ‘widgets’ without a corresponding increase in state
funding.”
The Board
project titled “Complete College Idaho” aims at increasing the percentage of
Idahoans age 25-34 who have acquired a post-secondary degree or certificate
from the current 31.4% to 60% by 2020. The rationale for the project, as
described in the official document, is that education must be “responsive to
the needs of business” and generate degrees that are “of value in the
marketplace.” It assures us that
governor Otter is bent upon “growing the economy through innovation and talent.” Provisions of the plan seek to “accelerate
completion” of degree programs by lowering the number of credits required and
making it more difficult for students to take courses not directly related to
their majors. “Performance-based
funding” for educational institutions will direct funding to programs that are
“productive,” i.e. generate degrees with minimal cost-per-graduate and have a
high job placement rate. This
project has its virtues, to be sure, but ignores the traditional values
associated with a college education and potentially skews funding in favor of
certain subject areas.
The SBOE has
also generated a “Strategic Research Plan” for higher education. Again, the only goal addressed is
enhancing “the future economic vitality” of the state. The plan doesn’t even mention research
and scholarship in the arts, humanities and social sciences. The only research areas it advocates
for are energy, natural resource utilization, bioscience, materials science and
data management/software development.
Moreover, what
is hinted at, but not made explicit, in the research document, is that the state
wishes to spend nothing of its higher education funds to support research. All the funding is to come from
external – federal or private -- sources.
The SBOE office has informed universities of this position, but not the
public. The downside of dependence
on such funding sources is well-known: it starves research in fields other than science and
technology and enables private business interests to subvert the public’s
control of public universities.
(It must be
noted that Otter’s IGEM project, which recommends an initial state contribution
of $2M to university research, is independent of the SBOE, and entirely
directed toward profit-making, science/technology enterprise partnerships
between private industry and higher education.)
The SBOE basically
conceives of students as worker “widgets” that will feed the state’s
economy. It seems oblivious to
education as a voyage of self-discovery and self-realization; as a transmitter
of human culture; as an expander of horizons and multiplier
of perspectives; and as the primary shaper of knowledgeable and responsible
citizens. Are we to trust the
future of education in Idaho to a group of reactionary businesspersons who
think that education is nothing but job training?
A final
note: those familiar with the situation at ISU have an additional reason to
distrust the SBOE. In the face of
what has amounted to a civil war between the faculty and the administration
over the past several years, the SBOE has chosen, at every opportunity, to back
ISU’s president in his attempt to impose corporate-style governance at this
institution. Surely it’s not
asking too much of the SBOE, familiar as its members are with business practice,
to recognize that there are times when a Board of Directors must do more than
rubber-stamp the decisions of its CEO.
