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Education, sigh Date published: 9/3/2005 By Paul Akers Sighs and wonders
SPOTSYLVANIA SCHOOLS CHIEF Jerry Hill is affable, This is the blase, take-two-aspirins response to scholastic anemia of a man marinated in the public-school culture, whose members divide into Bud Light-like teams and shout at each other: "Less accountability!" "More pay!" Hill has shown no detectable joy over the state SOL, the federal No Child Left Behind program, or any other unspinnable measurement of K-12 performance. He wants Mo Money. In this quest, he enjoys the hearty backing of county School Board members, whose basic activity is to pick up a huge log and, running at full speed, ram it against the door of the public treasury. Trampled underfoot is the herald bearing the message that Spotsylvania schools overall are academically sub-.500. Two years ago, the School Board voted to privatize cafeteria service. Should not the tenets of capitalism govern the top of the educational system as well as the bottom? They don't. The board last month extended Hill's contract until 2009, increasing his annual salary by $12,300 per year and raising his total compensation package to $203,800 annually, not counting insurance and retirement benefits. This occurred following a year in which, according to Standard & Poor's School Matters analytical service, Spotsylvania schools' performance dropped in nine of 19 SOL categories. This is performance-based remuneration? If the board's liberality mimics any kind of capitalism, it's the cozy, golf-foursome variety wherein directors dump lucre on CEOs who run down stock value and lose market share. True, Hill and his board deserve credit for managing their Little Shop of Horrors, a dizzily growing district with hundreds of voices crying "Feed me!" And maybe tying only test scores to pay is a bad idea. Stafford County schools are out-achieving Spotsylvania's, but I question the wisdom of throwing gold at the feet of a superintendent who urged college-bound Stafford honor students to hit the books on the chance that they could be the next Sally Jesse Raphael. Not that dubious role models are an exclusive motivational tool of the public school system. Some years ago in Richmond, the nuns at a Catholic preschool my daughters attended, in celebration of Black History Month, displayed a poster of Richard Pryor. Yes, that Richard Pryor, the noted vulgarian and dopehead who, setting himself ablaze while free-basing cocaine, ran down the street screaming, "I [expletive]ed up, man! I [expletive]ed up." It's possible, of course, that the nuns interpreted this as penitence. --Paul Akers
1. Be respectful. No personal attacks.
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