No expectations = No accountability

The Baraboo School board had the passage of the district's annual budget on last night's agenda. With the media coverage of the school district's position on the state budget on October 6 "Local Officials Clamoring..." this writer expected to see a widely promoted board meeting with the total of how much the district planned to legally extract from our wallets. Seeing as it was important to get the local taxpayer-funded talking head take on state politics, it is not an unreasonable expectation for the school district financial mouthpiece to boast wildly of how big of a cut the district will take from community taxpayers.

As long as the board was to be discussing the budget, one must wonder how much time they spent talking about how the district was going to increase its reading and math scores. Nothing like setting all your expectations at once. For example, with the hundreds of thousands of dollars the district is sinking into a new reading program including six elementary reading specialists and another for the middle school, what is the expectation for reading scores to increase? Maybe a 5% improvement? 10%?

How about setting the expectation that 100% of Baraboo students achieve 100% proficiency in reading and math in the next three years? According to numerous news sources, earlier this month it was reported that Wisconsin's definition of proficient is significantly lower than the national average. Nothing like keeping the bar low to make sure everybody feels good.(everybody: WEAC, administators, board members). If our youth get such a great public education in Baraboo, why aren't they surpassing the state standards instead of meeting them? Should the state lower the bar even more? After all, we wouldn't want to leave anyone behind.

My guess...there were no expectations set for student achievement at the meeting last night, or ever for that matter. Setting such goals would be too confining. The district must continue promoting generalities, else they may actually be held accountable for failing our community and youth - again.

And to think I wondered why so many colleges offer remedial coursework in reading and math.