A member of the Utah State Board of Education has started his own blog. If I understand the politics correctly, Tim Beagley’s up for reelection this year. A blog, in that case, could be quite an exercise in bravery. It could also be an exercise in stupidity — maybe both at the same time.
In his first post he laments that Utah has fallen behind in spending, but he rather stops short of calling for a lot more money: http://kcmannn.bravejournal.com/index.php.
Utah was the most highly-educated state population in the nation in the not-too-distant past. The line I used to insert into speeches was Utah had an average educational attainment of more than 12 years in school — high school graduation — and that was not only higher than most states, it was remarkable because Utah had a significantly younger population than other states.
Education funding is a key place to improve results, if the money is spent wisely. My view is that teachers’ salaries in almost all cases need to be increased, and in most cases, increased a lot. Teachers are still the front-line workers in education, the people who make all the other delivery system improvements work (or don’t make them work), and the people who really influence children.
Any attempt to improve education without raising teachers’ salaries might be compared to an attempt to improve safety in the airline industry while freezing pilot salaries. We might get the results we want, but it will be despite our gross errors in judgment, not because of them. Let me rephrase that, trying to be more clear: The quick way, and lasting way, to improve education results is to raise teacher pay; we may get better results without raising teacher pay, but it will cost a lot more money to overcome the difficulty of making the system work when the front-line workers are not the best we can get.
I spent my last years in public schools in Utah. I had a handful of great teachers who coached me to do my best. On their efforts I won a National Merit Scholarship. Certainly the administrative decisions to keep our academic day short, and to keep calculus out of the high school curriculum, did nothing to help me achieve. I suspect that is true for most people.
It would be good to see an advocate of increasing education spending declare that openly, and win.
Postscript: I am not in the business of advising candidates for profit any more, but were I , and were he to ask, I’d urge Mr. Beagley to hustle himself to a good portrait photographer right away.
Hat tip to Lavarr Webb’s Utah Policy Daily, at UtahPolicy.com.
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 
Thank you Ed Darrell. You have helped me segway into my second post (Friday I hope) and helped me decide which picture to display in my title. By the way, bravely-stupid may very well be the nicest thing anyone has ever said of me as a board member.:)
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