Rather than sounding like a voice of reason in the wilderness, the editorial sounds more like Chicken Little crying that the sky is falling and running to tell the king. The idea that the Utah State Office of Education should be in the driver's seat in partitioning school districts is moribund and stale; pulling yet another bureaucracy into the process is going completely in the wrong direction and is the antithesis of a solution to the issues at hand.
The word "stampede" is an extreme word choice. To get where we are today has taken several years and deliberation by several legislative bodies. This is not a wild rush of frightened animals trampling everything in their path. The folks driving this initiative have examined it in detail, and we were working on the solutions to capital construction funding and other issues long before the feasibility studies came out.
We have been, and are still, dedicated to ensuring that everyone is treated fairly. Throughout the entire process, the elected officials at city, county and state level have done their due diligence. Stampede is the wrong word.
At least two students apply for each seat at every new charter school started in Utah. There is a vociferous push for vouchers. Our home-school community is growing at a rapid clip. Legislated "accountability" measures, from the state's U-PASS to the federal No Child Left Behind Act, are failing to correct the problems with our public education system.
Remedial math and language programs at our colleges and universities continue to swell with the end product of our public education system. Industry complains that it must spend millions to fill in the educational gaps of our high school graduates. Our public education system is not getting the job done.
Rather than a stampede, this is a more or less orderly evacuation from a crumbling building.
The "experts" The Tribune would have come in to preside over the division of our school districts are the same experts who built this Tower of Babel. They are on the inside of the "great and spacious building" and have been fooled into believing they are wise when they are not.
They've had decades to address these issues and have failed to do so. If they could fix things they would have done it already. They haven't.
No, Chicken Little, the sky is not falling. That was a brick from the Tower of Babel that hit your head. Please step out of the construction area so we can finish the structural modifications to the building before it collapses entirely.
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* TAD WIMMER is a father of 11 children (eight of whom are still in school), lives in West Valley City and serves as the research director for the Utah Small Districts Coalition.
