At first glance, the new school grading system approved by the State Board of Education at the behest of the Legislature appears to hold schools to a surprisingly low standard. Based on a point scale in which 600 would be perfect (and unattainable), schools will get an A for at least 391 points, or 65 percent.

But, as it explained, the board designed the system to identify schools that need help to provide their students with a quality education. Since the Legislature, under direction from Sen. Howard Stephenson, R-Draper, mandated the school grading in order to “dismantle” struggling schools, the board had little choice but to devise a plan that creates a small pool of F-grade schools.

Stephenson is determined, one way or another, to take taxpayer money and siphon it to private schools instead of using more of it to improve public schools. Schools that don’t score up to par on the grading system would be closed and education of their students turned over to private businesses. It’s the first step to privatization, Stephenson’s ultimate goal.

His campaign against public education has been going on for years. The overwhelming referendum vote to repeal a voucher law Stephenson and his cronies created in 2007 apparently was only a minor setback in Stephenson’s crusade.

The school grading idea was based on parts of Florida’s education reform package that seems to be yielding success in that state. But the Legislature chose to ignore other provisions of Florida’s law that caps the number of students per class and provides more than twice the amount of money per student as Utah.

Stephenson’s strategy, in which most of his fellow Republicans are complicit, is to starve Utah public schools of the money they need to educate Utah students, then declare them failing and close them down. He contends that some members of the school board “are perfectly satisfied to keep punishing children by subjecting them to mediocre education” and that he, on the other hand is “less concerned about the feelings of educators who run mediocre schools than I am about the future prospects of those children in the school.”

Rubbish. The Legislature provides less-than-mediocre funding for public schools and ignores the needs of minority and disadvantaged children who desperately need early-childhood education and more one-on-one attention. And he ignores the desires of Utah taxpayers who turned down flat his earlier effort to privatize education.

It is he, not educators, who cares little about Utah’s children.