A Political Future Is On The Line

Walter C. Jones

July 1, 2008

K athy Cox has an opportunity to destroy her political career or propel it to a higher level. The State Schools Superintendent is getting the blame for the test mess that exploded just days before the end of this school year.

Critics say she should have better prepared the public for the horrible scores, better matched the tests to the curriculum or at least not wasted money on a social-studies quiz she ultimately scrapped. Supporters say she did nothing more than disillusion thousands of parents about their children.

Whether your child is spending an unexpected summer in school or at tennis camp as planned, the test results for middle-schools must have been jarring. So jarring that Cox is liable to feel the wrath in the voting booth. Scrapping the results for the social-studies exam that sixth and seventh graders took only mitigated the problem slightly.

Georgia education leaders expected a large number of student failures on both the social-studies and eighth-grade math test because of a change to a more rigorous curriculum. After all, the 60-percent pass rate on the math test reflected how Georgia students have performed for years on national standards.

However, warning parents and teachers could have become a self-fulfilling prophecy of bigger proportions. But at least it would have provided a little cushion for the shock of individual scores.

More troubling, though, are the numbers of students with good grades in advanced math classes who still wound up failing the test. Their failures represent a bigger, systemic breakdown.

Georgians have succumbed to the "Lake Woebegon effect" in concluding that "all of the children are above average," as the joke goes about the fictional town created by Garrison Keillor on his radio show. The fallacy has persisted in spite of decades of headlines announcing substandard education here because everyone felt their own child was better than the average, a natural assumption when report cards backed it up.

Now that Cox and the board have thrown cold water into every parent's face, the question is how will she react in the remaining two years of her term.

This isn't a manufactured political crisis with members of the opposing party calling for hearings and resignations in an effort to score political points – though some have used it as a reason for increased education budgets.

The anger is palatable from steamed parents – many of them Republicans like Cox.

Cox can borrow the examples of Margaret Thatcher and Paul Volker as policymakers who succeeded in making a huge, painful shift – Thatcher in wrenching Britain away from nationalized industry with high taxes; and the former Federal Reserve chairman in squeezing stagflation out of the American economy with the bitter medicine of high interest rates.

More than one protest rally climaxed with their effigies burning, but they eventually became heroes. They did so by staying in front of the public, confidently offering a vision of the improved circumstances for which they were aiming, and warning the public of the intervening discomfort during the transition.

In some ways, Cox has a harder job because most Georgians have a difficult time seeing how the state's weak education standards affect them. Most don't want their kids to grow up working in the Northeast anyway, so they're not troubled by the fact Fortune 500 companies don't recruit at colleges around here. It's been easy to dismiss Georgia's national reputation as northerners' regional prejudice.

Cox became unpopular for exploding some long-held myths. How she reacts in the face of the fallout will determine her political future – either as a tone-deaf bureaucrat or as a savior and potential governor.