Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
The purpose of this bill is to repeal laws that impose Regional mandates on Northeast public schools. I have targeted the laws that would be repealed by this bill for repeal because they force a one-size-fits-all curriculum on Northeast public school students, potentially shut down schools by forcing unfunded curricular mandates on public schools, imposes an unnecessary teacher licensing/pay regime, and/or rips public schools out of the control of the local communities they are intended to serve.
Let's start with the
Bi-Lingual Education Act. This requires every single public school in the Northeast to offer a foreign language course. Bilingualism can be a useful skill, but that doesn't mean it's the most useful of necessary for every student. There are some students who may be better served by spending time learning in other areas, and some schools who decide that the children of their local community may be better served by another class. Furthermore, since schools are required to implement this rather extensive with their own limited resources, this law has likely resulted in schools being forced to cut other programs which may have been even more useful, interesting, etc for their students. Some schools likely do not enough resources to fund this program at all, and thus this well-intentioned law has likely resulted in schools (probably in low-income areas) being shut down entirely for failure to comply with it. Finally, this law is actually in violation of a more recently passed law, the
Northeast Education Improvement and Modernization Act of 2013. Section 3, Subsection 1 of that law grants county governments exclusive control over the curricula of public schools within their jurisdictions.
Now, let's move on to the
Northeast Education Act. This bill creates a Regional Board of Education tasked with allocating education funds, writing a standardized test that all teachers must pass in order to receive a teaching license, determining teacher pay/benefits, and establishing a Regional curriculum. I view all of these tasks as unnecessary. I will address them all below:
Allocating education funds: The task of funding pre-university public education is reserved to local governments under Section 4, Subsection 1 of the NEIMA, so the only Regional funds that should be being are funds for public universities. I hardly think we need a special board to do that, especially considering that allocation of public university funds was handled directly by the Regional government (rather than a special board) perfectly fine prior to the passage of this law.
Writing a standardized test for teacher licensing: This is simply obsolete. Section 5, Subsection 3 of the NEIMA already requires teachers to hold a Master's degree in order to be licensed. The licensing system established by this law is just a waste of teachers' time and taxpayers' money.
Determining teacher pay/benefits: The Regional government shouldn't be involved in this. As I said previously, local government are already tasked with funding public education under the NEIMA, so they should be the ones to decide these things. It makes more sense for this stuff to be determined on the smallest level possible (preferably the schools themselves would just receive funds and then decide teacher pay themselves) so that the people who decide these things are as close as possible to the actual teachers who are effected by it and have the best idea of what the state of education is like in a given locality.
Establishing a Regional curriculum: This is in blatant violation of Section 3, Subsection 1 of the NEIMA, which gives county government control over public school curriculum. County governments should decide this stuff because they're closer/more connected/more responsive to the needs of the local communities whose children are attending public schools.
So, for those reasons, this law is wasteful and obsolete.
Now, we come to the
Northeast School Rescue Act. This law basically allows the Regional government to take control of any school based on standardized test scores. This is just ridiculous. Speaking from personal experience, most standardized tests (especially English ones) often have very little to do with what students are actually learning in school and the skills that are actually needed for kids to succeed. Plus, prepping for them eats up a huge amount of class time that could be spent on actual learning. This law uses a terrible metric to allow the REgional government to tear public schools out of the hands of local communities and has likely encouraged schools to devote even more time to pointless standardized test prep instead of actual learning.
