Lies, Damned Lies, and School Districts' Statistics

An interesting battle is brewing in Orem, one that could shape Utah education for years to come. The traditional approach in Utah has been to allow school districts to grow larger and larger, keeping their historical boundaries intact at the expense of cramming more and more students in already large districts. Utah has 4 of the highest enrollment districts (Jordan, Granite, Davis, and Alpine) in the United States, and those districts tend to wear that size around on their sleeves like a badge of honor. They talk of economies of scale (not mentioning that economies of scale follow a bell curve, and at their size, the economies have probably been lost) and of their heft - heft that they have used to not listen to citizens. As a result, recently there have been groups testing the waters in Jordan and Granite Districts (The Smaller Districts Coalition) and in Orem there is a group that has organized to pull out of the Alpine School District (Friends of Orem School District [FOSD]). I am somewhat familiar with the groups in Salt Lake County, however, FOSD has already caused change in the main issue of contention. Alpine introduced a $250 million bond (this is on top of a $200 million bond that was passed in 2001 that raised taxes throughout the district) and didn't have anything in the bond for Orem. That meant that Orem businesses and citizens would have paid for buildings that they never would have used. After FOSD pressured the Orem City Council, suddenly Alpine started introducing new projects for Orem, including completely rebuilding a high school they just finished renovating for electrical and seismological reasons. Does Orem need any new building projects? No. These are sops given to the citizens so that Alpine can trick them into voting to stay with the district so their tax base can pay for that bond without higher taxes on those who will actually be using the schools.
At least ASD has woken up a little. They still won't listen to parents. They won't acknowledge that the reason for having so many charter schools in the district's boundaries isn't because it's the "newest toy on the block," but because they've done such a lousy job educating the students, with the latest mumbo-jumbo swinging around the block (Investigations Math - where you can't learn things like times tables or basic arithmetic is the most egregious example). Parents don't want their children to end up years behind on such college basics as calculus and they want to have their voices heard by the teachers and administrators. That's why charter schools are successful. That's why Orem is trying to split off of Alpine. That's why Alpine can publish surveys like the one that the Deseret News reported on that use techniques like push polling, small sample sizes, and so forth, and think that nobody will notice that their statistics are misleading. They've come to believe their own press that they are "the best education in Utah" at "the best value in Utah." The fact is that Alpine is a dinosaur of a school district, caught in an evolutional shift that will make it as extinct as the creatures of the Jurassic era that they teach so much about.