Mike Easley crawls out of his hole | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's Note: This article originally appeared in the Beaufort Observer.

This time as an education consultant

    So Mike Easley has crawled out of his hole. Got his law license back and apparently he is ready for speaking engagements. He is now an education expert.

    Mike Easley says North Carolina legislators would be wrong to scrap a law that now requires public school classrooms in the earliest grades to have no more than 24 students -- a cap that the former Democratic governor championed during his eight years in office.

    Easley told The Associated Press on Thursday that giving flexibility to school districts to spend state money for teachers in kindergarten through third grade is the wrong way to go.

    "You can't keep the classes small without paying for it and giving flexibility doesn't pay for it," Easley wrote in an email, marking one of his first public forays into policy since leaving office more than four years ago.

    A bill sponsored by Senate Republicans and approved by a committee this week would end a requirement that currently means no classroom for kindergarten through third grade can be larger than 24 students. The average classroom size in a school district for these early grades can be no larger than 21 students.

    The idea behind the mandate is a state law that says classroom size must be linked directly to the money school districts receive from the state to hire teachers.

    Bill supporters say superintendents and principals should be given leeway during tight budget times to shift money around to pay for other priorities or try innovative teaching methods.

    When Easley was governor from 2001 to 2009, he made class-size reduction in those grades one of his top priorities. He persuaded lawmakers to set aside more funds for those classrooms.

    The former governor said there's plenty of evidence that prekindergarten programs and lower K-3 class sizes reduce the achievement gap. Easley also lobbied successfully for what was then called "More at Four," or state-funded preschool for at-risk 4-year-olds.

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    Commentary

    We can tell you that the last paragraph does about the same thing to his credibility as an education expert as his felony plea did for his character reference.

    The fact is, there is no credible scientific evidence that early childhood education makes any difference after about the fourth or fifth grade. Ask any middle school teacher to see if he/she can pick out their students who went to public pre-school and we'll be you they identify homeschooled pre-schoolers as often as the identify those that are doing better than their peers in middle school. The only studies we've seen that say public pre-school makes a difference are those studies done by someone who has a vested interest in that "outcome."

    Let us tell you which kids do better...the bright kids. The slow kids do not do as well. The problem in most schools is that we mix these kids together and then hold back the brighter kids while the slower kids take longer to learn the material. We then test them to determine if they have achieved minimum performance and if so declare it a success. The fact is that if you look at Morehead Scholar nominees you find that as many as not did not to go taxpayer supported pre-school. We'd love to know what our convict governor has to say about that.