Official Deceit

What do we do when a statewide elected official publishes an opinion piece in the state's major daily newspaper that asserts a bald-faced lie?

In today's, Oregonian, State Sup't of Public Instruction Susan Castillo opposes HB 3162, which would abolish CIM/CAM and replace Oregon's failed testing system with one outsourced to an independent testing company. Castillo says we shouldn't just dump the CIM, but rather should allow her staff to conduct a year long study and make recommendations about where to go from here.

Great idea... let's let the people who for 13 years have so monumentally botched the implementation of the CIM/CAM mess figure out what to do next. I've always had a guiding principle: if you want to solve a problem, don't look to the people who caused it - if they knew how to solve it, they wouldn't have created the problem in the first place!

But, nobody is really suprised by the suggestion. After all, bureaucracies love to create "task forces" made up of "stakeholders" to conduct "studies" and "make recommendations." It's a great way to look as if something is being done, make sure everyone is busy, and whatever "solution" is proposed doesn't threaten the status quo.

But what does surprise me is that Castillo would tell a bald faced lie in her column. Strong language, you say? OK, perhaps she just made a misstatement; perhaps the untruth was told unwittingly.

Here is the issue - you be the judge whether it is possible for Castillo to make such an errant assertion on a matter so central to the question at hand.

Castillo wrote:
"House Bill 3162 requires Oregon to scrap those tests and purchase new ones -- even if the new tests deliver less information at higher cost. If that wasn't bad enough, those off-the-shelf tests would not meet federal requirements, putting Oregon's $400 million in federal funds at risk.

Oh really? That's odd, I wrote the bill myself and I distinctly remember covering that base. Oh here it is, right there in the bill, Section 11:

the tests "shall: (a) Meet the requirements of the federal No Child Left BehindAct of 2001 (P.L. 107-110, 115 Stat. 1425);

It strains credulity to think that Castillo was unaware of this provision in the bill. It was discussed openly in hearings attended by her staff. In one hearing, her associate superintendent in charge of assessment was asked point blank whether HB 3162 would leave us in compliance with federal requirements, and he said yes.

If I were inclined to be charitable on this point (and believe me I am not, I have seen far too much soft corruption out of the Oregon Department of Education for me to give them the benefit of the doubt,) I could allow for the possibility that perhaps Susan Castillo was simply mistaken, and that her assertion was wrong, but unintentional.

Of course to believe that, you would have to believe that 1) she is utterly ignorant of the bill she is opposing; 2) she did not bother to ask her staff if one of her central arguments against the bill is true, and 3) no one on her staff read her column before it went out (far from it.... they probably WROTE the thing) and that nobody bothered to correct the misstatement.

That is hard for me to believe. They just aren't that stupid.

But they DO think YOU are that stupid, and that is what irritates me so much about this kind of official deceit. We see it all the time in our state agencies. They lie and they know they can get away with it. There is no accountability; they think they are untouchable. The local media never challenges what they say; rather, they basically are stenographers for the bureaucracy.

So Castillo doesn't even have a second thought. Go ahead and lie. After all, it is for a good cause, saving a jobs-for-bureaucrats program.