Nancy Honig’s Dunce Cap : Schools: Forget legalities-- how about common sense? Why should consultants be paid to do something so simple?

California Superintendent of Schools Bill Honig has said he wants to involve parents in their children’s education. That’s all his beleaguered wife, Nancy Honig, a school consultant, says she’s been trying to do too. Yet these good intentions have led to Bill Honig’s indictment on four felony counts of conflict of interest. I make no judgment about the legality of what the Honigs did. But I question whether you need pricey consultants with federal and foundation grants to do something the schools should be doing anyway.

Nancy Honig’s Quality Education Project is intended to involve parents in their childrens’ schools. Bill Honig called it “a breakthrough,” but also said it’s “common sense.” I agree about common sense. But why should something so basic cost so much--by QEP’s own calculations, from $30 to $65 per student per year?

If QEP’s parent-involvement plan works, it ought to be put into effect statewide. But school districts shouldn’t have to hire Nancy Honig’s outside consulting firm. Why isn’t it part of the California curriculum, and why doesn’t Bill Honig work on it?

The “breakthrough” policies introduced by the Quality Education Project are embarrassingly simple. Teachers are taught to send home children’s weekly work in a folder that parents are to sign. Parents are asked to commit themselves to attending back-to-school night, a parent-teacher conference and an open house. They also pledge to provide a quiet work space, making sure the child reads each day, arrives at school on time and gets a good night’s sleep. School officials are taught how to write a monthly newsletter. Teachers learn to use the back-to-school night to explain homework schedules, discipline and what they intend to teach.

Not exactly a radical concept. Many of California’s best public schools already offer those benefits, although they don’t dare call it the Quality Education Project. They call it school.

Each Friday, my kids clunk and clatter through the screen door, anxious to show me what they’ve done. My kindergartener’s folder is chock full of painted red rockets and three-word stories. Stuffed into my fourth-grader’s folder are wonderously quirky math stumpers, essays and spelling tests. There are newsletters from teachers and the school.

Yes, my kids do attend one of those pristine public schools in the countryside. Teachers and principal are dedicated. Stay-at-home mothers compete to paste hats on smiling snowmen in kindergarten classes. But every California family should be entitled to the benefits that the best public schools receive. That’s why I object to the Quality Education Project.

Nancy Honig is no Bill Honig. She’s a smart businesswoman and would never, she says, “pretend to be an educator.” Much of QEP’s cost to schools has been defrayed by the millions she raised in federal and foundation money. But some schools have to pay part of the bill, and every grant dollar to QEP is a grant dollar denied some other program.

Couldn’t one of the 1,400 state Department of Education employees have organized a parent-involvement model? And couldn’t some of the 200,000 teachers or 14,000 administrators assist.

A friend of mine, a fifth-grade teacher in a QEP school in Oakland, was outraged by the program’s hype and cost. Before QEP came along, she was sending home weekly folders, although not the fancy red ones that QEP provides. Despite QEP’s parent meetings and pledges, she saw no greater long-term parent involvement. She wished her school had spent the money to replace ceiling tiles that fell down and the floorboards that rotted after the winter rains.

Nancy Honig’s common-sense policies have also become mired in politics.

Last year, my son’s Friday folder included a pledge that parents were asked to sign, promising to support him in his learning. This year, the folder had no such pledge. Parents hadn’t objected: Nancy Honig had.

Other people suffered worse. Two former school board presidents at two of the largest school districts in California complain that Nancy Honig pressured their districts to take QEP. When they objected, both said she helped organize the campaigns of their opponents. The politics of QEP beg for investigation.

Not only would kids and parents be better off if the parent-involvement plan were statewide, so, I think, would Bill Honig. Every time he touts his wife’s program, he condemns his office. Recently, Honig said that QEP “rewrote the materials coming from the schools that were written in too complicated a fashion.”

It shouldn’t take a consultant to write in plain English. That, like a lot of the superintendent’s troubles these days, is an indictment that’s self-inflicted.