Your DEC, the best kept secret in Moncton.

The District Education Council is a body elected by us to look after our interests, especially as parents, in the school system. It met on Thursday evening, June 17, in the school board offices.  You didn't hear or read all about it in the news? Well, no. Probably not. Sure, I know education is vital to a province's future.  A baseball game in Los Angeles or a Tiger Woods story is not. But a news source has to sell its news; and the reality is more people care about a baseball story or a Tiger Woods story than they do about their children.

So, if you want to know about the DEC meeting, you have to go to the DEC website, and look up DEC. But that still won't help much. They have the agenda for the meeting there; but no minutes. Reasonable enough. The minutes can't be approved until the next meeting; so they aren't yet official.What's more troubling is that the May minutes aren't there either. So I settled down with the April discussion - and a tame one it was.

Two things are striking. Few of the committee members know much about education. But all of them fall in line for these destructive standardized tests and standardized curricula, all of them taken in by the pseudo-scientific reports of the Irving-influenced Atlantic Institue of Marketing Studies.  A report goes in. Eveybody votes aye, and it's on to the next sucker game. Democracy in action.

There are thousands of committees like that all over Canada. I've been on more than a few. Typically, they're set up to pull in some good-hearted people who want to help. Once in, they are dominated by a person of some connection with t he field, and whose job is to keep the DEC lined up with their masters, the AIMS and the  Irvings..

The bad part is DEC is helping to do enormous to your schools and your children. That good part it doesn't intefere with the latest news about Tiger Woods.