Posted 12:12 AM by Susan Darst Williams

DEAR SANTA: WISH LIST FOR NEBRASKA EDUCATION

Dear Santa,

We Nebraska taxpayers have tried our best to be good this past year. Here’s what we would like to find under our Christmas tree to make Nebraska’s K-12 schools the best they can be:

1. A new state law making it illegal for a Nebraska school district or educational agency to receive federal funding, so that we can avoid getting sucked in to the nationalization of our schools that is the actual intent of the No Child Left Behind federal education legislation.

2. Cancel Nebraska’s goofy assessment system because it is attempting to take methods that work well for individual students and classrooms and distort them into statewide, standardized and comparable measurements, which they are not and can never be. Instead, pass a new state law mandating that Nebraska schoolchildren in 4th, 8th and 11th grades all take the same commercial standardized test . . . from at least 25 years ago. That way, the test will reveal academic achievement, which the more recent assessments do not.

3. Cancel the state standards that go with the goofy assessment system, because they are goofy, too. They are boilerplate from what all the other states have as standards and that happened when Nebraska caved in to Outcome-Based Education. After the public squawked about OBE, the educrats just kept it in place but renamed it “Standards-Based Education” and other cute nicknames that unfortunately worked. So instead of “outcomes,” we got “standards.” Same old, same old. It’s got to go. Teachers, parents and taxpayers should be the ones setting and measuring educational objectives, not the educrats.

4. Close down the University of Nebraska College of Education and use some of the money saved from that move to help subsidize student teachers, who would now work under a teacher mentor for one year instead of just a few weeks after completion of their bachelor’s degrees. Offer education courses among regular liberal-arts fare, including child development, pedagogy (how to teach) and teaching reading with systematic, intensive, explicit phonics; the latter is not now offered as a semester course in any Nebraska college. From now on, college students who want to become teachers will major in a content area such as math or English or psychology, and districts can hire them even if they haven’t had a jillion hours of goofy ed psych classes that turn their minds into mush just to get that education degree. Instead, they’ll be disciplined professionals because they’ll have been educated within an academic discipline . . . not indoctrinated into the Nonsense Industry by the grand poohbahs of the Nonsense Industry, the teachers’ colleges.

5. Pass a state law mandating a moderate level of performance audits on the skillions of dollars of state aid to education that now flows from the state’s taxpayers to the K-12 school districts. At present those skillions of dollars are given only a cursory lick and a promise by pro forma school-district audits as for how they are being spent by the schools, and that’s it. That’s nuts. Use the skillions of dollars that will be saved with this sensible watchdogging of public funds to cover some decent teacher pay raises, and return the rest to the long-suffering taxpayers.

6. Mandate parental choice for kindergarten and first-grade classrooms. If a district receives state aid, then parents must be offered a choice of either a traditional classroom that is teacher-centered and uses only systematic, intensive, explicit phonics to teach reading (which is what we all want), or the crazy, chaotic, child-centered, whole language based classrooms that currently are the ONLY choice in the vast majority of Nebraska school districts, because that is all the educators know about and it’s what THEY want, not us. Watch everybody flood the phonics classrooms and all that will be left in the whole language ones will be a lonely cricket and a John Dewey disciple scratching his or her head. Watch the learning-disabled rolls dwindle down to next to nothing since kids will finally be taught to read properly. Watch the special education (SPED) budget shrink to manageable proportions so that the real SPED kids get the benefit of the SPED dough, not the false SPED kids who were not begotten that way, but made that way, by bonehead teaching methods.

7. Consolidate Nebraska’s 19 Educational Service Units into three, one for each of Nebraska’s congressional districts. Duhhh.

8. Pass a law requiring a CUT in pay for any teacher who becomes nationally certified through the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, since that designation has been shown to REDUCE academic achievement, not improve academic achievement, and minimize Nebraska’s teaching certification requirements so that all a prospective teacher must do to become “employable” in Nebraska is pass a simple literacy test and a criminal background check. Take the educracy completely out of the hiring, evaluation, compensation and staff development processes.

9. Bust the union in general and collective bargaining in particular by passing a law making it clear that it will not be a condition of employment for a Nebraska teacher to be bound by the collective bargaining agreement between the district and the union. Essentially, let’s be pro-choice for teacher employment freedom and allow each teacher to either opt in or opt out of the collective contract. Don’t you suppose the good ones will opt out? That way, districts will be free to pay merit pay, hiring bonuses and all that other good stuff that has been proven to help kids. Right now, they aren’t free.

10. Pass a state law requiring State Education Commissioner Doug Christensen to write 100 times on the blackboard, “I will not install goofy assessment systems that will run this state’s education establishment into the ground.” Put a gigantic poster that says “ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT” in the meeting room of the State Board of Education so that they will quit ignoring that as the purpose of K-12 education. Most of all, Santa, please put a Valium salt lick in every teacher’s lounge in the state. Until all of this gets straightened out, they will really, really need it.

Merry Christmas to everybody who loves children and cares about Nebraska’s schools. Let’s make 2003 the best year ever for public education in Nebraska.

GO BIG ED!

Posted 11:07 PM by Susan Darst Williams

NEBRASKA'S ASSESSMENT SCANDAL:
WE LOOK EVEN WORSE THAN THE 7-6 HUSKERS

A Nebraskan concerned about Nebraska's Alice in Wonderland standards and assessment system for K-12 public schools fired off a poison pen letter to the feds, asking them to look in to it. Here is the reply she received, and check out the flaming paragraphs near the end:

"Thank you for contacting the United States Department of Education regarding No Child Left Behind (NCLB). We welcome your comments and support, and I am placing your email in our comments database which is periodically reviewed by the Secretary and senior staff.
 
"NCLB represents a sweeping overhaul of Federal efforts to support elementary and secondary education in the United States and is a landmark in education reform designed to improve student achievement and change the culture of our nation's schools.

"The new law is based on four basic principles:

-- stronger accountability for results

-- greater flexibility for States, school districts, and schools in the use of Federal funds

-- more choices for parents of children from disadvantaged backgrounds

-- and an emphasis on teaching methods that have been demonstrated to work.

"The programs in NCLB have as their goal the education of all students, including students who are economically disadvantaged, limited English proficient, disabled, migratory, residing in institutions for neglected or delinquent youth and adults, or members of other groups typically considered 'at risk,' so that they can achieve to challenging content and academic achievement standards.

"States developed and implemented a plan for Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) this fall. AYP is an individual state's measure of yearly progress toward achieving state academic standards. It sets the minimum level of improvement that states, school districts, and schools must achieve each year.

"NCLB raises the bar of expectations for all students -- especially those ethnic groups and those disadvantaged students who are falling farther and farther behind and who are most in danger of being left behind. States start by defining adequate yearly progress -- the measurements of academic improvement a school must achieve to ensure that, at the end of 12 years, every student graduating will have a mastery of the basics.

"Schools that have not made state-defined AYP for two consecutive school years will be identified as needing school improvement before the beginning of the next school year. Under the 1994 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the precursor to the No Child Left Behind Act, each state was responsible for developing state content standards, assessments and definitions of AYP.

"In each state, schools that failed to make state-defined AYP for two or more years were identified as in need of school improvement. States reported the numbers to the U.S. Department of Education this past spring. Immediately after a school is found to be in need of improvement, officials will receive help and technical assistance. These schools will develop a two-year plan to turn around the school and corrective action will be taken.

"Some of the corrective actions for failing schools include public school choice, supplemental education services, and restructuring of the school if the school is in corrective action for four consecutive years. Restructuring includes: reopen as charter school, replace principal and staff, contract for private management company of demonstrated effectiveness, state takeover, or any other major restructuring of school governance.

"Secretary Paige and the U.S. Department of Education are concerned about the implementation of the NCLB across the country. I am including an excerpt from a letter Secretary Paige sent to the Chief State School Officers in October expressing his concerns:

"'Unfortunately, some states have lowered the bar of expectations to hide the low performance of their schools. And a few others are discussing how they can ratchet down their standards in order to remove schools from their lists of low performers. Sadly, a small number of persons have suggested reducing standards for defining "proficiency" in order to artificially present the facts. This is not worthy of a great country. I hope these individuals will rethink their approach for the benefit of the students in your states.'

"'The law is meant to spur improvement, encourage reform, and inspire new initiatives so that every boy and girl learns.

"'Thus, it is nothing less than shameful that some defenders of the status quo are trying to hide the performance of underachieving schools in order to shield parents from reality.

"'Not only is this political tactic an embarrassment, it undermines the public's trust in education as a cornerstone of freedom.

"'In order to ensure authentic school reform, our nation must raise the bar of expectations. Every child can learn. Every child must learn. And thanks to this bipartisan law, every child will learn.'

"The entirety of the letter is online at http://www.ed.gov/News/Letters/021022.html.

"For more information on No Child Left Behind, please visit: http://www.ed.gov/offices/OESE/asst.html.

"If you have additional questions, please do not hesitate to contact us again.

Sincerely,

Sharon Stevens, Information Resource Center"

Posted 10:26 PM by Susan Darst Williams

WHAT TO DO ABOUT NASTY SEX ED

A reader from eastern Nebraska has this lament:

"When my daughter was in the 8th grade she took the REQUIRED Health class. In that class her REQUIRED assignment was to give a report to the rest of the class (boys & girls) on a particular type of birth control.

"The other students were required to give talks (visual aids were encouraged) on different types of birth control. She told me about it and I was furious. But, she begged me not to pull her out of class because
only parents of 'geeks' pulled their kids from this class. I admit, I gave in to her peer pressure and just monitored the class from what she shared with me. It was another one of those times when I just developed the attitude, 'Get through it.'"

Another woman, from the southwest Omaha area, reports this:

"A friend this year whose daughter is in junior high told me that the Health class brought in high school girls, several of whom talked openly (and they were not anonymous!!!) about their sexual encounters and getting high on drugs when they were in junior high. They shared how much fun it was but they stopped because "you can't be in sports and take drugs."

"That was the focus?! Being in sports will prevent drug use and premarital sex???"

A third mother from west Omaha adds this:

" When my daughter was in ninth grade, she came home in tears one day because the teacher had said that the next day, in health class, they were going to be shown a film that was really strong stuff and that showed photographs of human bodies with sexually-transmitted diseases in graphic detail.

"My daughter did not want that to be her first glimpse of the male sexual organ. She was very, very upset about it, but got more hysterical when I said that I would just call the school and say she had an appointment and that I was taking her out of school for the afternoon. She said 'everyone' would 'know' and she would be subjected to brutal harassment and teasing, and the teacher would even join in.

"I didn't know what to do or what to tell her, but she finally came up with this solution: she went to the class, and she closed her eyes. She sat in the dark classroom and just kept her eyes shut the whole class period. My husband and I were irate, but what could we do?"

Well, here's what:

1. Call your school board members, or if you're too shy, send a nice anonymous letter, and just say what happened, and would they look into it and get back to you. The only problem with being anonymous is that, if any school policies were violated, they should take action and you should be informed of that action. But it's understandable if you wouldn't want to subject your family to the harassment that often happens to whistleblowers. Either way is fine. Just do it.

2. If the answer is that nothing violated school policies, then insist that a full transcript of the presentation that the students were given must be mailed home to the parents of the students in that class well in advance of the next school board meeting AND then repeated "live" to the school board at that public meeting, giving parents and the public a chance to comment on the content of that curriculum. Your reason for doing this: the content of the sex ed classes described above all violated state statutes that specify what the scope of sex ed in the classroom is supposed to be, and parents and the public have a right to protest this to the elected school board and get that nasty stuff out of the classroom pronto.

3. At that meeting, demand that in the future, parents must be given an option for their child's mandatory health class: make "comprehensive" sex ed class a scheduling option, and "abstinence only" sex ed class another scheduling option. The latter style of class would thoroughly cover the science and health aspects of sex ed, but skip the burlesque show and keep things decent, with a clear expectation that minor children will NOT be having sex . . . period. Since "comprehensive" sex ed, such as the content described in the three examples above, goes far beyond the boundaries of state law, it should be a no-brainer that schools can meet the requirements of the state sex ed regulations without including such vulgar, objectionable content. But they should have the right to offer it if it rings their chimes. However, so many parents would make a beeline to schedule their child for the decent, G-rated health class that the "comprehensive" one would probably die a very deserved death.

Parents: if you don't do this, who will?

Doooooooooo it. You'll be glad you did.

Posted 12:04 PM by Susan Darst Williams

WHY CAN'T NEBRASKA GET A HILLSDALE SUCCESS STORY GOING?

Hillsdale College in Michigan is famous for being a top-quality, conservative college that doesn't take any federal funding and so is free to educate students the old-fashioned way: with unvarnished excellence.

It is so attractive a concept that enrollment is growing. Now there are 25 Nebraska students at the relatively small (1,200 kids) institution. Among its recent graduates: the daughter of Nebraska State Treasurer Lorelee Byrd.

That's one of the largest conglomerations of Nebraska students at any college, public or private, outside the state.

There's a Nebraska couple who are to be congratulated for the great job they're doing in recruiting these growing numbers of students. They are Doug and Priscilla Falke of Wahoo. Email them at go2hillsdale@alltel.net for gracious conversation and everything you've ever wanted to know about quality college education.

One more thing: Doug is a retired business teacher, formerly of the Omaha Public Schools, and two of his three children are Hillsdale products. That's a pretty good recommendation right there.

The numbers got me to thinking: we want to stop the brain drain in Nebraska, and keep excellent students here, or at least draw them back here to serve their home state. But we don't have anything like Hillsdale in Nebraska. Not even close.

Why couldn't we privatize one of our struggling state colleges, give them their buildings outright in exchange for their permanent agreement not to take federal funds . . . and replicate the Hillsdale success, right here in the Cornhusker State?

Posted 11:57 AM by Susan Darst Williams

BRAIN SCANS FOR SCHOOL BOARDS?

Exciting findings from science about what happens in the brains of good readers are likely to be of great service in improving our methods of reading instruction . . . if people pay attention.

As I reported on www.DailySusan.blogspot.com Monday, researchers in Houston are finding through neuroimaging that the spots in the brain that relate symbols to sounds go off like the Fourth of July when a good reader is reading . . . but are blank and silent when a struggling reader is reading.

That's because struggling readers don't have phonics embedded in their brains and aren't automatically and incredibly quickly making those key symbol-sound connections as they attack a line of text.

Since whole language uses a wide variety of cues besides phonics, whole language readers develop distorted thinking patterns when they try to read a line of text. Because they are led to discern meaning based on the first letter of the word, the last letter of the word, the accompanying illustration, the context of the sentence, and so on and so forth, their brains literally clump together in a heap . . . instead of firing off automatically and incredibly quickly, the way kids who have been taught to read using strictly phonics can do.

Whole language readers are left up to their own devices -- educators literally call it "constructivism" because they are supposed to "construct" their own way of learning to read -- and so their brains aren't being used properly.

So here's my idea:

Why don't we hook up the members of the local school boards, as well as the State Board of Education, to brain scans . . . and then tell them this information, that their policies are literally causing kids' brains to fade to black, when they allow educators to use whole language instead of phonics?

Think it'd sink in then?

Just kidding. But it's a thought. :>)

Posted 9:23 AM by Susan Darst Williams

UNION CHEATS TEACHER OUT OF EXTRA PAY IN CRETE

Told you so. As I reported on StatePaper.com last year, the teachers' union in Crete, Neb., went to court to fight a piddling hiring bonus that the school district wanted to pay to recruit a teacher in a highly competitive specialty . . . and won.

So teachers, when you come to the public asking for more pay, don't look at us taxpayers. LOOK AT YOUR OWN UNION! THEY'RE THE BAD GUYS, NOT US! :>)

As reported by the Education Intelligence Agency, www.eiaonline.com, in 2001, Matthew Hintz, an industrial arts technology teacher, was hired by the Crete school district for $2,350 more than the district's usual starting salary. Hintz was the only qualified applicant, and that's how much he wanted. The district placed him at step one on the salary schedule, and added a $2,350 "bonus" to cover the difference between base salary and what he had been promised.

The Crete Education Association filed a complaint with the state Commission of Industrial Relations, claiming this arrangement was a "deviation" that violated the collective bargaining agreement. The commission, which is packed with pro-union people, agreed. If you browse through back issues of the Nebraska teachers' union publication, The Voice, on its website (www.nsea.org) you'll see them trumpeting this case and how "bad" it is to pay one teacher more than any other.

The district appealed, but the Nebraska Supreme Court decided 7-0 last week that districts cannot bypass the union to pay teachers more. A deal's a deal . . . so even if we WANT to pay good teachers more, we can't, because of the union contracts that tie both sides down.

That's why collective bargaining has to go, to help public education encourage good people to enter the field, and to break the union's irrational power and control over this most basic employment right of educators: the right to be paid what they are worth.

You think unions aren't crazy? Consider what the EIA reported is going on in Arizona. The Scottsdale Education Association filed a grievance against its own school district for its plan to spend as much as $500,000 on teachers who serve on committees or as club advisers. The union wants the money divided among ALL the district's teachers . . . whether they served, or not.

No kidding, folks: the unions have to change, or they have to go.

Posted 9:14 AM by Susan Darst Williams

ARE NEBRASKANS MAD ENOUGH TO STAGE A WALKOUT?

Fiery letters are being fired off to Nebraska newspapers about the statewide assessment program that is neither. People are upset and worried that our schoolchildren are going to fall behind the rest of the country because our accountability measuring rod is so poor.

Comes now the education watchdog, www.eiaonline.com, with a report of a union-style walkout . . . only this time, it was the parents going on strike.

More than one-third of the parents of students of the Johnson Magnet School for Space Exploration and Technology in San Diego kept their kids at home in protest of school policies. Test scores fell last year and the parents blame it on the school's decision to abandon their preferred reading program, which used direct instruction techniques, instead of the radically hands-off, child-centered, progressive approaches such as whole language that most of the nation's educators have been indoctrinated with in ed schools.

Direct instruction in reading is controversial among educators because it relies on scripted lessons, teacher-led instruction, drilling and phonics. It is less controversial among parents who find their children are unable to construct their own road to literacy.

The walkout ended with students heading to the Greater Life Baptist Church, where classes were held, staffed by retired teachers and other volunteers. After a meeting with school administrators, the parents agreed to return their children to school.

Is it going to come to this to get good reading programs in our schools, and cheap, effective assessment systems in place in this state?

Posted 9:10 AM by Susan Darst Williams

A PRINCIPAL AND A PRESIDENT: GOOD IDEA FOR SCHOOLS

Here's an idea that would work for Nebraska's larger school districts and in the looming consolidations of management of the smaller ones.

Instead of one superintendent and three or four assistant superintendents, have a "president" to handle business, budgets and facilities, and a "principal" to handle education matters. Neither of them would have any assistants because the management tasks would be more sensibly delegated and do-able.

There may not be many Nebraska high schools that have more than one assistant principal, but this idea would work on the school level, too, if management has gotten top-heavy.

The idea come from Sacramento, Calif., as reported by www.eiaonline.com

Former basketball star Kevin Johnson is trying to convert his alma mater, Sacramento High School, into a charter school to try to boost academic achievement. Hundreds of parents and community activists are on his side.

The district school board is expected to vote on the proposal next month.

Posted 6:02 PM by Susan Darst Williams

APPARENT PUPIL PRIVACY VIOLATION IN LINCOLN:
WHY SCHOOLS COST MORE AND DO LESS,
AND WHAT WE CAN DO ABOUT IT

A friend of mine in the Lincoln (Neb.) Public Schools sent along a copy of the following questions that his child was asked to answer in front of the other kids in seventh-grade health class:

1. More than anything else, I want to have a reputation for being_______.

2. What are 3 things I can do to get this kind of reputation?

3. What are 3 things I might do to ruin this reputation?

4. More than anything else, I want to keep from getting a reputation for being______.

5. What are 3 mistakes that might get me this reputation?

6. What are 3 things I can do to keep from getting this kind of reputation?

In addition, there were two questions for the child to take home to discuss with the parent and bring back a response.

Now, those questions aren’t as bad as the ones about sex experiences and drug use that my children were asked in “anonymous” and “confidential” -- but CODED and NUMBERED -- surveys given in our old school district, another reason we hightailed it out of there, because of the obvious and constant privacy violations.

But these questions really were bothersome and objectionable to my friend, who wrote: “Smells fishy to me. I guess I always assumed a health class to be one that teaches how the body works, how to avoid disease, how bacteria and viruses work, how to deal correctly with people who have any of a number of conditions, etc., and be helpful, not fearful . . . not some kind of psychobabble fishing expedition.”

He said, “Actually I find this kind of intrusive questioning to have an unintended consequence that could result in liability for the school and injury to the student. You see, they have to discuss this openly in class . . . in front of everyone . . . and a ‘bully’ type of kid would see this type of thing as a BONANZA of material to use to forever harass someone whose inner feelings do not have to be exposed to the world. Especially question #4, which has to be read aloud for others to hear.”

The bad news, this type of nosy questioning is going on at all grade levels, in all kinds of subjects, and taking time increasingly away from academic subjects.

The good news is, parents have a remedy. It’s called the “Hatch Amendment,” and it’s described below.

But this incident also brings up something that’s important for parents, policymakers and taxpayers to know: these “assessments” going on in our schools are not really “assessing” students’ academic skills anymore. They’re “assessing” each student’s future “worth,” and that “worth” is measured based more on the student’s attitudes, values and beliefs than on how well he or she is mastering the old 3 R’s.

Now we have the 3 T’s: testing (actually, assessing), treatment and tracking.

Schools “need” more money not to deliver academics better, but to find out what the kids are struggling with and then “meet” those “needs,” most of which are nonacademic.

It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: if you ask kids a lot of questions designed to turn up affective dysfunction instead of building their academic functionality, you are going to turn up dysfunction instead of making them more academically functional. And students who are less academically functional are going to be more affectively dysfunctional . . . which costs us more money to fix.

See?

It’s another example of how the “special education philosophy” has taken over our schools. The focus is on problems, not solutions, and inputs, not results. The result is making kids who are more dysfunctional and more dependent on the state, not less, and therefore more costly to “educate,” not less.

This slide into the “therapeutic classroom” has been documented in books like “Child Abuse in the Classroom,” the 445-page transcript of a series of hearings nationwide on school privacy violations, edited by conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly.

Privacy violations are happening everywhere, because over the last 25 years the philosophy of our public schools has turned much more toward “affective” education – education that centers on developing each child’s attitudes, values and beliefs – and away from the old 3 R’s plus science, history, geography, art, music and gym.

Education activists and authors have meticulously documented the slide into social engineering and the increasing use of information gleaned from these “assessments” and “surveys.” In general, they really are sophisticated “fishing expeditions.” Funding for them has been “laundered” by federal grants, think tanks, universities and “centers.”

With their information extraction capabilities, they act as go-betweens linking innocent, vulnerable children who are unwittingly ratting on their own and their parents’ attitudes and proclivities, with the government nannies who use the private, personal information extracted down to the microrecord level.

What for? For tweaking curriculum into mind-control ammunition designed to develop the politically correct attitudes, values and beliefs that the government nannies want. They literally use the personal information gleaned from kids to distort future curriculum into that which will change their attitudes and behaviors into what the state wants.

Government nannies also are using this personal information to label and pigeonhole individual kids into career paths their “affective portfolios” say they’re suited for . . . which might not be what they really ARE suited for, but might be what the state NEEDS them to be suited for.

The activists who have exposed this process include B.K. Eakman (“Educating for the ‘New World Order’” and “Cloning of the American Mind,” www.beverlye.com), Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt (“The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America,” www.deliberatedumbingdown.com), Berit Kjos (“Brave New Schools,” www.crossroad.to), Anita Hoge (who stopped the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania from giving these emotional assessments to all Pennsylvania students and set OBE back several years there, www.3Dresearch.com/hoge/), and Peg Luksik and Pamela Hobbs Hoffecker (“Outcome-Based Education: The State’s Assault on Our Children’s Values”).

Have they been able to stop the schools from doing this? No.

If a few more parents rise up and fight back, can we stop it? Probably not.

If ALL of us parents do, can we? Probably. But that probably won’t happen. Our schools are just too far down this path.

It’s lamentable, but that’s our world. Now how do parents who know and care navigate through situations like this?

Easy:

Your defense team is already in place, and it’s a little-known federal law.

Every public school is supposed to be following the Protection of Pupil Privacy Act (20 U.S.C. 1232H), called the “Hatch Amendment.” It was named for Sen. Orrin Hatch but ironically, the impetus for it came from the late Sen. Edward Zorinsky of Omaha.

If your school district does not have the protections of the Hatch Amendment in its district policy book and is taking federal funds, it will be in big trouble if its personnel violate the following provisions.

The act provides, among other things, that no student will be required to submit to a survey, analysis, or evaluation that reveals information concerning:

-- political affiliations.

-- mental or psychological problems of the student or the student’s family.

-- sexual behavior or attitudes.

-- illegal, antisocial, self-incriminating, or demeaning behavior.

-- critical appraisals of other individuals with whom respondents have close family relationships.

-- legally recognized privileged or analogous relationships, such as those of lawyers, physicians, and ministers.

-- income, other than information necessary to establish eligibility for a program.

Any test, questionnaire or survey that would produce those answers, but for which educators HAVE obtained the prior written consent of parents or guardians to give to their kids, is OK.

If my friend was not given reasonable time to scan those questions in advance and opt his child out to do something else during that class time without being embarrassed or losing any school credit, then the Lincoln Public Schools broke the law.

If my friend found that sort of information in his child's permanent file, guidance files, teacher documents or any other official school records, the district would be in big trouble. Parents who suspect this sort of wrongful data collection is going on have the right to inspect their child's guidance files and all other records, and should.

No immediate comment was available from LPS.

The incident points up another concern for parents besides the apparent “fishing” into our children’s hearts. And that deeper question is whether time in school is being used for the purposes we want.

Affective education is the cornerstone of Outcome-Based Education; the Lincoln Public Schools was the first district in Nebraska to jump into OBE full bore. The widespread adoption of OBE is why public schools are probably too far down the road to change back into academic focuses now. OBE is too deeply entrenched in everything from teacher training to state standards and regulations. So it should come as no surprise that these sorts of nonacademic exercises are going on across Nebraska, and especially in LPS, so heavily influenced by Teachers College at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the state’s education bureaucracy, the twin altars of OBE in Nebraska.

But these nosy health-class questions are just another example of why our K-12 public schools are costing more and more, and yet apparently our kids’ academic skills are developing less and less.

It’s not the money. It’s what they’re doing with it . . . and NOT doing.

It’s not an education problem. It’s a management problem.

My friend, the father of the seventh-grader, said he wants health information to be taught TO his child . . . not fished OUT of him, for who knows whose eyes to see on down the road.

Well, friend, it’s time for you and other concerned parents to be the physician, to fight this virus and protect our kids.

Prescription: print this out, anonymously if necessary, and send it to remind our schools about the Hatch Amendment.

Then make sure they take their medicine and follow through on doctors’ orders . . . which come from us parents and taxpayers, and are designed to cure this virus of privacy invasion in our schools, and start the recovery back to academic health.

Posted 7:42 AM by Susan Darst Williams

LET’S DO SCHOOLS THE WARREN BUFFETT WAY

The whole world knows the story: Omaha boy makes good, turns $140,000 into tens of billions of dollars with good, old-fashioned horse sense and mastery of the principles of capitalism.

He’s Warren Buffett, the Oracle of Omaha, everybody’s role model for smart, successful investment strategies.

So why on earth don’t we run our schools the Warren Buffett way?

He only sinks his money into companies whose business methods and purposes he understands, that have higher intrinsic value than the price on paper, are overperforming compared to expenditures, and meet his basic criteria for good investments.

We taxpayers are going to be asked to sink our money back into our public schools, so it’s a form of investment, too. Shouldn’t we be going by some sort of criteria, too, instead of just holding our noses and paying through them without any idea of what our money is doing and why?

Isn’t it time to do some good, old-fashioned valuation analysis for what our tax dollars are, and are not, doing in public schools?

Before we go through the bloodbath that is sure to ensue next Legislative session over state aid to education in this era of Old Mother Hubbard state finances, why don’t we first do a little Buffett-style analysis on how we’re investing in our children’s educations?

My guess is that, if we did, the result will be a whole new direction for education finance that will be smart, successful, world-class . . . and a tip ‘o the hat to Nebraska’s best-known billionaire.

Buffett’s criteria, amended to fit school finance terminology:

1. Has the company consistently performed well?

Have Nebraska’s public schools done better in the last year than they did 5, 10, 20 and 30 years ago? Have they done better than the private schools and the home schools? Do they cost more per pupil, adjusted for inflation, and if so, can they demonstrate added value as a sort of “return on equity”?

2. Has the company avoided excess debt?

What is the ratio of public-school debt to annual operating expenditures and how has that changed compared to 5, 10, 20 and 30 years ago?

3. Are profit margins high? Are they increasing?

If graduation rates, post-secondary continuing education rates, test scores and percentage of students who don’t need any remediation in college all are satisfactory and increasing, then management is efficient in the use of its resources. If not, not.

4. How long has the company been public?

Have schools stood the test of time? If they are considered good, enrollment should be rising. How does enrollment compare to 5, 10, 20 and 30 years ago (excluding pre-kindergarten, nongraded and other enrollment categories that didn’t exist in the past so that the numbers can be compared apples to apples)?

5. Do the company’s products rely on a commodity?

Do the schools provide a product that is basically indistinguishable from those of competitors? If so, they’re a bad investment. Is the product the school provides based on a uniform, standard, foundational resource that changes very little from one place to the next – for instance, oil and gas in the business world? Since Nebraska has been installing learning standards that are basically boilerplate of what every other state in the nation (except Iowa) is putting in, then the standards could be said to be an educational “commodity” that do not set Nebraska’s public schools apart in an attractive way, and therefore they’re a bad investment.

6. Is the stock selling at a 25 percent discount to real value?

This is the clincher. There’s no stock in public schools, but we can still place a value on them. Just as it is difficult to measure a company’s intrinsic value, which may be very different from its book value, it is difficult to measure the intrinsic value of public schools. This is why we really, really need those performance audits of state aid to education, to expose the wasteful and educationally questionable spending that might be reducing the real value of a year of public schooling in Nebraska. Surely a school’s total value will be higher than its liquidation value, so perhaps that lower number could be established by factors such as the book value of the buildings and contents, payroll, pension funds, annual revenues, income on investments and so forth. The question is, if public school is costing around $6,000 per pupil per year in Nebraska for operating expenses alone, is that undervalued, overvalued or about right? Are we getting our money’s worth . . . or more than our money’s worth . . . or less?

So what do you think? Using the Warren Buffett criteria, should we be reinvesting in Nebraska’s public schools the way we always have?

Or is it time for a change?

Weigh in this week with Go Big Ed at swilliams1@cox.net and I’ll report back.

And Mr. Buffett: would you consider giving one of your celebrated talks to the Unicameral along these lines, come January? Your insights have helped the business world and now it’s time for K-12 education to sit at the feet of the sage. We’d all turn out for it . . . and even bring our senators a whole lot of goodies from one of those Buffett babies, Dairy Queen.

Posted 11:38 PM by Susan Darst Williams

FAREWELL, WILMOT & PILLER: LOOK FOR THE UNION LABEL

Nebraska education activists will present armfuls of appreciation gifts to two outgoing members of the Nebraska State Board of Education who were defeated for reelection by challengers heavily funded by the state teachers' union.

Kathy Wilmot of Beaver City and Kathryn Piller of Omaha will be terribly missed as voices of reason and good representatives of parents and students on that board. Go Big Ed wishes them the very best.

Education Week covered the Nebraska state board race in its Nov. 20 issue, and quoted Mrs. Wilmot as saying that the union dollars and last-minute automated phone banks to western Nebraska voters featuring a young child urging a vote for the union-backed candidate were sad to see in an education race.

She said, "Running for office should be about people and constituents rather than who speaks for the union. I'm not a rubber-stamp vote."

Sigh.

A salute to two of Nebraska's finest education leaders, and may we see them again in leadership roles soon.

Posted 11:31 PM by Susan Darst Williams

A TAX WATCHDOG BARKS BACK

Tax watchdog Joe Elster had this to say in reference to a Nov. 22 World-Herald Public Pulse letter about the Omaha Public Schools tax-lid override measure that failed, written by Andrew J. Melichar and lamenting that teachers would bear the brunt of the budget cuts that seem certain to follow:

Elster: "He states that he is 'frustrated' with the anti-tax groups trying to help the board to run more effectively thus saving taxpayers money.  I am not sure where the figures he quoted came from (and they may be accurate).  Let us compare them to the OPS budget and see where the waste is.

"Mr. Melichar states teachers earn an average of $32,000 per year (he doesn't mention if this includes benefits). From the OPS budget, total combined salaries for ALL employees is $212,517,633 plus benefits of $61,329,040. There is a total of 6002.93 positions budgeted.  When you do the math, it comes out to just over $45,000 per year per position.

"So if the TEACHER portion of that is only getting an average of $32,000 per year then you can decide for yourself where the 'fat' is.  When you take the total budgeted amount for Certificated Full-Time 10-month positions and divide by the number of positions, the amount you get (not including benefits) is a little over $40,000 (and this does not include over $4 million of 'Extra Pay').

"So, annoying as it is, there are plenty of places to cut money from the budget while still maintaining a higher teacher salary.

"All my figures were taken from the following web address: http://www.ops.org/budget/budget.pdf and are found on page 56."

Postscript: Elster notes that the $45,000 is an average and includes teachers, custodians, secretaries and administrators. He breaks it down as follows, from OPS budget figures:

Certificated Full-time 12-month Board of Education office makes over $83,000/yr.
Certificated Full-time 12-month School Administration makes over $67,000/yr.
Certificated Full-time 10-month School Administration makes over $55,000/yr.
Certificated Full-time 12-month Business/Support services makes over $76,000/yr.
Specialist/Tech 12-month Business/Support services makes over $46,000/yr.
Specialist/Tech 12-month Buildings and Grounds makes over $49,000/yr.
Certificated Full-time 12-month ESU staff makes over $60,000/yr.
Specialist/Tech 12-month ESU staff makes over $43,000/yr.
Certificated Full-time 12-month TEACHER makes over $69,000/yr.
Certificated Full-time 10-month TEACHER makes over $40,000/yr.
Classified Full-time 12-month TEACHER makes over $33,000/yr.
Classified Full-time 10-month TEACHER makes over $17,000/yr.
Certificated employees have budgeted over $4 million in "Extra Pay."
Paraprofessionals have budgeted over $14 million.
Office personnel have budgeted over $9 million.
Custodian/Maintenance have budgeted over $14 million.

Posted 11:22 PM by Susan Darst Williams

NEBRASKA ESU'S COULD TAKE A CLUE FROM IOWA

The Iowa Board of Education has approved the merger of three area education agencies, or AEA's, that are similar to Nebraska's Educational Service Units (ESU's) in a move that will save more than $700,000 in redundant administrative staff costs alone.

Iowa is consolidating the AEA's that provide special-education services and information and technology support in a 9,000-square-mile sector of east-central and northeastern Iowa. Currently there are headquarters in Clear Lake, Marshalltown and Cedar Falls, but Cedar Falls will be the headquarters of the consolidated agency.

It will serve 72,000 students in 85 schools.

On Oct. 29, Go Big Ed began calling for the immediate consolidation of Nebraska's 18 ESU's to one each of Nebraska's three congressional districts in light of the state's ongoing fiscal crunch.

Posted 12:16 AM by Susan Darst Williams

ASSESSMENT MISTAKES TO COST $7 MILLION IN DAMAGES

Here's another reason Nebraska ought to put the boot to statewide assessments: mistakes in scoring on tests required for graduation in Minnesota will cost NCS Pearson up to $7 million in damages in a court settlement revealed last week.

The company scored the assessments in Iowa City two years ago and erroneously failed 7,997 Minnesota students in grades 8-12. They had, in fact, passed.

Students will receive amounts ranging from as little as $362.50 for those suffering minor consequences of the grading to as much as $16,000 for those who weren't allowed to participate in high-school graduation ceremonies because of the scoring errors. Students unnecessarily attended summer school, received psychological treatment or had delayed graduations as a consequence.

The company says the errors were caused by a last-minute test change ordered by Minnesota school officials. The answer key got messed up as a result.

With attorneys' fees and notification costs, the company could be liable for as much as $12 million altogether.

For more, see the Nov. 25 Cedar Rapids Gazette article, "NCS test error to cost up to $7 million," at http://www.crgazette.com

Posted 2:37 PM by Susan Darst Williams

WHEN VIOLENCE ERUPTS AGAINST SCHOOL STAFF

A few years ago, a very wonderful teacher we know was trying to discipline a middle-school student who was big for his age, new to the district, a racial minority, from a broken home, reportedly "optioned in" from the inner city because of serious behavior problems at his old school, and full of aggression.

The kid threatened the teacher's life. Squad cars were called. The kid was taken out in handcuffs. It was, to be sure, a scene.

The teacher was also our daughter's golf coach and we knew him to be a gentle, good man, a doting father and a really good coach. So we were angry and fearful that this happened to him.

But that weekend, something happened that put a whole new perspective on it. My husband had organized a golf outing long before to bring together this nice golf coach and some of the other dads of girls on the golf team. So off they went to the links.

Meanwhile, I went to north Omaha to attend a meeting of parents and community activists who wanted to improve schools. To my shock, one of the mothers started describing what her son was going through in the way of taunting and bullying in the suburban school district to which he had been optioned. She said his name: it was the same kid.

His trouble had all come to a head that week, she said, and he'd been arrested, even though he was a good boy who'd never harmed a flea.

Turns out the kid had a much higher IQ than most people do -- something like 170 -- but had been put in "behavior disability" programs instead of gifted programs in grade school because his behaviors were misunderstood. He would stick forks in the electrical outlets, for example -- not because he was bad, but because he was curious.

But the educators, for whatever the reason, interpreted it that he was bad, not smart. They gave him super-easy work to do, hoping his self-esteem would rise because he could get it done easily. Instead, he got madder and madder to be treated as "less than."

This was an articulate, funny, sensible, well-meaning mom . . . who made me realize that, quite frankly, what was really going on was not really a violent teenager out of control threatening the safety of a fine public-school teacher . . . but instead just a huge case of misunderstanding and miscommunication.

The boy's behavior had probably been misunderstood by teachers and other students to the point where he had exploded with rage. It had erupted in front of this good, gentle teacher and coach that we happened to know.

I know a heavenly coincidence when I see one. I called the teacher/coach and told him what I had learned.

Do you know what happened next? The teacher / coach and the so-called murderous boy started to meet after school for pick-up basketball. Just a few minutes of attention, a chance to build a relationship, a little mentoring . . . and it worked wonders for the boy. I never heard another word about him from anybody at that school.

Now, look. I know teachers sometimes feel that they are in physical danger from some of these troubled kids in our public schools today. I have a teacher friend who was shoved to the ground by a sixth-grader, but urged not to report it by the school principal to avoid "bad PR." I know litigation fears are tying their hands. I know parents are getting mad about the police in schools "gatekeeping" real safety threats so that parents don't find out about it, since the usual routes to filing police reports are shut off. I know that kids and teachers alike sometimes don't feel safe around some kids.

But what's happening is the start of a police state. That's being shown with a law that was proposed this week in Massachusetts that would give school administrators complete access to criminal police records of students. In turn, it would allow public school records and social-service agency records to be shared with law enforcement.

The bill is in reaction to the classroom stabbing death of a Springfield, Mass., school counselor, the Rev. Theodore N. Brown, in December 2001. Corey N. Ramos, now 18, has pleaded innocent and is awaiting trial for murder. School officials said he was on probation for an earlier violent crime of which they were unaware. Had they known, they said, they would have placed him in their alternative program for troubled students, the Springfield Adolescent Graduation Experience.

It is likely this bill will go through, and will spread across the land.

Will it mean that kids will have to be read their Miranda rights when they say the morning Pledge of Allegiance?

Will it mean that often-erroneous, misjudgmental and just plain crazy information that sometimes shows up on school and social-service records will now be made available to law enforcement agencies without warrants, and used against the kids later in court?

Will it mean that a boy like the one who messed with our wonderful golf coach, the one with the 170 IQ, would be pigeonholed into a "graduation experience" type of school, instead of using that fine brain of his in calculus and chemistry classes and learning how to get along?

We need to talk about this stuff. Not react to it. Talk about it. Look for those happy, heavenly coincidences that can help us understand each other.

We need to go into our schools and see for ourselves whether the principal and the teachers and the staff are modeling respect, courtesy, order and manners for the kids. I say they're not, in a lot of schools. I say there are a lot of schools where all you see is kids . . . waves of them . . . with no authority figures standing there like shepherds looking over the flock.

No wonder kids who are already leaning toward making trouble tend to explode: they're not being guided on a basic level on how NOT to explode.

Let's look for simpler, more developmental solutions to school violence, rather than destroying our freedoms and kids' right to privacy.

Let's insist on a lot more adult supervision of the kids in school, since that's what we're paying for. Get those grownups out in front of school in the mornings, in the hallways between classes, in the gyms, during classes, and after school.

If school staffs aren't doing a lot of that, they're asking for it. I don't want them to get it, please understand: I just want everybody to quit blaming the kids, start understanding them, and start looking for better solutions.

Posted 2:05 PM by Susan Darst Williams

REMEMBER KEVIN ROSS?

The poster child for educational malpractice in America is former Creighton University basketball player Kevin Ross, reportedly now working as a janitor at the high school where he starred as a basketball player many years ago.

Ross left Creighton after earning 96 credit hours there despite still not knowing how to read. At 6'9", he sat in class with second- and third-graders in the famous Marva Collins private elementary school in Chicago, and did eventually learn how to read. In nine months, his reading ability jumped several grade levels.

The case revealed that his course load at Creighton consisted of such subjects as "marksmanship," "theory of basketball," "theory of track and field" and "squad participation." The contention was that Ross was "used" for his sports talents and not truly educated at the university.

Ross took Creighton to court seeking damages for educational malpractice, negligent admission and emotional distress. He settled out of court for $30,000 in 1992. The case, though giving Omaha's prominent college a black eye, still was seen as doing a lot of good in establishing that the public wants academic goals to be primary over athletic goals in the field of higher education.

Now the Cato Institute has used the Kevin Ross story as an example of why it contends that people ought to file lawsuits against dysfunctional public school systems and collect damages that can be applied to private-school tuition.

Although so far across the country that tactic has failed or suits along those lines are barred against public schools, the think tank contends that documentation is being amassed that might make these lawsuits more feasible in the near future.

In a Nov. 23 article by Casey Lartigue on http://www.cato.org/people/lartigue.html the writer quotes Dr. Ronald Standler, a former professor and now an attorney in Massachusetts, as saying that torts may work for parents whose child is given a high-school diploma but who is demonstrably illiterate despite having normal intelligence.

Will there be a rash of educational malpractice lawsuits being filed, either here in Nebraska or around the country?

Might be worthwhile. After all, other professionals are held accountable in court -- doctors, lawyers, accountants -- so why not educators?

Posted 11:28 PM by Susan Darst Williams

LET OUR CHILDREN GO

The Wall Street Journal's lead editorial Dec. 2 has a little graphic that shows that scads of kids in the Washington, D.C., public schools are not meeting basic proficiency levels in reading and math. By 11th grade in the nation's capital, 47% of the kids are deemed, basically, illiterate, and 72% innumerate.

The newspaper called for freedom of choice in the form of school choice for these students trapped in rotten schools. Most of them are African-Americans and Latinos who are being "condemned" to second-class citizenship, the Journal alleged, by failing schools that aren't equipping them for good jobs. "If that isn't a national scandal, we don't know what is," the paper lamented.

The thing is, as I looked at the percentages of kids who didn't even meet basic academic proficiency levels as measured by the Stanford Achievement Tests in D.C., one of the highest-spending school districts in the nation, I couldn't help thinking about the kids in inner-city OPS whose scores were pretty much as bad.

Why couldn't someone in the Nebraska Legislature get the guts to come up with a no-strings-attached voucher for these kids? It could cover, say, half of the average amount now being allocated per-pupil to OPS in state aid. OPS could collect the other half just to keep its engines running. But half could go to the family of any student in one of those inner-city schools. Then that family can either scrape up the rest of the money needed to cover private-school tuition, or get a partial subsidy from a private scholarship fund such as the Children's Scholarship Fund.

What would be wrong with at least trying to get the ones out of there who want to get out?

Let our children go!

Posted 6:09 PM by Susan Darst Williams

SENSIBLE ASSESSMENTS

Everybody’s all in a tizzy about expensive, intrusive, time-consuming, statewide student assessments. For good reason.

They were written for educrats by educrats. They come straight out of the federal government. They are boilerplate of other states’ standards and assessments coast to coast, including many states that are academic basket cases compared to Nebraska.

The system imposed by these new standards and assessments forced teachers to dumb down and align their curriculum to the government’s learning specs, called “standards.” Voices crying in the wilderness a few years ago – including yours truly – warned that standards and assessments were a bad idea. Here we are in Nebraska, the Beef State: don’t we know that “standard” is a grade of beef BELOW GOOD?

One thing is clear: statewide K-12 educational standards and statewide assessments as we now have them, and as most other states have developed them slightly differently, are destructive, not constructive, because they do the opposite thing of what schools that are working do. The action in education right now is in private schools and homeschools . . . where clear accountability reigns, and testing is cheap, effective and efficient.

In stark contrast, widespread public-school standards and assessments are expensive, pointless and meaningless for students, parents and the public.

That standards and matching assessments are part of a plan to nationalize America’s schools has been well-documented by authors such as Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt (“The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America,” http://www.deliberatedumbingdown.com).

That the overemphasis on testing has damaged K-12 education, is profit-motivated, and shows little or no correlation to an improvement in learning, were all exposed in the book “Standardized Minds: The High Price of America’s Testing Culture and What We Can Do to Change It” by Peter Sacks, available on www.amazon.com

That we don’t want to have anything to do with a national testing system and the 20% elite, 80% worker bee political structure that it creates, like European and communist countries have, and thus must avoid any participation in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), has been pointed out by education thinkers and citizens’ groups such as Minnesota’s Maple River Educational Coalition (www.EdWatch.org).

So now what?

Well, we don’t want to get rid of standardized tests. We just want tests that give clear signals to students, parents, teachers, policy-makers and the public, and are useful for accountability purposes.

The reason the statewide assessments are so useless is that they are mostly subjective, performance-related “authentic assessments” that are of questionable validity and reliability and have to be hand-scored and so forth. But still, we don’t want to get rid of authentic assessments in our schools. They’re useful for individual teachers and students . . . just a rotten choice for broad-scale goalsbecause they provide no systemic accountability.

So . . . the answer is obvious:

1) Admit we made a mistake, and scrap all our state standards and assessments. If the feds squawk, claim state’s rights and refer them to #’s 2 and 3.

2) Pass a state law requiring that all K-12 students in Nebraska take the same objective, machine-scorable, commercial, standardized test each year, and tie that mandate to the receipt of state aid to education. This could revolve around to several companies and could be a contract negotiated by the State Board of Education. My suggestion: The Iowa Basics.

3) When test results are announced, it’s a good idea to publish aggravating and mitigating factors that, believe it or not, make a much bigger difference in student achievement than spending per-pupil or teacher pay. Remember, we’ve been paying teachers more and more over the past 30 years and test scores have been showing that students are learning and able to do less and less. It isn’t the money, it’s the method, but it’s also the background of the kids who are being tested. Key factors such as educational attainment of students’ parents, median household income, and major textbooks and teaching styles should be published alongside scores. Then if two relatively well-off suburban districts have significantly different math scores and have been using two different math textbooks for the past few years, we can at least get a start on understanding these numbers . . . and parents of the underachieving schools can force their political leaders to lose the loser textbooks that don’t work.

One last thing: it’s probably a good idea to test kids in fourth, eighth and 11th grades. But we should demand tests that are geared to the three objects of education at those three levels: grammar, logic and rhetoric.

Grammar is the basics; we used to call K-6 “grammar school,” remember? At the middle school level, we expect students to have the basics in place and the skills to apply them logically. By the end of high school, it is reasonable to expect them to use their strong academic foundation and logical thinking skills to develop cogent conclusions and support their own opinions logically.

The “creative” forms of assessment now in use mix those ‘way up. Instead of “assessing” the attitudes of fourth-graders on thorny political issues, they need to be tested on the basics. Until kids know how to find things out, how to think about them, and how to draw valid conclusions about them, it’s pointless to keep doing the subjective types of assessments we’re now doing, such as the writing assessments, which are a complete boondoggle.

In truly assessing a student’s writing ability, we need to test them on the basics of our language: spelling, grammar, punctuation, capitalization, parts of speech and so forth. There is no way kids can advance to the upper levels of logic and rhetoric in writing, or any other subject, without the basics.

Isn’t that a rational assessment?

Let’s keep it simple and sensible . . . and we’ll all pass the test.