GoBigEd

Thursday, September 30, 2004


EXCELLENCE IN TEACHING, BUT SHUCKS, NOT HERE

I was in the audience as a teacher from my children’s school was awarded a $25,000 prize for excellence in teaching. It was the ninth annual Henry Salvatori Prize from Hillsdale College in Michigan.

Tears of joy streamed down my face as my children’s teacher received the award. It went to our school in recognition of the outstanding use we have made of the hands-down best curriculum and instruction package in the country, the Hillsdale Academy Reference Guide.

It was like a dream come true when our school implemented the Hillsdale principles and processes that are in use at the Hillsdale Academy in Michigan as well as more than 400 other schools and countless homeschools.

All we had to do was download them, free, from http://www.hillsdale.edu/academy and throw out all the extraneous glunk that didn’t work in exchange for these time-tested techniques and materials.

From the great core curriculum, to citizenship, to the reading lists, to the parents’ handbook, weekly outlines and course syllabi, this school infrastructure is by far the best any of us parents had ever seen for teaching, learning, student self-respect, and parental satisfaction.

PING!

But then I woke up . . . and realized it was alllllll a dream.

As far as I know, not a single school in Nebraska is closely following the Hillsdale way. So not a single Nebraska teacher would be eligible for this award. And not a single Nebraska student is benefiting from it.

What a dream it would be if we could get a bunch of them going here.

Hint, hint: even though Hillsdale is a private school, the $25,000 prize is open to public and private school teachers.


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Wednesday, September 29, 2004


SCHOOL TAXES, HAPPY HEADLINES AND THE REAL DEAL

Cynics would say this is why schools don’t want their graduates to be able to read and think well: the North Platte School Board voted this week to cut the property tax levy . . . but will still have nearly $1 million more in revenue from property taxes than they had the year before.

Why? Because it’s a formula, silly. You multiply the tax levy times the assessed valuation of the property. Since valuations have increased as much as 16 percent in rural areas, and are averaging 4.1 percent higher in town, you can actually lower the levy rate and look like heroes to the taxpayers, and still rake in more dough than the year before.

Revenues from local property taxes will increase from $11.5 million last year to $12.4 million for the current year.

The North Platte levy fell from about $1.02 per $100 valuation to about $1. It figures to school taxes of $1,000 for the owner of a $100,000 house. That’s about a $20 “break’’ from the year before. Woo hoo!

But whoa! Pay attention here. A house valued for tax purposes at $100,000 last year would have increased in assessment status to $104,100, according to the 4.1 percent average annual valuation increase for the county.

So actually, that poor schmoe will be paying $20 MORE in school taxes this year than last year: $1,041.

Kind of puts the feel-good headline on a story like this in perspective, doesn’t it?

See for yourself: check the story, “North Platte School Board Cuts Tax Levy” published Tuesday on www.northplattebulletin.com

Remember, when you read about what politicians are doing with your money, especially in an election year, you need to use your eyeballs AND your head.


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Tuesday, September 28, 2004


OVERSPENDING AND UNDERPARENTING

A reader who has had children in both public and private schools in Omaha wrote this response to recent articles about the 2,000 Apple iBook laptop computers given to students at Westside High School earlier this month:

‘’I thought about the parallels between modern education and modern parenting. Instead of time spent with their kids, both parents work full time so that they can provide all the glitzy goodies to make up for the fact they spend no time with their kids.

‘’The logic is so circular it would be comical if it weren't so sad. In homes as well as schools, instead of doing the difficult work of teaching and learning, kids are provided with toys and entertainment. Also sad. Sigh.’’

She said she has learned to look beyond the lack of frills and extras in the private-school classroom to the quality of the education that her children receive there. The focus is just better when the parents are in charge, as they are in private school as opposed to public school, she said. In private school, it’s all about interaction and learning the material. But in public schools. when the educators and politicians are in charge, things get materialistic very quickly, and the emphasis shifts off what is essential: quality curriculum and quality instruction.

‘’You just have to seize the moment with kids,’’ she said. ‘’You can’t just give them things. If you aren’t there for them, after a while, they’ll quit turning to you. They just won’t feel close to you, and then they won’t let you influence them.’’ She’s concerned about what computers in the classroom are doing to the teacher-student relationship, which she feels has always been the key to success, and always will be.

So is the parent-student relationship. Is ‘’stuff’’ getting in the way of it?

Think about it: the vast majority of Nebraska schoolchildren in public schools read and do math at only a mediocre level, or worse, according to nationally-standardized tests. Very, very few of them are doing superior or advanced schoolwork. And yet how many of them have a car, a cell phone, the latest clothes, piercings, all kinds of home electronic equipment, and how many of their schools are just lavishly equipped, and now, there’s even a school-issued free laptop computer that’s much more expensive than the computers most of us adults are using in our jobs.

But they can’t read, write, spell or understand as well as previous generations. And yet how many of their parents have ever uttered a peep of concern or criticism over that glaring inconsistency, and demanded a better job by our schools?

The controversy over technology in schools may accomplish one thing: it may wake parents up to what is really important -- what we really want from our schools, and how schools can best use our money to give our kids what they really need, which really doesn’t cost that much.

After all, what kind of a mom or dad would serve a child a meal with one tiny bite of meat, and the rest of the plate heaped up with Twinkies, ice cream, M&Ms and potato chips?

And what kind of a mom or dad would stand for letting a school turn their child into an adult who is only barely literate and numerate at a K-12 cost that is approaching $100,000 per pupil?

Maybe it’s time we did a better job as parents . . . not in guiding and disciplining our children, but in guiding and disciplining our schools.


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Monday, September 27, 2004


SIGNS OF INEFFECTIVE SCHOOLING

Among the comments on last week’s series about giving students expensive laptop computers were several from people who said that going high-tech is just another sign that schools have lost sight of their marching orders from the public -- that they make our children literate, numerate, productive good citizens in a well-run, cost-effective manner.

The sentiment was summed up by a Texas education leader, Donna Garner, in an email message Sunday. She said that what we keep doing is buying more Band-Aids instead of solving the underlying problem –- which is that kids aren’t learning how to read, think and figure as well as they used to, and as well as they should.

Instead, she pointed out, we buy them more expensive technology to gloss over their academic deficiencies. We hire more teachers’ assistants. We think up catchy new acronyms for new initiatives and interventions. We hire more tutors. We reshape school into smaller units, such as ‘’Schools Within Schools.’’ We bring in distance learning and self-paced computer labs. We put in costly block-scheduling. We put kids in ‘’cooperative group learning’’ programs. We tie up hours and hours of classtime teaching them to make PowerPoint presentations with very little substance but lots of pizzazz.

The latest thing in Texas, she says, is that now, ALL students are in classes that are being labeled ‘’college preparatory.’’ So a high-school student who never mastered the multiplication tables he should have in third grade can at least go into a classroom marked “Algebra I’’ and feel good about himself, I guess.

Also of concern in Texas is a Houston Chronicle article over the weekend revealing that the State of Texas pays Houston Community College $250 to $300 for every remedial course taken by a student enrolled there. Remedial courses are skyrocketing for college freshmen, a clear sign of K-12 deficiencies. So, the article concludes, taxpayers pay twice to educate the same students, once in public schools at $7,000 to $9,000 per student per year, and again in remedial courses in college.

Ooh. Ouch. She’s talking sense. And all those signs are here in Nebraska. The question is, what are we going to do about it?


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Friday, September 24, 2004


LAPTOPS OF LUXURY: WHERE TO TAKE ED TECH
(Last of a five-part series)

My dad used to threaten us kids that he was going to take action to stop us from wasting so many hours watching The Beverly Hillbillies and other mind-numbing TV shows: he was going to take an ax to the set.

With all we know about the negative impact of injudicious use of technology on children, that might not be such a bad idea today. But of course, you’d have to go around smashing just about everything if you intended to get rid of all the potentially harmful technology that’s around. And nobody wants that. What we do want, however, is smart, positive, constructive use of the educational technology we’ve already bought for our public schools, and will buy in the future.

Over the past week, we’ve seen how Omaha’s Westside Community Schools, a prominent public-school district, has just spent $3.3 million to give its high-school students Apple iBook laptop computers, $1,000 machines which they will check out for the year, for free, like a library book. The move is controversial not only because of its unknown effect on learning, because also because district officials first said they could afford the laptops without raising property taxes and kind of pushed the momentous decision on the school board with newly-elected members still wet behind the ears. They then turned around and raised taxes to cover the project, anyway, when valuations didn’t rise as much as projected and the money wasn’t quite there.

But the laptops are in place, and that’s all water under the dam. Now the point is to figure out how to make the best of them where they already are, and whether to add them in places where they haven’t yet come.

Laptops are already in a few public schools around the country in places like Maine, where competition for enrollment is fierce from private schools, and that’s apparently a lot of the impetus behind Westside’s move. Two of its key private competitors, Brownell-Talbot and Duchesne, have structured their program around student laptops. The difference is that the parents of those students purchase the machines themselves, and at Westside, taxpayers give them to the kids.

The point is, ed tech is already ‘way out of the barn, and it’s past time for parents and taxpayers to give sharply-focused input to educators on how we want it used.

We’ve seen in this series how the use and abuse of TV, video games and computers can shape a child’s brain, personality and habits of mind in ways we don’t like. The potential is there for ed tech to reshape our whole society, when you consider everything from embedded Political Correctness in the computer curriculum that parents don’t see, to the data collection and cross-referencing that’s already going on among school, governmental and industrial bureaucracies with regard to the constant assessments and surveys the kids take in school, and the growing complexity of computer networking among schools, colleges, governmental agencies and employers exchanging that data.

Each one of us has a job to do, to manage all this. And here are just a few suggestions:

Parents: Read up on ed tech, and resolve to keep your child to no more than one hour a day of time on a TV or computer. Make sure to read to your child daily, spend lots of time talking with your child, and give your child lots of real-world experiences and interaction. Don’t let your child get on a computer until at least age 7, or risk having your child become a ‘’reluctant reader’’ who prefers colorful screen images to printed text. Don’t let your child use a computer to write assignments until the high-school years, because it’s been shown that kids who write only with a keyboard and screen become ‘way too linear and disconnected in their writing, compared to those who compose with a paper and pencil and have the mental advantages such as concentration that come with mastery of penmanship.

Taxpayers: Demand a freeze on additional ed tech purchases until your district can supply you with a clear accounting of ed tech expenditures to date, including how many of those computers are used by staff vs. how many are used by students, number of additional staff members, increased utility bills, etc. Also ask for these four figures from the past year and 10 years ago: total annual cost per pupil, then and now; the total staff-to-child ratio (include all nonteaching staff and all enrollment, including pre-K and special ed) . . . the total computers-to-child ratio . . . and ACT and SAT scores, then and now. If you don’t like what you see, write letters to the editor and discuss how adding more ed tech might not be the right answer. Also demand convincing evidence that there is a significant payoff academically from the computers you already have in place, and convincing evidence that additional expenditures will pay off, too. (Hint: there isn’t any, so watch their answers carefully.)

Voters: Tell your elected officials that you would like to see the computers they’ve authorized for public schools to be put to good use informing you about how well those resources are being employed, with lots more data for the public on per-pupil expenditures in all categories including special education and technology; salaries of various categories of school staff; cost and types of fringe benefits paid out, including retirement costs; attendance rates of students and teachers; standardized test scores compared to other districts around the country with student demographics like yours, and be sure to find out what percentage of total enrollment took the standardized test, not just what percentage of college-bound enrollment; dropout rates; percentage of enrollment which is non-English speaking or economically disadvantaged and what the family income level is for the latter designation; number of students who took the various Advanced Placement courses over the past few years and how many of them received college credit after taking the year-end exams; and so on and so forth.

School Board Members: Do all of the above, and ask yourself how come you don’t already have this information in clear, concise form.

Legislators: Look in to the apparent connection between nationalized standards, nationalized assessments, computerized curriculum, data collection and political control. If you see what I see, then take the necessary steps to ‘’sunset’’ Nebraska’s statewide standards and assessments, pull out of federal funding of all kinds, refuse to fund participation in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (the NAEP, the de facto national exam) and other components of nationalizing schools, and encourage a return to local control of our public schools and a hands-off attitude among state and federal educrats.

Will any of that ever happen?

I don’t know. I’m not saying we should pull all the plugs . . . just make sure that what we do with ed tech and our kids really, really computes.


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Thursday, September 23, 2004


LAPTOPS OF LUXURY: ED TECH AS BAIT FOR BIG BROTHER
(Fourth in a five-part series)

Why all this push toward computers in schools, such as last week’s move by Omaha’s District 66 to be an electronic Santa Claus to its high-school students and give them $3.3 million in Apple laptops?

We already know that only the self-serving computer industry says computers help kids learn better; everybody else knows that they’re causing public schools to spend more time and money, and to employ more people, to teach less.

We already know that educational software is designed to be ‘’teacher-proof,’’ so that nothing -- not even the teacher -- gets in between the curriculum that software is designed to present, and the student. That means teachers are out of the loop along with parents and taxpayers.

We already know too much time on a computer is bad for a child’s physical, mental and emotional health, and can actually hamper or erode his or her thinking ability and knowledge base. Kids used to fast-moving screens have trouble reading and listening for extended periods of time, and therefore they don’t pick up new vocabulary or discern subtleties as well. Meanwhile, computers in school are used for trivial pursuits for the vast majority of time at a cost-per-learning-unit that is many, many times more expensive than the traditional teaching tools of paper, pencil and books.

We’ve known for years that staring at TV and computer screens makes a child passive, reactive, overstimulated and distractible, rather than being the thoughtful, independent initiators of action that we want them to be. It’s as if the cyberworld makes the real world seem boring and irrelevant to them. It’s as if they’re addicted.

The ‘’stimulus-response’’ style of schooling, from computer ‘’prompts’’ to computer-graded standardized tests, values speed of response over quality of judgment. It’s lessening students’ ability to analyze and concentrate, and making them more isolated and single-minded, rather than warmly social, interactive, and open-minded.

We already know there’s a danger that technology will shape our minds and souls along with our schools, instead of the other way around. It’s already happening.

And we know that tens of millions of Americans have mastered the computer in adult life without spending a single day in school learning how to use it -- voila, moi, for example -- so any claim that the kids ‘’have’’ to become computer literate at an early age so that they can succeed in the workworld is ridiculous.

So wuzzup wit all dis fervor over computers in the classroom? Why is ed tech being sold to us parents and taxpayers in such dizzying array? And what are they doing with the mountain range of additional data that these computers are compiling on our kids?

To make a long story short: schools are no longer really about academics, but about political control. We all know information is power. That’s what this is all about. Computers are necessary for data collection . . . data collection is necessary for political control . . . and political control is the end game of wuzzup wit all dese computers in schools.

Computers are in schools not so that kids learn better. They’re there to produce more political control over people.

Now, take a deep breath. I know that’s shocking. But think about it:

-- All 50 states have in recent years adopted cookie-cutter graduation requirements and learning ‘’standards’’ in an array of subject areas that had to be incorporated in the curriculum presented at all grade levels, or the schools would lose their state tax funding. Basically, it’s curriculum written by educrats rather than parents, teachers and scholars. These ‘’standards’’ match from state to state, and amount to a national curriculum that’s pretty much boilerplate from coast to coast. This national curriculum is heavy on multiculturalism, environmentalism and all kinds of other ‘’isms’’ rather than traditional academics. Rather than facts, the kids are tested on ideology, to a large degree.

-- All 50 states are being required to assess their students on those same standards. An ‘’assessment’’ is a measurement, not a test. The purpose of these ‘’assessments’’ is to categorize that student in everything from career direction to character issues to personal demographics . . . a measurement of that student and his or her family’s politicized attitudes, values and beliefs, not academic progress.

-- The data from the ‘’assessments’’ is then compiled and stored for each individual student as well as for each student group, school, district and so on, and tracked for change over time.

-- The computer-based curriculum can easily be changed if the ‘’assessments’’ reflect a stubborn refusal to cave in to certain ideological points that the ‘’assessments’’ hold out as ‘’correct.’’ Students will be put through constant ‘’remediation’’ – something that used to be called ‘’brainwashing’’ – so that they can pass the ‘’assessments’’ eventually and share, at least on paper, the politicized opinions, values and beliefs of the educrats.

-- To make sure educators go along with this, ‘’high stakes’’ are in place that will cost them their jobs, their funding and, presumably, their first-born children, if the kids in their school don’t do ‘’well’’ on the ‘’assessments.’’

-- Our familiar standardized tests, including the Iowa Basics, the ACT, the SAT and the Graduate Record Examination, are all being rewritten to ‘’align’’ the questions to the new national curriculum represented by the ‘’standards.’’ New assessments, including graduation exams and teacher licensing exams, are being introduced to further cement this in place. The hurdle of these politicized ‘’assessments’’ is influencing curriculum in public, private and even homeschools to be more closely aligned with the national curriculum so that kids can do ‘’well’’ on the ‘’assessments’’ . . . which we already know are no longer really academic. But the ‘’assessments’’ are the gatekeepers for continuing education and various career paths, so doing ‘’well’’ on them will be a ‘’must’’ at all levels of schooling.

-- Computer records on each student will follow that student throughout school and for the rest of his or her life. So if you flunked a drug test in high school, or surfed on your school-issued laptop frequently to online gambling sites, school staffers will know, and so will future prospective employers. If your answers to computer-generated tests indicate that you tend to discount authority, you will be ‘’flagged’’ for referral to an in-school anger management class. If you refuse to go, that’ll be on your record, too. If your answers reflect a willingness to compromise your basic beliefs in order to meet the approval of your peers, that’ll be on there. If your answers reflect a strong belief in the Bible and Jesus Christ, complete with all His teachings, you may flunk test questions about ‘’appreciating diversity’’ such as homosexuality, that you believe to be sin. You’ll have to accept a lot of ‘’F’s’’ and be blocked from a good college, or be forced to change your religious views or at least pretend to on test questions. On the other hand, if your computer use indicates that you are questioning any form of religious faith or have adopted atheism, that’ll be on your record, too.

-- So to the extent that the educrats can control the formation of your attitudes, values and beliefs, and control your eventual college admission, graduate-school choice, post-secondary training opportunities and career path, they can control YOU.

So what can we do? Throw all the computers into the Missouri River and go back to one-room schoolhouses with chalk and slates?

Like that will ever happen. And it doesn’t have to.

There are ways to respond to this. There are lots of good things about computers. We can have it all. But we have to be smart. Reboot to the last in this series tomorrow . . . and let’s rebuild our desktops on this vital issue with a plan of action.



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Wednesday, September 22, 2004


LAPTOPS OF LUXURY: WHAT COMPUTERS CAN AND CAN’T DO
(Third in a five-part series)

Several years ago, I was throwing away a stack of spiral notebooks filled with my daughter’s homework and class notes, when a line in her neat script jumped out at me:

‘’Abraham Lincoln was an atheist.’’

Hunh? Was not! I showed it to her. She shrugged. The teacher must have said it, because she wrote it down.

I quickly brought her Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, with Lincoln’s famous pre-Civil War ‘’house divided against itself’’ line from Mark 3:25, and other Lincoln quotes, such as ‘’I pray that our heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement’’ in the Letter to Mrs. Bixby, and ‘’With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right’’ from his Address to an Indiana Regiment.

‘’OK, Mom. Geez,’’ she replied. (I get that a lot from my kids.)

It wasn’t that she had been taught so blatantly wrong on that one little point. It was that she MIGHT have been taught blatantly wrong on SKILLIONS of OTHER little points that I’ll never know about. And that made me get hives.

At least, in the olden days, parents could see the child’s textbooks and homework. There was a chance you could spot errors like that. But with all the computerization that’s going on, parents are out of the loop as never before. Ironically, so are educators. He who writes and buys the software calls the tune.

Loss of control over the curriculum is just one of the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad things about letting our public schools O.D. on computers in the classroom. Like the South in the Civil War, we are seceding . . . only this time, instead of the South from the North, it’s parents and teachers who are withdrawing from the responsibility of guiding the information that flows into our children’s minds and hearts, and turning that precious task over to who knows who online, and on disc.

I don’t think it’s all on purpose. I don’t think most educators have any idea what the ramifications of this are. But I do know a lot of them don’t like what’s happening, either. It’s degrading quality and school-home relations, bigtime.

When our older kids were in grade school, we parents were told that they had ‘’computer class’’ once a week. Our chests burst with pride. We were such savvy, with-it parents, providing so well for our kids!

Then one day I visited school during my child’s ‘’computer class.’’ One child was indeed sitting at a keyboard with a monitor. But everybody else just had a photocopy of a computer keyboard on their desks. All they were doing for ‘’computer class’’ was pretend-typing.

I’m not criticizing them for not having enough money to give every kid a computer. Far from it. But I am criticizing the obvious, deliberate misunderstanding that they created in the minds of us parents. They tried to slip us a PR Mickey. And that ain’t all.

When my older kids were in middle school, the staff was bragging about the fun and excitement of having a lot of CD-ROM’s for the kids to use. These info resources were said to be much more captivating and up-to-date for the computer generation than dusty, old books. In every subject area and certainly throughout the media center, there were CD-ROM’s from every source under the sun that the kids could turn to, for reference information and so forth.

Like most parents, at the time I was equating ‘’quality’’ with ‘’how much it costs.’’ So I was well-pleased. But then my self-satisfied smile bent into a frown: the kids were finding all kinds of suggestive, highly inappropriate, R-rated and X-rated material on these CD-ROM’s under innocent-sounding titles like ‘’health’’ and ‘’current events.’’ And the CD-ROM’s turned out to have come, not from traditional curriculum sources, but nonprofit organizations with innocent-sounding names that were actually special-interest groups with something to ‘’sell’’ behind parents’ backs.

I asked a teacher, ‘’Do you know what’s on some of these?’’ She got huffy. ‘’No! It would take me 80 to 100 hours to go through just one of them. I wouldn’t do it, anyway. We can’t POSSIBLY monitor EVERY word that’s these kids have access to,’’ she snarled. ‘’That would be CENSORSHIP.’’

Ohhh. So if the computer discs you’re offering our kids in school, at taxpayer expense, show a how-to activity in living color on oral sex, or mention in passing that, you know, Abe Lincoln was a commie and Batgirl was our 41st President, you wouldn’t want to know, and if you DID know, that would be CENSORSHIP?

Can you see why parents who look in to the perils of ed tech get hives?

It goes on. That district has had lots of computers available to the kids for a couple of decades now, with countless tax dollars spent on training, upkeep, new purchases and you name it. And yet I keep hearing from other parents about glaring omissions and shortcomings in their kids’ basic academic preparation -- the math facts, reading comprehension, spelling and other basics that we used to take for granted, but now appear to have been shunted aside, to a degree, by the frenzy over new media.

Find out how much your district is spending on technology compared to 20 years ago. Then find out what percentage of your seventh-graders do not read at grade level or better, compared to 20 years ago. The first number’s gone ‘way, ‘way up and the second number’s gone ‘way, ‘way down? I promise you, there’s a connection there. We need to address it sooner rather than later.

Kids who have grown up with the lights, camera and action of computer-based learning activities just have a tough, tough time sitting down and reading grown-up text in normal font sizes, as you find with a literary classic or a textbook chapter with some degree of analytic complexity. They just don’t like serious reading and they just don’t want to do it.

All they seem to be able to handle is a screenful of large-font text at a time, on a computer. Even then, after a few minutes, they feel the need to click away to something else.

If they turn in a beautifully computer-printed essay for their senior project, but the prose barely makes sense and there are misspelled words and poor sentence structure throughout, it’s not a genetic fault or a learning disability. It’s likely that their teachers have been too busy handling all the paperwork that comes with today’s ed tech requirements to have time to teach them how to write.

If they can’t remember to write their names on their papers and work from top to bottom, left to right, it’s not because they’re dyslexic: it’s because they’ve been spending so much time ‘’holistically’’ scanning a screen, moving their eyes around in loops and circles, instead of decoding text.

If they can’t write even a single line of cursive or printing that’s legible, it’s not that they’re dysgraphic -- it’s that they’ve spent their childhoods passively plugged in to electronics, instead of receiving all the great multisensory, mental construction, including fine-motor coordination and concentration. that comes from lots of practice with good penmanship.

If they can’t tell a forgery from the real thing, and are better understanding and interacting with stories online than real-life friends and family, it’s because they’ve been focusing on fake things -- things on TV and the computer -- all these years, instead of real life, including nature and other people.

The traditional academic tools of books, paper and pencil have just fallen by the wayside, or are about to. And we have the college remedial classes and increasingly academically inept workforces to prove it.

I recently asked a high-school honors kid how he used his computer for research.

He scratched his head. ‘’You know: for looking things up,’’ I said gently. ‘’Like, doing a string search on a search engine.’’

‘’Hunh?’’ I am positive he thought I meant doing yo-yo tricks on a choo-choo train.

I had to explain that it had to do with going to an Internet resource directory and typing in the first few letters of a word to see if that ‘’string’’ of letters showed up in a compilation of Internet files. Or if you know how to spell the first half of a word but not the last half, for example, that’s a way to get the correct spelling. You can use a dictionary just as easily.

‘’Oh,’’ he replied. ‘’Well, I’m not too great with the alphabet. I guess I never do that. I never use a dictionary, either. I just use ‘spell-check.’’’

What DID he do with his computer, then? He brightened up, and I’m sure you know what’s coming: downloading pictures of NBA stars . . . pirating music . . . playing poker . . . typing his papers, proudly, with ‘’spell-check.’’ And that’s it.

It kind of sheds new light on that $3.3 million worth of free laptop Apple iBooks that the Westside Community Schools in Omaha just gave all their high-school students, doesn’t it?

Look. I’m no Luddite. I’d never be one to say can all computers from all classrooms, and go back to chalk and slates. I think distance learning and web-based courses are cool. Email is terrific. I use the Internet for hours, daily, and love it. We parents want a K-12 curriculum that’s well-balanced with the best of the media and learning tools of the centuries, including the 21st. So I’m pro-computers in education. You bet I am.

But I’ve already BEEN well-educated. I do know my math facts, how to spell, and how to debunk a whopper, like ‘’Abe Lincoln was an atheist.’’ I’m afraid that today’s kids don’t.

I’m afraid that it’s because our schools are getting caught up in the materialistic hype and the PR of ed tech, and misusing it badly, missing its real value: using computers to make the process of education more efficient.

With all the dollars we’ve spent on computers for our public-school bureaucracies, we parents and taxpayers know far, far LESS about how our money is being spent than we used to. We should know far, far MORE about how educational resources are being allocated. But we don’t.

We should know far MORE about how the statistics for our local schools compared to others similarly situated across the country in all sorts of categories. But we don’t.

We should have computers that take care of trivial, rote work that bogs down the teaching process, and I know, I’ve been there; I’ve graded papers ‘til the wee hours, so semper fi on that one. Instead, we’re making teachers burn the candle on both ends -- fulfilling the endless new paperwork requirements that ed tech has brought with it and still trying to do the basics of good teaching, including drilling kids on the alphabet, correcting math homework and circling writing errors, that maybe the school’s computers ought to be doing for our teachers instead of being used by our kids to download bathroom humor and movie sound clips.

Heyyyy! Wait a minute! THERE’s a good idea:

Read my lips. I’ll be back.

Tune in tomorrow for another look at the hidden hazards of computers in the classroom. You’ll find out that Abe Lincoln might not have been an atheist -- but today’s educrats are using technology to find out which of our kids are.


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Tuesday, September 21, 2004


LAPTOPS OF LUXURY: EXPENSE VS. LEARNING GAIN
(Second in a five-part series)

Nationally-known education leader William J. Bennett pulls no punches about the waste of money that computers in the classroom can be. In his book, The Educated Child, he writes, ‘’When you hear the next pitch about cyber-enriching your child’s education, keep one thing in mind: so far, there is no good evidence that most uses of computers significantly improve learning.’’ (Touchstone Books, 1999, p. 619)

Most school board members, school administrators and the general public seem to believe that, when it comes to educational technology, more is better. But that doesn’t change the fact that actually, in this emerging controversy, less is better, and more people are beginning to say that out loud.

The point is on center stage in Nebraska this week as one of the state’s most prominent high schools, Omaha Westside, has just given $3.3 million worth of taxpayer-provided, free laptop computers to its high-school students. The move comes amid questions over whether that expense will be justified in future learning gains.

In his book, Bennett, former U.S. Secretary of Education, summarized years of research that show that computers are no more effective than pencils, paper and books in teaching children the academics that they need, and, in fact, ed tech ‘’can actually deter learning.’’

Hazards that computers create:

-- colorful, fast-changing computer images can make reading assignments harder for kids who already hate to read more than one sentence per hour and would rather ‘’look at pictures’’ or play games;

-- more difficulty for students who already have trouble paying attention to adults or their peers in class, but addictively hyper-focus on electronic screens for TV, video games and computers;

-- more pleasure-oriented, time-draining distractions, such as jokes, sports pictures, watching movies and listening to music, that erode time and attention away from straightforward academic learning;

-- distortions and inaccuracies in Internet content and computer software that parents and teachers can’t screen and may never discover and correct;

-- glitzy flashing images that merely seduce the child’s attention instead of encouraging serious, thoughtful concentration and analysis;

-- dumbed-down writing that comes in pre-engineered, canned snippets that stifle the student’s imagination and creativity;

-- a scatter-shot approach to ‘’research’’ where students are left to the four winds to grab the first ‘’answer’’ they can find even if it’s not relevant or coherent;

-- a failure to teach students how to skillfully sift through facts and opinions in the Information Ocean the way you have to pan for gold.

At best, the judicious use of technology can improve teacher productivity, which in turn will improve the learning curve for all students. No one denies that technology has been of tremendous value in special education and higher-level science, for example. There’s no question computers are capable of making great strides in relieving bureaucracy and providing better accountability to the public, if they are used right.

But in the main, computers in public-school classrooms have been neglected for lack of time and training on the part of staff. The reason for this obvious waste of money: lack of outside pressure to make schools efficient, since there are no stockholders in public education who demand effectiveness. Consequently, in large part, computers have been reduced to highly expensive, glorified typewriters or calculators, used only for video arcade-style gaming, or used as tools of not-so-amusing hijinks like downloading pictures of human posteriors and replacing teachers’ mugshots on the school webpage with them. Note to any kids reading this: you did NOT hear that from ME. :>)

In private enterprise, computers have been repeatedly shown to make businesses more competitive in a variety of ways: replacing human labor for rote tasks, expanding sales areas, and doing work more cheaply, more efficiently, or both. But few people argue that those benefits transfer to human service endeavors such as public education, where the desired end ‘’product’’ is a thinking, feeling, productive human being, not a widget.

But it’s hard to resist the materialistic pull of ed tech. Despite the lack of evidence that it is a wise move to spend big bucks on electronics, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, the ratio of students to computers in schools dropped from 12.1:1 in 1998 to 4.8:1 in 2002. Meanwhile, the nation has spent more than $20 billion hooking up schools to the Internet, with little or nothing to show for it in terms of improved instructional outcomes.

And at the same time that more computers were being added, more school staff was being added, too -- negating any chance of a productivity gain, but adding greatly to the financial burden of K-12 education.

What is all of this doing to the actual learning process? There’s some good news . . . and some bad. Point and click Go Big Ed tomorrow, for more on that key question.


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Monday, September 20, 2004


LAPTOPS OF LUXURY: TECHNOLOGY IN SCHOOLS
(First in a five-part series)

The big news in Nebraska K-12 education is that students at Omaha Westside High School all got Apple iBook laptop computers free of charge last week.

The move was thanks to a $3.3 million expenditure of tax dollars spent by a school board and staff intent on keeping enrollment stable by attracting more students from outside the district’s tax base. Nothing draws attention like the latest gizmo, kids want to be where the action is, and Westside is No. 1 in the state at offering the latest, coolest thing.

Each student was given a wireless laptop with a replacement cost of nearly $1,000. The high school’s desktop computers were all handed down to the middle and elementary schools. There are three new technical help centers for staff and students. There’s an Internet Café open weekday evenings at school for kids who don’t have Internet access. Although there won’t be the popular chat service known as Instant Messaging available at the start, and porno sites will be filtered out, students will still be able to access every other feature of the Internet, including downloading music

Isn’t it wonderful? Isn’t it great? Isn’t it just the best?

No. No. And no.

But nobody local is saying that -- because nobody, apparently, knows or will admit that there’s a mountain of evidence that lots of high-priced technology like this is actually bad for kids.

Go Big Ed begins a five-day series today with the straight scoop on computers in the classroom. It will point out the many shortcomings of this popular new investment in educational technology. Actually, the computerization of K-12 education poses grave dangers to students and taxpayers, and has not been shown to improve the learning process or educational productivity in any significant way.

Curiously, we’ve known this for a long time. The National Science Board reported in 1998 that costly educational strategies such as increased technology, smaller class sizes and other extras do not appear to enhance student achievement with any degree of cost-effectiveness that approaches good, old-fashioned, solid, traditional curriculum and instruction. There’s no replacement for quality interaction between students and teachers. That’s the key.

Researcher Larry Cuban, an expert on educational technology, also reports that more than 30 years of studies show only one sure benefit of computers in the classroom: a modest improvement in test scores from “drill and practice” type computer programs. Significantly, though, those improvements are not as great as the higher test scores that are attained when the students are given one-on-one tutoring, which is significantly cheaper than computers as well.

But what may be of more concern to mothers and fathers is the impact of tethering children to computers, as the Westside laptop program is doing. There are hazards that range from eyestrain and obesity to cheating, social isolation, aggressive behavior and anxiety. There are issues with the overstimulation of the vision, the narrowing of the knowledge base, and the hyperfocusing of the child’s thinking patterns into one mode: tight, deductive reasoning.

Gone will be spontaneity, imagination, creativity, analytical curiosity, and persistence; in place will be the stimulus-response mode of thinking – “get it now or forget it.”

Taxpayers also should know that there don’t appear to be any positive independent studies about the impact and value of computers in the classroom that have been done by disinterested parties. Instead, these studies are almost always proprietary in nature – in stark language, hyped by the computer industry -- with results tweaked or fudged to make it look as though expensive items like a computer in every lap is the Holy Grail that will get every kid into Harvard.

All of us should note that there’s a growing corps of experts in child development, education, health and technology who are calling for an end to the commercial pressures that are bringing all this technology into the schools, and for far more cautious and thorough research into the long-term implications, before we spend these millions, and not after.

See, for example, www.AllianceForChildhood.org for the report, “Fool’s Gold: A Critical Look at Computers and Childhood.”

Another good resource: the book, “Failure to Connect: How Computers Affect Our Children’s Minds -- and What We Can Do About It” by Jane M. Healy (Touchstone Books, 1999). She wrote another great one along these lines, “Endangered Minds” (Simon & Schuster, 1999). And there’s a 25th anniversary paperback out for the classic book, “The Plug-In Drug,” about what happens to the mind when the eyeballs are fastened onto a cathode-ray tube instead of the real world.

But all you really have to know is this:

What’s the first thing the kids downloaded with their taxpayer-provided, $1,000 machines?

The beheadings over in Iraq, reportedly.

Ewwww!

Let’s keep our heads on straight, and think hard about this. Computers and technology are great, in their place . . . but a lot of smart people are saying that place is not so prominently in school.





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Friday, September 17, 2004


SOCIALIZED MEDICINE COMES TO SCHOOL

There’s something creepy about lining up students at school and giving them all flu shots. But that’s what’s happening at Omaha’s Westside High School in a ‘’partnership’’ with Children’s Hospital.

Far be it from me to say there’s anything wrong with getting flu shots, even though I don’t. I don’t like all I’ve been reading about thimerosol, the common additive in many vaccinations which is mercury-based and linked to autism and so forth. Did you read about those construction workers who played with mercury in Bellevue, and the EPA and everybody went ballistic because it’s so poisonous? And yet it’s in our vaccinations, especially for little kids? Hola! Hello! Hoo boy.

What bugs me, though, about the flu shots in District 66 is that it’s socialized medicine -- a breach of the philosophy of medical care which has shown itself to be the best in the world. I mean individual patients choosing individual doctors and conducting their health-care regimens away from the purview of any governmental unit, including the public schools.

Even though they’re only charging $20 a flu shot, which is cheap, there’s a subsidy there which somewhere, down the road, will be made up somehow. My bet is that Children’s Hospital will be allowed to run a future school-based health clinic at Westside and have access to the enormous income stream that comes from that.

At any rate, the cost savings in individual flu shots can’t begin to make up for what parents lose in this latest transfer of parental say-so and autonomy to the public school bureaucracy.

And it may not be so bleepin’ cheap, either. The anonymous health-care delivery situation, where there’s no relationship between the caregiver and the patient, is the ripest breeding ground for litigation known to modern medicine. So if one of those nurses goofs, or there’s a lot of bad vaccine and kids get sick, or worse, who’s going to get sued? The deep pockets -- Children’s Hospital and the unsuspecting taxpayers of District 66.

School-based health care not only threatens the financial health of taxpayers and the authoritative health of moms and dads. This is just one more example of the raging sickness that has grasped hold of our public schools and is threatening to choke the academic life out of them:

Mission creep.

With ‘’services’’ like the flu shots, schools are trying to be parents. By definition, they cannot be. They are an institution. The more they let their focus creep away from academics, the worse of a job they do on their basic mission, and the worse the kids do on the old 3 R’s.

If there’s a shot that could teach that truth, I’d love to line up the educators for it. Don’t worry, I’d give it to them in their . . . arms.


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Thursday, September 16, 2004


ALL PARENTS WANT IS A LITTLE R.E.S.P.E.C.T.

One of my kids had a teacher in grade school who was obviously having personal problems that interfered with her ability to do her job. She was shouting at the kids, didn’t have any lesson plans prepared, never got around to social studies, and oozed smiles at us to our faces, while she mercilessly ‘’dissed’’ parents behind our backs.

I know this because I volunteered as the school gardener. One time she and a group of kids -- not my own, of course -- and another mother were watching me work on our school’s ‘’learning garden’’ through the classroom window. This teacher said, clearly, so as to NOT be misunderstood: ‘’There’s Mother B_itch.’’ In front of KIDS! When the kids told my daughter, and the other mother told me, I went to the principal’s office about it, expecting apologies and explanations.

Got nowhere. ‘’I’ll talk to her,’’ the principal said. Fat lot of good that did for my reputation and feelings, not to mention my daughter’s. Meanwhile, what was I there doing? Contributing lots of hours and my own money and plants, trying to help teachers like her by providing the learning garden for the kids and the beauty of flowers for a little stress relief for the teachers, too.

Sheesh. THAT went well.

I could go on and on, but no doubt you have a ‘’war story’’ like this. It’s striking how bad relations have gotten in many schools between staff and parents. I hear from parents all the time that they are merely pumped for more money but not valued -- that they are ignored and talked down to and gossiped about by the public servants entrusted with our children and paid at our expense.

In our case, after a number of other incidents and because our child was having nightmares and wetting the bed, we asked to have our child moved to the other classroom, and everything was fine after that.

But I still felt bad that the teacher ‘’got away with’’ what she had said. I chalked it up to the power of the unions and the bureaucracy being able to trump taxpayers and parents, even though we supply the two key ingredients of their jobs -- enrollment and tax dollars. Even so, they can and do ‘’diss’’ us. That’s just the way it is.

But we can change it. An idea was floated by Nebraska education leader Rick Savage Wednesday in Go Big Ed to go to total open enrollment in Nebraska public schools. The aim would be to put parents in the driver’s seat on how tax dollars should be spent in K-12 education. That sounded a lot like the mixture of charter schools and traditional public schools which is apparently working so well in Arizona. Another reader sent this story from the Opinion Journal along those lines:

-----------------------------------------------

LIVE AND LEARN
No Class
Why are "public" schools closed to the public?
BY ROBERT MARANTO
LOWER MERION, Pa.--It's back-to-school time. Unfortunately, despite school report cards and mandates like No Child Left Behind, many public schools still treat parents like mushrooms: feed them guano and keep them in the dark.

This occurred to me when, like any good parent, I called the principal's office at my local public elementary school to check it out before sending my son. Alas, despite spending $20,000 per child, our school had trouble returning three phone messages left during normal business hours. On my fourth try I reached a live person, and had a brief conversation:

"Hi, I'm Bob Maranto. I'm a parent who lives in [your school's] attendance zone. My son will be old enough for kindergarten next fall. He's actually right on the edge, so he could go next fall or the following fall, and I was wondering if I could come visit the school sometime."

"We don't have any visiting this year," the administrator replied. "We're doing construction and a lot of things are going on."

"Could I watch a class in session?"

"No, even when there's no construction you could not watch a class."

"Well, could I meet my son's teacher?"

"No, the teachers are busy teaching all day and then they go home."

As we used to say when I was in government, this is customer service worthy of the Internal Revenue Service. It also corresponds to playground gossip about this school, which has test scores lower than nearby schools.

A mere five months and 22 phone calls, faxes, and e-mails later--to the superintendent, school board, principal, and various other "public servants"--I was allowed to visit my son's likely school. Someday, I hope to watch a class.

But must it be so hard? Why not open public schools to the public?

In fairness, as my local school administrators complain, parents are a pain. Some have a "gotcha" mentality, some are rude, and many try to get a special deal for their kids.

Yet parents are not the only ones to blame. Traditional public schools view parents less as partners than as ATMs. Only 4% of American education schools offer courses on working with parents. Journalist Elinor Burkett estimates that the typical principal must comply with 470,000 federal, state, and local regulations. After all that bureaucracy, principals have no energy left over to work with parents--better to distract them with bake sales.

But some public schools do better. Last year I led an accreditation visit to an Arizona charter school, Tucson's Academy of Math and Science. I slipped away from the guided tour, roaming the parking lot as school let out to question parents about how school staff treated them. Thirteen of 14 parents said their school welcomed their input. As one put it, "if you complain about something, they let you act on it to fix the problem." Parents designed the dress code and sports program, and helped evaluate teachers. Half the parents had watched classes. As one lady assured me: "it's easy--you just talk to Mrs. Shannon at the front desk, tell her which class you want to go watch, and she'll tell you which room it's in."

Why can't all public schools work like that?

After seven years of research, I'm convinced that Arizona public schools cater to parents because of school choice combined with heavy reliance on state funding rather than local property taxes. Unlike most states, Arizona has open enrollment across district lines as well as 500 charter schools--many started by teachers--so parents unhappy with one school can easily find another. In addition, state funding means that education dollars follow enrollment, so schools that alienate parents lose money--which in turn alarms school boards and makes principals unemployed.

In response to competition, particularly competition from charter schools, Arizona public schools increasingly offer Montessori options, back-to-basics programs and a wide range of other innovations to keep parents from going to other public schools and taking state dollars with them. And they do all this on budgets far less than in my state.

But until my state's politicians get their act together, parents like me will have to make a nuisance of ourselves just to see the inside of a public school--never mind influence its policies. How public is that?

Mr. Maranto teaches political science and public administration at Villanova University.

Copyright © 2000 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.


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Wednesday, September 15, 2004


SAVAGE STATE

There are a lot of things to like about the radio broadcast, “Savage Nation” and its star, Michael Savage. He gets right down to it, doesn’t he? But here’s something I like even better from Nebraska’s own Savage -- former State Board of Education member Rick Savage of Bellevue. He’s got an idea about education that gets right down to it, too.

The retired military officer, now a self-employed landlord, believes we need to put control of education directly into the hands of parents, and foster healthy, much-needed competition among public schools.

His plan is targeted toward allowing parents to make the determination of what constitutes a ‘’good school,’’ not leave that important definition to bureaucrats and politicians.
Savage is calling for totally open enrollment in Nebraska. It would be very simple:
Parents would be free to enroll a child in a school district anywhere in the state. The money would follow the child. Presumably, there would be a flat, per-pupil allowance in state tax money determined for each child that could be used in any district in the state.
Right now, Savage points out, schools can reject a child ‘’if they do not have room,’’ but that gives ultimate control to the schools, not the parents.
His way, if enough parents were not satisfied with a particular school, the school would be closed down. But it could be reopened under the management of the school system which gained enrollment as a result of the parents’ choice to “disenroll” their child from that school.
For instance, if a lot of inner-city parents unhappy with the Omaha Public Schools because their children are not literate or numerate decided to enroll their children in Westside, then Westside would be required to take them with the corresponding per-pupil amount of state aid. If enough parents moved their kids to that district, Westside could open a branch in some of OPS's buildings, Savage proposes. The idea is that the money and the space have already been provided by taxpayers for the children; how that money and space is utilized should be a function of how the parents WANT it to be utilized, for their children’s benefit.
Yes, Savage knows the teachers’ union and school administrators would be up in arms because for the first time, there’d be a “smoking gun” to tie enrollment to how good a job they do, or don’t do.
Yes, transportation would be a hassle.
Yes, there would be instability in school systems in everything from hiring to purchasing, since they wouldn’t know for sure how many kids to plan for, from year to year.
Yes, special ed would be a headache, as it already is, and this radical change might be the time to bite the bullet and switch to full state funding of special ed, to keep it from totally burdening local schools into oblivion.
And yes, the popular schools might rage against this, because if they were forced to add more struggling students from low-performing schools to the “no-brainer” types of kids they mostly have now, it might make them have to work harder.
Eureka! As Savage points out, ‘’competition almost always improves the quality of anything offered to the public.’’

The longtime education advocate has watched various school-reform fads and programs start up and fade away over the years. Finally, he says, he realized that what’s needed is far more than tweaks.

‘’We need something more fundamental,’’ he said. ‘’We need power to the parents.’’

Could it work? Or is he just being a silly Savage?

I tell you what: it would be a beast to implement. But the results? I think they’d be great. We’d all go wild!





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Tuesday, September 14, 2004


MEMO TO DISTRICTS SUING US FOR MORE DOUGH

There are some big legal and financial threats on the table against Nebraska taxpayers in lawsuits filed by public school districts. They say they have more disadvantaged kids than average, and that makes their cost per pupil much higher than average. In short, they want more dough.

In fact, they don’t need it.

Take a memo: if any kids in their districts are having problems learning how to learn, it isn’t the kids’ fault. And it doesn’t have anything to do with money. In fact, more money would probably make the problem worse, not better.

It’s all about the teaching METHODS that they are using. They are the wrong ones in those early grades. It’s so obvious: generations past in America, there was much more poverty and much less parental educational attainment, and yet darn near 100 percent of the population was literate. Why? Because teachers knew how to teach kids how to learn in those days. They Kept It Simple, Stupid.

It’s almost incalculable how much money we could save if Nebraska public schools would just teach kids to read using direct-instruction techniques, in teacher-centered classrooms, with explicit, intensive, systematic phonics and proper handwriting skills.

Instead, they’ve got ‘’child-centered classrooms’’ and ‘’teachers as facilitators,’’ with kids laying all over the floor, with crayons in their fists willy-nilly, supposedly learning from each other and from ‘’activity centers’’ how the alphabet works and how ideas are transferred from the mind to the printed page. Nobody tells them how text is recorded and decoded – they’re supposed to figure it out their own way, however it ‘’makes sense.’’

Sheesh.

Take it from longtime Nebraska education leader Ann Mactier, formerly a member of the Omaha Public Schools Board of Education, and now on the State Ed Board.

She recently observed a phonics instruction class for teachers. You’ll note that no teachers’ college in the State of Nebraska teaches college students how to teach kids to read with phonics. Sigh, sigh, sigh. Only a handful of teachers in the whole state know how, thanks to that huge mistake. So Mrs. Mactier was at a federally-funded inservice for working teachers, several years out of college, learning the right ways at long last.

They learned how to divide a group of beginning readers into teams of two who took turns, first calling out the colors in a line of objects on a page one by one, then reading short words on lines, always going from left to right. You could get called on any time so you had to pay attention and know where the place to start reading was.

BOY! ISN’T THAT EXPENSIVE?!?! I’m being sarcastic, now. It’s just that, it’s so simple, and yet it’s the epitome of the types of simple things that are NOT taking place in public-school classrooms any more, to help kids catch on to reading correctly.

Mrs. Mactier said, ‘’This impressed me so much, because my daughter, Jan, got such a horrible start in school that she taught herself to read -- one line from right to left and the next one from left to right, all the way down the page. It ruined her life because she couldn't sound out words or spell or find her mistakes even on a page she had typed. She had letters and words out of order and couldn't see it! She was ambitious and wanted to go a top college, but she was in the bottom of her class . . . and no good school invited her.’’

Now, here’s the deal: Mrs. Mactier was one of the smartest women in Nebraska, and yet she didn’t understand what was wrong: schools had switched to the Whole Language philosophy instead of phonics. If one of the smartest mothers didn’t get it, don’t you suppose that the mothers of these disadvantaged kids that the districts are supposedly crying for more money to help don’t get it, either? And we already know that people with teaching degrees don’t get it, either. So . . . duhhhhhhh.

Couldn’t we just TRY the cheap and simple way, first, before we dump boatloads of more good money after the wrong-orrhea way?

Now, at the time, Mrs. Mactier didn’t understand that it was the school’s fault for not teaching reading in a simple, direct way, leaving the child to the four winds to ‘’discover’’ how, which a significant chunk of the student body never can do. She also didn’t know that Whole Language is at least TEN TIMES more expensive than phonics, because it uses all kinds of preengineered books and consumable materials that can’t be used over and over and over.

Here’s how Mrs. Mactier happened to figure out what was wrong: ‘’I didn't find out about this problem until I went to Crete and saw an ancient slab with the sigmas written in opposite directions on each line -- when Jan was in her 30's! The guide explained that the Greeks alternated the direction they wrote with every line.’’

Mrs. Mactier put two and two together, and for the first time, saw what her daughter had missed. And that’s why, even at her age, when other women are playing bridge and enjoying retirement, she is still going full bore to try to get this through educators’ heads, and the taxpayers’, too.

I’m saying that this kind of thing is going on all across Nebraska AS WE SPEAK . . . in the classrooms full of rich kids and the classrooms full of poor ones . . . and fixing it would not only NOT take more money . . . it would actually cost us far, far LESS.


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Monday, September 13, 2004


D.A.R.E.: FUNNY FOOTNOTES, AND SOME NOT SO FUNNY

Last week’s articles on the very expensive but very failed drug ed program, D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education), yielded a few humorous postscripts:

-- This morning, hauling Maddy to preschool, I had just taken a big gulp from my coffee cup and sighed a big ‘’Ahhhh!’’ when Maddy piped up: ‘’I HEARD ON THE RADIO THAT YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO DRINK AND DRIVE!!!’’ That points out one more thing about D.A.R.E.: overkill. Obviously, something was amiss when they were spending hours and hours and HOURS on making a few simple points. Kids are smart. You only have to tell them to stay off booze, drugs and tobacco once or twice, and maintain that expectation, and eureka! They ‘’get it.’’ The constant repetition and information on ways to use substances that characterized D.A.R.E. reminds me of the prophetic movie, ‘’A Clockwork Orange.’’ In it, the authorities supposedly indoctrinated thugs to stay away from violence by showing them lots of movies with lots of violence. What did they make them, instead? Even MORE violent. Because I love kids and know how smart they are, I say D.A.R.E. did the same thing, only it made kids more prone to use and abuse drugs, booze and smokes.

-- A city councilman of a big Nebraska city emailed back an ‘’Amen!’’ to the stats that show how much of a waste of taxpayer dollars D.A.R.E. really was. City government bore much of the expense through funding for police officers, along with schools and federal tax grants. ‘’But weren’t those bumper stickers awesome?’’ he wrote, sarcastically. ‘’Surely they were worth all the millions for the program.’’

-- A school board member in northeast Nebraska suggested that the upcoming Homecoming bonfires could be fueled by the mountains of D.A.R.E. pamphlets brought in by present-day narcotics and alcohol addicts, who all had D.A.R.E. when they were in high school at taxpayer expense, and have the rap sheets and rehab bills to prove it.

-- An Iowan I really admire, Paul Dorr, a homeschooling leader and school reform activist, said that a decade or so ago, he brought one of the big shots behind the philosophy of D.A.R.E., William Coulson, a former colleague of Carl Rogers, around western Iowa on a speaking tour. Coulson had realized how wrong the values-neutral philosophy was, and wanted to warn people against D.A.R.E. The result of Dorr’s efforts? He said the Iowa D.A.R.E. Officers Association and the D.A.R.E. Division Captain of the LAPD did an ‘’intell report’’ on the enemies of D.A.R.E. – Dorr and Coulson. Dorr still has a copy of it.

You know, that’s absolutely amazing, the ‘’kill the messenger’’ approach that so many of our public servants have toward education reform. It makes me sad that law enforcement would stake out those two men for what they were trying to say, instead of examining the program and discovering the obvious, that it didn’t work and just added to the problems, injuries, dangers and crime in society.

Makes you wonder: if educators couldn’t ‘’get it’’ with D.A.R.E., is it possible that they can’t ‘’get it’’ with what’s wrong with ANY curriculum and instruction they might be using, that’s equally ineffective?

Dorr says he also used to call up the Jan Mickelson talk show in Des Moines when he would be discussing the previous night’s action-packed crack house bust by the Des Moines P.D. Dorr would ask, ‘’How many of the officers on last night's bust spent the day before out teaching kids how to get into crack with the D.A.R.E. program?’’

Dorr writes, ‘’That got me an anonymous phone call inquiring as to what my beef was with D.A.R.E. I soon flushed out a staff officer of the Iowa Department of Public Safety. About a year later they busted the chief D.A.R.E. officer of the West Des Moines P.D. for trafficking in drugs and hardcore porn to local school kids. I have several accounts in the file of D.A.R.E. law enforcement officers getting caught peddling drugs by night.’’

There are people who believe the whole point to D.A.R.E. was to give the police a foothold inside schools, which they now, of course, have. It’s hard to believe the purpose was for nefarious exploitation of our captive children, as with corrupt drug-selling police and other less-than-constructive reasons. But why else would such an obviously bad program be propped up and kept going for so many years?

The point is, if it goes on in Iowa, do we think for one minute it doesn’t go on in Nebraska?

Dorr adds a humorous topper: ‘’My kids routinely question D.A.R.E. kids in local parade entries as to what D.A.R.E. means. The top two responses are ‘Drugs Are Really Exciting’ and ‘Drugs Are Really Expensive.’ ‘’


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Friday, September 10, 2004


D.A.R.E.: Driving a Concerned Parent to Drink

Several years ago, I brought a ream of research to a parents’ meeting in Omaha’s District 66 about D.A.R.E., the federally-funded Drug Abuse Resistance Education class that our sixth-grader was starting. As a reporter and a graduate of the same school system, I figured it was a lot easier for me than for other parents to find out stuff that was kind of difficult and embarrassing to talk about, and to get it openly discussed.

I truly thought that my contribution -- proof that D.A.R.E. actually made kids use MORE drugs and alcohol than kids who hadn’t had such ‘’values-neutral’’ drug ed -- would be warmly received by my fellow concerned parents and paid school staff.

Wrong-orrhea.

‘’So you found out D.A.R.E. doesn’t work to keep kids off drugs, alcohol and tobacco and we’re wasting our kids’ time and our taxpayers’ money? So what? Kids love D.A.R.E.! Teachers love D.A.R.E.! Everybody loves D.A.R.E.! Sit down and shut up! You want to know how to help your kids in school this year? Read to them!’’

Silently, I was protesting: gee, everybody loves Twinkies, booger jokes and staying up ‘til 3 a.m., too. Shall we pay for THEM with our tax dollars, too?

But I was so shocked and embarrassed, I backed down and shut up. All I can do is read to them? OK, I’ll read to them.

I went home and cuddled with our younger daughter, then in fourth grade, who had picked out this library book for the week from the school library: Anastasia Again by award-winning writer Lois Lowry (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981). I swear to God, it opened to this sentence:

‘’I think I’ll have a beer.’’ (p. 49)

Of course, being a mom, I slammed it shut and read one of our own books to her. And then later that night, being a reporter, I speed-read the book and came up with 12 references to alcohol: the 12-year-old getting a beer for Dad, Dad drinking two beers very fast, Dad letting the daughter drink the foam off his beer, the mom drinking beers when upset, sneaking vodka into a party, the kid smoking cigarettes, using air freshener to hide the smell of smoke from your parents, and, on p. 98, this gem:

‘’Anastasia thought that dirty books were generally not as gross as cigarettes, but rather like beer: interesting now and then, in small doses, but no big deal.’’

I went to school the next morning with my D.A.R.E. research and this book, suggesting that perhaps we had a problem with a drug ed program that has been proven ineffective, and on top of that we had a raging case of double messages in the schoolbooks purchased with tax dollars and offered to our 9-year-olds.

What was the reaction from our highly-paid professional public servants?

‘’First you were a troublemaker. Now you want to be a book burner. Everybody loves D.A.R.E., and everybody loves Lois Lowry’s books. You’re a whacko. Sit down and shut up.’’

Well, it wasn’t EXACTLY that bad. But it was bad.

And because I couldn’t believe it, I let myself get intimidated again. And I did sit down and shut up -- at least for a while. I figured that drug ed is the parents’ job anyway, and my husband and I were perfectly capable of keeping our own kids well-equipped to avoid the pitfalls of ‘’using,’’ which, so far, they have.

But that spring, three things happened in quick succession:

-- I drove by three boys from our daughter’s class, three D.A.R.E. ‘’graduates,’’ in the late afternoon outside the home of one of them, and they were drinking beers right down by the street. I stopped my car and stuck my head out of it; they recognized me and ran off. They were 11 years old. I didn’t know their parents very well, but they had been in the group of parents who had ridiculed me over my research. No, I didn’t report it to them or to school; what was the use?

-- The end-of-the-year assembly came up soon thereafter. The kids were all going to receive their D.A.R.E. certificates, and the one who wrote the winning essay about resisting drugs, alcohol and tobacco was going to get a prize. I was hoping against hope that it wasn’t one of the three boys I’d seen. As the parents and students gathered in the gym, the school band played a few jazzy tunes. I could not believe my ears when the band teacher, who was retiring in a few days, had the kids play a well-known drinking song -- the one PeeWee Herman danced to on a bar in his movie -- and in between verses, the student body shouted, ‘’TEQUILA!’’ I swear to God. I really liked the teacher and figured he was just poking fun as a last hurrah. But the hypocrisy was so striking. Of course, no one said a word, including me -- not any paid staffer, not any other parent. I’m not proud that I sat silent once again . . . but what was the use?

-- The next day, I got a call from a friend of mine who lives down the street from the school. ‘’I just have to tell you something because I know you’ll get a kick out of it,’’ she said. ‘’I saw a bunch of kids walking home from school last night in their D.A.R.E. T-shirts and they were SMOKING CIGARETTES. Ha ha ha! Isn’t that funny? Ha ha ha!’’

Ha . . . ha . . . ha.

This D.A.R.E. business is far from the only reason we pulled our kids out of District 66 . . . but it’s an important one. It’s not that our own children were being hurt, although technically, they were. It’s just that we knew other people’s children were not being equipped to resist the temptations that come from teen peer pressure, having access to money, and having nowhere near enough parental supervision, not to mention professional supervision of the curriculum and instruction that’s supposed to be delivered in school at taxpayer expense.

We knew that a lot of those cute, smiling kids were going to suffer and even die because they didn’t know the truth about drugs, alcohol and tobacco despite expenditures of hard-earned tax dollars and the trust of the general public . . . and that ain’t funny. It just ain’t.

But what’s the use of talking about this?

I’ll tell you what’s the use: we have to. We need to. We must. Let’s DARE to.


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Thursday, September 09, 2004


R.I.P., D.A.R.E.

The local daily reported last week that only two grade schools in Douglas County are still teaching Drug Abuse Resistance Education, the school-based substance abuse prevention program known as D.A.R.E. It used to be all over, with an estimated penetration in Nebraska grade schools of close to 80 percent in the 1980s and ‘90s.

What happened? People found out that D.A.R.E. didn’t help, and in fact, for kids like most of those in Nebraska, it actually hurt.

Nationwide, D.A.R.E. was costing taxpayers and private donors upwards of $1 billion a year, according to reporting by the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch posted on www.mpp.org/USA/news_1178.html Close to half of the money came from U.S. Department of Education funding through Safe and Drug-Free Schools grants. Translation: tax dollars. At schools across Nebraska, there were D.A.R.E. classes and rallies, ribbons tied on trees outside school, T-shirts, bumper stickers, and lots of loyalty and excitement.

But accountability for D.A.R.E.’s spending and evidence for its effectiveness were slim to none.

Our kids were at Swanson School in District 66, and I remember being pretty disgusted by the workbook, then doing just a little research to turn up a lot of this stuff. I remember bringing a page of damaging quotes about D.A.R.E. from big-time sources to a meeting for D.A.R.E. parents at our school. Instead of thanking me for pointing out the weaknesses of the program, I got a bunch of dirty looks and was basically told to sit down and shut up.

But here’s a sampling of what I tried to tell them:

-- A study of 10,000 kids showed D.A.R.E. had a ‘’nonexistent effect’’ on drug and alcohol prevention (Research Triangle Institute, Durham, N.C., commissioned by the U.S. Justice Department, reported in USA Today, Oct. 11, 1993).

-- Surveys of students showed they liked to spend time in drug ed classes to avoid real academic challenges; drug ed acts ‘’more as a guide than a deterrent,’’ and after programs like D.A.R.E., there is a ‘’quicker and wider use of alcohol, tobacco and cannabis’’’ (Richard H. Blum, Stanford University, Drug Education: Results and Recommendations, Lexington Books, 1976).

-- Children who had D.A.R.E. experimented with marijuana one year earlier than non-D.A.R.E. children, and there was increased use of marijuana overall after D.A.R.E. in the student population (Clayton et. al., Journal of Health Communication, 3 (4) 1991.

If I remember right, the late Liz Karnes of Omaha, longtime board member of District 66, served on the national board that dispensed grants to districts like ours. That’s probably why no one would look at the facts I presented in District 66 about how D.A.R.E. was being proven, over and over, to be counter-productive in keeping kids off drugs and booze. It would have embarrassed Ms. Karnes a great deal. I liked her and I never wanted that; I just didn’t want kids I knew to be defenseless about drugs and alcohol.,

So millions of dollars went down the drain and a much higher percentage of kids were ‘’using’’ than if we had never allowed an outside drug-ed program in the first place. All you have to do is tell kids that drugs and booze are illegal and wrong. D.A.R.E. did just about everything but.

I showed my school’s staff lots of evidence from the U.S. Justice Department, Stanford University, the University of Kentucky, and other sources. It showed that because D.A.R.E. was values-neutral and refrained from telling kids that drugs and booze were BAD for them and WRONG to do, D.A.R.E. wound up having either a neutral effect ,or actually increased drug and alcohol abuse among those kids with access to money, such as in District 66.

I think the problem was that the parents thought D.A.R.E. was ‘’moralizing’’ to the kids that drinking and drugging were wrong, but D.A.R.E. thought that was the parents’ job -- which of course, it is. But the D.A.R.E. crowd was so excited about getting all those millions of dollars, they kind of forgot to tell the parents that D.A.R.E. would get the money, but the parents still had the basic responsibility to do the basic job of drug prevention.

See?

Talk about getting wasted. Not just millions of precious education dollars in Nebraska . . . but look at the stats on the last generation of Nebraskans who had D.A.R.E. in our public schools. Look how much more drinking and drugging they do than the generations that came before.

At least there’s some humor in all this. Tomorrow, I’ll tell you a few ‘’drinking stories’’ about D.A.R.E. -- and I dare you not to smile.


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Wednesday, September 08, 2004


THE NEA’S AGENDA VS. OURS, PART II

Here are a few more non-education related resolutions passed recently at the national convention of the National Education Association. My comments are in parenthesis.

Here are two things you can do about the gulf between what this powerful national union defines as important for K-12 education, and what parents and taxpayers want:

1. Watch for the August issue of Education Reporter to be posted online on www.eagleforum.org/educate/index.html and print out the full two pages of NEA resolutions.

2. Give copies to your local teachers, administrators and school board.

3. Tell them about a good alternative to the NEA, which offers cheaper liability insurance and other perks to teachers that are even better than the NEA’s. The Association of American Educators is not political; they’re pro-quality, pro-teacher, pro-child and pro-family. They DON’T have their priorities all messed up like the NEA. Caring educators should pull out of the NEA immediately and join the Association of American Educators, www.aaeteachers.org They don’t have a Nebraska affiliate yet. How about it, Go Big Educators? Lead a revolt! If you think that’s too harsh on the Nebraska affiliate of the NEA, why don’t you ask ‘em why they’ve been going along with all these goofy NEA resolutions all these years, and are still sending your dough in for more of the same?

Here are those other NEA resolutions of note:

A-24. A ban on vouchers, tuition tax credits and other help for families to send their kids to private schools.

(So even though it’s our money and education is a top priority, we don’t get to decide how to spend it or where our children should go to school).

B-6. Maximum class size of 15 students, with fewer in programs for students with special needs.

(That’s even though there’s not a shred of evidence from anywhere that a class size that small provides any kind of academic benefit to children. The real need is for schools to go back to using traditional teaching methods such as phonics and computation so that kids will be more able learners and the staff-to-child ratio can be more cost-effective. This is a push to make education as labor-intensive as possible -- hurting kids academically in the process -- in order to employ more people and rake in more union dough).

B-57. Standardized tests should never be used as a criterion for reducing or withholding any educational funding or for comparing students, teachers, programs, schools, communities, and states.

(O . . . K. So what SHOULD be used as a gauge of educational quality? How cute you guys smile?)

B-69. “The National Education Association believes that home schooling programs cannot provide the student with a comprehensive education experience,” so “instructors” must be state-licensed, the curriculum must be approved by the state, and homeschoolers should not be allowed to participate in any extracurricular activities in the public schools.

(Oh, I see: Mom and Dad licensed like a dog. Will we get collars and tags? So much for the educational quality and character of Abraham Lincoln. He was homeschooled . . . by himself . . . remember?)

D-21. “The National Education Association believes that competency testing must not be used as a condition of employment, license retention, evaluation, placement, ranking, or promotion of licensed teachers.”

(What SHOULD we use for all that? Their INCOMPETENCY rating?)

F-2. Pay Equity / Comparable Worth. “The ‘market value’ means of establishing pay cannot be the final determinant of pay scales since it too frequently reflect the race and sex bias in our society.”

(How silly, to think that money has any value, or any connection to the good that your service to society might do. Oh, that race and sex bias that goes on. Yeah, it’s terribly unfair that an old, fat, white woman like me doesn’t get to start for the Huskers. What’s up with THAT? Where can I sue?)

H-11. Statehood for the District of Columbia.

(Oh, my gosh: we have four children! Their educations have been drastically harmed by the outrageous fact that D.C. isn’t a state! Oh, boo hoo. There goes their ACT scores.)

I-26. Freedom of Religion. “The Association opposes any federal legislation or mandate that would require school districts to schedule a moment of silence.”

(Silence? In school? But then the kids could think and read! That’s against the NEA’s religion!)

I-47. English as the Official Language. “The Association believes that efforts to legislate English as the official language disregard cultural pluralism; deprive those in need of education, social services, and employment; and must be challenged.”

(Wrong! You use a comma, not a semicolon, in the last of a string of dependent phrases. There have been lame attempts to get out of taking English class, but this takes the cake. Let’s not just abolish English class: let’s abolish the English language! Yeah! Hey! Public education can be twice as efficient! We can make our kids illiterate in TWO languages!!!)

I won’t even get in to the objectionable resolutions on hot potatoes like sex education; HIV/AIDS education; promotion of contraceptives and abortion; promotion of homosexuality; promotion of gay marriage; promotion of sex-change operations, and putting colored, flavored condoms on bananas to show ‘n’ tell kids what sex is all about according to the NEA. (See that? I do know how to punctuate . . . no thanks to the NEA.)

No. I won’t even get IN to that stuff.

I’ve passed a resolution of my own. It’s against the NEA. I’m done with it.

Want to join my union? There are no dues . . . only what’s due to children, which is a good education, and nothing but.


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Tuesday, September 07, 2004


SPEAKING OF CONVENTIONS . . . NEA’S AGENDA VS. THE PUBLIC’S

We’ve been learning about priorities from the recent Democratic and Republican National Conventions. But another recent national convention exposes priorities for public education that are radically opposed from those of Nebraska taxpayers, parents and educators.

The National Education Association met in Washington, D.C., this past summer, and the conservative education newspaper, Education Reporter (offered by subscription, with online highlights posted on www.eagleforum.org/educate/index.html), listed some of the NEA resolutions in its August issue.

It’s appalling to see the NEA’s utter lack of emphasis on academics, and extreme focus on socialistic issues.

Pop quiz: take out a piece of paper and a pencil, and list your top priorities for K-12 education. Yours might look a lot like mine:

Quality academic instruction in reading, writing, arithmetic, science, history, foreign language, the arts, and a chance to do a few things just for fun and self-development, such as sports, clubs and service

Good role modeling and fair disciplinary rules to build leadership and character

A high degree of respect shown by educators to parents, taxpayers and elected officials, with a service ethic and a dedication to excellence

Safety

Cost-effectiveness

Now compare those simple, common-sense goals with what the NEA wants. Here’s just a sampling of the union’s new resolutions, with my translation of what each priority really means in parenthesis:

A-2. Mandatory accreditation

(forced compliance with a rigid, top-down school format that minimizes academic quality and parental input, and maximizes bureaucratic and union power).

A-11. Ban on selling or leasing closed public-school buildings to private schools or other educational ventures

(an economic blockade against healthy competition, which is the only way to improve the quality of education in this country).

A-14. Increased funding for programs against race, gender and sexual-orientation discrimination and stereotypes, and full-day, every-day kindergarten

(push the schools even farther away from their basic mission of delivering academics, and even though there’s no evidence all-day kindergarten helps the vast majority of kids academically, the real goal is to shift the kids’ alliances further away from hearth and home at a younger and younger age, and deeper into the bosom of the bureaucracy).

A-15. Substantial increases in federal funding for public schools, and no federal help for private schools

(the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits federal funding for local schools, and increasing federal power shrinks accountability and control of parents and taxpayers).

B-1. Free child care and preschool in the public schools for birth through age 8 with diversity-based curricula, bias-free screening devices and mandatory kindergarten

(increase revenue stream into public schools and drive private child-care operators out of business by stealing their client base by offering free or taxpayer-subsidized day care, even though the more time kids spend in day care, the worse they later do academically, the more angry they become, the less they are properly nurtured, the worse their health becomes, and the worse they behave in real school on down the road).

We’ll list a few more of these confounded, illogical, anti-family NEA priorities tomorrow . . . with an idea of what to do about them.


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Friday, September 03, 2004


GOP PRODUCES READING HELP FOR NEBRASKA

No matter what your politics are, you have to admit that the Republicans have delivered big bucks to local school districts for much-needed improvements in reading instruction.

Nearly a year ago, it was announced that Nebraska would receive $23.8 million in Reading First funds. The money was to come over six years in U.S. Department of Education grants through No Child Left Behind reforms. The money is targeted at pupils in kindergarten through 3rd grade.

Federal education funds have flowed into public schools for years for reading remediation. The difference is, these GOP-directed funds have to be scientifically-based.

Reading First requires that the teacher training the money provides has to be based on methods that have been proven effective by scientific research. Translation: phonics, like schools USED to use to teach reading, not the whole-language mush that’s been pumped through teachers’ colleges and in classrooms for the past generation or so.

Now the training has begun across Nebraska, under the skilled direction of Lynette Block, a reading consultant from Educational Service Unit #6. She has a strong background in the proper instruction of systematic, intensive, explicit phonics.

The first targets for teacher training are those schools across the state whose pupils scored lowest on standardized reading tests and have the most families in poverty.

According to the State Department of Education, the following public-school districts received Reading First grants so far under the six-year program:

Omaha Public Schools, $745,000
Gering, $330,000
Anselmo-Merna and Broken Bow Consortium, $227,670
McCook, $220,000
Sidney, $180,000
North Platte, $176,011
Bancroft-Rosalie and Allen Consortium, $147,790
Chadron, $116,657
Ainsworth, $91,895
Beemer, $90,000
Elkhorn Valley, $90,000
Lakeview, $87,000

The money pays for instructional materials, assessment materials, supplemental texts, evaluation activities and trainers. Besides teaching the proper methods, the grant money will go for teaching teachers how to diagnose reading problems early, on a preventative basis. That’s important because research shows that the older children get, and the longer they struggle to read using the wrong approaches, the less hope there is that they will ever become good readers.

Early reports are highly enthusiastic. Ann Mactier, member of the State Board of Education, visited a training session in Omaha and said she was ‘’amazed” to see how happy the teachers were about the methods they were learning, and that the presentation was ‘’terrific.’’

Mrs. Mactier, a former member of the Omaha Public Schools board, said that teachers from OPS grade schools Lothrop, Miller Park, Belvedere, Kellom, and Mount View were receiving the training.

Although it isn’t exactly like the Spalding Phonics method that Mrs. Mactier and other reading leaders, including former Omahan Linda Weinmaster of Lawrence, Kan., have espoused before the State Board of Education, it’s very close, Mrs. Mactier said. The complete Orton code made up a page in the materials, she said, which is an excellent indication of quality.

There aren’t many features of the No Child Left Behind act that most Republicans like, since it represents federal involvement in local education. That’s a constitutional no-no. Most in the GOP would like to do away with the U.S. Department of Education entirely.

But at least No Child Left Behind is finally focusing our tax dollars on methods that actually work instead of the ineffective whole-language methods most schools have been using for years.

Maybe the best thing about No Child Left Behind is that, once our teachers know how to teach our kids how to read, we can leave federal education intervention and interference behind, once and for all.




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Thursday, September 02, 2004


ELKHORN STUDENT WINS WRITING AWARD

An eastern Nebraska 11-year-old has won a prestigious national writing contest with her 2,500-word story, “Bunny, Go Home.”

Meredith Gold, daughter of Kurt and Sue Gold of Elkhorn, won the Student Writer category for Grades 1-5 in the Kay Snow Writing Awards, part of the Williamette Writers group out of Portland, Ore.

Meredith’s name is listed on the group’s website, www.williamettewriters.com in first place, above students from Texas, California, Georgia and Oregon.

Heads up to teachers, homeschoolers and aspiring writers: that website has some of the best writing links around. Examples: the Children’s Writing Resource Center, the Children’s Literature Web Guide, and Common Errors in English.

Meredith comes by her talent genetically; her mother teaches writing. According to an article in the Douglas County Post-Gazette, the judge wrote, “I am so impressed with this story. Not only is it extremely well-crafted, it tackles some pretty hefty issues. I am bowled over that such a young writer has such keen storytelling skills. This is a writer to watch.”

Meredith will be homeschooled this year, according to the article.


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Wednesday, September 01, 2004


EDUCATION: A GROUND ZERO ISSUE FOR BUSH VS. KERRY?

Wouldn’t it be dumb if we tried to prepare our military people for battling terrorists by giving them a bunch of self-esteem exercises instead of teaching them how to load and fire a gun?

A lot of people think that the lack of focus academically in our public schools these days, in favor of what’s called ‘’affective’’ education -- concentrating on children’s feelings and opinions -- is the equivalent of intellectually disarming our country for future battles of all kinds.

People care passionately about education. It is, and should be, a focal point in all kinds of elections this fall.

And longtime Nebraska education leader Kathy Wilmot of Beaver City reports from the Republican National Convention in New York City that the real Ground Zero has taught yet another lesson as the nation looks forward to the November presidential election and a referendum on our top priorities, including education.

Mrs. Wilmot, former member of the Nebraska State Board of Education and a delegate to the GOP convention, said she backs President Bush largely because she sees his education policy as having far more potential to return schools to local control and an academic focus than the Democrats would ever do.

In a telephone interview, Mrs. Wilmot said convention speakers have praised the federal education bill, No Child Left Behind. But they may not be aware that Democratic left-wingers such as Ted Kennedy had a lot to do with its provisions dating ‘way back to the 1980s and the America 2000 / Goals 2000 push to institute a nationalized education system in the United States.

Still, the accountability it offers parents on what children are actually learning in school is a step in the right direction, she said. It is exposing many of the shortcomings of the education system which have been allowed to be covered up for far too long, she said.

A legacy of the Clinton Administration and Democratic control of education bureaucracies is that in the 1990s, schools were changed into mini social service centers instead of centers of academics, Mrs. Wilmot said. The GOP is in the process of reversing that course.

‘’I’d like to see our schools go back to local control and a strict emphasis on academics,’’ she said. ‘’For example, we shouldn’t be doing any assessment of our students on attitudes, values, beliefs and personalities. We need to get all of that out of the academic mix. Standards should be set by local districts. Let local teachers decide what’s needed.’’

She said Nebraska’s multiple assessment system, championed by Nebraska Education Commissioner Doug Christensen, is the wrong approach. It has far too much ‘’embedded psychometrics’’ – basically, value judgments -- woven into the assessments that have nothing to do with academics. Besides, the assessments aren’t true tests of knowledge and skills. They measure the student’s future worth in the marketplace, basically.

The system ought to be disbanded, she said. ‘’It’s cost us beaucoup bucks, it’s cumbersome and it’s taking teachers out of the classroom for days and weeks out of the year,’’ she said. ‘’It flies in the face of local control.’’

She said Democratic nominee John Kerry is likely to lead schools further away from academics and more toward a nationalized, Politically Correct, nonacademic, socialistic approach to K-12 education, which she opposes.

‘’I also believe John Kerry would pull us out of Iraq,’’ Mrs. Wilmot said. ‘’It’s amazing to me how the liberals are all saying we went to war for nothing. Well, our hotel is just one block from Ground Zero. I wish they could come walk down this street and smell the sickening smell of wet ashes -- three years later -- and see that hole in the ground, and tell me we weren’t attacked. What they’re saying is demeaning to the memory of all those people who died. What we’re fighting is an ideology, and to quit fighting it is to concede defeat. That, I know, is never the wish of the American people.’’

Mrs. Wilmot maintains a website as a public service with content on education and other key issues. She plans to update it upon her return from the convention. Visit www.kathywilmot.com


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