Posted 10:57 PM by Susan Darst Williams

GO BIG ED WILL RESUME ON MONDAY, JAN. 3.

MERRY CHRISTMAS, HAPPY NEW YEAR AND HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

Posted 10:37 AM by Susan Darst Williams

OUTTHINKING THE THOUGHT POLICE

I was sad to see that the Papillion-LaVista school board fired a 24-year-old math teacher this week because he persisted in talking about his faith in Jesus Christ during class time. He was praying for and with kids in the halls, raising questions that relate to a grander view of life than just what the five senses can take in from the material world, and trying to address the kids’ ‘’issues and worries’’ as real people, not just fork over the math lessons like a robot.

Robert Ziegler, a native of Riverton, Neb., talked about faith matters in class, encouraged the kids to think spiritually, and wrote searching questions on the board periodically, such as, ‘’What inspires you to love people?’’ and ‘’If you were to die today, what would you put on your tombstone, and why?’’

Apparently, some number of students and at least one parent complained. Ziegler was warned to stop, but didn’t. The fear of a lawsuit prompted the dismissal, even though character witnesses called him ‘’marvelous,’’ ‘’honest,’’ ‘’candid’’ and ‘’capable.’’ It’s especially sad when you know how many employees are accused of so, so, so much worse stuff, but don’t lose their jobs. I’m thinking of one who hit a kid when mine were in grade school, and another who kept touching the girls improperly in middle school. Both were reassigned to jobs with minimal student contact, not fired. It’s a sad commentary indeed.

Well, I wouldn’t have fired him. I would have redirected his zeal to sponsoring the Fellowship of Christian Athletes or a Bible Club after school hours. Then when kids volunteered to put themselves under his influence and guidance, nobody would have gotten upset and the kids who wanted his input would have gained immeasurably.

But nooooo. He’s canned. The school board has a right to interpret their own policies any way they’d like. If they choose to expunge freedom of speech and religious expression among their employees, and to censor someone who’s trying to help kids learn how to have good character and do what’s right, that’s their choice.

But I’m excited. Because now we have an opportunity to make them be consistent.

And that means they now have to censor, expunge and ban all of the following because THEY intrude on the religious sensitivities of the PARENTS and TAXPAYERS:

-- Halloween.
-- Ham from the lunchroom.
-- All offensive, negative content in schoolbooks that could encourage wrongful behavior in kids that violate their upbringing. I’m thinking of books like Maya Angelou’s autobiography, which is often taught, and is one of the coarsest, most repulsive selections for secondary students I can imagine.
-- All teachings, symbols and practices of Eastern mystery religions, including meditation, yoga, yin-yang, visualization, centering. . . .
-- The Gay-Straight Alliance or other pro-homosexual clubs, activities, counseling, posters, pro-homosexual content in textbooks, library books, movies and other curriculum, the gay prom . . . you get the idea. If a few students and one parent can get rid of Mr. Ziegler for what he said, then since the vast majority of students and parents are Christian or Jewish, and active homosexuality violates Biblical standards of morality and propriety, it all must go.
-- All references to out-of-wedlock sexuality, since that also violates Christian tenets of behavior. There goes a significant chunk of the English curriculum, many library books, much of the health curriculum. . . .
-- All coarse language. There go a lot of staffers’ jobs, the locker rooms . . . and maybe the teachers’ lounges! Just kidding. But let’s be honest: my kids report that the TEACHERS are the ones using dirty words many times, not the students.

Come on, now. Censorship is not what we want. We need to outthink the thought police. I say give Mr. Ziegler his job back, tell him to cool it, and allow any kids who want to to opt into another math class if they wish – that’s a big high school, after all. Let’s be who we are – free people, with free speech – and try to learn from one another, not shut one another up.

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HOW SCHOOL EMBEZZLEMENT HAPPENS

News that a state employee is accused of embezzling big bucks from an obscure fund prompted me to call once again for spot-check investigative audits of state aid to education.

It’s incomprehensible to me that Nebraska taxpayers are expected to fork over hundreds of millions of dollars every year that undergo only minimal, perfunctory, pro forma audits by the hometown accountants whose brothers-in-law are probably the school superintendents. That’s not a slam against accountants by any means – just the reality of the situation.

A reader accused me of bashing schools because of this call. He said monetary dishonesty doesn’t happen in Nebraska public schools, suggesting that school employees wouldn’t get very far if they went to the local bank with a check from school accounts made out to themselves for over $100,000.

No! Duh! But that’s not how embezzlement happens. And his claim that it doesn’t happen, because school employees are supposedly so lily-white honest, is ridiculous, too. A check of ‘’school embezzlement’’ on a search engine turned up more than 300,000 items.

Here’s what I wrote in my ‘’Show ‘n’ Tell for Parents’’ series explaining how money fraud usually takes place:

The vast majority of people who handle taxpayer dollars in schools and education-related government agencies are honest. But billions of dollars have been spent on public education in this country. It takes only a few rotten apples to make a real dent in such a big barrel. And yes, fraud, forgery, embezzlement and other crimes of financial corruption do, indeed, take place in school settings every day.

It can range from millions of dollars to petty cash, and from household names such as gubernatorial candidates to the lowliest of penny-ante school bookkeepers in obscure towns.

Often, a person with authority over a district’s checkbook is not being held properly accountable to an authority figure, and succumbs to the temptation to “cook the books” to siphon off money for himself. Perhaps a bookkeeper will make the recordkeeping so convoluted that no one can figure out when a few pennies are missing here and there, ‘til it adds up to a substantial sum. Cases all over have involved secret bank accounts, fake post-office boxes, accounts set up for vendors that don’t exist, and plain old shoddy bookkeeping practices so that cash from lunch receipts, student activities and even vending machines winds up in sticky fingers, not for kids.

Elaborate schemes that amount to criminal conspiracies have been exposed, too, in which enrollment is deliberately overstated to pad tax revenues, there’s bid-rigging and deliberate overpayment to employees’ relatives’ businesses, and lavish gifts, gourmet meals, and trips to destinations like Las Vegas are shared with fellow employees as hush money.

The answer: more audits and tighter accountability.

Homework: Fraud cases are often reported in www.edweek.org

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Go Big Ed will resume publication on Monday, Jan. 3. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Posted 8:56 AM by Susan Darst Williams

BRAVO TO THE GRAND ISLAND PAPER: THEY GET IT!

The Grand Island Independent is the first Nebraska newspaper to blast State Education Commissioner Doug Christensen’s pet project, ‘’essential education.’’ Not only would that scary, sweeping socialistic plan cost us an arm and a leg, it would morph our schools into government job-training facilities. Thank goodness at least one newspaper is on to it.

Christensen’s plan would cost an estimated $700 million extra over the next 10 years, according to legislative sources. It would force a lot of changes that cost a lot of money but don’t even help kids learn better, according to the research, such as all-day kindergarten. It would almost certainly force longer school days and a lot closer to year-round schooling.

Just as Tuesday’s Go Big Ed explained how educators ignore evidence that block scheduling is counter-productive, Christensen’s plan is clearly anti-academic and not supported by research. But he’s pushing for it, anyway.

How come? Money and power, silly. Same old, same old.

The plan is socialistic in the way it would standardize curriculum and even parental involvement activities from the smallest private school in the state to the biggest urban district.

Therefore, it’s a threat to the quality of education in our state, not to mention the very existence of rural schools and some of our very best private schools.

Come see the Tuesday editorial, ‘’State plan is an unfunded mandate on schools,’’ at:

http://www.theindependent.com/stories/122004/opi_edit20.shtml

Christensen’s plan would force schools to put in place all the fads an educrat’s heart can hold -- all-day kindergarten, a third year of mandated foreign-language class, and forced acceptance of a bunch of School-to-Work ‘’classes’’ that are not foundational, civilizing or academic in the least, but are really veiled job-training programs.

Send that editorial around to your peeps. We need to circle the wagons against this one.

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FOOTNOTE to Tuesday’s block scheduling article: an intrepid reader sent a copy of a study by The College Board, which runs the Advanced Placement program. The May 1998 study should be distributed far and wide to any educators thinking about imposing block scheduling on their high schools. Man, oh man, what a mistake.

AP exams given in May can earn a student college credit hours, usually if the student can score a ‘’4’’ or a ‘’5’’ on a 5-point scale. My daughters both gained several ‘’free’’ college credits this way, a value to our family of more than $10,000 since they both chose expensive colleges. A healthy AP program is one of the best marketing tools a school can have, because it definitely attracts the higher-quality students.

The study compared how kids in traditional school schedules did on the AP exams with the kids who were in block scheduling schools. A typical block schedule is four 90-minute class periods a day. Students would finish a year’s worth of course content in one semester.

The study covered more than 100,000 students who took the AP history and English literature tests, nearly 75,000 who took the calculus exam and 45,000 who took the biology test.

According to the study’s conclusion, “(S)tudents who are taught in compressed schedules score lower on all four AP Exams than those who receive year-long instruction.’’

Again, I say: if your district has block scheduling or is thinking of putting it in place, be quick out of the . . . BLOCKS . . . and getchermotorrunnin’ to get rid of it.

Posted 10:48 AM by Susan Darst Williams

BLOCK SCHEDULING: IT’S FOR BLOCKHEADS

A reader has asked for background information on block scheduling, which is under review in his Nebraska school district. Since the State Department of Education is hell-bent on getting what they call ‘’core academics’’ set in stone, it’s a good time to discover how lousy block scheduling is, because the two go hand in hand.

What was your school day like? Seven 50-minute periods, or something like that? With block scheduling, most commonly, there will be four 90-minute class periods. Under the old way, it took a year to divvy out the course content in most classes. With block, everything’s crammed into one semester.

The advantages were supposed to be more time in class to go over the material and get the students’ questions answered. It’s truly great for laboratory science, so that there’s time to set up and do experiments. Block scheduling is promoted as producing better student engagement and attendance, less distraction because of fewer passing periods, less cost because fewer textbooks are needed, more teacher planning time, and many other benefits. Blocks have worked well on the college level, including at the tony Colorado College in Colorado Springs.

But reality intervened. Block scheduling reduces the time available for content delivery. One 90-minute period is less than two 50-minute periods, no matter how you slice it. Teachers find themselves cramming material into the reduced teaching time, and letting a lot of content fall by the wayside. Take English class: with a block schedule, you give up half of the weekends in a school year, but that’s when students used to be expected to get a lot of their serious reading done. Voila: fewer books, and shorter ones to boot, are assigned. Music and Advanced Placement classes are particularly hard hit, essentially because of the consolidating what should be a one-year curriculum into one semester.

Then the problem of spacing occurs, since kids learn better bit by bit; consolidating the material into a shorter block of time actually reduced retention. But with block, they get it downloaded too fast. Last, but certainly not least, trying to keep student attention in longer class periods in this generation of media-crazed, ADHD, learning-disabled kids is a foolish idea and flies in the face of everything else that goes on in their lives today, much less the ever-changing, fast-paced work world. To try to capture at least some semblance of the kids’ attention, teachers are forced into pointless, ‘’fun,’’ hands-on group activities instead of actual academics. They take class time to do homework, shoot the breeze, play cards and watch videos.

Bottom line: block scheduling is harmful to academic achievement, dumbs down the curriculum, hurts test scores, and sets kids up for more blocks of time to do their School-to-Work apprenticeships, not broaden and deepen their intellectual ability so that they can compete in college and get professional and entrepreneurial careers.

If your district’s officials have bought in heavily to outcome-based education and School-to-Work, you will either have block scheduling in place now, or it’s coming, and soon.

Yes, I can prove all this. Go to www.jefflindsay.com/Block.shtml and see for yourself.

If you have it, or it’s coming, you’ve got to . . . BLOCK . . . it.

Don’t miss the study of 30,000 10th graders in which the kids on a traditional school schedule beat the kids on block schedules in every single measurement. Also note the Iowa State study of 568 high schools in Iowa and Illinois in which the kids on block schedules did worse on their ACT tests than the kids on regular schedules.

That kind of data is why districts like South Bend, Ind., have dumped block scheduling in recent years. In fact, according to TV station WNDU, block scheduling cost that district an extra $2 million, which it found it could no longer afford.

Can any of us? I’d say unless you have a mental . . . BLOCK . . . you’d have to agree that we can’t.

Posted 11:24 AM by Susan Darst Williams

A TEXTBOOK HERO PASSES THE TORCH

The best memorial I can imagine to the late Mel Gabler, the longtime Texas textbook guru who died yesterday, would be for all of us to do a much, much better job of monitoring what’s in the textbooks our tax dollars are paying to put in front of our children.

We need to do what he did: get our hands on those textbooks, record things in them that just aren’t so or have too much ‘’spin,’’ and then go to the policymakers and money-spenders in K-12 education, and squawk.

Gabler and his wife, Norma, have worked for 40 years reading textbooks and exposing errors in them. I have used their website, www.textbookreviews.org a number of times.

They traveled from their home in Longview to Austin faithfully for years to attend meetings of the Texas State Board of Education and its textbook review process. They heavily influenced textbook selection in that key state simply by telling the truth about textbooks, something nobody else was doing. Interviewed by national media a number of times, they went a long way toward getting rid of a lot of the Political Correctness, historical revisionism, and just plain hooey that otherwise might have gotten through.

Here’s hoping that spirit of public service on behalf of schoolchildren will spread throughout the land.

Rest well, Mr. Gabler. Job well done.

Posted 1:57 PM by Susan Darst Williams

VOTERS PUT COAL IN SCHOOL SCROOGES’ STOCKINGS

Dare I think it? Could it be a trend? I’ve just heard about not one but two big school bond issues being voted down. The reason is that the voters are sick and tired of school officials not giving them what they want -- especially the growing amounts of anti-Christian hostility, and the attempted suppression of Christmas in our schools.

One bond election failure was in four small Iowa towns northeast of Omaha. Opposition was mounted by a citizens’ group led by Go Big Ed’s good friend Paul Dorr of Ocheyedan, up by Iowa’s Great Lakes. He helped Go Big Ed and others defeat the whopper bond issue by the Omaha Public Schools a few years ago.

The other bond turn-down was in Oklahoma, and there’s a juicy new lawsuit in the Dallas area, too.

Christmas is in the air!

Are you listening, Blair and all the other Nebraska schools who garbled our laws about freedom of speech and freedom of religious expression and tried to keep a lid on the Christmas spirit this year? You’re next, if you don’t wake up and smell the eggnog.

First, Go Big Ed’s friend Dorr, a consultant who has helped 24 citizens’ groups opposing school bond issues over the past few years, almost all of them successfully, led a group that shot down a $5.6 million bond issue in Avoca, Hancock, Shelby and Tennant which would have built a new building consolidating all four districts into one.

School officials tried to use Dorr and his personal beliefs about education to demonize him and paint him as some kind of a fundamentalist wacko, but of course, it backfired at the polls. In an interview, Dorr said once the citizens’ group overcame school officials’ attempts to shield the financial truth from them and informed people how much the bond issue was really going to cost, they voted it down. Dorr is a homeschooling father and two of his children attend a conservative Christian college that accepts no government funding. Those are both positive things, but school officials still tried to smear him.

According to Dorr, whose op-ed on the matter was published this week in the Council Bluffs Nonpareil, school officials used all kinds of other dirty tricks to try to suppress the facts from the public. He revealed them -- telling voters how much more the bond issue would actually cost them with interest, and informing them about a ‘’back door’’ property tax in the ballot measure that could kick in 10 years from now. In reaction, he said, school leaders used tax dollars to hire an attorney to get dirt on him, and turned in a claim against him almost immediately declared baseless by the Iowa Ethics and Campaign Disclosure Board.

Dorr said, ‘’It still amazes me how school districts across Iowa can use large amounts of taxpayer money to effectively run a local political campaign full of twists, mistruths and lies and in the case of AHST pay to send their interim superintendent to a conference to listen to (another school official) spew his lies about me in an effort to teach Iowa superintendents how to defeat my clients, but when beleaguered taxpayers dig deep into their own pockets to pay a few thousand dollars to an individual like me to help them expose the abuse going on in their own district, somehow they are the demons.’’

He added, ‘’Congratulations to all the right thinking parents, voters, and taxpayers in the AHST school district who turned down this unnecessary new tax and spend proposal.’’

Congratulations to you, too, Mr. Dorr, and semper fi. (If there’s a bond issue coming up in your district, Paul Dorr’s email address is rtp@iowatelecom.net -- hint, hint.)

A little farther from home, but just as exciting, according to the Associated Press, voters in Mustang, Okla., southwest of Oklahoma City, voted Tuesday to defeat nearly $11 million in bond issues in retaliation for a superintendent who decided to remove a Nativity scene from an elementary school Christmas program.

It was the first time in 10 years voters in that suburb voted down the schools’ request for more money.

The AP reported that the day before the election, dozens of parents at a school board meeting expressed outrage at Superintendent Karl Springer's decision to end the school's tradition of closing the Christmas play with a manger scene.

"You've got to tell them you're not going to sit by and let them take away your rights,'' said Tim Pope, a former Republican legislator and leader of the campaign against the bond issues.

Concerned over the issue of separation of church and state, Springer had sought advice from the school board attorney, who recommended that the Nativity scene be removed. The children still got to sing ‘’Silent Night,’’ but Springer took out the manger scene.

‘’Probably in my life I've never had to make a decision as difficult as this,’’ said Springer, who added that he thinks his choice hurt support for the bond measures.

‘’But I had two strong legal opinions that said something we had planned could be illegal. I wanted to make sure we protected our community from some kind of lawsuit.’’

(See Go Big Ed’s story last Friday listing a few of the many sources of information school officials should already know about, that shows that attorney and superintendent are in error.)

About 100 people protested outside the auditorium where the play was performed Thursday night. The protesters staged their own live Nativity scene. Some carried signs reading, ‘’No Christ. No Christmas. Know Christ. Know Christmas.''

Some parents were angry that Santa Claus, a Christmas tree and symbols of Hanukkah and Kwanzaa were left in the production.

‘’If you're going to cut one symbol, then cut them all,'' said Shelly Marino, the parent of a third-grader at the elementary school. ‘’Santa Claus was in the play and a Christmas tree was displayed, but that's not a Christian symbol.’’

Last, but not least, also according to the AP, two days ago, four families filed a federal lawsuit accusing a school district north of Dallas of banning Christmas and religious expression from their children's classrooms.

The AP says the lawsuit claims the Plano, Texas, district barred students from distributing pens and pencils bearing Christian messages. A district attorney denied the claims and said school officials recently decided to allow the distribution of all materials - religious or otherwise -- at Friday's annual holiday parties.

I know, I know. These are difficult days. But if more people catch the spirit of freedom and fight back against these confused and misinformed school officials, we’ll all get to express our God-given right to talk about and celebrate what’s dear to us . . . including those same school officials. Only they won’t have as much of our DOUGH to play with.

Posted 10:17 AM by Susan Darst Williams

DON’T MESS WITH TAXES

I just love it when I find someone who really ‘’gets it’’ about school finance and how we can use public tax dollars to reshape education, like a potter with clay.

My latest crush is a Texan who wrote, ‘’Stupid Is As Stupid Does: So Goes School Finance,’’ on the website of that most excellent organization, the Texas Public Policy Foundation (www.tppf.org). Byron Schlomach is a Ph.D. economist there. He points out that we’ve tripled real spending for public schools in the past 30 years, while our kids’ basic performance has fallen flat on its face compared to other nations with far more poverty and multilingualism.

His words are powerful ammo against that ‘’equity’’ lawsuit that the Omaha Public Schools and confreres filed against Nebraska taxpayers. They’re trying to shake down more of our tax dollars in state aid to education since, as their claim goes, they have more low-income and immigrant children to educate and it takes more money to do that.

Suuuuuure it does. Read Byron’s article.

Then ponder this: how come student achievement is just fine and relatively equal at private schools across this state, where tuition can ping between $1,000 or less for an inner-city parochial school, to more like $10,000 for the tony Brownell-Talbot? Costs that vary by 90 percent? THAT’S not ‘’equitable.’’ But kids in both extremes are getting a pretty good education. How can that be?

It’s because more spending does NOT produce better achievement. Does not, never has, never will. And schemes to sock more and more taxpayer cash into schools that have already shown that their methods and curricula aren’t effective are not only boneheaded, they’re unfair and inequitable . . . to us taxpayers!

Instead of granting more money to schools with kids they say are harder to teach, we should be demanding that the public schools mimic what the private schools are doing with those same student populations, at less cost and with much better results.

Look. We’ve been redistributing school funding for more than a decade now, and what has happened? In OPS, the achievement gap between black and white, rich and poor is just getting bigger, not smaller, the more money we invest. Meanwhile, the private schools are bringing kids with the same demographics to a higher plane at considerably less cost per pupil than the public schools.

That’s the same thing this Texas economist has noted.

We both seek the same kind of equity: equity of outcome and opportunity. What kind of schooling gives that to kids of all income levels and backgrounds, across the state? Private schools, not public schools.

If we really seek equity for our neediest children, we’ll do the Texas Two-Step away from the communist philosophy we’re now following – ‘’ from each according to his ability, to each according to his need’’ – and enact public policies that will put as many kids as possible into private education.

Posted 5:52 PM by Susan Darst Williams

A SHORTCUT TO TOP-QUALITY MATH

Everybody’s bummed out over how bad U.S. kids did in an international math test comparison. There’s an insightful interview about it from National Public Radio at:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4227989

The expert interviewed basically blames dumbed-down math curriculum for this problem, and of course, he’s right. We HAVE to get our schools back to paper-and-pencil computation in those early grades, and dump most of those boneheaded manipulatives and wacky new new new new gnu math techniques. In later grade school and secondary schools, we HAVE to go back to training the kids’ minds to do the math and handle the abstractions and the thinking . . . instead of just punching their calculators. That’s literally all some kids can do.

But here’s one aspect the experts might not have considered: teachers with lousy language skills are lousy math teachers, and schools with lousy language instruction make math class even harder for kids . . . and that’s a huge part of this problem, too.

Example: an Omaha father of three boys just sent this lament to me. His seventh-grader still can’t sound out unfamiliar words or spell very well at all, because their highly-funded west Omaha school district does not teach kids to read and write with simple phonics in the early grades. You know, left to right, top to bottom, attack each letter of an unfamiliar word and sound it out. . . .

Therefore, when he looks at an equation in math class, he has trouble breaking it down into its individual parts . . . because he never learned to break down words the way he should have been taught. So he can’t ‘’read’’ equations, either.

Also, the instructions on his homework and tests are so badly written, he often misunderstands what he is supposed to do.

The other night, he came to his dad with 15 math problems on a worksheet. The instructions directed: ‘’Evaluate these equations.’’

He is in seventh grade, and he didn’t know what ‘’evaluate’’ meant, in this context.

Can you blame him? I mean, what DO they mean, ‘’evaluate’’ –do they mean, is the type font pretty? Evaluate whether these are hard questions? What are your chances of getting them all right?

Noooooo. They MEANT ‘’solve’’ the equations.

I am certain there is nothing wrong with the brains of American kids, that they should be falling so far behind kids in other countries. I really don’t think it’s necessarily bad math teachers, either. Every math teacher I’ve ever met is trying his or her best.

I do, however, believe it’s bad math curriculum and bad communication that are combining to create this crisis.

If I were Queen, the first thing I’d do is put nothing but phonics in kindergarten through second grade, and get rid of all Whole Language folderol. Next, I'd throw out all the math textbooks in this state except those from Saxon Publishing (www.saxonpub.com). It’s exactly what kids need, K-12, and it’s a crying shame more parents and taxpayers don’t know about it so that they’d demand it in our schools.

The next thing I’d do is fire all the curriculum figureheads who’ve been backing all that crummy, dumbed-down, ‘’rainforest’’ math we’ve been subjecting our kids to for so long. Out! Out with you!

Last, but not least, I’d do away with teachers’ colleges and simply have teachers who’ve majored in content areas get jobs in schools. The hours they’re now wasting in ‘’how to teach’’ courses that plug rotten stuff like whole math and fancy jargon like ‘’evaluating’’ equations would be much better invested in communication courses to help them learn how to read, write, spell and think so they can pass those skills on to the students.

If we did those simple things, we’d be world-beaters again. Here’s hoping it’ll all add up for the powers that be some day soon.

Posted 5:21 PM by Susan Darst Williams

LET’S REPORT STOOOOPID ZERO-TOLERANCE INCIDENTS

I ran across an education blog that apparently reports on ridiculous discipline cases in schools. Written by a father in Atlanta, the site reports cases of overzealous administrators using zero tolerance policies ham-fistedly.

Go see www.ZeroIntelligence.net

I’ve thought for years that zero tolerance policies were boneheaded, because the very kids who need to be in school are the ones who are usually kicked out, and rarely for anything that’s really scary. The ones that make me maddest are the cases in which kids confoundedly get suspensions for doing the right thing; there was one in the Omaha Public Schools last year, if you’ll recall, when a middle-school boy reported an attempted drug buy, but went about it the wrong way and got canned for his honesty.

This other site shows the extent of the problem nationwide. I still can’t quite believe that a Wisconsin girl who was forced to perform oral sex on a boy got suspended because she had been involved in the incident . . . or that students around the country are being suspended and expelled for the crimes of possessing scissors and over-the-counter medications.

Another one that really gets me is an Oklahoma girl who has a disease in her ovaries and needs a form of birth-control medication to treat it. Usually, she takes the medication at home, but one day, it was in her locker at school, and was found by a drug-sniffing dog. Her penalty: suspension for a year.

I’d like to send any Nebraska ‘’zero tolerance abuse’’ stories to this website in the future, so if you run across any, send them my way . . . and let see what we can do to drive the number of them to ZERO, because they’re intolerably stoooopid.

Posted 9:53 AM by Susan Darst Williams

PLUGGING THE BRAIN DRAIN

Good story in the local daily the other day about Census data that shows that Nebraska is gaining in ill-educated population but losing in college-educated population.

From 1995 to 2000, in the group ages 22-29, we lost 5,100 people with college degrees. But we gained 6,912 without them, including mostly immigrants with less than a high-school education. Most disturbing is that we lost 1,278 people with graduate or professional degrees in those years.

It’s ‘’the brain drain,’’ and it has very serious implications.

Our daughter is a good example: a National Merit Scholar out of Omaha Westside, she turned down a full ride to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to go to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She got a little scholarship money, but not much. They outrecruited her, that’s all -- same thing as has happened lately with the N.U. football team. Well, we just found out that she will graduate Phi Beta Kappa in May, and she’s applying to law schools . . . but none in Nebraska.

Her brain has been drained! WAH!

State officials are saying to plug this drain, we need to beef up our economic development efforts pronto, to make sure there are lots of opportunities for high-paying jobs and business start-ups. Duhhh! Don’t hold your breath, but that’s been obvious for years. That means smart tax policy, which means tax cuts, which means cutting spending, which means innovating.

And I say there’s a way to lop off at least 25 percent of our K-12 education costs and attract talented people at the same time. Here it is: we need a statewide initiative to make Nebraska’s schools the best in the nation.

We can do it by throwing out the mushy Whole Language and Whole Math curriculum and philosophy. Then we can start to teach kids to read, write and figure in the early grades the correct way, with phonics only. Then we would no longer struggle and spend to remediate them all through school, trying to address learning deficiencies and personal problems that wouldn’t have been created if we’d taught them to read with systematic, intensive, explicit phonics by direct instruction in the early grades.

We would blow other states away on standardized tests within a few years if we would do this. Hey! It’ll be a few years before the football team is No. 1 again. So why don’t we show ‘em how, by getting there first in the more important realm (well, to most folks) of learning power?

Why don’t we round up the six or seven high-intellect individuals we still have left in the state to come up with a plan to get that common-sense solution in place . . . and start attracting college grads to Nebraska again, if not for cool new jobs, then to get their kids into our first-in-the-nation schools that teach reading right.

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Follow-up to Friday’s ‘’Merry Absurdity’’ story about our private preschool banning ‘’Merry Christmas’’ from the parent newsletter I volunteered to write: they changed their minds! As long as I added ‘’Happy Hanukkah’’ and ‘’Happy Kwanza,’’ the ‘’Merry Christmas’’ could stand. Since Ramadan is over, they didn’t request mention of that. It’s still a little silly, since only one of the 105 families is Jewish and Hanukkah is not a biggie in that faith, anyway, and none celebrate Kwanza, but at least the censorship didn’t stand. I’m happy to say so, and indebted to Family First of Nebraska for their excellent and convincing memo that helped save the day.

Posted 2:19 PM by Susan Darst Williams

MERRY ABSURDITY

A case of Christmas censorship that involves me and my adorable 4-year-old is so sad, it’s almost funny. We take Maddy to a secular preschool that has excellent developmental and pre-literacy activities. There are 105 families; I’d guess five or so of them are from foreign countries, mostly in the Middle East.

Well, I volunteer as the board secretary of the preschool PTO, and put out a simple one-page newsletter every month. The PTO president and preschool staff preview it, and then photocopy it on donated paper and distribute in parents’ mailboxes at the preschool. Last month, for Thanksgiving, I brought them yellow paper. This month, it was green.

But I got a call this morning that they were censoring this month’s newsletter . . . because I committed the crime of typing ‘’Merry Christmas’’ along with ‘’Happy Holidays’’ and ‘’Happy New Year’’ on there. The graphics alongside these greetings were snowflakes -- not Nativity characters or even a star.

What, did they think those snowflakes looked like CHRISTIAN snowflakes? Or that I was trying to proselytize?

The confusion and Political Correctness over religious freedom of expression in this country have just gone ‘way overboard in recent years.

Now school staff is looking at information I’ve provided them, including an excellent legal brief from Family First of Nebraska, and the following websites. Hopefully, they’ll use my suggestion for a compromise: print up 100 copies of the newsletter with the ‘’Merry Christmas’’ still on there and put those in the boxes of all the parents whose religions they don’t know to be different than Christian. Then white out the ‘’Merry Christmas’’ and make the remaining five copies, for the families known not to celebrate. Voila!

But if that won’t fly with Corporate, then I guess, on principle, we’re out of there. We quit. When you try to use reason and goodwill and still can’t pierce through the fog, there’s no sense continuing to send them your money -- and more importantly, your child.

Hope the public schools grasp this concept, and soon, or there may be an exodus out of there the likes of which, and the consequences of which, are practically unimaginable.

Here are those good resources:

Memorandum, ‘’Constitutional Rights of Students, Teachers and Public Schools to Seasonal Religious Expression’’
Alliance Defense Fund; distributed in Nebraska by Family First
Obtain a copy by email for a suggested $5 donation: impact@familyfirst.org

Liberty Counsel, ‘’Friend or Foe’’ Christmas campaign
www.lc.org

Rutherford Institute, ‘’The Twelve Rules of Christmas’’
www.rutherford.org
(This group’s chief John Whitehead was on the O’Reilly Factor last night)

Hope you’ll use these resources if something like this crops up in your neck o’ the woods in what is SUPPOSED to be ‘’the hap-happiest time of the year.’’

And by the way:

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Posted 9:57 AM by Susan Darst Williams

STRAIGHT TALK ON ED . . . FROM A CONGRESSMAN?

Bellevue University brought in Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo for a speech the other day, and I guess it was terrific. His statements about what’s gone wrong with education were perceived to be right on, and astoundingly frank, for a politician.

Rep. Tancredo (www.house.gov/tancredo) bluntly says that the history textbooks in the U.S. are teaching ‘’venomous lies’’ that show a hatred for America and western civilization. He quotes example after example, including the same things I’ve reported about the gender-equity baloney that’s included in the textbooks about World War II while major, sweeping events like the Death March on Bataan and the murders of 65 million Chinese by Mao right after the war are totally left out.

He quoted a textbook’s definition of ‘’jihad’’ as this: ‘’to do one’s best to resist temptation and overcome evil,’’ pointing out the absurdity of kids thinking that’s what it is when someone in Israel blows himself up and everyone around, or rams the Twin Towers with a plane.

He’s an old civics teacher, and he’s up front with his fear that the next generation of kids are not going to love their country or appreciate what it’s done and where it’s been because they simply haven’t been taught those things.

In one chilling example, he said he asked an auditorium full of high-school students if America is the best country in the world, and only a couple of dozen raised their hands.

Now, I like all five of our Congressional delegation members, but dadgummit, you NEVER hear them talk with fire in their bellies about education and what we need to do to take out the trash that’s crept within them and make our schools the best they can be.

Haven’t they figured out that there are more voters outside of the teachers’ unions, than within?

Here’s hoping they’ll read Tancredo’s education speech posted here, and start talkin’ straight the way he does:

http://www.yorktownpatriot.com/printer_25.shtml

Posted 5:49 PM by Susan Darst Williams

NEBRASKA BOY WINS NATIONAL ART PRIZE

A 7-year-old from Washington County, Neb., is the grand prize winner in a national Christmas greeting card contest put on by UNICEF, Pier 1, and Weekly Reader.

Zane Boswell, son of Holly and Mike Mackie, drew a snowman with ‘’love’’ on his tummy with colorful houses behind. He said he imagined that all the children of the world built a snowman together.

The judges chose it and one other among thousands of entries. Zane and his family got to go to New York City from Nov. 17-22. A highlight was lighting an enormous snowflake at 57th Street and 5th Avenue with actress Sarah Jessica Parker and Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

The Washington County Enterprise reported that profits from the sale of the cards go to aid children in developing countries.

Here’s a mom that teachers would love: Zane did the drawing last March as a ‘’rainy day project,’’ when he was bored. His mom spotted the news release about the contest, told him what UNICEF is and what they do for kids around the world, and then went to fix dinner. When she came back, he was done.

Now, that’s efficiency and lack of bureaucracy . . . and look at the result!

Posted 10:22 AM by Susan Darst Williams

BOMBSHELLS FOR PEARL HARBOR DAY

At times, parents of kids in public schools, and the taxpayers who fund them, feel like they’re under attack. Lately, it’s been kind of like Pearl Harbor: educational quality is being submarined by a lot of factors that most parents, taxpayers and even legislators don’t understand. Consequently, the education news is often bad, confusing, or just plain wrong.

Case in point: the bogus ‘’improvement’’ in Nebraska public-school test scores released with great fanfare Monday by the State Education Department. All the scores really mean is that some school districts are doing a better job than others of aligning their mediocre curriculum to the state’s mediocre learning standards. Some also have learned better than others how to train their kids to score points with the highly subjective and basically useless writing assessment evaluators so that they’ll ‘’look good on paper.’’

But let’s do a reality check:

-- Turns out Nebraska’s average teacher pay actually dropped one slot, from 41st in the nation to 42nd, instead of the reported meteoric rise to 36th, for the highly embarrassing reason that the National Education Association did the math wrong.

-- For a hint on how that enormous teachers’ union could possibly do a simple piece of math wrong, consider that the Program for International Student Assessment is releasing a report today that shows that 15-year-olds in the United States rank 21st out of 29 industrialized countries in the application of math skills to everyday life. The test, conducted by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, indicated that American math teachers are significantly underprepared and underdeveloped, and the type of math that they are teaching is too analytical and theoretical, without sufficient work in computation and practical applications. So, for example, when the NEA left out the fact that the Nebraska average teacher pay figures included extra income from coaching and sponsoring clubs and so forth, that was an error that wouldn’t have been made by people with some experience in elementary statistics. Look again at the big boner by the teachers’ union in the first item, above. Ya think?

-- Similarly, the Brown Center for Education Policy just issued its annual report, ‘’How Well Are American Students Learning?’’ on www.brookings.edu/gs/brown/brown_hp.htm Conclusion: the math questions on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the national test states have to give at least some of their students to get federal education funds, are “extraordinarily easy.’’ Questions had very little to do with fractions, decimals and percentages, but were simplistic exercises with whole numbers for the most part. Researchers found that the average level of difficulty on the test given to 4th graders was 3rd-grade level, with some questions on the 1st-grade level, and yet only 36% of the 4th graders could master them. It was even worse for the 8th graders. The report also says that in a scientific survey of 252 math teachers nationwide, only 22% were math majors in college, and only 41% had math teaching certificates.

We need to declare war on the status quo, or our country will look back on what’s happening in our schools now as a ‘’day of infamy.’’ Let’s look hard at getting rid of education degrees and teachers’ colleges altogether, and instead put content-ready teachers in charge of content-rich curriculum. And let’s work hard at building our private education system in the next few years ‘til the public schools are rebuilt.

Remember Pearl Harbor: and let’s not let our schools get sunk.

Posted 11:19 AM by Susan Darst Williams

A PROPER USE OF FEDERAL EDUCATION TAX DOLLARS

You know all those millions of dollars in federal education grants that are being thrown down a rathole on cockamamie make-work programs and other foolish things? Well, finally, there’s an appropriate use of fed-ed dollars in place, with good people at the helm.

It’s the Institute for Education Sciences, located at:

http://www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ies/index.html?src=mr

This is the U.S. Department of Education’s attempt to bring into one place all kinds of useful information, research results, and statistics about K-12 education. It will be a good resource for educators, parents, taxpayers, policymakers, and all those interested in improving our schools. I’ve said all along that the federal government has no business making policy or funding programs with regard to our children’s schooling, but it should be monitoring and reporting what’s going on at the local level in useful ways . . . like this.

If your school proposes to do something wacky and faddish, you can consult this site to find out if it has been tried and discredited elsewhere. Or if your school is experiencing a problem in some area, you can gather evidence for what works to solve that problem by reviewing the research here.

This may be the best chance yet to get rid of the tendency in K-12 education to try things out just for the sake of trying them out, and flying by the seat of the pants just on a hunch or a whim, spending tax dollars because they CAN. A better course of action by far is an evidence-based approach, and now we all will have better access to that evidence.

It’s energizing, too, to see who’s on the board of this new service. They include Eric Hanushek, Caroline Hoxby, Richard Milgram, Sally Shaywitz and Herb Walberg, all education professionals whose work I greatly admire.

Good news for a Monday morning, eh?

Posted 11:22 AM by Susan Darst Williams

OPS EMPLOYEES TOP $57,000?!?

A nimble reader calculated the average salary of an Omaha Public Schools employee (full-time equivalent, certificated) and came up with $42,232.

That’s a good deal higher than the statewide average of $39,635. The difference is attributed to the increased cost of living in the urban metropolis of Omaha, vs. the rural character of most of the Cornhusker State, and also the ease of obtaining a master’s degree in the state’s largest city, which hikes one’s salary, too.

Just as Omaha teachers make more than their country cousins, the relatively low cost of living in Nebraska, and the relatively small number of urban school districts here, are major factors in Nebraska’s teacher-pay ranking of 36th in the nation. Using econometrics which factor those in, the actual ranking would be much, much higher.

But that’s not the whole story. Using data from the district’s 2004-05 budget, the nimble reader came up with a cost of the OPS fringe benefits package in excess of $15,000 per staffer.

Adding salary and perks, that’s an average of more than $57,000 for a 180-day contract per staff member in Nebraska’s largest district. And it has a lot of staff members, indeed: 3,679.67 are listed in this year’s budget report.

That brings up another factoid: divide the OPS student enrollment of 46,035 students by that staff, and you wind up with a student-to-staff ratio of 12.51.

Think back to when you rode your dinosaur to school. How many kids per teacher were there then? Maybe 25? More?

Not only that, but The Council of the Great City Schools (www.cgcs.org), representing some 60 big districts, including OPS, lists an average student-to-staff ratio of 17:1 for the most-recent school year listed, 2001-02.

More money . . . better bennies . . . smaller class sizes . . . now, what was that the teachers’ union was whining about, again?

Posted 3:39 PM by Susan Darst Williams

THREE P.S.’S ON TEACHER PAY

Three things come to mind in analyzing this week’s school finance rankings released by the National Education Association:

1. One of the key reasons Nebraska’s average teacher pay rose by 4.6 percent from the year before, to $39,635, is the oft-overlooked Rule of 85. A whole bunch of relatively high-paid, longtime teachers took early retirement in Nebraska about five years ago, after the Legislature put that rule in place. It assured them full pension payments if they had reached age 55 and had put in at least 30 years of teaching. So all those high-paid educators vamoosed it. Therefore, Nebraska’s average teacher pay has been temporarily, artificially depressed for a few years because of the relatively cheap hires of young teachers to replace those graybeards. That’s why we plunged in the rankings — not because we have mean, Scrooge-like taxpayers, as the state NEA union has tried to paint it. Nebraska’s gain from 41st place to 36th place in average teacher pay has to be analyzed in the context of many factors, not the least of which is that ultra-generous early-retirement opportunity.

2. Texas education advocate Donna Garner has pointed out that federal funding is not included in the NEA statistics on spending per pupil, a huge oversight, intentional or not, since federal tax dollars can cover as much as 11 percent of the total K-12 bill. In the case of Texas, that’s another $3 billion that the NEA figures exclude. Even without the federal piece of the education spending pie, average annual cost per pupil in this country has increased to $8,208, the NEA reported. Multiply that by 13 years of a K-12 education, and we’re well over the $100,000-per-pupil mark. How many BMWs would that buy? Heck, what about part ownership of an airplane? How many kids would rather have that 100 grand put in trust, and spend 13 years of their lives in the library with self-directed learning, knowing that if they can pass some relatively easy tests at age 18, they’ll be set for college and then some? And doesn’t that make the homeschoolers look even more heroic, sparing us taxpayers that $100,000 per child, and doing a better job of it to boot? Think, people. Think.

3. Nebraska needs to look hard at another ranking in the NEA stats and what it says about our efficiency, per teacher. The state ranks 40th in the ratio of students to teachers. We have one teacher in place for every 13.7 kids. That compares to the nation’s most-efficient personnel deployment state, Utah, with one teacher for every 22.5 kids. So 39 states have figured out how to educate more kids per teacher than we have. Hmm. Nebraska always says our student-to-staff ratio is a lot lower than in most states because we are so heavily rural and the kids are so spread out. But hey: what’s Utah? It ain’t exactly a bustling metroplex. And they beat us on standardized test scores all the time. Think about it.

The most important ratio of all isn’t even in the NEA’s news release, and that is the ratio of public demands for cost-effectiveness, to educators’ actual performance. Now, THAT’S a national ranking I’d like to see.

Posted 11:04 AM by Susan Darst Williams

KEEPING CHRISTMAS

In another outrageous misapplication of free-speech rights in public schools, a student band in South Orange / Maplewood, N.J., may no longer play instrumental Christmas music by order of their Scrooge-like administrators.

The lyrics were censored in the 1990s, along with religiously-oriented images like stars and dreidels in the concert programs. But now, kids aren’t even allowed to THINK the words to those songs, much less hum or sing them.

But isn’t that the law? You know, the separation of church and state? No! And those who think so are full of . . . well . . . reindeer doo-doo.

According to the U.S. Supreme Court decision, Lynch v. Donnelly, Christian and other religious symbols, wording and celebrations are A-OK for public-school use as long as they are not the entire focus. The birth of Jesus Christ and the stories behind Christmas songs and traditions are all A-OK for discussion in class, the subject of essays when students choose the subject matter, for music and on stage without fear of litigation, as long as common-sense rules are observed.

Examples: schools can have a crèche, as long as they have other symbols of the holiday’s cultural and religious heritage. Kids can distribute religious Christmas cards or tracts on school grounds as long as it’s not during instructional time. Schools can call their December concerts ‘’Christmas’’ concerts and don’t have to resort to euphemisms such as ‘’winter’’ or ‘’holiday’’ for their parties and programs, Donnelly held.

The courts have said over and over that there’s legitimate educational purpose for acknowledging Christmas in the public schools. As long as the religious symbols are ‘’presented in a prudent and objective manner’’ and are truly linked to the cultural and religious heritage of the holiday, they’re A-OK. That was the ruling of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals against the ACLU in upholding an excellent school district policy on religious holiday celebrations in Florey v. Sioux Falls School District.

Christian music in a concert or school pageant is fine, too, but it would be wise to include an appropriate mix of secular and religious songs, and an appropriate mix of different faiths among the religious songs, religious liberty attorneys advise.

Any student who wishes to opt out of any activities must be allowed to do so without any penalty whatsoever.

But, kind of like some of those Christmas gifts that you open and say, ‘’What is it?’’ for some puzzling reason, more and more educators are confused on these points, thinking that it’s safer and better to just skip Christmas and pretend it doesn’t exist, than to put up with the occasional frowny heckler from the no-fun, misinformed, litigious Left.

It’s alarming, this war against Christmas in our schools. And it seems to be accelerating. Here’s a sample of what’s going on around the country, reported in a Nov. 24 article by Don Feder, “Public Schools and the ACLU Play Scrooge This Christmas,’’ on www.FrontPageMag.com:

-- Last year, a kindergartener at a school near Portland, Ore., was told he couldn’t bring cards with a religious message to a school Christmas party. When a teacher noticed that Justin Cortez’s cards contained the name of Jesus, she confiscated them and forwarded them to the principal, who sent them to the superintendent.

-- The New York City school system allows menorahs and Islamic symbols in holiday displays, but not nativity scenes.

-- In 2002, the mother of a student in the Del Mar Union School District in San Diego was told she could no longer read a Christmas book to her child’s fourth-grade class, and at the Sage Canyon School, teachers were ordered to remove jewelry with a Christmas theme.

-- Also that Christmas, instructors at an elementary school in Sacramento were told not to use the word ‘’Christmas’’ in the classroom or in written material.

-- In Yonkers, New York, public school employees were ordered to purge holiday decorations with religious themes.

-- According to Rev. Jerry Falwell, a New Jersey middle school cancelled a field trip to attend a performance of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.

-- Last year, the Elbert County Charter School in Elizabeth, Colorado had a holiday program that included what Feder sarcastically called ‘’such proselytizing anthems’’ as ‘’Jingle Bells." The ACLU and Anti-Defamation League threatened to sue unless the program was cleansed. A joint letter from the censors to the principal claimed, ‘’Jewish students no longer feel safe or welcome’’ at the school. The letter demanded that the Elbert County Charter School ‘’take immediate steps to comply with the constitutional separation of church and state.’’

Well, as Feder pointed out, there IS no such thing. That’s not in the U.S. Constitution and government censorship of Christmas actually violates the precepts of the First Amendment. As Feder notes, no federal court has ever held that Christmas carols, Christmas decorations, Christmas cards, Christmas books, or Christmas greetings constitute a violation of the Establishment Clause.

So what are parents and taxpayers to do?

Well, if you never tell Santa what you want, you’re not as likely to get it, are you? So the obvious answer is for the silent majority to speak up, and tell school boards and school administrators that Christmas is legal and good for our kids, so let’s bring it back. We want it.

A great tool for informing educators about this important issue is offered by Gateways to Better Education, www.gtbe.org

For $4, you can buy a nice, eight-page card with the legal documentation about how Christmas observances are legal in schools. The card contains the Sioux Falls religious celebrations policy upheld as constitutional by the Supreme Court, and some lesson plan ideas. The cards are suggested for teachers, school administrators, school attorneys . . . and send a copy to your local ACLU office, in the spirit of giving and unity and kindness and truth. . . .

. . . well, what do you know? In the spirit of Christmas!