Reporting on key Nebraska K-12 education issues on a daily basis from Susan Darst Williams, a writer who lives at the base of Mount Laundry, Nebraska. To subscribe to this blog's mailing list, and see a variety of other education features and information, visit the main education website, www.GoBigEd.com
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Thursday, March 31, 2005
Posted
10:51 AM
by Susan Darst Williams
Forrest Gump told us that life is like a box of chocolates. If it is, then how come everybody only sees the same three pieces when it comes to education – public, private or homeschool?
There are sooooo many other sweet selections. Some are really old, and some are as new as last week. Some cost an incredible amount of time and money, while others are practically free. But that’s the way it goes with innovation: as with Forrest’s chocolates, there’s a lot of variety and surprising quality in the alternatives available to The Big Three that most parents and taxpayers just don’t see.
Charter schools are moot in Nebraska, since the teachers’ union kept them out years ago with a strong power play not likely to be overcome. But there are other kinds of private schools not often considered: day-care centers have private kindergartens, and there’s Montessori, for example.
But consider these innovative and unusual school designs for kindergarten and beyond. This is where I think the action is:
-- Tutoring.
Many people think this is the next big sea change in education, following the lead of homeschooling. It’s basically hiring a private teacher for your child and those of other children you can get together to share costs, unless you’re rich enough to pay one on your own, like the Captain Von Trapp in The Sound of Music, who hired a pretty fraulein as governess and wound up singing, in lederhosen and a funny hat. Hopefully, that doesn’t always happen. The more elite private schools are getting so expensive, full-day tutoring is looking more and more sensible. We already have after-school tutoring services such as Sylvan, Kaplan and Kumon. But why not full-time, if you can make the economics work? A casual read through Nebraska laws and regulations indicate that you could lump this under homeschooling, would be exempt from a lot of the rigamarole, could teach faith-related curriculum for top-quality character development, and wouldn’t need a certified teacher, though you could have one if you wanted to. The problem would be competing with cushy pay and benefits of the public schools – but aren’t there a lot of great teachers out there who are retired and want to work part-time? Check out tutoring structures and services: http://thecampusonline.org, www.learningexchange.net and www.educationindustry.org
-- Homeschooling co-op.
Parents pool their time and resources, take turns teaching each other’s children one or more subjects, collaborate on special learning projects, and organize joint field trips. Many meet in the afternoons after parents deliver core subjects in the morning. Co-op classes run the gamut to Latin, chemistry and music appreciation, to creative dance, P.E. and kids’ crafts. See www.legacyhc.org and www.co-opcurriculums.com
-- Homeschooling associated with a private school.
Homeschoolers proceed as normal, only they work under the direction and counsel of an established private school, using their recommended curriculum from textbooks to lesson plans to tests, and receiving support from a staff member as needed. For an example of this style, see the Baltimore, Md., school, www.calvertschool.org
-- Homeschooling/private school hybrid.
University Model Schools out of Texas use this innovative approach. For two days a week, the children attend a private day school. For three days a week, they are homeschooled. This maximizes parental involvement and parent-teacher partnership, while reducing private-school tuition costs in half. These schools have quickly spread to several other states, though none so far are in Nebraska. See www.naums.net
-- Classical private schools.
This top-quality school design is based on the “Trivium.” That’s the classical approach to education in three stages, dating back to the Greeks and Romans. In the early grades, the focus is on knowledge mastery in all the subjects. That’s “grammar.” (That’s why we used to call grade schools “grammar schools.”) The early secondary years, which we now call “junior high,” are for comprehending principles in all the subjects. That’s called the “dialectic” stage. Finally, in high school, expression and application of this knowledge and these principles are undertaken in the “rhetoric” stage. These schools teach kids really cool stuff, like Latin, which builds vocabulary so much that the mean verbal SAT score in a recent year for kids who took Latin was 157 points higher than for kids who didn’t. If you’ve ever heard of beloved education philosopher Dorothy Sayers, this is what she was talking about. There aren’t any in Nebraska. Hint, hint! See the Association of Classical and Christian Schools, www.accsedu.org
-- Model private schools.
Some of the nation’s best-known private academies, including the Calvert School in Baltimore mentioned above, and Hillsdale Academy associated with Hillsdale College in Michigan, will partner with an educational entrepreneur elsewhere to set up a replica on their time-tested model. The Calvert model is more active, selling their service along the lines of a franchise, though not quite. E.D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge Curriculum comes as a sort of package that is very popular nationwide, including in the Millard Public Schools’ Core Academy (www.coreknowledge.org) founded by my esteemed friend and colleague, Linda Weinmaster, now of Lawrence, Kan. The Hillsdale model is rather passive: they put their entire curriculum guide online, for free, for anyone to use as a guide and inspiration: www.hillsdale.edu/academy/
-- Schools for the gifted.
You could just CALL your school a “gifted school,” and sit back and eat bon-bons rather than struggle for enrollment and funding, because EVERYBODY thinks their child is gifted. Right? Well, not exactly. But for those who don’t believe the public schools are set up to meet the needs of top students, and where there is population and wealth sufficient to support it, you’ll find schools like this. Check out www.giftedschool.org in San Rafael, Calif. It’s a nice place to visit, and I WOULD want to live there.
-- Online schooling / distance learning / virtual academies.
Just because you’re a “lowly” homeschooler doesn’t mean you’re stuck with ancient dittoes, feltboards, filmstrips and manual typewriters for technology. Online learning is exploding, and a lot of it is wonderful. It reminds me of old-fashioned correspondence courses on turbo power. Although education guru Bill Bennett has had his trials lately, and although I’m somewhat skeptical about this, he has developed a pretty cool model for an electronic classroom that looks good so far: www.k12.com Most, though, are for Grades 7-12. Check outCompuhigh Online School – www.clonlara.org/compuhigh.htm, the Potter’s School, www.pottersschool.com, and my favorite in this category, Classical Free Virtual Academy, www.classicalfree.org
-- Afterschooling.
During the day, the children attend public, private or homeschool settings, but from 3:30 to 9 or so, they go to one or more hours of special enrichment or remedial classes offered by a private “afterschool.” This may be the best compromise for those who can’t afford private school or homeschooling, but know their kids are getting intellectually starved in the government schools. For one centered on mathematics in Boston, see www.russianschool.com
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FRIDAY: A “Eureka” For Class I Schools
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Wednesday, March 30, 2005
Posted
2:42 PM
by Susan Darst Williams
I’m only partly kidding when I say that as a mother, I’m a farmer. I’m growing a “crop” – a precious child, who I want to help to be the best she can be spiritually, emotionally, physically and mentally.
So what “field” do I plant her in so that her “roots” to support future learning will grow the strongest?
Public kindergarten?
Private kindergarten?
Or here in my own home, where I can be the one to cultivate and apply the “fertilizer” . . . which, my friends will tell you, is in plentiful supply.
Yes, I’m thinking about homeschooling our 5-year-old next year. It comes highly recommended. Homeschooling seems to be the best way to ensure that Maddy has freedom as well as order, to learn to read so that she can keep building a big knowledge base and a big vocabulary, the prerequisites for productivity and creativity.
It makes sense to me that if you start off with a 1:1 “staff” to child ratio in kindergarten and maybe a grade or two afterward, a child will be equipped to pretty much teach himself or herself on down the road. A child who can read well, and who has modeled his or her behavior and manners after an adult rather than other little kids, is bound to flourish in a classroom of any size.
I’ve known quite a few parents who homeschooled their children from K-12. They are in my Holy Moly What a Saint Parenting Hall of Fame, that’s to be sure. Their kids just have a “glow” about them. I’ve gotten thank-you notes from one set of kids from a family like this who came over for dinner, and I was amazed at how beautifully and thoughtfully they wrote. Wow.
I’ve known several more parents who homeschooled their children as far as high school, and then sent them to public or private schools to be polished, and to benefit from good college contacts and scholarships, though the bulk of the academic firepower was put in place by Mom and Dad, not the school. Two in particular stand out: one was a National Merit scholar alongside my daughter at Westside in 2001, and the other had so much time for sports as a homeschooled child from K-8 that she is en route to being All State in not one but two sports now that she has come to a public high school.
Now, homeschooling as a multi-year commitment may be out of the question, practically and financially, for many families today. That’s true of me, at least right now.
But homeschooling a child for at least kindergarten and maybe a year or two afterwards is absolutely doable . . . and an exciting and growing trend.
It’s because of that farming metaphor. Everybody knows that a good crop depends on a good start in good, well-cultivated soil. It’s the same thing with an education. Think of it as a solid start to a long-term investment . . . or as a vaccination against disease.
You read statistics like the one from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which reported that 42% of American fourth-graders read at a level defined as “below basic.” That means they DON’T read, despite tens of thousands of dollars already spent on their educations . . .
. . . and a child who is behind in reading at the end of first grade has a 90% chance of being behind at the end of fourth grade, and a high probability of dropping out of high school (Jerry Silbert, University of Oregon) . . .
. . . and 30% of the kids who enter third grade are not reading at grade level and have little or no chance of ever catching up with their peers . . .
. . . and 80% of the kids who are labeled as “learning disabled” or in special education are only there because they can’t read – not because they are mentally handicapped or have any other physical problem that’s medically discernible. They just can’t read.
Nobody wants their child to be in those stats. But reading disability and underachievement are realities in the rich ‘burbs just as in the inner cities – maybe not to the high degree, but real enough to be a worry. I’m saying it’s because of what’s not happening in those early grades, because teachers are overwhelmed with the diversity among kindergartners, are not allowed to ability-group, and are using the wrong methods of teaching reading in the first place.
So smart parents are left crossing their fingers and sending their kids, anyway, or becoming “educational do-it-yourselfers.”
I’m not saying it’s easy. You can’t homeschool on a lark, or teach your child to read in the first five minutes. Of course, it takes a huge amount of planning and lots and lots of effort and quality time.
But it sure can be done – and increasingly, it is being done.
Here are some resources in Nebraska and beyond to pass around to anyone you know with an incoming kindergartner. It’s food for thought – for those with the will to become a farmer in the garden of children.
Nebraska state regulations for homeschooling (Rule 13):
www.nde.state.ne.us/LEGAL/documents/CLEAN13.pdf
April 1-2, Statewide Conference, Nebraska Christian Home Educators Association, Indian Hills Community Church, 1000 S. 84th St., Lincoln:
www.nchea.org
Omaha Home Educators Network (July 23 annual conference):
www.omahahen.org
National groups:
Home School Legal Defense Association:
www.hslda.org
National Home Education Research Institute:
www.nheri.org
Encouragement for beginners:
www.consideringhomeschooling.org
The curriculum I’m investigating look terrific for the foundational skills of literacy and numeracy:
Texas Alternative Document, English Language Arts and Reading goals and objectives for Kindergarten:
http://www.educationnews.org/tad__11003.htm
Spalding Phonics Kit, $119, plus various supplemental materials:
www.spalding.org
Open Court Reader:
www.sra4kids.com
Saxon Math, kindergarten, $63.50 for teacher’s manual and book, and $64.50 for manipulatives:
www.saxonhomeschool.com
The reading and math portions are the centerpiece, of course. But there are lots and lots of choices and resources for science and history and music and art and cooking and P.E. and gardening and dance and field trips and Latin and Spanish and French and. . . .
Whoa! This is fun! I’m just like a gardener with a seed catalog in the early spring. I’m ready to do whatever it takes . . . to make someone I love grow and flourish.
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THURSDAY: Innovative private-sector alternatives
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Tuesday, March 29, 2005
Posted
2:24 PM
by Susan Darst Williams
I can remember visiting my suburban Omaha grade school with my best friend, Cindy Paul, back in the 1960s, the summer before we started kindergarten. While on the playground, we noticed that our future classroom door was open.
We walked in and picked up the little readers on the low table. Cindy immediately read the word “elephant.” I was impressed! I was reading, too, but just barely (what a slacker, but at least I was potty-trained).
We both knew the lay of the land: kindergarten was for learning to read, and if you already could when you got started, so much the better.
Now, let’s time-travel forward to today’s kindergartners. Kindergarten roundups have been going on in public schools all across the state this month, and what are parents hearing is the goal of kindergarten, which mostly lasts all day these days?
Not “reading.” Instead, the goal is “reading readiness” and “developmentally-appropriate practice.” Which means: glorified day care.
What used to be the standard a generation ago – independent reading by age 5 or 6 – has now been pushed back to the end of first grade. So one, maybe two full years of vocabulary development and comprehension practice are lost. And boy, does it show in test scores on down the road.
But not in private schools. Play and fun are still built in, but the curriculum is truly academic. You can see that just by touring a few public and private kindergartens, and looking at the caliber of the work that’s up on the walls.
I have just one thing to say about the Whole Language reading philosophy that’s in place in every public kindergarten I’ve ever visited or read about:
Garbage in, garbage out.
To the extent that pure phonics are taught in the early grades, you’ll find quality in the reading, writing and thinking that goes on there.
A survey of kindergarten curriculum in a few Omaha-area private schools shows some great things going on in private kindergartens:
-- Saxon Phonics at Trinity Christian School.
-- Spalding Phonics at the Phoenix Academy.
-- Phonics, French class (highest-powered for vocabulary building) and grammar instruction at Brownell-Talbot.
-- A teacher-to-child ratio of 1:7.79 at Montessori.
I realize that far more mothers are working, and therefore far more of the job of preparing a lot of kids for kindergarten falls to the preschools. They can’t, by definition, do as good a job as a full-time mother can. (Of course I’m biased because I “are” one, but then again, I don’t know anyone who’d argue with that.)
I also realize that, because of the breakdown of the family, there are a lot more social problems faced by little kids today than when I rode my dinosaur to school.
But that just means our kindergartens must try to mimic what a loving, creative, literate home does with a small child – exactly what the public kindergartens are NOT doing.
It’s perplexing, since it’s not for lack of funding: traditional kindergarten activities are actually very cheap. And there’s also a lot more money, proportionately, flowing into the public schools than a generation or two ago. Plus, with all the accreditations and certifications and credentialing going on, one would hope there’s a lot more known about what to do, and NOT to do, to help kids learn.
The public schools are technically spending a lot more per child than tuition costs at most private schools, especially the Catholic ones which are subsidized by their corresponding churches. But do the public schools measure up in the things that build literacy, numeracy and character?
Consider these kindergarten content standards from one public and one private kindergarten in the Omaha area. Which are more likely to produce competent readers by the end of the kindergarten year? Which give parents a clear idea of how it is to be done? Which promote the skills of literacy the best?
Here are the standards from Beals Elementary School in the Omaha Public Schools from www.ops.org (spending per pupil per year based on Average Daily Attendance as reported to the State Education Department, $8,420.69):
READING/LANGUAGE ARTS
K01 Demonstrate phonological awareness.
* Listen to nursery rhymes and identify rhyming words.
* Identify beginning, middle, and ending sounds in one-syllable words.
* Blend words orally.
K02 Memorize and recite familiar nursery rhymes and poems.
K03 Apply knowledge of the organization of print to reading.
* Point to words
* Locate top/bottom
* Track left/right
* Turn pages sequentially
K04 Name upper and lower case letters of the alphabet.
K05 Produce single consonant and short vowel sounds.
K06 Recognize color, number, and high frequency words.
K07 Listen to fiction and nonfiction to demonstrate understanding.
* Predict
* Recall
* Retell*
Distinguish between fantasy and reality
K08 Self-select and independently "read" fiction and nonfiction materials.
K09 Write the letters of the alphabet.
K10 Use writing to convey messages.
* Form letters
* Copy words
* Write from dictation
K11 Use oral language to communicate.
* Answer questions
* Ask questions
* Share information and opinions
K12 Gain information and complete tasks through listening.
K13 Recognize that people come from different cultural backgrounds
Do you think those standards are dumbed down from a generation or two ago? I mean, POINT to words? I sure do.
Now, compare those to these kindergarten curriculum standards from St. Patrick’s School, a Catholic grade school in Elkhorn, www.stpatselkhorn.org (tuition: $3,219 for a non-parishioner this year):
Students will retell sequence of events in a story.
Students will predict and revise predictions when reading.
Students will relate literature to personal experiences.
Students will recognize and identify main ideas, details, characters, and problem-solution in stories.
Students will identify similarities and differences in a story.
Students will order simple sequence patterns from stories read orally.
Students will differentiate between fantasy and reality.
Students will respond to various types of literature including fiction, nonfiction and poetry.
Students will categorize the stories read aloud as real or pretend.
Students will answer different types and levels of questions.
Students will recognize that words are symbols for objects and ideas.
Students will recognize letters.
Students will identify letters and differentiate lower and upper-case letters.
Students will match letters and sounds.
Students will divide words into syllables.
Students will identify beginning, middle, and final sounds of words.
Students will identify rhyming words.
Students will use letter-sound knowledge to read decodable words.
Students will understand directionality (top to bottom, front to back, and left to right).
Students will match spoken and written words.
Students will understand text structure (title, author, illustrator, etc.).
Students will respond to literature through discussion, movement, and art.
Students will select appropriate reading materials.
Students will print with lower and upper case letters where appropriate.
Students will write left to right and top to bottom.
Students will gain control of pencil grip, paper position, beginning strokes, posture, and letter formation.
Students will use appropriate letter size and spacing.
Students will dictate sentences/stories to an adult.
Students will write their first and last names.
Students will write rhyming words.
Students will use letters to build words.
Students will identify and use punctuation marks.
Students will use letter-sound knowledge to write words.
Students will recognize sight words, color words, and days of the week.
Students will recognize rhyming words.
Students will recite ABC’s and numbers.
Students will participate in show and tell.
Students will dialogue with neighbor(s) and paraphrase the response to the class.
Students will participate in oral activities in church in front of the congregation.
Students will use proper grammar and enunciate clearly in everyday speech.
Students will accurately recite prayers and the Pledge of Allegiance.
Students will use proper questioning skills.
Students will listen to a story and respond orally.
Students will demonstrate listening position.
Students will respond to directions.
Students will accurately follow procedures and directions given orally.
Students will exhibit proper listening skills at church, when being spoken to in school, at assemblies, and during special presentations.
Students will interact with computers.
Students will identify and use the mouse to navigate on a computer.
Students will type their names using the keyboard.
Students will properly use a tape player.
Is there any question? The private school kindergarten expectations are tons better. And it’s being offered at a tuition rate that is less than half what the average spending per pupil is in the public schools.
The private schools don’t cost taxpayers a dime beyond basic fire and safety protection. But in value, what private kindergartens do for kids is . . . priceless. And what they do for adults is, too, because in the sheer comparison, we can see what our public educational institutions need to improve.
Fortunately, there are 47 accredited and 176 approved private schools in Nebraska where you can get this caliber of a great start for your child.
Here’s where you can find them to begin the “smart shopping” process comparing what they do to what your local public school does:
www.nde.state.ne.us/APAC/Pub/ACCSCHLIST.pdf
www.nde.state.ne.us/APAC/Pub/APPSCHLIST.pdf
I’d say, as more and more people find out about the stark contrast in expectations and methods between public and private schools in Nebraska, and demand for private education grows, the list of private alternatives is going to grow and grow and grow.
And in the long run, that’ll help everybody – because nothing works like competition to improve quality.
I should know: I went to kindergarten with Cindy Paul, who could read the word “elephant” before Day One. It inspired me. I put the pedal to the metal. Today, I read and write for a living. And I can read even bigger words . . . like “cost-effectiveness,” as it relates to private education.
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WEDNESDAY: Homeschooling for kindergarten
(0) comments
Monday, March 28, 2005
Posted
12:16 PM
by Susan Darst Williams
Come and see, and tell your friends!
The GoBigEd blog is accessible in the upper right-hand corner of the homepage. Click on the red Nebraska logo.
Cheers!
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WHY PARENTS SHOULD AVOID PUBLIC KINDERGARTEN
Go Big Ed will be making a case this week for private kindergarten or homeschooling for young children, pleading with parents to avoid public-school kindergarten because of the need for children to learn how to read correctly, from the starting blocks.
That sounds a little crazy. What? The Cornhusker State has lousy kindergartens?
Believe me, it’s not that the public-school teachers aren’t capable and willing. It’s that the methods and approaches have been distorted so that regular education is more like special education in expectations and philosophies. The push is less toward literacy and academics, and more toward social engineering.
Lay this one at the feet of the outcome-based education movement of the 1980s and ‘90s. The dumbed-down standards have dumbed down each grade level to the lowest common denominator. That’s what standardizing education does. It has happened all over the country in public schools, unfortunately.
The goal of kindergarten used to be to set up children to become good readers and writers, in a low-pressure setting based on play. Up until recently, there was an unwritten rule that, by the end of the kindergarten year, most kids should be doing pretty well at the foundational academic skills, reading and writing.
But nowadays, it’s rare to find a kindergarten teacher with expectations like that. The developmental academics are gone. Instead, because of the increasing diversity in the kids, teachers are happy if most of the kids can sit still and listen for more than five minutes, and maybe name a few alphabet letters and the colors. Control and discipline is the centerpiece, not reading. Kindergarten has become a lot more like day-care than a solid introduction to school.
Everything has been slowed down to the point where I estimate the academic content and methodology of kindergarten is about what we used to deliver to 3-year-olds in preschools a generation ago. Literacy is not the goal at all, any more.
Maybe that’s the down side of being an older mother, as I am, with four children ages 21, 20, 17 . . . and our “whoopsie daisy,” who’s 5. My impressions really are based on experience, though. Now, some would say I know too much, and need one of those black boxes from “Men in Black” to zap my memory. But as a parental observer of public education, I have watched the quality truly erode in the primary grades over these last 16 years or so, and it makes me sad.
I’m sorry to say that I believe it is time for parents who can possibly afford it to put their children in a private school, or homeschool them, until about third grade, to make sure that they can read, write, think and figure correctly. Even then, if you can afford it, I’m recommending that you stay out of public schools ‘til high school.
Here’s why: for those children who are coming to kindergarten from literate homes who are already reading simple words or exhibit lots of phonemic awareness, the threshold skill for reading, attending one of today’s non-literate public-school kindergartens is like putting too much weight on a racehorse. It slows them down unnecessarily and unfairly.
And I believe it adds to misbehavior and chaos in the early grades, as above-average kids are frustrated, relegated to pointless busy work, and waiting for their less-ready classmates to catch up.
Just about the only enrichment that busy kindergarten teachers have time to make for kids who are already reading is to let them go to the school library and check out books that are closer to their reading level, instead of the ABC and wordless picture books in the kindergarten classroom that were appropriate and interesting for them when they were 3.
They can’t even practice their penmanship, another threshold skill for reading that’s fallen by the wayside in kindergarten. Why? Because there are no desks and chairs for solitary junior scholarship; everything has moved to “centers” or to the floor, on beanbags or sprawled on the carpet, in non-literate group activities. Nowadays a young child who wants to quietly read or write can only do it at home, and parents who want their child to hold a pencil correctly and form the letters well has to teach him or her themselves.
So you do everything schools ask you to do to get your child ready for kindergarten . . . and once there, your child has to go on “idle” for a couple of years until the other kids catch up. That’s because of outcome-based education – “no child left behind” – where everything is targeted toward the below-average student.
Dumbed-down kindergarten is all wrong for kids who’ve been read to by their parents, know the alphabet, are making up rhymes, use a pretty big vocabulary in everyday speech, can count to 20, know a few foreign words, respect adult authority, keep their hands to themselves, have good manners, and have been kept from TV addictions and so forth.
Those are the traits I see in my 5-year-old daughter and her preschool classmates. Yet they’re all going to go into another year or two of preschool-level methodology if they all go into public kindergartens, even in our so-called west Omaha suburban utopia. And it’s all because of the realities of a minority of their classmates, who are less well prepared, and the stubborn refusal of public schools to ability-group the kids until high school.
Now, this is all such a waste. We have everything that’s needed for a “best in the nation” public education system. Nebraska parents have provided mostly stable, intact, Mom-and-Dad homes; parental educational attainment is among the best in the nation; there are pockets of real poverty but they are scattered, and the overall conservative approach to “the good life” here favors common-sense educational philosophies and the old 3 R’s.
But things are changing, and changing fast.
Call me a canary – you know, like they have down in the mines. When the canary drops dead, they know there are gas fumes down there, and the humans scramble out. I ain’t dead yet – but I’m singin’ my head off.
And here’s my warning: there are reasons that two-thirds of Nebraska students test at mediocre or below on nationally standardized tests.
There are reasons so many Nebraska public-school students from Grades 7-12 don’t read and write at grade level.
There are reasons so many of our brightest students can pull down a 30 on the math portion of the ACT, but can’t even get into double digits on the reading side.
There are reasons above-average students sometimes feel like they’re twiddling their thumbs from K-8, until at long last, in high school, students are finally grouped by academic ability and not just by chronological age.
It’s because the special education mentality has taken over our schools, through standards-based educational regulations. Instead of gearing schooling toward the brightest, most able students, we’ve geared it toward those who need the most help.
You can tell by school budgets: tried-and-true, traditional content-based education is relatively cheap. The teacher’s salary and benefits are by far the biggest expense item, because about 80 percent of the kids should be able to practically teach themselves, once they can read.
Instead, the costs associated with the delivery of a traditional academic education now have dropped below 50 percent of the overall bill. Instead, we have waves and waves of staffers and programs and equipment and facilities geared toward delivering something else besides traditional academic content.
That’s where the money and the jobs are, which is what the unions like. So that’s what we have.
Of course, I’m for helping sweet, vulnerable children who need help. Of course, I’m for meeting legitimate special education needs.
But I hate how we’ve dropped the ball in the process of strengthening the weak to the point where now we are weakening the strong.
And it all starts in kindergarten. But smart parents can stop it before it starts.
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TUESDAY: Private kindergartens
(0) comments
Friday, March 25, 2005
Posted
10:04 AM
by Susan Darst Williams
What should parents of young children conclude from Go Big Ed’s hard look this week at trends toward more governmental control of the preschool years?
What should taxpayers think of the social engineering of the sandbox set that’s described in chilling detail on http://edaction.org/2005/031005.htm?
What should we think of a report by the President’s Commission on Excellence on Special Education (in Education Matters) that says that 80 percent of children in special education are there simply because they haven't learned how to read, and once in special education, they rarely catch up in reading or other core skills?
Well, I think we should hire the Pied Piper – you know, the one who called all the children to come out and follow him. Only instead of leaving their homes, this time, the children will leave the public schools – and be better off.
It’s time to quit hoping the public schools will introduce young children to literacy, numeracy, good behavior and the thrill of learning, and do it ourselves . . . by starting private kindergartens.
The only thing the public schools understand is loss of revenue. The only way to cut their revenue is to cut their enrollment. The only way to cut their enrollment is to develop places for the children to go, instead.
And the only way to influence the public schools to change, and do things right, is to show them how . . . from outside their influence.
It’s time to “skim the cream” off the top of Nebraska’s incoming kindergarten class, serve their needs better, teach them reading and writing correctly, and start showing the public what solid, traditional education can do for kids.
I really do predict that a season of “creaming” in Nebraska is about to begin. I think a lot of the more stable, wealthier parents are going to avoid public schools altogether. Why? Because they’re finally seeing the problems created by standards-based education, progressivism, Whole Language, Whole Math and the stubborn refusal of public schools to group children by reading ability so that their capacities are better matched to the curriculum.
I hope it becomes a strong trend that parents of 4- and 5-year-olds who are already reading, or about to, will sidestep the public schools and put their children in private schools, or start new ones, or even innovate with some of the cool hybrids I will describe next week.
Poor-quality, out-of-home preschool experiences, and chaotic, anti-academic kindergartens, have serious long-term consequences for children: they are being denied the things they need to maximize their IQ, literacy and life potential.
But there are lots and lots of resources out there, available to help, for those who want to find a better way.
That’s why I’m calling for parents to enroll their children in private kindergartens this fall, or if none exist, to start them.
Next week, we’ll look at how you can do just that.
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HAPPY EASTER!!!
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Thursday, March 24, 2005
Posted
11:50 AM
by Susan Darst Williams
Nowhere in our culture is the push toward socialistic government control over personal lives more apparent than in the sandbox and animal crackers set: our preschool children.
Nebraska is one of many states whose educrats are trying to take the early childhood education reins, and extend government control literally from the cradle to what they euphemistically call “Grade 16,” and we used to call the senior year in college.
It used to be that government on all levels kept its hands off kids ‘til they hit school. But starting with President Johnson’s anti-poverty push in the 1960s, with Head Start, government infrastructure and regulatory influence from birth through age 5 has mushroomed into a monolith.
Head Start has operated for nearly 40 years, enrolling 22 million children at a cost of more than $50 billion.
Cost of Head Start in Nebraska in 2004 was $35.7 million, for 5,080 children. That’s $7,027 per child.
For the lowdown on its ineffectiveness, search “Head Start” on www.cato.org and see articles by Darcy Ann Olsen, director of education and child policy for the Cato Institute. Housed within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Head Start is pitched to taxpayers as a way to get poor kids on a level playing field, educationally, with middle-class peers. But, as test scores show nationwide, it’s a failure.
Nationally, Head Start enrolled 905,851 children at a cost of nearly $6.8 billion last fiscal year. Because of a General Accounting Office report that indicated that 76% of the Head Starts had fiscal mismanagement issues, and a U.S. Health and Human Services finding that the net educational gain to Head Start children in the long run was a big, fat zero, the Bush Administration has been trying to dismantle Head Start.
Despite heavy opposition from left-wing organizations such as the Children’s Defense Fund, the Bush team seeks to block-grant the money to the 50 states to be administered more locally. It seeks a clearer focus on reading readiness, and not so much of the “save the rainforest,” “save the gays,” “bash the military” and “anybody who has any money is your enemy” indoctrination.
As more and more units of educational governance in Nebraska, including school districts like the Omaha Public Schools, become Head Start grantees, it shivers me timbers to think what a waste of tax dollars this is. Everybody’s for trying to help disadvantaged kids. But there’s a lot in it for the public school districts – more money and power, inflated enrollment statistics since they can fold pre-k numbers in with the rest – so that the conflict of interest is apparent. They’ll do it for the money, whether it works or not. And who’ll get hurt when 10 years down the road they find out it doesn’t work? The disadvantaged kids, of course.
The Cato Institute’s Ms. Olsen has it pegged: we know that free preschool for disadvantaged kids is a waste of money because of the many complex factors in disadvantaged children’s lives that put them at risk of school failure. Ms. Olsen says the only way to put all kids on equal footing in school is to use genetic engineering, surrogate parenting, and a nationwide network of homes away from home. But shhhh: maybe that’s what Hillary, Algore & Co. will try next.
Now, on the state level, government preschool is more modest in scale, but is growing rapidly. State-run preschools now cost taxpayers $2 billion nationwide, and counting. According to the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University (www.nieer.org/yearbook), about 10% of the nation’s 3- and 4-year-olds are in state-run preschool programs.
Nebraska has some 28 state grants to preschool programs going. For a list, see www.nde.state.ne.us/ECH/HeadStart/nestats.html) According to the NIEER, Nebraska’s system is ranked by access and resources to about where its population base suggests it should be; we are ranked quite high, sixth, in the quality of our standards, which is good.
The infrastructure for both state and federal preschools is already big, and growing. See the prek web pages on the State Education Department site, www.nde.state.ne.us There’s a Nebraska Head Start Collaboration Office, a state association and a national organization (www.nhsa.org) with a training conference coming up in Orlando, Fla.
But is all of this wise public policy? With Head Start, we already know that even the most expensive preschool program doesn’t help disadvantaged kids in the long run. Take a look at the demographics gaps in test scores in later grade school and high school, and you can see that. The Head Start kids are illiterate, drop out and land in jail at the same rate as disadvantaged kids who didn’t go to Head Start. The more we spend on government preschool for poor kids, the poorer they do in school.
So the Bush Administration would take the money now being thrown down a federal rathole into Head Start, and throw it down 50 state ratholes, with the push toward more state-run preschools.
That’d be like the Cat in the Hat – only instead of pink spots, it’d be taking the bad idea of government preschool, and spreading it and spreading it and spreading it.
So here’s a better way:
Survey the top 10% of this spring’s Nebraska high school graduates, public, private and homeschool. Find out what their preschooling was like.
How many hours a week did they go? Did it take place in a Head Start? A government-subsidized preschool? A private day-care center? A private preschool? A church-based preschool? Or mostly at home?
My gut instinct tells me the last two choices will be the prevalent ones because that’s where the kids feel the most loved – the most like precious children, and the least like “clients” that the education bureaucracy gets paid to enroll.
I bet close to 0% of the Top Ten went to Head Starts or public preschools of any kind.
So is that really where we want to invest? Noooooo.
Best answer: better parenting education for low-income families so that they’ll do a better job at the only preschool education practice that really works – reading aloud to kids – and access the already-generous health care and social services available to them now, outside of Head Start and state-run preschools, which should be minimized, not promoted.
Most importantly, we need significant tax cuts so that struggling parents can afford to give their kids the best head start possible. And that takes place in the private sector – mostly, in their very own homes.
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Wednesday, March 23, 2005
Posted
12:48 PM
by Susan Darst Williams
Nebraska is on the brink of instituting a government-controlled early childhood education system that will wreak the same kind of havoc on children ages 0 to 5 as the nationalized, dumbed-down “school deforms” of standardized, outcome-based education did to K-12 public education in the 1980s and ‘90s.
Public hearings are set by the State Department of Education for Tuesday, April 26, in Lincoln, North Platte and Scottsbluff that would erect the cornerstone of this new early-childhood edifice, mandatory all-day kindergarten. To review what’s proposed, send your comments, or plan to attend, see http://www.nde.state.ne.us/APAC/Rule10HearingDraft030405.htm
Oh, how I wish we had Dr. Karen R. Effrem of Minnesota here to blast all of this out of the water. She’s the pediatrician and pharmacist from the Twin Cities who is doing such a great job in Minnesota and nationally in explaining what’s wrong with government-controlled, public school-based, early childhood education.
See her excellent Feb. 24 testimony opposing two Minnesota bills similar to what’s proposed in Nebraska, “Testimony in Opposition to SF 673 and SF 949,” on the great Minnesota-based grassroots website, www.EdWatch.org
Besides mandating all-day kindergarten for all public-school districts by 2008-09, increasing the time in school for 5-year-olds from 400 hours to 1,032, Nebraska educrats want to force standards for curriculum and teacher training on early childhood education the way they’ve forced those boilerplated, dumbed-down, nationalized “standards” on K-12 schools.
That means somebody like me – a college graduate whose eldest daughter is graduating from a top East Coast college this spring as a Phi Beta Kappa – wouldn’t be “qualified” to teach toddlers, because I lack the training credential specified by the ultra-leftist National Association for the Education of Young Children.
Never mind all their radical political ideas, which they inflict on kids with their curriculum and philosophy. Let’s just talk about their approach to early childhood academics. I learned this from Dr. Effrem’s articles, among other sources:
The NAEYC is against grouping kids by ability. So a very bright 5-year-old who’s already reading will have to spend all day in kindergarten doing non-literate “activities” with kids who aren’t even sitting still yet, and don’t even know or care about the alphabet.
The NAEYC is also against teaching kids anything at all. Instead, they’re supposed to be left alone to “discover” everything for themselves. That’s why public kindergartens today are “child-centered” rather than “teacher-directed.” They’re oriented toward the group, not the individual child. There is no syllabus or curriculum guide with any meat in it. The kids are supposed to just “be” and “play.” It makes it a head-scratcher why the paid staff in these rooms are supposedly so high-skilled, then. As for the child’s learning, you don’t learn vocabulary, reasoning skills, problem-solving and how to behave from other little kids. At least not very well, and we have the test scores to prove it.
Last, but not least, the NAEYC has pushed “best practice” on public schools, and they’ve bought it, hook, line and sinker, even though it’s actually some of the “worst” ideas about working with precious young children. For example, “best practice” holds that helping kids see the relationships between written symbols for words, and the sounds those letters make when spoken, somehow quashes kids’ creativity and self-esteem. “Best practice,” according to the early-childhood educrats, is to allow a purposeless free-for-all and let kids “guess” at everything they undertake, from what words on a page say, to how to measure the weight of rocks. Naturally, most of the time, because of inexperience, they guess wrong – but they aren’t to be corrected, because that would quash their creativity and self-esteem, too.
Goofy! Surreal! Nuts!
And yet, if you look through early childhood education pages on the Nebraska Department of Education website, www.nde.state.ne.us, you see a growing infrastructure being put in place to seize government control of ages 0 to 5. Examples:
-- Rule 11, the state’s early childhood education regulations
-- State aid for all-day kindergarten and 28 subsidized preschool grants around the state, both of which would only grow in scope if the April 26 hearings don’t help stop them
-- The Early Childhood Interagency Coordinating Council
-- The “PreK to Grade 16 Initiative”
-- Parents as Teachers, the program with snoopy in-home social worker visits and micromanaging of parenting
As usual, the educrats are starting off with false cries of a “kindergarten readiness crisis” for disadvantaged kids. That’s why we “need” all these governmental programs. But of course, once in place, the mandates and regulations will soon sweep all children of all income levels and cognitive abilities under this rug. And you cannot believe the amount of social engineering and intrusive data collection that comes along.
But here’s how Dr. Effrem would refute each of the claims for why Nebraska’s babies have to be standardized at taxpayer expense:
-- There is no “kindergarten readiness crisis.”
According to a U.S. Department of Education study in February 2000 on 22,000 youngsters, titled “America’s Kindergartners,” 97% of incoming kindergartners are in good health, 94% are already proficient with numbers and counting, 92% are eager to learn, and 82% have solid pre-literacy skills already in place, such as phonemic awareness, the crucial threshold condition for learning to read that relates to the sounds that letters make, and knowing that print goes from left to right. Claims that our 5-year-olds are all educational basket cases and Nebraska taxpayers should subsidize state-controlled day-care and preschool or the next generation will all be stupid and turn to a life of crime are more ridiculous than a Dr. Seuss rhyme.
-- There’s no evidence that all-day kindergarten does anything other than provide free day-care for parents of 5-year-olds; doubling the time away from home at that age damages the child’s attachment to his or her parents for no good purpose and interferes with intellectual development.
Actually, according to the book Better Late Than Early by developmental psychologist, former school superintendent and former college president Raymond S. Moore, no legitimate research backs up the efficacy of compulsory education for young children. The rapid spread of infectious diseases among groups of young children, plus vision and hearing developmental differences, make group settings in which “learning” is supposedly taking place a bad idea in general.
Look at the damage that’s been done, particularly to boys, by forcing too much structured, out-of-home, tightly-regulated activity too early. That’s why so many are on Ritalin and so many hate school, have to have remedial education, aren’t leaders, misbehave, don’t read at grade level, hate to read in general, and are distracted toward amusements rather than pursuing the thrill of learning.
As Moore wrote, “the most powerful stimulus to a child’s development is warm, continuous mothering.” All-day kindergarten and “free” government day-care would make things worse, not better.
-- Claims that children’s brain development necessitates formalized preschool to maximize learning potential are bogus. The public is being deceived when taxpayer-subsidized early childhood education is sold as a necessity before the “window of opportunity” in brain development mysteriously closes.
Dr. Effrem cites studies from neuroscientists that explain that the brain studies that the educrats rely upon for those false notions were done on rhesus monkeys and laboratory rats – with far different developmental cycles and realities than human children.
The father of Outcome-Based Education, Benjamin Bloom, was deceptive when he said that half of the child’s intellectual capacity is attained by age 4 and that’s why early childhood education is necessary. The fact is, formalized “teaching” has nothing to do with the development of intellectual capacity. What children learn on their own time schedules instead of one forced on them is always learned better with far less anxiety, frustration and neurosis.
The only brain research that counts in terms of the link between early childhood and student achievement on down the road is that which shows that the more time spent reading or being read to, the higher the ultimate achievement in school and in life.
There also are dramatic differences in reading attitudes and abilities between kids who were read to a lot as itty bitties and those who were not.
It doesn’t take a massive bureaucracy, special training, billions of tax dollars or 40 hours a week to create a literate student who is well-behaved, loves to read and takes to learning like a fish to water. It takes time at home with Mom and Dad, and freedom, and peace and quiet. All the formalized preschool in the world can’t equal that.
I’m with Dr. Effrem: she says what we really need, instead of a huge Baby Ed superstructure, is to get rid of all the stuff that doesn’t work. Then we could afford to give families significant tax cuts so that moms can stay home full- or part-time with their kids, and give them a truly good head start on learning.
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Tuesday, March 22, 2005
Posted
11:26 AM
by Susan Darst Williams
A story last week in www.NorthPlatteBulletin.com reported that a mother of two grown children, a longtime taxpayer, spoke to the North Platte Board of Education about “mission creep” in the public schools.
She said it is saddling taxpayers with all-day kindergarten and now a proposed subsidized preschool program in the North Platte Public Schools.
She quoted district figures on state aid to education for all-day kindergarten. Surprisingly, the State of Nebraska provides North Platte with $1.2 million more than its reported extra cost of all-day kindergarten.
Technically, then, all-day kindergarten is a “money-maker” for the district – a cash cow. And yet there’s a hubbub in North Platte because nearly 50 of the little kindergartners aren’t cutting the mustard, even with all-day programming, to move on to first grade.
What’s the district’s proposed solution? Not the obvious one: fix their ineffective kindergarten curriculum. Nooooo. Instead, they want to ADD to the money and bureaucracy already in place in early childhood programs and kindergarten in the public schools, even though they aren’t working . . . to overfeed the cash cow even though it isn’t giving much milk.
Moooooooove over, cost-efficiency and common sense.
This is a good example of the trend in public education to turn toward “baby ed” to get more revenue streaming in, and more jobs for union members. But the evidence is clear: more time out of a parent’s care and in a large, chaotic, overstructured environment with other little kids, not your parent, as role models, is bad for little kids both cognitively and behaviorally speaking.
We know from bona fide research that formal preschool has no effect on IQ or later academic achievement . . . and that all-day kindergarten, which in Nebraska is almost always based on Whole Language techniques instead of phonics, denies kids early literacy, dumbs them down, and exposes them to twice as much boring, inappropriate time away from home as half-day kindergarten did, at twice the expense to taxpayers.
So who on earth thinks all-day kindergarten and subsidized preschool from the cradle onward, are good ideas?
According to a 40-page report earlier this year to the Nebraska Board of Education, “Nebraska Early Childhood Policy Study,” the state’s education bureaucracy sure does.
‘Course, the “leadership team” for this study were all union wonks, school district employees, educational organization chieftains and employees of educational bureaucracies – except for two lone parents. An avalanche of educrats, in other words.
So why are we not surprised that the “solutions” presented by this “leadership team” are . . . drum roll, please . . . more money and bureaucracy for the public schools to build their early childhood education edifices? (See the report, www.nde.state.ne.us/ech/ECPolicyStudy_2.pdf)
The report indicated that 67 percent of Nebraska kids were in full-day kindergarten in the 2003-04 school year, and counting. Meanwhile, there were 28 grants operating for subsidized, in-school, early-childhood programs around the state, with state tax dollars subsidizing up to 50 percent of the cost.
The verbiage in the report is chilling: they talk about getting universal government preschool, home visits by social workers, and all that other social engineering gobbledygook; they talk about needing to build a “collective will” to get this done in Nebraska, creating a “seamless continuum” of child care and preschool, and “embracing diversity” to make it really great.
So the beat goes on to institutionalize childhood as in the old Soviet Union, even in the American heartland like North Platte . . . and even with the utter absence of evidence that preschool helps any children except the basket-case disadvantaged kids who are already supposedly served by the federally-funded Head Start program.
Meanwhile, the push toward free preschool for all threatens to destroy the options for private child care for all but the richest parents. That includes church-based child care where the kiddies can fold their hands and say grace before meals, put on a real Christmas pageant, and be accepted and encouraged for whatever stage of development they may be in, instead of becoming grist for the standardized mills that our public schools are becoming.
In contrast to private preschools, government preschool is driven by nationalized standards and assessments, forced compliance with government specs to obtain accreditation, and tight reins on teacher credentials so that preschool staff will be indoctrinated with the politicized curriculum pushed by the National Association for the Education of Young Children.
The NAEYC pushed a two-year Child Development Associate’s degree through the nation’s community colleges that is going to be increasingly required. But it is based on radical, politicized ideas that are absolutely head-scratchingly wrong for itty bitties. Examples: embracing homosexuality; making anatomically-correct drawings; learning “religious diversity” by play-acting witchcraft with the witches as good, not bad; and so on.
What’s really crazy is that this stuff doesn’t even work. Note that European countries have had government preschool for years and years, and yet America’s younger kids moosh theirs on standardized tests.
The experts admit that the biggest subsidized preschool program in the U.S., Head Start, has cost this nation more than $44 billion since the 1960s but has created no discernible improvement in the academic achievement of the disadvantaged kids it is supposed to serve. (See articles by Darcy Olsen on Head Start and universal preschool on www.cato.org)
As is happening all over the country, school officials in North Platte are saying that kids are coming to kindergarten “not ready” for school. That violates the first goal of the federal takeover of education’s enabling act, Goals 2000, and its evil spawn, No Child Left Behind.
Of course, that’s balderdash: nine out of 10 kids are ready for kindergarten in terms of pre-literacy skills, number sense, good health and eagerness to learn. That’s according to studies of tens of thousands of young children all across the land.
And making them spend more time, not less, in the company of these boneheaded government nannies who refuse to teach them to read, write and figure, even though they’re ready, is the exact opposite thing that needs to be done.
Doesn’t anybody remember those recent studies that showed that the more time small children spend in structured, out-of-home day care, the more aggressive, defiant and disobedient they are later on, in school?
Doesn’t anyone remember the evidence that family characteristics, particularly a good relationship with one’s mother, are the best indicator of future academic success?
Doesn’t anyone know that reading experts like Jim Trelease (www.trelease-on-reading.com) affirm that the single most important thing a parent can do for a young child is to read aloud to that child lots and lots? But school-based preschool and all-day kindergarten rob a child of the priceless hours of “lap time” necessary for that to happen.
What kids need is a proper kindergarten experience – just a half-day – and the rest of the time either at home getting reared by a loving mom and dad, or in a small, unstressful, homelike, quality child-care setting such as a child-care home or small center, where they can keep from getting overstressed, overstimulated and overtired.
Schools would do a lot better correcting their off-base kindergarten curriculum than doubling the time they’re spending on the wrong things, anyway. Proper reading, writing, speaking, listening and spelling instruction, based on phonics, can be done in a big 20 minutes a day.
In schools with phonics-only kindergartens, 100 percent of the kids are reading and writing mighty fine by Christmas of the kindergarten year. You see that only in some private kindergartens, since they’re the only ones that didn’t kill phonics in the 1960s and ‘70s. In schools that use Whole Language, which is most of the public kindergartens in Nebraska, you get a gigantic mess like North Platte has, with herds of kids not reading and not ready for first grade.
North Platte has chosen Whole Language over phonics, and a “child-centered” approach, which is a preschool approach, over the traditional teacher-directed, instructionally-based but play-oriented introduction to academics which used to characterize a good kindergarten.
North Platte’s answer is outrageous: instead of going back to systematic, intensive, explicit phonics and a half-day program, which is what kindergartners need, the district is expanding its all-day no-good, very-bad kindergarten program, adding staff, and looking in to also offering a “developmental kindergarten” next year.
That “solution” from the government nannies would make these poor little kids who already feel like failures go through not one but TWO years of lousy kindergarten – the same old, same old stuff that isn’t making them literate and numerate NOW, but somehow, by immersing them in it for twice as much time and at twice the cost, it’ll be better for them.
Riiiiiight.
Where are my milk and cookies? I need ‘em, and a nap mat, pronto. This is so sad, I might even have to suck my thumb as I contemplate how easy it would be to do kindergarten right . . . but how powerful the forces amassed against it are . . . and how unlikely it is that North Platte or any other big district will be able to get it right any time soon.
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Wednesday: A Minnesota physician plays hardball on preschool politics.
(0) comments
Monday, March 21, 2005
Posted
10:03 AM
by Susan Darst Williams
(First in a series)
Something that’s going on with preschool and kindergarten in the public schools in North Platte and across the country reminds me of another one of my crazy education protest songs. I call it “Government Nannies”:
(to the tune of “Sixteen Tons”)
They’ve got to come to school ready and able
So government nannies rock the cradle.
Gave ‘em my babies; what a fool!
I sold my kids to the government school!
We gave ‘em K through 12, and what do we get?
A nation illiterate and deeper in debt.
Preschool, meals, latchkey, drug-testing, too:
Is there anything left for the home to do?
We give up our sweet kids and parental rights.
But kids need YOU, so put up a fight.
Don’t let ‘em fall into this cesspool:
Don’t sell your kids to the government school!
Well, it’s not THAT bad . . . but it’s bad. The more time and money we devote to public education, and the more young children are captured in the government-school system at earlier and earlier ages, the worse our kids seem to be doing, both academically and in terms of character development.
Not all kids, of course. But certainly enough to be very concerned.
I’m convinced that it is folly to extend the public school’s dominion over our kids to younger ages, before kindergarten, and after the 12th grade year, through what they’re now delicately calling “16th grade.”
I have children in both of those stages – one a college senior, and one who just turned 5. I’ve read and thought a lot about this issue. I’ve observed the long-term consequences of all-day kindergarten in two of my three older children and their peers. I’m familiar with what works best in preschool education for disadvantaged kids, based on reputable studies. And I have to conclude that parents and taxpayers need to blow the whistle on the increase in “government nannies” immediately.
Tomorrow, we’ll see how a mom in North Platte, Neb., did just that.
There’s a very good case being made for reducing time spent in government schools, not increasing it. And that goes double for the itty bitties.
Go Big Ed will cover this controversy this week with a five-part series on preschool and kindergarten in the public schools.
(0) comments
Friday, March 18, 2005
Posted
8:53 AM
by Susan Darst Williams
Now, here’s a fine how do you do: Go Big Ed reported this week that high-school graduation rates for Nebraska’s African-American students and Latino students were 53% and 50%, respectively. That’s according to a national report on graduation rates by a Ph.D. researcher on www.manhattan-institute.org/html/cr_baeo.htm
But 450 Nebraska educators were told Wednesday at the Annual Hispanic Education Summit co-sponsored by the State Education Department in Lincoln that the Latino dropout rate is actually 12.2 percent (Thursday’s World-Herald, p. 3B).
Since that’s only one-fourth as high as Go Big Ed reported, eyebrows were raised in skepticism in the palatial offices of Go Big Ed in the foothills of Mount Laundry, Neb.
So I went back to my source, and found out through a Wall Street Journal article posted with the national study that there are lots of ways to come up with a “dropout rate,” and educators always, always take the way that makes them look as dandy-fine as possible.
They’re cooking the books on all four burners with a turbocharge, in other words.
The claim that the Latino dropout rate is 12.2 percent is apparently an annual figure, not a cumulative one, then. It was from a report by Omaha sociologists Lourdes Gouveia and Mary Ann Powell. Nebraska Education Commissioner Doug Christensen attended the meeting, and there was no record that he corrected the outrageous 400% understatement. I mean, if you dropped out in ninth grade, you still dropped out when your classmates are graduating. But Nebraska doesn’t count you that way. It sweeps you under the rug.
Neither did he correct another understatement from the report, that the dropout rate for whites in Nebraska is 2.9 percent. According to the national study, it’s 10 percent.
How can this be? Well, lots of ways: according to the Dec. 18, 2001, Wall Street Journal article, educators almost never report the cumulative dropout rate. They just report how many kids dropped out that year. Since kids start dropping out as early as seventh grade, the lack of a cumulative, chronological figure is highly deceptive.
Also, educators always want to include kids who dropped out of school but eventually received their General Equivalency Diploma, or GED, in the “graduation rate.” However, that’s not fair, since what we’re measuring is how successful school systems were in accomplishing their basic mission, K-12.
If the student never got a diploma from that school, he or she shouldn’t be included in the graduation count. GED students have just about the same career and personal problems as dropouts, anyway.
The national study, by Dr. Jay P. Greene, was careful to exclude GEDs, and went back to 1993 figures to collect eighth-grade head counts reported by schools to the U.S. Department of Education. Then he compared those figures with diplomas awarded in 1998 to come up with his data.
Significantly, U.S. Department of Education officials do not dispute Greene’s data. So the 50% figure for Nebraska is much closer to the bruising reality for Hispanic citizens than the number bandied about by state officials.
Now, it is true that schools do not have good recordkeeping systems and often do not know whether a particular student has moved or has actually dropped out. With the extra mobile Hispanic population, that could indeed be a factor. But Greene’s methodology was sophisticated and deemed accurate. If he can find out, there’s no reason professional sociologists and high-paid state officials can’t.
In the Wall Street Journal article, Greene was quoted as saying that schools commonly “cook” their statistics to make themselves look good. For instance, there was a ballot issue pending in Michigan that would have allowed school-choice vouchers in any district that failed to graduate at least two-thirds of its students.
Miraculously, the graduation rate in Detroit went up from 30% to 68% in one year.
Now, THAT’S a fine how do you do!
Why should we care if Nebraska officials are operating under false data and giving the public false perceptions about the real problem with certain student groups?
Here’s why: according to the Journal article, high-school dropouts earned only about half as much as high-school graduates in 1999, and were much more likely to go on welfare, land in prison, or become single parents.
If that’s not “fine” with you, then give your state and local education officials a “how do you do,” and demand accuracy in public information so that we all can make wiser decisions on policy issues that mean so much to people’s lives and the future of our state.
(0) comments
Thursday, March 17, 2005
Posted
8:24 AM
by Susan Darst Williams
A reader expressing concern about revelations Wednesday showing a large racial graduation gap between whites and minority kids in Nebraska schools said we are lucky to have two private schools in inner-city Omaha already picking up some of the slack.
They are the Apollos Preparatory School, and its neighbor, the Omaha Street School, both at 3223 N. 45th St.
Apollos aims to give inner-city kids the best possible start with academic basics in a smaller, more personal setting, with excellent results. Older kids who are “push-outs” and dropouts, almost all of them black, are being served at the Street School.
It takes a whole lot more than just the luck o’ the Irish to keep schools like these going . . . but on this St. Patrick’s Day, we wish them the very, very best of luck, with our thanks and admiration.
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RACIAL GRADUATION GAP PERSISTS INTO UNL
Sometimes I feel like the canary down in the mines. When the canary sings, the miners know it’s time to get the heck out of there because she’s a-gonna blow.
Well, this canary is singing about racial disparities in Nebraska’s education system. But it’s not a happy song: far from it. The facts are, well, explosive. Turns out the differences in the outcomes among whites, blacks and Latinos that exist in our K-12 public schools persist into college, and even grow worse, at least in Nebraska.
Wednesday’s Go Big Ed reported that white students graduate from Nebraska high schools at significantly higher rates than African-Americans and Latinos (90% vs. 53% and 50%, respectively). Turns out that graduation gap is reflected in the state’s largest university and is much wider than the difference between the races in graduation rates of surrounding state schools.
At the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, almost twice as many white students graduate within six years as African-American students. While a racial graduation gap exists at each of our neighboring state universities, UNL’s is the widest.
The data is from The Education Trust (www.edtrust.org), which used National Center for Education Statistics surveys to compare graduation rates of most of the nation’s colleges and universities.
The University of Nebraska-Lincoln posted an overall six-year graduation rate in 2003 of 59.5%, which ranked 11th out of 16 in a grouping of state universities from all over the country with approximately the same enrollment, median SAT, cost and so forth.
White students at UNL had a graduation rate of 61.9%, versus 31.7% for African-Americans and 25.5% for Latinos.
Using a web tool provided by Ed Trust (www.collegeresults.org), Go Big Ed compared UNL to six surrounding state universities. UNL had the lowest graduation rates for African-American students and Latinos among the seven universities, and ranked fifth in the overall graduation rate and fifth in the rate for white students.
The graduation gap between whites and African-Americans at UNL, 61.9% compared to 31.7%, comes to 30.2 percentage points. That compares to 13.2 percentage points at the University of Missouri, 14.8 percentage points at the University of Colorado, 18.6 at Kansas University, 19.7 at Kansas State, 23.3 at Iowa State and 27.1 at Iowa University.
Here are the statistics:
UNL
Overall: 59.5%
White: 61.9%
African-American: 31.7%
Latino: 25.5%
Missouri-Columbia
Overall: 66.5%
White: 68.4%
African-American: 55.2%
Latino: 56.1%
Iowa U
Overall: 64.5%
White: 65.1%
African-American: 38%
Latino: 64%
Iowa State
Overall: 65.7%
White: 66.9%
African-American: 43.6%
Latino: 58.8%
Kansas
Overall: 58.1%
White: 59.7%
African-American: 41.1%
Latino: 47.3%
Kansas State
56.2%
White: 58.2%
African-American: 38.5%
Latino: 38.8%
Colorado
Overall: 67.8%
White: 69.9%
African-American: 55.1%
Latino: 57%
What’s the answer? Well, I’m a canary, remember? I only know one tune. And that tune is: we HAVE to deliver better academics in the early grades for disadvantaged kids.
For whatever the reason, they’re not getting the basics of reading, writing, figuring and thinking in Nebraska grade schools. And it shows. Once they get to the university, they’re not equipped, and they fail. It’s deplorable.
It doesn’t require more money. In fact, it probably requires less. Look at the inner-city Catholic schools around the country, producing more literacy and numeracy among the hardest-to-educate kids at a lower cost.
We can’t keep throwing money at this problem, because the conventional methods and systems obviously don’t work.
OK, the canary sang. We need to fix this. I say it’s time for school choice. We need to cultivate the kinds of schools that can put this right.
It’s time for Nebraska birds of all colors of feathers to flock together, and do what it takes to improve the educational outcomes of all our kids.
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Wednesday, March 16, 2005
Posted
10:07 AM
by Susan Darst Williams
Remember those firehoses they used on civil-rights activists who were trying to get a fair deal for black children in the schools of the South, a half-century ago? Well, let’s get those hoses out again, and crank open those hydrants full blast. Only this time, let’s aim them at school officials, because of this atrocious factoid:
Nebraska’s white students are third in the nation in the rate of high-school graduation. But our black students rank about 40th and our Hispanic kids are about 42nd in that important measurement of educational attainment.
That’s according to a study by distinguished education researcher Jay P. Greene, Ph.D., using 1998 federal data, www.manhattan-institute.org/html/cr_baeo.htm (Note: not all states had sufficient data to be in the study, so the rankings might be slightly different in actuality. But this is alarming enough.)
In Nebraska, 90% of the white students graduate from high school, but only 53% of the African-American students do, and 50% of the Latino kids.
That means for nine out of 10 white kids, parents and taxpayers get a satisfactory result from the expenditure of all those tax dollars over a K-12 education. But only about one out of two children of color obtain the same benefit.
What do you call that? Suggestion: “racism per se.”
Overall, Nebraska’s graduation rate is 85 percent, behind only Iowa (93%) and North Dakota (88%).
In terms of white kids graduating, our 90% mark is behind only Iowa’s white kids, at 95%, and Wisconsin’s, at 92%.
But our African-American students rank close to the bottom in graduation percentages. Only 10 states are lower than us: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Minnesota, Nevada, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Tennessee and Wisconsin.
Meanwhile, our Hispanic students have only a 50-50 chance of receiving that high-school diploma, and those odds are worse than all but these eight states: Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, Oregon and Tennessee.
I know there are umpteen reasons why this is happening, and I’m not saying anybody anywhere in Nebraska is doing this on purpose.
I’m only saying that what is, is . . . and can’t be tolerated a moment longer. They’ve had 50 years to fix this, and an unbelievable amount of tax dollars. It’s time to recognize that it’s a systemic problem, one that requires breakthrough thinking and a new structure.
If I were the Big Kahuna of Nebraska education, I’d immediately use those firehoses on the top-ranking officials of state government and local school districts who have allowed this situation to exist. I mean yes, state officials would be out of a job. And pressure in the form of direct competition and public exposure of the data on their failure would be put on local ed officials to shine the light on the racial inequalities in their districts.
Harsh? Yes. But so is racism.
Then I would go to work creating incentives for entrepreneurs to get in there and build lifeboats for these kids. I’m talking about using the courts to create a completely voluntary, no-strings attached, school-choice system for minority students in Nebraska. However much money their home district receives for their enrollment in state aid to education should instantly transfer to the private school of their parents’ choice.
There should be no assessment or record-keeping requirements associated with this other than your basic health, safety and enrollment data, to avoid having the public schools’ methods taint the private-school alternatives.
The knowledge that a doable sum of money will be there for each student would be enough to motivate charitably-minded entrepreneurs to set up private, nonprofit “lifeboat” schools to serve kids of color. Right now, there aren’t any because the economics are so impossible for starting private schools. But I know, from talking to countless people, that there is great concern and people want to help.
Tuition would be nearly covered by the state-aid vouchers, and surely the voucher students would be joined by others whose parents would have to come up with the money on their own.
Supplemental revenue would come from typical private-school fund-raising campaigns. There’s a wave of people now in their 70s, with money, who remember the civil rights battles well enough to see that our “solutions” just haven’t cut it, and another generation is going down the tubes.
An enterprising lawyer could make a case for this using the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, along with the “disparate impact” regulation of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Why? Well, obviously the huge discrepancy in graduation rates among the races indicates that the education system in Nebraska has a disproportionately adverse effect on children of color.
And that ain’t right.
C’mon, now: this is highly embarrassing for Nebraska, to see these kids’ futures going up in flames.
It’s an emergency! Let’s break glass and get them away from these schools where their dreams are going up in smoke. Let’s get them into private schools, which are demonstrating nationwide (www.noexcuses.org) that they are the schools which will give kids their educational rights.
Those rights include phonics, traditional math, handwriting instruction, spelling correction, quality kiddie lit, ability grouping, and solid curriculum K-12 instead of Political Correctness.
That’s how we can rekindle the flame of hope and opportunity.
That’s not blaming the public schools. That’s not mean. That’s using our heads. How do we prevent prairie fires and forest fires from getting out of hand? We clear out the dead underbrush that could fuel the fire.
It’s the same thing with schools that haven’t fixed this appalling gulf between the races in providing educational opportunity.
It’s practical, compassionate and smart. That’s more like the Nebraska we all know and love than the shocking statistic that only one out of two brown-skinned Nebraskans is in a cap and gown on Graduation Day.
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Here’s a quote on point:
"One last, seldom-praised function of competition in economic growth, is that it eliminates obsolete forms of economic activity, clearing away the underbrush, or if one prefers, burying the economically dead. This function is not to be taken for granted: consider the difficulty experienced by the political sphere in getting rid of programs that are obsolete or that have simply failed."
--How the West Grew Rich, Rosenberg and Birdzell, 1986 (p. 276)
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Tuesday, March 15, 2005
Posted
12:52 PM
by Susan Darst Williams
Two news events in other states pose a warning to Nebraskans who are determined to never let our public schools sink this low:
An ex-principal in Rockford, Ill., outside Chicago has sued the superintendent who demoted her and had her transferred after she blew the whistle on some bogus reading programs the district was using that were ineligible for federal grants.
Meanwhile, a group of parents are protesting a sex ed video to be shown to 10th graders in a district near Washington, D.C., with a woman stretching condoms over cucumbers and talking about oral and anal sex, transgenderism, and so forth.
O . . . K. So now we have to fight for our jobs and SUE our schools when they punish us for pointing out that they’re doing something wrong with taxpayer money that doesn’t work as well as what they’re supposed to be doing . . . and when schools teach things to kids that are so disgusting and tawdry they wouldn’t even have been imagined 20 years ago, and people complain, school officials think the ones who complain are the ones with the problem.
Read more about the Rockford situation in today’s Rockford Register Star, www.rrstar.com The Rockford ex-principal is Tiffany Parker, who filed eight counts against Superintendent Dennis Thompson in U.S. District Court under state and federal protection laws for whistle-blowers, and is also seeking damages contending that Thompson placed her in a false light before the public and denied her freedom of speech and due process.It is very instructive to point out that the principal is pro-phonics, and her school was using a direct-instruction, phonics-only program endorsed by the federal reading grants program, Reading First. Phonics is what we want; this was good. The school is 80 percent black and low-income, yet in 2003, those third-graders came in second in the district on the statewide reading exam; only the gifted kids beat them.
Wow!
But then new administrators came to the district, according to the lawsuit, and told teachers that they could switch to “balanced literacy,” which is Whole-Language based, rather than phonics-based. It’s what “The Blob” loves – the teachers’ colleges, education bureaucracies and unions. You know: minimize phonics instruction, have “guided reading,” let kids guess at what words mean, don’t correct their spelling or build their vocabularies systematically, and so forth. It’s what most public schools across the country, and (sob!) in Nebraska, are using, though it is nowhere near as effective in literacy as phonics-only curricula and is not supposed to be funded with the Reading First grants.
In Rockford, the superintendent has denied that the action taken against the principal constitutes retaliation for her informing the feds that the district wasn’t using the right method. It’s a mess, and somehow, one wonders if the exact same thing might not happen in Nebraska, where Reading First grants are being distributed left and right but most teachers only know about “balanced literacy.” We can only hope that if something like this happens here, there will be brave whistle-blowers like this, exposing the Return of the Blob.
As for the cucumber debacle, columnist Cal Thomas explained in www.townhall.com last week and homeschooling mom Callie Woodlief wrote in www.worldnetdaily.com on Saturday that in Montgomery County, Md., this spring at three middle schools and three high schools, students will be taught how to put a condom on a cucumber. Hardy har har, isn’t sex ed fun? They will also be taught that homosexual couples are the newest American “family” and that each student needs to “develop” his or her (or whatever’s or none of the above’s) own “sexual identity.”
Thomas reported that the pilot program requires parental permission for now, “but that won't last,” he wrote. “Once ‘legitimacy’ is established, pressure will be applied to make anyone who doesn't take the course feel like an outsider. Many will conform in order to avoid being ‘stigmatized.’”
Meanwhile, most of the kids aren’t at risk for pregnancy or sexually-transmitted diseases in the first place because they already KNOW sex out of wedlock is wrong and are trying to remain abstinent. An NBC News / People magazine poll in January surveyed 13- to 16-year-olds on sex attitudes; 27 percent of the kids said they were sexually active, and 73 percent said they were not.
Why, then, shouldn’t school sex ed focus on the good choices made by the majority of the kids, and helping the rest follow suit, Thomas asked. Why should kids be told the bald-faced lie that transgenderism is normal and that they need a chance to “develop” their sexual orientation, not get counseling if they have trouble accepting how they were made.
Instead, Thomas wrote, sordid sex ed programs like the one in Maryland seem bent on “encouraging the behavior we claim not to want.”
Yeah, well, what you teach, you get. Look at those great test scores in Rockford for those disadvantaged little kids: they were taught reading right, but then the method was taken away, and God knows what is going to happen to their literacy skills and their test scores next year.
It makes you want to bop educators like that on the head . . . with a very large cucumber.
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Monday, March 14, 2005
Posted
8:37 AM
by Susan Darst Williams
The Legislature’s website has posted a mighty interesting listing of lobbying expenditures in the Nebraska Unicam over the last year.
Of course, you see eye-popping budgets for Big Gambling, Big Booze, Big Pharma, Big Health Care, the tobacco people, the trial attorneys, all the usual suspects from corporate Nebraska, all the utilities and cities and so forth . . . and then there are the education lobbyists.
Here’s a partial listing. To wit:
University of Nebraska, $100,099.00
Nebraska State Education Association, $87,353.49
Lincoln Public Schools, $80,303.46
Nebraska Council of School Administrators, $72,461.66
University of Nebraska Medical Center, $52,000
Omaha Public Schools, $50,631.75
Millard Public Schools, $28,757.33
Nebraska Rural Community School Association, $25,000
Nebraska Association of School Boards, $15,785.00
Class 1’s United $13,600
Westside Community Schools, $12,875.05
Nebraska School Finance Coalition, $11,377.16
Nebraska Association of Retired School Personnel, $5,000
That’s only a partial list of education lobbyists over the past 12 months, but it comes to more than $555,000, or $11,300 for each of the 49 state senators. That’s for education influence peddling alone. Last I heard, state senators were paid $12,000 a year. Hmm, hmm, hmmmmmm.
Look at that beefy $87,000 being poured out by the teachers’ unions, vs. that scrawny $13,600 by the country schools in Class 1’s United. Those two are adversaries on the bill that would wipe out Nebraska’s rural schools. It’s a David-Goliath situation. Oh, well: look what Gambling With the Good Life did to Big Gambling despite being outspent by a zillion to one. Miracles do happen!
But boy, the political power being expended with an impact on education goes far, far beyond these lobbying clients. We saw that last week when, incredibly, the bill to ban mercury from childhood vaccinations went down to defeat in committee despite a mountain of evidence pointing to a link between mercury and autism and other learning disabilities.
If you browse the lobbying list for pharmaceutical companies on http://www.unicam.state.ne.us you will be amazed to see how many of them are on there.
Hmm, hmm, HMMMMMM.
What don’t you see, at least not much? Lobbying expenditures for grassroots parents and taxpayers on education issues and spending.
No wonder we never get our way on anything. That giant “L” you see on our foreheads is not for “Legislation.”
Hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, HMMMMMMM . . . D’OH.
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