Posted 8:45 AM by Susan Darst Williams

TGIF: ‘BEST OF BIG ED’ SERIES; SOS ON LD; DAD JAILED OVER GAY ED

Announcing a “Best of Big Ed” series of stories, beginning Monday.

We’ll search the state for the coolest, most exciting, most intriguing, most effective learning activities that went on this school year in public and private schools and homeschools.

Send in your nominations with the district, school and teacher’s name and a little about what went on. It’ll be inspiring and fun . . . and definitely worth sharing with everyone who loves quality education.

SOS ON LD

Are 80 percent of the students labeled as “special education” only because of reading problems, not really because they have medically-discernible handicaps or learning challenges?

Parents and teachers attending the monthly meeting of the Elkhorn Valley Learning Disabilities Association Thursday said that figure is pretty accurate. But they said they believed their children would not have developed learning disabilities to a significant degree if they had received proper reading instruction in kindergarten and first grade.

The group met at Elkhorn Ridge Middle School to hear a presentation on reading interventions in the early grades in the Westside Community Schools given by Jenelle Strecker. The goal of her work is to help teachers spot children who might develop learning problems on down the road if they do not have good preliteracy skills in kindergarten and first grade. The presence or absence of those skills are identifiable with 20-minute tests given three times a year, she said. Ms. Strecker and other District 66 staff then work with the classroom teachers to develop strategies to help the children improve in those deficiencies so that no serious problems develop.

The group’s purpose is to inform parents, educators and the public about “the hidden handicap of a learning disability.” Guest speakers come from the fields of education, psychology and medicine. Articles in the spring newsletter were on such topics as forming partnerships between parents, students and teachers to ensure school success; how to tell if an adult has an undiagnosed and untreated learning disability; how to adapt various school subjects for LD kids in an “inclusive” classroom; how the ADHD child fits in to family interactions; helping your child with homework; and ideas for family fun.

For more information, email ldaofneb@yahoo.com To join LDA-Nebraska, send a $30 check payable to LDA to LDA-Nebraska, 3135 N. 93rd St., Omaha, NE 68134, to cover national, state and local dues and to receive newsletters and information on the group’s upcoming fall conference.

DAD JAILED OVER GAY ED

It happened Wednesday in Lexington, Mass.: the father of a 6-year-old kindergartner was arrested and spent the night in jail for “trespassing.” Why? School officials refused to grant his request for advance notification so that he could opt his son out of pro-gay school books, lessons and discussions, and he refused to leave the principal’s office.

Read more about this sad, strange saga on a website of grassroots activists fighting Massachusetts’ same-sex marriage crowd, www.Article8.org

The father, David Parker, objected to a book his son brought home from school, “Who’s in a Family,” with colorful drawings and text that he said normalize and “celebrate” homosexual households. Captions read, “Laura and Kyle live with their two moms, Joyce and Emily, and a poodle named Daisy” and “Robin’s family is made up of her dad, Clifford, her dad’s partner, Henry, and Robin’s cat, Sassy.”

Parker is on record stating that school officials have rejected his written requests for advance notification and opting out, which he lodged so that his son is not exposed to the objectionable materials in the public schools.

The book is part of the school’s anti-bias curriculum, paid for by the school foundation and the PTA.

Posted 12:32 PM by Susan Darst Williams

WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM SCHOOLS IN IRAQ

Bellevue University hosted a dinner in Omaha Thursday with a guest speaker who was sent by the U.S. government to Iraq in 2003. His purpose: to help rebuild their 22 universities and 46 vocational colleges after the twin assaults of the Saddam regime, and the looting and bombing of the insurgency. What he has to say provides important lessons for how Americans can and should conserve what’s good about our educational system.

We all know about the casual torture, rape rooms, beheadings, and 300,000 political corpses in Iraq. The insanity and depravity reflected in news accounts of the war and its aftermath put a new perspective on the blessings of living in a free society.

But hearing stories about looters who ripped wires out of classroom walls and sinks out of science labs, and professors trying to teach chemistry with ingredients labeled “Expires June 1980,” puts new perspective on the billions and billions of dollars that Americans have invested in our school facilities and supplies, and how we shouldn’t take what we’ve built for granted or let it slide in the direction of what happened in Iraq.

Leftist extremism in American universities, speech codes and Political Correctness all come into chilling focus when you learn that Iraqi universities and their professors were denied new books under Saddam, suffered from “endemic corruption,” couldn’t access the Internet, couldn’t get a Ph.D. if they weren’t in Saddam’s political party, couldn’t go to conferences abroad and couldn’t learn from visiting professors . . . all because of the intellectual totalitarianism propagated by Saddam.

The speaker, former college president and now educational consultant John Agresto of Santa Fe, N.M., told the Omahans that the desperate straits of Iraqi higher education stem in large part from the “tyranny of socialism” under Saddam. Utter dependency on government, even a corrupt and violent one, has denied the Iraqi people a foundation of self-sufficiency which may prevent them from ever having a great education system or a truly free society, he said.

“It was a funny kind of tyranny,” Agresto said, noting that Saddam’s tactics of alternately spreading treasure and torture made the people “very much like children,” scared to death of making a mistake that could cost them their lives. They had free food, free water and free electricity, but they valued their own institutions so little that they burned entire libraries and destroyed college buildings during their looting rampage.

For example, the army found $43,000 in cash that Saddam had ratholed, and gave it to a university dean to fix the bombed-out windows on his campus. He was soon fired for political reasons – apparently he wasn’t enough of a religious fanatic, Agresto said. Agresto became curious as to what had happened to the money, and called the former dean to ask.

It turns out that he had been so afraid of making a mistake and ordering the wrong windows – a mistake which, in that culture, could actually get you killed – that he had just put the money under his bed. He was relieved when Agresto called, because he wanted to give it back to the authorities, but didn’t know how. So Agresto met him and received two big shopping bags full of cash, which he turned over to the new dean.

Agresto joked that when President Bush appointed him to the job, he never expected to go from being a college president to “a bag man.”

Agresto is former president of St. John’s College in Santa Fe and is an expert on the liberal arts who has been assistant, deputy and acting chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. He said that the Iraqi vocational colleges and their students were actually in better shape than the universities. That’s because they stuck to business of preparing students for future careers, while the universities had been ravaged politically for so many years that he has doubts that they will ever be very good.

So what hope is there for the Iraqi future? Agresto said, “The answer is to bring a kind of prosperous, middle-class democracy to Iraq – make the other Arab countries worry about something other than God and what I believe and what you believe and am I going to go to heaven? We need them thinking about getting a job – get them to mind their own business. Adam Smith said that people do the least amount of damage when they are engaged in business, and that is really what we need to be about over there.”

Agresto said he was afraid for his life a few times while in that country, and said, “I don’t think we did a very good job of restoring order over there . . . we went without enough men, money and gumption to do all that we had to do when we went over there.”

He anticipates more chaos, violence and disruption in that country of 27 million people, and warned that the younger generation is much more radical and volatile than their elders. Agresto is working on a book about his experiences, “Mugged By Reality: Lessons I Learned in Iraq and Other Classrooms.”

The insights prompted Bellevue University President John B. Muller to say after the meeting that the speech reminded him that the freedom, democracy and economic prosperity that we have built up in this nation “are not part of the natural state of affairs,” and need to be carefully cultivated with renewed attention and investment, including in our institutions of higher learning.

Muller also said the disturbing developments in Islamic fundamentalism and the breakdown in dealings between nation-states, government to government, pose tremendous long-term challenges for the generation of Americans now being prepared in college.

For more about Bellevue University, see www.bellevue.edu

For more about Agresto, see http://www.tla1.com/Talent/John_Agresto/JOHN_AGRESTO.htm

Posted 8:32 AM by Susan Darst Williams

A COUPLE OF ‘HEAR, HEAR’s’ AND ONE ‘OH, DEAR’

I’m happy to report that some good old Nebraska horse sense has been trotted out by Nebraskans elected to two school boards:

-- Jim Paloucek, board member, North Platte Public Schools, at a public hearing on a proposal to add taxpayer-subsidized preschool to the public schools:

“The best pre-school education is at home with the parents. I hope the taxpayers are not headed down the road toward public preschools. The vast majority of our children are already well served by parents and private preschools.” (Tuesday’s www.northplattebulletin.com)

-- The elected board of the Educational Service Unit #6 directed staff to look in to publishing a monthly mailing online, not snail-mailed on paper, to teachers and administrators in five counties to save money, and passed a unanimous resolution that should be music to all taxpayers’ ears:

“. . . (T)he Board of ESU #6 believes that it may not be in the best interest to pursue reorganization with other ESUs because it may not increase the efficiency of educational opportunities, and that it may not decrease the cost of providing services, and it may in fact increase most to providing the same services currently being delivered, and WHEREAS, the Board of ESU #6 believes that is it more feasible and prudent to pursue using our energies and resources to work with other ESUs including but not limited to ESU #4 and ESU #5 to enter into an expansion of the exchange of shared services. . . .” (Tuesday’s www.yorknewstimes.com)

Aren’t those refreshing?

Unfortunately, there’s another piece of news from Nebraska’s K-12 education family that is pretty sad:

-- A second-grade teacher in the Omaha Public Schools has been arrested on charges of possession of methamphetamine with intent to deliver (Tuesday’s www.omaha.com)

Oh, well: you know what they say . . . two steps forward, one step back.

Posted 10:31 AM by Susan Darst Williams

THE BEST THINGS IN TEACHING ARE FREE

A reader tipped me off to a very good book, “What Great Teachers Do Differently: Fourteen Things That Matter Most” (Todd Whitaker, www.eyeoneducation.com, 2004).

It’s striking how apt his insights are, and yet how little they have to do with what the Education Establishment thinks is important in assuring teacher quality. You know: teacher “credentialing” such as an education degree, state certification, national board certification, inservices, out-of-town conferences, master’s degrees, competency testing, student teaching, mentoring and endorsements.

Difference-makers in teaching are so much less complicated and expensive than those things.

I don’t want to give away the author’s 14 secrets, but here are just a few:

Great teachers never forget that it is people, not programs, that determine the quality of a school.
Great teachers establish clear expectations at the start of the year and follow them consistently as the year progresses.
When a student misbehaves, great teachers have one goal: to keep that behavior from happening again.

Another one should be taken to heart by school boards, principals and teachers before making any decision or change. They should ask themselves, “What will the best people think?” The best teachers, the best students, the best parents . . . will they like and support what you’re thinking of doing? If not, don’t do it.

Recently, in response to her request, I sent an educator a ream of material about the discredited mathematics curriculum, “Everyday Mathematics.” Her district is considering switching to it. (Search for it on www.mathematicallycorrect.com for criticism of its over-reliance on calculators even in the early grades, lack of challenge for strong students, and lack of overall depth and breadth.) She had a vague idea that it had been controversial here and there, but had no data or input from anybody without an ax to grind or a product to sell.

Now, I’ve done a lot of research on math curricula because it’s interesting to me, and math is important in our family: our two older daughters got “5’s” on the Advanced Placement Calculus test, and the third child scored in the 99th percentile on a standardized math test in eighth grade. One even got 790 out of 800 on the math portion of the SAT. So it’s not really bragging to say that these students are among the “best.”

Will it make a difference that the mother of students like these recommends against switching to Everyday Mathematics, or will the district just purchase it, anyway, because it seems to be “popular” around the country?

It will be interesting to see. I certainly hope they ask around a little bit more – seeking input from the people they serve who might be the best qualified to render an objective opinion.

That’s the way it is with everything in teaching. If schools and educrats had just asked the cream of the crop BEFORE they “deformed” education, we’d have never had federal micromanaging in K-12 education . . . no dumbing-down outcomes and standards . . . no union control over how much anybody gets paid . . . no whole language . . . no whole math . . . nowhere near 80% of the kids in special education simply because they were not taught to read properly . . . none of this “no child left behind, but no child gets ahead, either” baloney.

So much of what has gone wrong with K-12 education – from systemic misspelling, to politicized curriculum, to students’ disregard for authority – stems from the failure of educational leaders to ask that one simple question of the “best” of their patrons.

I hope they’ll get this book . . . start living by it . . . and quit “majoring in the minors” when it comes to matters of teacher credentialing and bureaucratic minutia. Instead, they should do the things that cost nothing . . . but are extremely valuable.

We could add a 15th “thing that matters most” – and that is, “put top priority on what parents and taxpayers really want from schools, and do everything in your power, every day, to deliver it.”

Posted 8:31 AM by Susan Darst Williams

TEACHER QUALITY

Nebraska is in trouble with the feds for not having a statewide competency exam for new and existing teachers, the way many states do. According to Sunday’s local daily, the feds also want middle school and high school teachers to major in their subject area or take plenty of classes in it, or their districts will lose federal funding through No Child Left Behind. Nebraska officials would rather the feds would MYOB and leave the evaluation of teacher quality up to the local yokels.

Now, I agree with those who say bureaucratic regulations such as certification don’t mean squat to ensure quality teaching. I believe good teachers are good communicators who have a heart for children and a bachelor’s degree.

But I can testify to what happens when a teacher with the brains to get a college degree still doesn’t have much knowledge in the subject at hand and isn’t interested enough in it to find out what should be taught.

Our daughter was in seventh grade and the four books selected for the class to read and discuss were all lousy -- at least, that’s the technical term, if you’re a bookworm like me. All were written on about the fifth-grade level, I’d say, within the last 20 years, by female authors, on Politically Correct topics: racism, anti-Semitism, euthanasia and teen violence. I don’t mind those topics, just the lousy, slanted, preachy way they were treated in those lousy books.

I wouldn’t have much minded the four books, either, if they were on a list with quite a few classics, too, so the kids were getting at least some quality. But noooo. That was it: no Shakespeare, no Austen, no Twain, no Faulkner, no way, no how. No literature.

So I said something to the English teacher. She confided that she hated reading and had been a drama major. She had been brought to that school to teach English until the drama teacher retired. Her real specialty was at-risk kids, anyway – not the academic cream of the crop, which is where she had been placed for teaching. She’d gotten the job because the district had gotten a federal grant to pay the salary of someone who knew about at-risk kids. I’d have no problem if that’s who she was teaching. But here she was, trying to teach English.

She suggested that we get some more challenging books for our daughter to read on her own. That made sense. I asked her for a few suggestions . . . and was saddened when she said she thought our 12-year-old should be reading crime novels by John Grisham.

Cheap, R-rated, pulp fiction . . . when, like any parent, I wanted my daughter exposed to the best literature with the most uplifting, original, wonderful ideas, plots and characters of history.

The poor teacher didn’t know any better, and she was the first to admit it. She was ‘way, ‘way, ‘way underqualified for that position. Our tax dollars at work.

So ironically, I agree with the feds – but that doesn’t mean I think the Nebraska officials should cave. Instead, I renew my longtime plea that we bail out of all federal funding, except for bona fide special ed.

Much more than mandates and regulations, we need freedom to concentrate on quality curriculum, instruction, hiring and firing, funded only with state and local taxes so that the educators and bureaucrats are responsive to the parents and taxpayers they are serving – not the feds – and educate our kids with excellence, making federal money and micromanagement totally unnecessary.

Here’s an article about teacher quality from my CD-ROM, “Show ‘n’ Tell for Parents.” For more, see my website, www.DailySusan.com:

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Teacher Quality

Q. Teachers say their certificates aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on, competency or licensing exams are so easy it’s ridiculous, and the whole system that the public thinks is ensuring teacher quality is a farce. Is this true?

Few would quibble with these basic requirements for a competent teacher: intellectual ability, formal education, and on-the-job experience. But what is at issue is which of those is the most important.

A teaching certificate is heavily slanted toward a university-based education degree and continuing education credits. But what does the research on teacher effectiveness show?

It shows that formal education is a distant third in what makes a good teacher. Average to high verbal ability as measured on exams such as the SAT, ACT and GRE, is a much more reliable correlate to a successful teaching career than having an education degree or a valid teaching certificate.

Similarly, the record shows that teacher induction programs with mentoring and a reduced first-year teaching load are much more predictive of teaching success than having a teaching degree – even a master’s degree in education – and a certificate.

There is solid evidence of a connection between the verbal ability of the teacher and the achievement of that teacher’s students. But there is no solid evidence of a correlation between the presence or absence of a teaching certificate, and student achievement.

It makes a lot of sense to scale down the teacher certification process to background checks for safety concerns, to verify qualifications, and provide governmental accountability to the public.

The study listed below concludes with this warning: “Reduced to its essence, teacher certification is incapable of providing any insight into an individual’s ability, intellect, curiosity, creativity, affinity for children, and instructional skills. So long as the deficiencies in the research on teacher quality are ignored, misrepresented, or debated, there are clear losers. They are the disadvantaged students who are most dependent on the quality of their teachers and the opportunity provided by a high quality public school education.”

Homework: Download the well-documented 2001 study, “Teacher Certification Reconsidered: Stumbling for Quality,” by Kate Walsh, The Abell Foundation, www.abell.org

Posted 10:53 AM by Susan Darst Williams

MAYBE BAM-BAM COULD GET THE CURRICULUM POINT ACROSS

I’m always taking guff for urging schools to use Spalding Phonics and Saxon Math in the itty bitty grades. I’m convinced the traditional, back-to-the-basics approach is best. Of course, it’s cheaper and far less labor-intensive, so the unions and school officials hate it and try to discredit it.

They act like the basics are prehistoric – like those of us who advocate for them are throwbacks to the Wilma Flintstone days. Like we’re in LaLa Land when it comes to grasping the superiority of their costly, now-and-wow, guru-based, Age of Aquarius curriculum. Sigh.

So it gives me great pleasure to point out that the exemplary charter school from Thursday’s story on Go Big Ed about school choice . . . the one in Phoenix that is nationally recognized for academic excellence . . . the one that produced the winner in the recent statewide geography bee and absolutely mooshes its competition in the Phoenix area, uses . . . drum roll, please . . . Spalding Phonics and Saxon Math.

See for yourself: www.valleyacademy.com

Maybe I should quit acting like polite, reserved Wilma Flintstone in pointing out that the curriculum and methods in most Nebraska schools, K-2, is keeping our kids in caves, academically speaking.

Maybe I should be more like . . . BAM-BAM!!!

Posted 11:32 AM by Susan Darst Williams

WHEN WILL NEBRASKA MAKE SCHOOL-CHOICE NEWS LIKE THIS?

For a good idea of what’s going on with school choice and charter schools all over the country – except in Nebraska, the Off the Radar Screen State – visit the Center for Education Reform, www.edreform.org, and its CER Newswire. Look at all the ideas that could save big bucks, give new birth to the beleaguered Class I schools, give teachers and parents tons more academic freedom, and most of all, give the benefits of more choice, flexibility, innovation and excellence to Nebraska’s schoolchildren. Here’s the April 19 edition:

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Vol. 7, No. 16

CHARTER SCHOOLS

HEY, BIG SPENDER. The Kansas City Board of Education says it will sue the state over a decision handed down by the Board of Fund Commissioners that requires the Kansas City school district to give charter schools the $6 million it is obligated by law to pay. For years the district has withheld $800 per charter school student. Charter supporters point out that charter school students are public schools students too, and are entitled to the funds. District Superintendent Bernard Taylor complains that services have to be cut if they pay. He does not mention, however, that the district is handling 20 percent fewer students who no longer need those services, nor does he say how much the lawsuit that he wants to file will cost. Meanwhile, the district's financial records show a healthy amount of cash in its pot - according to The Kansas City Star, $168 million in a capital projects fund and $31.7 million in its rainy day account. It's also important to note that the district that wants to rethink charters is plagued by educational failure, while the city's charters are exceptional in most cases.

THE FIGHT FOR CITY NEIGHBORS. For months now, Bobbi Macdonald of Baltimore, Maryland has been negotiating with the city school board for sufficient and equal funding for her recently approved City Neighbors Charter School. In true reformer fashion, she held nothing back in an impassioned letter to the chief executive officer of the Baltimore City public school system. Macdonald writes, "While further delay may make no difference to the School Board, to us, it means a risk that we will not open in 2005. I will exhaust every resource, loudly and strenuously, before allowing that to happen. Please, Dr. Copeland, help me to serve the 120 students who have signed up for City Neighbors, the parents who have put their hopes in our efforts, and the community that has supported us so graciously. Help me be true to your vision for innovation in our school system, as you've demonstrated by clearing a path for seven new charter schools." Macdonald will get her answer soon, as the state board will hear this case tonight.

LEGISLATIVE ANGST. The halls are hot in legislatures nationwide as charter issues continue to heat up. Texas is considering boosting support for high-performers and doing an immediate intervention to close all the rest; Ohio is still looking at how best to infuse accountability while maintaining quality growth; South Carolina is moving a bill forward that has negative implications for charters in the Palmetto State; Florida is hoping to further improve the environment for charters; Nevada's assembly just passed a bill that frees teachers from the school district collective bargaining agreement and offers flexibility with teacher license certification guidelines. There is more activity this session than in the three previous sessions combined. Watch this space.

A "BUZZ" IN ARIZONA. Earlier this month Kevin Bertram, a 13-year-old student at Valley Academy Charter School in Arizona, was able to correctly answer a very tough question about the Pribilof Islands and fur sear rookeries. In doing so, Kevin won the 2005 Arizona National Geographic Bee, beating 102 other fourth to eighth-graders from all over the state. Valley Academy Charter School educates 666 students in grades K-8 and is known for having one of the strongest language arts programs in the state. Its standardized test scores are among the top five percent in Arizona. As the winner, Kevin gets a chance to compete for the $25,000 scholarship and lifetime membership in the National Geographic Society to be awarded at the national competition hosted by Alex Trebek in May. Newswire will be following Kevin's progress! To visit Valley Academy Charter School, click here: www.valleyacademy.com.

STANDARDS AND ACCOUNTABILITY FREEDOM TO FIRE. Officials with the Chicago Public School system finally got smart last month and allowed principals to swiftly fire more than 1,100 incompetent teachers, all of whom had serious problems in the classroom. According to The Chicago Sun-Times, more than half of the teachers were fired for "classroom failings" which includes "mismanagement and poor teacher-pupil relationships." The second most common justification was "poor instruction" which includes "planning, methods and knowledge of subject." This new procedure creates a serious measure of accountability and is a welcome change for the frustrated principals in Chicago. In the past, to fire just one incompetent teacher took many months, several deadlines and reams of paper. Harry Randall, principal at Yates School agrees, telling the Times: "This is an easier way for principals to get rid of that dead weight."

HOME OPENER HOME RUN. The Nation's Capital has been without its own baseball team for 34 years. So last week's Nationals home opener brought out new fans, old timers, Orioles-haters and, of course, protestors (it is Washington, DC, after all). While standing in line to get through security for this historic event, one CER employee was berated by an angry DC parent complaining that the Washington Nationals franchise and the new baseball stadium "are taking money away from DC schools" and "we should be spending this money on education!" Given the fact that the security line was now at a standstill (the President was arriving to throw the first pitch), this gave the CER employee a chance to set the record straight. She kindly let the uninformed protestor know that, according to the US Department of Education, Washington, DC spends more money per pupil on education than any state in the US. It spends more per pupil than the entire state of New York and more than twice as much as Utah. The response? The protestor turned around and walked away. We'd say this CER employee hit a home run.

SCHOOL CHOICE DC HOME RUN TAKE 2. Another 271 kids will join the 1,700 currently benefiting from DC's Opportunity Scholarship Program. The Washington Scholarship Fund (WSF) announced the results of the first lottery for applicants who will be entering grades six through twelve. Demand for the open seats far outnumbered supply, which came as no surprise to supporters. But where are the critics? Earlier this year critics tried to discredit the importance and impact of the program, claiming it wasn't reaching the kids trapped in failing schools. The numbers state otherwise. Sixty-two percent of the students came from "needs improvement" schools and not one kid was already enrolled in a private school. So far, no comment from the detractors. To read WSF's entire press release, click here.

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In Other News:

National Charter Schools Week is right around the corner, May 2 – 6. Join us and other co-sponsors for the Kick-Off event in Washington, DC and see firsthand the impact charter schools are having on students throughout the nation! When: May 2, 2005 at 2:00 p.m. Where: Thurgood Marshall Academy, 421 Alabama Avenue, SE, Washington, DC 20032

Can't make it to a charter school in person? Visit a Charter School Online Today! CER brings back its popular virtual charter school tour on May 1. Keep your browser pointed to www.edreform.com.

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The CER Newswire may be redistributed in its entirety with proper attribution. The CER Newswire is published by The Center for Education Reform, the nation's leading authority on school reform. CER is dedicated to making schools better for America's children by improving educational access and excellence for all. CER works with parents, teachers and policymakers to advance meaningful education improvement initiatives.

Posted 11:13 AM by Susan Darst Williams

AND THEY’RE TEACHING ‘EM IN AN OLD TRAIN STATION

I have a friend who says that with the proper curriculum and instructional methods, you could teach kids in a TENT and still do better than what goes on in our costly, marbled halls of public education.

Well, I read about a really great charter school in Arkansas that has raised the SAT scores of its disadvantaged students by 64.1% for language and 52.7% for math, with few discipline problems, and best of all, they’re housed in an old train station.

It’s the Delta College Preparatory School in Helena, Ark., which follows the KIPP style of old-fashioned schooling. The acronym means “Knowledge is Power Program,” and it’s a charter-school model that is spreading around the country, especially in low-demographics areas. Charter schools basically take tax funding, as regular public schools do, but have the freedom to do things differently if the parents and teachers so choose.

This charter school has 96% black kids, with 88% on free or reduced lunch. Their full-time staff to child ratio is an amazing 25:1. The kids go to school from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays, plus one Saturday morning a month, and three weeks in the summer.

Their school is highly structured. They wear uniforms. The principal greets them each morning and is omnipresent, with more decision-making power than the usual public-school principal.

The desks are arranged in rows and the teacher is clearly directing student attention and activities. Productive student behavior, like doing your homework, is rewarded with tokens, prizes and field trips; undesirable behavior is swiftly redirected and punished with a “time out.”

It’s so amazing how the things that the Omaha Public Schools and others in Nebraska are doing are the OPPOSITE of these things in trying to help low-income kids up and out of the educational basement.

OPS just sues the State of Nebraska for more money; these guys are doing what WORKS.

Nebraska public schools are getting mired in the touchy-feeling “best practices” being pushed by the State Department of Education, while the old-fashioned stuff – orderly, teacher-directed classrooms and an academic focus instead of a social focus – is paying off, bigtime, for these Arkansas kids.

Check out the description of this school on p. 39, and the test scores on p. 110, of the report:

http://arkedu.state.ar.us/publications/pdf/nwrel_final_report2003.pdf

And all this, in an old train station! How fitting. Trying to get Nebraska’s public education monopoly to see that it’s the methods, not the money, that matters for kids, is like trying to push a train backwards with your bare hands.

But at least – toot! toot! – we have to keep on trying. Or our kids futures are going to get . . . run over.

Posted 10:08 AM by Susan Darst Williams

WITH A MOO, MOO HERE. . .

One reason more people don’t homeschool their children, or enrich the public-school curriculum with some quality “afterschooling,” is that they don’t think quality curriculum exists outside the schoolhouse door.

Ohhhhhhh, yes, it does.

The Internet has brought us a good share of problems. But it also has brought us some pretty great opportunities for free learning activities and curriculum reviews for our kids.

Take a look at these three websites, for starters:

www.welltrainedmind.com

www.EducationWorld.com

www.commonsensepress.com

Now, a friend of mine has some pedigreed sheep that just had lambs. I wanted to give Maddy, 5, a little introduction before we went over to see them. I could easily have gotten a library book on sheep, but happened to receive this weekly email that was remarkably on point. Just look at all the learning that’s available, just for kindergarten-age children, and just about farm animals:

http://edtech.kennesaw.edu/web/farmanim.html

Weekly emails like this are from a nifty site called www.gradelevelgold.com

Posted 8:18 AM by Susan Darst Williams

SPEAK UP: AN OPPORTUNITY FOR MEANINGFUL PARENTAL INVOLVEMENT

Parents complain that schools beg for parent volunteers, but then never call for their help. Or they complain that they are only offered opportunities to raise money for more TV’s and a new playground, when the old ones are fine, and what they really want to do is help enrich the academic experience.

Sometimes, you have to take the initiative. Here’s one way, from my series, “Show ‘n’ Tell for Parents”:

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My Mom, the Speech Coach

Q. Our sixth grade has a big speech contest, but the teachers don’t have time to teach the kids much about how to prepare. The kids whose parents do it for them always win. How can we change this?

With parental involvement! Public speaking is one of the most important life skills, but it is another one of the features of public schooling that is getting short shrift because of the standardization of American education and overemphasis on test scores.

Get together with other parents and propose a short-term Speech Club to the sixth-grade teachers and principal. Parents will provide the curriculum and give the kids tips and practice as they embark on their research and speech preparation. Schedule it to meet at school three or four times about 45 minutes before the school day begins. Use the time to give the kids a short-course in speech techniques:

-- Choose a topic that fascinates you and narrow the focus just as tight as you can make it, so it’s interesting and unique.

-- Set a goal or purpose for your speech. What ideas are your top priorities for getting across? What are you trying to prove?

-- Research the topic thoroughly, but tell only the best 10 percent or so of what you know. It should be new to your audience, too.

-- Write a “skeleton” outline with just a few words representing each key concept. Put these key words on note cards. Memorize the order of the outline; don’t write your speech out. Give your speech based on your outline, not by memorizing words you’ve written. That’s not speaking; that’s reading aloud!

-- Start with a bang! Get right to the point, then prove it.

-- Visuals are key. Use charts, pictures, models, comparisons, demonstrations, drama, expert testimony . . . think 3-D.

-- Rehearse a lot, ‘til you can give your speech in your sleep.

-- End with a bang! Make them laugh, feel touched or energized.

Homework: The two-audiotape guide, “Speak For Yourself” from Learn, Inc., is meant for adults but applicable for school speech tasks.

Posted 9:51 AM by Susan Darst Williams

READING ASSIGNMENT FOR ‘TAX DAY’

April 15 is a good day to sit back and be grateful for all the constructive public services that our tax dollars are buying . . . and then to scream in unity, “AAAIIIEEE!!!” over the ways our tax dollars are wasted or misused.

One of those is the way public schools choose to teach reading. It’s pretty unbelievable that so many kids read below grade level or have to have special-ed services. Science tells us that less than 5% of the population have bona fide neurobiological factors that could impede reading.

That means the vast majority of the kids with reading disabilities don’t have anything wrong with their brains – instead, they are “instructional casualties.” What we’re choosing to use as a method of teaching reading in our schools is what’s causing the problem. It’s our fault, not theirs. And we’re paying for this. Our tax dollars at work!?! AAAIIIEEE!!!

The vast majority of schools in Nebraska use whole language or “balanced literacy” methods that deny children true phonics instruction. That’s the beef.

Here’s a fantastic website that ‘xplains this in convincing detail. Please send it to educators, who need this crucial information. And please make time to read the interviews with Dr. Reid Lyon and Dr. Sally Shaywitz. Warning: these interviews are long and they use big words. It’s . . . TAXING to read. But this is information we all need. It’ll knock your socks off even more than the size of your annual tax bill:

www.childrenofthecode.org

Posted 10:10 AM by Susan Darst Williams

IT’S ‘ASK-A-PRINCIPAL’ HOTLINE TIME

One of the reasons parents are often reluctant to speak frankly with their school principal is that they fear repercussions to their children.

Also, those who don’t do well around authority figures are often intimidated, and many don’t want to appear ignorant. Still others don’t want to appear to be making a mountain out of a molehill, so even if they have a concern they err on the side of caution and say nothing.

Not feeling comfortable enough around your school principal to even ask a question is a sign of bad school-home communications, which in turn causes mediocre or poor parental involvement in the school. Unfortunately, it’s fairly common.

But once a year, there’s a way you can get some burning questions answered, either about a major or minor problem your child is having, or a school issue in general, by calling an anonymous national “Ask-a-Principal” hotline.

It’s sponsored by the National Association of Elementary School Principals and staffed by more than 125 principals and school psychologists during the group’s annual convention Sunday through Tuesday.

Call toll-free (800) 944-1601 during these times:

Sunday, noon to 6 p.m.

Monday, 6 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Tuesday, 6 a.m. to noon

Wouldn’t it be nice to have this service going year-round? Let’s fan the flames of putting a parents’ hotline on the front burner . . . and light a fire for more parental involvement in school.

Posted 10:01 AM by Susan Darst Williams

A POSITIVE APPROACH TO HOMOSEXUALITY IN SCHOOLS

Today is “Day of Silence” in public schools, when students are told to remain mute all day in school to protest so-called “harassment” of homosexuals. It’s disruptive and disrespectful to teachers, administrators and other students, but oh, well. The event is sponsored by the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, which claims 20 chapters in Nebraska schools, half of them in the Omaha metropolitan area (www.glsenomaha.org).

A more positive counter-demonstration is being planned for Thursday through the Alliance Defense Fund. Called the “Day of Truth,” students are being asked to wear a T-shirt with the message that truth cannot be silenced, with materials available for distribution that contradict the pro-homosexual message of the day before. (See www.alliancedefensefund.org)

The message on cards that can be handed out that day (not in class, however) reads:

“I am speaking the Truth to break the silence. I believe in equal treatment for all, and not special rights for a few. I believe in loving my neighbor, but part of that love means not condoning detrimental personal and social behavior. I believe that by boldly proclaiming the Truth, hurts will be halted, hearts will be healed, and lives will be saved.”

Also today and Thursday, homosexuality promotion in schools takes center stage as the Georgia State Board of Education considers a proposal that really ought to be policy in Nebraska schools. It would require high-school students to obtain written parental permission before joining pro-homosexual clubs at school.

Makes sense: they crawl all over the kids if they so much as try to take an aspirin without a notarized affidavit. Descending into homosexuality can REALLY hurt you, so being in a gay booster club is something on which parents and guardians should have say-so.

If approved, the rule would be implemented in high schools throughout Georgia in September.

Posted 11:21 AM by Susan Darst Williams

DON’T LET SCHOOLS MISS THE BOAT ON PENMANSHIP

Excuse the pun, but in most schools today, penmanship is . . . sunk.

They just don’t teach it systematically any more, except maybe on a remedial basis. They teach computer keyboarding, instead. Penmanship is a key facet of good phonics-only reading instructional programs such as Spalding Phonics. But that’s rare.

Most Nebraska schools take a whole-language or “balanced literacy” approach to early reading. So the alphabet and pronunciation and spelling rules and the proper way to hold a pencil and position the paper on the desk kind of take a back seat to “groovy creativity.” So penmanship is pooh-pooh’ed.

That’s a shame. But when you try to explain to an educator that the multisensory experience of forming letters, words, sentences and paragraphs with paper and pencil is a key component of a good language education, and the best possible start for good writing skills on down the road, they look at you like you’re Amish and think it’s 1853.

Well, $%^& it, I’m NOT Amish. And this is NOT about convenience. It’s about brain formation. I’ve read a lot about it, and am a true believer in handwriting instruction. The decline in kids’ penmanship skills and enjoyment of writing worries me about as much as anything else that goes on in our schools today.

Everyone BUT educators seems to know how important proper handwriting is. It helps develop fine-motor skills and concentration. It builds self-esteem to be able to produce work that is neat and legible. It leads to the bedrock reading skill of automatic letter-recognition. That provides the threshold for automaticity and flow in writing, that can only come from lots of practice.

It makes sense: the more practice you have physically forming letters and words on paper, the easier it is for you to abstractly visualize them, and the faster you can accurately recognize them in text.

Similarly, if you have been taught to take care with HOW you form those letters and words, you learn that writing with precision and planning matters. Then even if you keyboard all your livelong days, you will still take care with forming those words, sentences, paragraphs and whole pieces of writing, because that’s how you started out in your crucial formative years. You just don’t get that same sense of writing craftsmanship if all you’ve ever done is bang away at a keyboard.

I’m not calling for people to have to handwrite everything throughout their lives; I’m just calling for giving them the best-possible start, which is clearly proper handwriting instruction.

Yet district curriculum chiefs and K-1 teachers don’t know these principles, because the teachers’ colleges don’t teach them, and there’s no money to be made in consulting on such a basic subject, so the inservices don’t teach them, either. It’s the same reason you don’t see a lot of TV ads for broccoli: everybody needs it, but it just isn’t . . . sexy.

So the educrats sneer at parents and taxpayers who urge them to go back to teaching proper handwriting in the early grades. It’s really pretty sad.

But here’s something happy: there’s a new study that shows that writing practice has a huge influence on alphabet letter recognition in preschool children, and it’s much better for kids than typing.

It’s in the journal Acta Psycologica, vol. 119, pp. 67-79 , 2005, by Marieke Longcamp, Marie-Thérèse Zerbato-Poudou and Jean-Luc Velay.

The abstract reads:

“A large body of data supports the view that movement plays a crucial role in letter representation and suggests that handwriting contributes to the visual recognition of letters. If so, changing the motor conditions while children are learning to write by using a method based on typing instead of handwriting should affect their subsequent letter recognition performances. In order to test this hypothesis, we trained two groups of 38 children (aged 3–5 years) to copy letters of the alphabet either by hand or by typing them. After three weeks of learning, we ran two recognition tests, one week apart, to compare the letter recognition performances of the two groups. The results showed that in the older children, the handwriting training gave rise to a better letter recognition than the typing training”

So if somebody tries to tell YOU that handwriting is obsolete, whip out that study to . . . jam their keys . . . and let’s work together to get the penmanship to set sail once again, for the benefit of our kids.

Posted 10:15 AM by Susan Darst Williams

$44 MILLION MORE FOR NEBRASKA CLASSROOMS, TAX-FREE

I’ve been urging public schools to cut non-instructional costs for more than a decade now. Big whoop: all they do is increase and increase and increase their non-classroom spending. Finally, thankfully, a guy with some clout and big bucks has taken up that cause, bigtime. He has a plan that would drive more money into the classroom, and out of the clutches of the unions and educrats.

Enjoy today’s Show ‘n’ Tell for Parents from my website, www.DailySusan.com and note that in Nebraska, moving to 65% would raise $44 million – presto! Pain-free – which would be plenty to rescue our Class 1 schools, pay for Spalding phonics training for our K-2 teachers, and give every teacher in the state a fun little raise.

Surely there’s an enterprising citizen out there who could contact these folks and get this going in the Cornhusker State:

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‘Finding’ Extra Millions of Dollars for the Classroom

Q. Our taxes seem to be raised more and more for education. Yet it appears that a lot of the money is being siphoned off to pay for things other than teacher salaries and curriculum. In the days of the one-room schoolhouse, I bet 95% of the spending went for the teacher, books, chalk and other items actually used in the classroom, and 5% went for administration, coal for the pot-bellied stove and everything else. What’s the ratio today?

Nationally, 61.5% of the money flowing into the public schools actually winds up covering classroom expenses, according to a national organization, First Class Education. It is attempting to increase that percentage with a national push toward state laws that would mandate more in-classroom spending and less available for non-teaching activities.

Utah-based entrepreneur Patrick Byrne is pushing “The 65% Solution,” which would require that 65% of every school district’s operating budget has to be spent on classroom instruction. Even though 65% is just a few ticks higher than it is now, Byrne’s solution would add up to $13 billion that would suddenly be available for the nation’s classrooms, without new taxes.

It figures out to 300,000 new teachers making $40,000 a year, significant raises for existing teachers, or tons of new books and computers and other learning aids.

The 61.5% figure is from June 2004 reports of the National Center on Education Statistics. It’s down from 61.7% the year before. Byrne’s group reports that only four states – Utah, Tennessee, New York and Maine – now spend 65% or more of their education dollars in the classroom. Last year, there were seven such states, the group says. In 15 states, the instructional budget is less than 60%.

Where is the money now allocated in non-classroom areas, where cuts would have to be made to come up with the 65%? Administration, plant operations and maintenance, food services, transportation, instructional support including librarians, teacher training and curriculum, and student support such as nurses, counselors, social service workers and others.

Homework: Check out your state’s level of in-classroom spending, www.firstclasseducation.org

Posted 10:19 AM by Susan Darst Williams

TGIF: SONG FOR THE SCHOOL PLANTATION, . . . AND HERO IN KANSAS UNION SCANDAL IS AN OMAHA BOY

This week’s revelation of poor test scores in Nebraska, and unconscionably low graduation rates for African-American and Hispanic students, reminded me of a protest song parody I wrote a while ago.

It’s about the plight of disadvantaged children in today’s public schools, with horrible test scores and high dropout rates, and yet incredibly high rates of spending and lots and lots of paid staff – more than in the past.

By all accounts, more money and more paid staff are not what these kids need. They need a return to old-fashioned educational principles and practices in the early grades that can make them good readers and learners with hope for the future.

Without those methods, especially phonics-only reading instruction, you can see why absenteeism, truancy and dropout rates are high in these struggling schools and making the jobs of teachers there even harder: it’s because, like the slaves of centuries past, the kids feel they have no academic freedom and no means of escape.

That’s because Nebraska has no school choice legislation, no charter schools are allowed, and there are relatively few private school alternatives.

Will it take a civil war between the public and the educators to end this, and set them free? I hope not. I really hope the caring, compassionate people in education realize that the only solution is school choice, ASAP.

My protest song goes something like this:

School Plantations
(to the tune of “Old Man River” with apologies to Jerome Kern)

Inner-city kids go to school plantations,
Not the fancy schools where the rich kids play.
Plenty of poor kids gettin’ a poor education;
Less qualified on Graduation Day.

No algebra! No chemistry!
Barely grade-school literacy!
Tote that barge! Lift that bale!
You’ll work blue-collar, or land in jail.

We sold ‘em down the river to a school plantation!
The liberal ‘60s got the poor kids trapped.
Spending more dough on our schools won’t fix ‘em;
Give us school choice, and we’ll beat this rap.

We sold ‘em down the river to a school plantation!
Kids most needy, in schools most seedy.
To save their futures, we need a proclamation
Of educational emancipation.

Free the slaves of the liberal bias!
You think we’re kidding? Why don’t you try us?
Each child is precious!
Let school choice give them a chance!

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HERO IN KANSAS UNION SCANDAL IS A FORMER OMAHAN

What a coincidence: I know one person in Lawrence, Kan. She’s former Omahan Linda Weinmaster, one of my heroes for starting the Millard Core Academy and fighting against mercury in childhood vaccinations because, among other reasons, it causes autism, as with her son Adam.

I also admire her for her work starting Core Academy, because she didn’t turn her back on the public schools when they failed her son. She yanked her son out of the Millard Public Schools when he couldn’t read near the end of first grade. She put him in St. Agnes School, a great inner-city Omaha Catholic school, even though she’s not Catholic. That’s because they used the best method of teaching reading, Spalding Phonics. He was reading and writing above grade level by the end of the year. She returned to Millard, helped start Core, and eventually put her children back in that district, so it was a win-win.

Anyway, while at St. Agnes, she met a nice family who lived across the street. It turns out that their son, a high-school English teacher in Lawrence named Sam Rabiola, is the hero who blew the whistle on a teachers’ union president for allegedly stealing nearly $100,000 from the Lawrence Education Association.

Not only that, but Mrs. Weinmaster knows the man suspected of the embezzlement from the union, Wayne Kruse. She said he was a sixth-grade teacher at her son’s school, and in her opinion, he was “a terrible teacher.” She said he did not believe in teaching kids grammar or phonics, for example.

Mrs. Weinmaster adds that the general consensus of opinion among parents in that school was that Kruse is homosexual. She adds this: “At the sixth-grade graduation last year, he was hugging all the sixth graders as they walked across the stage. When Adam (that’s her autistic son) walked across, Adam said loudly, ‘Please don't hug me!’ The crowd all laughed and Adam's teacher said, ‘I don't blame him.’”

As we watch our teachers’ unions get more and more embroiled with homosexual activists because of the money they bring with them – note the Lincoln Public Schools race where that’s going on as we speak -- let’s remember this story. We’d better pay attention. That innocent, special-needs kid had Wayne Kruse pegged long before the cops did. Out of the mouths of babes. . . .

Posted 10:29 AM by Susan Darst Williams

SCHOOL CHOICE: HOW TO PLUG THE RACIAL GAP

Go Big Ed reported March 16 that there is a huge high-school graduation gap among the races in Nebraska: 90% of white students graduate, while only 53% of African-Americans do, and 50% of Latinos.

That’s in contrast to the fluffed-up graduation stats dished out by state ed officials, who “forget” to include cumulative dropout data, and just report dropouts on a per-year basis, which of course is much smaller than the real deal.

Comes now former welfare mom, Star Parker, a columnist on the national website TownHall, decrying the same statistical monkeyshines in California in general and Los Angeles in particular:
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/StarParker/sp20050405.shtml

Here’s a shocker: California’s racial gap isn’t as bad as Nebraska’s. Ms. Parker reported that a Harvard study found that 57% of Sunshine State blacks and 60% of Latinos graduate from high school. The LA public schools are indeed worse than Nebraska’s, but not by that much: 39% of Latinos and 47% of blacks graduate.

Here’s why that bites for those kids: she also reported that U.S. Census Bureau figures for 1999 showed earnings of full-time workers without a high-school degree as only 77% of the earnings of those with high-school degrees, and only 45% of those with bachelor's degrees.

Ms. Parker writes, “Poor kids are simply trapped in a government school monopoly where the manner in which education is defined and administered and the values that are conveyed are by and large pre-scripted by a politically correct establishment.”

Here’s her conclusion:

“When I log onto the Web site of the National Education Association, the national union of the teachers staffing our public schools, the first thing I see is a headline announcing a study that says ‘the goals of “No Child Left Behind” cannot be met without a significant increase in resources.’

“According to the Pacific Research Institute, the L.A. Unified School District spends more than $9,000 per year per student. I am confident that if inner-city parents had $9,000 through a voucher or scholarship to send their child wherever they chose to school, more than one in two would graduate.

“Businesses that face competition deliver more and more for less and less. Monopolies deliver less and less for more and more. What else can we expect from the NEA and the government school monopoly than claims that spending is the alleged answer for everything?”

Amen, and well said.

So there’s common sense from the land of the fruits and nuts. And if it makes sense there, it makes a lot more sense here, where our racial graduation gap is even worse than the land of Watts and the big barrios.

The unions will cry that school-choice advocates just want to hurt public education, and hog all the money and power for themselves. That’s simply not true. But listen up: if the education establishment did not want to lose control over K-12 education in this country, they never should have let abominations like the huge racial gap in graduation to occur in the first place.

I think it was the Beach Boys who sang, “And we’ll have fun, fun, fun once the taxpayers take K-12 awaaaaayyyyyyy (from union control).”

Posted 7:24 AM by Susan Darst Williams

NEBRASKA STATS VS. OUR NEIGHBORS’: ARE WE REALLY SUCH LOSERS?

Ouch, ouch, ouch. Put a black “L” next to the red “N” on our foreheads. We look like losers today.

According to data posted at www.schoolmatters.com, when you compare Nebraska to six surrounding states, we come out last or second to last in many important measurements of academic quality, and first in several categories that have a big impact on increasing school spending.

Wyoming wasn’t included in the data index, but Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, South Dakota and Minnesota were, and compared to them, Nebraska came in:

-- 7th out of the 7 in 4th grade reading proficiency on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)

-- 6th in 4th grade math, 8th grade reading, and 8th grade math on the NAEP

-- 6th in the average SAT score (1,145)

-- 3rd in the average ACT score (21.7 on a 0-36 scale)

-- 1st in operating expenditures per pupil ($7,741)

-- 1st in general administration expenditures per pupil ($292)

-- 1st in lowest class size (13.6 students per teacher)

-- 1st in lowest ratio of total staff to students (1:7)

-- 1st in students labeled as having learning disabilities (15.8%)

It should be pointed out that the ACT score at least isn’t worst, and also that the index does not reveal what percentage of students were “held out” of the NAEP testing because of learning disabilities or other reasons. The “exclusion rate” is a key figure that should have been included for a complete comparison. But still, Nebraska looks pretty bad.

It’s puzzling, since we have decent median household income ($42,696, ranking 4th out of these 7 states), pretty good parental educational attainment (23.8% of adults have bachelor’s degrees, also 4th among the states), and relatively few single-parent households (8.4%, or 5th), a key correlate of learning challenges including ADHD diagnosis.

So how come we’re first among our neighbors in the percentage labeled as “learning disabled”? Could it be all those farm chemicals in the water?

Nooooo. It’s directly related to those poor reading scores. Nebraska’s kids aren’t BORN learning-disabled. They are MADE that way, by improper reading instruction in the early grades, since the powers that be in Nebraska still don’t get it and still don’t teach reading with phonics.

So the kids can’t read, and are misdiagnosed as “reading disabled,” instead of being called what they really are, which is “instructionally disabled.”

Consequently, Nebraska’s schools drain more and more Title I federal funding to try to remediate what they caused, which is why Nebraska ranks second only to South Dakota with its Indian reservations in federal aid to education.

And we look like rumdums and give hemorrhoids to the people in charge of trying to attract new employers to this state, because our education system doesn’t look so good. Wah. Oh, wah-ellllll.

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LESBIAN ACTIVIST TAKES FIRST IN LINCOLN SCHOOL BOARD PRIMARY

Barbara Baier, an “out” lesbian activist raising a 5-year-old son with a female “partner,” finished first in her subdistrict of the primary race for a seat on the state’s second-largest school district, the Lincoln Public Schools. Clearly defining herself as an opponent of traditional family structures and Christian morals and principles, she was aided by a $1,500 donation from the Nebraska State Education Association and $9,357 in-kind from the Nebraska Democratic Party, according to the Lincoln Journal-Star.

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KANSAS TEACHERS’ UNION OFFICIAL CHARGED WITH STEALING

A former teachers’ union president has been charged with stealing nearly $100,000 from the Lawrence (Kan.) Education Association. Wayne Kruse, a sixth-grade teacher who headed the union from 1999 to 2005, was charged in March with two counts of forgery and one count of theft of more than $25,000, according to the teachers’ union watchdog, www.eiaonline.org

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LINCOLN PTO OFFICIAL CHARGED WITH STEALING

According to the Lincoln Journal-Star, a former member of Arnold Elementary School's parent-teacher organization was arraigned in March, accused of stealing $4,300 from the group. Last week, the felony charges against Rebecca Stalsberg, 35, were dismissed on the condition that she makes restitution to the school and completes a pretrial diversion program, according to court documents.

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DALLAS TEACHER CHARGED WITH ASSAULT

The Dallas Morning News reported Tuesday that a black teacher is charged with assault after an incident at a neighboring school involving a white teacher. According to a police report, the white teacher ordered the black teacher’s daughter and another black student to leave a hallway where they weren’t supposed to be, but ignored a white girl nearby.

The black teacher’s daughter got upset and went to the school counselor, who called the mother. According to the news story, she arrived “angry and unannounced” in the white teacher’s classroom.

The story reported: “Ms. Oliver was sitting at her desk when Ms. Baines walked into the room and grabbed her by the hair. She hit Ms. Oliver in the face repeatedly with her fist and dragged her across the floor as the class of seventh-graders watched. Ms. Baines also kicked Ms. Oliver several times in the side while she was on the floor.”

Reportedly, racial relations aren’t the best at that school, and African-American teachers and students were quoted in the story as saying that black kids don’t always get the breaks, grades and attention that the white kids do there.

Posted 10:30 AM by Susan Darst Williams

NEBRASKA TEACHERS’ UNION RAISING DUES, WAR CHEST

A national teachers’ union watchdog has reported that the Nebraska State Education Association is seeking one of the biggest dues increases in the country, with an added $12 sought from its 20,000-some members, plus a raise for its Political Action Committee fund from $8 to $10 per educator.

The Education Intelligence Agency, www.eiaonline.com, charts union activities coast to coast and mentions Nebraska in its weekly news story posted Monday. Only three state unions are seeking bigger dues hikes.

The NSEA will take up the matter at its annual confab in Lincoln April 15-16, with some perplexing resolutions on the agenda:

-- Deploring torture (and they don’t mean having to listen to Spanish-American war facts on a beautiful spring afternoon)

-- Deploring sexual assault (don’t we have laws that deplore it already?)

-- Deploring the use of student test data as a criterion in evaluating teacher effectiveness (the NSEA calls that “inappropriate” – how silly of parents and taxpayers to want to know if a teacher’s kids did better or worse than the year before)

-- Deploring any facts and evidence in science classrooms about life’s origins and development, such as those from the relatively new discipline of Intelligent Design, EXCEPT those that favor the theory of evolution (hear no ID-vil, see no ID-vil, speak no ID-vil)

-- Urging the acceptance of the International Criminal Court (what, so that Judge Judy can get a wider audience?)

-- Providing prescription drug benefits, especially for “domestic partners” of school employees

-- Demanding not more, but less, federal interference in schools by calling for more, not less, federal funding

-- Demanding more attention to “age-appropriate placements” for struggling students as being practically a birthright, while completely ignoring the “age-appropriate placement” needs of bright students who may be three or four grade levels ahead of the norm, but denied a chance to have challenging curriculum because that would make the other kids feel bad

-- Most perplexing of all, deploring direct instruction techniques for teaching reading in the early grades – the one type of reading instruction that has been shown to work by countless studies – because it somehow interferes with teacher freedom. Meanwhile, there’s nothing that can set a teacher free more quickly than having students who can read!

Come and read the resolutions for yourself on www.nsea.org See how different they are from what parents and taxpayers want our educators to be concentrating on: improving kids’ reading ability, sentence diagramming, better computation skills, maintaining order in the classroom, and so forth.

You know, I really, really wouldn’t be putting all that time and effort into all those topics if I were the NSEA, anyway. That’s because a whole new accountability index has just burst onto the national scene, and it doesn’t make Nebraska schools look very good at all.

It’s from Standard & Poor’s: www.schoolmatters.com

We’ll look in to its findings tomorrow. But here’s a teaser:

Nebraska ranks below ALL six of our surrounding states in the fourth-grade reading proficiency scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Also, our kids rank SECOND TO LAST among those states in fourth-grade math, as well as both eighth-grade reading and math.

Ohhhhhhh, boy. Now, THAT’S deplorable.

There are some other figures in this index that are pretty depressing, as well.

I don’t mean to harp on the NSEA, but come on . . . torture? Sexual assault? International criminal court?

What about reading, writing and arithmetic?

What was that Nero was “studying” while Rome burned? Oh, yeah: the violin. Maybe a pro-fiddling measure is on the NSEA resolution list, too. You know, right by the demands for cappuccino machines in every teacher’s lounge, and more paid time off for inservices on the lingering psychic effects of the tsunami on students when it’s windy outside. . . .

Posted 9:51 AM by Susan Darst Williams

NEWS BRIEFS: GAY ACTIVIST RUNS FOR LINCOLN SCHOOL BOARD

Barbara Baier, a prominent lesbian activist, is running for the Sub-District 3 seat on the board of the state’s second-largest school district, the Lincoln Public Schools, in Tuesday’s election. She is secretary of the Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgendered (GLBT) Caucus of the State Democratic Party.

Ms. Baier wrote a blistering post-election column for the December 2004 newsletter of www.lancastercountydemocrats.org In it, she rails against “self-righteous Republicans” and exploitation of GLBT people by “the Christian right-wing for manipulative, political purposes.” She said George W. Bush was mainly elected because of vote-mongering from the “Christian fundamentalist pulpit” and that GLBT people need to “address the attack upon our families from the right wing. . . .”

Oh, yeah. That’s a person I’d like to see in charge of molding young people’s hearts and minds. NOT!

Note that she is endorsed by Planned Parenthood, which has come under fire nationally for the obnoxious content on its “sex ed” website for youngsters, www.teenwire.com

Also in Tuesday’s school-board election, note this endorsement: the Nebraska Right to Life PAC recommends Norman Dority for Subdistrict 5 of the LPS school board.

CREIGHTON STAT REVEALS GRADE INFLATION

Puffing out your chest because Junior has close to a 4.0? Might want to rethink that. A generation ago, 18% of the students who took the ACT or the SAT had an A or A- grade-point average, but now that figure has ballooned to 43%. This is according to information supplied in an ACT prep class that’s being held on Saturdays at Creighton University.

So nowadays, almost half the class has all A’s? Gee. It’s going to be a looooooong graduation ceremony, listening to all those valedictorians.

Until parents and taxpayers demand “truth in grading,” though, rampant grade inflation is going to continue to paint a phony picture about educational quality and progress. It threatens to make the one measurement that used to be reliable, the GPA, absolutely meaningless.

ARLINGTON GIRL TAKES STATE IN LITERATURE CONTEST

Beth Milan, a seventh-grader at Arlington Junior-Senior High School, has won first place in the state in the “Letters About Literature” contest sponsored by the Library of Congress Center for the Book, and Target Stores.

Her letter to the author of “She Said Yes,” the mother’s tribute to the girl who died in the Columbine school shooting, was chosen out of 203 entries statewide for the excellent way it expressed her strong, personal reaction to the tragedy.

She won $100 cash, a $50 Target gift certificate and other prizes. She now will compete for $500 in Target goods and a trip to the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C., for herself, her parents, and a teacher.

Posted 9:59 AM by Susan Darst Williams

A ‘EUREKA!’ FOR CLASS 1 SCHOOLS

Winding up this week’s series on kindergarten and exciting private-sector alternatives for those who don’t think the public schools are getting the job done, it must be stressed that the following is NOT an April Fool’s Day joke.

If the Legislature “caves” to the teachers’ union and the State Ed Department, and kills our Class 1 country schools with LB 126, then I think the Class 1 schools should all go private.

That’s right: turn their backs on state aid, federal aid and local property tax revenues, circle the wagons, and re-create themselves as one-room schoolhouses run by parents, not the government.

Then hold on to your hats, and watch the educational quality eclipse the town schools. Why? Because the classics of American education – local control, a focus on good teaching, and involved parents – will come to the fore.

And guess what? They’d be in the “in” crowd. The one-room schoolhouse is a hot trend in education nationwide. Visit www.floridamandate.blogspot.com and read the article “One Room Schoolhouse” by Bruce Shortt to see how it might work in space provided by a church, which is certainly still found in every community. A teacher could be paid, but this also could be done with volunteers from among parents, retired church members and others who just love children and want their educations to be the best they can be.

What? No certification, accreditation, constant assessment, privacy-invading data collection, gobs of paperwork, unfunded mandates, zero tolerance policies, pointless inservices, multiculturalism, anti-Americanism, or forced acceptance of sexual perversions and promiscuity?

What would they DO all day? Just kidding.

Just think of the unionized job slots that would be lost if all those little schools dropped off the public-school rolls.

Just think how the rationale for bureaucratic jobs and expenses would vanish, if there were that many fewer schools for the bureaucracy to box with.

Just think about what would go on during a typical school day, if suddenly the focus could be put on the educational needs of the children, and not the financial “needs” of the powers-that-be.

Just think about the academic quality that would result if teachers and parents were truly in charge, instead of the “what’s nuts? let’s try it” attitude of the anti-family left-wingers in control of public education these days.

There’s something very satisfying about playing the “OK, I’ll take my ball and go home” game with educrats. It’s about time Nebraska parents and taxpayers called their bluff on this LB 126 power play that has nothing to do with educating children, and everything to do with their greed for more money and power.

Yes, it would be a lot harder for them to have to do the K-8 educating themselves. Yes, it would be unfair that they have to turn their backs on the bona fide tax dollars that should be coming to them. Yes, it’s too bad that the union is so powerful in this state that Nebraska doesn’t have a whiff of hope for charter school legislation or school choice.

But yessssss, it would be sweet to preserve that priceless atmosphere of the country school in Nebraska, such an important part of our heritage.

And yesssssss, it’d be great to model the power of close relationships in small schools, and the ability to focus on academics and not governmental intervention and social engineering.

Yessssss! In a way, I’m hoping LB 126 will pass . . . just to see an in-your-face to the politicians and the educrats and show them how they SHOULD have been doing their jobs for the past several decades.

Who knows? It might spark a revolution all across the country! And what an April Fool that would be. We and our children would laugh all the way to a happily ever after.