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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Sunday, March 26, 2006
Posted
2:11 PM
by Susan Darst Williams
The GoBigEd blog will resume publication on Monday, April 3.
Happy spring!
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Friday, March 24, 2006
Posted
10:34 AM
by Susan Darst Williams
LOTS OF ETC.,
AND GO BIG ED TAKES A SPRING BREAK
The proposed solutions in the Legislature for the controversy over the Omaha Public Schools are both bad: one would expand the bureaucracy with a metro-wide school board, and the other would result in still more highly expensive building projects and more debt, as districts would collaborate on mutual magnet schools.
Gubernatorial candidate Dave Nabity is the only one who has proposed a cost-saving solution. He recommends that the OPS board make long-term contracts for the management of the 23 most troubled OPS schools to the eight surrounding suburban school districts. Then let them compete to see who can make the biggest difference for low-income kids. If you use the right methods – phonics-only reading instruction, and traditional math with an emphasis on computation – kids of all income levels can soar, for a lot less money than we’re wasting on these boneheaded social engineering “programs” in low-income schools.
But the best solution of all, of course, would be school choice. And guess what? Low-income families already have it, under the No Child Left Behind Act.
School districts are supposed to provide and publicize transfer options for children in failing schools – educational opportunities where the parents want to re-enroll them. Has OPS been doing that enough, in its schools with the worst test scores? Maybe. Maybe not. Since Nebraska has such a weak assessment policy, in which districts get to evaluate themselves by subjective means, it doesn’t look like we have as many lousy schools as we do, at least on paper.
But in California, there’s hope. This week, the Phoenix-based Alliance for School Choice joined the Coalition on Urban Renewal and Education (CURE) in demanding that the Los Angeles and Compton Unified School Districts immediately provide that transfer information, and for federal education funds to those districts to be cut off until they do.
According to those two groups, a 2004 federal report by the General Accounting Office found that more than 3 million schoolchildren -- overwhelmingly low-income and minority children
-- were entitled to transfer, but only 1 percent of those eligible actually transferred.
The California complaints charge that of at least 250,000 children eligible for transfer in Los Angeles, only 527 (.2 of 1 percent) received transfers to better-performing schools. In Compton, zero students have received transfers despite appalling educational conditions, the groups contend. The complaints charge that the districts have failed adequately to make information available to parents or to provide sufficient options.
Since there aren’t enough available places in classrooms of other public schools, the two groups also are pushing for private-school options for low-income children in failing public schools.
See www.allianceforschoolchoice.org and www.urbancure.org
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ATTENDANCE FRAUD IN DETROIT?
IS IT HAPPENING HERE?
The Detroit Public Schools is in a freefall. It recently was accused of overreporting its enrollment data to the state by more than 800 students. An audit also has found that the Detroit district had 11,500 fewer pupils than the previous year. Low quality schools are literally bleeding enrollment away from the urban district.
The finding will cost the district $63 million in reduced state aid to education. Besides gaining more money than it was entitled to, overreporting enrollment directly distorts test score interpretation and inflates dropout rates, making a district look better on paper than it really is.
See:
http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060317/SCHOOLS/603170374/1026
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: there’s something that bothers me about that big gap between reported enrollment – average daily membership – and average daily attendance in the Omaha Public Schools.
See http://ess.nde.state.ne.us to surf to the Omaha Public Schools’ latest annual financial report on file.
You’ll see they report enrollment of 44,036,60 – and average daily attendance of 39,915.21. That’s a difference of 4,121.39 pupils, more than 10%, who are enrolled but aren’t in school on the average day.
Multiply that many pupils times the $8,724.02 in spending per pupil in OPS, and it comes to . . .
. . . GULP! . . .
. . . nearly $36 million.
I definitely am not accusing OPS of enrollment fraud, or reporting “ghost” pupils. I know they have a highly transient student population compared to most districts.
But dang! That’s a lot of kids . . . and a lot of money. Wuzzup wit dis? Isn’t it worth a hard look?
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EDUCATORS ACCUSED OF CHEATING TO GET HIGHER TEST SCORES;
COULD IT HAPPEN IN NEBRASKA?
http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/living/education/14155006.htm
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APRIL 8 WORKSHOP ON THE U.S. CONSTITUTION
OFFERED FOR ALL AGES IN BASSETT, NEB.
“The Making of America,” a seminar on the U.S. Constitution, is planned April 8 in Bassett, Neb., sponsored by Class Ones United. It features Earl Taylor of Mesa, Ariz., president of the National Center for Constitutional Studies (www.nccs.net), and a charter school administrator. Students, parents, educators and the public are invited. A fee of $15 is anticipated, with lunch available for a nominal price. For more information and to register, contact Mike and Trudy Nolles, mtnolles@huntel.net
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WORLD-RENOWNED PRIZE
GOES TO CREATION, INTELLIGENT DESIGN SCIENTIST
All those who find the theory of evolution ridiculous, and regret the censorship of creation science and intelligent design in our science classrooms, can take heart in a big deal: this week, John D. Barrow of Cambridge University received this year's Templeton Prize for his work on the “Anthropic Principle” – the study of the incredible “coincidences” that allow for the presence of life in any form, and human life in particular, in our universe. He has proved that there is no way, Jose, that random chance and purposeless rule; there has obviously been design, purpose and order all the way.
Evolutionists, in other words, are completely and thoroughly wrong. But we knew that.
The prize is awarded for "progress towards research or discoveries about spiritual realities." Among others who’ve received it: Mother Teresa and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
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SHUT UP AND TEACH:
COLORADO TEACHER REINSTATED
Did you follow the case of Jay Bennish, the Denver-area teacher who was recorded giving students a vicious, erroneous, slanderous rant against President Bush and capitalism, but somehow got his job back with barely a slap on the wrist?
It’s one thing for a teacher to talk that way to his buddies away from school, on his own time, over the weekend. But not to other people’s children, a vulnerable, captive audience, at taxpayer expense. Are we paying him for his opinion? Or to teach history?
And it would have been different had he made the slightest attempt to give equal time to other points of view. But according to his students, he doesn’t.
Do you think he should have been fired? I don’t. I think he should have been given a big cut in pay, and reassigned to picking up trash and cleaning toilets. Then maybe he’d learn the difference between what America stands for, and trash and toilet talk:
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/education/article/0,1299,DRMN_957_4533721,00.html
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GO BIG ED TAKES A SPRING BREAK
GoBigEd will resume on Monday, April 3.
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Thursday, March 23, 2006
Posted
10:08 AM
by Susan Darst Williams
BUT COULD GIVE US SCARY NEW ONES
I’ve been watching a national ruckus over $110 million in federal funding that’s been provided for a civics textbook, “We the People.” It minimizes the Second Amendment and the Bill of Rights, and maximizes “global citizenship” and something called “world transformation.”
It’s in use in Nebraska, even though it is said to have radical leftist and anti-American material in it. And now, with the big federal subsidies, it can be offered to local school districts for a song, with teacher training – strike that, teacher indoctrination – soon to follow.
You can read more about this morass from the Center for Civic Education by searching for the many stories that have been done on it at www.edwatch.org
Now the stage is being set for a possible redefinition of American civics education that could make that leftist point of view the “standard” here.
It appears that LB 1247, proposed this session by State Sen. DiAnna Schimek of Lincoln, and still alive in the Legislature’s Education Committee, sets the stage for the “new civics” to be installed in Nebraska by declaring traditional American history education “too narrow” and “a bit outdated.”
If her bill passes, the next step would be to put vague, ambiguous and relativistic language into new civics “standards” to be promulgated by the State Department of Education. And then the heavy federal subsidies for that leftist textbook would make it very difficult for a local school board to turn down a freebie that already has the slanted curriculum that meets the “standards” the state set up.
What really makes this ironic is that we had a chance to block all this. I’m ashamed of myself for not promoting an excellent addition to Nebraska’s civics education law that came up before the Education Committee in February, and was killed.
LB 1211 from State Sen. Abbie Cornett of Bellevue would have kept Nebraska’s existing Americanism statute intact, but added several specific examples of documents that ought to be taught to students so that they would understand the “principles, character and world view of America’s founders.”
Examples: the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Federalist Papers, presidential proclamations, Patrick Henry’s “Liberty or Death” speech, Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, acts of Congress, U.S. Supreme Court decisions. . . .
Great stuff. Only one person spoke in favor of it, though, and it died an unheralded death. I strongly urge Sen. Cornett and other senators to bring it back next session, and get it in place.
But now, to my double dismay, I see that the Schimek bill, LB 1247, which is still alive, would:
n transfer the ultimate authority over civics education from local school boards to the State Board of Education; it would develop standards, rules and regulations, and procedures for the teaching of civics, social studies and related courses.
n take out assurances that local school boards are supposed to make “as to the character of all teachers employed and their knowledge and acceptance of the American form of government.” Sen. Schimek said the State Department of Education says those assurances are addressed by the oath taken by teachers when certified.
n remove “American history” courses as the focus for civics education, change the wording to the more general “courses;” Sen. Schimek said, “This is because civics is comprised of more than just history. This is one of the areas that the statute is too narrowly written.”
n remove direction to teach about what was and is wrong with Nazism, communism and other ideologies (p. 4, 20-22); Sen. Schimek said those are “outdated” because they leave out “extremism and terrorism,” but of course, those could be considered “other ideologies.”
n remove specific direction to observe Lincoln’s birthday, Washington’s birthday, Flag Day, Memorial Day and Veterans Day; again, Sen. Schimek said those holidays have to go because “this list is narrow and undoubtedly excludes other important days and celebrations that should be recognized.”
n decrease requirements for three class periods per week to focus on civics, rewording it to “teaching periods” rather than a specific number.
You can read the existing civics law, Section 79-724, in the Nebraska statutes on:
http://srvwww.unicam.state.ne.us/Statutes2005.html
Now ,it’s not a priority bill, so it may just sit for several months. But we all should still let our senators know that this uncivil civics bill ought to find the round file.
Ironically, one of the reasons I really don’t like this bill is because of the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. That states that anything that isn’t specifically assigned to the federal government should be done by states and localities. Exhibit A: education. There really is no constitutional green light for the federal government to be involved in public education at all, besides insuring basic health and safety of children.
And now the federal government is funding and therefore shaping the curriculum that will teach kids about . . . the federal government? I . . . don’t . . . think . . . so.
What did Patrick Henry say? Give me liberty – give me a senator’s email address – give me a chance to explain how damaging this is, or could be . . . or otherwise, what will we get? A big, fat, propaganda machine – paid for with our own tax dollars.
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Wednesday, March 22, 2006
Posted
9:20 AM
by Susan Darst Williams
HOW TO END RUN ILLEGAL ALIENS
AND THEIR LIBERAL 'ENABLERS'
Entre los individuos como entre las naciones, el respeto al derecho ajeno es la paz.
(Among individuals, as among nations, peace is the respect of others’ rights.)
-- Benito Juarez, Mexican statesman (1806-1872)
America may be the land of opportunity, but that doesn’t mean you get to take “cuts” in line and elbow others out of your way to get your chance at The Big Lick.
It’s ridiculous and unconscionable that the Nebraska Legislature would even consider letting illegal aliens pay in-state tuition to attend our colleges. But that’s what LB 239 would allow – and it’s a priority bill of State Sen. DiAnna Schimek of Lincoln, so it’ll definitely come up.
Read it for yourself at www.unicam.state.ne.us/pdf/INTRO_LB239.pdf
Now, it’s clear that Sen. Schimek and her co-sponsors are just trying to be kind. But we have to draw the line somewhere. Noncitizens, especially those who mock our immigration laws, do not have a “right” to a free education, and that’s final. And there is no way, Jose, that we should ever be for “enabling” illegals or their children to get the benefits of citizenship without the responsibilities, and take classroom seats that rightfully belong to law-abiding Americans.
It’s bad enough that our K-12 schools can’t rat them out, by federal law, and so we are forced to provide free educations to willful felons in a mockery of the American system of mutual trust and support among citizens.
I know, I know, the kids aren’t the ones deciding to skirt the law, and shouldn’t have to pay the price. But that’s not our fault: it’s their parents’ fault. We shouldn’t be rewarding felons by granting their kids the same privileges as bona fide citizens get. That’s “enabling” law-breaking, the same way you “enable” someone to remain an alcoholic by buying more booze.
It’s not only unfair and immoral. It would also by definition “dumb down” college course work because of the language barrier and lower expectations posed by an increase in students whose native language isn’t English. It’s bad enough that it’s that way with so many teaching assistants these days.
So as a public-policy question, it’s an obvious no-go. But on a personal level, it’s even more of a bad idea. These three things in my own life are examples of why it would be repulsive:
1. Our daughter made it into a prestigious East Coast law school last year. It is a public university’s law school, subsidized by tax dollars. But it’s still very expensive. And out-of-state tuition is $15,000 a year extra, on top of the already-steep three years of tuition. She’s pretty sure she’s going to make her home and career in that state, so it’s important that her legal contacts be made there. Therefore, we had no choice but to make her move there officially and completely, take a year off, work at a job, put down roots, and establish residency to save our family $45,000. We could have broken the law and cheated, setting up a fake mailbox or doing some of the other crooked things people do to pretend to be residents. But we took the high road, and it has been difficult and costly for her in many ways. Now imagine how it feels to see our state senators willing to allow felons – illegal aliens who flout our country’s laws – who are tax evaders – haven’t obtained citizenship or otherwise demonstrated respect for their neighbors and our system of government -- getting to pay in-state tuition to Nebraska colleges and universities without jumping through any of the hoops that we did. It also means my family would be subsidizing their child’s education with OUR tax dollars.
2. We have a young family friend who is gifted with creative, hands-on intelligence, but for a variety of reasons, didn’t score well on his college admissions tests. His family is low-income and does not know how to “work the system,” so he did not receive any scholarships or financial aid. He’s having to go to a community college, and work long hours at two jobs to come up with the tuition and to help support his family as well. Now he has had to drop out because he can’t make ends meet, although he desperately wants to return. Imagine how it feels to know that some of the taxes he’s paying on his two jobs, though not providing enough salary to keep him in college, would now go to subsidize an illegal alien, whose parents don’t pay taxes, to sit in the classroom seat that should have been his.
3. Another young friend of our family is very bright, but her father died suddenly a couple of years ago, and her mother is unemployed. There is little extra money for college, so she is going into the Marines. She’ll be the fourth generation in her family to have served in our country’s military, including service in a couple of our wars. When I think of illegal aliens being allowed to enroll in tax-subsidized Nebraska colleges and universities when a girl from a patriotic, taxpaying family like this can’t, it literally makes my blood boil.
So what’s the answer?
Easy. Contact your senator via http://www.unicam.state.ne.us/senators/senators.htm and insist that LB 239 has to go, because granting special privileges for lawbreakers is . . . ALIEN . . . to the American way of life.
The other step we really should take: call your Congressional representatives and insist that we start making American citizenship a prerequisite for enrollment in American public schools. We’re so busying respecting everybody else’s “rights” and that’s nice . . . but it’s high time we respected our own.
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Tuesday, March 21, 2006
Posted
10:35 AM
by Susan Darst Williams
HOW TO GET THE BEST PEOPLE
FOR THOSE EYE-POPPING SALARIES
The governor of the State of Nebraska makes $85,000 a year. That’s far LESS than any of the five public school superintendents involved in the controversy over whether the Omaha Public Schools should take over most of its suburban neighboring districts. Meanwhile, the governor’s salary is $50,000 a year LESS than the highest-ranking K-12 education official in the state, the state education commissioner.
If salaries are supposed to communicate worth, authority, esteem and importance, wuzzup wit dis?
Superintendent salaries, as reported to the Nebraska Department of Education, put the OPS turf war into perspective, when you consider what’s at stake personally for these top district chiefs and their staffs. No wonder feelings have gotten so hurt and defenses have walled off dialogue and the hope for a creative resolution outside court. Big bucks are involved, personally and professionally, that’s why.
Note that these figures are strictly salaries, and don’t include other compensation and perquisites, which can add up to a sizeable amount of money on top:
$218,000 -- Omaha Public Schools Superintendent John Mackiel
$187,600 -- Westside Community Schools Superintendent Ken Bird
$170,000 -- Millard Public Schools Superintendent Keith Lutz
$140,392 -- Ralston Public Schools Superintendent Virginia Moon
$130,000 -- Elkhorn Public Schools Superintendent Roger Breed
It should be noted that the State Board of Education has authorized a salary of $145,000 this school year for State Education Commissioner Doug Christensen, who is appointed, not elected, and serves at their pleasure, and that’s going up by $10,000 come July 1. In the recent past, the commissioner’s salary has ranked him as the highest-paid state employee, except for a few psychiatrists in the Regional Center mental-health system, which is a statement in and of itself.
Note, too, that all of those school districts listed above have assistant or associate superintendents making upwards of $100,000 apiece, for the most part. That just adds to the pressure and intrigue over which district chiefs will keep their jobs or see their “holdings” shrink or enlarge as the OPS battle shakes down.
Now, then, for the comparisons. Salaries paid to the state legislators who disburse the lion’s share of our state tax dollars to these districts and decide many of the most crucial policy matters affecting K-12 education: $12,000.
Note, too, the lack of any salaries paid to the elected officials – the State Board of Education and the various local school board members – charged with holding the state and local superintendents accountable.
So what’s to be done about this situation?
Well, maybe it’s time to state the obvious: we have things bass-ackwards here. We give away the leadership jobs with the high pay by appointment, without a vote of the people. And then for the jobs that we choose democratically and make people really jump through hoops to get, we don’t pay a living wage.
Now, like everybody else, I want the best school leadership available, and I don’t even mind paying them big bucks, as long as we get what we’re paying for.
So I propose that we follow the lead of Southern states such as Florida and Mississippi, and start electing our school superintendents. That goes for our state schools chief. It’s atrocious that that person isn’t elected, and makes more than $50,000 more per year than our governor. What were we thinking, when we let that be an appointed job?
Ah, you say, but electing such a high-priority job as a school district superintendent will politicize it. Yes, well, maybe that’s the point: are you happy right now that voters and taxpayers have absolutely no “pull” about who gets these jobs or what they do in them? Could political pressure on student achievement be to a school superintendent what the bottom line on a P&L statement is to a CEO?
Could the mess we’re in over OPS be any MORE political than it already is?
Could it be that the best way to hold people accountable is the way we do it in the private sector?
Could it be that requiring a superintendent to have classroom teaching experience is an anachronism these days? Maybe we’ve been shooting ourselves in the foot by not opening up school management jobs to the best managers, not just the best ones that come up through the ranks of schools.
Nobody’s saying that the people now holding these important, high-paying jobs in Nebraska aren’t worth their salt.
But how can we say we really do have the best people in place? Maybe we do. But maybe we don’t. Maybe the racial achievement gap within OPS, and the annexation controversy, and the disturbing numbers of students who can’t read at grade level, and the huge chasm between rosy state assessment scores and not-so-hot national assessment scores for Nebraska pupils are all signals that it’s time for a change.
Maybe these problems aren’t so much with our students or our teachers, but with the managers we pay so handsomely to prevent the very things we’re seeing.
(0) comments
Monday, March 20, 2006
Posted
11:23 AM
by Susan Darst Williams
Q. I think the problem with our schools is too much bureaucracy. Our school districts employ so many people who don’t even have contact with kids, and don’t have any idea what goes on in the classroom today. Private schools have little, if any, middle management. Why can’t we follow that model?
There’s been a lot of hype about student achievement, a lot of hype about new programs, and a lot of hype about ground-breaking superintendents. What’s missing? A focus where the rubber meets the road – on the people doing most of the managing and decision-making within public education.
After all, people ARE the education business. A hard look at how they function makes a lot of sense.
Middle managers are program managers, assessment chiefs, content-area directors, budget specialists, and others whose work may actually have more impact on the school day than the proclamations of the school board, superintendent and union president combined.
All too often, though, they feel like mere paperwork-pushers caught in the middle between school leadership and the rank and file, unable for a variety of reasons to really change things for the better for kids, much as they’d like to.
According to the Chicago-based advocacy group, the Cross City Campaign for Urban School Reform, a study of school administrations in Chicago, Milwaukee, and Seattle showed that changes in the way the bureaucracy creates strategies, guidelines and procedures can be pivotal for turning a failing district around.
School leaders can be using the relative experience and consistency of mid-level managers much more wisely, the study found. It suggests:
-- Decentralization and school-based budgeting and management to a much larger degree than is now in place in most school districts around the country.
-- Dialogue about the real issues of teaching and learning between school leaders and mid-level managers, rather than heavy-handed directives.
-- Paperwork reduction.
-- In-school visits by central-office administrators, rather than an over-reliance on emails, memos and phone calls.
-- Central administrators should operate as brokers, working on improving the exchange of information and expertise within schools and districtwide, as well as to the greater community.
Homework: Read the outstanding report, “Leading From the Middle: Mid-Level District Staff and Instructional Improvement,” on a Chicago-based urban school reform group’s website, www.crosscity.org/downloads/exec_summary_final.pdf
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Friday, March 17, 2006
Posted
12:26 PM
by Susan Darst Williams
www.GoBigEd.com/Public_Policy_Briefs
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THE WEARIN' THIN O' THE GREEN:
ARE FEDERAL DOLLARS RUINING SCHOOLS?
Happy St. Patrick’s Day. As we kiss the Blarney Stone, let us contemplate the sometimes-ridiculous and often-negative influences of federal funding on local schools.
In the spirit of the day, here’s a limerick:
There once was an uncle named Sam,
Whose demands got our schools in a jam.
The truth, when you unearth it
Is his bucks just ain’t worth it.
We’re privatizing! So scram!
The day may be coming when the only way to avoid the unproductive mandates and social engineering of federal grants and programs is to have your children enrolled in private school. And even then, we’ll have to fight to keep federal intrusions – our dollars in the educrats’ hands -- from ruining things.
It’s enough to get your . . . IRE . . . up!
Here’s that good story:
http://www.goldwaterinstitute.org/article.php/925.html
(0) comments
Thursday, March 16, 2006
Posted
10:27 AM
by Susan Darst Williams
www.GoBigEd.com/Public_Policy_Briefs
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The Solution Staring OPS in the Face:
Pueblo, Colo., District Pulls Off a Miracle
Without Huge New Funding
When the Omaha Public Schools cries a river for huge amounts of new funding because they have so many high-poverty students to educate and “it costs a lot more,” the rest of us should take a look at what happened in Pueblo, Colo.
That district, with 65% of its student population poor enough to obtain free- and reduced-price school lunches, has recently undergone a metamorphosis. Pueblo used to be a bottom-feeder among Colorado school districts; now it is one of the top performers.
What did they do? Force consolidations with nearby richer, suburban school districts? Shake down Colorado taxpayers for more funding? Call Harry Potter?
Nooooo. They did the right thing – the thing that OPS should have done YEARS ago.
They switched to systematic, intensive, explicit phonics, and used their existing Title I federal remediation dollars to retrain all of their teachers how to teach the kiddies how to read the right way. The reading curriculum is Lindamood-Bell – not as great as Spalding Phonics in my book, but pretty great, anyway.
Presto! Eureka! It took several years, but the Pueblo test scores rose from near the bottom to the point where, today, 83% of Pueblo students read at a level deemed “proficient” or better. That compares to a statewide average of 71%.
The Pueblo superintendent said, “It does not take more money to do what we are doing! We quit doing things that didn’t work. We used resources that were already in the district.”
Read all about it on: http://www.educationnews.org/Commentaries/High_Minority_and_High_Poverty_Children-Can_Rise.htm
And if you have a friend who has any say-so in the OPS controversy, be sure to send that link to them. Presto! Eureka! You just never know what might be the happy thing that finally opens people’s eyes to the real solution that’s staring us all in the face.
(0) comments
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
Posted
9:58 AM
by Susan Darst Williams
www.GoBigEd.com/Public_Policy_Briefs
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News Briefs: Fort Calhoun Voters Override Lid;
Ed-Related Events Coming Up in Omaha
Though Fort Calhoun voters Tuesday approved an override to the legislatively-imposed lid on the property tax levy, it was not without spirited opposition.
The vote was 597 in favor and 331 against, according to preliminary results in The World-Herald.
There was a strong op-ed from the opposing point of view in the local Fort Calhoun paper, The Enterprise, on March 10 from Herschel W. Nelson, who wrote in part:
“Crocodile tears are now flowing; Chicken Little is running around hollering, ‘The sky is going to fall, the schools are going to close, the little town of Fort Calhoun is going to collapse!’ Great scare tactics; don’t believe it, folks!”
He called for an end to district funding of nonacademic pursuits, including sports, and for more attention to classes to prepare students for technical and trade jobs. The preoccupation with what Nelson called “fun and games” has resulted in this disparity: the United States produces about 60,000 new engineers per year, but China and Japan each produce 500,000, Nelson said.
Used Book Sale in Omaha This Weekend
Could Set You Up for Summer Reading
There’s a used book sale with books for all ages coming up at St. Timothy’s Lutheran Church, 93rd and Dodge Streets. The sale will go on from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. on Friday, March 17, and from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday. Books were collected by children who attend Trinity Christian School. Proceeds will be donated to Heifer International, which works to end world hunger.
Henry Doorly Zoo
Plans ‘Read Around the World’
Here’s a neat example of a community event focused on reading. Kudos to the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha for planning “Read Around the World” from 10 a.m. to 2 p.. Saturday. There will be reading stations throughout the zoo, arts and crafts, a bird show at 1:30, and it’s all free with a regular zoo admission or membership.
Omaha Learning Disabilities Group
To Meet March 21
Self-esteem of students, teachers and parents will be the topic as the Omaha Learning Disabilities Association meets Tuesday, March 21, for a presentation by Joan Johnson of PTI Nebraska.
The group will meet at 7 p.m. at First Christian Church, 6630 Dodge St. For information, see www.hometown.aol.com/omahaLDA
(0) comments
Tuesday, March 14, 2006
Posted
9:33 AM
by Susan Darst Williams
www.GoBigEd.com/Public_Policy_Briefs
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Teacher Tenure:
Does Job Protection Go Too Far
And Cost Too Much?
Sex, violence, child abuse, theft, arson, forgery . . . is it a soap opera, or the latest Oscar-winning movie plot? Nooooo. It’s case summaries from the Nebraska Professional Practices Commission. That’s the hearing board which handles cases of teacher license revocations, suspensions, reprimands and so forth.
It makes for interesting reading on http://nppc.nol.org
What’s striking is to keep in mind that there are more than 20,000 active educators at any given time on the job in Nebraska’s schools. Yet the case summaries show that only a relative handful have gotten as far as the Commission in the past 15 years. Fewer still have had their teaching licenses revoked.
And fewer than that had to be fired from their jobs. In fact, an education insider once told me that you can count on the fingers of one hand the number of teachers fired “for cause” in this state. He didn’t mean in a given year. He meant EVER.
Teacher tenure clearly is an area of Nebraska education policy that deserves a hard look. Iowa recently did away with secret buyouts that had been going on, out-of-court settlements to prevent a protracted court battle even when a district had the goods, hands down, on an incompetent teacher.
But finding information on teacher dismissals is difficult, as Nebraska’s accountability structure is one of the laxest in the country when it comes to informing the public on teachers who don’t make the grade.
Take a look at what an investigative reporter found out in the State of Illinois. This article is from GoBigEd’s sister website, www.DailySusan.com
Why shouldn’t the Nebraska Department of Education be revealing this same information about teacher tenure, evaluation, dismissal and litigation to us? It should. In a crucial public service like education, in which personnel is the most important consideration, it’s a crying shame that the public doesn’t know more about quality control.
----------------------
(from Hot Potatoes, 3/14/06, www.DailySusan.com)
Teacher Tenure: How Costly Is It?
Everybody knows it’s a shame that bad teachers can keep their jobs for life unless they’re caught in the act of committing a felony – or it seems that way – while good teachers can’t even get a modest bonus for doing outstanding work in the classroom.
But that’s the effect of teacher tenure laws, often union-promulgated and protected. There’s a huge veil of secrecy over teacher dismissals in most states. The public has no idea how few educators, who are, after all, public-sector employees paid with tax funds, are ever dismissed for cause from their jobs. In most school districts, bad teachers are shifted from school to school in what’s called “the dance of the lemons,” or given secret buyouts at taxpayer expense. Only taxpayers are never told this is going on.
An investigation in Illinois has shed new light on teacher tenure, and produced stunning statistics that ought to be taken to heart in statehouses coast to coast.
The State of Illinois has an estimated 95,500 tenured educators working in public schools in 875 districts. But over the past several years, on average, only seven have had their dismissals approved by a state hearing officer. That’s an indication that it is just too hard to get rid of incompetent and immoral teachers in that state, according to an exhaustive investigation by Scott Reeder, statehouse bureau chief for the Small Newspaper Group.
Reeder’s review of data revealed by 1,500 Freedom of Information Act requests also showed that only one of every 930 job-performance evaluations of tenured teachers resulted in an unsatisfactory rating, and only 50 percent of those with bad ratings actually leave teaching.
Reeder reported that in the past 18 years, 94% of Illinois school districts have never even attempted to fire anyone with tenure. In the past decade, his reporting revealed, 84% of Illinois school districts have never even rated a tenured teacher as unsatisfactory.
In one alarming case, a woman said she had become pregnant by her assistant principal when she was 14 and in seventh grade. A blood test indicated there was a greater than 99% likelihood that he was the father. But still, the education system’s hearing officer ruled that there was insufficient evidence to dismiss the man, saving him his job. He kept it for another nine years until a DNA test showed an even greater likelihood that he was the father. His teaching certificate was suspended, but not revoked, and he is paying child support.
In related reporting, Reeder found in campaign finance records that the two Illinois teachers’ unions had contributed $16 million to statehouse campaigns in the last 12 years, the first and third largest contributors statewide. Unions are the major defender of education employee tenure systems that appear to greatly favor the rights of the educator over everything and everyone else, including children.
Because of union pressures and litigation costs, Reeder learned that the going rate to dismiss a teacher has now topped $100,000 in attorney’s fees alone. In Geneseo, Ill., reportedly the school district has had to spend more than $400,000 in attorney’s fees in attempting to dismiss one educator, according to Reeder’s reporting.
The reporter uncovered settlement deals that are kept secret from the public, and for good reason: for example, in return for one educator’s resignation, the school board promised to remove any reference to an Illinois Department of Children and Family Services investigation and all unsatisfactory job evaluations from his personnel file, and pay him $30,000.
Reeder’s series ended with an editorial calling for much better public disclosure and accountability about job dismissal actions, as well as:
-- quicker and smoother dismissals
-- an end to secret buyouts
-- extra pay for teachers whose students show the most improvement while in their classrooms
-- more school choice so that parents can “punish” schools that harbor incompetent teachers by taking their enrollment dollars elsewhere
-- and the replacement of property tax as a school funding source in favor of a new income tax, which the newspapers contend would be fairer.
You can view the series of stories on www.thehiddencostsoftenure.com
(0) comments
Monday, March 13, 2006
Posted
1:07 PM
by Susan Darst Williams
Urge your state senator to oppose LB 228, which would institutionalize all-day k across Nebraska. It would be a mistake, since ample evidence shows that this costly "reform" would do little or nothing to help disadvantaged children. It basically is "free" day care, not educationally helpful. And it might actually be a disservice to middle-class children, especially boys, who are not developmentally ready for the chaos and pressures of all day in school.
Declining test scores, more aggression and bad behavior can all be traced, in part, to the increase in time young children spend away from home. Let's not contribute to those negative trends.
Let's find better tax policies and better ways to keep families shaping young lives, and allowing schools to concentrate on the quality academics that we all want them to deliver.
Posted
10:04 AM
by Susan Darst Williams
HOW POOR READING SKILLS DAMPEN MATH UNDERSTANDING
Q. Is there any connection between reading disability and math disability?
Yes. If you’ve ever wondered how a math student can be so bright and yet do so poorly on standardized tests, it may well be that the student isn’t reading well enough to comprehend the questions. We’re not teaching students how to read logically and systematically. That hurts their ability to think logically and systematically. And in turn, that hurts their math achievement.
Why? Because schools today don’t teach quick and accurate decoding of words with phonics-only reading instruction. Instead, they use a mixture of strategies that can be confusing. It’s called the “Whole Language” method, or “balanced literacy” or “eclectic approach.”
The students are taught to guess at words in text using cues, including what the context of the sentence might suggest. In approaching an unfamiliar word, the student’s eyes are trained to look at the start of the word, and then the end of the word, and back to the start, and maybe up to the illustration, and think about what it might mean, and then take a guess.
The student is not taught that reading goes from left to right, top to bottom, but instead is left to “discover” what text might mean in whatever visual approach to the words the student might take. This leads to looping and skipping the eyes all over a page of text, scanning for cues and so forth. Unfortunately, that habit spills over onto math schoolwork. If math teachers want to know why so many students today can’t remember to write their names on their papers, skip whole problems accidentally, or miss a lot of problems because they misread the directions, this is why.
A lot of students with reading problems go into special education programs that give them strategies for improving comprehension. But they don’t really work, and especially not for math. The special education technique of “key word triggers” – spotting what looks like an important word in a sentence or paragraph and focusing your problem-solving efforts on it, instead of accurately comprehending the whole paragraph – also has infested math instruction, to the detriment of math understanding and achievement. Students can only scan and guess, not analyze.
As the words in schoolwork become more and more complex in later grade school and on into the secondary years, reading comprehension declines. This is because the students don’t have the vocabulary, decoding and word attack skills that come from proper phonics instruction. That’s why so many students today can’t work a math problem with a three- or four-part order of directions; they can’t understand the directions in the first place because they lack the reading comprehension.
Then there are the math textbooks. They’re often not very well-written, which just makes it harder for the students to discern what to do. Today the focus is on story problems with a reduction on computation. The books focus more on reasoning skills and problem-solving. Often, just a little bit of math is wrapped up in a great deal of text: “critical thinking exercises” or “higher-order thinking skills.” The net effect is to trivialize math and make the math portion of a story problem a minor part of it, instead of placing it where it belongs: on center stage.
Now, nobody is against reasoning and problem-solving. It’s just that, if you’re not teaching kids how to compute answers, they’re not going to have the tools to reason and problem-solve. They’re only going to be able to estimate and guess.
What’s the answer? Phonics-only reading instruction from K-3.
Homework: For a great look by a math professor at the impact of poor reading instruction on math achievement, see “If Johnny Can’t Read and Follow Directions, Then He Can’t Do Math,” on www.math.umd.edu/users/jnd/subhome/Reading_Instruction.htm
(0) comments
Friday, March 10, 2006
Posted
10:24 AM
by Susan Darst Williams
AS THE LEGISLATIVE FUR FLIES
The days of this legislative session in the Nebraska Unicameral are counting down now, and it’s hard to keep track of important education bills as they come up for debate or are routed to the various pigeonholes.
So here are two ways you can keep track of the ones that are important to you:
www.unicam.state.ne.us
http://newsletter.ncsa.org
If it’s all mind-boggling to you, but you still want to understand how the process works, here’s a humdinger of some weekend poolside reading:
http://newsletter.ncsa.org/vnews/display.v/ART/3c4ca7649aedf
(0) comments
Thursday, March 09, 2006
Posted
10:50 AM
by Susan Darst Williams
Parents and teachers who would like to escape government schools might be ready to talk turkey about starting a private school. Among the problems they don’t think can be fixed:
-- Entitlement fever, fed by the unions and school administrators. It’s the old “keep up with the Joneses” peer pressure that has school districts falling all over themselves to build on infrastructure and add staff and programs in the absence of evidence that they’re necessary or will even help academically.
-- Enormous additional costs of Outcome-Based Education in the state’s accreditation standards and assessments that have little to do with traditional academics and lots to do with social engineering.
-- Stagnant bureaucracy which sucks away a great deal of money before it can reach teachers’ paychecks or children in the classroom.
-- An education system based on the lowest common denominator. If every child can’t have something, no child can have it. That attitude has created widespread, entrenched social leveling that, by definition, shortchanges the top 50% of students.
The worst thing that could happen to public schools is to lose the middle- and upper classes. They’re the ones with the political power, who could fight for public education – if it would serve their children’s needs. When it consistently fails to do so, they have the money to leave. And there goes a sizeable chunk of political power for the public schools. It’s too bad.
It’s possible that if enough of the Class I country schools get gutsy and assertive enough to privatize in the wake of how they’ve been treated by governmental institutions seeking to force them to consolidate with bigger districts against their will, those governmental institutions might wake up and clean up their act.
But it’s also possible that the Class I parents might pave the way for more urban parents to follow their lead. So it would be a very interesting endeavor all ‘round.
On to the task of starting a new private school: if there are no private schools in the picture, you’ll have to start one from scratch, or start homeschooling in some form. It’s pretty daunting. Where do you start? Ideas from GoBig Ed and its one-of-a-kind online resource guide, the Encyclopedia of Education (left-hand column on the www.GoBigEd.com homepage):
-- If a private school is your goal, gather research on private education and call a meeting to discuss the possibilities for starting a private school in your community.
Buy an ad in your local paper to establish yourselves as credible and serious. Let’s face it: it also helps to have the local paper think of you as a revenue-producer, not just someone who wants free publicity. Treat them well, and they’ll cover your efforts well.
A core group of four or five people should come out of this, and you can discuss who would like to lead the group and who would like to take on other responsibilities. It would be wonderful if your group includes a banker, a lawyer, an accountant and someone in the construction business.
Your group should begin contacting community leaders to explain what you’re doing and gain support. Other tasks include writing a business plan, doing research online and on the phone, and talking with staff at the Nebraska Department of Education.
-- Decide whether you want to be a secular school or a religious school.
The obvious advantage of religious education is that it’s best for kids. But there are other benefits: you can forge a relationship with a local church to lease space economically for your school if the government won’t let you have your old Class I building. Then you can piggyback on (and help pay for, through your lease) some of the church’s services and amenities, including a parking lot, playground and so forth.
Another advantage not always seen is that, with a religious foundation, it is easier to handle the things that always come up when groups of people work together: conflict, gossip, misunderstanding and pride. You can solve them a lot more easily with religious principles that everybody shares, since the answers to all those problems are right there in the Bible. One wonders whether public schools would have gotten so problematic if Biblical principles hadn’t been expunged from school management and daily life a generation ago. Now, you can put them front and center, and that’s a good thing.
-- Review the Nebraska Department of Education’s rules and regulations for private schools and homeschools to decide how to structure your school.
See Rules 12, 13 and 14 on www.nde.state.ne.us/LEGAL/RULES.html
-- Find an existing successful private school or association, visit them, and copy them.
Highly recommended: the Hillsdale Academy, www.hillsdale.edu/academy . . . the Core Knowledge schools, www.coreknowledge.org . . . and the Association of Classical and Christian Schools, www.accsedu.org
All three of these have start-up notebooks, reference/curriculum guides and other materials that you can order that would be of great help.
Closer to home, you might contact Trinity Christian School in Omaha or the Wider Omaha Lutheran Schools Association in Omaha for a tour, advice, and perhaps some mentoring.
-- Form a nonprofit, 501(c)(3) corporation to govern the school and be able to receive grants and donations.
It’s possible that any number of services for rural economic development could help set this up for you, or direct you to an attorney if there isn’t one nearby.
-- Ask to have the existing Class I school building donated to you, since neither local property taxpayers nor state taxpayers will have to help you pay for operating costs from now on.
You’re saving them countless thousands of dollars. The least they can do is give you the building.
-- If expenses are just too high for families to bear, consider a hybrid between a private school and a homeschool.
Consider a different schedule, such as 2, 3 or 4 days a week in school, and the rest of the time in a homeschool in which the parents are closely guided and supervised by the schoolteacher.
Another alternative: half-days in school, and half-days at home. This arrangement is known as the “University Model” with its own association housed at:
http://www.naums.net/naums_home.htm
Another alternative: hiring a tutor and pay only hourly wage instead of a professional salary with professional expectations. If there is a retired teacher in your community who wants to work part-time, or someone else who wants the job, and if that person’s spouse already has medical benefits, you’re set. Otherwise, it’s not affording the salary that’s hard, but coming up with the benefits that professionals expect today. The down side is that usually it’s up to the parents to make sure the kids are doing the work, because the tutor’s job is to deliver the skill, not necessarily to develop the whole child.
For more on this phenomenon, you could google articles by the writer Brigid McMenamin and tutoring.
-- Or, to save money, operate your school on a four-day school week.
More than 100 rural school districts around the country, mostly in rural areas, have pared back their school schedule to four days a week. Students may come to school 20 or 30 minutes earlier, and stay 20 to 30 minutes later each day. Proponents say that knocking off on Fridays or Mondays creates better time management and focus, and saves money on transportation, utilities and teacher and substitute pay. Fridays can become occasional field trip days, or a chance for kids to work on sports, music, hobbies and other outside interests on their own. See:
www.ncsl.org/programs/educ/fourdayschwk.htm
-- Individual homeschooling:
Nebraska requires homeschoolers to be in session 1,032 hours per year for elementary grades. You must teach language arts, math, science, social studies and health. There are no teacher qualifications unless the teacher is employed by the family and money changes hands. You have to file an annual notice of intent to homeschool with the State Department of Education by Aug. 1, or 30 days before you get started. There are no particular recordkeeping or testing requirements.
According to homeschooling proponents, by eighth grade homeschooled students score four grade levels above the national average on standardized tests. That statistic alone may make all that you have to do well worth it.
You will want to attend a homeschooling convention or curriculum fair – Nebraska’s is scheduled for March 31 in Lincoln; see www.nchea.org -- and tap into the used curriculum market to get started. There are many other aids available. Start with:
Nebraska Christian Home Educators Association, www.nchea.org
Omaha chapter, Home Educators Network: www.omahahen.org
For a list of HEN activities and resources: http://www.omahahen.org/resources/clubs.htm
National Homeschooling Links:
www.hslda.org
www.consideringhomeschooling.org
www.nheri.org
www.homeschoolheartbeat.com
www.home-school.com
www.TheOldHomeschoolhouse.com
www.HomeSchoolBuzz.com
Homeschooling / private schooling contracts:
www.calvertschool.org
Homeschooling co-ops / curriculum providers:
www.legacyhc.org
www.co-opcurriculums.com/html/co-ops.html
www.heritagehomeschool.com
-- Utilize distance education.
There’s a whole new world of online academies that can supplement private education, parent-provided homeschooling or a part-time private-school co-op. For example, see:
www.k12.com
www.nytimes.com/learning
www.potterschool.com
www.apexlearning.com
www.clonlara.org/compuhigh.htm
www.classicalfree.org
www.angelicum.net
www.LearningByGrace.org
-- Form a co-op for a full- or part-time paid teacher in a multifamily homeschool:
This is easier than achieving the accreditation requirements of a private school, though the most difficult part of that is hiring a certified teacher, meeting bathroom and fire safety requirements, and having a sizeable library.
Again, check the State Department of Education’s rules and talk with staffers about establishing a “multifamily attendance center.”
However, for many parents, hiring a pro makes a lot more sense than trying to do-it-yourself, and a multifamily co-op, though it takes careful communications and lots of planning, may be the best way.
Besides a core classroom teacher, who probably will have to multitask among several grade levels, you might consider hiring an aide, subject-area tutors or recruiting volunteers. This not only enriches the children’s experiences, but it gives your main teacher a little bit of planning time each day. Examples: someone to come in and do music, P.E., art, Spanish, Latin, or any number of other subjects that parents really want for their children.
-- When the tax dollars are yanked away, how on earth can we pay for all this?
Independence is not cheap. It is tragic to lose the funding support of state and local taxes. But that’s the price you pay for keeping your school alive, either as a new private school or as a multifamily homeschool with one or more paid instructors.
You’ll want to establish a school budget showing sources and uses of funds. There’s a good example for a school start-up in Appendix A of the Association of Classical and Christian Schools’ School Start-Up Notebook (www.accsedu.org)
Of course, the ideal situation is to find an “angel” who will underwrite a major portion of your start-up costs. You can also find a professional fund-raiser who can help you come up with a winning combination of tuition and fund-raising revenues. Nobody likes to fund-raise constantly, but that’s a way of life in private education. In a low-income, low-population area, it would seem to call for fund-raising in the service and food areas, rather than carnivals or charity auctions.
Even then, it’s not a good idea to subsidize tuition too much with fund-raising; part of your purpose is to make people responsible and independent, so you’ll always want parents (and grandparents!) to be paying the majority of your costs.
A big pitfall is to try to be too much, too soon. Stick to your knittin’. What you want is to become a “content-based school,” and that by definition is much cheaper and less complicated than a “process-based school” that our public schools have almost all become. Parents who have become too indoctrinated in expecting “progressive” process methods such as lavish technology, a focus on feelings instead of facts, and group projects and extracurricular activities instead of good teaching and individual study, may fear that they’re shortchanging their children with what might appear to be a bare-bones curriculum. But it’s not! It’s what they need.
Here’s a tremendous bank of articles from inc. magazine:
http://www.inc.com/guides/finance/20797.html
Here’s good background on financial aid opportunities for homeschoolers, including assistance for special-needs children:
www.homeschoolfoundation.org
(0) comments
Wednesday, March 08, 2006
Posted
9:29 AM
by Susan Darst Williams
A reader whose child’s small country school is now effectively doomed by Nebraska’s education bureaucracy has asked for information on how to start a private school.
If the Nebraska Supreme Court, the Nebraska Legislature, the Nebraska Department of Education and the Nebraska State Teachers Association all find the Class I, elementary-only, rural schools so objectionable as to cut off their funding and legislate them out of existence, that might just be the smartest way to play: take your ball and go home.
Or in this case, take over the reins of your child’s education once and for all, and never let the educrats make the rules again.
A one-room schoolhouse for the 21st Century! It’s an exciting prospect.
Returning to the “old school” format – parent-driven, parent-designed and parent-managed grade schools – with today’s “new school” innovations and improvements, from distance learning to the Internet to flexible scheduling – might be the best thing that’s happened in education in a long time.
Of course, any parent-driven school must still adhere to basic fire, safety and business rules. But beyond that, how do you do it? It’s not an easy job . . . but it must certainly be enormously fulfilling, especially when the curriculum and instructional methods chosen by the parents and the teachers wallop the academic achievement of the kids in the government schools, as happens all over the world.
Today and tomorrow, Go Big Ed will try to offer resources and tips on how to start and pay for a small private school or multifamily homeschool. To get started, here’s the lay of the land on private education from Go Big Ed’s Encyclopedia of Education, found on the left side of the homepage on www.GoBigEd.com:
Private education:
www.capenet.org (Council for American Private Education)
www.nais.org (National Association of Independent Schools)
www.acsi.org (Association of Christian Schools International)
www.ncea.org (National Catholic Educational Association)
www.naes.org (National Association of Episcopal Schools)
www.elca.org/schools (Lutheran schools -- ELCA)
www.lcms.org/pages/default.asp?NavID=1694 (Lutheran schools - Mo. Synod)
www.amshq.org (American Montessori Society schools)
www.montessori-ami.org (Association Montessori Internationale schools)
www.ravsak.org (Network of Jewish Community Day Schools)
http://mediaguidetoislam.sfsu.edu/intheus/04c_youth.htm (Muslim education)
www.ncgs.org (National Coalition of Girls' Schools)
www.privateschools.about.com
www.nces.ed.gov/globallocator/
www.petersons.com
www.ncgs.org (National Coalition of Girls' Schools)
Private scholarships (see also School choice):
www.scholarshipfund.org (a national Children's Scholarship Fund)
www.ceofoundation.org (San Antonio and beyond)
www.pave.org (Milwaukee)
http://hooverdigest.org (search for private scholarships K-12)
http://www.pfaw.org/pfaw/general/default.aspx?oid=5094 (opposition from People For the American Way)
Private school management / providers / franchisers:
www.isminc.com
www.face.net
www.edisonschools.com
http://slate.msn.com/toolbar.aspx?action=read&id=2070329
Private schools, excellent:
www.hillsdale.edu/academy
www.calvertschool.org
www.lawrenceville.org
www.giftedschool.org
www.cardenschool.org
www.latinschool.org
www.andover.edu
www.BoardingSchoolReview.com
Privatization:
www.sutherlandinstitute.org (report, "Saving Education and Ourselves: The Moral Case for Self-Reliance in Education")
www.heartland.org (search "school privatization")
www.reason.org (search "school privatization")
www.honestedu.org
www.exodusmandate.org
www.strike-the-root.com
(0) comments
Tuesday, March 07, 2006
Posted
9:42 AM
by Susan Darst Williams
The Nebraska Supreme Court has ruled that the state’s education bureaucracy may proceed as if Nebraska’s 206 elementary-only country schools were being abolished, even though a statewide vote on that issue is coming up in November 2006. Voters may very well save the Class I schools, but by then, it will be too late, supporters fear.
Class I supporters have vowed to fight the forced consolidation of their schools into larger districts all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. They say the legislation, LB 126, passed last year would unfairly destroy local control of education, diminish democracy by wiping out more than 206 elected school boards, and disenfranchise voters statewide since any vote to overturn LB 126 this fall would be moot.
But the controversy may have its best solution out of court.
The Class I supporters have made a good case for their cost-effectiveness and academic success. The “extra” cost of maintaining these tiny, rural schools is an infinitesimal drop in the bucket compared to the overall $2.2 billion spent statewide on K-12 education.
It appears that a huge reason for this illogical power grab is to raise the “basis” for teacher salaries elsewhere across Nebraska’s K-12 districts. The Class I teachers “drag down” those salary averages because of the economics: teaching jobs simply pay less in small towns. It’s understandable that urban teachers and their unions are squawking about the discrepancy. But perhaps they’ve lost sight of what’s best for kids. And nobody can argue with the higher test scores and lower dropout rates among kids who’ve come out of country schools.
Ironically, no one is crying out for the abolition of the Omaha Public Schools – which receives significantly more state aid per pupil than most Class I schools and has enormously lower test scores in the early grades.
So it’s not logical that the Class I schools have to go. They don’t. There are better ways to solve this issue. It doesn’t have to be a court battle; it just would take some leadership and some guts. They’ve been missing so far, at least effectively, in the Legislature and other possible political problem-solvers. So it may be up to those outside the system – those not employed by K-12 education or its financial backers – to come forward with a solution that everybody can live with.
Alternatives for Class I schools:
Go private.
Get out from under onerous state and federal regulations and enjoy the benefits of local control that can only be found these days in homeschools and private schools. You do not need a certified teacher to form a multifamily “group attendance center” homeschool. There’s no reason parents couldn’t “co-op” their money and volunteer time to pay one or more instructors and administer the school on their own. It would be easy to articulate the curriculum to ease the transition into seventh grade in the neighboring K-12 districts when the time comes to finish grade school. The evidence is clear, that going to school closer to home is best all around. If this is the only way, this is the smart thing to do, even though it’s unfair and more work.
Reorganize as charter schools.
It’s outrageous that Nebraska is one of only a handful of states around the country with no charter school enabling legislation. A charter school is simply a loosening of the bureaucracy and regulations to allow a group of parents and teachers to run a school the way THEY think it should be run, with less governmental interference. The Legislature really ought to allow the Class I’s to reorganize as charters if they wish, and receive block-grant funding for each student enrolled in the same amount per pupil that their corresponding K-12 district receives under the state aid formula. Then, if the Class I school can’t manage that money to run a school that continues to match or exceed the academic achievement of the K-12 district, the charter could be revoked.
Cut school spending elsewhere in the K-12 system to come up with the money.
The Legislature has said it believes that forcing the 200-and-some Class I schools into the K-12 districts would save Nebraskans over $12 million. The Class I supporters hotly dispute that. They say the real figure is closer to $4 million. Let’s take the happy medium -- $8 million.
Go to the Nebraska Department of Education website’s financial page:
http://ess.nde.state.ne.us/SchoolFinance/AFR/Downloads/0405/SWAfr0405.pdf
and you’ll see that, in the most recent school year recorded there, statewide K-12 spending in Nebraska equaled $2.2 billion. That means the Class I controversy is being waged over .0036 of 1 percent of what we’re spending on our K-12 schools in Nebraska.
Come on, now, folks. This is sooooooo ridiculous. Here’s where we could find that $8 million to save the Class I schools, and then some:
-- Reorganize Nebraska’s Educational Service Units, or ESU’s, and complete their functions by interlocal agreements between existing school districts. It’s dumb to have a big bureaucracy, buildings, computers and so forth in each ESU duplicating what the school districts have. It might have made sense over a quarter-century ago, when the ESU’s got started. But not now. Can ‘em. Savings: Could be mega-millions. See:
http://www.auditors.state.ne.us/local/audit/2006/basic/basicqueryapp.php
-- Turn down LB 228, which would mandate all-day kindergarten statewide. All-day kindergarten actually is worse for kids than half-day in the long run. Its benefits “wash out” by third grade, the evidence shows. Savings: $28 million.
-- The evidence is clear that smaller class sizes do not produce better learning achievement, and in fact, may actually contribute to lower test scores because teachers have time to use labor-intensive methods that don’t work – including Whole Language instead of phonics-based reading instruction, and Whole Math with its group projects and “discovery learning” instead of computation-based math instruction. State aid should be reformulated to have nothing to do with demographics, and everything to do with rewarding those schools that use the right teaching methods, even in larger class sizes. Look at the parochial schools: they may have 25 or 30 kids in the classroom, many of them low-income, compared to the 13 or 15 in some of those inner-city schools in the Omaha Public Schools. But the parochial schools’ test scores are significantly higher than in OPS. How come? They’re keeping it simple, stupid – teaching cost-effectively, with tried-and-true methods. The public schools could do that, too. Class-size reductions average $800 extra per pupil. So if normal class sizes were returned to just the 10,000 inner-city pupils within OPS, that would free up – guess how much? -- $8 million. Bingo!
(0) comments
Monday, March 06, 2006
Posted
9:05 AM
by Susan Darst Williams
www.journalstar.com/articles/2006/03/06/letters/doc440b7077c1357325964818.txt
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SMALL CLASS SIZE: NOT WORTH THE COST
Q. Isn’t the answer to many of our educational problems smaller classes, so that teachers can concentrate more on meeting the learning needs of each child?
No, old-fashioned teaching methods such as phonics for reading and computation for math would do a lot more than smaller classes.
Class size reductions cost an estimated $800 per pupil per year for additional teaching staff. That doesn’t count the costs of additional classroom space, additional administration and support, and twice as much learning material. Yet there’s no real evidence that smaller classes improve student learning.
Proponents of smaller class sizes tout two programs as “proof” that smaller classes work. They are Tennessee’s STAR (the Student/Teacher Achievement Ratio) and Wisconsin’s SAGE (the Student Achievement Guarantee in Education).
While they did show improvements for minority and disadvantaged students, these programs didn’t factor out other variables that might have contributed to or actually caused the improvements. The differences also were measurable mainly after kindergarten, and didn’t last much longer – they “washed out” in a few years, in other words. Lastly, there was evidence of the “Hawthorne effect” – teachers in smaller classes knew they were being studied, so they overachieved. So these programs aren’t a valid, reliable source of proof.
At any rate, class size reductions are expensive, compared to other reforms, such as better teacher training, alternative teacher certification, bureaucracy reduction, and school choice.
Eminent education scholars such as Caroline Hoxby of Harvard and Eric Hanushek of Stanford confirm that class size reductions are not what they’re cracked up to be. Hanushek reviewed 277 studies of class size reductions and found that 15% showed a positive effect on student achievement, but 13% actually showed a negative effect. The rest were about equal. He concluded that, based on how much class size reductions cost, they would not be good public policy.
See Hanushek’s article, “The Evidence on Class Size,” at http://edexcellence.net/doc/size.pdf and a collection of his writings on the topic at http://edpro.stanford.edu/hanushek/content.asp?contentId=73
Nationwide, while class sizes have dropped from an average of 30 students per classroom in 1961 to around 17 today, test scores of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) have remained maddeningly stagnant. Minnesota, noted for its high student achievement, has among the country’s largest class sizes, while Washington, D.C., with an average class size of 11.4 pupils, has the nation’s worst academic performance. See www.alec.org/meSWFiles/pdf/0023.pdf
In North Carolina, $23 million was invested over four years to zero in on smaller class sizes for children in low-income, low-performing schools. Results? A bust. Read more in the charmingly named article, “Honey, I Shrunk the Class!: How Reducing Class Size Fails to Raise Student Achievement,” Jan. 10, 2006, John Locke Foundation, http://www.johnlocke.org/spotlights/20060110123.html?BMIDS=13210320-b1c2eb50-99087
In California, the class-size reduction pricetag was $2.5 billion, and that didn’t count the cost of the huge exodus of teachers from inner-city schools to the suburbs to take the newly-created teaching jobs because of the smaller class size mandate. That forced school officials to hire incompetents to replace them: one-fourth of the 18,000 teachers hired in 1996 lacked teaching credentials. An exacting RAND study found no payoff for massive, multi-billion dollar class size reductions in California: http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v11n40/.
It’s not just states that are finding this out; foreign countries know this, too. Ironically, larger class sizes – not smaller ones -- were associated with higher student achievement in 11 out of 18 countries in one study. In five, it was a push. In only two out of the 18 countries could better student achievement be linked with smaller class sizes. See the article, “Crowd Control,” www.educationnext.org/20033/56.html
Others who have said that class size reductions aren’t worth it are influential sociologist James C. Coleman, credited for sweeping reforms in schooling for disadvantaged children; Harvard sociologist Christopher Jencks, who showed positive results with larger classes, and famed inner-city Los Angeles calculus teacher Jaime Escalante (made famous in the movie, “Stand and Deliver”), who often had as many as 75 students in his classes.
Homework: There’s a good synopsis of this issue from the American Legislative Exchange Council, www.alec.org/2/1/talking-points/2.html
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Friday, March 03, 2006
Posted
9:28 AM
by Susan Darst Williams
WEIRD AND WACKY
K-12 DEVELOPMENTS
NATIONWIDE:
BARELY HALF CAN READ
WELL ENOUGH FOR A COLLEGE INTRO CLASS?
You know, I harp on this: kids aren’t reading up to snuff, and it’s because the public schools aren’t teaching reading right in the early grades. But educators don’t care. Why should they? They don’t get in any trouble whatsoever. Good grief: isn’t it time we gave them some – grief – to turn this abomination around?
According to the ACT, 51% of the students who took the ACT last year had the reading skills necessary to succeed in first-year college classes or a job-training program. That’s the lowest proportion in a decade. And that’s just the kids who took the ACT – the college-bound population. It doesn’t even count the sizeable number of kids who didn’t even take it.
See for yourself on:
http://www.act.org/path/policy/reports/reading.html
What’s that the Cowardly Lion used to sing? “’F’I were king of the forrrrrrrrrest. . .” I’d sure as heck do some loud roaring about this. I’d probably fire a few educators . . . and send them to the Wizard for new brains AND new hearts.
MINNESOTA:
IF THERE’S BEEN ‘BLACK FLIGHT’ OUT OF MINNEAPOLIS,
CAN IT BE FAR BEHIND IN OMAHA?
(Here’s the start of a Wall Street Journal article published Thursday by a Minneapolis Star Tribune columnist. Inner-city black kids in Minneapolis were in the same boat as those in the Omaha Public Schools, with low test scores and a 50% graduation rate. The difference is, they could escape to the many good charter schools available there; Nebraska does not allow charter schools and very few private-school options. Could we possibly have a more politically powerful and stifling teachers’ union than Minneapolis, a state that’s far more liberal in policies and spending? But yes, unionism is the apparent reason for Nebraska’s lack of school choice. Sigh. Later in the story, a black leader says that if the public schools don’t clean up their act in the inner city, they’re going to be like dinosaurs in a museum – dead! Hmm. I wonder what an “OPSaurus” would look like.)
MINNEAPOLIS--Something momentous is happening here in the home of prairie populism: black flight. African-American families from the poorest neighborhoods are rapidly abandoning the district public schools, going to charter schools, and taking advantage of open enrollment at suburban public schools. Today, just around half of students who live in the city attend its district public schools.
As a result, Minneapolis schools are losing both raw numbers of students and "market share." In 1999-2000, district enrollment was about 48,000; this year, it's about 38,600. Enrollment projections predict only 33,400 in 2008. A decline in the number of families moving into the district accounts for part of the loss, as does the relocation of some minority families to inner-ring suburbs. Nevertheless, enrollments are relatively stable in the leafy, well-to-do enclave of southwest Minneapolis and the city's white ethnic northeast. But in 2003-04, black enrollment was down 7.8%, or 1,565 students. In 2004-05, black enrollment dropped another 6%.
Black parents have good reasons to look elsewhere. Last year, only 28% of black eighth-graders in the Minneapolis public schools passed the state's basic skills math test; 47% passed the reading test. The black graduation rate hovers around 50%, and the district's racial achievement gap remains distressingly wide. Louis King, a black leader who served on the Minneapolis School Board from 1996 to 2000, puts it bluntly: "Today, I can't recommend in good conscience that an African-American family send their children to the Minneapolis public schools. The facts are irrefutable: These schools are not preparing our children to compete in the world." Mr. King's advice? "The best way to get attention is not to protest, but to shop somewhere else."
COLORADO ROCKY MOUNTAIN HIGH,
OR TWO NEW TEACHING LOWS?
You be the school-board member: if teachers in your district said these things to children in the classrooms your voters and taxpayers provide, would you think it was great, or fire them on the spot? These are two separate incidents. The first link is a news story about a teacher’s in-class lecture and the second link is a recording of that lecture. The third link is about another Colorado classroom incident.
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/local/article/0,1299,DRMN_15_4508688,00.html
http://www.850koa.com/cc-common/podcast/single_podcast.html?podcast=news_worthy.xml
http://www.dailyrecord.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060302/NEWS01/603020327/1005
NEVADA MAN GAMBLES
THAT HE’S NOT THE ONLY ONE
SICK OF EVOLUTION PROPAGANDA
A Nevada man is putting together a petition drive that could make it illegal in that state to teach kids that evolution is fact. A constitutional amendment would require teachers to point out that there’s a controversy over how life began and how it developed:
http://www.family.org/cforum/news/a0039712.cfm
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