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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Friday, April 28, 2006
Posted
8:42 AM
by Susan Darst Williams
GIVE OPS ITS TURF UNDER THE 1891 LAW --
THE TURF IT HAD IN 1891
A brilliant solution to the mess over the Omaha Public Schools comes from a GoBigEd reader named Lori. She says that since OPS started the whole “one city, one school district” thing over its interpretation of an 1891 state law, then OPS should have its way. . .
. . . with the territory that it had in 1891.
And here’s what that was, according to an 1890 Omaha city street map available for sale on eBay. The price is $8.99 plus $5 shipping and handling; maybe the four suburban superintendents who feel so threatened by the whole deal could chip in. Take a look at what OPS has restricted itself to, by its dogmatic stance:
I can’t quite tell, but I bet OPS would still have Central and North High Schools. I haven’t looked at the OPS Board of Education districts, but this would probably be a giant kiss-off to most of those board members, who have presided over this whole debacle, instead of providing real leadership when it was sorely needed, and probably deserve to lose their seats anyway.
This “right-sizing” may be the only way to “right-size” the OPS central office, too. And if a whole bunch of educrats were removed from the TAC Building, guess what? They might be able to turn it back into Technical High School – which it should have been, all along, instead of a gigantic mausoleum to educational bureaucracy.
A dedicated voc-tech high school! Wouldn’t THAT be a cool development? Wouldn’t THAT be an “innovative” way to deal with the 50% dropout rate of African-American children in OPS? You don’t suppose that’s what a lot of high schools were like in 1891?!? What a concept!
What about all the neighborhoods that sprang up after the 1891 law was passed, and wouldn’t be included in the “right-sized” OPS because they didn’t exist in 1891?
Here’s another concept: let’s set up a temporary election commissioner and a special election. Who will be voting? The people who live in post-1891 OPS neighborhoods. We could structure it so that each high school and its “feeder” grade schools and middle schools could be a separate voting district. By majority rule, they will decide which district gets their tax dollars from now on.
Now, you know those suburban districts, such as Millard, Ralston, Westside, Elkhorn and all the rest? They could compete with OPS to become the district of the voters in each of those post-1891 districts. It doesn’t matter that their territory isn’t contiguous, in this day and age of electronic communication, for heaven’s sake.
But there are some juicy morsels of state aid to education attached to each child – worth fighting for. Instead of taking children for granted and getting stuck in a rut the way OPS apparently has, these new bidders would compete for the privilege of serving them. OPS could fight to keep them, which would be a good thing for OPS, too.
Each district could campaign to provide the type of academics that people want. They could set up information fairs and blitz the voters with brochures of ways that they can address the particular learning needs of the neighborhood children.
Then let those taxpayers VOTE which district they want to align with, by majority rule. Maybe it’ll still be OPS. But maybe not.
Facilities and assets would flow with the vote of the people to the district that they choose. Teachers and other building staff already working in each building could apply for jobs with to the new district, and most likely, most of them will be re-hired, although this would be a good opportunity to do some personnel pruning that OPS has apparently not been willing to do.
Sure, it’s out of the box. But hey: isn’t just about anything better than what we’ve got?
Sure. And next week, we’ll look at school choice – an even BETTER answer.
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Thursday, April 27, 2006
Posted
10:27 AM
by Susan Darst Williams
IS PRETTY CREEPY STUFF,
AND VIOLATES FUTURISTIC 'NEW SUBURBANISM'
Nebraskans may not know that the structure of governance that’s espoused in LB 1024, the controversial education bill just passed by the Unicameral, has been set in motion by the federal School-to-Work Opportunities Act.
We’re not innovating or doing anything unique for Nebraska at all. We’re just “caving” in to changes that the feds want. They are transforming U.S. public schools into training academies for the future workforce.
Don’t believe it? Just spend a moment on either of these two Nebraska-based websites. They’re about “preschool through Grade 16” schooling – whatever happened to K-12? – and replacing traditional academics with workforce training as the primary orientation for Nebraska’s schools.
See whether your picture of the purpose of K-12 education squares with what the educrats envision. Notice, especially, that they misspell that word as “invision” on the “p16” homepage, below. That reveals once again that educrats in general, and those who like stuff like “learning communities” in particular, don’t give a fig about academic pursuits such as proper spelling. If they get their way, and this “learning community” is pushed through, then it’ll only be a matter of time before our kids won’t know the difference, either. If you care about that, then you’d better start squawking about this stuff:
http://p16.nebraska.edu
www.futureforcenebraska.org
Fix yourself a cup of hot “c” and read this more global report on how educational infrastructures such as the “learning community” of LB 1024 fit in with this transformation. Take a hard look at what happens to “local control” – it shifts from placing the power in the hands of elected local school boards, to being in the hands of “local” individuals who have been appointed, not elected, to their positions, and who – knowingly or unknowingly – are simply enforcing a “template” of school operations imposed from ‘way up higher by people who are decidedly NOT “local yokels.” That’s what we’d get with the “council” that LB 1024 sets up. See:
http://www.eagleforum.org/educate/2006/mar06/global-citizenship.html
Last, but not least, consider this article by a futurist on “The New Suburbanism.” It contends that it is folly to try to make our inner-city neighborhoods the same as our suburban ones. People moved to the ‘burbs looking for good schools, safety, privacy and space. You can’t make up for bad city planning by destroying school systems that have developed in the ‘burbs, or forcing them to reconfigure into “local branches” of a standardized whole – like neighborhood McDonald’s outlets for K-12 education.
This article reveals the foolishness of the attempts by the Omaha Public Schools and LB 1024’s “learning community” to try to “standardize” K-12 education. It’s definitely shooting us in the foot in terms of economic development, removing the draw of our “highlight” neighborhoods, where many of the best new jobs are typically located, too. LB 1024 would seek to make everything from curriculum to facilities “equal” and "standardized" in all neighborhoods no matter what it costs or how it might harm what’s already there. It’s not very smart. See for yourself:
http://www.joelkotkin.com/index.htm
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Wednesday, April 26, 2006
Posted
9:36 AM
by Susan Darst Williams
FOR INNER-CITY SCHOOLS
THAT OMAHA COULD AND SHOULD EMULATE
K-12 Scholarships to Attend Private Schools
In Milwaukee, low-income parents can opt their children into the private school of their choice, paid for with tax funds in the form of a tuition “voucher” valued at up to $5,943. That’s cheaper than the same year of schooling in a public facility. But obviously, poor parents perceive the “cheaper” schooling as better for their kids: more than 15,000 children in 118 private schools are taking advantage of the voucher program.
A similar school choice program is operating in Cleveland, where 5,675 children attending 45 private schools have either 75% or 90% of their tuition paid for with tax funds.
Newer programs in Washington, D.C., and the State of Florida have drawn 1,025 students and 690 students, respectively. And there are specialty voucher programs operating in Florida and Utah for students with special needs to attend the schools of their choice.
Read more on:
http://www.allianceforschoolchoice.org/school_choice_states.aspx?p=45
100% Tax Credits For Donating to Private Scholarship Funds for Poor Kids
Partial tax credits are already available for donations to private schools and dedicated programs such as the Children’s Scholarship Fund.
But now individuals and corporations can earn a 100% tax credit by donating money to private scholarship funds that help send low-income children to private schools. Give $500, get $500 knocked off your tax bite. It saves money that otherwise would have to be spent in public education, since the child is now attending a private school instead.
Dollar-for-dollar tax credits are available for donations of up to $500 to Arizona’s Tuition Tax Credit Program, which helped 21,160 children attend private schools, as well as Florida’s Step Up for Students Scholarship Program (for corporations), which provided tuition assistance for 15,000 youngsters, and Pennsylvania’s Education Improvement Tax Credit Program, aiding 25,000.
Pennsylvania also has a tax credit for donations helping poor parents send 3- and 4-year-old children to good preschools, and Florida offers tax credits for financial aid to low-income parents who want their children to attend private kindergartens.
For more, see:
http://www.allianceforschoolchoice.org/school_choice_states.aspx?p=45
Inner-City College Prep in New York
The College Board is opening a specialized secondary school for inner-city and minority students in Buffalo, N.Y. The focus will be on preparing kids in Grades 6 - 12 to go to college. With financial help from two foundations, the College Board already operates four College Board Schools in New York City, with plans for three more besides the Buffalo one.
To learn more, see p. 8 of the April issue of Urban Educator, the newsletter of the Council of Great City Schools, www.cgcs.org
Pittsburgh to Save $14.7 Million by School Closings
The Pittsburgh, Pa., public schools expect to save $14.7 million a year in operating costs by “right-sizing” its district schools in response to thousands of empty seats in inner-city classrooms. The district will close 22 schools and create one new one in the reorganization.
More information is available on the identical page as the Buffalo, N.Y., story, p. 8 of the April issue of Urban Educator, the newsletter of the Council of Great City Schools, www.cgcs.org
Two-Year English Language Learner Grants in Arizona
There’s a move afoot in Arizona, faced with 150,000 English language learners (ELL) in public schools, to distribute two-year grants to cover the cost of making a child proficient in English at the school of his or her choice. Some might “spend” their grant in their own public school, while others may place it with a specialized service or short-term school such as www.berlitz.us if they think they’ll do a better job. The thought is that opening up the teaching of English to competition would help drive the cost down and the quality up.
Help For Immigrant Students in St. Paul
According to the Council of Great City Schools, St. Paul, Minn., is doing the best job in the nation in bringing non-English speaking kids up to speed academically. They have scrapped the traditional “English as a Second Language” program, and reward kids who read in English with amusement park tickets, among other innovative approaches. Test scores are now approximating the statewide average. See:
http://www.startribune.com/1592/story/390869.html
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Tuesday, April 25, 2006
Posted
9:39 AM
by Susan Darst Williams
WHAT A COSTLY BLUNDER!
LET'S TELL OPS THAT 'EQUITY' IS NOT 'FAIR' TO POOR KIDS!
In Camden and Newark, N.J., it now costs nearly $1 million to turn out just one academically-qualified, college-ready high school graduate, according to an April 19 article in the Times of Trenton (N.J.). That reflects the folly of school financing “equity” lawsuits and “equitable revenue” schemes such as contemplated by the Omaha Public Schools and the “learning community” of LB 1024.
The State of New Jersey has taken over 31 school districts because achievement gaps between low-income and middle-class students were outrageously high. The districts are called “Abbott districts” because of the series of equity lawsuits, Abbott v. Burke, in the New Jersey Supreme Court.
The idea was to bring up the level of spending in the poorest districts to what is being spent in the richest ones. Spending was tripled, to the point where now more is spent per pupil in the low-income districts than elsewhere in the state. Now 21% of the state’s children go to these “equity” schools, which receive more than half of the state’s tax dollars for K-12 education.
But state attorney general Zulima V. Farber said last week that there is no evidence that some of the state-funded education programs are succeeding or that kids are better off despite millions of extra dollars being spent.
According to the report, current operations spending for K-12 education comes to about $12,000 per student per year, statewide. Spending in many Abbott districts exceeds $15,000 per student. In certain Abbott districts (such as Asbury Park and Camden), it is as high as $17,000 to $18,000 per student. Suburban districts in New Jersey spend about $10,000 to $11,000 per child. The national average is around $8,000.
Despite the extra spending, graduation rates have declined, standardized test scores are down, K-12 attendance is less, and college attendance is down. Almost none of the freshmen in high school can read at grade level. So many students drop out or graduate through alternative means in Camden and Newark that a Newark school board member, Dana Rone, figured out that the cost per academically qualified, college-enrolled, high-school graduate in those two districts is nearly $1 million.
In 1999, Douglas Coate and James VanderHoff, economics professors at Rutgers University, analyzed the state's school-finance system. According to their findings, increased spending per student had no positive effect on achievement in the state. Furthermore, when they looked specifically at the Abbott districts, they once again found no positive effect.
Where has the money gone? The story reports: “In Camden and Newark, in particular, investigators and journalists over the years have discovered new cars, fancy meals, trips to tropical places, ghost students, ghost teachers, contractor kickbacks and selling of jobs. While bureaucratic red tape forces employees to bend rules and find a friend in high places in order to get legitimate tasks done, corrupt individuals take advantage of the habitual use of back channels and disregard of rules. The state needs to cut red tape and hold local officials and school principals responsible for results. Then local officials and principals will have an incentive to clean up corruption.”
Also:
“The state has paid more attention to construction of buildings than to having tests that measure student achievement and the effectiveness of academic improvement programs. Despite the known importance of high-quality teachers, the educational establishment has blocked productivity-oriented reforms, such as pay for performance.
“What is needed in the Abbott districts is not more money, but better incentives for school districts to spend money effectively. The failures of the Abbott districts are apparent to many, but there has been no political will to do what needs to be done. The state should at a minimum do what Gov. Corzine suggests and freeze funding increases to force school districts to put in place better incentives to be more productive in terms of student academic achievement.”
The writers of the article were Bill Evers, a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and a member of its Koret task force on K-12 education, and Paul Clopton, a research statistician for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs in San Diego.
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Monday, April 24, 2006
Posted
10:23 AM
by Susan Darst Williams
Q. Is it the parents’ fault that so many kids today can’t read very well? Did we do something wrong years ago, since half of today’s high-school graduates cannot comprehend text written at the college level? Are parents too busy and not reading enough to their young children in the early years?
With what we’re spending on K-12 education these days, it’s pretty hard to blame the parents for reading deficiencies. With spending per pupil levels around $8,000 per year, that’s more than $100,000 that we’ll drop per child over 13 years of schooling.
You’d think, for that expense, kids could master the basic skill of education, which is reading. Instead, it appears that the more we spend, and the more complicated we try to make the process, the less able to read the students are becoming.
There may be some deficiencies in today’s homes, but it’s not fair to ignore the deficiencies in our methods of teaching reading. And it’s high time we took a hard look at them.
The “pre-reading” activities in the homes, before kindergarten, that educators are always urging parents to do – reading aloud to toddlers and preschoolers – are nice and helpful. But they are by no means a cure-all or a guarantee of reading success. The government preschool program, Head Start, has consistently failed to make any impact on the reading performance of children from disadvantaged homes despite billions of tax dollars spent.
So many children develop reading disabilities despite coming from advantaged homes, or going through elaborate preschool programs, that the blame for why they can’t read must not rest with what goes on in homes – but what DOESN’T happen with reading instruction in schools.
The simple truth is that the direct instruction of phonics in the early grades teaches nearly 100% of children to read very quickly and efficiently, irrespective of what kind of homes they come from. Yet shockingly few schools teach reading with phonics, because it has fallen out of style in the teachers’ colleges.
It could be that it’s too easy and inexpensive to be attractive to the education establishment, with its voracious appetite for more revenue and “programs.”
The reason it’s so easy to teach reading with phonics is that children are taught the regular features of the language first. So they seldom have much trouble learning progressively more complex patterns later on. That’s the “systematic” nature of correct phonics instruction. In contrast, most schools use a complicated mixture of methods, relying more on sight reading and memorization, that doesn’t build on itself systematically from week to week or month to month.
The actual process of learning to decode words and employ the rules of spelling is actually very easy. In the 1700s in Wales, for example, the sheepherding population was totally illiterate. Then Griffith Jones, an Anglican vicar, organized traveling schools. Tutors were paid three pounds per year to go from one parish to the next. People housed and fed them, and they taught children and adults how to read. After three months, they moved on to the next village. Within a few years, the level of culture and literacy in Wales was astounding.
Teaching reading is the easy part. Convincing the education establishment that it is easy, and shouldn’t cost very much, is what’s hard.
Homework: See the website of the National Right to Read Foundation, www.nrrf.org
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Friday, April 21, 2006
Posted
11:54 AM
by Susan Darst Williams
THAT WOULD BE BETTER AND CHEAPER THAN LB 1024
-----------
THIS WEEK: SPECIAL REPORT
ON THE CRISIS INVOLVING
THE FUTURE OF THE OMAHA PUBLIC SCHOOLS
AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF NEBRASKA EDUCATION
INTO “LEARNING COMMUNITIES”
-----------
Part V: Five Solutions
That Would Be Better and Cheaper Than LB 1024
Last of a series.
Nebraskans could wind up with an exciting, innovative solution to the Omaha Public Schools controversy if they do one little thing:
Take it out of the hands of the educrats.
There are some good ideas within the law hastily passed by the Nebraska Legislature to address the problems of inner-city schools in the Omaha metro area. But there are too many bad ones, stained with the limited viewpoints of lifelong educational bureaucrats and union wonks. What we need is a solution hammered out by a broad, diverse spectrum of citizens that reflects democratic principles, not the “communitarian” ones in LB 1024.
We need elected officials from state and local school boards and the legislature, and maybe a City Council and County Board member or two. Obviously, we need some leadership from people of color. We need someone from law enforcement. We need some parents and grandparents. We need some business people. We need a physician and a social service agency representative.
We need those people to be advised by people in other cities whose schools are beating the odds and significantly raising academic achievement for low-income kids. They’re everywhere: in Arizona, in San Antonio, in Houston, in Florida, in California . . . everywhere but in Omaha. But we can change that . . . if we’re smart about this, and remember that our educational leadership is under our command and at our service, paid by us to do what WE want.
The point is, it should be US telling THEM what to do . . . not the other way around. So far, they’re ignoring what voters and taxpayers want, and how other cities around the country, faced with the same basic problems, are dealing with them.
Remember these two lines:
The definition of insanity is to keep doing the same things that aren’t working, over and over, and expecting the result to be different.
And . . .
The communist slogan: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”
LB 1024 can’t stand. It’s anti-American. It negates the longstanding American principle that you need to work hard and sacrifice to get ahead, then be a good citizen and watch how your tax dollars are spent to maximize freedom and democracy, and minimize oppression and governmental interference.
There is no way the “learning community” set up by LB 1024 fits. There’s no way it’s a good idea to pool our tax money into one fund and have a mega-board allocating it, relying on central planning, job forecasting, regulatory compliance and top-down mandates. That’s a recipe for disaster. Ask the former Soviet Union.
So the “learning community” has to go.
As for the Van-Choc-Straw Solution, dividing up the Omaha Public Schools into what would basically be a white district, a black district and a Hispanic district: it’s not necessary, and is creating a horrible distraction from the real problem, which is underachievement of low-income and minority kids.
So let’s get some focus here:
Did you notice that the four superintendents pictured on the front page of The World-Herald Thursday are all older, white guys who are lifelong public school employees? How can we expect them to think outside the box and take a risk and do something exciting and cost-effective? It’s unfair and unwise to leave the solution to these men, as nice personally as the four of them are. They are just not the right ones to solve this. They’re not trained for this. They’re mis-focused.
How do we know? Well, did you notice how many times the word “community” was used in the superintendents’ statement? Five times in three paragraphs. Did you notice how many times they mentioned the word “academics” in it? None. See where their focus is?
Did they deplore the yawning racial achievement gap in Nebraska in general and OPS in particular? No mention.
The graduation rate of well over 90% for whites, which is stuck around 50% for blacks and Hispanics? Not a word.
The fact that OPS has more than 260 central-office employees, while the Omaha archdiocesan schools, with just about half the number of kids to educate, operates with six? That got left out.
How about the fact that the majority of low-income children within OPS are not reading or doing math at grade level, and the problem gets worse the older they get and the more money we spend on them within OPS? Somehow, that isn’t on the bargaining table.
Did you notice that two of the other older, white guys who have stepped forward to “help” both used the word “collective” in the story? That was revealing. Obviously, Publisher John Gottschalk of The World-Herald and Omaha Mayor Mike Fahey aren’t communists. So it is puzzling. Unfortunately, they’ve apparently bought in to the same “paradigm” as the educrats, that government is the answer to government’s problems.
No, it isn’t. Here are five better solutions, right off the bat, that we could create if we would just get smart and put the right people in charge of this:
1. Dollar-for-dollar tax credits.
Individuals and corporations who donate money to private scholarship funds would receive a 100% tax shelter for contributing money to these funds. The funds provide partial tuition assistance to low-income parents who want their children to attend private school. There are openings in Omaha’s private schools, and I can tell you first-hand, private education should be encouraged and emulated; it’s often a better choice than public education and for poor kids, that goes double. Private schools do a better job with all demographic groups than public schools do, but poor parents can’t take advantage of that because most of them can’t afford it. We need to find ways to help them financially. Tax credits are the purest form of school choice with the least demand by the education bureaucracy for regulatory power over the private schools that benefit from the tax-credit funding. That way, we don’t threaten the autonomy of the curriculum and methodology of existing private schools. But we can still give low-income kids the opportunity and the benefits. Tax credits would save taxpayers the $8,000 per year currently being spent on each Nebraska child in public school, on average, and, because enrollment would decline within OPS in a natural way, it would create smaller class sizes and more per-pupil resources within OPS, though less funding overall, to do a better job with the kids who stay.
2. Universal school choice by lump-summing state aid to education.
Parents would be much more satisfied if they could choose which school in which to enroll their children – public or private, no matter what location, across county lines and no matter whether they pay property taxes or not. There should be no more restrictions on how that money is used than there was on the G.I. Bill after World War II. In other words, allowing for universal vouchers should NOT give the education bureaucracy carte blanche to start interfering with public schools; they should stand back and watch how well private schools do, and learn from them. Very quickly, the public schools, suddenly forced to compete, would improve. There could be simple protections to make sure public-school assignments stay fair for local residents as well as ensuring better racial diversity throughout. Federal grants could pay for door-to-door transportation for low-income parents who opt their kids far afield of their neighborhood school. Then no one would be forced to keep their child in a failing school, and no one could complain that schools are segregated. State aid now averages around $2,500 per pupil per year, which is about as much as private-school tuition is on the grade-school level. There are existing private scholarship funds already going (that offer partial tax credits) that provide tuition assistance for those who need it above and beyond the state-aid lump sum.
3. Allow “niche” schools to develop for early reading and math instruction.
Public education dollars could be better spent on teaching reading and math correctly in the first place, instead of seeing so many kids – especially African-American males -- fall through the cracks and become “learning disabled” or “behavior impaired” and in need of remediation from about third grade on. Obviously, what needs to be happening in those early grades in OPS is not happening. The best way to make it happen is to get the kids into a new structure as they begin formal education, and then, when they’re fit for learning with good skills and habits, and self-control, release them to the regular public-school system. Title I federal education grants and other money could be providing funding for reading experts to start more private, K-2 reading academies outside the public-school environment. An example: the Apollos Preparatory Academy, 3223 N. 45th St. Others include the KIPP Academies – Knowledge Is Power Program – a national private school-management franchise, which could work on a short- or long-term contract as a vendor to the OPS board, to demonstrate the effectiveness of the “niche” approach. Who knows? It could develop into a full-blown K-12 alternative, like the charter schools that Nebraska has banned, one of only a handful of states without them. The focus in these “niche” schools would be strictly on teaching children in kindergarten through second grade how to learn by equipping them with the research-based, tried-and-true methods that have been lost in “progressive” teachers’ colleges and gimmick-ridden public school bureaucracies. Only a handful of people in the State of Nebraska know how to teach a child to read using systematic, intensive, explicit phonics . . . but that’s what all kids need, and especially those whose homes aren’t the greatest language and learning role models. This would give low-income kids a great head start, and refocus public schools on Grades 3-12 with a much greater chance of success.
4. Appoint a “special superintendent” from outside the education establishment.
Break apart the 23 problem schools within OPS and appoint a short-term leader for the 23 principals to shelter them from the OPS bureaucracy, but still be a liaison to the elected OPS school board. Perhaps a contract of three to five years would be in order; it takes about that long to turn failing schools around. Lump-sum each school’s funding based on enrollment and give it directly to the principals; let them allocate the money how they see fit, reporting, of course, to the “special superintendent” for accountability purposes. Secure waivers from collective bargaining agreements from the union so that principals can be free to lead and make personnel decisions. The superintendent could coordinate staff development, curriculum selection, time management and all kinds of other concerns that are different in low-income schools than in the rest of the schools in OPS and elsewhere in the metro area. Someone from a related field, but not exactly the school pipeline, could do wonders to problem-solve and unite warring factions. This solution is similar to the “special prosecutor” often brought in to solve big, big controversies on a short-term basis, then ride off into the sunset when the job is done. I don’t want to create any difficulties whatsoever here, and have not discussed this with anyone, but I believe Omaha City Councilman Franklin Thompson, an education professor for the University of Nebraska at Omaha who is a great guy and a wonderful African-American role model – not to mention a Republican -- is the ideal person for this job.
5. “Shared Responsibility,” dividing up the problem schools among neighboring suburban districts and letting them compete to see who can do the most for inner-city kids.
This is the plan from gubernatorial candidate David Nabity which is probably the very best. But it sank like a stone when Nabity proposed it a few months ago. Why? Apparently, because the idea came from outside the education establishment, it would dilute power from OPS and the union, and increase the workload and risk for the suburban superintendents. But it’s still a great idea. The plan calls for dividing up the 23 failing inner-city schools within OPS and assigning two or three of them on long-term management contracts between the OPS board and each of the surrounding suburban school districts. They could employ integration, English immersion, technology, and team-teaching strategies to their hearts’ content; the idea would be to raise inner-city test scores however they see fit. Relax union hiring, firing and tenure rules and let the principals really lead. Establish merit pay or “battle pay” and tie it to “value-added assessment” – more money for principals and teachers if the kids’ standardized test scores rise. And they will, if common-sense changes are made to zero in on the deficiencies in reading and math, get parents engaged, and forget all the social engineering and bureaucratic wrangling that has contributed to the decades-old failures in OPS with these student populations. Let the teachers in those 23 schools make $10,000 a year more, but work two extra hours a day, or work all summer long, if necessary. The unions could hang on to their onerous rules and regs for the OTHER public schools in the metro area, but once we all see how great schools can be when they’re union-free . . . it could be a fantastic opportunity for us all to quit doing what we keep doing even though it doesn’t work, because the “union says.”
Most of all, we need a plan that brings everybody in to solve this massive problem, not just the educators themselves. No matter what we do, these things should start happening, too. Examples:
-- Parent volunteer groups in the ‘burbs should each adopt an inner-city school to mentor parents and teach them how to interact with teachers, put on fund-raisers and so forth.
-- Churches each adopt a school and help with money, supplies, volunteers, even sack lunches and cookies.
-- TeamMates, Big Brothers / Big Sisters and other mentoring organizations should be stepped up with more donations and volunteers from around the metro area.
-- Civic clubs could raise money for merit pay for inner-city teachers the way the Buffett Foundation rewards selected OPS teachers each year.
-- The Junior League of Omaha, the Assistance League, the Boys and Girls Club Guild, and other service organizations could be persuaded to drop everything else and concentrate on inner-city education for their volunteer priorities.
So this five-part series comes to an end.
The question is, what happens next? Go Big Ed will publish your comments and ideas next week. Send them to swilliams1@cox.net Let’s put our heads together . . . and come up with a winner.
(0) comments
Thursday, April 20, 2006
Posted
10:40 AM
by Susan Darst Williams
REALLY NEED
--------------------------------------------
THIS WEEK: SPECIAL REPORT
ON THE CRISIS INVOLVING
THE FUTURE OF THE OMAHA PUBLIC SCHOOLS
AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF NEBRASKA EDUCATION
INTO “LEARNING COMMUNITIES”
--------------------------------------------
Part IV: What Inner-City Schoolkids
Really Need
Fourth in a series.
In 1974, the average score on the statewide reading test at Bennett Elementary School in inner-city Los Angeles was in the 3rd percentile. That means 97% of the kids in California did better.
In a devastatingly poor neighborhood pestered by drugs, violence and crime, with a student population that was 50% Hispanic with weak English language skills, most people thought there was little or no hope for improvement.
Principal Nancy Ichinaga turned that around in short order. For over 20 years, her school has been among the highest-performing in all of Los Angeles County.
How did she do it? By doubling or tripling the amount of money spent per pupil? With tiny class sizes? Fabulous new buildings? Lots of specialized English-As-a-Second-Language staff?
Nooooo. Her school switched to phonics-only reading instruction beginning in kindergarten so that 100% of the kids were reading before the end of the year.
It switched from “progressive” curriculum to the “old-fashioned” Open Court series for reading and systematically-taught, drill-heavy Saxon Math.
It completely rejected bilingual education and taught all kids in all classes in English only.
It promoted kids to the next grades only if they deserved to go.
It maintained frequent testing schedules, especially in math, to catch weaknesses early and give teachers plenty of feedback about whether kids were learning what they intended to teach.
It set up enrichment for the 25% of the kids, who turned out to be gifted – but who were mired in the same failures as everybody else, for one simple reason: not because the kids were poor, but because there was poor school leadership.
Did you catch that?
Poor school leadership.
POOR SCHOOL LEADERSHIP!!!
Oh, my goodness gracious, Nebraska. Can’t you see it? THIS is what we need to do in the Omaha Public Schools. This is what we’ve ALWAYS needed to do.
NOT neo-segregation. NOT busing. NOT magnet schools. NOT a Brave New World learning community. And NOT nuclear war against each other.
Old-fashioned, common-sense school leadership is what we need. We need principals who are empowered and able to make the changes necessary to give needy kids what they need and deserve: a chance.
Who said that? W.E.B. DuBois, founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, many decades ago: “The Negro needs neither segregated schools nor mixed schools. What he needs is education.”
The key reason for school underachievement is disenfranchised parents, who aren’t engaged in their children’s educations. They don’t know and don’t care. So their kids just float . . . and, very quickly, sink.
That’s what we have in inner-city Omaha. The reason parents are disenfranchised and disengaged is that the schools are failing. Turn that around – make the schools succeed – and parental involvement revives. Once that happens, you’re home free – and it doesn’t matter one bit what the annual income is in the households whose children you’re serving.
That’s what the evidence shows, from all around the country.
It doesn’t take a horribly divisive, earthshaking split-up of OPS and enormous new bureaucratic infrastructures, despite what State Sens. Ernie Chambers and Ron Raikes say. It doesn’t take a stick-up of taxpayers or a shake-down of surrounding school districts for gobs more money: “your tax base or your life.”
It DOES take some kind of leverage over the education bureaucracy and union, though, to allow some of the common-sense changes to be made that can give needy kids the structure and curriculum to bring them up to speed.
Friday’s GoBigEd story will describe that leverage, and several plans that will work.
The best news of all is that those common-sense changes don’t cost a dime more than what we’re spending now. Actually, in most cases, they SAVE an incredible amount of money by removing the need for remediation, extra staff, extra oversight and so forth.
Why? Because the kids’ academic achievement is brought up from the basement, which is where it now is stuck in about 23 of those Omaha Public Schools buildings.
Significantly, common-sense changes save taxpayers far more than just reducing the cost of K-12 schooling, by helping us prevent the inestimable social costs of educational underachievement. The worse kids do in school, the less productive Omaha’s workforce, the more crime we have, the more welfare and the worse the quality of life.
But OPS is NOT “stuck.” It CAN change. And so can we.
The story about the L.A. school comes from the book No Excuses: Lessons From 21 High-Performing, High-Poverty Schools, by Samuel Casey Carter and published in 2000 by the Heritage Foundation, www.heritage.org.
The book concluded that these seven factors characterize successful inner-city schools, those that are high-achieving despite serving high-poverty student populations:
-- Principals must be free to spend their budgets their own way, free of central-office micromanagement and pointless mandates, and free to choose the curriculum and instructional methods they think are best even if they are “classical” and “old-fashioned” rather than “progressive” and “in style.”
-- There must be tangible, unyielding goals, such as 100% attendance and 100% of the students working at above grade level.
-- There must be freedom for principals to hire master teachers, chosen for quality and not just seniority, and rewarded financially for improving student performance, with “freedom to fire” also granted under relaxed tenure restrictions.
-- Regular, frequent diagnostic testing and personal monitoring of each student’s progress by the principal helps nip problems in the bud, combined with high-octane staff development directed by the principal, not the district office.
-- Achievement is used as the key to discipline, with self-control modeled and taught, not self-esteem.
-- Principals work actively with and communicate effectively with parents, clarifying expectations about school and behavior with written contracts, engaging parents in such practices as checking homework, scheduling three or four times as many parent-teacher conferences and open houses than in the typical school year, and arranging adult literacy help or other social services for parents if necessary in order to improve the learning environment at home.
-- Principals should be free to set up longer school days, longer school years, after-school programs and weekend hours if they feel they are necessary, and they should be free to arrange personnel practices so that that can happen, without union interference. Where will the money come from? By wisely avoiding wasteful expenditures on the things that DON’T work: better fiscal management by school leadership free to BE better at it, in other words. Teachers in inner-city schools may make substantially more than teachers in suburban schools, for example, but they work longer hours per day and/or more weeks per year, without the union pitching a hissy fit . . . because that’s what inner-city student populations NEED.
Simple? Common sense? You bet. And these ideas WORK.
The 21 schools are all as inspiring as the Los Angeles example:
-- Healthy Start Academy, Durham, N.C., was 99% black and 80% poor . . . but scored in the top 1% on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. Methods include frequent testing, five parent conferences a year, and traditional curriculum such as Saxon Math. A charter school that is part of, but separate from, the public-school district, it operates in a bare-bones, 75-year-old building and spends significantly less per pupil than regular public schools even though it is open for 11 months per year. It pays its teachers $10,000 a year more because it doesn’t have to pay for central-office bureaucracies, and offers merit-pay bonuses to teachers every year based on improvement in student test scores.
-- Morse Elementary in Cambridge, Mass., was 75% poor with many first-generation immigrants, and in danger of closing because it had lost so many students to magnet schools in the Boston area. The school changed to the Core Knowledge curriculum (www.coreknowledge.org) and now is the highest-performing grade school in Cambridge, with a median reading score in the 72nd percentile, and median math in the 84th percentile.
-- Mabel B. Wesley Elementary in Houston, named for a slave girl turned school principal, had 87% low-income students and 99% minority. Years ago, most students were reading several years below grade level. But with old-fashioned curriculum called “Direct Instruction” – heavy on phonics, quality literature, strong teacher modeling and lots of speaking and listening practice -- now almost the entire school scores two years above grade level, and half of the second-graders can subtract seven-digit numbers.
Friday: Five great alternatives to LB 1024.
(0) comments
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
Posted
10:48 PM
by Susan Darst Williams
THE STATE ED DEPARTMENT, AMONG OTHERS
-----------------
THIS WEEK: SPECIAL REPORT
ON THE CRISIS INVOLVING
THE FUTURE OF THE OMAHA PUBLIC SCHOOLS
AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF NEBRASKA EDUCATION
INTO “LEARNING COMMUNITIES”
-------------------
Part III: Who Dropped the Ball?
The State Ed Department, Among Others
Third in a series.
How did Nebraska’s education system ever reach this explosive crisis? Citizens, educators and politicians of all stripes are hurling charges and counter-charges in local, state and national arenas regarding racial segregation and discrimination in the state’s largest school district. We’re about to amputate the arms and legs of the Omaha Public Schools, dividing it into three parts along basically racial and income lines.
No wonder everyone’s so angry and frustrated: dropout rates are several times higher among black and Hispanic youth than among whites. Significant numbers of low-income and minority students read and do math well below grade level. There’s little or no chance for college for most low-income, minority kids out of OPS.
That’s in stark contrast to the good and even outstanding academic achievement of their suburban peers in the same district. It looks like racial injustice per se, but OPS spends significantly more per pupil on its inner-city charges than on kids in the wealthier ‘burbs.
So the question is, how did we let this enormous achievement gap fester?
How come we’re getting ready to spend more money and establish more governmental infrastructure on the inner city schools if we already know more money and more government doesn’t fix it, and we can tell by just looking at the inner-city private schools, which spend less and have little or no bureaucracy with the same demographical challenges?
Most of all, why didn’t we put smarter public policies in place long ago to prevent this whole debacle?
Meanwhile, as we squabble over the widespread dissatisfaction and turf wars among the various districts and voter groups, we’re being pushed in a hush-hush, rush-rush free-fall into a Brave New World-style “learning community.” Unless it is stopped in its tracks, Nebraska will wind up as one statewide school district that’s closely “benchmarked” with what’s going on with other school systems around the country and the world: nationalized and even globalized schools.
It’s not a conspiracy; as one longtime Nebraska education official says, it’s just the federal government’s attempt to bring some commonality to the hodgepodge of local school systems. And that may not be all bad, although of course local control is the hallmark of American education, which was the best in the world as long as local control ruled.
Now, it’s on the way out. And it’s almost schizophrenic, how Nebraska is being yanked by the nosering into a highly centralized, consolidated school structure with LB 1024. That’s the opposite of what we all know is best: small, family-centered schools with close relationships between parents and teachers and strong principals enforcing simple rules of behavior and effective instructional practices.
That’s just what rural Nebraskans had, until the Legislature last year nuked our Class I country schools. All the evidence in educational research holds that smaller schools and smaller districts are the best for students of all demographics and ability levels.
Now, with this “learning community,” students of astoundingly diverse ability levels, cultural backgrounds, and even ages are going to be grouped together with an almost impossible mandate to make their educational experiences “equitable.”
Schoolwork will be done in groups and “teams” so the able student will become the teacher and the behavior cop of the less able. No child shall be left behind, but no child shall be allowed to get ahead, either.
“Zero tolerance” will enforce a surrealistic Political Correctness where you’ll be afraid to say just about anything in such a diverse, multicultural environment. A kid in the cafeteria who says he hates tacos may just get himself beaten up as a racist.
If the Advanced Placement Calculus kids get computers to do their complex equations, by golly, the remedial arithmetic kids had better have them, too, or it won’t be “equitable” and there’ll be a lawsuit.
It’s a recipe for disaster.
And it’s all our fault, of course. We’re the ones who put the politicians in place who have allowed all this.
But significant blame also rests with the Nebraska Department of Education, and its governing board, the State Board of Education. The “learning community” concept that will basically “program” our young people, instead of educating them in the traditional sense, comes straight from the state. The whole idea is to “tool” the kids up for certain jobs, like cogs in a wheel, so that when they’re done with school, they’ll fit right in to the global workfoce, anywhere in the world. You can trace the development of this new purpose of K-12 education in documents from the State Ed Department and the State Ed Board over the past several years.
Did you know all this? Bet you didn’t.
Of course, state educrats are just passing it along from national and international educational forces. But the buck didn’t stop where it should have stopped, to spare us from the distortion and damage we’re suffering now. Instead of representing the best interests of Nebraska families and children, state officials just caved, over and over and over.
They had options. They could have gone to the public, gone to the Legislature, gone to the governor, and sought help for developing a better way.
But they caved. And now we’re stuck.
The only answer may be to withdraw from federal funding, which would deprive Nebraska schools of about 8% of their budgets, including the lion’s share of the remedial money they now use to try to help low-income kids, through Title I. So it’ll probably never happen.
We’re circling the drain, folks.
Get a load of the latest posting on the State Ed Department’s website from State Ed Commissioner Doug Christensen, www.nde.state.ne.us. It’s called “A ‘Flat World’ Look at Education: Developing a Global Mindset.” Combined with his other recent postings on “essential education” and the “new high school,” the wraps are off the purpose of the “learning community” that LB 1024 would create in the Omaha metropolitan area: job training.
Now, instead of a high-school diploma, Nebraska kids will have to get a “certificate of mastery” from government schools as proof they’ve met “specs” and are ready for higher education or their first job.
They’ll be “tracked” by a new statewide student and staff record system that debuts this October, will contain highly personal and perhaps damaging information, and can be shared with various outsiders, including, presumably, college admissions personnel and future employers.
Teachers and principals will have no say in what kids learn, but will just “guide” them and “facilitate” the process. If you squawk, you’ll be “remediated” in endless “staff development,” or be bought out with an early retirement package.
To get that certificate, a student will have to go through a dumbed-down, anti-intellectual, computer-delivered curriculum with “embedded assessment” – built-in testing and remediation on the computer that will block you from going on to the next section until you have “mastered” whatever the state wants you to “learn.”
You can’t “master” it unless you “agree” with it. Let’s say you don’t agree with “tolerating same-sex marriage” or “protecting the environment over allowing despicable capitalist exploitation.” But the curriculum demands that you do. You “flunk” your mini-test. You keep “flunking” that kind of stuff. What will happen? You’ll go to an “alternative youth center” where your views will be “remediated” . . . until you cave.
All this has come about because “equity” has taken over schools. It’s not “equitable” that some kids can ace physics, and some can barely read at the third-grade level. So, to keep schooling “equitable,” the focus has to shift off individual achievement and content-based curriculum, and onto things that ANYBODY can “get” – certain attitudes, feelings, opinions and beliefs that the central planners think are important to turn out good future workers.
It’s right there on Nebraska Education Department materials: the curriculum in the 21st Century “learning communities” now being put together will indoctrinate you with a global mindset with certain “interpersonal and cultural proficiencies” as well as “personal dispositions/values proficiencies” as defined by the state.
Ewwww!
State education officials are responsible for transforming Nebraska’s schools into clones of the 1990 United Nations World Declaration on Education for All (signed by former President George Bush) and the Dakar (Senegal) Framework for Action (signed by former President Bill Clinton). Those two global agreements, respectively, yielded the Goals 2000 and No Child Left Behind federal education laws and restructuring paradigm.
This has been documented and reported by education watchdogs such as www.EducationNews.org, the Eagle Forum’s Education Reporter (http://www.eagleforum.org/educate/index.html), Allen Quist (www.EdWatch.org), B.J. Eakman (www.beverlye.com) and Berit Kjos (www.crossroad.to), but almost nobody’s paying attention. They’re all still tag-teaming over the red herring and ego trip of State Sen. Ernie Chambers over “segregated” schools.
It’s a red herring to the max. The real issue is the “learning community.” It’s got to be stopped.
If you go back and look at the Goals 2000 goals, you can see them playing out in the counter-intuitive things that are gradually being put in place in Nebraska: “free” universal preschool and all-day kindergarten in the utter absence of evidence those are good for kids because of the Goals 2000 goal, “all children shall come to school ready to learn”; despicable revisionist history that denigrates the United States and capitalism because the federal government is now in charge of “citizenship” education under Goal 3, and defines that as “world citizenship” rather than “American citizenship.”
All the way down the line, we’re radically reforming definitions of what school is all about. We’re aligning standards with curriculum, and curriculum with assessments, and assessments with newly-formed graduation requirements and postsecondary entrance benchmarks.
Result: de facto nationalization of our schools, not far away from globalization, too, since so many other countries are doing the same thing. See http://www.ibe.unesco.org/countries/countrydossiers.htm for an eyeful on how other countries are aligning their curriculum with this globalized education process just as Nebraska is.
True, Nebraska went along with yielding control over school goals and curriculum to the federal government under duress, as did the other states. You mean we were forced? After all, the 1994 Goals 2000 law said aligning your state’s education system to the national goals was “voluntary.”
The dirty little secret, though, is that the funding bill that went along with it, H.R. 6, declared that if you didn’t comply with Goals 2000 and, now, NCLB, you would lose all your federal education funding. Even though that amounted to just 7% or 8% of Nebraska’s total K-12 spending, it was a pretty penny, so Nebraska caved.
But they didn’t TELL us they caved.
Both the State Ed Department and the elected State Ed Board have done a shockingly bad job of informing the public about how the $2.2 billion annually spent on K-12 public schools in this state is being allocated, how the $5.3 billion we have invested in school facilities is being managed, and how the nearly $1 billion and counting in school debt is affecting Nebraska’s overall budgeting and taxation outlook.
A lot of the excess spending has gone to put all this in place, not for doing a better job on delivering the 3 R’s – not by a long shot. Just look at the test scores, and that’s obvious.
Even less, our public servants have failed to inform us about the direction we’re going in the future. Voters and taxpayers have been flying blind for years.
“Schools for the planned economy” is why we “had” to have statewide learning standards a few years ago. This is why we “had” to have that cheesy statewide writing assessment. This is why we “had” to demonize school choice, charter schools, privatization, homeschooling and all the other alternatives that might have really helped poor kids learn better: because then it wouldn’t be as easy to place them within “the system.”
If the systemic change that is behind the “learning community” set up by LB 1024 hit you like a ton of bricks, blame your state ed department and state ed board, because they’ve been putting the pieces together for this quietly, under the radar, for many years.
For a look at the dollars flowing through public education in this state, see the statewide totals or your district’s annual financial report on http://ess.nde.state.ne.us
For a look at how closely the State Education Department is cleaving to the planned transformation of U.S. schools into one consolidated, nationalized system, see the latest article by State Education Commissioner Doug Christensen on www.nde.state.ne.us
Finally, for an eye-opener on the Nebraska Student and Staff Record System, which will create dossiers on the microrecord level for all students and educators in the state, including private schools, and can be cross-linked and released to third parties for various purposes, see http://www.nde.state.ne.us/AdminDays05/Administrator%27s%20Days%202005_files/frame.htm
So if we can’t pull out of federal funding to escape all this, what’s the answer? Not shift kids to private schools. After all, a lot of this applies to private schools, too, if they are accredited. And it’s likely that the “net” of regulations will require homeschooled students to get their “certificates of mastery” if they want to work or go on to college, too.
Is there a way out? There is. What is it? Stay tuned.
Thursday: What do low-income, minority and non-English speaking kids really need?
(0) comments
Tuesday, April 18, 2006
Posted
3:39 PM
by Susan Darst Williams
BEHIND THE 'LEARNING COMMUNITY' CONCEPT
----------
THIS WEEK: SPECIAL REPORT
ON THE CRISIS INVOLVING
THE FUTURE OF THE OMAHA PUBLIC SCHOOLS
AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF NEBRASKA EDUCATION
INTO “LEARNING COMMUNITIES”
Hats off to gubernatorial candidate
TOM OSBORNE,
who has said he would have vetoed LB 1024.
Hats off, too, to gubernatorial candidate
DAVID NABITY,
whose plan to share responsibility for Omaha’s failing schools
among the surrounding metro school districts
would have prevented this whole mess,
threats of lawsuits,
saved money,
encouraged integration,
and set up much-needed, healthy competition
and individual district autonomy
instead of a massive consolidation as with LB 1024.
-------------------------------------------
THE MONEY AND POWER
BEHIND THE 'LEARNING COMMUNITY' CONCEPT
Second in a series.
The “learning community” that would be established unifying all Omaha metro-area schools in Douglas and Sarpy Counties is the logical next step in the consolidation of schools within Nebraska into what essentially will be one statewide school district with local public schools reduced to local branches of government services.
What will make it a “community” is that all curriculum, assessment, personnel data, student data, and other information will be on computer – linked – grouped – consolidated – sharing funding and rendering moot any existing individual district management and decision-making power.
Rather than teachers and books holding center stage, the emphasis will be on centrally-derived, computer-assisted and data-driven instruction and assessment. All will be tightly focused on workplace development, rather than academic development. Not only parents, but teachers, will basically be “out of the loop” when it comes to shaping and influencing what’s being learned.
If the law isn’t stopped, get used to some strange new terminology coming out of the “local education agencies” we used to call “schools” that will be part of this massive new “learning community.” They include:
Certificate of Initial Mastery – schools will “certify” students as being workforce-ready; this replacement of the traditional “diploma” is intended to satisfy those who yearn for educational “equity” because it presents the deceit that physical labor and intellectual labor are the same.
Individual Career Plans (or Individual Learning Plans) – career exploration will begin in kindergarten and “pigeonhole” kids into rigid college prep or voc/ed tracks based on future labor-force needs assessments by central committees, with further specialization within those tracks, by the middle-school years.
Apprenticeships – these will be part of the redesigned secondary education for more than 80% of the students, moving a significant portion of some students’ educations away from school and into the workplace; these are a key reason why the educrats are fighting so hard to reorganize the school day into “block schedules” to “free up” sufficient time for job training and reduce time for traditional academics.
Applied Learning – Classic subjects such as English composition, chemistry and calculus are already in the process of being dumbed-down into concentrating on basic skills, so that a person taking a dumbed-down version of applied chemistry can score an “A” and feel good about himself, while the same knowledge base probably wouldn’t even garner a “D” in classic chemistry.
What’s gone on in Nebraska in recent days offers a rare peek behind the veil of the purpose of all the educational “restructuring” that’s been going on for the past several years – which the vast majority of the voters and taxpayers have no idea is happening.
The change merges preschool education with traditional K-12 schooling, on up to what’s euphemistically called “Grade 16” – post-high school studies in university or voc-tech settings – and through linkages to employers, the system will continue throughout each person’s life with continuing education and retraining in the workforce.
It’s no accident that the money for this enormous change in the philosophy, purpose and governance of public education has basically come from big companies that sell computers and software, including Intel, IBM, Microsoft and Apple. They’re joined by many left-leaning foundations and non-government organizations from far outside Nebraska which seek to replace local control of public schools with a nationalized system easier to sell to and deal with.
Nebraska is ahead of other states in setting in place the dumbed-down minimum “standards” that have been “benchmarked” to the needs of entry-level employers, so it is ripe for another giant step into the school-to-work system, and this is it.
And it didn’t just come out of nowhere. It’s been part of a plan for years. That’s why a 158-page amendment that rewrote LB 1024 suddenly materialized at 8 p.m. during the high-stress debating in the Legislature’s waning hours – almost literally the last minute – that set this new law in place with such mind-boggling complexity.
And the change is so mind-boggling, it’s obvious that it has little or nothing to do with zeroing in on the original problem, how to meet the needs of low-income and non-English speaking pupils within the Omaha Public Schools.
Note p. 38:
“Reorganization of school districts means the formation of new school districts that will become members of a learning community . . . the alteration of boundaries of established school districts that are members of a learning community (ed. note: all metro districts in Douglas/Sarpy are in the "learning community") . . . the dissolution or disorganization of established school districts that are members of the learning community through or by means of any one or combination of the methods set out in section 31 of this act, and any other alteration of school district boundaries involving a school district that is a member of a learning community."
Rather than assume that the “learning community” concept was originated by State Sen. Ron Raikes of Lincoln, author of LB 1024, it should be noted that “learning communities” are being set up all across the country with computer linkage between the worlds of education and employment. The term “learning community” originated in the computer industry and in fact, Nebraska is behind most other states in the infrastructure, though not behind in all areas.
The process began about 20 years ago with the forcing of Outcome-Based Education into Nebraska’s public schools over the objections of parents and educators alike. To their dismay, content-based academic standards that centered on knowledge were replaced with “performance” standards that centered on attitudes and skills. Objective, standardized tests were replaced with “criterion-referenced assessments” prepared in-house by the same educators the tests are supposedly holding accountable.
A pupil’s grades became worthless as an accountability tool as schooling changed to a “mastery” or “non-mastery” evaluation system, the hallmark of Outcome-Based Education. Instead of individual teachers and districts selecting from a wide range of curricula, choices were sharply-narrowed and aligned with the state standards, which in turn drive the curriculum and assessments today.
Traditional, teacher-led, content-based curriculum and instruction was gradually replaced with “wholistic,” “progressive” philosophies such as whole language, whole math, cooperative group learning, grades based on subjective criteria instead of objective tests and scores, and computer-assisted instruction.
The “outcomes” developed for key subject areas such as English and math were renamed as “standards” when many Nebraskans squawked about the sea change in methodologies and philosophies. Around the country, almost every state “developed” standards that are nearly identical to each other’s, boilerplated by non-governing organizations such as:
The National Center for Education and the Economy, whose chief, Marc Tucker, is a colleague of Hillary Rodham Clinton, www.ncee.org
The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, www.carnegiefoundation.org
The New Standards Project, run by Lauren Resnick, a psychologist at the University of Pittsburgh, http://www.lrdc.pitt.edu/
ACHIEVE, dedicated to make state standards merge into one set of national standards, www.achieve.org; note board members and contributors including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (Microsoft), the Hewlett Foundation, Intel, IBM, etc.; visit this subpage, http://www.achieve.org/achieve.nsf/StateProfiles-50Results?OpenForm, to see how Nebraska compares to other states on the road to restructuring schools as workforce development centers.
Pew Charitable Trust, www.pewtrusts.org
Annenberg Foundation, www.whannenberg.org
New American Schools Development Corporation, www.naschools.org
National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, www.nctm.org
National Council of Teachers of English, www.ncte.org
National Academy of Sciences, www.nasonline.org
. . . and many more.
For a thorough review of what’s going on and how it shook out in the State of Ohio a few years ago, see this report prepared by Diane Fessler, former member of the Ohio State Board of Education and now an Ohio state senator:
“A Report on the Work Toward National Standards, Assessments and Certificates”
www.fessler.com/SBE/Docs/research.doc
Wednesday: the role of the Nebraska Department of Education and others.
(0) comments
Monday, April 17, 2006
Posted
1:06 PM
by Susan Darst Williams
ON THE CRISIS INVOLVING
THE FUTURE OF THE OMAHA PUBLIC SCHOOLS
AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF NEBRASKA EDUCATION
INTO “LEARNING COMMUNITIES”
-------------------------------------------
THE BAD IDEAS
BEHIND THE OPS DEBACLE
First in a series.
Are you confused and perplexed about how the Nebraska Legislature and the Omaha Public Schools could have gotten us into such a horrendous pickle so quickly?
Are you embarrassed about national news stories ridiculing us as segregationists and back-water boobs?
Are you worried about the hastily-derived, unilaterally-created LB 1024 that is likely to set Omaha’s racial achievement gap in concrete, and further centralize and hyper-regulate Nebraska education in this era in which everybody else in the country is decentralizing and deregulating?
Well, you can trace a lot of it to the usual reason: bad ideas.
Stick with me, because it’s a bit of a long story, but I think this is what has happened:
I used to be embarrassed about the only “C” I ever got. It was in Economics 51 in college in the 1970s. I aced the first test, got a “B” on the midterm, and then flunked the final. It’s not that I didn’t study. I spent most of the semester trying my darndest to understand the professor and the textbook. Obviously, I never quite caught on to what they were trying to teach me.
And now I know why: that professor and that textbook were anti-capitalism and anti-free market. The economics they taught cast government as the answer to every problem, and the conceit that government should intervene in the lives and choices of individuals for the good of the whole.
Like the Presidents of the day, Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter, they were Keynesian – a little bit socialist, a little bit fascist, and a lot counter-intuitive.
They were based on the macroeconomics theory developed by British thinker John Maynard Keynes (pronounced “canes”), 1883-1946. His ideas spurred Roosevelt’s New Deal and the deeply entrenched ethic we have now in this country, that higher taxes and make-work public spending are the way to keep people employed and the economy alive, even though the services provided aren’t as good as the private sector could have provided, and everyone’s plunged into a bottomless pit of debt.
Keynesian economics spurs more activity by the government, not the private sector, and tends to create new problems that “force” government to keep spending and regulating more and more, displacing the private sector from its previous functions and responsibilities more and more.
Keynesian economics is why we are so deeply in debt with exploding government entitlement programs, levels of taxation that are becoming untenable for many people, a shrinking middle class, and so many marginalized people in this incredible land of plenty. We have these huge problems because we turned to Keynes and away from the free-market economics -- Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand” -- that served as the framework for the American dream for the centuries before.
Keynes was the king of letting enormous public debt pile up with little or no worry about the impact on the generations to come, because, as this non-Christian ideologue said famously, “In the long run, we are all dead.”
In other words, screw your kids and grandkids, and live for today.
Of course, Keynes never had any kids to worry about. He was a homosexual / bisexual who apparently preyed sexually on low-income boys, including those of color. Educated at Eton and Cambridge, he operated among the rich, powerful, intellectual and artistic crowd. He advised the government, but got so frustrated with the “lesser minds” he had to deal with that he had a nervous breakdown. He was a gambler and a speculator, but most of all, he was very, very smart. He was part of the intellectually gifted but morally bankrupt Bloomsbury Group in England in the first third of this century, who practiced various sexual deviancies including “higher sodomy,” which is what you call homosexual relations with someone of equal intellectual status, along with forays into the underclass for sex-tinged excursions.
Keynesian economics is basically a perversion of the economics most of us believe in. It basically holds that:
-- The elite should be in charge because they’re smarter, and everybody else should just come along for the ride without any meaningful input into what happens. But of course, the masses should still shoulder the cost. It is playing out now as the educational infrastructure in this country has grown beyond most people’s wildest imaginations, voters know less and less about how the money is being spent and have less and less input into what and how the kids are taught, and elected school boards appear to be more and more just meaningless rubber stamps for the government employees in administration and bureaucracy.
-- Instead of outright government control as in Marxist systems, however, the control is in semi-autonomous corporate bodies operating within the framework of the State, similar to the medieval fiefdoms of Europe. Private ownership is not deemed able to keep us all afloat, but government wants to stop short of the obvious government power in communism. So a few people will be allowed at least the appearance of leadership and ownership within the tightly-controlled networked matrix of control. That’s where all these “public-private partnerships” are coming from, especially in education. Bigwigs get huge tax shelters by donating big bucks for more and more government control of education even though what the government is doing is not what’s best for children. Why? Because bigwigs agree with the Keynesians that, in the Information Age, the need for government control of the “means of production” has shifted from factories and farms, to “human capital” – what we used to call “people.”
-- The rich and powerful will put their kids in private schools to position them for those few opportunities for future leadership, while the hoi polloi have no choice but to put theirs in the centrally-controlled, dumbed-down, highly bureaucratic “local education agencies” (as they’re already called in England) that lead mostly to make-work and donkey work. There’s the appearance of local control in these LEA’s, but actually, they’re just local branches of a national government agency, like post office branches. Chillingly, “LEA’s” is the same term used in the America 2000, Goals 2000 and No Child Left Behind federal education legislation of the past 25 years for what we used to call “local public schools.”
-- To Keynesians, the group is more important than the individual, which is the opposite of the American philosophy. Group concepts such as “global interdependence,” “world citizenship,” “sustainable development,” “equity” and “tolerance” will overshadow “anachronisms” of U.S. history such as “national sovereignty,” “independence” and “inalienable rights.” Keynesians believe aggregate demand for goods and services should rule over individual choices, perceived needs and desires. Conformity rules over choice, and submission to the government’s imposed values over personal freedom of thought. It’s basically “the government’s way or the highway” in everything from school curriculum to gatekeeping for who gets into the “right” colleges and gets the best jobs.
-- Social control is better public policy than freedom, according to Keynesians. It’s an elitist mentality. It’s best to offer people a minimum of “choice” in areas that don’t really matter so that they’ll think they still live in freedom. To sustain this fiction, government must unify with the private sector to create “social control.”
No wonder I flunked the Econ final! All that stuff is the opposite of what I believe.
In the years since college, I learned more about what other economists have said, and realized that Keynes was pointing us toward a world bank, a single worldwide currency, and world socialism, while the free-market, laissez-faire economists whose ideas square better with what America is supposed to be, including Milton Friedman and Ludwig von Mises, were getting drowned out by the Big Government types.
So now what on Earth does this have to do with Nebraska’s big problem with LB 1024 and the OPS debacle?
Simply this: the ideology of the public figures responsible for that bill align with the Keynesian view of the world. By no means am I trying to say that their ethical and moral philosophies or actions dovetail with Keynes’; heaven forbid. But their views about government and economics apparently do. Think about it:
Sen. Ron Raikes of Lincoln, who holds a Ph.D. in agricultural economics and is the bill’s author, taught economics at Iowa State in the 1970s. I have a friend who was a student there then, and said Raikes was a Keynesian through and through.
Colleagues praise him for his ability to crunch numbers and understand the minutia of school-aid formulas and so forth. But there’s a down side to having a person with a mind shaped by the dreary principles of ag econ in charge of formulating public policy on education and what’s going to happen to other people’s children. Former State Sen. Deb Suttle once said the brainy Raikes was “too smart for his own good.”
He made enemies in the ongoing battle over shutting down Nebraska’s 200-plus K-6 country schools with tactics that Class I proponents believe distorted the facts about spending, academic achievement and racial balance in Class I schools, and spread unfounded rumors and misled other state senators and the public.
Even though he once attended a one-room school, Raikes’ policies have been moving toward centralized control and nationalization since he has been in the Legislature and served as Education Committee chairman.
Raikes has been active in the Denver-based Education Commission of the States (www.ecs.org), which is promulgating nationalized schools which align with a globalized curriculum and everything run by educrats, not educators. He also has been aligned with the National Council of Chief State School Officers (www.ccsso.org ), which has the same trajectory.
Raikes also has been involved with the increasingly-scary student data collection and assessment systems which are already in place in Nebraska, important components of the globalization and standardization process going on in the U.S. and around the world.
Sen. Ernie Chambers of Omaha is from a North Omaha district that is almost the polar opposite of Sen. Raikes’ rural Lancaster County one, in the context of racial makeup. Both represent about 35,000 people, but Chambers’ district is about 72% black, while Raikes’ is about two-thirds of 1% black. (See http://unicam.state.ne.us/districts/index.htm for demographics on each legislative district.)
So you wouldn’t think these two men would agree on the best way to achieve educational equality and racial justice in Omaha-area schools. But Sen. Chambers is an outspoken atheist who contends that children belong to the State, not their parents.
His brilliant but cynical mind turns more toward being a racial provocateur than doing what it actually takes to raise the educational attainment of low-income and minority children. Like Keynes and like Raikes, he apparently believes that bigger government is the answer.
All the attention has been focused onto the racial undertones of the current controversy, while the real danger – Raikes’ overarching “learning community” – can quietly be put in place and assumed to be the “answer.”
Chambers’ egoism was a fertile field in which the seeds of LB 1024 could grow, sucking the disadvantaged into the “learning community” where they can be controlled and kept down on the farm, while what the eduwonks contend they need to “sustain” all this unwieldy infrastructure will require a bumper crop of new taxes every year.
Other individuals and organizations whose backgrounds, philosophies and actions can only be termed Keynesian also had a hand in this, including Gov. Dave Heineman, State Education Commissioner Doug Christensen and the Nebraska State Education Association. We’ll talk more this week about their roles . . . and what they and others could do to help pull us out of this swamp.
Tuesday: the real deal on “learning communities.”
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Friday, April 14, 2006
Posted
12:29 PM
by Susan Darst Williams
A FEW GOODIES, A FEW BADDIES
AND ONE BIG ROTTEN EGG
IN OUR EASTER BASKET
We can’t close the book on this session of the Nebraska Unicameral without thanking the senators for a good thing they accomplished for K-12 education.
They beat back the push to mandate all-day kindergarten statewide by nixing LB 228. The educrats desperately wanted it, to further standardize and force conformity on K-12 education in this state. They also wanted to get additional “income stream,” infrastructure and jobs into the public schools. And they wanted to protect their “turf” against any enrollment inroads by homeschooling and private schools, which generally don’t offer all-day k, seen as a major convenience and cost-saver for working parents.
All-day k is a “loss leader” for public schools; it draws in enrollment which tends to stay there. There’s something creepy about a unit of government conducting itself in that way – strategizing to get revenue rather than doing what’s best for the people it serves, in this case, little kids.
An all-day program for 5-year-olds technically is “unprofitable” for both the seller and the customer – the schools and the pupils. When you more than double their time in school, you don’t more than double their learning – in fact, you probably instill bad habits and set them back, since by taking kindergartners’ time doing what they don’t need to be doing, enrolled in a structured program at school, you take away time in which they could have done what they needed to be doing – which is basically living life in playful freedom at home half the day.
But for financial reasons, rather than educational, the educrats lust after all-day k. How come? Because most parents will choose “free” all-day k over having the child in half-day in kindergarten, and half-day in paid day-care or at home. Most parents will choose a freebie over something they have to pay for or that takes more of their time, even though it won’t necessarily help and might even harm their kids over the long run.
Educationally speaking, there’s no evidence all-day k is anything but “free” day care at taxpayer expense, and in fact it may be harmful in the long run to children’s learning power, especially little boys, who prosper more at age 5 in the freedom and order of their own homes with a one-on-one adult-child “staff ratio” – mom-and-child.
We all know that starting too early for children is detrimental to their long-term development, in everything from contact football to sexual behavior. It’s the same thing with formal schooling. All-day day-care and all-day k have been shown to damage children’s overall attitude about school, their self-discipline, and even their attachment to and respect for their parents.
Hats off to State Sen. Pam Redfield of southwest Omaha, among others, for showing the education bureaucracy that if you can’t prove something is a good use of tax dollars that will benefit and serve people, you shouldn’t try to push it through.
One other education-related vote gets a big thumb’s down, however: LB 239, which allows the children of illegal aliens who live in Nebraska to pay in-state tuition in Nebraska public colleges and universities. So they step in line in front of low-income, longtime citizens once again:
n They already get more expensive services in “free” public schools than the children of bona fide citizens, because they don’t speak English, and that dumbs down and dilutes the space and services available for other children, or at least costs us all an arm and leg more.
n They take a college classroom seat from the children of bona fide, taxpaying citizens, most of whom had parents and grandparents who served our country in the military and so forth, who score a 19 on the ACT and can’t get in to the University of Nebraska, but if the child of someone who is flagrantly breaking our immigration laws can score a 20, they’re “in” and the citizen’s child is “out.” The vast majority of the bona fide citizens who are aced out are low-income and minority Americans, too. So much for being law-abiding.
n And on top of that, the illegal’s child gets a whopping subsidy from Nebraska taxpayers to attend college, while the child of a bona fide, taxpaying Kansas or Iowa citizen does not: the illegal alien’s child will pay $4,530 in tuition while the legal citizen’s child, who’s from another state, has to pay $13,440. Why don’t we just hand over a CHECK to the illegal?!?
It’s just unbelievable that this bill passed. But oh, well. At least it makes for great headlines: “ALIENS TAKING CLASSROOM SEATS AND EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITIES FROM AMERICANS!!!” Yeah, well, you’d have to be from MARS to think this bill is fair.
Last, but certainly not least, we have the pageantry of LB 1024, the biggest egg in our legislative Easter basket, and according to most accounts, a rotten one.
What have we hatched? What do “peeps” really think of it? Are Sen. Ron Raikes and Sen. Ernie Chambers keen jelly beans – or do they have major egg on their faces? What do the “chocolate people” think? Will it make the education bureaucracy, which is already hard-boiled, even more impervious to attempts at local control? Will it stink up Gov. Heineman’s chances to be governor, since he signed it? We’ll take a hard look at all its aspects next week.
‘Til then, Happy Easter and Happy Passover, and here’s a wish from our happy little half-day kindergartner, Maddy:
(crayon drawing of a bunny, Easter basket and eggs available only on the GoBigEd email)
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Thursday, April 13, 2006
Posted
11:04 AM
by Susan Darst Williams
MAY RUIN NEBRASKA'S PUBLIC SCHOOLS
I finally get where the “learning community” concept promulgated by State Sen. Ron Raikes of Lincoln, apparently about to be accepted by a majority of the Unicam today, comes from.
Raikes is an agricultural economist. He has a Ph.D. in that field – excuse the pun. So his mind has been shaped to work with commodities and governmental regulations and programs. You know: they’re the guys who pay farmers not to farm, and keep tight controls on the market. How much local control is there in agriculture? Zero. Zip. Nada.
So now, it appears, they’re going to pay educators not to educate, and consolidate centralized control even more over public education. In the overarching learning community that will control what school districts do in the Omaha metro area, children will be grouped in one pile, like putting all the county’s corn in one silo.
Children will be treated like commodities, all the same, instead of allowing parents and educators to do and spend as they see fit to meet distinctly different needs of distinctly different student populations. Everything will be done by “committee,” and you know what impact committees have on spending decisions when it’s other people’s money being spent, and everybody on the committee wants to “contribute” to the overall complexity and pricetag.
Instead of allowing parents to “invest” in their child’s education and direct it in the way they choose, the government will hold all the cards, and quash any practice or person who won’t cleave to government specs and standards.
So even though laptop computers might make perfect sense to provide for highly-literate, high-achieving suburban high-school juniors and seniors in Advanced Placement classes, ALL children will “have” to have them, even if they can’t read, or else there won’t be “equity” within the overall learning community.
So we will see more and more events like the recent theft of $20,000 worth of laptops from Franklin Elementary School in inner-city Omaha. Oh, well: you-know-what happens when you’re striving for “equity.”
We will end up reducing our public schools to local government offices that provide government subsidies for standardized training for low-level, low-skilled workers from low-income families, and the college-bound kids will go to private schools with their parents paying tuition if they want more than the bare bones basics.
So not only will the schools themselves be segregated by race and income level, the whole spectrum of education will be: the rich will be in private schools, and the poor will be in public schools.
It is fairly likely that the “learning community” constraints will force a large number of nicer, smarter families into private schools sooner rather than later, to escape the Soviet-style, collectivist philosophy and methods that will be put in place with this mega-district concept. If you don’t want your child “processed” like everybody else’s, but you want education to be “value-added,” then you’ll have to pay for it in a private setting.
That will wipe out any hope of keeping public schools as the beneficent incubator of America. It will destroy the hope of making Nebraska’s public schools as great as they could be, and it could spell the death knoll for economic development in our state. We have high taxes and low plains – no mountains, no oceans, no forests, few big lakes – so what’s our draw? In the past, it’s been pretty good public schools. That may be in jeopardy.
But it may be too late, anyway: the Tax Foundation ranks Nebraska among the bottom 10 states with the worst business climates, 43rd to be exact.
High taxes, excessive government, and now so-so schools being strangled by over-regulation: it doesn’t appear that Nebraska will be able to reverse its population losses (minus 9.7% from 1995 to 2000) compared to other states (Nevada=plus 151.5%, Colorado=plus 43.8%).
(See http://www.taxfoundation.org/publications/show/78.html)
We could have had beautiful integration and rousing competition, if we had listened to gubernatorial Dave Nabity, who wanted to divide up the 23 most troubled OPS schools and assign a few each to surrounding public school districts to get them under fresh, new management. It would have been an impressive model for the nation. It would have really put us on the map.
We could have offered vouchers. We could have created tax credits. We could have enabled charter schools, or private management of public schools doing the worst job. We could have put some of Omaha’s best minority leaders in place as liaisons with neighboring districts to solve this from outside OPS, instead of expecting the same people who haven’t been able to solve the minority underachievement problem for decades suddenly be able to solve it now.
We had every opportunity to do something with this OPS crisis that was innovative, exciting, compassionate and cost-effective. But we didn’t.
That’s the bad news. The GOOD news is, it isn’t set in stone. So here’s hoping our Legislature and other leaders won’t settle for this, but will put their thinking caps on, and get back into the fields to farm up a better way.
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