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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Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Posted
9:17 PM
by Susan Darst Williams
AT MILLARD NORTH, ELSEWHERE,
IS ANTI-YANKEE, PRO-U.N.
Here's a well-documented article on it. IB is spreading like wildfire all over the country because of peer pressure: "elite" students are admitted to it, which makes anxious parents believe it is the "best." Soon, the leaders of tomorrow will all be globalized instead of Americanized. Bad, bad, bad.
Hope this article makes it around to the members of the Millard Community Schools board, who put the IB program in at Millard North High School and recently expanded it down to a middle school as well. It's time to reverse course and go back to a traditional, pro-American curriculum:
http://www.edwatch.org/updates07/031707-IB.htm
(1) comments
Sunday, March 25, 2007
Posted
10:24 PM
by Susan Darst Williams
ROLLBACK ON STUDENT DATA COLLECTION SYSTEM
WITH IMMEDIATE OPT-OUT PROVISION
Ooh. Ooh. Ooooooh. We need to slam the brakes on the State Education Department's massive electronic recordkeeping project, or we are going to be in a world of hurt.
Let's call for an immediate end to the project, and in the meantime, at a bare minimum, allow parents to opt their children's data OUT of this system if they choose, to protect themselves from the illegitimate hacking that's so rampant. Look at this horrible case out of California with mentions of past abuses in Ohio and Nebraska among other places. It's not even so much the hacking as it is the government-sponsored, disturbing, disgraceful invasions of privacy that will be going on constantly, at taxpayer expense, unless we put a stop to it.
According to the Associated Press:
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
LOS ANGELES. — The University of California, Los Angeles alerted about 800,000 current and former students, faculty and staff on Tuesday that their names and certain personal information were exposed after a hacker broke into a campus computer system.
Only a small percentage — "far less than 5 percent" — of the records in the database were actually accessed, UCLA spokesman Jim Davis told The Associated Press.
Still, it was one of the largest such breaches involving a U.S. higher education institution.
The attacks in October 2005 and ended Nov. 21 of this year, when computer security technicians noticed suspicious database queries, according to a statement posted on a school Web site set up to answer questions about the theft.
Davis said the hacker used a program designed to exploit an undetected software flaw to bypass security and get into the restricted database, which has information on current and former students, faculty and staff, and some student applicants and parents of students or applicants who applied for financial aid.
Many of the records in the database do not link names and Social Security numbers, however, the two pieces of information the hacker was after, Davis said.
The university's investigation so far shows only that the hacker sought and obtained some of the Social Security numbers. Out of caution, the school said, it was contacting everyone listed in the database.
About 3,200 of those being notified are current or former staff and faculty of UC Merced and current or former employees of the University of California Office of the President, for which UCLA does administrative processing.
Acting Chancellor Norman Abrams said in a letter posted on the site that while the database includes Social Security numbers, home addresses and birth dates, there was no evidence any data have been misused.
The letter suggests, however, that recipients contact credit reporting agencies and take steps to minimize the risk of potential identity theft. The database does not include driver's license numbers or credit card or banking information.
"We have a responsibility to safeguard personal information, an obligation that we take very seriously," Abrams wrote. "I deeply regret any concern or inconvenience this incident may cause you."
The breach is among the latest involving universities, financial institutions, private companies and government agencies. A stolen Veterans Affairs laptop contained information on 26.5 million veterans, and a hacker into the Nebraska child-support computer system may have gotten data on 300,000 people and 9,000 employers.
Security experts said the UCLA breach, in the sheer number of people affected, appeared to be among the largest at an American college or university.
"To my knowledge, it's absolutely one of the largest," Rodney Petersen, security task force coordinator for Educause, a nonprofit higher education association, told the Los Angeles Times.
Petersen said that in a Educause survey released in October, about a quarter of 400 colleges said that they had experienced a security incident in which confidential information was compromised during the previous 12 months, the newspaper reported.
In 2005, a database at the University of Southern California was hacked, exposing the records of 270,000 individuals.
This spring, Ohio University announced the first of what would be identified as five cases of data theft, affecting thousands of students, alumni and employees — including the president. About 173,000 Social Security numbers may have been stolen since March 2005, along with names, birth dates, medical records and home addresses.
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Sunday, March 11, 2007
Posted
11:46 PM
by Susan Darst Williams
MEDICAL POSTSCRIPT
EXPOSES FOLLY OF HPV SHOTS
Just in case the issue of requiring girls to get immunized against the sexually-transmitted disease, Human Papilloma Virus, or not be able to attend public school ever heats up in Nebraska the way it has in Texas and other places, here's fodder aplenty to battle and defeat the forces which would like to see that happen:
http://www.vaproject.org/ayoub/what-is-wrong-with-hpv-20070305.htm
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Thursday, March 08, 2007
Posted
8:02 PM
by Susan Darst Williams
IS PAR FOR THE COURSE NATIONWIDE
Nebraska's statewide assessment program has drawn some fire for posting such all-around high scores that our kids look like thousands of geniuses -- but on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, they look like rumdums.
Comes now a flurry of national stories bemoaning the declining literacy and numeracy evidenced by the NAEP numbers. And more and more people are noticing the questionable integrity of a state education department that would tout such high numbers on an inhouse test in which Nebraska kids are compared to other Nebraska kids . . . while conveniently ignoring the fact that the vast majority of those same high-scoring Nebraska kids have been exposed as reading BELOW grade level on the national one. Not only that, but it's beyond crisis mode for children of color.
Nebraska's gap is fairly wide, compared to those in other states. The main thing is, it's going on everywhere. It's what we get for caving in to all those nasty learning "standards" several years ago, when the educrats pushed "outcome-based education" on us, from coast to coast. Remember, the standards were deceitfully boilerplated from state to state. Nebraska's are virtually identical to almost every other state's. Our people were duped into thinking they thought they up on their own. Yeah. Right.
Here's the latest dish:
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/DebraJSaunders/2007/03/08/higher_grades,_lower_scores
What to do?
Parents like us are already moving their kids to private schools and homeschools. We hate to do it, because we believe in the principle of public education. It's just that . . . we also believe in the principle that we are responsible to make our children's educations the best they can be. So it's a no-brainer, for those who are awake to what's going on.
It's evident that it will take around 10 or 12 years to turn things around in the public schools so that embarrassing credibility gaps like this don't exist. But it'll take a lot of work from inside and outside the system. So if your kids are still enrolled in public schools, either roll up your sleeves . . . or assume the position.
Posted
6:33 PM
by Susan Darst Williams
THAN ALL THE FEMINISTAS, NDE AND FOUNDATIONS COMBINED
Nebraska's Rep. Lee Terry has done a very good thing. He's cosponsor with Rep. Sam Brownback of Kansas on a bill in Congress to give families who choose at-home parenting the same tax benefits as parents who choose out-of-home day care.
The Parents' Tax Relief Act of 2007 would also get rid of the marriage tax penalty, make the $1,000-per child tax credit permanent, and increase the tax exemptions for families who care for elderly relatives.
The best thing about it is that children do best when they have an opportunity to grow up in the peace, freedom and security of their own homes, for the most part, with at least Mom or Dad there with them most of every day. Across the board, mothers in general have far better verbal skills -- and far more love -- for their own children, than day-care employees. And it shows. The more we drop-kick our itty bitties into Soviet-style day-care centers, the angrier they're getting, the worse they're doing in school, the less they care about learning, and the rockier our country's future is getting.
Terry's bill is wisdom. The way the Nebraska Department of Education is getting our public schools into the day-care business, bigtime, with partial funding by well-meaning but ill-advised tax-free foundations, is foolish and wrong, and it's sad to see.
Rather than moving into universal "free" preschool for all, here's hoping the Terry bill will make it through. Even if it doesn't, here's hoping parents and taxpayers will thumb their noses at the Government Nannies who seem so intent on screwing up our youngest, most vulnerable little ones.
Brownback, Terry Hold Parents' Tax Relief Press Conference
Posted
8:48 AM
by Susan Darst Williams
THE TRUTH: DANG! IT'S A TRAP!
At first blush, school-choice vouchers seem like SUCH a great idea. Give low-income parents tuition assistance so that their kiddies can attend the private school of their choice, if the public school isn't cutting the mustard. Start the bus! The public schools will lose enrollment, which will feel very, very bad. But in the long run, that'll be good. It'll force the public schools to wake up and smell the Java(script), clean up their acts, get better in order to compete, and then we'll all be happy and kum-ba-ya'ing into the sunset.
But check out the revelations in the middle of this story about the Utah vouchers. Now the wolf in sheep's clothing is revealed. Note the reference to "assessments" which would be following the kiddies into the private schools in Utah, as the "strings attached" to the vouchers:
http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,660201436,00.html
Ah. Therein lies the rub. That's what would happen here. All the schools would eventually be alike, because all the schools would have to conform to what the "assessments" are after. And it ain't school the way you and I know school. (See my latest Public Policy brief on student data mining on www.GoBigEd.com, down below on the left-hand column.)
The "strings attached" to vouchers are why we have to stick to private-sector initiatives ONLY, to provide true school choice. We really do have to forego public funds for private education. It's the only way to keep our existing good alternatives -- private schools and homeschools -- as safe as we can from manipulation and government "specs."
Voucher plans ALWAYS have an "accountability" clause. They ALWAYS want the kiddies to take "assessments" so that they can see how they're doing in school. Now, that's sensible: if you're using taxpayer dollars, then taxpayers have a right to see what kind of a bang they're getting for their bucks.
But the "assessments" are always strapped to the curriculum, and reflect it as sure as shootin'. So to score well on the "assessments," the school has to align its curriculum that way. Now, the public schools are moving away from objective, "content-based" curriculum -- knowledge and facts -- to the much more subjective, "process-based" curriculum -- attitudes, values and beliefs. You know: all that Whole Language, Whole Math, Multiple Isms type curriculum I always gripe about.
So if a private school wants to keep up, it'll have to switch from the curriculum and instructional methods it uses now, to mimic what the public schools are using.
Even if that private school has built a high-quality, traditional, unique, content-based curriculum, its scores won't look too hot compared to the private schools that have caved in, and to the public schools that are already completely in.
So people won't send their kids to the better private schools, because they won't LOOK better on paper. Parents will only look at the score, and they don't know that kids aren't being tested on the kind of academics that we WANT them tested on.
It's a pickle. Unfortunately, for the same reason, charter schools are a trap, too. Again, it's that public funding conundrum.
Answer: find creative ways to foster more educational entrepreneurship. Let's look for private-sector initiatives that are both nonprofit and for-profit, and that really work, and expose what the Government Nannies are doing as ineffective. Then we'll have a real educational marketplace . . . and then we really CAN kum-ba-ya off into the sunset.
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Tuesday, March 06, 2007
Posted
4:08 PM
by Susan Darst Williams
ON STUDENT DATA COLLECTION
POSTED ON WWW.GOBIGED.COM
Check out the new report chock full of evidence why we need to sidetrack the rumbling locomotive called "electronic portfolios." It'll steal our privacy and give us a Big Brother noogie like nothin' we've ever seen. Read it, and share with parents, taxpayers and decision-makers you know:
www.gobiged.com/Public_Policy_Briefs/
(0) comments
Monday, March 05, 2007
Posted
7:38 PM
by Susan Darst Williams
Of Religious Liberty in Schools:
Washington State Kids Suspended For Praying Before School
http://www.lc.org/libertyalert/2007/la030207.htm
(0) comments
Sunday, March 04, 2007
Posted
3:51 PM
by Susan Darst Williams
SECOND VERSE
Another lament about the dumbing-down of America that can only be fixed by privatization:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-skube4mar04,0,3085966.story?coll=la-opinion-rightrail
Posted
3:25 PM
by Susan Darst Williams
PROCLAIMING THAT GOVERNMENT-FUNDED SCHOOL REFORM
HAS MADE THINGS WORSE, NOT BETTER
The question is, does anybody have the belly to do what should be done about it -- privatize public schools?
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20070302-090329-1295r.htm
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