Posted 4:04 PM by Susan Darst Williams

HOW EDUCATORS FUDGE THE NUMBERS
TO MAKE MATH TEST SCORES LOOK ROSY

Hmmm. This ed researcher from Washington State has done a good job of showing how educational administrators use numbers to conceal the sharp erosion in math knowledge at all levels of students in her state.

Go Big Ed will have to find some spare time to run these same numbers for us. Gulp. Hope it's not as shocking as this Nov. 29 report:

http://betrayed-whyeducationisfailing.blogspot.com

Labels: math test scores, misleading statistics, Washington State math scores

Posted 10:22 AM by Susan Darst Williams

THOSE WHO WANT TO REMOLD SCHOOLS
AS VOC-ED JOB TRAINING ACADEMIES
WORK AS A TEAM . . . AND THEY'RE GOOD AT IT

Re yesterday's post about the School-to-Work tsunami:

It's no surprise that the flagship of educational Political Correctness, the TC Record publication of Teachers College, Columbia University, would publish an article extolling the virtues of vocational education the same week as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce released a report that condemns schools in their present form and attempts to pave the way for a whole "new" educational system and a whole "new" philosophy of education . . . one that . . . gasp! . . . would center on vocational education just like the former Soviet Union and Germany and Japan.

Here's the Teachers College article, which was not-so-mysteriously resurrected from over a year ago and republished today:

http://www.tcrecord.org/Content.asp?ContentID=14537

Is this just a merry coincidence? Hardly. Follow the money, and see how the same companies and organizations that prop up the U.S. Chamber of Commerce also prop up the leftist teachers colleges, particularly Columbia's, where the anti-intellectualism of John Dewey first held sway.

The propaganda push is on. It's coming from all quarters. And it's likely to sweep us off our feet, unless we keep our feet on the ground and continue to insist on academic improvement, not massive systemic change.

Labels: School-to-Work, vocational education

Posted 11:25 PM by Susan Darst Williams

NEBRASKA'S LOW GRADES FROM CHAMBER REPORT
CAN BE FIXED MUCH MORE CHEAPLY AND EFFICIENTLY
THAN TURNING OUR SCHOOLS INTO JOB TRAINING ACADEMIES

No need to go haywire over the "F" grades that Nebraska got this week from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for poor school management, lack of innovation, poor use of technology, absence of charter schools, no-brainer learning standards, tsunami of teacher paperwork requirements, lack of college and career readiness, and very low percentage of students who pass advanced placement tests.

Hunh? How can those NOT be problems?

Well, they are. But they can be fixed in simple, cost-effective ways such as creating a bona fide competitive marketplace for education. Those problems would vanish if parents could control their own children's school placements and direct where their state education subsidy dollars will flow. Providing more educational freedom is a much, much better and cheaper solution to these problems than the scary and fascist system the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has in mind. THEIR system would destroy educational quality and freedom of choice for students, not enhance them.

What the politicians and the powers-that-be, including the U.S. Chamber, have in mind is School-to-Work. It's a new philosophy about schooling, that morphs schools away from traditional academics to job-training factories. How? By putting a heavy emphasis on career planning from an early age, dumbing-down academics for most students, and placing teenagers away from classrooms and into on-the-job apprenticeships, spending part of each day in the workplace, where their "higher learning" will be in voc-tech areas, not academics.

Big Government, Big Labor and Big Business are making this happen . . . greased by the federal education department, and your tax dollars. (Remember, "fascism" is when government and private industry mesh as "partners" while individual citizens, including parents of young children, have no say, but have to pay via increased taxes for what will destroy their freedoms and their children's futures. That's what School-to-Work will do.)

Now that it has come out strongly against the American educational system, saying it's "broken" and giving states poor grades based on carefully-crafted measuring rods that don't assess academic achievement in any way, the Chamber's "exciting" alternative is to adopt the School-to-Work philosophy of education.

It's the idea that schooling should be focused on preparing you for work in the global economy, and not necessarily for preparing you to become a well-educated, well-rounded U.S. citizen and voter.

The Chamber would like to follow the lead of the former Soviet Union, Japan and Germany in transforming schools into job-training academies, meshed with centralized government job forecasting and planning processes. How do we pay for all this?

Often, it's with sharply increased payroll taxes. Doesn't that sound ducky, in this recession with this level of unemployment? Where a few more dollars a month in payroll taxes may easily convince an employer NOT to hire a new full-time employee? Especially when that employer can get a "free" or "subsidized" teenaged apprentice employee through the School-to-Work program? But what about the adult laborer who needs that job? Tough. That adult laborer will just have to be re-trained for some other job. But don't worry -- it won't cost that laborer. It'll be "free." (Translation: taxpayer-provided.)

The likelihood of skyrocketing education costs that make today's spending levels look cheap is matched only by the breathtaking potential for politicization, corruption and unfairness.

If the central planners think we'll need more nurses 10 years from now, voila! All kinds of kids will miraculously "score high" on the "ooh, you should be a nurse!" questions on the annual aptitude tests. They'll mainly be trained to be nurses, and if the central planners are wrong, and we REALLY need tons more truck drivers 10 years from now, then darn! A lot of those nurses will just have to be re-trained!

But it won't cost them anything -- just the taxpayers, you know. The re-training will be "free." Riiiiiight.

Now, if your dream is to become a singer, but the "system" forecasts a need for culinary arts workers, then darn! You'll just have to become a singing waiter!!! Because if you're assessed as being suitable for culinary arts, and you turn that assignment down, then darn! There are no other slots for you other than what the central-planning committee came up with. You'll just have to leave school without ANY kind of training or credentials. Good luck with that, huh?

See why Big Labor loves this, too? The constant re-training, while laughably inefficient and costly for taxpayers, promises union members job security beyond all other systems. And the centralized government workers who will control this system will have all the power and say-so, and ability to extend favors and withhold placements -- NOT the parents, and NOT the lowly teachers.

You can trace the development of this plan from its genesis in the America 2000/Goals 2000 federal education legislation that got going in the 1980s, through the May 4 (interesting date, eh?), 1994, signing of the School-to-Work Opportunities Act by then-President Clinton. Since then, all kinds of funding has flowed into Nebraska to get these systems in place for the "right" time to crash traditional schooling and get School-to-Work in place, which appears to be now.

That's why there has been all this fuss about:

-- markedly increased federal involvement with local public schools and unfunded mandates which have seized effective control of local schools,just paving the way for nationalized schools which are actually job-training academies such as in Germany, Japan and the former Soviet Union;

-- "standards," which are basically the same at each grade level in all 50 states, paving the way for nationalized curriculum and the destruction of local control over curriculum by elected school boards;

-- "assessments," which are more like job evaluations than academic evaluations, have replaced academic tests, and measure attitudes, beliefs, opinions and job-related skills rather than knowledge and academic skills;

-- "benchmarks," which reveal whether a student has met the bare minimum standards for passing, which is all the School-to-Work system needs to know, with no incentives for kids who in past years might have stretched their efforts to get a "B" or an "A" -- now, with Outcome-Based Education, a "C" is all you need, and a "C" is enough;

-- specialized "academies," "magnet schools" and "focus schools," which are paving the way for specialized job training even at the grade-school level, and getting rid of the broad-based liberal-arts curriculum that has stood the test of time;

-- the decrying of the lack of charter schools in Nebraska, since charter schools are intended to be the mechanism for introducing School-to-Work, especially in low-income areas;

-- the big push for "year-round schooling" -- not because it makes any academic sense at all, but to provide employers with "year-round" apprentices for their year-round work schedules;

-- "lifelong learning" to get everybody ready for a world in which constant re-training is necessary, accepted and expected;

-- International Baccalaureate programs which are thinly-veiled Marxist prep schools to turn out a global-preferenced elite for multinational corporations, not citizen-leaders for the United States of America;

-- and all the references to "world-class" everything in schools. This last trend is because School-to-Work doesn't have anything to do with equipping students to start and own their own small businesses someday; it's all about providing labor for the global corporations which might need to send workers all over the world, so they have to be ready to fit in anywhere in the world on a moment's notice. So people need to be "globally-standardized," according to the School-to-Work gurus.

The people who have designed and are now instituting School-to-Work are not concerned about what PARENTS are concerned about, academic quality. Did the Chamber decry the huge numbers of students who can't read or do math at grade level any more? Noooo. Not a word. They don't care about that. They're getting ready to institute government-controlled job training in lieu of traditional K-12 education in this country.

To do it, the meshed forces of Big Education and Big Labor deliberately nuked the schools over the last 20 or 30 years with America 2000 / Goals 2000 and Outcome-Based Education, and are now criticizing them heavily, getting the voters all upset. That is so that voters and taxpayers will be prepared to accept the offered "alternative," which is fascist schools run by the government-labor cartel and NOT by your neighbors on the elected school board or little old Mrs. Humphrey, that nice teacher, or Mr. Mahoney, that nice principal. The role of educators in education is being down-sized, bigtime. It won't be teachers teaching; it'll be the system, "downloading." And putting in place School-to-Work spells the death knell of any semblance of local control by parents and teachers.

What's the telltale sign that School-to-Work is coming? Those learning "standards" you hear so much about. Those standards are boilerplated -- the same -- all over the country. They are dumbed-down unbelievably, to dupe the public into believing that since THEIR kids scored in the 90th percentile, they must be very, very smart, and their school must be tops. They'll accept nationally-standardized curriculum and assessment, figuring that since THEIR kids are tops locally or even statewide, they'll be tops nationally as well. But the score is meaningless. It's a ruse.

If you looked at kids' actual academic abilities in reading, writing and 'rithmetic, if you're over the age of about 30, you would be absolutely shocked at how much erosion in academic quality there has been since the 1960s.

This is a planned crash, apparently, and it's sad to see.

The Chamber is in cahoots with the educrats to get this done, because it is a strong belief among the leftists in government as well as education that we need a meek, malleable, sub-literate workforce with "skills" rather than classic academic knowledge, who would move anywhere in the world for a job. And since they don't have a broad base of skills and knowledge, they will be more "loyal" than the worker of today, who has more options because of that vanishing broad-based liberal-arts education that School-to-Work is demolishing.

The School-to-Work educrats would roughly follow the old 80-20 rule: 80% of the students would be "assessed" and pigeonholed into low-level jobs with intensive career readiness programming that starts in kindergarten, and only a lick and a promise in traditional school subjects rather than a thorough grounding in all academic subjects . . . just "brought up to specs" for an entry-level job, in other words . . . while the lucky other 20% would be "sorted out" at a young age, groomed in academic skills and given college-prep classes to get them ready for college to eventually emerge and take the reins of society as the ruling elite.

Of course there would be all kinds of corruption and fandango to determine whose kid gets labeled a "Smurf" with entry-level job prospects and opportunities limited (translation: conservative Christians and those who would dare to buck the fascist system), or, on the other hand, those whose kid gets an Ivy League education with all the perks (translation: leftists and ambitious parents who'll do and say anything to suck up to people in power to get their kids an edge).

Now who, pray tell, would be the "Smurfs" in Nebraska? Why, eureka! We already rank at about the bottom of the 50 states in the achievement gap between rich and middle-class students -- almost all of them white -- and those in poverty, almost all of them from families of color.

School-to-Work wouldn't do anything to raise the academic outcomes and, hence, life outcomes of those who are already at the bottom of the barrel. Instead, they'd be handed no-brainer apprenticeships and steered into dead-end jobs; no physics or calculus or art or in-depth history classes for kids like that.

Why would they need them, if the point of school is to get ready for a job?

But that's not racist -- deliberately dead-ending the mostly-poor, mostly-minority kids. School-to-Work is just "practical" -- it'll get them a decent job -- and isn't that what schooling is all about?

If you don't think so -- if you think the point of schooling is to turn out citizens, not worker bees -- you'd better get moving quickly and educate yourself, your fellow parents and taxpayers, your school board members, your state senators and anyone else who will listen, to expose and battle the School-to-Work juggernaut, coming to a school district near you.

Here's a great place to start:

http://www.arthurhu.com/index/stw.htm

Labels: School-to-Work

Posted 11:08 PM by Susan Darst Williams

ORD, NEB., BOND ISSUE APPROACHES VOTE:
SHOULD A SMALL TOWN BE SPENDING $10 MILLION
IN THIS ECONOMIC CLIMATE?

It's hard to see how people could vote for the massive, $10 million school bond issue that's coming to a head in the central Nebraska town of Ord. But sources say it's going to be a whisker-thin margin, either way. Results of the balloting will be in by mid-November.

A committee made up of pro-school district residents is urging a "yes" vote, claiming that snazzy school facilities will attract new residents to Ord. But an opposing committee has gathered information which indicates that the fire and safety violations at the school that the bond issue is intended to fix could be fixed for much less than the school officials are claiming, and that the nonacademic improvements that would be made, such as the practice gym, are off-target in the economic conditions of now and the foreseeable future.

Ord's student population has dropped to 480 from 515 five years ago, while its spending per pupil per year has increased to $12,817.98, adding five teachers to the payroll. Ord teachers make an average of $45,709 -- great money in that neck o' the Nebraska woods.

The $9.8 million bond issue is being sought to add a practice gym to the 1928 building as the fourth major addition in its history, plus bring various fire and safety features up to code, improve the HVAC system, add an elevator for handicapped access, and expand and modernize facilities.

According to the Nebraska Department of Economic Development (NDED), Ord already provides some of the nicest learning facilities in the state. The teacher-to-pupil ratio is 1:9 in the elementary school and 1:10 in the junior-senior high, and the computer-to-pupil ratio is 1:2. Academic results are average: about three-fourths of the senior class takes the ACT and scores right on the Nebraska average.

Actually, Valley County looks to be one of the richest counties in Nebraska on paper, with an actual valuation per pupil of $614,058, according to the NDED. All those rich farmers!

But wait:

Valley County actually has one of the lowest averages of household income in the state. Per household, income is measured at $43,000, which is significantly beneath the Nebraska average of $58,000. So there may be wealth in that county, but it's not easily tapped because it's tied up in property. The proposed bond issue would put an extra tax bite on top of regular taxes of $956.20 per year for the typical farmer, according to observers following the issue. Not a good cash-flow situation.

With the concern about the economy, it's questionable whether this is the time to be going into debt to the tune of $10 million, plus interest, over the next 20 years, in a tiny school district with declining enrollment.

One interesting footnote gathered in researching this issue:

According to the Ord district's annual financial report, sent to the Nebraska Department of Education and accessed at http://ess.nde.state.ne.us/ASPX/AFR/AFRDistrict.aspx?codistsch=88-0005-000&datayear=2007/08&id=1, Ord's superintendent of schools makes a salary of $119,012. That comes to $247.94 per pupil per year for his salary alone.

In contrast, the superintendent of the Omaha Public Schools makes $336,805.99 -- $8.08 per pupil.

But no . . . there's nooooooo way Ord could find any way to cut spending and avoid going so deeply into debt. Or is there?

Labels: Nebraska bond issue, Ord

Posted 12:29 PM by Susan Darst Williams

KUDOS TO ST. PATRICK'S SCHOOL
FOR A GEOMETRY PROJECT
THAT'S A PERFECT '10'

Fun idea at St. Patrick's Elementary School in Elkhorn: to celebrate the school's recent 10th anniversary, five eighth-grade geometry students who meet before school with their math teacher for geometry enrichment practice designed a human "10!" of hundreds of people that could be photographed from the air.

The students measured a nearby soccer field, brainstormed a design, made a scale drawing, painted exact measurements of the outlines of the numbers, organized over 600 students and teachers into the "10!" shape, and now have an unusual memento, the aerial photo.

Labels: good math idea at a private school in Elkhorn

Posted 12:15 PM by Susan Darst Williams

COMMON CONUNDRUM:
WHEN A DISTRICT'S AVERAGE ACT SCORE
IS MUCH, MUCH WORSE THAN ITS "ASSESSMENTS" WOULD PREDICT

Here's a head-scratcher: according to the Douglas County Post-Gazette, which covered the Oct. 12 meeting of the board of the Elkhorn Public Schools, fourth and fifth graders scored in the 96th to 100th percentile of mastery on state standards, as measured by the constant barrage of assessments

On the statewide writing assessment, Elkhorn fourth, eighth and eleventh graders scored in the 98th, 96th and 93rd percentiles of mastery.

Wow! Incredible! Sure looks like Elkhorn teachers are hot stuff.

But wait: the board also was told that Elkhorn's 2009 graduating class averaged 22.9 on the ACT exam, the same score as last year. The best score -- 100% mastery -- is a 36.

So let the head-scratching begin. The Elkhorn average of 22.9 computes to about a 47.6% on the ACT. And these are the kids whose parents' chests are bustin' with pride because their standardized test scores in the earlier grades are close to 100%?!?

I hate to pick on Elkhorn. This is going on all across the state.

What does that say about the value of our statewide learning standards, and all those assessments that teachers are complaining are substantially interfering with their ability to teach? Could the standards and assessments be a big, fat waste of time?!?

And what does that say about the actual, apples-to-apples quality of the education we are giving kids in Nebraska? Are you happy with a 47.6% for your close-to-$10,000 per pupil per year in tax funding? Didn't think so.

Labels: when ACT score is a lot less than a district's other standardized tests

Posted 10:24 AM by Susan Darst Williams

GOOD NEWS:
LAWSUIT CHALLENGES
LEARNING COMMUNITY'S CONSTITUTIONALITY

Three cheers for former Nebraska Attorney General Don Stenberg and his clients. They filed a lawsuit to point out that the Legislature's Learning Community is 'way off-road of the state constitution when it comes to assessing tax dollars. It's unfair, it's socialistic, and even though this would only chip away at its power, it's a good first step to get rid of it entirely.

Here's the lowdown:

http://nebraska.watchdog.org/2009/10/20/exclusive-lawsuit-claims-learning-community-unconstitutional/?utm_source=NE_Subscriptions&utm_campaign=90295e3903-NE_Breaking_29_15_2009&utm_medium=email

Meaning no disrespect to the late State Sen. Ron Raikes and former state senator and now Learning Community board member Ernie Chambers, who designed the LC, but what a boneheaded idea the Learning Community was and is.

The problems with this socialistic model of educational governance go 'way beyond the injustices of inequitable revenue extraction, positioning the Elkhorn School District, among others, as a loser, and districts including Millard and Westside as the winners.

The real problem is how the revenue production and dispersion has NOTHING to do with local control, everything to do with consolidation of power -- which always leads to corruption and waste -- and nothing to do with educators "on the ground" making the decisions for how to spend resources.

What the LC has in mind is, apparently, fancy-pants, high-tech "focus schools" with all the bells and whistles that will make construction companies rich and "look good on paper" for the political hotshots and big-government, left-wing donors who will be involved -- BUT ARE NOT WHAT KIDS NEED TO IMPROVE THEIR READING, WRITING, MATH AND THINKING SKILLS.

I've read about 10 books by authors of all political stripes on how to improve academic achievement among low-income students. That's my passion, and it's the ostensible purpose of the Learning Community. But I've been gravely disappointed by the LC concept since it was first proposed. The creation of yet another level of bureaucracy and expense that distances the educational power elite and control over curriculum and instruction even further from parents and students is NOT one of the many, many practical and cost-effective solutions that are being tried in other states.

We need to drive the money source CLOSER to the students, their families and their teachers, not further away, if we hope to meet their needs.

It was encouraging to learn last summer that Chambers is a new fan of systematic, intensive, explicit phonics -- which I firmly believe is a key solution to the outrageous lack of literacy among all income levels of students right now, something that all schools should have had in place 20 years ago.

So I hope this lawsuit can dissolve the Learning Community bureaucracy while preserving the network of well-meaning citizens, including Chambers, who can devote their efforts to doing what will WORK:

-- phonics and other no-nonsense language instruction in the early grades with a return to quality children's literature instead of the senseless, pointless and disturbing stuff that's on the reading lists of most public schools today;

-- traditional, systematically-taught, computation-based math instead of "whole math" with its ineffective "spiraling" which makes kids jacks of all math trades, but masters of none;

-- a true market system with meaningful school choice for parents, involving the public, private and homeschooling educational communities, instead of a shell game that "allows" students to choose among cookie-cutter, overstandardized public schools only, and only if they have the "right" color of skin or income level;

-- the promulgation of creative innovations for K-12 education -- why not get rid of the pointless requirement for teacher certification? why not have school from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. four days a week and save money while being more efficient? why not let kids who can meet state standards get out of school at 1 p.m. and give them a stipend to do the fun, challenging learning activities they WANT to do in the afternoons, at far less cost than maintaining a school class day that is in large part pointless for smart kids;

-- reform curriculum and instruction to increase the students' knowledge base and decrease the amount of Political Correctness, distractions and non-academic activities;

-- and cut waste and fraud within the massive public school system. Spending per pupil per year has nearly doubled since our eldest child toddled off to kindergarten 20 years ago; that's outrageous.

For those whose heads spin over trying to keep track of the educationese and jargon about the Learning Community, here's a good synopsis:

http://www.changforlearningcommunity.com/about-the-learning-community/

For those who would like to contact Don Stenberg and compliment him, comment on his efforts, or join in them, see:

http://www.changforlearningcommunity.com/about-the-learning-community/

Labels: Don Stenberg, lawsuit against Omaha area Learning Community

Posted 2:22 PM by Susan Darst Williams

NEBRASKA PUBLIC SCHOOL SPENDING
ALIGNS WITH THIS CHART:
SKYROCKETING COSTS, FLAT RESULTS

http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2009/09/30/chart-of-the-day-federal-ed-spending/

So what are we going to do about it?

Labels: chart shows skyrocketing federal K-12 education spending, flat student achievement levels

Posted 3:18 PM by Susan Darst Williams

BACKGROUND ON IB:
LET'S BRIEF OPS BOARD MEMBERS
ABOUT THIS RADICAL, 'GLOBAL CITIZEN' JUNK

Still sad about the Omaha Public Schools board voting in the International Baccalaureate program for Central High School and Lewis and Clark Middle School.

Here are dozens of articles explaining the roots in the United Nations of IB, and how it is part and parcel of the movement to internationalize school curricula. So much for local control! So much for the locally-elected school boards having any say-so whatsoever. In the process, any hope of teaching the next generations the facts about American exceptionism would be crushed. It is alarming and distressing that the board of the largest school district in the state doesn't understand this.

Here's hoping OPS school board members will educate themselves, revisit the IB vote, and reverse themselves:

http://www.eagleforum.org/search/?cx=017031022027986382240%3Afh-fsvzotas&cof=FORID%3A9&q=International+Baccalaureate#848

Labels: criticism of International Baccalaureate, database about IB

Posted 11:01 PM by Susan Darst Williams

CHARTER SCHOOLS DO MUCH BETTER
FOR LOW-INCOME KIDS; HO-HUM, YAWN, WINK

Here's another major study that shows that students who attend charter schools that have more leeway than traditional public schools do much better academically:

www.nber.org/~schools/charterschoolseval/

It's another major study that will be totally suppressed, if the educrats have their way, since charter schools just make too much darn sense, and apparently, the competition posed by higher-quality schooling is scary as heck to their cherished monopoly game.

Now, I don't like charter schools because I'm for private education -- private schools and homeschools -- as being the best form of educational liberty. Charter schools are fraught with peril -- have you heard about some of the Muslim-based ones that are springing up? And when you get right down to it, "he who pays the piper pays the tune." I don't believe an education bureaucracy that has been used to getting its own way for 40 years is going to cave in and grant real, true liberty to any charter school innovation any time soon.

In the meantime, the evidence is mounting that something, ANYTHING, will do the job better for kids than the monopoly system we have now. Somebody, ANYBODY, is bound to be listening. Hopefully, bigtime change is coming in a good way. So stay tuned.

Labels: charter schools serve low-income kids better academically

Posted 10:45 PM by Susan Darst Williams

WITH PUBLIC SCHOOL ADMINISTRATORS,
GUESS THERE IS SUCH A THING AS A FREE LUNCH

Take a look at this report out of Nashville. It shows that school district administrators spent about $100,000 at local restaurants, in a scandal that has resulted in several administrators' school credit cards being revoked. However, this columnist laments that it doesn't appear that major changes will be put in place to ensure that it doesn't happen again. Why? Apathy, apparently.

Just because citizens aren't picketing school board meetings, there's no excuse for not having good management practices in place to prevent stuff like this.

Is it too much to ask that a school district employee present a receipt, or if not, no reimbursement will be paid?

Is it too difficult, with all the computer equipment, handhelds, laptops, cell phones, etc., that we've bought for school employees, that they have to get preauthorization before they make an expense? At least have a LITTLE speed bump in their way?

Wonder how much of this is going on in Nebraska school districts:

www.tennessean.com/apps/pbcs.dll/section?Category=pluckcommentslocal&key=20091006.tennessean.DN910060336.article.COLUMNIST0101&s=d

Labels: credit card expenditures by public school administrators in Nashville

Posted 10:19 PM by Susan Darst Williams

SAD TO SEE OPS CAVES
ON GLOBAL EDUCATION PROGRAM

The board of the Omaha Public Schools went ahead and approved the spread of the International Baccalaureate globalist education system to Central High School and Lewis and Clark Middle School. The vote was unanimous.

Still no word on whether IB really will cost taxpayers an extra $1,400 per student per year. Maybe there was cost data divulged at the board meeting, but since no one spoke out against the move and asked questions, that data wasn't made available.

In other cities that have added IB programs, it isn't until years after the fact, when the programs are in place, that taxpayers finally feel the "bite" of the extra IB costs, which have been calculated to total about $1,400 per student per year above and beyond the regular per-student spending. These extra costs include the incessant, time-consuming training in deluxe, distant cities which is one of the hidden "perks" for IB coordinators, along with the other extra costs that aren't made public at the time of school board approval.

It's also unclear how exactly the OPS board intends to get around the Nebraska statute that requires an elected school board to retain control over the curriculum. The OPS board will have no say-so whatsoever, under a typical IB contract. Another Nebraska statute also requires the OPS board to make sure its schools teach American history, literature and civics intensively each school year, K-12. That will not be happening under globalist IB, either. Possibly Omaha parents will have to start an after-school club -- kind of like the Brownies -- to teach their children about America at their own expense and on their own time, which is a very sad commentary in these times.

The word on the street is that school boards fall over themselves to institute IB programs so that they can recruit the top scholars who are of Asian and East Indian descent, and in many cases not American citizens, simply to artificially inflate their schoolwide standardized test scores. Why? To cover up how ineffective their educational practices are for the majority of the students, who would not qualify for the selective IB program, including probably 99 percent of the African-American students in OPS. If you get enough kids who can score a 32 or higher on the ACT, statistically speaking you can cover up a LOT of academic underachievement or mediocre results from the many, many kids who score beneath a 20, which is a deplorably low score. I've said before that a POTATO could score a 20 just by sitting in any classroom for 13 years. By doing this, the OPS board is deciding to spend more tax dollars on non-American citizen students while continuing to widen the academic achievement gap that is pushing American citizens who are African-Americans further and further behind.

The IB curriculum is global in scope, and by definition minimizes teaching about the principles of American government, the significance of the U.S. Constitution, and facts and figures about American exceptionalism, including the benefits of liberty, capitalism and living in a nation founded on Judeo-Christian principles. Under IB rules, every system of government and every cultural feature must be considered of equal worth. It's Political Correctness run amok.

The other disappointing factor is that the OPS school board has effectively pulled a "Pontius Pilate" move by giving the keys to Central's academic honors program to a globalist organization that is immersed in the United Nations. So much for encouraging parental involvement in our schools; with IB, there won't be any that is meaningful, and parents will not have any leverage with the elected OPS board whatsoever. Parents who want to see the curriculum before it is delivered are turned away or brushed off, and if you have a beef, what are you going to do? Call Switzerland, where IB is based?

Guess it's not surprising, but is just another sign of the times.

Labels: IB comes to Omaha Public Schools

Posted 8:50 PM by Susan Darst Williams

OBAMA'S IDEA OF LONGER SCHOOL DAYS
AND LONGER SCHOOL YEARS
DISCREDITED AND DEBUNKED LONG AGO

Sigh. When will the politicians think of finding out what the EVIDENCE shows is the cost-effectiveness, or lack of it, of the ideas they throw out in an attempt to score points for education reform?

For the record, there's no evidence that year-round schools and longer school days help kids. What's needed is better management of school resources, including more time-on-task in school buildings, and selection of better-quality curricula all through the grade levels.

Despite the facts, President Obama is pushing for year-round schools and longer school days, anyway. Obviously, this is a union ploy to increase K-12 wages by 25% or more, with cascading consequences to the already-mountainous operating fund shortfalls, unfunded pension scandals, and all of the rest of the financial and management problems that schools have.

That doesn't even count what many parents and teachers dislike the most about year-round schooling and longer school days: the increase in burnout among students and teachers and accompanying behavior problems and "school sour" problems, and the erasure of time available for family-directed learning and family-strengthening "off-grid" relaxation time, including family vacations and complementary learning excursions.

The evidence has been clear for some time that lengthening the school day and the school year do not improve student achievement in any meaningful way. It's a jobs program that would only increase costs exponentially.

Here's a recent study which backs that up once again:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070811151449.htm

And here's a column I wrote about this issue:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070811151449.htm

Labels: longer school days don't help student achievement, year-round school doesn't help academic achievement

Posted 10:47 PM by Susan Darst Williams

WHY OPS SHOULD REJECT
INTERNATIONAL BACCALAUREATE

The board of the Omaha Public Schools is scheduled to vote Oct. 5 on whether to allow International Baccalaureate programs in Central High School and Lewis and Clark Middle School. The International Baccalaureate program, often under fire as being tinged with globalism, socialism, anti-Americanism and anti-Christianity, has been shown to cost $1,800 extra per student per year, and is not considered as cost-effective as the Advanced Placement programs that are more prevalent across the state.

Moreover, the International Baccalaureate program, or IB, appears to be in direct violation of Nebraska state law. The law requires curricular control by a locally-elected school board, adherence to Nebraska state standards of learning, parental control over a child's education, and a pro-America civics orientation for any taxpayer-supported public school.

Members of a local school board who fail to fulfill the American civics requirements of Nebraska State Statute 79-724 (http://nebraskalegislature.gov/laws/statutes.php?statute=79-724) are guilty of a Class III misdemeanor. But the IB curriculum that is under consideration for Central and Lewis and Clark appears to ignore the provisions in the law that require the teaching of civics pertaining strictly to the United States and to the State of Nebraska.

The two OPS schools would join Millard North and Lincoln High as IB schools in Nebraska.

There are many other reasons the IB program should be rejected, but the extra expense for no demonstrable benefits over AP programming, plus the apparent illegality, should be plenty to convince the OPS board to move on to more productive types of quality upgrades for the state’s largest school district.

The Swiss-based IB program, with much of its curriculum produced by the United Nations, demands an override of control or even input by the students' parents, the local school board, school administrators, and state and local elected officials. Testing and grading are conducted in Switzerland rather than by the district or state’s own personnel.

Although Omaha philanthropist Susie Buffett's Sherwood Foundation would pay the IB planning and start-up costs, estimated in other places as over $100,000 per school, it appears that there would be no private funding or subsidies to offset the additional $1,800 per student per year that IB typically costs.

In brief, IB has come under fire by U.S. education activists for many reasons:

-- The IB organization became a signatory in 2001 to the United Nations Earth Charter, which promotes the concept of world citizenship over the U.S. sovereignty proclaimed in American founding documents and legal principles. The "worldview," or perspective, of the IB organization and the educators it trains is clearly toward globalism over American sovereignty, which would violate the beliefs and wishes of most, if not all, of the Nebraska parents whose children would be taught in the IB system.

-- IB also is on record in favor of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, which directly contradicts the American Declaration of Independence. The U.N. document contends that human rights stem from government. But the American document contends that rights and liberties are God-given and inalienable, transcending human government. The U.N. point of view has been criticized as enabling totalitarianism over democracy.

-- The IB organization also is on record in favor of an array of U.N. policies that the U.S. has not endorsed. These U.N. policies, among others, promote biodiversity over economic development, children's rights over parental rights, environmental constraints over business (the Kyoto accords), global military disarmament vs. independent systems of national defense, and an international court which would supersede the high courts of sovereign nations, even in matters involving citizens of sovereign nations such as the U.S. Most, if not all, Nebraska parents of students who would be enrolled in an IB system would oppose most, if not all, of those policies, but their children will be taught to accept and promote them anyway.

-- The U.N. and therefore the IB curriculum, since the U.N. created and copyrighted much of the IB curriculum, also favors same-sex marriage, in direct contradiction to Section I-29 of the Nebraska Constitution.

-- Parents are blocked from seeing the IB curriculum in advance and cannot see their child's essays or test papers, since they are graded and kept in Switzerland, an obvious undermining of the parental rights which are strongly supported in American law.

-- Each district's IB coordinator acts as a "gatekeeper" trained to direct parental concerns to the IB headquarters in Switzerland; parents are denied the opportunity to work out concerns with locally-elected school board members or paid administrators even though their tax dollars are paying for the IB program.

-- The IB literature curriculum is heavy on anti-American, anti-Christian books which are leftist politically, negative about capitalism and traditional family values, and paint a bleak picture of the past, present and future. They lack richness of plot, vocabulary or character, and are almost without exception not even in the top 100 books most fans of quality literature would consider essential for an American middle-school or high-school student’s literary education. Many ridicule Christianity or by omission ignore its contributions, while elevating New Age and pantheistic religious belief systems. Examples of books frequently in the IB lineup that ridicule the Judeo-Christian religious belief systems: The Demon Haunted World by the late Carl Sagan (who claimed that science is more valid than religion), and The Power of Myth by the late Joseph Campbell, who called the belief in a bodily resurrection which is central to Christianity "a clown act." These sentiments would be highly offensive to parents of IB students, if they had any idea about the radical ideology which their children are being taught. If books like these comprised a minority of the reading lists in IB, it would be one thing. But books like these comprise 100% of the lists, and that amounts to politicized indoctrination, not intellectually-free education.

-- Most IB curriculum is heavy on relativism, the idea that "what is true for you might not be true for me, but that’s OK." Relativism permeates the teaching of conflict resolution within the IB curriculum. An example given is content that seeks to equate the perspective of a violent terrorist from a Third World country who feels deprived of resources, with the perspective of a law-abiding citizen from a wealthy nation, as if violence and terrorism are OK because the possession of resources isn’t equal between the two people. In stark contrast, the Judeo-Christian heritage on which the American form of government is based has a strong foundation in objective, rational, unchanging truth, which is not relative, but can be discovered and understood. Terrorism is always wrong, under the American system of thought, but under IB's relativism, there are conditions under which terrorism can be right.

-- Although IB is usually promoted in a school in order to try to attract college-prep type students and improve the intellectual atmosphere in a high school, it most often acts to segregate the strong students from the weak ones to an even more extreme degree than already occurs, since the IB students don't mix with the others and a degree of arrogance and exclusivity often develops in the student body.

Need more proof?

Here are 10 brief reasons why IB conflicts with the pro-American requirements of any elected school board under state law:

http://www.edwatch.org/updates06/040706-IBaq.htm

Here is why a well-regarded school district near Pittsburg, Pa., rejected IB after several years of experience with it:

http://www.crossroad.to/articles2/006/edwatch/2-23-ib.htm

This shows how IB is the intended vehicle for the international standardization of curriculum at the expense of any semblance of local control by locally-elected school boards:

http://www.ibo.org/ibna/media/documents/EdDaily.REV.11.27.pdf

Here is how a Minnesota teacher computed that IB would cost his district an extra $1,805 per student per year, but was nowhere near as cost-effective or helpful to students in obtaining college credit for high-school course work as Advanced Placement. In addition, he criticized IB because its insistence on curricular control pulled all power out of the hands of the locally-elected school board and local education officials:

Costs & Contents of IB (Eaton, in ppt) (10/14/06)

Labels: Central High School, criticism of IB, International Baccalaureate proposed to expand in Omaha, Lewis and Clark Middle School, why a school board should reject IB

Posted 2:59 PM by Susan Darst Williams

GREAT EXAMPLE OF COMPLEMENTARY EDUCATION:
SEATTLE HOSPITAL'S MOBILE SCIENCE LAB VISITS SCHOOLS

I'm an enthusiastic member of the pep club for the concept of "complementary education." There's a great, big, beautiful world out there full of community-based and corporate-based efforts to come up alongside the struggling schools and provide the students with quality educational experiences that they're not otherwise getting.

My dream is to start a C.O.W. Bus -- short for "Creativity On Wheels" or "Classroom Outside Walls." It would go the places where kids are in the hours outside school and give them creative enrichment experiences that they desperately need, but can't get, since schools have become so systematized these days and there doesn't seem to be time for . . . well . . . learning anything that isn't in the day's "script."

But it is in the unexpected and spontaneous situation, such as this mobile science lab demonstrates, that a student's interest catches fire and the lightbulbs go off over young heads. In this example, the kids scrape the insides of their cheeks and using scientific processes to isolate and study their own DNA!

Love it, love it, love it. and want it, want it, want it in Nebraska:

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2009922860_sciencelab23m.html

Labels: complementary education, mobile science lab

Posted 10:33 AM by Susan Darst Williams

FLORIDA SHOWS HOW SIMPLE AND CHEAP IT IS
TO RAISE LOW-INCOME KIDS' ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT

Hope Nebraska lawmakers are paying attention. We don't need the stinkin' socialistic Learning Community or some fancy-pants focus schools and the like to improve education for Nebraska children, especially the needy. We just need smarter public policies on K-12 education.

Florida has much tougher-to-teach demographics than we have, but managed to lift their low-income kids' standardized test scores a whopping amount with a few simple tactics:

-- Reform the way kids are taught to read. (I've been raging about this for 20 years, but few, if any, educators or legislators in Nebraska "get it"! We just MUST get rid of Whole Language, phony memorized spelling, idiotic word walls and all that kind of stuff that turns kids into morons by fourth grade, and get back to simple, effective and much cheaper and better phonics ONLY for the K-2 years.)

-- Frequently test them with meaningful and tough tests. (Nebraska's statewide assessments are covering up systemic underachievement even in the wealthy suburbs, and generally come in two forms: so easy, it's embarrassing that someone considers that level of academic achievement the "standard," or so subjectively scored on the wrong factors, such as the writing assessment, that the results are meaningless, and certainly not worth all the expense and hoopla.)

-- Give poor parents lots of options for school choice to form at least the start of a true educational marketplace. (Nebraska has ZERO parental choice for parents of any income level, and boy, does that need to change, since competition is the No. 1 route to quality, but we don't have any.)

The funny thing is, the tax dollars lost to the state in Florida through the school choice policies didn't hurt a bit. The fear in Nebraska about school choice ideas, including vouchers and tuition tax credits, is that many poor parents will yank their kids out of the failing urban public schools the moment they get a little tuition assistance for the more-effective private schools. When that happens, as it instantly did in Florida, the declining enrollment reduced the corresponding district's state aid funding. But that's the point: good government policy de-funds what doesn't work, and funds what does. These three simple changes didn't hurt the state at all, since the overall test score averages improved dramatically.

Why? Because of the simple and cheap things that Florida did, especially the crucial one -- reading reform.

So you can do more . . . with less money . . . if you just do education right?!?! What a concept!

And there's no reason NOT to do these three simple things here, too?

Come on, Big Red -- let's do this!

Read more on:

http://www.goldwaterinstitute.org/article/2771

Labels: Florida education results for low-income students, Nebraska has no school choice

Posted 5:28 PM by Susan Darst Williams

SEPT. 28 AFTER-SCHOOL PROGRAM
LETS COPS AND KIDS MIX AND HAVE FUN

Here's an opportunity for a bit of learning and fun in a program from the Omaha Police Department's Northeast Community Resource Center.

After school on Monday, Sept. 28, from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m., fifth- and sixth-graders are invited to come to the Salem Children's Center, 3131 Lake Street, on the south side of the church building, for "Cops & Kids." The children will talk with police officers, learn about police work, role-play realistic situations that police face every day, and increase positive police–community relations.

Participants are responsible for their own transportation. There'll be a light meal served to the youth during the program. Reservations are due by Thursday, Sept. 24, by calling 444.3367.

Labels: inner-city youth in Omaha and police-community relations

Posted 5:20 PM by Susan Darst Williams

ELITE BLACK DENTIST FROM THE 'HOOD
NOW REACHES BACK TO HARLEM TO PULL OTHERS UP AND OUT

I love stories of successful people who grew up around poverty, drugs and gangs, but found a way up and out through education.

This donor should inspire anybody in Omaha who grew up poor and made themselves rich to donate lots of money to the Childrens Scholarship Fund or other programs that give poor kids educational opportunity.

After decades of trying and failing, further investment in the public schools might not be as good an answer as a private-sector response. What we need to be doing is providing the financial assistance poor kids need to lift them out of the failed public schools and into the private schools where the odds are much better that they'll succeed:

http://www.tc.columbia.edu/news/article.htm?id=6956

Labels: educational opportunity for low-income students

Posted 10:46 AM by Susan Darst Williams

HERE'S HOPING NEBRASKA SCHOOLS
WILL COPY THE SUCCESS
OF THE K.I.S.S. PRINCIPLE:
KEEP IT SIMPLE, SILLY

Happy to see these great results for New York City low-income kids that have been gained with an excellent, back-to-the-basics curriculum, the Core Knowledge series, along with a sensible, cost-effective, back-to-the-basics approach to school management:

http://ednews.org/articles/scrimp-avoid-quick-fixes-watch-academic-achievement-rise.html

This Christian Science Monitor article contains several simple but smart changes that could help those 20 or so failing buildings in the Omaha Public Schools get it back together in a hurry.

Class size is kept fairly large, but test scores are 'way up, simply because these educators were able to say "no" to stupid and expensive fads, and met kids' learning needs in a straightforward way.

The Core Knowledge curriculum is excellent (www.coreknowledge.org), but in Nebraska is in only limited use right now, chiefly at the Core Academy in one grade school in the Millard district.

One of the neatest things the New York principal does is share the annual budget with parents and teachers. What a concept!

Labels: Core Knowledge for low-income students, smart school management ideas

Posted 2:50 PM by Susan Darst Williams

ACT SCORES RELEASED TODAY;
A TIP O' THE HAT TO OPS,
BUT ALSO A DART AND A CHALLENGE

Not so good news: Nebraska students average a mediocre 22.1 on a 36-point scale on this year's ACT college admissions test. The national average is 21.1, so we're not really doing such an impressive job after all.

And that's even though the percentage of low-income and minority students that we have taking the ACT in Nebraska is much lower than in other states. Only about 4% of this year's test pool in Nebraska are African-Americans, for example.

So much for the myth that ghetto kids' test scores are dragging down our statewide averages. We already know that there's a huge racial achievement gap in Nebraska, but the net effect of low scores among 4% of the population is not enough to hurt our statewide average that much.

We also know that over 50% of African-American students in Nebraska are dropping out of high school before graduation. So they're not even taking the ACT because college isn't even in the realm of possibility for them. And from about Grades 8-11, reportedly they are severely under-represented in the higher-level high school courses that prepare a student to excel on the ACT, anyway.

So technically, our statewide, all-race average should be much, much higher than a 22.1. Frankly, a potato should be able to make that score after sitting in our taxpayer-supplied classrooms from kindergarten through the middle of 11th grade, at a cost well in excess of $100,000 per pupil.

Then there's the whole question of how much school spending is going up every year in Nebraska, and yet we are falling closer and closer to the national average in test scores. Given our advantages, we should be advancing higher and higher than the national average: we have favorable demographics, favorable parental employment and educational attainment rates, favorite levels of intact families, higher than average rates of instructional spending, among the nation's lowest staff-to-child ratios, and so forth.

I know it's hard. But really: shouldn't we be doing much better?

Our profile starts on p. 7:

http://www.act.org/news/data/09/pdf/states/Nebraska.pdf

Better news: One statistic that may be lost in the hubbub over today's score release is that the number of African-American students who took the ACT in Nebraska has risen from 492 in 2005 to 647 today. One can only assume that a lot of the growth in that test pool took place in OPS, where the lion's share of the state's African-American students are in school. So hats off to the OPS educators, if they increased that number. That is still only a gain from 3% of the test pool to 4%, though, and still reflects a shockingly low representation of black students in the college-prep population in the Cornhusker State. However, according to U.S. Census figures, African-Americans make up only about 4.5% of the state's population. So the ACT test pool's racial makeup here is getting close to being proportionately equitable.

Dart: We need to look hard at the statistic that the average ACT score for a Caucasian student in Nebraska last year was 22.6, compared to 17.7 for the average African-American test-taker here. What an unconscionable racial achievement gap. I believe the ACT score minimum for entry into the University of Nebraska-Lincoln is a 20. So we're limiting educational opportunity far more harshly for our black students than we are for our white students, and that can't continue.

Challenge: Let's see what the average ACT scores are, by race, for each individual high school in Nebraska, with, of course, the raw numbers showing how many students took the ACT test and what percentage of that age group actually took the ACT. Let's see those stats for the private high schools, as well. Let's see if more racial minorities are taking the ACT at the private schools than the public schools, and scoring higher. I bet that's true, and if it's true, then why in the Sam Hill don't we start a school choice program NOW to help minority kids get into the college prep race?!? OPS and the other districts should be made to reveal that statistic since it is our tax dollars paying for everything they do, and we deserve accountability. Another stat we really need is the number of students, by race, in Nebraska who are scoring a "4" or "5" on the Advanced Placement tests each spring and thereby demonstrating that they have excelled in those academic subjects areas and gaining free college credit. I'll bet you the number of black kids getting AP credit is embarrassingly tiny in this state -- and that can't continue, either!

Labels: black underachievement, Nebraska ACT scores

Posted 4:18 PM by Susan Darst Williams

DETROIT PAYS 257 INVISIBLE TEACHERS;
COULD THAT BE HAPPENING HERE?

The Detroit Public Schools have been issuing paychecks to 257 nonexistent employees and millions of dollars in benefits for dependents who aren't eligible, an auditor's report issued recently has reported.

The district, which is about twice the size of the Omaha Public Schools, also has a warehouse full of unused motorcycles, BlackBerrys, metal detectors and other equipment in the face of a quarter-of-a-billion dollar budget deficit and talk of filing for federal bankruptcy protection.

See the cavalcade of management prowess on:

http://www.salon.com/wires/ap/us/2009/08/05/D99SSBVO1_us_detroit_schools_audits/

If even 10% of this is going on in the Omaha Public Schools, it would go a long way toward explaining why that urban district's spending is going up, up, up . . . while minority dropout rates do the same darn thing.

Makes you wonder if THIS is why certain Nebraska politicians and unions have fought tooth and nail against performance audits of our billion dollars annually in K-12 school spending. Maybe they know something we don't know . . . or should.

The audits we have now are pretty much pro forma: the school district says it spent this much, and yep! The auditors that the school boards hire and pay agree that they spent that much. It isn't a real check-and-balance at all.

What we need is more of a forensic audit that would turn up frauds like "invisible teachers" who get paychecks, or "invisible students" on doctored enrollment tallies for whom taxpayers are paying bogus state aid.

At the very least, we need to employ spot-check performance audits that can tell the people how much they spent and what on. We should start with the major urban districts in Omaha and Lincoln. Who knows what we may find? You never know until you look.

Labels: Detroit Public Schools, school audits

Posted 6:39 PM by Susan Darst Williams

HOW TO ACHIEVE A WIN-WIN-WIN
FOR BLACK STUDENTS, OPS AND TAXPAYERS

Are you cringing over the low test scores in the Omaha Public Schools, published in The World-Herald today?

See how, for many of the neediest kids in Omaha, the test scores are going DOWN, even after the multimillion dollar bond issues and increased spending of the past decade or so directed at meeting their needs?

It's long past time to put to rest the bogus assumption that more spending on education produces better academic results. Wrong-o!

The new test scores sure show the Charles Dickens "It was the best of schools, it was the worst of schools" character of OPS. But therein lies a real opportunity for improving things for pupils, OPS and taxpayers. Consider:

The newspaper showed a chart with 64 elementary schools listed by their California Achievement Test scores last spring in reading, language and math in Grades 2, 5 and 8. Some of the top schools are doing very well, averaging above the 80th and 90th percentiles.

Look at Dundee Elementary, with 43% of its pupils from families whose incomes are low enough to qualify for free or subsidized lunch. Yet that school still scored in the 90th percentile on the CAT compared to pupils in other schools across the country. That is admirable. OPS should be applauded.

Of the top 32 schools on the chart, only four are doing worse than a statistical analysis of the poverty factor in those schools would suggest. In other words, only in only four of the top half of OPS grade schools are the kids doing worse than one would expect, given their demographics. The vast majority of the top half of grade schools in OPS are beating the odds. That's something to celebrate.

But in the BOTTOM half of the school roll in OPS, 22 out of 32 were doing worse than they should be.

That's the problem -- the major, major problem, and the reason Omaha has egg on its face before the nation. Omaha's African-American students, who mostly populate those troubled schools, score at or near the bottom of the whole country in another nationally-standardized test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

So we have crummy scores in half of our schools, and minority kids are doing worse than they should be even if all other factors were equal, demographically-speaking. On its face, it looks like racial discrimination, for taxpayers are tolerating educational practices that are obviously and chronically negatively impacting African-Americans and other minorities in educational outcomes, compared to whites.

Can you say "major lawsuit"? Can you say "ruinous consent decree," similar to what happened in Kansas City, which caused a judge to nuke their public schools because of a problem that wasn't even as bad as this?

Note that these disappointing scores come despite the fact that most of the bottom 32 schools are "academy" schools, in which Nebraska taxpayers are pouring much more money, per-pupil. If spending levels had anything to do with educational quality, you'd certainly expect to see a better return than that on our investment. Once again, we can see that pouring good money after bad doesn't do a darn thing to help.

But there's a way out of this, as easy as 1-2-3:

1. Form a new private, nonprofit corporation. Put an educational leader of impeccable credentials at the helm -- City Councilman Franklin Thompson comes to mind. Allow that new corporation to manage the per-pupil spending in those 22 OPS schools on a long-term management contract with the Omaha Public Schools board. Pass through the tax funding for those kids straight to the new nonprofit. Declare an educational emergency that negates the union contract and supercede collective bargaining for employees of those 22 schools. Make sure to give Thompson, as the ad hoc superintendent, and the principals he puts in place, hiring and firing power. Most of the existing OPS staff would probably hire on, and salaries and benefits will no doubt be better if management could get out from under oppressive union rules. Cut the per-pupil spending in those 22 schools to the same as the OPS average, saving millions in taxpayer dollars right off the bat. Remember? More spending does NOT mean better academic results! It's a paradox, but if we set out to spend less, and do the simple things like delivering academic basics better because we can't AFFORD the more expensive things that are obviously screwing things up, the kids will be better off! You CAN get more for less!

2. Contract with an experienced private, nonprofit school management firm such as KIPP (the Knowledge Is Power Program, www.kipp.org). Allow them to put in place the simple, firm, effective curricular and operational changes that they have proven work very well for disadvantaged students at other schools all over the country. Examples: academic basics such as phonics for reading and computation for math, tangible incentive prizes for good grades and attendance, better discipline, longer school days and some Saturday sessions. If parents don't want to sign off on that, they should be allowed to put their kids in any private school in the city -- there are plenty of openings -- and the tuition is about one-third as much as OPS is now spending per pupil -- so we'd save beaucoup bucks that way, too.

3. Here's the beautiful part: Nebraska's NAEP test scores for African-American students would zoom high overnight, as if by magic, the very next year, and stay high. We would no longer be the bottom-feeders of the nation for our students of color. Omaha's economic development picture would brighten because we would be free of our current black eye -- the implication that we are a racist community because our minority students do so much worse in school than our Caucasian students. How would this happen, as soon as the 2010-2011 school year? Because we will have removed most of the low-scoring African-American pupils from the test pool in the public school setting, where we KNOW they don't do well, into a private school setting, where evidence from around the country shows that minority students do better. You remove the bottom-scoring one-third from a test pool, and what happens to the average? It zooms sky-high! Bottom line: minority kids not only will do better academically in the long run, but their scores in the meantime won't be counted against OPS, and in the long run will look much closer to what the other kids in OPS can do. OPS teachers will look like geniuses . . . and so will Nebraska taxpayers!

Labels: KIPP, long-term management contract for 22 worst-performing OPS schools, Omaha Public Schools racial achievement gap, solution

Posted 9:37 PM by Susan Darst Williams

LET OPS WASTE ANOTHER HALF-BILLION?
OR FIRE A FEW OFFICIALS FOR OBVIOUS INCOMPETENCE,
AND SPEND TONS LESS ON WHAT ACTUALLY WORKS?

Their timing was astoundingly bad. On the heels of news last week (GoBigEd, July 20) that Nebraska's black-white racial achievement gap in math and reading is just about the worst in the country, the board of the Omaha Public Schools is tossing around a figure of $500 million for school remodeling and other fiddle-while-Rome-burns spending.

So they want to spend a half-a-bil more on stuff that doesn't matter, instead of debating how soon and how thoroughly they should fire the superintendent and top officials who have presided over the decades-old debacle in the black-white test score gap.

Most African-American students in Nebraska live in the Omaha Public Schools district. We all know their standardized test scores begin to drop far beneath the average scores posted by white students to the point where a black eighth-grader's math and reading ability is several grade levels beneath that of a white eighth-grader in OPS.

Yet OPS is notorious for refusing to use any form of systematic, intensive, explicit phonics curriculum, called "research-based" reading instruction, even though has been proven time and time again to equip all students, but especially disadvantaged kids, for reading and other school subjects much better than the "balanced literacy" strategies that OPS has in place, and which is obviously failing African-American kids so drastically.

And now Nebraska is a national laughingstock. Great.

The reading philosophy that OPS uses is not only much more expensive than if they would teach reading right in the first place, causes far more pupils to be labeled as "learning disabled" on down the road at immense expense, but the statistics are just glaringly apparent that OPS is using the wrong curriculum, and really, truly, heads should roll.

Consider, for example, this graphic, which shows how effective just one of the research-based instructional programs, Success For All, is compared to what most of Nebraska is using:

www.successforall.net/_images/pdfs/410189049_RopesPCard_NE_w.pdf

Labels: Nebraska racial achievement gap, Success For All vs. balanced literacy in Nebraska

Posted 7:14 PM by Susan Darst Williams

HOW CAN NEBRASKA TEACHERS
REMAIN MEMBERS OF THE NATIONAL TEACHERS' UNION?

A National Education Association official referred to conservatives who oppose the NEA's politically radical agenda as "bast**rds." See:

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Education/Default.aspx?id=610828

Have to wonder how any teacher in Nebraska or anywhere else, for that matter, can stick with these people, who really are not on the side of decency or traditional American values as far as I can see.

Labels: NEA official's crass comment, why don't teachers quit the NEA

Posted 3:22 PM by Susan Darst Williams

Nebraska’s Racial Achievement Gap
Is Nearly the Worst in the Nation

Nebraskans will probably be shocked to learn that the racial achievement gap in reading and math is wider in Nebraska than in almost any other state, including the Deep South, Nebraska Department of Education chief Roger Breed was quoted as saying recently in The New York Times. He added that the disparity is “not acceptable.”

Nebraska’s test scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, when split out by race, indicate that only the District of Columbia and Wisconsin have a wider chasm in academic achievement between black and white than the Cornhusker State does.

When black children do significantly worse on nationally-standardized tests than white children, and your state’s gap is just about the widest in the country, it raises a number of red flags.

It also adds fuel to the fire of those who deplore the 50% minority dropout rate in Nebraska. They also may consider the possibility of 1960s-style civil rights litigation which could be filed in an attempt to repair this situation, but which could give the state a black eye nationally and cost a bundle. Or the stats may make the economic development crowd worry about the impact on the Cornhusker State’s reputation for being able to fill higher-paid knowledge-based jobs.

Then there’s the basic worry: that people are going to assume that Nebraska must be “racist” if its black-white education numbers are so far apart.

Eight-grade math posts our worst showing for African-American students. The Times reported that in eighth grade math, the average score for Nebraska’s black students in 2007 was 240 on a 500-point scale. That compares with the national average for blacks of 259. The average score for black eighth graders was 246 in Alabama, 251 in Mississippi, 258 in Louisiana, and 261 in Georgia.

In contrast, the average score for white eighth graders in Nebraska in math was 291. That’s almost exactly the national average, resulting in a black-white gap in the Cornhusker State of 51 points, far larger than in any other state, according to the report.

The study was based on results of the 2007 National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, prepared by the National Center for Education Statistics:

http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/studies/gaps/

Nationally, the difference in reading and math NAEP test scores between white students and black students is approximately equivalent to 2½ years of schooling, according to the Times. Even though the gap is wide, it used to be wider 15 years ago, the statistics show. Educators blame the gap on the legacy of slavery, racism and poverty among African-Americans.

Local observers add that the wrong methods of teaching math and reading in the early grades have been prevalent in Nebraska for decades. Despite extra tens of millions spent in the Omaha Public Schools and the Lincoln Public Schools on their pockets of poverty in the inner cities, the gap between the races has narrowed much less than in other states.

Equally disturbing for many is the fact that Nebraska’s average scores for white students are mediocre, given our relatively low rates overall of poverty, relatively high rates of educational attainment by parents, relatively stable families in Nebraska compared to other states, and other indicators which in general point to “more teachable” student populations in Nebraska than elsewhere.

What children of all demographic groups and income levels need to excel is systematic, intensive, explicit phonics reading instruction, and a back-to-the-basics curriculum for math as well, to provide a more solid academic base, observers say. Very few schools in Nebraska offer those foundational curricula, however.

Often, the math and reading deficits of Nebraska minority students are concealed in the overall scores, so the disaggregation of the data by race is a welcome step for clarity. To many, it was a surprise to see that Northern states, including Nebraska, had a wider achievement gap than the states in the Old South. The size of that gap is a shock, too. In Nebraska, the math gap in the average test scores reflects a disparity of around 5 years of schooling.

A look at the results shows that in reading, the picture is no better. For fourth-grade reading, Nebraska’s overall score of 223 is slightly higher than the national average for public schools, 220. But black 4th-graders in Nebraska scored only 194, a racial achievement gap of 36 points, or about 3½ grade levels, in the key skill of reading.

Only the District of Columbia, with a gap of 67 points, and Wisconsin, with 38, did worse in terms of a racial gap in fourth-grade reading. Note that eight states, including the Dakotas and Wyoming, do not have enough African-American students to produce a statistically significant average and were excluded from the results.

The Times reported that Wisconsin was the only state in which the black-white achievement gap in 2007 was larger than the national average in the tests for fourth and eighth grades in both math and reading, according to the study.

Labels: NAEP scores for Nebraska, racial achievement gap is huge in Nebraska

Posted 2:55 PM by Susan Darst Williams

YEAR-END ACADEMIC CONTESTS
PRODUCE LOTS OF WINNERS

Wow! A lot of Nebraska kids deserve kudos:

Jenna Lynn Taylor, a fifth-grader at Alice Buffeett Magnet Middle School in the Omaha Public Schools, won a statewide essay contest sponsored by American Mothers, Inc., for her essay, "What My Mother Means to Me," judged best of 110 entries.

Elkhorn High School's Math Quiz Bowl team won a contest against 60 teams from Iowa and Nebraska at Iowa Western Community College.

Elkhorn's team also won the statewide Economic Challenge held at the Champions Club in Lincoln, winning the most points in macroecnomics, microeconomics, international economics and the quiz bowl.

Labels: Nebraska K-12 academic contest winners

Posted 9:27 AM by Susan Darst Williams

Is Building Bright Futures
Stacking the Stats
For Universal Preschool?

A friend has attended several data-seeking meetings of the new educational nonprofit serving metropolitan Omaha low-income children, Building Bright Futures, www.buildingbrightfutures.net. She is glad to be offered a chance to try to influence the way the early childhood grants are going to shaped, but is dismayed over the direction she believes things are going.

She supports Building Bright Future's efforts to attract significant additional funding for early childhood education in metropolitan Omaha for low-income children. But she opposes the social engineering aspects that are coming with that extra funding. What's scary is that once the Building Bright Futures program is in place funded by these private grants, the services -- good or bad -- will transform into "entitlements," and eventually the taxpayers will be expected to foot the bill.

It appears to be a regression back toward the standardized child care in the government nurseries of the Soviet Union in the 1950s and '60s, instead of what you’d expect in 2009: an array of richly-diverse choices, including lots of support for parents who choose to mostly rear their own children in their own homes.

Examples: Building Bright Futures is apparently going to suggest a radical reduction in the staff-to-child ratio that is permissible in early childhood settings. That step alone would drive most private-sector day-cares and preschools out of business.

The group also is set to require frequent mental-health "assessments" of preschool children that are likely to lead to lots of "interventions" in the form of prescriptions for drugs such as antidepressants. And the group will likely propose "free" health clinics, perhaps traveling nurses for preschools but full-fledged health clinics in schools.

This school-based health care push will add more costs and tasks to the schools’ already-overburdened "plate" and will contribute to the skyrocketing cost of Medicaid. The clinics will replace parents as the child’s perceived health-care advocate, dispense birth control behind parents' backs, and further build a wall of separation between children and the parents who are supposed to be responsible for their care and upbringing. In a way, it will be "enabling" child neglect.

However, overall, the source is hopeful that the right things will mostly happen if all points of view are explored and discussed in Building Bright Futures – and if the donors are given accurate information that provides a truthful picture of the early childhood world. As a professional in the child care field, she is very excited to know that heavy hitters – rich and powerful people – are interested in donating money to early childhood programs that can make a difference. She just hopes that difference will make things better for all kids, not worse for any.

But she called me with grave concerns over the way that the data on the status of early childhood education in Omaha is being put together. She believes it is being skewed on purpose to favor the taxpayer-funded, heavily-staffed, school-operated, big day-care centers and preschools, and to disparage the quality of smaller church-based and home-based day-care operations in order to drive them out of business.

This information will be presented to donors, state senators and other decision-makers and policy-shapers, but she is afraid the information will be distorted and skewed by the way it is being collected, and decisionmakers will be none the wiser.

She believes the result will deceptively suggest that heavily standardized child care curricula delivered in large, governmental settings is best for preschool children. But that is a bad and dangerous idea. The problem is that the people putting this curricula in place don’t know any other way. They are mostly trained as K-12 educators, and they will control the staff development, so that nobody in early childhood ed will know any other way than the standardized way.

Meanwhile, K-12 educators have a less than stellar track record with Omaha's at-risk student populations as it is. Remember that the vast majority of inner-city students in metro Omaha cannot read, write or do math at grade level, and our percentages of children of color who drop out before high-school graduation are among the highest in the nation. Now that record of failure will be spread to the previously-diverse early childhood world, and it's sad.

Diversity in child-care provision is what my friend supports: strong safeguards for parental choice and all kinds of settings, all kinds of providers, and all kinds of curricula are what she believes is best.

But if this young professional is correct, the Building Bright Futures program is going to kill off the affordable private-sector alternatives in early childhood ed by directing their grants toward the big, standardized nurseries. Then only rich parents will be able to afford private preschools. Middle-class parents will be forced to use the "free" government preschool option. Preschools that aren't dependent on grants will be able to provide better-quality programming. Consequently, the achievement gap between rich children, and everybody else, will be expanded instead of contracted.

While preschool educational outcomes might improve for the poorest of the poor – and research does affirm that quality early childhood education is great for that student population -- the "leveling" that will occur in these large, standardized programs will wind up giving middle class children lower quality preschool experiences that will make them worse off than they are now.

My source shared the Building Bright Futures report, "Key Messages From Early Childhood Providers Outreach Session" dated February 2009, to back up her concerns. The sessions were held in November 2008.

A look at the topics and the people whose opinions were being collected bolsters the notion that these data are being "spun" to make it look like government-provided, subsidized, accredited and standardized early childhood education for all children, rich and poor – commonly called "universal preschool" -- is best for kids, and therefore should be the goal.

As an example, my source pointed to the fact stated in the report that 62% of the participants in the data-collection meeting work in a day-care center rather than in a family day-care home. Of those who work in day-care centers, 64% work at a center that is licensed for more than 50 children. That’s a HUGE child-care setting – not at all what the research shows is best for young children. The best setting is the home, or a child-care operation which mimics the home, with a relatively small number of children, and caregivers who are able to give a lot of warmth, nurturance, support and love.

In large, impersonal centers with the litigation risk looming overhead at all times, staff may not even be able to hug a child. And in the long run, that lack of demonstrated affection in the young child's experience is extremely damaging and might be contributing to the wave of bad behavior in K-12 schools that we're seeing.

It's also sad to note that apparently no stay-at-home mothers and fathers were included in the survey, completely wiping out a huge set of "stakeholders" in how quality early childhood education is defined. There are tons of people who believe that kids are better off with just a few hours a week of preschool experience, spending most of their time at home or in a small child-care setting in a home. But those views aren't included in the survey results.

Another red flag: 61% of participants were using the same canned preschool curriculum guide, Creative Curriculum, which appears to be the "model" for standardized early childhood ed in metro Omaha. While it has a good mix of topics, from cooking to music to pre-literacy activities, it is heavily into the "child-centered" philosophy, also known as "discovery learning," which is prevalent in early primary school classrooms right now.

"Discovery learning," or "constructivism," is popular because the teachers' colleges promote it as "the way" and because working educators have been taught in staff development workshops that it is more "progressive" to merely "facilitate" learning rather than actively, explicitly, systematically and directly teaching the children facts, ideas and skills.

In a "discovery learning" preschool or school classroom, the adults "stay out of the children's way" and let the children guide themselves in "centers" doing activities, rather than actually teach the content to the children.

This kind of philosophy frowns on adults demonstrating, guiding and teaching any materials, or indeed, interacting very much with the children and giving them vocabulary words or explaining things to them. Instead, what is favored is the practice of just laying out the supplies for various activities and letting the kids have at it.

The grade-school equivalent is Whole Language – the notion that if you just expose children to text, they'll pick up reading and spelling on their own -- which has been demonstrated for decades to be a total failure compared to fast, easy, cheap phonics instruction. Another example is Whole Math, which minimizes computation, memorization and math facts in favor of more abstract problem-solving activities, estimating and receiving credit for wrong answers as long as the "process" used to arrive at them was creative, group projects and other "child-centered" math activities which, unfortunately, result in most children having substandard math skills compared to generations past.

But the participants in the Building Bright Futures meetings were not given any options to vote for traditional preschool literacy and math activities. So my friend believes the stage is being set for declaring discovery learning curricula as the high-quality "standard," most popular among early-childhood providers, and sadly, the tried-and-true methods that work will become unfamiliar and soon vanish.

Meanwhile, she pointed out from the statistics that a high percentage of the children served by the participants in the Building Bright Futures surveys were receiving child-care subsidies through Title XX of the Social Security Act and are on the Child and Adult Care Food Program because they are low-income.

That doesn't match the overall demographic of the Omaha metro area, but again, children of all demographics will be viewed the same as these low-income students. That spells overspending, waste, and poor quality, with an accent on the revenue stream rather than on meeting young children’s individual needs.

And here's proof of that: when asked what they would do if they were given additional funding, 44% said they would give staff a raise and another 14% said they would hire another adult. Only 3% said they would buy more toys and materials for the children. That’s pretty telling.

Also evidence that the big-government fix is in is that 79% thought it would be "very helpful" to have a nurse come in to do health checks (no mention, however, of who would pay for that, or what would be done with the nurse’s findings), and 81% favored "developmental" screenings twice per year – again, with no mention of whether young children deemed "at risk" of school failure by some kind of pop psychology standards are going to be identified as young as age 3 and put on psychotropic drugs and so forth.

Can you see the "government nannies" taking over parental autonomy? Now, everybody's for good health care for children. The problem comes when the government tries to substitute in the parent role. It only discredits parents even further in their children’s eyes, and makes people of all ages more dependent on the government.

In addition, 60% of the day-care personnel queried said it would be "extremely important" for them to have "help" with "goals" – translation: standardized programming. And 86% favored having a "coach" to "help" with the overall program – translation: a government overseer. That means they are willing to cave in to the standardizations proposed by BBF in exchange for the grant funding.

So that's the status of the push toward universal preschool in Omaha. But it's nothing new. This is going on all around the country. For more on how this is being done – and how it is being opposed in other states – visit www.EdWatch.org and go to the "National Stories" archive to see stories on "universal preschool," "Baby Ed and Early Childhood Ed" and related topics.

What would be a better course of action than what Building Bright Futures is doing?

I would rather see a volunteer corps of experienced mothers and fathers set up to mentor and advise young parents and empower them, and advise child-care providers on an optional basis, alongside the university and government, rather than funding a huge new behemoth of government services to replace what the family has done down through the centuries: care for children.

I was a member of the Junior League of Omaha, a group of professional volunteers, and I could sure see a "Senior League" being set up to pass parenting life skills on to the next generation.

Getting books into children's homes, teaching their parents to talk to them about anything and everything, and read to them 30 minutes a day, would all go a long way toward improving kindergarten readiness and strengthening the family -- and would be not only more effective for kids, but tons and tons cheaper.

Labels: Building Bright Futures, concerns about government displacement of parental autonomy, universal preschool in Nebraska

Posted 10:35 AM by Susan Darst Williams

BEST THING GOING IN NEBRASKA EDUCATION:
CHILDREN'S SCHOLARSHIP FUND DEADLINE APRIL 20

Three cheers for the Children's Scholarship Fund of Omaha, www.csfomaha.org. It grants partial tuition reimbursement to low-income families who want to send their children to private schools in Nebraska but cannot afford the tuition all on their own.

The K-8 scholarships are coming due again on April 20. The application form was printed on Page 2FP of last night's World-Herald. The fund will draw names out by lottery and inform recipients well in advance of the 2009-10 school year.

The fund is wisely structured so that each family has to pay a minimum of $500 of the tuition costs per year, per child, and must cover books and fees above and beyond tuition. That way, the tuition assistance is not a total "freebie" feeding an entitlement attitude, and keeps the parents involved and supportive, with "skin in the game."

For an idea of how liberal the guidelines are, a single parent with one child who makes up to $37,800 a year can qualify, and on up the sliding scale so that a household with six people making $76,680 can get help.

So it's family-friendly, it gives low-income parents the same school choice that high-income parents have, it signals to the children that their educations are important enough for their parents to make this financial sacrifice, and it's a great way for Nebraskans to donate to an educational fund that demonstrably helps needy kids and is very, very much appreciated and invested wisely.

You can write to the Children's Scholarship Fund at P.O. Box 4130, Omaha, NE 68104

Labels: Children's Scholarship Fund Omaha

Posted 4:56 PM by Susan Darst Williams

JOHN STOSSEL BLASTS UNIVERSAL PRESCHOOL;
WHY WOULD NEBRASKA SNARE THE SANDBOX SET
IN THAT HORRENDOUS SPENDING SWAMP?

Here's a good article by commentator John Stossel, exposing the myths behind the left-wing push to provide government preschool for each and every child at taxpayer expense.

You can sure see Nebraska slipping slowly but surely into this new entitlement, with the Susie Buffett set-up grant, and various State Board of Education votes that are edging us toward "standards" for school-based, taxpayer-provided, pre-k programs for all.

It's bad enough that they're driving private-sector preschools out of business. On top of that, the universal preschool end-product is WORSE: the low-income kids that have gone to them (Head Start) don't do any better in school, there's not a shred of evidence that the middle- and high-income kids who WOULD go to them from now on would do any better, either -- more than likely, with the loss of competition, their preschool experiences would be far worse -- AND kids from these sorts of programs have been found to become overly aggressive, anxious, less-healthy "problem children" once they get into full-fledged school.

Ew! Ew! Ewwww! Let's all join the throng calling for the aerial overspraying of Prozac onto all preschools . . . just kidding.

The point is, if enough parents, taxpayers and policy leaders wake up to what a waste of time and money these Soviet-style government nurseries would be, maybe we can hopscotch around this one:

http://townhall.com/columnists/JohnStossel/2009/04/08/the_universal_pre-k_scam

Labels: criticism of universal taxpayer-provided preschool

Posted 9:03 AM by Susan Darst Williams

LEARNING COMMUNITY:
WHAT WERE WE THINKIN'?

Former welfare mom and now nationally-known political commentator Star Parker had a great two-liner that really crystallized what is wrong with the widespread socialization, systematization and standardization of our government schools.

From her website, www.urbancure.org:

Our politicians tell us now that we need to turn the whole country over to them because capitalism has supposedly failed and we need protection from exploitation by the wealthy.
Has anyone noticed that the only markets that have failed in America are the ones distorted with major government controls, regulations, subsidies, or taxpayer guarantees?

See what a dark well we are dropping our kids into, with the new Learning Community bureaucracy, controls, regulations, subsidies and guarantees we are putting in place? What we are doing is copying the Native American schools, which basically operate totally under federal controls and in the absence of parental involvement, for the most part. And what is the graduation rate and the average ACT score in Nebraska's Native American schools?

There's an old multicultural term to describe them: UFF DA!

Everything in my being says we are going to drive even the best of our schools closer to the atrocious performance and waste of the inner-city schools and the Native American schools, rather than improving them.

The only thing that would work is what has always worked in this country: free enterprise.

Labels: governmental control of education, Omaha Learning Community

Posted 12:05 AM by Susan Darst Williams

POINTLESS REPORT CARDS
A SYMPTOM OF OVER-STANDARDIZED SCHOOLS

Sad to see the Omaha Public Schools and all other public districts in the Omaha metropolitan area have caved in to the micromanaging rigidity of standardized report cards. In effect, parents will be getting less useful information from report cards, and an even fuzzier picture of how well or how poorly their child is mastering classroom content compared to the students of yesteryear.

Report cards have entered the Brave New World of standardized schooling. Since school curriculum and assessments have been aligned to the nationally standardized education system, it follows that report cards would have to be standardized, too.

Instead of the familiar A-F grading system, or perhaps alongside it to placate parental fears in the early going of this transformation, the child's progress in school is benchmarked to the three levels of performance that are reported on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP, pronounced "nape"). Those three levels are basic (below grade level), proficient (at grade level) and advanced (better than grade level).

You'll see slightly different wording in different districts, but essentially, they've aligned their report cards to the national standards-based educational paradigm. Some day soon, "the" nationally standardized test will be the NAEP, and the "grading" system will already be in place.

This is yet another sign that our schools are being transformed into "local education agencies" that are more or less local cookie-cutter franchises of a nationalized education system. The one professional privilege of being a teacher -- assigning a grade -- has been taken away, or rendered virtually meaningless. Parents will be duped into thinking their child is really doing outstanding work when the report card actually means that the child can meet the low-level, baseline, minimum standards set by the government.

It's all about the standards . . . and the standards are all about assuring a future workforce that has a certain level of minimum competencies, rather than giving students a strong motivation to be the best they can be in all academic subjects.

Read more about it in this column from my educational advice website:

http://www.showandtellforparents.com/wfdata/frame166-1022/pressrel17.asp

What can parents do? It doesn't seem likely that schools will get rid of standards-based education or bring back A-F grading systems since their funding and political systems are so firmly entrenched in the nationalization process.

So once again, if you want your child to be well-educated the way past generations have been, the answer is to homeschool your child or put him or her in private school if you can . . . and if you can't, then "after-school" your child with tutoring, enrichment experiences, and independent learning with good academic content such as making sure he or she has read the 100s of classic children's books that are no longer included in school curricula these days.

Labels: assessment and grading, NAEP's connection to curriculum, report cards, standardized schooling