Posted 11:55 AM by Susan Darst Williams

GLIMPSE INTO THE ULTRA-LEFTIST MIND:
BERTRAND RUSSELL PREDICTED TODAY'S
WAVE OF LEARNING DISABILITIES

The atheistic, radical British philosopher, mathematician and author Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) predicted the creation of a sheep-like public through government policies which have left us with the epidemic of debilitating learning disabilities including autism, ADHD, behavior disorders and others.

Have you ever conceived of the idea that a government might WANT to promote conditions which make people dumber, not smarter? To give them the equivalent of a "chemical lobotomy" so that they will be less able to think deeply and gain wealth independently, and easier to command and control?

With as much as we now know about the mercury content in childhood vaccinations pointing strongly toward the spike in autism, it's pretty hard to refute Russell's preview. See the very end of this enlightening article on the link between mercury in vaccinations, and autism:

http://nationalwriterssyndicate.com/index2.php?option=com_content&do_pdf=1&id=341

Labels: mercury autism chemical lobotomies learning disabilities Bertrand Russell

Posted 2:42 PM by Susan Darst Williams

THREE CHEERS FOR ED ZORINSKY:
MY RECENT RANT ON WWW.STATEPAPER.COM

Come see and please comment:

http://nebraska.statepaper.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2009/03/16/49be72c4b3654

Labels: Ed Zorinsky, government spending cuts

Posted 3:06 PM by Susan Darst Williams

ARE WE JUST THROWING
GOOD MONEY AFTER BAD
WITH ATTEMPTED SCHOOL REFORMS?

This well-thought-out piece from The American Thinker claims that the Obama educational "stimulus" money will be a colossal waste, and other massive school reform efforts are futile. See why:

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/03/how_todays_failed_educational.html

Labels: Obama education spending, parental involvement, school reform

Posted 11:01 AM by Susan Darst Williams

FORMER STATE BOARD OF ED MEMBER
CALLS FOR REJECTING THE USE OF
FEDERAL STIMULUS MONEY FOR EDUCATION

Urgent need to contact state senators today:

Kathy Wilmot of Beaver City, Neb., warns that if the Unicameral decides to use some of the unexpected federal stimulus money for use in its regular state aid to education funding, it'll lead to a tremendous state tax increase in the future when the federal money has dried up.

The former member of the Nebraska State Board of Education agrees with Gov. Heineman that we would be creating new educational entitlements if we use the one-time federal money to pay for ongoing state education costs, and then would have to resort to increasing state taxes in the future to keep those things paid for when the federal stimulus funding has run out.

It's kind of like adding on a room to your house: after the one-time expense, there are ongoing expenses year after year, of heating it and cooling it and furnishing it and cleaning it . . . and the money to pay for those ongoing expenses has to come from somewhere.

She urges citizens to act NOW. Find your state senator's phone number and e-mail address at http://www.unicam.state.ne.us/

Labels: education, Unicameral

Posted 11:44 PM by Susan Darst Williams

Quality Control Idea:
Have Your Child Tested
With a Private School Entrance Exam

A smart thing for parents of children in public schools to do once a year is to visit a competing private school. Just do a little comparison shopping! Look at the schoolwork at your child's grade level, the art work on the walls, the conduct of the teachers and students . . . just get an idea of how your child's public school experience might be stacking up.

But here's an even smarter idea: have your child assessed by the local private school!

Private school entrance exams are being given this time of year. They're usually free, though you probably should pre-register in advance. The entrance exam for Grades 1-6 at Brownell Talbot is at 9 a.m. Saturday, March 21, for example. Parochial schools all are offering pre-admission assessments at about this time of year.

If your child does great, that tells you something. But if your child bombs. . . .

An even smarter, bigger idea would be to offer free assessments city-wide. That would give parents a true idea of where their child stands, and where there might be major gaps in the child's skills, understanding and progress that aren’t reflected under our current overstandardized system.

Since math curricula are ''aligned,'' or closely tailored, to the assessments that the kids are given in our public schools, all the scores tell us is that the student mastered that particular curriculum. But if that particular curriculum is dumbed-down, then the score is basically meaningless. A student who gets an 80% on a really challenging test may actually be doing significantly better than a student who gets a 100% on an easy one.

And that's what’s happening, bigtime. The math stats from standardized tests are really not that reflective of the students' real math knowledge and skills.

Wish we had someone on the ball in this arena the way they do in Spokane, Wash. My friend, education activist Laurie Rogers, and Debbie Knutson, who runs a tutoring business, are offering free math assessments for students in Grades 2-12 on March 21 in Spokane. Each test will take 30-45 minutes.

The assessment will be ''aligned'' with traditional math standards at the various grade levels and rigorous international math standards. These assessments will NOT be dumbed down. But the organizers are predicting that test results may expose the weaknesses of the math curriculum in the public schools, if a lot of kids do poorly who, in contrast, get A's at school.

The March timing is intended to give parents a head's up on how far behind their child may be and in what areas. That way, they can arrange for summertime tutoring – preferably outside of the school system, since its curricular choices are what have most likely hampered the child's progress.

See: www.educationnwresources.com

Labels: free assessments, math curriculum, parental involvement

Posted 9:59 AM by Susan Darst Williams

MILLARD PILOTED OUTCOME-BASED EDUCATION
AND NOW WE'RE ALL PAYING FOR IT

A retired teacher from the Millard Public Schools contacted KFAB this morning to reveal consternation over an administrative order never to give a student a 0, D or F on any assigned project, no matter if the kid did absolutely nothing.

Why not? Because there is no such thing as "failure" with Outcome-Based Education. That's the educational philosophy that is now in place in Millard and all other public school districts in Nebraska and around the nation. When OBE became a controversial term, they renamed it "standards-based education," or "performance-based," but it's the same thing.

You are supposed to let a child who didn't try the first time on a test or assignment come back and try, try, try again, as many times as it takes, to pass a test or complete a paper or build a project or show up at group meetings for school. School has pretty much morphed from a traditional grading system with !-F into a "Pass/Fail" system, where an "A" signifies only that you met the outcome, and a "C" signifies that you met it, but barely, and it took a while.

Now imagine how that translates into the job world. Take a reporter: so you get all the facts wrong on your Page One story, misspell the mayor's name, and cause someone to commit suicide because you got the facts wrong?

Oh, well, that's OK: you can rewrite that story tomorrow, and fix most of your fact errors. And if you leave a few misspelled words in place, oh, well, you tried: it's the "process," not the "product," that matters, right?

Where on Earth did all of this come from?

In the “school restructuring” that took place about 15 years ago in the Clinton Administration (remember Goals 2000, the precursor to No Child Left Behind?), the Millard school system was one of the school districts around the nation to pilot Outcome-Based Education, the “no child shall fail” philosophy. The key change was that teaching reading mainly with phonics was banished, and instead, the Whole Language philosophy was instituted. Result: serious disabilities to kids' literacy, numeracy and thinking skills.

But Whole Language and Outcome-Based Education were such juicy fads, taught in federally-funded teacher inservices like crazy throughout the 1990s, and meant so many more school jobs for the unions, since so many more adults were needed to work in these deformed school systems to try to pick up the pieces that the social engineering created in ill-educated kids, that those destructive philosophies have now spread all over, and we are all seeing the destructive consequences.

I believe, but can't prove, that Westside was one of those districts that piloted the all-day kindergarten and special education "inclusion" components of this massive restructuring process, and the Omaha Public Schools tried out the "English Language Learners" component.

I think Papillion-LaVista tried out the School-to-Work / job training aspects, and the state as a whole was a model for the electronic portfolios that are now rearing their ugly heads around the country.

Other districts around the state and the country tried out other aspects of what I call "school deform" and then they were implemented with federal grants to local and state school systems over the past several years, until the "restructured" educational system that we have now took shape.

With OBE, we changed from a traditional school system with A-F grades to a standardized system in which there’s a pre-set, canned curriculum. It’s pretty much pass or fail – master it, or don’t. That’s why we have 40 “valedictorians” at graduation, since all you have to do to get an A any more is to show up breathing, pretty much, and we have high school graduates who read, write and figure on about a fourth-grade level, but still have those diplomas.

It's considered a better way to prepare kids for the job world, although of course it's foolish since it minimizes academics, individual effort, initiative and most of all, the 3 R's.

I was one of the parents who fought this in the Legislature along with then-State Sen. and later Auditor Kate Witek, but it was steamrollered from Washington, the educators didn’t understand and opposed us, and we lost. At one point, she had to be escorted from a public meeting by security personnel, it got so bad.

When Outcome-Based Education became controversial because of our opposition, they just changed the name to “standards-based education.” But it’s the same thing. Instead of “outcomes,” schools are still forced to teach to the “standards.” That’s what was up with all those “standards” that the State Board of Ed has put in place – all dumbed down and not helpful.

I don’t think our daughters missed a single math problem ‘til they got into high school, it was so easy. Our youngest was an average student at the private Christian school at which we started her, since they taught reading with phonics and no public school in Nebraska does. But now that we’ve moved her into public school, she is far and away the best reader in her class. And that public school is spending about three times as much per pupil as her private Christian school did.

The only hope for smart students is to read a lot of books on their own time, participate in complementary education activities after school and on weekends (see my new website, www.AfterSchoolTreats.com) and kind of home-school themselves as much as they can.

There are also AP and honors classes to look forward to in high school, but it’s a loooooong wait ‘til then.

What’s the answer? School choice with no strings attached – give each child who wants to attend a private school or be homeschooled a voucher for 50% of the state aid and local property tax funding that would otherwise go to the public school. If we did that, we'd encourage some educational entrepreneurship -- I'd be among those who'd open a school if I could have a reliable funding source of, say, $4,000 per pupil per year, and could supplement with grants and fund-raising pretty easily.

Then we’d save taxpayers countless millions of dollars, create some much-needed competition in Nebraska's K-12 educational world, give kids a chance at a better education, give teachers an opportunity to be paid what they're really worth if they can get out from under union seniority rules, and involve parents a lot more in their children’s educations since, like the rich – including President and Mrs. Obama – they’d have a choice in where their children would go to school and would be treated as a customer, not a clueless idiot.

I really don't see a down side to school choice, as long as there are no governmental strings attached that would distort the curriculum or assessment processes unduly. Think of it as like the G.I. Bill. And let's get it going!

Labels: outcome-based education, school choice, why schooling has declined

Posted 10:18 AM by Susan Darst Williams

Another Piece of Evidence
That Scribbling and Doodling
Beat Taxpayer-Provided Preschool

Footnote to the rant I just posted against additional taxpayer-provided pre-k programs:

The first thing I noticed in the picture posted with this article below was the crummy way the person was holding the pencil. See? All wrong. You can't write very well or fast with that pencil grip. And when you can't form letters well or quickly, you can't RECOGNIZE them well or quickly when they appear before you in printed text. Hence: dyslexia . . . dysgraphia . . . attention deficit disorder / hyperactivity. . . .

The second thing I noticed, though, was the scientific proof that what seems to be "aimless" scribbling and doodling is a actually a clear benefit to thinking skills . . . concentration . . . attention . . . learning.

Once again, reality is debunking the notion that taxpayers need to be providing free pre-kindergarten programs for little kids in school. Noooooo, we don't. They'd be much, much better off scribbling and doodling and playing on their own, at home, for the most part, during early childhood.

And I believe the workaholic-style, programmed pre-k is contributing immensely to our problems with kids labeled as having "Attention Deficit Disorder / Hyperactivity."

So we're not only being asked to pay for still more "free" pre-k in our public schools that doesn't work and actually hampers the vast majority of the kids in their academic progress . . . but that taxpayer-provided free pre-k is actually setting up MORE kids to have LEARNING DISABILITIES!!!!!

In these taxpayer-provided "free" pre-k programs and early primary classrooms, kids are NOT being taught good pencil-handling and handwriting skills. They are NOT being encouraged to scribble and doodle when they are itty bitty, since those are so cheap and you don't need a college graduate supervising such "lowly" little-kid activities.

Therefore, by doing stuff that's far more expensive than is needed and actually distorts little kids' early academic experiences, we are wasting tax dollars, dumbing down learning, and socking ourselves with a giant attention problem.

Remember: we humans are multisensory. The non-handwriting, non-phonics crowd that has charge of our public school system is literally handicapping our kids by ignoring that fact.

Take a look:

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1882127,00.html

Labels: multisensory education, school spending, school-based pre-k programs

Posted 9:11 AM by Susan Darst Williams

MILLARD IS FOOLISH
TO EXPAND PRE-KINDERGARTEN PROGRAMS

It's clear that the Millard Public Schools just had a "facilitator" in the house, manipulating a "strategic planning team" into "spontaneously" coming up with the hugely expensive, previously-decided "changes" that the big-spending ed bureaucracy has already said it wants.

Sigh. School management and tax allocation by deception, once again. And in these economic hard times. Is there no shame any more?

There's no other reason to foolishly plow still MORE money into ineffective, unwarranted early-childhood education "programs" that don't work and are, in fact, obviously dumbing down children's literacy skills at an alarming rate.

Millard would be much better off to encourage parents to get their kids scribbling and drawing in preschool, and listening to stories at home and at their child-care situations, than feather-bedding the school-based early childhood bureaucracy.

If you want to set kids up to hit the ground running when they get to the taxpayer-provided K-12 educations that are their birthright, you need to keep them OUT of the school-based early childhood bureaucracy -- and fight its expansion, because it's dumbing our kids down.

Instead, these school-based pre-k programs are job programs for educators, experiments in social engineering, amateur psychiatry, amateur medical diagnosis, and group dynamics, offering all kinds of hands-on play experiences and everything BUT what kids need to be better at reading, writing and arithmetic once they hit real school.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not for academic-style, workaholic, worksheet-driven preschool, either. And I can see that the 3% or so of the preschool population that really is in need of special education services can benefit from some preschool programming, to get them ready.

It's just that the vast majority of the kids do NOT need those preschool services, and the vast majority of children are ALREADY coming into our kindergartens knowing their ABC's, their colors, and their numbers to 10.

We're developing a huge bureaucracy to serve about 3% of the population, even though it acts to dumb down the other 97%, but to justify the expense, we're pretending that it's actually GOOD for kids.

It's clear that hands-on play is great for the preschool set. It's just that, in school settings, they tend to make it "mini-school" -- instead of the unstructured, creative, unpressured, unevaluated, unguided play that it needs to be.

And, from the pre-k programs I've seen, they minimize scribbling and coloring, I guess because those "products" don't look fancy enough for the adults. But the fact is, it's the PROCESS of scribbling and coloring that sets little kids up for good handwriting, with better eye-hand cooordination, fine-motor muscle strength and so forth. But I've yet to meet a school-based pre-k teacher who "gets it" about that. Sheesh! What are they TEACHING in ed schools today?!?

I was part of strategic planning efforts in two public school districts. In the words of an ancient scholar, it's a crock. Strategic planning is a propaganda device designed to get citizens to sign off on new spending that doesn't improve academic outcomes for K-12 students, but just grows the budget.

They were crazy about adding pre-k programs . . . until I asked "why?" Ask them where the evidence is that it makes kids succeed in school, and they gape at you. BECAUSE THERE ISN'T ANY.

In fact, there's evidence to the contrary: that the more out-of-home "programs" small children attend, the WORSE they do academically in school, the WORSE they behave in school, and the WORSE they feel about themselves, on down the road!

You'll note that the 35 people on the Millard committee were "administrators, school board members, teachers, students and Millard-area residents," according to The World-Herald.

Right. Stacked! When I served on a similar committee in another district, early on in the process I asked everyone on that strategic planning team who was NOT making money from district operations to please raise a hand. Mine, and one other person's, were the only hands that went up in the room. Shortly thereafter, I quit, disappointed in the blatant nepotism.

The announcement by Millard that the district intended to add computers, try for a bond issue to add on to various schools, and expand early-childhood programs, was equally disappointing, epsecially in these financial times.

Note that our daughter is regarded as pretty much the best reader in the third grade of her public school right now. Well, guess what? She went to very little preschool -- a couple of mornings a week -- and half-day kindergarten in a Christian school. That's in stark contrast to a taxpayer-provided, in-school pre-k program with college graduates "teaching" her, and full-day kindergarten such as all the public schools think they need to have.

She also attended that school for a full day in first grade, until we were sure that she was reading well. In contrast to all the public schools we could find in the Omaha metropolitan area, that private school was smart enough to teach reading with phonics, and took time to show the kiddies how to hold their pencils correctly, how to form their letters right, and other basic skills of a decent primary education.

So she gets to the public school, where they spend well over twice as much per pupil per year, and the kids have had another half-year of school with that full-day kindergarten and many of them had taxpayer-provided preschool, too . . . and yet, mysteriously, few of her classmates in third grade are even close to her reading, writing and spelling skills.

Also, from what I've observed, many of them aren't even holding their pencils right and have funky-looking handwriting that produces text at a significantly slower rate than Maddy can write.

Sure, I know, these kids will be composing on a typewriter and not on paper. But it's still a disaster. Because they didn't learn handwriting correctly and they can't get their thoughts down on paper very fast, now that their brain plasticity is slowing down as they near age 10, their word attack skills are less, their vocabularies are smaller, their grasp of the spelling rules is less, and they are doomed to compose text at a far slower rate than a child who was taught to read and write with phonics.

Their brains literally are "stuck" at a pre-literate spot . . . and all of this happened at taxpayer expense . . . and Millard wants to throw even more money at taking our kids down in that awful direction!

What's to be done about this? Talk to teachers, administrators, school-board members, state senators, and every taxpayer you can find. Surely, once people "get it" about the damage that more spending and more pre-k in schools will do, the "strategic plan" will gain better strategy . . . and start giving kids the simple, inexpensive academic skills that they need.

Labels: Millard Public Schools, school spending, school-based pre-k programs