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