Posted 3:33 PM by Susan Darst Williams

MORE THAN 1/3 OF NEBRASKA STUDENTS
HAVE 'BELOW BASIC' MATH SKILLS

Care to join the discussion?

http://nebraska.statepaper.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2011/08/29/4e5c115013e78

Oy vey. First order of business is to enroll your child in an after-school math tutoring or enrichment program, STAT. You cannot count on schools to instruct children and youth in math any more. Sigh. Sure, that'll cost you money out of your own pocket on top of high school taxes. But do you want your kid to grow up devoid of mathematical skill and qualified only to be a crash test dummy . . . or a school curriculum director? (Sorry -- that wasn't kind -- but why, oh why, can't these birds SEE why the kids can't read, write or figure any more?!?)

Anyway . . . though this is bad news, maybe it'll be good in the long run. More and more, people are waking up to the fact that when you quit teaching kids the basic skills of reading, 'riting and 'rithmetic, their intellectual and academic progress is going to suffer, bigtime.

Maybe this will be the Tipping Point that will get the Big Shot Powers That Be to finally, finally ash-can Whole Language, Invented Spelling, and Whole Math, and get back to traditional phonics for reading instruction, insisting on correctly-written and spelled papers, and good, old-fashioned, know-it-by-heart math facts.

Sure can hope.

Labels: why Nebraska math scores are so bad

Posted 4:12 PM by Susan Darst Williams

GREAT STRAIGHT TALK
ON TRUANCY LAW

Be sure the read the good column below by a journalist from North Platte.

We can't equate time in school with quality educational results. There just isn't an "input-output" relationship between those two things. Everybody seems to know that except Nebraska's educational policymakers, who recently put in a punitive new law regarding school absences that disregards minor details, like the student's gradepoint average.

Obviously, missing a lot of school hurts kids who don't have home support. But just as obviously, there's a WHOLE lot of learning to be done OUTSIDE of school walls, and if a student has average, good or great grades, then missing a lot of school, quite frankly, has not really been shown to hurt them in any way, and in fact, might make their educational experience even better.

I'm talking about kids who are nationally-ranked horsemanship competitors and have to travel around the country to get enough points to make the Olympics . . . kids whose families go to Africa for a month to build houses and farms for the dirt-poor . . . kids whose parents are on the ball enough to make sure they collect all their homework assignments in advance BEFORE they set off on that once-in-a-lifetime trip to Australia and New Zealand that couldn't be taken during the summer months.

If they were forced to skip those things or face prosecution by the local county attorney, that would be a net loss for education, and a net gain for . . . what? For the education bureaucracy? Now, what sense does THAT make?

Nebraska policymakers are all wet with their new truancy law, which doesn't get to the root of Nebraska's underachieving educational system's problems, but instead punishes normal, healthy families and students who -- imagine! -- are practicing the "lifelong learning" OUT of school that the schools and policymakers so ironically are always pushing.

Here's a good take on why we need to repeal the truancy law:

http://www.nptelegraph.com/articles/2011/08/19/opinion/todays_column/doc4e4de2d6b529f915355331.txt#comment

Labels: Nebraska truancy law, no input-output relationship with school attendance, North Platte telegraph truancy column, truancy law hurts good students

Posted 2:42 PM by Susan Darst Williams

$275,000 Minnesota School Embezzlement
Reveals Taxpayer Exposure to Fraud Risks

This makes taxpayers wince: a school district business manager has been arrested on suspicion of embezzling $275,000 over 11 years from her tiny western Minnesota school district, Chokio-Alberta. Liane Chaassen faces 20 years in prison:

http://www.kfgo.com/regional-news.php?pageNum_rsRegional=2&totalRows_rsRegional=5589&ID=15337

Apparently, she diverted tiny amounts of money frequently to her own bank account, and no one was the wiser over 11 years in that school district.

Sure makes you wonder, with all the countless millions of dollars that are sitting in little-known funds and accounts in school districts all across the nation, and certainly all across Nebraska, whether embezzlement is going on a lot more than we know.

As the embezzlement in the small Minnesota district persisted for 11 years without being caught by other employees or outside audits, this episode points up the dangers of the relative lack of business experience among school-district managers, most of whom were formerly classroom teachers and coaches, not MBA's or accountants.

I've said it before and will say it again: we need school district leadership that can be financially accountable to taxpayers. The best idea is to have school leaders from OUTSIDE of K-12 education -- the business world, the military, other non-school training sources -- if we expect to get the best bang for our bucks.

Labels: financial accountability in schools, Minnesota school embezzlement, need for business-trained school leaders, school embezzlement

Posted 4:55 PM by Susan Darst Williams

GO BIG ED BACK AT IT!

Sorry for the long hiatus. I'll try to post more often.

Was glad to see these key education stats in a World-Herald ad pulled from a blog by Dianne Desler, headmaster of Brownell-Talbot School. These facts sure do back up the position that we MUST improve the quality of the American educational product, and fast:

-- Of 50 students behind in reading in the first grade, 44 will STILL be behind three years later, in fourth grade.

-- An American student drops out of high school every 26 seconds, or 6,000 a day.

-- The U.S. ranked first in the world 30 years ago in the quality of our high school graduates. Today, it is 18th among 23 industrialized nations.

(Blog is http://www.educationmattersblog.com/; stats from the National Center for Education and the Economy, Jossey-Bass)

Labels: Dianne Desler education blog, educational statistics back up crucial need for quality reform

Posted 12:39 PM by Susan Darst Williams

HOW TO RESPOND IF EDUCATORS
BLAME PARENTS FOR THE
MILLARD SOUTH SHOOTING

Bleah. We all agree that the school violence at Millard South High School in west Omaha the other day is atrocious, sad, horrifying and should never have happened.

But I'm suspecting that educators, who lost one of their own in Assistant Principal Vicki Kaspar along with the teenage boy shooter, are going to become defensive as we continue to "debrief" ourselves on this tragedy.

Yes, parents should indeed bear the blame, since we're the ones in charge of our kids. The things they do reflect our choices as well as their own. I don't want to get in to that in this case, since none of us can know the whole truth.

But I do know this:

Schools and educators bear a lot of the blame for this incident, too. And here's how:

-- Schools quit teaching kids how to read and write using tried-and-true, cheap, effective methods about 30 years ago. Kids today, especially lower-income ones, have a very tough time reading and writing at grade level. They are nowhere near good enough at reading comprehension, concentration, vocabulary and all the other subskills needed to understand the Great Books That Build Character. If you can't read, you can't think. If you can't think, you can't control yourself. Therefore . . . they aren't having their characters built in a positive way any more. Self-control and personal responsibility are just not modeled in schoolbooks anymore. It is rare in schools today to have even one student in an English classroom who loves to read, much less is a good enough reader to absorb long books with tough vocabulary about heroes overcoming obstacles and so forth. Instead, the kids read junky teen novels full of sex, violence and crass teen jokes, because the teachers feel it's the only reading material that will keep them "engaged in reading." Right -- like PORNO is OK because it gets people into PHOTOGRAPHY!

-- Schools also expunged references to "right vs. wrong" years ago, when it was decided that Judeo-Christian values, ethics and principles had to be censored from public schools. If a student isn't in outside Christian education with regular Sunday School and youth group attendance -- and few are -- how is the student to learn the Ten Commandments? They are the basis for the American system of government and laws. Why should a student obey a law if he or she has no idea where it came from -- why it was made, thousands of years ago, and still holds true today? Why should a student obey laws if there is, as schools teach, no such thing as "right" and "wrong"? How is the student to learn how impressive is the historical background behind the rule, "Thou shalt not kill" . . . and live by that rule and the other clear, simple rules for living that schools USED to teach?

-- Put that together with the relativism in our schools -- "what's right for YOU isn't necessarily right for ME" . . . plus "values-neutral" stands on abortion, euthanasia and other life-related topics . . . plus the desensitization about human life instilled by violent video games, and you can see the witch's brew that might have led to the Millard South boy's turbulent, confused thoughts.

-- But there's more. The Millard Public Schools were a national pilot for Outcome-Based Education programs, which started in the 1980s and continue today under the name of "standards-based education." That's the national norm for school systems today. Millard educators are experts at it and don't know anything else. Since they have no basis for comparison, they don't seem to realize how OBE is so overly-standardized and programmed that kids who don't feel as though they "fit in" -- like the shooters at Columbine, and apparently the Millard South perpetrator -- often develop exaggerated feelings of "victimhood" because they aren't up to the government "specs" that are the basis for OBE.

-- Note that Columbine High School also was deeply entrenched in Outcome-Based Education, as were several other of the schools -- maybe ALL of the other schools -- where violence has erupted in recent years. That's not a coincidence.

-- The main problem with OBE is that it is based on stimulus-response programmed learning. Educators believe that it is good, but it's very bad. The thought is, we give the kids this content, and then we measure how well they learned it with this assessment. When they reach the standard -- meet the outcome -- we can go on. If the kid learns this one fact or skill, but not these 99 OTHER ones, that's not our problem. We're just bringing the kid up to "specs" on this one thing we're supposed to. See the inhumanity? There's no room for spontaneity, individuality, sidetracking in the area of a student's interest or passion -- it's very mechanized and "professional" -- and extremely dehumanizing, especially to kids who "walk to the beat of a different drummer."

-- And that gets doubly dangerous, because stimulus-response thinkers can only think of ONE response. It comes from computers -- the "1's" and the "0's." Stimulus-response. Stimulus-response. Kids today have little, if any, divergent thinking, which is ironic, with all the talk about "diversity" and "multiculturalism" in our schools today. Balderdash! They're brainwashed! They can only go to the "default" response. If this had happened a generation ago, under traditional educational philosophies, the kid might have (1) chosen to write a letter of apology and persuade the vice principal to let him come back to school, (2) organized a group of students to put on some car washes and dances to help him pay for the damage, (3) asked for counseling to understand why he was feeling so hostile and angry toward his school and why he chose to vandalize the football field in particular (fairly obvious that he was feeling jealous and left out, since the Millard South football team was crowned state champs last fall, but he wasn't part of all of that), or he could have exercised many other options to deal with this problem constructively. But nooooo. All he could think to do was grab a gun and go blow everybody away.

-- Stimulus-response thinkers also are devoid of empathy and values. Of course, educators kicked out any semblance of Judeo-Christian ethics, principles, values and empathy years ago. Into the vacuum moved "values clarification," or "values-neutral" philosophies. Instead of right-from-wrong, kids are taught that "whatever makes SENSE to you, you should do, and no one -- not parents, not teachers, not the law, not police officers, not Sunday School teachers -- can tell YOU what to do." This over-empowerment, combined with a lack of divergent thinking and the suppression of teaching of right-from-wrong, is what is causing kids to erupt in violence, instead of thinking things through for a more empathetic, constructive result.

-- There are tons of other problems with OBE, including the rampant grade inflation, which has destroyed the encouragement and punishment power of grades. It's pretty much Pass/Fail in schools today . . . and that means that both the adults and the students are reduced to comparing each other in terms of minutia. What you're wearing, what you did last weekend, what cool tech toys you have . . . those become the status symbols, not academic achievement. Human beings can't help but constantly evaluate themselves compared to others -- how'm I doing? where do I stand? -- and so in OBE high schools, unfortunately, since academics have paradoxically become meaningless, undue glory is given to the athletes and cheerleaders, and other kids deemed "high-achieving" in a socially-valuable way . . . while the artistic, creative, intellectual and thoughtful kids, especially those who are poor and from broken families, are often made to feel invisible and powerless -- a pain, a flaw, an "aberration" to the "standard." We sure saw that in Columbine, and I think, based on the situation, we might have seen it here, too. And what do they do? They react. And usually, in a very bad way.

There's a lot more to be said, and I hope you'll say it here, as we continue to armchair-quarterback a truly terrible incident, and link arms to do the things most likely to prevent a recurrence. What do YOU think of these ideas, and what do YOU think needs to be added to the discussion?

Labels: Millard South school violence, Millard South shooting, why educators bear as much blame as parents