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