GoBigEd

2012-01-25T09:10:00.000-06:00

DO THEY NEED SCHOOLING,
OR WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT?

Major dislike of LB 1144, introduced by State Sen. Brad Ashford of Omaha. It would create "career academy schools" to train students in vocational trades instead of delivering a full, liberal-arts high school education to each student. This dislike is not just because voc ed is tremendously expensive, and increased school spending is the last thing we need in this day and age. There are many more reasons this is a bad idea.

The idea has been around in the U.S. since at least the School-to-Work Opportunities Act of 1994. It was promulgated along with that terrible, horrible, no good, very bad Goals 2000 law. These two concepts dangled federal start-up grants to lock school districts into a destructive and expensive concept of denying some of their student populations a full education in exchange for training them for a blue-collar job after high school.

School-to-Work and "career academies" are a sad repeat of the huge mistakes made in the former Soviet Union, Germany and Japan. For decades, kids there were "sorted" at an early age -- dumb, smart, dumb, dumb, smart -- and directed to either be Smurfs -- given only workforce training -- or, for a small number who really are smart, and/or whose parents are Politically Correct, tracked for a real education so that they can become elites.

The Smurfs would get only rudimentary reading, writing, history, science and math preparation, less than half of the curriculum the rest of the students would be getting. Employers would get really cheap labor for the half-days these dumbed-down kids would spend in the workforce, doing apprenticeships for very low wages.

What about American equal opportunity? This concept would destroy that.

Now, I'm for tech ed as much as anybody. Of COURSE there's a certain percentage of students who would flourish in a technical career and not so much in college. Of COURSE we have to be realistic, that not all kids are academically strong, and we need to do everything we can to keep them from dropping out.

But this isn't the answer. Improving our schooling, all the way back to the early grades, where the academic deficiencies begin, is the answer.

The biggest hazard is a civil rights issue: there's a basic right to choose your own future, and work toward it, in this country. If millions of dollars are spent preparing career academies, you'd better BELIEVE they would find youth to fill those slots.

Just GUESS what the numbers would be in inner-city Omaha, for the percentage of students who would be sorted into the career academies vs. those who would be "sorted" into a traditional liberal-arts track that can lead to the executive suite, medical school, law school and so forth.

Regardless of their potential, talents or interests, the vast majority of the students in low-income areas would be tracked into the career academies.

This idea patronizes them and their parents, selling these kids' futures short -- "well, at least they can get a JOB after graduation" -- instead of delivering a quality, well-rounded, in-depth education that would leave their options open. Those options do, indeed, include a career in the vocations -- but it should be the employers, not the schools, doing the technical training and bearing the high cost -- and technical job training should never, ever replace bona fide education.

What's happening now is that technical employers are having to re-educate their new hires in the 3 R's -- reading, writing and arithmetic -- before they are even ready to be trained in their technical skill. Kids are coming out of schools as it is, unemployable because of a lack of academic skills. So if we cut their time in school in HALF, what do you suppose would be the result?

I don't relish the thought of driving over bridges built by people who only got half a high school education. Yikes!

If schools remained schools, and workplaces remained workplaces, we'd all be better off.

Schools are for turning out well-prepared, well-rounded citizens first, and future employees second. Right? Right!

It would short-change high-potential kids trapped in inner-city schools, building class envy and resentment to a fever pitch.

Career development and "sorting" begins as early as kindergarten, and the kids are put under enormous pressure to do well on standardized tests so that they don't wind up in the Smurf pigeonhole and cut their school days in half, with greatly dumbed-down curriculum, so that they can work at apprenticeships for pittance wages all afternoon.

Hmm. Harping on careers. Big pressure for state assessments. Who needs geometry, chemistry and Shakespeare if you're "only" going to work in construction, auto shop, health-care product assembly, or food prep?

Sound at all familiar with what's happening in our schools today?

Look what happened to those economies that went to the workforce development model. Look at the payroll taxes, particularly in Germany, as the cost of this workforce training is passed on to consumers by the businesses in the form of higher prices, instead of directly to taxpayers, to hide the financial boondoggle, and educational short-changing?

What a terrible idea in the Information Age, to lock kids out of dreams like owning their own businesses or being doctors, just because the government has provided these expensive voc tech academies, and SOMEBODY has to be enrolled in the programs using all that equipment.

Sigh. Here's hoping financial realities will kill this bill.

2012-01-24T19:41:00.000-06:00

TAXPAYERS NEED TO SAY "NAYYYYY!"
TO FRILLS, AND END COLLECTIVE BARGAINING

Here's a good article on the immense savings that could be had if we ended collective bargaining with teachers' unions, paid teachers as the professionals they are, and lived happily and more cost-effectively ever after:

http://goldwaterinstitute.org/article/save-taxpayers-tens-billions-dollars-end-government-sector-collective-bargaining

Ironically, this was in the news the same day as the announcement that the Millard Public Schools will now allow MINIATURE HORSES in schools as "service animals" for special ed kids. Meanwhile, there are tons of things that school officials say they "can't afford" that those of us who are for serious academics count as necessities, not frills.

Long past time to say "NAYYY!" to school overspending, and ending collective bargaining would be a great first step.

2012-01-24T09:28:00.000-06:00

PARENTS 'FIRE' THEIR INEFFECTIVE PUBLIC SCHOOL?
NEAT IDEA -- BUT GO PRIVATE, DON'T STAY ENTANGLED

Warning to those who are interested in the "parent revolution" going on here and there, including at longtime failed schools in California:

http://parentrevolution.org/

Parents in failed public schools in disadvantaged areas are forming unions, obtaining the right to restructure their public school as a charter school, hire their own "directors" (instead of principals) and operate on tax money supposedly under their own administration, curriculum selections and philosophies of education.

Whoa! Watch out! That's what President Obama did back in his community organizing days in Chicago. And it was a total waste of time. After power and control was wrestled out of educators' hands, and given to parents, they reformed the schools in charter schools. Taxpayers still paid the freight, but the say-so shifted to the parents -- most of whom weren't even high school graduates and had very low academic skills themselves.

You can't teach what you don't know.

Inevitably, the bill for schooling went up . . . but student achievement stayed the same, over many years. So they went back to the way things were. Everybody lost!

Much better outcomes can be obtained by detaching from an educational system that has failed your child, and enroll that child in a private school run by bona fide educators. That's why we all should fight for more tax breaks to induce people to donate money to tuition assistance funds to help poor kids get into the private schools that equip them much better for success.

2012-01-19T09:32:00.000-06:00

NORTH OMAHA NEEDS A CHRISTIAN SCHOOL:
C'MON, PEOPLE, LET'S DOOOOOO THISSSSSS!!!!!

Look at the convergence of these three things:

1. The Catholic archdiocese can't afford to keep subsidizing tuition for so many needy kids in inner-city Omaha and has announced a process which will probably result in closing six schools. That will dump hundreds of kids into the Omaha Public Schools system which is already overloaded and ineffective.

2. Nebraskans for School Choice and others are pushing hard this legislative session for L.B. 50, which would give state tax credits to qualifying businesses and individuals for donating money to tuition assistance funds -- a much-needed income stream for private schools here.

3. We have all these nice, big, fairly wealthy churches in west Omaha, and many of them are doing a ton of mission work . . . but how about joining forces to open a really great Christian preschool and grade school in North Omaha? Charity begins at home! Plus, there are beaucoup excellent retired teachers in every congregation who could work part-time or even volunteer in this group effort, and show how great the results can be from Christian education. The churches could provide start-up funding and then ongoing tuition assistance could be had if L.B. 50 were passed.

People? LET'S DOOOOOO THISSSSSSS!!!!!!!! :>)

2012-01-19T09:25:00.000-06:00

TEST SCORES SHOW CHARTER SCHOOLS
BEAT THE PANTS OFF PUBLIC SCHOOLS
FOR HARD-TO-TEACH STUDENT POPULATIONS

Why in the Sam Hill doesn't Nebraska have enabling legislation to set up charter schools? They give disadvantaged kids a much better shot than public schools do, a mountain of evidence reveals:

http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/01/confirmed_charter_schools_beat_the_daylights_out_of_public_schools.html

2012-01-19T09:13:00.000-06:00

SCHOOL CHOICE PROPONENTS
URGE INCENTIVES FOR TUITION ASSISTANCE SCHOLARSHIPS

Next week is School Choice Week! Woo hoo! Here's an on-point newsletter from Nebraskans For School Choice. Click the link in the lower right-hand corner:

http://www.nebraskansforschoolchoice.org/

The best thing for Nebraska education would be to start loosening up the death grip of the government and union monopoly, and inspire some innovation and competition from the private sector.

The best way to do that is to get some incentives and inducements in place to get some much-needed capital into the in-baskets of the private school community.

And the best way to do THAT is to pass a tuition assistance scholarship law in the Nebraska Unicameral. That would spur individuals, foundations and nonprofits to donate money to offset tuition for low-income students to attend private schools.

Nebraskans For School Choice has a new newsletter out that has the key state senators' contact information, and a fervent plea for you to push for this much-needed change in our ed landscape.

2012-01-11T11:04:00.000-06:00

'POLICE STATE' SCHOOLS?
CHECK THIS OUT

http://americanvisionnews.com/1143/public-school-police-state-thousands-of-children-arrested-fined-for-minor-disturbances

2012-01-11T08:37:00.000-06:00

TRUANCY LAW TWEAKS
MIGHT EASE PARENTAL TENSIONS

Good to see that two state senators have proposed minor changes in Nebraska's irksome new truancy law in the early days of this legislative session:

http://www.omaha.com/article/20120111/NEWS01/701119876

That's a hopeful sign that a resolution to the truancy problem may be possible. The parents' group opposing the criminalization of truancy has expressed a mixture of encouragement that their voices are being heard, but dismay over the continuation of what they see as the erosion of parental sovereignty over children. They decry the substitution of the criminal justice system over parents as the authority figure in school attendance matters.

Now, truancy is a "status offense." A "status offense" is something that a minor child might do that wouldn't be a crime if that person were an adult. It should be noted that a status offense such as truancy previously hasn't been handled in the court system per se, involving the county prosecutor with real-world consequences. Previously, school attendance problems have been handled at the local school level, allowing educators to use their best judgment as to how to solve the problem, and when needed, they have gotten the juvenile court system involved.

It's true that truancy -- the deliberate, anti-social form -- is associated with other status offenses, such as smoking cigarettes and drinking alcohol out of the supervision of both parents and educators, and even crimes, including theft and vandalism. But not all "truancy" is like that. So prosecuting families whose kids are dealing with chronic illnesses and miss school days, or who go on trips, or obtain special, out-of-school educational experiences -- BUT MAINTAIN PASSING GRADES or in some cases, the best grades in the school -- is a waste of time, and drives a big wedge in the already-shrunken level of trust between home and school.

The stiffened-up attendance regulations are likely to drive successful, high-achieving students to private schools so that they can participate in the complementary educational experiences that are so important. For example, a few years ago, a national champion equestrienne who needed to compete in other states to gain points toward her goal was forced to leave the public school in Elkhorn to go to Skutt High School.

Why? Because she was going to miss about 20 days of school over the course of a year, and Skutt has more flexible attendance rules, which are based on the educators' judgment of the credibility of the excused absences, not an inflexible state law.

This young woman was an A student, and continued to be an A student, as well as being highly involved in extracurricular activities at Skutt and a cheerleader. She handled the many days of absences very well, because she and her parents made sure she stayed caught up and maintained good communication with her teachers.

The students she left behind at the public high school missed out on a great classmate. Now, how would it have been to have had that girl PROSECUTED for "truancy" violations, with an A average?!?

It is hoped that the parents' group will continue to inform the public, and that the tweaks in the truancy law can be amended to everybody's satisfaction.

2012-01-11T08:17:00.002-06:00

SCHEER, QUANDAHL
TO LEAD STATE ED BOARD

Norfolk businessman and former city mayor Jim Scheer has been reelected president of the Nebraska State Board of Education.

Omaha attorney and former state senator Mark Quandahl is vice president for 2012.

2012-01-09T09:48:00.000-06:00

HAPPY TO SEE POLICYMAKERS
THINKING SMART ABOUT CIVICS

Did you see this good story in The World-Herald on Sunday? Nice, balanced account of how the lefties want social studies class to focus on the warts in our society (racism, sexism, upism, downism), while the righties want the kiddies to be taught a little about the warts, but to mostly study the documentation of American exceptionalism:

http://www.omaha.com/article/20120108/NEWS01/701089897

Hopefully, we'll get good social studies standards. But there's a risk with all this standardization of education: this year, the standards might include the Federalist papers, the Constitution and all that good stuff that most citizens want the kids to learn. But in 10 years, or 20, there may be a complete shift in political thought, and the educrats might be able to expunge all that good stuff out of the standards, and put their pro-Whatever stuff in, heavy on the racism, sexism, upism, downism, and light on the stuff that made America's system so great.

To prevent that, it's really important to make the point, over and over and over, that kids really need the foundation of any discipline -- including civics -- before they can handle thinking about the warts that developed on the corpus. Learn the basics before you learn the problems. In med school, you don't start by studying the odd diseases that can occur -- you start by studying the human body. After you "get" the biology, you can "get" what can go wrong.

Hope that's how it plays out in the important arena of social studies, and creating citizens who will preserve, protect and defend our nation's future because they understand where it came from and how it works.

2012-01-05T22:46:00.000-06:00

GOOD HISTORY OF PARENTS RIGHTS
SUGGESTS PARENTAL POWER IS ON THE RISE

Here's a well-written synopsis from the Family Research Council of parents' rights and schooling in the United States.

It points out what an anachronism it is, in this day and age, to have something as important as education being tightly run as a government monopoly.

Three cheers for the parents and taxpayers who are waking up to the fact that choice and competition in education, as in everything else, is best:

http://downloads.frc.org/EF/EF11B46.pdf

2012-01-05T22:39:00.000-06:00

SINGLE MOMS ARE THE TARGET
OF MORE SCHOOL NOSINESS

This chart is a sad commentary on something that, unfortunately, is easily observed in many public schools today. Single parents -- chiefly single mothers -- are more likely than married parents to have their kids get in trouble for behavior problems in school, and they and their children come under scrutiny and even attack by educators more often than traditional households.

This is from the Family Research Council:

http://www.frc.org/mappingamerica/mapping-america-53-parents-contacted-by-school-about-their-childrens-behavior-problems-and-family-structure

As we work through the current Nebraska truancy law issue, it's important to keep this in mind. Let's make sure that we aren't using a bureaucratic, micromanaging rule as a club against single moms, who need all the support they can get to keep on doing the best they can for their kids.

2012-01-05T17:03:00.000-06:00

THIS LEGAL GROUP IS LEGIT
IN FIGHTING FOR PARENTS RIGHTS

Hope any Nebraska mom or dad worried about the schools fiddling with their kids' hearts and minds improperly with anti-parent policies or actions, including the truancy issue, will make use of these good articles from the Rutherford Institute, particularly the bottom two under "Commentary":

https://www.rutherford.org/issues/parents_rights/

The Rutherford group is a civil liberties legal defense and public education organization. It has an excellent track record representing plaintiffs in cases in which units of government, including schools, have violated basic constitutional rights.

Keep 'em in mind as this Legislative session goes on. They know what they're doing. Friends are . . . our friends!

2012-01-04T22:28:00.000-06:00

SEN. LUCKENBACH . . . UH, I MEAN, LAUTENBAUGH
MIGHT BE ON TO SOMETHING FOR OPS;
BEST URBAN DISTRICTS HAVE 5, 7 or 9 BOARD MEMBERS, NOT 12

I keep humming that song about "Luckenbach, Texas, with Willie and Waylon and the boys" every time I think about the proposal by Omaha State Sen. Scott Luckenbach . . . darn, there I go again . . . LAUTENBAUGH to reduce the size of the board of the Omaha Public Schools.

There are 12 people on it now. They are unpaid. Some have been on the board for many terms. Most of them are devoid of business experience. They are mired in groupthink and rarely, if ever, vote against what the OPS management wants. It's a pretty sad, strange situation.

But some people are grousing about Lautenbaugh's proposal in the Unicam to reduce the number from 12 to 5, and to pay each person $20,000 in order to get more people with business experience. Under his proposal, board members would be limited to two 4-year terms, which might reduce the groupthink, and reduce the power of the superintendent over the board representatives, since they won't be serving for long.

I was wondering what to think about this, recognizing that the Omaha City Council and the Douglas County Board each has seven members, as does the state's second-largest school district, the Lincoln Public Schools. OPPD and MUD have eight members each. But a lot of very well-run big businesses in the Omaha area have 11 or more directors, including the Union Pacific, ConAgra and Berkshire Hathaway.

So I was leaning toward liking Luckenbach . . . I mean, LAUTENBAUGH's . . . idea, only upping it to seven board members instead of five. Even at that, a lot of pro-OPS people will squawk. They want to keep the status quo, I guess.

But here comes the smoking gun that backs up Lautenbaugh -- there, I got it right the first time -- and establishes that the most successful urban school districts in the nation have a school board of five, seven or nine members. And here's the proof:

http://www.researchonreforms.org/html/commentary/researchpapers/Governance%20Best%20Practices%20of%20Successful%20Urban%20School%20Districts.pdf

So if the unsuccessful scores OPS is havin' has got us feudin' like the Hatfields and McCoys . . . maybe it's time we got back to the basics (not of love, but of sound school governance) -- and pass that smart proposal in the Unicam 'fore we got blue eyes cryin' in the rain. . . . :>)

2012-01-04T11:21:00.000-06:00

THE LATE, GREAT SEN. ED ZORINSKY
FIGURES IN A PROPHETIC EDUCATION BOOK
THAT ALSO PREDICTED CHANGES LIKE
NEBRASKA'S NEW TRUANCY LAW

Speaking of education books that mention Nebraskans, you really need to read Education for the New World Order by B.K. "Bev" Eakman, someone I've met and like:

http://www.amazon.com/Educating-New-World-Order-Eakman/dp/0894202782/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1325695471&sr=1-1

That book came out in 1991, a few years after the late Nebraska Sen. Ed Zorinsky's sudden heart attack and death after a performance in the annual Omaha Press Club show. I always was mildly suspicious of that death, since the former Omaha mayor was so vibrant and able to handle stress so well.

But I digress:

The book mentions Zorinsky several times because the Nebraska senator had caught on to the dumbing down of books in school and had testified before a joint hearing of House and Senate education subcommittees. He understood how the education system's Whole Language "innovation" -- teaching reading by NOT teaching reading -- was actually CAUSING illiteracy in children.

Zorinsky was beginning to speak out against the ever-expanding reading remediation and special education systems that were sucking up more and more tax dollars to no avail, since they weren't making kids more literate any more than the regular classroom was. In fact, what was going on was educational malpractice -- the schools mistaught reading and created disability in students, who then needed to go to these expensive, and ineffective remedial and special ed programs, at higher and higher costs to the taxpayer and lower and lower results for each child's learning curve.

Zorinsky tried to start a commission to investigate teacher education, since no teachers knew how to teach reading with phonics, the obviously best method. But Zorinsky was so strongly opposed by the education cartel that his attempt was dead in the water.

According to the book, the senator was hearing a lot of complaints about poor reading instruction from his constituents, and saw parallels all around the country. In April 1985, he began introducing legislation about illiteracy, including starting a national commission to figure out why illiteracy and reading disability were growing so fast. He got 30 co-sponsors, so it should have been a breeze to pass. But again, his fellow politicians, who received huge campaign contributions from the education cartel, fought him off.

Zorinsky testified at a hearing on Oct. 1, 1985, that top reading professionals in the U.S. all agreed that teaching phonics to young children was the key to reading, but that most schools didn't teach with phonics because almost no teachers' colleges taught future teachers how to teach reading with phonics-ONLY methods.

At another hearing, on March 20, 1986, organized in large part by Zorinsky, a New Hampshire school superintendent from one of the poorest school districts in the country testified that when his district switched from Whole Language reading methods to phonics, the per-pupil cost for reading supplies dropped from $16 a year to $2.25. Meanwhile, the reading scores in that district "dramatically increased" and were consistently above state and national averages.

Numerous other witnesses presented proof of the superiority of phonics. Still, nothing was done because the other members of Congress blocked it.

In 1986, a year before he died, Zorinsky did get an amendment passed which directed the U.S. Department of Education to compile a list of beginning reading instruction programs and methods, including the average cost per pupil, and whether or not these programs aligned with the recommendations in a 1985 federal report, Becoming a Nation of Readers. Reportedly, this list has never been published.

You really have to get this book, and read about the valiant, five-year battle by Nebraska's senator.

Even more important would be to read Chapter 20, which details how Nebraska was pretty much tricked into participating into what would become the national assessment that is effectively nationalizing our schools -- the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP.

A Nebraska state senator, his aide, and apparently some other Nebraskans, insisted on seeing a copy of the test questions before allowing the NAEP to be given to schoolchildren in the Cornhusker State. They finally saw that the questions did not, indeed, measure reading comprehension, but were weird, trick questions designed to expose the child's values, attitudes and beliefs.

The chapter also shows that the Buros Institute for Mental Measurement at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln apparently figured in the creation of the nation's data trafficking system for collecting and storing privacy-invading information on children and their families in the guise of reporting "school data" on each child. The system was called ESIDS -- the Elementary and Secondary Integrated Data System.

Don't know if it's still called that, but know it exists, know that Nebraska has Red Chinese-style electronic portfolios on each student, know that government agencies and perhaps even multinational corporations can data-mine in that system, and know that UNL had a big role in the development of this gigantic, federally-funded data-mining proposition.

The book alleges that the assessments would first be "soft-sold" to Nebraskans as achievement testing until everybody was used to the idea of statewide assessments, the system was in place, and the individuals who would squawk at this wide-scale privacy invasion would come forward so that their opposition could be neutralized, usually by mild or overt threats to the people's own children and their academic fortunes.

Then the questions would morph over to those that would disclose each student's (and thus each family's) attitudes, values and beliefs.

Do you see this same step-by-step system in place with Nebraska's new truancy law?

EW! EW! EWWW!!! But get this book, and see what you think.

2012-01-04T10:42:00.000-06:00

THAT'S HOW THE REVOLVING DOOR WORKS IN THE EDUCATION RACKET

Postscript to the story about Project INSTRUCT installing "mastery learning" in Nebraska in the 1970s, according to p. 204 of The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America by Charlotte Iserbyt:

The then-assistant superintendent for instruction for the Nebraska Department of Education, Ronald Brandt, raved about the program. It is very possible the state department assisted the Lincoln Public Schools in obtaining the big federal grant, and approving and organizing the mastery learning system -- no doubt using the rural schools around Lincoln as guinea pigs.

Anyway, no surprise here, if you watch educrats for long: Brandt went on to become the ececutive editor of Educational Leadership, the publication of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD).

They call that "the revolving door." The educrats all like to "innovate" on the local or state level with a new "program" and then use it to catch a higher-paying, higher-status, national job. But meanwhile, back at the ranch, the "innovation" makes education worse, not better, for kids. Into the fray comes ANOTHER educrat who installs ANOTHER bogus "innovation" and ALSO uses that prestige to land a cushy bigger job -- while nobody realizes the new program doesn't work, either.

See who's left holding the bag?

The ASCD is one of the most influential education organizations in the world. Everybody who's anybody gets its publication. Through that pulpit, Brandt helped promote outcome-based education (today's "standards-based education" -- they changed the name when everybody hated it, but didn't change what it does) and its gurus. All of them were quoted reverently in Nebraska, and many came here to speak and lead workshops with Nebraska educators, no doubt referred by Brandt, throughout the 1990s as outcome-based education (OBE) became entrenched here.

So former Nebraskan Brandt was a key player in morphing our school systems into becoming government nannies instead of institutions of education.

WAH, WAH, WAH.

But do not despair. We can change this. Living well (with traditional schools free of OBE) is the best revenge.

2012-01-03T13:56:00.000-06:00

IDEA FOR THE FIVE WORST GRADE SCHOOLS IN OPS:
A PARENTS' REVOLT, EMPOWERED BY THE UNICAM!

Love a California state law that gives control to parents when 51% of them vote that their lousy schools aren't cutting the mustard any more. Then the parents can work together to get the reforms they need. Or they can set up a charter school, or do whatever they think will work to turn things around.

An easy way to do this in the Omaha Public Schools would be for parents, nonprofits, churches and other concerned citizens of the five worst grade schools in OPS to join this national group:

http://parentrevolution.org/content/chapter-organizing-efforts

. . . and then lobby the Nebraska Legislature for enabling legislation to allow for a parent takeover of schools at the bottom of the heap. Let's define it as, say, math and reading test scores in the bottom 20% of the state. Then, following a due-process election and under health and safety constraints, of course, funding for kids who want to switch to the new school setting would follow them wherever they want to go.

The five worst grade schools in OPS are clustered in North Omaha. They could work together to make meaningful economies of scale.

Since Nebraska doesn't have charter school enabling legislation, then our new law could redirect the property tax and state aid for all students who elect this new schooling plan to fund a newly-formed private school, a lawfully-formed parent cooperative school, a multi-family attendance center homeschool, or perhaps to the Catholic archdiocesan schools under contract.

If OPS really is spending $12,000 per pupil per year, as reported, then woo hoo! A solid private grade-school education can be had in Omaha for less than half of that per pupil, counting transportation to and from. It could work!

Of COURSE it wouldn't make sense for MOST schools in Nebraska . . . but for all those of us who can't wait a single more minute to improve things for the kids who need good schooling the most, LET'S DO THIS!!!

2012-01-03T13:03:00.000-06:00

TRUANCY LAW A NEW FORM OF MEDDLING?
AIN'T THAT NEW, SPORTS FANS

Beware of this book, if you want to understand what is going on in K-12 education. Then again, it's a fascinating read:

http://www.deliberatedumbingdown.com/MomsPDFs/DDDoA.sml.pdf

It has 462 pages plus that will blow your mind. Ironically, I found something that explains the basis for Nebraska's truancy law while I was looking up background information in this book on the Hatch Amendment,which is supposed to protect pupil and parental privacy in schools and uphold the parents as the No. 1 arbiters of what happens to kids in school.

What does the Hatch Amendment have to do with truancy? I think Nebraska's new truancy law violates it, bigtime. But while researching, I lit on this startling connection, starting on p. 202 of the eBook (it's 203 in the printed book):

A farmer testified in 1984 before the U.S. Department of Education's Region VII hearing on the Hatch Amendment, protecting pupils' and parents' rights in school. His little girl was in a rural school somewhere near the Lincoln (Neb.) Public Schools. LPS had a federal contract for $710,000, approved by the U.S. Ed Department in 1975, to introduce Project INSTRUCT to area public schools, including this farmer's little girl's school.

So that was 36 years ago. Keep that in mind.

Project INSTRUCT was one of a few "models" for outcome-based education -- code-named "mastery learning" -- now code-named "standards-based education" -- around the country. You know all the learning standards and assessments to measure how well the kids have mastered them? This is where all of that comes from. That's the system that almost all of our schools are operating under today, because of the federal money that comes with compliance.

But this farmer, Stephen Broady, said that his daughter suffered "emotional change" as a result of what he called "psychological manipulation" and "behavior modification" that undergirded Project INSTRUCT. He called it "a deliberate attempt to make children conform to an artificial environment which is more suited to the thinking of the school than to the needs of the children."

Whoa! Ignoring the needs of the children to force compliance with senseless governmental rules! Does that sound like the impact of Nebraska's micromanaging truancy law, which is hurting good students with good grades from good families and who don't NEED scary, criminalized government intervention in their studies . . . or what?

Broady proceeded to obtain the Project INSTRUCT evaluation report from the LPS superintendent's office. He found out that the same behavior modification techniques were to be used on anybody else who came in contact with that school, besides just students. That meant parents, the media, all administrators and teachers, paraprofessionals, volunteers, and even prospective employees.

So educators were being told to allow no behavior that didn't synch with the highly-structured behaviors that were part of Project INSTRUCT . . . even from the students' PARENTS?!? Compliance and conformity first, in other words. They trump everybody else's rights and needs.

The idea was that the quality of the education would increase if the Project INSTRUCT methods were consistent. Ironically, according to test scores, reading achievement went DOWN, and stayed DOWN.

But across Nebraska and the whole country, everybody's still using those methods! And learning capacity and progress are both still DOWN compared to the quality that we had in the 1970s . . . before school started becoming a prison and educators were forced to become wardens.

Same book reports on p. 198 that mastery learning was piloted in Omaha from 1969 to 1971. I think that was in the Millard Public Schools, though it doesn't say so in this book.

So when you are struggling to understand why Nebraska lawmakers cling to the truancy law despite the fact that threats and government programs don't help kids learn better, and illegally violate personal privacy rights of students and parents to boot . . . take heart in knowing that at least this kind of stuff has been around for over 35 years. Might take that long to get rid of it again, but at least it isn't some big, new monster that came out of nowhere.

2012-01-02T22:17:00.000-06:00

LINK BETWEEN HIGH-ACHIEVING STUDENTS
AND HIGH ATTENDANCE AT PARENT-TEACHER CONFERENCES,
THE THE OPPOSITE OF THE ABOVE:
NO KIDDING?!?!?!

Duh, duh, duhhhhh. Parents who distrust public schools and don't think they are able to help their children overcome poverty and illiteracy don't attend parent-teacher conferences anywhere near as often as middle- and high-income parents. Parents of kids who are doing well or at least OK in school come to the conferences full of hope that their kiddies will not only make it into college, but excel there. It's a lot easier to vote with your feet when you're feeling positive about school.

Here's a long, scholarly article about it, though this stuff isn't rocket science:

http://www.nova.edu/ssss/QR/QR5-3/mcdermott.html

The World-Herald published a good chart today that showed the direct link between parent-teacher conference attendance and school poverty characteristics. The schools in the 'burbs had statewide reading assessment scores exceeding 85%, conference attendance rates of 80% or better., and relatively low rates of poverty.

Meanwhile, the inner-city basket case schools have much higher poverty rates, only 30 percent or so of their kids reading at grade level, and dismal conference attendance rates by inner-city parents of 12.5% to 15.6%.

Everybody's wringing their hands about those "deadbeat" inner-city parents, since we all know that parental involvement is a huge correlate to student success. But it's no surprise why they don't show up.

How come schools don't "get it," that people don't like to come to a place where they're going to get scolded and feel emotionally beat up -- to hear year after year that their kid isn't cutting the mustard -- to see their child's best hope for a future smashed into the ground because the schools have failed to teach the kid to read well enough to do well in school?

When school does its basic mission -- teach kids to read, write and figure -- then parents will show up.

When will schools learn that the best way to get conference attendance up over 80% is to scrap that lousy Whole Language reading junk, and teach kids to read and write with intensive, explicit, systematic phonics?

Remember, close to 100% of the kids in a phonics-ONLY kindergarten classroom -- even a half-day program -- at all income levels, even in the poorest neighborhoods -- are reading by Christmas of the kindergarten year. Phonics is far, far cheaper, takes only about 20 minutes a day, and it's a real head-banger why OPS didn't go for it many, many years ago.

Maybe NOW . . . just to get those conference attendance rates up? Stranger things have happened.

2012-01-02T22:01:00.000-06:00

SPEAKING OF GOOD PULSE LETTERS:
LET'S HYPER-FOCUS ON PRE-K -- GRADE 3

Longtime Omaha politician Dick Galusha had a great Public Pulse letter in The World-Herald today. Although his politics are left-leaning, his stance on education's needed focus is great. Galusha says that we need to keep a tight focus on the effectiveness of what we're doing with students when they are ages 4-8, the primeau reading years. Couldn't agree more:

http://www.omaha.com/article/20120102/NEWS0802/701029985

Suppose we differ in "how" that should come about, though. I say that the more we've invested in taxpayer-provided, government Head Start, school-based preschool, and all-day kindergarten, the worse and worse things have gotten in OPS.

The very best thing that could happen in Omaha would be for every church to "adopt" a neighborhood and either provide on site, or help fund, quality preschool and private half-day kindergarten programming from the private sector. THEN the kiddies could read by age 6, and they'd be off to the races on their learning curves.

The government has shown that it does a lousy job in the itty bitty years. That's not government's job, anyway. Government nurseries were how they did things in communist Russia and China. Ew, ew, ewwww. It's long past time to rescue the sandbox set from the improper setting and overly structured environment of the government school system, and get them back into the arms of parents, grandparents, churches and other private sector folks, who do early childhood ed right.

2012-01-02T21:50:00.000-06:00

NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTION:
TO BE A FAITHFUL REPORTER THIS YEAR!

Resolving to post a lot more often from now on. So let's get cracking:

Really liked Nydra Karlen's Public Pulse letter about the absence of meaningful school choice under Nebraska law. The competition that would be introduced in Omaha through enabling legislation for charter schools would be a big help for the disadvantaged kids trapped in ineffective schools.

Scroll down to her letter:
http://www.omaha.com/article/20111223/NEWS0802/712239980

She also points out how the education bureaucracy, when faced with a problem, tends to "paper" over it with more and more layers of programs and regulations and "solutions" . . . instead of getting rid of the problem with a fresh, new, data-proven solution.

The meta-analysis of Omaha's education problems is convincing, that the solution is in the private sector, with privately-run schools. The private sector has shown that it does a better job with needy kids, utilizing better leadership, management and skill players (teachers) who know how to use the right curricula, rather than leaving kids in the government infrastructure that has failed so many of them for so many years.

2011-09-01T15:33:00.000-05:00

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.

2011-08-23T16:12:00.000-05:00

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

2011-08-04T14:42:00.000-05:00

$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.

2011-08-03T16:55:00.000-05:00

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)

2011-01-07T12:39:00.003-06:00

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?

2010-08-26T10:44:00.003-05:00

IN OPS, YOU HAVE A
1-IN-2 CHANCE OF BEING ILLITERATE

Not exactly a Chamber of Commerce week in education news: on top of the announcement that Nebraska is tied for first in the nation in the size of its graduation gap between the races (83% for white males and 40% for black males), comes now the atrocious scores on a statewide reading test posted by the Omaha Public Schools.

Only 52% of the OPS students scored as "proficient," which is generally considered to be at or above grade-level reading skill.

So if you attend an OPS school, you have basically a 1-in-2 chance of being functionally illiterate. Of course, the inner-city schools are much worse than the suburban ones within OPS, so it's more like a 9-in-10 chance, in some places. But the overall effect is atrocious.

OPS defenders say that the statewide reading test was only a quick "snapshot" of how the kids did on one day. Their own assessments take place over much more time than that, with lots of opportunities for remediation, and so their own reading test scores are much higher than the state's.

But even if the scores are only a snapshot, think about this: a picture is worth 1,000 words.

Ironically -- or tellingly -- in the Omaha Public Schools, scores were even worse in high school. At Benson High School, for example, only 35% of the students could read proficiently. And yet reading is the schools' basic mission, and these kids have been in high-priced public school for quite a few years, which reflects even worse on the low scores.

Lousy reading doesn't bode too well for their college prospects, or for the future workforce in this state.

And just think of the impression these students now have of what their fellow Omahans and units of government really think of them, to allow them to be in school for so many years and remain unable to read. Can we really blame them for turning to crime, unwed pregnancy and welfare?

Shame, shame, shame . . . but tomorrow, an idea for change!

2010-08-25T15:12:00.003-05:00

NEBRASKA'S 40% GRAD RATE FOR BLACK MALES
IS ATROCIOUS IN THE MIDWEST
AND THE BIGGEST RACIAL GAP IN THE NATION,
BUT FAIRLY NORMAL OTHERWISE

Talk about shocking: that horrendous 40% graduation rate for black teenage boys in Nebraska is about on par with the East and West Coasts, and actually better than many of the larger cities.

Even so, statewide figures and the huge disparity between black and white graduation rates for boys -- 83% for whites vs. that 40% for blacks -- lands Nebraska in a tie with New York for the largest statewide graduation racial gap in the nation.

Ew! Ew! Ewwww! That's a claim to No. 1 that nobody in Nebraska wants to hear -- and they're doing it to our kids, using our money.

See a report on 2008 national data from the Scott Foundation for Public Education, www.schottfoundation.org

If there has ever been a time to pull all low-income and minority children out of the public schools, and put them in the private schools where they can succeed, it is now.

There is no doubt that the relative illiteracy of Head Start teachers, the lack of phonics instruction in the early grades, and the overall atmosphere of harsh, unkind, zero-tolerance discipline by staff in the public schools has created a monstrous amount of illiteracy among young black males, and correspondingly high dropout rates with correspondingly high rates of juvenile delinquency and violence.

We need private donors to fund 200 one-room, K-12 schoolhouses around North Omaha, and it really wouldn't cost that much . . . and let OPS' inner-city schools implode, as they should, and let the district concentrate on its middle-class and upper-class schools, which also need help, but aren't in as drastic a crisis.

2010-08-24T12:12:00.003-05:00

GREAT NEW BELLEVUE U PRO-AMERICA CENTER
LEADS THE WAY ON PROPER SOCIAL JUSTICE EDUCATION

Those who are sick about the anti-American "social justice" curriculum that is on its way to Omaha's Nathan Hale Middle School should take heart: there are, indeed, people in the metro area who know what appropriate "social justice" instruction is for kids.

Maybe those with a grasp of the right kind of "social justice" training should have a talk with the Omaha Public Schools people who are now planning the "social justice" theme at the school, well aware that around the country, "social justice" schools tend to devolve into Marxism, multiculturalism, racism and all kinds of other "isms" instead of making their students highly literate, numerate and able to take the reins of citizenship.

The good "social justice" course is offered by the Bellevue University Center for American Vision and Values, in partnership with the Jesuit Virtual Learning Academy and the Heritage Foundation. The seven-week, dual enrollment (high school students earning college credit), online course is called "Re-Visioning Social Justice: American Civil Society and the World's Poor."

The course examines the history of poverty in the United States, and the pro's and con's of various private-sector and public-sector attempts to assist the nation's poor.

As the climax of the course, students design their own anti-poverty initiative and argue for its likely effectiveness.

For more about the Bellevue University Center for American Vision & Values, see:

www.americanvisionandvalues.org

2010-08-23T18:15:00.003-05:00

HOW MANY OF THESE NEA POLICIES
DO YOU AGREE WITH? LET THEM KNOW

Here are the rather disturbing policy stands taken by attendees at the annual National Education Association convention.

Circle any that you agree with -- don't worry, you won't use much precious ink -- and mail to your state or local NEA union affiliate with a note.

Your note could say something like, "These don't seem to have much, if anything, to do with actually educating children. Are you about schools, or politics?" See if you get a response:

www.eagleforum.org/educate/2010/aug10/resolutions.html

2010-08-20T13:08:00.003-05:00

HOW IS ANYBODY GOING TO AFFORD
SCHOOL SUPPLIES NEXT YEAR,
MUCH LESS COLLEGE TUITION?

Keep this in mind when you vote in November for new school board members, legislators, and anybody else who can levy taxes. What a bunch of anti-family, anti-education tax increases we are going to see! Do not vote for anybody who ISN'T talking about the urgent need to cut taxes and government spending, STAT, and to reverse these horrendous increases.

Imagine how hard it is going to be to save for your children's college educations now. The Democratically-controlled Congress and Democratic Party President have set in place these tax increases on you, starting Jan. 1:

-- Increase of income taxes; for example, the 35% tax bracket zooms up to 39.6%

-- New tax on the value of your health-care benefits

-- Loss of deductions for tuition, student loans and interest payments, as well as health savings accounts

-- Capital gains tax zooms up from 15% to 20%

-- Dividends tax zooms up from 15% to 39.6%

-- Death tax returns; that's 55% tax after the first $1 million in an estate, which these days, isn't all that doggone much

-- Child tax credit is cut in half, to $500

-- Marriage penalty tax is back

-- Dependent-care and adoption tax credits gone

2010-08-19T17:18:00.003-05:00

STATE, NATIONAL ACT AVERAGE SCORES:
A CHAIR LEG COULD DO AS WELL

Let's remember that the national average of a 21 on the college admissions test, the ACT, announced yesterday, is about as good as a CHAIR LEG could do on the test.

A perfect score is 36, and that's very hard to get, but a score of 21 is what would be posted by someone on the verge of functional illiteracy . . . and remember, that is the average, which means half of those taking the test did worse.

Nebraska's average score of 22.1 is actually pretty embarrassing on that 1-to-36 point scale, considering that we have relatively few test-takers who are African-American and Hispanic, two student groups who have notoriously low test scores for various reasons.

The Wall Street Journal reported that 75% of 2010 graduates who took the ACT had scores so low on the individual tests, especially science, that they lacked the academic skills to pass an entry-level college course in those subjects. That means our high schools have a 25% success rate in meeting their basic mission.

Rather than celebrating that Nebraska "beat" the national average on the ACT, we really ought to demand that the State of Nebraska compel the ACT to publish the test questions and send parents the test booklet with their child's answer sheet. Then we can all see the kinds of mistakes that our kids are making after 12 or so years of educating them to the tune of more than $10,000 per pupil per year.

There would be an immediate stampede to private schools and how-to books on homeschooling, betcha.

2010-08-18T10:16:00.003-05:00

KUDOS TO CHILDREN'S SCHOLARSHIP FUND:
HELPING 2,000 POOR KIDS GO TO PRIVATE SCHOOL

If you want to help a low-income child have the choice to attend private school instead of public school, donate to the Children's Scholarship Fund of Omaha, 3212 N. 60th St., 68104, or call 557-5650 ext. 1906 or 1908.

The organization's annual luncheon recently disclosed that donors helped 2,000 children in 23 northeast Nebraska counties, including Omaha, attend private schools through tuition assistance provided by the donors to the scholarship fund.

According to outgoing president J. Peter Ricketts, the program's effectiveness is shown by this statistic: 96% of the scholarshipped students who leave Holy Name School in Omaha's inner city go on to graduate from high school. That compares to an overall graduation rate in the inner city of less than 50%.

Around the country, the evidence is mounting that private education works better for disadvantaged children than public education.

New donors are being sought for the Nebraska group because of the recession. The poor economy has increased the need for tuition assistance at the same time as it has eroded giving power among existing donors. Ricketts said that there is only enough money to give 200 additional scholarships on top of the ones already being given this year, but the group has more than 1,300 new applications for the 2010-11 school year.

2010-08-17T14:02:00.003-05:00

HAPPY BACK TO SCHOOL!

Go Big Ed returns for the 2010-11 school year.

See you soon on Facebook, too. You can subscribe here or there to receive a link to a K-12 education story on approximately a daily basis.

Cheers . . . and Go Big Ed!

----------------

Whoopsie Daisy! Is K-2 Really the Answer?

Boy, is my face red. I've been going around for years, promoting K-2 as the answer to our education woes. 'Course, I mean that we need to have systematic, intensive, explicit phonics instruction on the front burner for our kindergarten through second-grade classrooms.

Comes now State Sen. Beau McCoy of west Omaha, who is sponsoring a bill next session that would make the sale or possession of a new drug, K2, illegal. K2 is synthetic marijuana, and it can give you rapid heart rate, agitation, panic attacks, paranoia and hallucinations.

We already have enough of THAT in our schools -- particularly when people get their school tax bills!

K2 is sold as "herbal incense" and goes by brand names such as Spice, Black Magic, Blue Summit, Blueberry and SuperNova.

Thanks, Sen. McCoy, for alerting parents to this latest threat to our kids . . . and giving me a heads up to make sure I make it clear, when I promote "K-2," that I'm talking about PHONICS for the itty bitty kiddies!!!

2010-02-22T13:06:00.003-06:00

RHODE ISLAND UNION-BUSTING TACTIC
IS THE PERFECT RX FOR OPS

Whoa! Cheers for Frances Gallo, a Rhode Island school principal, who is going to fire about 100 teachers, assistants, and administrators for failing to obey her orders aimed at improving the educational outcome of the high school in beleaguered Central Falls, R.I.

Half of the students are failing ALL of their classes, and the graduation rate is BELOW 50%. Unemployment is rampant in the town, with average salaries pegged at $22,000 a year. But school staffers are making upwards of $50,000 MORE than that.

So Ms. Gallo decided it was time for the staff to take some serious steps to fix the failing school:

-- work 25 minutes longer per school day
-- provide before- and after-school tutoring on a rotating basis
-- eat lunch with the students once a week
-- have more rigorous staff evaluations
-- attend weekly after-school planning sessions with other teachers
-- attend two weeks of summer training

The unionized staff refused. So Ms. Gallo FIRED them!!!

Woo hoo! Love it. Let's keep watching this one . . . and see if the idea spreads to other schools where far too many kids are failing and dropping out. Exhibit A: the Omaha Public Schools.

Read about it:

www.businessinsider.com/henry-blodgett-unionized-rhode-island-teachers-refuse-to-work-25-minutes-more-per-day-so-town-fires-all-of-them-2010-2

2010-02-20T09:58:00.003-06:00

NEBRASKA EDUCATION LEADER
BLASTS FEDS FOR ENDING SCHOOL CHOICE IN D.C.

It's encouraging to see a university president in Nebraska who "gets it" about how school choice is the answer for disadvantaged children and youth.

Even though we're a state which lacks any form of meaningful school choice -- vouchers, tax credits, charter schools, contract schools, a network of multifamily attendance area homeschools -- the president of Grace University still perceives the benefits of school choice. He still has enough common sense to see that it is wrong of the Obama Administration to end the school-choice vouchers program that was demonstrably working in the District of Columbia.

See:

www.issuesinperspective.com/2010/Feb/10feb20-21_2.cfm

2010-02-18T13:58:00.004-06:00

ELKHORN KIDS COMPETE IN
ENGINEERING CONTEST IN D.C.,
JOIN THE PRESIDENT IN SPACE CHAT

Congratulations to two middle-school teams from the Elkhorn Public Schools, who took first and second in a recent regional Future City competition, and were in Washington, D.C., this week, competing at the national finals. See http://www.futurecity.org/

Students from Elkhorn Ridge Middle School and Elkhorn Middle School designed and built tabletop models of a DURA -- Disaster Underground Relocation Area -- which was this year's theme for the student competition that is put on during National Engineers Week.

Three of the students got to visit President Obama along with students from three other states as he placed a phone call to American astronauts in the space station.

Kevin Riggert, principal of Elkhorn Ridge, said that experience and the Future City competition is a good example of how schools are teaching students 21st Century thinking skills, creativity, collaboration and real-world application. "It gives me shivers," he said. "This is what makes your job."

He said 34,000 middle-school students were in Washington for the event, so it was an honor indeed for the three Elkhorn students.

The students used simulation software, researched and wrote an essay and narrative about how the city would function, and gave an oral presentation to a panel of engineers. They worked with engineer mentors in this practical application of math, science, technology and engineering.

Riggert said his school's students were the only ones at nationals to use an outer space theme. He conjectures that is why some team members were invited to the White House. The team won a special award, he said.

2010-02-17T14:50:00.002-06:00

N.U. GRADS FUND READING CENTER
ON UNL CAMPUS FOR 1-ON-1 TUTORING

A major gift to the University of Nebraska Foundation has resulted in a new name for the remedial reading center in the Home Economics Building on East Campus at UNL. It's the Kit and Dick Schmoker Reading Center:

http://cehs.unl.edu/tlte/readingcenter/

The Schmokers graduated in the 1960s and live in Edina, Minn. Their git pays for salaries, outreach services, equipment, scholarships and fellowships for college students involved in reading education.

N.U.'s future teachers tutor children at the center to apply what they're learning in their undergraduate and graduate courses.

The center serves students who read one to three years below grade level. So far, nearly 300 students in elementary, middle and high schools have been aided.

2010-02-17T11:08:00.002-06:00

MONOPOLY:
GOOD GAME, BAD SCHOOL SYSTEM

John Stossel has a good article that points out how foolish it is to expect a government monopoly to do a good job delivering an important item like a child's education:

www.townhall.com/columnists/JohnStossel/2010/02/17/education_too_important_for_a_government_monopoly

In the last few days, I've talked to three teacher friends who are all down in the mouth over what they CAN'T do. It's all because they are forced to do things a certain way by the government monopoly.

One wants the freedom and flexibility to teach to the children's passions and interests, but has to stick to the multitudinous, micromanaging standards which bore her as much as they bore the children.

One wants to be able to flunk kids who aren't working hard in his high school science class, but it's against district policy to flunk anybody, and the kids KNOW that, so all he can do is let them take the same test over and over until even an eggplant would be able to pass.

The third would like to recommend to the parents of a short, frail seventh-grade boy to switch him to a private school, because he is getting bullied by the public school "toughs" who are already in gangs. But if she did that, she'd get fired.

What should we do?

End the government monopoly over schools. The question is, how?

2010-02-16T10:25:00.003-06:00

WATCHING THE SEATTLE SCHOOL BOARD SQUIRM
OVER JUDGE'S RULING THAT THEIR MATH CURRICULUM
DAMAGES THE FUTURES OF LOW-INCOME STUDENTS

It is instructive and encouraging to see how a citizens' group in Seattle is shining a spotlight on the terrible disservice that "whole math" does to all students, but particularly low-income and minority students:

www.educationnews.org/ed_reports/53457.html

The Omaha Public Schools has the exact same problem -- stubbornly clinging to "discovery" math curriculum that is actually making low-income kids more innumerate, and widening the racial achievement gap. It has become a civil rights issue in Seattle, and it sure as shootin' is in Omaha as well.

Now all we need is a small group of concerned citizens to file suit. Any takers?

2010-02-08T09:48:00.006-06:00

SEATTLE JUDGE ORDERS SCHOOL BOARD
TO TAKE A HARDER LOOK AT FUZZY MATH TEXTS

This is a victory for fans of traditional math instruction! A group of citizens filed a lawsuit against the Seattle Public Schools for selecting a "discovery math" curriculum, even though the evidence showed that it increased the racial achievement gap, rather than helped low-income and minority students succeed more in math.

The judge recently ruled that the school board should take another look at the evidence for and against that curriculum. While he stopped short of ordering them to throw it out, he agreed with the citizens that it looked counter-productive to the goal of helping low-income and minority students succeed in math:

http://betrayed-whyeducationisfailing.blogspot.com/2010/02/decision-favors-plaintiffs-in-court.html

"Discovery math" is the style of many, many public school boards these days. It keeps the low-income kids down, and prevents more advantaged kids from achieving as much in math as they could, if they had traditional math instruction.

Wouldn't it be great if school boards would come to their senses, drop-kick "fuzzy math" and get tried-and-true, computation-based math textbooks back in the classroom?

Or do we have to SUE 'em?

2010-01-15T13:16:00.004-06:00

HEAD START IS A TOTAL WASTE;
OPS SHOULD DROP-KICK IT IMMEDIATELY

According to this well-designed, massive study for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, kids who had been in the expensive, government-provided early childhood program Head Start scored no better than kids in their same economic circumstances on 40 out of 41 measurements of cognitive impacts at the end of kindergarten:

http://acf.hhs.gov/programs/opre/hs/impact_study/reports/impact_study/executive_summary_final.pdf

The study used a very large, nationally representative sample and used a random assignment design -- the gold standard for such research.

The study, "Head Start Impact Study Final Report," released this week, was produced by the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation of the Administration for Children and Families within HHS.

The Omaha Public Schools administers Head Start along with several other providers across the State of Nebraska.

2010-01-15T12:53:00.004-06:00

YET ANOTHER GOVERNMENT-FUNDED STUDY
SHOWS HEAD START DOESN'T DO A DANG THING

(See post, above, for the link to the study)

Nebraska's finances are in such dire straits, it's a no-brainer that we should immediately cancel our Head Start funding across the state. It's a boondoggle!

We should switch to the early childhood ed curricula and methods that have been proven to result in strong literacy and numeracy for all kids on down the road, but especially at-risk, low-income kids who are now being ill-served by Head Start. Those are phonics-based and play-based curricula and methods -- better, cheaper and more fun all the way around.

If our tax dollars aren't REALLY giving low-income kids a "head start" on doing well in school, why in the Sam Hill do we keep funding it?

I contend that lousy pre-K and early-primary curriculum and instruction in the Omaha Public Schools is WHY they have one of the nation's widest racial achievement gaps, and WHY the graduation rate is so low among low-income and minority kids.

The kids and their parents can tell right off the bat that their futures don't matter as much to OPS as those of the rich, white kids, and so they disengage.

I CAN'T LIVE WITH THAT ANOTHER DAY. CAN YOU?!?

If we used pre-K and early-primary methods for our state's low-income itty bitties that really could bring them up to par academically with their more-advantaged classmates, how much happier would we feel about the outcomes of our hard-earned tax dollars, vs. throwing them down a rathole with Head Start programs?

How much better would it be for Nebraska's economic development prospects to get rid of that atrocious race-based academic achievement gap?

And most of all, how many tens of millions of dollars in remediation and at-risk services would we save, now and in the years to come, if we could drastically reduce the number of kids who ARE at-risk because of lousy reading preparation and instruction?

The juicy stuff starts on p. iv of this report, indicating clearly that any benefit young children might get from attendance in the Head Start program washes out almost immediately.

It's just another red flag showing why it is long past time to force the Omaha Public Schools, which runs Head Start in the state's largest city, to drop Head Start immediately or "show cause" why they shouldn't.

2009-12-04T16:04:00.003-06:00

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

2009-11-13T10:22:00.002-06:00

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.

2009-11-11T23:25:00.003-06:00

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

2009-10-28T23:08:00.003-05:00

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?

2009-10-21T12:29:00.003-05:00

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.

2009-10-21T12:15:00.003-05:00

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.

2009-10-21T10:24:00.004-05:00

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/

2009-10-15T14:22:00.003-05:00

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?

2009-10-11T15:18:00.002-05:00

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

2009-10-06T23:01:00.002-05:00

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.

2009-10-06T22:45:00.003-05:00

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

2009-10-06T22:19:00.002-05:00

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.

2009-09-28T20:50:00.002-05:00

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

2009-09-23T22:47:00.004-05:00

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)

2009-09-23T14:59:00.002-05:00

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

2009-09-23T10:33:00.004-05:00

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

2009-09-22T17:28:00.003-05:00

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.

2009-09-22T17:20:00.003-05:00

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

2009-08-27T10:46:00.003-05:00

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!

2009-08-19T14:50:00.004-05:00

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!

2009-08-17T16:18:00.005-05:00

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.

2009-08-11T18:39:00.003-05:00

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!

2009-07-21T21:37:00.003-05:00

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

2009-07-21T19:14:00.003-05:00

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.

2009-07-21T15:22:00.002-05:00

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.

2009-04-21T14:55:00.003-05:00

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.

2009-04-14T09:27:00.003-05:00

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.

2009-04-09T10:35:00.003-05:00

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

2009-04-08T16:56:00.003-05:00

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

2009-04-08T09:03:00.003-05:00

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.

2009-04-03T00:05:00.004-05:00

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.

2009-03-31T11:55:00.002-05:00

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

2009-03-25T14:42:00.002-05:00

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

2009-03-24T15:06:00.003-05:00

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

2009-03-20T11:01:00.003-05:00

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/

2009-03-12T23:44:00.002-05:00

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

2009-03-05T09:59:00.002-06:00

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!

2009-03-04T10:18:00.003-06:00

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

2009-03-04T09:11:00.003-06:00

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.

2009-02-26T13:18:00.003-06:00

Redirecting Educators Toward the 3 R’s
For English Language Learners

Thanks to Susan Smith of the Nebraska Advisory Group (nagsusansmith@yahoo.com), a strong opponent of illegal immigration, for supplying the disturbing agenda of an education conference coming up this weekend in Los Angeles. It’s listed below.

If we see this caliber of propaganda creeping in to teacher inservices and so forth in Nebraska, we need to nip it in the bud. Whoa!

No wonder there’s such an achievement gap between Hispanic students and Caucasians. There’s not a single practical, explicit skill being taught in this conference agenda to instruct teachers how to help Hispanic kids do better in school.

It might be worth it to forward this story to members of your local school board or ESU board to make it clear that any taxpayer-provided continuing education program for teachers in Nebraska must focus specifically on academic topics.

Our educational organizations frequently hire consultants and provide inservices at taxpayer expense but offer little or no taxpayer input as to the content. So let’s make sure they concentrate on making English Language Learners better at reading, writing, arithmetic and the other school subjects, and NOT cause school staff to get propagandized by despicable content such as this.

You can also email the San Diego-based sponsoring organization of this conference and communicate your outrage: info@associationofrazaeducators.org

Here’s the conference agenda:

Association of Raza Educators
Education Conference
"Rethinking Social Justice in Education:
Ser Pueblo, Hacer Pueblo, y Estar Con El Pueblo"

Saturday, February 28, 2009
Santee Education Complex
1921 S. Maple Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90011(FREE PARKING!!!)

Keynote Speakers:

Omali Yeshitela, Chairman, African People's Socialist Party and Former Black PantherDonaldo Macedo, Professor, Univ. of Massachusetts, Co-author of Critical Literacy w/Paulo Freire

Sakeenah Shabazz, President, African Revolutionary Student Organization, Lincoln High School Student

Partial List of Workshops:

PANEL - Surviving the Neo-Colonial School District:
Black Listed Teachers Speak Out!
Amitis Motevalli, Former teacher at Locke H.S. Black listed for refusing police searches and organizing students
Karen Salazar, Former Jordan HS Teacher Black listed for teaching Malcolm X and student organizing
Marisol A lba, Celerity Charter Elm, Black listed for teaching a poem about Emmitt Till

Rethinking the “Line Between Us”:
Bringing History Alive in the Classroom
Bill Bigelow, Rethinking Schools magazine

The Politics of Education and Community Empowerment:
How To Struggle, How To Win
Aremi Lopez & Maria Ochoa
Association of Raza Educators, San Diego Chapter

Teaching through Lies:
Critical Ideological Literacy and Corporate Rap
Patrick Camangian, University of San Francisco

Raising Political Consciousness through Education:
Effectively starting & sustaining an ARE Chapter
Juan Orozco, ARE Statewide Council
Mariana Ramierz, ARE Statewide Council
Miguel Zavala, ARE Statewide Council

A Barrio Pedagogy: Identity, Intellectualism, Activism, and
Academic Achievement through the Evolution of Critically
Compassionate Intellectualism
Sean Arce, Tucson Unified School District
Augustine Romero, Tucson Unified School District

Hacer Pueblo in Higher Education
Edelina Burciaga, University of California, Irvine
Irene Vea, University of California, Irvine
Karina Cuamea, University of California, Irvine

Infusing Curriculum with Action and Critical Thinking Skills :
Chicano/ Latino Theatre at Evergreen Valley College
Lisa Edsall – Giglio
Evergreen Valley College, San Jose, CA

Film: Voices from War
Peter Dudar, Arlington West

Culturally Responsive Teaching:
The Raza Perspective
Javier San Román, Association of Mexican American Educators

A Revolutionary Pedagogy: Going Beyond the
Classroom and into Our Communities in Search of True
Liberation
Sakeenah Shabazz, A.R.S.O. African Revolutionary Student Organization
Jona than Flores, M.E.Ch.A_Lincoln High School

PANEL: 1948 to 2008: 60 years of Occupation,
Oppression and Ethnic cleansing in Palestine
Pouneh Behin & Suzie Abajian

Mujeres de Maiz: Harvesting Hope and Healing in Your
Community Through the Arts
Felicia Montes, Mujeres de Maiz

Mass Appeal: Creating Community Ciphers and
Fostering Youth Action in Our Classrooms
Tan Laurence, Joanna Alatorre, Elizabeth Silva, and Beverly Castillo
Watts Youth Collective

Deconstruction of the Colonized Mind Through Critical Media Literacy:
Ernesto Bustillos, Coordinator of the Raza Press and Media Association

Teatro For Your Pueblo:
Rosa Gonzales & Luís ‘xago’ Juárez, headRush
Association of Raza Educators, Oakland Chapter

Patricia Isasa's Fight for Social Justice:
Argentine Torture Survivor Speaks, excerpts from El Cerco
Patricia Isasa

RAZA SI PINTAS NO! EDUCATION, NOT INCARCERATION!
From the School Hall to Juvenile Hall, The Criminalization
of Raza Youth Under Colonial Education Institutions
Francisco Romero, Chicano Mexicano Prison Project

PANEL: Military-Education Industrial Complex
Marisela Guzman, Jefferson HS grad, Veteran, AFSC
Arlene Inouye, CAMS
Kiki Ochoa, ARE San Diego
Jonathan Flores, MEChA de Lincoln HS, Somos Raza, San Diego

The Struggle Within The Struggle, La Mujer
Magdalena Montrond & Jennifer Astudillo, Somos Raza Student Org. San Diego

Social Justice in Elementary Education
Carolina Valdez, Association of Raza Educator, Los Angeles Chapter

The Role of Public Education in our Society
Edin Barrientos & Danny Monterroso, Coalition for Educational Justice

A-G Electives as a Practice of Freedom:
Creating and Implementing A Chicana/o Latina/o
Studies Class and Program at your High School—An
Intimate Portrait of Raza Pedagogy in Pomona, Califas
Cati de los Rios, Pomona High School & The Eastside Café

Zapatismo: Creative Resistance and Lessons Learned
Olmeca, Artist in Rebellion from Los Angeles

2009-02-02T09:53:00.001-06:00

Top Ten Reasons
State Legislators
Really CAN Cut State Aid
Without Wrecking Schools

http://www.goldwaterinstitute.org/AboutUs/ArticleView.aspx?id=2501

2009-01-17T14:54:00.002-06:00

Music Teacher's Dedication Challenges Nebraskans
To Do Something Nice for Native American Kids

It is so encouraging to hear about the generosity that is being showered on John Mangan. He's a music teacher at the Omaha Nation School on the tribe's reservation in Macy, Neb.

After a World-Herald story appeared late last fall, he has received donations of money -- as much as $1,400 from an Elkhorn-area couple, and instruments -- a flute, a clarinet, an alto sax, even a tuba -- from Nebraskans who just wanted to help Mangan out as he continues to use music, the universal language, to help the disadvantaged students create the songs of their life.

Want in? Contact John Mangan at the school, (402) 837-5622, or jmangan@esu1.org

2009-01-17T14:50:00.002-06:00

Kudos for 83-Year-Old Mentor
For 3rd Graders at Elkhorn School

Wow! We love hearing about school volunteers like Margaret Andrews, 83, who has been coming in to tutor third graders at Manchester Elementary School, 174th and Blondo in Elkhorn, twice a week for the last two years.

She was named the mentor of the year by the Elkhorn Public Schools Foundation.

2009-01-17T14:35:00.004-06:00

Omaha Parent Group Embezzlement
Part of Disturbing National Trend

The alleged embezzlement of $4,700 from the Parent-Teacher Organization at Florence Elementary School, 7902 N. 36th St., seems like a ton of money for a low-income area. But it's actually small potatoes compared to the alleged embezzlement of more than $800,000 from a Kearney public-school foundation (see GoBigEd.com earlier this week), and the overall rate of school embezzlements nationwide.

For an eye-opening glance at this problem, just google "school" and "embezzlement," or "PTO" and "embezzlement."

Uff da! Hundreds of citations.

Why is this happening? It used to be that PTO groups were led by the most credible, reliable, admirable people in any given community. And that may still be true, most places. It also used to be that the gym or school library were packed with parents on PTO meeting night. Not any more, for the mo9st part.

In most schools today, the number of people who are willing to regularly volunteer and provide those necessary checks and balances for fiduciary oversight, such as PTO funds, has dwindled. It is very tough to recruit officers at most schools. The more capable people, mostly mothers, are for the most part, working, at least part-time, or engaged in other volunteer activities.

Consequently, you get more people "on the edge" -- who aren't quite as experienced and stable as in yesteryear -- who aren't working and thus may have more time than money -- and may manipulate other parents and the school staff into thinking that they are highly efficient when in reality, they're crooked.

In a situation like that, the temptation to steal and cheat is more powerful because it looks like you're more likely to get away with it . . . since nobody's looking.

Just another reason that each and every parent ought to be doing something to volunteer at school, if for no other reason than to keep each other honest.

2009-01-17T13:27:00.002-06:00

Kudos to Papillion-LaVista Principal
For Letting Her Hair Down

Portal Elementary School principal Kathy Szczepaniak (my longtime friend!) followed through on a promise that left her with her hair dyed pink and green.

She challenged her Papillion-LaVista area pupils to collect at least 4,300 pounds of canned food for the hungry, and if they made the goal -- they beat it by nearly 300 pounds -- she would let them dye her hair at an all-school assembly.

It's a good lesson in goal-setting and motivation . . . and how "hair-raising" it can be to be a principal these days!

2009-01-17T13:20:00.002-06:00

Gold Star Learning Idea:
Kid-Produced School Broadcast

Three cheers for the educators at Ashland Park-Robbins Elementary Schoool, 5050 S. 51st St., for putting together a daily closed-circuit TV broadcast produced by sixth-graders.

The production studio has been set up since 2003 in the school library. Students in teams of four take turns being "on air" talent, and working the controls, lights and teleprompter.

Content appears to be adult-created, rather than student-generated, to avoid slipping into nonproductive themes, no doubt. But that's OK; you can't have everything. Content includes a weather forecast, announcements, lunch menu, guest teachers, and the Pledge of Allegiance. There's a scrollover announcing birthdays of famous people and students at that school, and they're experimenting with more technology such as a "green screen" that will allow a student reporter to appear with different video backgrounds.

2009-01-13T12:43:00.001-06:00

Kearney School Foundation Embezzlement Scandal
Highlights Need for Fiscal Oversight

The financial credibility of Nebraska educators sure took a big kick in the pants this week as a school foundation chief in Kearney pleaded no contest to felony theft and faces up to 20 years in prison for embezzling over a half-million dollars within three years.

The case of Angela Regenos should alert board members of Nebraska's several public school foundations to immediately order an outside audit of their books. And if any financial corruption is found, the people responsible should immediately be prosecuted or made to resign, and the money replaced.

School foundations are supposed to collect tax-deductible donations to use for education-related benefits that there are no tax revenues to support. Usually, foundations provide scholarships for student leaders and help with special projects such as performing arts centers and extras for athletics. They typically subsidize before- and after-school programs for low-income students whose parents can’t pay the full freight.

In Kearney, Mrs. Regenos admitted to embezzling $577,277 from 2005 to 2008, the three years for which the Nebraska statute of limitations permits her to be prosecuted. Kearney officials claim nearly $300,000 more was filched dating back to 2001.

The 46-year-old has told authorities that she forged signatures, altered bank records, gave misleading financial statements and incorrect information to accountants, and used the ill-gotten lucre to buy jewelry and other goods.

The district is suing her and has cashed in an insurance policy to recover $250,000.

Read more on:

http://nebraska.statepaper.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2009/01/13/496c6fced134d

And if you suspect a foundation or other ed-related nonprofit might be experiencing financial corruption because of a huge disparity between revenues received and services delivered, you can get a good start on looking in to your concerns on this website, which provides a peek at IRS Form 990’s for nonprofits:

www.guidestar.org

2008-12-19T10:45:00.002-06:00

OUR ONLY HOPE:
TIE TAX RATES TO KIDS READING AT GRADE LEVEL

I volunteer once a week as a writing mentor in an Omaha-area school with 80% low-income students. These are fourth-graders. They are darling, and I love working with them. But . . . I have to tell the truth about their academic skills. They stink.

Almost none of them can write a single declarative sentence without making an error. Most of them have trouble getting more than a few words down on paper even if you give them 20 or 30 minutes. Their handwriting is atrocious and they don't even form their letters correctly on paper. So no wonder their reading skills stink: they literally don't know what to look for, when it comes to decoding. They read aloud slowly, in a monotone, stumbling and stuttering, like drones.

These kids obviously have not been taught proper language skills, and boy, does it show. Meanwhile, they have been in the government school system now for five years, at an average cost per year of over $8,000. So for $40,000 invested so far, we get . . . THIS?!?

Consequently, I'm not surprised to learn statistics such as the latest one that's shocking honest citizens everywhere: Arne Duncan of Chicago, the education "guru" that President-Elect Obama has selected to be U.S. education secretary, has presided over massive school failure just like I'm seeing, and is likely to spread that misery even deeper in U.S. schools.

In 2007, only 17 percent of eighth graders tested at or above grade level in reading in Chicago Public Schools – the school system administered by Arne Duncan since 2001.

According to news reports, Duncan, whom Obama termed a "reformer," said he would like to take the lessons he learned in Chicago with him when he moves to Washington. “I'm also eager to apply some of the lessons we have learned here in Chicago to help school districts all across our country," Duncan said after Obama formally named him to the job in Chicago.

Well, here's some REFORM we should try:

Let's adjust our local, state and federal tax rates to the percentage of students who read at grade level. The more students who can read at grade level, the more taxes the government schools will collect. The FEWER students who are made academically competent, the LESS money the government schools will get.

Doesn't that make perfect sense?

Hey -- you get what you pay for. Do you like what we're getting under education "systems" such as the one that Arne Duncan will no doubt try to spread out all over the land?

I sure don't. It's just one more reason to support the development of private schools, especially for low-income kids who need good curriculum and instruction the most of all.

2008-11-19T11:45:00.002-06:00

Nebraska's Big Brain Drain:
Talk Talkey to the Young'Uns About It Over the Holidays

Here's a well-researched story from the Platte Institute for Economic Research on the fact that Nebraska ranks 10th in the nation in a negative category: the percentage of young, single, college-educated people who move away from the state.

Usually, it's job-related, but the impact is massive in areas such as law and engineering, where about half of the graduates take their well-educated brains and move away. About one-third are moving to bordering states, including Colorado.

The implications for Nebraska colleges and universities are vast, since it is their mission to use Nebraska tax dollars to develop future Nebraska leadership in business, the arts, academia and the professions.

The implications for Nebraska businesses are serious, since our future workforce is crucial to our future, period. And the implications for K-12 education are vast, since if our smartest graduates are moving away, how can our future teachers and students be the best that they can be?

As the Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s holidays approach, and families gather, the brain drain ought to be discussed among grandparents, parents and students interested in keeping the future as bright as possible in the Cornhusker State.

Kudos to the Nebraska-based think tank, the Platte Institute, for bringing this issue front and center:

www.platteinstitute.org/publications/graduations-reunions-remind-us-of-nebraskas-brain-drain-issue

2008-11-19T08:49:00.003-06:00

ANTI-AMERICAN BIAS
CREEPING INTO KIDDIE SONGS

Used to be that in any school, even if the classroom teachers and curriculum had gone sour with leftist, anti-American content, at least the music department was still politically neutral, if not pro-American and at least not hostile to Christianity. And around Thanksgiving and Christmastime, at least there would usually be one or two songs about our heritage that would be fun and inspirational for the kids to sing.

Not any more. We're coming up on Thanksgiving, which is the typical time to cover why the pioneers came to this country and settled here in the first place. It's also a great time to cover Native American content as well. There are all kinds of great songs about these major themes.

But . . . the resident third-grader came home all frowny-faced yesterday and said that they sang this really boring, long song about how there USED to be buffalo roaming all over the Plains, but then . . . WE KILLED THEM ALL!!!!!

Heyyyyy! That doesn't sound like very much fun. That doesn't make it sound like Americans are very good environmentalists or animal lovers, either. And she's the sensitive type: the last thing she or any other child needs nowadays is to be focused on violence and killing . . . in music class!!!

Yes, I'm going to track down what she was talking about and see if I can get those lyrics and share them with you. In the meantime, here's the list of folk songs that I'm going to share with the music teacher, principal and school board, if I'm understanding what happened correctly. Took me two seconds to find this list on the Internet.

Here's the list of positive alternatives I hope the music teacher will choose from next time:

CHILDREN'S SONGS

A Tisket, A Tasket
All the Pretty Little Horses
Bought Me A Cat (the cat pleased me)
Bingo
Did You Ever See A Lassie
Eency, Weency Spider
Farmer in the Dell, The
Hickory, Dickory Dock
Hokey Pokey, The
Hush Little Baby (don’t say a word, papa’s ...)
Rockaby Baby (in the treetops, when the wind...)
If You’re Happy and You Know It
Looby Loo
Mary Had A Little Lamb
Muffin Man
Mulberry Bush
Oats, Peas, Beans, and Barley Grow
Oh! Dear! What Can the Matter Be?
Oh, Where Has My Little Dog Gone
Old John the Rabbit
Old MacDonald
Polly Wolly Doodle
Pop! Goes the Weasel
Ring Around the Rosies
Row, Row, Row Your Boat
She’ll be Comin’ Round the Mountain
Take Me Out to the Ballgame
There’s a Hole in the Bucket
This Little Light of Mine
This Old Man
Three Blind Mice
Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star
Wheels on the Bus, The

FOLK SONGS

All Night, All Day
Amazing Grace
Aura Lee
Away in a Manger
Billy Boy
Camptown Races
Cindy
Clementine
Columbia, Gem of the Ocean
Cotton-Eyed Joe
Crawdad Song
Dixie
Down by the Riverside
Down in the Valley
Drill, Ye Terriers, Drill!
Erie Canal, The
Follow the Drinkin’ Gourd
Frog Went A-Courtin’, A
Go Down, Moses
Go Tell Aunt Rhody
Go Tell it on the Mountain
God of our Fathers
Goober Peas
Goodbye, Old Paint
He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands
Home on the Range
I Couldn’t Hear Nobody Pray
I’ve Been Workin’ On the Railroad
Jim Along, Josie
Blue Tail Fly, The
Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho
Kum Ba Yah
Liza Jane
Michael Row the Boat Ashore
Oh, Susanna
Old Chisholm Trail
Old Folks At Home (Way down upon the Swanee River, far, far away)
Onward Christian Soldiers
Over the River and Through the Woods
Rock-A-My-Soul
Shenandoah
Shoo Fly
Shortnin’ Bread
Simple Gifts
Silent Night
Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child
Susie, Little Susie
Sweet Betsy From Pike
Swing Low, Sweet Chariot
Water is Wide, The
We Gather Together
When the Saints Go Marching In
You Are My Sunshine

PATRIOTIC SONGS

America
America, the Beautiful
Battle Hymn of the Republic
God Bless America
Marines’ Hymn (From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli)
Star-Spangled Banner, The
Caissons Song
This Land is Your Land
When Johnny Comes Marching Home
Yankee Doodle
You’re A Grand Old Flag

RECOMMENDED SONG LIST

1. A Tisket, A Tasket (a green and yellow basket)
2. All Night, All Day (angels watchin’ over me, my Lord)
3. All The Pretty Little Horses (Hushaby, don’t you cry, go to sleep little baby,when you wake, you shall have )
4. Amazing Grace (how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me)
5. America (my country ‘tis of Thee, sweet land of liberty)
6. America, the Beautiful (Oh beautiful for spacious skies)
7. Away in a Manger (no crib for a bed)
8. Battle Hymn of the Republic (glory, glory hallelujah, His truth is marching on)
9. Billy Boy (Oh where have you been Billy Boy, Billy Boy)
10. Bingo (there was a farmer had a dog and Bingo was his name-o)
11. Blue Tail Fly, The (Jimmy crack corn and I don’t care, my master’s gone away)
12. Caissons Go Rolling Along, The (over hill, over dale, we will hit the dusty trail, as those)
13. Camptown Races, The (camptown ladies sing this song, doo-dah, doo-dah)
14. Cindy (Get along home, Cindy Cindy, I’ll marry you some day)
15. Clementine (Oh my darling, oh my darling, oh my darling Clementine)
16. Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean (when born by the red, white, and blue, thy banners make tyranny tremble)
17. Crawdad Song (You get a line, and I’ll get a pole honey)
18. Did You Ever See A Lassie? (a lassie, a lassie, did you ever see a lassie go this way and that)19. Dixie (I Wish I Was in the Land of Cotton)
20. Down By the Riverside (and study war no more)
21. Down in the Valley (valley so low, hang your head over)
22. Eency, Weency Spider (went up the water spout)23. Farmer in the Dell, The (hi-ho the dairy-o, the farmer in the dell)
24. Frog Went Courtin’, A (he did ride, with sword and pistol by his side aha, ho-ho)
25. Go Down, Moses (way down in Egypt land, tell old Pharaoh, let my people go)
26. Go Tell Aunt Rhody (the old gray goose is dead)
27. Go Tell it on the Mountain (over the hill and everywhere)
28. God Bless America (land that I love, stand beside her and guide her)
29. God of our Fathers (whose almighty hand)
30. Goober Peas (goodness, how delicious, eating goober peas)
31. Goodbye, Old Paint (I’m a-leaving Cheyenne)
32. He’s Got the Whole World In His Hands
33. Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush (so early in the morning)
34. Hickory Dickory Dock (the mouse ran up the clock)
35. Hokey Pokey, The (you put your right foot in, you put your right foot out)
36. Home on the Range (where the deer and the antelope play, where seldom is heard a discouraging word)
37. Hush Little Baby (don’t say a word, papa’s going to buy you a mockingbird)
38. Rock-a-by Baby (in the treetops, when the wind blows the cradle will rock)
39. I’ve Been Workin’ On the Railroad (all the live long day)
40. If You’re Happy and You Know It (clap your hands)
41. Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho (and the walls came tumblin’ down)
42. Kum Ba Yah (my Lord, Kum Ba Yah)
43. Liza Jane (O Eliza, li’l Liza Jane, O Eliza, li’l Liza Jane)
44. Looby Loo (here we go looby loo, here we go looby light)
45. Marines Hymn (From the Halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli)
46. Mary Had a Little Lamb (it’s fleece was white as snow)
47. Michael Row the Boat Ashore (hallelujah)
48. Muffin Man, The (oh do you know the muffin man)
49. Oats, Peas, Beans, and Barley Grow (do you or I or anyone know how oats, peas, beans, and barley grow)
50. Oh! Dear! What Can the Matter Be? (Johnny’s so long at the fair)
51. Oh, Susanna! (oh don’t you cry for me)
52. Oh, Where has My Little Dog Gone? (oh where, oh where can he be)
53. Old Chisholm Trail (well come along boys and listen to my tale, let me tell you ‘bout my troubles on the)
54. Old Folks at Home (Way down upon the Swannee River, far, far away)
55. Old MacDonald (had a farm, e-i-e-i-o)
56. Onward Christian Soldiers (marching as to war)
57. Over the River and Through the Woods (to grandmother’s house we go)
58. Polly Wolly Doodle (oh I went down south for to see my Sal, singin’ polly wolly doodle all the day)
59. Pop, Goes the Weasel! (all around the cobbler’s bench the monkey chased the weasel)
60. Ring Around the Rosies (pocket full of posies)
61. Rock-A My Soul (in the bosom of Abraham)
62. Row, Row, Row Your Boat (gently down the sea)
63. She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain (when she comes)
64. Shenandoah (oh Shenandoah, I long to see you, away, you rolling river)
65. Shoo Fly (don’t bother me, shoo-fly don’t bother me, shoo-fly don’t bother me for I belong to somebody)
66. Shortnin-Bread (mammy’s little baby loves shortnin’ shortnin’)
67. Silent Night (holy night, all is calm, all is bright)
68. Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child (a long way from home)
69. Star-Spangled Banner, The (Oh say can you see, by the dawn’s early light)
70. Swing Low, Sweet Chariot (comin’ for to carry me home)
71. Take Me Out to the Ballgame (buy me some peanuts and crackerjack, I don’t care if I ever get back)
72. There’s A Hole in the Bucket (dear Liza, dear Liza)
73. This Land is Your Land (this land is my land)
74. This Little Light of Mine (I’m gonna let it shine)
75. This Old Man (he played one, he played knick-knack on my drum)
76. Three Blind Mice (see how they run)
77. Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star (how I wonder what you are)
78. We Gather Together (to ask the Lord’s blessing)
79. Wheels on the Bus, The (go round and round)
80. When Johnny Comes Marching Home (again, hurrah, hurrah, we’ll give him a hearty welcome then, hurrah, hurrah)
81. When the Saints Go Marching In (oh how I want to be in that number)
82. Yankee Doodle (went to town riding on a pony, stuck a feather in his cap)
83. You are my Sunshine (my only sunshine, you make me happy when skies are gray)
84. You’re A Grand Old Flag (you’re a high flying flag)

2008-11-13T16:48:00.003-06:00

WRITER HAS BILL AYERS PEGGED:
NOT A SCHOOL REFORMER,
BUT A 'SCHOOL DESTROYER'

Writer Sol Stern had a good Wall Street Journal article on the terrible, horrible, no-good, very-bad, radical education policies of William Ayers, the uninvited speaker at the University of Nebraska College of Education, in CASE there is any doubt left that Ayers should never be listened to by anyone who wants to improve the academic achievement of disadvantaged kids:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122411943821339043.html

Glad to learn that Stern has a book coming out on Ayers and his "social justice" philosophies. That'll be a good read. Here's hoping some Nebraskan will get a copy in the hands of each N.U. College of Ed poohbah who wanted him to come and speak. They'll rue the day!

2008-11-13T09:42:00.002-06:00

Three-Item Agenda to End-Run Ayers, Ed Schools,
And Others Who Would Radicalize Our Kids

1. Get rid of the U.S. Department of Education before it radicalizes our schools a la William Ayers' philosophies.

2. Get rid of the teaching certificate as a prerequisite to getting a teaching job in a K-12 school, since it is a sort of litmus test for kowtowing to Marxist principles of "bash the past and The Three C's -- Constitution, Capitalism and the Church."

3. Get rid of the education major at the University of Nebraska and other big crank-'em-out teachers' colleges. Instead of indoctrinating future teachers in left-wing philosophies that will end up radicalizing schools to the point where they teach our kids nothing but politics, we can have English majors and math majors and science majors and child psychology majors in classrooms teaching . . . gasp! dare I say it? . . . actual, quality content instead of politicized mush.

Why are these three simple steps so necessary? Because the University of Nebraska College of Education isn't the only teachers' college in the land having an unbelievably stupid, self-defeating romance with the cultural Marxism of William Ayers.

Thanks to Regent Randy Ferlic and other leaders with common sense, Ayers' invitation to speak at the N.U. ed school's big event this weekend was rescinded. But Ayers and others are still protesting that he is an important guru with good ideas for K-12 education.

HAH!

According to reports about the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, which Ayers and President-elect Obama were supposed to employ ($150 million or thereabouts) to help the academic progress of inner-city Chicago kids in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but which improved their academic progress not a whit, here's what the money DID do:

-- Formed "site-based management councils" in inner-city Chicago schools, composed mostly of parents, negating the policy power of an elected school board or the college-trained staff in the central office. Therefore, the rabble got in charge of the decision-making and how the money was spent. Can you spell C-O-R-R-U-P-T-I-O-N? It was supposed to transfer power to the parents, which could be a good thing, if the parents deserved that power. But few, if any, of them had any leadership ability, much less knowledge of how to teach kids reading, writing and 'rithmetic. No wonder the schools made no progress. This is Marxism.

-- Got rid of most of the Caucasian principals in those troubled schools and replaced them with principals who were by and large African-American. The only reason the white principals were canned is that they were white. That might not be so bad, if only the new principals were better-skilled than the old ones. But they were not. No wonder the schools made no progress. This is Marxism.

-- Instead of teaching the teachers the ideas of content-based, politically-neutral education leaders such as E.D. Hirsch, Diane Ravitch and others, the only education "thinkers" that the Ayers group permitted to be heeded were "constructivists" who don't believe in teaching kids anything directly, but just allowing them to hang out at school and soak up the knowledge and skills by hook or by crook -- to "construct" their own knowledge bases. Which, of course, doesn't work worth a dang. The ed "thinkers" that Ayers and others promulgate on unsuspecting teachers include Paola Freire, Henry Giroux and Jonathan Kozol, all of whom say that traditional America hates and oppresses people of color, that capitalism and our constitutional republic need to be overthrown, and that little kids in school ought to write nasty letters criticizing state senators and members of Congress telling them what they should do, or else. And THIS is what the teachers are getting trained to believe, instead of the rules of spelling, how to teach rounding, how classic American literature of hundreds of years ago covered the same hot topics as our TV shows today, and THAT kind of stuff. Noooo. All the "old" stuff had to go. In its place: political propaganda. No wonder the schools made no progress. This is Marxism!

Here's a pretty good article on this whole "social justice" curriculum, bringing in the element of multiculturalism, which also is part of the Ayers radicalization, and is infecting our schools in a bad way:

www.the-two-malcontents.com/2008/10/23/beyond-%E2%80%98taco-night%E2%80%99-barack-obama-and-the-frightening-future-of-critical-multicultural-education/

2008-11-12T16:57:00.002-06:00

Charters: 12/15 Best Schools Serving Poor in California;
KIPP Schools: Even Leftist Educators Concede Kids Do Better In Them;
So WHY Are Nebraskans Or Anybody Else Still Talking About Bill Ayers?!?

I reported several times this past month that the reason the University of Nebraska College of Education should never have invited unrepentant domestic terrorist William Ayers to speak at its big wingding is that he isn't really an educator. Can you spell L - O - S - E - R?!?!

His multi-million dollar "education" program that he and President-Elect Barack Obama both participated in, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, was just another kind of . . . well . . . bomb. According to its own final report, published in 2003, it had "little impact on student outcomes." Total spent: $150 million. But it didn't help kids. Sheesh. See:

www.ccsr.uchicago.edu/downloads/p62.pdf

But the Ayers invitation / disinvitation is still making news in Nebraska. Why, oh why?

Note what the N.U. College of Education, the Education Committee of the Unicameral, the State Board of Education, and the Omaha Public Schools STILL don't seem to grasp:

CHARTER SCHOOLS AND SCHOOL CHOICE ARE THE ANSWER FOR POOR KIDS!

Comes now a Los Angeles Times story dated Nov. 11 by Mitchell Landsberg that reports that 12 of the top 15 public schools in California serving poor kids are charter schools. That's based on standardized test results, and poverty levels reflected by a minimum of 70% of the student body having low enough family incomes to be on free or reduced-price lunch programs.

How could this be? The charter school officials quoted said that the kids are motivated to succeed because the public schools they were in before were failing them. And distractions were at a minimum, because unlike those former public schools, the charter schools focused on math and language arts, and not all that social engineering stuff like Bill Ayers likes to teach.

Also note another new report that's out from education policy wonks Jeffrey Henig of Teachers College, Columbia University, and Kevin Welner, University of Colorado-Boulder -- both left-wing strongholds -- but these two concede that the charter schools and private schools run by the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) are doing a better job with the same tough-to-teach disadvantaged students as the traditional public schools.

Detractors of KIPP say that they "cream" the best students from local low-income schools in order to look good on paper. But these left-wing wonks didn't find that. In fact, they said KIPP kids are more likely to have done WORSE in their former schools than average, and were more likely to be of color than Caucasian. Also, the wonks reported, if a student gets into KIPP and stays in KIPP, the student will have a better outcome, than if the student stays in the more-expensive traditional public school.

The only problems they cite are high student and teacher turnover, but those are problems overall in the low-income neighborhoods and nothing to do with KIPP per se.

Read about it on:

www.epicpolicy.org/publication/outcomes-of-KIPP-Schools

What don't we have in Nebraska?

Charter schools and KIPP schools.

We don't have Bill Ayers, either, which is a start. But let's hope the ed bigwigs begin to grasp some of these concepts soon, before we lose a whole 'nother generation to educational malpractice.

2008-11-07T17:13:00.002-06:00

If This Happened in a Nebraska Classroom,
Would This Teacher Be Fired?

An episode of a pro-Obama teacher emotionally abusing students in her North Carolina classroom who were supporting John McCain was captured on film by a Swedish TV documentary team, and posted online.

The teacher called the Iraq war "senseless," and told a girl whose father was in military service over there that McCain would keep American troops in place for 100 more years, so her father would have to be there for 100 more years.

The media's Glenn Beck and Michelle Malkin, among others, have posted the video or a transcript on their websites. Both expressed shock.

You can see it here:

www.glennbeck.com/content/articles/article/198/17923/

We all believe that teachers should have academic freedom. A key reason is so that they can lead good discussions of current events, including politically-sensitive ones. But surely we can all also agree that it is a basic principle of teaching that you never, ever, ridicule or bully a student of any age, or put excessive political “spin” on anything.

So watch the video, and then answer this: if this happened in a Nebraska classroom, would the principal fire that teacher?

2008-11-06T13:06:00.004-06:00

GERING: 80% REDUCTION IN SPECIAL ED REFERRALS:
AND ALL IT TOOK WAS TO TEACH READING RIGHT!

Look at the fantastic success that the Gering, Neb., schools have enjoyed in improved reading achievement! New special education cases have been reduced by 80% because, at long last, the kiddies are being taught to read correctly. This is since Gering started a phonics-ONLY reading instructional program in elementary schools:

www.sraonline.com/download/DI/EfficacyReports/GeringSchools_DI.pdf

Can you imagine how much money the Omaha Public Schools would save by reducing its enormous special education rolls by 80%? Special education is the most expensive way to educate kids, and the fastest-growing educational spending category. Wouldn't it be great to reverse that disturbing trend?

This proves what I've been saying for years, that the vast majority of the students who are labeled "special ed" or "learning disabled" simply were not taught to read properly.

There is nothing wrong with their brains -- or there WASN'T, until they were literally addle-pated by Whole Language reading instruction. That's what most schools in Nebraska are still using, despite great news like this about phonics-ONLY instruction.

That's the bad news. The GOOD news is, even current special ed students can be brought up to speed in a relatively short amount of time with good curriculum like Gering selected . . . saving taxpayers countless millions of dollars, since costly remediation, re-remediation, and re-re-remediation won't be needed any more.

And in the future, kids won't be stigmatized and depressed with a bogus special ed label, which is the best news of all.

Wake up, educators, and give kids what they need in those early grades: PHONICS!

2008-11-06T12:57:00.003-06:00

KUDOS TO JIM ENRIGHT:
FINALLY, A CONSERVATIVE ON THE OPS BOARD

What a breath of fresh air! Someone whose lips can actually form the words "cut school spending" has been elected to the board of the Omaha Public Schools.

Jim Enright will do a great job of pointing out ways that the state's largest school district could cut spending on programs that are not cost-effective. He's a fan of charter schools, and of making much-needed nonclassroom spending cuts. He's wise, soft-spoken and determined, a great combination for a school board member.

Here's hoping his success and leadership will inspire other good people with common sense to run for school boards across the state. We need more Jim Enrights, who can balance the legitimate needs of the schools with the best interests of taxpayers.

2008-10-29T11:11:00.002-05:00

OMAHA ED STATS POINT TO
A BETTER CHANCE FOR KIDS WITH
A PRESIDENT McCAIN

A teacher friend shared some statistics in the Community Action Plan developed by Building Bright Futures. That's a nonprofit education organization that plans to use grants to fight poverty and support inner-city schools in their efforts to keep at-risk students in school.

The statistics are pretty alarming, and they point to a key fact with next Tuesday's election coming up:

Presidential candidate John McCain is for school choice and other fresh, new ways of meeting the educational needs of low-income students bubbling up from the private sector.

His opponent, Barack Obama, would route all his suggested interventions through the federal government. And that's even though the federal government has a terrible track record on education (Head Start has wasted billions, Title I has wasted billions, the racial achievement gap has widened since the 1960s, etc.). Plus, according to the 10th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, the federal government isn't even supposed to be INVOLVED in education.

My teacher friend said that the challenges she faces every day in her inner-city classroom would stun a horse. Now, she's a very sharp person and a very good teacher. If she feels that way, I don't see any way possible that public schools are going to be able to make anything close to improvement for most kids, given how ineffective they appear to be now.

It's obvious there needs to be diversity in our schooling approaches, the same way we have diversity in restaurant choices: big? little? locally-owned? part of a national chain? ethnic specialties? casual or formal? Why shouldn't parents be able to make those same kinds of choices when they decide where to place their child for school? It's a good question.

That makes sense to me, and it shows more and more how the socialistic Learning Community that we're moving toward -- if it remains in place and isn't knocked out by the courts -- would create a whole bunch of McSchools. They would all be on the same too-long school calendar, using the same no-good school curriculum and instructional methods, failing the same at-risk kids. And they would be giving us the same disappointing statistics like these for the $10,000+ per pupil per year that we taxpayers spend . . . because it's the SYSTEM that's the problem, not the kids.

But, anyway . . . you decide. Here are the stats on low-income students in Douglas and Sarpy Counties. This is what we have. Decide for yourself how likely we are to be able to change these stats by staying with the system we now have. Decide whether to vote for more of the same system (Obama), or real change through school choice (McCain):

-- One-third of low-income students cannot read or do math at grade level by mid-elementary school.

-- Half will drop out.

-- Of the 1,131 African-American students who entered kindergarten in a recent year, only 99 will go on to graduate from college, and far fewer than half of those are males.

-- Of 1,045 Latino students entering kindergarten, only 76 will go on to graduate from college.

-- Nearly one in three Omaha Public Schools 9th graders, 29%, are off track for graduation because they have failed core courses.