Posted 4:57 PM by Susan Darst Williams

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.

Labels: Bill Ayers, charter schools, KIPP

Posted 1:39 PM by Susan Darst Williams

Who SHOULD the N.U. Educators Invite to Speak?
Here Are Five Great School Reformers Who Deserve the Mike

The N.U. College of Education and Human Sciences leaders were not the brightest lights in the candelabra when they invited unrepentant terrorist William Ayers to be keynote speaker at the N.U. Teachers College's upcoming 100th anniversary celebration.

Now they have to come up with somebody else, quick. And it'd better be somebody good.

Considering that Nebraska has one of the widest racial achievement gaps in the nation, ideas for how to plug it might be a pretty focus for that speaker. Ayers and Obama proved totally impotent on that, even armed with $150 million of other people’s money to throw around in the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, which did nothing.

So who else could N.U. invite? Is there anybody out there who has proven how to help disadvantaged kids do better in school . . . without setting bombs, committing treason against the United States, or trying to kill anybody? Well, let’s see:

-- Another Chicagoan, only a REAL educational hero, Marva Collins. She started a private school for inner-city Chicago kids in 1975 with $5,000 of her own money. At the end of her first year, every single student tested at least five grade levels higher. Almost all of her students, who come from the lowest socioeconomic groups, manage to go on to college, including the Ivy League. Mrs. Collins has inner-city fourth-graders reading (and understanding!) Plato. And she speaks all over the country about how schools could cut the baloney, and start TEACHING again, to make a huge difference for kids. So she's pro-American, her educational style is very inexpensive, and she gets results. What a concept!

-- Former Chicago school superintendent Paul Vallas, who has acknowledged that the Obama-Ayers ed project in Chicago was an utter failure, is now trying to patch up the absolute mess that the lefties and Hurricane Katrina made of the New Orleans school system. He got there to find 97% African-American populations in the public schools, and 75% poor and on free or reduced-price lunch. What he has developed is so exciting and creative, it would be a slam-dunk to fix the failing schools within the Omaha Public Schools. Instead of a top-down, command-and-control structure like OPS now has, with no room for educational entrepreneurship, New Orleans is using a "Diverse Providers Strategy." There’s school choice, charter schools, magnet schools, plenty of freedom for principals of schools that are doing great or OK, and increasing focus and control over principals of schools that are still failing. There are tons of sharp young teachers from Teach For America, too – another fantastic school reform that’s in 1,000 schools across the country but not a single one in Nebraska. Why not get that going -- try what's working elsewhere? Again, what a concept!

-- Florida education commissioner Eric J. Smith is an expert in using quality curriculum to improve the academic achievement of all student groups, especially the disadvantaged. In 10 years, using back-to-the-basics curriculum, Florida has lifted the quality of its educational delivery so high that Florida Hispanic students now score higher on the National Assessment of Educational Progress than the mostly-white, overall, total student populations of 15 other states. And all it took was good curriculum?!? What a concept!

-- Lance Izumi is a California researcher who found that low-income students could still be high-achieving with inexpensive, cost-effective educational practices. Examples: learning to read with phonics, and concentrating on computation mastery to get ready for algebra instead of way-out “rainforest math” activities in grade school such as most public schools use today. His report, They Have Overcome: High-Poverty, High-Performing Schools in California, documented that there is no correlation between higher student achievement, and higher spending and higher teacher salaries. It's not the money; it's the curriculum and the expectations! We don’t need mountains of more money?!? What a concept!

-- Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin are teachers who started the KIPP Academy (Knowledge is Power Program) in inner-city Houston in 1994, got funding from Doris and Don Fisher of Gap Inc., and by 2007, their inexpensive, common-sense methods have spread to 66 KIPP schools in 19 states and the District of Columbia serving 16,000 students, almost all low-income and minorities. While only 20% from that sociodemographic group typically go on to college, among KIPP students, the percentage is 80%. Wow! Of course, we desperately need programs like KIPP in Nebraska, and don't have a single one. N.U. could pave the way by inviting them here to speak. What? Invite GOOD guys, who have succeeded in real life? Not washed-up, educationally bankrupt terrorists? Educators who've actually helped people, not hurt them, to come and speak and inspire? What a concept!!!

Labels: Barack Obama, Bill Ayers, Dave Levin, Eric J. Smith, KIPP, Lance Izumi, Marva Collins, Mike Feinberg, Paul Vallas

Posted 8:31 PM by Susan Darst Williams

N.U.'s Bruce Johansen Gets Egg on Face
With a Twisted Defense of Bill Ayers

Point of order in the attempted defense of Bill Ayers by University of Nebraska at Omaha communications professor, my one-time colleague, Bruce Johansen. Sigh! When are these university employees EVER going to learn to research first, and THEN write? Sheesh.

In The World-Herald today, Johansen pleaded for Ayers' "free-speech rights," painting him as a brave warrior for truth and justice who just happened to have an unpopular view, and the "far right" threw its money around to shut him up.

Wrongaroni. Ayers is an unrepentant terrorist and mad bomber, and the final report of the biggest education project he ever embarked upon, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, admits that the $150 million project had NO EFFECT on student outcomes (see last weekend's posting on this). It was, in other words, another bomb.

But then Johansen threw a bomb of his own, attempting to defend Ayers by dropping the name of fired University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill as another "hate object" of the right. Yeah! Like Ayers, he was a great guy and brave liberal who just happened to have a different opinion about things than they do.

Also wrongaroni. Ward Churchill was fired for fabricating research, falsifying sources, and plagiarizing other researchers. Like Ayers, he has a total goose egg in the credibility department. Read about it here. He sued, and the case is expected to come to trial next March. Hardly anybody thinks he has a chance. But we'll see.

I remember this, because someone once told me that Churchill reported that the U.S. Army killed hundreds of thousands of Native Americans by giving them smallpox-infected blankets on purpose in the 1800s. I believed that for years, and felt terrible. When Churchill’s horrendous charge came out after 9/11, that the people killed in the Towers deserved to die because they were somehow "little Eichmanns," a big academic investigation about him ensued. And it came out that he had MADE UP the small story. His plagiarisms and fabrications went on and on. I was really mad to have been deceived. Hell hath no fury like a researcher who's been lied to.

But Johansen, who's not such a bad guy, really, apparently didn't know all this. So he laid an egg with his attempted defense of one bad egg by pointing to another bad egg. Which just makes N.U. professors look even WORSE, sad to say. And one more thing about your defense of Ayers and his "free speech rights," Mr. Johansen: there are many, many ways to exercise one's free-speech rights WITHOUT hurting anyone or anybody's property. Violence is never right. Hatred and selfish deception are always wrong. Can we agree?

Ayers is a loser, a hater and a criminal. Churchill is a loser, a hater and a cheater. In the marketplace of ideas, Mr. Johansen, I'd say you let yourself get robbed. As for those two creeps: NO SALE!

Labels: Bill Ayers, University of Nebraska, Ward Churchill