Posted 9:37 PM by Susan Darst Williams

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

Labels: Nebraska racial achievement gap, Success For All vs. balanced literacy in Nebraska