Posted 9:32 AM by Susan Darst Williams

Go Big Ed has transferred to an expanded website,

www.GoBigEd.com

Hurry, and you can still get there before the bell rings. :>)

See you in class, and Go Big Ed!

Posted 11:59 AM by Susan Darst Williams

NEBRASKA IS SITTING ON $12.8 MILLION
IN UNSPENT FEDERAL EDUCATION FUNDS?

Nebraska has received an increase of 47% in federal Title 1 money since 2001, according to federal figures. Nebraska education leaders have been complaining that federal education regulations in No Child Left Behind are coming with insufficient funds to pay for them. You hear it a lot: “unfunded mandates.”

But the state is sitting on a backlog of $12.8 million in Title 1 funds . . . that haven’t been spent, according to the Congressman in charge of federal education funding.

Title I is the federal program intended to help disadvantaged children and the schools they attend.

The revelation comes from Rep. John Boehner of Ohio, chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Education and the Workforce.

According to government figures, Nebraska schools received $33.8 million in Title I funding in 2001, and $49.7 million last fiscal year. The money is available for academic remediation, teacher quality grants, Reading First, help with assessments, after-school programs, and impact aid for military dependents.

See the article and charts: www.house.gov/ed_workforce/issues/108th/education/nclb/nclbfundingreport.pdf

Posted 9:10 AM by Susan Darst Williams

BUMMER FOR BRAINIACS: NEBRASKA LAST IN THE HEARTLAND ON SAT SCORES

The scores are out for what many people say is the most prestigious exam in the world, the SAT college admissions test. Nebraska ranks 27th in the nation, even though we had one of the lowest participation rates among the states, and by all rights should have been right up there with the leaders because of that.

Moreover, comparing Nebraska’s SAT score with those of six surrounding states, we come in dead last.

The Cornhusker State’s best and brightest took the SAT. Only 8% of last spring’s graduating class participated, and they tend to rank high in their respective high-school classes. That compares to the national average participation rate per state of 48%. Only eight states had proportionately fewer students take the test than Nebraska.

So, considering the relative quality of the “pool” of test-takers, Nebraska should have posted a much higher score than states with higher participation rates. Since our kids didn’t, it raises questions about the curriculum and instruction for the most able students.

The state’s ranking is still above the national average, though. Average verbal and math tallies for Nebraska students were 1,045 out of a possible 1,800, compared to the national average of 1,026.

The SAT is considered to be more of an aptitude test than a test of curriculum mastery. Nebraska schools have definitely aligned their curriculum with the ACT, based in our neighboring Iowa, and we do better on the ACT test with a national ranking of 14th.

But the SAT is important because it is considered highly accurate for predicting how well students will do in college, particularly on the East and West Coasts. It also reflects the status of many states’ highest echelon of students, since mostly those in the top 10% of their classes take this test in Nebraska and many other Midwestern states. The SAT is much more popular on the East Coast; for example, 87% of New York seniors took the SAT in 2004. But even many of those with much-higher participation rates beat Nebraska’s score.

I’m convinced this is another bit of evidence that Nebraska has gone ‘way too far toward focusing on the bottom quartile of students – the ones with problems – and have been neglecting our brainiacs. This is what we get for doing away with traditional, content-based academics, and switching everything to a “teach to the test” system of Outcome-Based Education, in the 1990s. (Because it was so controversial, the educrats changed the wording from “outcomes” to “standards,” but it’s the same darn thing.)

Wednesday’s Go Big Ed story about education leader Cheri Pierson Yecke, who got rid of standards in the State of Minnesota while she was ed commissioner there and just was appointed chancellor of K-12 ed in the State of Florida, made me nostalgic. A decade ago, she came to Nebraska and spoke to a packed public meeting warning us not to lock ourselves in to the dumbing down of Outcome-Based Education. Our policymakers did it, anyway. Then she spoke before the Nebraska State Board of Education lobbying for an adoption of high-quality outcomes such as the ones Virginia had in place, if we were bound and determined to have standards. Again, our ed leaders pooh-pooh’ed her advice and we’re stuck with so-so standards. Sigh.

And it shows. For comparison purposes, our best and brightest don’t look too hot compared to those in surrounding states who took the SAT. In fact, we come in LAST among the seven heartland states:

State, score, participation rate:
Iowa, 1,195, 5%
Missouri, 1,172, 8%
Kansas, 1,169, 9%
Colorado, 1,107, 27%
Wyoming, 1,097, 12%
South Dakota, 1,091, 5%
Nebraska, 1,045, 8%

For more about the SAT:
www.collegeboard.com

Posted 9:04 AM by Susan Darst Williams

NEWS BRIEFS: AT LEAST THERE’S ONE PIECE OF GOOD NEWS OUT OF FLORIDA

The hurricane news isn’t good from the South, but at least this is a breath of fresh air: Cheri Pierson Yecke has been named chancellor of public education in the State of Florida.

She’s a no-nonsense, back-to-the-basics education leader who got rid of dumbed-down learning standards in the State of Minnesota in a brief stint as education commissioner. But then union pressure got rid of her. Why? Because she was too good at advocating for academics over social engineering.

Well, she has resurfaced in Florida with a great, new job. A brief resume:

Yecke, 50, most recently served as Distinguished Senior Fellow for Education and Social Policy at the Center of the American Experiment. Previously, she was Commissioner of Education for the State of Minnesota. Her prior education service includes Senior Advisor for USA Freedom Corps, The White House, and Director of Teacher Quality and Public School Choice for the U.S. Department of Education. In addition, Yecke served as Secretary of Education for the Commonwealth of Virginia, a member of the Virginia State Board of Education and a classroom teacher.

A native of Minnesota, Yecke received a bachelor's degree in history from the University of Hawaii, a master's degree in teaching from the University of Wisconsin, and a doctoral degree form in educational psychology from the University of Virginia. Her book, "The War Against Excellence: The Rising Tide of Mediocrity in America's Middle Schools," was released in 2003.


SCHOOL CHOICE: GOVERNORS GIVE THUMBS UP

There’s a cool study from the National Governors Association with all kinds of positive information about how school-choice programs are raising student achievement and lowering costs. Take a look-see at www.nga.org/Files/pdf/EDUCATIONCHOICE.PDF and tell me one more time how come Nebraska isn’t in to this exciting development in K-12 education.


VALUE-ADDED ASSESSMENT: A COOL IDEA IS SPREADING

Another exciting development that is unfortunately not yet here in Nebraska is called “value-added assessment.” It’s a system that helps reveal which teachers and which curriculum are increasing individual student achievement, and which ones are not.

According to the New York State School Boards Association (www.nyssa.org, article: “Value-Added Pilot Project Begins This Fall”), 15 districts in New York are going to try value-added analysis this school year, following the lead of Tennessee, Ohio, Colorado, Iowa and Pennsylvania for this statistically-exciting idea.

Comparing an individual student’s test scores with the same student’s scores the year before, after a year in the charge of a teacher, is a great way to give meaningful feedback to teachers. It helps avoid the tendency to blame the kids’ homes or the moon or whatever, when aggregate, group scores hide the progress or lack of it of individual kids. It can really help with grouping, curriculum selection, and so much more. And it’s a natural foundation for merit-pay bonuses for those teachers whose “value-added” contributions mean the most to kids.

There’s a national value-added conference planned in October in Columbus, Ohio, where among other topics, they’re going to discuss why it’s so darn hard to find teachers who have been trained in the tried-and-true instructional methods that really work. That includes the phonics-only reading instruction that’s so good for kids all along the income spectrum. It’s value-added to the max.

Somebody from Nebraska ought to attend this, because value-added assessment is a proven way to increase achievement and reward good teaching. Learn more on:

www.battelleforkids.org/b4k/rt/events/VAConf2005

Posted 10:23 AM by Susan Darst Williams

‘A PAGE YEAR’ WRITING PLAN: A SENSIBLE WAY TO GET A HAPPY ENDING

The educrats were all gushing last week over the results of the statewide writing assessment. You can see the scores for the various districts on www.nde.state.ne.us

The statewide average score was announced as 86%, which sounds like a “B” . . . except you have to remember that this isn’t an objective test given by a neutral, third-party outsider qualified to truly analyze writing skills. And the scores don’t mean what we think they mean.

Instead, each district sets its own “standard” for “proficiency,” but “proficiency” doesn’t mean you’re a crackerjack writer. It just means you can meet the standard – the minimum – the baseline. So if the writing sample is peppered with misspellings and run-on sentences, but displays what the scorer thinks is a nice “voice” and a unique approach, it’ll get a good grade.

Oy.

It’s also important to note that the students are being assessed on a short personal essay, responding with personal opinion and expression to a “prompt” from the state. That’s soooooo easy. Think about that, compared to an assessment in which they have to craft a piece of writing based on content-rich text that they have to read, comprehend, think about, and explain and expound upon.

So these assessments have no basis in reality for measuring how well students are going to be able to do college work, or perform business writing. I mean, how many times in a college classroom or a workplace are you asked to write a paper or a memo on how you FEEL about SUNSHINE?!?

It also has to be noted that we don’t see any work samples, so we can’t judge for ourselves how accurate or inflated the scores might be. I assessed writing once for District 66, and I was pretty appalled; I doubt the scorers on these statewide assessments included many professional writers. We don’t know the qualifications of the people doing the assessing, so the scores they give might be suspect.

Also, across the country with these statewide writing assessments, the trend has been that the first year, the “scores” are terrible, and everyone gets in a tizzy and runs around asking for more money. But the next year they’re a little better, and by the third year, the educators are getting warm and fuzzy headlines on how wonderfully the kids are doing with their writing. It looks as though that’s what’s happened here.

Meanwhile, all that’s happened is that teachers have mastered how to teach to those minimum standards. They haven’t REALLY helped make the kids more proficient writers – just able to comply with the “specs.”

I think we should do away with the whole thing, because it’s pointless, and instead encourage districts to take up a simple, common-sense, inexpensive strategy like this one described in today’s educational advice column:


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Better Writing: ‘A Page Per Year’ Plan

Q. What needs to be done to help students become better writers?

Writing instruction has “gone soft” in recent years, as teachers have aimed more toward creativity and expression than research, conventions and organization.

It’s apparent that writing about one’s feelings and relationships, or offering one’s opinions on a current topic in five paragraphs, have not done the job of preparing students for college. Up to 65% of two-year college students are in remedial English classes, and up to 34% of four-year college students need that intervention after an expensive K-12 education. The same need for retraining in writing goes in the workplace, where a great deal of money has to be spent by corporations to make up for what students have not been taught.

If research term papers are required in colleges, and good-sized reports in companies and in the public sector, it seems fairly simple to assume that the best preparation at the high school level for these tasks would be to have students write a research paper or two and prepare a major report or two. Yet a study done for The Concord Review in 2002 found that while 95% of high school teachers thought research papers wereimportant or very important, 81% never assign a 20-page paper and 62%never assign a 15-page paper of the sort students may be asked for in college.

If schools want to improve students’ ability to do the sort of writing that they will need in college and at work, they should undertake the Concord Review’s Page Per Year Plan. This would assign a one-page paper to each first grader, to write about something other than themselves, and add a page each year, so that 6th graders would attempt a six-page research paper, and 10th graders a 10-page one, and so on, until every single 12th-grader could come to know more about her subject than anyone else in her class by writing a 12-page research paper.

The plan is like good writing: it’s simple, it’s easy to remember, and it works!

Homework: See more good advocacy for writing on www.tcr.org

Posted 10:38 AM by Susan Darst Williams

BACK-TO-SCHOOL NEWS BRIEFS: LAPTOP LULU IN ATLANTA

This may be instructive for Nebraskans in more ways than one: the superintendent of a large public-school district in Atlanta announced his immediate resignation, effective today, because of a huge controversy over his plan to give laptop computers to all students in Grades 6-12.

The Nebraska connection: OPS, Westside and other districts have new, free laptop programs on large and small scales. At least so far here, though, there haven’t been lawsuits over the funding mechanisms, allegations of bias and deception in the bidding process, or a sharply-divided school board, as is the case in Atlanta.

The superintendent, Joseph Redden, is a retired three-star Air Force general who won raves a few years ago when he began to attack low test scores among disadvantaged pupils in the Cobb County schools. His first move is one that would make a lot of sense in OPS: he paid $1,000 bonuses to inner-city teachers, counselors, social workers and instructional specialists to try to address the staff turnover problem in low-income schools. He also gave significant new power to principals and made other businesslike changes.

Result: Cobb County now posts its highest average ever on the SAT, above the national average, and is offering other innovations such as online courses.

The Cobb County public schools are a lot like OPS: a mix of high-performing suburban schools, and low-performing, low-income schools with growing numbers of non-English speaking pupils.

Redden’s approach drew the most fire, ironically, from educators, who didn’t like having a career military person in the top job and vow to replace him with an educator.

The district has 104,000 students, 13,000 staff members, and Redden was paid $197,000.

See: www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/cobb/0805/24a1laptop.html


‘MATERNA-TEEN’ CLOTHES FOR 65 GIRLS AT ONE SCHOOL?

Sixty-five girls at a high school in Canton, Ohio, are pregnant, according to a report from World Net Daily. That’s 13% of the student body. School officials say they are baffled as to how it is happening, though one hopes they don’t mean that literally:

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=45934

Hey! All I can say is . . . what do you . . . excuse the expression . . . EXPECT? The “bring it on” style of comprehensive sex ed that’s in place in most high schools is shamefully lurid, ridicules chastity, and now is forcing us to reap the damaging, lascivious propaganda that’s been sown in the hearts and groins of our young, at taxpayer expense.

Eww! Eww! Ewwww! Good citizens just HAVE to start demanding that schools teach G-rated, abstinence-only sex ed, or we’re just going to see more appalling stats like this – and pregnant girls sitting in class with belly-button piercings. Eww! Eww! Ewww!!!


THE HOMESCHOOLING HOLOCAUST IN GERMANY

Nebraska is said to have among the most stringent homeschooling statutes in the nation. But thankfully, our approach to homeschooling is nothing like what’s going on in Germany. Here are excerpts from an account from an author friend of mine, Bruce Shortt:

A letter dated Wednesday from a German dad: “Our legal fight for homeschooling and religious freedom here in Germany is pretty much over. We just relocated 8 families into Austria after the government took custody of three families and are going after the others. But this is not all. The government is pursuing these families in Austria, asking the Austrian government to insure that the mandatory school attendance laws be inflicted on these families in Austria even though homeschooling is legal there. This would mean that the families would not be able to avoid the horrible social agenda that is also in the Austrian public schools. Germany seems to have made a deal already with France to control German's living in France. Thing is, Germany is the financial power of the EU so they have a pretty strong voice.”Letter dated May 21: “On Monday, a Baptist family living in Paderborn is scheduled to appear in court. The judge has already made known that he is going to take custody of their 9 year old child and give it to the state, placing the child in an orphanage because, for religious reasons, the family has removed the child from school. Their 19 year old son was lost through the public schools. Now that they are experiencing problems with their 9 year old they decided to bring him home and try to save him in the faith.”Letter dated April 20: “Today, two mothers were taken to prison in the state of Nordrhein-Westfalen. They were not homeschoolers but were charged with keeping their children from fulfilling the mandatory school attendance laws of their state. Their crime? They refused to allow their children to participate in a very, very ungodly school theater piece. First they received fines. When they refused to pay the fines they were handcuffed and taken to jail. One mother's husband is in the hospital for a very serious lung operation. He like the other father will face jail when his wife finishes her punishment in prison. When she was brought to the police station the officer in charge told her to go home and not tell anybody. Why? Because she was brought to prison with her baby. She still nurses her baby.The other mother remains in jail. She has 12 children. The next step is to take the children away!

. . .

“A professor of Bielefeld University, Christoph Gusy, was quoted in a news article to say ‘private schools have to prove that they are able to provide the state educational goals. All forms of education that do not enforce these goals are inherently unlawful. The duty to attend public school does not reserve the right of individual decisions of basic rights.’ Folks, this means that private schools in Germany must carry out the state's dictates and that the mandatory school attendance is not limited by the basic rights found in the German constitution. In other words religious and conscience and parental rights according to the constitution do not supercede in any way the mandatory school attendance laws. There are articles in our constitution that guarantee religious and conscience and parental rights but no article that dictates a mandatory school attendance. Never-the-less: Schulpflicht ueber alles! (mandatory school attendance above all else)”Yesterday, in Hamburg, a 9 year old girl's Muslim parents contested that their little girl should be made to wear a swim suit to attend the co-ed swim course in her school - which they believed to be a sin. The state argued that it was in the best interest of the child to learn to swim. The judge ruled that the state is principally entitled to ‘follow its own educational goals independent from the beliefs and wishes of the parents.’. . .

Shortt concludes with this chilling quote from a German pro-family activist:

”It doesn't get much worse than when, last week, two social workers and a judge visited a family in Paderborn in an attempt to force them to send their child back to school. One of our attorneys was present and quoted the law that would allow this family to homeschool their child. The judge immediately retorted that he didn't want to hear about the law.”You know what they say about the mid-20th Century Holocaust over there: NEVER AGAIN. I’d like to add: NEVER HERE.

Posted 10:59 AM by Susan Darst Williams

READIN’, ‘RITIN’, ‘RITHMETIC, AND RECRUITING NEW NEBRASKANS

There’s a really neat study on “Public Schools and Economic Development: What the Research Shows” that all Nebraskans ought to ponder. Search for it on the website of the Ohio-based think tank, the Knowledge Foundation:

www.kwfdn.org

An excellent education system does this for a local and state economy:
-- higher wages
-- higher productivity
-- improved property values
-- better quality of life, because well-educated people HAVE a better quality of life
-- social stability
-- positive ripple effect of economic impact, even in low-income areas, if the schools are small, local and community-oriented

I like these two section headings and want to learn more about how these apply to Nebraska’s schools:

“The Role of Public Schools in Business and Worker Location Decisions”

“The Impact of Well-Maintained Schools on Student Performance”

This is the kind of information we need to be focusing on, to build Nebraska. Too often, educators and education policymakers are “compliance-based” instead of “performance-based.” They think if they make plans and budgets, and stick to them, and fulfill regulatory mandates, they’re doing well.

Unh-unh. It’s how the system that they’re operating WORKS.

And a key measurement of that is in economic development. If it isn’t so hot and you wish it could be, look at taxes, sure; look at weather; look at amenities.

But look, extra hard, at public schools. They make or break business moves, every darn day. Are we as competitive as we could be? That’s a good question. Let’s ask it!

Posted 8:47 AM by Susan Darst Williams

HATS OFF TO THE CLASS I LEADERSHIP

On the surface, getting rid of all those tiny schools in rural Nebraska makes sense. The idea is to cut down on administrative costs and nonclassroom spending by conglomerating as many kids as possible into fewer, larger districts. Then we could pay teachers more, because there would be a bigger tax base behind them and larger class sizes per teacher to justify the added salary.

But that’s just how it looks on paper. In the heart and now in the mind, too, thanks to a Class I schools defender who is also a good writer, it is clear that it would be a mistake.

George Lauby of Lexington wrote an op-ed published Monday that made many good points in support of the petition drive to repeal LB 126, the consolidation bill, but here was the best one:

The Legislature passed LB 126 to consolidate Class I school districts into the town schools mainly on the claim that it would streamline administration. But that has already happened to the max: in the 1960s, the Nebraska Department of Education was overseeing 2,000 Class I school districts. Today, there are 200, Lauby wrote. That’s only one-tenth as much to oversee, and heaven knows the NDE staff has grown since then. So the claim’s a red herring. But we knew that.

Lauby made some other good points, notably the huge loss of local control and the un-American specter of wiping out 200 elected school boards in one fell swoop, against their wishes. Here’s another key factor:

The academic achievement of the kids and spending levels of the grown-ups are just fine in Class I schools, meeting or exceeding state standards and averages. Problems with achievement or spending would be the only legitimate reasons to consolidate. Since they aren’t there, it’s clear that this is simply a power play that is not child-focused and family-focused . . . but bureaucracy-focused and, frankly, union-focused.

Lauby didn’t say so, but it’s a pretty good bet that the union is behind the Class I assassination in order to get the basis up for teacher pay statewide. Teachers in tiny country schools do a bang-up job for lots less than their urban counterparts. Why? It’s not because they’re worth less. It’s because a lot of the budget authority in the Class I schools has been transferred to the corresponding town schools, so the Class I school boards simply don’t have the money to pay. Also, obviously, the cost of living is much less in a rural area, so you don’t have to pay a high salary to be fair to a teacher.

The union hates this, so it works through legislators, whose political campaigns the union has helped fund, to kill the Class I schools so that union members can get their hands on more dough – whether or not that’s what’s best for children and their families.

You think this isn’t real, real important to the union? It’s back to school time. Go to the Nebraska State Education Association website and see what their lead item is. Not anything to do with starting the school year off right, improving academics, making teachers better, improving relations between school and home . . . but just take a guess: www.nsea.org

Gov. Heinemann and GOP gubernatorial candidate Dave Nabity have both signed the petition in defense of country schools. That’s admirable. Efforts are going on feverishly to come up with signatures of 10% of the electorate in order to get the bill repealed. Let’s hope they prevail.

Lauby is a Class 1 board member in Dawson County and regional coordinator of Nebraskans for Local Schools, www.nebraskansforlocalschools.org Also see www.class-1s-united.org, run very ably by Marilyn Meerkatz.

Posted 8:38 AM by Susan Darst Williams

SCHOOL CHOICE: IS NEBRASKA GETTING LEFT IN THE DUST?

The Arizona-based think tank, www.goldwaterinstitute.org, had an online story Monday on school choice that gave me the heebie jeebies, if not the hives. Nebraska has hardly any school-choice options – no vouchers, no charter schools, no tuition tax credits.

But according to Goldwater, nearly a fourth of K-12 students nationwide are opting now for an array of public and private options. Meanwhile, except for homeschooling, or allowing a relative handful of public-school kids to attend public schools outside their neighborhoods, we’re being left behind this trend.

State legislatures have established seven school-voucher programs and six education tax-credit programs since 1990, the article reported. All in other states, of course.

Goldwater reported that 1.2 million children now attend charter schools – not a single one in Nebraska, though, since they aren’t legal here.

Goldwater reported:

“Florida has been a leading state in expanding school-choice options. Through the creation of three statewide choice programs - A+ Scholarships for children in failing schools (800 students); McKay Scholarships for children with disabilities (18,000 students); and tax-credit scholarships for low-income children (15,000 students) - Florida has led the way in the creation of school choice.

“The Miami-Dade public school system recently announced its intention to create new magnet-school options as a response to the competition.

"’We cannot be ostriches anymore with our heads in the sand,’ a district official told the Miami Herald.

"’They either get on board with the changing landscape of public education, or they're going to be left behind, with no students and no teachers,’ a Miami teacher union official stated.

“Harvard, Stanford and University of Wisconsin scholars have established that children using choice programs score higher on achievement tests. The evidence concerning children remaining in their public schools is even more compelling.

“Harvard economist Caroline Minter Hoxby studied Arizona public elementary school test scores and found that those schools facing high levels of competition from charter schools made gains in fourth-grade reading four times as large as the other schools.

“While choice reform continues to advance, the issue has unfortunately become embroiled in a political controversy in Arizona.

“Last session, the Arizona Legislature passed and Gov. Janet Napolitano agreed to sign - and then vetoed - a significant expansion in school choice for low-income parents in the form of a tax credit for corporations providing scholarships to students to attend independent schools.

“While the veto has become a heated dispute, it is important to recognize that the ultimate winners from the resolution will be thousands of Arizona children who will have the opportunity to attend a school best matching their needs as chosen by the parents.

“Arizona badly needs this legislation and more like it, especially in areas where the need for options is most urgent.

“High-performing public and charter schools often have years-long waiting lists, while nearby independent schools have empty seats. Despite the progress made toward choice in Arizona, desperate parents often face terrible difficulty in finding a seat for the child when a change is needed. Upper-income people fled poorly performing public schools decades ago by exercising the most common form of school choice: buying a home in the suburbs.

“Giving the children of low-income families a similar chance to have their parents choose a school that serves their needs spurs public school reform and equality of opportunity, one of the few things upon which all Arizonans genuinely agree.”

The article appended some studies on point, including their own:

http://www.goldwaterinstitute.org/article.php/431.html

Here’s a study on how a school-choice program for low-income kids in Minnesota is predicted to save taxpayers $41 million over the next six years because the kids will be attending private schools that cost less than the public schools that are now failing them:

http://www.friedmanfoundation.org/news/2005-07-13.html

And here’s an article on how school choice helps achievement and saves money, from the Harvard economist mentioned in the Goldwater story:

http://www.educationnext.org/20014/68.html

Now I not only feel itchy, but I’ve got tears in my eyes. Must be because Nebraska’s getting left in the dust . . . when we should’ve been out in front on this wagon train.

Posted 9:51 AM by Susan Darst Williams

BILLION-DOLLAR TEACHER PENSION SHORTFALL A REAL POSSIBILITY

Did you catch, in Sunday’s paper, that if you added the $750 million projected shortfall in the state teachers’ pension fund to the $191 million shortfall projected for Omaha Public Schools retirees, that is getting uncomfortably close to a BILLION dollars? If the market goes south, we taxpayers are going to have to come up with a big chunk of that to cover our pension promises to our state’s public-school employees.

Ewwww!!!

Funny how the union lobbyists were soaking people’s hankies all across the state a few years ago about the “starvation wages” we pay teachers here in Nebraska. Yeah, right. Then they got the “Rule of 85,” the nation’s sweetest teacher-retirement deal. They did it under the leadership of longtime union activist Joe Higgins, now a member of the State Board of Education for the south Omaha area. He really should be pinned with this big shortfall now, and lead us out of the quagmire with pension reform, and stat.

Teachers can retire early, at age 55, with full pension benefits, with 30 years of teaching service (55 + 30 = 85 and hence the name). They chopped five years off the retirement age, with cost-of-living protection to boot, which helped swell the numbers.

The instant they got that sweetheart deal, they shut up about teacher salaries, for the most part. And now we know why.

Ewwww!!!

NOT TO BE A KILLJOY, BUT . . . WAS THIS TRIP REALLY NECESSARY?

Did you read the story in the Sunday World-Herald about all the teachers who are going, at taxpayer expense, to Spanish immersion classes for three weeks at a time down in Mexico? It’s supposed to give the teachers “cultural insight” that helps them teach non-English speaking kids better.

Five or six hundred Nebraskans are said to have gone through a University of Nebraska at Omaha program alone.

The Omaha Public Schools has sent about eight teachers a year, for the past six years, at a cost of $1,600 per person, through a federal grant of tax dollars. That comes to $76,800. Most of the kids being served with this cost are non-English speaking children of illegal immigrants. Stop and ponder what that tax money might have bought in the way of learning materials and teacher time for English-speaking American citizens. It’s a slap in the face to parents of inner-city kids, most of them African-American, who are full-fledged American citizens, but posting those low test scores in OPS.

I’m not saying we’re not supposed to be compassionate to children no matter whether their parents break the law or not . . . but come on.

Come to think of it, my husband and daughter and I spent Sunday afternoon at the Henry Doorly Zoo, and I was amazed at how many Spanish-speaking families there were down there. They weren’t even making an attempt to weave some English words in there with all that Spanish, which is too bad for their kids, since hearing English is an important building block to being able to read it and write it.

Here’s an idea: for a whole lot less money, we could provide an “immersion” experience for our teachers by buying them a ZOO PASS.

BRIDGE-BUILDING FOR BACK-TO-SCHOOL TIME

Here’s my Show ‘n’ Tell for Parents column for today. If you have more suggestions along these lines, drop me a line.

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Building a Strong Bridge Between Parent and Teacher

Q. What are some things parents can do to have a good working relationship with teachers?

It’s a lot easier in grade school, when there’s only one, or a couple. But through high school, there are certain things every parent probably should do, and a number of things you could do, to befriend, support and encourage a teacher. Here are some suggestions:

-- Meet the teacher and paraprofessional, ever so briefly, at an authorized time the week before school starts. Don’t just drop in, because teachers are really busy that week getting ready for the children. You can call ahead and make an appointment, limiting it to five minutes so that the teacher knows it isn’t going to be a Black Hole. A good school will have time set aside for parent visits, or you can call the office and find out what time might work. Just introduce yourself, say you want your child and that teacher to have a great year together, you’d welcome a call or email at any time, and you’re there to help.

-- Volunteer, even if you work full-time. The teacher works full-time, too, you know. Sign up to read to the kids for 20 minutes once a week, if you possibly can, or to help with room parties, field trips, straightening bookshelves, or whatever’s needed. Being willing to help and present in the classroom is a huge influence on a teacher’s attitude about your child in the early grades. In the later grades, ask for helpful things you can do in the evenings, at home, such as collecting project supplies, collating, stapling, preparing bulletin boards and so forth.

-- Watch how you volunteer at school. Everyone’s pressed for time, but the quality of your volunteer time should be devoted toward helping meet the children’s needs, and having contact with teachers. You might want to pass up those very helpful, but tangential jobs, such as organizing the school carnival or gift-wrap sale. Make it a high priority to give your time to help with the learning process directly.

-- Communicate through notes, especially thank-you’s. You’d be surprised how boring a teacher’s mail is, so a day-brightener would be much appreciated.

-- Never miss conferences, Open House or big productions such as concernts and science fairs. If you and your spouse really can’t be there, arrange an alternate time for a conference and send a representative, such as a grandparent, to a special event.

-- If you have concerns or don’t like the way things are taught, hold your fire until you feel you have a pretty strong relationship with the teacher. If you “shoot” too soon, it’ll come off as an attack. Even then, follow the 80/20 rule: make sure 80% of the teacher’s contact with you is positive, and less than 20% negative.

-- Don’t try to flatter the teacher, or suck up, but sincerely say up front, “I feel we’re in this together,” and “I want the best for my child and for all children; how can I help?” It will be music to that teacher’s ears.

Homework: An excellent guide is the book, “Helping Your Child Succeed in Public School” by Cheri Fuller (Tyndale House, 1999).

Posted 10:58 AM by Susan Darst Williams

IN COLUMBUS, PHONICS IS TEACHING A TOUGH CROWD HOW TO READ

Came across this inspiring news story from Columbus, Neb., which should be read by every teacher and every taxpayer concerned about the reading skills of Nebraska’s disadvantaged children.

The itty bitties at Sunrise Elementary School in Columbus are 81% Hispanic and 62% English Language Learners. The mobility rate there is an astounding 35% per year. What a challenge to teach reading.

But with a federal Reading First grant through No Child Left Behind -- $250,000 over three years – teachers were able to learn a new approach and work with the kindergartners through third graders for 90 minutes a day. They’ve lifted a substantial number of those kids up into reading competence.

Word has it that the same success is being marked in the other 11 Reading First grant schools across the state.

What made the difference? What do you think, silly? What have people like me been SAYING for all these years?

Well, what’s working is not really a new approach. It’s the old, time-tested, tried-and-true approach.

Systematic, intensive, explicit phonics instruction – not the Whole Language gobbledygook that most Nebraska grade schools are still using – is what’s working. If phonics will work this well with kids who come to school with very sparse language skills, imagine what phonics could do for the vast majority of Nebraska kids.

See for yourself:

http://www.columbustelegram.com/articles/2005/06/17/news/news1.txt

Posted 9:50 AM by Susan Darst Williams

HOORAY: NEBRASKA DOES GREAT ON THE ACT

Nebraska came out very well in Wednesday’s announcement of average ACT scores, compared to our neighboring states.

In analyzing averages, you have to consider two numbers: the score, and the participation rate. Nebraska had the second-highest score and the second-highest participation rate, of our seven-state “neighborhood.” Iowa’s kids edged ours on the test, which has a perfect score of 36, but we had significantly more kids taking it, so you could say our numbers actually look better.

Here are the numbers:

Nebraska, 21.8, 76%
Missouri, 21.6, 70%
Kansas, 21.7, 76%
Colorado, 20.2, 100%
Wyoming, 21.4, 69%
South Dakota, 21.5, 76%
Iowa, 22.0, 66%

Note that Colorado and Illinois have both mandated that all students take the ACT, not just the college-bound. That’s a great idea, and it’s working very well to raise everybody’s sights higher in the Rocky Mountain state. We should think about doing the same.

As for high schools in the metro area, wow! Westside made eye-popping progress on its average ACT score over the last year. They moved from a 23.4 to a 24.2 on the 36-point scale. That’s tremendous. According to The World-Herald’s published chart Wednesday, it looks to be the highest around the metro area.

Of course, that’s not counting all the Catholic high schools, most of which probably beat Westside, as they have for years. The last time I saw a straight-up comparison, Prep, Duchesne and Marian all beat Westside and all other public high schools by a couple of points. Brownell-Talbot did, too, and I think Concordia, the Lutheran school, did, too. But now, for various reasons, the archdiocese doesn’t let itself get swept up in the numbers game and participate in this annual chart. And I don’t know what happened to the other private schools.

Anyway, there are two other things you have to consider in looking at Westside’s score:

-- The chart should have included the exclusion rate. How many students enrolled in the graduating class have been labeled “learning disabled,” and were excluded from taking the test, having their scores count or receiving special accommodations, like having questions read to them? The chart indicates that Westside reported 75% of its 2005 seniors took the test, which is much lower than the 84% at Millard West and four other public high schools, including Omaha North. I bet the difference is LD kids. Westside is known to have a higher than normal percentage of LD kids, and a lot of “ungraded” kids in special ed who might stay in high school an extra year or two or three – so they would not be included in the group of “seniors” even though they are the same age. That ratchets up the academic ability of the overall group in a way that could be considered mildly deceptive.

-- The chart should have included the raw numbers of students who took the test and the number of students in the 2005 graduating class. So if Westside had 300 kids graduate – I’m just guessing – but only 200 took the ACT last year, then you can see how many classmates were actually excluded, and that the participation rate was closer to 67% than the 75% claimed, which is what I suspect.

But any way you slice it, Westside’s scores look good, at least on paper, and that’s progress. Congratulations are due!

To check out Nebraska’s latest scores compared to the rest of the country, remember the importance of the participation rate, and see http://www.act.org/news/data/05/states.html

Posted 9:49 AM by Susan Darst Williams

HOW ANOTHER CITY IS HELPING SPANISH-SPEAKING CHILDREN

Most of Nebraska’s English Language Learners speak Spanish and come from homes that are new to English. Significant numbers of them have academic achievement that is below grade level, largely because of the language barrier. Though lots of money is spent on them in the public schools, there’s a push afoot to spend even more.

But we don’t need no stinkin’ equity lawsuits, or higher taxes, or tons more state aid.

There’s a better way. In San Antonio, in a low-income school district that is 97% Hispanic, they’ve found it. And it’s called “school choice.”

We ought to take a hard look at it . . . muy rapido!

Hispanic children in that San Antonio district who received privately-funded tuition to attend local private schools posted gains on the Stanford-9 standardized tests of 5% to 7% per year over the first four years of the program. They also cut the achievement gap between Hispanic kids and the state average on the Texas statewide basic-skills exam by two-thirds in that four-year period.

There are now 1,916 children whose parents opted them out of the public-school district into private schools under this program, while 13,164 children remained. The program hasn’t hurt the public-school district: in fact, teacher salaries have increased by 23% in four years there, and funding is up by $1,000 per pupil.

So an amazing improvement in academic achievement for nearly 2,000 children was accomplished without a cent of extra tax funding, without drawing away any resources from the public-school district, and the local public-school district wasn’t financially hurt and, in fact, is better off as a result of this privately-funded competition.

The private funding came from a 10-year, $50 million program called “HORIZON” run by the Children’s Educational Opportunities Foundation, www.ceofoundation.org

You can read a study of this program posted on the website of the Hispanic Council for Reform and Education, www.hcreo.org/study/CEO%20Report.pdf

Posted 10:50 AM by Susan Darst Williams

HOW ANOTHER STATE IS BATTLING ITS RACIAL ACHIEVEMENT GAP

North Carolina is making an admirable, all-out effort to close the racial achievement gap among its public-school students. Since the test scores from the Omaha Public Schools revealed the persistent, decades-old gap between urban and suburban children, black and white, instead of whining and battling each other about the OPS consolidation controversy, it would behoove us to try to do something constructive like this.

The North Carolina plan features an Advisory Commission on Raising Achievement and Closing Gaps. They keep the elected State Board of Education and state schools superintendent informed on progress. Members include educators and retired educators, social services executives, elected officials, parents, business people, an attorney specializing in school law, a university person, and so on.

Here are the 11 recommendations the state is pursuing, and you can see the quality of this initiative on www.ncpublicschools.org/schoolimprovement/closingthegap

Recommendation 1. The state should take steps to reduce, then eliminate, the disproportionate number of minority students assigned to special education. Schools should provide descriptive data, in tabular format, that will allow people to compare the percentage of students assigned to the various categorical special education programs in local districts with state averages in those same categories and with those in the nation.

Recommendation 2. The state should recognize its obligation to ensure that students have an equal opportunity to learn by promoting, encouraging, and funding instructional approaches that expose minority students currently functioning at or near grade level to advanced content, challenging strategies, and high-quality work.

Recommendation 3. The state should initiate a professionally designed public information campaign to get the attention of parents and local communities.

Recommendation 4. The state should direct each district to request that each school: 1) prepare an annual action plan for creatively seeking to improve the school's image with parents and to raise the level of connectedness to parents in general and specifically to those not usually involved with the school; 2) keep records of parent involvement; and 3) consider voluntary home visits by teachers and administrators for the simple purpose of building a trusting relationship between home and school.

Recommendation 5. The state board and the state superintendent should make a public commitment to design and fund a required, but flexible, professional development initiative that will ensure that classroom teachers acquire the knowledge, skills, and dispositions needed to be successful in teaching a diverse population.

Recommendation 6. The state should provide the substantial time that classroom teachers need to update their skills and gain new skills in working with diverse populations by requiring that veteran classroom teachers accept 11-month contracts once every four years. The report noted that, during 2003-04, 25% of all teachers (regardless of funding source for salary) could participate in five days' training on issues related to understanding and respecting cultural diversity and on appropriate instructional strategies. The salary cost for an additional five days for 25% of all teachers would be roughly $20 million. Over a fouryear period, all teachers could participate in the training for a cost (in salaries only) of roughly $80 million.

Recommendation 7. The state should create, fund, and support special seminars and course development for existing university teacher education faculty members that are designed to ensure that they command and model the specific knowledge, skills, and dispositions necessary to prepare preservice teachers to be successful in teaching diverse student populations.

Recommendation 8. The state board should seek the support of the president of the University of North Carolina and the chancellors of various campuses to require all search committees for new teacher education faculty members to assess and rate applicants as to the knowledge, skills, and dispositions they will need to teach preservice teachers to work with diverse student populations.

Recommendation 9. The state should demonstrate its seriousness about resolving the shortage of qualified classroom teachers in North Carolina who are prepared to be successful with diverse populations. It should design and implement a specific preparation delivery system that provides monetary incentives for high school and community college graduates who want to teach - preparing, graduating, and placing them in high need schools and teaching areas. Work on this plan has already begun.

Recommendation 10. The state board should add a "closing the gap" component to the accountability system that sets a universal standard and sets measures and incentives at the school district level. More specifically, the commission recommends that the state board explore setting a "universal standard" by which to measure the performance of racial/ethnic populations and socioeconomic groups. For example, the one standard studied by the commission is for 95% of all ethnic/racial and socioeconomic groups to reach grade-level proficiency by the year 2010.

Recommendation 11. The state should commission a study to examine and profile the history of organized education for American Indians and African Americans in North Carolina. A document should be generated that tracks the formal academic training of these two cultures from the beginning of public schooling to the present. Specific attention should be paid to the state's assumption of responsibility for educating these two groups within the public schooling system.

Posted 10:50 AM by Susan Darst Williams

DOES OPS REALLY NEED MORE MONEY?

We saw the test scores in the Omaha Public Schools over the weekend in The World-Herald, and we winced. Ouch! And to think they’re spending $8,000 per pupil. For 20 pupils, that’s $160,000 per classroom. Circling the drain . . . going, going. . . . Well, it’s not THAT bad, but it’s not exactly deserving of a berth in the “School Cost-Effectiveness Hall of Fame.”

Plus, they’re suing us for more of our hard-earned tax dollars through more state aid to education for themselves, and they’re attempting to swallow up suburban schools to get still more money from an expanded property-tax base.

Yet the truth is, more money will NOT buy more academic achievement for low-income kids. It just won’t. Never has, never will.

So how come the teachers’ unions and urban school administrators keep crying for more money? Because they don’t know what they don’t want to know, I guess. They’re misinformed, probably on purpose.

And here’s how it probably happened:

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

The Lie of ‘Inequitable School Funding’

Q. How come Jonathan Kozol was listed in a recent book as one of the 100 Americans who are wrecking this country? I thought his work exposing the problems of inner-city schools has been extremely helpful to improving the educational outcomes of inner-city children. Not so?

You’re referring to the longtime education author and activist whose 1990s book, “Savage Inequalities,” inspired a barrage of equity lawsuits by public school districts against states.

Districts with a disproportionate share of low-income pupils have sought, and often won, larger amounts of tax dollars for education than middle-class schools receive. Billions in extra federal and state tax dollars have been poured into inner-city schools since the 1960s because of the claim that disadvantaged kids were being discriminated against by school financing systems that reward the rich.

Of course, that ignores the overwhelming evidence by educational economists such as Caroline Hoxby of Harvard and Eric Hanushek of the University of Rochester, now Stanford. The evidence shows that racial and class disparities in academic achievement are caused by factors other than money.

When children aren’t getting the basic skills but can’t escape the monopoly schools, the politicized rules of the teachers’ unions, and the erroneous but widespread leftist philosophies of the teachers’ colleges influenced by progressive icons such as Jonathan Kozol, you can spend double or triple the amount of money per child, and they still won’t do as well.

Most everyone outside the education establishment agrees that it’s not the amount of funding that is causing the disparities in academic achievement between black and white, rich and poor – but the abandonment of the teaching of basic skills in inner-city schools by leftist educators who think schools are for social change, not instructing children.

Kozol’s book “On Being a Teacher,” which is popular in ed schools, was based on his study of the school system in communist Cuba. Those schools teach the “deconstruction” of knowledge and skills that is used in communist propaganda. These radically anti-intellectual and anti-individualistic ideas have infiltrated U.S. schools today in the form of whole language and whole math instead of direct instruction in basic reading and math skills, an abhorrence of competition, and an insistence on “academic leveling” in which no child can excel but no child can fall behind. That’s educational Marxism, but few educators realize it.

Kozol was ranked ninth in the book “100 Americans Who are Screwing Up America” by former CBS News correspondent Bernard Goldberg (Medium Cool Communications, 2005).

Ironically, Kozol’s 1967 book, “Death at an Early Age,” which implied that there was widespread institutional racism in urban schools, was a key instigator of court-ordered busing. Busing wound up making urban schools much more segregated and academically and financially shaky than they were before.

Homework: Writer Sol Stern gives an in-depth look at Kozol’s impact on:
http://www.city-journal.org/html/10_1_americas_most.html

Posted 8:22 AM by Susan Darst Williams

HAWAII’S STATE-RUN SCHOOLS: WORTH AN ‘ALOHA'?

Somebody wrote in to The World-Herald Public Pulse Thursday and proposed that Nebraska chuck all its public-school districts run by individual school boards and administrations, and go with one statewide school district, like Hawaii.

There’s just one answer for that suggestion: THROW THAT GUY INTO A RAGING VOLCANO!

Reasons why:

-- Hawaii has among the nation’s worst schools. Nearly half of their fourth-graders and eighth-graders scored below a basic level of competence on a national math exam recently. See http://www.ncpa.org/iss/edu/pd101201a.html

-- Parents with money have long since abandoned the public schools in the Aloha State, leaving them disproportionately full of disadvantaged children with problems. Hawaii has one of the highest levels of private-school enrollment in the country, at more than 20%.

-- Educators have no say-so in budgeting, who’s going to be hired as a teacher, and where they are going to teach. It’s all done by the governor and state legislature.

The main reason his plan wouldn’t hold up, even in a Nebraska-sized bikini, is that it eliminates representative government.

With state-run schools, you lose any semblance of local control by getting rid of all those elected school boards.

If you have a beef about something in your child’s school, there’s nobody local who can do anything about it. You have to go to the State Capitol and meet with a faceless, heartless, spineless, brainless, upless, downless educrat.

Rots o’ ruck. It’d be kind of like doing a hula in a grass skirt in front of a herd of cattle. You’d put a lot of energy into it . . . but all you’d get would be . . . well . . . bull.

Posted 2:35 PM by Susan Darst Williams

GREAT (?) MINDS THINK ALIKE

Speaking of my call for out-of-the-box thinking in improving Nebraska's K-12 education system, I really have to commend to you this op-ed by Omahan Dave Nabity. He's a business owner and a Republican who is running for governor against two very nice guys, Sen. Tom Osborne and Gov. Dave Heineman, but there's no doubt in my mind that Dave Nabity would be the best choice for that job.

I read this, and just thought to myself: "Wow. Don't quit your day job. This guy can think, and he can write, too."

It's very encouraging that someone like him sees what I see: a need to reorganize and rethink the way we deliver education, especially for our most vulnerable young citizens in our inner city neighborhoods and rural Nebraska:

http://www.omaha.com/index.php?u_pg=609&u_sid=1479915

Posted 2:28 PM by Susan Darst Williams

FOLLOW THE TEACHERS’ LEAD: THEY’RE MOVING TO THE ‘BURBS, TOO

Footnote to Wednesday’s blockbuster announcement of a plan to deconsolidate the Omaha Public Schools to come up with six moderate-sized school districts in the Omaha area, instead of one big one with lots of problems and five small ones with lots of money:

Guess what? That’s what the TEACHERS want. Urban teachers are leaving behind the troublesome budgets, instability, and so-so management of big inner-city districts for brighter horizons and easier-to-teach pupils in suburban districts. It isn’t really for higher pay, despite what the unions say.

Take a look at today’s story in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, “Urban teacher exodus swells”:

http://www.startribune.com/dynamic/story.php?template=print_a&story=5554292

That just makes the idea of deconsolidating OPS even more attractive. We could keep these good teachers in the inner-city classroom if we’d split up a lot of OPS among the five suburban districts that surround it, and give inner-city teachers more financial resources backing them up, more stability, and better management techniques.

And to the extent that we could carve into the overspending at OPS, and pare down the bureaucracy, we would free up additional money to give teachers a pay raise, to boot.

The whole idea is how to meet the needs of the students better. But I’d say meeting the needs of the teachers is a close second.

Posted 3:42 PM by Susan Darst Williams

AN OUT-OF-THE-BOX SOLUTION FOR THE OPS CONSOLIDATION MOVE

You could call the attempt by the Omaha Public Schools to gain a monopoly on public education within city limits the “WalMart-ification” of K-12 education in the metro area. It’d be wiping out what little competitive spark and personality we have now, with our modest array of public school choices.

Is that really what we want?

It’d also wipe out several elected school boards, and yield even more control and say-so to the teachers’ unions and educrats instead of voters, parents and taxpayers.

Meanwhile, everybody from Bill Gates on down knows that competition is better than monopoly, including in education. The optimal size for a school district, both in terms of cost-efficiency and learning productivity, is about 6,000 students; the proposed “superdistrict” would have more than 10 times that.

Meanwhile, educational research is clear that smaller is better for meeting individual learning needs, especially those of disadvantaged children. That means smaller class sizes in smaller schools in smaller districts – the polar opposite of what OPS offers.

Rewarding OPS with millions of new operating dollars and thousands of new students seems ironic given the fact that, for whatever the reason, OPS has one of the largest achievement gaps between rich and poor, white and black, in the country. OPS has unacceptably high dropout rates, mostly mediocre test scores, and ‘way too many minority kids labeled as “learning disabled.”

It has a rigid culture that mostly rejects simple measures that help instill good learning and behavior habits -- like teaching reading with phonics, and teacher-centered instruction instead of group-based instruction -- because they aren’t the current “fads,” like Whole Language and child-centered classrooms.

It seems like an impossible culture to reform, one that other districts obviously don't want to join.

So I’ve been wondering: what would be a better way to resolve this?

I mean, do we have a choice? Must we let OPS puff up into a Macy’s Parade balloon, a humoungus consolidated district with all the overspending, bureaucracy and lower student achievement that comes with it . . . or must we fight to keep the suburban districts the way they are and suffer through a long, community-splitting court case?

I’m worried that, if OPS succeeds, the smart, rich people in west Omaha are going to start a bunch of private schools to step around OPS, and then we’ll have elitism up the whazoo, and the inner-city kids will be even WORSE off.

Either way, we will almost certainly wind up spending beaucoup, beaucoup tax dollars, while still keeping that achievement gap just as wide as it’s been for decades.

As the kids say: eww, eww, ewwwwww.

Well, I think there’s a better way. Now, hold on to your hips. Here it is:

1. Deconsolidate OPS through a petition drive. We could do it, under state law, by obtaining the consent of 60% of the legal voters in all of those districts, including OPS.

2. Imagine the metro area as a big pie. Let OPS keep Central High School, North High School, and their feeder schools, but divide up the rest of its schools to the surrounding five smaller districts. See below for a proposed scheme. All of them have excellent management and staffs, and can give a fresh approach to meeting the learning challenges of the former OPS student populations. There’d be a much more equitable and diverse mix of students and parents this way, and kids could still go to their neighborhood schools.

3. This would go a long way toward equalizing the wealth-per-pupil ratios in all area school districts, making the state aid formula a lot easier. Right now, there are tremendous differences in the amount of state aid per child various districts get, based on whether they are rural or urban, the amount of their property tax base, and so on. A better way would be to set an amount of money that will go for each child – the same amount to all districts across the state. But on top of that, there’ll be a “superfund.” This could be administered by the State Board of Ed. So if a district like OPS can demonstrate that its student body has more expensive learning needs than the average Nebraska student – non-English speaking, poverty, and so forth – they could apply for grants on top of their regular state aid allocation. So they could get extra funding, as long as they show that their curriculum and instruction methods are empirically-based – the “right stuff” for those problem populations. That would be enough sweetener to force schools to switch to phonics-only reading instruction, for example, and traditional math.

4. We need an all-out effort for disadvantaged kids, so I also propose a “scholarship tuition tax credit” program to provide private-sector tuition help for poor kids who would like to attend private schools anywhere in town. Under this plan, businesses would get special tax shelters for donations to corporate scholarship funds for low-income kids. Other states have this in place and it’s great. We also might consider “special education vouchers” for kids of any income level in any district who are labeled as “learning disabled” to go to a private school if they want to, because private schools tend to teach the basics much better and have stricter discipline in place. Anything we can do to make kids who are failing be more productive academically, we need to do, STAT.

5. I also highly recommend enabling legislation so that school districts could pay teachers assigned to schools with high poverty levels “battle pay” – a significant bonus – as a strong incentive to take on those tougher teaching jobs. The union blocks that, but it needs to happen. There also ought to be results-driven merit pay for all teachers, with a system like Tennessee’s value-added assessment, where teachers get bonuses if their kids do better on standardized tests after a year in their classrooms. The worse the test scores, the more room for growth, so the inner-city teachers would make more money, the better job they do with kids. Child advocates say nothing matters as much as having teachers in inner-city schools who want to be there. So let’s give the crucial gift of extra-motivated teachers to those kids.

6. We could set things up to make the redistribution of assets, retirement costs, debt service and other costs associated with those reassigned schools equitable across all parts of town. There’s a state law that says if the voters of a district took on bonded indebtedness, they have to pay up, but if the districts are reorganized in this way, that debt load could be redistributed, too.

7. Here’s how it would shake out:

OPS: Central High and North High, plus feeder schools, and convert unnecessary space at their administrative headquarters, the old Tech High, back into an expanded voc-tech facility, because it never should have been closed down in the first place.

Bellevue: Bryan High and feeder schools

Ralston: South High and feeders

Westside: Benson and feeders

Millard: Burke High and feeders

Elkhorn: Northwest High and feeders

NOW THEN . . .

I have this cynical friend who heard my plan, and replied, “That’s such a good idea . . . it’ll never work.” What he means is that the turf-protecting educrats and union wonks will never let this happen.

Ah, but what if they don’t have any say-so?

You know what? I don’t think they do. I’ve been studying Nebraska’s education statutes. They say that we’re SUPPOSED to reorganize school districts – through both consolidation AND deconsolidation – in order to meet the educational needs of local communities, ease disparities in per-pupil property valuations, equalize educational opportunities, and do other good things that this plan would do.

So, oh my gosh: this plan would be so, so Legislatively Correct. Not to mention fairer for all concerned, than the two bad options we're facing now.

The initiative would be run through the little-known State Committee on the Reorganization of School Districts, which could make this happen upon the petition of 60% of the people in all districts concerned, and HAS to do it if 65% say so.

Want to check it out? Go to www.unicam.state.ne.us and surf to the school statutes in Chapter 79. See:

79-102. Defines school districts as “embracing territory.” There’s no mention of “city limits.” So much for OPS' “one city, one school district” claim.

79-401. We’re supposed to reorganize school districts for “tax equity, educational effectiveness, and cost-efficiency.” Do we have those now in OPS? Most think not.

79-409. It does say that if there’s a metropolitan class city – one of Omaha’s size – then it “shall constitute one Class V school district.” But guess what? It doesn’t say ONLY one. I think it means at LEAST one. Here's hoping OPS will take another look at that.

79-413. The State Committee for the Reorganization of School Districts (established in 79-435) can change district boundaries upon the petitions of 60% of the legal voters, and must do so with a 65% mandate.

79-441. School district boundaries should be set with top priority on meeting the education needs of local communities, plus other good things mentioned above.

79-476. As interpreted in a court case citing this statute, annexation of territory next to a metropolitan city does not ipso facto put it into the city’s school district. Also note that the excellent July 22 letter from Douglas County Attorney Stu Dornan to OPS attorneys, stating that their “one city, one school district” claim does not appear to be correct under state law, is online at www.westside66.org

79-497. There’s language about dividing districts, including the big ones in cities of the metropolitan class, right there for all to see.

Yoo hoo, OPS: that would be you. Ipso facto.

So I was wondering . . . can we talk? :>)

Posted 1:27 PM by Susan Darst Williams

ARE BIG DISTRICTS BEST FOR ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT?

We don’t ask much. We just want Nebraska’s students to learn better, and spend less money in the process.

I don’t know a single educator anywhere who would disagree with that goal. But I don’t know many educators who think it’s attainable.

But where there’s a will, there’s a way. And the evidence is loud and clear, that consolidating school districts into big monopolies is NOT the way to meet either of those goals. Competition is.

Yesterday, we learned how the “economies of scale” often touted as the key reason for consolidation are actually quite minimal, because the big money is in salaries and benefits. It’s OK to spend a little more per pupil for administration, if you’re managing the troops better, in other words. And that shows up in nonfinancial data such as dropout and graduation rates, test scores, absenteeism, percentage of students labeled as “learning disabled,” and so forth.

It actually may be a false economy to spend a little less on administration, if the other data isn’t so hot. And that’s what we find with the Omaha Public Schools. The state’s largest district may spend a few dollars less on administration than its suburban neighbors, but their other data is so much better, it’s pointless as braggin’ material.

Actually, it’s the more moderate size of those suburban districts that might provide a lot of their superior academic results. That’s because medium and small districts have students with better results.

When it comes to managing schools in a way that will optimize spending and maximize student achievement, the answer seems to be actually to de-consolidate schools and keep them at more moderate levels of enrollment. Better achievement, more participation, and happier taxpayers are the result.

Is anybody listening at OPS, or the other pro-OPS forces involved with the current push to force consolidation on the suburbs?

Is anybody listening down at the Legislature, where they voted to let the country schools die?

I hope so. Because this is important.

And guess what: I’m going to consolidate as much as this information as I can into a big suggestion tomorrow of a possible win-win-win solution. I hope it knocks your consolidated socks off.


District Size and Academic Achievement

Q. Do bigger school districts do a better job for kids, or smaller ones?

It’s obvious that smaller private elementary and high schools have much higher test scores for their students than big public districts can match. That gap holds true even when the school serves low-income students traditionally thought to be harder and more expensive to teach.
It’s thought that this is due to the powerful accountability that comes from having most parents paying tuition, and therefore having more control and higher expectations of staff for cost-efficiency. But there may be more to it than that.
According to educational researchers, smaller and medium-size public school districts post higher student achievement than big ones, especially for low-income and minority students. While the Rural School and Community Trust points to the quality provided by small, rural schools, especially among low-income students (www.ruraledu.org), studies by researchers such as Driscoll, Halcoussis and Shirley Svorny (School District Size and Student Performance, 2003, studying 5,525 schools in 755 districts in California) concluded that “district size has a negative effect on student performance, as measured by standardized test scores” (p. 199).
It seems there’s an optimal size of school district in which economies of scale are maximized, but students still receive sufficient personal attention from teachers and other staff members, and the bureaucracy is small enough to sustain good home-school relationships, so kids flourish without too much ineffective, nonclassroom spending.
What is that level of enrollment for maximum efficiency and highest achievement? Somewhere less than 6,000, according to research.
According to a report by the Goldwater Institute criticizing proposals to consolidate schools in Arizona for academic as well as financial reasons, “medium districts averaging roughly 2,400 students perform as well as our better than the state’s 10 largest districts, which average nearly 34,000 students.”
The report said, “In consolidated school districts, the result is worse education and higher, not lower, per-pupil costs. . . . (E)vidence suggests smaller districts contribute to higher SAT, ACT and NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) scores.”
The institute concluded that significantly higher student achievement could be won at an actual cost savings – not additional spending – of as much as $1,530 per pupil, if Arizona were to increase competition by expanding its existing school-choice options.

Homework: See the conclusion of the report, “Competition or Consolidation? The School District Consolidation Debate Revisited,” Jan. 12, 2004, starting on page 30 on www.goldwaterinstitute.org/article.php/401.html

Posted 11:58 AM by Susan Darst Williams

SOMEBODY CLUE THESE FOLKS IN ON THE WOEFUL TRUTH ABOUT SCHOOL CONSOLIDATION, ‘K?

Longtime World-Herald publisher Harold “Andy” Andersen has written two opinion columns in recent days that, with all due respect, were full of misinformation about the proposed consolidations of the Omaha Public Schools and its suburban neighbors, and the Class I, K-8 country schools being forced to merge with schools in bigger towns.

Mr. Andersen, along with OPS officials and the Legislature’s Education Committee chief, Sen. Ron Raikes of Lincoln, believe consolidating schools is a good idea.

GONG! They’re so, so wrong.

Would somebody please let Mr. Andersen and others carrying the school consolidation banner know some of the factoids from the following column?

It also would be nice to refer Mr. Andersen to the legal opinion reported in his own paper on July 23 by Douglas County Attorney Stu Dornan. That opinion stated what most people think – that the “one city, one school district” philosophy OPS is claiming as its justification for taking over the suburban districts does not exist in Nebraska law.

The 1891 law that Andersen and OPS is citing has to be interpreted in context. That’s our system of laws, right? Well, in the context of OTHER school law, it does NOT mean there can only be one school district per city.

Dornan found another Nebraska school law from the 1950s that talked about how you elect school boards for Class III districts coexisting in the same metropolitan area as Class V districts. Obviously, lawmakers anticipated population growth in Nebraska where that would happen. So they did NOT wish to mandate “one city, one school district” as the public policy of the State of Nebraska.

A Class III district is one with a population between 1,001 and 149,999 within its boundaries – like the suburban districts OPS is trying to swallow up.

OPS is the state’s only Class V district – one with a population of 200,000 or more.

So why would that 1950s state law talk about Class III and Class V districts being in the same metropolitan area – if we were supposed to stick to “one city, one school district?”

Because Mr. Andersen and OPS are flat wrong, that’s why.

And they’re wrong about consolidation being a good thing financially or academically, whether it’s the urban case involving OPS, or the rural one involving the Class I country schools. We’ll talk more about that tomorrow.

Meanwhile, would somebody please give them a heads-up on this stuff? At least, keep them honest as this debate goes on?

We may never see a retraction or apology. But at least they’d be forced to come up with some OTHER reasons to back these foolish consolidations that don’t contradict the law and the facts.

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School Consolidation Doesn’t Work

Q. Does research show that school consolidation is always a good idea, both financially and for learning purposes? Or is there a point where it’s counter-productive?

Since 1960, the number of U.S. school districts has declined by 39%, to 15,747. Ironically, though, school administrative staffs have grown by 500 percent – while the number of teachers has increased by only about one-tenth that rate, 57%. Teacher salaries and benefits used to make up 80% of a district’s budget, but now have dropped to about 50%. Growing numbers of education policymakers are now thinking that school consolidation has been overdone.

The loss of local control and representation, increased travel time, and decreased child safety are all good reasons school consolidation isn’t such a good idea – but higher spending and lower student achievement are even better reasons.

Efforts to break up giant school districts are under way in Los Angeles, where the L.A. school district may be split up into 30 separate districts, and Las Vegas, with nearly a quarter-million students, as well as elsewhere across the country. The trend is toward smaller schools and mid-sized districts.

Evidence is mounting that adding competition for huge monopoly school districts is astoundingly more effective for holding down spending, and spurring better student achievement and participation, than consolidating schools of any size.

According to a heavily-documented report that recommended a halt to proposed school consolidation in Arizona, the Goldwater Institute found that “empirical research shows consolidation increases administrative costs at the expense of classroom instruction, yielding larger classes, fewer teachers, and lower student achievement.”

The report found that consolidation results in larger, not smaller, administrative staffs, and little or none of the hoped-for economies of scale in purchasing.

Larger school districts tend to spend more on nonteaching school staff salaries and benefits -- administrative bloat and “mission creep” that detracts from student achievement, the report showed.

Fans of consolidation tout the “economies of scale,” but it actually doesn’t exist for public schools, according to economists. Purchased services and supplies come to just 14% of administrative costs, while salaries and benefits make up 84%. Consolidation does nothing to reduce the vast majority of administrative spending, because most of it relates to the size of the individual schools, not the size of the districts.

In fact, the study found, very small districts have among the lowest administrative spending because staff members “multitask,” reducing per-pupil spending for salaries and benefits.

Finally, and most importantly, small and medium school districts outperform large ones not only in administrative spending per pupil, but also dramatically so on test scores – and obtain three to 20 times more student participation in the life of the school than their large, urban counterparts.

The study concluded that conventional, forced school consolidation in Arizona could save from $17 to $34 per pupil – but 90 times as much money, $1,530 per pupil, could be saved if the competition of charter schools were expanded in that state, and student achievement would rise a projected 3% even with those significant cost savings.

Homework: Obtain sources for these facts from the report, “Competition or Consolidation? The School District Consolidation Debate Revisited,” Jan. 12, 2004, on www.goldwaterinstitute.org/article.php/401.html

Posted 1:08 PM by Susan Darst Williams

ANNOUNCING A NEW TEAM AND A NEW GAME PLAN FOR K-12 EDUCATION

Why is there so much apathy and ignorance about K-12 education in Nebraska?

Why do only vendors, union representatives and school officials show up at legislative hearings and school board meetings?

Why do so few parents attend Open Houses and parent-teacher conferences in some districts, or limit their “involvement” to fund-raising projects instead of more meaningful, academic-oriented input?

Why do so many others feel powerless to do anything about their own child’s school progress, much less the whole class, the whole district or the whole state?

What’s missing?

Connections between people, that’s what. We’re missing the plumbing and wiring of exchanging ideas, information, suggestions and constructive criticism from subgroup to subgroup, district to district, town to town, person to person.

We all care a great deal about education, from the level of the individual child all the way up to the statewide student body. But we aren’t connected. There’s no flow. The policymakers don’t know what the people are really thinking, the educators have a lot of misconceptions about what parents want, the parents don’t understand a lot of the lingo and how things work, and the union wonks just think we’re trying to take money and power away from teachers when we say we want better resource allocation and evidence-based methodology.

We need to talk . . . much more often, and more productively.

So that’s the last plank of the Go Big Ed platform – to start a statewide, grassroots, public-service organization with no dues, no meetings, no bureaucracy. But here’s hoping it will do lots of good, because the purpose will be to bring people together for service and brainstorming – to bring all voices to the table – to get people to talk -- to make things better for our kids.

To make Nebraska No. 1 in education.

A simple goal and a challenging goal. But as we’ve seen with Husker football, it you bring people together with great coaching and a standard of excellence, it most certainly can be done.

One way of connecting everyday Nebraskans with policymakers will be a questionnaire on the GoBigEd.com website, now under construction. It will allow you to send your views on 10 key issues directly to state and federal lawmakers, school board members, officials in education-related government agencies, and your circle of influence, to get some of these talking points out into the public eye.

Here are the 10 questions I’m thinking of so far. I’d welcome any additional ones you think would be helpful.



Connecting Voters and Policymakers

Q. Education seems to be a closed loop: educators only listen to other educators when it comes to suggesting how to do things better for kids. Elected officials on school boards and state legislatures are supposed to be our voice because they control the pursestrings. How do we get them to listen, so that the educators will listen?

One way is to devise a statewide opinion poll that can be shared with decision-makers to keep them constantly reminded that meeting the needs of the students is the top priority, not meeting the needs of the educators and educrats.

Here are some suggested questions that the public could answer and send to officials to guide their policymaking. These were written for residents of the State of Nebraska, but could easily be adapted for any state:

1. The average spending per pupil in our state’s public schools is now $7,800 per year. Do you believe that is too much, too little, or just about right?

2. Our state allows “school choice” among public-school districts, but does not allow school-choice vouchers to give partial public funding so that disadvantaged students can attend private schools. Nor are there tuition tax credits for the parents of private-school students and homeschoolers. Nor are charter schools allowed. Are you in agreement that Nebraska doesn’t need any of these other programs, or more educational competition in our state?

3. Nebraska teachers are paid by union scale, which is based on seniority. They rank in the middle of the country for teacher pay, adjusted for the cost of living, but with the many small towns in Nebraska with a lower cost of living, average teacher pay shouldn’t be as high as in the big cities anyway. They enjoy the best-in-the-nation retirement program, the “Rule of 85” – at age 55, with 30 years of service, they can fully retire and receive full pensions. They also have an excellent health insurance program that is financially better than most private-sector employees at the same salary level. Do you favor keeping the same, years-of-service based compensation program, or freeing school boards to be able to pay merit pay for teachers who have demonstrated they run “value-added” classrooms, plus hiring bonuses and extra pay for hard-to-find specialties such as special ed, foreign language, math, science and vocational ed?

4. Reading disability is the root cause of many of education’s woes, including the skyrocketing numbers of kids labeled as “learning disabled.” Do you favor a return to phonics-only reading instruction in kindergarten and first grade, leaving schools free to continue to use the Whole Language method after the children have been taught the code of our language, or to switch entirely to phonics-only once they see how good it is?

5. Comprehensive sex education programs, which teach students how to use contraceptives and promote “safe sex” rather than “abstinence only,” have been controversial among Nebraska parents. Do you think parents should be able to choose which kind of sex ed their child will have, the way you can choose which foreign language to study, and opt their child in to comprehensive sex ed, or an abstinence-only program?

6. Right now, state aid to education is paid to school districts based on their school enrollment, not how many students actually were in school on a given day. But school success is tied to school attendance. You can’t learn if you’re not there. Some districts have far more absenteeism than others. Would you favor a change to paying state aid based on “average daily attendance,” with help for districts who need improvement in building their attendance rates?

7. There is no evidence that all-day kindergarten pays off in the long run for most children in terms of academic achievement, although it can be a help to disadvantaged kids from homes where education is not a top priority. For most kids, though, it’s just free child care at taxpayer expense. Would you favor a change to “tuitioning” for the second half of the kindergarten day, requiring parents who can afford it to pay for that service, and offer all-day k free for parents whose incomes qualify them for free or reduced lunch?

8. The presence of gay-rights clubs and speakers on controversial topics, such as gun control, in public schools has been controversial. Would you favor a state law that requires school officials to grant equal time for the “other point of view” when these controversial topics are addressed in tax-funded classrooms and assemblies?

9. The achievement gap between rich and poor, and black and white students persists in our inner-city school districts. It has been widening, not narrowing, with unacceptably high dropout rates and disproportional placement in special ed and alternative schools for low-income and minority students. Rather than allocating more money for this to go on, would you favor enabling legislation for “corporate scholarships” that would give tax credits to corporations for providing private scholarships for low-income and minority students if they would like to attend private schools that have better track records and test scores?

10. School officials are not allowed, by law, to report illegal aliens to the authorities. Yet their children are placed in public schools at taxpayer expense in growing numbers, inflating costs and increasing the pressure on school facilities to the detriment of the children of law-abiding American citizens. School employees can’t turn them in, but private citizens can. Would you favor a citizens’ effort along these lines?

Homework: See www.chalkboardproject.org for results of their exciting and unique opinion polling effort. Their survey results, posted on the website, are now fueling a new set of policy initiatives in the State of Oregon.

Posted 1:18 PM by Susan Darst Williams

ANNOUNCING AN ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT BOON: BECOMING THE ‘COOL SCHOOL’ STATE

Nebraska doesn’t have mountains, seashores, lakes, pro sports, fabulous arts, or even a reliably fantastic football team any more. We have high taxes because we have so many miles of roads and bridges to maintain and so few people to pay for it. And our taxes are high for a few other reasons – like keeping our public schools going.

Of course we want to attract great new people to come to Nebraska to live, and new industries and jobs. But it isn’t easy. Frankly, even though we’re the best place in the country to raise a family, bar none, we’re not real hotly competitive in the economic development department.

So I got to thinking: what better draw could we have for economic development here, than to be able to claim that we have the best schools in the country?

We don’t have a Harvard here, nor a Silicon Valley, and not a lot of millionaires. But we have what it takes: favorable demographics compared to the rest of the country, a solid work ethic among most educators, and most of all, a family-based culture that values education as a top priority. Attitude matters tons more than money when it comes to setting the stage for school success.

I believe Nebraska needs to reshape our educational system in the next few years, bigtime, to keep up with the Joneses – other states – and, hopefully, surpass them. If we don’t, we die. Or at least lose even more ground.

And I hope that the new Go Big Ed, with a statewide push for more grassroots networking and influence on public policy, can help make our schools No. 1.

We have a long way to go. The big school-consolidation pushes going on right now – the OPS takeover and the wiping out of Class 1 country schools – are diametrically opposed to what we should be doing to reverse the decline in student achievement among low-income and rural youth.

A few years ago, Nebraska got an “F” from the Thomas Fordham Foundation for the public policies we have in place regarding teacher quality. Ouch!

There were some disturbing “brain drain” statistics that came out last spring, that people new to Nebraska tended to be more illiterate than highly educated, and the people we lose to other states are our “value-added” contributions – born and raised here, like corn, and then exported to other states to live and work, so that those other states get the value of their citizenship that we actually created.

I was shocked to see another statistic like that the other day: Nebraska lost 9.7 people per 1,000 residents from 1995 to 2000, while our neighbor Colorado gained 43.8 (annual report, www.goldwaterinstitute.org).

It makes you wonder how much the quality of the schools has to do with a huge gap like that; mountains aren’t everything, you know. Why do so many more people think Colorado is the place to be, and dwindling numbers think that about Nebraska? I know Colorado has a favorable tax climate. But do they also have better schools? It looks so.

Then I winced to read that Iowa has started allowing parents the option to send their children to 10 charter schools as of this fall. That sounds like Iowa is more on the move with educational innovation than we are. So now our only neighboring state that does not allow charter schools is South Dakota. How many new businesses do we lose to South Dakota these days? Not many. How about Iowa, and other states more on the cutting edge of what’s going on in education? Lots. Nebraska is one of only nine states without enabling legislation for charter schools. That can’t be good for attracting new people here.

It’s kind of embarrassing that Nebraska doesn’t have a relatively objective outside assessment system for our educational quality, the way other states do, but instead has allowed our educators to assess themselves, and eureka! They’ve “found” that they’re doing fantastic! It’s totally meaningless, and damaging our national image.

It’s also pretty disturbing to note that we have a Social Security-type mess looming on the horizon in our teacher retirement system that needed addressing yesterday, and that sloth is going to haunt us.

Then the big push at the state level is for more government preschool and all-day kindergarten for everybody – the exact opposite move of what we should be doing, based on the no-good record of Head Start. Subsidized, universal preschools for all children will nuke private and faith-based preschools, which are far, far better than publically-provided ones, and keep parents and the private sector in charge of the sandbox set.

Half-day kindergarten using the right methods is far, far better for young children than all day in the grips of the public-school environment. Trust me on this, as the mother of four who is spending $2,000 to send our youngest to a private half-day kindergarten this fall instead of using the “free” all-day k in our local public school. I know from experience and from the research that all-day k a dumb move for all but economically deprived children.

And then we have the War of the Laptops, as Nebraska schools fall all over themselves to “provide” more and more of them for students and teachers, just showing off. Go Big Ed reported recently that Nebraska pays close to the top in the country for educational technology – when there’s not a shred of evidence anywhere that learning on a computer is better than the traditional and far cheaper tools of teacher, books, pencils and paper.

Why does Nebraska keep doing all the things the research shows SHOULDN’T be done, for educational quality? And why don’t we do the things that have been shown, in other states, to WORK?

In the past, I’ve been embarrassed to see astoundingly high numbers of Nebraska schoolchildren labeled as “learning disabled.” What’s up with that? Is it something in Nebraska’s water that gives kids problems? Of course not. Obviously, we’re teaching reading wrong. That’s a real economic development blooper. Surely, that can be reduced, bigtime, as well it should.

Now, our ACT and SAT scores look pretty good compared to the rest of the nation. But we “cook the books” because a relatively small percentages of our high-school students are taking them. People realize this, so it’s no big deal that your state’s top 5% “ranks” higher than your neighbor state’s 55%. I like Colorado’s mandate that everybody takes the college admissions tests whether they think they’re college-bound or not. I like the tremendous boost in scores that has resulted from that smart public policy.

We’ve got to do something for gifted and talented kids instead of the pervasive Political Correctness that seeks to level their achievement to the norm instead of letting them fly, intellectually, because it would hurt the other kids’ self-esteem somehow. Poppycock. As college prices mount, increasingly sophisticated parents realize that your chances of making it into a selective college, especially back East, are pretty small if your test scores are just good, not great, and you’re from a “flyover state” like Nebraska, attending public, not private, school. We are limiting our best students’ chances, and therefore, we will get fewer families with top students to move here, if we don’t act.

Another deficiency: we don’t really have much in the way of school choice in this state. We do allow a student in one public-school district to switch to another public-school district. But that’s of limited value if you’re looking for a significant difference in things like curriculum, discipline and avoidance of Political Correctness.

Because of the financial difficulties of this monopoly education system, there are nowhere near as many private-school slots in Nebraska as there is demand to fill them. For example, our local Catholic grade school had a waiting list of more than 75 children for kindergarten last spring, and counting. If private schools made a little more financial sense, more people would start them.

We need to “incentivize” private educational development, bigtime. To my knowledge, we don’t have any collaborations between private schools and homeschools in Nebraska, the way Texas does and some other states, that would give people more flexibility to combine those two educational styles.

We don’t have many tutors, nor do we have any vendors of online education here, that I know of. I’m not aware of any traditional, high-octane, classical academies in Nebraska other than Brownell-Talbot, though they are springing up all over the country elsewhere, with outstanding curriculum that’s far more civilizing and literate than anything I’ve seen in the three public districts our children have attended. If you want a classical education for your kids, though, you have to homeschool or move to Omaha and pay $10,000 a year to Brownell . . . or move to another state.

And of course, we’re not among the 12 states that now have school-choice voucher programs going on to help low-income families send their children to private school with partial funding from tax dollars. We do have the Children’s Scholarship Fund, but it helps only a few hundred kids a year, vs. the 20,000 attending Arizona private schools through tuition tax credits.

We don’t have merit pay for teachers, nor alternative certification to get good people in the classroom who didn’t go to teachers’ college but are still great teachers. We don’t allow districts to pay hiring bonuses, or pay more for teachers in hard-to-find specialties like math, science, voc ed and special ed.

Nor do we have value-added assessment like Tennessee, where teachers and principals are financially rewarded for doing more for kids.

We don’t have tax credits like Minnesota, and we don’t have very friendly homeschooling regulations.

Nor do we have one of the most exciting educational-freedom tools in the country – a corporate scholarship program like Arizona’s, where corporations can get tax credits for sending a disadvantaged child to private school with a full or partial scholarship.

You know, I still think we have the smarts and the guts in this state to will ourselves to the top of the educational pile. I really do.

I honestly think the problem is that Nebraskans have been too “nice,” have accepted the status quo, aren’t aware of the problems we have and how other states are solving them, have allowed unions to dictate to our educators how schools are going to be, and haven’t demanded true accountability and innovation from our public servants, and true options and alternatives for our kids.

So we need to start now to make the changes that are necessary to blow away all other states in the quality and cost-effectiveness of our school system. And tomorrow, I’ll tell you how you can make your opinions known so that together, we can do just that.

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Education as an Economic Development Tool

Q. In terms of quality of life and business climate, nothing counts as much toward a state’s economic development efforts as having excellent schools. With increasing global competition, it’s a given that you have to work hard to create 21st Century schools to turn out a workforce who can support high-value economic activity on down the road. What should our state be doing to get, or stay, competitive?

It’s a no-brainer. Good schools bring quality of life and prosperity. Bad schools bring crime, drug abuse, gangs, reliance on transfer payments, and all kinds of other problems that raise everyone’s taxes and make the world a worse place, not a better one.

We need schools that can maximize the knowledge and skills of each “crop” of students to equip them for the knowledge-based economy, where the most people can make the most money and live the happiest ever after. But it’s not easy.

The pressure is on those states with the most increases in the numbers of disadvantaged students, or new immigrants, as well as the strongest unions resisting innovation and “market competitiveness” in education.

What it takes is good business decisions by the education establishment. That’s not happening on a widespread basis now, but it should be.

Nobody likes the term “human capital,” since it is so demeaning, but the principle is valid: educational resources should be used as intelligently as possible to make students as ready as possible for fulfilling, lucrative careers.

So no state can afford to make big errors in educational resource allocation. That means state government and local school districts should do everything they can to make sure the evidence shows that they are using the best methods, practices, curriculum and infrastructure to maximize their students’ acquisition of knowledge and skills.

Voters and taxpayers need to use their leverage to force schools to be more cost-effective to do that.

If the evidence proves that using a phonics-only approach to reading instruction in the early grades is the fastest, cheapest way to build literacy, then that’s what should be used, instead of the ineffective and expensive Whole Language method that’s so popular.

If the research can show better school achievement by low-income pupils who were able to go to preschool through taxpayer subsidies, then more of those subsidies should be considered.

If a connection can be made between academic success and smaller class sizes, more technology and higher-paid, higher-trained teachers for at-risk students who are low-income or non-English speaking, then those investments would be worth it.

Homework: Get the book, “Smart Money: Education and Economic Development,” by William Schweke (Economic Policy Institute, 2004). Schweke is research director for the Corporation for Enterprise Development, which is dedicated to creating economic opportunity for low-income citizens.