Posted 11:41 AM by Susan Darst Williams

JUDGE TEACHES NORTH PLATTE SCHOOL A LESSON

God bless Lincoln County District Judge John Murphy. He reinstated a North Platte kindergarten teacher to her job last week, with back pay and benefits, and quoted Alice in Wonderland and one of its characters, Tweedledee, in describing the school district’s attempt to fire her.

According to the online publications www.northplattebulletin.com and www.StatePaper.com, Judge Murphy ruled that the North Platte district failed to follow its own disciplinary procedures and “acted arbitrarily” in the firing of seven-year teacher Cynthia Stevens.

Among the evidence presented against her: the principal at Jefferson Elementary school testified that she overheard the teacher tell one pupil, “Quit your whining!” and warned another, “You have automatically lost your snack.”

Among other points made in the teacher’s defense, it was brought out that last year, parents were up in arms at another grade school in that district, Osgood Elementary. It seems the third-grade teacher taught second-grade material all year, having made the switch from second to third herself. The kids’ math test scores on the Iowa Basics fell from the 80th percentile to the 57th percentile and they require special tutoring for a year or two to catch up, yet that teacher, Arliss Hraban, didn’t lose her job.

Regarding Mrs. Stevens’ firing, the North Platte district follows the pinnacle of Political Correctness when it comes to school discipline, the Boys Town behavior code. It may make sense for delinquents and runaways to require that a teacher make four “praise statements” for every correction, but it borders on the absurd in a kindergarten setting in a middle-income small Nebraska town. The district contended that Mrs. Stevens failed to keep to the required 4:1 ratio in praises and corrections to the kindergartners in her charge.

Judge Murphy wrote that, “with the apparent import of exact praise to criticism ratios, it is clear that the Court’s view that education is the instilling of knowledge and skill is hopelessly anachronistic.”

The district also claimed that it was up to the teacher to get her own “mentor” to help her improve and stave off her firing, even though the district’s own policy is that the district is supposed to assign that help.

The whole debacle took up a school board hearing last June 2 and 3 lasting from 4 p.m. to 3:46 a.m. Parents were reportedly overwhelmingly in favor of the teacher, but had to leave as the hearing dragged on so long.

The judge wrote that the whole scenario reminded him of what Tweedledee said: “’Contrariwise if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be: but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic.’”

Posted 9:19 AM by Susan Darst Williams

ED BILL WATCH: ILLEGAL ALIENS TO GET ED PERKS?

The most peculiar proposed law of all down in Lincoln this session is LB 239. It would allow an illegal alien the same educational privileges, college admission consideration, scholarship eligibility and so forth, as a Nebraska citizen.

As GOPUSA.com columnist Doug Patton pointed out, that’d be more rights than American citizens from the other 49 states would get from Nebraska colleges. A kid from Iowa who’s a sixth-generation American, let’s say, whose great-grandfathers and grandfathers fought for us in World Wars I and II, Korea and Vietnam, and paid taxes and provided other people with jobs and obeyed laws for decades . . . that kid would have to pay out-of-state tuition.

But an illegal alien kid whose parents are immigration felons and who’s been here 180 days gets to ride into UNL or a state college on a satin pillow, receive huge taxpayer subsidies for a postsecondary education, and probably beat all kinds of other longtime American citizens out for financial aid, too

And that’s after the same kid has unfairly enjoyed who knows how many years of K-12 education at additional huge Nebraska taxpayer expense, because the schools aren’t supposed to even ask ‘em if they’re here legally.

Geeeeeeez.

This is brought to you by State Sen. DiAnne Schimek of Lincoln, wife of state teachers’ union lobbyist Herb Schimek. ‘Nuff said on that combo, eh?

How they figure illegal aliens are a potent political power base worth thumbing their noses at the children of taxpaying citizens is beyond me. Meanwhile, tens of millions of dollars are being siphoned out of the Nebraska economy and sent to Mexico by these illegal immigrants, instead of turning over and over in Nebraska businesses and tax coffers as they should.

And meanwhile, untold amounts of Social Security fraud, identity theft, money laundering, drug trafficking and who knows what other crimes are being perpetrated by these folks . . . and what do our state senators do? Pander to them, roll out the red carpet for them, sell us out to them. . . .

I know, the rhetoric’s vivid. But we’ve just learned this week that Nebraska kids are 49th in the country on the important measure of high-octane brains, the Advanced Placement tests.

The achievement gap between disadvantaged kids and affluent ones continues to widen, not narrow, despite more and more money being poured into our public schools.

And the Legislature, the State Ed Department and the State Board of Ed continue to do all the boneheaded things that we KNOW don’t help and actually make things worse. To wit: the other ed bills proposed this legislative session, such as free pre-kindergarten programs in public schools, full-day kindergarten, and forced compliance to incredible paperwork loads and ridiculously dumbed-down government specs mislabeled as “learning standards.”

All this, and the red-carpet treatment for illegal aliens at our expense, too.

Are you beginning to see why more and more Nebraska parents are putting their kids in private schools and homeschools?

Is it time for a mass outcry of “Hasta la vista, Baybeeee”?

Posted 10:55 AM by Susan Darst Williams

ED BILL WATCH: SECOND-TO-LAST AP RANK SHOWS OUR NONFOCUS ON ACADEMICS

Nebraska public-school students did unbelievably poorly on the Advanced Placement exams that are a reliable indicator of K-12 educational quality and can earn a student college credit for next to nothing.

It’s a scandal. When you lay that dismal showing next to the Politically Correct, nonacademic, so-called “education” legislative bills that are proposed this session in the Unicam, you can see how the focus in Nebraska public education is ‘way, ‘way off academic excellence . . . and more and more on left-wing, dumbed-down, socialistic, governmental “programs.”

The facts: Nebraska juniors and seniors ranked 49th in the percentage of students able to demonstrate college-level mastery of various academic subjects on the 2004 Advanced Placement exams given by the College Board. (See the full report, www.collegeboard.com)

The national average: 13.2 percent of high-schoolers scored a 3, 4 or 5 on an AP exam, which equates to a C, B or A, respectively, on an introductory college course in the same subject matter.

But only 4.0 percent of Nebraska kids could muster that mastery, worse than every other state except genetically-challenged, marry-your-cousin Louisiana.

Only one Nebraska kid got a 5 on the advanced Calculus test; only one got a 5 in Physics; only 2 got 5’s in Spanish, and puny handfuls aced key subjects such as U.S. History, English Literature and Composition, and Chemistry.

Nebraska students now look like bottom-feeders to the rest of the nation. Niiiiiiiiice. Some economic development draw.

Now, these numbers exclude private-school students who took AP tests last year. Private-school students always do tons better on national tests like this than their public-school counterparts do, because they’re better-prepared for college. And state officials are saying, well, Nebraska is so rural, you know, and we can’t get crackerjack teachers out in the sticks, and that’s why our kids didn’t score as well.

Riiiiight. Other states have lots MORE private-school students than ours does, and this measurement is only of public-school kids. So by all rights, we should have done BETTER. And plenty of states just as rural as Nebraska, if not more, outscored us, including a couple of dozen which pay their teachers LESS. Most importantly, Nebraska’s demographics are very favorable compared to other states. We have less poverty, fewer immigrants and better home life, for the most part. Those are all huge advantages in test-taking. They all should be paying off in superior academic achievement on national tests.

Instead, we look like cornheads.

Meanwhile, what are our august state senators working on this session, to make Nebraska schools the best they can be? Is there some kind of SWAT team to improve academics? An E.R. set up to fix the way we teach reading so our kids can learn better? Some help being sought from corporate Nebraska to beef up that math and science pedagogy?

Noooooo. There’s just no room for academics in the education-related laws we’re looking to pass in Nebraska.

Instead, we get LB 126 – kill the country schools, one of the fewer ed models that actually works.

And we get LB 239, let illegal aliens have the same educational perks as American citizens.

And we have LB 264, send government nannies into the homes of infants and toddlers to snoop and nitpick “at-risk” parents into signing up for government programs.

And we have LB 285, ban pop and candy in our schools . . . yeah, if we can just keep those molecules of Twinkies and Mountain Dew from coursing through their veins, all of our kids can miraculously get 5’s in AP Calc and Chem. . . .

Think about it. This is embarrassing. This will not do. This has one solution:

If we expect Nebraska to lead in academics, we have got to get the government and the union out of our schools.

That means downsize and restructure the State Department of Education, pull out of federal funding, give Commissioner Doug Christensen a nice buyout and sunset that job entirely, repeal our expensive and no-account standards and assessments system, restore the academic mission, deep-six the social engineering, incentivize teaching, and privatize our public schools.

Radical? You bet. But can we afford to hit bottom like this, and stay there? No way.

Posted 10:22 AM by Susan Darst Williams

ED BILL WATCH: THE DANGERS OF EXPANDING PRE-K

The sponsors of Legislative Bills 350 and 577 should have their milk and cookies taken away. Gently, but firmly, they should be led to sit in the corner and think about what these bills would do to young children in Nebraska. Once they finish their timeout, they can re-join the Legislature with plenty of time left to withdraw these dumb and dangerous bills before the bell rings to close this session.

These bills would use state tax dollars to pay for in-school day-care programs, incorporating pre-k into the state aid formula, so that all of us would be subsidizing this disastrous programming.

Young children need to spend their preschool years in their own homes, at Granny’s, at the neighbor’s, at the church preschool, or if they must go to structured day care, it should be privately run with their parents firmly in charge.

Studies show institutional, group day-care such as is conducted in public schools turns out K-12 kids who are less able to learn, more angry and poorly behaved, and suffering from more health problems.

That’s what we would be paying for, with these bills. WAH! And not only that, “free” or “reduced” in-school day care would be indoctrinating parents at an earlier and earlier age to “buy in” to the public-school system. They wouldn’t have a chance to see that there are better ways of educating children. Maybe that’s part of the plan here.

The arguments against it are strong: the public schools are putting too much on their plates again with this move, diluting their ability to perform their basic mission for the K-12 students . . . kids who “start school” as infants will be ultra-sick of it by late grade school . . . teachers trained in K-12 methods aren’t right for early-childhood settings . . . early-childhood philosophies and methods are creeping up into first and second grade because of the mix of staff, which dumbs down grade school . . . and, most of all, this move is predatory on the family’s right to rear children the way they wish, not to mention predatory on private-sector day-care and preschool businesses.

But what really makes me grab my security blanket is that research clearly shows that full-time, school-based day care is actually bad for children later on, and ominous for future discipline problems – disobedience, destruction of property and fighting – in public schools. Misbehavior that’s kind of cute in a 3- or 4-year-old is ugly indeed 10 years later.

The number of hours children spend in day care is linked to the level of behavior problems they have later in life, according to a federal study published in the scientific journal, Child Development. The researchers found that, as the hours of day care increased, the reports of problem behavior generally increased right along with them. Researcher Sarah Friedman said the findings held true for all income groups of children in all out-of-home structured settings.

Another study, from the University of Minnesota, showed a significant increase in hormonal measurements of stress among preschoolers in day care. Note that those measurements fell for those same children on days they spent at home.

A third, by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) -- the most comprehensive ever conducted -- found that the more time children spent in non-parental day care arrangements, the more likely they were to display aggression, disobedience, and conflict with adults.

Of course, the reason public schools are getting in to early childhood education is that it brings in revenue. But with increasing evidence that full-time, out-of-home day care is bad for children and hampers learning later on, public policymakers may want to reconsider the billions of federal dollars going to subsidized day care, including in schools.

A better idea is to cut government spending to lessen the tax burden so more parents can stay home for more of those crucial early years.

One thing Nebraskans can do to fight these bills: Send your state senator the books, Miseducation by David Elkind, Day Care Deception by Brian Robertson or Better Late Than Early by Raymond Moore. Better include a binky, too, and tell ‘em : this idea SUCKS.

Posted 10:24 AM by Susan Darst Williams

ED BILL WATCH: ‘BOARD OF RUBBER STAMPS’?

Today’s Legislative Education Committee hearing at the Capitol in Lincoln will take up LB’s 223 and 378. The first bill would create the School Finance Review Committee, and the second would create the Commission on School Finance.

Ooh! Goodie! Fiscal accountability for the biggest user of our tax dollars in the state, our public schools!

NOT! This would be a great thing only if the appointees were to be taxpayer watchdogs, CPAs, bankers, investment counselors, purchasing agents and others with financial expertise from the private sector.

But noooooo: by design, in these bills, it’d be educrats, school administrators, politicians and union wonks. Wonder what THEIR financial review of schools will show? Duhhhh: “schools need more money.” Riiiiiight.

Why not just call this “The Board of Rubber Stamps”?

Think about it: what private corporation handling over a billion dollars a year, like Nebraska’s schools, has an oversight board made up totally of employees and others with snouts in the trough? For heaven’s sake.

A board like this is much-needed. But it would effective only if it had neutral, disinterested and qualified people on it who can truly represent the people who sign all those checks, which, last time I checked, is we the peeps.

A much smarter move: institute spot-check performance audits by a professional, financial SWAT team from the private sector that reports to an elected official, not edu-wonks. Then we’d be cookin’.

Posted 1:05 PM by Susan Darst Williams

FOCUS ON THE UNICAMERAL: EXCITING EQUAL ACCESS BILL

Should private-school and homeschool kids get to take individual classes like calculus and Japanese at the local public high school, or try out for parts in the elaborate school musical?

If not, why not? And if so . . . let’s go!

This week, we’ll look at key legislative bills proposed in the Nebraska Legislature, starting with a wonderful one from Sen. Phil Erdman of Bayard, with assistance from Sens. Mike Foley of Lincoln and Mike Friend of Omaha.

LB 270 would allow for part-time enrollment and participation in co-curricular and extracurricular activities in public schools by homeschoolers and certain private-school students. The public schools may be allowed to require them to enroll in one class to participate in the extracurriculars. But that’s doable.

This has been tried before in recent years, and fell short. But now is the time. It makes sense, and in fact, is a “must” under the Nebraska Constitution, which requires schools to give free instruction to anyone ages 5 to 21.

Anything that taxpayers have equipped the schools to offer kids – including higher-level academics, sports, music, debate and so forth – must by rights be intended for all kids, not just those enrolled in the public schools.

Isn’t that so? Then . . . let’s go!

Posted 10:30 AM by Susan Darst Williams

HAS IT COME TO THIS? PARENTS PAY EXTRA FOR ACADEMICS?

Well, it’s Long Beach, Calif., but it could be coming soon to schools in Nebraska. Finances have gotten so bad out there that parents at a school with 630 students are having to do fund-raisers to pay for Spanish class. The parent group has set a goal of raising $325,000 to ensure it can continue for four more years. Otherwise, it would have vanished due to budget cuts.

Meanwhile, the district likely has such overstaffing in the nonacademic departments that there’s an assistant to the assistant speck inspector. No doubt there’s AstroTurf on the high-school football fields, a cappuccino machine in the staff lounge, and a fleet of free SUVs for the bigwigs . . . but the parents have to hold bake sales for an academic “must” like Spanish in California.

Ay, carumba. Read more on:

http://www.gazettes.com/spanish01062005.htm

Posted 10:40 AM by Susan Darst Williams

CIRCLING THE WAGONS AROUND NEBRASKA’S LITTLE SCHOOLS

The Legislature’s Education Committee held a hearing Tuesday on how to force Nebraska’s rural Class 1 schools into history. But the champions of small schools are going to fight hard to preserve their school style. Of Nebraska’s 488 school districts, nearly half, or 231, are Class 1 schools, educating just 2 percent of the state’s pupils. The educrats say we can save up to $3 million by shutting them down and forcing the kids to larger schools. But that doesn’t count added transportation costs – and the loss of excellence. The quality of Class 1 schooling is concealed by the way the state educrats do things: test scores, for example, aren’t released if there are fewer than 10 pupils in a grade. And since the Class 1 schools end by eighth grade, we can’t see what smaller schools turn out in the way of ACT and SAT scores. Hint, hint: look at the 100% graduation rates and high test scores of tiny private schools like Brownell-Talbot and Duchesne, probably the best in the state. Bigger is NOT always better, and there are ample other ways to save tax dollars in K-12 education in this state that don’t hurt quality. Read the bill at:

www.unicam.state.ne.us/pdf/INTRO_LB126.pdf

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NAILING THE MAIN PROBLEM: LOUSY READING INSTRUCTION

Phyllis Schlafly is a great American. I’m not just saying that because she’s the auntie of one of my buds from Mizzou. It’s because she’s been faithfully and forcefully telling the truth about reading instruction in this country for years, and again very well in this dispatch:

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/phyllisschlafly/printps20050117.shtml


ZERO TOLERANCE FOR CARTWHEELS?

Students in West Covina, Calif., were all potential victims of an “unsafe situation” created by their classmate, 11-year-old Deirdre Faegre. So her school suspended her for a day late last year. Deirdre’s offense? Doing cartwheels and handstands during lunchtime. Her father pulled her out of the school, complaining about “cartwheel cops.” The plan is to homeschool Deirdre, a recent “Student of the Month” at that school, until they can find a private school for her. This has bulged into an international incident as Exhibit A of how “zero tolerance” school policies are wacky:

http://zerointelligence.net/archives/000232.php

Posted 9:49 AM by Susan Darst Williams

EVOLUTIONARY STICKY WICKET STILL STICKY

Good. A Georgia school board voted to appeal a federal judge’s ruling that the stickers their district put on public school biology textbooks have to come off. Why? Because they call evolution a theory, not a fact. And he thinks that violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

Riiiight. Pointing out what is true is bad for children? Evolution is theoretical because it is based on inferences, not observable, falsifiable data like so many other scientific lines of inquiry are. Until we invent time travel, scientists can’t observe or replicate the origins of life or the development of a new species. Even the most rabid evolutionist can go along with calling it a “theory.”

But nooooo. Somehow, the judge in the Cobb County case thought saying so on schoolbooks would cause the children to fall to their faces on the floor and worship the one true living God, Jesus Christ of Nazareth, or sprout acne in the shape of a cross or something.

Sigh. Next they’ll censor textbook mentions of Winston Churchill because he has “church” in his name. Yeah. You know, they can’t teach about fish in school – that’s a Christian symbol! All the mullions in all the windows of school buildings? They have to go – they’re in the shape of a cross.

Once again, the thought police of the ACLU are taking our money and our children’s time, and trying to take away the truth. How I wish people would . . . EVOLVE . . . a little smarts.

Posted 11:07 AM by Susan Darst Williams

‘THE KISS OF DEATH’ FOR SCHOOL OVERSPENDING

Go Big Ed’s friend Paul Dorr was featured in a big Sunday story in the Des Moines Register on how he has managed to help defeat 21 out of 24 school spending bond issues and tax-lid overrides in recent years. In fact, they call him “the kiss of death” for school bond issues:

http://www.desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050116/NEWS02/501160339/1001

Oh, it’s juicy reading. Dorr, who is 48 and the homeschooling father of 11, has parlayed a banking background into a consulting business that is giving hope to citizens’ committees facing The Blob – the rich, powerful and determined education establishment. He bears some of the credit for defeating one in the Omaha Public Schools a few years ago, and just won another one in southwest Iowa.

How I wish a white knight would step forward and underwrite Dorr’s help for the citizens fighting the $78 million bond issue that’s coming up fast, Feb. 15, in Millard. Opponents say they can make a solid case for why it’s premature and excessive, but have very little money and time to get the word out. But Dorr has done it before. And his rates are actually very reasonable.

Who will donate $3,000 to stop $78 million? Hint, hint! The Millard citizens’ group is headed by Paul Meyer, (402) 895-9162.

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WATCHING THE ED BILLS PILE UP

Not THAT kind of ed bills. No, it’s time to pay attention to the legislative bills introduced in the Unicameral. They wind up costing money, too – bigtime.

Those on the table so far are painting a picture of what’s going to go on this session. You can browse the lay of the land at:

http://www.unicam.state.ne.us/bill_intros/bill_intros_2005.htm

Today marks the start of public hearings on these bills, and at 1:30 p.m. in Room 1525, they'll take up LB 124, the attempted consolidation of Class I schools.

Posted 10:52 AM by Susan Darst Williams

WHY SHOULD THE STATE GET TO CALL THE TUNE?

For all the donkey work the State of Nebraska puts local schools through, from paperwork to statewide assessment nonsense, it was surprising to learn from Gov. Johanns’ state budget proposal that state taxes have dropped to covering just 37.3 percent of the K-12 education pricetag.

When Nebraska went to the “Robin Hood” style of equalization, 15 years ago, siphoning more money off from the rich to spread out to the poor, the story was that state aid was going to cover 45 percent of that school spending bill and grant some lovely local property tax relief.

Suuuuuuuure. Instead, we got all kinds of new state and federal mandates on our schools in the 1990s associated with Outcome-Based Education (now called “standards-based”), Goals 2000 and now No Child Left Behind, while local funding sources are paying for more and more of the bills.

And the beat goes on: property taxes just keep going up and up, and there’s no pressure whatsoever on schools to curtail their overspending.

Local property taxes and other local revenue sources, such as various fees, are carrying nearly two-thirds of the load these days. Yet the State gets bossier and more micro-managing all the time.

The latest: state educrats want $50 million extra from the Legislature for all-day kindergarten, early childhood education programs, standards and assessments, teacher training . . . and all kinds of other stuff that’s expensive and counter-productive to our basic goal of making kids literate, numerate good citizens without bankrupting their parents and grandparents.

Shouldn’t the state’s say-so in K-12 education be decreasing concomitantly with its decreasing share of the load? Ya think?

Here’s what I think: repeal all statewide standards and assessments, pare down state ed regulations as much as possible, and make the state stick to ensuring basic safety protections and the few other bona fide government services they should be doing. That will save so much money that districts won’t need federal funding any more, so they can drop all that and get out from under most of those unfunded mandates, too.

Keep state aid flowing to schools, but simplify how it’s figured. Take the amount of money we have available in state aid to education, divide it by each district’s Average Daily Attendance (note: not “enrollment,” but attendance), and send out an amount of money that’s the same per-pupil whether you’re in Millard or Podunk.

Presto! No more wheelin’ and dealin’ . . . and much more focus for schools to stick to their knittin’ and accomplish their basic mission in a cost-efficient manner.

Posted 11:00 AM by Susan Darst Williams

OH, THE DOUGH THAT GOES TO FLEE THE FLU

A little light weekend reading reveals that in 2001, only 32 Americans, ages 24 and younger, died of influenza.

And yet schools like Omaha Westside were planning to have mass vaccinations this past fall for staff, students and their families, if the supply hadn’t dried up since nobody could make any money on such a boondoggle.

Now, I’m sad that those 32 young people died. Seven of them were infants.

But this is a big country. Is it sane to be worrying about and paying for flu shots for schoolchildren the way we’ve been doing?

“Very few deaths are attributed to influenza in the population under age 55,” the report said.

And here it is, for your leisure-time pleasure:

“Trends in Pneumonia and Influenza Morbidity and Mortality,” American Lung Association, Research and Scientific Affairs, Epidemiology and Statistics Unit, August 2004.

Here’s hoping this factoid will go into someone’s boondoggle-fighting quiver for the next go-round in the important arena of school health.

Posted 10:41 AM by Susan Darst Williams

WHAT THE EYE-POPPING TECHNOLOGY BUDGETS ARE FOR

One of the reasons school budgets are so much higher these days is that they are buying and maintaining technology on top of the books, pencils and paper of yesteryear. Technology is part of the $78 million bond issue on the Feb. 15 ballot in the Millard Public Schools, for example. Everybody understands this; you couldn’t have a school, especially a high school, today without ed tech.

But I don’t like the way it’s going. As predicted, the ed tech is sold to taxpayers as a great learning tool, but behind the scenes is being twisted into a harness, or maybe a straitjacket. Technology is the way public schools are going to be turned into government training academies and instruments of social engineering. Bye-bye, academic freedom for teachers and a broad-based, individual liberal-arts education for youngsters. Hello, Brave New World.

I may be jumping to conclusions here, but I base some of this on the politicians’ love affair for the Education Leaders Council, a conservative school-reform group that became a federal contractor in 2002. Its former Chief Executive Officer Lisa Graham Keegan, also former superintendent of public instruction in Arizona, has Nebraska relatives and is generally well-regarded for cutting bureaucracy. But she has left.
The ELC has recently obtained congressional earmarks totaling $23.3 million. Earmarks mean what they’re doing is some politician’s pet project.

According to Sunday’s Washington Times, ELC just got six earmarks for an additional $9.7 million to expand its federally funded "Following the Leaders" technology project. They are computerizing curricula for more than 200,000 students in 600 public schools in 12 states in partnership with Achievement Technologies Inc. of Newton, Mass., and other donors.

Nebraska is not one of the states, but those that are included – Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Ohio – are heavily into standards-based education, which is what we used to call “outcome-based education.” So naturally, they would be the “leaders” in this, because they have the “systems-based schools” in place already, and this is where the money is going to be made on the whole standards-based “reform” movement of the past 20 years or so.

This is why the politicians, educrats and technology companies were so hot to trot to get boilerplate standards in place in all 10 states, under Goals 2000 and now No Child Left Behind. This computerized curriculum system is standards-based and Web-based. It uses the computer as a teaching tool, but also as an “eye in the sky” over what teachers are doing, to lash them to the mast of government specs . . . oops, I mean standards . . . in their lesson plans.

The kids basically sit in computer labs with earphones on and stare at the screen while their answers are recorded on individualized databases. The teachers flit from kid to kid and “facilitate” learning. It has a definite “stimulus-response” feel, like rat training.

The software is preengineered to match the state’s learning standards and comes with curriculum and a wide range of assessments, from daily quizzes to district-wide pretests, to get the kids ready for the annual exams. This is why those states with “high-stakes assessments” . . . meaning school officials lose their jobs if the kids in their schools flub the dub on these big exams . . . are the ones where the educators are into this the most.

It’s “teaching to the test” on steroids.

Meanwhile, a lot of money is being made by the businesses which sell the software and help schools manage all this technology. And meanwhile, a database grows that shows how the kid does in academics as well as how the kid feels about stuff.

This is the Political Correctness component that scares me. This is why I was among those opposing social engineering in our standards and graduation outcomes that were put in place in Nebraska schools in the 1990s.

Now, using preprogrammed “activities” on the computer, with the kid’s answers recorded, it will be easy to see which kids are independent thinkers, which ones follow the gang, which ones are from cool left-wing homes and which ones are from fuddy-duddy conservative homes.

If the answers they give on these “affective” type questions aren’t what Big Brother is looking for, then the curriculum can be re-manipulated to remediate them and reassess them, until they . . . “get it.” Meaning . . . see things the State’s way.

Ewwwwww!!!!!!!

See for yourself on the Education Leaders Council site (www.educationleaders.org) and the computerized curriculum sub-site (www.followingtheleaders.org)

I’d be the last person to say that technology has no place in schools. But I’m the first in line to say that we need to be very, very careful about what we’re buying, and what we’re getting our children and ourselves into.

Posted 11:06 AM by Susan Darst Williams

‘IT’S THE TYPICAL SHOVE IT DOWN YOUR THROAT MENTALITY’

Follow up to Tuesday’s story about the $78 million proposed bond issue in the Millard Public Schools: the leader of the opposition is a very nice, very reasonable guy.

“I don’t mind them spending money,” Paul Meyer said. “I just don’t like them wasting money.”

He said he has presented the Millard Board of Education with 110 recommendations for reducing the budget, and 34 questions about the bond issue. What has been the response? Zippo.

“It’s the typical shove-it-down-your-throat mentality,” Meyer said. “To school administrators, taxpayers are good for one thing, and one thing only: to provide the money.”

Examples of what he finds amiss in the $78 million spending proposal:

-- Meyer said the package includes $3.4 million to purchase land for two elementary schools and a nontraditional high school. At the $38,000 per acre rate the district cites, and using standard space allocations, that comes to just over $2 million. So, Meyer asks, what’s the other $1.4 million for?

-- The district says it must have those new schools in place because new neighborhoods are going to be built on 5,000 empty lots within the district. They figure that will bring in 3,500 more students. Meyer said, “That’s a bunch of baloney. With interest rates, we’ll have 2,000 more kids, tops. And they won’t be here next year, but many years from now. Millard already has a new grade school opening this fall. We’ll be fine for years.”

-- The bond proposal calls for $1.4 million to install artificial turf on the football field at Millard South. Meyer points out that if it costs $10,000 a year to fix the grass at the end of each football season, the district could play ball for 100 years before that $1.4 million would be cost-efficient.

-- He said the district could mail out ballots to voters to get much more voting participation than they will surely get by setting up polls on Feb. 15. Retirees and snowbirds will be disenfranchised because they’ll probably be out of town in warmer climates, for example. He is going to ask that the district go the mail-vote route, but isn’t holding his breath. Meyer said the unusually last-minute nature of the bond issue reflects a desire by school officials to avoid the accountability of a normal election, which he says they’d lose overwhelmingly. He also said the Feb. 15 election is going to cost $85,000, while waiting until the normal May 10 general election would have cost just $28,000, and a vote-by-mail system would have cost $25,000 at most.

Meyer said he moved to the Millard schools to keep his children out of the Omaha Public Schools’ busing program many years ago. He was a leader in the fight against Omaha’s annexation move against Millard. He has run for the Millard school board a couple of times. He retired as corporate safety director of Holmes Freight Lines, and recently went back into the trucking industry.

So he’s just one guy, working full-time, and yet he’s taking on a big bond issue in the state’s third-largest school district that comes up Feb. 15 against well-financed opposition?

Yeah, well . . . a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. Meyer plans to have an organizational meeting soon, would love to receive donations of any size to pay for an informational flyer he’d like to get out, and would love to have volunteers step forward and distribute that flyer to 100 or 150 homes, maybe a couple hours’ work.

Contact him: Paul Meyer, PaulMyr1@aol.com

Posted 10:30 AM by Susan Darst Williams

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DOES MILLARD NEED THE $78 MILLION?

The latest request for a school tax increase is on the ballot in the Millard Public Schools on Feb. 15, and citizens’ groups have formed to support it and oppose it.

Millard is asking for a $78 million bond issue to build two grade schools and a “nontraditional” high school, buy land for future schools, renovate existing schools, and add technology. With the cost of interest and the additional operating expenses that will be incurred with capital expenditures of that amount, the total tab to Millard taxpayers over time will likely be twice that.

Millard taxpayers have been very generous in the past, going 12-for-12 in previous bond issues in that district. But the latest one, $89 million in 1997, squeaked by with 52 percent of the vote. There have been some notable bond-issue turndowns in the area lately, including in the Omaha Public Schools and the Lincoln Public Schools. So this one will be interesting.

The leader of the opposition group is Paul Meyer. Heading up the “pro” side is Dave Anderson. Public meetings are planned Feb. 2, 5 and 8; check the Millard website, www.mpsomaha.org for details. I’ll try to go to one and report back.

Here are some fun facts gleaned from Millard’s most-recent annual financial report to the State Education Department (http://ess.nde.state.ne.us) that might inform the public debate:

-- Local property taxes yielded $62.2 million for Millard. Its budget was $134.1 million. Well over half of Millard’s spending is coming from taxes and other revenues besides property taxes. If they want to add infrastructure which will certainly increase spending, how come the rest of us, who don’t live in Millard, don’t get to vote?

-- Millard has said it expects to enroll 3,500 new kids in the near future because of new neighborhoods being built. With additional enrollment come large amount of additional state aid and federal funding. That additional revenue must be factored in. It’s certainly not up to Millard property taxpayers alone to carry that load. Maybe there’s another way to afford growth than raising people’s property taxes.

-- Millard’s average daily attendance is 18,185 pupils. But its “annual membership,” the total enrollment that it reports to the state to collect state aid, is 20,371. That’s 2,186 kids we’re paying for who aren’t there. Absenteeism of 11 percent? Where are they, at the bowling alley? Addressing this discrepancy would help a lot.

-- There’s also talk that the eastern schools in Millard are under-enrolled and that the new enrollment could flow to under-utilized schools instead of building new ones. Let’s see some numbers on that.

-- Divide the $78 million in the proposed bond issue by the 18,185 kids who come to class on an average day, and you get $4,289.25 apiece. That would buy an awful lot of No. 2 pencils. Could there be a better way to allocate the more than $7,000 per pupil per year that’s being spent now, so that another $4,289.25 apiece wouldn’t be necessary?

-- Millard’s total tax receipts in the most recent year reported were $134.1 million. Teacher salaries cost $45.2 million. That means Millard spent only about one-third of its operating budget on teacher salaries. Nearly $89 million went for other things. Remember when teacher salaries were said to be 70 to 80 percent of the typical school district’s expenses? And when teachers were “the heart of the district”? What are they now . . . the shinbone?

-- You hear that Millard is the richest school district in the state in terms of per-capita income, or if it’s not there yet, it soon will be. So, you’d think, there must be scads more taxable property in that district than most anywhere else, and those rich property owners can stand a little old tax increase. But think again. Divide Millard’s assessed valuation of $6.85 billion by its total fall enrollment, 20,371. That comes to $336,262.33 in taxable property per pupil. You know how the Omaha Public Schools is thought to be hard up for cash? Its property-per-pupil is almost the same, $320,092.81. Meanwhile, District 66 sports $455,919.82 per kid, and Lincoln Public Schools weighs in at $414,657.58. They have 25 percent more wealth per pupil, in other words. Maybe those Millard taxpayers aren’t driving Bentleys and wearing ascots the way the pro-bond issue PR suggests they are. Is this another smarmy case of “let’s tax ‘em and get the money, just because we can”?

Hey, I know how I’d vote. But I don’t live in that district. Let’s hear it from some of you Millard citizens: what’s the real deal, and what are you going to advise your fellow voters?

Posted 11:34 AM by Susan Darst Williams

TWO OUT OF THREE NEBRASKA STUDENTS ARE DOING LESS THAN WELL

Two-thirds of Nebraska students can’t read and do math proficiently, according to statistics released in Quality Counts 2005, the big annual factbook of Education Week (www.edweek.org).

Using results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the publication concluded that 32 percent of Nebraska fourth-graders can read proficiently, and 35 percent of eighth-graders can.

That means 68 percent and 65 percent, respectively, read less than well.

For math, there’s been an improvement in fourth-grade NAEP scores, to 34 percent proficient; 32 percent of the eighth-graders tested met that mark. But again, the numbers indicate that 66 percent of fourth-graders and 68 percent of eighth-graders can do math only on an average or below-average basis.

What makes this report a little more depressing is that it is unknown how many students were excluded from taking the NAEP because of a label of being “learning disabled.” Nebraska has one of the highest rates in the nation for that designation, and a startlingly high rate of reported disabilities overall: public schools in the state report that 15.8 percent of the student body is disabled in some way.

Among other facts in the report:

-- Nebraska has 1,250 public schools, 21,043 public-school teachers, 285,402 students in pre-K through Grade 12, and spends $2.2 billion a year.

-- Nebraska is 24th among the states in total taxable resources spent on education, totaling 4 percent, compared to the national average, 3.8 percent.

-- Nebraska is one of only 10 states with “negative wealth-neutrality scores.” That means that property-poor districts have more state and local revenue for education than wealthy districts do. That should be another nail in the coffin of that “equity stick-up” lawsuit filed straight out of the “whine cellars” of the Omaha Public Schools and sidekicks.

-- Nebraska is one of only 10 states that won’t allow charter schools and has no school-choice system other than choosing between public schools, grouping it among the states with the least academic freedom in the U.S.

-- In the 2001-02 school year, Nebraska spent $8,741 per pupil for education, which was more than in 39 other states. Meaning, the Cornhusker State is No. 11 in spending, we don’t give our parents any options or choices, and yet two-thirds of our kids can’t read or do math very well. Hmm, hmm, hmmmmmm.

Posted 11:38 AM by Susan Darst Williams

THREE SOB STORIES ABOUT PARENTAL INVOLVEMENT

As GoBigEd reported this week, a parents’ group in Ohio got “unrecognized” recently for staying neutral in a school tax increase vote instead of shilling for it. That’s a telling example about how everyday parents and taxpayers who are just trying to do what they think is best for kids and schools often get a kick in the pants for their trouble when their views conflict with the education establishment’s, as they often do.

It reminds me of three local parallels:

1. Linda Weinmaster, the mother of three boys, lived in the Millard (Neb.) Public Schools and as a parent volunteer helped start the much-appreciated Millard Core Academy in that district, offering a traditional 3R education, quality curriculum, phonics, and so forth. She moved to Lawrence, Kan., but before she did, she tried very hard to convince the Nebraska State Board of Education to adopt learning standards for English class that were absolutely excellent, instead of the mishmash they wound up approving, that were panned this week by the Fordham Foundation. Mrs. Weinmaster recalled that she had held a series of meetings with Nebraska bigwigs including Kiewit chairman Walter Scott, now-Congressman Tom Osborne, and other very influential people. They all gave her letters of support for the high-quality standards she advocated for before the Board. She did it out of good citizenship, putting a lot of time and effort into it, and believe me, she built a tremendously convincing case that her standards would be better for kids. However, the powers-that-be wanted the State’s proposed standards, which fit with their push to put Outcome-Based Education in place statewide. In a last-minute, back-room deal, the vote went the other way – and the board member responsible wound up with a new, high-paid job. All Mrs. Weinmaster’s friends could do was advise her to bite a towel; that’s the way the cookie crumbles, when you try to do something good for kids and buck the educrats.

2. Paul Dorr, my friend and school-finance consultant from northern Iowa, who has defeated dozens of unnecessary tax-lid overrides and bond issues, is just a drop in the bucket in the multi-billion dollar school finance big picture. But he was the target of a workshop teaching school officials how to defeat political opposition to their tax increases at November’s Iowa State School Boards Association convention. Iowa taxpayers paid the way of the 1,400 people in attendance at that meeting, of course. Now, he’s heard that they’re taking the workshop to a similar, national event. The trouble is, you can’t use taxpayer dollars for a political purpose like that, especially if the purpose is to defeat the very taxpayers and voters who pay your salary, and send you to fun conventions and workshops and stuff! So Mr. Dorr has filed a complaint with the Iowa Ethics and Campaign Disclosure Board, and I’m going to send him a towel to bite, too.

3. Our third sob story, though it’s more humorous than the others, involves a family named Williams. We used to live in Omaha’s District 66, and our children attended the Westside Community Schools. One of the reasons we left is how we were treated after I spoke out against a tax-lid override and a big bond issue to remodel the high school. I shared some financial data about both issues that the district was not making public. My side lost both of those battles by a narrow margin, but at least I tried. Well, then I got a nassssssty letter in the mail from the head of the gifted program in the district. It seems, he said, that our children had suddenly become “ungifted,” and were being dropped from the program. I knew it was a brutal attempt at political harassment on his part, to punish me for opposing the party line. Instead of getting mad or sad, though, I wrote him back a funny letter in which I said I was sorry he had learned about their LOBOTOMIES . . . !!! Shortly thereafter, we moved out of the district. Too bad he’s retired now, or otherwise I’d send him a copy of his letter along with our oldest daughter’s Phi Beta Kappa certificate from her top-notch university, and our next daughter’s big-dollar Presidential Scholarship from her college, the 5’s they both got on the Advanced Placement Calculus exam, and the third one’s standardized test scores in the 99th percentile . . . you get the idea. Bite a towel? Why ruin a good towel? I just use my teeth to smile at guys like that. Eventually, that kind of behavior winds up biting them, and you know exactly where.

By no means are all educators this nasty. But by no means should we pretend these nasty things aren’t happening. They need to be exposed and talked about, and the tax-paid school employees who are doing these nasty things need to be disciplined, corrected, straightened up and made to fly right.

Or else we’ll just be forced to give them . . . LOBOTOMIES!!!

Posted 9:16 AM by Susan Darst Williams

NEBRASKA BLEW IT ON MATH AND ENGLISH STANDARDS

Nebraska: The Beef State. We know that “standard” is a grade of beef “below good.” We should have known better than to impose statewide learning standards a few years ago. They’re making our formerly-great schools “below good.”

And it shows. The Fordham Foundation had two education experts take a look at the 49 states that instituted “government specs” on K-12 education – “standards” – and graded them, A-F. (Iowa is to be congratulated; it figured out that it didn’t need standards because all they would do is bring the level of quality down, not raise it.)

Well, we weren’t that smart. Nebraska’s math standards rated a “D” and our English standards got a “C.” Both were well below the national average.

You can read the full report on www.edexcellence.net, “The State of State Standards 2005.” Don’t miss the cogent commentary by language expert Sandra Stotsky on the English standards, and Cal State Northridge math professor David Klein on the math specs.

Nebraska’s English standards dropped from a “B” rating in 2000 largely because the 2001 standards, set by the State Board of Education, have “serious limitations,” according to the report.

Examples: there are no apparent expectations for vocabulary growth after fourth grade; most standards are so nebulous and vague they aren’t teachable, much less measurable; there’s a failure to show increasing difficulty from grade to grade, and there’s a total lack of acknowledgement of the substantive content of a model literature curriculum, with no suggested titles or even authors or genres mentioned at any grade level, K-12.

It’s as if the kids are supposedly studying English without reading or writing anything. It’d be funny if it weren’t so sad.

On the math end, the gong rings even louder. Nebraska’s taxpayer-financed math standards are called “sketchy,” “awkward and vague,” with a “heavy reliance on calculators throughout.”

Nebraska’s standards leave out the memorization of single-digit arithmetic facts, standard algorithms of arithmetic, the quadratic formula, and the Pythagorean Theorem. Nearly 40 percent of the 12th-grade math standards are given over to probability and data analysis, instead of solid calculations of algebra, geometry and trigonometry. The geometry standards were termed “peculiar,” and the standards on measurement required the kids to, well, measure, instead of do calculations in order to measure.

What should we do about this?

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: throw out our statewide standards and especially the assessments we’ve put in place at great expense even though nobody wanted this system, especially not parents, teachers and taxpayers. Why not? Because they’re nonsense. But the entrenched education bureaucracy has no motivation to understand that academics is what we want, not socialized mush.

Or if we refuse to do that, then we have to start a GI Bill-style vouchers system, to give to families who choose to opt out of the public schools at least a piece of the tax funding their child would have received if they’d stayed in. Then they can use that money to send their child to the private school of their choice, where they teach real stuff, and not “standards.”

One more thing that I’ve said before, too: to prevent this kind of thing from happening, and to save our public schools, we need to pass a law STAT to make the State Education Commissioner elected, not appointed, and to give the elected State Board of Education more power over the Commissioner. Then, finally, we might have a public servant at the top who is accountable to the public, and then we could begin to rebuild our schools.

Posted 11:13 AM by Susan Darst Williams

WHEN PARENTS DARE TO BUCK THE SYSTEM

What would happen if a Nebraska parents’ organization associated with a school district went on record opposing a bond issue, tax-lid levy override or other means of obtaining more revenue? Or what if the PTA or PTO chose to remain politically neutral when taxpayers are asked to fork over more cash for schools?

I have a funny feeling there would be repercussions such as happened last month in Ohio. School officials have officially defrocked a local parents’ group for failure to campaign for a proposed tax hike. The Parent-Teacher Organization decided to stay neutral, out of the political fray, neither supporting nor opposing the measure. It went down to defeat in November.

Now, according to the Akron newspaper, school officials of the Buckeye Junior High School in Medina no longer recognize the PTO as a district-related organization. School officials even turned down $1,000 the group raised in a sweatshirt sale.

Nasssss-ty.

Is it just a mirage when school officials say they try to foster a strong “home and school partnership,” when parent volunteers get treated like that? As if they’re not allowed to have an opinion that differs from the school administration’s? As if they’re just supposed to be mindless cheerleaders and political operatives?

If this happened in your district and you were on the school board, what would you do? I think a little more defrocking would be in order – of those administrators’ jobs.

Posted 10:44 AM by Susan Darst Williams

ARRRRIBA! 11.6%?

According to the National Council of La Raza, an Hispanic advocacy organization, the percentage of what they now call “English Language Learners” – kids who can’t speak, read or write English – has reached 11.6% of the nation’s K-12 enrollment. That’s a 126 percent increase since 1991-92, La Raza says.

I can’t quite believe it’s that high, although the non-English speaking student population in Nebraska is indeed said to be increasing drastically. Spanish-speaking kids make up the largest population of ELL’s, although African and Asian children’s numbers are growing here, too.

Of course, my joke is that we’re going to wind up making our kids illiterate in not one, but TWO languages. That is, if we keep up the silly way we’re teaching English in schools today, or should I say, NOT teaching it. If both public and private schools continue to use Whole Language methods instead of phonics, fail to correct misspellings, and assign drivel literature instead of the great books and poems, our kids will end up with about the same English language facility as immigrants. While I’m fully in favor of foreign-language instruction, especially Spanish, in our schools, I can see some problems it causes in the use of instructional time, and the ability of our kids to master their native language, too.

What should parents, educators and taxpayers do about this?

First, the research is clear: NOBODY thinks bilingual education is the way to go anymore. It clearly doesn’t work. But some people think we need to take it slow on our language expectations for non-English speaking students because of the multidimensional complexities involved, while others think they should be totally immersed in nothing but English from Day One as in generations past in the U.S.

There’s a wide gulf between advocates on both sides of this one:

For a pro-Spanish language approach, see the National Council of La Raza, www.nclr.org

For a pro-English language approach, see U.S. English, Inc., www.us-english.org

I come down strong on the side of the pro-English folks, though I sympathize with the other side, too, and feel that all language instruction -- properly done -- enriches minds, no matter what the language is.

Hasta la vista, ciao, and a bientot!

Posted 1:52 PM by Susan Darst Williams

Greetings and Happy New Year! I’m working with a new computer today, so if you didn't receive this by email today, please alert me at swilliams1@cox.net, and thank you very much.

Wishing you a healthy, happy new year.

-- S.

=============

NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS FOR SCHOOLS

A Go Big Ed reader asked for some common-sense solutions for school improvement, and an expert’s answers follow:

Q. What do experienced educators want to change in the way schools are run today?

Interestingly, they don’t necessarily clamor for more money. And they don’t wish for more experiments and "research" to fix our education problems. Veteran educators say they already have the resources and the knowhow for excellent teaching. What needs to happen is a fresh new look at those resources and that knowledge.

The basic principles of what works are timeless. A return to them would have to come from inside the education establishment, though, or there’d be too much resistance from the entrenched education bureaucracy. What’s needed is for longtime educators to do a better job of teaching younger teachers what’s needed, and why. Then they can build up a critical mass of well-informed professionals to win over the bureaucracy and the policymakers. That may be the only answer for innovation and change.

According to Charles R. Lewis, longtime math teacher and author of a series of math textbooks, here’s a basic list of what schools need to put back into place:

-- administration-enforced discipline
-- rigorous test-based passing standards
-- placement based on achievement
-- sequential, thorough presentation of concepts within disciplines
-- elimination of interdisciplinary, "integrated," and thematic approaches
-- elimination of group-based projects and grading, and a return to the belief in individualism
-- ceasing the stigmatization of religion, especially Christianity
-- elimination of "issues-based," politicized curricula
-- a return to the concept of "teacher" as opposed to "facilitator of learning," "activity leader," or "classroom manager”
-- banning of "cooperative learning," "authentic assessment," constructivism, "holistic scoring," "performance-based projects," and countless other ineffective, nonacademic concepts
-- genuine local control
-- the reimposition of the supremacy of arithmetic and phonics

Lewis concludes his list with a zinger. “Oh, what the heck: the closing of all government schools and their replacement with home schools, church schools, and amalgams.” That might be the best and fastest way to get power back into the hands of parents and teachers.

It’s a brand new year. We can dream, can’t we?

Homework: Lewis and other education writers appear on www.EdWatch.org and www.EducationNews.org