Posted 10:50 AM by Susan Darst Williams

CHRISTENSEN IN HOT WATER OVER TESTING SYSTEM

Nebraska Education Commissioner Doug Christensen got blasted in The World-Herald over the weekend for pushing through the state’s unique assessment system. Our state’s highest-ranking education official crafted a system that basically allows Nebraska schools to evaluate themselves instead of submitting to objective, outside assessments of educational quality.

Where I come from, they call that “studying your navel.”

But a lot of people have gone along with it because they didn’t want a nationalized or state-standardized exam system, which would mirror communist countries and so forth. Instead, we have no real accountability to the public. And consequently we continue to have raging grade inflation where masses of our students have close to a 4.0 average, and yet our state performance on standardized college admissions tests exposes our soft underbelly, for on those objective measurements, our kids are doing “C” work.

I say the problem is that we’ve let a bureaucrat tell us how we’re going to evaluate the job our public schools are doing. But no private-sector person would structure an accountability system that way. We SHOULD be comparing public-school performance to the job that’s being done in the private sector. There’s where the action is: a higher quality education for kids of all demographic groups.

Now, I can see where Christensen was coming from. Christensen didn’t want to bank entirely on standardized tests, because there’s more to evaluating learning than a test score. Everybody agrees with that.

But school superintendents such as Westside’s Ken Bird and John Mackiel of OPS say that the state’s complex system of multiple assessments to meet state and federal government education regulations is too expensive and cumbersome, for what it’s worth. And of course, they’re right.

Here’s the solution: scrap the system Christensen devised. It’s just plain too bureaucratic and downright meaningless.

Instead, prepare a newspaper supplement for every newspaper in the state, in which a set of easy-to-obtain data -- standardized test scores, spending per pupil, dropout rate, percentage of learning-disabled kids, percentage of kids in poverty, etc. -- are published.

The secret is, that same data should be published for public AND private schools in the state, plus lump the homeschoolers together as if in one district.

As soon as the public sees how much better the private schools and homeschools are doing on SAT and ACT scores and the other indicators, they’ll cry for the public schools to dump their lousy curriculum and align themselves with what WORKS, not what the bureaucrats LIKE.

That may be our best chance to get an apples-to-apples comparison of the job our public schools are doing. And boy, would it be a ton easier, cheaper and better.

FOOTNOTE TO FRIDAY’S STORY

Regarding the country school in Morrill County that made a mistake on its IRS forms and was scrambling to pay $9,000 in back taxes: Go Big Ed received a call from a good source who said there is more to this story than just the accounting glitch. While everything in the story is true, it might be wise to wait a while and let it play out before you commit to sending any money to help this country school. The vast majority of Nebraska's Class I schools are really good and well-run, and do an amazingly good job. Let’s just hope this situation works out for the best of all concerned, especially the eight students enrolled.

That story, by the way, was picked up by www.northplattebulletin.com Note that online and print publishers are always welcome to run GoBigEd stories, as long as there’s a byline and attribution to this blog.

Posted 9:36 AM by Susan Darst Williams

A CALL TO SAVE A COUNTRY SCHOOL

Fellow Nebraska blogger Rolly Church (http://thechurchreport.livejournal.com) has started a donation campaign to try to save a historic one-room schoolhouse in the Panhandle that may have to close because of an accounting error.

Church said the teacher, her aide, and a janitor/secretary/van driver have been working for free for months to keep the lights on and books open for the eight students who come to Hill Public School near Bayard, Neb.

The classic, one-room school is almost a century old. It is located about 30 miles from Scottsbluff in western Morrill County. You can see Chimney Rock from there.

In a predicament that made ABC News, USA Today and newspapers coast to coast, the little school got in trouble with the Internal Revenue Service to the tune of $16,600. After the intervention of a Chicago-based tax relief organization, the IRS agreed to drop the $7,000 in fines and penalties it first imposed, as long as the $9,600 in withholding taxes it says are still owed are paid over the next two years.

The arrangement isn’t finalized, but casts a little ray of hope. The school is looking to sell its $2,000 van, for example. But overall, the financial whammy is almost overwhelming for the one-room school, which also recently lost $20,000 in state aid, Church reports.

In a phone interview, Rhonda Maxcy, school-board secretary, said that school employees had nothing to do with the error and were shocked when it was revealed. She said the school’s accountant erroneously used Line 11 on the tax form when the income amount was $3.25 over the maximum, and in consequence, Line 13 was wrong, too. The same error persisted for two years before the IRS caught it.

It doesn’t exactly rank right up there with the Enron and WorldCom scandals, but the IRS says the money is owed, and so the money is owed.

Ms. Maxcy said she has written Warren Buffett, Oprah Winfrey and Ted Turner asking for financial help, and plans next to ask President Bush. Local businesses have been supportive, but the farm economy and the drought make collecting donations very tough, she said.

She feels extra passionate about the school because she has a daughter there, and can testify about the benefits of individual attention and academic encouragement in a country school.

“This is a piece of American pie that’s older than baseball,” Ms. Maxcy said. “We’re asking people to send whatever they can to keep our school alive so we can go on turning out well-educated, productive citizens.”

If you would like to help Hill Public School, send your tax deductible contribution to any US Bank. Make checks payable to Hill Public School, District 44. Or telephone or email Rhonda Maxcy, (308) 586-2278 or jlorrkmax@bbc.net

Posted 10:19 AM by Susan Darst Williams

A MASTER TEACHER BEGS LAWMAKERS TO BAN MERCURY

It’s not every day that a longtime teacher lobbies the State Legislature on an individual basis. Usually, they leave that to their unions.

But Go Big Ed has received a copy of a Millard teacher’s plea to Nebraska legislators to ban the toxic chemical mercury from childhood vaccinations. Her reason: there’s a strong possibility that it causes or contributes to serious learning disabilities, including autism and ADHD.

Reflect on how she describes kids today, and see if the hair on the back of your neck doesn’t rise up.

The teacher, Jean Howard, writes:

“This message is to urge you to proceed with the legislation LB 569 which will prevent mercury and mercury type preservatives in vaccinations.

“I have been a schoolteacher for thirty-seven years. I cannot begin to tell you all the changes in children which I have observed in the last 15 to 20 years.

“This seems to be especially true with males. Estrogen provides some protection from the mercury-based preservatives and that may explain why more boys are affected; however girls are not immune to the effects.

“I have used many programs and methods and have successfully taught children to read. It is becoming increasingly difficult to do, as there are more and more children who have a wide gap between their ability and their performance. They are becoming more easily distracted, have shorter attention spans, and are more hyperactive with each passing year.

“I have researched this issue and mercury poisoning is a consistent factor in the research. This is increasing our special education numbers, creating frustrated students and parents, and increasing our numbers of functionally illiterate.

“Since vaccines are available without the mercury-based preservatives, moving LB 569 out of committee appears to be a no-brainer with nothing to lose and possibly everything to gain.

“I therefore STRONGLY URGE you to move this bill out of committee to the Unicameral.

“I thank you for your interest in our children; please do your part to protect them.”

Three cheers for Sen. David Landis, sponsor of that bill, and I second Ms. Howard’s motion.

Posted 8:37 AM by Susan Darst Williams

OP-ED: MISINFORMATION CORRECTED ON CLASS I SCHOOLS

Last week, an error-plagued story on Nebraska’s Class I schools controversy ran in major newspapers here, and was picked up by www.drudgereport.com It perpetuated the myth that parents are yanking their kids out of the town schools in Lexington and Schuyler out of racism, to avoid the influx of Hispanic kids there for their parents’ meatpacking jobs. But the real reason they’re going to country schools is for academics, as we saw Tuesday.

The story also showed the author’s ignorance of the fact that Class I schools are so tiny, they don’t have cafeterias and don’t serve the ubiquitous free and reduced, subsidized, government lunches to low-income kids that the town and city schools do. The story thought the absence of the typical poverty indicator for a school population, the subsidized lunch percentage, meant that the kids are all rich. Wrong!

It also claimed spending per pupil was much, much higher in these country schools, implying that Nebraska is skimping on the brown-skinned kids and lavishing all kinds of moolah on the whities in the country. Again, wrong: many, if not most, Class I schools spend at or below the state average, and those that spend more have proportionately more special-needs kids, driving up their cost per pupil in a deceptive way.

So the story went out all over the country, making Nebraskans look like rich, racist, wild-spending yahoo’s. It was terribly unfair.

Luckily, here’s an op-ed that explains it all beautifully. It was in last week’s Lincoln Journal and is reproduced here compliments of its author, George Lauby, board member, Dawson District 22. He’s “legislative liaison” for Dawson County Class I’s and contributing editor, www.NorthPlatteBulletin.com:

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

By George Lauby

In the Legislature Feb. 10 during debate on LB 126, Sen. Ron Raikes portrayed six Dawson County Class I school districts near Lexington as havens for privileged white students.

They are not.

The unforgivable thing in this debate is that Sen. Raikes omitted data in the argument. He said the six districts spend too much.

Raikes cited budgeted costs-per-pupil of $9,500 to $11,000 that he said came from six Class I schools near Lexington. He NEGLECTED to include the budgeted cost at two of the districts nearest Lexington -- District 22, with an ‘04-‘05 budgeted per pupil cost of $7,070, and District 16, with a cost of $7,874 per pupil.

Nor are these schools segregated. There are minority students at all of the Class I schools. For instance, at the two districts mentioned above, 40 percent of the students are Latino or Native American.

Public schools serve the residents of their districts first and foremost. There are fewer minority students in rural areas than in towns, because most rural residents are farmers and ranchers. However, the districts and the schools are by no means exclusive.

Lexington Superintendent Dick Eisenhauer seems to imagine suburban, private neighborhood Class I schools. There are about 130 students, most of them residents of the districts, scattered among the six schools over an area of about 200 square miles. Most students travel 5-20 miles to the Class I school.

Districts 22 and 44 (6 and 8 miles from Lexington, respectively) have 44 students combined, and 7 of them opt in. Four of the seven are minorities.

The situation is similar at the other four schools. In all six schools, there are a total of 40 option-in students. 16 of them do not come from the city of Lexington. Eight are non-Caucasian (Latino or Native American). That means 16 or so are Caucasian from Lexington. Some of them are special education students or students who have been bullied or are failing for some reason or other at LPS.

Only two opt-in requests at all 10 Dawson County Class I schools have been turned away in the past 3.5 years and that happened because programs were full, according to board members and Dawson County Class I administrator Kenneth O’Mara, Ed.D.

Regarding poverty, Dawson County Class I poverty students do not register on the Nebraska Department of Education index of “free and reduced lunch eligibility” because the schools don’t serve reimbursable lunch. Students bring lunch from home as they have since Class I schools were founded more than 100 years ago. If lunch is arranged or provided, the schools don’t ask for reimbursement from the state.

If there is some correlation (certainly not a direct correlation) of special education students with income level, 30 percent of Districts 16’s and 22’s students are poverty level.

Raikes has never visited Dawson County Class I schools. It doesn’t appear that Supt. Dick Eisenhauer has, either.

Two of the six schools spend about $11,000 per pupil -- at one school, the special needs of a family of three students with a rare genetic disorder and a student who is nearly deaf have pushed costs skyward. An occupational therapist visits each week; the school hired a special aide and purchased sophisticated audio as well as visual equipment.

The children with the disorder no longer live in the district, but Mom has optioned the kids there and now drives 25 miles each way, using the school of her choice to meet exceptional needs, as provided by state law.

In 2003-04, 50 percent of the other students at District 15 had high-cost special education needs. If the school could be considered a haven, it would be a haven for appreciative parents of special needs children, not “privileged whites.”

Another Dawson County school with a high budgeted per pupil cost (nearly $11,000) that Sen. Raikes mentioned during floor debate is District 17. The school’s budget was based on last year’s student enrollment, which was 28.5 percent higher than this year. If actual spending this year (2004-05) decreases by 28.5 percent, the school will spend $8,000 per pupil, near the state average and $500 per pupil less than Lexington Public Schools.

If you put all the omissions and misinformation together, the average cost per pupil at the six Class I schools near Lexington is less than Lexington Public Schools and the state average.

Other Class I schools in the county are even more cost-efficient. A Class I school near Gothenburg has an ‘04-‘05 budgeted per pupil cost of $6,500, one of the lowest in the state. Those low-cost schools have something to teach us all about educating efficiently, but LB 126 would eliminate the board that personally oversees the operation.

Sen. Raikes’ spending numbers, which seem to have been provided to him by the Department of Education, were over-inflated and his numbers of poverty students were absurd. Needless to say, we are dismayed at the rhetoric and character assassination.

Three Dawson County Class I school districts dissolved during the past five years, even though the county’s population slightly increased, as residents dealt with the reality in their geographical school districts. We think that flexibility is intrinsic to Nebraska’s ingenious rural elementary school system.

On the other hand, the research if not the motivation of LB 126 is suspect. Its fiscal note uses vague math even though the bill has stood for 10 months.

Class I schools in Nebraska use about 7 percent of state K-12 spending, so even if all Class I schools were completely closed and it would cost nothing to educate the 8,000 students elsewhere (a preposterous projection) the taxpayers would save next to nothing – 1.3 percent.

If one accepts the highly questionable projected fiscal note savings attached to LB 126, $12.7 million, the bill would reduce K-12 spending by two-tenths of one percent.

If one accepts the earlier fiscal note (posted Jan. 11) of $2-3 million (also questionable), savings are “4-thousandths of 1 percent” of K-12 spending.

LB 126 was drafted and introduced a year ago as LB 1048, but the fiscal note savings were increased five-fold only three days before debate opened on the floor. Needless to say, that is highly suspect.

Sen. Raikes is unmindful of another minority group – ranchers who are Class I parents in Dawson County and live 15 miles or more from the nearest school and are busy now bringing to life the basic product of Nebraska’s economy – baby calves.

Assimilating with a K-12 5-7 miles from the Class I could cost those parents, and the K-12 district, another 20-30 minutes a day in transportation time and costs, plus more non-reimbursed travel for the parents to attend teacher conferences and activities.

A fair assessment by those who live in the area combined with U.S. census data is that 30-50 percent of those mostly Caucasian families are impoverished.

The misinformation seems to stereotype rural residents, who in reality are all kinds of people who value living in rural Nebraska and involvement in the governance of education, as our state founders intended when they created the system of Nebraska's schools more than a century ago.

Dawson County Class I’s cooperate under an interlocal agreement formed in 1999. They share an administrator and special programs. They would be interested in exploring interlocal agreements with the K-12s to help solve significant educational problems. Dawson County Class I board members already know such interlocal agreements allow people most directly affected to solve problems.

People solve problems, not laws.

A confused Dawson County Class I board member and parent, Tammy Paulsen of Cozad, said Feb. 10: “What have we done to deserve so much criticism, when we are only helping children learn?”

We don’t know.

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

Sources:
Non-white students at Districts 22 and 16: Tammy Knauss, board president, Dist. 16, Machelle Smith, board president, Dist. 22.

Kenneth O’Mara, EdD. – 308-858-4612 (home); 308-325-1150 (cell).

Reporting students eligible for free or reduced lunches: Board members or teachers at Districts 15, 16 17, 22, 25 & 44.)

Special needs at District 16: Cindy Schultheiss, administrative aide, Dawson District 15. 308-324-4752.

2004-05 budgeted costs per pupil, Districts 15, 16 17, 22 & 25: Nebraska Department of Education and Sen. Ron Raikes.

Tax savings if all Class Is disappeared: Nebraska DAS-Budget Division
-- 2005 K-12 spending (education dept. budget) - $1.1 billion.
-- 2005 total state budget -- $5.8 billion.
Nebraska Department of Education
-- Projected 2005 Class I state spending -- $75 million. (Same as 2004 because districts are closing).
-- LB 126 fiscal note, Feb. 7
-- LB 126 fiscal note, Jan. 11

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

Mr. Lauby can be reached by email at george@northplattebulletin.com, or
Office – 800-696-0096
Cell – 308-325-2315

Posted 8:53 AM by Susan Darst Williams

IS NEBRASKA HAVING ‘WHITE FLIGHT’?

America’s inner cities were decimated in the 1960s and ‘70s as middle-class white families moved to the suburbs, mostly to avoid school classrooms full of low-income minority children.

They called it “white flight,” though it was closer to “income flight,” since it’s well-known that weak demographics produce weak learners, and people didn’t want their kids swimming in that kind of academic sea.

It caused all kinds of social evils, including the expensive and ultimately ineffective court-ordered desegregation busing.

Now, to everyone’s dismay, the achievement gap between white children and those of color continues to widen, and schools and school staffs are even more segregated today than 30 years ago.

And you have to wonder: is the same thing happening in the Nebraska towns which have been inundated with immigrant families seeking entry-level meatpacking jobs? Look at Lexington’s public schools, with 32 percent of the student body non-functional in English, and 46.9 percent on subsidized lunch. Can you really blame longtime American citizens for option-enrolling their kids into nearby country schools where the numbers of kids with learning challenges aren’t as dramatic?

After all, it stands to reason that your children’s chances of academic success are better when the kids around them are good students, so everyone can learn more. Steel sharpens steel, and all that.

Besides poverty and lack of function with the English language, there are two other factors at work here: one is the far-ranging “inclusion” in regular classrooms of special education students with cognitive, behavioral or physical problems which might interfere with concentration or progress of their classmates.

And the other is the stubborn insistence of the educators to stick with “heterogenous” grouping – putting kids all the way along the academic achievement plumb line into the same classroom – instead of grouping students with those of about equal ability as much as possible, especially in the classes where it can really make a difference in overall learning.

In a classroom of 20 or 25 pupils, just one or two kids with really challenging special needs can become a virtual black hole for the teacher’s time and energy. Now imagine that it’s almost half.

That’s why some say the school-choice movement is a thinly-veiled attempt by middle-class Americans to escape the learning deficiencies which might hold back their children’s achievement because of classrooms with special-ed and English-language learners. Avoiding kids with academic problems, not minority skin color, is said to be among the causes for the boom in homeschooling and private-school enrollments, too.

Researchers such as Dale Schunk, educational psychologist with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, say that students will model on students with similar ability. That means that if the best students leave a classroom, the rest won’t lose much and will gain more of the teacher’s time and attention.

In fact, gifted-ed researchers Kulik and Kulik, and Feldhusen, who are tireless opponents of classrooms where kids of a wide range of ability are grouped together, say that separating strong students from weak ones is best for both. They’ve found that when gifted kids leave a classroom, they do better when they’re with other gifted kids, plus there’s a “blossoming” effect among the kids who remain. Suddenly, those dominant classroom stars are gone, and the average learners have a chance to shine. Invariably, they do

So, in a way, it might be better for all concerned if strong students do “abandon” public schools with lots of special-ed and English language learners.

But is this “fair”? Does it make it too hard for inner-city teachers or ones such as are working in Lexington, since their classrooms are losing or have lost academic role models to rub off on disadvantaged students? But we know that isn’t really how it works.

On the other hand, shouldn’t we be encouraging strong students to do what’s necessary to get stronger, not weaker, even if that means abandoning their neighborhood school?

Should we be forcing kids who don’t have problems to stay in classrooms with a lot of kids who do, in order to build unity in our country? United we stand, and all that?

Or is that slitting the throat of America’s future, reducing the opportunities for many of our kids after graduation, and dumbing down our future leaders?

Public schools now promise to give children equality of outcome – a standard education – but are they still giving children equality of opportunity? School-choice advocates say no.

There are strong opinions on both sides. For more from those who think school choice threatens the American way because it will give more learning opportunities to the rich and make inequalities of class and race even worse in this country, see the National Education Association’s take on school choice:
www.nea.org/vouchers/index.html

For those who say forcing strong or average learners to stay in classrooms with weak learners is stupid public policy and a radical attempt at widespread wealth redistribution in this country by crippling the futures of the middle-class with substandard education in the name of “equity,” see the Heritage Foundation’s article, “Why Catholic Schools Spell Success for America’s Inner-City Children”:
www.heritage.org/Research/UrbanIssues/BG1128.cfm

Posted 11:09 AM by Susan Darst Williams

NEWS SHORTS: AND THEY WONDER WHY PEOPLE ARE LEAVING THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS

Chatham, Va. – Parents of an 11-year-old boy have filed a $200,000 damage suit against the county school superintendent, the principal and assistant principal for making their son wear makeup, fingernail polish, lipstick and a bow in his hair as part of a “desensitization” exercise. The lawsuit contends that Matthew Scott Thornberry was also called “Mattie.”

-- Richmond Times-Dispatch, Jan. 23, 2005, p. 6

Ocala, Fla. – Two special-education students, ages 9 and 10, were charged with second-degree felonies and taken away in handcuffs by police officers from their school because they drew stick figures depicting violence against a third student. The boys also were suspended. Their parents said they should have been disciplined by the school and their parents, not police. In another Florida case, a 6-year-old was led away in handcuffs in an extreme exercise of school “zero tolerance” policies.

-- http://www.local6.com/news/4130302/detail.html

Suburban Chicago, Ill. -- There’s a showdown in Summit Hill School District 161: the superintendent of that suburban Chicago district has barred a parents' group from meeting on school grounds unless it gives the principal more authority over its decisions. The Arbury Hills School Association has refused to give the principal final authority in all decisions that affect students, including how to spend the money the group raises on behalf of the school. Board members point out that it is an independent organization with its own tax identification number. They say they worry that the money they raise won’t be spent entirely on children if administrators get the say-so.

-- www.PTOToday.com

It would be interesting to find out how many Nebraska PTA’s and PTO’s have bylaws that give veto power to a school employee over important decisions like where the money goes. I hope none. Anybody know?

Posted 10:53 AM by Susan Darst Williams

IS IT BULLYING TO MAKE GAY ACTIVISTS TELL KIDS THE MEDICAL TRUTH?

There’s an article coming out in the scientific journal Human Genetics that exposes as a lie the claim that homosexuals are “born that way” because of a “gay gene.”

Gay activists often make that claim to get uninformed legislators and the public on board for anti-bullying laws and programs, especially in public schools. They claim homosexuality is genetic, like a birth defect, and that’s why it’s “bullying” if you tell them that homosexual behavior is a bad lifestyle choice.

Yeah, well, once again, they’re wrongorrhea. Read about it on
http://www.cwfa.org/articles/7424/CFI/cfreport/index.htm

Tthere’s no gay gene. Homosexuality appears to be linked to certain heritable traits – the same as alcoholism, obsessive-compulsive disease and obesity. But looky, looky, looky: people come out of alcoholism and those other harmful behavior patterns alllll the time. They aren’t hopelessly locked in. It’s the same way with reversing homosexuality, although the gay Nazis don’t want people to know.

It’s my guess that the 10 students from Fremont (Neb.) High School and their Gay-Straight Alliance sponsor/teacher who got to skip school and visit the Unicam this past Monday used the pity card, that legislators ought to pass yet another hate-speech law “protecting” homosexual teens because they “couldn’t help it, they were born that way.”

But the push for more “bullying” legislation isn’t really to protect kids from bullying. Most schools already have codes of conduct which amply protect students. They state that intimidation, threats, gross disrespect, vulgar language and harassment are all prohibited and will get you suspended and so forth. Here’s the one from Fremont: www.fpsweb.org/CO/handbook.html

So what else could be behind all this talk about “bullying”? I think I know. Gay rights clubs were allowed in school under the Equal Access Act. But there’s one thing that’s NOT getting “equal access” in schools today, and that’s the truth about homosexuality – including the fact that there’s no gay gene, and that people are getting mental-health treatment and leaving homosexuality behind for good, every darn day of the year, all over this country.

I think the gay Nazis are afraid that kids are going to find those things out, and poof! There will go their recruiting and training prospects. So they’re hurrying to get “bullying” programs in place now, with their one-sided, pro-gay propaganda that censors the anti-gay side, including the medical evidence.

I hope the Legislature and the Fremont Board of Education pays attention to the fact that a judge in Philadelphia Thursday dropped all charges against four people who lawfully protested and held up signs with Biblical messages at an outdoor homosexual rally on public property this past Oct. 10. Because of unbelievable Political Correctness, they had been arrested, hauled to jail where they spent the night, and charged with crimes that could have landed them in the clink for the next 47 years.

Here’s how that could play out in a school like Fremont High: under the “anti-bullying” legislation these gay activists want, if a student wore a T-shirt to school with a Bible message about homosexuality or a website where kids can learn more about resisting homosexuality, such as www.exodusglobalalliance.org – certainly a lawful, nondisruptive, free-speech maneuver -- that would constitute “bullying” and that kid would get into trouble.

Just as bad, what comes with the “anti-bullying” agenda is a smarmy smorgasbord of “diversity training” assemblies, videos, presentations, handouts, booklets, encounter-group sessions, surveys, posters, skits . . . all taking time away from academics and all repeating lies like “they’re born that way” and “10 percent of the population is gay” (as if – it’s more like 1% of the females and 3% of the males, and even then, there’s no irresistible biological compulsion to act upon homosexual urges because of those “outdated concepts” known as self-restraint and celibacy).

Anyway, I hope the Legislature and the Fremont school board also read about the lawsuit filed the other day by the Alliance Defense Fund (www.adf.org) on behalf of students and parents in Ashland, Ky., who were forced to attend mandatory diversity training. The training included false claims by school employees and others that even if you believe homosexuality is wrong, you cannot say so to another student in school. Moreover, parents were banned from opting their children out of this diversity training, even though it violated their firmly-held religious beliefs about homosexuality and censored the fact that it can be overcome.

The lawsuit contends that the pro-gay gag order violates the free-speech and religious liberties rights of those students and parents, as well as the constitutional due-process rights of the parents.

Violating the First Amendment? Now, THAT’S bullying. I bet the parents and students will win in court, too.

So I hope Fremont and other high schools in Nebraska will watch this case, keep things fair, stay the heck out of court, and insist that their Gay-Straight Alliance clubs not only allow, but solicit, anti-gay content, including medical facts that contradict the party line, for their club’s activities, presentations, guest speakers, background reading and so forth.

Kids need to know those facts. They need both sides. They need balanced input.

On the other hand, maybe we should all hope the Gay-Straight Alliances DON’T tell kids the truth and keep spreading these lies. Then we can kick them off campus . . . for violating the school code of conduct requiring HONESTY.

Works for me!

So let’s be watching. Let’s be caring, for kids. We can’t help it . . . we were born that way!

Posted 10:43 AM by Susan Darst Williams

WOULD WONDERFUL WRITER WARREN WRITHE?

I’m normally a placid, peaceful person. But when I see really lousy writing, especially by people who should know better, I kind of writhe around in agony. Well, I was wondering if Omaha’s beloved and avuncular billionaire, Warren Buffett, has done any of that lately.

See, Buffett was honored last week for his wise and folksy writing in the Berkshire Hathaway annual report. That’s a well-deserved honor; he’s not only considerably richer than me, he’s a better writer and (sob!) funnier! Of course, I’m a lot cuter and make better Oatmeal Scotchies, so it evens out. Anyway, it was a good thing that he won that award. A group headed by former Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey, himself a pretty good writer and now a constantly-networking, new-age college president in New York City, gave Buffett the accolade.

The group is the National Commission on Writing for America’s Families, Schools, and Colleges: www.writingcommission.org It was set up by the College Board to prime the pump for the new Politically Correct twist on the SAT, the writing assessment. You know: write an essay based on their “prompt” and prove yourself to be politically and socially radical, or heigh ho, heigh ho, it’s off to the community college you go.

In any event, this commission appears to be at least taking a stab at helping teachers teach writing, though I’m still skeptical, mainly because Kerrey is called the “chair” of this group. What? Do they SIT on him?

I’m also doubtful because there are a bunch of libs on the commission’s board whose ideology is the opposite of what good writing instruction requires: phonics, grammar, spelling, capitalization, punctuation, sentence diagramming, vocabulary development, quality books written in quality language . . . all the stuff that public schools don’t do any more.

Worst among them is Diana Lam, the former assistant chancellor of the New York City public schools. She got fired for trying to give her husband a six-figure job in the school system, but her wacko, left-wing policies were really the cause of the job tenure readjustment. She put a horrible pseudo-phonics program in place that, if you can believe this, actually made NYC kids lose ground in reading. Then she resisted the reform of the bilingual education program so that an astoundingly-small 3.7 percent of the English language learners transitioned into the mainstream classroom. Most of them remained warehoused in non-English speaking language ghettos at horrific public expense.

Anyway, at least this commission recognizes that Warren Buffett is a good model for corporate communications. Now that he’s been honored for his writing, though, wonder what Uncle Warren and the Commission would say about the Buffett Foundation’s persistent denial that grammar and spelling matter?

See Go Big Ed’s archives for Nov. 9, 2004, about how year after year, the Buffett Foundation’s full-page ad announcing that nominations for fifteen $10,000 awards for great teaching in memory of Alice Buffett don’t have to be well-written.

That’s right! That’s what they say. It’s a head-scratcher. The foundation solicits letters of nomination for great teachers, but assures you, “don’t worry about grammar and spelling – these letters won’t be graded.”

Say what?

Now, for years, I’ve hoped that Warren Buffett would misspell his name as “Susan Williams” on a check to himself for, say, seventy skillion dollars. But he never will, because he really is a good writer. And good writers are always, ahem, smart.

So I hope he does something about this. Wuzzup, Warren? Wake up! This is . . . wong.

Posted 9:22 AM by Susan Darst Williams

MILLARD MILLIONS: LIKE CALORIES, MORE IS NOT ALWAYS BETTER

You knew it: the $78 million bond issue in the Millard Public Schools passed, as expected, yesterday. Since Millard was just about the first district in Nebraska to cave in to Outcome-Based Education in the 1980s, it points the way of the future for other districts.

This is what OBE, now called “standards-based” or “performance-based” ed, inevitably becomes. You spend more and more money on stuff that has less and less to do with academics, with less and less accountability to your patrons for the academic product. What leverage do Millard voters have, now that they’ve given the shirts off their backs?

Oh, well. Let’s sit back and see if Millard West gets diamond-plated laptop covers and a cappuccino machine for the teachers’ lounge, like last time, while Millard South and the other less-tony schools get plastic three-ring binders and lots of individual packs of Folger’s decaf. Just kidding: but still. . . .

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

COUNTRY SCHOOL DEFENDERS STRIKE BACK

Two good letters to the editor appeared recently in the Lincoln Journal that effectively refute efforts by the Education Committee chairman in the Unicam, Sen. Ron Raikes of Lincoln, to ax Nebraska’s elementary-only, country schools. Too bad the senators are ignoring common sense and plowing ahead with the ax murder, as LB 126 has now gone to the hold-your-nose-and-compromise-so-it’ll-pass stage.

One was from George Lauby of Lexington, a Class I school-board member where annual spending per pupil is $7,070, more than $1,000 less than the statewide average. That contradicts Raikes’ contention that it would save Nebraska money to force the 231 little schools to close. Lauby pointed out that in those Class I schools which do have higher than statewide average spending, it’s because there are kids with unusual special-education needs; with smaller enrollments, just one or two SPED kids can sky the numbers. Lauby blasted Raikes’ contention that people opt in to Class I schools to segregate their kids from minority students in the town schools; he pointed out that in two of the Class I schools in Dawson County alone, 40% of the student body are Latino or Native American. Meanwhile, he scolds Raikes: if Class I kids all appear to be high-income because nobody’s on the list of federally-subsidized lunches, well, duhhhh. It’s because kids BRING THEIR LUNCH to Class I schools, Senator. Geeeez.

The other letter was from Karen M. Johnson of Gering, an administrator shared by three Class I schools in Scotts Bluff County. She pointed out that forcing the 8,000 kids in Nebraska’s country schools to move to town schools would increase transportation costs astronomically, while “saving” just 62 cents per child per day, administratively-speaking. She contended that the drive to push the Class I students into larger districts is to raise the larger districts’ test scores for federal and statewide assessments because Class I kids have higher achievement. So duhhhhh! Maybe the larger districts should be forced to consolidate under the management of the Class I schools, which are doing a better job!

Great letters from two smart Nebraskans. Much appreciated.

For more data on this issue, see www.ruraledu.org/docs/nebraska/intro.htm

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

COLORADO SOUNDS OFF ON EDUCATING ILLEGAL ALIENS

A guy named Frosty fired off a red-hot column on the impact that illegal aliens are having on Colorado education in a www.newswithviews.com article last week. It’s instructive for the current discussion of whether school attention drawn away by non-English speaking Hispanics has driven Nebraska kids away from town schools and into rural Class I schools in search of an education of acceptable quality.

Frosty Wooldridge reported that in 2003, Colorado taxpayers paid $140.6 million for educating the children of the 250,000 illegal aliens in that state. He said half the kids can't speak English, “which degenerates the educational process for Colorado children.” He also reported that one-half of the potential Denver Public Schools graduating seniors three years ago flunked out or quit before graduation.

Read the article for yourself and see what he says about illegals taking college slots away from the children of American citizens who are longtime taxpaying Colorado citizens. Was that steam coming out of his ears in his mugshot? Is that steam coming out of yours? Nebraska’s numbers may be less, but could Nebraska’s situation be that different?

Posted 8:51 AM by Susan Darst Williams

MILLARD MILLIONS SPENT OR SAVED TODAY

Voters in the state’s third-largest school district go to the polls today to decide whether to take on $78 million in new debt in one of the biggest bond issue votes around.

Observers are pretty sure it’s going to pass easily because of the insurmountable propaganda job mounted by the district in little more than a month’s lead time for any citizens who would dare to oppose the measure.

Monday’s Go Big Ed did a lousy job of explaining where the money goes in Millard in an attempt to show how little of the money actually goes for classroom teachers. Here’s Take Two:

(Millard Public Schools, 2003-04 annual financial report, State Department of Education, http://ess.nde.state.ne.us)

Total spending: $136.7 million

Teacher salaries: $46.1 million

% of total spending for teacher salaries: 33.7%

Total spent on instruction (teacher pay plus benefits, supplies and materials, special ed, English Language Learners, support services, etc.): $86.8 million

% of total spending for instruction: 63.5%

Quick: ask the average Millard voter what percentage the Millard schools is spending on instruction, vs. central office administration, clerks, custodians, building maintenance and operations, transportation, liability insurance, yada yada yada?

I bet the average voter thinks what I thought: about 80% instruction, 20% other. But it’s closer to 60-40.

Look how the “other” spending has ballooned, to the point where actual teacher pay has dropped to only one-third of every school tax dollar. Yet I don’t know anybody who’d say that teachers are that low of a priority when it comes to public education.

Riiiiiiiiiight. And that’s where the school districts have got us. In our ignorance, we keep giving them more and more . . . to give us less and less of what we want.

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

TWO CAN PLAY THE RACE CARD GAME

In what I’m sure he thought was the nail in the coffin of Nebraska’s country schools, the Legislature’s Education Committee chair, Sen. Ron Raikes of Lincoln, has been saying that “racist” rural Nebraska families are opting to keep their kids in tiny Class I schools rather than drive them in to the town schools . . . . solely so that they can dodge minority kids. So continuing to fund country schools is this state is enabling blatant racism, the Raikes argument goes.

His targets in particular are Schuyler and Lexington, where lots of Hispanics have moved for meatpacking jobs, and it’s well-known that there’s a huge amount of pressure on the towns’ infrastructure as a result.

Country school advocates deny the racism angle vehemently, and point out that Class I schools often have far more racial diversity than much bigger suburban districts across the state. Our daughter, for example, attends a Class B high school with about 800 students, and I believe at the most there may be three African-Americans.

Now, I’m 100% for keeping the country schools because they deliver a quality education and keep towns vibrant. But gee. I don’t like any of those “isms” any more than Sen. Raikes does.

So . . . sorry, but he’ll have to be fired. We have too many white, upper-middle-class, middle-aged men in the Legislature. Goodbye, senator. What do we have, one black guy and one Hispanic guy? White governor? White mayors? White State Board of Education? So what’s all this harping on these rural families?

And we’ll have to fire our State Commissioner of Education and most of his management staff. White, upper-middle-class, middle-aged men, mostly. Ta ta.

As for our luxuriously-paid public-school superintendents across the state, a whole lot of them will have to go, too. They are almost without exception (Lincoln Public Schools just hired Susan Gourley, for example) WASP men; in fact, according to a 1992 study by Bell and Chase, 96 percent of the school superintendents in this country are white, and Hornbeck (1999) piles on by saying 88 percent of them are men. Can’t have that! Ciao, Babes.

School boards? ESU boards? Principals? Lily white, and boxer-short wearers, mostly.

The only reason all of these people got where they are is discrimination and racism, just like those Class I families . . . eh, Sen. Raikes?

Come on, now. End the power game. Keep the country schools. Lose the finger-pointing, because we all know the old adage: when you point the finger, three more point back at you.

Posted 9:35 AM by Susan Darst Williams

WHERE THE MILLIONS GO IN MILLARD

Voters in Millard Tuesday will decide whether to commit another $78 million on top of the annual $87 million or so in operating money that’s spent annually in the Millard Public Schools (2003-04 figures, the latest available from the state).

New schools would be built, which will of course balloon that operating budget considerably in future years. So it’s a pretty big chunk they’re biting off, if the bond issue succeeds; most observers think it will, for lack of enough time to mount an effective opposition campaign.

Millard’s spending per pupil is actually a bit less than the statewide average: Millard spends $7,341.48 per child (average daily attendance), vs. the average of $8,235.37, according to annual financial reports on file with the State Department of Education (http://ess.nde.state.ne.us)

You can navigate to that site to see where the millions go in Millard, or any other Nebraska school district, for that matter. For example, in that west Omaha district, teacher pay is over $46 million and employee benefits cost over $16 million. Special education is costing $15 million. Principals cost $7.8 million. The superintendent pulls down $161,569.32.

Oh, it’s interesting reading. How many Millard voters tomorrow have an accurate idea how much the annual budget really is, and where the money really goes in that district? I’d guess less than 1 percent; how about you?

They’ll be voting in new taxation without mental representation . . . and, because we all will be paying for increased spending in Millard since they will clamor for increased state taxes to help cover their increased expenses, it’s something we all should learn more about.

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

BANNING MERCURY FROM BABY BODIES

Did you know more than 700 children in Nebraska have autism, one of the most difficult disabilities parents have to deal with, and one of the most expensive, mega-million dollar special-education conditions facing our schools? Did you know a lot of smart people believe a huge cause of the autism epidemic, with nine out of 10 victims little boys, is mercury in our childhood immunizations? And that, for an extra $1 per dosage or so, we could have prevented all that by using a preservative in the immunizations that did not contain mercury?

LB 569, to remove mercury from vaccines, was up for public hearing Thursday in the Unicam, and a vote is expected as soon as today. Many thanks to Sens. Landis and Stuthman in this matter. Please, please contact these senators and urge them to vote to have Nebraska join California and Iowa in protecting babies by banning this toxic substance:

dcunningham@unicam.state.ne.us (402) 471-2801

dbyars@unicam.state.ne.us (402) 471-2620

jjensen@unicam.state.ne.us (402) 471-2622

perdman@unicam.state.ne.us (402) 471-2616

ghoward@unicam.state.ne.us (402)471-2723

jjohnson@unicam.state.ne.us (402) 471-2726

astuthman@unicam.state.ne.us (402)471-2715

dlandis@unicam.state.ne.us (402) 471-2720

For background information from a letter from a congressman who’s a medical doctor to the Washington, D.C., newspaper, The Hill:

http://www.thehill.com/thehill/export/TheHill/News/Frontpage/020905/ss_weldon.html


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

BIG BROTHER COMES TO LINCOLN SCHOOLS

A Go Big Ed reader sent this story from the Lincoln Journal on an extremely expensive security system, 10 times what they’re spending now, being put in place that presages Big Brother. Next down the pike, no doubt, will be implanted RDIF tags. Oh, well, for today’s teenagers, what’s another piercing? Coming soon, to a school near you:

http://www.journalstar.com/articles/2005/02/13/local/doc420e80b67eaf0810946513.txt

Posted 11:13 AM by Susan Darst Williams

SAVING MONEY WITH ALERT PARENTS, TAXPAYERS AND SCHOOL BOARDS

This coming Monday, Valentine’s Day, a bunch of students from the Fremont Public Schools get to get out of school and go down to Lincoln, complete with a free sack lunch, and lobby state senators about a proposed bill that has to do with bullying related to sexual orientation.

Now, according to the school receptionist, Fremont High School does not let kids out of school to go to Lincoln if their team makes it to the state basketball tournament. But for this, they get to go.

It’s sponsored by the Gay-Straight Alliance under the direction of English teacher Jessica Gall. An attempt to reach Miss Gall Friday was unsuccessful to ascertain whether taxpayer dollars were paying for all this.

See for yourself on www.fpsweb.org/news/fhsnews.html

I got an email from an irate parent in Fremont who is fed up with educators indoctrinating vulnerable students on radical political matters like this, when existing school codes of conduct and 10,000 other rules and regulations already adequately protect kids from being bullied and harassed.

I’m really not picking on homosexual issues in schools, but also the other day, another friend with a seventh-grader in an Omaha middle school bent my ear about how her daughter used the slang expression, “Oh, that’s gay!” in a student-to-student private conversation about the decorations and theme of an upcoming dance. She meant, “Oh, that’s dumb!” but succumbed to the current slang usage.

Well, the middle-school counselor happened to overhear it, and what did she do? Kindly and gently remind the girl not to use speech that could hurt someone’s feelings? Noooooo. She abruptly hauled this seventh-grader down to her office, shut the door, and basically threatened her. She said the girl was liable to get her mouth slapped for saying that kind of thing. You guessed it: turns out this counselor is someone with an atypical sexual orientation herself. With the door shut, and the teacher’s well-known sexual orientation and menacing body language, it was a frightening situation. Talk about bullying! The student was shaken, but when the mom, a single parent struggling to make a living, called the school with concerns about how this was handled, she was basically told to buzz off.

Now, on the other hand, the Family Research Council recently sent out an article praising former fighter pilot Stephen M. Hunt, a school board member in Fairfax County, Va. He sent a letter on his personal stationery to the district's 24 high school principals urging that they not simply teach "that homosexuality is normal and natural." He suggested that one way to achieve greater balance would be to host speakers with an "ex-gay perspective." Hunt's letter was hardly "gay-bashing"; he explicitly said, "If a person does choose a gay lifestyle, we should respect their freedom, their safety and their choice." Of course, all hell broke loose and people were calling for Hunt’s head on a platter, but he’s hanging in there. He told it like it is, and that’s all anybody can do.

Why do I bring all this up?

Because stuff like the first two examples, in Fremont and Omaha, is going on all over the place, involving all kinds of issues, in our public schools. It’s almost unbelievable how many schools – probably yours – have pro-homosexual books like King and King, Heather Has Two Mommies, and Gloria Goes to Gay Pride in their school libraries and in classrooms, and yet nobody squawks. Unfortunately, in issues like homosexual activism and countless others, the response of Mr. Hunt, in the Virginia example, is the exception rather than the rule. Parental and public involvement in our schools is almost nil.

If schools are going downhill and if money is being wasted, it’s only because parents, taxpayers and school-board members have been silent, apathetic, depressed, passive and hopeless.

That’s what’s got to stop!

Here’s a mini-action plan from my soon-to-be-released CD-ROM, “Show ‘n’ Tell for Parents,” that might give you some ideas:

Exposing Wasteful School Spending

Q. We’re a rural district with one high school, struggling with declining enrollment and declining ability to make ends meet in the school budget. We just found out that a nonprofit organization has donated $5,000 for a motivational speaker to come in and give a pep talk to teachers at the start of next school year. It figures out to an awful lot of money per teacher, which seems weird since they are underpaid to begin with. Meanwhile, the outside faucets don’t work at the grade school, there are floor tiles chipped and coming up in the classrooms, and the paperbacks are so yellowed with age you can barely read them. What can be done about things like this?

First, be understanding. Educators, like everybody else, want significance. They deserve to have their spirits lifted just like people who work in every field. That $5,000 might be spent in a lot of more practical ways, as you describe. But maybe your school board and administrators believe lifting teachers’ spirits is the top priority.

You might call a speakers’ bureau, a local business and a local civic group to compare what they pay in the way of an honorarium for a speaker like that, and share that information quietly and privately with a school official. If you don’t embarrass the educators, they might be able to cancel that speaker, get someone for a lot less money, and tactfully get the nonprofit to help the school meet more immediately, tangible needs, like paper, pencils and books.

What else can citizens do when school dollars appear to be spent frivolously? One of the best things is to get a group together, call your district and ask for an hour’s walk-through of the budget. Get the school finance officer to explain to your group the major budget items, plus expenditures in areas likely to have some overspending, such as continuing education, staff and student travel, central-office furniture, landscaping, lobbying, entertainment and so on. If you see problem areas, pitch in. See what trims you can tactfully bring about.

Homework: Your Chamber of Commerce, civic group or retired business group might provide volunteers to help with this.

Posted 11:31 AM by Susan Darst Williams

SAVING MONEY WITH BETTER SCHOOL MANAGEMENT

Can you imagine a bank board being run by nothing but tellers? Do you think a telecommunications firm would stay in business for long if its board of directors were all linesmen? How about Wal-Mart’s top executives: what if they were all stock clerks? What if nobody from outside any organization, profit or nonprofit, were allowed on the board or in the executive suite?

But that’s what we have in our public schools: they’re totally an inside job. And it shows.

Go Big Ed has been suggesting ways that schools could save money and do a better job this week. One of those is to improve the quality and diversity of the leadership within our schools and educational regulatory boards and agencies. Break the cartel! Let in some fresh, outside air! It would start with allowing people who are – horrors! – NOT certified teachers to hold management and executive positions within schools.

Quick: can you name a superintendent of a Nebraska school district who is NOT a middle-aged, white man who used to be a teacher?

Can you name a school principal who has ever worked for a sustained amount of time in private industry, managing people and resources?

Can you name any decision-maker in any public school or education agency who has ever excelled in a business or professional capacity in a competitive environment, outside the school setting?

In contrast, in private industry, can you name a chief financial officer responsible for tens of millions of dollars of spending . . . who for most of his career has been a gym teacher?

That’s not being cruel. It’s being realistic. Many top school officials managing millions of dollars would most likely not survive in an equal capacity in a private-sector company. Do they realize that? Don’t appear to. But why should they care? There’s no pressure on them to do any better, after all.

They’ve been too insulated by the peculiar protected culture of the enormous school monopoly in this country, and the unchecked supply of money. Because there are no checks and balances, and no real oversight on their spending, the insiders have no restraint in anything from selecting new curriculum, to hiring more people, to starting new programs.

A friend of mine sardonically calls this the “What’s nuts? Let’s try it!” syndrome.

School managers are alternately ‘way too susceptible to cleverly-marketed fads and promotions because they lack sophistication, or stubbornly shut tight to worthwhile proposals because they are made by people they don’t control.

That’s how so many wacky, boneheaded programs and philosophies have wormed their way into our schools. That’s why schools aren’t teaching reading with systematic, intensive, explicit phonics any more, even though every bit of research under the sun shows it’s best for kids. Because it’s not education insiders pointing it out, the education insiders refuse to listen.

Union campaign contributions and unfair politicking put union pets on school boards regardless of weak qualifications. Because the press and the public know almost nothing about how money changes hands within a school system, and accountability is loose at best, there are all kinds of inefficiencies and egregious ethical violations taking place. Meanwhile, management looks the other way, when not directly involved: steering business contracts to brothers-in-law; taking consulting fees from companies that sell their products to the district; cheating on expense accounts; creative accounting to conceal unpopular programs, and so forth.

Bad management has created a fog of groupthink, nepotism and corruption which is impossible for outsiders to pierce, even when they have excellent input to contribute.

What’s to be done? It might be too tangled. The answer might indeed be to let our public schools “crash” under unsurmountable overregulation, unsustainable funding demands and irredeemable poor management. That’s unfortunately where they seem to be headed, and determinedly so.

But there are places where school management is good, such as the private schools locally and nationally where children are excelling far beyond public-school levels. Maybe we should be finding out more about good school management, and spread the word.

Here are some suggestions from my upcoming CD-ROM, “Show ‘n’ Tell for Parents.” It’s called “How the Good Guys Run Schools.”


Q. What are some signs of effective school management?

-- Good statistical accountability to the public. We should know as much about a district’s academic and business activities as we do about its sports teams. It builds trust when officials report to taxpayers such key data as spending per pupil, total staffing per pupil, percentage of staff that are nonteachers working outside the classroom, dropout rate, percentage who graduate on time, test scores plus percentage of enrollment taking the tests, disciplinary action, property damage, crime, value of fringe benefits packages, perquisites for top staff, etc.

-- Cross-training staff, especially in the business office, helps prevent inefficiency, embezzlement, fraud and lots of mistakes.

-- Cross-training of nonteaching staff allows a district to be better able to handle the growing problem of absenteeism among school staffs. It also makes the operation flexible enough to distribute workloads over the course of the week or the day, reducing idle time and cutting overtime pay.

-- Written job manuals with policies and procedures spelled out are common in the private sector but uncommon in public schools. These should be available to parents, too.

-- Since staff training is so expensive and so many districts fly by the seats of their pants for most staff except certified teachers, formal job descriptions and manuals are signs of exemplary school management.

-- Segregate certain duties to prevent corruption. If the same person is opening the mail, making out deposit slips and receiving and reconciling bank statements, your district has a problem. Most of the growing numbers of school corruption cases stemmed from staffers who were isolated, handling money and able to cover up their tracks.

-- Direct-deposit of payroll to reduce labor costs and automated payroll methods for hourly employees.

-- Significant management power for principals.

Homework: Learn what management techniques are producing stellar results for schools for disadvantaged kids at www.noexcuses.org

Posted 1:23 PM by Susan Darst Williams

SAVING MONEY BY BUSTING THE UNIONS

Go Big Ed is taking a look this week at ways we can improve K-12 education and save money. A biggie would be to do what it takes to transform the National Education Association and its state and local affiliates back into what they started off as, and should be: a purely professional association for teachers.

Nebraskans should be glad that we’re a Right to Work state, with protections against forced unionism. But here’s a heads up on that: there are two Legislative Bills pending right now that would damage the rights of nonunion workers, including in schools. They have to do with paying the teachers’ unions “agency shop fees.” They need to be opposed, bigtime.

See the February newsletter of the National Right to Work Committee, www.nrtw.org/nl/nl-200502p7.pdf Basically, the two bills would force a nonunion employee in a setting like a school to pay the union to bargain and handle any grievances, instead of being able to pay for his or her own representation. That’s a stickup by the teachers’ union! Contact your senator to oppose LB 230 proposed by State Sen. Pam Redfield (who’s otherwise a fantastic representative, and must have her reasons on this one), and LB 354 from Sen. Don Priester.

How did we get to this point, where that kind of stuff is going on, instead of everybody working together on the 3 R’s, better school lunches, and longer recesses? Answer: the NEA.

The NEA, with an estimated 2.6 million members and revenues of $1.25 billion a year, is a relatively new, ultra-powerful union. It’s a toxic anachronism, in this day when hardly any other line of work is still unionized. Teachers never used to have collective bargaining, but when the Big Unions backed John F. Kennedy for President in 1960, he rewarded them with an Executive Order allowing union representation for that huge workgroup in America, our teachers.

What has been the result of the unionization of education? Consider this recent Wall Street Journal letter to the editor from Ken Powell of Munster, Ind.:

“The truth is, as teachers unions came to dominate public education over the past 40 years, the results have been bad for students and taxpayers alike. Consider these sobering statistics: since 1960, despite a threefold increase in inflation-adjusted spending, SAT scores have fallen 73 points and the percentage of 12th graders capable of college math to an abysmal 6%. During this time, however, school payrolls swelled: the number of teachers rose 57%, principals and administrators 79%, and non-teaching staff an eye-popping 500%.”

Collective bargaining is anti-American in the school setting, because it amounts to setting public policy outside of the public’s influence. It’s a no-win situation for parents and taxpayers, since the people on both sides of the bargaining table are educators whose pockets will be lined, the more overspending and overstaffing take place.

Though collective bargaining is incompatible with the nature and mission of K-12 education, union restrictions on wages and working conditions are responsible for a significant portion of the increased cost of schooling today, and for many of the problems and woes that school boards, parents and taxpayers are tangling with.

Here are some common-sense steps we could take to at least slow down the union’s stranglehold on our schools, if not bust it entirely:


Q. I think teachers would actually be better paid if we could get rid of the unions. They tend to institutionalize mediocrity both in teaching and in teacher pay. I don’t want to see picket lines or union officials dragged out of their classrooms in handcuffs! But how could we encourage more education workers to quit the union and end their sovereignty over public education?

-- Repeal your state bargaining statute.

-- Pass “no strings attached” school-choice legislation.

-- Publicize the growth and attractive qualities of nonunion alternatives that offer liability insurance and so forth: the Association of American Educators (www.aaeteachers.org).

-- Quit letting unions get free collection of union dues through automatic payroll deductions. Make them collect their own dues themselves and have their members “opt in” instead of being forced in, like every other organization has to do.

-- Publish school-district salaries and the teachers’ contract on a website so that taxpayers and parents in your district can see all the benefits and perquisites that union members are getting. How can the need for a union still be justified?

-- Urge your school board to hire the toughest labor law firm in the region to represent your district at the bargaining table instead of district employees and the local law firm they control.

--Urge your school board to adopt hiring bonuses, pay supplements for hard-to-find teaching specialties, merit pay, and bonuses based on test-score improvements.

-- Urge your school board to contract out and privatize as much non-instructional spending as possible.

-- Call for a state and federal audit of teacher union tax returns to see if they are misidentifying what is actually political spending as being “education-related.”

-- Donate to private scholarship funds to help more families get their kids into private schools.

-- Donate to legal defense groups battling the unions to improve K-12 schools, including Landmark Legal Foundation, Evergreen Freedom Foundation and the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation.

Homework: Book, “The Worm in the Apple: How the Teacher Unions Are Destroying American Education” by Peter Brimelow, and the Education Intelligence Agency, www.eiaonline.com

Posted 1:26 PM by Susan Darst Williams

SAVING MONEY WITH SMARTER TEACHER PREP

This week, Go Big Ed will address how we could save money in our schools if we would change the way we run them and teach kids.

Today’s topic: teacher’s colleges, certification and continuing education. You know the adage, “Education is people”? Well, “overspending is people,” too. A huge cause of inefficient use of resources in K-12 education is the wrong people with the wrong training doing the wrong things for the wrong compensation. Some major changes are needed in this area to put things right.

Q. How can we improve the qualifications of people who go into teaching, and to reward better teachers with higher pay?

Get rid of the union, of course. It’s an unnecessary anachronism that’s blocking progress.

But also, we need to counteract the movement in recent decades to overcomplicate teaching. The education establishment has done it to justify higher salaries, more employees and more power for schools. They’ve shifted the focus from serving children’s needs to politics and policy.

Now we have teachers’ colleges that major in the minors, exaggerate educational psychology, and instead of exposing future teachers to the world of true academics, put them through dumb, endless “how to teach” courses.

Meanwhile, people who would be excellent classroom teachers don’t get there because of time-consuming and pointless state certification requirements.

Also, continuing education practices work at cross purposes to the goal of cost-effective excellence: longevity rather than merit as the determinant of salary . . . “seat time” for a master’s degree or doctorate also gains more pay but, like longevity, has no connection to better student achievement . . . national board certification is paid for by your district or state in the utter absence of evidence it makes better teachers . . . staff development inservice consultants preach narrow, Politically Correct perspectives that have nothing to do with expanding knowledge and skills.

Teachers will be the first to tell you that a lot of this is nuts and needs to be changed.

Here’s where to start: fold the teacher’s colleges into the colleges of arts and sciences, and encourage future teachers to take more science, history, English, mathematics and other knowledge-based subjects. Give knowledge-based competency exams to enter the teaching profession. Let districts set their own hiring qualifications, do on-the-job training, and offer mentoring programs. End certification; districts can do their own criminal background checks. Institute what the unions hate: merit pay, hiring bonuses, and differential pay for teaching jobs with more intensive preparation requirements or that are more in demand.

Homework: See the book, “Ed School Follies: The Miseducation of America’s Teachers” by Rita Kramer.

Posted 9:16 AM by Susan Darst Williams

SAVING MONEY BY TEACHING SPELLING RIGHT

This week, Go Big Ed will address how we could save money in our schools if we would change the way we run them and teach kids.

Today’s topic: spelling. Is there a more familiar complaint from parents, taxpayers and employers, than how poorly today’s students spell familiar words in the English language? Dyslexia is blamed, and remediation costs soar, but the truth is, they’re not teaching spelling correctly, and we’re paying for it, bigtime.

This is from my soon-to-be-released CD-ROM, “Show ‘n’ Tell for Parents.” Title: Invented Spelling.

Q. I work in a furniture store. I can’t believe how horribly our younger employees spell everyday words: “fabrik,” “couche,” “curtins,” etc. What has happened to spelling skills?

When English was taught in a unified way – speaking, spelling, writing and reading reinforcing each other – students readily mastered language arts. The rules of spelling were explicitly taught along with phonics in kindergarten.

But now hardly any schools teach reading with phonics. And many don’t teach spelling at all until the third grade or so, when it’s too late.

Today’s educators mistakenly believe they should wait to give formal spelling instruction. They don’t think K-2 pupils are ready. That’s wrong, of course, but that’s the way it is.

Pupils today are in “child-centered classrooms” with “developmentally-appropriate practice.” The focus is on the process, not the end-product. Spelling errors are tolerated as long as the child is trying to construct meaning out of words, even badly misspelled words.

Children are encouraged to invent, or make up, the spellings of words however it makes sense to them. Much of the time, of course, they guess wrong with their spelling “inventions.” But since they aren’t corrected, the misspellings take root. Bad spelling habits get entrenched. They’re extremely hard to reverse.

When formal spelling instruction does begin, it unfortunately relies on memorizing spelling lists, even though that’s known to be a weak method. Since spelling is taught in isolation from the other language skills, it’s harder to learn, so the number of spelling words assigned in a school year has been drastically reduced from years past. Therefore, vocabulary and reading comprehension suffer, too.

Worst of all, by the week after the test, many kids have already forgotten the correct spellings they memorized, and already slipped back into the habit of “inventing” whatever spelling “makes sense” to them.

The answer: “reinvent” common sense, return to “phonics only” in the early grades, watch dyslexia dwindle to nothing, and American spelling improve drastically.

Homework: For an excellent analysis, see the book, “Why Americans Read and Spell Poorly” by Edward Loring Tottle.

Posted 10:42 AM by Susan Darst Williams

A WHITE CHARGER FOR SMALL SCHOOLS

Looks like the silver sword of governmental greed is poised to be thrust into the heart of Nebraska’s country schools, as the forced consolidation bill has been prioritized now.

But lo and behold! A hero has ridden up on a white charger, with a powerful weapon that contradicts the educrats who claim that closing our Class I schools will save money and improve quality.

As if!

The truth is, the smaller the school a student attends, the higher his income on down the road.

The data comes from a study of one million white males born between 1920 and 1949 which concluded that “smaller schools had a significant positive effect on students’ wages as adults.”

The author: Christopher Berry, assistant professor for public policy studies at the University of Chicago.

Read it for yourself in his article, “School Inflation,” on www.educationnext.org/20044/56.html

Now, there’s no doubt that different facets of consolidation can make a lot of sense in a lot of places. But it doesn’t mean lumping the kids all together in a big, behemoth building and ruining any vestige of local control by getting rid of elected school boards. You can consolidate administration – traveling superintendents and purchasing co-ops come to mind. You can make nonclassroom spending cuts. You can go without swimming pools and Astro-Turf.

The point is, we can keep our smaller schools, which have been shown to be better for kids, with better management. All it will take to get it is more political pressure from the voters, taxpayers and school-district patrons.

It’s what everybody wants. What’s a greater goal than to do what it takes to shape our educational system so that it maximizes a student’s chance at more wealth and success?

Doesn’t it make the educrats who want to kill Nebraska’s country schools look . . . small?

Posted 10:02 AM by Susan Darst Williams

USING THE COURTS TO GET WHAT WE WANT

A Georgia father has filed a lawsuit against that state asking that its education system be declared unconstitutional. The reason behind his lawsuit reminds me of the exodus of middle-class kids from the Omaha Public Schools through option enrollment, which is now under review in our Legislature to be shut off. Well, if schools and legislatures won’t help parents find acceptable schooling for their children, maybe it’s time to seek relief from the courts, like this Georgia father did. Maybe it’s time for some monkey-see, monkey-do in Nebraska.

Dana Williams said the public school his 7-year-old daughter was attending has closed. He'd like to put her in a better school, but doesn't have the money to pay for private schools. He also said he can't afford to move to a better neighborhood. So he turned to the courts.

"I want to be able to make a choice in what school my child goes to," he explained, "and not be told what school she has to go to."

The suit asks that Georgia's system of organizing and financing public education be declared unconstitutional and a new structure that includes parental choice – chiefly the ability to direct the destination for the educational financing allocated for their children -- take its place, according to attorney Clint Bolick of the Alliance for School Choice.

See their website, www.allianceforschoolchoice.org complete with some interesting model legislation.

Posted 9:11 AM by Susan Darst Williams

FIGHTING TAX-LEVY OVERRIDES: WHAT WE’RE UP AGAINST

Have you been noticing the kissin’-cousin coverage the local daily has been giving the Millard Public Schools these days, leading up to the big $78 million bond issue vote Feb. 15? Holy schmoly. Think how much that space would be worth in paid ads, which basically is what it should be.

People who would dare to oppose a huge school ballot issue have a tough row to hoe, and that goes double in small towns. So often, Superintendent Fleeblegetser’s brother, Mayor Fleeblegetser, is the father of your daughter’s boyfriend and the cousin of your boss over there at Fleeblegetser Farm-acy, or whatever. So you have to be tactful when these big school bond issues and tax-levy overrides come up, even when they’re obviously too costly.

Go Big Ed received a query from a reader who works part-time for the local school district in greater Nebraska, but who vehemently opposes an upcoming measure in his school district. He was told by a school official that because of the “rules,” he and any other school employee cannot undertake any political activity, for or against.

If that were true, that’d wipe out the whole town. But it’s false! That official was taking a ride on the Baloney Wagon.

I called Frank Daley, an attorney with the Nebraska Accountability and Disclosure Commission, and he cited two state statutes which pertain to this situation:

SS 49-14,101.02
(Says that public resources such as school phones, school computers, school paper, school buildings, school rooms, etc., cannot be used in the promulgation of, or the opposition to, ballot issues such as the tax-levy lid override in that district)

SS 20-160
(Says that public employees cannot be prohibited from the free exercise of their political rights, including speaking at meetings, passing out leaflets, having their names on advertising, and so forth and so on, as long as they’re not doing it on the job, in uniform, or using any kind of public resources to do it)

Which means . . . as long as Joe Fleeblegetset Jr. uses his own money and stuff on his own time, he can do whatever politickin’ he wants.

If by some miracle he or his group would spend or raise more than $5,000 in a calendar year, they have to report it to the Accountability and Disclosure Commission.

There’s enough to contend with in these big school votes . . . without having to fight school officials who are ignorant of the law. That one ought to go check with the city attorney – you guessed it, Ed Fleeblegetser.

Posted 10:29 AM by Susan Darst Williams

MORE ACTS FOR THE ED FOLLIES

A Go Big Ed reader sent these three anecdotes along that are just plain head-shakers:

-- The Wall Street Journal reported that a Haverford (Pa.) honor student was suspended and a notation was made on her permanent record for a Level 5 disciplinary violation: she took an over-the-counter, non-prescription type pain reliever, like an aspirin, for menstrual cramps.

-- The Journal also reported that the school district in Lincoln, R.I., has banned the annual spelling bee. Why? Because there can be only one winner which, in the view of school officials, makes all the other kids “losers.” District officials said therefore, the spelling bee violates the principles of the federal No Child Left Behind Act. How do YOU spell “a-b-s-u-r-d?” For the full story, see the fabulously-named online publication, the Woonsocket Call: http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=13834334&BRD=1712&PAG=461&dept_id=478996&rfi=6

-- According to an Associated Press dispatch out of Bismarck, N.D., there’s a move afoot in the North Dakota Legislature to outlaw undergraduate teaching assistants from foreign countries who cannot speak English well enough to make themselves understood in the college classroom. Who HASN’T this happened to? Sheesh. It’s about time. Bette Grande, a Republican representative from Fargo, was quoted as saying that tax-funded college teachers should be able to speak English reasonably well and understand students’ questions. The bill would require that their speech ability be screened at the job interview, and then if students still can’t understand them and learn from them, the students get a full tuition refund. If 10 percent of the kids complain, the unintelligible T.A. should be yanked from the classroom, according to the proposed bill. College officials are basically harrumphing, making defensive statements like: “these foreign grad students have a right to a job in the state college system and if taxpayers’ children can’t learn from them because of the language barrier, that’s THEIR problem.”

Here’s the grand finale for these ed follies:

1) We all take two aspirins and suspend ourselves from our workplaces, with pay, saying that nonsense zero tolerance policies give us a riproaring headache, until that honor student is reinstated.

2) Every college should have a “speech bee” for foreign graduate students who want jobs as teaching assistants. The winners, judged easiest to understand, get those college teaching jobs, and the losers have to suffer behind “left behind,” but not THAT left behind, because . . .

3) We can give those hard-to-understand foreign grad students jobs in our public schools teaching English as a Second Language to kids who ALREADY don’t understand English. They can learn it together, and then we’ll ALL be better off.