Let's Make Nebraska
No. 1 -
In Free Books For
Kids!
Three cheers for State Sen. Tony
Fulton of Lincoln. He is cheerleading for Nebraskans to participate in a
contest that could win 50,000 free, new children's books for children in our
state. Last year, we came in a close second to Oklahoma.
It's the "What Book Got You
Hooked?" campaign run by FirstBook, a charitable organization dedicated to
reading, especially helping disadvantaged children whose homes may not have
many books to read.
All you have to do is go to their
website and type in the title of your favorite kiddie book:
www2.firstbook.org/whatbook/
I did it! I put the Black Stallion series by Walter Farley
because I was horse-crazy and remember reading them with a flashlight under the
covers after bedtime.
Sen. Fulton is associated with
Read Aloud Nebraska, which is coordinating the statewide effort. To contact
Sen. Fulton, call (402) 471-2734 or email tfulton@leg.ne.gov
7/18/08
29 Nebraskans Per Day
Drop Out;
Minorities Fare Poorly
Here
If the national publication, Education Week, is to be believed, then minority
graduation rates in Nebraska are worse than the national average, and 29
students per day drop out of Nebraska's high schools, a report is projecting.
Two groups provoke major concerns: the high-school
graduation rate for black males in Nebraska has fallen to 36.1%, and for female
American Indians, it's an incredible 21%. That means if you're an
African-American boy in Nebraska, you have only about a one-in-three chance of
graduating from high school with a diploma, and if you're a Native American
girl, it's only a one-in-five chance.
Ed Week used
data from the National Center for Education Statistics (http://nces.ed.gov/ccd) in 2005 to come up
with the data. Its (study) discloses
that Nebraska's graduation rate is sixth in the nation. The Cornhusker State's
graduation rate for whites is 84.4%, compared to a 77.6% average nationwide.
But Nebraska's graduation rates of American Indians, Hispanics and blacks fall
short of national averages, which in themselves are pretty poor:
Nebraska Hispanics: 55% graduation
rate
National Hispanics: 57.8%
Nebraska blacks: 42.4%
National blacks: 55.3%
Nebraska American Indians: 28.9%
National American Indians: 50.6%
The five states with higher
graduation rates than Nebraska (79.6%) are New Jersey (83.3%), Iowa (82.8%),
Wisconsin (880.5%), Pennsylvania (80.4%) and Vermont (80.2%).
See the Nebraska information on:
http://www.edweek.org/media/ew/dc/2008/40sgb.ne.h27.pdf
6/9/08
Got Akshay?
Lincoln Boy's National
Geography Win
Showcases the Power of
Old-Fashioned Study
There's a new national champion in
Lincoln, but he's not on the football team. He's Akshay Rajagopal, a
sixth-grader at Lux Middle School in Nebraska's capital city. He just won the
National Geographic Bee, a $25,000 college scholarship, a lifetime membership
in the National Geographic Society, he got to shake hands with the governor, and
best of all, his classmates designed a T-shirt in his honor, along the lines of
the milk promotion: "Got Akshay?"
Akshay, the youngest of
10 finalists, didn't miss a single question through the prelims and finals,
only the second time that's happened in 20 years of the bee. (Photo from www.nationalgeographic.com)
His win is extra exciting because it reveals the truth to
Nebraska schoolchildren about hard work and study - it really does pay off! It
shows the benefits of parental involvement and support, too: Akshay's parents
say that he has been interested in geography since he was 5, and they provided
DVD's and textbooks for him to aid in his self-study over the years.
It's also exciting because it shines a little light on how
the immigration laws of the U.S., when adhered to, are constructive and
rewarding for our country. That's in stark contrast to the enormous drain on
our country, and especially our schools, that illegal immigration and lax
enforcement create. Even though Indian immigrants make up less than 1% of the
American population, Indian-American kids have won the National Scripps
Spelling Bee for seven years straight from 1999 to 2005, and again this year,
when Sameer Mishra of Indiana, 13, won it, with Siddharth Chand of Michigan the
runner-up. And now that success is spreading to the geography contest as well.
Reportedly, the best schools in India are so hard to get in
to, you really have to study. But if you make it and can get to the U.S. for
college or career, you can write your own ticket. Most Indian immigrants are
doctors, lawyers, engineers and other high-skilled occupations because of their
educational edge. Since the 1990s, when they noticed that their children did
well on the math portion of the SAT college admissions test, but not so well on
the verbal portion, as a group Indian parents got together to set up spelling
bees to help their children overcome the language barrier.
Contrast that with the academic record and habits of
immigrants from other countries, especially Mexico.
Akshay won the bee by knowing that Cochabamba is a
conurbation that has gone through conflict recently over privatization of the
municipal water supply and regional autonomy in the country of . . . ? He knew
the answer: Bolivia. Turns out he didn't know that "conurbation" means a metro
area, but he knew what country Cochabamba's in, and that's all it took.
How did he know that? Because he studied about it. Isn't it
funny - old-fashioned serious studying, concentration, reading, memory work,
and individual effort are all declared bad for kids by today's reigning
educational philosophies of Whole Language, Whole Math, constructivism and discovery learning, including our
leaders in Nebraska educational circles. If all Akshay ever did was the minimum
as required by school, he never would have attained this amazing excellence
that has brought so much honor to Nebraska. It was time spent on his own, at
home, that propelled him to this attainment.
Every time an educator ridicules the time-tested educational
practices of memorization, concentration and repetition as being "rote" and
"stultifying," I wish they'd look at the picture of Akshay with his prizes. How
do you spell success? A-k-s-h-a-y!!!
6/2/08
Bravo to Omaha Public
Schools
For Finally Moving to
Merit Pay
There's no question that, done right,
value-added assessment is the way to go in education. That means using test
data to see how much a classroom teacher has added to the learning curve of an
individual student. It helps schools assess not only the student's progress,
but the teacher's effect. Then when schools attach bonus pay and/or pay raises
to reward teachers for that real-life improvement, it becomes a much-needed
incentive to teachers to do the things that are going to help student learning
and be rewarded with some more of that good green stuff.
OPS is one of the last districts in
the country to finally get in to a merit pay study, and might tie teacher pay
raises to measurements of student learning as well as classroom environments.
I'm all for that! I'd also be for "battle pay" for teachers who will take on
the toughest-to-teach students, as long as OPS would quit wasting money in
sufficient non-classroom expenditures to come up with the extra money to cover
it.
That's the good news. The BAD news
is, the merit pay effort in OPS is being spearheaded by the teacher's union,
the Omaha Education Association. I smell a rat. Sigh. Unions typically oppose
pure and simple pay-for-performance plans, and muck up the waters with all
kinds of union entitlements and fear-of-pay-differentials. Unions also never,
ever think there's enough money, to the point of ridiculousness. The president
of the OEA, Maddie Fennell, was just quoted in The World-Herald as calling the $1 billion that Nebraska taxpayers
invested next year in our public schools as "inadequate." Spending here exceeds
$9,000 per pupil per year and OPS has one of the lowest staff-to-child ratios
in the country among big districts. So we're pikers who don't care about kids? Double
sigh.
One of the worst influences in education is the insistence
by union members that the ONLY reason you can pay one teacher more than another
is "seat time" - years of experience or putting up with the nonsense of getting
a master's in education. Neither of those is as close a correlate to teacher
effectiveness as change in test scores. Right? Right. So why don't we "punt" the
union-crafted compensation plans that we know don't work, and start paying
teachers what they're really, individually, demonstrably, worth?
Maybe the 3,700 members of the OEA
will rise up and make their union do this fairly and cost-effectively, and then
we'll all win.
5/7/08
Gov. Heineman Lauds 5
Students
With Perfect ACT
Scores
Neat! These students scored a
perfect 36 on the ACT college admissions test, and were honored Tuesday by Gov.
Heineman. He honored seven seniors for a perfect SAT last fall. The first
student on this list also got a perfect SAT score, and the twin brother of the
next one did, too. Guess you could say
those parents and teachers did a perfectly wonderful job:
Sarah Ferguson, Omaha Central
(perfect SAT as well)
Ross DeVol, Bellevue East (twin
Brian had a perfect SAT)
Kirsten Miller, Milllard North
James Morin, Lincoln Pius X
Madison Rezaei, Elkhorn
5/7/08
Good Student Writers
Expound Intelligently
on a Big Issue
Hats off to these Nebraska students for winning up to $5,000
in a scholarship contest sponsored by the anti-gambling grassroots
organization, Gambling With the Good Life:
www.gamblingwiththegoodlife.com/scholarship.htm
4/16/08
LB 1157:
Should Nebraska Move
to Statewide Testing,
And Away From
District-Devised Tests?
Nebraska's
testing quandary has reached the pages of Education Week (www.EdWeek.org),
which laid out in an article Wednesday the pro's and con's of keeping
Nebraska's district-specific assessment program vs. moving to what almost all
other states have, statewide tests. See the article on:
www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2008/03/26/29nebraska.h27.html?tmp=1467716544
The article quotes a Westside Community Schools official as
saying we need to change to the statewide testing because the district-devised
tests can't be compared from place to place, rendering them meaningless as a
quality control tool. It also quotes an Elkhorn Public Schools official as
saying that a single test is destructive to educational ends because it narrows
the curriculum.
Both sides are right, and that's what makes LB 1157 such a
pickle.
The controversy also puts Nebraska Education Commissioner
Doug Christensen in a tough spot. On one hand, he says he has invested his
career and reputation into the locally-devised testing system and can see
nothing positive about statewide testing. But that just shows the duplicity of
his staunch opposition to local control when it comes to so many other
educational issues, from school choice to taxation to innovations in teacher
hiring and compensation.
The
statewide tests would be used to satisfy the testing requirements of the
federal education legislation, No Child Left Behind. Federal officials have
been skeptical of Nebraska's "homegrown" testing system and have threatened not
to hand over federal education funding, which would be a substantial shock to
public school districts' systems.
Under LB 1157, public school districts would be required to
give the same standardized reading and math assessments in grades 3-8 and once
in high school, beginning in the 2009-10 school year for reading, and in 2010-11
for math. A science test would be mandated in the 2011-12 school year, at least
once in elementary, middle, and high school.
A contentious part of the proposed bill would establish a
governor-appointed advisory committee to review the statewide assessment plan. Members
of the State Board of Education would rather have that committee chosen by, and
answering to, them.
But critics have pointed out that, since Christensen is
opposing the statewide system, does not answer to the taxpayers since he is
unelected, and has virtual control of the State Board, he would be more likely
to strip the testing system of its teeth and keep the education bureaucracy in
charge, than would a group under the governor's control.
Supporters of a statewide testing program point out that the
locally-developed assessments are a paperwork nightmare for educators and deny
parents the information they deserve in evaluating whether their local schools
are doing a good job based on the demographics of the student population vs.
other school districts.
Opponents point out, and correctly so, that any time a
curriculum is pointed toward a standardized test, the curriculum becomes
standardized, too, which by definition "dumbs it down." State government can
lower the "cut scores" on a test to make it appear that more kids are doing
well on the tests than they really are. They also can put slanted and biased
test questions in place without local educators having any say-so, and forcing
students to answer questions in a particular way - usually, a leftist way
rather than a moderate or conservative way -- on hot potatoes such as evolution
and historical revisionism, or be scored "wrong."
That gives undue political and philosophical control over
the curriculum to unseen, unelected educrats who write the test questions that
drive the curriculum. The opponents' fear is that the United States will
develop a national curriculum similar to communist and fascist countries of the
past and present.
3/26/08
Florida ACLU Sues Over
Minority Graduation Rates;
Should Nebraska Follow
Suit?
Good citizenship requires us to care
very deeply about equal educational opportunity for all kids, no matter where
they live and certainly no matter what skin color or level of family income
they have. That's why Nebraskans should sit up and take notice of something
that happened a week ago in Florida.
Maybe we should do the same thing here, and sue the Omaha
Public Schools and the Lincoln Public Schools if we find that their minority
graduation rates are significantly lower than white graduation rates . . . and the
evidence shows that the racial achievement gap in high-school graduation in
Nebraska is actually wider than in Florida.
Last week, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a class
action lawsuit against the Palm Beach County, Fla., school district because
about one-third of its students do not graduate, and most of those who do not
graduate are black and Hispanic.
The ACLU contends that the district's low graduation rate is
a violation of the Florida Constitution. Palm Beach has 175,000 students.
According to the lawsuit, ". . . the consequences for the
students and the county are devastating, as those who leave school without even
a high school diploma are significantly less able or likely to share in the
American dream."
The suit asks the court to demand that the school district
change its methods so that the overall graduation rate, as well as the
graduation rate for minority students, low-income students, and those in the
process of learning English, all will improve.
The district's enrollment is 42 percent white, 28.6 percent
black, and 22 percent Hispanic.
According to the lawsuit, the graduation rate for black
students is 29 percentage points lower than the graduation rate for white
students. The graduation rate for Hispanic students is 20 percentage points
lower than for white students. The district has been reporting a significantly
higher graduation rate to the state government than the rate established by the
ACLU's research.
It is believed that the gap between the graduation rates for
whites and minorities is even larger in the Omaha Public Schools and the
Lincoln Public Schools than in the Florida district, if the number of dropouts
reaching down into the middle-school years is included in the statistics. It is
difficult to get precise numbers because of student mobility and other factors,
but in Florida one of the stated purposes of the lawsuit is to nail down the graduation
rate differential once and for all.
3/25/08
Top 10 Things
The New Westside
Superintendent Should Do
Congratulations to Jacquie Estee, the newly-announced
superintendent of the Westside Community Schools in Omaha. She was our kids'
principal years ago at Swanson Elementary School, and is a very nice, very fine
person. She has an incredible opportunity to make a difference for Nebraska
education, and we wish her the very best.
Commonly called District 66, the Westside district is only
about 15% of the size of the Omaha Public Schools, yet it is considered much
more of a leader in terms of educational programming across the state. The
things Westside does tend to trickle down to the other districts in Nebraska,
sooner or later, for better or for worse.
With that in mind, here are 10 things Mrs. Estee could do that
would have a tremendous impact on educational quality and cost-effectiveness
throughout the state:
1.
Change
the method of teaching reading and writing in kindergarten through second grade,
from the awful Whole Language mish-mash we have now, to systematic, intensive,
explicit phonics-only instruction. It takes about 40 hours to thoroughly train
a teacher in that system, which is the proper way. Phonics-only reading and
writing is why we used to have much higher rates of literacy in our society, up
until the last generation or so. Test scores would shoot skyward, especially
for low-income and non-English speaking students.
2.
Throw
out the awful elementary math curriculum that has held sway in District 66 and
most other public school districts for the past 10 or 15 years for all but the
top 10% or so of students. "Fuzzy" math doesn't work for the majority of kids.
All subjects should be taught to kids based on ability-level groupings, but
Westside refuses to do that until the secondary years, out of a sense of
Political Correctness. Is that "equality"? By so doing, the district is hurting
all the kids on an equal basis. They could solve the math deficit easily, by
offering ability grouping in grade school, and replacing "fuzzy math" for
average and struggling learners with a traditional, tried-and-true,
computation-based curriculum such as Singapore Math or Saxon Math. Why? The way
they're teaching math now in District 66 - or not teaching it, I should say -
is abstract vs. concrete in its approach to problem-solving. It also puts a
heavy emphasis on reading and writing besides plain old math. So kids who
aren't reading very well to start with (see item #1) are hamstrung, and it
shows in test scores. "Fuzzy math" may be fine for the top 10% of students, but
it's a nightmare for the remaining 90%. The only reason Westside's test scores
aren't worse is that the kids are allowed to use calculators on standardized
tests. That should stop, too; no calculators until seventh-grade, is a wiser
course of action. The only way to make those test scores great again is to go
back to the basics and teach math, not fuzzy feel-good "thinking skills."
3.
Post
the district's checkbook online, including general payroll and benefits
financial data. Teacher and staff identities should not be revealed, but the
public has a right to know how much teachers with various years of service and
various credentials are making, and how much their benefits packages are
costing taxpayers.
4.
Post
online complete and clearly-presented financial figures about the district's
$48 million operating budget, plus its other various funds and expense
accounts, online.
5.
Post
online complete and clearly-presented data about student testing, with appropriate
restrictions to protect student identities. For example, the public needs to
know how many students did NOT take the SAT and ACT but are still counted in
the enrollment totals, including those who are in special education programs.
Reportedly, an unacceptably high percentage of Westside students are not taking
these college admissions tests, making it hard to compare the school's
"average" with the average reported by area Catholic high schools, for example,
in which close to 100% of the student body takes those tests. Similarly, the
public should be told how many students out of the total (not just the
college-prep total) are in the various Advanced Placement classes vs. how many
of them score a "4" or a "5" on the year-end tests, thus gaining college
credit. Reportedly, at Westside, the percentage is very small, yet the public's
perception is that most Westside students are obtaining that enriched
curriculum and providing the financial boost to families that comes with
earning college credit while still in high school.
6.
Get
rid of the free laptops. Research clearly shows that they are a colossal waste
of time and taxpayer money. They would be great for classroom and study-center
use. But kids are using them as toys, not really learning aids, outside of
class or study center. And there's a bigger problem: theft rates are reportedly
high, and reportedly, low-income students are telling school officials that
their laptop was lost or stolen when in reality they are "fencing" them to
others, pocketing the proceeds. Then Westside won't require them to pay for a
new one since they are low-income, but just hands them over a new one. Meanwhile,
students from middle-class and upper-class households are forced to pay if
their laptops are indeed stolen or damaged. That sets up a class war, in which
the "poor" kids are exploiting the "rich" kids, and could be contributing to
the increasing tension and climate of bullying that is reportedly damaging the
Westside community.
7.
Westside
should be a leader statewide in insisting on school choice to help solve the
racial achievement gap in our state. There are open seats in private schools
that are doing a much better job with low-income and non-English speaking kids
than the public schools are doing, and for far less cost per pupil. Rather than
wasting still more millions in unnecessary new infrastructure such as the
intradistrict "focus school," Westside should be pointing the way toward a much
more cost-effective solution, which is wiser use of the community resources we
already have in place.
8.
Westside
also should be a leader statewide in changing the way taxpayers are expected to
pay for special education costs. Right now, there's a "bounty system," where
the more children a district labels as "special education," the more money that
district gains. That is OK if the child truly has a medical condition that
creates special learning needs, such as a physical handicap or a bona fide,
diagnosable mental or psychological condition such as autism or a mental
handicap, that makes it hard to learn. But the vast majority of kids labeled as
"learning disabled" don't have anything medically wrong with them - they just
aren't able to read at grade level. And that's not because of anything they or
their parents have done wrong - that's because the schools aren't using the
right methods of teaching reading and writing in the early grades. Westside
should pave the way for reforming this, and drastically cutting the unnecessary
hundreds of millions of dollars Nebraska districts are spending on unnecessary
special-ed and LD staff and programs, by switching to phonics-only reading
instruction and then getting a financial "reward" for every student they move
OUT of the special-ed and LD rolls because they're teaching reading right. That
"reward," of course, would only be a fraction of what we were spending
previously on the LD program, but children would be better served, parents
would be happier, and taxpayers would get relief.
9.
Get
out of the early childhood education business. That's not the mandate of the
K-12 schools. They are over-structuring the preschoolers' day and
over-standardizing the preschoolers' activities to the point where they are
actually harming intellectual and emotional development, not helping the
children. Convert the generous state and federal funding that Westside is
receiving into direct grants that low-income and non-English speaking families
in the district can use to offset their preschool and day-care expenses so that
they can obtain quality care. It is not right for a public school district to
be driving private-sector child care and preschool operators out of business,
but that is happening, and fast, in District 66. Kids are demonstrably much
better off in family-based child care and church-based or community-based
preschool settings. If they "go to school" within a public district from the
time they are babies until they are 18 years old, no WONDER they get bored,
frustrated, stale and sour. You can see that happening at Westside, too, and it
was one of the first districts in the country to move toward all-day
kindergarten, which was a regrettable step and is contributing to the stagnant
and falling test scores in the district.
10.
Lead
the state into a more modern philosophy of educational governance by "devolving"
total administrative and financial responsibility to the principal of each
school. The superintendent and school board should still have fiduciary
responsibility and oversight powers, of course. But the principals should be
the bosses. Attach a weighted level of funding to each student that grants more
for children who are from low-income families, non-English speaking or have
bona fide, medically-verifiable special needs. Let the principals handle hiring
and firing and all other school management functions. "Devolve" and downsize
the district-level staff to be service providers and no longer paper-pushing
bureaucracies, to the extent possible.
3/19/08
Blair Fifth-Grader
Wins
Nebraska-Kansas
Braille Contest
Chase Crispin, a fifth-grader at
Arbor Park Middle School in Blair, Neb., took first in the Nebraska-Kansas
Regional Braille Challenge, the only academic competition for blind students in
the United States.
Crispin competed in five categories:
reading comprehension, Braille spelling, chart and graph reading, proofreading,
and Braille speed and accuracy.
He moves on to the nationals in June in Los Angeles at the
Braille Institute.
For more information, see www.braillechallenge.org and www.brailleinstitute.org
3/11/08
Gifted Teacher Named
'Rookie of the Year'
More good news from Blair: Christi Gochenour, the K-12
High-Ability Learner Coordinator for the Blair Community Schools, was named the
"Rookie of the Year" by the Nebraska Association for the Gifted at its annual
meeting late last month.
In her first year in the post, Gochenour:
·
created
a web page for the Blair high-ability program;
·
led a
three-day Future Problem Solving workshop with eighth-graders on alternative
energy sources with guest speakers and PowerPoints posted on the web page;
·
facilitated
a reading group for sixth-graders;
·
coached
the Grades 6-8 Quiz Bowl team;
·
taught
an accelerated fourth-grade math class
·
directed
a readers' theatre production for fifth-graders, leading to a recording on
GarageBand and a podcast;
·
helped
with the spelling bee and geography bee;
·
led a
support group for gifted kids in Grades 3-5;
·
escorted
students to several workshops and conferences outside school walls.
3/11/08
Columbus-Area Grade
School Gets Kudos
For Great Job Teaching
Reading to ELL Kids
Hats off to Sunrise Elementary
School in the Lakeview Community School District east of Columbus, Neb. It was
recently recognized by SRA/McGraw-Hill for the outstanding job it is doing
teaching reading to low-income English Language Learners:
https://www.sraonline.com/download/DI/EfficacyReports/Sunrise_DI_FNL.pdf
Ninety percent of the students
quality for free- or reduced-lunch pricing because of low family income. Of the
70% of the student body who are Hispanic, 66% are non-English speaking to the
point at which they receive free school services to help them up to speed. The
term used is "English Language Learners."
One year after switching to Open Court, the phonics-only reading
instruction method from SRA/McGraw Hill, fourth-grade reading test scores at
Sunrise School topped all low-income schools in Nebraska who have received
Reading First federal grants, aimed at helping low-income, non-English speaking
children with their reading skills. In that year, the percentage of
fourth-graders whose reading skills tested as "proficient" or "advanced" rose
from 75% to 82%, as measured by standardized tests.
School officials said the secret was
the coordinated reading program from the Open
Court curriculum, teamwork among all the teachers, and designing a
three-hour block of time each day specifically for Language Arts.
3/5/08
Learning Community
Wrangling Gets Ugly
The chairman of the Legislature's Education Committee says
he has a "hammer" and he's going to use it on our heads if we don't go along
with what he and his minions want. The "hammer" is of course financial, but the
ugly, threatening tone is what's alarming. A power play against local schools
is what's up with LB 987, promoted by State Sen. Ron Raikes of Lincoln. He
wants to force all schools to make their kids take identical, statewide reading
and math tests, and he has come out and said that the bill he has introduced in
the Legislature this year is a "hammer" to force them to do it.
More about that later. But how did we sink so low as to have
such ugly language hurtling around Nebraska's education circles like this?
Didn't I tell you? This whole "Learning Community" package
of laws and reorganization of school finance has nothing to do with what's best
for disadvantaged kids. It has to do with socialism, money and power. They're
using the needs of the miseducated, under-achieving, disadvantaged kids in Nebraska as a "loss leader," or a "bait and
switch," to change the way education works for ALL children and youth. They're
muscling aside parents and teachers more than ever before.
If every kid in the state has to take the same test, then
the curriculum has to be the same, to give every kid a "level playing field."
And who will be choosing that curriculum? Not teachers, not parents - but educrats,
whose puppeteers are driven by one thing only: how to build a future workforce
- NOT how to educate kids. These "assessments" are full of politicized
attitudes, values, opinions and beliefs, NOT primarily academics, too.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see what's really up
with these statewide, forced assessments: why do you think they call it a
"work-FORCE"? The game will be: comply with how we see things, or you won't get
a job.
It won't be what is ON the tests, and hence, in the
curriculum, that matters. It will be what is left OUT. All the stuff I want to
see - the classic books, the rules of spelling, the math tables, the science
experiments, the arts, the geography, etc. - will be pretty much out. What will
be in? Whatever gets the kids ready to be cogs in the workforce. That is,
that's what will happen for the 85% who will continue to go to public school.
The rich will be able to send their kids to the private schools and have the
tutors that will be needed to get them into elite colleges and get the few
elite jobs that will still be available. Meanwhile, citizens and taxpayers won't
have a word to say about it.
Ew, ew, ewwww.
NOW can you see why they were so hot to get these statewide
learning standards in place several years ago, to standardize curriculum with
the rest of the country and, to be honest, the world?
NOW can you see why they're trying to force homeschoolers
and private-schoolers into the same boat as the public-school kids, taking
these "assessments"? They don't want anybody to know anything that anybody else
doesn't know. Because of the Total Quality Management philosophy adopted from
Japan, they want every child to graduate with the same "specs" - like
assembly-line products.
They want Nebraska's schools to turn into "local education
agencies" - that's the actual language in federal education laws - sort of like
"McSchools" that are identical, all across the state and the nation, and,
bluntly, the world.
No child will be left behind - they'll all be kept in the
same socialistic boat, and their futures will be controlled by how "well" they
do on these nonacademic tests.
So now it's crunch time, and Sen. Raikes wants to force all Nebraska
kids to take identical, statewide reading and math tests. He has come out and
said that the bill he has introduced in the Legislature this year is a "hammer"
to force them to do it.
A "hammer." Does THAT sound like the kind of rhetoric that
we want flying between our elected officials, like Raikes, and our public
servants, like the members of the State Board of Education and officials of
school districts across the state?
Raikes forgot to add "sickle." That would be funny . . . except
it's not a joke.
2/10/08
Hats Off to a Savvy
English Professor
Who Spotted the Spin
in 'Call of the Wild'
Did you know the Jack London
adventure novel The Call of the Wild is not only an Alaskan adventure novel,
but also has pro-socialism and pro-Darwinism undertones? Neither did I. But
thinking back over the story about the man and his dog-turned-killer wolf spun
out of control amid the harsh brutality of the dog-fighting world, I certainly
can. Thanks to Charles Johanningsmeier, associate professor of English at the
University of Nebraska at Omaha, for pointing this out in an op-ed Feb. 3.
He applauds the Omaha Public
Library's "Big Read" program, which is publishing and sponsoring a
community-wide effort to read this book together, young and old, and do various
activities to make it come alive. However, he urges the library not to just
teach it on a shallow, surface level, as if it is about a dog in Alaska, but to
expose and explore the deeper literary themes.
That's the difference between
schlock curriculum, and English curriculum. How I wish more K-12 schools would
approach their English courses and book selection with this in mind. Sure,
there are some books kids should read just for fun - and there are some they
SHOULD read, whether they like it or not - but there are many books, like this,
that have many different levels of connections to the real world. Children and
youth need to be taught how to analyze and critically-think, not just put in
time reading, and using entertaining books like this is a great way to do it.
Johanningsmeier would be amazed how
much "spin" there is in book selection in schools today, with books that
promote socialism over capitalism, immorality and amorality over living life
making prudent moral choices, and fatalistic Darwinism (life on this Earth is
"it" and so you're on your own for survival, and everybody's out to get you)
over stories that show people living lives filled with love, joy, peace,
courage, sacrifice and all that good stuff.
Hope he and others like him will
continue to speak out, and that educators will listen.
2/10/08
Hats Off to a Private
School
That Truly Values
Parental Involvement
Omaha Roncalli High School has named
Steve and Julie Grosse-Rhode its 2008 Volunteers of the Year, and they'll be
honored this week for all the work they're doing for the booster club,
fund-raisers and other school events. What a great idea. Here's hoping public
schools in Nebraska will all start an annual award recognizing great parents,
and telling others what they've done to serve other families through school
voluntarism. It would be an inspiration, and is credit long overdue for work
that is priceless for kids.
2/10/08
Foster Care Improves
in Nebraska;
Arizona Offers School
Choice to Foster Kids
Nebraskans have been worried about
problems with our foster-care system for years, especially as the
methamphetamine epidemic continues to impact more and more children, whose
parents get hooked and can no longer care for their children.
