Local Control of Public Schools:
Use It Or Lose It!
Sign the Petition to Protect Schools
From Unwanted Consolidation at the
Qwest Center Home & Garden Show
This Weekend
Please
stop by the Nebraskans for Local Control booth and sign the petition.
Hours:
Thursday, 5 p.m. to 10 p.m., Friday, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m., Saturday, 11 a.m. to 9
p.m., and Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Home show
cost: $6 for adults; children ages 6-12 $3; 5 and under free.
If you can
help staff the booth, won't be in downtown Omaha this weekend but still want to
sign, or want to help the petition efforts in any other way, please contact Cindy Carlson of Holdrege.
Email is tycync@atcjet.net and cell
phone number is (308) 991-2420.
This whole school
consolidation thing is beginning to look very fishy. The way the
superintendents are whoopin' on each other, raining blows right and left, and
yet in the end everything they're fighting for will wind up costing us more
money, reminds me distinctly of the fake body slams put on by the bulbous
participants in the World Wrestling Federation.
Could this all just be a
show?
Could this be a fake
crisis that's being used to stir people up in one direction, so that the REAL
goal can quietly be inserted behind our backs?
I mean, could the Omaha
Public Schools and Class I consolidation crises be a manufactured, manipulated
distraction so that the powers that be can usher in what they REALLY want, but
which we citizens would never otherwise have accepted - county-wide school
consolidation?
John Bonaiuto, executive
director of the Nebraska Association of School Boards, was quoted last June 8
in The World-Herald as saying: "It
would not be a stretch to see legislation that looked for one school district
per county."
For the last few
decades, the push by the teachers' unions and the educrats has been to wrestle
away local control and voting rights by the people, and replace it with
"governance" and collective bargaining and interlocal agreements. Why? Because
it's so much easier to get your own way when you don't have to mess with those
pesky citizens and taxpayers. Just take their money . . . and run with it.
The whole Outcome-Based
Education thing, and Goals 2000, which has morphed into No Child Left Behind,
are targeted toward nationalization of our schools. What's blocking it? Local
control.
Well, thank goodness for
Nebraskans for Local Schools (www.nebraskansforlocalschools.org).
They are running a petition drive to try to get a state constitutional
amendment on the ballot that would protect local control of schools. If it
passes, then there would have to be approval by the majority of voters in any
school district before it can dissolve, merge or affiliate with any other
school district.
The best defense is a
good offense. If this had been in place before the OPS and Class I messes, then
we'd never have scary legislation like LB 1050, the countywide school
consolidation bill.
It would make Nebraska
into a mini-Soviet Union with schools run by educrats instead of a beautiful
patchwork quilt of democracy knit strong with lots of stitches representing
lots of locally-elected school boards.
I mean, trust me: it's
hard enough to get listened to in today's moderately-sized school districts.
Just imagine any education decision-maker giving a rip about what you think if
the district goes countywide in the future.
You could try all the
body slams, half-Nelsons and over-the-head spins you want. But it'd be just
like WWF: it'd all just be for show, and you couldn't ever really win.
Get behind this
petition. They need something like 30,000 more signatures. Hop to it!
Second in a Series:
How and Why the Nabity Plan
Would Solve the OPS Crisis
Compared to a long, drawn-out court
battle, or any of the four proposals now before the Nebraska Legislature, the
Nabity plan is a far better solution to the consolidation controversy in the
greater Omaha educational community.
"Shared Responsibility" is the plan
by gubernatorial candidate Dave Nabity for addressing the problems raised by
the Omaha Public Schools in its bid to take over most of the surrounding
suburban districts in the greater Omaha area.
It's the only one that would mix the
races and income levels, cut taxes, reduce bureaucracy and introduce some
much-needed competition and expand choice among greater Omaha government
schools.
The other plans, for the most part,
reflect the concerns and desires of the education establishment and the unions,
rather than reflecting what would be the most cost-effective way to increase
racial justice and academic achievement among all children in the area. The
other plans would destroy local school boards and local control, greatly
increase costs for transportation or needless new construction, and continue
the wall of separation between white west Omaha and the inner city's more
diverse population.
Consolidating schools has been shown
by a large preponderance of the evidence based on what's going on all across
the country to increase taxes and reduce quality. What really helps low-income
and non-English speaking kids, and what the polls show their parents really
want, are common-sense solutions such as phonics instruction, English
immersion, and more focus on literary and numeracy and less on social engineering.
The definition of insanity is
continuing the do the same things that have already been shown not to work.
Therefore, the prudent and fiduciary response is to do something different.
This situation is a fantastic
opportunity for Omaha to do something exciting and innovative - and get it
done, once and for all, for the neediest children in our community.
The Nabity plan is the way to go.
------------------------------
THE ACHIEVEMENT GAP PERSISTS
Racial and
income-related achievement gaps have persisted for decades in OPS, with
unacceptable differences in test scores and graduation rates between the races
and income levels. All citizens agree that something has to change, for all
children deserve equal educational opportunities.
MORE MONEY DOESN'T APPEAR TO BE THE
ANSWER
OPS has
been spending more money per pupil in its inner-city schools than in its
suburban schools for years, with little or no improvement. OPS will be dealing
with a great deal of debt for years to come after its $254 million bond issue a
few years ago, most of which was spent on inner-city schools.
CONSOLIDATION WOULD BE
COUNTER-PRODUCTIVE
Evidence is
strong that the larger the school district, the lower the student achievement, the
higher the noninstructional spending, and the higher the cost per pupil. Consolidation
has proven to drive up administrative costs, increase bureaucracy, and
adversely impact student learning.
THE 'ONE CITY, ONE SCHOOL DISTRICT'
CLAIM
The statute
on which OPS bases its claim for consolidation does not mandate "one city, one
school district" and would not hold up in court, according to Douglas County
Attorney Stu Dornan and State Sen. Kermit Brashear, among others. On OPS' other
reason for seeking the consolidation, to achieve racial and financial equity,
there also is a wide range of legal opinion on how likely they are to prevail
in court. Around the United States, school districts have gotten mired for
years in long, drawn-out court battles over equity claims and costly,
disruptive integration plans, while test scores and parental satisfaction don't
improve significantly despite enormous increases in spending. Finding a
positive, cooperative, constructive out-of-court solution sooner, rather than
battling these issues out in court, would save countless dollars and priceless
time in our community's efforts to improve educational quality for all.
THE STRESS IT HAS
CAUSED:
COMMUNITY RELATIONSHIPS AND UNITY UNDER
SIEGE
The entire metropolitan area has
been launched into a state of panic because the very nature of parental choice
and control over education is being threatened. The cordial, collegial
atmosphere among educators in the greater Omaha metropolitan area has been
damaged by the rhetoric and tactics undertaken on all sides. The controversy is
quite possibly weakening the public's trust in educators' credibility and
leadership, and sets a poor example for children.
POTENTIAL FOR A CLASS WAR
Strong rhetoric from educational and
political leaders is provoking even stronger rhetoric from partisans of the
various districts, including parents, teachers and other authority figures.
What they are saying about this issue in the press, at rallies, at public
hearings, in their homes, and probably in classrooms as well, is often
disrespectful, biased and distorted, and mischaracterizes other people's
motivations and actions.
TAXPAYER ANGUISH
Taxpayers can see that all of the
proposed solutions so far are bound to cost an enormous amount of money. They
are already fed up with high property taxes and have been extremely generous
with OPS and surrounding districts in granting bond issues and tax-levy
overrides in recent years. However, they see the $254 million that OPS obtained
just five years ago, and might begin to label it a poor investment since test
scores of some of the schools that were greatly improved for that large sum
continue to lag near the bottom of the nation, and in fact have declined in
some schools rather than inching up. Many of the consolidation plans being proposed
would add significantly to school spending, when what taxpayers would like to
see is a solution that will keep quality up, but costs down.
DIVERSITY OR ACHIEVEMENT: WHAT POOR
PARENTS WANT
According to a survey of minority
parents by the national polling organization, Public Agenda, Hispanic and
African-American parents prefer improved academic achievement for their
children over racial diversity in their public schools, by a factor of 8:1.
Improving academics should be the focus of any changes made in our public
school systems, with diversity an important, but secondary, concern.
EXODUS TO PRIVATE SCHOOLS?
If this isn't solved constructively
and soon, families which put a high priority on quality education are certain
to opt out of the public schools and put their children in private schools to
avoid the disruption, worry and conflict. That will reduce public support for
public education, and it's a downhill spiral from there. But erosion of quality
students is already happening, with long waiting lists that are long and
getting longer for many of the area's private schools, and significant
increases in homeschooling populations.
OMAHA'S NATIONAL IMAGE TARNISHED
The Omaha educational community has
an excellent reputation nationwide, and our good schools are a key selling
point for economic development purposes. News is spreading about our racial
achievement gap and our boundary war, and it can't be good for our P.R. Since
Nebraska is one of only a handful of states with no vouchers, no tuition tax
credits and no charter schools, we already look to be a bit behind the times in
our public school governance.
SOLUTION:
SHARED RESPONSIBILITY
This plan
calls for reassignment of 23 of the lowest-performing schools within OPS to the
eight nearest districts. OPS would still be the largest school district in the
state and would keep their best schools. But the task of meeting the unique
educational needs of most of the area's toughest-to-teach children would no
longer be borne chiefly by OPS. It would be shared between OPS and the eight
other districts. Divide . . . and conquer!
NEIGHBORHOOD SCHOOLS
Most educators agree that it is
preferable for primary children to attend schools nearer their homes. It makes
them feel secure, improves attendance and builds community. Integration busing
moved the kids, but under this plan, the kids can stay put if they wish.
They'll just be "under new management." The eight suburban districts can come
up with innovative ways to mix staff and student populations from the inner
city to the suburbs, to achieve a more natural flow for integration and racial
diversity.
FUNDING
All funding
would flow with each child to the districts to which his or her neighborhood
school has been reassigned. This would take a great deal of negotiation and
adjustment between property-rich and property-poor districts, for example, but
with computer number-crunching, it can be done.
COMPETITION
Now that
the nine districts will have a greatly-improved balance of low-income and
non-English speaking student populations, there will be healthy competition
among districts over who can come up with the best programs to improve the
academic achievement among disadvantaged children.
STAFFING
Teachers
and other OPS personnel would have their jobs and salaries frozen for a set
period of time. They could remain in the OPS compensation, health insurance and
retirement plans, or switch to the reassigned district's plans. It is
anticipated that more flexibility in union contracts could be negotiated to
allow for innovations and changes pertinent to the disadvantaged student
population's needs. It also is anticipated that with 25% less enrollment, the
central-office and nonteaching staff within OPS would be reduced accordingly.
HOW THE EIGHT DISTRICTS' PATRONS WILL
RESPOND
A crucial
component of this plan involves each district's business base, foundations,
students, parents' organizations, mentoring groups, retirees, civic groups,
nonprofit organization, and religious groups, all of whom will be expected to
pitch in and find ways to share their strength and experience with families and
schools that really need support. Just as disadvantaged children need better
academic role models, their parents and guardians, and school staff, need to be
surrounded by an active and caring educational community beyond school walls as
well. There are more volunteers per square inch in the suburban districts that
many inner-city teachers would believe. But until now, there has been little
opportunity for west Omahans to get directly involved with low-income and
minority kids because they don't reside in OPS. Now, they will have a more
natural pipeline. It is time to reassign THEM to help inner-city kids, too.
EFFECT ON DISTRICTS:
OPS
Two high schools, four middle schools and 17 elementary
schools, a total of 23 schools, would be
reassigned. OPS enrollment would decrease
by 11,916 students, from 46,035 to roughly 34,000 students. The
downsizing equals approximately 25%. OPS would still be larger than the Lincoln
Public Schools by a few thousand students. It is anticipated that the central
office staff of OPS would decrease accordingly.
EIGHT
NEIGHBORING DISTRICTS
Fort Calhoun Public Schools:
McMillan
Middle School
Minne
Lusa
Ponca
Add 1,508 students • Enrollment: from
592 to 2,100
Bennington Public Schools:
Nathan
Hale Middle School
Wakonda
Add 842 students • Enrollment:
from 596 to 1,438
Elkhorn Public Schools:
Sherman
Miller
Park
Add 591 students • Enrollment:
from 3,644 to 4,235
Millard Public Schools:
Mount
View
Belvedere
Add 734 students • Enrollment:
from 19,912 to 20,646
Westside Community Schools:
Benson
High School
Monroe
Middle School
King
Franklin
Kennedy
Conestoga
Add 3,383 students • Enrollment:
from 5,866 to 9,249
Ralston Public Schools:
Jackson
Liberty
Add 638 students • Enrollment:
from 3,038 to 3,676
Papillion-LaVista Public Schools:
Indian
Hill
Highland
Add 951 students • Enrollment:
from 8,192 to 9,143
Bellevue Public Schools:
Bryan
High School
Bryan
Middle School
Chandler
View
Gilder
Elementary
Add 3,269 students • Enrollment:
from 8,966 to 12,235
(Enrollment data is from 2003-04
annual financial reports on file with the Nebraska Department of Education, http://ess.nde.state.ne.us and the 2003-04 OPS budget book.)
------------------------------
2/7/06 • www.GoBigEd.com
First in a Series:
How the Nabity Plan Could Help OPS
Vastly Improve Academics for
Immigrant Children
The Omaha Public Schools makes some valid
points about how much harder its student population is to teach than in other
Nebraska school districts. One example: OPS has a higher percentage of students
whose families have recently immigrated from foreign countries, and don't
speak, read or write English at all, or very well. That language gap wreaks
havoc on test score averages in OPS, the district claims.
But is the answer pouring more money into
the failed bilingual education model? A lot of people from around the country
say no. Modeling after successes in other states, a school reorganization plan
for OPS announced last week by gubernatorial candidate Dave Nabity would make
it possibility to help non-English speaking children get up to speed faster and
more effectively, for less money.
In today's typical bilingual education
programs, non-English speaking kids - mostly Spanish-speaking, but there are
many other languages sprinkled around -- are separated in a special classroom
and taught mostly in their home language by bilingual teachers. The goal is to
make them English-proficient, but it obviously doesn't work very well, based on
test scores and the dropout rate in OPS.
The process can take years. By the time
they mainstream into the regular English-speaking classroom, they're so many
years behind their peers, their test scores are abominable, and a huge
percentage (over half in Nebraska) drop out of school.
English immersion programs, in contrast, are
sort of like an "English language boot camp." Kids learning English are taught mostly
in English, rather than mostly in their home language, for one year in a
separate classroom where the language difficulty takes center stage above the
regular curriculum. Good, old-fashioned phonics and small class sizes are the
twin tools.
But after that year, the kids are
launched into the regular classroom, with of course support and tutoring as
needed. But they're mainstreamed - not segregated - and they have to perform in
English. There are no excuses or rationalizations for underachievement. And lo
and behold: they do better!
It's a far cheaper, better alternative.
Look at the results described by the California superintendent in this week's
educational advice column, below.
For whatever the reason, OPS has not
moved to this sort of "sink or swim" approach for its English language learners
in places like South High School. Instead, OPS has built a big bilingual bureaucracy
that's costly and ineffective. Yes, it's overwhelmed with the needs of these
non-English speaking kids. Yes, it's important to have some teachers who are
bilingual. But there's a better way than spending more money doing even more of
the wrong things - especially when the right things cost less.
The Nabity plan would reassign 23 of the
most struggling schools in OPS, that have high percentages of English language
learners, to the eight neighboring suburban school districts, perhaps under
long-term management contracts reporting to the OPS Board of Education. Then
each district would have only two or three schools on which to concentrate. It
would be much easier to institute English immersion because it wouldn't be such
a whopping big task, as it now would be all across OPS.
English immersion could yield test score
improvements, and graduation rate hikes, in the double digits, and for less
money, too. That's because there would be far fewer teachers employed in
bringing kids up to speed in English, besides the regular classroom teaching corps.
Better academics for less money? OPS
could try it! And it could work! Then us taxpayers could sit back, enjoy a
margarita, and shout "Ole!"
------------------------------
2/6/06 • www.GoBigEd.com
Is English Immersion Best For Immigrant Students?
Q. I'm confused. I thought that it
was best to teach an immigrant child regular school subjects in his or her own
native language, for the most part, and gradually ease the child into the
regular English-speaking classroom over a period of years. But now they're
talking about "sink or swim" English-language immersion for non-English
speaking kids. What gives?
Bilingual
education has witnessed a sea change in attitudes about what's best for
children in public school who are learning the English language as well as the
regular curriculum. Your attitude is now officially outdated, since states like
California and Arizona have switched to English immersion for several years
now, and Texas is moving that way.
Most
educators didn't want to make the switch. A powerful force for change, though,
has been Hispanic parents. They contended that the gentle, slow approach to
making Spanish-speaking kids proficient in English, which often took years,
slowed down their children's academic progress.
In typical
bilingual ed programs, non-English speaking children were segregated in special
English As a Second Language classrooms for several years. They were often
taught in their native language and not in English, and given a lot of
multicultural curriculum instead of the old 3 R's.
The result:
their test scores were enormously worse than the native English speakers. It
was feared that instead of becoming bilingual, they were becoming illiterate in
TWO languages!
For school
systems, it was a headache to find bilingual teachers, and then the way most systems
were set up, there were disincentives for those teachers to make the children
good enough at reading and writing in English to leave their classrooms and
take funding and "need" away from those teachers.
For public
policymakers, bilingual education was a nightmare because a "good" English
competency level in one school district might be evaluated as "unacceptable" in
the next one. It was hard to explain to the public why the dropout rate among
non-English speaking kids was so much higher than for native Americans, when we
were spending so much more per pupil on the immigrants than on the lifelong
citizens. Then there are the valid fairness complaints from taxpayers, since
some of these children are here illegally, with parents who are undocumented workers.
The
breakthrough came from educators like Ken Noonan, superintendent of the
Oceanside, Calif., schools and vice chairman of the California State Board of
Education who was co-founder of the California Association of Bilingual
Educators. For 30 years, he was militantly in favor of bilingual education and
against English immersion. He campaigned against California's Proposition 227
in 1998, the ballot measure that eliminated bilingual education and substituted
one year in a structured English-immersion classroom before the English
language learner is assigned to a mainstream class.
Noonan and others have raved
about the results ever since. He advises schools to reduce class sizes to 20
children or below in the early grades, and teach reading with phonics-only
instruction, to get results like his district's. After two years of English
immersion, the limited-English second-graders in Oceanside raised their scores
on standardized tests from the 13th percentile to the 32nd
percentile, getting nearer and nearer to the national average.
Homework: See the Oct. 25, 2005,
white paper, "Immersion Not Submersion: Converting English Language Programs
From Bilingual Education to Structured English Immersion in California and
Elsewhere," on this think tank's website: www.lexingtoninstitute.org/docs/707.pdf
2/6/06 • www.GoBigEd.com is a
public-service website on K-12 education issues by Susan Darst Williams, a writer
who lives at the base of Mount Laundry, Nebraska.
