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NINE COMMENTARIES ON NY K-12 EXAMS: TESTING TO THE RESULTS

2005-07-18T15:58:00.000-04:00

NY Makes Huge Scoring Change to 8th Grade ELA Exam
Look for a dramatic reduction of students scoring in the lowest level (Level 1) in the 2005 exam results
May 3, 2005

MAY 18, 2005 UPDATE: I'm beginning to wonder whether the state is creating scale scores and cut-off scores after the exams are given. If that's the case, the whole testing enterprise has been corrupted.

I have reported on several occasions that the state has been manipulating exams to produce better results. This year's 8th Grade ELA exam is one of the best examples of what's going on. Take a look at this chart, which compares the Raw-to-Scale-Score Conversions for 2003 and 2005:

In 2003, students had to answer 25 or more questions right to escape from Level 1, which the state defines as "indicating no proficiency."

In 2005, students needed to answer 9 fewer questions to escape the Level 1 designation.

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Now that, in and of itself, might not indicate a lowering of standards if exam difficulty was higher in 2005 than in 2003. To get an idea of whether that's the case, one would like to see the distribution of raw scores on the two exams. Assuming students were equally skilled in both years, if, for example, the number of students answering 15 questions correctly in 2005 fell in relation to 2003, then that would indicate the exam was more difficult. Consequently, that would justify lowering the cut-off score for Level 1 in 2005 so as to make a fair comparison with 2003.

Unfortunately, the state hasn't published the frequency distribution of raw scores on its website for a number of years. So, people are expected to take it as an article of faith that the tests are fairly calibrated and that standards are not being lowered.

But is that likely? We know the state has been altering other exams to make them easier and to obtain politically acceptable results. We also know that No Child Left Behind creates strong psychological and financial incentives for states to show Adequate Yearly Progress. Is performance on state exams really improving? Is it just a coincidence that exam difficulty is supposedly increasing so as to justify lower cut-off scores? Or might exam difficulty be relatively stable with cut-off scores being lowered to show progress? Without the raw score frequency distribution tables, it's difficult to know.

The state says raw scores cannot be compared from one year to the next because of changes in exam difficulty. That's why it converts raw scores to scale scores. A 650 scale score in 2003 is supposed to be equivalent to the same score in 2005. That means scale scores can be compared from year to year.

A scale score of 650 in 2005 required correct answers for 14 questions. The same score in 2003 required correct answers for 21 questions. That indicates a substantial increase in exam difficulty--at least for the "easy" questions. Again, to know if that were the case, one would like to see the tests and the distribution of raw scores for both years.

We know that well-written tests should produce a bell curve distribution of scores. The curve for 2003 closely approximates a bell curve distribution. But the 2005 scale-score curve is highly skewed. This raises the possibility that the 2005 8th-grade ELA exam was poorly designed psychometrically. If that's true, then any inferences drawn about improvements in student performance are suspect.

Here's the percentage of questions students must answer correctly to score in each level in 2003 and 2005.

Level	Definition	2003 minimum score	2005 minimum score
4	Meeting standards with distinction	91%	93%
3	Meeting standards	80%	74%
2	Not fully meeting standards	58%	37%
1	Not meeting the standards	Below 58%	Below 37%

Based on the changes in cut-off scores and raw-to-scale-score conversions, I have a prediction about what the 8th-grade ELA exam results will look like when they are released within the next few days:

The percentage of students scoring in Level 1 will decline significantly, indicating what will be characterized as dramatic improvement;
The percentage of students scoring in Level 4 (exceeding standards) may dip a bit;
The percentage of students scoring in Level 3 will increase;
The percentage of students scoring in Level 2 will significantly increase; and
The percentage of students scoring in Levels 1 and 2 combined will decline by a small to moderate amount.

See, also, the following related articles:

Regents scoring is a shuck
Carl Strock / Schenectady (NY) Gazette Columnist
June 30, 2005

See this follow-up commentary, Strock out-of-date on Regents' scoring.

The state Board of Regents is raising standards, you have perhaps heard. No more passing grade of 55 on the famous Regents exams taken by high school students. Henceforth the passing grade will be 65.

But what do you think 65 (or 55) means? Do you think it means the percentage of an exam gotten right, as it did when you went to school?

No, ladies and gentlemen, not in the wonderful world of educational bureaucracy, it doesn't.

In fact, it can mean almost anything, as dictated only by the stirrings of a magic potion deep in the basement of the State Ed building in Albany, but the one thing it does not mean, ever, is that a student got 65 percent of an exam correct. It never means that.

See NY Makes Huge Scoring Change to 8th Grade ELA Exam.

In fact, on the recent "Math A" test, given mostly to freshmen and sophomores, a passing score of 65 equated to just 43 percent.

Yes, 43 percent, which a student could get by answering correctly 18 out of the first 35 questions, and blowing off the rest of the exam if he so chose.

The highest that 65 has meant in the sampling of exams I have looked at is 60 percent, and there was such an uproar about that one that the state went back and rejiggered the scores, dropping the passing percentage to 55, though they didn't put it in those terms and you had to do the calculation for yourself.

(The basic data is available at www.nysedregents.org/testing/hsregents.html.)

The idea, pretty clearly, is to give the appearance of high standards by fudging scores, that's all. And if the fudging doesn't yield the desired result, as it did not on the recent "Math B" test, then the state Department of Education fudges a second time, retroactively.

It's called cheating. It's no different in effect than teachers helping students with their answers while taking tests.

Too many students failed the "Math B" test, taken by juniors and seniors, so State Ed stirred the vat of brew down in its basement and came up with a new "conversion chart," as they call it, which changes a student's "raw score" into a "scaled score," or final grade.

It's not simple, or we could all follow it and see the deceptiveness of it. It's as complicated as a teachers' salary schedule or a school budget - designed, in other words, not to reveal but to obfuscate.

Which totally undermines the utility of the exam scores and the purposes of the standards movement.

Remember when you went to school and took a test and some questions were worth maybe two points each, and some were worth 10 points, and so on, and they all added up to 100? You got your score, and it was the number of points you got out of 100.

Not anymore. Too clear, too easily understandable, too difficult to fudge.

Here's what they do now:

They still weigh the questions by difficulty, which is fair enough - most worth two points, a few worth three or four, some worth up to six. But the point value doesn't add up to 100. It adds up to something offbeat like 88, or 84, or 85 always different, so it's hard to do comparisons.

The number of points you get for your right answers is called your "raw score" - let's say, to take an example, 45 out of a possible 88, which would be about half.

To convert that raw score of 45 to your final grade, the teacher consults the official "conversion chart." If the test in question was the Math B test of June 2004, the teacher would find that 45 out of 88 (roughly 50 percent) equaled a "scaled score" of 65, the passing grade, and that would be your grade. Just like that! By magic!

A lousy 50 becomes a 65. Isn't, that beautiful?

And to make things as obscure as possible, and as difficult to follow as possible, the conversion changes from test to test. You can't say that just because 50 percent on one test converts to 65, that 50 percent on some other test will also convert to 65. Each test has its own magic chart, sort of like a deck of tarot cards.

A few examples:

On the Math A test of June 2004, a 50 percent score (42 out of a possible 84 points) converted to 70.

On the Math B test of August 2004, a 50 percent score (44 out of a possible 88 points) converted to 68.

On the Math B test that was just rejiggered, a 50 percent raw score (again 44 out of a possible 88) converted first to 58 and then to 61.

Not only is the transformation variable from test to test, it's also variable within the same test.

You can't say that just because one score gets jacked up 10 points they all get jacked up 10 points, or that they even get jacked up by the same percentage.

It would be greatly amusing to boil the system down to an exam question and see if any students - or even teachers, for that matter - could get it right. Of course, they could not. No one in the world could.

I derive this from the recently rejiggered Math B test:

On a visit to another planet, Susie took a test and got 71 out of 88 points. That translated to an official score of 85.

Her friend Jim got 44 out of 88 points. What official score did Jim's result translate to?

It's a simple ratio: 71 is to 85 as 44 is to X. Put it into fractions and cross-multiply. The answer is 53, meaning, if 71 somehow translates to 85, then 44 translates to 53.

But not on the state's conversion chart for that particular test. It translates to 61.

Why? Why all these irregularities and inconsistencies?

I asked a spokesman for the Education Department, Tom Dunn, and all he did was try to impress on me that the exam questions are weighted differently according to their difficulty, which is not the point.

Don't take just my word for any of this. Check out the Web site I mentioned, and also check the letter from a teacher today on page A11, under the headline, "Regents need to be more honest about test results." Teachers know all about this. It's no secret to them.

Regents need to be more honest about test results
A Schenectady Gazette Letter to the Editor
June 30, 2005

I was astounded and, I have to admit, somewhat amused to read your frontpage headline (June 22) touting Commissioner Mills' big announcement, "State sets tougher Regents standards."

The big hype was that students are doing so well on New York's exams, the state feels comfortable "raising standards." However, before everyone jumps for joy, your reporter may like to see the "magic charts" that are issued for each exam.

In most academic settings, the grade on an exam is the percent correct. So a 65 means the student answered 65 percent of the questions correctly. Now, however, for our Regents exams, a conversion chart is used to convert the raw score (the number correct) to the scale score, the one reported by the State Education Department. The scale score is not the percent correct!

So this year to reach the vaunted score of 65 on the Living Environment, my biology students only needed to earn 46 percent of the 85 possible points! A student who successfully answered 65 percent now receives a score of 78. This year, a score of 55 on my exam means the student only answered 35 percent of the exam correctly. So for me, at least, "raising the standards" means State Ed waters down the curriculum and then simply changes the way the exam is scored!

According to State Ed, "the conversion chart may change from one exam to another." In fact, this year, so many students failed the math B exam, Education Department spokesman Tom Dunn said, "We decided we needed a new conversion chart." So how can the state compare the grades from one year to the next, and from one subject area to the next, when the conversion charts keep changing, sometimes even after the exam is given?

I realize someone is sure to point out all the statistical analyses that go into making the charts. However, I have been teaching for over 20 years, and I firmly believe that the Regents exam grades are inflated so that the Regents can show how successful they are at raising standards. This gives our students, their parents, and the general public a distorted picture of our students' academic achievements.

And that distorted picture all inures to the benefit of educators. It keeps the heat off by passing off hamburgers as steak. As I said more than a year ago, the standards movement is dead. It's all about politics and acceptable scores, now.

In real life, there is no magic chart. It is unfortunate that our educational system is being sacrificed to make political points.

KATHLEEN BUTTERSTEIN
Princetown

Science education needs tough standards
An Albany (NY) Times Union Letter to the Editor
July 8, 2005

Jason Goldberg's June 25 letter regarding the utter lunacy of promoting students based on a raw score of 39 credits out of 85 possible on the recent Regents Living Environment exam underscores that the "higher standards" reforms are just a lot of hot air.

An analysis of the exam shows that reading comprehension plays a more important part in it than knowledge of scientific concepts. So we claim to raise the bar and allow students to walk right under it.

Meanwhile, Mary-Ellen Seitelman, in her June 26 Perspective article, "Mark of failure," lamented the lack of a "gifted" program for higher achieving students who can sleep their way through these "higher standards."

We do not push our students enough, especially in the sciences. A student can earn a Regents diploma with credits in earth science and living environment. Where is physics? Where is chemistry?

The bar has been set abysmally low, and many are slapping each other on the back to congratulate themselves on the "progress" being made in New York with regard to higher passing percentages on exams with ridiculous curves.

True progress in science education is a fading dream unless the public wakes up to the charade being played out with our kids.

Except in wartime, there has been no time in this country's history when the need for good scientists, engineers, doctors and researchers has been greater. The global competition that our children face for good, high-paying jobs depends on their ability to live in a highly technological and scientific world. Yet, at every turn, we choose to make science education a low priority in the high school setting.

I challenge educational policymakers to take a hard look at where the "higher standards" that we have set for science education have left us.

SERGIO DIANA
Niskayuna

Strock out-of-date on Regents' scoring
A Schenectady (NY) Gazette Letter to the Editor
July 7, 2005

I write in response to Carl Strock's June 30 column ("Regents' scoring is a shuck"). Thomas Friedman, in his book "The World is Flat" reminds us that we live in a world where many of our assumptions must change if we are to compete internationally. Mr. Strock's longing for the good old days when a score of 65 on a Regents exam meant 65 percent correct, is one of those old assumptions.

The "old" Regents exam system began changing in 1996 when the Board of Regents adopted the New York State Learning Standards in every subject area. These Learning Standards define what students need to know and be able to do to become competent citizens, workers and pursue further education.

That's questionable. Basically, the standards are a compromise among what students need to know, what most students are capable of learning and what most teachers are capable of teaching. Students need to know lots of things that aren't covered by the standards. See, generally, Modernizing the Curriculum & Schools.

The Regents exam for each subject is developed to test key skills and concepts of the Learning Standards. Any reader who doubts the difficulty level of the Regents exams is invited to try taking any of the tests on our Web site (www.emsc.nysed.gov.) These are tough exams!

I've read the standards and the exams. They aren't that "tough." Anything that all students must have a chance of mastering can't be that tough. If they are that tough, then exams have to be graded on a curve so enough students pass without creating a revolt.

New York teachers, create all the test questions on the Regents exams. Some questions are written to be more difficult than others, based on what skills they require students to use. Before a test is administered statewide, questions written for the test go through field-testing in classrooms across the state. This pilot testing by actual students allows teachers to rank the questions by level of difficulty from easiest to hardest. Teachers determine the minimum amount of information students must know to pass each exam (set at 65). This information is subjected to statistical analysis that determines what number of questions right will correspond to a 65 and what number will correspond to an 85 the scaled score.

Think about this. Teachers write the questions and field-test them. That lets them know the distribution of the number of students who answer 1, 2, 3 ... x number of questions correctly. Based on that and the past performance of students on the exam, they decide how may questions students need to answer to pass. Even after this is done, State Ed has still found the pass rates unacceptably low and ordered the rescoring of exams, most recently the Math B exam. Whether passing rates are set based on the results of field tests or readjusted after students have taken the exams, the result is the same--scoring scales set to politically correct pass rates, which may or may not be reflective of what students should know.

Beyond that, a test design that results in a scale score of 65% with 39% of the questions answered correctly is psychometrically flawed. It can't produce a bell curve, which is assumed for statistical analyses. Without a bell curve, statistical manipulation is required to approximate the results that would have been produced had the exam been properly designed. This introduces a source of error into the scoring process.

For more on how State Ed develops exams and determines scores see CAUTION: Falling Standards.

A conversion chart differs for every test and converts the raw score to a scaled score. This approach is fairer to students. By using a scaling method rather than a straight percentage correct, the difficulty of each test's questions can be taken into consideration, ensuring that test scores mean the same thing from year to year.

The assumption seems to be that it's not possible for teachers to write tests of equal difficulty from year to year. Yet, it is possible for the same teachers to identify the relative difficulty of each test and set a scale score that makes the tests equivalent. How do they do that? They combine field tests with a statistical model to predict how many students will correctly answer each question and then they set a pass rate at a subjective and arbitrary level that should produce the illusion that academic performance is improving. See NY Makes Huge Scoring Change to 8th Grade ELA Exam.

Mr. Strock calls for honesty about test results. The State Education Department describes how the Regents exams are scored on the web site (www.emsc.nysed.gov).

We publish not only the exams themselves, but all of the results of the Regents exams on the annual school report cards since 1997. No other state or test publisher provides as much information about the tests and the results It's no secret that our tests are tough and fair. They must be to ensure we have an edge in our competitive world.

JAMES A. KADAMUS
Albany
The writer is Deputy Commissioner of the Office of Elementary, Middle, Secondary and Continuing Education at The State Education Department.

Scoring of Regents is still a shuck
Carl Strock / Schenectady (NY) Gazette Columnist
July 10, 2005

As for the scoring of Regents exams, perhaps you noticed on the letters page the other day that no less a personage than James A. Kadamus, deputy commissioner of the state Education Department, wrote to protest a critique of mine that appeared in this space.

He accused me of "longing for the good old days when a score of 65 on a Regents exam meant 65 percent correct," as if that were some horribly quaint thing to long for, like a one-room schoolhouse with a woodstove in the corner.

How silly of me to expect that a grade of 65 might mean 65 percent correct! How silly of me even to expect that 65 might mean the same thing from one exam to another, when we have such resources available to us as conversion charts and psychometric consultants.

Not possible, ladies and gentlemen, not in this time of international competition and whatnot.

Why, the Regents exams are developed by teams of teachers, Mr. Kadamus wanted us to know. They are field-tested on actual students, and, as he emphatically put it, "These are tough exams!"

Which, of course, is not the point.

The point is not whether the exams are tough - I believe they are. The point is that the scoring of them is fudged so the toughness is negated.

As indeed it must be if you think about it.

Back in 1996, when the state Board of Regents decreed that all high school students would have to take the Regents exams instead of local exams in order to graduate, it was obvious that something was going to have to give. You couldn't just all of a sudden set a higher standard or the obvious result would be that a great many students would fail, and that would be politically unacceptable. There would be a popular revolt.

The first thing that gave was the passing score. The Board of Regents lowered it from 65 to 55 for a transition period of a few, years, and then they extended the transition period.

But the main thing that gave was the scoring of the exams.

The passing grade of 65 that is being phased in can actually mean as little as 43 percent, as it meant on the "Math A" exam given last month, and it never means 65 percent or even close to that. The highest I have found it to mean is 60 percent, and that yielded such a dismal result on one particular test that the Education Department had to go back and rejigger its magic chart to make 55 equal 65.

Mr. Kadamus knows all about this, since last year it fell to his lot basically to quell an uprising by local teachers and administrators when a passing grade of 55 on the Math A exam for freshmen and sophomores arose out of a laughable 33 percent score.

Can you imagine anyone passing an exam with a grade of 33? A lot of teachers couldn't either, and they protested.

Mr. Kadamus got off a memo to them, or to school superintendents, dated Feb. 4,2004, patiently explaining that the conversion chart which transmogrified 33 into a "scaled score" of 55 had been analyzed and approved by "psychometric experts," no less, and would therefore stand.

If I handed a 60-question, multiple-choice, high-school level exam to a third-grader requiring only 20 questions to be answered correctly for high school credit, statistically a fair number of third-graders would pass the exam while knowing nothing about the subject being tested! Random chance plus an occasional good guess based on test strategies or actual knowledge would produce third-graders performing at the high school level!! In fact, State Ed should start giving high school Regents exams to third-graders to show how good our schools are! Please. Any test with a substantial portion of the score coming from multiple choice questions that requires only a 33% to pass is not psychometrically sound. When a passing score is lowered to the point where students can pass by random chance, the test is no longer valid.

That's how Regents exams are scored. It doesn't matter if the passing grade is officially 55 or 65 or what it might be, since that number is made up anyway. It's not a percentage, it's not anything.

My strong suspicion is that the Education Department does whatever adjusting or "scaling" is necessary to make the politically acceptable number of students pass, that's all.

If they have to reach as low as 33 percent to come up with a 55 or a 65, they do it.

Mr. Kadamus wrote in his letter that by performing such conversions, as they call these devious increases, "the difficulty of each test's questions can be taken into consideration," but that's bogus, and he gets a C, at best, in the art of argumentation.

The difficulty of questions on Regents exams is already taken into account in assigning points to them, as in any other exam. Most questions are worth two points, some are worth three or four, and so on.

When I talk about a percentage score I mean the percentage of available points. I mean 28 out of a possible 84 points, for example, which is 33 percent.

When you then fiddle with those percentage scores, you're giving weight to the difficulty twice - once for the questions and then again for how well students do on them, which means you're pushing scores up so more students will pass, plain and simple.

Then you can praise yourself for meeting higher standards.

It's not a question of me longing for anything, except maybe for basic honesty.

I would love to see a Regents exam question on this subject. An essay, maybe, worth about 10 points.

Standards' fraud finally exposed
A Schenectady (NY) Gazette Letter to the Editor
July 11, 2005

It was about 10 years ago that I started telling reporters from both print and TV media that they should investigate what was going on in the so-called "standards raising" that-was being promoted by Education Commissioner Mills. I tried to tell them that this was not really raising standards at all, but a fraud being perpetrated on the people of New York by the educational bureaucracy.

Speaking of frauds, see New State Performance Index is a Fraud.

It was clear to most of us teachers that standards were in fact being lowered. I had worked as a mathematics teacher for almost 30 years, but eventually retired early, realizing that by the time that this would all come to light, I would be well past retirement age.

I read the letter from Ms. Butterstein (June 30), about biology Regents scores, and the column by Carl Strock (June 30) about Regents scoring in general, and realized that maybe the time has come that the charlatans in Albany will be unmasked.

I am sorry that the news media didn't listen more closely 10 years ago when I and a few others tried to alert them.

STANLEY L. MATHES
Scotia

The standards movement had something to do with setting standards but the bigger objective was to make teaching easier by informing teachers exactly what it is they should be teaching. I call it teaching by number--a reference to painting by number. It doesn't produce great art (or academic excellence) but it does ensure that at least something productive is happening. Prior to state standards, teachers could do almost anything they wanted and call it education, even if students didn't learn much and even if it produced large percentages of high school graduates who couldn't read or do math at an eighth-grade level. See, e.g., Student-directed learning is disaster for education, Worry less about dropouts, more about learning, Flabby theories turn middle schools into a muddle and Education's self-esteem hoax.

Regents has made a botch of things with "standards"
A Schenectady (NY) Gazette Letter to the Editor
July 16, 2005

I must, yet again, compliment Carl Strock on his superb and cogent expose of the Regents scoring scam, "Scoring of Regents is still a shuck." (July 10 column).

Strock skillfully and convincingly exposed the reality of the Regents "conversion chart" as a desperate, deceitful attempt to ".. make the politically acceptable number of students pass." If, God forbid, real percentages were used, the state education "standards" program would be revealed for the miserable failure it truly is - illconceived, fatally flawed, politically motivated; feckless at best, tragically wasteful for sure. These are very harsh words, but justified.

The underlying assumption of the Regents plan had to be that students were simply not trying hard enough to perform well academically; they needed to be "motivated," even coerced, to do better. Voila! Why not force all students in the state to pass Regents exams to graduate? And, just a little perk for the bureaucrats in Albany, imagine the tremendous power the Regents could wield over the teachers and administrators of every school in the state. How brilliant, and so simple!

And, yes, let's simply ignore the truth, that the roots of academic failure lie deeply embedded in the souls of failing students - broken families, neglected children, abject poverty, hopelessness, and emotional abuse. Better yet, let's not even identify those as problems; then we don't have to address them. Let's go instead with the lack of motivation thing; then we can snap the whip and show the people how "tough" we are.

See Investing in families improves learning, also written by Vince.

Well, folks, the results are in. The commissioner and his pinstriped cronies are scrambling desperately to somehow cover up their dismal failure. Almost 10 years into this "program," the best they can come up with is pathetic "conversion charts" analyzed and approved by "psychometric experts" to disguise the incredible failure rate.

Students who once eagerly hoped to earn a high school diploma have become completely discouraged, robbed of the dignity and self-esteem they could have had with a non-Regents diploma. Many teachers are no longer working on creative, stimulating lessons; they've become paranoid, focusing all their efforts on students passing the required state exams and Regents. School administrators live in dire fear of being "identified" as leading a "school in need of assistance" - a terrible stigma that invites the bureaucrats into their school to "instruct" them in cleaning up their mess.

I can't help but lament what could have been accomplished with the money and human resources wasted on this folly. We could have employed school social workers and psychologists to truly help our kids, provided daycare programs to give pre-schoolers a healthy environment while single mothers worked to survive, developed vocational programs for students with alternative talents.

How shameful! It's time to end this farce and really help our students.

VINCE DACQUISTO
Schenectady
The writer is a former teacher.

Vince got almost everything right. The thing he got wrong was the underlying motivation for Regents testing. It wasn't poorly motivated students; it was poorly motivated faculties who let their own standards of academic quality slip so low that not even politicians could ignore the thousands of students being given diplomas with reading and math skills no better than those of eighth-graders. It wasn't the students who brought this pox on the schools. It was the faculties.

Regents exams an exercise in self-deception
A Schenectady (NY) Gazette Letter to the Editor
July 18, 2005

More often than not, I find myself at serious odds with Gazette columnist Carl Strock's opinions relating to public servants, whether police, firemen or teachers. In a recent instance, however, I think he's onto something. I am referring to his column of June 30 on the scoring of Regents exams in New York state.

Strock has criticized the practice by the State Education Department of using conversion tables to interpret Regents scores, a practice which, at the extreme, has resulted in a student score of 33 on a Regents being converted to a passing 55. He goes to the roots of this confusion as he traces the problem to the Board of Regents' 1996 edict requiring all students to pass specific Regents exams in order to earn a high school diploma. The concept was that all students, when reasonably motivated and adequately taught, can pass high-standard Regents exams, Strock claims that the conversion table approach was devised to counter the public dismay that would have resulted from the number of failures that would have followed if traditional Regents scoring had continued.

The Regents exam program of my experience as a student and educator in New York state (1940s-'70s) was geared to students of at least average, and more often above average, academic promise. The Regents were highly demanding. The average would squeak through in the 65 score area, a score regarded as minimal achievement. The more successful students in the Regents program were college-bound. Impolitic as it may be to say so, when it comes to academic ability, there are wide differences among students from not very smart at all to genius, with many, many stops along the way. Unlike the students in Garrison Keillor's fictional village of Lake Wobegon, the students of New York state never have been and never will be "all above average."

The state policy requiring all students to pass prescribed Regents in order to graduate has been flawed from the get-go. I have been dismayed that superintendents of schools and leaders of teachers' professional groups have prostrated themselves before this policy rather than organize a parents' revolt against it. This misguided policy promoted by the Board of Regents and its commissioner of education has led public education into a stifling quagmire of testing and preparation for testing.

New York state is not alone in fostering this debacle undermining the infinite promise of public education. It has been a national movement promulgated by the conservative political forces that have come to the fore in our government. Conservative "think tank" types seeking ways of wresting power from the liberals came up with the idea of a massive attack upon public education. Who could defend against an onslaught of accusations that the schools are shortchanging our children, that our children can do better than this, that our children deserve better than this?

I had no idea that improving education was just a conservative idea. Anyone looking at students' scores on standardized tests over the decades and the scores produced by students in other countries knows that what was passing for excellence in American education had fallen too low. Something had to be done and with bipartisan and nearly unanimous support, Congress passed the No Child Left Behind law, which mandates lots of testing.

Rote learning and teaching to the test is certainly not an entire prescription for achieving academic excellence. However, rote learning is better than no learning, which is what students were being served in great proportions prior to standards' reforms and testing. The ideas of fun, high self-esteem and an aversion to requiring "correct" answers so infested education that genuine learning slowed to a crawl.

If someone's looking for a culprit, there's only one group to blame, and amazingly it's not the politicians. It's the professional unions of the teachers. They looked at the data and treated it too lightly. They spent too much time on bread and butter union issues and not nearly enough time on quality control and better academic outcomes. In other words, they gave short shrift to their professional responsibilities, preferring to pursue higher wages for declining performance, and by inaction invited the politicians in to do something about education outcomes that had become intolerable.

The "no child left behind" slogan is interpreted by parents to mean, "my kid's every bit as smart as any other kid, and if he isn't doing well, there must be something wrong with the school (the teacher, the system)." The slogan implies fallaciously that all the children of USA Wobegon are above average academic ability. Sorry, but that's just not the way that human beings are put together.

Back in founding fathers' days, Alexander Hamilton urged that education and politics should flow in widely separate channels. Contrarily, the national conservative political movement has made public education a sacrificial lamb in pursuit of its own ends. It has exploited and manipulated public education and led us into a morass of self-deception. When will we as a people wake up to this disaster?

No group has worked to insert politics into education more than liberals. See, generally, Social/Cultural Agendas in Public Schools. However, I completely agree with Hamilton. Education and politics should be as separate as religion and government. And that means the government has to get out of the education business. Of course, that won't happen, most importantly because liberals don't want it to happen. I have repeatedly attempted to show that government-run public schools are fundamentally inconsistent with the First Amendment. The proper role of government is to provide the funding so every child can be educated, not to run the education institutions. As long as government runs K-12 schools, you can be assured that politics will play a large and increasing role.

DONALD J. SAYLES
Northville

Proposal on teacher probation hijacks due process

2005-07-04T16:07:00.000-04:00

Dr. Douglas Sexton / Special to The Palm Springs (CA) Desert Sun
July 2, 2005

Intent on bypassing the legislative process, Gov. Schwarzenegger has called a special election for November.

It's something the law wisely provides for as a check on the legislature.

In particular, he hopes to pass a proposition that raises the number of years teachers receive probationary status from two years to five years.

For many voters who aren't teachers, the arguments for doing this might at first have some merit. But as Californians begin to learn more about this proposition, they will soon realize that it is this proposition that is really without merit.

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First, let's clear up something about teacher tenure. Legally, tenure means that a teacher's contract can only be terminated if the district has a reason to do so and follows the appropriate procedures. That's it. All of this nonsense about how difficult it is to fire teachers is, frankly, baloney. Any competent administrator who has a valid reason and follows the district's procedures can terminate a teacher's contract.

The "reasons" for which teachers may be fired are extremely limited. The procedures are extremely complex and costly.

When problems in firing a teacher do occur, they can usually be traced to an administrator who has failed to act in a competent manner. So ask yourself this: Where is the legislative focus on removing incompetent administrators?

Second, this proposition contains a provision that could limit a non-tenured teacher to two less-than-perfect evaluations. Now, administrators are fond of stating that the purpose of evaluations are to help teachers improve. In fact, many districts frown on principals turning in evaluations that tend to rate their teachers too well; after all, isn't there always room for improvement?

But let me set something straight: The purpose of evaluations is to ensure that the taxpayer is getting what they paid for.

That's not the purpose of evaluations. In 90% of the cases, evaluations serve no purpose. They're done essentially because that's what other professionals do. They generally have no impact on promotions, salary, firings or job assignments. They're based on extremely few observations of limited duration.

Professional improvement for most educators is an important but separate issue and needs to be addressed separately. It implies a partnership with the administrator that requires trust and allows risk-taking.

Employee evaluations are universally used for identifying employee weaknesses and setting goals for improvement. Evaluations don't prevent partnerships, trust or risk-taking.

Sadly, too many principals use evaluations as a punitive process. I remember meeting with one particular superintendent who instructed one of his principals to "mark down" several teachers who were officers of the local teacher associations.

Just because the teachers were union officers doesn't mean they didn't deserve to be marked down. Douglas doesn't tell us why the teachers were marked down, preferring that we infer it was because they were union officers.

In my experience as a principal, this example is far from anecdotal and is something that is all too common. Administrators are subject to the same failings that all human beings must face and deal with.

I just love how teachers complain about administrators. They rarely ascribe the kinds of failings they see in administrators to themselves.

This is why the system has procedural safeguards. And by the way, probationary teachers can have their contracts non-renewed at the end of the year without any reason being given to them.

Administrator misuse of evaluations isn't why the system has procedural safeguards. It's a convenient rationale. The reasons for procedural safeguards have to do with education traditions more than anything. These traditions were developed in a context very different from today's, which is reason enough to re-examine them.

An arbitrary number of poor evaluations is simply designed to circumvent these due process safeguards and opens up enormous loopholes that are just waiting to be abused.

Lastly, think about how long your probationary status was in place on your current job. What was it - 90 days, six months, perhaps a year? Would you like being yanked around on a probationary chain by your boss for five years?

This is comparing apples to oranges. Many workers and most professionals outside of government are at-will employees. Even after their "probationary" period, they may be fired for any reason. Former General Electric CEO Jack Welch annually fired the bottom 10% of workers no matter how good they were. It was a continual process of improvement that created one of the world's greatest companies. See Executive Who Saved G.E. Is to Train School Principals.

What kind of due process was due to GE professionals? The privilege of keeping their jobs as long as they weren't in the bottom 10%. That's it. Were some people fired because their bosses gave them poor evaluations based on personal rather than professional issues? Undoubtedly. Part of the professional's responsibility is to keep the boss happy. If the boss isn't happy and can't work well with the employee regardless of the employee's professional talent, s/he is "let go." That's what process is "due" for many professionals.

In this case, a 15-year veteran prosecutor in Albany, NY was fired for failing to consult with the district attorney before disposing of a misdemeanor charge. Assistant prosecutors routinely dispose of misdemeanor charges without consulting their boss. But in this case, the D.A. felt he should have been consulted first. Since he wasn't, he fired the A.D.A. That's all the process that was due.

Tenure has benefits and disadvantages. The history of tenure reveals that its sole purpose was to protect teachers from being fired for exercising academic freedom, which is essential for the pursuit of truth and its free expression. That's it. It had nothing to do with protecting teachers from firings for other reasons, including personality clashes with bosses and performance in the bottom 10% of the faculty. Today's misuse of tenure forces school districts to employ less capable teachers than they might be able to find in the labor market and that not only slows progress, it deprives students of the best education possible.

Isn't there a process used to dismiss or terminate employees where you work? Aren't there rules or due-process procedures that your bosses must follow before they fire an employee? Of course there are.

So ask yourself - why are teachers treated so differently than everyone else?

Douglas wants you to believe that tenure simply treats teachers like everyone else is treated. It's not true. They have far more protection and far more due process than almost any other professional in any other job. See, e.g., Can't teach? So what. Why are teachers being treated differently, indeed?

This November, as you wonder just why it is so important for the governor to spend so much of your money by-passing the legislative process, also ask yourself this question, "Isn't it time we start evaluating the governor and begin supporting our pubic school teachers?"

Dr. Douglas Sexton, a former middle school principal, currently teaches for both Palm Springs Unified School District and Chapman University.

Union goes to bat for pervert teacher
A New York Daily News Editorial
July 3, 2005

Cary Hershkowitz, a city teacher who tried to seduce a student, has no shame. Three months after a Manhattan Supreme Court justice described him as "every parent's nightmare," Hershkowitz is suing for reinstatement to the classroom and back pay. And he's represented by a lawyer for New York State United Teachers, the teachers union umbrella organization. It, too, has no shame.

The Department of Education has tried since 1999 to fire Hershkowitz, only to be stymied by the teacher disciplinary system. Regular readers may remember that we featured his case in calling on Mayor Bloomberg and United Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten to overhaul the contract.

At that time, state Supreme Court Justice Ronald Acosta had ruled that Hershkowitz deserved to be canned. He threw out an arbitrator's decision suspending Hershkowitz for a year and making him eligible to return to teaching once his time was up. Finally, sense seemed to have prevailed. How wrong we were.

Since then, it turns out, Hershkowitz's union-supplied lawyer has kept the department tangled up in disputes over naming a new arbitrator to decide the teacher's fate. (Yes, under the UFT contract, the schools chancellor still needs an arbitrator's permission to dump Hershkowitz.) And now, Hershkowitz and his mouthpiece have the gall to argue in court that, because his suspension was overturned, Hershkowitz deserves a year's salary plus all the benefits of an employee in good standing. Which he is anything but.

It is a sickening tale, but by no means an unusual one in a disciplinary process that puts teachers' interests over students'. Weingarten has said she was appalled by the Hershkowitz case and offered to negotiate automatic termination for sexual predators. Her NYSUT colleagues, who represent all accused teachers, take a different view. They're trying to reunite a predator with his prey.

Price of Kindergarten Cop's ego
Little respect for vexations of teaching
Jaime O'Neill / San Francisco Chronicle
June 26, 2005

My daughter has just finished her fourth year of teaching middle school, a job as demanding as any I can imagine. It is a life-consuming effort, drawing on vast emotional, physical and mental reserves. It is a job that invades sleep, that pokes itself into the recesses of her life.

When she is at the movies, she is thinking of the papers that await her at home. On weekends, she is either working on those papers, or she is feeling guilty because she is not working on those papers. Students haunt her, and each semester of her four years in the classroom has been accompanied by a handful of problem children who vex her patience and exhaust her imagination as she seeks ways to reach them, to help them, or simply to deal with them.

Early adolescence is a rough age -- rough for the kids, and rough for the people who must deal with them. The smell of my daughter's classroom is ripe with hormonal change; a sweet and metallic funk mingles with the smell of cedar pencils, mucilage, pulp paper. The classroom is nearly bursting with relentless youthful energy.

My daughter, and all her teaching colleagues, work in a cross fire between administrators (whose reputations ride on high test scores) and parents (many of whom cannot imagine their own offspring turning in inferior work). It's a difficult zone to occupy. Like many other teachers, my daughter often spends money from her own pocket to make up for the shortages of materials available to her. She also gives up evenings to serve as a chaperone, to confer with parents, or to meet with former students who are suffering one of the many kinds of confusions that torment people who have left middle school for high school.

I have listened to my daughter on the phone after a particularly trying day, her voice choking up as she fought back tears. This student, or that student, had given her attitude in a way that hurt her feelings, and she'd spent the rest of the day keeping those hurt feelings hidden until she got home from work. Or the work students turned in had shown less thought and effort than she had hoped to see. Or a special presentation she'd spent hours preparing had been greeted with bored indifference. Or the litany of excuses about this or that had finally just grown too tiresome to bear.

Most of all, there is the persistent desire to do more, to do better. No matter how trying some of her students might be, she truly loves them -- or most of them. Many of them are experimenting with adult temptations they are not yet equipped to handle. But they are fragile vessels of hope, and that makes them literally precious.

One of the things that makes my daughter so good at her job is her vivid memory of this stage in her own life. She remembers how indifferent she was to her teachers at that age, how remote and nearly irrelevant their teaching seemed at a time when she was so preoccupied with so many other challenges. She is, therefore, fiercely empathetic. It is not something she learned in the often useless education classes she was made to take in order to get her teaching certificate. Caring is not a skill, and it's probably not teachable.

It is also not a quality that could ever be adequately compensated, but my daughter's annual salary of $40,000 does not strike me as extravagant, especially when compared with the annual income of the sort of people who sometimes pretend to be teachers in the movies, people like our governor who made more for playing a teacher in a single movie -- "Kindergarten Cop'' -- than all the kindergarten teachers in California will make in any given year collectively.

It turns out that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has a problem with my daughter and with the work she does. He's concerned that people like her are not held to high enough standards, and he wants an $80 million dollar special election to change the rules so that people like her are denied tenure for a few more years. My daughter got her modicum of job security last year, but if Schwarzenegger's special election referendum on my daughter passes, she would not have gotten that little bit of job protection until next year. What an extraordinarily petty issue to set off such an expensive exercise in gubernatorial ego.

Would that temporary denial of tenure have made my daughter a better teacher? Would her students have been better shielded from poor teaching? More to the point: Would my daughter -- and the hundreds of fledgling teachers hired each year -- have felt any sense of support as she, and they, gained competence at this most demanding of jobs? How helpful is it when the government that employs its teachers assumes a suspicious and adversarial posture toward them?

And, given all the problems California faces, how strange is it that the most fearsome villain the governor has been able to find looks like my daughter?

In the interest of political grandstanding, the governor is determined to spend a big chunk of scarce state money to pick a fight with my daughter, and a legion of people like my daughter, people who are already beleaguered by the challenges of the jobs they do. But then the governor wouldn't know about those challenges. He's not a teacher; he merely has played one in the movies.

The TRUTH about a Teacher's "Truth" on Discrimination in the Military

2005-06-27T20:27:00.000-04:00

U.S. military does discriminate against gays
An Albany (NY) Times Union Letter to the Editor
Monday, June 27, 2005

Am I the only one to take issue with Chief Warrant Officer 2 William Hanrahan's June 18 letter stating that the U.S. military does not overtly discriminate?

Maybe.

As a high school counselor, I work with recruiters regularly. As a veteran, I have direct experience as a military recruit. As a citizen, I am aware of the military's famous "don't ask, don't tell" policy. In all of these roles, I find reason to take issue with Hanrahan's opinion.

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Hanrahan states at the end of his letter that "it would be nice if they (high school students) had all the information (regarding military discrimination) and acted more responsibly with it."

Hanrahan was referring to all the information pertaining to military service, not just information about "discrimination."

It is sad that he does not choose to offer the full truth regarding the military's discrimination against a significant portion of our society.

Who doesn't know what the full truth is? Does Morrissey think our highly educated high school students are clueless about the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy? Why should Hanrahan use scarce editorial space to restate what every interested person already knows?

The military will not allow openly homosexual people to serve in its ranks.

Hanrahan said, "The U.S. military does not overtly discriminate against anyone, but we do have standards in order to maintain discipline and readiness." He chose to phrase the restriction in the positive and Morrissey has chosen to phrase it in the negative. Morrissey's complaint seems to be not that CWO Hanrahan avoided the issue but that he wasn't sufficiently condemnatory of the policy. While public school teachers with tenure may be able to directly and publicly condemn policies they disagree with, Hanrahan is in the military. Get a clue. His duty is to support military policies and regulations at the peril of punishment up to loss of pay and rank, incarceration and a dishonorable discharge.

There is no evidence that anyone can produce that offers scientific proof that homosexuals pose a threat to the military or to the security of the United States.

Notice how Morrissey has shifted the argument from his complaint that Hanrahan didn't disclose the "full truth" to the argument that the policy isn't justified. Whether or not the policy is justified has nothing to do with whether the "full truth" was disclosed.

Yet, the military's leadership still refuses to allow homosexuals to serve. If such a stance is not overt discrimination, then what is?

I guess Morrissey isn't into the "full truth" either, otherwise he would have said, "The military's leadership still refuses to allow some homosexuals to serve, i.e., those few who openly advertise their sexual preferences despite knowing the prescribed consequences under military regulations."

It's hard to know what Morrissey means by "discrimination." People discriminate all the time in the sense that they recognize or perceive differences and adjust their behavior accordingly. For example, they behave differently in court than they do at a ball game. That's good.

People also treat others differently on the basis of sex. That's good, too. For a married guy, a night out on the town with the boys is quite different from a night out on the town with the ladies, and his wife will gladly educate him if he doesn't know otherwise--protests of discrimination notwithstanding.

Hanrahan's meaning in saying "the U.S. military does not overtly discriminate against anyone," is unambiguous in our cultural context. He was both acknowledging the existence of discrimination and distinguishing the military's policy from an out-right ban of homosexuals from military service.

Morrissey attacks Hanrahan by overstating the exclusion and twisting the meaning of his words. This is precisely the kind of misconduct Hanrahan was complaining about when he said, "[I]t would be nice if they [students] had all the information and acted more responsibly with it." In complaining about Hanrahan, Morrissey not only commits the same errors he alleges against Hanrahan, but he does so in a far more blatant manner.

In my role as a school counselor, recruiters often ask me why they are unwelcome in so many high schools in our region. As a veteran and a citizen supportive of the military's role in our society, I've never been sure why this is. Recent media reports over the unethical practices of recruiters in many parts of the country have helped me answer this question. Hanrahan's complete distortion of the truth regarding the military's discriminatory practices provides further explanation.

Unethical recruiting practices are an aberration that I have condemned. You can be assured that those who engaged in this misconduct will be dealt with far more severely than had they had tenured jobs.

But notice how Morrissey has escalated the charge against Hanrahan from not choosing to offer the "full truth" to making a "complete distortion of the truth." Not only has Morrissey failed to prove Hanrahan's statement couldn't be understood as being essentially truthful, he can't seem to distinguish between minor omissions completely understood in context and "complete distortions"!

Thank you, CWO Hanrahan. I will save your letter as a tool for responding to such questions from recruiters in the future.

Well, I must return the thanks to educator Morrissey. I will certainly save this letter as a tool for demonstrating the 8th-grade level of intellect, the bias, and the inability to reason with fairness that apparently pervades public schools. Who can possibly expect great things from public schools when the people working in them demonstrate such poor and unfair reasoning skills? Anyone want to give Morrissey a raise to see if that improves his abilities?

Finally, for someone promoting the "full truth," Morrissey was strangely quiet about the rationale that supports "don't ask, don't tell" and the court decisions that have upheld the policy. In Able vs US, the Second Circuit opined:

Military life is fundamentally different from civilian life in that ... the extraordinary responsibilities of the armed forces, the unique conditions of military service, and the critical role of unit cohesion, require that the military community, while subject to civilian control, exist as a specialized society; and ... the military society is characterized by its own laws, rules, customs, and traditions, including numerous restrictions on personal behavior, that would not be acceptable in civilian society....

The pervasive application of the standards of conduct is necessary because members of the armed forces must be ready at all times for worldwide deployment to a combat environment.

The worldwide deployment of United States military forces, the international responsibilities of the United States, and the potential for involvement of the armed forces in actual combat routinely make it necessary for members of the armed forces involuntarily to accept living conditions and working conditions that are often spartan, primitive, and characterized by forced intimacy with little or no privacy.

The prohibition against homosexual conduct is a longstanding element of military law that continues to be necessary in the unique circumstances of military service.

Call it discrimination if you will, but it's one of thousands of instances in which "discrimination" of one sort or another is not only tolerated but imposed by law. I served aboard submarines in the US Navy and I know the last thing I needed was romantic advances by my shipmates. The military's "don't, ask don't tell" policy has a rational basis which the courts have approved and "truth-teller" Morrissey never said a word about it. He gets an 'F' for both his poor analytical skills and his hypocrisy.

DOUGLAS MORRISSEY
Guilderland

U.S. military doesn't overtly discriminate
An Albany (NY) Times Union Letter to the Editor
June 18, 2005

I am the operations officer for the Marine Corps Recruiting Command in Albany and would like to set the record straight regarding recent comments about the request to remove recruiters from Averill Park High School.

First, I personally commend the students for forming groups and expressing themselves.

As one former Marine who observed the demonstration from the parking lot said, "I'm glad to see I did my job so well."

I could not agree more with that statement, but I do believe that taking a stand and being committed to a cause should be based on sound facts, and not prejudicial one-sided opinions. The U.S. military does not overtly discriminate against anyone, but we do have standards in order to maintain discipline and readiness.

The military is not a corporation; it is an organization that fights to defend our Constitution. Being so requires medical, moral and educational requirements. We do not process those who cannot obviously meet the standards due to no fault of their own.

Often it can be heartbreaking for young people who truly want to serve but cannot because of the increased risks to their own health, or the well-being of those who will be around them. Police and fire departments have similar standards.

The Marine Corps has no interest in intimidating young people or defying parent's wishes. That is clearly counterproductive to our mission. The recruiters' jobs are to inform young people of all their options and opportunities.

Many young people go on to college but drop out and seek out that recruiter they met in high school.

We will not shirk from our duty to protect all students from all schools, but it would be nice if they had all the information and acted more responsibly with it. Semper fidelis.

CHIEF WARRANT OFFICER 2
WILLIAM J. HANRAHAN
Latham

Frustrated DPS teachers rally

2005-03-26T15:33:00.000-05:00

Contract talks stalled
By Allison Sherry / Denver Post Staff Writer
Mar. 25, 2005

Do these teachers look impoverished?

Watch a Video of the Teachers' Rally

Close to 1,000 raucous teachers gathered in front of the Denver Public Schools administration building during a wet and frigid rush hour Thursday in hopes of getting more pay and planning time in their contract this fall.

They toted signs that read, "Teachers did not take a vow of poverty" and "Stop the Abuse."

Here's the DPS teacher salary schedule. A teacher with a master's degree starts at $32,000 and tops out at $61,622. The poverty rate for a family of three is about $15,000.

Even the truly impoverished behave better than the teachers. Do you see minimum wage workers demanding more "respect"? And what about taxpayers whose taxes have persistently increased faster than inflation to pay for education? Are they out on the streets demanding more respect?

It's beyond the pale that a group of highly educated "professionals" can have the audacity to compare their salaries to those of the impoverished. Not only should they be ashamed of themselves, everything they say should be summarily disregarded. They should not be acknowledged as education leaders when they exaggerate and distort the truth for their own economic benefit. It's not only unbecoming as a professional, it's unethical. It's bullying. It's abuse of the public trust given to teachers. Students: Don't grow up to be like these teachers. Be honest and judicious.

I have some advice for these teachers--Get off the streets, go back to your classrooms and work like these Quintilian Award-winning teachers: Jill Sayuri Nakamura, Sally Prince, Rafe Esquith and Leroy McClure. If, as a profession, teachers did this and provided the public with the education services and outcomes it expects, then teachers would have all the pay and benefits they could ever reasonably desire.

The rally comes after DPS and the Denver Classroom Teachers Association ended contract negotiations earlier this month at an impasse.

Among the sticking points: The district wants secondary teachers to teach one more class period a day, and the proposed salary increase includes only a 0.1 percent cost-of-living allowance, as well as the regular step increases.

Which, when combined with increases in health insurance benefits paid by the district, provides raises that almost certainly exceed the size of inflation.

But many teachers said their ire has more to do with respect than cash.

Melissa Underwood, a North High English teacher, said she resents giving up free time to teach six classes a day instead of five.

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"The grading would just pile up more," she said. "And they don't like to give us time to plan. Planning is a bad word in this district."

Underwood said that an increase in health-insurance rates this fall means that she wouldn't see the cost-of-living raise.

Health insurance is salary paid in-kind. The cost-of-living increase is the increased salary that is being paid to purchase health insurance.

"I have 17 years experience and a master's degree, and I'm only making $50,000," she said.

She's almost certainly lying. Check the salary schedule. The minimum she should be making is $53,935 plus a longevity payment. If she had earned some extra credits, she could be making $61,622 plus a longevity payment.

$50,000 is very likely at least $10,000 a year more than a teacher in the private sector earns in Denver. It's more than many professionals with humanities-type degrees earn. It's simply not a bad deal, especially considering job security, benefits, retirement and vacations. Anyone who thinks it's a bad deal is free to take his/her skills into the private sector to see what s/he can earn there. Apparently, over 3 million teachers in the U.S. think they're doing about as well as they can expect to do economically. Either that or they'd rather be teachers than do the kind of work needed to earn higher salaries.

* * *

Gabe DeMola, an English teacher at West High, said the district's "attitude hurts me. Increasing class sizes and increasing workloads, it's all contrary to the reform. ... And ultimately it's disrespectful to the kids."

It looks to me like the kids are getting dumped on from both sides. So, what else is new?

* * * *

Don't scapegoat teachers for state's school funding ills

2005-02-27T11:37:00.000-05:00

Michigan Education Association analysis contends that salary concessions have paid for increases in benefit costs
By Lu Battaglieri / Detroit News
Feb. 25, 2005

MyShortPencil's first Triple Crown Winner!

Honesty. Respect. Responsibility.

We teach these values every day in public schools from Detroit to DeTour. They are the basics.

Sadly, they seem to be in short supply among some lawmakers and school officials in Lansing as the debate over the lack of school funding intensifies.

Sadly, they seem to be in short supply within the data provided in this article.

Instead we have myths, attacks and the ever popular search for a scapegoat.

Instead we have obscurity and self-serving statistics that have been carefully selected to bolster a point of view.

Such behavior doesn't solve problems. It pits people who should be focused on kids against each other and further erodes public confidence in our public institutions.

Ditto.

It's time for a refresher course on the values necessary to do the right thing for Michigan's 1.7 million public school children.

By way of background, in 1994-95 Michigan spent $7,760 per student in constant 2001-02 dollars. This increased to $8,425 in 2001-02. From 1994-95 to 2001-02, per pupil spending experienced a real increase of $665 or 8.6%.

In 1994-95 Michigan had 1.6 million students. By 2001-02 it had 1.7 million students, a 6.3% increase.

From 1996 to 1999, the number of teachers in Michigan K-12 schools increased from 88,051 to 96,094 (9.1%).

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Honesty

The Michigan Education Association (MEA) analyzed public school budget data from the 1994-95 school year, when Proposal A took effect, to the 2002-03 school year, the most current data available.

What we found flies in the face of the popular charge that teachers are diverting resources from the classroom and putting them into hefty salaries, Cadillac health insurance policies and rich retirements.

What they actually found was a way of deluding themselves into believing this, though I'll admit that Michigan has done a better job of controlling salary, health care and retirement costs than NY.

The data show that salaries, FICA and retirement as a portion of total school expenses are down from where they were almost a decade ago. Salaries, FICA and retirement together accounted for 2.78 percentage points less as a share of total expenses for schools in the 2002-03 school year than they did in 1994-95.

What do you make of that? Is it possible that salaries, FICA and retirement could be contributing to escalating school expenses even though these are down by 2.78%? You betcha!

The MEA is comparing these to total expenditures. As more teachers are hired at the lower steps, as more interest is paid on more building projects, as testing costs rise and as utility and other costs may rise faster than increases in teacher salaries, the proportion of the budget spent for salaries, FICA and retirement will decline. This doesn't mean employee costs aren't part of the problem. It just means they aren't rising as quickly as other costs.

For example, we know that testing costs have risen dramatically during this period due to state standards and No Child Left Behind. These costs increase the total size of the budget, which means that salaries, health insurance and retirement will necessarily be a smaller percentage of total expenditures.

The same is true if average teacher experience is falling. Salaries may be steaming right along, but if average teacher experience is falling because of high retirement rates or other factors, then the portion of the budget spent on teacher salaries will fall.

For these, and lots of other reasons, knowing that "salaries, FICA and retirement as a portion of total school expenses are down from where they were almost a decade ago" tells us nothing about whether salaries and retirement are responsible for escalating education costs.

No one in education denies that health insurance has been going up as a result of the national healthcare crisis. For Michigan schools, the increase in health insurance as a share of total expenses since 1994-95 was 3.04 percentage points.

As other portions of the budget grow faster--like testing--the growth in health insurance expenses as a proportion of total expenditures will look relatively smaller. This doesn't mean schools are holding the line on health insurance. You have to know what other aspects of school budgets are increasing, by how much and why, before you can judge whether the increase in health insurance expenditures is reasonable in relation to total expenditures.

The MEA doesn't tell us this. If the news were in its favor, the odds are it would have.

The math is pretty simple. The reality is, too.

The math is simple, but the reality is simple only for those willing to use and rely upon simple-minded analyses. Both percentages and dollar amounts are necessary for approaching the truth of any financial situation. Whenever anyone gives you one without the other--or without the numbers needed to calculate the other--readers should be on the alert.

School personnel across the board have given up ground in salaries to cover just about all of the increase in health insurance.

If that statement is being made on the basis of the data analysis revealed in this article, then it's entirely unjustified. Beyond that, how much "ground" has been given up? Are salaries increasing faster than inflation but not as fast as before? That's entirely likely and it's not what I call "giving up ground." I call that "gaining ground at a slower pace."

On top of that, MEA members have joined workers everywhere and accepted less coverage, more managed care, higher deductibles and monthly out-of-pocket premium payments as high as $400 per month.

That's probably true, but that doesn't mean district contributions to employee heath insurance plans haven't been increasing much faster than inflation. It simply means that district costs aren't increasing as fast as they would have without the changes.

In some cases, our members who work as custodians, bus drivers and paraprofessionals are paying so much out of their own pocket for health insurance that they are working for nothing more than that benefit.

The average cost of a family health insurance policy in NY in 2002-03 was $9,051. (It's close to $11,000, today). Health insurance is nothing more or less than salary paid in-kind. It has to be earned. It isn't simply given away as part of the job, though that's what many educators seem to believe. If an employee is entitled to a 50% health insurance contribution from the district, that means s/he has to come up with the other 50% from her/his wages.

MEA members and those closest to the students -- the instructional staff -- have taken the hardest hit proportionately. Their salaries, FICA and retirement have gone down as a share of total expenses by 3.28 percentage points while insurance costs for that group have increased as a share of total expenses 1.81 percentage points during that same nine years.

Again, it means little unless you know whether average teacher experience is declining and why other costs are rising and by how much.

Ask yourself this: "Why is Lu reporting the percentage change relative to total spending rather than the actual dollar amount spent by school districts in 1994-95 and 2002-03 for salaries and health insurance?" The answer is because those numbers would not only reveal a much different picture but most likely knock your socks off. I've seen no data anywhere to suggest that district costs for employee compensation in Michigan haven't been rising at inflation-busting rates when controlling for staff experience.

Here's what the Michigan Department of Education says:

Escalating labor costs, primarily health care, pensions and minimal inflation-related salary increases, exacerbate the financial situations of local districts. As discussed at the November 9, 2004, Board meeting, almost 2/3rds of every new dollar provided is consumed by health care and pension costs.

Tom Watkins, Structural Issues Surrounding Michigan School Funding in the 21st Century [pdf], December 2004.

You can find detailed information on Michigan's public school finances here. Because Lu reports only percentages without actual dollar increases, in addition to the Orb of Obscurity, she also wins a Red Herring Award.

Respect

The rhetoric is that Michigan's school funding problems would go away if school employees would just sacrifice more. We have sacrificed, and the problems are still with us.

It's possible that total increases in school employee compensation have been rising at slower rates than in the past. But that doesn't mean they aren't rising much faster than inflation.

Blaming school employees for the crisis shows a genuine lack of respect for the facts. Even more disturbing, it demonstrates a fundamental lack of respect for the teachers and other school employees who are struggling with too few resources, too little parental support and too much bureaucracy to do what is expected and required of them under the federal No Child Left Behind Act and Michigan's Education YES!

As I have demonstrated, the most probable truth is that the MEA is distorting the "facts" by omitting the ones that would lead to a different interpretation. Why is the MEA doing this? Because it knows it can get away with it. It knows that public schools haven't educated students sufficiently well to see through the smoke. See The success side of American education.

All this is happening while many school districts are amassing large so-called "rainy day" funds. Statewide, these savings accounts have nearly doubled in relation to total school expenses since Proposal A passed.

We support responsible saving. But hoarding taxpayer money while laying off staff, cutting basic programs, closing school buildings and siphoning more money from parents for sports, band and other extra curricular activities shows a lack of respect for the social contract our schools have with parents and taxpayers. It also demonstrates the level of fear and insecurity schools feel as a result of the funding crisis.

Education is labor intensive. Putting prepared, experienced and tested teachers in front of every student is the best classroom investment a school district can make.

Wrong. Education needs to become a lot less labor intensive with schools for The 21st Century Student. You can't possibly replicate excellence in teaching 3.1 million times. It's foolish to try and it's expensive. Why have thousands of teachers replicating the same lessons when they can be provided in a variety of ways over the Internet to each student, who can take as much or as little time as needed to learn the material unaffected by the learning rates of others? We need to stop reinventing the wheel and start accumulating sophistication by producing thousands of high-quality, interactive, multimedia, learning-style-specific, Internet-delivered, parent-monitored, student-selected lessons with instant feedback, online professional support and software applications to monitor each student's progress on every lesson.

MEA members respect the need to debate over how to fix the school funding crisis. We respect that everything can and should be scrutinized along the way. But everything must mean everything.

Including salaries and benefits?

The MEA is making an assumption that it hopes you will buy. That assumption is that if total compensation is no greater now than in 1994-95, it must not be responsible for escalating school costs. But is that a fair assumption? What's been happening in the private sector? If total compensation there has actually been falling, then school employees would be getting a better deal than others because their salaries never fall to adjust for changes in the economy. Rather, schools cut jobs, not salaries. In the private sector, businesses cut salaries to maintain service levels. See Pilots Won't Fight UAL on Pensions and Bankruptcy Judge Allows US Airways to Cut Wages. Educators believe that it's more appropriate to cut services and programs for their customers--the students--than to take cuts in pay and pensions.

Responsibility

Schools have cut about a half a billion dollars out of their budgets over the past three years, and school employees have clearly done their part to help balance the books.

Now it's time for those in power --our lawmakers-- to do their jobs.

Finger pointing is not the answer. As much as we've endured it, we know that lawmakers, too, have been subject to criticism -- over salaries, benefits, absenteeism and raises they've given themselves.

That approach doesn't fix anything.

We know that kids listen to our lessons about core democratic values. And then they watch what we do.

The question is, which of our legislators will reflect the honesty, respect and responsibility it will take to fix the real problem--insufficient school funding.

It's a good thing the question wasn't whether the MEA will reflect the honesty, respect and responsibility needed to fix the real problem.

I note that neither the study nor the data used have been published on the MEA's website. That's a sure sign the MEA doesn't want others to scrutinize its "findings." As with most teacher union studies, this analysis is more about politics than truth. Lu has stolen the characteristics of ethical conduct and dishonored them. She has co-opted the high moral ground to achieve her own purposes rather than the public good.

Kids, don't grow up to be like this. Don't hide the facts that detract from your goals to make it easier to win your points. And if you do, certainly do not claim to be doing it in the name of honesty, respect and responsibility.

Lu Battaglieri is president of the Michigan Education Association, the state's largest teachers union.

Lawmaker wants to prevent cyberbullying

2005-02-24T17:21:00.000-05:00

By Kelly Kearsley, Associated Press via USA Today
Feb. 23, 2005

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin

"They that can give up freedom of speech to obtain a little education deserve neither freedom of speech nor an education. Freedom of speech is indispensable to education. Its diminishment leads to menticide and oppression. Good intentions are insufficient to prevent undesired consequences. The suppression and punishment of off-campus student speech by government schools is nothing less than bullying. It's a case of system needs trumping student rights." -- Jerry Moore

As you read these stories, ask yourself how long it will be before a government school punishes a child for something s/he said about a sibling, whether or not the parents agree with the need for punishment or type of punishment imposed. Between family members, speech that may sound harsh or cruel to others may be an accepted, familiar and enamouring aspect of family tradition.

There is no question that children and teens ought to be taught to be kind and considerate. But the means chosen to teach these lessons is not a trivial matter. Resorting to government imposed punishment for speech violations teaches students a lesson that can ultimately transform our society into one of great repression. See Teens miss the First Amendment's point and First Amendment No Big Deal, Students Say.

quote:
The other Persians were silent; all feared to raise their voice against the plan proposed to them. But Artabanus, the son of Hystaspes, and uncle of Xerxes, trusting to his relationship, was bold to speak:- "O king!" he said, "it is impossible, if no more than one opinion is uttered, to make choice of the best: a man is forced then to follow whatever advice may have been given him; but if opposite speeches are delivered, then choice can be exercised. In like manner pure gold is not recognised by itself; but when we test it along with baser ore, we perceive which is the better.

--Herodotus, History, VII, 10

The predominant inclination of the powerful has always been to suppress the speech that diminishes their authority or status. That inclination must be despised and condemned.

OLYMPIA, Wash. — Stephanie Gallardo doesn't spend much time on the computer since someone hijacked her instant-message screen name and sent out mean messages.

"The person was pretending it was me, and using it to call people names," the 14-year-old Seattle student said. "I never found out who it was."

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Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Welles wants to stop such behavior. She's sponsoring a bill that would require school harassment policies to prohibit "cyberbullying."

It's the end of free speech for children, and in a generation, for all of us. Not even Osama bin Laden could have accomplished that.

* * *

"Schools would make (cyberbullying) subject to disciplinary action and certainly students may think twice about engaging in this," said Kohl-Wells, D-Seattle.

And who decides what is and isn't improper speech? What's the burden of proof? Will students be guilty by association? Will they have the right to counsel? The right of appeal? What are you going to do about students who use the names of other students when bullying still other students? Will schools be given subpoena powers to learn the IP addresses of anonymous authors? Will they be given the power to issue search warrants? How much money will it take to enforce this law?

This is not only an assault on the constitution and parent rights, it's also a can of worms brought to you by the do-gooders who have so boosted the self-esteem of today's parents that they can't stand to be told the objective truth!

The Internet offers technology-savvy teens many ways to stay in constant contact with friends, from instant messaging to private chat rooms.

It also provides new forums for malicious gossips and school bullies. Cyberbullying ranges from ridiculing classmates on Web sites and spreading rumors through blogs to bombarding someone with harassing instant messages or publicizing their personal information.

Bad things. What to do? Tell the parents and let them handle it. If they don't handle it, use more speech to cure bad speech.

"It's limited only by the imagination and the technology that kids have access to," said Parry Aftab, a New Jersey attorney and executive director of Wired Kids, a nonprofit organization that seeks to prevent cyber abuse.

* * *

Cyberbullying can appeal to more than the regular playground bully because of the anonymity of the Internet. Sometimes kids bully by mistake, forwarding an e-mail or sending an instant message that's unintentionally offensive.

And it can cause more psychological damage than traditional bullying, said Nancy Willard, director of the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use in Eugene, Ore.

Then teach students how to deal with it. Don't coddle them and tell them that it shouldn't happen. This is the abstinence-only approach to bullying education. How many of these people support an abstinence-only approach to sex education?

* * *

Under current state law, school districts are required to have policies prohibiting bullying — written, verbal or physical acts that negatively affect a student or the school environment.

Kohl-Welles' bill would add electronic acts of bullying to that definition. Cyberbullying would not have to occur on school property, during school hours or with school equipment to be covered by the measure, as long as it has an adverse effect on a student or school.

It's the unconstitutional policy followed by many schools now.

It would also require schools to bar cyberbullying in Internet-use policies. Discipline for violations would be up to the school.

If Internet use is required to complete school assignments, schools cannot simply take away student access to the Internet. Do they take away the textbooks of students who misbehave?

Aftab said such laws can be problematic because they collide with schools' authority to regulate off-campus activities and speech.

That's it? "Such laws can be problematic." What kind of balance and analysis is that?

Off campus, not off limits
School responses to online bullying is the new threat to off-campus speech
Student Press Law Center
Winter 2003-04 - Internet
XXV, No. 1 - Page 33

In weblogs and chat rooms across the Internet, they dish out insults and spread gossip about their classmates from the comfort of their home computer.

They are the new generation of bullies — cyberbullies.

While there is nothing new about students taunting and harassing other students, the introduction of the Internet to this tradition is causing some educators to establish school policies that punish students for off-campus speech.

The effort by these educators to prevent bullying by smearing the boundary between on- and off-campus speech could have a chilling effect on a student’s First Amendment right to publish uncensored, experts say. As more high school student journalists turn to the Internet to publish news, the question of how schools differentiate between bullying and free speech could impact the editorial content of many off-campus student publications.

How about answering a more basic question, like whether schools should have this kind of power?

Most experts agree that bullying is a problem in schools and many claim bullying is linked to increases in crime, suicide and school shootings.

* * *

Some experts also believe that online bullying, or the humiliation and taunting of classmates online, can have just as many negative consequences as face-to-face bullying at school.

However, the question is whether schools should protect students from online bullying by creating policies that threaten students’ First Amendment right to free expression or whether there are better, constitutionally valid approaches to resolving the problem.

In the past, school administrators intervened when written harassment took place by tracking down the authors of “slam books” and erasing graffiti from bathroom walls. But with the advent of cyberbullying, administrators are finding it harder to locate the perpetrators not only because the bullying occurs off campus, but also because the Internet offers easy anonymity. As a result, critics claim cyberbullying can be more violent and bitter.

No doubt pushed in that direction by overburdensome rules governing speech in school.

Cyberbullying is different than traditional bullying because the Internet lacks feedback and therefore students are willing to say things that they wouldn’t otherwise, wrote Nancy Willard in her 2003 article, “Off-Campus, Harmful Online Student Speech” in the Journal of School Violence. In addition, students are aware that they are less likely to be caught, and in some online communities, bullies feel support from peers to post offensive messages.

As a result, many school officials have argued for the right to punish students for off-campus speech because of the direct impact Internet bullying has on the school environment. The officials claim that off-campus speech by cyberbullies creates a reasonable expectation that a “material disruption” of the school environment would occur if they fail to act.

The Supreme Court ruled in 1969 in Tinker v. Des Moines Community School District that public school students “do not shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gates.” But the court said that school administrators could “restrict student speech if it represents a material disruption to the learning environment.”

Some school administrators argue the ruling gives them the right to discipline certain off-campus speech even though Tinker is traditionally used to determine the free-speech rights of students at school.

Right. The context of the case completely eliminates any possibility that the court's holding can logically be used as a justification for expanding the power of schools to regulate off-campus speech.

Nevertheless, in lawsuits involving students who create off-campus speech that is deemed offensive, courts have generally protected students from punishment, which is good news for the student media.

A federal court in Seattle ruled in 2000 that a school could not suspend a student who created mock obituaries of his classmates on a Web site he created on his home computer. But in 2002, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled a student could be disciplined for a personal Web site that made a threat against a teacher because the student accessed the site at school and disrupted the school community.

Threats are not protected speech.

* * *

Wiseman said she balances a student’s First Amendment rights with being a responsible citizen. She said she asks students to think about whether “the right to say something that makes someone feel bad about themselves is more important then the right to walk down a hallway with dignity.”

Wonder if making a person feel bad is appropriate. Wonder if it's an expression of opinion. Is the First Amendment so feeble that we can outlaw and/or criminalize any and all speech that might hurt someone's feelings?

Some school districts across the nation already have a student code of conduct that regulates off-campus speech. For example, officials at Gwinnett County School District in Georgia used their student conduct policy at least twice this past year to discipline students for off-campus speech.

* * *

Two other Gwinnett County students filed a lawsuit this fall against the district, alleging that school officials violated their First Amendment rights by suspending them for comments posted on an off-campus Web site.

The Brookwood High School students were suspended in March after administrators said their comments that were posted on another student’s site threatened a teacher at the school. (See STAMPING, page 4.)

Administrators said the comments violated the district’s policy, which prohibits posting on the Internet “any expression (oral, written or gesture) which could have the effect of undermining the authority of the school employee.”

This is bullying. It's a case of system needs trumping student rights. It's unconstitutional. Government school employees are agents of the state. Such speech may often be political speech. And, may I add (until such time as it becomes unlawful) that any school board member, any teacher and any administrator who believes government schools should have the authority to punish students for truthful remarks and opinions about public educators made off-campus deserves no respect whatsoever.

I've said it several times before: The existence of government schools is inconsistent with the First Amendment. The importance of education has been used time and again to trump free speech. The First Amendment doesn't say, "If free speech makes it too hard for government to do what it wants to, then freedom of speech can be restricted." The First Amendment is supposed to be a check on government power.

In the lawsuit, the students are asking the court to declare provisions in the Gwinnett County School District student conduct code unconstitutionally vague and overbroad.

For the most part, the courts have ruled in students’ favor in lawsuits challenging whether school officials have the authority to discipline a student for off-campus activities, said Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit organization focused on protecting the digital rights of individuals.

“What a student does off campus is off campus,” Tien said. “Unless there are very special kinds of circumstances, there is no authority or entitlement by a school to really regulate off-campus conduct.”

Tien said that student online speech should not be treated differently than other off-campus speech.

Right. The fact that the subject matter is about government schools makes the case even more compelling.

“This is not any different than sitting at home bitching and moaning — it’s just that it is on a Web page,” Tien said. “It ought to be recognized by courts that there is a real strong dividing line in terms of the authority to [impose] consequences within the school context for [students’] lives outside of school.”

If school officials are allowed to discipline for off-campus bullying they could eventually expand their authority and discipline students for content posted in an off-campus, online newspaper, Tien said.

“Schools should absolutely not be disciplining students for off-campus newspapers,” Tien said.

There are already signs that some school officials are expanding their authority over off-campus speech.

This fall, a junior at Mechanicsburg High School in Ohio was suspended from school and later arrested on charges that he linked his personal Web page to a friend’s Web site, which school administrators and peers later deemed a threat to school safety. * * *

Jameson Pack, 16, was charged with seven counts of a first degree misdemeanor and a fourth degree felony for complicity to menacing by stalking. In addition, school administrators suspended him for 10 days and banned him from the school’s computer facilities for two years.

The charges against Pack stem from an Ohio law that went into effect in August. The Ohio legislature approved Senate Bill 8, which forbids a person from using “any electronic method of remotely transferring information” to engage “in a pattern of conduct” and “knowingly cause another person to believe that the offender will cause physical harm to the other person or cause mental distress to the other person.” If the victim is a minor, the crime is felony punishable by more than a year in prison if the victim is a minor.

“This [law] is clearly unconstitutional and a violation of free speech,” said Robert Ellis, who heads the Computer Law Committee for the Ohio State Bar. “It makes speech a felony.”

Ellis said this is the first time he has seen a law that makes it a felony to provide a link to a Web site whose content is controlled by someone else. In addition, he said the law is far-reaching and vague.

“Mental distress is not a criminal concept,” Ellis said. “If you do or say something [electronically] that causes mental distress and that’s a felony, my only response is, give me a break; this is America.”

While the Ohio law is perhaps one of the most severe laws regarding Internet speech, other states and school districts have also been adopting potentially overbroad regulations regarding off-campus bullying and speech in the form of zero-tolerance policies.

In school districts across the nation, zero-tolerance policies are being used to discipline students for both major and minor offenses with equally severe punishments. In some cases, students are being punished not for committing an offense, but for writing about one.

Rachel Boim, a freshman honors student at Roswell High School in Georgia, was suspended and later expelled this fall for writing a fictional story in her personal journal about a student who dreams of killing an unnamed teacher. * * *

Boim was punished under the district’s policy, which makes no exceptions for conduct that threatens the school security.

“In an era dominated by discussion of educational accountability and the need for schools to use only evidence-based practices, the continued support for zero-tolerance is surprising,” said Russell Skiba, an associate professor in the department of counseling and educational psychology at Indiana University. “There is no data that shows it in any way contributes to safe schools or student behavior.”

Some experts suggest that schools should only adopt policies regarding off-campus bullying that focus on prevention and not punishment.

Willard, who is also the director of the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use, said schools should approach problems caused by off-campus speech from an educational perspective rather than an administrative perspective.

Willard said she does not support school districts adopting policies that call for the punishment of off-campus bullying because the policies are unconstitutional and ineffective.

“Traditional disciplinary responses only teach kids that if an authority is present, they had better behave. There are too many places online where an authority is not present,” Willard said. “This issue must be addressed instructionally and through sensitivity awareness activities with both the students and their parents.”

Willard said that educators should start addressing bullying from kindergarten. Research shows that schools that effectively deal with harmful speech have fewer incidents of on-campus bullying, which would likely lead to fewer incidents of online bullying, she said.

Willard said administrators should assist the victims with information on practical and legal options instead of punishing a student.

In addition, online speech is often used as a vehicle for the powerless, Willard said. She said school officials should be mindful that the perpetrator of harmful off-campus, online speech may, in fact, be the victim of on-campus bullying.

As more students gain access to the Internet, it is unlikely that the trend in using the Internet as an outlet for violent and disrespectful speech will subside anytime soon, Willard said.

At one time, it was important that just journalists understood the basic legal standards regarding publications, Willard said. But with the Internet, everyone is capable of publishing content.

So as schools continue to adopt policies regarding off-campus speech, it becomes important for all students to educate themselves on their First Amendment freedoms, Willard said.

“It is exceptionally important for all student to have a good understanding of the legal principals that govern [online] publications,” Willard said.

They aren't going to take it anymore

2005-02-20T19:28:00.000-05:00

Jenny LaCoste-Caputo / San Antonio (TX) Express-News Staff Writer
02/19/2005

For writing an essay against standardized testing on her practice state exam, for recognizing that state exams are more about system needs than student needs, and for refusing to take state- and federally-mandated tests, I'm proud to recognize Mia Kang with the first Henry David Thoreau Meandering Brook Award. "What does education often do? It makes a straight cut ditch of a free meandering brook." -- Thoreau

Mia Kang stared at the test sheet on her desk.

It only was practice. Teachers call it a "field test" to give them an idea of how students will perform on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills.

But instead of filling in the bubbles and making her teacher happy, Mia, a freshman at MacArthur High School, used her answer sheet to write an essay that challenged standardized testing and using test scores to judge children and rank schools.

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"I wrote about how standardized tests are hurting and not helping schools and kids," said Mia, who looks and acts older than her 14 years. "I just couldn't participate in something that I'm completely opposed to."

Mia isn't boycotting just the practice tests. The straight-A student said she'll refuse to take the state- and federally-mandated tests Texas teachers begin administrating next week.

Mia has figured out that state testing isn't about her needs; it's about system needs. Because professional educators let millions of students graduate with 8th grade knowledge and skills--or worse--now they have to be watched. The cheapest way to watch them is to make their students take tests. What students need is schools for The 21st Century Student, where mastery must be demonstrated on each lesson before moving on. Statewide accountability tests are completely unnecessary in such schools, though annual testing of a random sample of students could be useful.

The decision isn't a popular one. When Mia refused to take the practice test, two school guidance counselors came to the classroom to try to change her mind.

Because she doesn't think like the herd, she must need counseling. See Students' Right To Refuse Counseling.

"They warned me that it would be a black mark on my record and that I should choose my battles wisely," Mia said.

A black mark on her academic record, maybe, but a gold star on her integrity and character record. Which is more important?

Mia is the latest in a growing number of students nationwide who are showing their opposition to high-stakes testing by putting down their pencils.

These young people say the "drill and kill" mentality of test preparation is destroying their thirst for knowledge and creating a generation of students who are missing crucial lessons in critical thinking, creativity and discovery.

Nothing about mandated testing requires a "drill and kill" approach. That's the choice of the professional educators.

Frustration also grips teachers, but at least in Texas, it's students who are making their voices heard.

A fifth-grader in Edinburgh also is refusing to take the test this year. And two years ago, Kimberly Marciniak, then a freshman at the North East School of Arts at Lee High School, received national attention for her decision to boycott. Students in Massachusetts and New York also have participated in organized boycotts.

Kimberly, now 17 and studying in New Zealand, said she has no regrets.

"I am definitely not an attention seeker and I was kind of unprepared for the attention it received," Kimberly said. "It really was a bit overwhelming, but I accomplished my goal of creating awareness and attention."

* * *

In Texas, third- and fifth-graders must pass the test to be promoted to the next grade, and high school students must pass all four sections of the test — English, math, social studies and science — to earn a diploma, regardless of what their report card says.

Kimberly said she won't take the test when she returns to the state next year even though it could cost her a diploma.

* * *

Test preparation dominates classes, Mia says, squeezing out time for meaningful discussion or creative projects.

"These tests don't measure what kids really need to know, they measure what's easy to measure," she said. "We should be learning concepts and skills, not just memorizing. It's sad for kids and it's sad for teachers too.

Mia's mother, Jennifer Radlet, said she supports her daughter.

"She has educated us on the whole issue for years now. I admire her for following through with this," Radlet said.

* * *

A MacArthur High teacher said Mia is showing courage by standing up for what she believes.

"We are constantly being told that character education is an important component of teaching a child," said the teacher, who asked not to be identified. "Clearly this child has learned her values. She's developing her character — a strong, honest character — and she's following through with it.

"Mia threatens people because Mia actually is evaluating what she believes in and is applying an intelligent response to an irrational situation."

That's it! That's what schools FEAR--a rational analysis of the irrationality within. That's why schools never ask students to analyze their own education environments. They prefer having students analyze things like corporations and tell them what they should be doing. See Students Teach Mega-bank To Keep Its Promises.

And you know what students who use their rationality to analyze their school environments need most? Counseling. That's the opinion of professionals. In 21st Century Schools a lot of this nonsense would vanish.

Mia doesn't plan to take the TAKS test ever. Like Kimberly, she doesn't intend to participate even though it means her diploma is on the line. Both girls have stellar academic records and hope colleges see beyond one test.

"If my high school diploma means I passed one test in the 11th grade, then that's pretty meaningless," Mia said.

Getting our Money’s Worth in Public Education

2005-01-21T06:19:00.000-05:00

Are we buying our 'McStudent' lie?
Robert Freeman / San Francisco Chronicle
January 18, 2005

Freeman's commentary will bring thunderous cheers from educators. He must be preparing a run for political office.

When are we going to stop lying to ourselves about public education? When are we going to stop pretending we can get world-class results on second-world spending? When are we going to stop fooling ourselves that our neglect will never come home to roost?

You know this guy's in trouble when the pencil comes out on the first paragraph. When it comes to education spending The U.S. is second only to Switzerland. But when it comes to results on all kinds of tests, including international tests and most notably the recent math test, the U.S. does, indeed, turn in second-world results.

This graph shows that on secondary education (per student) the United States spends more than 17 other nations. These data are taken from Education at a Glance Indicators 2003, a publication of the National Center for Education Statistics. The data originate from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

I spent 20 years in the computer industry before becoming a public-school teacher five years ago. I had risen to become vice president at one of the world's largest software companies. I know business. And I know something about education as well. Education is harder.

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Education is harder because cultivating human intelligence is one of the most difficult things in the world. It is far more complex and takes far longer than producing cheaper widgets or staging new ad campaigns. It takes millions of nuanced, exquisitely tailored stimuli, all reinforced at the right time, in the right context, and all delivered in a supportive emotional environment. Even then, it's not always predictable. But it is a certainty to fail without commitment.

And imbuing a child with what we call character is equally daunting. Perseverance, honesty, humility, courage, responsibility, compassion -- these are just as important as the intellectual gifts we treasure, but they don't come from assembly lines either. Like intelligence, they take years of deeply personal, meticulous cultivation. If they were so easy to manufacture, they would not be so highly prized.

Freeman seems to be saying that the process of education is extremely complex and difficult, not that the work done by any individual teacher is all that difficult. If that's what he's saying, I agree. The system can be complex while the roles of the individuals within the system are much less so.

For the sake of perspective let's note the following:

Many "unqualified" home schooling parents manage the entire education process for their children with better results.
Teachers with fewer degrees, larger classes and smaller paychecks did approximately the same work 40 years ago with outcomes not very different from today's.
Staggering increases in education spending have not significantly improved outcomes over decades.
Other countries do the same complex and difficult job with far lower expenditures, better academic results and likely better character formation.
What makes education especially difficult is that it is impossible to apply "millions of nuanced, exquisitely tailored stimuli, all reinforced at the right time, in the right context" in a classroom environment. The right time for the right lesson is different for every student. That's why we need schools for The 21st Century Student, so students can in fact receive the right lessons at the right time, and in a context that matches their interests, abilities and learning styles.
Most of what is taught in K-12 schools is not more complex than producing a widget, it only seems so. The software that runs your computer is the culmination of hundreds of thousands of person-years of labor. A cellphone, while easy to produce, is the same. The difference is that technology has grown directionally with increasing levels of sophistication while teaching has remained a craft requiring the reinvention of the wheel for every new teacher. We need to do for instruction what we've done for technology. We need to stop reinventing the wheel and start accumulating sophistication by producing thousands of high-quality, interactive, multimedia, learning-style-specific, Internet-delivered, parent-monitored, student-selected lessons with instant feedback, online professional support and software applications to monitor each student's progress on every lesson. Education needs to become far more complex and flexible while teachers' jobs are simplified.

These are the things we rightly want and need from our educational system. But the lie we tell ourselves is that we can get them on the cheap. California ranks 47th in the nation in per-pupil spending, 49th in class size. How many believe the company you work for can be the best in its industry if it only pays for the cheapest workers, if it only uses the cheapest materials in its products? None of us are so stupid as to believe this, yet we pretend we can get away with it in education.

California teachers are the highest paid in the nation. Adjusted for living costs, their pay is in the middle. Education Week places California per-pupil spending 8th from the bottom at $6,659, or $1,075 below the national average. Only 10 or so countries in the world spend more per-pupil than California.

When you compare California to Utah, California outperforms Utah on nearly every indicator of school spending and design, yet Utah outperforms California on student achievement. I guess Utahns are stupid enough to believe they can produce better outcomes without having the smallest class sizes and the highest paid teachers.

	California	Utah
STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT (Percent scoring at or above proficient)
4th grade NAEP reading (2003)	21%	32%
8th grade NAEP reading (2003)	22%	32%
4th grade NAEP math (2003)	25%	31%
8th grade NAEP math (2003)	22%	31%
4th grade NAEP writing (2002)	23%	20%
8th grade NAEP writing (2002)	23%	23%
STANDARDS and ACCOUNTABILITY	B+	C+
EFFORTS to IMPROVE TEACHER QUALITY	B-	D+
SCHOOL CLIMATE	C	C+
RESOURCES: Equity	C+	A-
Average class size for self-contained classes in elementary schools (2000)	22.7	23.7
Median pupil-teacher ratio in primary-level schools (2003)	19.7	22.2
Per-Pupil Spending	$6,659	$5,132
RANK	44	51
Unadjusted education spending per student (2001)	$7,434	$4,900
Average beginner teacher salary (2003)	$34,805	$27,135
Average teacher salary for all teachers (2003)	$55,693	$38,268

Also, note that what Utah has likely done differently than California is to keep programs and services at a fixed level and increase teacher salaries with the money left over. California, on the other hand, appears to have ramped up teacher salaries and cut programs and services to pay for them. Its average teacher salary is more than $2,500 more than New York's despite spending $3,784 less per student! Something has to give in a situation like this, and in California it has been cuts to student programs and services, which resultantly have driven academic performance into the doghouse.

No wonder California is producing McStudents. It was the free, self-interested choice of the professionals. Now that they've robbed the students of the education services they need and deserve, educators like Freeman want the public to rush in and restore what the teachers have taken to pay for their "lifestyles"! Why should anyone trust them not to continue robbing the students? They're addicted to it.

The truth is that we've been living off of our capital, eating our seed corn for at least a generation. It was Gov. Pat Brown in the 1960s who built one of the greatest educational systems in the world. But since at least the late 1970s and Proposition 13, we've been disinvesting, drawing on the pool of older workers, importing talent from out of state and from abroad. How long do we think we can play this game and still keep a world-class economy?

Proposition 13 was passed in 1978. In 1980-81, California's per-pupil spending was $5,091 in 2001-02 dollars. By 1985-86 it had risen to $5,802 for a $711 real increase in spending per pupil despite the passage of Proposition 13. Between 1985 and 1996, per-pupil spending stayed near $6,000. In 2001-02, California spent $7,188 per pupil (in 2001 dollars) and its spending for 2005-06, in 2004 dollars, will be above $8,000.

Now, it's true that Gov. Pat Brown (1959-1967) dramatically increased spending on education. In 2001 dollars, spending rose from $2,571 per student in 1959-60 to $4,091 in 1969-70. That's only half of what California spends per pupil today, despite Freeman's accolades.

But relative to the national average, Gov. Brown actually let California's education spending slip. In 1959-60, California spent $296 (13%) more per pupil than the national average. By 1969-70, California spent $242 (6.3%) more than the national average. So much for Gov. Brown's exceptional education improvement enterprise. If California in fact had one of the world's greatest education systems, Gov. Brown built it by increasing spending at the national average and by spending a lot less than New York. In 1969-70, California spent $4,091 per pupil compared to New York's $6,259! Freeman ought to check his facts before writing his fairy tales. If he did, he would learn that he is arguing that California can have a world-class education system for national average spending--a point I'm sure he's not aware he has made.

There's no doubt that pumping up educators' salaries and benefits at inflation-busting rates, decreasing class sizes, and creating state standards and testing--in that order--have put a lot of pressure on California schools. Lots of extras, like music, have been cut and some of its school buildings are wrecks. Many California school districts now have foundations to supplement public funding. But are these the fault of Proposition 13 or the fault of educators for failing to live within a budget that has doubled in real dollars over the past 30 years? Mr. Freeman can blame the revenue side if he likes--and apparently he likes--but there are two sides to the equation.

Source: Digest of Education Statistics 2003: Table 171--Current expenditure per pupil in average daily attendance in public elementary and secondary schools, by state or jurisdiction: Selected years, 1959-60 to 2000-01

Another lie we tell ourselves is that there will be no consequences for our miserly spending -- a seductive lie, because while the costs of education must be borne today, the payoffs don't come for years, perhaps decades. This is what the biblical story about building a house on sand is all about. Our "no-payments-until-March" mentality has lulled us into believing that we can scrimp today but still harvest tomorrow.

Remember Aesop's fable about the ant and the grasshopper? The grasshopper played all summer, laughing at the toiling ant. But come winter, it was he who shivered. It was the grasshopper who had to go begging to the ant for food. Do we imagine there's going to be a charitable ant to bail out our state's imprudent grasshopper? There won't be. By the time we realize the damage we've wrought, it will be too late.

You really have to wonder why a history and economics teacher resorts to using fables rather than historical and economic data to make his case. International education spending, Utah's education spending and results, and California's real increase in spending all suggest that California could be doing a much better job for students than it is with the money it spends. This is not a story about a grasshopper who plays, but a story about an ant who goes on a binge and gorges on his supplies before winter comes. It's a tragic story about the powerful, self-enriching professional educators in California who chose to eat their young by cutting student programs and services to pay for inflation-busting increases in salaries and benefits when revenues could not support increases in both.

Finally, we lie to ourselves that "privatization" will offer some kind of quick fix that will solve all of our problems. Privatization means corporate control of our schools. Corporations are wonderful things, but they only work for a profit. To make a profit from education you need to do two things: increase efficiency and reduce costs.

I wonder if Freeman has ever heard of non-profit corporations?

Increasing efficiency means removing variability while boosting output. This is a great formula for mass-producing hamburgers or semiconductors. It is a disaster for producing intelligence and character in children. Remember, intelligence and character come from carefully managed complexity, ambiguity and uncertainty, all delivered in a safe, patient, nurturing environment. This is the opposite of efficiency.

The proposition that efficiency is inconsistent with building intelligence and character is flatly false. Remember the greatest education system in the world created by Pat Brown? Class sizes were 50% larger back then and teacher aides and assistants were almost non-existent. In other words, Pat Brown's world-class schools of "carefully managed complexity, ambiguity and uncertainty, all delivered in a safe, patient, nurturing environment," were far more efficient than today's schools. Reducing class sizes is a teacher quality of worklife issue that does little to improve academic outcomes while dramatically increasing education costs. Refer to the articles in this subtopic, especially The Truth About Class Size. See, also, No Teacher Left Behind and Reform Blockers.

Beyond that, schools for The 21st Century Student can dramatically improve both efficiency and learning. In these schools teachers will do less "managing" of students' lives and learning as students take on more responsibility for these in a highly flexible system of education service delivery. In my opinion, educators way over-manage student learning, and they do it on the basis of what's best for the class, not what's best for individual students. It's a disaster and part of The Root Cause of Education Mediocrity. See this article, wherein Dr. Patrick Hazlewood states, "To make their schooling more 'relevant to life in the 21st century,' [students] are to be given responsibility for 'managing their own learning.'"

Thus, decreasing costs means cutting the salaries of already underpaid teachers, for they represent the vast bulk of the costs in education. But good teachers are expensive, as well they should be. They possess a magical combination of empathy, intelligence, ingenuity, patience and persistence -- the very traits we're trying to develop in our children. And the best teachers have the best options for work in other fields. They will be the first to go when told to become robotic readers of regimented curriculum.

Teachers as magicians! Freeman needs to stop with the fairy tales. I certainly agree that great teachers are worth a lot of money. I can count on one hand the number of great teachers I had in public schools and college. Empathy, patience and persistence were traits of none of them. They were obsessed with their specialties, highly intelligent, impatient, exacting and demanding. I learned more from these teachers than from any teacher who cared about my feelings.

My guess is that less than 5% of the nation's 3.1 million K-12 teachers can do the magic Freeman wants. Pay them $150,000 a year, if you want. But what are you going to do about the other 95%? The solution can't be to pay them all $150,000 so the higher salaries will attract more capable teachers. Freeman would never pay all his private sector employees wages at 3 times the going rate for an an average of 15 years in an effort to attract the most capable workers. He'd bankrupt the company. If you believe that higher salaries are needed to attract better teachers, then the solution has to be to offer the higher salaries to the new and better teachers, not to all teachers. But the unions won't allow it. Consequently, poor performers are paid a lot more than they're worth and great teachers are paid a lot less. Paying current teachers higher salaries is not going to improve student learning any more than paying current public defenders $300,000 a year is going to improve their job performance. People are generally doing the best they can under the conditions in which they work regardless of the level of their salaries.

How many parents are willing to turn their children over to companies whose principal goal is to make a profit off them?

This is a ridiculous question designed to stimulate bias, not thinking. In public education all the "profits" are paid to the staff. In the private sector, the profits are shared between the staff and the shareholders.

There are huge profits in the public education monopoly and they all go to the salaries and benefits of the employees. Most private sector K-12 schools run on much smaller budgets with lower paid staff than public schools and they produce equivalent or better outcomes.

Beyond that, the profit motive isn't just about low costs. It's also about high quality. Any business that wants to make a profit in education in the long run must offer high quality programs. On the other hand, public schools can stay in business regardless of the quality of their programs.

If people really understood the differences between government programs and competition in the private sector, they'd be demanding a lot more schools striving to make a profit.

Freeman's entire article makes me deeply question what kind of historian and economist he is. I'm sensing a strong element of socialism.

How many want them taught by the cheapest teachers, crammed into the largest classrooms, reciting only the most rote repetition? Yet, if it is to make a profit, that is the only plausible vision that mass privatized education has to offer us: McStudents.

McStudents. Is that what the privatized Catholic schools produce? Is that what KIPP schools produce? Freeman is off his rocker. I think he's missing his VP salary too much. If Freeman really understands the free market, he knows that no business can survive by providing shabby services. In fact, Freeman's description of for-profit schools almost precisely describes the public school monopoly, with the exception of cheap teachers! Government teachers earn 30 to 60% more than private sector teachers. See Small Miracles. McStudents is precisely what government schools produce. See What Money Can't Buy.

The supreme irony is that the truths we should be confronting here are the very ones we so gravely lecture our children about: You can't get "something for nothing"; actions have consequences; there's no easy fix to hard problems.

Back to policy making by aphorism. What's Freeman's solution in all this highly embellished rodomontade? Spend more money. Pay teachers more. That sounds like a grab for the easy fix to me. If Freeman wants a comprehensive, student-centered solution, he needs to abandon his 19th century, teacher-centered universe and start thinking about transforming schools into institutions for The 21st Century Student.

We need to stop lying to ourselves that we're doing what is needed to produce high-quality education. We can continue to mass produce cookie-cutter students on the cheap and we will reap a generational whirlwind of well-regimented, intellectually impotent dullards. Or, we can tell the truth. We can pay the honest freight to cultivate true intelligence and character in our children. To be sure, it is much harder and somewhat more expensive, at least in the short run. But it is the only way to sustain the blessings of prosperity that have graced our state.

My best guess is that Freeman is positioning himself for something. His cookie-cutter rhetoric and blindness to the data that contradicts his position is evidence of extreme bias, which either makes him a dullard or a master manipulator. I'm guessing it's the latter.

I see absolutely nothing in his writing that indicates he has ever read, much less understood, anything Milton Friedman, a Nobel Prize laureate in economics, has ever written, including Why America Needs School Vouchers and Free to Choose.

Robert Freeman, former vice president of international marketing at Sybase, teaches economics and history at Los Altos High School.

Before I leave Freeman's fairy tales, let's see what California can expect to achieve by increasing its $7,434 per pupil spending to New York's $11,218 (in 2001). With 6.3 million students, California would have to increase education spending from about $47 billion to $71 billion (plus inflation since 2001) for more than a 53% increase in spending.

Using data from Education Week's 2005 Quality Counts, we see that California can expect to raise its academic outcomes to approximately the same level of Utah's. Approximately 11 percentage points would be gained in the percentage of its students scoring at or above proficient on national exams. That means about 700,000 more of its students would be reaching proficiency, based on New York's spending and performance record. So, for a spending increase of $24 billion, that works out to be $34,300 for each student added to the proficiency column. There has to be a way to get a bigger bang for the buck. It's called a school for The 21st Century Student.

	California	New York
STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT (Percent scoring at or above proficient)
4th grade NAEP reading (2003)	21%	34%
8th grade NAEP reading (2003)	22%	35%
4th grade NAEP math (2003)	25%	33%
8th grade NAEP math (2003)	22%	32%
4th grade NAEP writing (2002)	23%	37%
8th grade NAEP writing (2002)	23%	30%
STANDARDS and ACCOUNTABILITY	B+	A
EFFORTS to IMPROVE TEACHER QUALITY	B-	B-
SCHOOL CLIMATE	C	C
RESOURCES: Equity	C+	B
Average class size for self-contained classes in elementary schools (2000)	22.7	22.3
Per Pupil Spending	$6,659	$10,002
RANK	44	3
Unadjusted education spending per student (2001)	$7,434	$11,218
Average beginner teacher salary (2003)	$34,805	$35,259
Average teacher salary for all teachers (2003)	$55,693	$53,017

Student suing school over patriotic necklace

2005-01-09T23:01:00.000-05:00

District says red, white, blue beads are gang-related
MSNBC/WNYT
Jan. 8, 2005

WNYT-TVUSA - A federal lawsuit is slated to be filed Friday. At issue is whether a Schenectady girl's constitutional rights were violated when school officials asked her to remove a necklace.

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Twelve-year-old Raven Furbert insists the beaded necklace shows her support for the troops. School administrators say regardless of what the necklace means, the beads are not allowed.

Think about this, folks. Do females wear beads in their hair to school? Do they wear necklaces? Neither is prohibited. But, if they take the beads out of their hair and put them on their necklaces--POOF!--instant miscreant. I mean, you have to be darn near a genius to think up all these subtle combinations to trip up students and get them into trouble so you can punish them. It's a great way to create a respectful learning atmosphere, wouldn't you agree?

For Raven, every day is a chance to be patriotic. Her uncle, J.D. Barnes, is serving in Iraq. So she made a red, white and blue beaded necklace to express her patriotism and her support for the troops.

She wore the necklace to Mont Pleasant Middle School on Tuesday until she was told to take it off.

"All they said was [the beads are] gang-related," Raven said.

If the school bothered to ask Raven why she was wearing the necklace, then it knew beyond all doubt that these beads were in no way connected to gang activity.

What the school is really concerned about is having to decide whether person X's beads are gang-related but person Y's beads are not, and then having to justify the decision.

The answer that comes to every administrator's tiny mind is easy. Ban them all! Religious beads, beads worn to memorialize death, political beads, stylish beads and all beads heretofore unimagined. It's supreme idiocy in the context of a nation that even half-heartedly recognizes the right of free speech for students in government schools.

"I don't get how beads can be gang-related," she added.

Even if some beads are gang related, why should the criminal predispositions of others make the innocent wearing of beads a school violation subject to punishment? Is this how schools show respect for students?

Raven's mother, Katie Grzywna, thinks her daughter's rights have been violated.

"In my opinion it's a constitutional issue. Freedom of expression," she said.

Good for you.

That constitutional issue is now at the center of a federal lawsuit Raven's attorney intends to file on Friday.

"If this little girl wants to come here and wear this necklace to show her support for those people then that's an issue I as a civil rights lawyer will fight for," Bob Keach said.

The school's code of conduct states student's jewelry "will be safe, appropriate and not...interfere with the educational process." It also says "students will not wear any clothing deemed to be gang related."

You see that? The clothing doesn't actually have to be gang related to be banned, it just needs to be deemed to be gang related. The federal court will have something to say about the reasonableness of the district deeming Raven's beads to be gang related.

The code of conduct does not explicitly mention beads or beaded necklaces. But school officials say the beads have been affiliated with gangs in the past. So they're not allowed.

I've got news for those in charge of the Schenectady schools. CLOTHES have been affiliated with gangs. Why don't you just make students show up naked? HAIR has been affiliated with gangs. Why don't you make students shave off all their hair? I mean, after all THIS IS A SAFETY ISSUE.

"We want to make sure that our students have options to express themselves, but it has to be done in a way that's safe for everyone in the school building," said Shari Greenleaf, the attorney for the city school district.

Every issue is a safety issue, isn't. I'd like to know how Raven's beads made anyone in the building unsafe. Why don't reporters ask these questions?

"It's red, white and blue. The colors of the school are red, white and blue. This is potentially gang-related? What does that mean? It's ridiculous," Keach said.

Oops! Looks like Schenectady is going to have to change its school colors. You can't have schools using gang colors, now can you?

School officials say the color red is often affiliated with one particular gang, and the color blue is often affiliated with another.

Do you let students use red or blue crayons in art class? Shall we ban U.S. flags from public schools if one gang or another adopts it as a symbol of affiliation?

I have got to find that college that's handing out degrees in moronity. We've got to get that place closed down.

The school would not comment specifically on the lawsuit. It is expected to be filed Friday.

Schools shouldn't be expected to take place of family

2005-01-03T23:35:00.000-05:00

Peter Berger / Schenectady (NY) Sunday Gazette
Dec. 26, 2004
Peter Berger teaches English in Weathersfield, Vt. Read more Peter Berger articles.

See, also, Schools That Do Too Much: Wasting Time and Money in Schools and What We Can All Do about It.

Students: Peter is an English teacher. Of all the articles he has written, this is the one to study for the secrets of great writing. It's packed with lots writing techniques. See if you can find the following:

an example
an anecdote
repetition of a key word or phrase (Hint: there are two--one major and the other minor by frequency)
a list
a summary
a comparison
an allusion
contrast
cause and effect
use of or reference to sound, sight and touch
inversion of a value system
citation to authority
a climax
an understatement
a rhetorical question
a twist
a paradox
a reflection

In the play Amadeus, the king reprimands Mozart because his opera has "too many notes." Mozart goes on, "Which notes don't you like?"

Similarly, one might be inclined to reprimand Peter for having too many writing methods, but which ones aren't likable? Peter would likely respond as Mozart, saying there are neither more writing techniques nor fewer than needed.

On the substance of Peter's article, that schools should not and cannot take the place of parents, one should ask whether he has supported his case as strongly as he might have and whether the article is logically bound as tightly as it is rhetorically bound.

I'm not sure what the Cratchits would think, but by modern standards I'm pretty old-fashioned. I refuse to shop till December, and I still say Merry Christmas even though you're not supposed to anymore.

These days the approved multicultural salutation is "Happy Holiday." Speaking for myself, I'll take a sincere greeting from anybody's tradition. You don't have to subscribe to a common faith to exchange blessings.

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"A Christmas Carol" is one of those blessings. Each December when I read about Scrooge or watch him in 1953 black and white, I learn a different lesson.

This year it was Bob Cratchit's daughter Martha. Bob calls her "our Martha." We don't talk like that anymore, but spoken or unspoken, that little word "our" is what family is all about.

Today many experts tell us the family is in trouble, and that kids are in' trouble as a result.

That's not to say there weren't problems in Bob Cratchit's London, or that many 21st-century families aren't doing fine, or that doing fine can't include slamming doors, hard times and misunderstandings.

But things seem shaky enough at home that schools are increasingly called upon to fill in and deal with issues that once were taken care of around the kitchen table.

Is it that things are shaky enough to call for intervention because problems are more complex, families are less connected, communities are less integrated, more mental health professionals have more to say about what should be done and more time to say it on the government payroll, some or all of these and/or something else?

Climate of connection

The expert authors of the "Wingspread Declaration" prescribe a contemporary remedy. They want schools to "create a climate of connection" so "every student feels close to at least one supportive adult at school."

What could be the good, bad and unintended consequences of doing that? Overall, is this an improvement or a trap? Moreover, consider whether the assumption that students need supportive adults is valid. Could it possibly be that non-supportive (demanding, critical, and Scrooge-like) adults can lead to better overall outcomes?

According to the Wingspread folks, this surrogate closeness to teachers will boost academic performance while it also reduces tobacco and drug use, suicide rates and teenage sex.

I can see where getting along with me could induce a student to work harder in my class. Of course, I've worked hard in classes where I didn't feel connected, and I've also known students who liked me just fine but never cracked a book.

As for closeness, I try to make an impression for good on my students. I know that here and there that impression will last, and that a handful will remember me as warmly as I remember my special teachers.

But as highly as I regarded my special few, none of them were the reason I smoked or not, or took drugs or not. They certainly weren't the reason I had sex or not.

I try to inspire my students. I try to appeal to the better angels of their nature. I enjoy spending my days with them. But I should never be more than a small part of their lives. I shouldn't be the "supportive adult" they're connected to. Their parents should.

The Commission on Children at Risk is also concerned about kids' deteriorating mental and behavioral health, but this commission warns that medication, therapy, and programs at school won't help the "growing numbers of suffering children."

Instead, they need deep connections to moral principles, spiritual and religious guidance, and clear limits and expectations. These experts likewise trace the present "crisis of American childhood" to a lack of close connections to other people.

English teachers aren't those other people.

Parents are.

I don't mean we should turn our backs on suffering and misfortune. Jacob Marley was right. Whether I'm a teacher or a carpenter, mankind is my business.

And if Marley's counsel isn't enough, there's an even older text that enjoins us to care for widows and orphans. We need to be careful, though, that our good intentions don't create more orphans.

Because the more we substitute schools for homes, the weaker both will become.

Correct, with one caveat--government schools will become more politically powerful as they expand the scope of "free" services to students. But education will become weaker, and I think that's what Peter means.

When two kinder gentlemen solicit Scrooge's help for the poor, he informs them he already supports several institutions. "Are there no prisons?" he asks them. "Are there no workhouses?"

That wasn't much of answer. But "Are there no schools?" isn't much better.

No replacement

Our trouble today isn't that we lack institutions, or even that we lack well-intentioned institutions. Our trouble is that no institution can ever care for us the way we need to feel cared for and be cared for.

No institution, including school, can supply the connectedness that children need.

Schools can't replace homes.

We shall probably find out whether they can or not. Plato wanted children raised by the state without ever knowing who their parents were. It's the direction we are headed in. Increasingly, being a parent will be more like being a non-custodial parent with weekend and holiday visitation rights--and, of course, the duty to pay child support. The values, principles and beliefs of parents who are doing their jobs will be increasingly trumped by government imposed values, principles and beliefs with the justification that it must do for all students the job necessitated by the neglect of a few parents.

In the end Scrooge becomes a good friend, a good master, and a good man. And everybody knows how he helps the Cratchits and how his help saves Tiny Tim.

But there's another family to note at the end of the story, the family where he's welcomed as Uncle Scrooge - his family where he can find comfort and rest from his endeavors out in the world.

Wherever we are, school included, we need to think like Scrooge. We need to look to the world with decency and compassion, especially that part of the world that's near enough for us to touch. But it's even more needful that we look to our families, to those whose names begin with "our," for their sake and for our own.

In hope and with best wishes.

Scissors get girl in legal trouble

2004-12-13T03:19:00.000-05:00

The 10-year-old was handcuffed and taken to a police station after scissors were found in her book bag.
By Susan Snyder / Philadelphia Inquirer Staff Writer
Dec. 11, 2004

A 10-year-old fourth-grade girl at Holme Elementary School in the Far Northeast was pulled out of class, handcuffed, and taken to the local police station in the back of a police wagon earlier this week after a pair of 8-inch scissors were found in her book bag, according to authorities and her angry mother.

Wow, a Colt 45 of scissors! Still, Handcuffing? For scissors? An 8-year-old with scissors is like a blind person with a cane. They go together. Schools simply cannot outlaw common objects without turning good students into outlaws.

School district and police officials said yesterday that they were following state law and procedures in dealing with students who have weapons on school property. They say that those rules demand police be called and that procedures call for handcuffing suspects regardless of age or crime.

It's a bald-faced lie. Scissors are not "weapons" under the criminal law absent the special circumstances that show the scissors were either used or intended to be used to inflict physical harm on another person. What is more likely the case is that the school disciplinary code defines scissors as weapons, regardless of student use or intent. But not all scissors. Oh, No!!! Not the scissors in the superintendent and principal's desks! Those are not weapons. Only scissors in students' backpacks are weapons.

Ordinary items commonly used for non-violent purposes cannot reasonably be defined as weapons unless they are used or intended to be used as a weapon.

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Porsche Brown's mother, Rose Jackson, was outraged.

"My daughter cried and cried," Jackson said yesterday. "She had no idea what she did was wrong. I think that was way too harsh."

Want to know why public schools don't have more parental involvement? Want to know why 12% of students attend private or home schools? Want to know why public education doesn't have broader support? This is why. 1,000 times a day, another future voter and his/her currently voting family are outraged at the stupidity of government educators.

Jackson said principal Ethel M. Cabry had known Porsche for four years and should have called her home.

"I want something done to that principal and that teacher. They didn't notify me about my baby. They called the police," Jackson said.

Why, mom! Isn't that what you would have done? After all, school officials are just acting in loco parentis. They are the ones who truly care about children. I think school officials would probably suggest you get some counseling and learn to be a better parent.

PARENTS: YOU EITHER HAVE TO OVERTURN THESE STUPID RULES OR GET OUT THE STUDENT CODE OF CONDUCT AND CONDUCT A SECURITY CHECK EVERYDAY BEFORE YOUR CHILD GOES TO SCHOOL OR THIS COULD HAPPEN TO YOUR CHILD.

District spokesman Fernando Gallard acknowledged that Cabry had not called Jackson but said that school police called her when they phoned city police.

School district officials acknowledged that the girl was not using the item as a weapon or threatening anyone with it. The scissors were found Thursday morning during a search of students' belongings after something was discovered missing from the teacher's desk area, Gallard said.

So, the scissors were found during a suspicionless search. It's time to call a lawyer.

The scissors, however, qualified as a possible weapon under a long-standing state law, and the school followed proper procedure by calling city police, he said.

That's right. Scissors are a possible weapon. To become a weapon the person must use, threaten to use, or intend to use them to inflict physical harm on another person.

Now, EVERY police officer following appropriate investigative protocol would have first ascertained whether the scissors were used or intended to be used as a weapon BEFORE PUTTING ANY PEACEFUL SUSPECT INTO HANDCUFFS. This is a case of false arrest and incompetent police practices.

Porsche will be suspended for five days, and the district will then decide whether to expel her to a disciplinary school or allow her to return to Holme, he said.

City police, meanwhile, decided not to charge her with a crime because they determined that she had no intent to use the scissors as a weapon, said Inspector William Colarulo, a police spokesman. In fact, police believe she had the scissors to unwrap a new CD, Colarulo said.

Is there some reason why the school, which cares so much about this child, couldn't have figured that out first?

He defended the police officers' decision to handcuff the child and take her to Eighth Police District headquarters. All suspects, regardless of age or crime, are handcuffed, he said. "The officers acted in good faith," he said.

WRONG. These officers could not have acted in good faith unless they had probable cause to believe that each and every element of a crime had been committed. They know that scissors are not commonly used as weapons, therefore they must first have developed probable cause to believe the child had used the scissors as a weapon or intended to use them as such. But they didn't do that. They arrested first and went searching for probable cause later. That's professional malpractice and these officers should be reprimanded.

Jackson, who maintained that her daughter had the scissors for a previous school assignment, said that if the district acted based on state law, the law must be changed.

"This should be done per case," based on circumstances. She said her daughter did nothing to warrant police intervention: "She's like, 'Mom, we use scissors in school.'"

DO YOU SEE THAT YOU IDIOT ADMINISTRATORS? How can you possibly expect even adults, let alone children, to figure out they can be suspended and arrested for possessing the same kinds of tools they use in school? This is a trap for the innocent caused by paranoia over a couple of sociopaths in one school district many years ago.

NEW SCHOOL MOTTO: UNTIL WE ALL BECOME CRIMINALS, NONE OF US CAN BE SAFE.

Cupertino teacher sues district for barring religious references

2004-11-26T19:31:00.000-05:00

Associated Press via the San Jose (CA) Mercury News
Nov. 25, 2004

CUPERTINO, Calif. - A public school teacher is suing his district and principal for barring him from using excerpts from historical documents in his classroom because they contain references to God and Christianity.

Steven Williams, who teaches fifth grade at Stevens Creek Elementary School in the Cupertino Union School District, filed the lawsuit in U.S. District Court in San Jose on Monday.

In the suit, Williams argues that he had a First Amendment right to teach the history of the country and its founding fathers, which includes religious references.

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The lawsuit alleges the school's principal prevented Williams from using handouts from several documents, including the Declaration of Independence, "The Rights of the Colonists" by Samuel Adams and George W. Bush's presidential 2004 Day of Prayer proclamation.

* * *

Williams' attorney, Terry Thompson of the Alliance Defense Fund, said the principal's policy violates the teacher's First Amendment rights and is blatant censorship of the writings of great men because they mention God or Christianity.

* * *

Williams probably does have a constitutional right to teach history with religious content to fifth graders, but courts have deferred to school officials in controlling course content, said Daniel Farber, a constitutional law professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

"I think his claim that he has a constitutional right to use these materials in a classroom is an uphill battle," Farber said.

Can you believe that government school administrators have the right to censor the Declaration of Independence and remove it from the curriculum because of references to a divine power? You are witnessing a rewriting of American history before your very eyes. Administrators around the country have decided that religion must be purged from school materials. See, e.g., Schools Say 'No Thanks' to Teaching About God. It's generally easier to stifle the speech than to risk a lawsuit except in the rare case where the teacher challenges the censorship. Government schools are on a mission to create a new generation of American children who are ignorant about the role of religion in our history, with the possible exception of Dr. Martin Luther King.

In schools designed for The 21st Century Student, students could chose whether to have their history lessons include or exclude the religious context. Those desiring a distorted view of history could have it and those who prefer truth wouldn't have to participate in a conspiracy to rewrite American history.

Williams told the Oakland Tribune that the problems started last year after he responded to a student who asked why the Pledge of Allegiance includes the phrase, "under God." After a parent complained, the principal started requesting his lesson plans and handouts.

Perspective: Still Tinkering

2004-11-21T15:42:00.000-05:00

A 21st Century Student Article of Vision
By Ronald A. Wolk / Teacher Magazine
Vol. 16, Issue 03, Page 4; November 1, 2004

Educators are fond of saying it's more important to do right things than to do things right. This article questions whether educators are doing the right things, let alone doing them right.

Confronting the need to mass produce an educated public, early educators adopted Industrial Age approaches to learning. Rather than realize the pragmatism that drove the choice, modern educators cling to an 18th century model of education as if it were one of Plato's ideal forms. It's more like a Gordian knot or a 200-year saga of Pickett's Charge. Nothing beats the personal attention of a wise and highly educated tutor. Many to this day would prefer an education with Socrates to that offered in public schools. The 21st Century Student initiative is an attempt to replicate unsurpassed personal tutoring for all students at a price we can afford. The longer we wait to transform our schools, the longer our children will continue losing the international education battle. See, e.g., Night Study Becoming Par for Course in S. Korea and China boys and girls. The Public Schools "Good Old Days" Never Were.

We’ve spent more than two decades trying to improve public schools and raise student achievement, the longest sustained reform period in history. We haven’t made significant progress. Willie Herenton, mayor of Memphis, Tennessee, and once superintendent of that city’s schools, told fellow mayors at their October summit on urban education that “the school budget keeps going up, and student performance keeps going down.”

People who think rising scores on state standards exams show we are making significant progress are being misled by statistical models that are designed to detect small changes in outcomes. At a macro level, nothing has changed. When you put student performance under the microscope with statistical techniques, you can detect small changes that are mostly the result of narrowing classroom learning to what's tested on state exams. This is an indication of neither improved learning nor an improved education. Rather, it indicates a shift in teaching from what is not measured or not measurable to that which is. See, related, High-Stakes Editorializing.

School administrators and teachers don’t like to hear that kind of criticism. They feel they are being blamed for problems they didn’t create and cannot solve. And, for the most part, they’re right.

I agree, which means that teachers and administrators are partly responsible for creating problems and ignoring productivity issues that have damaged public education.

We are in a bind. Our education system is not as productive or successful as it needs to be, but no single reform effort has worked. More than 25 percent of our students (and twice that number in many urban districts) continue to drop out. Most students do not achieve proficiency in reading, math, or science, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. And standardized test scores tend to decline between 4th and 12th grades.

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In the late 1980s, state and federal leaders successfully launched our nation’s de facto reform strategy: Set high standards, hold students accountable for mastering them, test regularly to assess progress, and attach consequences based on performance. A similar approach had helped American businesses compete with Germany and Japan, and it was widely expected to turn the tide in education. In 2002, President Bush and Congress “kicked it up a notch” with No Child Left Behind. There is disagreement over how much progress has been made, but—for good or ill—states have now identified a stunning number of “poorly performing schools.”

The paradox is that we want to reinvent our schools for the new century without making fundamental changes. We prefer tinkering our way to Utopia. If we truly rethink what we want schools to achieve and seriously analyze the premises on which the U.S. education system is built, we might realize that tinkering won’t get us there. Consider some of the major premises:

• Students should be grouped according to age and move sequentially through a common curriculum.

See, Grouping Kids by Age Should Have Vanished With the Little Red Schoolhouse, Third-graders may be held back for the second time and Education officials vow to halt grade-based dividing of classes.

• There is a comprehensive, detailed, grade-specific body of knowledge (i.e., academic content standards and the curriculum) that children need if they are to be successful in life and, therefore, must master.

There is a core body of knowledge and skills all students need to master. The core is pretty small and it consists of what every student needs to know to independently learn anything s/he wants to know or do.

But to say that there is a core is not the same as saying core knowledge can only be learned by one approach. There are an infinite number of ways to acquire core knowledge, as the next premise suggests.

• That body of knowledge must be segregated into distinct disciplines, or subject areas, that are taught separately.

Some believe learning should begin with synthesis--an understanding of the connectedness of the world. Knowledge and skills are added as the exploration of connections deepens. This approach contrasts with teaching students subject-defined knowledge and skills which they later add to attempts at synthesis. See, e.g., A rigorous way to teach and System Dynamics and Learner-Centered Learning in Kindergarten through 12th Grade Education.

• Because there is so much knowledge to master and school is the only place students can learn, they should be required to spend six or so hours a day in school until age 16.

Hidden within this premise is a reference to The Root Cause of Education Mediocrity. There's also a challenge to the false idea that time spent on task must be a constant and the quality of academic outcomes must be variable.

Most students don't need more time in school. What they need is an opportunity to use the time they spend learning more efficiently and more effectively. Removing wasted time from education resulting from just waiting on others to finish tests or to catch up on missed or misunderstood material could add the equivalent of a full academic year's worth of instruction to the education of many students.

According to Thomas Jefferson, schooling should be voluntary rather than compulsory. Modern education is based on coercion: coerced attendance, coerced school assignments, coerced acceptance of students by schools and by teachers.

In my opinion, when education is done right for each student it becomes a consuming passion needing little encouragement.

• Teachers are responsible for educating children [in classrooms]—generally by providing them with the information dictated by the standards and the curriculum.

It's the core fallacy that prevents the creation of schools for The 21st Century Student. Teachers should be coaches, advisors and diagnosticians. They should be capable of evaluating the course of a child's learning--no matter the sequence followed or the content included--and making recommendations for improvement. They should be experts in how people learn and use their expertise to write lessons which are turned into interactive, multi-media productions for delivery over the Internet. Studios like Dreamworks and Pixar should be churning out lessons as fast as teachers can write them.

Teachers should monitor the effectiveness of these lessons using a variety of techniques and periodically revise them to improve learning efficiency and effectiveness as well as the ability to "pull" students into them and motivate them to get to the next lesson as quickly as possible.

While some teachers would still run classrooms for the courses where it makes sense and for the students who thrive in them, other teachers would run small-group seminars, or become academic advisors, or become specialists in diagnostics, lesson development and producing computer-delivered instruction. Of course, some teachers will still be subject-area experts.

The second biggest fallacy underlying current reform efforts is the belief that we can replicate 3.2 million outstanding classroom teachers. It's flatly impossible.

And the biggest fallacy is the belief that current system design doesn't importantly limit the achievement of academic excellence for all students. The education system produces precisely the kind of results it is designed to produce. It's a fundamental, irrefutable law. While there are permutations and variability within the system, the outcome possibilities map is fundamentally constrained by the design of the system. A tractor is not a car. You can't plow a field successfully with a car and you can't travel across the nation very fast or comfortably on a tractor.

See, also, ED unveils new educator training site, which talks about providing teacher training in ways that should be used for educating students.

• Standardized tests alone adequately measure skill development and academic achievement in young people and should determine promotion and graduation.

In 21st Century Schools, students will not be in "grades." (They will also not have bells in classrooms to signal a mandatory transition of thought and focus). Two possibilities for change exist. First, for courses where learning proceeds sequentially within a subject--like math, for example--the student's computer will tell the student where s/he is at relative to a typical student. A student who is traditionally thought of as a third grader may well be performing math at level 4.3 (roughly equivalent to what a 4th grader in the third month of school knows today). Students will progress through levels of learning, not grades.

Second, for students traveling a less traditional path through knowledge--and that will be a majority of them after a time--exams will tell them what their core skill and knowledge levels are.

The great majority of policymakers, educators, and even reformers accept these fundamental principles almost without question. Because they are largely a given in most state and district efforts to improve schools, reform is confined to the margins.

We’re often unclear about what we expect of our schools, but I’d argue that there are a few primary goals. Schools should help kids learn to think critically and creatively; teach them to gather, analyze, and assess information, then draw logical conclusions from that information and defend their conclusions publicly; stimulate students’ curiosity and expose them to the humanities and sciences; and help them develop the commonly agreed-upon values of good human beings and responsible citizens.

The idea that schools "teach" is also problematic. Schools should provide effective, easy access to knowledge and skills and the focus must be redirected to students as learners, not teachers as instructors. All education is self-education.

Moreover, the concept of a school as a "place" for learning has to change. School is anywhere the student is when s/he is learning.

An education system built on the premises listed above will never accomplish these goals.

Absolutely, 100% correct. Because Ronald has arrived at the correct answer through an analysis that is fairly comprehensive and mostly correct, he gets an:

Remaking High Schools

2004-11-05T20:57:00.000-05:00

A changing economy and an influx of aid are spurring the radical transformation of a faltering American icon
by Kathleen Vail / Senior editor of the American School Board Journal
November 2004 issue

This is a sad story of how educators, using modified 19th century ideas and approaches, think they can climb the Mt. Everest of academic improvement by using toothpicks. It's ridiculous.

Fifty years ago, the American high school was doing fine. Most students weren't headed for college. If they earned a high school diploma, they could land a well-paying job. If they didn't graduate, they could still find good work.

The fact that this still isn't the case has a lot to do with the education lobby and the rejection of apprenticeships for formal college degrees.

"But today it's a disaster," says Tom Vander Ark, director of education for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. "A third of American students drop out, half of Hispanic and African Americans drop out. That's a civic, social, and economic disaster."

* * *

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While different in philosophy and approach, reform models all seek to change the basic building blocks of high schools: their size and how and what they offer. The Gates Foundation and other private groups, as well as the U.S. Department of Education, are pouring millions of dollars in research and technical assistance into districts willing to change how they run high schools.

The most important reform--and it's being completely ignored--is changing how they teach, not just what they teach. The only way to dramatically improve high school outcomes is to create schools for The 21st Century Student.

* * *

In June 2004, Robert Balfanz and Nettie Letgers, two researchers with Johns Hopkins University's Center for Social Organization of Schools, found that graduation is not the norm in 20 percent of U.S. high schools. Looking at high school "promoting power" -- the schools' ability to get their ninth-graders to 12th-grade graduation in four years -- Balfanz and Letgers identified 2,000 weak schools that they dubbed "dropout factories." These schools, which have 40 percent or fewer seniors than the number of freshmen four years earlier -- are attended by nearly half of the country's African-American students and two out of five Hispanic students.

* * *

According to the American Diploma Project (ADP) -- a partnership of three education advocacy groups, including the Education Trust -- more than 70 percent of high school graduates go immediately to two- or four-year colleges or universities. But 28 percent of them have to take remedial English and math courses before they can start their regular college work.

About 58 percent of students will take remedial English or math courses sometime in their college career. In 2002, the California State University system had to place 59 percent of its incoming freshman class in remedial math and English courses. According to ADP, 60 percent of employers question whether a diploma means students have learned academic basics.

* * *

Much of the money from the Gates Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, and groups such as the Carnegie Foundation is geared toward breaking down large high schools or starting new smaller schools. The small size is not an end, but rather a means to make other reforms work better.

It's a wasteful and costly step. When schools are reformed for 21st century learning, they will need less space, not more.

"If a school is relatively small, it's easier to create a coherent curriculum, easier to create a high-performance culture, to create a personalized environment," says Vander Ark. "All those things get exponentially more difficult the bigger the school gets."

That's why an effective school size of 1 is best. When students are guided by teacher-coaches through a rich, high-quality, consistent, online, interactive, multi-media curriculum supplemented with seminars, field trips, labs and conferences, and they have year-round access to lessons with the freedom to work at their own rates and complete as much college as possible before leaving high school, then, and only then, will full achievement and excellence be possible. As long as students are stuck in classrooms moving through the materials at uniform rates, taking breaks and vacations that fit teacher contracts and the holidays of organizations to which they don't belong, then high performance, personalization and maximum learning are impossible. The system defines the outcome possibilities map and no system substantially based on the current model can dramatically improve performance.

* * *

High school teachers often aren't prepared to teach in teams, act as advisers, or teach across subjects. "We're asking people who work in high schools to do something they haven't signed up for. They say, 'Dropouts aren't my fault. Kids have issues at home.' Now we are asking teachers to be responsible for it. The nature of the job is different," says Joseph DiMartino of the Education Alliance at Brown University.

Just FORGET IT! You are not going to get 1 million high school teachers to the level they need to be for our children's greatest success. Why not take the best teachers, and one lesson at a time, create the absolutely best interactive, computer-delivered instruction possible with different versions for different perspectives, interests and learning styles AND BE DONE WITH IT? The path educators are on is absolutely the most expensive kind of insanity money can buy. It is insufficiently flexible, offering too few choices in too few subject areas.

Once these lessons are prepared, professionals can monitor and test learning speed, comprehension and retention for each lesson and modify them as needed for different kinds of students, who will access the lessons on a schedule that makes sense for them and that meets a minimum threshold for progressing through the curriculum.

Union rules about seniority and other work-related issues can be a barrier, unless the union decides to work with the district on reform, as has happened in San Diego and the Mapleton School District, near Denver.

Union rules are mostly a barrier when you still have classrooms. Do away with classrooms for most students in most subjects and you bypass the union barrier.

Nostalgia can also be an obstacle. Parents and community members who fondly remember their high school days often protest when changes are proposed. It can be especially hard to reform old, historic high schools. Some districts solve this by allowing a revered old school to maintain its name, mascot, sports teams, and colors while breaking it into smaller learning communities.

True. But my guess is if the trade-off is having the entire curriculum with all the lessons available for parents to watch, learn from and comment on from their own homes, the overwhelming majority would say, "What's taking you so long?" Parents could watch the lesson on condom instruction and decide whether or when to include it in their children's curriculum. Everyone would not have to have the same lessons, and opting out of some wouldn't require any downtime like it does today. This 19th century, mass-production, uniform-content approach to education must end.

Sometimes, too, the doubt that students can perform to rigorous standards will impede change. "The biggest resistance to improving high schools is a deep-seated belief that many of our students cannot learn much. We've created a system that allows them to validate that," says Gene Bottoms, executive director of High Schools That Work, a reform effort now in about 1,000 schools in 30 states. "When adults decide to change that, wonderful things happen."

The system teaches students early on that working hard and excelling don't get them much. Consequently, the system conditions them to stop trying and to do the minimum needed to get by. See, The Root Cause of Education Mediocrity.

Most students are capable of learning far more than they do. I estimate that the fastest test-takers could receive three-quarters of a year more instruction over 12 years if they didn't have to wait for the slowest test-takers to finish their tests!

It is true that psychological conditioning and system design limit what students are capable of achieving. If you want them to achieve to their fullest potential, you MUST change the system.

* * * *

PUNCHBACK: ANSWERING CRITICS

2004-08-04T17:55:00.000-04:00

What’s Going On in Schools?
BY TOM SALTER / American Association of School Administrators / Full Article

If we had a nickel for every time someone claimed “I don’t know what is going on at the school—they are not teaching, they are just wasting money!” as an excuse for not supporting public education, there would be no need to ask for more funding. Unfortunately, there may be some truth to their lament, and it is our fault.

Not every parent or community member reads page 57 of section Q in the daily newspaper (where they bury the positive stories about education). And we spend too much time in public education blaming our lack of success in promoting our schools on our old pal “If only ….” If I only had a bigger budget, I could … If I only had more staff, we could … If there were only more … Rather than wasting time taking inventory of all the things you are missing, consider some items you have in your tool kit that you may have overlooked.

The issue, as framed by Tom, is the public's belief that schools are not teaching and wasting money. Let's see what Tom puts in his tool kit to answer the critics.

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Public Events

Athletic events offer a great public relations opportunity. Have the announcer at a basketball or football game promote the new computer lab; congratulate an outstanding student for an award or scholarship; thank a volunteer for hours of dedication; mention a teacher’s recent award; congratulate an academic team for its accomplishments. And ask the booster club to give you a page in the program booklet to promote the school system.

Tom's first tool has nothing to do with academics (not teaching). Some believe public school sports programs serve the few at the expense of the many and that whatever the merit of sports programs, especially in relation to other unmet academic needs, it doesn't answer the question, "Who should pay?" To some, sports programs are budgetary "fat."

But Tom's first choice is to use sports events as a public relations tool. That's fine, although Tom's interest is in giving the public a gilded view of the school rather than a fair and balanced view from which citizens can make informed decisions about whether schools need or deserve increased funding.

Using sports programs is not likely to be very effective in changing public attitudes because the vast majority of attendees are already onboard in supporting schools. In general, the critics aren't at school sports events.

Be sure the facilities, including the restrooms, are as clean and neat as possible. If that means having a custodian working during the event, it is worth the expense.

Tom's second tool is to hope that people will infer great teaching and sound management from outward physical appearances. Although educated people will always tell others not to judge a book by its cover, that's exactly what Tom hopes community members will do. Sadly, way too many people fall for this trick. They will foolishly pay a lot more for a piece-of-junk car that's washed and polished.

The same tips apply for plays, band concerts and other events where the public visits your schools.

These increase the chances of manipulating the perceptions of critics. Manipulation? Certainly. Tom has no intention of disclosing controversy, waste, disadvantages and failures; only unity, efficiency, advantages and successes.

Consider actions we have taken with good intentions that end up creating negative feelings. Consider the sign affixed to each school’s front door instructing visitors to check in at the office. Most read, “WARNING—All Visitors MUST Report to the Office.” Try instead: “WELCOME! To Ensure the Safety of Our Students, Please Come to the Office for a Visitor’s Pass Before Entering Other Parts of the School. Thank You!”

Tom's third tool is to use psychological tricks to soften the messages to community members that they are not part of the team. Tom knows that few people know how to read between the lines to see that "welcome" messages are really messages of control and exclusion. The reason Tom knows the public doesn't know how to read between the lines is because he knows public schools don't teach students how to do it. In fact, it's not in the interest of public schools to educate people on how to read between the lines. See, e.g., The success side of American education, wherein Walter Williams writes:

In keeping Americans ill-educated, ill-informed and constitutionally ignorant, the education establishment has been the politician's major and most faithful partner. It is in this sense that American education can be deemed a success.

A recent survey suggests parents rely on report cards as a primary source of information about their child’s school. Why not include a district newsletter with every report card?

Critics don't read school newsletters, especially if the school has repeatedly demonstrated that it will publish only good news and keep bad news safely locked in closets. I note there is little downside to some of Tom's ideas, but in moving from announcements at school events to newsletters in report cards, Tom has started to increase school expenditures with little chance of changing anyone's mind.

To ensure media coverage of an event, ask a reporter, anchor or editor to participate. Let a media representative serve as master of ceremonies at a spelling bee. Ask a reporter to judge a science fair or art contest. While it doesn’t guarantee coverage, it makes it much more likely.

Tom's fifth tool is to use the media. Many schools do this. Many schools also send glowing press releases to the media, which dutifully prints it without analysis. This tool has promise for reaching critics--it's also free--, but as Tom says, "Not every parent or community member reads page 57 of section Q in the daily newspaper (where they bury the positive stories about education)."

Offer your school system’s faculty as experts to the news media to comment on major news events. TV and radio talk shows are always looking for people they can call on when big events happen. Positioning your teachers and administrators as experts in their fields will also greatly enhance your system’s credibility in the community.

Tom's sixth tool is the hope that people will infer academic excellence and sound management from hearing a very few educators speak in public. He knows that most people will make illogical conclusions because public schools don't teach students how to avoid falling for illogical fallacies.

While this tool may expose the public to a star or two from the district, it may also expose some idiots. Use of this tool is risky. Moreover, using educators as commentators on issues affecting schools generally exposes assumed but unrevealed biases and sometimes solidifies the opinions of the critics. This tool has some upside potential and a lot of downside potential.

Notice that we are six tools into Tom's tool kit and he hasn't once suggested that educators directly address the concerns of critics about not teaching and wasting money. He has not suggested that anyone do the work to demonstrate efficiency and effectiveness on a system-wide scale. His approach is not to treat citizens as trusted partners in an adult-adult relationship, but to treat them as objects with vulnerability to psychological manipulations of perceptions. No properly educated person of ethics and principles would intentionally do this to their neighbors. Yet, education is lousy with professionals who think like Tom, which is an important reason why this website exists.

Succinct Communication

Hundreds of people see the message signs in front of your schools each day. Be creative, brag, congratulate, inform, and, if possible, entertain passers-by. Ask someone to look at it each morning to make sure some prankster hasn’t changed it or that a letter hasn’t fallen off. Change it often.

Few people have time to read in-depth articles. Your publications should have short, informative, bullet-pointed articles written on a 9th-grade level. Use callout boxes, colorful graphs and pictures of happy kids doing something. Be creative in the way your information is distributed. Consider asking a supermarket or discount store to put your publication in checkout bags and distribute it in doctors’ offices and public libraries.

Every first-year principal knows if you want to pack them in at PTA meetings, have the kids do something. Ask principals to divide their PTA meetings between students, teachers and extracurricular programs, and feature as many different programs as possible. Ask the PTA officers to keep the mundane items to a minimum. Brag on all the great things happening at the school and in your system. Above all, resist the temptation to always ask parents for something.

Ask teachers and administrators to visit the PTA meetings of their feeder schools. Ask the host school to introduce them and let them share one or two exciting things happening at the school these parents’ children will soon attend. Elementary teachers and administrators should visit nursery schools, day care centers and head start centers.

More of the same from tools 7 through 10.

Gift Horses

Keep your eyes open for help with your PR efforts:

• Chambers of commerce may welcome articles written by the superintendent or board president on how education affects business. Likewise, banks, local boards of real estate agents and various other civic groups produce publications that may welcome input.

• Establish a speaker’s bureau where trained school district presenters can be scheduled to speak to local clubs and business organizations.

• Ask a local billboard company to donate a board to promote education. Make sure the board shows that it was donated and no public funds were used.

• Offer to do a public service show once per month on local radio stations. Feature interviews with teachers, administrators, custodians, bus drivers and mechanics.

There you have it. Fourteen tools to increase support for public schools and not one of them was crafted to respond to the issues Tom framed--the lack of proper teaching and the wasting of money.

Educators believe this approach is effective. Schools pass the vast majority of budget votes and referenda. But how much better could they do if they openly and honestly reported fair and balanced information and persistently and publicly worked to correct deficiencies rather than brag on their successes--way too few for the money spent--and hide their failures?

Unlike NASA, public schools do not have mission critical disasters that shake them out of their complacency and force them to see that even when you're the best space agency on earth (or the best public school), the "lies" believed by the organizational culture are fundamentally detrimental to mission success. Columbia-like disasters occur in public schools hundreds of thousands of times each year when students drop out or fail their classes. Yet, public schools reject the notions that they are wasting money and failing to teach. If all these students were to come speeding to earth through the atmosphere in one large group, burning up with fragments of their remains crashing into the earth, I'd bet professional educators would be shocked out of their complacency and start creating schools for The 21st Century Student.

Remember, doing something and not talking about it is like winking in the dark.

Tom Salter is membership director for the Alabama Association of School Boards. . . .

Schools give archery a shot

2004-08-03T21:53:00.000-04:00

Physical education teachers became certified archery instructors while preparing to reintroduce the activity to their students.
By JULI PROBASCO-SOWERS / Des Moines (IW) Register Staff Writer

See, related, Archery Class. What's going on in PE?

Iowa's archers are helping the state's physical education teachers put a new spin on an old school sport.

"Archery is one more lifelong skill students can take out into the world and continue to use," said Keith Slifka, a PE teacher from Cresco . . . .

A lifelong skill. Are we all moving to Sherwood Forest? Sure, some people target shoot, hunt and/or compete at the Olympics with arrows, but it takes all of 15 minutes to learn the basics. You don't need to pay a PE teacher $75,000 a year (in many NY schools) to teach archery. Moreover, few people have easy access to bows and arrows, and because of potential injuries to children, many don't want them in their homes. So, how effective of a lifelong sport is this?

* * *

[V]olunteers with the Iowa State Archery Association and the Iowa Bow Hunters Association are trying to encourage the reintroduction of archery into physical education classes in Iowa middle schools.

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Slifka sees archery as one more way to combat the growing problem of childhood obesity by promoting lifelong activity and health. Those ideas have become a focus for the Cresco school district's physical education programs in the past year.

This is utter nonsense. Converting to sports like archery would likely increase obesity, not decrease it. And, what a surprise! Many schools around the country do teach archery and obesity has increased!

No cause and effect, you say? I wouldn't be so sure about that. A 130 lb person burns 207 calories an hour in archery--the same as walking at 3 miles an hour or golfing with a powered cart. That's substantially less than what a person would burn in the old-fashioned regimen of situps, pushups and running.

In two weeks of five archery classes, my daughter shot six arrows in each 40-minute class. The rest of the time she sat and talked. How much exercise is that? It's ridiculous. She could have gotten more of a workout from intensely playing 40 continuous minutes of computer games. Perhaps that's why some PE instructors want to add computer games to PE!

* * *

Slifka said students generally are enthusiastic about archery and have the opportunity to continue with the sport, especially with the high-tech bows that are available today.

Spend lots of money to produce inferior results--the motto of public education. Situps, pushups and running can be done for free. Yeah, students aren't excited about it, but these do much more for fitness than archery. PE is more about staying fit than having fun.

"I have been very impressed with this program" Slifka said. "The bows are high-tech, top of the line. This isn't your old fashioned curved bow and archery class." Students "can target shoot in the back yard for fun, join an archery club, or take it to another level and shoot competitively or go hunting."

Rural students may be shooting in their backyards, but are parents going to let their urban and suburban children do this? It's an invitation to disaster for almost no gain in physical fitness. Only a nut would recommend it.

Archery clubs and hunting are fine. Few students will take it to this level and in many schools no students will.

* * *

By the end of Monday's session, the teachers would be certified archery instructors. The program is affiliated with the National Archery in Schools Program and is modeled after a program in Kentucky. In three years, Kentucky's program went from a few students at one school to being a club sport with competition among schools and as many as 190,000 students involved in archery, said Olympian archer White.

That's nice. I wonder how many overweight archers there are? I wonder how many can't run a 10-minute mile without being completely winded and exhausted. Middle and high school students should be at the peak of their physical fitness. They aren't going to get there by having PE classes like archery. Every PE class should qualify as a complete workout to achieve and maintain top fitness. From Fitness Fundamentals (Developed by the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports):

Here are the amounts of activity necessary for the average, healthy person to maintain a minimum level of overall fitness. Included are some of the popular exercises for each category.

WARMUP - 5-10 minutes of exercises such as walking, slow jogging, knee lifts, arm circles or trunk rotations. Low intensity movements that stimulate movements to be used in the activity can also be included in the warmup.

MUSCULAR STRENGTH - a minimum of two 20-minute sessions per week that include exercises for all the major muscle groups. Lifting weights is the most effective way to increase strength.

MUSCULAR ENDURANCE - at least three 30-minute sessions each week that include exercises such as calisthenics, pushups, situps, pullups, and weight training for all the major muscle groups.

CARDIORESPIRATORY ENDURANCE - at least three 20-minute bouts of continuous aerobic (activity requiring oxygen) rhythmic exercise each week. Popular aerobic conditioning activities include brisk walking, jogging, swimming, cycling, rope-jumping, rowing, cross-country skiing, and some continuous action games like racquetball and handball.

FLEXIBILITY - 10-12 minutes of daily stretching exercises performed slowly without a bouncing motion. This can be included after a warmup or during a cooldown.

COOL DOWN - a minimum of 5-10 minutes of slow walking, low-level exercise, combined with stretching.

Folks, archery is a "cool down" exercise. It should never be the main exercise of a PE class.

In his job for the archery manufacturing company Brennan Industries and its sister company, Mathews, White travels throughout the United States, helping to begin and teach the archery programs.

Archery is mainly about jobs and sales. That's it.

Various archery groups and suppliers helped raise more than $32,000 to begin the program in Iowa schools, said Laverne Woock of Waterloo, project coordinator for the Iowa Archery in Schools Program.

The program budget gives the schools one or more sets of modern archery equipment. Each set is worth $4,500. Southeast Polk, if it implements the archery program, would receive more than $9,000 worth of equipment.

Public education is filled with these kinds of costs. It's fat that should be cut.

The curriculum emphasizes safety, proper stance and archery etiquette. The curriculum includes integrated curriculum information so math teachers, physics teachers and history teachers can be involved, White explained.

Arrow flight and bow flexing aren't so conceptually complex that students need to experience them to apply them to math, physics and history. Teachers are screaming around the country that we don't spend enough on education. We have higher priorities, and if we don't, then we are spending more than enough for education.

Brian Town, a Southeast Polk physical education teacher, is excited about teaching archery.

* * *

Town also likes the fact he can adapt the class for students with physical and mental disabilities. "Shooting a bow is something a student can do from a wheelchair," he said.

So, let the wheelchaired students do archery. But let's not reduce the fitness of all students to the level of fitness of those in wheelchairs.

White noted that Kentucky school officials found that archery helped students who might not otherwise be very involved in school become active.

Archery. The magic bullet. It does it all, doesn't it? I'll bet test scores improve in schools when archery is taught. I'll bet more students go into math and science.

Educators have got to stop using PE and sports as a crutch to attract students to boring classes. The right thing to do is to create academically rigorous courses that are compelling and cause students to want to come to school. See, e.g., The 21st Century Student and The best question comes from a third-grader.

"What I find with archery, although it can be a team sport in some aspects, is that it is very individual," White said. "Students can go out and have fun and not have to compete with other people."

That kind of makes archery a politically incorrect sport, doesn't it? On top of that, the purpose of bows and arrows, like bullets, was to kill. These are implements of violence. None of this bothers me, but I'm sure it bothers some.

Finally, I have absolutely nothing against archery. My beef isn't with archery. It's with PE teachers who are failing to keep our children fit and using flashy language like "lifelong skills" to justify it. It's not only unprofessional, it's a scam.

Superintendents get $2,000 consulting fees to hobnob with vendors

2004-07-19T19:59:00.000-04:00

By SCOTT PARKS / The Dallas Morning News

This problem is going to spiral out of control, just as it did with perks and pay-offs to military personnel in the 1960s and '70s. Ultimately, perks and "consulting fees" are added to the cost of education products, so the companies aren't paying these costs, but the taxpayers, who purchase the products for their schools, are paying them. The U.S. Navy has extensive rules about the financial relationships between military personnel and private sector vendors. Public schools need to get onboard. Now.

RANCHO MIRAGE, Calif. – The Resort, perched on a sandy hillside and surrounded by purple-hued mountains, sat baking under the desert sun last week.

Inside the luxury hotel on Frank Sinatra Drive, school superintendents from across the United States – including the Dallas-Fort Worth area – spent three days talking business with companies that want to sell their wares to school districts.

Textbook publishers, food-service vendors, computer manufacturers and many other companies all want to increase their share of the lucrative educational market. The school superintendents came to California's desert to help them.

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In return, the superintendents got an all-expenses-paid trip and a $2,000 consulting fee.

Why are the superintendents worth this kind of consulting fee? Simply because they have a great deal of control over deciding how billions of dollars of public money is spent. It's access to public money that makes superintendents worth $2,000 for three days, not their expertise in creating materials and programs for public schools. Public schools should require that all consulting fees paid to year-round school employees in excess of $25 a day be deposited with the district treasurer.

Business ethicists say the conference creates the appearance that companies and superintendents have formed an exclusive club with the potential to affect the contracts awarded by districts.

It goes well beyond this. In essence, superintendents are being paid to spend their time listening to one company's sales pitch as opposed to listening to another company's sales pitch not participating in the conference or doing something entirely different. The "consulting" rationale is, in almost every case, a partial, if not complete, deception. Moreover, it temps superintendents to spend their time doing activities for which they receive additional pay rather than working harder and longer on the problems covered by their public paychecks.

"I find it troubling that money from the private sector is finding its way into superintendents' pockets," said Diane Swanson, a business professor and founding chair of the Ethics Initiative at Kansas State University. "There is something wrong with blurring that boundary with a cozy group of people who may not be operating at arm's length."

* * *

Annette Griffin, superintendent of Carrollton-Farmers Branch ISD, said interacting with company executives gives her a chance to stay on the cutting edge of product developments that help students learn. She said she donates some of the money she earns to a scholarship fund.

Supers can stay on the cutting edge on their own time and without receiving $2,000 in pay. Donating "some" consulting fees to "a scholarship fund," which may even benefit her own children exclusively, doesn't fix the problem.

"I'm looking for the magic bullet," Dr. Griffin said during a brief interview in a meeting-room lobby overlooking the hotel pool.

Anyone who runs a school district and believes in magic bullets should be fired. It's the ultimate in lazy thinking.

* * *

In some states, the law requires superintendents to disclose their sources of income on publicly available questionnaires. Texas does not require financial disclosure for superintendents.

The Dallas Morning News has examined employment contracts for superintendents in 26 of the largest school districts in Texas. Twenty of them, including the contracts of Drs. Otto and Moses, contain language that allows outside employment. Dr. Griffin's contract also allows her to take outside employment, said John Tepper, president of the Carrollton-Farmers Branch school board.

Some contracts require superintendents to get school board approval before accepting consultancies. Others say the outside work cannot interfere with the superintendent's official duties.

Pots of money

Big dollars are at stake.

Most people view school districts as places that educate children. But they also can be viewed as big pots of taxpayer money with plenty of companies trying to get their share. The annual operating budget for Dallas ISD is $1 billion.

The U.S. Department of Education says the combined budgets for public school districts exceed $500 billion a year. Wal-Mart, the world's biggest retailer, is less than half that size. The gross domestic product of Argentina is less than $500 billion.

Education is the new military-industrial juggernaut. Spending on education in the 21st century is as spending on the military was in the 20th century.

A big chunk of a school district's budget goes for teacher and staff salaries. But another big chunk also goes for a multitude of contracts with private companies.

* * *

Privately owned

Educational Resource [sic, should be "Research"] and Development Institute Inc., a privately owned company in Grand Island, Neb., brings superintendents and company executives together twice a year: a summer conference and a winter conference.

* * *

Because ERDI is not publicly traded, little information about its finances is available. For example, Mr. Kneale declined to discuss how he structures the fees he charges his client companies.

* * *

In addition to paying all expenses for superintendents to attend the conference, ERDI pays up to $400 to defray the expenses for a spouse, Mr. Kneale said. Each superintendent gets a flat $2,000 fee to attend. A "full participant" who attends both summer and winter meetings earns $4,000 a year in fees, he said.

* * *

Karen Mortensen, executive education consultant with Sagebrush Corp., said membership in ERDI is well worth the fee. She said Sagebrush, which sells software and school library products, pays $22,000 a year to attend two conferences.

"What we get is dedicated time with key school leaders from across the country," she said. "And we get to mingle with them and other reps in social settings. It would not be acceptable to be pushing product while I'm at ERDI. I would be building relationships."

And the best way to push a product is by doing what? Altogether now, "Building relationships!"

* * *

Carol Wolf, another Harcourt Achieve vice president, initiated a conversation with the superintendents on an issue not on the agenda. How, she asked, does a sales rep determine whom to contact first in a district? All bureaucracies are different, and superintendents in large districts are notorious for not taking most vendor phone calls.

Which makes my earlier point that superintendents are being paid not for consultations but for accepting a sales call!

Suppose a superintendent routinely declines all sales calls. But suppose s/he also has a private consulting business with a publicly listed telephone number. When the sales rep. comes to school, s/he is politely rebuffed. The rep. does some checking, finds the telephone number for the super's private consulting business, and calls the super on that telephone line. The super reiterates her/his policy about not accepting sales calls but indicates a complete willingness to meet with the rep. in her/his capacity as a consultant at the standard hourly rate of $150 plus any expenses.

Is this ethical?

Suppose a year after starting his/her consulting service, the superintendent has earned a trival amount of income. S/he decides to change the long-standing policy of meeting with vendors by appointment to not meeting with them at all during working hours. As a result, vendors seek out the superintendent through his/her consulting services and income soars to $200,000 in the second year. How does this change your analysis, if at all?

* * * *

2004 winter and summer participants
Education Research & Development Institute documents obtained by The Dallas Morning News list the following school leaders as participants in its 2004 winter and summer programs. * * *

Arlene Ackerman, San Francisco Unified School District
Anthony Amato, New Orleans Public Schools

Brian Benzel, Spokane (Wash.) Public Schools
Ken Bird Westside (Neb.) Community Schools
Ed Brand, Sweetwater Union (Calif.) High School District
Ken Burnley, Detroit Public Schools

Billy Cannaday Jr., Chesterfield County (Va.) Public Schools
Rudy Castruita, San Diego Office of Education

Gerald Dawkins, Saginaw (Mich.) City Schools
Ken Dragseth, Edina (Minn.) Public Schools
Debra Duvall, Mesa (Ariz.) School District

Jim Easton, Lafayette Parish (La.) Public Schools
Mark Edwards, Henrico County (Va.) Public Schools
Barbara Erwin, Scottsdale (Ariz.) Unified

Greg Firn, Milford (Conn.) Public Schools
Steve Farrar, Lincoln Unified (Stockton, Calif.)
Mike Flanagan, executive director, Michigan Association of School Administrators
Karen Forys, Northshore (Wash.) School District
Alton Frailey, Cincinnati Public Schools
John Fryer, Duval County (Fla.) Public Schools

George Garcia, Boulder Valley (Colo.) Public School District
Carlos Garcia, Clark County (Nev.) School District
David Gordon, Elk Grove (Calif.) Unified School District
Peter Gorman, Tustin (Calif.) Unified School District
Carmen Granto, Niagara Falls (N.Y.) City School District
Terry Grier, Guilford County (N.C.) Schools
Annette Griffin, Carrollton-Farmers Branch ISD
Barb Grohe, Kent (Wash.) Public Schools

Bill Habermehl, Orange County (Calif.) Department of Education
Jim Hager, Washoe County (Nev.) School District
Joe Hairston, Baltimore County (Md.) Schools
Beverly Hall, Atlanta Public Schools
Bill Harrison, Cumberland (N.C.) County Schools
Patricia Harvey, St. Paul (Minn.) Public Schools
Howard Hinesley, Pinellas County (Fla.) School District
Peter Horoschak, South Orange-Maplewood (N.J.) School District
Sandy Husk, Clarksville-Montgomery Schools

Carol Johnson, Memphis Public Schools

John Kriekard, Paradise Valley (Ariz.) School District
Nadine Kujawa, Aldine ISD

Michael Lannon, St. Lucie (Fla.) County Public Schools
Pam Lannon, Lake County (Fla.) Schools
Mary Leiker, Kentwood (Mich.) Public Schools
Earl Lennard, Hillsborough County (Fla.) School District
Dave Long, Riverside County (Calif.) Office of Education

Ben Marlin, Collier County (Fla.) District School Board
Elfreda Massie, District of Columbia Public Schools (former interim)
Larry Maw, San Marcos (Calif.) Unified School District
Max McGee, Wilmette (Ill.) School District
Bill McKinney, Region IV Education Service Center (Houston)
Frank McKinzie, Elmwood Park (Ill.) School District
Gail McKinzie, Indian Prairie (Ill.) School District
Ray McMullen, Department of Defense Education Activity
Maggie Mejia, Sacramento (Calif.) City Unified School District
Leonard Merrell, Katy ISD
Hector Montenegro, Ysleta ISD
Mike Moses, Dallas ISD
Monte Moses, Cherry Creek (Colo.) School District
Jim Murphy, executive director, New Jersey Association of School Administrators

Connie Neale, School District U-46 (Ill.)
Ruben Olivarez, San Antonio ISD
Doug Otto, Plano ISD

Stan Paz, Tucson (Ariz.) Unified School District
Dennis Peterson, Minnetonka (Minn.) School District
Lane Plugge, Iowa City Community School District
Gerrita Postlewait, Horry County (S.C.) Schools

Jim Rickabaugh, Whitefish Bay (Wis.) School District
Stewart Roberson, Hanover County (Va.) Public Schools

Stan Scheer, Littleton (Colo.) Public Schools
Rick Schneider, Pasadena ISD
Darlene Schottle, School District Five (Mont.)
Althea Serrant, U.S. Department of Education, Region 2
John Simpson, Norfolk (Va.) Public Schools
Kevin Singer, Grapevine-Colleyville ISD (recently left to lead Manheim Township (Pa.) School District)
Dennis Smith, Placentia Yorba-Linda (Calif.) Unified
Keith Sockwell, Northwest ISD
Tony Stansberry, Lee’s Summit (Mo.) School District
Jim Surratt, Klein ISD

John Thompson, Pittsburgh (Pa.) Public Schools
Frank Till, Broward County (Fla.) Public Schools

Doris Walker, Clover Park (Wash.) School District
Gene White, Washington Township (Ind.) Metropolitan School District
Robert G. Witten, Central Susquehanna Intermediate Unit 16 (Pa.)

Alvin Wilbanks, Gwinnett County (Ga.) School District
Clayton Wilcox, East Baton Rouge Parish (La.) Public Schools
Joseph Wise, Christina (Del.) School District

SOURCE: ERDI documents

AFT 2003 Salary Survey Misleading

2004-07-15T20:26:00.000-04:00

AFT Salary Survey Press Release w/Links to Data

The AFT is crying over the 3.3% average salary increase given to teachers between 2001-02 and 2002-03. Never mind that during these years few employees saw pay increases this high. In fact, many workers saw their wages or their jobs cut, and the vast majority received pay increases of 2% or less.

The AFT reports, "The 2002-03 average teacher salary was $45,771. . . ." The AFT doesn't say whether it is reporting total salary or base salary. Based on the numbers and the incentive of the AFT to make teachers look as poor as possible, I'd say the data excludes salary add-ons, which typically add at least 5% to base pay and as much as 20%, particularly in places like Washington that have TRI pay supplements.

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Twice each year, the public is treated to reports by the NEA and AFT about how poorly teachers are paid. Never do you see other professionals in the news endlessly bellyaching about their salaries. When's the last time you read about nurses, accountants, public defenders, engineers, auditors, chemists, foresters, economists, librarians, or any of a hundred other professionals who have government jobs, report their national average salaries and complain about them?

For reference, the 2002-03 average teacher salary of $45,771 is $3,777 (9%) above the national 1999 median household income of $41,994. In other words, on average, the (base salary?) income from one teacher amounts to the median total household income of U.S. families. And this says nothing about teacher benefits and pensions, which are far more generous, on average, than those earned by private sector workers.

So, what does the AFT have to say about the sorry state of teacher pay?

"Exorbitant health insurance costs are taking an intolerable bite out of already inadequate teacher salaries," AFT secretary-treasurer Edward J. McElroy warned following release of the AFT survey. "Even as teachers are being asked to do more, compensation packages are nothing short of insulting and fail to take account of growing healthcare and other out-of pocket costs to teachers."

The AFT provides no data to support the assertion that rising health insurance costs are "taking an intolerable bite" out of teacher salaries. If the data showed that, I presume the AFT would publish the data, but it hasn't. Forgetting (1) that teachers, on average, contribute about half as much to the cost of their health insurance as other workers, (2) that teachers haven't been asked to increase their contributions as much as other workers, on average, and (3) that health insurance is simply salary paid in-kind which must be earned, health insurance contracts belong to employees, just like car insurance, and just because employers have traditionally covered the cost increases in one but not the other, doesn't mean that workers aren't responsible for paying the increased costs of both.

The AFT salary survey reports starting salaries and mean salaries. Unlike its 2003 Public Employees Compensation Survey on the salaries of other public employees, it does not report the maximum salaries of teachers. If top salaries were appallingly low, you can bet the AFT would publish them. It never does because it doesn't want the public to know what the top pay for teachers is.

In the following chart, I have combined the AFT's tables for starting and mean salaries. I have estimated the average top salary by state by subtracting the starting salary from the mean salary and adding it to the mean salary. On average, I'd be surprised if the estimate is off by as much as 15%. Keeping in mind that the AFT salary survey probably excludes thousands of dollars in pay for "add-ons," here's the AFT numbers, along with my estimate of top pay:

State	Starting Salary	Mean Salary	Est Top Salary
California	$34,805	$55,693	$76,581
Michigan	33,596	54,020	74,444
Connecticut	28,848	53,962	79,076
New Jersey	35,673	53,872	72,071
District of Columbia	35,260	53,194	71,128
New York	35,259	53,017	70,775
Rhode Island	31,025	52,879	74,733
Massachusetts	33,168	51,942	70,716
Illinois	34,522	51,496	68,470
Pennsylvania	32,897	51,425	69,953
Maryland	32,939	50,410	67,881
Delaware	33,811	49,821	65,831
Alaska	37,401	49,694	61,987
Oregon	32,804	47,463	62,122
Ohio	28,866	45,515	62,164
Georgia	33,919	45,414	56,909
Indiana	29,144	44,966	60,788
Washington	29,118	44,961	60,804
Minnesota	28,600	44,745	60,890
Virginia	31,414	42,778	54,142
Hawaii	34,000	42,768	51,536
Colorado	32,063	42,679	53,295
North Carolina	27,572	42,411	57,250
Vermont	25,240	42,038	58,836
New Hampshire	26,479	41,909	57,339
Nevada	32,169	41,795	51,421
Wisconsin	27,277	41,617	55,957
South Carolina	28,672	40,362	52,052
Florida	30,491	40,281	50,071
Texas	31,874	39,972	48,070
Arizona	23,548	39,955	56,362
Idaho	26,072	39,784	53,496
Alabama	31,000	39,524	48,048
Tennessee	29,045	39,186	49,327
Maine	24,631	38,518	52,405
West Virginia	26,692	38,497	50,302
Kentucky	28,886	38,486	48,086
Utah	27,135	38,268	49,401
Kansas	26,855	38,030	49,205
Iowa	26,967	38,000	49,033
Nebraska	27,127	37,896	48,665
Wyoming	25,694	37,789	49,884
Missouri	28,075	37,641	47,207
Arkansas	24,972	37,536	50,100
Louisiana	29,288	37,116	44,944
New Mexico	28,120	37,054	45,988
Montana	23,052	35,754	48,456
Mississippi	26,120	35,135	44,150
North Dakota	23,591	33,869	44,147
Oklahoma	27,684	33,277	38,870
South Dakota	24,311	32,414	40,517

Now, despite NY's lowly ranking of #6 in this table, average teacher salaries in NY are the highest in the nation, exceeding the national average by 34%. This is based on unbiased data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Neither the AFT nor the NEA ever compare the salaries of public school teachers to those of teachers in the private sector, who are typically not unionized. The AFT does report, "State employees with collective bargaining rights earn salaries up to 63 percent higher than their colleagues in states without collective bargaining . . . ." You can be assured that unionized public sector teachers are earning a lot more than private sector teachers. Taxpayers are paying a huge premium in salaries, benefits and pensions to public sector teachers without getting much, if anything, in return.

As mentioned above, the AFT did a salary comparison between teachers and other public employees in 2003. The following table shows the results of that survey.

Job Title	Mean Salary
Psychologist Sr/Lead	$60,740
Environmental Eng Sr/Ld	59,517
Economist Sr/Lead	57,638
Programmer/Anal Sr/Ld	54,243
Architect	53,153
Systems Analyst	51,493
Educational Specialist	50,839
Psychologist	50,465
Civil Engineer	50,107
Geologist Sr/Lead	49,852
Tax Auditor Sr/Lead	49,403
Environmental Engineer	47,972
Chemist Sr/Lead	46,965
Accountant Sr/Lead	46,228
Economist	45,719
Class & Comp Analyst	45,013
Forensic Scientist	44,638
Teacher (State)	44,508
RN	44,345
Programmer/Analyst	44,145
Buyer Sr/Lead	42,715
Personnel Analyst	42,437
Bridge Inspector	42,164
Financial Examiner	41,679
Biologist	41,591
Forester	40,594
Tax Auditor	40,110
Geologist	40,053
Accountant	38,921
Employee Benefits Analyst	38,798
Parole Officer	38,790
Chemist	38,772
Librarian	38,638
Social Worker	38,355
Correctional Officer Sr/Ld	37,960
Research Analyst	36,754
Employment Counselor	36,526
Buyer	36,091
Substance Abuse Counselor	35,946
Agricultural Inspector	35,493
Family Support Specialist	33,482
LPN	31,903
Correctional Officer	31,580
Data Processing Clerk	24,386

These jobs vary by college degrees required and actual hours worked (despite what job descriptions say). The data also do not reflect the ability of teachers to supplement their income by "volunteering" to teach summer courses, to coach or advise teams and clubs, or to attend teacher development training on non-contract days.

Notice that although most librarians work year-round and are required to have a master's degree, while most teachers need only a bachelor's degree, the mean salary of librarians is $5,870 below teachers. The approximately 15% lower salaries of public librarians (and social workers) comes as close as anything to representing the economic value of the political advantage of working in a job that requires nearly all children to consume the services of the profession. Were all children required to use the services of social workers and librarians, they, too, would have the political clout to increase their salaries to be on par with teachers.

Whatever else you might conclude from this table, it's extremely difficult to support the AFT claim that teacher salaries are "inadequate," and that "compensation packages are nothing short of insulting."

Overall, the AFT and NEA salary surveys swamp readers with a deluge of data calculated to make teacher compensation look as small as possible. The portion of the compensation picture revealed is as misleading as it is informative.

My recommendation is for readers to find a public school website near where they live that provides the current salary schedule, a list of salary "add-ons," and a list of benefits, and then use that data in the Lifetime Earnings Calculator to see how much public school teachers in their area are really making and to draw their own conclusions about the adequacy of teacher compensation.

Class size just one of influences on student learning

2004-07-13T12:46:00.000-04:00

Peter Berger / Gazette

Peter Berger teaches English in Weathersfield, Vt. Read more Peter Berger articles.

Everyone has heard the old grandfather's tale about trudging 10 miles to school, uphill both ways. This is accompanied by the image of the antique schoolmarm, teaching 57 kids while she feeds the woodstove with her free hand.

Exaggerations aside, typical class sizes are substantially smaller than they used to be. Where they're not, many experts urge that they should be.

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Opponents of reducing the size of classes recall that as recently as the 1950s, 30 students in a high school class was typical and viewed as educationally practical. They assert that reductions in class size over the past 40 years have not yielded proportional improvements in student performance.

Peter is rewriting history. As recently as 1970, class sizes of 30 to 35 students were typical in high schools. In 1970, 45.5 million students attended public schools, compared to 46.9 million in 2000. These students had 2.2 million teachers, compared to 3.7 million in 2000. While class size is not the same as the pupil-teacher ratio, they are correlated. In 1970, we had 20.7 pupils per teacher, compared to 12.7 in 2000. In 1950, we had 25.1 million students and 920,000 teachers, or 27.3 pupils per teacher. The further back in time you go, the less likely it was that a teacher would be doing something other than teaching in a classroom filled to capacity.

They also cite schools in Japan and other industrialized nations where classes are larger and test scores are higher than ours.

Any broad comparison involving nations and decades is potentially misleading. Clearly, a lot more distinguishes the United States from Japan than student-teacher ratios. And a lot more happened in American schools between my fifth and 50th birthdays than smaller classes.

In addition, class size isn't the same as student-teacher ratios. Owing to the expansion of special education and social services, you'll find more adults in school buildings today. That doesn't necessarily mean you'll find fewer students in each classroom.

Too many experts

The surplus of variables has led to a surplus of expert conclusions. Advocates of class reduction, citing Tennessee's STAR Project, contend that students in small classes consistently scored higher on achievement and basic skills tests."

This is oversimplified. (See, The Truth About Class Size.) The research shows that some students in some kinds of classroom environments benefit from smaller class sizes and those benefits are greater for some than for others. In general, students who have more difficulty learning and who are in disruptive classrooms see their test scores in some subjects improve by about one-half a standard deviation when repeatedly placed in elementary classes of 17 students over several years. Half a standard deviation amounts to about a three- to six-point improvement on tests, or 3 to 6 more questions right out of 100--enough, for example, to move a student from a B- to a B or B+. For the students performing in the top third of the class, their scores improve very little, if any, compared to learning in disruptive classrooms with 30 students.

To improve learning for the bottom two-thirds of the class, when reducing class sizes from 25 to 17, a 47% increase in the number of teachers and nearly the same increase in per-pupil spending is required. The research has nothing to say about whether similar gains can be achieved through alternative means that are far less expensive. For example, a ten minute daily regimen of student massages used in the United Kingdom, where elementary students give each other massages, may reduce disruption and improve learning to the same extent at significantly lower costs.

Smaller class sizes have three important negative consequences. First, the increase in the number of teachers means digging further down into the talent pool for teachers. As teacher talent declines, so does learning, even in small classes. Second, the high costs of reducing class sizes forces students in the top third of the class to consume education resources in ways that do not benefit them. Class size reduction has high opportunity costs for these students. Third, when class sizes get to 17 students, "there isn't enough diversity for students to make different types of friends and develop socially."

Moreover, reducing class sizes for gym, recess, lunch, etc., makes no sense, but that's what we do when we reduce the size of all classes. In Japan, the size of classes are reduced only for the core subjects. Our implementation of small class sizes is terribly inefficient. We do it for all students--good learners and poor learners--in all classes--whether disruptive or not--for the entire school day. We do this primarily out of "fairness," but there is nothing "fair" about wasting education resources that could be used more effectively. The primary beneficiaries of "fairness" are teachers, who want equivalent workloads. Teachers are simply unwilling to have some teach classes of 30 well-behaved, high-performing students, while others in the same grade teach 17 students, even though the practice would free up resources that could be spent with greater benefit to the 30 well-behaved, high-performing students.

Finally, when it comes to reducing effective class size, nothing beats the effective class size of 1, which is the hallmark of schools designed to teach The 21st Century Student.

Skeptics prefer a 1998 study compiled by Eric Hanushek, an economics professor. He argues that STAR produced benefits primarily at the kindergarten level, and that overall there is "no relationship between class size and student performance."

He concludes that "achievement for the typical student will be unaffected" by smaller classes and that the resulting increase in cost will be "unaccompanied by achievement gains."

Two important points need to be made. First, we have very poor tools for determining whether learning is improving in ways that make a practical difference at the end of a K-12 education. In other words, the research is preliminary and inconclusive. Despite this, teachers have latched on to smaller class sizes with a religious fervor, primarily because it benefits teachers and unions regardless of whether it benefits students.

Second, it's interesting that teachers who oppose high-stakes state testing and say, "There is so much more to learning that cannot be assessed by a paper-and-pencil test," completely forget themselves when the testing done in some studies shows that reducing class size improves student learning. These results are accepted at face value without any caveats about the limitations of tests in revealing true learning and knowledge.

Positioned in the middle, Johns Hopkins' Robert Slavin notes that shrinking classes from 22 to 18 probably won't make a big difference. Not surprisingly, reducing from 30 to 18 will probably "make a much larger difference."

Following a 1996 class size initiative, California's Public Policy Institute reported improved scores for students "who had the benefit of both a small class and a veteran teacher."

Unfortunately, reducing class size often meant hiring inexperienced teachers for the additional classrooms. Their students' scores declined, so the net result was "no appreciable effect" on statewide averages.

Here's a review of the literature on class size reduction.

Other factors

California's experience demonstrates how misleading averages can be and how easy it is to discount or ignore factors affecting student achievement.

According to the National Center for Policy Analysis, the signal difference between Japanese and American classrooms isn't class size. The problem for American classrooms is "student misbehavior," coupled with the fact that "many public schools do not allow teachers to use effective methods of controlling students."

Right. Reducing class size is not about improving learning through greater teacher contact. It's about improving learning by reducing disruptions. There are far less expensive ways to reduce disruptions. See Peter's article, Disruptive students need booting out, not 'time out'.

When Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., voiced her approval of France's school system, The New York Times observed that "many American parents probably would not be satisfied with the regimentation and discipline needed to make large classes productive."

See, e.g., Learning Is Rich at a Poor School in Mexico. U.S. students simply don't have the social and cultural experiences of students from past decades. Most have not been required to sit quietly in church for long hours. They have not been raised to be "seen but not heard." The lack of these dramatically decrease the abilities of students to learn in classroom settings. It's a core reason why education must be re-formed to teach The 21st Century Student.

I've taught junior high classes as large as 30 students. Conditions vary from group to group, but in my experience, 22 marks the frontier where class size begins to interfere with learning. Fifteen to 20 is ideal.

I have no data to justify my magic numbers, but I can testify that the number of students in the room makes a difference.

The teaching strategies needed to teach 30 students are different from the ones needed to teach 15 students. When class sizes were 30 or more, teachers knew what these strategies were and how to use them for effective learning. Primarily, these strategies use a combination of small-group peer learning, regular testing to ensure students are doing the work and accurate grading with no aversion to giving Cs, Ds and Fs. In larger classes, students have more of the responsibility for learning, and that's not a bad thing.

Class sizes of 15 students permits teacher-centered learning and increased personal contact. The style of teaching often changes in smaller classes--with both good and bad consequences for student learning habits. It doesn't necessarily improve a student's eduction, but it often makes teachers feel better, especially the teachers who feel better when they have more control.

It affects how many behavioral brushfires I have to extinguish. It affects how many papers I have to read and grade, how thoroughly I can comment on them, and how quickly I can return them.

Class size reduction is primarily a teacher quality of worklife issue. Professionals don't let the quantity of papers affect the thoroughness of review and commentary. Moreover, teachers in decades past read and commented on far more papers than today's teachers. See, e.g., Individual help of teacher’s red pencil now sadly missing and 2 Rs Left in High School. As Peter notes, there are "other factors" that affect learning, and among them are the amount of work modern teachers are willing to do for the dramatically higher real wages they earn.

It affects how many chances students have to participate in discussions, to test their knowledge, and to hone their skills.

It shouldn't and it needn't.

Many other factors influence learning and achievement. Hanushek holds that "the quality of the teacher is more important than class size." I'd add that the effort and intention of each student is also more critical.

Score a three-pointer for Peter. Despite all the research claiming teacher quality is most important or that parental participation is most important, the inescapable, irrefutable truth is that nothing is more important in the learning process than the effort and intention of the student. Students driven to learn can do extremely well even in extremely poor schools or with extremely incompetent or lazy teachers. Students who are disconnected from learning learn little, even when class sizes are 15.

The most critical issue in education is increasing individual student effort and intention. To do that, you have to understand The Root Cause of Education Mediocrity. And then you have to re-form public schools to teach The 21st Century Student.

But the existence of arguably more crucial factors doesn't give us license to pretend that class size isn't crucial, too.

Class size reduction is an expensive bullet with insufficient magic. There are better ways to achieve even better results. Unfortunately, teachers are fixated on the plan that has the greatest benefits for them, not for the students. See, e.g., Reform Blockers. This is just another in a long series of mediocre reform fads. But this one will not fade so quickly because teachers like the benefits it provides to them.

Parents, not schools, must teach kids to read

2004-07-06T00:05:00.000-04:00

By LYNN STRATTON / St. Petersburg (FL) Times

When I was in first grade, my teacher made me take a note home to my parents. When my father read it, an expression I remember as amusement crossed his face.

Then he told me very seriously that I probably should not discuss in school the books I'd been reading at home. My crime, in this particular incident, had been using the term "whorehouse" in class.

My father and I agreed that I would keep my reading to myself during school hours, although of course I could continue to read what I pleased, including Gone With the Wind, the book from which I had learned the unmentionable word. I tell this story not to show that I was particularly smart, but that my father was. I had started reading at 3 because he'd taught me to read, as his mother had taught him at the same age.

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My father never went to college; his mother was a teacher, but she never went to college, either. She taught in what was literally a one-room schoolhouse in the coal fields of Kentucky, with children of every age crammed into a tiny ramshackle building beside a creek.

But my father taught me to read, and his mother taught him.

I've been thinking about these things now that school is out and many parents are wondering how best to help their children with their summer reading lists. Here's why: We have convinced ourselves that only those with a degree in education, particularly those with specialized training and certification in reading education, can teach our children to read.

The specialized knowledge educators have isn't about the content and skills K-12 students must learn. Everyone should know that content. The specialized knowledge is mostly about classroom management, teaching children with special needs and a little bit of testing and curriculum sequencing . . . none of which is necessary for parents to know in teaching their children to read or learn almost any other elementary skill.

Yet I know that can't be true. My own experience tells me that. And countless parents over the centuries, both here and abroad, have taught others, both children and adults, to read. Although it can lead to rocket science, teaching someone to read isn't, in fact, rocket science. If it were, no one would have learned to read before the advent of certification and specialization, and clearly they did. Teachers colleges as we know them are a product of the 20th century - but still, Americans learned to read.

We are impressed by credentials. The people to whom we entrust our young are certified, we say; they are experts. How then to explain the successes of children who are homeschooled? Many not only keep up with their peers in the government-sponsored educational system, they often surpass them in reading ability and other skills. Some even go on to attend quite adequate colleges.

Parents are, and should be, their children's first teachers. I'm afraid that many of us have forgotten that, even though we don't hesitate to teach our children to speak, eat, play, walk or ride a bike. It is possible, I imagine, that some parents are simply so burdened with keeping the family going that it becomes easier to pass the chore on to professionals. Other parents, I imagine, may feel inadequate to the task, particularly those whose educational backgrounds may not include college, or even a high school diploma.

But we are putting the most important responsibility a parent or guardian can have into the hands of people who have many other children to attend to in our often-overcrowded schools.

Overcrowded? Nary a school in the country has as many students in elementary classrooms as teachers did during the 1960s and 1970s. Many have half as many students. The problem isn't too many children; it's teachers using a lot of their time to help slower students. Teaching to the middle has been replaced with teaching to the bottom. Why would any parent want this for their child?

We put it in the hands of - no offense meant to those teachers who take their jobs seriously and truly wish to help our kids - people unrelated to us, people whose commitment to our children is, by necessity, less strong than our own.

Make no mistake: Teaching a person to read is an enormous responsibility. Reading helps shape who we become and what we think. In handing over that incredibly important task to others, we allow those others to choose for us the subjects that we think about. We allow them, to a great degree, to shape what we think about those subjects.

The very act of reading is such a strong influence on who and what we become that even now I am grateful to my parents for not leaving the task to my otherwise wonderful, well-meaning teachers. During the years I taught writing and literature to college students, I saw a very clear difference between the students who read and those who didn't. The readers were overwhelmingly better writers and communicators. They were overwhelmingly more skillful in expressing their ideas; they were more curious, more imaginative. I have no qualms about stating this as fact, because I saw it consistently, wherever I taught, whomever I taught.

Yet we allow ourselves to forget the importance of reading, then we wring our hands when our children do poorly on reading tests, when they are held back in third grade because, by then, their own language is very nearly foreign to them. And we forget that, for good or ill, children emulate their parents. After working all night, my father would come home and make coffee in an old percolator. Afterward, he would stand at the kitchen table and read until it was time for the rest of us to get up. Clearly, if my father spent so much time doing it, it had to be important.

If you wish to help your children be successful in school - and more to the point, successful in life - read where they can see you. Read often. Read widely. Even if you don't enjoy it, even if you have other things to do, even if you're tired.

If you want to leave a legacy for your children, the love of reading is, I think, the most important gift you can bestow. Our schools can't do it all, and those who leave this job to our educational system are handicapping their children in a terrible way. Their children most likely will never catch up to the kids who come to school knowing how to read and how to learn. They almost certainly won't catch up to the ones who come to school not only knowing how to read, but loving it.

Given the difficulty that so many children are having with reading, I am grateful beyond words that my parents left me to my own devices after having provided me with the simple tools needed to read, on my own, a book. Or an article in a magazine. Or a story in a newspaper. Yes, my teachers routinely scolded them, but my parents held their own and refused to back down, refused to allow others to dictate what I could read and when.

And they accepted the responsibility of being their children's primary teachers. When that happens on a larger scale, we as a society will be the better for it.

I agree. But one must ask, "If parents must teach their children to read, why are we paying teachers up to $100,000 a year (including benefits)? Isn't that just a touch ridiculous.

And it's not just reading. I had to teach my child math in a school district that was a National Blue Ribbon School of Excellence!

And it gets even more ridiculous. If you teach your child to read and do math and your child is above grade level, the reward teachers will lavish on your child for your hard work is to IGNORE him or her while s/he helps out other students who aren't doing as well! Eventually, your child will be leveled by the great equalizer of public education. It's insanity and it has nothing to do with education. System needs trump student needs.

To get parents more involved with reading and math, here's what I suggest: Test students for their reading and math levels upon entering kindergarten. Whatever level the child tests at, the parents get paid what the teachers would have been paid to get the child to that level of performance. If the child is reading at the second grade level, the parent is paid what the district would have paid a teacher for reading instruction to the second-grade level.

Then, place the child in a second-grade level reading course.

The same goes for math.

All of this would be so easy to do if we had schools that could teach The 21st Century Student.

Lynn Stratton, a St. Petersburg Times database editor, taught writing at the University of South Florida for 15 years.

Time for a moratorium on charter schools

2004-06-29T00:14:00.000-04:00

A Times Union Letter to the Editor

When medical science develops a new wonder drug, it is not allowed on the market before undergoing years of careful testing. I wish the same cautious approach were taken with charter schools.

I wish the same cautious approach had been taken with government schools. Charter schools are public schools. They are no more or less experimental than government schools. Charter schools are staffed with "highly qualified" teachers, just like government schools. There is not a single charter school in the whole state that produces results as bad as New York's worst public school. The call for delay and careful testing is about union hostility toward charter schools and politics, not science. Why don't teachers' unions tell the public their real reasons for wanting to slow growth in charter schools? To publicize good-sounding but disingenuous rationales is manipulative.

Your June 20 editorial was right about stopping the mad rush to flood the city of Albany with charter schools. Let's face it, charter schools are not an educational panacea; they are the institutions where politics and education converge.

Government schools are no panacea, either. Politics and education are far more intertwined in government schools than in charter schools. This is another spurious argument designed to conceal the important reasons for NEA opposition to charter schools.

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Charter schools were born out of a political deal in 1998, in which the governor held up a legislative pay raise until a charter bill was passed. Once the bill was passed, the charter school forces went to town, particularly focusing their efforts on communities like Albany in which the schools were already underfunded by the state and overextended by the needs of an increasingly poor population.

Let's see, charter schools were born illegitimately, therefore their growth should be stopped. Great argument. The truth is that charter schools were born out of the repeated failure of government schools to produce the kind of education outcomes desired for the money spent on them.

Charter schools prey on poor communities with underfunded schools. According to US Census data on schools, Albany City Schools are in the 96th percentile, nationally, in per-pupil spending for instruction. Only 508 school districts out of the 14,276 listed in the 2002 school spending census having data on spending for instruction spend more than Albany's $8,983 per pupil. Would that Albany's public schools turned in academic performance in the 96th percentile!

Charter schools locate in places like Albany for many reasons, but chief among them is the fact that so much money is being spent with such poor results that the probability of failing is as close to zero as you can get in the private sector. Albany has the lowest mean scores on 4th and 8th grade state exams of any of the 41 school districts in our area.

So, what does NEA-NY VP Matt Jacobs want to do? He wants to stop charter school growth in Albany! How's that good for kids? This year, a Long Island charter school, with nearly all African-American and Hispanic students and more than half qualifying for free or reduced school meals, had 87% score proficient or higher on the 4th grade ELA exam. Know what percentage of students scored proficient or higher in Albany? 44.4%

Yep. We'd better stop charter school growth and make them undergo years of careful testing.

I'd like to know how supposedly smart people can say such stupid things. The NEA is grasping at straws. If this is the best argument it can make for stopping charter schools in NY, the unions are clearly desperate to save the system which they have learned to milk for everything they can get to line their own pockets at the expense of students.

The high monopoly prices paid in Albany makes it possible for charter schools to educate children better, for less money, while making a profit!

So far, there's not much to show for the charter school experiment in Albany or across our state. Occasional flashes of excellence are overshadowed by average and below-average results.

How's that different from public schools? Even if charter schools produce no better results than government schools, if they do it for less money with better satisfied parents who participate more in education--which they do--then what's to complain about? That sounds like improvement to me.

The Regent's draft report on "The Educational Effectiveness of the Charter School Approach" noted substantial increases by charter schools on state assessments with no adverse fiscal impact on public schools! While charter schools have existed a mere 5 years in New York, government schools in their current configuration are 100 years old. It's nothing short of phenomenal that such young institutions with relatively inexperienced teaching staffs can replicate public school results in such a short time.

It's time for a moratorium on charter schools. Let the political forces pushing them take a breather and let's, as a state, look at the results they're producing. Then we can decide if we are moving in the right direction.

The royal "we." I'd like to know if the "we" include students and parents or just educator unions and their bought-off politicians? There is absolutely no justification for slowing the growth of New York charter schools, and the distorted misinformation provided by Matt proves it. If there were a good reason for stopping charter schools, I'm sure Matt would have mentioned it.

It's not what the charter entrepreneurs want, but it's what New York's students need.

It's that pathetic? What about the government school entrepreneurs who are extremely successful at pulling inflation-busting sums of money into their personal wallets? As pointed out by a retired teacher, The quality of education falls as teacher pay increases.

The NEA is a teachers' union, not a students' union. IF it really knew what students' need, no one would have ever come up with the idea for charter schools. The NEA's arguing against charter school growth is like a conglomerate of gold mine operators lobbying against the opening of a small up-start gold mine because it will hurt the environment. Pay no attention to the environmental damage done by their mines.

One might suspect that protecting the price of gold, not the environment, excites their passion for the status quo.

MATT JACOBS
NEA/NY Vice President
Albany

Don't expect us to 'roll over'

2004-06-28T00:05:00.000-04:00

A Boulder (CO) Daily Camera Letter to the Editor

It's been a difficult school year in the Boulder Valley School District. Teacher morale is low. After the passage of the teachers' contract, I was ready to "move on," hopeful for a collaborative environment next year and time to plan for the restructuring of the salary schedule, without negotiations looming overhead. However, the article, "BVSD, teachers look to repair relationships, improve morale," in the June 13 Daily Camera immediately stopped the "moving on" I was trying to accomplish. Instead, school board president Julie Phillips' words fueled my frustration.

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On one hand she states, "We believe teachers make a tremendous contribution to our kids and our schools" and, "This board is probably the most pro-teacher that I've ever known." And on the other hand, she says, "All the walkout did was really convince the board that teachers didn't care about kids." Teachers wouldn't have used annual leave days in unison had the district not offered us a contract that drastically reduced our career earnings. Teachers felt backed into a corner, so we felt we had no alternative.

Here's what the June 13 article said:

Board president Julie Phillips said repeatedly hearing that the district doesn't care about teachers is frustrating. The board would love to pay teachers more, she said, but it isn't willing to increase class sizes or cut programs to do it.

"We believe teachers make a tremendous contribution to our kids and our schools," she said. "This board is probably the most pro-teacher that I've ever known."

Several board members also expressed anger at the walkouts, which they said violated the teachers' contract and disrupted classes.

"All the walkout did was really convince the board that teachers didn't care about kids," Phillips said.

Ms. Phillips stated that the board was not willing to cut programs to increase teacher salaries. Quality teachers make the difference in children's learning, not programs. Part of the Referendum 3A money taxpayers approved was to increase teacher salaries in order to "attract and maintain quality teachers." That money isn't being used to honor taxpayers' wishes.

No matter how much you pay current teachers, their quality isn't going to improve. Increasing teacher pay to attract high quality teachers makes sense if that pay goes to the new, high quality teachers.

Beyond that, teachers over-value their own services. The most important factor in learning is the student, not the teacher. Students who have access to the programs they need can, if they are motivated, learn nearly just as much with poor teachers as with great teachers. Why? Because learning is a student activity, not a teaching activity.

90% of what teachers teach comes directly from textbooks. Students who have been taught how to learn can learn from the textbooks and from Internet resources no matter how bad their teachers are. But if the school doesn't offer the course or program at all, then students are highly likely not to do academic work in the areas left off the curriculum.

Moreover, K-12 teachers are college graduates. If they endeavor to always do their best, they will always produce a learning environment adequate for a K-12 level of understanding. If they can't, they have no business teaching and certainly do not deserve bigger pay raises.

Something else in the article bothered me. Superintendent George Garcia said the difficulties with negotiations "came down to money, not negotiating style." During the '90s, Colorado was benefiting from a rich economy, but there was little money for schools. Salary increases were zero percent to two percent percent for several years. Because our negotiations were collaborative and interest-based at that time, there was not the contentious atmosphere that has been prevalent since Dr. Garcia came to Boulder.

Just stop it. I wonder if it is at all possible that teachers caught up in the years when salary increases were 2% or less?

Let's look at the facts from the US Census School Data. Here's the 1992 and 2002 data for this poor teacher's school district, Boulder Valley:

Year	Enroll- ment	Expendi- tures	Wages for Instruction	Benefits For Instruction	(W + B)/pupil	2002 Dollars	Increase/pupil
1992	22,534	$127 M	$50.8 M	$10.7 M	$2,729	$3,493
2002	27,963	$231 M	$93.8 M	$16.7 M	$3,952	$3,952	13.10%

As the table shows, instructional spending per-pupil has increased 13.1% faster than the rate of inflation. Part of this increase may be related to reducing class sizes in BVSD. Let's assume that BVSD reduced K-3 class sizes from 25 to 20 students, on average. Let's also assume that the 86 additional teachers would cost an average of $100,000 a teacher. That brings the per-pupil increase in instructional costs unrelated to reducing class sizes down to $3,644, which still beats the $3,493 cost equivalent to the rate of inflation by 4.3%.

Total district spending per-pupil has increase from $5,636 in 1992 to $8,261 in 2002, for a percentage increase of 47% with inflation of 28%. Over this same period, teachers have seen their compensation (salaries and benefits) grow by at least 33.5% and perhaps as much as 44.8%, with inflation of 28%.

The statement, "During the '90s, Colorado was benefiting from a rich economy, but there was little money for schools," is just flatly false for the school district where this teacher has nightmares about things that aren't true. Public spending on education and on teacher compensation beat inflation despite the number of years when salary increases were 2% or less.

In this topic I am asked, "Why do you hate teachers so much?" I am called a "teacher hater" here.

I don't hate teachers. I hate people who don't tell the truth and who distort the truth for personal gain. I hate it especially when it comes from college-educated people who should have the knowledge, professionalism and ethics not to deceive the public for whom they work from their privileged positions.

Why do teachers do this? It's simply easier to lie about the truth and create the public perception that teachers are being treated unfairly to use as leverage for higher wages than it is to make the case that teachers should be paid more. No wonder school boards become frustrated with teachers who believe the lies they tell themselves to lower their morale and pressure the public to pay them even higher salaries so they will not have to suffer in their self-inflicted, falsified hell.

To say that teachers don't care about children is an insult. We are more than willing to "move on," but refuse to "roll over" when mistreated.

The notion that BSVD teachers have been mistreated when it comes to salaries and benefits is completely false in comparison to the rate of inflation. To distort the truth for personal gain, and then to falsely claim abuse on top of it, is nothing less than bullying.

JOAN STANDEFER
Lafayette

Parents complain about school politics

2004-06-22T14:16:00.000-04:00

Educators deny using children on pro-tax issues
By Franco Ordonez, Boston Globe Staff

Burke Anderson was incensed. His 13-year-old son had come home from school one day this spring almost hyperventilating about how he wouldn't get into college unless his parents voted for an upcoming tax increase.

The Medway seventh-grader, according to Anderson, reported that the new high school couldn't open without the additional money. And he fretted that his diploma would be useless if the old high school lost its accreditation -- a word he'd never uttered before.

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''If you could have heard my kid that day when he came home," said Anderson, who believes the middle school principal was illegally promoting the tax increase to the students on school time, a charge the principal denies. ''I was furious because he was totally brainwashed, in my opinion."

Medway passed the $1.9 million measure last month.

But Anderson, who opposed the tax increase, is pressing the school system to establish a more explicit policy on what's OK to say about such issues in the classroom and what's not.

His allegations bring up a sensitive question, one that arises frequently when school-related tax increases are put to voters: When does explanation cross the line and become advocacy?

The medium is the message. If the explanation is coming from the school, the implied message is always to support the decisions the school has made. Beyond that, when schools get to choose which facts they use in explaining budgets, and they use only the facts that support their position, ignoring the many facts that cut against it, and when they focus only on the school and not on the bigger picture of the interrelationships among schools, budgets, communities and the economy, they present a biased, incomplete and distorted version of reality. As a matter of ethics--school officials being public servants--they should not have to be told that their duty is to provide all the relevant information they would give to a friend who has the responsibility for making an important decision. They should act like objective advisors, not advocates. But they don't.

Accusations that tax increase proponents are using schoolchildren to promote their message are on the rise.

According to Denis Kennedy, spokesman for the state Office of Campaign and Political Finance, his agency is receiving more allegations of misconduct as cash-strapped communities pursue Proposition 2 overrides, which allow cities and towns to increase local taxes beyond the limits set by state law.

''Anytime you live in a small town, an issue like this is going to come into the schools, whether you want it to or not," said outgoing Medway Middle School principal William B. Lynch, who said he was simply answering questions from students in a social studies class. ''What you can do is stick your head in the sand and forget it exists. Or, you can give an honest answer to the kids, which is what we did."

I wonder if that honest answer included the possibility of union give-backs on increases in compensation in excess of the rate of inflation? The "honest" answers schools give are loaded with assumptions and limitations on what is possible that aren't true.

School administrators and teachers face a dilemma when students ask about tax increase issues tied to education. It's against the law to use public time or resources to campaign for a political cause. A teacher, for example, is not allowed to tell students to make sure their parents vote a certain way.

But it's OK for a teacher to discuss the merits of a tax increase and give an opinion.

I have yet to hear of a report from students where teachers have discussed the pros and cons of either parts of the budget or of the budget as a whole. In general, they simply point to the good things that are in the budget without any consideration of what has been left out or of the better things that could be substituted for the good things, and assert that the good things are sufficient justification for supporting the budget. In doing this, they rarely fail to make an appeal to the students' self-interests, completely ignoring the possibility that the highest self-interests of students is examining the big picture rather than their immediate wants. "If the budget is adopted, what impact will that have on college costs? On job growth? On funding for the elderly and the poor? On access to health care services? Is the trend in school spending advantageous to the long-run health of the community? Does the budget include the services that will maximize future student success in education and in life?" I haven't hear of any teachers discussing these in an objective manner that explores alternatives. Yet, that's precisely what a "teacher" would do and that's precisely what's in the best interests of students, both in fact and in learning how to think and become a responsible citizen.

The key question, according to the Office of Campaign and Political Finance, is whether the activity is really geared toward influencing voters.

The agency investigates about a dozen complaints a year, Kennedy said. Rarely, he said, does the agency find that a local official knowingly violated the law.

But, he said, there are cases where the agency will rule that a community improperly used public resources to influence voters. The most common examples: distributing literature via a mass mailing or stuffing materials in children's backpacks.

''The prohibition applies not to the speech, not to the position being taken by officials, but in some cases by the means that information is disseminated," Kennedy said.

The penalties, however, are minimal. Activists who campaign against tax increases see that as a significant problem because, they say, officials and parents, knowing that the penalties are light, will cross legal barriers to promote their cause.

Exactly. Should a citizen in New York choose to spend thousands of dollars in attorney fees to challenge a school district's budget advocacy and win, the most that will happen is the Commissioner of Education will tell the school district not to do that again. That's it. No revote. No fine. No probation with observation.

''They usually do what they can until someone complains," said Barbara Anderson, director of the statewide group Citizens for Limited Taxation. ''It's an old expression: 'It's easier to apologize than ask permission.' "

Two years ago, according to town officials in Ashland, School Committee members were told by town counsel that they needed to reimburse the town after using public funds to print a pro-tax increase flier that was distributed in the local newspaper.

''People, in their zeal to do the absolute best for their children, will break the law," said John Ellsworth, a member of the Board of Selectmen. ''There is no malice in it. It just happens."

Are they really doing the best for their children when they do this? Beyond that, is it the children educators are concerned about or their jobs and the size of the paychecks? See, Reasonable reforms would control school costs.

Kennedy said the Office of Campaign and Political Finance investigated the city of Newton four years ago following complaints that school officials were illegally campaigning during public meetings for a additional public funding.

But the agency found no wrongdoing, stating that there was no prohibition on political speech in public buildings.

Opponents of the successful $11.5 million override in 2002 also contended that some school officials were sending home biased information with students.

''Newton is the king of all election misconduct," said Brian Camenker, vice president of the Newton Taxpayers Association, who said his children were told by teachers that they would lose their jobs if voters didn't approve the tax boost. ''They basically came home thinking I was this bad guy because I was against it."

The issue has come up recently in Bridgewater, which will vote on a $2.2 million override next month. Bridgewater Selectwoman Mary Beth Lawton, who is against the tax increase, said that students are being used as ''mules," and she believes information being sent home with them is worded deliberately to highlight the importance of approving the measure.

Parents have complained to me about the same misconduct in S-G. Children use class time to do projects to take home to parents that promote "yes" votes on school budgets. These projects never reveal objective and comprehensive thinking. They reveal indoctrination and appeals to self-intrests, which are exactly the opposite of what it means to be a teacher.

Less than a week before Winchester residents voted down a $3.75 million override this spring, John Natale said he was angry after finding a note in his fifth-grade daughter's backpack detailing the dramatic cuts that would occur if he didn't vote for it.

These "dramatic cuts" are always "possible" cuts, but frequently sold as inevitable cuts. Educators simply pick the services that give them the most political leverage and say, "If the budget fails, these will be cut." Some say, "These could be cut," but in the absence of a list of possible cuts with smaller impacts on student learning, the message is the same. In reality, when districts are forced to make cuts, the most damaging cuts are avoided. Yet, the most damaging cuts are what educators use to leverage "yes" votes.

''They have free access to 400 free couriers to prosyletize the school message to pass the override or else," Natale said.

Municipal officials, knowing how sensitive they have to be, say addressing overrides as a public official can be tricky.

''It's become a Catch-22," said Selectman David Teller of Ashland. ''You want to get the information out so people can make a logical choice, but as a town official you are strapped by the channel you can use to get the information out."

Kennedy said he found that most public officials were being too careful, stating that, as long as public resources are not used, they are free to voice their opinions.

Why should educators be free to voice their biased and self-interested opinions on school budgets to captive classrooms of students with whom they've built a trusting relationship? It's unprofessional and unethical, especially in the elementary grades where the practice is probably most prevalent.

''I oftentimes find school officials who are overly cautious, saying 'I haven't told people how they should vote on an override,' " Kennedy said. ''Well, I say go ahead, knock yourself out. Just don't do a mailing."

In Medway, Lynch said he gave no biased information and never raised the possibility that the high school could lose its accreditation. What he did tell students, he said, was that the tax increase was being requested because there was not enough money in the school budget.

Is that an "honest" answer, or does it reflect a narrow and biased interpretation of reality?

As long as Lynch only answered questions and did not advocate a position, he did nothing wrong, Kennedy said.

Medway Superintendent Arthur Bettencourt, who met with Anderson earlier this month, said it was unclear whether there was any wrongdoing, but he apologized to Anderson anyway. Bettencourt said he would clarify what is appropriate behavior for school officials in teachers' handbooks for the fall.

Anderson said he wants to make sure it's not just swept under the rug. But he also said that he was pleased with the superintendent's response.

''I am going to be watching carefully . . . it seems that they're taking action," Anderson said. ''I would give it a B."

Lawsuit seeks to force schools to graduate eighth-grade girl

2004-06-15T22:02:00.000-04:00

BY STEVE PATTERSON / Chicago Sun-Times Staff Reporter

The mother of an eighth-grade student is suing the Chicago Public Schools, seeking to force the system to let her daughter graduate to the ninth grade.

Ana Accove filed suit Monday in Cook County Circuit Court. She wants her daughter Juliana to be allowed to graduate with the rest of her classmates at the Newberry Math and Science Academy, 700 W. Willow.

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Juliana, the suit claims, is an above-average student, but is being denied the promotion to high school because she failed to pass the Iowa Test of Basic Skills.

But graduation is set for Wednesday and school officials are standing by their policy of denying graduation to anyone who doesn't score a passing grade on the test.

"We began this policy several years ago because we believed people were socially promoting kids, sending them all the way through without properly preparing them for the next grade," CPS spokesman Peter Cunningham said.

"Since we passed that policy, performance is up dramatically across the system.

"We stand by that policy."

Here's the problem. The parent thinks everything is fine because the grades are good. Then, WHAMMO! No graduation. And no opportunity for the parent to help the child along because the teacher was giving out inappropriate grades. If other professionals did that to their clients, they could expect to pay hefty damages in a lawsuit. This really stinks. What parent would voluntarily submit their children to conditions like this?

Imagine taking your child to Dentist A for years, who never finds a cavity. Then, upon taking your child to Dentist B, you learn your child has a mouthful of cavities. Dentist A would be banned from the profession.

In schools designed for The 21st Century Student, no child would finish the 8th-grade curriculum and be unable to pass the IOWA test. That's because every student must demonstrate mastery of every lesson before taking the next lesson. It may take the student 5 years to get through all the materials through 8th-grade, or 10 years. It really doesn't matter. In 21st Century Schools, quality is constant and time is variable--precisely the opposite of today's schools.

Accove, who identified herself in the suit as administrator of an abstinence education program for the State of Illinois, pointed to her daughter's history of average-to-above-average grades, as well as an Individualized Education Plan, which provided no prior indications that her daughter was not on track to graduate with her class.

The 14-year-old's report card was attached to the lawsuit, as was the IEP and a report on her grades at a previous private school. Also attached was a chronology provided by her mother, who did not hire an attorney for the suit.

Last week, she said, her daughter and two other Newberry students were called in for a meeting with principal Renaud Beaudoin, assistant principal Linda Foley-Acevedo and the school's case manager, Rita Ross, where they were told they wouldn't graduate.

Accove appealed the decision to area instructional officer Emil DeJulio, it claims, to no avail. Saturday, the appeal was denied, leading to Monday's lawsuit.

Accove did not return calls for comment Monday evening.