Schools

April 14, 2010 - What makes for good schools? While the subject has been hashed and re-hashed there has immerged a very straight forward and simple answer to our school problems. Clearly good parents and good teachers are the key. While many inner city kids are not blessed with good parents, the job in many cases has fallen on the teacher. There are several examples of inner city schools that have excelled despite terrible parents, single parents, or no parents at all. A study of these inner city schools revealed five keys to student success from outstanding teachers.

1. Classroom management through providing a challenging, exciting, interesting class. Learning can not even begin in an unruly classroom, but a Gestapo atmosphere does not promote learning and puts fear and mistrust into students. Classroom management and order comes naturally when the kids are excited about learning and the atmosphere is conductive to learning with students’ work smartly displayed on the walls.

2. Knowledge of subject- extremely important during the job interview. For example, in applying to be an English teacher the applicant should be asked what his/her favorite book is and what he/she is reading. If he/she doesn’t read, he/she doesn’t deserve to teach English! Principals are seen as a key to setting up criteria for hiring good teachers, and good teachers tend to have an affinity for schools with good principals.
3. A questioning technique that stimulates intellectual curiosity and creative thinking by giving the class "wait time" for them to think-- and then calling on them. If they think they'll be called on, they all have to "think."
4. Caring / Eye Contact - Letting students know that the teacher cares about them and think that they can do whatever is asked of them. They won't want to disappoint a caring and totally involved teacher. Teachers need to speak to their class every day as they walk in the door and make eye contact with every student during class.
5. Devotion to Profession - the magical elusive quality that some teachers have - love, joy, devotion, and enthusiasm for teaching, those qualities rub off on the kids.

On the national level the Obama administration is sending a wide-ranging overhaul of the education laws to Congress because the current “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) legislation has pushed schools to lower standards and results just to meet federal requirements. President Bush’s NCLB set up a regimen of state reading and math tests for students in third through eighth grades to identify failing schools. That program….

* Judged schools and children based solely on standardized test scores at the expense of preparing them with 21st century skills.

* Required every kid (except for 3% with serious handicaps or other issues) to achieve on grade level every year, climbing in lockstep up an ever more challenging ladder even though research showed that children start off in different places academically and grow at different rates.

* Forced schools to narrow the curriculum and divert resources from art, music, social studies, and physical education to teach to the test.

* Publicly labeled as failures, and vilified and shamed teachers and schools failing to meet NCLB inflexible goals.

* Lowered the bar to meet NCLB standards thus lowed the quality of education in comparison to other countries. Studies have found that standards have been lowered over the last eight years and students are learning less.

- 2005 - The United States is losing ground in education, as peers across the globe zoom by with bigger gains in student achievement and school graduations, a study shows. The United States was 7th in education compared to other countries.

- 2008 - The United States has slipped again to 18th among the 36 highly industrialized nations and is no longer the world leader in secondary education according to the rankings of an international organization.

- 2009 - The United States is producing too few graduates in Science and Engineering, and a very high share of PhD graduates are foreign citizens.

President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan want to go in a new direction by setting a higher bar while providing educators the flexibility to reach it. Schools that achieve excellence or show real progress will be rewarded, and local districts will be encouraged to commit to change in schools that are clearly letting their students down. Obama supports the expansion of public charter schools and calls for giving states and school districts additional flexibility in how they spend federal dollars as long as they are continuing to focus on what matters most -- improving outcomes for students. He will allow states to use federal grant funds to change the way teachers and principals are paid, to provide differentiated compensation and career advancement opportunities to educators who are effective in increasing student academic achievement. The Obama administration's $50 billion education budget adds $3 billion in funding to help schools meet these revised goals, with the possibility of an additional $1 billion. While his plans add to the Department of Education’s (DOE) budget, it must remember that it was President Bush II who increased DOE spending 60% during his administration.

An example of the Obama administration getting tough on schools and not folding in to union pressures is evidenced by is outspoken support for Rhode Island District’s firing of all 74 of its high school teachers in Feb 2010.

Education was meant to be the sole responsibility of the states. It was Jimmy Carter who established the Department of Education which has grown over the last 30 years under each administration (Republican and Democratic alike) to more than 5,000 employees. Whether good or bad, some states need a kick in the pants for having such terrible schools. Take for example Texas. With a population of almost 25 million and the lowest percentage of high school graduates in the nation where students have been scoring among the lowest of all the states on standardized exams, Texas must be doing something very wrong. One standout malady is the undeniable fact that Texas is one of the most despotic school districts in the nation by mandating centrally censored textbooks, not only heavily censored but extremely inferior textbooks. Texas has always billed itself as leaning right, but by denying teachers the right to teach as they professionally see fit, Texas schools are, in reality, leaning left.

By having highly-centralized political control of the content of public school textbooks, Texas has historically used this power to dumb-down and censor perfectly valid textbooks consistent with fundamentalist Christian and extreme right-wing political beliefs. The Texas State Board of Education has the power to compel publishers to make changes in the content of their books by refusing to adopt their textbook unless changes in content are made, and publishers have historically complied since the Texas textbook market is approximately $570 million each year! Social studies books were recently censored and Texas Board members pushed publishers to depict slavery in a positive light; take out references of rampant prostitution in the American West in the 1800s; and trade pictures of women traveling west with briefcases for pictures of women as homemakers. The Board even censored the dictionary; when the publisher refused to remove a few sexually-explicit words from the new edition. The Board refused to adopt it and Texas students had to use the old edition for another six years, despite the fact that most copies were already falling apart. Texas textbooks routinely avoid all potentially controversial topics; dangerous passages are watered down; and insightful passages are dumbed down. In Mach 2010 the Board removed Thomas Jefferson from the curriculum because he coined the term “separation of church and state,” and refused to require that “students learn that the Constitution prevents the U.S. government from promoting one religion over all others.” The State Board of Education members, having little or no knowledge of science, have exercised their power to censor science textbooks based of their own ideological, political, and religious beliefs. Currently biology books are so watered-down that high school students mistake them for elementary readers. For example, health books have been censored for being too explicit about sexual hygiene and contraception, notwithstanding the fact that Texas has among the highest rates of both teen pregnancy and sexually-transmitted diseases in the nation. In 2010 Texas State Board of Education will evaluate biology textbooks for the first time in eight years, checking them for "factual errors," attempting to censor the topic of evolution. In Nov 2007 the Texas Education Agency Director of Science Christine Comer was fired over an e-mail announcing a talk to be given by an anti-Intelligent Design (anti-Creationism) author. Texas’ “central planning” is reminiscent of George Orwell’s “1984!” http://www.texscience.org/files/textbook-adoption.htm

So there you have it – by leaving education to states, Texas shows us the heavy price to be paid in retooling our youth to meet the challenges of the 21^st century. National goals are important, however national and local “Big Brother” governments must not restrict good teachers from teaching kids to think for themselves, investigate alternatives, and simply learn how to be independent and inquisitive thinkers and learners on their own. Today we have the internet where kids are free to seek out all points of view and basic facts. China has shut down Google because Chinese kids might learn some facts about the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. Texas has just done the same disservice to its kids by shutting down Thomas Jefferson.