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Archive for the ‘Ugly’ Category

The debacle in Wisconsin this past week provides a perfect platform to study how education has become a ‘hot mess’ in the United States.  Over the last 15 years I’ve developed many theories on ways to improve education in the United States.  My head has been spinning this past week with an overload of thoughts like, “See, this is what happens when….”  I can fill in the blank with a dozen different thoughts.  So, over the next couple weeks, I’m not going to focus on the exact issues in Wisconsin, like collective bargaining rights.  But, on the solutions that should be brought to the table.

These are the top issues I’ll focus on:

  • How to undo the National Education Association (NEA)’s  facilitation of a teacher shortage and the belief that teachers are grossly under-compensated.
  • How the Wisconsin situation offers the perfect storm for the emergence of e-learning solutions and online education in K-12.
  • How school districts can counter the Federal government’s gain of control over local school district behavior and action by attacking contradicting policies and behaviors.
  • How to recruit and maintain top level talent, such as those that would otherwise be doctors or attorneys, to the education field.

Please subscribe and offer as many comments as you wish.   What else would you want me to address in this series?

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The federal government is throwing $3.5B at low performing schools in order for them to implement reform models most professional educators haven’t ever even heard of:

More than a third of school districts reported they had no familiarity with the models that are part of the federal School Improvement Grants heading to school districts this fall in a bid by the Obama administration to change the fortunes of the bottom five percent of America’s schools, according to the report from the Washington-based Center on Education Policy. And fewer than 12 percent had implemented any of the models in their schools.(http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/District_Dossier/2010/08/limited_familiarity_succes_wit.html#comments)

What a sad and massive disconnect between schools and the federal government.   Sometimes it is so nice to know we have a federal government that knows so much about turning schools around.  This way our nation’s professional educators don’t even have to know what to do.  They just need to take the money and follow the directions on the package it came in.  (yes, that is sarcasm)

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The Houston Chronicle is reporting  the number of secondary students being home-schooled has increased so rapidly that it is likely these are really dropouts being called something else.  The numbers are askew:

While home-schooling’s popularity has increased, the rate of growth concentrated in Texas’ high school population is off the chart: It’s nearly tripled in the last decade, including a 24 percent jump in a single year.

Even home-schooling advocates are not shy about their opinions of the questionable data:

“That’s just ridiculous,” said Brian D. Ray, founder of the National Home Education Research Institute. “It doesn’t sound very believable.”

Apparently the Texas Eduation Agency (TEA) has some very loose policies relating to documentation required for home-schooled students.  According to the Houston Chronicle article, with policies so loose, it is possible for a school administrator to coach a child to leave school and have the parents sign a statement that says the child is home-schooled.  Or, the parent can make an oral statement and an authorized representative from the school district can sign documentation.  This is all it takes.  The real atrocity that may exist is:

The problem is not among legitimate home-schoolers, but among public school officials trying to run off problem students, [Tim Lambert, president of the Texas Home School Coalition] said.

“We call it dumping,” he explained. Some advocates complain that Spanish-speaking and special-needs students are especially vulnerable to being pushed out of public schools.

So, with No Child Left Behind, and the reauthorization of IDEA holding school districts accountable for dropout rates, human nature is very vulnerable to loopholes like these.  Like in any economic situation, humans tend to do what they are incented to do within their power.  In this case, they are rewarded (or not penalized) for decreased dropout rates and not penalized for students who do not fulfill their home-schooling.  It is a natural, though hideous, consequence of TEA’s lax policy.

Kudos to the Houston Chronicle article by Jennifer Radcliffe for pointing out this suspicious data.

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