“The philosophy of the classroom in one generation will be the philosophy of the government in the next.” –Cynthia Dunbar, another Christian activist on the Texas board of education.

I have nothing against Christians or Texans; as the saying goes, some of my best friends are Christian and a few are Texans.

But I have a lot against the idea that tomorrow’s K-12 textbooks will be written to conform with the desires of the Texas educational system and the 7 Christian activists who have decided that the time is right to try to reshape the history that children in public schools study—in their version Robert Kennedy is not a “significant American,” but Newt Gingrich is.

The state’s $22 billion education fund is among the largest educational endowments in the country. Texas uses some of that money to buy or distribute a staggering 48 million textbooks annually — which rather strongly inclines educational publishers to tailor their products to fit the standards dictated by the Lone Star State.

This could go a long way to homogenizing thought and reducing international respect still further, not to mention encouraging hate, bigotry and ignorance.

But what else should I expect from a place where Republican Rep. Betty Brown suggested in testimony that “Asian-descent voters should adopt names that are “easier for Americans to deal with,”” and Brown’s spokesman insisted that the comment had nothing to do with race.

Nuff said; rant over; thanks for listening.

March 18: I couldn’t resist adding a link to this great Mike Luckovich cartoon that sums my rant up so nicely.

Image credit: haldean on flickr

Ask any employee at any level what motivates them the most

or

and 9 out of 10 will choose the second list.

So why do school boards do the opposite?

Many school districts follow the lead of the Dallas Independent School District, which follows the first list with slavish devotion.

What happens when the second list is followed instead?

One program is called early-college high school and it mixes college level courses with the normal courses taught in junior and senior years and is offered to at-risk kids, not the over-achieving elite.

North Carolina is the leader and the results are impressive.

“Last year, half our early-college high schools had zero dropouts, and that’s just unprecedented for North Carolina, where only 62 percent of our high school students graduate after four years,” said Tony Habit, president of the North Carolina New Schools Project, the nonprofit group spearheading the state’s high school reform.

In addition, North Carolina’s early-college high school students are getting slightly better grades in their college courses than their older classmates.

Another proponent of the second list is KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program), which runs charter schools in several states.

Started in 1994 as an experiment with 50 fifth graders in Houston’s inner city, KIPP has blossomed into the biggest U.S. charter school operator, with 82 schools for poor and minority children in 19 states.

KIPP now has an 85% college matriculation rate, compared with 40% for low-income students nationwide, according to a 2008 report card KIPP prepared and posted on its Web site. About 90% of KIPP’s 20,000 students are black or Hispanic; 80% qualify for subsidized meals.

The difference between the two lists can be summed up in one work—expectations.

The foundation of expectations is a belief that whatever it is can be accomplished.

We humans tend to strive to meet the expectations of those around us, be they bosses, friends, parents, teachers or school administrators.

Actions more than words tell us what is expected.

List 1 = low expectations and kids live up to them.

List 2 = high expectations and the kids live up to them.

Which list do you want at your work?

Which list do you support for your kids?

Image credit: bjornmeansbear on flickr

I found a great quote on JD Prickett’s blog by Harvard’s Roland Barth.

“Show me a school whose inhabitants constantly examine the school’s culture and work to transform it into one hospitable to sustained human learning, and I’ll show you students who graduate with both the capacity and the heart for lifelong learning.”

I agree passionately that the school’s culture is the basis for its accomplishments and that the principal’s MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) is the source, whether active, passive or by benign neglect.

Unfortunately, the culture described above is constrained, distorted or totally destroyed by education policy—Dallas Independent School District is a great example of how truly bad policy can destroy learning.

Prickett, a school administrator (not in Dallas) hit the nail on the head when commenting on the pressure to produce good test-takers he said “the price of short-term success is long-term failure.”

No Child Left Behind, test performance-based funding and similar idiocies over the years have focused education directly on short-term results.

And that sounds like any number of banks, auto companies, insurance carriers and other corporate entities whose short-term thinking and drive for quarterly results left them constrained, distorted and totally destroyed.

Short-term thinking and quick profits of any kind are incapable of breeding long-term success in business or education.

Too bad. It’s solid K-12 education and life long learning that truly fuels our economy, underlies our democracy and makes for a strong, engaged populace.

Of course, the full effect of actions such as DISD’s are a long-term function that won’t be felt until long after the members of local, state and federal legislators are out of office leaving a mess significantly worse than the current economic debacle.

Even when Congress does do something it’s often botched. They’re rushing out a $150 billion education aid package spread over two years and more than doubling the current DOE budget. A flash flood of money that will be hard to manage and too much is bound to be wasted.

And, of course, there’s the ideological fight as opposed to whether it will work.

“Representative Howard P. McKeon, Republican of California and the ranking minority member of the House education committee, said, “By putting the federal government in the business of building schools, Democrats may be irrevocably changing the federal government’s role in education in this country.””

True, but maybe the federal government’s role does need to change, especially in mandating expensive requirements—No Child Left Behind, multiple security measures—and leaving the States to find ways to pay for them or be penalized; an action similar to a company mandating doubling the number of new products in development with no increases in budget or head count (yes, that’s been done many times).

When did ‘decade’ and ‘long-term’ become dirty words?

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By CandidProf, who teaches physics and astronomy at a state university. He shares his thoughts and experiences teaching today’s students anonymously every Thursday—anonymously because that’s the only way he can be truly candid. Read all of CandidProf here.

Wes Ball, Tuesday’s regular guest, posted his response to my posting about the Dallas Independent School District grading policy.

He makes a point that a nurturing approach is a good one.  And I agree with him that giving students the opportunity to fix mistakes within defined boundaries is a good learning strategy, and one that I routinely use for my college students.

However, the key point is in the definition of those boundaries.

DISD has virtually removed boundaries. That is not acceptable.  If you go to a doctor for a serious illness, would you trust your doctor’s treatment if you knew that he or she virtually never got it right the first time?  Just what are the defined limits of acceptable shortfalls?  Sometimes, you just have to get it right.

Just look around and you will see the consequences of teaching people that they don’t have to be held responsible. If you teach students that sort of thing, then they will go into the workforce with that attitude.  And then you will have such things as lenders not thinking through who they lend money to, borrowers not thinking if they can repay loans, and top executives for major corporations not looking towards the future of their companies.  After all, if everything goes bust somebody will come along and bail them out and make everything OK, right?

But I think that the attitude that it is OK to set up policies that do not hold students responsible for their own misdoings is simply a carryover from the DISD’s top leaders’ own philosophies.

Now, it turns out that they don’t want to be held responsible for their own screw ups.  Apparently, DISD hired some new teachers last year, but forgot to think about how to pay for them.  This led to a $64,000,000 budget shortfall in 2007. That is expected to soar to nearly $84,000,000 this year.

How can top executives in charge of such a large district foul up enough to miss out on the fact that they were spending 64 million dollars more than they were taking in through taxes? This is not a small sum of money.  This is not simply a minor accounting error.  This is not just someone putting some expenditure in the wrong column of a data table or listing it under one account instead of another.  This is a major blunder.

But are the top school district executives held to account? Uh, no. The ones being held to account for this are the teachers who are facing losing their jobs.  Up to 700 teachers may be laid off in the middle of the school year.

What effect will that have on students who started learning from one teacher only to be shoved into another, over crowded, classroom with a different teacher?

And what of the teachers, themselves?  If they lose their jobs, they lose their way to make a living.  Teaching jobs don’t pay a lot to start with.  And teaching jobs are keyed to the academic year.  Teaching jobs begin at the start of the school year.  It is almost unheard of for a teacher to be hired in the middle of the year.  So, these teachers are out of a job until next August at the earliest.  Is that fair to them?

No, I think that accountability is important.  I think that standards need to be held fast.  I think that the bar needs to be set, and students, administrators, employees, and everyone needs to make it.  A good leader needs to encourage his followers to meet the challenge and to make the grade.

And if they don’t, then there must be consequences.  If the leader screws up, then he needs to face the consequences, too.

I’m including links to various news stories for more in depth information.

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/091708dnmetdisdcuts.1bd57b1.html

http://cbs11tv.com/business/education/disd.teacher.layoffs.2.819119.html

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/localnews/stories/DN-disdbudget_23met.ART.State.Edition2.26b709a.html

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