The new 6-4 moderate majority on the Kansas State Board of Education — guaranteed after the Aug. 1 primary — is likely to overturn the conservative faction’s decisions on more than evolution and science standards.
One likely switch, moderate board member Janet Waugh told the Lawrence Journal-World, will be on the conservatives’ new policy requiring a parental opt-in note for kids in sex education; expect that to go back to opt-out.
Current conservative Education Commissioner Bob Corkins (in photo) also might want to start floating his resume out there. Waugh said his job performance "will probably be a priority" of the new board. In other words, don’t expect vouchers anytime soon.
Posted by Randy Scholfield
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44 Comments
The best election commissioner we ever had–a public servant who doesn’t believe in public service.
Too bad we can’t find more like him.
Give me his wage, I’ll slip in the back door, take over,AND NOBODY WILL KNOW
Tracy – first you’ll have to find and hire a consultant to teach you how to do your new job that you have all the qualifications for.
Tracy, somebody would notice.
If you took over, the agency would stop bleeding staff. Qualified people would have been staying instead of trampling each other running for the exits.
Somebody would have noticed.
…and btw…
tap, tap, tap, tap,
where is cindy duckett?
We all need a little MOTIVATION from her.
heheheheheheheh
…and SURELY SBA, SD, STS, ruby, KCL, etc. lmnop should have SOMETHING to snivel about on this thread, no?
heheheheheheeheh
RightNut: In your first posting above, I suspect you meant to say, “the best EDUCATION commissioner” … rather than election commissioner … education referring to the Kansas State Board of Education for which Bob Corkins served as education commissioner or what I would call, executive director.
With the likely new moderate majority on the state board, I presume Corkins will be hitching a ride out of Topeka on the next stage coach.
hee hee wink, he wont be hitchin’ if he has to catch a fast train to escape a crowd with torches….
I think that is known as being “run out of town on a rail”?
Gee, do ya suppose the Kochs will hire him to go back to lobbying against government? I mean now that he has insider experience as a bone fide bureaucrat?
This Education Board really does provide us folks many laughs. Connie Morrie got hers in the end and now looks like Corkins will be getting his. Too bad the kids in this state will continue to be held in the balance of such fools fighting on this ridiculous Board.
CR brings up a good point, at least indirectly, is it time to consider abolishing the board while the adults are in charge?
It is difficult to see how this particular state agency does much for educating Kansas children. I would be happy to hear opposing views.
Correct, JWink.
Just think of me like Bush.
Go with what you think I mean rather than what I actually say . . .
I wouldn’t get too excited about Corkins departure. He shares a similarity with Larry Vaughn, the outsider brought in to superintend Wichita schools in the 1990’s. Vaughn was terminated because he proposed major changes that Wichita educators couldn’t countenance.
I’m no friend of Corkins. But here is the point. The National Governors Association Annual Meeting held an education plenary session on Monday, which showcased some very interesting public-school innovations, and mentioned, in passing, a cooperative bi-state endeavor involving both Kansas Cities. But Kansas, overall, was out of the picture.
Bill Gates was quoted by a governor as having said that the American high school is obsolete. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is deeply involved in reengineering public education for the 21st century. It is working with NGA to develop diverse model experiments, in 17 states, Kansas not being one of them.
See http://www.nga.org/portal/site/nga and follow the “High School Honors States” links.
For example, Rhode Island is implementing a statewide “Physics First” curriculum to integrate math and science by teaching physics-chemistry-biology in that order, as first proposed by physics Nobel Laureate Leon Lederman in 1998, and as implemented in San Diego two years ago. For public education, a 6-8 year period between an outsider-made-proposal and public-education implementation is phenomenally fast. This isn’t happening in Kansas, but it is happening elsewhere. Kansas is being left behind, in its perennial fashion.
Dr. Lederman pointed out that the biology-chemistry-physics sequence was invented in 1894. That was when these sciences were primitive, and biology in particular, had no relationship to chemistry or physics. This is no longer true, but the same sequence, invented not in the last century, but THE CENTURY BEFORE LAST, is still in force. That’s anti-scientific.
See Lederman’s original proposal: http://lss.fnal.gov/archive/1998/tm/TM-2051.pdf
In Texas, there is a plan to build 35 math and science academies, affiliated with universities, primarily for minority students.
At the meeting, Sir Kenneth Robinson, who champions creativity training, described visiting Oklahoma, right next door to Kansas, and seeing an effort to develop creativity and innovation skills development in children.
It turns out that the Asian nations are not only teaching math and science intensively, they are implementing methods to stimulate children’s creativity. Sir Kenneth rightly says that our industrial age school system shrivels children’s creativity. He recounts a story of another Liverpool student, also knighted, who was never encouraged by his school to develop his musical talents. That was Paul McCartney. Now the school’s music department is endowed by Sir Paul.
Sir Kenneth also talked about people born after 1980 being “digital natives” versus older people being “digital immigrants”. The “natives” have never known a non-digital world. It’s natural to them. That’s why kids can do things with techno-gear that we oldsters cannot.
Recently, CompUSA sold Compaq laptops for $300. With a printer included. For under $150 more, you could get upgrades to create a machine that would scorch a five-year old top-of-the-line 2001 Dell Dimension desktop PC.
Did we hear any proposals to give all Wichita public school students computers, through free or subsidy-reduced prices to working class and poor students? You could buy them for less than $5 million a year, supplying every student whose parents cannot afford home computers a new computer twice between, say, third and twelfth grade.
Some cities are developing free Wi-Fi networks. San Francisco, for example, has proposed a free low-bandwith option, and a low-cost high-bandwith option. They’re looking, like other advanced-thinking cities, as CIVIC INFRASTRUCTURE for the 21st century. Taxpayers pay for streets, roads and highways. The Internet was created using tax dollars. It is not inordinate to think about connecting people, including students, to the information superhighway, as a public project. Of course, perhaps an arena, at far, far higher cost, will stimulate higher citizen productivity. Or maybe Wichita will see itself being left behind in the 21st century economy.
Hasta La Vista CORKY!
Hearty……………..you’re consistent at least. This one is particular I really love: “Did we hear any proposals to give all Wichita public school students computers, through free or subsidy-reduced prices to working class and poor students? You could buy them for less than $5 million a year, supplying every student whose parents cannot afford home computers a new computer twice between, say, third and twelfth grade.” Are you sure you’ve done your math right, only $5 million? Do you even know how many free/reduced there are in USD259? What will you have them do with these laptops?
As usual, you have these “out-there” ideas without thinking them through. I’ll bet you’ll be drinking your coffee this morning crying about the imminent departure of Corkins, the master of innovation. LOL
You know what makes me sick?Supposedly well educated, well intentioned adults running around in circles trying to teach religion in school and spreading hatred everywhere that they intend to spread ‘god’s word’.
THAT’S WHAT MAKES ME SICK !!
You know what would make me feel much better?We should enlist the help of the state’s TOP H.S. graduates, each year, to go to the BOE and give them a breifing about what the actual REALITY of the student’s lives is!! And as far as I’m concerned, I think they should also ‘grade’ the BOE while they are there?NOW THAT’S WHAT WOULD MAKE ME FEEL BETTER !!
What do you think on that Apop?
I try to read most of what you post, as you seem like a person with some common sense.
Heartlander, I have to agree with you. This is the twenty-first century, and thinking outside the box should be a requiremnet. The examples you gave are some of what is needed to prod the education system into giving the kids of this state a quality education.
Being relatively new to the area, I have no idea of who Conklin is or what he proposed, so I’ll hold my own on that. But if people are afraid of changes to the education system that will actually help, then they should stand aside and let the freethinkers do what needs to be done. Problem is, that will never happen in Kansas.
Apophis..
” What will you have them do with these laptops?As usual, you have these “out-there” ideas without thinking them through. ”
Not thinking them through? Your lack of vision astounds me.. this has already been done not too far from here with great success!
http://www.usd394.com/rhhs/RH_Laptop_Pol_and_Proced.pdf
Great post heartlander!
We should enlist the help of the state’s TOP H.S. graduates, each year, to go to the BOE and give them a breifing about what the actual REALITY of the student’s lives is!! And as far as I’m concerned, I think they should also ‘grade’ the BOE while they are there.
Speaking from my own experience back in my younger days, I’d be more concerned about bullying in school and how to score a date for the prom than whether evolution is godless and sex-ed will lead to promiscuity.
Apophis, you dinosaur.
Let’s model this. Assume 15,000 3rd through 5th grade USD 259 students. A $300 computer, with a 2-year purchase-finance plan would cost about $15/month per student.
Assume that 30% of Wichita families cannot afford any cost. So, buying 5000 computers at $300 = $1.5 million. Assume that 30% of families can afford a median payment of half the computer cost. That’s $.75 million. Assume that 40% of families can foot the whole bill. So, the basic hardware cost would be $2.25 million. If you amortize the cost over 2 years, its $1.2 million per year. Thereafter, computers would only be purchased for 3rd graders, and let’s say starting in year 5, for 8th graders as well, in essence replacing 3rd graders’ machines after 5 years. Within a decade, every student in every grade can have a laptop.
Alternatively, how much would it cost to buy a $300 laptop for all ca. 50,000 USD students, amortizing the cost over a 5-year machine lifespan? $3 million.
Of course, there are extra costs for networking, repair and replacement, and teacher training. The district already has a lot of educational software, and can negotiate more user licenses at low cost. Many of these costs can be amortized over periods of 5-10 years.
You don’t get three things:
1. PC cost has dropped astonishingly just in the past few years. The $300 Compaq has more power than a $1800 laptop I bought four years ago. It has more power than a 1970 supercomputer. Within 5 years, you’ll be able to get laptops for less than $150, so future costs will be lower. But they’re already cheap. Five years ago, you could make an argument that laptops were too expensive to buy as a standard school item. You cannot make that argument today.
2. Average kids are much more facile computer-ops learners than you or I, or any adult we know who isn’t an IT professional. Kids are being called “screenagers”. They learn to use digital devices the way we learned to roller skate, swim and ride bikes.
3. Wichita can’t have its own “traditional education” system, i.e. a non-tech-intensive system, because we live in a technological world. Try getting a heart attack and demanding 1960 coronary care. If you could get it, you’d regret your choice, even though you’d save money.
Look at Wichita’s most important industry. Wichita doesn’t subsist on a local aircraft market. Its planes are sold worldwide. Conversely, you, a beneficiary of recirculated aviation dollars, send your money out of state everytime you buy clothes, most of your food, gas for your car, et al. You buy virtually nothing that can be said to be entirely locally produced.
Wichita has no choice but to be connected to the outside-world economy. Today’s Wichita students must acquire skills that enable them to interface with that economy. In essence they will have to trade their skills for dollars to live on. If they don’t have 21st century skills, they are going to be impoverished.
Sir Kenneth mentioned at the NGA meeting that education reform has up until recently been comprised of trying to teach traditional subjects more effectively, and he rightly pointed out that this is wrongheaded. He pointed out, as others have, including me, that you can’t improve an industrial age education system to meet a 21st century economy’s demands. I know you can’t understand this because industrial-age education is all you know. You’re like an aluminum airframe welder who is told to mix up a batch of chemicals and start fabricating carbon-epoxy airframes. Perhaps you could LEARN, but you believe that you already are an expert, and know everything you have to. Maybe you do. But today’s kids need to learn things YOU AND I DON’T COMPREHEND. A child starting kindergarten next week will be working until about 2070. Consider the world of 1906 versus the world of 1970. But the differences the world will see between 2006 and 2070 will probably be more analogous to those seen between 1806 and 1970, i.e. the early years of the Industrial Revolution (usually dated as opening ca. 1760 in England), and its peak. Change is greatly accelerated.
So, we give kids tools, like computers. We oldsters say, “I don’t get this, you youngsters need to figure this out on your own.” And they do. But if you deny them the tools, then you’re diminishing their inherent capacities to explore, imagine and figure things out.
Heart, sounds like a good idea to me. As you say, things are changing. Today, if you’re not skilled with a computer, it’s as bad as being illiterate. It means you’re left behind.
I have a concern. Having a computer isn’t much use without a connection to the web. IMHO, that has to be addressed for your idea to do any good. If you’re dirt-poor, you can’t afford an internet connection.
Suggestions?
Package deals with providers, both software and internet. Changes: remember channel 1? Why did it fail? Because it employed advertisements. Channel 1 could still work, if people are willing to recognize that advertisements are a modern necessity. They could be minimized, with such content either displayed at the beginning of a daily project or at the end.
Acceptence of new ideas, brought about in simple roundtable discussions by knowledable people willing to think outside the institutional box, then acted upon, with the public pocketbook in mind, is needed to compete in the twentfirst century. Who’s up for it?
JMW’s point makes sense. A company like Google might look at free community wi-fi provision as a terrific opportunity to make money through the back door. Just like the Google search engine is free to users, and airwave TV is free because broadcasters sell viewers’ eyeballs to advertisers.
On the other hand, I think a publicly built wi-fi system would be feasible. Some other cities think it is.
On my calling Ap a dinosaur, I’m one too. This isn’t us oldsters’ century. We know some timeless things that are useful. But kids are going to have to learn A LOT of things we can’t fathom. This happens in times of epochal shifts.
They’ll know much morethan I’ll ever know
Wonderful World.Best version is by Louie Armstrong
TRACY………I agree with many of your observations. As for heartlander and his crew who THINK they know something about education, you don’t. Leave it to the professionals. $300 laptops……………..LOL!
I wish we could post photos. I just got some of my son and friends teaching English in Africa. The kids look totally exited. They’re black, just like America’s African-Americans who putatively can’t learn.
I don’t know how to teach? My family has been producing teachers for generations.
Public education is really screwed up. Can it be regenerated for this century? I hope so. There are some great innovative experiments being conducted. But traditional industrial age public education is obsolete. Phase I of the Industrial Revolution took agrarian peoples and put them to work in factories (1760-1860). Phase II created an educational system to expedite industrial development by cogently training a workforce from a young age to fit into an industrial economy. Phase III is transferring lessons learned in phases I and II to late-developing nations in Asia and Latin America, and eventually Africa.
The developed world is grappling with a new economy, the information economy. This requires a different educational system from that previously envisioned. Or maybe diverse educational systems.
The Industrial Age was characterized by population movement from rural areas to cities. This hasn’t ceased, but we now see rising numbers of well-educated people moving from cities to small towns. They’re creating businesses. In essence, the industrial economy was based on centralization. We are now seeing decentralization. You don’t see this in Kansas, but from Colorado westward, and the Appalachians and eastward, this is happening.
We also see ever-increasing numbers of retired people taking community college courses, just because they want to learn things they couldn’t learn when they had full time jobs and families to support. Retirees taking college courses just for self-enlightenment and enjoyment was unheard of a mere 20 years ago.
It’s a different emerging world than that we oldsters have known.
Teachers have to take 120 to 150 hours of continuing ed every 5 years. Assuming that teachers with tenure know how to teach, why shouldn’t they get credit for taking college and graduate courses in any fields they want, from astronomy to art? Expand teachers’ minds, and they can be enabled to expand children’s minds.
Let’s take computers. I don’t know if it is true here, but on the coasts, most middle-class and affluent families have home computers. The kids do things with the computers that their parents can’t do. There is no reason to believe that poorer kids couldn’t do likewise. Schools’ problem is teachers’ computer ineptitude. But give kids the tool, and they’ll figure out how to use it, even if some of their teachers can’t. Kids can TEACH teachers how to do things. It is scary in the minds teachers like Apophis to consider this because it goes against the authoritarian paradigms that have been ingrained in him. But it’s necessary. It is ineluctable.
Last year, I had a 12 year old download city maps and program my GPS receiver. It would have been a CHORE for me. He thought it was FUN. This summer at age 13, he got a 43 year old World Bank economist’s Internet-provider-switchover up and running in a quarter of the time it would have taken her. The economist is really smart. She went to Duke. But the adolescent is a digital native, and she’s not.
LOL to Apophis too.
heartlander………….and your point is?
Apophis,http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?InvtId=AST135-U-S3300-R&cm_ven=Pricewatch.com&cm_cat=Shopping&cm_ite=total$321.00 laptop.You, and people like you are the ones holding back the public education system in this country. You have absolutely no idea what out-of-the-box thinking is because you have been implanted with the jumbled jargon of todays antiquated thinkers.
Heartlander is dead on in his assesment of what needs to be done. He is dead on in the fact that us older generation are going to have to step aside because technology will pass us by. It is the X generation that will have to step up to the plate and drive the system into the twenty-first century. Left to small thinkers such as yourself, we will still be teaching dick and jane at the farm coloring books fifty years from now.
We should be teaching dick and jane write programs in C++, and digital/spacial relationships, and how they relate to the ever changing market. We should be teaching mass foreign language classes at the earliest possible age. We should be teaching year round school. Teachers should be educated to provide the lessons necessary to teach new subjects, and receive the pay they should be getting. And we should be paying for it.
One of the things I know a lot about is automation, and with retirement coming up, I plan to investigate all possibilities on passing that knowledge to the younger generation.
Pass up on the new set of wheels for the 4X4 toy, and buy a computer for school instead. Take a vacation to the Ozarks instead of the Bahamas and buy software for school. The “me” generation will have to change gears and become the “childrens” generation. Got the huevos to do that, Apophis, or will you sit inside your box and mold? It’s the digital age, join it or analog yourself into digital shock.
JM Walker, you and heartlander are so full of s*** it’s pathetic. If you think you know so much about what’s right for public education why don’t you run for the school board? I thought NOT, so keep your trap shut.
Wrong link above:Correct link:http://www.shoplocal.com/default.aspx?action=browsebroadreachcategoryl2&ID=534431&DRT=1&N=135242&adref=Google_Computers%20and%20Software_Laptop%20Computers&r=632907515403722631257636479&DimExpand=100010&WT.srch=1&detid=1800008467&gclid=CKXxyOb504YCFQPWJAodMkkrDw
FYI a-hole……………I AM an educator and I do USE technology in my classroom. Trying shutting up and donating the money for some more laptops to me.
Apophis,Just what do you have to offer, other than ” I thought NOT, so keep your trap shut.” Ya got me, there . . . sheesh, I don’t know what to say to that. Such intelligent words coming from some dufus using a name related to a non-sentient rock that hit the earth millenia ago. Stupid is as stupid does, I guess.
Seems to me you got nada, and no brains to back it up, kinda like that rock, huh? You been slammed, moron, go back to your little black box and weep. Leave the real thinking to people who know what their doing.
“FYI a-hole……………I AM an educator” Pity the children.
Okay JM……..whatever you say…………..you have to be my master! I totally ignore the rantings of you and your type. Do YOU have a life outside of typing in a blog? Do you do anything that betters mankind? Remember, church membership doesn’t count either. You’re just another right-wing fool.
Apophis,If that’s all you’ve got to offer, I suggest you quit posting.
Most people here know me very well, and know I am anything but right-wing. What I do stand for is innovative thinking, something you apparntly know little about. The world is advanced by ideas, not restricted thinking.
If we practiced what you seem to believe, we would still be killing people for thinking the sun revolved around the earth. Times change, and they are changing rapidly around us. If we don’t use innovative thinking, we will be left behind the rest of the world in terms of schooling.
You may be an educator, but you apparently are a “by the book” educator. Kind of what the religious right wants for this state’s children. So who’s practicing “right-wing” thinking now? It sure as hell isn’t heartlander or myself. I suggest you polish the dust off your mirror and take a good hard look at what reflects back.
I think you have so much disregard for heartlander’s posts on other subjects, you fail to see that he comes up with some very interesting things to say. Your blinded by your own prejudices, and if that ain’t “right-wing”, I don’t know what is.
Try to show the false feathers of “innovation” all you want JM. All you and heartlander show is the usual contempt for the public school system. You are obviously part of a group who wants to destroy public education. In my experience, these individuals are more often than NOT associated with extreme right wing politics. I don’t think I am too far off base here. Let’s have YOU show your liberal credentials if your not on the right. Is that too difficult of an assignment? Maybe you could use one of those $300 laptops!
I learned some time ago that you can’t argue argue intelligently with Apophis, which is to say expansively (as in let’s expand our horizons because the future will be very different from the past) because his experience is constrained. I pegged him as a public school teacher months ago, because his statements had a programmed-automaton essence, which as a long-observing student, I recognized quickly.
I’ll posit another educated guess. I don’t think he has ever worked outside the Great Plains. This region was created by food-industry capitalists on the East Coast to be a granary–for their profit. Farms’ excess progeny were then recognized to be suitable minions for factory work. The education system here was never designed to allow, much less stimulate, creative thought, but rather to regiment students and entrain them to obedience to authority. Kansas was DESIGNED by people who chose not to live here to be a satellite economy. To be in a perpetually disadvantaged position. This is called transactional asymmetry.
Had Apophis possessed some pluck, he would have left Kansas, to learn about a larger world. He would have explored. But he isn’t an explorer.
He has said, why don’t I donate laptops? Well, I already pay more than $3000 per year in property taxes. I’ve never used public schools for my kids, so the value of my tax contribution is in OTHER KIDS’ learning. A $60 per student per annum cost for a laptop is less than 1% of schools’ per-student budget. I’d like my tax contribution to pay for computers for ALL Wichita public school students. I can’t afford this myself. If I donated 10 computers, that wouldn’t be effective, and I pay enough in property taxes to make it reasonable for the district to pay for the computers, which is to say, use the money that taxpayers like you and me provide.
My kids had a computer in 1986, and updated versions thereafter. I could think, “I’m giving them a leg up, and I don’t want other kids of lesser means to have this, because then they could compete with my kids.” But that isn’t my ethos. I think that the more educated OTHER PEOPLE’s children are, the better the world will be for my own children.
On $300 Compaq laptops WITH PRINTERS, Apophis can go to CompUSA and verify this. Unless he’s too lazy to get off his duff, or else he has preconceived notions, and doesn’t want to LEARN something he isn’t aware of, or else he just doesn’t want to see Wichita kids be prepared for productive 21st century lives.
When I post, and address to Apophis, I’m really trying to reach not him, but intelligent, open-minded people. Apophis always resorts to nonsequitur name-calling, and puerile asininities like “”Okay JM…whatever you say…you have to be my master,” because he can’t marshal fact-and-reason-based arguments. His statements indict himself as a small-minded person, in my opinion.
He calls himself a “teacher”. I feel sorry for kids in his classes. He may be a “teacher” who has generated U.S. Department of Education survey findings that 80% of public students find classes neither interesting nor engaging. Has he ever called for his school to hand out anonymous student-evaluation forms of his schools’ teachers? If not, why not? Students have a lot of insight into teacher quality.
Apophis,If your line of reasoning is what you teach the kids, I would very much like to know where and what grade you teach. I would make it a jihad to get your credintials pulled because you have no idea what you are talking about.
Neither heartlander, nor myself, have ever said a damn thing to lead you to say something like, “You are obviously part of a group who wants to destroy public education.” I have never advocated destroying the public school system. What both heartlander and myself have SUGGESTED is radical new thinking to bring the system into the twenty-first century.
I really don’t expect you to understand any of what we are SUGGESTING, as your mind is obviously clouded by an irrational though process still dwelling in the past. You are indeed a small minded person, and I feel nothing but sorrow for the kids you are supposed to educate to be the leaders of tomorrow, and contempt for their teacher.
Sorry, I meant “educator”.
I don’t really blame Apophis. Our educational system’s founders deliberately created an industry-emulating education system, in essence “factory schools”. We have unionized teachers because their predecessors recognized they were low-valued factory workers, and sought better treatment, which they had good reason to do.
The problem now is reengineering, transforming, reinventing an obsolescent system. In essence, the old school system fit hand-in-glove with the industrial economy. It doesn’t fit a postindustrial economy. Here is an analogy: ships, trains and automobiles were effective transportation devices. By the early 20th century, they were mostly made of steel. The airplane could not have been invented as a steel-based vehicle. So completely different lightweight materials had to be devised. Moreover, aeronautical engineers were not recruited from terrestrial and nautical engineers’ ranks. The latter’s knowledge bases were not applicable to flying devices.
Before I went to med school, Ph.D. scientists foresaw the future application of molecular biology to medicine. Very, very few medical doctors knew anything about molecular biology. Now it is a cornerstone of today’s medicine. It took “outsiders” to revolutionize medical practice.
Bill Gates is one of the richest men in history. His company is based on the PC, which didn’t exist when he was in school.
I have kids who send emails around the world. I couldn’t CONCEIVE of international communication as a student, much less nearly-instantaneous communication.
I learned formal subjects from books and print journals. I had to comb through stacks and hope that materials weren’t being used by somebody else. Now people can get information in their dorm rooms, and it doesn’t matter if somebody else is obtaining the same material, because it is simultaneously available to as many people who want to access it.
I remember doing statistical calculations with a pencil, paper and calculator. Then I learned to program a computer to speed things up. Today, students just access the statistical software on their university network, and type in their data.
Knowledge is being transformed. The people doing this are educating society, but they aren’t traditional school educators. The latter are largely mystified. Trying to maintain an air of authority and hold onto leadership power when you are clueless about what is going on around you is not helpful.
heartlander………we educators DO have control of the leadership power in today’s schools. we will control the system for the foreseeable future. You just need to deal with that. I would say YOU are the one who is clueless about what is going on around you.
Duh, of course educators have control of today’s schools. Your error is conflating control with leadership.
In the 1960’s the New York Herald, home to some of America’s most respected reporters and columnists was not doing well financially. The owners wanted to automate the printing presses to reduce labor costs. The printer’s union controlled the presses. They threatened to strike to prevent modernization, and the publisher capitulated. Jobs were protected–for four years. Then the paper closed. Instead of one-third of the printers losing their jobs, ALL of them lost their jobs, as well as hundreds of other people, such as editors, journalists, secretaries, accountants, janitors, et al.
GM and Ford wanted to bring in robotics in the 70’s and cut worker numbers. Blocked by the union. The union was fighting a rear-guard action. The UAW had 2 million members. Now it has 600,000. GM and Ford have pension and healthcare costs for hundreds of thousands of workers that it retained due to union demands. But the companies are now struggling to keep their heads above water. The union protected its own interests for a time, to be sure, but sowed the seeds for long-term wreckage.
Education is a long-horizon endeavor. Kids in school today will be working after 2050, and 2060. You unionists don’t have long-horizon objectives. That’s a serious problem for the nation’s future and the futures of today’s children.
Unfortunately you don’t have a clue about how to prepare kids to develop productive, family-supporting jobs and careers in this century’s economy. You’re essentially functionary relics of the late-19th and first-half 20th century economy, when workers could be semi-literate, know only basic arithmetic, not have foreign language fluency, not understand either American or world history, and not be creative. Schools taught kids that authority figures would give them assignments, determine what they should study, and how to tolerate tedium.
You don’t teach kids how to correct their own error. You don’t teach them how to write mathematical essays–you don’t even know that mathematics isn’t routine calculuations, it is a combination visuospatial and language-based discipline. Math teachers give homework assignments, collect them the next day, and return the papers with red-ink slashes, and points deductions two days after the assignments are given. By then, the class has moved on to something else. Kids see that they haven’t done problems correctly, but they don’t know WHY they did them incorrectly. So they get progressively confused. You cover this up, and keep parents from complaining by inflating grades, which is why kids who get “B’s” in algebra have to retake algebra in college. Those who get “A’s” invariably have help at home, and you take credit for their parents’ teaching. The same can be said about other courses. Kids who excel in English have literate parents who read to them as youngsters and help them write essays and reports.
Children have never liked school. They were taken from their parents and subordinated, ostensibly to the state’s interest, but the state was acting as proxy for industrialists. Since the industrial economy is dissolving, along with its top-down ideology, today’s schools have to be fundamentally different from what they were 50 years ago. But schools’ curriculum is virtually unchanged. How would this college-prep transcript look to you: English 4 years, algebra, geometry, algebra II, trig, precalculus, world history, American history, American government, French 3 years, art, biology, chemistry, physics. Pretty decent, eh? That’s what I took in he ’60’s.There is a difference however: our courses were more rigorous than today’s versions.
Before WWII, high school teachers who had regular university and college degrees. The teachers colleges were recognized as descending from normal schools, whose purpose was to provide grammar school education and they were recognized as being adequate for high school teacher training. This changed with the proposal that most kids receive a high school education, rather than an 8th grade education. The assignment of high-school-teacher training to teachers colleges has proven to be a failed experiment, certainly for college-preparatory courses.
This is why I have suggested previously that secondary teachers earn college of liberal arts and science bachelor’s degrees, followed by MAT training. I’m sorry, you can’t teach a subject if you don’t understand it. The history teacher whose final history class was a survey course doesn’t understand history the way that someone who took a half-dozen narrow-but-in-depth courses, and had to do library research-based term papers, understands history.
The minimum GPA for teacher qualification is 2.75. That’s enough for somebody to graduate and get a regular job, but it is grossly insufficient to qualify one to teach others. Unless the goal is to disseminate semi-ignorance.
You suffer the hubris of thinking you have leadership power, but this is false, because you’re running the wagons over the same old rutted road. Our current era marks a watershed period in human history in which changes occurring are as monumental as those of the agrarian to industrial transformation. In this era, leadership in education requires pioneering vision, which you do not possess. It requires long-range foresight, which you do not possess.
Who is leading change in education more than any other single person? He doesn’t have an ed degree. It’s Bill Gates. His foundation is spearheading and funding the innovate public education programs highlighted at the National Governors Association annual meeting. If Kentucky, Oklahoma and Arkansas can participate in this, Kansas should, in theory, also be able to. Too bad Kansas educators don’t have the energy, ambition, vision or self-confidence to contact the foundation and join the cutting-edge education-innovations initiative.
You want to think that what you already know, essentially lessons from the past, is good enough. Unfortunately for Kansas children, what you know may be good enough to support your own preferred personal lifestyle, but it isn’t good enough for Kansas children to be able to enjoy prosperous futures.
As Sir Ken Robinson noted, “The problem is not that schools aim high and fail, but that they aim low and succeed.”
that should be “INadequate” in para 8.