Recent articles in the state have reflected how right Alexa Posny seems for her new job as Kansas education commissioner, underscoring her experience as an educator and, most recently, director of the U.S. Education Department’s special ed programs and her record as an advocate for student achievement — “a cheerleader for all kids,” as she puts it. As expectations for Kansas public schools ramp up, thanks to the No Child Left Behind law and state funding increases, it will be great to again have somebody in that crucial role who not only knows and values what the schools are doing right but also knows what she’s doing.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
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12 Comments
Any word about school vouchers?
Can’t say NCLB is going to help Kansas. It appears to have made a nation of test-takers. It is some serious need of revamping.
But I think our new education commissioner has more on the ball the the old one.
One kansas taliban official gone. Many more to go.
Thank you Posny for returning sanity to the commissioner’s post.
The first question should be: What is the MISSION of the Kansas state-wide board of education?
Lets not do like the last State Education Commissioner who made up his goals which had virtually nothing to do with improving Kansas education. Instead he was long on busy work to give him job insurance as the saying goes.
For example, Bob Corkins wanted to start a “state level” school under his guidance for which he had no relevant education.
#2, Bob Corkins wanted to create a huge data base containing the records of all Kansas school children, a redundancy for no known reason.
Our Kansas schools are too important to leave to the whims of an expensive state wide educaton commissar who creates his own mis-guided goals.
The individual school boards, such as Wichita’s USD 259 school board, knows best what is needed from the state level. They should join other school boards to formulate state-wide goals for the state’s education czar and establish an oversight committee.
Most likely, local school boards are going directly to our state legislators who in reality serve as our state-wide board of education.
I’ll bet she has some really great ideas, like let’s do nothing. Let’s try nothing. Let’s not even talk about trying new ideas. Status quo all the way.
Celebration of Mr. Corkins’ departure may be premature. Yes, he’s gone, but what have Kansans, particularly Kansas children really gained?
Bob Corkins was “too educated” for the Kansas K-12 education establishment. He had a KU College of Liberal Arts and Sciences bachelor’s degree and a KU J.D.
Among Kansas’s post-baccalaureate university programs, KU’s law students’ GPA average is exceeded only by KU’s medical students’. To get into the law school, and get through it, Mr. Corkins had to master academic subject matter that would stymie most members of the Kansas K-12 education establishment.
We need lawyers to be studious, very intelligent and conscientious, for many reasons, including the rapid evolution and expansion of laws.
It is increasingly problematic that K-12 education is disconnected from higher education. ACT, Inc. for example recently published a white paper, based on meticulous research, titled “Rigor at Risk”, that finds so-called college-preparatory “core curriculum” course completion to be inadequate for college preparation. Essentially, this creates university-unreadiness that can only be rectified through much more challenging and materially advanced courses.
ACT’s analysis is born out by our state’s 6-year university and college graduation rates that are in the upper 50% range for KU, KSU and Washburn U, and mostly in the 40’s in our other higher education institutions. In essence, for every 5 students who matriculates to the first three universities, 2 drop out. Elsewhere, more than half drop out. Some of them ultimately earn degrees, but their progress is impeded. For some, financial hardship is at play, but for most the problem is study-skills inadequacy and lack of essential foundational knowledge required to understand the material presented at the university level.
Kansas schools are, by and large, not well-equipped to rapidly upgrade themselves to offer more-advanced coursework.
Why? Long, long ago, high school teachers possessed college of liberal arts and sciences degrees. They knew the knowledge and skills their university-bound students needed to possess so they too could earn their CLAS degrees.
This changed after WWII, when a new mandate arose to universalize high school education, which resulted in assignment of high school teacher training to colleges of education. In order to accommodate education-school courses, most upper-division CLAS coursework was eliminated, for example, senior-year capstone CLAS coursework was completely discarded.
Bob Corkins understood higher education, having experienced it, and succeeded in his own endeavors as an undergraduate and law student.
Mrs. Posney had a very different type of post-secondary experience, which has value, but is entirely unrelated to the crucial need to prepare Kansas young people for university, studying subjects that will enable them to prosper as adults, and make contributions to our nation’s well-being.
Mr. Corkins supported vouchers, for a sound reason: small entrepreneurial educational systems can respond to change much more rapidly than large bureaucratic ones.
Vouchers are not the only potential avenue for providing college-preparatory education to a much larger group of students, and inclusively, than Kansas currently does.
For example, a charter school in San Diego, The Preuss School, a private-public partnership institution, requires every student to take SIX Advanced Placement courses. In its first year of eligibility for Newsweek’s “America’s Best High Schools” this year, Preuss ranked #9 in the country. Kansas’s only ranked schools were in the Blue Valley District in JoCo, and the top one ranked in the 400’s.
Preuss is remarkable. Why? The school admits applicants by lottery. To qualify for the lottery, students must be: A. socioeconomically disadvantaged, as proven by eligibility for federal school lunch subsidy, B. have neither a parent nor guardian who graduated from college.
Actually, the median parental education level for Preuss students is no high school attended. Ninety-four percent of the students are minority. The school was founded for the purpose of qualifying minority students for admission to the highly competitive University of California, after California voters outlawed affirmative-action admissions.
Many people were upset that the door was slammed on minority students. Some farsighted UC San Diego professors decided to open it. The hard way. By giving minority students an education that rigorously prepared them for UC. This included longer days, and a longer school year, and a lot of personalized attention from their teachers.
Most of this schools’ teachers have academic subject College of Letters and Sciences bachelor’s degrees, primarily from the University of California at San Diego. The founding architects realized that to prepare students for UC, who had no at-home resources, such as university-educated parents, books, etc., it was imperative that their teachers know what succeeding at UC requires, by their own experience, for example, studying consistently, not cramming for exams, writing library-research-based term papers, and taking expository-format examinations (e.g. blue book exams), not multiple-choice/fill-in-the-blank/single-sentence-answer tests.
Preuss teachers are not unionized. They see no need, because they are treated with respect as professionals, by a principal who was named National Principal of the Year when she led a traditional public high school.
Apophis has said that teachers unions will lead change in American public education in the 21st century. But recent developments contest this assertion. In the nation’s two greatest strongholds of unionism, New York City, and Los Angeles, charter schools are blossoming. In the LAUSD, which has about 20% more students than Kansas, there are currently 105 charter schools. Not all charters there succeed, the bad ones are weeded out.
In most cases former union-member teachers staff these schools. They’ve left regular public schools to escape talent-stifling administrative bureaucracy and to be treated as professionals. Most are finding that they have to work longer hours than they did in regular schools, but the work is fulfilling.
Mr. Corkins’ departure represents a reestablishment of the status quo in Kansas K-12 education, a return to 20th century Kansas public-education sensibility.
Whether this will allow Kansans to cultivate productive, liveable-income niches the 21st century global economy is a question that more Kansans need to be asking. If not, what needs to be done?
These questions, alas, are “beyond the pay grades” of our K-12 education leaders and workers, who were recruited and trained for an American industrial-economy-supporting mission, devised when countries such as China and India were primitive agrarian nations who posed no competitive threat whatsoever to our industrial workers’ jobs. The world has changed.
American public education’s mission must be transformed, but the system is not designed to be transformable. For example, to make it transformable, you’d empower younger people to be leaders, replacing grey-haired “fixtures”. I don’t mean 23 year olds fresh out of ed school, but rather dynamic late-twentysomething to early thirtysomething year old people.
But this transfer of power isn’t conceivable in the industrial model of education: young teachers are required to “pay their dues”, and “wait their turn”, which is to say, lose their energy, enthusiasm, and insights before they gain the authority to do anything.
Thus transformation is rendered impossible, because the people in authority don’t want transformation. This would require too much effort, if they had to do it, and they don’t have the energy for it in late middle age, and they certainly don’t want to give up their own perquisites, comforts and status.
Change is happening. Kansas has a change-resistant ethos. Only time will tell if by the time Kansans decide to board their children on the train, will it have already left the station?
I thought vouchers were NOT a new idea. So the wingnut fight for vouchers isnt exactly “fresh, new thinking”.
Same ol same ol courtesy of your local wingnuts.
Vouchers is just a Republican code word for “pay for my children to go to a private school so they don’t have to interact with the minorities.”
You, WS Clark, have a severe case of guilty white liberal syndrome. I fear that it may be terminal.
“have a severe case of guilty white liberal syndrome”
Now that is funny, Mr. Slaughter!
The only thing I feel guilty about is not spending enough time with my children when they were growing up.
Is this new commisioner a liberal taliban? Why would the Eagle give her a glowing tribute if she is not Liberal with a capital L?
Dr. Posny is one of the most highly regarded educators, not only in Kansas but also in the United States, as evidenced by her selection last year to run the U.S. Dept. of Ed’s Special Education programs.
Roger, your arugments are so misguided, they do not warrant rebuttal … except for one thing: Mr. Corkin’s completion of KU’s law program, in no way, qualifies him to run any education institution. Your misguided belief is the same as on that permeates our society: being college educated makes one qualified to critique education. Until our country determines that education is a priority and that holding students accountable for their apathy and increasing teacher pay to entice the BEST people to teach, we’ll have more of the same: high dropouts in both high school and college.