Paybacks...

 Paybacks...

 

Last year was a totally online year for a significant number of students with disabilities.  Under federal and state law, students with disabilities are no longer entitled to services through the school year in which they turn twenty-one.  After that they are left to their eligibility for adult services.

A group of special education advocates and lawyers are now advocating to extend services to that group of students with disabilities who aged out of entitlement during this past year.  Public school officials are saying these situations need to be decided on a case-by-case basis if a parent feels the child needs more services.

The fact is that school systems really don’t know the losses that any kids have suffered during the last 16 months.  That information will become known once the students are back in school in buildings.  We won’t know that about plain kids let alone those with disabilities.

In New York City, a year’s extension has been granted to some students but not to all.  The DC public schools believe that perhaps a dozen or so students will need the extra eligibility out of hundreds who think they deserve it.  

Advocates are arguing that asking each student or the student’s family to file a request and then for the system to process that request is much more expensive than it would be to just grant the extra eligibility to all students who were impacted.   School systems do not see it that way.  They are requiring each student to file an individual appeal.  

The other approach being taken by advocates is to go to governmental legislative councils and ask them to set aside funds for the extra services.  Mostly advocates have been met with resistance to this idea.  One of the issues is that for a student with disabilities, that final year of school is often spent in on-the-job training which was next to impossible to do virtually.  So the student who worked at CVS stocking shelves and learning to have a snack in the break room with other staff, is not going to be able to learn those skills virtually.  

Of course, the real issue for all kids with disabilities (as well as plain kids) is that they were given all given less than they were promised for a school year.  Sort of like the 50-minute therapy hour.  Except for the kids who got a 20-week school year and no one wants to acknowledge that paybacks for the kids might not go as planned.

Is it really too much to ask?

 Is it Really Too Much to ask?

 

Why can’t editors and journalists use grammatically correct language?  For that matter why can’t children write a correct five sentence paragraph that is grammatically correct and follows the rules of clear language.  “The days of rain in western Europe has caused major flooding”.   NO, the subject of that sentence is “days” and it is plural, thereby, requiring the plural verb such “have”.  This sentence was spoken by a journalist for NPR.  This is truly fake news.  Food and Wine magazine had a similarly egregious headline in its last issue.  "The next generation of spice companies are delivering better tasting spices while disrupting an outmoded industry"  Evidently the author does not know that the subject of that headline sentence is generation  NOT spice makers.  

Years ago a Maryland State Superintendent of schools announced the creation of a BASIC curriculum for Maryland school children.  That still hasn’t happened.  

Before we keep adding more math classes and more advanced math and science courses how about we institute a truly BASIC curriculum.

All students would be required to use grammatically correct language in their speaking and writing.  In doing so they would need to learn not just the rules of grammatically correct English, but how to write and speak in a manner that is clear and precise.  As the lyrics in “Why Can’t the English Teach Their Children how to Speak” from the musical, “My Fair Lady” cries out “in America they haven’t spoken it for years”.  

Before we go on to teaching higher order math, how about teaching kids how to read credit card conditions.  People are paying 25% revolving interest on credit cards that dramatically increases what they are paying for what they buy.  It would be good to teach children how to read the fine print in advertising and understanding that things that are too good to be true usually are.  Not all two-fer deals are a deal.  It is not always cost-effective to buy the bigger size.  These are practical everyday skills that students need before they need to plot a graph.

Emails are regularly sent to encourage donations for causes that are not within the realm of change.  Children need to be taught how to evaluate a request for donations.  AND they need to learn how the government works before they decide what is wrong with it.  Most native-born Americans could not pass the citizenship test that immigrants need to pass to become citizens.   That situation is a failure of our schools.  

All of the improvements to education are just fine.  But like a house, education should be built on a firm foundation and we haven’t begun to do that.  Is that really too much to ask?

Playing Catchup

 Playing Catchup!

 

Many years ago, William Proxmire, a U.S. Senator, regularly announced his Golden Fleece Award.  This award was given to research activities that seemed to be a waste of the taxpayers’ money since they sought to research that which was abundantly and obviously known.  I was recently reminded of the Golden Fleece Award when I read the results of a research project that determined during virtual learning school attendance was down dramatically and so was achievement.   Who couldn’t have figured that out in about ten minutes?   I hope there wasn’t much money wasted on that.

Now we do know that federal and state governments are doing what they always do in the face of a problem- throw money at the problem before they have begun to determine either a solution or the cost of that solution.

Anyone who has paid attention has understood that attendance would be down.  Staring at a screen all day for instruction without personal interface becomes flat out boring.  Add to the fact that a parent might be in another room doing his/her own work from home activities means little to no supervision.  Some older kids have even gotten jobs.

If you are a teacher, teaching from a Chromebook is not your best way to display your teaching abilities.  Had less interesting teaching, the boredom of the screen, and lots of more interesting things to do with that screen than follow along with the teacher and you have a recipe for lower achievement.

School systems now have more money than they know what to do with.  In Maryland, besides all of the federal money flowing in, the Kirwan Commission money will soon be showing up in the school system coffers.  Maryland has a new young State Superintendent who has never had supervisory responsibility for  a school system before.  He will need to answer to the Maryland State Board of Ed as well as to the Oversight Board for the Kirwan money.

Spending more money on the same teachers, adding more teachers and writing policy papers isn’t going to do it.

All of this money gives us the opportunity for an entirely new paradyme of what public education needs to look like.  We should begin with the consumers-that would be the kids and recent graduates.  We need to be willing to really flip the system and do something very different.  Of course, the unions will be against any changes but playing catchup will just not be enough in this situation.  Or we could spend lots of money researching what we already know.

Not Perfect Quite Yet

 Not perfect yet

 

This past weekend we celebrated the 245^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.  A very upstart act that sometimes doesn’t seem as brave today as it was 200+ years ago.  When these men, yes they were all white men, (although not all old, Jefferson was only in his early 30’s and Adams only 41) signed the Declaration they ended with a pledge of their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor.  And sacred honor may have meant a lot more then.  They were putting their lives at risk.  Had this upstart set of colonies lost this war against the most powerful nation on earth at the time, their lives would have been sacrificed.

Twelve years later, after an initial failed start, the Constitution of the United States was ratified “to establish a more perfect union”.   You will notice the goal even then was not to establish a perfect union, but a “more” perfect one.  Even the initial framers knew perfect is an ongoing process.

Today states are forbidding the teaching of Critical Race Theory because they believe it is critical of the United States and these legislators do not want children to learn that our Union is not perfect.  First of all, as the name suggests, this is a theory not a curriculum.  Secondly, what is obvious to any marketer, whoever thought of this name needs to rethink his/her career choice.  The name is terrible, but the idea behind this theory  is not.

Even the most loving parent would probably admit that his/her child is not perfect, but that does not stop us from loving.  The same can be said about adult spouses, significant others or best friends.  It is also true of our nation’s allies.  “Ain’t nobody perfect” but that has never stopped us from loving.

Has our nation made some mistakes during the course of that 245 year history?   You bet, and some mighty big ones too.  Does knowing about those mistakes stop us from loving our country, not likely, but it might help us to work to make fewer mistakes in the future.  Just as being aware of and confronting our own mistakes in our personal lives helps us to grow and be a better person.  So being aware of our nation’s mistakes helps us to teach our children how to make fewer of them when they are old enough to be in charge.  Just as many a parent has said to his/her children, “I don’t want you to make the same mistakes I made when I was growing up.”

Mistakes in our personal lives and in our nation’s life are part of growing and perfecting.  None of us is perfect yet, not we as individuals, nor we as a country.  We can’t fix a problem until we identify what it is.  That’s all critical race theory is saying, let’s look at where we have gone wrong so we can go right in the future. Not much to be afraid of.  We are all still looking for the “more perfect union”.