An editorial in Alabama’s Montgomery Advertiser commends progress in Alabama schools toward achieving standards under the No Child Left Behind Act.
Alabama public schools made huge strides toward meeting national No Child Left Behind accountability standards, with 1,194 of the state’s 1,364 schools making “Adequate Yearly Progress” toward a goal of having every child in the state and in the nation performing at proficiency levels in reading and math by 2014.
That’s 87.5%.
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Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), Education, No Child Left Behind Act, Public education | 
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Posted by Ed Darrell
No sooner did I note the Nevada State School Board’s request for more money, mostly to increase teacher pay, than today’s editorial in the Las Vegas Review-Journal started shooting at the proposal, saying it has no chance to pass.
The editorial board wrote:
That the board would make such an outlandish demand is not surprising. Leading into each legislative session over the past decade, the board has prepared budgets that far exceed the state’s ability to pay. Of the board’s 10 members, six have ties to education, either through teaching positions or retirements from schools and colleges. From their perspective, schools can never have enough money, no matter how much they pull from your pockets.
The earlier story noted that the slide to the current average classroom size took several years. From the appearances of the earlier story, the state has not kept pace with funding needs in education. If the state board’s recommendations are not met one year, and they recommend full funding the next year, the recommendations will begin to look “outlandish.” As the needs continue to be unmet with funding, the need for funding grows — and usually such growth is not linear, but is instead exponential. Ten years of budget failure does not indicate that the current budget proposal is too large by any means. It would be the logical result of a state sliding in education capability. Read the rest of this entry »
3 Comments | Classroom size, Education, Education spending, Harry Wong, Public education, State school boards, Teacher Pay, Teaching | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Nevada’s State School Board Saturday voted to ask the legislature for an additional $1.1 billion, mostly for increases in teacher pay, but also to add 2,000 teachers. The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported the story in Sunday’s paper:
The Nevada State Board of Education voted Saturday to recommend that the 2007 Legislature increase spending on public education by $1.1 billion over current levels.
The proposal, if approved by lawmakers, would boost Nevada’s education funding by 50 percent and consume more than the $1 billion in additional general fund tax revenue that Gov. Kenny Guinn has said will be available for all state agencies in the upcoming budget.
Guinn estimates that state government will receive $6.9 billion in tax revenue for the 2007-08 and 2008-09 budgets, compared with $5.9 billion in the current two-year budget.
The board, which approved its education spending recommendation in a 9-1 vote, wants to increase teacher salaries 3 percent each year over the next two years. It also voted to reduce the current ratio of 21.4 students per teacher to 19.65. That ratio last was achieved by Nevada public schools in 2001-02.
Reducing the ratio would require public schools to hire about 2,000 additional teachers.
In the current two-year budget, the state spends about $2.2 billion on public education, or $4,600 for each of the 404,000 students. The proposals backed by the state board would increase state spending to $3.3 billion and raise the per-student allocation to $6,244.
(story reported by Ed Vogel of the Review-Journal’s Capital Bureau in Reno)
In Nevada, all but about 10% of local school funding comes from the state government. Nevada is the state among the continental 48 with the highest percentage of land controlled by federal agencies, way over 50%. Most of that land is unpopulated, but the state has experienced explosive growth around Las Vegas and Reno. New schools pop up with amazing frequency around Las Vegas. Budget issues in Nevada education may vary from other states.
The vote on the proposal was 9 in favor, one opposed. The one opponent to the budget recommendation explained her vote in a way that may pop eyes in other states:
Barbara Myers, the only board member to vote against the budget request, said she opposed the plan only because she wanted to reduce the student-teacher ratio even more.
Leave a Comment » | Education, Public education, State school boards, Teacher Pay | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
This week marks the 61st anniversaries of the U.S. dropping atom bombs on Hiroshima (August 6) and Nagasaki (August 9).
This is the only event that occasionally causes me to wish for school in early August. Marking the anniversaries in a U.S. history class could be a useful exercise. Texas’ TEKS require students to know a bit about President Harry Truman’s decision to drop the bomb, and especially his reasoning behind the decision. To get there in an orderly fashion, and to keep kids captivated by this most interesting part of recent history, I think a class needs to lay the background with the end of the war in Europe (especially D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge) with troops hoping to go home to the U.S. and being diverted to the Pacific, the background of the U.S.’s “island-hopping” strategy, especially the invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa and the carnage that was required to take the islands, and the background of the Manhattan Project, from Einstein’s letter to Roosevelt through the secret cities at Oak Ridge, Tennessee and Los Alamos, New Mexico, the Trinity Project at White Sands, the training of the bombers at Wells Wendover, Nevada, and the World War I service of Harry Truman himself. It’s a fascinating history that, the Texas tests show and my classroom experience confirms, students know very little about.
As with the misinformation on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq which I reported earlier today, this history of atom bombs informs us of policy choices available and necessary in our current dealings with North Korea, Iran, Ukraine and Russia, among other nations.
Japanese foundations sponsor trips to Hiroshima and Nagasaki for U.S. reporters, and there used to be one for high school teachers, too. It’s a history I lived with for a decade trying to get a compensation bill for downwind victims of fallout from our atmospheric nuclear tests in Nevada. I wish more people knew the stories.
5 Comments | Atomic Bomb, Curricula, Harry Truman, History, Nuclear weapons, Science, TAKS, Technology, TEKS, World War II | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Utah’s State Board of Education voted late last week to toughern the graduation requirements, with 18 state-mandated topics — requiring another year of science, another year of math, and another year of “language arts.” Here’s the story from the August 5 Deseret News.
Michigan recently strengthened graduation requirements, too, as noted in this story from the Macomb Daily.
Missouri joined a number of states (Texas and Utah) that require financial literacy, reported in this story from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
[Please send me a note if your state is considering or has recently adopted new graduation standards, to edarrell AT sbcglobal DOT net.]
Leave a Comment » | Curricula, Education, Public education, Science, State school boards | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Wholly apart from the damaging effects of belief in things that are not accurate, how much should we worry that people really get bad history?
From the Associated Press on August 6, via Editor & Publisher:
NEW YORK Do you believe in Iraqi “WMD”? Did Saddam Hussein’s government have weapons of mass destruction in 2003?
Half of America apparently still thinks so, a new poll finds, and experts see a raft of reasons why: a drumbeat of voices from talk radio to die-hard bloggers to the Oval Office, a surprise headline here or there, a rallying around a partisan flag, and a growing need for people, in their own minds, to justify the war in Iraq.
People tend to become “independent of reality” in these circumstances, says opinion analyst Steven Kull. [emphasis added by this blog – E.D.]
The reality in this case is that after a 16-month, $900-million-plus investigation, the U.S. weapons hunters known as the Iraq Survey Group declared that Iraq had dismantled its chemical, biological and nuclear arms programs in 1991 under U.N. oversight. That finding in 2004 reaffirmed the work of U.N. inspectors who in 2002-03 found no trace of banned arsenals in Iraq.Despite this, a Harris Poll released July 21 found that a full 50 percent of U.S. respondents — up from 36 percent last year — said they believe Iraq did have the forbidden arms when U.S. troops invaded in March 2003, an attack whose stated purpose was elimination of supposed WMD. Other polls also have found an enduring American faith in the WMD story.
This is a case where “enduring faith” can lead to bad policy, or disastrous policy.
The article notes that a recent news story could have skewed the poll. A report requested by two Republicans, a senator and a representative, both running for re-election, detailed the Pentagon’s information about weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) found in Iraq. There were 500 pieces catalogued, very old, left over from Gulf War I in the early 1990s. There was no evidence of new weapons, nor of a program to make new weapons such as that used to justify the invasion of Iraq. Read the rest of this entry »
Leave a Comment » | Accuracy, Bogus history, Current History, History, Hoaxes | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Mark Olson is a veteran blogger on issues of concern to conservatives and to Christians, at Pseudo-Polymath. He’s responded to my earlier post on vouchers. Marks calls it ‘a bit of a quibble.’
His first complaint goes to history: I wrote that once we had a broad consensus on the value of education. Mark wrote:
In colonial (and I presume probably pre-Civil War Virginia) the Chesapeake bay/plantation folkway had a … hegemonic attitude toward education. In fact, while the plantation “masters” were 100% literate, the servants and other classes in the society (white) were some 70% illiterate. It was something of a point of pride that public education was not generally available. Literacy and education as well, was not emphasised in the backcountry as well (which continues (I think) today in Appalachia for example). So of the four folkways which made up our early nation, only two held that education was of value.
That official policy prevented education as a mark of oppression and/or racism only makes the point. Infamously, some states and localities at various times had laws against teaching slaves to read, or to educate slaves formally in other ways. Denying education is a traditional form of oppression. This does not change the consensus that education is valuable, but instead is a dramatic demonstration that the policy makers regarded education as valuable and as a political tool for change. At the same time that these governments forbade educating slaves, they established schools for other people. Read the rest of this entry »
5 Comments | America's founding, Education, Freedom - Political, History, Public education, School vouchers, TAKS, Teaching | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Huntsville Times (Alabama) on extensive summer workshops teachers take in order to keep current and keep teaching credentials: Who says teaches take summer off?
Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) notes that some educators seem to fear teaching history for fear of saying something politically incorrect; Australia’s public school history courses are virtually non-existent, with the topic covered in other subjects: Schools ‘afraid of teaching history.’
An Associated Press story on a project that I think would work wonders in my high school classes: Pitt professor aims to help teach other subjects through music. A sample:
What do Woody Guthrie, Neil Young, James Brown, Dolly Parton, Irving Berlin and Bob Dylan have in common? They, among others, just may save music in American schools and put a powerful tool in the hands of teachers of all subjects.
A University of Pittsburgh music professor is disseminating a new approach to teaching history, English, social studies and other humanities by including music to be studied like any primary text. The results have been stunning for those teachers who have implemented his program in their curriculums.
More from Down Under: The Australian notes that several parts of Australian history face pressure from revisionists — and goes on to detail a challenge to the common notion that the Great Depression there featured a lot of evictions of renters into the rain — it was, instead, a tough time where Australians helped each other get by: The Myth of the Great Depression.
A press release from Pearson Scott Foresman details a new California history curriculum the company is selling, which is almost completely digital, and focused intensely on California standards.
A high school history teacher in Tibet got a 10-year prison sentence for writing a text on Tibetan history, government and geography that appears to have come too close to telling the facts, for Chinese authorities. He’s asked the United Nations to intervene.
One of America’s great local newspapers, the Louisville Courier-Journal, carried a report on the death of Henry E. Cheaney, a University of Kentucky professor who collected massive amounts of data on the state’s African American people, for in-depth history.
The Grand Rapids Press (Michigan) criticized proposed history standards from the Michigan State Board of Education. According to the newspaper:
A straight telling of the American story is what Michigan students need. State education bureaucrats should have been able to provide it.
Instead, they produced a truncated and ideologically tilted version that fully deserved the subsequent uproar and the decision of state Superintendent Michael Flanagan to send it back for remedial work.
Enjoy!
Leave a Comment » | America's founding, Education, Geography - Physical, History, Public education, Textbooks | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Libertarian-bent lawyer Tim Sandefur posts this note at Panda’s Thumb:
Neal McCulskey of the Cato Institute and Matthew Yglesias of The American Prospect have a debate going over whether school choice programs would help resolve the evolution/creationism controversy. Here’s McCulskey’s first post, Yglesias’ reply, and McCulskey’s rebuttal.
Vouchers. Parental choice is an issue across the curriculum, but it is especially poignant in sex education, biology, and history. In those three areas there are national movements to direct curricula, some of the movements in each area based on a great deal of misinformation and disinformation.
14 Comments | Creationism, Curricula, Education, Geography - Political, Intelligent Design, Public education, Religious Freedom, School vouchers, State school boards | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Third or fourth time is the charm, right?
In Arizona, where the legislature recently decreed a U.S. flag and a copy of the Constitution and Bill of Rights will be displayed in all college classrooms, the debate now turns to whether the legislature should require the study of U.S. history by undergraduates. I appears the legislators do not find college kids have enough appreciation for our nation’s history.
I’ll reproduce the entire story out of the Arizona Republic below the fold (Dan Quayle’s family’s newspaper!).
Is it just me, or is it that these pseudo-patriots who don’t think our kids are well-enough indoctrinated always stamp the life out of history when they start these tirades? I have yet to find a law that mandates that history be interesting. Instead we get standards that provide great, boring, history-crushing, mind-and-butt-numbing lists. In short, these requirements tend to make history not worth the study.
And, as with those who celebrate Fillmore’s bringing the bathtub to the White House, the advocates almost always get history wrong. [Millard Fillmore himself, never attended college; he apprenticed first in the cloth business, and then in law.]
Barry Goldwater will be coming out of his grave to stop this silliness. Maybe literally. If such standards don’t make high school students history literate, what makes anyone think the failed methods would work on college students? If the standards do work to make high school kids knowledgeable in history, why would the college standards be necessary?
This controversy smells. It has the earmarks of being one more way to issue diatribes against “librul college professors.” It’s one more way of flogging public education, while refusing to give educators the tools to solve the problems.
Article below the fold; please comment. Read the rest of this entry »
2 Comments | America's founding, Bill of Rights, Curricula, Education, Flag etiquette, History, History Revisionism, U.S. Constitution | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Heard this one before?
“Income-tax cut urged, Huntsman says it would benefit schools, but educators are wary,” is a headline in this morning’s Deseret Morning News in Salt Lake City.
Gov. Jon Huntsman, Jr., wants a cut in the state income tax. Education funding shrank a great deal as a priority in Utah in the past decade, and educators want to make up lost ground — much of the state income tax goes to support education. Read the rest of this entry »
1 Comment | Business, Current History, Education, Public education, State school boards | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Step right up! Just one click of the mouse!
New Carnival of Education at This Week in Education — #78.
New, 40th Skeptics’ Circle, with a gracious pointer to a post here, at Daylight Atheism.
Enjoy.
Leave a Comment » | History | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
A nicely-written blog, “I Had an Idea This Morning,” had a piece by Anne from Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, New York in the past week about just how far off the mark was George Orwell’s novel 1984 in its portrayal of the use of information devices, “1984 vs. the Blog: Orwell’s Big Blooper.” Instead of the government having a monopoly on the publication of news to be used to suppress the people, the people have fractured such distribution especially with the use of the internet. I find especially thought-provoking the last two paragraphs of Anne’s piece:
Looking back, it almost seems like the totalitarian regimes in Germany and the Soviet Union were the fruit of a never-to-be-repeated phase in the evolution of communications technology. For a brief, horrific period, governments had total control over powerful tools—television and radio—that they could use to communicate with their citizens. The internet, by design, makes such centralized control impossible.
But does that make us safe from groups of super evil mean crazy people? It’s been widely observed that new technologies—from gunpowder to nuclear fusion—have historically been harnessed to serve malevolent ends. Why should communications technology be any different? While mass communication technology helped enable the rise of totalitarian regimes that laid down the law, the internet is pretty good at empowering destructive entities that work outside the law—terrorists, for one. Just as the new technology has given us a billion little blogs and news sites and tv channels and video streams, it’s also giving us thousands of new, super organized hate-based groups to worry about.
The actual year 1984 is a generation gone, and we don’t see exactly the evils that Orwell wrote about. Read the rest of this entry »
5 Comments | Economics, History, Lesson plans, TAKS, Technology, TEKS | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
August 4 is the 184th anniversary of Madison’s letter to William T. Barry, with a discussion of the value of education to a free, democratic republic. Parts of the letter are among the most popular of Madison quotations.
A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.
James Madison, letter to William T. Barry, August 4, 1822
Photo of inscription to the left (north) of the main entrance on Independence Ave., of the James Madison Building, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
1 Comment | Education, Good Quotes, History, James Madison, Public education, Public libraries | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Bogus history infects political discussions more than others, though there are some areas where bogus history strays into the realm of science (false claims that Darwin and Pasteur recanted, for example).
1. The author pitches the claim directly to the media or to organizations of non-historians, for pay.
Historians are detectives, and they like to share what they find. One historian working in the papers of one figure from history will find a letter from another figure, and pass that information on to the historian working on the second figure. Historians teach history, write it up for scholarly work, and often spin it in more fascinating tales for popular work. Most years there are several good works competing for the Pulitzer Prize in history. Academic historians, those tied to universities and other teaching institutions, join societies, attend meetings, and write their material in journals — all pitched to sharing what they have learned.
Bogus historians tend to show up at conferences of non-historians. Douglas Stringfellow’s tales of World War II derring do were pitched to civic clubs, places where other historians or anyone else likely to know better would not appear (Stringfellow’s stories of action behind enemy lines in World War II won him several speaking awards, and based on his war record, he was nominated to a seat in Congress for Utah, in 1952, which he won; a soldier who knew Stringfellow during the war happened through Salt Lake City during the 1954 re-election campaign, and revealed that Stringfellow’s exploits were contrived; he was forced to resign the nomination). David Barton speaks more often to gun collectors than to history groups. Read the rest of this entry »
3 Comments | Accuracy, Bogus history, Voodoo history, World War II | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
You are currently browsing the Millard Fillmore's Bathtub blog archives for August, 2006.
Ed Darrell on Texas's Colorado River
Come on in, the water's fine. Come often: Cleanliness is next to godliness.
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 