Evangelism vs. scholarship: Bible study in public schools

September 15, 2006

Last year the Texas Freedom Network (TFN) published a revealing study showing that most curricula for Bible study in public schools promote Christian faith more than they study the Bible. The study was done by a witty and amusing professor of religion from Southern Methodist University, Dr. Mark Chancey.

This week they followed up that study with a detailed look at Bible studies courses in Texas public schools, as they are actually presented to students. It’s not pretty.

In their press release, TFN said:

Clergy, Parents Voice Concerns About Public School Bible Classes

New Report Reveals Poor Quality, Bias, Religious Agendas in Texas Courses

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 13, 2006

AUSTIN – Clergy and parents are voicing serious concerns that Bible classes in Texas public schools are of poor quality and promote religious views that discriminate against children from a variety of faith backgrounds.

“The study of the Bible deserves the same respect as the study of Huck Finn, Shakespeare and the Constitution,” said the Rev. Dr. Roger Paynter, pastor of First Baptist Church of Austin. “But in some public schools, Bible courses are being used to promote an agenda rather than to enrich the education of our schoolchildren.”

Dr. Chancey is a solid scholar of the Bible. His criticisms are detailed and often understated, in a business where criticism is generally more hyperbole than substance. Especially if you live in Texas, you should read the report.

In the original study, Chancey noted that some nationally-promoted curricula for Bible studies had plagiarized some of their most important materials, in one case including the entire section on honesty as defined by the Ten Commandments. Dr. Chancey does not write drily — he really does a great job turning words. Both studies are well worth the reading.

First Amendment charlatans are fond of quoting the Supreme Court’s decisions in school-and-religion cases since World War II, in which the Court urges critical studies of scripture, saying such studies are legal and good. Then the charlatans go on to advocate Bible studies that are devotional, confusing a Sunday school class-style of scripture study with the critical literature study the Court actually urged. These reports leave little room for squirming by those advocates.

Last time around, TFN held a meeting here in Dallas featuring Dr. Chancey talking about the report and the reaction to it from the religious right (they were stunned into saying many really stupid things). It was a fun night, and I hope TFN will do it again.

Other coverage of the report:

If you see a particularly good story on the study, will you please send me a link?

Patriots and Christians don’t let children take crappy Bible studies courses:

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81 Comments | Creationism, Curricula, Education, Education quality, First Amendment, Plagiarism, Public education, Religious Freedom, Texas, Texas Freedom Network, Textbook Selection | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Hot dog- and freak show-free: 84th Carnival of Education

September 14, 2006

Carnival of Education 84 is up at Current Events in Education, with great stuff, as usual. Colleagues in Irving ISD, in Irving, Texas: Be sure to catch the post on the value of computer use in education, from Steve Hargadon.

School is clearly back in for everyone. This is a fine collection of blog posts — high value.

1 Comment | Curricula, Education blogs, No Child Left Behind Act, Pedagogy, Public education, State school boards | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

One-room schools and national memory

September 13, 2006

Speaking of Jim Bencivenga — I did, here — he was the education reporter for the Christian Science Monitor prior to his time at the U.S. Department of Education, where he was my predecessor as director of Information Services in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) (a long title that means “the office that’s looking for good stuff and new stuff”).

A Google search revealed that Bencivenga is cited in a book of quotations for an article he wrote on one-room schools.

The single-room worlds remain strong icons at the heart of our national memory, permanent as any church spire piercing the New England sky.

On country schools, Christian Science Monitor 13 Feb 85

In my family, childbearing has been put off to later than average for a couple of generations. So I heard stories of the old one-room schools from those who experienced them. The memory of one-room schools was with my parents, and my maternal grandparents (I did not get a chance to meet my paternal grandparents). There are, in 2006, a few one-room schoolhouses remaining — in Maine, California, Nebraska, Hawaii, and other places. NPR featured a series on them this past year.

One-room schools seem awfully quaint, and perhaps wholly obsolete in times when some school districts give every student a laptop computer to get schoolwork done. The values taught in those schools should be preserved, however: Love of education, seeking of wisdom, cross-generational learning, respect for people of differing ages, and a reliance on living the golden rule, among other things.

The U.S was once a nation of mostly one-room schoolhouses. Change isn’t always completely for the better, even when it is mostly so. We struggle to keep good values in changing times.

We still don’t have a magic formula for how people learn, or how education should work; it remains true that in education, one-size fits few.

1 Comment | Good Quotes, History, Pedagogy, Public education, Teaching, Technology | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Contrary view from Kansas

September 11, 2006

I stumbled into a blog on education in Kansas. While I don’t take serious and violent exception to every post, let me say I found almost every post’s conclusion different from the conclusion I would have made. Should I add it to the blogroll?

Go take a look at Kansas Education, and let me know your opinion.

2 Comments | Education spending, Public education | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Today’s civil war in the U.S.: Homeschooling

September 9, 2006

Noting only that there is a vicious fight going on below the waterline at the moment, below the fold I offer two press releases about recent California legislation boosting pre-school programs for at-risk kids. Without my telling you, and without the numbers on the bills being the same, would you know these people are talking about the same bill?

Please, offer your own opinions in comments.
Read the rest of this entry »

5 Comments | Current History, Curricula, Education spending, First Amendment, Freedom - Political, Homeschooling, Public education, School vouchers | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Test today: Bogus science? Bogus history?

September 8, 2006

Several weeks ago I noted Bob Park’s characteristics of Bogus Science, and then, based on his work, I listed some characteristics of bogus history, here in Bogus History 1, and here in Bogus History 2.

Here’s a test, more of the Bogus Science than Bogus History, but still a test: Almost-creationist astronomer Hugh Ross claims to have a hypothesis of creation that is not Darwin, that is testable, and which will be published shortly in his new book.

Do you see any of the warning signs of “bogus” yet? (Some answers suggested at the end, below the fold.)
Read the rest of this entry »

5 Comments | Accuracy, Bogus history, Creationism, Intelligent Design, Public education, Religious Freedom, Texas Freedom Network | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Student, 12, shot; strike turns violent

September 4, 2006

In Palestine, that is; the Associated Press has a story in the Cleveland Plain-Dealer.

Education is valued world-wide; delivering education is a problem, world-wide.  Students suffer wherever education troubles proliferate.

Leave a Comment » | Current History, Education, Public education, Teacher Pay, War | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Detroit: No bumper sticker solutions

September 4, 2006

Teachers in Detroit may not be in class when school opens on the day after Labor Day — tomorrow. They are striking for higher wages and better use of classroom resources; the district is asking for $88 million in cuts to salary and benefits. Here is a summary of the issues from the Detroit Free Press.

Detroit’s troubles demonstrate, simply, that education reform is not easy.

There are test pressures:

“We don’t want to disrupt the education environment of our students,” said Lekan Oguntoyinbo, spokesman for the district. “We have MEAP exams coming up in a couple of months here. We’re striving to be more competitive. Every day is important.”

District officials plan to replace 9,500 teachers and other union members with 250 administrators, to manage the 129,000 students.

Parents want good teachers in the classroom:

Kizzy Davis, whose 5-year-old daughter is to start kindergarten, said putting non-teachers in classes concerns her. “I wouldn’t send my child to school” without teachers, Davis said. “I’d put her in another school district.”

Superintendent William F. Coleman III had promised to hold classes whether teachers showed up or not. And about 250 teacher-certified administrators attended orientation sessions so they’d be ready to hit the classrooms Tuesday. But Saturday, Coleman said the district might reconsider.

Delores Smith Jackson, whose grandchildren attend King Academic and Performing Arts Academy, said schools shouldn’t open if they don’t have enough administrators to fill the classes.

“It would just become a warehouse,” Jackson said.

But she said if school went on, “I’ll be right there, doing whatever I can to assist.”

Teachers and administrators go in completely opposite directions on the salary negotiations:

The sides have been negotiating for months. The district says it must cut $88 million from teachers’ salaries and benefits to help account for a $105-million deficit. The union has asked for 5% pay raises over the next three years.

District officials said they don’t have the money to meet teachers’ demands. But union officials said teachers haven’t had a raise in three years and insist the district has the money but that it’s mismanaged.

Teachers want more than money, too — they are asking for enough resources to make the classrooms places of learning:

“It’s not just the money we’re striking for,” said RaQuel Harris, an English teacher at Central High. “It’s really a matter of how they are spending the money. We don’t have supplies we need to educate the students. I only have one set of novels for my students to read, which means the students cannot check the books out and take them home.”

And the Detroit district is a model for voucher advocates –– it faces stiff competition from alternative methods touted as ways to improve foundering districts like Detroit, and foundering schools like many in Detroit. Charter schools and the ability to transfer students out only rob the district of money it needs to keep going, however, far from sharpening any competitive ability:

District officials had feared that if schools don’t open, even more parents would enroll their children in neighboring school districts or charter schools. Detroit has lost about 50,000 students over the last several years. In Michigan, public school funding is based on enrollment, and the exodus of students has fueled the district’s financial crisis.

Federally-mandated testing accompanied with no funding to fix classroom deficits or increase teacher salaries probably do more damage in this situation than help. Bumper sticker solutions — “give kids a choice;” “students don’t have a prayer;” “what kids need is a moment of science” — don’t even produce a smile in Detroit.

Solutions will take time. Every year sees another 10,000 students sent off without the education everyone says they need to have; this is not the first year of such crises.

What would it take to get you to sign up to teach in Detroit?

Update, September 7: Here’s an example of anti-teacher bias at two or three.net that clarifies my views: The teachers are probably right in demanding more money. A pay range of $36,000 for a college graduate, topping out at $70,000 for a Ph.D. with 30 years of experience, is an insult to humans, to education, and especially to any teacher with the guts to teach in Detroit. It’s a pay scale designed to scare away the best and the brightest. (Those who answer the call are saints.) I hope the school system can figure out a way to get the money to meet the teachers’ demands, and I fear that the anti-public education people are winning the fight to kill Detroit’s schools, and Detroit.

Update, September 14: The Education Wonks have a related post, “Dept. of Ed. retreats on teacher quality. Tip of the scrub brush to the 84th Carnival of Education at Current Events in Education.

13 Comments | Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), Charter schools, Education spending, No Child Left Behind Act, Public education, School vouchers, Teacher Pay | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Recruiting a few good men, to teach

September 1, 2006

Our local paper has been full of interesting stuff the past week — as it should be.

On August 30 the Dallas Morning News editorialized in favor of more men in teaching — citing a study that found men in the classroom improve the academic performance of male students.  (The newspaper said it is a study by economist Thomas Dee at Swarthmore, but it provides a link to a Hoover Institution magazine that does not mention the study . . . [grumble].)

For anyone looking for new arguments to get more men into the classroom, it’s tempting to hold up the new study as a manifesto. Could more men teachers help stem the hemorrhaging dropout numbers for boys? Or reverse the dwindling percentage of boys headed to college? Are more single-sex schools the answer?

The study is certainly not the last word on the matter; the author hopes it could be a jumping-off point for fine-tuning how schools entice youngsters into absorbing information. We hope so.

We also hope the study could be an enticement for the next young man to hear that calling to the classroom. And the next. And the next …

There should be no mystery about how to attract qualified male teachers.  How about we start by paying a competitive wage?  Teaching is a profession where one can take time out, spend seven or ten years getting a Ph.D., and then get a job that pays roughly what a garbage collector would make had he started collecting garbage at the time the teacher starting the march to the graduate degrees.  A recent graduate of our local high school spent a few months’ training with the Army Reserve, and upon return has an administrative job with a local police department — at a salary equal to a degreed teacher with a few years’ experience.  Cops on the beat don’t make enough, either — but someone who spends a decade getting ready to teach should do better than a rookie cop not on the beat.

In contrast, MBAs at accounting firms start out around six figures.  They often have less education and less experience than the teachers — and they are expendable (look at how many are weeded out by the firm in the first three years).  But with that kind of salary offered, a kid might make a well-reasoned calculation that two years of graduate business school and a life in accounting would be better than a Ph.D. and a life teaching in public schools.  I think it patently unfair to say that teaching then gets the leftovers — but it makes one wonder, doesn’t it?

Public schools are the only enterprises where we demand higher standards for the employees, and then hold salaries down until the employees reach the standards.  In every other line of work, the market raises wages.  We might learn a lot by observing (was that Stengel or Berra?)

For those conservatives who ask that education be treated more like a free market — do they really anticipate what would happen were that to occur?  A good teacher is easily worth as much as a starting accountant.  Why not use market devices to improve education?  Raise the wages. 

More men, and more highly-qualified women, will pursue teaching when we let the salaries float to levels comparable to other industries with similar demands and education requirements.  I read Milton Friedman — vouchers or no vouchers, he makes the case that education will be mired in mediocrity until we spend the money to attract the best people possible to teaching, and to keep them there.

6 Comments | Business, Business Ethics, Economics, Education, Education spending, Public education, Teacher Pay, Teaching | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

California – new law aids low-performing schools

September 1, 2006

Maybe California will get back on track.

Once California’s public schools were the envy of most of the nation.  Most of them worked well, and proved very attractive to new businesses who needed well-educated workers for increasingly complex and technical jobs.  Then the state lurched to a “don’t spend” mode with Proposition 13, which severely limited tax increases, and the school system began a long slide towards mediocrity.

Growth in the Las Vegas, Nevada, schools is driven in part by people fleeing California for better schools. 

The San Diego Union-Tribune reports a change in attitude in the top levels of government:

SACRAMENTO – A sweeping $3 billion agreement to give hundreds of low-performing schools smaller classes, more qualified teachers and additional counselors was revealed yesterday by the Schwarzenegger administration and the California Teachers Association.

The proposal would create one of the largest pilot programs in state history, targeting 600 struggling schools heavily populated with minority students.

What a unique idea!  Who would have thought that targeting low-performing schools with money to improve education would, you know, improve education? 

Meanwhile, other states struggle with “reform” efforts designed to take money away from struggling schools.  Nation to education:  “The floggings will continue until morale improves.” Read the rest of this entry »

6 Comments | Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), Classroom size, Education spending, Leadership, No Child Left Behind Act, Public education | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Burying Brown and the Board of Education, too

August 30, 2006

WordPress now alerts bloggers to other blog posts with similar content.  Sometimes it pulls one out of the past, and sometimes the posts pulled up make one shudder.

Reports last April said Nebraska’s unicameral legislature passed a law that will effectively resegregate Omaha’s school system.  Appletree has the story here.  How did it turn out?  I haven’t found much other news on it.

The news and the figures reported are troubling, regardless the final outcome (and I suspect the motion did not proceed exactly as the version reported).  Some of us have long suspected that the anti-education drive, manifested in proposals for charter schools, and especially for vouchers, is simply a masked version of segregation, a way to deprive people of color and people in poverty of a chance for a good education. 

One almost wishes Ronald Reagan were still alive to remind these people that, while a rising tide raises all boats, punching holes in the bottom of the boats sinks them, and in a drought, the entire lake goes dry.  The best ideals of the United States have been expressed in the drive for almost-free, universally-available primary and secondary education, for nearly 200 years.  The U.S. education system remains the model the rest of the world strives to copy.  Getting Americans to commit to keeping that system, and keeping it up to date in a world gone flat (see Tom Friedman) is an important political task for the next quarter-century.

Every kid deserves a chance to achieve as much as she or he can.  We need to focus more on making that happen, for all kids.

8 Comments | Charter schools, Civil Rights, Current History, Education, Education spending, Freedom - Political, Public education, School vouchers | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

The Carnival that was barked in the night

August 30, 2006

The 82nd Carnival of Education is up at Thespis.  Already.  Education is a hot area — this thing runs every week.

There is another link to this blog, to one of my posts on Colorado’s bizarre law banning most flags from being flown — but go see some of the other stuff. 

The post from A History Teacher is quite profound, a wake-up call on teaching kids to be wise consumers of internet information (and I feature that blog in the blogroll — most of what he posts is good stuff).  There is a flag-burning flap in Kentucky I hadn’t been aware of. 

Go see the Carnival, browse the Midway, win a couple of kewpie dolls . . .

Leave a Comment » | Flag etiquette, Public education, Teaching | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Carnival of Education #81

August 28, 2006

I failed to note earlier that the Carnival of Education 81 is up over at The Education Wonks.

Blog carnivals offer good opportunities to find blogs that provide great value, or to find blog entries which are individual gems.  When I send notices of these carnivals to other teachers, I always get thank-you notes.  It’s a cheap way to get a minor ego boost (is there any way to get those put down on the evaluation forms?).

One of the things I’m passing along to my Texas history-teaching colleagues from Carnival 81 is this post, a letter from a grandmother to a young boy, about what her schooling was like, in Texas in the 1890s.  From huffenglish.com.

Miss Gilbert's Music and Elocution Classes, 1891-92, Whitt, TX.

Students at the Parker Institute, Whitt, Texas, 1891-1892 — courtesy of huffenglish

1 Comment | Education, Education blogs, No Child Left Behind Act, Public education, Texas | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

If we valued education . . .

August 27, 2006

 . . . we would value teachers, and take care of them. 

Do we?

This blogger, Trisha Reloaded, a veteran teacher (outside the U.S.), gives her Ten Reasons Why I Hate Teaching.  She’s teaching in Singapore — but if she didn’t say, could you tell whether she’s teaching in your town?

TexasEd notes that teacher turnover is scandalously high, and wonders what are the costs of such turnover on students and on student achievement.  We focus on student drop-out rates — perhaps we should focus on teacher drop-out rates. 

1 Comment | Education, Education blogs, Public education, Teacher Pay, Teaching | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Colorado flag flap update

August 26, 2006

Update, August 28:  Interesting discussion at The Education Wonks.

The 7th grade world geography teacher in Lakewood, Colorado, Eric Hamlin, reached a compromise agreement with the school district over the display of foreign flags in his classroom, according to a couple of reports I heard last night after I posted on the controversy.  The World, a co-production of BBC, Public Radio International and WGBH in Boston, carried a thorough report, in audio.

But then he decided to resign from the school anyway, according to Matthew Rothschild at the online Progressive.  Denver Post columnist Jim Spencer added a few details, including the very temporary way the flags were mounted (the Colorado law bans “permanent” displays).  Lots of comments, including the text of the law, at Reason.com’s Hit and Run. (I have the complete text of the law below the fold.)

It would be difficult to write parody like this. Read the rest of this entry »

3 Comments | Current History, First Amendment, Flag etiquette, Freedom - Political, Geography - Political, History, Pedagogy, Public education, School discipline | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

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