Eliminated, or Replaced?

High-school seniors statewide were no doubt miffed if they heard the news out of Raleigh on Sept. 5: Gov. Roy Cooper signed a bill into law titled “AN ACT TO REDUCE TESTING ADMINISTERED TO STUDENTS IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS.” The bill’s first sentence stipulates that no tests will be eliminated until the 2020-21 school year, making members of the Class of 2020 ineligible for the legislature’s largesse. We’re very much in favor of reducing the amount of time students spend taking tests, especially useless tests that are never used to target areas of weakness or make adjustments to an individual’s course of instruction. However, the law contains another significant loophole regarding NC Final Exams. Its first section reads, No later than March 15, 2020, the State […]

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Farcical, but Not Amusing

STATE LEGISLATURE (NCGA): Goll-lee Moses! We’re spending way too much on education! The public schools are eating up dang near 40% of our whole dadgum budget! DISTRICTS: We need money for textbooks. We need money for classroom supplies. We need more money to pay for these expensive class-size reductions that y’all are requiring, but haven’t paid for. If you won’t increase our allotments, we’ll have to lay off all of our Art, Music, and PE teachers so we can build more classrooms and hire more K – 3 teachers. NCGA: Taxpayers will have our heads when they see how much we’re spending on the schools! We’re giving y’all the same amount we gave you 10 years ago—why isn’t that enough? Where’s all that money going, […]

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Things are Dippy over at DPI

The new website didn’t help matters. Ever since he took office in January 2017, relations between NC Superintendent of Schools Mark Johnson and advocates for the state’s teachers and public schools have grown ever more acrimonious. If Johnson had wanted to establish warmth and collegiality with teachers and the various groups that claim to speak for them, several missteps have placed obstacles in the path: He commented, during a Q&A session at a statewide meeting of school boards, that a starting salary of $35,000 for new teachers was “a lot of money” for starting teachers, presumably in their 20s. At the time (January 2018), the Raleigh News & Observer reported that Johnson himself was earning  $127,561. He tweeted that teacher pay was “on the right […]

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Teaching STEM with NASA Ambassadors

GUEST BLOG On July 20, 2019, we will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing, and it will be the topic of much media attention. That means that summer 2019 is a perfect time to teach students about space and space travel. Most teachers, however, are not well-versed enough in these topics to feel comfortable  teaching astronomy, space science, or space history. Because of this, most students graduate from American high schools and universities with a lack of knowledge about space and our place in it. One of NASA’s earth-bound missions is to change that equation. Its engineering center in Pasadena, CA, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), is probably best known as a pioneering developer of robotic space missions, but did you know […]

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How Did You Learn to Read?

When you were in kindergarten or first grade, how did you learn to read? Did you spend part of each day listening to your teacher reading to the class and to your parent reading a bedtime story? At some point, you were handed a book, and one day, you were reading independently. Just like learning to talk, reading came to you naturally…it just sort of happened! Right? Not likely. You were probably too young to be able to recall it clearly, but you and your classmates didn’t start to read independently after merely learning to sing the Alphabet Song and paying attention during Story Time. It’s far more likely that you learned to read by receiving multiple hours of instruction in letter sounds. After you learned the […]

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Are We Funding Our Schools Adequately?

Amid gasps of outrage from the conservative blogosphere, the Wake County Board of Education (BoE) submitted their annual budget request to the Wake County Commission during the first week of May, 2018. Each year when the official request is submitted, letters from the BoE and district Superintendent that accompany the full report inform the commissioners about the school system’s plans to improve the quality of district schools and provide some context for the present budget request. Monica Johnson-Hostler, Chair of the Wake BoE, wrote a more succinct letter this year than in 2017. She does not mince words when it comes to recent funding shortfalls: “state support, which provides the majority of funding for the school system, has lagged behind local efforts.” She adds that “public […]

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Transportation

Round-trip bus service to traditional public schools is free of charge in Wake County. Native North Carolinians might take the free school transportation for granted, but nationwide, free busing is not universal. In Orange County, CA, for example, a $335 “bus pass” is required if your child needs to ride the bus to a public school. And that fee pales in comparison with the fee in San Diego County, California, where the district charges $575 per year, per child. Massachusetts, Hawaii, and Colorado also have districts that levy substantial transportation fees. Many Wake County parents take advantage of the free transportation option for their children because it’s efficient, safe, and reliable, and Wake County residents should appreciate the reduction in traffic jams that the buses produce. Approximately […]

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Testing Should Help

A TED talk from April 2013 by “creativity expert” Ken Robinson—who has been criticized of late for being idealistic and clueless—makes a really simple point: tests should be diagnostic. He states, “Standardized tests have a place. But they should not be the dominant culture of education. They should be diagnostic. They should help.” At this writing, most students in Wake county have recently undergone the annual ritual of high-stakes testing, during which time virtually no other learning could take place at each school. There’s plenty to despise about the state-mandated standardized testing that occurs every May. Here are just a few of the common criticisms that angry parents have piled on in recent years: Testing wastes an inordinate amount of instructional time, as teachers are […]

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Newer Discipline Practices and School Safety in Wake County

In September 2017, two students were stabbed, and one was murdered at a public school in New York City. Some have blamed the school’s ineffective alternative discipline practices—practices that were adopted in response to guidance from the Mayor’s office to avoid major discipline referrals and suspensions. NC public schools are also developing and implementing alternatives to suspensions and expulsions. Could it happen here in Wake County? Over the past decade, public schools in the state of North Carolina have been actively encouraged to replace more traditional methods of applying discipline—typically, punishments for misbehavior—with Positive Behavior Intervention and Supports (PBIS), which is often referred to as “School-Wide Positive Behavior Supports,” or SWPBS. We discussed PBIS in our previous piece on this topic. The NC Dept. of […]

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Do Newer Discipline Practices Erode School Safety?

Max Eden of the Manhattan Institute think-tank has written something of an exposé for The74Million, a website devoted to news about American public schools. Eden writes that he had been doing research into “the unintended consequences and dangers of discipline reform” in public schools when he read about a knife attack at a public high school in New York. The details of the attack are gruesome: it was allegedly committed by a student who said he was being bullied; it occurred during class; it critically injured a 16-year-old student; and it killed his 15-year old friend. After interviewing current and former students and teachers at the school, Urban Assembly School for Wildlife Conservation, Eden concludes that it was “a once safe and supportive school that fell […]

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