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________________________________________ THE VERMONT EDUCATION REPORT
November 25, 2002 Vol. 2, No. 47
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Covering education news in Vermont and beyond...
Informative, provocative, unique...
Published by Vermonters for Better Education
VBE is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization whose mission is to enlist parents and the public at large in achieving quality educational opportunities for all the children of Vermont by monitoring the state of education in Vermont; promoting the value of educational freedoms for all parents; and giving parents the evaluative tools with which to identify excellence. Libby Sternberg, executive director: MAILTO:LSternberg@aol.com
NEWS & ANALYSIS...CRIMINAL CHARGES STILL PENDING AGAINST SUDBURY FATHER
As reported in August, a Sudbury father, Kenneth Levine, faces up to 32 years in jail and fines up to $36,000 for claims that he set up a false residence in Castleton in order to send his two girls to school there. The case is still pending and a "status conference" is scheduled for Monday, November 25 in District Court.
Concerned that some Otter Valley Union High School students were going to "get" his daughters if they went there, Levine rented a room in Castleton, registered to vote there, rented a post office box in the town and enrolled his daughters in the Castleton Village School.
For this, he was charged for setting up a false residence and giving false testimony to the Castleton Board of Civil authority, according to a Rutland Herald article by Seth Harkness. He has pleaded innocent to the charges.
Levine says he could not afford the tuition at Castleton Village School. He is a public school teacher in Wells.
For more information, the state's attorney's phone number in Rutland is: 802-786-2531.
IJ WILL LITIGATE SCHOOL CHOICE AGAIN IN VERMONT
A Sunday Associated Press story reports that the Institute for Justice (IJ), a public interest law firm that has litigated school choice cases all over the country, will return to Vermont to reopen a school choice case in federal court.
In 1999, IJ litigated the Chittenden case, in which parents in the tuition town of Chittenden wanted their children tuitioned to a Catholic high school. The Vermont Supreme Court ruled in that case that the Vermont constitution was stricter than the federal constitution on issues involving church and state, and therefore the tuitioning could not be allowed.
Earlier this year, however, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that vouchers to religious schools do not violate the federal constitution. So the question now becomes: does the Vermont Supreme Court's interpretation of the state constitution amount to a form of religious discrimination against those who choose religious schools under the tuition town system?
Whatever the legal answer to that question, Commissioner of Education Raymond J. McNulty has weighed in against vouchers to religious schools. In the AP article, he is quoted saying "Public education in general, from my perspective, provides a service to the community where I think people need to be brought together and develop a common community spirit."
TWO NEW WEB SITES
Two new web sites are now available with interesting information on different aspects of education:
http://www.higheredinfo.org/ - This site is chock full of information on higher education throughout the U.S.
http://www.bettered.org -- This is the web site for Americans for Better Education (ABE), a nonpartisan, broad-based coalition, consisting of prominent business leaders, parents, educators, and reform advocates who want to take a leading role in support of bipartisan reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The shared goal of the group is to secure passage of legislation that achieves systematic reform and improves K-12 education in the United States. The coalition also shares a belief that a strong education is the key to a well-prepared workforce and steady economic growth. (ABE is not connected with Vermonters for Better Education.)
FOR PARENTS: HOW TO DISAGREE WITH THE IEP TEAM
From Wrights Law, a web site devoted to education issues and parent advocacy
(for the full article, go to: http://www.wrightslaw.com/advoc/articles/strategy.disagree.htm)Many parents have questions about what to do when they are presented with an IEP that is not appropriate for their child.
You should advise the IEP team that you don't think the IEP is appropriate, that it does not provide your child with enough help or the right kind of help. You should use facts to support your position (i.e., facts from an evaluation of your child from a private sector evaluator, graphs of your child's test scores).
Be polite but firm.... When the team asks you to sign consent to the IEP, pick up a ball point pen and put the IEP on a hard table top. Write this statement on the IEP: "I consent to this IEP being implemented but I object to it for the reasons stated during the meeting."
Sign your name.
Do not be surprised if someone gets upset and claims that you are not allowed to write on the IEP because it is a legal document. This is not true - you can write on your child's IEP (although the person who objects may not know this).
You are a member of the team and a participant in the IEP process. The law requires you to make your objections clear. The IEP is the best document to use when you need to make your objections clear....
ELSEWHERE...NEW STUDY ON CHARTERS IN ARIZONA
A study that shows competition from charter schools helped improved pubic schools was recently circulated in the Columbia University Teacher's College e-newsletter. Entitled "Small Districts in Big Trouble: How Four Arizona School Systems Responded to Charter Competition," the study was conducted by professors at University of Virginia, Villanova University, and James Madison University.
Conducted in February 2000, the study looked at four regions in Arizona where charter schools were affecting the enrollments at local public schools. While each district faced different challenges in different ways, the researchers concluded that competition and marketplace pressures might take time to work, but they did ultimately have a positive effect on local public schools, forcing them to make improvements.
For the full story, go to: http://www.tcrecord.org/Content.asp?ContentID=10830
THE FACE OF HOMESCHOOLING
A fascinating study of Baltimore-area homeschoolers has found that nearly half the home-schooled children in the area are African-Americans whose parents are concerned about school violence, religious values, or inadequate attention at the local public school. Here's an excerpt and a link to the story by Baltimore Sun reporter Mike Bowler:
"About home-schooling, we hold certain truths to be self-evident. Home-schooling parents are white, we think. They're escaping lousy discipline and even physical violence in the public schools. Or they're deeply religious people who think the public schools are devoid of the spirituality that should be a part of their children's education. Or they think they can do a better job. Or the public schools don't have qualified staff to meet their children's needs.
"Arnita Hicks McArthur believed all of these stereotypes, too. But then the Baltimore City Community College professor got to thinking: How many African-American families practice home schooling? And why?
"McArthur set out to find out..."
PENNSYLVANIA OKAYS ALTERNATIVE TEACHER CERTIFICATION
According to a Philadelphia Inquirer article, the Pennsylvania State Board of Education recently voted to certify as "qualified" teachers who receive training from the Teach for America and other national alternative programs. The board also said that elementary teachers who also teach seventh- and eighth-graders must pass tests in their subjects in order to be considered highly qualified.
For the full story, go to http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/4522887.htm
SMALLER CLASS SIZES THROUGH SCHOOL CHOICE
From Children First America: http://www.childrenfirstamerica.orgavfc/index.htmThe Palm Beach Post reported that incoming Florida Senate President Jim King told reporters that the state would have to consider a number of options to implement the class size initiative, including expanding tuition vouchers and lifting the $50 million cap on tax credits given to corporations for tuition grants. This would be a wise course, given that it would allow Florida to lower class sizes in public schools with their existing education spending and would embrace a reform with proven academic results (choice) rather than with a reform with an enormous price tag and no record of results. Average class size has plummeted in the United States since the maturation of the baby-boomers while test scores have been stagnant.
COMMENTARY...WHOSE KIDS ARE THEY?
By David W. Kirkpatrick, editor of www.SchoolReformers.comIf you ask parents to whom their children belong, or who should be responsible for them, once they get over the shock of such a question most would point to themselves. They might find it hard to believe that anyone would maintain the contrary.
But a contrary view has a long history, going back to ancient Sparta. In that Greek city-state, when boys became seven years old they were taken from their families, placed in state-run boarding schools and trained to meet the needs of this military society. That would be extreme today but the essential belief that the young belong to the state has never died.
The point was made early in our history, ironically by Philadelphian Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Ten years later, in proposing a plan for education in Pennsylvania he wrote, "Let our pupil be taught that he does not belong to himself, but that he is public property."
Rush's plan died but not the sentiment. It was in Pennsylvania nearly a half century later, in 1834, that the first plan for a common school system was adopted. Its prime sponsor and defender, Thaddeus Stevens, said that the sons of both the rich and the poor are all "deemed children of the same parent... the Commonwealth."
That Stevens' view was not shared by the general public was demonstrated when most of the Representatives who voted for that measure were defeated at the next election. Stevens himself was reelected and in what has to be recognized by even those who disagree with it as one of the great speeches in American legislative history, he persuaded a majority in the new session to not repeal the new law, as they had been elected to do.
Fortunately the view that children belong to the state is not shared by the U.S. Supreme Court. In its unanimous Pierce decision in 1925, which still stands, the Court upheld parental rights to control their children's education, declaring that "The child is not the mere creature of the state," and "those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations."
This law of the land, however clearly stated, is neither universally accepted nor honored in practice.
A decade ago, in a debate on a Chicago radio station, when an advocate of school choice said the schools existed for the benefit of the students, Bella Rosenberg, assistant to then-American Federation of Teachers president Al Shanker, strongly disagreed, saying, "First and foremost, we're running a public system at taxpayer's expense for the public good and only secondarily for the good of parents and individuals."
Even if one accepts this point of view, she didn't explain how the system can serve the public good if students aren't successful. Certainly the public good is not served when millions of students drop out every year before graduating from high school, and huge numbers of those who do graduate possess minimal skills, as has been true for years.
In the 1980s Arkansas' governor was promoting education reforms in his state, among which was mandatory kindergarten. When asked by a writer if the state knows better than parents what is good for children, the governor's response was, yes it did. Then he attempted to take himself off the hook by adding, "Look, I can't change this, it's Hillary's bill." That was, in another sense, Hillary's Bill, later president Bill Clinton.
While few state it quite that bluntly, the tendency since Pennsylvania's 1834 Common School Act has been for the state to continually expand its field of control of children, which necessarily restricts the control of the parents. We've gone from Jefferson's plan for three-years of basic schooling to one embracing young people for thirteen years. Now the drive is to push schooling further down the age ladder and, as with the recent initiative adopted in California earlier this month, to more schooling at the upper ages.
None of this is to deny the importance of education, especially in a child's early formative years. But education and schooling are not synonymous terms and there is some indication that too much schooling, even when "successful," may be harmful. If this is true, the more schooling, the more harm.
The more time students spend in school the more they are with their peers. A generation ago Urie Bronfenbrenner cited research suggesting this is harmful. The more time children spend with their peers the more likely they are to have a negative view of themselves, their friends and their future. Compared with those who identify with their parents, peer-oriented children tend to be less responsible and to get in trouble more often.
School staff say problem kids tend to be so because of the family they are in. It may be, however unintended or indirect, at least partially because of the schools they are in. If so, that needs to be recognized, or at least considered.
Are they problem kids, or kids with problems?
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The VERMONT EDUCATION REPORT is published by Vermonters for Better Education 170 Church Street, Rutland, VT 05701, 802.773.5240 Contact LSternberg@aol.com for more information.
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