Demography is not destiny

"The state certainly doesn’t benefit when we low-ball students' potentials," the state's largest newspaper editorializes today ("By the numbers: Demographics must not lower expectations").

I agree.

Ya got trouble right here in Oklahoma City!

As author and attorney Bruce Shortt pointed out a couple of years ago in an article for OCPA, "Oklahoma's crack team of government educators, the folks who spend billions of dollars a year to achieve heretofore unknown levels of semiliteracy and illiteracy among otherwise normal children, periodically take time out from their educational misfeasance to offer ominous warnings that we've got trouble — terrible, terrible trouble — lurking in homeschooling homes all across the state."

Well, they're at it again. Oklahoma homeschoolers might want to light up the switchboards again.

So much for that excuse

The Associated Press reported yesterday that

Poverty and a growing population of minority students, including non-English speaking Hispanics, are presenting major challenges to public schools in Oklahoma City and Tulsa, a state school official said Monday. Sandy Garrett, state superintendent of public instruction, ... said whites now make up only 22 percent of the student population in Oklahoma City. Hispanics are the biggest minority at 40 percent, followed by blacks at 30 percent, American Indians at 5 percent and Asians at 3 percent.

The more cynical among us might suspect that Sandy is trying to make excuses for poor student performance in Oklahoma. But I have confidence that's not the case. For surely Sandy recalls what OCPA pointed out in the November issue of Perspective ("Demography Is Not Destiny"):

Educators sometimes imply that we shouldn’t expect too much from low-income and minority students. Florida proves them wrong. Thanks to abundant school choice and systemic education reform, Hispanic 4th graders in Florida now have higher reading scores than the statewide average of all 4th-grade students in Oklahoma.

Public-sector deadwood

Former state Rep. Debbie Blackburn, a liberal Democrat from Oklahoma City and a former public school teacher, once acknowledged that she has "taught with people that I thought should never have been in the profession" and that it might make sense to "get rid of the deadwood."

Oklahoma edu-blogger Wesley Fryer made a similar point yesterday:

It's a fact: Some teachers remain in the classroom not because they love their jobs, love their kids, or are passionate about learning, they remain for the steady paycheck and the three months off in the summertime. Anyone who has spent a length of time teaching in our public schools has run into these types of teachers. It's quite ironic that in our current economic climate, the "employee at will" nature of many business-world contracts is strikingly visible outside of schools [yep], and the challenge posed by "deadwood teachers" who are unlikely to ever be fired or replaced in their jobs is as glaringly obvious as ever.

The bottom line is the bottom line

Can you imagine Bob Stoops stepping to the microphone after the OU-Florida game and trying to spin reporters? Can you imagine Stoops prattling on about how shiny the Sooners' helmets were or how well-prepared the coaches were, while ignoring the — oh, what's the metric I'm groping for? — the final score?

Neither can I. That's not how Bob "No Excuses" Stoops operates. That's not how most folks in the regular world operate. But of course, as Chester Finn has pointed out, "the regular world" is quite different from "educator-land."

So I think Oklahomans are right to be amused and/or frustrated at the spin coming out of educator-land on the heels of the latest "Quality Counts" report from Education Week. The state's largest newspaper today seemed a tad underwhelmed with Sandy Garret's assertion that "we’re moving forward" in this state. "That's one way to look at it," The Oklahoman editorialized. "Another is to consider that the real bottom line is student achievement, and in that area, our state's children still have a long way to go."

Wesley Fryer seems to agree. One of the nation's leading education bloggers, Fryer wants to know since when is a "D" grade considered good and improving? "D's and F's are not 'good enough' or 'improving scores' for our children or for our state," he says.

'We will pass education reforms'

So the state Senate leader assured my friend Dave Saba this week.

Let's roll!

House Republicans plan to help autistic children

"In the coming weeks," a House press release said yesterday, "House Republicans will announce a plan to help families of children with autism without imposing a costly mandate." Here's hoping that plan includes tax credits for special-needs scholarships.

Quote of the day

"I had an experience in the past couple of weeks that really evolved my thinking about charter schools. I used to think charters were the epitome of all evil, and just created solely to bring down public schools. After my experience, I find I need to alter that view a lot. The people I met at this charter conference, I must say, are just like me, just like you. People who were simply fed up with the status quo and were tired of hitting their head against a system that will not change."

-– Julie Washington, elementary vice president of United Teachers Los Angeles

HT: Mike Antonucci

Senate Republicans want more parental choice

Republicans in the Oklahoma State Senate today released their policy agenda for the 2009 legislative session. One of their policy initiatives: "providing more local control and great choice for school boards and parents." Sounds promising. We shall see.

Homeschooling continues to grow

"The ranks of America's home-schooled children have continued a steady climb over the past five years," the nation's largest newspaper reports today on its front page.

The number of home-schooled kids hit 1.5 million in 2007, up 74% from when the Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics started keeping track in 1999, and up 36% since 2003. The percentage of the school-age population that was home-schooled increased from 2.2% in 2003 to 2.9% in 2007. "There's no reason to believe it would not keep going up," says Gail Mulligan, a statistician at the center. ...

The 2007 estimates are based on data from the Parent and Family Involvement in Education Survey of the National Household Education Surveys. Brian Ray, president of the National Home Education Research Institute, says the estimates are low because home-schooling parents "are significantly less likely to answer government-sponsored surveys."

Private schools at public expense

The death yesterday of former U.S. Senator Claiborne Pell (D-Rhode Island), father of the Pell Grant, serves to remind us that school choice is alive and well in this country, with public dollars flowing to private schools all the time.

Think of it: an 18-year-old student can use (gasp!) taxpayer dollars to attend Oral Roberts University, a Christian institution whose mission is "to enable students to go into every person's world with God's message of salvation and healing." Or Oklahoma Baptist University, a school which is owned by the Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma and which "engages in educational tasks in a manner consistent with the purposes of the Convention: to furnish the means by which the churches may carry out the Great Commission (Matthew 28: 18-20)." Private schools, public expense.

I have yet to hear an opponent of K-12 school choice in Oklahoma explain why it would be bad public policy to let an 18-year-old high school student in Shawnee use public money to attend, say, Liberty Academy, but good public policy for that same student, a few months later, to use public money to attend Oklahoma Baptist University.

Private-school scholarship helped young Obama

"President-elect Obama had caring adults in his life who saw to it that he went to good schools," the Children's Scholarship Fund (CSF) points out. "Like CSF recipients, President-elect Obama used a scholarship to attend private school -- in his case Punahou School, the private school in Hawaii where he studied from 5th grade through high school."

Wouldn't it be great if more Oklahoma schoolchildren, particularly disadvantaged children, could receive scholarships to attend private schools?

I'll drink to that

The state's largest newspaper suggests the following New Year's resolution for the state's largest labor union: "Resolve to embrace one school reform proposal for every funding gimmick you trot out in the new year."