Happy Pi Day

[Below is State Superintendent Janet Barresi’s newspaper column for March 16, 2012.]

An assistant state superintendent greeted me with “happy Pi Day” this week. It made me smile. I like pie as much as anyone (and think it’s a wonderful coincidence that pie is circular), but I love Pi for a completely different reason.

Pi – the Greek letter that symbolizes the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter – excites the math enthusiast in me.

At the State Department of Education our focus is to increase awareness of the need for a more intensive focus on math education in schools as we work to prepare students for the demands of college and careers in the 21st Century.

Over the next 6 years, 65% of all new jobs coming to the state of Oklahoma will require as minimum competency for entry-level positions, the mastery of Algebra, Geometry, Statistics, and Data Analysis and Technical Reading skills.

Stanford economist Eric Hanushek and two colleagues recently conducted a study that ranked American states and foreign countries side by side based on the percentage of students performing at the advanced level in math proficiency. Obviously, the students scoring highest are the most likely to get the best jobs in the future.

Oklahoma was near the bottom of the list alongside countries such as Uruguay, Bulgaria and Serbia.

We have some work to do, but I’m confident that as we hone our focus on math instruction, our students will begin to excel in this necessary discipline.

So how does all this relate to Pi?

Pi is interesting. It’s an irrational number meaning that the digits after the decimal point never end and never repeat. The most common approximation of Pi is 3.14, which is why March 14 is considered Pi Day. And Pi Day allows us all to have some fun with math – never a bad way to get students to learn.

I read this week how students all across the state celebrated Pi Day. Students at Ardmore High School, for instance, held a pie-eating contest and got to throw pies at their teachers. Oh what educators will do to teach a lesson!

7-year-old Ada girl's broken leg may be result of bullying

"An Oklahoma school is investigating Thursday whether bullying left an Ada girl in a wheelchair," KOCO-TV reports.

Registration set for Edmond 'public' schools

"Preregistration for kindergarten students at Edmond Public Schools for the 2012-13 school year will be March 28 and March 29," The Oklahoman reports.

Parents must bring two proofs of residency such as a current utility bill or mortgage contract, deed or lease agreement and a birth certificate. ... Parents who have applied for transfer to a school outside their neighborhood should preregister at their neighborhood school unless they have been notified their transfer request has been granted.

Yes, that "proof of residency" is critical. (After all, this is Edmond. We can't let just anyone in, you understand.) As the liberal Berkeley law professor John E. Coons has observed,

We still arrange education so that children of the wealthy can cluster in chosen government enclaves or in private schools; the rest get whatever school goes with the residence the family can afford. This socialism for the rich we blithely call "public," though no other public service entails such financial exclusivity. Whether the library, the swimming pool, the highway, or the hospital—if it is "public," it is accessible. But admission to the government school comes only with the price of the house. If the school is in Beverly Hills or Scarsdale, the poor need not apply.

Edmond students discuss drug use

"About half the people who spoke during an Edmond Public Schools forum mentioned drug use in the schools, especially the high schools," Matt Patterson reports today in The Oklahoman.

Andrea Batt, a senior at Edmond North, also spoke. She said her fellow students often talk openly in front of school staff about drug use, but little is done.

“I think it's a really sad situation because everyone knows it's there but everyone feels like they are so powerless to do anything about it,” she said.

Kevin Hill has three children in Edmond schools, including a son who is a junior at Edmond Memorial. Hill said he was shocked to see that several students who were arrested for drug possession off school grounds before the Christmas break took part in extracurricular activities during the break.

"It made me sick to my stomach," Hill said. "I am of the belief that it shouldn't matter whether they were arrested on school grounds. It's not a right to play baseball, or whatever the extracurricular activity is. It's appalling to me that the district doesn't have policies that let these coaches deal with these situations."

Dawn Craft said her younger sister has been bullied for reporting another student's drug use. She said more needs to be done to protect those who report drug use and other rules violations in the schools.

“When that student returned to school after being suspended, the bullying started,” Craft said. “There was stalking and assault and battery. She's the one who did the right thing, and she is the one being picked on and run off. How are any of these students going to come forward when they see that?”

'Solyndras in the classroom'

Does “investment in education” produce an attractive return? Most Oklahomans don't think so, and over at Forbes.com Louis Woodhill agrees.

The nation and its people would be much better off today if most of the additional “investment” in education that we have made over the past six decades had been used to create more nonresidential produced assets. GDP, real wages, and our standard of living would all be considerably higher.

Also, imagine if, instead of being given a 2009 education for $158,717, an average student were given a 1967-style education for about $58,000, and $100,000 in capital with which to start his working life. This would be sufficient to start any number of small businesses. Alternatively, if put in an IRA earning a real return of 6%, the $100,000 would grow to about $1.8 million over 50 years.

The huge government “investments” made in education over the past 50 years have produced little more than “Solyndras in the classroom.” They have enriched teachers unions and other rent-seekers, but have added little or nothing to the economic prospects of students. America does not need more such “investment.”

Head Start and unreliable government research

Sen. Tom Coburn and others are demanding answers.

School choice increases student safety

According to a new report from an assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School for Education.

Horace Mann, false prophet

Horace Mann, generally regarded as the father of America's current public school system, once predicted: “Let the Common School ... be worked with the efficiency of which it is susceptible, and nine tenths of the crimes in the penal code would become obsolete; the long catalogue of human ills would be abridged.”

Suffice it to say it hasn’t quite worked out that way.

Not only are the crimes not obsolete, they are now being committed in the schools themselves—and with such frequency that the federal government has to issue an annual report on the matter ("Indicators of School Crime and Safety"). Scarcely a day goes by that we’re not treated to an appalling new headline about some student or teacher behaving badly. It’s not a stretch to say that many schools—architecturally soulless buildings replete with metal detectors and police officers, and sometimes even put on lockdown—bear a striking resemblance to prisons.

Saddest of all, none of this seems out of the ordinary anymore. As one parent told The Oklahoman, it's just something "the kids feel like they have to get used to."

Ironically, crimes are now being committed in schools named for Horace Mann himself. The Oklahoman recently reported that “a student at Horace Mann Elementary School in northwest Oklahoma City has accused two classmates of holding her down while a third fondled her naked breasts in the presence of a substitute teacher and other students.” According to the police report, “This all took place in the classroom at the end of the day with 15 other students and a substitute teacher (present).”

As a parent, and as someone who once served as a volunteer reading tutor at that particular school, this is heartbreaking (and infuriating) news. As I never tire of repeating, if a child is in an unsafe school environment, or is being bullied, or is simply fed up with being treated like an inmate, that child deserves a ticket out. His or her parents deserve a voucher or a tax break so they can send the child to a nonpublic school.

After all, this is the way we operate in nearly every other area of American life. Just because the government provides something doesn’t mean the government has to produce all of it. Food-stamp recipients shop at private grocery stores. Medical-welfare recipients go to private doctors and hospitals. Perhaps more to the point, even many Oklahoma inmates are housed in private prisons. There’s no reason education should be any different. Parents should be free to choose.

Charles Burris, a history teacher at a public high school in Tulsa, points to what must surely be the final indignity. “In downtown Tulsa there is an ancient brick building that exemplifies the entire history of compulsory government schooling in one facility,” he writes. For years it “served its appropriate captive clientele” as the Horace Mann Junior High School, and then continued to do the same when it became the Horace Mann Community Correctional Center. “From ‘prison’ to ‘prison’ without anyone noticing any substantial change in mission statement.”

Yowch.

If Mr. Mann were alive today, I don’t think he would be surprised to learn that many parents are choosing the very option Mann chose for his own children: homeschooling.

Let parents choose how to spend it

A new report from the research affiliate of The State Chamber indicates that Oklahoma public schools spend $9,121 per pupil.

That's a lot. It's time to let that money follow the child. One promising idea is an Education Savings Account, described thusly by Education Week:

Under the program, parents who sign up get a debit card loaded with 90 percent of what would have been the state's allocation to the school district for their child. They can use the money for tuition, textbooks, therapy, or college classes while students are still in high school—or the money can be saved and used to attend college full time after graduation.

Condoleezza Rice, young homeschooler

Milton Gaither has a great post here.

Obama's education takeover

School choice's track record is promising

"Choice's track record so far is promising and provides support for continuing expansion of school choice policies," nine scholars and analysts write in a new essay in Education Week.

[W]e fear that political pressure is leading people on both sides of the issue to demand things from "science" that science is not, by its nature, able to provide. The temptation of technocracy—the idea that scientists can provide authoritative answers to public questions—is dangerous to democracy and science itself. Public debates should be based on norms, logic, and evidence drawn from beyond just the scientific sphere.

That said, science has a role to play. We have diverse viewpoints on many issues, but we share a common commitment to helping inform public decisions with such evidence as science is legitimately able to provide. We do not offer false certainty about a future none of us knows. But the early evidence is promising, and the grounds for concern have been shown to be largely baseless. The case for expanding our ongoing national experiment with school choice is strong. 

More Democrats for school choice

"School choice appeals to the best instincts of both political parties," four prominent Colorado Democrats write.

It allows Democrats to adhere to their core principals of equality and opportunity -- so that a student’s zip code does not determine the quality of their education. It allows Republicans to introduce moderate -- and managed -- market dynamics and the beginnings of limited competition in the public school sector.