Citizen Tom

It has been many months since I provided the highlights from a PWC School Board meeting.  In order to focus on the election, I decided to give up this part of my blogging for awhile.   Nonetheless, my favored candidates all lost.  I can only suppose that too much of the American public has yet to discover the unrivaled wisdom of Citizen Tom.   

So it goes.  I suppose we should take both our wins and our losses philosophically.

In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.
Robert Frost

So back to the School Board.  The November 5th meeting was predominantly an information meeting, and there was a lot of information.  The board devoted considerable discussion two big issues:  the quality of our nation’s schools with respect to Prince William County and impending budget cuts.

Author’s note:  PWC School Division’s website is oddly integrated.  The school division does not make it easy for bloggers to link directly to documents on their website.  So if you are interested in more details, you will have to find the document yourself.  Fortunately, that is relatively easy.  To find out more details about the last school board meeting, go here and look for the topic under the Electronic Agenda (November 5th).

Note that a video of the School Board’s meetings is available here.

Blessing

Pastor James Green of Little Union Baptist Church provided the blessing.  He asked for the Lord’s help to provide us the resources we need to educate our children, and he asked the Lord to help our children find the motivation they need to learn.

Consent Agenda

The School Board approved the following items without discussion.  These included:

• Two new courses:  Film Studies at Osbourn Park High School and Aviation Honors Ground School Program (AFJROTC) at Battlefield High School.
  
• $505,050 for the purchase of a Stream Mitigation Agreement.  With development of the Kettle Run Road elementary school and the 11th high school, the PWC School Division apparently disturbed some wetlands.  So the school division has to pay to develop additional wetlands elsewhere.

T-Mobile Leases at Forest Park High School and Beville Middle School

T-Mobile Northeast LLC wants to put up cell phone towers at two schools and is willing to pay rental fees. Given the schools lose nothing and gain a fair amount of money, these items should have been part of the Consent Agenda.  Nonetheless, because a few people still have safety concerns about the emissions from cell phone towers, the School Board spent a fair amount of time discussing the propositions.  With only a couple of dissenting votes, the board approved the leases.

PWCS Comparative Data Analysis/Education Trust (Briefing here)

This was an information briefing set up by Superintendent Walts.  Since the briefing made both Walts and the School Board look good, it is not hard to see why Walts wanted this briefing.

Kati Haycock, president of The Education Trust, presented a briefing with about 150 slides.  Haycock focused on the achievement gap between rich and poor and Whites and minorities.  Haycock provided statistics that showed:

• At the fourth grade the achievement gap significantly closed, but high school students made little progress.
  
• The relative status of the public schools in the USA with those of other nations is not improving.  USA ranks 25th in math, 21st in science, and 23rd in problem solving.
  
• Haycock attributed much of the poor performance of USA students to inequality in education.  Poor and minority students receive less financial support and less attention from the best teachers.  School systems have lower expectations poor and minority students.

Author’s observations: Haycock did not mention the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.  Nonetheless, it is curious that performance amongst fourth graders rose dramatically after the passage of the act.  Yet it had stagnated during the previous administration.

Haycock provided examples of poor and minority schools that have successfully fought the trends against them.  She pointed to data that said the attitude of both individual schools and of entire school districts makes a difference.

Haycock also reviewed the data on the Prince William County School District.  Using 2007 SOL data, Haycock showed that Prince William County ranks above the Virginia average and compares favorably with Fairfax County.  In particular, the PWC school division is doing a better job with poor and minority students.

Haycock offered the following observations on what successful schools do that works.

1. They focus on what they can do, rather than what they can’t.
2. They don’t leave anything about teaching and learning to chance.
3. They set their goals high.
4. Higher performing secondary schools put all kids—not just some—in a demanding high school core curriculum.
5. They provide extra instruction to the kids who arrive behind.
6. Principals are hugely important, ever present, but NOT the only leaders in the school (i.e., good teachers are needed).
7. Good schools know how much teachers matter, and they act on that knowledge.
8. Good systems aggressively tackle the myth that “Closing the achievement gap is unfair…and unachievable.”

Author’s observations: While Haycock’s advice would be generally useful for any school, it is most appropriate for a socialist school system.  That is because Haycock focused on what will improve achievement at poor and minority schools.  Why this focus? While all men are not equal, every vote is equal. Although some taxpayers pay much more, when government runs an enterprise, voters tend not to consider who funds the enterprise particularly important.  Since votes are equal, every voter demands his or her share of government funding and resources.   This very nicely follows the Marxist dictum.

From each, according to his ability; to each, according to his need.
Karl Marx

Thus our government-run school systems have a bias towards reducing inequalities.   When eliminating inequalities becomes the goal, too often quality suffers.  Instead of funding going to organizations that excel, funding is merely distributed equally.

This bias to reduce inequalities became most obvious when the discussion turned to the problem of keeping good teachers at poor and minority schools.  Haycock elaborated on the need for additional pay and higher status for teachers at poor and minority schools.  She explained how the whole community needs to be involved in according good teachers at poor and minority schools the highest possible status.  How would the School Board to accomplish that?  The board would spend more money on good teachers at poor and minority schools.

What I think really should concern citizens is the overall loss in respect teachers have suffered.  If teachers want to deserve the public’s respect, then they should lead the fight to remove the worst teachers from their ranks.  In other words, teachers should support the application of free enterprise to their profession.

Superintendent’s Time

During his time with the board, Walts mentioned that he is concerned about next year’s budget.  Because he is still uncertain how much money he will get from the county, he delayed the school board’s work session on the Capital Improvement Plan (CIP) from December 3rd to January 7th.  He has also directed schools to cut expenses so that they will have more money to carry over into next year’s budget.

The paper carried the story this last Friday.

The tone was cordial, but the news was gloom and doom, and Prince William supervisors and School Board members agreed wholeheartedly on one core theme: Impending budget cuts aimed at offsetting a $190 million shortfall are going to hurt.

“I share the sentiment these are hard times,” said Milt Johns, chairman of the county School Board, at the opening of Wednesday evening’s joint session with supervisors to lay the groundwork for fiscal year 2010 budget planning.  (continued here)

Board Time

In an effort to demonstrate the willingness to tighten their own belts, Lattin proposed that the board cut back on expenditures to attend Virginia School Boards Association (VSBA) and National School Boards Association (NSBA) conventions (beginning with the VSBA convention this month).  InsideNOVA.com covered this discussion here, and the paper accurately describes one part of the discussion, the split decision that allows board members to continue spending to attend these conventions.

What the paper neglected to mention was the most interesting part of the discussion.  The PWC School Division had intended to make presentations at the 2009 NSBA convention.  Apparently the VSBA nixed that.  Why?  The PWC School Board went with its own preferred vendor to take it into the realm of paperless meetings (see here and here).  That decision irked the VSBA.  The VSBA has an arrangement with a different vendor (see here), and it wants VSBA members to respect that arrangement (so much for competitive bidding).  Thus the VSBA was not inclined to approve the PWC School Division’s presentation at the national convention.

Author’s note:   Much of this discussion illustrated just how upside down our education system has become.  We set up huge a school division (over 70,000 children in PWC).   Then we nickle and dime the people responsible for running the affair.   We have a school board responsible for a budget over one billion dollar, and they have to pay their own bill to attend conventions?  That is stupid!  To get the best people, we should pay them well, at least $100,000 a year, and we do not even do that!

At the same time, the board should not be using taxpayer dollars to pay lobbyists.  This is a huge conflict of interest, and it has gotten entirely out-of-hand.  When VSBA/NSBA funds are used to lobby the state and local governments, these monies are effectively used to finance the very people WHO INSIST on regulating LOCAL school systems.  Do you really want your school board using your tax dollars to lobby the State and Federal Government to give it more money to spend?   Do you really want your State and Federal Officials conniving with School Boards so that they can be lobbied?

We used to fund schools locally.  What was wrong with that?  Have State and Federal funds improved or corrupted our schools?

Special Note

The next School Board meeting is on November 18th.

WHEN CONGRESS DERAILS OUR ECONOMY, IT CREATES A WORLD-WIDE TRAIN WRECK.