Conservative Women Blog

BY PEGGY MULLER, NOCW CONTRIBUTOR

Most parents assume when they walk into a public school classroom to speak with a teacher the teacher is autonomous with control over what goes on in his/her classroom.  If asked, the forthright teacher would say that is not the case.  From curriculum to discipline procedures much of what happens in the classroom is determined by those outside the classroom sometimes by others far removed from the classroom.  Here are two examples:

A friend of mine who teaches in a local elementary school once lamented, “It’s like teaching with one hand tied behind your back.”  What did she mean?  This comment came out of a discussion regarding how little control my friend had over the pace of what is taught in her classroom.  She shared with me that at the beginning of the school year she is handed textbooks, supplementary materials, and a pacing guide for core subjects.  The school district is so strict about adherence to the math pacing guide that periodically students are pulled from her class and tested to make sure they on track with the pacing guide.  In theory, the pacing guide is to keep teachers accountable for quality instruction.  Also with all teachers on the same page, students moving from one school to another within a school district can be assured of not getting behind.  Nevertheless, is this good teaching?  What if second grade students in a classroom in school A are struggling with basic multiplication while second grade students in school B are struggling with the concept of telling time?  Adherence to the pacing guide allows little flexibility for either teacher to stop and remediate the problem.  This is what my friend meant by “teaching with one hand tied” behind her back.  How can my friend effectively teach if she is unable to move through the curriculum in a manner that best fits the needs of her class? A most basic decision like working more slowly when students struggle and picking up the pace when students are succeeding has been removed from the teacher by virtue of the pacing guide and student testing.

Another example dates from when I was still teaching in an Independent Study program.  At the time, if a parent came to me with concerns about a novel or a chapter in a text, I had the freedom to discuss the problem with the parent and pursue a compromise.  It was rare a parent complained.  Even so, more often than not once I explained how a novel or chapter fit in with scheme of the course content, the parent and I came to an agreement.  I can count on one hand the times I negotiated with a parent to exchange a novel for another or modified a chapter to comply with a parent’s request.  That compliance did not allow the student to skip the content. I worked with the parent to find an alternative, so the student still met the content requirements of the course.  Today, I would no longer have the freedom to make such a decision.  Since I left the Independent Study program, the school board has changed the district guidelines.  Outside of content related to sex education, teachers are no longer allowed to modify course content to comply with a reasonable parent request.

Teachers have little autonomy.  I feel sorry for my former colleagues who feel like marionettes, teaching puppets dangling from strings. Who is pulling the strings?  Good question.  Given the layers of bureaucracy over education funds, curriculum, etc. at the local level on up through the federal level, it is difficult to determine who ultimately controls a teacher’s strings.

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BY PEGGY MULLER, EDUCATION ADVOCATE, NOCW

After reading last week’s article questioning the course of study for Social Studies and History, some parents may wonder “How can I supplement my child’s education to provide a more chronological focus?” Good question with an easy answer. There are a variety of publishers who offer good history books for children.  My favorites are Dorling Kindersley Eyewitness Books, Usborne Books, Scholastic, and McGraw-Hill Children’s Publishing.

The Dorling Kindersley Eyewitness Books series cover science and history topics.  Using the DK Eyewitness Books: Aztecs, Mayas, and Incas as an example, the book provides general background on the geography and a time frame for the civilizations. The book discusses home life, religious life, education, clothes, and customs of the civilizations.  Eyewitness books do not whitewash the history of these civilizations as is often done in textbooks.  Under religion, the book explains the Aztecs offered human sacrifices and even flayed humans alive as part of their religious rituals. This is not pleasant information, but at least it is an antidote to the “Other societies are good. Western European society and America are bad.” kind of thinking that predominates in U.S. textbooks. For younger children, there are books like A Journey Through Time, A Street Through Time, and A City Through Time which have beautiful illustrations along with text to show how a specific place has changed over the course of history. These books provide a visual sense of history for young children to understand time.

Usborne Books offers a different approach in books like A Visitor’s Guide to the Ancient World. The book is written like a tour guide through Ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome with tips on where to go and what foods to eat while including information about government, farming, religion, family, etc. If a parent wants to include geography, Usborne offers Atlas of World History which provides an overview of history utilizing geography.  Additionally, if a parent wants to include literature along with a study of the civilizations, Usborne also has a book Stories From Around the World that is a good companion to the study of history.

If a bit of comic relief would help the study of history, Scholastic offers a fun series with titles like You Wouldn’t Want to be a Mammoth Hunter! Other titles are “You Wouldn’t Want to be a Pirate’s Prisoner! and You Wouldn’t Want to be a Greek Athlete!  Each book provides accurate history of the topic with amusing illustrations and humorous text. My son especially enjoyed these books.

McGraw-Hill Children’s Publishing offers a series Myths and Civilization, i.e. Myths and Civilization of the Ancient Chinese.  The books are designed in a fashion similar to the DK Eyewitness series but interspersed in the books are abridged versions of myths that exemplify the religion and the customs of the society.

The gold standard for homeschooling families is The Story of the World: History for the Classical Child edited by Susan Wise Bauer.  It is a wonderful series which provides geography, a list of additional reading for more in-depth study, a literature list, and projects.  For the family with children in a traditional school, trying to supplement with a full history curriculum may not be viable.  The books listed in this article are a starting point.  There is much available in the market place for parents who want to supplement a child’s history education with a more thorough chronological approach to the study of history.

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BY PEGGY MULLER, EDUCATION ADVOCATE, NOCW

Last week, I offered ideas to supplement a child’s World History education.  What about US History?  There is much in the market place depending on the approach a parent wants to take to supplement a child’s education.

For an overview of history with a geography emphasis, a parent can utilize a DVD titled “Growth of a Nation” from www.animatedatlas.com.  The program has map with a narrated history of how the country progressed from east to west.  There are eight narrated segments on migrations.  A child can “view cultural, scientific, and historical events in parallel throughout history” by using the timeline feature in the DVD.

For younger children, there are books by Lynn Cheney and Mary Pope Osborne.  The Magic Tree House series by Mary Pope Osborne has two young children, Jack and Annie, traveling back in time to events in history.  Not all titles are related to US History, but several like Thursday on Thanksgiving and Revolutionary War on Wednesday have companion research guides which provide historical information to support the fiction story.  Osborne has written books like “American Tall Tales” which include   stories of Davy Crockett and Johnny Appleseed.

For greater depth and history that respects the Judeo-Christian heritage of the U.S. , there are curriculum, books, and DVD series available.  The American Heritage Education Foundation offers curriculum based on a four themed focus: freedom, unity, progress, and responsibility.  Vision Forum and Veritas Press are two companies that offer curriculum and historical fiction.  Vision Forum has a concern for reclaiming the traditional family and childhood.  Their catalog includes more than history. They have books that support girls being girls and boys being boys. The Vision Forum catalog may give NOW and the social engineers in education apoplexy, but parents have the right to teach their children mores and morals. Veritas Press is for families who seek a classical approach to education.

The American Heritage DVD series from wallbuilders.com is a series as the site states “dedicated to presenting America’s forgotten history and heroes, with an emphasis on the moral, religious, and constitutional foundation on which America was built – a foundation which, in recent years, has been seriously attacked and undermined.”

For parents who want to better educate themselves with a readable but non-revisionist history of the U.S., I recommend William Bennett’s two volume America: The Last Best Hope.  Parents educated with a viable knowledge of U.S. History are our children’s best hope of a renewed respect for America.

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BY PEGGY MULLER, EDUCATION ADVOCATE, NOCW

In February 2006, during President Bush’s State of the Union address, President Bush announced the American Competitive Initiative.  The goal of the initiative was to improve science education by bringing more professionals into high school science and math classrooms.  I found myself shaking my head and wanting to scream at the TV, “That is way too late! Science education needs to begin in preschool if we want our children to be competitive.”

One of the ironies of Bush’s speech is that his legacy, No Child Left Behind, has had the unintended consequence of pushing science education in the early grades to the back burner.  How? E.D. Hirsh Jr. in an article “Many Americans Can Read but Can’t Comprehend” provides an answer, “As a consequence of the law (NCLB), some localities have mandated that schools devote large chunks of time to reading in early grades.  In California, for example, it’s 150 minutes per day.” Why is this a problem?  Again, Hirsh provides an answer, “They may have been taught to read by phonics techniques, which are now regarded by most educators as the most effective way to teach reading. But they hadn’t been exposed coherently to important knowledge…They hadn’t developed the broad vocabulary that comes with general knowledge.”

When children spend an inordinate time on skill and drill to pass a standardized test, they are not spending as much time reading in the core subject areas. In a day and age where the world is smaller, more interactive, and science knowledge is increasing at an exponential rate, the negative consequence of NCLB is that it handicaps our children by providing them an inadequate education in history and science in elementary education.

I agree with Hirsh when he states, “Most of the precious hours spent on reading should be devoted to history, science, literature, and art, not bland stories about ‘Jose at the supermarket,’ or ‘Janice and her new friend.’  Content rich reading selections should be a part of an integrated curriculum that builds up the broad knowledge and varied vocabulary required for true reading comprehension.”

I read Hirsh’s article in 2004.  It informed my homeschooling.  I began building my children’s curriculum around either history or science and integrating literature related to the topic of study.  I looked for curriculum that proverbially “killed two birds with one stone.” I used Physics Level I from Real Science 4 Kids by Gravitas Publishing, Inc. for a study of physics.  I liked the conceptual approach that tough topics like force, friction, energy conversion, chemical energy, and magnetic waves could be distilled down to a level of understanding for children in grades 3-5. The curriculum was strong on lab work providing a lab using supplies generally found in the home to support each chapter.  Additionally, the curriculum had a Connects to Language workbook which I incorporated into my children’s weekly spelling list. The workbook focused on roots like “phys” to build vocabulary.  The words from this root were: apophysis, metaphysics, physiology, diaphysis, and physique.  These words made more sense to my children because they related to what they were studying rather than a list of words from a workbook that were unrelated to anything else they were learning.

My question to the reader is how is reading content in science, history, or classic literature any less a lesson in reading comprehension than a story about “Janice and her new friend.”?  If it is not, than the education establishment should rethink the skill and drill “bland” reading approach exacerbated by NCLB to reinstate quality “content rich” instruction in the early grades.

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BY KELLY C. CICHOCKI, CONTRIBUTOR, NOCW

School choice had never been a consideration for my children, as I worked as an educator in the same school district and knew the reputation of each school they attended.  That is until this same school division decided to close my son’s middle school, redistrict the area, and split the students between two different middle schools in order to house the overcrowded high school next door.  I was determined that my son would not attend two of the three schools being considered to house these students, nor would I consider allowing my son to attend his home school (he attends his middle school with special permission, a perk because I teach in his school district). Long story short, my son will be attending the public school of my choice,with special permission.
This is as it should be; however, not all parents are teachers.  They don’t have the luxury that I have: school choice by default. My son’s home school was not an option, and he would have attended according to his “zip code”. Although his home school houses a center-based gifted program, the regular part of the school is not an ideal place for my child. This is where charter schools need to become an option for parents, even at the middle school level, for those students who are at-risk; or for students whose interests lie in specific skills such as technology; or to offer job skills training for students who are performing at average or below, but have a desire to learn a trade. Our school district has no charter schools, but two alternative schools for at-risk students.  The alternative school that is experiencing much success in educating at-risk students at the middle school level…is closing. I can think of many students who would greatly benefit from school choice and charter schools.
So, no school choice, higher teacher-pupil ratios in the classroom (budget cuts), closing successful schools for the at-risk population, new federal mandates to eliminate “buffer” points from test scores of SPED students.
What’s wrong with this picture?

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