MY SUGGESTIONS FOR GETTING RID OF OBE IN 1996:
As a school board member in the 1990's, it was my duty to know board policy and cause actions that were best for KISD students. I took that charge seriously, and I tried my best to return the education in KISD back to the time when it was a useful, rewarding and proper education. I was not successful. Too many of the rest of the Board members were clueless about what the educrats and the governments had done to public education. Only twenty years later are a few people beginning to see what was wrong with all the changes and that I was the one who was right about how to fix all of it. What follows was my ignored proposal! What's interesting at this point in time (2017) is that all vestiges of the policies alluded to below are gone. The administrators (TASA) and TASB, probably, put their lawyers on it and eviscerated the Board's authority to "determine and approve the curriculum and instructional program of a school District." That's just another way that the insane are in charge of the asylum! That's why we have Common Core now. There is nothing the local school board could do at all about it. Had school boards stood up to these people twenty years ago as they should have, things would not have gotten so out of hand.
Recommended Board Policy Changes/Additions
Current Board policies allow the Board the latitude to institute change. Among these policies are:
EFA (Local) (on Page 1 of 4)
The Board shall provide a wide range of instructional resources for students and faculty that present varying levels of difficulty, diversity of appeal, and a variety of points of view. Although trained professional staff are afforded the freedom to select instructional resources for their use in accordance with this policy, the ultimate authority for determining and approving the curriculum and instructional program of the District lies with the Board.
In this policy, "instructional resources" refers to textbooks, library acquisitions, supplemental materials for classroom use, and any other material used for formal or informal teaching and learning purposes. The primary objectives of instructional resources are to deliver, support, enrich, and assist in implementing the District's educational program.
The Board generally shall rely on its professional staff to select and acquire instructional resources that;
1. Enrich and support the curriculum, taking into consideration students' varied interest abilities, learning styles, and maturity levels.
2. Stimulate growth in factual knowledge, literary appreciation, aesthetic values, and societal standards.
EFA (Local) (Page 2 of 4)
Selections of materials is an ongoing process that includes the removal of resources no longer appropriate and the periodic replacement or repair of lost and worn materials still of educational value.
Any parent of a District student, employee, or other resident may formally challenge an instructional resource used in the District's educational program on the basis of appropriateness.
EHAA (Page 1 0f 1)
The District shall provide a well-balanced curriculum in accordance with state law and State Board rules. Effective instruction shall be delivered to all enrolled students and instruction provided in the essential elements of each subject at appropriate grade levels. The essential elements represent core knowledge, skills, and competencies all students should learn to be effective and productive members of society. The District may add elements at its discretion, but shall not delete or omit instruction in the essential elements.
Believing that the Katy SID Board of Trustees is an elected body in a representative form of government that has an obligation to uphold and further the beliefs of the electorate in this locale, we acknowledge the existence of the principles of Mastery Learning and Outcome Based Education within the curriculum currently being delivered to our students. Our intent and purpose is to remove all vestiges of this inappropriate ideology and methodology wherever it is used, appears, or ostensibly used could be used. Believing that our parents and their children should receive a sound, traditional, academic education, we propose the following components of a Strategic Plan which shall be developed and implemented by the administrative staff and shall become Board Policy:
1. All curricular plans will exist to further the knowledge base of students. They will be content, rather that process oriented. The direct instructional method stressing facts will be used.
2. All curriculum will be driven from the top. There will be no "teacher as facilitator or peer tutoring." The teacher will deliver specific lessons, embracing the essential elements, in a specific, age appropriate, planned order. Content testing will be developed for each course and required at the end of each course. No student shall we asked to tutor or otherwise teach another student.
3. The primary consideration in Katy ISD will be delivering an academic education. There will be a de-emphasis on societal, environmental, personal, and self esteem type activities.
4. Administrators will be held responsible for screening all methods of instructional delivery including software, textbooks, and other printed materials, video presentations and any other items that are used to ensure that the objectives stated in this document are upheld.
5. Efforts will be made to assess the ability of our schools to educate our students in an accountable manner. Comparative studies should be made of students from different junior high schools as those students enter high school and of high school students as they enter and continue their education in selected colleges (preferably Texas A&M and the University of Texas).
6. All efforts to create alternative scheduling will cease. Adherence to the Carnegie Unit of delivery will be reinstated at the junior high and high school levels. Class time will once again be 55 minutes in length. There will be a minimum of six 55 minute class periods. All attempts to reduce instructional class period times while increasing teacher conference time will cease and be retuned to previous levels.
7. Students will be expected to achieve and learn in a finite amount of time. All allowances for retesting, and repeating instruction for the benefit of less than half of the class will cease. No student will be allowed to request a retest, and no test grade will be averaged with another test grade. There will be no "extra credit." The inflation of grades will cease. Students must be given the grades that they earn and be held accountable for learning the material. Teachers will not be penalized for failing students. Course remediation classes will cease. Students who do not receive a passing grade will repeat the entire course. Honor rolls in all their uses will be reassessed and redesigned to reflect true scholarship.
8. Co-operative learning as it is currently being employed will cease. No student will be held accountable or receive credit or discredit for another student's work. No assignments will be required that represent a cumulative effort by two or more students.
9. Core subjects will stress the acquisition of basic skills. The ability to perform addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, especially by rote memory, will be the primary focus at the elementary level. Also students will know how to use fractions, perform long division, and use square roots and decimals before they enter the sixth grade. The use of calculators for the processes will e de-emphasized. Drill and repetition will be main components of the math program. "Estimating' as a strategy will be eliminated. Students will be taught to read using the phonics method. Reading classes at the 7th grade will be re-instated. Spelling books will be purchased and used daily in the elementary grades. Rules of spelling will be taught in a sequential order. All students will be taught printing in kindergarten and first grade and cursive writing in the second and third grades. Efforts will be made to develop handwriting skills that cause students to write clearly and legibly. Writing will be stressed in every subject area. Students will be required to write every day. Writing assignments will be teacher graded for content as well as mechanics (punctuation, grammar, spelling syntax capitalization, etc.) at least once a week at all grade levels. Grammar, punctuation and capitalization will be taught each year in language arts/English classes. The use of "whole language" instruction will cease. Science classes will become content based. The SCISS program will be phased out, and students will be issued science textbooks in elementary school. Social studies will once again be called "history" and will be taught stressing the acquisition of historical knowledge rather than providing exposure to environmental concerns. The over-emphasis of all environmentalist concepts including the over-emphasis on the rain forest and global warming and other such progressive ideas will cease.
10. Parents will be afforded the responsibility and credit for teaching their children their values and morals, their views on political correctness, their views on their own personal cultural or racial background, their appreciation of diversity, their views on good citizenship, their views on human rights, their views on interpersonal relationships, and their views on any other attitude development or element in the "affective" domain.
11. Bilingual programs will stress the quick movement of non-English speaking students into the mainstream. The discriminatory practice of separating non-English speaking students within the school will cease. Assemblies, home rooms, and other common activities of students will be attended together. The bilingual program should exist in every home school. Parents of bilingual students have the right to have their children attend a school close to their home for obvious reasons. Bi-lingual students should be mainstreamed by the end of the second year in our program.
12. The first and primary effort of our district should be to provide an academic education for our students. Efforts to track students into a vocational program at the junior high level should cease. Every effort to afford them the opportunity to continue with their academic education should be made. Tech prep as a support program to allow students to find meaningful work while pursuing additional educational opportunities is commendable, but it should not be developed as an end in itself. If students are taught to read by the end of the first grade and learn math as stipulated above, they will not have to be shunted into a vocational program.
13. Reinstatement of honors classes/homogenous grouping will occur at all grade levels. A significant number of students are quietly submitting to the dumbed-down curriculum that is currently being presented to them since "basic" classes were eliminated. Our school district is supposed to serve ALL students at the level they can achieve.
14. Competition in KISD schools has been virtually eliminated in every area except athletics. Competition will be re-instated. Such events as science fairs, history fairs, math contests, etc. will be returned to the classroom. More opportunity for competition will be developed. The real "real world" is very competitive. Competition with one's self (as is our current practice) does NOT bring improved self-esteem. It only breeds mediocrity.
15. "Portfolio assessment" will cease. The accumulation of a student's work in a folder is a viable activity. Using this folder to demonstrate accomplishment is not. Testing instruments should be primarily objective in nature, and based on the acquisition of knowledge.
16. Problem solving as an activity should occur in the upper grades AFTER students have acquired a basic, fundamental education. Used prematurely, problem solving becomes a useless activity and wastes students' time. Students cannot think critically if they know nothing about which to think.
17. The idea that "learning must be fun" will be discarded. Learning CAN be fun, but that element is not a necessary requirement.
18. All courses will have a written curriculum, and parents will receive a summary of them at the beginning of each course so that they will know what to expect. They also may ask to view a copy of the curriculum in its entirety if they wish.
19. All requests for staff development (either bringing someone into the district or that which requires attendance outside the district) will be reviewed by the superintendent or his designee who will decide if the training supports the objectives of the Board. Only staff development in tune with the Board's philosophy will be allowed.
20. Counselors and other administrators as well as teachers will cease using "conflict resolution" as a teaching/counseling strategy.
21. "Life Management Skills" will be eliminated at the junior high level as a course.
22. The "Dare" program will be eliminated.
23. No block scheduling will be used at any level.
24. The flawed concept of suggesting that students have "varied learning styles" will be eliminated.
25. The practice called "inclusion" will cease in our school district. There is no law requiring it, no school board member thinks it is a wise practice, no teacher can properly teach when an "included" student is present in a class because he must devote most of his attention to that student and ignore everyone else, no child who is "included" benefits from the placement and is often subjected to ridicule by other students, and parents are simply trying to convince themselves that their Special Education child can somehow miraculously be made to be not disabled by being included in a regular classroom. Teachers have courageously appeared before the school board to object to the practice, and they should be listened to because they have to deal with the situation daily. Why any parent would want to subject their own child to this situation is not understandable to me. Why any parent would want an untrained teacher with a room full of other students, to teach their child when a special education teacher who has a degree in Special Education would do so much more to help his/her child, is a mystery to me. Board members allow it because they don't have the spines to stand up to a flawed and faulty practice.
26. Students will be taught while they are sitting in chairs. Forcing children to sit on the floor and under tables, etc. is demeaning, unhealthy, and part of the dumbing down process. Adults do not sit on the floor to learn, so why should children? It is not cute, cozy, clever or necessary. The school district (via the taxpayers) pays lots of money for chairs, and they should be used. Sitting in chairs is a civilized thing to do and represents a maintaining of decorum and acceptance of rules. Those are traits that SHOULD be taught to young children. Sitting on the floor is not conducive to any of those lofty goals.
27. The practice of notable (and not so notable) figures coming to elementary schools to read to the students will cease. If such people want to help reading in the schools, they should volunteer to come to a school and listen to the students read to THEM. (When they do so, they will become painfully aware of how poorly KISD students are reading.That's why this practice never happens!)
28. Paid travel to conventions by principals twice a year will cease. Such trips (which are in essence a free vacation at taxpayer expense) are useless and an unnecessary perk. If there are speakers of note at conventions, bringing them to Katy would be far cheaper than sending all our principals to San Francisco or Orlando or New Orleans or Los Angeles to hear them.
29. Paid travel by Board members should also cease. Getting elected to the school board is not a pass for free airline travel, vacations at upscale hotels, and fine dining. It needs to stop. If school board members want to go to conventions, they should pay their own way. If they need to eat, they need to buy their own food just as they would if they were at home. They don't work for IBM or Goldman Sachs. They are volunteers feeding on the taxpayer's money.
30. The entire Board needs to review the expense report for the superintendent each month.
31. The entire Board needs to see the expenses incurred by the District with regard to attorneys and their opinions. School districts should not be a cash cow for education attorneys.
32. School board members should not go to any school or school district property (unless with regard to their own children or for a public venue) without being accompanied by a superintendent appointed administrator with them. The schools are not the private purview of school board members. No school board member should ever go to the administration building unannounced and without an appointment. Just showing up is not acceptable.
33. The entire Board needs to review the superintendent's medical report each year.
34. The superintendent's salary needs to be adjusted to fit his/her qualifications and duties. No superintendent should make over $130,000. No other administrator should make over $80,000. None of them do anything to earn any more than that. Their education was easily obtained and of no value. They had the lowest (SAT) scores as a group when they entered a college. The colleges they selected to attend were not top tier. Most of them do not even have much experience being a teacher and/or running a business.
35. No superintendent should receive a contract longer in effect than any other administrator. Two years will suffice. No superintendent's contract should be self-renewing. It needs to be automatically terminated and then renewed every two years at the pleasure of the existing Board. Superintendents are a dime a dozen. School Board should realize that fact.
36. The school board should not let the TASB lead them around by the nose. They should be cognizant that the TASB is composed of retired public school administrators who are trying to supplement their income. As such they have no desire to aid local school boards in any meaningful manner, and they certainly do not have the best interests of local districts in mind.