Joe Enge : EdWatch Nevada

Don’t practice whole language on my kids: history of the phonics vs. whole language debate

Joe Enge — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 03:41:44 +0000

Below is one of the most informative and detailed articles I’ve come across regarding the whole language fiasco. The Weekly Standard’s “Read it and weep” by Charlotte Allen is far too long to print here. Key excerpts include:

American young people are also significantly behind their counterparts in other developed and even some developing countries. On the Progress in International Reading Study (PIRLS), a multinational test for fourth-graders administered in 2001, the United States placed only 9th out of 35 participating nations, trailing top-rated Sweden, the Netherlands, and England–despite spending more per student on education than any other nation in the world. On the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), a test of 15-year-olds in 2003, American students ranked just about in the middle in literacy skills, way behind their coevals in top-ranking Finland and a score of other countries including South Korea, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. It is an educational commonplace that children who cannot read at grade level by the fourth grade are unlikely ever to be able to read well enough to tackle the specialized textbooks they will encounter in science, history, and other subjects as they move to higher grades. More likely, they will fall further and further behind in school, eventually dropping out in many cases.

It would seem obvious, too, that learning how to read involves real learning–receiving and internalizing step-by-step instructions on how to decode the symbols on the page, fit them to spoken sounds, and then link those sounds to meaning. Hence vocabulary lists and the old-fashioned technique of having novice readers “sound out” words by reading aloud in class in order to associate sounds and letters. Children also need to learn how to make all those connections quickly and almost unconsciously, or reading will always be difficult and unpleasant for them, which is why fluency and comprehension are key measures of reading skill. Learning how to read would seem analogous to learning how to play the piano, in which practicing scales, mastering fingering technique, decoding the notes, and developing a feeling for the rhythm and beauty of the music are simultaneous but separate components of the process.

All this common-sense intuition–much of which underlay the famous phonics-intensive McGuffey Readers of the 19th century–is in fact supported by decades of 20th-century scientific research into how people actually learn how to read, starting with the work of Jeanne Stern licht Chall, a psychologist with a special interest in fostering the literacy skills of poor children who founded the Harvard Reading Laboratory at Harvard’s graduate school of education in 1966. Starting in the 1970s, a flood of reading studies–an estimated 10,000 in all–applied quantitative analysis and experimental, control-group-based research to identify the instruction strategies that teach reading most efficiently. The researchers included not only specialists in education and early childhood development but also experts in such fields as linguistics, psychology, neurology, genetics, anthropology, and sociology.

The resolutely apolitical NICHD, part of the National Institutes of Health, has been funding studies of reading development since 1964, and has sponsored longitudinal studies of 44,000 children in more than 1,000 schools since the early 1980s, tracking some of those children and their reading progress for more than 20 years as they grew to adulthood. It was all that research which led the NICHD to identify the five components that appear in Reading First’s enabling legislation (phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension). The value of these studies, their proponents argue, is that like all scientific studies, they are based on rigorous methodologies–assessments, for example, not only of how well children can read using various instruction strategies, but even how they move their eyes as they scan a printed page. And, like all valid scientific findings, the results can be replicated.

“We know how reading is acquired,” says Louisa Cook Moats, a protégée of Jeanne Chall’s at Harvard and director of the NICHD’s Early Reading Interventions project from 1997 to 2001. “It’s learning to process very specific kinds of linguistic information and build networks that coordinate phonological processing to the patterns of printed symbols that the eye sees, and it’s also connected to meaning and the building of vocabulary. When I explain how the process works to teachers, I compare it to an unraveled rope with the strands sticking out. The strands are all those beginning skills to be woven together in the rope.” Reading looks automatic and natural, Moats explains, but only because skilled readers are practiced enough to decode the symbols at lightning speed.

There are many causes for the resistance of the education establishment not only to the conclusions that Moats and others have drawn about reading instruction but to the research that underlies those conclusions. One bedrock philosophical principle, however, unites all those who oppose the step-by-step teaching of literacy skills: the notion that learning how to read is not at all like learning how to play the piano. Instead, the proponents of “whole language” instruction contend, it is a natural process akin to learning how to speak–something that children don’t have to be taught formally but pick up automatically if exposed to a sufficiently print-rich environment. Stephen D. Krashen, a professor emeritus of education at the University of Southern California and self-described “staunch defender” of whole-language strategies, explained in an email: “[A]ny child exposed to comprehensible print will learn to read, barring severe neurological or emotional problems.” Or, as Krashen amplified in a telephone interview: “Kids learn to read by reading.”

Hence the antipathy of the whole-language proponents to having children read a story out of a reader such as Houghton Mifflin’s; that doesn’t count as “real reading,” to borrow a phrase from Krashen’s email. Indeed, textbooks or any other kind of formal instructional material are eschewed. In elementary-school classrooms across the country, reading instruction typically consists of what is called “shared reading.” The teacher reads a story aloud to the class, often from a “Big Book,” an oversized, large-type edition of an illustrated children’s book of the teacher’s choosing that is propped up on a table or on the floor in front of the class. The teacher might read the story out loud several times, pointing out words that may be difficult, and then have the class read the story aloud in unison while the teacher turns the pages. There is almost no individual reading aloud, and the sounding out of words phonetically is actively discouraged as tending to turn youngsters into rote parsers of syllables who fail to understand what they are reading.

As for phonics per se, both Krashen and Yvonne Siu-Runyan insist that they indeed incorporate phonics instruction into their reading strategies, but only in elementary fashion and on an as-needed basis–”basic phonics,” as Krashen puts it. Whole-language instruction also typically includes periods of independent silent reading–”Drop Everything and Read” is the name for these impromptu sessions–in which the children pick out and peruse material of their choice from a classroom library of “leveled books”–that is, books that the teacher deems appropriate for their reading level. During these sessions the teacher typically “models” the process by dropping everything and reading silently from a children’s book, too, on the principle that seeing other people read encourages reading. As for vocabulary, whole-language classrooms typically incorporate a “word wall”–an ever-changing collection of large-letter words written on posters that the children chant together cheerleader-style and then write out.

The instructional principles behind whole language–light on formal content and heavy on assumptions that children will learn to read by feeling enthusiastic about reading–are far from new. Indeed, they date back to the end of the 19th century, to the educational theories of John Dewey (1859-1952), the pragmatist philosopher and educational theorist who held that children learn best not by directly absorbing instruction from their teachers in specific subjects such as mathematics or history, but by interacting with the real world. School, in Dewey’s thinking, should offer a simulacrum of real-world experience in which learning takes place obliquely as the child explores his or her surroundings under the guidance of a teacher. Dewey was in turn influenced by the romantic philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who believed that children were naturally perfect and that education ought to consist of allowing them maximum freedom to develop their innate talents.

In 1904 Dewey joined the faculty of Columbia Teachers College, regarded then as now as America’s premier education school (U.S. News currently gives Columbia Teachers its No. 1 rating). From there Dewey’s “progressive” theories of pedagogy profoundly influenced several generations of American teachers and school boards, right up until the Sputnik launch of 1957, when it suddenly looked as though the Soviet Union, whose Communist leaders had kept in place a decidedly non-progressive education system dating from czarist days, had the United States over a barrel in science and technology. The Dick and Jane readers widely used in American elementary schools from the 1930s through the 1950s were offshoots of a branch of Dewey-ism that held that phonics instruction was backward and proposed that the way to make children literate was to expose them to simple words repeated interminably. (”See Dick. See Dick run. See Dick run fast.”) This so-called “look-say” pedagogy (a forerunner to whole language in its emphasis on context and meaning rather than sounds and letters) met its end after Rudolf Flesch published his bestselling Why Johnny Can’t Read in 1955, two years before Sputnik. By the early 1960s it looked as though progressive education had run its course in all but the most outré private schools. Jeanne Chall’s 1967 book Learning to Read: The Great Debate, proposed a return to thorough grounding in phonics, but in up-to-date combination with interesting children’s literature.

Then came a revolution in pedagogy that swept through the K-12 grades in the 1970s and 1980s as thoroughly as its college-level sister, postmodernism, swept through the academy. The revolution was called “constructivism.” Like postmodernism, it had its grounding in arcane Francophone theory: the ideas of the Swiss cognitive psychologist Jean Piaget. Piaget proposed that children progress through distinct developmental stages during which they acquire knowledge not simply by learning it from the outside but by “constructing” it from within, building upon and reflecting upon what they already know in order to rise to new levels of knowing. In Piaget’s theoretical dialectic, the subjective process of learning was more important than any particular content learned. Indeed, Piaget argued, it was crucial that the developmental process taking place within each individual child’s mind not be interfered with, but rather nurtured and encouraged by the child’s teachers. As the ubiquitous mantra of Piaget-influenced educational theory later put it, the teacher should be “a guide on the side, not a sage on the stage.” The essential constructivist principle is that teachers should teach nothing directly, but rather function as coaches while their students basically teach themselves.

This was Dewey’s progressivism with a new, fashionably Continental face. “The idea is that education is growth, education is development, and that children grow all by themselves,” said Diane Ravitch, an education policy analyst and author of Left Back: A Century of Battles over School Reform, a mordant critique of constructivism. “The idea is that children figure everything out for themselves,” Ravitch added. “There’s no authority.”

Piaget acquired an army of American apostles at education schools and elsewhere. Chief among them were Frank Smith, an Australian journalist-turned university instructor, and Kenneth Goodman, an education professor at the University of Arizona. Smith, whose 1971 book Understanding Reading derided the teaching of phonics, and Goodman are credited as the creators of whole-language theory. In a 1967 article in an education journal, Goodman had described the process of learning to read as a “psycholinguistic guessing game” in which children decipher words on a page, not by decoding them phonetically as Chall maintained, but by following “cues.” The cues, Goodman maintained, can be the individual letters and sounds in the word–or they can be the larger context of the story in which the word appears, the artist’s illustrations, or even (and perhaps especially) the child’s own previously acquired knowledge. Like Smith, Goodman argued that phonics instruction was useless at best, downright harmful at worst. “Matching letters with sounds is a flat-earth view of the world,” he declared in a 1986 book, What’s Whole in Whole Language. Dramatically turning centuries-old principles of reading instruction on their heads, Goodman maintained that “a story is easier to read than a page, a page easier to read than a paragraph, a paragraph easier than a sentence, a sentence easier than a word, and a word easier than a letter.”

Both Smith, who had never taught reading in an elementary-school classroom, and Goodman, who had, derided the use of textbooks, worksheets, and other formal instructional material. Smith’s 1986 book, Insult to Intelligence: The Bureaucratic Invasion of Our Classrooms, complained about children being forced by their elders to memorize mountains of useless data. (Memorization is generally considered in constructivist theory to be developmentally inappropriate for elementary school.) In whole-language theory, the teacher’s job is to identify the child’s errors–or “miscues,” as they are called–and nudge the child in the direction of the correct cues. “Drill and Kill” is their derisive term for pedagogy that emphasizes the systematic teaching of content.

Thus began the practice, now a bedrock of whole-language pedagogy, of teachers’ encouraging beginning readers to look at the first letter of any difficult word they encounter in a story and guess the rest, or if that strategy fails to produce results, simply to skip the word and return to it later. Although Goodman refused to be interviewed for this article, stating in a pair of dyspeptic emails that he would not respond to “negative” criticism of his theories, Yvonne Siu-Runyan provided an example of how a whole-language reading lesson works in practice. “A child encounters the word ‘butterflies’ in a story,” said Siu-Runyan. “The first time he reads it as ‘b-flies.’ Maybe the next time he reads it as ‘butt-flies’ and the next time as ‘betterflies.’ For me to assume he’s not going to get it would be a mistake, because finally he’ll say to himself, ‘Does this make sense?’ He’ll look at the pictures of butterflies [in the book] and say to himself, ‘Oh, this is a story about butterflies!’ And he’ll get it right after that. It’s a lot more complicated a process than handing a child a list of words.”

Whole language and other aspects of constructivist theory swept through the education schools, starting with the flagship Columbia Teachers College, where Dewey’s progressive influence had never waned, where courses on reading pedagogy to this day concentrate on erecting a “theoretical framework” for instruction rather than teaching teachers what actually works in classrooms, and where the school’s publishing affiliate, Teachers College Press, churns out dozens of constructivist treatises every year. Smith and Goodman crisscrossed the country on the ed-school lecture circuit, where they were welcomed with open arms and standing ovations by professors and students alike. Whole language clearly appealed because it allowed teachers to do essentially what they liked in their reading classes, and it relieved them of the arduous work of ensuring that their students had mastered specific literacy skills. Teachers and administrators rushed to create “child-centered” and “learner-centered” curricula in every field and at every grade level (”learner” being the fashionable ed-speak word these days for “student,” as it connotes the constructivist idea that children take charge of their own education).

Sandra Wilde, an education professor at Portland State University in Oregon, deemed that learning how to spell, like learning how to read, “should ultimately be as natural, unconscious, effortless, and pleasant as learning to speak,” so spellers went the way of readers in classrooms across the country. Teachers encouraged youngsters to make up their own “invented” or “independent” spelling, also under the influence of Wilde’s self-described “holistic” approach, which theorized that children could learn from their spelling “miscues.” Wilde drafted a “Speller’s Bill of Rights” that included “the right to be valued as a human being regardless of your spelling.” Whole-language advocates and other constructivists also abandoned conventional tests and letter grades, which they thought slighted youngsters’ individuality, in favor of what they called “authentic assessment.” That usually means having students assemble samples of their work in a “portfolio” (the oversized envelope that artists take to job interviews) that the teacher then evaluates verbally.

Systematic lessons in grammar, handwriting, and punctuation also went by the boards, thought to be developmentally inappropriate for young children. The teaching of writing completely changed focus. Teachers in the primary grades had traditionally taught their students first how to construct grammatical and properly punctuated sentences, then how to form paragraphs, and finally how to build paragraphs into simple essays and stories. All this was abandoned in favor of a kind of writers’ workshop approach that focused on students’ self-expression and personal reactions. “Journaling,” which allows youngsters to choose their own topics to write about, became a favored classroom writing activity, even for kindergartners and first-graders. Students were encouraged not to worry about grammatical and spelling errors, as these could be cleaned up in an “editing” process with the teacher. Imitating the graduate writing program at the University of Iowa and the copy-desk procedures at the New Yorker was supposed to turn 6-year-olds into sophisticated writers, critics, and thinkers.

Two education professors at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Donald A. McAndrew and C. Mark Hurlbert, in an award-winning 1993 article in the journal of the National Council of Teachers of English, went so far as to urge students to indulge in “intentional errors” of syntax and usage as a way of rebelling against the “tyranny” of standard English usage. In 2003 the National Council took its own insurrectionist stand against standard English, voting to endorse a manifesto titled “Students’ Right to Their Own Language”–namely the right to write their homework in hip-hop-ese, Spanglish, Valley Girl talk, or whatever other nonstandard dialect they believe best expresses their “community” or “personal” identities. Many whole-language teachers do not bother to prepare lesson plans or syllabi, relying instead on querying their students on what they would like to learn on any particular day.

Like their opposite numbers in the reading science community, whole language advocates can point to plenty of published research, fattening the education journals and bolstering what the whole-language proponents insist is their superior approach to teaching literacy. That research, however, almost uniformly consists of anecdotal recollections by its authors of eureka! moments in their classrooms. The story that Siu-Runyan narrated about the child who finally deciphered the word “butterflies” is a perfect example. The education-school slang term for such “qualitative” (in contrast to quantitative) observations, analogous to the material that anthropologists record in their field notebooks, is “kidwatching.” Almost all kidwatching research consists of teachers’ first-person success stories–because whole-language advocates are human and they almost never report their classroom failures. “But they’re sure that those reports [in the education journals] are 100 percent scientific,” says Patrick Goff, a professor emeritus of education at San Diego State University in California and reading science advocate. “That’s because you can get a Ph.D. in education without ever having to read a single quantitative study. Even my own university would not teach its students about the empirical evidence concerning the teaching of reading.”

Fortunately, perhaps, for about 40 to 50 percent of children–the socioeconomic top 40 to 50 percent hailing from upper-middle-class-to-wealthy “print-rich” homes where the reading of books, magazines, and newspapers is an everyday occurrence–whole-language reading pedagogy does little if any harm. The most verbal of these youngsters, the gifted offspring of lawyers, college professors, and Hollywood screenwriters, either already know how to read by the time they get to kindergarten or pick up reading quickly no matter how they are taught. Others who are not so naturally verbal struggle with whole language’s guessing games and unsystematic instruction but eventually manage to read at grade level and to write and spell passably. Furthermore, many whole-language proponents, such as Siu-Runyan and Krashen, are clearly patient, gifted, imaginative teachers sensitive to their students as individuals (Siu-Runyan says she slips structure into her student-interest-driven lesson plans, and Krashen, who currently teaches in a suburb of Portland, Oregon, where whole language is officially verboten, runs his classes as a kind of Dead Poets Society, ignoring the ban while the administration looks the other way).

Indeed, even the staunchest supporters of the five-component scientific approach to literacy acknowledge that whole language’s emphasis on child-friendly classrooms and high-quality children’s literature are valuable contributions to pedagogy. Those desks arranged in clusters, not rows, the children sitting on the floor, and the plethora of stimulating books in Laverne Johnson’s classroom at Ginter Park represent some of the best of whole language’s legacy. Finally, many affluent parents with progressive political leanings actually prefer the unstructured, arts-and-crafts-oriented methodology of constructivism, which is why private progressive elementary schools such as the Dalton School in Manhattan and the Peninsula School near San Francisco continue to flourish (by the time those children enter high school, though, SAT cram courses and the rat race for Ivy League admissions are the order of the day; few of America’s top private prep schools operate on progressive pedagogical principles).

The children who suffer from the whole-language revolution are that bottom 40 percent of American children, the poor and near-poor who come from households where books are seldom seen and where unschooled parents have starved their offspring of the rich vocabulary and cultural exposure to which better-off children are accustomed as a matter of course. Children whose parents don’t speak English at home fare worst of all in whole language. This group of low-income, print-deprived children is the group that needs direct reading instruction most desperately, and as the results in Richmond indicate, benefits from it most dramatically.

Long before Reading First became law in 2002, there had been a backlash against whole language by parents and school superintendents unimpressed by their students’ low test scores despite being assured that their children were being taught according to the most up-to-date ideas. In 1987 the state of California mandated a whole-language approach to reading and writing. Within a few years California’s reading scores on the NAEP test plummeted to third-lowest in the United States and its overseas territories; only Louisiana and Guam ranked lower. The decline stretched across the socioeconomic board, among the offspring of the college-educated as well as the offspring of Hispanic immigrants.

Jill Stewart, a writer for the Los Angeles Weekly, visited a second-grade classroom at a highly regarded school on Los Angeles’s wealthy Westside. There she met a little girl who wrote “I go t gum calls” for “I go to gym class” in a journal that was entirely free of punctuation (which hadn’t been taught yet). In another classroom, a 7-year-old boy had gotten by with memorizing the “shared reading” story that the teacher had read over and over but could not actually read a single word of the story on his own. At one Los Angeles school parents held nacho sales to buy their classrooms forbidden spellers. In Charles Sykes’s book Dumbing Down Our Kids, a mother complained that her fourth-grade daughter had received a grade of check-plus (above average) and a teacher’s notation of “Wow!” for these sentences: “I’m goin to has majik skates. Im goin to go to disenelan. Im goin to bin my mom and dad and brusr and sisd. We r go to se mickey mouse.”

In 1996 California officially dumped whole language. (After parents there discovered that their fourth-graders couldn’t do long division, a similar, equally successful grassroots rebellion overthrew another constructivist fad promoted by education schools, “fuzzy” mathematics–in which children aren’t taught standard computations, the multiplication tables, or common formulas, but spend hours of class time pretending to be Pythagoras and trying to reinvent his theorem with sheets of colored paper.) A short time after the whole-language revolt, the Los Angeles Unified School District mandated the use of Open Court Reading, a phonics-based instruction program marketed by McGraw-Hill that happens to pass muster with Reading First. Deborah Jewell-Sherman’s decision to mandate Voyager Universal Literacy in Richmond also preceded Reading First. Indeed, after the California debacle, the education-school establishment began a strategic retreat in its antagonism toward phonics instruction. Many whole-language people now prefer to use the term “balanced literacy,” which means weaving a bit of phonics weft into the whole-language warp.

I can’t believe it! Reading and writing actually paid off!
Matt Groening, The Simpsons
US cartoonist & satirist (1954 - )

You know things are really bad when the Dems demand public school reform: Democrats for Education Reform

Joe Enge — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 03:31:30 +0000

I came across this group by way of Mike Antonucci’s Education Intelligence Agency
COMMUNIQUÉ. Mike has good stuff.

Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) was formed to, as they say below, “press for real education reform” and “we were frightened by our own party’s unwillingness to take on powerful entrenched interests to help them” (the students). Talk about encouraging and refreshing. It is heartening to see some of the Dems willing to do what is best for students instead of the interests. You can read their Web site by clicking here. Below are some excerpts from their site:

June 6, 2007
DFER Launches At NYC Event
Two years ago, a group of education reformers in New York and Washington, DC got together to see if an all-Democratic group could help nudge our party to press for real education reform. We were disheartened by the widespread failure of the public school system to give poor kids in America an opportunity to compete in the modern world, and we were frightened by our own party’s unwillingness to take on powerful entrenched interests to help them.

After several surprising but exciting victories, we have decided to expand our reach and launch a formal organization, called Democrats for Education Reform. We have hired an Executive Director, Joe Williams. Joe is a long-time journalist and Democrat who wrote Cheating Our Kids: How Politics and Greed Ruin Education.

We officially “launched” with an event June 5th in Manhattan. Guests came from all across the country, and included both educational and political activists.

This summer, Democrats for Education Reform will ramp up our efforts in New York and will expand our work to other promising battlegrounds. Great forces are still opposing us, but the tide is turning, and we believe that some important leaders and activists in our party are finally poised to make big changes.

July 23, 2007

DFER Quote of The Day
“The first ingredient in education reform is to tell parents the truth.”
– Former Georgia Governor Roy Barnes, via Charter Blog.

Office of the AG agrees Carson City School board agenda item would have violated the Open Meeting Law

Joe Enge — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 04:06:31 +0000

The Office of the Attorney General agreed with my concerns as a trustee of the Carson City School District that an agenda item for the district’s January 9, 2007 meeting was vague, too broad, and lacked specificity in violation of the Open Meeting Law (OML). I raised this issue before and during the January 9th meeting suggesting it be tabled and then voted against it when it wasn’t tabled. Ann Bednarski took these concerns to the AG’s office as a formal complaint the next day on January 10th. The response to the complaint was received by Bednarski on July 5, 2007.

Upon receiving the agenda for my first school board meeting in January as a newly elected trustee, agenda item # 6 “Adoption of policies and bylaws” seemed too vague to the point of being meaningless. I looked up the guidelines on the AG’s Web site regarding the OML and found indeed agenda items that are written with such a lack of specificity were a violation.

I wasn’t trying to play “gotcha” and sent the superintendent the AG’s guidelines and my concerns before the meeting so that it could be corrected. Needless to say it wasn’t corrected. When I raised the issue again at the board meeting, it was dismissed with a “that’s how we’ve always done it attitude,” and since I was new I didn’t know any better.

I did get a commitment from counsel that this issue would be corrected the next time it came up. The July 2 (written on that date, but received on July 5) AG letter states:

“The resolution agreed to by Trustee Enge and counsel for the Board was appropriate and it showed the public an exemplary degree of openness regarding Board business and a commendable cooperativeness between counsel and Trustee Enge which arrived at a solution to the problem.”

I do have a great deal of respect for the district’s counsel and don’t expect this issue will come up again. The AG letter supports my contentions and after citing the applicable statutes concludes:

“Applying the foregoing rules for use and preparation of agenda items, the Board’s use of ‘Adoption of policies and bylaws’ is far too generic and not reasonably calculated to inform the public of which policies and bylaws are to be considered.”

The AG letter further notes that their letter should serve as “guidelines” and there was not a formal violation because an agreement was reached at the meeting to correct future items and also because it took them more than the statutory 120 days to respond.

Ann Bednarski had a letter to the editor published Sunday about the matter and response from the Office of the Attorney General. You can read her letter by clicking here. Her letter is last among the many listed.

Joe Enge
Carson City School Board Trustee

The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced.
Frank Zappa

Heidi Harris Show appearance

Joe Enge — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 23:33:32 +0000

Joe Enge to appear on the Heidi Harris Show, KDWN Radio AM 720 Las Vegas Friday morning around 9:30 for the Nevada Policy Research Institute. The topic will be about teacher unrest in Clark County and the Association of American Educators as a real professional alternative to the unions, Clark County Education Association or Teamsters.

You can listen live by clicking here to go to their Web site. Then click the “Listen Live” tab in the upper left hand corner. Heidi is also a fellow columnist for Liberty Watch Magazine.

Ethics to hold formal hearing against former State Board of Education member Gary Waters

Joe Enge — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 15:01:24 +0000

As reported by Samantha Stone with KOH Radio this morning, 2 of the 4 charges Joe Enge with EdWatch Nevada filed against state board member Gary Waters in June of 2006 in trying to implement TeenScreen have been upheld to warrant a formal hearing with the Nevada Commission on Ethics in September. Waters is no longer a board member, his final term ended in December of 2006. Waters set up The Center for Health & Learning as a non-profit to implement TeenScreen. I questioned whether it is legal for a state board member to set up a non-profit and use Nevada Department of Education equipment and office.

TeenScreen is a highly controversial mental health screen that asserts it can identify students from the 5th to 12th grades who are suicidal. Critics nationally point out TeenScreen does more harm than good with their self-admitted 84% rate of false positives and makes end runs around the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment without obtaining proper, positive consent from parents. You can read details about TeenScreen on my former EdWatch Nevada Web site at www.campaignsitebuilder.com/templates/displayfiles1/Tmpl34.asp?id=19383.

Also available at www.edwatchnevada.com is one of the actual TeenScreen exams. Much to their chagrin, TeenScreen’s “super secret” exam is now public. The exam is listed under the heading of “Downloads.”

The two charges for setting up the non-profit were dropped. The Nevada Commission on Ethics came to the conclusion that it is legal for a non-profit, set up by a Nevada State Board of Education member, to use government equipment and offices. What’s legal is not always what’s right. I questioned also how this could be done without formal State Board of Education approval. They concluded the State Superintendent of Instruction, Keith Rheault, could do this on his own authority. They also concluded Waters did not make any money. $71,000 was awarded to the Center for Health & Learning, but he did not receive any of it.

My information shows Waters intended to start collecting money from a far larger federal grant of $1.2 million after he left office in December of 2006, the very reason he set up the non-profit. I suspect the publicity and scrutiny of my filing these Ethics charges in June of 2006 threw a monkey wrench into those plans. The federal $1.2 million grant has a table on page 29 showing a list of staff who will participate in the project with their role and level of effort. Waters is listed as director of the Center for Health & Learning and 100% FTE (full time equivalent). The center is also listed as a sub-grantee for funding. He can’t be convicted of his intentions once out of office since he was forced by these charges not to carry it out.

The Nevada Commission of Ethics did find just and sufficient cause exists to hold a hearing and render an opinion regarding whether Waters did not properly disclose his commitment, interests, or business relationship at the March, April, and June 2006 Nevada State Board of Education meetings at the time proposed standards for supplemental mental health and suicide were discussed, violating {NRS 281.501 (4)}. They also found just and sufficient cause exists to hear whether Waters acting on the same issues at these meetings violated {NRS 281.501 (2)}. The Nevada Commission on Ethics is scheduled to hear this matter on September 12, 2007 in Las Vegas at the Grant Sawyer State Building, room 4401.

Given it is legal in Nevada for non-profits to use government equipment and facilities, I think I will request an office in the Nevada Department of Education building in Carson City on behalf of EdWatch Nevada to better oversee their activities. I wonder what their reply will be.

Lesson in education

Joe Enge — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 23:53:12 +0000

Nevadans won’t settle for business-as-usual placebos like full-day kindergarten

By Joe Enge

Published in the July issue of Liberty Watch Magazine

In a mad rush to jack up education spending by more than $1 billion during the 2007 legislative session — without any serious and badly needed education reforms involving choice or accountability — Nevada’s education establishment tripped over the rock of reality and stumbled head on into a pronounced credibility gap.

While most media reports painted the session’s outcome regarding education as a balanced “compromise,” the reality is that the state’s insatiable behemoth was left stunned, trudging away with only $63 million in additional funding above Gov. Gibbons’ proposed budget.

General fund spending for K-12 ended up at $2.2 billion, or, when non-general funds are added to the Distributive School Account (DSA), $2.67 billion. The governor proposed a 13-percent increase, then accepted an 18-percent compromise. Instead of the $186 million sought for full-day kindergarten, proponents came away with $15 million.

Such a result was not predictable a year ago as the drumbeat and chants were building to blindly increase education spending under rosy state budget predictions. An expensive and inherently flawed adequacy study with predetermined results was touted in the run-up to the session, and the study’s predictable call for a massive increase was echoed by the Nevada State Board of Education. Then the state’s 17 school boards and 17 superintendents unanimously jumped on the bandwagon with their proposed “iNVest 07” plan calling for $1 billion in increased spending. “We’re asking for programs, not money,” they told lawmakers. But did anybody really buy that?

The false assumptions of the adequacy study were exposed during an August 2006 presentation to the Interim Education Committee. Testifying for the Nevada Policy Research Institute, the esteemed education analyst Dr. Richard P. Phelps and I made clear that, despite its seemingly impressive volume of numbers and statistics, the adequacy study’s invalid premises made its numbers irrelevant and unusable. The study briefly popped its head up again during the early session but, thanks again to NPRI testimony, suffered the fate of the resident pest in the whack-a-mole game, never to be heard from again.

The push for full-day kindergarten received its first challenge during NPRI’s pre-session testimony in November 2006. The challenge clearly took full-day kindergarten advocates by surprise, exposing their lack of familiarity with the voluminous array of studies that shred claims of universal academic benefits for full-day kindergarten programs. Proponents clearly had not done their homework, banking instead on the chorus effect to drown out any potential objections. That proved to be a major mistake, as the counter-evidence NPRI offered spoke to not only the flaws in proponents’ claims, but their lack of academic honesty as well.

Things grew even worse for the establishment on the credibility front when the Clark County School District tried in February 2007 to finesse a “study” they claimed proved the academic benefits of full-day kindergarten programs. But state Sen. Bob Beers called them on some key missing data. When finally provided, it revealed that full-day kindergarten students who were not “at-risk” actually performed worse by the second grade than their half-day counterparts. The new governor, too, helped Nevadans see through the smoke and mirrors with his opposition to universal compulsory full-day kindergarten.

A statewide decline in projected budget revenues brought the hammer down on full-day pre-school, yet Assembly Speaker Barbara Buckley & Co. clung to it as though it were public education’s Holy Grail. As the session neared its end, preposterous assertions, political rhetoric and hyperbole filled the air — advocates’ last refuge amid an absence of supporting research and funds.

“Buckley contended some inmates might not have ended up in prison if they had received a better start to education with full-day kindergarten,” reported Ed Vogel of the Las Vegas Review-Journal May 4. “Her comment sparked a response from Joe Enge, a member of the Carson City School Board and an education analyst for the Nevada Policy Research Institute. ‘I am not aware of one study that shows investing in all-day kindergarten will make any impact on the incarceration rate,’ Enge said. He said the Nevada education system’s problems occur at the secondary level, not in early grades.”

The lesson of the 2007 legislature is that the public wants substantial education reform and won’t settle for the expensive, business-as-usual “feel good” placebos that the full-day kindergarten push epitomized.

Until sound policy objectives — such as Sen. Barbara Cegavske’s bills to restructure the state education system (SB 540) and provide choice for special needs students (S.B. 158) — are taken seriously, the establishment’s budget-expansion balloons will continue to be popped.

Educational feudalism

Joe Enge — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 23:44:20 +0000

The peasants are beginning to revolt.

By Joe Enge

Published by the Nevada Policy Research Institute’s E-Bulletin June 29, 2007

Teachers often bemoan the fact that they are neither seen nor treated as true professionals. It is true that teachers are not held in nearly as high a regard in American culture as they are in many others. Having taught in Estonia, I’ve experienced the difference in treatment that teachers receive there as compared to here in the United States. In fact, students don’t refer to their teachers by name in Estonia, instead using the term “teacher” as a respectful way to address educators.

It is worth considering the degree to which American teachers themselves have undermined their professional reputations through unionism. There is an inherent conflict between unionism and professionalism that operates to the detriment of teaching. Demonstrating this is the current struggle between the Clark County Education Association (CCEA), affiliated with the Nevada State Education Association and the National Education Association, and a new, upstart Teamsters local.

The CCEA is facing unrest because of its failure to represent the interests of its members and over charges of selling them out. Former CCEA member Ron Taylor is leading the revolt, providing evidence to fellow teachers and the media that the CCEA has, indeed, been selling out its members. Taylor even charges that the union asked the administration to investigate him for going public. How nice – a “teachers” union that claims to defend teachers but actually works with the administration to keep teachers in line.

This is nothing new, by any means. A strange, modern version of serfdom has evolved in American education, with the teachers’ unions playing a key role in keeping the serfs from revolting. There are four interest groups involved in this drama: the teachers, the unions, the administration and, as a proxy for the public, the school board. The interests of both the teachers and the school board/public are neglected in a system where the union pretends to represent teachers, and the administration pretends to represent the school board and public. Since contract negotiations are closed to all except the union and the administration, the other stakeholders – including the general taxpaying public – cannot see what transpires.

Taylor’s efforts in revealing the true, ugly face of the CCEA are admirable and gutsy. His solution, however, is only to replace one union with another – in this case, the Teamsters. On Thursday, June 28, the official announcement was made: “Teamsters Local 14 announces they will begin an organizing campaign for teachers and support staff of the Clark County School District. This commitment by Teamsters Local 14 will surely change education in Clark County and certainly Nevada.”

The window for unsatisfied members of the CCEA to leave is short. NSEA affiliates usually have a two-week window (July 1-15) in which to drop the union, but the rumor is that CCEA has an even shorter window of July 1-11. It’s no accident that the short drop period falls around the July 4 holiday and right in the middle of summer vacation, when many teachers are out of town. The frustration of some over the CCEA’s antics is made clear by an “in your face” demonstration scheduled to take place right in front of CCEA headquarters during the drop period. One teacher even suggested bringing a big truck to park in front of the building to show that the Teamsters are here.

The CCEA fully deserves this raid. Whether it can be taken down in so short a time is another matter.

But the deeper question teachers in Clark County and throughout Nevada should be asking is whether it is in their professional interest to be in a union at all. Replacing one union with another is not the answer, as the feudal education structure will remain. Dropping union membership altogether, however, will raise the stature of the profession. A sizable number of American teachers over the years have reached this conclusion, forming the Association of American Educators (AAE) and rejecting the union label.

The AAE describes itself as “the largest national, non-union, professional teacher association, offering educators an alternative to partisan politics and non-educational agendas of the teacher labor unions.” It also offers teachers excellent liability coverage at a great saving.

As we watch the CCEA and Teamsters battle it out, teachers should keep in mind that there is another path for teachers, a path provided by the AAE that addresses the central conflict between unionism and professionalism.

In the end, educators have to ask themselves whether they prefer being called “teacher” or “Teamster.”

Professional choice

Joe Enge — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 23:38:19 +0000

Published in the Las Vegas Review-Journal on July 9 as a letter to the editor.

To the editor:

Because more and more teachers in Clark County have expressed discontent with their representative unit, the Clark County Education Association, the Teamsters have decided to throw their hat in the ring.

But the fact of the matter is neither the association nor the Teamsters is looking out for the best interests of teachers. Teachers are professionals who deserve a professional organization that will engender the type of respect and recognition that unions do not bring to the table. The Teamsters are no better a solution to the concerns of the teachers of Clark County than the association.

The militant labor union mentality is inherently wrong for teachers. Industrial-style unionism neither advances the respect and compensation that educators deserve nor does it improve the quality of education for kids.

Teachers have been tasked with the education of our nation’s children, and must be the best and the brightest. The union model rewards teachers who act in a way that belies the nature of their profession. If teachers strive to be taken seriously as a profession, they need to align themselves with groups whose priorities do not center on political agendas that have little to do with the classroom.

It’s understandable that Clark County’s educators are wondering if there are better options than a union. The answer is yes. In fact, there is a groundswell among America’s teachers, who are leaving traditional teacher labor unions to join non-union professional associations. Nearly 300,000 teachers nationwide have opted to join non-union educators associations such as the Association of American Educators, which has members in all 50 states. Members can get most of the benefits that the unions provide but at a fraction of the cost.

Clark County teachers have a unique opportunity to do what’s best for their profession and for the kids they teach. There have indeed been problems with the Clark County Education Association’s representation, and teachers should want change.

However, the Teamsters outdated labor model is no more appropriate for today’s teachers than is the National Education Association. Teachers deserve a professional choice.

Gary Beckner

MISSION VIEJO, CALIF.

THE WRITER IS CHAIRMAN OF THE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICAN EDUCATORS.

Regent Knecht’s Official Evaluation of Chancellor Jim Rogers

Joe Enge — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 22:41:11 +0000

• What did you think about Chancellor Rogers’s Self-Evaluation?

It was superficial, self-serving and Pollyanna-ish. It missed most of the major issues and misrepresented much.

• What would you say about the Chancellor’s relationship with the 8 institutions that comprise the system?

Chancellor Rogers’ relationship with the eight institutions that comprise the System is mixed to poor, because contrary to his claims, his relationships have involved micro-managing them. In his 2006 Self Evaluation, he states: “The Chancellor’s relationship with the System starts and ends with my relationship with the eight presidents. I believe it is injurious to all for the Chancellor to have any authority to instruct any System employee on any subject below the President. I expect the Presidents to report to me and I have told each that I will exercise no authority over anyone who reports to them.” However, in 2006, he opposed changes in the terms of the contract for UNLV Athletic Director (AD) Mike Hambrick that were similar to those that had been made the previous meeting to the contract of UNR’s AD, apparently in an effort to drive out Hambrick and replace him. While that effort surfaced because the change had to come before the board for action, there are also similar anecdotes told about his efforts to drive out other institutional staff below the presidential level. Yesterday, he engaged in an unprofessional public hectoring and bullying of Hambrick that was hypocritical if not plain dishonest and clearly malicious. (Among other things, he falsely accused Hambrick of not reaching out to the community when he – Rogers – didn’t even attend a single NSHE graduation ceremony this year.) In short, the contrast between his proclaimed hands-off principle and the reality of his behavior undermines completely his claims, made since his public interview with the Board to be appointed Interim Chancellor, to supreme integrity and being a stickler for honesty and forthrightness.

His relationships with the two flagship institutions, UNLV and UNR, have been notably marked by him driving out the two Presidents in office when he became Chancellor. If one accepts that it was a good idea to relieve them (and I don’t purport to know), it can be argued that he did so fairly effectively and with minimum ancillary damage via pressure that eventually caused them to leave their posts. However, shortly after becoming Interim Chancellor in 2004 and as part of the effort to drive out the UNLV president, he cancelled a $25-million commitment he had previously made to UNLV, leaving UNLV in the lurch. He seemed to do much better in the departure of CCSN President Richard Carpenter, so maybe he’s making progress.

• What do you think about the Chancellor’s efforts and progress on new initiatives, such as the Nevada Health Sciences System?

Regardless of whether the NHSS is ideal in the sense of being exactly what anyone would have designed from scratch, it is the health sciences and services-delivery path we are now following. However, even if it was in concept the best idea, it has been somewhat compromised and damaged by the personal stake that Chancellor Rogers has in it and his actions regarding it. There is a serious question as to whether the NSHE should be pursuing such a mission expansion when it is already challenged to do much better at its current mission scope. We may be spreading ourselves too thin in trying to solve all the problems of the world.

Jim Rogers has a history of self-aggrandizement by funding initiatives and slapping his name on them. To the extent that he or anyone else provides substantial funding for public benefit, they deserve such recognition for doing so and I support naming institutions for them or with their choice of another name. However, Mr. Rogers is said to have a history of promising and advertising higher levels of contribution than he actually makes, and more particularly of spreading his contributions over time so that he can leverage on a continuing basis more terms, conditions and concessions than those to which the recipients originally committed. Chancellor Rogers has advertised that he will put his own money into the NHSS, but has not yet done so and not yet sought to have the NHSS named for him or with the name of his choice. Even if he does not seek naming rights, his history and reputation noted above should raise a cautionary flag when he seeks active involvement (which many donors eschew) in conceptualizing and bringing to fruition such an initiative. That need becomes urgent and extreme when he also has CEO power as NSHE Chancellor. The potential problems and extent and urgency of the need for caution are already emphasized by two of his actions regarding the NHSS: a) the recent fiasco involving the search for a head for the NHSS; and b) his actions regarding the NHSS in the current Legislative session.

Active donor involvement in such initiatives is reasonable, although it often raises problems and complications. However, when the donor has CEO power in the recipient institution, then the relationship has become too complex and fraught with very real and tempting conflict-of-interest opportunities for him or the Board to be able to provide reasonable assurance that decisions are being made in the public interest. With Mr. Rogers being Chancellor, chief initiative proponent/architect, and advertised as prospective major donor, conflicts with the public interest are virtually assured, and there will be no way to convince the public that the project was not developed by him for his self-aggrandizement and to his particular tastes using public money in much vaster amounts than he can or would contribute. There will be an entirely reasonable suspicion that his private-agenda tail will be wagging the public-interest dog.

A committee of Board members, health science professionals and other qualified and dedicated persons had been formed (the Board’s Health Sciences Committee) and had engaged an executive search firm to help it find a head for the new institution. Early this year, the search firm produced a list of potential candidates for review. At that point, unilaterally, improperly and contrary to the desires of the Chairman of that committee (who is the voice of policy and direction to whom the Chancellor should report and answer in this matter), Chancellor Rogers intervened in the process directly and intemperately with the search firm because he was dissatisfied with the candidate pool. The net result was a blow up in which the NSHE was essentially fired as a client by a reputable experienced search firm due to Chancellor Rogers’ improper and very aggressive actions. Now, in addition to the schedule having been greatly set back by his rash and imprudently un-self-restrained actions, the word in both the search community and the community of potential candidates for the position is that the NSHE, this project and Chancellor Rogers are all poison to be avoided at any cost. The fact that the prudent and restrained actions of the Committee and its Chairman and the Chairman of the Board have been able to keep this matter quiet does not change the fact that Chancellor Rogers’ lack of the requisite mature judgment in his actions have set back the NHSS initiative badly.

Chancellor Rogers’ other problems with excessive involvement in too many ways in the NHSS are also illustrated in his advocacy for that initiative, as discussed in the answer to the next question that involves his relationships with the Executive and Legislative branches of state government.

• How effective has the Chancellor been with the Executive and Legislative Branches of the State Government?

Regrettably, Chancellor Rogers’ relationships with the Executive and Legislative branches of state government have not been very effective due to a combination of his ineptitude in some areas and his infidelity to the best interests of the NSHE and the policies of the Board that has at times veered into outright betrayal of those duties. Over the last year, Chancellor Rogers’ relationships with those two branches has been marked by his pursuit of four of his private agenda items, only one of which is arguably consistent with the best interests of the NSHE and Board policy. And in attempting to further his private interest in that one item, he may well have sold out or at least undermined the rest of NSHE interests. His four private agenda items have been:

1) His shrill, ill-informed and gratuitous advocacy of higher overall state tax levels – levels that are shown by the total body of serious scholarship in public finance to be, on net, destructive of aggregate human well-being as compared to current levels because they diminish economic growth; and especially of income taxes that voters have roundly rejected with a Constitutional amendment and which are also well-known to be very destructive of human well-being, economic growth and the public interest;

2) His shrill, ill-informed and gratuitous advocacy of extending all-day Kindergarten from at-risk populations that it already serves and for which public funding of such a program is arguably in the public interest to the rest of the population (i.e., to not-at-risk-student families), most of whom do not want or need it and for whom public funding of it is contrary to the public interest on the educational merits (because research shows it does not improve their long-term achievement and may well diminish it) and as a waste of scarce taxpayer dollars that could be better spent on other public priorities including higher education or that could be used to relieve pressure to raise taxes to ever more socially destructive levels;

3) His self-serving advocacy, contrary to express Board policy, of switching from election of Regents by the people to appointment of and by political insiders; and

4) His advocacy of the Nevada Health Sciences System.

While his advocacy for taxes and extending all-day Kindergarten may in part be undertaken in good faith, his presentation and defense of his positions on these matters are embarrassingly shallow and ill-informed (intellectually embarrassing, in fact), as well as gratuitous (advocacy unrelated to and unnecessary to the state of Nevada doing a good job in higher education). From these facts and his other actions, it is clear that this advocacy was undertaken in great part to curry favor with some politically extreme statists in the Legislature and press and the special interests they and he represent. Essentially, Chancellor Rogers has promoted the top two agenda items of Nevada’s minority of left-wing, extreme statists and has been their blunt tool in harassing the Governor Gibbons in return for their support of his other two private agenda items and perhaps for a vague promise that they would not be too beastly to the overall best interests of higher education.

On the other side, although Governor Gibbons has been gracious about the whole matter, Chancellor Rogers’ ham-handed political free-lancing has certainly been embarrassing to the NSHE and Board, and it has damaged the interests of higher education. Mr. Rogers’ relationship as Chancellor with Governor Gibbons got off to a terrible start when, as the gubernatorial campaign began in the summer of 2005, Rogers referred to Gibbons as “narrow-minded” and “simplistic”, and added, “I don’t think he’s very bright.” (This from a fellow who subsequently offered the intellectually embarrassing simplistic and socially destructive advocacy of higher overall tax burdens, income taxes and extending all-day Kindergarten to non-at-risk populations.) It is widely known that Chancellor talks regularly with extreme left-wing and smash-mouth columnist/broadcaster/blogger Jon Ralston, and that he and Ralston work together to float political trial balloons and promote aggressive statist agendas. So, when Ralston raised a rumor that Jim Rogers might fund the fantasy agenda of the extreme left-wingers – a recall effort against the Governor – few folks took at face value his subsequent disavowal of any such intention. The game he is playing has completely compromised the interests of higher education, and undermined and even betrayed Board policy and the duties of fidelity and integrity he owes as NSHE’s CEO. His performance in this area is not only ineffective, but damaging to the public interest.

A saving grace is that Chancellor Rogers, having little appetite or patience for details of the budget process, has left that work to the Vice-Chancellors and other NSHE and institutional staff and to the lobbyists jointly employed by him and NSHE (which joint employment is an absolutely unsound practice that needs to be remedied).

• How about his Relationship with the media and his public visibility?

His relationship with the media is mixed. He may well return all calls every day and the media may well be more supportive of NSHE than when Jim Rogers became Chancellor. Certainly, a lot of progress has been made by the Board and the System in those three years, starting from a very low water mark. Some credit in this area is due to Chancellor Rogers, some to Board members and some to various other people new and continuing in the NSHE, all making concerted efforts toward improvement in this area.

However, on the other side of the ledger, his claims made when he was appointed, repeated many times since then and echoed again in his self-evaluation, that he is totally honest and known for his integrity, and that he will not tolerate anyone who does not meet the same standard, are false. Before I was elected to the Board, I had heard accounts from reliable people in the Northern Nevada media that he is known primarily as a self-absorbed, self-indulgent bully and tyrant, given to rashly going off at little or no provocation.

Specifically undermining his claims of integrity and full honesty, he has recently surreptitiously put pressure on the editors who supervise the reporter who has given the most extensive and detailed coverage continuously to NSHE institutions and matters. My point in raising this item is not to claim that that reporter’s (or any reporter’s) work is completely above reproach or free of error. Suffice it to say that the reporter in question appears to this Regent to have done a workman-like job and always written and acted in good faith, even on particulars on which I did not agree. (In fact, some weeks ago I told the reporter that a characterization used of some important words I said and on which I had provided complete hard copy did not accurately or usefully convey the flavor, substance and intent of them.) I raise this point only to illustrate what I believe to be the Chancellor’s real reputation with the media – Jon Ralston excepted – of being a dangerous, vindictive bully that one crosses at one’s peril.

As I stated at the outset, the picture for his and the NSHE’s media relations is mixed, but better than three and four years ago.

Finally, I note that the Chancellor did not attend a single commencement exercise in the System this month, to my knowledge. And he did not arrange for Vice-Chancellors to fill in at all events. More than one Regent attended each event, with a majority for some major events. Chancellor Rogers’ public visibility may be good in that, by owning a string of media outlets, he has the power to inject favorable PR personally and otherwise to the System and institutions at any time it suits him. However, his parsimony with his time at such events and at Board meetings communicates an unfortunate and accurate message to the world that his agenda is more focused on self-aggrandizement and power and money politics than on higher education.

• How would you characterize Chancellor Rogers’s relationship with the Board of Regents?

His relationship with the Board is very poor and highly divisive. He owes the Board, the public and Regent Leavitt a complete and unadorned apology for his attacks on Regent Leavitt and his threat to resign if Regent Leavitt is elected Chairman or Vice-Chairman. The threat was insubordinate, absolutely unprofessional and unacceptable, and very damaging not only to relations with the Board but also to higher education. It cannot in any way be excused, and it would have led to the prompt firing of any other person in his position or a similar one – and we should apply the same standards to him as to anyone else in such regards. No excuse can justify over-looking this action, especially because it is only one item in a course and pattern of such behavior. For example, an excuse that Board members knew they were buying into such behavior when members hired him is insulting to them because it suggests they would knowingly harm higher education and the public interest by countenancing such behavior.

His arrogance; his disdain for the Board’s role in setting policy, direction and strategy and overseeing its implementation; and possibly a failure on his part to understand the basics of the Board/Chancellor relationship and of institutional governance emerged early in “Memogate” (a series of buffoonish and inappropriate memos he sent regularly to Regents early in his tenure attacking them). A major part of the problem is that his excessive ego, appetite for self-congratulation and long history of unchecked personal power and privilege due to wealth and a media empire seem to have warped his perceptions, judgments and behaviors.

• What in your view should be the performance objectives for the Chancellor next year?

He has a lot of remedial work to do. He’ll be digging out of a deep hole, and he needs to recognize that and completely change his attitudes and behaviors. To set performance objectives, we should start with frank acknowledgment of the main reason he was hired: his ability to contribute and, hopefully, to raise money from wealthy donors. He, himself, acknowledges that he has no great qualifications for academic leadership. There may be some notion that he was hired for management background in the private sector, but that’s undercut by the proliferation on his watch of System administrative and lawyer positions. On raising money, his pep talks at Board meetings give him continuing opportunities for self-congratulation, but they do not raise funds. Hectoring, badgering and goading potential contributors by throwing an “if you won’t give me your money, I’ll tax you and everybody else to show my vision and virtue” fit have not yet proven effective. He needs to try another approach with such donors.

He needs to work on the mature prudence, judgment and restraint his job requires and to reach out to the Board and public. He must understand and embrace the requirements of the job he sought and accepted and stop getting backward the principal/ agent relationship he has with the Board. He needs to reacquaint himself with living and working under the real-world standards that normal folks do and stop being a bully.

Everyone suffers when educrats don’t do their homework

Joe Enge — Mon, 21 May 2007 02:20:50 +0000

By Andy Matthews
May 18, 2007
Record Courier

Nevada’s public education system rightly demands that students do their homework, think critically and resist following the crowd in response to peer pressure.

Yet sadly, they do not practice what they preach and it is the students and the public who pay the price. The students pay in the form of a sub-standard education, while the public foots the bill for increasingly expensive programs that produce little benefit.

Exhibit A is the current debate over full-day kindergarten, which has demonstrated the shallowness of proponents’ arguments, based more on emotional solidarity and desire for public money than solid research.

A May 3 session of the Assembly Ways and Means Committee revealed a sharp contrast in the degrees of seriousness present on either side of the debate. While full-day kindergarten proponents submitted an authorless booklet that draws on a paltry 14 studies to support their case, Joe Enge, education policy analyst at the Nevada Policy Research Institute, countered with the institute’s recently published bibliography of nearly 300 studies and papers that have examined the effects of full-day kindergarten programs.

As NPRI states in the bibliography’s overview, “Attempts by other parties to provide a source of references on the subject have, unfortunately, fallen short of what is needed, usually because of the inclusion of too few studies. Given the importance of this issue, and in the spirit of honest academic research and debate, NPRI has chosen to provide a more comprehensive bibliography of the papers and studies available.”

Perhaps because of its limited scope, the proponents’ booklet, titled “Full-Day Kindergarten in Nevada: Learning to Learn,” omits a huge array of research on the subject, much of which contradicts their assertions that full-day kindergarten programs are beneficial to students.

As if to underscore the booklet’s lack of seriousness, its “summaries” section consists simply of a photocopy from the Pennsylvania Office of Child Development. The booklet does, however, boast an impressive and expensive-looking binding, cover and tabs that give it an air of authority apparently intended to mask its lack of substance (an old trick with which any indolent student is familiar).

As the testimony continued before the committee, the logical flaws in full-day kindergarten proponents’ reasoning only became more obvious and numerous. Several teachers of full-day kindergarten classes already in place were trotted out to offer stories of personal experience intended to buttress the argument for expanding these programs. These witnesses extended invitations to “come to the classes and see what great things are being done!”

No doubt, upon visiting a full-day kindergarten class, you would find energetic kids learning from dedicated teachers. But such anecdotal evidence, while heartwarming, contributes no real substance to the debate because it does nothing to refute the statistical evidence that undercuts the proponents’ case.

In particular, what you wouldn’t see is the evidence gathered through extensive research (imagine that) showing that in most cases any benefits enjoyed by students in full-day kindergarten programs disappear within a few years. Kindergarten teachers can’t be expected to know this independently. Their experience with students is, after all, limited to the kindergarten year. So they’re not around anymore when, in the third or fourth grade, any benefits enjoyed because of full-day kindergarten have disappeared.

But while we shouldn’t blame kindergarten teachers for seeing things the way they do (nor should we question their intentions), we should at least recognize their lack of credentials for testifying on the key question at issue. Trusting their judgment of the long-term effects of full-day kindergarten programs based on their necessarily limited knowledge would be like picking the winner of a football game because one team returned the opening kickoff for a touchdown.

Absent serious research and study of the real effects of full-day kindergarten, how can anyone a visitor to a classroom or the teacher himself know whether such programs produce real, lasting benefits to the students? They can’t and hence the need for such research.

It’s troubling that no one within the education establishment seems to have recognized this or taken it seriously enough to bother with an honest, in-depth examination of the extensive research available on the subject. The lockstep in which all 17 of the state’s superintendents, its 17 school boards and the teacher union in Nevada march as they push for all-day kindergarten represents uncritical, blind and dangerous group-think of the worst kind. Either these proponents did not know that contradictory studies exist, revealing a failure to “do their homework” before seeking expensive funding, or they were aware of the contradictory studies and intentionally left them out of the discussion. Neither scenario is acceptable.

The irony here would be delicious if the implications weren’t so potentially dangerous. No teacher worth his salary would accept such shoddy research work from a student. Surely we should expect more from those in whose hands we place our children’s future.

– Andy Matthews is communications director at the Nevada Policy Research Institute. NPRI’s bibliography of papers and studies on full-day kindergarten programs is available at npri.org.