Manning to educators: "What about this do you not understand?"
Published May 10, 2014
Editorial by News and Observer, May 9, 2014.
It will never be said of Wake County Superior Court Judge Howard Manning Jr. that those subject to his rulings don’t know where he stands. Thus, the state’s educators, from administrators on down the line, should pay close attention to Manning’s tough words about the many thousands of young students who cannot read as well as they should, students Manning says in effect are being cheated.
And he further says that changes in standards aren’t the answer to anything.
In a report, Manning wrote, “... the state of North Carolina cannot cut and run from the results (of assessments such as end-of-grade and end-of-course tests) by reducing standards and deleting the assessments because they do not bring good news.”
In other words, changing standards by cutting some tests and the like, blaming higher Common Core standards or ignoring testing as a way to guide the teachers’ instruction of students at different levels in the same class is not acceptable.
Manning focused in his latest report on his belief that reading levels for third-graders were crucial to their future success in school.
Manning was tough: “Bottom line requirement: Do the formative assessment and use the information to tailor instruction to meet the needs of the individual child. Do not put the data in the folder and continue on with the instruction for the entire class on one level. (What about this do you not understand?).” The judge is planning to review this year’s end-of-grade scores and ACT results.
The state Supreme Court has twice reinforced the state’s constitutional obligations to provide all children with a “sound, basic education,” something that came out of a suit (called “Leandro”) from five low-wealth school districts filed in 1994. That meant the state was required to provide adequate resources and instruction. It held the legislature and for that matter all of the state’s leaders responsible without specifically telling them how to achieve it.
In another development that is likely to shake up legislators and educators, the attorneys for those five counties have offered a court filing calling for an August hearing to pin down the state on how it is going to comply with that original “sound, basic education” ruling. They contend the state has not lived up to what the Supreme Court ruled was its obligation.
They say the state’s teacher salaries remain 46th in the country, that programs such as the Teaching Fellows have ended, teachers’ assistant jobs have been cut along with places for pre-kindergarten programs and textbook money. And while all this has been going on, the percentage of kids in the state who are eligible for free and reduced lunches has gone up to 56 percent from 39 percent 17 years ago.
In other words, the state has been doing less when it should be doing more.
While inadequate funding and those cutbacks surely have hurt many schools and many kids, Manning is right to hold educators responsible for the problems with reading and to encourage them (that’s putting it politely) to be flexible in using different strategies to teach children of different skill levels.
Manning certainly has not been unsympathetic to teachers and administrators and the difficulty of the task of public education to teach children from many different backgrounds in the same school and the same classroom. Now he seems to be issuing a wake-up call based on inadequate reading instruction.
And in the meantime, another Leandro confrontation seems to be inevitable. But if the tumultuous debate over the quality of education, and that right to a fundamentally sound and basic education, ultimately results in opening opportunities for all children, it will most emphatically have been worthwhile.
http://www.newsobserver.com/2014/05/09/3849653/judge-manning-champions-public.html?sp=/99/108/
May 10, 2014 at 9:17 am
Norm Kellly says:
'blaming higher Common Core standards'. Is there proof that these standards actually are higher? Is it just that if you tell us often enough that they are we will believe it even if they aren't.
The challenge I'm seeing with CC is the story behind the standards that powerful education-related folks seem to try to hide from us. We are TOLD that the standards are just that, standards. Why would anyone object to higher standards? True enough. But we've been lied to so often, on every topic, from our elected officials in the central planner community (commonly referred to as Washington) that THINKING people no longer believe what we hear. The central planners have become the MOST untrustworthy people in the country. Central planners are even more untrustworthy than used car salesmen. My apologies to used car sales people.
If CC were JUST a set of standards, there wouldn't be common curriculum across the country. There wouldn't be the same methods being used across the country at virtually every grade level. There wouldn't be the same ridiculous steps being taught to kids on how to do simple math, with carrying from column 1 to column 2 with addition. There are more than standards at play here. There is curriculum at play here. Curriculum forced on us by some central planner types.
If this were only standards, why is it that the feds would threaten a state if they CHOOSE to not participate? Why is it the feds threaten to withhold money from a state if they CHOOSE to have standards that meet the needs of their kids? Why is it that the central planners believe that central control of curriculum is meaningful across the country? Is this another area where the occupier believes there shouldn't be 50 experiments? You know, like there MUST be a federally mandated single size health care plan instead of allowing each state, as demanded by the US Constitution, to experiment with what works FOR THEIR CITIZENS?
Can ANYONE, including Manning, show where there's a push to lower standards? It seems the standards have been allowed to slip so much that just about anything we try should be better. Unless, of course, it's dictated by our central planners. Then we know that would be worse. IF our state can not only come up with high standards but also a curriculum that makes sense, and meets these high standards, wouldn't this be a good thing? Yes. Of course. But some are afraid to oppose the central planners and the occupier. Can Manning actually force the state to stick with CC, even if it doesn't raise the standard? Can Manning prevent our state from implementing a set of high standards along with a rigorous curriculum that actually educates kids?
Let's stop pretending that CC is only a set of standards. Let's admit that CC is also a curriculum designed to confuse kids, make kids better customers from someone, but we don't know who yet. If the 'white privilege' portion of the curriculum is allowed to permeate CC standards, then it's goal is indoctrination. If teaching kids a convoluted way of getting to a math answer is part of the curriculum, that you like to call a standard, then the standard curriculum must be thrown in the trash. It seems that some of the writing assignments, along with the convoluted math steps, are designed to get more kids to dislike school, not raise standards. It seems the common curriculum may also be designed to make kids think their parents can't help with teaching because the parents do the steps different, which is NOT allowed by the standard. If the goal of the curriculum is to have kids in lower grades reading pornographic books, then the curriculum standard must be thrown in the garbage. Why is it that allowing kids to read the Bible during independent reading time is prevented, but forcing kids to read pornography isn't just permitted but promoted? What is the goal? Indoctrination? Self-loathing? Hatred of math? Believing parents are less capable than government agencies/employees? Cuz if parents can't work with kids at home on school-related tasks, help in educating THEIR kids, then the kids start to believe their parents are less qualified than the government.
High standards = good. Bad curriculum = indoctrination. Bad curriculum = self-loathing. Bad curriculum = easily led & fooled masses. You know, low-information voters, more democrat supporters.
May 10, 2014 at 9:42 am
Richard Bunce says:
Opportunities for all children will only be achieved when relatively low income parents have resources made available to them in the form of vouchers/pre-refundable tax credits to choose their childrens education system in the same way that relatively high income parents, including many elected officials, judges, government education bureaucrats, government school administrators/teachers do.
May 10, 2014 at 6:26 pm
Johnny Hiott says:
It seems strange to me that way back in the sixties when I was in school we did not have a problem with students learning to read, do arithmatic, learn and speak English and even history. Why now with
all of the reductions in standards is it such a problem now ? Perhaps
the late fifties and early to mid sixties needs to be revisited. Perhaps the idiocy of elementary, junior high and then high schools
needs to be done away with and go back to community schools grades one through twelve ? Regardless of what anyone may have to say against community schools : They worked and got results ! From what I have seen in my professional life a high school education in North Carolins from the 1960's gave kids more intelligence than six years of college indoctrination of today. Go back to community schools, put Prayer and dicipline back into the schools and tell the federal govt. to remove itself from education completely and let the local govt. and parents run the schools. That would fix 99 % of the problems in our schools.
