MyQuest | my thoughts on life's journey

Elementary bullying

An ABCNews story about bullying of elementary school kids, particularly around issues of real or perceived gender non-conformity or being in LGBT families.  A child in Omaha opens the story.

UNL only Big 10 school without domestic partner benefits

UNL wanted to join the conference because they thought it more prestigious and more highly ranked academically.  They should also have to meet the standards of the conference as well.  

Why the Conventional Wisdom on School Reform Is Wrong and Why the Church Should Care

The UCC releases a report on the state of our schools and criticizing the conventional wisdom on school reform.

Cultural Proficiency

Why is this even causing controversy?  It seems to obvious.

Omaha Public Schools has begun a three year initiative to train its employees on increased cultural proficiency.  For some reason -- craziness, ignorance, prejudice? -- it is generating controversy.

Wisconsin education snapshot

Wisconsin's students out-perform their Red State counterparts, and for less in federal money.  Stats show that you get the results you pay for, as the best performing states have high per-pupil spending. 

To me the solution to eliminating bad teachers is paying teachers a proper professional salary so that more skilled and motivated people enter and remain in the profession.  Taking away their existing rights will have the opposite effect.

Updates on the Quigley case

Somehow I has missed these notices, and not being in regular contact with Joe anymore, I didn't know these developments.

Joe was again terminated by the School Board and negotiated a settlement, despite claiming that the second firing was also unfair.

Clearly there has been a movement growing to change the law, as this article from last fall demonstrates.

Oklahoma GOP takes on public education

In a stunning set of awful bills, the Oklahoma GOP has taken on public education.  Which is quite sad, given that the greatest education bill in the state's history was the result of our great GOP governor Henry Bellmon.

One of the strangest things is this idea to eliminate the ability of a teacher to appeal their firing to district court.  At the current moment, if the school district follows the proper procedure in firing the teacher, then they win the case.  The district overturns the firing if the proper procedure has not been followed.  If this bill becomes law, then a school board could basically fire, at will, an employee, and not follow any sort of disciplinary or other procedure.  Ridiculous and appalling.

Of course, this bill must have the Joe Quigley case in mind.  Longtime readers of this blog have followed the Quigley case.  The Oklahoma City School Board fired Mr. Quigley (just barely, one person absented and one walked out of the meeting to avoid voting) based upon what the district court said was bad information and improper process.  Joe filed his appeal and won in district court, which ordered the district to reinstate him.  The district appealed this ruling, and lost in the appeals court. 

Mixed race

When are we going to move away from the ethnic and racial boxes we've put people in?  I have argued with many officials and form presenters about not wanting to answer this question, or, at least, not wanting to answer it the way it is presented.  Being of Irish, Scottish, English, and Cherokee descent, I didn't want to simply mark "White."  It is more complicated for Michael who is Polish-German-Filipino and even more complicted for many other people, like the person in this article who is Peruvian, Chinese, Irish, Shawnee and Cherokee.  She gets labeled "Hispanic."  Which shows a problem with Hispanic, which is actually an ethnicity and not a racial category, as their are black, white, and native Hispanics of course.

Different agencies and departmens parse things differently, and at issue is new Dept. of Education guidelines:

Under Department of Education requirements that take effect this year, for instance, any student like Ms. López-Mullins who acknowledges even partial Hispanic ethnicity will, regardless of race, be reported to federal officials only as Hispanic. And students of non-Hispanic mixed parentage who choose more than one race will be placed in a “two or more races” category, a catchall that detractors describe as inadequately detailed. A child of black and American Indian parents, for example, would be in the same category as, say, a child of white and Asian parents.

The new standards for kindergarten through 12th grades and higher education will probably increase the nationwide student population of Hispanics, and could erase some “black” students who will now be counted as Hispanic or as multiracial (in the “two or more races category”). And reclassifying large numbers of white Hispanic students as simply Hispanic has the potential to mask the difference between minority and white students’ test scores, grades and graduation rates — the so-called achievement gap, a target of federal reform efforts that has plagued schools for decades.

Is web video leading a social transformation?

Chris Anderson, the curator of TED, thinks so.

I'm convinced that the latest iteration of crowd-accelerated innovation, fueled by Web video, is about to ignite the biggest learning cycle in human history. There are huge implications for the future of global education. Tomorrow's best teachers will be global stars reaching literally millions of kids. And talented students around the world will no longer have their potential destroyed by lousy teachers. They can learn directly from the world's finest.

Sex Ed in Nebraska

Longtime readers of this blog will know that in 2004, while living in Texas, advocating for comprehensive sex ed was one of my main issues.  If anything the problem has only gotten worse.  Attending the conference at OSU last month I heard frightening stories of how bad sex ed has gotten.

I had pretty good sex education.  In Miami in the 80's it began in elementary school -- in fourth grade for girls and sixth grade for boys.  We had it regularly after that as part of natural sciences and biology classes.  Though we didn't receive what today is called comprehensive, we did receive really good education for the time and much, much better than what kids receive today.

This article about the effort to improve sex ed in Nebraska reveals that here sexual education only begins in 10th grade, well after a significant portion of the population is sexual activity and well after puberty has begun.  This is unacceptable. 

The UCC supports comprehensive sex ed and has actually had to take over from the schools and provide not just the value aspect of the issue but even the basic biology and medical information.

Let's support and advocate for this bill.