Elk Konnected Hand out at County Commissioners meeting on 4/25

[Ross]

Isn't it time for our local politicians to follow what the voters told them, or are they simply ignorant of the voters?
Oh sure they can respond right here on this thread. Politicians are all over the internet.
So why Don't we hear from them?

[Ross]

Can't seem to engage those.Elk Konnected School Board Members, I wonder why?
It's sort like the Republicans trying to engage Obama isn't it?

[Ross]

Students Learn by Arguing in Science Labs
Studies suggest deeper learning may result
By Sarah D. Sparks
Washington
Teaching students to argue, question, and communicate more like real scientists may also help them understand scientific concepts more deeply, according to several ongoing research projects highlighted at the Society for Research in Educational Effectiveness conference held here last month.

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2013/10/09/07sree.h33.html?cmp=ENL-EU-SUBCNT

Perhaps our school board could take a lesson from teaching. Even the KSDE and State School Board encourage arguing to come to the proper solutions. Just something to consider if learning is encouraging arguing by students there must be something to it don't you reckon ?

[Patriot]

Perhaps our school board could take a lesson from teaching. Even the KSDE and State School Board encourage arguing to come to the proper solutions. Just something to consider if learning is encouraging arguing by students there must be something to it don't you reckon ?

Without a fair amount of friction, you never turn wheat into flour...  unless you believe liberal progressives.  For them, if you just think & talk 'positively', spend tons of money (other peoples money), & ignore all opposing ideas, the wheat will just melt into flour all by itself... fools.

[Ross]

Without a fair amount of friction, you never turn wheat into flour...  unless you believe liberal progressives.  For them, if you just think & talk 'positively', spend tons of money (other peoples money), & ignore all opposing ideas, the wheat will just melt into flour all by itself... fools.

Now it looks like teachers are wanting to be psychiatrist as well and perhaps they will throw in some socialism with the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning.  

Emotional Learning just what the hell is that? They use all these nice sweet terms and words to tell us, what they want us to hear and want us to know, but where does it stop?

When does real teaching start?

Why are teachers messing with children's emotions?
Some teachers have messed with children's emotions and ended up in jail for sexual abuse.

They government is saying they are not capable of teaching and need something called the Common Core in order to teach the children because the teaching standards are so low.

And with such low standards, all our schools are doing, is average or above average in teaching, as graded by the state.

The schools seem to buy into the commercialism of high tech in the class room, or a computer in every room and in every child's hands. That is just an extra expense to automate the job of the teacher. And we all know the computer systems become obsolete very quickly. Perhaps, soon we won't need teachers just room monitors at a much lower wage, which would then pay for the computers and the technician to care for them.

But, back to the Emotional Learning in the class room, take a look for yourself; it is dripping with milk and honey words to sooth the soul. Perhaps they will teach the kids not to question anything and speak with all that milk and honey type of communication.

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2013/10/16/08social.h33.html?tkn=LNOFKhpt1HudB5c63B9B9rWJZ%2B%2BCDF156kou&cmp=ENL-CM-NEWS2

Just some more to think on isn't it?

[Ross]

There are no excuses for mediocre schools or average  schools especially when the educational standards are so low.

But it appears that the Common – Core of the Federal Government intends to keep the schools at mediocre.
But for what purpose other than control. Like health control and gun control as in a dictatorship. You decide, why?

It's the responsibility of the school boards to demand  a better education by the school staff through doing a better job of teaching.

It is the local school boards responsibility to provide the leadership and not to allow themselves to be lead by the school superintendent. 'Familiarity breeds contempt' and it is time he in my opinion to get back to Formalities in running our schools.
Seperate the elected officials from the hire hands. Only elected board members should be seated on the school board (in this case the picknic table with all the goodies).

It is the responsibility of the local school board to have the superintendent report progress to them. Documented as in a written and signed report. And as frequent as necessary until a suitable standard is met or exceeded. The school board is the BOSS and suppose to be working for the students and the taxpayer, very simple.

We don't need programs like no student left behind, we need better leadership. That's my opinion.

Read below why there are no excuses and then you decide, okay?

Top public schools demand more than Common Core

By Watchdog Staff / October 17, 2013
By Joy Pullmann | Special to Watchdog.org

The best U.S. public schools — including those with high numbers of poor and minority kids — require more of students than state standards and Common Core, and school leaders attribute their success partly to these high expectations.

CAN IT BE BETTER: The Common Core lists what its creators think students should know in K-12 math and English. Forty-five states agreed to it under pressure from the Obama administration in 2010. The Core calls itself "rigorous" and "internationally benchmarked," but investigation into actually rigorous and internationally competitive standards within the United States casts doubt on these claims.
The Common Core lists what its creators think students should know in K-12 math and English. Forty-five states agreed to it under pressure from the Obama administration in 2010. The Core calls itself "rigorous" and "internationally benchmarked," but investigation into actually rigorous and internationally competitive standards within the United States casts doubt on these claims.

High-achieving public schools tend to take two approaches to producing outstanding results, said Florian Hild, principal of Ridgeview Classical Charter School in Fort Collins, Colo.. Ridgeview is on the U.S. News and World Report's gold list of top schools in the country, and ranks second-best high school in the state.

"You can be top by playing the testing game better than all of the other public schools," he said. "What other schools do is look at that as a side effect of a serious education. So if our students, our ninth graders can read Thucydides and Homer and Virgil, whatever the state test asks them to do, they can do."

A look at what some of America's best public schools teach children indicates that Common Core is more of an afterthought than a guide to high-quality instruction.

Best schools in the world BASIS charter schools are a network that began in Arizona, where their first two schools consistently rate in the top 10 on several national rankings. Children attending BASIS encounter math books two or three grades above theirs — fifth graders take seventh grade pre-algebra, and so forth.

"I would describe our curriculum as competitive with the best schools in the world," said Mary Riner, a Washington, D.C., mother who lobbied to bring BASIS to her city. She is now its director of external relations. "We really are looking to close the global achievement gap."

The Global Report Card from the George W. Bush Institute is one of many markers demonstrating that even the top U.S. school districts are mediocre compared to international peers.

"We call a school high-performing if 80 percent of kids can read at grade level," Riner said, with disdain. "Our kids are years behind kids in Canada and Finland and Shanghai."

To graduate from BASIS, students must take a minimum of six Advanced Placement exams, four in core subjects. Every student takes AP Calculus. The average student takes 10 AP exams, and 90 percent pass. Its Arizona schools operate on $6,500 per-pupil funding.

'Crap thrown into school'
Riner sought BASIS for her children because she became annoyed with "the crap thrown into school to make it fun." Her fifth-grade daughter's Latin homework, for example, was coloring Latin words.

"It excites students to know more than their parents, and to have this knowledge and be able to think about it... That is rewarding. And that is fun. And that is what we're trying to achieve, not this therapy kind of fake, shallow, immediate gratification," she said, passionately.

To achieve a challenging academic environment, BASIS hires teachers who are experts in their field, most with content-based master's degrees. Most teachers have majored in education, not a content subject. BASIS teachers work together to create a multi-grade syllabus, then have freedom to teach the material they've decided using their own style.

"We don't even look at state standards," Riner said. "That's the last thing we do. State standards are there because we have to be in compliance. We finish the Common Core by the ninth grade... Literally what we are using are world standards."

Poor children, rich standards
BASIS schools have been criticized for offering a curriculum many children can't keep up with. A third of their DC students are eligible for federal free and reduced-price lunch, a proxy for poverty. Other charter school brands specifically target hard-to-educate children from broken homes, and they hold students to higher standards than typical public schools, too.

Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) charter schools are renowned for doing what many say is impossible. More than 86 percent of KIPP students live in poverty, and 95 percent are black or Latino. More than 93 percent of KIPP middle school students have graduated high school, and more than 83 percent of KIPP alumni have gone to college, according to KIPP.

"The state sets the academic objectives for the children, and (KIPP schools) extend those objectives because our job is not just to take them to college but to get them through college so they are successful and happy," said Alma Salman, principal of KIPP's Houston elementary.

To prepare for being a KIPP principal, Salman visited top public and private schools around the country. She said she saw what they expected of children, and although those expectations are higher than state standards, she wanted her students to have the best.

"The state says by the end of the school year the kindergarteners should be reading on level four, for example. We want our children to be reading at level six," she said. "We read a lot more books to them and expose them to a lot more literature and phonics."
Similarly, Texas expects kindergarteners to be able to count from one to 20. KIPP Houston teaches kindergarteners to count to 100. Common Core asks the same, but it does not introduce kindergarteners to ordinal numbers (first, second, etc.), time and calendars, or graphs. KIPP Houston does.

Like BASIS, KIPP teachers meet together across grade levels each year to plan lessons and make sure each subject and grade fits well with the next.

College prep for needy kids
Also in Houston, 11 YES Prep charter schools also aim to lift disadvantaged children. Two of their high schools rank in the top 100 nationally, and in the top 20 in the state, according to US News & World Report. Its students are 97 percent Latino and black, and 79 percent low-income. All its students graduate and attend college.
Teachers write YES Prep's curriculum and thrice-yearly internal exams, said Jason Bernal, YES Prep's president. In hiring teachers, YES Prep considers grades, experience, and administers a behavior assessment to see if the teacher will fit the school culture.
Then, candidates give a sample lesson in front of the principal and school leader they would work with. New teachers participate in a two-week intensive training, and all receive personal coaching and group professional development every week. YES Prep looks for "perfection, leadership, (and) rebound time," Bernal said. The school also pays for performance rather than awarding tenure for longevity.

"It took 15 years to develop the curriculum and tests the schools use now. The schools' curriculum development team started with AP exams and worked backwards to define what students will learn in each grade," said Jennifer Hines, a YES PREP senior vice president: "We built 100 percent of our curriculum." Each summer, they revisit curriculum.

"We're using AP as a proxy for what kids should know, and it's admittedly a blunt instrument but we've found it to be at least consistent and fairly good," she said.

State education standards "are somewhat helpful" but not extremely specific in outlining what should be different in each grade, especially in language arts, she said, "also when we're talking about skills, not content, in science and social studies.. So if we are teaching a rigorous set of expectations and ensuring students are mastering them, we do not need to teach explicitly to the state assessments. And we will ensure we cover state standards, but that's a small proportion of what we're doing."

In short, she said, education standards "are a starting point for us." (here in Elk County it appears to be the end point)

Liberal arts and Core Knowledge

State and national education benchmarks are more of an afterthought for schools that attempt to immerse children in time-tested education styles, such as the classical liberal arts. Colorado's Ridgeview largely follows the Core Knowledge sequence in grades K-8. Core Knowledge outlines what a coalition of researchers have decided is essential content for preK-8, initiated by retired University of Virginia professor and literacy expert E.D. Hirsch. For high school, Ridgeview teachers write and revise their own curriculum.
Like the other school leaders School Reform News interviewed, Hild said his most important task was finding and improving excellent teachers who know and love their subject.

"We have a curriculum which we will teach, but we want to hire adults who are self-respecting intellectuals, and you can't tell a self-respecting individual that the Colorado state standards will determine how we teach the American revolution," Hild said. "That has to be determined by the individual teacher. They will cover the same material, but they have to own it." (doesn't this mean they have to accept responsibility for the curriculum they teach?)

While large portions of state standards and Common Core focus on content-empty skills, Core Knowledge builds its curriculum recommendations based on Hirsch's and other research showing that knowledge builds on knowledge, and so do academic skills. It is extremely specific.

Core Knowledge, for example, recommends children begin learning about money in kindergarten, while Common Core introduces money in the second grade. Core Knowledge would introduce fractions in first grade, while Common Core does so in third grade. Core Knowledge also expects children to be proficient in multiplication and division by third and fourth grade, while Common Core expects this by fifth and sixth.

While Hirsch and his foundation have endorsed Common Core, they also have said it does not sufficiently outline a good curriculum.
For this reason, a number of Core Knowledge schools, like Ridgeview, have rejected Common Core. Hirsch agrees Common Core does not outline the essential content children need for a good education. Instead, the introduction to Common Core encourages "a content-rich curriculum," which he hopes will have more schools reaching beyond Common Core into Core Knowledge.

"Education has to do with human beings trying to grow as moral and intellectual beings, and if you regiment it you denigrate the ideals of education," Hild said. "We don't worry about the state tests and the Colorado state standards or the Common Core standards. We worry about the integrity of our curriculum and the implementation of a serious classical education."

http://watchdog.org/111120/top-public-schools-demand-more-than-common-core-2/

So when do the local school boards start talking education standards and doing something responsible for the childrens education?

Building a Taj Mahal for Howard does not improve educational standards, does it?

Remember: The purpose of formality is to protect us against hasty judgments and decisions.
Ponder: The purpose of some rules elude us until problems arise.  

[Ross]

Food For Thought

is way

No, I did not write the following but I have always thought this way.
A degree does not make a person wise!
A mensa IQ does not make a person wise either.

A plumber is educated as a plumber and a doctor is educated as a doctor and they can not do each others trade can they?

But here is what someone else had to say one the subject.

One of the fundamental problems with our society today, is that we have conflated the possession of wisdom with the appearances of intellect.  As a result, we grant power and authority to those who went to the "right" schools, got the "right" degrees, have held the "right" positions, and talk 'right" ... even if their actions, and the derivative results, exhibit an abject lack of wisdom on their part.  We think that "smart" equals "wise", when that is often not the case.
 
This is one of the main reasons for a school board and like mindedness does not solve problems, but open discussion of opposite views can through heated discussions may very well do the trick. Lemmings are of a like mindedness not real people.

[Ross]

I'm still here, just been busy.

I missed this months School Board Meeting, so I have nothing to tell you about the meeting.

I received my School Board Meeting agenda a day after the meeting took place, that is why I missed the meeting.  Sorry!

Pretty poor planning on the part of the person that mails out the agend, I guess.
I mean, if you know there is a government holiday, I would think, you would adjust for that holiday. Unless, you just don't care that is.

I did notice there was nothing in the agenda to discuss the construction of the Taj Mahal they have been spending so much money on; you know just the planning process of something they don't need.

I'd still like to hear from those educated people on the school board, about where they plan to come up with the money, to build their Taj Mahal or if they have perhaps decided to do the ethical thing and scrap the plan after all, they were told "NO" by the voters weren't they?

How come them folks had all those studies, they paid to have done, that suggest engaging the public and their own plan to engage the public and yet they fail to do so. Why have studies done if you have no intention of following sound advice?
Why do they fail?
What is going on?
Are they hiding something?

It's sort of like Obama's government transparency isn't it?
Are they going to fail like ObamaCare?
I'm being a bit facetious here with the Obama thing, just a bit.
But, I'm never facetious about wasting money.

Are they beginning to feel a bit of shame for spending money that is meant for our children's education, that they have been wasting on studies and contractors?

They were told by the voters not to do that, weren't they?
Is that it?
Have they finally woke up, to what they have been saying about the,
declining student enrollment and the declining population? I sure hope so!
   
I guess we will have to wait and see, huh?

Any school board members that would care to enlighten us, your effort would be greatly appreciated.
Perhaps the School Board Elite of Elk Konnected can enlighten us, that could be considered an action towards Quality of life in Elk County just by Konnecting with the Citizens and Taxpayers of Elk County. So please indulge us. Thank you.

Happy Halloween Everyone.

[Ross]

Check out the politics in the coffee shop.


http://www.cascity.com/howard/forum/index.php/topic,15665.msg214248.html#msg214248

[Ross]

Please Watch this video
The man quotes himself from a 1958 Speech.
He briefly expresses that the Federal Government wants control of Education.

And now we have the Federal Government with it's Common-Core for education.

Go figure.

http://www.cascity.com/howard/forum/index.php?action=post;topic=11780.5830;last_msg=214249