Tina Fey was spectacular last night, in an episode of SNL that was otherwise atrocious. Global Warming? “just God huggin’ us closer.”

Josh Marshall highlights the first two lines of the US Naval Academy Honor Concept: “Midshipmen are persons of integrity: They stand for that which is right. They tell the truth and ensure that the full truth is known. They do not lie.” Maybe Senator McCain should review those ideas.

How many times can the McCain campaign lie about Governor Palin’s record on earmarks are governor? Apparently, about $750 million times.

In Helena, a Sarah Palin voter is demanding that a book be removed from the Lewis and Clark Library. Public comment is welcome.

Roy Brown is committed to certainly committed to your children getting the best education. So much so that he offered this bold, specific proposal:

Roy Brown, the Republican candidate for governor, proposed Friday paying $10,000 in signing bonuses to some full-time beginning teachers, particularly in rural areas.

If approved by the Legislature, his plan would offer these bonuses, paid to teachers over three years.

How specific is the proposal? This specific:

• Brown hasn’t settled yet on how many teachers would get the bonuses under his proposal.
• He has not decided how the bonuses would be allocated, but one of his top priorities is to help rural schools attract new teachers.

That’s some gubernatorial leadership there. I can hear the campaign ad now:

If you vote for me, I will give some unspecified amount of money to an undefined group of teachers in non-specific geographic locations over an undetermined amount of time. I’m Roy Brown, and I approve this message.

Embarrassingly enough for the Brown campaign, the worst part of this proposal is not how vague it is, or even that they haven’t figured out the news cycle with less than two months left in the campaign. It’s that Brown doesn’t even seem to believe it will work, and with good reason:

He said this program might help keep more teachers in Montana. He cited statistics that teachers can make $10,000 to $20,000 a year more in Wyoming than in Montana.

Gimmicks like this are not the answer to the sustained funding problems of small schools, and Brown knows that. It’s just that he doesn’t have any substance to run on.

The essay-evaluation process with both India-based operations was similar and was overseen by the online schools’ teachers, Mr. Kwitowski said.

Students handed in various drafts of essays electronically to their teachers through a secure computer server, he said. The teachers reviewed the essays and decided whether to give students their own initial feedback or to use the essay service.

A teacher using the service would remove sensitive personal information, then using a separate server, would “send it to a reviewer who would provide initial feedback, which [the teacher] would receive and use at their discretion, or discard,” Mr. Kwitowski said.

Frustrated that students don’t seem to be able to get their homework done or come to school? Pay them $100/mo for doing it!

For years, school officials have used detention, remedial classes, summer school and suspensions to turn around poorly behaved, underachieving middle school students, with little results. Now they are introducing a program that will pay students up to $100 per month for displaying good behavior.
Beginning in October, 3,000 students at 14 middle schools will be eligible to earn up to 50 points per month and be paid $2 per point for attending class regularly and on time, turning in homework, displaying manners and earning high marks. A maximum of $2.7 million has been set aside for the program, and the money students earn will be deposited every two weeks into bank accounts the system plans to open for them.

Yikes.

• Homework grades should be given only when the grades will “raise a student’s average, not lower it.”
• Teachers must accept overdue assignments, and their principal will decide whether students are to be penalized for missing deadlines.
• Students who flunk tests can retake the exam and keep the higher grade.
• Teachers cannot give a zero on an assignment unless they call parents and make “efforts to assist students in completing the work.”
• High school teachers who fail more than 20 percent of their students will need to develop a professional improvement plan and will be monitored by their principals. For middle school the rate is 15 percent; for elementary it’s 10 percent.

There’s one good idea here. Teachers should intervene when students are struggling and try to talk to parents. Occasionally, letting a student re-take a test or do an assignment again can be valuable as an educational tool. As a policy, however, what the Dallas School District is doing represents a trend across the country: schools, desperate to improve their graduation rates now that they have become publicly promoted because of NCLB, are developing strategies to ensure completion of classes, no matter how little the students learn, or even try. 

The Dallas policy represents the logical extreme of a movement that seems bent to concede that some students can’t learn. The last provision is especially egregious; punishing teachers for students who fail will only encourage teachers to pass more kids, not authentically teach more. The net result will certainly be more students passing—and less students achieving.

The New York Times describes the abuse of another form of this mentality, credit recovery programs in which students acquire credit for classes they have failed by working for a short period of time to make up semesters worth of work. Consider this example:

A teacher at another Bronx school, who did not want the name of his school published for fear of retribution, said a program there let students earn a year’s worth of science credits by responding to 19 questions on 5 topics. “Research and list all the global environmental issues that science focuses on,” read one, under the “environmental studies” category. “What are some ways that you, as an individual, can help?” read another.

All of these interventions to increase the rate of students passing classes are probably good-intentioned, or at least, only slightly tinged with self-promotion and self-interest of administrators eager to burnish their credentials. Ultimately, though, they represent a profoundly troubling ideology—the idea that struggling students can’t be reached, or encouraged to achieve. Rather than doing the heavy lifting of helping students develop work skills, self-confidence, and the tools to make choices in their adult lives, districts and schools are abrogating that responsibility in pursuit of sham statistical gains. The damage done to students is incalculable, as Mel Riddle, former principal notes:

“This is a stopgap measure at helping these students get a high school diploma. It’s certainly not going to help them go onto post-secondary education, which really should be our goal.”

We don’t do any favors to students from challenging socioeconomic backgrounds or with weak academic preparation with the paternalism of low expectations. Giving them credit for limited work and expectation undermines the value of a high school diploma and severely limits what these students can achieve as adults. Truly reforming American education means going beyond finding ways to artificially boost numbers; it means committing to authentic, earned achievement—not to appease the right wingers who want to destroy schools, but to truly empower students to change their own outcomes and the communities in which they live.

"When the federal government started making schools gun-free zones, that’s when all of these shootings started. Why would you put it out there that a group of people can’t defend themselves? That’s like saying ’sic ‘em’ to a dog," Thweatt said in Friday’s online edition of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

Thweatt said officials researched the policy and considered other options for about a year before approving the policy change. He said the district also has various other security measures in place to prevent a school shooting.

I would love to know what that “year of research” entailed. My guess is that it involved 11 months of trying to connect his computer to the Internet, followed by three weeks of signing up for AOL, concluding with a week of reading the NRA’s web page.

Is Superintendent Thweatt concerned about students being hit in the cross fire? No, because the armed teachers “have to use ammunition that is designed to minimize the risk of ricochet in school halls.”

That is a relief.

Countdown until Tim Fox proposes this for Montana schools…10…9…8

1. Mrs. Herman should probably give up that damn raffle.

It’s far from clear that Mrs. Herman is following the law with her El Camino raffle. It is, however, clear that she should consider alternative avenues to fund her campaign. Maybe she could freelance as a proofreader.

2. Mrs. Herman has an interesting relationship with the English language.

As a teacher who writes in the short-term world of blogs, I can understand the occasional typo or grammatical error on a public posting. They’re embarrassing, but happen. If, however, I decided to run for the statewide office in charge of education, I might spend a bit more time proofreading than Mrs. Heman apparently has. Maybe it’s nitpicking, but I’d like the next person who leads our schools to care enough about the writing process to spend a bit of time on it. After all, do we want someone who writes like this in charge of teachers and students?

There are three things I do before making any decision: (a) I make sure I know the facts and if it is the truth I am basing my decision on (b) I investigate the need (c) and most important, will it benefit the children? If it passes all those criteria’s I’ll do everything I can to make it happen.

At a minimum, Mrs. Herman ought to decide if she prefers overall, over-all, or over all.

3. Mrs. Herman doesn’t have a great deal of respect for the truth.

I’m sure that claiming the “MEA reported spending nearly $300,000.00 to get the democrat State Superintendent elected” plays well with the base, but it’s simply not true. It would be helpful if Mrs. Herman would campaign on issues that matter to Montana students and parents, rather than engaging in cheap political attacks that don’t even have the merit of being true.

4. Mrs. Herman sure doesn’t have many specific proposals.

Other than some vague (and moderately creepy) promises to intervene in the custody battle between parents and school districts, a  call for saying the Pledge every day, and an even more vague pledge to spend money better, it’s entirely unclear what Mrs. Herman intends to do as Superintendent. It’s clear that she despises Democrats; I hardly think that is reason enough to elect her.

Lately, the Fourth seems to have become an excuse for one group of people to question the patriotism of another. Today’s entrant is Thomas Sowell, who takes the opportunity of the holiday to give us a new version of history in an effort to demonize teachers. For my money, nothing says American unity better than a little historical revision that seeks to compare American teachers with those cheese-eating Frenchies (a sure hit with the right wing there).

Why did France lose World War II? Not poor strategy, a paralyzed and inefficient government, or a naive belief that war could be avoided. They lost because the schools had make them weak:

In France, after the First World War, the teachers’ unions launched a systematic purge of textbooks, in order to promote internationalism and pacifism…

The once epic story of the French soldiers’ heroic defense against the German invaders at Verdun, despite the massive casualties suffered by the French, was now transformed into a story of horrible suffering by all soldiers at Verdun — French and German alike.

In short, soldiers once depicted as national heroes were now depicted as victims — and just like victims in other nations’ armies.

For the National Review readers, Sowell had to explain his subtle comparison: American teachers are DOING THE VERY SAME THING:

Most Americans today are unaware of how much our schools have followed in the footsteps of the French schools of the 1920s and 1930s, or how much our intellectuals have become citizens of the world instead of American patriots.

Yes, Mr. Sowell, many Americans are unaware of this trend, including you, since you are making the argument up out of whole cloth. American textbooks are anything but cosmopolitan or liberal in their biases, and teachers, like Americans as a whole, hold a wide variety of political beliefs, and use their classrooms to teach, not to indoctrinate.

I know fire-breathing conservatives hate public education. Hell, if the continued existence of my political ideology rested on a combination of fear appeals, distortions of evidence, and shameless propagandizing, I’d try to destroy institutions charged with developing critical thinking skills, too. It’s the only way they could ever hope to make people believe that America has become weakened by its teachers rather than its reckless foreign and military policy.

Incidentally, Mr. Sowell, one of the things that I teach my students is to give attribution for ideas in their papers. Since you’ve chosen to crib Mona Siegel’s argument wholesale, you should at least mention her book.

• Do you think the state education-funding system is fulfilling its mandate?
• How have you as governor or state legislator worked to fulfill the education-funding mandate while balancing the state budget?
• What changes - if any - do you propose that the 2009 Legislature make in how Montana funds its K-12 schools?

In general, I found their responses disappointingly vague. Both rely primarily on waving the magic wand of economic development to better fund our schools, but that’s not an answer—it’s a hope. It’s not as if the state of Montana, the legislature, businesses and workers in the state haven’t been doing their level best to productivity and income, and while promising economic development is an appealing sound bite, it’s not a policy that the schools can count on.

Neither piece addresses the continuing damage done by one-time, rather than sustained, funding for the schools; neither mentions the absolute necessity to provide better educational opportunities for students who live in poverty and those who live on the reservations; neither mentions plans to work with the school boards who are suing the state for more funding; neither mentions plans raise Montana teacher salaries, which still linger near the bottom of the nation. These are the hard questions our political leaders should answer.

In his piece, Senator Brown does what he has done so well in this campaign: pretend to be an advocate of education while throwing enough rhetorical bones to anti-education base in his party. He refers to giving more money to the schools “as throwing more money” at the problem, wonders why the state is being sued again, all before making vague appeals to increase the money available for education by increasing development.

Brown suggests that the state could have resolved the issue of school funding with the recent surpluses:

With the historic tax surpluses in the last four years, we’ve squandered a great opportunity to address the issue.

Pardon my ignorance, but don’t Brown and his running mate advocate giving the entirety of the surplus back to the taxpayers? And wasn’t Brown in the Legislature for the last session, certainly an opportunity to have suggested such a remedy? He certainly sounded like he had done a great deal of thinking about the subject of education funding :

But House Republican Leader Roy Brown of Billings said there’s no doubt that the budget will change as the 2005 Legislature wrestles with the school funding problem.

"Whether it’s $30 million or $5 million or $100 million, I don’t know," Brown said.

In the 2007 session, Brown didn’t exactly lead the fight to help Montana schools. The bills he introduced that were more important to him than education issues? Securing loads on the highway to prevent litter, attacking the governor, and allowing people to carry switchblades. Seriously.

And, that, in the final analysis, is why Montanans who care about public education cannot trust Roy Brown to deliver for the schools. He’s not interested in the subject, and he represents a party hostile to the schools. While I may have some disagreement with Governor Schweitzer’s approach and believe we need to make a more substantial commitment to education than he does, it’s clear that he and the Democratic Party are certainly stronger advocates for the schools than Roy Brown will ever be.  As Schweitzer writes:

But economic development in such areas does not guarantee future investment in education as some would have you believe. That can only come if we have a governor dedicated to education, who advances sound funding proposals, and a Legislature that appropriates the funds.

Anyone who believes that the Montana Republican Party will appropriate adequate funding for the schools just hasn’t been paying attention for the past twenty years. I have no doubt that Roy Brown wants to dramatically increase some forms of economic development in Montana; I just don’t have any reason that he will fight to spend those revenues (if they materialize) on our schools.

1. The Thomas Fordham Foundation has rated Montana’s content standards with a F, suggesting that they are too general, devoid of content, and missing basic instructional processes. Do you agree that Montana’s content standards need substantial revision? How do you propose to improve them?

Yes, I think our content standards need substantial revision.  They are overly broad and provide no instructional guidance.  Revising them is tricky because of our state’s strong belief in local control.  Local districts don’t want to be told what to teach and when to teach it.
That being said, many districts have put a lot of effort into developing their own comprehensive content standards, and some of them are quite good, offering guidance for teachers and a framework the parents/the public can understand.
I would like OPI to provide more direction guidance in the preparation of local standards.  We could provide examples of “model” standards and regional training and work sessions for districts to develop their own.  Summer would be an ideal time to offer these training/work sessions.  We could look for grants so we could pay teachers for their participation.
The work on content standards needs to continue through training principals and teachers to use these standards in a comprehensive way to guide their instruction.  Again, I would like OPI to offer regional summer institutes to provide this training and follow-up.

2. To some extent, all of you have been critics of the federal No Child Left Behind Act.  Given that the federal mandates are unlikely to change in the short term, how can OPI help Montana schools deal with the consequences of the law?

I think the most disastrous consequence of the law has been the feeling that teachers must abandon what we know to be good teaching–teaching to the whole child.  The most exciting time for me to be teaching was when we stressed integration of curriculum and cross-curricular teaching.
I believe we can still do that, and we need to spotlight teachers who do so successfully at all grade levels, then provide opportunities for other teachers to learn from them.
I also believe that as we develop and monitor our progress in quality early reading instruction, there will be less and less need for wholesale remediation and we can focus more on content and application.

3. One of the issues that has been highlighted by NCLB is the issue of student achievement gaps. What will you do as Superintendent to close the gap and improve student scores for reservation and high-poverty schools?

I am a strong proponent for quality early reading instruction.  The greatest window of opportunity for changing a child’s life is pre-K through 2nd and 3rd grade.  My goal as Superintendent is to provide the training for teachers and the resources for schools to enable them to teach this critical skill.
I believe we need to make learning to read a community effort. Teach parents how to work with their kids at home; bring them into the schools to work with other children.  For many people in our high-poverty communities, schools were not places where they themselves experienced success, so they are uncomfortable and don’t necessarily want to come back with their own children. We need to actively work to change this.

4. Do you favor or oppose dual credit courses, in which students can simultaneously receive high school and college credit?

I favor dual credit courses.  For many students, receiving both high school and college credit may be the push they need to encourage them to pursue higher education.  I believe we need to expand our view of our educational system from K-12 to pre-K - 20.  Learning is a continuum, and our system of public education needs to adapt to provide for all learners along that continuum