Updated 3/14/19 – see the opinion of the sitting member of State School Board on the whole 550 member Ohio Department of Education at the end of the article. It is very alarming!
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We received this recap of the meeting held in Northeast Ohio and was attended by many of the school superintendents in the area. This is not painting a very glowing picture of the current public education system and the need to test, test, test the students.
Based on our meeting with Representative John Patterson, there appears that changes in school funding and mandatory testing is going to be changed in the near future.
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Growing concern about the high stakes testing of our students has reached a tipping point and is now being addressed in many regions of our country. On March 11 in collaboration with the Schlechty Center, the Ohio Public School Advocacy Network (OPSAN) is hosting a symposium with John Tanner, author of The Pitfalls of Reform: Its Actual Incompatibility with Improvement. This symposium is free and will be held at the Educational Service Center of Northeast Ohio from 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. To register, contact Tracy Spies at tracy.spies@escneo.org.
The Symposium was well attended by about 60 – 65 School Superintendents, Principles and other educators from around the area. It was told to me by John Tanner that everyone paid for this on their own dime, therefore everyone who was in attendance wanted to be there.
The thrust of the meeting was on True Accountability, Why, Why Now & What Happens if we don’t?
There is a growing awareness that the Public School System is in trouble, and if corrective actions are not taken, may not be around in 20 years.
John discussed at great length how the current Accounting System employed by “Common Core”, “Race to the Top” and so forth are only a Particle Accounting Systems with a flawed mandate that IF YOU TEST THE HELL OUT OF KIDS – THEY GET BETTER!
John Tanner argues the Mission of an Effective Organization is to create Thorough Accounting to generate Appropriate Signals to achieve their Mission. If your fundamental accounting framework is ineffective for the organization mission statement, you are NOT that organization.
Is our mission to meet the needs of every student?
John went on to say we have a Failed American Education System because the Particle Accounting leads to Inappropriate Signals which is ineffective as a whole process because it’s dependent on particle information.
John Tanner talked about the Images of School Chart created by Phillip C. Schlechty and asked the participants where they thought their school/district was at. Most answered that they were more like Prison and NOT Learning Centers.
“Accountable For vs. Accountable To” was the thrust of the conversation where current “Accountabilism…encourages bureaucratization and fragmentation…the ascendancy of accountabilism, state and federal mandates have supplanted the authority of the local community in shaping how to run its schools. Consequently, local schools that were once viewed as sources of community pride are increasingly being seen as extensions of the government, judged more by nameless and faceless “experts” located in think tanks in Washington D.C., than by local community leaders.”
John Tanner argues that the Accounting System is designed to fail, and so it has….and to correct this we need a new system for Accounting Success.
John gave us a “Smartness Profile” where everyone was rated Super Smart for things they are passion about and Not Smart about subjects that bore them. Then John proffered the question “why then do we cut things like music/art and sports out of the student curriculum and expect them to succeed? The bottom line is we are doubling and tripling down on subjects that bore the hell out of a student and then wonder why they fail?
In Texas, John has a pilot program that is into it third year with sixty three school districts implementing a new system of Accounting for Success. He also referred to other states such as Georgia, North Carolina, Ohio, Louisiana and Washington where there is interest in his work.
The bottom line is a Community Network in the Districts to build citizens into the discussion, with some groups already formed here in Ohio.
I sum up the symposium this way at the end and shared it with John Tanner who agreed: “I think people are figuring it out that the U.S. Department of Education is a hinderance – not a help. The accountability System changed in 1980 – and has only gotten worse.”
It was a worthwhile meeting and I believe some of these groups can be partnered with.
I did ask John Tanner to be a guest on our radio show, “Roundtable with George Csatary” every Monday night on WHKW, 1220AM, The Word,
www.thewordcleveland.com, from 7-9pm, in the upcoming weeks and hope to have Lisa Woods as our special guest in studio for this very important topic.
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Updated 3/14/19
Here are comments from a sitting member of the State Board of Education:
“The five monthly 2-day long Ohio State Board of Education meetings that I have attended (November through March) have hardly scratched the surface on what is buried deep in the 550-person Ohio Department of Education (‘the Department’). The federal money strings, vendor interests, lobbyists’ (associations of all kinds) interests and local school districts interests are deep.”
(LFC Comments: Ladies and gentlemen, wake up, we are being deceived and they are increasing our property taxes to fund a failing and corrupt system at the highest levels. They are “feathering their own nest” at our expense.)
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