Fred Klonsky’s PREA Prez Blog

Blogger Ken Swanson, “IEA Prez”

Ken Swanson, Illinois Education Association president is now a blogger. His first post is on NCLB. It’s a good one.

So, the President and the members of Congress who passed the original law can make all the photo op appearances they want and tell us over and over that NCLB and AYP are working. We know that is not true, more members of Congress recognize it isn’t true, and more and more of America can see it is not true.

Rotherham and Co. busted. Again.

Eduwonk and others are arguing that NCLB has not forced schools to become drill and skill factories. This is a position that can be argued by those who don’t actually teach, since it flies in the face of real classroom experience.

But Eduwonkette gets them on their logic.

eduwonk and Barone are arguing that not all schools have responded to NCLB’s incentives this way, so the problem isn’t with NCLB. The underlying assumption is that good educators can resist these pressures. But eduwonk and Barone both support NCLB, I think, because they believe schools need incentives to improve. If you believe that incentives can have strong impacts on behavior, it doesn’t make sense to argue that schools can (and should) just turn their backs on these incentives. Schools get no credit for teaching science and social studies, and schools that cut back on untested subjects and do lots of test prep are playing by NCLB’s implicit rules.

English Language Learners get no break in Illinois.

Faced with demands from the Feds and despite pleas from educators and parents, Illinois officials confirmed that ELL students will take the same standardized tests as their English-proficient peers this spring. This will doom many districts in their attempts to make AYP.

Damned if they do. Damned if they don’t. Read it here.

As I posted last week, a small group of parents backed by the the bigots of the Illinois Family Institute, are trying to bully the Park Ridge, Illinois District 207 school board into removing part of the science curriculum because it discusses birth control.

At a packed school board meeting in which the issue wasn’t on the agenda, the IFI supporters tried to make their case. Amazingly, the board didn’t laugh them out of the room.

The Park Ridge Herald-Advocate reported:

While most of the 17 people who spoke were Park Ridge parents, a sign-in sheet of the close to 60 visitors showed various out-of-town individuals affiliated with the Illinois Family Institute (IFI), a Christian not-for-profit group, were also there. The IFI rallied its membership last week to attend and show support, while two sets of local parents, in touch with the IFI, had sent a separate mailing to Maine South parents.

Pro-science parents also spoke:

Matthew Petersen, who supports the current course, said his sophomore daughter said she did not feel uncomfortable in the class. But he gave his own illustration of how demands to censor coursework can damage education:

“Because I never liked quadratic equations, please remove their teaching from algebra class,” he suggested. “Because the Holocaust makes me personally uncomfortable, please do not teach it in history class. Because Shakespeare sometimes makes sexual innuendos in his plays, let’s never mention his works in English class.”