February 17, 2008 - February 23, 2008 Archives

Fifteen months: What’s 15 months in the life of a child?

It depends on the child’s age, of course. Fifteen months ago, my 6-year-old was barely scratching her name in crayon and learning to push herself on the swing. Now she’s writing in sentences and short paragraphs, beginning to read chapter books, and scrambling to the top of the spindly holly tree in front of our house.

The changes are even more pronounced in my 3-and-a-half-year-old. After all, 15 months is almost a third of her life. She was not much more than a baby back then; now, she’s a little girl who likes to sing songs and tell stories and imagine she’s any number of baby animals. (Currently incarnation: a baby fish.)

I mention this because 15 months is the length to which many military deployments have been extended because of the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. (The previous maximum was usually 12 months.) It doesn’t matter if you’re a mother, or a father, or if this is your third deployment, or if you never got home to see your son or daughter being born. If you are in the military and you are called up, you will be required to make a sacrifice that many of us civilians can only imagine.

I’ve been assigned a story on schools and military children for May’s ASBJ and have been calling public schools in and around Fort Bragg, N.C., and Camp Pendleton, Calif. It’s not a task I particularly relish -- and not because I’m uninterested. It’s just that I find it hard to leave my kids for a six-day conference (though, to be sure, it’s nice to get a break); I can’t fathom an absence of a year or more, or the possibility that such an absence could, in an instant, become permanent.

For most of us, the wars are happening somewhere else, far from our lives. We’d rather think about the Super Bowl, or American Idol, or which actors might take home a coveted Oscar Sunday night.

It shouldn’t be this way, of course. We should follow the wars closely, watch them on TV, read about them in newspapers and magazines, discuss them among ourselves, and become better informed citizens regardless of our political party or how we feel about the conflicts.

Every day, tens of thousands of military families -- husbands, wives, and children -- are making an enormous sacrifice. We need to pay attention.

Lawrence Hardy, Senior Editor

Over the past few months an investigation by the Washington Post has provided an ample supply of the most heartbreaking and infuriating anecdotes as evidence of the dysfunction of the District of Columbia’s public school system.

But those media reports “are just the tip of the iceberg,” one of the insiders says.

Allen Lew, who was recently appointed director of school construction by D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty, used the terms “hopeless” and “deplorable” to describe the state of the department he took over last summer, but he says even those words can’t sum up the magnitude of the situation. “You just can’t imagine how bad the school system is,” he told attendees at a school design symposium at the University of Maryland this weekend.

It was so bad that repairs were backlogged for years, a third of the schools didn’t have working boilers, contractors weren’t paid on time or at all, and even though many school buildings were way under capacity and needed major repairs, the suggestion of closings could end a career.

How to fix such a mess?

Lew’s first priority was to ensure each school had a working heating system by Oct. 15, 2007—accomplished after two temporary boilers were quickly borrowed from Kentucky. Longer term, while Fenty and School Chancellor Michelle Rhee are moving forward with a controversial consolidation plan and curriculum reforms, Lew wants to build relationships with other agencies that could have a stake in the school system. Lew says his plan is centered on making a school building—a new or nicely renovated structure with a working boiler—an integral part of the community.

Lew seems like a very smart and honest guy, and his credentials as a developer and public servant in D.C. are impressive. Listening to him speak gives hope that in time, this can be fixed. But we all know it will take years of dedicated, relentless, and fearless leadership to make significant progress. Let’s hope he can do it.

Joetta Sack-Min, Associate Editor

I love listening to school administrators and school board members complain about tenure rules—and how such rules make it hard to fire poor-performing teachers.

That’s because such bemoaning gives me an opportunity to ask a few questions that make folks uncomfortable.

For instance, when one board member complained that her school district just couldn’t get rid of a number of bad teachers, I asked how those teachers had gotten tenure in the first place. She just shook her head and admitted: "Well, our principals don’t like to give bad evaluations because it causes hard feelings and makes their jobs harder."

Duh.

Chatting with a principal one day, we got on the topic of tenure, and he offered a very blunt reason why so many mediocre teachers won this precious job security: In his urban school district, the turnover of new teachers was so high that principals were desperate just to get a warm body into each classroom. And if the teacher stayed around long enough, they got tenure.

Such conversations always lead to the same conclusion: A recognition by board members and administrators that teacher evaluations should be taken more seriously. That teacher retention should be a higher priority. And that somebody ought to be screening teachers before they're awarded tenure.

And yet, a year or two later, nothing seems to have changed for these school leaders—and the complaining goes on.

Del Stover, Senior Editor

Earlier this week, Florida’s Board of Education voted 4-3 to approve new science standards that, unlike former standards, include evolution.

Although this may seem like a victory for pro-evolution groups, both sides of the argument have concerns about the revision.

The new standards require increased instruction in the “scientific theory of” evolution, an improvement over standards from 1996 that didn’t even mention evolution, instead calling it “change over time.” The standards also call evolution “the fundamental concept underlying all of biology.”

Groups advocating for intelligent design or those skeptical of Darwinian evolution wanted a provision to allow teachers to “engage students in a critical analysis of evidence” for and against evolution. Their request was denied.

But those who support teaching evolution in schools disapprove of the wishy-washy language--“theory” instead of “law” or “fact”--in the new standards.

“It doesn’t destroy them,” Joe Wolf, director of Florida Citizens for Science, told the Associated Press. “It weakens them.”

Instead of improving outdated standards, Florida’s board, in an attempt to appease both parties, seems to have thoroughly pleased no one. Taking the middle ground on this issue has produced confusing standards that leave instruction up to the subjectivity of the teacher.

Stacey Hollenbeck, ASBJ spring intern

The March issue of American School Board Journal has just been posted online at www.asbj.com.

Be sure to check out this month's cover story, "The Rise of Autism and Its Costs" by Associate Editor Joetta Sack-Min. She follows three New Jersey districts and their efforts to educate their growing populations of children with autism.

Also, we continue our award-winning "Children at Risk" series with Senior Editor Lawrence Hardy's article "Mental Health Services Lacking for At-Risk Children."