Kentucky Education Commissioner Terry Holliday sat with WKYT's Bill Bryant this weekend for an interesting interview.
This from WKYT:
Highlights include:
- The weather and calamity days under HB 427 which allow the Commissioner to excuse up to ten days. Nobody will go to school beyond June 21.
- Holliday is looking at a switch to Average Daily Membership (ADM) rather than the current Average Daily Attendance (ADA) for calculating attendance. Probably a good move overall although it might not help small schools.
- The TELL Survey has gather responses from about 25,000 Kentukcy teachers on working conditions and leadership in the schools. Look for results in May.
- The state has removed about 17 school councils to date pursuant to (HB 176) Audit Team recommendations in low-performing schools.
- Some stuff about conservative anxiety over cursive writing, civics, math by hand, grammar, penmanship... Holiday says we are "preparing children for their futures, not our past."
- Holliday's best rejoinder came in response to concerns that today's students don't know their civics like their parents do. Holliday said, "I would challenge you: [You] pull randomly ten folks off the street and let me pull ten fourth graders and let's have a civics competition... I think our schools are doing pretty good work. Something happens when they become adults though. They forget what they learned in school."
- Holliday is still open to charter schools and believes, "If parents have a choice, they're more engaged in their child's education." But he correctly reads the data an says there are some great charters and some really bad charters.
- Rand Paul sees no federal role for education. Holliday disagrees and says [if there was no Department of Education] "I think children would suffer" particularly poor students and special needs students. "I think the federal government has a huge role to play in that.
- A little chatter on the tenure debate.
- Cooperation and collaboration with teachers, improved working conditions and fair evaluations...
- Pension and health care..."about to put us out of business"
- Stu at Prichard: "real excited about Stu going into that position"
- Holliday's one goal: More kids graduate from HS college and career-ready
- Bad budget and the Legislature: We look at 2013-14 as being a better session
9 comments:
"We are preparing students for their future not their past." What an anti-intellectual statement, from Doctor Holliday. An emphasis on basics is not irrelevant. An emphasis on cursive and civics education is not irrlevant. Our education czar is irrelevant.
The quote was, "preparing children for their futures, not our past" but I don't see how that's anti-intellectual. Are you making some kind of assumption about what it would mean to give our children a nice solid 1950's education - that would be better?
No, Richard, but I felt civics was important as a teacher at Cassidy. And the same applied to handwriting.
Ah.
Well, I'm totally with you on civics.
As for handwriting, penmanship, mental math; all are necessary but not to the same degree.
Mental math is important in the same way civics is important. It's part of what you have to know to have walking-around-sense as an adult citizen in a democracy. Critically important.
But, speaking as one who has written nothing but my signature since college - penmanship is well down the list.
FCPS no longer requires its students to have mastery with multiplication tables. The result at my school: kids can't do basic math without a calculator. Sad.
Does the school use Everyday Math? Reasons not to trust the spiral:
http://kitchentablemath.blogspot.com/search/label/Everyday%20Math
It seems to me that basic math and a generalized number sense are necessary survival skills.
There was great presentation at tonight's FCPS board meeting by Peggy McKee about how FCPS schools who have switched to Singapore Math/ have greatly reduced their achievement gaps. Benefits were a greater focus on problem solving, increased rigor and better alignment with the new common core content standards.
And the article about FCPS & Singapore Math
http://www.kentucky.com/2011/03/28/1688088/more-fayette-schools-sign-up-for.html#storylink=misearch
Post a Comment