Ok, maybe that’s a little dramatic.  Stacey Campfield’s widely-ridiculed bill to reduce public assistance payments to parents whose children make bad grades isn’t really dead and buried, just relegated to Summer study.  Sort of like a kid who failed a class, but gets another chance.  Except that Campfield isn’t going to miss a meal or have his phone cut off for this failed effort.

Statistically, children from lower income households are more likely to have difficulty with academics.  Solving the problem though, requires understanding why — and there are multiple reasons, not all of which apply to every child.

1) Many children from economically disadvantaged homes don’t have access to the same resources — books in the home, a computer with internet service, travel and experiences, parents who have the time or ability to help with homework, etc.

2) The number of families on public assistance are disproportionally single-parent households, where the parent-in-residence may be working multiple minimum wage jobs just to make ends meet.

3) Families on public assistance are much more likely to have lower levels of education themselves; in some cases, this results in education not being valued, but in others, a simple inability to help.  Sometimes, it means that the vocabulary used in the home is much more limited than what the more-advantaged peers are exposed to; sometimes, it means that a child didn’t get enough sleep because he has to work to help support the family.  All of those things impact school performance.

4) Like it or not, genetics usually does play a role in academic performance.   While children from the deep end of the gene pool may go through hard times, it’s not likely to be long-term.  In the case of generational welfare recipients, the kids are much more likely to be from the shallow end.

Lastly, grades are not the ultimate measure of learning.   We, as a society, tend to equate good grades with mastery and poor grades with failure, but I don’t buy into the fact that poor grades are necessarily a failure to learn — perhaps a failure to comply with expectations.  Longtime readers will recall some of my frustrations with Beta, whose geometry teacher once approached me with the concern that she “has a 110 test average and a 14 homework average.”  Unfortunately, homework counted for a significant part of the grade, so in spite of the fact that she clearly knew the material, her grade wasn’t very good.

I know exactly what the problem was: if she understood the material, she spent her time on homework that she needed to do in order to learn it.  Stuff that she already understood, she didn’t waste time on.  In four weeks, Beta will receive her BS in Physics.   In spite of her unapproved homework methodology, it worked for her.

We need to ensure that children from all socioeconomic backgrounds learn, and reach their fullest potential.  That’s hard, because it’s tough to know exactly what that potential is.  We need to be looking for ways to help, not ways to punish.

Want to ensure that children from families on public assistance can succeed in school, and break the cycle of dependency?  Expand preschool.  Provide computers and internet service that they can take home.  Ensure that they interact with people who expose them to a larger vocabulary, new ideas, and encouragement to succeed.  Challenge them, but respect them as children with potential they don’t even know they have.

There has to be a better way.

Mixed messages abound in the education world these days.  We want to graduate more students, but we want to make it harder to graduate; we want to add math, science, and foreign language requirements (read: add teachers), but we don’t want to increase funding for education.  And those are just a couple of examples from high school.

Higher Ed is in a similar predicament.  The goals are noble and good, but the means to achieve them are dwindling.  To wit:

• Tennessee must increase our percentage of college graduates.
• Remedial courses should be taught at community colleges, not universities.
• High school students could take remedial courses at community colleges while in high school, there by lessening the pressure on K-12 systems to hire more teachers, and also lessening the need for developmental courses at 4-year schools.
• And yet, 524 staff members at Board of Regents schools have accepted a buyout offer to save millions in salaries and benefits, but will result in fewer experienced instructors, larger classes, and fewer course offerings.

Anyone who has recently been a college student, or any parent of a college student, knows that one of the biggest challenges to graduating on time is to get into the classes one needs, when one needs them.  Offering more sections, more frequently, would undoubtedly improve the college graduation rate.  Offering fewer sections (with more students in each) less frequently cannot possibly yield improvement in the graduation rate — it will have the opposite effect.

But to keep it simple, the analogy is thus:  jump as high as you can.  Next, you must jump 50% higher… so dig a hole, stand in it, and try again.

Let me know if this works for you.  Like my physics major and rugby player daughter tells me, “gravity sucks.”

The Education Improvement Act of 1992 brought Tennessee’s change from mostly elected superintendents of schools, to a system of Directors of Schools appointed by the local school board. Although only three states still have any elected superintendents, bills to revert to such have been filed every year since 1992.

I wrote about this a couple of years ago, and every word still applies.

Why does it merit a second look? Because last Thursday, Rep. Frank Nicely (R-Knox and Jefferson Counties) tacked on an amendment to HB3857 that would have allowed elected superintendents in his two counties. That bill was tabled, so Nicely then tried to amend HB3455, only this time, a bunch more counties were included: Knox, Jefferson, Cumberland, Bledsoe, Roane, Union, Campbell, Washington, Meigs, Polk, Fentress, Morgan and Overton.

Rep. Ulysses Jones’ motion to table the amendment failed, and it was only because the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Gerald McCormick, had previously agreed to refer the bill back to committee if any amendments were added that it didn’t pass on Thursday.

There are still a few more days left in this year’s legislative session, and there are plenty more bills out there that could be amended. After all, HB3455 was about utility districts having the ability to form public building authorities, and HB3857 provides for contracts between local education agencies for use of one another’s facilities in the event of a disaster.

I do wish they’d implement a rule to disallow tacking on unrelated amendments. This is the time of year, with only a few days of voting left in the Legislature, that serious mischief happens.

The News-Sentinel has taken a stand against elected superintendents, as has the Tennessee School Boards Association. The only way to keep professionalism above politics in our schools is to call your state legislator and ask that they vote against any bill or amendment to allow elected superintendents.

A little more professionalism in the Legislature wouldn’t be a bad thing, either.

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postscript:  SchoolMatters is covering this as well.