Franklin Schargel’s Blog

Who is this sign supposed to deter?  Sensible, law abiding people, the 99.99% (totally my guesstimate) of us would never consider carrying any weapon into a public building like a school.  How about the .01% of criminals, evildoers, or deranged men that we keep reading about not only carrying weapons into schools but then shooting people indiscriminately.   Would such a sign deter them?  Would someone at the end of their rope, intent on doing harm, and armed to the teeth stop in his tracks by this sign and mutter: “heck I was unaware.  I guess I will just turn around and go home.”  Of course they wouldn’t.

Thus, the sign deters no one.  Then why put them up?  It seems like a small waste of money and time.

Educators are increasingly creative in their use of the media.  There are some amazing, highly entertaining and expensively produced television shows which can be accessed via computer or television. Teaching history by using the History Channel or the Discovery Channel makes history come alive.

For elementary science classes use You Tube.  One such example is 5 Scientific Experiments with Glover: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeLT-O8Mz2M

About 8,000 preschool students were suspended from U.S. preschools in 2011-2012, and 42 percent were African-American – even though black children make up about 18 percent of children enrolled in preschool programs.

WHAT’S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?  Suspending 4 year-olds?  Because we believe that our teaching and learning processes are correct, we fault people.  Obviously,  we need to find better way to punish misbehavior?   What do we teach children who seek attention by misbehaving when we suspend them?  And who wishes to explain why we are suspending so many black children?

Of the nearly 20 million American who attend college each year, about 12 million borrow.  Estimates show that the average 4-year graduate accumulates $26,000 to $29,000 in loans and some leave college with six figures worth of debt.  Student debt now totals more than either credit card or auto loan debt.

About 40 percent of households led by some 35 or younger have a student loan debt according to a 2012 Pew Research Center analysis.

What has caused this rising student debt?  It has been driven in part by rising tuition and reduced state funding and costlier campus facilities.  But this increased debt has other consequences.  These college graduates cannot afford housing or need to postpone marriage and having children.

It would appear to me that governments could take advantage of this debt by postponing it or even cancelling it so that these graduates would take jobs as educators or law enforcement officers or could provide vital service jobs that have been difficult to fill.

A report from the Legislative Finance Committee in New Mexico has reported that students that take remedial courses dropped the six-year bachelor’s degree rate from 77 percent to 17 percent, while taking a second remedial course reduced the graduation rate to 5 percent.

The report concluded that New Mexico has successfully increased access to post-secondary school for large numbers of students many “show up unprepared to earn college credits.  Instead time and money a re wasted on a sequence of remedial courses, rarely leading to program completion.”

I do not believe that this situation is unique to New Mexico.  I I am correct, why do colleges fail to validate high school achievement or lack of achievement?  Why do colleges lower their standards by accepting students who should not be admitted?  Why are preparing every student to enter college them many -too many, fail to succeed?  Is there a better way?

The Texas Tribune newspaper reported that after an investigation it has uncovered years of inaction by state officials while money flowed to tutoring companies, delivering few academic results and flouting state regulations. As companies racked up complaints “” and school districts spent further resources investigating them “” the state agency responsible for administering the program repeatedly claimed it had no authority to intervene.

For example the Dallas Independent School District, spent $18 million on tutoring since 2009.

A provision in the federal education law requires poorly performing school districts to reserve 20 percent of the federal financing they receive for economically disadvantaged students to pay for “supplemental education services,” or tutoring, in middle and high school. In the last six years, Texas school districts have spent $180 million on such services, primarily from private providers.

As the academic standards that schools had to meet under federal law increased each year, the number of schools required to set aside money for tutoring grew, and so did their troubles with the private companies providing the services.

As early as 2009, school administrators began reporting claims of falsified invoices, overly aggressive student recruitment and questionable instructional methods. They doubted the academic benefit of such programs “” something internal agency evaluations had already suggested and soon confirmed. They detailed the use of Ipads, phones and laptops as incentives for students to enroll in the services. They described instances of company representatives paying students and teachers to recruit for their programs and showing up on school property without permission or criminal-history background checks.

But companies vigorously defended their practices, sometimes even filing complaints with the agency themselves. They said their gifts to students were “learning tools” permitted under the law and blamed school districts’ lack of communication if they failed to comply with state procedure.

Four years and more than 75 formal complaints (emphasis added) later, the Texas Education Agency finally moved to bar some of the most egregious offenders “” including two companies operating with fake tax identification numbers and one that did not certify that its employees had passed criminal background checks “” from the list of approved providers, which until 2012 included a company using Scientology-based instruction.

The program was intended to give low-income parents equal opportunity to acquire private tutoring for their children. School districts were given little control over which companies the parents selected; the companies only had to be on the state list.

In 2011, the Edinburg district asked the agency to investigate one of the state’s largest tutoring providers. It detailed a number of issues, including a lack of evidence that certified teachers conducted tutoring sessions or that instructional materials aligned with state standards or students’ academic needs.

The Houston school district, the state’s largest, filed 13 complaints in 2010. Twelve received the same response: there was insufficient evidence to proceed.

When an annual audit revealed discrepancies in the invoices of a few tutoring providers in the Dallas I.S.D., it prompted a district-level investigation of all tutoring companies that billed for services in the 2010-11 academic year.

The district identified potential problems with the invoices of 12 providers “” including forms filled out in the same handwriting and misspelled names in student signatures. In all, $143,000 went for services that investigators said were not provided. Later on, it found another $500,000 in falsely billed services.

The Dallas I.S.D. began refusing to pay the companies, prompting a lawsuit from one. The district also received a letter from the Texas Education Agency threatening to withhold the district’s federal financing if it did not continue to provide tutoring.

Jordan Roberts, the director of the district’s office of grant compliance, said the Dallas I.S.D. had still not recouped any of the money it said it was owed by fraudulent providers.

“Most of these companies, when we go after them, they dissolve,” he said.

Obviously some students need tutoring in order to succeed, but the use of private companies with the lack of government oversight leads to false invoices, fraud and other crimes.  No one profits, especially the students and their parents, under these conditions except the companies that take advantage.  The Texas Education Agency and the Federal Government have an obligation and a responsibility to stop these practices.  Something needs to be done because Texas is not the only state where this is taking place. 

In the “Building a Grad Nation” report – which was co-authored by Robert Balfanz, a leading scholar of dropout rates at Johns Hopkins University – found strong improvements in graduation rates in a diverse collection of states including Tennessee, Louisiana, Alaska, California, Texas and New York. The national graduation rate jumped from 71.7 percent in 2001 to 78.2 percent in 2010, with the pace of improvement accelerating in the past few years. For the first time in decades, the United States is making steady gains in the number of high school students earning diplomas, putting it on pace to reach a 90 percent graduation rate by 2020, according to a new analysis.
However, students with learning disabilities and limited fluency in English are still having difficulty finishing high school, with graduation rates for those groups as low as 25 percent in some states. Minority students also continue to fall well behind their white peers, with about one-third of African-American students and 29 percent of Hispanic students dropping out before graduation.
Iowa, Vermont and Wisconsin lead the nation with graduation rates close to 90 percent, according to the report, which used data from 2010 and 2011. At the bottom of the heap: Nevada and New Mexico, where barely six in 10 high school freshmen can expect to earn a diploma within four years. Idaho, Kentucky and Oklahoma didn’t use the same formula for calculating rates as other states and thus were not included in the report.
The report indicates what techniques have been successful in raising graduation rates credit a range of tactics:
* Launching new schools designed to train kids for booming career fields, so they can see a direct connection between math class and future earnings
* Offering flexible academic schedules and well-supervised online courses so students with jobs or babies can earn credits as their time permits
* Hiring counselors to review every student’s transcript, identify missing credits and get as many as possible back on track
* Improving reading instruction and requiring kids who struggle with comprehension to give up some electives for intensive tutoring
* Sending emissaries door-to-door to hound chronic truants into returning to class
Nearly every state will soon be rolling out curricula tied to the Common Core standards, which aim to bring more rigor to math and language arts instruction. Many will require students to pass exams tied to those higher standards to graduate, which could push lead to more failures and higher drop-out rates, the report suggests.
The authors also warn that some states, such as Kentucky, New Mexico and Florida, plan to grade high schools in large measure by student test scores and participation in advanced courses, with the graduation rate accounting for less than 20 percent of the school’s grade. That could give principals an incentive to push out failing students and focus on high-achievers, rather than helping the stragglers work toward their diplomas.
Another concern: some states, such as Texas, do not count students as dropouts if they say they are leaving to be home-schooled or to transfer to a private school. The report notes that thousands of those students are significantly behind in credits and suggests that many may be dropping out without admitting it.
In Nevada, for instance, just 23 percent of students with disabilities, 29 percent of those with limited English skills and 43 percent of African-American students earned their diplomas in 2011.
Even generally high-performing states such Wisconsin, Massachusetts and Connecticut have strikingly poor records with some minority students. Minnesota has the biggest gaps: The graduation rate for African-American and Hispanic students hovered around 50 percent in 2011, compared to 84 percent for white students.

It is common knowledge that student loan debt is now larger than credit card debt.  Some colleges have shown that they are concerned about their costs and have been thinking about this as graduates struggle with debt and decreased job prospects.  Tuition and fees at four-year public colleges rose 27 percent in the past five years, while those at four-year private schools rose 14 percent according to the College Board.

About 320 colleges and universities have frozen tuition during the 2012-2013 school year.  These schools represent about 6.7 percent of the nation’s colleges.  Many of these fixed-rate plans are coupled with a commitment to hold financial aid steady so that students and their parents have a firm cost estimate. In general, students starting as freshmen pay more than the standard tuition for their first two years to offset lower rates in the last two.

Potential students should check with their colleges to see if they offer this program.