Accept No Substitutes for Real Decentralization

We, the People of Santa Barbara,

in order to expose school corruption, reform education, and restore justice and democracy in our schools and community,

to establish the rights and responsibilities of parents, teachers, and students so that we may learn and grow together,

create an educational system that nurtures and engages our children's minds, bodies, and spirits, and empowers everyone to communicate, collaborate, coordinate, and cooperate as educational partners,

provide for the common defense and advocacy of sane practices and democratic policies that support family values, promote domestic harmony, and ensure social justice,

and reweave the fabric of our society and thereby secure the blessings of love, health, and happiness for ourselves, our children, and our children's children,

do hereby ESTABLISH THE APPLE CORPS AND PLEDGE TO PROMOTE DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION* WITHIN A COOPERATIVE SCHOOL PARADIGM.

*Democratic education is an engaged, relevant and socially-conscious curriculum in a cooperative and supportive atmosphere with an embrace of diversity, an accommodation of different learning styles, and a fair distribution of funds.

The 19th century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was quoted as saying: "All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident."

"Every blade of grass has an angel bending over it, whispering, "Grow! Grow!" says the Talmud.

How to Grow

We cannot pull and tug and make things grow.

When the plant or tree is young and tender,
a thin little shoot of green,
a delicate bit of emerging life —
we cannot tug on its topmost shoots and make it grow.
We will only pull it from the soil that nourishes it.

Shorn of its feeder rootlets, it withers and dies.
It becomes a dry, brittle, rigid and lifeless brown stalk.

We cannot force a person to learn and grow, to expand and enjoy.
When we try to force a person to learn and grow —
when we try to push our beliefs and values
and ways of living upon him —
we may only suppress him, stunt him, distort him and twist him.

We may only influence him to become
a hollow dry shell of a human being,
like the brittle stalk of a plant or tree pulled from the soil.

Unless he is resilient and strong and flexible within his own beliefs,
self-confidence and native instincts,
he may give and bend and twist under the force,
but he will not grow.
He will collapse inward and build strong outer walls
of protection and defenses.

What then, can we do, to help a person learn and grow,
expand, unfold, and enjoy?

We can only help him find or create
a viable, living garden of environment —
a community of people and nature and things
within which there is opportunity for growth.
We can only cultivate the soil of life around him
with the prongs of our own thoughts and disciplines —
feed and nourish him with our love and faith and friendship —
help support and sustain him with our own confidence and belief —
lure him onward to greater personal growth
with visions of distant goals, alternative pathways,
and virgin unexplored territories of life.

We can entice him onward with greater visions
and pictures of his own potentials and capacities —
we can nudge and prod and stimulate when he is chained with inertia.

When he falters from doubt and uncertainty and confusion,
we can help him see fresh footprints and pathways.

We can help him create an atmosphere within himself
which is conducive to growth and joy —
an inner sense of harmony and balance and love of himself.

We can only expose him to the light,
the sunshine of knowledge, facts and ideas —
the enlightenment of new experiences, new environments,
new people.

We can only water the soil around his thirsty, hidden roots
of needs and interests and desires,
with raindrops of love, respect, trust, hope and affection.

We can only spray him with our ideas, beliefs, confidence and faith
to help him develop his own ways of coping
with the diseased forces of evil and destructiveness.

When the branches and twigs of overwhelming knowledge
and facts and opinions and pressures from other people
proliferate, grow thick and tangled, confusing and smothering —
we can help him continuously prune away the branches and deadwood until the sunlight and fresh air of simplicity and clarity and wisdom
filter through once more.

We can only lure him to an inner mountain-top
of lofty, inspired dreaming and thinking —
where he can gain the perspective of distance and scope —
where he can gain the broad sweep
of intellectual reasoning and conceptual thinking —
where he can gain the vision and imagery and wisdom
of a universe greater than himself and his fellow men —
where he can gain the sense of loftiness, quiet joy, and eternal peace — the exhilaration of vastness and things unknown.

No, we cannot force a person to learn and grow,
any more than we can force a tree to grow.

We can only be a gardener who loves to help things grow.

Julian Moody
Dearborn Inn, Dearborn MI
1963

November 4, 2009,

When Teachers Are the Experts
How Schools Can Improve Professional Development

By Ross Hunefeld
Edweek.org.

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2009/11/04/10hunefeld.h29.html?tkn=NOLFu5J6fzHTmSmZyxYr7Y%2FhwLBCcBKLjVsK

I think I’m going to miss the coffee and Danish most of all. I won’t miss staring at the clock with my politely disengaged colleagues. And I won’t miss the guy up front, some former principal or ace teacher, who’s going to teach us about some topic that has been deemed important for the entire staff.

These whole-school workshop sessions that many of us have experienced are what I’ll call “old PD”: professional development in the form of an expert up front and teachers listening passively. If improved teaching practice and better student outcomes are the goal, then these methods of keeping teachers up to date and growing professionally are not working.

What my school is learning, and what current research suggests, is that teachers don’t improve by listening to someone tell them how to do something newer or better in their classrooms. They learn by working together to address problems they themselves identify in their schools and classrooms. This type of staff development goes by many names, but I’ll use the term “collaborative PD.” The problems with old PD are so many, and the benefits of collaborative PD so great, that the days are surely numbered for the former. Yes, old-style professional development is doomed.

But, some will say, if we’ve been doing it for so long, what can be wrong with bringing in experts to share their knowledge with teachers? One major issue is the variation in teachers’ experience and ability levels. Any group presentation runs the risk of being too advanced for some and too basic for others. Teachers also have different interests and needs, so the topic of the day may lack relevance for many in the room.

Given this, is it any wonder that we tend to see terrible rates of carry-over from presentation to classroom practice? Studies show that techniques taught in old-style professional-development workshops result in extremely poor classroom implementation. On top of this, the cost of hiring experts to provide such programming is high. In today’s economy, no one has extra money to throw into ineffective training events.

The truth is, these expenditures are unnecessary. A staff of hardworking teachers with access to basic technology could learn much more together than they would under the tutelage of an imported expert. Rather than hiring external presenters, schools can see much better results by putting the responsibility for, and the control of, professional growth in the hands of their own teachers.

There are few problems teachers can’t solve, and few techniques they can’t master, given adequate time and resources. Collaboration allows them to share the expertise within a school, and gives veteran teachers the opportunity to take on leadership roles. Teachers are also able to work together to learn about areas in which the school has no existing expertise.

Professional learning in this context becomes much more authentic, as teacher-learners choose their own topics to emphasize and proceed at a pace that is appropriate to them and to their students’ needs. Experimentation with new teaching methods happens in a classroom-as-laboratory setting, so the implementation is virtually automatic.

Technological improvements in communication and the transfer of information have made professional learning communities like this highly feasible. Teachers have much more access to information today than even a few years ago. Through the Internet, they can pull up full texts of scholarly and more-general articles on education, as well as view video libraries of excellent teaching. They are also able to share and read the opinions of other educators on countless edu-blogs. And they can expand their learning through online presentations and webinars. Such resources are readily available, free or for a small fee.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

At my Chicago high school, Noble Street College Prep, we gave up doing old PD and organized professional learning communities, what many call PLCs, instead. These are groupings in which teachers have the chance to work collaboratively with members of their departments.

Each PLC began by looking at student test data from the previous year, to set a clear goal for student achievement. Then, to meet the goal, each PLC followed an action-research model involving new learning, choosing a strategy to meet the goal, experimenting with the new strategy, and checking progress against the goal.

Math teachers, for example, worked together to improve the level of questioning in their classes. English teachers worked on vertical alignment of their planning. And science and elective teachers began implementing reading strategies in their classes. Reading teachers worked on pre-, during-, and post-reading strategies to better reach their students.

At the end of each semester, we held a “share fair” at which teachers shared with one another what they had learned. The result was soon apparent: As teachers learned from each other, student learning also improved. This collaborative approach is one of the reasons our students’ test scores have reached their highest point in the school’s 10-year history.

Our system is by no means perfect, and implementation has not been easy. We had initial missteps in determining how much structure to provide, we spent too little time on team-building and establishing group norms, we struggled to find time in the workday for meetings, and we had difficulty establishing the best ways to measure progress. Still, the obstacles highlight another of the approach’s benefits: With good teacher feedback, we can continually adjust and improve our system. And we believe a flexible, collaborative approach to professional development, while not easy, is one that can be implemented at any school.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A widespread shift to collaborative PD, however, would require some changes in the education world. A first one would encompass education consultants and academics, who play a major role of discovering the best practices we hope our teachers will implement. These experts are certainly important, but in the new plan they wouldhave to change how they presented their material. Increasingly, experts would respond over long distances, in individualized ways, to targeted groups of teachers.

Rather than having a reading expert address an entire school staff, for instance, groups of teachers working on content-area reading strategies in various schools around the country could interact with and learn from a university-based expert via conference call, webinar, e-mail, or video.

Second, schools of education would need to include some components of collaborative “action research” in their undergraduate programs, producing students ready to direct their own continuing professional development. Independent research and study is a common component in undergraduate work in science and engineering. Our teachers need to be as adept as our scientists at working in teams to uncover current knowledge in their field and pushing themselves to new learning.

Finally, schools must place an emphasis on hiring staff members who are willing to collaborate and who wish to constantly improve their practice. A new teacher willing to work and learn with colleagues will quickly surpass a more experienced colleague who is not interested in collaborating. Principals should take this into account as they look for new members to add to their teams.

With these changes, and a continued call from researchers for more collaboration, it will not be long before old PD practices fade away and collaborative PD is the norm. And schools will reap the benefits: Students will have more creative and engaged teachers; budgets will balance, with professional-development funds used on resources that yield greater returns; and experts will expand the use of technology to reach teachers more efficiently and directly.

My only hope is that somehow, even in this new world of teacher growth, we can hold on to the best parts of the old way: free coffee and Danish.

Ross Hunefeld is the dean of instruction at Noble Street College Prep, a campus of Noble Street Charter School, in Chicago.

Vol. 29, Issue 10, Pages 24-25





The Apple Corps ANGELS:

ANDREW HARVEY and INSTITUTE OF SACRED ACTIVISM:

Defy Gravity

Healing Beyond the Bounds of Reason

http://andrewharvey.net/newsletter/newsletter101309.html


Brilliance, passion, wit, forensic clarity, and a realistic unshrinking compassion- these are all qualities we have come to expect from the extraordinary work of Caroline Myss, and they are in abundant, vivid and provocative display in her latest book Defy Gravity. What is also remarkable and inspiring about Caroline as a writer, teacher and person, is that she is continually reinventing herself, constantly pressing forward to a more and more all encompassing integration of mind, heart, body and soul. For her, this search for the unified force-field of truth is never a purely individual one; it takes place in the context of an urgent and radical confrontation with our exploding world crisis that is now threatening the survival of the human race and much of nature, and it is born out of a passionate desire for planetary as well as personal healing.

It is this exploding and all menacing world crisis that is at the secret heart of Defy Gravity. Caroline Myss knows exactly where we are in a vast disaster of our own making, a growing catastrophe engendered by our addiction to and adoration of reason and the powers of control it opens up to us and by our abandonment of the Sacred and the rigorous and exacting mystic laws that govern its application to life. Our survival is threatened on every side- by the demons our passion for domination of each other and of nature have unleashed, by our flawed and tribal understandings of religion that fuel instead of resolving conflict, and by our continuing refusal to face the personal and collective shadows of our greed, fear, cruelty and unacknowledged despair at our untransformed human nature that continues to indulge in war and genocide and suicidal exploitation of the environment.

This is a book to read and savor again and again, to learn from and live by. My personal gratitude to Caroline for continuing to risk the searing journey that makes such healing visions accessible to her and through her to us will soon be shared by all of you who read this book with an open heart and mind.

In Entering the Castle, Caroline Myss guided us through the timeless path of wisdom opened up by Theresa of Avila; in Defy Gravity Caroline claims her own authority as guide and radical mystic pioneer with the humility, intensity and clarity that potentially ennobles us all.

New York Times best-selling author Caroline Myss draws from her years as a medical intuitive to show that healing is not only physical; it is also a mystical phenomenon that transcends reason. In Defy Gravity: Healing Beyond the Bounds of Reason, Caroline introduces a model of healing that explores the relationship between our seven shadow passions and our seven inner graces. This knowledge holds the key to understanding what it means to defy gravity and break through the boundaries of ordinary thought where you can heal any illness, channel grace, and live fearlessly.

Learn More About The Hope

Are You a Sacred Activist?

- Do you have a burning desire to change the world or make a difference?
- Is there a cause or issue that breaks your heart?
- Are you devoted to a spiritual practice such as prayer or meditation?
- Are you concerned about the environment, social justice, non-violence and personal wellness?

If you answered YES to two or more of these questions than you are being called on to become a Sacred Activist -what I define as a humble and divine agent of change to birth a new world of compassion, peace , balance, justice and harmony.

In my new book THE HOPE: A GUIDE TO SACRED ACTIVISM, I sound a clarion call to all who care deeply about the future of humanity and of the planet!

At this critical juncture in history and myriad crisis facing our planet from our monetary systems collapsing, to environmental depletion, nuclear proliferation, rise in fundamentalism and the hurried, disconnected pace of life, the future can seem bleak. THE HOPE, offers sage advice and practical tools for overcoming these seeming insurmountable global catastrophes and shares an urgent yet inspiring message for those seeking personal and planetary transformation.


MARGARET WHEATLEY and BERKANA FOUNDATION

PROFESSOR DUNCAN WAITE:

The International Center for Educational Leadership and Social Change, housed at Texas State University-San Marcos, has been established to facilitate social change by local educational leaders. The Center is designed to collaborate, share, and coordinate with Regional Institutes in various settings across the world for promoting and understanding how educational leaders bring about significant social change that advances both the education of children and the overall health of a just and equitable community.

Vision: The International Center for Educational Leadership and Change will identify and sustain a new generation of educational leaders, within and across nations; leaders devoted to narrowing the divisions between school and community. Such leaders will be prepared to partner with community members to confront and reverse patterns of poor health care, systemic poverty, environmental degradation, illiteracy, lack of economic opportunities, inadequate transportation, violations of human rights, and disenfranchisement from political participation.

Rationale: Without a community that serves all citizens well, there always will be glaring inequities in the education of its students. Without schools that engender a comprehensive sense of education to strengthen local neighborhoods, towns, villages, states, nation, and world, there always will remain uncontested and horrible inequities in the lives of the world’s citizens. In essence, to improve community and to improve schools is a common, interrelated task, worthy of serious attention in the preparation and support of the next generation of international and local education and community leaders.

Goals: The Center and the Regional Institutes will empower local educational leaders (principals, heads, assistant principals and assistant heads, teacher leaders, and community leaders and educators) to effect strategic change—locally, regionally, nationally, and globally. The Center and its affiliates will support local action research initiatives seeking to identify and positively affect those school-community conditions that are discovered to be impeding the education of the children in the local school’s care.

The Role of the Center: The Center will help identify and establish Regional Institutes around the world interested in collaborating with the Center in its mission. The Center will solicit funds to support its work and the initial establishment of the Regional Institutes. The Center will lend support to the Regional Institutes and the local schools they identify for participation. The Center will likewise identify schools in its host country to participate in the action research, which is fundamental to the work of the Center. The Center will collate and disseminate the fruits of the action research under its aegis. One outlet for such work may be the International Journal of Leadership in Education, for which the Center Director also serves as Editor. The Center will host national and international conferences to disseminate the research it gathers and to foster an exchange of ideas related to improving the educational/social conditions of children and their teachers. The Center will serve as a conduit for the research that it gathers from the Regional Institutes, and disseminate such research to the other Regional Institutes, targeting those areas where such research is likely to have maximum effect. The Center will assume the responsibility for oversight and evaluation of those activities associated with this, its initiative. The Center will share the information and insights gained through these worldwide action research efforts, but especially those in its host country, with policy makers and others who have an influence on educational matters.

The Role of the Regional Institutes The Regional Institutes will, through coordination and dissemination of the results of the local action research efforts they initiate, will seek better education and community development in their areas. They may do this by disseminating, in a school-to-school model, the research and the insights gathered, and/or by using this information to influence educational policy in their areas—locally, regionally, or nationally. Regional Institutes will be encouraged to set their own agendas, within the broad framework of this initiative, and to develop their own funding sources after the first critical period. Regional Institutes will be responsible for the oversight of the projects they initiate. Regional Institutes will collect and transmit the information gathered through their local action research initiatives to the Center, and, likewise, will transmit and otherwise share information gotten from the Center with educational authorities—local, state, regional, and national—in their areas. Members of the Regional Institutes will regularly attend conferences and meetings hosted by the Center, and otherwise communicate with the Center.

Distinctiveness of the Approach:

Respect for grass root structures and initiatives: The Center structure will permit the Regional Institutes great latitude to develop their own agenda around educational leadership for social change during the critical startup phase. Likewise, through use of an action research approach, local schools and local school leaders will be encouraged to discover for themselves those issues within their local educational community (the school and its community) that negatively impact their children’s educational attainment. The Center will not export, nor impose, one prescriptive approach to educational issues for those associated with its work. Rather, it will foster, encourage, and support grassroots efforts that might target potential change agent action research leaders in various schools and communities; build such work into stand-alone leadership centers and graduate student programs (both masters and doctoral); connect with and/or help establish special licensure programs in school-community leadership; relate with international exchange and collaboration programs on specific school-community issues; and, otherwise link with existent school/community/university partnerships that extend and support the Center’s mission.


Inter-agency/inter-departmental collaboration: In order to address social/educational issues, multiple areas of expertise will be required. University and Regional Institute collaborators may be drawn from, for example, areas having to do with literacy, childcare, community education, health, business management, and more.


Impact: In a type of coordinated, ripple effect, local schools and local school leaders will impact the comprehensive issues affecting their students. Likewise, Regional Institutes and the Center itself will impact educational and social change through an impact on social/educational conditions and on policy.
Immediate and Long-term Timeline: The first year of Center operation will be taken up with establishing the structures, policies, and processes which will determine Center operations through time as well as identifying immediate grass roots educational leadership for social change activities in various regional locations. Establishing and supporting Regional Institutes will also be one of the main activities of the first three years. Collation of research from the Center’s host country and from the Regional Institutes, and its dissemination, will be a major part of Center activities. Conferences, visiting scholars, exchange programs and on-site logistical support will be required. Fund raising will be on going. Evaluation activities will begin with the first year of formal funding and carry through the life of Center operations.

Expected Results:Beginning immediately, the Center staff and those associated with the Center in various roles will identify educational leadership for social change activities and action research in various regions of the world that are making a profound change in both the educational lives of students and their community. In turn, as the Regional Institutes create, revise, or extend educational leadership programs with an integrated social change and action research component, the Center will document and share the results in local, state, national, and international settings that can be used to reshape policy and preparation programs in school and community leadership The old paradigm of “experts” from one country or locality telling others what they should do will be eschewed. Instead, the Center and the Regional Institutes plan to create a new conversation among all those concerned with schools, communities, and the role of leaders. This conversation will respect and narrate local educational leadership for social change in its multiplicity of roles, forms, and activities all across the world.

The International Center for Educational Leadership and Social Change
Texas State University-San Marcos
601 University Drive
San Marcos, Texas 78666
USA
http://www.edlchange.org/


FOR BETTER SCHOOLS, DEVELOP BETTER BOARD OF EDUCATION

For Better Schools and for Civic Life, Boards Must Assert Power

By Peter Meyer

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2009/10/14/07wallace-meyer.h29.html

I remember sitting in my first executive session as a school board member, in 1999, and thinking to myself, “This is like getting into Fort Knox.”

I had been a general-interest journalist for some 25 years at that point, and had always had the hardest time cracking institutions that took care of children. They almost always denied journalists access, arguing that it was not in the best interests of the child.

Now, here I was, on “the inside,” on the school board, discussing intimate details about children, parents, teachers, aides, maintenance workers—and I was seeing what I had always suspected. The organization’s leaders were not so much protecting (or caring for or even educating) children as they were caught up trying to manage a bumbling and relatively incompetent bureaucracy.


I am not much more than an interested student of school board history. But my sense of things, after two stints on my local school board—for six months in 1999-2000 and since 2007 to today—is that school boards have been overtaken by the “educatocracy,” by powerful trade unions, certified specialists, certification agencies, state and federal rule-makers and legislators, grants with strings, billion-dollar-contractor lobbyists,textbook mega-companies, professional associations, and lawyers—the list could go on.

Under these circumstances, it doesn’t surprise me that many people think school boards are irrelevant. They are. Boards do a lot of moving the chairs around on the deck, but they’re not really steering the boat. Ask board members anywhere what their biggest problems are and they are likely to say: state and federal regulation. Mandates.

I recall a Nigerian immigrant who had several children in our district trying to explain to someone who was complaining about a school why America was so great. “Here,” he said in halting English, “if you don’t like something, you vote no.” I didn’t have the heart to tell him that, in fact, a no vote on a school budget didn’t really mean no. Because of state law, if voters rejected a school budget, all that happened was the district had to operate with the same budget as the previous year, plus inflation.

And if state and federal regulation ties one hand behind your back, the unions take care of the other by protecting teachers who really should be dismissed.

Then there’s the mind-numbing minutiae. At least twice a month, just before a school board meeting, I receive a packet from the superintendent. It contains the agenda—usually three to four pages long, each item numbered, with subcategories with numbers like 13.1.7—and sometimes hundreds of pages of documentation to go with them. At any given meeting, there also can be several dozen detailed resolutions.

It’s no wonder that “experts” have to be called in to explain it to us board members. “A superintendent’s primary job,” I was once told by one of them, “is to manage the board.” And that’s the problem. School boards have been taught impotence in the face of information, a problem that causes them to act—and fight—like children. I recall one evening being called in to a special meeting to approve $25 million in construction contracts. “I’d like to see the contracts,” I said. My colleagues, so lacking in confidence in their own responsibility, voted 6-1 not to see the contracts.

One year, I had a debate with a board member in a newspaper’s letters column on the question of whether the board should have a curriculum committee. He was certain that it was the school board’s only job to hire a superintendent and then sit back and let him or her run the district. The board shouldn’t be “meddling” with curriculum. It was a view shared by the five other board members, even after someone unearthed for me Board Policy #4200, which clearly stated the “board is committed to establishing and maintaining a coordinated curriculum management process.”

Indeed, in the blizzard of paperwork that buries board members, there are many dozens of rules and regulations that are honored only in the breach. Each year, before I was on the board, I would make a pilgrimage to a board meeting and read from a section of the state-mandated code of conduct that required annual staff training on implementing the code. “Was it done?” I asked each time. And each time, I got the same answer: Of course it was. And each time, after the meeting, several members of the staff would tell me it was not done.

For all their problems, though, I believe school boards are vital institutions. It is the country’s gradual neutering of school boards that has helped cripple our education system.

Instead of seeing school boards’ apparent irrelevance as evidence of the need to hurry them out the door, we need to wonder whether such irrelevance is, like the disappearance of the frog, a sign of broader environmental stress.

We have to clean the polluted ecosystem, not kill off the frog. But we also have to recognize that, unlike the poor frog, we have multiple adaptive strategies. School boards must see themselves for what they are—the only relevant link between communities and schools—and take responsibility for their role in governing districts.

True, the abundance of federal and state regulation has complicated the life of school districts. All the more reason for boards to be proactive.

Wallace Report: Leading for Learning

The sixth annual Leading for Learning report, funded by The Wallace Foundation, examines the school board's role in education leadership.



As a former economics teacher in my district once put it to me, “As teachers, one of our jobs is simply to avoid the 600-pound gorilla.” By that he meant that he and his colleagues had become expert at doing what they wanted to do, despite the multitude of federal and state rules and regulations.

School boards still have enormous power—we could have voted no to the $25 million in contracts and could easily adopt a rigorous curriculum—especially on the local level.

My own battle is to get my board to acknowledge that power, and to re-engage itself in the task of educating children, to revive a sense of the relevancy of democracy itself. It’s a win-win. Not only do we get a better education for our children, but we also get a community that begins to feel that it can deliver that education.

Peter Meyer is a former news editor for Life magazine and a contributing editor at Education Next. He is a member of the school board in the Hudson City School District in Hudson, N.Y.

A special report funded by The Wallace Foundation.

Wallace Report:

Leading for Learning
Overview: An Overlooked Institution Struggles to Remain Relevant
In Pittsburgh, Monitors Hold School Board Accountable
Governance Project Teaches Value of Policy Framework
At State Level, Power Over Schools a Contentious Issue
Education Secretary Leads Chorus Calling For Big City-Hall Role
Mayors Can Be ‘Prime Movers’ Of Urban School Improvement

Commentary: Meetings Are Just Tip of Iceberg
Commentary: Keeping an Eye on the Big Picture—From a Small Town
Commentary: For Better Schools and for Civic Life, Boards Must Assert Power

Dear Norm Clevenger, San Marcos High School Principal, and Master Teacher, Debbie Keys-Thomas,

Our "Back to School" Parent Night meeting was AWESOME! We are the core of the SBSD Special Education Apple Corps, an innovative new paradigm creating "child-centered, teacher-directed, parent-involved" schools that promote communication, cooperation, collaboration, and coordination.

Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act (IDEA) and the Individualized Education Plan (IEP), a legal contract, made Special Education into a separate REALM of education.

The SELPA heirarchy created an autocracy and a tyrannical regime; unlimited funds for tax-payer paid lawyers have made complaints futile and due process procedures financially and emotionally devastating.

ENOUGH! (Cue lights and music.) EUREKA!

Announcing the Special Education "Apple Corps," a parent-teacher cooperative model for learning communities of students with special needs.

Apple Corps Goals: Educate and nurture families with special needs children and partner with Special Education Staff; promote democratic education; participate in trainings and school activities; celebrate "teachers, parents and children learning and growing together."

President Obama called upon Congresswoman Lois Capps to write up the legendary Starr King Parent-Child Workshop Educational Philosophy, Curriculum, Methodology, and Evaluation as a model for the nation. (Sara Folsom Foot, Founder and Director, 1947; Hanne Sonquist, Director.)

Imagine: a network of empowered, experienced, and compassionate people who EMBRACE, EDUCATE and SUPPORT Special Education Teachers, Parents, and Children.

Imagine: laptops provided so that teachers and parents can communicate and do research---and the students can email each other ad nauseum.

Imagine: an online network for special education documents so that each child is the center of the universe.

Imagine: a calendar of seasonal celebrations and holidays in each classroom and school so that the beginning and ending days of school are joyous occasions; Fall, Winter, and Spring Festivals celebrate the year's cycle with traditional songs, dances, and traditional crafts; birthdays and milestones are shared; challenges and crises are encountered with collective strength and wisdom......etc.

Imagine: communicating, cooperating, coordinating, and collaborating as partners so that concerns and needs are met, conflicts are resolved, and an effective complaint procedure makes lawyers and due process UNNECESSARY and OBSOLETE.

Imagine: the "school of our dreams" a reality.


The SBSD SEPAC (2003-05) posited SEPACS-IN-EVERY-SCHOOL; I have posited the idea at the SB SELPA CAC for years.....but the words "Parent Advisory COMMITTEE" limited membership, activites, and even the SCOPE....it was OUTSIDE of the classroom and school operations.

"Apple Corps" is ALL-INCLUSIVE and WITHIN the school's operational structure.

The organization is simple: parents and teachers meet twice a year during the school-district sponsored Back to School Night (when ELL, LULAC, and GATE parents meet).

Each SEAC elects one professional and parent representative to the SBSD Special Education "Big Apple" (SBSD oversight group), which meets monthly.

I explained to SBSD SpEd Directors Dr. Caryl Miller and Tom Guajardo that I considered my $50. per day transportation money to be payment for my work as the SB SELPA CAC Parent Representative. The Parent Ombudsman is another resource for the Apple Corps.

I am a successful grant writer. In order to apply for government, non-profit, and private funds, I request that the SBSD Special Education Department formally submit the Apple Corps model to the SBSD School Board for approval so that I can write grant proposals to fund mini-laptops and wi-fi connection for all special education families. (The Bill Gates Foundation has been looking for this innovative model of education reform, and President Obama's Grants for Innovation Program has already expressed interest in this plan as a model for our nation. see sbschooltalk.com NOTES: Grants for Innovation.)

The first "Apple Corps" token was presented to Maria Neilson at my meeting with Dr. Miller and Tom Guajardo. I'll be at San Marcos today to give you both the OFFICIAL Apple Corps token, and will come in to celebrate the season with Emily's classmates on Friday, September 18 and 25.

Now....let's tackle the immediate medical and other needs of Emily Rose!

Sincerely,

Kate Smith

(God Bless America!)


“Whatever you dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.” – Goethe

"To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society."
------Theodore Roosevelt

“The people are responsible for the character of their Congress. If that body be ignorant, reckless, and corrupt, it is because the people tolerate ignorance, recklessness, and corruption.

If it be intelligent, brave, and pure, it is because the people demand these high qualities... If the next centennial does not find us a great nation... it will be because those who represent the enterprise, the culture, and the morality of the nation do not aid in controlling the political forces.” --------James A. Garfield

(From the nomination speech he was asked to give for John Sherman at the opening of the Republican Convention in 1880. His speech received such a standing ovation that the convention nominated him instead of Sherman)

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

Visit www.sbschooltalk.com, and www.santabarbarajar.ning.com where The People are mobilizing to expose wrong-doing and posit reform measures.

Santa Barbara's school reform, social justice, and mental health activists are on the brink of exposing an Education-Politico-Industrial Complex. (EPIC)

Please join our efforts to expose corruption and reform our schools and society by joining the Apple Corps in Santa Barbara---or by starting an Apple Corps in your own school district.

Power to The People!

Kate Smith