Blogging with the doors open: he may receive 1,000 posts on a controversial matter, but this superintendent wants to keep a finger on the public pulse

School Administrator, May, 2006 by Clayton Wilcox

Let me ask you now: Do you know how your students did on the last criterion referenced test? Do you know what each child needs to learn to improve his or her learning? Did you clamor to find out what the benchmarks from this fall told you? If not, consider yourself to be offering the kind of instruction the dentist used. But you don't have to stay with your current practice. You can change. And today, my message to you is to find ways to reach and teach all the children regardless of the circumstances that hinder their educational opportunities.

The federal legislation of No Child Left Behind has gotten a bum rap. When anyone steps forward to decry what we have learned and can now practice in education, you have to ask yourself what is wrong with a drive to reach and teach them all. I can tell you as the mother of a child who is on an IEP for a language perception problem, if someone gave up on him just because of his disability, I would be fighting mad. And if teachers accept that only 50 percent or fewer of their children will become proficient in reading and math, then these children should be fighting mad about the low expectations for them. Don't you think?

Education Choice Dear Blog Watchers,

It's not a popular thing among public school leaders to believe in educational choice. My superintendent, whom I admire immensely for his educational practice, is strongly against educational choice as are just about all educational leadership organizations that I know.

There is a belief that educational choice is the beginning of the end for public education. I recently read the convention bulletin for the ASCD, and there was a session about an activist who "lays out why NCLB is not really about improving schools but privatizing them." And so it seems behind every educational initiative is a fear that we might be changing public education.

We are so afraid to find alternatives to public education that we hurt public education by failing to make the changes that would improve our practice. [For example], there are children who detract from regular class instruction due to significant behavioral issues. Some teachers experience more difficulty with these children than others; and yet, all teachers experience some degree of dysfunctional student behavior.... In my own elementary school, we have children whose behavior is so dysfunctional as to continually stop the educational process. We have involved parents, provided behavior intervention plans, gotten counseling for the students, disciplined them with progressive steps of punishment and invoked other seemingly endless interventions. These children pose a significant threat to other children and to the teacher.

Unfortunately, there are no alternatives for these elementary school-aged children within our district's (and most other districts') regular public education venue.

But there appears to be an answer. There is a dangling carrot to send the student to charter schools and other choices that are not supported by the traditional public school district .... However, this choice is not supported, as referring our children to other entities would cause our district to lose the funding for that student. It puts the educational practitioner in a rather difficult position, i.e., keep the child and suffer the educational consequences for the teacher and other students or refer the child and lose funding.... If we are unable to provide the services, it is not such a far leap of logic to assume that someone will.