Analysis of Jim Stonebraker’s Letter to the Editor in The Call – Edited August 24, 2007

My analysis of Jim Stonebraker’s letter to the editor as seen in the August 23rd edition of Call Newspapers, found here, is presented below. My comments and thoughts are in red, Stonebrakers letter is in black… Edits on August 24th are in Green, other than the correct spelling of Stonebraker’s name.

Reader won’t bow to Mehlville school board’s ’superior wisdom’

“Stonebraker: August 22, 2007 – In recent issues, the Call has covered remarks by Mehlville Board of Education Secretary Micheal Ocello concerning various proposals for public contact with the board. Mr. Ocello, however, wants to ban “political speeches” and “opponents” from a dialogue with board members. As president of a company that owns an empire of strip clubs, Mr. Ocello has made millions of dollars exercising his First Amendment rights. I cannot understand why he wants to muzzle those who disagree with his views on public education. Since Mr. Ocello is concerned about political issues tainting the Mehlville School District, it must be pointed out that he and most of the other school board members are active members of local Democratic political organizations and support candidates for elected office.”

This is true, but Stonebraker forgot to mention that he is an ardent and proud neo-/far-right conservative Republican. (Jim Stonebraker made a comment to this post stating that he is not a neo-conservative, just a conservative.) However, the Call’s editor, Mike Anthony, rightfully pointed this out as an editor’s note at the end of his letter. That being said, most people are more moderate in their politics, as well as in their everyday lives. Quality education is a priority for the majority of the participants of both major political parties. Most of our community resides in the “vast middle,” not where all of the divisive, polarizing far left and far right reside.

Stonebraker: In fact, Mr. Ocello spearheaded “Strippers Against Bush” during the 2004 election cycle. Mr. Ocello stated in a recent letter to the editor: “… (T)here might be some who would try to hijack our forum for political purposes. This comment referred to those who are clearly opposed to public education and motivated by its destruction” and “I am opposed to providing a platform for those who wish to destroy an institution that has served us so well.” These comments are elitist at best and Stalinist at worst. To Mr. Ocello, anyone who is opposed to giving Mehlville School District and its public-sector unions a blank check is guilty of destroying public education.

This is not a fair characterization of Mr. Ocello. While it is very easy to agree or disagree with a person and their profession, it is a stretch to compare someone so directly to Stalin, who was a communist who executed political enemies and was directly responsible for the deaths of thousands of peasants. If Ocello starts assassinating his political enemies, then maybe we can begin to mention them in the same breath, but even then, well, you know, this is just a local school system. But it would probably make 20/20.

Stonebraker provided this blog the following definition of Stalinism:

Sta·lin·ism (stä‘lə-nĭz‘əm)
n.

The bureaucratic, authoritarian exercise of state power and mechanistic application of Marxist-Leninist principles associated with Stalin.

I looked up Stalinism in the Oxford Political Dictionary, and it states that Stalinism is:

Stalinism
Stalinism has come to stand for the whole of the repressive Soviet political system under Joseph Stalin (1879-1953) from at least 1928 until his death, although many commentators extend the term to include the period before perestroika. He has been held personally responsible, as a total and arbitrary autocrat, for millions of deaths and for the ‘deviations of socialism’ that went on under his rule. In recent years, however, a new historiography has appeared which seeks to distinguish Stalin and Stalinism from a range of competing ideological positions in Soviet politics. Many of the tenets of ideological Stalinism are considered by these historians to have lost ground in the 1930s, though adherents of this position continued to exercise influence and power throughout the Soviet period.

The definition provided also mentioned that Stalinism is bureaucratic, which by definition means non-elected government officials. Ocello was elected by the people of this community.

For more on Stalin, click here.

Stonebraker: Here is an example of Mr. Ocello’s enlightened “non-political” leadership. He and board members Leach, Felton and Christopher recently awarded School/Community Relations Director Patrick Wallace a 6-percent raise from $69,451.20 to $73.618.27. Mr. Wallace is alleged to have campaigned for selected school-board members at the polls and elsewhere — political, Mr. Ocello?

But his most odious ethical lapse was his office’s transmission of solicitation letters to advertisers of the Call Newspapers informing them that advertising in the Mehlville Messenger, a taxpayer-funded publication, was cheaper than advertising in the Call. In my opinion, it is unethical for a governmental agency to interfere in the business affairs of a newspaper because it is politically opposed to its editorial policy. Mr. Wallace should have been fired for his department’s actions, not rewarded with a pay raise. Mehlville’s PR department, the Mehlville Messenger and Patrick Wallace are a waste of more than $250,000 of our tax dollars a year.

The question facing the taxpayers of the Mehlville School District is very basic. Do we want to pay more of our hard-earned money to a district with declining enrollment, lackluster academic performance and a board that is spending uncontrollably?

Lackluster academic performance? We were just awarded Distinction in Performance status by the State of Missouri, and received our results back from our ACT scores and we were a whole point higher than the state average. How is that lackluster?

While there was a trend of declining enrollment for a while, it has leveled off, due in part to the tuition increases in private schools. However, to be fair, it should be noted that the average cost of operating a school district has more than doubled in the last 15 years with little to no additional funding from the State of Missouri. Unfortunately, that means that we have to pick up the tab locally. At Mehlville, we are starting to receive more money from the state, but still not as much as we are putting in.

Stonebraker: In light of 30-percent reassessment increases and increasing demands for revenue at all levels of government, I say no. Over 40 percent of our residents pay tuition at private schools. Can they afford to pay more taxes for educational services they will never use?

This is not true. Well, not completely. Assessments did go up, but Mehlville is required to roll back the tax-rate accordingly. Any additional revenues received by the Mehlville School District will only come in the form of Consumer Price Index increases that we are only allowed to do every two year.

Stonebraker: The district’s elected officials want to soften us up for a huge tax increase. That is the primary purpose of all of these recent public forums and outreach attempts. This strategy was made very clear by board member Ken Leach, who stated: “All of our constituents are going to see that it’s important (that the district appear fiscally responsible) during a tax levy, during elections, during all of this stuff.”

Mr. Leach may or may not have said this. I am sure he probably did, but knowing Leach for three years now, I can tell you this much, he most likely has not yet made up his mind as to whether Mehlville needs a tax increase. In this instance, Mr. Leach would have only been stating the obvious, which is that it is important that we are fiscally responsible. Not just in appearance, but also in practice – at all times.

Stonebraker: The voters have no reason to vote for any increase of funding for Mehlville schools. The current board has embarked on an orgy of spending over the last year when it was discovered that a $12 million surplus existed.

 

That is a mischaracterization of what happened and it does not represent the operations of the Mehlville School District. This is one of those “outside – looking in” statements that lacks the proper amount of information to be accurate and is laced with political overtones. Not to say that his stance is right or wrong, but a statement should be recognized for what it is, and this statement is just baseless political rhetoric. The use of the word “orgy” in this example is exhibit number 1. Does Mr. Stonebreaker really think that restoring bus transportation or buying textbooks is really an “orgy of excess?”

Also, it is up to the voters to decide whether or not they want to fund programs for the children of the Mehlville School District. Communities decide every day what kind of school district they want for their children and what programs those schools offer. Mehlville is a good school district that can continue operating in the bare-bones as we always do, or our community can decide that they want to take Mehlville to the next level in educational prowess. Can we do some things better? To say that we couldn’t would imply that we believe we are a perfect district in every way. I would be the first to say that we are not perfect, but what district is?

Because of this, our community engagement process serves several purposes. One of those purposes is to help us identify what we might be missing in our operations that could help us be a better district, to help us get closer to the ever-allusive goal of being a perfect district. Another purpose is to help us identify exactly what our community wants out of Mehlville in the future. Sure, some of those things cost money, money we don’t have. So, I don’t think it is irrational to ask the community, “Do you really want these things, and are you willing to pay for them?” If they say, “no,” then so be it. It is back to business as usual for Mehlville.

Stonebraker: Last year, teachers were awarded up to 6.88 percent in salary increases. In 2007, teachers and administrators were granted 6-percent across-the-board pay hikes. The president of the teachers’ union was thankful for the raises, but added beginning teachers’ salaries must be increased to the levels of neighboring districts. Frankly, I don’t care what other districts pay their employees. Mehlville taxpayers should decide what level of compensation is appropriate and let the market decide.

I don’t see what the big deal is about paying the median of what other districts in the area are paying. It is not unreasonable to be in the middle of the pack is it? I could see an argument as to why we have to pay at the top, but in the middle? Not to mention, we still are not in the middle yet. Our teachers are still under the county median…which when you are competing for quality teachers with other districts, that is the area you have to be concerned with. It has little to no relevance to compare our salaries to teachers in New Madrid. Sure, we could find people to teach our kids for less, but imagine how many No Child Left Behind failing schools we would have then. I guess with some people you are just damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Stonebraker: This year, nearly $2 million will be spent on installing artificial turf in athletic fields. Not one of the above expenditures had anything to do with improving the academic performance of our children.

This is very debatable. Just because someone says that it has nothing to do with improving the academic performance of our children does not make it true. There are enormous amounts of evidence out there that say athletics and appropriate facilities do directly affect the academic performance of our children. To disagree, without any supporting evidence to the contrary, is disingenuous.

It also comes down to a philosophical debate, which I am not going to get completely in to, other than to just say that what public education is, and what a community wants from their school district, is just that. If the voters and taxpayers of a community as a whole want athletics to be a part of their school system, then there you have it. That is the beauty of democracy. Just as a thought experiment, imagine for a moment that we stopped all sports programs for Mehlville. How would the community react? What do you think would happen to our property values? What other “unintended” consequences might you foresee?

And to know the real facts behind the economic and physical benefits of the synthetic grass installations at Mehlville and Oakville High School, click here.

Stonebraker: There are many other points I would like to make, but space does not permit. The bottom line is this: If the Mehlville School District wants a tax increase, the Board of Education should tell us how much money they want and what they want it for. The board should stop pretending that they care what we think.

It is very presumptuous for anyone to suggest that they know what anyone on the board is thinking at any given time, let alone to accuse board members of only pretending to care about what others think about our performance; hence this web site. The very purpose of it is to try to “engage” the members of this community on an ongoing basis. I very much want feedback from my constituents. I am here to serve. But I am not just here to serve the loudest and most flamboyant constituents, I am here to serve all 100,000 of them. Just because one person does not always see eye-to-eye with the board of education does not mean that we are on the wrong side of the fence. It just means that either there is a failure to communicate, or that someone is either the bearer or receiver of misinformation.

Stonebraker: Obviously, Mr. Ocello and company would prefer that we keep our mouths shut, bow to their superior wisdom and write them the check.

That is not true, but it makes for good drama.

Jim Stonebraker

Oakville

Editor’s note: Mr. Stonebraker served six years on the Lemay Fire Protection District Board of Directors. He is a former president of the Lemay Township Republican Organization and co-founder of No Accountability, No on A.

Quick Facts About Standardized Testing and No Child Left Behind – NCLB

Below you will find the problem with No Child Left Behind, or as most call it, NCLB.  There are pros and cons to NCLB, but in my opinion, the cons heavily outweigh the pros.  Essentially, there are better ways to accomplish the pros, without the No Child Left Behind Cons.

While some of these facts have been posted based on previous reading, I decided to pull some off of the George Lucas Educational Foundation web site called Edutopia.org and list them here.

• “Standardized tests have been used to evaluate America’s schools since 1965, when the U.S. Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) became law.
• “That statute provided for the first major infusion of federal funds into local schools and required educators to produce test-based evidence that ESEA dollars were well spent.”
• “…the SAT and ACT are used to predict the grades that high school students will earn when they get to college.”
• “In contrast, standardized achievement tests (Like our MAP scores) indicate how well a test taker has acquired knowledge and mastered certain skills.”
• Nationally standardized achievement test need to produce a range of scores (score-spread) from all test takers.
• In order to produce these variations in scores for comparative data, test writers have learned to tie the successful answering of questions to a students socio-economic status. A student above the median socio-economic status will answer the question correctly more often, while the one below the median socio-economic status does not. This gives the test writers the score-spread they were looking for for comparative data.
• “Unfortunately, this kind of test tends to measure not what students have been taught in school but what they bring to school. That’s the reason there’s such a strong relationship between a school’s standardized-test scores and the economic and social makeup of that school’s student body.”
• In Plain-English, this means that all of this tax money is being spent on an annual basis to tell us what we already know, and that is what the socio-economic status of our community is.
• A second kind of instructionally insensitive test is the sort of standardized achievement test that has been developed for accountability by many states during the past two decades.
• Such tests were typically created to better assess students’ mastery of the officially approved skills and knowledge.
• When a state’s education officials decide to identify the skills and knowledge that students should master, the typical procedure for doing so hinges on the recommendations of subject-matter specialists from that state.
• The resultant litanies (repetitive results) of committee-chosen content standards tend to resemble curricular wish lists rather than realistic targets.
• Educators must guess about which of this multitude of content standards will actually be assessed on a given year’s test.
• After working with standards-based tests aimed at so many targets, teachers understandably may devote less and less attention to those tests. As a consequence, students’ performances on this type of instructionally insensitive test often become dependent upon the very same SES (Socio-Economic Status) factors that compromise the utility of nationally standardized achievement tests when used for school evaluation.
• Three Big Consequences of standardized testing and No Child Left Behind are:

  • Curricular reductionism.

    In an effort to boost their students’ NCLB test scores, many teachers jettison curricular content that — albeit important — is not apt to be covered on an upcoming test. As a result, students end up educationally shortchanged.

  • Excessive drilling.

    Because it is essentially impossible to raise students’ scores on instructionally insensitive tests, many teachers — in desperation — require seemingly endless practice with items similar to those on an approaching accountability test. This dreary drilling often stamps out any genuine joy students might (and should) experience while they learn.

  • Modeled dishonesty.

    Some teachers, frustrated by being asked to raise scores on tests deliberately designed to preclude such score raising, may be tempted to adopt unethical practices during the administration or scoring of accountability tests. Students learn that whenever the stakes are high enough, the teacher thinks it’s OK to cheat. This is a lesson that should never be taught.

An AntidoteIs it possible to build accountability tests that both supply accurate evidence of school quality and promote instructional improvement? The answer is an emphatic yes. In 2001, prior to the enactment of NCLB, an independent national study group, the Commission on Instructionally Supportive Assessment, identified three attributes that an “instructionally supportive” accountability test must possess:

A modest number of supersignificant curricular aims.

To avoid overwhelming teachers and students with daunting lists of curricular targets, an instructionally supportive accountability test should measure students’ mastery of only an intellectually manageable number of curricular aims, more like a half-dozen than the 50 or so that a teacher may encounter today. However, because fewer curricular benchmarks are to be measured, they must be truly significant.

Lucid descriptions of aims.

An instructionally helpful test must be accompanied by clear, concise, and teacherpalatable descriptions of each curricular aim to be assessed. With clear descriptions, teachers can direct their instruction toward promoting students’ mastery of skills and knowledge rather than toward getting students to come up with correct answers to particular test items.

Instructionally useful reports.

Because an accountability test that supports teaching is focused on only a very limited number of challenging curricular aims, a student’s mastery of each subject can be meaningfully measured, letting teachers determine how effective their instruction has been. Students and their parents can also benefit from such informative reports.

These three features can produce an instructionally supportive accountability test that will accurately evaluate schools and improve instruction. The challenge before us, clearly, is how to replace today’s instructionally insensitive accountability tests with better ones. Fortunately, at least one state, Wyoming, is now creating its own instructionally supportive NCLB tests. More states should do so.

What You Can Do

If you want to be part of the solution to this situation, it’s imperative to learn all you can about educational testing. Then learn some more. For all its importance, educational testing really isn’t particularly complicated, because its fundamentals consist of commonsense ideas, not numerical obscurities. You’ll not only understand better what’s going on in the current mismeasurement of school quality, you’ll also be able to explain it to others. And those “others,” ideally, will be school board members, legislators, and concerned citizens who might, in turn, make a difference. Simply hop on the Internet or head to your local library and hunt down an introductory book or two about educational assessment. (I’ve written several such books that, though not as engaging as a crackling good spy thriller, really aren’t intimidating.)

With a better understanding of why it is so inane — and destructive — to evaluate schools using students’ scores on the wrong species of standardized tests, you can persuade anyone who’ll listen that policy makers need to make better choices. Our 40-year saga of unsound school evaluation needs to end. Now.

F for Assessment – Edutopia.org

F for Assessment

by W. James Popham

published 3/23/2005

Credit: VEER: James Godman

For the last four decades, students’ scores on standardized tests
have increasingly been regarded as the most meaningful evidence for
evaluating U.S. schools. Most Americans, indeed, believe students’
standardized test performances are the only legitimate indicator of a
school’s instructional effectiveness. Yet, although test-based
evaluations of schools seem to occur almost as often as fire drills, in
most instances these evaluations are inaccurate. That’s because the
standardized tests employed are flat-out wrong.

Standardized tests have been used to evaluate America’s schools
since 1965, when the U.S. Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA)
became law. That statute provided for the first major infusion of
federal funds into local schools and required educators to produce
test-based evidence that ESEA dollars were well spent. But how, you
might ask, could a practice that’s been so prevalent for so long be
mistaken? Just think back to the many years we forced airline
attendants and nonsmokers to suck in secondhand toxins because smoking
on airliners was prohibited only during takeoff and landing. Some
screwups can linger for a long time. But mistakes, even ones we’ve
lived with for decades, can often be corrected once they’ve been
identified, and that’s what we must do to halt today’s wrongheaded
school evaluations. If enough educators — and noneducators — realize
that there are serious flaws in the way we evaluate our schools, and
that those flaws erode educational quality, there’s a chance we can
stop this absurdity.  Click here to read on…

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Education Quotes

“The illiterate of the twenty-first century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” –Alvin Toffler