Who’s raising the children in your neighborhood?
You might think their parents are, but you’d be wrong about that. In most neighborhoods children are in day care or pre-school before they reach kindergarten.
By the time they’re in second grade, they spend 7 hours per day with their classmates, and a few more hours Monday through Friday with the television.
By the time they’re in junior high, they’re like hotel guests in their parents’ homes.
They eat there; they sleep there; they don’t live there.
Their peer group is elsewhere. They entertain themselves elsewhere. They work and study elsewhere. If they’re in front of a computer -at home- they’re virtually elsewhere.
They engage peers, friends, online friends-whom-they’ve-never-met, and maybe a coach or a teacher, but where are the parents?
Too many parents’ conversations with their children are limited to interactions like this:
“Did you get enough to eat?” “How much money do you need?” ”What time do you have to get up?”
That’s pretty much the interest you’d get from a waitress, a bank teller, and a concierge. Family time has gone by the wayside and the result is children raising children. Most teens seek the approval of their peers far more than the approval of their parents.
When was the last time you had a conversation with a teenager that didn’t have to do with meeting an immediate need… a conversation not borne of necessity… a conversation that engaged their thoughts on something at least a year away?
There are good teachers and bad teachers in public education, but blaming the teacher doesn’t begin to address the problems with public education.
If you aren’t happy about curriculum, the teacher may not be either, but curriculum is mandated by the state. The teacher doesn’t get to choose the curriculum.
Don’t like the lack of discipline in the classroom? That’s usually an administration problem. Schools don’t get money for students on suspension, so they keep them in the classroom regardless of behavioral issues.
No child left behind equals all children left behind. Teachers don’t like that rule either.
Your student isn’t being adequately prepared for college? Take another look at curriculum.
Class size is too large? The district had to downsize and administrators weren’t about to cut their own jobs.
Materials aren’t contemporary? It’s hard to pay for new books and computers when your district used funding for new administrator offices.
Lots of money gets pumped into this country’s educational system, but the teachers don’t get to make decisions about how it’s used, and very little of it is spent on students. If you aren’t pleased with the way things are going at your child’s school, consider running for the local school board and increasing your input in support of teachers and students.
Innovation is the difference between being a leader or a follower.
Google and 3M don’t just encourage their employees to be innovative. They allow their employees time to think of new ideas… to just think of stuff.
In the spirit of promoting personal motivation in learners, it would be interesting to do the same thing with students. Encourage them to think of innovative ideas they can implement.
Students who are taught to build contraptions and gizmos are more likely to apply that experience to future projects. The behavior of creating something is a behavior. It’s applicable across fields. A 9 year old who builds a catapult is more likely to see his ideas as something build-able than a 15 year old who has never been encouraged to make anything.
One instructor I knew made her class engage in a political action for an assignment. The students had to create a political action that they all agreed on, plan it, and carry it out. The result was a classroom full of students who were familiar enough with the process to repeat it.
Education is a dialogue, not a monologue. Students need to invest their energy, to speak up, to act, and to create. This facilitates leadership.
Thousand of teachers are being laid off due to mismanaged state budgets.
17, 000 layoff notices were sent to teachers in Illinois, 22,000 in California, and 15,000 in New York.
The numbers will increase. The U.S. Secratary of Education, Arne Duncan, believes that between 100,000 and 300,000 public education jobs in the U.S. are in danger.
This is too often highlighted as an economic concern and is overlooked as an educational concern.
The effect of these layoffs will likely have a much higher cost as we institutionalize future students in schools that don’t have enough teachers to meet the demand.
This will result in an uneducated work force whose future earnings are limited to direct labor. As the U.S. education continues to fall behind other countries when it comes to technology, this will cause even greater disparity.
It’s no secret that your computer has a camera. But you probably don’t think it’s been used to spy on you.
Students in the Lower Marion School district in Philadelphia made the same assumption, and were wrong. The students were using school computers at home. According to the district, computers were loaded with “tracking devices” that would enable theft recovery.
The tracking devices were designed to take a snapshot every 15 minutes, and relay the photo for tracking purposes. It seems like a simple GPS feed would have been more accurate, but the district wanted pics. Why?
How many candid pics did the district get? 56,000
Roughly 38,500 of those images are believed to have been captured by 6 stolen laptops. So that leaves 17,500 candid pics of high school students taken without permission. 
The FBI has gotten involved and the case is under investigation.
This raises continued safety issues for students and responsible educators everywhere. Warn your students that their computers are visual, 2-way devices, and a cheap video camera can be as small as a flash drive.
The more we use computers to learn, the more important it becomes to protect our privacy and the privacy of those we teach.
If you’ve come face to face with the failures of the U.S. educational system, but don’t know how to stop the corruption in your child’s school, here’s the guidebook.
Stopping School Corruption is an extremely inexpensive guidebook designed to help parents stop an increasingly expensive problem: lousy public education. If you’re getting stiffed by public education and you aren’t sure how to fight back, here’s what you need to know.
Solutions are given for improving the financial quagmire that is hurting schools at the district and classroom level. This book will give you the tools to put educators and administrators back on track.
The Article “Stupid In America...” includes a 40 minute video that addresses the failures of the American Educational System. It’s well worth watching.
The failure of American Schools isn’t related to money. It’s related to mismanagement. The video addresses the following problems.
1. Students and parents aren’t allowed to choose their district, and the lack of competition has allowed school administrations to slack off.
2. Unions protect bad teachers and teachers whose classroom activities are inappropriate.
3. The education system’s shift from being service oriented to being business oriented has made school administrators wealthier while students get substandard educations.
4. Too much money goes in to administrators pockets, or office buildings. Not enough is spent on students.
5. Parental involvement is too low to help students succeed or to force schools to improve.
I have been writing grants for some time and I have learned a few things.
Here are my 5 steps to successful grant writing.
1. Identify your organization well. Your introduction letter should have enough information in it to give your funder a sense of who you are. This should include your name, address, Tax ID number incorporation date (per bylaws), contact person, past successes and future goals.
2. Identify your specific need. Your grant funder wants their money used for a specific and dynamic purpose. For example, instead of asking for money, ask for “funding for new sports equipment of a specific kind, to be used by a specific number of people for a specific purpose.
3. Identify the people you want to help. If you are not making a difference in the world, then what’s the difference? Continue reading '5 Steps To Successful Grant Writing'»
The Achelis Foundation of New York Focus area: New York
The Polk Bros. Foundation, Inc. Focus area: Illinois
PNM Resources Foundation, Inc. Focus area: New Mexico and Texas
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