Serving Lincoln County for more than a century!
Serving Lincoln County for more than a century!
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For the past 16 years, former Odessa High School English teacher Dr. Duane Pitts, now semi-retired and living in Moses Lake, has written a special piece honoring the late Dr. King on the occasion of this national holiday. We can end homelessness, but don’t. Dr. King noted that our failure of will means we “cannot enter the kingdom of greatness.” Busing a homeless woman elsewhere, tossing a coin to a homeless family, punishing a homeless veteran for sleeping in the park are neither compassionate nor charitable. Each denie...
Homelessness, like poverty, is not a choice. Society creates the circumstances for both to exist, sometimes side by side. In other words, the misery experienced by the homeless and the poor is cruel and needless except to those who have political power to punish them for suffering under the conditions created by those who have power. For example, the recent ordinance by the Moses Lake City Council banning all citizens from using the parks between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. is such a punishment aimed with one particular group of...
Will a minimum wage of $15 an hour lift a full-time worker of a family of four out of poverty? Yes and No. Yes, it will; $15 an hour equals $25,923 yearly income. The poverty threshold for 2017 was $24,257. No, it won’t, because the threshold will increase over time, as it historically has, but the hourly wage income will remain the same. Crossing that imaginary line is easy. One visit to the hospital or one major problem with the car will return the whole family to poverty. We should want all families to feel secure with a l...
It’s that time of year again to make a New Year’s resolution. Like the Roman god Janus, we look to our past to see what didn’t work as we hoped and then to the future with a new promise, which we probably will not keep. But we can take comfort in having good intentions. As a nation, we sometimes make promises that we don’t keep either. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., had noted, one such unmet promise has yet to be fulfilled: Equality. When our Founding Fathers gave us the promissory note that “all men are created equal,” t...
Dissatisfaction with government has a long history in this country. Henry David Thoreau noted this in his 1849 essay “Civil Disobedience,” where he claimed that to achieve “at once a better government,” individuals first have to become more just themselves before the government will follow suit. He further suggested that people needed to live their faith, not give lip service to it. Then the State would be just to all and “treat each individual with respect as a neighbor.” However, being just with one another and treating ea...
In 1967, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. proposed his vision for America in his book Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? He challenged those in political and religious power to eliminate poverty once and for all. That gauntlet has yet to be picked up by any American leader. Dr. King held firmly to the belief that freedom is founded on the religious principle that every life – rich and poor, white and Black, Republican and Democrat – is a reflection of God in us. He further asserted that “every act of injus...
As Veterans’ Day approaches, I begin reminiscing. When I was about eight or nine years old, my father introduced me to Sgt. Wilburn Ross at Fort Lewis. All the non-coms and officers looked up to Sgt. Ross in total awe and reverence. We were in the presence of greatness. I thought then, and do so now think, that this man, a recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor, walked on water! Years later I would understand what he did as Private Ross on October 30, 1944, near St. Jacques, France. Single-handedly, he killed or wounde...
“True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar….it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.” – Martin Luther King Jr. Today’s TV commentaries about economic justice may seem new to many of the younger generation, but in his December 1964 speech “Accepting the New York City Medallion [the highest civilian award given by New York City], Martin Luther King, Jr., addressed the issue: “In both Norway and Sweden, whose economies are literally dwarfed by the size of our affluence and...
Decades of research indicate that poverty has a huge impact on student learning. According to professor emeritus Stephen Krashen of the University of Southern California, studies show that “more poverty means lower scores on all measures of school achievement.” Many studies show that poverty negatively impacts school performance. In brief, here are some findings: - Children of poverty are more likely to suffer a lack of adequate food, resulting in slower language development and behavioral problems. - High-poverty fam...
Ever since Sputnik ascended the heavens in 1957, education reforms have consistently failed to improve schools. Why has there been no improvement? David Berliner offers an answer: Failure does not reside inside the schools. He states: “The sources of America’s educational problems are outside school, primarily a result of income inequality.” However, the U.S. Department of Education‘s goal is that “with better teaching, we will have more learning [higher test scores], and this will improve the economy.” As Berliner no...
In 1943, Professor Abraham Maslow of Brooklyn College proposed that human behavior is guided by five basic needs (in this order): 1) physiological, 2) safety, 3) belongingness, 4) esteem, and 5) self-actualization. People, children included, are motivated to fulfill the basic needs (1-3) first before moving on to the last two needs. In other words, food and shelter (1), safety and protection (2), love and affection (3) come before learning or achieving on test or in school (4 and 5). Individuals will not move on to higher...
Many students in high-poverty schools perform poorly on state tests already. With Congress’s plan to cut food stamps for the poor, elderly, and disabled, schools nationwide will face much greater difficulties in educating hungry children. Then add the cost for technology to make Common Core testing possible. Many schools have trouble now connecting to the Internet, and others have many connections but terrible WiFi infrastructure. Systems have been known to crash on the day of testing, forcing students in mid-keystroke of a...
In Part 7, we saw Common Core curriculum being used with second-graders in New York. For K-12, the standards, readings, and suggested curriculum remain about the same – developmentally inappropriate for learners, especially in elementary school. How did it come to this? According to the 2010 U.S. Census and the National Center for Education Statistics, 13,604 school districts oversee the more than 100,000 public schools serving about 50 million students. I understand that about 100 high-poverty school districts formed the bas...
Many teachers are concerned about the Common Core State Standards. Compounding their anxieties, Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Education, has noted that the CCSS establishes national standards for the country, as though they had never existed before. However, we have had national standards for a long time. Since World War 2, textbook publishers have competed with each other for the school textbook market. As a result, many texts from different publishers were barely distinguishable from one another. That is still the case...
Marianne Iksic and I realized that though the state standards were superior, the new national standards were here to stay. About 90-95% of our English program matched the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). At Common Core English workshops, we both have heard teachers’ concerns, the major one being that the CCSS would dictate the books that teachers were to teach and students to read. When teachers saw, for example, that Alice Walker’s The Color Purple or William Faulkner’s The Sound and Fury were marked at the 4th grade...
As we learn from home and research, the most important influence on a child is the parent. Next, we learn that daily support in reading from parents and other adults contributes greatly to the child’s success in reading. Then comes the inevitable question: What do I do when my child gets stuck reading? Well, there are several strategies that teachers use with K-3 children that parents can also use at home. In fact, these strategies also work on readers of any age. The parent can ask the child, “What would make sense her...
As noted last week, the backlash against Common Core State Standards (CCSS) has begun. A look back to two years ago may provide some insight into the current groundswell against the CCSS. In 2010-2011, Marianne Iksic and I examined the English portion of the national standards. We shared the same understanding – the state standards were as good as, if not better than, the CCSS. The only major differences in the national curriculum were the use of traditional grammar (labeling by parts of speech), an emphasis on a...
Research into early reading shows numerous elements that help children become readers. Teachers know these factors; and if parents know also, they can support their children at home with some of the same information. I comment on some of them in no particular order. One, exposing children to books and literature from infancy, maybe even before birth, helps them as readers when they go to school. The town library has an excellent elementary collection of books that parents can use all year long, in addition to the elementary...
Common Core is the most recent version of a five-decade long reform movement, which has stressed over and over that public schools are failing. It all started with Sputnik. In 2012, McDonnell and Weatherford, professors at UC-Santa Barbara, examined the connection of Common Core, policy, and politics. Contrary to common perception, public schools were not failing. They discovered that politics determined the definitions of what makes up “research” in order to support policy decisions concerning the Common Core State Standards...
When parents read aloud to their young children, they can also do any of the following, which teachers do all the time. As I noted before, when parents and teachers share some of the common methods in helping children understand books, the child gains confidence at home and school that he is a reader. While you read the book, let your child make comments on events and characters in the story. Part of good reading is having ideas about what one is reading, and then sharing them with someone else. Reading is not always a...
Last week we discovered that President Eisenhower’s decision to let the Russians launch a satellite first was a military-political decision; it had nothing to do with the education system in the United States, which he deemed as successful. Since 1957, though, the claim has often been asserted that the public schools are failing the nation. Common Core was established in part to address the “failure” of the schools with a national curriculum, to create one system based on standards to hold schools accountable. Common Core...
"People cannot learn by having information pressed into their brains. Knowledge has to be sucked into the brain, not pushed in. First, one must create a state of mind that craves interest and wonder. "You can teach only by creating an urge to know." Victor Weisskopf (1908-2002) As this school year comes to a close, I look bakc upon my 42 years of teaching. It's been an interesting journey, to say the least. I began in what was then the largest high school in Georgia with 2,100 students, and I end in a rural eastern...
On Monday, January 21, we celebrate both Martin Luther King, Jr., Day and the inauguration of Barack Obama. Much has happened between the Civil Rights Movement, which began in 1954 with Brown vs. Board of Education, to the election of America’s first bi-racial president to another term in office. In April of 1968, King went to Memphis, Tennessee, to support the sanitation workers striking for better working conditions and a living wage. Not only had he fought discrimination against all minorities in this country, he also c...
In this last column on how to become a superstar student, Michael Geisen emphasizes balance. You need balance for yourself as well. Having a fulfilling community life and personal life will make you a healthier, happier and more interesting person. A balanced mind and a balanced life are important. Your future employers and the colleges or technical institutes you apply to won’t just be looking at your grades and SAT or ACT or AP test scores. They are going to consider your life skills and experiences. They want to know if y...
Last week, we looked at Michael Geisen’s suggestions about how to prepare for a test. This week, we will examine what to do during the test and after the test. Instead of diving into the test when the teacher hands it to you, you need a strategy to approach it so you know what to expect. First, scan the whole test. This will give you an idea of the formats and concepts you will need to deal with. You also may find answers to some questions within other questions. Second, divide and conquer time management. Figure out which s...
