Ignorance on the school board and “what’s an analog clock?”

Ignorance on the school board and “what’s an analog clock?”

Its election time in Tennessee

Its election time and for whatever reason I get a spate of calls from local candidates seeking my support. This time a person running for the school board called me. I told him that I would not support anyone who did not aggressively advocate for Direct Instruction and phonics. He had no clue what I was talking about. I said “How can you run for the school board if you don’t know about the effectiveness of teaching methods?” He mumbled something about my being able to educate him. I said no. Educate yourself. That episode highlighted how useless is the Board of “Education” in educating our kids. Earlier when I tried to get three different board members interested in alternative instruction methods, none showed any interest in changing the status quo even though their schools had proficiency levels of under 10 percent.

I could care less how the school administration is spending my money. All I care about is educating our children to read, write and do arithmetic. Nothing else matters to me. The current method of instruction written in all the texts by professors of education who then teach it in their classrooms and is endorsed by the accreditation boards is called “balanced literacy” which ignores phonics. When I tried to get a reading curriculum put into the Knoxville schools based on phonics, the school superintendent rejected it because “it contains too much reading.” I kid you not. But phonics works. I’ve written about the Mississippi miracle where that state that was last in reading proficiency adopted phonics and has now risen up to 11^th. I was once told that by using phonics in K-3, children learn to read. Afterwards they read to learn. The reading scores in Knoxville’s elementary schools are abysmal. We all should be ashamed that in the city with the University of Tennessee that our children can’t read and the school administration and board of education refuse to do anything about it.

I’ve posted before Here the 2024 third grade reading chart for Knox County. Here it is again. The plot has proficiency on the vertical axis and economic disadvantaged on the horizontal axis. The red line is the state average which is abysmal. Knox county is worse. Only 17 of the 52 Knox County elementary schools are above the line. This should be scandalous. Direct Instruction has shown that virtually every child can read at grade level unless suffering from a serious learning deficiency. Even the best elementary school in the county is at less than 90 percent proficiency. It has less than 10 percent disadvantaged students. Note the one outlier. The second highest school has 40 percent disadvantaged. Why doesn’t the superintendent take what is working at that school and impose it throughout the system? That he doesn’t is the clearest indication that he should be fired. But of course, the school board would have to do that and they don’t have a clue – or care – about proficiency either. I think the surest way to motivate the superintendent would be to tie his salary increases to changes in proficiency.

My annual “wellness” exam

I had my annual physical – now called a “wellness” exam because I am 80. The nurse had two memory tests. The first was she wanted me to draw a clock showing 11:10. So I drew this one

She was aghast and said “I meant the clock with the numbers on it and the hands showing 11:10.” I then drew this one

She also said that I had to remember three words and that she would ask me later what they were. They were “village, kitchen and baby.” So when she asked me I said to her: “Do you remember what the three words were?” She said yes. I said that maybe I didn’t believe her and if she had forgotten them, then when I told her the right words, she would say that I was wrong remember when in fact I was right. I told her to write them down first. Of course, I was joking but for some reason she didn’t appreciate my sense of humor.