PROPOSED IDEAS/ISSUES FOR MARION COUNTY GREEN PARTY EDUCATION PLANK
1. Expand and/or duplicate current magnets and learning options that have a waiting list.

–Create new and different types/kinds of magnet/learning options.

–Encourage charter or charter-like schools, sponsored by local boards, within the regular public schools. Give these schools the freedom from many of the debilitating state rules and regulations. This will give these programs the flexibility to meet the diverse learning needs of students.

–Encourage teachers/parents/organizations/students or combinations of these groups to create innovative programs, or schools, or schools-within-schools, etc.

2. Have the Indiana legislature review and make appropriate state graduation and dropout rate calculation formulas.

–Current graduation rates are inflated and thus mislead the public as to the effectiveness of their schools (Associated Press, 2003; Telling the truth (or not about high school graduation rates, 2004).

–Dropout rate calculations must also be challenged. U.S. Secretary of Education Ron Paige announced the creation of a panel to review formulas (Expert panel to review high school dropout and graduation rates, 2004).

3. Encourage democratic education.

–Make public education feel like a public enterprise again (Meier, 2003).

–Realize our public schools must model democracy: Teachers and students must be a part of the classroom and school decisions that affect them.

–Advocates of democratic education believe that students, if they are to acquire the skills, knowledge, and values they need to perform their roles as citizens in a democracy, should receive a type of education that actively engages them as citizens in their own schools and communities. For example, they believe that students should participate in the governance of the school and engage in service-learning activities in their local communities. See Common Sense.

–This will help us abandon the contradictions in our culture that embrace democratic ends for its schools, but resist the practice of the democratic means from which the ends cannot be separated.

–Have local districts consider national and international initiatives for democratic education (First Amendment Schools, 2003; CIRCLE, 2003; Project 540, 2003; Soundout, 2003; International Democratic Education Net, 2003).

–Encourage school districts to realize the many positive outcomes of having students study and actually practice democracy through participation in classroom decisions, school governance, and community service (Hannam, 2001).

–Have students in all courses apply/relate what they are learning in the classroom to service learning, community problem solving, or real-world community experiences.

–Realize that democratic classrooms and schools offer the best hope for support of our public schools.

4. Review current alternative education and special education policies.

–Alternative education is a metaphor for our public school system.

–The very existence of alternative schools exposes the system’s faults and hides them at the same time: Difficult students are sent to “soft jail” alternatives to be “fixed” and returned to their home school. These alternatives cover up the more far reaching problems of the regular schools since rebellious or failing students are successfully segregated and labeled deviant. Alternative schools allow legislators, policy makers, and educators to avoid the necessity of making any changes in the regular school since it is the children, not the system, who must be fixed (Patterson, 2003).

–It shows its possibilities: Many of the present innovative policies such as small learning communities came out of the research and development of alternative education, an approach that challenged the traditional one-size-fits-all mentality. Pursuing a focus or theme, student and teacher choice, shared decision-making with students, learning/teaching styles, authentic assessment, service learning or internships, flexible scheduling and active learner engagement through individualized learning are practices that alternative school pioneered. In fact alternative public schools of choice are the clearest example of what a restructured school might look like (Lange & Sletten, 2002).

–Encourage districts to move from alternative education to educational alternatives.

–Provide learning alternatives for everyone all the time (Glines, 2002). Abandon the mentality that alternatives are just for the “bad” kids. Open Marion County alternatives to any student. This will remove the stigma and thus the implication that traditional school size, climate, and “one-size-fits-all” mentality are not a part of the problem of why traditional school does not work for some students (Loflin, 2003).

–Offer educational/learning alternatives, through small learning communities or alternative schools of choice, that follow all best practices (Loflin, 2004), to those students in the county’s large grade schools and middle schools, and local super-large high schools (North Central, Lawrence/North, Ben Davis, Pike, Perry Meridian) who would choose and benefit from these more personalized learning environments if available.

–Support the current breaking-up of IPS high schools into small learning communities where relationships and trust can be built.

–Encourage adoption and use of the ideas proposed in Breaking Ranks II: Strategies for High School Reform developed by the National Association of Secondary School Principals (http://www.nassp.org/breakingranks/BRII_policy.pdf) and Every Child a Graduate: A Framework for Excellent Education for All Middle and High School Students released by the Alliance for Excellence in Education. See www.All4Ed.org.

–Since, nationally, many students dropout after the 9th grade, support the emphasis on making sure students make a safe the transition to high school and on to the 10th grade via “Freshmen Centers” (McCleery & Renze-Rhodes, 2004).

–Eliminate the issue of social promotion vs. retention by providing 7-8th grade LEAP Academies for students 1-2 years behind. Through a challenging and accelerated learning program, students can catch up with their peers (Harrison, 1998).

–Currently, IPS Alpha programs in each high school intend to keep students, who are 15-16 years old and who are 9th graders—2 years behind their peers, in school. In light of recent national graduation rate studies (Orefield, Losen, & Wald, 2004) this approach is not working.

–Abandon and reinvent the concept of special education.

–Question the concept of LD (Armstrong 2004): Why are so many children seen as psycho-biologically impaired or diseased (Spear-Swerling & Sternberg, 1998)?

–Put a moratorium on the placing of Black boys in special education classes unless they have a physical disability. Too many are placed due to behavior, not learning problems (Russo & Talbert-Johnson, 1997; Kunjufu, 1999).

–Help teachers and staff with educating Black males.

–Review “too much schooling, too little education” arguments (Shujaa, 1994).

–Review middle-class teachers: help or hindrance (Kunjufu, 2003)?

–Review the role and importance of Black male teachers/administrators

–Issue: Are Black males who are a part of public school system a part of the problem?

–Provide alternative learning environments that provide options to medications for students with ADHD (Carroll, 2004).

5. Assure that all students can read at grade level by the end of the 3rd grade

Support current efforts by IPS to reach this goal. Encourage other districts to follow IPS’s leadership.

–Encourage the use of the adolescent literacy initiative, “Adolescents and Literacy:Reading for the 21st Century” sponsored by Alliance for Excellence in Education. See www.all4Ed.org.

6. Abandon the “one-size-fits-all” approach and the Bell curve mentality.

–Customize learning

–Weave learning-styles, multiple intelligences, and brain-based education (Guild &Chock-Eng, 1998) with the needs and interests of students to create personalized education plans (PEPs) for each student (Scherer, 1999).

–Expand what it means to be smart. When we expand the range of abilities we test for, we also expand the range of students we identify as smart (Sternberg, 1997).

–Consider the Seven Ability Plan: 7 Bell curves for each student (Skromme, 1998). Many students do poorly because school only regards academics and does not recognize and test for hidden abilities such as creativity, dexterity, personality, judgment, empathy, or motivation.

–Successful intelligence (SI): This kind of intelligence differs from IQ. SI maintains that the best predictor of success in the real world are creative and practical intelligence. These individuals may not do well on tests, but are “smart” at achieving. They know how to make the most of what they do well and find ways to work around their limitations (Sternberg, 1996).

–Social/emotional intelligence: It is the effective domain, not the cognitive that will determine the future (Glines, 2004).

–Taking the above ideas into account will democratize our concept of intelligence(Williams, 1998) because when we value all abilities, talents and intelligences, not just the academic (analytic/memory IQ), we will find thousands of kids are smarter than we think (Sternberg, 1997).

–Abandon the Bell curve mentality by providing a school climate that promotes a high level of learning for all students. When all students are given the same task, given the same amount of time to accomplished it (or not) and given the same test to show what they have learned, a Bell curve is automatically created. This can be eliminated by outcome-based education/performance-based assessments where students are given the pace/time they need to learn–and assessment options that are used to improve, not just grade, learning. When learning is personalized, we can have high expectations for all students because they are given the time and personalized learning and assessment alternative(s) to accomplish the task and show what they have learned.

–The at-risk do not need slow learning; they need accelerated learning–the same high expectations, academically challenging, and enriched learning provided to the gifted and talented (Barr & Parrett, 2003). The at-risk need to be given the opportunity to analyze, synthesize, and evaluate what they are learning; and, to apply what they have learned across disciplines, in real-world predictable and unpredictable situations as illustrated in Daggett’s Relational Model (Daggett & Kruse,1997).

–Along with the traditional objective classroom exams and high-stakes ISTEP/GQE assessments, provide a variety of non-traditional assessments that measure how a student thinks about and applies acquired knowledge and skill over and above the ability to recall facts. Examples are the use of rubrics/scoring guides, oral quizzes, student self-evaluations, performance-based assessment, and portfolios (Smith, J. 1997). Each provides an option for student success (Combs, 1997).

–Multimedia projects and performance-based presentations. Student produced multimedia presentations are both a way of learning course content, and a way of authentically assessing learning since it connects learning to the real world (Simkins, Cole, Travalin, & Means, 2002).

–Portfolios and graduation by exhibition: Alternative Community School Ithaca, NY (607-274-2183) lists over 150 colleges and universities that accept portfolios, not GPAs, for admission. Some educators believe Final Graduation Exhibitions of the skills, knowledge and attitudes needed to be global citizens are a better way of determine how well students did in high school than GPAs.

7. Abandon the limited definition of parental/guardian-school involvement. Turn parents/guardians from clients to partners in all school decisions. Although school personnel support the general idea of parental involvement, they consider involvement worthwhile only if it relates to the parent’s children rather than the broader issues related to school at large. This is because traditionally parents and community members have been viewed as clients. The client concept implies parents and community members are: dependent on an expert’s opinions, passive recipients of services, in need of redirection, and peripheral in decision-making. Partners suggest that parents and community members are: active and central in decision-making and its implementation, having equal strengths and equivalent expertise, are reciprocal in contributing and receiving services, and share responsibility as well as accountability with the professionals. Besides answering the phone or holding bake sales, parental involvement in school personnel and budget priority issues, scheduling matters, and all other important school decisions—sharing

responsibility for the school, will help move them from clients to responsible authentic partners. And if parents are not qualified to make these decisions, train them to do so (Kahn, 1996).

8. Abandon the deficit model of children.

Encourage a new vision of so-called low-performing students:

Current View ————————> A New Vision

Deprived —————————> Culturally different

Failing/low achieving ——–> Unrecognized abilities
———”——————————>/underdeveloped potential

Unmotivated—————–>Engaged/self-motivated/effortful

At risk—————————————–>Resilient

–The new vision challenges the deficit model–a model that assumes the problem for school failure is located in and limited to a lack in the culture, in abilities, in motivation, or in coping skills of the children and their families (Laden-Billings, 1994; Williams, 2003).

9. Don’ t forget the arts: Art as the 4th R.

Most schools discuss what foreign language the school will teach. Spanish, French, Japanese…are mentioned. Curiously, “the arts” are not. Yet, that’s what “the arts” are, another language. Dance, sculpting, weaving, pottery, drama and screen/play writing, poetry, singing, playing and composing music, drawing/painting/animation, movie and video making are now ways of self expression, expressing ideas, understanding and expressing understanding—making them invaluable classroom tools for reaching a wide variety of learners and assessing student efforts. The also help learning by developing a student’s integrated sensory, attentional, cognitive, emotional, and motor capacities—brain systems that are the driving force behind all other learning (Jensen, 2001). The arts teach discipline and self-expression. We become more fully human, because the arts help us represent what we cannot express in other forms.

–Presently, what is absolutely astounding, is that this point of view is being expanded, mostly due to desktop publishing—creating the concept of media literacy (Ohler, 2000). In an era when students design Web sites for projects and integrate video, graphics, and animation into their presentations, art is fast becoming the new literacy of our times: To be fully literate, art must be included. Easy-to-use multimedia computer technology has open up the world of the “artist” in us all.

–Multimedia communications is spreading throughout the internationally connected world of the Internet—citizens of the world are moving away from “text-centric” communications and towards pictures, diagrams, sound, movement and other more universal forms of communication.

–Media literacy teaches students to evaluate the many media images and messages that surround them, will give then the tools to make responsible choices about what they see and hear.

–Encourage school leaders to value the arts as much as math, reading, or science by seeing the work of teachers either in the arts or with arts integration as legitimate as and accountable as other subjects (Allen, 2004).

10. Teaching the Information Generation: Understand that technology is youth culture.

–Incorporate technology into all aspects of teaching, learning, and assessment.

–Encourage educators to reflect on ways that technology influences the “I” Generation —and what they need to know about its impact on teaching and learning (Scherer, 2000).

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© John Harris Loflin 2005 Black & Latino Policy Institute