Great Turnout for screening of August to June, Bringing Life to School

About 100 people met at UAH to view the educational documentary last Thursday. A lively discussion followed the screening with audience participation. The audience was a mix of parents, teachers and education students. Several grads of Country Day shared their thoughts about the influence they felt our kind of individualized education had made on their lives. The roundtable consisted of Dr. pat Kuby, professor at Athens State, Dr. Pam Patrick and Dr. Phillip Kovack, professors, from UAH,and Deborah Baker from the Village of Promise. Each expressed their own concerns and opinions that our current public schools are pushing academics and developmentally inappropriate learning downward into Kindergaten and the Pre-K programs and several spoke of this as a form of educational child abuse. They felt that the joy of learning was being extinguished by third grade. All decried the current emphasis on testing and teaching isolated skills. All felt that more emphasis should be placed upon whole child development which was displayed in the film. We hope to find other films to bring to our community in the future to keep awareness and dialogue going.

Audio Recording (1): August to June Movie
Audio Recording (2): Roundtable Discussion
Audio Recording (3): Roundtable Discussion Ending
Video Recording: Some short clips during Roundtable Discussion

State waivers granted to exempt from No Child Left Behind!

Today the Obama administration has granted ten states a waiver to exempt them from the hated No Child Left Behind federal law. This is wonderful news for the schools, teachers, and students in these states. Without the pressure to constantly "teach the test" teachers will be freed to educate children to their fullest potentials. This law, while well intended, has done great harm to our countries educational system in the past ten years. I am hopeful ALL states will soon be waived and that we can get back to the important business of really educating our nations youth, instead of just trying to jump through federally mandated hoops!

Legislature will consider charter schools

I have previously written about Charter schools, public schools which are freed from much of the problematic central regulation which makes it so difficult for good teachers to educate kids beyond test taking skills. I have said that I did not think Alabama would ever have the opportunity to try them. I may have been wrong. There is a new bill coming in front of the legislature in two weeks that has Gov. Bentley's support and the support of the republican held majority. Locally Phil Williams is behind this bill. The AEA and the superintendents are against it. It will be very interesting to see what will happen. I am told that it will only be for a certain population of students and that Birmingham and Montgomery are the favorites to get a nod to try some pilot schools. Politics come to bear in all things. Of course, my personal preference has always been that parents get vouchers to send their child to whatever school they feel will educate them best....public or private. This was a serious consideration during Bush One and I can only wonder how much better off the state of American education would be right now if it that had been allowed to happen.