What would Galileo Say?

For those who are hoping for positive results from the Galileo School for Math & Science in the old East Middle School building in D11, I would suggest that you lower your expectations.

According to the Gazette on 27 September, Daniel Pink, an author who emphasizes feelings over learning, was in attendance at the grand opening of the math and science magnet. He was quoted as saying, "If you can write down the steps and it has a right answer, it's gone." This seems like a very odd comment to make at the opening of a math and science school. Despite opinions to the contrary, math has answers, and coincidently, so does science. Further, both of these fields involve specific processes and steps to analyze data and to determine solutions to problems. If the staff of Galileo believe as Pink believes, this school is doomed to failure.

Pink is the hero of anti-parent politician Mike (hey wife, go steal some signs for me) Merrifield, the Manitou Springs relativist. He believes that the solution to our education woes is to declare that there is no longer any right or wrong and that all that matters is that students feel good about themselves after they spend their days in school being told that feeling good is more important than learning. Or, if one happens to have been a female student at Coronado when Mike was the music teacher, all that mattered was time spent in the music room. Math and science are topics from the past. With calculators, says, Merrifield, there is no reason to put our dear children through the anxiety of having to learn math. Sadly, Merrifield has great sway over D11, so chances are, Galileo staff likely will follow the thinking of Pink, much to the detriment of Galileo students.

In a strange irony, Galileo was well know for pioneering the use of quantitative experiments whose results could be analyzed with mathematical precision. It looks to me as if he thought that math and science were processes that consist of steps and right answers.

There is no doubt that the arts are an important component of a solid education. To declare that math and science are dead, (which, sadly, is a true statement in America's public schools), is to encourage the further dismantling of an education system that continues to threaten the future of this nation.

Let us now turn to the mission statement of the Galileo school to determine how the school staff plans to succeed. The mission, as posted on the D11 Galileo web site, is as follows: “The mission of Galileo School of Math and Science is to establish an integrated, creative, technology-enriched, and individual talents abilities, skills, creativity, and potential of its students while promoting cultural responsiveness. This mission will be accomplished through academically rigorous, standards-based educational programs in the context of discipline, respect, and a high degree of community involvement.”

If you are able to put meaning behind that mission statement, you are probably over-qualified for the school. I suppose D11 never did claim thatGalileo was to be an English literacy or grammar magnet.

If you think the English is bad on the web page, wait until you see the Latin. Under a sub-topic titled “What We Offer” is this paragraph: “Ut lacreet dolore magna aliquam sic semper fi tyrannis erat volutpat. Wisi enim ad minim veniam. Dolore eu sata sfeugiat. Ipsum lorem vei illum sat dolor euis mod tincidunt vei auminiure dolor in esse. Ultaceet dolore magna si napi. Wisi e nim ad minim veniam, quis nos In a tsvulpate velt esse meleste at semper manet sola. UT lacreet dolore magna aliquam sic semp fi tyrannis erat volutpat. Wisi enim ad minim veniam. Dolore eu sata sfeugiat."

Immediately next to this paragraph is another titled: “Where we Deliver.” Under this heading is the exact same paragraph as above. This page can be found at http://www.d11.org/GALILEO/aboutus.htm.

Such high hopes, such an embarrassing start. Typical D11.

Shameless

On September 17th, the Gazette ran an opinion piece exposing the fact that School District 11 has filed a lawsuit against the State Board of Education for requiring that D11 enter into an operational agreement with an online charter school, the Hope Academy. In setting a new standard for shameless behavior, D11 CFO Glen Gustafson has sent a letter to surrounding school districts begging them for money to help D11 in its lawsuit. In other words, not only is D11 throwing away D11 tax payer dollars towards this ridiculous lawsuit, but it is asking citizens of other districts to help defray the cost of this very stupid decision by the D11 board and administration.

D11 is facing a financial crisis that began in the 1990s as labor union purchased school boards turned a blind eye to poor classroom performance by teachers who were being led by inept administrators. Due to the decrease in the quality of education being offered by D11 schools, parents began to move to districts that tended to show an interest in educating kids. Those parents who remained within D11 boundaries began to home school, permit their kids into surrounding districts, or send their kids to charter schools.

To this day, D11 administrators and board members simply don’t get it. They somehow believe that they have a right to take ½ billion dollars from the tax payers, fail to use this money to adequately educate kids, and then force parents to send their kids to the failing schools. They are outraged when parents and business leaders take the initiative to create alternate choices for their children in efforts to give their kids the type of education that D11 personnel are simply not qualified to offer. Now they have stooped to a new low, begging surrounding tax payers to keep D11 students in rotting schools.

Not only is D11 begging for help to finance an absurd lawsuit, it once again has its hand ready to reach into the D11 tax payers’ pockets for an additional $20 million to add to the already $500 million budget. The last mill levy passed in 2000, and D11 made bold promises to the business community to garner support from the business community for that tax hike. These promises included a guarantee to meet 11 performance goals and to allow a bi-annual review of the district by a group called QPG. In each of the district reviews since the passage of the levy in 2000, QPG has noted that D11 has not kept its promises on these 11 goals. Each year, D11 tells the business community that they just need one more year and then they will meet those goals. The business leaders have been foolishly buying the district’s pleas for more time.

What does the district plan to do with this additional money that it can’t accomplish with its ½ billion dollar budget? They went to the old standby pledge: reduce class size. Yes, that’s right. Here you have a district that is hemorrhaging students, and they are telling us that they need money to reduce class size. D11 already has enough teachers to have class sizes of 16 or fewer per class. The goal based on the 2000 tax increase was an average class size of 22 students. The district is well below that average right now. If we are to believe that the addition of more teachers is the trick that will finally stop the train wreck that is coming in D11, then how can the district explain the poor performance of those schools in the district with the smallest student to teacher ratio? Oh wait a minute – that’s right. The explanation is what it has always been. Those students, well, you know, they are poor and minority, and everyone in the labor union and everyone with a higher level education degree in D11 will tell you that “those” students just can’t learn. So give them $20 million and that money will apparently be used to educate those students who can learn.

Remember the good old days when all of D11’s problems were blamed on those nasty board members who were elected in 2003? Remember how those nasty board members were causing undo stress by demanding that people be held accountable for their performance? Remember how all it would take to stop the sinking D11 ship was for those nasty board members to go away and allow people who care about children to guide the district? Welcome to the fantasyland that is D11. The ship continues to sink, the board continues to sleep, the labor union continues to do nothing, and the six figure earning bureaucrats continue to laugh at the tax payers for allowing them to play pretend with the lives of their students.