News & Observer, Charlotte Observer, Whitehouse.gov----
(Many parents are in an uproar over Pres. Obama's upcoming school speech to America's students, however none of them have said a thing about America's failing public schools or our country's high drop-out rate.)
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(Republican Jim Greer speaks out about Pres. Obama's speech to students scheduled to be delivered nationwide next Tuesday.)
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(PSAs for Pres. Obama's upcoming School Speech to Students.)
Ire, accolades precede speech to kids
A Presidential Speech urging students to take responsibility for their own academic success is turning into a political flashpoint in Charlotte and the nation.
At issue: President Obama's 15-minute address to students at noon next Tuesday – and the U.S. Department of Education's detailed instructions on how to prepare students for it.
Some see it as an attempt to force government in general and Obama's beliefs in particular into the minds of kids. They're especially outraged by activity guides that suggest students discuss such questions as “What is President Obama inspiring you to do?”
“I am simply basing my opinion on what Pres. Obama has done thus far in his presidency, appointing czars with communist and socialist ties and speaking out against America and our founding fathers,” Hildi Chinigo of
Matthews wrote in an e-mail to the Observer.
Others see something to celebrate: “I think it is wonderful that the President is going to speak to schoolchildren,” wrote Maddy Baer of Charlotte. “Whether or not you voted for him or support particular policies, he is a role model of achievement for all young people.”
And still others are aghast at how much adult political bitterness is spilling onto a classroom event.
“Gracious, how deeply can this culture divide itself and still hold as a nation?” wrote Tish Signet of Mooresville.
As national bloggers and talk shows urged parents to keep their kids out of school, school districts around the region reassured families that no student would be forced to watch the speech.
All Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools will show it, but parents can request that their kids not participate, said spokeswoman LaTarzja Henry, who said central offices have been bombarded with calls and e-mails.
“This is more of an opt-out thing. We're encouraging participation,” she said.
Officials in Cabarrus, Union and York County, S.C., also said student participation is optional and teachers have discretion about how to work it into lessons.
Some districts say no
Faced with criticism from GOP lawmakers and regular citizens, districts in states including Texas, Illinois, Virginia and Wisconsin have decided not to show the speech to students.
White House officials agreed Thursday to post the speech online Monday so teachers and parents can be prepared. They also revised study guides that were “inartfully worded” – rewriting, for example, a line that suggested students “write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president.”
But White House deputy policy director Heather Higginbottom stood by the overall approach: “It's simply a plea to students to really take their learning seriously. Find out what they're good at. Set goals. And take the school year seriously.”
She noted that President George H.W. Bush made a similar address to schools in 1991. Like Obama, Bush drew criticism, with Democrats accusing the Republican president of making the event into a campaign commercial.
At South Charlotte Middle, Principal Christine Waggoner said she's trying to avoid letting political conflict create student drama. She notified parents in her electronic newsletter that students who want to opt out should privately tell their homeroom teacher. Those students will go somewhere else during the speech. For instance, she said, eighth-graders will watch in the cafeteria during their normal lunch time; students who aren't watching can eat in the courtyard.
She said teachers have the Department of Education activity sheets, but it's up to them to create lessons. For instance, a weekly career-education class will probably focus on goal-setting. “Everybody can set goals,” Waggoner said. “I don't think they need to listen to a speech.”
Politics and the classroom
Obama will speak at a high school in Arlington, Va., on a day that's the first day of school in some states (Carolinas kids started last month). The speech will air live on C-SPAN and videostream on the White House Web site.
As the White House site describes it, “the President will talk directly to students across the country on the importance of taking responsibility for their education, challenging them to set goals and do everything they can to succeed.” White House officials said Thursday they'll post the remarks Monday at www.white house.gov , allowing schools and parents to be prepared.
Bloggers, politicians and talk-show hosts seized on the speech and the Education Department's push to get schools to participate, getting the word out even before education officials had sent out news releases.
Florida's Republican Party chair, Jim Greer, issued a statement saying “President Obama has turned to American's children to spread his liberal lies, indoctrinating American's youngest children before they have a chance to decide for themselves.”
N.C. GOP chair Tom Fetzer joined in with a different tack: “This speech is clearly political in nature and has no place in the classroom. Our focus should be improving our students' test scores, not the President's approval rating.”
Tammy Bruce, a Los Angeles-based conservative talk-show host, posted on Twitter that Sept. 8 should be “skip day,” adding that “parents are the moral tutors of their children, not a lawyer from Chicago sitting in the WH.”
In Charlotte, talk show host Tara Servatius brought up the topic on WBT radio, complete with an online poll on whether listeners would let their kids participate.
A moment for teaching
Ken Gjertsen, a school board member and CMS parent, said he had several e-mails from upset parents Wednesday. He said he understands concerns about whether the speech will be political and disrupt classroom time, but he won't keep his children away.
“It's a president of the United States who is deserving of respect, and if we can instill that in our schoolkids, that's a good thing,” Gjertsen said. But he added that it might have been smarter to schedule the speech in the evening, when children and parents could watch and discuss it together.
Amy Farrell, executive director of Kids Voting, applauded the chance for students to hear the president speak in language aimed at them, in a classroom setting.
“I would like to see this become an annual trend. It would be a neat thing for students to look forward to,” she said.
Farrell, whose nonprofit group promotes civic education, urged parents to seize the moment for a lesson: “Part of civic dialogue is there are going to be people you don't agree with. We need to teach students not to just yell at them or not go to school.”
President's talk alarms Parents
President Barack Obama's plan to deliver a speech to public school students Tuesday has sparked a revolt among Conservative parents, who have accused the president of trying to indoctrinate their children with socialist ideas and are asking school officials to excuse the children from listening.
The uproar over the speech, in which Obama intends to urge students to work hard and stay in school, has been particularly acute in Texas, where several major school districts, under pressure from parents, have laid plans to let children opt out of lending the president an ear.
Some parents said they were concerned because the speech had not been screened for political content. Nor, they said, had it been reviewed by the state Board of Education and local school boards, which, under state law, must approve the curriculum.
"The thing that concerned me most about it was it seemed like a direct channel from the president of the United States into the classroom, to my child," said Brett Curtiss, an engineer from Pearland, Texas, who said he would keep his three children home. "I don't want our schools turned over to some socialist movement."
The White House has said the speech will stress the importance of education and hard work in school, both to the individual and to the nation. The message is neither partisan nor compulsory, officials said.
"This isn't a policy speech," said Sandra Abrevaya, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education. "It's designed to encourage kids to stay in school. The choice on whether to show the speech to students is entirely in the hands of each school. This is absolutely voluntary."
Obama's speech was announced weeks ago, but the furor among conservatives reached a fever pitch Wednesday morning as right-wing Web sites and talk show hosts began inveighing against it.
Mark Steyn, a Canadian author and political commentator, speaking on Rush Limbaugh's radio show on Wednesday, accused Obama of trying to create a cult of personality, comparing him with Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il, the North Korean leader.
The Republican Party chairman in Florida, Jim Greer, said he "was appalled that taxpayer dollars are being used to spread President Obama's socialist ideology."
And Chris Stigall, a Kansas City talk show host, said, "I'm not letting my next-door neighbor talk to my kid alone; I'm sure as hell not letting Barack Obama talk to him alone."
Previous presidents have visited public schools to speak directly to students, although few of those events have been broadcast live. Obama's address at noon, Eastern time, at a high school in Virginia will be streamed live on the White House Web site.
In 1991, President George H.W. Bush, a Republican, made a similar nationally broadcast speech from a Washington high school, urging students to study hard, avoid drugs and to ignore peers "who think it's not cool to be smart." Democrats in Congress accused him of using taxpayer money -- $27,000 to produce the broadcast -- for "paid political advertising."
Herb Garrett, executive director of the Georgia School Superintendents Association, said many of his members feel the controversy has put them in an awkward situation, vulnerable to attacks from conservative talk-show hosts if they open up instructional time for Obama's speech, and open to accusations that they have disrespected the president if they do not. "It's one of those no-wins," Garrett said.
In Texas, calls and e-mail messages flooded into the offices of many local school officials. "I didn't get a positive call all day," said Susan Dacus, a spokesman for the Wylie Independent School District outside Dallas.
School officials in Wylie decided to record the speech, review it and then let individual teachers show it, offering students the opportunity to avoid listening if they wished.
In Houston, teachers have been asked to tell parents if they intend to show the speech. The schools will provide an alternative class for those whose parents object, said a spokesman for the district, Lee Vela.
Some Houston parents, however, said telling children they should not hear out the president of the United States, even if their parents dislike his policies, sends the wrong message -- that one should not listen to someone with whom you disagree.
"It's difficult for me to understand how listening to the president, the commander in chief, the chief citizen of this country, is damaging to the youth of today," said Phyllis Griffin Epps, an analyst for the city who has two children in public school.
Three schools still Low-Performing
Intensive state coaching has done little to help improve student performance at three Durham high schools where students have a history of poor test scores.
So state officials said Thursday that they will step up their efforts to help Hillside, Northern and Southern high schools do a better job of educating students.
"When progress doesn't occur, there's an individual story about why it doesn't," Pat Ashley, a state education official, told the State Board of Education on Thursday. "We'll work with the superintendents and the principals and talk about what needs to happen to make change in those schools."
The three Durham schools -- three-fifths of the county's traditional public high schools -- have received extra attention from the state Department of Public Instruction for the past several years. They were part of a group of 66 high schools in North Carolina where passing rates on state tests fell below 60 percent.
But though 30 of the schools in that group have lifted their test scores above the 60 percent threshhold in the past three years, none of the three Durham schools has cracked the 50 percent mark. Southern High School's scores have gotten worse in three years -- its 32.5 percent passing rate puts it near the bottom of high schools statewide.
Six Charlotte-Mecklenburg high schools were in the improvement program. Three have boosted their test scores above 60 percent, enough to no longer need the biweekly visits from coaches who work with principals, teachers and district administrators.
The state effort to assist struggling high schools was supposed to last three years. The push for the effort came from Wake Superior Court Judge Howard Manning Jr., who has warned since 2004 that high schools were falling short of their constitutional mandate to provide students with equal educational opportunities. He once threatened to close poorly performing high schools unless they made sweeping reforms.
But three years after the effort began, state officials say they will keep sending regular help to 36 high schools across the state. The three Durham schools are in a group of 16 that will be in a stepped-up program of more intensive and individualized aid.
In a way, the schools where fewer than half of the students passed end-of-course tests will start from the beginning, with the state taking a fresh look at what those schools need to improve. The help and advice the state offers will be based on the new assessments.
Durham schools are making progress, said Chris Bennett, assistant superintendent for secondary curriculum and instruction for Durham schools. No one likes passing rates below 50 percent, he said, but students at all three high schools met goals for academic growth last year.
Southern's scores improved even though nearly 350 students left the school for a new public academy focused on health-care careers, he said. Southern wasn't able to benefit from the scores of high-performing students who transferred to the new school.
Teachers put a lot of effort into students' academic growth, Bennett said, and those gains will eventually lead to more students passing end-of-course tests, he said.
"We are very, very involved with working with those high schools to make growth and assist those students," Bennett said. "My curriculum team is constantly in the schools. The teachers are delivering that instruction to students. We've had a couple of leadership changes. I think we are starting to see these schools turn around."
State education leaders often say that turnover in the principal's office can result in low test scores, and Hillside and Southern have a history of losing principals.
Hillside's principal, Hans Lassiter, started work there last month. He replaced a principal who resigned after three years at the school.
Kenneth Barnes has been the principal at Southern since May 2008. He replaced a principal who'd been at the school four years.
Problems start long before high school, said board chairman Minnie Forte-Brown: Some students showing up not prepared for the work. But she sees improvement, with all three schools' passing rates improving last year over the year before.
"There's no doubt in my mind that those schools are turning the corner," she said.
Trilby McClammy, Durham's PTA president, doesn't buy the notion that principals bear much of the responsibility for low test scores. Many factors go into student achievement, she said, including good teachers, parent involvement and student responsibility, she said.
"The principals don't take the tests," she said. "The students take the tests."
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Sources: Whitehouse.gov, Charlotte Observer, News & Observer, Creepygif.com, Google Maps
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