The Ennis Daily News (Ennis, Tex.), Ed. 1 Thursday, January 16, 2014 Page: 4 of 8
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Opinion
Page 4
Thursday, January 16,2014
Ennis Daily News
EISD’s board
deserves our
appreciation
It’s one thing to criticize. It’s quite
another to take part in making
changes for the better.
That’s the task that
Our
Point of
View
is at the feet of the
Ennis Independent
Board of Trustees
every meeting, and
they pick up and
carry that responsi-
bility with grace and
a desire to do good
things for the students, faculty and
stakeholders of our local school dis-
trict.
They establish a vision. They design
the methods to achieve that vision,
and they act as a public face for the
district in dealings around the com-
munity They get involved not only in
the operation of the school district by
attending meetings and casting their
votes, they get into public service else-
where. The bug is infectious, so to
speak, and once you’ve invested your-
self in the task of being a public ser-
vant, your responsibilities and
involvements tend to grow. That is
clearly true of the members of our
board.
They pull together toward solving
the common problems that face us as a
community, giving hours and hours of
their time to realize goals. Beyond just
crafting the policies that govern the
operation of the EISD, members of the
board approve hires, listen to com-
plaints, honor the people who achieve
great things and spend a large amount
of their personal time invested in
making Ennis a better community
The EISD Board of Trustees con-
sists of: Bramlet Beard, president;
Alan Clark, vice president; Walter
Beasley, secretary; Dr. Mack Boyd,
member; Alan Linson, member; Julie
Pierce, member; and Miles Strunc,
member.
As Interim Superintendent James
Sanders said:
“We proudly salute these education
advocates as they provide vision and
leadership for student achievement,
academic programs, district funding,
and school facilities. Their service en-
sures that decisions about local public
schools are made by those most famil-
iar with the needs of our community’s
children and families. These dedicated
individuals deserve recognition and
thanks for their unfailing commit-
ment to the continuing success of our
students now and in the future.”
© Contents copyright 2014 and cannot be reproduced
without the written permission of the publisher.
Tre Bischof ■ Publisher Tammy Fry ■ Advertising Manager
Nick Todaro ■ Editor Teresa Watson ■ Office Manager
Jared Massey ■ Production Manager
Nikki Cohan ■ Circulation Manager
Melissa Honza ■ Composition Manager
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Bears do it: Let s hibernate
Without much effort, I think I
could become a hermit.
It’s January ... and there are
days when I would like to vanish
from the landscape, lay on the
couch until dark en-
velopes the house, and
gain 45 pounds eating
chocolate.
Just thinking about
it makes me smile.
I know the sun’s
going to come out
again, Annie, but
when I wake up to
rain on Monday, I’m
aware that the odds
are stacked against
me immediately
“Wear bright col-
ors,” an elementary
school principal once
told me. “That’s what they tell
teachers; on dreary days, wear
bright colors.” She was a longtime
educator and professional believer
in color.
So I put on my red shirt and
headed to work, looking longingly
at the house. The dog lay listless
under the boat shed. She hates
rain; she hates damp; she hates hot
or cold. She wants 75 degrees, blue
bird skies and a bone.
That dog and I have a lot in com-
mon, except for the bone.
I rolled down my car window, as
I do every morning, to tell her
“goodbye.” After all, she’s an old
dog. I don’t want to leave any
morning without saying “good-
bye” only to return home to realize
it’s too late.
The dog, however, looked sad.
She can’t frolic when it’s raining.
No other dogs come over to play
Rainy days and Mondays always
get that dog down.
“I wish I could stay
home with the dog,” I
said to the husband,
thinking that he
might let me because
he loves the dog so
much.
“Well, you just stay
home...” said the hus-
band, pretending to be
a doting husband.
“Better yet, come to
work for eight hours,
and then you can go
back home again.”
He’s so sweet.
Some people, I know, are given
to boredom. They hate rain and
rainy days. Granted, I’d rather be
beat with a stick than locked up in
my house for 24 hours with the
children in rain.
But if you leave me alone, I can
think of 100 things I’d like to do on
a rainy day, probably one for every
letter of the alphabet. Give me
recipes to prepare, photographs to
file, books to read, movies I never
saw on the big screen. Find me a
puzzle, play me some music, catch
up on the sewing, write, write,
write.
I can fertilize the houseplants,
look at the baby books, bake
brownies or alter my clothes be-
cause of all that chocolate. I can
call friends in faraway places, fill
in my calendar for the new year,
write, write, write.
But in my red shirt, today, I sit
surrounded by a group of people
in an office with lights. And I must
say: God bless people who come to
work, even when it’s Monday, even
when it’s raining. As I approached
our downtown district, I looked at
the office lights on the left and the
right; they almost looked like
home. Justice doesn’t stop for rain,
and I saw the courthouse crawling
with activity People eat doughnuts
on rainy days, they pay their util-
ity bills and they go to the library
They buy hardware, make bank
deposits and order sandwiches.
They renew newspaper sub-
scriptions, get their hair cut and
pick up prescriptions.
And they complain about the
rain. It’s just trendy to complain
about the rain.
But if I had a choice, for just a
few days, I’d curl up on the couch
and forego make-up. I’d wear
warm socks, read warm books and
think warm thoughts.
And I’d emerge, after my hiber-
nation, a new person. Ready for
life. Starving for red meat. Want-
ing a good conversation.
A little bit of hermit isn’t a bad
thing.
Susan Lincoln is the managing
editor of the Perry (Fla.) News-Her-
ald, a sister paper of the Ennis
Daily News. She can be reached at
muddle@perrynewspapers.com.
Susan Lincoln
The Midweek
Muddle
Parents resist collective standardized tests
Huge numbers of students must
take high-stakes standardized tests
that may shape the rest of their
lives. These tests, however, take no
account of the differences among
the individual stu-
dents. For particular
examples, the tests
don’t recognize the
students’ home lives,
or the visual or hear-
ing problems that have
impeded their learn-
ing.
Those students
often failing these
tests are lower-income
blacks and Hispanics,
and students with spe-
cial needs such as
English language difficulties. But
many other children fail them too.
Furthermore, many of these
students who keep failing learn in
school that they are dumb and
drop out to begin dead-end lives.
But now, parents are actually
reading about these tests and in-
creasingly organizing against
them. For example, as Bob Peter-
son, the President of the Milwau-
kee Teachers’ Education
Association, commented on his
blog last fall, “This year both the
state and the school district have
increased testing for four-, five-,
six- and se ven-year-old students in
the district” (“Parent Opposition to
Early Childhood Testing on the In-
crease,” Bob Peterson, “Public Ed-
ucation: This is what democracy
looks like,” Oct. 1,2013).
He went on to write about Mil-
waukee parent Jasmine Alinder,
whose daughter was just starting
kindergarten. Alinder, the presi-
dent of Parents for Public Schools
of Milwaukee, explained her frus-
trations in an essay she posted to
Facebook, which Peterson quoted
extensively from.
Alinder wrote: “MAP (Measure
of Academic Progress) testing for
five-year-olds does not test math
and reading competency At best it
tests patience and computer liter-
acy, which is more likely an indi-
cation of computer access at home.
“At worst it creates a culture of
stress and frustration around stan-
dardized testing that may scar
some of these children for the rest
of their school careers” (“A Par-
ent’s View: MAP Testing of Five-
Year-Old Kindergartners,”
Jasmine Alinder, Sept. 25,2013).
I’ve known older kids taking
such tests in higher-income neigh-
borhoods. They get sick to their
stomachs taking practice tests in
preparation for the actual tests
that will be on their permanent
records.
What do they really learn from
such tests?
But parents are continuing to
speak up nationally, as AlterNet re-
ported last October on a school in
my city, New York:
“The Castle Bridge Elementary
School is a progressive, dual-lan-
guage K-2 school in the Washing-
ton Heights section...
When parents there
learned of a plan to
give multiple choice
tests to children as
young as kinder-
garten, they decided
enough was enough.
They refused to let
their children be
tested” (“What Hap-
pens When Parents
Stand Up and Say No
to Testing?” Elizabeth
Hines, AlterNet, Oct.
30,2013).
Actually, as reported in the New
York Daily News, “more than 80
percent of parents opted to have
their kids sit out the exam” (“For-
get teaching to the test — at this
Washington Heights elementary
school, parents canceled it!”
Rachel Monahan, Oct. 21,2013).
So the principal canceled the
test.
A penetratingly clear, common
sense reason for doing away with
collective standardized tests is pro-
vided by Neal McCluskey, the asso-
ciate director of the Cato
Institute’s Center for Educational
Freedom. (I am a senior fellow at
Cato.)
In the November/December
2013 Cato Policy Report, which was
on the emergence of the Common
Core State Standards, McCluskey
wrote: “Why is the idea of com-
mon standards (and tests) wrong?
Simply put, it’s because all chil-
dren are different. They learn dif-
ferent things at different rates
during different times.
“They start from different
places. They have different inter-
ests. The idea that they should all
be fed into some sort of lock-step
standardized system doesn’t fit
with the reality of human beings”
(“Common Core: The Great De-
bate,” Cato Policy Report,
Nov./Dec. 2013).
For many years, until arthritis
limited my traveling, I saw these
human differentiations — from el-
ementary school through high
school—in classrooms around the
country Getting to speak to stu-
dents outside of their schools, I
found some of their homes and
neighborhoods were such that
they distracted the kids from get-
ting an education. Indeed, I saw in-
dividual differences in the
children’s hearing and vision ca-
pabilities that deeply affected how
and when they learned.
In addition to McCluskey’s
views on the various ways chil-
dren learn how to learn, another
beneficial perspective comes from
an article sent to me by Nancy
Carlsson-Paige, professor emerita
of early childhood education at
Lesley University in Cambridge,
Mass. The article, on the short-
comings of standardized collective
testing, was co-authored with
Randi Weingarten, president of
the American Federation of
Teachers.
I am often at odds with the
American Federation of Teachers,
but as I have reported elsewhere, I
do agree with Weingarten’s efforts
to have public schools become part
of an evolving interaction with the
surrounding community
In the article, she and Carlsson-
Paige explained: “Young kids learn
actively, through hands-on experi-
ences in the real world. They de-
velop skills over time through a
process of building ideas. But the
process is not always linear and is
not quantifiable; expecting young
children to know specific facts or
skills at specified ages is not com-
patible with how they learn.
“It emphasizes right and wrong
answers instead of the develop-
mental progressions that typify
their learning...
“They need to figure out how
things work, explore, question and
have fun” (“Early Learning: This
Is Not a Test,” Randi Weingarten
and Nancy Carlsson-Paige, aft.org,
Nov. 17,2013).
Instead of “having fun” as a
goal, I would emphasize enabling
young kids to discover the joy of
learning. This leads them to ex-
ploring the range of their capaci-
ties as knowledgeable individuals
in our society on how it works.
Again and again I’ve seen this
dramatic discovery happen when I
tell kids why we have, for example,
a First Amendment and what it
has taken for that right to survive
so that they can use it.
For another example, I know an
8-year-old who gets high on science
classes, and when I bring her
Robert Louis Stevenson’s “A
Child’s Garden of Verses,” she
dives right in as her imagination
flares up.
What too many teachers, princi-
pals and school boards have yet to
learn is that education can be very
exciting for students preparing to
be active citizens.
Next week: I report on Carmen
Farina, the new chancellor of
schools of New York City — a pos-
sible national model for how chil-
dren can and do experience the joy
of learning.
Nat Hentoff is a nationally
renowned authority on the First
Amendment and the Bill of Rights.
He is a member of the Reporters
Committee for Freedom of the
Press, and the Cato Institute, where
he is a senior fellow.
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Todaro, Nick. The Ennis Daily News (Ennis, Tex.), Ed. 1 Thursday, January 16, 2014, newspaper, January 16, 2014; Ennis, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth774625/m1/4/: accessed April 23, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Ennis Public Library.