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Category Archives: Schools and Assessment
Rote Learning
Yesterday, while visiting Bill Noomah’s 5th grade classroom at McNeil Canyon, his students gathered to practice their recitation of the Robert Service poem Cremation of Sam McGee. I was impressed that the group had memorized all the verses and pleased to know that they would soon recite it to some of Homer’s senior citizens. Later, […]
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Fork in the road
Earlier this week after giving a presentation on the state of the district, I was asked what we are doing for our students who do not plan to go to college. The expressed concern is that for some students, the final years of school are increasingly irrelevant to their lives. As an example, it was […]
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Fixed Practice
Each year, the masonic lodges of Kenai, Seward and Sterling hold an awards ceremony to recognize a student from each of our schools. At the beginning of the event a flag presentation walks the audience through the history of our nation’s flag. Friday was my fourth time in the past six years to see this […]
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Causal Relationship
Swirling around the edges of K-12 education is a multi-billion dollar services industry that sells products to support our schools. Most of these products are programs designed to improve student achievement and each one of these comes with slick advertising that claims superiority when compared to other like programs. While the advertising is fair, the […]
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Parental Involvement
I recall a homework assignment when I was in first grade that asked my class to draw a map of their neighborhood. I remember dutifully finding a piece of cardboard and drawing a crude bird’s eye view of our cul-de-sac and its 15 houses. One of my classmates returned to school the following morning with […]
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Collective Effort
One of the more uplifting parts of my job is receiving news that one of our students or staff members has been recognized for an award. In the past two weeks I learned that we have a regional principal of the year (Jason Bickling, Seward Middle School), the Ken Haycock Award recipient given by the […]
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Stimulating change
While in Juneau this week I met with several legislators to share my reservation about HB 278, the large education bill that includes several proposed changes to how charter schools are approved and supported. I consider our charter schools to be an important part of KPBSD and feel that they work just fine- there is […]
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Where’s the public initiative?
Last week the State Senate was scheduled to debate and then vote on a resolution that if passed, would let the public vote on changing our constitution to allow public money to be used for tuition at a private school. Without getting into the pros and cons of this, it is important to note that […]
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Funding Plan
Last week while in Juneau, I met with several legislators to share that we are doing good work and deserve a modest increase in funding. Predictably, each of the senators and representatives was confident that schools would see more money next year, but no one was willing to say how much more. And so from […]
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