drjamesarnold.com

  Magic Beans and Silver Bullets    I have a question for you.   If someone said they had a magic solution to your local educational issues that guaranteed your child or grandchild – along with every other child in your community - would be educationally successful and academically competitive with every other child in your state would you be interested in hearing about it?   Of course you would.   “I have such a solution” said Governor Deal, “but I can’t give it to you unless you pass an amendment to the Georgia Constitution.”   Hold on there, pardner.   So you’re telling me that state control is the only way to improve schools designated by the state as failing?   That you can only tell us the secret answer if we give you even more control over educational finances than you already have?   Isn’t that rather childish of the man that’s supposed to be leading our state?   He knows the answer to academic achievement for all but...

Deal or No Deal      Most Georgians are old enough to remember Sonny Perdue’s gift card program for teachers.  Sonny heard that teachers were spending their own money on pencils, paper and classroom supplies, so, out of his great concern for the welfare of Georgia’s teachers in an election year, he authorized about $10 million dollars in $100 gift cards, one for every teacher in every classroom in Georgia.  Rather than raise the amount of money available for teachers to spend on supplies and classroom materials, or, God forbid, give them a raise, good ole’ Sonny - the inventor of austerity cuts for education - saw that he might get a lot of votes for what amounted to a miniscule investment.  Sure it was an election year gimmick, but he showed his concern for teachers by handing out those cards and by imposing the 65% rule that said libraries and media centers and counselors weren’t really valid educational expenditures.  Go Fish - I mean...

Splasher Six is the newsletter of the 100th Bomb Group Foundation.  It was also the assembly point for B-17's of the 100th over England in WW II.     Robert L. “Bobby” Black was born in the sleepy little town of Alderson, West Virginia on September 7, 1923.  Standing on Main Street it’s not hard to imagine the Alderson HS Band leading the 4 th of July parade down the street with their version of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” with batons and instruments flashing, followed by the fire truck and a few floats and cars sporting beauty queens and local dignitaries and sponsored by local businesses and clubs.   Aldersonians, like most Americans in most places in 1940, described their town as being in the middle of “God’s country,” and they were convinced they wouldn’t be happy living anywhere else.  It was an All-American place to grow up, an All-American place to live and an All-American place to be from when you went out into the world to defe...

      President Obama has met the law of unintended consequences.  The Presidential decree prohibiting public schools from discriminating against those students that self-identify as transgender by forcing them to use the bathroom that corresponds to their biological gender effectively creates a political firestorm from what was essentially a non-issue for schools.  "There is no room in our schools for discrimination of any kind, including discrimination against transgender students on the basis of their sex," Attorney General Loretta Lynch said. "This guidance gives administrators, teachers and parents the tools they need to protect transgender students from peer harassment and to identify and address unjust school policies."  The USDOE and the DOJ created a tag-team to body slam schools that might resist their social engineering efforts by threatening to withhold Federal funds from schools, districts or states that disagreed with the policy....

    My Dad was a Police Officer for 26 years in Jackson MS.  My brothers and I were subject to almost daily interrogations from a trained professional.  Partly because he controlled the car keys and the family finances and partly because we had a healthy respect for his occasional use of corporal punishment, we were denied the use of our 5th amendment rights concerning self-incrimination. We did, however, learn from our mistakes, and became experts at answering his questions in ways that did not, at least too much, incriminate us and our teenage friends.  We also became, through observation of and participation in Dad’s investigative techniques, experts at detecting bovine scatology when we heard it.  He once pointed to a newspaper story of a Mississippi politician that proposed a 75% raise for members of the Legislature.  Public outcry was immediate and overwhelmingly negative, so a 2nd politician came immediately to his colleagues’ defens...

 In my years as a teacher and administrator, staff development meetings were unavoidable.  They were often held in the afternoons or on Saturdays, and in too many cases were held for the purpose of meeting some arcane requirement or to put a check mark on some district to-do list.  Agendas were rare, purpose was often vague, content was delivered by lecture or interminable powerpoint, questions were not encouraged and the primary purpose seemed to be for someone to make sure we put in our time.  Most of the content in sessions like these could have been more effectively and far less painfully delivered in the form of an email, but I suppose that would have meant the end of a job for whatever “expert” was making the presentation and somebody somewhere would not have been able to document the hours teachers had spent in professional development.  I remember a colleague that once noted “I hope my death comes during a professional development meeting, because the ...