drjamesarnold.com

It’s So Hard To Say Goodbye…     Most teachers love their jobs.  Most teachers are very good at their jobs.  As in any profession, there are exceptions, but what’s scary about the education profession now is not that there are enormous numbers of bad teachers (there aren’t) but that there are enormous numbers of good teachers that have recently retired or soon will.  Some absolutely can’t wait to get out that schoolhouse door for the last time, and their replacements are not exactly flooding into teacher prep courses. Add that to the 44% of new teachers that never make it past their first five years and we have a full blown teacher shortage.  Here are the numbers from the Georgia TRS:     Retirees in Georgia Yrs. Exp     2007     2008     2009     2010     2011     2012     2013 ...

The Apoc-eclipse     I have to tell you right up front that Betsy and I did not catch the eclipselectic fever that seemed to infect most of the country.  We started out the day like most other days, sitting by the pool with coffee and talking about our respective goals and tasks for the day.  Sammie, our little white dog that lives to be petted, goes with us and sniffs everything in the yard that hadn't been sniffed since the day before, pronounces all as satisfactory and sets herself up in guard position so that we would be between her and anything that happened to climb out of the pool. Frogs can be scary when you don’t expect them.  Betsy did ask if I thought we should get glasses for later in the day.  My response was indicative of my lack of enthusiasm, and I told her I was pretty sure they would be cheaper and readily available on Tuesday .  After a few minutes of conversation we parted ways for a few hours.  I went to Troy a...

Singer and songwriter Harry Nilsson observed in his 1971 album “The Point” that “a point in every direction is no point at all" and "if everyone has a point, then I must have one too.”       I had the pleasure of judging several students a few weeks ago as part of a district wide scholarship competition in written essays and face to face interviews.  While the questions were pretty basic (what do you like and dislike about school, what’s your favorite subject) some of the answers were not.  I remembered an old Art Linkletter show called “Kids Say The Darndest Things” and, after the interviews, decided that not only was Art right, but that one viewpoint always missing from the “how can we improve schools” debate was that of the students.  They are, after all, the subjects and the central focus of the debate on school improvement, and their contributions could add a perspective not usually considered.  Their job for now is to be students....

  HB 610 was introduced in the House of Representatives on January 23 2017 by Representative King of Iowa and Representatives Harris and Franks of Arizona.  The bill is a study in brevity by current standards (10 pages in its entirety compared to the 2400 pages of the Affordable Care Act or NCLB legislation of over 1.000 pages) and in its present form is a legislative haiku that says a lot in comparatively few words.     The bill’s purpose is to “distribute Federal funds for elementary and secondary education in the form of vouchers for eligible students and to repeal a certain rule relating to nutrition standards in schools.”     You could probably hear public school parents, teachers and students cheering when they find out about the second part.  Nobody but a dyed in the wool hard core Democrat whose kids don’t go to public school likes school lunches in their current state of culinary purgatory, and the nuts and twig...