My PEEPS Local Board of Education

Text Box: Doxology of the UNION! All Hail the UNION! Purveyors of all that is pure and good! May all educators excellent and incompetent be sanctified and protected by the UNION's mercies. To Tennessee Education Association, we humbly submit our children. May no person speak unkindly of an incompetent teacher! All Hail the UNION! For there is no god, other than the great and powerful EVOLUTION, permitted in education, HIS ministers are the UNION and HIS trinity is time, consensus and ignorance. Travis R. McGaha 2007

Basic Local Board of Education Summary

These are the elected officials who dictate local standards. The sad reality is that this group of people deserves the lion’s share of blame for the failure of any Tennessee school system. The state legislature really puts the responsibility of setting standards to the local school board.

Monthly Stipend: $400 per month for 1 board meeting which ranges in time from 15 minutes to 45 minutes!

In trying to come up with reasons why schools are failing our children, I have come across articles that refer to lack of religious faith, lack of market input and apathy towards the children and their parents. I’ve listed some web-sites; they are great reading material and they explore these arguments.

http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=21

http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=4864

http://reformed-theology.org/html/issue08/whats_wrong_with_schools.htm

http://www.fff.org/comment/com0503m.asp

http://www.smarthomeschool.com/2005/09/whats-wrong-with-public-school-part-1.html

One good point that I came across was that “people are so involved in their busy lives that confronting any school system for the sake of change is too exhausting.” The truth is that I have been having trouble staying focused at times. The information in print, on television, on the web, and from other people is overwhelming. The truth is that everyone in this country knows there is a problem with public education. The problem is that everyone believes the problem to be bigger in districts other than their own. Otherwise more parents would be directly involved in demanding change.

The reality is that the problems are here and that no leadership exists to straighten out the problems. Our leaders at the local level use the excuse that they are limited by some aspects of legislation. Legislation at the state level is purposefully vague so that the lawyers who wrote this tripe have jobs in litigation for years to come. State Departments of Education are more concerned with the well-being of the licensed professionals, thanks to the unions, than they are with the tax-payers and their children whom they are in existence to serve.

I have noticed that while the state legislation and State Department of Education rules may have been purposefully vague that does not mean that the local board of education is restricted from establishing standards. In finding curricula guidelines, I found this link http://state.tn.us/sos/rules/0520/0520-01/0520-01-03.pdf . The school board should pick up the reigns and be leaders. If, for instance, Freshman English means disseminating in class 1 play by Shakespeare, 1 novel, 1 poem by 10 different authors and being able to pass a knowledge test on all of these items then write it down as policy. Or if 4^th grade mathematics means having memorized all of the multiplication tables for numbers 1 through 12, then do not pass a child to 5^th grade mathematics until that child has those tables memorized. The priority should be in listing what knowledge is expected. But in the same respect, if a child can do 5^th grade studies, do not call on that child to remain in 4^th grade just because that is where the child is socially.