Letter to FCEE 4/16/2001

Dear Steering Committee Members of the Florida Council on Elementary Education (FCEE),

I discovered your website during this mornings internet browsing. I read with great interest your "Mission Statement" and also your list of Goals. When I read your Goals I felt compelled to sent this email inquiry.

        I read the bullet within your Goals, "to serve as a forum to provide participation from teachers, principals, supervisors, and teacher educators as equal partners, concerning issues which directly affect all aspects of elementary education". As a member of two teaching families (my husband has been a public school teacher for 24 years) and having had multiple family members who have garnered 340+ years teaching in the public school classrooms, I felt I was qualified to write to all of you and express my concerns.

        As a parent who has taken an active role in the education of my three children, I am writing this correspondence with the hope that I will receive some feedback from your Steering Committee members.

        Over the years, I've become very concerned with what I view as a paradigm shift in classroom instruction from content-based, teacher led instruction to a very pronounced process-based form of teaching where the students select what and how they will learn.

       Many individuals who have studied education reform over the years have come to view current practices as not the "best" practices, and regard the loss of traditional teaching methods as part of the academic decline in our schools.

       Florida has taken great strides through the efforts of our Governor Jeb Bush and the Florida Legislature to bring accountability to the education system in our state. Surely we should not continue to pump more funds into a system that has not shown itself to be accountable to those it serves. The growing acceptance of voucher initiatives is proof in itself that parents want choices for their children.

        External accountability is offensive to some within the edu-establishment,  but it serves a higher purpose. The concern we have is what takes place in the state's classrooms each day. It appears that oversight over the multitudes of edu-theories and their impact of academic achievement is last on the list of improvements to reach the goal of a "years worth of learning in a year's time."

       Our classrooms have been run-amok with "education theories". Most of the theories are based in purportedly the latest "brain research", yet in practice are often implemented by unskilled, under-trained teachers (practitioners).

        We have come to recognize through our research (and personal experiences with our children) that there are great discrepancies and conflicts between the traditional core-knowledge approach to classroom instruction and the current process-based (outcome-based) pedagogy currently imposed on our classrooms.

        Does your council view parents as equal partners in education issues?

        If so, could you acknowledge that often parents are the last to know about the never ending stream of experimental theories being implemented in their children's classrooms? Please don't be offended by this statement. Were it not for some bad experiences with my own children in an elementary school immersed in Gardner's Multiple Intelligence Theory, I'd not have the foundation of experience on which to bring forth my distress.

       Many parents are able to recognize education as an "industry" that purchases its programs from education gurus, and the peddlers who market the next best "innovation" claiming it is the panacea for the deficiencies in the classroom. Often these "cures" have spent a brief time in Level I and II research and are immediately implemented as Level III...in the classroom. Psychologists like William Glasser and Robert Slavin have made millions marketing their innovations to school districts eager to find solutions to their ailing test scores. Time-tested curriculum and instructional practices like direct instruction and "phonics" are denounced and ridiculed. Parents who prefer these formerly honored educational practices are often ignored because the bureaucracy has no time or desire to hear their complaints. They are "progressivists", wanting to give the appearance of forward motion, ignoring the fact that some of the decades old practices were indeed based in common sense.

     I am the President of IVBE, Inc. (Independent Voices for Better Education). We are a 501(c)(3) organization developed in 1990 with members scattered across the State of Florida. Our Board of Directors reside in several Florida counties. Our purpose is to bring our individual voices to the front burner in education reform, with the intention of challenging the status-quo education bureaucracy. It is time that parents views be registered into the education equation.

      We support School Choice and a competitive, free-market education system  in which parents can choose which education and instructional institution best serves the needs of their children. Freedom defines the American way of doing business.

      Our classrooms have become too focused on socially-engineering children in politically correct ideologies, too focused on psychology-based programs resulting in a lack of discipline and academic integrity. Our education establishment has assumed the role of "raising" children on a full-time basis, and then complains that the children are not meeting benchmarks of Reading, writing and math.

      Perhaps if we were to return to focusing on what the children are actually there for, the academic disciplines, we'd come to discover that intellectual development would thrive and the neurotic preoccupation with "behavior" would actually become less of an issue.

     Hundreds, thousands of parents desire direct, teacher-led instruction where the teachers actually serves as the center of the classroom, as "instructor", not as a mere "facilitator". You'd think that after several years of this "new" facilitator philosophy, and the lack of noticable academic progress, the education bureaucracy would get a clue that the children need discipline. They need to view the teacher with respect and honor, knowing the teacher is the authority...which is not what occurs when teachers choose to serve as entertainers in the classroom. Providing lists of things for the children to do, enabling them to make child-led choices and then wondering why the children are confused, or unfocused, is not responsible education, in my view.

      I would be very appreciative for your responses to this message.

     Shelley Nelson
     President, IVBE Inc
     www.ivbe.org   (website is currently being revised)