School Board is Out of Touch...Are You?

From the Jackson (TN) Sun.

What's important in this story is not that the local school board is out of touch, whether in Jackson, Tennessee or Morrisville, Pennsylvania. If it's a Monday, then there's a school board out of touch.

It's about the video links at the end of the story. This is where education needs to be going for the 21st century. For every resident who has bemoaned how the PSSA scores need to rise, watch the videos and see if we, the community, are providing these American children (the same people who are going to be picking out and staffing our nursing homes), the tools to be 21st century global (not just American) citizens.

School board is out of touch By Tom Bohs, February 15, 2009

Thanks to technology, I was able to attend the Jackson-Madison County Board of Education meeting on Thursday night, and I didn't have to leave the comfort of my TV room to do it. Thanks to my own jacksonsun.com streaming webcast, Jackson Energy Authority's E+TV6 and WNWS 101.5 FM radio for providing live coverage of the meeting. It was a great example of technology enabling the public to connect to its elected officials and to see them in action, or inaction, as the case may be. Think of it as our own local version of C-Span.

All day long, rumors flew that some on the board had conspired to fire Superintendent Dr. Nancy Zambito. Fortunately, that didn't happen, which I believe would have been a terrible mistake. In fact, the person who made the most sense during the meeting was Dr. Zambito, though I commend board Chairman Dr. Joe Mays for steering the board through some tense and troubled waters with a steady hand.

I've followed the school board closely for 17 years, and sat through more board meetings than I care to remember. The current board is as bad as I have seen, but it's not any worse than others that have gotten seriously off track. Do I need to remind anyone of the infamous "McMillin Five" that managed to fire perfectly good Superintendent Dr. Lester Beason and shoehorn Buddy McMillan into office? It is painful to recall that at one point, we had five superintendents in seven years, and our school board was the laughingstock of state public education. In my opinion, the current school board crisis is no better or worse than those of the past.

But one important thing has changed since 1992, technology. And that is what makes the current school board infighting more dire and important, and something the community must demand be addressed, if in no other way than in the 2010 election.

Six or seven of our school board members are hopelessly out of touch with what is happening in the world. They think that what is going on in Jackson-Madison County is their chief concern. They are wrong, and hopelessly out of touch with reality. As a result, our kids could be hopelessly left behind. While these school board members argue about who should be superintendent, whether he or she should be black or white, and who screwed up the most since the last "gotcha" school board meeting, the rest of the world is running, and I mean running, away from our local education system, technologically speaking. This is the real tragedy of our current school board.

We have teachers who aren't even proficient at sending e-mails. We have teachers who don't have a clue how to use today's sophisticated education software or how to integrate technology into their classrooms. We are graduating students who don't know how to write decent English or use the Web to do simple research or understand how to use technology to collaborate with others, learn new things and plan for their futures.

Do our students know what a wiki is? Do they know what Web 2.0, let alone Web 3.0 is? There are kids all over America, and India, Western Europe, Japan and China who do. And they outnumber us by a staggering margin. There are more high school top-tier honor students in China, the top 1 percent or 2 percent, than all of our students in this country put together.

While our school board argues over race, personal agendas and other nonsense, the rest of the education world is moving ahead at breakneck speed. Computer capabilities are doubling every 18 months, while we struggle to put the latest technology in our classrooms and train teachers to use them. We are losing this battle, and our school board is missing in action. That is what troubles me.

If you care about this issue, I urge you to watch three You Tube videos. Just go to your Web browser and enter the following links: www.jacksonsun.com/didyouknow; www.jacksonsun.com/machine and www.jacksonsun.com/web2. If you don't "get" what these videos are about, you know what most of our students know. And, oh, by the way, all three videos are two years old.