From the Tip Line:
Richard Woods of Tifton will run for State School Superintendent in 2010 as a
republican. He is the only republican to announce a challenge to Kathy Cox, the incumbent. His website is woodsforgeorgiaed.com
Fresh Political Pickins From The Peach State
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Don’t know much about Woods, but anybody but Cox for me.
I first heard about Woods on a blog called Peanut Politics. It was first thought he would run as a dem, but he will instead run as a republican. His website was up, don’t know what happened to it. Let me say there will probably be more republicans running against Cox for school superintendent.
just wanna mention that Woods is currently a curriculum director at Irwin County Elementary school.
There needs to be an alternative to Kathy Cox in the Republican primary. In my opinion, the state DOE, lead by Mrs. Cox, has moved towards a more centralized model of top down education for the last several years. The math CRCT fiasco last year was only one of many events that demonstrated Mrs. Cox inability to lead. Georgia’s Department of Education takes more and more control away from the local BOE’s every year in the name of educational reform.
What I want in a state superintendent:
1. I want a state superintendent that will put more control back in the hands of parents, teachers, and the local school systems.
2. I want a superintendent that supports real technical education designed to obtain a student a real world job when they graduate high school. Many school systems would love to create this type of program at every school, but local BOE’s have very little flexibility to fund these programs because of state budget mandates.
3. I want a superintendent that reforms our current insane testing system. Students are tested from the 1st through the 12th grade 5-10 times a year. Many of these standardized test are redundant and could be consolidated or made more efficient.
4. I want a superintendent that has a plan to help local school systems become 21st century schools.
I am actively seeking an alternative to Mrs. Cox at the moment but as of yet no one is running that I would support.
I would like to see a State School Superintendent who will (to the degree he can within the law):
1. Ensure 100% of the education taxes follows the child to whatever school the parent(s) choose – government, private, or religious.
2. Remind parents that they, and they alone, are responsible for making sure their child has an education. Teachers are who you hire to assist in that goal.
3. Require local government schools to allow homeschooled kids take part in extracurricular activities (sports, band, chorus, etc.) for a cost-only fee if #1 above is accomplished, or for free if it is not.
4. Tell the teacher unions, national and state, they have no access to his office.
5. Require government schools to give preference in teaching and administrative posts to former Marines, Rangers, Navy Nukes, and those who were in special ops. Having more teachers and administrators who understand accomplishing their objectives and how to use their brains would be a big step forward.
6. Require local government schools to identify and permanently expel the small percentage of miscreants that cause trouble for everyone else. Watch how quick the drugs and gangs are gone from the schools.
7. Fund the use of drug sniffing dogs to be used on a daily basis in all government schools, in conjunction with telling students that their lockers are not their private property, and they have no privacy rights in those lockers.
8. End tenure. Period. Excellence in any job is often proportional to how bad you want to kepe your job.
9. Any high school student with a B average or better, and no criminal record, can proudly have their hunting rifles or shotguns in their pickup trucks.
10. Provide training for any teacher or administrator who will bring their own weapon and ammunition to school for self defense and defense of innocents. An armed teacher is a happy teacher.
11. Require that any child caught using their cell phone, IPod, etc. during class will have the item confiscated immediately, and destroyed in front of the class. Provide free hammers if you need to.
12. Reinstitute dress codes. Girls have no business looking like hookers, and boys have no business with their underwear showing. Send them home, and don’t let them back on campus until they fix the problem. Those who continue in non-compliance would fall under #6 above. You can’t fix stupid.
13. Tell the US Dept. of Education to kiss off. Don’t take their money, and invoke Georgia’s 10th amendment rights to run its own schools the way Georgians see fit. Oddly enough, the amount spent per student is inversely proprotional to the quality of education.
14. Hold local school administrators and teachers personally liable if the potential high school graduate can’t: a) read with comprehension, b) write intelligibly, c) do basic math, geometry, and algebra, d) balance a checkbook, e) create a working budget, f) fill out a job application, g) explain the history of the US and what the Constitution means. And the student would not graduate.
15. End multilingual education. Any student who does not speak English with sufficient proficiency to learn in an English-only class would be put into English immersion until they obtain the minimum level of proficiency.
16. Set graduation standards from high school, in addition to #14 above, where each student is required to have passed:
a) 4 years of English grammar
b) 4 years of English literature
c) 1 year each of algebra, geometry, and trigonometry
d) 1 year each of music and art
e) 1 year each of Georgia history, US history, and World history (sans the anti-US, PC garbage)
f) 2 years of a foriegn language
g) 1 year each of biology, chemistry, and physics, sans the global warming mythology.
h) 3 years of phsyical fitness
i) 1 year of social studies
j) 1 year of computer skills & general technology
17. Aside from the above, get the state out of running the local government schools. If #1 above is accomplished, then the good government schools will flourish, and the bad government schools will either change or go out of business.
I don’t know if this is possible, but it might be a good way to rapidly increase the quality of education. All teachers and administrators with Obama stickers on their cars would be fired (welcome to “change you can believe in”). All students whose cars, or parents cars, have Obama stickers would be put into remedial classes.
Hall County Schools Superintendent Will Schofield should run.
MSBass – thank you for that, it made my day.
Will Schofield? Give me a break! Under his tenure we have a 10 million dollar shortfall. Hundreds of teachers and staff have been laid off. Salaries of some of the remaining teachers are going to be reduced. He’s done all this while appointing his friends to the school board. He should be investigated not promoted.
MSBass,
Not every student is destined for a 4 year degree. This is the problem with idealism driving education, instead of reality. Physics, trigonometry or calculas being taught to someone who is not really capable of understanind the material is a waste of the student’s time, the schools resources and creates more problems than it is worth.
Doug, based on your comment you are going to love one guy who is going to jump is the race soon.
Doug Deal,
You have a very valid point – not every student is “wired” or ready for getting a college degree. It took 4 years in the Navy to get my head on straight to understand and appreciate a higher education. So I started college at 21 instead of 17 (when I graduated from high school).
I grew up and was educated in a rural, south Georgia small town. We had one high school for all but one very small town in the county.
Most of the kids who went there were from farm or blue collar households where, for the most part, their parents had little or no college education. When I was in high school, we had already integrated.
Yet, in those ancient days, algebra, geometry, and trig were part of the graduation requirements from my small government high school. Students who were college bound and students who frequented FFA and “shop” all took those courses. I took algebra in the 8th grade, geometry in the 9th, and trig in the 10th. Others started that series in the 9th or 10th grade. Students of an average intelligence are capable of far more than we give them credit for. They will always live down to our low expectations, and will live up to our higher expectations. A student, even one who never goes to college, needs a well-rounded education to be able to understand the world around them – and be able to spot the goofiness of so many liberal ideas. For those very few miscreants who refuse, after repeated effort by teachers and parents, to be educated, then they have no place staying in school dragging the majority down.
If a student of average intelligence has a teacher worth his salt, and parents who expect the student to give his best, then learning HS level algebra, geometry, and trig is doable. If the student doesn’t have that, it doesn’t matter what the curriculum is – the student is sunk.
I hope it is not a conservative-liberal thing that conservatives believe in the average student and liberals see such average students as dumbed-down sheep unworthy of the time and effort to obtain a good general education. Doug Deal, such requirements worked before, and they’ll work again. You sound like you truly care about kids getting educated, but have faith in them that “yes, they can”.
High school graduates with a well-rounded education (not indoctrination) are one of liberalism’s greatest nightmares.
epierce08,
Who is going to get in the Superintendent’s race….?
Kevin, Wait til May 5th.
Speaking of it being the announcement season, I have heard that word started circulating at the GFRW meeting of a stealth campaign against state GOP Chairman, Sue Everhart. I hope if someone is seeking the position that they’ll be kind enough to announce soon.
Everhart is a star on the National GOP stage after our great showing in a very difficult election year. My first thought was “why on Earth would people want come after a chairman who has been successful, available to the grass roots, and ‘one of us’?”
From what little information their was, and it being more rumor than fact, all I can gather this is a move by some folks who think the party should be run from the top down and miss having the party as a personal campaign resource for the campaigns of their choosing.
Has anyone else heard anything?
It is encouraging as an educator to see a vigorous dialogue over the issue of education. Communication between all vested parties is a critical component to placing Georgia’s schools on the correct path and providing the education that our children deserve. I am writing this post to offer some insight to my educational beliefs and goals for our state.
•As a strong supporter of site based educational leadership, I do believe that the best interest of students, teachers, and parents is best handled at the local level. The needs of each school system and school are unique. It is the job of the State School Superintendent and Department of Education to provide statewide goals and benchmarks, needed resources, and financial funding and flexibility.
•In the area of school funding, I support more of a block grant model. We should give our local systems lump financial resources with few spending regulations and let them attack the issues facing them. If they need more teachers and paraprofessionals verses buildings and resources or vice versa, let them make the call. Our local systems are better at making these judgments rather than a large and centralized bureaucracy. We as a state should also do a better job at partnering with statewide and national businesses. Their support with financial and material resources can help with the funding disparity that faces our rural school systems. That being said, the local systems must be held accountable for their performance and resource allocation.
•I do agree that our testing system does need to be evaluated. The presentation and expectation of our state test, the classroom curriculum, and the information given to our teachers is not fully aligned. There is also some redundancy and overkill in testing. This seems to be more of an issue at the high school level. Grades 1-8 are formally tested 2-3 times a year. It must also be noted that our formal testing does not fully measure the value and level of a child’s academic performance and capability nor a child’s complete educational experience.
•Active parental involvement is one of and perhaps the most important aspects of a child’s education. Children who have active parents are generally assured of a successful education experience and endless life opportunities.
•In addressing the constitutionality of the U.S. Department of Education, I believe that MSBassSinger does express a legitimate point. The 10th Amendment does state the powers not delegated to the U.S. by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States or to the people. You do not find the responsibility of education mentioned any place in our U.S. Constitution. Thus, the federal “No Child Left Behind Act” does over reach the authority of the federal government. Even though the “No Child Left Behind Act” did bring about a national awakening on the issue of education and the need for accountability, its regulation have greatly burdened our school systems. It would also be more productive not to send money up to Washington D.C. and have them to send it back down to Georgia with many strings attached. Yet, I do believe there is a very limited role for the federal government as we are the United State of America and not independent countries that haphazardly work together as present in the European Union.
•In assessing point #16 in MSBassSinger’s post, I find the set of standards to be most challenging and rigorous. If a student were in a 4×4 block schedule or a traditional 6 period schedule, Georgia students would be unable to complete a four year program with one year course offerings as stated. The presented program does seem to be geared towards a traditional college prep diploma. I am curious on how you would address an allowance for technical training, optional curriculum experiences, and special needs children.
It is imperative that our students receive a solid core curriculum. They must also display mastery of such a curriculum as well. Research has shown that a student must be on grade level for reading by 3rd Grade and on grade level for math by 5th Grade. If a student fails to meet either criteria, they have a high degree of becoming a part of our unacceptable 40% drop-out rate.
Furthermore, I would like to offer our students flexibility with their post high school experience by giving them a solid fundamental education. Georgia’s students must be given an education that prepares them to move straight into the workplace and allows them to pursue either a technical college or university degree. If a child is heading down a college program, it does need to be rigorous and do more to prepare our students for the challenges of a university experience. Our college drop-out rate and the number of high school students taking remedial classes in college is alarming.
If a student is pursuing a technical track, their education should prepare them with the basics that will allow them the opportunity to enter a traditional college at a later date. I am a prime example of this as I went to a technical school and held a job in the workplace for several years prior to entering college. Mastery of core basic skills in the areas of reading, writing, and mathematics will open the doors of opportunity to anyone.
It has been a privilege to be a part of this post and have the opportunity to express my views. Our freedom of speech and the exchange of ideas are one of the cornerstones that has made this the greatest country in the world. I ask you to consider my candidacy for the position of State School Superintendent and visit the campaign website at http://www.woodsforgeorgiaed.com.
Respectfully,
Richard Woods
Republican Candidate for the office of State Superintendent
reggiejg, you are the umpteenth person I have heard mention a “rumor” that there will be a challenge to Sue Everhart’s position at the state convention. However, you are the first one I have heard say that it was a challenge from “folks who think the party should be run from the top down.” Every other person said it would come from folks who think the party is being run too much from the top down, and needs to return to being a grassroots organization.
Interesting. Maybe Savannah will be fun after all?
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