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Correctable Error

January 17, 2014

I have written at other times and places that if it had been the stated purpose of our state’s and country’s chief executives and legislators for the past 20 years to weaken public education, they would have done exactly what they have done. They have spoken about strengthening schools and improving education, but their actions have done the opposite.

This is precisely the point of the richly researched Reign of Error, The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools by Diane Rovitch (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013).

Competition, choice and corporate influence are all attacked, as are the misuse and overuse of standardized testing and the excessive reliance on e-education.

The author’s prescription for schools is not everything new and different, but removal of politicians and profiteers. And, catching my attention most, Rovitch writes: 

“As students enter the upper elementary grades and middle school and high school, they should have a balanced curriculum . . . Their school should have a rich arts program where students learn to sing, dance, play an instrument, join an orchestra or band, perform in a play, sculpt, or use technology to design structures, conduct research, or create artworks. Every student should have time for physical education every day . . . Every school should have after-school programs where students may explore their interests, whether in athletics, chess, robotics, history club, dramatics, science club, nature study, scouting or other activities.”

The kinds of programs that the MHSAA promotes and protects are the keys to the type of education students want, need and deserve. And I admire every school that provides these programs in spite of all that has conspired against them for two decades.

A Change Narrative

October 13, 2017

Here are five points to describe the essence of possible changes being processed by the Michigan High School Athletic Association for its transfer rule.

  1. We would move from a rule designed years ago for three-sport athletes to a rule that’s equally effective for regulating single-sport athletes.

  2. We would be treating all sports the same, regardless of season – fall, winter, spring. No longer would the transfer rule have a greater impact on winter sport athletes than fall or spring sport athletes.

  3. We would be getting out of the way of more “school of choice” parents who want to move a child from one school to another. If the student has not played a particular high school sport before, then eligibility is immediate in that sport ... at any level, and without any MHSAA Executive Committee action.

  4. We would be causing students who have played a high school sport (and their parents) to pause before they transfer. They would miss the next season in that sport unless one of the 15 stated exceptions to the transfer rule applies. (There is significant sentiment that this apply only to students who have played previously at the varsity level – i.e., if the student has participated previously only at the subvarsity level in a sport, that student could transfer and remain eligible at the subvarsity level; but this would be allowed one time only.)

  5. We would make it even tougher on students (and their parents) to circumvent the athletic-motivated and athletic-related transfer rules by eliminating the automatic residency exception in those special cases. (This is the most hotly debated of the changes being considered.)

The theme is “get out of the way of the benign transfers and get still tougher on the really bad ones.”