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Text of District 46 Parent's Presentation to School Board at April 9th Board Meeting
(reprinted with permission)Hello, My Name is Mary Pirrello.Return to Watch District 46 Schools Home PageI came here almost six years ago. We moved here from a school district in Connecticut, leaving behind a district struggling to rid itself of OBE. The Parents weren't happy, the students were not performing as promised. The writing skills were down, the reading skills were slipping, the math skills were barely holding up against the rest of the country. OBE was failing and it took a whole slew of children with it. In Illinois, thank God, we were careful to move into a district that still emphasized personal achievement and recognition. One that takes pride in its accomplishments as a district with the middle school being a Blue Ribbon School and Avon adopting the Koality Kid program which emphasized personal growth and responsibility at all levels of the school life.
I have four reasons for opposing OBE.
The first one is my daughter Sarah (children's names changed -ed.). She started Kindergarten the year Naugatuck was beginning OBE mode. The system was starting to adopt the idea that All Children Can Learn. Well, she was not accomplishing anything in the first few months, unbeknownst to me. By mid March, the school sat down with us and recommended her for something new called Transitional-a grade created to give her more time to mature and develop her learning readiness. With no other option available but to push her into first grade, which they felt she would not succeed at, nor did we at that point after listening to them; we went along. She was terribly stressed at why she did not understand some things the other children did, but I just thought it was a normal Kindergarten thing, they never mentioned till March she was not going to be put to the next grade. If they had told me earlier in the year, I could have taken her out and put her back in Kindergarten the following year. But the OBE way was to keep her in school, the options were not made available to us that might have otherwise. Sarah has always felt she flunked Kindergarten, she is extremely fearful of failure and always will be extremely nervous about tests. She studies hours on end at home and re-writes notes and homework until it is PERFECT, she is so afraid she will fail again. I had a teacher call me once and apologize for not being able to give her an A, because she was so upset about it. He felt we would punish her or something.
My second reason is Thomas, who started school the following year after Sarah. His work was very good from day one, but he was troublesome for the teacher in the classroom, he knew all the material and was ready to move on but she couldn't move him on and he had to follow the course until all the students in the class had gotten the material. He was bored and said so using different words like he was tired of doing the same things over and over until "Jimmy" got it. They wanted to test him saying something was wrong, maybe attention deficit or some other brain damage was at work. We as parents would not consent, his testing scores were good and we felt they were just on a witch hunt to solve an internal classroom problem. By fifth grade I was so frustrated at them asking for testing every single year I had allowed them to test him. They came back saying that he was not the problem, but the problem was bigger than all of us. He was extremely intelligent and that he had been spinning his wheels for so long now and learned to do it so well he was now a "non-performing intellect".
My third reason is Charles, he too was put into Transitional grade before entering First. He was not meeting all the criteria for entering First grade and seemed to have behavior difficulties…..He was bored in other words. OBE was in full swing at Andrew Avenue. Parents were getting wise and so were we. Charles still to this day cannot spell to save his soul, trying to sound out words and spell them. He never switched over in his head. After seeing and reading the words for years now the right way, he still spells them the way they sound because from day one he was allowed to think this was good by the teacher and never given the right way to spell those words until second grade when we had moved out here. Being told this was not really the way these words were to be spelled was culture shock for him. Yes he had read these words in books correctly but thought spelling them his way in his own work was OK. Three years of being trained to think the way you were thinking about spelling was good because they didn't want to stifle your creativity. He is creative but I am afraid he well end up like Bohr who had his wife do all his writing because his writing skills were poor as well. Without being able to communicate in written words he will struggle to get his ideas across the rest of his life.
My fourth and final reason for being against OBE is Michael. He, thank God, has gone to school out here since day one. He has been encouraged to excel personally by his teachers, by the system here and is doing well. I had to make my point when he was in First grade that he has a wonderful mind and needed to be challenged and I continue to encourage the school to raise the bar. He is an excellent student according to teachers and seems happy and productive. Has a dose of self-confidence and will continue to do well in all he does because he has had a good foundation of reading writing and arithmetic here with emphasis on personal performance standards. He reaches for the bar and it gets raised. He is in the challenge program and understands he earned his way in there and has to continually prove he should be in there. He was bored for awhile in the lower grades but with the addition of challenge in third, and now more Science and Social Studies, seems to be challenged to learn more. He has had to learn to learn, which is something you cannot teach them later if they get out of Elementary school without it. He will not earn the label "non-performing intellect".
This OBE sounds good in theory, but in practice it can be a nightmare! You already use a few of the aspects of OBE in math, reading and writing. However, you have tempered it with good judgment and personal pride. OBE will stifle a teacher's ability to make the call when to move on and when not to. It puts it all on paper but forgets the human aspects of the classroom. If the children in general get it the teacher moves on. Yes all children can learn, but even I know they don't all get it at the same time and you know this too! That is why we send them to school every year and why curriculum repeats itself each year to make sure the core aspects are repeated and re-enforced. It is why some children are held back and others put ahead, so they are placed where they are not frustrated and ending up as angry adults spinning their wheels waiting for something to happen of interest to them. These are individuals you are helping, not compliant robots.
Conformity is another OBE tenant. They want all the children to be the same, no one should stick out, so everyone feels good. That's ridiculous and sounds a little Communistic and Socialistic to me. Corporations sponsor OBE so they can have a pre raised compliant workforce trained to go along with the flow and not make any waves, compliancy is stressed so everyone gets along. SO WE WON'T THINK FOR OURSELVES!
Think about this. I beg you, don't do this to District 46, to the administrators, to the teachers and to the parents. Think before you act, protect your freedoms to make decisions for yourselves. These children are the future, and if you don't teach them to learn to learn from early on, they will learn, but it will be the hard way, in fear of failure, labeled as a "non-performing intellect" or being left with a lifelong struggle to overcome.