BREAKING NEWS!!! High School Sports Restrictions Enacted

Today the state legislature passed and the governor signed landmark legislation aimed at upgrading the educational experience of the state’s children. In a surprising landslide vote both houses passed the measure by large majorities.

The central thrust of the legislation is to force educators to face facts that their process emphasis stance has served our children poorly for decades. The bill requires that by the start of the next school year all districts that use constructivist or discovery curricula will be forced to certify, subject to random audits by the state, that they are not using direct instruction and drill approaches in any sport program in the district. Practices would only involve general conditioning and allowing the team members to play around trying to discover the best techniques on their own without the facilitator’s direct influence. Violations would require a lost season in the sport found to be noncompliant. If the districts take swift action to replace their constructivist curricula with direct instruction curricula by the start of the upcoming school year the sports sanctions will not apply. In a move to encourage swift action by districts the law requires a two year added no-sports penalty for each year of delay. That is, for each year delay in implementing direct instruction the district will lose the right to participate in sports of any kind for two years.

The speed with which the legislature and governor moved indicates that the frustration of decades of higher and higher spending on education without commensurate improvement in results had reached a point where the legislators who have been hearing rising complaint levels from constituents were fed up with the glacial pace of change in education improvement. This was seen as especially critical due to the ineffectiveness in addressing the achievement gap between poor and minority children and the other children.

The governor who ran on a promise to dramatically improve education commented at the bill signing that he was sick of the educators’ refusal to address core issues preventing improvement while using the research-based and best-practices mantras coupled with constant whining about the need for more money. He said it seemed to him that the educators would feed arsenic to the kids if the bottle was labeled “research based. He commented that if the educators are so convinced that the constructivist curricula are the way to go in spite of evidence from the countries like Finland and Singapore that do far better at educating their kids than we do, let them apply it to sports. Then they will see when using the constructivist approach you can’t be competitive in sports as well as in global achievement testing.”

Education leaders immediately attacked the lack of understanding of the “non expert” legislators dictating to them when the educators are the true experts who should continue to make all education decisions. They said it is a travesty that the politicians are holding the sports programs of the schools hostage to their uninformed beliefs.

Senator I.M. Fedup commented that this was a warning shot across the bow of the educators that expectations were changing dramatically. The educators have used up all of their credibility in wheel-spinning that has benefited no one but the educators as the demands for more and more money have been met over and over. He further commented that they will perform better, much better, and quickly or be replaced by vouchers and other alternatives.

Coaches of high school sports were threatening to cancel the sports seasons hoping that public outrage would cause the legislators to flinch. That doesn’t seem likely as several legislators commented that it was time to get educational priorities straight and put the proper amount of concentration on curricular activities as opposed to overemphasizing extra-curricular activities.

The state administrators association in conjunction with the NEA and the AFT unions put out a joint press release condemning the meddling of the uneducated in education decisions better left to the experts.

A sampling of education experts we spoke to are saying that the legislation will cause a rethinking of education school curricula to address the lack of rigorous subject knowledge training. Also, the long held tradition of virtual brainwashing of prospective teachers in naturalism [progressivism, romanticism, transcendentalism] ideas that don’t stand scientific scrutiny will be under increasing pressure. We should begin to see a move toward balance between the pedagogy and subject knowledge aspects of education school training in the near future.

MORE TO FOLLOW . . .