Parental Activist Calls on Schools to Enhance Reading and Introduce Rigor

by David Awbrey
Ad Astra Magazine

January/February 2001

Cindy Duckett is Kansas' first cyber-school activist. From the computer in her southwest Wichita home, she serves as a sounding board for school reformers across the state and as a primary research resource for journalists, parents and others interested in educational issues.

In 1990, Duckett was one of the first Kansans to go on-line. Through chatrooms and bulletin boards, she created a network of committed parents suspicious that their children were getting an inferior education in the Wichita Public Schools. Organized as Project Educate, she and her allies challenged the Wichita schools to raise academic standards and demanded greater parental participation schools.

She helped create Wichita's Parental Rights Policy, which since has become a national model to ensure privacy and other guarantees.

A self-described child of the 1960s, and now a professional web designer, Duckett began taking on the educational establishment at an early age: She was one of the first two girls to manage boys sports teams at Wichita High School East.

"Civil rights was something I grew up with," she says. "I think I had good parents and they taught me that you do have social obligations."

Today, Duckett's cause is high-quality education. She charges that schools lack academic rigor. She cites the Core Knowledge program endorsed by the Wichita district as a good curriculum model. Based on the "cultural literacy" concepts of E. D. Hirsch, Core Knowledge stresses the common heritage found in history, literature and other traditional subjects that are often neglected by schools.

"Nationwide, Kansas schools rank really high," she says, "But how good is that when we are just the best of the bad?" Noting that only about a third of Kansas fourth- and eighth-graders earned a "proficient" score on a recent standardized reading test, she observes: "No other education can take place unless you know how to read. Literacy is number one."

Most of all, Duckett says, Kansans should be passionate about schools. "We should be open-minded and innovative. Let's get brave here. Let's experiment."