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Oral History and News Story: Dr. Cindy Clemson
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Michelle Hawks
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Though she originally received a degree in occupational therapy, Cindy Clemson is no stranger to education.
For the past three decades, Clemson has been involved in education at nearly every level. In 1987, after graduating with a degree in education, Clemson began teaching head start.
“That was an outstanding experience,” Clemson said. From there, she served as a special education teacher for five years at the elementary and high school levels for Murray City Schools. She went on to spend 22 years at Murray State University working with college students who have disabilities. In 2015, she received her doctorate and teaches special education as a faculty member in the College of Education.
For the past three decades, Clemson has been involved in education at nearly every level. In 1987, after graduating with a degree in education, Clemson began teaching head start.
“That was an outstanding experience,” Clemson said. From there, she served as a special education teacher for five years at the elementary and high school levels for Murray City Schools. She went on to spend 22 years at Murray State University working with college students who have disabilities. In 2015, she received her doctorate and teaches special education as a faculty member in the College of Education.
Data Driven Decision Making
One of the topics Clemson teaches her students is data-driven decision making. According to the book "Data-Driven Classroom" by Craig A. Mertler, data-driven decision making “refers to the process by which educators examine assessment data to identify student strengths and deficiencies and apply those findings to their practice.”
Clemson said this process requires a lot more testing of students, but it’s better in the long run. She said this particularly helps students who are behind in areas like reading and allows for teachers to assess their individual learning before it becomes too late.
“We need to see where our students are actually learning,” Clemson said.
This process also applies to special education students. Clemson said that an Individual Education Program (IEP) is “absolutely driven.” She said she likes to think that IEPs served as a foundation for implementing data-driven decision making for use with all students.
Soft Skill Development
However, the future focus isn’t solely on individual data in traditional areas of study. Clemson said moving forward, the classroom should also be a place where students learn soft skills, such as showing up on time, completing tasks and working as a team.
“Yes, they might be able to come out and do geometry, but they can’t work with somebody else because they’re hooked on their phone all the time,” Clemson said. “So I think it’s in that way schools and classrooms provide that really needed area as well.”
She said a concern also exists about how students handle failure.
“…when they don’t know how to do something, they just quit,” Clemson said, “and employers are saying, we need to teach them that it's okay to fail.”
She went on to reference famous examples that are often used of successful people who overcame failure, such as Albert Einstein and Abraham Lincoln.
Clemson said she thinks in order for students to be truly successful, schools “need to be classroom-oriented and group-oriented” so that soft skills can be taught, as well as allowing for an individualized approach to education. She said it is important for educators to think about how they can prepare students to be the best workers and citizens that they can be.
Moving Forward
As discussions of pension reform and charter schools still loom, the future of education in Kentucky is unknown. Clemson said moving forward, it is important for those unfamiliar with education to educate themselves about it.
“Ask questions of your school board, ask questions of your principals, of your schools,” Clemson said.
In addition, she said it is also important for people to become involved in the school, whether it be through donating to various fundraisers and food banks or volunteering.
“Help the schools make a difference with our kiddos, because that's why we're here,” Clemson said. “We're here to help all students to be as successful as they can be.”
Original Format
The audio file to this oral history interview can be accessed at this link:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SkSj6v2uAHv7QEmwhB-a9AlDj8h17N_C/view?usp=sharing
Transcript:
Michelle Hawks: This is Michelle Hawks. The date is Thursday, October 18, 2018. Today, I will be speaking with Dr. Cindy Clemson about testing as it relates to different aspects of education. Dr. Clemson, do I have your permission to conduct this interview?
Dr. Clemson: Yes, Michelle.
MH: Okay. Just to begin, you’ve had a very extensive career in education. Can you briefly tell me a bit about it?
Dr. Clemson: Sure. I’ve been very lucky to be involved in education since the early 1980s. I have an initial degree in Occupational Therapy. And so, I was able to initially work with babies who were born with disabilities in trying to teach them about learning and how to…just…and so we were working with children with Down Syndrome and things like that and trying to give them from the time they were born and the disability was identified, trying to help them just mitigate some of the circumstances of their disability. So, for babies who are born with disabilities, their education can start at birth. So, I was lucky enough to do that for a while. Then I was fortunate enough to spend some time teaching at head start and working with the federal Head Start program, which is a federal program that has a preschool for children who meets certain socioeconomic guidelines. That was an outstanding experience. Then I taught for Murray City Schools—a special education teacher—and I taught at the high school level, and I taught at the elementary school level. And then for 22 years I worked here at Murray State in working with college students who have disabilities. And then in 2015, I finally finished a doctorate, and I've been teaching now as a faculty member in the College of Education as a special education faculty member.
MH: Okay. Before you've briefly mentioned that you teach a course that discusses data driven decisions—am I getting that term right?
Dr. Clemson: Mmhmm
MH: And for those of us who aren’t familiar with that term, can you tell us what it is?
Dr. Clemson: Sure. That—believe it or not, the state of Kentucky is very progressive in education. And so, even starting back in 1990 when we had passed a law called KERA, the Kentucky Education Reform Act. It was a very…helping very diverse students because our population in our state is, was very different. And looking at students in Appalachian versus students who lived in very urban areas like Louisville, Lexington, the opportunities were not the same for a student if you grew up in the Lexington area versus if you grew up in Hazard, Kentucky. And it was very unfair the way our funding was at prior to KERA being implemented and set up as a law in our state. And so basically before then the way public schools were funded was based on the income of your county. A certain percentage went back into your schools, so very poor counties in eastern Kentucky and Appalachia had very little money to spend on their schools, whereas if you lived in a more affluent county, say Jefferson County or even the Lexington area, they had much more money to put into their schools. So Kentucky said this wasn’t fair, so it was very huge educational reform back prior to the 1990s about educational funding. And that made big, big decisions and made some great changes in our state for students that now funding for education was more even across the board. And that the state was going to get involved in helping that. The next thing that we then began to realize was that some of our students, due to the diversity that we were seeing of the students in our state—some of our students were not ready when they graduated from high school to move into either college or move into a career. So again, the state was very, very forward thinking and said, well, by a certain date, we want to have a majority of our students to be college or career ready. So that's been the latest educational push in our school, in our state…can look at House bill—Senate Bill One addresses what we want to look at in terms of students who are college or career ready. And one of the ways that we have figured out that we need to do that is we need to look at our students. We need to see where our students are actually learning. So, we've done a lot of—a lot more testing of our students in the last few years to see where they actually are. If you're in fifth grade, but reading at a second grade level, instead of just continuing to push you along and that gap getting wider and wider, and then by the time you graduate from high school, you're still not reading at a level that is going to allow you to get a good job or allow you to move into the college, we’re doing—we are looking at these results of all this testing we’re giving. So, we're giving tests, we're seeing where kids are, and then we're teaching those kids. So, we're grouping kids who need to work on certain things, we’re—it’s called response to intervention, and it's another new initiative in education. And just—that is a nationwide initiative in education, looking at kids who are struggling, using good evidence-based ways to teach kids instead of just saying, “Here's the textbook, read it…if you're not where…” We understand that people learn differently, and students from different diversity, different diverse backgrounds don't all learn in the same way. So, we're trying to understand how students are learning and then how we, as teachers, need to teach so that our students are learning so they can be college and career ready. So, we're constantly testing kids, doing screenings of kids. And then we have all this data, and schools are able to take that data, drill it down, looking at the individual student level, and each month, seeing how a student is progressing in learning these skills. So instead of just waiting and hoping that the student kicks in, we're doing more what we call data driven decision making. We're looking at this, we're testing the kids, we're seeing where they are, then we're not just testing them and hoping they'll get better in the next month, we're figuring out what are different ways that we need to be teaching. So, we are going back in, in a sense kind of becoming researchers or going out and looking at the research that says, if you have kids who are struggling in phonetic awareness, and learning to read, here's some evidence based strategies that you as a teacher can do to teach these kids who are struggling. Or on the other hand, many times, kids who were not quite identified as gifted, they were just kind of told the teach themselves, or kind of, maybe they would teach the lower kids. But now we're also looking at those students and grouping them as well, and adding additional challenges or teaching them in the ways that help them to become the best student that they can be. So I think we're using—we're becoming a much more, I guess…just the data driven looking at these research strategies, looking at things that have been proven to help students who are struggling with this, or students who need to be challenged in a different way, looking at students who have disabilities, figuring out how to help them the best, how does everybody learn? Where are they? And moving students along.
MH: Is this individualized approach to learning—is that the future of education?
Dr. Clemson: Well, I think that probably we’ll still be all together in classrooms. Because there's so many things that we need to learn—we need to learn how to be team, how to work in a team, we need to learn to work with people who are not…who do not look exactly like us, maybe, that you know, we need to be a diverse global society. And so, I think we'll always have classrooms, but I think we will be looking more and more at individually helping students move to being the best they can be. But I don't think we'll ever just have one teacher and one student. I think it will always be in a classroom setting, because that's how most jobs are. We work together as a group in a job, we were on a team in our business, we…we need to learn those teamwork skills, those h—we need to learn those skills, not only academic skills, but skills like showing up on time completing your work, being responsible. So that's one of the things that employers are telling us that they're not seeing sometimes in our students, what we call soft skills. Yes, they might be able to come out and do geometry, but they can't work with somebody else because they’re hooked on their phone all the time. So I think it's in that way schools and classrooms provide that really needed area as well. Or people have said that students give up too easily. Now, they don't have a way to when they hit a…when they don't know how to do something, they just quit, and employers are saying, we need to teach them that it's okay to fail. Albert Einstein did it, Pres—Abraham Lincoln failed. You know, he lost many, many Senate races and before he was ever elected president and people would say he's probably one of our best presidents. So, think…so I think we'll—schools will also need to be classroom-oriented and group-oriented so that we can teach some of those other skills like a growth mindset and teamwork and persistence overcoming your frustrations. So, yes, I think we're looking—so I see schools in providing both things: a nice way to individualize education, to see how…how we're going to move you to be the best students you can be. But also, how we can help you to be the best citizen, the best worker that you can be, the best—even if it is just the best welder. I mean, so many careers now need some different…a different set of skills as well. So, it's really our job as teachers, as schools, as our state to be able to prepare our students to continue to keep our society going…moving successfully along.
MH: Going back for a second to your background in special education—you teaching special education—how does this data driven…I think you’ve touched on this a little bit…but how does this data driven decisions effect special education students?
Dr. Clemson: So, students who are considered to be in special education, there's a federal law called the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. So if a student has a disability and is eligible for special education—and special education isn't a place it's not a room down the hall. special education is a service that we provide to students who have a diagnosed disability. So, because if they're identified as having a disability under IDEA, they're entitled to what we call an Individual Education Program. And you've heard of something called an IEP and that is absolutely driven. We must look at where the student currently is, and we must monitor their progress, just like we're doing with the whole schools are doing, we must monitor the progress and then find ways to teach students to learn those skills that are—that we've determined are deficient based on their disability. So, as a matter of fact, I think special education and these IEPs, where we were monitoring the progress of students having to look at those, maybe, have now applied to all of education, I think maybe people have seen, wow, this is really helpful to those kids that we, about 13% of students in our state are considered in special education. So, I think maybe people have looked and said, oh, wow, this is really helping them. And so, maybe how could we do this with all of our students? I like to think that that's the way it that it was in the way that we've come about that. But I think we're just learning more and more about the diversity of our students, and that they're not learning in the old ways that we used to teach and that schools needed to change in order to make our state be successful.
MH: Just sort of wrapping this up, moving forward, not only how would you like to see education progress, but also, do you think that Kentucky is providing an example for the rest of the nation?
Dr. Clemson: I think in many ways we are. It's interesting to read comparisons of students in Kentucky versus students in other states. And I think there are some really, really fine pockets of teaching going on in different parts of the state—of our state. So for example, every year you can that the State Department of Education puts out where are the top performing schools, elementary, middle school and high school, and where are the low performing schools and a student—if schools continue to be in that low performing and the students aren't learning, then actually, the State Department can come in and remove the administration that's in that school and put in new administrators to kind of get the school moving in the right direction. I think that's a really good thing. Because it's not fair to those students that they don't get what they need, I mean, that their parents pay taxes as well. So I think one of the things that worries me a little bit about education some, depending on—I believe, our current president believes the best way to learn to—for schools to be successful is to allow parents to have choice. So, he has advocated using charter schools. And as always being in a public school, having taught for public schools, and my children have gone to public schools, that I feel like maybe sometimes people just give up on public schools, instead of saying, Oh, well, let's just figure out how to get a good administrative team in here, and good teachers in here to teach the students, now we'll just let parents move their kids out if they can afford it, to go to another school, and then that public schools are only going to be for kids whose parents can't afford it. And that makes me really sad. That is to me not fair—that’s not what I believe the framers of our United States Constitution believed when they said that every citizen has as one of our civil rights to, for the government to educate students. And so, I think there'll be a—I think that's one of the things I see in the future, that debate on public schools versus charter schools and funding of them, parent choice.
MH: Kind of going off of that for a bit. For those of us who aren't familiar with education as much, what would you say to us as we kind of try to figure out moving forward?
Dr. Clemson: I think you need to educate yourself. I think it's really good that you're in journalism, but you're looking at education, because education is what drives everything. I mean, it is the one thing that was happening as well as that teachers don't make the kind of money that other people do, but yet we teach everybody. You know, we teach at the college levels—we teach, you know, we teach the Einsteins, we teach the engineers, we teach the doctors. So education was not—it is not respected as it is in some other countries, like Korea. And I just happened to know that because for—I've been in South Korea a couple of times, and my husband was also responsible for a plant in South Korea, a chemical plant, so he was over there a lot. So education was very, very highly regarded there, and their teachers were very highly regarded. Whereas here, I think that education is not some—people think, “Oh, well, if you can't be a doctor, go be a teacher. If you can't do this, then go be a teacher.” So, I think that for people who are not teachers, I think it's just really important to begin to read up on what schools are doing, what is our state doing? How are we preparing our students to be college and career ready? Ask questions of your school board, ask questions of your principals, of your schools. You'll be parents most likely. Get involved in your schools, so that you have the opportunity to help make a difference as well. I think that it shouldn't be—schools should be a microcosm of the community, of the society. And so, we need everybody to be involved with what's going on. But if you haven't been reading what's going on, just educate yourself. The Kentucky Department of Education is great, just go volunteer at the school. I mean, even if it is nothing more than helping out with the backpack program in terms of donating food for children. One out of every five children in our country goes to bed hungry, so helping our schools by donating food so that they can-- we can send food home for kids over the weekend who need it. That happens in Callaway County. We don't think about it. We don't see it. Understand that even if it's just donating to the Christmas drives that the schools have, that our Family Resource Centers do, even if it's just helping donate school supplies for kids who can’t afford to buy new backpacks or new shoes, donating money to the Family Resource Center so that they can help those students who might not be able to get a new backpack full of school supplies. So, I think encouraging people to get involved, do some reading, and then you know, get in there and volunteer. That would be the best way that you can see what's going on. And then how you can make a difference as well. Help the schools make a difference with our kiddos, because that's why we're here. We're here to help all students to be as successful as they can be. I tell my students in my one class, every student can learn. Maybe just not in the same way, and maybe just not on the same day, but every student can learn.
MH: Well, thank you, Dr. Clemson.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SkSj6v2uAHv7QEmwhB-a9AlDj8h17N_C/view?usp=sharing
Transcript:
Michelle Hawks: This is Michelle Hawks. The date is Thursday, October 18, 2018. Today, I will be speaking with Dr. Cindy Clemson about testing as it relates to different aspects of education. Dr. Clemson, do I have your permission to conduct this interview?
Dr. Clemson: Yes, Michelle.
MH: Okay. Just to begin, you’ve had a very extensive career in education. Can you briefly tell me a bit about it?
Dr. Clemson: Sure. I’ve been very lucky to be involved in education since the early 1980s. I have an initial degree in Occupational Therapy. And so, I was able to initially work with babies who were born with disabilities in trying to teach them about learning and how to…just…and so we were working with children with Down Syndrome and things like that and trying to give them from the time they were born and the disability was identified, trying to help them just mitigate some of the circumstances of their disability. So, for babies who are born with disabilities, their education can start at birth. So, I was lucky enough to do that for a while. Then I was fortunate enough to spend some time teaching at head start and working with the federal Head Start program, which is a federal program that has a preschool for children who meets certain socioeconomic guidelines. That was an outstanding experience. Then I taught for Murray City Schools—a special education teacher—and I taught at the high school level, and I taught at the elementary school level. And then for 22 years I worked here at Murray State in working with college students who have disabilities. And then in 2015, I finally finished a doctorate, and I've been teaching now as a faculty member in the College of Education as a special education faculty member.
MH: Okay. Before you've briefly mentioned that you teach a course that discusses data driven decisions—am I getting that term right?
Dr. Clemson: Mmhmm
MH: And for those of us who aren’t familiar with that term, can you tell us what it is?
Dr. Clemson: Sure. That—believe it or not, the state of Kentucky is very progressive in education. And so, even starting back in 1990 when we had passed a law called KERA, the Kentucky Education Reform Act. It was a very…helping very diverse students because our population in our state is, was very different. And looking at students in Appalachian versus students who lived in very urban areas like Louisville, Lexington, the opportunities were not the same for a student if you grew up in the Lexington area versus if you grew up in Hazard, Kentucky. And it was very unfair the way our funding was at prior to KERA being implemented and set up as a law in our state. And so basically before then the way public schools were funded was based on the income of your county. A certain percentage went back into your schools, so very poor counties in eastern Kentucky and Appalachia had very little money to spend on their schools, whereas if you lived in a more affluent county, say Jefferson County or even the Lexington area, they had much more money to put into their schools. So Kentucky said this wasn’t fair, so it was very huge educational reform back prior to the 1990s about educational funding. And that made big, big decisions and made some great changes in our state for students that now funding for education was more even across the board. And that the state was going to get involved in helping that. The next thing that we then began to realize was that some of our students, due to the diversity that we were seeing of the students in our state—some of our students were not ready when they graduated from high school to move into either college or move into a career. So again, the state was very, very forward thinking and said, well, by a certain date, we want to have a majority of our students to be college or career ready. So that's been the latest educational push in our school, in our state…can look at House bill—Senate Bill One addresses what we want to look at in terms of students who are college or career ready. And one of the ways that we have figured out that we need to do that is we need to look at our students. We need to see where our students are actually learning. So, we've done a lot of—a lot more testing of our students in the last few years to see where they actually are. If you're in fifth grade, but reading at a second grade level, instead of just continuing to push you along and that gap getting wider and wider, and then by the time you graduate from high school, you're still not reading at a level that is going to allow you to get a good job or allow you to move into the college, we’re doing—we are looking at these results of all this testing we’re giving. So, we're giving tests, we're seeing where kids are, and then we're teaching those kids. So, we're grouping kids who need to work on certain things, we’re—it’s called response to intervention, and it's another new initiative in education. And just—that is a nationwide initiative in education, looking at kids who are struggling, using good evidence-based ways to teach kids instead of just saying, “Here's the textbook, read it…if you're not where…” We understand that people learn differently, and students from different diversity, different diverse backgrounds don't all learn in the same way. So, we're trying to understand how students are learning and then how we, as teachers, need to teach so that our students are learning so they can be college and career ready. So, we're constantly testing kids, doing screenings of kids. And then we have all this data, and schools are able to take that data, drill it down, looking at the individual student level, and each month, seeing how a student is progressing in learning these skills. So instead of just waiting and hoping that the student kicks in, we're doing more what we call data driven decision making. We're looking at this, we're testing the kids, we're seeing where they are, then we're not just testing them and hoping they'll get better in the next month, we're figuring out what are different ways that we need to be teaching. So, we are going back in, in a sense kind of becoming researchers or going out and looking at the research that says, if you have kids who are struggling in phonetic awareness, and learning to read, here's some evidence based strategies that you as a teacher can do to teach these kids who are struggling. Or on the other hand, many times, kids who were not quite identified as gifted, they were just kind of told the teach themselves, or kind of, maybe they would teach the lower kids. But now we're also looking at those students and grouping them as well, and adding additional challenges or teaching them in the ways that help them to become the best student that they can be. So I think we're using—we're becoming a much more, I guess…just the data driven looking at these research strategies, looking at things that have been proven to help students who are struggling with this, or students who need to be challenged in a different way, looking at students who have disabilities, figuring out how to help them the best, how does everybody learn? Where are they? And moving students along.
MH: Is this individualized approach to learning—is that the future of education?
Dr. Clemson: Well, I think that probably we’ll still be all together in classrooms. Because there's so many things that we need to learn—we need to learn how to be team, how to work in a team, we need to learn to work with people who are not…who do not look exactly like us, maybe, that you know, we need to be a diverse global society. And so, I think we'll always have classrooms, but I think we will be looking more and more at individually helping students move to being the best they can be. But I don't think we'll ever just have one teacher and one student. I think it will always be in a classroom setting, because that's how most jobs are. We work together as a group in a job, we were on a team in our business, we…we need to learn those teamwork skills, those h—we need to learn those skills, not only academic skills, but skills like showing up on time completing your work, being responsible. So that's one of the things that employers are telling us that they're not seeing sometimes in our students, what we call soft skills. Yes, they might be able to come out and do geometry, but they can't work with somebody else because they’re hooked on their phone all the time. So I think it's in that way schools and classrooms provide that really needed area as well. Or people have said that students give up too easily. Now, they don't have a way to when they hit a…when they don't know how to do something, they just quit, and employers are saying, we need to teach them that it's okay to fail. Albert Einstein did it, Pres—Abraham Lincoln failed. You know, he lost many, many Senate races and before he was ever elected president and people would say he's probably one of our best presidents. So, think…so I think we'll—schools will also need to be classroom-oriented and group-oriented so that we can teach some of those other skills like a growth mindset and teamwork and persistence overcoming your frustrations. So, yes, I think we're looking—so I see schools in providing both things: a nice way to individualize education, to see how…how we're going to move you to be the best students you can be. But also, how we can help you to be the best citizen, the best worker that you can be, the best—even if it is just the best welder. I mean, so many careers now need some different…a different set of skills as well. So, it's really our job as teachers, as schools, as our state to be able to prepare our students to continue to keep our society going…moving successfully along.
MH: Going back for a second to your background in special education—you teaching special education—how does this data driven…I think you’ve touched on this a little bit…but how does this data driven decisions effect special education students?
Dr. Clemson: So, students who are considered to be in special education, there's a federal law called the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. So if a student has a disability and is eligible for special education—and special education isn't a place it's not a room down the hall. special education is a service that we provide to students who have a diagnosed disability. So, because if they're identified as having a disability under IDEA, they're entitled to what we call an Individual Education Program. And you've heard of something called an IEP and that is absolutely driven. We must look at where the student currently is, and we must monitor their progress, just like we're doing with the whole schools are doing, we must monitor the progress and then find ways to teach students to learn those skills that are—that we've determined are deficient based on their disability. So, as a matter of fact, I think special education and these IEPs, where we were monitoring the progress of students having to look at those, maybe, have now applied to all of education, I think maybe people have seen, wow, this is really helpful to those kids that we, about 13% of students in our state are considered in special education. So, I think maybe people have looked and said, oh, wow, this is really helping them. And so, maybe how could we do this with all of our students? I like to think that that's the way it that it was in the way that we've come about that. But I think we're just learning more and more about the diversity of our students, and that they're not learning in the old ways that we used to teach and that schools needed to change in order to make our state be successful.
MH: Just sort of wrapping this up, moving forward, not only how would you like to see education progress, but also, do you think that Kentucky is providing an example for the rest of the nation?
Dr. Clemson: I think in many ways we are. It's interesting to read comparisons of students in Kentucky versus students in other states. And I think there are some really, really fine pockets of teaching going on in different parts of the state—of our state. So for example, every year you can that the State Department of Education puts out where are the top performing schools, elementary, middle school and high school, and where are the low performing schools and a student—if schools continue to be in that low performing and the students aren't learning, then actually, the State Department can come in and remove the administration that's in that school and put in new administrators to kind of get the school moving in the right direction. I think that's a really good thing. Because it's not fair to those students that they don't get what they need, I mean, that their parents pay taxes as well. So I think one of the things that worries me a little bit about education some, depending on—I believe, our current president believes the best way to learn to—for schools to be successful is to allow parents to have choice. So, he has advocated using charter schools. And as always being in a public school, having taught for public schools, and my children have gone to public schools, that I feel like maybe sometimes people just give up on public schools, instead of saying, Oh, well, let's just figure out how to get a good administrative team in here, and good teachers in here to teach the students, now we'll just let parents move their kids out if they can afford it, to go to another school, and then that public schools are only going to be for kids whose parents can't afford it. And that makes me really sad. That is to me not fair—that’s not what I believe the framers of our United States Constitution believed when they said that every citizen has as one of our civil rights to, for the government to educate students. And so, I think there'll be a—I think that's one of the things I see in the future, that debate on public schools versus charter schools and funding of them, parent choice.
MH: Kind of going off of that for a bit. For those of us who aren't familiar with education as much, what would you say to us as we kind of try to figure out moving forward?
Dr. Clemson: I think you need to educate yourself. I think it's really good that you're in journalism, but you're looking at education, because education is what drives everything. I mean, it is the one thing that was happening as well as that teachers don't make the kind of money that other people do, but yet we teach everybody. You know, we teach at the college levels—we teach, you know, we teach the Einsteins, we teach the engineers, we teach the doctors. So education was not—it is not respected as it is in some other countries, like Korea. And I just happened to know that because for—I've been in South Korea a couple of times, and my husband was also responsible for a plant in South Korea, a chemical plant, so he was over there a lot. So education was very, very highly regarded there, and their teachers were very highly regarded. Whereas here, I think that education is not some—people think, “Oh, well, if you can't be a doctor, go be a teacher. If you can't do this, then go be a teacher.” So, I think that for people who are not teachers, I think it's just really important to begin to read up on what schools are doing, what is our state doing? How are we preparing our students to be college and career ready? Ask questions of your school board, ask questions of your principals, of your schools. You'll be parents most likely. Get involved in your schools, so that you have the opportunity to help make a difference as well. I think that it shouldn't be—schools should be a microcosm of the community, of the society. And so, we need everybody to be involved with what's going on. But if you haven't been reading what's going on, just educate yourself. The Kentucky Department of Education is great, just go volunteer at the school. I mean, even if it is nothing more than helping out with the backpack program in terms of donating food for children. One out of every five children in our country goes to bed hungry, so helping our schools by donating food so that they can-- we can send food home for kids over the weekend who need it. That happens in Callaway County. We don't think about it. We don't see it. Understand that even if it's just donating to the Christmas drives that the schools have, that our Family Resource Centers do, even if it's just helping donate school supplies for kids who can’t afford to buy new backpacks or new shoes, donating money to the Family Resource Center so that they can help those students who might not be able to get a new backpack full of school supplies. So, I think encouraging people to get involved, do some reading, and then you know, get in there and volunteer. That would be the best way that you can see what's going on. And then how you can make a difference as well. Help the schools make a difference with our kiddos, because that's why we're here. We're here to help all students to be as successful as they can be. I tell my students in my one class, every student can learn. Maybe just not in the same way, and maybe just not on the same day, but every student can learn.
MH: Well, thank you, Dr. Clemson.