Monday, April 7, 2003

Special Education

Republican unwillingness to fully fund special education continues to cause debate in Congress on the reauthorization of IDEA legislation according to the Associated Press's Ben Feller. In Special Education Debate Centers on Cash, Feller writes:

Republicans rejected a Democratic attempt to make Congress guarantee it would contribute 40 percent of the money needed to educate special-needs children within six years. Congress set that goal when it passed the law in 1975, but the federal contribution stands at 18 percent.

 

That means states and school districts must come up with the difference, which amounts to billions of dollars that could be spent on teachers salaries, equipment or other expenses.

David M. Herszenhorn of the New York Times has a couple of good reports posted on the New York city situation. In Lawmakers' Opposition to New York's School Plan Increases, he looks at backlash from lawmakers who felt blindsided by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's decision to eliminate local school districts. Herszenhorn also tells in Bloomberg and Klein Have Plan to Improve Special Education of Mayor Bloomberg and School Chancellor Joel I. Klein's plans to improve the city's special education services.

The mayor and the chancellor pledged to move more disabled students into mainstream classes. They also said they would employ innovative teaching strategies intended for special-needs children and shrink bureaucracy while imposing higher standards and greater accountability.

 

To help schools, the mayor and chancellor said that up to 1,000 teachers would be trained in a special reading program, called Orton-Gillingham, that is intended for special-needs programs as well as receiving training in how to identify learning disabilities.

Frequent EdNews reader and contributor Joe Taylor wrote recently of the current news coverage on special education reauthorization:

Some interesting details of the proposed bill not included in there are: 3 year IEPs (if parents & the school agree), the ability to change IEPs without convening a meeting (if parents & the school agree...I can just see doing all of this over the phone), and elimination of the double standard disciplinary process.

 

However, have you heard that the legislature wants to put it on fast track to have it approved for approval before spring recess? After all, who wants to mess with things like input from parents and educators?

Sad Story

Washington Post columnist Marc Fischer tells a compelling story of two new teachers in D.C. classrooms in Pass/Fail. "One idealistic young Teach for America recruit meets with inspiring success inside a troubled D.C. school, the other with a night in jail and a $20 million lawsuit."

Let's All Become Consultants

My boss often refers to educational consultants as folks who "couldn't handle a real job in a classroom." He also adds that his best consultants teach in classroom in his building. Along those lines, Boston Globe writer Carlene Hempel's story, Law helps children, boosts consultants, which she begins:

The federal No Child Left Behind Act was meant to help school districts and children, but its biggest beneficiary may be those who educate the educators. David Haselkorn, a dean at Lesley University, said some jokingly refer to the legislation as: No Educational Consultant Left Unemployed.

Gotta send that url to the boss.

Apple Remote Desktop Update

Apple Remote Desktop has been updated to version 1.2. New features include:

• Remote Software Installation to remotely install new software to groups of Macs simultaneously over a network;
• Remote Network Startup Disk to set any number of Mac OS X clients to start up from specified NetBoot or Network Install disk images on a remote server;
• Automatic Update for upgrading Apple Remote Desktop clients automatically over the network; and
• Enhanced security including encrypted control and KeyChain® support to protect passwords and private data.

Version 1.2 is available as a free update to existing Apple Remote Desktop customers via Software Update or the Recent Software Downloads page.

Devotion for February April 6-12, 2003

Zach Wood's weekly devotional for this week is I Want to Die Worshipping. Zach also maintains an archive of previous devotionals.

Send feedback to

Thursday, April 10, 2003

Working With Carbon Copy Cloner

Jim Crittenden wrote this week asking if Mike Bombich's Carbon Copy Cloner was as good as reported. Jim wrote:

Hi Steve,

 

I have read with interest about your experiences with Carbon Copy Cloner. While I am waiting for a 120 GB FW drive to arrive, I am trying to figure out how it will work. To be honest, I am still confused by it all. I had this idea that I could just make up a complete hard drive's worth of system and application software, and when something goes haywire on a computer, then I could just boot from the firewire drive, reformat the sick computer, and restore everything back in about 30 minutes. Is this really what the software enables? Because if it is, then we will finally have a practical answer to our chronic lack of tech support, as our district steadily drifts over to Wintel.

 

I am hoping that from an educator's point of view you can understand my confusion. The Bombich forums increase my insecurity as a teacher techie.

 

Thanks, and best wishes,

 

Jim Crittenden

I'm sure there are probably some glitches that can happen using Mike Bombich's Carbon Copy Cloner to transfer part or all of an OS X install to another computer. But so far, I've had excellent luck using it. The application will do just about what Jim asks above.

In a quick follow-up, Jim wrote:

Steve,

 

I guess the problem I am having is how OS9.x and 10.x can both be ghosted together. On the Bombich site, he talks about transferring certain system 10 files, and the discussion is just way too advanced for me.

 

The Basic Question: Is this easy for a simple teacher to do without resorting to hours and days of study? It's amazing how some things simply do not compute for me!

 

Thanks again.

 

Jim

Again, I'd advise Jim to get a firewire cable, take two of his iBooks off a cart, and have at it. Carbon Copy Cloner has a lot of features built into it, but the basic function of copying the entire contents of one hard drive to another while preserving the ability to boot from OS X or 9 is really rather easy.

The Process

I've written bits and pieces about using CCC here on Educators' News several times, but maybe it would be worthwhile to say it all again in a little more organized fashion. Here's what I've done. Obviously, your experiences and results may be somewhat different.

I set up one of our Macintosh iBooks exactly as I want it. I include a copy of Carbon Copy Cloner in the Utilities folder and also put the full set of desktop pictures we use to make each iBook a bit unique in the Shared Documents folder.

I then use Carbon Copy Cloner to transfer the entire contents of the iBook's hard drive to a 20 gig partition on my 120 gig external firewire drive. When I want to move the files to another iBook, I connect the external drive to the iBook and select the external drive as the startup drive and reboot. I then use the Disk Utility to erase and format the iBook's internal hard drive. Then I use carbon copy cloner to transfer the entire contents of the 20 gig partition to the iBook.

Using the console (at right) is a 1, 2, 3, 4 operation. Select the source you want to use, then select where you want to copy it to, unlock the permissions (login password), and finally clone. You might want to delete a few items occasionally before cloning. With our 8 gig "ghost" of files we use on our iBooks, it takes a bit over 30 minutes per machine.

(The screenshot at right of the console is of my home G3, not our iBooks, as I'm writing this at home and simply didn't bring home an iBook this evening!)

When I reboot the iBook, I need to change the iBook's name to something unique in the File Sharing System Preferences. Since we plan to use Apple Remote Desktop for future updates, it's essential that each iBook be uniquely identified on the network. The names I've chosen aren't very creative, just iBook 1 through iBook 24. I also change the iBook's desktop picture.

That's about all there is to it. Since originally doing the procedure above, I've also added a second copy of our iBooks on the second partition of the external firewire drive. The "ghost" on the first partition has Mac OS X 10.2.4. Unfortunately, most of our iBooks are susceptible to the problem of the iBook reverting to a date of 1969 or 1970 at startup introduced with the 10.2.4 update. So the second partition contains a 10.2.3 system, along with all of our apps and OS 9, of course.

Since I only created two partitions on the external firewire drive and also use it for various backups, a folder on the second partition is named "z - leave alone." It contains all the stuff I don't want to transfer to our iBooks, including backups of our student files from our MacServer, various backups of parts or all of my personal Mac's hard drives, and some other odds and ends. With CCC, you can delete items from the transfer list. By keeping all the "non-iBook" stuff in one folder, it makes it easy.

Finally, I now just use a firewire cable to transfer files from one iBook to another (see Reverting to Mac OS X 10.2.3 in the 3/28/03 Educators' News posting).

Really Winding Down

I'd really hoped to finish up the last month of Educators' News on a strong note, but annual case reviews, followed by a really nasty respiratory infection pretty well negated those hopes. I'm glad Jim wrote, as it gave me something worthwhile to post, rather than a lame collection of links to current education columns around the web.

I'm really looking forward to closing EdNews, as it appears I may be able to effectively devote myself to teaching in a way not possible the last four or five years. Many readers know that I had planned to take early retirement from my current teaching position this July. I was doing so more because the teaching situation had become impossible due to overwhelming numbers than any desire to just quit teaching.

In the last month, a groundswell of parent and staff support and protests to my principal, the superintendent, and the school board, backed with the veiled threat of lawsuits, convinced them to address the overwhelming numbers we're facing. We're adding another instructional assistant for the remainder of this school year and will add another learning disabilities teacher next fall.

The prospect of being able to effectively teach disabled students to read, write, and compute once again is truly exciting.