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Rock Star Superintendents With 20% of school districts in the country actively seeking a new superintendent and the demands of NCLB, the phenomena of the "Rock Star Superintendent" has been created, according to Christian Science Monitor staff writer Patrik Jonsson. In Rise of the "Rock Star" School Superintendent Jonsson tells of the incredible salaries and perks being awarded to some superintendents going in to do a quick fix on "failing schools." Cheating A very good column by Regan McMahon about cheating, It's time to deal with students who cheat, appears in the Sunday San Francisco Chronicle. Carla Rivera also has a good column on the subject, Exam cheating goes high tech, but its causes are nothing new, in the Los Angeles Times. Reading First Program Defended Washington Post staff writer Maria Glod tells of the controversy about the Reading First Program in Bush Aide Defends Reading Program. Glod describes the administration's efforts to continue funding for the program despite allegations of "overt favoritism practiced by the DOE." Freebies With the launch last week of Adobe's free, online Photoshop Express, an update to my Freebies page became necessary. It contains links to lots of free software that may be useable in your classroom. I finally moved the Mac Classic section and some of my stuff to the bottom of the Freebies page, but did retain it, as there are still some educators with the odd, old Mac still in use. Many of the classic apps will still run on newer PowerPC (not Intel based) Macs running Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger or earlier) in the classic mode.
I have lots of stuff under plant lights ready to go into the outdoor cold frame once I get a new plastic cover on the frame. Broccoli, onions, and some hanging baskets with trailing petunias in them are just waiting for me to get with it! As I move stuff out to the cold frame making space available under my plant lights, I continue repotting small plants where I got too many seeds in a cell. I also plant successive crops of lettuce and broccoli for later transplanting. Several weeks ago, I discovered that my plot I thought I'd prepared for spring peas wasn't in the shape I'd thought it was. I found way too many weeds had gotten started on the spot I'd tilled, so I tried something "a little different."
I had to spot spray some dandelions last week with Roundup, but otherwise, it appears the trick is working. I gently uncovered some of the pea seed and it appears to be germinating nicely!
Since I mentioned the farm above, I thought I'd share a few shots I scanned for a friend a few years ago. The friend needed some farm shots of pigs for a classroom project, and since she knew I'd once been a hog farmer, asked me if I had any. The sow on the left is Leslie, our first purebred Duroc on the farm. Later, we added a purebred Duroc boar named Gogo (actual registered name: "Go Get Her" :-). Leslie and Gogo were practically pets on our farm. That may be part of why I'm no longer a farmer! File Under "Things Could Be Worse" If you're having a tough day, just think how much worse things could be! I got the email below from a listserve here in Indiana I subscribe to:
The writer got lots of good, immediate advice from other tech directors around the state. Interestingly, several had suffered similar experiences. Light Web Hosting I received an email today from a reader in North Dakota who asked, " I want to put together a web site - mostly for my family who is spread across the country. How do I find a place to host that is free (or really cheap) and safe - with nothing to offend the elder members of the family?" I described my most recent good experience with free web hosting last month on Educators' News. I had given Google's then new Page Creator service a test drive and found it to be quite useable for purposes such as the reader inquired about. There are also lots of other free web hosts out there, but Google is likely to be around a while and remain free. Christopher Heng has a good review of the tool online. Educators' News and Senior Gardening are both hosted by Hostmonster.com. They seem to do a good job.
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Years ago when I had a farm, our first garden there went into ground that I scalped with the mower, covered with mulch, newspaper, and black plastic, and planted through holes cut in the layers. Lacking free mulch at this time of year, I bought some cheap, bagged top soil and some very expensive sphagnum peat moss as a cover. I put landscape fabric over a bit of ground for a flowerbed, but put the pea seed right onto the ground and covered it with the topsoil and peat. 
APOD Humor I'm not terribly into April Fools jokes and pranks, as most seem to end up being cruel to someone, but the Astronomy Picture of the Day always has a funny April 1st posting each year. Be sure to check out today's New Space Station Robot Asks to be Called "Dextre the Magnificent." DOE to Require Single Dropout Rate The U.S. Department of Education will begin requiring schools to submit dropout and graduation statistics using "one federal formula." The move, according to the New York Times's Sam Dillon in U.S. to Require States to Use a Single School Dropout Formula, will "correct one of the most glaring weaknesses of the federal No Child Left Behind law." Previously, states were required to submit the information but were allowed to set their own formula. As reported two weeks ago here, states reporting one graduation rate to Washington often have a far lower figure publicly posted elsewhere. For example, one state "has defined its graduation rate as the percentage of enrolled 12th graders who receive a diploma, a method that grossly undercounts dropouts by ignoring all students who leave school before 12th grade." Autism A feature story by Cynthia Hubert in the Sacramento Bee, A New World for Autistic Children, tells about a parent of an autistic child who created an educational DVD series more suited to her son's needs. "Moving at a far slower pace and with more repetition than the typical Disney or "Baby Einstein" DVDs, they meticulously introduce children with autism and other learning disorders to concepts such as colors and emotions." The DVDs are available online at My World Learning and from Amazon Annie and I watched Autism: The Musical for the first time last evening. It's an excellent documentary that follows five autistic children (and their parents) through the creation of a musical to help them with their specific needs. It's appearing on HBO this month. I'll add this item here, since we're talking special education: An Associated Press posting by Nancy Zuckerbrod, Helping special Ed students move toward graduation day and beyond, relates some of the problems for special ed students once they are out of school. (Alternate link)
Graduation...and Dropouts The stories on graduation and dropout rates continue with a new analysis of data showing City students less likely to graduate than suburban kids, The lowest graduation rates were reported in Detroit, Indianapolis, and Cleveland, according to a report released Tuesday by America's Promise Alliance. (Also see Low Grad Rates in US Cities and Mesa ranks No. 1 in graduation rates.) I tried to add a link from the Indianapolis Star for this posting, but it appears the Star chose not to carry any form of the story! Upcoming Dates Earth Day is coming up April 22, and Reading is Fundamental Week is May 12-18.
California Exit Exam for Special Needs Students Upheld The issue of whether all special education students who have completed graduation requirements have to pass state exit exams is a tough one. There's justification for upholding the value of a high school diploma with the exit exam and also an unfairness to the disabled by requiring one without regard for their disabilities. Nanette Asimov describes the issues in Disabled students required to pass exit exam.
NAEP Writing Scores Out The news probably arrived on your local news outlet as "Writing Scores in (your city or state) Improved/Went Down." The writing results of the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) were released yesterday. Some improvement in 8th and 12th grade student writing was apparent, but only "about a third of the nation’s eighth-grade students, and roughly a quarter of its high school seniors, are proficient writers." The National Assessment of Educational Progress periodically test students in participating states in mathematics, reading, science, writing, the arts, civics, economics, geography, and U.S. history.
Probably the best summary of the results I saw online was by Nanette Asimov in the San Francisco Chronicle's State's Eighth-graders Need to Improve Writing:
When poking around the web for locally oriented stories about the NAEP results, I found that the Orlando Sentinel had posted a basic Associated Press article about the results yesterday, Teen Writing Improves at Basic Level, but had also gone on to post a preposterous editorial today, Our position: It's irresponsible and costly for teachers to take sick days when they are well. In an obvious effort at teacher bashing, now becoming a national pastime, the editor managed to tie sick days to the NAEP results. Fortunately, a lot of pro-teacher folks gave the Sentinel a piece of their mind in the comments section. Bacteria That Eat Antibiotics I ran across a really interesting article yesterday by AP medical writer, Lauran Neergaard, Scientists Find Bacteria in Soil that Gobble Up Antibiotics. Neergaard relates that researchers at Harvard "have discovered hundreds of germs in soil that literally gobble up antibiotics, able to thrive with the potent drugs as their sole source of nutrition." The full report, Germs Take a Bite Out of Antibiotics, appeared in this month's Science magazine, which requires a paid subscription to read :-(. Earth Science Visualizations I'd seen several of these before, but a posting on the FREE site zeroed me into a nice index page of McDougal Littell's Classzone Earth Science Visualizations. If you already use their earth science textbook, you've probably used this and other resources. But for those outside that text or grade level, it's a good, free source for earth science animations. I also like their Classzone narrated tutorials for math. They're great for math students with limited reading skills. Bees
After reading a number of product reviews, I found Mike Pasini's review of the HP ScanJet G3010. It convinced me to finally go ahead and part with $100 for a flatbed scanner that has a built-in 35mm negative and slide box and software to remove the orange masking from photo negatives. I found that the HP ScanJet G3010 does the job well, albeit rather slowly. Mike's comments about the bugginess of the HP Scan software are also well taken, as I've had some unpleasant adventures there, too. But overall, I found the product to be a good way for someone like me, without a lot of bucks, to digitalize old photos and slides. Do be aware that if you scan at resolutions higher than HP's recommended 200 dpi (I use 1200), you'll have time to brew a pot of coffee and eat a sandwich before the job is done! Have a great weekend!
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