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Obama Again
Going to such an event is an interesting experience. Although we already had tickets (that Annie had stood in line 2 hours to get), we stood in line again for the security check to enter North's gymnasium. The check was similar to airport security with a metal scanner and some folks getting scanned additionally with a wand. Interestingly, no one seemed to mind standing in line. When Obama was speaking, it was easy to pick out the teachers in the crowd. When he mentioned a new emphasis on early childhood education, a lady in the row in front of me leaped to her feet applauding. His remarks on education may have drawn the greatest applause during the whole speech! I couldn't help but feel that Senator Obama was "preaching to the choir," as it seemed the gathered crowd seems strongly pro-Obama from the outset. One other thing both Annie and I noticed during his speech was his ability to seem to make eye contact with individuals in the crowd as he spoke. At the first of the month America's Promise Alliance launched a campaign to combat the "nation's high school dropout and college-readiness crisis." The news release for the campaign included a report (1.8 MB PDF doc) that listed the "graduation rates for the main school systems in the nation’s 50 largest cities." The Indianapolis Public Schools (IPS) ranked next to last with a 30.5% graduation rate. The Indianapolis Star appeared to have ignored the report until mentioning it among several others in an April 6 editorial, Let's look forward to brighter education future. On April 10, IPS Superintendent, Dr. Eugene White, issued a rebuttal to the findings in the report in a letter to the editor, Graduation rate story fails to show IPS successes. Yesterday, the Star's Andy Gammill, issued a giant rip of IPS with his column, IPS stuck in culture of apathy, inefficiency. IPS is a struggling center city school district. It faces many problems that other similar districts in large municipalities face. Indianapolis may be unusual in that the city is the county (subtracting the cities within the city of Beech Grove, Lawrence, and Speedway), but IPS is the center district surrounded by suburban, and more affluent districts still within the county. Gammill's accounts of inefficiency and downright blundering are undoubtedly true. His story of a teacher wanting a whiteboard while several were stored unused is similar to one a friend and IPS teacher told me years ago about his science lab equipment. (BTW: I've found Andy Gammill's columns to be pretty accurate and fair over the years.) Dr. White has been a lightening rod for both praise and criticism since taking the reins at IPS several years ago. He is a strong leader who wants things done right, quickly, and his way. Teachers I've spoken to in the system either love him or are looking for work elsewhere. It actually breaks down to about 50-50! In his previous position in a suburban Indianapolis district, he courageously took on a popular governor who was trying to unfairly withhold funds from Indiana schools. The really sad part of all of the controversy is that IPS is a poor school district, and with Governor Mitch Daniels's "property tax relief" package, is a district that will face even more funding cuts. Indiana's legislature approved the Daniels package and may yet initiate making it a constitutional amendment to prevent future legislatures from "tampering" with the property tax caps that fund much of the state's school and community revenue. Legislators who supported the package pretty universally say communities and schools will have to become "more efficient." (See It's time to overhaul Prop. 13 to save state for a comparison to a similar situation in California.) Obviously, things are a bit of a mess in IPS. "Good schools" do remain in the district, but the graduation rate numbers from the America's Promise Alliance don't lie. Still, there have been some incredible success stories out of IPS in recent years. Why am I spending time on the situation? I'm a product of IPS K-12 education years and years ago. When I got out of college in December, 1970, I substitute taught in IPS and elsewhere for a semester and knew then I probably wouldn't be happy teaching there. I went on to teach for ten years in one of the "suburban" school districts before moving to southwest central Indiana for the last 23 years of my classroom career. Over the years, I've had many friends who taught in IPS. They were good teachers, fiercely proud of what they and their kids were doing in the classroom. But they also frequently spoke of a bureaucracy that threatened to frustrate their efforts. I don't have all the answers for IPS, but many of the obvious ones lie beyond Dr. White and the teachers' control. The poverty of the district (and districts like it across the nation) must be addressed at a national level. The crime rate and lack of good job opportunities for residents must be addressed. And of course, Indiana, like everywhere else, is going to get what they pay for in schools. The recent actions of the Indiana legislature in the property tax relief debacle will cause serious cuts in school staff and services when just the opposite is needed. It's not a pretty picture for a city and state so proud of its football team and new stadiums. Shame on us all in Indiana! Moodle ZdNet has a good, brief blog posting about the Moodle course management system, Moodle your way out of the education muddle. Having spent a couple of years or so helping train folks here in Indiana to use Moodle, I pretty well agree with and endorse Dana Blankenhorn's posting. Freeze? We have another freeze watch tonight here in southwest central Indiana, so I've brought in my tender plant starts (since I didn't get my cold frame out and covered with new plastic this year). But spring is definitely here and actual direct planting may commence towards the end of the week...if the soil ever dries out enough.
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Slow News Day There doesn't appear to be a lot of earthshaking education news out there again today. Rather than just take the day totally off, I'll post a few links that I found interesting and somewhat education related. Online Learning eSchool News has a couple of good articles about online learning. Panelists: Online learning can help minority students talks about online classes helping bring students back into education who'd previously left the system. Patent office deals a blow to Blackboard is an update on the Blackboard/Desire2Learn battle. The good news there is that the patent office is reviewing all of the Blackboard patents which can only help course management systems such as Moodle, Joomla, and Sakai. Science News Science Daily again has some interesting reading in Unusual Earthquake Swarm Off Oregon Coast Puzzles Scientists and Ancient Method, Black Gold Agriculture May Revolutionize Farming, Curb Global Warming. PBS on iTunes U Something a bit more classroom related is Enjoy PBS Programming on iTunes U (Note: Link requires iTunes). A number of PBS titles are available free via iTunes U. Teacher Opening Her Own Special Education School Years ago, a "back to mother earth" friend and fellow teacher shared his dream of opening his own private school on his small, nearly self-sustaining farm. I'd just left the urban school corporation where we'd both taught and bought a small farm in southwest, central Indiana and found his idea intriguing. I don't thing he and his wife ever got to start their school, but we enjoyed talking about how to "do it right" many times. From one of my previous principals who had long experience in parochial schools, I learned that running a private school, and especially starting a new one, is a giant undertaking. Even so, a Connecticut special educator is fulfilling her dream in starting her own school for special education students. Teacher hopes to serve special-needs students tells of Kathleen Krenicki's plan to open Timothy Memorial School next fall with up to ten special needs students. Krenicki will use a variety of approaches in teaching her new students, including a type of the Orton-Gillingham method of teaching reading. IPS May Use Online Classes for Summer School WTHR Eyewitness News reporter Rich Van Wyk tells that the troubled Indianapolis Public Schools may use online classes for some summer school courses as a cost cutting measure. IPS looking to take summer school online states that "Corporate donations revived academic summer school two years ago, but now, IPS is on its own...However, the superintendent says there is enough money for virtual school." The Indianapolis Star's Andy Gammill reports that the IPS administration may get major shake-up with up to 50 administrators being moved around the corporation. "Gone Fishing" Edition It's another slow news day, but it's absolutely gorgeous weather here today. No, I'm not going fishing, but rather than dig for some obscure education news stories, I'm heading out the garden to see if I can till a bit and get some kale, broccoli, and cauliflower planted. (Ah, the joys of being "retired!")
AT&T Aspire to Address Dropout Crisis AT&T yesterday announced a $100 million program to help address the high school dropout problem. AT&T Chairman and CEO Randall Stephenson stated at the announcement, "AT&T Aspire is about supporting the great work already underway to help our kids succeed in school, and helping students see the connection between education and their best future." the program will include the $100 million pledge "toward high school success and workforce readiness," and will include:
From Science Daily Science Daily has a follow-up to the Project Vulcan story I covered April 8 in Worst Offenders For Carbon Dioxide Emissions: Top 20 US Counties Identified. The research team led by Purdue University has released a list of the "top twenty carbon dioxide-emitting counties in the United States. Science Daily also has one that I missed from the press release, NASA Extends Cassini's Grand Tour Of Saturn Two More Years. Cassini Contest There's also a NASA contest going on "giving 5th to 12th grade students the opportunity to study Saturn and make decisions, just as scientists on the Cassini-Huygens mission do on a daily basis." Winners will have the opportunity to decide "where to point the cameras onboard the Cassini spacecraft on June 10, 2008." Entries are due by May 8, 2008. See JPL Contest Overview for more information. Roller Coaster in a Science Class Science teacher, Patricia Herr "has to explain complex concepts that often are perceived as dry, but she is always looking for innovative ways to bring those ideas to life," according to She Makes Learning a Ride, Not a Drag in the Washington Post. When faced with a class that didn't quite get it in physics, Herr tried a hands-on activity to design and build an "electric-powered roller-coaster small enough to fit into her classroom -- and the concepts of motion, force and electricity no longer seemed so foreign to them."
Earthquake We started the day here with a minor earthquake. My wife was up already, and the 5.4 on the Richter scale earthquake awoke me. While our old house shook and dishes rattled, there was no damage. When I logged onto my email, one of the mailing lists was full of reports of the earthquake and also some helpful URLs from the United States Geological Service.
West coast readers are probably chuckling at our discomfiture from a minor earthquake, but it was all too real for us! Declination Delirium This is a short posting for now, as I wanted to get something up about the earthquake. I really am in on a break from a garden terracing project - waiting for the cordless drill pack to recharge. Last Wednesday after tilling the garden, I decided it was finally time to do something about our garden runoff problem.
Being somewhat anal, I decided that I really wanted to do things right and get my garden timbers aligned to a true north-south line. That involved getting out the compass and also finding the correction factor from magnetic north. I had to update Google Earth to find my exact latitude and longitude and then found the page for the National Geophysical Data Center correction page. If you're not as anal as I, you can get by with just entering your zip code. Punching in the geographic coordinates revealed a difference between magnetic north and true north of -3.004o at my house. (The value for my zip code was 3.247o.) Along the way, I found a good page of explanation for finding declination from the Compass Store. Once I recovered from my declination delirium, I started on the project with a couple of timbers I had on hand. Of course, I ended up making to trips to the lumber yard for more timber! I'm now down to drilling holes and hammering in rebar to lock the timbers into place. Once done, the project will create a raised bed of sorts that will help with drainage. If necessary, I'll add a dry sump at the low corner of the raised bed later. A dry sump is a trick I picked up when living on a farm. You just dig a hole as deep as possible with a post hole digger and fill it with sand! I used the technique years ago to help dry out the approach to our back door of the farmhouse. I lacked sand on that one, but successfully substituted pea gravel. Your mileage may vary :-). Have a great weekend!
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All I really wanted to do was put in some treated timbers to keep our garden from eroding. Our lawn slopes from a farm field through the garden and down through the yard towards a pond. The pond overflow runs across a swampy wooded area into a creek that feeds Turtle Creek Reservoir. For years the grassy area just past the garden was the best lawn on our property. That was because all of my precious top soil, soil amendments, and fertilizer were getting washed into that area.
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©2008 Steven L. Wood