Monday, July 14, 2008

New Ad Campaign

A new TV ad campaign about education in America will begin today in seven states. According to AP writer Stephanie S. Garlow, the campaign is sponsored by the non-partisan group Strong American Schools and seeks "to nudge Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama on ways to improve the standing of U.S. schools compared with other industrialized nations." The ads will air initially in Colorado, Iowa, Missouri, Ohio, New Mexico, Virginia and Wisconsin.

The group's news release about their One Nation Left Behind ad campaign is filled with words guaranteed to further emphasize the public's belief that all American schools are failing. The title includes the phrase, "Dire State of America’s Education System and its Risk to Students," and other goodies such as "sub-par education system," "America’s current public education system is failing," and "the harsh reality that America has slipped to the middle of the pack."

While the group "seeks to build a powerful online community among parents and education activists" and "a platform for parents, educators, elected officials and journalists to hold an open dialogue about changing education on local and national levels," the harsh rhetoric may only marginally goad presidential candidates to action while turning off our nation's teachers.

Obviously, I prefer a more positive approach such as the the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education initiative reported on here in June.

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Wednesday, July 16, 2008

McCain on Education at NAACP Convention

Senator John McCain spoke today at the NAACP Convention in Cincinnati, telling the crowd that teachers' unions opposing vouchers leave families and their children stuck in failing schools. AP writer Devlin Barrett reports in McCain at NAACP pledges more education options that McCain spoke in favor of school vouchers and merit pay for teachers.

If my teaching experience was any indicator, vouchers and merit pay will do little to improve instruction in America's classrooms. I generally found that simply having enough staff to do the job was the most important thing that could be done to help my students. Better pay for non-certified staff and benefits would have retained a couple of crackerjack teaching assistants I lost to better paying jobs. Public assistance programs that helped needy families would also have greatly impacted my students, as we were a "rural poor" school.

Vouchers and merit pay? I think Mr. McCain has it all wrong, but I'd guess the conservatives will eat that stuff up.

About California's Algebra Testing

Claudia Ayers, a retired public school math teacher, shares some good insights about the fallacy of California's plan to require algebra in eighth grade in Former math teacher's lesson of the day. She writes in part:

During the last two decades, decision makers playing fear cards (such as documents like "A Nation at Risk" and phrases like "competing in the global economy") have transformed school curricula. Now, everything is rushed and ratcheted up to the extent that we teach first grade in kindergarten, junior high in sixth grade, ninth grade in eighth grade, and junior college in high school.

Friday, July 18, 2008

In the absence of any earthshaking education news, I'll just meander around a bit today with a few thinly related links.

NEA Lobbies

The Boston Globe has a story about the NEA's lobbying efforts in the first quarter this year. National Education Association spent $285K lobbying in 1Q lists a number of worthy efforts of the teachers' union.

Space Stuff

As the time draws nearer, there will be lots of posts about the upcoming Perseids meteor shower, but Space.com has the first I've seen this year in Spectacular Summer Sights: Shooting Stars. The Perseids will peak around August 11-12 and " can produce 50 to 100 fast, bright meteors per hour."

I thought I'd reported on a NASA contest for high school and college students last December, but it turned out that I'd done a calendar posting on it on my last job. With such contests, we often don't hear of the results, but this one is covered in Airliners of Tomorrow-As Students See Them. Students were asked to "design a next-generation equivalent of the famed Douglas DC-3 transport aircraft."

Mars Lander Successfully Collects Ice Sample is another success story for the Phoenix Lander. Both JPL and NASA maintain pages on the mission with lots of photos that might be useful in the classroom.

A story on ScienceDaily, Three Red Spots Mix It Up On Jupiter, led me to a great photo on the Hubble Site about the three red spots on Jupiter. Jupiter has been prominent in the night sky this month with a magnitude of around -2.28 (very bright).

Early Teaching in America

The Nevada Appeal has a quick and interesting article about teaching in the past, Pioneer's journal reveals early days of education system. Author Ruby McFarland writes:

Style was non-existent so they wore the same clothes year after year. In the winter, the kids wished the teacher had another dress as it became very smelly along towards spring.

NTFS on Macs

We "inherited" another castoff computer this week, an HP Pavilion 7965. It came to us from a friend of one of our daughters who said it wouldn't work.

When I brought the box in from Annie's car, the thing smelled burnt. That's never a good sign, but most of the odor appeared to be coming from the power supply. I tried the machine and was surprised that it did power up, but couldn't boot to Windows. I should have known what was wrong from a similar experience years ago at school, and ended up wasting a lot of time with various Windows XP installers and old anti-virus software.

I finally pulled the main hard drive from the Pavilion, took it to my old G4 QuickSilver Mac and did a virus scan. It turned up around twenty infected files, the majority of which were the W32.Nimda virus. I should have known, but when I clicked repair, I found the Mac couldn't repair or write to the NTFS formatted volume! There have been a lot of columns about this omission of the Mac OS, but I'd forgotten about the limitation.

While there is a commercial solution that enables one to write to an NTFS volume on a Mac, I also found that there was an open source alternative. Using MacFuse and NTFS-3G should have allowed me to again scan the drive and repair the infected files. Unfortunately, when I installed the open source packages, it became apparent that the drive was near a SMART failure. Oh well, it was good to find out that someone has picked up the NTPS-3G for Mac OS project.

Have a great weekend!

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