Monday, March 1, 2010

Another Parochial System Contracting

Catholic school closings loom tells a familiar story of rising costs and falling enrollments affecting yet another Catholic school system, the Archdiocese of Baltimore. Reader Ed Harris sent along this link that relates that the archdiocese will announce a consolidation plan on Wednesday for its 64 schools and 22,700 students. The Baltimore Sun's Arthur Hirsch writes that this situation "reflects the broader challenges confronting Catholic schools in the traditional urban strongholds of the Midwest, the Mid-Atlantic and New England. The faithful have fled the cities for the suburbs, teaching sisters available to provide instruction at little cost have dwindled in number, and families have been less willing or able to pay rising tuitions."

School Turnaround Program to be Announced

Two articles this morning relate that "President Obama plans Monday to outline a get-tough strategy for turning around persistently struggling schools, offering increased federal funding to local school systems that shake up their lowest-achieving campuses." The President and Secretary of Education Duncan will announce the new campaign, "Grad Nation," at a meeting of America's Promise Alliance. The Alliance was founded by former Secretary of State Colin Powell and his wife, Alma.

The funding will come in the form of "School Turnaround Grants" over the next five years for the 5,000 lowest -performing schools in the nation. Schools identified and participating in the grant program will have four options, or model programs to deal with schools with the highest dropout rates:

"Turnaround" the school by firing the principal and at least half the staff.

"Restart" the school by opening it as a charter school or a school under the management of an education organization with expertise in running schools.

Close the school and transfer students to a higher-achieving school in the district.

"Transform" the school by firing the principal but retaining -- and retooling -- personnel to implement "comprehensive instructional reform strategies."

• Politics Daily: Dropouts Targeted by New Obama Plan for Underperforming Schools by Lynn Sweet
• The Washington Post: Obama to announce get-tough strategy for struggling schools by Nick Anderson

The new program sounds like more of the Obama/Duncan business strategy to "reform" schools that Diane Ravitch debunks in her new book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System.

Thin Clients Return

If you're not terribly geeky, you may think the heading above refers to customers on a weight loss program, but it really deals with a new offering from Microsoft. New software multiplies computers in schools tells of the release of Microsoft's MultiPoint Server 2010 that uses one computer to "deliver a Windows 7 desktop experience to up to 10 other terminals, also called thin clients." The San Francisco Chronicle's Ryan Kim writes about the software release that allows just one computer to power a number of student terminals that only require a keyboard, mouse, monitor, and USB hookups to the computer/server. Advantages are said to be cost savings on CPU's, less maintenance, lower energy costs from having just one computer, and even less air-conditioning to cool computers in a computer lab or cluster.

Looking Ahead

I didn't realize that today was National Pig Day until I checked the Teachers Corner March calendar! I'm really a little disappointed that Hallmark doesn't have a card to mark the occasion. And then when I did a search to check my attempt at witty sarcasm, I found that 123Greetings and Care2 both offer free pig day eCards!

Anyway, the Teachers Corner's monthly calendars are a pretty good way to stay on top of things. Tomorrow, of course, is the NEA's Read Across America kickoff day and Dr. Seuss's birthday. That should produce lots of silly hats in elementary classrooms across the country. On a more serious note, Daylight Savings Time begins on the 14th (spring forward, fall back???), and for serious partying, St. Patrick's Day on the 17th is always a good excuse. The 20th is the first day of spring (vernal equinox) and the 28th is Palm Sunday.

Looking Back - The Top Ten

I haven't done The Top Ten since last October, but a question from a reader about an upgrade card for his PowerMac 7500 (discontinued 5/18/1996) reminded me that folks still read a lot of my old Mac columns! Considering that my newest computer is my four year old PowerBook G4 (affectionately known as my Slab-O-Mac), and that I do most of my serious computing on a five and a half year old twin G5 tower, maybe I should go back to writing columns about older Macs.

The results at left are combined mathdittos2.com, Educators' News, and Senior Gardening stats. Growing Geraniums from Seed always gets more hits than it deserves, as I show how to germinate seed on damp paper towels. After writing the feature, I realized that lots of folks use the same method to germinate marijuana seed! I think A Roll-Your-Own Spelling Program also gets a similar benefit from the same crowd.

Can You Identify This Image?

The photo above is of a flat of onions I have growing under plantlights in the basement. They're actually due for their first "haircut" today. I'll just snip them down to about 3-4" high with a pair of scissors. That process, along with regular watering and occasional fertilizing, will be repeated a few times until the young plants are ready to go outside in April to harden off before being transplanted into our garden.

And what do onions in my basement have to do with Educators' News?

March marks a time when I begin having to split my time a bit more evenly between the two web sites I publish, Educators' News and Senior Gardening. The gardening site doesn't get a lot of time or attention from November through February, but in March, we begin getting all of our plants started indoors that we can. March is also the month where I fill in for special education teachers out doing annual case reviews. So there may be a few days where we don't publish an update on Educators' News as things begin to get really busy.

On the other hand, the gardening stuff produces some nice, if unrelated, color for the site. And actually, gloxinias like the one pictured at right make great classroom plants for teaching flower parts and plant pollination.

A Milestone

Educators' News reached a milestone of sorts last week. Friday marked the second anniversary of the resumption of regular publication of this site. The site was first published from April 18, 2001, through April 18, 2003. A rising caseload and a number of other issues dictated "closing" the site in 2003, although it still received occasional updates in the intervening years with the somewhat whimsical banner below.

Full-time publication of the site resumed on February 26, 2008.

Font note: For those folks always on the search for new fonts to spice up classroom handouts and worksheets, the font used in the old banner above is Bazooka. Our current banner was made with Boulder. Both are available for free download on various font sites.

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Tuesday, March 2, 2010

NASA Image of the Day

NASA's Image of the Day for today is a great HST shot at right of the Crab Nebula. The same photo was featured in October on the Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) site, but with a little better caption. It reads:

This is the mess that is left when a star explodes. The Crab Nebula, the result of a supernova seen in 1054 AD, is filled with mysterious filaments. The filaments are not only tremendously complex, but appear to have less mass than expelled in the original supernova and a higher speed than expected from a free explosion. The above image, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, is presented in three colors chosen for scientific interest. The Crab Nebula spans about 10 light-years. In the nebula's very center lies a pulsar: a neutron star as massive as the Sun but with only the size of a small town. The Crab Pulsar rotates about 30 times each second.

One of the acknowledgments for the photo led me first to the Skyfactory site and then to the European Home Page for the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and this great shot of "N90, one of the star-forming regions in the Small Magellanic Cloud" with its "numerous background galaxies." This one was featured on APOD shortly after it was taken in 2007. Part of the APOD description notes, " At the estimated distance of the Small Magellanic Cloud, the picture spans about 200 light-years, but a tantalizing assortment of background galaxies are also visible in the sharp Hubble view. The background galaxies are hundreds of millions of light-years or more beyond NGC 602." The full size image (36 MB) shows incredible detail. I found myself playing "Count the Galaxies" as I looked at it!

I'm not sure how I missed it, but I quickly added a link to the NASA/ESA Hubble Wallpaper Image Archive to our Out of this World Desktop Pictures feature. And if you're just poking around for some cool space shots, their Hall of Fame page is a good place to start.

School Turnaround Program Draws Immediate Criticism

President Obama's School Turnaround Program announced yesterday has drawn some immediate and well deserved criticism. Obama angers union officials with remarks in support of R.I. teacher firings in the Washington Post and Plan to stem dropout rate stirs controversy on eSchool News tell the basic story.

While trying to improve graduation rates is laudable, Obama's business oriented approach that relies on firing principals and teachers, closing schools and opening charters along with his comments on the recent staff firings in Central Falls (RI) moved Walt Gardner to write on his Walt Gardner's Reality Check blog:

The purge is the favored tactic these days to turn around failing schools. The stated rationale is that such draconian steps are necessary when all else has failed. But there is far more here if readers are willing to approach the matter with an open mind.

The fact is that all else has not failed because all else has not yet been tried. If Central Falls is even remotely similar to other communities where poverty is rampant, students bring to class huge deficits that schools serving affluent students simply do not face. As a result, teachers in Central Falls are forced to perform what amounts to triage on a daily basis before they can begin to teach their lessons.

Valerie Strauss adds some valuable insights on the President's misguided remarks and direction on her The Answer Sheet blog in Obama's unfortunate comments on teacher firings. She writes;

So when Obama and Duncan talk about firing all the teachers and replacing them as if it is a last resort worth doing, they have it all wrong.

It is a last resort, but it doesn’t solve the problem and creates havoc not only for the teachers--many of whom do a good job--but for kids who have enough problems without being subjects in endless educational experiments.

The proposal and the events in Rhode Island bring to mind Diane Ravitch's observations and prediction in December's Obama and Duncan Launch NCLB 2.0:

What we are witnessing now is the culmination of the plans of the education entrepreneurs who are driving national education policy at the highest levels. They are not educators. They do not understand how to help or support a school, so their first instinct is to close it down and start over. I think that is called creative destruction. Just watch: It will be coming soon to a school near you.

And in Today Is Publication Day, Ravitch relates that "part of the goal of my book (The Death and Life of the Great American School System) is to discredit the current knee-jerk reaction of editorialists and public officials, who blame teachers for everything that goes wrong in the schools."

Blaming the teachers lets everyone else off the hook: families, the media, the popular culture, policymakers, and students themselves. The overwhelming majority of our nation's teachers are doing the best they can under difficult circumstances, with not enough support from society, parents, or the media.

Thursday, March 4, 2010

Study of Teachers' Views

If you missed the announcement yesterday of the study Primary Sources: America's Teachers on America's Schools (full report 798K PDF document) sponsored by Scholastic Inc. and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, let me recommend it to you. The study surveyed 40,000 teachers about education in America with the goal "to place the views of our nation’s public school teachers at the center of the discussion on education reform." If you have the time (over an hour), watch the webcast video about the report. I caught it live yesterday and found it riveting.

• Press release: 40,000 Teachers Give Their Views on Education Reform in "Primary Sources"
• The Washington Post: Survey: Supportive leadership helps retain top teachers by Nick Anderson
• AP: US teachers more interested in reform than money by Donna Gordon Blankinship

I took a "day off" yesterday to watch the Primary Sources video. Well, actually, I spent a lot of time yesterday spraying apple trees and starting petunia seed. And other than this brief posting, I'll "be off" again today to begin reading Diane Ravitch's The Death and Life of the Great American School System.

Friday, March 5, 2010

Phase 1 Race to the Top Finalists Announced

The Department of Education released the 16 finalists for the Race to the Top competition yesterday. "Winners for phase 1 will be chosen from among the 16 finalists and announced in April." States applying had "to document their efforts to make changes in educational policy supported by the Obama administration, like integrating what the administration calls “career-ready standards” and new tests into their school systems, building better teacher evaluation systems, creating school data systems that can track student achievement, intervening in failing schools and eliminating caps on charter schools."

Here are a few of the many stories about the selections:

• The New York Times: New York Is Among Finalists for U.S. School Grants by Sam Dillon
• The Los Angeles Times: California disqualified from receiving federal school funds by Jason Song and Howard Blume
• The Washington Post: D.C. schools in, Va. out in contest for federal aid by Nick Anderson and Bill Turque
• The Indianapolis Star: State vows to proceed with education reforms by Andy Gammill
• Education Week: Race to Top Enters Home Stretch With 16 Finalists by Michele McNeil and Lesli Maxwell

And the list:

And bless her heart, the Post's Valerie Strauss looks at the craziness of the "contest" in Race to the Top finalists and the 'ick' factor.

The whole notion of this administration making its education initiative a kind of race where states compete for funds is counter to the desired goal of providing equal resources to children in all public schools.

Then there’s the problem noted by many commentators...that the initiative is requiring states who want to be funded to adopt practices that claim to be “research based” but, in fact, haven’t been shown to be broadly successful at all.

Have a great weekend!

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