Tuesday, June 15, 2010

School of the Future

The AP's Kathy Matheson gives a progress report about Microsoft's School of the Future in Microsoft's high school in US traveled rocky road. Matheson relates that the school is graduating its first senior class today "with every graduate headed for an institution of higher learning."

More on Gadgets (Interactive Whiteboards)

The Answer Sheet guest blogger Daniel Willingham adds a bit of perspective in The unrealized promise of whiteboards to Stephanie McCrummen's article linked here on Saturday. Willingham writes of interactive whiteboards (which he seems to favor), "What is perhaps most remarkable in this story is that enormous sums of money are being spent on this (and other) technologies without correspondingly thorough and thoughtful professional development. In many districts, the technologies have simply been plopped into teachers’ classrooms with minimal or no support. Little wonder that they are not being used as effectively as they could be."

Odds 'n' Ends

I noted last week that OpenOffice for Kids, the free companion to the free OpenOffice suite, had been updated recently. Somewhere along the line, I missed NeoOffice, a free Macintosh variant of OpenOffice, being updated recently as well to version 3.1.1. A patch released today caught my eye, so I got my installation up to date. While I still work in Microsoft Office, I like having a free backup like the OpenOffice apps that can open and edit my documents. Microsoft also issued updates to Microsoft Office 2004 and Microsoft Office 2008 last week.

Apple released version 5.0 last week of its Safari web browser for Macs and PCs. Since I'm getting way behind on hardware and software, I opted for their Safari 4.1 release for PowerPC Macs running the old Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4) operating system.

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Thursday, June 17, 2010

Testing

The local papers around here are full of stories about schools and their ISTEP+ scores released yesterday by the Indiana Department of Education. 7th, 8th graders strong on ISTEP and Latest ISTEP scores spur cautious optimism are typical of the reports. As I read the articles highlighting this or that grade or school showing better test scores, I couldn't help but wonder if we were measuring student learning or simply the results of countless hours of targeted test practice.

Diane Ravitch's The Great Accountability Hoax and Trip Gabriel's Under Pressure, Teachers Tamper With Tests may sadly more accurately define what is happening now in education that our high stakes test results do. Diane gets right to the point in her first paragraph:

The evidence continues to accumulate that our "accountability" policies are a great fraud and hoax, but our elected officials and policymakers remain completely oblivious to the harm caused by the policies they mandate.

Gabriel notes that the phenomenon of cheating "is increasing as the stakes over standardized testing ratchet higher — including, most recently, taking student progress on tests into consideration in teachers' performance reviews." Having retired from a school corporation with a rich history of cheating on high stakes tests, I can say that such cheating isn't new, but may be on the upswing. I got out of Dodge just in time, having been asked by an administrator to try and find him a "cold copy" of Indiana's ISTEP+ the year I finally retired. I didn't, but he found someone who would...and they all lost their jobs over it. Good people can resort to drastic measures when placed under enough pressure.

Deborah Meier writes in We Are Deciding on Our Shared Future that she has "been mulling over the well-organized attack on the concept of seniority and tenure." She briefly touches on cheating, saying, "If Wall Street'ers cheated us for money, greed being part of human nature some would argue, why would we expect it to only have a beneficial impact on teachers if their livelihoods were at stake?" But her real focus is the push by conservative groups and the Administration for merit pay tied to test scores:

Like all competent "revolutionaries," the "cabal" in charge has learned to grab the moment before anyone blinks. Make changes quick and make them that hard to take back. So we better be sure we have thought about the consequences before we lock ourselves into another century of school failure. Perhaps you and I could agree that, in a labor-intensive industry (schooling) designed to prepare people's character as well as their skill set, the revolution can't lose sight of ends as it argues over means.

Andy Cody adds in Does Duncan Really Believe Teachers Support Race to the Top that our Secretary of Education is still spreading the myth that most teachers support the Administration's Race to the Top and ESEA reauthorization proposals. He writes, "The Department of Education and Arne Duncan have a huge credibility problem with the teachers of America, and pretending we are in agreement is only going to make this worse." Merit pay, test scores, union bashing and attacks on tenure are all pretty far away from my experience of trying to help kids retain sight-sound relationships and blend those sounds into words and meaningful sentences. I'm with Deborah Meier on her comment, "It's beyond belief. I'm speechless."

The Three Stooges

A funny cartoon has been floating around the web for months now, but I just noticed it on Michael Doyle's Science Teacher blog. While lots of bloggers have reposted it, the cartoon does appear to be copyrighted, so you'll have to follow Mike's link to see it. The cartoon is a parody of a Three Stooges movie poster, but features the names of Arne Duncan, the Rev. Al Sharpton, and Newt Gingrich (the latter two with images superimposed over stooges' photos) with some funny, but soberingly accurate text about what the conservative and Administration"reforms" for education will do.

While the link above is just to the cartoon entry, Michael has several great recent posts that make the full blog a great read.

Have a great weekend!

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