Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Want to Help with Educational Computer Games?

The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) Learning Technologies Program is collaborating with Muzzy Lane Software to create a series of games for middle school science. Their ClearLab Project is seeking designers, teachers, and students who have an interest in the creation of effective learning games. FAS is also looking for beta testers for version 2 of their Immune Attack learning game.

About Those Movies

Rick Hess, a self proclaimed "hard-core enthusiast of charter schooling, accountability, merit pay, and such since before it was cool," is having some qualms about the promotion of movies such as The Lottery and Waiting for Superman. He writes in We Don't Do Propaganda:

Movies that sell charter schools as a salvation are peddling a simple-minded remedy that takes us back to the worst charter puffery of a decade ago, is at odds with the evidence, and can blind viewers to what it takes to launch and grow truly great charters. These flicks accelerate the troubling trend of turning every good idea into a moral crusade, so that retooling K-12 becomes a question of moral rectitude in which we choose sides and "reformers" are supposed to smother questions about policy or practice. They also wildly romanticize charters, charter school teachers, and the kids and families, making it harder to speak honestly or bluntly.

...I think these movies have a valuable and constructive role to play, so long as advocates don't deem it a substitute for reasoned argument.

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Thursday, July 15, 2010

Test Scores in D.C.

Bill Turque's D.C. elementary schools lose ground on test scores; secondary gains continue give a good overview of the drop in elementary reading and math scores in the District. With Chancellor Michelle Rhee's focus on test scores, you can almost hear Ricky Ricardo saying, "Lucy (Michelle), you got some 'splainin to do." Valerie Strauss also gets in her digs in Rhee’s problem with D.C.’s new test scores.

About TFA

Walt Gardner weighs in with some of the problems with TFA on his Reality Check blog with Evaluating Teach for America. He looks at the question of whether students learn better under TFA teachers or traditionally certified teachers and also at the issue of career commitment.

Indiana Turnaround Leadership Academy

With a good deal of fanfare, Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett announced Indiana's new Turnaround Leadership Academy for identifying, recruiting, training, and developing "transformational leaders who will focus on the challenge of turning around Indiana's chronically lowest-achieving schools." The Indy Star's Andy Gammill gives a bit more objective look at the proposed Marion University program in Teaching principals to save schools.

It appears that the Marian University Academy for Teaching and Learning Leadership will pick up a cool half million each from the state and the Kern Family Foundation of Wisconsin to begin the new programs. The press release notes that "Experts from Teach for America, The New Teacher Project, and Uncommon Schools are also members of the faculty and will teach alongside Marian University's professors."

Bennett's press release included the troubling statement, "The success of these turnaround efforts will hinge upon key principles, such as teacher and principal effectiveness, which are the most important factors in improving student achievement and closing the achievement gap." I agree with Bennett and others that good administrators are critical to school success, but wish he wouldn't repeat the inaccurate mantra of teacher and principal effectiveness being more important that things like poverty and home conditions.

Open Source

If you're looking for software for your classroom over the summer, be sure to check out osalt.com for free, open source alternatives to commercial programs. It has an easy-to-use interface that allows one to look for open source software by categories or by specific commercial program.

Get Your 3D Glasses Ready

eSchool News reports in 3D content for education on the rise that "At least a dozen companies now offer three-dimensional learning content, according to industry sources, and some of the major players in the educational video market are rumored to be developing 3D content as well." One example they noted was Tactus Technologies new version of its V-Frog virtual dissection software "that lets students using stereoscopic 3D glasses explore virtual dissections of frogs, flatworms, jellyfish, and sponges in three dimensions—making the images come alive for students, and helping students visualize the special relationships between various parts of the anatomy."

Friday, July 16, 2010

A Month in the Museum

The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago announced a unique contest yesterday. Their Month at the Museum contest seeks a person to stay at the museum 24/7 from October 20 to November 18, 2010. The winner's "mission will be to experience all the fun and education that fits in this historic 14-acre building, living here and reporting your experience to the outside world. There will be plenty of time to explore the Museum and its exhibits after hours, with access to rarely seen nooks and crannies of this 77-year-old institution."

If you don't have a teaching gig for next fall and have good writing, blogging, photo, and web skills, this contest might be a great way to highlight your teaching skills. It certainly wouldn't look bad on a resume, and the winner will receive a $10,000 cash prize upon completion of the assignment. If I were 20, no, 30, well, maybe 40 years younger and footloose and fancy free, I'd apply.

When I taught in Indianapolis, we used to take our sixth graders on a one day trip to the museum. We rented buses, left early and came home late. In the week before the field trip, we used a slide show we'd developed to acquaint our kids with the layout and exhibits at the museum. We grouped them and assigned them some key exhibits to visit, along with enough free time to also see things along the way that appealed to them. It was one of the better field trips we provided the kids, even though it made for a very long day.

About Poverty and Education

I took issue yesterday with a line from Tony Bennett's press release about Indiana's new Turnaround Leadership Academy. Bennett wrote that teacher and principal effectiveness are "the most important factors in improving student achievement." While I got my point of view in print, I was really happy today to see that Walt Gardner has addressed the issue of poverty on his Reality Check blog with Economic Inequality = Educational Inequity. Walt begins, "The role that poverty plays in learning is so well documented by now that it seems superfluous to raise the issue once again." But folks like Tony Bennett, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, and even President Obama seem determined to ignore the social issues that often negate good and great teaching. Their proposed "reforms" really don't address the underlying issues that so often frustrate our best efforts to teach our kids.

I'll not add more tidbits from Walt's posting here, as it really deserves to be read in its entirety. But I'll add a link from the comments section to an op-ed piece by Paul L. Thomas that originally appeared in June in The Greenville News. Test scores aren't the most serious problem. Paul is even more direct than Walt, laying it on the line:

To be blunt, we say we care about education, we say we value children—but we simply don't...

We as a country are simply willing to tolerate childhood poverty at a rate that other countries will not endure. And we are also willing to misinform by condemning the quality of our schools—while failing to acknowledge that school achievement is a reflection of social poverty.

Andrew Cody addresses the same issue in The Education Reformers: Willfully Blind on his Living in Dialogue blog:

The central claim of the "education reformers" in and out of the administration is that our schools, and in particular, teachers who hold low expectations, are the reason for the differences we see in performance between different socioeconomic groups. To bolster this, they cite research that shows that some teachers are better able to lift student performance than others. So, if we had nothing but great teachers like these, our problems would be solved. But while many of us have invested heavily in our own efforts to become more effective, and in processes such as National Board certification that offer ways to demonstrate and elevate our practice, these processes alone are not going to eradicate the inequities faced by our students.

Ironically, the administration co-opts the language of the Civil Rights Movement to proclaim education as "the civil rights issue of our generation." The leaders of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s were deeply concerned about education, but they understood very well that fighting poverty was fundamental to the health of their communities. So-called reformers have turned civil rights on its head, and no longer worry about the resegregation of schools, or the vast inequities in funding between wealthy and impoverished schools, or the widespread poverty and violence in these communities. Now these are dismissed as excuses offered by the real culprits, those teachers who set low standards and allow their students to fail, and the unions that protect them.

Have a great weekend!

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