Monday, August 16, 2010

The Biggest Bully on the Education Block

Dana Milbank's On education policy, Obama is like Bush pretty well captures what is wrong with the Obama education agenda, both in its flawed substance and the way it's being presented and promoted. Milbank writes, "In federal education policy, the president and his education secretary have been the neighborhood toughs -- bullying teachers, civil rights groups, even Obama's revered community organizers."

Milbank spends several paragraphs taking apart the Obama/Duncan "obsession with testing" and correctly states that "Test obsession won't help the bad schools, and it will wreck the good ones." Many others have written of the flaws of the Obama/Duncan plan for expanded testing and use of those test scores "to determine how much teachers will be paid, which educators will be fired and which schools will be closed -- despite evidence that such practices are harmful." But Milbank goes on to explore the attitudes of the President and Secretary of Education:

Privately, Obama's one-time friends are far more caustic. They talk of an "elitist" and "arrogant" administration embracing an education policy produced by the Center for American Progress with too little regard for what happens in practice.

Obama's response to his supporters: Buzz off.

"There's an attitude that if you aren't with us, you are against us -- and therefore against children and reform," a Democratic friend of mine who runs an education advocacy group in Washington told me. The administration, she said, "tries to bully and condemn any opposition, even if it is from groups that should be their allies."

Milbank joins a growing number of writers and educators opposed to the Obama/Duncan education plan. It now appears that the only solution to the President's intransigence to changing a horrible education plan will be at the polls by electing people willing to expose the President's faulty plan and stand up to his bullying techniques.

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Tuesday, August 17, 2010

About That LA Times Article

An article appeared in the Sunday Los Angeles Times, Grading the Teachers: Who's teaching L.A.'s kids, announcing the paper's intent to publish a database of individual teachers’ estimated effectiveness based solely on student test scores. Because of the sheer nastiness of the the apparent intent of the story, plus my own previous opinion of the authors' apparent anti-teacher bias, I decided to just not comment on it. The article begins with a photo of a teacher in front of his class in Los Angeles with the caption, "Over seven years, [teacher's name redacted] fifth-graders have started out slightly ahead of those just down the hall but by year's end have been far behind."

Yesterday, a Stephen Sawchuk posting on Education Week, Value-Added Debate Heats Up in Los Angeles, made me reconsider. He pretty well misses the point in his article, but fortunately, commenter Michael Barbour reminds him of a Gerald Bracey article that related that many working in value added assessment "acknowledge that it cannot permit causal inferences about individual teachers. At best, it is a beginning step to identify teachers who might need additional professional development."

Arne Duncan, of course, thought the misuse of the value added scores just dandy. But at least the writers of the Times story quoted Diane Ravitch in a later piece as saying, "I thought it was disgraceful. There was a fundamental meanness about [the story] that turned my stomach."

Valerie Strauss has a good guest blog today by Larry Ferlazzo, The best kind of teacher evaluation. Ferlazzo also has released a compilation of The Best Posts About The LA Times Article On “Valued-Added” Teacher Ratings on his own blog.

It's Time to Break with the President

The recent LA Times descent into yellow press finally pushed me to publish A Letter to the President I sent in March. As Anthony Cody wrote last week's This is How a Tipping Point Feels, "It has become clear they know exactly what they are doing, and nothing we say matters."

It's time that teachers and parents start shopping for senators and congressmen who will oppose the President's flawed agenda for education "reform." It's time for Arne to do something else. And it's also probably time to begin considering presidential alternatives for 2012. We need a leader with the courage and wisdom to address the underlying issues that frustrate reform in education instead of one who panders to the "bad teacher" crowd while ignoring the crying social ills that prevent effective education of all our children.

Worst Practices in Information and Communications Technology

While just looking around on the New York Times site, I clicked into Stephanie Strom's Nonprofits Review Technology Failures. She tells of the FailFaire event, held in July by MobileActive. The event brought together "a network of people and organizations trying to improve the lives of the poor through technology" to do "light-hearted examinations of failures," hoping to turn those failures into learning experiences and help prevent others from making the same mistakes. It's a good read.

The educational connection in this posting comes from the winner for the worst failure in using technology to help improve lives in third world nations. Michael Trucano, senior information and education specialist at the World Bank, presented to FailFaire a list of the 10 worst practices he had encountered in his job. Trucano stated, "We dump hardware down and hope magic will happen." His list, Worst practice in ICT use in education, was written in reference to things done wrong in Africa, but most of the entries could also be taken from many schools here in America.

1. Dump hardware in schools, hope for magic to happen
2. Design for OECD learning environments, implement elsewhere
3. Think about educational content only after you have rolled out your hardware
4. Assume you can just import content from somewhere else
5. Don't monitor, don't evaluate
6. Make a big bet on an unproven technology (especially one based on a  closed/proprietary standard) or single vendor, don't plan for how to avoid 'lock-in
7. Don't think about (or acknowledge) total cost of ownership/operation issues or calculations
8. Assume away equity issues
9. Don't train your teachers (nor your school headmasters, for that matter)

Trucano left his #10 worst practice blank "as an acknowledgement that there are many additional worst practices that merit mention, but I have run out of space." He adds:

For those who work in educational technology, none of these will be new. For many others new to this topic, the items on this list may appear to be so obvious that they need not even be mentioned. Even if indeed they are "obvious," that unfortunately hasn't stopped them from occurring (and re-occurring) around the world with depressing regularity.

If you read Trucano's article, I'm sure you, like me, will find yourself saying, "We did that" a time or two.

Odds 'n' Ends

Paul Thomas, associate professor of education at Furman University, has a good commentary on Education Week in Why Common Standards Won't Work.

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Rehiring Teachers Put Off

Motoko Rich writes in the New York Times, Given Money, Schools Wait on Rehiring Teachers. She writes that many school corporations facing potential deficits for the next academic year are planning to hang on to any Edujobs money they get to defray state and local cutbacks later this and next year.

A Different Take on the LA Situation

Walt Gardner's How Not to Win Support for Teachers Unions looks at the response of United Teachers of Los Angeles President A.J. Duffy to the Los Angeles Times using a value-added model of student test scores to estimate the effectiveness of teachers. Walt writes that by calling for a boycott of the LA Times, "Duffy adds fuel to the fire of criticism that teachers unions obstruct reform," and suggests Duffy should have "challenge[d] his opponents to a debate on the issue."

Friday, August 20, 2010

On the Blogs

John Spencer's A Thought-Provoking Video led me to Daniel Pink's adapted animated talk on motivation from RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce). While not targeted at education, the incredibly entertaining video presents another view of why merit pay based on student test scores is probably a bad idea. See RSA Animate for other, similarly constructed videos.

Ever get upset about folks who use a promotional phrase ending with "That make learning fun?" Jenny Orr says it's one of her pet peeves in Kids Learn, Like It or Not on her
Elementary, My Dear, or Far From It blog. She reminds us that the use of such phrases "suggests that, naturally, learning isn't fun at all."

She continues:

Anyone who has worked with young children knows that learning is amazingly, astoundingly fun for them. Adults love to learn, on their terms. They take art classes, join clubs, meet with friends who share a passion. Human beings need to learn. It's a driving force for us.

After taking the summer off from blogging, Sandra G. McCarron has a couple of great posts on her Reflections of a Science Teacher blog. Back to School is her checklist and two-week preparation plan for getting ready for school. (Gosh, I'd love to be that organized and productive.) Picturing my Classroom talks about how she sets the tone for her student-centered classroom.

Life's a Carnival–the Education Buzz #2 on Bellringers presents "an eclectic smattering of things buzzing about the EduSphere" that I won't try to recreate (steal?) here.

Jim Horn sorta blew me away with An Army of Parents Collaborating with Teachers on Schools Matter. He writes:

The future of the teaching profession depends upon an associative shift that reawakens the basis of the student-teacher relationship and the child advocacy motive that is at the heart of what it means to be a teacher.  That future is now, and it does not involve the union prostisuits who have sold out their memberships as well as the parents and children they serve in order to have a seat at the feeding trough. 

The new beginning for teaching and learning starts when teachers and parents get on the same team to bring unrelenting pressure on Washington and their representatives to act for the renewal and rebirth of public education, rather than acting against it for the benefit of the education industry, vulture philanthropy, and the Oligarchs who seek to turn learning and knowledge into another market that can be manipulated and corrupted.

I loved the comment, "My days are suddenly filled with mandatory laziness (get it in now since I wont have time to get it in later) and desperately trying to finish all those projects and errands I'd told myself I'd do this summer when school ended in June," from New Books on Organized Chaos.

Paul L. Martin gets us back to serious stuff with his Wake The Sleeping Bear posting on The Teacher's View. He starts out by talking about the Los Angeles Times "going after teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District," but brings his posting around to an interesting plan for school improvement. I only wish our nation's leaders would read Paul's post.

Odds 'n' Ends

If you're a regular reader of Educators' News, you've already noticed that I've inverted the usual order of my posting for today, leading with the blog postings of classroom teachers and leaving the stuff by others for the Odds 'n' Ends scrap heap. But there is some good stuff here.

Frank Kordalski's entertaining Think education is back-breaking now? Consider the 1800s should satisfy ones need for nostalgia. Frank is the archivist for the Allegheny Foothills Historical Society.

On Education Week, Walt Gardner's Open Season to Run Schools and Dakarai Aarons's Congress to Investigate School Turnaround Companies both talk about companies with little to no experience in education trying to cash in on school turnaround funds. Stephen Sawchuk's Unions' Tactics Diverge in Engaging Obama Agenda gives a good look at the differing positions the AFT and NEA are taking towards the Obama/Duncan flawed plan for education reform. And Rick Hess gets the award for today's catchiest headline in Duncan's First Rule of Holes: "When You're in One, Dig Faster." I really wish he'd applied the headline to Arne Duncan's affinity for contests like Race to the Top with its winners and losers instead of the Edujobs bill. But sadly, I think Rick loves RttT...and he makes some good points about bailouts.

Sherman Dorn's comments in Not exactly covered with glory in L.A. pretty well sum up how a lot of us feel about the situation there.

eSchool News reports that Pearson Education has announced that "its PowerSchool student information system (SIS) software will cease to support Macintosh database servers by Dec. 31." In Mac-based districts could face SIS quandary, Laura Devaney relates that Pearson will upgrade PowerSchool, which runs on an Oracle database, to an Oracle version only compatible with Windows servers. Oracle is mum on when the required Oracle 11g update might become available. Options for schools running PowerSchool on Mac OS X Server include moving to a Windows based server, using a Windows virtual server such as Parallels or VMWare on their Mac server, moving to a cloud based version of the software, or switching to another SIS program.

When I finished writing and proofing the first version of today's posting, I lopped off a week of posts at the bottom of the page to facilitate decent loading speeds. After doing so, I realized that I had two weeks of Educators' News without a single photo or reference to a fruit, flower, or vegetable. It made for a dreary view.

So here's a shot I grabbed this week of a begonia that has summered on our back porch and wintered under plantlights in our basement for several years. It wasn't an expensive plant when I bought it, coming from a discount store closeout of their summer, hanging plants. It's been repotted several times, almost died once, but seems to survive my worst brown thumb treatment.

Have a great weekend!

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