Monday, August 23, 2010

Free Stuff for Teachers, Homeschoolers, and Students

I often do an end-of-the-year roundup of items posted here on Educators' News. It occurred to me a few weeks ago that an updated review of all the freewares, free web sites, and open source applications that have appeared here over the last twelve months might be more useful to teachers at the beginning of the school year, rather than in December. So I began pulling stuff together, not knowing what I was letting myself in for. After two weeks of off-an-on work, more off than on, and a weekend of near constant writing, editing, link checking, etc., the three page behemoth, Free Stuff for Teachers, Homeschoolers, and Students, is online.

Mirror Paint

As you check web sites and applications to make sure they haven't disappeared from the web (a few did!) before publication, you're sure to get a pleasant surprise or two. When writing Free Stuff for Teachers, Homeschoolers, and Students, I decided to include a reference to the Mac-only freeware, Mirror Paint. I had been pleasantly surprised when I wrote about it in February, as I found that programmer Robin Landsbert had added a Mac OS X version for the children's favorite kaleidoscope drawing application. I could only hope for an iPhone or Windows version.

When I checked Robin's site yesterday, there were links to both a MirrorPaint Lite and a 99¢ MirrorPaint version for the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad. I quickly downloaded the 99¢ version for one of my granddaughters and sent a quick note of thanks to Robin for porting the app to the iPhone. Even though it was getting late in the UK where Robin lives, I got a quick response to my email:

Yes, it was only a few months ago that I ported MirrorPaint to the iPad first and worked out how to "miniaturise" the user interface to work on the iPhone and iPod Touch. It has been a reasonable success so far with a few hundred copies sold, so won't give up my day job just yet! However it is just a hobby, so I am quite happy just to have people use it. I am glad your granddaughter enjoys it.

Ravitch Suggests Books

Diane Ravitch takes some pretty good shots at the Obama Administration's plans for education "reform" in Three books about education reform on the Washington Post. She writes of the "contests" for states to receive funding:

...the winners will not be those that come up with the best reform ideas, but those that agree to do what the administration wants: create privately managed charter schools, evaluate teachers by their students' test scores, and close low-performing schools. Since so much power and money are arrayed on one side of the issue, it is useful to consider some dissenting views. These three books have the power to change the national discussion of what now passes for "school reform."

She recommends Linda Darling-Hammond's The Flat World and Education: How America's Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future, Barbara Torre Veltri's Learning on Other People's Kids: Becoming a Teach For America Teacher , and Richard Rothstein's Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right.

Diane modestly leaves out what is probably the most effective indictment of the flawed Obama/Duncan plan for education "reform," her own The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, which I reviewed in March.

Autism Linked to Multisensory Integration

ScienceDaily has a report of a new study that "offers new insights into autism and could lead to objective measures for evaluating the effectiveness of autism therapies." In Autism Linked to Multisensory Integration, senior author of the study, Sophie Molholm, Ph.D., associate professor in the Dominick P. Purpura Department of Neuroscience and of Pediatrics is quoted as saying:

One of the classic presentations of autism is the child in the corner with his hands over his ears rocking back and forth trying to block out the environment. People have long theorized that these children might not be integrating information across the senses very well. If you have all these sights and sounds coming at you but you can't put them together in a meaningful way, the world can be an overwhelming place.

Study co-author, Professor John Foxe, noted of the results:

This doesn't mean that the children with ASD didn't integrate the information at all. It does mean that they didn't integrate it as effectively as they should have, given their age and maturity. They may go on to integrate well later in life. We don't know. This is a single slice of the developmental trajectory.

On the Blogs

The two most recent postings on The Dark Side of the Chalkboard, an educator's blog I really should have long ago added to my visit often list, caught my attention over the weekend. The author writes of visiting a local library and finding "the book I have been waiting for but didn't know it existed," Understanding Your Refugee and Immigrant Students: An Educational, Cultural, and Linguistic Guide. "This book has all the information I ever wanted about the kids I don't understand. The author talks about 18 of the largest immigrant populations in the US and explains the cultural context they are coming from." His summary of the book made me smile:

This is the information I have been desperately seeking and not finding for the eight years I have been a teacher. This is like the magical unicorn at the end of a double rainbow with twin leprechauns.

The blogger's second post (as I found them), Farming 101, was an entertaining lesson on grass seed farming. Having owned and operated a small farm myself for eight years, I found his descriptions of how one harvests grass seed (such as fescue) fascinating. He illustrates with some nice photos how the grass is cut and windrowed like hay, but then combined (must have some kind of a baler-like pickup head) to separate the seed from chaff and stalks. Despite my years of farming, I guess I thought that bluegrass seed just jumped from the plant into the pretty bags at the garden store.

Odds 'n' Ends

Michael Birnbaum's front page With limited training, Teach for America recruits play expanding role in schools on the Washington Post gives a pretty balanced look at the Teach for America program. Jim Horn's TFA: Temps For African-American Children pretty much tells it like it is. Walt Gardner's Performance Is Not Necessarily Learning makes the distinction that high test scores don't always result in students internalizing the material.

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Tuesday, August 24, 2010

"Winners" and Losers

Federal education officials today revealed that nine states and the District of Columbia will share in up to $3.4 billion in Phase 2 Race to the Top funds. While the states and the District were described as winners, respected education historian, Diane Ravitch, cautioned last Friday in a Washington Post article:

...the winners will not be those that come up with the best reform ideas, but those that agree to do what the administration wants: create privately managed charter schools, evaluate teachers by their students' test scores, and close low-performing schools.

Race to the Top funding will go to the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, and Rhode Island. Round 2 finalists not receiving funding include Arizona, California, Colorado, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina. In all, eleven states, including first round "winners" Delaware and Tennessee, and the District have been approved in rounds one and two for Race to the Top funding.

Each time a milestone is passed in the Race to the Top competition, it's important to remember that the Obama/Duncan school "reform" plan creates winners and losers with its competitive grants. As I wrote in July when the round 2 finalists were announced, "Obviously, federal tax money is often returned to the states unproportionally to what the states have paid in. But making essential funding a contest with winners and losers is immoral. Folks need to remember that this funding goes to provide free, appropriate, public education for all our children."

A posting by Valerie Strauss on her The Answer Sheet blog in March, Obama’s contradictions on education, is still timely in its criticisms of the Obama/Duncan school "reform" plan and contests such as Race to the Top. She wrote that the President has repeatedly said his goal "is to make sure that every child has a quality education and the opportunity to graduate from college," Strauss takes the President and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to the woodshed for implementing and proposing education policies that "cannot ever reach this goal."

Strauss reminds us of the President's abandonment of a frequent campaign promise: "Stop high-stakes standardized testing from driving our public education system." She points out that Secretary Duncan's Race to the Top contest has "encouraged practices in school districts that were unsuccessful in No Child Left Behind in closing the achievement gap - including a continued obsession with high-stakes standardized tests."

But her real target in the posting is the "obscene...way the Race to the Top has been structured." She writes:

Contests have winners and losers, but in this case, the losers aren’t adults who couldn’t answer a fifth grade science question correctly. In this competition, the losers are school children in states where the adults either did not know how to play Duncan’s game, or chose not to follow his rules.

The only way that poorly performing students will ever have a chance of doing better is if public schools are equitably funded. That means that they have the same resources, the same highly qualified teachers, as the best systems in the country.

A contest with winning and losing states is by its very definition unable to accomplish what is most needed.

Links to the story:

• Education Week: Race to Top Round 2: Announcing the Winners byguest blogger Sean Cavanagh
• The Washington Post: N.Y., N.C., Ga., Ohio win second round of Race to the Top grants by Nick Anderson
• The New York Times: New York Wins Race to the Top Grant by Jennifer Medina
• DOE: Nine States and the District of Columbia Win Second Round Race to the Top Grants

Odds 'n' Ends

The Answer Sheet guest blogger Marion Brady writes in How ed reformers push the wrong theory of learning of "The New Progressives" who are driving education reform in the wrong direction. Of New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, Eli Broad, financier and philanthropist, ex-Florida governor and possible 2012 presidential contender Jeb Bush, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Bill Gates, and New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, he writes, "None is, or has ever been, a teacher." Nuff said?

Sam Dillon writes in Drive to Overhaul Low-Performing Schools Delayed that "Schools from Maine to California are starting the fall term with their overhaul plans postponed or in doubt because negotiations among federal regulators, state officials and local educators have led to delays and confusion."

And in a "please read" to our Secretary of Education and President, I recommend Phillip Harris and Bruce Smith's excellent commentary, Can't Anybody Here Play This Game: Foolishness in the Pursuit of "Effective Teaching," which states that "'value added' assessment, a growth model that appears superficially to make sense, is not yet ready for prime time and still needs lots of investigation before we hang our students' and teachers' futures from it."

Thursday, August 26, 2010

PDK/Gallup Poll on Public Attitude Towards Schools

The annual Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll of the public's attitudes toward public schools released this week showed "fewer Americans approve of the job President Barack Obama is doing in support of public education, but they continue to have a highly favorable opinion of their local schools." The AP's Donna Gordon Blankinship tells the story in Poll: Local schools up, Obama education plans down as does Dakarai I. Aarons in Education Week's Fewer Americans Back Obama’s Education Programs.

Fallout from RttT Awards

Sam Dillon's Eastern States Dominate in Winning School Grants popped up Tuesday evening after results of the second round of the Race to the Top competition were announced earlier in the day. Dillon noted that many states that didn't win felt that the "competition’s rules tilted in favor of densely populated Eastern states, which tend to embrace more the ideas that Washington currently considers innovative, including increasing the number of charter schools and firing principals in chronically failing schools." Dillon adds, "One aspect of the rules that especially rankled rural areas was a four-part federal menu of strategies for turning around failing schools, three of which included firing the principal." Another was the inequity of resources, as many of the winning states "spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on professional writers...to prepare applications."

Odds 'n' Ends

Valerie Strauss has been presenting guest bloggers' articles on her Washington Post The Answer Sheet blog while she's been on vacation. Mary Tedrow's Why the National Writing Project should be saved takes issue with why KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) and Teach for America each received $50 million in i3 grant money while the National Writing Project got none. She wrote:

It doesn’t matter that the gains claimed by Teach for America are questionable or that most charters have no appreciable proven success over the regular public schools. Or that veteran (and higher paid) teachers are being fired and replaced by newcomers fresh out of a summer crash course in teaching, upending communities with promises of short-term mentoring for kids who need long-term stability in their lives. These programs, the Education Department is telling us, qualify as innovation.

It simply makes no economic or educational sense to abandon this model [the National Writing Project] — proven to produce good teaching among teachers committed to classroom careers — in favor of approaches that rely on the recruitment of young missionary teachers who are told, explicitly, that they will be here today and gone tomorrow.

Guest blogger Will Fitzhugh writes about "Impossible" working conditions for teachers in Florida with "six classes of 30 or more students (180 students)," and one teacher being asked "to teach seven classes this year, with 30 or more students in each (210)." He notes that if those teachers assigned a not uncommon 20-page research paper, "they would have 3,600 pages to read, correct, and comment on when they were turned in, not to mention the extra hours guiding students through their research and writing efforts. The one teacher with 210 students would have 4,200 pages of papers presented to him at the end of term."

Robert King's Challenges clear for School 61 kindergartners in the Indy Star is a good look at the disparity in readiness of new kindergarten students at one Indianapolis Public School.

And the row of zinnias and these lavender petunias are brought to you from Senior Gardening, as Educators' News for today is really colorless. At first, I'd considered running a snow blower ad today from Snow Joe's to add a little levity to the page, but decided that was just a bit over the top for August. So I settled on the flower photos which appeared in my posting yesterday on Senior Gardening, my other web site. I haven't grown a vegetable garden in years that hasn't had a row of flowers here and there and flower row markers instead of the traditional stakes to mark the ends of rows of vegetables. It just brightens things up. And I guess that's why there were always lots of flowers in my classroom when I was still teaching.

Friday, August 27, 2010

Dear President Obama

Valerie Strauss has published a letter to the President from a group of parents representing a number of organizations across the country. Dear President Obama asks for "broad-based parent participation not just in our local districts, but at the U.S. Department of Education" and "effective, proven, common-sense practices that will strengthen our existing schools." The letter notes, "The current emphasis on more charter schools, high-stakes testing, and privatization is simply not supported by research," and deplores the negative rhetoric of the President and the Secretary of Education in characterizing those who don't agree with them as supporters of the "“status quo."

The letter also calls for "parent input into teacher evaluation systems, fairly-funded schools, smaller class sizes and experienced teachers who are respected as professionals, not seen as interchangeable cogs in a machine. We want our children to be treated as individuals, not data points."

Their summary is strongly worded:

More specifically, and urgently, we insist on being active partners in the formulation of federal school improvement policies. The models proposed by the U.S. Department of Education are rigid and punitive, involving either closure, conversion to charters, or the firing of large portions of the teaching staff. All of these strategies disrupt children’s education and destabilize communities; none adequately addresses the challenges these schools face.

I found that writing the President and Secretary of Education can turn out to be a one-sided conversation, as the Obama Administration doesn't seem to respond to suggestions and criticisms from previous supporters. Dana Milbank, writing in the Washington Post, noted that the President's "one-time friends...talk of an 'elitist' and 'arrogant' administration," with "an attitude that if you aren't with us, you are against us."

But even if the President and Secretary choose to stonewall their supporters who question their flawed education "reform" policies, it's still important for teachers (and others) to send them their views. Anthony Cody's Facebook page, Teachers' Letters to Obama, is a good rallying point for those interested in making their views known to the Obama Administration. Signing the Teachers' Letters to Obama petition on the Care2 (Make a Difference) Petition Site is another way to weigh in with the Administration. And of course, one may email the President, or use good, old, snail mail:

The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

If your views don't match that of President Obama, don't hold your breath waiting for a response! But in the meantime, writing your representatives in Congress, who can get the President's attention, is probably a good idea.

Have a great weekend!

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