Monday, June 27, 2011

On the White House Lawn

Nadean Talley writes in TMA on the White House Lawn on The Other 17 Hours blog about 50 Thurgood Marshall Academy students last week participating "in the one year celebration of Let's Move Outside, an extension of First Lady Michelle Obama's Let's Move! campaign to fight childhood obesity." She writes, "We enjoyed activities such as rock climbing, mountain biking, tent pitching, kayaking, and even fly fishing. All right there on the White House Lawn!"

Little Victories

As teachers, we often don't get big results or victories in our efforts with students, more often seeing gradual, little victories. "Mrs. Lipstick" writes of a sorta big, little victory in The Beautiful Beginnings of Summer on her Organized Chaos blog about the change she saw in self-portraits by a challenging kindergartner over the school year.

On Science Teacher

Mike Doyle always spins a good yarn on his Science Teacher blog. The trouble with Mike's postings is that his writing style seems all over the place before he pulls it all together to make his point. Along the way, there are usually some gems of ideas and thoughts offered, but putting it all in a one paragraph nutshell escapes me today.

In his recent Stories Matter posting, Mike captures our attention with a Rosie the Riveter (actual title, "We Can Do It!") graphic and tales of great American stories told on a porch before boring in on international competition in education and asking:

When did arrogance and efficiency and misplaced elitism become our story? Why do we care what Bill Gates and Eli Broad have to say? How does a man like Arne Duncan become the national figurehead for what used to be education?

When did we stop wanting to be Americans?

He touches on the importance of literacy and having a "sense of place."

Love of our land can start with the simple act of putting a bean seed in a recycled milk carton, filled with dirt scooped up by a child's hand from the ground next to the school building. It can start with a walk to the closest stream. It can start with listening to a grandmother describe what her town looked like a few decades ago, when people knew what a stoop was for.

Not sure growing a bean will help a child on the NJASK, our tithe to the NCLB nonsense. But I am sure of this:

A child who has a love of place, of life, of the universe has a better shot at happiness than one who does not. Few things are more dangerous than an educated adult with no sense of place. Right now they're running the show, and telling the tales.

He winds up the excellent posting with some choice comments about the leadership and direction being provided in New Jersey by its Acting Commissioner of Education, Chris Cerf. And by the end of the piece, he's crafted a powerful protest of what the business oriented "reformers" want to do to public education.

It's too late to apologize, it's too late

Thanks to a blog posting by Paul L. Martin, I ran across the excellent video, RIF Now, Pay Later, produced by the Roy Romer Middle School community in North Hollywood, California, protesting "the deplorable layoffs" at that school. Connie Llanos tells in Faculty, students at NoHo school produce music video to protest layoffs, that "since the school's opening three years ago, Romer Middle has shed 15 teachers due to budget cuts and is expected to lose 12 more next year." The lipdub video was designed by Romer drama production teacher Bobby Arnold, set to OneRepublic's Apologize, and employed more than 300 students and 60 teachers lipsynching the song's lyrics while onscreen text and signs held by students and teachers protested the layoffs.

The Flip Side of the Coin

Mr. Teachbad's latest contribution to the blogosphere illustrates the flip side of the teacher employment coin from the Romer Middle School situation. By his count, over 200 teachers have moved through the 85 jobs at his school in his 3 years there. Mr. Teachbad attributes the turnover mainly to a principal that "is ultimately full of shit and primarily concerned with protecting her little fiefdom and her own reputation above all else." I'll just share the first two paragraphs of Turds of Administration here, and let you go to Mr. Teachbad's Blog of Teacher Disgruntlement for the rest.

If you are a regular or semi-regular reader of this blog, you know that, as a group, the administrative class at my school suffers from Diminished Interpersonal Capacity Syndrome or DICS.

This is a terrible condition that causes people to relate to others as if they were not truly human and to treat them poorly for no good reason. The organization New Leaders for New Schools has been identified as a carrier of DICS. Beware.

Be sure to check out the DICS link above, as it leads to some "interesting," potential organizational slogans from the "DICS Foundation Advisory Panel" that I can't print here, but may give you a good chuckle.

Odds 'n' Ends

Most of the content for today's posting would usually appear under the heading, On the Blogs. But the postings presented above seemed to deserve something more than a short blurb or bullet listing under the usual heading. I found the Romer Middle School video moving, and was just plain happy for the kids at Thurgood Marshall Academy for getting to visit the White House.

Some other good, but far more political blog postings I read over the weekend include:

• Schools Matter: Brooklyn Ascend Brought to Earth by Former Teacher, Part 1 by Jim Horn
• Failing Schools: Breaking the Code on Buzzwords by Marie Sallee
• Failing Schools: More Bullying from Sec of Ed Duncan by Mark Friedman

In hard education news, Diette Courrégé writes in $36 million for special education in jeopardy that the state of South Carolina may face some serious sanctions for cutting school funding last year under the rules of the stimulus package (which basically said states couldn't use the stimulus to cut state contributions to public schools).

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Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Reasons for Hope

Despite "a full-fledged, well-funded effort to replace public schools with private management" and "a full-throated effort to hold public school teachers accountable for the ills of society," Diane Ravitch wrote yesterday of her Reasons for Hope for the return of "a sane, sound public policy" on education. She winds up the Bridging Differences blog posting with a stinging indictment of how the current education "reformers" will be remembered in history:

History will not be kind to those who gleefully attacked teachers, sought to fire them based on inaccurate measures, and worked zealously to reduce their status and compensation. It will not admire the effort to insert business values into the work of educating children and shaping their minds, dreams, and character. It will not forgive those who forgot the civic, democratic purposes of our schools nor those who chipped away at the public square. Nor will it speak well of those who put the quest for gain over the needs of children. Nor will it lionize those who worshipped data and believed passionately in carrots and sticks.

Those who will live forever in the minds of future generations are the ones who stood up against the powerful on behalf of children, who demanded that every child receive the best possible education, the education that the most fortunate parents would want for their own children.

Diane also did a segment for NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross this week, Standardized Testing Undermines Teaching.

About Mitch

There are still lots of writers bemoaning Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels' decision not to enter the primaries in hopes of becoming the Republican candidate for president in 2012. Two recent articles give a fuller picture of Daniels and why one wouldn't want him as president.

• The Los Angeles Times: Indiana's bumpy road to privatization by Matea Gold, Melanie Mason, and Tom Hamburger
• The New York Times: The Indiana Exception? Yes, but... by Michael Powell and Monica Davey

On Science@NASA

Even though most teachers and students are now on summer vacation, Science@NASA continues to crank out timely science stories written for middle and high schoolers. Dauna Coulter's What's to Blame for Wild Weather? "La Nada" talks about potential answers to a question many of us have about the apparent increase in violent weather in the last year or so.

Dr. Tony Phillips writes in Getting Ready for the Next Big Solar Storm about the damage a major solar storm could do. "Modern society depends on high-tech systems such as smart power grids, GPS, and satellite communications--all of which are vulnerable to solar storms."

Odds 'n' Ends

Here are a couple of other articles that caught my eye:

• NPR: Investigating Charter Schools Fraud In Philadelphia
• The New York Times: Teacher Grades: Pass or Be Fired by Sam Dillon

Friday, July 1, 2011

Long Holiday Weekend

I'm taking a long holiday weekend. Educators' News will be back on Wednesday, July 6, 2011.

Have a great holiday!

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