Monday, August 15, 2011

Cosmic Exclamation Point

A Cosmic Exclamation Point

Beyond the really cool NASA Image of the Day at right, I didn't find a lot online to turn me on late Sunday evening and in the wee hours Monday morning. While not hard education news, I did like Christine Haughney's Children With Autism, Connecting via Transit on the New York Times. I also found Valerie Strauss's The Perry-Obama education fight to be pretty perceptive. And while many teachers offended by President Obama's assault on the education profession and public schools (disguised as education "reform") might justifiably be tempted to vote against the President in 2012, a re-read of Molly Ivins highlights about Governor Rick "Goodhair" Perry should scare the daylights out of any rational educator.

On the Blogs

I'm going to have to rebuild my list of education blogs to follow for the new school year. While I'll carry over a lot of blogs previously followed, there's a good attrition rate amongst education bloggers. Some just burn out, some get fired, and others seem to "go Hollywood" after some event or award. So, if you have a suggestion, send it along to me.

Sherman Dorn's All your speaking fee are belong to me is an interesting critique of Alexander Russo's recent Smearing Ravitch Could Blow Up In Reformers' Faces posting. Dorn makes some good points about the whole speaking fee deal currently going on before winding up with this bit of good humor:

Update: I forgot to explain my own speaking fee structure:

• State of Florida: just pay my expenses
• Out of state: expenses plus an academic’s honorarium ($250)
• Daily deal: Pay me $1000 and I say NOTHING the whole day.

Chris Lehmann's Changing NCLB - A Letter To Secretary Duncan discusses the motives behind Arne Duncan's "generous" offer to waive NCLB requirements for states meeting his "high bar." He suggests to the Secretary, "Please don't make states choose between your agenda on the one hand or damning all their schools to being labeled failures on the other."

TeachermanDC tells about attending former students' graduation ceremonies in On Your Mark.

Back to School Best Wishes

Schools in Indiana now start on all sorts of dates with some interesting experiments going on with school calendars. Most of the schools in our immediate area will begin classes tomorrow. As I read about scripted teaching, daily staff meetings, evaluations based on high stakes testing, and good teachers being fired for honestly blogging, I realize that I'm a bit of a dinosaur in education today. I doubt I'd make it a month without telling an administrator to go take a flying leap and getting fired. So it's probably a good thing that for the first time in over forty years, I won't begin the school year with an association with a school, college, or school district. I'm not even signed up to sub this year, although I'm thinking about putting in some hours as a volunteer at a nearby charter school.

To those dedicated folks still in the classroom, my best wishes for a great school year go out to you.

Odds 'n' Ends

Our cloud cover broke enough around 1 A.M. Sunday morning for me to just barely see a couple of whispy Perseid meteors. The nearly full moon made it almost impossible to see the faint streaks, but I was outside for a breath of fresh air on a wonderfully cool night, so the meteors were just a bonus.

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Wednesday, August 17, 2011

What Would Harry Rex Do?

NPR's Neal Conon had an excellent interview on Monday with the New York Times' Michael Winerip, When Teachers Cheat, What About The Kids. Winerip has written extensively about both the Atlanta and potential Pennsylvania cheating scandals. He told Conon in the interview about some of the types of cheating in Atlanta and the extreme pressure brought to bear upon teachers to raise student test scores:

There are things in it you just couldn't make up. There were tests that were held in piles that were sealed in cellophane, and one of the teachers in one of the schools where there was cheating took a razorblade, cut the tests, looked at them, made notes on them, put them back in and used a cigarette lighter to then - you know, to put the cellophane back together.

At another school, there was a principal - if the teachers at the classes didn't make their numbers, he would have them climb under, walk under a table, kneel under a table, just make the point that their scores were too low and they were low. It was extraordinary what went on.

As more and more pressure is applied to teachers to raise student test scores without our government addressing the primary cause of student failure in school, poverty, teachers find themselves in the impossible position Winerip describes as:

We're bribing people by saying if you can get your scores up, we'll give you thousands of dollars and if you don't, you're fired and out of the field, you're unemployed.

As I read the interview, I couldn't help but wonder if teachers in Atlanta and in other school systems now suspected of cheating on high stakes student tests didn't feel like the characters in the John Grisham novel and movie, A Time to Kill. In one scene where Ellen Roark saw no way to achieve their goal, the following dialog occurred:

Ellen Roark: I keep thinking, what would Jake do? What would my father do? What would Lucien do?
Harry Rex Vonner: Well see, there's your problem. What you should be thinking is, what would Harry Rex do?
Ellen Roark: What would Harry Rex do?
Harry Rex Vonner: Cheat. Cheat like crazy.

Whether it was a conscious decision to engage in massive cheating on high stakes student tests or something the folks in Atlanta just slid into gradually, Deborah Meier, who joined the interview, commented on its effects:

But, you know, cheating is so corrupting to us all, and, you know, a time in history when our whole democracy is in fairly fragile state, I'm more and more worried about the lack of trust that we have for each other. So this undermines it, and I worry about it.

Atlanta, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C. probably won't be the end of the cheating scandal investigations. I cringed recently when our State Superintendent of Public Instruction, who Liz Ciancone so accurately described as "that man in Indianapolis masquerading as an expert on education," ballyhooed (and took credit for) the increases in student test scores on our own high stakes tests, the ISTEP+. I hope the suggested improvement in scores was accomplished without cheating, but I worry that Indiana may be next up on the list of states with cheating scandals on student tests. And I know that we've cheated our students in their education to achieve improved test results, as I've seen first hand the disruption to a complete education test prep has caused in our schools.

Odds 'n' Ends

Laura Devaney wrote what I thought was a rather naive article about a recently released report, State Education Agencies as Agents of Change (590K PDF document). Although the report has some plausible suggestions for improving state DOEs, it was mainly written by folks who have bought into or helped create the current market oriented "reforms" for education. Having seen our Indiana Department of Education in "reform" mode, I would hope "that man in Indianapolis masquerading as an expert on education" isn't given any more power to screw up education in this state.

Other possible items of interest include:

• The New York Times: State Challenges Seen as Whittling Away Federal Education Law by Sam Dillon
• The Los Angeles Times: Profile of ADHD sharpens in each school year by Amanda Mascarelli
• Reality Check on Education Week: Schools, Workers and Jobs by Walt Gardner
• The Indianapolis Star: Judge won't grant [temporary] injunction against school voucher plan by Carrie Ritchie and Scott Elliott
• Valerie Strauss's The Answer Sheet: The "absurd" debate about length of school year by Mark Phillips

Since I really am fully retired now (no subbing even), I spent yesterday morning, the first day of school around here, in the garden. I picked, cut up, and sampled several melons from our East Garden. We have lots of watermelon, cantaloupe, and honeydew producing gorgeous melons in a garden plot in a small field east of us that the farmer has chosen to leave fallow for several years. We'd never have room for such vining crops without a free field to use.

Towards evening, I noticed an exceptionally pretty hanging basket plant on our back porch and began taking pictures of our porch plants and flowers in the garden. Even more stunning than the wax begonia I first noticed on the porch was a cluster of snapdragons growing on a trellis near a row of caged tomato plants. (I also spent more time than I'd like picking up groundfall grape tomatoes under some of the plants. We grow the grape tomatoes for our grandkids to pick and eat right off the vine.)

The snapdragons first shared the trellis with our Sugar Snap peas. When we pulled the pea vines, the snapdragons still had to share their trellis with our Japanese Long Pickling cucumber vines, an open pollinated variety I came within one seed of losing several years ago.

We share our cucumber seed, along with a tomato and a pepper variety we're helping preserve, with other gardeners through the Seed Savers Exchange annual yearbook. If the Seed Savers Exchange sounds vaguely familiar to you, it may be due to a recent political event held there, President Obama conducts town hall meeting at Seed Savers Exchange.

Anyway, I didn't have to go to school yesterday and didn't miss it a bit.

Friday, August 19, 2011

Mr. Teachbad Strikes Back

I've been visiting Peter Gwynn's Mr. Teachbad site a bit more frequently since word of his firing by the District public schools became public. I wondered where he would go with his writing now that he's out of the classroom. If you're unfamiliar with Gwynn's writing, his blog, formerly titled Mr. Teachbad's Blog of Teacher Disgruntlement, has been a hilarious, biting, profane, and scarily accurate depiction of what teaching can be like under a poor administrator. Those of us who have suffered through similar experiences in teaching find ourselves going, "Attaboy, Mr. Teachbad!"

Gwynn's latest posting, Teachbad and Jay Mathews: Part I, is in part a response to Jay Mathews' recent posting, Maybe schools shouldn’t work as teams. Mathews had used a sports analogy in describing Gwynn's situation, and Gwynn continued the analogy in a critique of the administration of the Columbia Heights Education Campus (CHEC), a D.C. secondary school. Gwynn winds up the posting with a pretty damming set of statistics about CHEC:

You can write me off as a disgruntled former employee. I don’t mind and, in fact, it’s true. But the numbers speak for themselves: 3 years; 85 teaching positions; 235 teachers. Nobody working in that sort of environment has time to worry about “The Team”. They are just trying to survive. I’m told there are 53 new teachers starting at CHEC this week. And so they roll on…

On the Blogs

It's not often that I run our On the Blogs section twice in one week. That may be because there's a dearth of hard education news, it's the beginning of a new school year, and/or there are just a lot of good postings this week. But a good part of the impulse to do a second round this week came from Carol Richtsmeier's Back-to-School, Top 5 Dream Killers & Educational Polyjuice on her Bellringers site. There's little worse than being totally pumped for the new school year, only to have to sit through hours of inservice and other meetings when one could more productively be working in their classroom.

Stephen Krashen on Schools Matter reminds us of a good piece by the late Gerald Bracey in Opinions about American schools: Experience outweighs rhetoric. "Mrs. Lipstick" writes on Organized Chaos about Looking at poverty in education: an excuse or a way to find solutions? And I'll include mention of 365 Days of Astronomy here, even though it's a podcast rather than a teacher blog, as I found the site via a mention of it on someone else's blog (and forgot the source). Individuals, schools, companies and clubs are invited to provide 5-10 minute audio recordings for the daily podcast.

Odds 'n' Ends

• Associated Press: Milwaukee voucher, public schools yield similar test scores by Dinesh Ramde
• Associated Press: Archaeologists comb newly-found Civil War POW camp by Russ Bynum
• ED.gov Blog: Participate in a Robotics Competition—in Space!
• eSchool News: Ten things every new teacher should know by Meris Stansbury

Have a great weekend!

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