eduskeptic

School districts across the United States are struggling to keep up with the budgetary realities of the day.  It is difficult to maintain a level of educational excellence in the face of a budget that forces more children into each classroom, and cuts more programs that have been good for children, K-12. In California, and across the nation, the task is disheartening in many ways. Laying off over 20,000 teachers in California is not an easy thing to do, nor is it likely to be ignored by anyone with an agenda regarding unions, seniority, and the educational establishment in general.

In an article in the Sacramento, California, Bee newspaper, July 6, co-written by Diana Lambert and Phillip Reese, it is pointed out that, in general,  schools with the most troubles, economically, behaviorally, academically, have suffered the most from teacher layoffs. The reason is relatively simple: the staff at these schools tend to be younger, less experienced teachers. The general rule is last hired is first fired. This may or may not be true in all districts across the United States.

The article points out that a newer teacher, with a PhD in education (doesn’t say from where the PhD is from), who has written about education, and was teacher of the year for his district, was given a pink slip, which has since been rescinded. His take on the layoff business is that it should be based on performance. Perhaps it was, and that is why he still has a job. To assume that it wasn’t is simply naive.

School districts, at least in California, are paid based on the actual attendance of the students enrolled in the district. Absences equal a loss of money to the district. There are no excused absences anymore. If a child is absent, it costs the district. Every district has to make a guess about how many children will be attending school the next school year, and about what the attendance percentage will be, in order to figure out a budget.  March 15, in California, is a day when districts have to notify teachers of potential layoffs. Chief financial officers generally give the superintendents a conservative number regarding the number of potential students for the next year. The incoming Kindergarten class, subtracted from the outgoing 8th grade class, or 12th grade class in a unified district, equals the number of students lost, or, perhaps gained. Based on this number and the number of children each class will carry, teachers will be laid off, or more will be hired. It’s pretty simple. The Phd teacher of the year might want to look into this prior to making assumptions about the process.

The younger, less experience teachers are the ones who take the biggest hit in this scenario, no matter where in the district they are teaching. Teachers with tenure, those who have made it through 3 probationary years, are less like to actually lose their jobs. They do get pink slips. Teachers who have been teaching for 8 or more years have been getting pink slips. Most have been rescinded, but for a large number of teachers, the pink slips have turned out to be real. Tenure is not, as is commonly misquoted and believed, equal to lifetime employment. It means that a teacher cannot be fired, or laid off, without due cause. The reason for this is pretty straightforward.

This writer has written about this, in this blog, before. Prior to the tenure laws, teachers were fired at will for any number of reasons: having different political views from someone on the board, not financially supporting a pet project of a principal or board member, not working for free, having the termidity to argue with a principal, the principals wife, or board member, getting married or pregnant if a woman, not buying the correct clothing at the correct store, being old, not putting up with sexual harassment or assault, even thinking about joining a union, being of a different nationality, color, and the list just keeps going on and on. Tenure laws exist to protect the civil rights of teachers. It is not, and never has been, a ticket to lifetime employment.

The newspaper article, and others like it, point out that a disproportionate number of teachers at difficult schools in difficult areas are laid off at a higher rate than teachers at better schools, because the teachers in these schools tend to be the newest, least senior. Nowhere in the articles that this teacher has read has anyone taken the time to figure out that the older teachers in the districts paid their dues a long time ago. They have already been at the difficult schools with the difficult students in the difficult areas of town. They have been through the grinder and have transferred to less stressful situations. There are not many teachers who can sustain the daily assault on civility, the lack of community support, the mind numbing stress of teaching in such situations, over the long haul. Some can, and do. After a few years though, most teachers in these positions, when offered the opportunity to go to a different location, and preserve what is left of their sanity and health, do so. Not very surprising, really.

The newer teachers are also the ones who are most likely to teach anywhere they are sent, without question, who are most likely to do the involuntary “volunteer” work that principals and other administrators come up with, who won’t speak up too freely about conditions, or 3 hour staff meetings, simply because they fear for their jobs. A colleague of this writer gave up a Saturday to “volunteer” at school for what was called an ADA make-up day. The reasoning? Fear of being laid off.

Nowhere in the press, with all of the focus on the under performing schools having such high numbers of layoffs has anyone pointed out that other teachers filled those slots. The districts put more children in the classrooms, and transferred other teachers into those low performing schools to teach. These transferred teachers are the more experienced teachers. The articles and opinions on the op-ed pages would have the general public believe that the children in these difficult schools are just cast afloat, which is a patently ridiculous position.

The teachers, young and old, are not to blame for the financial mess that the schools and states find themselves in. There is no rejoicing in the teacher ranks when the young and talented are told their services are not needed for the next school year. The more experienced teachers know full well that there is a great need for young, enthusiastic, and energetic teachers to enter into, and stay in, the teaching ranks, and it is they who most profoundly feel the loss of these good young teachers. A good mix of the experienced with the inexperienced in the teaching ranks is what is needed.

No crisis will ever be left untouched for political gain by politicians. What seems to have floated to the top of the pool in this mess is a thinly veiled assault on unions, mounted by politicians who think now is the time to point to the teachers and their civil rights as a cause for the layoffs of good, young teachers. Instead of figuring out how to get the schools back on a stable financial footing, they begin to blame the unions, and all senior teachers. It is, of course, much easier to do this than to actually fix anything. It also does nothing to help children and schools do anything at all.

In the last post from Eduskeptic, the establishment of national standards for schools across the nation were discussed. In general, it may be a good idea, on several different levels. When the states apply for educational funding from the Federal government, it would be nice to know that the scores were based on the same criteria, that the criteria were assessed in the same manner, and the scoring itself was an equal opportunity proposition. As of now, that premise is doubtful at best.

While a case can be made for national educational standards across the K-12 spectrum, the rule of unintended consequences will undoubtedly apply, no matter what. It always does. The other side of national testing, the tricky part, needs close scrutiny, at least as close as the standards themselves. If teacher pay and retention is to be tied to the students success with the standards, someone has to pay attention to the process that takes place.

Teaching to the test is not new. It is what educators have done since the beginning of the educational business. How can it be otherwise? A teacher has a text, or expectations, that drive the teaching of the curriculum on a daily basis. If the expectation is that the students will understand the sound of the letter L, it makes perfectly good sense to focus on the letter L and the sound that it makes. After sufficient time dwelling upon this sound, the test is simple: what sound does the letter L make? Follow up is likewise pretty straight forward: in several different words, which ones start with the sound of the letter L? It would be completely counterintuitive to spend a week with the letter Q, then test for the letter L. Not too difficult to understand. There are some things that lend themselves rather well to this model. It is teaching to the test in a pretty pure form.

Once the varied sets of sounds, math formulas, and steps to get the right measurements and quantities is mastered, things do become more difficult. In any part of the curriculum, at least from about 4th grade on up (4th grade is the first year of mostly pure content teaching. Skills based curricula is a K through 3rd grade experience), content  becomes the focus. Students should already know the alphabet, how to read, and a  bucketful of math facts. Content is a different world altogether, but it is dependent upon the successful acquisition of the necessary skills. Content lends itself to interpretation.

Written papers begin to appear in earnest in 4th grade, and then blossom into a full bore flood after that, all the way to the end of the University years. Papers are written for every subject within the curricula strata. Some of the information that is taught isn’t open to very much, if at all, interpretation. Some historical dates are relatively cast in stone, as are some things that have happened in the various disciplines. It is not quite as easy to adequately grade the way things are written about. Teachers all hope for competent usage of the written language. After that, it gets dicey, which is to say, subjective. The various bits of scientific discoveries are not at all always consistent with what the text book may say. While Marie Curie was busy discovering radioactivity, she was in the process of killing herself with her experiments. Text books used to focus on the wonders of radiation, not so much on what happened to Marie. Perhaps they still do.

In a paper about Marie Curie, what is to be showcased? How does a teacher go about grading two equally good compositions about her, written from two perspectives that are completely at odds with each other? Does the science teacher grade differently from the history teacher, who has a different outlook than the English teacher, regarding the assignment?  History is largely, in this writers opinion, distorted very badly in the K-12 curricula. Who’s version are we writing about? Is one version more wrong than another? In the realm of English, is Shakespeare really that good?  Are “be” verbs all that insidious? Is there really only one way to solve a problem in the world of math? Is science a closed loop, with only one answer per question?

In a standardized testing situation, with standardized scoring, there is only one answer per question. This would indicate that the students have to be asked to memorize pre-sorted facts, which can then be sorted out on a bubbleized scantron card. Fill in the correct bubble, and move on. At the end of the test, the card goes into the scantron reader, and a numerical score is produced. What this measures, and all that it measures, is the ability to memorize the material that is pertinent to the test, and which can be scored with fill in bubbles. Math may be different, as a student may actually have to solve a problem to get to the right bubble on the card. Of course, since there are only 4 or 5 answers to choose from, getting close may be all that is needed.

If the nations teachers are going to be held accountable for great scantron scores in order to stay employed, or to move up, or down, on the salary scale, it becomes important to focus on the presumed correct answers. In fact, there have already been instances where teachers have been accused of cheating on this type of scoring, in order to reach the correct numerical strata in order to be judged a “good” teacher. Herein lies the problem, and this may be the dark side of national standards and testing. If the teaching day focuses on only the correct set of, or acceptable set of, answers to a nationally standardized test, it is more about the teacher than the student and what and how the student learns. The restrictions are enormous in this scenario.

The actual art of teaching takes a clear back seat to the mechanical recitation of someones version of facts. This, in and of itself, in this teachers view, is not good. The wide based critical thinking skills that are a hallmark of teaching in the United States, and which have proved to be pretty important, won’t survive in this type of atmosphere. Rote recitation is not education, it is not learning.

Somewhere there is an answer to this conundrum. Somewhere, either at the national level, in Arne Duncan’s group in the Department of Education, or in the staff room of the local elementary school, there is someone who should be able to figure out how to mesh actual learning with a set of national standards and standardized testing that will be acceptable across the educational spectrum. This will only happen if Duncan et al reach out to the educational professionals who actually spend time in classrooms. The theoreticians are useful as well, as are the sociologists, as this is not just a question that centers only in the classroom. It will take the involvement of more than just teachers to make all of this work. After 36 years of teaching, I have to hope that it does work.

Recently, the move to a national set of curriculum standards took on new life.  For quite some time there has been concern that the standards based lessons being taught around the country were anything but equal. The laws that, for better or worse, came into national prominence with the No Child Left Behind legislation, were meant to establish a basis for measuring success in the  classroom. So far, that’s not what we have.

Some states have moved to rectify the mishmosh of expectations. The intent is to make sure that when the educational, and the anti-educational, establishments are touting their success or lack of it  on the standards platform, that everyone is standing on the same platform. Initially, all of the states were given leeway to establish what the standards in their state would be. The fox was about to have lunch, and dinner, in the hen house. That is changing.

The  National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) released a set of state-led education standards, the Common Core State Standards. These standards are meant to be rigorous, consistent, and understandable, from state to state, across the nation. In light of the push by the Department of Education for better compliance with the NCLB laws, and the changes in this law, this should be a good thing.

A teacher in California, Iowa, and Maine, should be able to teach a set of recognized and accepted curricula that would enable a family moving from one state to another to be assured that their children will be able to apply what they have learned in a fair and equitable manner. Students should be able to seamlessly blend into a classroom anywhere in the nation and understand what is being taught. States should be able to absolutely rely on a level competition for whatever federal education dollars that are available.

That has, up till now, not been the case. Several states established norms that were, when examined closely, at best, laughable. Texas has long claimed great educational gains using various programs. Held up to national review, the claims haven’t always held up. Mississippi and Louisiana established themselves at the bottom of the credibility ladder. What is clear is that everyone should be seeking the top of the same ladder. Educators, at least the ones this writer has worked with over the last 36 years, would appreciate this.

Because the stakes, which have become more monetized than ever, have gotten more critical, it is likewise more critical for everyone in the education arena to know what is at stake. If we are to improve the perceived quality of education on a national basis, it is important that the states sign on to an agreed K through 12 set of standards, and then to adhere to them. Inherent in the standards agreement is the component that assess how the standards are being met. The fox has to leave the hen house.

It is not just the national standards that are coming down the road. Subsequent to the standards, or, lurking in the background, depending on your point of view, are some other items. If the standards become nationalized, the business of education at the university level leading to a teaching credential may need to be standardized, to the highest state standard that exists. A teacher in one state, moving to another state, would have a portable credential. That does not currently exist. Holding teachers accountable for meeting the national standards would similarly need to be a consistent from state to state. That would seem to indicate that acceptable classroom behaviors would also need to be as standardized as possible. What to do with disruptive students, and how to measure their effect on a classroom would need to be consistent. There would need to be an acceptable alternative placement for the disruptive, or a method of applying a discount to the classroom performance, consistent from state to state. If we are to truly measure each student, teacher, state, against a set of reasonable and rigorous standards, the environment from which the children come to school will absolutely need to be part of the formula.

The list of the possible ramifications, modifications, and permutations of national standards is likely to be quite long. The law of unintended consequences will apply as well. This is not to say that the status quo is acceptable. It isn’t. We have to start somewhere, and the first step does seem to be nationally accepted standards. Education is not a static phenomenon. It is always changing, and over time, the good changes outnumber the bad ones. Anything that stays static for too long will deteriorate. We never have been able to afford that in education. We certainly cannot afford to have that happen now.

When the greedmeisters in the hedge fund/securities/mortgage/bank/realty industries threw everything off the cliff, with many willing participants going with them, our government threw out a safety net: ” too big to fail” was the name of the net. The net belonged to us, the average citizens of the country. What, you thought someone else was going to pay for it? Silly.

The large corporations made out just fine, with much of the billions, we think, having been repaid.  The world economy didn’t spin out into a black hole, never to be seen or heard of again. Too big, too important to fail. My, my.

Over the last few days, the local paper has been reporting on an effort, now deceased, to throw a safety net to the educational entities around the U.S. In California alone, about 22,000 teachers have actually received real pink slips: no job for next year. Local districts are scrambling to figure out how to make it through the next school year with drastically reduced funding. Even if you believe that the school system as a whole is over-paid, the magnitude of what is happening across the U.S is staggering.The economic hit of 22,000 teachers out of work, on top of everything else, is enormous.

The smaller class size movement in California, and anywhere else it was implemented, is rapidly slipping into nostalgia land. Although as a teacher, this writer can say that the smaller class size has been good for all concerned, there is no research to prove it. The jump to 20:1, K-3, was made so quickly that no one thought about research, control groups, and all of the planning that goes into preparing to study a major shift in class sizes. Many districts in California have simply abandoned all pretense at smaller class sizes. There is no money to support it. With larger class sizes comes a lesser need for teachers. It is an inverse equation. Many thousands of teachers across the U.S. have lost their jobs.

A district in New York advertised for 8 teaching positions. They had to wade through 3,100+ applications for the positions. The applications came from everywhere across the U.S. A district in New Jersey needed 7 teachers: 1,065 applications, again from everywhere in America, flooded in. For a few special ed positions in a district on the east coast, twice the number of applicants threw there hats in the ring: 650+. A small, rural, district in Northern California, up in the mountains, needed 1 teacher: 130 applications, again, from areas spread far and wide.

Think about it. These applicants, all, one must assume, meeting the credential and educational requirements of the districts that advertised, were willing to move, perhaps 3,000 miles, just to find a teaching job. The saddest part of this whole miasma of lunacy is that the bulk of the now jobless teachers are the good, young, educators that we need in the system to propel everyone forward in this ever changing world. This writer is 64, and my energy level, and willingness perhaps, to jump back out onto the tip of the educational leadership spear, is not the same as a much younger teacher in his or her 20’s or 30’s. In the near term, some of the laid off teachers will hang on, hoping that, due to retiring teachers, or some magic influx of funding, they might get back into the classroom. The newest of the new, just graduating University, have next to no chance at a classroom of their own.

The Democrats in Washington mounted an effort to put a few billion into the funding stream so that the school system would be able to keep teachers teaching, and children learning, in a sensible educational environment. Today, May 31, 2010, the local paper reported that the effort has been abandoned. Politically not a good idea right now it said; there’s no support for it they said.

We apparently are not too big to fail. We apparently aren’t doing much of anything to warrant much consideration at all. Fail, though, is what we will experience, and what the children will experience, as class sizes grow, and class diversity in content shrinks. A large increase in the standards that we expect children to reach, especially younger children, with a concurrent decrease in teachers to provide a quality classroom experience, is just plain nuts.

We should have mortgaged everything in sight when we had the chance.

The State that one lives in doesn’t seem to matter just now. For reasons known only to the various deities out there, the education establishment across this nation seems to be in a tailspin, financially speaking. This writer hasn’t read anything recently about a school district being solidly in the black, either in a financial or educational sense. Perhaps bad news simply sells better.

The first funds that the Dept. of Education are distributing in the Race to the Top series are going to two states that the pundits didn’t quite predict: Delaware and Tennessee. Education Secretary Arnie Duncan’s take on it: “”Both states have statewide buy-in for comprehensive plans to reform their schools. They have written new laws to support their policies. And they have demonstrated the courage, capacity, and commitment to turn their ideas into practices that can improve outcomes for students.”

Delaware will receive $100 million, and Tennessee will receive $500 million to implement their programs. The money is distributed over 4 years. The actual budgets have yet to be worked out. Someone, somewhere in Delaware and Tennessee, is getting paid well to figure out that budgeting process. As the yet-to-be-worked out benchmarks are met, money will change hands. There remains $3.4 billion to be raced for. 40 of the States, plus the District of Columbia, submitted applications for the funding. The applicants that didn’t make it have another chance though.

Phase 2 applications are due at the Department of Education by June 1, 2010. In order to assist those who didn’t cross the finish line in the first phase,  the Department of Education has made all Phase 1 applications, peer reviewers’ comments, and scores available on its website. Something else will be available that this writer didn’t know about: videos of states’ presentations will also be posted. Quite the race, video’s documenting it all.

You can access the Secretary’s remarks here. There will be a workshop on April 21 for all phase 2 applicants who want to sharpen their proposals. The workshop will be attended by the good folks from Delaware and Tennessee, who will help out. Where the money for the workshop, and the travel, lodging, food, expenses, will come from isn’t stated. Sounds like a good time to visit Washington, DC. Perhaps the cherry blossoms will still be out for all to see.

Secretary Duncan deems the Race to the Top a success in many ways, stating that it “…has been a catalyst for education reform across this country, prompting states to think deeply about how to improve the way we prepare our students for success in a competitive, 21st century economy and workplace.” Oddly, this writer was under the impression that all the staff meetings for the last umpteen years at his school district were about exactly the same thing. Perhaps not. Maybe there is a parallel universe that we go to during staff meetings, and all that we did just went into an educational black hole.

The federal stimulus money that is scheduled for schools may not make it to California, where I teach. Seems as though the Feds are requiring a system to track teachers and student progress, and to couple them somehow, for some reason. Currently, we have no such system, although I believe that Jack O’Connell, our state Super of Schools, has said that we will, or maybe we do and the Feds just don’t understand what we have and how it complies with the Fed requirement.

I have written before about accountability. It can be a boost to the system and pretty good, or it can be another political opportunity for complete stupidity amongst the politicians in this state, something that is in abundance right now. Since public schools are funded by public tax money, it is reasonable for the taxpayers of this state, and all other states, to demand some accountability. They, and I am one of the “they”, have a right to expect to know how the money is spent and what the results are.

Accountability for student success in the classroom is a very difficult batch of results to measure. There are quite a few variables that are rarely, if ever, taken into account by those who think the school system is incapable of actually educating students. The hue and cry from this group is often that schools should be run just like big business is run. Here are, again, some of the variables: students come from intact families, divorced families, single parent families, loving families, completely dsyfunctional families, no families at all, violent families, absentee families; students come to school developmentally ready, developmentally out of place, well fed, hungry, clean, dirty, alert, sleep deprived, intoxicated, abused, relaxed, stressed out. This type of list can get to be quite lengthy.

According to NCLB (no child left behind), all of these children are supposed to be at grade level, at the same time, at a precise time in the near future. I am willing to be held accountable for the complete success or failure of the disparate group of Kindergartners in my room if, and only if, we adopt the Wall Street model of compensation and bonuses.

In an article in the Sacramento Bee today, July 31, compiled form the New York Times and the Los AngelesTimes, figures released by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo provide a very interesting look at how Wall Street and the banks compensate their staffs: 4,793 bankers and traders were paid more than $1million in bonuses last year. Keep in mind that profits shrank, and the biggest banks got billions of our dollars to keep them afloat. Citigroup, Bank of America (which now includes Merrill Lynch), Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase are just the tip of the iceberg of names of financial institions that passed out billions, in bonuses, last year. Here is the best part, according to Cuomo’s report: “When the banks did well, their employees were paid well. When the banks did poorly, their employees were paid well. And when the banks did very poorly, they were bailed out by the taxpayers, and their employees were still paid well.”

That’s the business model I want applied to me and my teaching and the success or lack thereof of the students in my classroom. No matter what, I get paid well, with big bonuses. It’s a business model I can finally live with when applied to education.

The Governor of California, as mentioned in an earlier post, thinks that the wave of the future for education is digital textbooks. Maybe, he has a point. Maybe, he hasn’t thought it all the way through yet. I don’t know what the Governors of other states are thinking in regards to this issue, but it is far from simple. I haven’t heard much lately about the issue, as California is on the verge of running out of money to pay its bills and perhaps that is a more pressing issue, although you certainly couldn’t tell by what the legislators in Sacramento are doing. I’m curious as to how the digital textbook thing will work. What will the publishers do? The California Governor actually said “free” in reference to digital textbooks, but somehow I think that word isn’t in the everyday lexicon of the textbook publishing industry. I suspect that whether it’s in print or delivered electronically, they will want to be paid. Now, the printing industry just may take a bit of hit on it though, as it may mean they’re not going to be printing hard copies of the texts, or at least not as many.  I’m also interested in how the educational community, already hanging on by a mere financial thread, will be able to provide this digital experience to all of the students in the system. Marina Leight, at Converge Magazine, has mentioned it as well. It’s a complex issue, as all things governmental and educational tend to be. I’ll be doing some research on the issue for future posts, but in the meantime, if you have any ideas, please do let me know what they are.

Some Facts

Arne Duncan is the Secretary of Education in the Obama administration. The education department has4,200 employees and a $68.6 billion budget. Who is he, and what qualifies him for this position?  From June 2001 through December 2008 Duncan ran the Chicago School District. It is the third largest in the country with over 600 schools, and he was tasked with transforming  its weak schools into strong ones, closing the ones that were not performing, and improving the overall quality of teachers and teaching. His title, which will become pertinent to this post in a paragraph or two, was Chief Executive Officer. Most school district heads are known as Superintendents.  According to his biography, he has done a  quite a few things over the years (Ariel Education Initiative, Inc.), none of which involved or included teaching. He does not hold a teaching credential from anywhere, and he has never taught anywhere. He did, however, play professional basketball in Australia. He holds a degree in sociology from Harvard. Where in all of this does it become apparent that he is qualified to be the Secretary of Education for the United States?

What Does it Take?

In an earlier post on this blog, I pointed out the difference between the jobs of teacher and principal. I made the point that educational leaders are in the classrooms. Good principals make it possible for teachers to teach, and good teachers make it possible for principals to run the school well. The job of principal is wildly different from that of superintendent, and because of sheer scale, superintendent positions are different from chief executive officer positions. Superintendents are responsible to school boards for everything in the district: education, facilities, transportation, legal matters, everything. Principals are responsible to the superintendents for everything at their school. What does a chief executive office of a school district do? About the same thing that a superintendent does, except on a much, much larger scale. Running a district with over 600 schools, k-12, with an overall budget in excess of $500 million, just might be a bit different than running a district with 100 or fewer schools, with a budget in the $100 million range, or a small district with a few schools and a $10 million budget.

Does It Take An Educator?

I don’t think so.  While it is possible that some very large districts have CEO’s or Superintendents who once were teachers, and may have empathy for the every day classroom situation, the necessary skills to be successful as the head of a very large school system are more likely to be business skills, not educational skills. The complicated web of laws that pertain to schools, the mountains of paperwork, the politics and the fiscal complexity of the entire thing need management expertise. The heads of these very large school systems have assistants for just about everything. They rarely see the inside of a classroom, talk to teachers, or union/association people either. They delegate that sort of thing to the assistants, who in turn report back to them. Management meetings rule the day, and probably necessarily so. Arne Duncan is a manager, not an educator, which is what the Secretary of Education needs to be.

Is He The Right Person?

Not everyone in Chicago will think so. Duncan closed some schools, and everyone at those schools had to reapply for their jobs. Not everyone was successful at being re-hired when the schools re-opened. The schools he closed were in dismal shape. Most of those schools are doing better now. Google it and find out for yourself what happened in Chicago. I heard him on NPR the other day, and he sounded every bit like a CEO on a mission. He’d better be. The President is expecting him to accomplish a great deal, and I doubt that it will get accomplished without an enormous personality, energy, and sense of urgency. Not everyone is going to agree with his approach. My personal position is that our educational system isn’t as bad as it’s made out to be, and absolutely needs to be better than it is. Re-inventing how we educate children is not an activity for the faint of heart or risk averse types. I don’t think Arne Duncan fits either of those descriptions. He doesn’t have unlimited time or funds available to him. Judging from what he did in Chicago, he may actually make some headway. I am looking forward to what happens next. Time will tell if he is the right person, at the right time, to foster needed changes. In the meantime, assume nothing, verify everything. Check it out for yourself.

It is a magical time of year for everyone in school. It doesn’t matter where you are in the system: head start, pre-school, all the way up to grad school. It’s magical. All of the work that students have done finally pays off. Another crop of grads is on the way to the next step. For the younger grads, the next step is a nice summer break, followed by the next grade level and the new experiences that go along with it. For the University level grads, the next step is into the unknown. About the only thing known for sure is the amount of debt that they are carrying. Perhaps the biggest question is whether the grads are ready for the profession that they have chosen. The hue and cry from the business world, at least according to the yearly outpouring of words in the national press, is that the grads aren’t ready. Oddly though, business hires new grads all the time. Ready or not. It is difficult in the extreme for any educational enterprise to provide educational experiences that are specific enough for any business block, or public sector group, to use without further work. It is a ridiculous demand to make. There is always further learning and education about the work to be done in any job situation.

The System

The main job of the educational system is to build a solid base of some skills: reading, writing, math, art, science. Depending on the chosen field, one of those five will have greater focus. More importantly, the educational system, at least here in the United States, teaches exploration, critical thought, the importance of continuing to learn, and how to continue to learn. Learning doesn’t stop with the cap and gown experience. Graduation from University, Trade School, or Tech School, is the beginning. Stepping into a new job with the confidence that comes from a solid background is always a plus. It is, still, a beginning. Employers actually expect employees to show up and work and to do what is required. The halcyon days of school, the protected bubble of the campus, are over at this point. If the educational establishment has done its job, over the span of the last18 to 20 years, the transition to the work force, in whatever form it takes, will work well.

Into the Wild

As the graduations continue throughout June, the excitement of grads and parents, and all those connected to the grads, is replayed from town to town, across the nation. It is well earned excitement. Eduskeptic sends out congratulations to all who have persevered and made it to the end. Good for you all. You did it, and should be proud that you did. Take a moment and savor the people who helped you get here, the friends you made along the way, and the brief moment that exists before reality kicks in. Best of luck to all of you!

I had the opportunity to attend the west coast Government Technology Conference in Sacramento, CA, last Wed and Thurs, May 13&14. I have enjoyed this conference over the years for a number of reasons. I get to meet vendors of just about everything that I use or might use, talk to different company reps and specialists about trends, what’s working and what is vapor ware, and what’s toast already, what changes have taken place in the market place since last year, and pick up a pen or two with cool logos on them. I get to experience talking with adults all day too, which is vastly different than my normal day. I also get to sit in on various presentations and discussions that are of interest to me, or that I think will be of interest to my district and our technology needs and dreams. Last year I watched a fantastic presentation on interactive white boards, and a system that basically puts a fully functional computer desktop on the white board at the front of the classroom. For those of you of a certain age, blackboards all but disappeared some years ago, along with chalk. They are now whiteboards, and one uses non-permanent markers on them. I got to see the system in action when I talked with a rep at the Western Blue booth. He was using a system that put the desktop on his rather large screen, about the size of a classroom white board, fully connected to the Internet, fully functional, while he looked up some information on it for me. Very impressive. Expensive, but impressive nonetheless. This was very interesting to me, as the subject of interactive whiteboards has been spoken of, and dreamed about, by some teachers in our district, over the last few years. I was able to bring a great deal of information, and enthusiasm, back to school with me. This year I attended a session on “Demystifying the Stimulus Package”. It was presented by Paul W. Taylor, Phd. of  Converge Magazine, with a number of vendors co-hosting the event. During a rather nice lunch we were able to meet other educators, vendors, and administrators. I sat a table with one of the head IT people at San Francisco State, two reps from Cisco, and two from Elluminate. While the seating was completely at random, I couldn’t have chosen better had I been given a list. First, the Cisco guys are experts at networked systems. Second, the Elluminate reps were experts at putting together distance learning for school districts. The San Francisco State guy uses Elluminate all the time for various projects at SFS. We had a good working lunch. The main topic of the session, the stimulus package and what it means for education, included quite a few participants who spoke of the need, in addition to saving jobs, to begin using the technology tools we have today, in the classroom. It is not a given that school districts are using any of the technology that is available to the private sector. We do have computers, the age of which may be shocking to anyone who hasn’t been in a classroom lately. We do have high speed internet pipelines to our sites. Whether we have a good enough infrastructure to carry the highspeed past the entry point is different from district to district, state to state. We don’t have enough computers for all classrooms to have them. A computer lab may have, and may not have as well, current edition computers, and may or may not have a lab person who actually knows not only the machines, but who is able to work with children as well. Printers, ink, and anything more exotic than that may or may not either exist, work, or be available to all classrooms. What does all of this have to do with demystifying anything? Read on. There was quite a bit of talk about online education, online textbooks, either instead of or in addition to, hard copy texts, distance learning, and a constant ability of any student to connect on line to access school curricula, any time, from anywhere. Exciting stuff, to be sure. I think that having the ability to access curricula, assignments, and assistance, over the internet is one of the parts that will help students succeed. Children come to school, in Kindergarten, with greater technological knowledge and skills, than one can imagine. Their knowledge and use of technology grows from there, and it grows in leaps and bounds. If we aren’t able to keep up with what they have outside the classroom, we may just lose them. The enthusiasm from the private sector, the vendors and company representatives, is truly great, as it should be. They have some really cool things to offer. Maybe the stimulus package for education will help districts participate with some of it. One participant spoke about all students having an iPhone or Blackberry, and how they could then connect anytime, anywhere to the good old World Wide Web to access education. Doesn’t that sound good? After I left the session I headed to the ATT booth on the expo floor. I wanted to know how much it might cost, per person, for a level of connectivity that would allow web access from a hand held of any kind. Rough guess: $60-$70 US per person, per month. That is in addition to the cost of the hand-held device. Do the math for your district. The stimulus package seeks, in one small part of the education section, to erase the digital divide, that is, the discrepancy between those who have and use technology and those who do not. The cost is simply staggering. The digital divide is just as likely to widen as it is to shorten. In a catch-22 twist, the very people who are most likely to help with erasing the technology chasm, the good, enthusiastic, up to their ears in technology since they were born, young teachers, are the very ones who are losing their jobs due to the lack of funds for school districts. While the demystification of the stimulus is somewhat complicated, and the session offered good information about a broad range of monies coming to education, what remains a mystery is how, especially in the economic times we are experiencing now, are we going to pay for what the enthusiastic company reps have available. There is definitely another divide out there. It’s the divide between private business and public schools, how they are funded and run, and how the private sector has no clue about the Alice in Wonderland experience of school finance, which may never be demystified. Maybe next year we can have a session about demystifying school finance.