Joe Williams riffs on Michele riffing on Andy riffing on Michele. With the whole letter thing too–an L, an A, an F and a T, all thrown around and mixed up. If you don’t know what I’m talking about you are totally not one of the cool kids and are probably either a) pandering to the status quo needs of adults; or b) de-professionalizing the field.
–Guestblogger Kevin Huffman
Clayton Christensen’s Disrupting Class*, about the untapped power of technology to transform schools, has gotten a fair amount of play in the blogosphere (see here and here). I’m almost finished with it myself, and some of the ideas are refreshing, others a bit worked over. I tend to have trouble with these b-school books in that the messaging is so heavy-handed. After all the rave reviews of The World is Flat, I decided to give it a whirl, but it just seemed like on every other page, Freidman surmised, “And that’s why the world is flat.” Yep, got it.
Anyway, one of the most striking passages to me in Disrupting Class, and it no doubt stood out to others, is where the mother observes her daughter working on a biography of Madame Curie and thinks, I did that same assignment for the same teacher when I was in school, the only real difference being that her daughter is using a computer to look up information instead of an encyclopedia. Sort of the, These Go to Eleven, school of thought on how to use a computer in the classroom.
I hope that Christensen is right, that technology will eventually transform how students learn and teachers teach. But in the meantime, can we at least fix the bathrooms in our schools?
*See Christensen’s Ed Next article on his book here.
–Guestblogger Michele McLaughlin
Over at The Early Ed Watch Blog, Sara Mead provides a roundup of recent blogging about the practice of “academic redshirting.” I gotta say, as the mom of a 3½ year old with a December birthday, I am quite puzzled by the pro-redshirting crowd. Who are these people prepared to pay for an extra year of child care? I can’t wait until my son starts kindergarten—I’ll get a about a $15K raise! Looks like new research shows it doesn’t have the academic payoff commonly thought anyway. Oops!
–Guestblogger Michele McLaughlin
Keeping its eye on the really critical issues facing Americans this election season, the Times this week reports on the dearth of private school placements for kindergarten in Manhattan–“it’s harder than getting into college!” Apparently things are so bad that one tony pre-school graciously decided to open an elementary school after a few five year olds didn’t get their first choice private school. It is really great when people step into the fray and fill a pressing social need like that.
In other news, Donna Foote notes in this week’s Newsweek that at Locke High in Watts a few years ago, 1,000 kids started as freshmen, 240 graduated in four years, and 30 of them had the prerequisites to go to a California state school.
–Guestblogger Kevin Huffman
How can you not fall in love with an article on teaching practice with that kind of title? Love it! This article is just one of several worth reading in UnBoxed, the online education journal published by High Tech High’s Graduate School of Education.
If you don’t know, High Tech High is grounded in the theory of project-based learning. One of the other articles in this issue written by Jeff Robin, a founding faculty member at High Tech High, talks about the importance of planning, management and exhibition in doing project-based learning well. Here is what may be the best example ever of the importance of planning to effective instruction:
Exhibiting projects is a difficult task. Sometimes you get lucky and it comes together on its own. Mostly it takes planning and skill to do it well. I personally have been knocked unconscious hanging a ceramic mobile. I saw stars, and if I had planned it better and thought it out I would have never been in that position, 15 feet in the air on a lift, unconscious.
Hard to top that! After perusing UnBoxed, be sure to look at some of the students’ digital portfolios. Very cool stuff.
–Guestblogger Michele McLaughlin
One of the coolest nonprofits in DC is Critical Exposure, which provides students with training in documentary photography, leadership, and advocacy, so students can document their experiences at school and use their voices and images to impact decisions that affect their education. I first learned about Critical Exposure when I saw the gallery of student photos from their DC project displayed in one of the Smithsonian buildings. Be sure to check out their entire gallery of photos from projects in Baltimore, DC, Austin and Albuquerque, and maybe sign up for their Photo of the Month Club.
–Guestblogger Michele McLaughlin
Since Kevin brought up the Presidential race, I can’t resist linking to two posts on the candidates written by my favorite humorist, Andy Borowitz. In true bipartisan fashion, I give you one on McCain: McCain Makes Historic First Visit to the Internet, and one on Obama: Obama Releases List of Approved Jokes About Himself. Enjoy!
P.S. Just like the election, neither post has anything to do with the education.
–Guestblogger Michele McLaughlin
Education is scoring pretty low right now on most voter ratings of “most important issues,” with only 12 percent rating it as the top issue in one* survey, and four percent in another. Yet when voters are allowed to rank how strongly they feel about multiple issues simultaneously, education scores about the same now as it did back in 2000 when it was a much bigger campaign issue.
One obvious explanation is that voters consistently care a lot about education, but the state of the country and world makes other issues variable. In a close election, though, can education policy make a difference in the minds of voters? Maybe more as a metaphor than as an actual issue. Arguably, George Bush’s focus on education in 2000 helped flesh out the “compassionate conservative” meme. People didn’t vote for his ed policy per se, but it helped reinforce a carefully crafted image–a man with conservative values who cared about poor people. It seems like there is a large swath of domestic policy middle ground sitting wide open in a close election right now, and it’s not hard to imagine creative ways for either candidate to use education policy to flesh out a broader image of change or pragmatism or accountability or other memes. The issue still seems there for the taking.
On the other hand, The Onion has an alternate theory on THE key election issue, and I find the case somewhat compelling.
*Story via Education Week, subscription needed to view.
–Guestblogger Kevin Huffman
This bit on Jon Stewart last week reminded me of how easy it is to go for an obvious blog post title. Stewart mocks CNN’s American Morning for using unimaginative songs as the “bump in” for a story. Rock Me Like a Hurricane for a story about . . . a hurricane. Take the Money and Run for a story about . . . the economy. Bowie’s Changes for a story about . . . pretty much anything. I was definitely guilty of this in my former blogging life—I know I used Changes! We must dig deeper bloggers and avoid the easy hook! Now if I can only build a post around The Daily Show theme song, Dog on Fire. I’m an old Husker Du and Sugar fan—love that Bob Mould.
Check out the clip at the 7:20 mark.
–Guestblogger Michele McLaughlin
More than one blogger has linked to this LA Times piece by Elle Herman, a TV writer, about her trials and tribulations in getting certified to teach in the public schools. Its woe-as-me style is funny—she must have been a sitcom writer—but it’s also, quite frankly, a bit whiny. Must she really “endure” a TB test and a criminal background check? Um, yeah. Does she really have to take a test to show content mastery? Uh, yes, I think so. Look, I’m not saying that she doesn’t have a legitimate beef with some of California’s certification requirements, and it is true that alternative certification programs should be more streamlined than they currently are, but really, are all the requirements just a “mountain of detritus”? Here’s the world’s tiniest violin . . .
Update: Alexander Russo gets all teary-eyed about the blog dialogue on this post (requires reading the comments).
–Guestblogger Michele McLaughlin
Teach For America corps and staff alum Tim Morehouse is in the Olympics in fencing. Saturday night (Aug. 9) at 7, NBC will air a segment on Tim and his Olympic preparations. You can read his blog here.
I know that somewhere (maybe Palo Alto?) someone is saying, “Now wait a minute, TFA–you can’t just train a kid in fencing in 6 weeks and send him into China!” Well guess what–we totally can. And the next time someone wants to mess with us, hopefully they’ll picture this sword-wielding bad ass and think twice.
–Guestblogger Kevin Huffman
It’s not exactly beach reading, but Three Cups of Tea, about a mountaineer who built over 50 schools in Pakistan, is very engaging and certainly an object lesson on perseverance. I am about halfway through it and, like most readers I suspect, just amazed that author, Greg Mortenson, knew nothing about fundraising but was able to pull it off. One of my favorite passages in the book is where he and an American Pakistani—who teaches him how to use a computer—brainstorm a list of really wealthy people in the United States (including Oprah), and then write them letters asking for money. Incidentally, Mortenson’s experience is not so different than that of Teach For America founder Wendy Kopp’s in the early days of the program, as chronicled in her book One Day. Funny how being somewhat oblivious of the obstacles can actually pay dividends.
Another summer reading rec: The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. Very entertaining. My only complaint: as with The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, author Michael Chabon seems to have a hard time finishing a book.
–Guestblogger Michele McLaughlin
Test scores in Denver Public Schools rose significantly last year. As in DC, lots of questions about why, who gets credit, etc. and a broader question around how this impacts the teacher compensation discussions per this post.
These positive stories beg the broader question of how much incremental change–growth that outpaces every other district in the state, mind you, but growth still leaving DPS kids below proficient–should be celebrated. I’m not going to defile Michael Bennet’s Wheaties this morning though because he’s the first to ask this question even as he is rightfully praised for his vision and willingness to stick his neck out. One scary thing is that new administrations in DPS and earlier in July, DC Public Schools were able to get test score gains right out of the gate which sated the local beat writers and bought some time. Would the patience for radical reforms still be there if they didn’t get the early bounce?
–Guestblogger Kevin Huffman
In his most recent Gadfly commentary, Mike Petrilli writes:
The strategy of opening up the teacher pipeline to non-traditional routes is clearly showing some success, in some areas. (Areas, by the way, that tend to attract young high-flyers; the list of such areas is unfortunately short.) . . But this strategy isn’t showing success at scale. And thanks to our national obsession with “reducing class size,” we boast a teacher workforce of more than three million; teachers coming through TFA and TNTP are a metaphorical drop in the bucket.
The “scaling up” argument on Teach For America is a bit shopworn. It’s true that Teach For America corps members make up a very small percentage of all teachers in public school classrooms. However, I would argue that in our 18 years of existence, we have learned quite a bit about effective recruitment strategies that, with some tweaking, could be applied to traditional teacher preparation settings. There’s nothing preventing such programs from using these strategies to target undergrads in their sophmore year of college. I think we also know quite a bit about how to accelerate teacher learning that has applications for both traditional and alternative teacher preparation programs.
Despite our elitist rap, we do play nice in the sandbox and look for opportunities to share what we have learned—it’s part of what I was brought onboard to do. Drop me a note if you would like to receive a hard copy of our complete program overview or a PowerPoint on our recruitment strategies.
–Guestblogger Michele McLaughlin
I am honored to kick off the first week of Andy’s summer vacation with my colleague Michele. I have been on staff at Teach For America for 8 years (I was in the 1992 corps in Houston and later practiced education law in DC before coming back to the mother ship).
My goals for the week are relatively simple: 1) ensure that we maintain a nice lead-in audience for Goldstein; 2) don’t embarrass Wendy Kopp; 3) write at least one thing that gets cross-posted on the anti-Teach For America blogs as further evidence of the coming of the apolcalypse; and 4) totally blow your minds that a TFA lifer and a former AFT blogger could work together and blog together and, like, totally get along. It’s wild, man. Reminds me of one of my childhood faves… (note: MM said she gets to be Stevie–apparently not a Paul fan…)
–Guestblogger Kevin Huffman
Thanks to Eduwonk for allowing us to kick-off the first week of his guestblogging extravaganza. I hope Andy catches lots of fish, rewrites the U.S. Constitution or whatever it is he does on vacation. I am happy to see that he has not, in recent times, referred to his SO as the eduwife—that always creeped me out a bit.
So, I have my blogging shoes on, and I’m ready to roll. Feeling a bit rusty. I used to write for the AFTs NCLBlog—be sure to check out what my pals Ed Muir and John See are up to over there (no good I’m sure). I am now at Teach For America. (Yes, they do “let people go the other way” as someone queried me recently at a conference.) My boss Kevin Huffman talked me into co-blogging for the week at Eduwonk—thanks Kev! He assures me that he can be quite clever—we shall see!
I thought that out of the box I would just put to rest what may be an underlying question about someone who moves from the AFT to TFA (and yes, I have noticed it’s the same letters reversed).
I drank the Kool-Aid. I believe that Teach For America is building the movement to eliminate educational inequity. There. I said it. Happy now? And, I humbly submit that it is not inconsistent to be a trade unionist at heart and completely embrace the mission of Teach For America. Talk amongst yourselves.
Let’s move on, no? Is guest-blogging about the blogger (yawn)? Or their organization (bigger yawn)? I think not. I will try to keep references to Teach For America within reason. That said, here is my wholly self-indulgent link of the week: as you sip your morning coffee, take a gander at this video clip if you want to get stoked about the sense of possibility—as some like to say at Teach For America—that together we can close the achievement gap.
P.S. Andy, you owe me dinner. I know you are reading your blog on vacation.
–Guestblogger Michele McLaughlin
For the past few weeks in education fly fishing circles there has been some buzz that this photo of Dutko’s Ben Wallerstein in Alaska raised some, umm, you know, size questions relative to Wireless Generation’s Josh Reibel’s recent striper. Today, upping the stakes, the Reibel clan sends along two photos from a recent Panama trip. All prior education fish porn pics here.
Though I’d like to see it, I’m not as optimistic as some others about a 2009 that sees both a reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and enactment of a broader scheme for childrens’ health insurance. It seems like 2007 or 2008 was more the time for such a deal when the President could have enacted one of his top domestic priorities (a new version of No Child Left Behind) and Democrats could have enacted one of their top domestic issues (childrens’ health insurance). That’s a deal because both issues involve policy for children. What 2009 looks like depends on several things that are uncertain right now, including the composition of the government.
Check out the new policy and government specific search engine that has just launched.
Next week our summer guestblogger schedule starts. I’ll drop in from time to time but most content will come from this line-up of interesting folks.
And the caption Justin Cohen’s photo contest generated some good stuff. But the winner is Patrick with two amusing entries. Honorable mentions to Vincent Cho and all the good Miami Vice riffs. T. Brewster gets the award for obscure insider reference…
And if it seems like content has been light lately, it has, I’ve been on the road a lot in July for various professional obligations but it’s summer so some fun is in order anyway.
US News looks at Response to Intervention. New American School Board Journal looks at risk and reform.
I’m in meetings most of this week and haven’t had time to dig into the numbers on this Times story about a school in CT that didn’t make “adequate yearly progress” but it seems like something doesn’t add up. Based on the article shouldn’t the school should have made sufficient progress via “safe harbor” under the law unless they also missed other targets like student participation in assessments that the article doesn’t address? Readers, sort this out!
Although it’s about the housing bill, Carl Hulse’s Times essay also offers a glimpse into one reason why Elementary and Secondary Education Act (NCLB) reauthorization is on hold…it increasingly looks as though President Bush’s embrace of a more active federal role in education may well be remembered as an anomaly rather than a point of departure or real pivot for Republicans on the ed policy issue.
New analysis from NCTQ (pdf) about what’s in their big teacher contract database, or actually more precisely, what isn’t. Worth checking out, examines the state role around policies that are commonly assumed to be issues covered by teachers’ contracts. Disc: I’m on the NCTQ board but didn’t have anything to do with this project.
Just in time for the weekend. Courtesy of The Times’ Tamar Lewin, all gender warriors to DEFCON 1.
If you read this and say, yeah, that more or less makes sense, then you are probably a good fit for this job.
The very talented Justin Cohen runs the Office of Portfolio Management for the District of Columbia Public Schools under D.C. Chancellor Michelle Rhee…in other words, he’s a big gun on the D.C. school scene.
The other day, while on an otherwise uneventful boat trip, Cohen’s vessel was boarded by the U.S Coast Guard for a routine safety search, most likely because in that outfit and shades, Cohen gives off the vibe of an international fugitive or trafficker rather than a school official. Anyway, caption this photo and the best caption gets a free lunch.
 Collective Bargaining in Education: Negotiating Change in Today's Schools Edited by Jane Hannaway and Andrew J. Rotherham
|  Why Newsweek's List of America's 100 Best High Schools Doesn't Make the Grade By Andrew J. Rotherham and Sara Mead |
 A Qualified Teacher in Every Classroom Edited by Frederick M. Hess, Andrew J. Rotherham, and Kate Walsh |
 America's Teaching Crisis By Jason Kamras and Andrew J. Rotherham |
 Rethinking Special Education For A New Century Edited by Chester E. Finn, Jr., Andrew J. Rotherham & Charles R. Hokanson, Jr. |
 Making The Cut: How States Set Passing Scores on Standardized Tests By Andrew J. Rotherham |
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