DaveShearon

Education is important for...

Why should the public put resources into educating all young people?  Two answers are often proposed:  (1) to be competitive internationally economically and (2) so they can function as citizens in the most advanced economy and leading democracy in the world. 

I've posted before on The Power of Productivity by Willaim Lewis.  Good book.  In it, he establishes that America is THE standard for productivity in almost every industry and overall by a long shot.   That's why our standard of living is higher.  However, as a result, we're having to figure out what governmental, legal, societal and regulatory schemes will allow further improvements in productivity by trial and error.  We have no place to look where a better structure to encourage productivity has been evolved.  As a result, his comments on education and it's role in helping or hindering the development of poor nations do not apply here, but, overall, they are interesting:

"I have begun to suspect that economic development causes education to develop even if governments don't force it as Korea has done.  After all, that's how education got started.  When we were all hunters and gatherers 10,000 years ago, we did not have time for education.  we did not even have time to wonder much about anything besides finding enough food.  Only when our productivity for food production increased did we hve time for other things.

Jared Diamond gives us a good explanation of this transition.  We wanted to do things that would make us richer and more powerful.  We also wanted to know things about which we were simply curious. Who are we?  What are we?  Where are we?  Why are we? Education arose naturally as successive generations wanted to learn what those going before them had learned and thought.  We began to make the trade-off between simply working more now and learning more to work in more valuable ways later.  We also wanted to learn more to satisfy our curiosity.  The more productive we became, the more we had time for education.  we demanded that education.

No doubt, as education increased, our productivity potential increased.  If our policies pushed us to achieve that potential, then we could afford more education.  As I will come back to in chapter 1`1, this increasingly high level of education probably is necessary, but not sufficent, for the complex political systems necessaryt for advanced economic performance.  It's possible that poor countries today will not get out of their poverty traps without political changes.  Those political changes may only be possible with broader education.  The point is, however, that education is not a constraint on the ability of today's workforces to achieve substantial productivity improvement around the world.  It's the other way around. Constraints on productivity improvement are the reason education is not developing faster around the world.

How should Nashville proceed?

In response to an article in the Tennessean on our superintendent, Pedro Garcia, calling for the public to improve schools, I recently posted this on a yahoogroup for Nashville PTO talk:

He was hired four years ago because of too-good-to-be-true test score gains in California.  Now, our budget is way up, morale is way down, and test scores are flat -- and he wants the public to make schools better?  Weird.

That drew this response:

Dave -- let's make this positive. Why should he not ask not the community for help to make the schools better?  I think it is high time the districts says it cannot do it by itself.  Parents or some significant adult in each child's life needs to stress the importance of education. Children need to come to school ready to learn.  The teachers cannot do this for the students.  I believe students need to be held accountable, too.

What would you recommend the district do to improve the schools. Bear in mind the NCLB testing mandates are in place at least for the foreseeable future. I do not see the district giving up its federal funding to get out from under the NCLB dictates.

FYI -- There was year-over-year improvement in test scores.  However, the three year trend was flat.

I know you served on the school board for four years.  I am truly interested in your thoughts about how the public schools can be improved.

Looking forward to your response --

And I replied as follows:

Elizabeth, I understand the desire to be positive.   But, when the patient is bleeding from a major artery, it's not a good time to talk about how clear his complexion is. 

#1 -- Decide if Dr. Garcia is the right person to lead this school system now.  He has failed in his promised improvements in student achievement, but those are promises we never should have believed anyway.  The disturbing question is whether he really believed them.  If he did, then we need to know how he has changed.  If he didn't, we don't need him. 

Assuming we get past that hurdle, does he have the liking, respect, and trust of principals?  Is he articulating a reasonable strategy for how we are going to move forward?  Can the individuals on the Board back him?  If he isn't, pull the plug and try again, hopefully without continuing to make the mistake of looking for a program implementer.

#2 -- Get a handle on morale.  The passion, engagement, and effort of teachers is the most vaulable resource of this or any other school system.  Almost all systems give lip service to this concept; virtually no systems act like it.  Unfortunately, the leadership (board and administration) has failed to implement a system that would provide good data on this over the past few years -- and such a system was possible.  Correct this now.

#3 -- Put the planning time back in the calendar and reinstitute lesson study.  I think Dr. Garcia should re-assemble the committee that launched that effort, he and Dr. Johnson should personally apologize for belittling and dismantling it, and ask that group to help resurrect it.

#4 -- The Board should start an immediate study of urban systems where the market share of public schools has dropped to less than 75%. Do we want to be like those systems?  If not, why not?  What does the Board plan to do about it?  We're hemorraghing kids and familes who can afford to get out.  That's not a good sign.

#5 -- I agree that getting the community involved is a good thing.  St. Paul has been pretty successful now over a number of years with a program of encouraging students to read 25 books per year.  They started it with a big community buy in that even included public leaders committing to read.  Sounds like a good idea to me.

#6 -- Bail out of the urban schools caucus.  Our budget has increased dramatically over the last four years and all we've got to show for it is more private schools, and more of our community's leaders' children in them.  Now is NOT the time to be saying that this Board, which has overseen that result, should be in charge of taxes.   

Secondly, if the Board was given taxing authority, it would be a political disaster.  The Council (and Mayor) would then be perfectly free to wash their hands of the whole issue and make pounding the schools a regular pastime since they would have no authority and therefore no responsibility.  Further, you'd see races for the school board turn on who would swear most profusely that under NO circumstances would they raise taxes.  If you liked the horn honkers, you'll love those board races. 

Finally, it ain't going to happen -- the politics are all wrong for a bunch of reasons.  So, by being involved, we generate hostility and lose credibility for no purpose.

#7 -- De-emphasize the strategic plan as a policy tool and go back to an Accountability Framework with no more than a dozen goals (fewer would be better).  Require a report from the Administation on ALL of them the first Board meeting in July, starting this July.  The current strategic plan has simply diluted accoutability into reams of action items and time lines and what not that virtually no one reads or pays attention to.  This is par for the course for such plans and we should admit it and move on to a more easily understood, remembered, and believed framework. 

Well, you asked; though I suspect few in leadership positions in this city would join you in that request!  As for your other points, I don't see NCLB as a hindrance to any of these steps.  Good teaching promotes good learning, and good learning, on the whole, will be reflected in the test scores. That will be enough.

Dave Shearon

Damaging PR for Teachers

Thanks to OneHandClapping for pointing out this story in the NY Post about letters from a NY middle school to an Army private in Korea lambasting him for destroying mosques and killin civilians in Iraq.  Yep, Iraq.  They were written as part of a social studies assignment.  The teacher didn't return calls, but the principal gave this nonsensical statement:

"While we would never censor anything that our children write, we sincerely apologize for forwarding letters that were in any way inappropriate to Pfc. Jacobs. This assignment was not intended to be insensitive, but to be supportive of the men and women in service to our nation."

What does that mean?  Was part of the assignment to mail the letters?  Does he mean that they wouldn't have edited the letters, but might not have mailed them, but that would not have been censorship?  Was the assignment to write a supportive letter?  If so, was that appropriate?  And, what if that wasn't the assignment and the principal just said that to try and get the heat off him and his school?

Well, I doubt anyone's going to go get the answers to those questions.  Notice, however, how damaging this kind of thing is for all teachers.  Here are some of the comments from another blog that posted on this, Wizbang:

What else do you expect from glorified babysitters? I have about as much respect for the average grade school teacher as I do for personal injury lawyers, used car salesmen, and street people who beg for money.

***

That teacher SHOULD BE FIRED!

They are glorified BABYSITTERS!

God help them if they actually had to WORK FOR A LIVING!!!

***

Lee: You don't know the half of it. My wife's stepsister (I'll call her Hazel) is a sixth-grade teacher, at one of the worst schools in town, no less (when you don't have seniority, you get the crap assignments). She's told us lots of horror stories about people who get into early-grade teaching not because they want to teach second-graders, but because they want to be second-graders. Their idea of teaching is all-day playtime. Hazel says that about half of the students she gets entering the sixth grade each year are reading at least two grade levels behind, and that many of them have had imprinted in them an anti-intellectual attitude that makes them proud of their failures. They bully any student that "blows the curve".

Hazel tells us that she is one of the very few teachers in the school that writes up daily lesson plans. She says that most of the teachers keep a boilerplate lesson plan or two in a drawer, so that they have something to whip out when the school board comes around to inspect. They use the same ones over and over and nobody ever gets wise to them (or, if they do, they don't care). The principal is just marking time until retirement and has basically told the teachers with concerns to buzz off.

During the campaign last year, for about a week, there was a large Kerry sign posted at the school's student dropoff/pickup entrance. It took complaints to the city council and a TV station report to get it taken down. The school administration never owned up to who put it there.

I'm on record that teachers are the key to better results in schools, but it's stories like this -- and the attitudes they encourage -- that make that position difficult to sell.  I would just make these points:

• Lesson Study -- by getting teachers to work in groups on improving lessons -- can help minimize this kind of error.  What a teacher might overlook due being focused on some other aspect of the lesson (or due to bias, etc.) others can catch.
• Regardless, any superintendent trying to create a culture of collaborative effort to improve lessons is going to have to withstand some criticism when some of the lessons, especially early in the process, reflect poorly on the teachers that designed them.

NSBA on NCLB

Apparently, NSBA is trying to water-down the transfer provisions of NCLB by allowing transfers only for students scoring less than proficient in the subject where the school failed to meet AYP, and then only for those students in the subgroup whose failure to meet AYP triggered the transfer provision.  NSBA's issue brief says the amendments would change NCLB so that:

A transfer option need only be offered to those low achieving students within the group who failed to meet their AYP targets in the same subject for two or more years – not to all students in the school.

Financial obligations for a school district to provide transportation for a student ends when the group to which the student belongs no longer is identified as not meeting AYP target within the student’s former school even if that school continues to be identified as not making AYP for other reasons.

Bogus.  This creates a perverse incentive for schools to cycle attention, remediation and resources through subgroups rather than try to improve the school as a whole.  At least, as it stands now, high-achieving students have a chance to escape a bad school if it fails any subgroup (and high-achieving students are not such a sub-group; NCLB falls into the "they'll be ok anyway") trap.

I picked up on this from a story in our local paper about TN school board members going to Washington to lobby for NSBA's position.  The official spin, from TSBA's director of governmental operations, is "It just doesn't make sense that we would use those funds to transport students who are doing well to another school."

First, let's kill all the ... SPAMMERS!

Mitch Kapor notes in his blog that he has had to require registration for comments and turn off trackbacks because of spam.  He particularly laments the latter as reducing the connectivity of the web.  I don't usually react to events or people with anger, but spam and spyware make me FURIOUS!  They're persoanlly invasive, and for no purpose.  I don't know about killing 'em, but, if they put a spammer or spyware perpetrator in stocks, I'd drive 500 miles to throw rotten vegetables at 'em.  Put 'em in naked and let 'em sunburn, peel, and sunburn again.  Really.  We ought to treat Islamo-fascist-criminals with decency, not because they deserve it, but because it's in our best interest.  But spammers and spyware perpetrators are surely no longer human, if they ever were!  We just need to discourage them from making their sordid existence come to our attention!

Now, He's Open Source

Mitch Kapor blogs:

I would have been ecstatically happy with a much smaller outcome at Lotus. I would have been even more happy had the competitive landscape then been more like it is becoming today. Open source levels the playing field and makes it more difficult for monopolists to triumph with technically inferior products which are also hard to use.

Microsoft and Excel, I assume.

Great Pix

http://www.photo.net/photodb/photo?photo_id=2950755

Teaching Optimism

The University of Pennsylvania has announced a Masters in Applied Positive Psychology under Martin E.P. Seligman.  The site includes:

Teaching Taskforce
A research-based initiative is underway to engage high school teachers and students in a program designed to build students' understanding of and ability to make use of the tools of positive psychology in their own lives and in the larger community.

I think the program would be interesting and the Teaching Taskforce is very interesting.

AP English Class Blog

Oak Park and River Forest High School.  Doesn't say where.  Posting started this month.  They're reading King Lear.  And the school apparently offers a course called "Women in History."

http://english.typepad.com/lovaas1/

Word of the Week

On a local elementary school sign:

Word of the Week:

      Fair Play

Sigh.