AssortedStuff

I know that for most of the world, we just passed the calendar’s halfway point with the days getting shorter and warmer at the same time, at least in the Northern Hemisphere.

But no matter how you measure it, this school year is done and no one I know is sorry to see it go. Not that the one just beginning is shaping up to be a winner either.

It’s all about the budget, of course.  Two years worth of a crappy economy has resulted in no raises for everyone, contract cuts for some, larger class sizes and reduced support for teachers.

Despite all that (and more) the big bosses here in the overly-large school district are sending the message that none of this is supposed to affect what we do.  Everyone is supposed to provide the same level of service – more, actually – with less time, people, and resources.

In other words, nothing changes.

And that attitude is probably our biggest problem.

Even without the economic mess, the education system in this country should be changing, drastically, and this crisis should have been an ideal catalyst to force that process.

We should be using this opportunity to seriously reassess our traditional concept of “school” and what students need to know and be able to do when leave the formal educational process.

Instead our “leaders” work overtime (and expect us to do the same) to maintain the status quo, expecting that when the financial storm ends everything will go back to “normal”.

Failing to understand (or acknowledge) that “normal” was not working for an increasing number of students even before our money problems started, and will serve the needs of an even smaller percentage after the crisis has passed.

I still believe we need public schools in this country.  Places, whether physical or virtual, where educators organize communities to help students learn essential skills, those that can’t be assessed using multiple choices.

However, if a strong, relevant system for public education is a serious national goal*, it’s going to take a conscious, determined effort.

It won’t happen by paddling in place waiting for the rescue boat to come by.

Ok, now that I have that rant down in electrons, I can focus my attention on the rest of the month.

I will be working during July but it’s a relatively quiet period around here as most of the people I work with are away, allowing me some time for bigger picture thinking, working on longer term projects, and reading stuff by people I’ve never met.

And, at the end of the month, I get to spend most of a week advancing my own learning with some folks from Google, immersed in their Earth and Sketchup programs.

Whatever your summer break looks like, make it a good one.

*And I’m not entirely sure support for the concept in the general public is particularly high, and is likely declining.

change, crisis, economy, olsd, schools

This song, produced by NPR’s outstanding podcast Planet Money, explains in under two minutes one huge part of the crap financial firms were pulling in 2006, 07, and 08 that crashed the economy.

And there’s a very good reason it sounds like something Mel Brooks might have written for the shysters in The Producers to sing.

If you want a more detailed explanation of how one big company plotted to screw things up, listen to the first segment from a recent edition of This American Life.

I don’t claim to completely understand all the economic concepts involved, but the report makes it very clear that someone (probably many someones) should be in jail.

crooks, economy, npr, planet money

In a recent Class Struggle post, Jay Mathews declares that the concerns about budget cuts expressed by parents in our overly-large school district (he calls it hysteria) are “silly”.

The source for his conclusion comes from the comments of parents quoted in another Post column about our economic problems.

They are hysterically concerned about things like increased class sizes, cuts in kindergarten time, major reductions in elementary school music programs, elimination of most summer school program, and more, and in doing so are “so divorced from reality as to be comical”.

So, why is none of this important to the quality of education in our schools?

Well, because our high schools still score well in his “challenge” index, the 2010 edition of which will be unleashed in a couple of weeks (you have been warned).

Beyond the fact that his index is one of the most fraudulent measures of school quality ever devised*, it should be clear to anyone paying attention that our budget problems will most severely impact the elementary schools.

Which will then impact the high schools a few years from now.

Anyway, after making a pitch for his index, Mathews goes on to make several unsupported claims about how the quality of our schools will be maintained, in spite of major, multi-year declines in revenue, all during a time when the numbers of students continues to increase.

He partially attributes this to the fact that the county is one of the richest in the country, with many involved parents like the ones who are quoted, adults who, according to Mathews, “don’t have a true perspective”.

Among other factors he also ignores the large and growing low income neighborhoods of our county, where schools must cope with increasing numbers of non-English speaking and special education students, all of who require additional services that will also be impacted by cuts.

Areas where parents are not the vocal kind that make hysterical and silly comments and who, for the most part, can’t or don’t provide the instructional support to make up for what their kids no long receive at school.

Of course, in the end, Mathews is right that our district is far better than many in this country and will likely continue to be even after the budget is sliced (although I don’t buy his confidence that we won’t lose a lot of great teachers in the process).

However, as we often tell students, the better measure of quality is not found in comparing ourselves with others but comparing ourselves now with where we should be in the future.

*Search this site for many posts explaining why.

challenge index, economy, jay mathews, olsd, parents, post, stupidity

One key assumption behind No Child Left Behind – and pretty much every major education reform effort of the past half century – is that a strong education system is essential to American economic growth.

However, as Larry Cuban points out, although multiple reports and even more politicians have repeated the mantra, even economists don’t have evidence to support it.

And current attempts to connect school reform and economic growth are nothing new. Remember our past love affair with Japanese schools?

Recall that in the 1980s, U.S. policymakers including corporate leaders looked to Japan with its remarkable annual growth and pointed to its schools as driving the economy. Educators, economists, and sociologists traveled to Japan to study its schools and contrast them–in highly positive terms–with U.S. schools. But the contrasts fell flat in the 1990s when Japan’s economy nose-dived for that decade until just recently. Few policymakers today use Japan as a model for U.S. schools.

So, if it’s not going to make us a lot of money, is there a good reason to pay for a strong public education system?

After all, there are many reasons to have strong schools in a society beyond, but including, economic ones. Although they hardly get mentioned by policymakers save in throwaway lines at graduation ceremonies, expanded literacy in service of developing an engaged citizenry who, in fulfilling their civic obligations, build better communities and live moral lives are, and have been, historic reasons for investing tax dollars in American schools. But not now with the three-decade concentration in educational policymaking on equating higher graduation rates and college attendance with economic growth.

Although you wouldn’t know it from visiting most of our schools, there IS more to a good education than getting a high school diploma and going to college.

economy, education, larry cuban, nclb, school reform

Seth Godin, whose blog is well worth a daily read, wonders about the old cliche which says that if your only tool is a hammer then all problems look like nails.

The practical effect of this thinking is that “when the market changes, you may be seeing all the new opportunities and problems the wrong way because of the solutions you’re used to”.

His theme is business, of course, and specifically with how they’re using social media, but Seth’s basic concept still applies to the institution of American education.

For starters, we don’t seem to understand that the “market” has changed (drastically!), so we continue to pull hammers out of the tool box.

Although we talk a lot about “differentiated instruction” and “individualized learning”, the details and solutions tend to look like the same classroom hammers we’ve always used.

When it comes to the major education reform proposals of the past fifty years, we’ve pretty recycled the same old hammers by painting different politically motivated labels on them (think: Sputnik, Nation at Risk, NCLB).

Then there’s the little corner of the system with which I’m most familiar, instructional technology.

Millions of classroom computers, most connected to world-wide networks, with a variety of amazing communications tools should have brought about major alterations to our process of teaching and learning.

If we didn’t just use them as digital versions of the same analog tools we’ve always used.

We want laptops to be electronic textbooks or workbooks.

Expensive interactive whiteboards are too often used for one-way transmission of knowledge, in very much the same way as the traditional analog chalk version.

Students write research papers and create presentations using sophisticated software for an audience of one.

And here in the overly-large school district we’re taking binders full of central office-blessed curriculum materials and test questions, putting it all in a big database, and declaring this to be a paradigm shift.

As Godin has pointed out many times in his writing, in times of crisis, economic and other, smart companies inspect every aspect of their business processes and find new opportunities to grow hidden in the bad news.

Instead of stocking up on new types of hammers as we in education seem to be doing.

Image: Hammer for what…? by Per Ola Wiberg (Powi) used under a Creative Commons License

business, economy, edtech, education, reform, seth godin, tools

Paul Krugman is a Nobel-prize winning economist and someone who sees a direct connection between education and the economic success of the US.*

He also says that our national “educational neglect” has led to “a slow-motion erosion of America’s relative position” in the world.

And the current financial mess is only feeding that neglect.

But things are about to get much worse, as the economic crisis — its effects exacerbated by the penny-wise, pound-foolish behavior that passes for “fiscal responsibility” in Washington — deals a severe blow to education across the board.

His focus in this column is on college-level education but much of what Krugman says also applies to K12.

There’s no mystery about what’s going on: education is mainly the responsibility of state and local governments, which are in dire fiscal straits. Adequate federal aid could have made a big difference. But while some aid has been provided, it has made up only a fraction of the shortfall.

As a result, education is on the chopping block. And laid-off teachers are only part of the story. Even more important is the way that we’re shutting off opportunities.

Certainly money is never the sole solution to all our problems, educational or otherwise.

However, an excellent public education system, one that provides an excellent foundation for every child no matter where they live, cannot be done on the cheap.

The longer we wait to provide adequate funding for that system, the larger the number of children who are shut off from those opportunities.

* BTW, I’m one who believes the economic connection is NOT the most important reason for creating a strong public education system.

budget, economy, education, paul krugman

On Monday’s edition of the outstanding NPR podcast Planet Money, the hosts looked at the issue of teacher pay.

During the program they reviewed the many factors that might go into differentiating salaries and spoke with an economist about how the system under which most K12 teachers in the US are paid compares to employee compensation in the real world.

This short discussion is one of the best overviews of the subject I’ve ever heard, possibly because it’s coming from people who are not teachers (although the mother of one of the hosts is), politicians, or education “experts”.

It’s well worth spending 20-minutes of your time to listen.

And if you’re at all interested in an approach to understanding the economy and personal finance that’s very different from what is produced by the talking heads channels, subscribe to this podcast.

economy, merit pay, npr, planet money, podcast, teachers

Virginia voted for Obama in the election last November but, unfortunately, we still have too many idiots running the show in the state capitol of Richmond.

A divided General Assembly narrowly rejected $125 million in federal stimulus money Wednesday that would have provided additional unemployment benefits to thousands of jobless Virginians.

This despite the fact that “Virginia provides some of the lowest unemployment benefits in the country”.

Among those voting against taking the money is this very compassionate conservative.

“It is not stimulus. Paying workers not to work does not promote economic growth,“ Byron said.

I’m sure Ms. Byron is convinced that the 7.5% of the people in her district who are unemployed lost their jobs expressly for the purpose of being paid not to work.

Can we take Northern Virginia and start our own state?

economy, government, virginia

Recently I was watching an interview with some financial expert who was asked when he thought we would recover from whatever we’re now calling this economic mess.

He said something about it taking at least two years before we would be back to “normal”.

Normal? Is that really our goal?

It seems to me that the conditions from the past few years that this and many other “experts” would consider normal are exactly what we don’t want, exactly the stupid conditions that caused the problems in the first place.

So, is “normal” our goal or should we aim for something better?

I recall someone recently being quoted as saying that “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste”. In many ways, that makes a lot of sense.

A crisis, at least one that doesn’t involve immediate life or death situations, can be a great opportunity to do a complete re-evaluation how things are done.

It should force us as a society to do that and then make some very necessary major alterations which, in normal times, would not happen.

And then we have the American education system, one of the few significant parts of our society that has changed very slowly, if at all, over the past half century.

I wonder if our current financial crisis will have any effect our traditional system for educating children.

Or, once the problems with the economy get fixed, will we go back to normal.

I’m not sure I’m optimistic, considering that the near total upheaval in the way information is processed and communicated over the past decade hasn’t done much to push things outside of the education box known as “normal”.

change, economy, education, normal

If you want to see one of the best examples of journalism on television in a long time, skip past all the broadcast networks, talking heads channels, and especially Fox “News”.

Go watch Jon Stewart’s interview with financial talking head/showman Jim Cramer from last night’s Daily Show.

Unlike way too many people in the TV news business, Stewart was well prepared (whoever logs video for the DS deserves a large raise), asked very relevant questions, and refused to allow Cramer to BS his way out of answering them.

At the end, Stewart expressed his desire to downplay this assertive role (“Was that as uncomfortable for you to watch as it was for me to do?”) and return to making fart noises and funny faces.

I hope he doesn’t. At least not until the real news organizations are willing to step up and do their jobs,

Well, ok, maybe not the whole time.

I’m sure no Daily Show fan will mind if he throws in a few puns and jokes of questionable taste along with the great interviews.

daily show, economy, jon stewart, satire