This article asks: “LAUSD iPad Deal: iPaid Too Much?”
Is it legal to use voter-approved construction bonds with a 25-year or 30-year paydown period to buy devices that will be obsolete in 3-4 years?
Isn’t this a misdirection and misuse of what was approved by the voters?
Were voters misled?
Would they have approved a $1 billion tax to pay for iPads?
Surely there must be a city or state official with the power to investigate this mess.
Brian Crosby is an inspiring elementary school teacher. He has been teaching in upper elementary grades for 30 years. He is a STEM teacher in Nevada. After he read Sharon Higgins’ post, he chided me for seeming to diminish the importance of STEM subjects. I assured him that this was not my purpose, and I am sure it was not Sharon Higgins’ either. Her point was that the “crisis” has been vastly oversold, and that many young people with STEM backgrounds are not finding the jobs they trained for. If this is true, I suspect it is because our major corporations are quick to outsource STEM jobs to countries with wages far lower than ours.
I want to assure Brian and everyone else who is teaching STEM subjects that I believe they are a deeply important and valuable part of a liberal education. I don’t think anyone should be ignorant of mathematics, science, engineering, and technology. These are hugely important skills, tools, and knowledge in our society–not only for careers but for general civic understanding and personal survival. For daily life, everyone needs enough mathematics to function in the world, as a consumer and as a citizen. We are constantly debating issues of science–whether it has to do with the environment, or space, or global warming, or evolution, or the effects of tobacco on our health, or the causes of obesity, or a million other topics.
STEM may or may not be necessary for the careers of the future–in my view, we have no idea what the careers of the future will be, say in ten years. But the STEM components are valuable. They comprise necessary skills.
But I insist that STEM subjects must co-exist with other important subjects, subjects that are also important for citizenship and the development of each of us as thinking persons. I insist on the importance and value of the arts, literature, history, civics, government, economics, geography, foreign languages, and physical education.
I believe in a full education for all students. They need to know about the world they live in and they need to know how it came to be. They need to learn about their society and other societies. They need the insight and inspiration that can be gained by reading literature, and they need the understanding that comes from the study of history.
So, Brian, this is meant to assure you and others who are teaching STEM that I support what you are doing. And I hope that you find time to listen to music, to see a play, to read a novel, to read a history, to learn a foreign language, and to get outside and play. All these things matter. We go to school not to become global competitors, not to prepare for a job (because we have no idea what jobs will exist in the future), but to explore all kinds of possibilities, to try out and develop new talents, to learn and discover new ideas. Education is a beginning. The hard thing is to learn how to learn, and to continue doing it long after you graduate from high school or college.
As you may know, Michelle Rhee is holding three “teacher town halls” in which she and Steve Perry and George Parker talk to an audience who are allowed to submit questions.
George Parker was previously the head of the D.C. teachers union; he now works for Rhee.
Steve Perry, once a commentator for CNN, runs a magnet school in Hartford. Earlier this year in Minnesota, he spoke at a public forum and called unions “roaches” and accused teachers of being responsible for the “literal death” of children.
The first was held in Los Angeles, the second in Birmingham, and the third will be held in Philadelphia on September 16. (Ironically, I will be speaking in Philadelphia on the next night at the Free Library.)
G.F. Brandenburg, retired D.C. math teacher, explains here how the “teacher town halls” work.
Philadelphia is a great place to have a genuine conversation with teachers.
The governor cut the state education budget by $1 billion.
Thousands of teachers and other school staff were laid off last spring.
Many schools are opening without guidance counselors, social workers, teachers of the arts, basic supplies.
Teachers should try to attend Rhee’s “teacher town hall” and see what solutions the panel offers.
Sharon R. Higgins, an Oakland parent and blogger, questions
whether there is a STEM cris and offers documentation for her
views. She writes: The STEM alarm is definitely a manufactured
crisis. 1. “As the push to train more young people in STEM —
science, technology, engineering and math — careers gains steam, a
few prominent skeptics are warning that it may be misguided — and
that rhetoric about the USA losing its world pre-eminence in
science, math and technology may be a stretch.” (“Scientist
shortage? Maybe not.” USA Today, 7/9/2009,
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/science/2009-07-08-science-engineer-jobs_N.htm?loc=interstitialskip
2. “’There is no scientist shortage,’ says Harvard University
economist Richard Freeman, a leading expert on the academic labor
force.” (from “Does the U.S. Produce Too Many Scientists?”
Scientific American, 2/22/2010),
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=does-the-us-produce-too-m&sc=WR_20100224
3. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, of the top 20
fastest growing occupations, only one is STEM-related (biomedical
engineers). http://www.bls.gov/ooh/fastest-growing.htm 4. According
to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, of the top 20 occupations
w/highest projected numeric change in employment, ZERO are
STEM-related). http://www.bls.gov/ooh/most-new-jobs.htm 5. The STEM
push ignores the subtleties. According to the Bureau of Labor
Statistics, some STEM occupations have job outlooks that are
“faster than average” but many fall into the “average” or “slower
than average” category. 6. The Gulen Movement has cleverly taken
advantage of the STEM push for its charter school expansion. ALL
their schools boast about having a STEM emphasis. Just one example
is with Harmony Public Schools, the Texas chain.
http://www.harmonytx.org/AboutUs/TSTEMatHarmony.aspx
This teacher blogger, Rene Dietrich, addresses an open letter to Apple about the iPads for all students in the district.
Such questions as whether they are configured to block inappropriate content; whether Apple will offer training and tech support to teachers; whether they can be used without access to the Internet; whether there is any way to disable them if stolen; and many more. These are the kinds of questions that school districts should get answers to before spending hundreds of millions of dollars on new technology.
Metro Nashville teachers passed a vote of no confidence in State Commissioner Kevin Huffman.
The article doesn’t say how many teachers voted or what percent oppose Huffman.
Presumably, these figures will emerge.
The vote by the teachers comes on the heels of a letter by nearly half the state’s superintendents criticizing Huffman’s top-down style.
A retired teacher is happy that parents are opting their children out of state testing
She writes:
“I am a former elementary art teacher and I am thrilled parents are taking matters into their own hands. The testing culture is madness. I had to sit in too many staff meetings, and watch as the administrators devote all professional development time to students passing the standardized tests. It did not matter that students did not take tests in art, the specialists still had to sit there and listen for hours about how to teach to the test. All resources were put toward classroom teachers teaching to the test. All professional development days were used for classroom teachers teaching to the test. The specialists were told to find something to do on those days. I thought to myself, we as educators need to just say no. I am glad someone finally is saying no!”
In the article in Sunday’s New York Times magazine about the introduction of Joel Klein/Rupert Murdoch’s Amplify tablet, Klein asserts that those who oppose his views on technology are ideological, not evidence-based.
Klein asserts that we can’t hope to compete with Korea and other nations with high test scores unless we put kids on his tablets.
But here is a contrary view, forwarded to me by Will Fitzhugh of The Concord Review.
It is an excerpt from Amanda Ripley’s new book, The Smartest Kids in the World:
...But the anecdotal evidence suggests that Americans waste an extraordinary amount of tax money on high-tech toys for teachers and students, most of which have no proven learning value whatsoever....“In most of the highest-performing systems, technology is remarkably absent from classrooms.” ignore shiny objects Old-school can be good school. Eric’s high school in Busan, South Korea, had austere classrooms with bare-bones computer labs. Out front, kids played soccer on a dirt field. From certain angles, the place looked like an American school from the 1950s. Most of Kim’s classrooms in Finland looked the same way: rows of desks in front of a simple chalkboard or an old-fashioned white board, the kind that was not connected to anything but the wall. Tom’s school in Poland didn’t even have a cafeteria, let alone a state-of-the-art theater, like his public school back home in Pennsylvania. In his American school, every classroom had an interactive white board, the kind that had become ubiquitous in so many American schools. (In fact, when I visited Tom’s American high school in 2012, these boards were already being swapped for next-generation replacements.) None of the classrooms in his Polish school had interactive white boards. Little data exists to compare investments in technology across countries, unfortunately. But the anecdotal evidence suggests that Americans waste an extraordinary amount of tax money on high-tech toys for teachers and students, most of which have no proven learning value whatsoever. As in all other industries, computers are most helpful when they save time or money, by helping to sort out what kids know and who needs help. Conversely, giving kids expensive, individual wireless clickers so that they can vote in class would be unthinkable in most countries worldwide. (In most of the world, kids just raise their hands and that works out fine.) “In most of the highest-performing systems, technology is remarkably absent from classrooms,” Andreas Schleicher, the OECD international education guru, told me. “I have no explanation why that is the case, but it does seem that those systems place their efforts primarily on pedagogical practice rather than digital gadgets.” In the survey conducted for this book, seven out of ten international and American exchange students agreed that U.S. schools had more technology. Not one American student surveyed said there was significantly less technology in U.S. schools. The smartest countries prioritize teacher pay and equity (channeling more resources to the neediest students). When looking for a world-class education, remember that people always matter more than props. Ripley, Amanda (2013-08-13). The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way (pp. 214-215). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.
The New York Times magazine has a long article by Carlo Rotella about the first trial of the Amplify tablet in the schools of Guilford County, North Carolina. Amplify is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation and run by Joel Klein, the former chancellor of the NewYork City public schools.
Klein is certain that public education in America is a disaster and the only things that can save it are disruptive technology and the Common Core. Those are the same recommendations made by the task force Klein co-chaired for the Council on Foreign Relations last year.
Happily for Murdoch, Klein, and other apostles of saving the schools by selling technology to them, they have a friend in Arne Duncan. He is quoted as follows:
“To keep doing the same thing we’ve been doing for the past hundred years — everybody working on the same thing at the same time, not based on competency. . . .” He sighed and let the thought trail off, then added his standard reminder that we must equip our students to compete with counterparts in India and China. He did acknowledge, though, that the fear of falling behind puts added pressure on school systems to do something, anything, which then makes them more vulnerable to rushed decisions and to peddlers of magic bullets. “There are a lot of hucksters out there,” he said.
“Duncan, whose longtime allies include Joel Klein, Bill Gates and other apostles of disruption, has a record of supporting reforms that increase the role of market forces — choice, competition, the profit motive — in education. He wants private enterprises vying to make money by providing innovative educational products and services, and sees his role as “taking to scale the best practices” that emerge from this contest.”
One of the trainers of teachers uses a phrase that we have now heard about a million times , meaning that we are experimenting on you and don’t know how things will turn out: “Another PLEF, Wenalyn Bell, told her group, “It’s like building a plane while it’s flying.”
Rotella retains a healthy skepticism. He knows that Los Angeles laid off teachers while it spent big bucks to buy iPads.
He ends with these observations from his last interview with Klein.
“Take Finland,” Klein continued, citing everyone’s favorite example of a country that puts its money on excellent teachers, not technology, and routinely finishes at the top in international assessments. “There’s a high barrier for entry into the teaching profession,” the kind that lets in the Robin Britts and keeps out weaker aspirants. Teachers there are also well paid, held in high esteem and trusted to get results without being forced to teach to the test. But America’s educational system is a lot bigger, messier, less centralized and more focused on market-based solutions than Finland’s. Also, our greater income inequality and thinner social safety net make for much wider variation in student performance, and a toxic political climate has encouraged our traditional low regard for teachers to flower into outright contempt.
“Still, if everyone agrees that good teachers make all the difference, wouldn’t it make more sense to devote our resources to strengthening the teaching profession with better recruitment, training, support and pay? It seems misguided to try to improve the process of learning by putting an expensive tool in the hands of teachers we otherwise treat like the poor relations of the high-tech whiz kids who design the tool.
“Are our overwhelmed, besieged, haphazardly recruited, variably trained, underpaid, not-so-elite teachers, in fact, the potential weak link in Amplify’s bid to disrupt American schooling? Klein said that we have 3.5 million elementary- and middle-school teachers. “We have to put the work of the most brilliant people in their hands,” he said. “If we don’t empower them, it won’t work.” Behind the talking points and buzz words, what I heard him saying was Yes.”
The Atlanta Journal Constitution reporter Heather Vogell conducted a two-year investigation of standardized testing and discovered many errors in them.
Yet with all these errors, the test scores are being used and misused to make life-changing decisions about students, teachers, principals, and schools.
Standardized tests are a weak reed on which to base a decision for firing staff and closing schools.
Vogell and the AJC were key in exposing the widespread cheating scandal in Atlanta. Now the AJC reports:
Miscalculated scores, flawed questions and other errors on standardized tests have become near commonplace in public schools across the country, according to a new investigation by The Atlanta-Journal Constitution.
Repeated failures in quality-control measures have allowed mistakes to keep happening even as testing took on a more crucial role for students and teachers, the newspaper found. In some cases, students have been initially denied diplomas or entry into special academic programs because of incorrect scores.
The findings expose significant problems in the execution of the landmark No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, which sought to use test scores to hold schools publicly accountable for students’ academic performance. The newspaper has previously reported other problems with standardized testing, exposing widespread cheating in Atlanta Public Schools. A follow-up investigation in 2012 revealed nearly 200 school districts nationwide had high concentrations of suspect scores.
In the current year-long investigation, the AJC’s Heather Vogell studied test design, delivery and scoring and reviewed statistical reports on the quality of more than 92,000 test questions given over two years to students in 42 states and Washington, D.C.
The investigation revealed that almost one in 10 tests nationwide contained significant blocks of questions that were likely flawed. Such questions made up 10 percent or more of those tests — threatening their overall quality and raising questions about fairness.
Anyone wanting to read about the built-in flaws of the testing industry should read Todd Farley’s book Making the Grades, which exposes the scandalous lack of qualifications of those hired to score test questions, their poor training and supervision, and the superficial attention they give to the answers students write.
