Holier than Thou

I've been advocating that Connecticut schools be allowed to use blogging technology for some time now. My basic thesis is that teachers can blog the daily assignments for students [on some periodic basis] giving students and parents an exact idea of what the students are responsible for. And maybe class notes as well.

The very nice by-product of this is that students who are sick can keep up online.

But the second by-product is that when schools close for snow days or whatever reason, students and teachers can attend a school day virtually.

The only make-up days that need to be made up are days where there's no internet connection available.

But the real point I'm coming to is this, Yahoo just ran an article on the difficulty of scheduling. Parents, teachers, and everyone else want some certainty about vacation time and so on. Moving toward virtual makeup days make more personal choice possible.

Here's a sample of School schedules try to respect all faiths By Cara Anna, Associated Press Writer

It can get complicated. When Muslims in the Tampa Bay region of Florida asked for a day off to celebrate the end of Ramadan, another local religious group perked up.

"There was discussion in the Hindu community if we should also push for a holiday," said Nikhil Joshi, a board member of the national Hindu American Foundation.

The Hillsborough County school board responded by ending days off for all religious holidays. The move inspired more than 3,500 e-mails. Christian leaders pleaded for the Muslim holiday. Finally, the district restored this fall's original calendar, with days off for Good Friday, Easter Monday and the Jewish holiday Yom Kippur.

The Muslim community was relieved it hadn't hurt other faiths. The Hindu community decided not to ask for days off.

"You would hope in a country of religious freedom all would be recognized, but we know that's not practical," Joshi said.

School districts say they can't take days off for purely religious reasons, but they can act if they think operations are affected by students or staff taking the day off.

That practice gives school holidays a certain regional flair. Some schools close for the beginning of hunting season. San Francisco schools have Cesar Chavez Day on March 30 to celebrate farmworkers, and Chicago schools have March 5 to honor Casimir Pulaski, a Polish count who helped the American side in the Revolutionary War.

Religion is more sensitive. Some districts mark "special observance days" when no test or exam can be scheduled. Other districts find inspiration in the business world — each student gets a number of "floating" days to celebrate his or her own holidays with an excused absence.

"'Choose your own holiday' has become more popular," said Kathryn Lohre, assistant director of Harvard University's Pluralism Project, which studies diversity in religion. "It takes pressure off the school boards."

New Jersey's board of education now lists 76 excused religious holidays, from Russian Orthodox to Sikh. New York City schools are even more flexible. Students with a letter from parents get an excused absence for a holiday in any religion.

Some have tried the traditional route of schoolwide holidays, and failed. In Ohio, the Sycamore Community School District once canceled classes on the Jewish High Holy Days after some parents asked why schools closed on Good Friday. Muslim and Hindu parents then asked why they didn't get days off. The
American Civil Liberties Union sued the district.

The case was settled in 2000, and the High Holy Days became school days again.

Technology Void in the Classroom

When Americans look for FAILURE, they need look no further than the myopic stupidity of No Child Left Behind. The national delusion that NCLB will somehow magically correct the social ills of public schools is no less insane than a half-dozen other Bush initiatives. The difference being that NCLB experiments not only with a few generations of children but does so at the expense of America's well-being.

There are still a few of us who care about the health of the nation and cringe at the self-destructive practices in American high schools. In my experience the following report is no exagerration. NCLB legislates a testing of teachers and students that emphasizes silo content specialties. Yet the modern world is expanding information theory in precisely the opposite way.

American school teachers need to understand information retrieval mechanisms, information organization and dissemination mechanisms, and dozens of other technical and organizational skills and methodologies far more urgently than they need to worry about becoming content specialists. There is neither time, money, or incentive for teachers to lift a finger.

NCLB is a toxic educational waste dump. Teachers are so buzy fretting over perpetual testing and frivilous factoid exercises that the students never learn how to learn, value information, think, intellectually breathe, follow their bliss, or become a real person. We are creating a Pinnochio generation of micro-managed, Fox News terrorized young people who are devoid of initiative, as technically illiterate as their teachers, and treated as easy pickings by credit vultures (the federal government being one of the hungriest predators).

A report in Information Week merely confirms the obvious.

Report: High Schools Fail To Meet Needs Of Tech-Driven World

Roughly only a quarter of U.S. high schools require students to take computer science courses, due in part to a misperception that computers are for video games and surfing the Internet, says a new report.

By K.C. Jones, TechWeb.com, Jun 12, 2006 12:10 PM

"The United States cannot ignore the fact that there will be a shortage of qualified candidates for the 1.5 million computer and information technology jobs by 2012," co-author of the report and CSTA President Chris Stephenson said in a prepared statement. "This report provides a call to action for a variety of audiences to help others acknowledge computer science as the fundamental field that it is."

-snip-

CSTA issued a statement saying the report should serve as a "wakeup call to the United States on how far behind it has fallen in treating computer science education as a core knowledge requirement for all educated citizens."

There is no doubt in my mind that sounding wake-up calls to the "What Me Worry" administration will produce little more than more really bad ideas, so I'm looking to responsible citizens to vote hard come November. Don't just send these political idiots a message, boot them the hell out of office like you mean it.

The View from the Titanic or is it the Hindenburgh?

Art Skerker alerted us last week [click the link to see his blog entry] that the Federal House of Representatives eliminated the Enhancing Education through Technology (NCLB Title II, Part D) program that is “a program that provides teachers and students with the technology resources that are improving teaching and learning and allowing our nation to compete effectively in the 21st century workforce.”

Before we go any further let me just vent a little - WHEN WILL CONNECTICUT STOP VOTING FOR WORTHLESS REPRESENTATION LIKE ROB SIMMONS AND NANCY JOHNSON? WHEN? Oh wait, as long as we're mentioning worthless representation let's not forget, Joe Lieberman. Let's put it this way, students need not learn arithmetic to count what all these politicians have done for Connecticut. The answer is zilch, nada, "I don't know", or "None of the above".

Okay, I feel better now. But that leaves a giant yellow elephant standing in the national living room.

America is in real trouble people. The utter insanity of the Bush administration has so comprehensively dibilitated this nation's priorities, national wealth, and ability to compete that the future is looking grim as we slide head first into an abyss of bizarre psuedo-conservative politics.

MSNBC recently ran this story:

How Long Will America Lead the World? by Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek

It is not just writers like Prestowitz who are sounding alarms. Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of GE, reflects on the growing competence and cost advantage of countries like China and even Mexico and says, "It's unclear how many manufacturers will choose to keep their businesses in the United States." Intel's Andy Grove is more blunt. "America ... [is going] down the tubes," he says, "and the worst part is nobody knows it. They're all in denial, patting themselves on the back, as the Titanic heads for the iceberg full speed ahead."

Much of the concern centers on the erosion of science and technology in the U.S., particularly in education. Eight months ago, the national academies of sciences, engineering and medicine came together to put out a report that argued that the "scientific and technical building blocks of our economic leadership are eroding at a time when many nations are gathering strength."

Oh. And that quote is from the optimists. I bolded Andy Grove's comments in case you're speed reading. The sociopaths in the House of Representatives would do well to get their heads out of the political -cough- "troughs" long enough to to start funding education like it needs to be because the nation's welfare is truly at stake.

And if you're a voter, you damned well need to write these people, call these people, and run these people out of our government [and out of this country as far as I'm concerned] before they do any more real harm. We have got to take back the schools and regain our nation will to lead before it's too late.

And the hour is already late. Sound some alarms. We need better schools, better priorities, and better politicians. Business as usual is killing the country.

Technophobia in the Classroom

The rage today is to be lectured by corporations, politicians, and educationalists about the importance of students being 'exposed'to technology, learning the latest computer jargon, and so on. One would think that those doing the lecturing were technologically saavy themselves. They usually aren't.

This game of aggressive language that oozes the progressive vision of technological prowess has a sad underbelly of passive acceptance and even outright stonewalling when acts of conviction are required.

What most of these loud advocates for technology education usually are saying is that they want somebody else to teach, use, and learn something new - "we're 100% behind you all the way!" In practice many of these people will not raise a finger to help themselves or anyone else introduce new ideas, techniques, or classroom methods. Floating downstream, attending meetings, and arguing pointless bullet agenda items is filling enough for their palates.

This is too bad. The tsunami of changes rushing our way will consume us if we are incapable of understanding and coping with their consequences. What is coming in just a few scant years is nothing less than centuries of change compressed into years and months recursively. For the Federal or State government to legislate quaint political homilies as these waves of change crest is sinful.

Schools need to stop testing factoids and begin preparing students for dealing with massive streams of data, with an information society unlike anything imaginable, with enhanced human counterparts, and machines smarter than natural humans can ever be. Yes, curriculums need to begin to address learning in entirely different ways, emphasizing entirely different metrics. And it has to happen NOW.

The ability to skim and assess information quickly is more important than memorizing facts. The ability to be fungible is more important than conformity and comfortable familiarity.

And so teachers who don't practice open-minded attitudes toward innovations and who refuse to change or exercise new technologies are teaching the wrong lesson. Stonewalling, belligerence, and passive resistence are unacceptable role-models for students. We cannot preach our global preparedness while educating an intellectual labor force of technophobes. Teachers, administrators, and government need to be active partners in embracing change especially when it comes to school and curriculum innovations.

Virtually Integrating Our Schools

I take the persistence of poverty in America as a given. Those who care about eliminating poverty and classism in America are powerless to change its inevitability and ubiquity. And the consequence of poverty is racism, benign bigotry, and poverty community schools hopelessly mired in failure.

Our society continues to condone and tolerate this phenomenon with a vengence. NCLB pogram advocates only obfuscate the tolerance and further nurturing of a convenient underclass. The political invention of "failing schools" neatly skirts the fact that poor children are hopelessly trapped in urban social warfare reservations.

Recent studies uncover the lie that a child in a failing school can simply transfer across to the next school to get out of a failing one. Failing schools are clustered in geopolitical constructs that may as well be prisons of poverty and violence for those trapped in the confines of these ghettos. To call the recent rash of shootings and killings in Hartford a tragedy is not enough. Even tragedy mourns when one tragedy begets another and another. Any conscientious human being is numbed by the slaughter of children randomly shooting children.

In the one-upsmanship of American society, racism and classism observe no color lines. Those who empower racism and poverty are as likely to be black or spanish middleclass citizens as white. In every case, the same arguments are made. The shiftless and lazy arguments that forty years ago slurred minority populations are now exercised without question toward helpless and politically impotent child populations. The arguments are so compelling that arming poor kids with guns so that they can thin the ranks is de facto social policy.

My words will not change a thing so I resign myself to the same profession that Jonathan Kozol endeavors to be, merely a witness. I have rarely found truth to be a worthwhile virtue but I exercise the reckless honor anyway, usually at my own expense.

Assuming that nothing changes [and very little has in my lifetime] these violent urban operas will continue to persist and feed the nightly news broadcasts with a profitable fill of blood and tears and empty homilies.

However there is something that liberal educational evangelists can do to at least virtually integrate the classrooms of urban fortress schools and that is to advocate for the wide adoption of collaborative educational tools. There is little or no expense involved. Numerous online tools exist that can allow students in suburban school sto collaborate on a like assignment in an urban school.

For example, an English class reading the same book, might ask students to individually be teamed up with a counterpart at another school and write an essay or produce a dialogue about what they read. Recent studies indicate that a student is more likely to communicate with a person online than a student sitting next to them. while many lament this phenomenon, it offers opportunity to teachers to use it to broaden discussions beyond their school walls.

I created a writeboard here and sent it to some random educators. Let's see if they're saavy enough to respond.