Education Week 5/25/2011 Reflection

Specialists Weigh Common Social Studies Standards:  This is an interesting article because it touches on some really delicate issues.  Anything having to do with History going across a wide area is going to have a drastically different effect.  One of the largest issues that comes to mind in recent memory is when Japanese-Chinese relations came to a head when I think Japanese history textbooks decided to neglect all of the atrocities that had occurred in NanKing and the rest of China when the Japanese invaded prior to their involvement in World War II.  I could definitely see some of the same issues here in the United States.  Any number of issues ranging from slavery to the succession in the south and other topics could draw the ire of states that border others that happen to adopt history lessons that residents of another state don't like.
here are a lot of benefits to adopting a common standard across the nation as we are beginning to do with math and english.  One of the things that I think of most are the kids from families that move from place to place with great frequency.  These are the kids that really suffer from the lack of a common standard in subject areas.  We talked in class at the beginning of the year about some of the folks who went from school to school and ended up learning many of the same things that they had learned at their old school.  Other times they would move to another school district and then find that they are woefully behind because the school district that they moved from had significantly lower standards than the school district they moved to.
It doesn't necessarily mean that all students across the country would have to learn the same thing all year.  I definitely think that it would be a good idea to have a decent amount of what the students learn should have some commonality.  Outside of that, each region of the country should try to incorporate their own specialty.  For instance, the Northwest should (and does) incorporate elements of history such as the Oregon trail, Lewis and Clark, a lot more Native American history and logging and everything else Pacific Northwest.  The Florida and Southeast could incorporate a lot more history involving the age of exploration (explorers such as Ponce de Leon searching for the fountain of youth which awesome!) and everything else related to the Southeast.  As a whole though, the general information regarding things other than local history should try to have as much commonality as possible.

Education Week 5/18/2011 Reflection

Why Wrong Is Not Always Bad:  I thought this was an excellent article about issues surrounding our society when it comes to teaching kids about results.  It really hit the nail on the head.  The quote "victims of excellence" really stands out to me because its so hard to imagine anyone being a victim when they are associated with excellence.  I definitely feel like a victim of excellence sometimes.  The times in this program where we are doing nothing but sharing our feelings and sharing the "process" of our learning experiences, I experience boredom because there isn't any product involved.  I came directly from Undergraduate school where so much of the focus is product oriented so there are times in my mind where I don't care too much for the process and am much more interested in the product.  Even more interesting is the study (which I think I have heard before, not sure where, maybe it was something that was associated with the Alfie Cone stuff we have listened to) in which the super-majority of students who were praised for being smart chose not to take the harder test that may lead to a lower score.  This is a perfect example of "victims of excellence" because once those students have been associated with being smart, they don't want to let it go.  Staying "smart" becomes more important than learning.  Getting the good grade isn't the means to an end in which the end is learning and understanding the material, instead the good grade becomes the end and learning and understanding be damned.
Another portion of this commentary that I found interesting was the use of the example in comparing American and Japanese (and some Chinese) cultures.  I was just talking with Ian Mansfield in class recently and he described a situation in which a student incorrectly working out a math problem would never happen here because he said that teachers want to immediately "correct" a wrong way thought because the sooner it is gotten rid of and fixed the sooner a student or the classroom will be able to learn how to do it the correct way.  However, I don't agree at all with the teacher the writer referenced at the end of the article who said they would rather hire a B or C student than an A student because the B or C student is willing to take risks and be wrong.  This seems like a very silly thing to determine because who says that that was the reason they got Bs and Cs?  Couldn't it just be the case that they were just lazy and didn't want to work hard enough for the A?  It just seems way too much of a jump to assume that they got a B or C because they were not afraid to make mistakes.

Education Week 5-11-2011 Reflection

School Lunch Applications:  Continuing on with a trend of reflections on food comes this tasty tidbit from the US Department of Agriculture - only half of the applications, of which 279,000 was a mere sampling of the applications, were found to be accurate.  As a result of this, twenty percent were getting free meals when they should have only been getting reduced price meals.  On top of this, one third of the students will lose their free or reduced meal pricing because parents would not provide documentation of how much money they make.  This completely flabbergasts me.  How is it that these families were even on the program in the first place?  Did they provide documentation to start with?  I'm assuming they did.  If they didn't then we have a whole other issue with how this aspect of our school system is run because that is ridiculous!  After that, one has to ask how often these families are supposed to provide documentation to keep getting the benefit of free or reduced lunch.  Hopefully it has only been one year.  Any long than a year and I would begin by saying that is a gross neglection of responsibility.  Go ahead and fire all of those people.  They have been letting people (extreme emphasis) steal from the government!  Those people become responsible for what I am assuming to be millions of dollars "wasted" on families that do not deserve to have free or reduced lunch.  What it's really doing is stealing from the other needy families who deserve those free or reduced meals more.
Former GM Exec Named Detroit Emergency Manager:  See, this a move that I absolutely do not understand at all.  GM was once one of the great American motor companies before it started to fall behind and eventually had to take a wealth of money from the public in a federal bailout.  Tell me again, why on Earth are we handing the reigns of Detroit's Emergency Finanacial Management over to one of the executives that ran that company into the ground.  Perhaps the Governor of Michigan doesn't realize that this guy is one of many who are the reason I and I'm sure many other Americans probably wont ever think to buy an American brand car.  Yeah this guy probably didn't make all of the decisions that ruined General Motors, but being a high executive comes with it's fair share of responsibilities, which he clearly did not fulfill very well.  It's a good thing that GM cleaned house and decided to get back on the right track, but this seems like a really poor decision on the Governor's part.  It feels very much like a nod, nod - wink, wink kind of deal or doing a favor for a friend where you really aren't comfortable or confident in how he is going to perform.  Would the governor do such a thing?  Get back to me in ten years or so with how Detroit school districts have done.

Education Week 4/27/2011 Reflection

Studies Find "Desirable Difficulties" Help Students Learn:  I have considered myself to be pretty dedicated to my studying outside of the classroom for a long time.  I can remember as far back as fourth grade that I would be studying and doing homework.  Specifically there was one time when my friends were going to have a home run derby tournament at the park a quarter mile from home and I couldn't go because I was studying; that was in fourth grade.  It makes me feel good when I read about certain study tips that I have been doing for years.  I was really surprised to find out the science and the numbers behind those effective and non-effective study tips.  Whenever I study vocabulary words, I always do the whole list.  It has never really made a whole lot of sense to me when people only study a small amount of words at a time because that is not how the test is given to you.  The entirety of the list is shoved in your face on the test, or, my preference, you have to learn a huge list well enough so that when you are given a group of ten people or places (or whatever) you have to write about those one.  In college, I had a lot of history tests and religious studies tests set up in that way.  I really enjoyed that.  Even when I have a giant list of key people, places and events to learn, I try to start early and make a third of the list a week before and study that, and a few days later make the second park of the list and study the two of them together, and finally go with the third.  I always found it helped me out.  The fact that students thought it was easier to learn words that were bigger fonts is kind of strange to me.  I am a person who has always written everything pretty small.  If anything, the larger font would make things even harder for me to remember, especially if it were typed out.  I try to handwrite everything because I find that, more often than not, I am able to remember how I write certain things and that will help me remember the material associated with how its written.  It's sort of like when people do color coding for their flash cards, but instead of colors, I use the way my handwriting looks to help me remember.  When I am a teacher I will definitely want to pull that factoid out to show students that the more you study so that recall can happen is three times as likely when a student is able to answer correctly five times instead of just once.  That is incredible motivation in my eyes.  Why not study a little bit more and make the entirety of the time used to study that much more effective?  A teacher could say, "once you think you know it, study for another twenty minutes" and I really think the ones who are motivated to learn are going to latch on to that and put it to good use.

Education Week 4-20-2011 Reflection

Parents' Deployment Found To Exact a Toll on Students' Learning:  Let me begin by saying that I am a military brat.  That is the common term for people who are the son or daughter of someone in any branch of the US Armed Forces.  Since my father was in the Army, my older brother was born in Florida, I was born in California, and my younger brother was born in Florida after moving back there, and then we moved to Washington.  Since I was only four years old, I don't remember what it was like to move from place to place and have to "start all over" as many kids and families often do when them move to the other side of the country to where they don't know anyone.  I was lucky enough to stay in the same place to go to one elementary school, one junior high school, and one high school.  Some kids go through a heck of a lot more than that.  They go through YEARS without seeing one or both of their parents.  One of my earliest memories is sitting on my mom's lap at the computer looking at a blue screen as she would type the words I was saying in a letter to my dad while he was on a six month long cruise on the USS Nimitz.  Six months isn't much compared to twelve or fifteen months.  I would argue that it was much easier to get through the time my dad was away during that six month cruise on the Nimitz than it was when he was gone for eight months getting trained to become a teacher in Georgia.  I was in seventh grade at that time and it was very difficult for me as a 12 year old to be without my dad.  People say that the most formative years of a child's life is when they are a toddler to eight years old.  My thinking is that a kid is growing up to be the person they are going to be the rest of their life from about age eleven or twelve years old onward.  Not having either a father or a mother figure in your life is potentially going to give the child a skewed upbringing.  What I mean by skewed upbringing is that more often than not, one parent is going to be more disciplinary and the other more nurturing.  If the disciplinarian of the two is gone, I think it could be argued that the child would be more likely to have behavioral issues that could definitely find their way into the classroom and affect a student's performance.  If the more nurturing of the two is gone, a child will miss out of that portion of parenting and could potentially have emotional problems.  It just goes to show you that these wars we are involved in the Middle East take a much greater toll than just our country's budget.  The children of this country are suffering because they aren't being raised by their parents.  Not only are we selling this country down the river by digging ourselves into deeper and deeper debt, we are damaging out kids as well.  I'm not sure which is worse, but both are awful and it needs to stop.

Education Week 4/6/2011 Reflection

School Meals Makeover Stirs Pot:  I'll begin by first saying that I absolutely love food.  Food is one of the many things I truly enjoy in life.  A really good meal just can't be beat.  That being said, I did not grow up eating meals provided by the schools until about Jr High.  I took a bag lunch to school almost every single day but I think that was largely due to the cost of school lunches as opposed to buying groceries and taking a sack lunch (however it should be noted that not all families are in the same situation financially and must buy school lunch at reduced rates).  In fifth and sixth grade I was waking up early in the morning to pack lunches for myself and my little brother.  I also have to say that I am also a big fan of Jamie Oliver.  If you have not already seen his miniseries special  Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution, you absolutely have to see it.  It will dramatically change the way you look at food provided by the schools.  You will also be shocked at what these kids end up getting served.  The chicken nuggets are absolutely disgusting.  He does an experiment in which he brings kids into his cooking shop and grinds up a chicken that just bones and crap meat, breads and cooks them, and the kids want to eat the chicken nuggets.  It is apparent from that scene that many of these kids are not going to want to change the way they eat, regardless of what the food they like is currently made of.
This article is slightly misleading because of some of what is included about the Potatoes council and their being upset about cutting down potatoes from the meals.  The advocate for the potatoes say that "many fries are baked in the oven" but really there are no numbers to back that up.  Many schools could just be an indication of the number of schools that do it and not the percentage of schools that do it.  Who really cares if 10,000 schools bake their fries in the oven but thats only 1% of the schools in the country?  I also thought it was interesting that they mentioned that many of the kids started avoiding whole grain pizza.  Perhaps that is still a good thing though.  Most pizza really isn't that good for you.  As much as I love pizza, changing the bread to whole grain probably isn't going to do too much to increase the total healthiness of that food.  By the time I was in high school I was eating nothing soups and sandwiches for lunch every single day and sometimes an extra donut because those were the most filling things.  Kids mostly want to eat what tastes good and if the school are able to make things healthier without them noticing that much that is great.  In reality though, there needs to be a dramatic change and it doesn't matter whether or not the kids are super happy about it.

Education Week 3-30-2011 Reflection

Studies Shed Light on How Cheating Impedes Learning:  This article caught my eye right from the get-go.  I thought it was interesting that judging from the recent results of a 2010 study that the older a student gets makes it more likely that he/she will cheat.  To me, this can be attributed to a couple of things.  First, the more obvious (to me) of the two, is that students who are getting older are more likely to cheat because of the increased difficulty of their classes and the increased expectations they find in those classrooms.  Is an elementary school student learning addition and subtraction as likely to cheat as a high school student who is learning calculus?  I would venture to guess that it isn't as likely in large part because the material is not nearly as difficult at a younger age.  The more nuanced reason for students most likely cheating in their later years is that fact that students who have already spent time cheating are going to see that there are "no negative consequences" for their cheating.  They will only see that they have gotten a better score on that last test and that means they get an A in the class instead of a B+ or an A-.  It becomes reinforced in their minds because there are no perceived consequences and only the positives of getting a better grade on the test or assignment and in the class.
I actually found it pretty funny that the students at Harvard had duped themselves into thinking that they would be just as successful on tests if they weren't allowed to cheat.  Admittedly the test only had 36 people involved in it and the students were from Harvard.  I don't think that anyone going to Harvard are going to be indicative of normal students who are going to try and cheat on a test or a quiz.  This might also be a little presumptuous but the fact they are from Harvard would also indicate that they are pretty darn confident in their own abilities.  It may not be the case that they are thinking that way because they are cheaters, but rather because they go to Harvard.  This is more or less confirmed when the study showed that social recognition reinforces self-deception.  Anyone who goes to Harvard is probably going to make a big deal of it, or their parents will, or their school will.  It seems pretty unavoidable as it is the top school in the country (or one of them.)
Finally, I thought the biggest point of the article, as it pertains to me as a future teacher is that students are more likely to cheat in an environment in which the teacher is not fair or is not trying to engage them to learn.  This means that I am going to have to do my best as a teacher to make sure that students do not cheat simply by being a good teacher and not by focusing on not having them cheat.  Who wants to work hard for a teacher that isn't working hard for them?

Education Week 3-17-2011 Reflection

Schools Use Digital Tools to Customize Education:  One of the things that I question about this article is the fact that, in a way, moving away from a one-size-fits-all method of teaching into a more personalized way is in fact pandering to students.  It is not to the degree that Vikram Savkar suggests when he says the pandering is complete and total personalization.  The reality of it is that when you change your curriculum to include a variety of different learning styles is that the teacher is pandering to students.  Admittedly, the teacher is not going out of his/her way to personalize assignments for each of thirty students, but moving from a lecture based lesson to one in which the students are interacting with each other and sharing their knowledge is pandering to those students who work better that way.  One of the most interesting things about the entire article is when it brings up programs that allow kids to work at their own pace and tailor their lessons around the subjects which they are least comfortable and not quite as good.  I, personally, would not fare very well in that program because I wouldn't want to spend very much time on the things that I am not good at!  Math would be a subject in which I would continually try to avoid doing the hard parts of it as much as possible because I am not good at it at all.  It is very comforting to know that Savkar knows about the challenges that teachers face and that we as teachers have to rise to the occasion if we are going to be successful in the world of education as it currently is and in the ways that it is changing.  He is completely correct when he says that more talented teachers are going to be required to teach students in the coming years because they will have to incorporate all of these new technologies.  Old teachers could very well be left in the dust (pun intended).  Older teachers must be able to push themselves as well.  It does not take very much talent to be able to create a lecture based classroom, or as this article would call it, a one size fits all classroom.  "All" the teacher has to do is get up there and talk and the students have to listen.  That isn't belittling those teachers, because yes it does take quite a bit of effort to do that.  Even more effort is going to be required if they are going to help the future students of this country succeed in the ways in which this article has pointed out.  One of the things that this article mentions is 1 to 1 laptop initiatives and I would be very much interested in learning more about those.  I love having a laptop for my personal use, but I'm not sure if I would be particularly successful as a student if I were to have one with me at all times as a student growing up and in high school.  It's the same way with cell phones.  I didn't get one until I was 16 years old, and even by many of today's standards that is very late for a kid to get a cell phone!  Would I have been as successful as I was as a student if I had one as a 7th grader?  I'm inclined to guess that I wouldn't have been.

Education Week 316/2011 Reflection

Study Links Pupils' Stress to School Environments:  It totally makes sense that "the lack of adequate, appropriate materials can affect children negatively in part because teachers become more harsh or frustrated when they cannot teach properly given a lack of resources" I can say for sure that I would experience a lot of frustration if I didn't have all the materials necessary to teach my students the things they need to be taught.  I think that is one of the most interesting things about Teach for America is the fact that they dump teachers in low income neighborhoods and expect them to teach students when they are woefully unequipped to handle the situations.  My friend Steven Millard went into Teach for America and he went to Chicago and some of the experiences he has described to me have been absolutely frightening.  I'm not sure if there is any way that I would be able to do the things he was able to accomplish under the circumstances.  I guess I never really thought about the consequences that it would have on the students.  My question is how are the researchers able to distinguish the mental damage done to the children that is a result of the kids not having the benefit of the resources that would help them and mental damage that is a result of the teacher being stressed.  Perhaps there isn't any difference?
School Health Centers:  I'm very curious as to what district they took the study from in Washington State.  And I'm also curious as to what they mean by Health Centers.  Does that mean that it is just the nurses office?  I honestly don't even know if my high school had a nurses office.  We definitely had an athletic medicine office though.  I spent a lot of time in there but I was never really sick in high school, and even if I was I probably just went home rather than to the office.  Greater access to the health is indicative of a lower dropout rate in part because the students get another resource for help.  People who care about them are showing them that they care and the kids probably take notice of that and want to stick around.

Education Week 3-9-2011 Reflection

Seattle Ousts Superintendent After Program Audit by State:  Well I have to say that I'm glad they got her out of office cause it definitely sounds like she was siphoning funds into her own pocket!  Seriously, 300,000 dollars are missing for services that the district never received?  Doesn't think make people want to do an audit of her personal finances just to see if she happened to get something like thirty ten thousand dollar checks over her three years in office?  More than 1.5 million dollars spent on questionable services?  They only gave one example of these questionable services.  Are relaxing weekends at the spa or private getaways with some lover part of these questionable expenses.  Based on this article it sounds like the school district decided to get rid of her based on the fact the school district wasn't getting everything it was paying for.  I think she should be personally investigated.  in addition to all of this they are still giving her a severance package of a 1/4 of a million dollars and benefits on top of that.  "Thanks for doing a really terrible job for us, but we are still going to give you a giant severance package.  Good luck in life and good luck in ripping the next school district off that you work for!"  How is it that it isn't in these people's contracts that if they are fired for conduct like this that they won't get any benefits whatsoever?  It's a gross misallocation of state and district funds.  She shouldn't receive a dime for the money she stole/wasted during her time in office.
Tying Class Sizes to Teachers Skills:  Now doesn't this just seem like a wonderful idea in theory?  Give the better teachers more students, and subsequently more pay, and the worse teachers fewer students and less pay.  First of all, you better make sure that however you are evaluating these teachers, and from what it sounds like they would be evaluating them on whether or not their students do well enough on tests, is going to be an accurate way of measuring teacher effectiveness.  I can easily see a situation happening in which teachers teach to the test even more so than they already do in an effort to get a few more students and a few more bucks added to their salary.  What does this say about teachers who teach mostly electives classes?  How are you going to judge them and even then what are you going to do about their class sizes?  I'd be willing to guess that a lot of those classes they have are totally determined by the number of students who sign up for them.  That is how it was done at my high school.  Of course, this comes into question that Bill Gates is bringing this up, and wasn't he one of the biggest sharks of the computer industry next to Paul Allen?  I'm not sure if his advice is the kind I would be seeking in terms of figuring out how I would want to pay teachers.

Education Week 3/2/2011 Reflection

There are times when I read articles like In War of Words, Reform is A Potent Weapon, that I just want to say things like "duh" and "no kidding Sherlock."  Of course people are always going to use rhetoric to try and claim the moral high ground.  That is the whole point of rhetoric!  Using the right words to belittle or make your political opponent look bad or like they don't really care is how people win and lose elections.  It goes a lot farther than that.  Two weeks ago the Pittsburgh Steelers runningback Rashard Mendenhall made kind of controversial claims about the death of Osama Bin Laden.  Regardless of what he might have meant to say, people didn't take too kindly to his words because they implied that he wasn't happy about Bin Laden being killed and seemingly questioned America's War on Terror.  The fallout of his Twitter comments were pretty far reaching.  The Pittsburgh Steelers organization issued a statement about his comments pretty much saying that they disagreed with their running back.  Champion Sports, a pretty big sports supplier, severed their relationship with Mendenhall so that he is no longer representing their company.  This guy lost out on probably hundreds of thousands of dollars because the rhetoric he used indicated that it was wrong that so many people were celebrating the death of an (albeit very evil) man.  It just goes to show you that words are very powerful, and that they definitely do affect people more than most realize.  That is why it is not at all surprising that people in government use the words they do.  They know exactly what they are saying.  When the whole "groupthink" issue starts to come into play, more people begin to realize the power that certain buzzwords have and they want to use them for their own purposes.  Look at this article.  These proponents of reform are trying to sway people to their side.  How are they doing that?  By insinuating that people who are not on their side have no interest in "putting students first," they are hoping the public will latch onto that and say "why on earth would I want to vote for so and so when they don't want to put my child first.  They are only protecting their own interests!"  Mr. Freeman touches on this issue at the end of the article.  It doesn't matter that he wants to improve education.  The fact that he doesn't approve of increased support for Charter Schools is grounds for claiming that he doesn't want to improve education because that is what the rhetoric has trained us to believe.

Education Week 2/23/2011 Reflection

House GOP Presses for Deep Cuts in Education:  Ok these are the articles that have me extremely frustrated with our government and particularly with the Republican party.  Yes, at this point I am aware that the government avoided a shutdown for the first time in ten years (no we should not applaud them for agreeing to do their jobs when that should just be common sense...) but this is simply ridiculous!  Cutting almost 16% of the Department of Educations discretionary funding which would totally remove programs such as Pell Grants?!  Honestly what kind of a move is that?  We don't spend enough money on education in this country as it is and they want to cut their current budget by that much?  God forbid that we get out of the two or three wars that we have going on in the Middle East and devote some of those BILLIONS of dollars that we are investing in those wars to education and other focuses.  No I'm not advocating that we totally pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan immediately and do nothing to help stabilize the region.  I am advocating that we do a better job of pulling out of the area and redistributing a percentage of those funds that we would be using there on education.  The Republican Harold Rogers from Kentucky is kidding himself when he says that the cuts are shared commitment and sacrifice.  What a bunch of baloney!  A shared commitment to sacrifice would be reducing the tax loopholes for big business.  As a whole, our country, its general population and our government, do a really terrible job of living within its means.  What does that mean exactly?  Look at the credit card debt that so many Americans are in.  Look at the budget deficit that our government runs every single year, year after year, until we have a 9 trillion dollar debt.  Are we ever going to pay that money off?  I seriously doubt it.  All we are doing are selling the future generations short by making these cuts.  Back to wanting to get rid of Pell grants, why on earth would they want to get rid of those?  I thought they wanted more people with low incomes to be able to go to college?  If anything getting rid of them would make sure that few low income and minority students actually go to college.  Also wanting to get rid of 100 million dollars in technology grants seems stupid considering the goals of our country are focused around getting our education in technology and the sciences back on par with the other nations around the world that are currently kicking our butts in those areas.  All of the cuts proposed indicate one thing to me: our government is one that is penny-wise but dollar-foolish.  A commenter on the site, Cathy Winters, had this to say: "Do the leaders of this country have any semblance of reality?"  Good question Cathy, good question.

Education Week 2/9/11 Reflection

College for All Confronted:  In general, I have to think that many of the readers of this article and of the "college for all" initiative are taking the term college much too literally.  I completely agree with Michael Cohen when he says that it isnt just going to be a 4 year University that they are trying to get students to go to but any kind of post-high school education.  I was really impressed with the statistic (however, I have to say that I have absolutely NO idea as to how they came up with it; I would be very interested to know as to how they figured it out) that half of the new jobs are going to be ones that require associate degrees or vocational training.  This further emphasizes the increasing need for more and more high school graduates to continue with their education.
Another alternative to continuing their education past high school, and the article touched on this, is that high school could do a better job of preparing students for life in the technical fields.  I for one side on the air of hesitation for exactly the reasons outlined by Kati Hayock, the president of Education Trust.  I have done a project on tracking before in one of my education classes I took in undergrad and have personally been tracked myself (even though I was the receiver of many of the benefits of a tracking system) and just like she says, more minorities and more lower income students inevitably get funneled towards the lesser of the tracks.  This means that we are selling our kids short and they are not realizing their full potential.
I'm not sure if it is entirely possible to make it so that the minorities and the lower income students are not funneled towards tracks.  I think that the suggestion/model school in which students take all of the same core classes but choose a certain kind of field or focus for their electives is a great idea.  Say for instance that a kid did all of the electricity courses in addition to all of his normal core classes.  Sure that kid is probably in all likelihood going to heads towards becoming an electrician but that isn't a "for sure" thing.  What is to stop that kid from going to a "traditional" four year college or university?  Won't they see that he had that electrician kind of focus and disregard him? NO!  If anything that makes him/her a much more intriguing prospect for the school and will add to the diversity of that class significantly with the unique skillset and opinions that he/she brings to the classroom.  The focus fields of these "tracks" still need to be wide enough that a kid will still be fully prepared to do anything else should he/she decide that whatever track they are in is not what they want to do with the rest of their lives.

Education Week 2/2/2011

 Education Innovation:  Tougher than It Looks.  This article hits the nail on the head of one of the largest problems in our society, which is everyone is trying to get more money.  Normally that wouldn't be a problem.  I grew up as a republican and entrepreneurship is one of the major tenants of that political party.  However, the issue here is that no one is willing to invest the money in programs that could potentially really help the schools in this country.  It is the very same issue that we are facing in our government today.  So many of the brightest and greatest thinkers have absolutely no business or desire going into politics because of exactly that: there is no business going into it.  The president of the United States of America makes something like 110,000 dollars a year.  Mind you this is a pretty penny for pretty much all of us normal folks. The only "problem" is that the truly innovative people like Bill Gates and others like him who are able to build and develop and fund programs make millions and millions of dollars doing what they do now rather than go into government.  This article points out the same issue: for profit organizations don't want to wait for a most likely mediocre return on the investment that they would get by going into the research field of education.  They most likely realize that even if they waited 10-15 years to get a return on their investment, they would probably only break even, because if they were lucky enough that enough school districts had purchased their programs or whatever they are selling, more research would come out that would render theirs in second place.  What then?  Start over from scratch?  It isn't like the computer business where you can just get out there and do more research and development to get the newest, faster processor and beat out the competition that way.  There is so much prior knowledge to build off of there that you have a legitimate starting point.  I'm willing to bet that there isn't nearly the same kind of thing with the development of teaching strategies because of the issues this article described.  There is no real way to win.  Even if they demonstrate in a small subject area that something works, it won't work for everyone.  Even then if it has been found to be successful in that setting, there is the very distinct possibility that when it is sent out into the real world, some teachers won't use it because it isn't technically practical.  Why would someone buy it?  Exactly, they wouldn't.  So why would others work on developing it.  Obviously the answer here is that educators don't teach for the money otherwise they wouldn't be a teacher.  The issue is that the rest of the world runs on this notion.

No I'm not arguing for the redistribution of wealth.  Just trying to put my voice out there that there is a very obvious reason why we have the issues described in the article.

Education Week 1/126/2011 Reflection

"'No Pass, No Drive' Laws Popular, Not Proven" is one of those articles that I feel like I need to listen to the Alfie Cone cd from last semester again before reading.  I find myself very conflicted because I still don't have a very good idea of how many and what kind of rewards and punishments I want/need (need is a very relative term) to use in my classroom.  There is a comment on the article that criticizes one of the people listed in the article who doesn't think its a good program, saying that getting kids into the building is better than not having them in the building at all.  After reading the comment, I largely agreed with the person who made it.  But then again, there are days where I come to school and I don't feel like I learn very much of anything.  There are definitely times where I question whether I should be in the program or not, and then I think to myself about the multiple thousands of dollars a year raise I get for having a Master's in the Arts of Teaching and I'm able to make it through class knowing that I am certainly in there for at LEAST one reason.  One could argue that I shouldn't go to class at all and forget about getting a Masters degree if that is the reason I am doing it.  Obviously I am doing it for a lot of reasons.  In the same way, I honestly don't think that the kids who are affected by these law are not going to school solely for the purpose of getting and keeping their licenses.  There are a lot of reasons to go to school.  School is where a lot of their friends are etc etc etc.  The same person who didn't think that the program is a good idea said that there were other things that he would rather the district be doing instead.  My question to him is, why cant we do this program and do more of his ideas? Does this program really hurt?  Again, you'd have to refer back to the Alfie cd from last semester before you can answer with an informed decision.

Quick hit:  I have a question for the atheist father of the girl in Illinois who doesn't want a "moment of silence" in school.  Is it the fact that it probably is specifically for prayer and that they are trying to use the moment of silence to give people the opportunity to pray to start the day?  From my perspective, a moment of silence is perfectly fine with me.  But then again, I'm a Christian person.  The atheist guy probably doesn't like this veiled attempt at keeping prayer in schools.

Education Week 1/19/2011 Reflection

To start, the "Teacher-led school innovates with student regrouping" felt like a very disjointed article that was trying to do too much at once.  This could have easily been two separate articles.  The school being teacher-led is not surprising considering the economic climate that our country is currently in.  It comes as no surprise to me that schools are trying to cut down on the costs of running operations by having fewer people perform more duties.  However, it kind of makes me think that the schools are ignoring the students that those teachers have to teach.  The article mentioned that the new teacher/administrators have a lot of extra work to do on top of their teaching.  It also mentions that the teachers have to take on a lot more students because of the class schedule system that they have put in place.  In addition, what about those teachers who are interested in coaching students in sports.  In addition to more administrative duties, more students, more meetings, how on earth would they be able to take all of that on?  To me, it simply seems like they are trying to have the teachers take too much responsibility.  Don't they have enough to do as it is?  Yeah, money is probably tight, and more creative ways of getting the job done are necessary, but this doesn't seem like a viable long term option.  I imagine that those teacher/administrators are going to get burned out at a much faster pace than they would if they were simply teaching.
It's funny because my first thought reading about the new scheduling system that the school put in place was "this sounds an awful lot like tracking" so I am very glad they at least addressed tracking in the article.  One of the main things that people knock tracking for is the fact that students cannot readily get out of the track that they have been "assigned."  This system seems to alleviate concerns that a child would get stuck in a single track, but it develops a whole new case of problems.  The biggest one that comes to mind is attendance.  How are teachers supposed to keep track of who is in their classrooms when there are kids coming and going on a monthly, weekly and even daily basis.  It also seems like that would generate a whole lot of paper waste to confirm that such and such student is in this class this week and this class another week.  It also brings to mind the issue of how their credits are measured and how many they should receive for doing such an amount in one aspect of a course and a different amount for another aspect.  I don't necessarily think this is a terrible idea, but it just seems like, based on the limited amount of information provided by this article, that this system places a huge burden on teachers.  I would hope that the students show a marked improvement, because, otherwise this system is probably not worth it.

Quality Counts: Education Week 1/13/2011 Reflection

Definitely the most interesting portion of the article was the state report card.  My main focuses were Washington state and Oregon, because Washington is where I'm from and would like to teach (Oregon obviously because it's where we are learning and getting certified).  How is it that we are only getting a C- here in Oregon.  I do not see how strongly each of these portions are weighted but I thought it was interesting that the college readiness of Oregon was at 50%, which is absolutely awful!  Are we not preparing students here in Oregon for college very well.  Do we have any idea what is causing that?  Is it possible that it is directly related to the we got an F (a 58.8) on accountability for quality?  What this says to me is that students are falling through the cracks and teachers are simply passing them so that they don't look bad for having to fail students.  I've seen it happen that ninth grade students have third grade reading levels.  How on earth does that happen?  It's ridiculous!  What does it mean that our spending is at 59.9%?  Do we waste money?  I would like to see something that says why Oregon got that F.  There isn't a single state that got an A on this list.  Not even the very best of the states (which appears to be Maryland...who knew?) got an A.  Either we are grading on a very hard curve, which means that Maryland is full of absolutely awesome teachers, or we all kind of suck.  As a student, I'm not happy with a C.  Most of the time, I'm not even happy with a B.  I don't get the impression that very many states are happy with their C's.  When I look at a map like this, my first thought is how do we even get started at fixing and/or improving the situation?  It's such a daunting task.  My first step would be to look at everything that Maryland and a few other states at the top of the list are doing and start doing exactly what they are doing... Another thing to notice the West Coast is subpar compared to the east coast.  Do we not do things as well over here?  Do we not get the same amount of money?  Pretty much anything East of the Appalachians has a good chance of having a B grade.  Perhaps there is an East Coast bias in the grading of education just like there is in College Football...except on this map the Atlantic Coast Conference dominates pretty much every single conference...(laughable in college football)

Education Week 1/12/2011 Reflection

Reading "Simulations Helping Novices Hone Skills" was an eye-opening experience.  I had no idea that something like this was even being done.  It makes perfect sense, but I am still very skeptical about it.  The idea of a computer program that can simulate classroom conditions seems really farfetched to me.  Don't get me wrong, we should do anything we can to try to help prepare teachers and to try and make educating teachers more effective.  Computer simulations don't carry a whole lot of weight in my book when regarding students because you can honestly never know how all of those students are going to react.  Do the programs take into account everything that could be happening in an individual child's life and influence his/her actions in the simulation.  Can it even do that?  Can legitimately do that for five students in the one program and up to 18 in the other?  I highly doubt that.  I don't think it's possible.  Who can say how people are going to act?  The decisions we make are influenced by so many factors and I don't necessarily think that these simulations are good indicators of how students actually act.  It also is interesting for one of the programs to use actors, which I think lends some degree of realism to decision making skills.  But the flaw in that system is that they are connected by microphone and situated across campus at the university (Central Florida).  I think that this completely shatters any sense of realism that the simulation generates.  The article is correct that it will work out for student teachers who are trying to work on a limited skillset, but overall, I do not think that it is very indicative of a general classroom setting.  The other point I have with this article is the fact that they simply label the children in the simulations as "urban."  last I checked there were as many "urban" students who could act like and be like suburban or rural students.  This was one of the things that led me to believe that a program like this is not very effective.  The program is putting these kids and their profiles in a metaphorical box.  It almost seems like it is trying to stereotype kids and in doing so, they have severely limited the effectiveness of the program.  There is no doubt in my mind though that I would participate in these studies and try out the simulations for myself.  Some practice is better than no practice at all, even if some of that practice may not be entirely accurate or realistic.  That's probably what they are going for anyways.

Education Week December 8 Reflection

The main article I read was the "Digital Transformational Key to K-12 Success."  I thought that there was a substantial amount of negativity from this article concerning the difficulties that states would encounter when trying to implement new policies concerning digital education.  The man mentions that “What we put down [in writing] today, in a year, technology can rapidly make obsolete" and he is right to say that it at least makes a roadmap.  I think it's important to get stuff down.  Policy is no different from the technology itself.  In a few years, the stuff you bought/wrote is going to be outdated.  While you can't continually update the technology, since it gets ridiculously expensive, you have to buy something sometime.  Otherwise, you will continually use the excuse that it will be outdated soon and never buy anything.  The same goes with the policies that surround technology.  you can't be paralyzed by the fear of it becoming outdated, otherwise you are never going to get it done and written down.
I was actually really surprised to read about the Florida Virtual school that serves 97,000 students.  That number just blows my mind.  I don't at all agree with the fact that High School should be a completely online experience because there is so much more to a high school education that simply learning all of the facts in math class etc.  There is a great degree of socialization and other skills that you learn while attending a physical high school.  I'm sure that even Barry Jahn would agree with me that it is a terrible idea to do a completely online high school.  Teachers cant be replaced.  I'm sure he completely agrees with the Michigan school districts decision to make sure that every student takes at least one online course to graduate from high school.  That is a great idea.  With the proliferation of technology, I think it is imperative that student's familiarize themselves with taking classes online and be able to function in an online educational setting.  Back to the online high school thought though, how do they fund the online school?  Do they simply appropriate the funds that would have been spent on the students had they gone to a regular public school to the resources needed for the online school?  How does that affect the schools who no longer have those 97,000 students and the money that is given to the schools that those 97,000 students provide?  I'd like to see how those numbers affect those schools and what that does to the money available to those schools and teachers in those districts...

December 1 Education Week Reflection

The New Vigor Propelling Training was the first article I read from this issue, and the very first paragraph jumped out at me: "preservice preparation could be the next stop on the teacher-quality continuum to receive a similarly high level of scrutiny."  My very first thought was hey that sounds an awful lot like what we are doing!  Because it pretty much is.  It got me to thinking about Willamette's program as opposed to other Masters Programs.  Our student teaching session is in our fourth semester, but they mentioned in the article that year long residencie's may become the new big thing.  It seemed like an awful lot to me, but then again, as someone who is feeling a little burned out on schooling after three and a half years of undergrad and jumping right into part time graduate school, it makes sense that I may grimace at the idea of a year long residency.  It also goes into the fact that teachers aren't prepared well, or prepared well enough.  First and second year teachers are going to struggle.  That is obvious.  I can't help but think to myself that that is just what happens.  Does that necessarily mean they aren't well prepared.  Perhaps.  I honestly think that it has more to do with the fact that you don't get good at something if you don't practice it with real world application.  Would a year long residency help?  Yeah it probably would a little bit no matter what.  Would it help the people who were going to stay at that same school district or same school when they are done with their residency?  Definitely!  The people who move away from the area are going to struggle regardless because they are having to get used to a new school, a new peergroup, new curricula, everything new.  Lesson plans are going to change according to different textbooks they have to use.  New schedules are going to dictate how much time they have to teach students different subjects.  I noticed in the article that Oregon was listed as one of the 8 states holding meetings over these reform recommendations.  Is WU's program technically ahead of the curve, even though ours is only a semester long?  if they adopted reforms, would we switch to a year long residency described in the article?  Until more states do this, do we are WU student's look more appealing to school districts because we have had this training?  let's hope so!