Author: Mr. Chase

Can you imagine making this when you were in school?

Watch this first (and comment), then come back.

I ask the question for two reasons:

  • I can’t imagine being bold enough to tackle the topic of this documentary while I was in high school in rural Illinois. Our history curriculum rarely, if ever, stepped outside of a study of the wars. This is to say nothing of its almost total ignorance of marginalized groups and the completely blind eye it turned to LGBT history.
  • The quality is pretty wonderful. I’d use this in my classroom to intro any of the topics listed above (probably  not war), and generate class conversation and questions about marginalized and untaught histories. Max and Sam are working with a brilliant script, mined excellent primary sources, and kept a close watch on the final product. I may have had their taste in school, but I didn’t have anything that looked like their abilities. Maybe I was an underachiever.

Pretty tremendous.

What’s the barrier between gov’t. agencies and civic engagement via social media?

“We do agree agencies aren’t doing the best job of engaging on these networks yet,” wrote Dash in an e-mail to techPresident in response to some questions about lessons learned from the Expert Labs experience. “One key finding we’ve focused on in our final reports is that the division between communications/outreach arms of agencies, which typically manage social networking accounts, and the policy making groups within agencies, which actually impact the decisions being made, is a pretty significant barrier to public participation.”

via Expert Labs: Putting The ‘Public’ Into Public Policy Wasn’t Easy | TechPresident.

Are PARCC, SBAC, and Common Core State Standards Initiatives the DOE’s SuperPAC?

It’s a surprise to me to find myself writing in agreement with something coming out of the Pioneer Institute, but their “The Road to a National Curriculum: The Legal Aspects of the Common Core Standards, Race to the Top, and Conditional Waivers” is the first comprehensive piece of scholarship I’ve found that examines the legal nuance of the RtTT effort and compares it to both the letter and the spirit of federal law. The entire white paper (by Robert S. Eitel and Kent D. Talbert with contributions from Williamson M. Evers) is worth a read.

I realize not everyone has the free time to sit and consume a white paper, so I’ll highlight some salient points:

With only minor exceptions, the General Education Provisions Act (“GEPA”), the Department of Education Organization Act (“DEOA”), and the ESEA, as amended by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (“NCLB”), ban federal departments and agencies from directing, supervising, or
controlling elementary and secondary school curriculum, programs of instruction, and instructional materials.

And while RtTT and NCLB waivers don’t explicitly direct, supervise, or control curriculum, programs of instruction, and instructional materials; it’s hard to imagine either isn’t attempting to do so using the levers of financial aid or reprieves from NCLB sanctions.

Eitel, Talbert, and Evers point out:

Thus, rather than permitting state and local authorities to use standards and assessments that uniquely fit a given state as required by the  ESEA, the Race to the Top Assessment Program requires each state in the consortium to use common standards across the respective states of the consortium. The result is that the Race to the Top Assessment Program moves states away from standards and assessments unique to a given state and into a new system of common standards and assessments across the consortia states.

Again, this isn’t the expressed purpose of these moves, but it does appear to be the desired effect.

Regarding the PARCC and SBAC consortia established to draw up RtTT-required assessments, the authors write:

These PARCC and SBAC supplemental funding materials, together with recent actions taken by the Department concerning ESEA waiver
requirements, have placed the agency on a road that will certainly cause it to cross the line of statutory prohibitions against federal direction, supervision or control of curriculum and instructional materials – upsetting the federal system.

…adding…

With conditions that mimic important elements of Race to the Top’s ingredients, the Conditional NCLB Waiver Plan will result in the  Department leveraging the states into a de facto long-term national system of curriculum, programs of instruction, and instructional materials, notwithstanding the absence of legal authority in the ESEA.

The conceit of the argument is that the Department of Ed has implemented these programs and made money available to those who applied. What, specifically, groups like PARCC, SBAC, and CCSSI do with that money after it’s passed on is out of DOE control. If they want to implement a national curriculum, national standards, and national assessments, well bully for them. If each of those pieces happens to be exactly in line with what the DOE would like to see happen but is banned by federal law from doing, all the better.

The result is an education policy SuperPAC that acts in the grey area of the law – aligned with the letter, but in clear opposition of the spirit.

My annotated version of the white paper is here.

An analysis of the how and who of congressional tweets

This sort of helps me understand how SOPA and PIPA came into being…

Browse more infographics.

 

 

Capitol Tweets: The Yeas and Nays of the Congressional Twitterverse | Edelman Digital.

Learning Grounds Ep. 005: In which Daniel discusses policy, microecon and education as a public good

In this episode of Learning Grounds, Education Policy and Management student Daniel explains what he’s learning in the education policy realm and how that might shape his ideas as he heads back into the classroom as an elementary teacher. Also, Zac challenges Scott and Daniel to convince him education is a public good.

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Learning Grounds Episode 004: In which Sarah discusses looking at student work and the difficulty of objectivity

Sarah discusses the difficulty of using protocols to look at student work while remaining objective, and the benefits for teachers when they push through to the other side. We also talk about the complications in giving each trying to pay close attention to every student.

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There’s a chance for learning in the NYC teacher scores

As a journalist, I would have published the scores.
The argument isn’t whether or not the New York Times should have published NYC teacher evaluation scores.
They are a newspaper. The scores are news. Their job is to publish them. They publish the news.
If they’d sat on the scores, if they’d held them internally, if they’d published pieces of them or only profiled certain teachers, they would have been compromising and editorializing.
The coverage of the scores has certainly had an editorializing effect on how the scores are consumed. As José pointed out the other day, the person telling the story affects the narrative.
Now they’re out there, and a conversation has been stoked around the use, intent, validity of the scores.
As it should be.
As a teacher, I abhor the scores.
These scores (and value-added measures in general) are imperfect, imprecise, skewed, and dangerous tools. Let’s make that argument. Let’s make that argument better and more profoundly than those who stand by the scores.
If ever the teaching profession was faced with a teachable moment, this is it. Isn’t this what we do? We make complex issues accessible to those standing on unfamiliar ground and help them come to deep understanding. If we’re right (and we are) the truth of the argument against the scores will become apparent through education.
Yes, resent that time, money, energy must be spent on this. Detest, the scores the same way you detest poor grammar, ignorance of culture and history, or imperfect proofs. Then, find a way to teach toward understanding.
This is one of those few moments in the teaching profession’s wheel house. Let’s not miss it by admiring another problem so long that we forget to teach through it.
Teachers are better than that.
This is where unions can take the lead.
It is time for the AFT and NEA to hike up their big-kid pants and lead their membership not through dues or rallies, but through teaching.
I mean this in two ways. First, teachers are historically challenged when it comes to telling their stories. There’s every reason to believe this inability is only going to be exacerbated when faced with an issue as emotionally charged and personal as the NY scores. If teachers are going to respond and educate, they’re going to need guidance. Every union head in every school across the country should be leading trainings in how to create talking points and craft effective editorials. If there is a conversation to be had about how we measure teachers, let teachers lead it and educate teachers in how best to have those conversations.
Second, after these PR primers, help teachers organize forums and community meetings to build understanding of the scores and all their imperfections. Use the presence of the NYC conversation to move preemptively against other imperfect and unfair measures of teachers. These should have been the moves the moment the courts allowed the publishing of the scores. There’s still time to make this a thoughtful, productive conversation. All it will take is all it has ever taken – teaching.

Thanks to Paul and José for helping me figure out my thinking on this one.

Faced with problems as opportunities, students can make amazing things

This came through my Facebook feed from a friend who teaches in Mission, SD.

It speaks for itself.

The story via NPR:

Unhappy with portrayals of Native Americans in mainstream media, a group of students from South Dakota’s Rosebud Sioux Reservation created a video to show that their community is about more than alcoholism, broken homes and crime.

The students are visiting Washington, D.C., on Monday to lobby Congress for increased funding for schools on reservations.

Filmed in black and white, the student-produced video More Than That takes viewers through the hallways, classrooms and gymnasium of the Rosebud Sioux Reservation’s county high school.

Using their bodies as signposts, the students explain that they’re more than stock images of poverty, alcoholism and violence. With words drawn on their hands, arms and faces, they share the traits that describe who they really are: humor, intelligence, creativity — and the list goes on.

The point the students are trying to make, says English teacher Heather Hanson, is that they’re not victims.

The nonprofit National Association of Federally Impacted Schools invited the Lakota students to attend its winter conference Monday in Washington, D.C. While in town, the students will also lobby South Dakota’s congressional representatives.

Here’s the ABC News special the movie references.

They weren’t content to be exoticized and knew how to tell the story of how they see themselves.

More Than That has 49,750 views right now. ABC’s clip can claim only 17,391.

I take hope in those numbers.

What if we built syllabi like this?

The community over at reddit got a little steamed (understandably) in the wake of SOPA and PIPA.

Not being keen on waiting for the next wave of censorship-inspiring legislation, they decided to write the the bill that was more representative of the people. They wrote are writing it together, online, collaboratively. The first version of the bill was an open google doc where any visitor had editing privileges. Now in v2, the doc is restricted to commenting. (I assume this is to get the doc to a submittable place.)

Even if you don’t have time to read the entire bill, the comments on the definitions section, alone, help show how such a shift in the drafting mindset can inspire greater creation.

I’m starting to think about how scholarship and literature could benefit from this process. What if novelists started using this approach and then took the work offline after the commenting period. Would the increased public “ownership” drive sales?

What if a city council decided to put every matter to their constituents for open comment?

What if, on the first day of class, teachers shared a google doc with their students and said, “Let’s write our expectations for this space?” What if every assignment had a student review period before it was launched?

Interesting.

‘College and Career-Ready’ shoots too low

If you graduate from high school in America, you can find a college that will admit you. I’m not limiting my stance to for-profit, online colleges and universities. Some of the oldest institutions of higher learning in the country, faced with diminished federal funding (see Anya Kamenetz’s DIYU for more on this), are lowering the barriers to admission in order to increase the supply of tuition dollars.

It’s not all a money grab.

We’re sending record numbers of students to college, and we’re telling them it is the correct path (read the only path to success/happiness/money). Many of these students are the first in their families to attend institutions of higher education, and they’re showing up in numbers colleges and universities have never seen before. While much of the literature speaks to the need to help shift the cultures within k-12 schools and their students/families, very little is written about how higher ed needs to think about what it means to be educating shifting populations (see Mike Rose’s thoughts here or in Why School?). It’s what worries me when I see things like the graph on p. 4 of this Achieve report.

If we said the goal of schools was to have kids “life-ready” by the time they left, how would we shift how we look at the work being done in classrooms and schools?

The conversation about “college and career-ready” is an interesting one in that it cleverly makes it sound as though it doesn’t lead to schools forking their curricula to generate two separate tracks for students. If you are to be college-ready, you will be in academic classes. If you are to be career-ready, you will be in vocational classes with the bare-bones academic programs. Vocational programs and academic programs should not be an either/or proposition. College and or career-ready has that as its possibly unintended result and students internalize the distinction. Moreover, teachers internalize the two-track faculty mindset, which erodes internal cohesiveness for faculties.

The idea of a tiered graduation system such as those at work in many European countries is an interesting proposition. I wonder if it doesn’t work to further institutionalize class separations currently at play in the system. Does it say, “We expect all students to meet high standards (and some students to meet higher standards)?” A slippery slope.

If we said, build classrooms and schools to make students life-ready, it would be a messy proposition. I doubt it any messier than college and career-ready. Are we talking all students should be Yale-ready or Phoenix-ready? Are we saying minimum-wage ready or 1% ready? Maybe we’re hoping the language doesn’t raise any questions of whether or not it’s raising the bar.