This page contains an archive of all of the posts that have been published to the Practical Practice in the category: Current Events. They are listed from oldest to newest.
I first heard Craig Barrett speak when Mabry received the Intel and Scholastic Schools of Distinction Award for Technology Innovation. He seems to have a genuine interest in education. I also especially appreciate the 5 key 21st century skills Brenda Musilli presents. However, I would love to know more about how the foundation defines collaboration and communications. Just in case you missed it:
Today, Intel announced a new initiative to rapidly broaden the reach of its program, Intel Teach. The Intel effort, started in 2000, focuses on training teachers around the world to use personal computers as a tool in classrooms. The company announced at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York that its program, up to now based on face-to-face instruction for teachers, would add a hybrid online program. In the past, Intel Teach involved 40 hours of in-class training for teachers. The new online offering will include eight to 12 hours of face-to-face instruction, and the rest over the Internet, at the teacher’s convenience.
“This is a way to exponentially expand the program,” Craig Barrett, Intel’s chairman, said in an interview.
The Intel Teach effort has trained 4 million teachers worldwide so far, and the company plans to reach another 10 million or so in a decade. The online teacher training is initially aimed at 1.5 million teachers in 15 countries, from the United States to India, over the next four years.
The Intel approach, largely funded through the company’s philanthropic foundation, revolves around the teacher. “What really drives quality education is quality teachers,” Mr. Barrett said. “Computers are a tool, but no more. Teachers are the most important part of bringing kids into the 21st century with 21st century skills.”
The five, key 21st century skills, says Brenda Musilli, president of the Intel Foundation, are: problem solving, collaboration, communications, digital literacy and creative thinking.
In the marketplace of public policy and educational ideas, few have ever been as effectively, even brilliantly marketed as "No Child Left Behind." Who can argue against mom, apple pie, the American flag, and helping every child? The nickname for this law goes well beyond sounding wholesome and good. In fact, the carefully crafted name commands the dimensions of a moral imperative and a patriotic duty. This alone should have caused each of us to pause and start to think critically.
But we are a busy people. Our lives are filled with endless distractions demanding our immediate attention. We barely trust the headlines, and we certainly do not believe the fine print. Taking the law "by name" and trusting our politicians to take care of our children was quite simply the easy thing to do.
And certainly, the intentions of our law makers were not evil.* However, good intentions do not always sound educational policy make. And unless lawmakers amend NCLB, the number of "failing" schools is about to swell from our present 30% (an absurdity in and of itself) to nearly 100% in the next 7 years. Frankly, this angers me greatly. Such failure will not be on the part of our children and their schools, who will none the less be the target of media's blame, but on the part of the politicians who have crafted poor policy into law.
I am hopeful the law will be substantially amended as having most of America's schools labeled a failure is certainly not a politically defensible position for any lawmaker to withstand. Americans quite simply feel confident that the school down the street is doing a pretty good job.** After all, they know those teachers. They know those children.
Our educators work much too hard. We expect and get more from our students today than at any time in our history. To simply label everyone's hard work and impressive record of achievement a failure is anything but a moral imperative or a patriotic duty. It lacks good common sense and is utterly disrespectful.
But what has caused me the greatest level of concern is the cost of lost opportunity. The unanticipated consequence of this legislation has been the dumbing down of curriculum to fact-based, simple recall for the high-stakes tests--the results from which will punish or reward. (Oh, and the reward? You don't get punished. Wow! And in some high performing schools the system redirects your precious, ever-needed resources to the failing schools. So, I guess you get punished, too.) We need a nation of critical thinkers, creative producers, and problem-solvers, not people who have memorized a minimum body of facts that can be easily tested. Critical thinking is hard to measure. Problem solving is difficult to measure. Creative production is illusive and emotive.
And where has the passion for inquiry and thinking gone? Where has the respect and appreciation for culture gone? These have all been left behind in the wake of frenzied efforts to cram facts, disconnected from their realities and contexts, into the minds of unsuspecting children who would increasingly wonder why they have to learn this if they did not already know: it could be on "the test."
Has the life of this generation been reduced to a test of minimum fact recall? My childhood was framed by my teachers within a context of exploration and discovery, of wonder and of amazement, of awe and inspiration, of the beauty of connection and significance.
We steal from and rob our children so as not to leave a child behind.
California State professor, Art Costa, recently said: "What was once educationally significant, but difficult to measure, has been replaced by what is insignificant and easy to measure. So now we test how well we have taught what we do not value."
Our nation will not feel the horrific cost of this tragically flawed educational policy for at least another decade or two. It will be the invisible numbness of a soulless American society functioning at a basic level of empty blandness and boredom, lacking discovery, invention, and creativity. We will consume more and more in our efforts to discover meaningfulness and significance. We will increasingly become a people incapable of doing the hard work of solving enormous global problems. Perhaps because of our short collective memories, no one will understand how this happened.
Educators and the American people as a whole need to demand accountability of politicians.
__________
* I am however reading increasingly about efforts within political circles to off load the cost of public education to the private sector--an effort I would categorically believe to be anti-American at its very core!
**38th and 39th Annual Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll, August, 2006 and 2007
I have not followed John Edwards message very closely (and am not endorsing him here), but when I came across this post on YouTube, I was astounded. When asked what he would do to NCLB, he actually says what I've heard numerous state level educators around the nation say has been the administration's explicit purpose for NCLB: to privatize America's public schools--a move I think is against our nation's core values and one that would seriously threaten the very survival of our democracy.
I've posted about TED before. This year's conference is coming to a close. As I read blog posts from the attending bloggers, I am often deeply touched by the power of hope, the affirmation of the positive, the actualization of creativity, and the dense, saturating belief that we can change the negative forces that limit us as a species on a delicate planet. The exact opposite of the evening news, the exact opposite of fear-based politics, this conference is transformative: bringing together luminaries that can lift us above our present to see a bright way forward. What greater gift?
But enough about what this conference does for me. This post is really about one of the three TED Prize 2008 winners and what he wants to do for public schools, yes, for public schools!
The Prize Itself...
The TED Prize was created as a way of taking the inspiration, ideas and resources that are generated at TED and using them to make a difference. Although the winners receive a prize of $100,000 each, that's the least of what they get. The real prize is that they are granted a WISH. This is the forum to help make their wishes come true.
One of the 2008 Recipients...
In this post I want to call attention to one of the TED Prize 2008 Winners: Dave Eggers. Speaking to the audience, this is his wish:
"I wish that you - you personally and every creative individual and organization you know - will find a way to directly engage with a public school in your area and that you'll then tell the story of how you got involved, so that within a year we have 1,000 examples of transformative partnerships."
The 1,000 brilliant people who attend and present at this annual conference each directly engaging with a public school?! (Just look at the list of people who participated in the conference this year!) I find this an overwhelmingly joyous thought. Educators often are so consumed with the distractions of NCLB that we forget to seek out and build rich partnerships with people in our communities who have and are willing to share giftedness that will transform the life of a child.
This website, Once Upon a School, has been started to facilitate the realization of this wish. I encourage you to explore it, engage with the project, get ideas that you can implement in your own school/classroom, and find ways to make this wish become real in schools (your own?) across this nation!
On a Personal Note...
I hope that a new administration in Washington will unfetter our schools from the shackles that are leaving all of our children, teachers, and schools behind and constitute policy that will allow our profession to reconnect with the substance of our soul: empowering all of the children in our care to reach their highest potential.
We talk a lot in educational circles, and especially those of us who are technology enthusiasts, about global literacy, global competitiveness, global awareness, global warming, connect, connect, connect. It's a big world out there. Blah, blah, blah.
But in this video from TED, Alisa Miller, head of Public Radio International, highlights the irony that in a time when we have the capacity to know more about our world than ever in the history of human kind, we actually know less.
Americans are fed a steady diet of superficial because, according to Alisa, it's simply cheaper to do. I have long decried the sad state of journalism in our country. Listen to her short (about 4 minutes) talk from TED. Then go hug a Social Studies teacher. Then you and the Social Studies teacher subscribe to TED. Watching those presentations will enrich your life!
In the past two weeks I came across two quick reads and two videos that caused me to make some connections worthy of thought.
Bruce Schneier, writing on May 15, 2008, at Wired, made me stop and think about all of the "free" services I routinely explore for their value-added potential in education. I often just make up absurd information when that information is required of me and I don't want to provide it (like, for an email address: noneof@yourbusiness.com). I have never stopped to think about the lifespan or later possible use of this meaningless, inaccurate information. I just don't want any more junk mail. Bruce writes:
Our data is a part of us. It's intimate and personal, and we have basic rights to it. It should be protected from unwanted touch.
We teach children about the socially expected behaviors surrounding our personal physical space from casual to intimate. This article really got me to stop and think about the virtual me, my data (from financial, health, social, professional, civic...) and the socially and legally appropriate ways that information should be touched--information, accurate or not, that comes to represent me and affect decisions made about and for me, perhaps without my knowledge about the decisions ever being made. I might not even know the information was aggregated and used.
I also watched Jonathan Zittrain's presentation (from April 11, 2008, at the Tribeca Grand in NYC) about his new book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. The video of the presentation (about an hour) is graciously made available by the New York Greater Metropolitan Area chapter of the Internet Society at this link. In the presentation Jonathan talks about the generative nature of the internet versus a new push to use "tethered devices" as he calls them--devices that close innovation and are controlled by the manufacturer even after the sale. [I have written briefly about the internet as an operating system before. Jonathan's ideas helped me clarify some of my thinking.]
He mentions several really interesting examples before extending his examples to the FBI paying to have the OnStar system remotely reprogrammed in a car owned by people of interest to the FBI so that everything spoken in the car was transmitted to the FBI through OnStar without anyone in the car being aware. He goes on to say that because of consumer demand we have built an unrivaled infrastructure that could be leveraged for surveillance (by the good guys and the bad): cell phones and other devices.
And then I read this article about the National Cyber Security Initiative by Ryan Singel at Wired:
... would spend billions on unproven, embryonic technology, and possibly illegal or ill-advised projects, according to the analysis ...
While many of the specifics of the plan are classified, U.S. intelligence chief Michael McConnell told the New Yorker in January that he wants the National Security Agency to begin eavesdropping on the internet, and a McConnell aide said the spy agency was prepared to examine the content of e-mails, file transfers and Google searches without a warrant.
I'm not really passing any judgement on these examples. Like most everyone else, I want the bad guys caught. I want us to prevent the bad people from doing bad things to good people. But larger issues may be at stake, issues worthy of careful thought and scrutiny. None of us want to wake up one morning and ask, "How in the world did we get here?!"
The rampant pace at which our technologies are developing is vastly outstripping our awareness of the issues that surround that development and our capacity to have informed conversations about those issues to establish public policy and legal frameworks that are both reasonable, fair, and that appropriately safeguard and balance the best interests of a free democratic society, a capitalist economy, and the rights of the individual. And not only is the pace of development rapid, can it also be completely invisible to public scrutiny and democratic oversight? Should it be? These are complex questions!
And during the week I also came across this video interview, on a less weighty, yet more immediately personal level, at Switched with Clay Shirky, adjunct professor teaching New Media in the graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU. Clay really informs my thinking about the internet.
The issues broadly touched on in this post are complex and have long term implications for freedom, safety, democracy, privacy, economic sustainability, to name but a few. In order to have more informed conversations with our children about these significant, developing concerns, we need to have greater public and professional conversation about data security, privacy, and ways we can move our social, political, and legal structures to develop policy frameworks that keep pace with the challenges that technology brings to our daily lives.
Dare I say it? Is there a problem? Might the problem have little to do with students and teachers and more to do with policy makers who are radically out of touch with reality? I'm just asking questions here.
In March a principal was reportedly arrested in Texas because he allegedly threatened to kill the science teachers at the school if the students didn't pass the end of year high stakes test--and apparently he seemed to actually mean it.
Anita White, who taught at New Braunfels Middle School for 18 years before being transferred this month to the district's Learning Center, said Principal John Burks made the threat in a Jan. 21 meeting with eighth-grade science teachers.
She said Burks was angry that scores on benchmark tests were not better, and the scores on the upcoming Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills tests must show improvement.
"He said if the TAKS scores were not as expected he would kill the teachers," White said. "He said 'I will kill you all and kill myself.' He finished the meeting that way and we were in shock. Obviously, we talked about it among ourselves. He just threatened our lives. After he threatened to kill us, he said, 'You don't know how ruthless I can be.'
"We walked out of the meeting just totally dumbfounded because it was not a joke," White said.
New Braunfels Police spokesman Mike Penshorn said the incident was filed as a verbal assault, but is being investigated as a terroristic threat.
And now I read this from Georgia, my home state of 20 years, where I invested 20 years of my best professional efforts as an educator:
State notifies parents before releasing awful test scores
In social studies CRCT, less than 30 percent pass; In math, 40 percent
By LAURA DIAMOND
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 05/19/08
Georgia school leaders were so shocked by dismal scores on state math and social studies tests, the state superintendent released a statement Monday to prepare parents and others for the results.
According to the unofficial results, only 20 to 30 percent of Georgia's sixth- and seventh-graders passed the state social studies exam. In math, about 40 percent of eighth-graders could be held back because they failed the test.
The state will release official scores from the Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests next month.
Parents whose children failed the math test will be notified by local schools. The state requires eighth-graders to pass the reading and math exams to move to high school.
Where will the school districts in Georgia find enough teachers to teach summer school for the increased number of children who can not be promoted? What educational programs will have to do without, or be eliminated in order to fund this enormous additional expense (that now includes sky rocketing transportation costs)?
Will a significant number of 9th grade teachers have to be reassigned next year to 8th grade to teach those students who could not be promoted based on these results? Will the test results from the summer retakes be "fixed" to solve these enormously disruptive issues?
How many assessments are our students required to take from K-12? And how much money has been spent developing and grading all of these tests? What is the total amount of money spent to date on this accountability agenda that is producing these results? The sum must be staggering! Would this money not be better invested in hiring teachers in the schools that can actually offer services to students that promote academic achievement? Is it time to hold this accountability agenda into account for expense versus value added results?
But the two most important questions that come to my mind: What will be accomplished if we completely break one of our most precious and essential democratic institutions--our public schools?! What of the children?
I remain fascinated by the disruptive impact of technology, and not just in schools, in other institutions and whole societies around the world. The ease of use of pervasive technology, digital cameras and video, with access to immediate global distribution will inevitably be used in social activism that challenges existing social, corporate, and political structures the world over in ways that will make the 1960's in the United States look boring and passé.
To date such activities largely have been entertaining and benign as this video by "Improv Everywhere: We Cause Scenes" demonstrates. They mobilize large groups of people via the internet to show up and stage an improvisation in a public setting.
But in the last couple of days two videos have been posted to YouTube that I suspect are an omen of things to come: people leveraging these tools to make global statements challenging the status quo. In this first example, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer begins a lecture at a university in Hungary as a protester stands up, accuses Microsoft of stealing billions in Hungarian taxpayer money and then throws three eggs at the CEO.
Then Russian presidential candidate Garry Kasparov was delivering a speech when a modified, remote controlled, toy flying helicopter carrying male genitalia came flying toward him. Russian speaking commenters over at Wired.com's post about the incident offered the following translation of Kasparov's comments after the flying object was smashed by security:
I think we have to be thankful for the opposition's demonstration of the level of discourse we need to anticipate. Also, apparently most of their arguments are located beneath the belt." Someone in the audience shouts, "Finally the political power shows its face!" Kasparov quickly replies, "Well, if that's its face..." to laughter from the audience.
I do not speak Russian and have no idea if the translation is accurate or not, but another commenter seems to indicate it is. (Don't watch the video if it will offend you. That's certainly not the point of my including this link to it.)
I include these examples, not to entertain, embarrass, or offend, but to make the point that these tools will inevitably be used for activism--probably in more significant ways that these examples begin to demonstrate. Perhaps this is among the reasons we have seen China's efforts to centrally control the internet in China.
And while governments and corporations the world over have been increasingly leveraging technology for surveillance of their citizens, citizens the world over are going to turn that surveillance, that reporting, that global transparency on the goeverments and corporations themselves. The fact that the technology is readily available to everyone will disturb a delicate balance.
As a photographer who reads numerous photo-related blogs around the world, I have seen an increase in posts about the legal rights of photographers as increasing numbers of photographers, while taking pictures in public places, are claiming to be harassed by police and security. In fact a large protest rally is being organized in Los Angeles.
But It Just Got Even Easier
A company in Israel, FlixWagon, has now made it possible to broadcast live from your Nokia Series 60 3rd edition cell phone! (Here is a link to an interview with FlixWagon by Robert Scoble over at FastCompany.TV.) Now, as long as a cell phone signal is available, security will not be able to confiscate the video shot of a staged incident or event as it will already have been broadcast. Certainly this is only the beginning of an increase in this capacity to broadcast your life coming to market. People seem to love it!
As I have mentioned before, our capacity to develop technology is vastly outpacing our capacity as a society to come to terms with how to use this technology in ways society feels are appropriate, fair and proper. Social norms have yet to be formed about any of this. What is private? What is public? What expectations should I have to anonymity of person, of information, of data?
Implications for School
This technology has significant implications for learning. If I were a teacher today, I would be all over uStream.tv! For some time now educational technology enthusiasts have chided our profession for banning cell phones from our classrooms. The more cautious educators have been reluctant to change practice citing the ways the cell phone can be abused in the school setting.
And now that live CellCasting (remember you first read the term here!) is possible, I can see this debate heating up significantly. I for one do not blame schools for wanting to proceed with cautious deliberation and informed integration. But, in the long term, school is likely to be the place this new disruptive technology has the least impact.
The world is being carved wide open, and, for better or worse, we will all get to see what it looks like.
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Dare I say it? Is there a problem? Might the problem have little to do with students and teachers and more to do with policy makers who are radically out of touch with reality? I'm just asking questions here.