Included are important news articles from various sources that pertain to education today. Occassionally there are a few tips and tricks relating to education throughout the blog.

Friday, July 4, 2008

School districts find gaps in kindergartners' readiness skills

From: The Plain Dealer
http://www.cleveland.com/news/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/other/1215160456302091.xml&coll=2
Plain Dealer Reporter

When school resumes at the end of August, more than eight of every 10 kindergartners in the Bay Village district are likely to show up with all the skills necessary to start reading.

Fewer than 2 percent will need intense help to catch up to their classmates, if results are similar to those seen last year on a statewide assessment.

Compare that with the Cleveland public schools, where last year fewer than two of every 10 kindergartners scored at the high end of the state evaluation and 45 percent needed concentrated support to get up to speed.

The huge difference in readiness skills is evident in schools across Northeast Ohio.

In many cases, the results mirror what decades of research show: The chance of a child being well-prepared for kindergarten rises right along with the parents' income and education level and the use of high-quality preschool programs.

Yet, all public schools are ranked based on the same annual state tests. Cleveland just edged into the "continuous improvement" category - the equivalent of a "C" - last year. Bay Village is perennially in the "excellent" group.

The tests that contribute to such rankings start in third grade, so the pressure is on the minute kindergartners walk through the door.

Thea Wilson, who heads early childhood education for the Cleveland public schools, acknowledges there's a certain element of unfairness.

"Our children have to hurdle so many obstacles just to get to the starting gate," she said.

Among those obstacles, she said, is the poor quality of many child-care centers in the city.

Wilson is pushing to start up more free preschools at elementary schools across the district. In 2005, there were 22. Now, there are 40, and she hopes to add at least six next year with partial funding from Head Start.

She also is working to bring parents of the district's youngest children into the process.

Parent involvement is a given at Normandy Elementary in Bay Village, where James McGlamery is principal for students in kindergarten through second grade.

"The students are very much ready by the time they come to us," he said.

He estimates at least 70 percent of the youngsters have attended preschool.

"Years ago, children started to learn to read in first grade," said Carla Calevich, director of curriculum and instruction for the Brecksville-Broadview Heights district. "But with the new state standards, now that begins in kindergarten."

Between state standards and the federal testing mandates of the No Child Left Behind law, instruction is driven more than ever by data - not entirely a bad thing in Calevich's view.

"We can look at grade levels, classes and individual students to drill down and find areas of strength and need," she said.

Sandy Miller, who heads the Ohio Department of Education's office of early learning and school readiness, said the state has focused on reading since 2000 because "it is the foundation for all subject areas."

More recently, Gov. Ted Strickland and state legislators have beefed up funding so more districts can offer preschool, she said.

And the Early Learning Initiative - basically the state's Head Start for low-income families - is serving its target of 12,000 children after earlier versions were criticized for too-rigid eligibility requirements.

Using a grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the state also will work with 10 schools - to be announced in September - to figure out how to ease children's transition from preschool to the early grades.

Ohio's investments in preschool will pay off down the road with more high school graduates and skilled workers and fewer people arrested or on welfare, said Debra Ackerman of the National Institute for Early Education Research.

"This is how you can get the best bang for your public dollar," she said.

But research has shown the levels of preschool attendance take the shape of a "U," she added, with use dipping for working-class families. They make too much to qualify for a subsidy but not enough to afford high-quality preschool.

The average cost for a full-day program in Cuyahoga County is about $11,000 a year.

County preschool program also helps train staff

That's one of many problems tackled by Invest in Children, a public-private partnership administered by the Cuyahoga County commissioners.

Executive Director Gabriella Celeste said the just-completed first year of the county's universal preschool program saw about 1,000 children served at 24 sites. That includes private programs, Head Start centers and home-based care.

Participation is voluntary, but the ultimate goal is to make sure everyone has access to good, affordable preschools. Scholarships are given to help close the money gap for working parents.

Wade Child Care Center, in Cleveland's Glenville neighborhood, is one of the universal pre-kindergarten sites getting that assistance. Stacy Sheppard, a teacher in the Cleveland district, said her 5-year-old son, Nile, has benefited from Wade's frequent field trips to nearby museums and its emphasis on vocabulary skills.

"If my son hadn't attended Wade, I might be nervous about him starting school. But they've gotten him ready for kindergarten and beyond," she said.

Help Me Grow is one of Invest in Children's partner agencies. As part of the program, specialists visit homes to teach parents about language development and link them to local libraries.

Tierra Dunn of Cleveland said specialist Sharon Fagin has given her helpful ideas about activities to put her 20-month-old- daughter, Taliyah Moore, on the path to reading.

Starting Point, another agency under the umbrella of Invest in Children, has been pushing the importance of literacy for years, said its executive director, Billie Osborne-Fears.

Wilson, from the Cleveland schools, said readiness scores there have improved over the past few years and the latest data on preschoolers show even more promise. "These children just need to get the opportunity to learn," she said. "We just need to plant the seed."

Thursday, July 3, 2008

Police aim to fight crime w/txt msgs

From: eSchool News
http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/top-news/index.cfm?i=54404&i-d
From eSchool News staff and wire service reports

Efforts seek to get teens and others to text-message tips anonymously

Primary Topic Channel: Safety & security

Police in the 1970s urged citizens to "drop a dime" in a pay phone to report crimes anonymously. Now, in an increasing number of cities, cyber-savvy youths and other tipsters are being invited to use their thumbs--to identify criminals using text messages.

Police hope the idea helps recruit teens and 20-somethings who wouldn't normally dial a Crime Stoppers hotline to share information with authorities, while potentially making schools and other facilities safer.

"If somebody hears Johnny is going to bring a gun to school, hopefully they'll text that in," said Sgt. Brian Bernardi of the Louisville, Ky., Metro Police Department, which rolled out its text-message tip line in June.

Departments in Boston and Cincinnati started accepting anonymous text tips about a year ago. Since then, more than 100 communities have taken similar steps or plan to do so. The internet-based systems route messages through a server that encrypts cell phone numbers before they get to police, making tips virtually impossible to track, the authorities say.

In Louisville earlier this week, Bernardi's computer displayed a text message from a person identified only as "Tip563." It read: "someone has vandalized the school van at valor school on bardstown rd in fern creek." The note also reported illegal dumping in a trash container and in the woods.

"It's obvious that the future of communication is texting," said officer Michael Charbonnier, commander of the Boston Police Department's Crime Stoppers unit. "You look at these kids today and that's all they're doing. You see five kids standing on the corner, and they're texting instead of having a conversation with each other."

When Boston adopted the system last year, the first text tip yielded an arrest in a New Hampshire slaying. In the 12 months that ended June 15, Boston police logged 678 text tips, nearly matching the 727 phone tips during the same period.
Earlier this year, a text tip led to the arrest of a notorious suspect in a drug case.

"We've gotten some great drug information, specific times, dates, names of suspects, locations, pickup times, license plate numbers," Charbonnier said. In another instance, a hearing-impaired man who could not call 911 used a text message to report a domestic violence incident.

Since the beginning of the year, cities such as Tampa, San Francisco, Seattle, Denver, Indianapolis, New Orleans, and Detroit have started their own text-based tip systems, according to Texas-based Anderson Software, a leading provider of the technology. Many cities are adding the text messages to a system that already accepted anonymous tips through a web site.

Lisa Haber, a sheriff's detective who heads the Tampa-area Crime Stoppers unit, recently spent an hour exchanging 21 text messages with a tipster about a possible stolen car. It didn't yield an arrest, but Haber said it allowed her to glimpse the potential of being able to communicate in real time with texters. A marketing blitz will help get the word out when Tampa-area students return to school later this summer.

"It's got a lot of potential," said Cincinnati police Lt. David Fink, whose agency has collected about five text tips a month since adopting the system in May 2007. "Just like when we started Crime Stoppers 27 years ago, it took some time for it to catch on."

Sarah Coss, an 18-year-old incoming freshman at the University of Tampa, typically logs around 6,000 text messages a month chatting to her friends. She thinks people who use text messaging every day will be more likely to report crimes that way, and the impersonal nature of text messaging will give more people her age the confidence to share information with authorities.

"It might take a while for people to know about it and get more comfortable with it, and for people to know it's really anonymous, and they're not going to get in trouble," she said.

Just like callers to a crime hotline, text tipsters can collect rewards for significant information. It's done with the cooperation of banks that hand over the cash--no questions asked--to people who present a code issued by police.

Officers acknowledge it might take time to get used to the text shorthand favored by younger people, who tend to LOL (laugh out loud) at the relative technological cluelessness of their parents' generation.

"We were kind of nervous about that, having to learn a new code language," Bernardi chuckled.

Links:
Crime Stoppers
Anderson Software

Wednesday, July 2, 2008

Online safety: Dispelling common myths

From: eSchool News
http://www.eschoolnews.com/conference-info/necc/highlights/index.cfm?i=54386&i-d

Primary Topic Channel: NECC

Video

At NECC 2008, a panel of internet safety experts agreed: Education is the best tool to keep kids safe online.

From Closets to Community: Our PLC Saga

From: Teacher Magazine
http://www.teachermagazine.org/tm/articles/2008/07/02/39tln_rigsbee.h19.html
By Cindi Rigsbee

My initiation into the world of professional learning communities was unusually swift. The staff at my school had to get from zero to functional teams faster than most schools. And although we knew that swimming was the only option, sinking was definitely part of my past experience.

Most of my years in teaching have been spent in "at-risk" middle schools—schools that have Central Office staff visiting nearly every day and morale problems that interfere with instruction. In fact, I once chaired a teacher morale committee at one of these schools. Morale was so bad that the committee members wouldn’t even show up for the meetings.

After years of working to improve student learning (and teacher dispositions) in these challenging settings, I was given the opportunity to step over the county line and help open a brand new middle school. In July 2006, our faculty met for the first time for a summer retreat. We were strangers, most of us, a melting pot of teachers from all over the county, and from many neighboring counties, who had the same vision for being part of developing an exemplary school.

I remember feeling awkward when it came time for lunch. No one really knew where to sit, but I grabbed a teacher I had met in the parking lot, and we ate together. It was a strange feeling to realize that after many years, I would be teaching beside people I barely knew. But the world was about to spin in another direction. Just minutes after the tasty dessert, I heard the words "professional learning community" for the first time.

I take that back. I'm sure I'd heard the words before. But so what? Of course we are professionals. Of course we want to learn. And all schools consider themselves communities. But I was about to embark on a PLC journey that would change my thinking about schools and "community."

To make the PLC case to our newly melded staff, our administrators brought in an expert to speak to us—a middle grades teacher who was part of a successful professional learning team. We soon learned we had something in common with him: he'd been a member of a faculty that had recently opened a brand new school not far from us. We sat and listened, wondering if our school could ever display the positive characteristics he described.

Unfortunately, the school year began with our new building unfinished, and we became squatters at a nearby school. Circumstances were difficult. Not one of our teachers had a classroom. The band held class in the host school's instrument closet. The former "shop" became two classrooms with no doors or instructional boards. Teachers wrote lessons on chart paper.

We soon began gravitating to the media center during our planning periods. It was there, where we sought refuge (and a place to sit), that our professional learning communities were born. People who had been total strangers only a month before were now inseparable: making plans, discussing instruction, and collecting student learning data. By the time we moved into our new building in early November, we were a blended faculty. We had the same mission and goals, but we still needed to define our relationships within our own walls.

Growing a Culture

As we settled into our new home, our administrators pulled together a five-member group of teacher leaders who comprised the instructional team. We worked for several days that year with a regional school leadership institute, participating in sessions like "Building a PLC Culture." We soon realized we had much to learn before we could truly define ourselves as "a collaborative team whose members work interdependently to achieve common goals linked to the purpose of all."

Even so, we have made great strides since those first few months when we didn't have a place to call our own. Content area PLCs are thriving, planning together daily. Students are assessed using common documents every three weeks, and teachers adjust instruction according to those results. Grade level PLCs are meeting, and while they are reminiscent of "middle school team meetings" of my past, there is one major exception: No longer do we sit around a table and discuss student behavior or share "woe is me's." Instead, all our conversations were focused on one result: student achievement.

In addition, our PLCs had a component that most schools would have difficulty implementing. Because 8th graders were "grandfathered" and able to stay at their original middle schools, we opened with only 6th and 7th grades. This situation meant that elective teachers were without students in the middle of the day—the time they would eventually teach 8th grade electives. Our administration saw this as a tremendous opportunity to build PLCs that could cross the border between curricular areas.

That first year, elective teachers participated in ten literacy workshops—professional development that gave them strategies to teach reading and writing through their own content. Then, during the middle-of-the-day time slot, they "buddied" with a core teacher and shared students. Sometimes they were team teachers in the same room; sometimes they pulled students for remediation or enrichment activities. Importantly, the administration allowed times for core and elective teachers to meet in grade level PLCs together. There were times when administrators covered duties for teachers so that all disciplines could meet and plan together.

While we were working quickly with colleagues we barely knew, I believe that our fast pace was helpful in keeping out some of the negative feelings that can carry over from year to year and make a true professional learning community very difficult to build or sustain. Those early days without our own building bonded us in a positive way. Currently, our school is thriving, and I believe our entire staff would agree that a strong relationship among colleagues is one of the most attractive characteristics of our school.

We are also participating in a regional teacher leadership network created by the Center for Teaching Quality and funded by the Wachovia Foundation. We are still relatively new to this work, and the opportunity to share ideas with colleagues in other schools who are further along in the process of forming and utilizing PLCs has been very valuable to us. Most of this dialogue takes place online in a virtual learning community. And while many of the schools involved are within an hour's driving distance, we all know that every school is a time-bound island. The technologies supported by CTQ make it possible to knit these islands of teachers together into a meaningful whole.

For schools that don't experience the "start-up" situation we had, the challenge is to find a way for teachers to build the all-important trust and respect. Each school has its own distinctiveness; Professional learning communities can grow out of that individuality and thrive as they work together for children.

And I have to wonder how much easier our professional lives could have been in my former school if PLCs had been established. Maybe there wouldn't have been a need for a morale committee. Certainly, we would have managed to actually have a meeting!

Free K-12 content available through iTunes U

From: eSchool News
http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/top-news/index.cfm?i=54390&i-d
From eSchool News staff and wire service reports
From eSchool News staff and wire service reports


Primary Topic Channel: Web Resources

A new section on Apple's iTunes U contains a wealth of free online content for K-12 educators.

The State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA) announced the availability of these materials during the National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) in San Antonio July 2. As with other content on iTunes U, which before had been geared primarily toward college and adult learners, the new resources can be downloaded to a computer or mobile media player for easy playback and review.

Arizona, Florida, Maine, Michigan, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Utah--along with individual school districts, museums, and other educational institutions--are now sharing resources not only for K-12 educators in their own states, but also for teachers around the world, through iTunes U. The service's new K-12 initiative creates a place where professional development, curriculum resources, best practices, and samples of student work are easily accessible from a single location, SETDA said.

"This comprehensive collection of high-quality digital content offers teachers and students a single location to access resources on topics from Florida history to the Navajo language to nanotechnologies," said Mary Ann Wolf, SETDA's executive director. "Teachers can now access these resources in real time to support teaching and learning. The new K-12 resources on iTunes U address the critical need to engage students through technology-based resources in the core curriculum areas."

Michigan, for example, has posted content from its MI Learning initiative, which includes podcasts on school leadership and professional development, as well as lecture modules on high school business and marketing. The Florida Center for Instructional Technology offers resources on history, digital literacy, and technology integration. And Maine's Education Department has added material on teaching and learning with digital text and adding inquiry to science lessons, among other topics.

"Michigan is constantly looking for ways to innovate in education," said Michigan's superintendent of public instruction, Mike Flanagan. "MI Learning on iTunes U presents a unique opportunity to engage students, teachers, and parents in new ways of learning. With the growth of mobile devices and interactive media, we now have a variety of content options that helps learning happen any time, anywhere, and not just inside the classroom. That is true innovation."

"It is extremely exciting to be able to share best practices with the educational community via this pioneering approach to digital content," said Kate Kemker, Florida's director of technology learning and innovation. "This project pushes the envelope with technology and provides professional development and curricula resources from Florida and other states to the greater educational community."

"Maine has been working closely with partners statewide to bring together materials that foster a 21st-century learning environment," said Jeff Mao, Maine's learning technology policy director. "iTunes U is now an even better resource for K-12 educators, and we look forward to adding more content to enhance and extend teaching and learning." iTunes U is an area of the

iTunes Store dedicated to providing free educational content (See "Schools use technology to share course content.". iTunes, a free software download for Macs or PCs, is required. Focused collections of content designed for use in elementary, middle, and high school are available in the K-12 category of iTunes U.

Links:
iTunes U
State Educational Technology Directors Association

Tuesday, July 1, 2008

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

From: theatlantic.com
[website]
by
Nicholas Carr

What the Internet is doing to our brains

"Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial “ brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”

I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets’reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”

Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

Anecdotes alone don’t prove much. And we still await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition. But a recently published study of online research habits , conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think. As part of the five-year research program, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site. Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it. The authors of the study report:

It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.

Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.

Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.

But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”

“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler , Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”

The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. People used to think that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. But brain researchers have discovered that that’s not the case. James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, says that even the adult mind “is very plastic.” Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”

As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies. The mechanical clock, which came into common use in the 14th century, provides a compelling example. In Technics and Civilization, the historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford described how the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.” The “abstract framework of divided time” became “the point of reference for both action and thought.”

The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man. But it also took something away. As the late MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum observed in his 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, the conception of the world that emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping instruments “remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality.” In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.
The process of adapting to new intellectual technologies is reflected in the changing metaphors we use to explain ourselves to ourselves. When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their brains as operating “like clockwork.” Today, in the age of software, we have come to think of them as operating “like computers.” But the changes, neuroscience tells us, go much deeper than metaphor. Thanks to our brain’s plasticity, the adaptation occurs also at a biological level.

The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition. In a paper published in 1936, the British mathematician Alan Turing proved that a digital computer, which at the time existed only as a theoretical machine, could be programmed to perform the function of any other information-processing device. And that’s what we’re seeing today. The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.

When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.

The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets. When, in March of this year, TheNew York Times decided to devote the second and third pages of every edition to article abstracts , its design director, Tom Bodkin, explained that the “shortcuts” would give harried readers a quick “taste” of the day’s news, sparing them the “less efficient” method of actually turning the pages and reading the articles. Old media have little choice but to play by the new-media rules.

Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today. Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us. The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.

About the same time that Nietzsche started using his typewriter, an earnest young man named Frederick Winslow Taylor carried a stopwatch into the Midvale Steel plant in Philadelphia and began a historic series of experiments aimed at improving the efficiency of the plant’s machinists. With the approval of Midvale’s owners, he recruited a group of factory hands, set them to work on various metalworking machines, and recorded and timed their every movement as well as the operations of the machines. By breaking down every job into a sequence of small, discrete steps and then testing different ways of performing each one, Taylor created a set of precise instructions—an “algorithm,” we might say today—for how each worker should work. Midvale’s employees grumbled about the strict new regime, claiming that it turned them into little more than automatons, but the factory’s productivity soared.

More than a hundred years after the invention of the steam engine, the Industrial Revolution had at last found its philosophy and its philosopher. Taylor’s tight industrial choreography—his “system,” as he liked to call it—was embraced by manufacturers throughout the country and, in time, around the world. Seeking maximum speed, maximum efficiency, and maximum output, factory owners used time-and-motion studies to organize their work and configure the jobs of their workers. The goal, as Taylor defined it in his celebrated 1911 treatise, The Principles of Scientific Management, was to identify and adopt, for every job, the “one best method” of work and thereby to effect “the gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb throughout the mechanic arts.” Once his system was applied to all acts of manual labor, Taylor assured his followers, it would bring about a restructuring not only of industry but of society, creating a utopia of perfect efficiency. “In the past the man has been first,” he declared; “in the future the system must be first.”

Taylor’s system is still very much with us; it remains the ethic of industrial manufacturing. And now, thanks to the growing power that computer engineers and software coders wield over our intellectual lives, Taylor’s ethic is beginning to govern the realm of the mind as well. The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as “knowledge work.”

Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California—the Googleplex—is the Internet’s high church, and the religion practiced inside its walls is Taylorism. Google, says its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, is “a company that’s founded around the science of measurement,” and it is striving to “systematize everything” it does. Drawing on the terabytes of behavioral data it collects through its search engine and other sites, it carries out thousands of experiments a day, according to the Harvard Business Review, and it uses the results to refine the algorithms that increasingly control how people find information and extract meaning from it. What Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind.

The company has declared that its mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It seeks to develop “the perfect search engine,” which it defines as something that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.” In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.

Where does it end? Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.” In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”

Such an ambition is a natural one, even an admirable one, for a pair of math whizzes with vast quantities of cash at their disposal and a small army of computer scientists in their employ. A fundamentally scientific enterprise, Google is motivated by a desire to use technology, in Eric Schmidt’s words, “to solve problems that have never been solved before,” and artificial intelligence is the hardest problem out there. Why wouldn’t Brin and Page want to be the ones to crack it?

Still, their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.

The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.

Maybe I’m just a worrywart. Just as there’s a tendency to glorify technological progress, there’s a countertendency to expect the worst of every new tool or machine. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” Socrates wasn’t wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but he was shortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).

The arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th century, set off another round of teeth gnashing. The Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness, making men “less studious” and weakening their minds. Others argued that cheaply printed books and broadsheets would undermine religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread sedition and debauchery. As New York University professor Clay Shirky notes, “Most of the arguments made against the printing press were correct, even prescient.” But, again, the doomsayers were unable to imagine the myriad blessings that the printed word would deliver.

So, yes, you should be skeptical of my skepticism. Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists will be proved correct, and from our hyperactive, data-stoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom. Then again, the Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different. The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.

If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture. In a recent essay, the playwright Richard Foreman eloquently described what’s at stake:

I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.”

As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”

I’m haunted by that scene in 2001. What makes it so poignant, and so weird, is the computer’s emotional response to the disassembly of its mind: its despair as one circuit after another goes dark, its childlike pleading with the astronaut—“I can feel it. I can feel it. I’m afraid”—and its final reversion to what can only be called a state of innocence. HAL’s outpouring of feeling contrasts with the emotionlessness that characterizes the human figures in the film, who go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency. Their thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they’re following the steps of an algorithm. In the world of 2001, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.

ISTE unveils new tech standards for teachers

From: eSchool News
http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/top-news/?i=54371
From eSchool News staff reports




Primary Topic Channel: NECC



Schools looking for a framework to help guide their teachers' use of technology in the classroom have a new resource at their disposal: The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) has issued new technology standards for teachers.

Unveiled June 30 at the National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) in San Antonio, ISTE's revised National Educational Technology Standards (NETS) for Teachers mark a significant overhaul of the group's original teacher technology standards, which ISTE introduced in 2000.

Those first standards focused on what teachers should know about, and be able to do with, technology. The new standards expand this focus to include what teachers should know and be able to do "to promote students' abilities to learn effectively and live productively in an increasingly digital world."

"We've got to have teachers prepared to prepare today's students for the challenges of a new digital world," explained ISTE Chief Executive Officer Don Knezek at the launch of the new framework.

The original teacher standards included categories such as "technology operations and concepts." For the revised standards, "we began with the assumption this time that every teacher recognizes the importance of technology and how it can transform teaching and learning," said Lajeane Thomas, chair of ISTE's standards committee and director of the NETS project.

The "NETS for Teachers, Second Edition" includes five categories, each with its own set of performance indicators: (1) Facilitate and inspire student learning and creativity, (2) Design and develop digital-age learning experiences and assessments, (3) Model digital-age work and learning, (4) Promote and model digital citizenship and responsibility, and (5) Engage in professional growth and leadership.

Under the category "facilitate and inspire student learning and creativity," for example, there are four performance indicators: (1) Promote, support, and model creative and innovative thinking, (2) Engage students in exploring real-world issues and solving authentic problems using digital tools and resources, (3) promote student reflection using collaborative tools, and (4) model collaborative knowledge construction by engaging in learning with students.

For every performance indicator within each category, ISTE has included a rubric that describes what meeting the standard would look like at four levels of proficiency: beginning, developing, proficient, and transformative.

The "transformative" proficiency level is new to the revised standards, and it's indicative of ISTE's more recently articulated focus on really transforming education through the use of technology, not just layering technology over traditional educational practices, Knezek said. This notion of transforming education with the help of technology is also the theme of this year's NECC (see "NECC attendees urged to become ‘change agents'").


The new NETS for Teachers mark the culmination of a year-long process in which ISTE solicited feedback from ed-tech stakeholders worldwide. The group held at least 25 face-to-face forums with more than 600 participants, and another 1,000 people took part in online surveys and two virtual forums.

The revised teacher standards represent the second step in ISTE's effort to update all of its ed-tech standards. At last year's NECC, ISTE unveiled new NETS for students, and the group kicked off an effort at this year's conference to revise its NETS for administrators, which will be released at NECC 2009.

Kim Vidoni, educational technology coordinator for the Nevada Department of Education, said her state is in the process of revising its ed-tech plan and technology standards, "and we'll be looking to these new NETS for teachers as we do this."

Link:
International Society for Technology in Education

A Teacher’s Transcript: The Value of Failure

From: The Apple
http://www.theapple.com/benefits/4678-a-teachers-transcript-the-value-of-failure
By Kevin Bibo


Teachers know a lot of stuff. We are generally respected for our knowledge and our ability to share and pass on this information to others. This kind of respect is welcomed by most teachers, so welcome in fact that sometimes we let it go to our heads. There is power in knowledge, and most teachers wield this power with professionalism and maturity. Teachers get to play the role of wise sage day in and day out. People come to us for answers to problems because we can usually help them out. Most students treat us like “fountains of facts” or “wells of wisdom.” It’s cool to know more stuff than most people. It’s fun to play along with the Jeopardy contestants and beat them sometimes (never for me personally). Over time some teachers just grow accustomed to their role and start to forget what it was once like to be uninformed or to fail.

I recently had the wonderful opportunity to participate in a four-day course for training teachers in a popular industry level video editing software application. The other participants included the textbook’s author (a fantastic resource and gracious instructor), two software engineers, a documentarian, and five other teachers who currently teach the video editing software in some capacity in their own classrooms to their own students.

We spent four days exploring the text, teaching small units, and sharing our teaching experiences. I had a truly enjoyable time, and I learned a huge amount from the instructor/author and my colleagues. At the end of the four days, we took a test that when passed would certify us as qualified instructors by the software manufacturer. The pass rate was 85%, high by public educational standards, but not by computer certification norms. When the test was completed only the two software engineers passed. The teachers were disappointed, as was the instructor, to say the least.

I must admit it was quite a blow to see the words FAIL on the screen once I had submitted my exam for scoring. When I grade student work, I try to avoid the word because of its negative connotation. But I teach teenagers, and I am an adult, so a simple four letter word should not bother me, right? I think it’s important that teachers be cognizant of the effects of failure. While I believe that failing students is necessary and important to the students’ overall and long-term success in life, I think we need to be sensitive to how we treat failure. A giant red “F” written across an essay might not be the best way to support our students. Our ultimate goal in education is not to break students down, but to build them up

I now have a new obstacle to overcome. Failure of the test I took was not an option. The school district paid for the course and expected me to be certified upon completion. Oops. The good news is that I get a redo; in this case, a second chance to take the test. But I won’t get a third chance, so I must get it right this time. Our students experience the angst of mandatory success in our classrooms every day. But the further teachers get away from being students themselves, the more unfamiliar becomes the need to succeed in this way. Sure, we have the pressure of standards, administrators, and common assessments of the performance of our students, but that is not the same as struggling for personal success.

When was the last time you failed an exam, or a class, or any kind of test in your life? I’ll bet it was a humbling experience. Our humility with our students is our greatest asset as teachers, greater even than our wealth of knowledge. Our modesty and our willingness to be available to our students is our greatest power. Sometimes it helps if we fail in something that is important to us. Failure humanizes us. If we share these experiences with our students, then it gives them the opportunity to see us as people, and not just icons.

Reflect for a moment on how you became this smart. How did you achieve wisdom? For most people failure had something to do with it. But it’s funny how the wise and the smart can often lose touch with their individual paths to success and the many, many failures along the way. Remembering the times we fell short will keep us both humble and wise as we educate our students.

Monday, June 30, 2008

Schools could benefit.

From: philly.com
http://www.philly.com/philly/education/20080630_Schools_could_benefit_.html
Author: Faye Flam

Where you vote may influence how you vote

If you're an undecided voter, where you vote could subconsciously influence your choices. Researchers at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford found that people who voted in schools were more likely to support increased education funding.
Wharton's Jonah Berger said that marketing specialists already knew colors and other environmental cues can influence buying decisions. But could that idea extend from the convenience store to the voting booth? The researchers first looked at voting data from Arizona's general election. That's where they found that even when they corrected for where people lived, voters in a school were more likely to back an education funding initiative.

Then they set up a laboratory experiment in which they asked people to participate in a mock vote on school funding. One group of subjects was exposed to pictures of lockers, hallways, and other images invoking school. The rest saw churches or other buildings.

Berger said he told the subjects to answer an inconsequential question about the brightness of the building images. They were told these were part of a different study unrelated to the voting one.

The result: Those who saw the school images were significantly more likely to vote for school funding.

"It's not that people are dumb," Berger said, or that they're easily manipulated. They won't switch from Obama to McCain based on a building or a wall color.

He suspects the setting matters only when voters don't enter the booth with strong opinions, and on issues where the setting is connected to the vote.

Now, that's something school officials could learn from.

Could Standard Grading Practices Be Counterproductive?

From: Education Week
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2008/06/30/43barnwell-com_web.h27.html?tmp=515556529
Vol. 27

By Paul Barnwell

Imagine the following scenario: Valerie gets her report card back on a day when palpable excitement and fear surge through the school as students bustle back to homeroom in the afternoon. She is relieved­—straight A’s, as usual—and goes on her way. Valerie is a responsible student—some might label her a “teacher pleaser.” She completes most of her homework, despite struggling a bit on exams.

In another classroom, Jonathan gets his report card from his homeroom teacher, and his hands tremble as he unfolds the paper. A few C’s, a few D’s, and one F—and this despite the fact that he scored high on his tests in all subjects. Jonathan usually did not turn in homework, and was lazy at times in class. Yet he demonstrated mastery of the content.

With these scenes in mind, please consider the following: What do grades mean? More important, what should they mean? Should they be emphasized in our schools as much as they are?

Grades can mean many things, of course. To receive an A as Valerie did might mean that a student worked diligently, completing all assignments and doing just well enough on tests and other projects. It also could mean that a student knew most of the material going into the course and had no trouble at all, receiving high marks but barely learning anything. It might mean grade inflation. It might be a reflection of a few graded assignments, or it could reflect dozens of assigned grades, depending on the teacher’s assessment methods. Countless other variables are possible when grades are tallied.

It is hardly surprising, then, that parents, teachers, and students often discuss or dispute grades, with the constant threat of panic or conflict if a grade drastically dips. What is shocking is how rare the following question is asked: Does this grade reflect whether or not the student has actually learned anything?

The problem with our grade-dominated system is that emphasizing grades and grading can distract us from a concentration on what really matters: whether or not students are comprehending and learning the material. A ridiculous, even tragic, amount of time is devoted by too many teachers to disputing grades with parents and students. That time could be better used discussing what the child is learning, or having other productive conversations.

Another problem with a heavy reliance on grading is the underlying assumption that grades are a necessary motivator for students. There are several problems with this contention. Psychological research has shown that students, and people in general, are more likely to lose interest in what they’re doing if they are promised carrots or threatened with sticks. Using grades as a threat or reward for completing or not completing schoolwork is extrinsic, or external, motivation. This type of motivation often results in a decreased focus on the learning objective.

I cringe when I hear students ask, “Is this for a grade?” We should try to eliminate that question in our schools. Don’t we, after all, want students to be motivated by the prospect of learning itself? In classroom environments where grades are pushed, the sad fact is that students will often choose the easiest path to high grades, rather than challenge themselves in meaningful and creative ways. In classrooms where students are intrinsically, or internally, motivated, excellence is more likely to occur.

Most students will want to learn if they are presented with engaging and exciting learning environments and experiences. At the least, I’ve found that more students are motivated to learn when presented with authentic, stimulating learning climates than by the threat-reward bargain of grades. Research shows us that the human brain is wired to enjoy discovery and novel ideas, experiences, and situations. If we focused more on creating ideal learning climates, grades could slowly be pushed aside, and we could concentrate more on the kind of constructive feedback that spurs more student growth. Unfortunately, the pressure of grade competition and comparison is ingrained in our system.

I work in a public school where grading is seen as an important motivational facet and feedback tool. But this is no reason for me to despair, despite the problems I have with the practice. We are changing, little by little. Members of the school’s math department, for example, are actively making strides by recording fewer grades, focusing instead on formative assessments and interacting with students to constantly gauge what they know. As a language arts teacher, one of the most productive paths I’ve found is to de-emphasize grades. Traditional grading is insufficient as I attempt to assess student learning, growth, and development.

Like every other student, I enjoyed receiving good grades in school. But I honestly didn’t care much about the grades in courses I was most interested in. There, what we were doing was for the sake of learning itself. That kind of intrinsic motivation can ultimately lead to the creation of students who display the greatest tribute to public education, a desire to keep on learning, long after they have left the classroom.

Sunday, June 29, 2008

Bringing Potential Dropouts Back From the Brink

From: The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/29/nyregion/nyregionspecial2/29dropoutli.html?ref=education
By JULI S. CHARKES

Roosevelt
ON the morning of her Regents Exam in English language arts earlier this month, Sheile Echie-Davis, an 11th grader at Roosevelt High School, pointed to a blemish just below the swirls of pink and purple polish that covered her long fingernails and explained its meaning. “I’ve been writing so much, I’m getting bruises from holding my pencils,” she said, her tone conveying pride rather than concern that the results of weeks of intense studying were so visible.

Sheile, 16, expected to do well on the exam, judging by her past results: She scored 88 percent on her Regents Exam in United States history last year, even though the subject is her least favorite.

Three years ago, Sheile was an unlikely candidate for academic success given her chronic truancy from school. Skipping class regularly led to her having to repeat eighth grade in her Brooklyn middle school. Parental pressure and visits from truancy officers did little to budge her belief that the classroom was not where she belonged. Dropping out, she said, was a foregone conclusion.

“There was just no way for me to sit with 35 other kids and be able to learn anything,” she said. “I couldn’t do it.”

Sheile’s prospects improved when her mother and nine siblings moved to Roosevelt. Here, in a school district that is one of the area’s poorest, she caught up and is now planning her next step come graduation next spring: enrollment in a local college with the hopes of working as a medical technician. Dropping out is no longer a consideration.

Roosevelt has a 34.6 percent dropout rate, according to figures from the New York State Department of Education from the 2004-5 academic year (the latest year for which statistics are available). By comparison, nearby Hempstead has a 7.1 percent dropout rate and Malverne a 3.7 percent dropout rate.

To improve their dropout numbers, officials in districts throughout Long Island said they were taking aggressive steps to keep students in the classroom.

Next year, Malverne will start a mentoring program to help students most at risk of dropping out. “Once they slip away, it’s hard to reconstruct a successful path,” said James H. Hunderfund, the superintendent.

Brentwood also has programs in place to stem dropouts, including one that identifies children as young as elementary age who are not attending school and may be at risk of dropping out in later years.

Sheile’s prospects improved when she enrolled in the New Horizons Alternative Education Program at Roosevelt High School. The five-year-old program caters to about 85 students from the regular high school who have been identified as academically at risk, whether because of truancy, disciplinary issues or even incarceration, said Charlene Stroughn, the program director.

Housed in the sprawling Roosevelt High School, New Horizons classes take place in late afternoon and early evening, long after the 700 or so students enrolled in the regular high school have gone home. The late hours allow students to hold down jobs during the day. The alternative school also emphasizes small classes in which individual attention can be paid to students, allowing them to remediate and accelerate their academic standing so they can earn a high school diploma within a time frame consistent with their peers’.

That distinction — targeting would-be dropouts and encouraging them not only to return to the classroom, but also to catch up with other students — is important because of new accountability standards school districts must adhere to under state law.

Two years ago, the State Department of Education initiated a new system of tracking graduation rates that is based on the number of students who began ninth grade together and graduated four years later, said Tom Dunn, an Education Department spokesman.

The goal of the tracking system was to provide a more comprehensive assessment of the number of students completing high school, he said. The previous system did not consider factors like students who dropped out in the first two years of high school, Mr. Dunn said. He called the new system much more accurate even though under it, school districts typically show lower graduation rates than reported using the previous system.

Identifying students at risk of failing as early as possible is a vital step in their recovery, said Patrick A. Silvestri, principal of the Program of Alternative Comprehensive Education, or PACE, the alternative high school in Brookville sponsored by the Nassau Board of Cooperative Educational Services.

Situated on 40 acres, the Brookville school sits at the end of a secluded road, giving it a remote feel that one recent graduate, Troy Sinatra, 18, of East Meadow, said he initially found daunting. “What is this place?” he recalled thinking when he began classes there two years ago at the suggestion of a guidance counselor who advised him that he was in danger of flunking out.

The seclusion worked in Troy’s favor, though, allowing him to apply himself without distractions.
Last week, Troy and his 24 classmates graduated from the program, which grants a special certificate. A New York State regents diploma is issued by each student’s home district.

Joining Troy was Crystal Sanatass, 18, also of East Meadow. Next fall she will begin attending Nassau Community College, which would have been unimaginable a few years ago when her dismal attendance record at her middle school in East Meadow led her to consider dropping out.

“I was just uninspired; no one took the time to sit me down and make the effort,” Crystal said.

That changed with her enrollment at PACE. In addition to small class sizes and individual instruction, it emphasizes physical outlets like wall climbing and outdoor yoga that can help with behavioral issues that are often factors in attendance and performance, administrators said.

Crystal said that she particularly enjoyed the yoga, which allowed her to relax and concentrate on her studies. “You would lay back and see the sight of the sky and the trees,” she said. “That was beautiful.”

Linda Saslow contributed reporting.

Julia Steiny says schools can’t punish a kid into cooperation

From: projo.com
http://www.projo.com/education/juliasteiny/content/se_education_watch29_06-29-08_HHAKIB5_v9.29109fb.html
Author: Julia Steiny


No one likes an unruly, mouthy or disruptive brat. But the adult urge to fight unwanted behavior by shaming, temporarily banishing or otherwise hurting the kid into compliance has begun to seem not just ineffective to me, but full-on Jurassic.

“Zero tolerance?” Does that even sound like a good idea, when you think about it?

So I asked psychologists Margaret Paccione-Dyszlewski and Steve Barreto to help me better understand the psychology of punishment. I was surprised when our meeting began with their insistence on first defining terms. To them, “discipline” and “punishment” are two very different animals.

Dr. Paccione-Dyszlewski is the director of the department of behavioral education and Dr. Barreto is a senior psychologist at the in-patient program at Bradley Hospital. Both are also clinical assistant professors at Brown Medical School. Bradley was the nation’s first children’s mental-health hospital.

Dictionaries often define discipline as punishment and vice versa. But the psychologists distinguish between the two by looking at the presence of emotion and how it’s handled.

“Punishment” is meted out in the heat of the moment, by a person having a visceral reaction. Or it is a hurtful consequence of violating rules intended to control the heat of emotional reactions. Those thick student handbooks that students take home, but never look at, establish the school’s authority and right to punish. Barreto says, “At a school, when the adults or institution are challenged, that can be emotional.”

When a kid is rude or insulting, teachers’ feelings naturally get hurt. The thick book of rules handles the teacher’s emotions by imposing punishment, hoping to create a negative Pavlovian response in the kid, so the mouthy punk won’t do it again. These rules are considered fair because they apply to all kids — not to the grownups, of course — without regard to circumstance or individuals.

The “suspensions” pages for each Rhode Island school on the Information Works Web site show that “insubordination/disrespect” and “disorderly conduct” are leading reasons to kick a kid out of school for a few days. That’s punishment.

“Discipline,” on the other hand, involves a community collaborating on a set of rules that define who we are as a community — be it a family or a school. The point of the rule system is to help us hold together as a community. Barreto says, “Authority comes in relationship to community. We agree we both have a responsibility to the community.” Discipline includes the child in the community by reengaging her, in what the psychologists call a “relational model.” Punishment excludes.

Paccione-Dyszlewski gives this example, “If Steve is the student, and he runs out of math class, the teacher says, ‘That’s bad; you need to go to the vice principal.’

In a relational model, the teacher says, ‘Steve, help me understand why you’re running out?’ If Steve feels safe and believes I care about him, Steve’s going to tell me. He’s likely to say, ‘I don’t understand the math. I want to go to the bathroom. I can’t sit still that long.’ So what do I [the teacher] need? I need Steve to sit through my math class. So we’ve told each other what we need. I’m sharing my authority with Steve. That’s discipline, relationship building. I might then say, ‘So go to the bathroom. Or walk to the library and then come back. Then do the last five problems.’ ”

Barreto adds, speaking as the teacher, “And tomorrow, put something on your desk so I know what you need. But don’t leave the room. I need you to cooperate; the community needs it. This is a collaboration.”

Paccione-Dyszlewski completes the thought, “Every child needs to learn how to negotiate so he can be a member of a community. This is partly my job as a teacher.”

Because these days, it is all too easy for youths to feel excluded from the community, whether it’s an overburdened or neglectful family, a tough “hood,” or an uncaring school.

Discipline in a collaborative or relational model is about meeting three needs — the adult’s and the child’s needs, of course, but also the community’s need for the adult to retain authority.

Paccione-Dyszlewski says, “When the school system [teachers or administration] come to the table to solve problems with the child, they can feel as though they lose authority. In fact, you gain authority by giving it away. The mere fact that I’m sitting with the child shows I’m choosing to be respectful, choosing to be collaborative. And that respect is going to come back to me 1,000-fold. It enhances my authority.”

She continues, “Schools can be communities, but too often they exclude parents and exclude kids. A lack of community results in punishing behaviors, because breaking the rules assaults the school’s authority.”

And then schools end up in a bad cycle of punishing kids, some of whom retaliate by acting out again, and on it goes.

But as the Bradley psychologists show, finding out what’s really going on with a kid, while expressing grownup needs as well, will get to the root of the problem and be much more likely to nip antisocial behavior in the bud.

In short, punishment doesn’t work. Schools should give it up.

Julia Steiny, a former member of the Providence School Board, consults for government agencies and schools; she is co-director of Information Works!, Rhode Island’s school-accountability project. She can be reached at juliasteiny@cox.net , or c/o EdWatch, The Providence Journal, 75 Fountain St., Providence, RI 02902.