Dear Commons Community,

In today’s edition of the the New York Times, there are several articles documenting the sad conditions in which many of our children receive their educations.

First,  with the unbridled emphasis on assessments, there is yet another report of educators helping students cheat on standardized tests.

“Investigators for a school district on Long Island’s North Shore are looking into allegations that more than a dozen educators from two elementary schools improperly helped students on standardized tests, including by coaching pupils on correct answers last year during state exams, union and district officials said on Thursday.

The investigators, hired by the school district in Glen Cove, Long Island, have spoken to “17 or 18” teachers from the Margaret A. Connolly and Landing Elementary Schools and some of them have been “presented with some draft allegations,” which could lead to disciplinary proceedings, said Karen Ferguson, the president of the union, the Glen Cove Teachers Association.”

Second, investigators are charging a company, Bilingual SEIT, of Flushing , Queens, has been overbilling and taking advantage of the poor oversight by the City and State of New York, in providing services to pre-K children with special needs.  While being paid as much as $17 million a year,

“…many of the children entrusted to Bilingual SEIT did not get the care they needed, according to numerous interviews with workers and parents and an extensive analysis of government records.

Some children whose first language was Chinese languished in classes taught in Spanish or Korean. Others who were supposed to receive individual tutoring were thrown into groups of four or more children, all with different types of disabilities.

Some children did not have disabilities at all and were simply being used to generate billings, the interviews show. “

Third, last week, in the wake of the Newtown, Conn., shootings, a task force of the National Rifle Association recommended placing police officers or other armed guards in every school. The White House has proposed an increase in police officers based in schools.

But as school districts across the country consider placing more police officers in schools, youth advocates and judges are raising alarm about what they have seen in the schools where officers are already stationed: a surge in criminal charges against children for misbehavior that many believe is better handled in the principal’s office.

Since the early 1990s, thousands of districts, often with federal subsidies, have paid local police agencies to provide armed “school resource officers” for high schools, middle schools and sometimes even elementary schools. Hundreds of additional districts, including those in Houston, Los Angeles and Philadelphia, have created police forces of their own, employing thousands of sworn officers.

The effectiveness of using police officers in schools to deter crime or the remote threat of armed intruders is unclear.

Yet the most striking impact of school police officers so far, critics say, has been a surge in arrests or misdemeanor charges for essentially nonviolent behavior — including scuffles, truancy and cursing at teachers — that sends children into the criminal courts.

“There is no evidence that placing officers in the schools improves safety,” said Denise C. Gottfredson, a criminologist at the University of Maryland who is an expert in school violence. “And it increases the number of minor behavior problems that are referred to the police, pushing kids into the criminal system.”  Nationwide, hundreds of thousands of students are arrested or given criminal citations at schools each year. A large share are sent to court for relatively minor offenses, with black and Hispanic students and those with disabilities disproportionately affected, according to recent reports from civil rights groups, including the Advancement Project, in Washington, and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, in New York.”

In sum, can somebody please save our children from the cheaters, scammers, and gun advocates that are infesting public education.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times has an article reporting on legislation that is being introduced in Texas to reduce the amount of testing in public high schools.  Texas spawned test-based accountability in public schools and spearheaded one of the nation’s toughest high school curriculums.   Lawmakers there are now considering a reversal that would cut back both graduation requirements and standardized testing.   The article stated:

“The actions in Texas are being closely watched across the country as many states move to raise curriculum standards to meet the increasing demands of employers while grappling with critics who say testing has spun out of control.

The Texas House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill this month that would reduce the number of exams students must pass to earn a high school diploma to 5, from 15. Legislators also proposed a change that would reduce the required years of math and science to three, from four. The State Senate is expected to take up a similar bill as early as this week.

The proposed changes have opened up a debate in the state and beyond. Proponents say teachers will be able to be more creative in the classroom while students will have more flexibility to pursue vocational or technically oriented courses of study…

Test critics also argue that standardized tests stifle experimentation in the classroom. “It turns our schools into these cookie-cutter manufacturing plants,” said Dineen Majcher, president of Texans Advocating for Meaningful Student Assessment, a grass-roots group.

Some educators say the tests do not account for students who learn at different paces. “We expect every student to perform at certain levels with the same amount of time,” said H.D. Chambers, superintendent of the Alief Independent School District west of Houston. “That’s fundamentally flawed.”

But at a time when about half of the students who enroll in community colleges in Texas require remedial math classes, Michael L. Williams, the state’s commissioner of education, called the proposed changes “an unfortunate retreat.”

“What gets tested gets taught,” Mr. Williams said. “What we treasure, we measure.”

This legislation will indeed be watched closely by education policymakers around the country.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

In what he calls a “ sad long letter,” Gerald Conti, 62, notified the Westhill School District last month that he will retire when the school year ends. Conti said he’s leaving two years before he is eligible for a full 30-year pension, because he can no longer stomach what’s going on with the educational system.

“This whole thing is being driven by people who know nothing about education,” Conti said today.”It’s sad.”

Conti is concerned about the emphasis being placed on standardized tests and the data they create versus creativity, teacher autonomy and innovation that excites students. Below is an excerpt:

“Essential Learning,  creativity, academic freedom, teacher autonomy, experimentation and innovation are being stifled in a misguided effort to fix what is not broken in our system of public education and particularly not at Westhill. A long train of failures has brought us to this unfortunate pass. In their pursuit of Federal tax dollars, our legislators have failed us by selling children out to private industries such as Pearson Education. The New York State United Teachers union has let down its membership by failing to mount a much more effective and vigorous campaign against this same costly and dangerous debacle.  Finally, it is with sad reluctance that I say our own administration has been both uncommunicative and unresponsive to the concerns and needs of our staff and students by establishing testing and evaluation systems that are Byzantine at best and at worst, draconian. ..

My profession is being demeaned by a pervasive atmosphere of distrust, dictating that teachers cannot be permitted to develop and administer their own quizzes and tests (now titled as generic “assessments”) or grade their own students’ examinations. The development of plans, choice of  lessons and the materials to be employed are increasingly expected to be common to all teachers in a given subject. This approach not only strangles creativity, it smothers the development of critical thinking in our students and assumes a one-size-fits-all mentality more appropriate to the assembly line than to the classroom.”

He placed the letter on his Facebook page, and since then it has taken on a life of its own.   Another teacher earlier this year posted a video upon his retirement in Providence, Rhode Island, that went viral expressing many of the same sentiments as Mr. Conti.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

John Wallach, a colleague at Hunter College, sent along an article that appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, reporting the results of a survey of corporate executives, identifying the skills they are looking for in college graduates. Conducted by the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U),  the study, It Takes More Than a Major: Employer Priorities for College Learning and Student Success, concludes that employers’ support the idea that students should be broadly educated and should apply their learning to the real world during college. More than half of the employers indicated that recent college graduates should have “both field-specific knowledge and skills and a broad range of skills and knowledge.” (The report is based on an online survey of 318 employers conducted in January.)

The Chronicle article also commented on a compact, signed by 160 employers and 107 college presidents wherein they agreed to help the public understand the importance of a “21st-century liberal-arts education,” comprising broad and adaptive learning, personal and social responsibility, and intellectual skills.

“The signatories also pledged to promote students’ access to such an education, expand opportunities for hands-on learning, document progress in students’ ability to apply their learning, and advocate for college as a path to both career success and civic responsibility.

When college presidents tout the value of a liberal education, long championed by the AAC&U, the message doesn’t necessarily get traction. The public can be skeptical of higher education’s self-advocacy, said Ronald A. Crutcher, a signer of the compact who is president of Wheaton College in Massachusetts. “We need to have some of the employers speak on our behalf to make the case to the public,” he said.

Through the compact, executives will be able to communicate to hiring managers that broad learning matters, said Mr. Crutcher, who is also co-chair of the association’s Liberal Education and America’s Promise project.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Educators unveiled new guidelines yesterday  that call for sweeping changes in the way science is taught in the United States — including recommendations that climate change and evolution be taught as early as middle school. The guidelines, known as the Next Generation Science Standards, are the first broad national recommendations for science instruction since 1996. They were developed by a consortium of 26 state governments and several groups representing scientists and teachers.  A New York Times article describes the standards as:

“The guidelines take a firm stand that children must learn about evolution, the central organizing idea in the biological sciences for more than a century, but one that still provokes a backlash among some religious conservatives.

States are not required to adopt them, but 26 states have committed to seriously considering the guidelines. They include Arizona, Arkansas, California, Iowa, Kansas and New York. Other states could also adopt the standards.

Educators involved in drawing them up said the guidelines were intended to combat widespread scientific ignorance, to standardize teaching among states, and to raise the number of high school graduates who choose scientific and technical majors in college, a critical issue for the country’s economic future.

The focus would be helping students become more intelligent science consumers by learning how scientific work is done: how ideas are developed and tested, what counts as strong or weak evidence, and how insights from many disciplines fit together into a coherent picture of the world.

Leaders of the effort said that teachers may well wind up covering fewer subjects, but digging more deeply into the ones they do cover. In some cases, traditional classes like biology and chemistry may disappear entirely from high schools, replaced by courses that use a case-study method to teach science in a more holistic way.

In many respects, the standards are meant to do for science what a separate set of guidelines known as the Common Core is supposed to do for English and mathematics: impose and raise standards, with a focus on critical thinking and primary investigation. To date, 45 states and Washington have adopted the Common Core standards.”

The standards also call for more hands-on science work which is desperately needed in many schools. Educators said they foresaw more use of real-world examples, like taking students to a farm or fish hatchery — perhaps repeatedly, over the course of years — to help them learn principles from biology, chemistry and physics. This is a win for K-12 education in this country.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Several Texas A&M professors know something that generations of teachers could only hope to guess: whether students are reading their textbooks.  They know when students are skipping pages, failing to highlight significant passages, not bothering to take notes — or simply not opening the book at all. One brief article comments:

“It’s Big Brother, sort of, but with a good intent,” said Tracy Hurley, the dean of the school of business at Texas A&M.

The faculty members here are neither clairvoyant nor peering over shoulders. They, along with colleagues at eight other colleges, are testing technology from a Silicon Valley start-up, CourseSmart, that allows them to track their students’ progress with digital textbooks.

Major publishers in higher education have already been collecting data from millions of students who use their digital materials. But CourseSmart goes further by individually packaging for each professor information on all the students in a class — a bold effort that is already beginning to affect how teachers present material and how students respond to it, even as critics question how well it measures learning. The plan is to introduce the program broadly this fall.

Adrian Guardia, a Texas A&M instructor in management, took notice the other day of a student who was apparently doing well. His quiz grades were solid, and so was what CourseSmart calls his “engagement index.” But Mr. Guardia also saw something else: that the student had opened his textbook only once.

“It was one of those aha moments,” said Mr. Guardia, who is tracking 70 students in three classes. “Are you really learning if you only open the book the night before the test? I knew I had to reach out to him to discuss his studying habits.”

Students do not see their engagement indexes unless a professor shows them, but they know the books are watching them. For a few, merely hearing the number is a shock. Charles Tejeda got a C on the last quiz, but the real revelation that he is struggling was a low CourseSmart index.

“They caught me,” said Mr. Tejeda, 43. He has two jobs and three children, and can study only late at night. “Maybe I need to focus more,” he said.

CourseSmart is owned by Pearson, McGraw-Hill and other major publishers, which see an opportunity to cement their dominance in digital textbooks by offering administrators and faculty a constant stream of data about how students are doing.”

Big brother indeed but most faculty members would probably  like to know more about their students’ reading habits.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Margaret Thatcher, the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, died yesterday and the news media was awash with praises of her legacy.   The cable news channels such MSNBC, Fox News, and CNN lauded her contributions.   A New York Times editorial commented:

“She was a pathbreaker from the moment she took office in 1979 as Britain’s first, and so far only, female prime minister. And she was the rare conservative leader to come not from the upper echelons of Britain’s class-obsessed society, but from a modest apartment above her father’s grocery.

But much more than that distinguished the 11 years of Mrs. Thatcher’s government, which followed years of tepid leadership, economic stagnation and high inflation. She tamed the power of Britain’s once powerful labor movement by shutting down inefficient coal mines and privatizing state-owned industries. She encouraged an entrepreneurial culture that had grown timid and somnolent. With her powerful, plain-spoken approach to issues large (like Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait) and relatively small (the brief war over the Falkland Islands), she reawakened Britain’s taste for military engagement.”

Anthony C. Grayling, a British philosopher who founded and became the first Master of the  New College of the Humanities, has another take on Thatcher, which is not as complimentary.   

“It is hard to think of a more divisive figure in British politics than Margaret Thatcher…

Her admirers laud her for breaking Britain’s once-powerful trade unions, and liberalizing the City of London’s financial services industry; these acts, they say, halted the country’s economic decline. Her detractors blame her for destroying much of the country’s manufacturing base by refusing to aid struggling industries, and effectively annihilating the mining sector by emasculating the National Union of Miners. Her premiership will always be remembered for the bloody battles between workers and the police, and the high unemployment and sudden appearance of industrial wastelands that followed.

If Argentina hadn’t invaded the Falkland Islands in April 1982, she might not have even won the 1983 election. National pride raised her approval ratings, and the implosion of the opposition Labour Party sustained her party at the polls for nearly another decade.

Mrs. Thatcher’s own downfall was the so-called Poll Tax, a highly unpopular flat-rate levy on every adult, officially known as the Community Charge. The law was passed in 1988 and caused violence in many cities, including the London riot of March 31, 1990, before it was scheduled to take effect. The tax eventually helped precipitate her resignation from the premiership.

Mrs. Thatcher left behind a changed and divided Britain.”

Regardless of our views of her accomplishments, she definitely left her mark on her country.  May she rest in peace.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Although it is still early in the New York mayoral election season, movement, money and commercials are beginning in what promises to be a brutal battle.  The Democratic primary with the likes of Christine Quinn, Bill deBlasio, William Thompson and John Liu competing for the coveted nomination, will be especially volatile.  The New York Times has an article today describing a coalition, NYC Is Not for Sale 2013, made up of labor unions, animal rights, and anti-Michael Bloomberg groups. A TV commercial  is scheduled to begin airing today and will continue for three weeks.  As described in the article:

“The imagery conjures up “The Wizard of Oz”: as smoke fills the screen, the head of a frowning Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker, materializes.

“She wants you to think that she’s a progressive, but on the issues New Yorkers care most about, she is always on the wrong side,” a male narrator intones. “All that’s clear when the smoke lifts is her political ambition.”

As a succession of blurbs from newspaper articles suggest that she has waffled on key issues, the narrator concludes, “When Christine Quinn doesn’t support our values, how can you support her for mayor?”

… The 30-second commercial, the first of the mayoral race, comes quite early in the primary season, underscoring the competitive nature of the contest to succeed Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.

The commercial is not the work of one of Ms. Quinn’s opponents for the Democratic nomination, but of a coalition of left-leaning labor unions and Democratic activists who say they are not backing anyone in particular.

The organizers have pledged more than $1 million to the campaign and are spending $250,000 for the initial television advertising, said Scott Levenson, president of the Advance Group, which produced the spot. Another commercial is to be released this week, followed by several mailers and radio ads.

Ms. Quinn, who has been a key ally of Mr. Bloomberg, is generally viewed as the front-runner, thanks to a high-profile position and a high-octane style that has brought her admiration as well as enmity.”

New York may be in for a quite a mayoral election ride this year.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times has an article today on the rising interest in studying capitalism among historians.   Here is an excerpt:

“A specter is haunting university history departments: the specter of capitalism.

After decades of “history from below,” focusing on women, minorities and other marginalized people seizing their destiny, a new generation of scholars is increasingly turning to what, strangely, risked becoming the most marginalized group of all: the bosses, bankers and brokers who run the economy.

Even before the financial crisis, courses in “the history of capitalism” — as the new discipline bills itself — began proliferating on campuses, along with dissertations on once deeply unsexy topics like insurance, banking and regulation. The events of 2008 and their long aftermath have given urgency to the scholarly realization that it really is the economy, stupid.

The financial meltdown also created a serious market opportunity. Columbia University Press recently introduced a new “Studies in the History of U.S. Capitalism” book series (“This is not your father’s business history,” the proposal promised), and other top university presses have been snapping up dissertations on 19th-century insurance and early-20th-century stock speculation, with trade publishers and op-ed editors following close behind.

The dominant question in American politics today, scholars say, is the relationship between democracy and the capitalist economy. “And to understand capitalism,” said Jonathan Levy, an assistant professor of history at Princeton University and the author of “Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America,” “you’ve got to understand capitalists.”

That doesn’t mean just looking in the executive suite and ledger books, scholars are quick to emphasize. The new work marries hardheaded economic analysis with the insights of social and cultural history, integrating the bosses’-eye view with that of the office drones — and consumers — who power the system.

“I like to call it ‘history from below, all the way to the top,’ ” said Louis Hyman, an assistant professor of labor relations, law and history at Cornell and the author of “Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink.”

The new history of capitalism is less a movement than what proponents call a “cohort”: a loosely linked group of scholars who came of age after the end of the cold war cleared some ideological ground, inspired by work that came before but unbeholden to the questions — like, why didn’t socialism take root in America? — that animated previous generations of labor historians.

Instead of searching for working-class radicalism, they looked at office clerks and entrepreneurs.”

I am not an historian so I guess I have to ask colleagues such as Steve Brier about this development.

Tony

Click to enlarge.

Dear Commons Community,

John Liu, Comptroller for the City of New York, released a report today highlighting the disparity of access to Internet technology in the City’s households.  Specifically, the report states:

“… that nearly one-quarter of households in New York City lack a computer, highlighting a digital divide that threatens to leave many young people without the technology skills necessary to succeed after high school. Black and Hispanic households are especially likely to have no computer (41 percent and 29 percent respectively), as are households in the Bronx (37 percent). Additionally, 60 percent of households without broadband Internet have annual incomes lower than $30,000, and 73 percent are headed by someone who did not attend college. To address these disparities and improve students’ ability to use technology, the report recommends working to expand computer ownership, broadband adoption, and technology training for students and their families.

“We must confront this digital divide in order to ameliorate inequities that limit the potential of our city as a whole,” said Liu “In today’s digital world, technology skills are no longer optional — they’re necessary for success.”

The report provides interesting data with important ramifications for instructional technology policies in New York City public schools.

Tony