Stephen’s Untold Stories

It will be nice to be able to watch the Olympics and see someone the same age as I am. Congrats to Dara Torres!

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Outstanding news for Georgia!

Six states are getting the OK to write their own prescriptions for ailing schools under the Bush administration’s signature education law.

It’s a softening from how No Child Left Behind currently works — with schools having to take certain steps at specific times for missing math and reading testing goals. Critics have complained that the approach is too rigid and treats schools the same regardless of whether they miss the mark by a little or a lot.

Indiana, Illinois, Maryland and Ohio. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings plans to make the announcement during a speech Tuesday in Austin, Texas.

The states that won approval have come up with plans to more closely tailor solutions to individual schools’ problems and focus resources on schools in the worst shape.

“We expect to see a closer fit between the causes of school underperformance and a focused attention at repairing those sources of failure,” said Margaret Raymond, director of an education think tank at Stanford University and the chair of a panel that reviewed the state proposals.

Examples of changes the states plan to make include requiring schools to offer tutoring earlier than is currently called for and a greater reliance, in Indiana for example, on testing throughout the year to catch academic weak spots.

In Georgia, schools will be able to become charter schools, which are public but operate with broad independence, earlier than is currently called for, said the state’s superintendent of schools, Kathy Cox.

Some critics worry the changes, specifically the focus on the worst-performing schools, will take the pressure off schools that are generally doing well but having trouble with one group of students — such as a minority group or kids with disabilities.

“I don’t think it’s taking the pressure off. I think it’s allowing focus,” Cox said.

Spellings has said up to 10 states will be allowed to try to participate in the pilot program. The Education Department plans to review additional state proposals this fall.

The six states that won approval were among 17 that sought it.

The states that didn’t win approval were Alaska, Arkansas, Louisiana, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia.

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I am at a complete loss for words.

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A little over a month ago the city of Macon was hit hard by a tornado. Macon State College suffered a lot of damage, but the cleanup has gone well. Here are some before and after photos.

Note: It looks like their site is down fro a while. Hopefully it will be back soon.

More photos here.

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Not great in Georgia, but not the worst either.

Link to current version

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If you near a computer at 5:00 EST today, take a look!

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html

Thanks, Wes!

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If you’ve read my blog for long, you know that I generally avoid political discussions, and I don’t intend for this to turn into a political rant.

Those of us who have been working in education since the advent of No Child Left Behind are well aware that it just isn’t working. Don’t get me wrong. Accountability is very important in any endeavor, but when an over-emphasis on accountability begins to affect the true mission of education, it’s time to step back and re-examine what’s really happening. Educating a person is not a business. You can’t judge how well a person is learning something the way you judge how much product a company is selling. Standardized tests have their place, but they are not the major reason we have schools. No Child Left Behind has created a culture of “teaching to the test,” which if you know anything about teaching, isn’t really teaching at all.

To that end, I will direct you attention to the following:

“This starts with fixing the broken promises of No Child Left Behind. Now, I believe that the goals of this law were the right ones. Making a promise to educate every child with an excellent teacher is right. Closing the achievement gap that exists in too many cities and rural areas is right. More accountability is right. Higher standards are right.

“But I’ll tell you what’s wrong with No Child Left Behind. Forcing our teachers, our principals and our schools to accomplish all of this without the resources they need is wrong. Promising high-quality teachers in every classroom and then leaving the support and the pay for those teachers behind is wrong. Labeling a school and its students as failures one day and then throwing your hands up and walking away from them the next is wrong.

“We must fix the failures of No Child Left Behind. We must provide the funding we were promised, give our states the resources they need and finally meet our commitment to special education. We also need to realize that we can meet high standards without forcing teachers and students to spend most of the year preparing for a single, high-stakes test.

Yes, that passage is from a recent speech made by Barack Obama. I am not endorsing him (or anyone) for President at this point, but his words really mean something to me. They mean he gets it.

Here is a link to the entire speech.

This doesn’t make a lot of sense, but higher education seems to make less and less sense every day.

Who is to blame when students fail? If many students fail — a majority even — does that demonstrate faculty incompetence, or could it point to a problem with standards?

These are the questions at the center of a dispute that cost Steven D. Aird his job teaching biology at Norfolk State University. Today is his last day of work, but on his way out, he has started to tell his story — one that he suggests points to large educational problems at the university and in society. The university isn’t talking publicly about his case, but because Aird has released numerous documents prepared by the university about his performance — including the key negative tenure decisions by administrators — it is clear that he was denied tenure for one reason: failing too many students. The university documents portray Aird as unwilling to compromise to pass more students.

A subtext of the discussion is that Norfolk State is a historically black university with a mission that includes educating many students from disadvantaged backgrounds. The university suggests that Aird — who is white — has failed to embrace the mission of educating those who aren’t well prepared. But Aird — who had backing from his department and has some very loyal students as well — maintains that the university is hurting the very students it says it wants to help. Aird believes most of his students could succeed, but have no incentive to work as hard as they need to when the administration makes clear they can pass regardless.

“Show me how lowering the bar has ever helped anyone,” Aird said in an interview. Continuing the metaphor, he said that officials at Norfolk State have the attitude of “a track coach who tells the team ‘I really want to win this season but I really like you guys, so you can decide whether to come to practice and when.’ ” Such a team wouldn’t win, Aird said, and a university based on such a principle would not be helping its students.

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Happy Memorial Day everyone!

Frank Woodruff Buckles, the last known living American-born veteran of World War I, was honored Sunday at the Liberty Memorial during Memorial Day weekend celebrations.

“I had a feeling of longevity and that I might be among those who survived, but I didn’t know I’d be the No. 1,” the 107-year-old veteran said at a ceremony to unveil his portrait.

His photograph was hung in the main hallway of the National World War I Museum, which he toured for the first time, and the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States presented him with a gold medal of merit.

Buckles, who now lives in Charles Town, W.Va., has been an invited guest at the Pentagon, met with President Bush in Washington, D.C., and rode in the annual Armed Forces Day Parade in his home state since his status as one of the last living from the “Great War” was discovered nearly two years ago.

Federal officials have also arranged for his burial at Arlington National Cemetery.

Born in Missouri in 1901 and raised in Oklahoma, Buckles visited a string of military recruiters after the United States entered the “war to end all wars” in April 1917.

He was rejected by the Marines and the Navy, but eventually persuaded an Army captain he was 18 and enlisted, convincing him Missouri didn’t keep public records of birth.

Buckles sailed for England in 1917 on the Carpathia, which is known for its rescue of Titanic survivors, and spent his tour of duty working mainly as a driver and a warehouse clerk in Germany and France. He rose to the rank of corporal and after Armistice Day he helped return prisoners of war to Germany.

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I have to admit, but part of me is thrilled to see this! I feel bad for the teacher, though.

Students at a South Bronx middle school have pulled off a stunning boycott against standardized testing.

More than 160 students in six different classes at Intermediate School 318 in the South Bronx - virtually the entire eighth grade - refused to take last Wednesday’s three-hour practice exam for next month’s statewide social studies test.

Instead, the students handed in blank exams.

Then they submitted signed petitions with a list of grievances to school Principal Maria Lopez and the Department of Education.

“We’ve had a whole bunch of these diagnostic tests all year,” Tatiana Nelson, 13, one of the protest leaders, said Tuesday outside the school. “They don’t even count toward our grades. The school system’s just treating us like test dummies for the companies that make the exams.”

According to the petition, they are sick and tired of the “constant, excessive and stressful testing” that causes them to “lose valuable instructional time with our teachers.”

School administrators blamed the boycott on a 30-year-old probationary social studies teacher, Douglas Avella.

The afternoon of the protest, the principal ordered Avella out of the classroom, reassigned him to an empty room in the school and ordered him to have no further contact with students.

A few days later, in a reprimand letter, Lopez accused Avella of initiating the boycott and taking “actions [that] caused a riot at the school.”

The students say their protest was entirely peaceful. In only one class, they say, was there some loud clapping after one exam proctor reacted angrily to their boycott.

This week, Lopez notified Avella in writing that he was to attend a meeting today for “your end of the year rating and my possible recommendation for the discontinuance of your probationary service.”

“They’re saying Mr. Avella made us do this,” said Johnny Cruz, 15, another boycott leader. “They don’t think we have brains of our own, like we’re robots. We students wanted to make this statement. The school is oppressing us too much with all these tests.”

Two days after the boycott, the students say, the principal held a meeting with all the students to find out how their protest was organized.

Avella on Tuesday denied that he urged the students to boycott tests.

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Great story that got started because of a blog.

A collection of school supplies for students in Afghanistan all started with Riley Beler’s dad.

Paul Park, a teacher with the Prairie South School Division and Canadian Forces soldier with Task Force 1-08, has been serving overseas since February.

To keep friends and family up-to-date on how he’s doing, Park began a blog called “The Sandbox: Dispatches from a high school English teacher in Khandahar, Afghanistan.”

“People started asking him how they could help the people of Afghanistan,” said Sandi Kerney, a Grade 6-7 teacher at Sunningdale School, where Beler is a student.

“One day, he wrote a post about a school that had burned down. He said they could use supplies and it all kind of just went from there.”

A request for pencils, books and other items was included in Sunningdale’s monthly newsletter and the donations started rolling in.

A total of 14 large boxes have been packed up and are ready to be shipped through 15 Wing Moose Jaw’s free overseas shipping to soldiers program.

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Here is an excellent interactive Flash-based tool that shows how much Americans spend on various things.

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Very nice story from an area which needs good stories.

No road leads to George Washington Carver Senior High School here. It sits on no street and has no address. No sign announces it.

It is little more than a collection of prefabricated steel-and-wood classrooms floating in a no man’s land by the highway, and its vague location and bootstrap atmosphere sum up the problems and promise of the big education experiment now under way in this city nearly three years after Hurricane Katrina. There is no gym and no auditorium at Carver, and at breaks the school’s 350 students congregate on unshaded strips of concrete between the trailerlike boxes.

Carver’s only context is ruin — it sits across a field from the flooded-out pre-Katrina Carver High — and yet it is trying all over again, with new teachers and new methods, at what largely failed before the storm and immediately afterward: educating its students. Carver High is hope’s challenge to bleak circumstance.

And it is beginning to meet that challenge. Though there is disorder in many classrooms, there is also learning going on, amid the struggle. In an English class taught by Courtney Stuckwisch, the searing hard-times images of a Langston Hughes poem touch a chord, and the students look up eagerly. In Colleston Morgan’s social studies class, students beetle earnestly over textbooks for a lesson on supply and demand.

All around the city there is a similar would-be alchemy. Dozens of new charter schools, a flood of idealistic young teachers from elsewhere around the country — now as many as 17 percent of the total here — and a hard-charging reform superintendent from Chicago are all arrayed to rescue one of America’s most needy student bodies, which ranked at the bottom of a bottom-dwelling state even before Hurricane Katrina.

Only in the last year, with the marshaling of new forces, has anything like a coherent poststorm strategy for the shaky schools here emerged. It is too early for results — standardized-test scores are out in May — but educators here insist that there are some promising signs. At the very least, early shortages of teachers and space for students have been overcome.

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I am not a global warming alarmist, but I found this to be a bit disturbing.

You know when climate change is biting hard when instead of a vast expanse of snow the North Pole is a vast expanse of water. This year, for the first time, Arctic scientists are preparing for that possibility.

“The set-up for this summer is disturbing,” says Mark Serreze, of the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). A number of factors have this year led to most of the Arctic ice being thin and vulnerable as it enters its summer melting season.

In September 2007, Arctic sea ice reached a record low, opening up the fabled North-West passage that runs from Greenland to Alaska.

The ice expanded again over the winter and in March 2008 covered a greater area than it had in March 2007. Although this was billed as good news in many media sources, the trend since 1978 is on the decline.

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While I have issues with the importance we put on standardized tests, refusing to administer them is a bit far to go to make a point. This teacher did just that, and was suspended.

When it’s time each spring for Carl Chew to give his Seattle sixth-graders the federally required standardized tests, he can feel their anxiety.

They complain about stomachaches, they get sick and some of them just start to cry. Even the straight-A students.

For both teachers and young children, the annual Washington Assessment of Student Learning test creates an atmosphere “rife with fear,” the science teacher at Nathan Eckstein Middle School told ABCNEWS.com.

“The WASL is presented in a secretive, cold and inhuman fashion,” he said. “The teacher is not allowed to read the questions, or help, and the kids have to maintain silence for hours and hours. They are only allowed a bathroom break once in a while.”

But after agonizing about the detrimental effects of standardized testing for several years, Chew did something about it last week. He refused to administer the test, which is the key measure of academic progress under the federally mandated No Child Left Behind law.

The WASL is just one of numerous high-stakes tests that now dominate the curricula of elementary schools across the country. A growing number of teacher and parents are rejecting these kind of tests, which have increased in frequency and gravitas after No Child Left Behind.

They rebel at their own peril, however. Chew was suspended for nine days without pay by his principal. But today — sitting at home while a substitute teacher takes his place — he is a rock star among parents and teachers who have blamed the testing for stamping out the love of learning in children.

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Another example of improvement. As always, we have a long way to go but it is still nice to be able to report progress.

Georgia’s 8th graders are scoring at the national average in writing, according to test results released Thursday.

The results of the 2007 National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP) showed that 88 percent of Georgia 8th graders scored at or above basic proficiency levels, one point higher than the nation. This was a six-point jump for Georgia since 2002, the last time the NAEP writing test was given.

“These NAEP results offer further proof that our new curriculum is making a big difference,” said State Superintendent of Schools Kathy Cox. “There is no doubt in my mind that the rigor and focus of our new standards is having a positive impact in the classroom.”

The NAEP is given to a representative sample of students in every state. Scores are on a scale of 0 to 300 and are broken into four categories — below basic, basic, proficient and advanced. Georgia students in grade 8 took the NAEP writing exam last school year. The students who were tested had been taught using the state’s new Reading/English Language Arts curriculum for two years.

Georgia’s 8th graders scored a 153, up six points from 2002. Georgia’s score was one point lower than the nation (154) and one point higher than other southern states (152). But just like a public opinion poll, there is a margin of error, which makes these scores statistically equal.

Georgia’s African-American and Hispanic students made significant gains on the NAEP writing test.

The scale score for Georgia’s African-American students rose to 144, a jump of six points since 2002 and four points higher than the national average (140) for African-American students.

Hispanic students in Georgia scored 142 on the NAEP writing test, an increase of 31 points from 2002 and one point higher than the national average (141) for Hispanic students.

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It appears that’s exactly what some students at the University of Texas at San Antonio did.

The goal was an honor code that discouraged cheating and plagiarizing.

But the wording in a draft by students at the University of Texas at San Antonio appears to match Brigham Young University’s code — without proper attribution.The student in charge of the honor code project said it was an oversight; he plans to include proper citation and attribution when the draft is submitted to the faculty senate.

Cheating experts say the case illustrates a sloppiness among Internet-era students who don’t know how to cite sources properly and think of their computers as cut-and-paste machines.

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The Google home page has turned black for some of us today in honor of Earth Hour.

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Once again, Georgia has done well. Our grade in Access to Technology dropped from a B+ last year to a C this year. Guess we’ll have to work on that one.

Here is a link to the complete report for Georgia (pdf)

And here is a link where you can look at other states.

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Mine must have been around 27 or 28.

Here are the top 5.

1. Gawker
2. MacRumors
3. Huffington Post
4. Perez Hilton
5. TechCrunch

Here is the complete list.