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Installing a New iMac Hard Drive

Wednesday, July 1, 2009

It’s been a while since I’ve had a tech story to tell. This one ends OK, but it wasn’t as simple as I’d hoped it would be – as if that ever happens.

Last winter our family’s 2006 era iMac began crashing repeatedly, losing the kids’ unsaved English papers and generally pissing us off when the colorful “wheel of death” announced that whatever we thought we were doing was not going to happen. There was also a clicking sound that accompanied the death wheel, which (to me) suggested that it was a hard drive problem. I mentioned to Amy that we could get a new computer with some of her art studio money, since her business requires a computer for various things. She thought that was a great idea. What a gem! The hard drive may have been damaged, or maybe it was crammed too full of music and video files; I didn’t know. My son is publishing snowboarding videos now, and everyone has a pile of music and photos. When we bought it, 256 gigabytes seemed like a lot of storage, but the new computer holds 4 times that.

While I was waiting for the new machine to arrive via FedEx, I looked into what it would take to replace the hard drive on the old one. Emboldened by a YouTube video demonstrating a 17″ iMac Hard Drive Replacement, I went ahead and ordered a new drive from an online distributor. I especially liked the opening sequence in the video where the guy demonstrated unplugging the computer. Right there I knew this was going to be aimed at my skill level. Before today, I’d never taken the cover off a computer.

After the new computer came and I got all the files moved onto it, I zeroed out the hard drive on the old one and re-installed everything. It ran fine, confirming my suspicion that what was wrong with it was that it was simply too full. This left me in the position of having to break my “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” rule. The new hard drive cost 26 bucks to ship to Alaska, and I wasn’t going to pay more to send it back.

Getting the cover off the computer was easy, and so was taking the cover off the fan. Then I was supposed to disconnect three wires from the hard drive. The 2 on the inner-most side of the drive came off easily. I just pulled the connectors away from the drive, and they came right off. But the other one near the outer edge of the computer wouldn’t come loose, and I couldn’t even see how the connector worked. This was something I’d worried about beforehand. I did NOT want to muscle the thing off and tear up some delicate little piece of plastic. That wire was connected to the metal housing that holds the drive in the computer, and not to the drive itself. Maybe it didn’t need to come off, I thought. That was GOOD IDEA #1. There was no connection at all on that part of the new drive. The cable was connected only to the metal band that secured the drive to the computer, so I left it alone and unscrewed everthing, leaving the wire attached. It was long enough to get the job done without any trouble. But I did need a pair of tweezers to retrieve some screws that dropped into hard-to-reach places inside the computer.

When I got it all back together and turned it on, the installer program did not “see” the hard drive. This was a major glitch. I didn’t know if the drive was bad, or if I’d messed up that little wire by tugging on it. I put the old drive back in to see if it worked (It did.) and then I took it out and put the new one back in after a bunch of Googling to see if there was information about this problem online. What I learned was that the installer script needed me to “format” the new drive with a program on the Mac called Disc Utility.

I’d already looked at Disc Utility, though, and there wasn’t a Format option. I opened up Disc Utility from the Utilities menu on the installation disc and – for kicks – I clicked on the Erase tab. The Erase option was available. Lacking any better idea, I “erased” this brand new hard drive. Wonder of wonders, a message in the dialog box announced that the computer was partitioning the drive. I have no idea what that was about. After that, still operating on desperation, I decided to click Repair Disc. Amazingly, it ran a “repair” sequence and listed several things that it did, ultimately declaring the drive to be in proper order.

And it was. The installer script recognized the destination disc, and I had a beer while I watched the progress bar show me the system being re-installed. It took me over 3 hours to accomplish what the guy in the video did in 5 minutes.

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It’s bricks all the way down

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Nonsense from our national school policy leadership is just so much noise – whether naive or disingenuous, I don’t know. It may be both. Tom Hoffman is right - Arne Duncan will learn some hard lessons of his own before this is all over. In the meantime, it hurts my brain to listen to him – almost as much as Sarah Palin – and I plan to stop thinking about him for a long while after I finish writing this.

Marion Brady offers Arne and Co. some insight in a comment on an article about Duncan’s political battles:

The Duncan-Obama education reform strategy will fail. It will fail not because of institutional inertia, not because of union resistance to change, not because of inadequately motivated teachers, not because of poorly trained administrators or for other reasons currently being advanced. It will fail primarily for the same reason No Child Left Behind failed — because it relies on tests keyed to standards keyed to a fundamentally flawed curriculum.

But Duncan is talking tough love about low performing schools, and he’s got a multiple choice plan for “school turnarounds”:

1. Award planning grants in the fall so new principals and lead teachers can develop curricula to meet students’ needs. During the spring, they begin recruiting teachers and in June they take over the school. Current teachers can reapply. Some get rehired, but most go elsewhere.

2. Turn the school over to a charter or for-profit management organization. This approach also replaces school staff and leadership.

3. Keep most existing staff but change the culture through:
* performance evaluation and support, training and mentoring.
* stronger curriculum and instruction.
* more learning time for kids (afternoons, weekends, summer) and more time for teachers to collaborate.
* more flexibility for principals in budgeting, staffing and calendar.

4. Simply close under-performing schools and reenroll the students in better schools.

This, Duncan noted, is a state and local responsibility.“ But,” he said, “the people who run our schools—and the parents who depend on them—must demand change if they want it to happen.”

Fortunately for us, a group of parents in Chicago prepared a document [pdf] explaining how Arne Duncan’s school turnarounds have worked out for them. Note the easy to read column format comparing “What Secretary Duncan says” with “What the data show.”

He must not be too sure about that local responsibility part, though. Mike Klonsky noticed that Arne, who never met a cliche he didn’t like, promises to “come down like a ton of bricks and withhold the second round of funds from anyone who defies Obama’s wishes.” Mike is curious to know what we have to do to make the bricks fall on us. I don’t have the quote, but as I recall, Duncan was talking about withholding more money from states who chose to underfund schools and use the stimulus money to make up the difference.

But any time we talk about bricks and schools, we should remember that bricks are what they’re all about.

Bricks don’t bother me. Hand me another brick.

Filed in commonplaces, curriculum, education, politics | | Comments (7)

The Global Talent Pool

Saturday, June 13, 2009

Yet another dire warning about the need for workers who can “thrive in the global economy:”

[T]he Commission concludes that reform in mathematics and science will be possible only if we “do school differently” in ways that emphasize the centrality of math and science to educational improvement and innovation…. As a society, we must commit ourselves to the proposition that all students can achieve at high levels in math and science, that we need them to do so for their own futures and for the future of our country, and that we owe it to them to structure and staff our educational system accordingly.

Gerald Bracey urges us to think critically when we use international comparisons to guide education policy:

Principle 23 of the “principles of data interpretation [pdf]” that organize “Reading Educational Research: How to Avoid Getting Statistically Snookered,” reads “If the situation really is as alleged ask, ‘So what?’” The question does not call for some smart-ass response, it calls for an evaluation of the consequences of the situation. So the U. S. is not #1 in mathematics or science testing. So what? So, very little.

First, comparing nations on average scores is a pretty silly idea. It’s like ranking runners based on average shoe size or evaluating the high school football team on the basis of how fast the average senior can run the 40-yard dash. Not much link to reality. What is likely much more important is how many high performers you have.

Bracey brought this report from the OECD to the attention of the EDDRA list, Top of the Class: High Performers in Science in PISA 2006

The Global Talent Pool

Figure 1.2 depicts the number of 15-year-old students proficient at Levels 5 and 6 on the PISA science scale by country. Both the proportion of top performers within a country and the size of countries matter when establishing the contribution of countries to the global talent pool: even though the proportion of top performers in science is comparatively low in the United States, the United States takes up a quarter of the pie shown in Figure 1.2, simply because of the size of the country. In contrast Finland, that educates the highest share of 15-year-olds to Levels 5 and 6 in the PISA science scale, only contributes 1% to the OECD pool of top-performing 15-year-old students, because of its small size.

The US seems to be putting up a fair number of high performers, comparatively.

I am 100% in favor of quality math and science education. And since the Cargegie Commission understands that “America’s young people care deeply about problems such as global warming, world hunger, and poor health and want to be involved in solving them,” I hope they don’t forget to mention this to the corporate interests that are causing all these problems. We’ll want their cooperation when we get around to buiding our “sustainable future.”

Filed in borderland, curriculum, literacy, politics, science | | Comments (5)

Notes from the Margin

Sunday, June 7, 2009

It is no surprise that Gov. Palin wants to sit out the plan to write new national common core education standards. After all, she also wants to turn down $28.6 million in stimulus money for energy cost relief because taking it would require us to adopt energy-efficient building codes, which she says should be a local decision, and not “a dictate from the federal government.”

And now, due to a warp in time and space, Sarah Palin and I are in agreement:

“The standards are not the education problem we face,” the governor said. “The major challenges are persistently low achievement among some students and a low graduation rate. Now is the time for the state and school districts to work together to improve instruction and student achievement.”

[....]

“The State of Alaska fully believes that schools must have high expectations of students,” Governor Palin said. “But high expectations are not always created by new, mandated federal standards written on paper. They are created in the home, the community and the classroom.”

Actually, while I’m glad to see the governor standing up for local control of education, her decision to merely monitor the national standards initiative is probably a bad idea from an administrative standpoint. There’s no cost going in, and it’s almost always a good idea to take a seat at the table when the rules are being written.

Alaska’s Commissioner of ED says that we’ve already put a lot of time and money into developing the standards we have now, and adopting new standards with new tests would put us back at square one, making it impossible to use all the test data we’ve already generated. Imagine that! Federal standards written on paper, bad; state standards written on paper, good. Reform talk runs off the rails quickly at every turn.

Susan Ohanian has a new essay review of a book on data-obsessed decision making called Accountability and the Slippery Language of Public Relations. She says:

Certainly language is a good place to start reform. We could start by admitting that the claims made for transparency are at best laughable and hypocritical and at worst deliberately deceptive. How can anybody claim data transparency when the test contents are kept secret? Florida, to name just one state, declares it a felony for a teacher to take a peek at the state test. People who declaim for data-based decision-making operate in a test question vacuum. They cannot speak for the adequacy of a test when people with intimate knowledge of the children being tested must remain blind to that test’s content.

Ohanian shares some examples of bad test questions, commenting, “No wonder they insist on keeping tests secret.” She points to research indicating that “The more you know about the subject of a test question, the more likely you are to get it wrong.” This research, she says, is “particularly attentive to the role of culture in shaping children’s understanding of what they read.”

Clay observes that Arne Duncan is nearly incoherent whenever he opens his mouth these days. Speaking at the National Press Club, he says, “This is not let a thousand flowers bloom,” and then in practically the same breath, “You have to give these charters real autonomy.” Normally, we’d hope that a guy with $100 billion to throw around would make more sense. But there are no standards for Education Secretary.

Teachers are in the business of letting a thousand flowers bloom, though, and sometimes that means stepping beyond the norm. Father Michael Oleksa, a Russian Orthodox priest with a long-term interest in Alaska’s Native communities and cross-cultural education, wrote that

For 100 years, Native Alaskans went to a school where their own language was forbidden, their history and culture benignly ignored or violently demeaned, denigrated, even persecuted. Teachers were given no orientation to the language or culture of their students or the communities in which they taught. The curriculum was the same course of studies as anywhere else in the U.S.

Oleksa believes that teachers need to understand their students and their communities well enough to help them find relevance in their education. “The village school,” he says, “remains an alien institution whose aim is the destruction of the community in which is operates. We systematically take bright, beautiful 5-year-olds and in 10 years transform them into angry, alienated, suicidal 15-year-olds.” This is a critically serious problem, and a standardized curriculum imposed by people who know nothing about the targeted student population only makes things worse. We need to find ways to include and celebrate local knowledge in the classroom.

This Inupiaq oral history project is a good example of making education relevant to the local community. Also, to illustrate just how different the life experiences of many Alaska Native students are, compared with the US mainstream, look at these videos about an Inupiaq hunting camp, posted in the Alaska Digital Archives.

Alaskans been working on curriculum for some time now. The standards push came along while we were getting our own grassroots education reform going, after over a century of federal control.

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There’s a place for us

Friday, May 29, 2009

The last day of school we had our annual talent show, and some of the acts were pretty good. It made me think again about how there are so many important things that kids can learn at school – about themselves and each other – that don’t come from books. One of my favorite moments came when the kindergarteners sang “My Girl” by the Temptations to 3 teachers who retired this year. The teachers sat in chairs set up directly in front of the kindergarteners, and the kids each handed them flowers, one at a time, until the teachers all had bouquets to hold. It was a great moment.

When they came back to sit in the audience, I told one of the retiring teachers – a woman I’ve worked with for over 20 years, and who worked with two of my own kids – that the performance was so moving it nearly choked me up. Five or six people who overheard my comment burst out laughing. It was OK; I knew it was funny.

This video of Mark Knopfler singing Romeo and Juliet had a similar effect on me.

(h/t TBogg)

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Retro reform idea – Merit Pay

Thursday, May 28, 2009

Now and then I like to post about writers who have contributed to our knowledge about progressive education. It would be nice to talk about new ideas, but if we’re going to discuss old ideas, we should at least know what’s already been said so we can stop repeating ourselves and either move the discussion forward or change the subject.

EdSec Duncan, for example, has a big pile of money he wants to use to “incent” and reward excellence “based on student achievement” because he believes that a quality education for every student is a civil right. That’s a nice idea, but we need to agree on some key details before we can expect to see much progress there. Prof. Daniel Willingham posted a video on You Tube, offering six reasons why merit pay will not work. Three reasons are about why test scores won’t give us valid information about teacher effectiveness, and the other three are about social factors that make some classes more challenging than others.

James Herndon covered this topic in his own special way 25 years ago in Notes From a Schoolteacher:

The idea that if you’re paid more you’ll work harder may apply to selling encyclopedias. If you’re a lion-tamer, you’re not going to work any harder just because you’ll be paid more. The job of a teacher is more like a lion-tamer, I think.
-Al Shanker, President
AFT, AFL-CIO

I’ve tried hard to find something to say, pro or con, about merit pay – something that has not already been said hundreds of times. Shanker’s remark, above, is one point of view. You must work hard, as a schoolteacher, simply in order to avoid being eaten alive. Subduing the lion’s natural appetite comes first – after that is assured, maybe you’ll be able to teach him a trick or two.

Merit pay has been around a long time in the corporate / industrial world, but even there no one seems satisfied with it. No research can be found which agrees that the salesman works harder or is more successful at his trade if he is given extra pay for “merit.”

It is, anyway, quite beside the point whether one works hard or not. Success is the point. But even there, sales managers report that no one is satisfied if the person who demonstrably sells the most of whatever product it is, is paid more. The other salesmen argue that they had bad territories, mix-ups in their deliveries, no cooperation from the front office, storms – otherwise they would have been right up there.

Teachers, like salesmen, all believe that they are among the very best at their job. You simply must believe that in order to continue teaching (and probably selling).

You begin to teach as a lion-tamer, to be sure and, if not eaten up, go on to ask other teachers what they do here and there, what “works” for them, and quite soon, by some curious amalgam, you develop a way to work in the classroom which suits you and which you think is best … best, considering the various and vast distances between what you must do, want to do, and can do.

You think it best, for you and the students, or for the students and you.

I certainly think that my “style” or “strategy” in the classroom is the best. That’s why I do it that way. I also know that my opinion is not shared by the other teachers at Spanish Main, each of whom, quite rightly, prefers his own.

The whole idea of merit pay, then, seems to founder at this point. If we all think that we are among the best, how are we to reward the best?

If we must decide who is the best, then who is to decide, and on what basis?

Herndon doesn’t say anything about test scores, presumably because nobody had the genius idea of using them to compare teachers. Instead, he tells us that the “plans suggest a committee” of roving teachers who would visit schools and rate them based on their observations. Herndon wonders about the inferences these people would draw if they paid him a surprise visit.

The visiting team, concluding that this teacher is not teaching at all, let alone well, is not dedicated, doesn’t give a damn, certainly deserves no merit pay (if he deserves to be paid at all!) – the team has just missed out on one of the best teachers in the world! They are unaware of it.

Too late, then, for my thoughtful discourse on what teaching is, how students learn, etc.!

Has something been left out in this discussion? I want to cover everything about this now; I never want to return to it.

Well, the basis is left out. The standard, criterion, measure, rule of thumb … anything, any way by which to tell the great teachers from the simply OK teachers. The standard, etc., by which to tell the wonderful teaching strategies from the mediocre ones.

Are the great teachers more entertaining? Have they better intellectual command of their subjects? Have they greater rapport with the students? Are they more efficient, provide more time on task? Are they more aware of their students’ ethnic backgrounds, social class, personal or family problems? All of the above? Well, some of the above?

No one knows.

Does anyone know whether students actually learn more from great teachers, if you could ever find out who were the great teachers?

No one knows that either. The sentence just above sounds insane (p. 85).

It would be so much more interesting to talk about that.

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80 days

Saturday, May 23, 2009

Summer break kicked off yesterday; I’ve got about 80 days to work with, doing whatever needs doing. A few people have asked me what I’ve got planned, and my basic answer is, As little as possible. I do have some general objectives, though, to include: exercise, camping, fishing, gardening, reading – just being here.

-thinking about next year:
We had an inservice session last week with Jason Ohler, a media education specialist from Juneau who does digital storytelling projects. The timing on this was good, since I’m buying a Flip video for the classroom next year and I want to do some multimedia projects with my next class. I enjoyed Jason’s presentation a lot. His orientation is more toward the storytelling than the technology, but he has a lot to say about both. His basic message is to focus on expression first, and technology second. One of the things he talked about was how to create emotional interest in even a short project of just a couple of minutes.

Coincidentally, this morning I read an article, Media as a Weapon, about a group of New Orleans filmakers called 2-Cent Entertainment. Mentioned in the article was a short award-winning video called New Orleans for Sale that asks a really good question.

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Back and Forth and Back on Teacher Unions

Friday, May 22, 2009

Before I fill in a missing piece from a wide-ranging discussion about teacher unions, we should review:

Diane Ravitch:

If getting rid of the unions was the solution to the problem of low performance, then why…. do the southern states — where unions are weak or non-existent — continue to perform worse than states with strong unions? And how can we explain the strong union presence in Massachusetts, which is the nation’s highest performing state on NAEP?

Mike Petrilli:

I’ve concluded that no, Diane isn’t right…. [W]hen it comes to union influence on the ground, at the district level, it’s not at all clear that the “strong states” versus “weak states” distinction makes any sense…. As Jay Greene told me, the unions’ goal “is to ensure as little policy variation across states as they can on their core issues.”

Jay Greene:

Many factors influence student achievement, so isolating the effect of teacher unions would require a rigorous social science research design that could identify the influence of unionization independent of other factors.

Rather than point to a state or district, which proves nothing, I would point people to a rigorous study [pdf] by Caroline Hoxby in a leading economics journal. The abstract states: “I find that teachers’ unions increase school inputs but reduce productivity sufficiently to have a negative overall effect on student performance.

Leo Casey:

Greene is up to his old “cherry picking” tricks here, citing the one study which supports his position while ignoring the many which do not. There is a small body of scholarly literature on the subject, and Hoxby’s essay is clearly the minority view; there are more noteworthy studies showing a positive relationship between teacher unionism and educational achievement.

Casey mentions a study by Lala Steelman, Brian Powell and Robert Carini, “Do Teacher Unions Hinder Educational Performance? which examines correlations between the presence of teacher unions and high SAT/ACT scores. Additionally, Casey cites F. Howard Nelson and Michael Rosen, “Are Teacher Unions Hurting American Education? [pdf], which makes a similar argument.

Casey also points to a couple of literature reviews on the topic, one of which comes from the Education Policy Studies Laboratory at Arizona State University, “School Reform Proposals: The Research Evidence,” by Robert Carini [summary pdf], [full report pdf].

Jay Greene:

Caroline Hoxby’s study, upon which I base my claims, employs a vastly superior research design…. But even if Leo insisted upon relying on the literature reviews he cites rather than the higher quality research, he would have to accept some results that aren’t very flattering to teacher unions. Those lit reviews find that unionization raises the cost of education by about 8% to 15%. In addition, they find that unionization tends to hurt the academic achievement of high-achieving and low-achieving students while benefiting more typical students found in the middle of the ability distribution.

Greene likes Hoxby’s methodology because he believes that it separates causes from effects. But Greene ignores a criticism of Hoxby mentioned in the Carini paper:

Hoxby found that unionized districts had higher dropout rates than non-unionized districts from 1970 to 1990. Of the five studies examined in this section, Hoxby’s may offer the strongest evidence, although like the others, it too can be challenged on methodological grounds. In particular, Hoxby reported that she analyzed 10,509 school districts, and asserted that her sample constituted 95% of all districts in the United States in 1990. Given that there were 15,552 school districts in 1990, Hoxby’s research only covered 68% of the districts, not the 95% that she reported. It is not clear why nearly one in three districts were lost. More important, the missing districts were likely fiscally dependent districts, the bulk of which are located in strongly unionized Northeastern states. This is a potentially critical omission that may completely change her findings, particularly given the small gap in dropout rates that she found.

And even more significantly:

Further, Stone has argued that Hoxby’s finding that unionism led to higher drop-out rates is not necessarily inconsistent with research documenting favorable union effects. The argument is that, with a focus on high school dropouts, Hoxby essentially limited the scope of her study to lower-achieving students. In any case, three other studies discussed previously have reported that unionism did not increase dropout rates.

Nowhere do I see delusional people harder at work than I do when I read the contorted ravings of education policy wonks discussing harebrained ideas for how to fix schools. Choose your swamp. Then wade around in it. This is the beauty of the internet. Greene reports about the achievement gap, which is attributed to the standardization of instructional settings that comes from unionization. But he ignores the obvious fact that this is precisely what the standards movement is all about, and which teachers recognize as exacerbating the problem.

The anti-union pro-corporate education reformers don’t have any actual solutions. Instead, they resort to changing the subject by criticizing unions for tying the hands of administrators. They don’t acknowledge the fact that administrators haven’t the slightest clue about how to stimulate academic progress for disadvantaged students without resorting to heavy-handed “motivational” approaches devoid of any educational merit.

Teacher unions haven’t been vocal enough in opposing these so-called reforms. But we can look to the teachers in Los Angeles for an example of teacher solidarity and activism. This is important because corporations are getting more militant and punitive in their efforts to prevent workers from unionizing. The “reformers” know that if the unions don’t slow them down, nobody will.

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My Evil Plan

Friday, May 15, 2009

There are 3 days of school left, and they are all early-out days with afternoons set aside for administrative chores. My principal had a Title 1 evaluation meeting downtown today, and he asked the teachers if we had any classroom data (pre/post) he could take with him. I asked if he’d be interested in student reflection pieces, and he said that would be good.

Students were overwhelmingly positive about the reading/writing workshop, and website. These are some clips from the highlight reel.

This year I have learned to like other genres of books. Before I went into sixth grade I only liked manga and mystery. But when we had to read books that the rest of the class had, I began to like humorous books and history books.
-K

This entire year I’ve read like twenty thick books and I found out that writing is fun, and I want to write books when I grow up. I’ve already started on one. It’s called Ten Days. It’s about a murderer that captures people and then ten days later they’re dead on the front porch. I’ve read stuff like that in books and now mine will be part of the collection. So in the future when I am older if you are still living, maybe if it is out you might look for it and see how much I like to write. Well, in the beginning of the year I hated reading but now I love reading and that got me into writing.
-J

When I came to 6th grade I didn’t like to read that much. When I started reading I read mostly informational books. I read informational books until my friend told me about this funny fiction book he read, Curse of the Campfire Weenies. Somehow after I read that book I started to read a lot more fiction books.
-C

Reading and writing this year was a fun experience for me. The subject I disliked the most was reading. It’s not that I’m a bad reader, because I’m not; it’s that sometimes I had trouble choosing what book to read. While with writing I always had something new to talk about, whether it was about school, home, sports, or anything else, I always had something to say.
-G

I remember at the beginning of the year I hated to read but now I am more into it. Right now I’m reading a book called Avalon: Web of Magic. These books got me to the point where I love reading again. I’ve definitely learned from reading. On the other hand, writing is a different story. I have been writing since I was about 5. I want the stories I write to make people laugh, be amazed, be sad, and more. To me, writing is a way of expressing my feelings…. Reading and writing is a way for me to connect to the world.
-A

In the beginning of the year I hated, just hated, just hated reading and writing. But now I love them…. Writing was hard for me at first because I did not spell well. But with help I am doing OK. I think of the writing as work after playing. I also think about a writer, for example Scott Westerfeld, and I am writing to tell him what I thought about the book. Reading was hard too because I did not know how to read. I was reading kid books and not my age books, but now I am reading my age books. Some books are hard for me still, but I try to work through the difficulties and soon I am off to another book. When I am interested in something I look up all I can and write what I know down.
-B

At the beginning of the year I was hard headed about reading and didn’t like it at all! But now Mr. Noon has made me realize all books aren’t so bad. I have come to enjoy reading a bit more than I used to and it has opened a whole new gate for me. Now I like fiction books that are humorous. My writing at the beginning of the year was good. I loved to write and still do, but Mr. Noon, classmates, and others have helped me to improve and learn more about the concepts of writing. I have learned to use descriptions such as colors, words, and letting the reader visualize, not just read the words.
-K

I didn’t really like reading at the beginning of the year, but now I will go to Barnes and Noble, get a 100-650 paged book and read it for hours non-stop. I really like action-adventure, fantasy adventure books, such as Dragon Rider, The Thief Lord, and The Hobbit. I’m glad Mr. Noon had The Hobbit. That book was awesome!… I don’t really feel the same about writing. Our class web site is cool, but I almost always have writer’s block on things we’re assigned, like writing about magazines we read, I always have to look back at it a lot. I think writing is a lot better than it has been in past years, though. -T

Based on what they had to say, I’m thinking about ways to build opportunities for small group book clubs and writing teams into the program next year, making sure they still have options for what they’ll read and write. Many may have done better, or had more fun, with some additional kinds of support. It was interesting to see how frequently they mentioned following up on recommendations from their friends. I want to encourage that.

Several months ago, one of the boys told me that he was starting to like reading. Ah, you’ve fallen for my evil plan, I told him. He smiled. Getting them to enjoy reading was my main goal this year, and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.

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Rewriting David Brooks

Friday, May 8, 2009

The fight against poverty produces political posturing and fatuous claims about “Harlem miracles.” You go visit any low-income public school, job-training program, or community youth center, and you meet committed, caring, idealistic people, hard at work. Then you look at the results from low-grade standardized tests that have been forced on school communities by politicians intent on blaming and shaming teachers and students, and you find that public concerns are being exploited by corporate interests for private gain.

Instead of relying on advocacy research supporting charter schools from the likes of the Education Innovation Laboratory CEO, Roland Fryer, and funded by the Broad Foundation, we should examine the questionable claims that charter schools produce achievement results superior to public schools. One such study, “Is There a ‘Consensus’ on School Choice and Achievement?” which appeared in a recent issue of the Education Policy Journal [abstract] refutes claims that choice-based programs are more effective than regular public schools.

The claims by advocates of a consensus on this question are quite revealing because they represent new modes of research production and dissemination in education research and policy making. These strategies, which tend to skirt traditional processes designed to determine research quality, are particularly noteworthy for their effectiveness in attracting positive media attention and shaping the policy debate.

The authors look at how research on school choice is conducted and promoted, and comment on what they call the “political economy of educational research and policy making,” examining in particular, claims that choice programs serve to boost student achievement for students who use vouchers to attend private schools.

This is a powerful critique of education policy think tank research which is echoed by New York Times columnists who like to frame education experts as “the establishment,” advocating for economic reforms along with education reforms. The so-called “education reformers,” on the other hand, are recognized for their claims that school-based approaches, alone, will produce big (test score) results. Accordingly we should note that education journalists often confuse who belongs to “the establishment,” and who favors real social change.

These journalists have become “no excuses” journalists who shill for organizations like KIPP, [pdf] and Green Dot, and promote entrepeneureal corporate efforts to profit from publicly funded social services. They celebrate superficial efforts to mold student behavior such as teaching students to look at the person who is talking, and teaching them how to shake hands, assuming that cultural deficits and professional intransigence are to blame for disappointing student learning outcomes. The basic theory is that mainstream journalists have certain working models in their heads; who is a real education expert, the benefits of free-market capitalism, and corporate innocence in economic inequality.

Many teachers and parents who actually work with students don’t have these internalized models. They understand that, while a “disciplined, orderly and demanding” school environment can promote middle-class values, these efforts, alone, will not sustain long-term changes for underprivileged students. Education reform must be accompanied by low-cost health care, decent housing, public and domestic safety, employment opportunities, job security, and affordable higher education.

Basically, the no excuses journalists distract us from talking about what really needs to be done by serving as mouthpieces for people with financial and political agendas. They don’t tell us about the funding sources for the advocacy research reports they promote because they know that it undercuts their credibility. They also abuse the traditional role of investigative journalists who speak truth to power by challenging their official sources with difficult questions. Instead, they successfully focus public attention on test scores to the exclusion of real-world measures of disadvantage, generating propaganda suggesting that education without economic justice can create social mobility.

…Because David Brooks believes in miracles.

Filed in borderland, education, politics, social class | | Comments (6)