Diane's Discoveries

A Little Humor About NCLB

Link: EduBlog Insights � Blog Archive � If no child gets ahead, then no child will be left behind.

Did you see NCLB–The Football Version? Author Unknown

l. All teams must make the state playoffs, and all will win the championship. If a team does not win the championship, they will be on probation until they are the champions, and coaches will be held accountable.

2. All kids will be expected to have the same football skills at the same time and in the same conditions. No exceptions will be made for interest in football, a desire to perform athletically, or genetic abilities or disabilities. ALL KIDS WILL PLAY FOOTBALL AT A PROFICIENT LEVEL

3. Talented players will be asked to work out on their own without instruction. This is because the coaches will be using all their instructional time with the athletes who aren’t interested in football, have limited athletic ability, or whose parents don’t like football.

4. Games will be played year round, but statistics will only be kept in the 4th, 8th, and 11th games.

5. This will create a New Age of sports where every school is expected to have the same level of talent and all teams will reach the same minimal goals.

If no child gets ahead, then no child will be left behind.

Dismantle the No Child Left Behind Act

Anne Davis points to an excellent petition regarding the NCLB Act: EduBlog Insights � Blog Archive � A Petition Calling for the Dismantling of the No Child Left Behind Act.

Read Lani Ritter Hall’s post on No Child Left Behind–One Size Does Not fit All!.

Science Leadership Academy

Thanks to Will Richardson, I just followed his link to another terrific blog. At first I was just curious about the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, but going to the author's (Chris Lehmann's) blog, I started reading her previous blogs which I believe you will find insightful and useful. Investigate her blog; I guarantee you won't be sorry you took the time! Weblogg-ed � Science Leadership Academy Up Close and Personal.

"...Chris Lehmann at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia...Bottom line is that Chris is building a vibrant community of learners among both teachers and students that has a unique feeling in the world of public schools I’ve seen...And it’s really not about the technology as much as it is about the culture of learning that they are creating. Yes, every student has a laptop. And they have been working with Moodle and Elgg to build class sites and online portfolios. But what’s neat is that the students are taking real ownership over what happens at the school...

Time Magazine Article

David Warlick points us to a Time magazine article: 2 Cents Worth � How to Bring Our Schools Out of the 20th Century.

"...an upcoming cover article for Time Magazine.  It is available now, online. TIME.com: How to Bring Our Schools Out of the 20th Century — Dec. 18, 2006 — Page 1: For the past five years, the national conversation on education has focused on reading scores, math tests and closing the “achievement gap” between social classes. This is not a story about that conversation. This is a story about the big public conversation the nation is not having about education, the one that will ultimately determine not merely whether some fraction of our children get “left behind” but also whether an entire generation of kids will fail to make the grade in the global economy because they can’t think their way through abstract problems, work in teams, distinguish good information from bad or speak a language other than English.

This is a great article, if only that it validates what most of us have been saying for years.  This simply says it more loudly and to more people — and probably more eloquently.  Read it!"

Follow-up to Building Bridges

In December, Konrad Glogowski followed up his October post about Building Bridges: blog of proximal development � Blog Archive � Students Reflect on Group Work.

When I posted my two entries on group work some time ago, I had no idea that this issue would follow me around for such a long time. It seems that wherever I turn, someone or something reminds me of advantages or disadvantages of group work. I’m not complaining - these are excellent opportunities for further reflection.

A couple of days ago, for example, I received a memo issued by administration at my school in order to “make sure that everyone is on the same page” and ensure that there is consistency on some key curriculum and administrative matters. The memo addresses study hall, homework, student absenteeism, and group work. In short, some pretty mundane and uninspiring issues. The section on group work, however, caught my attention:

'Please remember to assign and vary the partners in group work. Through speaking with parents and children, we have found that partner and group work is a very sensitive issue. To use their words, some students feel that they are “left out,” “stuck with,” or “looked past” during group work. Many of these kids have other social stresses to deal with. Can we all please make every effort to alleviate this stress during class time?'

Wait. There’s more. Last week, I received an e-mail from Jessica, my former student. She graduated in June and is now attending high school. Jessica was one of the participants in my doctoral research study. She found this blog a couple of months ago and has been visiting it regularly. In her e-mail, she offered her own response to my recent entry on groups:

'Hey Mr. G!
[…] I am reading Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden right now. GREAT book, by the way.
I was thinking, yesterday, about what you wrote on Sunday about groups in class. Right now, I am working on a project with three of my classmates in English. we are reading a short story, analyzing it and making a presentation to the class about that the themes are and things like that. I have found so far, that the kids I am working with are, to be frank, taking over, but total slackers, if that makes sense. The three of them tell each other what to do and how to do it, but none of them want to take charge and do the work - they just want to tell people what to do. So yesterday, I said to them that they should take some responsibility and do some work themselves and not end up dumping it all on me. I got, to my surprise, a very understanding answer. They agreed that it was unfair to argue with each other and end up giving me the work, and that they will go home this weekend and finish their different parts of the presentation. This is exactly what you said in They Begin To Build Bridges. In some cases, there are kids who are dominant, but not necessarily more competent than the others who take control and demand that they have it their way. Other times, it’s the kids who are dominant AND more competent than the others who messes it up for the whole group. It ends up being that one person who does the project and the others get credit for it, but I know teacher;s aren’t stupid. You even said yourself last year that you can tell when it’s just one person’s work.'

Building Bridges

Konrad Glogowski doesn't post in his blog often, but when he does it's so very thoughtful, i.e., this was posted in October (yes, I know, I haven't been actively posting in my blog either!) This is just a partial post; you need to go to his blog for all the information: blog of proximal development � Blog Archive � They Begin to Build Bridges.

"We have started a long novel study unit and the students will soon have to start working on major unit projects. The idea is to give them the freedom to explore the novel on their own, to make connections between the novel and any current or historical events, and to spend some time becoming an expert who will then present a specific aspect of the novel to the whole class. The question I am considering, though, is whether to make this an individual project or a group one. I think I understand the advantages and disadvantages of both but, as my previous post makes very clear, I am deeply suspicious of groups. I understand that we are social animals, that students need to learn to work collaboratively, that ideas grow when minds work together, and that team work is a highly prized skill out there in the “real world.” Yet, at the same time, I know that more often than not, when students work in groups many individual voices are subordinated to the dominant voice of the group."...

This post has several comments from others making for interesting reading.

Education Officials Violated Rules

A "No Child Left Behind investigation report is out now; you can read the whole Inspector General"s report in pdf download titled: The Reading First Program’s Grant Application Process, ED-OIG/I13-F0017 September 2006

The following was in today's New York Times: Report Says Education Officials Violated Rules - New York Times.

By SAM DILLON
Published: September 23, 2006

Department of Education officials violated conflict of interest rules when awarding grants to states under President Bush’s billion-dollar reading initiative, and steered contracts to favored textbook publishers, the department’s inspector general said yesterday.

In a searing report that concludes the first in a series of investigations into complaints of political favoritism in the reading initiative, known as Reading First, the report said officials improperly selected the members of review panels that awarded large grants to states, often failing to detect conflicts of interest. The money was used to buy reading textbooks and curriculum for public schools nationwide.

States have received more than $4.8 billion in Reading First grants during the Bush administration, and a recent survey by an independent group, the Center on Education Policy, reported that many state officials consider the initiative to be highly effective in raising reading achievement. But the report describes a tangled process in which some states had to apply for grants as many as six times before receiving approval, with department officials scheming to stack panels with experts tied to favored publishers. In one e-mail message cited in the report, from which the inspector general deleted some vulgarities, the director of Reading First, Chris Doherty, urged staff members to make clear to one company that it was not favored at the department. “They are trying to crash our party and we need to beat the [expletive deleted] out of them in front of all the other would-be party crashers who are standing on the front lawn waiting to see how we welcome these dirtbags,” Mr. Doherty wrote. Mr. Doherty recently resigned from the department to “return to the private sector,” Katherine McLane, a department spokeswoman said. Officials relayed reporters’ requests for comment to Mr. Doherty, and he declined to be interviewed, an official said. The abuses described in the report occurred during 2002 and 2003, when Rod Paige was education secretary.

John Grimaldi, spokesman for the Chartwell Education Group where Mr. Paige is chairman, said he had not read the report but would seek Mr. Paige’s reaction to it. “Some of the actions taken by department officials and described in the inspector general’s report reflect individual mistakes,” Secretary Margaret Spellings said in a statement. “Although these events occurred before I became secretary of education, I am concerned about these actions and committed to addressing and resolving them.”Officials will review by the end of the year all Reading First applications that the department approved, to determine that they met all applicable requirements, Ms. McLane said.The report recounts how during the formation of a review panel in 2002 a journalist asked the department whether federal officials were trying to stack the panel so that some reading programs would not be treated fairly. The report cited the Reading First director’s response to the department employee who relayed the journalist’s question: “Stack the panel? ... I have never heard of such a thing ....” the director replied. “The response,” the report concluded, “suggests that he may indeed have intended to ‘stack’ the expert review panel.”

The report mentions Reid Lyon, the former chief of a branch of the National Institutes of Health, who was a research adviser to President Bush and an architect of Reading First. He exerted immense influence at the department when Mr. Paige was there. In 2002, Dr. Lyon told the Reading First director and other department officials that a woman whom the department had already selected to be on a review panel had been “actively working to undermine” a reading initiative he favored, the report said. “Chances are that other reviewers can trump any bias on her part,” Dr. Lyon told the officials. “We can’t uninvite her,” a senior adviser to Mr. Paige wrote in response, the report said. “Just make sure she is on a panel with one of our barracuda types.” The incident demonstrated “the intention of the former senior adviser to the secretary to control another panelist,” the report said. In an interview yesterday, Dr. Lyon said that in the 2002 incident he sought to neutralize bias. “If we detected bias, we had to make sure that the review panel was put together so that that bias would be neutralized,” he said. Dr. Lyon left the national institutes in August 2005 and is now an executive vice president for Higher Ed Holdings, a company based in Dallas that is working to found a college of education. “Oh man, I’m mortified,” Dr. Lyon said of the report. “To see the facts that were presented today was very disappointing, because it’s an outstanding program.” The investigation was opened last year after the inspector general received accusations of mismanagement and other abuses at the department from publishers of several reading programs, including Robert E. Slavin, a director of a research center at the Johns Hopkins University who is chairman of Success for All, a nonprofit foundation that produces reading materials.

Audit finds No Child program corruption

So many of you have said that the NCLB program has many problems; a reporter from Associated Press, and one from the New York Times agree with you when reporting about the recent Inspector General's report just out.

Inside Bay Area - Audit finds No Child program corruption.

Review targets director in willful mismanagement of billion-dollar program By Ben Feller, Associated Press

WASHINGTON — A scorching internal review of the Bush administration's billion-dollar-a-year reading program says the Education Department ignored the law and ethical standards to steer money how it wanted.

The government audit is unsparing in its view that the Reading First program has been beset by conflicts of interest and willful mismanagement. It suggests the department broke the law by trying to dictate which curriculum schools must use.

It also depicts a program in which review panels were stacked with people who shared the director's views, and in which only favored publishers of reading curricula could get money. In one e-mail, the director told a staff member to come down hard on a company he didn't support, according to the report released Friday by the department's inspector general.

"They are trying to crash our party and we need to beat the (expletive deleted) out of them
in front of all the other would-be party crashers who are standing on the front lawn waiting to see how we welcome these dirtbags," the program director wrote, the report said.

That official, Chris Doherty, is resigning in the coming days, department spokeswoman Katherine McLane said Friday. Asked if his quitting was in response to the report, she said only that Doherty is returning to the private sector after five years at the agency. Doherty declined to comment.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings pledged to swiftly adopt all the audit's recommendations. She also pledged a review of every Reading First grant her agency has approved.
"When something undermines the credibility of this department, or the standing of any program, I'm going to spring into action," Spellings told The Associated Press.

First aims to help young children read through scientifically proven programs, and the department considers it a jewel of No Child Left Behind, Bush's education law. Just this week, a separate review found the effort is helping schools raise achievement. But from the start, the program has been dogged by accusations of impropriety, leading to several ongoing audits. The new report from the Office of Inspector General — an independent arm of the Education Department — calls into question the program's credibility.

The ranking Democrat on the House education committee was furious.
"They should fire everyone who was involved in this," said Rep. George Miller, D-Calif. "This was not an accident, this was not an oversight. This was an intentional effort to corrupt the process."

For the complete article: insidebayarea

Another Excellent Teacher Lost

A respected science teacher fought to teach evolution in her classroom; she prevailed, but the stress was too much...she's retiring.

Evolution's Lonely Battle in a Georgia Classroom

By MICHAEL WINERIP

Published: June 28, 2006

OCCASIONALLY, an educational battle will dominate national headlines. More commonly, the battling goes on locally, behind closed doors, handled so discreetly that even a teacher working a few classrooms away might not know. This was the case for Pat New, 62, a respected, veteran middle school science teacher, who, a year ago, quietly stood up for her right to teach evolution in this rural northern Georgia community, and prevailed.

She would not discuss the conflict while still teaching, because Ms. New wouldn't let anything disrupt her classroom. But she has decided to retire, a year earlier than planned. "This evolution thing was a lot of stress," she said. And a few weeks ago, on the very last day of her 29-year career, at 3:15, when Lumpkin County Middle School had emptied for the summer, and she had taken down her longest poster from Room D11A — the 15-billion-year timeline ranging from the Big Bang to the evolution of man — she recounted one teacher's discreet battle.

Read the article at: Evolution's Lonely Battle in a Georgia Classroom - New York Times.

Curriculum is Dead

Read David Warlick's thoughts about curriculum:
2 Cents Worth � Curriculum is Dead.

I’m getting tired of hearing people continue to ask for the evidence that technology helps students learn. It doesn’t matter. We know — that good teachers help students learn. We need technology in every classroom and in every student and teacher’s hand, because it is the pen and paper of our time, and it is the lens through which we experience much of our world.