Category Archives: Education

More Product Pimping

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First yogurt, now duck tape brand duct tape.

Seventeen is researching college scholarships. Where was this one thirty years ago?

I was no where disadvantaged, athletic, or academic enough to qualify for any scholarships. I might have been able to compete for this one though.

Duck Tape Brand Duct Tape

Scholarship Name: Stuck at Prom Scholarship Contest
Description: If you are a fashion-forward high school student who doesn’t mind getting yourself into a…sticky situation, then you have a good chance at winning $3,000 for college. Here’s the deal: Go to your high school prom dressed in duck tape. Yup, duck tape. Winners are picked for their “originality, workmanship and quantity of tape.” That quantity thing is a major piece of the puzzle – don’t just accessorize with the tape. Past winners went for a total duck tape ensemble, so if you’re serious about this fashion challenge, it’s best to go all out.
Award: $3,000
Awards Per Year: 1
Award is Open to: High school students
Major/Field of Study: Open
How to Apply/Contact: Take a picture of you and your duck-taped date and send it into the Duck Brand Duct Tape Stuck at Prom Contest, www.stuckatprom.com.

The Decade’s First Global News Story

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Paul Collier in a January 17th Guardian story.

“Humanitarian crises around the world have shown that, while disaster response is often fast, effective and well-funded, reconstruction attracts fewer resources and, in many instances, fails to deliver an opportunity for a better future. Aceh, on the tip of the Indonesian island of Sumatra and a region often taken as a model for focused development efforts after the 2004 tsunami, now faces new challenges as aid agencies reduce cash handouts and a lack of employment opportunities threatens stability.”

The media spotlight is shining brightly on Haiti just as it did Aceh in 2004. What are the odds that in six years, we will read that Haiti “now faces new challenges as aid agencies reduce cash handouts and a lack of employment opportunities threatens stability.”?

People’s recent generosity towards Haiti strikes me as odd given how little attention most people typically pay to desperately poor people and places.

In the medium and long-term, what impact can we expect an “ignore, give generously, and ignore again” style of philanthropy to make?

We need to commit to more serious and sustained global citizenship that rests on historical knowledge of colonialism, of specific places like Haiti, of globalization and neo-liberal economics, and less on one-off, media-inspired, charitable giving.

I would be more optimistic about Haiti’s future if people checked out books by Sachs, Collier, and other experts on global poverty and formed groups to debate the merits of their proposals for reducing global poverty.

If we don’t press our government to give more generously and intelligently, and we don’t consider changes in our own lifestyles, I can’t help but wonder if we give at times like this out of a sense of guilt.

Yogurt

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Now that we’ve fixed pubic ed, we can move on to . . . yogurt.

Eating yogurt, like most of life, entails decision-making. What kind to eat?

Since Lance has recommended more pictures and you’ve been dying to know, here’s a pictorial that represents the yogurt journey I’ve been on.

Initially, my yoggie world was all YoPlait, all the time. It was ubiquitous, I was unsophisticated, and it had lots of sugar. Favorite flav was KeyLime, but French Vanilla rallied and overtook it as the #1 seed.

Everything was copacetic until the wife rocked my yoggie world one summer day by saying, “You know YoPlait has a lot of sugar.” Voice inside my head, “No duh, why do you think I like it so much.” Actual voice, “Mike said Tillamook is very good and has less sugar, maybe we should give it a try.”

And like a dairy Tiger Woods, I began eating around.

What wasn’t there to like about Tillamook? Good taste, less sugar, and two extra ounces.

It was a solid relationship, until, you knew an “until” was coming, until I started to hear repeated references to a different, more exotic and alluring yoggie. . .Greek.

I read references to it in triathlete’s blogs, I heard more and more people talking about it and got wanderlust. Because I wanted to be like the other kids, I instructed the wife to “Bring me some of this magical yoggie of which everyone speaks.”

And so yesterday, with the YoPlait and Tillamook quivering in the fridge, I assembled three versions of Greek on the kitchen island and proceeded to taste each. I was underwhelmed, whelmed, and overwhelmed.

Then I took a look at the nutritional info and understood why: blow those pics up and take a gander at the sugar, fat, protein, etc.

In layman’s term, you could eat the nonfat like it’s Hagen Daz, empty the cartoon, and barely move the needle on the scale. In contrast, you gain weight from the regular, which overwhelmed me, just by glancing at it in the fridge.

But this isn’t a problem, the wide range of choices is quite nice. This morning I ran 10k and then swam 3.5k. I sucked down some regular guilt free. Tomorrow morning, when I won’t have time to workout before teaching, I’ll apologize to my taste buds and probably go with the non-fat.

Imagine if life was so accommodating. I’m sure my wife would love it if she could alternate among three of me. When she hears me pull into the garage, she could say I want non-fat Ron so “Just zip it and listen to me all night.” Or regular Ron, “Okay, talk to me, engage me, make me laugh.” Or low-fat Ron, something in between.

Wondering about the Mountain High? It’s the (mostly summer) smoothie workhorse that the wife gets at the hippy co-op. It’s okay with some of the wife’s all-world granola, but it’s most at home in the blender with ice, fruit, and juice.

What Work Will The Next Generation Do?

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First and last sentences from an article in today’s WSJ titled “Even-In-A-Recovery-Some-Jobs-Won’t-Return”.

Even when the U.S. labor market finally starts adding more workers than it loses, many of the unemployed will find that the types of jobs they once had simply don’t exist anymore.

. . . Harvard’s Mr. Katz warns that past experience suggests. . . conjecture is likely fruitless. “One thing we’ve learned is that when we attempt to forecast jobs 10 or 15 years out, we don’t even get the categories right,” he says.

In other words, the economy is so fluid, it’s illogical to plan on having any particular job.

So what are young people to do?

I have lots of thoughts on the subject, but I’m curious about what you think?

Teacher Merit Pay 3

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Washington’s gov has had meetings with the state’s top ed officials to see if they can tweak state policy so that they might qualify for a couple of hundred million of the Obama admin’s “Race to the Top” funds. Among other things, they’re talking about instituting a teacher merit pay plan to gain Washington’s favor.

Here’s the context of those discussions. The following cuts have been proposed in the gov’s supplemental budget, which deals with an anticipated $2.6b shortfall:

• cut preschool for 3 year-olds in low-income areas ($10.5m)

• increase class size in K-4 ($110.6m)

• suspend the money the state gives to districts that can’t raise much through property taxes ($142.9m)

• eliminate gifted ed ($7.4m)

• suspend all day Kindergarten for students in schools with the highest poverty levels ($33.6m)

Given this context, I worry any merit based pay system will involve slicing the existing $34,237-$64,531 pie differently.

For example, take ten first year teachers salaries, throw them in a pot totaling $340,237. Establish the rules of the game.

Say we end up with three winners who see a 15% pay boost, three losers who lose 15%, and four status quoers. So now the salary range is $29,101-$39,373.

Does anyone believe border-line poverty (for a family) is a great motivator?

If I was a unionized teacher, I would never sign on to a “slice the existing pie differently” plan.

If states want to see stronger candidates enter the profession, retain the best teachers, and revitalize the profession, they have to make public schooling an even higher priority and find ways to pay bonuses to teams of teachers or entire schools for improved attendance (teacher absenteeism is a serious problem in places), improved student attendance and achievement, and for working for half the summer on curriculum planning and related professional development activities.

Teacher Merit Pay 2

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The “conventional wisdom” problem I outlined in the last post is not the problem in my view. Children are not like cars or hamburgers. Some aspects of our public life, like health care and education, are too critical to our well being to allow for losing schools.

Drum roll. . . I will now concede a few points often communicated by conservative critics of public schools. Teacher unions will generate more good will if they work together with school boards, districts, and administrators to not only make sure all teachers are given due process when evaluated and conceivably terminated, but also to develop more rigorous criteria for continuing employment so that more (1% would be a large increase in some districts) consistently ineffective teachers are let go. Emphasizing due process almost exclusively has proven counter-productive.

Also, thanks to M.A. for turning me on to Atul Gawande, surgeon/genius health-care writer for the New Yorker. In the December 14th issue, in an article titled “Testing, Testing” he makes a very convincing argument that the best way forward in health-care, is for bottom-up, grass-root pilot studies of medical care, insurance, and related innovations.

Ed reformers would be well served to follow suit. Of course there’s a lot of innovative magnet, charter, and other public schools-within-schools, the challenge is scaling up what works in one context to another. But I digress. Even though schools are not car dealerships and restaurants, we need to free schools up to innovate and distinguish themselves one from another so that families can comparison shop. Families that consciously choose a school are far more committed to it.

To paraphrase from Deborah Meier, we need to provide families choices among small, distinctive, public schools.

The trend is the opposite, the pendulum has not only swung towards standardization in assessment, curriculum, and teaching methodologies, but it’s gotten stuck.

The record on charter schools is terribly uneven, some are exceptional, many are not. I’m not enough of an expert to know how to tip that balance, but my guess is greater fiscal and curricular accountability.

Back to “the problem”. Recent commenters, “Mom’s Favorite” and Lance (also a fantasy appellation), are both right. We need to find ways to attract especially strong candidates to the profession. What do I mean by “especially strong”? For starters, solid academic background, caring, and interpersonally skilled. And we want people motivated more by improving their communities than by enriching themselves.

Right now beginning teachers in Washington State make $34,237 and the scale tops out at $64,531 so we have a lot of room to increase pay without altering the tremendous altruism that motivates most teachers.

Until recently, I taught one course a year in an International Studies program that tended to attract especially strong students. Bi and trilingual, strong writers, confident discussants, serious international experience, ambitious, socially aware. The exact type of people I need applying to the teacher certification program I coordinate, but for the bulk of them, $34,237 is insufficient. After three years of law school they can triple it (leaving aside the fact that a lot of lawyers don’t like lawyering).

Stay tuned because the next question is whether merit pay (yes, I’ll get back to it) means dividing up the same $34,237-$64,531 pie differently or whether there are ways to increase the size of the pie, and as the cliche goes, have a rising tide lift all boats.

Teacher Merit Pay 1

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First things first, what’s the problem we’re trying to fix? Arne Duncan, as a high-profile representative of conventional wisdom, would probably answer this way. “The problem is motivating teachers to work harder so that we can close the achievement gap between more and less wealthy students, improve graduation rates, and hold off our traditional economic rivals, Japan and Germany, and our emerging ones, India and China.”

So here are the assumptions: 1) teachers don’t work hard; 2) because teachers don’t work hard, we have a pernicious achievement gap; 3) schools exist to help us maintain our relative advantage in the global economic race.

Conventional wisdom suggests teachers don’t work hard because their pay is predetermined based upon their educational credentials and years of service. That combined with tenure translates into educational malaise. This is a deeply held view by many Americans who view business model principles as immutable.

Business model peeps reason schools are like car dealerships and fast food restaurants. There’s no point being sentimental about shuttered dealerships and restaurants because they are a natural byproduct of intense free market competition. Keep your consumer eyes on the prize, a wide choice of affordable, high quality cars/food.

If unfettered competition is the economic magic bullet, no reason it can’t be the educational one too. Schools in a given locale don’t fear one another enough nor do teachers within individual schools. The proliferation of student test scores enable us to keep score between schools and teachers within individual schools.

Before I proceed, is that the problem merit-based teacher pay is supposed to fix?

Tell the Truth. . . Most of the Time

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This thirty second sportsmanship commercial produced by the Foundation for a Better Life got me thinking about how in sports an “ends justify the means” mentality often dominates. Why is that?

We’re used to seeing wide receivers trap balls and pop up as if they caught them before they hit the ground. Similarly, we’re using to seeing outfielders pop up after trapping line drives as if they were legit catches. And as the commercial highlights, in bball players routinely deny having tipped a ball.

One definition of morality is doing the right thing when no one’s looking, in some sports though, we seemingly accept whatever it takes to win.

Can’t athletes be both passionate about winning and ethical?

I take a car crash approach to YouTube comments, try not to look, but in the case of this commercial, I couldn’t help myself. One commenter made an interesting point by saying it’s important to defer to the third, impartial party to maintain control and that the refs wouldn’t have liked having their call questioned. Is that a legit explanation for the status quo or is it a weak rationalization for lying? Most people ripped the player for admitting to touching the ball before it went out of bounds.

Again, why do we expect people to tell the truth when completing their taxes, but take an “anything goes” approach to winning? If you’re over thirty five you might remember the fifth down game. Gotta love Bill McCartney‘s (of Promise Keepers fame) stirring response.

Maybe it’s just the major sports. Golf is well known for requiring honesty and as Rosie Ruiz found out, generally you have to run the whole 26.2 miles of a marathon.

What am I going to do all about this? The next time I race my daughter in the 500 free, I’m going to get my counter to flip from 13 to 17 and hope no one notices. If they do, I’m sure everyone will cut me some slack.

Thanks

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I joined the blogosphere in January 2008 and took a hiatus during the spring of 2009. Absent much feedback, I’ve been somewhat fickle with occasional name, formatting, and post schedule changes. And now I’m doing it again by reneging on my recent M-W-F plan. Instead of adhering to a set schedule in twenty ten, I’m going to an inspiration-based schedule.

The top three posts to this point and time: 1) Student-Centered Education Reform; 2) Two Types of Self Esteem; and 3) Why Merit-based Teacher Pay is Not a Good Idea. That suggests Lance is wrong not just about the University of Washington football team’s prospects next fall, but people’s interest in my swimming, cycling, and running as well.

Jeez, could my sista be right, it’s not all about me? Shudder the thought.

Thanks for continuing to read, and in some cases, comment. I appreciate it. I hope you’ll consider passing the link to others and jumping in with a comment sometime in twenty ten in order to generate more positive momentum. Also, I’m curious if there are specific questions, topics, or issues you’d like me to write about in the year ahead.

I hope the new year  starts out especially well for you and yours.

Ron