Yale Education Leadership Smackdown!
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 02/05/2009 - 23:19On Friday, February 13, the Yale School of Management will sponsor the Yale Education Leadership Conference. Two years ago, the conference ended with Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach For America, Dacia Toll, president of Achievement First, Rep. Andrew Fleischmann, chairman of the General Assembly’s Education Committee, and Steven Adamoski, Superindendent of the Hartford Public Schools talking about “Closing the Achievement Gap in the State of Connecticut”.
This year’s conference will include keynotes by Joel Klein, Chancellor of the New York City Department of Education and Alberto Carvalho, Superintendent of the Miami-Dade Public Schools. One of the panels will have Rep. Fleichmann return, along with Congressman Chris Murphy, Chairman of the Connecticut State Board of Education Allan Taylor, and Connecticut State Department of Higher Education Commissioner Michael Meotti.
Concurrent with this, the Yale Law School’s Law and Media Program will be holding a conference, “The Future of Student Internet Speech: What Are We Teaching the Facebook Generation”. This conference will include a discussion of The Doninger v. Niehoff Case and how far school authority should extend.
It is unfortunate that these two events overlap since they cover related topics and I would love to be able to attend both. Meanwhile, I still need to write up my notes from the presentation of the proposed Woodbridge school budget and make it to the next committee meeting where we are discussing a three-year technology plan for the school district.
Against this backdrop, I am hearing people talking about Gov. Rell’s latest nominee for the State Board of Education. Today, Linda McMahon, CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), testified before a legislative committee. People have criticized the nomination arguing that WWE programs borders on pornographic. They have pointed out the issues with steroid use amongst WWE wrestlers and pondered what Ms. McMahon would have our children learn.
Others asked what her qualifications are, other than significant campaign contributions to numerous candidates. I have been more concerned about her unwillingness to accept interviews about her nomination and her inability to give anything beyond basic answers when asked about various educational issues. Somehow, I don’t expect to see her at any of the educational conferences coming up in the next few weeks.
Yet I don’t expect her to do significantly worse than any of the other members of the State Board of Education. After all, my cynical friends always point out to me, isn’t that how most political appointments are made, not on merit but on connections? Look at Gov. Rell, they point out. She was Gov. Rowland’s Lt. Governor for nearly ten years before Gov. Rowland’s resignation.
Now, Gov. Rell is campaigning on reducing the bloat in government. Perhaps the first place to start is by seeking nominees for political appointments based on their merit instead of how well connected they are. Until then, her comments about reducing bloat in government are going to sound awfully hollow or hypocritical.
Will Rell's Budget have Results Based Accountability?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 02/04/2009 - 14:34At the 2007 annual meeting of the National Conference of State Legislatures, the Connecticut Joint Appropriations Committee and the State Office of Policy and Management was awarded the first Con Hogan award for “their achievements in considering how state spending affects key outcomes for Connecticut families and the environment.” This was due to their focus on “results based accountability”. With the large budget deficit, it will be interesting to see how well they do this year.
The initial indications are that it may be a rough battle for the appropriations committee to stay on task. Already Gov. Rell has gone on television poisoning the well by suggesting that anyone who doesn’t support her version of the budget is just a “special interest”. Meanwhile, she is being pilloried by some of these “special interests” as merely mimicking Pres. George H.W. Bush’s promise of no new taxes and suggesting that her focus on making government smaller is following down the same path as Grover Norquist’s goal of getting government down to the size that it can be drowned in a bathtub, the way it was in New Orleans.
Will Gov. Rell’s plan mimic that of Former President Bush? Will more costs need to be picked up by local governments, forcing them to raise taxes similar to the way Pres. Bush’s policies forced states, including Connecticut to raise taxes in 1989-1991?
Gov. Rell gave a good speech. She says she is seeking to avoid forcing municipalities to raise property taxes by not cutting Education Cost Sharing (ECS), by putting off unfunded mandates and by seeking regionalization.
Yet when you look at other cuts she is proposing you have to wonder if some of the cuts will actually end up costing the citizens of Connecticut more. As an example, according to Mark Pazniokas’s blog post Watchdogs Cut From Rell's Budget , Rell’s cut of watchdog groups in the government includes “The elimination of consumer counsel would remove an independent entity that often challenges utility rates, sometimes suing state rate-setters. “
Will the loss of such watchdog groups end up costing the taxpayers more than Rell is trying to save them? If we learned anything from the financial crisis on Wall Street which has precipitated much of the budget deficit, it is that we need strong watchdogs.
Now it is up to the legislature to sort out what the budget really should be. In her speech, she attacked people who would criticize her budget proposal. Then she went on to ask them to work with her. It seems to lack a basic understanding of interpersonal dynamics.
The award winning Connecticut Joint Appropriations Committee has a rough job in front of it. It needs to get past Gov. Rell’s divisive rhetoric and focus on what it has been recognizing for doing so well, “considering how state spending affects key outcomes for Connecticut families and the environment.” Let us hope that they look beyond the speeches and focus on “results based accountability”.
We, the citizens of Connecticut can have our say to. The proposed budget can be found on the Office of Policy and Management website. Be prepared, however, the budget in brief is 57 pages long and the whole is nearly 800 pages long. It will take a while to sort through all of it.
Wordless Wednesday
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 02/04/2009 - 09:31
What do Digital Aborigines Teach Their Young?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 02/03/2009 - 12:33Over on a mailing list of Second Life educators, there is another long discussion about Digital Natives. It actually started off with a great discussion, asking for ‘OLD digital natives’ to come forward and identify themselves. The discussion has been fascinating as digital natives older than myself have come forward and talked about their work on the IBM 7070 years ago and their work today on iPhones.
This illustrates a very important idea about Digital Natives. I read various people complaining about the whole idea Digital Natives and their complaints are mostly that they run into youth who are not digitally savvy while they themselves are digitally savvy. My understanding of the discussion of Digital Natives is that it has nothing to do with age, and everything to do with whether or not a person has ‘grown up digitally’.
While I’m way too old to be considered a Digital Native by those who somehow think that being a digital native means being born after a certain arbitrary date, I ‘grew up digitally’, and consider myself a Digital Native. Beyond that, as being one of the older Digital Natives, I like to call myself a Digital Aborigine.
This raises an interesting question. What do Digital Aborigines teach their young? I should note that I’ve read some literature on education, but I’m more of a programmer than a professional educator. I believe that much of my pedagogical style can probably be traced back to ideas like resource based learning, constructivism, and other educational ideas, that’s not especially how I think about things.
So, what do I teach my kids? I always told my two older daughters, they were free to play any computer game that they could write. They started working in Logo. Wrote programs in MOOs and even did a little with Basic. I never held it as a hard and fast rule, but it did give them a much different perspective on games, and perhaps, on the way they put their thoughts together.
As technology changes, so do the approaches. At one point, I started my youngest daughter, Fiona using Google SketchUp. She created some three-dimensional objects and made them pretty colors. I’ve been encouraging her to do a little bit of work with photographs and visual editing tools. So far, it has been pretty simple stuff, red-eye removal, cropping, scaling, and related ideas. We’ll get into more interesting stuff later on.
Today, she is home from school with a cold. After the morning quota of PBSKids, Fiona went to the computer. She started playing some Dora the Explorer game on the computer, so I presented her with the rule I had told her older sisters. Then, I set her down in front of MSWLogo, a windows version of the Logo programming language.
I showed her the simple aspects. To make the turtle go forward, you type FD and some number for the number of steps. To make the turtle turn, you type RT and how far you want the turtle to turn. We made a few shapes together. Then, I introduced REPEAT.
She was very happy running commands like REPEAT 7596 [ FD 9438 RT 7539 ]. These commands produced Jackson Pollock like images which she found very interesting. I could now return to my other work.
I sent out a message about her starting to work in Logo, and I received a response from another online friend. While I don’t know the early history of this friend, I suspect that, he too, is a digital aborigine. He asked the question, “Do you have any particular strategies for teaching kids programming?” He went on to talk about the difficulty we digital aborigines have when we show our kids programming.
Programming is so interesting and exciting; it is hard not to push. It is hard not to push. It is hard not to present too much information all at once.
So, I presented her Fiona very small bits of what she could do, until she was hooked and was saying things like, “Oh, cool” or “Awesome”. Then, I handed over the keyboard to her at let her run with it. Every so often, she would come back and ask me questions. Some, I deferred for a later day. Others I answered and gave her enough to keep her interested.
As a general rule, and I suspect that all of the educational theorists will talk about this in terms of resource based learning, I like to give her the tools to play with and see what she creates. However, at some points, it is useful to have a goal. So, following an example I saw from some logo programming book years ago, I drew a simple pattern and asked her to get the turtle to draw it. It is actually a big challenge for her, and she has been working on it for a while. She comes back to me every so often with questions, but she has almost completed the task.
Mixing this together with things like doing an Internet based Radio show, Fiona is building a groundwork to create some very interesting things in something like OpenSim, and I look forward to seeing what she might create sometime.
However, I haven’t been doing this as part of a conscious plan to build up right selection of tools. Instead, I present tools to her based on whatever I think she might find interesting in the moment.
I don’t know if I’m a typical digital aboriginal parent, and I would love to hear thoughts from other digital aboriginal parents about what they are teaching their younger children.
Can you change a school?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 02/02/2009 - 18:35The election is over as are the inauguration parties. It is time to roll up the shirtsleeves and get down to work. Sure, some people are busy focusing on the 2010 elections, but it does seem like there is a lot of work to be done before hand before we get too involved in those elections.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot at the local level. Yes, some of this may be driven by the fact that Woodbridge will have municipal elections in May, but even before that, there is much to be done. I’m on a committee discussing technology and education at my local school. We’ve been talking about the importance of improving Internet based communication between the school and the parents. Whenever these sort of discussions come around, I always talk about the how significant a factor parental involvement is in students’ success. One teacher noted that research shows that it improves not only the success of the students whose parents are involved, but also the success of all the students in the classroom. It seems like we should be encouraging more parental involvement.
Then, today, I read a blog post that really got my attention. The blogger started off, “I don’t want to change the world…just one little school.” He then proceeds to describe the situation with his children and ends off with,
I think next year might be the year I get off my butt and actually open my mouth and I am trying to figure out where to start.
I could talk about procrastination and about how people always think about doing something next year, but there is something much more striking. The person writing this is the author of the second highest rated education blog for 2008. He writes a great blog about his experiences as a teacher. So, why is it so hard for even a great writer about education to figure out how to get involved locally? Perhaps some of it because he has seen inside the educational system and recognizes the barriers to change.
Tomorrow evening, there will be an opportunity for citizens of Woodbridge to get more involved. Dr. Stella will be presenting the proposed 2009-2010 budget to the Board of Selectmen and Board of Finance. It is a 1.8% increase over the previous year. A presentation about the budget is also available online.
So, today, I’ll focus on the local school budget. Do you know who is on your Board of Education? Have you been to a Board of Education meeting recently?
Sure, I expect we’ll have some people show up tomorrow. I suspect many will be concerned about keeping their property taxes low. In this economic climate, that is understandable. Hopefully, there will be others there that recognize the importance of a good educational system in keeping the property values up. Maybe, if we're lucky, there might even be someone thinking about greater issues, like are we doing the right things for our children and how are we preparing for the future.
Later, I hope to focus more on bills being presented in Hartford. With all of this, what I really want to focus on is how we get more people paying attention to local budgets and state legislation.
Partly, this is because it seems to me that just as students do better in schools where the parents are more involved, communities also do better where the citizens are more involved.
