Teach Citizens' Journalism with YouTube Reporters' Center

by Clay Burell

categories: Education and Technology, Teaching Ideas and Resources

Published July 01, 2009 @ 07:04AM PT

Older teachers often feel up against a wall when told to teach 21st century skills, and it's hard not to sympathize. When they were students, the classroom was a book, paper and pencil world, so it's no surprise that they resist the new media. They have little to no experience with it, academically.

YouTube is here to help, with the new YouTube Reporters' Center channel. Its blurb:

Ever captured a natural disaster or a crime on your cell-phone camera? Filmed a political rally or protest, and then interviewed the participants afterward? Produced a story about a local issue in your community? If you've done any of these things or aspire to, then you're part of the enormous community of citizen reporters on YouTube, and this channel is for you.

The YouTube Reporters' Center is a new resource to help you learn more about how to report the news. It features some of the nation's top journalists and news organizations sharing instructional videos with tips and advice for better reporting.

I've browsed a few, and here are four keepers -- and one stinker:

1. How to shoot two kinds of interviews

Reuters.com editor Adam Pasick describes how to shoot two different kind of video interviews, including lighting, framing and sound.

2.Katie Couric on how to conduct a good interview

Katie Couric chats with producer Tony Maciulis about what makes a good interview. This video is part of the YouTube Reporters' Center.

3. NPR's Scott Simon: How to Tell a Story

I really like his admonition to be conversational, instead of polysyllabically constipated. No need to throw out "osculate," I tell my students, when "kiss" is the much better word. Simon also discusses openers, purpose, organization, and sentence structure for audio -- an entirely different beast in comparison to print.

4. How to Catch the Latest News on YouTube

This is handy. I didn't know about these tricks.

There are many more good tutorials at Reporters' Center -- and a few eggs.

5. Lord a' Mercy, I don't recommend this one

WaPo White House correspondent Dana Milbank, for example, infamous for his recent hissy fit over Obama calling on HuffPo Iran reporter Nico Pitney during last week's press conference (and for allegedly calling Pitney a "dick" for outing his "journalism lite" propensities -- Obama swimsuit questions, Bush "Mission Accomplished" swooning -- on CNN), offers up a tutorial on "Comedy and News." Watch Milbank's attempt to be funny in the video below -- phew! -- and you'll see why I find his posing as a comedy expert to be, in itself, the highest comedy:

Somebody needs to school Milbank in one of the main commandments of the Church of the Subgenius: "If you're not funny, don't try to be."

J.R. "Bob" Dobbs icon by gordasm

The Asians aren't Coming! The Asians aren't Coming!

by Clay Burell

Published June 30, 2009 @ 07:05AM PT

A quick snippet from "Think Again: Asia's Rise" in the latest Foreign Policy, which I hope makes EdSec Duncan, President Obama, and the rest of the "Asian (education) peril" crowd, um, "think again":

Asia is pouring money into higher education. But Asian universities will not become the world's leading centers of learning and research anytime soon. None of the world's top 10 universities is located in Asia, and only the University of Tokyo ranks among the world's top 20. In the last 30 years, only eight Asians, seven of them Japanese, have won a Nobel Prize in the sciences. The region's hierarchical culture, centralized bureaucracy, weak private universities, and emphasis on rote learning and test-taking will continue to hobble its efforts to clone the United States' finest research institutions.

Even Asia's much-touted numerical advantage is less than it seems. China supposedly graduates 600,000 engineering majors each year, India another 350,000. The United States trails with only 70,000 engineering graduates annually. Although these numbers suggest an Asian edge in generating brainpower, they are thoroughly misleading. Half of China's engineering graduates and two thirds of India's have associate degrees. Once quality is factored in, Asia's lead disappears altogether. A much-cited 2005 McKinsey Global Institute study reports that human resource managers in multinational companies consider only 10 percent of Chinese engineers and 25 percent of Indian engineers as even "employable," compared with 81 percent of American engineers.

Hell Freezes: Defending Meghan McCain v. Paul Begala

by Clay Burell

categories: Education Politics, Mainstream Pundits

Published June 29, 2009 @ 07:04AM PT

Democratic strategist and pundit Paul Begala gives Republican Daddy's girl and instapundit Meghan McCain a smackdown on Bill Maher's Real Time that, on the face of it, is deserved (and delicious). Watch the two-minute clip:
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You're not going to hear me say McCain didn't deserve the schooling: she's posing as an expert all over cable news and the web, so she'd damn well better know whereof she speaks, and in this case clearly doesn't. To cover her rear, she hits Begala below the belt by playing the "I'm young and you're old" card, fully justifying the spanking Begala gives her backside.

But. Begala's response to McCain's ignorance about the Reagan years still makes this history teacher call foul: "I wasn't alive during the French Revolution, but I still know about that."

McCain probably knows a good bit about the French Revolution too. I'm sure she got that in high school, maybe even college. Schools are great at teaching stuff that happened long before the students' parents were born. But they're dismal at teaching all students -- not just the minority who take a "current events" elective -- about the world of their own, and their parents', generation. (This is old news to those of us who have read James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your U.S. History Textbook Got Wrong.)

I'd put money on the fact that Begala learned next to squat, in high school, about the two or three decades preceding his graduation year.

So rather than celebrating the spanking, we should be decrying the curricular reality this little brouhaha points to: we're graduating politically illiterate youths into adulthood.

You've heard of studies like this:

According to a 2006 survey of Americans aged 18 to 24, less than four in ten can identify Iraq on a map of the Middle East; one-third of young Americans cannot calculate time-zone differences; even after Hurricane Katrina, two-thirds cannot find Louisiana on map; almost one-third think that the United States has between 1 and 2 billion, and two in ten, amazingly, cannot point to the Pacific Ocean on a world map.

So sure, as an astute commenter on another blog notes, Meghan McCain might be "the political Paris Hilton: Famous daughter of a rich man and she likes the attention." But worse than that, she's one of our "elite best and brightest" -- you know, the Teach for America talent pool. And by her own admission she knows little about the recent political history of the country her father helps to -- I want to say "serve," but I'm not talking about health insurance and oil corporations here, so I'll choose -- rule.

It's less scary coming from Miss South (or was it "East"?) Carolina. It's full-on disturbing coming from McCain.

And since school history classrooms are every bit as fearful of provoking "partisanship" as it seems our current president is, it's hard to see how this is going to change any time soon. Especially since that president's ed reform seems mostly determined to equate "education" with "workplace readiness," and to hell with citizenship.

Mr. Obama, Tear Down This School!

by Tom Panarese

category: Education Politics

Published June 28, 2009 @ 07:05AM PT

Someone needs to tell Arne Duncan and company that the Berlin Wall didn't come down because Germany wanted to simply "rebrand" itself.

The Washington Post has reported, tongue a bit in cheek, that the Obama administration recently tore down one of the more theatrical symbols of President Bush's No Child Left Behind law -- a red schoolhouse that served as the backdrop for NCLB's signing and for the last seven years has sat on the corner of Maryland Avenue SW, in front of the U.S. Department of Education building.

Tearing down the building is a symbolic gesture ...

"It's like the new Coke. This is a rebranding effort," said Joe Williams, executive director of Democrats for Education Reform. "The feng shui people believe you need to take the roof off buildings to allow bad chi to escape. Let's hope this helps."

... and the next act will be to try and change the name of the now-infamous law ...

Matthew Yale, deputy chief of staff for Duncan, said the department is considering a contest to rename the law.

"We want to think about something that's forward-looking instead of something that seems to have a negative connotation," Yale said. "We want to think of something that talks about future and potential."

You know, that's all well and good, but why do I have a feeling that the people in charge of our educational system are working from the Cliff's Notes on "How to Run General Motors"?

Read More »

Pharmer's Market: The Cost of Producing "Successful" Students

by William Farren

categories: Education and Business, Education Politics, Standardized Tests, Student Culture, Student Rights, Unschooling Alternatives

Published June 26, 2009 @ 07:05AM PT

[A big welcome to William Farren with this first guest-post. Bill has long struck me as one of the most original and piercing critics of education around. You can see his "Did You Ever Wonder?" video in the left sidebar, below, for a taste. Bill writes at the radically sane Education for Well-Being. - Clay]

Not long ago, I finished reading Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma, a book about the high price of cheap food and the disconnected thinking that produces it. It made me think that the way we produce food today--that is, ignoring nature's logic in the quest for efficiency--is very similar to the way we produce "educated" citizens. Ignoring millions of years of evolutionary design has resulted in some interesting (if not disconcerting) similarities between the two camps. Both industrial schooling and industrial agriculture seem to have developed pathological ways of looking at pathology.

Whether in the field, the feed lot, or the classroom, issues of low productivity and dysfunction are commonly attributed to the individual, rarely the larger system that controls it. When a farmer curses a corn plant's inability to repel a particular pest, he does so without reflecting on the fact that the plant has been taken out of its natural environment and placed into a man-made monoculture--a hotbed of disease. Plants grown in isolation lose the defenses and nutrients that neighboring species once freely provided.  In homogeneous rows designed for the convenience of machinery, a plant's exquisite defense systems become ineffective. "Corrective measures" in the form of herbicides and pesticides end up coating the plants and sterilizing the soil.

Pigs are faulted for biting other pigs' tails as a result of being weaned prematurely and packed together tightly. Animals living in stressful conditions, denied the expression of their once useful behaviors, lose the will to protect themselves in the face of danger. As a consequence, when infection sets in on a chewed tail, pigs are put down. (It's not profitable to nurse them back to health.)   Forward thinking hog farmers, in an attempt to stamp out this "vice", noticed that by docking the pigs' tails they could produce a sensitive nub that would force even the most demoralized pig to fight back.

Cows, ruminants which have evolved to eat grasses and fibrous vegetable matter, are today mostly fed a diet of government-subsidized corn. Here again, we ignore nature's design. Not having evolved for such a diet, cattle end up living in a state of permanent illness, propped up and kept in the system by a permanent cocktail of pharmaceuticals. Big Pharma is only too happy to fill in when nature is ignored.

Our education systems, seeking efficiency through standardization and conformity end up creating students who, just like their agricultural counterparts, are no longer well-adapted to their environment. Michael Pollan reminds us that, "Most of the efficiencies in an industrial system are achieved through simplification: doing lots of the same thing over and over." Like corn planted in a monoculture, removed from the diversity that protects it, or cattle fed an unnatural diet of corn, students today are fed a standardized diet of procedures and reproducible facts. This educational monoculture does nothing to nourish minds that have evolved to seek diversity, novelty and stimulation.

Those numbed by disconnected ideas unrelated to their needs are soon labeled attention-deficient, unmotivated, substandard. Stimulants, antidepressants and impulse inhibitors are used to conform the human mind to a deformed system the same way herbicides, pesticides and antibiotics are used in agriculture's great disconnect. Like the corn-fed cow raised on an unnatural diet of corn, constantly anemic and never well but kept alive through the use of drugs, students raised on disconnected facts, numbing routines, and endless testing often find themselves on the receiving end of a medical prescription. Those who don't have the stomach for such unsatisfying fare, who prefer not to be chemically altered, who'd rather have a more free-range existence, are eventually "counseled out". Simply put: they have not met the required production quotas of a system designed for scalable throughput.

In standardized environments, students with a high tolerance for monotony and the ability to repress their curious gene are deemed the fittest of the bunch.  Strangely, curiosity, a trait nature has selected for and which has served us well, seems to be selected against in schools.  Blue ribbon students grow their grade point averages en route to graduation and a chance to compete in the "real world". Their farm analogues, purposed for industry, have been selected to tolerate crowding, pesticides, sameness--but most importantly--to be high yielding. The corn farmer with the most bushels per acre is acclaimed for his skill at converting petrochemicals into grain. The feedlot operator's profits depend on how efficiently he can turn grain into meat. The highest ranked schools floss in the knowledge that they can efficiently convert standards and routines into high test scores.  Along the way, little thought is given to the soil that is depleted in the field, to the groundwater being spoiled by the feedlot, or to the creativity and innovation being extinguished in the classroom.  How productive is all this productivity?

It seems that despite (or maybe because of) our fetish with productivity, many of humanity's most pressing issues seem to be getting worse. The unnatural selection playing out in schools creates what every educational institution's mission statement pledges against: the creation of uncritical, passive, challenge-averse individuals, unwilling and unable to tackle the challenges of the 21st-century. It's simple to blame the students for being unproductive or unmotivated, for lacking curiosity. Indeed, they often are seen as the problem, especially by those who've designed the system. Grameen Bank founder Muhammad Yunus, however, reminds us that "the seed of poverty is in the institutions we have made, not in the person." With more effort and an inward gaze we'd see the deeper connections. We'd see students acting rationally in environments that ignore their evolutionary history. We'd understand that avoiding challenges and dropping out are simply logical responses to a system that discourages risk-taking and too often treats curiosity as a challenge to authority.

In their quest for efficiency and value, consumers have failed to notice the creation of false economies.  We are now using more energy (in the form of oil and gas) to produce a calorie of food than we ever have in our history. What nature used to do for free through biodiversity and solar power, now requires pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers and pharmaceuticals. In the bargain, our industrial agriculture is destroying our two most important environments: our bodies and our planet. Cheap food has led to obesity, type II diabetes and heart disease. Meat marinated in medicine and the effects it has on people (never mind the animals) never seems to make it into the cost-benefit analysis. Polluted air, toxic water and soil depletion are not billed at the supermarket register. Taxpayers, subsidizing the food that malnourishes them, complain little. Taxpayers, supporting educational systems that miseducate them, complain little. What's the true cost of an educational system which "through simplification: doing lots of the same thing over and over", causes mind and spirit to atrophy, suffocating students' natural desire to know? Maybe the biggest loss comes from the creation of generation after generation who cannot tell the difference between a bargain and a heist.

Michael Pollan writes, "Our food system depends on consumers' not knowing much about it beyond the price disclosed by the checkout scanner. Cheapness and ignorance are mutually reinforcing." Education today requires the same relationship. Educational policies seem to display a meager understanding about the importance of curiosity, awareness, or how we fit into larger systems. Education's checkout scanner--tuition and taxes--provide only a partial accounting of its true costs. Similar to industrial farming, industrial education produces no bargains while diminishing itself in the process. The price of producing a "successful" student may be higher than we think.

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William Farren: Interested in making education an instrument of well-being. Believes that schools, as the most important shapers of mental models, need to seriously retool in an effort to address the problems caused by dysfunctional economic models, biophobia, “nature-deficit disorder” and an immense lack of planetary situational awareness.

Keeps asking himself, "How is preparing students to enter a system that is at war with itself, preparing them for the future?"

Image by Plearn

More Evidence: Anti-Charter Bias is Reality-Based

by Clay Burell

categories: Charter Schools, Education and Business, Education Politics

Published June 26, 2009 @ 01:04AM PT

In his June 25 Huffington Post column, Gerald Bracey makes a really important point about the argument that charter schools don't drain public schools of funds because "charters are public schools." Responding to EdSec Arne Duncan's recent claim on Democracy Now! (video above) that "opponents often say that charters take money away from public schools. And we all know that's absolutely misleading," Bracey writes:

No, Arne, we don't all know that because it's not true. Some, and Arne appears to be one of them, contend that since charter schools are public schools, then Q.E.D., they don't take money away from the publics. The more usual argument is that the money going to charters is offset by reduced costs at the remaining public schools. But this is not the case. It might be true if all the kids going to the charter left from Mrs. Smith's class in P. S. 101. Then we could fire Mrs. Smith. Even so, the school operating costs, transportation costs, administrative costs, etc., would remain the same. But, in fact, maybe only 3 kids leave from Mrs. Smith's class. Because money is allocated on a per-pupil basis, that's three fewer allocations. Costs are not lowered but resources are reduced. And if the three kids return to the pubic school, as happens in many cases, the money does not come back with them.

As important is Bracey's straight talk about the recent report from Stanford's Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO), funded by many pro-charter camps, that found a two-to-one margin of bad charters to good charters, according to lead author Margaret E. Raymond, and according to its press release "reveals in unmistakable terms that, in the aggregate, charter students are not faring as well as their traditional public school counterparts."

Duncan has already committed himself to charters as a major pillar of his ed reform package in his speeches and, worse, in what amounts to his extortion to states to either lift their caps on charters or else disqualify themselves from his $5 billion "Race to the Top" fund. (It must be cool to have Bill Gates' ed reform clout by being given $5 billion in taxpayer dollars to push the Gates and Business Roundtable agenda.) So this study surely makes all his missionary zeal for charters a bit embarrassing. Duncan addressed it by saying,

The CREDO report last week was absolutely a wake-up call, even if you dispute some of its conclusions or its language. The charter movement is putting itself at risk by allowing too many second-rate and even third-rate schools to continue to exist.

Bracey's response:

Wake up call? Arne, was living in Chicago like living in China? Did Daley preclude you from hearing news from the outside world? Charter schools have been found to be underperforming for over a decade.

Moreover, if the CREDO results are true, Arne, why are you blackmailing states with threats to withhold stimulus money unless they permit charters or lift charter caps? The logic here is astonishing. Suppose I invent a medicine and find it helps 17% of people, doesn't do anything for 46% and hurts 37%. Would the FDA approve and tout my medicine? CREDO is a Stanford University-based think tank and its findings were that kids in charters did better than matched peers in publics in 17% of the cases, worse in 37% and neither better nor worse 46% of the time. As I closed my chapter on charters in Setting the Record Straight (second edition), "Charter schools were born of perceived failures in public schools. So, if the charters are doing worse than the publics, where is the outrage about them?" Where indeed, Arne?

It's too soon to tell, but I think it's a safe bet that Duncan will tout the brand name charters - KIPP, Green Dot, and such - as the "good charters," and promote them, and brand independent and local charters as the "second-rate and even third-rate" "bad" charters. Which means those public funds will be drained from public schools into fewer and fewer - and happier and happier - Charter Management Organizations.

Isn't it funny how the Obama administration is pushing for a public health care plan against HMO's, while he's pushing against public schools for CMO's and private charters? If the HMO's wanted a good argument against the government's faith in its ability to provide good social services, it should just point to the Department of Education.

In any case, check out Bracey's article on HuffPo. He grades a few more parts of Duncan's speech that I don't mention here.

Curriculum Watch: Abstinence-Only and Clean Coal Ideologues in Your Classroom?

by Clay Burell

categories: Education and Business, Religion and Education, Student Rights

Published June 24, 2009 @ 05:41PM PT

Just a couple of alerts about ideologues trying to sell their schtick to your children under "re-branded" packages:

1.The National Abstinence Education Association (source):

At an April 29 Capitol Hill briefing, Huber told the room that abstinence-only education is "not a 'just say no' message." "This is not abstinence only, this is a holistic message that prepares and gives students all of the information they need to make healthy decisions," Huber said. In fact, the NAEA isn't even calling its programs "abstinence only" anymore -- now they're "abstinence centered."

Similarly, WhyKnow -- a major provider of abstinence-only education curriculums -- recently changed its name to On Point, its tag line to "Direction for Life" and hired PR company Maycreate Idea Group to help recast its image. Lesley Scearce, executive director of On Point, said in an article for the Chattanoogan that the organization is trying to "get teens involved in new, positive directions that lead to a healthier, more fulfilling life. Without a re-naming, re-branding and re-positioning, this new direction wouldn't have been possible...."

Huber...assured her audience that "abstinence education talks about STDs and the medically accurate information regarding that" and that "abstinence education talks about contraception." But of course, the only time abstinence-only classes will talk about contraception is when they discuss failure rates -- often exaggerating those rates or spreading misinformation about the dangers of contraception. In the past, this tactic has been taken to extremes. In Montana's Bozeman High School, for example, teens in 2005 were taught that condoms cause cancer.

2. The American Coal Foundation (source):

An elementary school curriculum designed by the American Coal Foundation suggests that students learn about the costs and benefits of coal mining by using toothpicks and paper clips to "mine" chocolate chips out of cookies. They also go about "reclaiming" the "land" damaged in the process by tracing the cookies’ outline on graph paper. Costs are to be calculated by the amount of time spent per chip and the expanse of graph paper that needs to be reclaimed.

One of the discussion questions to follow the lesson is: "What do you think are some of the costs associated with mining coal?" (Read the rest...)

Things to keep an eye on....