Posts by Clay Burell
Yes, yes, yes. And thanks.
Published July 12, 2009 @ 03:56PM PT
I didn't introduce Shelly before his just-concluded week of guest-blogging 
because he jumped the gun with his first post, which introduced him just fine.
His entire week of posts was fine. If you missed them, do yourself a favor and treat yourself to some superb writing and thinking. (And then subscribe or bookmark his blog, Teach Paperless, for regular reading.)
Coming Soon: More weekly guest-bloggers
I've invited a few people who, like Shelly, are already known for their blogs to take the reins here for weekly stints. Starting Monday is Ira Socol, whom I suspect many of you already know. I'll stick to our precedent and let his posts say the rest.
(Me? In a week, I finally leave Seoul for the new chapter, teaching in Singapore.)
Teach Citizens' Journalism with YouTube Reporters' Center
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!
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
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.
More Evidence: Anti-Charter Bias is Reality-Based
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?
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....
The Wonks: Technology Does, and Doesn't, Boost Learning
Published June 21, 2009 @ 02:42PM PT
I've been meaning to share this one for a while. It offers a good chuckle at the expense of ed wonks. It comes at the very end of the panel discussion at the Brookings Institute last month that followed Arne Duncan's brief appearance. As you'll see from the transcript below, a woman asks a question about training teachers to use technology effectively to enhance classroom learning. The first expert - kill me for not wading through the hour plus video to get names, or kill the transcriber for not including them and instead just calling them "SPEAKER" - basically pooh-poohs the idea that technology can enhance learning, and cites the inevitable study to support his case:
SPEAKER: Well, I can respond a bit to that. The Institute of Education and Sciences within the U.S. Department of Education carried out a large scale study of leading technology products that are used in classrooms to boost reading and math scores found no difference in outcomes for students in classrooms randomly assigned to receive those products versus carry out business as usual.
The developers of those products protested and they said that, well, if the teachers had only used and the students had only used these products for the number of hours intended, they would have worked much better. In fact, it was a study of normal conditions of use and technology in the school.
I think the nation has a frontier in front of it in understanding how to apply new technology to teaching and learning, but I think the results we have in hand suggest that it is a frontier we need to get to rather than a location at which we presently sit. So it's promise and potential, and I expect that some of the stimulus money at the local level, when it gets there, is likely to be used to invest in technology because the machines and the software remain after the stimulus funds are expended.
Let's stop there for a second and parse the language: This wonk seems to conceive of educational technology as "educational products" to "boost reading and math scores" - technology for the sake of test prep, produced as canned software by commercial companies. Digital drill and kill, in essence. It's a remarkably impoverished, 1990s view of technology in education. Yet this view is espoused by a Brookings expert.
The irony comes when the next speaker disagrees completely with the last, and cites different studies to back up his position:
[DIFFERENT] SPEAKER: I'll suggest a little bit different slant on this. My own instinct is that over the next eight to ten years, the biggest changes in the schools will come through technology. I think the I actually think that the economic downturn is going to contribute to that in many ways.
From another body of data, if you look at courses, that is, full courses, often that are now used in many cases for credit recovery, which is often associated with small schools, students they only give biology once every two years, and if a student flunks biology the first year and does not have a chance to take it until senior year and they want to take chemistry later in the senior year, they take a credit recovery course, they take it with technology. These are pretty weak courses in many cases, but the results from them suggest that they are just as weak or as strong as the conventional teacher.
And so we have a long body of research over the last ten or 15 years which indicates that there's no significant difference between the taking the course from a piece of technology, the full course, or taking it from the teacher itself.
Now, that's changing, in fact, it's tipping the other way, and what you're finding in the new technology, in the new courses that are being developed, are very, very high quality materials, with feedback loops in them that give that allow for adaptive instruction, that is, a student is working through this course, they take a little assessment, find the course itself, the technology discovers that the student isn't doing so well, so it cycles it back through the material again, or it gives it another piece of material that may teach the concept in a different way.
Just very quick, Carnegie Melon University, and this is working with freshman and sophomores, so they're very close to high schools, they did a study of a piece of technology like this, what they call a cognitive tutor, and they compared random samples, just a classroom against another classroom, a random sample of students.
The sample of students who took only the technology were only given half the time, they were only given half the semester to take it, and so they took it under their own control, their own speed, they took exactly the same hour exams, exactly the same final exam as the other students, and they did better than the other students. Not only did they do better, they did it faster, obviously. So we're challenging both the idea of a semester and the course load in a semester, as well as do you actually need a lecturer who's going to pace it for you.
Re: that underlined part: I'll have more to say on that in a follow-up post about my own experience of taking Yale's Open Courseware Jewish Bible class by downloading a full semester of lectures and readings, and watching them at my own pace.
