Welcome to Summer 2008!

The Gem Girls have joined up and for 5430 we're with The Life of the Party. We'll also be working as just the Gem Girls for 5585. Here's our home for sharing ideas.

Chapter 6 ~ More food for thought!

OVERHAULING NCLB!!

• I know I complain about NCLB as do other people, but has anyone "with brain cells" actually sat down to try to rethink this is a way that would benefit students??? or are we all just waiting on someone else to do it? I am just a lowly teacher, is there anyone in Washington really on our side?
• It won't happen overnight!!!!!!

Beehinds Behind ~ Chapter 5

I feel like I keep asking the same questions over and over!!!

• Does no one seem to understand what NCLB has done to the teaching profession?
• These tests that we are giving are doing nothing but leaving more and more children behind, especially the ones who needed help in the first place!
• The students who do NOT get vouchers to "get out" of the lagging schools, what happens to them? When you have a whole school who needs vouchers to get out of a low performing school, what do we do with the building, teachers, etc. Is there not somthing wrong with the picture?
• THIS IS ALMOST TOO MUCH TO HANDLE!!!

The Quest Continues

The presentation now has Thought Provokers for Those Left Behind for Chapters 3 and 4. We need to make sure we plan for our 20 min. We don't want to leave the basketball version or "not on the test" behind.

Gem Girls... can you see the end of the tunnel??? I see a glimmer of light.

Don't leave your BEEhind Behind- Chapter 4

• Does our federal government go about every single decision BACKWARDS?
• p. 73MCLB- People in charge, must know the schools intimately -- through first hand engagement, not printouts and manipulatable bureaucratic data.
• "When's the last time anybody here saw a higher up in their school?"

Don't leave your BEEhind Behind- Chapter 3

• How many parents do you really think understand when we say "You're son/daughter is doing very well and improving tremendously, HOWEVER they have failed the test, Sorry!" (p.55)MCLB. Raising a child's score 30% counts for nothing for them or for us as teachers, but if you were lucky enough to get a group of high achievers in your homeroom, guess what you are awesome!!!
• Should we not be looking at each student individually and measuring their personal growth instead of looking at overall scores of a school (such as mine) with a large transient population as a whole?

Now we do the dance of joy!

Frolicking with abandon.... Finished! Finished! Finished!

MCLB Summary Chapter 6

MCLB Chapter 6: Leaving No Child Behind: Overhauling NCLB
--Monty Neill

No Child Left Behind cannot “fulfill its lofty promises” as it is written. The objectives of the law are laudable, but cannot be accomplished through heavy use of standardized testing and punitive sanctions. NCLB is underfunded, and promotes a public perception of widespread school failure where none exists.

Instead, schools must follow principles for authentic accountability. (They should NOT be held accountable for factors beyond their control, like poverty and “the historical consequences of racism.”) Ten principles include: a shared vision and goals; adequate resources used well; participation and democracy; prioritizing goals; multiple forms of evidence (the portfolio approach); inclusion; improvement; equity; balance bottom-up and top-down accountability; and interventions. Time must be allowed for any changes in schools to take effect, and severe penalties like “reconstitution” should only be considered if nothing else has worked—for there is no evidence that reconstitution improves the quality of instruction. A national campaign and a commitment to reclaiming quality educational practices will allow us to better achieve NCLB’s stated goals without the need to suffer from the law’s many negatives.

MCLB Chapter 5 Summary

MCLB, Chapter 5: NCLB and the Effort to Privatize Public Education
--Alfie Kohn

No Child Left Behind keeps local communities from being able to choose their own educational policies and programs; it makes teachers choose between real learning and test scores; and it punishes the children on the other side of the racial / socioeconomic gap. The entire initiative is endorsed by people who are opposed to the idea of public education. Is NCLB a political tool of those who wish to privatize education?

When large numbers of students reach proficiency on standardized tests, officials raise the cut scores. The call for “high standards” (code for high-stakes testing) and “freedom of choice” (code for voucher programs) comes from the very people who would benefit most from the inevitable perceived failure of public schools under NCLB’s mandates—businesses and corporate interests. Desperate and “failing” schools use federal funds to buy curricula designed by private firms while panicked parents send their kids to Sylvan, Kaplan, or Princeton Review for (pricey) test tutoring.

It is not enough to say that NCLB needs to be reformed; “instead of scrambling to comply with the provisions of NCLB, our obligation is to figure out how best to resist.” (p. 96) Teachers—indeed, all citizens—should reject NCLB as a step towards the privatization (and de-democratization) of education.

MCLB Chapter 4 Summary

MCLB Chapter 4: NCLB and Democracy
--Deborah Meier

“The very definition of what constitutes an educated person is now dictated by federal legislation. A well-educated person is one who scores high on standardized math and reading tests. And ergo a good school is one that either has very high test scores or is moving toward them at a prescribed rate of improvement. Period.” (p. 67)

People nowadays have been distanced from educational governance. The “cure” for this that NCLB offers is to increase that distance, taking decision-making out of the hands of local school boards and handing down requirements from large test publishers, federal education consultants, and politicians. Consolidation of schools has seriously endangered students’ feelings of community; NCLB locks this divide into place. The implication is that children, families, teachers, and communities don't have sufficient judgement to make sound educational decisions for themselves. Trust in the multiage community is undermined.

Democracy, messy and time-consuming as it may be, is the real solution to these problems. Schools must “build a community-wide consensus about the essential purposes of schools,” decide what to do about minority / dissenting viewpoints, choose their own educational leaders, and find a way to ensure that rich and poor students are allocated equal resources. Returning decisions about promotion standards and real accountability to the local level won’t solve all of education’s problems —but it’s a start.

MCLB Chapter 3 Summary

Many Children Left Behind Chapter 3: NCLB’s Selective Vision of Equality: Some Gaps Count More than Others
--Stan Karp

Some of the most-publicized aspects of NCLB are the sanctions it imposes on schools and students with low test scores. These include mandated school-funded transfers for students at low-scoring schools, required but unfunded tutoring services, staff replacement, and even restructuring of schools who fail to meet targets for five years running. Unfortunately, none of these strategies have any record of success as school improvement strategies. Instead, they are “political strategies designed to bring a kind of ‘market reform’ to public education.” (p. 55)

Schools that are obsessed with test scores are schools that fail to appropriately address students’ real needs for learning. Bilingual education classes, foreign languages, art classes, and field trips are discarded in favor of developmentally inappropriate practices that people hope will ratchet up test scores. Special education students and other disadvantaged subgroups get blamed for missed score targets, building resentment against those who need extra intervention. At the same time, the underlying social factors that are shown to cause unequal performance are actually increasing in strength. Rather than address the causes, our country’s social and educational policies perpetuate the conditions which create those gaps in the first place.

So why would our leaders support an initiative in which an estimated 75% of all schools are predicted to be labeled as failures? Karp infers that it is political posturing, whereby the worse things seem, the more politicians have to work with to get themselves reelected. As he says, “it becomes clear that NCLB is not a tool for solving a crisis in public education, but a tool for creating one.” (p.65)

Many Children Left Behind

I've been researching the authors of each chapter of the book. All of them are proponents of education, but know that NCLB is not working. It's underfunded, and has way too many standards that can't be reached. A well performing school can be deemed below standard because it can't make unachievable goals.

Our Gem Girls team discussed all of our responsibilities as we finish the book after class last Thursday. Vicki our illustrator and summarizer extraordinaire has wonderful information already available here on the blog. Sheri is already making the connections between MCLB and Brophy. Thank you ladies! I've printed the rubric so we'll be on track.

Thank you as well Sheri for the request of being able to finish up our Teacher Work Sample during Spring Break. Thank you Dr. Zimmerman for allowing us this extra time!

Conference Follow-Up

It's seems I've been so busy since we taught a session at the conference on 3/14. We had a great group of 49 participants. Since then we've been busy back to ASU Graduate School classes, getting grades into the computer, lesson planning, teaching, etc...

Unfortunately due to our county's student conference day we missed over half of Thursday's sessions. I greatly missed SMART Board sessions done by middle school teachers on Thursday afternoon.

Most of the sessions I attended were great.

Thursday after the opening session I learned about making my own Wiki. Kimberly Harris taught participants how to create their own wikis. She has been in touch with participants after the conference with more information.

The only other session I was able to attend on Thursday was Get your SMART Board up to Speed. I learned more tools that I didn't even know were available on my new SMART Board. I've already had fun using the timer and spinner with students.

On Friday morning Vicki and I spent the first session time visiting vendors and psyching ourselves up for presenting. It went well!

After presenting on Friday I went to a non-fiction session led by a well known company. Since I don't have the option of spending money on a big program this wasn't very interesting to me.

The last concurrent session I attended was Start SMART: Winning SMART Board Lessons. These two gentlemen were not only entertaining, but also informative. I learned even more about the options of using the SMART Board in my classroom.

The Closing Session and Luncheon were great. Our table was the Goody's 500 so many samples of Goody's on the table. Lunch was great, I even got Vicki to switch desserts and I got the chocolate!

I greatly enjoyed closing speaker Deneen Frazier-Bowen. What an actress! We found that she had been all of the interesting "students" that had visited pre-conference and concurrent sessions and the opening session as well.

A great close to the conference was the it was moving to Raleigh in 2009. The NCaect also moved the bus to a new name-- TIES. Looking forward to an opportunity to attend the conference in '09.

Opening Keynote

Shift Happens! Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach has led us on a journey from what was to what is NOW! Web 2.0 -- Web 3.0. Second Life-- AET Zone has some of the attributes of Second Life, but I won't be buying any couches for my avatar's living room anytime soon, of course she would have to have her own living room first. Something to ponder-- Bloom's Taxonomy should now have the top Create. The Top 10 jobs in 2010 aren't even jobs today. To get 50 million users it took the radio 38 years-- digital cameras 8 years-- camera phones 3.5 years.

This conference is so deep into the Shift Happens- Gear Up With Technology-- there has been a constant race theme. There are drivers and pit crews- races and sponsors. We began with "Educators, Start Your Engines!"

"Student" Eddie is sharing with us now and has decided that Sheryl can keep speaking. She seems to know the language. She has three sets of numbers on her shirt-- they stand for the numbers of drop outs over the last three years. All of the numbers are over 20,000. Visit http://learningconditions.blogspot.com

Driving Questions session--sites we visited

Here are just some of the sites / programs we examined in Kevin Honeycutt's session at NCaect. They're cool tools we can use to help reach all our kids. (Not all of the sites are for the use of those kids, though--some of them are just for us teachers, and the rest need to be used judiciously with supervision and guidance....like any other teaching materials, really.)

Apple - iTunes - iTunes Overview

Apple - iWork - Keynote - New in Keynote ’08

Art Snacks

Celestia Home

Classroom 2.0

EarthBrowser - Interactive Earth Globe

Flying Meat VoodooPad

Google SketchUp - Home

Jing Project Visual conversation starts here. Mac or Windows.

Joost - Free online TV - Comedy, cartoons, sports, music and more - Download today

Kevin Honeycutt

Lulu.com - Self Publishing - Free

MabryOnline.org

NetSmartz.org

podOmatic Podcast Portal Create, Find, Share Podcasts!

Second Life Official site of the 3D online virtual world

Skype official website – free download and free calls and internet calls

Solar System Simulator Product Product home

TeacherTube - Teach the World Teacher Videos Lesson Plan Videos Student Video Lessons Online Teacher Made Videos Teac

The Teaching Company Educational Courses on DVD, Audio CD, and Audio Tape- Lecture Series by College-University Professors

There - the online virtual world that is your everyday hangout

Twitter

USTREAM.TV Shows Free LIVE VIDEO, Webcam & Video Chat Rooms, Streaming Broadcast, Stream Video Clips, Internet Radio Cams, Web

YourTeacher Online Math Help Pre-Algebra, Algebra 1, Algebra 2, & Geometry

YouTube - Broadcast Yourself.

Zamzar - Free online file conversion

Several books also came up, including The Curse of Knowledge, Made to Stick, On Intelligence (available on Audible.com), and Coloring Outside the Lines.

Driving Questions session @ NCaect

So many links, so little time! I'm a little overwhelmed at all the information we've seen, all the ideas for engaging and creating opportunities for kids to learn. If you're interested, check out http://kevinhoneycutt.org/ for the basics. I'll add more later.

Audra, Sheri--Kevin was really interested in AETzone. I demo'd it for the session. :)

Connect, Explore, & Share

I'm learning a lot about the issues and concerns that Instructional Technology Specialists face each and every day. Resources, budgets, professional development... and of course the desire of teachers and administrators.

I've been to Moodle, Ning, and have made a new blog for my students. So many sites are available on the Burke County Schools Instructional Technology Specialists Wiki- http://bcpsits.pbwiki.com/ -- Enjoy!

Chapter 2 "Food for Thought"

• What message is NCLB sending if everyone is just looking for a way to get rid of the kids who will bring down the scores? ~~I have actually witnessed this at my school. We are supposed to be checking all of the children's races, because one of our AYP subgroups that we don't usually do well in is black and we just happen to only have 43 students that fit into this group. Therefor I am being forced to 'check' and be sure that all students are in the "correct" group.
• Can we really blame those schools and principals, especially since those scores could affect their jobs?
• Why does no one but the teacher seem to see that the program that was set up to protect these poor, handicapped and children of color is more often than not, hurting them and forcing them to be left behind? Are the higher ups ~government officials~ oblivious, clueless or do they just look the other way?
• Is NC doing something wrong by mandating recess? Our kids are doing no worse since requiring recess each and everyday, so for once are we doing something right?????
• I have now seen "Mile Wide-Inch Deep Curriculum" in Many Children & Brophy, do we think someone may be catching on, or is it just coincidence?

NCaect Conference: CyberHunts for the Middle School Learner

Two-thirds of the Gem Girls will be presenting our CyberHunts session at the NCaect Conference on Friday, March 15. We're scheduled for Piedmont B from 9:15-10:00. We've got a couple of posts on the Technologyties blog pointing back here, and we plan to blog about the sessions we attend. We've gone public, people!

Sheri, wish you were coming with us. Of course, if our pre-conference brainstorming and planning session at Holbrook was any indication, we'd just spend the whole 45 minutes cracking each other up. ;)

You go Gem Girls!

Vicki- you are the BEST summarizer and illustrator!!! Please make sure you have these great illustrations saved for our presention at the end of the semester. The book is a great read. I so don't approve of the high-stakes testing that my students will endure for reading on May 20. I'm researching our authors to be ready for my Investigator role. Dr. Zimmerman and I already talked, since Debbie Meier is already done on the AET Zone I'll be looking into the other authors instead. What do you think ladies-- PowerPoint good for the final presentation? I'm going to do my FrontPage and Expression work to do my Position Paper for Steve in hypermedia.

Questions for Chapter 1

Isn't NCLB a performance goal (Ch. 4 Brophy)? It is exactly the kind of thing our book talks about as being what we shouldn't do if we want our children to actually value learning.

NCLB also requires schools with the lowest proficiency to make the largest gains? Again, isn't this contradictory to 'Brophy', in that a student should make progress based on where 'they' are not where everyone else already is?

Many Children Left Behind: Chapter 2 Summary

"A View from the Field: NCLB’s Effects on Classrooms and Schools"
--George Wood
Summary

With NCLB and the pressures of high-stakes, severe sanction testing, “We have embarked on one of the greatest social engineering experiments ever to be conducted on our children.” (44) The most devastating effects of this “blame-and-shame” experiment are found in classrooms today.

Negative effects include a rise in pushouts, dropouts, and retention; less fulfilling classroom practices including joyless worksheets, drill-and-kill, and a focus on easy-to-test facts rather than complex thinking; and a narrowing of the school experience through elimination of “extras” like naptime, recess, art, music, shop, and computer class. Schools that serve economically disadvantaged or minority populations are most negatively affected by NCLB; conversely, “Blue Ribbon” schools are ones that are already better funded and serve a less diverse population than state average.

Test scores are the driving force behind NCLB, but as the author says, “the only evidence that things are improving as a result of testing is that test scores are gradually going up.” (35) Science has so far shown no correlation between increasing test scores and turning students into better citizens, neighbors, employees, or college students. The current test rush ignores what we know about how children learn. Nevertheless, schools are punished for failing to meet testing criteria. As a result, they are sometimes forced to choose between the school and the child, as the examples of Angelica and Perla show.

In order to fix the imbalances that NCLB creates, the author offers three suggestions. First, we should call a moratorium on testing until we can figure out what the scores DO predict. Second, we should institute more complex models of school health to evaluate our schools. Third, we should target intervention funds and support to the schools that are farthest behind—those that serve large minority and economically disadvantaged populations.

Many Children Left Behind: Chapter 1 Summary

Many Children Left Behind
Chapter 1: “From ‘Separate but Equal’ to ‘No Child Left Behind’; The Collision of New Standards and Old Inequalities”
--Linda Darling-Hammond

Summary
No Child Left behind as it is currently implemented is more likely to harm than help, especially for the very students who are the targets of its aspirations: the poor, the special needs population, and children of color. It puts unmeetable test score targets on top of an existing unequal and underfunded system, complicating problems that already exist. It does not provide enough money to remedy the problems in the poorest schools, and it ignores other inputs that affect school quality.

Some have referred to the “diversity penalty” of NCLB, whereby schools with more diverse populations (and thus more subgroups) are more likely to be labeled inadequate due to testing failure in a single subgroup. Because of this requirement, most of our schools are likely to be labeled failures within a few years. High groups will hit ceilings, and low students will struggle on with still inadequate resources.

High stakes testing as mandated by NCLB is leading to a drop out / push out / disappearing student phenomenon. This is particularly true of those who score at the bottom of their subgroup. Students are leaving school without diplomas and without the skills to be able to join the economy—the “school to prison pipeline.”

NCLB must be amended to allow states more flexibility in performance assessment. Standardized tests need to be used diagnostically, not as punishment. Individual improvement formulas rather than school averages should be used. Goals for EC and LEP subgroups should be sensible but challenging (rather than impossible). Finally, the federal government must fully fund the mandate and offer extra help for failing schools.

We must also ensure that students are taught by qualified teachers. Many incentives would help with this, such as loan forgiveness to attract potential teachers to the profession, but mentoring and other programs designed to keep teachers in the profession are also essential.

Many Children Left Behind: Preamble Summary

Many Children Left Behind Preamble
“A Reminder for Americans”
--Theodore R. Sizer

Summary

We are long on rhetoric about public schools, and short on action. We cannot just continue at our comfort level; we must endure some discomfort for the sake of helping the materially insecure. Free public education has long been the “primary engine for social and economic health and for individual social mobility” in our society, and as such it is our responsibility to deal with the threats to it.

These threats include the following: poorly funded and equipped schools; poor communities whose taxes cover needed expenses, and state / federal funding which does not equalize the deficit; detailed state and federal direction of school routines; de facto segregation by social class in neighborhood schools; and the narrowing of teacher and principal authority. All of these are made worse by the demands of NCLB.

The original ESEA (1965) gave state and local authorities federal funds to be used creatively as they saw fit to improve local education; NCLB’s 2002 reauthorization instead centralizes, depriving LEAs of local authority—and giving insufficient funding to accomplish its demands. Obsessive focus on test scores distorts the problem and ignores many reasons for school and student failure.

Many Children Left Behind: Introduction Summary

Many Children Left Behind
Introduction
--George Wood

Summary

No Child Left Behind sounds like a good idea. It has its origins in our proud and hard-won tradition of improving access to and quality of education for all learners. As the reauthorization of 1965’s Elementary and Secondary Education Act (which gave us Title 1, among other things), it is designed to close the achievement gap by targeting areas of high need. However, despite forty years’ trying, the achievement gap is still there, and the reauthorization we call NCLB is actually making things worse.

NCLB calls for increases in money for schools that serve poor students, insists that teachers be highly qualified, and forces school districts to disaggregate data so all subgroup scores can be seen. These are not in themselves bad things—but the ways they are implemented are damaging. The mandate is underfunded by an estimated $12 billion dollars, and hits a low blow to underperforming schools (usually the poorest to begin with); restrictive definitions of teacher qualifications make it difficult to hire teachers in rural or multi-subject positions; subgroups like EC and ESL are virtually set up for failure with impossible proficiency targets; and the bill is full of special interest provisions.

NCLB cannot be fixed. Fixation on test scores causes declines in school quality, not increases; equity vanishes as nontested subjects get shunted aside; and the threat of federal takeover erodes local support for and trust in schools. We need instead to look at other types of school reform to increase the quality of education for all children.

Many Children Left Behind

Let's try this again Gem Girls-- Vicki want to post here?