Merit Pay

I don't get it. I don't believe merit pay is possible in education.

My first question would be which teacher was most responsible for the child's success on some test? How do you know it was that teacher? Each child has many teachers in an academic career, which one gets the merit pay? I know from my own experience, I would have had some teachers fired on the spot. Then when I became a teacher, yikes did I get it about that teacher I thought stunk. I also realized the ones I thought were great actually stunk. I remember one thing a teacher told me in ninth grade. I didn't get it until college. Ironically when I went to teach in that school with that teacher, I told him my epiphany. He chuckled and was glad I finally got it. Yeah it took awhile. So is merit pay retroactive?

Another question would be how do we separate degree of success in one class from another when one is an AP class and the other is a recovery class. Improvement for a student with a low grade is far more likely than a student with the high grade. The rubric for determining improvement is going to be impossible. In Carlo Rotella's, Profiles, “Class Warrior,” in The New Yorker, February 1, 2010, p. 24 Steven Rivkin is quoted, "Test scores are very noisy measures of knowledge. It's hard to come up with a model that can define the impact of the teacher separate from the community and family, and the principal may assign the toughest kids to the best teachers, and they'd stop which would be too bad."

Let me provide a personal example. In the early 90's I received two teacher of the year awards. It did not bring me more money, just some prestige and too much animosity from my colleagues. Why was I chosen? Based on what criteria? I couldn't answer these questions. I was as surprised as they were. Somehow I was selected and chosen for no apparent reason. My choice was never discussed with the staff, nor things I did that seemed to warrant these honors explained. My class was a model for technology and if that is the reason for my choice, then so be it. But it did not make me more of a teacher of the year then many of my colleagues and we knew it. What this honor did to me was to ostracize me and eventually drove me from the school in which I taught for eighteen years. What will merit pay do to a staff?

Here is an odious example from Houston that used test scores for bonuses. Look at how they were distributed: teachers on average received $3,606 in bonus pay, and principals, on average, were rewarded with more than $6,000. Higher-level administrators earned an average of $16,157 in bonuses. Why are administrators getting any money? And why so much and more than the teachers? Shouldn't this scale be reversed where teachers get the $16,000 an dhigh level administrators get $3000.? If this is how merit pay will work, we will lose teachers to be administrators who do nothing in the class or for the class. This is outrageous and from Houston. Ron Paige's old hunting grounds. Seems they haven't fixed their problems there at all. One of the teachers who received one of the largest bonuses said, “Basically what I do is what everybody else here at Burbank does,” said the school's top-earning social studies teacher. “We come to school every day well prepared with the necessary resources. We teach vigorously and we expect our students to learn the material. If they show signs of struggling, then we intervene in various ways.”

Merit pay is a terrible idea just as the Wall Street bonus system is bad. It will find teachers vying for the best classes, the students who really need good teaching won't get. Merit pay will further damage the divide between the haves and the have nots. Merit pay will damage the collegiality in a school staff. Merit pay will further the politics in school.

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Federal Money for Technology in Education

The National Center for Research in Advanced Information and Digital Technologies plans to award grants this fall for innovative education programs that use technology. The Center will Work with the Department of Education.

"To build support for the project, the group created three prototypes: an educational video game for biology students called Immune Attack; a game for museums, called Discovering Babylon; and a computer simulation to train firefighters in high-rise fires. They typify the projects the center will be looking to finance." I would have hoped for more ambitious applications, These are simply glorified webquests and SOSO. We have to move beyond "Math Blaster" educational game programs, "Where's Carmen San Diego" and even SimCity. We have these things. In the new age of assessment and accountability, I'd hope to see more projects using cloud computing and incorporating it in assessment via archive technology so we can grow a way to collect student data for authentic assessment.

I'm not sure the three prototypes are going to address the educational divide we have between the baby boomers and the digital natives. This is the crux of the problem in education as I see it. We, the baby boomers, are still trying to control an environment that is peopled by digital natives. We approach the problem from our point of view and not from theirs. Therein lies the rub, methinks. Advanced technologies allow the user to be in control, more control than baby boomer teachers are accustomed or ready to acquiesce. In the end we are assessing the digital natives by baby boomer rubrics, which is why we are so lost. We are in an apples and oranges situation.

One of the key points the proposal makes is that "improvement in education and training has been slow." Yes it has been and I'm not quite sure why, except for the layers of bureaucracy we have. I would say that "Advanced technologies have the potential to make learning more productive for students of all ages and all backgrounds and are an essential part of meeting the nation's education and training challenges. " is the strongest and most accurate statement. I would say that "advanced technologies" could be the game changer in improving education and training. The technologies would help the baby boomers learn how to let go and trust the digital natives, while documenting everything so the boomers can assess on their own time. We need to rethink, we need to leave our baby boomer comfort zone since we are in the way.

Were I to submit a proposal, I'd seek funding to create a computer system that allowed us to archive our student work and then use it for their future years in school, for college admission, for employment. I did this on a one school level, then on a multiple schools level when I used linux. Our server archived our scholars work, both teachers and students. Over the years the archive grew and we had years of data on teachers and students. Then the computer was sabotaged, destroyed, vandalized. Yes, we backed up. We need a better archiving system. As models, we have Google tool, Docs and Spreadsheets, which is a good example of cloud computing. For a good example of archiving we have The Wayback Machine. I would want to develop servers across a district and archive the work of all of the schools' teachers and students' work to serve as ways to do proper assessment, to see growth or lack of it and use months of work as a way to assess student progress and even teacher effectiveness. This would be a very transparent assessment tool. As we collect student data we will have necessary baselines of the students for assessment and for informing instruction. We would not only collect student data, but also teacher data and this would be a good method of teacher evaluation. Since we aren't doing a good job at assessing progress in education, I'd propose methods to make assessment more transparent and effective via archiving. I see this as good middle ground betwixt the digital native and the baby boomer.

As I read Duncan's piece in the Winter 2009-2010 edition of American Educator, I found this passage as support of a reliable archiving system of student work as the way to gather the data and the method he describes here:

Our guiding principle is simply that teachers should be treated as professionals: They should have the support, tools, and opportunities to perform at their full potential by having timely and accurate data about their students to inform instruction; they should have time to consult and collaborate with their peers; and they should be evaluated, compensated, and advanced based in part on student learning.

Student growth and gain, not absolute test scores, are what we are most interested in - how much are students improving each year, and what are teachers, schools, school districts, and states doing the most to accelerate student achievement.

Further on.. It defies common sense to bar all consideration of student learning from teacher evaluation. But it is time to move past the over-reliance on fill-in-the-bubble tests to richer assessments of successful teaching and learning...

Duncan has argued well for and even asked for innovative ways to evaluate the educational experience for all involved and I exclaim that archiving and webpages are a very real and good method to gather this data.

Another report from the federal government "Use of Education Data at the Local Level: From Accountability to Instructional Improvement" tells me we aren't quite sure what data we need nor how to collect it and use it. What Happens in CyberEnglish is a good model that may be useful in helping to solve this problem of data collection and use.

Let me provide a real world example demonstrating the difference between baby boomer thinking and digital native thinking. One is waiting for the daily newspaper for job opportunities while the other is using Twitter.

Schools have to change. Maybe this new book by Louis Menand is a good place to start.

Good luck to all who submit for this grant, think like a digital native.

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Digital Textbooks

This school year began with a smell of change was in the air. No it wasn't the burning of books. Not yet anyway. It was a digital change in how we get information to our students. many schools are converting to digital textbooks while abandoning the atomical textbooks. Many schools, at all levels are exploring the use of more digital texts over the physical hulks that weigh too much, cost too much, take up too much space, and require hours of inventory taking. I've been a digital classroom since 1986. Sure there are texts and books in my classroom, but the use of them is limited. When I need something from them, I scan those pages and put those converted to digits on my website for distribution to my scholars. And when needed we print digital texts so the scholars may have the atoms in hand. The key is that I'm trying to be more flexible, dexterous in my classroom, especially since my digital natives are always a step ahead of me. I'm grateful I can still stay in their rear view mirrors as they speed down this digital superhighway.

An article in August predicted where we will be going. "“In five years, I think the majority of students will be using digital textbooks,” said William M. Habermehl, superintendent of the 500,000-student Orange County schools. “They can be better than traditional textbooks.” This is a refreshing prediction and I hope it happens faster. Certainly it will if teachers take on more responsibility by building webpages and using online resources as texts in their curriculum. “Teachers need digital resources to find those documents, those blogs, those wikis that get them beyond the plain vanilla curriculum in the textbooks.” A further move in the paradigm has to be in more virtual education, one that I have been arguing for for years, “We’re still in a brick-and-mortar, 30-students-to-1-teacher paradigm,” Mr. Habermehl said, “but we need to get out of that framework to having 200 or 300 kids taking courses online, at night, 24/7, whenever they want.” The bottom line is that this will happen when the publishing companies start doing it and money can be made. Stay tuned and follow the money.

As teachers realize the power of digitizing their classrooms more will do it and want it. When I got my first networked classroom in 1988, I was amazed at my power and the importance of this technology to education. Each scholar was working on hir own project at her own pace. I would sit at my station using my mouse to click on each scholar's screen to see what was happening. It was as close to brain surgery that I was going to get. I watched them think, make decisions, work. This was new, since rarely do students let us see this when they are sitting at a desk working with pen and paper. Also proximity stunts this kind of observation. Over the din of clicking keys, I would address a student about hir work, to hir shock. They are always shocked when I speak to them about their work from my desk. I could dial in and do work on hir page too. Sometimes they would ask me to show them something and I could do that from my desk on their computer across the room. Another neat power was I could broadcast a scholar's page onto the screen of every scholar and do a mini 30 second lesson and then return them to where they were. Now that my scholars publish online, the scholars can view classmate's pages at will. A digitized classroom is far more efficient than a non digitized classroom. A math teacher in California has realized this power, as he sits in the back of his room overseeing his scholars work on what they each need to work on and record grades at the same time. More of his time is now devoted to teaching and less to administrative tasks, better done by the computer. "This textbook-free classroom is by no means the norm, but it may be someday. Slowly, but in increasing numbers, grade schools across the country are supplementing or substituting the heavy, expensive and indelible hardbound book with its lighter, cheaper and changeable cousin: the digital textbook." Certainly a big issue is about reliability, "Keep in mind that with open-source materials, you have to ask, 'Where are they coming from?' " said Jay Diskey, executive director of the Association of American Publishers' school division. "Is it a trusted source? Is it aligned to state standards? Is it based on real research?" Of course this comes from a publisher representative and something we would expect to hear. The point raised however is important. Textbooks haven't always proven themselves to be reliable or correct. As Ben Franklin said, "Believe none of what you hear and half of what you see." Another concern has to be the continued digital divide, "It's going to be a bit of a challenge for schools throughout the country to implement this new technology," said David Sanchez, president of the California Teachers Association. "How do you guarantee all children have access to that kind of textbook?" We don't need a computer per student either, "This initiative is not about hardware, classrooms where there were a couple kids using laptops, several had textbooks, some had a couple chapters printed out, and the lesson was displayed on a screen in front of the class." It will be a slow process but where there is a will there is a way.

As we approach the half way point in the school year, a city and a state are converting to digitized texts in select schools. A publisher and a city, Indianapolis have teamed up to digitize all the texts in 12 schools. This pilot program is important as we begin to hear how this progresses. They announced the program at a recent FETC conference. This program is also creating ways to share the work of the scholars. This sounds like a very good program. In West Virginia, the state education department is launching a program that will use digitized textbooks. They have distributed laptops to a school and the teacher is finding the students are more on task this way then when he used books. In addition he has easier access to the daily work of the students and the use of drop boxes makes it easier for students to hand in work even when not in school.

eSchoolNews is maintaining a page of links and stories about 21st Century digital libraries. Over the years, I too, have maintained a page of sources for online texts I use in my teaching. As more and more schools use online sources, companies will crop up that sell digital texts. I have found that all the texts online I need are there since so many belong to the public domain. Added bonuses happen when we find multimedia texts available such as the readings from Librivox. What is really neat is they have some readings by the author hirself as in the case of a reading poem select poems by Robert Frost. Sure textbooks have included cassettes and the like to augment the text, but once those extras are lost or broken, the multimedia aspect is gone. Not so when we use online texts. The online libraries are growing and what Google is doing makes it even more prevalent.

Of course we must consider the downside to digital textbooks. The costs of digital texts must be much lower than the current atom form of the book. A common format is necessary for universal use. Ownership and time text stays on users computer or electronic device is a legal football that could always sink any good idea. The bottom line is always about the money, follow the money.

I wonder where John Dewey would stand on the issue of digitized texts.

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Fix the Test

Over the years I have read in newspapers across the country from Florida to California to New York, from Texas to Minnesota the mistakes made by the test makers and scorers that have affected the graduation or promotion of students. How do we know these tests are valid and useful for our schools? Because these tests are proprietory, we don't have easy access to them before or after they have been given. Tests are given and scored and then destroyed. Something is terribly wrong when the impact of these tests is so important to so many people and they are still flawed. If we are going to use these tests for important decisions, one important decision is to reexamine the instrument(s) we use for assessment.

Let's start with the recent firefighter's case in New York involving the "biased" test. I think education may see a court case similar to the one we have recently seen with the firefighters in New York. This case raises the issue of "testing bias." "In his ruling on Wednesday, the judge found that the city intentionally discriminated against blacks in using those tests and in ignoring calls over the years to change the testing procedure. The suit was brought by three people who took the test and by the Vulcan Society, a fraternal organization of black city firefighters." This is the crux of the matter, the test was biased and therefore bad. I have heard over the years the complaints of test biasing in schools. I have seen test questions eliminated because of bias. I have always been conscious of my tests. If the results are bad, then something is wrong with the test. The courts in NYC decided this and did something about it. Perhaps educators should follow the firefighter's lead. We as a nation have never looked at the test being the problem. Instead we blame the schools, the teachers, parents, the students. Never ever have we blamed the test nor questioned the validity of the test. Perhaps we should examine the tests as we rethink education in this country.

An example of mistakes being made can be found in Kansas. A simple mistake but we have seen bigger ones over the years. The point is that we are putting much too much reliance and importance on a test instead of on portfolios. If we are going to use these tests we need much better oversight by the states.

New York's ELA exam has changed radically over the years and it is about to change again in January 2011. Here is a chance to reexamine the test. Race to the Top has added much pressure on the states and very little on the test makers. We need to change this mind think. Students at Drexel University are using a real bridge to help in their assessment. Using real world situations are the best forms of assessment, not tests created by disinterested parties.

Perhaps the final nail in this discussion has to come from Edweek's annual "Quality Counts 2010" issue. Discussion about national standards and methods of assessment dot the issue with arguments from E.D. Hirsch Jr., Alfie Kohn, Diane Ravitch, Nel Noddings. Testing doesn't work, the tests are bad, wrong, and proprietory. We need to reexamine the test and our single reliance on one instrument of assessment.

The matter of education in this country has always been a personal one since it involves all of us one way or another. Since it is personal, perhaps we should take a more personal, subjective approach to assessment rather than the failing objective one. First I would recommend a better assessment of the test and secondly, I'd recommend a method of using efolios of student work to use in assessment in conjunction with the test or alone. We know the test alone is inadequate. Let's think digits, not atoms.

For further reading: From Edweek, "Quality of Questions on Common Tests at Issue"

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Green Schools

In July of 2008, I became more aware of how education was going green. Colleges were doing greener things to attract students. Finally we are seeing the trickle down affect in the greening of K-12 schools.

We learn from the Green School in NYC that sustainability is the key to being green and at the school the students learn what this means. "To create balance in order to strengthen and support life for oneself, others, and future generations. We feel this is an important theme because when we look around we see that the way we live can be very destructive - both to the natural environment, and to people in our communities." The mission of the school, "The Green School is a progressive alternative high school in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York that focuses on sustainability, the environment, science, social justice, experiential learning, and career planning." The Green School is part of a larger organization, community, social awareness base in the Green Charter Schools Network of about 200 school. In addition there is the Growing Up Green Charter School in Long Island City, NYC. Starting students out in elementary school to understand the importance of sustainability is far better than simply creating workers for the immediate workforce which is the current agenda of the government efforts like "Race to the Top." Green schools are for more important for our future. We've been down the path of creating workers and it has failed us badly.

"The 1st Annual Green Schools National Conference of educators, students, school and community leaders to promote environmental literacy and sustainable communities throughout the country." will happen in Minneapolis, MN October 24-26, 2010. The theme of this first conference is “Growing Green Schools Across America.” Since governmental leadership is behind this movement not only should the conference be exciting and successful, so should the creation of the schools.

There are a few things all schools could do immediately to start the "green movement." Create bags that fold up into very small packages with school name on it for all students when they shop before or after school to replace those hideous plastic bags all stores use. Distribute water bottles to all students to replace the ubiquitous plastic ones. New projects geared to make the school "greener" should be added each month. Every student should see "The Story of Stuff." One step at a time.

Not only can this be done, it is being done in a school in Hudson valley in New York. "A staggering 11,880 plastic garbage bags were used at Crispell during the 180 days that school was in session. That computes to 66 bags used daily during the school's breakfast and lunch periods. But beginning in September, with students and staff working and learning together, Crispell has cut that number to 10-12 bags a day, which will reduce the total number used for the 2009-10 school year to around 2,000." This is impressive and important. Lots more is being done here and elsewhere.

Another aspect of being more "green" is eating better, especially in our schools. Obeisty is a major problem leading to diabetes and poor health which will cost us more. So if we improve our school cafeterias, the food choices, the education about the environment in our schools we can begin to make a better impact on our environment. It always starts with education.

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Happy Birthday Martin

I'm still stunned by how America deals with the celebration of this man on this day. I'm also always reminded about an excellent Internet Literacy lesson about Martin.

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Software

During my early use of technology in the early 80's taught me much about hacking and using software that I could alter or even create my own lessons. When I found software that let me run my own content, I was very excited. I still use much of this software today. I chose to spend time incorporating my lessons and my voice into this software, because it would be more personalized for my scholars. They would be reading the words and phrases I am usually using in class. I was able to provide visuals and names to personalize them even more. I also discovered over the years the amount of text online that was in the public domain and even podcasts of texts being read. Access to material for my classroom and my online scholars became the foundation of CyberEnglish. I could do so much more in CyberEnglish that was both online and f2f, then in a f2f class alone. With the advances in software development, we are seeing much more effective and efficient use of technology in schools.

There is an increase in the use of technology in our schools, says a recent PBS survey. This is good news and bad news. As I have said before we are more consumer oriented than producer oriented. When I was examining those early software packages, I would reject those that I couldn't alter or add my own content. I was not happy with the content on some of that software and it was too hard to navigate through good parts of some packages and good parts of other packages. If I had total control of the content then I was going to use that software, because it was an extension of my class and not the product of some developer. Much of the online web based software provides lots of clips that teachers don't have access to in their schools. The Internet is a great repository of film clips, articles, public domain texts, and documents. I love a particular site, LibriVox, that provides recording of thousands of texts for the English class. I also find some podcasts and YouTube valuable sources to augment my lessons. Being able to add multimedia to my classroom is more possible with the Internet than not, especially when one considers costs.

I was intrigued when I read about a Charter school in Utah claiming to be the first school to use online texts, "The Open High School of Utah is believed to be the first secondary school in the nation (perhaps the world) to use learning materials and textbooks that are freely available for anyone's use, remixing and redistribution. Because the materials aren't produced by commercial publishers, they can be tailored to meet students' educational needs, free of copyright or licensing restraints. " I'm not quite sure I agree. Are they speaking about a whole school and solely using online resources? I know in CyberEnglish, I only use online resources and mold my assignments using these online resources and customizing each lesson. I know this is the same for many of my colleagues, too. Despite the claim, a trend to do this because of our access to so many resources online will make access easier and more vast and manipulating the texts is always possible when we use any word processing program or HTML. This power has always been one of my strongest arguments to use online resources, digits, and not textbooks, atoms. Digits are much easier to move around and distribute than atoms.

Another example of how the technology can be used to publish the scholars work and to be used with parents is a neat program in a third grade in California. The teacher is using the ipod to provide lessons and to record the students' responses. Each student can work at hir own pace and what I really like is the teacher can share this with the parents' to show progress. "'It's also for the parents, too. I'm going to play them during parents conferences so they hear their child's progress,' the teacher said." Technology is not new to this school, "In September, this class was chosen for a pilot program to gauge if students' English comprehension and fluency improved with daily use of the iPod Touch. Oswalt Academy is already using technology in the classrooms, having implemented a One to One Laptop Learning Program two years ago. Currently, fifth through seventh grade students use computers with pre-loaded textbooks and other applications, said Astrid Ramirez, Oswalt's principal. Oswalt was recently named one of eight schools in California as an Apple Distinguished School. " Perhaps one of the problems with the equitable use of technology in schools is that some schools have lots of it, while others are bereft of it. Good technology use begets more technology. With all these pilot programs, how many pilots actually spread to other schools?

Sometimes we need to actually speak to a human or feel the human interaction. Brightstorm has developed a truly unique and friendly math tutor website. The student navigates to the area of study that needs assistance and a video of a teacher appears and explains the function. In addition to math, the user will find help in literature and writing. This site can be a perfect model for what a teacher can do. If a teacher were to videotape a class, that class could be uploaded for future use and for hir own class. Podcasting is a growing tool. What may be something to consider is copyright.

Carnegie Learning has developed a tutor who shows some empathy, based on how the student on the computer responds. Using artificial intelligence to build the software for this empathetic tutor is the product of University of Massachusetts Amherst and Arizona State University in Tempe. “Human tutors are believed to be the highest form of instruction,” said James C. Lester, a computer scientist who is exploring such ideas at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. “Why? The hypothesis is that there is very strong affective feedback going on. Five years ago, this was something the field would’ve thought was far out, but now it’s getting a lot more resources thrown at it.” HAL from 2001 is echoing in my ears.

I have always been a fan of gaming as an educational tool. I have used many different kinds of game oriented tools over the years with great success. The reason I had success was that the programs combine so many of the multiple intelligences at the same time. A strength assists a weakness and a weakness gets stronger. Now we have research that speaks about the affects of gaming on the brain and learning. All of my anecdotal evidence can now be supplemented by this new research. Let the games begin.

Something we haven't seen really take off is the actual use of real people as telementors. I'd love to see schools of education require all of their students do telementoring while they are students pursuing a degree in teaching. This would provide them with a real hands on application of using the internet as a teacher and would assist schools.

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