The Green Cup

Note: I spent last week in Myrtle Beach, without consistent Internet access. While I lived through the withdrawal involved, I also took the week off from Tech Tools…

I recently encountered an excellent online collaboration tool called Wizehive. Read about it here…

I’ve recently begun following the story of Alex Barton (a primary grades student with Asperger Syndrome) and Wendy Portillo (a kindergarten teacher). The story is set in Port St. Lucie, Florida, where Portillo had Alex in her class at Morningside Elementary School.

The story is interesting to me for a variety of reasons. I’m a special education teacher certified in autism; I’ve worked with students with disabilities in a kindergarten classroom. I’m also certified in administration; I suppose I could find myself someday having to manage and lead a school in the aftermath of an incident like this.

While the story is not simple, there are some simple facts associated with it:

• Portillo’s kindergarten class had at least 17 students in it, including Alex.
  
• In May, 2008 students in the class discussed Alex while he listened and voted 14-2 to exclude him.
  
• Alex has been diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome.
  
• Alex stopped going to the school for a period of time after the incident and may still not be attending the school.
  
• Alex has a brother, Kyle, who also attends the school and participates in the gifted program.
  
• Kyle continued to attend the school after the incident and may still continue to attend the school.
  
• Portillo was suspended as a result of the incident for one year, without pay.
  
• Portillo was reinstated and will return to the classroom in November, when her one year suspension is up.
  
• The situation has become emotional and personal. Parents and the community seem to have sided in large numbers with Portillo and have picketed the school and confronted Alex’s mother, Melissa Barton (now pregnant), when she comes to pick up Kyle. At least once she’s been in a physical altercation with another parent (though it seems no charges have been filed).
  
• The case has attracted nation attention from the disabilities community, and the local school board has received over 2,000 requests to terminate Portillo. Melissa Barton was recently on CBS’s The Early Show to talk about the case.
  
• Melissa Barton maintains a website designed to pressure the school system to terminate Portillo.
  
• Portillo (the only adult in the room when the incident occurred) has been prohibited by a court gag order from discussing the incident for most of the time since it happened.

Some fuzzier details:

• It is not clear that Alex had been identified as meeting the requirements of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and thus qualifyed as a “special ed” student at the time of the incident. While the distinction may seem semantic, Portillo’s actions were aimed at a child who was being evaluated for a possible disability, not against a child who’d been determined to have a disability. And it seems probable that either Portillo would not have had Alex in her class if he’d already been identified as having Asperger Syndrome or she would have had the assistance of a special education aide or teacher in her room with him.
  
• While most accounts of the story make it sound as though the vote was on the question of whether to exclude Alex, some accounts make it seem that the vote was on whether or not to readmit Alex to class after he’d already been sent to the principal’s office for being disruptive.
  
• While most account make it seem like students voted to exclude Alex from membership in the class, some accounts make it seem more like students were voting on whether to readmit him at that moment (as opposed to later in the day, or the next day).
  
• While verifying such accusations are problematic, Melissa Barton describes herself and her family now as the target of retribution from the local school system.

From a great distance away and without the benefit of knowing anyone involved in any of this, I can make a couple of observations.

First, it’s always interesting to me to see how the crowd that gathers in the blogosphere (or in real life) after an incident like this always wants the offending party fired, and fired now. Sometimes (in the eyes of the mob, at least) people do things so bad that they don’t deserve due process. Of course, without due process we don’t really know that they did it. As a card-carrying member of the ACLU I’m rarely in favor of doing away with due process. Of course, suspending a teacher until we decide what actually happened is just part and parcel of due process when children are involved.

Second, unless there’s more to it (there may well be) or a prolonged pattern of this kind of behavior on the part of Portillo, it’s difficult for me to see firing a teacher over this one incident. I’m not minimizing it. It’s a horrible lapse of professional judgment that should be severely reprimanded. We know Portillo was suspended for a year without pay as a result of the incident. Exactly what other consequences she may have suffered in terms of requirements being placed on her (probation of some kind, or to attend professional development workshops on autism, for example) are probably confidential under state personnel law. And they should be.

Third, we live in a society where people get compensated when their rights are violated the way Alex’s rights seem to have been. I sympathize with Melissa Barton and her son, Alex; but she doesn’t seem to want compensation. She seems to want blood. Wendy Portillo appears to have made a profound professional mistake. Portillo and the district almost certainly have liability insurance to compensate the Barton family for the harm caused by that mistake. Retribution and revenge have been replaced in our history with litigation and restitution. However distasteful litigation may seem at times, it’s far more civilized than revenge.

Should Portillo still be teaching? There are a number of considerations in answering that question. We haven’t seen much about her personnel record and we probably won’t. I don’t know the Florida education job market well, but I know that most districts locate a replacement for a teacher before they fire them. Are there kindergarten teachers in South Florida standing around waiting to be hired? If this is the only dark spot on Portillo’s record as an educator, I suspect she’s learned a lot from it. Firing Portillo might make Alex’s mother feel better; but I’m not sure it will do much for Alex.

You can read other people’s thoughts about the case here:

• Anthony Westbury: Wendy Portillo deserves her day in court
  
• Kindergartner Voted Out By Students @ CBS News
  
• Open Letter from Melissa Barton
  
• Should Wendy Portillo still be teaching? @ Autism – Change.org
  
• Wendy Portillo, Again? @ My Autism Insights
  
• Justice for Alex Barton
  
• Portillo Reinstated @ AspieWeb.Net
  
• Disability Scoop
  
• Disability News
  
• Special Education Law Blog
  
• On Special Education @ Education Week

A letter to the editor in the New Jersey Star-Ledger came to my attention this past weekend. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan had been “listening” in the area, and he managed to say a few things as well. A retired teacher, Jane Ebihara, didn’t like some of what he said. So she worte the letter…

I found her on Facebook. I contacted her and got permission to reprint her letter. Here it is:

Education isn’t a sporting game

Education Secretary Arne Duncan thinks teacher pay should be tied to student performance just as sports teams are judged by “looking at their box score” (”Ed chief: Tie pay to student performance,” June 9). Well, let’s think about that.

When was the last time professional sports teams had to put everyone on the roster who simply showed up? When was the last time professional sports teams had players whose physical limitations made it impossible for them to keep up with the rest of the team, or whose emotional or mental disabilities made it difficult for them to even understand the rules of the game?

When was the last time coaches of those professional teams had not one team, but five and were allowed only 200 minutes a week to prepare each team for the big game?

Oh, and I’m sure that those same coaches understand that many of the players won’t be showing up for practice on a regular basis; some will come to practice hungry, depressed, distracted with family issues, and sleep deprived. But surely that won’t have any effect on those “box scores.”

Good that Duncan is no longer a student in someone’s classroom because with faulty logic like that, his teacher should surely expect to be looking at a cut in pay.

I’ve thought a lot about this issue and it seems to me that merit pay faces two profound delimmas.

First, what do we base it on? We could base it on a general standard. We could say, “Every teacher whose students average at least a 75 on the test this year gets the bonus” (or something like that). Depending on the school they’re in and the kids they start out with, some teachers would have to do almost nothing to get the bonus while others would certainly miss the bonus despite extraordinary efforts in the classroom. That seems unfair. Or we could say, “Every teacher whose students’ average score improves 10 points this year gets the bonus” (or something like that). Depending on the school they’re in and the kids they start out with, some teachers would get the bonus even though the average score in their classroom was a 50 while other teachers would miss out even though the average score in their classroom was 85. That seems unfair. And the real delimma is that we are in a situation nationally where every solution I’ve heard offered a.) generates some progress and b.) seems unfair to most people.

Second, how will we decide who gets credit for a child’s progress (or lack of progress)? If a child’s reading scores improve, the general education classroom teacher can probably take some of the credit. But there are also specialists in the building who go room to room, pull children for intervention, provide data that helps shape instruction and so on. They can take some of the credit as well. Is a specialist who only works in an intervention setting with children who have some academic problem going to be penalized for the problems those kids have (or rewarded when they make progress)? It all seems to run contrary to the idea that every faculty member in a school should feel responsible for the success or failure or every student in the school.

And maybe that’s the solution (or part of it, at least): corporate merit pay. I suspect that real peer accountability would not be far behind. And that would just leave us with the first dilemma: how to measure merit…

Back in March I went to Charleston for the Reading Research Symposium, and I took my laptop with me because the Holiday Inn Express I was staying in had free wireless access. It was marvelous. Then it stopped. I had no idea why. Called their tech support and was able to continue working through a cable…

I got home and the laptop no longer worked on my wireless hub/home network. So it wasn’t the Holiday Inn. Then, well, I procrastinated for a while.

This weekend I took my laptop to a local techie. He called me the next day and told me that the problem was solved. The problem, he’d discovered, was a wireless access switch on the front of the computer. It had been moved somehow to the “off” position. Thirty bucks for a half-hour’s work (the smallest billing increment the guy uses).

To be fair, he said it took him about 15 minutes to figure it out. So, I’ve now paid money to have a highly trained computer tech show me how to slide this little switch back and forth. And I learned that my laptop (and presumably many other laptops) have a switch for turning wifi access on and off.

Eleven years of college and I still learn something new everyday…

A handful of things I wish I had time to comment more fully on:

• I saw a number of stories on the NY City Charter school that will pay its teacher $125,000 each. But the Atlanta Journal-Constitution blog was the most succinct. The idea seams to be to pay teachers more but sacrifice with class size, technology and administrative support to pay that bill. Sounds like robbing Peter to pay Paul…
  
• I saw a number of articles about the push for national standards in public education. Larry Ferlazzo thinks it’s a wild goose chase. Andrew C. Porter and Morgan S. Polikoff at Education Week disagree with him.
  
• EdWeek also had an article on restraints and seclusion being used with children with profound disabilities. I think that in special education the emphasis on behaviorism sometimes means we end up treating kids like animals (a Skinnerian idea). It bothers me…
  
• The Huffington Post had a piece about how public education today looks like GM in the 1980’s — it’s dying and doesn’t know it, according to author Tom Vander Ark. I think he’s smoking something.
  
• David Warrick had an article on what his readers wish for in public education. Top of the list: more technology. One-on-one time with students comes second. More willingness to innovate and better student health tied for third. A good piece…

I came across this at Clif’s Notes recently.

Directions

Summer can be a great time for professional development. It is an opportunity to learn more about a topic, read a particular work or the works of a particular author, beef up an existing unit of instruction, advance one’s technical skills, work on that advanced degree or certification, pick up a new hobby, and finish many of the other items on our ever-growing To Do Lists. Let’s make Summer 2009 a time when we actually get to accomplish a few of those things and enjoy the thrill of marking them off our lists.

The Rules

NOTE: You do NOT have to wait to be tagged to participate in this meme.

• Pick 1-3 professional development goals and commit to achieving them this summer.
  
• For the purposes of this activity the end of summer will be Labor Day (09/07/09).
  
• Post the above directions along with your 1-3 goals on your blog.
  
• Title your post Professional Development Meme 2009 and link back/trackback to http://clifmims.com/blog/archives/2447.
  
• Use the following tag/ keyword/ category on your post: pdmeme09.
  
• Tag 5-8 others to participate in the meme.
  
• Achieve your goals and “develop professionally.”
  
• Commit to sharing your results on your blog during early or mid-September.

My Goals

• Improve my knowledge of project-based learning by attending the Special Education Teacher Leadership Academy in Charleston, WV in July
• Become more familiar with the new virtual desktop (and related tools) my state is offering by attending the July 15 workshop on WebTop in Charleston
• Keep up with my goal of learning a new technology skill once a week.

I Tag…

I listened yesterday to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan on National Public Radio’s Talk of the Nation.

It was a live stream and I tried to get a question in, but no luck. If I’d gotten through, I probably would have pointed out that charter schools are an urban and suburban concept. Charter schools (which usually target students who are “at-risk”) are also a redundant idea in many of America’s poorer rural corners where in some cases the vast majority of kids qualify as being at-risk. Then I would have asked him if there wasn’t a model available to promote the innovation that charter schools engender, while staying within the current public school framework in impoverished rural areas.

I might also have asked him if it wasn’t time to reconsidered the “supplement, not supplant” provision of Title I. When that idea was made law there was a lot of room in the curriculum and in the school day for supplemental instruction. Today almost everything we do is done because it is required in some way, and the specialists who could do it best often work for Title I and often have their hands tied by that provision of the law.

Oh well, maybe I can catch him on another talk show…

It’s been a busy month so far for Secretary Duncan.

• On Wednesday (June 3rd) he was testifying before a Senate budget committee about the plan to move $1 billion from Title I grants to the Title I school improvement fund. He also “got grilled” (as on source put it) on a proposed increase in funding for the Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF).
  
• On Monday (June 8th) Duncan gave a speech to the Institute for Education Sciences. It was at their fourth annual conference, at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, DC. Among the messages: test scores should play some role in evaluating teachers. But what role? Maybe I’ll blog about that later…
  
• Yesterday, Duncan attended a policy breakfast sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor. Politico got him on video talk about playing basketball with the president. The CS Monitor did a story that day featuring Duncan on the topic of national education standards.

In between, he’s done a little traveling on his listening tour – mostly in New Jersey, I think.

I’ve clarified a goal for myself recently in the area of professional development. The goal: develop a new technology skill on an average of once each week.

While that may sound ambitious, the truth is that it will probably be easy. There are lots of little possibilities that qualify. Last week’s tech skill was sending text messages to a cell phone using a computer. I discovered that there are a number of websites that will send text messages from your computer to a cell phone for free:

• Online Text Messaging
• Txt2Day
• SMS Everywhere
• txtDrop

Be forewarned that the process of converting an email into a text message takes place at the cell phone holder’s service provider – and it can take about an hour. That’s how long it took for my wife’s cell phone to get my message.

Next up? Tomorrow I’m going to learn to use the new voter registrar software that has replaced the paper poll books in Virginia. I’m a precinct chief in Virginia and I have to be at the polling place with a couple of laptops (instead of the old paper list of voters) and some voting machines at 5am.

Future plans include learning to use some screen capture software (which is essential for presentations on some topics) and attending a workshop on the new virtual desktop (WebTop) that the West Virginia Department of Education is providing for teachers. I’m sure I’ll come up with other ideas…

VodPod had this fascinating five-minute video recently on a Twitter experiment. An instructor at the college level used Twitter to facilitate discussions in a history class with 90 or so students. The results? People who otherwise might not have participated took part. Distracting and off topic remarks were minimized by the 140 character limitation of the microblog format. A permanent record of the discussion was created (on Twitter) and the instructor could go back after class and continue the discussion by responding to student posts.

Can this be used in secondary school classrooms? Probably. I think I might could make it useful even in the intermediate grades…

I had the pleasure about two weeks ago now of being interviewed for a principal’s job in McDowell County. Joe Sparks, who’s been the principal of Bradshaw Elementary School for the last couple of decades, is retiring. I put in a bid for the job when it was posted even though my paperwork hadn’t actually come through and I didn’t have my license for educational leadership physically in my hands yet. (I’d completed the last requirement for the license on May 2nd.)

Six people applied for the job. Two were already in teacher leadership roles at the school. I went in for the interview tickled pink to just be there.

The interview took place in a conference room with our Superintendent and the Assistant Superintendent for Elementary Education. Many of the questions were predictable based on the requirements of section §18A-4-7a of the state code. I was asked questions about my elementary experience, my administrative experience, my academic achievement and GPA, etc.

Two questions threw me off a bit. I was asked what I thought my strengths were. That wasn’t hard. If you know me at all you can probably guess that I can talk at some length about my strengths if asked to do so. Stupid me… it never dawned on me (even as obvious as it seems in retrospect) what the next question would be: What are your weaknesses? The question caught me off guard I suppose because, to be honest, I don’t think much about my weaknesses – or at least I hadn’t before the interview. I mumbled a few things that I’m not sure came out as complete sentences, and I came very close to saying that, well heck, I wasn’t sure I had any. (Some members of the Title I staff at my school are, at my request, graciously composing a list of my weaknesses for me to carry around as a reference in the future.)

The other question that threw me was this: What are your plans for future professional development? I’d just completed my certification program in educational leadership 17 days earlier. I’m looking at my first summer without a graduate course hanging over me in the last five years. I said something about feeling like Christian in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress after he’d just been relieved of his burden. I have more graduate hours than the state will pay me for. Of course, that wasn’t the question. And I do plan to continue my professional development. But at that moment during the interview I had very little idea how.

So, next time I’ll know the answers to those questions. And in the meantime, going through the interview was a useful experience.