The Green Cup

Note: Back on June 11 I blogged about a goal of developing a new technology skill on an average of once each week. And I’ve been trying to blog about keeping up with that goal. So…

On June 15th I attended a workshop in Charleston on WebTop (which I’ve talked about in some detail here and here).

The workshop was actually a five-in-one set of hour-long mini-workshops. We were introduced to a tool for creating electronic portfolios (ePearl) and a virtual classroom (Manhattan). We got a look at developments in the evolution of our state’s student records system, WVEIS (and we were cautioned, on pain of death, that we could no longer call it “Wee-vus,” but had to say the letters – “dubya-vee-ee-eye-es”). We were given an introduction to Google Sites (which is embedded as a tool on the new virtual desktop). And we got to see how the desktop and its accompanying social network, WebTop Communities, works.

I tweeted.

Now, I know there will be some of you thinking, “What does that mean?” It means I used Twitter to record my thoughts and experiences as the workshops progressed. Twitter is a microblogging tool that allows users to publish statements of up to 140 characters in length. And I live tweeted the workshop – publishing about 30 Twitter posts (or “tweets”) as the day progressed.

Twitter uses something they call a hashtag to track topics. So I put the hashtag #WVDE in my posts, but that only works for a week. You can find things I’ve posted to Twitter at my Twitter page: http://twitter.com/gregcruey.

Live tweeting is quickly replacing live blogging of conferences and events.

Below is a list of tweets I posted during the workshops. I’ve arranged them in chronological order, even though almost any Twitter client tool would present them with the most recent post first.

• Tweeting from a workshop in Charleston WV 2day ay Capital HS. Workshop on WebTop, the new virtual desktop. #WVDE #WebTop
  7:46am Jul 15th

• Starting with a tool called ePearl. We’re in small groups in computer labs and we are on the same keyboard all day. Nice… #WVDE #WebTop
  8:27am Jul 15th

• Presenter for ePearl: Donna Landen http://wvde.state.wv.us/dir… eLearnign Coordinator #WVDE #ePearl #WebTop
  8:32am Jul 15th

• Toying with customizing the appearance of ePearl. Students can pick images and color themes they like. #WVDE #ePearl #WebTop
  8:53am Jul 15th

• ePearl is open source. Nice. #WVDE #ePearl #WebTop
  8:54am Jul 15th

• Naming/color coding folders. Students can color code folders to show level of completeness – so teacher can assess it. #WVDE #ePearl #WebTop
  9:10am Jul 15th

• Discussing how ePearl could be interfaced with other software – like techSteps and Writing Roadmap. #WVDE #ePearl #WebTop
  9:12am Jul 15th

• Looking at example of student portfolio. Teacher has included a rubric. Includes a box where teacher types comments. #WVDE #ePearl #WebTop
  9:16am Jul 15th

• ePortfolios provide a way to fix Pontius Pilate Syndrome: “What I have written, I have written.” Get kids to edit. #WVDE #ePearl #WebTop
  9:22am Jul 15th

• Resource section for ePearl includes both text and video based tutorials. #WVDE #ePearl #WebTop
  9:23am Jul 15th

• Next up, Fernando Ibanez on Manhattan Virtual Classroom http://wvde.state.wv.us/dir… #WVDE #PBL #WebTop
  9:58am Jul 15th

• Manhattan is intended to facilitate project based learning for Teach 21 wvde.state.wv.us/tea… #WVDE #PBL #WebTop
  9:59am Jul 15th

• Creating a class on Manhattan. WVDE has given 500 mg of space to students for their ePearl portfolios #ePearl #WVDE #PBL #WebTop
  10:10am Jul 15th

• Looking at modules available within Manhattan course. 17 different module formats that can be used in combination. #WVDE #PBL #WebTop
  10:20am Jul 15th

• Discussing the possibility of interfacing Manhattan & Writing Road Map. #WVDE #PBL #WebTop #WRM2
  10:34am Jul 15th
  
  
• I received this tweet from… ladyvolhoops@gregcruey 17 modules for what
  10:43am JUL 15th

• I received this tweet from… ladyvolhoops@gregcruey i am sitting in a conference with people doing pbl globally. listening to how it is done in italy
  10:43am JUL 15th

• I received this tweet from… ladyvolhoops@gregcruey r they looking at eports for how many years. 5oo mgs would not be enough if done correctly for 9-1210:44am Jul 15th
  
  
• @ladyvolhoops Modules that can be used in structuring a class for Manhattan Virtual Classroom -open source, in WebTop #PBL
  10:45am Jul 15th

• Adding students to Manhattan classroom. Searchable list of candidates based on people in the WVDE WebTop System #WVDE #PBL #WebTop
  10:46am Jul 15th

• @ladyvolhoops epearl in WebTop for ePorts. Can be uped to 1 gig on request. ePearl can be passed on 2 next grade #ePearl
  10:49am Jul 15th
  

• I received this tweet from… ladyvolhoops@gregcruey y would you want a virtual classroom? what r they saying is the purpose?
  10:50am Jul 15th
  
  
• @ladyvolhoops Fernando says it helps manage the interaction between face-to-face teaching and online tools. #PBL #WebTop #WVDE
  10:53am Jul 15th

• Discussing how teach21 can be used inside Manhattan Virtual Classroom. #WVDE #Teach21 #PBL #WebTop
  10:54am Jul 15th
  
  
• I received this tweet from… ladyvolhoops@gregcruey don’t mean to be a pain, but what is fernando basing this on? we already do this in our school without a virtual class
  10:55am Jul 15th
  
  
• @ladyvolhoops No pain…I suppose it’s just an alternative format. It’s a free open source tool. But, bout to break for lunch…
  10:59am Jul 15th

• Session 3 is on WVEIS. Presenter Richard Pullin http://wvde.state.wv.us/dir… #WVDE #WVEIS
  11:39am Jul 15th
  
  
• I received this tweet from…jonbecker@gregcruey I worked with lots of OIS folks a while ago when WVEIS was a system way ahead of its time. Made for great research databases
  11:42am Jul15th
  
  
• @jonbecker We’re basically getting a run down of what WVEIS can do. FERPA prevents much hands on work in a workshop. #WVDE #WVEIS
  11:55am Jul 15th

• WVEIS (our student records) has gone from a tedious DOS-sorta application to being web based. Much nicer, more user friendly. #WVDE #WVEIS
  11:59am Jul 15th

• Presenter: Jeff Takarsh on Google Sites #WVDE #GoogleSites #WebTop http://wvde.state.wv.us/dir…
  12:57pm Jul 15th

• The WebTop virtual desktop uses Google Sites as a tool and links from that virtual desktop. #WVDE #GoogleSites #WebTop
  12:58pm Jul 15th

• Creating a new Google Site – practice, basically. #WVDE #GoogleSites #WebTop
  1:05pm Jul 15th

• All normal Google Sites stuff. But the account comes thru the Department of Ed. Keeps personal things separate. #WVDE #GoogleSites #WebTop
  1:39pm Jul 15th

• Presenter: Chris Casto http://wvde.state.wv.us/dir… on WebTop Communities #WVDE #WebTop
  1:55pm Jul 15th

• WebTop Communities is a closed social network (much like Facebook) for WV educators and (eventually) students #WVDE #WebTop
  1:56pm Jul 15th

• WV’s WebTop Communities page is available in 28 (twenty-eight) langauges, from Arabic to Vietnamese… #WVDE #WebTop
  2:11pm Jul 15th

• Hadn’t noticed the bookmarking feature in WebTop Communities before. I can share bookmarks with WebTop friends. #WVDE #WebTop
  2:20pm Jul 15th

• WebTop Communities gives me a gig of storage space separate from the gig I have at the WebTop desktop. #WVDE #WebTop
  2:21pm Jul 15th

• Looking at creating communities in WebTop Communities. Any WebTop user can create communities. #WVDE #WebTop
  2:30pm Jul 15th

• “Any WebTop user can create communities.” Check that: students will NOT be able to create communities. #WVDE #WebTop
  2:34pm Jul 15th

• Well, headed home…
  2:45pm Jul 15th
  

I talked last week about WebTop – the West Virginia Department of Education’s virtual desktop and accompanying tools. One of those tools is WebTop Communities.

WebTop Communities is a closed social network for state education. At the moment it’s inhabited by the employees of the state’s schools systems. But eventually the plan is to include students.

WebTop Communities home page I get when I’m logged in.

WebTop Communities gets compared to MySpace by WVDE staff. I’m a member of MySpace and Facebook. I like Facebook more. MySpace seems a little more cumbersome to me than Facebook.

There are some ways that I think WebTop Communities is like MySpace, some ways it is like Facebook, and some ways it is different from both of them.

WebTop Communities is like both MySpace and Facebook in a number of ways. It includes its own messaging system where you can send other members emails, and it will notify you that you have email waiting. But MySpace sends you an email telling you that someone has sent you an “email” on MySpace, and you then have to login at MySpace to read that message (which I find inconvenient); Facebook and WebTop Communities both send you the text of your message in an email, and you only have to login to the service if you want to reply.

My friends at WebTop Communities.

WebTop Communities, MySpace, and Facebook all three allow you to formalize relationships by “friending” people within the network. But Facebook and MySpace require those relationships to be reciprocal: I friend you, you friend me back (or approve my “friend request”) and then we’re friends. WebTop Communities allows you to display people as “friends” on your page without them listing you as friends on their page (and vice versa). And in that sense it is more like Twitter (which allows you to “follow” people who don’t follow you).

My WebTop Communities profile page.

Unlike MySpace and Facebook (or Twitter for that matter), WebTop does not have a place for personal, status, or “mood” updates. On Facebook there’s a window when you login that asks “What’s on Your Mind?” On MySpace the Status and Mood page asks “What are your doing right now?” And Twitter asks simply “What are you doing?” There is nothing like a “status update” on WebTop Communities. That makes it a little more like LinkedIn – a professional network. Social, but professional…

WebTop Communities is more like Facebook than MySpace in the ease with his smaller groups within the larger social network can be formed. So for example, I have a closed community within WebTop specifically of staff at my school. I moderate the community, decide how visible it is to users who are not members of my community. And I determine who can be a member of the community. MySpace may be able to do this (I’m not absolutely sure), but such pages are legion on Facebook. WebTop Communities makes them very easy to create and use.
Like both Facebook and MySpace, there is a blog tool in WebTop Communities. And recent blogposts show up on the WebTop Communities home page.

My blog page at WebTop Communities.

So I guess my main point is that the community is unique. While its appearance hasn’t changed much in the year since I joined (my first blog post at WebTop was July 23, 2008), I suspect it’s capacity has increased greatly and the ideas for its future have multiplied.

I think WebTop Communities feels more like Facebook. MySpace has always had a problem with spam that is, well, in poor taste. I’ve rarely experienced that on Facebook (which doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen). I hope that WebTop Communities will become more like Facebook in that Facebook has seen a proliferation of applications for users – games, quizzes, etc. I know that the WebTop apps would be educational. But if we’re building a social network to include students in an educational setting, I think such applications would have potential.

Finally, Facebook is growing. MySpace isn’t. I hope that WebTop grows…

This week my new tech tool was screen capture. I used a program I’d come across a while back (but had never actually installed) from a company called Etrusoft.

!Quick Screen Capture (the name of their program) was easy to install and quite easy to use. I used it to caputre a series of screens that have to do with the West Virginia Department of Education’s WebTop program.

WebTop is an cloud-based personal desktop that West Virginia educators and (eventually) students can sign up for. It allows them to maintain their own access to a particular set of tools and documents despite having to move from classroom to classroom (or even school to school, depending on their job).

Let me show you some of the screens I captured (you can click on them to get a larger image)…

To log onto WebTop you go to http://wvde.k12.wv.us. The page looks like this:

In the blue box on the left of the page, the second option down is “WEBTOP LOGIN.” Click on that and you get this page:

I fed in my user ID and password:

And I got this (my own virtual desktop):

I haven’t done much with mine yet. So you might call this the standard look. Let’s take a look at the four folders on the WebTop. Going from left to right, the first folder is the WVDE forlder. Inside you find this:

The folder contains:

• a shortcut to the State Department of Education website (the little A+ thinggy)
• a link to a page that will let you check your state issued email account (and you have to have an “access” email account to get a WebTop account)
• a link to WebTop Communities (kind of like Facebook for state teachers; I’ll look at WebTop Communities in some detail on another day).
• Several Google tools that you can maintain separately from any personal Google account you might have.
• A couple of other tools that at this point I haven’t used.
• And a link to page where you can look up other teachers you know of in the state and find their email address (a handy tool).

I used this box most often to click on through to the WebTop Communities page.

When you open the “Teacher Tools” folder you get this:

The folder gives me access to the Manhattan Virtual Classroom. I also get a link to upcoming professional development opportunities, some online textbooks, and a place where teachers can check their own certifications.

The third folder is on project based learning. Inside:

There’s the Manhattan Virtual Classroom, an eportfolio tool called “epearl,” and some Google tools.

The last folder is for student tools and it currently contains just a link to Acuity, the state’s benchmark assessment program.

You get the idea. You get the idea about WebTop. And you get the idea about screen capture. The only problem with screen capture is that the Etrusoft tool isn’t free. I may pay for it (eventually) but I’ll look for a good free screen capture tool first.

On Wednesday I have a workshop on WebTop in Charleston. For now, I think I’ll play the chess game featured in WebTop’s software folder…

Note: Scott McLeod put out a call recently for people to participate in Leadership Day 2009 and blog about technology leadership. (You can find the results of his call from last year here). This post is my response…

I’m spoiled. At least I suspect I’m spoiled. I work in a state that was recently ranked top of the pile in the Technology Counts 2009 report. Only West Virginia and Georgia received an “A” in both technology use and technology capacity in the report. I’d like to think that my particular county is more aggressive in pursuing technology goals than many in our state. So I suppose you can take what I say with a grain of salt. Or you can look at it as something that could be helpful for predicting future problems as your school system catches up with us…

Even in our district’s smallest elementary school, we see new technology walking in the door regularly. Every classroom has a handful of PCs that can be used for learning station activities for small groups. Many/most of our classrooms have replaced overhead projectors with document cameras, chalk boards and dry erase markers with SMARTBoards and those little electronic slates that the kids can write on. Several teachers (right down to kindergarten) have electronic student responders. There are cameras and flip cams, laptops and mobile presentation stations – I could go on. All of this in a building that dates back to at least the Depression era, for a student population of less than 90.

The hardware is only half the story. We have a number of cloud-based curriculum tools that allow students to start an assignment in class and continue working on it at home (if they have Internet access at home). Those software packages allow the teachers to view and access student work at school or at home. I graded papers last year for a writing assignment while I was at a conference in Charleston, 100 or so miles away, by accessing the work on my laptop via a wireless connection in my hotel room. We have consistent broadband access, state-provided email accounts, and regular professional development opportunities that generally occur outside normal school hours and include a stipend. What more could a body want?

If we have a technology problem at the moment it’s that the maintenance of our computer systems is not a local issue for us. That is to say, we rely on outside sources for trouble shooting and repair of our systems. That outside source is primarily our RESA office. We send work order from repairs, upgrades, etc. to them. They cover several counties with minimal, and they get to us when they can. Sometimes that means that a particular machine is dysfunctional for a weeks.

If two or three of the machines in a lab become dysfunctional and stay that way for three or four weeks, the usefulness of the lab can be reduced. Instead of taking a class into the lab and sitting everyone down at a machine and giving them an assignment, you end up with a handful of students who don’t have access. There are ways to cope; it would be better to just have the machines working.

From a layman’s perspective, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a hardware or a software problem. And even a geek wannabe like me can’t usually tell which it is just from looking. We have someone in the building who’s been assignment duties as a sysop for the school. Maybe reloading Windows would fix the problem. The sysop doesn’t have the time or authority to do that – and doesn’t know if it would solve the problem. So we wait…

When the PC is one of 16 in a lab, it’s annoying. When it’s one of four or five in a classroom, it becomes a problem that can change the course of instruction because a teacher no longer has enough PC’s to have a functional learning station.

Technology integration is the simple idea that a teacher and a group of students have come to rely on some technology as part of their instruction to such an extent that they take it for granted. Nobody expects it to work perfectly all the time. But success in technology integration is a factor of reliability.

It’s not a particularly flashy issue. We’ve committed a lot of personnel resources and money to just having technology already. But to succeed in technology integration we will eventually just have to make upkeep and maintenance more of a local, in-school function. In my state, I suspect we’ve taken steps to better equip district personnel to cope with computer problems through our technology integration specialist (TIS) program. That seems likely to keep us ahead of the national curve. Eventually that level of training will need to filter down to the school level.

A friend of mine on a closed social network for WV teachers asked me a couple of weeks ago what educational uses I thought Twitter had. I thought I’d recycle my answer to her. Here it is…

I wrote a blog post a couple of weeks ago on an instructor at a community college in Texas who’s used Twitter to facilitate discussions in his history class. I’m guessing that similar applications would work in high school classrooms. Of course, Twitter in the classroom provides some liabilities regarding privacy and publishing student work. Maybe a parent’s signature on an acceptable use policy gets around that; I’m not sure…

Angie Dowling (teaches in Morganton, I think), pointed me to a microblogging platform with greater security, designed for educators: Edmodo (article at TechCrunch). I don’t know it the law is keeping up with technology, or whether having a closed (passworded) platform gets past the liabilities involved or not. Having a closed system with limited participants certainly serves to manage traffic. But there are other ways to do that – Twitter groups or communities.

I use Twitter as part of a personal learning network. I follow 130 160 people on Twitter at the moment. It’s one way I know, for example, that Scott McLeod (Dangerously Irrelevant) is having a summer book study and that Wesley Fryer (Moving at the Speed of Creativity) had a new post yesterday on copyright and the idea of creating a culture of information sharing (“sharing by default”). Of course, Twitter overlaps with my RSS reader for this. But I have a few dozen people in Twitter who

• don’t write a blog
• work as educators, often with some job focus on technology and
• will often answer questions I ask on Twitter, especially if I direct the question specifically at them.

Twitter is a marvelous professional development tool, IMHO.

Instructional use? If you can do it with chat, you can probably do it with Twitter. Slightly different limitations. You have to be a little more succinct. But you can create clickable links. And there’s a more-or-less permanent record automatically created. AcademHack has some interesting ideas for Twitter assignments. An example of middle school use is at Digital Directions (Education Week).

Backing away to a slightly broader perspective, Twitter (or one of the other microblogging platforms) is fast becoming basic literacy behavior for the 21st Century. If I can find ANYTHING that encourages kids to write words down and send them to each other in a socially productive framework, THAT’s a win. Literacy behavior as a form of social interaction is what social networking is about. It should be part of the educational environment for a 21st Century school. If I had my way, every child in the intermediate grades at my school would have a microblogging platform and a social network presence (like WebTop) where social networking skills could be practiced and modeled, and they’d have access to a keyboard as often as possible so they could READ other people’s replies to them.

I neglected to mention that microblogging is becoming a communication tool that businesses use to to allow employees to communicate with each other in the workplace – kind of a replacement for email. A microblog post could be used instead of an intercom system for announcements (”Teachers: please keep students out of the down stairs boys bathroom until further notice while the custodian deals with a plumbing issue…“). Of course, that relies on the idea that teacher will actually use the microblog.

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…