I Would Like To Cash This Check

I have a check sitting in my wallet. It is from the PTA, a reimbursement for a field trip totaling about $160. I simply had not gotten around to depositing it.

Since I am leaving for Oregon in the morning, and I was going right past the bank from which the check was drawn today, I decided to go in and cash it, knowing that I didn't have an account at Bank of America, but the check originated from that very BofA branch, so I could just cash it there! Cool!

I went into the nearly empty bank, walked up to a teller, handed her the check, and said "I would like to cash this check."

She told me to "swipe" my BofA card, and I said I don't have an account, but the check is from here.

She told me to sign the roster on the round table and a banker would verify the signature.

Twenty minutes later, after a conversation with a wonderful guy who was also waiting for something, the signature was verified and I was told to go back to a teller to get the check cashed.

Almost there...

The teller took the check and started entering keystrokes into her computer. Seven million keystrokes later she said, "There is a $5 service charge for cashing a check."

I took the check from her hand and walked out.

Now the check is back in my wallet, I guess where it belongs.

Oregon, mom, here we come. Blogging will be light, if at all, for the next week or so....

It's The End, Not The Means!

The time is right — your foundation [Gates'], the world's largest, recently announced a big push to improve postsecondary education. It's a terrific move. High-quality college credentials are the key to opportunity in the modern economy. If our higher-education system doesn't get much better at helping more students earn them, your good work in improving elementary and secondary education will be for naught.

Maybe it's just me, but don't the bolded sentences seem to say that it is the degree--the piece of paper--that is the goal of college as opposed to, say, the education one might receive at the college?

And this is from Kevin Carey, a self-described education policy reformer. Here, folks, is a perfect example of the problem we face when we talk about reforming education: a "wonk" claiming the important thing to get at college is the degree.

Monday Cartoon Fun: McNamara Edition

Robert S. McNamara Dead At 93. Whew!

Robert McNamara, Architect of Vietnam War, Dies at 93

Robert S. McNamara died in his sleep at his home in Washington early this morning, family members said. McNamara, who served as secretary of defense during the Vietnam war under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, was 93.

There may come a day I will dance on your grave. If unable to dance I will crawl across it. Unable to dance I will crawl... (Hell in a Bucket, The Grateful Dead)

h/t DWT

Silence Is Stupid

School Reform: A Sham Since Forever, or There Never Was A Crisis, But We Have One Now!

From Edutopia:

From the start, however, some doubts must have risen about the crisis rhetoric, because in 1990, Admiral James Watkins, the secretary of energy (yes, energy), commissioned the Sandia Laboratories in New Mexico to document the decline [of SAT scores] with some actual data.

Systems scientists there produced a study consisting almost entirely of charts, tables, and graphs, plus brief analyses of what the numbers signified, which amounted to a major "Oops!" As their puzzled preface put it, "To our surprise, on nearly every measure, we found steady or slightly improving trends."

One section, for example, analyzed SAT scores between the late 1970s and 1990, a period when those scores slipped markedly. ("A Nation at Risk" spotlighted the decline of scores from 1963 to 1980 as dead-bang evidence of failing schools.) The Sandia report, however, broke the scores down by various subgroups, and something astonishing emerged. Nearly every subgroup -- ethnic minorities, rich kids, poor kids, middle class kids, top students, average students, low-ranked students -- held steady or improved during those years. Yet overall scores dropped. How could that be?

Simple -- statisticians call it Simpson's paradox: The average can change in one direction while all the subgroups change in the opposite direction if proportions among the subgroups are changing. Early in the period studied, only top students took the test. But during those twenty years, the pool of test takers expanded to include many lower-ranked students. Because the proportion of top students to all students was shrinking, the scores inevitably dropped. That decline signified not failure but rather progress toward what had been a national goal: extending educational opportunities to a broader range of the population.

By then, however, catastrophically failing schools had become a political necessity. George H.W. Bush campaigned to replace Reagan as president on a promise to confront the crisis. He had just called an education summit to tackle it, so there simply had to be a crisis.

The government never released the Sandia report. It went into peer review and there died a quiet death. Hardly anyone else knew it even existed until, in 1993, the Journal of Educational Research, read by only a small group of specialists, printed the report.[emphasis all mine]

More here and here.

h/t PP

Happy 4th Of July!

How To Save Health Care: Homeopathy

h/t PZ

Sarah Palin To Resign!

From KTUU:

WASILLA, Alaska -- In a stunning announcement, Gov. Sarah Palin said Friday morning she will resign her office in a few weeks.

Speculation has swirled for weeks, perhaps months that Palin would not seek re-election in 2010 as she pursues a political career on the national stage. The former vice presidential candidate has long been rumored to be considering a run at the Republican presidential nomination in 2012.

Palin did not address those rumors at the press conference at her Wasilla home, during which she did not take questions from reporters.

Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell will be inaugurated as her successor at the Governor's Picnic at Pioneer Park in Fairbanks on Sunday, July 26, Palin said.

Parnell said he will seek election to the governor's office in 2010. Parnell ran unsuccessfully against Rep. Don Young in the Republican primary last year.

Palin made the announcement flanked by Parnell and most, if not all, of her cabinet.

Update: She may have resigned due to this.

Richard Feynman: Be Confusing!

He was a genius and Nobel Laureate as well as a bongo player and wildman. But fundamentally he was a teacher; yes, he was a perpetual student, but being so smart he had to teach himself much of what he learned, making him a teacher, mkay?

This video is a glimpse into his pedagogy, though I don't think that was the film's purpose. Feynman is so all-over-the-place in terms of curiosity that his pedagogy just slips out.

I find his notion of confusion as classroom practice refreshing, and right.

He's a joy to listen to, even for an hour!

About Finland And Singapore...

Good Working Conditions and Respect for Teachers - A Foreign Concept

You would never know it, but there was an important meeting yesterday at the National Press Club in Washington DC about education. The title of the meeting was Top-Scoring Nations Share Strategies on Teachers (Ed Week carried the article) featuring speakers from Finland and Singapore, two very different approaches but models of high performance.

The story will never be covered by the corporate owned media in this country because the business leaders and politicians who sat through the meeting have their own agenda - and despite what they might have heard at the meeting, like making working conditions for teachers better or respecting the profession of teaching - there's just no money in that.

Meanwhile, Jeb Bush is busy pushing "technology" as the new panacea for transforming education and propelling the U.S. to its rightful place in the global race to the top. There's lots of money to be made and it's the gift that keeps on giving. Teachers stormed the Hill this week looking for more money for technology - perhaps they should focus more on trying to gain some basic RESPECT.

Here's a clip from the Ed Week story:

Yet in some respects, those two nations have risen to the top in very different ways.

That was one of the lessons that emerged yesterday at what was billed as the Global Education Competitiveness Summit, which brought state officials and business leaders together here to discuss lessons from high-achieving countries that could be applied to U.S. school systems—an omnipresent theme in American education circles these days.

Two of the speakers whose nations are perched at or near the top of recent international test results offered insights on their home countries’ educational models: Low Khah Gek, the director of curriculum, planning, and development for the Singapore Ministry of Education, and Timo Lankinen, the director general of the Finnish National Board of Education.

The forum was organized by the Education Commission of the States, a Denver-based policy and research group; the International Society for Technology in Education, or ISTE, in Eugene, Ore.; and the Microsoft Corp., in Redmond, Wash.

Attendees seemed especially keen on learning how the two countries recruit and train teachers, and the speakers gave them two distinct perspectives.

In Singapore, the selection of teachers is heavily directed by the central government, specifically the Ministry of Education, and the candidates are elite: The government recruits from the top third of graduating classes, Ms. Gek said.

Teacher-candidates attend one year of preservice training, but they are also given continuous retraining throughout the school year and their careers, she added, receiving at least 100 hours of professional development annually. In addition, the Singaporean government actively works to establish career “tracks” for teachers, according to Ms. Gek. It encourages young educators to become master teachers or subject specialists, and one day, school administrators.

“We feel that is the pinnacle of education service,” Ms. Gek said of the jobs of administrators, because of their influence over instruction and the school environment.

Singapore also has a thorough system for grading and evaluating teacher performance, she told the audience, and it awards bonuses for effective instruction that can equal between one and three months’ pay.

An Elusive Formula

The Finnish approach to cultivating and retaining teachers, as described by Mr. Lankinen, is in some ways strikingly different.

Like the United States, Finland has only “very limited” performance pay for teachers, he said. A far more pressing concern, he said, is “how to maintain good working conditions in schools”; national leaders believe such conditions are essential to luring talented people into classrooms and keeping them there.

While Finland, like Singapore, has a national curriculum, Finnish teachers are given broad authority to shape lessons and use strategies they believe will help students meet standards.

At one point Mr. Lankinen was asked by an audience member about Finnish leaders’ overall impressions of the U.S. education system. He remarked that the broad American emphasis on testing, and on measuring student and school performance, was “striking” and a source of curiosity in his home country. Mr. Lankinen said American school officials routinely ask him about how his high-performing country uses high-stakes tests—only to have him explain that those exams are largely absent from the Finnish system.

Finland tests representative samples of students primarily as a way to gauge trends in school performance, and teachers routinely assess students’ progress in class, in order to improve instruction, he said.

Although he and other Finnish education leaders have had general discussions about adding high-stakes tests to the mix, that idea has not taken hold because “it’s difficult to say if it’s helping educators to do their job better,” Mr. Lankinen explained, after his presentation. Finns regard having “well-trained, educated teachers” as more essential to raising student achievement, he added.

It follows that Finnish teachers, like their Singaporean counterparts, are an elite group. All Finnish teachers must have master’s degrees, and admission to teacher education programs is highly competitive. Mr. Lankinen estimated that fewer than 15 percent of applicants are accepted.

Perhaps not surprisingly, one common feature of the Singaporean and Finnish education systems—like those of some other high-achieving nations—is the respect that their societies have for educators, and the general view of teaching as a top-tier profession.

In Finland, Mr. Lankinen said, “people dream to be teachers.”

Tuesday Cartoon Fun: Obit Edition

Senator Al Franken

It's over. Coleman gave up, Pawlenty will sign the certificate. Awesome!

Monday Cartoon Fun: Infidel Whore Edition

Kids Need Adults To Talk With Them

A study in Pediatrics indicates that having conversations with kids is a great way to develop healthy language.

I have known, through experience, that having conversations with my students made them more curious, better listeners, and more receptive to input. I also know, through experience, that my parents talked to me, and I talk(ed) to my son, and we are really smart!

National standards, longer school days/years, busting teacher unions, chartering all the public schools, firing teachers, and changing curricular materials are not the means by which we are going to solve the problems the achievement gap creates. Early childhood education (as well as talking to your kids!!) is the best way to begin the huge job of creating a society where education is valued, and poverty is not allowed. Here is the abstract:

OBJECTIVE: To test the independent association of adult language input, television viewing, and adult-child conversations on language acquisition among infants and toddlers.

METHODS: Two hundred seventy-five families of children aged 2 to 48 months who were representative of the US census were enrolled in a cross-sectional study of the home language environment and child language development (phase 1). Of these, a representative sample of 71 families continued for a longitudinal assessment over 18 months (phase 2). In the cross-sectional sample, language development scores were regressed on adult word count, television viewing, and adult-child conversations, controlling for socioeconomic attributes. In the longitudinal sample, phase 2 language development scores were regressed on phase 1 language development, as well as phase 1 adult word count, television viewing, and adult-child conversations, controlling for socioeconomic attributes.

RESULTS: In fully adjusted regressions, the effects of adult word count were significant when included alone but were partially mediated by adult-child conversations. Television viewing when included alone was significant and negative but was fully mediated by the inclusion of adult-child conversations. Adult-child conversations were significant when included alone and retained both significance and magnitude when adult word count and television exposure were included.

CONCLUSIONS: Television exposure is not independently associated with child language development when adult-child conversations are controlled. Adult-child conversations are robustly associated with healthy language development. Parents should be encouraged not merely to provide language input to their children through reading or storytelling, but also to engage their children in two-sided conversations.