NCLB and Closing Schools

This morning I heard a report on the radio about a local Middle School that is being threatened with closure if their test scores do not improve. The problem is that most of the students from Pierce Middle School would have to move to Webb Middle School if the school closed, but Webb barely escaped the same fate last year.

What is happening is that many of the schools on the east side of Austin are failing-or not making Annual Yearly Progress. So, what is happening is that schools that are not making it are closing and overcrowding OTHER schools that are not making it. How does that help anything?

AND I teach in a high socio-economic area with schools where the MAJORITY of students score in the HIGHEST level of the test. The push here is not to help the kids to pass, but to help them move from Proficient to Commended. I heard yesterday that the 5th grade was 100% commended in math! These are the kids who could really benefit from higher-level thinking. They could be blogging and be involved in deeper thinking, but we don't have time because of the testing. It is not as bad as in some schools where the testing frenzy starts in September. However, starting in February there was huge effort put into test prep and it has taken up most of April.

What suffers in our situation is the challenging of the students AND the teachers. They do not have time for professional development because they are tutoring after school or grading lots of papers. They don't try challenging projects or even think about them because there is not time in the curriculum. They have TAKs prep to do.

What are we doing to our kids? Both the well off and the poor?

Janice

Technology for all

This morning I was reading an article in the Tech Edge quarterly publication of the Texas Computer Educators Association by Miguel Guilin about Creativity. He talks about how one student is writing chapter books online and ended up collaborating with some kids from another state who are making it into a cartoon on Youtube! Near the end he reveals (sorry to spoil the ending!) that the student writing the book is his daughter.

My first thought was that it is not fair for him to talk about what his daughter is doing. He is a tech director for a district. He probably writes multiple blog posts a day. He writes regular columns for journals like this one and uses technology all of the time. He makes the point that his daughter is not doing any of this at school and that because she was publishing online there were kids in Tennessee that she connected with who read her work at KidPub and asked if they could publish it in cartoon form.

But what about ALL of those other kids who do not have tech savvy parents who can point them to KidPub and provide technology for them to write, etc... OH... that is the point! It is not fair and teachers need to be doing more to even the playing field. But how can that happen with all of the time constraints of school?

Reality Check

Today was a teacher workday at school. We made plans for the coming year and I had a chance to talk about technology professional development. In the course of talking about that Web 2.0 was mentioned and I was really surprised that many of the teachers had never heard the term. They did not know what it was! Someone asked if that was the fast Internet. There is a huge gap between my experience and that of most of the teachers I am working with.

Cyberfair

I just finished reviewing the Global SchoolNet Cyberfair. What an amazing opportunity. Students from all over the world create websites on various themes and I get the chance to look at them and compare them to a rubric. This year I did one from Maine, one from UK, one from China and one from Taiwan. The one from Taiwan was outstanding!!

It really makes me think that we are in trouble in the US. The quality of the student's work and the fact that they were doing it in Chinese and in English was amazing. The beginning talked about the many difficulties that they had to overcome to do this project. It was clear that they put HUGE effort into it.

That reminds me of the one that I reviewed a few years ago from Tajikstan. The students only had Internet access from a certain office which they had to travel to by streetcar after school and only on a few machines. The students and the teachers worked evenings and Saturdays to make their project successful and it was amazing! Both of these projects were clearly facilitated by teachers and volunteer adults, but the student voice came through clearly.

What can we do with American Education to strive for this level of excellence?