Food and Culture
As taught in: Spring 2011
A photograph of a child eating dim sum.
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/anthropology/21a-265-food-and-culture-spring-2011/

Food plays an important role in our culture and relationships.
Instructors:

Prof. Heather Paxson
MIT Course Number:

21A.265
Level:
Undergraduate
Course Features

Assignments (no solutions)

Course Description

Explores connections between what we eat and who we are through cross-cultural study of how personal identities and social groups are formed via food production, preparation, and consumption. Organized around critical discussion of what makes "good" food good (healthy, authentic, ethical, etc.). Uses anthropological and literary classics as well as recent writing and films on the politics of food and agriculture.

A New Yorker travels South (by Southwest)
http://thedailyirv.com/?p=65

I made my first trip to South by Southwest (SXSW
) this week and I enjoyed it. If you have any doubt about the innovative spirit or entrepreneurial energy of America's youth, travel to Austin next March. It was a joy to be around so many driven young people. The young men and women camped out at the Convention Center and at "Start-Up Village" at the Hilton seemed to be fueled not just by Red Bull but by idealism and the hope that they were creating something unique, lasting and important.

SXSW began almost 30 years ago as a casual music festival for country and alternative rock fans. Today, it is a curious combination of technology and culture. For the first three days SXSW focuses on film; then there are the four "Interactive" (or technology) days. And the Festival concludes (or peaks) with a music festival. In addition, on the first weekend of the Festival you also can attend "Screenburn" a video gaming bacchanalia that brings out gaming fans from nine to ninety. It was great to experience each of these somewhat disparate disciplines and talk to the fans and creators of new products.

One of the most interesting observations about the conference was the importance of mobility and wireless broadband. Mobile devices and applications were center stage at every venue and much of the innovation centered on the possibilities that mobile technology provides. In fact, the biggest controversy at the Festival, the use of homeless people as mobile broadband providers or hotspots, also centered on mobile technology. As objectionable as the homeless hotspot project was, it did serve to underscore the almost insatiable appetite of Festival attendees for mobile bandwidth.

There was an equally insatiable appetite for new and novel applications. As several attendees noted, one of the most common questions during the Festival was: "So, what's the coolest app you saw this week?" Some of the most interesting apps I saw or read about this week were: Zamp (an app any frequent flyer would love); Voxio, (a communications (VOIP) app that is very easy to use); and, to feed your inner artist, Arqball Spin. NewsiT and WeVideo allow you to share news items and video with their new apps. Highlight is a new social/location app that received a lot of buzz, and it will be interesting to see how and whether consumers embrace it. My personal favorites were Space Dog Books, bringing a new artistic twist to children's books and Borglar, a location based augmented reality game that I believe has significant potential for business and other commercial uses.

All of these applications perform best on broadband networks and are data intensive. That's why it's not surprising to note that Cisco predicts that global mobile traffic will increase 18 fold between 2011 and 2016. That's based on current assumptions and existing trends. I recall that four years ago none of us knew what an app was and no one had downloaded the first app for their smart phone. Apple alone has 1 million Apps in its Apps Store and, just last week, celebrated the download of the 25 billionth app from that App Store. That's Billions with a B, folks. In just four years.

No one knows definitively how many more apps will be downloaded over how many smart phones and tablets in coming months and years. It's pretty clear, however, that the intense and innovative young men and women who traveled to Austin this weekend will be back again next year with more ideas that we all are going to adopt. It's going to take a lot of effort to ensure that, without resorting to human hotspots, we will have sufficient bandwidth to take full advantage of their innovation and their ingenuity.

http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/25-free-3d-modelling-applications-you-should-not-miss/

Visuals at the web site.
Technically, 3 Dimensions refers to objects that are constructed on three plans (X, Y and Z). The process of creating 3D graphics can be divided into three basic phases: 3D modeling, 3D animation and 3D rendering.

Three dimensional (3D) computer graphics are widely used and they are almost too common to see anywhere, let it be movies, products designs, advertisements, etc. Although they are commonly seen, that doesn't mean they are easily created. In order to interactively control a 3D object, it must be created in a 3D authoring tool which usually cost a lot to a non-professional user.

A 3D model is usually originated on the computer by engineer using some kind of 3d modeling tools. Creating 3D models is not easy and the software alone can cost a fortune Therefore, we thought it might be interesting to check out the availability of open source 3D modeling tools out there. Crawling from sites to sites, reading through end users comments and feedback, we bring you 25 Free 3D Modelling Applications You Should Not Miss. Full list after jump.

Blender

A free and open source 3D modeling and animation application which can be used for modeling, UV unwrapping, texturing, rigging, water simulations, skinning, animating, rendering, particle and other simulations, non-linear editing, compositing, and creating interactive 3D applications.

25 (Free) 3D Modeling Applications You Should Not Miss
K-3D

K-3D is free-as-in-freedom 3D modeling and animation software. It features a plugin-oriented procedural engine for all of its content, making K-3D a very versatile and powerful package.
K-3D excels at polygonal modeling, and includes basic tools for NURBS, patches, curves and animation.

25 (Free) 3D Modeling Applications You Should Not Miss
Art of Illusion

Art of Illusion is a free, open source 3D modelling and rendering studio. Some of the highlights include subdivision surface based modelling tools, skeleton based animation, and a graphical language for designing procedural textures and materials.

25 (Free) 3D Modeling Applications You Should Not Miss
SOFTIMAGE|XSI Mod Tool

A free 3D modeling and animation software for aspiring game developers and modders. The Mod Tool is a free version of XSI for non commercial game creation. It is made for everyone needing a powerful 3D application to make and mod games. The Mod Tool plugs into all the major game engines and development frameworks for next-generation games, casual games, mods for existing titles and even Flash-based 3D games.

25 (Free) 3D Modeling Applications You Should Not Miss
Zmodeler

ZModeler (or Zanoza Modeler) is a 3D modeling application developed by Oleg Melashenko. It is aimed at modelers who model for computer games. ZModeler is capable of complex modeling, even though it does not support important modeling functions such as extruding, or beveling.

25 (Free) 3D Modeling Applications You Should Not Miss
TopMod3d

TopMod3d is a free, open source, portable, platform independent topological mesh modeling system that allows users to create high genus 2-manifold meshes. It can also create solid models that can be prototyped using various rapid prototyping technology.

25 (Free) 3D Modeling Applications You Should Not Miss
Google SketchUp 6

25 (Free) 3D Modeling Applications You Should Not Miss

Google SketchUp is software that you can use to create, share and present 3D models. Whether you want to design a new deck for your house, build models for Google Earth, or teach geometry to your fifth-graders, you can use SketchUp to see your ideas in 3D. And when you're done, you can export an image, make a movie or print out a view of what you made.
AutoQ3D Community - 3D Editor

AutoQ3D Community is an easy, light and fast 3D model editor tool that uses the full power of your PC´s graphics hardware, allowing you to rapidly prototype your 3D designs. Its interface is intuitive and easy to use and provided at no charge. It is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License so it will be free to use, modify and distribute within any educational, professional or commercial purposes.

25 (Free) 3D Modeling Applications You Should Not Miss
Anim8or

Anim8or is a 3D modeling and character animation program which allows users to create and modify 3D models with built-in primitives such as spheres, cylinders, platonic solids, etc.; mesh-edit and subdivision; splines, extrusion, lathing, modifiers, bevel and warps,

25 (Free) 3D Modeling Applications You Should Not Miss
Seamless3d

Seamless3d is free open source 3d modelling software which designed for the artist who is realistic about the time it takes to learn any tool that's going to offer creative freedom.

25 (Free) 3D Modeling Applications You Should Not Miss
BRL-CAD

BRL-CAD is a powerful cross-platform constructive solid geometry solid modeling system that includes an interactive geometry editor, ray-tracing for rendering & geometric analyses, network distributed framebuffer support, image & signal-processing tools.

25 (Free) 3D Modeling Applications You Should Not Miss
3DPlus

With 3DPlus you can create outstanding 3D designs in just a few minutes - with no need for any complicated VRML or other programming. 3DPlus is the amazing 3D design software that enables you to create stunning 3D graphics for your home, school or business - no experience required!

25 (Free) 3D Modeling Applications You Should Not Miss
3D Canvas

3D Canvas is a real-time 3D modeling and animation tool that incorporates an intuitive drag-and-drop approach to 3D modeling. Complex models can be constructed from simple 3D primitives, or created using 3D Canvas' Object Building Tools. Modeling tools are provided to deform, sculpt, and paint 3D objects.

25 (Free) 3D Modeling Applications You Should Not Miss
eDrawings

eDrawings is a freeware utility which will give the user the power to view, create and share 3D models and 2D drawings. eDrawings offers unique capabilities like point-and-click animations that make it easy for anyone with a PC to interpret and understand 2D and 3D design data.

25 (Free) 3D Modeling Applications You Should Not Miss
Blink 3D

Blink 3D is an authoring tool for creating 3D environments. The 3D environments are immersive, just like today's modern games and can be viewed using the a Blink 3D Viewer on the Web or locally.

25 (Free) 3D Modeling Applications You Should Not Miss
Minos

MINOS extends the capabilities of your existing 2D-or 3D-wireframe-based systems, so you can take advantage of all the benefits solid modeling offers right away. MINOS makes it easy to design 3D parts and assemblies. The design methodology is based on defining simple geometric elements including lines, curves, and circles, and then linking them together to form contours.

25 (Free) 3D Modeling Applications You Should Not Miss
freeCAD

freeCAD is a basic 3D CAD with advanced Motion Simulation capabilities. It is suitable for anyone interested in learning 3D CAD and Motion Simulation for free before using more sophisticated packages. Its motion simulation capabilities are comparable to the best and can provide accurate answers to engineers and scientists in diverse fields.

25 (Free) 3D Modeling Applications You Should Not Miss
Bishop3D

Bishop3D is an interactive modeler and animation tool for the popular freeware raytracer POV-Ray™, a world-class renderer for creating three-dimensional photo-realistic images. Bishop3D allows you to model the scenes interactively and it will automatically generate the correspondent POV-Ray SDL script. It offers native keyframe animation support, POV-Ray SDL import and a powerful texture editor.

25 (Free) 3D Modeling Applications You Should Not Miss
K3DSurf

K3DSurf is a program to visualize and manipulate Mathematical models in three, four, five and six dimensions. K3DSurf supports Parametric equations and Isosurfaces. K3DSurf can be used by every one interested in 3D Mathematical drawing functions and don't require any special competences by users.

25 (Free) 3D Modeling Applications You Should Not Miss
DesignWorkshop Lite

DesignWorkshop is a three-dimensional modeling program for architectural design and related endeavors. Its unique interface makes it more profoundly "Mac-like" than any prior modeling software. This interface allows it to support actual design in three dimensions, as opposed to just recording design ideas already worked out with other media.

25 (Free) 3D Modeling Applications You Should Not Miss
GDesign 2.0

GDesign 2.0 is a 2D/3D free generative art application for Windows. With GDesign you can interactively build, test, and edit complex models. You can create, edit, build and preview huge 2D and 3D objects with extended LSystems and Cellular Automata tools.

25 (Free) 3D Modeling Applications You Should Not Miss
Sweet Home 3D

Sweet Home 3D is a free interior design application that helps you place your furniture
on a house 2D plan, with a 3D preview. Sweet Home 3D helps people to design their interior quickly. The user may: draw the walls of his rooms upon the image of an existing plan, change the color or the texture of the walls, import additional 3D models created by himself or downloaded from different Web sites, change the size, view the changes in the plan simultaneously in the 3D view, either from an aerial view point, or from a virtual visitor view point, print the home plan and the 3D view.

25 (Free) 3D Modeling Applications You Should Not Miss
trueSpace

trueSpace7.6 is a fully-featured 3D authoring package that will let you model, texture, light, animate and render 3D content. As well as traditional images and movies, you can also make 3D content for online shared spaces, and for Virtual Earth.

25 (Free) 3D Modeling Applications You Should Not Miss
Alibre Design Xpress

Alibre Design Xpress is a rich and capable 3D solid modeler for creating mechanical parts, assemblies and 2D drawings - and is free. Alibre Design Xpress equips the person needing basic 3D design capabilities. Alibre Design Xpress has a rich set of integrated tutorials that you can use to learn the product quickly.

25 (Free) 3D Modeling Applications You Should Not Miss
3DVIA Shape

3DVia Shape is a free online 3D modeling application that eases you to create, publish and share ideas in 3D. There are 3DVIA archive of prototypes and modeling software you can choose to create three-dimensional. Each model can be viewed at any angle, spun around and zoomed-in on.

25 (Free) 3D Modeling Applications You Should Not Miss

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http://www.districtadministration.com/article/are-you-ready-common-core-math
By:
Alan Dessoff
District Administration, March 2012
An elementary student in the San Francisco Unified School District works on fractions, multiplication and addition on a whiteboard in class. The district has been preparing for the Common Core assessments and using the Charles A. Dana Center at the University of Texas as professional development mentors to ensure the new standards are relevant to the teachers.
Also in this article


With new Common Core State Standards assessments in K12 mathematics due to be in use by the start of the 2014-2015 school year, many district administrators and teachers do not know what they should know about them now and are not taking steps they should be taking to prepare for them. While they are aware that the assessments are being developed, educators generally do not understand what that means to them, according to Doug Sovde, senior advisor to the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for Colleges and Careers (PARCC).

The assessments are based on the Common Core State Standards that districts are using to revise their curricula and instruction in math as well as English Language Arts and Literacy. "If they get to know the standards, they will know the assessments," Sovde declares.

The Common Core assessments will probe more deeply than assessments do now into what students are learning in math and how they are learning it. "I think we'll see some questions that apply to real-world settings, and I wouldn't be surprised if students have to describe in writing how they got an answer rather than just filling in a blank with it," says Richard A. Carranza, deputy superintendent of the San Francisco (Calif.) Unified School District, one district that has actively begun preparing for the assessments.

Another major change that districts should be aware of is that the questions students are asked will be delivered online and answered online instead of on paper. While that will provide immediate results to teachers and administrators, it might require districts to install more computers and other technological tools, which could raise questions about how they will pay the costs in a period of tight budgets.

One reason many districts are not paying much attention to the forthcoming assessments is that they are not known in their final form yet. Carranza says, "We're trying to take an educated guess at what we think they will look like."J. Michael Shaughnessy, president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, speaks with a couple of teachers at NCTM's annual conference, Initiative in Reasoning and Sense Making, last spring. Math curriculum directors and state supervisors, he says, need to help teachers implement the Standards for Mathematical Practice and connect them to math content.

PARCC is one of two multistate consortia working to develop the assessments; the other is the SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC). "No one has had much time to get to know either of them," says Melissa Young, mathematics manager on the instructional support team in the superintendent's office of the Cincinnati Public Schools.

Even though the final assessments have not been released, some districts are finding that they have already engendered internal discord. "Some teachers love them, but others hate them. Some are very in tune with what's coming, while others are saying students can't take a math test with a computer," reports Young.


More Rigorous Tests

As PARCC and SBAC have revealed in documents available on their Web sites, students will face more rigorous questions about both mathematical practice and content. The assessments will test students on practices such as making sense of problems, reasoning abstractly and quantitatively, constructing viable arguments and critiquing the reasoning of others, modeling with mathematics, using appropriate tools strategically, communicating precisely, and looking for and making use of structure.

"Students will be assessed on extended problem-solving and performance tasks and will need to show their reasoning," says J. Michael Shaughnessy, president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM). District math curriculum directors and state supervisors, he says, "need to help teachers implement the Standards for Mathematical Practice and connect them to math content. That is a big change for them."

As the U.S. Department of Education reported when Secretary Arne Duncan announced the grants to the two consortia in September 2010, each is taking its own approach to developing the assessments. PARCC is replacing a single end-of-year accountability test with a series of assessments throughout the year that will be averaged into one score for accountability purposes. SBAC will ask students tailored questions based on their previous answers. It will continue to use one end-of-year test for accountability purposes but will create a series of interim tests to inform students, parents and teachers about whether students are on track.

Sovde, a former mathematics teacher and principal in the Bellevue (Wash.) Public Schools, says one of the tests PARCC is developing is a diagnostic assessment for the start of the year. He declares about the optional test, "If I were a district administrator, I would be jumping all over it, because it's going to give you a good handle right up front about where your kids are." All the new assessments will measure the abilities of students to solve problems, think conceptually, reason mathematically, and demonstrate more skills than rote memorization. "That's going to be a shift, a different way of doing business," says Sovde. The final, end-of-year summative assessment will require students to use computers or handheld devices to solve problems or think about mathematical issues. "It won't be just a paper-and-pencil test put on a screen," Sovde explains.

In early February, PARCC announced the release of the Educator Leader Cadre (ELC) Invitation to Negotiate (ITN). The ELCs are a major part of PARCC's work to engage educators in implementing CCSS and developing and implementating the assessments. The ITN purpose is to procure services to develop and interact with K16 educators to build expertise in CCSS and PARCC over three years. This will be accomplished through face-to-face meetings, online modules and professional development webinars. Cadre members will discuss best practices around using and implementating review sample tasks and model instructional units, and identify ways of disseminating information through the network on how the PARCC resources can inform classroom practice.
Prepping for the Inevitable

As they await more information about the assessments, some districts are doing what they can to get ready for them. The Ventura County (Calif.) Office of Education scheduled a daylong workshop last month on preparing for the new Common Core assessment system, with a presentation by Susan A. Gendron, policy coordinator for SBAC and formerly Maine's commissioner of education. In the Murfreesboro (Tenn.) City Schools, a teacher at Northfield Elementary School used candies and a deck of cards as props to teach fourth-graders about probability in an exercise applying math to real-life experiences, a skill the assessments will test.

The Ohio Department of Education "has provided us with a lot of documents," says Neal Bluel, teacher leader for K12 science and math for grades 4 to 12 in the Upper Arlington (Ohio) City School District. "We're getting comfortable with the idea of learning as we go and planning the best we can."

Debora Binkley, associate superintendent in the Upper Arlington district, says the district has to first get the curriculum aligned with Common Core standards. "We've worked pretty hard to be sure everybody knows what's going on, and that includes our teachers, who are actively involved in writing our curriculum," adds Emilie Greenwald, associate principal of Upper Arlington High School. With a three-year, $3 million grant from the S.D. Bechtel Jr. Foundation, the San Francisco Unified School District is partnering with the San Francisco School Alliance and the Charles A. Dana Center at the University of Texas at Austin on a project to help the district align its curriculum, instruction and assessment practices and policies to the Common Core standards. The Bechtel Foundation, named for the philanthropist/business leader who created it in 1957, is dedicated to "advancing a productive, vibrant, and sustainable California," its Web site states.

The SFUSD started its project last fall by introducing the math standards to "every constituent group in the district, from the central administration to all school administrators and teachers," says Carranza. The objective, he explains, is for "everyone who touches a student instructionally to have an opportunity to spend time with the standards and understand what they are, how they work," and how they are similar to or different from the current standards. Toward that end, Carranza adds, the SFUSD is using the Dana Center as "professional development mentors to make sure this is relevant to all of our instructional staff."

Policy changes in the district might be necessary in connection with the new assessments, whatever they look like, Carranza admits, "We are in the process of reviewing all of our board policies, and some of those questions will come up in that review," he says.
Technology Issues

Meanwhile, in San Francisco and other districts, delivering the new CCSS math assessments online is causing concern among some administrators and teachers about how their districts will pay for the new computers, hardware, software and professional development they might need. The Cincinnati district is unsure about possible costs of new technology and professional development, says Young, partly because of continuing developments in technology that make it difficult to select products. "I'm seeing more and more tools out there for students to take tests," she says.

"A lot goes into being able to do it, including the technological infrastructure," says Carranza. "I'm not sure we're ready to do that." With additional funding from a tax approved by San Francisco voters three years ago, the district already is upgrading bandwidth and looking at how it can provide the hardware that schools will need for online assessments. But cost is "a huge issue" in this economy, says Carranza, and while online delivery is "predicated on a wonderful idea, it's an unfunded mandate and creates another level of requirements that at least our district isn't prepared to assume at this point."

PARCC and SBAC awarded Pearson a contract in January to develop a new Technology Readiness Tool. This new open source tool, with the assistance of the State Educational Technology Directors Association, will support state education agencies as they work with local education agencies to evaluate and determine needed technology and infrastructure upgrades for the new online assessments. "For districts that don't make much use of technology right now, this is going to be a major shift," Sovde acknowledges. "They will have to start thinking about how they will get those resources."

Alan Dessoff is a contributing writer to District Administration.

By FERNANDA SANTOS
Published: March 7, 2012

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/08/education/teacher-morale-sinks-survey-results-show.html?ref=education

The slump in the economy, coupled with the acrimonious discourse over how much weight test results and seniority should be given in determining a teacher's worth, have conspired to bring morale among the nation's teachers to its lowest point in more than 20 years, according to a survey of teachers, parents and students released on Wednesday.

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More than half of teachers expressed at least some reservation about their jobs, their highest level of dissatisfaction since 1989, the survey found. Also, roughly one in three said they were likely to leave the profession in the next five years, citing concerns over job security, as well as the effects of increased class size and deep cuts to services and programs. Just three years ago, the rate was one in four.

The results, released in the annual MetLife Survey of the American Teacher, expose some of the insecurities fostered by the high-stakes pressure to evaluate teachers at a time of shrinking resources. About 40 percent of the teachers and parents surveyed said they were pessimistic that levels of student achievement would increase in the coming years, despite the focus on test scores as a primary measure of quality of a teacher's work.

Sandi Jacobs, vice president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, a nonpartisan advocacy group in Washington, said the push for evaluations, punctuated by a national movement to curb the power of unions, had fostered an unsettling cultural shift.

"It's easy to see why teachers feel put upon, when you consider the rhetoric around the need to measure their effectiveness - just as it's easy to see why they would internalize it as a perception that teachers are generally ineffective, even if it's not what the debate is about at all," Ms. Jacobs said.

More than 75 percent of the teachers surveyed said the schools where they teach had undergone budget cuts last year, and about as many of them said the cuts included layoffs - of teachers and others, like school aides and counselors. Roughly one in three teachers said their schools lost arts, music and foreign language programs. A similar proportion noted that technology and materials used in the schools had not been kept up to date to meet students' needs.

"The fixation on testing has been a negative turn of events when the things that engage kids in schools are all being cut," said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers.

The survey, in its 28th year, showed similar attitudes among teachers working in poor and stable neighborhoods; in schools serving large numbers of immigrant students who are not proficient in English, as well as native speakers from middle-class backgrounds. The race and ethnicity of the students, and length of a teacher's experience, had little bearing on the results.

Nonetheless, teachers in urban schools and in schools with a large proportion of minority students tended to be less satisfied about their jobs.

Teachers with high job satisfaction were more likely to feel secure in their jobs, and to have more opportunities for professional development, more time to prepare their lessons and greater parental involvement in their schools, the survey found.

Parental engagement has increased over the past 25 years, according to the survey, but remains a challenge: parent participation declines during the high school years.

Globaloria Creator Idit Harel Caperton Discusses Her Recent Visit To East Austin College Prep
http://blog.swkey.org/2012/03/12/idit-harel-caperton-interview/

Posted by Southwest Key on Mar 12, 2012 in EA College Prep, Education | 0 comments


I caught up with Dr. Idit Harel Caperton, President and Founder of World Wide Workshop, the inventors of Globaloria, while she was in town from New York City for the SITE Conference and SXSWedu 2012. Seated on a bright turquoise couch in the frenetic halls of the Austin Convention Center, we talked about her impressions of her most recent visit to East Austin College Prep (EAPrep) where she participated in giving a special tour of the school's Globaloria program to SITE attendees.
"It was a fantastic experience for us because people are always talking about how education in other countries is better," Dr. Caperton said. (She asks me to call her simply Idit; it's an Israeli Hebrew name.) "20 people came, they were from many nationalities - Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Holland, Saudi Arabia, Philippines, China and Israel, to name a few - and they all seemed very excited to meet Globaloria students and faculty and to learn about what East Austin College Prep is doing in the community."
EAPrep is the first charter school in the world to integrate the Globaloria network and daily curriculum as a school-wide teaching and learning opportunity. All EAPrep students take Globaloria just like any other core subject, math or English, and will do so every day for 7 years until they graduate in the 12th grade.
Globaloria started five years ago by the World Wide Workshop, and was structured to teach students how to design and code social-issue and STEM games, work in teams, and figure out many digital literacies along the way..
"Today," Idit tells me with pride, "it's a vibrant network with 2000 students and educators in five states, and growing." AMD Foundation introduced Idit and her Globaloria invention to Southwest Key CEO Dr. Juan Sanchez in the summer of 2009. "Today, East Austin College Prep is a shining star in our network. It's an inspirational model for a full integration that can shape a school's STEM culture."
One reason Idit and her team love working with EAPrep, she says, is because, "the school is a start-up, and so we're all entrepreneurs together who've gone through the challenges of moving from an idea to a fully operating school, with faculty and leadership in place, and maybe one day, even a chain of schools. Globaloria is a core piece that fits well with EAPrep's college preparation vision and drives STEMing of each and every student." She adds, "Southwest Key, World Wide Workshop and AMD Foundation and the AMD volunteer employees formed a great partnership to change the game of education here, together."
According to Idit, visitors at the SITE tour were able to witness the amount of learning students can accomplish in two years by visiting Teresa Valdez's newly inducted 6th graders, and then Nyssa Arcos Evans' more seasoned 8th graders who, thanks to the Globaloria program, have been immersed every day for two-and-a-half school years in learning innovation, computational languages, collaboration and communication skills.
"I can really see the STEM culture being formed here in front of our eyes," Idit said. "Both teachers and students are becoming more and more comfortable. I also see how the Principal, Marisol Rocha, really gets the value of this way of teaching and learning and this level of problem solving for kids who come from homes where the parents don't fully understand the value of engineering education, networked learning, or STEM. Marisol told our visitors yesterday that she sees results in the kids' academic performance and test scores, and observes their comfort and fluency with innovation and technology. That's simply amazing."
"It's not just that they're using computers to do worksheets," Idit adds. "Marisol talks a lot about how they use computers to come up with their own ideas. Every time I hear her speak about her faculty and students, my heart gets happy. As the creator of Globaloria, I work with so many principals and educators, and she rocks."
But it can't be all roses. I asked Idit to identify any challenges.
"Everybody thinks the challenge is the students, because they often come to EAPrep below grade level, and many of them are English-language learners, and the Globaloria digital curriculum is not a traditional test-prep curriculum, and it is professional and so demanding, including learning digital communication skills, lots of reading and writing in English, plus learning a new and complex computer programming language. But the kids are alright. They get it. The toughest challenge, since 2009, has been to recruit compassionate and amazing teachers who are committed to this new way of digital teaching and learning."
Which is great for aspiring Digital Learning teachers, because, as Idit says, with EAPrep growing to 500 students by adding 5th and 9th grades in the fall, the school is now recruiting new Globaloria teachers to be trained this summer.
Before we depart the bright turquoise couch at the Convention Center, Idit says to me, "From my humble perspective, all EAPrep graduates should be able to attend and speak here, and win the top awards at SXSW and other high-end tech conferences. The global tech and creative industries need all of them badly!"

Written by Stephen K. Peeples
Thursday, 01 March 2012 13:30

KHTS News Brought To You By:


After warning users for weeks that changes to its privacy policy were coming, today is the day Google Inc. began to put those changes into effect, enabling Google to combine user data from Google search, YouTube, G-Mail, Picassa for photos, Google calendar, Android phones and tracking data from a variety of other sources into a single common user profile.

"We've included the key parts from more than 60 product-specific notices into our main Google Privacy Policy, so there's no longer any need to be your own mini-search engine if you want to work out what's going on," the Mountainview, Calif.-based Internet giant said on its official blog today. "Our Privacy Policy now explains, for the vast majority of our services, what data we're collecting and how we may use it, in plain language."

Don't miss a thing. Get breaking news alerts delivered right to your inbox!
In the past, Google was unable to combine data from YouTube and search histories with other information in a user's account. "Our new Privacy Policy gets rid of those inconsistencies so we can make more of your information available to you when using Google."

While the changes were made to improve user efficiency and targeting of ads, and to enable it to "build a better, more intuitive user experience across Google for signed-in users," according to the company, many Google users are worried their privacy has been or will be compromised by hackers and/or identity thieves as a result of this new aggregated policy.

"There's a lot of concern because Google's a lot bigger than anyone of us ever imagined before," said Parry Aftab (pictured at right), an Internet privacy and security lawyer and executive director of the online consumer watchdog group WiredSafety.com. Aftab appears on national media outlets frequently as a cybersafety expert.

"They're taking 60 different privacy policies and they're consolidating them into one, and that one is now reminding all of us that YouTube and Gmail and Gdocuments and Blogger and Androids are all part of the Google family," she said. "So when we share something on our Android and we share it on our Gmail, and we're logged into our Gmail on our accounts, or into our Google accounts, everything's tied together."

Aftab acknowledged users' concerns, but noted that many privacy safeguards and much oversight is already in place to prevent Google and other data aggregators from violating privacy laws and procedures.

"There are watchdog groups such as WiredSafety.com and so many others out there," she said. "There's the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) in the United States, the Privacy Commissioner in Canada, all of the EU (European Union) privacy directors. Around the world, there are people who do this for a living, and all they do is check and make sure people aren't misusing the information."

Aftab noted that while many people are concerned about the policy changes, many others aren't, and she noted a generational factor in the equation.

"I told a thousand teens and college students recently about this, and they feel as if they don't mind if people have this information as long as they're not doing anything wrong," she said. "They also indicated that they wouldn't read a privacy policy, wouldn't look at a video, wouldn't even play a game to learn about privacy. And in the end, they said they trusted Google more than others because they have so much money, they wouldn't have to sell this information to anyone else."

Aftab noted that part of the problem lies with users. "What we do is never read privacy policies, we click 'I accept' and we forget what it is we're saying or put things in writing that we never would have put in writing before," she said.

So what's the best way for Google users to deal with the new privacy policy to protect themselves from unwanted sharing and other security breaches, as of right now?

"There are Google privacy tools, it's google.com/privacy/tools, that'll let you opt out of targeting marketing and the others, and the simple thing is, just log out of your Google account when you're doing anything you don't want them to track," Aftab said.

But there are other ways to work around the Google privacy/security issue, she said.

"Google will not be too happy about this - I have two different Google accounts, one really for me, and the other one that I set up for my Droid account when I had one," Aftab said. "And that's the one that's logged into my computer when I forget to log out. So they're finding out information that really isn't tracked to anything anymore and I really don't even have an Android anymore. So a great way to surf anonymously is to have two accounts, one that's public and another that's pretty private. The rest is think about where you're going, what you're saying and what you do online, and if you're uncomfortable with it, stop using it, go use the privacy tools and settings and decide how YOU want to treat your information. You can do that."

As an aid to Google users, Aftab said, WiredSafety.com plans to post tutorials in the next week or two detailing how to adjust privacy settings on Google accounts.

She said Google's privacy changes can, in the end, be helpful, "as long as we make sure those watchdogs and governmental agencies are around, and that Google is as open and above-board as they have been here. If we just stop being a little lazy and read this (policy) or get an eight-year-old to help us figure it out, we might actually be able to survive."

Visit http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/02/googles-new-privacy-policy.html and www.wiredsafety.com for more information.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/the-war-on-teachers-why-the-public-is-watching-it-happen/2012/03/11/gIQAD3XH6R_blog.html
The war on teachers: Why the public is watching it happen
By Valerie Strauss
This was written by Mark Naison, professor of African and African American Studies at Fordham University in New York and chair of the department of African and African-American Studies. He is also co-director of the Urban Studies Program, African-American History 20th Century. A version of this first appeared on the blog With A Brooklyn Accent.

By Mark Naison

All over the nation, teachers are under attack. Politicians of both parties, in every state, have blamed teachers and their unions for the nation's low standing on international tests and our nation's inability to create the educated labor force our economy needs.

Mass firings of teachers in so-called failing schools have taken place in municipalities throughout the nation and some states have made a public ritual of humiliating teachers. In Los Angeles and New York, teacher ratings based on student standardized test scores - said by many to be inaccurate - have been published by the press. As a result, great teachers have been labeled as incompetent and some are leaving the profession. A new study showed that teachers' job satisfaction has plummeted in recent years.

Big budget films such as Bad Teacher and the documentary Waiting for Superman popularize the idea that public school teachers prevent poor children of color from getting a good education, while corporate funded organizations perpetuate the idea that the only way for children to excel is if their teachers lose their job security and bargaining rights.

Why has this campaign attracted such strong bipartisan support and why has the public failed to speak out loudly against it?

Attacks on teachers have occurred in the midst of a broad-based attack on the bargaining rights and benefits of all public workers - but even by that standard, teachers have been singled out.

In New York State, where teacher evaluations were just released to the press, the state Legislature just passed - and the governor signed - a bill that exempted police and firefighters from having their evaluations released to the public. What better symbolizes the way teachers have become "fair game" for public demonization?

There are huge profits to be made in the testing industry, in educational technologies that replace teachers, and in constructing and managing charter schools, so it is not hard to see why some people in the corporate world would benefit from attacking public education and teachers unions.

But why are so many parents and the general public buying into this campaign? Certainly politicians wouldn't be voting to take away teachers' rights if they didn't think it would get votes.

Let's look at the way many in America's shrinking middle class and battered working class view the teachers in their midst.

Large numbers of people are losing their jobs and homes, earning sub-standard wages and taking in their children who can't find jobs. All the while, they see teachers, 80 percent of them women, who make better salaries than they do, have better health plans and pensions, and get two or three months off in the summer!

Many say to themselves: "Who do teachers think they are? Why should they live so well on my tax dollars when I can barely keep my head above water? At the very least, they should feel some of the insecurity I feel every day and face the kind of performance assessments workers in the private sector deal with all the time."

That is the same sentiment that America's unionized blue collar workers faced in the '70's and '80's and '90's when big corporations started closing factories and slashing wages and benefits. The non-unionized work force in big industrial states refused to rally to the defense of their unionized counterparts, and industrial unions lost battles to maintain their wage and benefit levels that allowed them to live a middle-class life style or prevent plants from relocating.

That posture is short-sighted for two reasons.

First the same policies that create an insecure, deeply resentful teaching force will end up harming children.

Not only will excessive standardized tests - now used to evaluate teachers - make children hate school, but the whole test-based accountability movement has served to narrow the curriculum and turn many classrooms into test-prep factories. Parents are discovering that their children are not only unhappy at school but not well prepared for higher education or challenging careers.

There is another more insidious consequence of the attack on teaching. Every time you undermine the job security, working conditions, and wages of one group of workers, it makes it easier for employers to undermine them for all workers. This is why, during the Depression, many unemployed people organized in support of workers on strike, even though anybody with a job in that era was relatively privileged. They believed in the concept of solidarity - the idea that working people could only progress if they did so together, and if one group of workers improved their conditions, it would ultimately improve conditions for all.

That kind of solidarity, for the most part, is gone now. If American workers are ever going to regain their fair share of national income and win back respect on and off the jobs, it is something they are going to have to re-learn. The Occupy Movement has brought back the idea of solidarity with its image of "the 99 percent fighting the 1 Percent," but this idea has not yet spread fast enough to stop the war on teachers.

There are, though, signs of hope. In Chicago and New York, Occupy groups are uniting with teachers, parents and students to fight school closings; in New York, parents groups have rallied to the defense of teachers stigmatized by the publication of outrageously inaccurate teacher ratings; in Florida, a pernicious "parent trigger" law favoring charter schools was just defeated in the legislature with a big push from parents.

These actions are, hopefully, just the beginning of a transformation of public consciousness that will lead to an end of the war on teachers.

By Valerie Strauss
This was written by Mark Naison, professor of African and African American Studies at Fordham University in New York and chair of the department of African and African-American Studies. He is also co-director of the Urban Studies Program, African-American History 20th Century. A version of this first appeared on the blog With A Brooklyn Accent.

By Mark Naison

All over the nation, teachers are under attack. Politicians of both parties, in every state, have blamed teachers and their unions for the nation's low standing on international tests and our nation's inability to create the educated labor force our economy needs.

Mass firings of teachers in so-called failing schools have taken place in municipalities throughout the nation and some states have made a public ritual of humiliating teachers. In Los Angeles and New York, teacher ratings based on student standardized test scores - said by many to be inaccurate - have been published by the press. As a result, great teachers have been labeled as incompetent and some are leaving the profession. A new study showed that teachers' job satisfaction has plummeted in recent years.

Big budget films such as Bad Teacher and the documentary Waiting for Superman popularize the idea that public school teachers prevent poor children of color from getting a good education, while corporate funded organizations perpetuate the idea that the only way for children to excel is if their teachers lose their job security and bargaining rights.

Why has this campaign attracted such strong bipartisan support and why has the public failed to speak out loudly against it?

Attacks on teachers have occurred in the midst of a broad-based attack on the bargaining rights and benefits of all public workers - but even by that standard, teachers have been singled out.

In New York State, where teacher evaluations were just released to the press, the state Legislature just passed - and the governor signed - a bill that exempted police and firefighters from having their evaluations released to the public. What better symbolizes the way teachers have become "fair game" for public demonization?

There are huge profits to be made in the testing industry, in educational technologies that replace teachers, and in constructing and managing charter schools, so it is not hard to see why some people in the corporate world would benefit from attacking public education and teachers unions.

But why are so many parents and the general public buying into this campaign? Certainly politicians wouldn't be voting to take away teachers' rights if they didn't think it would get votes.

Let's look at the way many in America's shrinking middle class and battered working class view the teachers in their midst.

Large numbers of people are losing their jobs and homes, earning sub-standard wages and taking in their children who can't find jobs. All the while, they see teachers, 80 percent of them women, who make better salaries than they do, have better health plans and pensions, and get two or three months off in the summer!

Many say to themselves: "Who do teachers think they are? Why should they live so well on my tax dollars when I can barely keep my head above water? At the very least, they should feel some of the insecurity I feel every day and face the kind of performance assessments workers in the private sector deal with all the time."

That is the same sentiment that America's unionized blue collar workers faced in the '70's and '80's and '90's when big corporations started closing factories and slashing wages and benefits. The non-unionized work force in big industrial states refused to rally to the defense of their unionized counterparts, and industrial unions lost battles to maintain their wage and benefit levels that allowed them to live a middle-class life style or prevent plants from relocating.

That posture is short-sighted for two reasons.

First the same policies that create an insecure, deeply resentful teaching force will end up harming children.

Not only will excessive standardized tests - now used to evaluate teachers - make children hate school, but the whole test-based accountability movement has served to narrow the curriculum and turn many classrooms into test-prep factories. Parents are discovering that their children are not only unhappy at school but not well prepared for higher education or challenging careers.

There is another more insidious consequence of the attack on teaching. Every time you undermine the job security, working conditions, and wages of one group of workers, it makes it easier for employers to undermine them for all workers. This is why, during the Depression, many unemployed people organized in support of workers on strike, even though anybody with a job in that era was relatively privileged. They believed in the concept of solidarity - the idea that working people could only progress if they did so together, and if one group of workers improved their conditions, it would ultimately improve conditions for all.

That kind of solidarity, for the most part, is gone now. If American workers are ever going to regain their fair share of national income and win back respect on and off the jobs, it is something they are going to have to re-learn. The Occupy Movement has brought back the idea of solidarity with its image of "the 99 percent fighting the 1 Percent," but this idea has not yet spread fast enough to stop the war on teachers.

There are, though, signs of hope. In Chicago and New York, Occupy groups are uniting with teachers, parents and students to fight school closings; in New York, parents groups have rallied to the defense of teachers stigmatized by the publication of outrageously inaccurate teacher ratings; in Florida, a pernicious "parent trigger" law favoring charter schools was just defeated in the legislature with a big push from parents.

These actions are, hopefully, just the beginning of a transformation of public consciousness that will lead to an end of the war on teachers.

-0-

Follow The Answer Sheet every day by bookmarking http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet.

By Valerie Strauss | 04:00 AM ET, 03/12/2012

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/marketplacek12/2012/03/live_from_sxsw_social_media_and_the_youth_culture_of_fear.html




Cyberbullying's recent emergence in the public conversation has given way to deeper discussions about how youths interact with the Internet and each other. But according to Danah Boyd, a leading researcher on youths and social media, it's also brought many misconceptions about what the real risks to teens are online. The Internet doesn't increase bullying, Boyd says, but attitudes toward it increase the fear and misunderstanding about what teens are exposed to.

"The Internet has made bullying much more visible to adults, but they don't recognize the things outside their purview, the things not in front of them," Boyd said Saturday at the South by Southwest Interactive Conference, the massive gathering of innovative thinkers and technology enthusiasts going on in Austin, Texas, this week (I covered the SXSWedu conference earlier in the week).

Boyd is a senior researcher at Microsoft Research and holds a variety of positions in academia. Her SXSW talk, "The Power of Fear in Networked Publics," posited that the Internet is amplifying and confusing a "culture of fear" capitalized upon by marketers, politicians, and the media.

First, data show that students are still bullied the most in school, and the Internet hasn't increased bullying, Boyd said. But parents can't see what happens at school the way they can see what happens online. Because it's more visible to them, parents teach their kids to fear online culture as a way to control them, the same way media and marketers do, Boyd said.

Though not a subject of Boyd's talk, this control dynamic seems to be a greater concern on the school district level. This week, on behalf of a 12-year-old Minnesota girl, the American Civil Liberties Union and the girl's mother sued the Minnewaska Area Schools, alleging it disciplined the student after searching through her online messages.

And because it's proved effective, teens are using the same fear-mongering tactics to get ahead in the race for attention, another byproduct of the Internet era, Boyd argued. That's what causes most cruelty among teens, Boyd said (not the "strangers on the Internet" parents warn about).

"Fear begets more attention. Attention begets more fear," she said.

So what's the solution? Keeping with the theme of the conference, Boyd suggested designers and technologists need to take responsibility for creating the systems where fear-mongering and attention-getting rule and get to better know their users. Boyd has told Education Week Teacher (through the Teacher Leaders Network) in the past that a network like Facebook rewards participation so much that it limits expression and controls interactions among its teen users.

But she also said we shouldn't blame the Internet on all of youths' ills.

We're keeping an eye out for Boyd's next research piece on this subject, "The Social Lives of Networked Teens," which will be published by Yale University Press.

Categories: Conferences , SXSW , Social Media
Tags: Danah Boyd , social media , SXSW

By Valerie Strauss
Here are questions that education historian Diane Ravitch posed to politicans who make education policy. Ravitch, a research professor at New York University, is the author of numerous books including the bestselling " The Death and Life of the Great American School System ," a critique of the modern school reform movement. These questions first appeared on the Nieman Watchdog website.

By Diane Ravitch

1. Both Republican candidates and President Obama are enamored of charter schools - that is, schools that are privately managed and deregulated. Are you aware that studies consistently show that charter schools don't get better results than regular public schools? Are you aware that studies show that, like any deregulated sector, some charter schools get high test scores, many more get low scores, but most are no different from regular public schools? Do you recognize the danger in handing public schools and public monies over to private entities with weak oversight? Didn't we learn some lessons from the stock collapse of 2008 about the risk of deregulation?

2. Both Republican candidates and President Obama are enamored of merit pay for teachers based on test scores. Are you aware that merit pay has been tried in the schools again and again since the 1920s and it has never worked? Are you aware of the exhaustive study of merit pay in the Nashville schools, conducted by the National Center for Performance Incentives at Vanderbilt, which found that a bonus of $15,000 per teacher for higher test scores made no difference?

3. Are you aware that Milwaukee has had vouchers for low-income students since 1990, and now state scores in Wisconsin show that low-income students in voucher schools get no better test scores than low-income students in the Milwaukee public schools? Are you aware that the federal test (the National Assessment of Educational Progress) shows that-after 21 years of vouchers in Milwaukee-black students in the Milwaukee public schools score on par with black students in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana?

4. Does it concern you that cyber charters and virtual academies make millions for their sponsors yet get terrible results for their students?

5. Are you concerned that charters will skim off the best-performing students and weaken our nation's public education system?

6. Are you aware that there is a large body of research by testing experts warning that it is wrong to judge teacher quality by student test scores? Are you aware that these measures are considered inaccurate and unstable, that a teacher may be labeled effective one year, then ineffective the next one? Are you aware that these measures may be strongly influenced by the composition of a teacher's classroom, over which she or he has no control? Do you think there is a long line of excellent teachers waiting to replace those who are (in many cases, wrongly) fired?

7. Although elected officials like to complain about our standing on international tests , did you know that students in the United States have never done well on those tests? Did you know that when the first international test was given in the mid-1960s, the United States came in 12th out of 12? Did you know that over the past half-century, our students have typically scored no better than average and often in the bottom quartile on international tests? Have you ever wondered how our nation developed the world's most successful economy when we scored so poorly over the decades on those tests?

8. Did you know that American schools where less than 10% of the students were poor scored above those of Finland, Japan and Korea in the last international assessment? Did you know that American schools where 25% of the students were poor scored the same as the international leaders Finland, Japan and Korea? Did you know that the U.S. is #1 among advanced nations in child poverty? Did you know that more than 20% of our children live in poverty and that this is far greater than in the nations to which we compare ourselves?

9. Did you know that family income is the single most reliable predictor of student test scores? Did you know that every testing program - the SAT, the ACT, the NAEP, state tests and international tests - shows the same tight correlation between family income and test scores? Affluence helps - children in affluent homes have educated parents, more books in the home, more vocabulary spoken around them, better medical care, more access to travel and libraries, more economic security - as compared to students who live in poverty, who are more likely to have poor medical care, poor nutrition, uneducated parents, more instability in their lives. Do you think these things matter?

10. Are you concerned that closing schools in low-income neighborhoods will further weaken fragile communities?

11. Are you worried that annual firings of teachers will cause demoralization and loss of prestige for teachers? Any ideas about who will replace those fired because they taught too many low-scoring students?

12. Why is it that politicians don't pay attention to research and studies?

13. Do you know of any high-performing nation in the world that got that way by privatizing public schools, closing those with low test scores, and firing teachers? The answer: none.

-0-

Follow The Answer Sheet every day by bookmarking http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet.

By Valerie Strauss | 03:00 AM ET, 02/24/2012

http://mindshift.kqed.org/2012/02/introducing-programming-to-preschoolers/

Introducing Programming to Preschoolers | MindShift

"What's most important to me is that young children start to develop a relationship with the computer where they feel they're in control," Resnick said

By Valerie Strauss

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/duncans-equity-commission-and-the-rising-tide-of-avarice-hostility-testing/2012/02/23/gIQALB7jWR_blog.html

This was written by John Merrow, veteran education reporter for PBS, NPR, and dozenso f national publications. He is the president of the nonprofit media production company Learning Matters. Merrow's latest book is "The Influence of Teachers." This post first appeared on Merrow's blog, Taking Note.

By John Merrow

"The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people."

Surely everyone recognizes the five-word phrase. Some of you may have garbled the phrase on occasion - I have - into something like 'Our schools are drowning in a rising tide of mediocrity."

But that's not what "A Nation at Risk" said back in 1983. The report, issued by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, was a call to action on many levels, not an attack on schools and colleges. "Our society and its educational institutions seem to have lost sight of the basic purposes of schooling," the report states, immediately after noting that America has been "committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament." (emphasis added) Schools aren't the villain in "A Nation at Risk;" rather, they are a vehicle for solving the problem.

Suppose that report were to come out now? What sort of tide is eroding our educational foundations? "A rising tide of (fill in the blank)?"

This is a relevant question because sometime in the next few months another national commission, this one on "Education Equity and Excellence," will issue its report. This commission clearly hopes to have the impact of "A Nation at Risk."

However, the two commissions could hardly be more different. The 1983 Commission was set up to be independent, while the current one seems to be joined at the hip to the Department of Education.

Consider: Ronald Reagan did not want a commission to study education because he wanted to abolish the U. S. Department of Education, which had been created by the man he defeated, Jimmy Carter. So Education Secretary Terrel Bell did it on his own.

The current commission has the blessing of the White House and the Congress.

Secretary Bell asked the president of the University of Utah, David Gardner, to chair the commission. He knew Gardner and trusted him to oversee the selection of the Commission members. Dr. Gardner then hired Milton Goldberg as Staff Director and they selected 15 members, plus two reliable political conservatives the White House insisted on. They asked the key education associations to nominate five candidates, then chose one from each association. They ignored the teacher unions and selected that year's Teacher of the Year as a Commissioner. Meanwhile, Secretary Bell stayed on the sidelines, cannily keeping his distance from an effort that his boss was not in favor of.

Unlike Ted Bell, Education Secretary Arne Duncan seems to have been involved from the git-go. He has spoken to the group and recently intervened to extend its deadline. His Department named the co-chairs and all 28 members, who represent every possible constituency in the education establishment: rural, urban, African American, White, Hispanic, Asian-American, Native American, conservative, liberal and so on.

Rather than delicately balancing his commission to be politically correct, Gardner, a university president, put five other people from higher education on his commission and famously declared there would be "no litmus test" for commission members.

Duncan has touched every base, at least once. Well, almost every base - no classroom teachers or school principals serve on Duncan's Commission.

Gardner included out-of-the-box thinkers like Nobel Laureate Glenn T. Seaborg and Harvard physicist Gerald Holton. Duncan's Commission is depressingly predictable, with the exception of Netflix founder Reed Hastings. Why no Tim Brown, Deborah Meier, John Seely Brown, Sal Khan, Laurene Powell, Larry Rosenstock or James Comer?

Because the "Risk" commission had no ex officio members, it had limited contact with the department or the White House. Staff Director Milton Goldberg recalls that Secretary Bell read the 31-page draft report for the first time just one week before its release. ("Golly, it's short," was his initial reaction, Goldberg recalls.)

The current commission has seven ex officio members, including Roberto Rodriguez of the White House and Martha Kanter, who is #2 in the Education Department. Not only that, it appears that the Department's PR people are on hand at all times. No secrets, no surprises.

The earlier commission held most of its meetings and hearings around the country. The current commission held seven of its 12 meetings at the U. S. Department of Education, including the final five.

Given all that, it's difficult to think of this as an 'independent' Commission. End of the day, it's Arne Duncan's commission, established for the express purpose of finding ways to close the 'resource gap' in spending on education for poor kids in this country.

That's a worthy goal, because the spending gap is huge. However, closing it won't be easy. States are pretty much broke these days, so the money will have to come from Washington.

And that's a problem, because no one in Washington seems to trust states or local school districts, which, after all, are responsible for the 'savage inequalities' in the first place. Because education is not a federal responsibility, Washington can send money and make rules but cannot send in the troops to punish misbehavior. As Michael Casserly, long-time cxecutive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, dryly noted in the January meeting, "We haven't really resolved this question about where state responsibility ends or where their capacity and willingness end, and where the federal government's willingness and capacity and authority begin."

There's some history here. Earlier efforts to equalize spending haven't worked all that well. The early days of Title One of ESEA [Elementary and Secondary Education Act] saw federal dollars that were supposed to be spent on disadvantaged kids going instead to build swimming pools for suburban kids or for 'teaching machines' that gathered dust in locked closets. States and local districts - seemingly by instinct - took the federal money and then cut their own spending by that amount, until the feds made that illegal.

And there's also the knotty problem of past experience with spending more on poor kids. It hasn't produced results in Newark, N.J,, or Kansas City, or anyplace else as far as I know.

More than a few of the commissioners see the 15,000 local school boards as an impediment; they are, however, a fact of American political life. It should be noted that the commissioner who wrote the first draft of the forthcoming report, Matt Miller, is also the author of "First, Let's Kill All the School Boards," which appeared in The Atlantic in January/February 2008.

The commission wants more preschool programs and the most qualified teachers to work in low income districts, and so on, but those are local or state decisions, and most members of the commission - those speaking up at the meetings - do not seem to trust anyone but Washington.

So if Washington can't just write checks to close the resource gap because it can't control states and school districts, what does it do? Several commissioners spoke approvingly of a more "muscular" federal governmental role in education, but it's not clear how it would flex those muscles.

End of the day, the commission's big goal is to energize public opinion, just as "A Nation at Risk" did.

Read through meeting transcripts (as I have been doing) and you will find lots of discussion about how to sell the public on the big idea of what Co-Chair Edley calls a "collective responsibility to provide a meaningful opportunity for high quality education for each child."

Shorthand for that: spend more to educate poor kids.

Slogans emerge in the discussion:

"Sharing responsibility for every child,"

"From nation at risk to nation in peril," and

"Raise the bar and close the gap."

At one point a department PR man took the microphone to offer a suggestion. "In the communication shop, myself and Peter Cunningham, my boss, are always happy to help you guys through this process, to the extent to which you - you know, you'd like our help. But 'one nation under-served' would be kind of a way that to kind of capture that, and harken back to sort of patriotic tones and kind of a unifying theme, and the fact that you know, we're not hitting the mark we should, as a country and international competitiveness. So, I just put that out there."

What will probably be "put out there" in April will be a document designed to make us morally outraged at the unfairness of it all and, at the same time, convince us that failing to educate all children is going to doom America to second-class status in the world. Expect rhetorical questions like "Would a country that's serious about education reform spend twice as much on wealthy kids as it does on poor kids?"

I am virtually certain that the new report will reflect the administration's technocratic faith that pulling certain policy levers will produce dramatic change - despite years of evidence to the contrary. (It's part of 'a rising tide of predictability' that inhabits our land, as positions harden and debate and inquiry disappear.)

The real problem is not the Constitution's limits on the federal role in education. For all its talk of public education as 'the civil rights issue of our time," this administration, like the one before it, simply does not have a powerful vision of what genuine education might be. Full of the same hubris that led to No Child Left Behind, it believes in technical solutions.

Channeling Dr. King, this might be Secretary Arne Duncan's version of that famous speech: "I have a dream that all children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin or the content of their character but by their scores on standardized tests."

That's harsh, I know, but this commission and this administration ought to be asking other important rhetorical questions, such as "Would a country that's serious about education reform devote as much as 20% of classroom time to test preparation and testing?"

or: "Would a nation that believes in the potential of all children spend about $10,000 per child on schooling and then measure the results with a $15 instrument - and swear by the results produced by those cheap tests?"

or: "Would a nation that believes in education develop a 'reform agenda' that attacks teachers knowing that, even absent such attacks, 50% of teachers have been leaving the profession in the first five years?"

While I agree with what I expect to be the commission's findings ("We haven't been serious about leveling the playing field in education"), I find it impossible to see this commission as anything but narrowly political.

More than that, however, I think this commission represents a missed opportunity to engage American citizens on a more fundamental issue: the education of all our children.

Suppose the administration had been willing to ask a group of independent thinkers an honest question - and been prepared to deal with whatever answers emerged?

My question would be: "Does a rising tide threaten our educational foundations and our very future today? If so, a tide of what?"

I can find evidence for the following: Avarice, regulation, indifference, hostility, testing, and irrelevance.

You can make the case that a rising tide of avarice is a threat. After all, K-12 education is a reliable pot of big bucks, almost $600 billion a year for K-12 alone. That's why for-profit charter schools are proliferating, why Pearson and McGraw-Hill are expanding voraciously, and why tech companies are banging on the doors of desperate school boards with 'solutions' to sell.

Is there a rising tide of hostility, suspicion and finger-pointing? Ask almost any teacher.

The rising tide of testing hasn't crested. With new emphasis on evaluating all teachers according to student test scores, the high water mark is nowhere in sight.

What about a rising tide of regulation, much of it coming from Washington? Ask principals in Tennessee, who now must spend multiple hours evaluating each teacher and filling in forms to satisfy the state, which is in turn satisfying the U. S. Department's rules for "Race to the Top."

A rising tide of irrelevance threatens the entire enterprise. I believe public education is drowning because schools have not adapted to a changed and changing world. Consider: Of the three historical justifications for school, only one applies today. I write about this at length in "The Influence of Teachers."

In the past, you had to go to school because the knowledge was stored there. Today, information is everywhere, 24/7, which means that kids need to learn how to formulate questions so they can turn that flood of information into knowledge. But most of our schools are 'answer factories' that offer 'regurgitation education.'

In the past, you went to school to be socialized to get along with kids from different backgrounds, race, religion and gender. Today, however, there are Apps for that. So schools and the adults in them need to help kids understand the power - and limitations - of those Apps and technology in general. After all, kids need to learn that the 14-year-old they're texting (and sexting?) may actually be a 40-year- old sicko. Our kids may be digital natives, but that doesn't guarantee they are or will become digital citizens. Schools need to fill that vacuum.

Finally, schools back then provided custodial care so your parents could hold down jobs. We still need custodial care, but when schools provide marginal education and fail to harness technology in useful ways, they become dangerous places for some children, and boring places for others. We lose at least 1,000,000 students a year, dropouts who may be hoping to find something more relevant on the street. (And, sorry, raising the dropout age to 18 will not solve the problem.)

Are there existing models of schools that are relevant to America's future? Can we create incentives to expand those model programs to serve 50,000,000 children and youth?

I believe the answer to both questions is 'yes.' But first we have to ask those questions.

Before issuing its report, the Duncan Commission would do well to re-read "A Nation at Risk," especially the last recommendation.

"The Federal Government has the primary responsibility to identify the national interest in education. It should also help fund and support efforts to protect and promote that interest. It must provide the national leadership to ensure that the Nation's public and private resources are marshaled to address the issues discussed in this report." (emphasis in original)


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By Valerie Strauss | 04:00 AM ET, 02/24/2012

MIT linguist reveals how modern English resembles Old Japanese, and other surprising convergences between far-flung tongues.
Peter Dizikes, MIT News Office



February 22, 2012


Shigeru Miyagawa, professor and head of the Foreign Languages and Literatures Section.
Photo: Melanie Gonick
February 23, 2012

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You don't have to be a language maven to find the direct object in a basic English-language sentence. Just look next to the verb. Take a simple sentence: "I gave a book to Mary." In this case the verb, "gave," is quickly followed by "book," the direct object. The sentence's indirect object, "Mary," lies farther away from the verb.

Things look quite different in Japanese, however, where direct objects pop up all over the place, and are signified by the presence of a language particle, -o. For example: The Japanese sentence, "Taroo-wa hon-o kinoo katta," means "Taro bought a book yesterday." But as written in Japanese, the word order is "Taro a book yesterday bought." The word "hon-o," or book, is the direct object with the particle, but it is not adjacent to "katta," which is the verb "bought."

To the chagrin of anyone who knows one of these languages but not the other, then, English and Japanese appear to be frustratingly different tongues governed by drastically different rules. And yet, under the surface, English and Japanese have deep similarities, as MIT linguist Shigeru Miyagawa argues in his new book, Case, Argument Structure, and Word Order, published this month in Routledge's "Leading Linguists" series.

In turn, the similarities between English and Japanese underscore a larger point about human language, in Miyagawa's view: All its varieties exist within a relatively structured framework. Languages are different, but not radically different. Dating to the 1950s, in fact, much of MIT's linguistics program has aimed to identify the similar pathways that apparently unrelated languages take.

"There is this very interesting tension in language between diversity and uniformity," says Miyagawa, the Kochi Prefecture-John Manjiro Professor of Japanese Language and Culture at MIT. "Human languages are diverse in stunning ways. Each one has some unique property that distinguishes it from 6,500 or maybe 7,000 other languages. But when you look as a linguist, you begin to notice that there are uniform properties shared by languages."

English and Japanese may be different, but, as Miyagawa shows in his book, when it comes to denoting a direct object, they have performed a kind of grand historical flip-flop: Each has adopted rules that the other language has abandoned. In Old Japanese, in the eighth and ninth centuries, direct objects existed without the particle -o attached to them. In the sentence "Ware-wa imo omou," or, "I think of my wife," the word "imo," or "wife," lacks a particle. Instead, particles were used to mark points of emphasis: In Old Japanese, "kono tosi goro-o" means "during this year."

By contrast, Old English, dating to the same time, used case markings (the equivalent of the -o particle) to specify that all direct objects take the accusative case, a rule derived from the structure of Latin. And unlike today, Old English word order was more flexible: Direct objects could appear in many sentence locations.

In this grammatical regard, at least, "Old Japanese is modern English," Miyagawa says. "And Old English and Latin are modern Japanese. It is really quite remarkable."

Indeed, English and Japanese effectively swapped rules during a time when they could not have influenced each other directly. But the nature of language is such that those changes "cannot just be anything," as Miyagawa says. And the nature of linguistics is such that these parallels are not always obvious; many patterns emerge only after years of scholarly analysis.

Miyagawa's book summarizes work he has done over three decades of research. He analyzes recent findings by other scholars in the area, engages with recent critiques of his work - "You have to be ready for that," he says - and assesses the current state of knowledge in his own area of the field.

Recent work by linguist Yuko Yanagida at Tsukuba University in Japan seems to have strengthened Miyagawa's suggestion that there are parallels between Old Japanese and modern English, and Old English and modern Japanese. Yanagida has shown that Old Japanese had an alternative way of denoting direct objects, which also surfaces in modern English. This is "compounding," the joining of verbs and direct objects into new words.

Thus the Old Japanese sentence, "Sirokane-no su-wo hitobito tuki-sirohu," has a compound verb at the end: "tuki-sirohu" literally means "poke each other." (The sentence as a whole, literally "silver cover people poke each other," is probably best rendered as, "People laugh amongst themselves at the silver cover.")

This type of word formation occurs occasionally in English today. We join a verb and a direct object in words such as "bird-watching." And linguists find the same habit elsewhere. In the Chukchee language of Russia, the sentence transliterated as "ytlygyn qaa-tym-ge" means "father deer-killed," or "father killed a deer."

Scholars who work on the evolution of language have welcomed the arrival of Miyagawa's book. "There aren't many languages in the world where we have historical records, only a handful where one can work on change [in language], and most of those languages are Indo-European," says David Lightfoot, a linguist at Georgetown University, who has read the manuscript. "So it's enormously valuable to have a very well-analyzed treatment of change in Japanese."

Curiosity, but no gloriosity

Case, Argument Structure, and Word Order analyzes several other ways in which English and Japanese, despite superficial appearances to the contrary, actually converge. Japanese is regarded as having extensive word formation rules whereas English, at a glance, does not. On closer inspection, however, English does have a system governing word formation. We can turn "curious" into "curiosity," for instance, but we don't change "glorious" into "gloriosity." Why not? Because English already has a relevant noun, "glory," in place. That exact same rule - a "blocking effect," as linguists say - holds in Japanese, too, as Miyagawa first asserted.

"In Japanese, we see this blocking effect in a very extensive manner," he says. "But no one had ever really perceived this comparison before."

John Whitman, a linguist at Cornell University who has read the book, thinks its impact "will really be lasting," and increasingly so in Japan. "Linguists within one national tradition tend to think their language has always existed within the same basic ground plan. But Shigeru Miyagawa's work shows that, no, Japanese 1,000 years ago was a very different thing." As Whitman sees it, the "next step" for researchers "is to look in more detail at specific periods. He has a broad sweep over hundreds of years, and we would also like to look at 50-year slices."

Beyond making the case for the similarities of Japanese and English, Miyagawa says, he hopes his work will reveal the excitement of discovery in linguistics - and the larger fascination in pondering language's apparent universalism.

"It's so exciting to see languages and know there is this diversity we should celebrate," Miyagawa says. "And when we look closely we see they all work with the same mechanisms. That's one thing that is so interesting about human language."

By Anthony Cody on February 22, 2012 11:35 AM

http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2012/02/a_perfect_storm_hits_public_sc.html
Guest post by Steven Sellers Lapham.

Note: Steven Sellers Lapham and Jack Hassard worked together on this post.

Public schools in America are under attack from many directions, and the U.S. Department of Education (ED) seems bent on delivering a lethal one-two-three punch. This decade will likely witness more neighborhood schools shutting down, crowded classrooms, excellent teachers fired, and children fobbed off to "online learning programs." Let's recall that Prince Edward County, Virginia, closed its schools 1959-64, creating a "lost generation" of children who were hobbled, as adults, by years of missed education. Today, a school district in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, cash strapped and unable to pay its teachers, is being kept open only by a federal court order.

We now face the prospect of a school closing because the local tax base has withered, the state government is under water, and the federal government has deemed the school to be unworthy of aid due to lackluster scores on high-stakes student tests. The federal Department of Education, which should be the strongest defender of public schools, is making the problem worse.

Punch #1: Punish the Poor.
The slogan "Race to the Top" is social Darwinism at its most ugly: Reward those who are doing well (inevitably, schools in wealthier neighborhoods) and punish those who are struggling (predictably, schools in America's poorer neighborhoods). A child in Oklahoma, Mississippi, or North Dakota should not have to rely on a state administrator's clever grant-writing skills in order to receive a good education. Certainly, some grant monies should be available for innovation and experimentation in schools. But to make "success" the guiding star of educational policy is wrong.

Punch #2: Death by Paperwork.
States might avoid the draconian punishments of the No Child Left Behind law (NCLB) by applying to ED for a "waiver." The mad rush is on. To date, eleven states have submitted a "flexibility report." Georgia's is 249 pages long. California estimates that enacting all of the waiver requirements (unfunded mandates) would cost at least $2 billion and has declined to apply. ED could make the waiver process useful by placing a 1,000-word limit on applications (a bit longer than this essay) and asking only for a brief description of a state's educational goals. This would free up teachers and administrators to do real work.

Punch #3: Absurd Metrics.
Teacher evaluations will be based on "student growth." There is, however, no scientific basis for doing this. The practice contradicts a 2011 National Academy of Science report, "Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education."

Using test scores to measure the efforts of teachers is a pseudoscience akin to phrenology of the 1800s, which purported to measure one's intelligence according to the shape of one's skull. It also brings to mind journalists and social scientists of the 1920-60s who misued prison statistics to "prove" that black people are genetically inclined toward criminal behavior. In his Harvard University Press book, Khalil Gibran Muhammad established how a racial and racist, 'scientific' discourse promoted this idea. Today, we use high-stakes test scores to "prove" that embattled schools are "failures," and that hard-working professionals aren't working hard enough.

There are many reasons why student test scores might not mount endlessly upward, such as an influx of non-English speaking immigrants; a rise in divorces; the town's factory closes; family transience; a rise in home foreclosures; a sad absence of parents, who are serving in Afghanistan; etc. Or maybe the for-profit company that created the test got a little sloppy when it wrote the test questions, skewing the results. These powerful influences cannot be adequately controlled in a statistical analysis on the small scale of a single school district, a single school, and least of all, a single teacher.

Pushing Back
We must ban the use of standardized tests to make high-stakes decisions of any kind. Standardized test scores might be used ethically as a diagnostic tool ("Apply first aid here!"), but never as an excuse for punishment ("Bleed the patient dry!"). As a study by Fairtest has revealed, the system has placed an inhumane burden on teachers and administrators on the ground, resulting in cheating scandals in 32 states and the District of Columbia. Valerie Strauss reports that the "misuse of standardized tests mandated by public officials has created a climate in which increasing numbers of educators feel they have no choice but to cross ethical lines."

Of course, teachers, like any professional group, should be evaluated and held to high standards. Experienced teachers and administrators in the school itself have personal knowledge of the teacher, students, local community and curriculum. Peer observation and evaluation have been a part of healthy educational settings for centuries. There are rigorous protocols for teacher evaluation provided by professional and subject-discipline associations. Let's use those.

In New York State, 1,359 principals (and even more teachers) have signed a letter protestingthe use of students' test scores to evaluate their job performance. California, with more public school students than any other state, has jumped ship. So has Pennsylvania, apparently. "The emphasis on testing under the waiver plan is as heavy-handed as it has been under NCLB,"said educational historian Diane Ravitch, who served as assistant secretary of education.

Replacing NCLB with a new law could propel our nation's educational standing. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's most cherished goal is to return the United States to first place in the percentage of the population who graduate from college. To do that, let's provide every child who could benefit from daycare with free admission to Head Start, which is the most powerful predictor of success for children born into poverty. Then we can strive to make every school in every neighborhood in America a center of excitement and excellence, not just the chosen few.

Until Congress passes a new federal education law, ED can write its rules and marshal its resources to assist students, teachers, and schools - and stop punishing them. And it can adopt a new slogan to match this new ethic. How about "Raise All Boats!"

Have the Federal Government's education acts (No Child Left Behind and the Race to the Top) created conditions that have led to the "perfect storm" hitting American education? What do you think?

- Steven Sellers Lapham is an editor at a nonprofit educational association. The opinions expressed are his own.