Dr. Goodloe-Johnson and Money

Our Broad trained public school superintendent here in Seattle who sits on the board of NWEA which provides the MAP test that was recently rolled out for millions of dollars and who sits on the Board of Directors of the Broad Foundation, has been pretty footloose and fancy-free with our money in Seattle and has a track record of abusing her  position to receive additional “perks” in Charleston as well where she was superintendent before transferring to Seattle.

Check out the conversation regarding the school audit that was recently made public at Seattle Public Schools blog. I think that you might find it interesting.

Washington State Remains Free from “Race to the Top” Extortion

Seattle Ed 2010 Editorial

So our state was not selected by Arne Duncan & co. for his “Race to Privatization and Teacher Demoralization.” (See: “Washington Not a ‘Race to the Top’ Finalist State,” Puget Sound Business Journal.)

Hooray!

That’s right. This is good news.

There are some who are lamenting this “loss” of the RTTT monies, like League of Education Voters’ Chris Korsmo: “Our kids need and deserve a world class education to be competitive in today’s global marketplace. Right now, we’re coming up short.”

But there are others among us who are glad that our state is not going to be strong-armed into adopting discredited, damaging “solutions” for our schools like privatization via charters and the toxic, innovation-crushing  high-stakes testing and punitive “merit pay” which unfairly and narrowly tie teacher evaluations and bonuses to student test scores.

What’s more, the amount of money that the “Race to the Top” kitty represents when divvied up by “winning” states and then by each public ed student is a mere pittance. Less than $100 per student in some cases, and that is a one-time-only payment.

So clearly “Race to the Top” is not really about the money. The money will not make much difference in each public school child’s life.

No, “Race to the Top” is about forcing states and school districts to change their laws and policies in order to push through an agenda that otherwise would likely not get voter or public approval. And why should it? Charters and merit pay, the two key components of “Race to the Top,” have proven to be seriously flawed concepts.

Arne Duncan and friends (Eli Broad, Bill Gates and others) want our state to change its laws and usher in “reforms” that have been discredited and are driven by a business-centric agenda that has no input from the families who are most affected by these “reforms.”

We at Seattle Education 2010 opposed the elements of the recent Senate Bill 6696 that represented Washington State’s attempted capitulation to the misguided and draconian “Race to the Top” agenda.

As I stated before, here’s why:

I believe that the Obama administration’s mandates for “education reform” are heavy- handed, at times downright draconian, and show a complete disregard for local autonomy and disrespect for the profession of teaching. The recent spate of mass firings of teachers and sacrificing of principals in Marysville and Rhode Island and now Tacoma is unconscionable and alarming.

[UPDATE: Add Washington D.C. to that list. School Chancellor Michelle Rhee (former Teach for America corps member and Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson apologist) summarily fired 241 teachers earlier this month, supposedly because their students had low test scores.]

Unfortunately, that is where this current form of “education reform” is leading. We all need to stand up and say “No! Washington does not need this kind of destructive ‘reform.’”

This brand of “education reform” also puts a heavy emphasis on high-stakes standardized testing, which is of limited use. Here in Seattle, for example, the district is making children as young as 5 take a computerized test (MAP) three times a year — kids who may not yet know how to read, hold a mouse, and should not be subject to such stress so soon.

Word is, these tests will indeed be used to evaluate teachers, despite how flawed a measure these tests may be.

Studies by esteemed universities, Stanford and Vanderbilt, show that two key components of Education Secretary Duncan’s “Race to the Top” frenzy are seriously flawed and do not amount to positive change. The CREDO report out of Stanford showed that charters perform no better — in fact, most perform worse — than regular public schools.

A recent report by the National Center on Performance Incentives at Vanderbilt University, showed that “merit pay” does not work. It does NOT improve student achievement. Even the Gates Foundation’s latest survey of 40,000 teachers supports this fact.

Please also see: “The Pillars of Education Reform Are Toppling.”

Do those who think Washington State should vie for the RTTT contest realize how little money a RTTT grant amounts to per child? As little as $85 a child. Why should our state be strong-armed into changing its laws and adopting questionable “reforms” just for a one-time cash infusion that really amounts to a mere pittance?

For these reasons, I oppose legislation that is geared toward helping our state achieve dubious and damaging “Race to the Top” goals.

We already have innovative schools and programs in Washington state — the high scoring Nova Project alternative high school and numerous other alternative schools, the popular Aviation High, as well as the top performing, award-winning Accelerated Progress Program in Seattle.

Let us retain our local autonomy and replicate what we know works for us, and not capitulate to demands from the federal government that we embrace two extremely flawed “solutions” — privately run charters and “merit pay” tied to high-stakes standardized testing.

Washington can do better.

–Sue Peters

OPEN LETTER TO BILL GATES ABOUT EDUCATION (from a public schools’ parent)

Dear Bill,

I am a public schools’ parent in your own general neighborhood (Seattle). I realize you have an interest in public education, and are a major participant and funder in the current “education reform” efforts being attempted nationally.

Unfortunately, I don’t agree with a number of the choices and “investments” you are making in our schools. I believe they have not been that effective, and some of them are even damaging.

Your all-tech $63 million “School of the Future” in Philadelphia, for example, apparently hasn’t worked out so well. Your $2 billion “Small Schools Initiative” was ultimately canceled (though the concept of smaller schools seems sound to me). And now you are promoting charter schools and “merit pay” for teachers as a measure of “teacher effectiveness,” even though recent reputable studies from Stanford and Vanderbilt universities cast serious doubts on both of these concepts, showing that most charters are not better than public schools and merit pay doesn’t work. (Also see “The Pillars of Education Reform Are Toppling.”)

In other words, you seem to be spending a lot of money and not getting good results.

Does “merit pay” actually improve “teacher effectiveness”?

As a keynote speaker at the national American Federation of Teachers (AFT) conference that was held here in Seattle last week, you said: “The truly impressive reforms share the same strategic core – they all include fair and reliable measures of teacher effectiveness that are tied to gains in student achievement. Public schools have never had this before. It’s a huge change – the kind of change that could match the scale of the problem.”

By this you mean teachers being measured by and paid according to student test scores.

But lashing teachers to test scores is the kind of “change” that will quash innovation and passion, and turn teachers into test-prep robots and schools into test-prep factories. It leads to teaching to the test. That’s already happening in some schools as a result of No Child Left Behind “Annual Yearly Progress” pressures. Not all students test well, by the way – didn’t Einstein famously get Fs in school? And not all learning shows up on tests. I have said before, how do you measure that “Aha!” moment when a child understands something for the first time? It will never show up on a standardized test, but those moments are the real measure of successful teaching.

Above all, research shows that “merit pay” for teachers doesn’t work – it does not lead to true and lasting improvements in genuine student academic achievement.

Meanwhile, perfectly good teachers and principals are being sacrificed and fired under such draconian rules, as this article in the July 19 New York Times attests, “A Popular Principal, Wounded by Government’s Good Intentions.”

One of the main problems with merit pay is that it’s based on the flawed presumption that teachers are motivated by greed and competition, and not by collaboration and helping students learn. But teaching is a cooperative profession; the best teachers are not motivated by making more money than their colleagues.

You yourself have said you want teachers to share their expertise with each other, so they can all become stronger teachers. They already do that, for starters. But how likely is it that they will continue to help each other if you set up a scheme in which they are pressured to compete with each other to get bonuses?

If you want teachers to improve, help give them the respect and salaries they deserve, the resources they need, and the autonomy to be creative and innovative and cooperative with each other, and small classes so they can give each student the attention s/he needs.

Why charter schools?

At the National Charter Schools Conference on June 29 in Chicago where you also spoke, you promoted charters – privately run schools that use public money but have little to no public oversight.  Why do you keep promoting this concept when growing evidence shows that most charters are no better than public schools? In fact, according to Stanford’s CREDO study, as many as 83 percent of charter schools perform no better or do worse than public schools.

Even the Secretary of Education Arne Duncan recently admitted at the same convention of charter operators that charters have serious problems: “…unfortunately, we have far too many mediocre charters and we have far too many charter schools that are absolutely low performing.” (Duncan’s address to the National Charter Schools Conference, July 1, 2010.)

(Also see: “Study Finds No Clear Edge for Charter Schools,” Education Week, June 29, 2010.)

Education reformers repeatedly claim to be “data-driven.” The data do not support charters.

If you support innovation, take a look around inside public school districts. Secretary Duncan recently toured Aviation High School, an innovative public school here in the Puget Sound area. Check out the Nova Project, an innovative alternative high school in Seattle that has some of the most independent thinking and civically aware kids I’ve ever met and some of the highest SAT scores in the district. In Seattle, we also have successful and award- winning schools for highly gifted kids that challenge these kids with an accelerated and deeper curriculum while keeping them in with their age group peers (Accelerated Progress Program), and a number of alternative schools that all have waitlists because they are so popular – Salmon Bay K-8, Thornton Creek. And yet your education reform colleagues and your own foundation are pushing curriculum alignment and standardization on all our schools, quashing any chance for individuality or innovation. That’s a mixed message you are sending.

While it is certainly good of you to be generous with your wealth, it would seem that you are funneling good money after bad, as the saying goes.

So I have some suggestions for you. As a parent with children in public schools, as someone who is the product of both private and public schools and an international education, I hope you will consider my thoughts on how you can direct your public education involvement in a manner that will get genuine and positive results for children. These would be investments in education that parents like me could get behind.

Here are three ideas. They are not flashy. They are not tech-oriented. But they will get positive results.

Invest in Smaller Class Sizes

If you want to fund education and make a difference, fund smaller class sizes. Help school districts hire more (and genuinely qualified – not short-term, inexperienced Teach for America type) teachers and reduce class sizes. Every child would benefit from more one-on-one interaction with a teacher. I don’t think it takes a multi-million dollar “study” to prove that. Here in Seattle our superintendent has laid off teachers two years in a row and closed schools. So class sizes are large and getting bigger.

One of the main reasons people who can afford it choose private schools is because they tend to offer smaller teacher-student ratios.

I’ve read you’d like to see kids taught en masse by one teacher on camera beaming a lecture via the Internet to thousands of students at once. While technology may have its place in our world and in schools, don’t you agree that the most valuable connection a child can have is not to the Internet, but with a teacher, a parent, a nurturing human who will give this child the individualized, personalized attention s/he needs?

Here’s a study that shows that class sizes matter:  “Smaller is Better: First-hand Reports of Early Class Size Reduction in New York City Public Schools,” as does this blog: Class Size Matters.

At the AFT conference, you said something that implied that funding for public schools has gone up in my lifetime and class sizes have gone down: “The United States has been struggling for decades to improve our public schools. We have tried reform after reform. We’ve poured in new investments. Since 1973, we have doubled per-pupil spending. We’ve moved from one adult for every 14 students to one adult for every eight students.”

I am confused by this claim because all my life (which began before 1973) public schools have been scrambling for money, school districts are constantly telling us parents, our kids and their teachers that cuts and layoffs and school closures have to happen. Our own state of Washington, Bill, ranks 46^th in the nation for per-pupil funding! Washington State recently passed a law mandating full state funding of K-12 education, yet that is not happening. Meanwhile in California, the public education system has been drained of property tax revenue ever since the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978.

Are you referring to student-teacher ratios? Or do these “adults” you speak of include all adults in the school district,  from counselors to custodians to central district office staff? (If the latter, that would be true for Seattle, which has a disproportionately high and growing number of administrators in its overstaffed central office. See “Central Administration Efficiency in Seattle Public Schools,” a very troubling report by parent/analyst Meg Diaz.)

Class sizes have not gotten smaller in my lifetime. Neither I nor any of my children have ever been in a public school class of eight – or 14, for that matter. Here in Washington, teacher to student ratio has not gone down, even though we voted for it on Initiative 728 which passed with 72 percent of the vote in 2000.

What is your source for this data? Is it that McKinsey & Corp study that Vicki Phillips, your foundation’s education director, has referred to in the past? The same discredited consulting firm that was “a key architect of the strategic thinking that made Enron a Wall Street darling,” according to Businessweek? If so, I think you can understand how one might question their research.

Lastly here’s a personal story: One day earlier this year, I sat at my kindergarten son’s lunchroom where some of the kids were goofing around. When I told them as group to settle down, I got a limited response. But then I knelt down and looked one of the boys in the eyes and asked him about one of his hobbies, he calmed down immediately and engaged with me. That personal engagement is priceless and essential to good and inspired teaching. It’s not possible when classes are too big and teachers are overwhelmed.

Consider Grants for Books

I sense you have mixed feeling about the value of books. I understand your “School of the Future” in Philadelphia is bookless, paperless and pencil-less, but offers a laptop and Microsoft portal for every child.

I personally want my children to know the pleasure of reading an actual book, the smell of the paper, perhaps the feel of the embossed letters of the title or the details of the illustrations, the joy of summer reading while lying on the grass or idly spinning from a tire swing with a book in hand, unplugged from the wired world.

If you and Melinda were to simply create an endowment that would provide every school in the district, for example, a grant to stock their libraries, buy complete textbooks for classes, that would be an amazing gift and would go a long way toward endearing you to the community for such an obvious, tangible contribution. Because, as you may or may not know, schools like Rainier Beach High School in Seattle don’t have complete or updated sets of history books. Hard to believe, but true. Teachers across the nation still scramble and scrounge to buy class sets of books. My own brother, a public school teacher in California, is trying to gather enough copies of Shakespeare plays for his class. I’m helping him out by scouring local used bookstores up here and mailing them to him. Is this the way it should be? Don’t you agree that every child in every class should be able to take home and spend time with a book, read it on the school bus, even if they are not fortunate enough to own a laptop, and that the cost should not come out of the teacher’s own pocket?

I can imagine a bookplate with your and Melinda’s name on it. (I believe Paul Allen does something similar.) If my children were to grow up believing that you are the providers of books to Seattle school children, believe me, you would rank high in their pantheon of heroes. They love books. (The thrice-yearly Measures of Academic Progress™ computerized test your foundation may be funding, not so much.)

How about Nutrition & Health here in the U.S.?

There are kids who come to school hungry, as I’m sure you know. School districts serve packaged food of questionable nutritional value. Good nutrition would manifest itself in positive and tangible ways. I know you are concerned about health in other parts of the world — how about in your own backyard?

Imagine a Gates Foundation program that supported the creation of freshly cooked meals made of locally and sustainably grown organic produce for all of Seattle’s public schools. (I don’t mean Monsanto-style GM foods, by the way.) I promise you that a well-fed child will do better in school than one who is hungry or on a nutritionally empty diet. This would also create business opportunities for local farmers.

In sum, these ideas, simple as they might seem, will work. They will help kids do better in school. Charters, merit pay have a very mixed and inconsistent record.

I know you and Eli Broad and others have some notions about how you would like schools to be. But as you have acknowledged yourself, you are not an education expert, and I understand that neither you nor your children have attended public schools. So I am asking you to listen to parents and teachers and kids who are in the public schools, who are on the receiving end of all that is good and not so good about our current system, and on the receiving end of all your “reforms,” and learn what we really need and want for our kids.

I suggest you take a look closer to home at the town of Everett, Washington, where the school district has managed to decrease high school drop-out rates significantly in the last few years. (See: “Simple, steady is way to win,” by Danny Westneat, Seattle Times  and “Once shamefully low, Everett’s graduation rate soars,” by Linda Shaw, Seattle Times.) How? With computers and Smart Boards? No, with old-fashioned follow-up, teachers and counselors getting to know kids and keeping them in their sights, engaging and challenging the students with interesting classes. What this requires is the time and care of sufficient staff. Meanwhile, here in Seattle, the school district (SPS) continues to lay off needed teachers and counselors. If you could offer a grant to SPS to rehire these crucial people, you would see results, I guarantee it.

I would value the opportunity to meet with you to discuss these and other thoughts about education. Your new foundation headquarters are not too far from where I live. You can reach me care of Seattle Education 2010, a blog some parents and I started up last year in response to the school closures and “reforms” our children and their schools have been subjected to.

Sincerely,

Sue Peters

Seattle public schools parent

July 2010

Sue Peters is a Seattle-based writer and public schools activist. She co-edits the Seattle Education 2010 blog which can be found here
and here.

Bill Gates, co-chair and trustee of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, was a speaker at the AFT convention held in the Seattle last week. His speech can be found here.

(Originally posted on As It Ought to Be, July 20, 2010 by mattgonzalez)

IS THE GATES FOUNDATION INVOLVED IN BRIBERY?

Check out the article at Undernews.

Dora

Schooling Arne Duncan: I met with the United States Secretary of Education

by Jesse Hagopian

“Hi, Arne. My name is Jesse Hagopian.”

As I locked eyes and firmly shook hands, I wondered if my years of teaching would be enough to help the freshman United States Secretary of Education gain the knowledge and skills he would need.

Arne Duncan had come to the Seattle area on July 9 to address Aviation High School, and his visit happened to coincide with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) convention taking place in Seattle. I joined the picket of teachers from the AFT who had journeyed to the high school with signs such as “Race to the Top: First place business, last place students,” in an effort to inoculate the Seattle area from Duncan’s corporate driven federal education initiative.

As we rallied outside the high school, the event planners grew nervous that we would disrupt this stage-managed affair. They offered us a meeting with one of Duncan’s aides in exchange for our polite behavior during his address. We agreed, and after the event were escorted to a nearby classroom for the meeting.

When an aide entered the room and told us, “The Secretary will come meet with you soon,” I assumed he meant one of Duncan’s clerical assistants would come write down our concerns. But a few minutes later, Secretary Duncan himself entered the classroom and took a seat in the center of the room, with us educators fanned out around him.

We Teachers pooled our collective experience that day to construct, on the fly, what turned out to be a comprehensive “lesson plan” for the schooling of Arne Duncan, driven by the essential question: “What is a quality education?” Our lesson was complete with a pre-assessment, a multi-stage lesson plan targeted at Arne’s deficiencies, a concluding summative assessment and an intervention plan for follow-up assistance–not unlike what we would do with any other student at risk of failure.

Our pre-assessment of Arne’s skills was based on years of following Arne’s speeches, writings and public policies–all of which have culminated in his “Race to the Top” initiative (RTTT) and his national “turnaround plan.”

RTTT is tied to a $4.3 billion fund to make states compete for desperately needed education money by using eligibility requirements to push for charter schools–schools publicly funded by taxpayers, yet run privately, outside the control of local school boards–and merit pay schemes where teachers are paid according student test scores. Arne’s turnaround plan proposes closing some 5,000 schools across the county and firing entire teaching staffs at schools perceived to be failing.

These national initiatives were first developed by Arne in his role as CEO of the Chicago Public Schools (where he served from 2001-2008) for his “Renaissance 2010″ program that consisted of closing down dozens of schools, predominately in Black neighborhoods, and converting many to charter schools or military academies.

At numerous school board meetings and protests, teachers, students and community members warned Duncan that the reckless closing of schools would have dire consequences–from the loss of cherished neighborhood schools and union teachers to an increase in gang violence.

Predictably, these education advocates were proven right. Student achievement stagnated, and deadly violence soared in the schools–with some 34 deaths and 290 shootings in 2009 as a result of students being transported to schools across gang boundaries.

A study by the University of Chicago’s Consortium on Chicago School Research released in October 2009 examined the academic effects of the closings on students at 18 elementary schools shut down between 2001 and 2006. The study concluded that the vast majority of students went from one low-performing school to another, with no achievement gains–and in fact, even saw temporary decreases in test scores during the stressful period when the announcement of their school being slated for closing was made.

Moreover, a massive study by Stanford University, looking at data covering some 70 percent of all charter school students nationally, found that bad charter schools outnumber good ones by a ratio of roughly 2 to 1–and an astonishing 83 percent of charter schools were either no better, or worse than, traditional public schools.

The performance pay experiment that Duncan imposed on the Chicago Public Schools, known as the “Teacher Advancement Program,” had equally dismal results.

Merit pay schemes have long been criticized by teachers’ unions and education advocates for driving teachers to narrow the curriculum to cover only what is assessed on tests–and for pitting teachers against each other for a limited pool of money, thus breaking down teacher collaboration and creating disincentives for educators to share effective teaching techniques.

A report issued last May by Mathematica Policy Research on the merit-pay program that Arne initiated in Chicago reveals that paying teachers according to test scores didn’t increase student achievement whatsoever.

Thus, every major initiative that Arne Duncan is currently advocating on a national level has been shown by non-partisan research institutions to be ineffective at best.

One teacher from Detroit opened our meeting with Arne by summarizing the results of our “pre-assessment,” saying, “What you are doing is stepping up privatization, charterization, and segregation and inequality…and you know that.”

Our “lesson” then began by providing context to our essential question: What is a quality education?

I explained that I was a seventh-grade humanities teacher in the Seattle Public Schools until the budget cuts hit, and I was laid off. I then expressed my displeasure with his decision to reject a call from Congress to tap some of the Race to the Top funds in order to save some of the projected 200,000 to 300,000 teaching jobs that will be cut in the upcoming school year.

What follows is the transcription (taken from my audio recording) of our exchange. Note that I use the “Socratic seminar” teaching method that stresses asking open-ended questions to allow for the student to develop High Order Thinking skills, such as analysis, evaluation and creativity:

Mr. Hagopian: I really need an answer to my questions about the recent Stanford study that was funded by the Walton Family. As soon as that study showed that charters underperformed public schools, I don’t know why you didn’t change policy.

Arne: There is a real mix of charter schools. You have good charter schools, you have medium charter schools, you have bad charter schools. And so I just think we need more good schools in this country…I have said good charter schools are part of the solution and bad charter schools are part of the problem. So you can’t tar or paint everyone with one brush. The reality is much more complex than that.

Mr. Hagopian: I’ve heard that response that you have given, but what still doesn’t make sense to me is…that the problem with charters is that you put public funds under private control. So if public schools on the whole are outperforming charter schools on the whole, then why don’t we use the system where public funds stay under public control, and then we bring in innovation and resources to the public schools?…What is the advantage of charters?

Arne: There is nothing inherently good or bad about charters…

As I looked around the room, I noticed my educator colleagues taking mental note that Arne clearly hadn’t done his homework on the charter school issue–and thus provided an incomplete answer that could impact his overall grade for the lesson. I realized then that I needed to step in with some facts to help scaffold this activity for Arne.

Mr. Hagopian: I [have also] taught in Washington D.C….I taught 10 minutes from the White House–I would drive by the White House, and then I’m in a school with a hole in the ceiling, and it rains into the class.

Then I would get charter school students who were kicked out of their school come November. But what happened? When they get kicked out of their school, the funds don’t follow them. The funds stay in the privatized charter school, but my class size rises. That is a flawed system that has to change.

Our lesson concluded with an informal summative assessment of Arne’s analysis of our essential question about “What is a quality education?” Chicago teacher Danielle Ciesielski began the assessment by questioning Arne about his support for scripted lessons in Chicago that eliminated teacher creativity, ended project-based learning and narrowed the curriculum to pre-approved seminars.

Arne: To be clear, we [the Department of Education] want curriculum to be driven by the local level, pushing that. We are by law prohibited from directing curriculum. We don’t have a curriculum department.

Mr. Hagopian: I have to interject on that point. Because I think that merit pay…

Arne: Let me finish, let me finish…

Mr. Hagopian: …Directly influences curriculum. When you have teachers scrambling and pitted against each other for a small amount of money [based on how their students perform on a test], what it does is narrow the curriculum to what’s on the test, even if you don’t set curriculum specifically. So I think you have to address that.

Arne: I will. No one is mandating merit pay.

Mr. Hagopian: But you support it though?

Arne: I do, I do…

Mr. Hagopian: So you support narrowing the curriculum.

Arne: Can I finish? It’s a voluntary program. Schools and districts and unions are working together on some really innovative things.

Mr. Hagopian: Merit pay isn’t part of Race to the Top?

Arne’s non-answer to my direct question was troubling, and I hoped my rhetorical question at the end of this exchange would push him to a deeper understanding of our topic.

While Arne’s performance during our lesson was disappointing, none of us educators was surprised, given his chronic absenteeism from the realm of pedagogy. As a spokesperson for Arne recently admitted to the media, his only instructional experience came as a youngster when “his mother ran an after-school program for underprivileged kids in a church basement, and he was both a student there and a tutor.”

At the end of our lesson, we had to acknowledge that we failed in our objective to help Arne develop the concept of a quality education, and my belief that all students can succeed was truly tested. Determined not to give up even on the most challenging of students, however, we recommend Arne meet with the following specialists for these targeted interventions:

• Parents: Don’t let Arne close your child’s school. If the federal government can bail out the banks and find the money to bomb children in Afghanistan, then we know there is enough money to build a world-class education system in your neighborhood. Demonstrate and speak out for the funding your school deserves rather than let it be shut down or privatized.

• Students: You are not a number generated by a Scantron machine. You are a passionate, creative young person who can change the world. Refuse to be categorized solely by a test score and demand an education that speaks to who you are and what is important to your community.

• Teachers: Unions brought us the weekend. They are indispensable, don’t let Arne bust your union. Fight to make your union stronger. Replicate the success of the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE) in Chicago–the reform caucus newly elected to run the Chicago Teachers Union–with its vision of social justice education and social movement unionism in unflinching opposition to those who would seek to profit off of the public schools.

With this action plan of parents, students and teachers finding common cause in building their own vision of a quality education apart from that of Corporate America, Arne Duncan may, despite himself, get the education he so desperately needs.

——-

Jesse Hagopian is a teacher in Seattle who lost his job due to budget cuts and a founding member of the progressive union caucus Social Equality Educators within the Seattle Education Association.

What Race to the Top Really Means

This post is for Seattle.

We haven’t had to face this yet but if it is determined by the Governor and the legislature that the state of Washington needs to more aggressively go after Race to the Top funds, this is what will happen in Seattle. It is happening in other states around the country so don’t think it can’t happen here.

This is from the New York Times, published on July 18, 2010

“A Popular Principal, Wounded by Government’s Good Intentions”

by Michael Winerip

Joyce Irvine was removed July 1 as principal of Wheeler Elementary in Burlington, Vt., to comply with rules allowing the district to seek stimulus funds.BURLINGTON, Vt. — It’s hard to find anyone here who believes that Joyce Irvine should have been removed as principal of Wheeler Elementary School.

John Mudasigana, one of many recent African refugees whose children attend the high-poverty school, says he is grateful for how Ms. Irvine and her teachers have helped his five children. “Everything is so good about the school,” he said, before taking his daughter Evangeline, 11, into the school’s dental clinic.

Ms. Irvine’s most recent job evaluation began, “Joyce has successfully completed a phenomenal year.” Jeanne Collins, Burlington’s school superintendent, calls Ms. Irvine “a leader among her colleagues” and “a very good principal.”

Beth Evans, a Wheeler teacher, said, “Joyce has done a great job,” and United States Senator Bernie Sanders noted all the enrichment programs, including summer school, that Ms. Irvine had added since becoming principal six years ago.

“She should not have been removed,” Mr. Sanders said in an interview. “I’ve walked that school with her — she seemed to know the name and life history of every child.”

Ms. Irvine wasn’t removed by anyone who had seen her work (often 80-hour weeks) at a school where 37 of 39 fifth graders were either refugees or special-ed children and where, much to Mr. Mudasigana’s delight, his daughter Evangeline learned to play the violin.

Ms. Irvine was removed because the Burlington School District wanted to qualify for up to $3 million in federal stimulus money for its dozen schools.

And under the Obama administration rules, for a district to qualify, schools with very low test scores, like Wheeler, must do one of the following: close down; be replaced by a charter (Vermont does not have charters); remove the principal and half the staff; or remove the principal and transform the school.

And since Ms. Irvine had already “worked tirelessly,” as her evaluation said, to “successfully” transform the school last fall to an arts magnet, even she understood her removal was the least disruptive option.

“Joyce Irvine versus millions,” Ms. Irvine said. “You can buy a lot of help for children with that money.”

Burlington faced the difficult choice because performance evaluations for teachers and principals based on test results, as much as on local officials’ judgment, are a hallmark of the two main competitive grant programs the Obama administration developed to spur its initiatives: the stimulus and Race to the Top.

“I was distraught,” said Ms. Irvine, 57, who was removed July 1. “I loved being principal — I put my heart and soul into that school for six years.” Still, she counts herself lucky that the superintendent moved her to an administrative job — even if it will pay considerably less.

“I didn’t want to lose her, she’s too good,” Ms. Collins said, adding that the school’s low scores were the result of a testing system that’s “totally inappropriate” for Wheeler’s children.

Justin Hamilton, a spokesman for the United States Department of Education, noted that districts don’t have to apply for the grants, that the rules are clear and that federal officials do not remove principals. But Burlington officials say that not applying in such hard times would have shortchanged students.

At the heart of things is whether the testing system under the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 can fairly assess schools full of middle-class children, as well as a school like Wheeler, with a 97 percent poverty rate and large numbers of refugees, many with little previous education.

President Obama’s Blueprint for Reform says that “instead of a single snapshot, we will recognize progress and growth.” Ms. Collins says if a year’s progress for each student were the standard, Wheeler would score well. However, the reality is that measuring every student’s yearly growth statewide is complex, and virtually all states, including Vermont, rely on a school’s annual test scores.

Under No Child rules, a student arriving one day before the state math test must take it. Burlington is a major resettlement area, and one recent September, 28 new students — from Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Sudan — arrived at Wheeler and took the math test in October.

Ms. Irvine said that in a room she monitored, 15 of 18 randomly filled in test bubbles. The math tests are word problems. A sample fourth-grade question: “Use Xs to draw an array for the sum of 4+4+4.” Five percent of Wheeler’s refugee students scored proficient in math.

About half the 230 students are foreign-born, collectively speaking 30 languages. Many have been traumatized; a third see one of the school’s three caseworkers. During Ms. Irvine’s tenure, suspensions were reduced to 7 last year, from 100.

Students take the reading test after one year in the country. Ms. Irvine tells a story about Mr. Mudasigana’s son Oscar and the fifth-grade test.

Oscar needed 20 minutes to read a passage on Neil Armstrong landing his Eagle spacecraft on the moon; it should have taken 5 minutes, she said, but Oscar was determined, reading out loud to himself.

The first question asked whether the passage was fact or fiction. “He said, ‘Oh, Mrs. Irvine, man don’t go on the moon, man don’t go on the back of eagles, this is not true,’ ” she recalled. “So he got the five follow-up questions wrong — penalized for a lack of experience.”

Thirteen percent of foreign-born students, 4 percent of special-ed students and 23 percent of the entire school scored proficient in reading.

Before Mr. Obama became president, Burlington officials began working to transform Wheeler to an arts magnet, in hopes of improving socioeconomic integration.

While doing her regular job, Ms. Irvine also developed a new arts curriculum. She got a grant for a staff trip to the Kennedy Center in Washington for arts training. She rented vans so teachers could visit arts magnets in nearby states. She created partnerships with local theater groups and artists. In English class, to learn characterization, children now write a one-person play and perform it at Burlington’s Very Merry Theater.

A sign of her effectiveness: an influx of new students, so that half the early grades will consist of middle-class pupils this fall.

Ms. Irvine predicts that in two years, when these new “magnet” students are old enough to take the state tests, scores will jump, not because the school is necessarily better, but because the tests are geared to the middle class.

Senator Sanders said that while the staff should be lauded for working at one of Vermont’s most challenging schools, it has been stigmatized.

“I applaud the Obama people for paying attention to low-income kids and caring,” said Mr. Sanders, a leftist independent. “But to label the school as failing and humiliate the principal and teachers is grossly unfair.”

The district has replaced Ms. Irvine with an interim principal and will conduct a search for a replacement.

And Ms. Irvine, who hoped to finish her career on the front lines, working with children, will be Burlington’s new school improvement administrator.

“Her students made so much progress,” Ms. Collins said. “What’s happened to her is not at all connected to reality.”

The Art of Teaching (and the Automatons of “Education Reform”)

In light of the recent New York Times article about robo-teachers that Dora found, here’s a re-post of a related article I wrote in January. — sp:

I came across a Seattle magazine article from 2008 the other day called “Hot Button: Math Problems.” It said that Seattle Public Schools math teachers are being forced to exactly replicate what someone in Japan has deemed a “perfect lesson” right down to where they must stand in the classroom.

“The district is also trying to improve teaching methodology. [Seattle Public Schools’ K-12 math program manager Rosalind] Wise wants her math teachers to take advantage of all the new information about how to teach. For example, next year in every middle school, one math teacher will work with a “math coach” to develop a monthly “perfect math lesson,” in which everything, from the concept to where the teacher stands, is planned. Then this lesson will be taught in front of all the other math teachers in a “studio classroom,” so they can see it and copy it. This approach has been adopted from a Japanese model with the idea of standardizing instruction and giving teachers a precise and well-thought-out plan for teaching.” – Bob Geballe, Seattle Magazine

The fact that this lesson comes from Japan which recently unveiled the first fully automated robot teacher might make one wonder if teach-bots might well be the ideal of certain “education reformers” who seem to have such disdain for living and breathing teachers and, indeed, call them “human capital” instead of human beings. Robots aren’t likely to form unions, ask for fair working conditions and rights, will never need to take a leave of absence for illness or a sick child, and they can surely be programmed to stand wherever anyone wants them to all day long if need be!

Such authoritarian micromanaging of a professional individual is pretty bizarre.

It’s also laughable.

Sure, there is some pedagogical, experiential wisdom applicable to teaching, but so much of what goes into good teaching is not so readily measurable — and certainly not determined by where a teachers stands in the classroom.

Teaching demands a great deal of a person — heart, mind, theatrics, management skills, quick thinking, a love of children, a love of knowledge, structure to keep things in order and a degree of predictability, as well as flexibility when a changing situation merits it, creativity and the ability to provide guidance that does not stifle the creativity of a child.

Teaching is not a profession one enters if one wishes to be rich or lazy. Most public school teachers work long hours, buy supplies out of their own money and are not paid as well as people in other fields.

Yet there are some who are taking aim at our teachers right now. Ganging up on them, in fact, in the guise of “education reform.” Though they have no teaching experience themselves, these powerful or wealthy individuals and their allied organizations are telling teachers what to teach, how to teach, even where to stand in the classroom. They want to test students every chance they get and measure teachers’ worth by those standardized, computerized tests. They want to tie teachers’ pay to these test scores, regardless of whether the child is learning in ways that can’t be measured by tests, and punish teachers financially if children don’t test well, regardless of what else may factor into a child’s test scores.

I guarantee that this approach will stifle the very magic and soul of teaching.

And it will fail.

Here’s why: Teaching is an art – not a computer app. The so-called “reformers” apparently do not understand that simple yet profound fact. By art, I mean it is a mastery that comes from a deft weaving of multiple skills that cannot be summarized in bullet points or PowerPoints or measured by computerized tests.

How, for example, do you measure that “Aha!” moment when a child understands something for the first time? It will never show up in on an SAT or WASL – or the new MAP (trademarked) tests that all Seattle public schools kids are being forced to take, even in kindergarten. But those moments are the real measure of successful teaching.

Here in Seattle, a Washington DC-based enterprise that calls itself “the National Council on Teacher Quality” issued a “report” late last year allegedly assessing Seattle’s public schools’ 3,300 teachers. They were invited here quietly by the Alliance for Education, a local enterprise which claims to be a fundraiser for Seattle’s public schools, but clearly is involved in much more of the school district’s workings than benign gift-giving (as some local parents have figured out).

In fact, it is not clear why the Alliance invited this politically connected, privately funded operation to bring its services to our district. Surely the $14,000 price tag of this report is money that could have been better spent in the classrooms. A number of Seattle parents made this very point in the blogs and on the Seattle Times’ site.

Might this report have something to do with influencing the teachers’ contract that is up for renewal this year?

The NCTQ’s claim that this “report” was done on behalf of the 46,000 kids of SPS is quite plainly false. No children asked NCTQ to turn its hypocritical inquisition lamp on their teachers.

They claimed that they are here to tell the district how to manage its “human capital’’ –i.e. its teachers. “Human capital”? That’s a very revealing statement about how operations like NCTQ view teachers.

NCTQ recently wrote a report for Colorado public schools with advice on how that state could qualify for federal “Race to the Top” funds. Unfortunately President Obama’s Education Secretary and hoops buddy, Arne Duncan, has a very mixed record from his tenure as “CEO” of Chicago’s public schools, but is pushing two main demands on states—charter schools and merit pay for teachers.

One of these demands is to allow privatization of our public schools via charters. Another is to force “merit pay.” What does that mean? Someone will decide that some teachers should be paid more than others most likely based on student test scores. Who is going to want to teach the struggling students, the students with dyslexia or A.D.D., the underprivileged kids, the ones whose abilities won’t register on a standardized computerized test? Who will want to or be able to teach children with their heart and soul if the only thing that will matter and keep their job is a test score? They will teach to the test and the magic will be gone.

Which brings me to the NCTQ “report.”

Of all the issues and concerns facing my kids in Seattle Public Schools, whether my kids’ teachers take a Monday or Friday off for sick leave is not one of them.

And yet, in its so-called “report,” NCTQ goes to great lengths to outline and graph which teachers in which schools took sick leave, and how, for some reason, sick leave is bad and, by the way, shouldn’t be allowed on Mondays or Fridays. I guess a Seattle Public Schools teacher who has a child who contracts Swine Flu on Monday or Friday, is out of luck.

The presumption underlying much of this “report” is that these professionals are a bunch of lazy, untrustworthy cheats who need to be badgered and punished.

Higher on the list of my — and many parents’– concerns are: Class size. My child is one of 29 this year. We have a superintendent who has cited some unnamed study that says class size don’t matter, all you need is a brilliant teacher.

First, show me the study. Actually, forget the study; any parent would rather have their child receive 1/20th of their teacher’s attention rather than 1/29th of it. It’s plain common sense and one of the chief reasons some families choose private schools over public – smaller class sizes and greater individual attention. (And perhaps the reason Seattle’s School Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson chose to send her own child to the highest funded school in the system, which touts smaller class sizes.) It’s a no-brainer. In fact, I’ll counter with another study that shows that class sizes do matter: “Smaller is Better : First-hand Reports of Early Grade Class Size Reduction in New York City Public Schools” (Also see: Class Size Matters)

So why did Seattle’s school superintendent lay off over 165 teachers last year when enrollment is up 1,200? Why does Seattle have larger classes when voters voted for funds to create smaller class sizes?

Also on the list: Everyday Math – where to begin? It’s quite clear that schools and teachers are trying their best to work through and around this poor unclear textbook and its idiotic “spiraling” sequence. WASL math scores are down since the district adopted EDM, so why are we continuing on this path to failure? (Last year the district voted to adopt the controversial high school textbook in the same problematic series, Discovering Math, and is being taken to court for it.) And where are the resources to teach Singapore Math, which the district also voted to adopt but has neglected?

Why are our children being sent to learn in seismically unsafe buildings that the district has failed to maintain? Why don’t ALL schools in the district offer the same amount of enrichment? How can Seattle’s proposed new student assignment plan be equitable when not all the schools are equitable? Why does Seattle have one of the largest central administration budgets and staff in the entire state of Washington? (See SPS parent and analyst Meg Diaz’s report on the district’s budgetary shell-game: “Central Administration Efficiency in Seattle Public Schools”) How can we protect Seattle’s many strong schools and programs against the corrosive influences of privatization?

I’m very concerned to read in the Diaz Report that Seattle School District has one of the largest, overstaffed central administration offices in the state. A state audit last year found SPS 39% overstaffed. Why can’t we parents demand an instant cut there, and tell them to bring back our teachers?

Those are the sorts of educational concerns on my mind.

Yet the so-called “education reformers” would have us all believe that the only issue that matters, the one cause for all that ails public schools is not chronic underfunding or district mismanagement, but teachers. They would have you believe they are the number one reason a child may be failing in school. (See “Gates Foundation gives $335M for teacher quality” by Donna Gordon Blankinship. Although Gates really ought to read the recent analysis by Vanderbilt University’s National Center on Performance Incentives that found that merit pay doesn’t work, before he throws more money at this dubious “reform.” See: Study: Texas’ teacher merit pay program hasn’t boosted student performance, Dallas Morning News, Nov. 9, 2009)

In the process of fomenting their case, the reformers tend to humiliate and demonize teachers and try to rally parents to do the same. (I’ve witnessed ‘pro-reform’ local elected officials shamefully do this in Seattle). And their end goal is clear: they want to weaken the teacher’s union, exert more control over teachers, hire cheaper, younger teachers (Teach for America style), and then open privately run charters in our public school systems, diverting public funds into private hands. They may claim they want to “close the achievement” gap, but their solutions are not accomplishing that. A teacher’s union that advocates for fair pay, non-capricious treatment of teachers and job security is an obstacle to the education reformers’ agenda.

They reveal their bizarre corporatist – and dehumanizing – bias when they use terms like “human capital” to describe our children’s teachers. I guess we should expect no less from this group of reformers who also refer to our children as “customers.” (A closer look at their schemes would indicate that they actually think of our kids as “products.”)

The reformers claim to be focused on “closing the achievement gap.” But what causes the gap is far more complicated than what their “solutions” address.

Are any of these other factors being addressed by the likes of NCTQ?:

Socio-economics? Parental involvement? Inept or corrupt school district? Bad curriculum? Hunger? Poverty?

No, none of these matter, according to the “National Council on Teaching Quality” along with the Broad Foundation and the Gates Foundation and all the other “philanthropists” with an agenda.

“Education reform” as it is currently being defined should be filed alongside “Welfare Reform.” i.e. a punitive curtailing of rights and assistance to the most needy amongst us pursued by people in political power with an agenda disguised as an effort (by mostly privileged people of non-color) to help the underprivileged. It is a misleading term, to say the least.

“Education reform” as defined by Arne Duncan, Bill Gates, Eli Broad and co, leads to excessive standardized computerized testing, uniformity of curriculum that quashes creativity, and a punitive approach to learning.

Seattle Public Schools’ motto under the current (Broad Foundation boardmember) superintendent: “Excellence for all. Everyone achieving. Everyone accountable. No excuses.”

Is it a coincidence that a particularly disciplinarian model of private charter schools, Mastery Charters shares this motto: “Excellence. No excuses.”

Who is making up excuses?

You can see where their expectations are. They expect our children and teachers to shirk their duties and make up excuses. Our teachers, one of the most hard-working and underpaid group of professionals in the country. Our children, who will live up to whatever expectations we give them if nurtured properly.

Something is terribly askew here.

The funny thing is, reformites like Gates and Broad et al (a number of whom have never attended nor sent their children to public schools) are so clearly clueless about what goes into teaching and what makes a good teacher. It is a collaborative, cooperative profession — not one that will produce good results if the focus is merely test scores and getting more money than the teacher in the next room.

I believe such “reforms” will ultimately fail because of this lack of intuitive knowledge of the teaching profession. But they may do some serious damage along the way. Which is why Washington State and Seattle should not capitulate to the demands of Race to the Top nor heed the questionable and purchased “analysis” of politically motivated operations like NCTQ.

–sue p.

Gates’ Ultimate Dream of Education

Robo-teach

Gates’ idea of education is students sitting in front of computer screens gaining all of the knowledge and tools that they need to succeed in life, at least at Microsoft, by way of lectures that are broadcast throughout any number of school systems by selected teachers.

I would call that truly being out of touch with how children learn as well as how most humans communicate and interact with each other most effectively but analyzing Gates’ psyche and his world view can be dealt with at another time.

There was an article in the Sunday New York Times that was intriguing and yet disturbing to me.

Some of the comments in this article are priceless, for instance, “The problem with autonomous machines is that people are so unpredictable, especially children.” Jeez, that could be a real problem!

After much thought, I decided to post the article here. Just to let you know, I brought in the images from other sources.

I would love to get comments on this.

Enjoy, or not.

Dora

“Students, Meet your New Teacher, Mr. Robot”

By BENEDICT CAREY and JOHN MARKOFF

Published: July 10, 2010

LOS ANGELES — The boy, a dark-haired 6-year-old, is playing with a new companion.

The two hit it off quickly — unusual for the 6-year-old, who has autism — and the boy is imitating his playmate’s every move, now nodding his head, now raising his arms.

“Like Simon Says,” says the autistic boy’s mother, seated next to him on the floor.

Yet soon he begins to withdraw; in a video of the session, he covers his ears and slumps against the wall.

But the companion, a three-foot-tall robot being tested at the University of Southern California, maintains eye contact and performs another move, raising one arm up high.

Up goes the boy’s arm — and now he is smiling at the machine.

Robo-teacher at the University of Tokyo

In a handful of laboratories around the world, computer scientists are developing robots like this one: highly programmed machines that can engage people and teach them simple skills, including household tasks, vocabulary or, as in the case of the boy, playing, elementary imitation and taking turns.

So far, the teaching has been very basic, delivered mostly in experimental settings, and the robots are still works in progress, a hackers’ gallery of moving parts that, like mechanical savants, each do some things well at the expense of others.

Yet the most advanced models are fully autonomous, guided by artificial intelligence software like motion tracking and speech recognition, which can make them just engaging enough to rival humans at some teaching tasks.

Researchers say the pace of innovation is such that these machines should begin to learn as they teach, becoming the sort of infinitely patient, highly informed instructors that would be effective in subjects like foreign language or in repetitive therapies used to treat developmental problems like autism.

Several countries have been testing teaching machines in classrooms. South Korea, known for its enthusiasm for technology, is “hiring” hundreds of robots as teacher aides and classroom playmates and is experimenting with robots that would teach English.

Already, these advances have stirred dystopian visions, along with the sort of ethical debate usually confined to science fiction. “I worry that if kids grow up being taught by robots and viewing technology as the instructor,” said Mitchel Resnick, head of the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the Media Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “they will see it as the master.”

Robo-teacher in Korea

Most computer scientists reply that they have neither the intention, nor the ability, to replace human teachers. The great hope for robots, said Patricia Kuhl, co-director of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington, “is that with the right kind of technology at a critical period in a child’s development, they could supplement learning in the classroom.”

Lessons From RUBI

“Kenka,” says a childlike voice. “Ken-ka.”

Standing on a polka-dot carpet at a preschool on the campus of the University of California, San Diego, a robot named RUBI is teaching Finnish to a 3-year-old boy.

RUBI looks like a desktop computer come to life: its screen-torso, mounted on a pair of shoes, sprouts mechanical arms and a lunchbox-size head, fitted with video cameras, a microphone and voice capability. RUBI wears a bandanna around its neck and a fixed happy-face smile, below a pair of large, plastic eyes.

It picks up a white sneaker and says kenka, the Finnish word for shoe, before returning it to the floor. “Feel it; I’m a kenka.”

In a video of this exchange, the boy picks up the sneaker, says “kenka, kenka” — and holds up the shoe for the robot to see.

In person they are not remotely humanlike, most of today’s social robots. Some speak well, others not at all. Some move on two legs, others on wheels. Many look like escapees from the Island of Misfit Toys.

They make for very curious company. The University of Southern California robot used with autistic children tracks a person throughout a room, approaching indirectly and pulling up just short of personal space, like a cautious child hoping to join a playground game.

The machine’s only words are exclamations (“Uh huh” for those drawing near; “Awww” for those moving away). Still, it’s hard to shake the sense that some living thing is close by. That sensation, however vague, is enough to facilitate a real exchange of information, researchers say.

Robo-teaching in 2005, California

In the San Diego classroom where RUBI has taught Finnish, researchers are finding that the robot enables preschool children to score significantly better on tests, compared with less interactive learning, as from tapes.

Preliminary results suggest that these students “do about as well as learning from a human teacher,” said Javier Movellan, director of the Machine Perception Laboratory at the University of California, San Diego. “Social interaction is apparently a very important component of learning at this age.”

Like any new kid in class, RUBI took some time to find a niche. Children swarmed the robot when it first joined the classroom: instant popularity. But by the end of the day, a couple of boys had yanked off its arms.

“The problem with autonomous machines is that people are so unpredictable, especially children,” said Corinna E. Lathan, chief executive of AnthroTronix, a Maryland company that makes a remotely controlled robot, CosmoBot, to assist in therapy with developmentally delayed children. “It’s impossible to anticipate everything that can happen.”

The RUBI team hit upon a solution one part mechanical and two parts psychological. The engineers programmed RUBI to cry when its arms were pulled. Its young playmates quickly backed off at the sound.

If the sobbing continued, the children usually shifted gears and came forward — to deliver a hug.

Re-armed and newly sensitive, RUBI was ready to test as a teacher. In a paper published last year, researchers from the University of California, San Diego, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Joensuu in Finland found that the robot significantly improved the vocabulary of nine toddlers.

After testing the youngsters’ knowledge of 20 words and introducing them to the robot, the researchers left RUBI to operate on its own. The robot showed images on its screen and instructed children to associate them with words.

After 12 weeks, the children’s knowledge of the 10 words taught by RUBI increased significantly, while their knowledge of 10 control words did not. “The effect was relatively large, a reduction in errors of more than 25 percent,” the authors concluded.

Researchers in social robotics — a branch of computer science devoted to enhancing communication between humans and machines — at Honda Labs in Mountain View, Calif., have found a similar result with their robot, a three-foot character called Asimo, which looks like a miniature astronaut. In one 20-minute session the machine taught grade-school students how to set a table — improving their accuracy by about 25 percent, a recent study found.

At the University of Southern California, researchers have had their robot, Bandit, interact with children with autism. In a pilot study, four children with the diagnosis spent about 30 minutes with this robot when it was programmed to be socially engaging and another half-hour when it behaved randomly, more like a toy. The results are still preliminary, said David Feil-Seifer, who ran the study, but suggest that the children spoke more often and spent more time in direct interaction when the robot was responsive, compared with when it acted randomly.

Making the Connection

In a lab at the University of Washington, Morphy, a pint-size robot, catches the eye of an infant girl and turns to look at a toy.

No luck; the girl does not follow its gaze, as she would a human’s.

In a video the researchers made of the experiment, the girl next sees the robot “waving” to an adult. Now she’s interested; the sight of the machine interacting registers it as a social being in the young brain. She begins to track what the robot is looking at, to the right, the left, down. The machine has elicited what scientists call gaze-following, an essential first step of social exchange.

“Before they have language, infants pay attention to what I call informational hotspots,” where their mother or father is looking, said Andrew N. Meltzoff, a psychologist who is co-director of university’s Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences. This, he said, is how learning begins.

This basic finding, to be published later this year, is one of dozens from a field called affective computing that is helping scientists discover exactly which features of a robot make it most convincingly “real” as a social partner, a helper, a teacher.

“It turns out that making a robot more closely resemble a human doesn’t get you better social interactions,” said Terrence J. Sejnowski, a neuroscientist at University of California, San Diego. The more humanlike machines look, the more creepy they can seem.

The machine’s behavior is what matters, Dr. Sejnowski said. And very subtle elements can make a big difference.

The timing of a robot’s responses is one. The San Diego researchers found that if RUBI reacted to a child’s expression or comment too fast, it threw off the interaction; the same happened if the response was too slow. But if the robot reacted within about a second and a half, child and machine were smoothly in sync.

Physical rhythm is crucial. In recent experiments at a day care center in Japan, researchers have shown that having a robot simply bob or shake at the same rhythm a child is rocking or moving can quickly engage even very fearful children with autism.

“The child begins to notice something in that synchronous behavior and open up,” said Marek Michalowski of Carnegie Mellon University, who collaborated on the studies. Once that happens, he said, “you can piggyback social behaviors onto the interaction, like eye contact, joint attention, turn taking, things these kids have trouble with.”

One way to begin this process is to have a child mimic the physical movements of a robot and vice versa. In a continuing study financed by the National Institutes of Health, scientists at the University of Connecticut are conducting therapy sessions for children with autism using a French robot called Nao, a two-foot humanoid that looks like an elegant Transformer toy. The robot, remotely controlled by a therapist, demonstrates martial arts kicks and chops and urges the child to follow suit; then it encourages the child to lead.

“I just love robots, and I know this is therapy, but I don’t know — I think it’s just fun,” said Sam, an 8-year-old from New Haven with Asperger’s syndrome, who recently engaged in the therapy.

This simple mimicry seems to build a kind of trust, and increase sociability, said Anjana Bhat, an assistant professor in the department of education who is directing the experiment. “Social interactions are so dependent on whether someone is in sync with you,” Dr. Bhat said. “You walk fast, they walk fast; you go slowly, they go slowly — and soon you are interacting, and maybe you are learning.”

Personality matters, too, on both sides. In their studies with Asimo, the Honda robot, researchers have found that when the robot teacher is “cooperative” (“I am going to put the water glass here; do you think you can help me by placing the water glass on the same place on your side?”), children 4 to 6 did much better than when Asimo lectured them, or allowed them to direct themselves (“place the cup and saucer anywhere you like”). The teaching approach made less difference with students ages 7 to 10.

“The fact is that children’s reactions to a robot may vary widely, by age and by individual,” said Sandra Okita, a Columbia University researcher and co-author of the study.

If robots are to be truly effective guides, in short, they will have to do what any good teacher does: learn from students when a lesson is taking hold and when it is falling flat.

Learning From Humans

“Do you have any questions, Simon?”

On a recent Monday afternoon, Crystal Chao, a graduate student in robotics at the Georgia Institute of Technology, was teaching a five-foot robot named Simon to put away toys. She had given some instructions — the flower goes in the red bin, the block in the blue bin — and Simon had correctly put away several of these objects. But now the robot was stumped, its doughboy head tipped forward, its fawn eyes blinking at a green toy water sprinkler.

Dr. Chao repeated her query, perhaps the most fundamental in all of education: Do you have any questions?

“Let me see,” said Simon, in a childlike machine voice, reaching to pick up the sprinkler. “Can you tell me where this goes?”

“In the green bin,” came the answer.

Simon nodded, dropping it in that bin.

“Makes sense,” the robot said.

In addition to tracking motion and recognizing language, Simon accumulates knowledge through experience.

Just as humans can learn from machines, machines can learn from humans, said Andrea Thomaz, an assistant professor of interactive computing at Georgia Tech who directs the project. For instance, she said, scientists could equip a machine to understand the nonverbal cues that signal “I’m confused” or “I have a question” — giving it some ability to monitor how its lesson is being received.

To ask, as Dr. Chao did: Do you have any questions?

This ability to monitor and learn from experience is the next great frontier for social robotics — and it probably depends, in large part, on unraveling the secrets of how the human brain accumulates information during infancy.

In San Diego, researchers are trying to develop a human-looking robot with sensors that approximate the complexity of a year-old infant’s abilities to feel, see and hear. Babies learn, seemingly effortlessly, by experimenting, by mimicking, by moving their limbs. Could a machine with sufficient artificial intelligence do the same? And what kind of learning systems would be sufficient?

The research group has bought a $70,000 robot, built by a Japanese company, that is controlled by a pneumatic pressure system that will act as its senses, in effect helping it map out the environment by “feeling” in addition to “seeing” with embedded cameras. And that is the easy part.

The much steeper challenge is to program the machine to explore, as infants do, and build on moment-to-moment experience. Ideally its knowledge will be cumulative, not only recalling the layout of a room or a house, but using that stored knowledge to make educated guesses about a new room.

The researchers are shooting for nothing less than capturing the foundation of human learning — or, at least, its artificial intelligence equivalent. If robots can learn to learn, on their own and without instruction, they can in principle make the kind of teachers that are responsive to the needs of a class, even an individual child.

Parents and educators would certainly have questions about robots’ effectiveness as teachers, as well as ethical concerns about potential harm they might do. But if social robots take off in the way other computing technologies have, parents may have more pointed ones: Does this robot really “get” my child? Is its teaching style right for my son’s needs, my daughter’s talents?

That is, the very questions they would ask about any teacher.

Heroes

East Harlem Teacher Ed Simon

There are countless numbers of teachers who go to their schools everyday and do everything in their power to bring our children along and prepare them for life.

I came across Every Day Heroes in Love and Learning this morning and want to share with you some priceless photographs.

I Met With Arne Duncan Yesterday

I met with Arne Duncan today

…but let me start at the beginning of my day, actually, I will begin with the events of the night before when I was at the AFT, American Federation of Teachers, convention. This will not be a short story so get comfortable.

I was invited to meet with the Chicago delegation that was participating at the AFT Convention and had the great pleasure of meeting Michael Brunson who is now the new Recording Officer for the Chicago Teachers’ Union and Karen Lewis, the new president of the Chicago Teachers’ Union. See: CORE Wins Leadership of Chicago Teachers’ Union and Karen Lewis’ Acceptance Speech

They were fresh from their victory in Chicago where they took over the union leadership and are hard at work at taking back their schools after several years of Arne Duncan and charter schools.

Listening to Ms. Thomas speak in person, I could well understand how she won the leadership in Chicago. Her passion, warmth and intelligence come through in everything that she says. She is a great speaker and an impassioned educator.

Everyone there was warm and friendly and I enjoyed meeting new people and sharing our stories.

During the course of the evening, I heard that something was to happen at Aviation High School where Arne Duncan was to be speaking the following day.

Someone said that I should bring my camera and record the events. See, this is when I really start feeling like a blogger. I thought that sounded interesting and intriguing so I decided to go the next day.

As fate would have it, my internet went down just as I was getting directions to the high school. I remembered that there would be a bus leaving the convention center to head to Aviation High School so I caught the next bus downtown and was fortunate enough to be able to catch a ride on the convention bus.

Aviation High School, by the way, is a small school with an all-district draw. It is located in Des Moines, Washington which is about a 30 minute ride from downtown Seattle. The focus of this school is in the area of science and technology. It has been open for three years and it is my understanding that they will be moving into a new building shortly.

On board the bus I saw people who I knew and began to make new friends as well.  There was a lot of positive energy and camaraderie during the ride. People were laughing, chanting and sharing stories. I was having a great time. People were making signs and I made one too. Mine said “parents FOR teachers”.

I felt like I was on the Magic School Bus. It was a gregarious and upbeat group and just about every seat was taken.

During the ride someone announced that about 50 people protested Race to the Top in front of the Wild Ginger where Arne Duncan was having lunch with a select few.

When we arrived at Aviation High School, we pulled up and the police officers said that we could not be on the school grounds so we got off at the exit to the school and headed to the sidewalk where we waved signs and chanted. The sun was out, it was a beautiful day and everything was going well.

About 45 minutes into our sign waving and cars honking, three well-dressed individuals appeared and asked who our “leader” was.  One person came forward and they spoke for a while.

The offer had been made to have an opportunity to speak to Senator Murray’s staff after the event to let them know what our concerns were. They also said that we could come in an listen to Duncan but we had to leave our signs outside. That sounded reasonable. I wasn’t there to disrupt the proceedings, none of us were.

I thought, OK. It’s not the Senator herself but it wouldn’t hurt to talk with her staff so I saw this as an opportunity to share our views. After about an hour of sign waving and chanting, all of the guests had arrived so some of us opted to stay and hear Arne Duncan while the majority of people needed to return to the convention.

When we got to the table to sign in where there was a plethora of LEV sticker buttons, some of Murray’s people said that the event was for people who lived in Washington so the AFT members from other states were not invited.

I said “I live in Seattle, I’m a parent and I vote” and I walked on in. The rest of the contingent soon followed.

We got inside and there were seats in the back rows that they indicated we were to sit in. That was fine with me. At this point I had my reporter’s hat on, my notepad, (still no laptop) and extra pens to record so I was ready to go.

Looking around I saw two familiar faces, Melissa Westbrook and Stephanie Jones  with CPPS, but that was it. I suppose because it was not in Seattle there would not be too many Seattleites in the crowd. Total count not including press and the entourage of Murray and Duncan was about 140 people at most sitting in the gym.

Because it was a gym and the mic didn’t work well (do they ever at any school?) and there were huge fans in the back of the gym that made a lot of noise, it was hard to catch the introductions or much of what any of them said but I will share what I heard and saw.

The sound bites and rhetoric would start flowing from Murray and Duncan so I will limit repeating  those remarks. You’ve heard them before and you will hear them again. What was most interesting is what the other guests had to say.

By the way, there were to be questions from the audience, but I’ll get to that later.

So Murray starts out with “These are challenging times for all of us” I told you there would be a lot of that.  I have no qualms with Senator Murray but it’s just amazing to see how much one can say and yet not say as a politician.

She begins to introduce Aviation High School as a school where private and philanthropic organizations have come together with public education to develop this school where technical skills are developed and that she wanted Duncan to see what was being done in the state of Washington.

Arne responded with a few platitudes. He comes across as a good spokesperson, kind of slick and almost like a jock.

The panel was introduced and I only got maybe 50% of what they were saying. There was the principal and “CEO” of the school, just like a charter school, a CEO of some Seattle based business, a student of AHS, a recent graduate of AHS and a teacher from AHS who used to work at Microsoft. There was another person on the panel but I didn’t understand who he was.

What I did catch was the following.

The moderator asked the AHS student what he liked best about the high school. The student said that he liked having project based curriculum where he could create, project manage and present to professionals what he had designed. (Now let me say right here that this is the exact opposite of what Arne Duncan’s reform has done. His RTTT directives are about a standardized curriculum and testing based on a narrow scope of information.)

The recent graduate of AHS answered the question by saying that when she began her internship upon graduation she felt confident about what she was asked to do. She said it was “no big deal, I’ve done this before”. She felt that AHS had prepared her well for her first job.

Again, I must describe the parallel between AHS and Nova, our alternative high school in Seattle. The students are prepared for life in general at Nova not only because of the project-based learning but also because of the decision-making process that happens at Nova. The Nova students have the responsibility of organizing and developing with staff what happens in the school, from deciding on and creating their own events to interviewing potential staff and making decisions along with the faculty on who would be the right fit for the school and the culture. The students also take complete responsibility for their course choices working alongside a core coordinator. By the time these students graduate, they are ready to take on life as responsible citizens.

The difference being that Nova has been around 13 years longer than AHS.Both are successful and neither is a charter school. One receives business backing and the other struggles with the same financial picture that all of the other high schools have in Seattle.

The next question from the moderator was why is AHS successful and does it have to do with the meshing of the private sector (a term that was bandied about many times) and public backing.

The principal said that they see it as a prototype, (as Nova was to our new STEM school in Seattle. The principal of STEM conferred with Nova’s principal, Mark Perry, on Nova’s successful model of project based learning.)

Let me back track a little here so that you understand why I keep bringing up Nova. Our school as well as other alternative schools in Seattle, have been under siege since the reign of our Broad Board of Director’s Superintendent, Dr. Goodloe-Johnson. We have had our schools closed, moved and marginalized and now we dealing with curriculum alignment which has no bearing on project based classes and would destroy the successful curriculum that has been developed over the years in our alternative schools. Hence,the parallels.

The question was then asked of the “private sector employer” regarding what makes AHS successful and he said that the graduates are able to think critically and solve problems (the antithesis of RTTT with narrowed scope of focus on subjects by way of curriculum alignment, high stakes testing and merit pay).

Then there was a question posed by the moderator about the “culture” of AHS.

The principal stated that there is no basketball or football at AHS, just like Nova, because they wanted to use their resources elsewhere. At Nova, if the students want to have a sport within the school, it is their responsibility to develop the program. Nova has roller derby, Ultimate Frisbee and Parcore.

Then the principal said that their school was not about high school proficiency exams or the WASL, it is about what students learn and experience every day. Excellent!

The moderator then asked a question about “failure”. (Tell me this whole thing wasn’t scripted).

The AHS student said that it is how they learn. He said that “it’s the best way to learn”.

The recent grad said that they still continue to fail but at the school that they attend now, they don’t give “F’s” so it’s OK to try something outside of their comfort zone. (Just like Nova, you receive credit but not a grade).

I kept thinking about how this would fit into Arne’s framework of RTTT education reform. My answer in two words is, it doesn’t.

Then Arne had his opportunity to speak. This is what I wrote down. “Facing huge challenges”. “I’m optimistic”. “Celebrate diversity”. “Need to have 10 more, 100 more of these (schools) around the country”. We do, Arne.

Then there was applause.

Wow, one sound bite right after another. I wrote it the way that I heard it.

Then there was a question to Patty Murray of how “this project based approach” can be implemented on a Federal level.

She never answered that question but said something else that I couldn’t catch.

Then Arne jumped in again, more rhetoric and more applause.

At about this time, someone whispered to me that if we didn’t ask any questions during the Q and A period, we would be able to meet with Murray’s staff, otherwise the deal was off. I laughed out loud and said “that’s b——-“and shook my head. I was not going to agree to that deal. I had come there to listen and report but after that remark I decided that I would ask a question and a rather directed one at that.

At this point people from the audience were introduced. First up was Mary Lindquist, WEA President, who asked the question “What can we do to support our teachers?” She said that AHS has an exciting program and that there are also programs similar to it throughout the state such as the Tacoma School of the Arts which receives private and public support.

Then Arne responded to Ms. Lindquist concern regarding, I guess, the support of teachers with saying  “I am desperately worried about this.”

Patty Murray said that they were working on a supplemental bill to try to get the RTTT funding through the Senate. (Arne Duncan’s RTTT funding request got a kibosh from Congress and instead Congress added money to keep teachers on. Thank you for that. Now it has to get through the Senate. Arne was all up in arms about it but Congress is beginning to question the validity of the RTTT demands, particularly the charter school issue. Anyway, we’ll deal with that in another post.)

I would highly recommend that an e-mail to Patty Murray would be in order at this time if we don’t want the demands of RTTT in the state of Washington.

Then Randy Dorn, the Washington State School Superintendent, was introduced. He said that there are STEM schools throughout the state and that there are schools, I think that he was referring to a particular ESL school, that has extended days and classes on Saturday’s. He said that all of these schools have been created within the existing “rules” I’m not sure what his point was. Was he trying to say that we do have schools similar to charter schools and therefore don’t need to change our laws to accommodate RTTT funding?

Again, an e-mail to Randy Dorn would also be a good idea.

Then Bill Williams, the Executive Director of the Washington State PTA, was introduced. He said that the fixation on test results inhibits learning. Those were his words. Now I am truly starting to question the push by the Seattle PTSA and Kim Howard for all things RTTT. Is there a disconnect between what the State President is saying and what Ramona Hattendorf, the Seattle Council PTSA President and her retinue keep trying to pound away at, MAP testing and merit pay? Inquiring minds want to know. This will be fun to get to the bottom of.

Then Trish Dziko was introduced and started to speak about TAF Academy where there is a 75% population of children of color and a population that is under-served in the district. She said that in the lifetime of her children, there will not be charter schools in Washington so “give us the funding” that is needed.

That remark received a big round of applause.

Then the business person said that there was a business consortium that was going to be giving $50M to fund additional STEM programs. This guy also gave accolades to Arne and Obama for the RTTT initiative. I don’t think these folks understand that RTTT is in in direct conflict to what this guy and others see as positive programs. Project based programs cannot exist within the framework of RTTT initiatives.

Sometimes I think people need to understand what they are applauding.

There were to be questions from the audience at this time but I suppose they decided against that. I had not agreed to the deal of not asking questions and others might not have either.

Patty Murray said that she would take “all of this” back with her to DC.

Arne said something about being “serious about competing in the global economy” and then Arne acknowledged the principal of AHS on the job that she was doing. There was a standing ovation for that and then it was over.

Our group was taken to a classroom where there was bottled water on ice, thank goodness for that, and tables set in a semi-circular fashion.

It was interesting how they shuffled us out of the room while Arne was shaking hands but that was OK with me. The last thing that I wanted to do was shake the hand of someone who was causing students and teachers so much grief and destroying schools, neighborhoods and communities around the country.

One of Murray’s staff said that the secretary would be there in about 15 minutes. I thought, secretary, what secretary? Someone is going to be taking notes? Well, whatever. I was glad for the water and a cool room.

We sat around the table and gathered our thoughts. Then someone told us that Secretary Arne Duncan would be with us shortly. Then I thought, oh that secretary! Whoa! Wait a minute, Arne Duncan was going to sit down and talk to us? Yeah, right, OK just like his “Listening Tour” that he had when he was supposedly listening to teachers. parents and business leaders about education in this country and then turned around and did what his intention was all along, RTTT.

Well, he did come into our room, shook our hands as we introduced ourselves and then sat in the chair that was in the middle of the semi-circle.

Jesse Hagopian, a laid off teacher in the first round of rif’s and closures in Seattle, started the conversation. He asked why a school has to be privatized for it to work. How do we fund public schools so that they can function properly? The Credo report states that charter schools are no better than public schools so what is your reasoning behind charter schools?

Duncan said that there are good charter schools and bad charter schools. I had heard him say that before. Some of us think that he is starting to back track from that issue because as one Senator pointed out to Duncan during recent hearings on RTTT funding, charter schools wouldn’t work in rural counties. It’s also been well established that charter schools segregate students and that most do not perform as well as public schools.

He said something about getting additional funding through the Senate, but nothing really addressed Jesse’s questions.

Then a teacher from Detroit began to speak saying that Arne is a union buster and was stepping up the privatization and segregation of public schools. He was angry and went on until someone interrupted him to ask a question.

A Seattle parent asked the question about the bill that will be coming up for a vote regarding state income tax in Washington and if that passes, we will have sustainable revenue for our schools. With that revenue, the demand for charter schools could be replaced with our ability to provide the much-needed funding for public school education in our state.

Then I brought up the concern that there are successful project based schools in Seattle referred to as alternative schools but with the demand for curriculum alignment and standardized testing, these programs could easily be destroyed. I said that he and I seem to have the same concerns and intentions but that the ramifications of testing, performance pay and curriculum alignment on our schools can be damaging.

Duncan mentioned a “well rounded education” passage in his bill that addresses those concerns. I haven’t looked it up yet but will follow-up on that at a later date.

Then a teacher from Chicago talked about her concerns for her students. Her school is surrounded by charter schools so her school receives all of the students that the charter schools discharge due to lack of performance on the part of the student or IEP issues. She said that there is no funding for the public schools to handle the load of special need and low-performing students that they receive back into their system.

Arne answered but it was just rhetoric again. He said that he would look into it.

He said, getting back to my question that the Department of Education can’t devise curriculum, that’s a relief, and that no one has demanded merit pay although he supports it.

He had to leave but shook everyone’s hands again.

After listening to Duncan, I came away with the impression that he thinks that what he is doing is the right thing but is not aware of how his agenda is affecting schools, students and communities. But then again, how could that be? What he did in Chicago he is trying to nationalize now through RTTT. I know that he has heard this all before from teachers and parents in Chicago over the last few years. Then, knowing that it’s not working in Chicago, why is he continuing to think that his idea of education reform will work anywhere else?

I appreciated the fact that he spent time speaking with us but also felt that these conversations needed to happen not only with Duncan but also with our Senators and Representatives.

If you participated in the day’s events, please feel free to add your observations and comments.

Dora