the future is upon us, like a school of pirhanna....

lots of interesting stuff here...some beneath the surface. in other maryland counties, secretary spellings accepted pitches for leniency plans. in one of the highest performing counties, highest in terms of AYP, the county simply reworked a few numbers and boosted special ed students up into the regular student category and BINGO, the disaggregated statistical outcome was miraculously changed. in (our) neighboring county, a committee set up to evaluate this statistical miracle decided, hmmmmmmmmm, this operation looks mighty interesting....

assuming that superintendent grasmick intends to begin her election campaign for lt. governor in md, she certainly has the beginning of a nice, fat, portfolio of support from the current administration.

but no one in the public political spotlight get's their back scratched for free-- and this time, and in deference to her newly formed warrior "fan-club" and her warrior president, madam spellings, i have to hope that the baltimore city folks are going to see that being the very first school system to be sold out, bought, and operated by corporate pirhannas is not the deal they'd prefer...the price of her campaign strategy is way too high....

the scary thing for all of us is, if we allow this to happen, even once, even this once, it will be repeated all over our nation. don't sell out the urban schools-- we will all be in the same boat when reckoning day is here...

U.S. education secretary applauds state move

By Liz Bowie
Sun reporter
March 31, 2006

U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings expressed her support yesterday for the Maryland school board's decision to take over 11 failing middle and high schools in Baltimore.

"To sit idly by with the kind of data and results and chronic failure that has been demonstrated is educational malpractice," Spellings said. "Accountability is meaningless if there is no end of the line."

Spellings said she supports Maryland schools chief Nancy S. Grasmick's attempt to help the schoolchildren of the city. "She is a warrior on No Child Left Behind on behalf of the kids," Spellings said.

Grasmick is the first superintendent in the country to seek the takeover of schools under the four-year-old federal No Child Left Behind Act.

The state board voted Wednesday to approve Grasmick's plan, which calls for four large high schools to be managed by companies or nonprofits that report to the state. The city schools would be given the choice of turning seven middle schools into charters or establishing contracts for a third party to operate them.

Within hours of the vote, Spelling's department issued a statement backing the decision, but her comments yesterday indicated the degree of support for Grasmick in Washington as she battles a barrage of criticism from legislators, politicians and the community.

"I am president of the Nancy S. Grasmick fan club," Spellings said. Grasmick has worked on national commissions and makes regular trips to Washington.

In addition, Spellings, who has been in her job a little more than a year, has made several trips to Maryland schools.

She previously worked on education policy in Texas and helped draft the NCLB before replacing President Bush's first education secretary, Rod Paige of Texas.

National response to Maryland's groundbreaking action came from other camps yesterday as well. The Council of Great City Schools, a national group representing urban districts, issued a statement saying it was "skeptical" of the move.

"State takeovers and other dramatic changes in school governance have not proven to be the silver bullet," the statement said.

The council noted that Baltimore's test scores in the past few years have shown improvements in reading and math in elementary and middle schools.

liz.bowie@baltsun.com

i am going to consider this a statistical gift in favor of a decent pick

18 Apply for School Superintendent Job in Anne Arundel

By Daniel de Vise
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 14, 2006; B05



Eighteen people have applied to be superintendent of schools in Anne Arundel County, fewer than a third of the number who sought the top education job in neighboring Prince George's County this year.

The number could change, as some people may yet apply and others could withdraw, said Bea Gordon of the Maryland Association of Boards of Education, which is conducting the search. Applicant screening began at the end of last month, after several weeks of recruiting. Anne Arundel school board members will see a list of qualified applicants March 25. The new superintendent is to start in July.

The response is on the low side, compared with some recent searches in area school systems. The Prince George's search attracted 66 people to replace the departing Andre J. Hornsby. A search in Prince William County last year netted 44 applicants to succeed Edward L. Kelly. Twenty-two people applied last year for the job in St. Mary's County. The Prince George's system is larger than 75,000-student Anne Arundel; Prince William and St. Mary's are smaller.

Carl W. Smith, executive director of the state school boards group, said a superintendent search turns more on quality than quantity. The Anne Arundel pool, he said, has "18 applicants who are serious candidates for the position."

Some of the Anne Arundel school board's critics have predicted that the well-publicized disputes with the previous superintendent, Eric J. Smith, who resigned at Thanksgiving after a critical internal audit, would scare away potential candidates to replace him.

Konrad M. Wayson, school board president, said he didn't know what to make of the applicant pool: "I haven't seen names or qualifications of any of them yet."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/13/AR2006031301678.html

...what happens when a country falls for the soft bigotry of low expectations.

read me...

"To the extent that students succeed in real learning and teachers in teaching and parents in raising their children to be thoughtful and considerate, they succeed in spite of the education system, not because of it.

The remarkable thing about the public schools isn't that some teachers become demoralized and "burned out," or that some students drop out or do poorly, but that so many teachers and students achieve so much in the face of a system designed to fail."

--Dave Stratman

the above quote is from: YOU'LL NEVER BE GOOD ENOUGH: SCHOOLING AND SOCIAL CONTROL by Dave Stratman from New Democracy, Sept.-Oct. 1998

http://newdemocracyworld.org/control.htm


and now, from the High School Valedictorian:


(Annelise Schantz delivered this speech at a Hudson, MA. high school graduation. Governor Cellucci, a supporter of high stakes tests, was on the stage at the time as Annelise received a long standing ovation led by her fellow graduates.)

***

Umm yeah, so I'm the valedictorian. Number one. But, what separates me from number 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 50, or 120? Nothing but meaningless numbers. What really is the difference between 3.8, 2.9, and 1.5? All these randomly assigned numbers reflect nothing about the true character of an individual. They say nothing about personality. Nothing about desire or will. Nothing about values or morals. Nothing about intelligence. Nothing about creativity. Nothing about heart.

Numbers cannot and will not ever be able to tell you who a person really is. Yet in today's society we are sadly becoming more and more number oriented. Schools today are being forced to teach to the numbers. Children are no longer learning because it is interesting and fun; they are learning to pass the test so that the school will continue to be funded. New mandates across the country and in our own state incorrectly correlate test scores with the worth of teachers and schools. Not once do these new mandates take into account that schools in low income areas will never have as many books, long term students, parent volunteers, or state of the art facilities. How can anyone call these tests fair? Just as class rank and SAT scores say nothing about the true worth of a person, a child's or school's score on a test says nothing about the worth of the school or teachers.

It is disturbing enough that throughout high school, GPA and grades are pushed as the most important things, while learning, the real reason we are in school, falls by the wayside. The MCAS serve as just another set of meaningless numbers that add one more reason to focus on scores and forget learning.

The already teetering learning process, made difficult by the social dynamics of school cliques, disrupted by a constant lack of funding and misplaced values, has been further torn apart by a few meddling politicians and yuppies who were bored and felt the need to create what they call a standard. Who cares that it is completely biased against those with learning disabilities and those in ESL programs. Who cares that the test itself is frighteningly ethnocentric in its rigid definition of what we should be learning. Who cares that all these numbers and standards only help to stamp out independent thought. All that matters is that the head honchos want some numbers that they can spew to the public to prove that they are so helpful to today's school children. Numbers, useless meaningless numbers. I doubt that a single one of these politicians has ever stopped to consider that we are not numbers. We are individuals. How dare they restrict us once more into useless categories of failing, proficient, advanced. Judging us by our competency on a biased test is perhaps the biggest injustice that the state could ever inflict upon us.

Useless information about the double helix shape of DNA or the square root of negative one will not help anyone to survive. Last time I checked, the properties of diffusion and osmosis were interesting but they still were of no help in reality. The battle of 1812 cannot help you prepare a healthy meal and common error C cannot help a jurist in a murder trial. Instead of realizing this, the bureaucracy that claims to be for the people continues to push for the advancement of uniform mediocrity in schools. Learning rote information never taught anyone to think. History, Science, Math, and English won't do you any good if you can't apply them. Formulaic thinking might help one to get good scores on tests but it doesn't do jack in reality.

When will society realize that the only useful skill that high school could ever teach us is the art of using our brain to think independently and express our ideas coherently? With the use of one's brain anything is possible, any problem solvable, any question answerable, any goal reachable. Unfortunately, it is the one thing that many students never learn because they are too busy trying to pass the tests.

Schools are being turned into factories churning out brainless, mindless, opinion-less hacks year after year. Any student that challenges the system is labeled a difficulty. Any teacher that pushes the limits and forces their students to actually use their brains is chastised and labeled extreme. In my five years, I have seen too many wonderful teachers lost or restricted to the box. I have seen too many extraordinary kids give up on school. But no one cares.

The idea of MCAS testing is similar to putting a band-aid on a severed limb. Not only is it pointless, it is a waste of time that could be much better spent. The solution to the poor education of children is not a uniform curriculum and it is certainly not a test. The solution lies in equal and adequate funding for all schools. So that teachers are paid what they are actually worth and budgets don't have to choose between paper for the copy machine or books for the students. Perhaps it is the grand old elected officials' education that needs to be questioned. Public officials that can unflinchingly spend a third of the national budget on an unnecessary army and billions on the Big Dig to please commuters, but cannot hack up enough money to adequately fund schools and social service programs.

How are we supposed to grow up to be thinking individuals when the examples set for us are those of greedy politicians bought out by money in a corrupt democratic system where only the rich are allowed to participate? A corporate world where our parents whore themselves out to heartless companies that are only out to make a buck. A clothing and manufacturing industry that moves to the third world so that it can freely underpay and abuse its workers in order to make the most profit. A world where our education is reduced down to GPA, SAT, and MCAS. Maybe our society should worry less about the three R's and more about the morals of future generations, and leave the teaching to the teachers.

There are some who have managed to grow beyond the memorized facts and formulaic thinking. Those who were in Seattle at the WTO conference. Those that are in Harvard Square today protesting the Gap's labor and environmental policies. Those that will be protesting at this year's republican and democratic national conventions. Those that are trying to make a difference. But they are a miraculous few. They could be and should be so many more. We do community service and plant a few flowers but are never given the chance to truly understand what a community is. We participate in a student government but never learn what it truly means to be an activist. We are taught history but are never truly taught about the history that we have the chance to make.

We hear GPA, class rank, SAT, test grade, midterms, finals, scholastic achievement but never once do we hear "never mind the grades, think about the learning, think about activism, think about life." We celebrate those who have earned good grades but don't bother to consider if they are at all worthy of the praise. Does anyone care about the human beings behind the numbers?

Perhaps I am bitter, but I have every right to be bitter and angry about the world that I see around me. My responsibility lies in that I must do something constructive with my anger. And I suppose that in the end I have school to thank for making me so unhappy, inadvertently giving me the fuel to take a stand in life and do something with what I have been given. And so I stand here today and forever, and refuse to be defined as a number.

Annelise Schantz

http://newdemocracyworld.org/annelise.htm

clever, incredibly funny, so aware, irresistable...

here is my alltime highest recommendation for news and opinion...

http://jonswift.blogspot.com/

here is a sample:

"I decided to read up on Dubai, which I had never heard of before, and the more I read about it the more I began to doubt this country even existed. Supposedly, it's a desert paradise where alcohol and Eastern European prostitutes are plentiful. It sounded like a made-up place to me. But then I saw that Dubai is also spelled Dubayy and I had a revelation. I rushed to confirm my suspicions with an Arabic man who runs the local grocery store near me (on whom I am keeping a watchful eye for any suspicious activity) and he confirmed what I discovered. The Arabic spelling of Dubai (right) is exactly the same as the Arabic spelling for "Dubya." Suddenly, I understood why Bush wanted "Dubai" to control our ports and make the terrorists believe that they were actually under the control of a friendly Arabic government. At that moment, I got down on my knees and said, "Mr. President, how could I have ever doubted you?" Now you see why President Bush is so adamant about this deal. Shhh! Don't tell the terrorists." --Jon Swift

http://jonswift.blogspot.com/