Should school uniformity limit a student’s device features?

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Posted on 6th September 2010 by Judy Breck in Equality | Mobiles | Next | Schools we now have

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The Naked CIO writes this week about: Apple’s iPad – why it’s iBad for business IT. The article delves into this: “No one could fault the innovation behind Apple’s iPad tablet but the fact remains that this immature technology will cause problems for the IT department . . . .”

Delving into the same issue for schools raises this question: Should the devices a student uses be limited to those the school is equipped and staffed to control? There is a range of issues. On the practical end: Should student devices be able to interface the school’s content management and other IT (if any) designed for use in instruction? At the privacy end: Should students only be allowed to use devices in school that the IT staff can monitor?

There are two separate areas to which these questions apply to schools:

1) Tech stuff that is only inside the ivy wall of the school: When it comes to the internal applications the school uses, innovative devices like the iPad may well be iBad for the reasons described by the Naked CIO.

2) Browsing the internet: Issues of censorship by schools arise when they limit or prohibit internet browsing — issues that are very different than when schools require devices that work with the instruction technology within their own walls. A key policy of Tim Berners-Lee’s W3C, which sets Web standards, is One Web: the critical standard that the devices all essentially interface the same content from the open internet. Any device that allows a student to browse the internet should be welcome in schools, and the authorities at the schools should not take it upon themselves to alter and/or block that content before their students can browse.

You may disagree with this in terms of the safety of allowing kids to have full access to the internet. That is, however, a separate issue from the wading in by educators to manage learning content from the open internet before students are allowed to access it.

These are fascinating new issues that are just beginning to come over the horizon into mainstream schooling.

Public (socialist) school shame is on front page, again

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Posted on 16th August 2010 by Judy Breck in Equality | Obamaschool | Schools we now have | Testing and assessment

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For six years now, billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg has thrown everything he can at New York’s public schools to try to equalize student achievement. In an front page New York Times article today, titled Triumph Fades on Racial Gap in New York City Schools, we learn that:

. . . When results from the 2010 tests, which state officials said presented a more accurate portrayal of students’ abilities, were released last month, they came as a blow to the legacy of the mayor and the chancellor, as passing rates dropped  by more than 25 percentage points on most tests. But the most painful part might well have been the evaporation of one of their signature accomplishments: the closing of the racial achievement gap.

Among the students in the city’s third through eighth grades, 40 percent of black students and 46 percent of Hispanic students met state standards in math, compared with 75 percent of white students and 82 percent of Asian students. In English, 33 percent of black students and 34 percent of Hispanic students are now proficient, compared with 64 percent among whites and Asians. . . .

One has to suppose that their low numbers underrepresent the lost black and Hispanic students who drop out of public schooling. Many of them are the brightest boys, bored at school and lured into the streets for the excitement and profit of crime.

The New York City public school system is the largest school system in the world. Mayor Bloomberg’s inability to improve how well this system works for its students is a dramatic demonstration of the systematic failure of public education. The numbers above show failure for students: 60% of the blacks (who make up a large majority of the system’s students), 54% of the Hispanics, 25% of the whites, and 18% of the Asians.

The socialist notion that public education is an entitlement is being pushed hard by the Obamaists. In the real world example of the New York City public schools, that entitlement leads most of the students to failure. Shame on us for putting up with what happens to kids in public schools. How can we possibly think Obama will make public education better when Bloomberg hit the wall? When will we look beyond the public school model to 21st century learning methods.

No wonder they are taking their education into their own hands.

Should blacks and Hispanics be sought for Elena Kagan’s high school?

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Posted on 5th August 2010 by Judy Breck in Equality | Mobiles | Next | Obamaschool | Schools we now have

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In a very revealing New York Times article today, a multiracial boy graduating from Elena Kagan’s elite Hunter public high school said this in his graduation speech:

“If you truly believe that the demographics of Hunter represent the distribution of intelligence in this city,” he said, “then you must believe that the Upper West Side, Bayside and Flushing are intrinsically more intelligent than the South Bronx, Bedford-Stuyvesant and Washington Heights. And I refuse to accept that.”

The article describes the throes of guilt the school is dealing with because its admission test has created these statistics: “This past year, it was 3 percent black and 1 percent Hispanic; the balance was 47 percent Asian and 41 percent white, with the other 8 percent of students identifying themselves as multiracial. The public school system as a whole is 70 percent black and Hispanic.” The Hunter admissions test, reports the article, “has remained essentially unchanged for decades” and was presumably taken by sixth-grader Elena Kagan to gain her own admission into Hunter.

Judson Hudson, age 18, refuses to accept the “demographics of intelligence” Hunter represents. If Judson is correct, what then is going on here? Surely there is something more to be done about this disparity than to use Hunter as a whipping boy on the front page of the New York Times.

The problem is not that Hunter is a great school. The real problem is that most primarily black and Hispanic New York City public schools are often just awful. Sixth-graders from awful schools score poorly on Hunter’s test.

How can the true demographics of intelligence of New York City be reflected in the level of educational achievement of the next generation of New York City youngsters? A powerful new tool is coming into prominence: individual access to online knowledge. There is today a seven-year-old in a Bedford-Stuyvesant project practicing her vocabulary outside of school, on her mobile. By taking schooling into her own hands, she has a real chance to sit one day on the United States Supreme Court.

That chance is virtually nonexistent for children whose only education is obtained in awful NYC public schools. Shoving a few kids from the projects into Hunter simply applies another bandaid to crumbling public [socialized] education and to our collective guilt.

Standardized education is a leveling tool of the liberal left

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Posted on 30th June 2010 by Judy Breck in Equality | Obamaschool | Politics | Testing and assessment

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The setting of the same median goal for all students levels individuals into masses. Sure, you can say you hope many students will do more than pass the minimum standard. Will they? Do they?

Their is an illuminating bit of trivia about all this in an obituary today in the New York Times. The quote that follows begins with the obit’s headline and lede, then a sample of the deceased’s liberal stripes, and concludes with a paragraph (in red) noting the fact that he supported George W. Bush’s education initiative.

William Taylor, Vigorous Rights Defender, Dies at 78

William L. Taylor, who as a lawyer, lobbyist and government official for more than a half century had significant roles in pressing important civil rights cases and in drafting and defending civil rights legislation, died Monday in Bethesda, Md. He was 78 and lived in Washington.

Mr. Taylor is also credited with helping to devise a strategy by liberals to defeat President Ronald Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987, partly by recruiting well-known law professors to criticize him.

Mr. Taylor could sometimes be unpredictable, as when he openly supported President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law to overhaul education. Liberal critics called the measure punitive, poorly financed and too oriented toward standardized tests.

Yet Taylor was not convinced. As he probably foresaw, standardized educational tests do not lift all students to an equal and meaningful level of excellence. Instead the forced sameness of learning to the tests tends to settled more and more kids into the same level of mediocrity. Senator Ted Kennedy, who was a visceral and relentless liberal and leveler, is another example, like Taylor, who pushed the Bush vision called No Child Left Behind.

Showing his deep leftist core, Obama has not abandoned No Child Left Behind. Instead he is spending billions of dollars on what he calls Race to the Top. The name of that program belies its actual structure and goal. This, Obama’s major education initiative so far, is trying only to boost “failing schools.” He is building a welfare state of public education where youngsters are promoted with low grades, while billions are spent to push children’ scores a bit higher at the worst schools. The effect is not only to lock in a median mass — but to almost ignore education policy that would reward individual achievement. Assessment is made equal for all, while opportunity to learn settles into a media that gets lower and lower.

Beware of the educator with a level in his hand.

Every kid who has a smart phone can read this poetry

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Posted on 24th June 2010 by Judy Breck in Equality | Findability | Mobiles | Obamaschool

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The picture of the girl reading American Negro Poetry is from the Gates Foundation website. Getting the analog book into her hands undoubtedly cost the foundation quite a bit of money. She could, instead, use her smartphone to read comprehensively in the Negro poetry genre for free.

If you will go to the page where the girl is reading and click the picture, you will be cycled through some other classroom projects funded by Gates grants. The starfish dissection (one of the pictures) provides a strong illustration about how much more can be learned through subject websites than in a small classroom module. Sure, actually cutting up a dead starfish has dimensions the virtual experience may not, but wow: a student can learn a very great deal about starfish on a website like this one where there is even a video of a starfish dissection.

In what follows, I am committing the highest level of pedagogical heresy:

I do not understand why the Gates folks pour their support into this bottom line (from the page where the picture of the girl above appears):
“We believe that all students should graduate from high school prepared to succeed in college, career, and life.”

My italics in the sentence above capture the new trend: Do what it takes for all students to graduate from high school and then college. How long will this take! Obama has set the goal for 2020 — ten years from now.

Why not first get a smart phone to every student so they each can read the world’s poetry and virtually dissect starfish? Some of the students equipped and trained do that may miss the assessment credits pedagogues think they need to receive high school and college diplomas. But if youngsters now in school can learn online — not waiting for the halcyon days when all kids succeed in school — far more of them will be prepared to succeed in career and life.

What would John have done with a smart phone?

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Posted on 12th June 2010 by Judy Breck in Equality | Mobiles | Next

What would the slave boys shown in a newly discovered 1860ish photo have been able to do if they had had mobile devices connected to the internet in their pockets? The discovery of the photo, with its attached record of John’s sale for $1,150 in 1854, is causing an outpouring of remarks about the way slave children were treated a century and a half ago.

There are those who would assume that the social stuff would have to come first to open the doors for a slave boy: political emancipation, financial support, social acceptance of his different skin color. Fifteen decades after this picture was taken, there are still many children for whom political/social barriers remain. They are still trapped in real and virtual kinds of slavery of many sorts in lots of places around the world.

When the picture was taken, there was no way to connect the actual John shown in the photo with knowledge beyond his slave shack and his master’s grounds. Today it is possible to connect every child on earth individually with the sum total of what is known by humankind. We can put all that into every youngster’s pocket. Certainly there would be some — many! — who would break beyond their shacks and the limits set by their masters.

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