Getting Through the Tough Times

Bray:

I got more and more convinced that we in the developed world are in for a pretty severely shitty period; short and deep or long and shallow; let me just say that I hope it’s one of those two. Then when I got to the show, it was jam-packed with starry-eyed young geeks high as a kite about how they were gonna build the next mega-viral social-networking stream-aggregating tag-driven microformat-rich video-focused Facebook-beating Kozmick Web Nexus, and I was thinking “Yeah, well actually some of you are gonna be looking for work pretty soon.” So, since these people are my tribe and I care about them, I just had to rewrite the talk.

The Universe Goes Planetside?

It is ironic that the real world home of my favorite game universe based on cut-throat capitalism, piracy, intrigue and outright warfare is being devastated by a real world financial crisis. In the meantime, however, in-game financial news is good!

Rens – Six Kin Development, one of the Republic's largest construction firms, was awarded a government contract today for the construction of a number of new housing developments in decaying urban centers throughout the Republic. Urban Management, which is managing the contract, awarded the contract to Six Kin only two weeks after the company released its line of new biotech construction materials and designs, a technology previously almost unknown outside the Federation and the State.

These new projects are intended to replace thousands of residential units that are in poor shape largely due to shortfalls in maintenance funds over the last few decades. The proposed replacements will use the latest in advanced construction techniques to improve the quality of the dwellings and reduce maintenance costs. They will also include many of the aforementioned biotech products, including those designed to improve air quality and provide greenspaces within housing developments, part of an effort by Urban Management to reduce the air pollution that afflicts many Minmatar urban centers.

Six Kin's plans have raised many eyebrows in- and outside the Republic. This is one of the few times in recent memory where a Minmatar corporation has been asked to take on such a cutting-edge project. Most suspect this is an effort by Prime Minister Shakor to both promote domestic industry, instead of contracting to Federation corporations as has been done in the past, and showcase the technological progress of the Republic while war continues to rage on the border with the Amarr.

Sprinting in Arlington

I'm at the Arlington Career Center this weekend, where we're having a small sprint on the SchoolTool gradebook with Jeff and Alan Elkner, Douglas Cerna (from El Salvador), Filip Sufitchi (a senior at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology). We're making some progress with planning and coding.

Also occupying the school are about 150 Plone sprinters who are following up on this week's PloneConf. Once again, Arlington leads the way in showing how two way collaboration between schools and the free software community can work: the hackers provide the school with great software, the school occasionally provides the space for them to work.

My Employer on the Current Economic Crisis

Mark Shuttleworth:

I’m nervous.
The big question I’m asking is which sidelines don’t have landmines? My team and I are fortunate to have stepped out of many markets before the current flood of fear. We stepped right into a few problems, but in large part dodged the cannonballs. So far so good. But what does it mean to have cash in the bank, when banks themselves are failing? What does it mean to hold dollars, when the dollar is being debased in a way that would feel familiar to the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe? These are very dangerous times, and nobody should think otherwise.

Edjurist

Kudos to CASTLE for supporting Edjurist, a blog covering school law. The interpretation of law, which is often via paranoid hearsay and self-interested marketing, has a huge effect on how we implement IT in schools. In particular, it is the ultimate conversation-ender: "We can't do that because it is illegal."

These two posts on e-discovery are essential:

As I mentioned above, the e-discovery amendments for the first time introduced into the FRCP explicit provisions regulating the disclosure and production of electronically stored information. Since then, a misconception has developed among some public education practitioners that institutions using such information must therefore now archive all electronic information in case it is later needed in discovery, despite their prior practices and despite the lack of any anticipated litigation concerning the information in question. No such independent duty was created by any of the e-discovery amendments adopted in 2006, and no such duty exists anywhere else in the FRCP (although state education laws or administrative codes may require otherwise). As I will explain further in a future post, under the FRCP, an institution may be required to halt the routine destruction of electronically stored information once litigation has begun, but outside that limited circumstance, the e-discovery amendments do not require the archiving of any electronic information not previously stored.

There is nothing about e-discovery that requires schools to archive all electronic communication coming in and out of a school -- a common argument for blocking virtually all websites that allow user posting.

Another excellent post is Revisioning The Justification For School Employee Legal Education, which starts to make the case that education for democracy requires, in turn, education of educational lawyers about education for democracy.

Extending SchoolTool With Grok

A big part of my vision for SchoolTool is to create an 100% open source platform to help schools create their own administrative tools, for tracking things like IEP's, disciplinary reports, or alternative assessments. Over the past 20 years schools have done this with Access, Filemaker, FoxPro, and other commercial systems. Now, a few are using web frameworks like Ruby on Rails or open CMS's like Drupal and Moodle for some of these tasks.

As SchoolTool approaches our beta and 1.0 releases, our longer term story for extending SchoolTool is looking brighter, thanks in part to developments with Grok. SchoolTool is built using the Zope 3 framework, which, unfortunately, has had a higher barrier for entry -- that is it is more difficult to learn to program with -- than the newer generation of frameworks like Rails or Django. Grok is a new layer that works on top of the Zope 3 libraries, but incorporates the conventions that make the new frameworks so accessible. And happily for SchoolTool, Grok is taking care to make its components accessible to other Zope 3 programs.

The upshot of this is that, well, a year from now at most, we should have some very nice documentation on how to save time and money by using SchoolTool and Grok to create simple applications for your school. Not to mention that in the long run it will probably make our core developers more efficient.

Kudos to the Grok Project!

A Generous Mind

Alan Kay's comment on jazz and programming over on Mark Guzdial's blog is just full of wonderful:

And, there are the difficulties of learning jazz (even listening to it) that arise from its developed aspects -- to the point that most young people would not recognize e.g. the blues as being one of the foundations of jazz, but because of its simplicity and use in pop culture, generally think of it as pop music. Since two of the main elements of pop culture are identity and participation, the tendency is for extremely accessible forms that require little learning to be invented and used as tokens and symbols of membership. As jazz got more developed, it fell out of the pop culture because of the learning that most of its best art requires.

I think computing has quite a few points of similarity with this range of properties of music, but with only 50 or so years of development. Perhaps the most important for this discussion is the difficulty of moving from pop ideas to developed ideas as a *creator* of new developed ideas. The trade-off here is that we find creativity all the time in pop music, but there is little substance in most (but not all) of it (it is easy to have weak ideas), whereas getting fluent in a huge developed genre tends to kill creativity (in part because having a good idea in an already developed area is difficult). Another trade-off is between the acts of improvisation and composition which are similar in one sense and could not be more different in other aspects. These are rarely confused by jazz musicians, but I think are confused all the time in computing. [...]

Down deep, I think that it is a reasonable sense of *quality* that is lacking in computing, and there are many reasons for this. Not the least of which are available jobs for programmers who can just fog a mirror, and greedy universities (now businesses) that value retention and the fees thereof above the sacred duties they used to have to define and impart high levels of quality.

Richard Archambault also used to spin a different jazz/education analogy in Philosophy of Education classes at Brown. I was lucky to catch his last year of teaching.

Be Thankful

There will be no job for Dick Morris in an Obama White House.

Scaling Up Fleet Combat in EVE

EVE Insider Dev Blog:

That Saturday, out of the blue we saw one of the nodes supporting 0.0 go to Critical status and shortly afterwards it shut down. This happened a few more times in quick succession, and it became apparent that there was a new issue where extremely loaded nodes were simply not able to keep up with their heartbeat. This issue in itself is fixable and we are working hard to get it resolved.

At this point, it was apparent that with 700+ players trying to "pew pew", the AMD node they were on was not going to do anything other than keep crashing. We re-mapped the system in question to one of our dedicated Intel blades, just to see what it was capable of. Jita had performed so well the night before, that we thought these nodes would handle a fleet fight quite nicely. The system held, and the rest, as they say, is history.

On Sunday night, the M-OEE8 System was the hotspot and it had been placed on an Intel 64 bit dedicated SOL blade in anticipation. It held fine with a peak of around 450 players.

On Monday night, over 1000 players tried to start a fight in this system. As with Sunday, we had anticipated there would be fighting there, so it had been placed on a dedicated node. Unfortunately, what had caused node crashes at 700 players on our AMD blades caused our Intel blade to miss its heartbeat after going a bit over 1200 players. Interestingly enough, despite missing its heart beat, many players have reported that the performance of this blade with 1000 players was very good in the 10 - 15 minutes prior to its shutdown.

I would like to stress that we at CCP are very excited by this, and we are very hopeful that once the issue causing these node deaths is solved that we will start to see this impressive performance much more often. A lot of people have put in a lot of hard work towards new technologies and it is starting to pay off for you, the players.

Of course, once you can handle 1000 ship battles, everyone will try to pile in for a 2000 ship scrum...

Hobnobbing with the Coastal Liberal Elite

Jennifer, Vivian and I went out on Sunday to Clingstone for an Obama fundraiser hosted by the Woods. We all had a blast.

Vivian's ready to get on the boat:

A cloudy but dry day:

This is blurry, but captures (well, hints at...) some of the colors around the foundation of the house:

A jazz guitar and trumpet duo provided some entertainment next to a warm fire:

Vivian says "I had fun!"

I Don't Think This Metaphor Means What You Think It Means

Jay Mathews:

For the past several years, D.C. schools have ranked near the bottom of city school systems in student achievement. They are the educational equivalent of the financial services industry and need the same kind of bitter medicine being prescribed for those downfallen businesses.

Meaning, what? Taxpayer bailout?

Bleeding the DC Schools with Leeches

Isn't "For Kids' Sake, Power to Fire Teachers Crucial" (WaPo, Sept. 29) comprehensively rebutted by "D.C. List Shows 90 Teacher Vacancy" (WaPo, Sept. 29)? Also, Eduwonkette.

There is no light at the end of this tunnel.

This Is Not Change We Can Believe In, My Friends

Coronation of Empress Jamyl Launches New Era for the Amarr Empire:

Amarr - Jamyl Sarum, the resurgent heir to the Sarum royal family, was today crowned Empress of the Amarr Empire. In a ceremony that began with her arrival amidst a huge assembly of Imperial Navy warships, interim Court Chamberlain Hemirin placed the sacred crown upon Her Majesty, declaring her the "Holy Ordained Empress of Creation".

Why is this "Plan B?"

So Michelle Rhee is going to start enforcing the existing D.C. teacher's union contract's provisions on firing and transferring teachers, in part with administrative support from her foundation friends. Fair enough. What took so long? I mean, what's the point in making big noise about changing the contract if you don't take advantage of the power you've got in the current one?

The End of the Reagan Revolution

Andrew Leonard:

The moral authority of the Reagan revolution has collapsed. It will be many, many years before a Republican can address the nation with a straight face and declare that what we need is more deregulation. Oh, they'll try it -- I've heard Senators and Representatives make that very case this week. But the majority of Americans will not pay attention to their garbage. [...]

The spectacle of this enormous bailout is an undeniable refutation of the ruling philosophy of the last 30 years. Government has failed us. If this country survives the economic turmoil that is sure to come, we will never be the same. We might even end up better off, because of it.

Digital Media in a Recession

It will be interesting to see how what looks to be a severe recession impacts the new media economy. In relatively flush economic times (which, all things considered, describes the past 15 years or so), perhaps the "give away the music and make money on t-shirts and touring" model works, or the "1000 True Fans" model works. In the near futher, a lot more people will download the music and simply not have enough money to buy the optional fancy packaging or fill their tank with gas to drive across the state to a show. It may be tough for artists. There is nothing to be done about the change in technology; we may actually be forced reconsider how we fund the arts to publicly subsidize more activity.

On the other hand, lots more young people will have time on their hands and fewer prospects, which is often good for rock and roll, at least.

Trumka on Race, Labor and Obama

I've gotten to see Richard Trumka speak in person a few times, and it is always a pleasure, although it probably comes across better irl compared to YouTube. via Sullivan.

Another Example of Why You Can Only Trust Free Software

The discovery of surveillance of Skype messages in China is particularly disturbing since I advised my sister that Skype would be the most convenient and secure means to communicate with her friends in China.

That Would Explain a Lot

dday:

Do we really know whether or not Sarah Palin is Sacha Baron Cohen's greatest role?

Economics-Driven Educational Philosophy and Vice Versa

As most of my readers know, lots of pundits in the education and educational technology space like to point to long-term economic trends and predictions as arguments for their preferred reform initiatives. So, on the surface, one might be surprised that there is precious little discussion of our recent economic upheaval on relevant education blogs -- in particular from the the 21st century learning and ed-tech scene. You would think that the unraveling of what has been a relatively stable system for the past 30 years or so would draw some comment.

The primary explanation is that education-policy centered analyses have simply ignored financial services, despite the fact that it has become the largest sector of the private economy. Finance, as an industry didn't fit the storyline -- the only storyline that fits is the "we need those experts from finance to come in and show the educators how it is done" -- so it just didn't exist. People like to talk about kids becoming artists or doctors or scientists or carpenters or community organizers but who wants to talk about them becoming insurance adjusters, stock pickers or hedge fund managers? I'm rather fond of a report that came out a few years ago called "Education for What? The New Office Economy" for telling the unsexy truth about how our economy actually works and what a reliable path to upward economic mobility looks like, if that's what you're actually interested in.

Arguments about education policy based on economic theories and projections are basically a hoax. People don't change their educational philosophy to match economics. They just pick economic ideas that buttress what they already believe about education. If you don't believe me, just keep an eye out for people changing their ideas about education in response to what will probably be pretty drastic changes in our economic outlook and let me know if you see anyone doing anything other than trying to cope with budget cuts.

Bush's Legacy

Brennan Center for Justice, via digby:

Today the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law released one of the first systematic examinations of voter purging, a practice—often controversial—of removing voters from registration lists in order to update state registration rolls—click here for report. After a detailed study of the purge practices of 12 states, Voter Purges reveals that election officials across the country are routinely striking millions of voters from the rolls through a process that is shrouded in secrecy, prone to error, and vulnerable to manipulation. Upon the release of Voter Purges, today the Brennan Center and the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law began filing public records requests with election officials in 12 states in order to expose the purges that happened this year.

EVE Backend Upgrades

EVE devblog:

Normally Jita (solar system) reaches a maximum of about 800-900 pilots on any given Sunday. On the Friday following the deployment of StacklessIO, 19 September, there were close to 1,000 concurrent pilots in Jita and on the Saturday, 20 September, the maximum number reached 1,400. This is more than have ever been in Jita at the same time. Under our old network technology Jita could become rather unresponsive at 800-900 pilots but on the Sunday, 21 September, it was quite playable and very responsive with 800 pilots, thanks to StacklessIO.

All that's running on Stackless Python.

Getting Back on the XO Tip

I put my XO's on the shelf a while ago to wait out the endless stream of small fixes and regressions (and discussions of constructivism and constructionism) that necessarily followed the initial release. I've subsequently been waiting for the "hey, you've got to try the new Sugar and/or Fedora on XO release, it's much better" buzz, which, unfortunately hasn't really emerged yet. Also, my keyboard and/or mousepad stopped working on the occasions I pulled the XO off the shelf. And the decision to remove all the activities from your XO when you update to more recent builds of Sugar without providing a straightforward method of re-installing them provided one with ample incentive to neglect one's XO.

I figured, though, that I ought to try to get my XO running for Open Minds. After some unpleasant struggle, including a still broken mousepad, I just did a clean install to the latest test image, which is considerably different than the latest stable version, and close to what will presumably go out in the next G1G1. I don't want to hype it too much. You still can't, for example, print, but it unquestionably feels like a step in the right direction. Also, my mousepad started working again (and the keyboard is fine for the moment, too).

Not surprisingly, quite a few other people, including some Sugar developers, brought their XO's to the conference, and Walter Bender gave a talk. All this helped my motivation enough to start poking around the Browse code to see if I could scratch my biggest XO itch.

I had a few chances to chat with Walter at the conference, but I was very happy to find that he and I were taking the same route home (it was cheaper for him to drive down and fly from Providence), including a three hour layover in Chicago. So I had plenty of time to gently pick his brain about everything I could think of, and then sit in the airport and try to write "VIVIAN" in scalable letters using Turtle Art, which Walter has been hacking on lately. If you don't do these things yourself periodically, you forget how rigorous even simple tasks can become. It was funny sitting in Midway with the former head of the MIT Media Lab trying to remember what trigonometry does and if it would be necessary to draw a properly scalable "V."

It was also a reminder that having a virtual "mathland" on hand makes it much easier to do things like teach multiplication as scaling rather than repeated addition which otherwise seems almost impossible in practice.

The overall takeaway from the trip is that I'm feeling confident that both the XO and Sugar should be able to "keep the ball rolling" for the indefinite future, in particular creating more space for Sugar to continue its improvement. There are still some thorny technical hurdles, including a re-write of the Journal and the difficulty of running a Jabber server, but the whole venture isn't going to disintegrate before there is a chance to overcome them.

Still Open, But Perhaps Narrower?

I would call the second K12 Open Minds conference a limited success. It went well enough to have another next year, but it did shrink compared to last year (like a lot of conferences, apparently, due to the economy), didn't find the kind of sponsorship we'd been hoping for, and we generally didn't solve our organizational problems. I say "we" because I was on the organizing committee and frankly, I didn't do much, so I take my share of the blame.

I think the conference has a bit of an identity crisis. Mike Huffman's vision is of an international, multidisciplinary conference -- kind of like an international EduCon with a focus on open source, openness in general. Given that EduCon is as old as Open Minds but already noticeably stronger, less may be more here, even though balancing the "ed" and "tech" in ed-tech is always an admirable goal. At least unless one can get good sponsors, but the breadth of focus on Open Mind's part makes a harder sell for sponsorship.

In practice, K12 Open Minds this year did have a fairly narrow focus: the real strength of the conference as I see it is learning about large scale Linux deployments. There wasn't much on open content, or really even open source philosophy writ large, and the educational content is pretty common stuff at conferences (if not actual classrooms).

Given a choice, I'd probably make K12 Open Minds into the premiere international conference for learning about large scale, low-cost educational computing. Which is not to say it is the only thing I care about, but I think it would make the most viable and effective conference. It is the conference that would be most likely to gain effective sponsors, draw people from around the world, and teach them things they wouldn't learn sitting at home.

There's just nothing quite like, for example, as I experienced last week, having a few folks fly up from the Brazilian state of Paraná to tell you face to face how they successfully administer 44,000 widely distributed desktops with 12 admins and a tiny budget. Go ahead and try Googling for info about it, though. I don't find anything (in English). There is no reason we couldn't put together a much simpler program of a solid day and a half of mind blowing tales of massive open source successes, and there is no reason to think we can't find some vendors to pay for it.

Alternately, or in addition, we could just move to more of an unconference for K12 open source advocates, which would achieve much of the benefit of the current conference at less cost and hassle.

Anyhow, those are my thoughts, which I don't think are representative of the rest of the organizers.

FOSS and K12 Education Awards

The impressively named National Center for Open Source and Education handed out the first FOSS and K12 Education Awards at K12 Open Minds last week. The very worthy winners:

• Robert Arkiletian - Fl_TeacherTool
• Eric Harrison - K12LTSP
• Daniel Howard - GOSEF
• Paul Nelson - K12LTSP
• David Trask - NELS/FOSSED

Some well deserved recognition for the folks who have been toiling away in the trenches for years.

Free Sarah Palin!

Apologies for Another Paul Tough Post

And yes, the answer is a little deeper knowledge of school reform is helpful, so you can skip the rest if you want...

The reason I keep coming back to Paul Tough is that I think he's doing good reporting about current school reform initiatives, but his analysis is thin. His post today on the difficulties the first classes to move from Achievement First middle schools are having in the new Achievement First high school is interesting. It also is a demonstration of why he has too much faith in the power of the "conveyor belt" strategy, that is, the idea that if we can just get kids in a coordinated sequence of high-quality schooling from early childhood on, we can close the achievement gap.

Now, obviously, this is a desirable goal in itself. Nobody is going to argue for, say, low-quality middle school. But the question is, in effect, whether the effects are additive or multiplicative.

The thing is, if you're curious about the effects of K-8 or K-12 "conveyor belts," there are plenty of existing examples. Off the top of my head, here in Providence we have Times² Academy, a K-12 charter, a couple blocks from my house we've got CVS Highlander, a K-8 charter designed in part to feed into The Met high schools, which are run by the state. We've got Paul Cuffee School, a K-8 charter expanding into high school. A couple years ago we came within a hair's breadth of setting up a formal feeder relationship in the between (what would have become) the neighborhood K-8 site-based elementary school and the neighborhood site-based high school.

The whole idea is pretty common. One of our last superintendent's big ideas (which didn't happen) was to convert the whole district to K-8. Most of the private schools in town are K-12.

Good schools at all levels, with good coordination and communication between them, is a good idea, but if it was the idea, we'd know it already. What happens if you start the process with prenatal care is another, more interesting and less explored question.

If Only the Government Had Some Mechanism to Raise Money to Pay for a Bailout...

My morning shower thoughts on the bailout negotiations: We're getting too hung up on trying to punish the involved parties and make our money back from this like it is some kind of investment. Either one is convoluted and risky. Why don't we just give them this bailout on the condition that it is paid for by tax increases on the financial industry, real estate industry, and the wealthy in general? I'm thinking restoration and increase of the estate tax, micro-tax on all financial and securities transactions, increase on income tax to the top brackets (and creating some even higher tippity-top brackets), etc. Most of this stuff is in Obama's plan in a milder form anyhow.

Recession and School Reform

It will be harder to squeeze out money for school budgets, to be sure, but let's think about how this is going to play out vis a vis current school reform initiatives. As unemployment goes up and in particular jobs disappear in financial services, does the logic behind Teach for America continue to make sense? I mean, is TFA still something you do for two years before going to work at Lehman Brothers? Perhaps staying in teaching is a better idea now. Perhaps it will be easier to just permanently fill those teaching jobs with qualified candidates who have deigned to take some professional training first.

A bad economy really endangers the grand bargain for teachers to give up their work rules and job security for higher pay. People forget that in many cases, like Providence, those work rules were introduced when teachers were getting lousy pay to start with, inflation was high, and the city was flat broke. The only thing the city had to offer was work rules and job security, and if they hadn't relented on those, well, I'm not sure who would have bothered to try to teach in Hope High School circa 1978. By the time Bush is out of office, all the money may be gone.

We talk about the generational divide between young and old teachers in attitudes about job security and tenure. Let's not forget that the young teachers probably can't remember a severe recession. Older teachers can.

Also, let's not forget that we've got a better shot at substantive labor law reform than we've had in a generation. The AFT and NEA may be to sclerotic to organize new charter schools, but someone else may be able to step in. Perhaps Wendy Kopp could start her own union. We'll all need to adapt.

Panic, Therefore Panic!

Fred Clark:

When in the course of human events a purportedly democratic official demands that the people give him $700,000,000,000 -- no strings attached, by weeks end, or else -- then the duly elected representatives of the people have one and only one responsible response: Say "No."

When You Know No History, Everything is Innovative

Paul Tough:

The Locke project is in many ways a risky undertaking. It's hard to turn around miseducated ninth graders. And Locke is unlike other charters, in that families don't have to fill out a special application to attend. If they live in the neighborhood, Locke is their high school. As the L.A. Times pointed out recently,

it's one thing to make progress with students who voluntarily sign up for a rigorous academic environment and whose parents actively support the endeavor. Green Dot's experience with Locke's many doubt-filled teens will provide a more realistic measure of what charter schools can do for poor and minority students who typically have lower test scores and higher dropout rates. And if it succeeds, Green Dot will have created a blueprint for public schools.

I certainly hope Green Dot succeeds, for the good of its students and community, but also because it will be a step forward in a long, well-trod path of urban school reform. Trying to fix urban high schools is difficult. I don't really think it is risky, because one can walk away pretty easily without blame and most people will agree that your biggest error was taking on an impossible task. Nonetheless, it is a task that thousands of teachers and principals have engaged in for decades -- centuries even -- with little fanfare. And if Green Dot is successful, it will be because they're following through on established principles that are very, very familiar to everyone in working in urban education over the past couple decades.

A Clear and Concrete Example of How Open Source Development Works

Walter Bender:

There has been a discussion on the OLPC-sur list about the need for a square root function in Turtle Art. Below, I have documented the process I used for adding this functionality with the hope that others may feel comfortable in emulating me in regard to making changes and enhancements to Sugar and Sugar Activities and sharing those enhancements with the community.

Microsoft's Cultural Problem

Gruber:

Microsoft’s cultural problem is that they seem utterly dissatisfied with the perception that they are a company that makes boatloads of money selling (a) boring but profitable business software and (b) the lowest common denominator PC operating system, even though that’s exactly what they do.

Stager Claus

I have to thank Gary Stager for scoring a Wii (and) Fit for me. So those of you who come here exclusively for mean-spirited Stager-directed snark, you may have to look elsewhere (for a while). Seriously though, Gary may be crazy, but he's good crazy.

Meanwhile, the Wii Fit seems perfect for addressing some longstanding flexibility and asymmetry issues that have been creeping up due to my work at home lifestyle. It has performed flawlessly thus far.

Thanks Gary!

Time Out for Ed-Tech Advocates

This post by Bill Ferriter is a good example of why most of the people involved with ed-tech in this country just need to go sit in a quiet corner for a few years. Not as a punishment of course -- just to clear their heads.

As an English teacher, it would be nice if, when I gave them a writing assignment, every student had equal and ample access to the tool our society uses for writing, both at home and in my classroom. When I want them to edit their work, I'd like them to have equal access to contemporary editing tools, to be able to share their work and their classmate's work without having to make five paper copies of each student's work before each class. And it would be nice to give them equal access to modern publishing methods, since they are uniquely cheap and accessible. And I'd like to be able to assign them any short story or novel written before 1923 and have all my students download the text at no cost onto a device designed with reading longer texts in mind.

It is really not that complicated. It doesn't need to be complicated, and when ed-tech advocates getting flustered over presidential candidates mentioning PowerPoint and that perhaps spending money on technology would be a good idea, it just seems like we're never going to be able simply explain and demand that we need inexpensive, robust computers that work, and then we can get down to serious innovation.

Note: As a (former) English teacher I also acknowledge some rather tortured syntax in the above rant, even by my standards. You get what you pay for.

I Like the Way this Yglesias Kid Thinks

Matt:

...while we may not have any idea how to organize a regulatory scheme to keep well-credentialed con artists from making hundreds of millions of dollars by screwing things up so badly that taxpayers need to spend tens of billions cleaning up the mess, we most certainly do know how to put higher taxes on extremely high-income people and spend the money on social services for the broad mass of people.

AIG & Broad: No Excuses!

Last time I was visiting with Chris, he brought up that progressive school reform has been losing the PR battle lately. Not that it is ever really ascendant in PR, but I think we're both particularly appalled by the fact that somehow one week in July the thoughtful, ambitious, innovative reformers we'd been following our whole careers were successfully re-labeled in the press as representatives of the status quo.

My best idea at the time seemed pretty weak -- hoping that an Obama victory will trigger a such a broad based backlash against the policies of the Bush administration that everything that happened the past seven will be tainted and fundamentally re-considered. Those of you who are not children or dilettantes know that "accountability," charter schools and many other reforms are, in fact, much older.

However, the conventional wisdom is unwinding with alarming speed. Market uber alles is in shambles. The nationalization of large chunks of our financial sector shatters the privatizer's notion that everything government employees do is wrong and everything businessmen do is right. Their authority is in tatters -- a 30 year run is ending. Most deliciously, philanthropist Eli Broad's AIG would have collapsed if the US government hadn't stepped in an essentially taken an 80% stake in the company (whether that was sane, prudent or legal, I don't know). So while Broad's foundation is leveraging his wealth to shift American school systems to a more business-like footing, his business is collapsing into the arms of the public sector.

Perhaps it is unfair to Mr. Broad to pin the AIG collapse on him. To which I say (gleefully), No Excuses! We've accepted the status quo long enough! Any change would be better than what led AIG to this point! This complacent acceptance of free market cant must end -- think of the children, whose futures are being mortgaged to bail out our financiers!

Indeed:

• Despite the urgency of the need and the righteousness of the cause, public education the American financial system today remains mired in a status quo that not only ill serves most poor children, but shows little prospect of meaningful improvement.
• We must have an honest and forthright conversation about the root causes of this national failure. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. That is the trap we must avoid or risk losing another generation of our children('s money).
• The sad reality is that these systems are not broken. Rather, they are doing what we have designed them to do over time. The systems were not designed with the goal of student learning enhancing the public good first and foremost, so they are ill-equipped to accomplish what is demanded of them today.
• Changing the system so that it better meets the needs of students the American people will require not only a shift in our collective thinking, but also a shift in power. As the civil rights movement itself makes clear, such transformations inevitably generate resistance and political conflict. We must no longer shirk from that struggle. The stakes are simply too high.

Well put.

Perhaps our newly nationalized financial sector will consider applying the AYP system of evaluation to their enterprises. It is pretty simple, really. If every sub-unit of the corporation is profitable, you're fine. If not, declare the corporation a failure and start firing executives. Actually, I've been told for years that this is what it is like in the private sector anyhow, so it shouldn't be much of a change.

Accountability and Authority

Welcome back Dean Millot:

At the least, NCLB accountability implies a new allocation of decision authority between schools and districts – along with the relevant capacity, and entirely new capacities. Details matter, but the general direction of change is apparent. Schools need the authority and resources to determine and meet the educational needs of individual students. The central office needs to support schools in their non-educational functions.

NCLB's almost inevitable centralization of authority at the district level combined with a focus on accountability at the school level is what makes NCLB feel like a trap at the school level. Teachers get more pressure and less control at exactly the same time, and as the pressure increases, teacher autonomy does down further, the pace of seemingly arbitrary changes in policy accelerates, etc.