Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious: A 21st Century Gap-Analysis (Fast Forward: The Urgency of the True Emergency)

While the abject failure conversation/debate of our U.S. 20th Century Education Model rages on, a real-world 21st Century Global Competitiveness conundrum emerges. Conclusion: Find the Sweet-Spot!

Spoken like a Gentleman Farmer!

Now for the Rest of the Story

Conservancy helps finance 186 acre Upper Bushman preservation project in Independence Township



With help from NOHLC, Independence Oaks County Park near Clarkston will expand by 186 acres when a purchase agreement for what is called the Upper Bushman Lake property is signed. The parcel is one of the most significant high quality green spaces in Oakland County. "NOHLC has longed viewed Upper Bushman Lake as Independence Township's #1 priority for natural resource protection. More than 700 acres of Independence Oaks habitat are directly influenced by water quality from the Upper Bushman Lake property which is the headwaters area of the Clinton River," said Sue Julian, NOHLC president.

The property's $2.836 million purchase price will be paid for with $1.74 million from Oakland County Parks, $945,000 from a Michigan Department of Natural Resources Trust Fund Grant, a contribution of $16,000 from NOHLC as well as other sources to be finalized soon.

The NOHLC donation will come from a fund created primarily from multiple small donations from residents within Independence Township.

The pristine property features a 31-acre lake within it's boundaries. It is situated northeast of Independece Oaks County Park and bordered by Sashabaw and Oak Hill Roads.

NOHLC P.O. Box 285, Clarkston, MI 48347 Tel
248.846.6547 Fax
248.846.6548

General information email: mail@nohlc.org

Katie Anderson, Executive Director: mail@nohlc.org

Learning Center Catch

A PRIZED CATCH IN OAKLAND COUNTY

By BILL LAITNER FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER

   A coveted private fishing hole in northeast Oakland County — so good, anglers have been sneaking onto the property — is to open for public fishing in spring 2011.

   Upper Bushman Lake is on 186 acres of unspoiled land newly acquired by Oakland County Parks and Recreation and adjoining Independence Oaks County Park, three miles north of DTE Energy Music Theatre.

   Officials who led tours around the lake Friday called the parcel a prized catch.

   “You really feel like you’re Up North here,” county parks Executive Officer Dan Stencil said after strolling through the mixed conifer and hardwood forest, said to be a rarity in southeastern Michigan.

   “We saw migrating ducks going through, some mute swans and a few deer. There’s evidence of beaver activity,” Stencil said. Not to mention, swimming in 31-acre Upper Bushman Lake are bass, pike, bluegill, perch, sunfish and more.

   “We’ve heard there’s some real lunkers. This hasn’t been fished much in a long time,” he said.

   Park officials have put up gates and “No access” signs. However, they’ll roll out the welcome mat next year not only to anglers, with a new fishing dock, but to bird watchers and hikers. By October 2011, “We hope to open it to archery deer hunting,” but only on this new parcel, not on the other 1,098 acres of Independence Oaks park, natural resources planner Brittany Bird said.

   The Arnold family, which sold the property for $2.8 million, is moving from the 4,000-square-foot manor house and 2,000-square-foot guest cottage to Bloomfield Hills, parks officials said.

   “Ultimately, we’re looking to turn this into an outdoor recreation learning center. We’d provide learning opportunities for archery, fishing, trapping, kayaking, birdwatching — things related to Michigan’s heritage,” Bird said.

   • CONTACT BILL LAITNER: 586-826-7264 OR BLAITNER@FREEPRESS.COM  

SARAH RICE/Special to the Free Press

   Dan Stencil, Oakland County Parks and Recreation executive officer, conducts a tour of the land surrounding Upper Bushman Lake, adjoining Independence Oaks County Park in Independence Township on Friday.

Peter Senge of the Society of Organizational Learning on Imagination, Creativity and LEARNING by DOING!

http://www.clomedia.com/media/Peter_Senge_0910.mp4

CONTRAST: U.S. Education Conversation and Michigan Gubernatorial Understandings (Relevance Factor?)

Thursday, Oct. 07, 2010

Waiting for 'Superman': Education Reform Isn't Easy

By Andrew J. Rotherham

In the midst of a panel discussion following the Washington premiere of the education documentary Waiting for "Superman" on Sept. 15, CNN's Roland Martin breathlessly told his followers on Twitter that Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, "says they are going to look at making change to teachers tenure in their contracts. THIS IS HUGE."

Martin isn't the only one caught up in the moment. Today, the enthusiasm among education reformers is palpable. And why not? This seems like an amazing time, with NBC hosting a big education summit across its various networks to kick off the school year, a president seemingly committed to bold reform, and a feature film, Waiting for "Superman," from a major studio — made by none other than the Oscar-winning director of An Inconvenient Truth! (See "Fenty's Loss in D.C.: A Blow to Education Reform?")

Although the momentum seems unstoppable, don't pop the champagne or, worse, declare 'mission accomplished' just yet. Waiting for "Superman" is a hard-hitting documentary that lays bare many of America's education problems. But despite all the attention it's bringing to education, there are still more reasons to bet against reform than for it.

For starters, history doesn't offer much cause for optimism. This isn't the first time substantial reforms have seemed imminent. Education history is littered with big promises, national commissions and task forces, summits, and surprisingly little change. Two decades ago, when then-governor Clinton and the first President Bush gathered the nation's governors in Charlottesville, Va., reform seemed unstoppable. Some progress came out of it — it helped with the development of better state education standards — but it did not herald the revolution many were predicting at the time.

One reason for the slow pace of reform is because American public schools are fundamentally conservative — and because Americans are fundamentally conservative about their schools. In other words, the bias is strongly against change rather than for it, which explains why among parents, change is popular in theory but controversial in practice. (Affluent parents, for instance, support higher standards until those measures show that their public schools are not as good as they should be given the high property taxes these families are paying.) Although opposition to reform is often laid exclusively at the feet of the teachers' unions, it is actually a broader issue. (See pictures of a prestigious public boarding school in Washington.)

Of course, the unions obviously have a hand in today's debate, too. Although we like to think of teachers as a breed apart, their special interest groups — the two large national teachers' unions — are basically the same as any other special interest, and the politics just as brutal. In fact, combined, the two national teachers' unions spent more on federal campaign contributions than any other interest group from 1989 to 2010, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. And that is just the national teachers unions, not the thousands of state and local ones. That adds up to a lot of money to keep various reforms at bay. And to keep various reformers at bay too. In Washington, for example, Politico reported that the American Federation of Teachers spent about $1 million in the run-up to last month's Democratic primary to help defeat Mayor Adrian Fenty, who had ushered in sweeping changes to the city's school district.

All this helps explain why John Wilson, executive director of the biggest teachers' union, the National Education Association, is nonplussed by Waiting for "Superman" and the slew of other education documentaries that have come out in recent months. "I think the films are a blip," he told the Sacramento Bee. "They will come and go, but the union will still be there, our members will still be in these schools." Sure, this may sound a little thuggish, but it's a political reality education reformers had better understand.

In American politics, concentrated special interests can do a lot to slow or thwart reform. Think about policy battles on issues as wide-ranging as energy, guns, tobacco, health care, the environment, or telecommunications and cable television. When it's the general interest pitted against an organized special interest, bet on the latter. (Comment on this story.)

In addition to the cultural and political entrenchment, the process of how funding gets allocated as well as how the various federal, state, and local rules constrain schools leaves surprisingly little room for innovation in education. Coupled with American education's anemic research and development infrastructure, the reality today is that we know a lot more about what does not work than about what does. For example, it's clear from abundant research that paying teachers only on the basis of their degrees and years of experience is not in the best interest of students or teachers. As the National Council on Teacher Quality, a research and policy organization whose board of directors I chaired for several years, put it, "the evidence is conclusive that master's degrees do not make teachers more effective." Such clarity does not mean, however, that the reforms to fix these problems are obvious. The education field still has a lot to learn about how to effectively differentiate salary and incorporate elements like performance into compensation. (Watch TIME's video "Can Michelle Rhee Save Our Schools?")

Consequently, there will be a lot of trial and error along the way. Each failure provides critics with plenty of fodder and complicates the politics that much more. For example, when researchers at Vanderbilt University released a study in September showing no large improvements in student performance from a teacher merit pay pilot program, these findings were widely cited as definitive evidence of the folly of performance-based pay. But it was just one study of one program, hardly the last word. Meanwhile, the political debate about charter schools remains largely focused on the low-performing ones rather than what we can learn from those that are delivering transformative results.

So what's the takeaway? Certainly not that reformers should take their cue from Dante and call it quits. But they should realize the enormous work and time genuine reform will take. Building the capacity to deliver substantially improved education while simultaneously addressing the politics is an incredible two-front effort. Despite its promise and impressive accomplishments to date, the reform community is not yet prepared to do so at scale. Genuinely bold reformers are still more likely to lose elections than win them, and truly aggressive reform activity is still concentrated in relatively few places.

That's a problem because if there is a lesson from the last two years of education activity, it is that nothing happens absent tenacity and intense pressure for reform. Despite the rhetoric about changing teacher tenure, for example, Weingarten is still struggling to find a middle ground that satisfies her members and actually alters the reality in schools. Don't tell Roland Martin, but this past weekend there she was on CBS Sunday Morning, explaining why tenure isn't a problem anyway.

Andrew J. Rotherham, who writes the blog Eduwonk, is a co-founder and partner at Bellwether Education, a nonprofit working to improve educational outcomes for low-income students. School of Thought, his education column for TIME.com, appears every Thursday.

See TIME's special report on paying for college.

See pictures of the evolution of the college dorm.

Snyder’s plan

It’s time to get finances in order

School funding must stabilize, he says

By PEGGY WALSH-SARNECKI FREE PRESS EDUCATION WRITER

   Businessman Rick Snyder says it’s time to stop making schools guess at how much money they’ll have each year.

   The Republican candidate for governor would stabilize school funding by cutting costs. He would have teachers pay more for health insurance and replace pensions with traditional 401(k)s for new teachers. He would require competitive bidding in school districts and look at more consolidation and sharing of services.

   “We need to be more cost-efficient,” Snyder said. “I’m not sure we can afford the system we have today.”

   He also would push for school districts to pool all their insurance needs into one pot, in order to get better rates.

   Snyder said he knows it could be tough to force changes to teachers’ benefits without cooperation from unions, in particular the Michigan Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union.

   Many Michigan districts have health insurance through the MEA’s insurance arm, and the union has typically fought to keep it that way.

   But, “it’s a subject we need to have on the table,” Snyder said.

   Snyder said he believes his plan can save between $743 million and $1.11 billion: $87 million through pension reform; $156 million to $223 million through insurance reform; $200 million to $500 million through more competitive bidding, and $300 million through more consolidation and service sharing.

   Competitive bidding is already happening in many districts, but Snyder said he’d like to see it expanded. That doesn’t necessarily mean privatizing, he said.

   Instead, school districts could bid on contracts from other districts — to provide busing, for example.

   Snyder said he’d also push for consolidating across districts more services such as business functions, payroll orcurriculum planning.

   He said he’d also hold schools accountable for the quality of the education they are producing, while rewarding teachers for their success.

   “Shouldn’t we be able to do an analysis of what are the successful schools, the successful teachers?” Snyder asked.

   He said he wants to use data to find out what successful districts are doing, and how it can be replicated in others. Student test scores would be part of that data, but he said teachers should not be measured by scores alone.

   “Too often, we view measurement systems as a way to penalize people. I happen to see it as a way to reward success,” Snyder said.

   Snyder said he believes successful educators should be rewarded for success with some sort of pay for performance, or merit pay. He is not specific about how this would work, but he said merit pay, often a red flag to the unions, should go to the entire school instead of individual teachers. School-wide merit pay is much more palatable to union officials.

   “These are tough questions that we need to address, in terms of getting them on the table,” Snyder said.

   • CONTACT PEGGY WALSH-SARNECKI: 313-222-8851 OR MMWALSH@FREEPRESS.COM  

Republican Rick Snyder says he’d push for more consolidation for school districts. “We need to be more cost-efficient,” he said. “I’m not sure we can afford the system we have today.”

CARLOS OSORIO/Associated Press

Bernero’s plan

It’s all about student success

Communities part of the solution, he says

By PEGGY WALSH-SARNECKI FREE PRESS EDUCATION WRITER

   Students convicted of crimes may need to finish high school to get out of jail if Virg Bernero becomes governor. That’s just one of the ideas he has for improving education for Michigan children, outlined in his plan, Education is Economic Development.

   Making sure those kids have a diploma is not only better for the economy, but it’s also one of the best ways to avoid repeat offenders, Bernero said. A criminal record makes it hard to get a job, and a diploma could put them one step closer to getting hired.

   And Bernero said there are steps that can be taken now to keep those students out of jail — changing suspension policies, for instance. The solution right now is often kicking kids out of school, but that doesn’t solve the problem, it just encourages kids to drop out, Bernero said.

   Education would be better served if all schools used in-school suspensions. If in-school suspension doesn’t work, he would then send the student to what he calls right-track academies to turn the kids around.

   “If you do two things, if you discipline in a serious way and do an all-out assault on the dropout rate, that alone would bring a sea change to schools,” Bernero said. “I intend to lead the assault for the dropout rate and an extension of that, I very likely will lead community involvement in the schools.”

   While his plan is filled with his own ideas for fixing schools — including universal preschool and all-day kindergarten — Bernero said he also wants to make the community a part of the solution.

   “I want to build a system that allows for creativity and local ingenuity, that empowers the district so we let them know that failure is not an option,” Bernero said.

   His school reform would begin with “getting into these schools and talking to the teachers, doing some interviews, talking to parents, to see what’s going on.”

   Bernero’s interest in addressing education issues is spurred in part by his wife, Teri Bernero, principal of Lewton Elementary School in Lansing. The Democratic candidate also said it’s time to stop pummeling schools with costly, unfunded government mandates, such as annual reports on test scores and documentation for how government funding is spent — work that takes time that could better be focused on education.

   Let educators have a say in what’s needed to fix schools because they’re the ones who really know what’s going on inside the classroom, he said.

   He also would expand vocational education and career training. All students do not graduate from college, he said, but all Michigan students need to be able to get a decent job.

   Like his opponent, Rick Snyder, he also wants to fix school funding and, if elected, plans to create a statewide task force to address the issue.

   One area that would help save money, he said, is in consolidating duplicative services throughout each county, such as busing or payroll. Many services could be streamlined and run by county intermediate school districts.

   “Let’s get real about education funding,” Bernero said.

   • CONTACT PEGGY WALSH-SARNECKI: 313-222-8851 OR MMWALSH@FREEPRESS   .COM  

Democrat Virg Bernero says his reform would start with talking to teachers and parents. “I want to build a system that … empowers the district so we let them know that failure is not an option,” he said.

CARLOS OSORIO/Associated Press

EDUCATION NATION: Summary! (Sir Ken Strikes Again / RAISING the EDUCATION REFORM CONVERSATION BAR and/or KRYPTONITE!)

Sir Ken Robinson 


EDUTOPIA April 2008 #1 / Education Policy and Creativity http://www.edutopia.org/sir-ken-robinson-creativity-video

EDUTOPIA April 2008 #2 / Creativity & Pedagogy http://www.edutopia.org/sir-ken-robinson-creativity-part-two-video

If YOU thought K-12 EDUCATION was PROBLEMATIC, CHECK-OUT THE EMERGING COMMUNITY COLLEGE CONVERSATION! The Next Conversation? The Failure of Siloed 4 YEAR U.S. EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS! So If WE Want to KNOW Where U.S. EDUCATION COMPETITIVENESS Will be in 10 Years CHECK-OUT U.S. BUSINESS COMPETITIVENESS TODAY! Are WE Having Any FUN Yet?

More Blow-back

September 28, 2010, 03:59 PM ET

NBC's Education Nation: Policy Summit or Puppet Show?

By Marc Bousquet

I’d like you to imagine the following. Suppose we are going to have a national summit on health care. Do you not suppose that a substantial number of the voices included would be from professionals in health care, including doctors and nurses? Would you have three people with just the head of the AMA to represent doctors?

Or how about legal reform – would not lawyers scream if such a conference were organized without a substantial portion of the main participants being members of the profession representing the range of opinions within the legal field?

Why then is it when it comes to education that people think it is appropriate to have major discussions about education without fair inclusion of the voices of those who bear the greatest burden for the education of our children, the parents and the teachers? --Kenneth Bernstein, Cooperative Catalyst

So I tied off my upper arm and mainlined anti-nausea drugs Sunday and Monday in order to stomach hours of biased, dishonest, irresponsible NBC hate propaganda paid for by, you guessed it, for-profit higher ed vendors and foundations devoted to privatizing public schools.

Just as Obama's pursued the Republican party line on education, NBC has taken a page from Fox News and Oprah. Their lineup on a two-day policy summit with a dozen conference panels--you know, the kind of panels usually filled with folks with credible expertise in the topic--features politicians, astronauts, TV anchors, musicians, corporate executives, and charter-school entrepreneurs.

NBC did include one or two figures associated with parent organizations. Just not those representing the real views of most actual parents--you know, the real parents who on balance are unhappy with Obama's education policy, who fired a mayor to get rid of Michelle Rhee, and who, when given the chance to vote, overwhelmingly support teacher-run schools over charter-school operators.

But somehow they completely failed to include practicing teachers, scholars of learning, or even recognized analysts of education policy.  All day Monday and Tuesday, the only figure in the summit remotely acquainted with the scholarship of learning was Randi Weingarten, AFT president. She had to do double and triple duty, since she was simultaneously the only voice for practicing teachers, or for any policy recommendation other than those endorsed by Duncan's Race to the Top.

Burn the Witch!
Incredibly, Weingarten played the same role all day Sunday. On Meet the Press and other programs, she was consistently positioned as a solitary voice against a solid bloc of panelists and journalists pounding away at the Duncan-Rhee party line. NBC positioned her on the extreme edge of the outdoor panel, literally in the wind, with her hair flying sidewise like the Wicked Witch piloting a broomstick.

Later, she faced an even larger panel completely united against her, this time featuring the propagandists who scored her appearances in Waiting With Superman with ominous chords redolent of Darth Vader.

They can feature both the director and composer of the film who painted her as the captain of the Death Star but not one credible authority on the positions being pushed by the film?

Interestingly, despite the outrageous set-up, on both programs Weingarten spoke more than any other participant--nearly as much all of the other participants combined.

Seems the shows' hosts had to ask her to talk to nearly every point precisely because she was the only person who could provide any other perspective.

Perhaps also because she was the only person who actually had anything to say?

A Failed Hit Job
The one place where NBC allowed teachers--not scholars of learning or credible policy analysts--to have a few words was in a carefully scripted "town hall" program, segregated from all of the marquee shows and policy conference.

They stacked the audience with school administrators and charter-school teachers, allprimed to spout their propaganda: "Teachers are under attack and we should be!" shouted one, on cue. "We young teachers don't need tenure to do our jobs," said another.

Even in the complete absence of journalistic scrutiny, the stories of these plants didn't stand up to their own telling.

One charter-school hero stood up to mouth the no-excuses "challenge education" mantra that anybody can overcome any learning obstacle if they are confronted with sufficiently absurd expectations.

As an example, he cited his willingness to offer free day care to one of his students' siblings in his classroom from 7am to 7pm, freeing the student from family-care responsibilities and allowing her to do her homework.

While laudable, his willingness to address the poverty of the student's family in this way is not, as they say, a scalable solution to the problem. Um, duh, most teachers have families of their own that they can't and shouldn't neglect to offer 12 hours of day care to others.

Right on the surface of this vignette is the cruel hypocritical absurdity--that those who are already sacrificing (the half of teachers who don't quit in despair in the first five years) are not just asked but are really being forced to sacrifice more.

For instance, we could solve a lot of poverty-related issues if physicians or TV journalists or Wall Street banks turned their facililties into day-care centers and staffed them after hours.

Hey, let's just say that everyone should work 12 hours a day for a teacher's wage!

Any takers? I didn't think so.

Nose Ring vs. Soul Patch
NBC made the mistake of letting a few actual veteran teachers in the room (actually a tent on Rockefeller plaza). And the atmosphere was apparently charged: anchor Brian Williams called the room "a beehive, a cauldron of activity and emotion," and joked about being in "physical danger." (He also called one reporter "honey," and flirted with one of the teachers on stage. Patronizing and chauvinist much? Guess we really are heading back to the Eisenhower era.)

Because NBC failed to make sure everyone in the room was an administrator or a twentysomething working-slash-volunteering before law school at a charter, we saw a couple of flashes of honest teacher feeling and insight. 

These included thoughtful defenses of tenure as due process and analyses of the real issues (funding, poverty, support for professional development, workload, retention).

You could have heard a pin drop on Fifth Avenue when one California principal described her guilt at hiring a new teacher on the salary she was allowed to offer: "I basically condemned her to never owning her own home," she said.

Astonishingly, one teacher that made it onto the show because she was acquainted with the anchor actually compared Davis Guggenheim to Hitler's most brilliant propagandist, calling him "the Leni Riefenstahl of 2010."

Personally I think that kind of comparison isn't worth the backlash, but I think it could prove the most telling moment of the week.

In my experience, persons reaching for the Nazi comparison are intellectually or emotionally stunted, or else desperate. Since this apparently kind and thoughtful, intellectual person was evidently not the former, I think she was struggling to communicate--in the few seconds she was permitted--the stifled frustration and outrage of the tens of millions of parents, teachers, scholars and students who are being hurtled toward yet more schoolroom misery by this tsunami of pro-Duncan propaganda.

If you want to capture the essence of the tension that kept erupting through this scripted event, just fast forward to the middle of program, the second featured panel.

Comprising a charter-school reading teacher in blond dreadlocks and nose ring, and a public-school science teacher of the year sporting a soul patch, the panel was intended to talk about teaching technique.

Asked to describe how she succeeded as a teacher, Nose Ring was unable to manage a syllable describing or defending her teaching practice. She floundered helplessly ("well, you just show them how far behind they are in the world") until the moderator let her off the hook, summarizing her philosophy: "Just teach 'em hard, huh?"

Invited to share his own teaching tips, Soul Patch, a public school teacher of the year, gently rebutted much of the propaganda previously circulated. American top students, he pointed out, perform at the same level as the top students anywhere in the world. The problem is inequality and unfairness, he observed.

Asked to celebrate the Duncan-Obama grim focus on STEM fields, science teacher of the year Soul Patch demurred, pointing out that his own practice and education research showed the importance of "right brain" creativity, of "movement and music right in the science classroom."

Anti-social media
Up until a firestorm of complaint forced them to open the forum, NBC aggressively censored the one place where teachers and parents were mainly allowed to participate--on a Facebook page promoting the event. Even established columnists for national mainstream education journals like Education Week were repeatedly "unfriended" or had their comments removed.

Obama's Today Show interview
This was only about 20 minutes on education before Lauer moved on, but kudos to Lauer for acting more like a journalist than anyone else NBC has put forward.

To his credit, Lauer only gave the administration props for the one initiative (pre-K schooling) actually supported by research, and showed that research in the video package.  He challenged the president on the unfair demonizing of teachers and teacher unions in Waiting for Superman. He pointed out that most charter schools underperform union schools.

Above all, he kept the focus on funding and support, quoting Clinton: "It's not just a money thing, but it is a money thing."  Obama tried to counter with the Republican bromide that it "isn't a problem we can spend our way out of," and began mouthing accountability and competition cliches.

But Lauer kept at it finally getting the President to concede that there is no problem recruiting teachers into the profession--just a massive problem retaining them.

Most young teachers find they "can't afford to stay" in the profession, Obama confessed, "especially when it comes to having families of their own."