New DEEL seeks proposals

New DEEL is an small educational leadership organization which shares many ideals of educators and scholars in the Deweyan tradition. I thought, in the spirit of cross-fertilization and collaboration, I would spread the word about their recent Call for Papers for their May 2013 conference. The proposals are due on Jan 7, 2013 (see details below).

According to Ning of the New DEEL organization,

"The mission of the New DEEL is to create an action-oriented partnership, dedicated to inquiry into the nature and practice of democratic, ethical educational leadership through sustained processes of open dialogue, right to voice, community inclusion, and responsible participation toward the common good. We strive to create an environment to facilitate democratic ethical decision-making in educational theory and practice which acts in the best interest of all students."

Currently, New DEEL is calling for proposals for their May 2013 conferenced which will be held at Temple University in Philadelphia. The theme of the conference is Creating and Sustaining Democratic Ethical Leadership: The Impact of the Political and Global Financial Crisis on Education.


Proposals for the 2013 conference are due Jan. 7, 2013. For more info and to see the 2013 Call for Proposals, visit this website

The DEFCON project

Here's a super-geeky video of me talking about our DEFCON video game project at Congress 2012. It was produced by the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, which provided infrastructure support for the project. DEFCON is a violent nuclear war simulation, and (somewhat counterintuitively, perhaps), we're trying to see if it might have a positive educational impact. The video explains it all.

The DEFCON research has been conducted in  partnership with two other Concordia faculty members--Ann-Louise Davidson and Vivek Venkatesh. We've got some good initial results, and we're hopeful that we'll be sending off a journal article sometime soon.

A massive lobbyist-driven smartboard purchase gets erased

In a surprise victory for the technoskeptics of the world, the Québec government announced today that it is scrapping the previous government's plans to buy 40,000 smartboards for Québec public schools. Speaking to La Presse, Education Minister Marie Malavoy commented, "It was a comprehensive program that, after examining the evidence, didn't seem to be the best option." Malavoy further noted that school boards didn't actually want the smartboards--"The problem was that the smartboards didn't really line up with the needs of the school boards and the schools. They didn't ask for them. It wasn't a choice they made."

Interestingly, this development comes a few months after La Presse revealed that the company that makes smartboards (Smart Technologies) had, in 2011, hired Martin Daraiche,  a lobbyist who had previously worked as an advisor to both former Liberal Premier Jean Charest and former Deputy Premier Nathalie Normandeau. The mandate that M. Daraiche was given was to ensure that "a directive was established following the [government] budget which would confirm the mandate to furnish every classroom with an interactive blackboard in order to improve student success." Evidently, given the level of success that smartboards had under the Liberals, M. Daraiche's lobbying efforts met with some measure of success.

In Science in Action (1987), Bruno Latour talks about a popular (but, in his view, false) conception of technological progress that he calls the "diffusion model." In this model, worthy ideas and technologies seem to spread and multiply under their own steam, without human intervention. Latour comments at some length:

...it seems that as people so easily agree to transmit the object, it is the object itself that forces them to assent. It then seems that the behavior of people is caused by the diffusion of facts and machines. It is forgotten that the obedient behaviour of people is what turns the claims into facts and machines; the careful strategies that give the object the contours that will provide assent are also forgotten...the model of diffusion invents a technical determinism, paralleled by a scientific determinism. Diesel's engine leaps with its own strength at the consumer's throat, irresistibly forcing itself into trucks and submarines, and as to the Curies' polonium, it freely pollinates the open minds of the academic world. (p. 33)

As Latour explains, people work very hard on behalf of both ideas and technologies to construct strategies that will make them "just catch on." If these strategies work well, no one will ever notice them--the machine will simply have been "built right" and will have "really caught on." Smart Technologies tried hard to do this in Québec classrooms and failed. But it is instructive to realize that it is the failures that we notice and not the successes, which are all around us. Cellphones are a great example of a technology where we have bought into the diffusion model wholeheartedly; we have forgotten all of the strategies that were pursued in order to make cellphones appear necessary.

Are some of you out there reading this teachers and professors that are struggling with technologies that are trying to inevitably diffuse their way into your classroom? Is a smartboard or clicker system that will revolutionize student success just around the corner for your little nook of the educational realm. Tell us about it in the comments.

Killer Robots Bite Back (with a helpful educational website)

Some years ago, back in grad school, I asked one of my fellow students what he was working on. "I'm working on building robots," he told me, "Robots that fly around and can bite people." At the time, I was a bit taken aback by this, and I took some consolation from the fact that educational theory, my own subject, had somewhat less direct destructive potential.


As it turned out, however, my colleague had picked an excellent dissertation topic--as of 2012, the robots that bite (and that do rather more than bite) have been proliferating. One might say, in fact, that we are well into the era of the killer robot. Naturally, not everyone is overjoyed about this. What with this business of unmanned aircraft wiping people out left and right, people are starting to see these 21st century engineering marvels as harbingers of the surveillance society. As a result, drones have a bit of a PR problem.  

Conscientious objectors to the testing regime

This post comes from guest blogger, Carolyn Browder, a masters degree candidate at Peabody College, Vanderbilt University:

I recently read an article in The New York Time which profiles a movement of Brooklyn parents who are boycotting the standardized testing at their children's schools. Their complaint is not with the content or style of the tests--they concede that the tests may be worth while for measuring content knowledge as their children progress through school. They are instructing their children to sit out the tests out of fear that standardized tests are being overvalued in teacher evaluation. Many school districts are evaluating teacher performance based primarily on student test scores, and these parents fear that this will produce unhappy, unsuccessful teachers. First, placing such a tremendous value on the tests strips teaching of any artfulness or creativity. Second, teachers who believe they are successful because they train their students to perform well on a multiple-choice test might have an inaccurate perception of what successful teaching really looks like. For both of these reasons, Brooklyn parents and other around the country are showing concern that not only are standardized tests potentially disenfranchising students but they may also be causing harm to good teachers and reinforcing undesirable attitudes in bad teachers.

Obama’s Re-election: What Can We Anticipate for Education?

On the day after the election, many of us in education may be wondering what might have been and what will be when it comes to the presidential impact on schooling.  Mr. Romney’s election may likely have ushered in increases in school choice programs (especially vouchers and for-profit charter schools) and decreases in school spending (at least if Mr. Ryan’s budget would have held out).  With those changes on the loosing end of the ballot, should we anticipate more of the same from a second four years of President Obama?  In some ways, yes, I believe we will see more of the same—for better or worse. 

Given Mr. Obama’s emphasis on the need to keep America competitive in an increasingly technological and knowledge-based global economy, we will likely see more focus on recruiting and (hopefully) preparing math and science teachers, which will be backed with government funds.  We will likely see continued efforts to alleviating bullying and the achievement gap in schools, but we will likely see less federal funding to aid in doing so, especially as the last of the stimulus money dries up, putting Obama’s major first-term project, Race to the Top, at risk.  And while Race to the Top funding may cover some of the performance pay plans that the president desires, others will go unfunded by struggling local districts. 

Money may be sought from other sources, however, as I believe President Obama will continue to celebrate philanthropists and foundations that sponsor educational innovations.  Relatedly, I think President Obama will continue to applaud the efforts of organizations leading the charter school movement.  If his pattern from the first term holds, he will likely do so without enough careful scrutiny of the practices of those schools, especially in terms of how they use public dollars or meet the needs of poor and minority children with pedagogical styles that sometimes jeopardize other educational opportunities, like the development of good citizenship. 

I suspect we will also continue to see Secretary Duncan offering NCLB waivers, despite the fact that these have angered many political opponents who see them as circumventing the good intentions of the original law, which had Democratic roots, bipartisan support at the time of signing, and a Republican legacy.  Hopefully this situation might provoke positive changes and a reauthorization of the overdue ESEA law during Obama’s second term.  Additionally, I anticipate that Republicans at the state level will continue to push school voucher and tax credit legislation despite Mr. Obama’s position against it, as demonstrated by his stance on the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program.  Finally, the next four years will begin to show us the usefulness and effectiveness of the new Common Core State Standards, an endeavor that Obama’s administration has supported, sometimes dangling funds in front of leery states in order to get them on board.

This is what I anticipate.  I welcome hearing from you regarding what you suspect we will see in the next four years.

Photo credit: Romeo Area Tea Party

Just came across Ushahidi and am wondering how this "crowdsourcing" tool might support the kind of communication and community-building (read education) that Dewey -- and Jane Addams and others -- locate at the heart of democracy.  Remember, the cure for democracy is more democracy!   Anybody have ideas on how this came be used educationally?

The Signal and the Noise in Ed Reform

Saw this in Leonard Mlodinow's review of Nate Silver's new book The Signal and the Noise (New York Times on-line this morning):

Healthily peppered throughout the book are answers to its subtitle, “Why So Many Predictions Fail — but Some Don’t”: we are fooled into thinking that random patterns are meaningful; we build models that are far more sensitive to our initial assumptions than we realize; we make approximations that are cruder than we realize; we focus on what is easiest to measure rather than on what is important; we are overconfident; we build models that rely too heavily on statistics, without enough theoretical understanding; and we unconsciously let biases based on expectation or self-interest affect our analysis.

It struck me that this is a pretty good description of the "science" of education (and teacher) evaluation espoused by contemporary "reformers" (those who Debbie Meier calls "deformers"): models sensitive to assumptions, crude approximations, measuring what can be measured rather than what is important, basing models on self-interest. Silver's point is that it is very, very difficult to distinguish the signal from the noise. A little humility is in order ...

Parents Know Best—But Does That Mean Their Curriculum Conscience or Their School Choice is Better?

 Over the past year (1/14/12, 2/11/12, and 9/9/12), I’ve offered several posts about the role of parents, their rights, and their desire for school choice. Even though these topics were not something that interested me in the past, my developing interest should come as no surprise given the dramatic increases we’ve seen in discussions of school choice and parental rights, especially in the context of the election and in light of a slew of school choice related bills being introduced in states throughout the country.

In one of my earlier posts, I discussed a bill recently passed in NH (HB 542) that allows parents to remove their child from any teaching or curriculum they find objectionable to their conscience and to demand an alternative course of study. Related bills or practices are in place in other states like Missouri and Kentucky. I want to share with you here an intriguing analysis that stems from the work of law professor Robert Vischer that shows how calls to protect parents’ rights of conscience—while seemingly aligned with the rise in calls for wider school choice—may actually pose an interesting predicament for the two parental desires.

Many parents may support wider and publicly-financed forms of school choice in hopes that it will allow them to enact their conscience by selecting a school whose views are already more aligned with that of the parent. Interestingly, professor of law Robert Vischer remarks on the implications of parental conscience in relation to school choice: “As school choice bolsters the ability of a school to create its own identity, the ability to maintain and defend that identity presupposes a reduced authority for the individual consciences of the school’s prospective constituents” because “to the extent that the implementation of a school’s mission creates tension with a dissenting student’s conscience, the student’s exit option gives the school a stronger claim to maintain its mission” (2010, p 207). In other words, while school choice may enable parents to more thoroughly enact their conscience by selecting a school more closely aligned with their views, those parents lose the ability to flex their conscience by demanding curricular changes within the chosen school because parents have the ability to remove their child from that school at any point. In a setting of substantial school choice, the child is not a captive audience to a curriculum to which the parent objects and the parent has less grounds on which to dictate it.

I’ll be curious to see how parents reconcile their claims for school choice with the right to parental conscience in control over what is taught to their children.

Photo credit: http://www.dpfc.net/ResourcesforKindergarteners.aspx

University of Phoenix 3-year Default Rate: 26.4%

The U.S. Department of Education has started publishing student loan default rates, and the University of Phoenix is, as usual, at the back of the pack. 26.4% of University of Phoenix students default on their student loans within 3 years.

Americans, that's a lot of your tax money down the drain (and lining the pockets of the giant corporations that run these schools). You can go here to browse the figures on some of the other proprietary schools (e.g. Ashford, Kaplan), many of which aren't doing a whole lot better. Should you wish to search conventional public and private universities, go here.


Naturally, the for-profit schools aren't going to take this default rate problem lying down! As Salon's Andrew Leonard explains in a great article, the colleges are now providing counseling to students to help them avoid default:

Lauren Asher, president of the higher education research and advocacy think tank the Institute for College Access and Success, questioned whether Corinthian’s sharp drop in default rates actually served the interests of students. She pointed to a May 3 conference call Corinthian held with investors, in which company executives acknowledged that much of the improvement resulted from “deferment and forbearance. “In other words, Corinthian students were being counseled on how to delay paying back their student loans, in order to avoid defaulting during the three-year window tracked by state and federal governments." 

Of course, this regime of counseling isn't simply out of the goodness of the proprietary schools' hearts--the threat of federal and state sanctions is motivating them to bring default rates down. Interestingly, as Leonard points out, this counseling may actually be harmful for some students who would default anyway, since delaying default simply adds to the balance of the loan.

Social Issues has lots more coverage on University of Phoenix and its brethren--here, here, and here.