This site has about the most nearly complete, concise case against the Utah school voucher proposal I have found. Is there any chance the voters in Utah still need to be swayed to reason on this issue? Send them to this site, after you have them view the real story about Oreos.
Concise case against Utah voucher proposal
October 31, 2007
2 Comments | 
Economics, Education, Education reform, Education spending, Politics, School vouchers | Tagged: Education, Politics, School vouchers, Utah referendum | 
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Posted by Ed Darrell
Utah voucher referendum: Slapping the hand in the cookie jar
October 30, 2007A Utah school teacher made his own video, in his home it appears, with a non-professional camera and crew — and it eviscerates the points Richard Eyre was trying to make in his slick, professionally-produced, commercial version.
The Truth about Cookies Utah Vouchers:
Tip of the old scrub brush to a reader and commenter named Brack.
Update, November 7, 2007:
Utah voters soundly rejected vouchers in the election November 6. Here’s my version of the story.
10 Comments | Education, Education quality, Education spending, Politics, School vouchers | Tagged: Education, Politics, School vouchers, Utah referendum | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
“Cool Tools”: Making searches safe for students
October 29, 2007A History Teacher, even while on hiatus, shows how you can protect your students and point them in the right direction in their research, all at the same time.
Thanks to Google, of course, and a tip of the old scrub brush to A History Teacher.
1 Comment | Classroom technology, Education, Technology, Technology in the classroom, Weblogs | Tagged: Classroom technology, Education, Technology | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
NBC video — free from HotChalk, through December
October 27, 2007Teacher magazine reports that NBC News made available to teachers more than 5,000 chunks of news video and still photos from their news archives, for use in the classroom.
The service requires a free subscription to HotChalk through December. After that, a school subscription to HotChalk is necessary, starting in 2008.
Great resources, but I predict few teachers will have the connections to put these to work in the classroom. Comments are open, of course, for you to share your experience. Please comment on how useful you find these images, and how you use them.
Historic photo of woman on early cellular telephone, NBC News photo, from HotChalk.
Leave a Comment » | Education, Geography - Economic, Globalization, History images, History video sources, Images, Video and film | Tagged: Classroom technology, Education, history video, HotChalk, NBC News, video | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Global warming a piffle by comparison
October 26, 2007
Here’s the word from Bob Parks’ great e-letter, “What’s New,”October 26, 2007 edition; I’ve highlighted some stuff:
2. ENVIRONMENT: MAJOR U.N. REPORT SAYS IT’S “UNSUSTAINABLE.” According to a story in the New York Times this morning, a report issued by the United Nations yesterday in Paris is so frightening that French President Nicolas Sarkozy immediately put $1.4 billion into new energy sources and biodiversity. Unsustainable consumption of resources and population growth is taking Earth beyond the point of no return. As an example, the report says, two and a half times as many fish are being caught as the oceans can produce in a sustainable manner. No word yet from Washington on the U.S. response. No steps taken to protect the environment will help in the long run if population continues to grow.
Denialists will start whining in just a few seconds. Three . . . two . . . one . . .
Considering the weather (everywhere), fires in California, droughts in Georgia, the Nobel Peace Prize this year, you’d think this would be front page news. Where did it run in your local paper?
Sources:
- Global Environmentalk Outlook 4 (GEO4)
- Press releases
are not yet available (?!)in English, in .pdf
- GEO4 fact sheets
- Environment Canada press release, “Minister welcomes GEO4 report”
- The Post (Pakistan) — “Report presents less grim picture”
- Times of India – “45,000 sq. miles of forest lost across the world”
- Deutsche Welle story
- Kansas City Star (Bloomberg News)
- Toronto Star
Leave a Comment » | Education, Environmental protection, Global warming, Globalization, History, Politics, Science | Tagged: Climate change, environmental disasters, oceans, Politics, sustainable harvest, UN | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Lot of damage, not much benefit: The truth about Utah vouchers
October 22, 2007Editorials in two of Utah’s second-tier daily newspapers spell out exactly why the Utah voucher proposal submitted to voters is a bad one. The Provo Daily Herald urges voters to study the voucher proposal, and then vote for it. The Logan Herald-Journal discusses a key problem for Cache Valley parents and educators, in aging buildings that are often older than the grandparents of the students, but which will cost a fortune to replace.
The Utah voucher plan is only half-vampire (blood sucking, that is; or money sucking), leaving with the public schools some of the money allocated for students who choose to leave — at least for five years. In that one regard, the Utah proposal stands a head above other voucher plans offered in the U.S.
That is not enough to make it a good proposal, however. Why?
Here are “givens” for this article, the basic set of facts we have to work from.
1. Crowding is a key problem for Utah schools. Statewide, public schools average 30 pupils per class. That’s above national norms, and twice the concentration of students that studies show make for the most effective classrooms (15 students). (A new study from the Utah Taxpayers Association, a usually credible source, shows Utah’s public school student population growing from today’s almost 550,000, to about 750,000 by 2022 — requiring more than $6 billion in new construction costs.)
2. Partly because of large families in Utah, per pupil spending ranks near the lowest in the U.S. The usual figure used in the voucher discussions in Utah is $7,500 per student per year, but I can find no source that corroborates that figure. The actual number is probably closer to $5,000 per student, but may be lower. Legislative analysts based their scrutiny of the proposal on the $7,500 figure, and for discussion purposes, that’s good enough. It won’t make any difference in the outcome. (A reader in comments on another post says the $7,500 figure comes from the Park City School District, the state’s richest — it may be high by as much as 40% for the state. Can that citation be accurate?)
3. Utah’s schools perform well above where they should be expected to perform, on the basis of number of teachers, teacher pay, and student populations. Despite crowding and shortage of money, three Utah middle schools were named among the nation’s 129 best last month. Utah students score respectably on nationally-normed tests. A high percentage of Utah students go to college. Utah parents deserve a great deal of the credit for this performance boost. Utah has for years had higher than average educational attainment. With several outstanding colleges and universities in a small state, many Utah parents have a degree or two, and they buy books, and that achievement and the drive to get education rub off on their children.
4. These problems should get worse without drastic action. Utah family size may decrease slightly, but immigration from other states adds to pupil population increases. Utah’s economy is not so outstanding that it can easily absorb significantly higher taxes to pay for schools. (See the Utah Taxpayers Association study, again.)
Those are the givens. Advocates of the voucher plan, notably people like Richard Eyre, who made a fortune investing in Kentucky Fried Chicken, and has since invested much of his time in dabblings in public policy, argue several benefits to the voucher plan:
A. Not much damage to public schools by taking money away. In fact, they argue, during the first five years, for each student who leaves a public school with a voucher, the school will keep at least $4,000 (this figure would apply only to the richest districts, if the baseline number comes from Park City as my commenter suggested). This $4,000 would be spread among the other 29 students remaining, effectively, leaving just under $140 additional money per student in the average classroom. (There are problems with this calculation, of course).
B. Public school classroom size will shrink, to the benefit of the remaining kids.
C. Public school spending can hold steady when schools fire the teachers who lose students (I assume this is a misstatement from the Eyres’ video — that instead, some savings might result from dismissal of low-performing teachers in schools where a significant portion of students leave).
D. Magically, competition will create better education.
Below the fold, I’ll tell you why the benefits will not obtain, and point out some of the dangers of pushing the whole education system over a cliff that are inherent in this scheme.
2 Comments | Economics, Education, Education quality, Education reform, Education spending, Elections, History, School vouchers | Tagged: Economics, education economics, Politics, school funding, teacher motivation, Utah referendum, vouchers | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Vouchers as Oreos: Crumbs for the kids
October 21, 2007Here’s the infamous “Oreo® cookie” ad by the pro-voucher Richard and Linda Eyre, in the 30-second version:
I have a few questions for the Eyres and their Modified Vampire Voucher program:
1. Private schools are few and far between in Utah — where is a kid supposed to find a school?
2. National statistics tracked by the Department of Education show Utah at the bottom of the per-student spending list. Were Utah spending $7,500/year/student, Utah would rank comfortably near the top. Where did you get your figures for spending in Utah, and why do they differ from the national statistics?
3. Are you saying that, if vouchers cut student loads at public schools, no teachers or classrooms would be cut? I don’t see that guarantee in the law, and I’m wondering why you’re claiming something like that will occur.
4. How many kids need to leave the average public school classroom before there is a significant increase in money left over for the rest of the kids, under your formula? By “significant,” I mean at least 10% increases, or with your statistics, $750/pupil. My quick, in-my-head calculations show that, if only rich kids leave, we need to get 5 rich students , with the lowest vouchers, out of that 30-student class in order to get a significant increase in spending. That’s 17% of the students.
If 17% of the students left Utah’s public schools, how much would your program cost? How many private schools would need to be created to accommodate that percentage?
5. You say Utah spends about $7,000/student, and you suggest that Utah should be spending nearly $10,000/student. In order to get a $3,000/student increase in that classroom, you’d need to get 10 rich students to leave, or 33%. How soon do you think you can get a third of the students to leave Utah’s public schools?
6. You say teachers should lose their jobs if students leave public schools for private schools. Why? Studies show that generally it is the best students who leave public schools for private schools. If their teachers are punished . . . well, explain just what it is you really advocate?
7. When I published the research studies at the U.S. Department of Education, we published studies showing that reduction in classroom size helped student achievement — a measurable amount once classroom size got down to 18 students, and significantly once classroom size got down to 15 students per class. By your figures, we’d need to get half of all students to leave Utah’s public schools to get down to 15 kids per class — without firing any of the bad teachers. How long will it take to get that reduction? How much will it cost?
8. If we can’t get a third of all students to leave the public schools, we’re still stuck with a massive shortfall in funding. What’s your backup plan, since getting a third of all students to leave is a stupid idea with zero chance of success? When you’re done hammering at the foundations of public education, what then?
9. Do the good people at Nabisco approve of your abuse of their cookies?
Eyre’s program may look neat as Oreos, but it leaves only crumbs for the kids. Taking money out for vouchers does almost nothing to contribute to solutions for Utah’s education problems.
Below the fold: The longer version of the ad.
7 Comments | Education, Education spending, Elections, Politics, Rampant stupidity, School vouchers | Tagged: Education, Politics, school funding, Utah referendum, vouchers | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Pro voucher forces panic in Utah
October 20, 2007With the nation’s first state-wide voucher on the ballot in Utah this November, and with the polls showing a large majority ready to vote the idea down, voucher supporters push every button they can find, hoping one of them is the real “panic” button. 
But, legislators recruiting lobbyists into a referendum? A new blog dedicated to the Utah referendum, Accountability, carries the story with links to local Utah news media.
. . . I know there’s a whole industry built up now to protect the will of lawmakers from their constituents.
But I didn’t think that was the prevailing wisdom here. We hadn’t fallen victim to the political industry like folks have back East.
Then I read articles like Paul Rolly’s column in this morning’s Trib and I wonder if we’re not so far away from succumbing to it, too.
“Lawmakers stack the deck on vouchers” is the headline, and the first sentence tells the whole story. “About 20 lobbyists were summoned to a meeting Monday by legislative leaders who urged them to roll up their sleeves and help save the voucher law.”
Isn’t a ballot referendum supposed to be the voice of the people? In fact, isn’t it the last chance the people have to have their say on a law, after the legislature has had its way? That’s what the Constitution provides. So what’s wrong with informing every Utahn man and woman of voting age what the referendum says, answer any questions they have, then let them vote on whether to keep this law or discard it?
The story as related at Accountability would be a road map for a corruption investigation into the Republican leaders of the Utah legislature for a state attorney general out to defend the electoral process from graft and the legislative process from corruption. Does Utah have such an attorney general? Utah’s relatively clean and open political processes, artificially bipartisan by LDS Church decree in the 19th century, appears to be going the way of all political flesh.
Cash is provided from interest groups far outside Utah, groups that have never considered the effects of a voucher bill on a kid in San Juan County, Utah, who has a 50-mile, one-way bus ride just to get to the nearest public school.
Later stories at Accountability detail the cash flow from outside, and the folly out-of-state and out-of-their-mind interests create in local elections. (I have not found any identification for the author of that blog — does anyone know who it is?)
Maybe it’s time we took a more historic view of this fight, and labeled it for what it is: As Chris Mooney has documented the Republican War on Science, this Utah skirmish is part of the larger War on Education; whether it’s an exclusively Republican declaration of war is not yet clear. It doesn’t bode well for peace, progress and prosperity that the Republican leaders of the Utah legislature are the ones commanding the gun batteries shooting at Utah’s schools.
Leave a Comment » | Economics, Education, Education blogs, Education reform, Elections, History, Politics, Public education, School vouchers | Tagged: Education, education funding, political corruption, School vouchers, Utah referendum, vouchers | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Robert Scott named to head Texas Education Agency
October 18, 2007Texas Gov. Rick Perry named Acting Education Commissioner Robert Scott to head the Texas Education Agency yesterday. The Houston Chronicle carried the Associated Press story.
Some Texas educators are disappointed that no one like Mike Moses got the job. Moses is a long-time public school educator who was a very popular and knowledgeable. But disappointment was tempered by relief for what might have happened. Gov. Perry earlier in 2007 named a creationist and hard-back conservative to chair the State Board of Education. Scott is not thought to be that deep into right-wing political ideology.
Scott is a policy wonk, coming out of legislative staff to staff TEA. This is the second time he was acting commissioner. Oddly, he is so little known that it is unclear whether he is the Robert Scott who appears to have acted contrary to ethics and law in an earlier TEA contract problem, or whether it was another TEA employee also named Robert Scott. People who would usually know the difference in such situations, appear not to know in this one.
Were there a stock market in state educational attainment, Texas’s stock would have dropped 8% yesterday, with analysts saying it was better than the expected 12% decrease.
Can teachers alone save Texas’s education system? It’s a risky experiment.
(Text of TEA press release below the fold.)
Leave a Comment » | Education, State school boards, Texas, Texas history | Tagged: Education, Texas Education Agency | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
They do as you do, not as you say
October 13, 2007If you were wondering whether it’s still true that kids watch what you do rather than listen to what you say — yes, it’s still true. It’s more important to walk the walk than talk the talk — Gallup Management Journal features an article emphasizing the phenomenon, “The Sixth Element of Great Managing”:
One of the most powerful discoveries about how humans understand the world around them came about by accident. In the early 1990s, a group of researchers led by Dr. Giacomo Rizzolatti, a neuroscientist at the University of Parma in Italy, placed small electrodes in the brains of monkeys near the regions of the brain responsible for planning and carrying out movements. If the monkey picked up something, an electronic monitor that was connected to the wires in the animal’s brain would sound — “brrrrrip, brrrrrip, brrrrrip” — to register the firing of those neurons.
Then something happened — something so unusual that the researchers thought it had to be a mistake. If the monkey saw one of the scientists doing something — eating an ice cream cone, picking up a peanut or raisin, grabbing a banana — the monitor registered the firing of brain cells as if the monkey had done it, when all the animal did was watch.
“It took us several years to believe what we were seeing,” Rizzolatti told The New York Times. The structure behind the phenomenon was discovered to be what they called “mirror neurons,” cells scattered throughout key regions of the brain that mimic everything the monkey sees another do.
Subsequent research found a far more complicated set of mirror neurons in people. This “human see; human do” circuitry is believed to be why a yawn can be contagious, why even a newborn will stick out her tongue if she sees someone else do it, and why American boys sometimes mimic the idiosyncrasies of their favorite baseball players at bat. “It explains much about how we learn to smile, talk, walk, dance, or play tennis,” said a 2006 cover article in Scientific American Mind magazine.
If you want your students to be good at map reading, they need to see you reading maps. If you want your students to read, they need to see you read. The “mirror neurons” phenomenon should affect the strategies we use in the classroom.
- Scientific American Mind, “Therapeutic Reflection,” June 2007 (subscription required)
- Scientific American, November 2006
- Schools for Children Notebook
File this under the “nothing new under the sun” category, or “oh, yeah, now I remember!”
1 Comment | Brain development, Brain learning, Education, Ethics, Learning, Learning styles, Teaching | Tagged: brain mirroring, Education, Learning, mirror neurons | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Utah voucher wars: When very desperate, bribe
October 13, 2007Salt Lake Tribune political reporter Paul Rolly shows just how desperate are the voucher supporters in Utah, with polls showing the voucher referendum on the November ballot will crush the pro-voucher legislation: They offered bribes.
Yes, bribes are illegal. You know that, I know that. Tell it to the voucher advocates:
With polls showing overwhelming numbers of voters poised to repeal the voucher law that was passed by the Legislature last winter, voucher advocates got so desperate Thursday they sent an e-mail from the FreeCapitalist Project offering money for pro-voucher votes in next month’s referendum election.
But then someone must have let them know it usually is considered illegal to buy votes, so they sent a second e-mail several hours later retracting everything they said in the first e-mail.
The original e-mail said Parents for Choice in Education is conducting a “Friends and Family” campaign in which “advocates” are encouraged to sign up friends and relatives who commit to voting in favor of the voucher law in next month’s referendum election.
If the advocate provides his or her field manager with 25 names committed to voting for vouchers and they actually vote, the advocate gets $10 per person, or $250 for the 25 names, the e-mail said. Plus, the advocate will get $10 for each voter they get beyond the 25.
The contacts for the program were listed as Brandon Dupuis and Jim Speth, PCE field managers for northern and southern Utah, respectively.
So, as the old saying goes (a bit amended): If you can’t dazzle them with your brilliance, baffle them with a bribe.
But then came the Oops!
“Retraction,” the second e-mail boomed.
“We apologize for the previous e-mail . . . . It was simply incorrect and misrepresents the Free Capitalist Projects’ grass-roots efforts. Neither Parents for Choice in Education nor the Free Capitalist Project will ever provide incentives that appear to pay people to vote. The earlier e-mail was sent by determined and sincere individuals who are working diligently, but the Free Capitalist Project and Parents for Choice in Education did not approve, authorize or see the e-mail in advance.”
I’ll wager it wasn’t the illegality that stopped them. Somebody probably sat down with a calculator and suggested how much it might cost them, at $10.00/vote, if people took them up on the offer. And for the $10.00, there’s no guarantee that any of the votes would be switches — no guarantee that it would sway any votes their way.
3 Comments | Education, Education spending, Elections, Rampant stupidity, School vouchers | Tagged: education vouchers, referendum, Utah vouchers | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Nobels, a lagging indicator
October 12, 2007P. Z. Myers at Pharyngula notes buzz about the science Nobels all going to Europeans (even the two U.S. residents are European). Nobels are a lagging indicator of things, at best, P. Z. says. The real damage done to U.S. research shows up other places.
Thanks for the reassurances, P. Z.
(He’s right, you know. He’s using Nobels as an indicator of the robustness of U.S. science; I use them as an indicator of the robustness of U.S. education. Much of the same stuff applies. More on science, later.)
3 Comments | Education, Science, War on Science | Tagged: Education, Nobel Prizes, War on Science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Too much communication: e-mail
October 12, 2007What’s one big difference between education and business? Communication, especially electronic communication. Businesses have too much of it, many if not most educational organizations are a decade behind that curve, not yet having enough.
Free content at the Wall Street Journal includes this column by Sue Shellenbarger in Work and Family, “A day without e-mail is like . . .” She tells the story of U.S. Cellular’s chief operating officer banning e-mail on Fridays to improve work. He was striving for more face-to-face communication among employees, and he got it.
My first experience with e-mail was at the U.S. Department of Education — good heavens! — two decades ago. We were experimenting with electronic communication with the old, slow systems that linked dumb terminals through telephone connections (1200 BAUD, anyone?). Our formerly technophobic boss, Checker Finn, was at home recuperating from some physical ailment, and we made the delightful mistake of showing him he could send and receive messages by computer. Within a few weeks it took at least an hour a day to keep up with the messages. But our operations were split, with administration across town at the main ED building, and most of the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) closer to the Capitol, at New Jersey Avenue, NE. Basic communications that had taken three days by inside mail, courier, and the limousine between the two buildings, were shortened to exchanges over 15 or 20 minutes. Computer messaging was a huge boost to productivity on most things. E-mail, such as it was, had to be printed out to be read. Saving it was a manual filing process.
3 Comments | Best practices, Business, Classroom management, Classroom technology, Education, Education success, Organizational communication, Teaching, Technology in the classroom | Tagged: E-mail, Education reform, Organizational communication | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Spinning dancer
October 10, 2007
Cool .gif, and a bit of a rant:
Cool .gif: I found this .gif at That Wealth Advisor Guy, a blog of a midwestern investments advisor. He claims that if you see the dancer rotating clockwise, you are right-brained; if you see her rotating counter-clockwise, you are left-brained. I can see it both ways (look under her feet for a few seconds, see if she doesn’t reverse for you, too).
If this is a valid test — and I have no way to gauge that it is valid — it provides one more way to discern one more fact about people you work with, or know — or about your students with some relevance to their learning styles (I don’t know what the connections would be).
The rant: That Wealth Advisor Guy posts no links, no sources, and no citations to back up any of his claims. It may well be just a cool .gif. How could we know if he doesn’t give us the details?
His blog doesn’t allow comments.
Would I invest with a guy who doesn’t provide all the information I want, or all the information that should be legally required, and who seems unduly influenced by woo stuff he finds on the internet?
Off to see if I can find citations . . .
Below the fold: Right-brain, left-brain characteristics, as related by That Wealth Advisor Guy. Are they accurate, or backed by any research? Who can tell?
Update: Mo at Neurophilosophy debunks the left-brain / right-brain stuff. It’s just an optical illusion, which illustrates that we often see things differently from other people, but probably provides no deep insights into anything you should take seriously. Go read what he says!
19 Comments | Brain development, Brain learning, Education, Learning styles, Woo | Tagged: left-brain/right-brain, Spinning dancer illusion, Woo | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Nobels: Medicine prize for gene knockout tools
October 8, 2007My general predictions about Nobel Prizes are way off after the first announcement today.
The London Telegraph announced it:
The Nobel prize for medicine is shared today by Mario Capecchi, Martin Evans and Oliver Smithies for their work on stem cells and genetic manipulation that has had a profound impact, from basic medical research to the development of new treatments.
Although stem cells are one of the hottest fields in science today for their potential for growing replacement cells and tissue for a wide range of diseases, the prestigious 10 million Swedish crown (£750,000) prize recognised the international team’s work for genetically manipulating stem cells to find out what genes do in the body and to provide animal versions of human disease to help hone understanding and test new treatments.
Capecchi was born in Italy and is a US citizen. Both Evans and Smithies are British-born. Sir Martin is known for his pioneering work on stem cells in mice, while Capecci and Smithies showed how genes could be modified.
The Nobel Committee press release gives their formal identification and affiliations:
Mario R. Capecchi, born 1937 in Italy, US citizen, PhD in Biophysics 1967, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA. Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and Distinguished Professor of Human Genetics and Biology at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA.
Sir Martin J. Evans, born 1941 in Great Britain, British citizen, PhD in Anatomy and Embryology 1969, University College, London, UK. Director of the School of Biosciences and Professor of Mammalian Genetics, Cardiff University, UK.
Oliver Smithies, born 1925 in Great Britain, US citizen, PhD in Biochemistry 1951, Oxford University, UK. Excellence Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC, USA.
My usual (and still standing) prediction is that most Nobel winners will be Americans, and educated in America’s public schools. Of the three announced today, one is Italian born (but a U.S. citizen now), and the other two are British.
Update: Turns out that Dr. Capecchi moved to the U.S. from Italy at the age of 9. Does anyone know where he went to elementary, junior high and high school?
Capecchi’s success belies his very difficult upbringing in war-torn Italy during World War II. At the age of four, he was separated from his mother, who was taken by the Gestapo to the Dachau concentration camp. For the next four-and-a half years, he lived on the streets, fending for himself by begging and stealing. The two reunited when Capecchi was nine, and they soon moved to the United States, where he began elementary school without knowing how to read or write or how to speak English.
More prizes to come.
Sources:
1 Comment | Biology, Education, Education success, Science | Tagged: medicine, Nobel Prizes, Public education, stem cells | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 