NC Legislators Vow to Find Voucher Money Despite Budget Woes

Once again, our state legislative leaders in North Carolina demonstrate where their hearts really are: anything but public education. According to to WRAL,  North Carolina State Representative “Skip” Stam from Wake County said he hopes to find “another $7 to 8 million” to pour into the state’s legally challenged voucher program that the North Carolina predominately anti-public education legislature passed last year.

Not to be outdone, North Carolina State Senator Jerry Tillman jumped in and stated that he felt obligated to continue pouring money into state vouchers too.

One thing is clear; this North Carolina Legislative leadership, which includes Senator Tillman, Senator Phil Berger, and NC House Speaker Thom Tillis, do not demonstrate the same dedication and determination to provide for students in the public schools in this state.Their eagerness to find money for vouchers rather than find funding for textbooks, teacher assistants, and teacher pay is a clear indication of where their heart is. Together, these three have done more to damage public education in this state than anyone else. At the end of their anti-public education campaign, there will be no public schools left standing. For more information about their determination to find voucher money even in difficult budget times, check out “Voucher Backers Want NC to Double Available Slots Before Lottery."

With political leaders like these guys, North Carolina continues to become the anti-education state.

Scribe: An Inexpensive Outliner Note-Taking Software Alternative for Mac Users

Recently,  I found myself in search of a simple program that would allow me to outline my readings for my doctoral program. Obviously, I could create those outlines within a word-processor like MS Word or Pages, but when I’m taking notes, simplicity in operation is important. I found a simple outline program in Scribe by Peppered Software. It is a simple outline program that provides minimal features for simple note-taking.

• Easy keyboard shortcuts
• Minimalist interface that keeps superfluous features from getting in the way
• Ability to export your outlines to multiple formats, including: OPML, Rich Text (For your MS Word or Open Office programs), or plain text.

For the Mac user looking for a simple, inexpensive Outliner note-taking program, Scribe has proven for me an excellent choice.

Scribe Interface

Note: I haven't received any compensation for the promotion of this software.

Value-Added Measures and 'Consulting Chicken Entrails' for High-Stakes Decision-Making

“Like the magician who consults a chicken's entrails, many organizational decision makers insist that the facts and figures be examined before a policy decision is made, even though the statistics provide unreliable guides as to what is likely to happen in the future.” Gareth Morgan, Images of Organization: The Executive Edition

Could it be that using Value-added data is the equivalent of consulting “chicken-entrails” before making certain high-stakes decisions? With all the voodoo, wizardry, and hidden computations that educators are just supposed to accept on faith from companies crunching the data, value-added data might as well be “chicken entrails” and the “Wizards of VAM” might as well be high-priests or magicians reading those innards and making declarations of effectiveness and fortune telling. The problem, though, is value-added measures are prone to mistakes, despite those who say “it’s best we have.” Such reasoning itself smells of simply accepting its imperfections. One only need hold their nose, and take the medicine.

What President Obama, Arne Duncan, down through our own North Carolina state education leaders do not get is that Value-added measures simply are not transparent. If anyone reads any of the current literature on these statistical models, you immediately see many, many imperfections. There’s certainly enough errors of concern to argue that VAMs have zero place in making high-stakes decisions.

As the “Wizards of VAM” prepare to do their number crunching and “entrails reading” in North Carolina, we await their prognostications and declarations of “are we effective or ineffective?” Let’s hope it doesn’t smell too bad.

Leadership and Letting the Difficulties of Life & Job Be Our Teachers

Aren’t our difficulties always our best teacher, taking us to the places we rarely willingly go on our own?

Bayda, Ezra (2014-04-08). The Authentic Life: Zen Wisdom for Living Free from Complacency and Fear (p. 192). Shambhala Publications. Kindle Edition.

There’s something noble in looking at even the daily difficulties of life as teachers. These troubled situations in our lives do indeed impart wisdom if we have a willingness to allow them to teach us, but we must be willing to be openminded and drop the difficulty-avoidance strategies we often engage in. Many pray that their god will take away the difficulty so they don’t have to endure it, but I am reminded of the story of Jesus Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, where he did do the human thing and ask that the difficulty be taken away, but also acknowledged that if it was his path, then he could accept it. There’s is true nobility in accepting our difficulties as our teachers. Regardless of religious faith, difficulties can be our teachers if we’re willing to let them be.

I once had an administrator who believed that with proaction, all difficulty and complication could be avoided. He painstakingly planned for every possibility. To him a school was a machine to be manipulated and controlled to the point that every issue could be avoided. That was, until the one difficulty he missed occurred. Due to this difficulty, he found himself transferred to another school, where he was free to practice proactive avoidance strategies once again.

We as administrators must do what we can to proactively prevent problems; that’s a big part of our mission, so I am certainly not arguing that we slacken our efforts to prevent issues and difficulties from happening. What I do advocate is a simple recognition and openness to let life use difficulty to teach us, because, as Zen teacher Ezra Bayda points out, these difficulties "take us places we aren’t willing to go on our own."

We don’t have to see difficulties in our jobs as something to be avoided. We can see them as our “best teachers."

NC Legislature & Governor Incapable of Listening to Reason

It seems the North Carolina legislature has found a new target after the North Carolina Senate targeted teachers with a budget that offers a bribe for them to give up due process rights or tenure in exchange for massive pay raises which are basically paid for by gutting other parts of the state’s education budget. What’s their new target? The Common Core State Standards. Today the North Carolina House voted to toss out those standards and create a commission of parents and educators to develop more rigorous standards for the state of North Carolina.  What is their primary reason for doing this? Here’s what former school administrator from the last century and current North Carolina State Senator, Jerry Tillman had to say"

“A lot of time and energy were invested in something we should never have gotten into the start with. We ought to own our own standards, and this will put them in our hands.” (See “House, Senate Takes Bites From Common Core Apple” from WRAL.)

Now, as I’ve posted before about the Common Core Standards, I am under no illusion that these have any power to improve education, nor do I step out here to defend them. If they are that great, then they need no defense nor marketing from me; they’ll stand on their own. But Senator Tillman’s statement I think captures more of a “how dare that federal government tell us what to do” attitude than any actual critique of the standards themselves. I would bet he’s most likely never read them, and that is fundamentally a problem with this state legislature.

This North Carolina government is incapable of listening to argument and reason because they are so ideologically driven. Even if one were capable to making a solid argument for Common Core, raising teacher salaries, or increasing funding for textbooks, it doesn’t matter. Our state legislature and even Governor McCrory are incapable of even having any open-mindedness to listen to arguments. That is North Carolina’s greatest danger right now; we have a government driven by ideology and if your ideology or ideas clash with that, forget it.

In the end, Senator Tillman’s objections to the Common Core aren’t based on logic or reason; it’s based on an ideology that blinds them to any level of reason and understanding, and unfortunately, I would say that doesn’t bode well for North Carolina Public Schools this year.

Katherine Stewart's book "The Good News Club" A Book Review

“Today, there is more religious activity in American public schools than there has been for the past 100 years.” Katherine Stewart, The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children

When writer Katherine Steward discovered that a program called “Good News Club” was announced as an after-school activity at her daughter’s public school, she decided to investigate further. The result was basically her book The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children. What she discovered was that the after school club was actually more than just a club that met after school; it was an attempt by an evangelical Christian organization to proselytize in public schools.
According to Stewart, the Good News Clubs advertizes  themselves as “Bible study” clubs that are only focused on those students whose parents give permission for their children to participate. But in practice, according to Stewart, those who run these clubs use tactics to try to coerce and cajole  other children to participate, even if those children’s families are of other religious persuasions. Stewart also points out that these clubs are more about instilling a fundamentalist religious doctrine in kids who participate than trying to simply study the Bible.

In her book, Stewart traces the Good News Clubs all the way back to an organization called Child Evangelism Fellowship, which is a global organization who does nothing to mask its intentions. Its intentions are clear if you look at their web site. “Child Evangelism Fellowship is a Bible-centered organization composed of born-again believers whose purpose is to evangelize boys and girls with the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ and to establish (disciple) them in the word of God in a local church for Christian living.” Through their Good News Clubs their goals are to teach and indoctrinate children in a fundamentalist Christian worldview and make sure children attend Christian churches who subscribe to that fundamentalist world-view.

Throughout her book, Stewart takes readers through the various tactics that those who lead these Good News Clubs utilize to indoctrinate and lure children to this fundamentalist worldview. She actually attends conferences and training to get a complete view about what these clubs are really about. In the end, her verdict is that these clubs are more about trying to proselytize in public schools and undermine public education than offering after school options to parents.

Perhaps someone who buys into the fundamentalist Christian perspective would find Stewart’s book offensive. After all, if you believe your worldview is the one all people should have, then whatever tactics used to disseminate that view to others is acceptable, even directed toward little children. But Stewart’s book should provide enough reason to pause, for school leaders, before allowing these kinds of clubs to move into school settings. We as school leaders in the United States also serve a broader public whose beliefs do not always fall in line with a fundamentalist Christian worldview. Our students represent many faiths, and, while clubs like the Good News Club might serve some of our students, we must not forget that there is diversity in our schools. In this sense, we become the guardians of tolerance. Stewart’s book is an excellent read in that sense. School leaders facing a decision on whether to allow Good News Clubs in their schools would do well to read this book first.

ReadKit: An Inexpensive RSS Feed Reader for Your Mac

Since purchasing a MacBook Pro last weekend, I’ve been exploring RSS Feed Reader programs. Of course there’s the web-based stand-by programs such as Feedly or NewsBlur which I’ve written about before. But somehow, since the demise of Google Reader, I’ve been using either one of these, and I haven’t been entirely pleased with the experience of these two reader options. Both seemed to be plagued by bugs and misfires, at least in my experience, so while using Windows, I used them because there just didn’t seem to be a great deal of options.
Since becoming a Mac user, I have been trying some RSS feed readers, and in ReadKit, I think I’ve found a solid reader that has a clear interface as well as the ability to share articles directly from the reader to a number of other web services. The program allows users to share to the usual social media outlets such as Twitter or Facebook, as well as sharing to other collection apps such as Pocket or Instapaper. Users can also customize the interface to their own needs like most other Feed readers, and they can also use their usually RSS feed services such as Feedly, Fever, NewsBlur, Feed Wrangler and Feed and Feedbin. While most other Readers provide all of these features, for the most part, ReadKit has proven to reliable and less buggy than other readers I’ve tried, and it has a well-laid out interface with easy to learn features. Currently, ReadKit is on sale for $4.99 in the App Store. It is an excellent Feed Reader for Mac Users.