ODYSSEYWARE

Tonight, President Obama will announce his spending priorities for the next year. With a large deficit facing the country and spending a major concern for many voters, the President has made announcements that spending will be severely curtailed under his new budget with one notable exception: education. As CBS reports, this upcoming year’s education budget will face an extraordinary increase after experiencing an unprecedented one year increase in last year’s budget and stimulus spending. The result is a greater ability for school districts to accommodate learners and make technology acquisitions that modernize classrooms and meet today’s digital natives. From CBS:

President Barack Obama will highlight his commitment to education reform in his State of the Union address Wednesday, highlighted by a 6.2 percent increase for the Department of Education.

Although this increase is welcome news, the devil will be in the details, as early news stories are claiming that many existing programs will be cut or consolidated resulting in decreased spending in other, yet to be named, programs of the Department of Education. All that said, this unprecedented level of spending should give reason for cheer in the education sector that has consistently called for greater funding. A 6.2% increase amounts to nearly $4 billion in additional spending. Great news for education and hopefully for students!

Whatever you do, do not call the Washington Post’s Jay Matthews uncreative. For years he has come up with innovative, if unconventional, ideas for reforming education and improving instruction in the classroom for students without resorting to the usual calls for more funding and more teachers. Yesterday’s column was no different as he made a call for converting lunch time into ‘reading time’ where students are required to eat and read rather than socialize with other classmates. The idea is that, in the recent calls for expanding school hours, schools can get academic results out of a time generally reserved for non-academic time for students. In these times of constrained school budgets, Matthews argues that using the lunch period more effectively would go a long way toward improving education and doing so in a cost-effective way. From his column:

I know. This sounds impractical. But it is worth a try. It would add 45 minutes of the best kind of learning, just reading, to the school day, without actually making it any longer. Students can talk to each other on the way to their next class, and on the way home.

Or, you could allow online curriculum to play a larger role in the classroom, driving down textbook acquisition costs, lengthening the school day as students complete lesson plans on their own and allowing students to socialize, work, play, etc. on a schedule that meets their own needs. That would be our counter-suggestion.

Yahoo News is reporting that David Guggenheim, the director of the Oscar Award winning An Inconvenient Truth, will be releasing a new film which focuses on the U.S. public education system called Waiting for Superman. The film is intended to show the problems facing public schools in our country and will debut at the Sundance Film Festival this week in Utah.

The film also estimates that by 2020 the education system will produce only 50 million students capable of filling more than 120 million jobs seeking highly qualified individuals.

“As much as politicians, reformers and the press know what the real problems are, they’re not going to talk about them, because they’re politically deadly,” Guggenheim states.

In addition to the movie, Bill Gates, whose net worth was estimated at $40 billion by Forbes magazine in 2009, will be in attendance as well.  He has a starring role in the documentary and will be appearing at the movie’s showing to discuss education and ways Americans can demand greater accountability out of our public schools, as well as strategies for overall reform of how we teach students.  His foundation, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, gives away millions of dollars to improve schools in America and has been a driving force for change in instruction in its few short years of existence.

It’s too bad this event won’t be publicly aired and we have to wait for the movie to be mass released because, as Guggenheim notes, this is a great opportunity for raising the profile of education in our nation’s debate.

“But the only way we’re going to address this crisis is if these uncomfortable truths are spoken out loud.”

As part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which helped the country stay out of a recession, many schools are receiving funding for new computers and technology.  States such as New Hampshire, in turn, are using the funding to purchase those resources now to shore up their technology and acquisition projects and, as a result, transform their classrooms.  According to the Concord Monitor, schools in Pittsfield, New Hampshire used more than $500,000 to purchase computers.

“(The grants) are a huge shot in the arm for the districts that got the awards,” Cathy Higgins, a state education technology consultant, said. In the districts’ grant proposals, “we hoped that they would be laying the groundwork for significant transformation in their schools.”

Pittsfield plans to use the money to provide a digital learning environment in the classrooms of eight teachers, elementary school Principal Doug Kilmister said. Their classrooms will have digital cameras and interactive whiteboards on which students can buzz in their answers to polling or multiple choice questions.

The exciting part of this report is that these classrooms will be staffed with teachers who can use the curriculum and technology tools in creative ways.  Too often, technology monies go to classrooms where students are just expected to “surf” the internet, generally leaving the technologies unused or underutilized.  With this acquisition, however, a real step in the direction of incorporating technology into the broader classroom curriculum framework seems to be afoot.  That’s great news for New Hampshire students!

Students in New Carrollton, Maryland have received a new jolt of energy and money from Hewlett-Packard and the Washington Wizards.  Four students in the suburban Washington, D.C. school received more than $80,000 worth of HP equipment as a result of their successful application to the HP Digital Assist Education Grant competition.  To win the competition, students needed to show how technology allowed them to learn a complex topic with greater ease and demonstrate that lesson plan in video form.  For many students there is no tougher discipline than science, but with the help of technology, the award recipients were more than capable.

According to the Washington Post,  eighth-graders Raynal Bell and Amber Booth, both 13, and seventh-graders Phyllis Arthur-Williams and Marquette Freeman, both 12, produced and filmed their video, “Science and Basketball”, to demonstrate the concept of kinetic energy and specifically whether the transfer of kinetic energy is related to the mass of the object. (Kinetic energy is the extra energy an object has because of motion.)

Antwan Jamison of the Washington Wizards visited the students at school to let them know they had received the award.  Although exciting in itself, this award provides yet another example of technology’s ability to bridge difficult issues with a student’s desire to learn.  Now, with the smarts of these students, their classmates will be able to harness that potential as well!

While writing in Education Week, Katie Hanifin, a high school teacher in Oneida, New York, explains the basic needs — the new needs, that is — of students in today’s classroom. From her perspective, students today are different learners and need to be treated as such. As digital natives, they tend to grasp information in a way that requires higher speed access, dynamic options, and less context than a map toward the answers. Writing from a student’s perspective, Hanifin continues:

We don’t always require introductions followed by backgrounds, followed by histories. Give us the content and feel free to leave us something to figure out on our own. Thanks to Google and Wikipedia, we can research independently—we’re actually quite good at it. Give us something about which to be curious.

The University of California – Los Angeles’ (UCLA) Institute for Democracy, Education and Access conducted an interview of 87 K-12 schools across California as a means of determining how the state’s public schools were dealing with the financial crisis, which has created a national recession. California, with an unemployment rate peaking around 12.4% is struggling to find the tax revenue to continue funding its schools. Adding to the state’s woes, achievement and quality of schools continue to decline in the state, leaving California near the bottom in overall education ranks. But, as Education Week reports, the statistics that will further impact the state’s schools are staggering:

— 62 percent of principals reported that teachers in their schools had been laid off, threatened with layoffs, or reassigned to other schools. The number of actual layoffs was four times greater at schools in poorer communities than wealthier communities.

— 67 percent reported that class sizes had increased, with 74 percent of elementary school principals reporting larger class sizes.

— 75 percent reported that summer school had been reduced or eliminated.

— 75 percent reported reductions in instructional materials and supplies.

— 70 percent reported cuts to professional development programs.

These are very deep cuts that will have an impact on students throughout the state, regardless of the strength an individual school district’s budget. We wish the state luck and offer a hand to help in this difficult time for the country’s largest state.

Students in metro Detroit’s Westwood Community School District are excelling, and not just the students in mainstream classes. Students in the at-risk, alternative education program at Westwood have enrolled in an online class called “Cyber School,” where they can take their courses, receive credit, and matriculate along with their peers without ever having to set foot in the school itself. This remarkable opportunity has yielded results for students reaching as high as 32% increases in previous year grades. From the Detroit News:

Kyle Grigg, who was forced out of Melvindale High school for falling behind, is now heading toward graduation because he’s no longer confined to a seven-hour school day.

The Race to the Top, while generating much attention in its own right, has set the stage for a much larger debate about the shape of what legislation replacing or amending No Child Left Behind (NCLB) might look like. With its assurances for performance, mandating improving test scores and removing barriers to assessment, Race to the Top has forced many state legislatures, as we have documented on this blog for some time, to make some tough choices in order to receive federal dollars. With that, however, might be a better understanding of where this administration plans to take education over the coming years and what form a look of NCLB might take.

“There are 50 ways to fail” under the No Child Left Behind Act, the current version of the law, said Mr. Duncan, a critique he has raised in the past. But there are “very little, if any, rewards if you do a good job. … We want to put unprecedented resources out there on a competitive basis for those who are committed” to boosting student achievement.

In many ways, Race to the Top is just that: an incentive-laden approach to reform. It hearkens back to the old debate of the carrot versus the stick.

Although it is unclear when and how this debate will begin, it is clear that President Obama intends to modify NCLB, leaving a legacy of his own in the education realm. As many educators can attest, NCLB made some significant changes to how schools and classrooms operate, driving a substantial national discussion on education and its varying approaches based upon each teacher’s views. Yet another look at this law and the other overall national view of how children should be educated will likewise cause another discussion. We’ll be here to follow it and to provide our insight as educators for you!

Marcus Winters, writing in today’s Los Angeles Times, argues that with a patchwork of states devising their own state standards for curriculum and assessments, there has been a gradual yet inarguable decline in the quality of standards and, by extension, the quality of education that students are receiving. As the Common Core Initiative receives greater scrutiny for its approach toward greater uniform standards across all nations, Mr. Winters op-ed today touches on some interesting points on the state-defined standards debate.

Worse, standards are declining. A recent federal study noted that 15 states lowered at least one of their proficiency standards in math and reading between 2005 and 2007.

Although OdysseyWare does not explicitly endorse one approach over another, we believe support strong standards stressing all that is needed for students to be well-prepared for what comes after grade school, be it a job, college, or something else. That is why our curriculum continues to adapt and to meet each state’s needs, consistently rising to the challenges of ever-changing standards. In this sense, our online-based curriculum can quickly adapt to changing standards while static materials — such as textbooks — remain stale and behind the times.