ODYSSEYWARE

Do you remember your high school principal? My high school principal was a brainiac poet who filled in when the algebra teacher was sick. After reading an article in the New York Times about an effective high school principal who was removed from her position in the name of education reform, I can only wonder how my high school’s principal would fare in an environment that’s a bit hostile to public school teachers and administrators.

According to the article, this principal was removed “because the Burlington School District wanted to qualify for up to $3 million in federal stimulus money for its dozen schools.”

The number of children that could benefit from the funding simply outweighed the cost of losing a great principal. I wouldn’t want to have to make that call.

Under the NCLB rules, for a district to qualify, schools with very low test scores must do one of the following: close down; be replaced by a charter; remove the principal and half the staff; or remove the principal and transform the school. (You knew that, right?)

Yes, the school at which she was principal was indeed a low performer when held up to federal standards, but her students were different: 

• Thirty-seven of 39 fifth graders were refugees or special ed students.

• About half of the 230 students are foreign-born, collectively speaking 30 languages.

• Many have been traumatized.

• One-third see one of the school’s three caseworkers.

Ms. Irvine, the article said, received rave reviews from parents, peers, and her superiors. She developed a new arts curriculum and often worked 80-hour weeks in service to her students and the district.

Her tenacity to help students succeed simply did not stand a chance against the take-no-prisoners policy currently in place by the Department of Education.

As I see it, it would be hard to allow for exceptions under NCLB, as almost every school can give valid reasons why performance is down. Yet, it seems a tragedy that effective principals like Ms. Irvine must be casualties in the fight being waged to save public education. She was indeed one of the good guys.

Someone smart (whom I don’t know) once said, “There is zero intelligence when you start applying zero tolerance across the board.

So how do we keep the good, get rid of the bad, and still fight the good fight? More importantly, what should we do with the casualties?

Almost every parent thinks his child is gifted. I know I do. I bore my friends with stories of how my three-year-old corrects his dad’s pronunciation of dinosaur names and how he knows all the names of the months. Let’s face it. Kids are brilliant, and they know how to find the soft spots in our hearts.

As responsible parents, we also want our children to have all the opportunities to succeed academically and beyond. This has led to a new trend for toddlers. If you have the money, you can enroll your child in test prep and tutoring for four-year-olds.

The New York Times recently ran an article investigating this hot trend. With the fierce competition for acceptance into gifted programs, many parents have turned to programs that will give their kids an advantage over other pre-kindergarten students.

According to the article, Bige Doruk opened Bright Kids NYC in 2009 to help kids prepare:

She runs a two-month ‘boot camp’ for the gifted test in the fall that includes eight one-on-one 45-minute sessions and two test-prep books for $1,075.

The demand, Doruk says, continues to increase.

As a parent, I understand the urge to give my (brilliant) kid every opportunity that money can buy, I have to ask myself if the test is actually evaluating how gifted a child actually is. Instead, it seems we’re testing knowledge which, in my book, is a totally different game. Perhaps we’re testing how much money parents are willing to spend to get their children into a good school, leaving those without the means in an inequitable situation.

At ODYSSEYWARE, we believe that every student should be given every advantage necessary to compete and excel academically. With customizable online curriculum that can accommodate the learning styles of gifted students as well as those at-risk, students can begin at the appropriate place, and accelerate through the courses at a pace that works for them. This levels the playing field for many kids who haven’t had all the advantages but want to succeed.

Early learning is important for kids. The learning gap seems to widen every day as wealth, not ability, determines what is “gifted.” In addition, when children become test scores instead of living, breathing, brilliant, and curious little learners, we are passing over some of the best and the brightest, and this costs our entire society.

When Johnny comes to school tired, nobody wins. Fatigue is one of the biggest motivation killers for today’s students. With so many ways to connect with friends late into the night, many are coming to school sleep deprived and unprepared to learn. Read more »

Inspired by a series of entertaining, thoughtful articles in Reader’s Digest about the secrets of people in various careers, I thought a list for teachers might be in order. The following list of truisms surfaced through my 12 years of teaching high school English. Read more »

Every education class advocates having high expectations for all students. Unfortunately, in the trenches of teaching, sometimes it’s all too easy to expect great things from stellar students and less than spectacular things from students who underperform. During my teaching career, I learned the value of expectations in an unusual way. Read more »

Apples and oranges, peas and carrots, salt and pepper. All of these pairs have something in common, yet they are not equal. In the same way, we can compare earning a GED and a high school diploma. Read more »

Do you remember dial-up? Close your eyes and think back to a time when a high-pitched whine signaled that your phone line was trying to connect your computer to AOL or Netscape. Often, the result was a busy signal. This was frustrating to hordes of excited explorers who were at the very brink of the digital revolution. If you remember that, you probably remember getting “knocked off” too. Patience was a requirement if you were to stick with this Internet thing. (You don’t remember? Take my word for it; you wouldn’t have liked it.) Read more »

Does anyone win in the Race to the Top? Does competition, by default, create losers? These are questions regarding the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) debated by delegates to the NEA convention last week. In the aftermath, Race to the Top got low marks by the teachers’ union. The “no confidence” vote not only reflects teachers’ feelings about competitive grants, standardized testing, and more aggressive teacher assessment, but also about Arne Duncan and the president. Read more »

Computing in the cloud sounds dreamy, but as ed tech moves into the stratosphere, we’re finding out that the cloud may have a few hard edges that need some smoothing out. Probably the most prominent is security.

Despite the security concern, cloud computing has so many benefits that it’s difficult to ignore, or so said Nashville professional development specialist Richard Alcantar during a session at ISTE in Denver. Read more »

Tuesday morning I left for work in a mad rush. Feeling the effects of a long holiday weekend in Chicago, I was experiencing guilty mom syndrome. My heart said that my not-quite-three year old son should stay home today. He was as road weary as a kid can be and wanted no part of getting up at six, getting dressed, and heading off to preschool. Actually, I think I needed a day to recover. Do sore muscles from sleeping in a too-hard bed, riding in a too-small car, and cramming five days of visiting into a too-short weekend qualify as “sick”? Read more »