Educational Insanity

I have an idea. Maybe it’s a meme. Who knows? Who cares?

Anyway, the idea has three origins. First, it dates back to a dinner conversation in Chinatown (D.C.) during NECC ‘09 with (CAUTION: name-dropping to commence…) Joyce Valenza, Doug Johnson, Wes Fryer and Scott McLeod. I forget how the discussion started, but we ended up talking about resuscitating old blog posts. I thought it would be interesting to somehow curate a collection of self-nominated “favorite” or “best” blog posts.

Second, I’m fairly convinced that many of “us” use our blogs less regularly since Twitter came upon the scene. Sometimes I struggle to write anything that is more than 140 characters.

Finally, I’m reminded of when Scott McLeod used to recognize blogs that deserve a bigger audience (DABA). I know I’m not alone in thinking that there are individual blog posts that deserve a bigger audience.

So, here’s the idea: resuscitate a blog post that was written “before Twitter” and be sure to include the tag: #edublogBT.

For those of us that blogged reasonably regularly before we starting tweeting regularly, that should be pretty easy.  For those of you who started blogging and tweeting about the same time (or started Tweeting first), you can’t play…Well, I suppose you can still play and revive a post that you wrote a while ago that you would like to reintroduce to the world.

I have some ideas of how I’d curate this collection of posts (which all assume you are good about including the “edublogBT” tag.  If you have other ideas, fell free to share them in the comments here.

I’ll (re) post my first “edublogBT” post tomorrow.

Wanna play?

photo credit: Jasmin Baltres PhotographyI

I haven’t written much here since the summer.  I need to.  I want to.

So, I’m hoping that a remodeling of the site breathes some new life into my blogging efforts.

There are apparently 7 reader selectable themes, so you get to have some say in how this space looks for you (I think you have to have cookies enabled to save your customization, though).

Let me know what you think!

I’m teaching a course called The Politics of Education to an awesome group of our doctoral students this semester.

The wiki/syllabus (a living, breathing document) is located HERE.

You can participate and help my students’ (and my own) learning in a couple of ways.

First, tagging…anything that you think might be related to what the course is about (see e.g. http://sites.google.com/site/edpolitics/syllabus) can be tagged with “adms707“.  I know, just about everything education-related is also about the politics of education, but that’s OK. Tag away. We will all be feeding Google Reader with a subscription to the tag and we can filter out what’s useful or not.

Second, please consider subscribing to and/or reading the blogs my students are using as reflection spaces.  You can get to individual blog posts HERE.  Or, you can see the blog URLs HERE.  Of course, comments are helpful as I want this blogging endeavor to be meaningful in a connectivist sort of way.

Thanks for considering being a part of our learning experiences this semester!

photo credit: helgasms!

You couldn’t expect a guy with a doctorate in the politics of education to let the education portion of Wednesday night’s presidential debate go unchecked, could you?

Apparently, both candidates support charter schools.  No surprise from McCain; the Republican party tends to support most forms of school choice (that’s a gross generalization, but I’ll live with that for now). That Obama supports charter schools signals an interesting policy shift, assuming that Obama’s stance is representative of the Democraticy party as a whole (which it may very well not be).  I’m personally pretty mixed on charter schools.  On one hand, I think any policy or set of policies based in free market principles where perfect information on the part of consumers is assumed is highly problematic in the field of education.  On the other hand, these days I’m for anything that attempts to disrupt the status quo in public education.

And, speaking of “perfect information,” both candidates at least implied that charter schools “work” or that they are “effective” in some way (as opposed to voucher programs, where there seemed to be some disagreement).  Well, that’s less than perfect information.  Consider this study conducted as part of NAEP’s pilot study of charter school performance in 2003.  According to the executive summary for the report, “After adjusting for student characteristics, charter school mean scores in reading and mathematics were lower, on average, than those for public noncharter schools.”

I also bring your attention to more recent research conducted by colleagues and “social associates” (I’m not sure I can call them “friends,” but I have been out socially with them on multiple occasions) Sarah and Chris Lubienski.  Based on their analyses of NAEP data, Sarah and Chris concluded that “charter schools, privately operated and publicly financed, did significantly worse than public schools in the fourth grade, once student populations were taken into account.”

(BTW, teachable moment…the next sentence in the NYT article is as follows: “In the eighth grade, it found, students in charters did slightly better than those in public schools, though the sample size was small and the difference was not statistically significant.”  That’s a nonsensical statement.  If the differences were not statistically significant, then nobody did better than anybody else; not even slightly better.  So, the first part of the sentence cannot logically precede the second part.  This bugs me!)

The body of research on charter schools and school choice policies more generally has become overly politicized.  There are too many researchers with agendas dabbling in that field, and too many policy advocates who cherrypick a single study to support their argument.  However, in my reasonably well-informed opinion, the two studies above are as “independent” as they come.

So, Senators Obama and McCain, I’m in favor of exploring any and all educational policy options, including choice-based alternatives.  But, let’s please not mislead the American public.

Yes, you’re at the right place. I gave the blog a bit of a makeover. I started to feel like the old template was a bit dreary. This new theme is called GenkiTheme developed by Ericulous. Apparently, Genki means “cheerfulness, vibrancy and vitality” in Japanese. So, it certainly contrasts with the last theme. Other benefits of this new look:

• The posts are a bit wider, and I’m definitely using more of the screen with this templated.
• I like the tabs on the left that move while you scroll; people will think I’m a code monkey or something cool and nerdy like that.
• I LOVE how the dynamic WP Cumulus teg cloud (see “What I’m Writing”) looks here (even if it is a little small). It was at the very bottom of the page in the previous iteration and I don’t know that anyone saw it.
• I’m able to include my picture/avatar on here. As those who follow me on Twitter know, this is becoming part of my “brand.” I’ve been told by people who know me and who’ve seen the avatar that this is EXACTLY what I’d look like if transported to South Park.
• This theme/template is “widget ready.” To the non-bloggers out there, all that means, among other things, is that it is MUCH easier for me to add things to the two sidebars on the right. For the prior theme/template, I had to fiddle with the CSS and pretend I knew something about PHP codes (I don’t).

That said, the real reason I switched is probably because I’m terribly busy again and in the absence of time to write anything substantively meaningful, I figured I would at least make a cosmetic change.

Hope you like it.