My
estimable teacher-blogger colleague, Ms. Bluebird, is sputtering about  the parent-accessible online grading system in
her district. She bemoans the fact that parents aren't tracking their children's assignments and grades, even though it's now become totally
convenient to (as the kiddies say) creep on their progeny. Evidently, this is
an issue of deep concern to lots of teachers, as Ms. B's first 13 commenters
enthusiastically jump on the "parents just don't care" bandwagon.

Ms.
Bluebird totally rocks--but on this issue, I disagree. When it comes to online
gradebooks, I believe what's happening here is a misguided faith in the magic of
technology to solve problems (even things we didn't realize were problems beforehand).
If parents weren't allowed to peek into teachers' gradebooks twenty years, what
makes us think they're interested now? And furthermore--is it even a good idea
to nurture grade-stalking in parents?

Points
to consider:

•  Expecting
  parents to track their children's grades--and do something about low grades or missing assignments--shifts
  responsibility for learning and monitoring the grade to parents. And guess
  what? It's the student's job to do that, not Mommy's.

• When
  parents are suddenly hawking their gradebooks, teachers feel compelled to put
  lots of numbers in the book, proving that they're organized and soldiering
  away, assigning lots of homework and giving lots of grades. My principal sent
  us a memo suggesting that we add at least one new grade per week, it being
  worrisome when parents see that several days have gone by with no grading.

• Some
  of those grades represent formative assessment: constructive feedback to
  students in the process of learning to master a concept or skill. Formative
  assessment is supposed to be non-punitive--information that helps a student
  improve. If curriculum is appropriate--in the sweet spot where it challenges,
  but builds on prior learning--then formative assessment will show lots of room
  for growth. Try explaining that to one panicked parent at a time

• Not
  everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be
  counted. (Einstein said that, not me.) An online gradebook converts all
  assessment data to numbers. Because it's...digital. Sometimes, kids need
  coaching or commentary, not a comparative percentage. Sometimes, it's OK to
  paint a pumpkin, just to see how it turns out. You don't have to grade
  everything, to make it real or valuable.

I
find my district's online grading program so inflexible as to be nearly
useless. I collected lots of valid assessment data on my students that could
not be represented in the gradebook program (the program routinely converted a memorized
D-flat major scale into 60%). I never checked on my son's grades, either, although
it would have been extremely easy to do so--and, trust me, I am a caring
parent, with a deep commitment to his education. I got his report card, and I
went to parent-teacher conferences. And that--really--was enough.

I
suppose it was inevitable. When the blurring between reality TV and, you know,
actual reality has encompassed things like marriage, parenting and Hugh Hefner,
it was only a matter of time until schools offered up their students--and their
integrity--for fifteen minutes of fame and $3500 an episode.

Tony
Danza--who wasn't even The Boss--appears to be headed for a well-publicized turn
as a fake teacher on a reality show based in a public school in Philadelphia. I
thought Channel One  was bad--and renting
a brand-new school in my hometown as movie set for a stoner flick was
abominable. This is much worse.

Philly
Mayor Michael Nutter is all for it. His rationale? Students might be allowed to
serve as production interns, he says-- and such a reality show will make it
easier to recruit teachers.

"Teach'
represents a unique opportunity to highlight many of our city's dedicated
teachers and administrators, and the talented students they serve.''

Well,
gosh. If the show were truly going to highlight the city's best bona fide teachers,
I'd be all for it. And I'll believe that having high school students work as
gofers on a TV set in their own school is a good idea when I see the rigorous national
content standards for movie production. My thinking runs along the lines of
Philadelphia Daily News' Ronnie Polaneczky who said the idea was:

"...a way
to pimp our kids' education to an unemployed sitcom actor who wants to
kick-start his stalled career on the backs of students who'll be distracted by
cameras and microphones.''

This
is actually something I have experience with; I can offer some first-hand insights
into how this will likely play out with Tony and the kids in Philadelphia:

Some
years ago, I was asked to be a featured teacher in the Annenberg Foundation's
video series on teaching, The Learning
Classroom. It was a project with an excellent pedigree--the series advisors
were highly respected academics, and the mission was sterling: filming teachers
at work, hearing how and why they make teaching decisions, integrating theory and
practice. My segment was Feelings Count:
Emotions and Learning.

I had
several conversations with the producer before they came to film. The plan was
for the crew to spend five full days in my classroom. Don't worry, she said.
You won't know we're even here. I was the one who insisted on notifying
parents, and getting release forms signed--a precaution the producer found
ridiculous.

I
also spent considerable energy devising lessons that would tap into the
emotions of volatile middle schoolers to yield richer learning. My seventh
graders were working on Ashokan Farewell,
a lovely tune that Ken Burns used throughout his Civil War series, most notably during the heartbreaking letter from
Major Sullivan Ballou of the Union army to his wife, Sarah. One of my
students--a young man--read excerpts from the letter, and I shared some
thoughts about how music helps people through milestone moments in their lives.
Students spoke about songs played at a grandparent's funeral--or how they found
joy and consolation in particular songs. It was a terrific lesson, a nice blend
of rich content and relevant emotion.

Unfortunately,
none of that lesson--or any other bits of creative, solid teaching--ended up in
the final segment. At lunchtime on Day One, the producer (who turned my office
into her own personal Disgusting Starbucks) had a little problem. She wanted to
know when they were going to see some reality. The kids were so good. So
polite. Clearly, this was not the way they behaved every day. "I feel like
I'm in Mayberry," she said--and she didn't mean that in a nice way. Where,
she asked, was the emotion?

I
explained that it took months of hard work to build a functioning community of
65 12-year old musicians. She didn't buy it. She needed to see some
conflict--somebody crying would be ideal. On Day Two, the production crew moved
from my classroom to the hallway, hoping to catch a fight or a breakup.  The producer went to the principal, asking for
permission to film all the kids. At a quick after-school staff meeting,
permission slips for the entire student body were distributed. I shared my apprehension
with the rest of the teachers. Some of them were concerned--but others were
hoping for a visit from the camera crew. "You're not the only good teacher
in the building, you know," one said. "Some of us would love a chance
to be on TV, too."

It
was a long week. The worst moment occurred on Friday. One of my 8th graders had
been out of school for several weeks, undergoing treatment for testicular cancer.
He came back for a quick visit, and was surrounded by friends, trying to figure
out what to say to another teenage boy who has a life-threatening illness. As I
hugged him, I heard the cameras whirring. They followed him into the band room
and filmed his interactions with friends attempting to be cool, and his own
struggle to describe his illness without telling them where his cancer was, or
what procedures he had undergone.

I
would never have interrupted these painful but essential conversations--but I
sure as hell did not want them exploited. I told the producer later that we had
no release form, so they would have to scrap the film they were salivating
over. We did not part on good terms. While I do appear in the video series,
none of the things that were important to me were captured or highlighted.

One
can only wonder what the producers of a reality show will find compelling. And
whose education will be compromised.

It's
time for the annual round of teachers-in-summer blogs. These come in several
flavors: Ambitious (with a side helping of enrichment). Justification (a.k.a. "I
work harder than you know"). The traditional, obligatory Reading List for
Teachers. (This one blew me away--three books involving Nazis, Charles Murray
of Bell Curve fame, and...Daniel Pink?
) A Snarky Saga of the Last Days of '08-'09 (where someone almost gets punched
out, speaking of tense and irritable...). Plus two new cable TV shows for your
summer viewing pleasure, featuring garden-variety, nice-guy teachers. One manufactures
and sells high-test meth to build a nest egg for his family (since he's dying
of cancer), and the other sells his own substantially endowed body since he
doesn't make enough money teaching to keep his children happy and a roof over
his head.

Moral
of all the stories: Teaching is an undesirable low-prestige, low-salary,
high-stress job--and teachers can no longer publicly say the three best things
about teaching are June, July and August.

The
answer to all these trials seems clear to me. The traditional school calendar
is way past its expiration date, and should be abandoned. Its flaws are
well-known:  too much time off in the
summer, too much review needed in the fall--not enough well-used time, crammed
into too few days. The agrarian calendar represents a wildly inefficient use of
resources, and the folks who support it do so for reasons that have nothing to
do with education. All of the barriers to changing the calendar--busing,
sports, vacations, staffing, summer camps, cheap labor for summer businesses--
can be effectively addressed. 

My
personal preference would be a modular calendar, with four- to six-week
curricular units, offered flexibly, year-round--through both in-building residencies
and on-line. Students would be required to be "in school" a minimal
number of days (say, 180) but could select additional modules to attend school
200 or 220 days a year. Short vacations would be scheduled between modules. Students
could enter the system at multiple points in the year (September, January,
June) and finish when all the modules were successfully completed. Nobody would
"fail a grade," because a module could be re-taken if material wasn't
mastered. There are dozens of ways to improve the school calendar.

I
find it amazing--and get huffy and defensive--when I am reminded that a
significant chunk of the general public still thinks that teachers are working only
when there are students in front of them. The first step in changing that
perception is not going to be strongly worded blogs, however. It will be
banishing the lazy, crazy 10-week summer vacation.

A
few years ago, a local reporter interviewed me for a story on what teachers do
in summer. I ran through the usual agenda: planning, reading, looking at new
music, cleaning the percussion cabinet, taking a class, directing the community
band. They sent out a photographer for a photo. We had coffee on my deck--and
he persuaded me to stretch out in our backyard hammock with my own summer professional
reading. The photo (below) made the front page of the paper. 

And---I
got a call from a School Board member, that evening. He was dismayed that I
would agree to a photo suggesting that I was "laying around" all
summer, doing nothing. The Board wished another shot had been chosen. Perhaps a
glamorous pose of me cleaning out the spit-valves on the school-owned euphoniums?
 I declined to give him the brief lecture
on Urgent vs. Important that came to mind. But we have a long way to go before teaching
is a real profession in the public's mind.

Images: Livingston County Press-Argus; k.l.macke

 Just
got home from a mini-vacation visiting Beautiful Daughter in Scottsdale
(Arizona in the summer! It's a really dry heat!)--and a respite from All Things
Internet, which is good for the soul. And the very first blog I read upon
returning was the irresistible guilty pleasure of It's Not All Flowers
and Sausages starring Mrs. Mimi. I adore Mrs. Mimi, because she
represents truth and the American way in education--and because no other blogger
makes me laugh out loud with every post, like she does. Or at least, no other
bloggers make me belly-laugh intentionally,
as opposed to the sarcastic snorting engendered by many Serious Policy World
reads.

Mrs.
Mimi's posts are generally full of cute kids, au naturale, and screwed-up power-hungry
adults--just like the real world. This one was about a field trip where the big
yellow bus drove past a Calvin Klein billboard--let your imagination create any
smoldering male zipper-down image--and got stuck in traffic in front of a semi-naked
Lady GaGa covering the side of a building.  Mrs. Mimi points out that all the interesting
facts and images planted in her kiddos' minds during the field trip are now eclipsed
by this sleaziness at the lowest pandering denominator. Sleaziness that's a constant
in their lives, by the way, unlike trips to the museum which occur rarely. Her
kids laugh and hoot at Lady GaGa, because they think that's what they're
supposed to do.

Sometimes,
the carefully planned lessons, carefully chosen books, and carefully spoken
words at school are just not even close to enough, to counterbalance the powerful attraction of our vulgar, ADD world.

And
that's a shame--because forays into the real world are often the juiciest
opportunities for real learning. In spite of the possibility (OK, the
certainty) that things will go wrong, getting out of Dodge has always been my
favorite learning strategy. I have taken 135 8th graders into a smoky dive of a
jazz club on Rush Street in Chicago (at noon, with the bartender slinging
frozen pizza and pitchers of coke), to watch the house band play a blues set
then offer my best drummer the opportunity to sit in on "Summertime."
We played a concert for old men in wheelchairs at a Veteran's Home in St.
Louis, and another on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, as jets flew overhead.
We've seen symphony orchestras in seven different cities, and at least as many
musicals. Preparing the kids for a field trip is much more than raising money
and laying down rules for the bus--it's curriculum.

Here's
an exciting field trip destination: Cleveland. Cleveland actually does
rock--and it was far less expensive than New York or Washington D.C.. The
centerpiece of our visit to Cleveland was a day at the Rock and Roll Hall of
Fame, one of my favorite places on earth. It was a hard sell to get the kids to
agree to Cleveland (their first choice was New Orleans), but the opportunity
for unlimited time wallowing in Rock and Roll finally clinched the deal. I went
on a visit, solo, a few weeks before taking the 8th graders, to scope out new
exhibits and give them a recommended day plan of activities. There was a list
of must-sees--Mystery Train, a short film on the roots of rhythm and blues, and
the exhibit on Motown. And there was also a traveling exhibit on sex and drugs
in the rock culture, featuring lots of nasty language, bare skin and the
occasional corpse.

While
I may have let my personal children see the exhibit, with some prior
information and lecturing from Mom, I knew it was not my prerogative to let
other parents' 8th graders see the presentation. So I told the students that it
was there, it was inappropriate, and they could see everything else. Then I
posted rotating parent sentries at the theatre door. A few kids approached and
were checked by the chaperons, but most didn't even try. There were plenty of
other things to see and do. It was a fabulous day.

Before
leaving Cleveland the next day, we visited the zoo, an activity we added at the
last minute to give kids a chance to release some energy before the long bus
ride home. Cleveland has a world-class zoo, with an amazing Rain Forest. It was
in the Rain Forest, at the orangutan exhibit, that I came around the corner and
found half my students watching two orangutans very publicly expressing their desire to make more orangutans. One of the
chaperoning dads--a minister--turned to me and said, "And here we were
worried about the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame."

And
so it goes.

Am
I the only one who thinks the story about Barack Obama not getting an honorary
degree, after giving the commencement speech at Arizona State University, was a
big, blown-up bunch of nothing? An event with no real impact, a lightweight feature
piece best used to fill space on a slow news day? Obama himself seemed
unperturbed, and wittily incorporated the dustup  in his speech (he seems to be adept at that:
see Notre Dame Commencement). He delivered a stirring graduation address, full
of admiration for the students who were breaking ground in their families by
getting a college degree--and pushed graduates to think about leadership and success
in non-material terms.

Why
do I care about this? Because I was a tuition donor to ASU, from 2003 until
2007 (note: four years), when my daughter graduated. I have seen Arizona State up
close, and know some things about the campus, the students and the mission of
the university. If you asked my daughter why she went to Arizona State, she'd
tell you it was because of their unique Justice Studies program, but I'd be
remiss in not mentioning that none of the other schools she applied to had a
Palm Walk or year-round flip-flop mojo. ASU does have a well-deserved
reputation as a party school (parents know these things). The Daily Show dished
up the funniest take on this--I'm pretty sure that the pool scene was shot at
my daughter's apartment complex.

I
care because I am a fan of big, comprehensive public universities. I see them
as the higher-ed manifestation of the American mixing bowl ideal--places of
rich diversity where children of the wealthy mix with children of immigrants, where
serious scholars go to class with injudicious 18-year olds on their own for the
first time. Arizona State has a generous admissions policy, a huge, fast-growing
student body (more than 60,000) and a commitment to increasing minority
enrollment--nearly a third of this year's freshmen were minorities.

As
a long-time secondary teacher, I taught many intellectually capable but
unfocused high school students who had zero future plans or goals, despite the
best efforts of their parents and schools.  Big state universities serve an important
function, offering an elastic opportunity for students who don't enroll as
motivated scholars. Yes, some of them drop out. But others find their academic rhythm
or their passion.

If
we believe that a four-year college degree is an essential component of the
American dream, we need places like Arizona State, which blend open opportunity
with an array of showcase programs.  I
was surprised to see edbloggers attempt to tie Obama's choosing ASU for his first
commencement speech to low NAEP scores in Arizona (!?)--or use the story as a vehicle
make the cheap-shot observation that not every school can compete with
Princeton or Stanford.

One
other thing I care about: graduation speeches. One of the highlights of my
professional career was being invited to deliver the commencement address to
graduates of the School of Education at Michigan State University, another
large public university. I took the task seriously, and read lots of famous
graduation speeches. I finally decided to speak on the need for educators to
become story-tellers, to help their students make meaning of what they learned. 

Sometimes,
these narratives change, with time. I used the example of the commencement
address at my own undergraduate exercises. It was delivered by Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, Jr, shortly after the U.S. pulled troops out of Viet Nam. Zumwalt
spoke with great passion about selfless service--and especially of his son, just
a few years older than the graduates, who fought bravely in Viet Nam, doing his
patriotic duty rather than protesting or seeking shelter from the draft. The
admiral's son, Elmo Zumwalt III, later died of multiple cancers that his father
was convinced were caused by exposure to Agent Orange, a toxic defoliant used
by American troops in Viet Nam. Perspectives take time.

I
congratulate the Class of 2009 at Arizona State, and wish them the gift of
remembering both the speaker and the speech that marked their graduation.  Do you remember who spoke at your college
commencement?