Student Generation Factor

I learned a fun new term this week: Student Generation Factor. This is the number that the LCPS planning department uses to predict the number of students that will come out of a future residential development.

Single Family: .83 students per home
Townhome: .47 students per home
Multi Family: .28 students per home

Let's say a future development has 100 single family homes. LCPS would predict that 83 students would come from that development. Where does LCPS get that number? From the triennial census.

But wait, there's more! How old are those students? According to LCPS Planning, 51% will be Elementary age, 22% will be Middle Schoolers and the remaining 27% will be High School Students. Here's what else I know... under the current plans, LCPS will build High Schools to house 1,850 students each, Middle Schools at 1,350 students each and Elementary Schools with capacity for 875 students.

Let's have some fun with our new math today. If I understand this correctly, according to the Approved Residential Projects list, there were 41,712 units in approved or by-right developments which have yet to be permitted in Loudoun County as of January 1, 2008. So without further approvals that's another 41,712 homes on the way (more than that actually, because it only lists developments of 20 or more homes, but let's stick with what we know).

Housing Type	# Units	SGF	# Students
Single Family	11,161	0.83	9,264
Townhouses	12,468	0.47	5,860
Multifamily	41,712	0.28	11,679

That's a total of 26,803 kids who have yet to arrive (to provide a sense of scale, one year ago our student population was about 54,000). So how many new schools does that call for?

School Type	% of Students	# Students	School Capacity	# Schools
Elementary	51%	13,670	875	16
Middle	22%	5,897	1,350	4
High	27%	7,237	1,850	4

So that's a total of 24 new schools. Most of them will be south of the Greenway (Rt. 267) or West of Rt. 15. Again for scale, we currently have 75 schools, most of them with smaller capacity than the models listed here.

There are a number of caveats to this. There are factors will bring the number down. Not every approved or by-right unit will ultimately be built, for instance. There are other factors that will send the number higher, such as newly approved densities and developments under 20 units that didn't make onto the report. And then there is the question of how soon these various developments will be built.

There's also the caveat that I may be interpreting something incorrectly so feel free to check my math, correct my logic or provide me with different documents. I'd be happy to post updates.

Keep the Achievement Gap?

An interesting piece by Washington Post Education Columnist Jay Mathews caught my eye today, titled Forget About the Achievement Gap.

Why don't I like talking about the achievement gap? Because we use the term in a way that suggests narrowing the gap is always a good thing, when that is not so. Here are some ways the gap could narrow: Low-income scores improve but high-incomes scores don't; low-income scores don't change but high-income scores drop; low-income scores drop but high-income scores drop even more. In each of those cases of gap-narrowing, something bad is happening.

In case you weren't aware, the Achievement Gap Mathews refers to is the persistently lower academic performance of kids who are poor or who identify as Black or Latino. I've written about this before here and here. Mathews' vehicle for this exploration is a study called High-Achieving Students in the Era of No Child Left Behind published a month ago by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. The study concludes that

Gaps are narrowing because the gains of low-achieving students are outstripping those of high achievers by a factor of two or three to one. The nation has a strong interest in developing the talents of its best students to their fullest to foster the kind of growth at the top end of the achievement distribution that has been occurring at the bottom end.

Mathews concludes:

Why not curtail all this achievement-gap talk? Let's focus instead on the progress of every child, no matter if she or he starts the year two grades behind classmates or two grades ahead. All children deserve a chance to climb as high as they can.

This is an interesting topic for Loudoun County families, so many of whom are well educated and affluent and expect the best education available for their high-achieving offspring. We also have a significant number of our neighbors struggling to get by on little education of their own. Some of their kids do very well in school, and others struggle.

Maybe it is because I'm not a professional educator or academic that Mathew's approach utterly baffles me. By suggesting scenarios where "low-income scores improve but high-incomes scores don't" he links achievement and income and posits that income and achievement necessarily move together. This may be a historical reality, but it should not be a future assumption. He even treads dangerously close to social darwinism by tying his statements to the "best students" phrasing of the report to his own "high income" grouping.

There will always be a top tier and a bottom tier. People have different abilities. Nobody desires to hold back the top tier until the bottom tier catches up. But it is our moral responsibility to try to create a world where the tiers are no longer passed down through generations.

Parents & Pictures (redux)

It's fun when an idle thought grows into a full-blown discussion. Please see yesterday's post for a very informative comment by Ed Myers that helped me to have a much better understanding of the concerns that some parents have about their children being photographed.

In addition, some LCPS teachers are apparently having a conversation about these same photo restrictions via email, so I went a little more in depth and pulled out the photo permission form, and the explanation provided in the Student Rights & Responsibilities handbook:

Students may occasionally be photographed or videotaped during their participation in school activities. These photographs may be used to provide information to the public about LCPS programs and activities through school system publications and displays, in newspapers and other print media, on television, and in connection with school system information provided on the internet.
Parents/guardians may elect not to have their child photographed or videotaped for use in media and may further request that no individual pictures be used in the school yearbook and that the child not be a part of classroom photographs.

On the form itself, parents have three options:

I grant permission for my child (named below) to be photographed or featured in any videotape, television, audio recording, or broadcast that will be produced by and available to the public from LCPS, or (to the extent that access is within LCPS’s control during school hours) to the media.

I do NOT grant permission for my child (named below) to be photographed or featured in any videotape, television, audio recording, or broadcast that will be produced by and available to the public from LCPS, or (to the extent that access is within LCPS’s control during school hours) to the media.

I do NOT grant permission for my child to be photographed for the school yearbook or in a classroom photograph.

Parents & Pictures

Two years ago I was having lunch with my daughter at school, which was a weekly tradition we had since she was in second grade. At lunch a couple of the kids noticed my cool PDA cell phone and wanted to check it out, so I let them, and of course they quickly discovered the built-in camera. Suddenly everybody wanted to take a picture and be in one. Instead of a free-for-all I set up a system. Each kid could take a picture of the kid next to them, then pass it along. The person who just had their picture taken could look at the picture of his/herself and then take a picture of the next kid. Everybody got their turn as both photographer and subject, without causing a lunchroom disruption.

Of course nothing is simple in this world, and I knew I was going to be reminded of that (again) when I left the cafeteria only to find the Vice Principal making a stern beeline for me. In her office she asked about what now could be best classified as an "incident." I told her, and she told me to delete all of the pictures on the phone, because not every parent had signed the photo permission form. Now mind you I was not a School Board member at the time, not a representative capable of acting on behalf of the school or the school system. I was a Dad. I was the same Dad who had made and edited a video of the same classroom of kids for one of their projects. The same Dad who had taken class portraits before on the playground at the request of a teacher. The same Dad who has taken pictures of Bingo and winter festivals and flag-raising ceremonies at elementary schools. I had hoped to take all of the pictures on that phone and make a collage for the kids, but somehow this was different from those and so I deleted all of the pictures right there in the school's office.

I hadn't thought much about it again until yesterday, when I was at another school, this time as a School Board member, reading a book for Dr. Seuss day. After I was done reading, a teacher asked to get my picture with the book for the website. I didn't want to be alone in the shot, so I plopped down on the floor and the kids instantly gathered around me to be in the frame. After a few takes (some with eye-crossing, tongue-sticking funny faces) we wrapped it up.

Later in the day, the teacher emailed me a copy of the photo, and I have to tell you that it is a wonderful thing to see. My smiling mug with a Dr. Seuss book, surrounded by countless, joyous bright eyes and shiny teeth. I sent copies to my family, I ordered large prints for framing. But when I showed it to a fellow Board member with delight, the reaction was quick... "you can't use that photo. Did those kids' parents all sign the release?"

It can't be simple anymore. A person can't just snap a harmless picture, because around every turn is a threat of one kind or another. The threat of a litigious parent. The threat of an abusive ex-husband stumbling upon a child's whereabouts. In this area, the threat of having your mother be a classified operative. I don't know why we need those permission forms, or why somebody wouldn't sign one, but we have them and that's the world we live in now.

I wanted to post that photo here, to share it with all of you, because it is the highlight of my month. It is escape from budget distress and fights about penguin books and the pile of papers that reappears on my desk every morning. It is the why. I wanted to post it here but if I do, will I be sued by the parent of one of those smiling kids? Will it be the principal or the Superintendent who calls me to tell me I have to take it down? Will the teacher be able to post it on the website?

The next time you see a picture of a public school class in a local paper, look to see if you can see the kids' faces, or if you just see the backs of their heads.

What Every Teacher Ought to Know

Each year in August, before the start of school, LCPS calls all of its teachers together for three days of training workshops. Hundreds of workshops are offered, every teacher is required to attend, but as I understand it no one session or topic has been required of teachers in the past.

At last week's meeting of the Minority Student Student Achievement Advisory Committee's Steering Committee, Superintendent Hatrick agreed to make cultural/racial diversity/sensitivity/awareness training mandatory for all teachers during these workshops. I caught the tail end of the meeting, I don't have all the details. The details are probably still under development and the details aren't the subject of this post.

There is considerable debate between the some members of the MSAAC & NAACP leadership over whether LCPS has an acute problem with discrimination. That debate is also not the subject of this post.

I am certain that my friends on the Special Education Advisory Board will be interested to hear about the implementation of mandatory training, because they too would love to have mandatory training about students with special needs for all teachers. I'll bet that the parents of kids with food allergies wouldn't mind a mandatory training for elementary teachers about the dangers and difficulties that their kids face at school every day. That's not the subject of this post.

"Get to the point, Stevens."

Okay, here's the point... as a community, we put tremendous expectations on the shoulders of our teachers. They're not just teachers. They're also counselors, social workers, law enforcers, life coaches and cultural engineers. We want them to teach our personal views of morality, give every one of our children an individualized education, and cleanse our nation of the stench left behind by centuries of institutional racism that has become unlawful just within my lifetime. And we want it done before mid-June. With each graduating class we hope that we've finally overcome all of our nation's problems with ignorance, poverty, bigotry, crime, personal debt and substance abuse.

We don't just send our children into these classrooms, we send our hopes and desires for what the future of our nation will be, and our advocacy of what it should be. I suppose it has always been this way to some degree.

There was a little-noticed film in 1998 called Alien Nation, in which one of the main characters, an outsider who comes along with his people out of slavery and into this country, marvels at the way that Americans continually set standards that we never reach and still raise the bar with every generation. I've edited the quote slightly so that it makes more sense in this context. The original can be found here.

You are very curious to us. You invite us to live among you in an atmosphere of equality that we've never known before. You give us ownership of our own lives for the first time and you ask no more of us than you do of yourselves. I hope you understand how special your country is, how unique a people you are. Which is why it is all the more painful and confusing to us that so few of you seem capable of living up to the ideals you set for yourselves.

The point then my friends, is that we're asking our schools to be everything that can't bring ourselves to be.

This isn't wrong. But it is something we should be aware of as we're doing it.

What Should a B Be?

This front page Washington Post story about the different grading systems is more than a month old now, but I held onto it until this week because on Wednesday LCPS parents will see first semester report cards come home. The story has to do with grading disparities between localities, and compares Fairfax to Montgomery.

Simply put, Fairfax high schools set a higher bar for grades than those in Montgomery. To earn an A in Fairfax, it takes a score of 94 to 100. In Montgomery, it takes a score of 90 or higher. Standards for grading in the two counties, including bonus point calculations, are so out of sync that it appears possible for a Fairfax student to earn a 3.5 grade-point average for the same work that gets a Montgomery student a 4.6 GPA.

The article discusses the various impacts this can have on a student's college admission prospects and scholarship opportunities, and reviews the very few studies done on the issue.
I hadn't been aware of or given any thought to this issue until a parent brought it to my attention, so I'm not taking any position, I'm just bringing up the issue for your consideration. Michelle Zuckerman writes the following, printed here with her permission. She makes a number of statements that I have not attempted to verify and a number of others which are her opinion. LCPS would surely dispute much of what she says. I'm sure many parents would agree with her and many will disagree. I leave it for you to judge. I welcome your thoughts in the comments.

I put the Loudoun grading scale up against the Fairfax and Montgomery County scales and found the results interesting.

I have long maintained that our grading scale is too harsh, particularly at the lower end of the scale. The adjustments made several years ago really didn't fix all the problems. It seems to me that earning a grade of 80-81 should not earn you a "C" and that an 82-84 should get you more than "C+". In addition, I don't understand why a "+" added to a grade is only worth .3, rather than .5 points (as it is in Fairfax and Montgomery).

The comparison laid out in the paper highlighting the differences between two students taking the same courses in Fairfax and Montgomery resulting in drastically different GPAs is made even more interesting when you figure out the GPA a Loudoun student would earn for the same courses. We're right there with Fairfax's 3.5, far away from the 4.6 a Montgomery County student would earn.

As the woman interviewed in the article points out, our students are at a huge disadvantage when it comes to college admissions and scholarships. Now the standard line the guidance counselors offer is that "All the colleges know that Loudoun has the toughest grading system." While that may be true for VA schools, it is certainly not the case everywhere else. GPA is the first thing that admissions counselors look at. The same is true when applying for scholarships, particularly for merit scholarships. Loudoun students are at a definite disadvantage because the difficulty of our grading system makes earning a good GPA harder, not so much for the brightest students, but for the average to above average student.

It also fuels the competitiveness of grades at the high school level. The pressure on our kids to succeed is out of control. The push to get as many kids into AP courses and for students to take as many AP courses as they can before they get out of high school is beyond reason (and caused, I believe, in great part, by LCPS' desire to score high on the Post's Challenge Index). We congratulate ourselves on the record number of kids taking AP exams, but conveniently forget that we eliminated the honors courses in all of our history and government courses, forcing many kids into AP classes before they're ready or because their parents don't want them in the academic courses because that's where the behavior problems are. And the pressure and competition lead to all kinds of undesirable behaviors, among all students.

God Made School Boards

In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.

Mark Twain. Link here.

Don't read anything into my posting this quote. I just came across it today and thought I should share.

Anatomy of a Decision

A question was asked in the comments to a previous post about the ‘Online Assessment System’ that the board scratched from the budget this week. The questioner was, I suspect, not terribly interested in an actual response, only in trying to throw an insult and be done with it. I won’t return such insults, though it would be easy enough. I think it is enough to say, and probably obvious enough to most people anyway, that one’s comment is worth only as much as the amount of informed thought one puts into it.

Anyway, the experience of cutting the OAS was illustrative of the struggle we face in trying to make good decisions about spending in a tight budget year, so I thought I’d write about it. Everything I say below constitutes my understanding of the facts based on discussions at budget sessions over the past six weeks. My understanding is certainly incomplete and quite possibly inaccurate in more ways than one. Any readers who have more knowledge than I and can provide better information are more than welcome to do so, either in the comments or in another online venue that I can link to. I think the illustration of where my knowledge falls short is as important a lesson as what I have learned, because we are all required to make these decisions based on our incomplete information.

In addition to SOLs and many other standardized tests that our kids take, twice each year they take subject assessment tests that are designed to help teachers and principals identify how to adjust instruction now to help the kids achieve success in the same school year. You see, the SOLs do little to help the kids who take them. They evaluate the school and perhaps the teacher, but by the time the results come back, these kids are about to start a new grade level.

The current assessment process is that kids take the tests and fill in the little circles with their number two pencils. The papers are scanned and scored, and predefined reports in PDF format are sent back after a few weeks. There is a fair amount of a teacher’s manual effort required to submit these tests and the fixed format of the reports limits the ways in which the results data can be used to help teachers identify which students need extra help and for principals to identify which teachers need extra help.

Enter the Online Assessment System. With the OAS, tests are taken online. The results are immediately stored in a database and immediately available. Reports can be aggregated across subjects for an individual student, across teachers for an individual subject, by student ethnicity, by date of birth, by any data fact that we store about our students. There are a thousand ways to dissect the data to look for patterns and ways to improve instruction. In addition the assessments are linked to individual student records allowing educators to better understand how an individual student progresses over the course of multiple years, a concept called the growth model which is very big in people who track student achievement data and of great interest to me and other board members. Oh, and it does all of this while cutting down dramatically on the teacher’s level of effort.

I am a database designer and programmer by vocation, so this type of system is right up my alley. Less effort, better results. It’s what technology is all about. It is necessary and inevitable that we employ an OAS in the future at LCPS. So why was I the one to propose that we cut it?

Well obviously the price tag made it a big target. The OAS is a service provided by third party companies to the tune of $400,000 per year. In addition, the administration proposed a new staff person whose job it would have been to oversee implementation of the OAS across the district and to provide all of those custom reports. This employee would also have been responsible for implementing electronic School Improvement Plans, something else we really need. Add $63,700 per year in salary and benefits.

In an $800 million dollar budget, there’s only so many $20K items you can have time to go over with a fine toothed comb. This is the nature of a large institution and you can’t pin that on LCPS. It’s the same at every large corporation and government organization I’ve ever worked at, with the US Military topping the list.

But even in an $800M budget, those half-million dollar items that are brand new really stick out. And when it comes to new employees, we allocate for new special education aides in batches akin to ordering up fries at Five Guys. But new administrative positions are looked at very closely, one by one. What will this person do, is somebody else already doing it, can it wait another year?

And so this $463,700 item got a closer look. Will it substantially improve our test scores and save us from NCLB’s wrath? Will it dramatically improve the efficiency of our teachers and administrators? Are we really ready to take advantage of it? Can it wait another year? Most importantly…and this is at the core of all of the preceding questions but should also be asked on its own… will it improve our children’s education better than using the money another way?

The answer I came up with was “I’m not sure.” I need more time, more information, more understanding. When that’s the answer, I think the time isn’t yet right to spend the money, and I proposed that the OAS be cut. Enough other members agreed that the OAS was cut from the proposed budget. Was it the right decision? I can’t be sure. I would like nothing more than to give our students, teachers and administrators every tool available to succeed. Maybe by next year I’ll have learned enough to know that this was a terrible cut. Or maybe I’ll have learned that we can accomplish the same thing for less in a different way, or that we’re really just fine with the process we have.

There were dozens of decisions just like this one on a bewildering array of topics, some explicitly voted on but many more made by simply moving on to the next item. This is just an example.

That is the nature of this budget process for me as an average dad on the School Board: Gathering as much information as I can in the little time that I have, and then making million-dollar decisions based on information that is inevitably incomplete only because of the limitations of my schedule, my experience, and my mental capacity.

Start of a New Term

From Edmund Burke, in a speech to the Electors of Bristol, November 3, 1774.

Certainly, gentlemen, it ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinion, high respect; their business, unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasures, his satisfactions, to theirs; and above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own. But his unbiassed opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure; no, nor from the law and the constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.

My worthy colleague says, his will ought to be subservient to yours. If that be all, the thing is innocent. If government were a matter of will upon any side, yours, without question, ought to be superior. But government and legislation are matters of reason and judgment, and not of inclination; and what sort of reason is that, in which the determination precedes the discussion; in which one set of men deliberate, and another decide; and where those who form the conclusion are perhaps three hundred miles distant from those who hear the arguments?

To deliver an opinion, is the right of all men; that of constituents is a weighty and respectable opinion, which a representative ought always to rejoice to hear; and which he ought always most seriously to consider. But authoritative instructions; mandates issued, which the member is bound blindly and implicitly to obey, to vote, and to argue for, though contrary to the clearest conviction of his judgment and conscience,--these are things utterly unknown to the laws of this land, and which arise from a fundamental mistake of the whole order and tenor of our constitution.

Final notes of 2007

This final day of 2007 marks the end of my appointed term on the School board, filling the final ten months of John Andrews' term after his resignation in January. When a member resigns, the remaining members select that person's replacement. I felt a little odd at first that none of the people who were in a position to select the next representative of my district lived in my district.
In June though, when the filing deadline passed for the November elections and I was to be the only name on the ballot, I felt comfortable not only that I could spend the remainder of the year focused on doing the job instead of campaigning, but that folks in the neighborhoods around mine were comfortable with me as their representative. (Of course there is always the possibility that they just hadn't really noticed what I'd been doing.)

At the risk of engaging in some navel-gazing, I thought I'd put a few thoughts down to wrap up the year.

Being a School Board member isn't a thankless job (but being a School Board member's spouse is). Almost from the first week on the job, I started to hear people say to me "I know you've got a thankless job." On the contrary, in my experience so far, it isn't thankless at all. In my first month we had "School Board Appreciation Day," when students brought us a number of handmade gifts and portraits of ourselves. My own portrait was done by my daughter Jenny, making it particularly special to me. I speak with lots of people every week about our work on the school board, and in many ways either explicitly or implicitly they let me know that they appreciate the effort we give. Thank you all for doing so. I hope that those folks who get the opportunity will extend that appreciation to my wife Lori and our children who have to do a lot of things at home that really should be my responsibility, because many times I'm not able to be there for them.

The blog. On May 8th I began this blog as a way to journal my experience, share interesting things I learn along the way and promote more open government. This is the 100th entry. There were warnings from the beginning that something I wrote would come back to haunt me... the less there is on the record, the less there is for people to attack you for. I suppose there's still plenty of time for that. But that warning misses the point. This job isn't about me, and hopefully the blog isn't much about me either. So I don't worry about the impact of the blog on me, only on the work that I do for the children of my community.

The members. Getting to know the members of the School Board personally has been a real joy for me this year. Each person on the Loudoun County School Board brings a different perspective and different strengths. While we don't have nearly enough ethnic diversity for a county of our demographics (of course I don't add to that diversity, do I?), we are otherwise a pretty mixed lot in age, economics, political persuasion, education and career path. To quote Jack Valenti, they "are all parents, normal human beings, neither gods nor fools." Each is alike in one important aspect... every one has a background in community service that preceded our election.

For two members, this marks their final day in office. Sarah Smith is a career LCPS Spanish teacher who in her four years focused on the folks who need a champion... special ed students, custodians, students headed to trade school instead of college. Sugarland Representative Dr. Joseph Guzman aptly described her many times as "the conscience of this board." She is steadfast and determined, and a reminder that LCPS isn't just about students taking AP classes from teachers with masters degrees.

Catoctin representative Mark Nuzzaco came to the Board with a story that demonstrates one of my favorite political sagas... the citizen reasonably disgruntled by the system who doesn't just get mad, he gets involved, becomes part of the system and ultimately loses his seat to the same passions that swept him in. Mark got involved as many parents do, during a boundary process that sent his kids from their home in Leesburg to the new Stone Bridge High School in Ashburn. Instead of throwing up his hands in frustration he rolled up his sleeves and went to work as the president of the Stone Bridge PTO. From there Mark won a seat on the School Board where, in a classic political irony, he ultimately became the target of parents angry over boundary decisions. It was my luck to sit next to Mark on the dais this year, and on a personal level I am very fond of him and will miss him greatly. Read more about Mark Nuzzaco here.

Finally I would like to recognize John Andrews, who served as a Board member for more than seven years, including a couple of years as its chairman. John has been an excellent source of advice this year and was for years a competent voice in local government, something we should all wish to be. While no longer an office holder, he remains a confidant and sage to many of the people I respect most in Loudoun government. I hope and expect we'll see more of him in the future.

The lesson. Get involved. Of the dozen individuals who are part of either the 2004-2007 or 2008-2011 School Boards, few are educators and none are professional politicians. They are your neighbors and were first part of Parent-Teacher organizations, Rotary Club, the Good Shepherd Alliance, little league coaching, Boy Scouts and more. Our community has hundreds of advisory committees, charities, churches and sports leagues that run entirely on the force of ordinary people who just show up willing to help. Step outside of your life for a while, decide what is important to you in the community and make it happen. It doesn't require special expertise.

Tomorrow I officially begin a new four-year term. In my time and on this blog I will focus in the first two weeks primarily on the budget. Best wishes to all of Loudoun's students, parents, educators and citizens for a successful new year.

Hearsay is the Strangest Thing

In my short time as a public official, I must say that the strangest aspect is the frequency with which people attribute things to me that I have never said, and just how dramatic those things can be. You might sometimes hear a politician gripe about being misquoted in the press, but that isn't what I'm talking about.

What I'm talking about is the conversation where one person tells another "John Stevens said he's moving to Timbuktu." My favorite variation adds "Three different people told me they heard him say it!" The best part is that this isn't just speculation on what I'm thinking, or what I might do... these are quotes attributed directly to me.

I'm not bothered by this in and of itself, but when it gets back to me it's usually because whatever I was quoted as saying was upsetting to someone. If people are going to be upset by something I say, I'd prefer that it be about something that I actually said (which is also happening with increasing regularity).

I know that this must happen to everyone else in this arena as well, I know I'm not special in this regard. I'm frankly quite surprised that anyone would pay enough attention to me to warrant discussions of this kind. It has taught me not to take too seriously what one person tells me about another.

Truth be told, it's mostly the small group of people who are politically active in our community... party activists, other elected officials and the people who regularly work with them. Many enjoy the maneuvering and relationships that go along with public policy . I'd be insincere to say that I don't also enjoy those things. The gossip is part of it I suppose.

When one of these oddball statements finds its way back to me, I can respond with "I never said anything of the sort," but it always seems to leave the questioner wondering. The best I can do from there is to say "I guess you'll find out for sure when a little time goes by and I haven't moved to Timbuktu."

While I'm on the subject, here's something else that makes me chuckle: people who bring up something from my blog (often within an hour or two of my posting) who immediately add the disclaimer "not that I read your blog, I don't have time for that." Folks, I don't expect anybody in particular to read what I write here, except that I know my mother checks it daily (hi Mom). If you do read and it's interesting to you, I'm glad. If you don't read it or when you do it isn't of interest, that's fine too. I don't quiz people on it, tally who is paying attention, or take it seriously enough to think that anyone else should.

Should Teachers be Wired for Sound?

There is an interesting article circulating among School Board members about putting audio systems into every classroom that will amplify the words of each teacher through a wireless microphone though speakers placed throughout the classroom. This is one of those things that seems like an extravagance until you read the data. According Time Magazine article called Now Hear This (admittedly a year old) :

• A 2002 Brigham Young University study found that standardized test scores for fourth- and fifth-graders rose from 10% to 15% in every subject at a Utah public school the year after amplification began, though no other changes were made.
• These systems may be especially helpful in the early years when kids' hearing systems are still developing. A "small but influential study" done in 2002 found that "78% of preschoolers and kindergartners in sound-amplified classrooms scored above the mean on a key prereading skills test, compared with just 17% in a comparable group without the technology."
• This may be leading edge, but others are paving the way. Since 2003, the State of Ohio requires that "districts using state funds to build or renovate schools include sound amplification in their construction plans."

I wonder what our elementary teachers think of this idea. I wonder if I can get a system like this for home. ;)

Paper, paper, everywhere

We approved a new contract yesterday for copier paper. $100,000 for 4,200 cartons. We spent $41,000 on 1,680 cases last month. Man, we go through a lot of paper. In the 12 months prior to this purchase, LCPS bought 27,720 cases of paper at a cost of $656,124.

With over 54,000 students and 12,000 employees in 72 schools I guess it should not come as a surprise.

But I'll tell you what I'm thinking... incentive program. If a school were to save $2,000 in paper per year, that school should be get an extra $500 in its activity fund. If every school saved $2,000 in paper, that would be nearly $150,000 in savings each year for the system as a whole.

Is it worth the trouble for principals and teachers to change how they work to cut down on the use of paper, for a few hundred dollars in the kitty? What about recognitions? Plaques and applause?

Food for thought.

Back-To-School Fundraisers

Back to School Fundraisers

It’s the end of the first week of school, and all my kids are sitting around the kitchen table this morning, going over fundraiser sale catalogs and the prizes they think they’ll win if they can just convince enough relatives and co-workers to buy gift wrap and magazine subscriptions and pizza-making kits. I don’t like this at all. I don’t like that our schools take time out of their academic day to hold assemblies that are pep-rallies for consumerism. This is how kids in richer neighborhoods get better schools than kids in poorer neighborhoods. This is a sign that we’re not providing our classrooms with the things they need.

I know that these things raise thousands of dollars for every school. I also know that we spent $550,000 on security cameras and buzz-in systems. That’s $7,600 per school. That’s a lot of gift wrap.

Shift Happens

On Monday & Tuesday this week I attended the Governor's Conference on Education. I have a lot to report, and will find time to write about it over the next few days. In the meantime I'm giving you a little food for thought, a slideshow originally entitled "Did You Know" and now known by it's closing line "Shift Happens."

You can click this link to watch the slideshow.

The slideshow was originally created by a Colorado High School teacher named Karl Fisch for a staff development meeting. You can download the original materials and the sources of his information from his blog, The Fischbowl.