Here’s an article on the 20 Best Prep Schools in America, as decided by Forbes (I assume. It’s their article.)

Here’s what they say about #1…

The top prep school in the U.S. is the Trinity School, located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, in New York City. Founded in 1709, this co-ed day school has an average enrollment of 960 students in kindergarten through 12th grade. There’s one teacher for every six students, more than 80% of the faculty hold an advanced degree and the school’s $40 million endowment helps assure the facilities are first-rate. Tuition for one year of schooling in the Upper School (grades 9-12) is $34,535, though the school offers financial aid.

And here are all the things my school has in common with #1.

• We were both founded (at some point, though they have a few hundred years on us, I think).
• We’re both co-ed.
• We’re both in the U.S.

And in what ways is your school similar to the Trinity School, I ask?

Should I feel bad that my school is not more like The Trinity School, I wonder?

Are articles like this designed to make me feel inferior about the school where I teach/the schools where I will send my own children or is that just my insecurity showing?

No, I don’t think all America should be held to this standard, but I do want to know, if you are teaching at a 6 to 1 ratio where tuition is $34K a year, which inconveniences you more: classroom management issues or your pedicurist canceling without providing you sufficient notice.

No, no, I jest. I am sure the teachers who work at Trinity are plagued with all kinds of issues that stem from holding the job of being an educator in modern America. See, that’s the one thing: kids are kids are kids.

And parents are parents are parents.

Some of the kids will make you click your heels in joy. Some of the kids will make you cry out in frustration. Some of the parents will make realize that being a teacher feels like one of the most noble and fulfilling jobs on the planet. And some of the parents will make you feel like dog-doo.

Yes, the Trinity School and Lynwood High might be millions of years apart in some ways, but in others, I am sure there is more common ground than mot people would, at first glance suspect.

While perusing the web, I ran across this article which claims studies prove that taking the SAT in a crowded room is a detriment to student scores and performance.

They call this the”the N-effect.” Basically, as the article says, the larger the “N”—the number of participants involved in a task—the worse the outcome for the individuals who are participating.

Hmm… really?

So if a 4 hour stretch of time in a crowded room is detrimental to test scores, WHAT ABOUT LEARNING IN CROWDED CLASSROOMS OVER THE COURSE OF AN ENTIRE YEAR?!

Kindergarten with 29 kids per class.
Middle schools with 38 kids per class.
High schools with 41 per class.

Does anyone care to do a study on this? Matter of fact, I am sure there are scores of them. But then again, isn’t this simply self-evident stuff? I mean teaching at 39 to 1 versus teaching at 22 to 1 is an immense difference… and one sure way to improve the quality of the educator is to reduce the amount of students on their roster.

A fair teacher is a better teacher with they are not forced to teach in impacted classrooms.
A good teacher is a better teacher with they are not forced to teach in impacted classrooms.
A great teacher is a better teacher with they are not forced to teach in impacted classrooms.

A bad teacher — well, even they are able to be less bad if they have less kids. Or at least they negatively affect less kids when they have less kids so there’s even some benefit in that, right?

Just remember, every time you hear the term “budget cuts” one thing that surely follows is larger class sizes… and that’s not good for anybody.

So how in the world can we affect the N-effect in our classrooms?

For the price of $65.00, starting in January, you will now be able to take a Los Angeles Gang Tour for Tourists. No joke… check out this article about it in the Los Angeles Times.

My first reaction was, these people are sick. And they are crazy. And they are looking to exploit inner city L.A. for profit.

And if they do that, it seems inevitable that this is going to end badly. And violently. And fast.

But after reading the article, and seeing how the founder of this enterprise wants to paint this as a human rights issue — and seeks to try and funnel whatever profits that may be had into the community in an attempt to revitalize some aspect of a sector of Los Angeles that is grossly suffering from dire economic hardship, I am not as skeptical.

I mean I am still skeptical, don’t get me wrong. Just not as skeptical.

But think about it for a moment, what is this tour exactly going to be? Is it a bunch of rich white folks who want to go slumming for an afternoon? Is it the international crowd, say a horde of Japanese or Argentinians who get picked up from a hotel in Beverly Hills and are then chauffeured in an air-conditioned gang bus past downtown to the southeast right through cities like Lynwood where I teach? (By the way, if I ever take the tour myself and see a student I know from my high school, am I supposed to wave, duck, or boast to all the other people on the bus, “Hey, I know that kid. He’s in my third period class!”)

Boy, wouldn’t I be the stud of the bus then?

Maybe the clientele is a a bunch of effete Frenchmen who once watched the movie Colors and like to play the hard beats of NWA over their Renault’s car stereo systems?

BTW, are gangs really going to grant “safe passage” through the hood for a brightly colored bus filled with tourists? I mean, isn’t one of the easiest criminal marks a crook could ever hope to target a tourist? Think about it, they don’t know their way around, some don’t even know the language, and they always travel with cash and expensive goodies because they have to pay for things like hotels, meals, and bus rides through inner-city gangland?

Oh yeah, am I the only troubled by the voyeuristic dehumanization aspect of this tour we might potentially be seeing here?

And for sixty-five bucks, what do I get? I mean is my driver packin’ heat? Like if they start shooting at us is someone on my bus gonna be shooting back at them?

Are there pit stops so that I can experience what it’s like to score drugs off the street?

Will I have the opportunity to write my name in graffiti on the side of a public building so that I can learn how to “tag”?

If I see a cop, should I flip him off, run, or drop to my knees and thank God that someone is about to save me from the Jurassic Park aspect of this stupid tour?

And if I don’t see any menacing looking homies who mad dogg me and make me think they are going to rip off my head and kill every member of my family, will there be some sort of refund? Like I wanna feel like I am going to die — but I am also hoping that the bus will serve lemonade, too… because as a tourist, it’s nice to have lemonade.

Oh yeah, can I get a tattoo to show that I am down for the hood? Just a henna though, please. My mom would kill me if she found out I used real ink.

For years I have said that while our attention is focused on an international war, our urban communities have been mired in a domestic war that is costing our citizens more of their lives, safety and sense of prosperity than anything going on in the middle east right now.

Truly, scores of kids die each year in urban America as a result of gang violence. As a teacher in L.A. and the author of the YA novel Homeboyz, I kinda feel I know what I am talking about to a small extent.

And now, you too can see what it’s like to live on the hard streets of gangland U.S.A. Don’t forget your camera — the trip promises lots of special photo opportunities.

Especially when you see the chalk outlines of 14 year olds. Those make for great stories once you get home and share your photo album with all your friends while sipping hot chocolate by the fireplace.

I tell ya, if it was white kids dying in America at the same rate of black and brown kids, lots of people would be singing a different tune about gangs in America.

And about tours that offer the chance to gawk.

So people are now being sued for libel based on the content of their tweets. And while the courts are struggling to keep up with technology — and how free speech plays out in evolving social networking mediums — there is a lesson for all to be learned, I believe, in the idea that “slander is slander”.

This article raises some interesting ideas. Worth a read.

A quality line I like in the article comes from Jeffrey Toobin, the CNN Legal analyst:

“You have a robust debate on a million different subjects every day on the Internet,” he said. “But on the other hand, is that a license to damage people’s reputation with knowing falsehood?”

Worth a lesson to teach to our students, no? I mean we have so many kids that flame one another on MySpace and FB that might not see the repercussions of just sliding over to falsely torching professional businesses, business people and so forth… that’s gonna bring out the sharks, er, lawyers.

All of us need to be aware. Seems to me the safest rule in the 21rst century belongs to what mamma used to say back in the 1100′s…

“If you don’t have anything nice to tweet about someone, don’t tweet anything at all.”

Even if they are an no brain, cankerous, lying, slutty, sum bee-yatch!

BTW, you can follow me on twitter @alansitomer… to keep track of how many times I don’t take my own advice, of course.

LOL!!

This article in Education Week calls attention to potential “conflict of interests” between educational publishers and those that are behind the scenes of the national standards push.

Essentially, here’s the thrust of the article…

The Literacy Research Association sent a letter Oct. 21 to the groups overseeing the development of common standards that, among other points, expresses concern that many of the authors are “representatives of multiple commercial entities that stand to profit enormously from selling curricula, instructional materials, assessments, and consultancies as the standards are rolled out.”

On one hand, can you really be surprised? When billion of dollars of government money is on the line, there are going to be commercial wolves salivating for the cash. (It happens in defense, construction, telecommunications and so on.)

On the other hand, the people who are authoring the national standards are some of America’s foremost thinkers and experts on students, achievement and blah, blah, blah. I mean where else would the Dept. of Ed turn for this authorship? And the educational publishers need these type of people to author their materials as well… so where do you think they are going to turn?

To the same people.

The conflict of interest was inevitable.

The solution seems kind of obvious to me. Make the contract read, if you write the standards you can’t author/consult/and so on for commercial educational publishing/testing materials for say, 5 years. (Or, if you have accepted money for authoring/consulting educational publishing materials, you are automatically excluded from national writing standards.)

Either way, should we be shocked that some people want to set it up so that “the folks in Congress get to vote on their own pay raise” (cause it’s kind of analogous)?

In parts of school and educational policy these days, all you have to do is follow the money.National standards means national standardized testing… and who will profit off of the implementation and administration of that I wonder?

The chumminess is troubling — even more so when it gets obfuscated behind closed doors, through back channels and what-not. But, hey, Joe and Jane parent… whadda they know. After all, they are entrusting both their kids and their tax dollars to us so that we can, as professionals, make these “best decisions” for them..

Hard to make a best decision for somebody else’s kids when you are staring at 10 figure contracts on the line.

That’s right BILLIONS are hanging in the balance.

But the internet makes for an amazing watchdog, does it not? People with hands in cookie jars… they gotta be more careful than ever, don’t they?

For those of us with students who don’t think they’d ever want to consider a career in writing, this article might be an arrow in your quiver to help inflate a student’s sense of why knowing how to properly punctuate a sentence is a skill that they might want to have in their professional, job hunting arsenal.

After all, who’s going to want to read reviews about sensie bud from a person that doesn’t even know how to correctly incorporate a lucid and illuminating appositive phrase?

That’s right, a new day is here with new, 21rst century jobs out there for the taking and as marijuana clinics boom all over the country we now find ourselves in need of weed connoisseurs.

The day of the critic has arrived. Don’t laugh, because just as cars need reviewing, restaurants need reviewing and wine needs reviewing so do the multitude of different styles and offerings of the wacky tabacky!

Wanted: Pot Critic

Experience Required:

• lots of smoking
• lots of toking
• having visited lots of laser light shows while blazing out of your mind on Thai Stick a plus.

Skills Required:

• joint rolling
• bong loading
• pipe stuffing
• able to self-edit manuscripts because your bosses will probably be too high to actually read what you write.

Hours:

• whenever, dude

Okay, I jest. But the thing is, the city of Los Angeles has seen an explosion in “medical dispensaries” this year and they have become so popular that there is a very real job out there to be a Bud Critic. (Read this article and be amazed: 966 clinics are now open in L.A.) I mean from what I have heard some of this pot will hit you like an elephant gun and some will simply give you a “mild, light buzz, you can still remain semi-coherent” buzz. Users want to know what’s what and what to expect.

Imagine not knowing the difference between having two beers and having two shots of Arkansas moonshine. This is where the erudite dope folk come in. They will have sampled the goods, smoked the various strains, and done their “get high as a friggin’ kite homework” in order to be a guide, a judge and a navigator for other users journeying through this very green forest.

Do we turn our noses up at wine critics? Will weed experts be welcomed into society with the same open arms? Will there be a stigma to be a stoner or is this just a new brand of cultural connoisseur?

Either way, the job requires a person to be able to write… and do it well.

And really, look at those hours.

As Joseph Campbell once famously said, “Follow your passion!”
As the military once famously said,” “It’s not just a job, it’s an adventure.”
Or, as Cheech and Chong once famously said, “Hey man, how am I drivin?… I think we’re parked man.”

(BTW, that pic above shows a map — as identified by little red marijuana leafs — where all the pot clinics in L.A. currently are open. The explosion is so large that there are now two of them within walking distance of my house… each open less than a year. Can’t say I’m the biggest fan at all of the ubiquity but then again, I never even bother to count the bars. Fodder for another post, I guess.)

Everyone on the internet has a perspective to sell. Simply put, I don’t believe that there is anything remotely related to objective data being published about our schools right now.

Look too closely at any aspect of things and you are almost assured of detecting bias For example…

Charter schools are the big buzz these days. But are they the magic pill that’s being sold? Of course not. Yet are they commendable in a variety of ways. For sure.

To that end Stanford just put out a report on charters, a pretty sweeping one that is well-summarized in this L.A. Times article.

Now as I state all the time, I think the assessments for all these studies are flawed (i.e. have you heard me holla about bubble tests before?) so I don’t put all that much stock into much of the data I am fed. But it’s certainly interesting to see how people are viewing — and informing others — about what’s going on.

As written, the Los Angeles Times article says, “California charter schools stronger in reading than math.”

But it also could have said…

“Statistics prove charter schools outperform traditional schools.”

Or it could have said…

“For all the hoopla, charter schools only negligibly better.”

Or it could have said…

“Over 33% of charters deliver worse results than traditional schools.”

And each and every headline would have been acceptable (based on the information in the article).

The point is, how the news is framed matters immensely — it’s an activity I do with my students all the time to demonstrate bias in the media — and while this reporter seems to have worked hard to be fair, there is no doubt that through the examples above we can all see that if there’s an axe to grind, data can be easily manipulated to do it.

It’s why Fox News and MSNBC can report on the same story and see two totally different things.

You think our schools don’t do this stuff? Our politicians? NCLB policy wonks? Voucher advocates? Union heads? The ACLU? The NEA?

It’s just amazing the ways in which headlines can be written. So how important is the manner by which information is framed to the perception we take away from the information? I’d suggest it might even be more important than the information itself!

Next time you see numbers on education, see how they’ve been set up and presented. Remember, it matters. It matters a lot.

(NOTE: This post was inspired by a good friend of mine, Dr. Jerry Harvey, who turned me on to a winner of a book called, How to Lie with Statistics.)

In a topic that is dear to my heart for a variety of reasons I saw this article and immediately flashed to a, “Why can’t all the kids who have made bad choices in terms of getting embroiled with gangs see the same light?”

When I was writing Homeboyz, a book unfortunately inspired by too many true-to-life violent circumstances involving my own students, I uncovered more and more and more “things” in the course of my research than anyone ought to know. And basically I came to realize that the relationship between youth violence and education is inextricably tied.

You may poo-poo my insights, you may think I am a bleeding-heart liberal who is opining for more government spending, you may think I am one of those softee folks who doesn’t see the side of the victim and their pain when I advocate for felonious kids. Well, that may be true. However, gangs are a scourge on our nation and as society gets more polarized between rich and poor, have and have-not, well-educated versus poorly schooled, realize that the price being paid by not being more effective with our children while we have them in our classrooms is costing our communities immensely.

Here’s a class project (an enhanced podcast) my students did about gangs in Lynwood. Great work about a tragic topic.

So $100,000,000.00 was just spent (that’s right, 100 mill) and, as this article points out, virtually no positive results were reaped by the extra expenditure of cash-o-la invested in education by a fella with a pet education project named Randy Crew. Hmmm, what can we deduce?

*The Sticky Floor Theory is alive and well. (For those of you not familiar with the “sticky floor” theory in education it basically postulates that those who are down, once down, stay down — because the “floor” is sticky. Put another way, the thinking goes that once you sink into the combustible mix of poverty, sparse employment opportunity and low levels of education, there is a cultural sort of tar to this bottom-of-the-rung environment that seems to keep the feet of those who wish to climb up stuck to the ground levels. And upward mobility is plagued by there being an invisible yet formidable substance oppressing those who wish to rise. Essentally, it’s kind of an inverted cousin of the glass ceiling.)

*Money alone doesn’t solve problems. Without good ideas and intelligent practices, more money spent is not going to equate to higher results achieved. (Maybe this is why NCLB remains so under-funded? They know if they do fund some of this buffoonery it ain’t gonna make a spit of difference. Hey! I just realized something. George Bush was actually a fiscally prudent, insightful, almost prescient president. Whoo-dah-thunk-it?)

*More time in and of itself isn’t going to solve the problems. As you see the article mention, the kids were more fatigued from the extended hours, the teachers were more fatigued from the extended hours and yet there seems to be virutally no improvement from simply spending more time in class. (Might it be that quality supercedes quantity? However, I, for one, do believe that America’s kids need more time in class — not less, not the same but more. WAY MORE! Yet alone, this isn’t going to do anything.)

*The assessments are flawed. Ask any real teacher in a real Florida classroom about how much faith they put in the FCAT’s as an authentic measurement of student achievement — or as a tool that gives true insight as to the qualities of the educator — or as to the true aptitudes of the students and you’ll hear a boatload of complaints. Standardized testing, as it currently exists — and in my opinion — is a sham.

*The teachers charged with achieving the results sought were not properly prepared for the task. What was the PD prior to the expenditure of this money? Can we assume that this Zone experiment might have needed more prep time so that the people working in the Zone were properly readied for the task? Or, is it a case of the next item on the list…

*The teachers stunk. Unfair to say, but this certainly provides more artillery for those who want to fire every teacher in America and then hire a whole new work force. (As if people are beating down doors to go work in Miami’s lowest performing schools.) I mean, hey, we just spent 100 million for no improvement — it’s gotta be the teachers fault, doesn’t it?

*People will now be frightful of signing off on spending money towards, what seems to have been, an exceptionally ambitious and meritorious aim. I know very little about this guy Randy Crew. He was forced out with a six-figure buy-out according to this article but only the lord above knows what really happened in Miami. However, I salute the guy for going to bat for the poorest, lowest achieving schools and really trying to make a difference. I mean the man seems to have staked his career on this venture and he came up as the goat. So what, I say. He apparently took a swing of the bat and gave his best run for the money in an effort to help some of Florida’s least fortunate. (And if you know anything about Miami/Dade county, you know that when we’re talking about a textbook case of America’s severely disadvantaged.) Crew went to bat for these kids and for that I think he’s to be saluted. And I am not alone. As Board member Agustín Barrera said in the article, ”It was a well-thought-out plan that, unfortunately, did not bear the fruits we all thought it would. The mistake would have been not trying the zone, because then we would have failed the students by not trying something new.”

Was it a an attempt for personal glory — the article implies that, too — or a case of going to bat for the kids in a real and earnest and dramatic way? I really don’t know.

But it does seem that education reform for America’s lowest performing schools — not just in Miami, but all across our country — just took a Crew cut.