I just spent a whole bunch of time talking about PBL (Project-Based Learning). Yet, at the end of the day, a picture is worth a thousand words:

Just one question: Where were these cutting edge-thinkers back when I was in elementary/middle/high school?

Okay, college, too? (Think about it… people who majored in English Lit because they loved the Romantics versus frat boys at keg parties… you do the wedgie math!)

If this isn’t worth an A in some class at school then really… what is?

The Brilliance of Wedgie-Proof Underwear needs to be academically validated!

I want to keep this short and sweet today but I feel as if I owe an apology to the folks in Alabama who found my blog post from two weeks ago to be hurtful, inappropriate and incendiary.

That was never my intention. And you should know that I took down the post.

Though I thought I went out of my way to salute the educators making strides in the Deep South — the ones really laying it on the line in an admirable way who are working their tails off, bringing change and fighting for social equity in the Alabama schools — apparently, that point was lost and some Alabamians felt unfairly targeted. Re-segration through gerry-mandering was the broad picture theme of the post but I have a tendency to be flippant, smarmy and insensitive at times in my quest to be entertaining as well as informative — and I seem to have genuinely hurt some people’s feelings.

I am not Glenn Beck. I am not an anger-monger. I actually find this kind of rage to be detrimental to productive growth and in the spirit of seeking to open an earnest dialogue, I instead opened something else to which people took a great deal of offense.

I have no ambition at all to hurt people, destroy the morale of educators and the such. And with so many teachers already feeling demoralized (see this article — a whopping 40%!) I certainly have no aspiration to add more salt to our collective educational wounds.

BTW, choosing to take down the post was a real Catch-22 for me because I am not one prone to bow to pressure or censorship. However, in the end I believe I erred. I made a mistake. Why? Because I was insensitive and even came across as haughty (cause it ain’t like the state of California doesn’t have issues with race, poverty, small-mindedness and so on… which I do feel I often point out in my blogs but hey, that’s a different story.) Yet at the end of the day, my greatest mistake was that I added a bunch of negativity to a bunch of hard-working educator’s lives and that’s not who I want to be nor what I want to do… so I have taken a step back and decided to simply say, “I am sorry and I will try to do better in the future.”

Obviously, some people are gonna be furious with me forevermore for insulting Alabama. I can’t change that. However, I do know that if there is a productive, positive conversation to be had about gerry-mandering school district zones and institutionalized racism, by no means will I be shying away from this topic in the future, Alabama or not. But I will work harder to make sure I don’t paint such wide brush strokes in the name of going for a giggle.

I messed up. Oops! Time to move on.

At some point — hopefully before my grandkids enter school — America is going to go to growth model assessments.

And once they do, watch out!

As I just blogged about yesterday, Newsweek issued a list identifying our country’s best high schools… but this doesn’t seem to take into account one of the most critical measures of any “teacher’s effectiveness”:

HOW MUCH DID THE STUDENTS GROW OVER THE COURSE OF THE YEAR?

People in schools like mine routinely get kids who are reading and writing at levels years below grade level yet, do we get any credit when we take a 15 year old kid who is at a 4rth/5th grade reading level and elevate them to an 8th/9th grade level (3-4 years growth in one year)? Not when they take 10th grade bubble tests we don’t.

And my school gets dragged through the mud for having scores and scores of kids who don’t “bubble up.”

It’s as if all of us working in these NCLB schools that are sinking deeper and deeper into the throes of probation are a bunch of loafers. A bunch of slackers. A bunch of preposterously over-coddled tenure-ites who live off the fat of the land and do little to nothing over the course of a year.

Newsweek thinks that if more of my kids simply took more AP tests (not performed well on them, but simply took them) and we brought in IB and a bunch of other high fallutin’ acronyms, we’d deserve notoriety.

A teacher named Gary Anderson had this to say…

My school is on the list. We’re 715, up from 958 last year. This is good news for the real estate market around here.

I’m actually sort of ashamed of our ranking. Yes, we’re a good school, but I make that claim in spite of our AP philosophy, not because of it. We literally push kids into AP classes, even when it overwhelms them. It sure looks good when the Newsweek and US News & World Report rankings come out–which are mostly based on how many AP tests are taken (not how well the students scored)–but many, many students get roughed up in the process. Real estate agents and parents who like to brag to their relatives get very excited about these rankings, but I’ve seen the emotional and physical toll it takes on some kids. It’s not worth it.

When students who would be better served in a regular-level class are forced into an AP class where they are in over their heads, they are not only a drag on the AP class, but the regular-level classes where they could have been stars are worse off without them.

Wow, huh?

Adults in the world of public schooling are treating education like it’s a game, as if there are winners and losers and rules to learn in order to play well.

I thought the objective was to educate ALL our kids.

How naive of me.

Bring on the growth model assessments!! As my grandfather used to say, “If we can land a man on the moon…”