As the President has made abundantly clear, he believes the nation needs more post-high school education. He’s lobbying for it. He’s speaking about it. He’s even putting our money where his mouth is.

And then you read info like this (as reported in the Los Angeles Times) stating that University of California’s freshman class drops by 6.8%:

Freshman enrollment at the University of California will be 6.8% lower this fall, a drop of 2,603 students from last year that closely matches a reduction the university sought because of budget shortfalls, UC officials said Tuesday.

In all, 35,435 students from California and other states have told one of UC’s nine undergraduate campuses that they intend to enroll as fall freshmen, compared with 38,038 last year.

Geez, what to do? On one hand we know what needs to be done. We need to invest more money in education at every level of the system. On the other hand, the citizens of the U.S. are going to have to pay for it and the only way the government gets to pay for anything is by spending the tax money of its citizens.

So who’s up for higher taxes? Obviously, not enough of us. Matter of fact, we want lower taxes. Or better yet, no taxes. But we want all the services… please don’t cut those.

What is the cost of a highly educated citizenry? What is the expense of a poorly educated citizenry? It all brings to mind one of my favorite quotes of all time:

If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.
–Derek Bok

Or as the sign says, “Get a brain, MORANS!” (Go USA)

Teaching kids who are not motivated to learn wears on you. Sure, Hollywood movies make it all seem as if being in a job where a large amount of kids who are not motivated to participate in their own education simply requires one simple “epiphany” (either by the teacher or the students) in order to right the ship and send everyone off into a bright, bold and bountiful future… but the reality of it is much different.

Much.

It challenges you. It frustrates you. It makes you call into question why you even bother to do this kind of work. And anyone who does not pay heed to these ideas doesn’t know what it means to be on the front lines, what it means to be working in a school with an outrageous dropout rate… what it means to try and care more about a kid’s education more than the kid (or the parent of the kid) does themself.

To take liberties with an old cliche’, “You can lead a student to knowledge, but you can’t make them think.”

Indeed there are days where I feel like the Pied Piper, where no matter what I do with a class of students, they are on the bus, all in, eager, excited and fired up to go push our boundaries into a whole host of new, exciting intellectual directions.

But there are scores of kids who just don’t play ball floating through our American schools. Their attendance is horrible, their homework is non-existent and their sense of actually wanting to take an active role in their own education is horrifically low. And then, when they show up at the end of the year, having missed 8 of the 14 prior days of class, without even attempting to give a half-hearted effort at turning in a final project, what do you do?

It wears on you.

I’ve already spent so many of the arrows in my quiver. I’ve yelled. I’ve cajoled. I’ve been soft and cut slack and I’ve been firm and drawn lines in the sand. I’ve tried to get other people at school to join forces, I’ve made attempts to work with parents… what more is there to do? 7 days of school left and there is no way for this kid not to get an F… and I am sure that my class is not the only one like this for this student.

And then NCLB comes in and paints me and my school district as if it’s our fault that these kids are under-performing.

Is it the dentist’s fault when a patient gets a cavity?

“Honestly, California has lost its way.”

This quote doesn’t come from me. It doesn’t come from my compadres in the Golden State. It doesn’t even come from a person who is known for making blustery, large, sweeping statements like this.

It comes from U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, speaking to dozens of mayors, superintendents and school board trustees at San Francisco City Hall this past week.

Ouch!

And then he put some spank on it.

“California used to lead the nation in education.”

That’s right… used to. But now, as we all know, California looks like some sort of mushy-brained prize fighter from an era gone by who still thinks it has the chops to be in the ring with a ferocious opponent — yet its face is being turned into hamburger meat by the opposing educational forces it now faces.

Used to… Damn if that don’t slice to the core.

He also said that, “Our dysfunctional adult relationships have hurt children in far too many places.”

Gee, I might find that grossly offensive it it wasn’t so grossly true.

Duncan also slammed Schwarzenegger’s proposal to lop seven days off the school year, saying students need to be spending significantly more time in class to close the achievement gap. I’ve been saying the same thing for months. I mean by Arnold’s logic, if cutting 7 days of school is going to be fiscally prudent, why don’t we just cancel the entire 2009/2010 school year — that might be downright profitable!!

Thing is, as my state and my peeps out West get body-slammed by Duncan, there’s one thing we all know to be true. If you were to take a look at the top of the mountain, the tip of the iceberg which is above water and not the whole glacier, there’s no one who wouldn’t agree that the state of California has some of the most wicked, most phenomenal, most cutting edge, leading thinkers and educators on the planet. In a definite amount of places, California rocks like no other.

Heck, if we were Rhode Island, we’d be slam-dunking on fools like Kobe Bryant at a Laker game!

But we can’t seem to find a way to spread the love we have at the top all around. The upper tiers have it — and they have it good — but the rest of the state is getting pummeled.

“It’s often at times of crisis we get the reforms we need,” Duncan also mentioned. Well, we certainly need reform. And we certainly are in a crisis. And being that he was pretty much right about everything else he said, I certainly hope our Secretary of Education is right about this one, too.

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.

I don’t think it’s any great Einstein-ian insight to say that public education is dependent on the community in many, many ways. And when the community surrounding and supporting public education is dysfunctional, flawed, lacking, and so on, it’s really hard to be productive, excellent, amazing and wonderful in our classrooms.

Not that it can’t be done, but it becomes exceptionally challenging.

It’s almost self-evident that the first ally in our aim to excellently educate the students of this country is always the parents. For a kid that comes to first grade knowing how to write their name, read, identify letters, shapes, colors and has been socialized to working in classroom environments by having attended pre-school, teachers and schools can be rightfully expected to well educate that child. However, for the kid who did not have the “at home” pre-instruction to instruction, the kid who can’t write their name, doesn’t read a lick, struggles with elementary numbers and has no b.g. with books nor has been socialized yet to the demands of working well in a classroom environment, our schools are just not set up well to serve that kid — especially when mixed with other kids that are both above and below their individual level.

And then, as these students move up in grade level, the gap in skills and competencies — as all the data shows — grows and grows.

So yes, we need institutional change and yes, “there is something fundamentally flawed with the structure, management and compensation of the labor force in the public education system,” as was mentioned in another post on this ning but school readiness and community support are adding fuel to the fire and lots of us are quite sick of the fact that we’re viewed as if it’s all “our dysfunctional fault” that public education is in the state it is in.

We need better support! No matter how we are organized or re-organized, until we are better supported by the parents and community we are going to be extremely hard-pressed to meet our objectives because this lack of support is very much a weight on our back, an almost insurmountable albatross in many ways. Without real support from outside the school walls and halls, it’s spectacularly difficult to create the kind of wholesale change we’d all like to see. Sure, anomalies and success stories will always disprove any sweeping stereotypes but on the whole, turning around Washington DC, Oakland, Philly, Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago and so on is going to take the communities of Washington DC, Oakland, Philly, Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago and so on. Without the parents, without the local business owners, without the support of the alumni and the local governments, schools are going to be hard pressed to achieve the results that we all want to see.

When Barack said “parents” during the campaign, he knew exactly what he was talking about. We need the parents to be more involved, dedicated and committed.

Check out this story about the coming tsunami for education that was splashed today. They literally titled it, “A ‘tsunami’ of Boomer teacher retirements is on the horizon.”

Of course, just because we know about the problem, doesn’t mean we are going to do anything about it. America has turned — much to our discredit — into a nation of reaction instead of proactivity. (I blame George Bush’s short-sighted mentality about proper management of things for much of this right now. To wit, I cite the pouring ga-zillions of dollars into a red-herring chase for drummed-up charges of WMD’s in Iraq instead of recognizing that we had things at home that could have been proactively dealt with before they became a calamity like the housing crisis, banking mess, Wall Street rapaciousness, Louisiana levees, deteriorating schools, the need for green energy, and so on. Anyway…)

Right now, it seems to me that we have to find a way to get our best and brightest to actively choose the profession of education. Currently, the top — and even the middle range of college graduates — are heading into things like business and law, jobs that chase the money (and feed the rat race). I’ve said this before, but when is the last time the Harvard valedictorian stood up and said, “I am going to be a middle school English teacher for the next 35 years.” And meant it.

The crowd would groan conveying the sentiment, “But why? You could be so much more.”

This stigma is very dangerous. People view the profession of teaching as a second rate career. I, for one, will disagree to my last breath but still, how do you change the perception of a culture?

Boomers are retiring. God bless them for their service. But it’s clear that we need an infusion of new educators and I think it’s going to take a national bill — like the GI Bill or something — because American education needs an overhaul. In many ways, we are looking like GM, once the model and envy of the world, now a… well, I’ll let you fill in the blank.

Check out my sweatshirt today. It’s Spirit Day, purple and gold for the Lynwood Knights. How many folks are actually proud to be an American teacher these days? I am, but when I travel the country and speak to others, so many, many of them seem demoralized.

We have to CHANGE THE GAME, FLIP THE SCRIPT, TURN THE PAGE… and avoid cliches as we do so.

On this night, after having read this interview, I became an official Arne Duncan fan.

And I am wearing my hoodie up because I am only hoping that I don’t have to hide my head underneath a full bag at some point in the future regretting the day that I made this proclamation forevermore to be referenced by the digital literati.

But he won me over. I believe his actions will follow his intentions and American education will be better off, will turn a new leaf with this man in charge.

Besides, sitting on the fence reserving judgement is something that doesn’t suit me well. We need change, we need action, we need to re-shuffle the deck (and not view it as deck chairs on the Titanic). And so, I am staking my claim as an official supporter.

As you know, I was never a fan of Spellings and felt that she was a calamity for public education. Then again, I felt that way about Dubya as well. But Mr. Duncan has just won my support and I will now feel comfy to tell all I know that he has earned it. And why?

Well, if you read the aforementioned interview, one thing is quite clear… HE GETS IT!

Now, the question becomes, can he remediate it? Well, he’s gonna need help from teachers, from people like me, if he is gonna be successful.

So here we go. God’s speed, Arne. God’s speed.

I am jumping on a plane home after a ROCKIN’ time at ASCD in Orlando where we hosted our very first Sitomer Summit.

The Sitomer Summit was an educational event unlike any other I have ever attended. (Much less hosted.) If you were there, you know what I mean. 4 state Teacher of the Year Award Winners spoke, we saw student work on the big screen that authentically illuminated evidence that 21rst education is not only here but is already being taught in certain classrooms across the country (and we saw how it can easily be taught in so many more classrooms as well if people are in possession of the right tools), we heard from 33 year veterans at the top of the educational food chain about how they rediscovered the passion as to why they got into education in the first place, witnessed the power of real books (not textbooks, not scripted curriculum,… REAL BOOKS!) to heal lives through the the make-me-weep-words of Dr. Joan Kaywell and did it all while being served filet mignon (literally, we ate filet mignon) at Ruth Chris Steak house.

We gathered, we thoughtfully engaged and we each left with a more clear vision on what our next steps ought to be to better the state of public education in America.

We literally participated in national movement. It reminds me of the famous quote from a few decades ago, “The revolution will not be televised,” Well I believe we have evolved.

The movement will be broadcast… but first we must BE THE MOVEMENT.

Like I said, if you were there, it was an event unlike any other. And if you were not there, think about joining us next time. It stirred my soul unlike almost nothing else.

So much talk goes on about improving education but what is an educated person in society today? I mean, what constitutes smart? Intelligent? Worthy of admiration?

Is “smart” a person with a graduate degree from an Ivy League School? What about the Ivy League graduate who cheats on his wife, drinks and drives, evades paying taxes and gets in trouble with the law for things like embezzlement?

Do we consider the high school dropout who works 3 jobs for near minimum wage intelligent? What about if he puts food in his the mouths of his kids, coaches pee wee soccer, attends PTA meetings even when it might cost him wages and always stays on the right side of the law when it comes to being a part of America’s citizenry?

Have we not muddled our interpretation of these ideas?

Does character education not play an important role in school education? Does it not need to play a more important role?

These days I really wonder, is a Wall Street scoundrel who bilks investors out of millions, stealing life’s savings from the unsuspecting, any more or less contemptible than a gun-toting car-jacker?

Would I rather have students well educated in terms of character with low academics or students well educated in terms of academics but of poor character?

The answer seems self-evident (if it’s an either/or choice). Yet character education is completely NOT A PART of the way in which my school is evaluated. I mean why isn’t there some sort of standardized test for this aspect of school? While there are numerous ways we, in the world of public education, seem to be failing our kids, it seems to me that the neglect of this arena of school might end up being the most calamitous.