The President’s economic stimulus plan will provide unprecedented levels of funding for the federal department of education, but will these resources lead to school improvement?  A NY Times Editorial considers this question.  What do TCR readers think?

The President-elect has selected Arne Duncan, CEO of the Chicago Public Schools, as the next secretary of education.  Reports in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, explain what this choice might signal about education policy in the new administration.

With no announcement yet on the choice of a new secretary of education, check out David Brooks’ column about the behind-the-scenes maneuvering and the issues connected with the various candidates.  What does not seem to be in doubt is that we can anticipate an even larger federal role in education as the growth of the federal government continues unabated though yet another administration.

Looking for a chance to exhibit your educational design skills on camera?  Then you may be interested in auditioning for a spot on School ReDesign, a new web TV reality show that will engage teams of contestants in designing a green classroom.   And, of course, we will be looking for the show to appear right here on TCR as part of AfterEd later this fall.

Worried about how to balance authority and reach in online media?  Well, apparently Encylopedia Britannica is worried as well.  

In an announcement posted on their website, the editors of Britannica have announced a new online site that will allow contributions from a broader community beyond the experts previously engaged.

The editors will still review content that is part of the core Britannica product, and such content will be labeled “Britannica Checked” to assure readers that it has been, eh, well, “checked.”    

“Now is not the time for more educational research or reports or commissions.”  So says A Stagnant Nation, a new report that examines the state of U.S. education twenty-five years after the release of A Nation at Risk.  

The report observes that few of the recommendations of the earlier report resulted in substantial action, and the U.S. educational system has continued to decline, particularly in comparison with the educational systems of other nations.

The American Legislative Exchange Council has released a new report ranking the educational systems in the states.  This is the 14^th edition of the report, and it contains data from 1985-1986 through 2006-2007

The 2007 rankings show Minnesota ranked first and the District of Columbia in last place.

Leading educators have identified the lack of attention to values and character as major failings of the Indonesian education system, according to a recent article in the Jakarta Times.  

They cited the importance of emotional maturity, called for the cultivation of wisdom, and highlighted the lack of a national vision for the country’s educational system.

Amidst the political turmoil and on-going campaign in Pakistan the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the Pakistan Institute of Legislative Development and Transparency will convene a conference for the leaders of the political parties to consider the state of primary education in the country.  This report from the Daily Times notes that Pakistan lags behind is neighbors in the region in the provision of elementary education.

What happens when K-12 teaching becomes more widely visible?  We can glean some indication of the impact of highly visible teaching through the case of a Monmouth, Oregon science teacher who created short video talks on global change and posted them on YouTube.  

The videos have been viewed millions of times by individuals all over the world, including a number of experts directly involved in the debate on global climate change.  The impact on this teacher’s career and on his students is worth considering.  It seems that the visibility has energized an already successful teacher and engaged his students.

Observers of higher education have long lamented the limited visibility of teaching in building academic careers and institutional reputations, but that is starting to change.  According to an article in the NY Times professors like MIT’s Walter Lewin are developing global followings as a result of recorded lectures made available on the Internet.

The lectures delivered by Professor Lewin appear to be having a big impact on the lives of a wide range of viewers of all ages from around the world.  The positive impact seems to be adding luster to MIT and even to the USA.

So says Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust who is quoted in a BusinessWeek article on The Dangerous Wealth of the Ivy League as advising lesser universities “to really emphasize social science or humanities and have science endeavors that are not as ambitious” as the Ivy Plus schools.  

The article discusses the enormous wealth of the elite private institutions and how their financial prowess is leading to problems for the higher education sector, particularly public universities in danger of being drained of talent.

Educators at all levels using Hurricane Katrina and the New Orleans recovery as a case to examine race and poverty in the United States will find a wealth of ideas in Ellen Livingston’s new blog for the Teaching the Levees project.  

Recent entries have covered the events directly connected to New Orleans, such as the visit of Mikhail Gorbachev to the Lower Ninth Ward, as well as those that raise related issues of race and class in the U.S., such as the rally in support of the Jena 6.

The blog is designed to support educators using the Spike Lee’s HBO film, When the Levees Broke and the curriculum designed to support use of the film in classrooms.

As reported in an article in the NY Times, a new effort is underway to provide ongoing systematic examination of New York City public schools.

Modeled after the Consortium on Chicago Schools Research, The Research Partnership for New York City Schools is a collaborative effort that brings together scholars from New York University, Teachers College, and the CUNY Graduate Center.  

The Partnership will seek to enhance the infrastructure for educational research in New York City by providing an independent source of information on the performance of NYC public schools.

Creating and Connecting, a new study from the National School Boards Association, reports that students between the ages of 9 and 17 are now spending nearly as much time using online social networking services each week as they do watching television.  

Many of these students are engaged in creative activities online, including uploading their own music or podcasts, uploading videos they have created, uploading their own photos or artwork, updating a personal website, contributing to a blog, or authoring other kinds of content.  Nearly 60% of all students report talking online about education related topics, and about half report talking online specifically about homework.  

The report goes on to discuss the ways that schools are responding to the growing popularity of these new social networking technologies and the variety of policies that both discourage and support student use.

The 2007 edition of the Southern Regional Education Board’s Factbook highlights the progress in higher education enrollment made by women students and black students, but it also notes the coming collision between the costs of college and the need for higher education for students from middle- and lower-income families.  A related report from Inside Higher Education discusses some of the trends for different types of higher education institutions.

The NY Times Magazine features a piece on the work of Ruby Payne. Payne’s work has been discussed in TCR on several occasions, notably by Gorski with a reply by Payne and by Ng and Rury again with a reply by Payne. TCR receives a mention near the end of the piece.

The recently announced effort by Eli Broad and  Bill Gates to raise the profile of education in the coming presidential campaign appears to be getting mixed reviews.  A key point in this effort is dissatisfaction with the pace of education reform.  What new ideas are being surfaced by this new initiative?  Stronger and more consistent standards, lengthening the school day and year, and enhancing teacher quality by means of merit pay.  Yawn.  

A study of open access publishing reveals that although scholars are willing consumers of open access journals, they are reluctant to use them as outlets for their own work.

The reluctance to publish in open access journals appears to be related to insufficient impact factors, questions about long-term availability, difficulty reaching a specific target audience, and low levels of use of open access publishing outlets by colleagues.

Although the headline reads A History Department Bans Citing Wikipedia as a Research Source, this article in the NY Times provides a more nuanced and complete discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of student use of the online collaborative encyclopedia.   The piece discusses the immediate action of the Middlebury College history department, the forthcoming debate on the issue at Middlebury, and the ways in which professors on other campuses are incorporating Wikipedia use and contributions into their courses.  

Fostering democratic dialogue is the goal of a new curriculum called Teaching the Levees being developed by the Social Studies Program at Teachers College in conjunction with the EdLab at the Gottesman Libraries.  The project, sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, draws on Spike Lee’s HBO movie When the Levees Broke.  

The curriculum, available to schools nationwide later this year, is discussed by Rockefeller Foundation President Judith Rodin in an article in the New York Times as an example of the new types of foundation work spanning former program boundaries.

Should schools send student Body-Mass Index data to parents?  An article in the NY Times reports on the impact of new initiatives to provide information on student weight.  In the article Marlene Schwartz of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale is quoted as noting that there is “no solid research” on either the physical or psychological impact of reporting and that “Entire states are adopting a policy that has not been tested.”

I have not noticed schools sending such data to employees such as teachers, administrators, or even professors of education so I suppose this is another “special” assessment service provided to students.

The transcripts from the oral arguments before the Supreme Court in the case of Meredith versus Jefferson County Board of Education are now online for examination.  Related materials and a set of briefs in the case are also available online.

The American Educational Research Association has released the Standards for Reporting on Empirical Social Science Research.  The standards provide a valuable framework to guide the preparation of manuscripts based on empirical studies.

The Gottesman Libraries at Teachers College have just announced the availability of a new digital archive that brings together a large collection of materials documenting the events and school finance issues connected with the Campaign for Fiscal Equity (CFE) v. State of New York case that began in December of 1999.  The archive, developed through a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, is designed to support a variety of research and teaching activities.  

If you think the world of education research and policy is overly tame, just consider the following excerpt from the U.S. Department of Education’s Inspector General’s report on The Reading First Program’s Grant Application Process:

In e-mail correspondence with the staff member regarding the Wright Group, the Reading First Director stated:

Beat the [expletive deleted] out of them in a way that will stand up to any level of legal and [whole language] apologist scrutiny. Hit them over and over with definitive evidence that they are not SBRR, never have been and never will be. They are trying to crash our party and we need to beat the [expletive deleted] out of them in front of all the other would-be party crashers who are standing on the front lawn waiting to see how we welcome these dirtbags. (p. 24)

The entire report reveals a wider culture at the Department to subvert the intentions of Congress by intervening to influence the selection of reading programs at the state level.

The story has been reported by various media outlets, including the NY Times, the Anniston Star, and the Eugene Register-Guard which offers a special take on the role of University of Oregon researchers.

Let’s see how much sustained attention this all gets from the public, and more importantly, from Congress.  And, let’s see if the educational research community can resist getting itself all worked up the next time the administration plays the science card.

 

Two recent NY Times pieces take on the issue of teacher and executive salaries.  William Chace observes that as a college president he was over compensated at about five times the salary of an average professor while Hubert Herring points out that a corporate CEO makes in a day about what a typical teacher earns in a year.

Work reported in an article in the Christian Science Monitor suggests that bullying behavior among middle school students might be reduced by acquainting them with the fact that most students are not engaging in such behavior.  Such social norms interventions have been used to address a range of behavior problems.

Federal earmarks to support specific research projects at universities in states of connected legislators are not new, but they are growing according to this article on the earmarks enjoyed by Mississippi State University.  Do such earmarks make us less competitive?

In this column in the Hartford Courant Lawrence DeNardis highlights the role that discussions of education in the twenty-first century will play at the G-8 Summit in St. Petersburg.  The G-8 leaders will be considering the growing importance of higher education in the wake of globalization and the impact of science and technology in advancing human progress.

The Supreme Court is moving toward a ruling on the permissibility of considering race in decisions regarding student assignments to particular schools within school districts.  While some call school districts’ claim that assigning students to achieve racial integration as a means of preparing students to be better citizens the result of “touchy-feely social science,” others such as TC Record Board member Gary Orfield worry that already growing racial isolation in schools would intensify as school boards are forbidden to do what they were once ordered by do by the courts.  

Apparently, we will have to intensify racial segregation and isolate poor and minority students until we generate a new wave of urban race riots before we get beyond “touchy-feely social science” to as we resume our journey toward “two societies.”  

The Supreme Court is moving toward a ruling on the permissibility of considering race in decisions regarding student assignments to particular schools within school districts.  While some call school districts’ claim that assigning students to achieve racial integration as a means of preparing students to be better citizens the result of “touchy-feely social science,” others such as TC Record Board member Gary Orfield worry that already growing racial isolation in schools would intensify as school boards are forbidden to do what they were once ordered by do by the courts.  

Apparently, we will have to intensify racial segregation and isolate poor and minority students until we generate a new wave of urban race riots before we get beyond “touchy-feely social science” to as we resume our journey toward “two societies.”  

Students have adopted a technology originally meant to chase them away from shopping malls as a cell phone ring tone that cannot be heard by adults, including most teachers.  According to this article in the NY Times, the new ring tone operates at frequencies that cannot be heard by most adults as a result of hearing deterioration associated with aging.  So what else are we missing?

As if we needed more evidence that education in the United States is increasingly about preserving privilege, consider this article on the growing reliance on private tutors for home schooling.

For those of you who thought that central state planning fell with the Berlin Wall, check out the report on state educational data systems in the NY Times.  Particularly outlandish is the notion that such mammoth state-wide systems, if they ever become operational, will help teachers “zone in on individual students’ learning needs.”

TCR’s own Lyn Corno has a letter in the NY Times commenting on a recent column by David Brooks.  Lyn endorses Brooks’ call for educators to help students develop good academic work habits and takes the opportunity to note that research on student volition has uncovered effective strategies for teachers.  Lyn, of course, edited the recent TCR special issue on student work habits that covered much of this research.

New legislation sponsored by Sen. Joseph Lieberman and Sen. John Cornyn would require reports stemming from government financed research projects to be posted to a government website within six months after appearing in a scholarly journal.  Academic publishers and professional societies are raising concerns about the viability of journals if research is made available free online, according to this article in the NY Times.  The financial concerns of the publishers may be reasonable.  My greater concern is involving the government as the primary or exclusive provider of scientific information.  Maintaining a scholarly publishing sector free of government support and government control seems as important as maintaining a free and independent press.

TCR readers should be concerned about current efforts afoot in Congress to abandon internet neutrality, the principle that accords equal access and service for all online content.  Commercial network service providers are lobbying for the right to create different service levels based on fees.  See the new savetheinternet website for more details and directions on how to contact Congress.  For a quick review of the basics, see the video on the Public Knowledge website

The National Society for the Study of Education has released a new yearbook focusing on the superintendency under the title “Voices for Democracy:  Struggles and Celebrations of Transformational Leaders” with chapters by Paul Houston, Beverly Hall, Larry Leverett, Allan Alson, Becky van der Bogert, and Paul Kelleher.  The chapters of the yearbook are available online to NSSE members, and members also receive online access to four additional journals in education.

Hey, let’s all get together and pretend to address the dropout problem one more time!

The March 13, 2006 issue of BusinessWeek reports that CIA staffers have been caught changing entries in Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that can be edited by anyone.  The entry for Bill Clinton was changed by someone from a CIA computer to say that Clinton was “dumber” than his Republican predecessors.  The BusinessWeek article goes on to say that users from the Justice Department, the Marine Corps and the Navy have also politicized entries and that access to Capital Hill computers was blocked earlier after lawmaker entries were similarly politicized.

There has been more than a little discussion about the accuracy of information on the internet.  Comparisons are often made to seemingly more authoritative sources in print.  And, of course, the government is growing increasingly interested in guaranteeing that students in its schools receive and learn the “facts” as verified through government sponsored standardized tests.  The democratization of knowledge is coming just in time.    

In the absence of any credible scientific information to suggest that the adoption of standardized testing regimes offers the best opportunity to improve k-12 education where they have been employed for many years, the federal government appears to be moving to pressure higher education institutions to adopt standardized testing as a major quality control measure.  The NY Times reports a growing consensus among members of The Commission on the Future of Higher Education on the need for greater accountability in higher education that can be addressed by standardized testing of students.    

There appears to be growing support for policies that would require school districts to spend 65% of resources at the classroom level on things such as books and teacher pay.  Perhaps more interesting than the policy itself is the use of educational research to shed light on it.

There seems to be a growing consensus that it is time to invest more attention and resources to encourage more students to study science and math.  In addition to reversing the declining numbers of majors in these areas, there is interest in recruiting science and math teachers for k-12 schools.  

We have been living with shortages of math and science teachers for decades, and the problem is particularly acute in urban schools serving disadvantaged populations.  Despite stated goals of making progress in science and math, particularly in international comparisons, there has been little effort to address the lack of fully qualified teachers in these areas.  Much of the current concern is prompted by comparisons to other countries, notably China where training in science and engineering appears healthy and growing.  

Although international comparisons are always useful for moving U.S. policy makers, we might attend to some of the nuances of the differences among countries.  Instructive in this regard are the observations of Singapore’s education minister as reported by Fareed Zakaria.  Zakaria asked the minister why Singapore schoolchildren lead the world in science and math test scores but fail to deliver world class performance as adults.  The minister explained that American children test worse but do better later in life because “Yours is a talent meritocracy, ours is an exam meritocracy. There are some parts of the intellect that we are not able to test well—like creativity, curiosity, a sense of adventure, ambition. Most of all, America has a culture of learning that challenges conventional wisdom, even if it means challenging authority. These are the areas where Singapore must learn from America."  Let’s hope that American policy makers learn this lesson as well.

Will efforts to provide better schooling opportunities for low-income students drive middle class families from the public schools of New York City?  According to an article in the NY Times middle class parents are becoming discontent with the increasing focus on test preparation and remedial work as well as the declining influence of middle class parents in the schools.  This raises the more general question of whether schooling in the US can maintain support if it ceases to be a mechanism for the transmission of privilege.  

The New York City Leadership Academy, a heavily funded program to prepare new principals for city schools, has shown mixed results with only 113 of the 180 candidates who entered the program moving to positions as principals.  This raises the question of whether the current configuration of schools is such that we can reasonably expect to find and prepare enough people to serve as effective leaders.

A new course at the University of Kansas titled, “Special Topics in Religion:  Intelligent Design, Creationism, and Other Religious Mythologies” to be taught by Religious Studies Professor and Chair Paul Mirecki has set off a controversy in a state where intelligent design is now part of the state science curriculum.  The Lawrence (Kansas) Journal World reports the latest dimensions of the controversy in an article titled, “KU Official Responds to Course Critics,” including threats to the funding for the university.  The University of Kansas website presents a statement by UK Provost David Shulenberger defending the course as well as an earlier statement by Chancellor Bob Hemenway defending evolution as a “central unifying principle of modern biology.”  Further investigation reveals that this special topics course is not the only course Professor Mirecki will be offering during the spring semester.  The Religious Studies spring semester course listing indicates that Professor Mirecki will also be teaching REL 124 – Understanding the Bible and REL 500 – Readings; Non English Religious Texts.  O tempora! O mores!

Citing the low quality of the workforce and the lack of skilled technicians, China’s premier announced that the State Council will expend funds to expand secondary vocational education so that it is the same size as regular high school education by the year 2010.  

The latest data from the Massachusetts Department of Education show an increase in the dropout rate for the 2003-2004 school year.  Anne Wheelock of the Progress Through the Educational Pipeline Project at Boston College offers an interpretation of these data as they relate to the MCAS graduation requirement and suggests a number of steps that might be taken to address what appears to be a growing problem.

This article from the NY Times illustrates once again that the debate about intelligent design has more to do with religion than science.  

The President of Cornell University has termed the national movement to have intelligent design taught in U.S. science classrooms “dangerous” and called on colleges to do move to speak out on the issue.

A recent article reports that the Pacific Justice Institute and Quality Science Education for All filed suit in federal court against the University of California at Berkeley and National Science Foundation officials.  The suit, directed at the university’s Understanding Evolution Website, claims that public money is being used to endorse some religions because a part of the site states that most religions have no conflict with the theory of evolution.

What program attracted 12% of Yale’s graduates, 11% of Dartmouth’s, and 8% of those from Princeton and Harvard?  An article from the NY Times discusses what is quickly becoming the Ivy League teacher education program.

Daniel C. Dennett explains why discussions of intelligent design belong in social studies classes instead of science classes in Show Me the Science.  

Nathan Glazer reviews Jonathan Kozol’s The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America and concludes that our commitment to individual freedom will preclude politicians from preventing wealthy parents from enhancing the schooling resources of their own children or leaving the system completely.  It is hard to disagree with this conclusion in the absence of serious political leadership on this and related social issues.

The newly formed Stanford Schools Corporation as taken over operation of the East Palo Alto High School, according to this report in the Stanford Magazine.  With more than 80% of the teachers from the Stanford Teacher Education Program and the involvement of Stanford faculty such as Linda Darling-Hammond and Anthony Bryk, the school is developing as a model of university-school collaboration.

 

In The Job No One Wants from Inside Higher Ed, Russell Olwell asks whether we have made the position of ed school dean too difficult.  Have the demands of the ed school deanship become too diverse and daunting and made the position unattractive to too many potential candidates?

The TCR book review of Media Literacy: Transforming Curriculum and Teaching is a reminder of the growing online presence of the National Society for the Study of Education.  The NSSE website holds current and past yearbook content as well as news of member activities and discussions of current issues in education.  Definitely worth a look.   

The George Lucas Educational Foundation is featured in an article in the New York Times.  The article highlights the Foundation’s interest in encouraging educational programs that emphasize hands-on project-based work, practical experience, and the use of film, video, and digital materials.  The Foundation serves as a source of encouragement for educational innovation at a time when such innovation is becoming increasingly more difficult.

An article from the New York Times describes the internal struggles of a high school English teacher and Marine Corps veteran who advises students about military service in a high school that has lost four recent graduates in Iraq or Afghanistan.  This piece raises some interesting questions about the broader role of teachers in helping students with important life decisions.

This article from the New York Times discusses the controversy surrounding the battle between advocates of intelligent design and those supporting the teaching of evolution in the schools.  The article details the various conservative groups promoting intelligent design.  The most interesting aspect of all of this to me is what it says about the low level of science literacy among the American population.  Unfortunately, battles like this one that take attention and energy from the teaching of serious science, do not lead me to be optimistic that we can do much to address the real needs in the area of science education.

This article from the New York Times laments the delays in communicating the results of state standardized tests in New York, noting that it is difficult to use such tests to support student improvement.  The article lists a variety of excuses for this situation, but perhaps it is simply time to face the fact that standardized tests are not meant to enable teachers to work with students to help them improve.  Such improvements would require very different investments and assessment strategies.

A new report on Teens and Technology from the Pew Internet and American Life Project finds that teens increasingly view e-mail as a technology for communicating with teachers and adults while they prefer instant messaging for communicating with their friends.  The report also notes that teens are leading the nation in the adoption of new communications technologies.

What part of the higher education sector is growing most rapidly?  According to this article in the NY Times it is commercial institutions with a consumer orientation and a mission to help adults improve their career options.  The article examines both the positive and negative aspects of this growth, but with such institutions growing at three times the rate of the rest of higher education in New York State, commercial institutions of higher education are becoming a larger part of the higher education sector.

If we need more evidence that testing is fundamentally a socially agreed upon set of conventions, look no further than “Principal Hid Fraud on Tests in Brooklyn, Officials Say,” a NY Times article describing how educators have been altering the grades on regents exams so that more students pass.  

While we all might be concerned about the altering of grades, the most interesting part of the article is the seventh paragraph:

Last week, state officials lowered the score needed to pass the Math B Regents exam after they said they had erred in scaling the test results and that too many students would probably fail. In recent years, there were similar problems with the Math A and physics tests.

This paragraph has no connection to anything else in the story, but it does provide a revealing look at how social and political circumstances grant privileges regarding testing.  Individual educators will be prosecuted for adjusting test scores, but state officials will be allowed to alter the scores of far more students as part of their regular duties.  

“Evolution is not the only issue at stake.  The very definition of science is at stake.”  This is how Alan Leshner, chief executive of the American Association of Science, justified the decision by most scientists not to participate in hearings on evolution held by the Kansas State Board of Education this spring.  An article in the NY Times discusses the refusal of scientists to participate in the hearing to avoid giving the impression that there is a credible scientific debate regarding evolution and intelligent design.

“We can practice music. But we can’t put together an orchestra.”  That is how one home schooling parent explains the interest in having home schooled students participate in some extracurricular activities and selected classes in the public schools.  An article in the NY Times reports on the growing interest among home schoolers in selective participation in parts of public education as well as the resistance to such participation by some school districts.  What I find particularly interesting about this phenomenon is how students and parents evaluate various aspects of public school offerings (e.g., athletic teams, AP courses) and how clear those evaluations become when students and parents are allowed to choose the parts of the public education system they deem worthwhile.

Charging that America operates two education systems, one for wealthy white students and an inferior one for black and Hispanic children, TC President Arthur Levine announced a new Campaign for Educational Equity to be headed by Michael Rebell, who as director of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, has led the fight for school finance reform in New York.

Quick, who is the “worlds leading provider of international higher education”? Take your best guess, and then check your answer.

If you are not yet convinced that the forces of globalization will impact the field of education, you might want to read the BBC report on the outsourcing to India of part of the grading of standardized exams from the UK.  Still not convinced?  Then perhaps you should read this account from Onlypunjab.com that is more informative than the BBC report.  Perhaps it’s time to outsource the reporting as well.

The Evangelical Christian movement is taking on the Ivy League with plans to establish evangelical student centers on all of the Ivy campuses.  The effort is being led by the Christian Union, a group of evangelical Ivy alumni.  A NY Times article quotes Matt Bennett, founder of the Christian Union, as saying that “What is happening now is good, but it is like a finger in the dike of keeping back the flood of immorality."

Apparently, the group will have its work cut out for it.  On a tour of Harvard a few years ago, one of the people in my tour group asked the student guide, a senior, the schedule of services in a building she had just identified as the chapel.  The tour guide seemed perplexed as she explained that she had never set foot in the chapel, and while she supposed some kind of services might be held there, she certainly did not know the schedule.

“Hear me: an unconscious people, an indoctrinated people, a people fed only partisan information and opinion that confirm their own bias, a people made morbidly obese in mind and spirit by the junk food of propaganda is less inclined to put up a fight, ask questions and be skeptical. And just as a democracy can die of too many lies, that kind of orthodoxy can kill us, too.”  Bill Moyers discussed the threat to democracy posed by the current state of the press in Propaganda and the Press:  The Role of Public Broadcasting in our Democracy.  Perhaps more “news” has not resulted in a more well informed public.

"I feel a little bit coerced. Unfortunately, this is endemic in the academic world, where one way to make some people seem good is by making other people seem not so good. Most students here do a lot of work and a very good job, and they deserve to be rewarded."  The comments by Princeton Professor John Fleming appear in an article reporting on Princeton’s new grading policy limiting “A’s” to no more than 35% of a class.  The grade inflation discussions at Princeton and other elite universities have seldom risen above the technical or bureaucratic level so Professor Fleming’s brief comments seem worth considering.  

"The great enemies of learning are anonymity and invisibility…People who are invisible don't learn. In no sense are they accountable, in no sense are they responsible, and therefore they can simply turn off."  Lee Shulman quoted by John Merrow in The Undergraduate Experience:  Survival of the Fittest in the NY Times.  John Merrow follows the college experiences of five students among the 37,000 at the University of Arizona in an examination of the challenges of learning in such large state universities.

The Federal Communications Commission has responded to requests to investigate the use of video news releases (externally packaged news stories) by reminding broadcasters, cable operators, and others that they must disclose the source of such materials at the time of airing.  As I noted earlier, the growing use of VNRs by government and corporate entities threatens to compromise the educational function of the free press through increasing propaganda. The movement to present VNRs from infiltrating legitimate news operations has received further support from a recent vote by the U.S. Senate to approve an amendment to a supplemental spending bill to prevent any federal agency from using taxpayer dollars to distribute prepackaged news without identifying the pieces as being federally sponsored with taxpayer dollars.

The TCR Editorial Board met today during the AERA Meetings in Montreal.  The Board reviewed various aspects of the operation of the journal and proposed several new initiatives to develop over the coming months.  One effort will be to design strategies to promote greater involvement of graduate students with the editorial processes of the journal.  This might entail greater use of student reviewers as well as opportunities to help students develop as reviewers.  A second effort will be to organize a special issue of the journal focusing on research on high school reform projects.

Apologies to Peter Frankel and Junior Achievement for any offense caused by my use of the term in the context of my earlier entry on the sixth grade counterfeiting incident.  I have always admired programs that try to engage students in real-world projects, and I only wish that the enterprising sixth graders behind the counterfeiting scheme could have been swept up in more wholesome activities.  Apologies also for my misreading of the report that led me to conclude that the currency in question was the $20 bill instead of the still not protected $1 bill.  Thanks to Nicholas Stroud for bringing this to my attention.

After years of careful design work by the U.S. Treasury to incorporate the most advanced anti-counterfeiting design elements, the U.S. 20 dollar bill has been counterfeited by a group of sixth graders in Seattle, Washington who scanned and made copies of the bill good enough to deceive cafeteria workers in the school lunch line.  The fake bills were discovered at the end of the day when the lunchroom staff was counting up the proceeds from the day.  According to the NY Times, the three boys involved received a stern lecture and a 3-day suspension from school. So far there are no reports of suspensions of U.S. Treasury officials in this matter.

 

Teachers might be given new responsibilities and new capacities under a proposal by National Rifle Association First Vice President Sandra S. Froman.  Responding to the recent Minnesota school shooting, Froman in an interview with the Associated Press said that all options should be on the table to enable teachers to protect students, including the possibility of arming teachers and allowing them to have guns in school.

If this proposal is adopted, we can look forward to a host of other necessary adjustments.  Schools of education might begin including methods classes on marksmanship and gun maintenance.  Gun distributors might begin renting exhibit space at conventions of teachers.  Publishers might include certain gun models in the ancillary materials provided with newly adopted textbooks.  Students might think twice before disrupting a class.  Efforts to recruit teachers might be more successful in attracting those with a penchant for fire arms as guns become standard issue equipment.  The educational research community could initiate a series of scientific studies to develop a better understanding of the impact of diverse gun practices on classroom order and student learning.

Although this is an obviously absurd idea, schools have been subjected to many absurd ideas over the years so perhaps we had better prepare in earnest for this possibility.  Lock and load!

 

The role of the news media in the education of citizens in a democracy is of enormous importance.  Not only do we rely on the media for general information on a daily basis, but we also make heavy use of information provided by the press in school-based instruction in social studies and other areas of the curriculum.  It is thus of great concern that the press is increasingly manipulated as a result of the government’s growing efforts to shape public opinion.  

A recent NY Times article reveals that the $240,000 paid to columnist Armstrong Williams to promote the No Child Left Behind Act without acknowledgment that he was working for the government is but the tip of the iceberg when it comes to government intervention in the media.  The Times reports that the Bush administration has spent a quarter of a billion dollars on public relations activities and that government produced “news stories” are increasingly appearing in the media without acknowledgment of the source of such information.  Although the Congressional Accountability Office has found that federal agencies may not produce prepackaged news reports that fail to identify the source of the material, the Justice Department and the Office of Management and Budget have instructed executive branch agencies to ignore the G.A.O. findings.  

The government operation to shape the news seen by U.S. citizens is growing more sophisticated and powerful as evidenced by efforts to contribute to news about military operations.  As the hours devoted to news programming have expanded while news budgets have been squeezed, the government has stepped in to fill the growing need for news of U.S. military operations.  A military information website provides local news directors with news segments and free satellite feeds from Iraq for use in news programs in the U.S.

The problem of government intrusion in the news may well be made worse by the erosion of paid newspaper subscriptions intensified by the migration of readers to online news sources. A decline in revenues to support news gathering is likely to make publishers more dependent on news sources provided by others.

Amidst all that has been written in response to Harvard President Lawrence Summers’ comments on women and science there have been few attempts to place the event into a broader institutional context.  A particularly interesting perspective is developed by Richard Bradley in a column that contrasts the style of university leadership represented by Summers with that of his predecessor Neil Rudenstein.

The National Governors Association held another education summit this weekend to call attention to problems in U.S. high schools.  They released an action agenda to organize efforts for high school reform, including:

·

restoring value to the high school diploma

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redesigning the American high school

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giving high schools the excellent teachers and principals they need

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setting goals, measuring progress, and holding high schools and colleges accountable

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streamlining and improving education governance

This effort has all the now familiar pieces:  the involvement of politicians and business leaders (This time they had Bill Gates offering to kick in $15 million, less than half the cost of the recent inaugural celebration!), dramatic statements of the current crisis (Only 68 of every 100 ninth graders complete high school within four years, this after two decades of constant announcements of improvements by governors across the nation.), and, of course, the required international comparisons (Believe it or not, the US trails Turkey, Mexico, Iceland, and ten other developed countries in college graduation rates!).  I am assuming that somewhere in Washington there is now a firm (perhaps several) specializing in organizing these events, and the formula is now well established.  Also well established is the record of a political class that for decades has maintained opposition to school finance reforms to increase equity and create realistic conditions for genuine improvement.  In the words of President Bush “There’s an old saying in Tennessee – I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee – that says, fool me once, shame on – shame on you.  Fool me – you can’t get fooled again. (Nashville, TN, Sept. 17, 2002).

The news that Random House has entered into a licensing agreement with VOCEL to allow cell phone access to foreign-language study programs and video game strategy guides suggests some intriguing possibilities for the future use of cell phones as education delivery channels.  Although current cell phones have some obvious limitations when it comes to delivering a full-range of educational content, there are certain text-based educational efforts that can be delivered effectively even now with future cell phone development promising even more possibilities.  Current cell phones, for example, allow foreign language instruction to include both text components and audio components to reinforce pronunciation.

As cell phones become the most mobile and ubiquitous vehicle for the delivery of information, their potential as educational tools will become even greater. VOCEL is already working with Princeton Review to deliver SAT study materials via cell phones.  In the UK, Edutext is offering a service to deliver a challenging vocabulary word, complete with a definition and an example, to school children whose parents sign up for the service.  Other Edutext applications allow school administrators to use cell phone text messaging to communicate with parents and students regarding attendance, school closings, and reminders of events or trip permission forms.  Exam tips for students can also be sent using the service.

These developments raise some intriguing questions.

If cell phones continue to develop as delivery channels for educational content, what organizations or individuals will play a role in determining the content of those channels?  Will it be global corporations, state and national agencies, local schools, individual teachers, student peers, or all of the aforementioned?  

How will the economics of this channel influence the distribution of educational resources?  Will efforts be made to avoid introducing new forms of inequity into the educational sector, or will historic patterns of privilege and disadvantage be replicated once again?  

When most people have access to a continuous and reliable channel for the delivery of information and educational content, how might the school curriculum change to reflect the reduction of some knowledge needs and the rise of others?    

In the aftermath of the statement by Harvard President Lawrence Summers that innate differences between the sexes might explain why fewer women succeed in science and engineering careers, there have been several encouraging developments, including Summers’ own subsequent remarks.  In particular, the recent statement by the Presidents of Stanford, Princeton, and MIT highlights the progress made in recent decades in increasing the numbers of women pursuing careers in the sciences as well as the need for educational institutions to redouble their efforts in this regard.  Even more interesting are the remarks by Princeton President Shirley Tilghman that Princeton was prepared to be an “Ellis Island” offering a haven for female academics in the sciences.  

Mark Bauerlein’s concerns about young people not reading even online are reinforced by Jakob Nielson’s recent study of the Usability of Websites for Teenagers. Nielson finds that teenagers do not like to read a lot on the web, but they do like interactive features such as online quizzes, online voting, games, and message boards. Nielson also casts doubt on the common assumption that teens are more sophisticated web surfers.  He finds that teens successfully complete representative tasks on web sites only 55 percent of the time compared to a rate of 66 percent success for adults.  Insufficient reading skills, less sophisticated research strategies, and a lower level of patience seem to explain the lower online success rate for teenagers.   

In 1780 John Adams, writing to his wife Abigail, imagined a type of progress that would shift the focus of educational activity over generations:

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.

In the February 2005 issue of Wired magazine, an article by David Pink suggests that the United States may be moving toward the final stage in the progression highlighted by Adams.  Pink argues that increasing automation, outsourcing of knowledge work to Asia, and the growing material abundance that results in a yearning for meaning will all come together to move the US from the information age to the conceptual age.  Whereas the information age depended on logical and precise work, the conceptual age, according to Pink, will require artistry, empathy, and emotion.  If Pink is even partly correct in his analysis, the success of the US in the emerging world economy may depend on the ability of schools to help students develop their conceptual and artistic capacities.

C-SPAN has been televising a series of talks on The Digital Future at the Kluge Center of the Library of Congress.  The series includes sessions with David Weinberg and Brewster Kahle.  The next session in the series will be shown on Monday, February 14 with David Levy discussing the shift to digital documents.  In addition to the live broadcasts, the sessions are archived at C-SPAN and definitely worth a look.

See the New York Times article on the growing use of online video games for instructional purposes in today’s NYT.  The piece points out that such games are growing in popularity as a strategy for reaching various audiences with public service messages.  With games ranging from highly produced multi-million dollar efforts to less ambitious projects costing several thousand dollars, the opportunities for game development are substantial.  

Although the Times piece questions whether video games can be instructional, educators have long used games for diverse instructional purposes, and these games come in many forms and formats.  Competitive games like spelling bees have been used from the classroom level to the national level, and they generated considerable student interest.  Simulations such as mock trials and Model UN’s have been used to structure learning interactions involving large numbers of students in coordinated efforts.  Of course, the most sophisticated and advanced instruction in physical education organized is around interscholastic competitions.

The internet adds several very useful dimensions to educational games beyond the obvious one of providing a set of tools and technologies for building screen-oriented displays as game settings.  First, an increasingly networked educational sector facilitates the sharing of games developed by teachers or students.  Second, the network allows players to be widely dispersed and still interact in competitive or cooperative ways.  Third, digital games allow for fine-grained and real-time collection of data on student performance and so bring possibilities for adjusting game conditions for student skill levels.

One important implication for teacher educators is the need to prepare teachers both to create and to select games to support their instructional agendas.  As game development tools become more accessible, we might look forward to a growing collection of what could become increasingly central elements of teaching and learning.  This should be fun and instructional.

I was annoyed as I tried to reach up to the kitchen cabinet to retrieve a glass.  I was annoyed because my way was blocked by a full size body reaching in the same direction, a body that a mere twelve years earlier I had held along the length of my forearm with head cupped in one hand.  I grabbed my son with a glancing hug and moved him aside, joking that I would not be stopped from my quest by the rising competitor for the contents of the kitchen.

Confronting the growing stature and power of one’s own children is both unsettling and rewarding.  It is gratifying to contemplate the energy and force of youth when they are engaged in the service of positive goals.  It is equally troubling to consider how such powers might be used in destructive ways.  

The tragedies that have plagued too many schools over the last year resulting in the deaths of too many sons and daughters have served to remind us that our students, our children, have enormous capacities that can be used in radically different ways.  This point is made all the more strikingly by the fact that the Columbine shooters would be considered successful students by most of us.  

With so many school shootings now seared into our memories, it is difficult to forget such possibilities as we deal with students on a daily basis.  Indeed, it is difficult to dismiss such possibilities as we go about our tasks of empowering young people with food, and clothing, and shelter in our role as parents as well as with knowledge, and skills, and values as part of the educational process.   

It is not just that we as parents and educators may fear our children or, more precisely, their potential for destruction.  It is more than that.  It is the realization that we are surely developing within our students capacities that we cannot ultimately control.  The present environment of school violence has the potential to generate a fear that can in due course cripple our work.  

The danger of unleashing the capacities of the young has always been present.  Our realization of the potential uses of student powers has always been with us.  The English teacher who arms students with a capacity for powerful language cannot avoid thinking about the many ways, both constructive and destructive, that such language might be used.  The social studies teacher who equips students with a complete understanding of the passion and force of the revolutionary actions that began the modern era cannot help wondering if one or more students will be moved to a new era of revolutionary action.  Those who teach in science and mathematics and technology cannot keep themselves from worrying about how the might locked within those content areas will be let loose.  

There are a number of ways in which we might react in the face of school violence.  We might become more wary of the conditions in the schools in our communities.  When my older son returned home late from middle school one day without his backpack, I questioned him and discovered that a student had called in a threat that caused the evacuation of the school and dismissal without an opportunity to retrieve belongings left in the building.  This left me counting the days until the end of the school year.      

We might become more vigilant with our own students and children hoping to see early signs of developing danger.  In the days and weeks following Columbine I found myself watching my own sons more closely and asking them what they were doing, what their friends were doing, and what kinds of things were going on in their schools and their heads.  Our conversations, always plentiful, became more pointed as we discussed the wave of shootings and what they thought of them.  

Perhaps the worst outcome of the violence in our schools would be that we shy away from students out of fear or unease, seeking to avoid interaction to minimize the chance of confrontation.  If this happens, we will diminish our effectiveness as educators and weaken the educational experience for students.  Nevertheless, this is a likely outcome of school violence as educators slowly and silently withdraw from students in an attempt to protect themselves.  It is not simply that we may avoid certain students, but that we may distance ourselves for all students and from our mission of empowering them.  Some worry that we will be too frightened to approach our troubled students before it is too late.  I worry that we will be too hesitant to empower our students, all of our students, when it is still early.  That would add tragedy to tragedy.

To avoid the tendency to withdraw from students we must redouble our efforts to work with them.  We must seek to overcome not only our fears of what they might do, but also of what we might enable them to do.  We must not allow our fears of how they may use their growing powers to deter us from helping them to develop those very powers.  

The next time I reach for a glass and find my way blocked, perhaps I will make sure that the hug I give is more than glancing.

At the end of the twentieth century American schooling, always a defining element of the national character, has become a peculiar combination of opportunity and decision, of prospect and purpose, of development and foreclosure. As schooling has come to be viewed as the central process in the determination of adult success, the pressures placed on all aspects of school performance have intensified.

Following the Columbine High School tragedy there has been much speculation about the pressures that must have driven the perpetrators to unleash such hostility against their own classmates. Observers have noted the growing stresses that we seem to be placing upon individual high school students. But few seem to have understood how the increasingly important role of schooling in American life makes schools a likely institution to host displays of disappointment and frustration not only with schooling but also with the broader life chances that it seems to dominate. It is not just that American youth are so much in school; it is that school is so much in American youth.

This was all brought home to me in a powerful way while I was conducting interviews with high school students as part of a study of the systems for evaluating student performance. The interviews were conducted with students drawn from a high school in a relatively affluent suburban community. I was set up in the school’s conference room, an impressive and spacious room with ultra modern furnishings that might have been taken directly from the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. Students arrived individually throughout the day over several days for interviews that would last about 30 minutes.

In the interviews my questions focus on the ways that high school students are evaluated in terms of their academic performance, their social behavior, and any extracurricular performances. Now I have written many interview and survey questions, and these are true to form: clear, dry, analytic. They are designed to get answers, but what they get is a good deal more.

The students on my first day are mostly freshmen and sophomores. They are active, eager to please and have difficulty sitting still throughout the interview. Their answers are quick and relatively complete in only a sentence or two. Their answers show perhaps more confusion than anything else as they are still struggling to understand how they are being evaluated by teachers, by administrators, and by other students. When they receive poor evaluations they confess to being unsure of what the evaluations really mean and uncertain about how to improve the next time around. Whatever their individual situations, as a group they seem to have sufficient energy and believe they have sufficient time to correct any serious problems.

By the middle of the second day of interviews I begin to see juniors and seniors. These interviews are generally more earnest, and the demeanor of the students shifts noticeably. These students are not the confused freshmen and sophomores; they are neither unsure nor uncertain. They are firmly attached to the spider web of evaluation activities that has become the American high.

About mid morning on the third and final day of interviews, an oh so tall junior walks into the room, introduces himself and slinks into the pre-positioned chair for the interview. As he takes the seat, I can’t help but notice his over large feet in well designed sneakers, feet that outsize my own by at least a few numbers. It turns out that this particular student has fairly good grades that he maintains while playing on the varsity basketball team.

As we move into the interview questions, I can tell that he is trying to answer carefully and completely, being as helpful as he can. We fall into a rhythm while moving through the items on academic work and social behavior; these areas appear to present few problems. I move into the final set of questions concerning performance in extracurricular activities and look at the clock above his head, certain that we will complete the interview well before the approaching lunch period.

The set of questions begins routinely with him answering each in turn. He pauses from time to time to think a bit more about these questions than he seemed to in the earlier areas. As we move further into the questions his answers become slower and more troubling. It is clear that he has thought a lot about how his performance on the basketball court is being judged and how he is being affected by each practice and game of the season.

He begins to describe the dilemmas basketball seems to present. It is troubling when he can’t decide how to feel when he has a good night and the team loses or the reverse. It is difficult to know how to react when a friend has a particularly bad game. He is not sure how he feels for the other team when they lose. He is not sure what his parents think of his performance and how he is balancing his time on the team with his time keeping up his grades. He is uncertain of how colleges will view his whole pattern of performance.

As I glance up from my note pad to regain eye contact I am confronted with eyes so wet that only the surface tension of the liquid keeps it from running down his face. For a brief stark moment we look directly at each other, he takes a breath, and I, no we both, look down at his sneakers which anchor the room as it seems to revolve around the stillness that suddenly confronts us. I look up again unable to help him move beyond the moment, the Starship comes to a dead stop, and the quiet of the deep space within him threatens to overwhelm the room. He blinks, and we both pull back from the moment as the fluid that threatens his cheeks recedes from the edge, surface tension replaced by subsurface tension.

As school extends itself further into all aspects of our lives it is not surprising that the effects of schooling, both positive and negative, become more pervasive and more powerful. In the context of the school, even basketball is not just a game anymore.

In the days since the murder of thirteen at Columbine High School by two students who subsequently killed themselves after identifying, terrorizing, sometimes interrogating, and then killing their classmates, high schools and middle schools across the nation and beyond have been racked by a large number of events similar in intent but for the most part failing to achieve the desired ends of murder and destruction. While much of the adult population's attention has been focused on the events in Littleton, young people throughout the country have decorated the tally maps of assaults, planned and posed, as uniformly as the back of a measles victim stepping from a warm bath. Amidst all the commotion there has been no shortage of analyses of the individual perpetuators, their personal conditions and circumstances, the internal processes that enabled them, indeed compelled them, to move with such apparently pleasurable violence against those they saw on a daily basis. We have struggled to identify the uniqueness of the case in a heroic but ultimately ruined attempt to define these perpetuators as "not us, not here, not our kids, not our schools." All the while the replicates, in intent and feeling if not in physical devastation, of the drama of Littleton have surrounded us.

Twenty nine years to the season I encountered my own high school cafeteria taken over by students in rain coats and black clothes broken only by the white soles of their athletic shoes as they strutted across the raised platform at one end of the large room with the supposedly calming green walls and large windows which could barely hold the spring sun. A few of them were real men boys, you know, those guys who need a shave by mid morning in their fourteenth years, but most were just boys lost in the swaddling of the old rain coats that waved as they ran from one side of the platform to the other.

It was the spring of 1970, a season marked by unrest as protestors broke more than the rules of decorum on the campuses of major universities and elite suburban high schools. The protests in these schools, written up in the newspapers and news magazines of the day, were political. But my high school was neither elite nor suburban, more working class and working poor than the middle class we all believed we were. And the protest this spring day was not political or at least not of the contemporary moment with its focus on a distant war. No, this protest was to be both more structural and, as it would turn out, more personal.

The day had started with bands of students running through the school waving chains that clattered against each other and hit with deeper thuds as they struck the old dark wooden classroom doors and already battered metal lockers, leaving what for many of the perpetrators, would be their major mark on the school. It had progressed through several stages as administrators and teachers struggled to regain control of the school while students were forced to remain in their classrooms. Somehow these roving students had convinced school officials to convene the entire student body in the cafeteria to serve as an audience for their complaints. Those of us who spent the better part of the day confined in classrooms were a bit concerned, but mostly just annoyed at being forced to play the gallery for what could only be a ragged display of what we imagined to be a poor imitation of the nightly news.

The order of entry from the various classrooms placed me at a table in the center of the room surrounded by students from my English class. I had little interest in the proceedings and hoped it would all end soon so I could get back to work. The guys on the stage had no concern for assignments and deadlines, but such things defined my school time and my out-of-school time and both were at a premium. I determined to go unnoticed and to do nothing to delay whatever was going to happen.

Suddenly, amidst the continuous stream of ranting, I heard my name being called out by the figures on the stage. I was asked, no ordered, to stand and face them. Now this seemed more than a little strange to me since I had relatively little contact with the boys on the stage throughout high school. I generally avoided them and others like them who seemed menacing at worst and a nuisance at best. A rigid tracking system ensured that I would seldom if ever be in the same class with these guys, and my own avoidance strategies took care of other chance encounters.

But I couldn't avoid the fact that my name was being called out and everyone was looking at me to see how I might respond. I stood and faced the platform just because it seemed like the thing to do. As I stood, pointed directly at me with considerable effort and force at the end of the outstretched arm of the most vocal and most animated figure on the stage was an index finger that would have poked me in the chest or the eye if it had not been twenty feet away. And now he was saying "You, people like you think you run…" and the rest is a blur, not because I have forgotten in the intervening years, but because it was always a blur, a stream of words and emotions fired off rapidly, strung together more by sheer energy than by any logic or syntax.

The anger from the figures on the platform struck sharply, stung deeply, and then was reflected right back at them as I boiled to the point of raising my hands to reply before deciding to lower my hands, my voice, and my gaze. I picked up my books, turned from the platform and left the room, walking past the administrators and faculty stationed at the door, stopping only long enough to ask my best friend if he was going to join me in my exit.

My action, or more accurately inaction, served to infuriate the ranting group further. You see, I was doing what I always did; I was avoiding them. After all, in a few months high school would be over, and I would be going away to college, and they, they would be going to work, if they could find jobs. It wasn't that I didn't care about their complaints about a system of schooling that had kept them busy with one diversion or another for years all the while denying them serious engagement with a kind of learning that might improve their present lives and surely give them greater control over their futures. After all these students were like me, were me, but for a minor turn here and there in the path through the public school system. In fact, I was well on my way to thinking about the nature of schooling and the problems it presented for students who were not attuned to its particular rhythms. For me the entire matter was a fascinating puzzle whose solution was only made more urgent by the slow erosion of hopes and dreams surrounding us all.

The siege ended within hours and the school returned to a normal schedule the next day. I never discussed any of the events with the student organizers. In fact, the entire matter was soon subsumed beneath a flurry of activity as the school year drew to a close.

Less than three months later, standing on stage at graduation I addressed the class and the audience. A week of avoiding the faculty member charged with supervising my speech had left me with a text entirely of my own design. In a season where the air at every graduation was charged with issues of life and death, of war and the struggle for peace, my speech was rather smaller in scale. For it addressed the issues raised in the cafeteria that spring day and in my mind years earlier, issues of access and its denial, of differentiation and stratification, of who is in and who is out, of a system of schooling that served the interests of adults usually to the detriment of children. My embarrassed principal could only note at the end of the speech that whatever others may have thought if it, it had done the one thing that was not accomplished at any other time during the entire school year; it brought the entire class together and on their feet. Too bad it was in our last moments together. The boys on the stage, earlier in raincoats and now in gowns, didn't have a clue, and until the end, I never gave them one.

The events of Littleton touched different people in different ways, but they made me wonder what might have happened if the index finger I found pointed in my direction that spring day in 1970 had instead been curled around the trigger of a gun.


Those who know me well will understand that one of my most challenging daily tasks is finding something to change into upon arriving home that is more relaxed than what I am typically wearing during the work day and yet still acceptable for answering the door. With no jacket to cast aside, no tie to loosen, no shoes to untie, the options range from robe and slippers, to a shower wrap, to cut-offs, all but the last requiring too much forethought.

So it is that I approach the task of figuring out how to conceive of this new less formal column as part of the on-line component of the Teachers College Record. When I became editor of the Record, I inherited a wonderful tradition of an editor's column known as For the Record in which I could provide some proper introduction to a particular issue and speak formally on issues pertaining to scholarship in education. I also introduced a new column known as Off the Record in which I tried to strike a less formal and more personal tone.

Now that we are introducing the on-line component of TCR it seems only appropriate to begin yet another column, this one more suited to the on-line medium. So what are the goals of n of One, now my third TCR column, and the first to appear only on-line?

First, I want to offer commentary in a still more personal, less formal way. One of my aims in all of the writing that I do for the Record as editor is to let readers know something about the individual behind many of the decisions made about content in all TCR operations. All academic journals are edited by individuals or groups of individuals with values, preferences, and styles, and it seems useful for authors and readers to know something about those reviewing their work and selecting their reading. You may not like my personality (Some days I'm not thrilled with it myself.), but it's the only one I have so I will try to share a bit of it here, if only as a warning.

I have called this column n of One because this phrase reveals the two sides of more personal commentary. It has been used for years as a disparaging comment by reviewers of articles submitted to educational research journals to indicate work that fails to rise beyond the singular event. More recently, it has enjoyed more respect as more members of the research community begin to appreciate the value of even small bits of information when set within rich theoretical traditions or careful descriptive accounts.

My own reading of the history of scholarship in education leads me to believe that it has all too often been subject to personal and collective ideology disguised as science. Perhaps if we can create more legitimate outlets for the personal views of researchers we can begin to separate those views from the formal inquiry many of them are trying to conduct and strengthen the community of scholars.

Second, I want to use this column to explore modes of communication for academic journals in the on-line environment. I think that this new world will require stronger writing, more grit, and more bite than we typically see in academic print journals. The challenge will be to harness this new medium to the demands of serious scholarship to create a powerful vehicle for communication among those at the forefront of serious inquiry. Fashioning the appropriate style for academic work on-line will require much hard work and more than a little risk taking. It is in n of One that I will take risks that those in less protected positions might be advised to avoid at least for now.

As we move academic discourse on-line we run the risk of falling into the patterns of public access TV, Sybil the Soothsayer from the film Network, and much too much of PBS. That is, we can become inchoate, irreverent, irrelevant, or all three. I will be counting on readers of this column to let me know when we crash and burn.

Finally, one of the things you will not find in the writing that I do for TCR is reports on my own research. My role at TCR is to host the great works of the educational research community, I believe I can do that best by not inserting my own scholarship into the mix. Including my own work would be like inviting Steven Spielberg to dinner and then insisting on showing my home movies. So in my mind, I am the only person in educational research whose scholarship should not appear in TCR.

Now where did I put those cut-offs?