[Edu-sig] re skool politics and fixing the broken math track

[kirby urner]

One positive aspect of Pycon is I get to meet a lot of world savvy
people with skills outside of my skill set.  We also get to exchange
ideas about economic matters.

One electrifying email from ISEPP, my home office for the conference,
told me of plans to close our flagship charter where Edubuntu is used
and students learn entrepreneurship skills like music publishing.

This is one of the most innovative charters in the state, and because
it makes other more unimaginative schools look tawdry by comparison,
it has never been offered a building, though by law it's public, and
the Portland District has a surfeit of unused school buildings in
inventory, many of them standing quite empty.

The goal among some has been to force LEP High into a high rent
corner, suck all the life out of it, then leave it for dead.  March
30th with supposed to be the final nail in the coffin.

Fortunately, Portland's leadership is not quite that short sighted and
the thugs behind this mendacious plan were met head on by student
activists and community organizers, who managed to raise much of the
cash needed for rent.  Even the landlord got into the act, by lowering
the amount due.

http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2009/03/portland_school_board_closes_p.html
 (Oregonian write-up)

Willamette Week wrote a highly supportive editorial whereas I fired
off some Wiki stuff (Dr. Benson and I both use Wikis for political
work, easier to change on the fly) attn school board, letting 'em know
that LEP High has some friends in high places, including at ISEPP,
represented at Pycon.

http://wweek.com/editorial/3520/12350/  (Willamette Week)

http://wanderers.pbwiki.com/PyconPromo  (my Wiki page promoting PDX as
FOSS capital)

Anyway, that's just local politics, maybe not that exciting to outsiders.

The economics are more general though:  charter schools, networking
directly with federal agencies (many of which have stimulus money)
allow fast tracking noob teachers, including geeks with still-intact
ideals, with the added benefit of merit pay (not just mindless
"seniority") to keep the more skilled from fleeing to more lucrative
careers (that's been the problem:  learn any math industry actually
uses and you're out the door, gone from teaching, especially high
school).

If you can make up in perks and status what's missing in basic income,
yet still offer a livable pay grade, that's something.

Having summers off is another big plus, although LEP High adopted a
year round model (same number of vacation days), as other schools are
likely to do, on top of whatever remote access.  Some teachers do
computer camps during this time period,

The model here is a numerate faculty with skills will maintain its own
RAMP stack (R is for Ruby, Linux presumed -- more a joke than a
serious proposal, but we should acknowledge that LAMP is a bit dated,
given Google App Engine et al -- just saying MVC might be better) in
tandem with apprenticing students.

Why would a school want an intranet, a place to store history,
trophies, results of virtual contests, lore?

Why would a biology class want to register field work from year to
year?  Why would class photos still be meaningful to alumni years
later?  Yearbooks on the intranet?  Why would anyone want that?  A few
charters might.

The rhetoric here is "all schools are charter schools" i.e. it's more
a matter of when, in time, you got handed your template, which mixins
you've got.  By today's rules, it's OK to fast track and merit pay
geeks.  It's also worthwhile to upgrade in place i.e. get those skills
on the job (no matter when your charter).

There's this tendency to say "charter" versus "public" among those
ignorant of the code, whereas the whole point of charters is to
integrate them into the public framework (moves which antediluvians
resist, by encouraging the perception of charters as "not public" --
an transparent deception if you think about it).

The current federal administration is on board with these innovations,
which many conservative Republicans like as well as this is seen as a
"states rights" issue, e.g. Alaska doesn't want to kow-tow to some
national standards committee with its sorry textbook recommendations
(there is no such national committee but you can bet some old skool
recyclers would want there to be -- plus they should mandate TI
calculator use while they're being lazy).

That's the easy way to get a market, dictate through legislatures, but
in a democracy promising lots of choices, that's unlikely to be
sustainable.  The politicians need a credible rhetoric as well, can't
do the impossible, no matter how much a lobby group make think it
"owns" someone.

If a charter in Matsu District wants to contract directly with
O'Reilly for teacher training, and go with a more geekish discrete
math track, such as we're working on here in Oregon (TechStart of
Software Association of Oregon a player here), then who's to stop 'em?
 Freedom of choice is what parents want as well.

The bogus argument that "changing schools will mean falling behind if
not everyone is using the same textbook" is another idiotic dodge
you'll find in the literature, an argument for lockstep conformity,
using ETS (Educational Testing Service) as the one common beacon
("blue meanies revenge" might be a name for this syndrome).

Minus a Math Czar, the Prussian objectivists, filled with fantasies of
lockstep, see ETS as the next best thing.  If we have top-down control
over the math track, we'll be able to enforce the "broken pipeline"
philosophy that keeps our math bereft of anything that smacks of
computer science, nevermind the social costs in terms of kids turning
away, not seeing the point of ascending Calculus Mountain merely to
please the AP bosses (last year's Chicago talk).

My daughter's public charter, a geek Hogwarts called Winterhaven, went
with Math Learning Center's visual math for its cohorts, something
mostly unheard of at the national level, and way better for some types
of learner.  It's maybe easier for a middle school to innovate in this
way as they're further from the ETS gatekeepers, time-wise.

This is the same school where I was invited to teach Python to all the
8th graders, which they ask I present with the GIS spin.  That meant
using XML-RPC to get lat/long coords based on home address, KML files
from Google Earth, lots of geographic rich data structures (e.g.
Python dicts with embedded lists).

http://www.4dsolutions.net/ocn/winterhaven/

I've archived all this before so will trail off at this juncture...

Kirby

PS:

Thx to Steve Holden's tutorial for reminding me that string
interpolation in key:value mode works with any object with a
__getitem__ rib, not just a dict.  I hadn't quite remembered that,
plan to use that in classes this month.

>>> class C(object):
	def __getitem__(self, key):
		return self.__dict__[key]

	
>>> o = C()
>>> o.a = 1
>>> o.b = 2
>>> o.__dict__['a']
1
>>> "and a %(a)d and a %(b)s" % o
'and a 1 and a 2'