This Doesn't Happen in Other Places

Every time I come to Florida, I open a local paper and come up with a gem that just can't be found anywhere else. It's not that people are any crazier here than they are elsewhere. It just seems to always ends up in the paper down here (usually with pictures).

Dr. Captain America

Blogging One Year Later

Sitting here before Will Richardson’s presentation “The Changing Notion of What It Means To Be A Teacher,” I think back to how excited I was at this time last lyear. I thought that we had found blogging, which was a free tool that we could use with students to engage using technology. Because it’s basically free and kids like it, it seemed like a no-brainer for a cash-strapped school district.

Unfortunately things just haven’t worked out. I’m not sure exactly what went wrong, but it just hasn’t been adopted at the level that I hoped for in our district. We all have blogs, but very few people use them regularly. It has been one more disappointment in a very disappointing year.

The session that Will delivered was excellent once again. I don't know what it is, but when he talks tech, I feel hopeful. The way that he looks at Web 2.0 is really intelligent for a lot of different reasons. I'm going to his podcast session now.

The Fall Of My Discontent

It has been a long time since I have been able to write in the blog. The fall of this school year has been brutal for me. We have had a major labor contract problem (for a history of this ugly time from the union perspective) in my school district, and it has been a situation that has hurt almost everyone associated with my school district. My job was threatened on numerous occasions by the board and administration if I participated in an "illegal job action." I never wanted to strike, and I would have had grave reservations about walking out on my job with my students under any circumstances. The threat of being fired added another level to the depression that everyone felt with the current situation in our district.

I'm currently taking a class that involves neuroscience and learning. It is a fascinating class, and I'm thankful to be part of it. One of the ideas that has been put forward is that people need a non-threatening environment to learn effectively. The absence of threat is a necessity. This is a very ironic bit of knowledge when applied to the current situation in my learning organization. Teachers are supposed to be learners too, right? What happens to the teacher, and his or her ability to go forward as a teacher or learner when there is a contstant presence of threat? The threat of losing a job, benefits, and possibly a degraded opportunity to find another job in education has consistently been in place for months in our school district. I wonder how much this has cost us all. I also wonder what anyone has learned from this situation.

The Prius

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originally uploaded by jwoods11.

We have had the Prius for about 4 weeks now. I love this car. It has about 850 miles on it. I've filled it up once. It only took 8.625 gallons (it has an 11.9 gallon tank). I would have filled my Explorer about 3-4 times to go that distance. It's already saved me about $75, minimum. It's also the quietest car that I have ever driven, on a par with a luxury car like a Mercedes or a Lexus.

Driving the Prius is a learning experience. It's kind of like getting a new computer with a new operating system, and trying to learn a few new features every day. I've managed to pick up a lot of good information from the Yahoo Prius group-it's full of bright people-and from a few really good web sites.

It has changed my driving habits. I find myself looking at the consumption screen all of the time and monitoring my current mileage (I'm getting about 51 MPG on my second tank). This often causes me to drive more fuel efficiently, but also slooowly! There have been a few complaints. But none when we get the lower credit card bill with one or two gas purchases a month!

What a great car. I wish everyone could have an opportunity to drive one of these.

More On Toyota

Everybody wants the world's biggest automaker to put a new factory in their locale. It's great for everyone. Why did Toyota decide to put their new plant in Ontario? It came down to two things: educational attainment levels of prospective employees, and health care. Canada won on both counts. This comes from Paul Krugman's piece today.

But last month Toyota decided to put the new plant, which will produce RAV4 mini-S.U.V.'s, in Ontario. Explaining why it passed up financial incentives to choose a U.S. location, the company cited the quality of Ontario's work force.

What made Toyota so sensitive to labor quality issues? Maybe we should discount remarks from the president of the Toronto-based Automotive Parts Manufacturers' Association, who claimed that the educational level in the Southern United States was so low that trainers for Japanese plants in Alabama had to use "pictorials" to teach some illiterate workers how to use high-tech equipment.

But there are other reports, some coming from state officials, that confirm his basic point: Japanese auto companies opening plants in the Southern U.S. have been unfavorably surprised by the work force's poor level of training.

There's some bitter irony here for Alabama's governor. Just two years ago voters overwhelmingly rejected his plea for an increase in the state's rock-bottom taxes on the affluent, so that he could afford to improve the state's low-quality education system. Opponents of the tax hike convinced voters that it would cost the state jobs.

But education is only one reason Toyota chose Ontario. Canada's other big selling point is its national health insurance system, which saves auto manufacturers large sums in benefit payments compared with their costs in the United States.

You might be tempted to say that Canadian taxpayers are, in effect, subsidizing Toyota's move by paying for health coverage. But that's not right, even aside from the fact that Canada's health care system has far lower costs per person than the American system, with its huge administrative expenses. In fact, U.S. taxpayers, not Canadians, will be hurt by the northward movement of auto jobs.

To see why, bear in mind that in the long run decisions like Toyota's probably won't affect the overall number of jobs in either the United States or Canada. But the result of international competition will be to give Canada more jobs in industries like autos, which pay health benefits to their U.S. workers, and fewer jobs in industries that don't provide those benefits. In the U.S. the effect will be just the reverse: fewer jobs with benefits, more jobs without.

So what's the impact on taxpayers? In Canada, there's no impact at all: since all Canadians get government-provided health insurance in any case, the additional auto jobs won't increase government spending.

Ouch. They had to use pictorials to train their employees? That's not good. I'd bet that Michigan could offer a workforce that could do better than that.

The healthcare issue is another story. I sat in a meeting with a local member of the U.S. House of Reps. earlier this year, and he suggested that a national health care system would be in the works within the next five or six years. It's becoming pretty obvious that business in the U.S. will no longer be able to foot the bill for health care pretty soon. But will a system of nationalized health care get here early enough to take pressure off of U.S. businesses and stop the drain of manufacturing jobs? Five years may be too long to wait.

Time To Get With It Big Three

The greening of Detroit? Only if the green refers to money. What a fantastic scenario Daniel Akst paints in his article from the Sunday Times.

Imagine that you are running a domestic automaker. Rising gasoline prices threaten your lucrative S.U.V. sales, a glut of car-making capacity promises ever more competition, and burdensome union contracts limit your ability to cut costs. Then there are the Chinese. They're beginning to put together the parts they've been making for years, and sooner rather than later, whole cars from China will arrive at scarily low prices.

What do you do? The easy answer is to follow the path that Detroit has taken for years. Grind out well-made but ho-hum vehicles and offer them at huge discounts. Let your debt rating fall below investment grade. And when California tries to impose mandatory reductions in greenhouse gases, you sue, even if some other states want the same stricter standards - and even if some consumers are lining up to pay hefty premiums for energy-saving hybrid vehicles that run on both gasoline and electricity.

Now I'm the first to acknowledge that without a C.E.O.-sized paycheck, I am far from qualified to run a major manufacturing business. But isn't it possible that Ford and General Motors are on the wrong path?

As long as the big domestic automakers focus on short term gains and meeting earnings projections, I doubt that any of the big three will become "green" soon. But it does seem likely that the local automakers are on the wrong path. Michigan's governor, Jennifer Granholm, seeing the competitive advantage that companies like Toyota have in the hybrid car market, is travelling to Japan this week to try to convince Toyota to locate their next North American plant in Michigan. She may be tired of seeing Toyota choose her native country Canada over her current state Michigan, as the next great place to locate manufacturing operations. Canada does have its benefits, but more on that in another post.

It's Not Just The States

On the editorial page of the NY Times today was an article that described the fact that states are "cooking the books" to understate dropout figures in their public schools. Dropout figures are supposed to be part of the NCLB data that is provided by states to the federal government. All schools keep records of this kind, and then report them to the state, and the state then aggregates the data and reports to the federal government.

The NCLB statutes put a tremendous amount of pressure on states and local school districts to report increasingly positive numbers of all kinds from their schools. Given the inherent impossibilities of NCLB, is it any wonder that the data reported would be inaccurate? When states base local school district funding on per pupil headcounts, is it surprising that districts will do almost anything to try to maintain a semblance of high educational achievement so students will remain enrolled, or be drawn to their school system?

A real issue for anyone that is interested in school performance across districts within a state is comparative test scores. The MEAP test in Michigan is a prime example. Some districts have all 11th graders, regardless of readiness or educational background, take the test. Other districts have SOME 11th grade students take the test, and even covertly recommend to some parents that their children don't have to take the test! When the passing/failing letter grades for each school district are reported, the data is almost never discussed in the media, just a letter grade is reported. When that is the case, parents, community members, and others interested in school quality have less than a thumbnail sketch of what the actual testing results were for a given district, and almost no idea of the educational quality of the schools. A school that tests 20% of its 11th graders is compared equally to a school that tests 95%+ of its students. There is also usually almost no media discussion of the individual sub-population scores that highly influence the letter grade a district receives.

In short, education consumers are much better off going over to their local school and observing, or taking part in some activities to figure out how things really are at that school. It is unlikely that the average person will ever get an accurate interpretation of the hard data that schools report, or an effective instrument to evaluate one school's quality against another's.

Graduation '05

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originally uploaded by jwoods11.

What a great day. It was a little hot, and I was concerned that I might melt in my nice, warm blazer, but I survived to see many great students reach the finish line of the Holland Public Schools.

There were so many fantastic students moving on to the next stage in their lives, and leaving HHS after a successful career as students. Congratulations to all of the new graduates! Your hard work and dedication will be rewarded in your future endeavors.

As you can tell from the photo, graduation day is a time for students to now step in and begin supporting the teachers, who are sometimes overcome by the heat, excitement, and emotion of the day.