Education

Think, West Virginia

4 March 2010

With all the organizations out there aimed at improving life as we know it in West Virginia – from Vision Shared to CreateWV to ImagineWV to the Democratic and Republican Parties, it is with great trepidation that I suggest the addition of another group to fill a desperately needed void – Thinking.

I grow frustrated by the two extreme forms discussions in West Virginia take. At one extreme, you have the Fox News/ MSNBC crowd that sees everything at one or the other end of the political continuum. If President Obama says it, it must be bad/good depending on which end of the political continuum you place yourself. At the other extreme, you have people who spout platitudes as if they’re somehow meaningful and love every new idea (term defined very broadly here), no matter how hare-brained, that someone proposes and the sychophants who follow these platitude-spouters around.

Having given up on all current organizations, I have decided to create a new group called “Think, West Virginia.” “Think, West Virginia” will focus on one thing – thinking through the serious issues of the day and coming up with nuanced solutions to our problems. Some proposed ideas for “Think, West Virginia’s” platform:

The plural of anecdote is not evidence.
If everybody agrees with you, you’re not saying anything.
If the solution to a difficult problem is simple, you haven’t yet found the solution.
If the idea can be crystallized completely into a sound bite, it’s really not an idea.
If your strategic plan can fit on one page, you don’t have a plan to address any problem larger than what to cook for dinner.
If your strategic plan includes every idea thrown out in a brainstorming session, you don’t have a strategic plan. You have toilet paper.
The number of pretty pictures in a publication is inversely proportional to the knowledge being imparted in that publication.

The first major initiative of Think, West Virginia: to require a debate class as a condition for graduation from every public and private high school in West Virginia. Given the level of public discourse I have observed recently, it’s clear that our schools are failing miserably at teaching critical thinking skills. And I know of no better activity than policy debate, which sadly is offered nowhere in the State of West Virginia anymore, to teach critical thinking. In policy debate, students wrestle with a single topic for an entire year. They learn to prepare cases defining the problem, demonstrating its significance, exploring barriers in the status quo that prevent obvious solutions from being implemented, proposing plans, and setting forth advantages to their plans. But, more importantly, they learn how to tear down every piece of the case they just built and then to rebuild it again using sound logic and reasoning.

Think, West Virginia. It’s truly the only way to improve things.

The thinker

20 December 2009

The news recently has been filled with stories about educators making poor decisions: a Riverside High School cheerleading coach in hot water for allowing pictures of topless cheerleaders in a hot tub to be taken and a choir director at Paradise High School in Phoenix, Arizona facing the music for taking her students to Hooter’s for lunch. (Bad puns, of course, intended.)

While titillating, the poor decisions highlighted in these stories pale in comparison to a poor decision made by the administration of Swanson Middle School in Arlington, Virginia, last week. As part of a model United Nations debate, some students were assigned to argue in support of Afghanistan’s Taliban before administrators stepped in to stop the assignment after a few parents became angry.

Is the purpose of education to indoctrinate students or to teach them to think? While I believe in providing students with a common cultural foundation as part of their education a la E.D. Hirsch, Jr., I do not believe that should be taken as an excuse not to teach students to think critically and to attempt to understand others’ points of view, especially given that our country is at war in two countries in which a lot of people think quite differently than we.

Is there no valid argument to support the Taliban position? Only a non-thinking person would say so.

Argument No. 1: Afghanistan is a sovereign nation, and the United States should respect its sovereignty absent a serious and immediate threat from the government of that country. At the time of its invasion, Afghanistan did not pose a serious threat to the United States, and thus its sovereignty should have been respected.
Argument No. 2: The Taliban should not be held any more responsible for the actions of Osama Bin Laden than should the United States government’s puppet Karzai regime, which has not been able to reign in Osama Bin Laden or his network.
Argument No. 3: The Taliban could be no worse than the current Karzai regime, which does everything from steal elections to kill family members with which it is feuding.
Argument No. 4: The Taliban may engage in religious practices that we find repugnant and repressive, but their religious preferences should be respected in the same way that American Episcopalians respect the religious practices of American Catholics and American Jews.

While I could provide a strong response to each argument, it does not make the arguments unworthy of making or considering. I want students to reach reasoned conclusions after considering many sides of an issue, not after being told what to think by one of our nation’s leaders.

Is it somehow wrong to expect eighth graders to think? According to Linda Erdos, spokeswoman for the Arlington Public Schools, “There is a sensitivity that eighth grade kids don’t have the maturity level to do this at this point.” I could not disagree more. It’s never too early to teach a student how to think.

I, for one, worry far more about the students at Swanson Middle School than I do about the students at Paradise High School.

H/T The Answer Sheet

Student privacy and the data warehouse

18 November 2009

Late last month the Fordham Center on Law and Information Policy issued a report on the security of state educational data warehouses, which are all the rage right now.

The idea is a good one: Create longitudinal databases containing all kinds of student information so researchers have a ready repository to support formative and summative evaluation, as well as policymaking. I liked the idea so much that I drafted House Bill No. 3340 (2009), which passed the West Virginia Legislature during the 2009 regular session and mandates that public and higher education work together to develop shared educational data systems.

The Fordham study warns, however, that many states developing data warehouses do not have basic security systems needed to protect student privacy in place. The study lists eight security “musts” for any educational data system. Scarily, my former employer does not meet half of the security “musts,” which is not unusual, according to the report.

For anyone interested in a detailed FERPA tutorial, the first part of the report contains an excellent one – the best I’ve ever read.

We shall … surrender

16 November 2009

The London Times ran an interesting article last week about new software for marking British students’ English papers.

In a test of the software’s effectiveness, it was given several of Winston Churchill’s famous wartime speeches, as well as Ernest Hemingway’s, William Golding’s, and Anthony Burgess’s prose, to decipher.

Some of the more humorous conclusions:

Churchill’s call to ‘fight them on the beaches’ was too repetitive, and he used ‘upon’ and ‘our’ too frequently. His reference to the ‘might of the German army’ lost him points because the computer assumed he meant to use ‘might’ as a verb, not a noun.
Hemingway needed to write with more care and detail and was rated below average.
Burgess’ opening lines in “A Clockwork Orange” were incomprehensible.

Such software, of course, is all the rage in the United States.

Constitution day

17 September 2009

Today marks the 222d anniversary of the signing of the U.S. Constitution. And thanks in large part to Senator Robert C. Byrd, celebrations and reflections will occur across the country. In West Virginia alone, there will be events at the West Virginia State Capitol; at the United States Courthouse in Charleston and the Boone County Courthouse in Madison; and at Shepherd University, where you can hear a lecture titled “Restoring the Constitution in the Wake of the ‘War on Terror,’” and West Virginia University, where you can learn about recent U.S. Supreme Court cases interpreting the Constitution.

At the State Capitol, we will read the most amazing part of the U.S. Constitution – a part not in the original, but quickly added by a wise citizenry – The Bill of Rights. Democracy is premised on the notion of majority rule; the Bill of Rights seeks to ensure that the majority’s rule is not tyrannical – that the minority have certain rights that cannot be trampled upon by a rabble-rousing majority: the right to go to the church or synagogue or mosque of your choosing, the right to scream from the rooftops that the majority’s rule is corrupt, the right to a home generally free of government intrusion, protection against lynch mob justice and cruel and unusual punishment.

In the Bible, Christ says: “Inasmuch as you have done it unto one the least of these my brothers, you have done it to me.” That’s what the Bill of Rights is all about – how we treat the least of these – our brothers and sisters with whom we may not always agree.

Take a few minutes and read the Bill of Rights.

Think, West Virginia

The thinker

Student privacy and the data warehouse

We shall … surrender

Constitution day

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