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 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.

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.

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.

The story was interesting, not for its discussion of these pilot programs, but rather for its discussion of psychological studies on the impact of extrinsic rewards on student behavior.  According to one expert, psychological research tells us: “any type of ‘extrinsic’ reward, by and large, undermines motivation.”  According to another expert: ”The bigger the reward, the more damage it does.  The more you use cell phones, T-shirts, money or whatever, the more you undermine motivation for becoming engaged and prolific learners.”

Has anyone ever wondered whether the same principle applies to merit pay for teachers?  The bigger the reward, the more you undermine motivation for becoming an engaged and prolific teacher?

From the real article:

The approach Ms. McNeill uses, in which students choose their own books, discuss them individually with their teacher and one another, and keep detailed journals about their reading, is part of a movement to revolutionize the way literature is taught in America’s schools. While there is no clear consensus among English teachers, variations on the approach, known as reading workshop, are catching on.

Children are not going to become lifelong readers if they do not like or understand the books they are reading.  I remember reading Lord of the Flies, part of the accepted literary canon of my era, in middle school and being thoroughly bored by it.  The lessons about power, government and mankind’s natural state completely escaped me.  Luckily, I persevered in my reading and ultimately rediscovered Lord of the Flies as a college student and today believe it to be a masterpiece.

Too many children, I fear, will not persevere as I did if exposed exclusively to the literary canon.  The reading workshop seems like a reasonable approach to promoting lifelong reading.

• Former House Education Committee Chairman Jerry Mezzatesta got into trouble for his role in the distribution of a grant.  He is receiving $192,000.
• Mylan Chief Operating Officer Heather Bresch got into trouble for claiming a master’s degree from WVU.  She has been promoted to President.

It is good to see people who have struggled doing so well.