Witness

History repeats itself...an old saw we are all familiar with. But something has changed.

I am eighty four years old. My best friend is ninety, and, unlike in the past, there are now millions in our age range and older who can remember the more distant past, and verify that repetition.

I remember Adolph Hitler, I heard him on the radio, and watched the Anschluss in the newsreels shown then at the theaters with every movie. It was commonplace for escaped Jews to appear at our front door selling one thing or another to feed themselves and their families. They told us their stories and warned of the future.

So I remember the Thirties.  I can close my eyes and remember how it felt to be there then.

It felt  like now.

Back Again!

It has been well over a year since I last posted to this blog. I've been busy with political  efforts for my Party, and have thoroughly enjoyed the effort. But now it  is time to give my people some variety in approach by retiring, and letting someone else fill my slot. So retire I did,  and I am back to blog!

It almost went without saying that I would immediately foul up...which I just did, by totally erasing the paragraph and a half I had just written. And it is so hard to re-do a lost piece. So I will stop, go away for a while, and come back later to write a new piece very unlike the one I lost. A pity! I really liked it!

Bye for now, with apologies!!!!!!

Barack Obama-Again!

I posted this open letter to then Senator Barack Obama during his first Presidential campaign. I am re-posting it as a reminder of how he got where he is. He offers a lot to a great many...and there's the rub!

Thursday, February 21, 2008

Open Letter to Barack Obama
Dear Senator Obama,As one approaching Eighty years, I have heard your message and am both thrilled and appalled.You are offering the transcendent moment. You do give the promise that we can leave the race issue behind. You do give us another view of a shining city on the hill; a city absent the strife of race, prejudice, and built-in disadvantage. You appeal equally to aspiring people of color, and whites who yearn for that distant level playing field, and don’t know how to get there. I applaud you.
A caveat. It is true, I believe, that not to learn from history is to be forced to live it again.I am not sure you have learned, and I need your reassurance.Our country was built by millions of people reaching for a better life. Some achieved it some did not. They worked for it and they paid for it or they failed; the mighty and the average man. There always has been and will be a degree of special advantage: it is in the nature of Man. That being said, how best can we minimize that impact?All I read of your philosophy and the programs you offer tells me you see government as the answer to that question. Why?
For those of us who lived through the Depression, the Stalinist years, the Hitler years, and the benign, but unimpressive, socialist systems of other countries around the world, please explain how you will reconcile the basic entrepreneurial characteristics of America with the government you propose.We have seen governments that promised what you offer become the worst possible enemies of their citizens, their neighbors and the world at large.We are watching China and India step back from Government programs and become more entrepreneurial. Why are they embracing what you ask us to reject?Much as I would like to see you succeed and bring about Philip Wylie’s happily tea-colored world, I believe you will fail if you cannot answer the question I ask. Please reply.

You May Not Recognize Tomorrow

                               You May Not Recognize Tomorrow

2040…just twenty two years away, but to hear Ray Kurzweil… talk about it, it sounds like a world other than the one we know. This visionary designer of artificial intelligence has a view of our future, and the relationship of the human mind to education(among other areas), that is way beyond thought provoking even to a cursory glance. The question for the folks who will travel those years with him is: how do we take advantage of the phenomenal developments he promises, and keep our education system moving forward, despite the adaptations we will almost certainly have to make? How will these developments affect our children and our schools? There are few certainties here, but the promise is compelling. There are also problems.

Imagine a child in 2040…should the parents sculpt his education carefully, as parents have traditionally done, or depend on the implantation of the Kurzweil-promised blood-cell sized computer, that is infinitely more intelligent than a human mind, to facilitate his mental growth and organization? Or is this even a sane question? I don’t know, and until I have read his new book How to Create a Mind, I don’t expect to.

I have brought up Mr. Kurzweil as a holiday surprise. He is part of that information revolution I can’t seem to escape. His ideas, and similar way-out ideas like them, will be coming our way for years, and I thought you might want to ponder them over the holidays. I intend to! Bear in mind that we have shortened our school year by weeks, and thus substantially cut the amount of knowledge students will absorb. The rest of the world is doing no such thing, and their children will, predictably, outshine ours in world markets for decades to come. The teachers unions seem unperturbed.

Maybe that cell-sized computer is our only hope!

The Old and the New

                      

The more complicated the situation in Education becomes, the more simple the solutions are becoming. There is a clear choice here. We can have a future system that utilizes the present fragmentation of the educational structure we knew, to put together competitive, innovative units of many different types that have in common their control by parents. Parents who can use their state’s per-student money their child is entitled to, and choose a school. Or we can succumb to pressure, and let the teachers unions run the show, and use the money the states provide per student, to further their primarily adult oriented goals… ie. more teachers.

The Wall Street Journal recently had a piece that reminded readers about class size in the heyday of our education; fewer teachers and larger classes. But despite all the efforts that have been made to improve results since then, through large expenditure on more teachers for smaller classes, results are poor. Math and reading scores for 17-year-olds today are about the same as they were in 1970.

This has to do with both the quality of the individual teacher, and the presently dawning realization that learning surges as a result of student interaction far more than had been understood. This is seen most clearly, as I mentioned in an earlier piece, when flipping puts the information on line for homework, and makes the teacher a coach for later discussion of the material. The fact that large classes progress faster than the small ones offers some evidence of that. It is interesting too that at the university level the same phenomenon happens. MIT observed this, and their President wrote about it recently. He said his advanced students did not want academic help or coaching after viewing work online, preferring to work together….at least in the instance he was discussing.

There are other aspects to our changing system, of course. But this one is interesting in both its educational and financial ramifications. Keep your eyes open…there is surely more to come.

The Human Connection

                                    

 There is lots of talk in higher education circles about the wonderful proliferation of courses being offered, at little cost, on the internet, by universities as prestigious as Harvard and Yale. You can now, in many cases it seems, achieve all the credits necessary for a degree through these courses. What you can do with those credits is still being bandied about. And therein lies the rub; you have not been to the institution awarding the credits, only to their internet extension.

The question of value is inherent here. Is the internet education capable of matching the results of the actual expensive university experience? Certainly, for many people, it is all they can manage in time or money, or both. And certainly the physical universities could not accommodate the hundreds of thousands around the world they serve on line. It is indisputably wonderful to have these courses available to so many. But what formal recognition should their completion provide? Are the physical attendance at class, the residential factor, the laboratory and seminar situations where students and faculty constantly meet face to face, mingle, and exchange ideas, essential to the quality of a university’s degree? That is the question being asked

Recognizing the cost of residential, traditional colleges and universities, recognizing that they have been seen to be moribund by many watching the growth of for-profit colleges, and recognizing the transformative nature of this revolutionary period in which we live, there may well be a hybrid taking shape that will blend the two. That would be in line with the changes in grades one through twelve. Our universities are a national source of pride, so we have a lot to lose if we move too quickly with this.

Ours is a world awash in pads and pods that provide communication between individuals. The phone is playing second fiddle to the text-message, the voice second fiddle to the thumbs. The human connection is thus, to some degree, diminished, and it may appear to  young college students, that it is quite normal that this should happen.

As a vintage human, it doesn’t look that way to me, and I will be watching to be sure that the human connection is not withdrawn from the college and university experience to any degree that reduces the value of that experience.

The Needed National Education Umbrella

                                                              

 As you know, I believe that we need a units of learning, or what is commonly known as a ‘standards based’ education system (SBS) in our public schools nation-wide, or in a parallel nation-wide public charter school system. We are a large and mobile nation. It is projected that each individual will have at least three separate jobs in his or her working life. Irrespective of that, employees are often moved from city to city by their companies. With the grade level system in place today, new students usually arrive to find themselves either way ahead or way behind the class they enter This system would guarantee parents that their children, in any move, would go into each subject at their new school, at exactly the same level they were at in their old school. Fortunately the system already exists, in microcosm, in the Adams 50 school district in Westminster, Colorado.

The standards based system is not new, but its use has been very limited. In the 1990s it was tried in Alaska, where the widespread Chugach district went from the lowest performing district in the state, to the highest performing quartile in five years. In 2009, the Adams 50 school district gave it a try. Before implementing the system, a team of teachers and administrators traveled to Alaska to see the system in action. The district is happy to report that while the road has not been easy, students involved in it, are thriving. The results have been so good that Kansas City, Missouri and the State of New Hampshire are adopting similar programs. The state of Colorado is following District 50’s progress, and next month school administrators are scheduled to speak before the Joint Education Committee. Colorado is now creating state-wide academic   standards so that there is more consistency from school to school.

With state funds shrinking, and with them state controls, across the country there are school districts exercising local control to bring innovation into their schools. While these local districts do their job, the country as a whole needs a nationwide umbrella to unify them. The ‘standards based’ education system would do that job without affecting content, and that could turn the present Federal Department of Education into a small Department of Educational Correlation. A result many of us would welcome.

      To understand the system, I ask that you go to their website at http://www.sbsadams50.org/. Visit the home page and you will find a detailed explanation of how the system works. You will be fascinated!  It is complex enough to convince me not to try to explain it. The Westminster, Colorado system will eventually provide the opportunity for advanced students to move on to college classes in the subjects they complete, while finishing their remaining high school level work .This is, for me, an essential ingredient.

 Please, do visit the website. We need to get behind a unifying system for this country while the districts do their innovative things. It would be wonderful, and maybe even possible, to have this system ready to put into place by the time our next President takes his place.