Chad's spot for various thoughts, musings, poetry, ideas and whatnot

Friday, August 29, 2008

I'm not sure if you've read the big education news from these parts but the Clayton County public schools became the first school district in nearly 40 years to lose their accreditation. Reading the news reports and some of the citizen reaction at various media outlets has been pretty interesting. In short, most of the problem stems from the long term behavior of the school board elected by the citizens of Clayton County. The board has shown over and over again that it has no ability to act in a way that is legal, ethical or proper; even when appropriately advised by its own legal counsel. This has led the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) to revoke the accreditation of the entire district which, depending on who you talk to, will have various impacts on the students and staff of the district. I guess what I'd like to do is give my two or three cents worth about the crisis in response to what I've read and from my understanding of and experience in education.

One of the protests that we're hearing a lot from people who I think are probably in denial about a lot of this is why someone is punishing the kids for something the adults (there's debate on whether that's the board or the voters or the "evil" SACS people or the Governor) have or have not done. My answer to that is that the kids have already been punished and continue to be punished by the dysfunctional school system in which they reside. What SACS has done is to wield about the only club they have left to get the adults to do something that will make things better for those who have no power. The truth is that on objective measures such as the SAT (and our own internal testing here at Gordon) the students from Clayton county perform worse as a group than the students from any other county in the state. Given that Clayton County is a suburban district outside of Atlanta with significantly greater resources both in terms of personnel and finances than most rural south Georgia counties, this says a lot about the culture of learning (or lack thereof) that exists in the schools. Because of the actions of the board, the schools don't do a good job of teaching their students (on average) and the removal of accreditation is basically an acknowledgment of that fact and a way to get the self-absorbed adults to change what they are doing. I hate it for the kids but, to be honest, they and their parents should know what the quality of their education is worth.

One of the questions I hear a lot from students at the College here is how the board's behavior affects the quality of education in the district. That's a complicated thing but the way I explain it is that a local board of education's job is to review and set policy, establish priorities and evaluate the administrators they have hired to implement those things. The board in Clayton vastly overstepped their role by going into specific schools to influence hiring and firing decisions (often in such a way to bring personal benefit to themselves or members of their families), to enforce or, more often, circumvent policy and to steer purchasing contracts in ways that didn't benefit the district but did line their pockets (or, again, the pockets of their family members or political supporters). All of these actions undermines the authority and morale within the upper and middle level management of the district. Principals and assistant principals become afraid of taking a stand on issues because they fear losing their jobs if a board member decides to take a personal interest in their decision making. The strategic priority at that level of school management goes from what's best for the school at large to "cover your ass". One of the biggest results of this (which I've culled from conversations with numerous teachers in the Clayton schools) is that administrators are no longer willing to stand up for teachers in disciplinary decisions and in areas of academic rigor. All it takes is for one angry parent to know one board member in some way for the administrator (or in some cases, the individual educator) to be called up on the carpet and be told to ignore some policy or overlook some infraction or find another place to work. Once that happens, everyone is looking over their shoulder, avoiding risk and confrontation and taking the easiest road possible. In education here in Georgia, that means giving everyone B's so they get their HOPE scholarship and trying not to make the students angry. The results of this are obvious.

So where does Clayton go from here? That's the $64,000 question (now there's a dated reference). The Governor, on recommendation of a state judge, has removed the last four members of the board that brought on the sanctions that haven't either resigned or been forced out. A couple of the seats have been filled through a special election a couple of months ago but the Clayton County school board basically consists of two or three people right now who have had almost no training on what it means to act in an ethical or proper manner. The other seats won't be filled until the November elections and the new members of the board may not be seated for a few weeks after that. In it's latest report explaining it's decision, SACS said that one of the biggest issues the district faces is that it hired it's interim superintendent improperly and that it gave him more power to run the district than is ethical or allowed by state law. In other words, they have said that the district will not regain its accreditation until this superintendent is either removed from his office or his contract is significantly rewritten to bring it within the bounds of the law. This is something only a legally constituted board can do and that doesn't really exist at the moment. So for the next two months, Clayton County's schools will be run by a super whose job description is illegal and whose power to run the district is illegitimate.

I think I understand what happened here. The guy wanted to have the power that Paul Vallis in the New Orleans recovery district and Michelle Rhee in the Washington DC schools have in order to move quickly to reform the Clayton County schools. In each of those cases, the voters chose to cede their local authority to the respective state boards of education in order to remove conflict of interest. Both Vallis and Rhee still have to report to duly elected governmental authority. Clayton's voters have not elected to do that and the board wrote a contract with the super that gave him all their power to set policy and priorities. That's not going to work and it's got to get fixed if SACS is going to reaccredit the schools. To his small credit, the super has suggested that he would be open to revisiting his contract (very big of him I think-given that he negotiated the original contract that has gotten the district into this bind in the first place).

All of this assumes, of course, that once elected, the new board will be able to get along and move quickly to address the issues SACS has cited; eight of the original nine of which still remain. Given the history of elected school official in Clayton County this isn't nearly as obvious as it might seem. There's a really good chance that the members of the board will spend as much time pointing fingers and laying blame rather than getting the training they need in ethics and how to be a proper board with proper boundaries. This will especially true if voters elect individuals that have ties to previous members of the board or their actions. Clayton basically has until May, about 5-6 months after the full board is elected, to make a fairly significant amount of progress. If that doesn't happen then SACS will close the window on the short process of regaining accreditation and the school district will have to start from scratch; a process that will take between 2 and 3 years assuming a functional institution.

As of now, the exodus of students out of the county and district that was a slow but meaningful flow is beginning to become a flood. Reports from yesterday told of stories of parents taking their kids out of school in the middle of the day in order to find a solution in an accredited school as soon as possible. I expect that you'll see the teachers begin to do the same as soon as they are able since they no longer accrue years towards retirement in the state's teacher retirement system and any professional development credit they might have gotten from within their own district is no longer valid. As these teachers go to other sites to earn those credits they'll see their colleagues going about their business without the stress of having your life controlled by the specific actions of nine or ten people far removed from them. Other districts will move quickly to hire the best master teachers from Clayton to replace their own retirement or attrition losses; a process made easier as classes are eliminated in Clayton due to declining student numbers. Any missteps by the new board or any waffling or further equivocating on the part of the superintendent will only serve to speed up the process. From this point forward, the district has to be transparent in everything that it does. There is no more trust and no more grace on the part of teachers and parents towards the district at this point as so everything now happens in a low trust environment. One of my biggest concerns right now is that the first statements by the superintendent following SACS' announcement do not show that he understands this. He wants the parents and teachers to wait out the storm but, as of right now, they don't trust that the boat is seaworthy enough to survive it.

I think if the voters were smart and objective they'd introduce a ballot measure to cede the authority of their locally elected board to the state board until such a time as the district can get itself righted and reaccredited. Such objectivity is rare in local politics however (which is why it took Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans to achieve that sort of change), especially when there are racial overtones as is the case here.

I'm torn as to whether this is for the better or the worse. If the loss of accreditation leads the citizens of Clayton County to do better by their students then I think people will look back on yesterday as the first step towards a solution. If county devolves further into backbiting and despair, then this is just another step on a long downward spiral such as those experienced in New Orleans and DC. I hope it's the former but only the citizens of Clayton County can really decide.

Thanks for Reading.

Grace and Peace.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Sunday, August 24, 2008

For two days now we've been dealing with the remnants and effects of Tropical Storm Fay. While areas of Florida have experienced rains of over two inches and places less far to our south are coping with 6 or more inches of rain, we've been laboring under gusty winds, frequent rain showers and an occasional thunderstorm or two. I think our rainfall totals may end up being in the neighborhood of two inches once tomorrow morning comes and, if the meteorologists are correct, we'll spend the next two or so days dealing with muggy/thundery conditions. While a bit of nuisance, the weather has done little more than force me inside on my rollers and trainer.

School's off to a seemingly slower start. I'm not doing Senate this year and I'm into the first year of our new course reduction schedule which means I only teach three classes and fifteen contact hours this semester (instead of four classes and 21 contact hours). Things just seem a lot more humane at this point. I have time to think and plan my classes. I can make adjustments to my curriculum that I've been wanting to make for the last two or three years. I may even have a chance of truly assessing whether or not they work. THe biggest change is going to be teaching the new Physical Science of Elementary Education. Part of me is really stressing out over the curriculum but another part of me feels like I'm finally making a real difference. All of the students in this class are studying to be K-5 educators and I get a chance to talk not only about content but how to teach it. I can't tell you how excited that makes me. For the first time, I actually have a community in the classroom that shares my desire to help people learn. I don't know if that will translate into learning for them but it makes the conversation so much more interesting. Don't get me wrong, I still love my engineers and I still want to help them grow into students we can be proud to send to Georgia Tech but this is a different thing.

I'm not an engineer by calling. I can understand them because of a shared love to understand how things work. I'm an educator by calling. I knew that in grad school when I realized that I enjoyed teaching those who wanted to learn more than I enjoyed modeling galaxies in a computer. What I didn't know at the time was how complicated a thing it was to teach someone something you already knew. I appreciate that a little better now and I know that I can teach that to others.

So next week is week two and I'll have a better sense of who my classes are by the end of it. I'll have my first assessments in and I'll know a bit more about them through their writing and their performance on their quizzes. Then I'll know where we'll go and how much work it'll take to get there.

Thanks for Reading

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Saturday, August 09, 2008

So, this weekend, as part of my birthday package, my wife took me to see the Dark Knight. A series of events (most of them not unfortunate) have conspired to keep us away from the film but today we decided to take the plunge. I was interested to see the film because a few Christians (and film critics) I've read have expressed their misgivings about the film and I wanted to see for myself.

Now, before I go any further with this blog, I want to warn anyone who hasn't seen the movie that I'l be discussing some of the specifics of the plot. If you don't want to know about those things you can think to yourself, "Well, at least he didn't write about that boring cycling stuff again..." and click off to some other, more entertaining and enlightening place and come back in a few days when this blog has been bumped down by something else I've written that is probably a lot more cycling related and a lot less interesting.

So, OK, back to the Dark Knight. Some of the critiques I've read (not just Christian by the way) have been troubled by the moral ambiguity of the film. To be honest, I'm a bit stunned by this. Come on, this is Batman. Batman has been from the beginning, in part, a study in the ambiguity of vigilanteism. If you don't think we as a society aren't just a bit uneasy about people taking the law into their own hands you need only look at the case of Bernie Goetz, called by some, "The Subway Vigilante". For those too young to remember Mr. Geotz, he was a middle aged man riding the subway during a more crime filled time in New York City's history (under the leadership of Mayor David Dinkins if I remember correctly). Mr. Goetz was surrounded by four young men on the subway and told to produce $5. He responded by shooting all for of the young men with an illegal handgun he had purchased after being mugged three years prior to the incident. At first, Goetz was acquitted by a grand jury as acting in self-defense during a time when the crime rate was over 70% higher than the national average and many New Yorkers felt like the city was out of control. A short while later, when new witnesses came forward about the events in the subway car, a second grand jury, indicted Mr. Goetz on charges of attempted murder and assault. The charges were then dropped due to subsequent criminal activity by two of the young men when threatened Mr. Goetz. The charges were reinstated by the New York Court of Appeals. The criminal trial only convicted Goetz in illegal handgun possession. However, in a civil suit, argued in a time when crimes rates in New York were dropping due to the newly instituted "broken window theory" measures (under the leadership of Rudy Guillini and his police chief), a jury found that Goetz had acted recklessly and dangerously and held him liable for damages in the sum of $43 million. The short of all of this is to point out that the movie is about a vigilante and his actions and what those actions mean to a group of people who feel as if they have little or no hope. As such, for the story to be told faithfully, there's got to be more than a little moral ambiguity and we, as an audience, as to leave the film with significant unease.

In addition, this narrative isn't going to have a nice, neat, tidy, happy ending. Batman is a postmodern fable. He's not Superman which is exactly what Bob Kane wanted when he dreamt up Bruce Wayne as a tortured soul who hunted other human beings to bring them to his form of justice. It's not going to be "Truth, Justice and the American Way". Batman is Kane's Noir Superman. While he has his principles (or maybe just one principle) he's also human and flawed and twisted by what he is and what he becomes. He's a fallen hero in a fallen city just like all those in Gotham City who want to stop crime but he desperately, and I emphasize desperately, has hope in something better.

So this brings us to this movie and to it's end (and if you're still reading and haven't seen the movie this is your last chance to not have it spoiled. After this, I take no responsibility for ruining anything for you). Bruce Wayne wants to be a normal guy. He wants to stop being the one who lives behind the mask so Gotham can have hope and courage. In the movie, he sees the new District Attorney, Harvey Dent, as the one guy who can offer that hope out in the open. But when Dent is scarred and split and becomes Two-Face, Batman realizes that Harvey can no longer be that for the people of Gotham. Not if they know what Dent has done and what Dent has become and what corruption still infests the Gotham City police department. So he tells the new Police Commissioner to tell the people a lie. His justification is something along the lines of "Sometimes the truth isn't enough. Sometimes people need more than the truth." This sentiment has gotten some people up in arms, which I can understand. Especially if you're a Christian fully schooled in hyper-rationalistic ways of thinking.

You see, in that way of thinking, there is only One Truth. And that's correct in a sense. The problem is that we can never approach that Truth so a lot of us invent our own version of it. We invent versions of it where it votes for our political candidates and espouses our causes and, most often of all, hates the same people we hate. But the Truth isn't that. And the truth is that we do need more than the truth, our version of the truth, sometimes. Let me give you an example that is germane here.

Let's take justice. Human justice is about right and wrong, guilty or innocent, determining who is good and who is bad. Our justice is about assigning blame and guilt and determining punishment. Sometimes, when we rise above our baser natures, we accept blame and guilt and not only accept punishment but seek reconciliation. But Truth's idea of justice is very different than that I think. Truth's idea of justice is about bringing all creation back to it in love. Truth's idea of justice is about bringing and giving hope to the afflicted and fallen and broken of this world. Truth's idea of justice is redeeming all of the two-faced hypocrites out there by bringing them to Him. Even if it means having to die to conquer death. even if it means being branded a criminal and an outcast so that all those who wander and are lost find Him. Too often I hear good intentioned but poorly informed people talk about a justice of truth that is really just a more powerful version of our human kind of justice; a justice of truth that punishes more perfectly, that assignes blame more accurately and that knows true goodness from sincere self-interest when evaluating motive. When I hear that presented as truth, I think that "truth isn't enough, I need more than truth." The truth is that I'm fallen and guilty and broken. The truth is that I'm every bit as fallen as Adolph Hitler and Josef Stalin and so many others. The truth is that like Paul, I am "first among sinners." And if I look at justice from the eyes of men, I have no hope. In the movie, Batman tells Gordon to lie so that the people of Gotham can have hope that it is possible for a person to rise above the chaos and crime without having to resort to vigilanteism. His example for this hope is in the fact that people on two ferries don't blow each other up but choose to accept that they might die over killing a group of unknown others. It is similar with us. To have hope we must look beyond what we see everyday and beyond what our own minds can conceive. In truth, I have no hope. But in Truth, who seeks me and all those like me above all things, I have hope. And while the postmodern fable of Batman breaks down here in hiding the Truth in lies, it reveals that the Truth might lie beyond what we can "know" or "rationalize".

Grace and Peace.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Friday, August 08, 2008

For this blog I decided to hi-jack the term the Packers and Favre have been using all week. I have to say that I'm really glad that the situation there is resolved so that I can here about something, anything else on SportsCenter. So, moving forward, here's what's going on here:

Cycling: Last weekend was the Elberton race and it was a tough weekend for me. For the second time in a row, I flatted during the TTT. This time it seems like my tube just failed. I've decided that for my 20 mm tires, I'm going to go with heavier duty tubes to see if I can lower the incidence rate on flats. Still the team ended up winning the state championship on the work of Bill and Ron so I can be proud to be a part of that. I died in the crit and then worked for the team in the road race. My teammate Robert "DHo" Jordan got away in a break to Ron and I sat on the front and kept tempo. An unexpected benefit of racing with my power meter was that I knew Robert could hold 300 watts for about an hour so I rode at 250. It allowed the break to get four minutes and stay away. More interesting to me was the number of people just riding at that level put into trouble. We killed about half the field just riding tempo on the front and only once did anyone try to force the pace. We just sat on their wheels until they cracked (which wasn't very long) and then got back on the front. For all my work, I got dropped from the main field about 4 miles from the end of the race and ended up finishing about 15th. Not the weekend I have hoped for but it is what it is.

School: We start back on Monday for faculty back week. I can't really decide where I'm at with things attitudewise. I want to be fired up and I have a lower work load this semester but I'm just not quite feeling it. Still, this week I've managed to get some extra work done to get ready for classes including setting up to try a news teaching strategy to hopefully get students to look more closely at some of the misconceptions inherent in the physics they do. I'm kind of excited about that and I'm hoping it goes really well. I'd like to give a paper on the practice at a Georgia Academy of Sciences meeting early next year if it seems to work.

Weather: God it's been hot. That's part of what made this last weekend's racing so hard. Heat levels well over 100 degrees on both Saturday's crit and at the end of Sunday's road race. That combined with a Tuesday Night Word's ride that was over 100 degrees and I've been wrung out all week. That's probably part of the reason I'm feeling ambivalent about school starting I'm sure but I've done almost no good training this week due to my legs feeling so empty. Hopefully it'll break this weekend and I'll be able to do some riding in the morning.

More Later. Thanks for Reading.

Grace and Peace.

The Physicist   Link Me    |