One. Third.

Two different data depictions crossed my information stream in the last twenty-four hours. Let’s see what they have in common.

First up is this data visualization of PISA scores put together by Michael Marder, a Professor of Physics and the Associate Dean for Science and Mathematics education at the University of Texas, Austin. Unlike the usual way these scores are presented (particularly to the American public), this time the U.S. scores are broken down by poverty level. Here’s a screenshot, but you really should explore the interactive Tableau visualization or view the mp4 that Professor Marder narrates.

 

Second was this report (pdf) from the Colorado School Finance Project, depicting the characteristics of Colorado’s K-12 population over the last 17 years. Again, a screenshot, but take a look at the entire PDF as well.

[As you view the Colorado data above, also keep in mind the current budget situation facing Colorado school districts (pdf).]

Now, regular readers of this blog (are there any of those any more given my recent blogging drought?) know that I have some serious concerns about various aspects of our education system, and I believe there are many changes we need to make to best meet the needs of our students. My current frustration, however, is that I feel most of the talk around education reform at the national, state and even local level is not only about the wrong issues, but also misreads the data and ignores the most important factor affecting what they (not I) believe is the best metric for measuring how our students are learning.

For some reason Alex Trebek’s voice popped into my head while thinking about this.

Me: I’ll take Education Reform for $1000, Alex.
Alex: It’s the Daily Double! How much will you wager?
Me: I’ll bet it all on Education Reform, Alex.
Alex: That’s very bold. The one issue that well-known national education reformers might actually be able to have an impact on, but also the biggest issue they pointedly ignore.
Me: What is poverty?
Alex: That is correct! 

 To be clear, I don’t think poverty is our only issue in education. Nor do I think we should use it as an “excuse.” But as long as reformers think that "test scores" and "accountability" are the best path to meeting the needs of our students, then I think they need to get past the rhetoric and address the underlying issue of child poverty. The hypocrisy of misusing data to justify asking for more and more data from schools in order to judge how well we’re doing is stunning.

A full one-third of public education students in Colorado are on free lunch. One. Third. Until we address that, please spare me any more discussion of CSAP/TCAP/ACT/PISA/TIMMS/NCLB/RttT/YAA.

The CSAP is Dead. Long Live the CSAP (err, TCAP)

The Colorado Department of Education just announced the name of the test that will replace the CSAP next year - it will be called the Transitional Colorado Assessment Program (TCAP). It's "transitional" because it's a bridge between the current test and the new test that will be coming in 2014 once our new state standards (based on the Common Core) are fully in place. (I predict it will be called the Colorado Common Core Assessment Program, or C³AP ™.)

No word on whether the TCAP (or the C³AP ™) will, in the words of Will Richardson,

. . . tell us anything about the qualities we most want from our children: a love of learning, a willingness and the patience to grapple with important, real problems, and the ability to make sense of the world as they experience it.

Snow Kidding

Just a quick post to point out two articles in today's Denver Post. The first article is about how Colorado Ski Resorts are leveraging technology to get the word out about ski conditions.

"The snow message is absolutely as important as it has ever been for us," said Vail Mountain's senior vice president and chief operating officer, Chris Jarnot.

What has changed is that everyone with a mobile phone can be a snow reporter — and everyone with a mobile phone or computer can be the instant recipient of the latest snow news.

Not even a year ago, resorts' hopes hinged on snow during televised Broncos games. Resorts issued snowfall totals a day after the snow fell. They bought powdery ads in magazines six months before the season began.

The idea was that resort reservation desks were inundated with calls when football stadiums were frosted white, and last year's photos of untrammeled snow were good enough.

But by 5 a.m. this frosty Christmas week morning, the news of new snow was posted on websites for Vail, Beaver Creek, Breckenridge and Keystone, the four resorts that host more than a third of Colorado's roughly 12 million annual skier visits. It was waiting in the inboxes of thousands of skiers. Newspapers, radio and TV stations had it ready for morning reports.

Copper Mountain and Sunlight have eliminated the middlemen like Semrow — allowing Web surfers to check the snow themselves via webcam.

"Now we see that blip (of vacation interest and bookings) as soon as the first flake flies," Jarnot said.

And here's the quantification of that shift:

Vail Resorts held back about 80 percent of its multimillion-dollar winter marketing campaign by skipping the traditional one-page ads in national magazines like Outside, Men's Health and Conde Nast Traveler. Instead, the company joined the social-networking revolution and now e-pitches its powder.

The company took the money it would have spent on those pricey magazine ads and kept it for up-to-date campaigns issued through e-mail, newspapers, search-engine display ads and online banners.

It's a plan that works with skiers' changing habits: Where they once booked holidays months in advance, today they are increasingly apt to book the week before.

80 percent. Wow.

The second article was a brief report on the accuracy of ski resort snow total reports. The interesting thing here was not that resorts in New England (the study didn't look at Colorado) tend to inflate their snow totals slightly, it was this:

Ironically, during the study period, a new iPhone application emerged that allows users to report their own snow observations at various resorts.

Suddenly, according to Zinman and Zitzewitz, "exaggeration falls sharply, especially at resorts where iPhones can get reception."

So, perhaps nothing profound here, but another indication of two of the shifts that I think we're seeing.

First, a shift away from traditional marketing and broadcast advertising to more targeted, passion-based, direct-to-those-who-are-interested-when-they-are-interested campaigns, with the resultant elimination of various middlemen (including traditional media). It's also a "just in time" information delivery service, which allows people to much more easily adapt their plans at the last minute ("they are increasingly apt to book the week before"), which I think is an interesting emerging meme that we'll see a lot of discussion about in the next few years.

Second, the continuing rise of user-generated content, in this case real-time snow reports, that - at least in a small way - continues to democratize access to information and transfer some of the power from businesses to customers ( and governments to citizens; and producers to consumer/producers). As transparency increases, behaviors change, which is also another interesting meme I think we'll be talking about.

So, this post is mostly just to point you to those two interesting tidbits, but I do wonder about the potential impact to educational institutions. Passion-based, just-in-time delivery of information and the importance of transparency and users generating relevant and meaningful information for each other - I wonder what we can learn from that?

Questions for Senators Obama and McCain

So, both the calendar and my jam-packed and very messy office tell me it’s August. In addition to the usual "It’s the beginning of the year how am I ever going to get all the stuff done that I need to get done before the students arrive?" panic attack, I had an additional panic attack. What if I bump into Senator Obama and I don’t have a good question ready?

Seriously, I’m worried about this. I live and work just south of Denver and, as you hopefully know, Denver is hosting this little thing called the Democratic National Convention coming up here at the end of August. While I know that conventions are pretty much completely scripted, Senator Obama doesn’t strike me as a man – or a candidate – who would spend the entire four days in his hotel/the Pepsi Center/Invesco Field at Mile High. So what if I’m at the grocery store and run into him, or what if he decides to visit my school? Hey, it could happen. George Bush (#41, not the current President) spoke at my school when he was Vice-President (before my time, but there are pictures to prove it – and we didn’t own Photoshop then), so I think it would be somewhat symbolic if Senator Obama stopped by.

I’m not very good at the "elevator pitch" - once a conversation gets going I think I get warmed up and can contribute, but put me on the spot for a serious and thoughtful question – not so much. So I’ve started trying to think of the one question I’d ask him if I did bump into him by the blueberries (or walking across our cafeteria).

I mean, there’s the obvious:

When are you going to name Chris Lehmann as your Secretary of Education designate?

Yes, I realize I already volunteered for this position, but sometimes you have to take one for the team.

Or there’s the standard:

Most educators think that NCLB has some serious flaws, and you seem to agree. What would you replace it with?

But then I’d just get the talking points.

Or I could reuse the question I didn’t get to ask Governor Richardson:

You have a statement in your plan about rigor, relevance and relationships. Too often in education I feel like rigor is defined as simply "harder" or "more homework." It seems like folks are saying that what we’ve been doing isn’t working, so let’s just require more of it. Instead, I think often what we should be asking is, "Are we doing the right things in the first place?" Can you talk a little bit more about how you define rigor and what are the key skills, abilities and habits of mind that our students need to be successful in the 21st century?

But I didn’t particularly like that question and it was directed specifically at a statement Governor Richardson had in his own plan.

You see, I’ve read the highlights of both Senator Obama and Senator McCain’s education stances, and looked more deeply at their web sites (Obama's Education Page, McCain's Education Page). And I’ve even listened to these three short NPR pieces on their personal tech literacy and how they would address technology in their administrations. (Apparently it’s a necessity to have a former FCC chair – from your own political party, of course - as a technology adviser. Hmm, if not Secretary of Education, perhaps I could be Senator Obama’s Technology Czar. I’ve never been a Czar.)

But I’d really like to ask that deep, meaningful, thoughtful question that gets to the heart of it all and allows us to really see his baseline, fundamental beliefs about education and what needs to change in order to meet the needs of our students. To help us understand if he thinks education is at a tipping point, and that it’s a different world out there, and schools need to adapt and change to meet it? Or if he believes that, while changes and improvements are always necessary, things are basically good as they are. And a question that gets beyond the usual talking points and helps explore all the ideas we’ve been talking about in our blogs for the last few years.

Now, I don’t mean to be partisan about this, I’d want to ask the same question of Senator McCain, but I just figure that’s it’s more likely I’ll run into Senator Obama here during the Democratic Convention than Senator McCain. (Although Arizona is just a long day’s drive southwest of here, perhaps he could come up for the day.) So, I said to myself, "Myself, you have a blog. Why don’t you ask for some help?" If you’re so inclined, please leave a thoughtful question in the comments for Senator Obama, Senator McCain, or both of them.

This is not a political blog, and I don’t want your "question" to really be a statement of political beliefs. So, if you comment, please honor this post in the spirit in which it's intended. I really want to know the one question you would ask either of these gentlemen that might help us better understand their beliefs on education. A question that hopefully gets away from the talking points and gives us a glimpse of the vision they have – or don’t have. This would help me out if I happen to run into either of them and, frankly, would help me out in case I find myself in an elevator with other important folks. (I’ve been having more of these "opportunities" than usual in the last few months, and have a few more coming up, it’s kind of weird - and I don't think "Hi, how are you?" is quite cutting it.)

Finally, if either Senator’s campaign staff stops by, I’d also like to formally offer to host a conversation between the two Senators regarding education. (Come on, staffers, Colorado may be the swing state, it's the perfect place to do this.) And I chose the word "conversation" very deliberately. I don’t really want to host a debate, at least not what passes for political debate these days – where each candidate takes whatever the question is and morphs it into the same old sound bites. I really would like to see both of these men have a thoughtful conversation about education. A conversation where, yes, we would indeed see the differences between them. But also a conversation where we could see the similarities, the common ground where we are most likely to be able to move forward together. A conversation where they were genuinely looking for solutions, not just trying to score points off one another. And, while I know this is terribly naïve of me, a conversation that perhaps actually generates some new ideas of how we can move forward together. Wouldn’t that be something?

(As a mostly irrelevant side note, I happened to mistype a URL on Senator Obama’s site while testing a link in this post and got the image below, embedded within the frame of his site. I gotta say, it seemed consistent with his campaign and made me smile a little. For the record, Senator McCain’s site gave me the standard 404 Page Cannot Be Found page, without the frame of his site around it.)

Colorado High School Graduation Requirements Wiki

The Colorado Graduation Guidelines Development Council is tasked with making recommendations to the State Board of Education regarding high school graduation requirements. They've setup an informational wiki, have an online survey you might want to take a look at, as well as a few public forums you can attend in person.

I'm glad they have this information out there, although I'm not sure how well they've advertised it (I stumbled across it due to a tweet from Bud). I also find the membership of the Council of interest. The ones I know of are all thoughtful people, and I would assume the others are as well, but it seems to me that there are a few categories of folks missing. Anyone else see the same gaps?

Update 3-29-08: In the comments Rick linked to his earlier post about this. It's worth reading.

Save the Date

Colorado: We're #41!

Just a quickie via David Warlick.

According to this story, this report (pdf), and this spreadsheet David created, Colorado has an average download speed of 1.354 mbps, which places it 41st in the United States (the average in the U.S. being 1.9 mbps). (Interestingly, Colorado ranks 9th in the U.S. in upload speed – 0.489 mbps.) This mainly reflects results from broadband users (95% of those that were tested). This compares to estimates that show average download speeds in Japan of 61 mbps, in South Korea of 45 mbps, in France of 17 mbps and in Canada of 7 mbps. (I wonder about a couple of things here. Except for Canada, the other three countries are fairly "compact." Which makes me wonder about how widespread and representative the surveying was – I’ve got to think there are vast areas of Canada without high speed access, but I don’t know.)

Now, as I think I’ve made fairly clear on this blog, I don’t think technology is the answer to everything in education, but it is important. And broadband access speed is only one piece of the technology puzzle. But this does make you wonder. As the Internet become more and more important in so many different areas of our lives – including learning – what differences might emerge between students that have 61 mbps download speeds and those with 1.35?


Image Citation: i25 and 15th street, 10:30 pm, originally uploaded by Rob.