David Safier

Part 3, Education: The Rest of the Story

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by David Safier

This is the third and final segment of the first episode of the cable TV show, Education: The Rest of the Story, which Ann-Eve Pedersen and I are hosting, made possible by Tucson Cable Access. The show airs Thursdays at 4:30pm on Cox channel 20 or Comcast channel 74. You can see the other two 10 minute segments here and here.

As well as debunking current education myths, as we did in the segment looking into the myth that our public schools are failures, we plan to present head-scratchers and jaw-droppers. This segment is one of those. It's about a newly created online database, inBloom, that will store huge amounts of information about students culled from school records and make the data available to private education companies. I posted about it here.

As well as being a betrayal of the sacred trust between schools, students and parents, this venture shows how easy it is for the corporate "education reformers" to put their half-baked, sometimes dangerous ideas into practice. The database is being created courtesy of a $100 million grant, mainly from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation with some help from the Carnegie Corporation. Someone comes up with an idea, some billionaires kick it around for awhile, then say, "What do you need? A hundred million? Sure, who do I make the check out to?" The other corporate giant involved in this venture is Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., which is creating the database.

You can watch the 10 minute segment below the fold.

Illinois teacher calls it quits

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by David Safier

Fourth grade teacher Ellie Rubinstein decided to quit rather than take an involuntary transfer. She made a 10 minute video describing her reasons. What's interesting is that she left a career in advertising and public relations to become a teacher at age 45 "to do something meaningful with my life." She describes loving teaching but becoming increasingly discouraged by the regimen of standardization and testing.

You can tell from the video Rubinstein is one of those "difficult" teachers who fights for what she thinks is best for her students, which likely got her into squabbles with her administration. I can relate — I was often one of those "difficult" teachers — but I also remember when I got into those battles, the best administrators would listen to me, sometimes argue with me, sometimes bend to what I wanted and sometimes not, but they understood that this is a healthy part of professional-to-professional dialogue. These days, it's getting harder even for good adminstrators to be flexible when they're faced with inflexible demands from above.

You can watch the video below the fold.

A commenter about Edge High School

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by David Safier Yesterday I posted about a column Tim Steller wrote talking about Edge High School, a charter school that serves students who are generally cast-offs from other schools and has a D grade from the state. The grade reflects the difficulty of the school's mission, not a failure of the school. One grateful … Read more

Good news day

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by David Safier

The news has been so dismal when I've picked up my morning paper lately, I've considered trying to find a local chapter of NewsAnon to cut back on my addiction. Then came today. It wasn't all good, of course, but I'm not going to let the perfect news day be the enemy of a day with enough good news to cheer me up.

We will return to our regularly scheduled cynicism and dismay in the next post.

From today's Star:

  • Great front page pic of Ironwood HIgh grads. Congrats, all!
  • Three high school grads are spotlighted. One, an Asian American, works
    in a UA lab and wants to be a neuroscientist. She also loves to play
    the steel drums. "It's the connection I make with people when I play."
    The second is a Somali-American who arrived in the U.S. at 9 without
    ever attending school and is graduating with A's and B's. Thanks to
    JTED, he interns in the phlebotomy lab at Tucson Medical Center and will
    soon be a certified nursing assistant. He wants to be a doctor. The
    third is a Hispanic-American who has been a varsity catcher for 3 years,
    took Advanced Placement classes, acted as a mentor for freshmen and
    raised a pig as part of Future Farmers of America. He's going to college
    on a partial baseball scholarship.
    It's the mixed-up, crazy-quilt American dream. If the future is truly this bright, I'll have to wear shades.
  • Baby gets a 3-D laser print of a splint that allows him to breathe on his own and leave the hospital. The age of miracles.
  • Factories are moving back to the U.S. because transportation costs and lag time from foreign factories are getting too costly.

Part 2, Education: The Rest of the Story

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by David Safier

As I posted yesterday, Ann-Eve Pedersen and I have created a new half hour cable TV show, Education: The Rest of the Story. What I neglected to mention yesterday is that the wonderful people at Tucson Cable Access supplied the studio and the technical expertise which allowed the project to go forward. Special credit and thanks to Carolyn Brown who suggested the idea to us and did the title and editing work. The show airs Thursdays at 4:30pm on Cox channel 20 or Comcast channel 74. It's divided into 10 minute segments which I'm posting individually on BfA.

Yesterday I posted a 10 minute segment debunking the myth that our public schools are failing. Today's 10 minute segment is about Arizona's education budget which is still in limbo at this moment, along with the rest of the state budget and the Medicaid expansion. Ann-Eve begins with a 5 minute primer on the state of school financing in education, a subject she knows as well as anyone in the state. She headed the Arizona Education Parent Network that spearheaded Prop 204, which would have guaranteed increased funding for our schools. It was opposed by a well financed negative campaign and lost at the polls.

According to Ann-Eve, the reason we're near the bottom of the states in dollars spent per student isn't lack of funds. "There is a hostility toward funding education in Arizona."

You can watch the video below the fold.