by David Safier
Florida Sub Fired for Classroom Wizardry: Land O’ Lakes, Florida, has moved from the Stone Age all the way up to the Middle Ages. A substitute teacher entertained his class with a magic trick. He made a match disappear and reappear. A parent called the school accusing him of wizardry. The district told him they would no longer call him to sub. The district swears it had other reasons to get rid of him. Trust me. Subs are rarely fired. It was the magic trick. (The story has already been picked up all over the world, by the way. The only way it can get more legs is if Bush and the Republican legislators push a bill forbidding witches and sorcerers from teaching in public schools. Those who persist will be burned at the stake.)
They’re laughing at us in Long Beach: Cal State Long Beach’s independent student newspaper is making fun of the Arizona bill to make it illegal to denigrate American values in schools. “Doesn’t sound like the America we know now, does it? Well it’s not. It’s Arizona. Our neighbor. The Grand Canyon State.” I’d be insulted if I didn’t agree.
How to deal with a nursing shortage: don’t let students into Nursing School: No wonder people make fun of Arizona education. The stories practically write themselves. “The College of Nursing and Healthcare Innovation can afford to admit only 60 percent of the Arizona State University students who apply each year, even as the state struggles with a nursing shortage.” To be fair (I try, really), the article goes on to say, “The nursing college doubled in size the past six years” and has been successful at increasing the number of nurses in the state. But if we cut higher education spending, and it’s hard to see how we can avoid it (without increasing revenues, which means increasing taxes, which means people will have to admit that us tax-and-spend liberals sometimes know what we’re talking about), nurses, teachers and other needed professionals will be in even shorter supply.
Will Cyber Schools knock out brick-and-mortar schools? A Harvard business prof just published a book, “Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns.” According to the article, “disrupting” our education system is a good thing, akin to the disruptive force of computerized businesses on more traditional businesses. He thinks distance learning will simply overwhelm traditional learning, and it will not be done by today’s schools changing. It will be new schools replacing the old. Remember, though, business models rarely work in education, which is now and has always been a very labor intensive process. Whether the internet will change that picture, only time will tell. He very well may be wrong, like other business types who said they were going to make education more economical and successful, and failed. Twenty years from now, we can reconvene and see if he got it right.