Entscheidungen über Deutschunterricht

These are the comments I made at the April 28, 2014 meeting of the School Board.

I am of Germanic heritage. 

My children both took several years of German at Darby and received college credit for much of it.

I was a chaperone for a group of Hilliard students who spent 3 weeks traveling across German-speaking Europe.

I like German cars and German beer and have purchased a fair amount of both.

Ich habe Deutsch gelernt

Nonetheless, the resources of our community are not infinite, and we must constantly evaluate and adjust how we allocate resources to prepare our children for their future.

Depending on what list one consults, German is barely in the top ten list of first languages, although it is a few places ahead of French. Bengali, Hindi, Portuguese, Russian and Japanese are all more widely spoken as a first language.

I traveled to Germany often for business. For the past 70 years, nearly all children in the former West Germany have studied English and are competent in English, and since the German Reunification almost 25 years ago, so have the children of the eastern states. It is not difficult to do business in English in Germany, although admittedly disrespectful.

While Europe and Germany will continue to be important trading partners for America, there is no question of the growing importance of Asia and the Middle East in our future. It may be time to begin reallocating our education resources relating to citizenship of the world toward those regions

Education is a people business – teachers instructing students. That means changes to programming and methods affect people. Tough decisions sometimes have to be made, and they will affect the lives of people we respect and care about.

That means we need to make these decisions in an empathetic and compassionate, but unambiguous way. No one should be left guessing.

If possible, we should allow there to be sufficient time for affected individuals to respond and adapt. If we can provide resources to facilitate the transition, that would be appropriate.

This too is a teaching moment for our students.

April 28, 2014 School Board Meeting

Here are the supplemental materials for the April 28, 2014 School Board meeting, to be held at 7pm at Scioto Darby Elementary.  Note that the Administration is posting this stuff on the district website as well.

I've added a new link to the list on the right - Curriculum.  It contains the Course of Study documents which have been presented to the Board over the past year or so. This is our curriculum - not the Common Core. You'll of course see references to some elements of the Common Core, because it's a pretty good set of standards and it makes sense to use many of them. But we add, delete and change curriculum elements as we see fit - locally.

That's why I don't understand the criticism of the Common Core, at least here in Ohio. Each local school district determines its own curriculum standards and instructional approaches to deliver that curriculum. If you want to have a conversation with me about the Common Core and Hilliard City Schools, please read these documents first.

Five Year Forecast

Here is the Five Year Forecast that will be presented at the next regular meeting to the School Board by Treasurer Brian Wilson.

click to enlarge

The changes are slight from the last forecast, approved October 2013, and shows a small increase in the projected FY18 end of year cash balance. It shows us in good shape to be able to wait until 2015 before asking the voters for another levy, my estimate around 5 to 5.5 mills. We could even wait another year, but that would demand a levy in excess of 8 mills to fund.

It might be worth reviewing the article I wrote in 2011 about the four big Budget Knobs, those being: 1) our cash reserve balance; 2) our spending rate growth, 3) when we want the next levy to be on the ballot, and 4) how large we should plan for that levy to be.

One of the unfortunate side effects of losing the old SaveHilliardSchools.org domain is any of the links in the blog which refer to that domain are now broken. I'll experiment with fixing that when I have a chance. Sorry for the aggravation.

Whoops....

I must have missed the notices to renew the domain name I've held since 2006 - SaveHilliardSchools.org.  It is now apparently in the possession of Majid Hussain, who lives in Birmingham, England. One of the many kinds of entrepreneurs on the Internet - those who somehow find out about expiring domains and snatch them up, hoping to collect a "ransom" to give them back.

Fortunately, that doesn't mean the hundreds of articles and years of work have been lost. I've had the domain "EducateHilliard.com" registered but dormant for several years, so have put it back into service for this blog. I'll put the word out of the change, and hope that folks find their way back. Meanwhile perhaps the scads of spam comments will stop.

All the 400+ articles I've written are still here, and folks should still find them when doing a Google etc search if they're looking for this kind of information.

iPads for Everyone, Part 2

One of the ways in which we plan to offset the cost of a 1:1 deployment of iPads to our students is by acquiring content in a different way than copyrighted textbooks.

Right now, electronic versions of many traditional textbooks cost nearly the same as the paper version. That's because the textbook industry hasn't yet been transformed in the way the music industry has (see my prior article on this subject). Few people pay $20 for a music album any more - we got very tired of albums with maybe two decent songs and a bunch of mediocre stuff. Now we expect the option to buy music by the song, with only a few artists having the market power to demand that their songs be bundled in albums any more.

Will we see something similar with textbooks?

Ask most teachers, and they'll tell you that a significant fraction of the material in their current textbooks is never used. In some cases, there just isn't time to cover every chapter. In other cases, most but not all of the contents match our evolving curriculum. So the teachers use what fits, and have to find other sources for everything else.

An evolving practice is for teachers to assemble much of their material from sources other than textbooks. It may be modules available from online sources, or material written by inhouse staff. And of course teachers have been writing some of their own lesson material for years.

With iPads in the hands of every student, we have a lot more flexibility as to how to assemble course material. What doesn't make sense is for every school district in America to write their own materials for every subject.

What I think will develop is a network of content developers, some embedded within school districts but mostly independent, each specializing on various subjects, or courses, or even particular units within courses. For example, maybe Hilliard schools becomes known as an excellent producer of American History content, and we start selling that to school districts across the country. Maybe Worthington becomes the Trigonometry experts. Maybe Bexley specializes in 17th Century French Literature. A school district in Boston becomes the go-to source for Physics curriculum.

If folks like Prentice Hall, one of the major textbook publishers, are smart, they'll start to nurture and develop these independent content producers. And they'll find a way to package and sell content in a manner like iTunes, where a school district can download a math unit for a couple bucks per student.

The competition will drive content producers to figure out more and more powerful ways to present concepts, using the full audiovisual capabilities of devices like the iPad. We already see some of this with the Khan Academy material for teaching math and science.

I think we'll also see a kind of publishing standardization develop such that a course is say American History can be assembled from modules acquired from many sources without subjecting students and teachers to jarring and distracting differences between authors. That in turn will drive the device manufacturers to build more and more capability into their devices. And drive down the price.

In the process of getting stuff organized for the upcoming move of our household (still within the school district), I came across a document from my 9th grade year explaining to our parents why our school was arranging a three day trip to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Here's an excerpt:

Today, we desperately need more effective science instruction, for international competition is ever increasing. Our scientific and technical knowledge is increasing and changing at at such an accelerating rate, that to cram more facts into the heads of our children is certainly not the answer. Professional scientists tell us that 1/3 of what we are teaching today will be obsolete five years hence, and what replaces this knowledge has not yet been discovered.

I was in the 9th grade in 1968, forty-six years ago. Yet it's remarkable how much this educator's warning sounds like what we hear today. In those days, our personal calculating device was a slide rule, and we produced term papers on manual typewriters (footnotes were a pain!!). We had to find our information by actually going to a building called a library, looking through the card catalog (title, author, subject), checking out several promising books, searching those books for relevant information, and making dozens of note cards. "White-Out" was our best friend.

One of the casualties of our move is a set of very fine encyclopedias and a dictionary that my wife and I bought soon after we were married. Today, it's not worth making shelf space for these expensive books in our new, smaller home. Truthfully, we haven't cracked open one of these volumes for decades.

What does the future look like for today's 6th graders, the first of our students to be issued iPads?  We haven't a clue. We know that they'll be expected to locate and synthesize vast amounts of information, and they won't need to be trained on the Dewey Decimal system to find it. They won't be competing with peers who are armed with facts, even though we marvel at Aaron Craft's ability to recite Pi to 60 places.

I remember a physics professor once saying that in our working lives, we wouldn't be expected to pull the differential equations of thermodynamics from our heads, but we'll need to have internalized that there has been a method developed for addressing such problems, so that when we encounter one we'll know it can be solved, and what resources to use to proceed.

That's the kind of knowledge we need to impart to our kids, whether we're talking about science and math, or philosophy and history. They need to be able to call on the great thinkers who came before them and add their own insight (a function of knowledge) and creativity to help solve problems that we today don't know exist. And as much as many like to poo-poo the value of a liberal arts education, teaching kids how to think and reason is just as important as teaching them a trade.

These iPads are both a instructional learning devices, and a portal for access to the incomprehensible amount of information out there. Will they hold up as state-of-the-art for long?  No, of course not. The slide rule I mastered in high school was out of date and relegated to a drawer in my first couple of years of college. No one in my workplace used a slide rule - everyone had pocket calculators, expensive as they were.

But that doesn't mean my high school physics teacher shouldn't have taught us how to use a slide rule. In fact, I was at an advantage when I started engineering school at Ohio State - many of my classmates had never used one before.

Likewise, I have no doubt that the students of Hilliard City Schools will be advantaged by the incorporation of these devices into our methods for delivering instruction. Isn't that why most of us moved to Hilliard and continue to financially support our schools - so our kids will have a great start in life?

iPads for Everyone

At the School Board meeting held March 10, 2013, Superintendent Marschhausen introduced to the public a plan to begin equipping our students with tablet computers. Much of what he said was captured in a story in This Week Hilliard.

One of the most important statements he made was that this program would not result in any new taxes. That detail was noted in the This Week story, as well as in the story in The Columbus Dispatch. In his March 11 blog post, Dr. Marschhausen goes on to say, "We will pay for this initiative mostly through a reallocation of district and parent resources with only a small amount of additional dollars being spent on the entire program."

That's a big deal to me.

Readers of this blog know that I've written at length about the economics of our school district, and that our costs are driven primarily and appropriately by the compensation and benefits of our team of teachers, support staff and administrators. Indeed, compensation and benefits represents 86% of our operating budget. But did you know that after compensation and benefits, one of our greatest costs is textbooks and educational materials?

Textbooks are crazy expensive, especially for the upper grade levels. It's not unusual for textbooks to go for over $100 each, and for them to last only seven years. That replacement cycle is due in part to wear on the books, but also because of changes to curriculum and content. It's the reason virtually every school district in America is looking for an alternative to the printed-on-paper textbook.

The textbook industry is about to go through the same kind of radical evolutionary process as the music industry already has. I read an excellent story about the music industry a few years ago in which the author made the claim - accurately I believe - that the record companies had once maintained power in that ecosystem because they had built the scale necessary to manufacture, distribute and retail plastic discs: first vinyl records, then CDs.  Yes, the record labels did manage to lock up artists and exert creative influence, but the artists signed with the labels because that was the only way to get millions of records pressed and distributed. And that's how everyone made money (except the Grateful Dead, the ultimate touring band).

Then came the internet. It became possible for artists to record their music and distribute directly to consumers. Some did exactly that and made a few bucks. Then outfits like Napster showed up and nearly succeeded in making the going price for music essentially zero through their implicit support of music piracy (aka copyright infringement). The music industry had a period of chaos when it looked like no one was going to be able to make money.

Then along came Apple Computer, who changed everything when they released the iPod and iTunes. Concurrently, Napster was sued by the Recording Industry Association of America for copyright infringement and won (which I think was the correct outcome), and music piracy came pretty much to an end. A reasonable price point for music was found, and consumers went back to spending $billions, but the wealth was now being distributed differently than before. No one would have predicted 20 years ago that a computer company would be one of the biggest players in the music industry and that the traditional record labels would become almost invisible. But that's what happened.

No longer did the record labels rule the roost, but they managed to survive by finding a viable niche in the new music ecosystem: they could still help find, produce and promote emerging artists. I suspect that the music industry is bigger than it ever was, and more artists are making a decent buck.

Similarly, one could argue that the book publishing industry has maintained its power because of its investment in and control of the printing and distribution of bound collections of ink on paper. When Amazon came along, it first began to disrupt the distribution end of books on paper, and life became pretty tough for the brick-and-mortar retail bookstores. The next assault on the book publishing industry came when Amazon released the Kindle, and did to book publishing what the iPod did to music publishing.

Except in the case of  K-12 school textbooks.

While it seems like an obvious move to start buying all textbooks in Kindle format, it's not that easy. A basic Kindle may not cost any more than many textbooks (Kindles are $69 today), it seems like it would be shortsighted to get a basic e-reader when the potential is so much greater with a tablet device like the iPad or the Android devices.

As has been done before with big-deal decisions like this, a task force of community members, teachers and administrators was formed to make recommendations on this matter. With their input, the Administration decided that we'd start with the Apple iPad mini, to be first issued to next year's 6th graders. The 6th grade teachers will get their iPads this spring, along with professional development to help them integrate these devices into their instructional routine. Then during the summer they'll have the opportunity to familiarize themselves with the devices and applications they'll use in the classroom.

Not everyone will agree with this decision. The choice of computing platforms has long been like a religious discussion, especially along the lines of PC vs Mac. Recently the Android operating system has become a viable third alternative, and Amazon is still in there as a player with the new models of the Kindle. I've long been a PC bigot, scorning the Mac world in the same way Fox News regards MSNBC (and vice versa).

Then one of my kids gave me her first generation iPod Touch as a hand-me-down when she got her first iPhone (with her own money, yeah!). I used it mostly as a PDA, storing my calendar and contacts, and giving me wireless email access (I've been a PDA user since the first Palm Pilots were introduced in 1997). But I still carried a cheap cell phone - because I'm cheap.

When we shifted to Consumer Cellular, I used the radical reduction in our cell phone bill to fund the cost of an iPhone 5C. Love it. Meanwhile my wife started using an iPad mini, and she rarely gets on our PC anymore. The camel had gotten its nose under the Lambert tent.

After getting zapped by one more virus, or registry corruption, or memory leak, or whatever it is that's making my office PC run like a slug, I finally made the leap to a Mac Mini for my primary office use. I still use Microsoft Office for my productivity software, but otherwise I've fully converted to the Dark Side. Sorry Bill.

The Apple folks have very aggressively attacked the K-12 education segment, and have developed sophisticated products and efficient management platforms. We've long had a few iMacs in elementary classrooms for shared use, and recently starting making shared carts of Macbooks available for checkout when a teacher wants to teach a module which makes use of online resources. For the number of buildings and computers we have in our school district, it takes a remarkably small number of administrators to keep everything update and functioning. That's partly due to the choice of a Mac environment, and partly because of the wise choices made by our Technology Department, long led by Gary Orr (who retired a couple of years ago), and now by Rich Boettner.

So continuing our evolution to the so-called 1:1 device environment (one device permanently assigned to each student) with Apple technology makes sense to me. Starting with the 6th grade students, using the iPad mini as their device, makes sense as well.

But my support is equally due to the commitment our Administration made to pull this off with no increase to our budget. It's easy to spend a ton of money on all kinds of stuff in a school district, and we already spend plenty. Without a doubt, the time would come when it would be a no-brainer to shift to a 1:1 device environment. We're on the leading edge of that curve, and will have to work hard and be smart to make our fiscal commitments come true.

I'm asking Dr. Marschhausen to develop a way to assure the School Board and the voters that the promise of "no new taxes" is honored. At a minimum, it should show up as a permanent downward inflection in our textbook spending. At a macro level, the spending side of our Five Year Forecast needs to remain on substantially the same trajectory as was last approved in October 2013.

Meanwhile, I'm proud to be associated with a school district who is among the first to take this step. Many are watching us.

Common Core

This article was stimulated by one by Michael Petrilli of the Fordham Institute, titled "Lies, Damned Lies, and the Common Core."

I was a little surprised that during time leading up to the November 2013 election, no one asked the candidates for Hilliard Board of Education what any of us thought about the Common Core. It didn't come up during the "Meet the Candidates" night conducted by the League of Women Voters. The reporters from This Week Hilliard didn't ask about it, nor did the online questionnaire published by The Columbus Dispatch.

And I was glad.

Not a lot of people understand the Common Core: what it is, how it is designed to be used, or what it contains. That means most of the questions someone like me gets about Common Core originate from ignorance and prejudice, often fueled by what they hear from folks like Glenn Beck and Fox News.

The radio in my car has three stations on "speed dial" - WOSU-FM (89.7), WTVN-AM (610), and WODC-FM (93.3).  If I'm out during the morning or afternoon drive time, I'm usually listening to 610 because I enjoy the local programming, and in particular have long been a fan of John Corby and Joe Bradley, who do the afternoon drive-time show.

I also enjoy lots of the WOSU programming: BBC World Service, All Sides with Ann Fisher, All Things Considered, Fresh Air, and of course, Car Talk. And when I just need to clear my mind, or want to revel in a beautiful day - I crank up the oldies on 93.3. That's my chicken soup.

Every few days, I'll decide to listen to what Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh have to say. It doesn't usually last long.

I remember when I first became aware of Glenn Beck. It was right after 9/11.  Before then, 610 had a locally-produced morning show with Bob Conner, a long-respected radio personality here in Central Ohio. Then on 9/12 or one of the days immediately following, Clear Channel said something like "we're bringing Glenn Beck to all our stations nationwide during this time of crisis."  I don't know that BC ever returned to the air on a regular basis, and it's been Glenn Beck every weekday morning since then.

Beck has been able to amass a huge audience in the years following of course. It's more than just an audience though. He now has disciples - folks who absorb what he has to say as truth, and are inspired to act on his agenda, which I'm not quite clear about. I'm not sure many of his followers are clear about it either.

On some points, I'm right with him:  less government, free markets, love for God and our fellow man. Sounds pretty conservative, and one would assume this makes me a staunch Republican, maybe even Tea Party.

Nope.

Nor am I a "Big D" Democrat, even though I think an appropriate amount of government regulation is a good thing. If we're going to function as a society, we need some ground rules that we'll all abide by, and in particular our markets needs some boundaries that dampen out wild swings and prevent unhealthy monopolies from developing. Some parts of the Democratic Platform I agree wholeheartedly with - especially those dealing with social justice. Other things are way outside my morals and sensibilities, and I can't accept being labeled a Democrat if those values get attributed to me as well.

So I'm an independent, or as Ohio law defines me, "Unaffiliated." As I put on my Facebook profile, my political views are - well, you have to ask me about a specific topic.

Back to Common Core.

Glenn Beck seems to have taken the position that the Common Core is part of a left-wing conspiracy to indoctrinate our children with liberal values, much to the detriment of our republic. In fact, I think that's pretty much the words he uses. He believes its purpose is part of the long-view strategy of the Democrats and others to win the liberal struggle by bringing up a generation of kids who share their views.

That view is promulgated by the hard-core right, and the elimination of Common Core has become a key plank in the platform of many Republican and Tea Party candidates.

Here's my take.

If you want to have a discussion with me about the evils of the Common Core, the first thing I'm going to ask you is whether you've actually read significant elements of the Common Core standards, and compared it to the curriculum standards currently in place in your school district. If so, what differences do you see that concern you?  I'd happily engage in such a conversation, and would likely learn something in the process.

Or are you just reacting emotionally to the showmanship of folks like Glenn Beck?  I think Beck is a marketing genius. He's identified a genre of issues that matter to many Americans, and has been able to stir up a fair amount of fear and emotion around those issues, drawing people to listen to him - which is how he gets paid.

Yet, the greatest threat to our nation isn't all this political debate and stupid squabbling. Nor is it al-Qaeda and others who threaten us with physical harm.

It's the ignorance and apathy of the voter. I thank you for electing me to another term on your school board, but by the way, only 13% of the registered voters showed up in November. Only 7% of the 56,488 registered voters in our school district voted for me (just 8% for Andy and Lisa). So do my views align with the majority of the people in our community?  Who knows?

What fraction of the voters do you think have put any effort into the daunting task of understanding the Common Core? Or the Affordable Care Act, potentially one of the most impactful pieces of legislation written in the past fifty years?  Heck, most of Congress doesn't understand the ACA. I expect that not a single member of Congress has read the whole thing. Nor has the President.

Neither have I.  I just want to know what it means to me: Can I get cheaper coverage? (No)   Is this program going to cost me a bundle in taxes so others get benefit? (Probably).  Is the country better or worse off because of it?  Note that this is my third question. Me first, country second.  Such is the way things are going in America.

We can get specific information to answer the first question, and I did so. I finally made a successful pass through Healthcare.gov and got quotes for coverage. I compared it to my current arrangement, and found that I'm better off where I am. Nice data-driven, objective decision.

The other two questions are trickier. Even if I read and fully understand the thousand or more pages of the Act, I still wouldn't necessarily be able to predict all the economic and political consequences, mainly because I don't understand the motivations of all the lobbyists who actually write much of the legislation these days. So like every other American, I'll form my opinions based on what I read in the press and hear on the radio and TV.

I'll listen to Glenn Beck on occasion and try to pick what makes sense out of the snake oil pitch. I'll listen to NPR as well, and even a little John Stewart.

By the way, did you hear that the Administration is thinking about using The Onion as a channel for reaching young folks about the ACA?  Isn't that interesting - that the most trusted news sources for the Millennials are those who overtly parody the news?

I'll turn to my Feedly feed, and read some mainstream news sources as well as blog articles which seem to be applicable, like the one by Petrilli which I reference at the beginning of this story. I'll attempt to synthesize all that and form an opinion.

Or maybe I'll just watch the Winter Olympics. When will it be warm enough to get the Harley out? It already is in Sochi...