One positive aspect of Pycon is I get to meet a lot of world savvy people with skills outside of my skill set. We also get to exchange ideas about economic matters.
One electrifying email from ISEPP, my home office for the conference, told me of plans to close our flagship charter where Edubuntu is used and students learn entrepreneurship skills like music publishing. This is one of the most innovative charters in the state, and because it makes other more unimaginative schools look tawdry by comparison, it has never been offered a building, though by law it's public, and the Portland District has a surfeit of unused school buildings in inventory, many of them standing quite empty. The goal among some has been to force LEP High into a high rent corner, suck all the life out of it, then leave it for dead. March 30th with supposed to be the final nail in the coffin. Fortunately, Portland's leadership is not quite that short sighted and the thugs behind this mendacious plan were met head on by student activists and community organizers, who managed to raise much of the cash needed for rent. Even the landlord got into the act, by lowering the amount due. http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2009/03/portland_school_board_closes_p.html (Oregonian write-up) Willamette Week wrote a highly supportive editorial whereas I fired off some Wiki stuff (Dr. Benson and I both use Wikis for political work, easier to change on the fly) attn school board, letting 'em know that LEP High has some friends in high places, including at ISEPP, represented at Pycon. http://wweek.com/editorial/3520/12350/ (Willamette Week) http://wanderers.pbwiki.com/PyconPromo (my Wiki page promoting PDX as FOSS capital) Anyway, that's just local politics, maybe not that exciting to outsiders. The economics are more general though: charter schools, networking directly with federal agencies (many of which have stimulus money) allow fast tracking noob teachers, including geeks with still-intact ideals, with the added benefit of merit pay (not just mindless "seniority") to keep the more skilled from fleeing to more lucrative careers (that's been the problem: learn any math industry actually uses and you're out the door, gone from teaching, especially high school). If you can make up in perks and status what's missing in basic income, yet still offer a livable pay grade, that's something. Having summers off is another big plus, although LEP High adopted a year round model (same number of vacation days), as other schools are likely to do, on top of whatever remote access. Some teachers do computer camps during this time period, The model here is a numerate faculty with skills will maintain its own RAMP stack (R is for Ruby, Linux presumed -- more a joke than a serious proposal, but we should acknowledge that LAMP is a bit dated, given Google App Engine et al -- just saying MVC might be better) in tandem with apprenticing students. Why would a school want an intranet, a place to store history, trophies, results of virtual contests, lore? Why would a biology class want to register field work from year to year? Why would class photos still be meaningful to alumni years later? Yearbooks on the intranet? Why would anyone want that? A few charters might. The rhetoric here is "all schools are charter schools" i.e. it's more a matter of when, in time, you got handed your template, which mixins you've got. By today's rules, it's OK to fast track and merit pay geeks. It's also worthwhile to upgrade in place i.e. get those skills on the job (no matter when your charter). There's this tendency to say "charter" versus "public" among those ignorant of the code, whereas the whole point of charters is to integrate them into the public framework (moves which antediluvians resist, by encouraging the perception of charters as "not public" -- an transparent deception if you think about it). The current federal administration is on board with these innovations, which many conservative Republicans like as well as this is seen as a "states rights" issue, e.g. Alaska doesn't want to kow-tow to some national standards committee with its sorry textbook recommendations (there is no such national committee but you can bet some old skool recyclers would want there to be -- plus they should mandate TI calculator use while they're being lazy). That's the easy way to get a market, dictate through legislatures, but in a democracy promising lots of choices, that's unlikely to be sustainable. The politicians need a credible rhetoric as well, can't do the impossible, no matter how much a lobby group make think it "owns" someone. If a charter in Matsu District wants to contract directly with O'Reilly for teacher training, and go with a more geekish discrete math track, such as we're working on here in Oregon (TechStart of Software Association of Oregon a player here), then who's to stop 'em? Freedom of choice is what parents want as well. The bogus argument that "changing schools will mean falling behind if not everyone is using the same textbook" is another idiotic dodge you'll find in the literature, an argument for lockstep conformity, using ETS (Educational Testing Service) as the one common beacon ("blue meanies revenge" might be a name for this syndrome). Minus a Math Czar, the Prussian objectivists, filled with fantasies of lockstep, see ETS as the next best thing. If we have top-down control over the math track, we'll be able to enforce the "broken pipeline" philosophy that keeps our math bereft of anything that smacks of computer science, nevermind the social costs in terms of kids turning away, not seeing the point of ascending Calculus Mountain merely to please the AP bosses (last year's Chicago talk). My daughter's public charter, a geek Hogwarts called Winterhaven, went with Math Learning Center's visual math for its cohorts, something mostly unheard of at the national level, and way better for some types of learner. It's maybe easier for a middle school to innovate in this way as they're further from the ETS gatekeepers, time-wise. This is the same school where I was invited to teach Python to all the 8th graders, which they ask I present with the GIS spin. That meant using XML-RPC to get lat/long coords based on home address, KML files from Google Earth, lots of geographic rich data structures (e.g. Python dicts with embedded lists). http://www.4dsolutions.net/ocn/winterhaven/ I've archived all this before so will trail off at this juncture... Kirby PS: Thx to Steve Holden's tutorial for reminding me that string interpolation in key:value mode works with any object with a __getitem__ rib, not just a dict. I hadn't quite remembered that, plan to use that in classes this month. >>> class C(object): def __getitem__(self, key): return self.__dict__[key] >>> o = C() >>> o.a = 1 >>> o.b = 2 >>> o.__dict__['a'] 1 >>> "and a %(a)d and a %(b)s" % o 'and a 1 and a 2' _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
