The birth of alternative certification?

It could be. I am headed to the library now to pour over the boxes of microfiche to try to find an earlier reference/suggestion that New Jersey should consider such an approach…..on second thought, I am hungry. I am going to go have dinner instead.

Here is an excerpt from a letter that is an excerpt from the post I linked above:

Providing actual school practice is the easy part; producing broadly educated and intelligent young men and women is the hard part. But we already have these young men and women. Instead of using the bureaucracy to keep them out of our public schools, shouldn’t we find some way to let them in?

He was likely not the first to make this connection, but New Jersey was most definitely the first state to go down the road to loosening their certification regulations. I would have loved to be in those conference rooms when this was discussed, but I was busy solving differential equations as a seven year old…or at least learning basic math.

Carnival of Education…

…has gone hiking courtesy of Successful Teaching.

Iran updates…constantly

Andrew Sullivan and his helpers at The Daily Dish have been aggregating information coming out of Iran constantly all weekend and today. It’s impressive what they are getting from many sources.

I am both fearful and hopeful today. Fearful of the safety of the, literally, millions of protesters, but hopeful that some good (in other words, more freedom/representation) may come of this. It will likely be quite messy and not necessarily a benefit to the US immediately, but has to be better than what is there now pretending to be a republic.

A side story is how this blog has basically trumped the MSM. As Megan notes, it might not all be their fault, but it is yet another indication of the change that is coming.

Stealing Elections

If I was going to steal an election, I would not do it like Mr. Ahmadinejad. From the WSJ, Amir Taheri writes:

Mr. Ahmadinejad was credited with more votes than anyone in Iran’s history. If the results are to be believed, he won in all 30 provinces, and among all social and age categories. His three rivals, all dignitaries of the regime, were humiliated by losing even in their own hometowns. This was an unprecedented result even for the Islamic Republic, where elections have always been carefully scripted charades.

Many in Tehran, including leading clerics, see the exercise as a putsch by the military-security organs that back Mr. Ahmadinejad. Several events make these allegations appear credible. The state-owned Fars News Agency declared Mr. Ahmadinejad to have won with a two-thirds majority even before the first official results had been tabulated by the Interior Ministry.

I would try to make the results believable. Here is more on how insane the results are:

From 538.com

Speechless

It is not often that I am speechless. This usually happens when I am very angry and do not wish to offend or say something I regret. Another possibility is that whatever might come out of my mouth would be very cynical. Both of these were true a few hours ago when I first read this.

Skilled professionals in math, science and other fields could bring their real-world knowledge and experience into Pennsylvania’s classrooms under a proposal by Governor Edward G. Rendell that will boost student achievement, address teacher shortages and better prepare the state’s future workforce for high-demand science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM, fields.

I have since recovered my tongue and will now explain. We were accepted in PA in 2002 for a few subject areas (Math, Elementary Ed, English). Since that time, we have added 8 more certification areas. We have attempted to engage the state regarding adding the Sciences (Physics, Chem, Bio, etc.) to what is accepted for about 4 years. This has been a slow process to be kind. Mostly, we have been ignored. Granted, the state certification office has every right to ignore us.

However, why would you go and create a certification route that is identical to ABCTE and that targets Math and Science career-changers? This will cost you money and take time to develop. It also will not have great assessments behind it validating the knowledge of these potential teachers. You could have been getting these candidates 4 years ago. I am back to speechless now.

A little more on Sotomayor

As a follow-up to my post on Sotomayor and identity politics, I wanted to also link to this column from Charles Krauthammer. He articulates a few of my issues with identity politics and the SCOTUS much better than I could. If I had read this before posting this morning, I no doubt would have linked to it earlier.

Krauthammer addresses empathy in regards to every day life vs. the courthouse:

Empathy is a vital virtue to be exercised in private life — through charity, respect and loving kindness — and in the legislative life of a society where the consequences of any law matter greatly, which is why income taxes are progressive and safety nets are built for the poor and disadvantaged.

But all that stops at the courthouse door. Figuratively and literally, justice wears a blindfold. It cannot be a respecter of persons. Everyone must stand equally before the law, black or white, rich or poor, advantaged or not.

He goes on to articulate a political tactic regarding her confirmation that may help the hapless Republican party that I agree with.

Make the case for individual vs. group rights, for justice vs. empathy. Then vote to confirm Sotomayor solely on the grounds — consistently violated by the Democrats, including Sen. Obama — that a president is entitled to deference on his Supreme Court nominees, particularly one who so thoroughly reflects the mainstream views of the winning party. Elections have consequences.

Talk of National Standards

It’s time for the latest round of national standards development. Yippee! I truly wish the groups working on this (CCSSO and the NGA) the best of luck in crafting standards representing a core knowledge of what we would like our children to emerge from the K-12 system knowing.

It is logical on so many levels to put all states on a level playing field in the era of No Child Left Behind. It isn’t so much in line with federalism, but many states have been quite bold in lowering the bar (I’m talking to you Wisconsin and Arizona) in order to keep the Federal money flowing in. Others (good job Massachusetts) have held the line and kept their standards high.

Eduwonk points out the “perverse incentive” inherent in any national effort such as this:

…isn’t there a powerful incentive to be as inclusive as possible in order to get the most states to sign-on and appease as many constituencies as possible?  In other words, in the media this will be seen as a failure unless some critical mass of states sign-on to it.  Yet, in fact, it might really be a success even if only a handful join initially.  Perhaps the problem isn’t that few states will join, it’s that everyone will…

Core Knowledge notes that early reports on the standards sausage-making are, as one would expect, not pretty at all.

The ABCTE standards for our 12 exams are very strong. (Note that I am as biased as I could possibly be on this topic having engineered the development of the majority of them.) The beauty of our process is that no one was looking over our shoulder through every step of their development. We worked very hard to get dedicated, knowledgeable subject matter experts in the room and told them we wanted standards without fluff that would serve as the framework for future test questions.

We did not have buy-in from any states ahead of time, but we were confident that most educators would approve of them after review. The process was 100% transparent. Our experience has shown this to be true; roadblocks to us entering states are generally political, regulatory and/or philosophical. In fact, after piloting our Math certification for a few years, the state of Utah examined our assessments with a magnifying glass and proceeded to enthusiastically approve all of them.

Identity politics discussion

The nomination of Sonia Sotamayor and the firestorm that some Republicans attempted to subsequently whip up spawned a great discussion between a few Atlantic bloggers regarding identity politics. The editors have taken the liberty of compiling the highlights in one place (linked above) to save readers some time (I very much appreciate this).

Before I get to the discussion itself, let me note that I really get tired of what happens when it’s time to nominate a new SCOTUS judge. We get the same tired old arguments from both sides when you know he/she is going to be confirmed. I am too young to remember Robert Bork, but he and Harriet Miers are the only exceptions in recent times. I am quite thankful that the firestorm surrounding Miers led to her withdrawl by the way.

My feelings on judges is that you pick the best person for the job. Experience, hard work and intelligence should rule the day. My views are formed by the fact that I strongly believe a judge interprets the law. He/She is not there to shape it to the world we live in. That is for our elected representatives. If 10 years from now, we somehow have nine Hispanic female judges, I will have no problem with it if they were selected based on their resume. Sotomayor has a solid resume and the quotes that the R’s are using to attack her are pretty weak.

Now to what was, for me, the highlight of the discussion. I enjoyed the identify politics discussion and the way it branched into some political philosophy. The beauty of it was at the end when someone actually admits they might have made a mistake. Andrew Sullivan (The Daily Dish) writes:

I think I blew it in that post on Sotomayor. I was unfair. My worries about the reductionism of identity politics stand. And Ta-Nehisi isn’t that far apart from me in fact. But it was unfair to project all that on a Latina woman who made it the hard way based on one stray comment and years of activism in her community. I got owned and deserved it.

This is extremely rare and it raises my respect for anyone with the stones to say it out loud in such a public place as the Internet. TNC expresses something else important as well when he notes:

I don’t think of blogging as a final verdict on my politics, as much as I think of it as a factory without walls. You are watching writing get made, largely because you are watching thinking get made. And then a few times a year, you’ll see the final product of that thinking in long form. And even then I reserve the right to revisit that long form and dissent from my own words, to recast them, revise them, and reject them completely, if need be.

I have deep respect for the humility of this statement. I feel the same way in that I am fully aware that there are countless things I don’t know anything about and a few that I know just a little bit about and maybe a handful that I feel very confident discussing (sadly, the Steelers likely top the list instead of something useful). If this blog lasts long enough, I would expect to see future me disagree with current or past me.

Measurement Error?

One of the climate blogs I follow has a side project wherein the author and many of his readers have been surveying a large percentage of the surface stations in the US. There are 1,221 ground stations blanketing the country to measure temperature. Their sample is now large enough (860) that the Heartland Institute has published the findings.

The project found that “89 percent of stations “fail to meet the National Weather Service’s own siting requirements” that say stations must be located at least 100 feet from artificial heat sources.” This was not a surprise to me as I’ve been following the blog which occasionally publishes details of the more egregious violations in the stations it surveys.

I also wanted to note a couple more things about this. I am surprised that I was quoting from a pretty major newspaper (Orange County Register) expressing some alarm that what is supposed to be the best temperature record in the world is likely quite unreliable.

It’s also amazing what the author of this blog (Anthony Watts) has accomplished. His readers did a tremendous amount of work surveying these 800+ surface stations. He obviously did his fair share creating the tools for them to survey and keeping the web site up to date (with the help of other volunteers). He did all of this without receiving funding from anyone. No corporate or individual donations were accepted. It’s a testament to both the power of the Internet and his personal drive regarding accurately measuring what we are told is of critical importance to our future (climate change).

Teacher of the Year a career changer

This is good times. I don’t really have anything else to say on the subject. It just makes me happy to see a true career changer become National Teacher of the Year. Someday, it will be an ABCTE alumni winning this award.