Dear Fraser Institute,

You SUCK!

In fairness I am telling you this on the basis of a single observation. One salient point. That’s all I need.

I am basing this judgement on my own narrow area of interest, but it is one that is important to me, and it is one that is way too complex to be summarized by a single, poorly executed assessment.

The area of interest is Public Education and the assessment I speak of is the Foundation Skills Assessment (FSA’s). To be fair, I must say that the design of these tests are good:

The assessment instruments are developed by BC educators. The development generally involves a year-long cycle in which the Ministry of Education engages teams of practicing classroom teachers and subject area specialists in the process. (link)

Also, having seen the tests, they are indeed well written.

Ah, but then you step in! The Fraser Institute takes the results of these tests, the free and available information collected from every school, and RANKS THEM. After all it seems this is your duty, and in some misguided way, your responsibility to do so:

A free and prosperous world through choice, markets and responsibility

The Fraser Institute measures and studies the impact of competitive markets and government interventions on individuals and society. Our peer-reviewed research is distributed around the world and has contributed to increased understanding of how economic policy affects people. (link)

It is comforting to know that you use peer-reviewed research in other areas of interest but in education:

How Is our Research Conducted?
We use objective, publicly-available data to rate the schools, such as average scores on provincial tests provided by provincial education ministries. (link)

‘Objective‘? Yes, if you mean ‘unbiased’ in an uninformed way, but not if you mean ‘undistorted’. You see as educators we know better than to cast judgement on students based on a single test, or based on a single objective viewpoint. After all, could my judgement of your organization be true? Should you wait another year to find out if my opinion has changed? Is this fair? Or more importantly is my opinion that ‘you suck’ informative and helpful to you as an organization? (Perhaps if you hear me through.)

Furthermore, I’m not sure what you mean, above, by ’such as’ when in fact results from one test are the only data you collect. Nothing else. You collect average scores from a single test and publish them in a ranking, because the information is there and because you can. But why?

Let me bare my assumption of your altruistic motives: Apparently you want to inform parents about the quality of the schools they put their children into. Well let me ask you this, based on your single test results can you please inform parents of the following:

When a child is bullied in my school, how is this handled?

Is there value in the peer mediation program we run, or the student leadership program?

When a student has special needs how are these met?

How does my school address 21st Century skills? How do we implement the use of technology?

What are our music and creative arts programs like?

What are we doing to implement formative assessment?

How do we differentiate instruction to meet the needs of different kinds of learners?

What does your test tell parents about the learning experiences their children will have in our school?

But let’s not stop there Fraser Institute… rater of schools and keeper of the objective truth. Let us remove the objective lens and get political. You see, this is where you really start to ’suck’!

To look at the damage that you are fostering, we need to examine the negatively charged atmosphere your ranking creates. Teachers see the blatant flaws in this sort of testing and in your ranking of schools, (only some of which I have expressed above). As a result they have banded together and refused to administer the tests. In doing so, they are breaking the law and choosing civil disobedience to protest the misuse of these test results and your subsequent ranking.

The tests are no longer administered by the teachers of the students who take the test. The results are no longer reflected upon or used as a tool for learning. Students are placed in a position of writing a test that is not meaningfully used to assess them, but simply to rank schools.

So now, as a parent of a Grade 4 student expected to write these tests, I cannot see myself subjecting my daughter to this testing simply for your gain… and what it comes down to is that it really and truly is your gain since students, teachers and parents are not gaining anything from this testing process.

And this brings me to your not-so-altruistic motives: Your school rankings brings the Fraser Institute a significant amount of publicity. And I am assuming here, that as an organization that depends on private funding, you need this publicity to maintain your survival. Is this responsible behaviour for an organization that wants to serve the public?

In conclusion, I would like to offer a suggestion to help the Fraser Institute serve parents and for that matter our students, our educators and our schools. I would like to suggest to you that perhaps the ranking of schools does not meet the objectives that you may have originally set out to meet, when you started with this endeavour. And I would like to suggest to you that perhaps standardized testing, as it has been delivered historically, is hindering educators from meaningfully improving schools and learning. And finally I humbly request that you examine some of the trends in education and use your influence and peer-reviewed research to help public education progress in a meaningful way.

I sincerely look forward to changing my opinion of the Fraser Institute in the future.

Regards,

David Truss

Sonya Woloshen is a new teacher this year. She is a job-sharing French Immersion teacher at our school 2 days a week, and at another Middle School the other 3 days.

Sonya did a short pro-d session this afternoon with some of our teachers. Her session title: “I took the red pill”.

She ran through using Powerpoint/Keynote, Screencasts, and podcasts. But time and again her emphasis was not on the technology or the tools, but on the meaningful engagement of students. It was about students learning transferable skills and teaching each other as they learned.

Sonya also highlighted how she and her students use ipods/iTouch/mp3s in her class. Here is her ipod-touch-proposal she made to our Director of IT. She also wrote an article on ipods for CueBC.

For this presentation, she showed the first video here to start things off. Here are a few quotable quotes from her session:

“In 5 years I want to run a paperless class.”

“As a new teacher, I don’t think of it as a issue when one student doesn’t have the technology available. That’s not a problem, just something to work around.”

“I push technology in every project I do, but of course I make it available to my students to do a poster or paper presentation if they want to or if they don’t have the technology available to them at home.”

“What if you don’t know everything? Students love knowing more than you and teaching you.”

Sonya is a digital teacher. She gets that it isn’t about the technology but about engaging students in meaningful ways. She is brand new and yet ahead of the curve. What I really liked about this presentation was that she didn’t just ’sell’ technology, she mentioned the challenges too… from her iTouch being stolen (it was returned) to technical issues causing her to load programs on 25 iTouch/ipods only to have to reload 15 of them the next day when students should have been using them. These are not deal-breakers, simply challenges to overcome.

As she talked I thought about how many teachers get fed up with technology and give up. Imagine a teacher going to a photocopier and it doesn’t work, so they say, “That’s it, I’m never using that again!” Or a person getting behind the steering wheel of a car for the first time, struggling, and then never driving again.

What makes Sonya a Digital Teacher is that she sees the value that tech tools offer and she overcomes the challenges they present (fearlessly). Sonya understands the potential of POD’s, and she is starting her career at a point that I had to evolve to:

I’ve seen a real shift in my own thinking recently. Forget whining about access, disregard the slow speed of change, get over the obstacles! Go after meaningful results. Engage and empower students. Be a leader and a role model.   Opportunities, Access & Obstacles

It is exciting and inspiring to see a new teacher, confidently and fearlessly sharing her learning with a group of teachers, who in turn are equally interested in, and engaging with, new teaching and learning practices. Kids today are part of a YouTube Generation and they need digital teachers to help guide and inspire them to be lifelong learners, equiped for a future that I myself cannot truly imagine.

This was my final presentation that I did at BLC08. I never ended up posting it and now I’ve just recently re-presented it for some student teachers at Simon Fraser University.

[Update: July 20th, '09 - new post with SlideShare available]

Afterwards, I had them contribute to a VoiceThread, just like I did with the TLITE presentations, and with my first – two presentations in Boston. Then I created a Diigo Classroom with them… (I should have spent more time on this final part!)

In my presentation, ‘The Ant’ is a metaphor for a networked learner. Ants work together and do so much more than they could as individuals or even as smaller groups. But, I’d call this the weakest part of the presentation… So how do I fix that? I let my network do it for me!

Here is what happened during the presentation

My (Twitter) Network in Action Part 1: The Shout-Out (Read from the bottom up.)

But that’s just a small sample of the power of a network. Sunday night Heather, a student in my session, sent me this e-mail:

Hey David

I have a quick question, i am going to do a wiki with my bio 11 students
with microbiology.  They have to go online and type in a virus and give a
whole bunch of information.  But how do i know which students did what?  I
did it with wetpaint.  And i have blocked all access just in case the
parents have issues with it.

I’ve never tried Wetpaint. I went to two different Wetpaint pages and didn’t have an answer for her so I went back to Twitter!

My Network in Action Part 2: Seeking Help (Again please read from the bottom up.)

It took just a few minutes to get help from someone in Thailand that I’ve never met face-to-face. We may not have met (f2f) before, but Jeff Utecht is in My Neighbourhood. I actually used the images from one of his posts for my Brave New World Wide Web Slide Show then Video.

Another Tweet by Jeff ended with “Let me know if you need any help”. Thanks Jeff, and thanks also to Jen Jones for inspiring this post! I used one of her blog posts in my presentation above.

And I’d like to say thank to Bob Cotter, Cheryl Oaks, Penny LindBalle, Steve Sokoloski, Maureen Tumenas, etalbert, Lesley Edwards, Mrs_Banjer, Derrall Garrison, Sue Waters, Amanda Salt, Elizabeth Lloyd, Silvia Tolisano, Ian Hecht, Neil Varner, James Gill, Kathy Cassidy, James McConville, Lorraine Orenchuk, Brian Crosby, and Dean Shareski for contributing to the networked ‘conversations’ above.

Ants are individually insignificant, but networked in a collaborative way, they literally move mountains! Networked teachers and educators like these I’ve mentioned are moving mountains too, and it is my hope that Student Teachers will see the value of becoming networked and having their students be networked too!

I’ve been tagged by 3 people, Liz, Alec, and Heidi, to participate in the “7 things you didn’t know about me” meme. Well, here it is… sort of…

1. I’ll start with a confession: I hate memes! As I openly admitted here, I was never really good at doing ‘assignments’ and this blog has never felt like that to me. I’ve thought about this post for days and couldn’t get my butt in front of the computer to write it because it felt contrived. Even when I last wrote a meme I sort of cheated and just printed something I’d already written, (my grandfather’s eulogy to be specific). So, the fact is that you won’t see me write too many of these. -Glad that’s out of the way!

2. I have bouts of insomnia. I’ll be fine for three to six months then I get hit with it. I’ll live off of 3-4 hours sleep for 5 or 6 days, then catch up with a 6 or 7 hour night, and then go another 5-6 days on less than 4 hours sleep. Even when insomnia isn’t hitting me I tend to need very little sleep. I slept in this morning and tonight, if all goes as planned, I will probably get 3hrs sleep. When people tell me, “You are killing yourself”, I usually respond with, ‘I might die younger than you, but I’ll be awake longer than you were.’ Oh and for no rhyme or reason sometimes I can drink coffee and then go right to bed, sometimes it wires me awake for hours, and the same holds true for medicines that are supposed to cause drowsiness.

3. I am not Tech Savvy! If I had a pair of dimes for every time someone said, ‘Dave, you are good with computers, can you help me with this…” then I could retire early. I’ll explain this with a tangent example: The fact is that I happen to be a very good driver. Put me behind the wheel of a car, even in a snow storm, and I’ll get you to your destination safely. However, don’t ask me to do anything more to the car than put gas or windshield washer fluid in it… maybe check the tire pressure… that’s it! Give me a working computer and I can do pretty good there too! Not because I’m savvy though… just because I spend hours trying things… see #2 above.

4. I’ve never owned a car. Both cars we currently have are in my wife’s name.

5. I’m am inventor. I commuted on my bicycle when I first moved to BC and I designed my own commuter bag. It was the first time I’d ever had something made that I designed and other than being a bit too small it turned out great!

From ‘03 to ‘05 I dedicated thousands of hours and created a patent for bicycle locks that connect together. At over 140 pages, 90 or so drawings (many requiring pixel-by-pixel adjustments), not to mention about $15,000, this was a huge undertaking! I flew to Boston to pitch my idea and a patent specialist at Kryptonite Locks liked it… But I pitched it to them just after this happened… their money was a bit tied up to be toying with a specialty lock. I also pitched it in my own back yard at Norco Bikes. They wanted it, but could not convince their foreign lock-maker to make it for them… a long story and moot after The World Patent Office rejected my international patent request because they thought my idea wasn’t ‘novel’ enough. This, despite two industry specialists liking it and finding it novel! I decided not to fight it and throw good money after bad, but I’m really proud of taking this as far as I did.

My ideas mostly come during my bouts of insomnia, when my mind won’t rest. I remember seeing Phenomena with John Travolta and in it there is a scene where he describes random ideas flooding his brain, like shortening the mailman’s route pattern and changing the layout of a parking lot to fit more cars. I really connect to what that feels like. I’ve fully developed ideas in my head for bike lights, an alarm clock and bed sheets… who in their right mind tries to revolutionize the design of bed sheets?

6. I was a Treasure Hunter! Some of my closest friends don’t know this… they thought I was doing ‘mineral exploration’… (this wasn’t really a lie). We never found any treasures, but we found some very interesting holes in some very remote places. Basically we always got there too late!

My adventures included: Nights under remote skies where Magellanic Clouds could be seen with my naked eye; Fishing in waist high water, catching barracuda and tying them to a rope attached to my leg -later on that evening called ‘bait’, when I found out that I was in shark-infested waters; An out-of-body experience, alone on spit facing the Atlantic Ocean with a storm passing by; Hiking a desert mountain only to be hailed on in a freak lightning storm- we had no choice but to take shelter under a tree to avoid welts from the marble sized hail… 20 minutes later we were sweating in blistering heat; Suffering from ‘mask squeeze’ on a 75 foot wall dive (my first dive ever)-I was relieving my ear pressure, but not the pressure in my mask and I ended up with the whites of my eyes almost completely red. Being bitten by over 30 wasps in a cave on a tropical island; Not being bitten by a 4 foot rattle snake I almost walked right into near the Superstitious Mountains; Dragging a boat for over an hour through methane-rich muck because low tide prevented us from lowering the motor; Spending 24,000 kilometers in a Jeep Cherokee in one summer… that’s 10 full days calculated at an unrealistic 100km/hr average; Thousands of false beeps on metal detectors and ground-probing radar; Too many holes dug; Watching the tide change in the Bay of Fundy; Horizon-less fog; Mesmerizing dust devils; Unbelievable hikes; Incredible sunsets; And fond memories to last a lifetime.

7. You didn’t really expect me to follow the rules did you? I’m done. And since I don’t like doing these, I won’t pass this on to anyone. If I’ve inspired you to share, leave a comment with a link and I’ll add my own link below this to give you some link-love.