BlogSafety Community: Predators & cyberbullies: Reality …
- Quote: “The CJR article continues, ‘Dateline has argued that ‘Predator’ serves a genuine public good, but it could be argued that, in fact, Dateline is doing the public a disservice.’ One significant disservice is the way Dateline presented the numbers. ‘When Attorney General Alberto Gonzales gave a speech about a major initiative to combat the ‘growing problem’ of Internet predators, he cited a statistic that 50,000 such would-be pedophiles were prowling the Net at any given moment and attributed it to Dateline.’ An investigative reporter looked into the figure Attorney General Gonzales used and found Dateline had gotten it from ‘a retired FBI agent who consulted with the show’ and who, when asked, suggested he kind of pulled it out of the air (Dateline has since disowned the figure, CJR adds).”
Note: Nice deconstruction of the predator myth that is pervading this conversation. And if you want a look behind the whole Dateline hysteria, see the source article in Columbia Journalism Review.– post by willrich
Education Week: High-Stakes Testing Is Putting the Nation At Risk
- Quote: “Because so much depends on how students perform on tests, it should not be surprising that, as one Florida superintendent noted, ‘When a low-performing child walks into a classroom, instead of being seen as a challenge, or an opportunity for improvement, for the first time since I’ve been in education, teachers are seeing [that child] as a liability.’ Shouldn’t we be concerned about a law that turns too many of the country’s most morally admired citizens into morally compromised individuals?”
Note: Worth the free registration to read this summary of a new book by the authors titled “Collateral Damage: How High-Stakes Testing Corrupts America’s Schools,” published this month by Harvard Education Press. Let’s just say the effects of testing are abusive on a number of different levels.
– post by willrich
- Quote: The big “P” word in technology these days is “participatory.” But I’m increasingly convinced that a more important “P” word is “presence.” In a world where we’re seldom able to spend significant amounts of time with the people we care about (due not only to geographic dispersion, but also the realities of daily work and school commitments), having a mobile, lightweight method for both keeping people updated on what you’re doing and staying aware of what others are doing is powerful. –Liz Lawley
Note: I agree, though not so much in the minute to minute way that Liz is writing about. (I just started a Twitter account…) But i wonder about the pedagogies of presence. Presence obviously makes us available to learn from those who know we are here (or there). How do we leverage our ability to have a presence in learning terms?
– post by willrich
Will – “… for the first time since I’ve been in education, teachers are seeing [that child] as a liability.” This is so true – I have sat in meetings and presentations where we actually discussed and were told to put our focus with the “bubble kids” – those that are just below passing scores, because if we get such and such a percentage of those kids to score above ?% our school will make AYP.
The “bubble kids” term just struck me when Brian wrote that. I have been in those same meetings, even spoke at length with my mother about it (her whole job right now is to pull “bubble kids” out of the classroom and work with them for this purpose!).
What is funny is that although I have heard this term many times, this is the first time that it reminded me of the so-called “Bubble Boy” back in the 80’s (I think) who was on the news a lot for a while there. I remember thinking, “what a sad existence that would be”.
Ugh, now I’m feeling the same way about our new “bubble kids”. What a sad existence we have created for these kids as a result of the AYP pursuit.
Will–
I posted on my blog about Twitter being used at the SXSW music conference by attendees this week for people to locate their friends or make plans remotely, which I found interesting.
And on another note, the quote about students with difficulty being seen as liabilities because of AYP rings as sadly true.
The question is, what are we as educators going to do about that and advocate for those children?
Will, what’s this, three blog posts for the price of one? 😉
1) Blogsafety article – funny, I was just reading this yesterday too. My problem with the Dateline NBC series is that any initial value it had (and for raising awareness and creating conversations it had a LOT) was diminished with each successive episode. How many different miscreants do we need to see paraded across the screen? What is this, Predator Idol? While I suspect there are people at NBC who genuinely want to help combat this problem, this series has turned into a cash cow for them. It disgusts me. I would like to see NBC make an announcement that 100% of the advertising revenue they get from the show is donated to the Center for Missing or Exploited Children or something like that. Seriously!
2) Bubble Kids … ugh. We just experienced grades 5 & 8 testing this past week and 3/4 are this week. Please, everyone, say a prayer for every kid you know in a NJ elementary school this week!
3) Twitter … ugh again. Ok! So I signed up and friended you, put a badge on my personal blog, and I’m checking it out. I plan to try it using the web-only interface for now but am thinking it might come in handy at NECC in June.
Peace!
-kj-
I have taught remdial reading for 30 years to elementary and middle school children.Some children do not learn a “year’s worth of growth” in a year. We are dooming them to failure year after year. It makes me so angry that these students have no chance of being a success. Who are we to say that they have to make a certain amount of growth to be successful. Tortoise and the hare?
And don’t even go there talking about merit raises based on how your students performed on a test!
Now that my blood pressure is up, I will go for a walk.