Within five minutes, a woman responded that it was a memorial to a Civil War general.

What makes this story so remarkable was that the woman who sent the information was in New Zealand, Warlick added.

The founder of the Landmark Project used this anecdote to show that technologies such as Twitter have completely — and rather suddenly — changed the way the world communicates and obtains information. Those ways are particularly compelling to students, and school board members must find ways to harness – not ban — these technologies to understand the youngest generation and teach them more effectively.

Educators repeatedly have been given the message to embrace technology in education. But figuring out what that means—and what to do about it—remains an elusive goal for school board members.

Warlick shared his thoughts in an interactive session at the final session of NSBA’s Leadership Conference Sunday. Attendees shared their reactions online during the presentation in a Twitter-like chat room called Knitterchat.com, which Warlick created. He uses the Knitterchat platform not only as a way to further discussions and answer questions from participants but also as an example of how students use technology to access information.

Today’s students “have almost no formative recollection of 20th century. They are 21st century learners,” he said. “Yet they are still learning in 19th century classrooms.”

Warlick showed examples of his college-age son’s videography and texting as ways the younger generations use technologies to gain information and communicate. Rather than fear cell phones, social media, and video games, educators should use them as classroom tools, Warlick said.

“Things have to change — we are for the first time in history preparing children for a future we can’t describe,” he said. “So what do our children need to be learning for an uncertain future?”

For one, education policy experts have repeatedly emphasized the need for more classes tied to STEM—science, technology, engineering, and math—subjects because so many future jobs will be in those fields. But Warlick argued for a similar emphasis on creative arts, including music, drama, and culture.

Not only will those classes stimulate learning in STEM topics and other areas, but these students will be prepared for careers that require creative arts skills to support STEM fields, such as designers for the casings of new technology products.

He suggested questions that school board members should ask, including, “What are the children learning that I didn’t learn?” and, “How the schools are using this new information environment to touch their communities?”

For more information on Warlick’s work, visit http://landmark-project.com.

That was the message of Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education, who spoke Sunday at NSBA’s Leadership Conference in Washington, D.C.

More attention must be paid to technology because limited financial resources and demographic trends are likely to force schools to hire fewer, younger, and less-experienced teachers in the years ahead, he said. Technology will prove a useful tool to help these teachers maximize their time and instructional effort.

But the promise of technology will only be kept if school leaders are smart about its use, Wise warned. Technology is not simply about adding laptops or Internet connections to classrooms.

“If you do that, you accomplish nothing but the spending of a lot of money,” he said. “What is required is a conscious strategy. When talking about districts where the technology is not working and large amounts of money were spent, you’re looking at a district that did not develop a conscious strategy beforehand.”

To emphasize his point, Wise showed his audience two slides: one of a classroom of a hundred students sitting in an amphitheater-style classroom with laptops in front of them; the other of a classroom where students were organized in small groups, with the teacher standing amidst half a dozen students, each working on their own laptop project.

The more intimate setting was the more reassuring, he noted. The scene suggested students were receiving personalized instruction. They were more engaged in individual instruction and advancing at their own pace, with an instructor available to answer questions, track individual student progress, and ready to step in when students faltered.

Any discussion of successful technology in schools won’t focus gadgets and software, he added. “It’s about the teaching, the pedagogy. We want technology to enhance teachers … We want technology matched with what teachers teach to allow them to do what couldn’t be done before.”

That’s going to take a lot of thoughtful planning—and school boards are just the entity to see that happen, Wise told conference attendees. One of the strengths of technology is that it can be adapted to variety of settings, and school boards are best positioned to determine what adaptations are needed for their school settings and student populations.

“During the next several years, the local school board will be the main agent for change,” Wise told School Board News after his presentation. “They will provide the innovation … school boards are where the rubber meets the road, and they’ll create the future education laboratories to help us find what works.”

“The National School Boards Association has been an advocate for the use of technology to enhance teaching and student achievement for more than two decades,” said NSBA’s Executive Director Anne L. Bryant. “On Digital Learning Day, we must ensure that all students have access to these resources or we will see the digital divide widen.  Devices and content alone will not transform education.  Policies and targeted resources must also be aligned to ensure teachers have the essential professional development opportunities that are necessary to maximize learning in this exciting new age of content.”

Today, a majority of states, hundreds of school districts, thousands of teachers, and more than a million students will encourage the innovative use of technology by trying something new, showcasing success, kicking off project-based learning, or focusing on how digital tools can help improve student outcomes.

To see real examples of the positive impact digital resources are having on learning, visit here to participate in Digital Learning Day’s virtual town hall meeting today from 1-2:30 p.m. EST. NSBA will be hosting a Technology Leadership Network site visit February 19-21 in the Texas’ Klein Independent School District, one of the districts featured during the virtual town hall. To learn more about Klein Independent School District’s technology initiatives go to:  http://www.nsba.org/tlnsitevisits/klein.htm.

That’s what Jim Hull, a senior policy analyst at NSBA’s Center for Public Education, points out in a series of blogs appearing this week in response to comments by education historian Diana Ravitch and Washington Post education blogger Valerie Strauss. All totaled, the three blogs provide a good introduction to what value-added is — and, perhaps equally important, what it isn’t.

“As the Center for Public Education report Building a Better Evaluation System states, value-added scores can be an effective tool in accurately identifying effective and ineffective teachers,” Hull writes, “but they should be used within the context of a comprehensive evaluation system that includes observations and other qualitative measures of a teacher’s performance.

Is education technology the key to solving our K12 problems? That’s an exaggeration, of course, but Time columnist Andrew Rotherham says we’re often seduced by what technology can do and consider it a panacea. No Luddite he, Rotherham presents a compelling argument for being purposeful and realistic when you consider new technology for the classroom.

Lastly, read Brett Nelson on Forbes (who comes to us via Joanne Jacobs’ blog) on why students should delay college for two years and get what he calls “grownup training.”

“Specifically: six months spent working in a factory, six in a restaurant, six on a farm and six in the military or performing another public service such as building houses, teaching algebra or changing bedpans,” Nelson writes. “. . . I’d reckon that grownup training would put undergrads deeply in touch with 1) why they wanted to go college in the first place, 2) what a special opportunity college really  is, and 3) more than a vague notion of what — and better yet — who they wanted to be when they grew up.”

Covering mostly math and science, Khan’s low-key, straightforward and concise approach to brain-jarring concepts like quadratic equations and the phases of mitosis have taken the education community and students by storm.  

Khan, who is a keynote speaker at NSBA’s 2012 Annual Conference in Boston in April, carved time out of his busy schedule to talk to ASBJ Senior Editor Naomi Dillon about his journey toward “helping people learn what they want, when they want, at their own pace.”

So you’re an educator to the masses. Would you say that’s an accurate description?

Different people have different views on what an education is, and we don’t pretend that just experiencing on-demand video by itself is the panacea to solving education’s problems. But what we think we’re giving, at minimum, is an alternate way to tackle the material. If students missed a day at school, if their mind wasn’t engaged when it was happening in class, if they need to remediate things from previous years they’re definitely getting that. And I actually don’t think that should be understated, because frankly I think a lot of the reason why some students have trouble progressing is because they have gaps in their basic knowledge.

Few people realize how difficult it is to transfer knowledge from one person to the next. Did that come naturally to you?

I wouldn’t want to pretend by me recording these videos that I’m doing everything that a teacher does. I once volunteered teaching seventh-graders when I was in Boston. It didn’t take long for the classroom management to go through the door. I did not know what I was doing in terms of being able to handle 30 kids. But the part about explaining concepts, that is something I am into, and that’s hopefully the value I’m bringing. There’s a methodology to learning and my videos are about sharing that methodology to other people: “Let’s think this through; let’s do what seems logical; let’s try to find the pattern between things; and let’s do it in a conversational way.” You should feel like it’s a story even if it’s a math problem.

Where did this drive and appreciation for learning and education come from?

I think it’s a human instinct to love to learn and understand the world. But I think, what’s happened for most people is they become frustrated with one topic or another, or have a bad experience along their education, and they kind of fall off and start to believe that they don’t like learning. When really, they just don’t like being frustrated, they just don’t like being talked down to, and they don’t like when the information is going past them.

Explain why we don’t see you in your videos – just a black screen and a drawing tool with a multiple array of colors, a whole setup you call “The Forum Factor.”

When I decided to make the first videos I didn’t have any production equipment or a background in video production. I just got a cheap $20 head-set to record my voice, used screen capture software and just started using Microsoft paint. My cousins liked it. Other people gave good feedback. And now, although we have the ability to do more, we realize that [this way] is not only easier to produce, but it focuses on the content. It’s more intimate. It feels like we’re sitting next to each other as opposed to me at a white board talking to you.

Your videos are known for being brief and concise, lasting no more than 10 minutes. How do you know how much material to cover and when to stop?

I have found with most concepts 10 minutes is actually about enough time. You can get about two or three pretty decent concepts across in that time. If it requires more complex development I will say, “Hey, let’s just take a break,” and I’ll just resume it in the next video.

Besides the actual lesson, what do you want the viewers to take away from the videos and the exercises on the Khan Academy?

What we’re hoping to do is give students a genuine love for learning and, frankly, I hope I can make students see what I see: a world that’s fascinating, a world that’s full of mysteries to be solved.

Education Week‘s Alyson Klein noted, “In giving this election-year State of the Union speech, Obama may brag about some of the steps his administration has taken on education, including creating the Race to the Top education redesign competition, and offering states wiggle room under key parts of the No Child Left Behind Act if they agree to take-on the administration’s reform priorities.”

Klein went on to mention, “Last year, President Obama asked Congress to pass a bipartisan reauthorization of the law. But it never happened, and now the administration is moving ahead with a waiver package that Obama’s own secretary of education thinks is stronger than any of the legislation under consideration. So, if I were a betting woman, I’d guess there won’t be much talk about NCLB this time.”

The National School Boards Association (NSBA) will be hosting a Twitter chat during the State of the Union address tonight starting at 9 p.m. EST.

Join the Twitter chat by using hashtag #EdSOTU and share your thoughts about the president’s speech and his plans for K-12 education.

By using #EdSOTU in your tweets, you will become a part of this virtual conversation. To see the entire conversation stream just go to Twitter and search #EdSOTU.

Join the Twitter chat by using hashtag #EdSOTU and share your thoughts about the president’s speech and his plans for K-12 education.

By using #EdSOTU in your tweets, you will become a part of this virtual conversation. To see the entire conversation stream just go to Twitter and search #EdSOTU.

Speaking of initiatives, the panelists– which included award-winning science teacher Jason Pittman, Jayne Marlink of the California Writing Project and the Alliance’s Bob Wise—also spent time discussing the inaugural Digital Learning Day, the flagship event of the Alliance’s Center for Secondary School Digital Learning and Policy, which recently released the report, “The Digital Learning Imperative: How Teaching and Technology Meet Today’s Educational Challenges.”

NSBA has joined other leading education organizations as a core partner of Digital Learning Day, the culmination of a year-round national awareness campaign to improve teaching and learning, utilizing the power of today’s technology tools.

Marked for February 1, Digital Learning Day will feature a nationwide, interactive town hall meeting and a request that everyone do one of three things: start a conversation, try one new thing and showcase success.

This year’s roster of host districts is no exception and as always encompasses a diverse set of districts from across the country.

“Through NSBA’s technology site visits school leaders are able to see education technology innovation in action and develop their own successful technology initiatives,” said Ann Flynn, NSBA’s Director of Education Technology. “This is a great opportunity for school leaders to witness classrooms where curriculum goals drive technology decisions.”

Leading this year’s line-up is Klein Independent School District in Texas, whose site visit runs Feb. 19-21, conveniently coinciding with the American Association of School Administrators Annual Conference, which concludes on the 19^th in Houston.

Located less than an hour away, Klein ISD is a highly diverse district serving 46,000 students. Visionary leadership and job-embedded professional development are critical factors in the district’s many accomplishments, which include the deployment of more than 8,600 Tablet PCs. And no wonder, the district is led by Jim Cain, who was named one of 2010’s “Tech-Savvy Superintendents,” by e-School News.

Klein’s tour is quickly followed by Alabama’s Cullman City Schools, which also boasts a 2010 “Tech-Savvy Superintendent” in Jan Harris. Under Harris, Cullman has experienced significant gains in student achievement since launching its 1:1 Laptop Initiative in 2006. Serving 3,000 students, Cullman was the first district in Alabama to provide laptops and wireless Internet access to students and educators and is a former TLN Salute District and a CoSN Team Award-winner. Cullman welcomes TLN visitors from Feb. 29 to March 2.

Though the next site visit kicks off April 1 in Surprise, Arizona, Dysart Unified School District No. 89’s whole-hearted adoption of technology is no sleight of hand. With a student population of some 25,000 students, Dysart’s enrollment has more than tripled in the last decade, making it the fastest growing district in Arizona and the second fastest in the country. Recognized as a 2010 TLN Salute District and home to a pair of previously named “20 to Watch” educators, Dysart provides Instructional Growth Teachers at each campus and has developed iPal, the district’s Integrated Data tool to provide dynamic assessment data, online curriculum maps and professional development opportunities.

Nevada’s Clark County School District rounds out the circuit in late April, immediately following NSBA’s Annual Conference. As the fifth largest district in the nation with nearly 310,000 students, Clark County encompasses both Las Vegas and its outlying communities. Ranked first in last year’s Digital School District Survey, Clark County is a leader in using technology to provide enterprise systems that support the business of learning and provide engaging 21st century experiences for all students. From cyber-bullying prevention initiatives and Bring-Your-Own-Device pilot programs to online professional development and the extensive use of social networking systems, this visit offers examples of innovation that can be applied in districts of any size. See for yourself between April 25 and 27.

“Site visits offer administrators, teachers and board members a unique opportunity to travel together with a shared focus on how the technology innovations they are seeing compare to their current initiatives or may potentially influence their future decisions,” Flynn said. “Staff and board members from the host districts connect with individual attendees who share their roles to address specific concerns and issues unique to their particular job responsibilities while ensuring all participants leave with an understanding of how technology is helping address the district’s “big picture” goals and objectives.”

Registration for these dynamic learning opportunities is now open and accessible here along with full agendas and more details about the districts and the TLN program.

His innovations allow adults and children alike to interact with their world in ways only previously imagined in science fiction. Many adults recognize the convenience of having the power of the Internet in the palm of their hand, the ability to manipulate content with the touch of a finger, the option to carry a lifetime of favorite tunes, or download applications to simplify everything from airline schedules to paying for parking meters. Yet some of those same adults have not embraced the idea that these tools can have the same transformational impact on education for today’s youth. Jobs’ Apple was among the earliest technology companies to recognize that their devices could impact learning and invested heavily in research known as Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow. Those early studies paved the way for desktop hardware manufacturers from IBM to Dell and a host of software developers. Fast-forward to today, and we see Apple again paving the way in the education marketplace with innovative learning tools like the iPad. Parents of autistic students have said it is a device that it empowers their children, while the multitude of applications allow teachers to create engaging, real-world learning experiences for all students.

As an observer of education technology for 20+ years, I believe Jobs’ greatest legacy is the foundation he helped establish to transform how students learn. He provided the vision and the tools, now it is up to the rest of us to ensure they are implemented in such a way to become as seamless and effective as Edison’s contribution to electricity. Perhaps when devices like the iPad are accessible to all children, the next generation’s Edison will find his or her calling and we will see a new model for learning in our K-12 institutions.

• In 21st century, Apples aren’t just for teachers but for students
• Apple Computer founder: Retain great teachers
• NSBA technology poll shows need to better assess 21st Century skills
• Could Apple return to ed tech?
• What do Dell, Microsoft, and Apple have in common? . . . Besides computers

Share your thoughts about Steve Jobs, post a comment.

Thankfully, NBC has learned its lesson. This year’s event took pains to correct past wrongs as it recognized the complexities school leaders face in managing a public system that is open to all.

Starting with a screening of “American Teacher,” a documentary that helped erase some of the “bad teachers” taste left by “Superman,” and ending with an appearance by former President Bill Clinton, Education Nation featured a strong balance of heavy hitters from education, philanthropy, and politics.

You also had a touch of celebrity — basketball player Lebron James, actress Jennifer Garner, and what amounted to a family reunion with former Gov. Jeb Bush and First Lady Laura Bush participating in sessions — but in this case, it fit the overall tone.

The key word here is balance. Last year’s programming was flawed because it exhorted simple antidotes to complex problems. This year, silver bullets were nowhere to be found, but calls for more effective teaching and improvements to early education were.

You can watch many of the sessions online at www.educationnation.com, but here is my list of highlights:

• Start with “Brain Power: Why Early Learning Matters,” a fascinating hour-long session featuring Nancy Snyderman, NBC’s chief medical editor, and three university professors. Held on Monday morning, it was the best, most concise presentation I’ve seen yet on why we need to reach children much, much earlier than we do.

• The dramatic rise in poverty rates was a focus throughout, especially in the session “What’s in a Zip Code?” moderated by Brian Williams. Poverty is reality for many people in today’s economy — Clinton was eloquent on this topic in the closing session — and communities must come together to do more.

• Education Secretary Arne Duncan was everywhere this year, participating in interviews with Tom Brokaw and responding to questions during various panels (a nice touch).

• We saw an entertaining back and forth between Geoffrey Canada, founder of the Harlem Children’s Zone and Diane Ravitch, author and professor of education at New York University. Their approaches are so different, but both made excellent points. Canada and Sal Khan, another Education Nation speaker, are scheduled to keynote NSBA’s 2012 Annual Conference.

• Teacher and student accountability, as you might expect, was a recurring theme. Michelle Shearer, the current National Teacher of the Year from Maryland’s Urbana High School, said teachers “want to be evaluated on things that really matter.”

“There are all sorts of different ways of looking at student growth,” she said. “Whatever evaluation looks like in the end, it has to be a system of multiple measures, because often what’s most important are those intangibles … that are tough to put on a check list.”

• At the same session, Khaatim El, a former member of the Atlanta school board, addressed the cheating scandal that has plagued the district he served for almost a decade. “We wanted to be the hype,” he said of the allegations, which are based on the state assessments. “We wanted to be the first to get it right so bad.”

But El noted the district also made huge gains in NAEP scores during that time, an achievement untouched but overshadowed by the scandal. “I would be remiss if I didn’t point to the hard work that many educators put in,” he said. “We focused on the basics. Literacy instruction in elementary school. Autonomy for principals. We invested in professional development. Those things were overshadowed by the cheating scandal. And they were good things for kids.”

The setting for Education Nation was not perfect — the big tent in Rockefeller Plaza is a good idea in theory, but the humidity and poor audio were ever-present distractions. And while this year’s session was far more substantive, future years should stop belaboring the problems and focus instead on how to solve them. Panels featuring districts that have been successful at “what works,” with ideas and content that are easily imitated and replicated, would be a valuable start.

Chances are good that will happen. The National School Boards Association (NSBA) had a strong presence in the planning and execution of the meeting. Anne L. Bryant, our executive director, met with NBC officials about the content and answered audience questions in a video Q&A format prior to the event. Mary Broderick, NSBA’s president, was featured in a panel session with the mayors of Albuquerque, Baltimore, and Newark.

“What we’ve heard from the last two days of this conference is that we need to come together around a sense of urgency,” Broderick said during her session, noting that it takes a shared vision between the school board, the mayor’s office, and the community. “The vision needs to be of excellence. If that cohesive message can be carried through our schools … there’s nothing off the table.”

And what about yesterday’s classroom technology? Or, more broadly, yesterday’s teaching methods and the curricula that went with them? Are they still relevant today? Not only are they relevant, argues Core Knowledge founder E. D. Hirsch Jr. — they’re far superior to the process- and test-based approaches of today, an approach he says is responsible for across-the-board declines in verbal SATs.

“Our national verbal decline transcends this ‘achievement gap’ between demographic groups,” Hirsch writes. “The language competence of our high school graduates fell precipitously in the seventies, and has never recovered. What changed — and what remains largely un-discussed in education reform — is that in the decades prior to the Great Decline, a content-rich elementary school experience evolved into a content-light, skills-based, test-based approach that dominates in our schools today.”

It’s an intriguing argument; and, for what it’s worth, I buy some, but not all, of it. Hirsch thinks we’ve all gone skill-based crazy, but at my daughters’ elementary school in Virginia, for example, the approach to skills and content is quite obviously  “both-and,” not “either-or.”  Is it an outlier? I don’t think so.

Another critique of what some consider today’s newfangled education can be found in The Quick and the Ed, where Richard Lee Colvin proclaims that “dumb uses of technology won’t produce smart kids.” He’s commenting on a recent New York Times article on how state-of-the-art technology has not led to higher test scores in many classes.  Once again, his argument is interesting, if taken with a dose of skepticism.  I doubt, for example, that Colvin could find a lot of school technology experts who think that dumb uses of technology are just the thing to make their students smarter.  It’s a bit more complicated than that.

We’ve quoted from the conservative side (Hirsch) so I thought it only fair to go the other direction, and what better place than to education commentator Susan Ohanian? And it turns out, her guest writer, Yvonne Siu-Runyan, president of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), is pining for the old days too. More specifically, a time when school libraries and public libraries weren’t staggering under huge budget cuts. Siu-Runyan quotes an American Library Association study showing that school expenditures for information resources decreased overall by 9.4 percent from 2009 to 2010, and in high-poverty areas by an alarming 25 percent.

It doesn’t bode well for creating the kind of content-rich environments that Hirsch and so many others say are critical to our future.

Building on the popularity of the TLN’s spring series, a new education technology site visit will take place October  12 to 14 in the St. Charles Parish, La., school district, held concurrently with NSBA’s Council of School Attorneys (COSA) School Law Practice Seminar in New Orleans..

“In a time of increased social networking and communications both among students and faculty, the need for school lawyers and school-based technology coordinators to remain abreast of legal trends in the field is readily apparent,” said NSBA General Counsel Francisco M. Negrón, Jr. “The partnership between COSA and TLN is a natural one that is sure to contribute positively to dialogue.”

School policies and legal guidance often struggle to keep pace with the rapid advancements resulting from the introduction and adoption of new technologies, added Ann Flynn, director of education technology and state association services for NSBA.

“This new meeting is designed to address that intersection and offer attendees the practical guidance they need from COSA’s relevant technology-oriented sessions by integrating a traditional TLN site visit around those legal workshops,” Flynn said.

Located 20 minutes west of the Crescent City, St. Charles Parish Public Schools serves about 10,000 students in 17 schools. The district’s successful integration of technology includes a nearly 2:1 student-computer ratio districtwide and a leadership culture that views its commitment to technology as an essential component within the school board’s Strategic Action Plan. The district’s freestanding Satellite Center where high school students can explore career pathways in engineering, culinary arts, multimedia and broadcasting utilizing cutting-edge technology tools will be showcased along with classroom visits and mini-briefings to other schools across all grade levels.

Technology leaders and school attorneys will get an update on the latest technology cases and how the outcomes could impact district policies. Discussion topics include the “do’s and don’ts” of data mining on job candidates and current employees, what forms of board member communication can be considered public information, and how districts can leverage Web 2.0 tools to improve community engagement and instruction without opening itself up to potentially embarrassing, libelous, and litigious situations.

“This event creates an opportunity for dialogue between attorneys and school practitioners to better understand each others’ positions  around these emerging issues  and  provide both groups with valuable insights,” said Flynn.

A notable panel of legal experts, communication specialists, and district officials will lead a discussion on the inherent conflict between the First Amendment rights of media and the confidentiality rights of families involved in crisis scenarios such as cyberbullying and student suicides.

“The role that technology can play in those incidents, as well as how social media is used to transmit information about a crisis reflect the challenges educators face in striking the right balance with policies,” Flynn said. “New state laws limiting communication via social media between students and teachers is another example of how quickly the tech law landscape is changing.”

School tours and classroom observations will be interspersed throughout the three-day event, providing participants with a chance to watch technology in action, be it a computer electronics class that teaches high school students to rebuild and repair used computers that are then provided to their fellow students or an engaging and effective reading intervention program powered by the latest science and technological advances. District staff will also offer mini-briefings to ensure participants understand how professional development and the use of data contribute to the district’s success.

Registration is open and more information is available at www.nsba.org/tlnsitevisits/

BoardBuzz has learned from “Women in STEM: A Gender Gap to Innovation” that women in STEM jobs earn about 86 percent of what men earn (compared to 79 percent in non-STEM jobs).  The wage gap is smallest for engineers (7 percent) and largest for those in computer and math jobs (12 percent).  Yet in spite of the financial advantages, women hold less than 25 percent of STEM jobs, even though they are almost half (48 percent) of the workforce.  Why is that?

There are several reasons, but BoardBuzz has sussed out that when STEM majors work in education or certain other fields, such as healthcare or social science, they are not counted as “STEM jobs.”  BoardBuzz thinks this practice needs to change.  For one thing, it is critical to have an adequate number state-of-the art STEM instructors in our nation’s schools to support the next generation of innovators.  Further, women STEM educators are important role models for young women and can help shrink the gender gap among STEM majors.  Finally, overlooking traditionally female occupations when defining what constitutes a STEM job becomes its own form of stereotyping.  

So, the path to innovation is clear – educate all our students to be proficient in 21st century skills, and recognize that educators are crucial to their success.  Interested in educator effectiveness? Visit the Center for Public Education “Building a Better Evaluation System” web page.

That said, it’s hard to imagine a more breathtaking illogicality than the law’s central premise: That all children, despite their considerable differences, could be taught to a single high standard and that all students would be “proficient” by 2014.

This quote from Arne Duncan’s recent Politico piece on the law is telling:

Despite our shared sentiment for reform and the Obama administration’s long-standing proposal to reshape NCLB, the law remains in place, four years after it was due for reauthorization. Our children get only one shot at an education. They cannot wait any longer for reform.

Read that carefully and you’ll notice the education secretary isn’t talking about reforming schools, but reforming reform. Our children get only one shot at an education, and they cannot wait any longer to reform the reform.

Duncan’s heart is in the right place. He knows the legislation is seriously flawed and has vowed to do, through regulatory reform, what Congress won’t address with legislation. But the Secretary isn’t going far enough — offering merely to be more “flexible” under the same assessment system. That begs the question: If the legislation is so horrendously flawed, shouldn’t there be a moratorium on schools labeled “failing” under that broken system?

That’s exactly what NSBA Executive Director Anne L. Bryant argued last week in a commentary in the Huffington Post:

We need the regulatory relief this summer before school starts, instead of a new bureaucratic process that the Department of Education is purposing that could take many months to create. And as we need this as a matter of policy — not state or school district case-by-case waivers. We specifically support suspension of additional sanctions under current AYP requirements, effective for the 2011-12 school year, so that schools currently facing sanctions would remain frozen; no new schools would be labeled as ‘In Need of Improvement’ or subject to new or additional sanctions.

Lawrence Hardy, Senior Editor

“The site visits have been part of NSBA’s commitment to educational technology since the late 1980s … and they provide a great hands-on opportunity to see, hear and talk with educators that are engaged in using technology in transformative ways,” said Ann Flynn, NSBA’s director of education technology.

As diverse as its student population—about half are minority students and 60 percent receive free or reduced-priced meals–Jefferson County’s integration of technology, as their two-and-a-half day tour revealed, spans an array of subject matter and curriculum.

From a cutting-edge video production studio at Thomas Jefferson Middle School, where broadcasting students learn about electronic publishing, multimedia production, and computerized television to the Humana Fitness Lab, a state-of-the art facility at Wellington Elementary School, where health and fitness is not only fun, thanks the Wii Fit, Playstation GameBikes, and Dance Dance Revolution equipment, but academically enriching as the 2007 and 2008 Mayor’s Top Apple Award for reading achievement shows.

“When you see a district of Jefferson County’s size making concerted efforts across the district for all kids, that’s really impressive because it’s hard to do when you’re that large,” Flynn said.

And while many of the ways Jefferson County has utilized educational technology in the classroom are similar to what other progressive school districts are doing, be it videoconferencing, podcasting, or Web site designing, the school system’s site visit highlighted programs that are fairly unique to them.

Take for instance, Roosevelt-Perry Elementary School, the district’s only grade school technology magnet program where their motto is “Where technology is child’s play,” though what they accomplish is far more elementary.

“The students are exhibiting skills that go far beyond cutting, pasting and coloring,” Flynn said of technology playground rooms where kids create robots or the entries they contribute to their teacher’s blog. “They are really getting the academics though they haven’t taken the fun out of kindergarten.”

On the opposite side of the spectrum is Eastern High School, which boasts a model technology program that consistently rates at the top in the state and in the country. Students there are required to take at least two years of technology courses to graduate and often leave with high-end industry certifications under their belt, which are enough to land them lucrative careers. The program has proven to be so successful that Jefferson County is in the midst of expanding it to two other school sites.

“It was an exceedingly impressive program and it just shows if you put the right kind of program and the right kind of course work in place, you can get kids ready for serious career options,” Flynn said.