District Administration - April 2008 - (Page 29)

children practice reading. So far, IBM has given grants worth about $5 million to put the program in 497 sites in 19 countries. Another recent initiative is ¡TradúceloAhora!, which translates Web sites from English to Spanish and allows Spanishspeaking families to trade e-mails with English-speaking teachers and read the district Web pages in their own language. Some 461 schools and nonproﬁts use the technology, worth $9 million. “We hear wonderful stories of how schools and not-for-proﬁts are using it to improve services for Spanish-speaking families,” Willner says. “It costs tens of thousands of dollars of wasted opportunity by putting time into teaching with something that’s not beneﬁcial.” —Solomon Hill, director of technology, Ravenswood City School District, East Palo Alto, Calif. HEWLETT-PACKARD A once-troubled low-income district in the Silicon Valley, the Ravenswood City School District in East Palo Alto, Calif., has attracted nearby businesses that contribute everything from books to laptops to employee elbow grease for painting and landscaping. In a district where 90 percent of 5,000 children receive free or reduced lunch, Solomon Hill, the K8 district’s director of technology, knows the right kind of assistance can go a long way toward narrowing the digital divide for his underprivileged students. But he also knows that some oﬀers of corporate largesse can bring more problems than beneﬁts. A few years ago, a powerful Silicon Valley company “dumped” used computers on the district’s doorsteps, but Hill says maintaining the outdated computers was costly. “Sometimes board members or administrators or members of the community get approached with ideas about products that don’t ﬁt with the goals of the instructional leaders, but they ﬁnd it very hard to turn them down,” Hill says, both because of the corporation’s inﬂuence and because of the district’s cash challenges. “At times, we’ve had to accept those resources, and ultimately it was for political reasons. Instructional leaders know that’s not what they really need, and even though you think it’s free, it costs tens of thousands of dollars of wasted politico education summit in Charlottesville through the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act in January 2002, the BRT has been turning up the volume on its long-playing message that pounds out the beat for systemic school reform. In the name of preparing workers for the global economy, we get hyperacademics: kindergarten twisted from a children’s garden into a high-skill zone, with blizzards of worksheets and threats of failure; we get third graders vomiting on the tests that will determine whether they move on to fourth grade; we get high schoolers weak in bibliographic reference skills and trigonometry denied a diploma. By 1989, CEOs had reached consensus on what school reform should look like, and soon they were cranking out materials and strategies enabling its members to speak with one voice. Using a common education agenda as a springboard for action, each BRT company took responsibility for at least one state. In Maryland, the CEOs of Lockheed Martin, Potomac Electric Power, and Citigroup established the Maryland Business Roundtable for Education; in Washington it was Boeing. And so on across America. The BRT’s deep pockets aided the eﬀort: with its $51.3 million lobbying eﬀort from January 1999 through December 2002, the BRT oﬀered members of Congress “a direct pipeline to big-business CEOs.” By 2000, many states’ legislatures, however, were balking at the sheer size and scope of what corporate America was demanding. The Business Roundtable took note of this resistance when publishing, in the spring of 2001, a booklet titled Assessing and Addressing the “Testing Backlash”: Practical Advice and Current Public Opinion Research for Business Coalitions and Standards Advocates. Edward Rust, CEO of State Farm Insurance and chair of the BRT Education Task Force (and member of the boards of McGraw-Hill, Achieve, and the American Enterprise Institute, as well as President-elect Bush’s Transition Advisory Team Committee on Education), provided the spin on the economic motive behind the BRT’s education agenda, a spin that pops up in newspaper headlines frequently. In a global economy built on knowledge and technical skills, employees must be able to do more now than they did a generation ago. And these demands will continue to increase. The percentage of U.S. companies reporting a lack of skilled employees as a barrier to growth continues to rise—from 27 percent to 1993 to 69 last year. This claim can be handily refuted by looking at U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Writing in Fortune in June 2003, Nelson D. Schwartz noted, “Of the nine million Americans out of a job, 17.4% are managers or specialty workers.” High-skills diplomas won’t keep us safe from global pirates who continue to blather about schools preparing kids for highly skilled jobs for the twenty-ﬁrst century at the same time they are outsourcing jobs faster than we can count. When IBM ships thousands of programmers’ jobs overseas, they call it global sourcing. The truth that the corporate fat cats refuse to speak is that there are more highly skilled workers than there are jobs—and that’s the way they like it. When you have lots of people competing for few jobs, workers are scared and compliant. And so the schools participate by scaring children over high-stakes tests, getting kids ready for their future. —Used with copyright permission. www.DistrictAdministration.com April 2008 29 http://www.DistrictAdministration.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of District Administration - April 2008

District Administration - April 2008
Contents
Editor’s Letter
Letters
News Update
Technology
Facilities & Construction
Curriculum
Inside the Law
District Profile
Administrator Profile
Profit and Loss in School-Business Partnerships
The Broad Way
Big Macs for Big Grades
Hometown Success
How Well Does This Web Site Work?
Speaking Out
Crisis Response
New Products
Problem/Solution
Computer Literature
Research Center
Calendar of Events
Products Showcase
Understanding the Times

District Administration - April 2008