In my day job, I create web tools to display achievement data and best practice information about California public schools. So, I have a little experience working with school data and presenting it.

Today, Governor Schwarzenegger's office released SchoolFinder.ca.gov, a new web site designed to bring "together information about California’s schools and makes it easily accessible for parents." I have admit that I'm completely underwhelmed. The interface to finding your school is fine, but once you've found it, other than a cool map which shows a dot nearby your school (school campuses are too large to be accurately located on the map), the provided information is really too basic to be useful.

The only academic performance data provided is a single year's school-wide Academic Performance Index (API). How are parents supposed to know if a school is improving or declining? How is a parent supposed to know if their African American or Hispanic student will have a good opportunity for success? Without individual subgroups scores or results over time, this site is basically useless for school choice decisions. Parents would be much better served by visiting Just for the Kids - California.

The only financial data provided is a single $/ADA figure for the district. There are no details on revenue or expenditures on the site and nothing giving the parent any clues as to whether funding has been increasing or decreasing or how it is being spent. Parents would be much better served by visiting Ed-Data.

With the exception of the maps, there's nothing on this site that isn't done better by commercial sites such as GreatSchools or the non-profit SchoolDataDirect. Considering that Microsoft and Google were involved in this project, it is quite surprising that this web site is so completely devoid of valuable information.

Even though the State Board of Education has made the decision that 8th graders will be tested in Algebra, the argument over the decision continues in the press. Here are a couple articles for your consideration, one on the pro-Algebra side and one on negative side.

I thought this Ventura County Star opinion piece was pretty representative of the pieces that seem to suggest that this decision is one of the worst ever made by the State Board.

Here is a story of two young men of my acquaintance, both products of the California public schools.

Both enrolled in algebra in the eighth grade.

One, perhaps because of an innate aptitude for math or perhaps because of the skill of his sixth- and seventh-grade math teachers, fared well. The class became the gateway for higher-level mathematics, progressing ultimately to calculus and beyond.

The other, although cautioned that he might not be quite prepared for eighth-grade algebra, decided to take on the challenge. He failed the course, but used it as a kind of hard-knocks preparation-for-algebra class for which he got a ton of frustration and no credit. The next year, in the ninth grade, he took the course again and excelled.

From these experiences, this is my conclusion: Some students are ready to take algebra in the eighth grade, while others need another year of development and preparation.

Now, I'm just a dad and have an admittedly small sample of personal experiences upon which to base this opinion. But the evidence is that my own very limited qualifications are superior to those of the majority of the state Board of Education.

Last week, acting hastily and without the benefit of research data to justify the decision, the board voted to require that all eighth-graders be enrolled in algebra beginning in three years.

Actually, I believe the decision didn't have any to do with enrollment, but rather said that 8th graders will take the Algebra I California Standards Test (CST) rather than some kids taking a General Math CST based on 6th and 7th grade standards and the rest taking Algebra I or higher tests. As I understand it, the US Department of Education told California that it had to give one test as a measure of 8th grade math proficiency, not two and certainly not one based on standards from lower grades.

I thought it interesting in this piece that even the student who failed Algebra I in 8th grade, took it again in 9th grade, not only passed it, but excelled. That doesn't seem like a terrible thing.

This Riverside Press Enterprise editorial took the opposite position.

The state Board of Education's decision last week that requires schools to teach algebra in eighth grade closes a gap between stated expectations and daily practice. California gains little by setting high standards and then creating loopholes that allow schools to ignore those benchmarks.

The state board made the right choice, however. And the discussion needs to turn from hand-wringing over the algebra standard to the more crucial task of improving students' grasp of that subject.

The board's decision stemmed from a federal order in February to revise the state's eighth-grade math test. The federal government said the state could no longer test some eighth-graders on algebra and others on general math. The general math test covers material taught in lower grades, but federal law requires states to test eighth-graders on eighth-grade course content.

The board had contemplated a new test that would still allow eighth-grade students to bypass algebra. But the board members decided instead to make all eighth-grade students take the algebra test -- in essence, requiring those students to take algebra. About half of the state's eighth-graders now take the algebra test.

Critics, including state schools chief Jack O'Connell and the California Teachers Association, argued that schools needed additional resources to meet that mandate. Without extra tutoring, additional qualified math teachers and more preparation, students will fail, critics said.

That argument confuses resources with standards. Yes, schools will need to do a better job giving students in lower grades the foundation necessary to master algebra. And the state needs to increase the number of specialized math teachers.

I think one of the biggest reasons that students are having difficulty in Algebra I in the 8th grade is poor math instruction in prior years. If students are scoring below basic or far below basic in 7th grade math and earlier, it shouldn't come as big surprise that they're having difficulty in Algebra I as an 8th grader. Opponents of the decision argue that it will cause more dropouts, but I would suggest that students who are going to fail 8th grade Algebra probably also failed earlier math tests. This one test isn't going to change that situation.

I do believe that in the long run, this decision will have a positive impact. The California High School Exit Exam has focused attention on students having basic skills and language arts and math and this has led to new interventions for students who aren't ready to pass the test. My hope is that this change will increase the pressure on elementary school teachers to step up the quality of their math instruction and encourage schools to create math interventions to make certain students are prepared for 8th grade Algebra I. Those would be positive changes.

This San Francisco Chronicle opinion piece by Claudia Ayers, a retired math teacher, caught my attention. Claudia connected the recent Algebra decision with the California High School Exit Exam (CAHSEE).

It isn't absurd enough that we test high school students with a High School Exit Exam that is pretty much on a par with the California Basic Educational Skills Test (CBEST) required of teachers, but now we are all congratulating ourselves with a decision to test eighth graders for algebra. At least state schools chief Jack O'Connell has learned from his own past mistakes and opposed this decision. If only he had the guts to say he blew it on advocating for the exit exam, which is not only a complete waste of tens of millions of dollars, but sends more and more kids into the streets and trouble with the law when they fail to graduate because they do not test as well as others. (About 10 percent of high school students must "fail," otherwise it isn't a "test.")

This first paragraph started my alarm bells ringing loudly. The first point she made was that the CAHSEE "is pretty much on a par with the California Basic Educational Skills Test (CBEST) required of teachers." Doesn't the CAHSEE test 8/9th grade math and 10th grade language arts? No wonder our students are having difficulty in passing the CAHSEE if their teachers are only skilled enough to pass this minimal test. Since the "B" in the test's name stands for "Basic", I think we probably should expect more from our teachers. This test just verifies basic skills.

The second problem with the paragraph is the assumption that "more and more kids" are being sent into the street by the CAHSEE. Certainly, having a bar for graduation is going to cause some students to not receive a high-school diploma who would have previously done so. The evaluation of the CAHSEE by HumRRO found that the graduation rate only dropped by 4 percentage points after CAHSEE implementation. That's a pretty small change. Other reviews of CAHSEE results found that the vast majority of students who didn't pass the CAHSEE also didn't meet other requirements for graduation such as being short of credits, missing required courses, etc.

The final comment, "About 10 percent of high school students must 'fail', otherwise it isn't a 'test.'" is completely wrong. In days past, when we used primarily norm-referenced tests, which are graded on a curve, we did have expectations about a certain percentage of students failing. Criterion-referenced tests, such as the CAHSEE, are strictly pass/fail, so all students can pass the test if they score above the passing threshold. Since the test is at the 8/9/10th grade level, isn't it reasonable to expect our high school seniors to pass it before receiving a diploma?

The only good news from this opinion piece is that Claudia is retired. At least she's not teaching our children any longer. We need fewer teachers like Claudia and more teachers that are focused on getting all of their students to grade-level, every year. If students are at grade-level every year, when they get to high school, they'll be prepared to pass the CAHSEE and prepared to enter college or the world of work.

I thought this Slate.com article was very interesting.

Firing bad teachers may seem like a rather obvious solution, but it requires some gumption to take on a teachers union. And cleaning house isn't necessarily the only answer. There are three basic ways to improve a school's faculty: take greater care in selecting good teachers upfront, throw out the bad ones who are already teaching, and provide training to make current teachers better. In theory, the first two should have more or less the same effect, and it might seem preferable to focus on never hiring unpromising instructors—once entrenched, it's nearly impossible in most places to remove teachers from their union-protected jobs. But that's assuming we're good at predicting who will teach well in the first place.

It turns out we aren't. For instance, in 1997, Los Angeles tripled its hiring of elementary-school teachers following a state-mandated reduction in class size. If L.A. schools had been doing a good job of picking the best teachers among their applicants, then the average quality of new recruits should have gone down when they expanded their ranks—they were hiring from the same pool of applicants, but accepting candidates who would have been rejected in prior years. But as researchers Thomas Kane and Douglas Staiger found, the crop of new teachers didn't perform any worse than the teachers the school had hired in more selective years.

This unexpected result is consistent with the findings from dozens of studies analyzing the predictors of teacher quality. Researches have looked at just about every possible determinant of teaching success, and it seems there's nothing on a prospective teacher's résumé that indicates how he or she will do in the classroom. While some qualifications boost performance a little bit—National Board certification seems to help, though a master's degree in education does not—they just don't improve it very much.

I'm not sure this result is really that surprising. To me, good teaching is a bit science and a bit art. You can't tell is someone is a talented singer or violinist based on their resume. You have to hear them play. I believe that teaching is the same. It is is difficult to determine if someone is a good teacher solely based on their resume, an interview and a couple reference calls.

Since firing a bad teacher is almost impossible, that's one reason why I support lengthening the time that it takes for teachers to gain tenure. With just two years of time, there really isn't much time for intervention to help poor teachers improve. In the present system, a principal only has a couple years to assess the teacher's skills and help them to improve their classroom skills before they have to make a judgement on whether they should continue teaching. I think beginning teachers need and deserve the time to perfect those skills.

I think this FoxNews story speaks for itself:

Woman Shoots Herself While Trying to Kill Mice
Tuesday, July 08, 2008

POTTER VALLEY, Calif. — A Mendocino County woman who was trying to kill mice in her trailer with a gun ended up shooting herself and another person.

The 43-year-old woman pulled out her .44-caliber Magnum revolver after she saw the mice scurrying across the floor of her trailer on Highway 20 in Potter Valley, sheriff's officials said.

But she accidentally dropped the gun, which went off as it struck the floor. The bullet went through the woman's kneecap, bounced off the keys sitting on the belt loop of a 42-year-old man in the trailer and grazed the man's groin before ending up in his coin pocket.

Authorities did not release the shooting victims' names.

The mice escaped the shooting unharmed.

OK, maybe it does deserve some commentary. This could well be a good argument for gun control. Geesh! I thought it was kind of funny that they mentioned more than once that this couple lives in a trailer. Talk about your bad luck, she gets hit in the knee, which will probably be a life-affecting injury and her boyfriend/husband gets it in a place that could well end the physical side of their relationship.

This happened just a few miles from where I live. It is a sad statement on some of the residents of our county. We're not all like that, I promise. When I shoot mice with my .44, I hit them the first time.

7/10 Update:
According to this Press Democrat article the woman's name was Debra Due. The gentleman involved is apparently her tenant and not her boyfriend. The District Attorney's office is considering whether to file charges against Debra.

The Sheriff’s Office has submitted the case to the District Attorney’s Office, suggesting that Due be charged with negligent discharge of a firearm, Smallcomb said.

Smallcomb said there may be a lesson to be learned from the accident.

“I guess you don’t drink and shoot mice at the same time,” he said.

Good lesson Captain.

This Associated Press story which appeared in the San Diego Union Tribune caught my attention. While cheating on tests isn't new, I thought what was interesting was how the kids were cheating.

The testing service began an investigation after school officials suspected some students cheated on the exam. The probe revealed some students cheated on their statistics and economics tests by swapping formulas over cell phone text messages, Fish said.

How in the heck could the people administering the test not see kids sending or reading text messages? Even if the kid had their phone in their lap, I can't imagine how the staff wouldn't see it, or the apparent sudden interest that students had in their lap? Even discounting the technology, might that not suggest a paper hidden in their lap? Weird.

7/8 Update: Friend of Dave Bob pointed out that his company has cell phone detectors that the school could have used to detect the presence of operating cell phones, even phones in stand by. Hopefully this school will now be in the market for some of these. From another article I read, it seems that the school had an insufficient ratio of proctors to test takers and they had the student's chairs too close together. Both of these issues led to the problem.

In case you thought that there wouldn't be any positive impacts from the new cell phone hands-free law, I offer this Los Angeles Times story as evidence of that impact. Apparently, an officer stopped a young man who was talking on his cell phone only to find out that the vehicle he was driving was stolen. Then the fun began.

The incident began shortly before 1 p.m. when an officer stopped a driver in his 20s near Santa Monica Boulevard and Rexford Drive after seeing him talk on his cellphone without a hands-free device, said Lt. Tony Lee, a Beverly Hills police spokesman.

When the officer ran a check on the white Ford Econoline van's license plate, he learned the vehicle had been reported stolen. As the officer got out of his patrol car to approach the van, the suspect drove off, heading west on Santa Monica.

"He was driving recklessly at a very high speed," Lee said.

The man hit at least two cars as he fled. Lee said he did not know if anyone was injured in the collisions but no fatalities were reported.

The man then drove south onto the northbound 405 Freeway at Wilshire, Lee said. California Highway Patrol and Los Angeles Police Department patrol officers and a helicopter joined the pursuit. The chase ended when the man got off the 405 at Olympic Boulevard and was surrounded, Lee said.

"You could tell he was nervous when he got pulled over," Lee said. "But this behavior is just not normal."

I bet that guy won't use his cell phone while driving again! At least not until he gets out of prison.

I thought this EnGadget post was pretty interesting. It describes the world's most evil alarm clock.

We've seen alarm clocks institute some fairly unorthodox methods of waking users up, but this is exceptionally high on the list of "oh, no they didn'ts." Alice Wang's Tyrant, which we can only assume is a concept, actually dials a random number in one's mobile contact list for every three minutes that the sleeper doesn't address the obnoxiously loud ringing. In other words, unless you pick yourself up out of bed within ten minutes of the alarm going off, you'll have three angry friends wondering why they're getting phone calls from you everyday at O-five-hundred hours. Brilliant. Pure, sadistic, barbarous brilliance.

Now that's an alarm clock!

As I read news stories about the latest happenings in Sacramento, I often ask myself the question, "What are they thinking?" This Flashreport opinion piece by Assembly Republican Caucus Chairman Bob Huff is no exception. In his smackdown of democratic education priorities, Assemblyman Huff points out the opposition to SB 1105 Margett, which would "revoke the teaching credentials of those convicted of sex offenses, drug crimes and other violent crimes if they plead guilty or no contest." He goes on to talk of the opposition to the bill by CTA:

I was surprised to hear representatives of the California Teachers Association testify in opposition. Keeping sex offenders and other dangerous individuals out of our schools should be something we can all agree upon. It is just plain wrong to put both students and teachers at risk in our schools just to keep more dues-paying union members on the payroll.

I verified on their site that they oppose the bill and according to Assemblyman Huff apparently testified against the bill. I just don't get it. I'd love to hear their justification for opposing the bill. It seems like a no-brainer.

The education code already requires the Commission on Teacher Credentialing to revoke the credential of any teacher or administrator:

• who has been convicted of any sex offense defined under Education Code Section 44010
• who has been convicted of any narcotics offense defined under Education Code Section 44011
• who has been convicted of any crime listed in Education Code section 44424, or
• who has been found to be insane by a federal or state court
• who has been judicially determined to be a mentally disordered sex offender under the law.

This measure simply adds pleas of no-contest to this process. From reading the bill's legislative analysis, it appears that a no-contest plea wasn't considered a "conviction" under this process. That's a pretty big loophole. I'd love to CTA's excuse for opposing this bill. I've searched their site, but I haven't been able to find it. If you can point me in the right direction, I'd appreciate it.

I thought this story was interesting. New research from studying Greenland ice cores suggests that we've had much more rapid global warming that we've been experiencing in recent years.

The ice core showed the Northern Hemisphere briefly emerged from the last ice age some 14,700 years ago with a 22-degree-Fahrenheit spike in just 50 years, then plunged back into icy conditions before abruptly warming again about 11,700 years ago.

If man is really the primary reason for global warming, then why did we see this 22 degree change in just 50 years at a time when we didn't have SUVs running around the earth? We're talking about changes of a degree over a hundred year period and yet this newly discovered change is much more dramatic in a shorter period of time.

As I've said before. I don't deny that the climate is changing. I don't deny that man's activities have an impact. My problem is with those who say that the "science is settled" and that anyone who suggests that perhaps man isn't completely responsible are suddenly "global warming deniers" and on par with members of the Nazi party. How can we expect to find out the best approach for dealing with global climate change if we only allow one opinion? It just doesn't make sense.