Just one example of an universally organic pedagogical learning environment

Do the Work! (Is there anything else?)

Something that informs our mutual understanding and of which, nothing else will suffice.  Click-on "see inside this book" and Enjoy!
http://www.amazon.com/Do-Work-Steven-Pressfield/dp/1936719010

The End of Growth by Richard Heinberg

The End of Growth (And the Beginning of Sustainability)
http://richardheinberg.com/bookshelf/the-end-of-growth-book

Our Economic Black Hole
http://richardheinberg.com/227-our-economic-black-hole

A New Meaning to Fill'er-Up!

June 7, 2011

The Earth Is Full

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we’ll look back at the first decade of the 21st century — when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all — and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we’d crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once?

 “The only answer can be denial,” argues Paul Gilding, the veteran Australian environmentalist-entrepreneur, who described this moment in a new book called “The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World.” “When you are surrounded by something so big that requires you to change everything about the way you think and see the world, then denial is the natural response. But the longer we wait, the bigger the response required.”

Gilding cites the work of the Global Footprint Network, an alliance of scientists, which calculates how many “planet Earths” we need to sustain our current growth rates. G.F.N. measures how much land and water area we need to produce the resources we consume and absorb our waste, using prevailing technology. On the whole, says G.F.N., we are currently growing at a rate that is using up the Earth’s resources far faster than they can be sustainably replenished, so we are eating into the future. Right now, global growth is using about 1.5 Earths. “Having only one planet makes this a rather significant problem,” says Gilding.

This is not science fiction. This is what happens when our system of growth and the system of nature hit the wall at once. While in Yemen last year, I saw a tanker truck delivering water in the capital, Sana. Why? Because Sana could be the first big city in the world to run out of water, within a decade. That is what happens when one generation in one country lives at 150 percent of sustainable capacity.

“If you cut down more trees than you grow, you run out of trees,” writes Gilding. “If you put additional nitrogen into a water system, you change the type and quantity of life that water can support. If you thicken the Earth’s CO2 blanket, the Earth gets warmer. If you do all these and many more things at once, you change the way the whole system of planet Earth behaves, with social, economic, and life support impacts. This is not speculation; this is high school science.”

It is also current affairs. “In China’s thousands of years of civilization, the conflict between humankind and nature has never been as serious as it is today,” China’s environment minister, Zhou Shengxian, said recently. “The depletion, deterioration and exhaustion of resources and the worsening ecological environment have become bottlenecks and grave impediments to the nation’s economic and social development.” What China’s minister is telling us, says Gilding, is that “the Earth is full. We are now using so many resources and putting out so much waste into the Earth that we have reached some kind of limit, given current technologies. The economy is going to have to get smaller in terms of physical impact.”

We will not change systems, though, without a crisis. But don’t worry, we’re getting there.

We’re currently caught in two loops: One is that more population growth and more global warming together are pushing up food prices; rising food prices cause political instability in the Middle East, which leads to higher oil prices, which leads to higher food prices, which leads to more instability. At the same time, improved productivity means fewer people are needed in every factory to produce more stuff. So if we want to have more jobs, we need more factories. More factories making more stuff make more global warming, and that is where the two loops meet.

But Gilding is actually an eco-optimist. As the impact of the imminent Great Disruption hits us, he says, “our response will be proportionally dramatic, mobilizing as we do in war. We will change at a scale and speed we can barely imagine today, completely transforming our economy, including our energy and transport industries, in just a few short decades.”

We will realize, he predicts, that the consumer-driven growth model is broken and we have to move to a more happiness-driven growth model, based on people working less and owning less. “How many people,” Gilding asks, “lie on their death bed and say, ‘I wish I had worked harder or built more shareholder value,’ and how many say, ‘I wish I had gone to more ballgames, read more books to my kids, taken more walks?’ To do that, you need a growth model based on giving people more time to enjoy life, but with less stuff.”

Sounds utopian? Gilding insists he is a realist.

“We are heading for a crisis-driven choice,” he says. “We either allow collapse to overtake us or develop a new sustainable economic model. We will choose the latter. We may be slow, but we’re not stupid.”

The GELT-ART of the LINCHPIN!

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LINCHPIN by Seth Godin





A linchpin, as Seth describes it, is somebody in an organization who is indispensable, who cannot be replaced—her role is just far too unique and valuable. And then he goes on to say, well, seriously folks, you need to be one of these people, you really do. To not be one is economic and career suicide. 

No surprises there—that’s exactly what one would expect Seth to say. But here’s where it gets interesting. 

In his best-known book, Purple Cow, Seth’s message was, “Everyone’s a marketer now.” In All Marketers Are Liars, his message was, “Everyone’s a storyteller now.” InTribes, his message was, “Everyone’s a leader now.” 

And from Linchpin? 

"Everyone’s an artist now." 

By Seth’s definition, an artist is not just some person who messes around with paint and brushes, an artist is somebody who does (and I LOVE this term) “emotional work.” 

Work that you put your heart and soul into. Work that matters. Work that you gladly sacrifice all other alternatives for. As a working artist and cartoonist myself, I know exactly what he means. It’s not what you do, it’s the way that you do it. 

The only people who have a hope of becoming linchpins in any organization, who have any hope of changing anything for the better in real terms, are those who have the capacity to do “emotional work” at a high level—to be true artists at whatever they set their minds on doing. The guys who just plod around the office corridors, just turning up for their paycheck.... Well, those guys don’t have a prayer, poor things. The world is just too interesting and competitive now. 

And Seth then challenges us, the readers, to become linchpins ourselves. To make the leap. To become artists. To do emotional work, whatever the sacrifice may be. It’s our choice, and it’s our burden. Seth won’t be there to catch us if we fall, but to become the people we need to be eventually, well, we probably wouldn’t want him to, anyway. 

Congratulations, Seth. You have penned a real gem of a book here. Rock on. 

--Hugh MacLeod

CHANGE this Conversation! (Too CHANGE Student-focused OUTCOMES)

Much homework still to do on DPS

   There is a lot to like in the skeletal outline of Gov. Rick Snyder’s plan to create a turnaround district for low-performing schools, starting in Detroit, ground zero for bad schools.

   Michigan lags other states in this kind of directed effort to eliminate endemic failure. And Snyder, by moving with purpose to treat these schools differently, is assuming a premier level of responsibility. Pass or fail, this will be on him.

   But details matter, and there weren’t many in last week’s announcement. Snyder’s proposal is particularly lacking in three critical areas: money, talent and accountability.

   Arranging such specifics is presumably why the governor won’t get the district going until fall of 2012. But that’s also why there needs to be immediate focus on filling in the blanks in his plan.

   Let’s deal with each area in turn.

   Money

   I was floored that Snyder and Roy Roberts, the emergency manager for Detroit Public Schools, announced the new turnaround district last week without any commitments for new money.

   In New Orleans, where a similar district was started after Hurricane Katrina, it was announced with $500 million on the table from foundations around the country and the federal government.

   A similar capital commitment will be required for such a plan to have a prayer of working in Michigan, especially Detroit, where the new district could take in 40-45 schools and 30,000 or more students. It takes money to train and recruit staff, to build the infrastructure to measure and reward progress, and to generate the community-based support that Snyder and Roberts say they want to be part of every school.

   There were reports last week that Eli Broad, a native Detroiter whose foundation has funded reform initiatives in many other cities, is planning to help. But there was no announcement about it. Neither was there word that the Gates Foundation or other big national drivers of educational reform were prepared to back Snyder’s plan.

   And while federal Education Secretary Arne Duncan joined Snyder’s announcement via video hook-up, he didn’t commit any cash from Washington.

   One of Snyder’s first tasks has to be securing the money to make this work.

   The governor also needs to do a better job explaining how the new turnaround district will affect the remaining public schools in Detroit, those that are already doing OK.

   DPS will lose the state per-pupil allocations for students who go to the new district, but apparently will retain financial responsibility for the buildings that house those students. That will put added pressure on DPS’ efforts to retire its deficit and right-size. Snyder and Roberts must better explain how that will work without forcing unwise sacrifice on some of the district’s best-performing students.

   Talent

   Snyder was right to focus the turnaround effort on principals and their staffs. They are the key to turning failing schools into successful ones, and the governor intends to give them unprecedented leeway to do so.

   Detroit actually has a head start on this front, too. After Race to the Top legislation passed in Lansing about two years ago, the district replaced principals in most of the lowest-performing schools, got state-approved improvement plans in place in all of them, and assigned those schools to work with independent partners who specialize in school turnaround.

   That’s fabulous groundwork for Snyder’s plans.

   But you still need a significant talent upgrade at both the principal and the teacher level in these schools. For years, Detroit has struggled to attract and retain the best teachers, and its principal ranks are thin when it comes to the kinds of leaders needed for turnaround.

   Snyder and Roberts need to focus intently on boosting the district’s stable of high-performing teachers and principals, or their entire effort could wind up as a yet another showy reorganization with little substance.

   This gets back to money. Investments from some of the big national reform players — such as nonprofit foundations and school operators who specialize in helping urban districts — are essential. Those organizations can help train the principals in the new district (many of whom were in high-performing schools, will need help transitioning to turnaround), and could also help recruit new leaders to Detroit.

   One opportunity for the new district would be to engage Teach for America, which brings high-achieving college graduates to urban school systems. The TFA members do as well as, if not better than, other teachers, and in other cities have become the foundation for a creative class of educational innovators that Detroit just doesn’t have right now. Culturally, the city is still pretty hostile to the idea of real reform.

   TFA has been in Detroit for a year, and by fall 2011 will have 200 teachers in the city, some in public schools, others in charters.

   But why not staff schools in the new turnaround district with far more TFA innovators? Snyder and Roberts should at least consider it.

   Accountability

   Snyder and Roberts said a lot about how the new turnaround district would hold schools (and principals, in particular) accountable for performance.

   But in truth, they’re promising more than what the state has been able to deliver for any schools to date. The state’s annual testing exercise, the Michigan Educational Assessment Program, is a joke — calibrated so that even kids who get a majority of the questions wrong are graded as satisfactory.

   And there has been little follow-up. Schools aren’t really held accountable for their performance, whether they’re doing well or poorly, despite the fact that even the decade-old No Child Left Behind legislation allowed states to take action when schools fail.

   Snyder is in the middle of changing some of that, and has bills pending in the Legislature that would hold teachers more accountable.

   But he will also need formidable changes in the way the Michigan Department of Education behaves to create a genuine system of accountability statewide, and especially for a turnaround district.

   The state needs a consistent, reliable measure of how schools — whether public or charter — perform, and needs to have concrete steps in place to make changes before failure becomes chronic.

   Otherwise, the talk about accountability is just that, and won’t make a lick of difference in some of the state’s worst educational environments.

   It’s too early to get too excited — in favor or against — Snyder’s idea for a turnaround district. It could work. Or it could flop — all depending on how he fills in the details.

   If he focuses on money, talent and accountability, the chances of success go way up — for Snyder, Roberts and thousands of children.

   • STEPHEN HENDERSON IS EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR FOR THE FREE PRESS AND THE HOST OF "AMERICAN BLACK JOURNAL," WHICH AIRS AT 2 P.M. ON SUNDAYS ON WTVS (CHANNEL 56) IN DETROIT. CONTACT HENDERSON AT SHENDERSON600@FREEPRESS.COM   , OR AT 313-222-6659.

PAUL SANCYA/Associated Press

   Detroit Public Schools Emergency Manager Roy Roberts and Gov. Rick Snyder announced an ambitious education reform plan to save failing schools Monday.

AMC Conference 6-24-2011 (The Detroit Media Economy Collaborative's Youth Network)

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WISDOM Underlined!

ROY ROBERTS ON DPS FUTURE

Every job, contract on line

He’s ready to trim — starting at the top

   Detroit Public Schools emergency manager Roy Roberts marched across his private conference room Wednesday morning and pointed to a whiteboard where he had drawn in black marker a chart showing the new top hierarchy for the school district.

   It had only seven jobs, down from the current 30.

   But we ain’t seen nothing yet.

   Roberts, the former General Motors executive who has been with DPS for only five weeks, said he expects to make massive employee cuts. He also plans to cancel and rebid every major contract in an effort to eliminate a $227-million deficit and run the city schools like a business — a business that will pay dividends to the community by successfully educating its children.

   Roberts, who said his prime mission is to fully educate children, said the district will keep only the number of employees it can afford, including all 4,400 teaching positions.

   “We’re the biggest employer in town. We need to figure out an organization structure,” he said in an exclusive interview. “We’re going to go through and say what’s needed in every functional area and every job under that functional area. And we’re going to put a name on every job. And when we run out of jobs, those left over are excess people.”

   Regarding contracts with DPS, he said, “a lot of people had set up a little industry inside of this company. We’re going to stop it. We’re going to take every contract, every major contract that is in here, and we’re going to cancel it and ask people to keep working with us for 60 days. And we’re going to bid it. That’s the only way we’ll get the best price.”

   New statewide district

   The revelations came two days after Roberts joined Gov. Rick Snyder in announcing that some of Detroit’s worst-performing schools would be assigned to a special statewide district to help them improve. Roberts praised Snyder for understanding that Detroit is the state’s largest city and for helping people understand that Michigan cannot succeed without Detroit succeeding.

   “I was a county commissioner, city commissioner and I’ve been a Democrat all my life,” Roberts said, “and a Republican called me and said, ‘Michigan runs through Detroit, and if I don’t help get Detroit on the right track, then I can’t reinvent Michigan. And the biggest single problem I have in Detroit is the Detroit public school system.’ … Every time we talked, it was about educating the kids first.”

   Snyder also announced that Eastern Michigan University had signed on as a partner in the agreement to create the Education Achievement System because the agreement needed two government entities to create a statewide one. Responding to immediate pronouncements from some EMU faculty that they would not teach in city schools as a show of support for DPS unions, Roberts said no one has asked them to.

   “Eastern was selected because of its long history of being a great teaching school,” Roberts said. “I haven’t heard one person, including the governor or anyone else, suggest that Eastern Michigan would have people in Detroit. There was no expectation for them to do that. But we would welcome their help.”

   Unlike former emergency financial manager Robert Bobb, who spent a great deal of time rooting out corruption as he fought to change academics, Roberts said he would not be looking for criminals with DPS. He said his staff would certainly pursue prosecution of anything that comes up, but the primary focus will be on creating an accountable system that educates children, pays its bills and supports teachers, whom he said had been “castigated” in recent years.

   ‘You still need the teachers’

   Detroit Federation of Teachers President Keith Johnson said Roberts broke the news over dinner Sunday night that he didn’t plan to lay off any teachers.

   “He said he didn’t see the need to alter our collective bargaining contract because he recognizes that’s not the problem,” Johnson said. “You still need the teachers because he’s budgeting for 68,000 students.”

   Johnson said that the decision now means class sizes would be about 17-25 in kindergarten through third grade, 30 students in fourth and fifth grade and 35 students in sixth through 12th grade. He said that projections of 60 students per class, which made national news, “were never going to happen.”

   Roberts said the Legislature has given him more tools than Bobb had. He can cancel union contracts and doesn’t have to work with the school board, “not because they’re bad people but because it’s a bad process.”

   And he said he’s operating on a stopwatch, not a calendar .

   “I know how to do this. I have people who know how to do this. None of us woke up this morning and said, ‘I think I’ll change today.’ People change because there are external stimuli. I’m going to provide the stimuli. This is not rocket science, and I’m not a rocket scientist. This is having a reasonable degree of intellect and the guts to get it done. You’ve got to call it.”

   A personal matter

   Roberts said his decisions, whether about personnel or finances, are all to make academics easier. For him, he said, it’s personal.

   “I was one of those kids once,” he said. “My wife was one of those kids. I was raised in public schools in Muskegon. My father had a third-grade education. We were on welfare from time to time. We didn’t have books in our home because we couldn’t afford it. … And somewhere along the way, I got the bug for education. Education is what turns dreams into reality and if I can help a youngster get that same bug, then I’ll get my reward in heaven.”

   • CONTACT ROCHELLE RILEY: RRILEY99   @FREEPRESS.COM  

ANDRE J. JACKSON/Detroit Free Press

   Detroit Public Schools emergency manager Roy Roberts said the primary focus will be on education, rather than corruption.

DPS EAS (Burp!)

EMU staff: We won’t work in Detroit

Union leaders wary of plan for new district

By DAVID JESSE and CHASTITY PRATT DAWSEY FREE PRESS EDUCATION WRITER

   As Eastern Michigan University’s Board of Regents voted Tuesday to take part in a new school district to reform Michigan’s worst performing schools, faculty leaders promised not to do any work in Detroit that might help bust union contracts.

   Detroit Public Schools emergency manager Roy Roberts would lead the new district , called the Education Achievement System, or EAS. And he has the power to nullify or change union contracts — a sore point.

   EMU President Susan Martin said no faculty would be assigned to any work in a school in Detroit. But union leaders were skeptical, saying Monday’s announcements appeared to pledge faculty involvement to help turn around Michigan’s failing schools, starting with 34 DPS schools.

   The new district idea resembles others created to deal with failing or troubled school districts. One of its key tenets is to increase money spent on classroom instruction from 55% to 95% of a school’s budget.

   It’s unlikely the EAS will be able to reach that goal, predicted Mike Griffith, a senior analyst at the Education Commission of the States. He said the national average is 65%.

   “There are things you need in a school — administrators, lunchroom staff, secretaries. … Those come to more than 5%.”

Emergency manager Roy Roberts

EMU faculty to respect union deals

Promise comes as board OKs DPS plan

By DAVID JESSE and CHASTITY PRATT DAWSEY FREE PRESS EDUCATION WRITERS

   Eastern Michigan University faculty members are promising not to do any work that might help bust existing public school teacher contracts, possibly crimping plans to use the faculty in a new statewide school district run by the university and the Detroit Public Schools.

   “We won’t have our membership involved in breaking union contracts,” said Howard Bunsis, the treasurer of the EMU faculty union.

   Gov. Rick Snyder announced a plan to create an Educational Achievement System, which would take in Michigan’s failing public schools, possibly starting with 34 DPS schools in about a year.

   At issue is the power of DPS emergency manager Roy Roberts, who would also be chairman of the new district’s governing authority. As a governor-appointed emergency manager, Roberts has the legal power to end or modify DPS union contracts and to negotiate contracts for the new district.

   A key ingredient of Snyder’s plan would be EMU’s willingness to move faculty from its college of education into struggling public schools to help train teachers and to work in other ways. Roberts said he was particularly interested in using faculty and their expertise to help students with special needs.

   EMU’s union leadership balked at the Board of Regents meeting Tuesday. Despite the protests, the regents approved the agreement to take part in the new district.

   The role of outside union members in a district run by a leader with legal powers to cancel contracts is but one gray detail that needs to be worked out. Some parts of the plan might need legislative approval and others are still in the planning phase.

   Louisiana’s example

   The Michigan district would be a new animal but based on an existing structure in Louisiana, which took in New Orleans Public Schools following Hurricane Katrina.

   A major difference between Michigan’s EAS and Louisiana’s Recovery School District is that the RSD transformed most of its New Orleans schools into independently-run charter schools.

   Chartering would be a possible course for Michigan’s future EAS schools. A school that shows adequate progress in five years may seek approval to become a charter school, return to its original school district or remain under the jurisdiction of the EAS.

   Some performance indicators are positive for New Orleans . The Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University studied 44 New Orleans charter schools’ test scores from 2005-06 to 2009-10. It concluded that the RSD charter schools were making gains in reading and math at a faster pace than others.

   Sen. Phil Pavlov, a Republican from St. Clair, said he’s working on draft legislation to help solidify the EAS.

   “I’m working on legislation to require the highest level of accountability and transparency,” Pavlov said.

   He predicted that the earliest the legislation would be introduced is late July.

   Communication worries

   EMU faculty members didn’t learn about the EAS until Monday morning from a news release, union President Susan Moeller said at the Tuesday meeting.

   “I am not here to debate whether the EAS is a good idea or not for Detroit. What I want to bring to your attention is that, again, President (Susan) Martin has ignored the faculty and violated the contract. …

   “Faculty need to be involved in the development and discussion of what is going to happen with this plan. They are the experts, and it cannot succeed without them.

   “There still has been no communication from President Martin or the dean of the (college of education) to the (college of education) faculty regarding what this agreement is all about.”

   The EMU faculty union wasn’t the only one to complain about lack of information before Snyder announced the plan on Monday. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, sent out a critical news release.

   “We are troubled at the lack of teacher and school employee voice in the current plan, especially in light of the hard work Detroit’s education unions and school district have already done in collaborating to develop and implement workable solutions for the city’s schools.”

   EMU President Martin said no faculty would be assigned to any work in a school in Detroit.

   “This is an opportunity. We certainly hope that faculty would be willing to work in some of these struggling schools,” she told the Free Press.

   Martin also said there was no intent to bust the teachers union or to exclude the faculty union from the process.

   “This came together very quickly. We certainly want to work with the faculty union going forward on how we can take advantage of this opportunity.”