Sunday, September 30, 2007
INSIGHTFUL and INTENTIONAL!
The Unsung Heroes Who Move Products Forward
Illustration by James Yang
AT first blush, the iPhone from Apple, the new microprocessor family from Intel and the ubiquitous Google search engine have nothing in common. One is a gadget, one is an electronic part and one is a service.
Yet all of these products — much acclaimed for their creativity — depend on obscure process innovations that, while highly complex and lacking glamour, are an essential part of establishing a winning edge in commercial electronics. Indeed, the success of Apple, Intel, Google and scores of other technology companies has as much or more to do with their process innovations as the products that inspire loyalty among fans and admiration from foes.
First, a definitional detour. Processes are the stuff in the proverbial “black box,” the alchemy unseen by consumers or the inelegantly termed “end users” who buy computers, cellphones, cameras and all manner of digital devices and services.
Snazzy products are the stuff of legends, romanticized by “early adopters” and skewered by neo-Luddites. Yet while these products bring glory to companies, novel processes are often more important in keeping the cash registers ringing.
The proof of this proposition is that while companies often spend millions to advertise and market new product designs and innovations, they guard intensely the details of their process innovations.
Consider the question of Google’s greatest business secret. Is it the algorithms behind its search tools? Or is it the way it organizes vast clusters of computers around the globe to answer queries so quickly? Perhaps predictably, Google won’t disclose the number of computers deployed in its vast information network (though outsiders speculate that the network has at least 450,000 computers).
I believe that the physical network is Google’s “secret sauce,” its premier competitive advantage. While a brilliant lone wolf can conceive of a dazzling algorithm, only a superwealthy and well-managed organization can run what is arguably the most valuable computer network on the planet. Without the computer network, Google is nothing.
Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, appears to agree. Last year he declared, “We believe we get tremendous competitive advantage by essentially building our own infrastructures.”
Process innovations like Google’s computer network are often invisible to the public, and impossible to duplicate by rivals. Yet successful companies realize that maintaining competitive advantage depends heavily on sustaining process innovations. Great process innovators often support basic research in relevant fields, maintain complete control over the creation of every aspect of a product and refuse to rely on outside suppliers for important components. Certainly, there are exceptions to these patterns, but even companies like Apple that buy essential processes on the open market nevertheless invest in gaining a working knowledge of the technologies and an understanding of their future arc.
Intel treats its process innovations as a competitive weapon, striving to create a “new generation” every two years. That enables the company’s chips, even if there were no changes in their design, to perform better and cost less to make.
Consumers are usually blind to the importance of novel processes. Even when they learn about these innovations, they tend to think only of the product itself.
“The average consumer doesn’t care what processes are used,” says Mark T. Bohr, an Intel physicist who oversaw what is arguably the most important advance in decades in the technology for making microprocessors, the brains inside computers and other digital devices.
Faced with ever-faster chips that threatened to explode into flames, Intel searched desperately for new processes to make microprocessors. Enter hafnium, a rare metal. Designers led by Mr. Bohr in Hillsboro, Ore., chose hafnium to replace silicon oxide, the venerable insulator in chips and a material used in making glass. Mr. Bohr also helped to identify new materials, whose identity Intel is keeping secret, for the crucial transistor “gates” that sit atop a chip’s insulators.
On Nov. 12, Intel will begin shipping its first chips using the new processes. Gordon E. Moore, Intel’s co-founder, recently declared that the hafnium-and-gate process innovations should allow his so-called Moore’s Law, whereby chips grow ever faster and less expensive, to hold true for some time.
Despite the enormity of the achievement, Mr. Bohr is relatively anonymous, even within Intel. “The work of process development comes second to creating new designs for chips,” he says. Not surprisingly, when Intel starts shipping the new chips, neither the hafnium nor the gates innovations will be trumpeted as selling points. Rather, Intel will emphasize how customers can benefit from using the chips.
If process innovations are unheralded, consumers may misunderstand the nature of technological change.
“Process innovation tends to receive less attention from the informed public for the same reason that incremental innovation tends to receive too little attention: it is more difficult to encapsulate in a press release or photo opportunity,” says David C. Mowery, a business professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a scholar of technological change.
“Process innovation, even more than most product innovations, also tends to realize its economic potential through a lengthy process of incremental improvement based on learning by doing and other types of learning,” he added. “So ‘breakthroughs’ in process engineering are, if anything, even rarer than in product innovation.”
As a result, process gurus are resigned to playing in the shadows, leaving fame, if not fortune, to others. John Feland, human interface architect at Synaptics Inc. in Santa Clara, Calif., knows this enduring truth of invention. He helps design arrays of sensors that drive the touch screens in the newest cellphones like the Prada from LG. Such touch screens are earning raves from consumers, yet Mr. Feland is essentially an invisible man.
“My job is to make our customers look like heroes,” he says philosophically. Then he sums up the special role played by fellow members of the process tribe: “We are like Q to James Bond.”
Friday, September 28, 2007
Reality Check: The URGENCY of the DIGITAL EMERGENCY!
Dismantling Detroit
By PAUL CLEMENS
Published: September 28, 2007
Detroit
TO get to the auto plant that I’ve been drawn to for much of the last year, I drove, on my lunch hour last Monday, past an auto plant that members of the press had been drawn to for a full 45 minutes. As I drove east from midtown Detroit along I-94, the Ford Freeway, I could see a helicopter ahead, circling the General Motors Detroit/Hamtramck assembly plant — “Poletown,” in these parts.
TV news crews were parked outside it, to cover the strike that had begun at 11. I exited the freeway to see a dozen or so strikers, a handful of Detroit police officers and a couple of people holding tape recorders interviewing a couple of others holding picket signs. The United Auto Workers had called a national strike against G.M., and Poletown, for the press, was the place to be.
Back on the Ford Freeway I continued east, past the abandoned Packard plant, empty for half a century now, on my way to a more recently shuttered factory just up the road. I was pretty sure there’d be no TV crews at the Budd Detroit plant. Built in 1919 by the Liberty Motor Company and bought by the Budd Company in 1925, it had been a parts supplier, producing brake drums, wheels (old-timers still call it “Budd Wheel”) and auto body stampings for the major car companies. For eight decades, it supplied jobs to the city and the industry that drove the expansion and symbolized the strength of the American middle class — a class, the striking U.A.W. workers rightly asserted, that they were proud to belong to and didn’t want to see disappear.
The Budd plant — latterly, the ThyssenKrupp Budd plant — helped shape the contours of Detroit’s 20th century. Literally: in the 1950s, Budd Detroit built and assembled the body of the iconic, two-seat Ford Thunderbird. Last December it closed, and this past summer I spent much of my free time at the plant, observing workers from General Rigging disassemble it.
I wasn’t “press,” not here. In the Budd plant, “press” means stamping presses, and many of them still stand, a couple of stories high, in numbered lines of half a dozen presses each. A Spanish auto supplier, Gestamp, has bought 16 Line for one of its Mexican plants. A couple of Mexican engineers from Gestamp, along with German engineers from Müller Weingarten, the press maker that Gestamp contracted to oversee the 16 Line’s installation in Mexico, have been observing the disassembly. “Their role is to stand there, in awe, and hope they can put it back together when they get it to Mexico,” said Duane Krukowski, General Rigging’s electrical foreman.
If the picketers I’d passed a few miles back, with their demands for job security, were trying to counter the effects of globalization, Francis Blake Sr., the owner of General Rigging, embraced it. In addition to Mexico, press lines had gone or were going to India and Brazil. “None of it’s staying here,” Fran said, “here” being not just Detroit, but America.
Fran’s foreman on the Budd Detroit dismantling is Matt Sanders, an affable fellow in a Stars-and-Stripes hard hat. General Rigging had just completed a smaller job at a plant in Upper Sandusky, Ohio, owned by Tower Automotive, the bankrupt auto parts supplier, and had moved on to another Tower plant in Kendallville, Ind.
This process has been likened to the clear-cutting of a forest. The forest, in this case, spreads through parts of Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York State, and goes by the name of the American Rust Belt. Whether anything will grow back is unclear. What is clear is that dismantling America’s industrial infrastructure has become a growth industry.
“I get no pleasure from taking these places apart,” Matt said to me more than once this summer, exhaling cigarette smoke. Tower Automotive’s new owner, Cerberus Capital Management, also owned the Chrysler assembly and engine plants that bookend the Budd plant. Despite himself, Matt couldn’t help but speculate on which stamping plants Cerberus might decide to close.
While the Big Three seek to shed workers, Matt is always looking for bodies. “When can you start?” he asked when we first met. Some of the older guys on the crew are former U.A.W. members, and the younger guys, in an earlier era, might well have been Big Three workers. Yet even they seemed to realize that by working the Budd job they were part of something historic. Still scattered about the plant were Frisbees and buttons bearing the logo for U.A.W. Local 306, and this message: “I Believe in Budd Detroit.”
“See you Saturday?” I said to Matt on my way out. “I’ll be here,” Matt said.
On my way back downtown, I saw that the picketers in front of Poletown remained, but the news crews had departed. A day and a half later, the strike would be over, and among the reported U.A.W. concessions was the acceptance of a two-tier wage structure, one that could pay new workers as little as $12 to $15 an hour. That means that a young worker starting out could conceivably make as much taking an auto plant apart as he could working in one. It’d be dirty work, occasionally dangerous and done without union backing, much like auto work had been before the U.A.W.
“I want to be here to take this apart,” Duane, General Rigging’s electrical foreman, said to me this summer. He considered the Budd plant holy. “I used to work at Ford’s,” he said, applying the possessive, as working-class Detroiters do, “and I got laid off from Ford’s. What they did was, they built a new assembly line. One day, we went over for a tour of the new line, and they showed me a machine that was doing my job. This was in 1979. They turned the lights out, and the machine was still doing the job. So I said to myself, ‘Now I need to learn how to build machines.’ Which is why I’m here taking them apart. Because I know how to put them together. Now I’m 50 years old, and I wouldn’t give up being here for nothing.”
Paul Clemens is the author of “Made in Detroit: A South of 8 Mile Memoir.”
NSF ITEST STEM GRANT meet NCLB on 21st Century Skills
http://www.eschoolnews.com
Contents Copyright 2007 eSchool News. All rights reserved.
Lawmakers step up NCLB renewal process
21st-century skills, data-driven instruction are areas of focus in new House draft proposal
From eSchool News staff and wire service reports
September 6, 2007
College and workforce preparedness, 21st-century skills, and the use of data to inform instruction are among the new points of emphasis in a draft version of a bill to reauthorize the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB).
Proposed by Rep. George Miller, Democratic chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, and the committee's senior Republican member, Buck McKeon, the draft bill is a response to "two dozen hearings in D.C., a review of written recommendations from more than 100 education groups, and conversations with constituents and colleagues in Congress," the two lawmakers say.
The proposal calls for extensive revisions to the nation's education law. It would focus more on low-performing high schools in an effort to boost graduation rates, and it would offer greater flexibility in assessing and measuring school and student progress--especially for special-needs students and those just learning English. In addition, it would distinguish between schools that narrowly fail to meet Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) and those that significantly miss AYP goals.
"This draft is a work in progress, subject to change in the coming weeks as the committee moves a bill through the legislative process," Miller and McKeon write. "However, we believe it represents a starting point from which to receive input."
The draft legislation would create a Graduation Promise Fund, which would establish new resources for high schools with the lowest graduation rates. These resources would support data-driven instruction, staff collaboration and professional development, and individualized student support--including counseling services for students at risk of dropping out.
The House draft also would provide incentives for states to develop standards aligned with the skills needed for success in the 21st century, such as problem solving, critical thinking, and collaborative skills.
In addition, it would allow states to use more than a single test for accountability purposes. States could use multiple, state-developed tests taken at different points in time to measure AYP, and they could consider more than just reading and math test results. Under this scenario, for example, schools could get credit for student performance on history, civics, or science exams, as well as for improvement in graduation or college enrollment rates.
The draft bill also would let states include students' academic growth over time in their definition of AYP. To use such a "growth model," states would need to have in place a longitudinal data system that can compare the progress of the same students from year to year.
In addition, the proposal would treat schools that fail to meet AYP in only one or two subgroups differently from those that fail to meet AYP in several subgroups.
The draft creates two separate categories for schools in need of improvement: "Priority Schools" and "High Priority Schools." And it offers a range of intervention options for these schools, including formative assessments and data-driven instruction.The House proposal also allow states to measure how well students first learning English are doing at acquiring language skills, instead of judging these students on standard reading tests. The substitute test would only be allowed, however, for two years after the law is enacted.
During that time, states would be expected to develop alternative tests for limited-English speakers--such as tests using simplified English.
The draft proposal would encourage states to develop foreign-language reading and math tests, and it would allow students to be tested in their native language for five years instead of three.
School officials nationwide have complained it makes no sense to give subject-area tests in English to students who don't know how to read English well.
However, not everyone likes this proposed change: It would take the pressure off schools to get kids up to speed quickly in English, says Amy Wilkens, vice president of the Education Trust, a nonprofit organization that advocates for poor and minority kids.
"It's too long," Wilkens said, referring to the newly proposed grace period. "That seems to me a terrible disservice to those kids and these families."
Reaction from some other education groups to the draft proposal was more encouraging.
"Chairman Miller and ranking member McKeon, along with their colleagues and staff, should be applauded for creating an open process and dialogue on the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act," said Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education and former governor of West Virginia. "The staff discussion draft marks a true step forward for high school reform at the federal level."
Wise said his organization looks forward to working with Congress "to ensure that this reauthorization includes the best policy for our nation's high school students." But he added that, regardless of any proposed changes to NCLB, adequate funding is "critical to the success of school improvement efforts."
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
AIM Project Lead The Way! (NSF ITEST STEM Grant Initiative)
Published Online: September 25, 2007
Published in Print: September 26, 2007
Engineering a Blueprint for Success
A rapidly growing program aimed at propelling more U.S. students toward engineering careers is attracting recruits beyond the usual pool of prospective high school talent.
Wheaton, Md.
Amid the clicking of computer mice and muted consultation, Wheaton High School teacher Marcus Lee’s class of 11th and 12th graders pored over the electronic blueprint for a four-story building they were designing on their desktops. The calculations for each floor needed to be set just right if the structure was to stand on its own.
“What we want to do is lay a foundation,” Mr. Lee explained. He was addressing the students in his civil-engineering and architecture class, but he could just as well have been talking about the goal of his school’s Academy of Engineering—and that of Project Lead the Way, the national curriculum it uses.
| A Search for Answers in Science and Math |
|---|
Often referred to by its acronym, PLTW is a rigorous four-year program of honors-level math and science, plus engineering, culminating in at least precalculus and advanced science classes, along with an intensive, hands-on collaborative engineering project. The curriculum is produced by Project Lead the Way Inc., a 10-year-old, Clifton Park, N.Y.-based nonprofit organization dedicated to increasing the number of American college students who study and ultimately work in engineering fields.
The program has swiftly grown to include about 2,200 schools in 49 states. Last school year, 175,000 students were enrolled in PLTW classes nationwide.
Shane R. Stroup, the director of Wheaton High’s Academy of Engineering, gives the rigor of PLTW’s curriculum much of the credit for the success his students have had so far.
Members of the academy’s 26-student class of 2007—its first graduating class—went on to study in mechanical, electrical, nuclear, and other engineering fields at such selective universities as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Cornell University, claiming more than $1.6 million in scholarships. Eighty-nine percent of Wheaton High’s 1,325 students are members of racial or ethnic minorities, and 41 percent receive free or reduced-price lunches.
“I think the reason was because of the Project Lead the Way curriculum,” said Mr. Stroup. “It prepared these students.”
It’s a familiar refrain that the United States is critically short of students prepared to perpetuate the nation’s decades-long pre-eminence in science, engineering, and the mathematics critical to both.
But when it comes to doing something about it, educators who have studied the alternatives say there’s no one else offering as much rigor in the so-called STEM fields of science, technology, engineering, and math education to as many students as Project Lead the Way.
“What we found was that PLTW offers the best curriculum out there,” said Bart Aslin, the director of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers Education Foundation in Dearborn, Mich. “It’s a pipeline vision to let as many students as possible see the excitement of science, technology, math.”
The Technical Track
Students at the Project Lead the Way program at Wheaton High School in Montgomery County, Md., can choose from among several sequences of courses designed to prepare them for the postsecondary study of engineering.
Click on graphic below to see the Grade 9 - 12 curriculum.
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NOTE: The curriculum also calls for freshmen and sophomores to take physical education, and for seniors to take an engineering-related college course, elective, or internship.
PLTW was singled out by the congressionally chartered National Academy of Sciences in its oft-cited 2005 report “Rising Above the Gathering Storm,” which recommended that the program serve as the national model for expansion of science and engineering education.
Still, the program is neither cost-free nor easy. Because of the hands-on nature of many PLTW classes, implementing the curriculum can cost up to $95,000 per school depending on what computer equipment and facilities a school already has. Robotic equipment and automated manufacturing machinery required for PLTW elective courses, such as Computer Integrated Manufacturing, can cost tens of thousands of dollars more.
Schools or districts must also pay for the specialized two-week summer training for teachers at one of PLTW’s 30-plus partner colleges and universities. The per-teacher cost of the required course varies, but can exceed $2,000.
To the teachers who attend—70 percent of whom have previously taught career and technical education, and may not have any formal engineering training—the cost may feel like the least of it. Mr. Stroup, the Wheaton High engineering-academy director, called the training “boot camp.”
“These classes are very hard-hitting,” concurred Renny Whittenbarger, an engineering teacher at Cleveland High School in Cleveland, Tenn. “PLTW will fail you. … You have to pass their exam before they let you [teach].”
At Wheaton High School, a clutch of adults filtered into Mr. Lee’s darkened class early one recent Monday morning, watching as the students compared notes on their building project. The students were showcasing the kind of collaborative effort that PLTW emphasizes, in lieu of the “eyes on your own paper” style of learning that prevails in many classrooms.
“What’s really impressive to me is to see the kids helping each other out—you never see that at the university level,” whispered James W. Sturges. “That’s how we work in engineering.”
Mr. Sturges was visiting in part because he’s the president of the Montgomery County school district’s advisory board on careers in engineering, scientific research, and manufacturing technologies, but also because he is the director of mission assurance at the Bethesda, Md.-based aerospace giant Lockheed Martin Corp.
“We’re the biggest employer of engineers in the United States,” said Mr. Sturges, who is himself an engineer. “If we can’t get [enough of] those, it’s going to affect our business.”
Student Sephar Simon uses a measuring device known as a digital multimeter to gauge resistance during the class.
—Christopher Powers/Education Week
Those same concerns gave rise to the project that would become PLTW.
In the 1980s, Richard Blaise, now a vice president of PLTW, was the director of occupational education for the Shenendehowa Central School District in Clifton Park, N.Y. To help expand his district’s technology education offerings, he reached out to local industry leaders, including Richard C. Liebich, now PLTW’s chief executive officer and the chairman of its board of directors, to form a technology advisory board.
Mr. Liebich, a former president of Houston-based Sysco Foods, was then running Transport National Development, an industrial cutting-tool manufacturer in Orchard Park, N.Y.—one of several similar companies he would eventually head as CEO and chairman.
Mr. Liebich was having trouble hiring engineers, “and it became apparent then that, yes, we need to do something,” said PLTW spokeswoman Crickett Thomas-O’Dell.
Funding the nascent idea through Mr. Liebich’s Clifton Park-based Charitable Venture Foundation, Mr. Blaise and his staff were able to field-test what would become PLTW at upstate New York middle schools in the late 1980s and early 1990s. By the 1997-98 school year, when PLTW was spun off to become a separate nonprofit group, high schools piloted the program, and by 2000-01, over 300 schools in more than 25 states offered the curriculum.
Project Lead the Way is now self-sufficient, running on revenues from the licensing of PLTW software and the sale of teaching tools to schools, Ms. Thomas-O’Dell said.
David Waugh, a dean emeritus of the University of South Carolina’s college of engineering who has observed PLTW with interest but is not involved with the program, attributes much of its rapid expansion to the fact that while many precollegiate educators recognize the importance of engineering, few teach the subject.
“So many people in high school have very little idea about what engineering really is,” said Mr. Waugh, a past president of the Alexandria, Va.-based National Society of Professional Engineers. “They have science classes, and they’ll encounter things like chemistry and even physics, but with engineering, they don’t encounter anything. That’s sort of where it ends.”
By contrast, PLTW puts engineering firmly in the foreground, and it mixes lots of projects into the curriculum.
Ninth grader William Mendoza works on a class project as part of a pre-engineering program at his Wheaton, Md., high school that follows a curriculum from a national initiative called Project Lead the Way.
—Christopher Powers/Education Week
“We make it fast-paced and hands-on,” said Steve Clariday, the career education director at Cleveland High in Tennessee.
As part of a Cleveland High PLTW engineering class, students work in teams to build cardboard boats that they’ll race in the school’s swimming pool. But first they have to calculate how many cubic feet the boat should be, how fast it will sink, and other factors on their own; the only equation they’re given is that one cubic foot of cardboard will sustain 60 pounds.
“They get frustrated,” Mr. Clariday said, “but they get to know the math.”
Cleveland High students also have designed tools to help people in their community, including a can opener with an extra mechanical advantage to help a woman with arthritis, and a rake that a one-armed man can use comfortably.
Along with other nations’ more-aggressive prioritization of technical education, raw population trends do not favor future American pre-eminence in engineering.
According to projections by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s directorate for education, India will produce more than twice the number of American and European college graduates combined by 2015. China will have even more.
The United States “cannot build a workforce of just white males in engineering,” said Laurie Maxson, the director of Science Technology & Engineering Preview Summer Camp Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo.—a transition between PLTW’s middle-school-level Gateway to Technology program and its high school curriculum.
“They’re focusing on all groups—all groups in this country are underrepresented when it comes to engineering,” the University of South Carolina’s Mr. Waugh said of PTLW.
According to data gathered on behalf of PLTW in 2005-06
by the evaluation firm TrueOutcomes Inc. of York, Pa., the program has had some success in recruiting students of color.
White students still account for more than 70 percent of PLTW students. But they’re only slightly overrepresented in PLTW classes compared with the enrollment of the schools in which they operate. Hispanics also are slightly overrepresented in PLTW classes, relative to the populations of their schools.
African-Americans are underrepresented by about 20 percentage points in PLTW classes, compared with their share of their schools’ overall enrollment—“not where we want to be,” said Carolyn Helm, PLTW’S pre-engineering curriculum project director.
“But we’re doing a heck of a lot better than colleges,” in whose engineering programs African-Amerian students are even more underrepresented, she said.
The program has had trouble attracting girls, who make up only 17 percent of PLTW classes. “We really have a hard time getting females involved,” Ms. Maxson said.
Yet Project Lead the Way has made strong inroads among two other groups that are not always well represented in STEM fields: the less-well-off and the academically unspectacular.
Senior Jessica Steinmann, bottom at right, and junior Marcos Rego work on computer-generated building designs during their civil-engineering and architecture course.
—Christopher Powers/Education Week
According to the TrueOutcomes data, the program is available at schools across the economic spectrum, but is represented especially well at schools that serve free or reduced-price lunches to more than 70 percent of their students.
“We don’t have money for college,” said Jessica Steinmann, a 16-year-old senior in Wheaton High’s engineering academy. “This is a way out.”
A Haitian immigrant, Ms. Steinmann now plans to study aeronautical engineering in college.
Andrew Kim, a 17-year-old Korean-American senior in the Academy of Engineering, came into the program in 9th grade as a special education student with poor grades. Now he is breezing through honors-level classes and hopes to study mechanical engineering at either MIT or the University of Maryland Baltimore County.
“My dad actually didn’t want me to go to Wheaton High School,” said Mr. Kim, recalling his father’s fears about “thugs in the hallways.” The school is the poorest in mostly affluent Montgomery County, Principal Kevin E. Lowndes said.
Senior Andrew Kim, second from right, works with Richard Sutton during their class in engineering design and development at Wheaton High’s engineering academy. Mr. Kim, who started out with poor grades, plans to study mechanical engineering in college next year.
—Christopher Powers/Education Week
But Mr. Kim said the academy’s rigor has won his father over, and now his younger brother, a 9th grader, has joined the program.
If PLTW hewed to the usual strategy of putting high-rigor academic programs only in well-to-do areas, said Mr. Sturges, the Lockheed engineer and advisory-board president, “you wouldn’t put this [engineering academy] in a high-FARMS [free and reduced-price meal system] area, you’d put it in a no-FARMS area.”
Mr. Lowndes, the Wheaton High principal, said “the most impressive thing” about the engineering program is what it does for average students. “It’s teaching them through a cohort how to be successful in school and why it’s important to take the rigorous courses,” he said.
As Lynne M. Gilli, the program manager of the Maryland Department of Education’s career and technical education instructional branch, put it: “We are not trying to recruit the best and brightest” for PLTW pre-engineering programs. “We’re trying to recruit the top 80 percent.”
Sunday, September 23, 2007
AIM VISION Reaches and Teaches the STARS! CONGRATULATONS!
Detroit HS tech stars get backers
By Eric T. Campbell
The Michigan Citizen
DETROIT - Leaders from the education, faith-based and labor communities came together in front of the Northwestern High School student body Thurs., Sept. 14, to announce the creation of the Northwestern High School Success Project.
The assembly, held in Northwestern�s auditorium was part of the Rainbow/PUSH Third Annual Community Symposium.
Rev. Jesse Jackson, Deputy Mayor Anthony Adams, Detroit Schools Superintendent Connie Calloway and U.S. Representative John Conyers addressed the students.
The "Success Project" was initiated by a partnership of Northwestern Alumni with the Michigan Labor Constituency Council, the UAW, International Union, New Detroit Incorporated and the Rainbow/PUSH coalition.
Honorary Chairs and committee members include a long list of Detroit community leaders and activists. The five-year pilot program seeks to identify specific educational and structural needs at Northwestern and to raise a $500,000 fiduciary fund for the school to "augment their academic program over a five-year period", according to the symposium guide booklet.
The program also stresses the need for "community wide mobilization" to support student's scholastic needs and improve Detroit high school graduation rates.
"They've raised over $90,000 for us to augment our programs, organizations and clubs, to have a holistic approach, a community approach to transforming," Northwestern Principal Patricia Pickett told the Michigan Citizen. "We're going to try and develop a clean, safe learning environment with rigorous instruction. We're all stakeholders, continuously learning."
Northwestern High School was chosen to pilot the program in part because of its potential to incorporate an extended academic structure. The curriculum at Northwestern already includes nine advanced placement classes, four computer laboratories, two libraries and one of the only Planetariums located in a Michigan public school.
Dr. Shedrick Ward is the facilitator of the AIM program at Northwestern, which identifies and nurtures students from the ninth grade on and offers scholastic options based in technological fields.
"To bring the teachers together across areas to perform a unified approach" that's the American transformation of the high schools so that the kids are connected to places like Ford Motor Company, Chrysler, General Motors, who have their challenges in this global network," Dr. Ward told the Michigan Citizen in his office. "But young people still have some responsibility in understanding what that challenge is going to be when they leave high school."
In addition to the morning assembly, the Community Day Symposium also included a luncheon and town hall meeting, at which participants discussed and reviewed elements of the "Success Program".
The day ended with a black tie gala and fundraising dinner at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. Keynote speaker Judge Greg Mathis has strong ties to the "Success Program" through his National Youth and Education Crusade, which focuses on issues of crime and education.
But the day was best exemplified by the gathering of the student body in the high school auditorium on Grand Boulevard, during which wisdom was passed from generation to generation in the spirit of community uplift and educational advancement.
"We are now the conscience of this country," congressman and Northwestern High graduate, John Conyers told the listeners. "We are now holding hands with the 6.6 billion people in the world and we can all make a difference."
Keynote speaker Rev. Jesse Jackson paid tribute to Northwestern High and its role, even beyond the neighborhood.
"You have such a sterling history and heritage of impacting our world by lessons taught and learned from this school," Jackson began.
He focused directly on the students in the building and their responsibility to uphold the advancements made by those in the Black community.
"We're going another way, against the odds, we at Northwestern, are going to higher ground," the audience repeated with Jackson. "We shall lift ourselves, and our community, our city, our state, by the power of our minds. We change our minds, and the whole world changes. We must first change our minds to change the world."
 |
| Principal Patricia Pickett, Superintendant Connie Calloway, Rev. Jesse Jackson. PHOTO BY JACKIE BARBER |
By Eric T. Campbell
The Michigan Citizen
DETROIT - Leaders from the education, faith-based and labor communities came together in front of the Northwestern High School student body Thurs., Sept. 14, to announce the creation of the Northwestern High School Success Project.
The assembly, held in Northwestern�s auditorium was part of the Rainbow/PUSH Third Annual Community Symposium.
Rev. Jesse Jackson, Deputy Mayor Anthony Adams, Detroit Schools Superintendent Connie Calloway and U.S. Representative John Conyers addressed the students.
The "Success Project" was initiated by a partnership of Northwestern Alumni with the Michigan Labor Constituency Council, the UAW, International Union, New Detroit Incorporated and the Rainbow/PUSH coalition.
Honorary Chairs and committee members include a long list of Detroit community leaders and activists. The five-year pilot program seeks to identify specific educational and structural needs at Northwestern and to raise a $500,000 fiduciary fund for the school to "augment their academic program over a five-year period", according to the symposium guide booklet.
The program also stresses the need for "community wide mobilization" to support student's scholastic needs and improve Detroit high school graduation rates.
"They've raised over $90,000 for us to augment our programs, organizations and clubs, to have a holistic approach, a community approach to transforming," Northwestern Principal Patricia Pickett told the Michigan Citizen. "We're going to try and develop a clean, safe learning environment with rigorous instruction. We're all stakeholders, continuously learning."
Northwestern High School was chosen to pilot the program in part because of its potential to incorporate an extended academic structure. The curriculum at Northwestern already includes nine advanced placement classes, four computer laboratories, two libraries and one of the only Planetariums located in a Michigan public school.
Dr. Shedrick Ward is the facilitator of the AIM program at Northwestern, which identifies and nurtures students from the ninth grade on and offers scholastic options based in technological fields.
"To bring the teachers together across areas to perform a unified approach" that's the American transformation of the high schools so that the kids are connected to places like Ford Motor Company, Chrysler, General Motors, who have their challenges in this global network," Dr. Ward told the Michigan Citizen in his office. "But young people still have some responsibility in understanding what that challenge is going to be when they leave high school."
In addition to the morning assembly, the Community Day Symposium also included a luncheon and town hall meeting, at which participants discussed and reviewed elements of the "Success Program".
The day ended with a black tie gala and fundraising dinner at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. Keynote speaker Judge Greg Mathis has strong ties to the "Success Program" through his National Youth and Education Crusade, which focuses on issues of crime and education.
But the day was best exemplified by the gathering of the student body in the high school auditorium on Grand Boulevard, during which wisdom was passed from generation to generation in the spirit of community uplift and educational advancement.
"We are now the conscience of this country," congressman and Northwestern High graduate, John Conyers told the listeners. "We are now holding hands with the 6.6 billion people in the world and we can all make a difference."
Keynote speaker Rev. Jesse Jackson paid tribute to Northwestern High and its role, even beyond the neighborhood.
"You have such a sterling history and heritage of impacting our world by lessons taught and learned from this school," Jackson began.
He focused directly on the students in the building and their responsibility to uphold the advancements made by those in the Black community.
"We're going another way, against the odds, we at Northwestern, are going to higher ground," the audience repeated with Jackson. "We shall lift ourselves, and our community, our city, our state, by the power of our minds. We change our minds, and the whole world changes. We must first change our minds to change the world."
The Milford Powerhouse Project
The Milford Powerhouse
http:www.milfordhistory.org (click-on "powerhouse" on left-side)
Powerhouse (Virtual Tour)
http://www.visualtour.com/shownp.asp?SK=13&T=843903
The Pettibone Creek Powerhouse blog-site
http://pcpowerhouse.blogspot.com
Milford Powerhouse Renovation Committee
NEXT Meeting: Wednesday, October 10, 2007 7:00PM (Informal Presentation)
Friday, September 21, 2007
SWEET! (UWSEM Agenda for Change Initaitive)
September 7, 2007
United Way for
Ref: UWSEM Agenda for Change “Educational Preparedness” Collaborative LOI
Agenda for Change Committee:
Communities to Schools Regional Digital Collaboratory
SKETCH of INTENTION “Pilot Project”: Create and develop a youth-based digitally networked community (networked two-way telecommunications) of inclusive entities to include schools, neighborhood and city community centers, human service organizations, various community capacity building organizations, public service organizations, arts and cultural organizations, business, industry and government.
Attributes of Aspirations (Limited Only by Our Combined Imaginations, Creativity and Innovation)
- Community Interaction and Engagement
*Build deeper and richer community alliances. Build organizational leadership and capacity, service-learning and engagement vehicles for change from merely synergistic to systemic imperatives.
- Educational Enhancement and Distribution Channels
*Utilize existing K-12 educational assets; teachers, pedagogy, curriculum, underutilized digital infrastructure, etc. Develop digital media and learning curriculum, pedagogy, distribution methodologies and modalities aligned with new 21st Century economic realities with a particular focus on Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) disciplines. Create connections to relevant real-world experts and working environments.
- Youth Development and Leadership
*Create student-led, student-taught, project-based explorations emphasizing creativity, innovation and entrepreneurial endeavors that resonate with their world as they encounter it while also learning how to think instead of what to think.
- 21st Century Skills for New Creative Economy Career Development
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Digital Directions Readers Respond
Published: September 12, 2007
Readers Respond
The premiere issue of Digital Directions, launched in June, prompted many responses from readers. Here is a sampling.
Digital Natives
This is a great publication, and I truly appreciate all of the articles, especially John Q. Porter’s interview. I agree with him that technology is being held to a greater standard than some of the other instructional tools.
I am the K-12 technology curriculum leader for the Long Beach Unified School District in California and am constantly looking out for effective emerging technology for use in the district and in the classroom. Our student population has changed, and we need to help our teachers meet the needs of these digital natives.
I am currently working on my dissertation on the changing roles of teachers in one-to-one laptop classrooms and am interested in seeing what is happening in other educational institutions.
Our district technology budget is currently limited since there is no line item for technology at the state level and we have to depend on district general funds. We are looking at our needs and hope to have a budget that will allow us to support the emerging technologies.
I think this publication is above average and look forward to future issues.
Vanitha Chandrasekhar
K-12 Technology Curriculum Leader
Long Beach Unified School District
Long Beach, Calif.
Exemplary Methodologies
Congratulations! Finally, something that is both innovative and generative with regard to truly exemplary educational digital-technology methodologies and executions. Thank you on behalf of all teachers, students, and parents currently constrained by traditional education irrelevance.
Jim Ross
President
21st Century Digital Learning Environments
Clinton Township, Mich.
Keep It Up!
Education Week does wonderful work, and I’m really looking forward to this new resource for information on a field of such large and growing importance. Keep it up!
Brian Taylor
Managing Editor
California School Boards Association
West Sacramento, Calif.
Gaming in the Classroom
I wanted to drop you a note and tell you how much I enjoyed the Digital Directions magazine. I wanted to share something that we are working on in West Virginia that you might be interested in. I have done a lot of research on teachers’ using gaming in the classroom. What I found was until teachers have their own “game” to play and learn from, they will not transfer that methodology to the classroom. With that being said, we worked with Ruby Payne and one of her books, Working with Students,and used the context of it to build an online simulation game for teachers to play to practice classroom-discipline strategies. We have done formative and summative evaluations on it in five universities across West Virginia.
Nancy Sturm
Education Technology Adviser to Gov. Joe Manchin III
West Virginia Office of Technology
Charleston, W.Va.
Correction: A story in the Summer 2007 issue, “Wireless Technologies Present New Set of Challenges,” incorrectly referred to routers and hubs in wireless networks. It should have referred to wireless hubs, which do not use routers. Also, the story should have said that the common wireless standards are 802.11 b and 802.11 g, and that 802.11 b moves data at up to 11 megabits per second, and 802.11 g moves data at 54 megabits per second. In addition, the story should have said that standard wired networks move data at 100 megabits per second.
Vol. 01, Issue Fall 2007, Page 5
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
The "Real Genius" of Design!
The New York Times
_____
September 11, 2007
Low Technologies, High Aims
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Beneath the bustling “infinite corridor” linking buildings at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, just past a boiler room, an assemblage of tinkerers from 16 countries welded, stitched and hammered, working on rough-hewn inventions aimed at saving the world, one village at a time.
M.I.T. has nurtured dozens of Nobel Prize winners in cerebral realms like astrophysics, economics and genetics. But lately, the institute has turned its attention toward concrete thinking to improve the lives of the world’s bottom billion, those who live on a dollar a day or less and who often die young.
This summer, it played host to a four-week International Development Design Summit to identify problems, cobble together prototype solutions and winnow the results to see which might work in the real world.
Mohamed Mashaal, a young British engineer headed for a job with BP on the North Sea this fall, poured water into a handcrafted plastic backpack worn by a design partner, Bernard Kiwia, who teaches bicycle repair in rural Tanzania and hopes to offer women there an easier way to tote the precious liquid for long distances.
Sham Tembo, an electrical engineer from Zambia, and Jessica Vechakul, an engineering graduate student at M.I.T., slowly added a cow manure puree to a five-gallon bucket holding charcoal made from corncobs. In the right configuration, the mix might generate enough electricity to charge a cellphone battery or a small flashlight for a year or more.
The summit (www.iddsummit.org) was the brainchild mainly of Amy Smith, a lecturer at M.I.T. who received her master’s there in 1995 and in 2004 won a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award, and Kenneth Pickar, an engineering professor at the California Institute of Technology. Faculty and students from Olin College, an engineering school near Boston, were also involved.
The flurry of activity was taking place at D-Lab, a research center and set of courses at M.I.T. devoted to devising cheap technologies that could have a big effect in impoverished communities. In homage to Ms. Smith’s passion for attacking poverty from the ground up, the lab is nicknamed “Amy’s World.”
Typically, D-Lab sends students abroad in midwinter breaks to work with people who are struggling with a lack of clean water, electricity, cooking fuels or mechanical power to turn crops into products. For four weeks, though, the real world had come to M.I.T.
Throughout the workshop, Ms. Smith served as scoutmaster, cheerleader, cook and personal shopper (when work flowed deep into the night), and she provided periodic reality checks.
She seemed dazed at times, but never fazed. “Everyone calls this an experiment,” Ms. Smith said of the workshop, the first of its kind. “I call it the realization of a vision.”
The work itself was often two steps back, not one step forward. As Lhamotso, a young woman from Tibet, and Laura Stupin, who just graduated from Olin, wrestled with a whirring Rube Goldberg mash-up of bicycle and grain mill, the chain slipped with a loud clang.
“We have a real friction problem,” Ms. Stupin yelled.
The workshop was developed over the last year by Ms. Smith, Dr. Pickar and others after a meeting to discuss a “design revolution” — a shift in focus among companies, universities, investors and scientists toward attacking problems that hamper development in the world’s poorest places.
“Nearly 90 percent of research and development dollars are spent on creating technologies that serve the wealthiest 10 percent of the world’s population,” Ms. Smith said. “The point of the design revolution is to switch that.”
She added: “There are several different places where that revolution has to take place. We started thinking, ‘How do we train engineers so they might start thinking of this as a field of engineering they’d want to pursue?’ ”
Developing a pedal-powered grain mill or a backpack for water, as workshop participants did, was only a first step. The teams also had to be sure that their creations could be built of local materials cheaply enough to be bought by the world’s poorest people, that they could be fixed easily and fit ways of living that have deep-rooted rhythms.
The workshop began in mid-July, with the arrival of nearly 50 visitors from Brazil, Ghana, Guatemala, Tanzania, Tibet and other countries.
Most of the $200,000 budget was provided by donations from individuals and private groups, including the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance, which supports university programs to develop commercially viable products that advance society.
The workshop began with a lecture by Paul Polak, a psychiatrist turned entrepreneur, who develops simple solutions for the problems of the poor. Dr. Polak, who has become something of a guru to the design revolution movement, railed against conventional charity and insisted that the route to prosperity lies in inventions that improve lives but mesh with existing lifestyles.
He laid out the principles of development from the bottom up, including the importance of first listening and watching, then following the old dictum “small is beautiful” with another, equally important one: “cheap is beautiful.”
The goal, he said, should be to improve a million lives, and to make technologies that can be sold and bought in increments — like a drip-irrigating system that can expand as a farmer’s income rises. Dr. Polak said in an interview that at least in the classroom, the push for such initiatives was coming from young people.
Ms. Smith said she wanted to avoid having the workshop end up as yet another academic exercise where the only outcome is often a set of paper proceedings or pledges. This time, she said, the goal was “no paper, just prototypes.”
In fact, in the first days of the workshop, it seemed that the only paper in evidence was an ever-spreading, flower-petal array of blue, green, pink and yellow sticky notes on walls and blackboards. The notes charted the progression from basic needs (water, food, energy, health) to specific issues (a three-mile hike to and from the nearest water supply in a Tanzanian village, the lack of a well-testing kit that a Bangladeshi village clinic could afford).
Ms. Smith placed participants in project teams. Then came round-table discussions, rough sketches, technical drawings and the first three-dimensional models.
Half a dozen volunteer mentors helped the participants make their ideas more concrete. Some were academics, like Ariel Phillips of Harvard, whose specialty is group dynamics. Others were drawn from Ms. Smith’s black book filled with an array of fixers and crafters — people whose careers have been spent solving problems by turning metal, plastic, wood, circuitry and motors into working devices. They included Dennis Nagle, a former weapons designer who abandoned the profession, he said, during the Summer of Love and turned to lighting design and other things, like the 24-ton array of speaker cabinets for a Guns N’ Roses concert.
The mentors’ task was making things work. “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re on the verge of a Home Depot run,” announced Jock Brandis, who had driven to the workshop from Wilmington, N.C. After a career building contraptions on movie sets, Mr. Brandis now helps run the Full Belly Project, which develops machines to simplify village work.
Mr. Brandis noted that the budget for developing a peanut sheller for a Malian village was far different from that for building a camera-toting vehicle in rural Mexico to film Antonio Banderas galloping through the desert as Zorro. But the challenge of filling a niche with limited materials and tools is similar.
The other similarity is that both kinds of design begin with a blank slate. As Mr. Brandis put it: “It’s, ‘Here’s the model high-rise made of Styrofoam, and then the flying saucer has to fly into it, and we need to shoot it three times from three different angles, and next Tuesday it’s got to happen.’ ”
At the workshop, Mr. Brandis examined with approval one group’s design for an oven with three grates of progressively finer mesh to hold charcoal fuel, so that big pieces that have not burned down stay separate from more fully consumed fuel, limiting harmful smoke.
“What you try to do in virtually every situation is make their lives more efficient,” he said. “That’s what the big revolution in America was between 1860 and 1960 — that a person doing a day’s work can produce a lot more product. And that means time is more valuable and that means he has more time to do other things.”
Ashley Thomas, an entering senior at M.I.T., explained the appeal of such work while struggling with a teetering metal frame for a cooler that uses evaporation from wet fabric instead of electrical components to draw heat from its contents. The idea was conceived with participants from Tibet, where meat must be stored for weeks in isolated rural areas, and India, where heat can quickly ruin a vendor’s inventory.
“Imagine a fruit vendor in a rural area or the slums,” explained Deepa Dubey, a partner of Ms. Thomas, who studies product design as a graduate student in Kanpur, India. “He comes with all his fruit and vegetables. At the end of the day he makes one dollar, and whatever is left he has to throw it away because he can’t store it.”
Ms. Thomas said, “Amy’s class is about the hardest class to get into at M.I.T., including at the Sloan School, which is basically about how to make a million dollars after you graduate.”
She added: “It’s taking industrial design theory and applying it to where you can have the greatest impact. Here, $5 worth of angle iron and towels could mean a month’s supply of food. To me, that’s just worth so much more than spending that amount of time working on designing a slick new computer.”
_____
September 11, 2007
Low Technologies, High Aims
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Beneath the bustling “infinite corridor” linking buildings at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, just past a boiler room, an assemblage of tinkerers from 16 countries welded, stitched and hammered, working on rough-hewn inventions aimed at saving the world, one village at a time.
M.I.T. has nurtured dozens of Nobel Prize winners in cerebral realms like astrophysics, economics and genetics. But lately, the institute has turned its attention toward concrete thinking to improve the lives of the world’s bottom billion, those who live on a dollar a day or less and who often die young.
This summer, it played host to a four-week International Development Design Summit to identify problems, cobble together prototype solutions and winnow the results to see which might work in the real world.
Mohamed Mashaal, a young British engineer headed for a job with BP on the North Sea this fall, poured water into a handcrafted plastic backpack worn by a design partner, Bernard Kiwia, who teaches bicycle repair in rural Tanzania and hopes to offer women there an easier way to tote the precious liquid for long distances.
Sham Tembo, an electrical engineer from Zambia, and Jessica Vechakul, an engineering graduate student at M.I.T., slowly added a cow manure puree to a five-gallon bucket holding charcoal made from corncobs. In the right configuration, the mix might generate enough electricity to charge a cellphone battery or a small flashlight for a year or more.
The summit (www.iddsummit.org) was the brainchild mainly of Amy Smith, a lecturer at M.I.T. who received her master’s there in 1995 and in 2004 won a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award, and Kenneth Pickar, an engineering professor at the California Institute of Technology. Faculty and students from Olin College, an engineering school near Boston, were also involved.
The flurry of activity was taking place at D-Lab, a research center and set of courses at M.I.T. devoted to devising cheap technologies that could have a big effect in impoverished communities. In homage to Ms. Smith’s passion for attacking poverty from the ground up, the lab is nicknamed “Amy’s World.”
Typically, D-Lab sends students abroad in midwinter breaks to work with people who are struggling with a lack of clean water, electricity, cooking fuels or mechanical power to turn crops into products. For four weeks, though, the real world had come to M.I.T.
Throughout the workshop, Ms. Smith served as scoutmaster, cheerleader, cook and personal shopper (when work flowed deep into the night), and she provided periodic reality checks.
She seemed dazed at times, but never fazed. “Everyone calls this an experiment,” Ms. Smith said of the workshop, the first of its kind. “I call it the realization of a vision.”
The work itself was often two steps back, not one step forward. As Lhamotso, a young woman from Tibet, and Laura Stupin, who just graduated from Olin, wrestled with a whirring Rube Goldberg mash-up of bicycle and grain mill, the chain slipped with a loud clang.
“We have a real friction problem,” Ms. Stupin yelled.
The workshop was developed over the last year by Ms. Smith, Dr. Pickar and others after a meeting to discuss a “design revolution” — a shift in focus among companies, universities, investors and scientists toward attacking problems that hamper development in the world’s poorest places.
“Nearly 90 percent of research and development dollars are spent on creating technologies that serve the wealthiest 10 percent of the world’s population,” Ms. Smith said. “The point of the design revolution is to switch that.”
She added: “There are several different places where that revolution has to take place. We started thinking, ‘How do we train engineers so they might start thinking of this as a field of engineering they’d want to pursue?’ ”
Developing a pedal-powered grain mill or a backpack for water, as workshop participants did, was only a first step. The teams also had to be sure that their creations could be built of local materials cheaply enough to be bought by the world’s poorest people, that they could be fixed easily and fit ways of living that have deep-rooted rhythms.
The workshop began in mid-July, with the arrival of nearly 50 visitors from Brazil, Ghana, Guatemala, Tanzania, Tibet and other countries.
Most of the $200,000 budget was provided by donations from individuals and private groups, including the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance, which supports university programs to develop commercially viable products that advance society.
The workshop began with a lecture by Paul Polak, a psychiatrist turned entrepreneur, who develops simple solutions for the problems of the poor. Dr. Polak, who has become something of a guru to the design revolution movement, railed against conventional charity and insisted that the route to prosperity lies in inventions that improve lives but mesh with existing lifestyles.
He laid out the principles of development from the bottom up, including the importance of first listening and watching, then following the old dictum “small is beautiful” with another, equally important one: “cheap is beautiful.”
The goal, he said, should be to improve a million lives, and to make technologies that can be sold and bought in increments — like a drip-irrigating system that can expand as a farmer’s income rises. Dr. Polak said in an interview that at least in the classroom, the push for such initiatives was coming from young people.
Ms. Smith said she wanted to avoid having the workshop end up as yet another academic exercise where the only outcome is often a set of paper proceedings or pledges. This time, she said, the goal was “no paper, just prototypes.”
In fact, in the first days of the workshop, it seemed that the only paper in evidence was an ever-spreading, flower-petal array of blue, green, pink and yellow sticky notes on walls and blackboards. The notes charted the progression from basic needs (water, food, energy, health) to specific issues (a three-mile hike to and from the nearest water supply in a Tanzanian village, the lack of a well-testing kit that a Bangladeshi village clinic could afford).
Ms. Smith placed participants in project teams. Then came round-table discussions, rough sketches, technical drawings and the first three-dimensional models.
Half a dozen volunteer mentors helped the participants make their ideas more concrete. Some were academics, like Ariel Phillips of Harvard, whose specialty is group dynamics. Others were drawn from Ms. Smith’s black book filled with an array of fixers and crafters — people whose careers have been spent solving problems by turning metal, plastic, wood, circuitry and motors into working devices. They included Dennis Nagle, a former weapons designer who abandoned the profession, he said, during the Summer of Love and turned to lighting design and other things, like the 24-ton array of speaker cabinets for a Guns N’ Roses concert.
The mentors’ task was making things work. “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re on the verge of a Home Depot run,” announced Jock Brandis, who had driven to the workshop from Wilmington, N.C. After a career building contraptions on movie sets, Mr. Brandis now helps run the Full Belly Project, which develops machines to simplify village work.
Mr. Brandis noted that the budget for developing a peanut sheller for a Malian village was far different from that for building a camera-toting vehicle in rural Mexico to film Antonio Banderas galloping through the desert as Zorro. But the challenge of filling a niche with limited materials and tools is similar.
The other similarity is that both kinds of design begin with a blank slate. As Mr. Brandis put it: “It’s, ‘Here’s the model high-rise made of Styrofoam, and then the flying saucer has to fly into it, and we need to shoot it three times from three different angles, and next Tuesday it’s got to happen.’ ”
At the workshop, Mr. Brandis examined with approval one group’s design for an oven with three grates of progressively finer mesh to hold charcoal fuel, so that big pieces that have not burned down stay separate from more fully consumed fuel, limiting harmful smoke.
“What you try to do in virtually every situation is make their lives more efficient,” he said. “That’s what the big revolution in America was between 1860 and 1960 — that a person doing a day’s work can produce a lot more product. And that means time is more valuable and that means he has more time to do other things.”
Ashley Thomas, an entering senior at M.I.T., explained the appeal of such work while struggling with a teetering metal frame for a cooler that uses evaporation from wet fabric instead of electrical components to draw heat from its contents. The idea was conceived with participants from Tibet, where meat must be stored for weeks in isolated rural areas, and India, where heat can quickly ruin a vendor’s inventory.
“Imagine a fruit vendor in a rural area or the slums,” explained Deepa Dubey, a partner of Ms. Thomas, who studies product design as a graduate student in Kanpur, India. “He comes with all his fruit and vegetables. At the end of the day he makes one dollar, and whatever is left he has to throw it away because he can’t store it.”
Ms. Thomas said, “Amy’s class is about the hardest class to get into at M.I.T., including at the Sloan School, which is basically about how to make a million dollars after you graduate.”
She added: “It’s taking industrial design theory and applying it to where you can have the greatest impact. Here, $5 worth of angle iron and towels could mean a month’s supply of food. To me, that’s just worth so much more than spending that amount of time working on designing a slick new computer.”
Monday, September 10, 2007
NCLB Reauthorizing Debate BEGINS in ERNEST!
Save School Standards
Congress should resist attempts to water down the No Child Left Behind law.
Congress should resist attempts to water down the No Child Left Behind law.
Monday, September 10, 2007; A14
THE DEBATE on No Child Left Behind begins in earnest this week, and the outcome will be determined by one fundamental question: Does this country want to make schools better -- or just make schools look better? If Congress is true to the noble idea that all children, no matter their races, family incomes or circumstances, can learn to read and do math, it must reject suggestions that make a charade of standards and accountability.
A draft bill reauthorizing President Bush's signature education initiative will be the subject of a hearing today by the House education committee. Its chairman, Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), is an architect of the 5 1/2 -year-old law and an astute champion of good schools, and there is much that is admirable in the draft. Foremost is making sure that needy schools get their rightful share of state and local funds and of quality teachers. Performance pay for teachers is endorsed, a brave stand considering the opposition of the politically powerful National Education Association. Mr. Miller, with insights into how schools scam the law's requirements, would plug loopholes that let schools enhance their records through statistical sleights of hand and by excluding hundreds of thousands of minority and special education students from measurement.
At the same time, though, Mr. Miller would open the door to even larger end runs around accountability. His draft would allow states to use measures besides math and reading tests to judge school performance. A school unable to show student proficiency in math and reading would be allowed to trot out other tests where children did better or could get credit for graduation rates or Advanced Placement tests. Not only does this diminish the central importance of math and reading as fundamental subjects to be mastered, it also lets schools define their success by masking the failure of some of their students. Equally troubling is a provision that would allow some states to use differing local assessments. The public's stake in knowing how its schools are doing would be compromised by methods that are easily manipulated, hard to understand and impossible to use in comparing one school or district against another.
Mr. Miller argues that the recommendations are aimed at undoing some of the unintended consequences of No Child Left Behind. No doubt he is right that some schools teach to the test and that some districts have starved their curricula of other subjects. But letting schools off the hook is not the answer. Nor is letting them go their own way. Instead of multiple measures, the discussion should be about national measures. Then, too, there needs to be a candid assessment of whether the laudable goal of 100 percent proficiency by 2014 is having adverse effects. Is it driving states to lower the standards and take shortcuts? Would it be better to give schools more time so that they can aim higher and achieve more?
That there are enormous political pressures surrounding this debate is undeniable. Mr. Miller's prospects of getting any semblance of No Child Left Behind reauthorized involves both wooing of traditional Democratic constituencies and outreach to Republicans. Nonetheless, a political victory at the expense of policy won't be a win for any of the children who end up left behind.
Sunday, September 09, 2007
Wednesday, September 05, 2007
AIM: Begin With the END in MIND!
Leadership by Visualization
Science hasn't fully explained how or why visualization works.
But the fact that it does is enough for most major air forces in the world to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in flight simulators.
Frankly, if you're aiming to achieve a major goal, who cares if you know how or why visualization works - just that it does!
And there's no doubt that visualization is a proven success technique used by achievers in every field, from athletes to actors to astronauts. None other than golfing legend Jack Nicklaus is said to have always played a course in his mind before actually beginning a game. John Goddard, the number one goal achiever in the world, told me several months ago that visualization was one of the main techniques he used to accomplish more that 550 major goals!
Brian Tracy says that, "All improvement in your life begins with an improvement in your mental pictures. Your mental pictures act as a guidance mechanism that causes you to act in ways that make your mental pictures come true in your life."
Last December we introduced a brand new tool as part of our Champions Club program. The Goal Tiger Vision Board is a very powerful application for your computer that enables you to take the teachings of the Law of Attraction and apply them in your daily life. It helps you to visualize your goals and dreams in a unique and dynamic way on your computer screen, using your personal dream images. You can combine these images with self chosen affirmations and power words. This way, the Goal Tiger Vision Board assists you in adjusting your belief system to break through any self limiting barriers you might have to reach your goals and create the life you desire.
Until now, the Goal Tiger Vision Board has only been available with membership in the Champions Club. But we've heard from a lot of our subscribers that they'd like to put the Vision Board to work to magnetically attract their goals and dreams.
So, with special permission from our software developers, for a limited time we are making the Goal Tiger Vision Board available as a stand-alone tool.
For a lot more details and all the benefits of the Goal Tiger Vision Board go here: http://www.goals-2-go.com/visualize/
Tuesday, September 04, 2007
21st Century Digital Learning Environments!
Pennsylvania's "Classrooms for the Future" Program Increases
Two hundred-twenty-five more high schools will benefit from Pennsylvania's innovative Classrooms for the Future technology initiative this school year, bringing the total number of participating high schools to 358.
The expansion of the program means high school students in 303 of the state's 501 school districts will be able to begin using laptop computers and other high-tech tools to improve their learning and better prepare for future success.
"Classrooms for the Future is helping our high school students engage in learning on a new level," Governor Edward G. Rendell said. "The new technology will nurture students' minds and feed their appetite for learning and it will prepare them to use equipment and machines that are commonplace in colleges and universities, corporate offices, production plants and just about anywhere they will go after graduating.
"By using technology as a learning tool, we are ensuring Pennsylvania's workforce will remain relevant and competitive in the global economy."
Classrooms for the Future is a three-year investment to provide laptop computers, high-speed Internet access and state-of-the-art software to high school classrooms across the state. Under Rendell's plan, every high school would be part of Classrooms for the Future by 2009.
The 2007-08 budget signed by Rendell in July allocates $90 million to provide the 255 high schools with 83,000 laptop computers and related equipment. It also invests $11 million in high-quality professional development for 12,100 teachers in new Classrooms for the Future high schools. That money, coupled with $2 million in federal funds, will enable each Classrooms for the Future high school to receive $30,000 for staff development.
Education Secretary Gerald L. Zahorchak said professional development is crucial to the success of Classrooms for the Future. As teachers learn how to integrate the technology into classroom instruction, they can move beyond being a mere lecturer and facilitate student-driven work.
The technology is being used in math, science, English and social studies classes to broaden the learning possibilities for Pennsylvania students and provide an unprecedented "gateway" to information and knowledge, the secretary added.
"After only one year, Classrooms for the Future already has proven to be a success for students and educators," Zahorchak said. "Teachers tell us students are more excited and engaged because of these new learning tools. In some cases, truancy and absenteeism are declining."
Greater student engagement is not the only benefit, he noted. Classrooms for the Future helps students connect their academic coursework to the real world, giving deeper meaning to what goes on both inside and outside the classroom.
As examples, the secretary cited a current events teacher who used Classrooms for the Future equipment to help her students stage a videoconference with a soldier serving in Iraq. In another classroom, a group of students studying bridge design used computer software to not only design structures but also to test them to determine whether they would work in a real-life application.
Such activities move students beyond being passive listeners and make them into active learners, Zahorchak said, while the professional development component of Classrooms for the Future ensures teachers are prepared to integrate high-technology into classroom instruction and activities.
NSF ITEST STEM Grant 2007 / UPDATE!
The ITEST program director has recommended our proposal for funding on 08/24/07. This recommendation was received in the Division of Grants and Agreements on 08/25/07. It appears that the NSF Grants Officer issuance of an award may require 4 weeks or more from the receipt of the recommendation. Even though no award is ensured at this moment I think we are close to hearing the good news.
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A National Disgrace
Mayor Adrian Fenty of Washington embraced a Herculean challenge when he convinced lawmakers to give him direct control of the city’s corrupt and dysfunctional school system. The mayor and his new schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee, are working hard to reassure nervous parents and to get the schools up and running for the new year. But remaking the schools will inevitably mean dismantling a central bureaucracy that has shown a disturbing talent for subverting reform while failing the city and its children in every conceivable way.
Washington has long been infamous for having the worst performing big-city system in the country. But The Washington Post exposed the scope of the problem earlier this summer in an eye-opening series. According to The Post, the city ranks first in terms of the budget share devoted to administration and last in spending on teachers and instruction. The imbalance is particularly disturbing, given that the District’s children fair worse at school than children in other big cities.
Nor is the administrative money well spent. Tens of millions of dollars have been thrown away on aborted or poorly thought-out projects that have become a fact of life in the nation’s capital. The system, which has a $1 billion budget and more than 10,000 employees, has been relying on paper records kept in cardboard boxes instead of computerized files. As a result, it has fallen years behind in processing paperwork and doesn’t quite know how many employees it has or what they all do.
The Fenty administration is struggling now to computerize personnel records and hopes to have the job done soon. But other problems won’t be so easy to solve. The damage wrought by lax management and cronyism have already been considerable. Last month, a former school official pleaded guilty to stealing more than $200,000 through a shell company that she controlled. In total, she arranged about $650,000 in illegal payments and insider deals for herself and her friends. She did this so easily that it suggests an absence of the most basic auditing and management procedures.
In the past, superintendents who wanted to restructure the disastrously dysfunctional central office were hampered by laws that guarantee displaced administrators the right to keep their salaries even as they moved to lower level jobs in the schools. The City Council will need to eliminate those laws if Washington is ever to remake its schools.
Sunday, September 02, 2007
AIM to DO the SMART Thing!
Matthew Jacobi, left, and Andrew McConnell, both 9, use a SMART Board at Mountain View Elementary School. (By Tracy A. Woodward -- The Washington Post)
Writing on Chalkboards Fading?Officials Push for SMART Devices in All Classes by 2010
By Delphine Schrank
Washington Post Staff Write
Thursday, August 30, 2007; LZ01
With the continuing rollout of interactive electronic whiteboards in schools across Loudoun County, the digital age is spreading its wings and the ancient world of the chalkboard is crumbling like, well, a stick of chalk.
The SMART Boards look much like their unplugged whiteboard counterparts, but they have a touch-sensitive display connected to a computer and a projector.
Loudoun school officials have set a goal of putting a SMART Board in every classroom by 2010, and each Loudoun school already has at least a handful of them -- one of the reasons the school system was honored by the National School Boards Association last year for its efforts to use new technology to enhance student achievement.
For Elizabeth "Betty" Korte, head of mathematics at Stone Bridge High School in Ashburn, the boards are nothing less than the dawn of the future. Korte's department was one of the first in the county to use them. Two years ago, she purchased several with a stipend she earned from a teaching award and matching funds from her husband's employer. The boards were $1,400 apiece at the time, Korte said.
In the past two years, the technology has improved and prices have dropped by about half, said Michael Williams, principal of Sterling Middle School, which also started using the boards two years ago and now has them in 13 classrooms. "It's a very valuable thing," Williams said.
Korte said the possibilities for instruction are endless. "In my mind, the boards let me turn the math classroom into a lab. I can introduce things like color, detailed diagrams, animated Java applets that change before the kids' eyes."
Other teachers agreed that one of the board's chief benefits is providing visual tools to illustrate the abstract, making concepts seem more real.
Probability can be demonstrated with a throw of dice. Graph lines can tantalize with a line of stars instead of points. And with different software, "you can be a million different colors," Korte said. "All kinds of crazy things."
Because the boards digitally record notes scrawled across them with a finger, they can be recalled a day later if lessons end too soon, Williams added.
Korte said she typically posts notes onto her Web site so that struggling students can relive a class in full, and students with heavy loads from other classes can catch up later.
After Korte purchased the first set of SMART Boards, the other math teachers in her department -- as well as three special education teachers -- soon caught on, she said, and their use "just mushroomed."
But Williams cautions that the extent of a student's engagement depends somewhat on the teacher's versatility with the board, which can vary based on experience with the technology. Teachers typically get a day and a half of training, Williams said.
In short, not everyone is quite the "virtuoso," a word used by Loudoun schools spokesman Wayde B. Byard to describe Korte.
"I pretty much use the SMART Board and its associated software as the center of my lesson," Korte said. "It's not just a pretty show-and-tell. The more of that we do, the better off we'll be."
Moreover, for the students, she said, "they are so used to technology and all the bells and whistles that this just fits into their world." The software gizmos "absolutely" grab their attention, and every day, she said, is a new adventure.
And what of the time-tested technique of grabbing the attention of unruly students with the screeching of nail on chalkboard? Has Korte any nostalgia for the chalkboard?
"Me?" she said. "Nooooo."
Another Voice!
DPS execs resign amid scandals
By Diane Bukowski
The Michigan Citizen
DETROIT � Three top Detroit Public School (DPS) administrators have resigned in the wake of revelations that the state may fine the district nearly $28 million due to its illegal use of 11 �Last Chance� contract schools, and that the district made possibly criminal payments of at least $46 million to risk management vendors.
A divided school board has continued business with four Last Chance schools, set up to school drop-outs.
Hildred Pepper, Jr., chief of procurement and contracting, submitted his resignation Aug. 22, according to school board member Paula Johnson, who chairs the procurement and contracting committee.
The resignations of chief facilities manager Darrell Rodgers and General Counsel Jean-Vierre Adams were announced at last month�s board meeting.
Pepper and Rodgers could not be reached for their comments on why they resigned, and Vierre-Adams did not return a call for comment. District spokesman Lekan Oguntoyinbo said the district does not comment on personnel matters.
Rodgers and facilities vice-chair Mark Schrupp, who has taken his place, were the chief architects of the school closings plan. The district�s current $1.2 billion budget calls for the closings of 34 buildings this year and between three and 10 for each of the next three fiscal years.
The closings will allegedly save the district $10.8 million this year, which will be wiped out by a cost of $20 million to close them.
The closings are part of a state-mandated deficit elimination plan, but the board has taken no action beyond a resolution to challenge that plan.
State threatens district
State Schools Superintendent Mike Flanagan cited Vierre Adams in a July 18 letter to Supt. Connie Calloway, saying that Adams told the state in a 2006 e-mail that �the District has always followed the requirements of [state law] 1231 and contracts directly with teachers who provide services for our children. There are no agreements with third parties to provide teacher services.�
However, a year later, Vierre Adams finally provided the state with copies of contract waivers between the district and the Detroit Federation of Teachers for the Last Chance schools, showing that the teachers were not employees of the district, but independent contractors.
The state also said most of the schools never submitted proper paperwork showing enrollment and attendance figures, and questioned whether they were providing any services, among other matters. The contract schools received 80 percent of the state per pupil allotment of $7,459.
Flanagan said the district faces a penalty of $5.9 million for its transgression, and on Aug. 1 told Calloway that DPS also faces the loss of up to 20 percent of its federal Title I allotment, or close to $22 million, if it does not correct the contract schools situation.
Detroit�s federal Title I allotment, awarded to poverty-stricken districts, totaled $136.2 million last year, and is conditioned on the provision of equal services to all schools.
However, on Calloway�s recommendation, the board on Aug. 14 awarded new contracts to four of the schools, Riverside Preparatory, Tredco-Patch-More School Initiative, the Detroit Association of Black Organizations, and the Detroit Behavioral Institute. Board President Jimmy Womack initiated that special call meeting.
DPS school board candidate Sandra Hines, who works at Courtis Elementary School, is running against board vice-president and finance committee chair Joyce Hayes-Giles. �Why would you vote for giving illegal schools DPS money, and closing legal schools like Mackenzie High School and Miller School?� asked Hines. �And why would the board vote for new contracts with the risk management firms under investigation?�
Board continues business with risk management vendors
Over the objections of board members Marie Thornton, Jonathan Kinloch, and Paula Johnson, the board on Aug. 16 voted to hire 26 employees of Long Insurance, LLC for three months, and awarded a $314,188 contract to New Bridge Multi-Media, Inc.
The two companies are among seven cited in an investigation by the Grand Rapids law firm of Miller Johnson of $46 million in questionable wire transfer payments.
Since the completion of the investigation, the board voted to turn the matter over to the Wayne County Prosecutor�s office and the FBI for possible criminal charges.
�I believe today�s action taken by the Detroit Board of Education may prevent the FBI from reducing public corruption within the DPS system and further erodes public confidence in our education institution,� said Thornton in a release.
Calloway recommended the payments to the Long Insurance employees, claiming the district faced an emergency situation where workers compensation checks would not be processed otherwise.
However, the Miller Johnson investigation said that Employer�s Comp Advocate, the only company of the seven that it exonerated, �does all of the check processing and payments for the various claims in workers compensation, including medical, rehabilitation, indemnity and redemption.�
The risk management vendors, Long Insurance, LLC and the global Marsh & McLennan Company, as well as Stephen Hill, the district�s chief player in the deals, to light beginning last August.
A five-page executive summary of the Miller Johnson investigation targets Hill, the former Executive Director of Risk Management from 2001 to 2005, and acting director �on loan� from the global firm Marsh & McLennan from June 2006 to Feb. 2007.
It says that the district paid Long Insurance, owned by Larry Long, an alleged friend of Hill, $17.9 million from July 18, 2003 through Jan. 1, 2007 in �exorbitant consulting fees for simply serving as the conduit to provide these employees to the district.�
Global, white-owned companies got $14 million
Marsh and McLennan was hired by the District as an insurance broker and risk management consultant from 2001 to 2004 under the school reform board, and paid $1.2 million.
However, says the summary, �From July 18, 2003 through Dec. 15, 2006, the District paid $12,196,380.72 by wire transfer to Marsh.� That included $450,000 approved by Hill although he was working for Marsh at the time.
The district also paid the Arthur J. Gallagher Company, one of the largest risk management companies in the U.S. $2.6 million in June and September of 2005 for consulting fees on the Emergency Management Information System. Hill worked at Gallagher from Sept. 2005 through May, 2006, according to the report. Long Insurance received a cut of the payments as the Minority Business Enterprise (MBE) in the joint venture.
Black-owned companies cited
The report also cites wire transfers to smaller companies. New Bridge Multi-Media, owned by Yolanda Stott-Glover, received $3.9 million from 2004 through 2006. The Spectrum Financial Group, owned by Robin Dysart, who the report says was a friend of Hill�s, received $651,467 from Jan. 2004 through Aug. 2006. It says that Hill even ran her business while she was sick with cancer.
Finally, Associates for Learning and E-Care Solutions, owned by Marilyn White, Sherry Washington, Gwendolyn Washington, and Sally Bond, received $3.3 million in payments for a �DPS WeCare� wellness program that the report cited as �virtually non-existent.�
In a letter to board members, Sherry Washington, whose art gallery also sold $1.6 million in artwork to the district, disputed the results of the investigation, saying she and her principals were never interviewed or asked for records proving that they provided services.
Washington called the report and subsequent media coverage a �biased and direct, racist and sexist assault against our company, the principals of our company, and other vendors.� She detailed 13 elements of the We Care Healthy Lifestyles Program, which she said was implemented in 20 schools, maintained records and issued regular reports.
Washington contributed small amounts to the campaign funds of Jimmy Womack and Joyce Hayes-Giles, but no other vendor in the investigation was identified in board campaign finance reports.
Other vendors were not able to be reached for comment. Long has said in published reports that he can document his work.
Procurement and Contracting committee chair Paula Johnson said she expected that more extensive revelations implicating other officials will come to light in the future, including details in a 113-page report issued by Miller Johnson but not given to board members. Johnson was the board member who changed her initial vote on the school closings, after the board originally voted them down 6-5.
 |
| (Clockwise from top left) Larry Long, Paula Johnson, Dr. Bill Spriggs, Jean-Vierre Adams |
The Michigan Citizen
DETROIT � Three top Detroit Public School (DPS) administrators have resigned in the wake of revelations that the state may fine the district nearly $28 million due to its illegal use of 11 �Last Chance� contract schools, and that the district made possibly criminal payments of at least $46 million to risk management vendors.
A divided school board has continued business with four Last Chance schools, set up to school drop-outs.
Hildred Pepper, Jr., chief of procurement and contracting, submitted his resignation Aug. 22, according to school board member Paula Johnson, who chairs the procurement and contracting committee.
The resignations of chief facilities manager Darrell Rodgers and General Counsel Jean-Vierre Adams were announced at last month�s board meeting.
Pepper and Rodgers could not be reached for their comments on why they resigned, and Vierre-Adams did not return a call for comment. District spokesman Lekan Oguntoyinbo said the district does not comment on personnel matters.
Rodgers and facilities vice-chair Mark Schrupp, who has taken his place, were the chief architects of the school closings plan. The district�s current $1.2 billion budget calls for the closings of 34 buildings this year and between three and 10 for each of the next three fiscal years.
The closings will allegedly save the district $10.8 million this year, which will be wiped out by a cost of $20 million to close them.
The closings are part of a state-mandated deficit elimination plan, but the board has taken no action beyond a resolution to challenge that plan.
State threatens district
State Schools Superintendent Mike Flanagan cited Vierre Adams in a July 18 letter to Supt. Connie Calloway, saying that Adams told the state in a 2006 e-mail that �the District has always followed the requirements of [state law] 1231 and contracts directly with teachers who provide services for our children. There are no agreements with third parties to provide teacher services.�
However, a year later, Vierre Adams finally provided the state with copies of contract waivers between the district and the Detroit Federation of Teachers for the Last Chance schools, showing that the teachers were not employees of the district, but independent contractors.
The state also said most of the schools never submitted proper paperwork showing enrollment and attendance figures, and questioned whether they were providing any services, among other matters. The contract schools received 80 percent of the state per pupil allotment of $7,459.
Flanagan said the district faces a penalty of $5.9 million for its transgression, and on Aug. 1 told Calloway that DPS also faces the loss of up to 20 percent of its federal Title I allotment, or close to $22 million, if it does not correct the contract schools situation.
Detroit�s federal Title I allotment, awarded to poverty-stricken districts, totaled $136.2 million last year, and is conditioned on the provision of equal services to all schools.
However, on Calloway�s recommendation, the board on Aug. 14 awarded new contracts to four of the schools, Riverside Preparatory, Tredco-Patch-More School Initiative, the Detroit Association of Black Organizations, and the Detroit Behavioral Institute. Board President Jimmy Womack initiated that special call meeting.
DPS school board candidate Sandra Hines, who works at Courtis Elementary School, is running against board vice-president and finance committee chair Joyce Hayes-Giles. �Why would you vote for giving illegal schools DPS money, and closing legal schools like Mackenzie High School and Miller School?� asked Hines. �And why would the board vote for new contracts with the risk management firms under investigation?�
Board continues business with risk management vendors
Over the objections of board members Marie Thornton, Jonathan Kinloch, and Paula Johnson, the board on Aug. 16 voted to hire 26 employees of Long Insurance, LLC for three months, and awarded a $314,188 contract to New Bridge Multi-Media, Inc.
The two companies are among seven cited in an investigation by the Grand Rapids law firm of Miller Johnson of $46 million in questionable wire transfer payments.
Since the completion of the investigation, the board voted to turn the matter over to the Wayne County Prosecutor�s office and the FBI for possible criminal charges.
�I believe today�s action taken by the Detroit Board of Education may prevent the FBI from reducing public corruption within the DPS system and further erodes public confidence in our education institution,� said Thornton in a release.
Calloway recommended the payments to the Long Insurance employees, claiming the district faced an emergency situation where workers compensation checks would not be processed otherwise.
However, the Miller Johnson investigation said that Employer�s Comp Advocate, the only company of the seven that it exonerated, �does all of the check processing and payments for the various claims in workers compensation, including medical, rehabilitation, indemnity and redemption.�
The risk management vendors, Long Insurance, LLC and the global Marsh & McLennan Company, as well as Stephen Hill, the district�s chief player in the deals, to light beginning last August.
A five-page executive summary of the Miller Johnson investigation targets Hill, the former Executive Director of Risk Management from 2001 to 2005, and acting director �on loan� from the global firm Marsh & McLennan from June 2006 to Feb. 2007.
It says that the district paid Long Insurance, owned by Larry Long, an alleged friend of Hill, $17.9 million from July 18, 2003 through Jan. 1, 2007 in �exorbitant consulting fees for simply serving as the conduit to provide these employees to the district.�
Global, white-owned companies got $14 million
Marsh and McLennan was hired by the District as an insurance broker and risk management consultant from 2001 to 2004 under the school reform board, and paid $1.2 million.
However, says the summary, �From July 18, 2003 through Dec. 15, 2006, the District paid $12,196,380.72 by wire transfer to Marsh.� That included $450,000 approved by Hill although he was working for Marsh at the time.
The district also paid the Arthur J. Gallagher Company, one of the largest risk management companies in the U.S. $2.6 million in June and September of 2005 for consulting fees on the Emergency Management Information System. Hill worked at Gallagher from Sept. 2005 through May, 2006, according to the report. Long Insurance received a cut of the payments as the Minority Business Enterprise (MBE) in the joint venture.
Black-owned companies cited
The report also cites wire transfers to smaller companies. New Bridge Multi-Media, owned by Yolanda Stott-Glover, received $3.9 million from 2004 through 2006. The Spectrum Financial Group, owned by Robin Dysart, who the report says was a friend of Hill�s, received $651,467 from Jan. 2004 through Aug. 2006. It says that Hill even ran her business while she was sick with cancer.
Finally, Associates for Learning and E-Care Solutions, owned by Marilyn White, Sherry Washington, Gwendolyn Washington, and Sally Bond, received $3.3 million in payments for a �DPS WeCare� wellness program that the report cited as �virtually non-existent.�
In a letter to board members, Sherry Washington, whose art gallery also sold $1.6 million in artwork to the district, disputed the results of the investigation, saying she and her principals were never interviewed or asked for records proving that they provided services.
Washington called the report and subsequent media coverage a �biased and direct, racist and sexist assault against our company, the principals of our company, and other vendors.� She detailed 13 elements of the We Care Healthy Lifestyles Program, which she said was implemented in 20 schools, maintained records and issued regular reports.
Washington contributed small amounts to the campaign funds of Jimmy Womack and Joyce Hayes-Giles, but no other vendor in the investigation was identified in board campaign finance reports.
Other vendors were not able to be reached for comment. Long has said in published reports that he can document his work.
Procurement and Contracting committee chair Paula Johnson said she expected that more extensive revelations implicating other officials will come to light in the future, including details in a 113-page report issued by Miller Johnson but not given to board members. Johnson was the board member who changed her initial vote on the school closings, after the board originally voted them down 6-5.
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