Dangerously Irrelevant

Okay, at the risk of being labeled a Scrooge, I’m going to say it, because one of the things we bloggers do is challenge each other (hopefully politely) to spark thinking and promote discussion: Miguel, I liked your team’s ‘Xmas card‘ but I think it is illegal.

Public schools (and, by extension, their employees) have a legal obligation to be neutral when it comes to religion. This means that public schools may not favor one particular religion over another  (e.g., Christianity over Judaism), one particular religious denomination over another (e.g., Southern Baptist over Mormon), or even religion over no religion (i.e., religion over atheism). A long list of United States Supreme Court cases bears this out, including:

• West Virginia State Bd. of Ed. v. Barnette (1943)
• McCollum v. Board of Education Dist. 71 (1948)
• Engel v. Vitale (1962)
• Abington School District v. Schempp (1963)
• Epperson v. Arkansas (1968)
• Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971)
• Stone v. Graham (1980)
• Wallace v. Jaffree (1985)
• Edwards v. Aguillard (1987)
• County of Allegheny v. ACLU (1989)
• Lee v. Weisman (1992)
• Santa Fe Indep. Sch. Dist. v. Doe (2000)

The electronic card created by Miguel’s team says Happy Holidays and shows a snowman, ice skaters, and penguins. All of these are nonreligious and are fine on their own. However, because Miguel refers to the electronic card as a ‘Xmas card,’ I don’t think the card survives the first prong of the Lemon test (a secular purpose). Because the electronic card uses other arguably religious symbols such as a Santa hat, mistletoe, holly, reindeer horns, a poinsettia, and what appears to be a scarf decorated with Christmas tree lights, it may be that the card also fails County of Allegheny‘s nonendorsement test
(government action may not have the purpose / effect of endorsing
religion by conveying a message favoring a particular religious belief).

Even if these latter symbols are considered nonreligious, they still are pretty clearly associated with a Christian holiday. Individuals who are of the Islamic, Jewish, Sikh, Buddhist, Hindu, or Taoist faiths, for example, rarely wear or use these symbols during this time of year. Use of even these possibly nonreligious symbols can be educationally troubling because schools also have a professional / moral / ethical obligation to create inclusive environments for students and employees.

It may be that few of the nearly 400 employees in Miguel’s school district that received the card are non-Christian. It may even be that those individuals who are of other faiths (or no faith) were not troubled by the electronic card. However, it only takes one or two individuals to raise a Constitutional concern and, I think, federal courts are pretty likely to hold that the card violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. The Establishment Clause is in our Constitution to protect the rights of religious minorities. As retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor noted, "We do not count heads before enforcing the First Amendment."

All in all, then, I think Miguel’s team should have done some things differently:

1. Eliminated all symbols even arguably related to Christmas.
2. Changed the wording from Happy Holidays to Have a great break (or something like that).
3. Not referred to the electronic card as a ‘Xmas card.’

Are these suggested changes political correctness run amuck? Maybe. Are they measures that protect the district against legal liability and increase inclusiveness? Absolutely.

Finally, I will close with two resources that may be useful to folks interested in this issue:

• Christmas curriculum: Unintended consequences (www.tolerance.org)
• Schools, holiday decorations, and the law (my 2002 article for the  Minnesota School Boards Association Journal)

I look forward to hearing others’ thoughts on this topic.

Miguel posted about John’s graph on rate of change.

Here’s how I’ve presented on this topic…

Cue up the dueling banjos!

I’m hoping that most of us bloggers will do what some folks did last December: create a top 10 (or so) list of their favorite / most important / most popular blog posts of the calendar year. I found some really great posts last year that I had missed because some bloggers did this.

I’m already thinking about what mine might be!

So I had this great idea. I’d contact TIME magazine, ask them for a clean PDF version of (and permission to freely reprint) their great article from last week, and then school organizations, leadership associations, bloggers, etc. could point educators to the link or copy the PDF for workshop, conference, and/or training purposes. In other words, we all could leverage the prestige and reach of TIME to actually make the changes the article discussed. And thus my adventures with Big Media began…

My original message

Greetings!

 

I am the director of
the nation’s only university center dedicated to K-12 technology leadership
issues. Our primary function is to try and help school administrators understand
this "new" (to them, at least) world of technology and what it means for
schools.

 

Your recent article,
How to Bring Our Schools Out of the 20th Century, should be required reading for
every K-12 principal and superintendent in the country. Of course I want to help
make that happen! Can you give me more information on how to get a PDF copy of
this article? Would TIME be willing to let us post it on our web site for others
to access? As we (and others) do workshops with school leaders, it would be
great to be able to send them to the article for background
reading.

 

Hope you can help.
Thanks!

TIME’s reply

Scott,

Thank you for your interest in TIME Magazine.  Unfortunately there are only two options for electronic use of our content:

1. If you wish to link to articles in the Time.com archive, there is no charge for the link. 

2. If you wish to post the article onto your website, there is a 1-year fee of $2,000 per article.  The license fee is for text only, since we do not own the rights to the images.

Let me know how you would like to move forward.

Thanks,

Evelyn
TIME Reprints

My second try

Thanks for the quick reply. Unfortunately option 2 is well beyond our
budget. Is there no one I can talk to about the possibility of waiving this fee?
Getting K-12 educators access to this single article doesn’t seem like it would
be a big deal on TIME’s end but could have a huge impact on making the kind of
changes the article discusses. If TIME made this freely available to folks, a
lot of school-oriented organization could publicize TIME’s donation of access
and get lots of educators to read the article. This is THE most important issue
facing schools right now and they don’t even know it, more or less talk about
it. It’s amazing how timely and prescient this article is. Can’t TIME help us
help schools?

TIME’s second reply

Scott,

The link can be posted free of charge, the article will be in the
archive indefinitely.  My apologies for the inconvenience, but I cannot grant
permission to post the actual article.

Thanks,
Evelyn

Today is the last day of Chart Week here at Dangerously Irrelevant. Today’s
post addresses teacher professional development regarding classroom Internet
usage. All data are from the recently-released NCES report, Internet Access
in U.S. Public Schools and Classrooms: 1994-2005.

Professional development for use of the Internet in public school
classrooms

The chart below shows that 83% of public schools said that they or the
district offered professional development to teachers on classroom Internet
use in 2005.

Of course, just because professional development is offered doesn’t mean that
teachers participate. The data below show that in 2005 only about a third of districts
said that they were able to get more than 75% of their teachers to participate.
Another third or do said that less than one-fourth of their teachers
participated in such training. These numbers were slightly better than in 2002.

There are a variety of reasons why teachers might not participate in
professional development related to classroom use of the Internet. The training
offered might not be worthwhile or at convenient times, teachers might feel they
have more pressing professional development needs, etc. However, in an era when information / media
/ Internet literacy have become vitally important, these numbers are at least
somewhat concerning.

So what did we learn?

Here are the rest of the posts from Chart Week:

• Monday – Internet
  access in public schools
• Tuesday – Student
  laptops and wireless classrooms
• Wednesday – Length
  of student laptop loans
• Thursday – Internet
  safety

What did we learn this week? We learned that most schools and classrooms have
wired connections to the Internet but that classroom wireless penetration is
stagnant. We learned that student laptop usage is minimal, both overall and even
in schools where students get to use them. We learned that significant
percentages of schools fail to have students or parents affirmatively sign that
they have read and understand acceptable use policies. And today we learned that
teacher professional development may not be furthering our goals related to
information and media literacy.

As in other areas, these data show that we have work to do.

Today is the fourth day of Chart Week here at Dangerously Irrelevant. Today’s
post relates to the various technologies and procedures that public schools use
to protect students from inappropriate Internet material. All data are from the
recently-released NCES report, Internet Access
in U.S. Public Schools and Classrooms: 1994-2005.

Technologies and procedures used by public schools to prevent
student access to inappropriate Internet material

Public schools have a variety of options when it comes to protecting students
from inappropriate material on the Web. As the chart below shows, nearly every
school is using blocking / filtering software. In addition, nearly every school
says that teachers or other staff members monitor student Internet usage.

The federal data are unclear whether acceptable use policies (AUPs) are in
place in schools. What NCES asked is whether schools ask parents and students to
sign written contracts regarding Internet usage. About a fourth of schools in
2005 did not ask students to sign a contract and about a fifth of schools did
not ask parents to sign a contract regarding student Internet use. These
percentages were the same as in 2002. Elementary schools (72%) were less likely
in 2005 to have students sign contracts than secondary schools (88%). City
schools (72%) were less likely to have students sign contracts than rural
schools (82%).

It may be that schools have a student AUP in place but simply are not asking
students or parents to sign that they have read and understand the AUP. It also
may be that schools are relying on filtering / monitoring software and teacher
monitoring alone. Either way, all schools should realize that AUPs can be
powerful tools for school regulation and enforcement of appropriate Internet
usage and should not assume constructive notice
via student handbooks or school policy binders.

Other options employed by public schools to address student usage of the Internet include use of intranets to control student access, student honor codes, and monitoring software (e.g., keystroke logging and other surveillance software).

Schedule for the rest of the week

• Friday - professional development for use of the Internet in public
  school classrooms

Today is the third day of Chart Week here at Dangerously Irrelevant.
Yesterday’s post on student
laptops and wireless classrooms discussed how many public schools lend
laptops to students and the extent of wireless penetration in classrooms.
Today’s post extends those data to show the length of time that students get to
use the laptops that are loaned out to them. All data are from the
recently-released NCES report, Internet Access
in U.S. Public Schools and Classrooms: 1994-2005.

Maximum length of time of laptop loan to
students

NCES asked those public schools that said they loaned laptops to students what was the
maximum length of time of those loans. In other words, how long did students
have use of the laptops they received? Here is the chart:

As the data show, nearly half of the schools that said they loaned laptops to
students did so for less than a week. Only about a sixth of the schools surveyed
in 2005 said that they gave students laptops for the entire school year; this
proportion is unchanged from 2002. When combined with yesterday’s
data, which show that only about 10% of schools even loan laptops to
students in the first place, we can see that few students in our country are
receiving the opportunity to work with laptop computers, even for only a few days at a time. One probable explanatory factor regarding low laptop lending by
schools (and thus low laptop usage by students) is that most
public school classrooms lack wireless Internet access.

Schedule for the rest of the week

• Thursday – technologies and procedures used by public schools to
  prevent student access to inappropriate material on the Internet
• Friday - professional development for use of the Internet in public
  school classrooms

A few final notes about the TIES
conference…

1. The highlight of the conference for me was the hour I got to spend hanging
   out with Dr.
   Jim Hirsch, Assistant Superintenent for Technology and Academic Services,
   Plano (TX) Independent School District. Jim and I talked about a variety of
   topics, including the need for better technology leadership training for K-12
   administrators (surprise!), the difficulty of influencing policymakers, and the
   potential power of federal (or foundation) investment in free, high-quality,
   wiki-based, multimedia textbooks. I’ll blog on this latter issue sometime
   soon.
2. As you know, I like to brag about the people and organizations that
   intersect with CASTLE. Two of
   our alumni were honored at the TIES conference. Matt Oswald, a math
   teacher at Stillwater (MN) Area High School and a member of our third School
   Technology Leadership cohort, was recognized as a TIES
   Exceptional Teacher this year. Lisa Finsness, Director of Instructional
   Media and Technology for the Osseo (MN)
   Area Schools and a member of our first cohort, was selected as the TIES / Palm,
   Inc. District Technology Leader of the year. Kudos to both Lisa and
   Matt!
3. Tim Wilson noted that TIES was very
   Web 1.0: very few folks tagging or blogging along with the conference. I
   agree with him that this was disheartening. As Amy Hendrickson noted in her comment to Tim’s
   post (about my administrative
   blogging session), many attendees are just now learning what blogs are, how
   they work, etc. These folks are the ones that actually attended our state ed
   tech conference; I shudder to think about the folks that didn’t even come.
4. Finally, several people, including Doug
   Johnson and Miguel
   Guhlin, said really nice things about my TIES presentations.
   Thanks.

That’s it from me for this year’s conference. We’ll see where we are next
year at this time!

After my TIES session last Tuesday on blogging
administrators, I sat in on a presentation by Aimee Bissonette. Aimee is an
attorney for Little Buffalo Law &
Consulting and an expert on intellectual property issues, particularly for
creative artists and entertainers. Her presentation, Law and Technology: Why
Legal Limits Don’t Have to Limit Teaching Options, highlighted a number of
copyright and other related issues for K-12 educators. Apparently Aimee struck a
nerve with the folks in the room: she didn’t even get to finish her presentation
because she was deluged with questions and scenarios. Good stuff!

The podcast of
Aimee’s session is available on my TIES 2006 web page.

Today is the second day of Chart Week here at Dangerously Irrelevant. Yesterday’s topic, Internet access in public schools and public school classrooms, may not have been very exciting for many of you, but I needed to create some context. I am guessing that today’s topic, student laptops and wireless classrooms, may be more interesting to most folks. All data are from the recently-released NCES report, Internet Access in U.S. Public Schools and Classrooms: 1994-2005.

Percentage of public schools lending laptops to students

As the chart below shows, about 10% of public schools reported that they lent laptops to students in 2005, about the same number as in 2002. In 2005, secondary schools (18%) were more than twice as likely to say that they lent students laptops than elementary schools (7%); these numbers also are the same as in 2002. In 2005, 15% of the schools with less than 6% minority enrollment said that they were lending laptops to students, while in schools with 50% minority enrollment or higher, only 7% said that they were lending students laptops.

Percentage of public school classrooms with wireless Internet connections

If you recall, yesterday’s post showed that 94% of public school classrooms are connected to the Internet. The chart below shows the progress that has been made in converting public school classrooms to wireless (rather than wired) connections, arguably an essential prerequisite to having students use laptops meaningfully and frequently in the classroom.

Schedule for the rest of the week

• Wednesday – length of time public schools lend laptops to students
• Thursday – technologies and procedures used by public schools to prevent student access to inappropriate material on the Internet
• Friday - professional development for use of the Internet in public school classrooms