Maybe, in fact, it’s 95%.

Which, as is so often the case, leads me to think about my kids and the reading and writing they are going to do in the next school year. For my son who’s 11, I’m guessing about 90% will be given out and handed in on paper. For my daughter, who is 13 and has “adopted” my old MacBook as her own, it may be closer to 75% on paper coming in and going out as I’m sure she’ll be asked to print most of what she composes on the computer. In either case, I’m guessing not much instruction or discussion is going to be centered on the ways in which screen reading and writing are changing the very nature of the acts. They’re not creating links. They’re not deconstructing them.

They should be.

Two great pieces by Scott Rosenberg and Kevin Kelly have me thinking deeply about this. Scott’s piece, “In Defense of Links Part 3: In Links we Trust” neatly captures so much of the shift around reading that I think it should be required reading for every teacher (since every teacher is a writing teacher.) I’m serious. Here’s a fairly short snip that gets to the complexity of reading and writing in links.

The context that links provide comes in two flavors: explicit and implicit. Explicit context is the actual information you need to understand what you’re reading…you land on my page and you might well have no idea what I’m talking about, since this is part three of a series. Links make it easy for me to show you where to catch up. If you don’t have time for that, links let me orient you more quickly in my first paragraph with reference to Carr’s post. I can do all this without having to slow down those readers who’ve been following from the start with summaries and synopses. Again, even if the links that achieve this do demand a small fee from your working brain (which remains an unproven hypothesis), I’d say that’s a fair price.

By implicit context, I mean something a little more elusive: The links you put into a piece of writing tell a story (or, if you will, a meta-story) about you and what you’ve written. They say things like: What sort of company does this writer keep? Who does she read? What kind of stuff do her links point to — New Yorker articles? Personal blogs? Scholarly papers? Are the choices diverse or narrow? Are they obvious or surprising? Are they illuminating or puzzling? Generous or self-promotional?

Links, in other words, transmit meaning, but they also communicate mindset and style.

Which isn’t to say that written texts don’t communicate mindset and style. But it is to suggest that interacting with links, both by simply reading them and by clicking on them, creates quite a different experience, one with more complexity and, I think, more potential. It’s not as simple as “links provide context.” The choice of what we link to speaks volumes about our interests, biases, agendas, and those cues are now a part of the reading interaction, a piece of what we as readers then use to make sense of the text.

Kevin Kelly’s piece in the Smithsonian Magazine, A Whole New Way of Reading, also gets to the complexity of these changes.

But it is not book reading. Or newspaper reading. It is screen reading. Screens are always on, and, unlike with books we never stop staring at them. This new platform is very visual, and it is gradually merging words with moving images: words zip around, they float over images, serving as footnotes or annotations, linking to other words or images. You might think of this new medium as books we watch, or tele­vision we read. Screens are also intensely data-driven. Pixels encourage numeracy and produce rivers of numbers flowing into databases. Visualizing data is a new art, and reading charts a new literacy. Screen culture demands fluency in all kinds of symbols, not just letters.

There is a lot going on in that paragraph, a lot about balance, about participation, multimedia, literacy and more. And a lot about the flows of knowledge vs. the stacks of knowledge that John Seely Brown and others write about in Pull.

So here are the questions I’m asking: Are reading and writing changing in these linkable, screen centered environments? If so, does the way we think about reading and writing literacy have to change to embrace these shifts? If so, what are we doing about that?

Right now, I think the answer in most schools is “not much.” In fact, I’m not sure many even realize the extent to which this shift is occurring. They have other things on their minds. (Case in point, see this snip from a local newspaper that Steve Ransom tweeted to me this morning.) Which is why I just sent these two links to the English Department supervisor and various others at my local high school and my kids’ two schools. As good as they are at what they do, my sense is that they need us as parents out here in this stew to send them this stuff to read.

Here’s hoping they click the links.

Source: Will Richardson

Source: Elizabeth Green

Daily Intel’s post adheres faithfully to the WSJ and Department of Education’s line until the very last paragraph when its author took a left turn. She writes:

The Journal thinks Klein is holding on to the pool for philosophical purity. “For Mr. Klein, forcing teachers into vacancies would go against his philosophy of giving principals market-based autonomy and accountability.” So in order to promote free-market principals and accountability, Klein wants to offer job security for life to laid-off employees during a recession with no stipulations for getting them back into the city’s workforce? We must have missed that social-studies class.

Klein does not want to offer job security for life to laid-off employees during a recession with no stipulations for getting them back into the city’s workforce. In fact, he wants the opposite.

The pool of excessed teachers exists because Klein believes it is more important to give principals choice in who they hire than it is to limit spending by keeping every teacher, good or bad, in a classroom. The teachers union won’t allow him to remove excessed teachers from the payroll — some argue it would defeat the entire idea of having a labor union at your back — so he made his choice and he’s stuck with it until he or the union budges.

There’s also a slight problem with the Wall Street Journal’s lede, which reads:

A majority of New York City teachers who lost their positions at schools earlier this year have neither applied for another job in the system nor attended any recruitment fairs in recent months, according to data released by the Department of Education Thursday.

We don’t know if a majority of New York City teachers who were excessed in the last year failed to pursue a real job hunt. We know that most (60 percent) of the 1700 teachers who haven’t found work did not go to recruitment fairs or apply to jobs online. But those 1700 people are 60 percent of the 3,000 teachers who were in the excess pool at its peak this summer. So really, 60 percent of 60 percent of the excessed teachers — which does not a majority make — did not use the established routes to find a job.

The city has not made any job search details public for the 1,3000 teachers who did get new positions.

Source: Anna Phillips

The schools will test early versions of new 3-11 grade exams that a consortium of 26 states — New York included — is creating. The same schools will get extra funding this year to pilot the new common core curriculum standards in their classrooms.

Because New York is a “governing state” in the consortium, its education officials have already agreed to begin using the new tests by the 2014 school year. It also means that New York officials, including city Deputy Chancellor Shael Polakow-Suransky, are helping design the new tests.

The PARCC group — Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers — won a $170 million federal grant yesterday, which it will use to build the tests.

The new exams will complement the new national curriculum standards that New York has also agreed to take on. They will also completely overhaul the form that state standardized exams take, and when they’re given, Suransky said today.

Right now, New York students sit for state standardized tests once a year, and the state reports results months later, over the summer. The tests consist mainly of multiple-choice questions, along with several free-response questions.

The new state test will be designed with four separate parts that students take over the course of the full school year, Suransky said. The first two parts, which students will take earlier in the year, will be shorter assignments that cover material the students should have learned up to that point. The third assignment will be longer and more complex. The fourth will be a comprehensive exam measuring a year’s worth of learning and will be given at the end of the school year.

And the consortium intends to dispense with much of the multiple-choice testing that students currently sit through, Suranksy said. Instead, the assessments might take the form of a research paper or long-form math problems, for example.

“Those kinds of assignments are actually closer to the kinds of tasks that teachers are using in classrooms anyway,” Suransky said. “These will function as a way to test some of the new, higher-order skills that are in the common core standards.”

Suransky and other test designers are trying to meet a federal goal to create tests that better reflect student learning. ”By far the number one complaint I’ve heard from teachers, from parents, from students themselves is that state bubble tests pressure teachers to teach to a test that doesn’t really measure what matters,” U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan told reporters yesterday when he announced the grant funds.

At the end of the year, students’ four test scores will be combined into a single score. And teachers will also receive reports of their students’ performance on each of the individual sections weeks after they take them, so that they can use the results to adjust their teaching over the course of the year.

In that way, the new tests are designed to replace both the annual state tests and the diagnostic tests that many city schools already give students over the course of the year to track their progress, Suransky said. Suransky and federal officials said the new exams could lessen or roughly equal the amount of time students currently spend hunched over exams.

“I would argue we actually over-test now, in many places, in ways that aren’t helpful to the child and to the school and to the teacher,” Duncan said.

There’s also the possibility that the consortium’s tests for high school students will eventually replace the state’s current Regents exams. The state’s Board of Regents have not made a decision on the fate of the high school exams yet, though Suransky said he expects them to take up the question in the next few years.

The consortium is currently in the earliest stages of designing the new tests and will likely evolve over the next three years as designers build the new exams and test their validity.

Read the PARCC Consortium’s full grant application, which lays out its plans for building the new assessments in detail, here. Section A(3), which begins on page 43, gives a good description of what the new tests will look like.

Source: Maura Walz

The common response from excessed teachers is that they have made an effort, but it hasn’t paid off — they aren’t finding work. Some report that the city’s website makes it difficult to apply for open positions.

Two readers, both in the pool of teachers who’ve been excessed and haven’t found new work, commented saying that they can’t see job vacancies because the department’s website doesn’t recognize them as excessed teachers.

One possible cause of this problem could be that some principals don’t understand how to register their excessed teachers with the city. When this happens, the DOE and its website don’t recognize the teacher’s new status. 

Commenter “ATR” wrote:

This is my short experience with being an ATR. I was told in June I would be excessed in a 5 minute conversation with my principal. I was never given any official notification other than short e-mails from my principal telling me to attend various job fairs. On the Open Market it said I was not excessed.  I sent out resumes on the OM and to everyone I knew. I got one interview. I never heard back from the principal. Then I went to a hiring fair. At the hiring fair I was told by DOE I was not in excess but could enter as a “transfer.”  I got an interview with one school. I went on the interview and was told that the principal thought I had an English license, not ESL. He informed me that he had 4 open English positions but no ESL and that furthermore there were no restrictions on hiring ESL teachers. That was the last I heard. I tried to log on to the ESSS and my status is not in excess. I have no access to vacancies. I sincerely doubt that I will ever get another full time position as a teacher. I don’t believe there is any principal who will hire me even though I am highly qualified.

Commenter “Jr” wrote:

Im also locked out of the Excessed Staff Selection System, as it says im not in excess. Cant check my status, cant look at vacancies.

DOE spokeswoman Ann Forte said she didn’t think it was common for excessed teachers to be barred from seeing open positions.

“All approved excesses are able to access job openings and apply for them. If a person is having trouble logging on, the person should call HR,” Forte said.

According to the city, a majority of the teachers who are currently jobless have not gone to job fairs or applied for jobs online. The city does not keep count of how many excessed teachers who did find new work used these services.

Another commenter, a principal, wrote to say that even when she reached out to excessed teachers, none of them responded.

Nicole wrote:

We have a vacancy and have contacted every excessed teacher in the license area twice inviting them to apply. Not a single one has chosen to apply, and almost half have not even bothered to respond to our messages.

Source: Anna Phillips