I've taken part in a few conversations and read more than a few threads on teacher certification exams recently. Specifically, CS teacher certification exams. There are a bunch of them floating around. There's the Praxis offered by ETS, the one from the National Evaluation Series, the Washington Evaluator Test Series one and then there's what's going on in Texas. NY State says it will eventually develop their own.

I have mixed feelings about exams like these. From what I've seen some of the content seems fine and the "stuff you have to know for the test" isn't necessarily the worst in the world. As a one time gatekeeper, I'm not necessarily happy with them but they can provide a test for a basic threshold of knowledge with out too much focus on test prep.

Of course, they're just the tip of the iceberg, many states including New York make their teacher candidates also take other exams. In NY candidates must take the edTPA which is expensive for the teacher candidate but a big money maker for Pearsons.

All of this came out of NCLB back in the day which also created requirements like "must complete an approved program" as opposed to just accruing a bunch of relevant education and content credits which in turn led to more courses like Math for Math Teachers.

For you youngsters out there (which I guess is most of you), I thought I'd share what it was like back in the day.

Back then, New York City certified it's own teachers as opposed to now when everything's done directly through the state. The system was, in my opinion far superior.

I came in as a career changer - I was doing computer work at the time - and I came in as a math teacher since there was no CS. Since math was an area of need it was a little easier for me to get my foot in the door than it would have been for say an English teacher.

To start I went down to the Board of Education in Brooklyn armed with my college transcript and waited in line. I then met with someone who evaluated my transcript. Normally, to get started, I would have needed a certain number of education credits and a certain number of content (math) credits. I think the magic number was 24 for the content. Since math was an area of needed you could get started with a TPD license (Temporary Per Diem) which required no education credits going in. You had to get 18 graduate education credits within the first, I think two years and take the National Teacher Exam. You also got one period off to be mentored which was a pretty sweet deal. Of course it wouldn't be that simple. I only had 16 math credits so fell short but the evaluator decided to give me credit for a couple of my more mathy CS classes like Algorithms to get me over the hump.

I then went to another line to get a brief mini physical and at some point I was fingerprinted and I had my TPD. The BOE then ran a one week "learn to teach" bootcamp and I was left to find my own job which I was fortunately able to do.

So, I had my foot in the door but as a TPD I had no job protections. I was observed at least 6 times a year and could be fired at will. In fact, TPD's were annually given pink slips in the spring and had to be rehired again in the Fall if their schools wanted them.

I got my 18 education credits over the next two years and took the NTE which was both the easiest and hardest exam I ever had to take. Easiest content wise but hard because it was a FULL DAY of non stop writing and my hand was cramped up into a club by days end. That got me to the next level - the PPT - Preparatory Provisional License, I think. This allowed me to be appointed. Once appointed you had job retention and seniority rights. Not tenure, but a step closer and you did get some legit job protections. If you started the process with education credits to go along with content credits you could have started directly with the PPT.

The final step to get that appointment with the PPT is that you had to go for an interview with the Board of Examiners. This was the good part. After work one day I went down to Brooklyn Tech, waited my turn and then was ushered into a classroom. A typical panel would have a principal, an assistant principal in your subject area, and a couple of teachers, again in your subject area. They could grill you on anything they wanted.

They could ask you general teaching questions (usually cached in a scenario):

• how do yo u handle a mixed level class,
• how do you handle a disruptive student

Preparation questions:

• how would you motivate a class on the Pythagorean Theorem?
• How would you turn a lesson on solving quadratics in to a hands on lab experience?

or content questions:

• solve this calculus problem…
• Derive this theorem…

I don't remember how long the session lasted but afterwards I left and a couple of weeks later, I had my PPT and was appointed.

There were a couple of last steps - tenure, which pretty much just happened since my AP and Principal were both happy with my performance and I had to get my Masters. Back then you could get a Masters in anything so I decided to get it in CS rather than Education.

There was a lot to like about the old system. I've never been a big fan of a lot of the education credits one has to get and while I still needed a number of them, I'm glad I had the option to take mostly content credits. I also like what amounted to being evaluated face to face by an individual rather than an amorphous bureaucracy. I also loved the mentoring I got but while the system gave me the class relief time to allow it to happen I think much of the value was due to my colleagues at Seward Park High School without whom I would have washed out.

The biggest thing I liked was the Board of Examiners. I found it somewhat stressful since I was never a math guy but the idea that you've got to prove yourself to a bunch of local city educators was HUGE. You weren't expected to give the "correct for the test" answer, you had to convince people that you might have to work for or with that you got the goods.

I'm sure we'll never go back to the old days but I thought the current generation might be interested in hearing what it was like back in the day.

As I mentioned in my last post, this coming weekend is the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) conference. I've been a member of CSTA since the beginning but this will be only the second time I've made it to the annual conference.

The CSTA conference might be the largest conference specifically for k12 computer science teachers and that makes it different from conferences like SIGCSE which is for CS education and education research at all levels or ISTE which seems to be more of an Ed Tech conference.

I really enjoyed the conference last year but as the sessions seemed to be weighted towards beginning CS teachers and towards the CSTA standards I found most of the value in the "hallway track" when I got to meet and chat with CS teachers from all over the country.

Glancing at the program, there looks to be a bunch of interesting sessions and this time more sessions that I think I'll personally be interested in .

I'm also giving a talk. New York State just approved and created K12 Computer Science Teacher Certification and we're currently making plans to roll out our Masters and Certificate programs for CS teachers as soon as we get state approval. The Masters program will be largely for preservice teacher candidates and the certificate program for in service teachers certified in other areas.

The talk will cover a bit of the history of CS Education in New York, what the state is doing and mostly what where building at Hunter and why. It should be a fun talk. I'm hoping for some people from other states attend so we can have a rich discussion during the session.

So, if you're going to be at the CSTA conference, I'd love to see you either at my session or at the conference in general. I'll be spending most of my non session time there with my friends at GitHub education.

For those of you can't make it, I hope to blog about the weekend and I hope others do as well.

Next weekend I'll be attending the Computer Science Teachers Association's annual conference. It's probably the biggest conference focussed on K12 Computer Science education. This year, in addition to attending, I'll be giving a talk on preservice and inservice CS teacher preparation programs. I'll be talking about the new New York State certification requirements along with what we're rolling out at Hunter College.

This means putting together a slide deck for the session. When I have to work collaboratively with non-Emacs users, I will usually go to Google Docs for presentations. It works and the collaborative aspects are nice but tools like Google Docs and Powerpoint are designed around composing slides manually. I much prefer to use a tool where I can focus on writing my presentation and have the tool turn it into a presentation.

Org-mode is of course the ideal tool. As an outliner, it lends itself to organizing a talk:

* topic 1
   the content for slide one
* topic 2
   the content for slide two
* topic 3
   etc.

I can embed code, tables, images, and more. I can also cycle visibility so I can focus on individual sections. Org-mode also has a number of export options to take a plain org file which is just ascii with markup and export it as a presentation. In the video, I'll take a quick look at ox-beamer, which exports to a Beamer presentation in LaTeX and then a PDF, epresent which presents right in Emacs and finally ox-reveal wich creates a reveal.js presentation. I ultimately decide to continue to use ox-reveal as it's pretty simple and flexible and I can also directly serve the final presentation from my own laptop, a usb drive, or directly from GitHub.

Check out the video to see how. If you want more information on using ox-reveal check out my earlier Using Emacs post and video.

Yesterday I was back on campus for an early orientation session for Hunter's incoming Daedalus CS honors students. It was the first time all of us got to meet face to face. The students I met with will be my third cohort. I got to thinking how far we've come in under three years.

Hunter's had a strong but little known undergraduate CS program for as long as I've known. Much like any program, we've got our strengths and weaknesses but you go through our program and academically you'll be as well prepared as from anywhere else. We have some challenges being a commuter school, a liberal arts school and a school not commonly thought of for CS but the core has always been there.

Hunter has been making a concerted effort to up its computer science game and my joining the team has been part of that. The Daedalus program is an honors scholarship program. It's similar to the well known CUNY Macaulay program but it's specific to Hunter and specific to CS. Our kids get scholarships, laptops, special classes (with me), activities and events and more. Our first cohort had 12. This past year we had 23 but a funny thing happened right after we started. Hunter's Macaulay CS students heard about what was going on and wanted in. The end result was that last years cohort had a total of 27 students as we invited the incoming Hunter Macaulay CS students into the fold. This year, we're up to about 50 total and it looks to be a very strong group. To be honest I'm a little scared of growing this quickly. The kids will be great but it will be a challenge building the community across multiple classes.

I'm really pleased with the first two cohorts performance both in class and out. They're progressing well through the academic program and are ahead of schedule in terms of internships and outside activities but I'm even happier that they've been working to level up Hunter CS as a whole. They started a once a week Dojo last year where all Hunter CS students could hang out and work on tech projects and have a speaker series on tap for this coming year. For my part, I've got a couple of new ideas up my sleeve but I'm going to keep them under wraps for now.

Three years ago Hunter wasn't so much on the map for CS inclined high school students and while there's much work to be done, many of our incoming cohort members chose us over other programs that have traditionally been considered CS strongholds.

At the same time, our efforts to connect Hunter CS to the NY Tech community have begun to raise our profile on the other end of the pipeline.

There's still a long rode ahead but I thought I'd give myself a day to look back on how far we've come in a short time. Having a great public college option for CS education is critical for NYC. This was one of the things I left Stuy to accomplish and we're well on our way.

I saw a couple of tweets from Sarah Judd this morning:

A lot of CS Ed PD assumes you are new to CS. I really want CS Ed PD for people like us that came from a CS background and want to understand the pedagogy for CS in particular better. Do you know of some?

— Sarah Judd (@SarahEJudd) June 27, 2018

Yes! I love SIGCSE and CSTA. I just feel like... Math teachers don't get PD that starts with "and this is how you add and subtract!" and I'd love more CS PD that assumes the content is there, and can focus on the pedagogy.

— Sarah Judd (@SarahEJudd) June 27, 2018

It wasn't the first time I've heard this refrain. Last year I attended my first CSTA conference. I had numerous conversations with CS teachers on the fact that everything was on an intro level in terms of both content and teaching. Further conversations with local teachers with stronger CS backgrounds led me to run a professional development session at Hunter this past election day for more experienced CS teachers at schools that offered more than the basics.

While it's not surprising that most of the PD opportunities for CS teachers are rather rudimentary given that nationally most programs are new and most teachers are new to the subject but there are a few deeper reasons.

To start, there are big players in the CS Ed movement that are pushing curricula and specific programs and that leads to scripted PD for their products and not depth of knowledge nor deep pedagogical content knowledge let alone basic pedagogy. Add to this the fact that many of the "thought leaders" in the space don't have experience teaching CS at the K12 level and in many cases don't have a background either in teaching nor tech and you can see where the problem comes from. On top of this we have the erosion of respect for teaching as a profession where reformers are trying to take the teacher out of teaching and are trying to reduce pedagogy to following scripts. This problem goes well beyond CS Ed but as the new kid on the block it probably hits us hardest.

In any case, preparing beginners is both necessary and appropriate for the time being but we can and must do a better job than what's currently "state of the art." At the same time we have to do something with the CS teachers who indeed do have strong content knowledge but don't feel comfortable with imparting that knowledge.

So, what should we do?

For new teachers the solution will ultimately have to come from pre-service programs but what we end up getting is going to largely be dictated on what's required by individual states. If states merely require passing an exam like the Praxis CS exam which, from what I can gather isn't a horrible content exam then we're going to see CS teachers bumble through their early to mid careers while trying to figure out how to teach CS much like I did way back when. If they end up endorsing pre-service programs that are focused on specific curricula - APCS-A for teachers, APCS-P for teachers, Math for Math teachers if you will but for CS, we're also not going to get strong well prepared pedagogues. On the other hand if you can design a program that has a strong pedagogical component to go along with the content, you have a chance. Even with a well designed program implementation will still be a challenge. Who will teach it? Education professors who don't have CS backgrounds? CS professors with little pedagogical training? Neither of those groups necessarily have any real experience as actual K12 teachers. If you can find honest to goodness experienced, strong K12 CS teachers to teach your pedagogy courses that's a big win but that's going to be hard in most cases.

I think we designed a great program at Hunter and have a practical and strong implementation plan. If you're going to be at CSTA2018 you can hear all about it and why we designed it as we did in the talk I'm giving.

For the more experienced I don't have a universal answer but I can say what I'm planning. Teachers in NY have to complete 100 CTLE hours every five years. For beginners, there are plenty of options, at least content wise. For teachers who know CS, not so much. I was at a meetup talking to a few friends a couple of weeks ago and one mentioned that they get most of their hours in Math for America CS workshops. Unfortunately more than a few of my CS teacher friends who are in MFA tell me that the CS content in these workshops, while they do satisfy the hours, are somewhat lacking on the CS / CS pedagogy side.

Here's what I'm planning - we (Hunter) will host a once a month dinner/session for CS teachers who are a little farther along CS wise. I haven't worked out all the details yet but I've got a few tech companies that are already interested in sponsoring and helping out should we need anything and we'll probably set most of our agenda for the year at the first session where I'll make my best guess at a useful agenda. This is something I'm pretty excited about. It should help create a network of more experienced CS teachers which will both help bolster that segment of the community and provide a long term resource to newcomers and it should be a lot of fun.

In some ways, this is why I ended up joining Hunter. Regardless of what the city and state do, we're going to prepare the teachers and if you have a well prepared teacher, you've got a shot.

I've been using Emacs for email for a couple of years now. Not for everything, for now my personal email is still Gmail but work is sent and read through Emacs. I'm currently using mu4e and while it has a few quirks and limitations, I like it very much. You can take a look on how I configure and use it here.

The other day I saw this thread on Emacs about a new package - mu4e-conversation. It's a package that deals with email threads.

It's pretty cool. You can invoke it whenever you're in the headers view you can just run M-x mu4e-conversation and it combines all the email messages in the current thread into a single buffer.

It's pretty nice.

You can navigate between messages in the thread with C-c C-n and C-c C-p and use most if not all of the usual mu4e goodness but on top of that you can also toggle what the author calls tree mode by hitting V. Tree mode turns the thread into an org-mode tree - also extremely cool.

On top of this, you can also make mu4e your default viewing mode by setting a single variable with (setq mu4e-view-func 'mu4e-conversation).

Although it's very cool, I'm not sure if mu4e-conversation will find its way into my workflow or not and probably won't know for a while. This is mostly due to the fact that it's summer so work email slows down and I won't have too many long threads to play with this on.

I'll report back once I give it a fair shake but in the meantime if anyone out there has had the time to play with it, let us know what you think.

Time to get back to CS and CS Ed related blogging.

Last week, in Garth Flint's post about his summer plans, Garth mentioned wanting to get his head around Object Oriented Programming and possibly taking a course to help him get there. I thought I'd talk a little about how I got my head around OOP here and some of the difficulties I faced then and what people might face now.

Nowadays, kids are faced with OOP pretty early on. If they take APCS-A they're using Java which is Object Oriented. Same if they start at a college using Java. If they start with C++ or Python they may or may not see objects early on. In any event, the nature of that first course doesn't really lend itself to really grokking OOP. Even if a student takes a class prior to APCS-A or it's college equivalent, they're pretty y raw. Small programs with just a few constructs don't really show the uses of OOP. Both inheritance and interfaces can feel forced in a first year course and when the examples are artificial and wonky and their are easier ways to accomplish the same task, it's hard for a student to really buy into the paradigm.

Now, in all fairness, I'm not a big fan of Object Oriented Programming and it's usually not the first tool I go to. That said, it's a useful tool and it has it's place.

I cut my teeth in the 1980s. I went to the Courant Institute at NYU. The core language back then was Pascal which had a number of limitations including only supporting single file programs. Somewhere along the line I taught myself C which most professors were happy to accept assignments in. I never heard of OOP in my formal schooling. Some time near or soon after I graduated I had heard of this C++ thing but hadn't used it.

After working my way through school I spent some time as a developer at Goldman Sachs. I was the only guy on my team doing Windows 2.1 development. Windows 2.1 was built on top of DOS. It's big improvement over Windows 1.0 was that it supported overlapping windows. Pretty cool.

I learned to program Windows like everyone else:

It was all done in C. The big project I was on was for Global Equities. Specifically, supporting trading of Japanese Warrants. I had to write a trading system and in doing that implement among other things a mini spreadsheet in C from bare metal.

This was probably going to be the most complex thing I designed and built from scratch to date. I had a bunch of cells that were associated with either rows or columns or both and all sorts of complex interactions. I needed a way to manage complexity and even though I didn't use the term at the time, manage state.

C doesn't have a lot of fancy in language constructs to help and I was somewhat on an island - I taught myself C and there weren't any experienced C / Windows programmers in my group or on my floor so I had to figure things out on my own.

Here's what I came up with, or rather something like what I came up with – it was close to 30 years ago and I don't even remember 100% of what it was supposed to do.

I decided to create a single file for each concept -

• cell.c / cell.h for cells
• row.c / row.h for rows
• sheet.c / sheet.h for
• etc.

In each, I would do something like this:

/* sheet.c */


/* things declared here are "global" but limited to this file **/
struct sheet *sheets; /* an array of the sheets */

/* functions that will be made available to other files */

/* return a pointer to the named sheet */
struct sheet sheet_get(char *name){
/* implementation */
}

/* create a new sheet */
struct sheet *sheet_create(char *name, int rows, int cols){
/* implementation/
}

/* functions that will only be used internally */

struct sheet *allocate_sheet_memory(int rows, int cols){
/*implementation*/
}


/* etc */

/* sheet.h */

/* 
   Note that only the headers for the exterrnally available stuff is included
*/


struct sheet *sheet_get(char *name);
struct sheet *sheet_create(char *name,int rows, int cols);

The idea is that everything about a sheet is in sheet.c and only a few functions are made available to the rest of the program via the header file.

Shortly after I designed the program, I started to delve into OOP at the encouragement of some colleagues. I read Meyer:

and the first edition of Booch:

I realized that in a way I was implementing singleton objects in C. The file declared the object. The functions I exposed via the header files were public, the other functions private and the "global" variables that were local to the file, private class variables.

There was no inheritance but it did help me encapsulate functionality and state.

It turns out I saw something like this when I briefly looked at Ada. I think it was called Object Typed Programming - objects with only a single instance and no inheritance.

The books gave me the official names for things but the project I was developing gave me the context to where it all made sense. I had a problem to solve that didn't lend itself to a low level imperative language but you work with the tools you have and this is what I came up with.

Unfortunately, it's harder for beginners as projects are smaller and while there are good small example of OOP there's also so much going on in a course like APCS-A. It gets more convoluted when you're using Python or C++ as you might be shown Objects in a C++ class while professor is really teaching C with Objects rather than doing things the C++ way.

One thing that helps is using a language or tool where objects make sense. NetLogo - used in Stuy's intro course is a nice one. Turtles and patches - the inhabitants of the NetLogo can be viewed as objects. I'd draw heavily on NetLogo analogies when teaching APCS at Stuy. There are also tools like BlueJ which is tied closely to objects and is probably terrific at giving structure to help objects make sense but I don't like those types of tools for other reasons.

At the end of the day, it is just a tool and to be honest, I'm not really a big fan of OOP. I'll use it but it's not my go to paradigm.

I'll leave you with this video which talks about why:

Yesterday I shared my thoughts on Bill de Blasio's plans to "fix" the selection criteria for New York City's specialized high schools. If you haven't read the post, you can find it here.

I was going to get back to CS and CS Ed related blogging today but there's more to the story.

In spite of what BdB stated, it's not enough for him to switch to another measure - the middle school state exam along with some modifiers. This is about ending the exam altogether and not replacing it with anything better. Here's a link to information on the proposed legislation for New York Assembly Bill 10427 including links to the actual text.

There's a lot of beurobabble but the end game is to basically allow the chancellor (not sure if this means city or state) to do whatever they want.

Here are some of the key points:

• Seats would ultimately go to the top 5 to 7 percent of each middle school's class.
• These students would have to also be classified in the top 25% city wide.
• Top is defined by a composite score of multiple measures as determined by the chancellor which means anything goes.
• Remaining seats will be filled by lottery of all students with a 3.7 GPA or greater.
• It's not clear how the students would be allocated to each of the specialized schools.

So, what does this all mean?

Multiple measures could mean the state test + average. It could mean average + recommendation. It could be shoe size + favorite color. The chancellor also decides how to weight these multiple measures.

This means that the politicians can do whatever they want to paint any picture they want regardless of how their ideological and political games hurt kids.

Any teacher, in fact, any rational adult will tell you that middle schools are not interchangeable. The top students at one middle school are typically not at the same level as top students at another one. I'm sure you can cluster middle schools in terms of the students they graduate, what the students know and can do and the clusters will likely fall on economic lines. This is the problem that BdB should be addressing not how to rig the specialized school admissions stats.

Even if this is done right, you're assuming an even distribution of top gifted students across all the middle schools. If one school has higher concentration of gifted students, they're out of luck. The end result is that if you attend an SP or other gifted program for eighth grade you'll likely be locked out of the specialized schools. What if a particular middle school is attractive to all of our top math team talent? Only a couple will get in to the specialized schools under the new system since each school is allocated a fixed number of slots.

I guess this does make sense if you don't believe in gifted students or gifted education but then why not just get rid of the specialized schools to begin with rather than playing these games. This "solution" will result in parents having to decide - do I send my kids to the gifted middle school program and hurt their chances to get into a specialized high school or do I try to find the lowest performing school I can find and have my kid stand out. This is pretty messed up.

At the end of the day, though, you have to remember that any change to the process can help one group and hurt another. Stuy, for example has 46% of it's students on free or reduced lunch and is about 70% Asian. If in the new system you're increasing the percent population of an under represented group, you're likely reducing the percentage of Asian students. So, you're creating opportunities for a number of as of yet undetermined students (who might not be properly prepared for the experience) at the expense of economically disadvantaged Asian students who have proven to be prepared for the experience. Wouldn't a better solution be to fix the opportunities presented at the middle schools rather than rig the system of high school acceptance.

Going further, a response on another blog noted that BdB probably refused to do anything with the admissions criteria of the non big three because they all had numbers that he would consider more diverse. The commenter provided the Black / Latino percentages, I added the free and reduced lunch numbers:

All the more reason to run some tests or analysis there. Of course, if you look further you'll note that HSAS only has 25% of its students on free or reduced lunch so is it really doing better than Stuy or Sci with ~45% low income students each or Brooklyn Tech which supports 62% or are we to say that there's low income and then there's the right low income?

Certainly the education system needs work but the proposed legislation is not a solution. It's taking a flawed but objective measure and replacing it with essentially chancellor's discretion.

If the legislation passes, by the year 2022 we will have admissions to what used to be some of the nations finest high schools determined by a political appointee rather than an objective test.

It's a shame. It was very important to my wife and me to have our kids go to public schools and I was very happy to have been able to navigate the system with them from first grade through high school graduation with only a few bumps along the way. With this nonsense from the political left and the privatization push from the political right (or actually both sides) pretty soon there will be nothing left.

Yesterday, Bill de Blasio, the current Mayor of New York City outlined how he would "fix" our specialized schools. The schools he was referring to were the "big three" of Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech and then five additional schools - The High School for Math Science and Engineering at CCNY, The High School for American Studies at Lehman, Brooklyn Latin, The Queens Arts and Science High School at York College, and Staten Island Tech.

All use a single SAT style test, the SHSAT, for admission. The Big Three are locked into that system unless there are changes made by the state legislature. The Mayor can make changes to the admissions criteria of the other five on his own.

The problem, as stated by Chalkbeat writers Alex Zimmerman and Monica Disare is that:

The city’s specialized high schools — considered some of the crown jewels of New York City’s education system — accept students based on a single test score. Over the last decade, they have come under fire for offering admissions to few students of color: While two-thirds of city students are black or Hispanic, only about 10 percent of admissions offers to those schools go to black or Hispanic students.

I normally don't write about things like this but given my history at and with Stuyvesant I thought I should.

Before getting started, my biases - I believe in public schools, not charters, I also believe that a system should have gifted programs and magnet schools and also a mix of large comprehensive schools and smaller niche ones. Additionally, while I do believe in gifted programs I'm not sure at what point it makes sense to start offering them. When we were looking at elementary schools for our own kids we opted for a neighborhood public school rather than applying to the district gifted program as we felt it offered a better overall education. On the other hand, had our kids not made Stuyvesant, I'm not sure what we would have done. Part of that was due to the fact that the Bloomberg administration destroyed just about all the large comprehensive schools so, other than that large test schools and LaGuardia, good luck finding a school that was strong in the humanities, sciences and offered a robust music program.

For reference, here are unofficial cutoff scores for the specialized schools from 2018 along with the NY State data on free and reduced lunch for 2017. Note that there's overlap between the schools. I separated out SI Tech since geography probably affects it's numbers more than the other schools and I separated the big three from the remaining four because I think the three are all substantially larger. The free and reduced lunch percent is important because I believe an entire school qualifies for Title I funding if the number's over 40 so while these schools are not populated entirely by low income students, all but HSAS has a substantial number and there's a chance, some say a good one that at best BdB's plans will merely shuffle which low income kids get in rather than actually solving the root problem.

So there you have my thoughts on BdB's specific proposals but I also want to address his contention that a single measure is bad and makes the comparison to colleges where they by and large use multiple measures. This is a ridiculous comparison. Yes, colleges look at multiple measures but after watching decades of Stuy students go off to college, it's clear to me that the process is by no means fair or consistent. Elite schools can easily game their acceptances and they still can have 100% of their applicants with off the charts SAT scores.

A single test might not be ideal but it can only be gamed by test prep and test prep can be as cheap as buying a test prep book.

As to other measures that come up from time to time - interviews, portfolios, essays - who does that help? The low income kid or the well to do one?

If you're going to add another measure for admission it has to be something that can't be gamed or politically influenced,

Should the city address the fact that there are groups that are under represented at the specialized schools? Certainly, or rather, the city should address deficiencies in opportunities that are like the causes of this under representation.

Should the city be doing things differently? Also yes. Here are some thoughts on what the city can and should be doing.

There are a lot of changes I'd love to see in our public schools and I do believe BdB's heart is in the right place. I'm concerned that some of the solutions that he and other politicians come up with will hurt the current low income students at the specialized schools and unintentionally advantage the well to do while not helping those that at least BdB may honestly want to help.

He should enact Discovery and research the State Tests but proceed with caution. The test schools have always been and continue to be a gateway for poor and immigrant students and any changes that are proposed should be weighed carefully and tested before taking steps that could real harm when good is intended.

Every morning one of the first things I do is quickly glance at my emails and other notifications. I really should wait until I'm more awake but old habits die hard.

As some of you know over the past couple of years I've been making a series of videos and related post on using my editor of choice, Emacs. I've done 48 videos, have over 2500 subscribers on YouTube and people seem to find some value from the series.

This morning one of my emails was a new comment on one of my videos:

Thanks for not describing a single key combination and how that fits into basic usage of org mode. I was going to subscribe but if all your videos are going to be about showing off how fast you are at typing emacs commands on your annoyingly noisy keyborad, then no thanks!

My first reaction was "you know, you could have said something like 'if you slow down an actually say the keys it would be much easier to follow and would be more valuable' and it would be much better received" but then I started to think about instructional videos in general. I started to make these videos for my students. I thought they might be helpful and then found that the Emacs community by and large liked them. They're not teaching anything deep or complicated just how I use a programmable editor. Even so, I was reminded by this comment about the limitations of videos and ed tech in general.

Videos provide some nice features - you can watch them at any time, you can pause and replay, and in some cases you can watch at super speeds. What you can't do is slow the video down and most importantly you can't ask questions or interact with the instructor. You can leave comments if the video is on a platform like YouTube but that's pretty limited.

On the other hand, if this was a class, we would have been able to interact and I as the instructor would have had a much better chance to make sure this "student" was up to speed.

Of course, this wasn't a class. I don't have the time to teach tools like Emacs in class and since it is a mechanical skill, it can be offloaded to a video. The video has the ancillary benefit of living on and being discoverable and viewable by the public at large. This is a good thing. Videos are tech and tech scales. Unfortunately, good education doesn't.

Videos are tech and tech is the rage. Lots of people are working hard to get more tech in front of our kids - usually at the expense of having a great teacher. This is something we don't need. Technology is nice but I'd rather have my kids in a small class with a knowledgable teacher and a piece of chalk than all the tech in the world.

As a computer science guy and a computer science teacher I think it's good to remind myself that tech is cool but a good teacher is way cooler.