Rose at 20 - The Players

This is the second installment (first here) of the Rose at 20 videos from the ELA conference in Louisville. See here for details and thank yous.

In this video, Debra Dawahare, the counsel for the plaintiffs and Ray Corns, the district court judge, tell their stories about the case and reflect on its impact and the future of school finance in Kentucky. At the beginning, our new Deans of the Education and Law school introduce themselves.

Rose at 20: Debra Dawahare, Esq. and Judge Ray Corns from UK College of Education on Vimeo.

Again, thanks to Brad Duncan for doing the recording.

UCEA Flavor

Sorry I didn't post much during #UCEA09, but Internet access was spotty (at best) and there really was only a couple law sessions. Anyway, to get a little flavor of the conference, you can check out the videos Scott McLeod shot. It's a good way to get a sense of the conference and, if you are intrigued, we're in New Orleans next year (during Halloween ... yeah! - hoping my wife will let me go!). 

The Debate over Higher Education Costs in California

California's budget has reached crisis, and it is slouching toward catastrophe, by the looks of it.  At AERA last Spring, I learned that California's budget shortfall at that time was larger than the actual budgets of many of the other states.  Since then, the leaders of the state have engaged in all manner of cutting, slashing, and reorganizing to close the budget gap, but the leadership is substantially hamstrung by the state constitution's provisions limiting local property taxation and requiring a supermajority to pass a tax bill.  Thus, to shore up the state's higher education system, the most recently approved measure has been to greatly increase tuition in the UC system, such that, in the near future, one might have to pay as much as $60,000 per year to attend UC as an out-of-state law student.  Of course, if you are in-state, you get a break--it will only cost you $50,000 per year to attend law school at UC-Davis, for example, in 2012-13.  Remember, this is just tuition--not the whole bill. 

In response to this dire scenario, Michael O'Hare at The Reality Based Community has posted a very interesting and thought-provoking cost-benefit-based analysis of the question whether higher education should be subsidized by the state.  Check it out here. 

Rose at 20: Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear

Over the course of the next couple weeks, I'll be releasing the videos from the Rose at 20 event in Louisville celebrating the Rose v. Council for Better Education case. This event was a partnership between the UK College of Education, College and Law, Kentucky Law Journal, and the Education Law Association, with funding provided by Wyatt, Tarrant & Combs.

Today, the first of those is the Governor of Kentucky, Steve Beshear. The first part of this speech, really the first 7-8 minutes, is absolute gold. I was really highly impressed with the Governor and he was really being honest in his statements because he was a player in the litigation as the Attorney General and Lieutenant Governor of Kentucky around the time of the case. He brought a good deal of political heft and class to the event. Enjoy:

Rose at 20: Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear from UK College of Education on Vimeo.

Thanks to Brad Duncan for doing the video recording and processing. 

Freedom of the Press IS Freedom of the Internet

When most people think of "freedom of the press" in the First Amendment, I think they think of a freedom that is associated with news reporters (those folks that work for newspapers, radio, TV, etc.). I don't think that is what the founders meant. The words press and media and other terms nowadays refer to specific elements of news reporting (because of their historically close association as users of that technology) ... but they have broader meanings that were used more heavily during the founders time. The press referred to the printing press (as in paper was "pressed" against a dye to replicate information) and media as a plural of medium, an information intermediary. If you look at the Oxford English Dictionary and their earliest usage references (click on previous 3 links), it seems much more likely that press meant the actual printing press as the earliest references to press and media as people instead of machines happened about the time or slightly after the time the Constitution was written. In other words, the medium as much as, or more than, the content or the purveyors of that content. 

As Al Gore points out, in his largely otherwise forgettable book the Assault on Reason, the physical object of the printing press was the technology largely responsible for the Enlightenment and subsequently the reestablishment of democracy in America. Thus, protecting the physical object was as important or more important to the founders than protecting the content that the physical object replicated.

By extension, "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom ... of the press" could be interpreted these days, I think appropriately, as "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom ... of the Internet."

Credit: Matt Britt via WikipediaBasically, the Internet is just a much wider and more powerful collection of printing presses (think of each node in the image to the right as a printing press). It is the distribution capacity that has changed, but the basic theoretical component of a machine that replicates and distributes information has not changed. Thus, it is no extension of the constitution to apply to the historical protections afforded the press directly to the Internet.

I am sure other scholars have made this point, and probably numerously so, but it was a realization that occurred to me over the weekend and I wanted to pass it along. If someone has a reference to a paper that makes this point further, I would much appreciate it.

Copyright and Lesson Plans - A Rejoinder from Tom H.

Tom Hoffman at TuttleSVC, a longtime friend of the blog, has taken the copyright post on teachers selling lesson plans to the logical next level of whether this information is even capable of being copyrighted at all. It is a good post and I encourage you to continue our ongoing conversation on this issue over there. There is such good conversation on this issue, and so many implications, it looks like I am going to be forced to write an article on this one.

Case law and Article Searches on Google Scholar

The good news of the week for my education school professor colleagues, and for practitioners in the field who do not have unlimited access to Westlaw or Lexis, is that Google Scholar now allows you to search for both case law (federal and state) and articles through the familiar Google interface.

I tried it out by doing a search with the terms, "school finance" (no connectors).  Sure enough, all of the familar cases (state and federal) came up, beginning with Rodriguez and including Serrano, Rose, and the rest.  If you click on an opinion, the interface allows you to read it as a web document, but unlike other web documents, which frustratingly do not include page numbers (big problem when you are using the Bluebook), the Google Scholar version has the correct pagination for the regional reporters in which the cases appear. 

I doubt that I will shift all of my legal research from Westlaw to this search engine, as Westlaw still affords many advantages over the broader Google search interface, but this will be a great tool to universalize access to the law and save many people huge amounts of time. 

Edjurist TV: Episode 7 - Education Law in South Africa, A Conversation with Rika Jobert and Jean Van Rooyen

Had the marvelous opportunity a couple weeks ago to sit down and chat with Professors Rika Jobert and Jean Van Rooyen, of the University of Pretoria's Department of Education Management and Policy Studies. We chatted about educational law, leadership issues, finance issues, preparation issues, etc. It was a great time and our department enjoyed hosting them in Lexington before they went on to Louisville for the ELA conference. Below is the interview and the relevant links:

Interuniversity Centre for Education Law, Education Leadership and Education Policy
Rika's Book: The Law of Education in South Africa (and a new one out as well).
Jean's Book: People Leadership in Education
South Africa Constitution

School IT Departments ... Concerns

As I am working here in KY to modify our schools for the information economy, increasingly I am becoming concerned that school IT departments might be more of the problem than the solution. I know that is heresy (especially given my large IT based readership), but I am starting to really have some concerns. Reading Wes Fryer's excellent post yesterday caused me to want to articulate those concerns.

First, power from the administration is being increasingly delegated to the IT department - because administrators don't understand (or won't bother to learn) the necessary technical information to make what amount to essentially administrative decisions. These IT departments may not view themselves as leaders. They may not take the more legally risky move that has the potential for more educational benefit (think blocking stuff), whereas I have coached my principals to make those moves where ethics outweigh the law. 

Second, the IT departments I have seen are generally not "big picture" departments. They are more concerned about their line items in the budget than the overall budget picture. We can't sacrifice special education funding for a new computer lab - so stop asking. You are not helping the principal or superintendent by requesting outrageous investments. 

Third, they are insulated - and I think intentionally so. They become little fiefdoms - a bit like Oz in the Wizard of Oz. Don't ask me how the network operates ... just respect me because it does operate ... and for the love of God, please don't pull back the curtain.

Fourth, they start to look down/criticize slow adopting teachers. This in turn breeds resentment and then stubbornness. There is just not nearly enough patience. Yes, I know you want to talk about Twitter and personal learning networks, but teachers generally are just beginning to understand blogging. Generally, they are too far ahead.

Fifth, they are geographically isolated. The school I taught in had the IT department in a little corner office off the far end of the library. Unless you knew where to look, you would have never found it. What kind of statement is that? On one hand, we want all the wires in the school to run to it, on the other we don't actually want to see it.

Sixth, they are not professional enough. They dress in jeans, are not clean shaven, don't come to meetings, spend their time on twitter instead of talking face-to-face, etc. And, when you are not professional, you are not part of the larger conversation.

Of course, I think this all adds up to a concern I have more broadly over their attitude. Returning to Wes' post, it is the best intentions gone awry. Generally, I do not question that school IT departments are doing what they think is best for the students and the school. Also, I generally do not question that school IT departments are legitimately trying to be cutting edge and trying to advance their school through technology. They legitimately have the best of intentions - but those good intentions are not translating to systemic reforms. There is plenty of blame to go around and I don't want to assign it all to IT folks, but their insular and "better-than-you" attitudes, their lack of patience and professionalism, their constant pushing toward new technology, it just doesn't translate well. And, while I do think school IT departments are advancing the ball, I think they are advancing it just enough so that everyone else can write off their technological responsibilities. Scott McLeod had a great point yesterday as well, and I invite you to join in the conversation that is currently going on over there in the comments. But, this comic does sum it up pretty well.

Dilbert.com via Dangerously IrrelevantThat's my fundamental concern here. IT Departments, through with the best of intentions, have become a cop out. Schools are not really serious about large scale, systemic, technology-based reforms; they are just serious enough to let someone else worry about it for them, though. And, as long as IT departments continue to be that responsibility write-off, I don't think we can ever get to systemic changes to reorient our schools to the new economy. 

University Presidents Should be Rock Stars

Time this week compiled a list of the top 10 university presidents. Gordon Gee, an education law alum, was the feature story and the list also included another alum, Mark Yudof. 

I loved the story, I loved the list, and I hope they keep it up. Picking a top 10 of anything, of course, is going to be mostly arbitrary. But I love the national attention that these people should be getting anyway. These university presidents, especially R1 presidents, should be rockstars. We should compete for them the way we compete for basketball coaches. It is the rare combination of innovative ideology, bureaucratic understanding, political tact, financial sense and, yes, legal competence, that can make a top notch university president. In fact, great university presidents are a much more rare commodity than great basketball coaches and, of course, they have a much larger impact on the state. I follow both @presidentgee (5,137 followers) and @mark_yudof (1,187 followers). I do not follow @UKCoachCalipari
 even though he has nearly a million followers. I look forward to the day, although it will probably never come, when our university president rock stars outshine our athletic coach rockstars. 

Vamos a Cuba Case Denied Cert.

Good, I think. It was too political and would have made for bad precedent. Plus, it is just not that complex of a case. A school board has the right to prohibit a book as long as they follow procedures and do not discriminate. In this case, the factual accuracy of the book was questioned and (rightly or wrongly) the school board decided to follow their procedures to prohibit it from their school. Unless you can prove discrimination ... that's that. There is no First Amendment issue.

If you disagree with this denial of cert. by the Supreme Court or the current structure of the legal argument, don't get mad at the court - focus your attention on state legislatures that give school boards such broad authority to ban books.

Mark Walsh has more as always.

Teachers Selling Lesson Plans - What Legal Issues?

The big story making rounds over the weekend was the N. Y. Times story on teachers across the country selling their lesson plans online to make themselves a profit. Lots of local papers ran it in their Sunday edition, including my local paper. 

So, why not? I've weighed it over the weekend and I can't come up with a really good reason to legally ban it, not to mention I don't think there is any existing legal issues. I am no intellectual property guru, but a teacher's lesson plan is his or her own intellectual property, meaning they would hold the copyright (if they sought one). As the copyright owner, they are free to sell it in the same way they are free to give it.  Update: See the comments below - my readers think this is "work for hire" and the property of the school district. I'm not so sure, but until I complete my own research, I suggest that their opinion is the one to be relied upon. 

And, I think schools should stay out of it. They may try to take a cut (and I think there is a reasonable argument they should get a cut), but they should just forget about it. There is just not enough money there to pay a lawyer to handle all the intellectual property issues and negotiate prices. 

Maybe I am crazy, and feel free to tell me that I am, but I think this is an area where the market, aided by the Internet, could actually be a good thing for schools. 

The Future of Education Law Information

Lots of current events have caused me to consider what the future of education law information will look like. I'm the new technology chair for ELA, Scott B. has been appointed to West's Education Law Reporter Board, Mark Walsh (who has a redesigned site) and I have been talking lately, and lots of other thought provokers. Collectively, it has caused me to think about what education law information will look like in the future and the following are some of my thoughts:

1. Westlaw & Lexis. I have now lived a over a year without them and I can confidently say there is simply no replacement. They are not going anywhere for the foreseeable future. I've posted on free alternatives, and while those are developing rapidly, West and Lexis are doing more, more quickly, and with more detail because of their enormous capitalization and human resources. The free resources can't match that development process. At least not yet because there has been no organization toward shared goals. 
2. Just a few blogs. This blogging thing has been around quite a while, and while there is a substantial stable of education law blogs, it is by no means the plethora that I thought might develop. Instead, what I think we have seen are a few bloggers really develop substantial followings. Jim Gerl, for instance, at the Special Education Law Blog, has leveraged his blog into a 600 member facebook group, among other things. These blogs are filling the space that other potential blogs might develop into. Thus, I think we have moved past everyone coming to the table, to everyone sorting out to the few existing tables. 
3. Lots of Linking. While I think there will be few bloggers serving as permanent resources, I think there will lots more linking between independently produced news. Links to MSNBC articles, ACLU postings, cases, new videos, etc. will be shared mostly between randomly existing groups, with some coordination at professional association levels (see @ELAOffice and @legalclips). Again, professional associations provide some structural support, but most of this type of information sharing I see as being random and independent. The sources for this type of linking will be e-mails, twitter, facebook, maybe Ning's, etc. 
4. The Relegation of (Paper) Books. I don't see education law books, including texts, as surviving forever. I see them surviving, especially the texts, as long as there continues to be an overload of ed. leadership preparation entities without law specialists (i.e. the Alexanders are the law specialists and the teacher is just a facilitator). But, I don't see that educational regime as holding on forever. States are decertifying programs, forcing redesign, permitting district alternatives, allowing online courses, etc. At the same time, the Internet permits the existing specialists to have a further reach. Thus, the forces are working against the traditional textbook model everyday, and everyday textbooks in education law lose a little ground. They have already lost ground to me. I don't require a textbook in most of my education law courses at the moment, and in a couple years I will probably do away with the textbook altogether. There may still be a place for online texts (think Rapp's Education Law currently on Lexis going public) and I think paper resources will never totally disappear, but the profit margins for paper education law books is shrinking and at some point most of them just won't be financially feasible. 
5. The Proliferation of Journals. Counter-intuitively perhaps, I see journals as expanding in their role. But, that probably doesn't apply to the existing journals, unless they engage in some radical changes. In some ways, there will likely be a merger between blogging and journals. This may seem an unsubstantiated statement, and that's because it is at the moment. As of now, we have not seen any new online journals in education law survive. But, just because the surface is calm, doesn't mean there is not vast movement below the surface. It is just far too easy for a group of ed. law interested folks to start a journal to think that it won't happen. Not only will it probably happen, but I imagine it will happen in a big way. Law schools will support some of these outlets, but most will probably exist independently geared more for the educational audience. Not all will be indexed by West, but all will be indexed by Google - which is just as useful, if not more so. This really could happen immediately, the start-up costs are that low, and I wouldn't be surprised if I heard about a new journal starting tomorrow. This is just waiting on organization of like-minded individuals. 
6. Governmental Contributors. I think you are going to start seeing a whole lot more sites like this one in Missouri. There is simply too much educational law and too few educational law professors and practitioners to disseminate it. So, the producers of the educational law themselves will probably start doing a better job of disseminating their own information. Not only have judicial circuits started putting out their own cases and state legislatures started putting out their own statutes, but increasingly they are also offering summaries, better searching, indexing, linking, and lots of other features that makes the information dump actually useful. I would also expect movement from the federal department of education in this direction soon.   
7. Professional Associations and Other Entities. Filling in the governmental gaps will be professional associations. NSBA already does an outstanding job (actually, I have learned that Tom Burns is really doing most of the exceptional work) and ELA is beginning to wake up to this online world (interested to see just how much they want to play). But, that won't be the end of it. Already NASSP has shown it wants to play (and I helped). And I expect lots more involvement from bar associations, advocacy groups, policy centers, and more. To stay relevant in the information economy, you need to be putting out information. So, more and more entities are likely to jump into the fray, with varying levels of quality and substance.  

And, so in sum I see more information distributed more widely. Instead of compiling all of educational law into a single 600 page textbook, the independent and distributed educational law information sources will slowly take their place - which offer much richer information on any given topic. Already if you search Google for "student expression rights" you get a whole page of useful links each of which has slightly different takes from slightly different sources - and, heck, my paper on student expression comes up on the second page and full text is available. 

But, my article coming up on the second page or my involvement with NASSP is an important indicator. The media of educational law information is likely to substantially change, but the sources of educational law information are likely to change much more slowly. The experts are still going to be the experts for a while. And, while new people may jump on and try to become experts, the simpler and cheaper way to generate information is still to let the existing experts write it (or record it as the case may be). Few people may read Mark Walsh's education law stories in the paper version of Ed. Week in the future, but few self-respecting legal experts miss his blog posts. Mark Walsh hasn't changed, just the medium. In the same way, professors are still going to be major content providers, although the medium in which they are publishing is likely to change. And that will be both good and bad. You might be able to talk to a professor in a different state or country on twitter, but that professor may spend more time tweeting 140 character entries instead of 30,000 word essays. Or, for instance, the online journal articles may be smaller and more to the point (if one person does a good lit. review, why not just link to it and save the trouble). So, there will definitely be some substantive changes as the medium changes, but the basic content points are unlikely to change all that much.

So, I think that's the future of educational law information that we are looking at. More choices in increasingly different media published by an increasing lot of publishers, but a whole lot of the same old players and much of the same content categories.       

School Technology Leadership and the P-20 Continuum - Paducah

I was invited to speak at the SACS/AdvancedED Western Kentucky Conference this past Friday and I want to post the video and sources to that presentation. The presentation was an extension on the presentation I gave at the school law conference, with a vastly different theme at the end. In this version I present the beginnings of the new P-20 Initiative we are undertaking here at UK to help make technology leadership a priority in Kentucky's schools. As before, I borrowed Lawrence Lessig's presentation style, lots of Michael Wesch's data, and Scott McLeod's ideas, amongst others, ... and combined them into this presentation.

The video of my presentation:

Videos embedded in my presentation:

Learning to Change, Changing to Learn

K-20 Center

Sources:

Most of my sources are embedded on this page.

But, for this version I also relied heavily on:

Read/Write Government - Lessig

Michael Wesch and the Future of Education

And, Scott McLeod's Oklahoma Presentation (to K20 there - it all comes full circle).

21st Century Teachers are Those that Pass Tests?

According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce ... yes. 

In their latest education report card, what they deem a report card on educational effectiveness, they have 9 different subjects on which they are reporting. One of those subjects that the states are graded on is "21st Century Teaching Force." I figured that would be a bit difficult to measure, so I checked out their methodology in determining whether a state is preparing 21st Century Teachers. 

It turns out, they have 4 factors. If you have all 4, you get an A, 3 a B, and so on. And what are these outstanding factors that determine whether a state is creating a 21st century teaching force ... testing and alternative certification. Here they are: 

1. Teachers must pass basic skills test. 
2. Teachers must pass subject knowledge test. 
3. State has alternative cert. program. 
4. State tests alternative cert. teachers. 

Maybe I am missing something, but what in the heck does that have to do with preparing 21st Century Teachers? Seriously. If someone knows, please tell me. 

Tell you what, though, they have a really fancy chart. It's cool even. The take-away here is not that the U.S. Chamber is doing great research ... they are not. Mostly, they seem to be borrowing off other people's research even. The point is that they know how to present research. And, if it looks cool people tend not to play with the details. 

Where I am at...

on Twitter. And so are lots of other people. Follow along.