Fayetteville High School students are participating in an annual ritual to raise money for less fortunate families in the district.  Here is the announcement from the district blog:

The annual FHS Student Council Homeless Vigil will be held on Thursday, December 3, beginning at 5 pm. The fund raising goal for the 2009 vigil is $11,000, and all proceeds go to help families in need in the Fayetteville School District. The students will sleep outside in makeshift shelters, warming themselves by a fire in a barrel. Donations of cash and non-perishable food items are greatly appreciated and may be dropped off at the vigil, which will be held in front of the FHS gym on Stone Street.

These students slept outside in the frigid temperatures last night and continue their vigil today.  The students had raised $6,400 toward their goal of $11,000 as of 10 am this morning.

These same students are also assisting with the blood drive at the high school today.

If you live or work in Fayetteville, please consider stopping by the high school to show your support for these kids and their causes.

UPDATE: FHS students raised $14k+!

One wonders what those of us here in Northwest Arkansas have done to deserve so much attention from charlatans lately.  In the last year we have been visited by Eva Klein and Associates, Tony Wagner, and now Sarah Palin.  Unfortunately, the community coughed up money to be wooed by Eva Klein and Tony Wagner.  Palin is at least coming for free, unless you count the cost the English language is incurring by losing any non-ironic use of the word “rogue” henceforth.

The latest sum of money the community will be parting with–$36,000 to be exact–is going to pay Phi Delta Kappa for conducting a curriculum audit of the Fayetteville School District.  Like Eva Klein & Associates did for Fayetteville (for $150,000), Phi Delta Kappa came into town  for a few days and held focus groups with community members to hear their ideas.  In February they’ll provide us with a nifty presentation that summarizes what community members told them.  The modus operandi of these types of consultants is well-known. Dilbert has been lampooning them for years.

To be sure, the report that Phi Delta Kappa comes up with won’t look exactly like the same ideas the community gave them.  They’ll be re-written in such a way that any resemblance or lack of substance will be obfuscated by consultant-speak gobbledy-gook.  For example, when the Rogers School District hired Phi Delta Kappa to conduct an audit, one of the recommendations they received was:

Develop and implement a comprehensive curriculum management system that delineates short- and long-term goals, directs curriculum revision to ensure deep alignment and quality delivery, and defines the instructional model district leaders expect teachers to follow in delivering the curriculum.

Translation: Establish a system to set and achieve goals. And make it a good one.

Here’s another recommendation from the Rogers audit:

Research, identify and implement strategies to eliminate inequities and inequalities that impede opportunities for all students to succeed.

Translation:  Do what you and every other school district has already been doing (or should have been doing) for decades.

I’m willing to bet Fayetteville’s audit will contain many of the same recommendations given to Rogers.  These types of consultant groups have stock boiler-plate language that they recycle time and time again.  I also expect to see some of the views of the community rewritten in consultant-speak.  Here’s some of the comments and concerns the Northwest Arkansas Times picked up from teachers and parents at one of the focus groups:

I got this list from the newspaper, which cost me fifty cents–a whopping $35,499.50 less than Phi Delta Kappa is going to charge for repackaging these ideas in consultant-speak.

I don’t know exactly why organizations pay money to outside consultants, like when the city paid Eva Klein & Associates to tell us that the University was one of our strengths, and that the perception that Fayetteville was anti-business was one of our weaknesses.   Don’t we already elect and pay people to think about these things and have a vision for what we need to do?  So why are they sub-contracting out their duties?

Still, I don’t want to prejudge the Phi Delta Kappa report too much, and I am hopeful that when the report comes out it will be useful.  But my concern and my prediction is that some form of the goals written above, re-written in consultant speak, along with some more generic goals, like the ones in the Rogers report, are going to make up the bulk of what Fayetteville receives.

We’ll come back to this in February when we finally get our hands on the report, at which time we’ll translate it into English and check my predictions.

Last Monday the Obama administration announced a new, largely privately funded, initiative which aims to “improve the participation and performance of America’s students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.” The administration is calling the campaign “Educate to Innovate.” You can check out the White House blog post here and the New York Times article here. The campaign is being supported by several media and technology companies as well as scientific societies across the nation. The administration kicked-off the campaign by announcing five public-private partnerships as its first steps:

1. Time-Warner Cable, Discovery Communications, Sesame Street, and other partners will get the message to kids and students about the wonder of invention and discovery.
2. National Lab Day will help build communities of support around teachers across the country, culminating in a day of civic participation.
3. National STEM design competitions will develop game options to engage kids in scientific inquiry and challenging designs.
4. Five leading business and thought leaders (Sally Ride, Craig Barrett, Ursula Burns, Glen Britt, and Antonio Perez) will head an effort to increase private and philanthropic involvement in support of STEM teaching and learning.

While this announcement may not be earth-shattering, it represents a significant shift in the way science and math will be treated on the national stage. It is my opinion that President Bush’s obvious disdain for science* (and intellectuals in general) had a significantly negative impact on the way the general public viewed scientists and their work. And I believe that having a President who celebrates scientists can have a similar positive effect. Here are a couple of good Obama quotes from the NY Times article:

“If you win the N.C.A.A. championship, you come to the White House,” he said. “Well, if you’re a young person and you’ve produced the best experiment or design, the best hardware or software, you ought to be recognized for that achievement, too.”

“Scientists and engineers ought to stand side by side with athletes and entertainers as role models, and here at the White House, we’re going to lead by example. We’re going to show young people how cool science can be.”

There are, however, a couple of problems I can see with the President’s plan to celebrate scientists as we do athletes.  First science is inherently messy.  Unlike athletic competition, the arena of ideas often does not produce clear cut winners. In science, ideas generally undergo years of scrutiny and revision before they are adopted. Unless we engage in some type of Monty Python style competition between scientists (see video below) it will be difficult to determine who the winners are, at least in the short term.

Second, anytime the President speaks about a topic he brings a lot of political baggage with him. It would be difficult for the President to host any particular scientist without sparking a firestorm of debate about the scientists character or the validity of her work. His celebration of science could and would be construed as an endorsement of a specific person and her ideas.

I think the most consequential portion of the administrations campaign is bringing real-live scientists to kids in their classrooms and homes. This type of interaction with scientists and their work could make celebrities of our nations scientists, and encourage kids to explore these fields in ways their teachers and parents may never have been able to.

I would like to see local school districts and the University develop a partnership to bring real people working in science (both social and hard) and math into the classroom. Seeing these people and hearing about the work they do could be truly inspiring. Having a research university so close is a tremendous resource, and it’s time we started making better use of it.

*If you need some evidence of President Bush’s mistreatment of science, take a look at some of the articles referenced in this Wikipedia entry.