This is a tribute to my friend Mano. We work together, but I only help in small ways. Martin Luther King would have been proud to know her.
Manorama Talaiver is an tireless, always working, inspired educator who has created wonderful opportunities for students, teachers and administrators.
When I worked for the president of the United States who was then Bill Clinton on the National Information Infrastructure Advisory Council she called me, and asked” What are you doing for Virginia?”
She invited me to make a difference in the state. I was not sure how to do this , but she created pathways , for me. At the time she was working at the Science Museum of Virginia. We started working then when we could to change the face of teaching and learning in the state.
The South has a burden of history!
Southern Schools Mark Two Majorities
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/07/us/07south.html
January 7, 2010
By SHAILA DEWAN
ATLANTA — The South has become the first region in the country where
more than half of public school students are poor and more than half
are members of minorities, according to a new report.
The shift was fueled not by white flight from public schools, which
spiked during desegregation but has not had much effect on school
demographics since the early 1980s. Rather, an influx of Latinos and
other ethnic groups, the return of blacks to the South and higher birth
rates among black and Latino families have contributed to the change.
The new numbers, from the 2008-9 school year, are a milestone for the
South, “the only section of the United States where racial slavery,
white supremacy and racial segregation of schools were enforced through
law and social custom,” said the report, to be released on Thursday by
the Southern Education Foundation, a nonprofit group based here that
supports education improvement in the region. But the numbers also
herald the future of the country as a whole, as minority students are
expected to exceed 50 percent of public school enrollment by 2020 and
the share of students poor enough to qualify for free or reduced-price
lunches is on the rise in every state.
The South, desperate for a well-educated work force that can attract
economic development, will face an enormous challenge in tackling on
such a broad scale the lower achievement rates among poor and minority
students, who score lower than average on tests and drop out more
frequently than whites. Four of the 15 states in the report — Georgia,
Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas — now have a majority of both
low-income and minority pupils. Only one, Virginia, has neither.
“This is the beginning of a very clear trend that has enormous
implications,” said Michael A. Rebell, the executive director of the
Campaign for Educational Equity at Teachers College, Columbia
University. “When we realize that the majority of graduates of our
schools in the long run are going to come from backgrounds with
educational deprivation, it makes it imperative that schools be
improved.”
School districts in the South are already struggling to adapt, but it
is not clear which methods are most effective.
“That’s the question that Congress, the legislature, the Gates
Foundation — everybody’s trying to solve that,” said Arthur C. Johnson,
the superintendent of the Palm Beach School District in Florida, which
has gone from 40 percent minority students to 63 percent in 15 years.
Remedial programs, career-centered academies, and intensive teacher
training have helped, Mr. Johnson said, but have not closed the gap in
achievement and graduation rates.
Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia and Maryland have been among those
states where poor and minority students have shown the most improvement
in fourth-grade reading and eighth-grade math. From 2003 to 2007, black
fourth-graders in Alabama showed the most improvement of any state in
reading on the National Assessment of Economic Progress, though they
still rank slightly below average.
In Tennessee, where many districts have seen Hispanic enrollment
increase by factors of 10 or more, districts have scrambled to hire
more teachers of English as a second language. In Mississippi, which
has no publicly financed preschool, some schools have used federal
money for poor students to prepare 4-year-olds for the classroom.
In Louisiana, a recent study has tried to determine which
teacher-training programs are most effective. Districts are
experimenting with ways to attract more experienced teachers to
high-risk schools.
“We’ve got to figure out how to break the cycle of poverty, and the way
we’re doing it now isn’t working,” said Hank M. Bounds, the Mississippi
commissioner of higher education and, until recently, the state
superintendent of schools. “An affluent 5-year-old has about the same
vocabulary as an adult living in poverty.”
More minority students in a district does not mean that classrooms are
more integrated, said Richard Fry, a senior research associate with the
Pew Hispanic Center, whose research shows that most white children in
the South attend predominantly white schools and an even higher
percentage of black and Hispanic children attend predominantly minority
schools.
Southern schools are far more segregated now than they were at the
height of integration in the ’70s and ’80s, a period that saw a
narrowing of the achievement gap, said Gary Orfield, the co-director of
The Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles at U.C.L.A. The
South has the lowest percentage of children in private school of any
region, Mr. Orfield said.
Minority schools tend to be larger, have higher student-teacher ratios
and have higher poverty rates, Mr. Fry said. For some education
advocates, such correlations raise the possibility that politicians
will be less likely to adequately finance public schools as they fill
with poor and minority students.
“We have a history of providing the least educational resources to the
students who need the most,” said Steve Suitts, the vice president of
the Southern Education Foundation and the author of the study. “The
people in the South have to be concerned about all children, not just
their own grandchildren.”
On the other hand, Southern politicians are keenly aware of the need
for an educated work force. Spurred in part by school financing
lawsuits, more than half the 15 states included in the study already
provide more state and local financing to heavily poor or minority
districts than to affluent or low-minority ones, according to figures
compiled by Education Trust, an advocacy group in Washington. But
schools often layer programs on top of programs without analyzing which
are effective, said Daria Hall, the trust’s director of K-12 policy.
Mano is a leader. She went first to virtual work, with Margaret Corbitt, before it was the fashion.
She and I were going to present it at a conference,and we were ready, but the fashion had not
taken place and so we did not get to present it. I thought of her when I went to see Avatar, and of Margaret Corbitt who pioneered this work.She is a digital pioneer.
Mano’s work cannot be summed up quickly , and she works quietly , late and early so , she probably does not have time to share what she does with everyone. These pictures will help you to see a bit of her work. She brought Alan November for a conference to rural Virginia.
Manorama Talaiver, Ed.D., is Director of the Institute for Teaching through Technology and Innovative Practices (ITTIP) of Longwood University.
As a little girl, I wanted to go to Longwood University, but the opportunity has come to me in a different way. From time to time I get to work with Mano at Longwood, University.
My history and hers merge in some ways. She is of Indian descent. I had a Fulbright to India. She went to catholic schools, but then there are the differences. We have never had words. When I get most discouraged, she has a kind thing to say, and moves on. She let me attend the Supercomputing Conference in Portland as a part of the team, when there were only a few places this fall.
: Mano has a passion and commitment to transform instructional practices in the classrooms nationally and internationally. She has worked in Greece, Ghana and India. Online she has affected a lot more countries than that. She is active in ISTE, and other groups.
Her teacher education workshops in using computers and multimedia began in 1988 when she joined the mathematics and science center, a consortium of six school divisions. She has been a pioneer in implementing Lego integration in elementary instruction beginning in 1989, developing awareness about supercomputing among teachers and students in collaboration with Lawrence Livermore National Lab in 1990-91, working with teachers in developing global projects using Kidsphere and Kidlink in eighties, training teachers in the use of videoconferencing with CUSEEME, and so on.
Every year Mano has introduced the pre-service and in-service teachers to new technology applications and instructional practices since 2005. Her recent teacher education efforts are focused on 21st century skills, STEM learning, integrating games in education, computational thinking, and cloud computing. She is facilitating teacher empowerment through face-to-face, synchronous and asynchronous opportunities for teachers so that teachers can receive professional development any time, anywhere based on their needs.
Mano also directs the enhancing education through technology grant project for Central Virginia Technology Consortium (www.cvctech.org)
Mano works in a place in Virginia where the economy was in trouble based on the change of
permission for industry. Tobacco trust may not mean anything to you, but I grew up in these
areas , in the summertime. Farms, with tobacco, truck gardens, and livestock. My family
was from Dinwiddie, which is one of the areas she serves. We owned tobacco and farmed peanuts and other crops.
A more interesting part of the history of some of the places in which Mano works, is the Brown vw the Board of Education ruling. One of the counties closed down schools.
Rather than abide by the U.S. Supreme Court mandate that public schools be desegregated, the Prince Edward County Board of Supervisors appropriated no funds for public schools during that period.
Many of the students in the county were displaced, and families were split apart. Some students received no education during what is called the “closed school era,” while others moved to other parts of Virginia or even out of state so they could attend school.
Tobacco was shut down as an industry in the state of Virginia. There was provided some tobacco trust funding to help with workforce development.
In 1999, Governor James S. Gilmore, III proposed and the General Assembly approved legislation allocating fifty (50) percent of the Master Settlement Agreement money due the Commonwealth of Virginia to tobacco community revitalization in Southside and Southwest Virginia.
Working closely with 25 rural school divisions in Southside Virginia and fifteen urban and semi-urban school divisions in Central Virginia, Mano is faced with challenges of closing the digital equity gap with regard to access, teacher expertise, and parent resources.
She used to call me and say,”W why aren’t this parents interested?” I used to tell her my Black history observations. My mother had to move to town to go to high school. The boys in her family were not that lucky to be able to be away from the farm.
She continues to strive to address digital equity issues by developing out-of-school programs for students, parent awareness workshops, providing technology access and resources through grants such as establishing community technology centers, and writing grants to support the teachers in receiving training, resources, and graduate credits. Her current educational technology initiatives to bring digital equity focus on motivating children to be game creators as a way to introduce them to research, design, communication, and programming; developing computational thinking skills in students through professional development; facilitating global collaboration projects; and on facilitating teacher empowerment through face-to-face, synchronous and asynchronous opportunities for teachers on developing 21st century skills, TPCK, and STEM learning. Until 2005, Dr. Talaiver was the Director of Learning at the Science Museum to develop technology skills in children. She implemented the Community Technology Centers and 21st Century Community Learning Center programs to serve children and adults in low-income communities. In her vision, children should be scientifically and technologically literate all over the world.
Digital equity work in Ghana and India: Talaiver trained teachers in a K-12 school in Tema, Ghana on integrating Internet resources in instruction and conducting global collaboration projects. The goal is to have interactions among the students and teachers in the US and in Ghana. Because of her work, along with the Dean of College of Education and Human Services, one of the teachers will join Longwood University in fall 2010.
. She and I are now on a team for Supercomputing and we have attended
conferences. Some thought, well what would happen if the teachers were in a team and had to write a plan.
Well we , with Mano’s leadership have participated in several summits, that was open to teachers, counselors and colleges, then the second one was sharing Bob Panoff’s Shodor.org.
We as a team learned a lot but, our team leader took what she learned and formed ITEST grants, and outreach in the state of Virginia.
We look forward to projects at the Robert Russa Moton Museum, and hope to establish Supercomputing , computational thinking as projects there. NSF, Supercomputing, and Teragrid
have been our ladders to excellence.