Social Capital

An addition to the "District Comparisons" page on the Hamilton Central Options website...
On the end-of-the-world solstice (12/21/2012), I see a note about Hamilton as #11 in Forbes' "America's Friendliest Towns:" 11. Hamilton, NY says

Population (2010): 6,690
This tiny historic Central New York town -- home to a village by the same name -- was founded in 1975 as Payne's Settlement. Today it is perhaps best known as the location of prestigious Colgate University. Crime rates are markedly lower than the national average and despite being a college town, the rate of homeownership is more than 60%. The Village Green offers local eateries and merchants as well as some of the area's most historic homes. Neighbors gather for fundraisers, holiday parties, safety awareness events, holiday charities and fitness groups, according to Nextdoor.

Now, it seems that Forbes has confused "1975" with "1795", but otherwise it seems accurate. Is it unChristmassy to note that Morrisville didn't make this list? Hamilton has a lot of social capital to lose...

Failure is Good

The international test scores are out today, and as always US kids rank fairly low in performance, high in confidence. Yong Zhao comments that Numbers Can Lie: What TIMSS and PISA Truly Tell Us, if Anything?

So far all international test scores measure the extent to which an education system effectively transmits prescribed content.
In this regard, the U.S. education system is a failure and has been one for a long time.
But the successful transmission of prescribed content contributes little to economies that require creative and entrepreneurial individual talents and in fact can damage the creative and entrepreneurial spirit. Thus high test scores of a nation can come at the cost of entrepreneurial and creative capacity.
While the U.S. has failed to produce homogenous, compliant, and standardized employees, it has preserved a certain level of creativity and entrepreneurship. In other words, while the U.S. is still pursuing an employee-oriented education model, it is much less successful in stifling creativity and suppressing entrepreneurship.

We failed...hooray! Let's design schools that don't even try to do what we're failing at!
Or then again, maybe not. (Actually, we do need to transmit a fair amount of prescribed content; as Salman Khan puts it in One World Schoolhouse, this should take about 20% of the school day.)

Consolidation Context -- M-E

A note I should have posted earlier, from March's Syracuse Post-Standard, says New York state school districts won't merge even when offered extra money

In 2007 and in 2008, Newsweek magazine recognized Morrisville-Eaton High School as one of the best in the country based on the number of Advanced Placement courses it offered its students.
This year, the Madison County school doesn’t have a single AP class. The district jettisoned them as enrollment and state aid dropped, costs rose and it cut staff and spending to balance its budgets...

Well, maybe some school districts will merge when offered extra money. Or then again, maybe not.

Consolidation and Real Estate Values

Just a note, citing Duncombe & Yinger How Does School District Consolidation Affect Property Values? A Case Study of New York (38 page PDF) from August 2012:

This paper explores the impact of school district consolidation on house values using a sample of house sales in New York State from 2000 to 2010. During this period, three sets of districts consolidated. ... the impacts of consolidation on house values are more negative in high-income census tracts, where parents may have a relatively large willingness to pay for the access to teachers and other non-budgetary advantages of small districts.

Plausible, at least as part of the explanation.

Higher Education Bubble note

Every now and then we should stop and think about the context of higher education that we mostly hope most of our kids are headed for.... the New York Federal Reserve has come out (November 27, 2012) with a Q3 household financials report, Decrease in Overall Debt Balance Continues Despite Rise in Non-Real Estate Debt - Federal Reserve Bank of New York

in the third quarter, non-real estate household debt jumped 2.3 percent to $2.7 trillion. The increase was due to a boost in student loans ($42 billion), auto loans ($18 billion) and credit card balances ($2 billion). ...The reduction in overall debt is attributed to a decrease in mortgage debt ... and home equity lines of credit...
Outstanding student loan debt now stands at $956 billion, an increase of $42 billion since last quarter. ... $23 billion is new debt ... the percent of student loan balances 90+ days delinquent increased to 11 percent this quarter.²...
² these delinquency rates for student loans are likely to understate actual delinquency rates because almost half of these loans are currently in deferment, in grace periods or in forbearance and therefore temporarily not in the repayment cycle. This implies that among loans in the repayment cycle delinquency rates are roughly twice as high.

These debts, of course, are not discharged in bankruptcy. It's a profoundly immoral system in which our almost-adults are urged to jump into heavy debt with no serious consideration of their long-run finances, and no way out at all. The very useful ZeroHedge finance site emphasizes "The Scariest Graph of the Quarter," being the student-loan line from

A slow multi-year rise to 9%, back to 8.5%, and now a sudden jump to 11% where the new delinquency measure is known to underestimate the real problem quite drastically. So it's worse than that, even though the other loan types are not doing anything of the kind. Looking for something positive to say, we can see this as one source of pressure for online education technology at the college and graduate level; that technology, whether from Coursera or MITx or Western Governors or ...., then becomes available at the KhanAcademy level.
Or then again, maybe not.

Consolidation Location -- Rephrased

We (the "CAC") have been asked to express last week's Consolidation Location choice in terms of the "challenges" and "opportunities" associated with each choice. Okay...
We leave elementary schools where they are, for HCS and for M-ECS. We can merge middle schools into HCS and high schools into M-ECS, as option "C", or merge middle schools into M-ECS and high schools into HCS, as option "D". I group the challenges and opportunities under "Identity", "Distance", "Nearby Places", and "College Courses". There are of course many challenges and many opportunities shared by both of these options, not to be discussed here.

Identity: One village or the other will almost certainly be perceived by some of its residents as "losing the high school" that is part of their personal and community identity. I doubt that the middle school will be thought of the same way.
Challenge for C Loss of identity for Hamilton;
Challenge for D Loss of identity for Morrisville.
These are symmetric, so I don't think it affects this choice.

Distance: Distance increases for both. This is not symmetric, because many Hamilton students walk or bike, which is not practical for Morrisville students; HCS is inside Hamilton, M-ECS (high school) is not inside Morrisville.
Challenge for C Hamilton students stop walking/biking, or ride is longer.
Challenge for D Morrisville students have longer ride.

Nearby Places: My kids all got themselves to music lessons in town, after school; they would also meet friends at local food places, and one had a habit of stopping for coffee while walking to high school. Groups of kids and grownups, e.g. theatrical and athletic groups, have found places to meet. I always thought this convenience was a major advantage; it turns out that some M-ECS parents think that their lack of this convenience is a major advantage, because truancy is harder work when your school is out in the middle of nowhere. That's interesting. It seems there's a tradeoff between making life harder for kids you trust, and making life harder for kids you don't. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding something here -- I often do. I'm calling this a rather strong H+, but I accept that people with different values may call it an M+, and I accept that different values may provide good reasons not to merge in the first place.
Challenge for C Trusted students lose local-resource options.
Challenge for D Untrusted students have more ways to get in trouble.

Opportunity for C Untrusted students are more under control.
Opportunity for D Trusted students keep/gain local resource options.

College courses: It's common for HCS students to take a few Colgate courses despite schedule mismatches -- at any given moment, a dozen or so students are doing this, with about forty students in each HCS year. (I.e., a dozen or so out of about eighty juniors+seniors.) Some M-ECS students, according to the superintendent, would do the same if they could -- and they will be able to, if the high school location is in Hamilton. If the high school location is in Morrisville, that's probably gone -- add transport to the schedule mismatch and it won't be an option.
Challenge for C Hamilton students lose those options.
Opportunity for D Morrisville students gain those options.

Human Capital?

Following 2300 students over four years, we find that Study: Many college students not learning to think critically | McClatchy

Forty-five percent of students made no significant improvement in their critical thinking, reasoning or writing skills during the first two years of college, according to the study. After four years, 36 percent showed no significant gains in these so-called "higher order" thinking skills.

Note that this is not "compared to a control group who didn't go to college"; this is simply lack of improvement. In a control group, some would have developed the critical thinking skills being tested here, and some would not. To continue:

The study marks one of the first times a cohort of undergraduates has been followed over four years to examine whether they're learning specific skills. It provides a portrait of the complex set of factors, from the quality of secondary school preparation to the academic demands on campus, which determine learning. It comes amid President Barack Obama's call for more college graduates by 2020 and is likely to shine a spotlight on the quality of the education they receive.

Arum concluded that while students at highly selective schools made more gains than those at less selective schools, there are even greater disparities within institutions.
Students who majored in the traditional liberal arts — including the social sciences, humanities, natural sciences and mathematics — showed significantly greater gains over time than other students in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills.
Students majoring in business, education, social work and communications showed the least gains in learning. However, the authors note that their findings don't preclude the possibility that such students "are developing subject-specific or occupationally relevant skills."

Hmm.....education students at the bottom. However you interpret it, that's not good news for future K-12 students. Those are tomorrow's teachers.
Or then again, maybe not.

Star Academies?

"Welcome to Star Scholar U, where professors are the credential".
Professors deliver self-service online courses | The Daily Caller

Founding a university may sound dramatic, but in an era of easy-to-use online tools it can be done as a side project—akin to blogging or writing a textbook. Soon there could be hundreds of Star Scholar U’s.
Two recent examples are Marginal Revolution University, started by two economics professors at George Mason University, and Rheingold U, run by the author and Internet pioneer Howard Rheingold. To be clear, these professors are using the word “university” loosely—they award no credit and claim no spot on any college ranking. And they probably won’t become rich through their teaching. But the gambit gives them full control over the content and delivery methods. And it offers their personal brands as a kind of credential.

Rheingold U is new to me:

Rheingold U. is a totally online learning community, offering courses that usually run for five weeks, with five live sessions and ongoing asynchronous discussions through forums, blogs, wikis, mindmaps, and social bookmarks. In my thirty years of experience online and my eight years teaching students face to face and online at University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University, I've learned that magic can happen when a skilled facilitator works collaboratively with a group of motivated students. Live sessions include...

I dunno. The idea of the star as teacher is at least partly a matter of student incentives...of generated focus. Maybe we can have an actual profession which is "course designer", and an actual profession of course certification/evaluation, and a star lecturer can do the actual mini-lecture deliveries...how about real stars? Patrick Stewart as a physics lecturer? Does it really matter if he understands what he's saying? (Taylor Swift as a psychology lecturer?) Extend the mini-lectures with mini-dialogues, in which an actor/student takes a role with which the actual student can identify -- in fact each mini-lecture becomes multiple online mini-dialogues, so you can follow along with the education of the fictional character you most identify with, interacting with, well, with the
"Second star to the right, and straight on till morning."
Or then again, maybe not, except in Neverland.

Focus

A professorial note on MOOCs develops a view of their limits, which is a familiar view but I'm not sure it's correct. The Year of the MOOC? — Crooked Timber

MOOC’s have to be the new frontier of social networking. Some kind of peer-to-peer bootstrapping, with lots of students helping each other help themselves, because there’s no way one instructor (or just a few) can individually help every student, once you scale up past a certain point. But this still requires the students to be mature and self-motivated, as learners, to start with.

This is such a huge number of people – especially globally – that it’s great news, all in all. But it leaves a lot of people behind...(Poor kid, he has to go to Harvard because he’s not ready for Coursera!) College is for students who can’t yet help themselves, don’t know how to study, don’t know enough to know what they want, or what they should want, to learn. They need to be more or less locked into an environment where they will be induced to learn how to learn. Which is, after all, what college is supposed to teach.

That's what (some say) college is supposed to teach...but does it? Take a bunch of kids with comparable SAT scores, high school grades, socio-economic background and so forth as well as comparable "grit" and most of all, comparable ability-to-learn. Now put some of them randomly into college, some into the military, some into jobs. Five years later, six years later...test their ability-to-learn again. Will the ones who went to college stand out, as having learned how to learn? Will they be more mature? More self-motivated? I have no confidence in this claim. I would want to see some data before taking it seriously.

Actually, I'm not at all sure what ability-to-learn is, though I believe it involves being "mature and self-motivated, as learners" just as stated above; I just think that definition's probably pretty much circular. If you focus on what's in front of you then you're going to be described as mature and self-motivated and as having developed the ability to learn (although you might be very slow at it.) Of course learning-how-to-learn also involves the mechanics of taking notes and looking stuff up and trying things out, i.e. experimentation, but that ought to come in elementary school, and if elementary school comes to involve MOOCs then maybe that's all that's required... Your first grade class, or more likely pre-Kindergarten, puts you in a couple of actual physical play-groups with physical friends (some of whom are animals, and some are robots?) and also a couple of virtual groups where you do Google Hangouts (or the equivalent) with virtual friends, some of whom are cartoons and others are kids that you might meet someday. Later you take notes (to send to each other) and you look stuff up (with Google, and Wikipedia!) and you experiment (with a hammer, but preferably not Maxwell's. ) And a situation in which the "bright" kids and the "slow" kids are not waiting for each other, in which each kid has the habit of making progress at his or her own pace...hmmm. It might do.

A large part of self-motivation is habit. Indeed, a large part of maturity is habit. Hey, you know what? Almost everything is habit. William James on Habit

"Ninety-nine hundredths or, possibly, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of our activity is purely automatic and habitual, from our rising in the morning to our lying down each night."

"The teacher's prime concern should be to ingrain into the pupil that assortment of habits that shall be most useful to him throughout life. Education is for behavior, and habits are the stuff of which behavior consists."

"We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can."

"Seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits you aspire to gain."

"Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state."

Or then again, maybe they wouldn't at all, not nohow. And anyway it's much much much too late for me.

Education Election

A Time Magazine "ViewPoint" says that The Election Has Compromised Education Reform

The 2012 presidential election sidestepped the issue of school reform. Neither candidate spent much time laying out, let alone talking up, an education policy agenda. But around the country, there were ballot referendums and state and local races with big implications for schools. Teachers’ unions had a good night, but so did charter schools....

We don't know the right answer... we muddle on.
Until we can't, of course.

Consolidation Location

I want to think about several issues of school consolidation location selection, and focus on what for us may be a central issue -- the college connections. But first I'll consider some others, and (as an update) at the end I'll add some context.

Split Elementary If two declining-enrollment school systems consolidate to save money, they can often leave their elementary schools in place, and that seems like a good idea -- I suspect that most parents will agree that distance matters more for the very young (and their parents) and I'm not going to argue it here.

Merged High The high schools, however, must actually merge: if no new building is contemplated, then one set of students (and teachers) has to go to the buildings formerly occupied only by the other. In this case, we actually expect a merge to result in all middle-school students at one location, high school at the other, but it seems that high school is the focus of discussion.

Identity It's an emotional issue for many, which I think has to do with a sense of identity, and is likely to be strongest for those who grew up in one place and still live near their old high school; in rural communities that's common. I suppose I'm not the best person to address that sort of connection; I am at this moment close to 2627 miles almost due north of my old high school, which was my fourth high school (counting correspondence school but not counting junior high, or the other way around), and anyway senior year I spent more time doing freshman math and physics at a local university...the yearbook had a blank where my picture should have gone, and I've never gone back. So I should probably leave that issue alone. In any case, it's neutral -- except as a reason not to merge in the first place. Community identity is presumably always damaged in consolidation. (Or is it?)

Practicalities Apart from emotional ties, we have several possible concerns:

• Distance If A is much larger than B, then making A's students go to B is worse than the other way around -- but that's really an annexation, not a merger. In any case it doesn't seem to apply to us. If many of A's students walk or bicycle and only a few of B's, then it might again be less disruptive to bring B to A (they were on the road anyway.) That seems to apply -- I think that HCS students are more likely to walk (mine did) and M-ECS students have to drive or bus (it's far out from the village). Indeed, M-ECS seems to do more than double the bus transport of HCS, reinforcing the notion that the HCS student population is more concentrated. Call it a moderate H+, which will become more important in future if fuel costs rise.
• Facilities If one building is much newer than the other, or has a much better physical plant, then of course we use that one -- but both HCS and M-ECS have been recently upgraded and are probably comparable. (Except elementary, which is not in question here; see below.) I'd call it a wash, except that the HCS facility will soon be heated less expensively, by natural gas; I don't know how M-ECS is heated or what the relative costs are. So it might be a weak H+, or neutral.
• Outdoor Spaces Comparing upstate schools should involve not only athletic fields but woods and trails; apparently these are comparable.
• Nearby Places My kids all got themselves to music lessons in town, after school; they would also meet friends at local food places, and one had a habit of stopping for coffee while walking to high school. Groups of kids and grownups, e.g. theatrical and athletic groups, have found places to meet. I always thought this convenience was a major advantage; it turns out that some M-ECS parents think that their lack of this convenience is a major advantage, because truancy is harder work when your school is out in the middle of nowhere. That's interesting. It seems there's a tradeoff between making life harder for kids you trust, and making life harder for kids you don't. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding something here -- I often do. I'm calling this a rather strong H+, but I accept that people with different values may call it an M+, and I accept that different values may provide good reasons not to merge in the first place.

And then there are the college connections which are my main focus here. Colgate has a history of supporting HCS, and of course SUNY Morrisville has supported M-ECS. It's my understanding that the level of support is not really comparable, simply because Colgate has a lot more resources. Some of these resources are straightforwardly financial -- Colgate gives a substantial voluntary contribution each year (there is no formal PILOT (Payment-In-Lieu-Of-Taxes) agreement, it's just voluntary.) Some apply at the elementary level. Some have to do with faculty volunteers. The connection that's most visibly endangered, though, applies to HCS juniors and seniors. It's common for HCS students to take a few Colgate courses despite schedule mismatches -- at any given moment, a dozen or so students are doing this, with about forty students in each HCS year. (I.e., a dozen or so out of about eighty juniors+seniors.) Some M-ECS students, according to the superintendent, would do the same if they could -- and they will be able to, if the high school location is in Hamilton. If the high school location is in Morrisville, that's probably gone -- add transport to the schedule mismatch and it won't be an option.

Is this a big deal? It is for the kids who sign up for it, and it is for those who would if they could, but can't yet do so. If the function of school is to serve kids' developmental needs, I'm calling that a strong H+.

And that's all I can think of....

Or then again, maybe not.

Context (update): This post is basically about two possibilities, but others exist. The elementary issue mentioned above is the possibility that Andrews Elementary, the separate and older elementary school for M-ECS, might close, with those students going to the M-ECS high school building, and M-ECS high schoolers coming to HCS. If enrolment is high and we stop using BOCES, this risks overcrowding. On the other hand, if later on we learn that we have a safety margin, this would save a good deal of money, about $300-350K/year in addition to any gain from sale or lease, and avoiding the likelihood that as the oldest building it might need repair sooner than the others. Even apart from consideration of Morrisville's heavier debt and heavier dependence on state aid, it may be worth keeping this option open. (Whenever I say "state aid" I think "New York, like most states, is in trouble...and there are lots of reasons why the financial district that's providing this aid might not do as well in years to come.")

Just by taking...

I feel aggravated. I just read High school rigor and good advice: Setting up students to succeed (At a glance)

Our analysis found that a student with above average SES and achievement had a 10 percent better chance of persisting in a four-year institution if that student had taken Pre-calculus or Calculus or math above Algebra II. Low SES/achievement students with high-level math were 22 percent more likely to persist.

That looks like a perfectly reasonable statement about the data. Then it continues with a statement about (cause and) effect:

Advanced Placement/International Baccalaureate courses: Taking an AP/IB course had a dramatic effect on students’ chance of persisting even when students fail the end-of-course test. Low achieving and low SES students who took an AP/IB course were 17 percent more likely to persist in four-year colleges and 30 percent more likely to persist in two-year institutions. The more of these courses a student took, the higher their persistence rates were.

And in the illustration's caption, I see a flat-out causal claim:

Just by taking these high-level courses, low-income, low-achieving students improved their college persistence rates close to their high-income, high-achieving peers.

Well, that's certainly one possibility. Another is that taking the high-level courses had some effect, partly explaining the improvement; a third possibility is that taking the high-level courses had no effect whatever.
Why do I say that? Because signaling is a factor here. Put it this way; some low-achieving students in high school will grow up a bit and start working harder in college. How can you tell in advance which ones? Well, the ones who sign up for hard courses, even if they don't do well and if the courses have no effect on them whatsoever, even if the courses themselves are a total waste of time for all concerned, might be the ones who are going to keep trying until they find something they can do well.
The researchers, it appears, never do group-by-group (e.g. school-by-school) comparisons, or if they did those comparisons are left out of the report. It would be nice to have a state pick two comparable schools lacking in these "tough courses" and offer funding for those courses to one of them, then compare outcomes ten years later (to let 9th graders go through the system and then six years to get through college). Short of that, you might get similar confidence by weighting the results for group comparisons, but the summary here looks pretty close to useless.
Or then again, I might be totally wrong.

Online Smicha

A different note on online (higher) education at Using latest technology to train rabbis - Israel Jewish Scene, Ynetnews

Employing the use of cutting edge video conferencing, online forums, and a private discussion board, onlinesmicha.com in the past two years has ordained doctors, lawyers, chaplains, and other working professionals....
To receive smicha, students must pass written and oral tests covering the laws of Shabbat and Isur V'Heter in-depth, and must participate in a final test administered in person.
The rigorous, yet flexible program offers students of varying backgrounds with a Standard track and an Accelerated track both covering the laws of Basar B’Chalav (Meat with Dairy), Ta’aruvos (Mixtures), Melicha (Salting), Shabbat, and more.

I'm not certain that the "written and oral tests" are online, but of course they could be; the oral would presumably be handled via videoconference.

School Consolidation Saves Money?

As of 2009, the Pennsylvania School Boards Association wrote that

The merger/consolidation research shows:

• There are no documented cases of financial savings from merger/consolidation.
• Merger/consolidation has had a negative impact on student achievement.
• The potential for adverse economic impact on smaller communities that lose facilities exists.

and last February in Maine, the Bangor Daily News said

Dale Douglass, executive director of the Maine School Management Association, which oversees statewide superintendent and school board associations, has been watching how consolidation has played out for the last three years.
“I’m not able with any certainty to tell you that consolidation has been a success or not. You have to examine it with verifiable data about what schools [used to] cost and what they cost now and if people are paying more or less than they are now,” Douglass said.
Because there is no information like this, “I think this is individual based and they’re not easily categorized. I won’t generalize. There are success stories out there and there are elements that people have questions about it.”

But personally I don't think "people are paying more or less than they are now." I think they're paying exactly what they are now. Right NOW!
Or then again, maybe not.

The Value of School -- STEM training?

For me, as an advocate of STEM schooling (actually STEAM schooling because I think the arts should stay in), this is an uncomfortable argument... Advocating More STEM Training Misses the Point

You report that Mexico is now successful at producing lots of engineering graduates, but so far unsuccessful at employing this talent in ways that unleash substantial economic growth (“Mexico is now a top producer of engineers, but where are jobs?” Oct. 29). Herein lies an important economic lesson: those who wish to promote genuine economic growth must more carefully distinguish cause from effect.

Well, actually I'd say that to have a successful market in engineering skills, you have to have both supply and demand, and it would be a good idea to know which is the limiting factor at any given moment. I do believe that the US and the world could do better with a whole lot more technical people, but that doesn't mean that the US or the world would be better off if we simply did a whole lot more technical training. "Would you like fries with that?" is often described as the key question resulting from a liberal arts education, but it could also come out of a technical education if it's the wrong technical education for the social and economic (and government) environment. STEM training may not be valuable in itself -- like anything else, it's valuable in the right context.

So, maybe the crucial education which is now missing is in fact economics. Yesterday I drove four hundred miles, going to and from the George Washington Bridge Plaza in Fort Lee to collect my son, who walked across the bridge. His friend who would have brought him half-way would not have been allowed back in without getting more passengers, which he wasn't sure he could do -- so he considered having a couple of more friends just go for a ride out and back, which is an amusing incentives puzzle, but it wasn't necessary. For the last hundred miles, gas shortages were obvious, and when I stopped at the Plaza two girls asked me if I knew where they could get gas -- we were almost right across from a gas station which had a "No Gas" sign but people waiting anyway. Here's the situation: Gasoline Runs Short, Adding Woes to Storm Recovery - NYTimes.com

The ports and refineries that supply much of the region’s gas had been shut down in advance of the storm and were damaged by it. That disrupted deliveries to gas stations that had power to pump the fuel. But the bigger problem was that many stations and storage facilities remained without power.
Politicians were scrambling Thursday to increase the supply of fuel — the Port of New York and New Jersey opened just enough to allow boats carrying gas to move, and Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey waived restrictions that make it harder for stations to buy gas from out-of-state suppliers. Mr. Christie’s office had warned that price gougers would be prosecuted, but drivers were reporting that some stations were charging more than $4 a gallon, even though the state had set gas prices at $3.59 on the highways last week.

In other words, the shortage was generated (as shortages usually are) by price controls. In MyersWorld, the initial hurricane warnings would have mentioned "In the event of storm damage, gas prices will probably rise astronomically" so people would have filled up, just in case, and companies would have brought trucks full of gas (and generators capable of running a gas station) fairly close, just in case -- and the "No Gas" signs would have been signs saying "$10/gallon", or even more, until the supply rose, thus providing incentives for conservation and for re-supply.... There would not have been any shortage. Nobody would have been short of gas....of course some people would be short of money and it might be government policy to help some of them out. (Markets are good at resource allocation, but not at income redistribution, and sometimes redistribution is a good thing.) But as Wikipedia puts it Economic shortage

Economic shortages are related to price—when the price of an item is set below the going rate determined by supply and demand, there will be a shortage.

Maybe we have a shortage of STEM/STEAM graduates...
Or then again, maybe not.

The Value of School; Actual Data

This morning I see two kinds of data on the aforementioned "human capital" (vs signalling and ability bias and whatever else there may be) theories of the value of school. First, an international study, examining the failure of schooling to boost national income in various low-income countries. Why Is the National Return to Education So Low?

For human capital extremists, schooling increases income - national and private - by teaching useful skills. So if low-quality schooling fails to boost national income, it should also fail to boost private income.
This prediction is the opposite of the truth. In low-income countries, the private return to education is unusually high.

And obviously that tends to count against the idea that schooling, the specific extra schooling in the specific countries being examined, increases income by teaching useful skills such as "how to think" or whatever. Instead, we have reinforcement for signalling and/or ability bias.

Another kind of data comes from a proposal that I've heard many times over the years: year-round schooling. After all, we don't need the kids out in the fields with the crops any more, so they can learn an extra 30% more or thereabouts in the same number of years. Indeed, if you spend the summer forgetting part of what you knew, your schooling is less effective in teaching useful skills -- so 30% ought to be an underestimate. Is it? Does (constant #days) year-round schooling matter?

This paper presents a human capital model to illustrate the conditions under which these calendars might affect achievement. We then exploit the natural experiment to evaluate the impact of year-round schooling on student achievement using a multi-level fixed effects model. Results suggest that year-round schooling has essentially no impact on academic achievement of the average student.

Again, that counts against the human capital theory and in favor of ability bias and/or signalling. Sigh.
Or then again, maybe I'm missing something.

The Value of School

There's an unexamined assumption in the previous post, an assumption that the point of school is at least partly to add to economic growth, i.e. to add economic value to the country and perhaps the world. I think that's true--"at least partly". Education ought to add to your ability to plan at least your personal economic future. Of course sometimes that doesn't work; Ohio State University research suggests that

Before the financial crash of 2008, it was highly educated Americans who were most likely to pile on unmanageable levels of debt...

So maybe Simon was right to sing Kodachrome

When I look back on all the crap I learned in high school,
It's a wonder I can think at all,
And though my lack of education hasn't hurt me none,
I can read the writing on the wall.

Still, it's true that education, indeed formal schooling, is strongly correlated with lifetime earnings. Does that measure the economic value of school? Well, no. There are actually three theories of that correlation; each of them is probably part of the truth. (Sez who? Sez me. Wait a minute here.)

Consider Joe and John. They both go to school and then get jobs at the local shoe factory. It happens that Joe is much smarter than John, he has a more positive outlook on life, he's taller and healthier and harder to discourage and finds it easier to get up in the morning and get somewhere on time...this was all true before they started kindergarten together (That doesn't mean it's genetic, either. Might be, might not.) Curiously, Joe does much better in French and algebra and world history ... and later he makes more money than John does, even though neither of them ever uses those courses again, and in their careers it happens that no employer ever looks at their educational records. Does this mean that those courses added human capital to both, but more to Joe? Maybe so, but it may only, or also, mean that there's an ability bias in the system: maybe Joe has more of what employers call "ability," including all the factors I mentioned and others besides -- and both educational attainment and income attainment are caused in part by "ability". Maybe. Maybe James, who has Joe's abilities but does very badly in school because he hates it, does just as well as Joe does -- and in fact going to school has no value at all, except that Joe enjoyed it.

Is ability bias part of the reason that more educated people get higher incomes? Well, some say no. I'd say, read Correcting For Ability Bias By Measuring Ability

The straightforward way to test for ability bias is to measure ability, then control for it. If this approach failed to reveal ability bias, it would be reasonable to dismiss it. In practice, though, the straightforward test finds ability bias to be not merely real, but large.

Now it happens that as Joe and John are retiring, the new shoe factory owner, whose name is George, notices the connection between their educational and vocational achievements, and finds that this is pretty common. He ignores James. He decides to hire academically bright kids like Joe right into management and pay them extra; he is going to use their educational level for signaling what value they will produce for him, and it turns out that this means he gets employees sorted out much quicker and they make more money and so does he -- even though some kids with high academics will perform poorly, and he may miss out on kids like James, so he does make mistakes. In this new world, income is even more strongly connected with education, and going to school now really is valuable to the student, but not because of anything school teaches.

What I'm talking about here is described by Bryan Caplan in Two Educational Heresies: Ability Bias vs. Signaling and then laid out as a table in Economic Models of Education: A Typology for Future Reference

Model	Effect of Education on Income	Effect of Education on Productivity	Notes
Pure Human Capital	WYSIWYG	WYSIWYG	Education may raise productivity by directly teaching job skills, but character formation, acculturation, etc. also count.
Pure Ability Bias	Zero	Zero	"Ability" includes not just pre-existing intelligence, but pre-existing character, acculturation, etc.  Pure Ability Bias is observationally equivalent to a Pure Consumption model of education.
Pure Signaling	WYSIWYG	Zero	Pure educational signaling can consist in (a) learning and retaining useless material, (b) learning but not retaining material regardless of usefulness, (c) simply wasting time in ways that less productive workers find relatively painful, leading to a positive correlation between education and productivity.
1/3 Pure Human Capital, 1/3 Pure Ability Bias, 1/3 Pure Signaling	2/3*WYSIWYG	1/3*WYSIWYG	A good starting position for agnostics.
.1 Pure Human Capital, .5 Pure Ability Bias, .4 Pure Signaling	.5*WYSIWYG	.1*WYSIWYG	My preferred point estimates.  I know they're extreme, but my book will explain my reasons and try to win you over.

 

I guess I'd better read the book.
Or then again, maybe not.

National Investment in Education

Both presidential candidates talk about investment in education. Hmmm...Garrett Jones looks at Did Nations that Boosted Education Grow Faster?

Some nations boosted schooling more, some less. How did that turn out?

On average, no relationship. The trendline points down slightly, but for the time being let's just call it a draw. It's a well-known fact that countries that started the 1960's with high education levels grew faster (example), but this graph is about something different. This graph shows that countries that increased their education levels did not grow faster.

That's not very comforting. Or maybe it is comforting...it suggests that whatever the solution is, it's not to throw money at the problem.
Or then again, maybe not?

Peer Pressure

A random note on peer pressure at school says Peer pressure can be used for good when it comes to physical activity

Maritime Heart Center (MHC) found that peer mentors can significantly influence the amount of physical activity kids have throughout the school day.
The MHC team created a Heart Healthy Kids (H2K ) Lunch program, which included three games that peer mentors could lead during lunch time once every two weeks. At least one MHC staff or adult volunteer was present at each H2K Lunch to ensure that the peer mentors were adequately supported.
"Using positive influences on children to be physically active works," says Dr. Hancock Friesen. "It may be that social reasons for physical activity trump other influences for kids. Unlike adults, they are not as motivated by concern for weight control or long-term health."
Students selected as peer mentors, who were age mates with other team members (grades 4, 5 and 6), received training in organization, positive feedback and team building....

It makes me think of Judith Harris's book on The Nurture Assumption, asserting that the environment that matters (in addition to genetics) is mainly the peer environment. I often think that school should be All About Designing the Peer Environment....
Or then again, maybe not.

Online Option$

At the college level, a lot of commercial development is going on. Online Education Startup Udacity Raises $15 Million in Funding

This year alone, Coursera, which offers free online college classes raised $16 million in April; 2U, another online education technology company, raised $26 million that month; and Codecademy, an online, basic programming educator, raised $10 million in June. Furthermore, National Venture Capital Association statistics showed venture investing in education technology jumped to $463.1 million so far this year from $457.2 million for all of 2011.

Actually, 2U has raised a total of $96M, as a technology company helping universities go online. Meanwhile, free resources are growing. New NASA Online Science Resource Available for Educators and Students

Called NASA Wavelength, the site features hundreds of resources organized by topic and audience level from elementary to college, and out-of-school programs that span the extent of NASA science. Educators at all levels can locate educational resources through information on educational standards, subjects and keywords and other relevant details, such as learning time required to carry out a lesson or an activity....

Faster, please.
Or then again, maybe not.

School Staffing Surge

It's the sort of thing you might expect Milton Friedman's foundation to focus on. The School Staffing Surge: Decades of Employment Growth in America’s Public Schools | The Friedman Foundation For Educational Choice

Between fiscal year (FY) 1950 and FY 2009, the number of K-12 public school students in the United States increased by 96 percent .... teachers’ numbers increased 252 percent while administrators and other staff experienced growth of 702 percent...
Between FY 1992 and FY 2009, the number of K-12 public school students nationwide grew 17 percent... teachers’ staffing numbers rose 32 percent while administrators and other staff experienced growth of 46 percent...

The report is a 32 page PDF with various alternatives, such as a growth closer to growth in student numbers which would enable substantially higher teacher salaries. As a geek, I tend to think of improved technology as enabling disintermediation -- administrative tasks should fade into the (network) software and technological unemployment should result. That hasn't been happening, which makes me tend to suspect that the applicable explanatory principle is Parkinson's law:

[Parksinson] explains this growth by two forces: (1) "An official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals" and (2) "Officials make work for each other." He notes in particular that the total of those employed inside a bureaucracy rose by 5-7% per year "irrespective of any variation in the amount of work (if any) to be done".

And of course this may interact with the Peter Principle.
Or then again, maybe not.

Educational Cartoons...

Problems must be solved and dilemmas require compromise, according to Larry Cuban -- Cartoons on Problems and Dilemmas | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

I worked with K-12 teachers, principals, school board members and superintendents in distinguishing between problems and dilemmas when it came to figuring out school reforms and getting into complexities of classroom practice. Occasionally, I would use cartoons to make my points...

Interesting and fun, but the most thought-provoking item I found was not one of the cartoons, was not even one of the linked cartoons, but was a linked absence-of-cartoons in Cartoons/YouTube on Charter Schools | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Of all the cartoons on charters that I found, every single one opposed them. I scoured the Internet and could not find a pro-charter cartoon. I do understand that the nature of cartoons is to satirize and caricature but those I found hammered again and again the theme that charters are, at best, harmful to, and, at worst, destroying public schools.

I have a feeling that controversy-cartoons generally do "anti" much better than "pro", and this is supported by the commenter who tells him to look for anti-union cartoons (as being implicitly or explicitly pro-charter, I guess). Very odd.
Or then again, maybe not.

Flipping flops for some?

At the undergraduate level, the Khan-Academy style flipped classroom (extremely loosely defined as "watch videos alone, then come to class to do problems") gets skeptical comments and comments on the comments at I’ll flip something § Unqualified Offerings

I have several colleagues who are doing the flipped classroom this year and it’s bombing. Basically, they say it’s working great for motivated students who love going at their own pace with online “modules” and are happy to do problems in class. But, anything will work for motivated students.
For most of the lot, they say, it’s a failure because they come to these problem sessions (what used to be lectures) and they haven’t read the material and now you have to sort-of teach them in digest form on the fly if their time is not to be completely wasted. So yes, I am unimpressed with the flipped classroom.

This kind of thing obviously wants watching; I would like to know what sort of videos are in use here. It sounds like this might be simply institutionalized one-hour talking-head lectures made available to students on the web. If so, I would expect such failures...but if the results apply to actual Khan-Academy style small segments in Khan's own "don't see me, see what I'm seeing" style, with questions to answer before passing to the next segment, then there's at least a potential Big Problem. And of course this is possible. And if there's a Big Problem, it may or may not have a solution (are your online answers part of your grade? Do you need to check in to a scheduled lab to do your online work? etc. Khan's own belief, at the lower level where he's working, seems to be that scheduled labs, total maybe 20% of the day, are about right. But that's not the way some schools are trying it. Hmm.)
I dunno.

Rocketship charters

This summer, the Washington Post asked Is a charter school chain called Rocketship ready to soar across America? - The Washington Post

After their first week at Rocketship, the children woke up early on Saturday morning to do their homework unprompted. The boys made progress. And Vivian had a math breakthrough. “She said, ‘Dad, I finally get it,’ ” Martinez said. “I asked how did your teacher show you?’ She said it wasn’t the teacher. It was the penguin.”
An animated penguin is featured in the math software used by Rocketship.
Computers cannot replace good teachers, Danner said. But rote tasks — math drills, for example — can be offloaded to computers, freeing teachers to focus on more creative work, he said.
Computers cut roughly $500,000 annually from Rocketship’s labor costs for each school, which has an average enrollment of about 500. The savings means Rocketship can finance its own new school buildings — a luxury in the charter world, where facilities pose the greatest obstacle.

In fact what Rocketship brings to the table that's new may be mainly financial. Back in February, Larry Cuban had asked and answered: Are Rocketship Schools the Future? Part 3 | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

The answer is maybe. But not for all schools.
Like KIPP, Aspire, YES Prep Schools, Uncommon Schools and other charters including regular schools that have aimed at enrolling low-income minority children and youth...–hybrids like Rocketship are the latest generation of the “effective schools” movement that began in the late 1970s. Aimed at urban failing schools, Ron Edmonds’ work on whole-school reform energized districts across the country as they replicated his five features (strong principal leadership, climate of high expectations for students, focus on basic academic skills, etc.) that seemingly accounted for high-achieving slum schools. ....
What the standards,testing, and accountability movement has done for the past two decades is create different models of “effective schools” to rescue students from toxic urban schools. Rocketship schools founded just before the recent economic recession offers a less expensive hybrid model...

It's certainly plausible that parts of that may carry over to schools that really aren't failing and are very far from urban...but there's no special reason to think that the solutions of "toxic urban schools" will work for us. Maybe we're already doing what they do, just not as cheaply. On the other hand, I'm not knocking cheap. Cheap is good, cheap frees up resources for other things, cheap is a quantity having a quality all its own. (Yes, quantity having a quality all its own is supposedly Stalin.) I find it very plausible that each of us, whether six or sixty, of whatever income and linguistic background, can have a collection of things to be learned by computer games, and that's where Rocketship comes in; and a collection of things to be learned in self-assembling study groups (mostly of people in your own time zone, but video between Greece and the US does work), and a collection of things to be learned with the individual assistance of actual teachers, with teachers preferably being certified by students rather than by officials... It might work.
Or then again, maybe not.

Time on MOOCs

From Time Magazine, a sampling of online courses and the way they can leverage what we've learned about learning.... College Is Dead. Long Live College! | TIME.com

Minute 4: Professor Brown asked me a question. “What did the Greeks know?” The video stopped, patiently waiting for me to choose one of the answers, a task that actually required some thought. This happened every three minutes or so, making it difficult for me to check my e-mail or otherwise disengage — even for a minute.
“You got it right!” The satisfaction of correctly answering these questions was surprising. (One MOOC student I met called it “gold-star methadone.”) The questions weren’t easy, either. I got many of them wrong, but I was allowed to keep trying until I got the gold-star fix.
Humans like immediate feedback, which is one reason we like games. Researchers know a lot about how the brain learns, and it’s shocking how rarely that knowledge influences our education system. ...
... Minute 8: Professor Brown explained that Plato had also tried (and failed) to estimate the earth’s circumference. Brown did this by jotting notes on a simple white screen. Like all the other videos in the course, this clip lasted only a few minutes. This too reflects how the brain learns. Studies of college students have shown that they can focus for only 10 to 18 minutes before their minds begin to drift; that’s when their brains need to do something with new information — make a connection or use it to solve a problem.

For any given person, on any given day, as the day goes by the ideal pace of learning changes. No one can predict how that's going to work even for one person, much less make an ideal pace for a group...but maybe self-paced learning (unlike the teaching-machines self-paced learning that I read about in high school, in the 60s) can finally work out.
Or then again, maybe not.

Ericsson -- Future of Learning

I've mentioned TED talks by Daphne Koller: What we're learning from online education and Sugata Mitra: The child-driven education; Here's a 20-minute Ericsson-funded documentary, noted by Geekdad at The Future of Learning

Talking with the likes of Sugata Mitra, Daphne Koller, and Jose Ferreira, The Future of Learning examines how the learning process can be adapted to the needs of each child and how the highest quality education is now available for any person who can connect to the internet.

They also have Seth Godin as a speaker -- I've linked in the past to Stop Stealing Dreams -- Seth Godin at Hamilton Central Options. I guess I've heard of Jose Ferreira and of Knewton, his adaptive learning/teaching software platform that will be the basis for Pearson's efforts, but didn't know much about him.
The "highest quality education" claim in the Geekdad summary is not actually what Mitra or Koller or especially Godin are saying; they don't think we can (yet?) provide an online substitute for a good teacher, but they do think that kids with good teachers can do better than they have done with these new resources, and they also think that kids with bad teachers or no teachers can do better than they have done. In the next 30 years, more kids will leave school than have left school in all of human history...
Or then again, maybe not?

On Playground Assembly

Several people helping assemble the HCS playground equipment on the 12th and 19th (links to both day's pictures here) commented that it was repetitive and awkward. True enough; it was the sort of thing that ought to be done by a robot. So I look at assembly line robotics on YouTube:

Well, clearly we're not quite ready to assemble playground equipment on site. Engine assembly we can do; there's no obstacle in the complexity or mechanical force (or repetitiveness, or awkwardness). But flexibility is a problem. Still, consider last month's "Baxter" announcement by Rethink Robotics, as in Rethink Robotics: Meet Baxter - YouTube

Meet Baxter, a revolutionary new category of Robot from Rethink Robotics that is capable of applying common sense behavior to manufacturing environments. Affordably priced, versatile and safe enough to work shoulder-to-shoulder with people, Baxter robots redefine how small, mid-size and large domestic manufacturers use automation to compete with manufacturers in low-cost regions of the world.

We're getting there; repetitive assembly will all be done by robots, by and by.
Or then again, maybe not.

HCS Playground #2

The playground that was started (well, so far as community volunteers were concerned) a week ago is almost done; I spent this afternoon with socket wrenches and such, assembling more equipment. Pictures here.

ADHD or not, here we come...

Attention Disorder or Not, Children Prescribed Pills to Help in School - NYTimes.com

“I don’t have a whole lot of choice,” said Dr. Anderson, a pediatrician for many poor families in Cherokee County, north of Atlanta. “We’ve decided as a society that it’s too expensive to modify the kid’s environment. So we have to modify the kid.”
Dr. Anderson is one of the more outspoken proponents of an idea that is gaining interest among some physicians. They are prescribing stimulants to struggling students in schools starved of extra money — not to treat A.D.H.D., necessarily, but to boost their academic performance.
... ... Reported side effects of the drugs have included growth suppression, increased blood pressure and, in rare cases, psychotic episodes.
The disorder, which is characterized by severe inattention and impulsivity, is an increasingly common psychiatric diagnosis among American youth: about 9.5 percent of Americans ages 4 to 17 were judged to have it in 2007, or about 5.4 million children, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The wonders of chemistry in our kid's education.
Or then again, maybe not.

CourserA etc, legal limits?

The Chronicle of Higher Education says that Minnesota says online courses have to get local permission for Minnesota residents, but Professor Volokh says they're wrong: The Volokh Conspiracy » The First Amendment and Free Online Courses

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Minnesota has barred Coursera from offering free online courses — including ones that don’t even result in a degree — because it hasn’t properly registered as an educational institution with the Minnesota Office of Higher Education, and, presumably, because the universities and colleges that provide classes through Coursera have not gotten approval to use the term “college” or “university” from that Office...
if an entity — whether or not it has “college” or “university” in its name — offers free non-degree-granting courses, it is as shielded by the First Amendment as a newspaper Web site, a site aiming to educate people about some political or scientific issue, Wikipedia, or for that matter a blog.
...I’m not sure whether Coursera is planning to fight the Minnesota rules; but if it does, I think it will easily prevail.

Wikipedia says

Volokh is noted for his scholarship on the First and Second Amendments to the United States Constitution

and has been cited in Supreme Court opinions and all that; maybe all is well.
Or then again, maybe not.

Update: Slate adds Minnesota bans Coursera: State takes bold stand against free education.

Honorable mentions go to New York City’s Taxi and Limousine Commission for driving out Uber’s online taxi-hailing service and to automobile dealers’ groups in four states for trying to have Tesla dealerships declared illegal. But the grand prize in this week’s unexpectedly heated competition for most creative use of government to stifle innovation has to go to Minnesota.... ... ... ... ...
Hear that, kids? The Internet is no place for learning. You can Facebook and Twitter and play World of Warcraft all you want, but if you want to study Machine Learning, Principles of Macroeconomics, or Modern & Contemporary American Poetry, you’re going to have to take it elsewhere.

And Adam Smith was right...you can't and shouldn't set government to zero, but the more of it you choose, the more representation you get for those who have a seat at the table and want to protect it, at whatever cost to the public.
(Or then again again again, maybe not.)

TED Talk on Creativity (and Patents&Copyright)

Kirby Ferguson's TED Talk: "Embrace the Remix" - a must-see - Boing Boing

creativity comes about as the result of creative re-use of others' work. It's not just explicit remixes and samples -- everything from the iPhone to Bob Dylan's music are made out of other peoples' inventions and creations.

It's possible that there is some domain in which creativity is often, or at least sometimes, a matter of someone who stays in an attic alone until the Great Work pops out, but this is certainly not the usual case, and the creativity which education (and "intellectual property" law) should encourage is certainly not of that sort. Creativity is, in common usage, a matter of adding something to the remix. Our current laws are actually anticonstitutional in that they actively discourage the creativity, the "progress", that the Constitution says they should promote. And yet we want to encourage creativity in that context. Hmm.
Or then again, maybe not.

To Be Educated...

A note from slightly longer ago than most of my notes:

Every systematic science, the humblest and the noblest alike, seems to admit of two distinct kinds of proficiency; one of which may be properly called scientific knowledge of the subject, while the other is a kind of educational acquaintance with it. For an educated man should be able to form a fair off-hand judgement as to the goodness or badness of the method used by a professor in his exposition. To be educated is in fact to be able to do this...

On the Parts of Animals, Book I Ch. 1; Aristotle

And I was thinking of this in the context of a Washington Post argument about chemistry requirements -- "Why Are You Forcing My Son to Take Chemistry?". In the Pipeline:

It's short, but it can be summarized as My son will not be a chemist. He will not be a scientist. A year of chemistry class will do nothing for him but make him miserable. He could be taking something else that would be doing him more good. And this father is probably right about his son, who's 15, not becoming any sort of scientist....

And today I see -- You Should Take Chemistry: A Response. In the Pipeline:

Should your son be forced to take chemistry? Absolutely. But the curriculum needs to be rethought in a way that would instill practical knowledge, curiosity about the world, and an appetite for at least understanding scientific achievement and its necessity/implications.
People don’t have to become scientists if they don’t want to, but they should have a fundamental understanding of scientific concepts. That way, people like myself need not be terrified that an ignorant public will vote to slash funding for scientific research and understanding...

So I wonder...it seems to me that the guy being quoted is going further than he should. It would be great to instill curiosity about the world and appetites for healthy things, it would be great if those who buy fish (or grow gardens) knew about elementary chemical concepts like pH, but what we need is for future voters to be educated in the Aristotelian sense. They need to be able to tell who to trust, in a world in which they cannot trust the authority of government because those who hold that authority frequently don't know what they're talking about, or possibly don't dare admit what they know because this would offend their core supporters.
Or then again, maybe not.

Khan Academy in India

Lacking Teachers and Textbooks, India's Schools Turn to Khan Academy to Survive - NYTimes.com

The foundation has already dubbed 38 Khan Academy videos in Hindi, Tamil and Kannada, with plans to complete 120 by March and 450 by 2014.
The foundation is making the dubbed videos available through an affiliated Web site, TeachersofIndia.org and through its field institutes that work with rural schools.
“When good instructional material is easily available, why should we reinvent?” he said.

It certainly makes sense; I wonder how many kids will learn English by listening to Salman Khan as they study the subtitles. As the story notes (but not about Khan Academy), learning English is a major draw, though I imagine the content is more important.
Or then again, maybe not.

Exercise and ADHD

I tend to think of some level of ADHD as "normal", and I've always associated it with the need for kids to run around before sitting. I find this disturbing: Exercise may lead to better school performance for kids with ADHD

drugs have proven largely effective in treating many of the 2.5 million school-aged American children with ADHD,
In the study, Pontifex and colleagues asked 40 children aged 8 to 10, half of whom had ADHD, to spend 20 minutes either walking briskly on a treadmill or reading while seated. The children then took a brief reading comprehension and math exam similar to longer standardized tests. They also played a simple computer game in which they had to ignore visual stimuli to quickly determine which direction a cartoon fish was swimming.
The results showed all of the children performed better on both tests after exercising.
"To date there really isn't a whole lot of evidence that schools can pull from to justify why these physical education programs should be in existence," he said. "So what we're trying to do is target our research to provide that type of evidence."

Now, why would that be disturbing? Very simple: we seem to be putting a couple of million kids on medication without doing that research first. No, surely that's not what it means. This has to be a misrepresentation.
Or then again, maybe not.

Higher EdX gets Bigger...Texas Size

It's higher education, but the more MOOC (massive online etc) technology grows at the upper level, the more available it will be at all levels. Anyway, Texas is in; U. of Texas Plans to Join edX | Inside Higher Ed

The University of Texas is planning today to officially join edX, which offers massive open online courses or MOOCs. Because the Texas announcement involves an entire system, it represents a major expansion of edX, which was founded by two universities (Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and was later joined by one other (the University of California at Berkeley). Coursera, another major MOOC provider, has been adding universities at a rapid pace. The Texas system plans to focus on general education and introductory-level courses for its MOOC offerings. Bloomberg reported that the University of Texas is paying $5 million to join edX.

So we link to EdX and incidentally to Coursera and we say: Faster please, this is good.
Or then again, maybe not.

AP classes: Good or Bad?

I took a bunch of AP classes in high school, in the late 60s, but never took the exams because they were sent surface mail (to Colombia) and arrived after the required date. My kids have taken AP classes...I've never thought much about it. Today's online Atlantic has AP Classes Are a Scam - John Tierney - The Atlantic

My beef with AP courses isn't novel. The program has a bountiful supply of critics, many of them in the popular press (see here and here), and many increasingly coming from academia as well (see here). The criticisms comport, in every particular, with my own experience of having taught an AP American Government and Politics course for ten years.... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...
To me, the most serious count against Advanced Placement courses is that the AP curriculum leads to rigid stultification -- a kind of mindless genuflection to a prescribed plan of study that squelches creativity and free inquiry. The courses cover too much material and do so too quickly and superficially. In short, AP courses are a forced march through a preordained subject, leaving no time for a high-school teacher to take her or his students down some path of mutual interest. The AP classroom is where intellectual curiosity goes to die.

I don't know how much of that I believe, but it could be important.
Or then again, maybe not.

HCS Playground

The playground that my kids used, which was under construction when I interviewed at Colgate in 1986, is gone -- no longer safe, so it went away during the summer. Today was the first of a two-day "community build" so I spent the day helping; I figure I can afford to spend a weekday which most people can't, and apparently there will be a lot of people working at phase #2 tomorrow (Saturday), with food provided and all that. I took some cell phone pictures and put them here.

School Choice & the Law

There seems to be a lot going on in the area of school choice, but at the moment it's mostly going on in courtrooms: School Choice Marches Forward : Education Next

Now, in 2012, it is still not clear whether the legislative advance of school-choice bills in 2011 made more education options available or simply ushered in a bevy of new lawsuits. Maybe both.

Sigh.

Online Resources from/for Teachers

Most of my notes are about resources coming from outside the current educational system, but this morning I noticed Teachers Make Money Selling Materials Online - ABC News

Teachers like Nannini are making extra money providing materials to their cash-strapped and time-limited colleagues on curriculum sharing sites like teacherspayteachers.com, providing an alternative to more traditional — and generally more expensive — school supply stores. Many districts, teachers and parents say these sites are saving teachers time and money, and giving educators a quick way to make extra income.

They're talking about TeachersPayTeachers.com - An Open Marketplace for Original Lesson Plans and Other Teaching Resources and about Share My Lesson - Free K-12 Resources By Teachers, For Teachers, and about the more institutional approach of Membership, policy, and professional development for educators - ASCD, with its ASCD InService Blog.

As a total outsider, I feel some hope that teacher developments can grow to meet the Khan Academy and its ilk somewhere in the middle, but wonder if our educational system (The System™) actually has the flexibility to allow that growth; I remember the hope of Papert's MindStorms, long ago, and then his later book, The Children's Machine: Rethinking School In The Age Of The Computer. I remember my eldest and his high-school friends in our kitchen, talking excitedly about the "Children's Machine" and about how School™ had absorbed the promise of Logo in spite of all the good teachers, just because of the kind of system it was. It's likely that change will have to be pushed from outside.

Or then again, maybe not. Hope springs eternal, and all that.

Salman Khan's Ideal Classroom

As a follow-up to the previous post (now that I've read the book), I'd like to quote Khan's description of his "ideal classroom" (pp. 203 et seq):

I would group together as many as a hundred students of widely varying ages. They would seldom if ever all be doing the same thing at the same time. And while nooks and alcoves within this imagined school might be perfectly quiet for private study, other parts would be bustling with collaborative chatter.
At a given moment, perhaps one-fifth of the students would be doing computer-based lessons and exercises aimed at a deep and durable grasp of core concepts. Let me pause a moment to stress this: one-fifth of the students. This is another way of saying that only one-fifth of the school day, or one to two hours, would be spent on the Khan Academy (or some future version thereof) and any peer tutoring that it might catalyze. Given the greatly increased efficiency of self-paced, mastery-based learning, one or two hours is enough...
Twenty out of a hundred are working at computers, with one of our team teachers circulating among them, answering questions...as they occur....augmented by peer-to-peer tutoring and mentoring...
What of the other eighty students?
...learning...by way of board games... teams, building robots... creative writing projects... original music...

Hmmm... and also Well.... I find him quite convincing on the virtues of self-paced, mastery-based instruction; convincing for a larger range of topics and students than I would have expected. It's easy to agree about the deficiencies of what he calls "Swiss cheese" instruction, which sends you to the next level if you manage to pass tests with 60% or so of the right information; from tutor work in high school on up to trying to help one of my graduate students pass a Ph.D. prelim, I've been inclined to believe that each of those holes eats more time than you would have spent filling it in the first place (unless, of course, it needn't be learned in the first place.) He seems to have convincing experience, actual data with high and very-low end students, that mastery is a realistic goal for KhanAcademy-style lessons; it certainly isn't realistic for a traditional classroom. (It was arbitrarily defined as ten-right-answers-in-a-row to get to the next little lesson, with "stuck and needs help" defined as fifty questions tried without achieving mastery; he says they refined these definitions some, but doesn't say how.) And it's clear why, if they work, these lessons should be far more efficient in student-time than traditional classrooms. Or perhaps than traditional tutoring...I recently showed my daughter how to use STDEV in a Google spreadsheet, and she cut short my explanation by saying that she'd look for it on khanacademy.org and I was proud. (I did look for it myself, and commented that she should check the variance lesson right before standard deviation.)

Still, my ideal classroom would be organized differently. I think. For one thing, there would always be one or more performances going on; in fact I think that each student would at any given moment be a member of a group generating another lesson video, with their own explanation/demo. And most would be involved in some kind of drama, or some kind of music; probably most (about 70% at HCS, it seems) would be involved in sports.

But as he says, there'd be lab groups and writing groups, of course. And many groups would have mainly virtual meetings, even with current (Google Hangout, Skype, etc) technology; even more so with the kind of table I've talked about before, where you and a friend or two are at one corner of a virtual table, whose other three corners are across from you on the other side of some big screens, but are probably not in your zip code. And possibly that can grow into a Second-Life avatar meeting where you put on your goggles, step into your Kinect closet, and you can sit, stand, move a step or two without hitting the physical walls, but all the time you're in a very very very big room. (Psst, look at that galaxy! Now, pick up the black hole at its center; shift your vision into the X-ray spectrum, and watch the time dilation on your wristwatch...)

On the other hand, maybe not.