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.

One World Schoolhouse

The Slate.com version is Salman Khan and YouTube...

Once upon a time, a brainy MIT graduate working as a hedge-fund analyst started tutoring his cousin in math and science online. He decided to make YouTube videos of his tutorials. The videos racked up millions of views and reached audiences around the world, and appreciative students offered stirring testimonials. After three years, the hedge-fund analyst quit his day job to set up an educational nonprofit called The Khan Academy. The mission: provide a world-class education to anyone, anywhere for free.

And he has a new book, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined: Salman Khan. Downloading....
Or then again, maybe not.

CAC Meeting

The Community Advisory Committee met last night, still working through the details of a possible school merger; the topics were athletics/co-curricular activities, and building use.
The coaches of Hamilton Central and of Morrisville-Eaton have already merged the football teams, which are now black and white rather than green for Hamilton and red for Morrisville-Eaton; other sports have been effectively merged for longer, in the sense that a student who wants to play sport X which is supported only at the other school may simply go and join that team, subject to various permissions issues. An actual school merger would make this automatic for all teams; it's not clear to me how much difference it would really make. It might be easier to maintain modified and JV soccer, for example; these could be merged without merging varsity soccer, but in that case it would not be possible for a kid to move between JV and varsity in the middle of a year. Still, if it's best for the whole soccer programs to be merged, then they can be merged without involving the rest of the school. (Unless the league forbids it, which is possible but unusual. I think. If I understand correctly. Which I probably don't.) There is a possible disadvantage to any team merger, namely that there may be only so many "starring"/starting/whatever positions on a team and if you merge two teams into one then you've just reduced the number of stars, and therefore you've reduced the odds of any particular kid becoming one. And another disadvantage that some kids walk or bicycle to practices, which becomes less practical with merged teams. And a third disadvantage in that such activities are dependent on volunteers; if the school moves away from its community, or from one of its communities, then some volunteers will probably be less involved.
And the same applies to co-curricular activities generally, and music/drama in particular.
On building usage, we have one contiguous structure in Hamilton and two, being an elementary separated from the high school, in Morrisville (and each village has a bus garage.) So you take projected enrollments and try to split them up so that the merged high school ends up in one building, while the elementary and middle schools may or may not physically merge. Well, high school in Hamilton has the advantage that ambitious students can take a couple of Colgate courses. So if we leave the elementary schools alone, merge the middle schools into Morrisville, merge the high schools into Hamilton, perhaps it can almost work. There was a review of academic benefits of merger...the clearest to me would be that Morrisville students might get the AP classes and stringed instruments and foreign language instruction that they've dropped, which are still kept in Hamilton -- and maybe economies of scale would actually make it easier to keep them in a merged school than for Hamilton to keep them alone. (A Morrisville parent remarked that a kid who doesn't want to take AP classes may look better in college admissions evaluation if he went to a school that simply didn't offer them. My feeling is that a college that thinks that way is not a place where a kid like that should be applying.)
Or then again, maybe not.

Open-Source Learning

This morning's TED talk was Richard Baraniuk's 2006 Goodbye, textbooks; hello, open-source learning lecture. He wants to take a large number of books, break them down into small chunks, package each chunk in XML to make it easy to combine with other chunks (not necessarily the ones it originally came near) and replace the idea of a textbook with the idea of a collection of such chunks. Okay by me.
Actually, I'd like to see chunks, video or audio or text or all of the above, labeled with pre-requisites and objectives; these labels would also appear on knowledge maps like the Khan Academy's. Then you place yourself (or your teacher/tutor/advisor places you) on the knowledge map, perhaps by taking quizzes, and you identify your final objectives, and we identify lessons which are claimed to get you in the right direction....
Or then again, maybe not. The Connexions website did seem both clunky and underpowered, but maybe that's just me.

Presidential Debate

On last night's debate, Eduwonk says that

Both candidates for president mentioned education early and often, sometimes even in surprising ways. President Obama mentioned Race to the Top three times, he made a veiled reference to the Common Core (and the role the feds had in supporting it), and he (sorta) endorsed class size reductions... Governor Romney also praised Duncan and Race to the Top, but in the (education) quote of th­e night he said:

I’m not going to cut education funding. ...I’m not planning on making changes there.

The "(sorta) endorsed class size reductions" is a reference to Obama's "wonderful young lady ....she’s got 42 kids in her class.... That is not a recipe for growth; that’s not how America was built." Okay, but that doesn't go very far. It does seem obvious that neither candidate would be interested in doing what I think they ought to do...
Or then again, maybe not.

Writing Revolution?

The Atlantic is sponsoring a battle of educational essayists at Why American Students Can't Write - The Atlantic, starting with Peg Tyre's tale of The Writing Revolution at New Dorp:

faced with closure, the school’s principal went all-in on a very specific curriculum reform, placing an overwhelming focus on teaching the basics of analytic writing, every day, in virtually every class. What followed was an extraordinary blossoming of student potential, across nearly every subject—one that has made New Dorp a model for educational reform.

Perhaps the most impressive aspect is that their success seems to have been an imitation of someone else, i.e. there is an explicit method which can be copied. The someone else in this case (one Judith Hochman) did want to clarify Tyre's report, in that her focus on Academic Writing Isn't a Throwback to the 1950s. Fair enough, but it is apparently, to some degree, a replicable framework, something about which one can actually say that 'I'll Have What They're Having!': The Challenge of Replicating One School's Success

Teaching students how to use words like "although" not only improves their writing and their reading; it improves their thinking. The linguistic structures that Hochman and the faculty at New Dorp are teaching their students are also heuristics, cognitive moves that help students to think about the world -- the poems they read, the molecules they study, and yes, their personal experiences -- in new and more powerful ways. If you're going to pick one thing and stick with it, this form of writing instruction is not a bad place to start.

Of course, it would be a terrible place to stop; any single place would be. In branching out, I liked John Maguire's The Secret to Good Writing: It's About Objects, Not Ideas

Tyre points out how small some of the important skills are, and how conscious instruction in them can make a difference. When New Dorp discovered that students didn't know how to use such words as "although" or "despite," the school consciously set out to teach them...
Like the teachers at New Dorp, I believe in conscious skill instruction and over the years have made my own list of missing skills. One is the skill of giving specific concrete examples in an essay...
start the course with physical objects, training students to write with those in mind, and to understand that every abstract idea summarizes a set of physical facts. I do, in fact, take that approach. "If you are writing about markets, recognize that market is an abstract idea, and find a bunch of objects that relate to it," I say. "Give me concrete nouns. Show me a wooden roadside stand with corn and green peppers on it, if you want. Show me a supermarket displaying six kinds of oranges under halogen lights. Show me a stock exchange floor where bids are shouted and answered."
"What is a concrete noun?" a student might ask.
"It's something you can drop on your foot," I always answer. "It's that simple."
"So if I am writing about markets, productivity and wealth, I am going to...."
"Yes indeed -- you are going to write about things you can drop on your foot, and people, too. Green peppers, ears of corn, windshield wipers, or a grimy mechanic changing your car's oil. No matter how abstract your topic, how intangible, your first step is to find things you can drop on your foot."

I like that, it reminds me of Feynman more than Maguire's own examples, but again it's just an item in a class of items on a list of classes of items...it's another branch. It would be nice to think that scalable online evaluations (i.e., evaluation by programs or peers or possibly parents, but not so much by teachers) can identify problems faced by a given student (can't use "although" correctly, literally doesn't know what concrete thing would be an example of his verbal fuzz, whatever) thus identify which small unit should next be experienced by that student.
Or then again, maybe not.

HCS data conflict

Ken Bausch notes that Newsweeks's America's Best High Schools 2011 - Newsweek and The Daily Beast report said that 90% of our 2010 students were college-bound:

Rank	School	City	State	Student/ Teacher Ratio	Grad Rate	AP/IB Tests	College Bound (%)	Avg SAT	News- week Score
496	Hamilton	Hamilton	NY	11.5	94	1.3	90	1558	0.092

However, http://www.hamiltoncentral.org/files/217205/college%20data%20me%20hamilton.pdf says on page 5 of 12 that Hamilton's "College enrolled in 1st. Y r." figure for 2010 was 72%. Strange.

Cornell Notes

On being systematic: I wonder how many variations on Cornell notes there are, and how to identify which students should use which method...What We Learned Today: Cornell Notes

the note-taking page is set up in a specific way. There is a wide left column for questions, keywords, or cues. The wider right column is where the main notes are taken. At the bottom of the page, there is an area to summarize the notes taken on that page.
Step One: When you’re taking notes in class or from another source, take notes on the right side of the page. Don’t use complete sentences, and abbreviate what you can. Write down the key ideas, and pay special attention to things written on the blackboard, if you are using this for school.
Step Two: Soon after you are finished taking notes, on the left side of the page write questions, keywords, main ideas, or cues to remind you about the notes. This will reinforce the learning in your mind, and help you make it all clear, connecting related bits of information. It is also a good opportunity to see if you have any questions about the material yourself.
Step Three: Within the next day, on the bottom of the page summarize the material in the notes column.

Maybe everybody should do things that way, or in some other specific way. I am more inclined to suspect that everybody (including me, at age 60) should spend part of each year trying to look for (and measure) a better way, even if it's a way that wasn't better before.
Or then again, maybe not.

Update 2014: Noticed that the wired.com link had succumbed to linkrot, asked Google to find the article on wired.com, and replaced the link target with the "archive.wired.com" value.

Marginal Revolution University

My favorite economics bloggers, being professors, have started a Khan-Academy-style online university with one course -- Development Economics; soon to grow. A Blog Hopes Its New Online Course Will Be More Than Marginal | The New Republic

one of Cowen’s many, many driving questions: what is education really for—what really makes it valuable? Mainstream economic thinking, Cowen noted in a lengthy 2006 blog post that foreshadowed MRU, views education primarily as a signaling device....
But Cowen posited that education is most efficiently used as a tool for self-improvement in the broadest sense. “Education is about self-acculturation,” he wrote, continuing:

education gives you a peer group, a self-image, and some skills as well. Getting an education is like becoming a Marine. Men need to be made into Marines. By choosing many years of education, you are telling yourself that you stand on one side of the social divide. The education itself drums that truth into you.

MRU is ultimately aiming for a better actual education, not a better means of signaling. ... “You can think of this,” Cowen says, laughing for the only time during our phone conversation and only lightly, “as a marginal attempt—a marginal revolution, so to speak—to get education to be more about learning.”
...a professor from the University of Oklahoma will lead a course on Mexico early next year—and Cowen is encouraging readers/viewers to make their own videos and send them in, with Tabarrok citing Wikipedia as MRU’s model here. Its optimistic motto is “Learn, Teach, Share.” This ad hoc philosophy is central to MRU’s method—and is potentially its greatest weakness.

As long as they're providing a resource for self-education and a resource for teachers in classrooms, that should work. If they need to evaluate students, I presume they'll have to develop some kind of peer grading; I've been thinking about networks of Google hangouts for that purpose. (You get assigned to a series of Google hangouts, working with different people and validating each other's actual existence...that it's actually you taking that test, for one thing.
Or then again, maybe not.

Students Evaluating Teachers

Research on role reversal? No, just an apparently-practical way to evaluate teachers. Why Kids Should Grade Teachers

The responses did indeed help predict which classes would have the most test-score improvement at the end of the year. In math, for example, the teachers rated most highly by students delivered the equivalent of about six more months of learning than teachers with the lowest ratings. (By comparison, teachers who get a master’s degree—one of the few ways to earn a pay raise in most schools —delivered about one more month of learning per year than teachers without one.)

"Rated most highly" doesn't mean "most likable"; they're asking which teachers have control of the classroom, which teachers teach. It seems to work.
Interesting.

Investing in Education?

It's common to claim that when we spend more and more on education, the results tend to indicate that we've wasted our money. One more depressing set of graphs along those lines comes in looking at the SAT trends over the years Squandering Assessment Test

There are factors that make comparing year-to-year SAT scores imprecise. But the trend clearly reinforces what we should already know: we get almost no return for our education “investment.”

Well, maybe. Or maybe not. But this is data.