Family v. School

From back in October, a note on the obvious (or is it?)Parenting more important than schools to academic achievement, study finds

Oct. 10, 2012 — New research from North Carolina State University, Brigham Young University and the University of California, Irvine finds that parental involvement is a more significant factor in a child's academic performance than the qualities of the school itself.
"Our study shows that parents need to be aware of how important they are, and invest time in their children -- checking homework, attending school events and letting kids know school is important," says Dr. Toby Parcel, a professor of sociology at NC State and co-author of a paper on the work. "That's where the payoff is."

Of course it's possible that the connection of family to school performance comes from other pathways as well. But it may well be that the biggest influence a school can have on kids is actually through the parents. And then again we have Judith Harris...and it's possible that the biggest influence a parent can have is through the peer group.
Or then again, maybe not.

Flipped Classrooms -- Continuing

Progress (in some direction) continues... we see Yahoo News (from AP) on students whose Teachers flip for 'flipped learning' class model:

spend class time doing practice problems in small groups, taking quizzes, explaining the concept to other students, reciting equation formulas in a loud chorus, and making their own videos while teacher Crystal Kirch buzzes from desk to desk to help pupils who are having trouble.
It's a technology-driven teaching method known as "flipped fearning" because it flips the time-honored model of classroom lecture and exercises for homework — the lecture becomes homework and class time is for practice.
... the online community Flipped Learning Network now has 10,000 members, up from 2,500 a year ago, and training workshops are being held all over the country...
Under the model, teachers make eight- to 10-minute videos of their lessons using laptops, often simply filming the whiteboard as the teacher makes notations and recording their voice as they explain the concept. The videos are uploaded onto a teacher or school website, or even YouTube, where they can be accessed by students on computers or smartphones as homework....
"The first year, I was able to double the number of labs my students were doing," Sams said. "That's every science teacher's dream."
In the Detroit suburb of Clinton Township,...Flipping yielded dramatic results after just a year... Green attributed the improvements to an approach that engages students more in their classes. ....
The concept has its downside. Teachers note that making the videos and coming up with project activities to fill class time is a lot of extra work up front...
Explaining to adults that homework was watching videos was a little harder, though. "My grandma thought I was using it as an excuse to mess around on the Internet," Nguyen said.

Note that "making the videos" is to some degree a one-time cost; videos are shared to similar classes. The "buzzes from desk to desk" teacher-activity should to some extent be a slightly-older-student activity, as suggested by the "explaining the concept to other students" which precedes it. And "coming up with project activities to fill class time"...well, that's also to some extent a one-time cost. Hmm.
Then again, maybe not.

K-12 Education and Life Expectancy

Kevin Drum in Mother Jones points out that Not Everyone is Living Longer

Longer life spans, it turns out, really do depend on just how privileged you are.

He's referring to a MacArthur Foundation Research Network report that Differences In Life Expectancy Due To Race And Educational Differences Are Widening, And Many May Not Catch Up :

Drop in life expectancy for least educated whites, slight increase for least educated blacks. It is important to note that the size of the least educated subgroup of the U.S. population has been shrinking in recent decades (down to about 8% for whites).

Their graph summarizes:

So the data is compatible with what Drum claims: it appears that life expectancy has dropped for the less educated. In the course of 18 years, a randomly selected white female dropout has lost 5 years of life expectancy while a randomly selected white male dropout has lost 3 years...but that's not the only interpretation. The white female dropout population of 1990 (WFD90) has different people in it than the white female dropout population of 2008 (WFD08).
Imagine that we could rank people in some combined ordering that combined intelligence with emotional factors including "grit"; think about perseverance, focus on a plan, supportive family, all kinds of factors that make it easier to finish an education and that also make it easier to do well in life, not only getting and keeping a job but seeking and following medical advice from stop-smoking and stop-eating-so-much to recognizing the symptoms of a heart attack and taking the pills you've been prescribed. In my understanding of the world, these factors very often (not always) go together.
Now, think of WFD08 as being an exact copy of WFD90 except that we've pushed education harder, so that the dropout population is a smaller part of the population (hey, it is). Some of the top dropouts in WFD90 have gone into the high-school graduate population instead, but perhaps some or all of their other life-factors are no different. In that case, part of what we're doing is simply lowering the margin below those who were the top of the bottom group: it could be that every individual of 2008 is better off than an identical individual of 1990 would have been, but we'll see that the average lifespan of a dropout is less. Finishing high school may have helped the graduates live longer, or it may have made no difference at all -- the data is compatible with either.
A lot of research has this kind of ambiguity; a set of international-comparison studies that were much discussed this week led economist Arnold Kling to write Good News: School Doesn’t Matter!

In my view, the policy implication is that we should spend a lot less on classroom education and instead spend more on better research, including randomized controlled trials, to find out what, if anything, makes a difference. For now, I see no evidence that the money we spend on education is anything other than an enormous waste.

I wouldn't go quite that far, but I do think it would be a better world if people were more careful with their inferences.
Or then again, maybe not.

District Comparisons

The Syracuse Post-Standard reports that Interactive map shows your school's aid from New York state

The Citizens Budget Commission, a non-partisan budget watchdog group, produced this interactive map with 2012-13 budget data in July. Just click on your district to get a peek at the amount of aid your district is getting, along with related statistics including district property values, free and reduced lunch percentages and enrollment.

They link to School Districts Map

State School Aid by District, School Year 2012-13
The map showcases the distribution of the main components of school aid in addition to the districts' financial and educational need measures.

The data for Hamilton Central School and Morrisville, shown together (update: with Scarsdale and Syracuse for comparison):

Category	HCS	M-E	Scarsdale	Syracuse
Total General Aid Per Student	$7,231	$13,445	$1,212	$13,013
Foundation Aid Per Student	$4,154	$8,133	$499	$9,603
Categorical Aid Per Student	$3,077	$5,312	$713	$3,410
Property Value Per Student	$180,897	$109,050	$787,352	$77,957
Students Eligible For Free or Reduced Price Lunch	20%	56%	0%	82%
District Need Resource Capacity Index	0.48	1.88	0.01	4.89
Public School Enrollment	558	732	4,743	21,327

The "District Need Resource Capacity Index" is defined by NYSED at Need/Resource Capacity Categories (PDF) as:

The need/resource capacity index, a measure of a district's ability to meet the needs of its students with local resources, is the ratio of the estimated poverty percentage (expressed in standard score form) to the Combined Wealth Ratio (expressed in standard score form). A district with both estimated poverty and Combined Wealth Ratio equal to the State average would have a need/resource capacity index of 1.0.

It is possible that there have been successful mergers of schools with such disparate need indices.
Or then again, maybe not.

Common Core: One More Year

I've mentioned Yong Zhao and his book, and his thesis that American entrepreneurial success (in business and in science) has been in substantial part a result of our schools' failure in the perpetual institutional quest to squelch creativity. He has Five Questions to Ask about the Common Core, and he fears that

the world of American education may end in 2014, when the Common Core is scheduled to march into thousands of schools in the United States and end a “chaotic, fragmented, unequal, obsolete, and failing” system that has accompanied the rise of a nation with the largest economy, most scientific discoveries and technological inventions, best universities, and largest collection of Nobel laureates in the world today. In place will be a new world of education where all American children are exposed to the same content, delivered by highly standardized teachers, watched over by their equally standardized principals, and monitored by governments armed with sophisticated data tools.

I doubt that the chaos will end, but he has convinced me that the Common Core is likely to do somewhat more harm than good. In educational practice as in home repair, it's all too easy to fix something so that it never quite works again.
Or then again, maybe not.

Future Finance: NY

Back in December, I noticed but did not blog when the NY Times said
Experts Warn of Budget Ills in New York State, Lasting Years

New York State faces long-term budget problems that are compounded by the teetering finances of its local governments, an aging infrastructure and the possibility of severe cuts in federal funding......New York’s problems had been “papered over with gimmicks” for decades...
... outsize spending on health care and education, its vulnerability to the ups and downs of Wall Street, and the struggles of its local governments to pay retirement obligations. ... “Albany has increased dependence on a small number of very wealthy taxpayers to keep the state going,” ... New York... is particularly vulnerable to possible cuts in federal aid resulting from efforts to reduce the federal budget deficit....The report said New York’s local governments were “facing a rapidly deteriorating fiscal future.” ...Syracuse... annual pension costs had increased 50 percent since ... 2010, to $30 million from $20 million. “If you say to the municipality, ‘You’re just going to have to figure out how to pay for it,’ what you are saying is that now bad people aren’t going to be arrested, fires aren’t going to be put out,” she said. “Snow will not be plowed from the roads. Trash will not be collected.

The 69-page PDF Report of the State Budget Crisis Task Force reports on many sources of instability and unsustainability, including

A new top rate of 8.82 percent applies to individuals with taxable income above $1 million and married couples above $2 million and does so in a more concentrated way than has occurred previously. Further, this “millionaires” bracket brings increased dependence on a relatively small number of taxpayers (estimated to be 31,000), roughly half of whom live outside the state.

In other words, the money available to the state may suddenly decrease, whether from renewed recession or from financial companies moving their operations to lower-tax regions; their incentives for doing so have risen.

State general aid to local governments is moderate ($873 million in 2010), and is procyclical, increasing when state revenues are strong and remaining flat or decreasing during downturns. Aid to K-12 education is by far the biggest portion of state aid ($23 billion) and is the largest item in the state budget.

And the result for K-12 education?

95 percent of school district leaders said they were drawing on reserves to pay for recurring operating expenses, with two-thirds indicating they were “very concerned” at the extent to which they were doing so. Compensation costs represent 70 percent of school district budgets, but contractual cost relief is difficult. Few districts are negotiating contracts with zero across-the-board increases. Built-in annual step increases remain in place; increases in pension and health care costs are in the double digit range. Further, the savings from the generational turnover of teachers seems to have peaked. All other things remaining constant, status quo contractual terms and ordinary retirements will drive larger average annual salary increases than in the recent past. Add to that any increase in costs other than compensation.

Unsustainable trends will not be sustained indefinitely. They will end.
Or maybe not? No. They will end.

Study Strategies

Which study strategies make the grade?

Students everywhere, put down those highlighters and pick up some flashcards! Some of the most popular study strategies -- such as highlighting and even rereading -- don't show much promise for improving student learning, according to a new report published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

If I understand correctly, basically they support flashcards and practice tests (spread over time). Looking at the successes and failures, it seems that the more effective techniques (in their study) are those which directly mimic performance (on a test) rather than those like highlighting and summarizing which try to make sense of the material. My suspicion is that we're not comparing apples and oranges but rather axes and hammers -- different tools which should be used at different times for different tasks by different students; so I'd advocate computerized highlighters (as in the Kindle) and computerized flashcards (all kinds of software available) linked to self-tracking software (based on Google spreadsheet forms, or the equivalent.) Your mileage may vary, so you should keep track of it.

Why Girls Do Better At School - Slashdot

A new study explains why girls do better at school, even when their scores on standardized tests remain low. Researchers from University of Georgia and Columbia University say the variation in school grades between boys and girls may be because girls have a better attitude toward learning than boys. One of the study's lead authors, Christopher Cornwell, said, 'The skill that matters the most in regards to how teachers graded their students is what we refer to as "approaches toward learning." You can think of "approaches to learning" as a rough measure of what a child's attitude toward school is: It includes six items that rate the child's attentiveness, task persistence, eagerness to learn, learning independence, flexibility and organization. I think that anybody who's a parent of boys and girls can tell you that girls are more of all of that.'

Actually (after three boys and two girls) I see what they mean but I'm not sure how to put it together...I suspect that a large fraction of each of those, including "learning independence", has to do with boys' greater, umm, rebelliousness -- unwillingness to do stuff that doesn't make sense to them, lesser respect for authority, stuff like that. It's a question of incentives, which will have to be addressed by 21st century school design.
Or then again, maybe not.

Khan Academy in Idaho -- and in the movies

Slashdot reported last week that Khan Academy Will Be Ready For Its Close-Up In Idaho

Education officials ... say they are arranging to have Khan Academy classes tested in about two dozen public schools next fall in Idaho, where state law now requires high school students to take online courses for two of their 47 graduation credits. 'This is the first time Khan Academy is partnering to tackle the math education of an entire state,' ... film director and producer Davis Guggenheim (Waiting for Superman, An Inconvenient Truth), who will be in Idaho in January filming The Great Teacher Project, a documentary which will highlight positives of education, like the Khan Academy pilot in Idaho.

One of the Slashdot commenters adds

My brother is a math teacher who convinced the board of his school system to let him try it in two of his classes. Now the entire school system is moving to Khan for the math program.
The major change in his teaching format is that learning a new concept is now homework (through Khan Academy), rather than him droning on about it in class. Then every morning he gets a report for each student and can see who did well and who didn't. That allows him to concentrate on the students that didn't get the concept in class. Overall he has seen a major improvement in the class as a whole since fewer kids get left without a good understanding of the fundamental concepts.

Davis Guggenheim is

the only filmmaker to release three different documentaries that were ranked within the top 100 highest-grossing documentaries of all time (An Inconvenient Truth, It Might Get Loud, and Waiting for 'Superman').

In the origin of Davis Guggenheim: "Waiting for Superman" to Save Our Public Schools

I actually said "no." I thought that the subject of education was too complicated. The next morning I was packing my kids up in my minivan and taking them to school with juice boxes and backpacks. Out of the corner of my eye, I started to see the local public schools that I was driving by. And it started to haunt me that my kids whom I send to private school were having a great education, but the kids in my own neighborhood were not. I said, "Well, maybe that is the approach that I should make for this movie....

And now he's working on Khan Academy, and presumably related trends. Could be helpful.
Or then again, maybe not.

Saving Money

The "Conversable Economist" keeps looking for research supporting low-cost school reform proposals. Lately he's seen Classroom Evaluation of K-12 Teachers

"During the TES [Teacher Evaluation System] evaluation year, teachers are typically observed in the classroom and scored four times: three times by an assigned peer evaluator—high-performing, experienced teachers who are external to the school—and once by the principal or another school administrator. ... dozens of specific skills and practices covering classroom management, instruction, content knowledge, and planning, among other topics.... the evaluators are often pretty tough in grading and commenting on lots of specific skills and practices, but then they still tend to give a high overall grade.... almost everyone was ending up with fairly high overall scores, so the practical effects of this evaluation in terms of pay and jobs was pretty minimal.
Nevertheless, student performance not only went up during the year that the evaluation happened, but student performance stayed higher for teachers who had been evaluated in previous years. "... Imagine two students taught by the same teacher in different years who both begin the year at the fiftieth percentile of math achievement. The student taught after the teacher went through comprehensive TES evaluation would score about 4.5 percentile points higher at the end of the year than the student taught before the teacher went through the evaluation. ..."

It's a substantial change, presumably higher for some teachers (and students) and lower for others. It would be interesting to see how much the effect depended on the administrator evaluation vs. the external evaluator evaluation; what could be done by variations in the rubric, or self-evaluation, or even student evaluation using different rubrics. But mostly I'd be interested in how this would work with classes structured in non-traditional ways, especially flipped classrooms.

Taylor (the Conv. Econ.) links to his earlier low-cost reform research post at Low-Cost Education Reforms: Later Starts, K-8, and Focusing Teachers

three organizational reforms that recent evidence suggests have the potential to increase K–12 student performance at modest costs: (1) Starting school later in the day for middle and high school students; (2) Shifting from a system with separate elementary and middle schools to one with schools that serve students in kindergarten through grade eight; (3) Managing teacher assignments.... We conservatively estimate that the ratio of benefits to costs is 9 to 1 for later school start times and 40 to 1 for middle school reform.

Again, my main concerns would be how this interacts with modified classroom structure -- and with consolidation, which tends to separate the age groups from one another, and by increasing mileage among low-density populations tends to increase the cost of separating transportation.
Or then again, maybe not.

MOOCing money

In more contemporary news of online education, the NYT today reports Massive Open Online Courses Prove Popular, if Not Lucrative Yet

One tiny revenue stream has begun flowing into the nondescript Silicon Valley office building where Coursera’s 35 employees work to keep up with the demand for their courses: the company is an Amazon affiliate, getting a sliver of the money each time Coursera students click through the site to buy recommended textbooks or any other products on Amazon.
“It’s just a couple thousand, but it’s our first revenue,” Ms. Koller said. “When faculty recommend a textbook and people buy it on Amazon, we get some money. The funny thing is that we’re getting more than twice as much money from things like Texas Rangers jackets as from what the textbooks are bringing in.”
Other possibilities around the edges include charging a subscription fee, after a class is over, to continue the discussion forum as a Web community, or perhaps offering follow-up courses, again for a fee. And advertising sponsorships remain a possibility.

And possibilities like making the course content freely available but charging for tutor services...
Or then again, maybe not.

Asimov on the Khan Academy, Wikipedia, etc

From before the internet (1988) a video interview Isaac Asimov on Bill Moyers World of Ideas; Asimov is arguing that if you let kids loose with their own computers and the ability to access on-line info relating to their own interests, (as well as a certain amount of required learning and interactions with other kids), then learning can lose the stigma of being kid stuff. As Moyers puts it, the reward of school is like the reward of prison, that when you're educated they let you out and you don't need to go back. (And you're all grown up.)

Of course, we'd probably want a rather drastic reduction in the list of things that kids are required to study.
Maybe.

Class Size

Christmas seems to be over; Happy New Year! Sandra Carter has contributed a Class Size page to Hamilton Central Options:

But to appreciate the impact of class size on student achievement one must look beyond personal experience to get the bigger picture, a view that is enabled through educational research and analysis of data. Toward this end, we’ll be looking at some state-wide class reduction plans that have been carried out in the United States. One such began in 1985 with the advent of the class reduction plan for primary schools in Tennessee. Since then, several other states have implemented their own class-size reduction plans. This is not a comprehensive treatment of class-size reduction programs but it is a look at three statewide projects referred to fairly often when the subject is broached. The first, Project STAR, seems to be the gold standard....

The conclusion offered by the researchers cited is that smaller classes are good, especially in the lower grades. My own feeling is that this is convincing, and that school consolidation discussions need to take it into account; expanding class size is a risky way to save money -- and communities that want to take that risk shouldn't merge with communities that don't.
In the longer run, I'd add that the research will eventually need to be redone in a variety of contexts: different kinds of learning, supported by different kinds of technology, works for different kinds of kids with different kinds of teachers on different subjects in different ways. Some learning is best done alone; some with one other student; some with two; etc. To each group size 1,2,...N, we add a physical teacher, a virtual teacher, or none.
I do have thoughts about patterns worth trying, e.g. at Khan's Ideal Classroom, but I don't think anybody knows what the results will be. I do think that we're likely to end up with a system in which each kid knows from personal "self-experimentation" research whether he or she memorizes new Spanish vocabulary best early in the morning, after a meal, late at night... and similarly for dozens of different tasks. And I do think we're likely to end up finding that physically large classes are among the least cost-effective way for kids to learn.

Or then again, maybe not.

Update:I should have noted that I've seen a number of articles challenging the "smaller class-size is good" notion, and other articles based on these, e.g. Half the Facts You Know Are Probably Wrong

Dinosaurs were cold-blooded. Increased K-12 spending and lower pupil/teacher ratios boost public school student outcomes. Most of the DNA in the human genome is junk. ...
In the past half-century, all of the foregoing facts have turned out to be wrong.

There are studies pointing that way, but the response seems to be that most if not all of these are conflating class size with student/staff ratio, which is a convenient but inaccurate indicator of class size. Other things being equal (which they often aren't), smaller class-size is good, especially in the lower grades.