New York State Rural Schools Association 2013 Statement

Our state Rural Schools Association has a statement to make about school consolidation...Education and Teacher Preparation Programs at Cornell University

2013 RSA Legislative Position Statement
... We caution legislators and policy makers that research on school consolidation reveals that anticipated savings from consolidation are frequently illusory, or temporary, while harm to a community from loss of a school is permanent. Consistent with their views on local choice, the RSA supports Regional High School legislation implemented after local voter approval is obtained.

(HT Ken Bausch)

Khan on Future Learning

Courtesy of the KhanAcademy guy, creator of all those thousands of two-to-ten minute lectures with questions attached, we have "Future Learning" (from Good Magazine)

with a number of interesting thoughts.

• "The lecture is only valuable if you have that question in your brain..."
• "The school is gonna be one or two Really Big classrooms..."
• "If a bunch of kids want to take a month or two off to build a robot, go ahead -- you're not going to miss class, there's no such thing as missing class..."
• "The teachers are fountains of knowledge, experience, mentorship, humanity -- as opposed to fountains of a scripted lecture."

Or then again, maybe not.

Tests, Grades, Gender

So little boys test well, but get worse grades. And people keep doing research on why. Here's this week's entry: New UGA research helps explain why girls do better in school | UGA Today

Why do girls get better grades in elementary school than boys-even when they perform worse on standardized tests?
New research from the University of Georgia and Columbia University published in the current issue of Journal of Human Resources suggests that it's because of their classroom behavior, which may lead teachers to assign girls higher grades than their male counterparts.
... The data show, for the first time, that gender disparities in teacher grades start early and uniformly favor girls. In every subject area, boys are represented in grade distributions below where their test scores would predict.
The authors attribute this misalignment to what they called non-cognitive skills, or "how well each child was engaged in the classroom, how often the child externalized or internalized problems, how often the child lost control and how well the child developed interpersonal skills." ...
This difference can have long-reaching effects, Cornwell said.

I would think it might indeed. This causes me to think two kinds of thoughts: one is that maybe more girls than boys are comfortable in a top-down directive factory-model school; different school formats will work for different kids. And the other kind of thought is more specific...it would be very interesting to see if this is still true with "flipped" classrooms.

The Industrial-Factory Model

A large part of what I've learned over the past year is that when it comes to education, we really really don't know what we're doing, but we can be pretty sure that it's not the right thing. Last week I saw the NY Times with Teachers - Will We Ever Learn? - NYTimes.com

Call it the industrial-factory model: power resides at the top, with state and district officials setting goals, providing money and holding teachers accountable for realizing predetermined ends. While rational on its face, in practice this system does not work well because teaching is a complex activity that is hard to direct and improve from afar. The factory model is appropriate to simple work that is easy to standardize; it is ill suited to disciplines like teaching that require considerable skill and discretion.

I'm not sure I agree with most of that essay, but the part I've quoted should go further...the factory model is ill-suited to teaching and to learning, and top-down direction and incentives are based on a theory of motivation which is not just unsupported but discredited by experimental data available since before I was born. (I'm 60.)

Points from the April 17th "Informational Meeting"

Ten of us from the CAC, having attended many meetings and reviewed much data, met last night with the BoE scattered among forty-odd community members, Superintendent Diana Bowers presiding...and near the end, someone in the audience commented that there seemed to be two of us in favor of the merger proposal, two undecided, and six against. I think that's about right, at the moment; and at the moment, I'm among the reasonably-solidly-against. There was a camera going; the video ought to appear on the Hamilton CSD site somewhere sometime soon. My very-fragmentary thoughts:

What Next? The perennial question, Where Do We Go From Here? was answered by Dr. Bowers, as indeed I laid it out in my CAC Done; Do You Feel Lucky? post: next comes (1) a BoE vote, and they can choose to stop everything, or to proceed. If they choose to proceed, then there's (2) a community straw vote, which can stop everything, or proceed. If we choose to proceed, then things go to the DoE and (3) back to the BoE, which can stop everything, or proceed to (4) a final community vote for district merger. Meanwhile Morrisville has the same sequence. If all the votes are favorable, then there's a merger, and then we (the combined district) elect a new combined BoE, and they decide what happens next -- who to hire, what to do with the existing buildings, whether to build a giant swimming pool instead (as Dave Hollis put it), and and at that point we ...well, it goes on. And on. And on, until Somebody gets tired of our performance and rings down the final curtain. (I don't think Diana actually got that far.)

Please Read: As Susan Marafino said, anybody who is going to vote on this should dive into the data, probably starting at the end with the 15-year Financial outline if we merge, based on the Possible Program/Staffing (where we save by economies of scale) and the Transportation Plan (where we pay to get kids together to achieve those economies of scale, and incidentally give them an hour per day extra transportation time for all HCS middle schoolers and M-ECS high schoolers.) Also please read my own collection of District Comparisons on this blog and at the accompanying site, based on the earlier documents and on reports I saw in the past year or so. (Some of these were out of date; as Susan commented at the meeting, M-ECS has in the past few years drastically cut its programs, and some of the district comparison material I linked is out of date in that respect.)

Summary: As Diana indicated at one point, the communities fit together in that our true-value tax rates are very very close (I believe neighboring communities have higher rates). As I said, I think that this equality actually indicates an additional difference: Morrisville made a choice between cutting programs and raising taxes which I do not believe we would have made. There are all kinds of reasons behind this; I'm not saying that they made the wrong choice, for them. I am saying that if a merged district were somehow to run short on money in future, I expect that most Hamilton homeowners would be voting differently than most Morrisville homeowners, and somebody would lose and be very unhappy about having merged. Of course if the merged district were never to run short of money, that's not a problem. If fuel costs stop rising (why would they stop rising? Well, they might, I suppose)...if the state doesn't run out of money (won't it run out of money? Well, maybe not...but I haven't read any economists or investors who think the current situation is sustainable. Some promises will be broken.) My feeling is that this merger is a very big gamble, which is why I wrote the CAC Done; Do You Feel Lucky? post which goes over both of those issues, with links.

And If We Don't Do This Merger Now? Well, we may do a different merger later (such as the merger I proposed in that post), or no merger at all. A couple of people were commenting on the value of merger in terms of having enough students for advanced classes, (again, I wrote about that in the aforementioned post.) One item I wanted to repeat in the meeting, but didn't get to: the economic issues of advanced K-12 (or introductory college) courses are changing rapidly. A recently completed study is reported as Online Education Trumps the Cost Disease

In a large, randomized experiment Bowen et al. found that students enrolled in an online/hybrid statistics course learned just as much as those taking a traditional class.... Perhaps even more importantly, Bowen et al. found that the online model was significantly less costly than the traditional model, some 36% to 57% less costly to produce than a course using a traditional lecture format. In other words, since outcomes were the same, online education increased productivity by 56% to 133%! ... ... Online education even in its earliest stages appears to be generating large improvements in educational productivity.

Actually outcomes were not the same; students learned the same material faster in this "hybrid" (online + one class/week) model than in the classroom-only model.

Then again, there's the Khan Academy which I've discussed many times, as a not-yet-complete K-12 curriculum (with some college courses) of thousands of explanatory videos with software to go with them; they're not intended to make teachers obsolete, but they are intended to make "class size" obsolete as a concept. I've also discussed Khan's One World Schoolhouse book a few times, in which he explains how that can work. Will it work? Which model will win? I don't think anybody knows, but the background to the economics of education is changing faster than ever before, and the most clearly currently-effective change is happening at just the right level to make merger unnecessary. Predicting is hard, especially the future -- but there's no need for panic. There's a very good chance that we will end up replacing the traditional model of school with something that's somewhat cheaper and a whole lot better. (Or with something that's a whole lot cheaper and somewhat worse -- I admit that's possible too.)

Tell me what I'm missing...

Update: Radio Free Hamilton (i.e. Dave Hollis) reports: 'What If' Scenarios Paint Post-Merger Picture

Members of the committee of HCS district residents studying the possible merger with Morrisville-Eaton Central School discussed the study in a forum Tuesday night in the school cafeteria attended by about 70 people.

70? Well, I guess there were more people after I counted. And yes, the picture is me. (And Susan remarks that there was one CAC member who stayed in the audience; 11, not 10.)

Learning by Video Game

From UCSD via Science Daily, a self-motivating educational experience: Computer scientists develop video game that teaches how to program in Java

CodeSpells' story line is simple: the player is a wizard arriving in a land populated by gnomes.... The wizard must help them. She (or he) writes spells in Java. ...
Players can also earn badges by undertaking simple quests, which help them master the game's spells. One quest entails crossing a river. Another entails rescuing a gnome from the roof of his cottage... By the time players complete the game's first level, they have learned the main components of the Java programming language, such as parameters, for if statements, for loops and while loops, among other skills.
Researchers tested the game on a group of 40 girls ages 10 to 12 in San Diego...."We were purposefully vague," they wrote, "as we hoped to encourage a largely unstructured learning environment."
The students were disappointed when they had to stop playing because the test was over.

And there ain't no maybe not about it.

Charters, Incentives, Performance

A few days ago, USA Today editorialized Charter school experiment a success: Our view

Critics — whether district superintendents or teachers' unions or school boards or a traveling band of academic doubters — snipe at the newcomers, arguing that they're siphoning students and money from traditional public schools.
But as evidence from the 20-year-old charter experiment mounts, the snipers are in need of a new argument. There's little doubt left that top-performing charters have introduced new educational models that have already achieved startling results in even the most difficult circumstances.

And they talk quite a bit about the Knowledge Is Power Program

a KIPP school typically provides 60 percent more time in school than a regular public school.[12] By extending school days, requiring attendance on Saturdays, offering extra curricular activities, and adding three extra weeks of school in July, students have more educational opportunities. ...
Each middle school student receives a paycheck at the end of the week of KIPP dollars they have earned based on academic merit, conduct, and overall behavior.
At the end of the school year, KIPP students have the privilege of attending a week long field trip.
In June 2010, Mathematica Policy Research produced the first findings[16] from a multi-year evaluation of the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP)

Using a matched comparison group design, results show that for the vast majority of KIPP schools in the evaluation, impacts on students’ state assessment scores in math and reading are positive, statistically significant, and educationally substantial.

I believe what they say, and I can see a value to KIPP and similar high-intensity charters as providing a somewhat better factory school, one which will outdo our really bad urban schools; it also serves as a vehicle for self-selection, which is both good and bad. It is possible that similar schools could work in a suburban or rural context, matched against really-not-that-bad-at-all schools like HCS. I've become sceptical, however, about the incentives we're using -- grades, academic awards, KIPP dollars, disciplinary action. These certainly can and do lead to enhanced performance on some kinds of tests, but I'm afraid these are precisely the kinds of tests that ought to be becoming obsolete: tests for the ability to shut up and sit down and follow orders. Here's a discussion (with video) of the kind of research I mean: How Monetary Rewards Can Demotivate Creative Works | Techdirt

once people have a base level of money that makes them comfortable, using monetary incentives to get them to do creative work fails. Not just fails, but leads to worse performance.

When I think about this kind of research in the context of school reform, it seems to me that we as a nation have been heading in one of the wrong directions for a while now, and that the KIPP-style charter is a better dinosaur. The flexibility of charters may be necessary for finding better answers, but it also makes even worse answers available. I'll post soon about experiments in other directions.
Or then again, maybe not.

Home (?) Schooling

In reading about educational options this past year, I've been surprised by how little can be excluded. I thought that "academic rigor" with lots of expensive one-on-one adult attention and lots of carefully graded homework was ideal, for a kid who would do well in college and beyond. I didn't take homeschooling seriously. I still don't, in the sense that I doubt that a large proportion of families can do what I used to think of as homeschooling, but the it seems that the term covers a wide and increasing range of approaches to education. A pediatrician blogged recently on 18 Reasons Why Doctors and Lawyers Homeschool Their Children — ChildrensMD

I timidly attended a home school parent meeting last spring. Surprisingly it was full of doctors, lawyers, former public school teachers, and other professionals. These were not the stay-at-home-moms in long skirts that I expected. The face of homeschooling is changing. We are not all religious extremists or farmers, and our kids are not all overachieving academic nerds without social skills.
An estimated 2.04 million k12 children are home educated in the United States, a 75% increase since 1999....

But that homeschooling need not be entirely at home, so it's not clear what's going on; Wikipedia notes Homeschooling # Homeschool cooperatives

Co-ops also provide social interaction for homeschooled children. They may take lessons together or go on field trips. Some co-ops also offer events such as prom and graduation for homeschoolers.
Homeschoolers are beginning to utilize Web 2.0 as a way to simulate homeschool cooperatives online. With social networks homeschoolers can chat, discuss threads in forums, share information and tips, and even participate in online classes via blackboard systems similar to those used by colleges.... Regarding socialization, Taylor's results would mean that very few home-schooling children are socially deprived. He states that critics who speak out against homeschooling on the basis of social deprivation are actually addressing an area which favors homeschoolers.

It's interesting. Homeschoolers make some major claims:

Created by: CollegeAtHome.com

From my point of view, the important thing is simply that this does not seem to be a disaster: it's a real choice which parents have been increasingly making, where benefits seem, for many, to outweigh any harm, and research suggests that this is just fine. I don't see any reason why the trend should stop; in fact, the costs are going down and the benefits going up as technology improves, so the trend is likely to accelerate.

Or then again, maybe not.

Instant Feedback

The New York Times reports onNew Test for Computers - Grading Essays at College Level - NYTimes.com

EdX, a nonprofit enterprise founded by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will release automated software that uses artificial intelligence to grade student essays and short written answers.

The software will be freely available to any institution that wants to use it, and apparently the grading results (after initial training) are within the range of variation expected of human graders. I'd expect that for years to come, the "artificial intelligence" code will fall short in the sense that a student who understands it (and would be getting excellent grades anyway) could use that understanding to get excellent grades for essays that any human would say are lousy. In practice, that may not matter: the essays will be online, which means that students trying to "cheat" in this way will have to face the fact that some of those essays will be seen by human readers; perhaps a random selection, perhaps at a later time, and some courses will be designed so that students read and react to two essays for each essay which they write, to provide supplementary feedback. I would think that the main value of the system will be the instant feedback that it provides; a student can submit, consider the response, submit, consider the response, submit... And learn.

Or then again, maybe not.

Hybrid Course Research

 This is research on introductory-level university course design; I believe it applies reasonably directly to present and near-future advanced high school (e.g., AP) courses as well. Basically, it seems to be saying that the expensive way we're teaching these now is not buying us anything. We can do better, cheaper, with "hybrid" courses (they aren't trying purely online courses).... Interactive Learning Online at Public Universities: Evidence from Randomized Trials | Ithaka S+R

randomly assigning students on six public university campuses to take the course in a hybrid format (with machine-guided instruction accompanied by one hour of face-to-face instruction each week) or a traditional format (as it is usually offered by their campus, typically with 3-4 hours of face-to-face instruction each week).
We find that learning outcomes are essentially the same—that students in the hybrid format "pay no price” for this mode of instruction in terms of pass rates, final exam scores, and performance on a standardized assessment of statistical literacy. These zero-difference coefficients are precisely estimated.

If this is true (and it looks quite solid), then a merged district's enhanced ability to get groups together for specialized courses is seriously weakened as a motivator.


Or then again, maybe not.

Attention Span and Testing

It's really hard to pay attention to all of a long presentation; back when I was a brand-new (and really bad) asst. prof of computer geekery at the University of Delaware, the Center for improvement in teaching (or some such name) explained that typical lecture retention was 17% -- I remember the number, more than thirty years later, but not the experimental support for it. One way to improve, which I never really mastered, was simply to break up the lecture into small chunks for which retention would be at least a bit higher -- and ask questions in between. Good teachers do that, they don't get lost in their lecture thoughts. Today I see Harvard psychologists saying that the questions-in-between pattern also works online: I admit that I don't see that it's all that different, but they say Online learning: It's different

in both experiments, students who were tested between each segment -- but not the others, even those who were allowed to study the material again -- showed a marked drop in mind-wandering and improved overall retention of material.
"It's not sufficient for a lecture to be short or to break up a lecture as we did in these experiments," Schacter said. "You need to have the testing...." Those tests...act as an incentive for students to pay closer attention to the lecture because they know they'll have to answer questions at the end of each segment.
Another surprising effect of the testing, Szpunar said, was to reduce testing anxiety among students, and to ease their fears that the lecture material would be very challenging.

I'm filing this under "Independent experimental evidence that the Khan Academy is doing it right."


Or then again, maybe not.

Adult Incentives and School Reform

This morning I saw Eugene Robinson: The racket with standardized test scores - The Washington Post

It is time to acknowledge that the fashionable theory of school reform — requiring that pay and job security for teachers, principals and administrators depend on their students’ standardized test scores — is at best a well-intentioned mistake, and at worst nothing but a racket.
I mean that literally. Beverly Hall, the former superintendent of the Atlanta public schools, was indicted on racketeering charges Friday...

and the problem seems to be that administrators, teachers, and students are all rewarded for doing well on measurements -- measurements which can be faked, so those who are disposed to fake them will do well. Business Insider reports on Atlanta Cheating Indictment Beverly Hall

Former 'Superintendent Of The Year' Could Go To Prison For 45 Years
Thirty-five Atlanta educators were indicted last week for allegedly participating in a cheating conspiracy involving one of America's most storied school superintendents.

and similarly Daily Kos discusses, saying

Robinson writes

Our schools desperately need to be fixed. But creating a situation in which teachers are more likely than students to cheat cannot be the right path.

....the vast majority of teachers do NOT cheat. The statement has the effect of smearing the profession. It is more than unfortunate that Robinson offered those words. For all the cheating scandals he can identify, even where teachers were involved, in some cases they were directed by their superiors to do things that are illegal and unethical....

I don't see that as a correction to Robinson, but as an explanation of part of the mechanism by which some teachers were led to cheat. Sure. Creating a situation in which [administrators and] teachers are [more] likely [than students] to cheat, whether because they are directly ordered to do so or simply because their evaluations depend on it, cannot be the right path. For some reason I am reminded of Twain's The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg, found as a Gutenberg text here.

Or then again....

update: I see a better write-up at Cheating in schools: There are no good guys here | The Economist, but not a basically different point of view.

Field Trips With Augmented Reality

This post is sort of a placeholder, for a train of thought prompted by reading Roadtrippers Redesigns the Travel Guide for Esoteric Exploration | Wired Design | Wired.com

Discover interesting places and paths through the country on the Roadtrippers app.

Field trips, or travel more generally, have always been an essential part of education, but it has recently gotten easier to see what you're looking at whether it's a rock, a bird, a building... you can look it up online while you're right in front of it. Like many people, I'm willing to sign up for a tour...but I'd be happier to sign up for a virtual tour at my own pace, taking the detours I wanted to take and learning what I wanted to learn, or just going along while one of my kids did so....I'd download a zillion video segments in advance so I could actually hear what the tour guide wanted to say. Wouldn't you? And I'd also like to take more tours by telepresence...
Well, maybe not. I dunno

Pod People

Udacity announces Course Pods: A New Way to Connect With Classmates

Udacity! What do you love about online learning? Udacity students have gotten in touch with us to rave about two things: flexibility and community.
Our classes are awesome because you can learn at your own pace (we’re lookin’ at you, back button) and from anywhere you want (no one knows you took that quiz from the bathroom)!
Now, while learning at your own pace and from your own place, you might be wondering about your classmates. Our passionate students love connecting for study sessions, helping each other through tough spots in the course, collaborating on group projects, and having fun along the way.
Our study groups are a cornerstone of our student community, and they just got a little bigger! You can already start your own study group through the course forums and Meetup.com. We are delighted to introduce...Course Pods!

I don't know that "Course Pods" will prove successful in Udacity itself or in a K-12 context, but I do think that the only way to find out is to try.


Or then again, we may just end up with pod people.