Four Day Week?

Research on rural schools from Georgia State and Montana State comes up with a minor surprise: Four-day school week can improve academic performance, study finds -- ScienceDaily

The researchers found a four-day school week had a statistically significant impact on math scores for fifth-grade students, while reading scores were not affected....

"We thought that especially for the younger, elementary school kids, longer days on a shorter school week would hurt their academic performance because their attention spans are shorter. Also, a longer weekend would give them more opportunity to forget what they had learned."...

A number of school districts in the United States have moved from the traditional Monday through Friday schedule to a four-day week schedule as a cost-saving measure to reduce overhead and transportation costs. Four-day weeks have been in place for years in rural school districts in western states, particularly in Colorado, New Mexico and Wyoming....

Walker notes the results are only applicable to smaller and more rural school districts.

So, kids do better in math and as well in reading, while the community saves money. Still, there are lots of legitimate issues among the four-day school week pros and cons - Google Search. But it's interesting.

Unlock the Library

Economist/author Bryan Caplan has an interesting proposal to "change the K-12 curriculum in one small way"; he would Unlock the School Library

By this I mean...

1. Give kids the option of hanging out at the library during every break period.
2. Give kids the option of hanging out the library in lieu of electives.

My elementary, junior high, and high schools all had marvelous libraries. But they were virtually always closed to the student body. You couldn't go during recess or lunch. And you certainly couldn't say, "Instead of taking music/dance/art/P.E./woodshop, I'll read in the library." ....

Unlocking the school library requires almost no resources. Simply:...

After the novelty wears off, I expect many kids will get bored at the library. That's fine: Send them back to regular classes. But many other kids - especially nerdy kids - will seize the day.

I can see his point; I was certainly the sort of nerdy kid who would have spent a whole lot of time at the library. And of course there would have been teachers saying that I ought to be in music, art, P.E. and shop, because I would get so much out of them if I was forced to go, but it so happens that I was forced to go and I didn't get anything out of them. (I know, this will bother my sister if she reads it, but it happens to be true.) At any rate, it's an interesting proposal.

Test Rejections

A week or two ago, I noticed Radio Free Hamilton's Even More HCS Students Opt Out of Math Tests

Fewer HCS elementary and middle school students took this week's state-mandated math tests than took last week's English language arts (ELA) exams.

An actual majority refused to take the tests here. In the state as a whole, it was only about a sixth, but Tens of Thousands of New York Students Refuse Tests

Pressed for a reaction to the boycott, which is fueled by allegations that Common Core is rigid and age-inappropriate, and that the tests are excessive, Governor Andrew Cuomo chose to split the difference in characteristic style, by minimizing both the importance of the schooling standards to which his state government (like most) has committed, as well as belittling objections to the same.

"My position was, the department of education had not done a good job in introducing the Common Core, and they had rushed it, so we said, for a period of five years, the test scores won’t count," Cuomo told reporters. "So they can opt out if they want to, but on the other hand, if the child takes the test as practice, then the score doesn't count anyway."

"The grades are meaningless to the student," he added, not exactly shoring up the argument for committing time and effort to filling in ovals on a sheet of paper.

Former U.S. senator from New York, and current presidential hopeful, Hillary Clinton went a step further last week, referring to education as a "non-family enterprise."

So... Maybe parents and students have no business raising a fuss, in her view.

Ouch. Well, What If They Threw Common Core Tests and Nobody Came?

Maybe Common Core would have received a better reception if it had been imposed on the country in 1946, after years of regimentation and top-down decision-making from the New Deal bureacracy and the war effort. A gray standardized approach might have suited a collectivized era. But it was decades too late.

... as with so many things, one size doesn't fit all.

High-Tech Teaching: Japan

I'm a long-run techno-optimist about a lot of things, including education, but the crucial thing about any technology is how you use it... Lessons Learned from a Chalkboard: Slow and Steady Technology Integration (Bradley Emerling) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Every classroom I visited was equipped with a large green chalkboard. There were few computers, few projectors or smartboards, and no other visible forms of 21st century technology in most of the classrooms. Japanese colleagues and researchers confirmed this was representative of the average K-12 classroom in Japan. In January 2015, the Tokyo Broadcasting System reported approximately 75% of Japanese classrooms still use chalkboards as the primary medium for presentation of lesson content (Sankyuu, 2015).

My first reaction was one of astonishment. How could Japan, a society known for its creation of gadgets and highly specialized technological devices, be so far behind in their use of 21st century technology?

As I continued to record lessons, I began to note the masterful way Japanese teachers utilized this “primitive” instructional medium....

Since I spend a fair amount of time trying to keep up with Japanese robotics developments, I find this amusing...but it really depends on what lesson structure you want. If you can do it on a chalkboard, then computers provide only a very big waste of time and money. (And very much smaller screens.)

The K-12 Teacher and the Computer

On "the deconstruction of the K-12 teacher", we see When the Computer Takes Over for the Teacher - The Atlantic

I think it used to be taboo for teachers to borrow or buy plans written by other professionals, but it seems that times are changing. Just last week, I spoke with a history teacher from Santa Maria, California, who bluntly said, "I don’t ever write my own lesson plans anymore. I just give credit to the person who did." He explained, rather reasonably, that the materials are usually inexpensive or free; are extremely well made; and often include worksheets, videos, assessments, and links to other resources. Just as his administrators request, he can focus on being a facilitator, specializing in individualized instruction.

I’ve started recognizing a common thread to the latest trends in teaching. Flipped learning, blending learning, student-centered learning, project-based learning, and even self-organized learning—they all marginalize the teacher’s expertise. Or, to put it more euphemistically, they all transform the teacher into a more facilitative role....

Note that there's no claim here that the teacher is being marginalized; it's the teacher's expertise. And that might make a fundamental difference in who is qualified to be a teacher, and what pay scales should eventually be. Interesting.

Textbook Stories...

Environmental law professor Jonathan Adler writes in the Washington Post about Environmental history errors in a high school textbook - The Washington Post

The other night I took a look at a few pages in my daughter’s U.S. History textbook (Pearson Prentice-Hall, U.S. History: Reconstruction to the Present (Ohio Edition, 2008)) concerning the growth of the environmental movement in the 1960s and 1970s, as I was curious what my daughter was learning about it. I expected to disagree with some of book’s choice of emphasis or the way certain events are portrayed. What I did not expect, however, was to find a series of plain factual errors....

I'm reminded of experiences 20 years ago with my children's textbooks. I still have a letter (well, I still have the TeX file from which the letter was printed) from March 4, 1995, noting that page 197 of my 10-year-old son's science book, by Mallinson et al., defined "resistance" as "a force applied by a machine". That's the meaning of "resistance"? I added that

The Mallinson usage seems clearly counter to the ordinary English use of the word, as well as to that of traditional physics. I suspect a typographical error here, but there's no diagram, example, or calculation given which might clarify their meaning. That, I think, is a more serious problem than an erroneous definition, and I'd noticed it before with this book....

It's not really fair to say that the book was wrong, because the book didn't really mean anything by its definition....it was just words. The book was not even wrong. It's a problem noted by Richard Feynman in his fairly famous encounter with the California school textbook system, some thirty years earlier, emotionally described at Corruption in textbook-adoption proceedings: 'Judging Books by Their Covers'. This has been going on for a long time. Some people don't want to allow Wikipedia as a reference, because it does have errors. Many of them. Perhaps we shouldn't allow K-12 textbooks as references either.

Testing Teacher Effectiveness

Grant Wiggins, the "Understanding By Design" guy, agrees with Cuomo that the current local system of teacher ratings in NY is a "sham", but writes (from New Jersey) in An Open Letter to Governor Cuomo: Re-think the Regs of APPR | Granted, and...

Here is a simple analogy to make the point. You were a ballplayer and are a Yankees fan. But suppose only once per year, we “tested” the Yankees on their skills, on tests developed by experts. Now, imagine, the players do not know how they did, either during or after the test. Now imagine, the NYSED gives them a value-added score – with test security, so they cannot double-check or question the test results (or test validity). Worse, imagine in addition that the impartial evaluators and internal supervisors (coaches) went to one game where the Yankees were terrible – like the game last week in which they made 4 errors, left runners stranded, and pitched poorly. By the logic of your plan, we would be obligated to find Manager Girardi “ineffective.” But that’s both bad measurement and not common sense. Two weeks later it looks different, doesn’t it? Indeed, the charm of baseball is that a long season of 162 “tests” enables the truth of quality to out. If this is true for highly-skilled and trained professional athletes, what about novice young students?

In short, I fear you are making matters worse, not better, by this new round of reductionist rules. And by insisting that they be put into operation next year, with no time to really think them through, test them, and refine them ensures that this effort will backfire.

Smaller Schools, Bigger Achievements?

They're talking about urban schools, but I choose to focus on Small Is Good, in Small high school reform boosts districtwide outcomes -- ScienceDaily

"Small school reform lifted all boats."

Small school reform, in which new, small high schools replace large, comprehensive high schools, has been adopted by major U.S. cities, such as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Diego, and Boston. Studies in New York and Boston have found that small high schools deliver better outcomes -- including higher graduation rates -- than large high schools for urban students.

I'm convinced. :-)

Stand up to pay attention

One of many possible small improvements (or maybe it won't be confirmed; let's say one of many items worthy of exploration).. We think better on our feet, literally -- ScienceDaily

A study from the Texas A&M Health Science Center School of Public Health finds students with standing desks are more attentive than their seated counterparts. In fact, preliminary results show 12 percent greater on-task engagement in classrooms with standing desks, which equates to an extra seven minutes per hour of engaged instruction time.

I'm not sure how far to go with that "seven minutes per hour", simply adding on 12%, but if you can then it's a substantial increase to the school year....certainly my school years could have been stretched quite a bit with extra attentiveness, and maybe a standing desk -- like the one I'm typing this on -- would have helped with attentiveness as well as health. It's hard to say.

Research on Programs for Gifted Students

From the University of Iowa, U. S. schools are still shortchanging gifted kids, experts say -- ScienceDaily

This two-volume report is designed to "empower" parents, educators, administrators, and policy-makers with evidence and tools to implement 20 types of acceleration, which include early entrance to school, grade-skipping, moving ahead in one subject area, or Advanced Placement courses.

And just as important, A Nation Empowered aims to keep the conversation about acceleration going....

But it's not actually available quite yet; I follow links to Acceleration Institute

Coming Spring 2015

with a lot of other links, mostly having to do with the previous version of report that they're updating. Still, that's interesting too.

Share & Learn; iPad Usage Research

Science Daily reports on literacy testing of young technology users at Kindergartners who shared iPads in class scored higher on achievement tests -- ScienceDaily

a natural experiment where classrooms in one school had 1:1 iPads; classrooms in a second school had 23 iPads to share, where kids primarily used them in pairs; and classrooms in a third school had no iPads. She looked at the effect that using 1:1 iPads for one academic year (9 months), compared to the other two conditions, had on student literacy (as measured by the STAR Early Literacy Assessment).

Results showed that students in shared iPad classrooms significantly outscored their peers in 1:1 and non-iPad classrooms on the spring achievement test, even after controlling for baseline scores and student demographics. Blackwell found that shared iPad students scored approximately 30 points higher than 1:1 iPad students and non-iPad users.

Sometimes the best teacher is another kid -- and not necessarily an older kid, though it might be. I am reminded of some of what Sugata Mitra said in his TED talk at The child-driven education

In a series of real-life experiments from New Delhi to South Africa to Italy, he gave kids self-supervised access to the web and saw results that could revolutionize how we think about teaching....

Yes, you do need grown-ups sometimes (that's why Mitra's later work has been on his plan to School in the Cloud with the "Self Organized Learning Environment (SOLE) toolkit". Mitra wants to involve professional educators as much as possible...but his most dramatic successes have been with kids together with raw materials, sometimes encouraged by a "granny" who may or may not be physically present and who may or may not be professional at all. I think we need more experiments on "self-supervised" sharing. (With a grown-up in the background. Usually.)

NSF EdTech

Reports on reporting about what we're learning about learning (and, of course, teaching about teaching) at the Huffington Post's 7 Cyberlearning Technologies Transforming Education | Aaron Dubrow

...NSF funds basic cyberlearning research and since 2011 has awarded roughly 170 grants, totaling more than $120 million, to EdTech research projects around the country.

The speakers in the lecture series, all leading cyberlearning scholars, ... represent the forces transforming what education may look like in the future.

1. Classroom as Virtual Phenomenon: RoomQuakes and WallScopes

HelioRoom simulates the orbital motion of the planets in the Solar system on a set of synchronized computer displays situated on the walls of the classroom, with planets "orbiting" around the periphery of the room. ...

... RoomQuake, an earthquake simulation system where the classroom itself becomes an active seismic area. At unpredictable times throughout the unit, rumbles emanating from speakers attached to simulated seismographs signal to the class that an earthquake is occurring....

Students rush to terminals around the classroom, read the data from seismograms .... Over the course of six weeks and dozens of earthquakes, students discover a "fault line" emerging. ...

Tablets adjacent to the walls of classrooms serve as viewports into an imaginary space inside the walls filled with the virtual fauna in Wallcology. ...

2. Games for Good: Learning While You Play

... in the game "Citizen Science," created by Squire and his team, players help restore Lake Mendota, a real lake in Wisconsin that, in the year 2020, has become polluted. As players explore the landscape, they take water samples, interact with a virtual, simulated watershed and talk with stakeholders....

... for a game that might reach even broader audiences, Squire and colleagues created Progenitor X, a zombie-themed tissue engineering game. In Progenitor X, players learn about the relationships between cells, tissues, and organs while trying to survive a zombie invasion. ... As a member of The Progenitor X Defense Force, you are a part of a highly trained squad of scientists who use highly advanced bio-medical technology to locate, seek out, and treat infected humans to contain the threat. ....

"These projects are not only using technologies that only recently became possible. They also build on decades of excellent research on how people learn," said Chris Hoadley, the program officer at NSF who leads the Cyberlearning program. "I believe it's only by advancing technology design and learning research together that we'll be able to imagine the future of learning."...

3. Teaching Tykes to Program: Never Too Young to Control a Robot

... Bers described her latest project, the KIWI robotic kit (subsequently renamed KIBO), which teaches programming through robotics, without screens, tablets, or keyboards. Using KIBO, students scan wooden blocks to give robots simple commands, in the process learning sequencing, one of the most important skills for early age groups. By combining a series of commands, kids make the robot move, dance, sing, sense the environment or light up....

4. Virtual role-play and robo-tutors

... Virtual role-play - where learners engage in simulated encounters with artificially intelligent agents that behave and respond in a culturally accurate manner - has been shown to be effective at teaching cross-cultural communication.

"You learn by playing a role in a simulation of some real life situation"

"We found in our military training that when soldiers use this approach, once they get into a foreign country -- let's say they're sitting down with local leaders -- they feel as if it's a familiar situation to them... Moreover, the software could address the shortage of qualified teachers able to teach Chinese, Arabic and other less popular languages... The first Web-based course was tested last year via Virtual Virginia, a statewide virtual school program, and received overwhelmingly positive ratings from the students....

5. Tools for Real-time Visual Collaboration

... "Computers have been individualistic devices," said Ramani. "But a new class of technology is emerging that allows us to engage in our individual learning process and also in a collaborative process." SkWiki ... allows many participants to collaboratively create digital multimedia projects on the web using many kinds of media types, including text, hand-drawn sketches, and photographs....

6. Fusing data collection, computational modeling and data analysis

Simulation and modeling have come to be regarded as the "third pillar" of science... ... By embedding simulations and sensor data collectors in the classroom, Dorsey and Wilensky are able to aid students in gathering, visualizing and analyzing data from multiple sources. A principal innovation of InquirySpace is the integration of the Concord Consortium's CODAP data exploration software with the modeling environments. This integration enables students to plan extended investigations of models, to do sophisticated analyses of the model runs, and to engage in arguments from evidence. ...

7. Virtual Worlds and Augmented Reality: Increasing ecological understanding

... Two decades ago, with funding from NSF, Dede started investigating head-mounted displays and room-sized virtual environments... At the beginning of the two to four week EcoMUVE curriculum, the students discover that all of the fish in a virtual pond have died. They then work in teams to determine the complex causal relationships that led to the die-off. The experience immerses the students as ecosystem scientists. ... At the end of the investigation, all of the students participate in a mini-scientific conference where they show their findings and the research behind it.

I don't know how well the experiments will scale up, but I would like to note that all of this seems to require ending the teaching-to-the-test that the last few posts have been about. They all seem to require teamwork, but none of them have much to do with traditional lectures. All of them have a learn-by-doing framework, where the computer facilitates the doing -- or even provides the universe for that doing to be done in.

Creation vs Current Curriculum

This is a rather more abstract level than I usually post about, but I want to link to Yong Zhao's recommendations at A World at Risk: An Imperative for a Paradigm Shift to Cultivate 21st Century Learners

• Stop prescribing and imposing on children a narrow set of content through common curriculum standards and testing.
• Start personalizing education to support the development of unique, creative, and entrepreneurial talents. ... ...
• Stop constraining children to learning opportunities present in their immediate physical environments by assigning them to classes and teachers.
• Start engaging them in learning opportunities that exist in the global community, beyond their class and school walls.
• Stop forcing children to learn what adults think they may need and testing them to what degree they have mastered the required content.
• Start allowing children the opportunity to engage in creating authentic products and learn what they are interested in, just in time, not just in case.
• Stop benchmarking to measures of excellence in the past, such as international test scores.
• Start inventing the excellence of the future. You cannot fix the horse wagon to get the moon. We have to work on rocket science.

A Final Word
To implement these recommendations, the first thing we need is to abandon ... the obsolete employment-oriented educational paradigm, the very mindset that both gave birth to and has been perpetuated by A Nation at Risk. After thirty years of experiments that have brought revolutionary, destructive changes to American education, without any measureable improvement, it is time to be freed from its spirit.

As Newsweek found almost five years ago, reporting on The Creativity Crisis

When faculty of a major Chinese university asked Plucker to identify trends in American education, he described our focus on standardized curriculum, rote memorization, and nationalized testing. “After my answer was translated, they just started laughing out loud,” Plucker says. “They said, ‘You’re racing toward our old model. But we’re racing toward your model, as fast as we can.’ ”
Overwhelmed by curriculum standards, American teachers warn there’s no room in the day for a creativity class....

Campbell's Law, Standardized Testing, Accountability, Atlanta

I've mentioned Campbell's law on this blog before. As Wikipedia says, Campbell's law

is an adage developed by Donald T. Campbell:

"The more any quantitative social indicator (or even some qualitative indicator) is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."

The social science principle of Campbell's law is sometimes used to point out the negative consequences of high-stakes testing in U.S. classrooms. This may take the form of teaching to the test or outright cheating.

This week SlashDot reports Prosecutors Get an 'A' On Convictions of Atlanta Ed-Reform-Gone-Bad Test Cheats - Slashdot

in early 2010, the Atlanta Business Chronicle reported on how Hall and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation were bringing a "fair and transparent evaluation and support mechanism" to the Atlanta Public Schools. "We are excited to continue our [$23.6 million] partnership with APS and Dr. Hall," said Gates Foundation director of education Vicki L. Phillips. Five years earlier, in a 2005 Gates Foundation press release, Hall said, "We look forward to partnering with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to take our reform efforts to the next level."

And now they're in jail -- well, Hall was facing 45 years in prison, but died before the end of the trial. Eleven are in jail. And it's hard to argue that this isn't a foreseeable consequence of excessive reliance on measurables -- i.e., on standardized testing. As the Atlantic puts it, Eleven Atlanta Educators Have Been Convicted for Cheating Conspiracy, Revealing the Dangers of Standardized Testing — The Atlantic

The scandal shows the dangers of hyper-testing and bureaucracy in a school district serving a particularly disadvantaged population of students. Unfortunately, although what happened in Atlanta is especially egregious, these educators' actions are not unusual...

People do respond to incentives.

That doesn't mean that testing is bad...testing is good, every teacher uses it. High-stakes testing creates strong incentives which will distort results and hurt some kids. The kind of low-stakes testing built into Khan Academy or Ted-Ed lessons is pretty safe because no individual score is worth gaming. But the Big Test Day idea, where scores mean money, strikes me as fundamentally flawed.

Test-taking

Fareed Zakaria of the Washington Post talks about Why America’s obsession with STEM education is dangerous but maybe his best points are about the attempts to make schools focus on test-taking skills:

the United States has never done well on international tests, and they are not good predictors of our national success. Since 1964, when the first such exam was administered to 13-year-olds in 12 countries, America has lagged behind its peers, rarely rising above the middle of the pack and doing particularly poorly in science and math. And yet over these past five decades, that same laggard country has dominated the world of science, technology, research and innovation.

Consider the same pattern in two other highly innovative countries, Sweden and Israel. Israel ranks first in the world in venture-capital investments as a percentage of GDP; the United States ranks second, and Sweden is sixth, ahead of Great Britain and Germany. These nations do well by most measures of innovation, such as research and development spending and the number of high-tech companies as a share of all public companies. Yet all three countries fare surprisingly poorly in the OECD test rankings. Sweden and Israel performed even worse than the United States on the 2012 assessment, landing overall at 28th and 29th, respectively, among the 34 most-developed economies.

But other than bad test-takers, their economies have a few important traits in common...

Bottom line, their economies work pretty well--and attempts to fix a 50-year-old "crisis" of bad test scores do run a serious risk of doing much more harm than good. We need more innovators, not more test-takers...STEM has to be a big part of that, and many people doing STEM understand that just fine. By all means, let us advocate "STEAM not STEM," but if somebody starts advocating standardized tests as a basis for evaluating creativity...ummm.... no. Just say no.

Motivation, Feedback, Content

For an infovore like me, the Internet does indeed seem like a gigantic, interactive version of the libraries that took (or do I mean provided?) so much of my childhood -- and between them, they've served as basis for self-education that keeps on going. But does that provide an alternative to classroom learning for normal people? I dunno. Arnold Kling suggests in Online Self-Education: The Bigger, Closer Library | askblog that we

think of learning as requiring motivation, feedback, and content. The library has the content, but you have to be motivated to use it and you need feedback to know whether you are using it well. Perhaps right now the classroom provides better motivation and feedback.

However, I expect within a few years to see feedback systems on phones and tablets that are at least competitive with the feedback process that occurs in a classroom. At that point, the only contribution that classroom time can make is to help with motivation–teachers motivating students and students motivating one another.

That's quite a claim, but it's not at all impossible. Feedback systems on phones and tables will not, of course, be similar to the feedback system provided by a teacher any more than a sewing machine's motions are similar to those of a traditional seamstress. However, the app that reacts to your input will have learned from experience with tens of millions of students, some of whom had more or less exactly the problem you're having. Dissimilar != worse.

TEP Charter: Teacher Pay, Student Scores

Wikipedia describes The Equity Project as

The Equity Project (TEP) is a New York charter school opened in September 2009. The school will instruct students in fifth through eighth grades and will pay its teachers a starting salary of $125,000 per year, more than double the national average. Teachers must also work double the hours a typical teacher works.

Now Vox reports that This school paid teachers $125,000 a year — and test scores went up

Four years later, students at TEP score better on state tests than similar students elsewhere. The differences were particularly pronounced in math, according to a study from Mathematica Policy Research released in October. (The study was funded by the Gates Foundation.) After four years at the school, students had learned as much math as they would have in 5.6 years elsewhere: ...

... Teachers at TEP also get more time to collaborate and played a bigger role in school decision-making than teachers in other jobs. Teachers were paired up to observe each others' lessons and provide feedback, collaboration that experts agree is important but happens too infrequently. During a six-week summer training, teachers also helped set school policy.

The workload at TEP, where teachers also take on administrative duties and had an average of 31 students per class, is fairly heavy even with the extra pay. But the school also had more teacher turnover than usual. Nearly half of first-year teachers didn't return for their second year, either because they resigned or because they were not rehired.

Intriguing...and a hopeful sign generally. It should be noted, however, that I got to that report from the link at statistics-prof Andrew Gelman's blog on Time-release pedagogy?? - Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science

...there’s something strange here or i’m missing something obvious. That jump from 3-year impact to 4-year seems excessive.

That does seem really odd. Still, it's a hopeful sign.

State Policy Impact on HCS Budget

(updated below 2015-03-31, and again 2015-04-03)
A link with clips to a document on the Hamilton Central website, at Factors Affecting the Hamilton Central School 2015-16 Budget (PDF)

New York Schools face an exceptionally difficult task when preparing budgets this year. The Governor has linked funding to an aggressive legislative agenda, and has pushed back the dates for sharing state budget runs with districts. This document provides a brief summary of how these proposals could impact HCS.

The Gap Elimination Adjustment(GEA) is an adjustment to state aid to schools first implemented in 2009-10 to help close large state budget deficits. ... The amount taken from this year’s budget was $474,572. We cannot predict the GEA amount for next year’s budget....With a 5 billion dollar state budget surplus there is no longer a budget gap, and there is no justification for continuing the GEA.

The final tax cap calculation for HCS that had to be submitted to the state by March 1 was -0.49%. In order to be tax cap compliant this year, we would have to reduce the 2014-15 levy amount by $32,232. Of course our expenses continue to rise, so even keeping the budget the same as the current school year would result in cuts to our current offerings....

The Governor and the Board of Regents advocate changing APPR so that 50% of a teacher’s performance score will come from student performance on standardized tests. [Part of the remaining score must be based on] observations... by an independent observer... This is an unfunded mandate, and would put more strain on our budget....

Contact Information:

• Governor Andrew M. Cuomo http://www.governor.ny.gov/contact
• Assemblyman Bill Magee contact via online form: ​ http://assembly.state.ny.us/mem/William-Magee/contact
• Senator Dave Valesky​: valesky@nysenate.gov​
• Members of the Board of Regents: http://www.regents.nysed.gov/members/
• HCS Board of Education: boe@hamiltoncentral.org

Update:Deal Is Reached on New York State Budget; Ethics Measures Are Included - NYTimes.com

The governor had dangled a $1.1 billion increase in education aid in exchange for the Legislature agreeing to pass a series of reforms, including tying teacher evaluations more closely to students’ state test scores, making it more difficult for teachers to receive tenure and allowing the state to take over low-performing schools.

Teachers’ unions energetically opposed the governor’s proposals. ...

In the end, the budget will include an even larger increase in education aid – about $1.6 billion, according to Assembly Democrats. Cuomo administration officials said the budget would establish parameters for teacher evaluations that would result in a more rigorous evaluation system; the changes would be left to the State Education Department to work out.

The budget agreement would lengthen the time before teachers are eligible for tenure to four years, from the current three; Mr. Cuomo had proposed a five-year wait.

Update 2:Estimated State Aid for 2015-2016 is shown at 2014-15 AND 2015-16 AIDS PAYABLE ... HAMILTON which they summarize as

$ CHG 15-16 MINUS 14-15                                      140,890
% CHG TOTAL AID                                                 3.26
 
$ CHG W/O BLDG, REORG BLDG AID                               260,655
% CHG W/O BLDG, REORG BLDG AID                                  7.43

Most items are increased a bit, but the biggest single change is the $-291,889 reduction ("GAP RESTORATION") in the GEA. There's some discussion at Only 1 school district in Central New York will get state aid cut in NY state budget | syracuse.com

Teacher Effectiveness, Teacher Training

On the topic of making teachers better...Arnold Kling, economist-who-is-skeptical-about-pretty-much-everything, notes in his "Null Hypothesis" series that Null Hypothesis Watch | askblog

On the bright side, TFA teachers appear to be at least as effective as regular teachers when it comes to teaching reading and math to elementary students. The fact that TFA requires only a five-week crash course in pedagogy — rather than traditional teacher certification — is another reason to question the value of an education degree.

I don't really doubt that "good teacher"/"bad teacher" is a very important distinction, at least in some situations, but it doesn't seem that education degrees have much to do with it. Not surprising, I suppose, since otherwise home-schoolers would perform substantially worse than those in public schools.

Ineffective Schools are Ineffective at Judging Effectiveness?

More precisely, failing schools rate their teachers higher than successful schools rate theirs. Well, at least in some cases. Grant Wiggins tries to compare NY schools that are doing badly with some that are doing well, as a way of evaluating Cuomo's much-criticized criticisms. This is not easy, and he ends up comparing just three against three. In Teacher Effectiveness Ratings – Part 1 he finds a

Tentative conclusion. From this (limited) data we can infer that in a successful school – whether clearly improving or doing well in absolute terms, on credible exams and client survey results – the local teacher effectiveness ratings are often lower, sometimes far lower, than those provided locally to teachers in failing schools. So, there would appear to be some merit to the core premise of the Cuomo report, regardless of how mean-spirited the approach feels to many NY educators.

This fits my biases. In an ideal world, we would just make the failing schools do teacher evaluations like the more successful ones, and then all schools would be successful. Somehow, my confidence in my biases is low: I doubt this will work. Still, it's possible that a culture of criticism would help a bit. It's also possible that a comparison of failing schools in general against successful schools in general would fail to confirm Wiggins' work here....and yet, and yet, it really does fit my biases. Perhaps I'm just ineffective at judging the effectiveness of effectiveness-judgement.

Charters etc up, reading comprehension level, null hypothesis?

Pro-charter school group estimates 14 percent enrollment gain nationwide - The Washington Post

The National Alliance of Public Charter Schools estimates in a new report that 2.9 million children now attend U.S. charter schools, up 14 percent from last school year.

Note that 14% increase per year corresponds to a doubling time of just under 6 years...quadruple in twelve...eight times as many in eighteen years...well, maybe not. I do think the proliferation of charters is a Somewhat Good Thing, partly because choice is a way to get people to be happy (even if actual results are no better, I think happiness is a good thing and if you don't, well....okay.) Mostly, though, because I like experimentation; each public charter (or in some cases groups of charters) is an experiment in doing things a bit differently than whatever failed in the area it's trying to serve. We don't know what works for which students in which kinds of learning, and we won't find out without trying, and that will involve a bunch of failed experiments and failed programs and failed schools, which is sad but necessary. (500 charters opened and 200 closed.) Here's Grant Wiggins, thinking about public schooling mainly, on the way that zillions of trials (and hugely rising expenditures) have utterly failed to improve average reading comprehension: Maybe we don’t understand what readers really do – and why it matters | Granted, and...

Numerous causes and their implied solutions, as readers know, have been proposed for flat reading scores: poverty, low expectations, inadequate background knowledge, an anti-boy bias in schools (especially in terms of book selection), IQ links to reading ability, computer games, TV, etc. etc.

The utterly flat national trend line, over decades, says to me that none of these theories holds up well, no matter how plausible each may seem to its proponents. Perhaps it’s time to explore a more radical but common sense notion: maybe we don’t yet understand reading comprehension and how it develops over time.

If we don't specifically know what it is we're hoping they learn, we don't know where they're going and it's hard to help them get there, even if we have tests that supposedly tell us whether or not they've arrived. Of course maybe some or most or all of the efforts really are working, but they're roughly balanced by negative effects: maybe the harder we try the more they fail. As Wiggins put it last month in A Post from Paris | Granted, and...

A 7th grade girl, when interviewed by teachers as part of our summer institutes, said the most amazing thing when asked how she felt about ‘typical’ teaching. “The more the teacher talks, the more I feel alone and useless.”

Or maybe the truth is close to Arnold Kling's "Null Hypothesis". The Null Hypothesis in Education is Hard to Disprove | askblog

In education, the null hypothesis is that nothing makes a long-term, scalable, replicable difference. That is:

1. Take any pedagogical innovation or educational intervention.

2. Subject it to a controlled experiment.

3. Evaluate the experiment’s outcome several years later.

4. If the experiment works, attempt to replicate the experiment in more situations.

By the time you reach step 4, if not sooner, you will be unable to show that the innovation makes any difference in outcomes. What this suggests to me is that in the long run it is the characteristics of the students that determine outcomes, at least on average. Think of an individual student as “predestined” to reach a certain outcome....

That's an extremely uncomfortable way to think, even at the margin. It's obviously false in extreme cases, such as urban poverty, but it's not obviously false for the programs at the margin, i.e. programs that are supported and opposed with reasonably thoughtful people on both sides. Kling notes an OECD report saying The Null Hypothesis Strikes Again | askblog

In practice, however, grade repetition has not shown clear benefits for the students who were held back or for school systems as a whole.

One interpretation of this is that the marginal benefit of an additional year of schooling is zero. However, that interpretation is not something that anyone wants to discuss.

I don't actually believe even the marginal version of the null hypothesis...I think that a sufficiently-responsive educational system could actually evaluate each kid and in almost all cases say "this is the group they fit in (diagnosis) and this is what worked on members of that group (i.e. what they should do next)." In software. On a cell phone.

But not this year. :-)

Depressed Teachers, Low Class Performance

I notice this morning a report on a Florida study: Elementary teachers' depression symptoms related to students' learning -- ScienceDaily

Teachers experience some of the highest levels of job-related stress, and such stress may leave them more vulnerable to depression. How do elementary school teachers' symptoms of depression affect the quality of the classroom environment and students' learning? A new study has found that teachers who reported more symptoms of depression than their fellow teachers had classrooms that were of lesser quality across many areas, and students in these classrooms had lower performance gains, particularly in math...

The researchers looked at 27 teachers and their 523 third-grade students (primarily White and from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds) in a Florida school district. Teachers reported the frequency of their symptoms of clinical depression, and students' basic reading and math skills were assessed throughout the year.

My first question, though, is: cause or effect or both (i.e., causal loop)? Do classes do badly because the teachers are depressed, or are teachers depressed because their classes are (or are expected to be) doing badly? (Or both?)

If the depression results from job-related stress, and if (low) classroom quality results from many factors which contribute to job-related stress in many ways, then it would be really surprising not to find a correlation between measures of classroom quality problems on the one hand, and symptoms of depression on the other. I suppose a mild depression that we see may actually be making visible classroom troubles mildly less bad, if we believe in Depressive Realism | Psychology Today

While people with depression can suffer from cognitive distortions, the scientific literature suggests that those with only mild-to-moderate depression can also have more accurate judgment about the outcome of so-called contingent events (events which may or may not occur), and a more realistic perception of their role, abilities, and limitations. This so-called 'depressive realism' may enable a person with depression to shed the Pollyanna optimism and rose-tinted spectacles that shield us from reality, to see life more accurately, and to judge it accordingly.

So it's not an easy call, if you want to know what influences which -- but either way, it does seem worth watching for symptoms of depression...and one of those symptoms, though far from conclusive, is a class that's not doing well. Interesting.

3D Printing

The school's YouTube channel just uploaded a video, at Link 3D Printing at Hamilton Central - YouTube

Thanks to a gift from the Emerald Foundation, 3D printing is now a reality. Please check out this short video (sorry no sound), to see what we have printed so far and to see the assembly of a mechanical hand that can be used with children that may be missing some or all of one of there hands.

For those who haven't been following the 3D printing developments, here from two years ago is Dad Uses 3D Printer To Make His Son A Prosthetic Hand (VIDEO)

Leon McCarthy was born without fingers on his left hand, but with some help from his dad, he can now draw, pick up food and hold a water bottle using a homemade prosthetic.
CBS Evening News reports that instead of paying tens of thousands of dollars for a factory-made prosthetic hand, the 12-year-old's father, Paul McCarthy, printed one.
The Massachusetts dad had spent two years searching for affordable ways to give his son a prosthetic. Finally, he found inspiration on the Internet. He told Fox that he found a YouTube video detailing the work of Ivan Owen, who used a 3D printer to create a prosthetic hand for a 5-year-old in 2011. Following in Owen's footsteps, McCarthy used a 3D printer purchased for his son's school and began working on the hand with his son.
Earlier this summer, NPR reported that McCarthy used online directions from Owen to put the prosthetic hand together and -- with a little trial and error -- created a hand that Leon was able to try.

It's not just humans: 9 Animals Whose Lives Improved Thanks to 3D Printing

the fifth-grade students of May Howard Elementary School in Savannah, Ga., went well beyond your average class work when they designed and built a 3D-printed prosthetic for an injured box turtle appropriately named Stumpy.

(That slide show ends with a 3D printed replacement beak for an injured eagle.) And of course it's not just prosthetics. 3D Printing: Are You Ready for the New Decentralized Industrial Revolution? | WIRED

In the field of medicine, 3D printing of complex living tissues, commonly known as bioprinting, is opening up new avenues for regenerative medicine. ... This cutting edge technology in conjunction with stem cell research is likely to revolutionize the made-to-order organs, cutting across the transplant waiting lists.
The Aerospace industry, an early adopter of this technology, is already designing small to large 3D printed parts saving time, material and costs.
The Automobile world is already witnessing crowd-sourced, open-source 3D printed vehicles driving off of the showroom floors...

And yesterday's news included Scientists develop superfast 3D printed octopus submarine | 3D Printer News & 3D Printing News... And so on, and on and on.

So, is this a good thing to be doing in school? I think so. Will it improve test scores? Um... probably not, which for me is one more reason for not over-emphasizing test scores. Will it measurably help students get Ready For Jobs? (I.e., has the prospective unemployment rate among HCS graduates ten years hence been measurably lowered?) Some will say yes, but I think probably not. Why, then, is it a good thing to be doing in school?
That's not an easy question...but I think that I think that school, to a significant extent, ought to be about feeding dreams. So personally I approve. Yay!

College Advising

CONVERSABLE ECONOMIST: High School Career and Technical Education

How will those who do not attend college... make a connection to jobs...? The most popular answer is that public policy should encourage... college, but I'm skeptical about that answer.
From the student point of view, imagine someone who has struggled to make it through K-12 schooling, perhaps consistently ranking in, say, the 30th percentile of academic performance. That person has for years received a consistent message that academic studies are not their strong point. Telling such a person that the route to adult success involves yet more years of study, this time in a more academically intense environment where they are likely to be closer to the bottom and to struggle even harder, doesn't seem like a positive message to send.
This point is an uncomfortable one to make. It's emotionally much easier to remember true stories about a student who didn't seem to be doing well, but then soared. ... We need alternative pathways to job and career success that don't assume a college degree is the right path for everyone.

It's not obvious what a high school can or should do, but it's worth thinking about.

Feb 4: Global School Play Day

I've mentioned educational psychologist Peter Gray many times, e.g. here and here and here. Right now he's promoting an event. Spread the Word: Feb 4 is Global School Play Day | Psychology Today

Global School Play Day is more than just a day of play. It's a day of acknowledgement that play matters, that kids need play, that our society has gone amok with testing and drilling and making kids sit in seats and has forgotten what childhood is all about. This is for affirming the child’s right and need to play. It is a day for parents, educators, playground directors, city planners—for everyone—to think about what they can do to make free play once again a major part of childhood.

Take a look at the website. Listen to the official Play Day Song (at the website). Announce it on your Facebook pages. Tweet it. Do everything you can to spread the word. Wouldn’t it be great if every school everywhere signed on?

Maybe so.

Teaching Tolerance?

It would be nice to think that niceness is improved by education; ignorant people are less nice, e.g. less tolerant, than the educated. But maybe that's not what matters. Does economic freedom lead to greater tolerance?

...the data shows that when a society has impressive scores on property rights security and low inflation ... these characteristics are strongly and positively correlated with tolerance of gays. It’s possible that low inflation, and the behavior of a central bank, are stand-ins for the general trustworthiness of a nation’s government and broader institutions, and such trustworthiness helps foster tolerance....

We are often told that education is an important remedy, yet it does not register as a meaningful factor in the cross-country data in this paper. Higher levels of education simply have not correlated significantly with higher levels of tolerance across countries.

I suppose that "I have a post-secondary degree" ... "I have a PhuD" might translate as "I have learned to absorb, echo and elaborate on whatever my culture/government wanted." That might be it. Sigh.

Google Classroom, mobile version

Google Classroom is a big deal, just as a set of utilities to make instruction work a bit better. Now it's an app: Google rolling out Classroom mobile app for students, teachers | ZDNet

The mobile version of Classroom, Lugo explained, is designed to further facilitate communications between teachers and students, namely through the addition of a teacher assignments page and the ability to archive classes.

Students will also be able to attach files (i.e. PDFs) and use the mobile device's built-in camera to attach photos to their assignments, whether they be drawings for an art class, a family tree for social studies, or diagrams and results for science experiments.

"And if they've forgotten their homework, they can ask someone at home to snap a photo, text it and then turn it in with the app," Lugo remarked. "Of course, if the dog has actually eaten it, Classroom can't help you."

My main reaction to this is a memory of correspondence-school courses in elementary school, just over half a century ago while living in Veracruz. Writing under Mom's supervision had advantages, even with the actual teachers being weeks away by snail mail. Google Classroom utilities can't replace teachers -- but they can expand the set of available frameworks for teaching.

Or then again, maybe not.

Timing the Vegetables

The Journal of Preventive Medicine (via TreeHugger) says that in elementary school, Kids will eat more veggies if you let them play first : TreeHugger

Moving recess to before lunch increased consumption of fruits and vegetables by "0.16 servings per child", which might sound small, but it represents a 54% increase, which is huge. Pre-lunch recess also increased the number of children eating at least one serving of fruits or vegetables by 10% points.
Another beneficial effect of this simple change was the dramatic reduction in wasted food, by about 40%.

It's the sort of thing that I would class as "worth a try", both for schools and households. Wouldn't you?