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!