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.

Teaching Entrepreneurship

Yong Zhao keeps explaining that the crucial skills we're not teaching are those of entrepreneurs...Well, here's a single MOOC course that tries to be the capstone of the program we're not providing, at Udacity Blog: How to Build a Startup Available With Certificates, Coaching & Project

Taught by serial entrepreneur Steve Blank, who founded eight startups, with four that have gone public, this class teaches you the key steps necessary to bring your product from concept to market. With the full course experience, you will talk to customers, build a Business Model Canvas, prototype your product, and pitch to coaches.

After completing a final project, you’ll also earn a certificate verifying your new entrepreneurship skills. Don’t let that next million dollar idea get away.

I don't believe that this has college-course prerequisites; I wonder if it would be a good idea to use its ideas as an implied critique of a high-school curriculum.

Disruption

I strongly doubt the "2015" here, but I think "The Futurist" is right to think that the education industry is headed for a multi-faceted disruption of the general sort that he describes: the jobs and careers that will best survive in the 21st century will require skills that we now associate with a college degree, and personality traits which we often signal with a college degree, but they don't actually require a degree of any kind. And that opens us up to changes in education. The Futurist: The Education Disruption : 2015

Google, always leading the way, no longer mandates college degrees as a requirement, and has recently disclosed that about 14% of its employees do not have them. If a few other technology companies follow suit, then the workforce will soon have a pool of people working at very desirable employers, who managed to attain their position without the time and expense of college. If employers in less dynamic sectors still have resistance to this concept, they will find it harder to ignore the growing number of resumes from people who happen to be alumni of Google, despite not having the required degree. As change happens on the margins, it will only take a small percentage of the workforce to be hired by prestigious employers.

...  the ever-increasing variety of technological disruption means that the foremost career of the modern era is that of the serial entrepreneur. If universities are not the place where the foremost career can be learned, then how important are formal degrees from these universities? Since each entrepreneurial venture is different, the individual will have to synthesize a custom solution from available components.

... Udacity, Coursera, MITx, Khan Academy, and Udemy are just a few of the entities enabling low-cost education at all levels. Some are for-profit, some are non-profit. Some address higher education, and some address K-12 education. Some count as credit towards degrees, and some are not intended for degree-granting, but rather for remedial learning. But among all these websites, an innovative pupil can learn a variety of seemingly unrelated subjects and craft an interlocking, holistic education that is specific to his or her goals. ....
(Moody's has already downgraded the outlook of the entire US higher education industry). But most importantly, the most valuable knowledge will become increasingly self-taught from content available to all, and the entire economy will begin the process of adjusting to this new reality.

Parts of this are certainly true.

Out of Basement Readiness

A note from Yong Zhao at the beginning of this month: Education in the Age of Globalization » Blog Archive » College Ready vs. Out-of-Basement Ready: Shifting the Education Paradigm

The Common Core and most education reforms around the world define the outcome of schooling as readiness for college and career readiness. But as recent statistics suggest, college-readiness, even college-graduation-readiness, does not lead to out-basement-readiness. ...
They are the “boomerang kids,” writes a New York Times magazine article last week. These were good students. They were ready for college. They paid for college (many with borrowed money). They completed all college requirements. They did not drop out. And they graduated from college. But they are back in their parents’ basement for there is no career for them, ready or not.
The reason is simpler than many would like to accept: education has been preparing our students for an economy that no longer exists. ...
The “boomerang kids” are not poorly educated, but miseducated. They were prepared to look for jobs, but not to create jobs. They were prepared to solve problems, but not to identify problems or ask questions. ...
the more successful these reform efforts become, the more “boomerang kids” we will have.... ... The Common Core wants your kids to develop career readiness, but ask the question: who is equipped to create the careers they will become ready for?
So my 4th of July suggestion: Stop the Common Core or ready your basement for your college graduates.

Well, it's not entirely an educational problem; regulatory frameworks normally (necessarily?) favor those who already have a seat at the table. so an increasingly regulated economy has less room for the innovation that creates jobs, even if the innovators are prepared to do their part. But I think he's right: it is partly an educational problem, and our reforms are moving in the wrong direction.

Or then again, maybe not.

"American Graduate Week"

This week is apparently American Graduate Week, following up from the American Graduate Day Announcement

Unless graduation rates increase, nearly 12 million students will likely drop out over the next decade, resulting in a loss to the nation of $1.5 trillion in lost wages and increased social costs due to crime and healthcare. Among students who do graduate, one-third need remedial courses in college and far fewer will go on to earn a college degree. Yet, more than half of all new jobs in the next decade will require some postsecondary education.

As that phrasing suggests, the "crisis" is not an increase in dropout rates, but rather an increase in the need for the qualifications which graduation is an attempt to represent. Really we don't need high school graduates; we need adults whose education suffices for a life of production, consumption, creation, family, and citizenship. (Hm, is that all?) So we have an effort by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting which the NYT reports as Public Broadcasting Takes Role in Improving Graduation Rates

While graduation rates have inched up in recent years, nearly 25 percent of students over all drop out.

And Ray Suarez of PBS imagines our current system as a mechanism for generating dropouts, a mechanism in need of sabotage; Call is Out to Sabotage the Dropout Crisis | PBS NewsHour

The National Council of La Raza, the nation's largest Latino civil rights organization, helps run a charter school in Los Angeles? Who knew? A not-for-profit called BuildOn takes students who are on the verge of dropping out and gives them international service learning experiences, of the kind that has become commonplace for upper middle class kids, but is much less available to poor kids. Harlem RBI takes teens with school troubles, puts them on baseball and softball teams, and requires tutoring, workshops, and homework help to keep a player's average high enough to stay on the team.

The athletics approach is one I have to keep reminding myself about: it's not one that appealed to me as a kid. But it's not exactly a newfangled notion. In Plato's world,

Both boys and girls receive the same kind of education. Elementary education consisted of music and gymnastics, designed to ...create a harmonious person.

And I think archery and riding went in there too, although I also think story-telling comes even earlier, in character formation. But anyway athletics is important, somewhere in there, even if it might be minimized for people like me. But then, as Plato also put it,

“Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.”

Fair enough. I suspect that somewhat greater attention to (and measurement of) what amuses kids' minds would do quite a bit towards raising graduation rates, and even the rate of achievement of any particular level of qualifications.

Or then again, maybe not.

Teacher Evaluation

Economics Nobelist Gary Becker seems to approve this summer's new teacher-evaluation research; in Good and Bad Teachers: How to Tell the Difference he says

Teacher unions all over the country have fought against using performance-based measures to evaluate teachers, but the unions are gradually losing this battle...
...the criterion used in evaluating teachers by many school systems and also by academic articles on school reform is the value added (VA) by teachers to student performance; namely, the improvements in students’ test scores as a result of taking classes of different teachers.
... the fundamental way to judge teachers is not how their students do on tests, but how different teachers affect the likelihood that their students finish high school and go to college, how teachers affect the earnings of their students after they enter the labor force, and whether their students get involved in gangs and crimes.
A small number of recent academic studies have tried to see how well VA measures predict how students do when they become adults. A summary of a good study along these lines by Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and Jonah Rockoff was published this summer in the journal Education Next under the title “Great Teaching”. ... 20 years... 2.5 million children ...
They find large effects on subsequent adult earnings when these young students had teachers who produced good improvements in test scores...

teachers with good VA ratings should be paid considerably more than teachers with bad ratings.

Or then again, maybe not.

OECD: International Education at a Glance 2012

The OECD Education at a Glance 2012 report is out; the Huffington Post leads with

while the U.S. boasts high education attainment levels overall, it lags behind other countries that are increasing attainment levels at a higher rate.

TechCrunch, however, says "who cares?". Why It’s Never Mattered That America’s Schools ‘Lag’ Behind Other Countries | TechCrunch

The scorecard for the U.S. is not pretty:

• The U.S. ranks 14th in higher education attainment at 42% of 25-34 with a degree, 20 points behind the leader, South Korea.
• The U.S. ranks 26th in early childhood education (69%)
• The U.S. is the 6th worst in terms of high school graduation, with 23% failing to attain a diploma

“Based on these trends, the U.S. may find that an increasing number of countries will approach or surpass its attainment levels in the coming years,” reads the U.S. report card.
However, the report implies that education translates into gainful market skills, an assumption not found in the research. For instance, while Chinese students, on average, have twice the number of instructional hours as Americans, both countries have identical scores on tests of scientific reasoning.

The author here thinks that maybe we shouldn't be trying to do what the other guys try so hard to do; it's not worth doing. He cites a 2008 article in Nature, responding to very similar international comparisons: Making the grade:

To produce leading-edge technology, one could argue that it is the numbers of high-performing students that is most important in the global economy.
These are students who can enter the science and engineering workforce or are likely to innovate whatever their field of study. Remarkable, but little noted, is the fact that the United States produces the lion's share of the world's best students (see graph).

TechCrunch, and commenters at Slashdot, also comment on the importance of immigrants. So maybe we should combine those, and build on established American strengths; maybe local schools like Hamilton Central should work on what they offer to the top students (hey, we need a robotics team!) and try to ease budget pain by appealing to a reasonable number of international students, as some other NY schools have done...even to the extent of selling empty classroom seats abroad.
Or then again, maybe not.

On Demography and Jobs and (not being in) Cities

Rural schools have a problem; they're trying to educate kids for jobs that don't generally appear in the rural world at all. This problem is not getting better. Why High-Tech Companies Are Moving to the City - WSJ.com

For as long as many of us can remember, high-tech industries have flourished in the suburban office parks that are so ubiquitous in Silicon Valley, North Carolina's Research Triangle and other "nerdistans." But in recent years, high-tech has been taking a decidedly urban turn.

I've written about this before, in the local context, at Mistakes By TjM: Upstate NY Demographics and School Consolidation

This is a doom-and-gloom post. Well, not really. But partly. It's not obvious that school consolidation would actually contribute to the solution, but there really is a problem. Let's look at it.

And I added a bit at Mistakes By TjM: Consolidation and "Hollowing Out the Middle". But it's worth noting that things are keeping on keeping on, which is what they will do until they don't.