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.)

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....

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.

The Importance of Choosing the Right Superintendent

We need a new superintendent next year....but how much difference does it actually make? A former superintendent notes recent research at Superintendents and Test Scores | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Here is what the researchers found:

1. School district superintendent is largely a short-term job. The typical superintendent has been in the job for three to four years.
2. Student achievement does not improve with longevity of superintendent service within their districts.
3. Hiring a new superintendent is not associated with higher student achievement.
4. Superintendents account for a small fraction of a percent (0.3 percent) of student differences in achievement. This effect, while statistically significant, is orders of magnitude smaller than that associated with any other major component of the education system, including: measured and unmeasured student characteristics; teachers; schools; and districts.
5. Individual superintendents who have an exceptional impact on student achievement cannot be reliably identified.

Results, of course, are from only one study and must be handled with care. The familiar cautions about the limits of the data and methodology are there. What is remarkable, however, is that the iron-clad belief that superintendents make a difference in student outcomes held by the American Association of School Administrators, school boards, and superintendents themselves has seldom undergone careful scrutiny.

Well, maybe

Girls vs. Tests, Boys vs. Classwork

Or perhaps boys vs. work, generally; Why Girls Tend to Get Better Grades Than Boys Do - The Atlantic

girls succeed over boys in school because they tend to be more mastery-oriented in their schoolwork habits. They are more apt to plan ahead, set academic goals, and put effort into achieving those goals. They also are more likely than boys to feel intrinsically satisfied with the whole enterprise of organizing their work, and more invested in impressing themselves and their teachers with their efforts.

These days, the whole school experience seems to play right into most girls’ strengths—and most boys’ weaknesses.

On the whole, boys approach schoolwork differently. They are more performance-oriented. Studying for and taking tests taps into their competitive instincts. For many boys, tests are quests that get their hearts pounding. Doing well on them is a public demonstration of excellence and an occasion for a high-five. In contrast, Kenney-Benson and some fellow academics provide evidence that the stress many girls experience in test situations can artificially lower their performance, giving a false reading of their true abilities. These researchers arrive at the following overarching conclusion: “The testing situation may underestimate girls’ abilities, but the classroom may underestimate boys’ abilities.”

Perhaps we need two-dimensional grades.

Good Fat, Bad Fat, Test Scores

An international comparison suggests that diet has a really major impact on test scores: Breast milk reveals a correlation between dietary fats and academic success -- ScienceDaily

"Looking at those 28 countries, the DHA content of breast milk was the single best predictor of math test performance," Gaulin said. The second best indicator was the amount of omega-6, and its effect is opposite. "Considering the benefits of omega-3 and the detriment of omega-6, we can get pretty darn close to explaining half the difference in scores between countries," he added. When DHA and LA are considered together, he added, they are twice as effective at predicting test scores as either is alone...

The authors seem to think they're talking about cause and effect; both fats are part of normal brain development, 'cos the brain is mostly fat. They might be right. Of course, some of us have been trying to use more omega-3 anyway. I wonder how much it would cost to raise the omega-3 (and lower the omega-6) content of school food.

Income and expectations

A few weeks ago, the NYT reported on an international survey of principals, asking if their schools had lots of low-income students. Conclusion? Principals in U.S. Are More Likely to Consider Their Students Poor - NYTimes.com

This much is clear: American students from low-income backgrounds are more likely to struggle in school than low-income students in many other countries .... And American principals are much more likely to describe their students as disadvantaged than principals in many other countries — including some countries that are significantly poorer than the United States. Neither fact qualifies as good news.

It's actually a pretty dramatic effect; consider the graph:

It's put more bluntly at Idiosyncratic Whisk: Regulatory Predestination and the Right to Exit:

In short, we have school districts that are compulsory institutions, school leaders who attribute student failures to poverty, and school leaders who overstate the level of poverty in their schools. Is there a bit of constructed fatalism here?

He's not claiming that the "school leaders" are consciously dishonest. He is obviously thinking that many of the student failures being attributed to poverty must have some other cause, plausibly a cause within the school system, and that all of us have a pretty strong incentive for finding/believing explanations of failure that don't cast blame on us.

Appealing to International Students

I posted on the possibility that appealing to international students could have financial, academic, and cultural benefits for the school (and quite possibly for schools nearby, as one case where we might share benefits as well as costs). I'd like to say a little more about that.

One interesting question: why would students from China want to come to American schools? School quality is compared between different nations by the "PISA" tests, whose 2012 results came out earlier this month; as you can see at Wikipedia's Programme for International Student Assessment, China (specifically Shanghai) is on top, and we're not. As the Washington Post put it at Key PISA test results for U.S. students

Average scores in mathematics literacy ranged from 613 in Shanghai-China to 368 in Peru. The U.S. average score was 481, which was lower than the OECD average of 494. The U.S. average was lower than 29 education systems, higher than 26 education systems, and not measurably different than 9 education systems.

If we're way down on the test-takers list and they're at the top, why would any students want to come here from there? Community members who went to Yong Zhao's lecture here in August, which I mentioned (with a variety of related material) at HamiltonCentralOptions: Rethinking School Motivations, will not be surprised. Indeed, I'd talked about him (and about psychology prof Peter Gray talking about him) in May at HamiltonCentralOptions: The US is Not Really #1 Yet...Fortunately

You might think the Chinese educational leaders would be happy that their kids are scoring so high on these international competitions. But they’re not. ... At the same time that we are continuing to try to be more like them, they are trying—though without much success so far—to be more like us, or like we were before we began trying so hard to be like them. They see that their system is quashing creativity and initiative, with the result that it produces decent bureaucrats and number crunchers, but very few inventors and entrepreneurs.

So take that as context for the Huffington Post's 2011 article on this topic at Public Schools Recruit Tuition-Paying International Students To Boost Revenue

Lei Huang, 16, from Shanghai, is attending Camden Hills high school this year. The school aims to have 10 foreign students next year, from China and Vietnam.

Schools in China, he said, demand long days in the classroom and long nights doing homework, with an emphasis on memorization and testing. In Camden, he appreciates the emphasis on creativity and tapping into students' interests.

Outside of school, he likes being able to drink water out of the tap, the abundance of trees and time to participate on the high school ski team. But he misses buying live fish at seafood markets in China, authentic Chinese food and public transportation so that he's not dependent on others with cars to get around.

So it shouldn't be surprising that this year, Yong Zhao responded to the PISA score release by saying Education in the Age of Globalization » Blog Archive » Reading the PISA Tea Leaves

While the East Asian systems may enjoy being at the top of international tests, they are not happy at all with the outcomes of their education. They have recognized the damages of their education for a long time and have taken actions to reform their systems. ... It is no exaggeration to say that that the majority of the parents in China would send their children to an American school instead of keeping them in the “best performing” Chinese system, if they had the choice.

I'm not denying the importance of test scores -- other things being equal. Test scores give good data about how well students do on tests, and that tells you a lot about the quality of a significant part of education. However, test-directed education means giving up some even more significant parts of education...and one of the most attractive aspects of attracting Chinese students (and students from other countries that consistently outscore America by virtue of test-directed education) is that it might help us remember that test-directed education is not necessarily good education. The theatre program is also relevant; so are other things. Yes, we should worry about the PISA results with the worst-case interpretation being something like CONVERSABLE ECONOMIST: U.S. Education: "Unthinking, Unilateral Educational Disarmament". Yes, we should also look at demographic factors as in Super-Economy: The amazing truth about PISA scores: USA beats Western Europe, ties with Asia. And yes, we should also consider other points of view like TheMoneyIllusion » Why Swedish schools are better than Finnish schools

South Korean students are the least happy students in the world. Finland’s students are near the bottom, and are the least happy of any Western European country. In contrast, South Korea usually scores at the top of “education rankings” based on test scores, and Finland is often in second place.

It’s interesting to compare Finland with its neighbor Sweden. Based on test scores Sweden has the worst schools in Western Europe, even worse than America’s K-12. Horrible schools. But their students are above average in happiness, far above Finland. What explains that difference?

One reason might be that Sweden has a 100% voucherized school system, so schools have to cater to parents. Now I don’t mean to suggest that schools in Sweden are perfect—Swedes have told me the legacy of the old socialist system hangs on to some extent, and most students still go to state schools. Still, the vouchers are gradually forcing the schools to conform more to customer preferences.

Some might argue that high test scores are needed to produce the sort of highly-skilled workers needed for the modern economy. That’s false, and Sweden proves it. Its workers are more productive than Finnish workers because test scores tell us little about productivity...

(Recent news suggests that some of the private companies providing Sweden's education weren't well-run, financially. That's a factor too.)

And is there a conclusion here? Not really -- except that (1) everything is more complicated, the more you look at it, and (2) there are good reasons why some, perhaps even most, Chinese parents might prefer our school system to theirs, and (3) learning about international students might tell us something about ourselves. Is that surprising?

I was also going to list random attractions, like the walkability of the village and the presence of the hospital, but I think I'll skip that for now.

Finland, India, Mexico

Wired Magazine reports on How a Radical New Teaching Method Could Unleash a Generation of Geniuses

he had happened on an emerging educational philosophy, one that applies the logic of the digital age to the classroom. That logic is inexorable: Access to a world of infinite information has changed how we communicate, process information, and think. Decentralized systems have proven to be more productive and agile than rigid, top-down ones. Innovation, creativity, and independent thinking are increasingly crucial to the global economy.

And yet the dominant model of public education is still fundamentally rooted in the industrial revolution that spawned it, when workplaces valued punctuality, regularity, attention, and silence above all else. (In 1899, William T. Harris, the US commissioner of education, celebrated the fact that US schools had developed the “appearance of a machine,” one that teaches the student “to behave in an orderly manner, to stay in his own place, and not get in the way of others.”) We don’t openly profess those values nowadays, but our educational system—which routinely tests kids on their ability to recall information and demonstrate mastery of a narrow set of skills—doubles down on the view that students are material to be processed, programmed, and quality-tested. School administrators prepare curriculum standards and “pacing guides” that tell teachers what to teach each day. ... ... ...

“In 1970 the top three skills required by the Fortune 500 were the three Rs: reading, writing, and arithmetic. In 1999 the top three skills in demand were teamwork, problem-solving, and interpersonal skills. We need schools that are developing these skills.”... ... ...

Some school systems have begun to adapt to this new philosophy—with outsize results. In the 1990s, Finland pared the country’s elementary math curriculum from about 25 pages to four, reduced the school day by an hour, and focused on independence and active learning. By 2003, Finnish students had climbed from the lower rungs of international performance rankings to first place among developed nations.

The moral drawn here is something like this: Even when the technology isn't working, as in the Mexican school most discussed here, and even when the final test is standardized, students excel with self-actuated group work where the teacher starts things going and gets out of the way except to serve as a consultant. And the additional note I'd make is simply that this is not a model wherein class size plays any fundamental role. Group size, probably yes, but that's not the same thing.

NYS Education Department Assessments, Grades 3-8

I just saw the Assessments for grades 3-8 for HCS and MECS, so I'll put them down with links:

MECS 3-8

at http://www.p12.nysed.gov/irs/ela-math/2013/2013ELAandMathemaitcsDistrictandBuildingAggregatesMedia.pdf#497

Group	#Tested	%Level 1	%Level 2	%Level 3	%Level 4	Mean Scale
Grade 3 ELA	50	52	40	8	0	276
Grade 3 Math	51	56.9	25.5	15.7	2	274
Grade 4 ELA	60	36.7	45	16.7	1.7	290
Grade 4 Math	60	40	40	16.7	3.3	287
Grade 5 ELA	51	45.1	33.3	13.7	7.8	290
Grade 5 Math	51	54.9	27.5	17.6	0	287
Grade 6 ELA	54	29.6	48.1	11.1	11.1	296
Grade 6 Math	56	51.8	33.9	8.9	5.4	277
Grade 7 ELA	54	29.6	46.3	16.7	7.4	299
Grade 7 Math	54	44.4	38.9	16.7	0	289
Grade 8 ELA	53	34	30.2	28.3	7.5	298
Grade 8 Math	52	32.7	46.2	21.2	0	296

 The median scores would be 1,1,2,2,2,1,2,1,2,2,2,2.

HCS 3-8

at http://www.p12.nysed.gov/irs/ela-math/2013/2013ELAandMathemaitcsDistrictandBuildingAggregatesMedia.pdf#499

Group	#Tested	%Level 1	%Level 2	%Level 3	%Level 4	Mean Scale
Grade 3 ELA	51	27.5	39.2	27.5	5.9	309
Grade 3 Math	51	25.5	29.4	35.3	9.8	308
Grade 4 ELA	46	23.9	41.3	28.3	6.5	302
Grade 4 Math	46	32.6	41.3	17.4	8.7	293
Grade 5 ELA	37	35.1	40.5	13.5	10.8	300
Grade 5 Math	37	29.7	37.8	21.6	10.8	303
Grade 6 ELA	40	15	47.5	12.5	25	311
Grade 6 Math	40	25	27.5	15	32.5	315
Grade 7 ELA	31	9.7	19.4	35.5	35.5	329
Grade 7 Math	31	16.1	29	38.7	16.1	320
Grade 8 ELA	41	26.8	26.8	24.4	22	311
Grade 8 Math	41	29.3	41.5	24.4	4.9	297

 The median scores would be 2,2,2,2,2,2,2,2,3,3,2,2.
(update: In other words, the median performance levels for MECS student groups are split between "does not meet" the standards and "partially meets". The median performance levels for HCS are split between "partially meets" and "meets".)

Update by Carolyn Hsu, 2013-11-01:

NY State Assessment Test Results, ELA/Math 2013

Tables:

ELA = English Language Arts		Level 1: Students performing at this level are well below proficient in standards for their grade.	Level 2: Students performing at this level are below proficient in standards for their grade.	Level 3: Students performing at this level are proficient in standards for their grade.	Level 4: Students performing at this level excel above the standards for their grade.		Level 3+4: Students who are performing at or above the standards for their grade
Morrisville-Eaton
Group	#Tested	%Level 1	%Level 2	%Level 3	%Level 4	Mean Scale Score	% Passed=L3+L4
Grade 3 ELA	50	52	40	8	0	276	8
Grade 3 Math	51	56.9	25.5	15.7	2	274	17.7
Grade 4 ELA	60	36.7	45	16.7	1.7	290	18.4
Grade 4 Math	60	40	40	16.7	3.3	287	20
Grade 5 ELA	51	45.1	33.3	13.7	7.8	290	21.5
Grade 5 Math	51	54.9	27.5	17.6	0	287	17.6
Grade 6 ELA	54	29.6	48.1	11.1	11.1	296	22.2
Grade 6 Math	56	51.8	33.9	8.9	5.4	277	14.3
Grade 7 ELA	54	29.6	46.3	16.7	7.4	299	24.1
Grade 7 Math	54	44.4	38.9	16.7	0	289	16.7
Grade 8 ELA	53	34	30.2	28.3	7.5	298	35.8
Grade 8 Math	52	32.7	46.2	21.2	0	296	21.2

Hamilton Central School
Group	#Tested	%Level 1	%Level 2	%Level 3	%Level 4	Mean Scale Score	% Passed=L3+L4
Grade 3 ELA	51	27.5	39.2	27.5	5.9	309	33.4
Grade 3 Math	51	25.5	29.4	35.3	9.8	308	45.1
Grade 4 ELA	46	23.9	41.3	28.3	6.5	302	34.8
Grade 4 Math	46	32.6	41.3	17.4	8.7	293	26.1
Grade 5 ELA	37	35.1	40.5	13.5	10.8	300	24.3
Grade 5 Math	37	29.7	37.8	21.6	10.8	303	32.4
Grade 6 ELA	40	15	47.5	12.5	25	311	37.5
Grade 6 Math	40	25	27.5	15	32.5	315	47.5
Grade 7 ELA	31	9.7	19.4	35.5	35.5	329	71
Grade 7 Math	31	16.1	29	38.7	16.1	320	54.8
Grade 8 ELA	41	26.8	26.8	24.4	22	311	46.4
Grade 8 Math	41	29.3	41.5	24.4	4.9	297	29.3

Data source: http://www.p12.nysed.gov/irs/ela-math/2013/2013ELAandMathemaitcsDistrictandBuildingAggregatesMedia.pdf

NOTE: in 2013, the NYS Assessment test was revised to fit the Common Core standards. As a result, statewide scores dropped significantly compared to previous years. The statewide average for passing (Level 3=Level 4) was 31%.

 


With thanks to Susan Marafino and Carolyn Hsu.