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.

The US is Not Really #1 Yet...Fortunately

More on Yong Zhao's case against US educational "reform" trends (I've mentioned him here and here) at Be Glad for Our Failure to Catch up With China in Education | Psychology Today

Our schools are better than China’s because ours don’t work as well as theirs.

For more than 20 years we’ve had national educational goals aimed at emulating the Chinese (and Japanese and Korean) educational system. We’ve been working toward more centralization of control, more standardization of curricula and methods, and more student time in the classroom and at homework, all in an effort to produce higher scores on standardized tests. ...

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.

The columnist is psychologist Peter Gray; his alternative reform direction is interesting, to put it mildly. I should write about that.

Head Start Research

A week or so back I encountered a Science Daily report with Happy News about Academic gains, improved teacher relationships found among high risk kids in Head Start

A new study by Oregon State University researchers finds that Head Start can make a positive impact in the lives of some of its highest risk children, both academically and behaviorally.

That startled me; it sounded great, but I had already seen Timothy Taylor, the Conversable Economist, saying (I think about the same study) that Head Start is Failing Its Test

I am predisposed to favor programs that would help disadvantaged children early in life. Thus, I was delighted when Head Start announced some years back that it was going to carry out a randomized control trial--that is, to assign some preschool children randomly to Head Start and others not--so that it would be possible to do a statistically meaningful test of how well Head Start worked. I presumed that the test would provide ammunition for my pre-existing views.
But as the evidence has built up, Head Start is failing its test. The latest evidence appears in the "Third Grade Follow-up to the Head Start Impact Study: Final Report," which was released in December... Basically, the report shows that Head Start provides short-term gains to preschool children, but those gains have faded to essentially nothing by third grade.
To appreciate how depressing this conclusion is, you need to appreciate the high quality of the study....

So I went down the Science Daily report, and five paragraphs inwards found in summary that:

Analyzing the data on 253 children in non-parental care, they found the program had short-term positive impacts on school readiness, particularly in regards to early academic skills, positive teacher-child relationships, and a reduction in behavior problems.... "The impact we saw was modest, not huge, but statistically significant...

Okay, so there were modest short-term gains to preschool children, and that's that. The way I'll remember this is simple and doubly depressing: Head Start is failing its test, and Science Daily was minimally honest in presenting that.


Or then again, maybe not.

Khan Academy in Idaho -- and in the movies

Slashdot reported last week that Khan Academy Will Be Ready For Its Close-Up In Idaho

Education officials ... say they are arranging to have Khan Academy classes tested in about two dozen public schools next fall in Idaho, where state law now requires high school students to take online courses for two of their 47 graduation credits. 'This is the first time Khan Academy is partnering to tackle the math education of an entire state,' ... film director and producer Davis Guggenheim (Waiting for Superman, An Inconvenient Truth), who will be in Idaho in January filming The Great Teacher Project, a documentary which will highlight positives of education, like the Khan Academy pilot in Idaho.

One of the Slashdot commenters adds

My brother is a math teacher who convinced the board of his school system to let him try it in two of his classes. Now the entire school system is moving to Khan for the math program.
The major change in his teaching format is that learning a new concept is now homework (through Khan Academy), rather than him droning on about it in class. Then every morning he gets a report for each student and can see who did well and who didn't. That allows him to concentrate on the students that didn't get the concept in class. Overall he has seen a major improvement in the class as a whole since fewer kids get left without a good understanding of the fundamental concepts.

Davis Guggenheim is

the only filmmaker to release three different documentaries that were ranked within the top 100 highest-grossing documentaries of all time (An Inconvenient Truth, It Might Get Loud, and Waiting for 'Superman').

In the origin of Davis Guggenheim: "Waiting for Superman" to Save Our Public Schools

I actually said "no." I thought that the subject of education was too complicated. The next morning I was packing my kids up in my minivan and taking them to school with juice boxes and backpacks. Out of the corner of my eye, I started to see the local public schools that I was driving by. And it started to haunt me that my kids whom I send to private school were having a great education, but the kids in my own neighborhood were not. I said, "Well, maybe that is the approach that I should make for this movie....

And now he's working on Khan Academy, and presumably related trends. Could be helpful.
Or then again, maybe not.

Time on MOOCs

From Time Magazine, a sampling of online courses and the way they can leverage what we've learned about learning.... College Is Dead. Long Live College! | TIME.com

Minute 4: Professor Brown asked me a question. “What did the Greeks know?” The video stopped, patiently waiting for me to choose one of the answers, a task that actually required some thought. This happened every three minutes or so, making it difficult for me to check my e-mail or otherwise disengage — even for a minute.
“You got it right!” The satisfaction of correctly answering these questions was surprising. (One MOOC student I met called it “gold-star methadone.”) The questions weren’t easy, either. I got many of them wrong, but I was allowed to keep trying until I got the gold-star fix.
Humans like immediate feedback, which is one reason we like games. Researchers know a lot about how the brain learns, and it’s shocking how rarely that knowledge influences our education system. ...
... Minute 8: Professor Brown explained that Plato had also tried (and failed) to estimate the earth’s circumference. Brown did this by jotting notes on a simple white screen. Like all the other videos in the course, this clip lasted only a few minutes. This too reflects how the brain learns. Studies of college students have shown that they can focus for only 10 to 18 minutes before their minds begin to drift; that’s when their brains need to do something with new information — make a connection or use it to solve a problem.

For any given person, on any given day, as the day goes by the ideal pace of learning changes. No one can predict how that's going to work even for one person, much less make an ideal pace for a group...but maybe self-paced learning (unlike the teaching-machines self-paced learning that I read about in high school, in the 60s) can finally work out.
Or then again, maybe not.

Ericsson -- Future of Learning

I've mentioned TED talks by Daphne Koller: What we're learning from online education and Sugata Mitra: The child-driven education; Here's a 20-minute Ericsson-funded documentary, noted by Geekdad at The Future of Learning

Talking with the likes of Sugata Mitra, Daphne Koller, and Jose Ferreira, The Future of Learning examines how the learning process can be adapted to the needs of each child and how the highest quality education is now available for any person who can connect to the internet.

They also have Seth Godin as a speaker -- I've linked in the past to Stop Stealing Dreams -- Seth Godin at Hamilton Central Options. I guess I've heard of Jose Ferreira and of Knewton, his adaptive learning/teaching software platform that will be the basis for Pearson's efforts, but didn't know much about him.
The "highest quality education" claim in the Geekdad summary is not actually what Mitra or Koller or especially Godin are saying; they don't think we can (yet?) provide an online substitute for a good teacher, but they do think that kids with good teachers can do better than they have done with these new resources, and they also think that kids with bad teachers or no teachers can do better than they have done. In the next 30 years, more kids will leave school than have left school in all of human history...
Or then again, maybe not?

Chicago teachers vs. teaching?

The Economist notes on The teachers' strike in Chicago: Fighting irrelevance with fire that

The boffins at the Urban Education Institute (UEI) in Chicago have written an exemplary book on school improvement. They looked at 100 elementary schools that showed progress in attendance and test scores over a seven-year period, and 100 others that did not. They argue—with quantitative data—that five essential pillars are needed to build a great school. These are:

• effective school leadership,
• collaborative teachers (with committed staff and professional development),
• parent-community ties,
• a student-centered (and safe) learning climate with high expectations,
• and ambitious and demanding instruction.

(Reformatted.) I'm always suspicious of lists like that, but it's plausible. In any case, like most of what I've read in the past few days, the point of the article is far from favorable towards the striking teachers; the author here believes that they not just demanding more money, but trying to prevent improvements in a failing school system. And this seems to be bipartisan, to a considerable extent: they're battling Rahm Emanuel, extremely prominent Democrat, while from the other side we hear Paul Ryan on Chicago Teachers’ Strike: ‘We Stand with Mayor Rahm Emanuel’ - ABC News

“I’ve known Rahm Emanuel for years. He’s a former colleague of mine. Rahm and I have not agreed on every issue or on a lot of issues, but Mayor Emanuel is right today in saying that this teacher’s union strike is unnecessary and wrong. We know that Rahm is not going to support our campaign, but on this issue and this day we stand with Mayor Rahm Emanuel.”

Emanuel and Ryan both like charters, too. So do I. And they both like external evaluation. I have mixed feelings about that. Should Teachers Be Graded On Standardized Tests?

if you think that teachers do make a difference, and that some of the teachers aren’t very good, it seems to me that you have two choices. Hold out for a decentralized, discretionary, local-knowledge based system which has no change of materializing for various legal and structural reasons. Or develop admittedly imperfect evaluations, and use them as a replacement metric for seniority and ed credentials. Naturally, the teachers will hate this, in part because some of the resulting decisions will in fact be unfair. But it might be the best we can do.

Well, in Chicago it might be the best they can do; I suspect that local small schools can eventually do better. Or then again, maybe not.

There was also a roundup of opposing views at Chicago Teacher Strike: A News and Opinion Roundup | Via Meadia.

Parents as problem v. School as problem?

National education policy -- oh, how it's changed

"Poor students were framed as trapped in failing schools, and needing parents to rescue them, in 2001. This is a reverse of the framing in 1965, when they were portrayed as trapped in culturally impoverished families and needing schools to rescue them,"

"Won't Back Down"

Teachers on the Defensive - NYTimes.com

“Our very best teachers ought to be treated much, much better than they are today,” said Joe Williams, the executive director of Democrats for Education Reform. “But in order to get there, we need to be able to say out loud that some teachers are better than others.”
That’s precisely what “Won’t Back Down” says. Although the movie is bound, in this politically charged climate, to be analyzed solely in terms of the position it seems to take on parent trigger or its qualms with union behavior, it’s ultimately about the impact of superior teaching, the need to foster more of it and the importance of school accountability. Who could quibble with any of that?