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.

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.

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.

Psychological Trends, Play, and Schooling

I've mentioned psych-prof (and author) Peter Gray both recently (School and Mental Health) and further back (Rethinking School Motivations). Here's a 16-minute talk he gave in June about "the decline of play and rise of mental disorders" in children and young adults, over the past 60 years.

And he says that children and young adults are more depressed than in the Great Depression, more anxious than during the Cold War (with its elementary-school air-raid drills). Narcissism scores (as far back as we have them) trend upwards with later generations, empathy scores trend down. The effects are substantial, and they don't correlate well with economics or wars -- the trends are roughly linear. Here he's thinking of research like Twenge's Birth cohort increases in psychopathology among young Americans, 1938–2007: A cross-temporal meta-analysis of the MMPI - Twenge et al (2010) [10-page PDF], summarized at USA Today, and Twenge's own Psychology Today summary of narcissism research at How Dare You Say Narcissism Is Increasing?

The research findings fall into 5 main areas: 1) narcissism, 2) positive self-views and other traits related to narcissism, 3) cultural products such as language use, 4) positive trends connected to individualism, and 5) the validity of the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI)....

It's not a cataclysm (yet?) but it's not a pretty picture, and of course Gray has an explanation. He's an evolutionary-psychology guy and he studies play in animals and in hunter-gatherer societies, and he notes that if you want to create high-anxiety depressed rats or monkeys with poor social skills and poor emotional balance, it's easy: just raise them without the opportunity to play. He believes that some or all of the negative trends he sees are due to the fact that self-directed play has been declining throughout those decades. Supervised "play" of the sort we see in gym class or in AYSO games is not a substitute. Well, I suppose that's obvious, or should be. We are raising our kids as if we want them to be emotionally crippled; it's surprising that the effect is not even greater than what we see.

Interesting Math in Boring Math Classes

Almost all kids find math class to be boring. That included me, even though I was a completely weird kid who loved math and read math books for fun, and when I doodled in math class it was quite likely to produce a snowflake curve, as in Doodling in math: Triangle party | Doodling in math | Khan Academy. That's by Khan Academy's Recreational Mathemusician, Vi Hart, and you'll notice you can use the Khan Academy sidebar to explore her cool mathy videos which I would have loved until I grew up (irony filter applies here -- I do love them, and in my 60s it's probably too late to grow up at all.) She also maintains two YouTube channels, vihart for intricate fun and music, and vihartvihart for strange randomness. (Have you ever counted down with your microwave? I have.)

Today I happened to notice the "math class is boring" theme at 5:20 in an interview with her.
Of course math class is boring, and that is a starting point for her work, but she says it's only administrators who object to the way she's being "insulting to teachers"; she does get lots of feedback from teachers, of course, but teachers know what the problem is, and it's not them.

And what is the problem? Well, it has to do with the standards and the standardized tests...

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.

Opt-Out Info Links: Information from a Parent

An HCS parent who prefers anonymity wanted to share some research on the opt-out "movement":

Here are some of the links I think are worth considering:

Letter and position paper by three NYC teachers (the position paper is quite thorough):
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/04/04/teachers-refuse-to-administer-standardized-tests/

Letter from District 2 NYC principals to parents:
http://dianeravitch.net/2014/04/07/top-scoring-nyc-district-will-protest-ela-tests-this-friday/

Letter to NYS Commissioner King and the NYC Schools Chancellor by a parent/CUNY prof:
http://dianeravitch.net/2014/04/04/nyc-parent-cancel-the-tests/

History of the Common Core:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/01/18/everything-you-need-to-know-about-common-core-ravitch/

Letter by Award-Winning Principal Carol Burris:
http://www.liparentsforeducation.com/common-core-2/principal-i-was-nave-about-common-core-by-carol-burris/

On Market-Based Education reform, specifically regarding Pearson:
http://www.alternet.org/education/corporations-profit-standardized-tests?page=0%2C0

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/pearson-pays-77-million-in-common-core-settlement/2013/12/13/77515bba-6423-11e3-aa81-e1dab1360323_story.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/04/24/a-brief-history-of-pearsons-problems-with-testing

Building the Machine (Common Core Documentary)--39 minutes long:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjxBClx01jc

update:

This link has feedback from teachers and principals who have seen this year's test, as well as some parent feedback:

http://testingtalk.org/responses/?region=NY

To these I (TM) will just add a link from Science Daily this week: Education: States' standardized tests have a negative impact on parents' civic engagement -- ScienceDaily

New research from a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has found that parents of public school students in states with more extensive and stringent student assessment systems express lower trust in government, less confidence in government efficacy, and more negative views of their children's schools, thereby threatening civic engagement and the potential for future education reform.

 I'm a data guy myself--I would love to approve of more data collection, but once you start making decisions based on that data, well, as I quoted a while back:

Campbell’s law: “The more any quantitative social 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 Opt-Out Option; Parental Protests Against Over-Testing

Bottom line: NYS wants to use "high-stakes testing" to see how well schools (and teachers) are teaching the material that can be readily tested. This is great, except that it forces schools (and teachers) to concentrate on that material to the exclusion of whatever has to be left off those tests, and sometimes the leftover material is crucial. "Teaching to the test" is inevitable -- and bad. A lot of parents choose to protest by having their children opt out of the evaluative tests.

---

Our outgoing Superintendent posts Guidance for the Upcoming State Exams - Dr. Bowers - SuperintendentHamilton CSD

Recently, we have had a number of students ask questions about the school's reaction if a parent or child "refuses" to take the 3rd - 8th grade State Assessments. Attached please find a copy of the letter that was sent home to parents to clarify the district's viewpoint.

The crucial paragraphs:

   As per prior memorandum from the New York State Education Department (NYSED), please be aware that low assessment participation rates could adversely impact a school district's funding or increased state oversight of local school functions.

   Therefore it will be our practice to provide each student with a copy of each examination that students in that grade level are required to complete. Parents that wish for the child to be released from State testing must communicate their "intent of refusal" to HCS, before the exam is given. Upon receipt of the refusal, the district will arrange an alternative activity and the student will read quietly in an alternate location, rather than complete the examination. Their exam will be coded as "not tested." Although the student will not be penalized for the refusal, the school district may experience the effects described above.

It's pretty much what I remember her saying at the BoE meeting I put here but she did say a bit about the opt-out movement being even stronger downstate. Here's a video summary from NYS Allies for Public Education: They disagree with one point in Dr. Bowers' letter: they note that the threat of impact on school funding has not been carried through yet, and they don't believe it will be. A variety of web sites have more information, such as Opt Out CNY

dedicated to informing the Central New York public about the negative negative impact that high-stakes standardized tests are having on children and public education... How to REFUSE NYS Grade 3-8 TESTS

There are forums like the Onondaga Forum to focus on opting children out of state tests, other Common Core issues | syracuse.com As that "other Common Core issues" suggests, it's a national issue; United Opt Out National has a New York section, but there's nothing that special about us.

The Defiant Parents: Opting Out of Testing : The New Yorker

Last spring’s state tests were an entirely different experience, for children and for teachers. Teachers invigilating the exams were shocked by ambiguous test questions, based, as they saw it, on false premises and wrongheaded educational principles. (One B.N.S. teacher, Katherine Sorel, eloquently details her objections on WNYC’s SchoolBook blog.) Others were dismayed to see that children were demoralized by the relentlessness of the testing process, which took seventy minutes a day for six days, with more time allowed for children with learning disabilities.

Basically I see this as a protest against a trend: US education has been increasingly test-directed, which is great from a data-guy's point of view except for the minor fact that the most important parts of education aren't readily testable, so they tend to be squeezed out by teachers and schools who are evaluated on how well their kids do on the standardized parts. If this goes on, we could end up with an education system which generates excellent PISA scores but whose graduates are unable to think for themselves; really good at solving simple word problems but unable to create, unable to innovate, not even particularly good at working together. That's scary. If you're interested in the issue, I'd suggest that you check some of my posts mentioning Yong Zhao who spoke at HCS a while ago, or just watch the (long) videos at NYC Public School Parents: Video: Yong Zhao on how high-stakes testing is damaging our schools

Check out Yong Zhao's terrific (and funny!) presentation on October 12, along with the question and answer session, co-sponsored by Class Size Matters, GEM, Time out From Testing, and Parents Across America.

Prof. Zhao is the nation's most eloquent critic of high-stakes testing and discusses how the current education reform agenda is taking our nation's schools in entirely wrong direction.

Campbell's Law

I'd like this blog to be a repository of possibly-helpful ideas for Hamilton Central's short-term, medium-term, and long-term options... and of course at the moment it's going to focus on the 2014-15 Budget Process and even on the next Upcoming Public Event:

---

Please Come To The 5:30PM Jan 29th High School Library Meeting

Bring Ideas

---

On the other hand, I do want to go back to putting up posts about interesting articles/books/TED talks that I think are relevant, even if indirectly. This morning I see a Wired Magazine article about the methods by which we evaluate options, specifically about limitations on the value of the sort of quantitative methods that geeks like me get involved with implementing, at Why Quants Don’t Know Everything

all these new systems—metrics, algo­rithms, automated decisionmaking processes—result in humans gaming the system in rational but often unpredictable ways. Sociologist Donald T. Campbell noted this dynamic back in the ’70s, when he articulated what’s come to be known as Campbell’s law: “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making,” he wrote, “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.”
On a managerial level, once the quants come into an industry and disrupt it, they often don’t know when to stop. ...As soon as managers pick a numerical metric as a way to measure whether they’re achieving their desired outcome, everybody starts maximizing that metric rather than doing the rest of their job—just as Campbell’s law predicts.
Policing is a good example, as explained by Harvard sociologist Peter Moskos in his book Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore’s Eastern District. Most cops have a pretty good idea of what they should be doing, if their goal is public safety: reducing crime, locking up kingpins, confiscating drugs. It involves foot patrols, deep investigations, and building good relations with the community. But under statistically driven regimes, individual officers have almost no incentive to actually do that stuff. Instead, they’re all too often judged on results—specifically, arrests. ...
The same goes for the rise of “teaching to the test” in public schools, or the perverse incentives placed on snowplow operators, who, paid by the quantity of snow cleared, might simply ignore patches of lethal black ice. Even with the 2012 Obama campaign, it became hard to learn about the candidate’s positions by visiting his website, because it was so optimized for maximizing donations—an easy and obvious numerical target—that all other functions fell by the wayside.

At best, your measurements make a model: as George Box put it, all models are wrong, but some are useful. And as he added: "Since all models are wrong the scientist cannot obtain a 'correct' one by excessive elaboration. On the contrary... overelaboration and overparameterization is often the mark of mediocrity." A little quantification, a little measurement, can be very helpful; more is often worse. (The world would be easier for me to deal with if this weren't so.)


Or then again, maybe not.

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.

A Note on "Forced Mergers" and Incentive Aid

Apparently some people in Hamilton have been saying that they think we should go ahead with a merger because, if we don't, the state government will eventually force a merger anyway and the terms might be worse. I believe that this prediction of "forced merger" comes from a confusion, one which I shared back when I started thinking about this almost three years ago. I wrote here that

My Upstate New York village has had a school for quite a while; it may not have a school for much longer. New York has long had a consolidation "incentives" policy, pushing "central schools" like ours (which serves neighboring villages and the rural area around) into mergers into larger, more central, more remote schools. There is an argument that consolidation saves on overall costs...

And if consolidation saves on overall costs, and some of these costs are carried by your state taxes, and New York State is increasingly stretched for money, then surely it makes sense that eventually the state will say "merge, or we stop supporting you at all." Right? That's what economies of scale push you into: it's not that you want to lose your local district's independence, it's just that the economics makes this into the least bad of the available options.
The state has had thousands of school district mergers over the past century, and probably they all had bad effects but they also had economies of scale: it costs less to educate a thousand kids if you put them into one building rather than keep them in fifty one-room schoolhouses. I believed that. Hey, I still believe that. I would bet that nearly (but not quite) all of our thousands of mergers have been net positives.

So it's understandable that the June 3, 2008 Suozzi Commission Report wanted to

11. Give the Commissioner of Education discretionary authority to order consolidation of school districts based on reviews triggered by objective standards, including but not limited to the size of the student population and geography, declining enrollment, limited educational programs, ability to achieve fiscal savings, and high tax burden.... the LGEC report estimated that consolidating school districts in New York State with fewer than 900 students would result in annual savings of $158.5 to $189.2 million.

At the time, that went nowhere; six months later the New York Times reported on tiny downstate school districts in Making Sense of School Consolidation on Long Island

Members of the State Legislature long ago made this calculus for many of the state’s districts, and every year they refuse to touch bills calling for consolidation. So there is a feeling in these parts that the Suozzi commission’s recommendations will gather dust on a shelf.

And it has gathered dust; the currently applicable governor's "Recommendation 6" of the Education Reform Commission Report.pdf does say

Recommendation 6. Promote increased access to educational opportunities by encouraging school district restructuring through consolidation and regional high schools.

but it's a lot more cautious, and more open to other ways of saving money. No forced merger is on the table. Still, it seemed that some way, some how, the dragon of Economy Of Scale would end up eating up the fair maiden and any (Emerald or other) Knights trying to stop it would just have to go spin their windmills. Less money, fewer schools. Right? That's what I sadly thought in 2011.

But then we had the merger study and I spent my time on the CAC and it turned out that in our particular case, the economy of scale (fewer teachers) is neatly balanced by the diseconomy of scale (more bus runs); the difference between them is less than 1% of the combined-district yearly budget. And if fuel cost trends continue, the diseconomy of scale will come to dominate the economy of scale. From an economy of scale perspective, from a total costs perspective, this particular proposed merger is a loser and (so far as I can tell) none of its supporters dispute that. The "ability to achieve fiscal savings" mentioned in the Suozzi recommendation just plain isn't there. Maybe that's true of most of the remaining un-merged small districts: maybe that's why they haven't merged for all these years. Or maybe not, but it's certainly true of us.

Therefore, increasing fiscal pressure on the state means decreasing pressure to merge. Except of course for any remaining districts which really can save money by merging; it's possible that those tiny Long Island districts that the NYT talked about will someday fall into that category. Not us, unless transportation costs go down. For us, the relevant parts would be the other ways of saving money in Recommendation 6 and elsewhere.


Why, then, are we still considering merger at all? Well, because of the state incentive aid involved. Spread over fourteen years we would get $20 million; that's big, isn't it? If the state pays it, it's almost 3/4 of one year's expected budget. So you can think of it as a 5% budget savings for fourteen years, and then it's gone. (Or gone earlier, if the state hits a sufficient crisis before then, as now seems quite plausible.) And there's also the fact that by merging with Morrisville we would become a "high needs district" and get more aid, until we don't because the state's financial troubles force aid cuts, as they have before.

The state's financial troubles, which are very real and might get much worse without much warning, are not a reason to merge or to expect forced merger. Those troubles are a reason not to put ourselves into a position of depending more and more on state finances to fix the problem of New York's super-expensive education...twice as much as the average state, with no obvious educational benefit coming from the rules that generate that extra cost.

Or so it seems to me.



update: Forgot to mention that Ken Bausch did most of the work for this post. All the mistakes are mine, as always. -- tjm

Rathskeller PTO Meeting

Well, the PTO meeting in the Colgate Inn Rathskeller took place this evening; several people presented parts of the ABCs of HCS, and then "student presenters" Maddie Lamel-Brown and Zach Coddington presented their Student Merger Survey Results. Note that a clickable (slightly longer) version of the ABCs is available here. The room seemed pretty full; I don't know if any minds were changed.

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.

Rethinking School Motivations

Radio Free Hamilton notes that Educator Speaks at HCS Thursday

Educator and author Dr. Yong Zhao, who wrote World Class Learners: Educating Creative and Entrepreneurial Students, will speak in the HCS auditorium at 6:30 p.m. Thursday. ... ... He also talks about “Black Collar,” or REAL (rigorous, entrepreneurial, authentic, life-long) learning and the need to create the entrepreneurial spirit in our students, as the learners of the new millennium.

The "entrepreneurial" theme is also visible this morning in Salon.com; psychologist Peter Gray, author of Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life, says that School is a prison — and damaging our kids - Salon.com

Schools as we know them today are a product of history, not of research into how children learn. The blueprint still used for today’s schools was developed during the Protestant Reformation, when schools were created to teach children to read the Bible, to believe scripture without questioning it, and to obey authority figures without questioning them. The early founders of schools were quite clear about this in their writings. The idea that schools might be places for nurturing critical thought, creativity, self-initiative or ability to learn on one’s own — the kinds of skills most needed for success in today’s economy — was the furthest thing from their minds. To them, willfulness was sinfulness, to be drilled or beaten out of children, not encouraged.
When schools were taken over by the state and made compulsory, and directed toward secular ends, the basic structure and methods of schooling remained unchanged. Subsequent attempts at reform have failed because, though they have tinkered some with the structure, they haven’t altered the basic blueprint. The top-down, teach-and-test method, in which learning is motivated by a system of rewards and punishments rather than by curiosity or by any real, felt desire to know, is well designed for indoctrination and obedience training but not much else. It’s no wonder that many of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs and innovators either left school early (like Thomas Edison), or said they hated school and learned despite it, not because of it (like Albert Einstein)....
I have spent much of my research career studying how children learn. Children come into the world beautifully designed to direct their own education....
This amazing drive and capacity to learn does not turn itself off when children turn 5 or 6. We turn it off with our coercive system of schooling. The biggest, most enduring lesson of our system of schooling is that learning is work, to be avoided when possible.
The focus of my own research has been on learning in children who are of “school age,” but who aren’t sent to school, or not to school as conventionally understood. ... In these settings, children’s natural curiosity and zest for learning persist all the way through childhood and adolescence, and into adulthood.

What I'd like to focus on is the "Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose" motivational research suggesting that the top-down rewards we use are not just non-optimal, they are specifically known to be counter-productive in cognitive tasks. There's a cute RSA Animate summary by Daniel Pink, author of Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, which I'll embed here: He's not talking about school, but about motivation for cognitive tasks generally. I think he's probably right. In fact I think all three of these are talking about the same thing.
Or then again, maybe not.
Update: Yong Zhao's blog, just last week, reported on Education in the Age of Globalization » Blog Archive » China Enters “Testing-free” Zone: The New Ten Commandments of Education Reform

No standardized tests, no written homework, no tracking. These are some of the new actions China is taking...

So we become China and China becomes us? Maybe as the NSA gets more intrusive, they'll turn libertarian? (Or then again, maybe not.)
Also this morning... Economics Nobelist Vernon Smith says Discovery gives learning that touch of magic | learning, know, learn - Life - The Orange County Register

What has endured from my early school years are memories of pleasure and excitement in learning, a search-and-discovery process that was intrinsically rewarding. But that process was increasingly compromised by the growth of performance testing in the schools. By the high school years, "learning" had become less important in proportion to scores on achievement tests. ... What I remember is how little of it was worth remembering.

It's all about motivation vs. control? Maybe.
Update 8/28 On the subject of Yong Zhao, I should probably have also mentioned HamiltonCentralOptions: The US is Not Really #1 Yet...Fortunately which links to earlier posts mentioning him.

"Inquiry-Based Learning"

A model which seems to be having some success for some students, reported at Hogwarts for Hackers: Inside the Science and Tech School of Tomorrow | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com

the school’s secret isn’t cash or high tech gimmicks like online classes. At the core of the school is the notion of “inquiry-based learning,” a concept that dates back to the 1960s and draws on earlier concepts from thinkers like Jean Piaget, John Dewey, and Maria Montessori.

“The math teachers don’t lecture. They give out worksheets, and we learn as we go,” explains Emma Sloan, a sophomore. These worksheets are basically problems that the students must solve, using their own wherewithal — and help from other students. In class, students will often gather in circles — or “hexagons” ...
The inquiry approach is then taken to extremes on IMSA Wednesdays. There are no classes held on this day. The entire day is devoted to completely freeform education. “You can go find a mentor — some bad-ass in the particular field you’re interested in. You can do your own research. Or you can play video games,” says Kador.

It's interesting that "freeform education" would be effective; apparently it is. One question would be: is all-Wednesday an optimum, or should it be only half of a day, or half of every day, or...? (Or different for different students at different ages?)

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.

The Industrial-Factory Model

A large part of what I've learned over the past year is that when it comes to education, we really really don't know what we're doing, but we can be pretty sure that it's not the right thing. Last week I saw the NY Times with Teachers - Will We Ever Learn? - NYTimes.com

Call it the industrial-factory model: power resides at the top, with state and district officials setting goals, providing money and holding teachers accountable for realizing predetermined ends. While rational on its face, in practice this system does not work well because teaching is a complex activity that is hard to direct and improve from afar. The factory model is appropriate to simple work that is easy to standardize; it is ill suited to disciplines like teaching that require considerable skill and discretion.

I'm not sure I agree with most of that essay, but the part I've quoted should go further...the factory model is ill-suited to teaching and to learning, and top-down direction and incentives are based on a theory of motivation which is not just unsupported but discredited by experimental data available since before I was born. (I'm 60.)

Learning by Video Game

From UCSD via Science Daily, a self-motivating educational experience: Computer scientists develop video game that teaches how to program in Java

CodeSpells' story line is simple: the player is a wizard arriving in a land populated by gnomes.... The wizard must help them. She (or he) writes spells in Java. ...
Players can also earn badges by undertaking simple quests, which help them master the game's spells. One quest entails crossing a river. Another entails rescuing a gnome from the roof of his cottage... By the time players complete the game's first level, they have learned the main components of the Java programming language, such as parameters, for if statements, for loops and while loops, among other skills.
Researchers tested the game on a group of 40 girls ages 10 to 12 in San Diego...."We were purposefully vague," they wrote, "as we hoped to encourage a largely unstructured learning environment."
The students were disappointed when they had to stop playing because the test was over.

And there ain't no maybe not about it.

Charters, Incentives, Performance

A few days ago, USA Today editorialized Charter school experiment a success: Our view

Critics — whether district superintendents or teachers' unions or school boards or a traveling band of academic doubters — snipe at the newcomers, arguing that they're siphoning students and money from traditional public schools.
But as evidence from the 20-year-old charter experiment mounts, the snipers are in need of a new argument. There's little doubt left that top-performing charters have introduced new educational models that have already achieved startling results in even the most difficult circumstances.

And they talk quite a bit about the Knowledge Is Power Program

a KIPP school typically provides 60 percent more time in school than a regular public school.[12] By extending school days, requiring attendance on Saturdays, offering extra curricular activities, and adding three extra weeks of school in July, students have more educational opportunities. ...
Each middle school student receives a paycheck at the end of the week of KIPP dollars they have earned based on academic merit, conduct, and overall behavior.
At the end of the school year, KIPP students have the privilege of attending a week long field trip.
In June 2010, Mathematica Policy Research produced the first findings[16] from a multi-year evaluation of the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP)

Using a matched comparison group design, results show that for the vast majority of KIPP schools in the evaluation, impacts on students’ state assessment scores in math and reading are positive, statistically significant, and educationally substantial.

I believe what they say, and I can see a value to KIPP and similar high-intensity charters as providing a somewhat better factory school, one which will outdo our really bad urban schools; it also serves as a vehicle for self-selection, which is both good and bad. It is possible that similar schools could work in a suburban or rural context, matched against really-not-that-bad-at-all schools like HCS. I've become sceptical, however, about the incentives we're using -- grades, academic awards, KIPP dollars, disciplinary action. These certainly can and do lead to enhanced performance on some kinds of tests, but I'm afraid these are precisely the kinds of tests that ought to be becoming obsolete: tests for the ability to shut up and sit down and follow orders. Here's a discussion (with video) of the kind of research I mean: How Monetary Rewards Can Demotivate Creative Works | Techdirt

once people have a base level of money that makes them comfortable, using monetary incentives to get them to do creative work fails. Not just fails, but leads to worse performance.

When I think about this kind of research in the context of school reform, it seems to me that we as a nation have been heading in one of the wrong directions for a while now, and that the KIPP-style charter is a better dinosaur. The flexibility of charters may be necessary for finding better answers, but it also makes even worse answers available. I'll post soon about experiments in other directions.
Or then again, maybe not.