The K-12 Teacher and the Computer

On "the deconstruction of the K-12 teacher", we see When the Computer Takes Over for the Teacher - The Atlantic

I think it used to be taboo for teachers to borrow or buy plans written by other professionals, but it seems that times are changing. Just last week, I spoke with a history teacher from Santa Maria, California, who bluntly said, "I don’t ever write my own lesson plans anymore. I just give credit to the person who did." He explained, rather reasonably, that the materials are usually inexpensive or free; are extremely well made; and often include worksheets, videos, assessments, and links to other resources. Just as his administrators request, he can focus on being a facilitator, specializing in individualized instruction.

I’ve started recognizing a common thread to the latest trends in teaching. Flipped learning, blending learning, student-centered learning, project-based learning, and even self-organized learning—they all marginalize the teacher’s expertise. Or, to put it more euphemistically, they all transform the teacher into a more facilitative role....

Note that there's no claim here that the teacher is being marginalized; it's the teacher's expertise. And that might make a fundamental difference in who is qualified to be a teacher, and what pay scales should eventually be. Interesting.

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.

Algorithms learning about human learning

One consequence of the online-5-minute-lecture (e.g., Khan Academy) approach is that with lessons broken into bite-size pieces, each of which has associated exercises, it's easier to test the effectiveness of any given piece. Khan Academy, Video tasks on the learning dashboard

Many of our exercises are tagged with “curated related videos”—videos that are hand-selected as related to the exercise. Using this as a starting point, we looked at all the videos that were already tagged as related to any exercise. For each of these videos, we compared the accuracy on its associated exercise both before watching the video and after watching it. From there, we selected the top fifty most effective videos, each improving the accuracy on its associated exercise by at least twenty percent, and are now highlighting them on the mission dashboard. When the system recommends an exercise with an associated video on the list of our top fifty related videos, it will automatically recommend the related video as well.

Compare with a human teacher who is trying to see which explanations are most helpful, judging class reaction and then perhaps a weekly quiz...the algorithm is of course completely incapable of what the human does, but on the other hand it has immediate access to individual data about what works for whom. In the not-terribly-long run we should be able to have videos tagged as having different styles (highly compressed v. wordy, words v. equations v. pictures, rules v. examples, humor v. straight exposition...) and automatically choose whichever works for given students based on what has improved their scores in the past. I suppose in the very long run we're moving towards a time and motion study program for small units of learning-effort.

Or then again, maybe not.

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...

Knowledge Maps and Custom Courses

Take a quick look at the Khan Academy Knowledge Map and then think about The Chronicle of Higher Education asking Are Courses Outdated? MIT Considers Offering ‘Modules’ Instead

People now buy songs, not albums. They read articles, not newspapers. So why not mix and match learning “modules” rather than lock into 12-week university courses?

That question is a major theme of a 213-page report released on Monday by a committee at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology exploring how the 153-year-old engineering powerhouse should innovate to adapt to new technologies and new student expectations.

“The very notion of a ‘class’ may be outdated,” the report argues.

Indeed; a course is an administrative tactic, and we may be moving beyond it. At every level. I posted about the idea a couple of years ago, in Open-Source Learning. Perhaps it's getting somewhere.

Or then again, maybe not. Comments at Slashdot

Independent (online) learning

A freshman survey from UCLA found High School Students Not Waiting For Schools To Go Online

"Students who chose to independently use online instructional websites are also more likely to exhibit behaviors and traits associated with academic success and lifelong learning."

So, never mind what the school does -- make sure your kids check out Coursera and Khan Academy and CrashCourse - YouTube (with the individual "courses" like Biology (That's Why Carbon Is A Tramp: Crash Course Biology #1) and World History and so on), not to mention random excellence like SciShow Space and MinutePhysics and MinuteEarth, individual user channels like Vi Hart (a recreational mathemusician who works for Khan Academy) and SmarterEveryDay, and ...
There's a lot of cool stuff out there. Learning it has nothing, nothing, nothing to do with grades. On the other hand, learning it helps a lot with later "academic success and lifelong learning."

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.

2014-15 Budget Process --- Join In!

As the Budget Calendar mentioned, our January 21 BoE meeting (which will supposedly be on Youtube eventually (see below) was largely about the budget, starting with the NYS proposed aid in the 2014-15 EXECUTIVE BUDGET PROPOSAL which had just come out a couple of hours before. It was not happy reading; Aaron commented that he had expected our Gap Elimination Adjustment to come down fairly substantially which would have led to a relatively straightforward budget process. Instead, it came down by 6%, remaining still above $500K, leaving us with a back-of-the-envelope $250K deficit. It's a big problem for many schools... as North Country Public Radio quoted What does Cuomo's budget mean for schools in the North Country?

"...it seems odd that the governor touts increasing aid to education on the one hand and fails to say that he’s taking it out of the pockets of educators with the other hand"

Of course it's not just the GEA; our insurance costs jumped sharply, more than in quite some time; apparently this is a consequence of Obamacare. (It's a surprise to me; I had thought NY to be one of the very few states where our existing mandates would make the ACA look good, except for the "narrow networks" phenomenon which may provide nasty surprises for New Yorkers who spend time in other states and expect to have non-emergency care while they're away.)

And there are mandates for equipment for simultaneous test-taking, and there's an individual property which was reassessed a couple of years ago from $1.3M to $1.7M and the appeal is almost certainly going to result in a settlement back down to $1.2M with our school on the hook for some excess taxes. Ouch.

The applicable tax cap is Whichever Is Less of 2% and the official CPI which is 1.46%, plus a local growth factor of almost exactly 1%, so income is not rising to match outgo unless we vote to override the tax cap.So...

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

Bring Ideas

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Ideas? Of course there is always sharing; the actual merger plan did not save money (long-run) because the diseconomy of scale from added transportation cancelled the economy of scale from cutting staff, but sharing doesn't have to involve large-scale transportation costs. Diana discussed doing more (mainly administrative) sharing among the 4 local schools through BOCES, and we can do more athletic sharing (girls' basketball with Madison). This will not save a lot, but every little bit helps.

Shared Admin can go pretty far, there is such a thing as a Shared Superintendent possibility; it's not obvious that this is applicable to our situation. In general, if we consult the New York State Professional Staffing Ratios" (large PDF) (we're on page 244), we might find that some other small schools do it with reduced staff and maybe we can do what they do...or maybe we can do New Things; telepresence robotics is taking off, after all, and getting lots cheaper than being there.

Smart Schools Equipment for telepresence, for distance learning (below), and to satisfy the mandate Diana mentioned for simultaneous test-taking is not just getting cheaper: it may be covered by the "smart schools allocation" at the bottom of the "BUDGET PROPOSAL", which for HCS is $409,770. It's likely that the "allocation" is intended to encourage long-term shift towards options like the Khan Academy, or simply lessons like our own Youtube channel to be used locally or shared. In the long run that's important, but it's possible that some replacement of people cost with machine cost will actually be feasible even in the fairly short term. (It's also possible that the geek writing this is overly optimistic.)

Natural Gas was discussed; my understanding of Diana's remarks is that it will save each year but that this coming year the savings is roughly cancelled by the installation cost. Ken Bausch points out by email that if if that understanding is correct, then it's a normal capital cost which should be funded by a bond issue, just as we do to amortize bus cost; in fact it's far more obvious in the case of the one-time-only natural gas cost. If indeed that's how it goes, and if the link above was correct in projecting $160,000/year savings, then we're more than halfway home right there. If.

Distance Learning is a current topic for Madison; Ferdinand sends a link to MCS bringing new instruction via distance learning through BOCES and in the long run this may be a major winner, but probably not a big issue for the next few budgets. Well, it might be.

Alumni/Community Fundraising was discussed; Amy Hurta as Treasurer reported that she had learned the day before that the Sports Boosters, like the Emerald Foundation, is in fact a tax-exempt 401(c)3 organization listed with the IRS, "and always has been." Send Money! Andrew Coddington says the Emerald Foundation is always looking for alumni donations and tries to keep an alumni list, so Send Names/Addresses! (And Money!) And there's also HCS alumni site which isn't very active--but links to a facebook page.

Sponsorship Stephanie McClintick (via email) brings up the possibility of local company sponsorship of teams and other activities, which is a common development elsewhere; the Albany Times-Union reported a year ago on Schools look to sponsors to help pay for programs - Times Union

Cuts force districts to find alternative funding

which is certainly a familiar story; from this past fall we can add This student planner brought to you by… | The New York World

New York City middle and high school students will be receiving free planners next school year courtesy of corporate sponsors, under a new city Department of Education plan.

There is an organization to support this kind of thing: Sponsorship and Advertising | School Administrators Association of New York State

The Corporate Sponsorship Program helps SAANYS to achieve its mission of continuing to provide programs and services to the school leaders of New York State - leading to greater opportunities for the students within their care. Participating in the program provides companies with many opportunities to interact with school leaders from all over the state.

Of course, there can be problems, and caution is advised; from Utah we hear High school sponsorship contracts raise concerns, but also benefit programs | Deseret News

In this piece, Amy Donaldson examines the regulatory environment surrounding these deals and how local coaches have gotten into legal trouble with respect to such contracts.

It could happen here.

Foreign Students I've written before about the possibility of tuition-paying international students and about some of the reasons why HCS might appeal to some. Astrid brought this up at the meeting and Diana replied that HCS did indeed go through the "accreditation" process with Homeland Security so we are "SEVIS-certified"; indeed we are on page 108 of last June's official list at DHS and we can accept foreign students with "F" visas, although not "M" visas. See SEVP Certification Basics and maybe Everything you need to know about Foreign Students (F-1) studying in Public Schools

• Secondary school attendance is limited to twelve months.
• F-1 secondary school students are required to pay the school the full cost of education by repaying the school system for the full, unsubsidized, per capita cost of providing the education to him or her.
• F-1 students are prohibited from attending public elementary schools or publicly-funded adult education programs.

And Clinton High School went through this in 2004 but may have dropped it, their website doesn't mention it. The idea went nowhere at HCS, beyond conversations with a company which actually offered to provide students and pay $2,000/year to HCS for their education. Not a good offer, in fact much less than is required by the second requirement above. Is the idea hopeless? I don't think so, not at all. Consider the town of Millinocket, Maine, reported in Millinocket using China program money to keep schools going in 2014 — Bangor Daily News...

Seven Chinese students attended Stearns this year, each paying about $24,000 tuition. ...
Millinocket is among several Maine municipalities hoping to offset shrinking school revenues with Chinese students but had recruiting difficulties. An informal poll of state public high schools’ Chinese student enrollments taken in February showed the most students, 12, at Orono High School. Some private schools had close to 100.

What does Millinocket have that we don't? Connections with Chinese high schools, apparently. Hmm... but we do have potential connections through Colgate faculty/students/admin, including the China Study Group. USA Today reported last July on U.S. summer camps increasingly popular overseas

U.S. summer camps are increasingly popular in countries such as China, where rising middle class can send their children to experience American life -- and possibly set the stage for going to college in the USA

The article featured Colgate rather prominently. At the wrong level for our purposes, but still -- it's worth exploring. Do we have such connections? (Carolyn?) Do we have people, preferably parents of current HCS students, who'd be hosts? (Astrid?) Of course this doesn't have to be China, but China is prominent in the F-1 high-school student visa discussions.

That's all I can think of right now. Diana wanted to emphasize that ideas need to be considered in the context of our layers of regulations, mandates, subsidies... When Ferdinand talked about transportation costs, working with local transport to save some of the $90,000/year we give to BOCES, she replied that transportation is among our highest aid-ratio costs so that much of the money we give BOCES comes back to us, and even if we found a cheaper transportation solution it's likely that the budget cost would be higher. We can't count on specific aid ratios for long-term planning, but for right now, let's talk about the next few years' budgets, with focus on next year.

Update: I didn't mention Activism, or at least Letter-Writing; note that the state's disappointing Budget Proposal is not a Final Budget. There will be a post about this, Reasonably Soon Now.

Update2:The BoE meeting is now a (long) video at ▶ Hamilton CSD BOE Meeting 1.21.14

...apologies, the next one will have better sound.

Below is the order [of] events and the times in which each Agenda Item appears:
0-10min: Items 1.0-3.6, Call to order, Preliminary Action, Consent Agenda (Business Operations)
10-11 min: Item 4, Consent Agenda (Old Business)
11-17 min: Item 5, Community Participation Part 1
17-21 min: Items 6-6.4, New Business
21-35 min: Item 6.5, Budget Sports
35-55 min: Item 7, Information and Correspondence
55-1:41 min: Item 8, Community Participation Part 2.

Hooray for open government!

Update 3 Yes, the sound is terrible. If you have LOTS of energy then

• (a) download the video from youtube, lots of e.g. Firefox extensions for that;
• (b) split off the sound track, probably in iMovie or whatever basic video handler you have;
• (c) download Audacity (free) from http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/
• (d) follow, e.g. http://www.podtopia.net/gettingstarted/removenoise.shtml

No problem. Well, umm, assuming you have several hours...make it a day, this is a long video and there will probably be synchronization issues when you put it back together so you may have to do it one clip at a time. And the result will not be perfect. No, I'm not gonna try, but I'll post the result if somebody else does.

Flipped Classrooms and Class Size

The flipped classroom (Amazon link to cited book) doesn't depend on the Khan Academy. I note a New York Times op-ed on Turning Education Upside Down

Three years ago, Clintondale High School, just north of Detroit, became a “flipped school” — one where students watch teachers’ lectures at home and do what we’d otherwise call “homework” in class. Teachers record video lessons, which students watch on their smartphones, home computers or at lunch in the school’s tech lab. In class, they do projects, exercises or lab experiments in small groups while the teacher circulates....
Like everything disruptive, online education is highly controversial. But the flipped classroom is a strategy that nearly everyone agrees on. ... many people are holding it up as a potential model of how to use technology to humanize the classroom.

It is a strategy to maximize human contact by teachers. Interestingly, once we learn to use it effectively, there is really no such thing as "class size". Teachers spend their time interacting with small groups and individuals, no matter whether there are 20 students per grade or 2000.

21st Century Resources: Khan Academy

When we think about the options available to a 21st century school, the Khan Academy has to be considered. It may continue to grow or it may be replaced with something better in a few years; we don't know. We do know, as I've noted before, that it offers a model of education which has considerable research support; a model of education where we begin with supplemental and review  material and student-tracking tools for ordinary classes, but in which there is ultimately no requirement for any such thing as "class size", no requirement for any such thing as a "grade level". Many schools are making decisions such as "we can't offer class X, there aren't enough students who want it" (on the grounds suggested by the Javascript widget at the bottom of this page), and that kind of decision can become obsolete. One way or another (with Khan's vision or somebody else's improvement) it will become obsolete for those schools which want it to.

It isn't obsolete yet, but things are changing fast; on August 30th, the Academy announced that "We just launched the biggest change in the history of the Khan Academy. It’s a new learning experience that will figure out where you have gaps and help you fill them. Check it out:..." What they mean is that the software now tracks not only the specific lessons you've mastered but the relationships between lessons, so that it can say what lessons you definitely don't need (because you have the skills) and what lessons you're just ready for. A limited kind of academic counselling, but a useful one...and you don't have to get an appointment with a counsellor.

Every week or so I get emails mentioning new lessons, from Finding factors and multiples on to Late Classical: Lysippos, Apoxyomenos (Scraper), c. 330 B.C.E. (Roman copy) | Ancient Greece , on to Overview of Chinese History 1911 - 1949 and on to Fun with a Spider Bot. People thinking about educational options and costs and decisions, though, may prefer to look at teacher's perspective videos. Here are three:

First, from a fairly abstract perspective, about the tools that they make available: How I use Khan Academy data - An educator's perspective .

Teachers' views of kids, reported at Student ownership of learning in my classroom.

More concretely, here's a case study of a math classroom: Shelby Harris' classroom (Idaho, 2013) | Khan Academy in K-12 classrooms

Generalities are available at many places, e.g. Five Lessons from Salman Khan on the Future of Education | Psychology Today:

Salman Khan needs no introduction.  He was recently on the cover of FORBES and was named one of TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people.  And he just published a book—The One World Schoolhouse—which is already a bestseller.
I recently interviewed Sal to get his thoughts on the future of education.....

Still, if you have 12 minutes handy, you might prefer to watch  Sal Khan on Digital and Physical Learning | Our vision , explaining the current "supplemental" use of Academy videos, and the transitional "flipped classroom" model, and the on-beyond-classrooms self-paced instruction he expects beyond that. And if you have 16 minutes in addition, you might try his Year 2060: Education Predictions | Our vision where he begins with "In ten years, this [traditional lecture-based] classroom model is going to completely go away..." (update: and 11 minutes in, says "I think the role of the teacher is going to go up dramatically.")

  I'm not sure I believe that; it might be that replacement will be blocked by institutional resistance, which is always a strong factor. But it certainly can happen, and there's a good deal of evidence (anecdotal and data) suggesting that the replacement will be a good thing.

Khan on Future Learning

Courtesy of the KhanAcademy guy, creator of all those thousands of two-to-ten minute lectures with questions attached, we have "Future Learning" (from Good Magazine)

with a number of interesting thoughts.

• "The lecture is only valuable if you have that question in your brain..."
• "The school is gonna be one or two Really Big classrooms..."
• "If a bunch of kids want to take a month or two off to build a robot, go ahead -- you're not going to miss class, there's no such thing as missing class..."
• "The teachers are fountains of knowledge, experience, mentorship, humanity -- as opposed to fountains of a scripted lecture."

Or then again, maybe not.

Tests, Grades, Gender

So little boys test well, but get worse grades. And people keep doing research on why. Here's this week's entry: New UGA research helps explain why girls do better in school | UGA Today

Why do girls get better grades in elementary school than boys-even when they perform worse on standardized tests?
New research from the University of Georgia and Columbia University published in the current issue of Journal of Human Resources suggests that it's because of their classroom behavior, which may lead teachers to assign girls higher grades than their male counterparts.
... The data show, for the first time, that gender disparities in teacher grades start early and uniformly favor girls. In every subject area, boys are represented in grade distributions below where their test scores would predict.
The authors attribute this misalignment to what they called non-cognitive skills, or "how well each child was engaged in the classroom, how often the child externalized or internalized problems, how often the child lost control and how well the child developed interpersonal skills." ...
This difference can have long-reaching effects, Cornwell said.

I would think it might indeed. This causes me to think two kinds of thoughts: one is that maybe more girls than boys are comfortable in a top-down directive factory-model school; different school formats will work for different kids. And the other kind of thought is more specific...it would be very interesting to see if this is still true with "flipped" classrooms.

Points from the April 17th "Informational Meeting"

Ten of us from the CAC, having attended many meetings and reviewed much data, met last night with the BoE scattered among forty-odd community members, Superintendent Diana Bowers presiding...and near the end, someone in the audience commented that there seemed to be two of us in favor of the merger proposal, two undecided, and six against. I think that's about right, at the moment; and at the moment, I'm among the reasonably-solidly-against. There was a camera going; the video ought to appear on the Hamilton CSD site somewhere sometime soon. My very-fragmentary thoughts:

What Next? The perennial question, Where Do We Go From Here? was answered by Dr. Bowers, as indeed I laid it out in my CAC Done; Do You Feel Lucky? post: next comes (1) a BoE vote, and they can choose to stop everything, or to proceed. If they choose to proceed, then there's (2) a community straw vote, which can stop everything, or proceed. If we choose to proceed, then things go to the DoE and (3) back to the BoE, which can stop everything, or proceed to (4) a final community vote for district merger. Meanwhile Morrisville has the same sequence. If all the votes are favorable, then there's a merger, and then we (the combined district) elect a new combined BoE, and they decide what happens next -- who to hire, what to do with the existing buildings, whether to build a giant swimming pool instead (as Dave Hollis put it), and and at that point we ...well, it goes on. And on. And on, until Somebody gets tired of our performance and rings down the final curtain. (I don't think Diana actually got that far.)

Please Read: As Susan Marafino said, anybody who is going to vote on this should dive into the data, probably starting at the end with the 15-year Financial outline if we merge, based on the Possible Program/Staffing (where we save by economies of scale) and the Transportation Plan (where we pay to get kids together to achieve those economies of scale, and incidentally give them an hour per day extra transportation time for all HCS middle schoolers and M-ECS high schoolers.) Also please read my own collection of District Comparisons on this blog and at the accompanying site, based on the earlier documents and on reports I saw in the past year or so. (Some of these were out of date; as Susan commented at the meeting, M-ECS has in the past few years drastically cut its programs, and some of the district comparison material I linked is out of date in that respect.)

Summary: As Diana indicated at one point, the communities fit together in that our true-value tax rates are very very close (I believe neighboring communities have higher rates). As I said, I think that this equality actually indicates an additional difference: Morrisville made a choice between cutting programs and raising taxes which I do not believe we would have made. There are all kinds of reasons behind this; I'm not saying that they made the wrong choice, for them. I am saying that if a merged district were somehow to run short on money in future, I expect that most Hamilton homeowners would be voting differently than most Morrisville homeowners, and somebody would lose and be very unhappy about having merged. Of course if the merged district were never to run short of money, that's not a problem. If fuel costs stop rising (why would they stop rising? Well, they might, I suppose)...if the state doesn't run out of money (won't it run out of money? Well, maybe not...but I haven't read any economists or investors who think the current situation is sustainable. Some promises will be broken.) My feeling is that this merger is a very big gamble, which is why I wrote the CAC Done; Do You Feel Lucky? post which goes over both of those issues, with links.

And If We Don't Do This Merger Now? Well, we may do a different merger later (such as the merger I proposed in that post), or no merger at all. A couple of people were commenting on the value of merger in terms of having enough students for advanced classes, (again, I wrote about that in the aforementioned post.) One item I wanted to repeat in the meeting, but didn't get to: the economic issues of advanced K-12 (or introductory college) courses are changing rapidly. A recently completed study is reported as Online Education Trumps the Cost Disease

In a large, randomized experiment Bowen et al. found that students enrolled in an online/hybrid statistics course learned just as much as those taking a traditional class.... Perhaps even more importantly, Bowen et al. found that the online model was significantly less costly than the traditional model, some 36% to 57% less costly to produce than a course using a traditional lecture format. In other words, since outcomes were the same, online education increased productivity by 56% to 133%! ... ... Online education even in its earliest stages appears to be generating large improvements in educational productivity.

Actually outcomes were not the same; students learned the same material faster in this "hybrid" (online + one class/week) model than in the classroom-only model.

Then again, there's the Khan Academy which I've discussed many times, as a not-yet-complete K-12 curriculum (with some college courses) of thousands of explanatory videos with software to go with them; they're not intended to make teachers obsolete, but they are intended to make "class size" obsolete as a concept. I've also discussed Khan's One World Schoolhouse book a few times, in which he explains how that can work. Will it work? Which model will win? I don't think anybody knows, but the background to the economics of education is changing faster than ever before, and the most clearly currently-effective change is happening at just the right level to make merger unnecessary. Predicting is hard, especially the future -- but there's no need for panic. There's a very good chance that we will end up replacing the traditional model of school with something that's somewhat cheaper and a whole lot better. (Or with something that's a whole lot cheaper and somewhat worse -- I admit that's possible too.)

Tell me what I'm missing...

Update: Radio Free Hamilton (i.e. Dave Hollis) reports: 'What If' Scenarios Paint Post-Merger Picture

Members of the committee of HCS district residents studying the possible merger with Morrisville-Eaton Central School discussed the study in a forum Tuesday night in the school cafeteria attended by about 70 people.

70? Well, I guess there were more people after I counted. And yes, the picture is me. (And Susan remarks that there was one CAC member who stayed in the audience; 11, not 10.)

Attention Span and Testing

It's really hard to pay attention to all of a long presentation; back when I was a brand-new (and really bad) asst. prof of computer geekery at the University of Delaware, the Center for improvement in teaching (or some such name) explained that typical lecture retention was 17% -- I remember the number, more than thirty years later, but not the experimental support for it. One way to improve, which I never really mastered, was simply to break up the lecture into small chunks for which retention would be at least a bit higher -- and ask questions in between. Good teachers do that, they don't get lost in their lecture thoughts. Today I see Harvard psychologists saying that the questions-in-between pattern also works online: I admit that I don't see that it's all that different, but they say Online learning: It's different

in both experiments, students who were tested between each segment -- but not the others, even those who were allowed to study the material again -- showed a marked drop in mind-wandering and improved overall retention of material.
"It's not sufficient for a lecture to be short or to break up a lecture as we did in these experiments," Schacter said. "You need to have the testing...." Those tests...act as an incentive for students to pay closer attention to the lecture because they know they'll have to answer questions at the end of each segment.
Another surprising effect of the testing, Szpunar said, was to reduce testing anxiety among students, and to ease their fears that the lecture material would be very challenging.

I'm filing this under "Independent experimental evidence that the Khan Academy is doing it right."


Or then again, maybe not.

Networks of Imagination

Ken Bausch mentioned this last December; The Global One-Room Schoolhouse: John Seely Brown | DMLcentral

In this video, which contains the highlights of his “Cultivating the Entrepreneurial Learner” keynote at the 2012 Digital Media and Learning conference in San Francisco, he introduces the fascinating notion of “a global one-room schoolhouse through networks of imagination.”

It seems to me that this is quite compatible with Sal Khan's vision (and book) that I've mentioned a few times, but it's an interestingly different point of view. I'm inclined to see it as a mix of Khan with some of Yong Zhao's World Class Learners, but that oversimplifies as usual. I do see him as detecting and approving a trend towards tools like Scoot & Doodle | Get Creative Together, which has just received fairly major support from Pearson among others.

Google+ Hangout App Scoot & Doodle Raises $2.25M Seed, From Valley Angels & Pearson, To Get More Kids Learning Through Play | TechCrunch

Well, maybe not just kids, or just play; I'll add some emphasis in a quote from the GeekDad report on Scoot & Doodle: Makes Google Hangouts a Collaborative Playspace | GeekDad | Wired.com

essentially, it is an app that works with Google+Hangouts and lets you type, draw and engage in a visual and tactile way – as well as through video and voice. In my use of it I have found it to be really stable and offer a fluid and worthwhile experience whether with my kids or with business colleagues. Like many startups there appears to be more potential applications than you can imagine; however, kudos for both the Scoot & Doodle team and Pearson for seeing the potential of this in the education and learning space.

And I certainly approve of the idea that education works off study groups that fit in a Google+ Hangout. That works.

Or then again, maybe not.

Other School Analogies: Day Jail?

School isn't just about learning; it's also about signaling that you've learned, of course. Beyond that, it's about making society work, in such a way that parents can do what they need to do all day. Arnold Kling, in The Dark View of Schooling, notes

Bryan Caplan thinks that schooling is not about education. He thinks instead it is about signaling.
Bryan’s view is benign compared with John Holt.

society demands of schools, among other things, that they be a place where, for many hours of the day, many days of the year, children or young people can be shut up and so got out of everyone else’s way. ... That is an important part of what schools are for. They are a kind of day jail for kids.

I do believe that technological improvements can make signaling a lot easier, in K-12 as much as in How testing could transform higher education:

having a well-calibrated measurement would put a lot more focus on learning the material and much less on how you learned it. No one will care too much which book you read, which online class you took, or what exercises you did. Those are all just ways to learn. Second, this would truly democratize education—the self taught Bangladeshi is on equal footing with the legacy Harvard admittee.

If you want to know if a kid has grasped 10th grade math, start him on the Khan Academy 11th grade sequence and see how quickly he reaches "mastery". Of course you probably need humans to rate English composition, if not reading comprehension, but you can go a long ways without adult humans involved -- let ten kids write short essays to summarize some information, each of them answers ten sets of multiple-choice questions, and they get comprehension scores based on how well they answered, but composition scores based on how well their readers answered. (Is this a bad idea? Probably; I just thought of it. There are lots of possibilities.) The testing tools for this probably won't come very quickly, and they won't come at the same pace in all subject/skill areas, but they're coming. I'm less confident that we'll get a substitute for the "day jail for kids." Many parents will want to know that their kids are somewhere being supervised -- the sort of "off in the woods, probably building a dam" that went over well enough in the late 50s (when I went along with my elder siblings) is probably gone forever.

Or on the other hand, maybe not.

All that Jazz -- Education Analogy

Alex Tabarrok, economics professor and co-founder of the online Marginal Revolution University, comments on Online Education and Jazz

there is something special, magical, and “almost sacred” about the live teaching experience...It’s even more true that there is something special, magical and almost sacred about the live musical experience... and yet by orders of magnitude most of the music that I listen to is recorded music.
In The Trouble With Online Education Mark Edmundson makes the analogy between teaching and music explicit:

Every memorable class is a bit like a jazz composition.

Quite right but every non-memorable class is also a bit like a jazz composition, namely one that was expensive, took an hour to drive to (15 minutes just to find parking) and at the end of the day wasn’t very memorable. The correct conclusion to draw from the analogy between live teaching and live music is that at their best both are great but both are also costly and inefficient ways of delivering most teaching and most musical experiences.

I think that's true, but I think that maybe he's missing part of the point of his own work and that of other online services: online teaching environments and live teaching environments both offer opportunities for interaction, and for student improvisation. Online teaching can (and probably will) get better with time, the techniques are reasonably cumulative. The approach of, say, the Berlitz LP records that helped me learn Spanish fifty years ago is still available online -- it is now supplemented, not entirely replaced, with the game-like approach of Rosetta Stone which one of my sons used recently, to help get ready to go to Nicaragua with some old friends from HCS. Live teaching from a great teacher is not cumulative in the same way (I was a worse teacher than most of my teachers, no matter how hard I tried.)

If MOOCs were going to be "everybody watch the same lecture and then take the same exam", that would be of some value, and the use of a great teacher could increase that value greatly...but that's not what's happening. On places like CourseTalk | MOOC Reviews & Ratings you can learn who is teaching what and how, and how well it worked...you can learn about online courses, yes. But at the same time, when you interact with software like that of the Khan Academy, that software is learning about you. In fact it can pay more individual attention to you than any human teacher can, outside of the traditional 1-1 ideal, and it can eventually improve on that 1-1 ideal because it can try out different approaches on millions of students -- different explanations, different experiences suggested by thousands of different teachers and students. It can note which works for whom -- and it can compare you to more somewhat-similar students than any 1-1 human teacher can ever make notes on.

Will it ever outdo human teaching in every respect? Gee, I dunno. But it can certainly outdo human teaching in many respects.

Or then again, maybe not.

CAC Done; Do You Feel Lucky?

The "Community Advisory Council" (or are we a Committee? I forget) had its final meeting last night, to look at the documents mentioned in the last couple of posts. My initial summary, as I said in the meeting, is that the "What If" program document suggests a economy-of-scale savings of $717,000 per year, while the "What If" transportation document suggests that in order to get the kids together for their economy of scale, we need to spend $642,000 extra per year on buses. That's a yearly savings of $75,000 out of $27,000,000 for the combined districts. Everything else we're talking about (millions of dollars in benefits) seems to be coming from the state incentives for merger -- incentives which mostly run out after fifteen years, even assuming that they don't stop earlier than promised.

Hmmm... Well, I would like to go a little further than that initial summary.

• The $717K savings looks pretty solid.
• The $642K extra cost is a pretty big gamble.
• I don't entirely trust the state benefits.
• There are also some genuine non-financial benefits to consolidation.
• I don't think they're as important as many think.
• I have another proposal. :-)

The -$717K program proposal strikes me as well-done; this is where our SES Study Group shows off the fact that they really do know what they're doing, putting together something credible and credibly saving a bunch of money at the same time. No criticism from me -- but I understand where some critics were coming from, having hoped that the program could have more in it.

The +$642K transportation proposal is understandable, and as they said they asked the local experts how to manage it and it probably can't be done much better though experience will improve it some. BUT -- As Susan Marafino said in the meeting, that $642K will rise if fuel costs rise: consolidation is a bet that they won't. As I said in response, fuel costs might not rise: natural gas prices have been falling and we are seeing increasing use of natural gas vehicles; on the map you'll see one station in Utica, three around Syracuse, three around Albany, one in Poughkeepsie...prices may fall. Or not. On the other hand, the past fifteen years have seen gas prices quadruple. On transportation cost, it comes down to this: Do you feel lucky?

Increasing transportation is a small gamble in another sense. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) says

An average of 24 school-age children die in school transportation-related traffic crashes each year (11 occupants of school transportation vehicles and 13 pedestrians).

That's not many; it's not one of the major risks of childhood, it's not even a major part of the risk of vehicular death in childhood. But it's a bigger risk than random shootings at school unless Sandy Hook is the new normal; if you're worried about school shooters, if you're worried about causes of death in general, you should worry about this a little more.

The transportation plan also involves another cost, which some will think small: as I said in the meeting, we'll have some hundreds of kids spending about an hour each day (two twenty-minute rides and maybe ten minutes waiting for each, morning and afternoon) which they do not now require. Kids from Hamilton will do this for three years, kids from Morrisville will do it for four. That's not a gamble, it's just a little sad. And boring. (But it's better than exciting...gee, I remember hanging on to the bus' door handle going home from my own elementary school, with one foot on the step and a couple more kids on the steps ahead of me...boring has a lot to be said for it.)

The state benefits are the big deal here; they don't just handle impacts like the first year of extra bus usage, they pay off millions of existing debt and provide other benefits. Do they? Well, maybe they do, before they come to an end and leave us, lucky or not. But there is a New York State Budget Crisis Task Force, and they seem to me to be saying that

the money available to the state may suddenly decrease, whether from renewed recession or from financial companies moving their operations to lower-tax regions; their incentives for doing so have risen.
... Aid to K-12 education is by far the biggest portion of state aid ($23 billion) and is the largest item in the state budget.

When you make big plans based on promises of future state aid, you are assuming that the state will be able to keep its promises. The state is in trouble, unprecedented trouble in some ways; that trouble is almost certain to get worse; that trouble might suddenly get much, much worse; K-12 aid is the biggest chunk; New York State K-12 education is more expensive than anybody else's (except Washington, D.C.?). If something's gotta give, it's likely to be us. Do you feel lucky?

Now, there are genuine non-financial advantages to consolidation. If you scroll down to the bottom of this page, you'll see a little Javascript widget about grade sizes that says

Here's a test of the importance of grade size, which is roughly doubled by a merger of equal schools. Suppose we have a grade of size gradeSize (say, 45) from which we want to select a Latin 4 class of at least 10; it won't be offered without 10....

I suggest that you put in your own guesses about grade sizes for HCS and M-ECS, now and fifteen years from now. Put in your own guesses about the percentages who'd like Latin 4, advanced chemistry, or jazz band. I believe you'll see that consolidation makes it easier to offer advanced courses, when schools require minimum enrollment the way ours do.

I also believe that minimum-enrollment policies will become less common in a world of the Khan Academy and Salman Khan's One World Schoolhouse, so I don't think grade size is as important as I would if I thought minimum-enrollment policy was a necessary part of school. (see footnote.) Still, the benefits of consolidation are, or might be, quite real -- but so are the costs, and consolidation is a gamble that the costs will not be too much higher than the benefits. Do you feel lucky?

I have another proposal. Last night, for the first time, I heard someone say that the M-ECS school could handle many more students; that it had handled many more students. The SES response was that it couldn't do so with the current usage pattern as defined by the Board, which is certainly fair enough. But suppose that this is true. If so, I would propose a different kind of merger, one which is probably politically impossible for excellent reasons, but still worth a thought. Leave every HCS student at HCS; close Andrews Elementary completely (this will save a whole lot of money, really), moving all those students a little ways north; now go to Hamilton with Morrisville's 12th grade, 11th grade, 10th grade...9th? Does it fit? It might...and the advanced classes can go on, even with minimum enrollment policies, and Morrisville students will be able to sign up for Colgate courses, and so on. Nobody loses, everybody wins...or not, depending on what they care about. And "what they care about" is important. Indeed, that's what it's all about...I don't think this will happen. But it's worth a thought.

---

footnote on minimum enrollment policies: My own AP classes were mostly independents; I think I had two classmates in AP English, but my own high school (it was smaller then) wasn't a good candidate for consolidation. In any case, I don't think 10 is a good minimum class size; I think it's bigger than most study groups ought to be, even considering that I think most study groups should probably be virtual -- maybe two students physically present, with webcams and big screens to connect up a virtual table, and a responsible adult who is not a "teacher" present somewhere nearby, while tutors connect mainly online... but that's just one image among many possibilities. School is changing. Prediction is hard, especially of the future. My vision is almost certainly wrong. Consolidation commits you to a single vision. I'm skeptical.

footnote on district comparison: I've tried to collect some district comparison data at this blog's disorganized companion website as well as around here. It seems to me that consolidation commits you to having a single vision; you have to agree with people about what kind of lives your kids are likely to live (and then, of course, you have to support your kids with whatever they decide for themselves, which won't resemble your visions very closely.) That's hard. Of course you might find that you really do agree on priorities. Or not. Do you feel lucky?

March 12 Update on What's Next: As I understand it, the SES Study Team will now finish their write-up as a submission to New York State, which paid for the study and expects a document. Meanwhile, the Hamilton and Morrisville Boards of Education will be talking about it. Then it goes public, as they say here:

Adopting the merger is a three-step process.

• Boards vote to move the process to an advisory referendum or "straw vote."
• The communities hold a straw vote. If this passes, the results are sent to the education commissioner who authorizes a statutory or final referendum.
• The communities hold a final referendum.

(Or then again, maybe not.)

Granny Cloud

Sugata Mitra is mainly known for his kids'-self-education TED talks in 2007: Sugata Mitra shows how kids teach themselves and 2010: The child-driven education. He continues, with the 2013 TED Prize, to develop A School in the Cloud and the Future of Learning

Mitra recruited an army of retired teachers, all women, whom he dubbed the “granny cloud.” The grannies connected to Mitra’s schools via Skype, and when the kids were assembled in groups of four to six they asked questions like “Can anything be less than zero?” “Will robots be conscious one day?” and “How do my eyes know to cry when I am sad?”
Then they sat back and let the kids do the learning, injecting themselves only to offer the kind of encouragement that only grannies can. “If there is a child in trouble we beam in a Gran,” Mitra jokes. What Mitra saw was that the Granny cloud kids’ English improved, their science scores soared. By most measures they were learning more and more quickly, and doing it mostly on their own. “It just requires broadband, collaboration and encouragement,” Mitra says.
... What Mitra proposes is the dismantling of an educational machine created by the British over centuries of Empire building.... “I am not saying its bad, it’s brilliantly constructed, but it’s not needed.”
What Mitra envisions are “schools in the cloud,” classes of 24 students in actual brick-and-mortar spaces managed in person by his volunteer grannies. The grannies ask the questions, offer the encouragement, everything else happens remotely, the lights, heating, and locks are all manipulated via the cloud. For now Mitra envisions these cloud schools will function as a supplement...

If Mitra's vision (in many countries) seems to be working, it's likely that we'll see volunteer+paid organizations of grannies, grandpas, and others, trying to make small schools work better by a mix of "child-driven" online and offline experience. It might be effective, too.
Or then again, maybe not.

Exploration (v.?) Explanation

Khan-Academy style videos are sometimes criticized because they are lecture-based explanations rather than student-centered explorations; of course they're student controlled, but that sounds bad and contrary to Good Modern Pedagogy. The Khan Academy lead developer answers questions on Slashdot: Interviews: Khan Academy Lead Developer Ben Kamens Answers Your Questions - Slashdot

The fundamental belief of Khan Academy is that students should engage with content they need on-demand, at their own pace. We agree that any curriculum that forces all students in a class to follow the same, preordained "watch this video, do this exercise, watch this other video" path isn't using technology in a meaningful way. ...
Our classrooms see varying implementations, but the best of them try hard to help students move at their own pace. Some students might never need to listen to Sal say a word. They can master content by experimenting on their own. Absolutely. Fine. By. Us.
Khan Academy exists to give students the freedom to engage with the content they need while giving teachers immediate feedback about who's working on what and where they need help. We think we can help teachers by making this acquisition of core skills a more personalized, efficient process.
In doing so, we hope to move teachers _up_ the value chain so they can focus on exploration-based learning and targeted coaching with the rest of their class time.
I personally think that'd be a significant advance in learning. And FWIW, we consider anybody who fights for exploration-based learning to be an ally of Khan Academy.

That certainly fits the One World Classroom vision...and it really Just Might Work.


Or then again, maybe not.