Smaller Schools, Bigger Achievements?

They're talking about urban schools, but I choose to focus on Small Is Good, in Small high school reform boosts districtwide outcomes -- ScienceDaily

"Small school reform lifted all boats."

Small school reform, in which new, small high schools replace large, comprehensive high schools, has been adopted by major U.S. cities, such as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Diego, and Boston. Studies in New York and Boston have found that small high schools deliver better outcomes -- including higher graduation rates -- than large high schools for urban students.

I'm convinced. :-)

HCS Board of Education Flyer

The Hamilton Central School Board of Education had a meeting last night, and distributed a flyer briefly explaining the issues; it's public information, so I've shared a scan of that flyer on Google Docs (thanks, Amy!). It's pretty good. I would like to make a few points:

• they start out by noting that our current troubles come from an (unplanned) 21% decline in state aid, which is of course a fact, and
they list $20.29 million in future state aid as if it were a fact; it's not. It's a plan, dependent on the sustainability of New York's budget.
• Their "pro" point 1 is "Save money through economies of scale"; this only works if the plan's increased transportation costs, especially fuel, don't continue to rise.
• Point 2: "Improve the ... educational choices" might work if the economies of scale work, or the $20.29M is delivered as planned.
• Point 3: "Receive additional state aid" has the same problem.

And so on.

There are also secondary issues not raised; it's reasonably certain that Hamilton real estate values will go downwards. It's absolutely certain that the debt load to which Hamilton property owners are vulnerable will increase, since Morrisville's debt load is much higher; all such debts are subject to the usual form

The Notes will be valid and legally binding general obligations of the School District, all the taxable real property within which will be subject to the levy of ad valorem taxes to pay the Notes and interest thereon, without limitation as to rate or amount.

Of course, if the state budget turns out to be sustainable indefinitely (i.e., continues to support increased state aid rates even long after the 14-year merger period), that may not matter. It's a gamble.

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.

Home (?) Schooling

In reading about educational options this past year, I've been surprised by how little can be excluded. I thought that "academic rigor" with lots of expensive one-on-one adult attention and lots of carefully graded homework was ideal, for a kid who would do well in college and beyond. I didn't take homeschooling seriously. I still don't, in the sense that I doubt that a large proportion of families can do what I used to think of as homeschooling, but the it seems that the term covers a wide and increasing range of approaches to education. A pediatrician blogged recently on 18 Reasons Why Doctors and Lawyers Homeschool Their Children — ChildrensMD

I timidly attended a home school parent meeting last spring. Surprisingly it was full of doctors, lawyers, former public school teachers, and other professionals. These were not the stay-at-home-moms in long skirts that I expected. The face of homeschooling is changing. We are not all religious extremists or farmers, and our kids are not all overachieving academic nerds without social skills.
An estimated 2.04 million k12 children are home educated in the United States, a 75% increase since 1999....

But that homeschooling need not be entirely at home, so it's not clear what's going on; Wikipedia notes Homeschooling # Homeschool cooperatives

Co-ops also provide social interaction for homeschooled children. They may take lessons together or go on field trips. Some co-ops also offer events such as prom and graduation for homeschoolers.
Homeschoolers are beginning to utilize Web 2.0 as a way to simulate homeschool cooperatives online. With social networks homeschoolers can chat, discuss threads in forums, share information and tips, and even participate in online classes via blackboard systems similar to those used by colleges.... Regarding socialization, Taylor's results would mean that very few home-schooling children are socially deprived. He states that critics who speak out against homeschooling on the basis of social deprivation are actually addressing an area which favors homeschoolers.

It's interesting. Homeschoolers make some major claims:

Created by: CollegeAtHome.com

From my point of view, the important thing is simply that this does not seem to be a disaster: it's a real choice which parents have been increasingly making, where benefits seem, for many, to outweigh any harm, and research suggests that this is just fine. I don't see any reason why the trend should stop; in fact, the costs are going down and the benefits going up as technology improves, so the trend is likely to accelerate.

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.

Khan Academy in Idaho -- and in the movies

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

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

One of the Slashdot commenters adds

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

Davis Guggenheim is

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

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

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

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

Star Academies?

"Welcome to Star Scholar U, where professors are the credential".
Professors deliver self-service online courses | The Daily Caller

Founding a university may sound dramatic, but in an era of easy-to-use online tools it can be done as a side project—akin to blogging or writing a textbook. Soon there could be hundreds of Star Scholar U’s.
Two recent examples are Marginal Revolution University, started by two economics professors at George Mason University, and Rheingold U, run by the author and Internet pioneer Howard Rheingold. To be clear, these professors are using the word “university” loosely—they award no credit and claim no spot on any college ranking. And they probably won’t become rich through their teaching. But the gambit gives them full control over the content and delivery methods. And it offers their personal brands as a kind of credential.

Rheingold U is new to me:

Rheingold U. is a totally online learning community, offering courses that usually run for five weeks, with five live sessions and ongoing asynchronous discussions through forums, blogs, wikis, mindmaps, and social bookmarks. In my thirty years of experience online and my eight years teaching students face to face and online at University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University, I've learned that magic can happen when a skilled facilitator works collaboratively with a group of motivated students. Live sessions include...

I dunno. The idea of the star as teacher is at least partly a matter of student incentives...of generated focus. Maybe we can have an actual profession which is "course designer", and an actual profession of course certification/evaluation, and a star lecturer can do the actual mini-lecture deliveries...how about real stars? Patrick Stewart as a physics lecturer? Does it really matter if he understands what he's saying? (Taylor Swift as a psychology lecturer?) Extend the mini-lectures with mini-dialogues, in which an actor/student takes a role with which the actual student can identify -- in fact each mini-lecture becomes multiple online mini-dialogues, so you can follow along with the education of the fictional character you most identify with, interacting with, well, with the
"Second star to the right, and straight on till morning."
Or then again, maybe not, except in Neverland.

Focus

A professorial note on MOOCs develops a view of their limits, which is a familiar view but I'm not sure it's correct. The Year of the MOOC? — Crooked Timber

MOOC’s have to be the new frontier of social networking. Some kind of peer-to-peer bootstrapping, with lots of students helping each other help themselves, because there’s no way one instructor (or just a few) can individually help every student, once you scale up past a certain point. But this still requires the students to be mature and self-motivated, as learners, to start with.

This is such a huge number of people – especially globally – that it’s great news, all in all. But it leaves a lot of people behind...(Poor kid, he has to go to Harvard because he’s not ready for Coursera!) College is for students who can’t yet help themselves, don’t know how to study, don’t know enough to know what they want, or what they should want, to learn. They need to be more or less locked into an environment where they will be induced to learn how to learn. Which is, after all, what college is supposed to teach.

That's what (some say) college is supposed to teach...but does it? Take a bunch of kids with comparable SAT scores, high school grades, socio-economic background and so forth as well as comparable "grit" and most of all, comparable ability-to-learn. Now put some of them randomly into college, some into the military, some into jobs. Five years later, six years later...test their ability-to-learn again. Will the ones who went to college stand out, as having learned how to learn? Will they be more mature? More self-motivated? I have no confidence in this claim. I would want to see some data before taking it seriously.

Actually, I'm not at all sure what ability-to-learn is, though I believe it involves being "mature and self-motivated, as learners" just as stated above; I just think that definition's probably pretty much circular. If you focus on what's in front of you then you're going to be described as mature and self-motivated and as having developed the ability to learn (although you might be very slow at it.) Of course learning-how-to-learn also involves the mechanics of taking notes and looking stuff up and trying things out, i.e. experimentation, but that ought to come in elementary school, and if elementary school comes to involve MOOCs then maybe that's all that's required... Your first grade class, or more likely pre-Kindergarten, puts you in a couple of actual physical play-groups with physical friends (some of whom are animals, and some are robots?) and also a couple of virtual groups where you do Google Hangouts (or the equivalent) with virtual friends, some of whom are cartoons and others are kids that you might meet someday. Later you take notes (to send to each other) and you look stuff up (with Google, and Wikipedia!) and you experiment (with a hammer, but preferably not Maxwell's. ) And a situation in which the "bright" kids and the "slow" kids are not waiting for each other, in which each kid has the habit of making progress at his or her own pace...hmmm. It might do.

A large part of self-motivation is habit. Indeed, a large part of maturity is habit. Hey, you know what? Almost everything is habit. William James on Habit

"Ninety-nine hundredths or, possibly, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of our activity is purely automatic and habitual, from our rising in the morning to our lying down each night."

"The teacher's prime concern should be to ingrain into the pupil that assortment of habits that shall be most useful to him throughout life. Education is for behavior, and habits are the stuff of which behavior consists."

"We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can."

"Seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits you aspire to gain."

"Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state."

Or then again, maybe they wouldn't at all, not nohow. And anyway it's much much much too late for me.

Education Election

A Time Magazine "ViewPoint" says that The Election Has Compromised Education Reform

The 2012 presidential election sidestepped the issue of school reform. Neither candidate spent much time laying out, let alone talking up, an education policy agenda. But around the country, there were ballot referendums and state and local races with big implications for schools. Teachers’ unions had a good night, but so did charter schools....

We don't know the right answer... we muddle on.
Until we can't, of course.

Educational Cartoons...

Problems must be solved and dilemmas require compromise, according to Larry Cuban -- Cartoons on Problems and Dilemmas | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

I worked with K-12 teachers, principals, school board members and superintendents in distinguishing between problems and dilemmas when it came to figuring out school reforms and getting into complexities of classroom practice. Occasionally, I would use cartoons to make my points...

Interesting and fun, but the most thought-provoking item I found was not one of the cartoons, was not even one of the linked cartoons, but was a linked absence-of-cartoons in Cartoons/YouTube on Charter Schools | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Of all the cartoons on charters that I found, every single one opposed them. I scoured the Internet and could not find a pro-charter cartoon. I do understand that the nature of cartoons is to satirize and caricature but those I found hammered again and again the theme that charters are, at best, harmful to, and, at worst, destroying public schools.

I have a feeling that controversy-cartoons generally do "anti" much better than "pro", and this is supported by the commenter who tells him to look for anti-union cartoons (as being implicitly or explicitly pro-charter, I guess). Very odd.
Or then again, maybe not.

Rocketship charters

This summer, the Washington Post asked Is a charter school chain called Rocketship ready to soar across America? - The Washington Post

After their first week at Rocketship, the children woke up early on Saturday morning to do their homework unprompted. The boys made progress. And Vivian had a math breakthrough. “She said, ‘Dad, I finally get it,’ ” Martinez said. “I asked how did your teacher show you?’ She said it wasn’t the teacher. It was the penguin.”
An animated penguin is featured in the math software used by Rocketship.
Computers cannot replace good teachers, Danner said. But rote tasks — math drills, for example — can be offloaded to computers, freeing teachers to focus on more creative work, he said.
Computers cut roughly $500,000 annually from Rocketship’s labor costs for each school, which has an average enrollment of about 500. The savings means Rocketship can finance its own new school buildings — a luxury in the charter world, where facilities pose the greatest obstacle.

In fact what Rocketship brings to the table that's new may be mainly financial. Back in February, Larry Cuban had asked and answered: Are Rocketship Schools the Future? Part 3 | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

The answer is maybe. But not for all schools.
Like KIPP, Aspire, YES Prep Schools, Uncommon Schools and other charters including regular schools that have aimed at enrolling low-income minority children and youth...–hybrids like Rocketship are the latest generation of the “effective schools” movement that began in the late 1970s. Aimed at urban failing schools, Ron Edmonds’ work on whole-school reform energized districts across the country as they replicated his five features (strong principal leadership, climate of high expectations for students, focus on basic academic skills, etc.) that seemingly accounted for high-achieving slum schools. ....
What the standards,testing, and accountability movement has done for the past two decades is create different models of “effective schools” to rescue students from toxic urban schools. Rocketship schools founded just before the recent economic recession offers a less expensive hybrid model...

It's certainly plausible that parts of that may carry over to schools that really aren't failing and are very far from urban...but there's no special reason to think that the solutions of "toxic urban schools" will work for us. Maybe we're already doing what they do, just not as cheaply. On the other hand, I'm not knocking cheap. Cheap is good, cheap frees up resources for other things, cheap is a quantity having a quality all its own. (Yes, quantity having a quality all its own is supposedly Stalin.) I find it very plausible that each of us, whether six or sixty, of whatever income and linguistic background, can have a collection of things to be learned by computer games, and that's where Rocketship comes in; and a collection of things to be learned in self-assembling study groups (mostly of people in your own time zone, but video between Greece and the US does work), and a collection of things to be learned with the individual assistance of actual teachers, with teachers preferably being certified by students rather than by officials... It might work.
Or then again, maybe not.

Ericsson -- Future of Learning

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

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

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

Gallup on Schools

Gallup says public schools have a credibility problem. Americans look down on public schools:

Only 32 percent of Americans believe public schools deliver a good education, and just five percent of people surveyed believe students at public schools will receive an excellent education. Sixty-one percent of Americans think public schools will give only a fair education at best, including 18 percent who rate the education as poor.
The public school system’s disapproval rating is higher than the approval rating of charter school systems. Sixty percent of Americans think charter schools will provide at least a good (43 percent) or excellent (17 percent)....