Test Rejections

A week or two ago, I noticed Radio Free Hamilton's Even More HCS Students Opt Out of Math Tests

Fewer HCS elementary and middle school students took this week's state-mandated math tests than took last week's English language arts (ELA) exams.

An actual majority refused to take the tests here. In the state as a whole, it was only about a sixth, but Tens of Thousands of New York Students Refuse Tests

Pressed for a reaction to the boycott, which is fueled by allegations that Common Core is rigid and age-inappropriate, and that the tests are excessive, Governor Andrew Cuomo chose to split the difference in characteristic style, by minimizing both the importance of the schooling standards to which his state government (like most) has committed, as well as belittling objections to the same.

"My position was, the department of education had not done a good job in introducing the Common Core, and they had rushed it, so we said, for a period of five years, the test scores won’t count," Cuomo told reporters. "So they can opt out if they want to, but on the other hand, if the child takes the test as practice, then the score doesn't count anyway."

"The grades are meaningless to the student," he added, not exactly shoring up the argument for committing time and effort to filling in ovals on a sheet of paper.

Former U.S. senator from New York, and current presidential hopeful, Hillary Clinton went a step further last week, referring to education as a "non-family enterprise."

So... Maybe parents and students have no business raising a fuss, in her view.

Ouch. Well, What If They Threw Common Core Tests and Nobody Came?

Maybe Common Core would have received a better reception if it had been imposed on the country in 1946, after years of regimentation and top-down decision-making from the New Deal bureacracy and the war effort. A gray standardized approach might have suited a collectivized era. But it was decades too late.

... as with so many things, one size doesn't fit all.

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.

NSF EdTech

Reports on reporting about what we're learning about learning (and, of course, teaching about teaching) at the Huffington Post's 7 Cyberlearning Technologies Transforming Education | Aaron Dubrow

...NSF funds basic cyberlearning research and since 2011 has awarded roughly 170 grants, totaling more than $120 million, to EdTech research projects around the country.

The speakers in the lecture series, all leading cyberlearning scholars, ... represent the forces transforming what education may look like in the future.

1. Classroom as Virtual Phenomenon: RoomQuakes and WallScopes

HelioRoom simulates the orbital motion of the planets in the Solar system on a set of synchronized computer displays situated on the walls of the classroom, with planets "orbiting" around the periphery of the room. ...

... RoomQuake, an earthquake simulation system where the classroom itself becomes an active seismic area. At unpredictable times throughout the unit, rumbles emanating from speakers attached to simulated seismographs signal to the class that an earthquake is occurring....

Students rush to terminals around the classroom, read the data from seismograms .... Over the course of six weeks and dozens of earthquakes, students discover a "fault line" emerging. ...

Tablets adjacent to the walls of classrooms serve as viewports into an imaginary space inside the walls filled with the virtual fauna in Wallcology. ...

2. Games for Good: Learning While You Play

... in the game "Citizen Science," created by Squire and his team, players help restore Lake Mendota, a real lake in Wisconsin that, in the year 2020, has become polluted. As players explore the landscape, they take water samples, interact with a virtual, simulated watershed and talk with stakeholders....

... for a game that might reach even broader audiences, Squire and colleagues created Progenitor X, a zombie-themed tissue engineering game. In Progenitor X, players learn about the relationships between cells, tissues, and organs while trying to survive a zombie invasion. ... As a member of The Progenitor X Defense Force, you are a part of a highly trained squad of scientists who use highly advanced bio-medical technology to locate, seek out, and treat infected humans to contain the threat. ....

"These projects are not only using technologies that only recently became possible. They also build on decades of excellent research on how people learn," said Chris Hoadley, the program officer at NSF who leads the Cyberlearning program. "I believe it's only by advancing technology design and learning research together that we'll be able to imagine the future of learning."...

3. Teaching Tykes to Program: Never Too Young to Control a Robot

... Bers described her latest project, the KIWI robotic kit (subsequently renamed KIBO), which teaches programming through robotics, without screens, tablets, or keyboards. Using KIBO, students scan wooden blocks to give robots simple commands, in the process learning sequencing, one of the most important skills for early age groups. By combining a series of commands, kids make the robot move, dance, sing, sense the environment or light up....

4. Virtual role-play and robo-tutors

... Virtual role-play - where learners engage in simulated encounters with artificially intelligent agents that behave and respond in a culturally accurate manner - has been shown to be effective at teaching cross-cultural communication.

"You learn by playing a role in a simulation of some real life situation"

"We found in our military training that when soldiers use this approach, once they get into a foreign country -- let's say they're sitting down with local leaders -- they feel as if it's a familiar situation to them... Moreover, the software could address the shortage of qualified teachers able to teach Chinese, Arabic and other less popular languages... The first Web-based course was tested last year via Virtual Virginia, a statewide virtual school program, and received overwhelmingly positive ratings from the students....

5. Tools for Real-time Visual Collaboration

... "Computers have been individualistic devices," said Ramani. "But a new class of technology is emerging that allows us to engage in our individual learning process and also in a collaborative process." SkWiki ... allows many participants to collaboratively create digital multimedia projects on the web using many kinds of media types, including text, hand-drawn sketches, and photographs....

6. Fusing data collection, computational modeling and data analysis

Simulation and modeling have come to be regarded as the "third pillar" of science... ... By embedding simulations and sensor data collectors in the classroom, Dorsey and Wilensky are able to aid students in gathering, visualizing and analyzing data from multiple sources. A principal innovation of InquirySpace is the integration of the Concord Consortium's CODAP data exploration software with the modeling environments. This integration enables students to plan extended investigations of models, to do sophisticated analyses of the model runs, and to engage in arguments from evidence. ...

7. Virtual Worlds and Augmented Reality: Increasing ecological understanding

... Two decades ago, with funding from NSF, Dede started investigating head-mounted displays and room-sized virtual environments... At the beginning of the two to four week EcoMUVE curriculum, the students discover that all of the fish in a virtual pond have died. They then work in teams to determine the complex causal relationships that led to the die-off. The experience immerses the students as ecosystem scientists. ... At the end of the investigation, all of the students participate in a mini-scientific conference where they show their findings and the research behind it.

I don't know how well the experiments will scale up, but I would like to note that all of this seems to require ending the teaching-to-the-test that the last few posts have been about. They all seem to require teamwork, but none of them have much to do with traditional lectures. All of them have a learn-by-doing framework, where the computer facilitates the doing -- or even provides the universe for that doing to be done in.

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.

Charters etc up, reading comprehension level, null hypothesis?

Pro-charter school group estimates 14 percent enrollment gain nationwide - The Washington Post

The National Alliance of Public Charter Schools estimates in a new report that 2.9 million children now attend U.S. charter schools, up 14 percent from last school year.

Note that 14% increase per year corresponds to a doubling time of just under 6 years...quadruple in twelve...eight times as many in eighteen years...well, maybe not. I do think the proliferation of charters is a Somewhat Good Thing, partly because choice is a way to get people to be happy (even if actual results are no better, I think happiness is a good thing and if you don't, well....okay.) Mostly, though, because I like experimentation; each public charter (or in some cases groups of charters) is an experiment in doing things a bit differently than whatever failed in the area it's trying to serve. We don't know what works for which students in which kinds of learning, and we won't find out without trying, and that will involve a bunch of failed experiments and failed programs and failed schools, which is sad but necessary. (500 charters opened and 200 closed.) Here's Grant Wiggins, thinking about public schooling mainly, on the way that zillions of trials (and hugely rising expenditures) have utterly failed to improve average reading comprehension: Maybe we don’t understand what readers really do – and why it matters | Granted, and...

Numerous causes and their implied solutions, as readers know, have been proposed for flat reading scores: poverty, low expectations, inadequate background knowledge, an anti-boy bias in schools (especially in terms of book selection), IQ links to reading ability, computer games, TV, etc. etc.

The utterly flat national trend line, over decades, says to me that none of these theories holds up well, no matter how plausible each may seem to its proponents. Perhaps it’s time to explore a more radical but common sense notion: maybe we don’t yet understand reading comprehension and how it develops over time.

If we don't specifically know what it is we're hoping they learn, we don't know where they're going and it's hard to help them get there, even if we have tests that supposedly tell us whether or not they've arrived. Of course maybe some or most or all of the efforts really are working, but they're roughly balanced by negative effects: maybe the harder we try the more they fail. As Wiggins put it last month in A Post from Paris | Granted, and...

A 7th grade girl, when interviewed by teachers as part of our summer institutes, said the most amazing thing when asked how she felt about ‘typical’ teaching. “The more the teacher talks, the more I feel alone and useless.”

Or maybe the truth is close to Arnold Kling's "Null Hypothesis". The Null Hypothesis in Education is Hard to Disprove | askblog

In education, the null hypothesis is that nothing makes a long-term, scalable, replicable difference. That is:

1. Take any pedagogical innovation or educational intervention.

2. Subject it to a controlled experiment.

3. Evaluate the experiment’s outcome several years later.

4. If the experiment works, attempt to replicate the experiment in more situations.

By the time you reach step 4, if not sooner, you will be unable to show that the innovation makes any difference in outcomes. What this suggests to me is that in the long run it is the characteristics of the students that determine outcomes, at least on average. Think of an individual student as “predestined” to reach a certain outcome....

That's an extremely uncomfortable way to think, even at the margin. It's obviously false in extreme cases, such as urban poverty, but it's not obviously false for the programs at the margin, i.e. programs that are supported and opposed with reasonably thoughtful people on both sides. Kling notes an OECD report saying The Null Hypothesis Strikes Again | askblog

In practice, however, grade repetition has not shown clear benefits for the students who were held back or for school systems as a whole.

One interpretation of this is that the marginal benefit of an additional year of schooling is zero. However, that interpretation is not something that anyone wants to discuss.

I don't actually believe even the marginal version of the null hypothesis...I think that a sufficiently-responsive educational system could actually evaluate each kid and in almost all cases say "this is the group they fit in (diagnosis) and this is what worked on members of that group (i.e. what they should do next)." In software. On a cell phone.

But not this year. :-)

Google Classroom, mobile version

Google Classroom is a big deal, just as a set of utilities to make instruction work a bit better. Now it's an app: Google rolling out Classroom mobile app for students, teachers | ZDNet

The mobile version of Classroom, Lugo explained, is designed to further facilitate communications between teachers and students, namely through the addition of a teacher assignments page and the ability to archive classes.

Students will also be able to attach files (i.e. PDFs) and use the mobile device's built-in camera to attach photos to their assignments, whether they be drawings for an art class, a family tree for social studies, or diagrams and results for science experiments.

"And if they've forgotten their homework, they can ask someone at home to snap a photo, text it and then turn it in with the app," Lugo remarked. "Of course, if the dog has actually eaten it, Classroom can't help you."

My main reaction to this is a memory of correspondence-school courses in elementary school, just over half a century ago while living in Veracruz. Writing under Mom's supervision had advantages, even with the actual teachers being weeks away by snail mail. Google Classroom utilities can't replace teachers -- but they can expand the set of available frameworks for teaching.

Or then again, maybe not.

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.

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

Chromebooks in education

Gadgets come and gadgets go. A few years ago I thought netbooks would become standard courseware; then tablets; now chromebooks? From a couple of weeks ago: Chromebooks Are Outselling iPads In Schools - Slashdot

Apple thrilled investors earlier this week when they revealed that they had sold 13 million iPads to schools and claimed 85% of the educational tablet market, but that wasn't the whole story. It turns out that Apple has only sold 5 million iPads to schools since February 2013, or an average of less than a million tablets a quarter over 6 quarters. It turns out that instead of buying iPads, schools are buying Chromebooks. Google reported that a million Chromebooks were sold to schools last quarter, well over half of the 1.8 million units sold in the second quarter. With Android tablets getting better, Apple is losing market share in the consumer tablet market, and now it looks Apple is also losing the educational market to Google.

So, for people who haven't been following this development...I'd already heard people claiming Chromebooks and education: A perfect match | ZDNet

Chromebooks, in general, are good choices for schools. They're lightweight, durable, inexpensive, secure, and fun to use....

He makes a good point about Chromebook having "the most secure operating system," and I knew about Google's own Chrome for Education and Chromebooks for Education Overview - YouTube pages, and "Manage 10 or 10,000 Chromebooks with ease"... Also about collections like Free Technology for Teachers: 30 Ideas for Using Chromebooks in Education. However, I hadn't noticed Private school’s Chromebook program explains why Google’s laptops have captured nearly 20% of the educational market - TechRepublic:

So, the school began throwing things out there to see what would stick. They got some iPads, Android tablets, Lenovo tablets, and Chromebooks. The wow factor was high with the iPads, and the school was convinced they were going to be an iPad school, until the kids started trying to produce content on them. At this point the focus shifted to entirely to the Chromebook and Google Apps, where content was easy to produce and collaboration came naturally.

In public schools, Google In Education: Chromebooks A 'Right Time Technology' For Passaic, New Jersey School District

Google‘s Chromebook — and by extension Chrome OS — is being adopted by our education system at a brisk pace. As of February 2013 more than 2000 districts in the United States have deployed Chromebooks to their students and faculty. I’ve reported on Chromebooks before, but I wanted to take a deeper dive and explore the benefits as perceived by superintendents and IT directors.

And I also hadn't realized how well you can Use your Chromebook offline - Chromebook Help. It really does look good. So maybe we're actually moving towards the One True Technology which won't be forgotten five years from now.

Or on the other hand, maybe not.

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.

Transportation, Technology, Education -- Long Term Trends

This post has nothing to do with any decisions for this year or next, except possibly for the Superintendent search where some people might want to ask candidates for their thoughts about long term trends. The bottom line is that this week's news on transportation technology may make a cost-saving merger more feasible but less necessary, in interesting ways.

First, remember (for those who have followed my previous arguments) that I came to oppose the merger when I learned that it would shift costs (from teaching to transportation) without appreciable overall net savings. There were other issues, major issues, but it was at that point that I stopped thinking "unfortunate necessity" and started thinking "nonsense." I did, however, note that transportation costs per mile might go down, e.g. if natural-gas bus transport options improved. And this week I do see a possible future lower-cost option.

The University of Delaware (where I started out teaching computer science in 1980, back when the ARPAnet was a few sites, and international email waited until midnight to be picked up and sent via 1200-baud modem) now reports on "V2G" (Vehicle-to-Grid) electric vehicle technology; Science Daily says Diesel bus alternative: Electric school buses that power grid could save school districts millions

Choosing a V2G-capable electric bus over a diesel bus would save a school district $6,070 per bus seat, or $230,000 per bus over the vehicle's 14-year lifespan. Even with taking out the medical and climate change costs associated with diesel pollution, school districts could still save $5,700 per seat.

"They could save a large amount of money while also shifting away from the consumption of diesel and enhancing school children's health," the authors write in the paper.

There is still a way to go before such V2G-capable school buses become a reality, however. Electric school buses are uncommon, with the first Trans Tech all-electric school bus tested in California earlier this year.

While electric school buses can be cost-competitive without providing V2G services, the V2G technology would produce substantially larger savings for school districts.

That's pretty cool, and it might work -- and if it had worked already as part of the merger plan, I suspect that the numbers would have looked quite different and we'd have merged, despite the problems it would have caused in other directions. However, this week also has a much more in-the-news transportation technology announcement, in the "Official Google Blog" at Just press go: designing a self-driving vehicle

We’re planning to build about a hundred prototype vehicles, and later this summer, our safety drivers will start testing early versions of these vehicles that have manual controls.

And what will the long-term impact of these be? Until this week, I had mainly thought of driverless cars in the context of urban driving. But now I take seriously TreeHugger's Google unveils its designs for a self-driving car, and it will change our cities and suburbs:

The self-driving car will certainly affect our cities, given that you need far fewer cars when they are shared and they don't need parking, but the real revolution is in the suburbs, which suddenly make a lot more sense. Grandma isn't stuck in the house all day; the kids get driven to school and to soccer practice; mom can work while the car drives to the office. Parking lots and garages disappear as the cars are shared and always on the move....

Tim de Chant says...

Self-driving cars are one of the biggest threats to the future of cities... As people’s commutes are freed up for other tasks, including work, they’ll stretch their daily trips, once again allowing them to live where they want. And as we’ve seen, people want to live where they have more space.

So it may well be that improved transportation will reverse the decline in upstate population.... Or not.

It's hard to predict, especially the future.

Common Core

I wrote a year ago about the Common Core: One More Year; that's the Common Core described as

The Common Core State Standards Initiative is an education initiative in the United States that details what K-12 students should know in English language arts and mathematics at the end of each grade. The initiative is sponsored by the National Governors Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and seeks to establish consistent education standards across the states as well as ensure that students graduating from high school are prepared to enter two- or four-year college programs or enter the workforce.

My concern has basically been that well-intentioned centralization tends to have consistent results -- as Larry Cuban (teacher/superintendent/blogger) puts it in giving what I think of as a Common Core context, On Centralization

Teachers have felt pressured to drop student-centered activities such as small group work, discussions, learning centers, and writing portfolios because such activities take away precious classroom time from standards-based curriculum and test preparation.

That was in October; I didn't even realize that in October, our own Superintendent Bowers was testifying that with Common Core prep, We are heading into the storm. Interesting. The terminology she's using is from Tuckman's stages of group development:

The Forming – Storming – Norming – Performing model of group development was first proposed by Bruce Tuckman in 1965, who maintained that these phases are all necessary and inevitable in order for the team to grow, to face up to challenges, to tackle problems, to find solutions, to plan work, and to deliver results. This model has become the basis for subsequent models.

Some of the fuss is simply the awkwardness of a big new set of mandates that will take time and lots of money to work out in detail; I doubt their value, I think the money (including the continuing expense of "performing") will be mostly wasted, but I wouldn't put too much stress on articles like Bizarrely complex Common Core math for America's children | The Daily Caller

Still, I do think Diana's phrasing showed prescience, and not just about the fact that we really don't know what we're doing (specifically we don't understand the world that we're educating our kids to live in): the storm has arrived, in more than Tuckman's terms. Common Core Curriculum Now Has Critics on the Left - NYTimes.com

Carol Burris, an acclaimed high school principal on Long Island, calls the Common Core a “disaster.”

“We see kids,” she said, “they don’t want to go to school anymore.”

Leaders of both parties in the New York Legislature want to rethink how the state uses the Common Core.

The statewide teachers’ union withdrew its support for the standards last month until “major course corrections” took place.

Centralized decision making might be great if the center had access to the necessary information. Perhaps someday it will, but I don't think we're there yet -- if we were, we'd probably be trying to develop something entrepreneur-oriented, something far from the Common Core as it now stands. For now, I'd just say that Hayek was right.

Enrollment Projections and Merger Alternatives

Downloaded today, December 8th, from the Cornell Program on Applied Demographics, is our problem (click for enlarged view):

As you can see, our school has been shrinking...but Cornell thinks that our shrinkage has pretty much reached an end, for the next several years. I don't know that they're including our currently most-since-1997 elementary enrollment or the Colgate-funded expansion of the nursery school, but I look at that graph and I think: that's a problem, yes. (At least it's a problem for the kind of school we now have, which I expect to be drastically modified in the next decade or two but not right now.) It's a problem. Are we desperate? No. Will we become desperate? We don't know...the graph doesn't go that far into the future, but we're sort-of-okay for a while. Do we have time to work on alternatives which (unlike the currently proposed merger) would actually save money? Yes.
And of course some of those alternatives would be mergers, possibly with Morrisville-Eaton under different circumstances (as I've proposed before) or possibly not -- or possibly with a couple of other schools at once, as Stanley Roe was reminding us in his letter to the Mid-York Weekly this week. None of those merger proposals would make me bubble over with happiness, but if they saved money, if they saved money in the long run, then I would almost certainly stop fussing with this blog.

same-day update: Carolyn looks more carefully and is confident that the recent expansion data is not included, so the graph should probably be given an uptick. Separately, Ken points out that if you go to the Cornell source and check the Madison and Morrisville-Eaton districts, you find that Madison's predicted to have more stable enrollment than M-E. Indeed, we should keep the whole region in mind for all the plans we consider, and I wasn't. Thanks!

Gap Elimination Adjustment

In yesterday's post I noted parts of Wanda Berry's note on NextDoor; I should also have mentioned a very important point she brings up in that note:

Whether or not the merger goes through, it is time for us to believe in democracy enough to mobilize a citizens’ effort to get the state legislature to get rid of the Gap Elimination Adjustment, which is the real threat, along with our declining school age population.

Indeed, while the proposed merger is all about promised state aid; one irony is that it is also all about previous promises of state aid being broken. More concretely:

• as often discussed, we wouldn't be discussing a merger that doesn't actually save money, if there weren't state incentives offering an average 5.3%-of-budget aid for fourteen years, plus permanent (?) reclassification of Hamilton as part of a "high needs district". But also,
• we wouldn't be discussing a merger at all if it weren't for a fiscal squeeze resulting from the "Gap Elimination Adjustment", a formula by which the state has refrained from paying millions that had been promised.

So what, and why, is this terrible "Gap Elimination Adjustment"? Basically, it's a formula by which the state says "we have a fiscal gap this year, with more outgo than income, and sure, we promised you a certain amount of aid, but here's your school district's share of the pain." And we respond with "OUCH". Here's a Vimeo video explanation:
Gap Elimination Adjustment: An Explanation from Cap Region BOCES on Vimeo.

Wanda and many others are hoping that if we all get together and say "No!" then the state legislators will say "Okay" and the schools won't be short of money any more. I sympathize very strongly, but I think we need to consider the context. What are we actually asking the state legislators to do? They want to please their voters; they already want to restore school funding. If they restore school funding, they must either reduce funding for something else, or else they can raise taxes. (Of course they can probably borrow money now, but that means that at some future time they'll be either reducing funding for something else, or raising taxes. Borrowing money now to fix it later is part of how we got in this mess.) This, of course, brings us to the Report of the State Budget Crisis Task Force (PDF,page 7)

The conclusion of the Task Force is unambiguous. The existing trajectory of state spending, taxation, and administrative practices cannot be sustained. The basic problem is not cyclical. It is structural. The time to act is now.

From their point of view, the elimination of the Gap Elimination Adjustment would be a big step -- in the wrong direction. If they remove the GEA, then the painful decisions to be made get worse -- do we cut our already-underfunded pension plans, do we cut our massive health care payments, do we just let the infrastructure rust? Or -- the most obvious answer -- do we raise taxes? Hmmm... raising taxes sounds very good, doesn't it? Or does it?

Exactly how high are our taxes, comparatively speaking? That's complicated, because it involves income taxes and sales taxes and property taxes; for Alaska it also involves some weird taxes which don't actually get collected from the individual, they're based on oil movement, but apart from that we can sort of say that NY has the highest tax burden outside Washington DC in the state tax-burden chart. That's a statement that needs lots of qualifiers about what you're including and excluding; some are noted at the bottom of the chart. Some charts will put NY as low as #5 in state tax burden, but we can definitely say that a lot of New York residents and New York businesses notice, now and then, that they could be paying a lot less by moving to another state. And what happens then? Sometimes nothing. Some of us pay, and stay to pay again. For others... Income Migration: What Does It Really Mean For States? - Forbes

New Yorkers are subject to some of the highest state tax rates in the country, so it is not surprising that commentators have suggested residents will leave the state in droves. And it appears to be true. As reported by the Tax Foundation, between 2000 and 2010, New York lost $45.6 billion in income to other states. That’s far more than any other state. The next closest is California, which lost $29.4 billion over the same period.
This is a significant amount of income migration. But where did it all go? The answer, not surprisingly, is that much of the income went down south. Florida reportedly had a net gain of $67.3 billion. ...

Or as the NYT put it two years back, At 102%, His Tax Rate Takes the Cake - Common Sense - NYTimes.com

Mr. Ross said he asked his accountant what he could do. “He said, ‘Fire everyone here and move to Florida,’ ” according to Mr. Ross. He employs 10 people in his New York office.

Of course some of the migration goes to neighboring states, which do have lower state taxes; Florida has no income tax at all. But as our taxes rise, it becomes increasingly attractive for high-income Manhattan residents to start thinking: how much of this could I do on the Web, or by teleconference? As the New York Times put it a year ago Midlevel Finance Jobs Leave Wall Street as Firms Cut Costs

New York’s biggest investment houses are shifting jobs out of the area and expanding in cheaper locales in the United States, threatening the vast middle tier of positions that form the backbone of employment on Wall Street.
The shift comes even as banks consider deeper staff cuts here, which could undermine the state and city tax base long term.
“Places like New York or London will remain financial centers, but most of the players are taking a much harder look and asking whether they can move large numbers of jobs...”

When you ask the legislator to raise taxes again, you're not just being generous with your own money. You're asking that legislator to bet the state's fiscal stability on your hope that these people, people whose lives revolve around the way they care about money, will decide that they don't really care about money all that much: they'll stay, and pay again.

They might, or they might not. State aid cuts may go away, but they might expand. They might expand a lot. Ask for state aid, hope for state aid, but don't count on it.

(My inclination is to agitate for mandate relief more than increases in aid. NYS education costs twice as much per pupil per year as the national average. We should work on that.)

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.

Yes, but...

Radio Free Hamilton editorializes that it's Time for Merger Study to Flunk Out

There is no good reason on this or any other planet for the HCS Board of Education and its counterpart organization in the Morrisville-Eaton Central Schools District to continue entertaining thoughts of the two districts merging.

None. Zero. Zip. Zilch. Nada. Acun. Ninguno. Nullus.

As soon as the study is returned by the State Education Department, both boards ought to stick a fork in the proposal, declare it done, not waste the public's time with a vote and move on to more important things.

And I want to re-register my strong agreement -- the merger is not a solution to the problems we face -- but at the same time, I want to re-re-register my concern that the problems are quite real: there are bad financial and demographic trends which apply to this school district, to Upstate NY school districts, to rural school districts generally. We have a way of doing things, a model of education: that model is slowly coming apart, fastest in the rural regions, and we should be well along in the process of re-thinking and replacing it. We're not.

We're really not.

Demographic Reminder

The other day a neighbor stopped me outside the post office to say thanks for working on the merger proposal...I commented that I was pleased that we'd seen the new-and-reelected Board members speak against it, since I don't believe it solves the very real problems headed our way, but that I hadn't heard what anyone (other than myself) has been proposing as possible-solutions-worth-exploring to those problems. Today I see a reminder of the demographic issue: RealClearScience - Murphysboro & The Death of Small Town America:

Murphysboro appears to be yet another victim among a much larger demographic trend: The slow death of small town America. From 2010-2012, for the first time in history, rural ("nonmetro") America declined in population. (See chart.)

As shown above, nonmetro America's population has always grown -- albeit in fits and starts. But notice how the gray line ("total population change") dips below the dotted line starting around 2010. That represents population loss, and it's happening because of falling birth rates and net migration out of rural areas.
It's hard to imagine this trend reversing. Indeed, immigration into urban areas has been a global phenomenon for decades....

This surprised me in that I hadn't realized that nonmetro America's population had been rising overall; that's not the case around here.

Education Funding: the Null Hypothesis

It's hard to believe that more money doesn't produce better results. It's hard to believe the graphs that accompany Evaluating the Null Hypothesis in Education | askblog

there is no clear correlation between funding and school average performance; for a given level of funding, there is significant variation in performance the calculated correlation coefficient between the two variables was less than 0.1. In our view, this suggests that the level of funding, per se, is almost irrelevant as a predictor of performance.

Not absolutely irrelevant; only almost.
Or then again, maybe not.

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.)

Federal yes-and-no

The American Enterprise Institute has interesting opinions and lengthy arguments on What Uncle Sam can (and cannot) do to improve K–12 schooling: Lessons for the next four years

We believe that federal policymakers are uniquely well-suited to put particular education issues on the national agenda, tackle discriminatory practices that violate constitutional protections, push states to adopt cut-and-dried policies like annual assessment or data disaggregation, and promote transparency by collecting data and requiring states to report on student achievement. At the same time, Washington is ill-suited to change what happens in schools or classrooms and to compel state and local officials to conscientiously do things they are not inclined to do. Attempts to mandate school improvement models, teacher evaluation frameworks, professional development, or other interventions that depend on the skill and commitment with which they are implemented are likely to disappoint for the same reasons that have hampered even the best-laid federal plans for “fixing” schools.

I'm not convinced by much of it -- in fact it's not at all the infrastructure focus I'd choose for Federal policy, but it's worth reading.