Open Textbooks

If I were in charge, there'd be a lot of this going on... Teachers Write an Open Textbook In a Weekend Hackathon

"A group of Finnish mathematics researchers, teachers and students write an upper secondary mathematics textbook in a three-day booksprint. The event started on Friday 28th September at 9:00 (GMT+3) and the book will be (hopefully) ready on Sunday evening. The book is written in Finnish. The result — LaTeX source code and the PDF — is published with open CC-BY-license. As far as the authors know, this is the first time a course textbook is written in three-day hackathon. The hackathon approach has been used earlier mainly for coding open source software and writing manuals for open source software. The progress can be followed by visiting the repository at GitHub or the project Facebook page."

Free information-resources for education ought to be something everybody could get behind...
Or then again, maybe not.

Family Rewards Program

I'm mildly surprised, so I'll link it here: the cash-for-kids-for-academic-performance Family Rewards Program

Changed how teenagers spent their time. For the subgroup of academically proficient teenagers, it increased the proportion of those who engaged primarily in academic activities and reduced the proportion who engaged primarily in social activities;
Increased parents’ spending on school-related ...
...substantially reduced [teenagers’] problem behavior, such as aggression and substance use;
Did not reduce teenagers’ intrinsic motivation by paying them rewards for school attendance and academic achievement.

This was for low-income families; it's not obvious that it would or wouldn't work outside that context.
In the end, I suspect, a motivation program should try to affect your sense of who you are. Hmmm.
Or then again, maybe not.

Learnability

 Well, the essay emphasizes and uses examples of Learnable Programming, as a response to Khan Academy's (very clever) programming lessons, by Bret Victor who was credited with inspiring them, but it's really about learnability in general, and as he says,

The canonical work on designing programming systems for learning, and perhaps the greatest book ever written on learning in general, is Seymour Papert's "Mindstorms".
Designing a learning system without a solid understanding of the principles in this book is like designing a mechanical system without understanding "the lever". Or "gravity". If you are reading this essay (and I'm pretty sure you are!) then you need to read "Mindstorms".
Seriously. I mean it. If you are going to design anything whatsoever related to learning, then you literally need to read "Mindstorms".

Well, actually if you're right here then you're not reading that essay at all, you're reading a quote from that essay. But the advice may still apply.

Or then again, maybe not.

"American Graduate Week"

This week is apparently American Graduate Week, following up from the American Graduate Day Announcement

Unless graduation rates increase, nearly 12 million students will likely drop out over the next decade, resulting in a loss to the nation of $1.5 trillion in lost wages and increased social costs due to crime and healthcare. Among students who do graduate, one-third need remedial courses in college and far fewer will go on to earn a college degree. Yet, more than half of all new jobs in the next decade will require some postsecondary education.

As that phrasing suggests, the "crisis" is not an increase in dropout rates, but rather an increase in the need for the qualifications which graduation is an attempt to represent. Really we don't need high school graduates; we need adults whose education suffices for a life of production, consumption, creation, family, and citizenship. (Hm, is that all?) So we have an effort by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting which the NYT reports as Public Broadcasting Takes Role in Improving Graduation Rates

While graduation rates have inched up in recent years, nearly 25 percent of students over all drop out.

And Ray Suarez of PBS imagines our current system as a mechanism for generating dropouts, a mechanism in need of sabotage; Call is Out to Sabotage the Dropout Crisis | PBS NewsHour

The National Council of La Raza, the nation's largest Latino civil rights organization, helps run a charter school in Los Angeles? Who knew? A not-for-profit called BuildOn takes students who are on the verge of dropping out and gives them international service learning experiences, of the kind that has become commonplace for upper middle class kids, but is much less available to poor kids. Harlem RBI takes teens with school troubles, puts them on baseball and softball teams, and requires tutoring, workshops, and homework help to keep a player's average high enough to stay on the team.

The athletics approach is one I have to keep reminding myself about: it's not one that appealed to me as a kid. But it's not exactly a newfangled notion. In Plato's world,

Both boys and girls receive the same kind of education. Elementary education consisted of music and gymnastics, designed to ...create a harmonious person.

And I think archery and riding went in there too, although I also think story-telling comes even earlier, in character formation. But anyway athletics is important, somewhere in there, even if it might be minimized for people like me. But then, as Plato also put it,

“Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.”

Fair enough. I suspect that somewhat greater attention to (and measurement of) what amuses kids' minds would do quite a bit towards raising graduation rates, and even the rate of achievement of any particular level of qualifications.

Or then again, maybe not.

Teacher Evaluation

Economics Nobelist Gary Becker seems to approve this summer's new teacher-evaluation research; in Good and Bad Teachers: How to Tell the Difference he says

Teacher unions all over the country have fought against using performance-based measures to evaluate teachers, but the unions are gradually losing this battle...
...the criterion used in evaluating teachers by many school systems and also by academic articles on school reform is the value added (VA) by teachers to student performance; namely, the improvements in students’ test scores as a result of taking classes of different teachers.
... the fundamental way to judge teachers is not how their students do on tests, but how different teachers affect the likelihood that their students finish high school and go to college, how teachers affect the earnings of their students after they enter the labor force, and whether their students get involved in gangs and crimes.
A small number of recent academic studies have tried to see how well VA measures predict how students do when they become adults. A summary of a good study along these lines by Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and Jonah Rockoff was published this summer in the journal Education Next under the title “Great Teaching”. ... 20 years... 2.5 million children ...
They find large effects on subsequent adult earnings when these young students had teachers who produced good improvements in test scores...

teachers with good VA ratings should be paid considerably more than teachers with bad ratings.

Or then again, maybe not.

Once Upon a School

 A couple of days ago my exercise-TED was Dave Eggers' wish: Once Upon a School, in which he tells the story of his attempt to start a volunteer tutor service in which his writer friends would be available to students...but the students didn't come, until "826 Valencia" also became the Pirate Supply House. And clever energetic people did clever energetic things, building up a volunteer list of people in the community who would come in for an hour or many hours each month, and it really seemed to help a lot of kids. Now there are a bunch of somewhat similar groups with a variety of themes, and there's onceuponaschool.org which, on its front page, suggests that you sign up by putting in your zip code...Hmmm, I see when I put in the Hamilton Central zipcode I get

We found 18 Opportunities

Volunteering Opportunities within 20 miles of Hamilton, NY 13346, US
Results 1-18 | Sort by: | Search Again
opportunity	location	great for
1. Mentor High School Exchange Students in Sherburne, NY and Surrounding Areas!	Sherburne and Surrounding Areas, NY	55+
2. Run the Exchange Student Program in Eaton, NY or surrounding areas!	Eaton or surrounding areas, NY	55+
3. ...

There are a number of volunteer "opportunities" associated with schools nearby, but it doesn't seem that my own school has signed up with any of the organizations in question. I wonder if a bet is being missed.

Chicago

Wins, losses and draws in Chicago school strike - CNN.com

"Across the board, on every issue, the teachers got a more favorable outcome than the school system," [Professor Bruno] said Wednesday.
The deal, which still must be ratified by the union's overall membership, calls for an average raise of 17.6% over four years... it also strips out a merit pay program that would have been tied to increased emphasis on student test scores... Teachers also managed to hold the line on health insurance increases, and protect seniority pay increases and raises for additional education that the school system wanted to limit or eliminate. Union officials also trumpeted victories in ... The union didn't get all it wanted. In addition to the salary compromise, the school day and year will be extended
"The mayor doesn't walk away empty-handed from this,"

Well, maybe not quite.

From the viewpoint of progressive Matthew Yglesias we get Chicago public schools' pension crunch.

I get annoyed when conservatives talking about the federal government running out of money, but listening to some progressive crowing about the outcome of the Chicago teachers strike it's also frustrating when people don't acknowledge that the city of Chicago most certainly can run out of money. Things like extra money for music and art teachers could be great ideas or could be bad ones depending on where it comes from. But it's not as if Chicago Public Schools is sitting on some giant pile of money that administrations have just been refusing to use. On the contrary, it's actually sitting on a large unfunded pension obligation:...

Everybody's going broke.
Or then again, maybe not?

update: The libertarian summary is found on Saturday Links | The Agitator

Step one: Capitulate to the teachers’ union in the largest city in your state. Step two: Ask the rest of America to guarantee your state’s $200 billion pension gap.

Yeah, everybody's going broke.