Social Capital

An addition to the "District Comparisons" page on the Hamilton Central Options website...
On the end-of-the-world solstice (12/21/2012), I see a note about Hamilton as #11 in Forbes' "America's Friendliest Towns:" 11. Hamilton, NY says

Population (2010): 6,690
This tiny historic Central New York town -- home to a village by the same name -- was founded in 1975 as Payne's Settlement. Today it is perhaps best known as the location of prestigious Colgate University. Crime rates are markedly lower than the national average and despite being a college town, the rate of homeownership is more than 60%. The Village Green offers local eateries and merchants as well as some of the area's most historic homes. Neighbors gather for fundraisers, holiday parties, safety awareness events, holiday charities and fitness groups, according to Nextdoor.

Now, it seems that Forbes has confused "1975" with "1795", but otherwise it seems accurate. Is it unChristmassy to note that Morrisville didn't make this list? Hamilton has a lot of social capital to lose...

Failure is Good

The international test scores are out today, and as always US kids rank fairly low in performance, high in confidence. Yong Zhao comments that Numbers Can Lie: What TIMSS and PISA Truly Tell Us, if Anything?

So far all international test scores measure the extent to which an education system effectively transmits prescribed content.
In this regard, the U.S. education system is a failure and has been one for a long time.
But the successful transmission of prescribed content contributes little to economies that require creative and entrepreneurial individual talents and in fact can damage the creative and entrepreneurial spirit. Thus high test scores of a nation can come at the cost of entrepreneurial and creative capacity.
While the U.S. has failed to produce homogenous, compliant, and standardized employees, it has preserved a certain level of creativity and entrepreneurship. In other words, while the U.S. is still pursuing an employee-oriented education model, it is much less successful in stifling creativity and suppressing entrepreneurship.

We failed...hooray! Let's design schools that don't even try to do what we're failing at!
Or then again, maybe not. (Actually, we do need to transmit a fair amount of prescribed content; as Salman Khan puts it in One World Schoolhouse, this should take about 20% of the school day.)

Consolidation Context -- M-E

A note I should have posted earlier, from March's Syracuse Post-Standard, says New York state school districts won't merge even when offered extra money

In 2007 and in 2008, Newsweek magazine recognized Morrisville-Eaton High School as one of the best in the country based on the number of Advanced Placement courses it offered its students.
This year, the Madison County school doesn’t have a single AP class. The district jettisoned them as enrollment and state aid dropped, costs rose and it cut staff and spending to balance its budgets...

Well, maybe some school districts will merge when offered extra money. Or then again, maybe not.

Consolidation and Real Estate Values

Just a note, citing Duncombe & Yinger How Does School District Consolidation Affect Property Values? A Case Study of New York (38 page PDF) from August 2012:

This paper explores the impact of school district consolidation on house values using a sample of house sales in New York State from 2000 to 2010. During this period, three sets of districts consolidated. ... the impacts of consolidation on house values are more negative in high-income census tracts, where parents may have a relatively large willingness to pay for the access to teachers and other non-budgetary advantages of small districts.

Plausible, at least as part of the explanation.

Higher Education Bubble note

Every now and then we should stop and think about the context of higher education that we mostly hope most of our kids are headed for.... the New York Federal Reserve has come out (November 27, 2012) with a Q3 household financials report, Decrease in Overall Debt Balance Continues Despite Rise in Non-Real Estate Debt - Federal Reserve Bank of New York

in the third quarter, non-real estate household debt jumped 2.3 percent to $2.7 trillion. The increase was due to a boost in student loans ($42 billion), auto loans ($18 billion) and credit card balances ($2 billion). ...The reduction in overall debt is attributed to a decrease in mortgage debt ... and home equity lines of credit...
Outstanding student loan debt now stands at $956 billion, an increase of $42 billion since last quarter. ... $23 billion is new debt ... the percent of student loan balances 90+ days delinquent increased to 11 percent this quarter.²...
² these delinquency rates for student loans are likely to understate actual delinquency rates because almost half of these loans are currently in deferment, in grace periods or in forbearance and therefore temporarily not in the repayment cycle. This implies that among loans in the repayment cycle delinquency rates are roughly twice as high.

These debts, of course, are not discharged in bankruptcy. It's a profoundly immoral system in which our almost-adults are urged to jump into heavy debt with no serious consideration of their long-run finances, and no way out at all. The very useful ZeroHedge finance site emphasizes "The Scariest Graph of the Quarter," being the student-loan line from

A slow multi-year rise to 9%, back to 8.5%, and now a sudden jump to 11% where the new delinquency measure is known to underestimate the real problem quite drastically. So it's worse than that, even though the other loan types are not doing anything of the kind. Looking for something positive to say, we can see this as one source of pressure for online education technology at the college and graduate level; that technology, whether from Coursera or MITx or Western Governors or ...., then becomes available at the KhanAcademy level.
Or then again, maybe not.

Consolidation Location -- Rephrased

We (the "CAC") have been asked to express last week's Consolidation Location choice in terms of the "challenges" and "opportunities" associated with each choice. Okay...
We leave elementary schools where they are, for HCS and for M-ECS. We can merge middle schools into HCS and high schools into M-ECS, as option "C", or merge middle schools into M-ECS and high schools into HCS, as option "D". I group the challenges and opportunities under "Identity", "Distance", "Nearby Places", and "College Courses". There are of course many challenges and many opportunities shared by both of these options, not to be discussed here.

Identity: One village or the other will almost certainly be perceived by some of its residents as "losing the high school" that is part of their personal and community identity. I doubt that the middle school will be thought of the same way.
Challenge for C Loss of identity for Hamilton;
Challenge for D Loss of identity for Morrisville.
These are symmetric, so I don't think it affects this choice.

Distance: Distance increases for both. This is not symmetric, because many Hamilton students walk or bike, which is not practical for Morrisville students; HCS is inside Hamilton, M-ECS (high school) is not inside Morrisville.
Challenge for C Hamilton students stop walking/biking, or ride is longer.
Challenge for D Morrisville students have longer ride.

Nearby Places: My kids all got themselves to music lessons in town, after school; they would also meet friends at local food places, and one had a habit of stopping for coffee while walking to high school. Groups of kids and grownups, e.g. theatrical and athletic groups, have found places to meet. I always thought this convenience was a major advantage; it turns out that some M-ECS parents think that their lack of this convenience is a major advantage, because truancy is harder work when your school is out in the middle of nowhere. That's interesting. It seems there's a tradeoff between making life harder for kids you trust, and making life harder for kids you don't. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding something here -- I often do. I'm calling this a rather strong H+, but I accept that people with different values may call it an M+, and I accept that different values may provide good reasons not to merge in the first place.
Challenge for C Trusted students lose local-resource options.
Challenge for D Untrusted students have more ways to get in trouble.

Opportunity for C Untrusted students are more under control.
Opportunity for D Trusted students keep/gain local resource options.

College courses: It's common for HCS students to take a few Colgate courses despite schedule mismatches -- at any given moment, a dozen or so students are doing this, with about forty students in each HCS year. (I.e., a dozen or so out of about eighty juniors+seniors.) Some M-ECS students, according to the superintendent, would do the same if they could -- and they will be able to, if the high school location is in Hamilton. If the high school location is in Morrisville, that's probably gone -- add transport to the schedule mismatch and it won't be an option.
Challenge for C Hamilton students lose those options.
Opportunity for D Morrisville students gain those options.

Human Capital?

Following 2300 students over four years, we find that Study: Many college students not learning to think critically | McClatchy

Forty-five percent of students made no significant improvement in their critical thinking, reasoning or writing skills during the first two years of college, according to the study. After four years, 36 percent showed no significant gains in these so-called "higher order" thinking skills.

Note that this is not "compared to a control group who didn't go to college"; this is simply lack of improvement. In a control group, some would have developed the critical thinking skills being tested here, and some would not. To continue:

The study marks one of the first times a cohort of undergraduates has been followed over four years to examine whether they're learning specific skills. It provides a portrait of the complex set of factors, from the quality of secondary school preparation to the academic demands on campus, which determine learning. It comes amid President Barack Obama's call for more college graduates by 2020 and is likely to shine a spotlight on the quality of the education they receive.

Arum concluded that while students at highly selective schools made more gains than those at less selective schools, there are even greater disparities within institutions.
Students who majored in the traditional liberal arts — including the social sciences, humanities, natural sciences and mathematics — showed significantly greater gains over time than other students in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills.
Students majoring in business, education, social work and communications showed the least gains in learning. However, the authors note that their findings don't preclude the possibility that such students "are developing subject-specific or occupationally relevant skills."

Hmm.....education students at the bottom. However you interpret it, that's not good news for future K-12 students. Those are tomorrow's teachers.
Or then again, maybe not.