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.

Boys (mostly) Won't Be Girls

Everybody's different. Sometimes one group of individuals seems substantially different from another. Stop Penalizing Boys for Not Being Able to Sit Still at School - Jessica Lahey - The Atlantic

According to the book Reaching Boys, Teaching Boys: Strategies That Work and Why, boys are kept back in schools at twice the rate of girls. Boys get expelled from preschool nearly five times more often than girls. Boys are diagnosed with learning disorders and attention problems at nearly four times the rate of girls. They do less homework and get a greater proportion of the low grades. Boys are more likely to drop out of school, and make up only 43 percent of college students. Furthermore, boys are nearly three times as likely as girls to be diagnosed with Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Considering 11 percent of U.S. children--6.4 million in all--have been diagnosed with a ADHD, that's a lot of boys bouncing around U.S. classrooms....

Hmm....sounds like 4.8 million boys and 1.6 million girls. You wouldn't want to forget the 1.6 million by creating a boys v. girls division, but on the other hand even that might be better than what we have now. The book being described apparently sorts out results from a survey describing

eight categories of instruction that succeeded in teaching boys. The most effective lessons included more than one of these elements:

• Lessons that result in an end product--a booklet, a catapult, a poem, or a comic strip, for example.
• Lessons that are structured as competitive games.
• Lessons requiring motor activity.
• Lessons requiring boys to assume responsibility for the learning of others.
• Lessons that require boys to address open questions or unsolved problems.
• Lessons that require a combination of competition and teamwork.
• Lessons that focus on independent, personal discovery and realization.
• Lessons that introduce drama in the form of novelty or surprise.

I suspect that, in the end, we want all of those to be available -- not compulsory -- for kids and groups, some in formed in person and some by telepresence.

Or then again, maybe not.

Standard Schooling v. Human Diversity

Psychology professor and "quantified self" proponent Seth Roberts says of Occupational Specialization as Far Back as the Bronze Age that

The more you see the centrality of occupational specialization to human nature, the more you will see how modern schooling malnourishes almost everyone who undergoes it — which is almost everyone. Human nature takes people at one place and time — such as Mycenaean Greece — and pushes them to become adults who do all sorts of different things (woodcutter, herald, beekeeper . . . ). It takes people who start off the same or almost the same — same place, same food, same weather, similar genes — and creates diversity among them.

Modern education tries to do the opposite: Take a diverse set of students and make them the same. One example is No Child Left Behind. Another is that in almost every college class, all students are given the same material, the same assignments, and graded on the same one-dimensional scale. We don’t need everyone to be the same; in fact, we need exactly the opposite. The more diverse we are, the sooner we will find solutions to pressing problems, because they will be attacked in many different ways.

He has written occasionally about educational methods at the university level, and of course as a champion of self-experimentation he's focused on results that vary from one individual to the next. It happens to be Father's Day; if I were a father (rather than grandfather) of young children now, I do believe I'd start a notebook for each, each notebook titled What Works For Me And How I Know It, with a major section on How I Learn Best and How I Learned That It's True, with subsections about...well, never mind.

Or then again, maybe 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.

"Inquiry-Based Learning"

A model which seems to be having some success for some students, reported at Hogwarts for Hackers: Inside the Science and Tech School of Tomorrow | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com

the school’s secret isn’t cash or high tech gimmicks like online classes. At the core of the school is the notion of “inquiry-based learning,” a concept that dates back to the 1960s and draws on earlier concepts from thinkers like Jean Piaget, John Dewey, and Maria Montessori.

“The math teachers don’t lecture. They give out worksheets, and we learn as we go,” explains Emma Sloan, a sophomore. These worksheets are basically problems that the students must solve, using their own wherewithal — and help from other students. In class, students will often gather in circles — or “hexagons” ...
The inquiry approach is then taken to extremes on IMSA Wednesdays. There are no classes held on this day. The entire day is devoted to completely freeform education. “You can go find a mentor — some bad-ass in the particular field you’re interested in. You can do your own research. Or you can play video games,” says Kador.

It's interesting that "freeform education" would be effective; apparently it is. One question would be: is all-Wednesday an optimum, or should it be only half of a day, or half of every day, or...? (Or different for different students at different ages?)

The US is Not Really #1 Yet...Fortunately

More on Yong Zhao's case against US educational "reform" trends (I've mentioned him here and here) at Be Glad for Our Failure to Catch up With China in Education | Psychology Today

Our schools are better than China’s because ours don’t work as well as theirs.

For more than 20 years we’ve had national educational goals aimed at emulating the Chinese (and Japanese and Korean) educational system. We’ve been working toward more centralization of control, more standardization of curricula and methods, and more student time in the classroom and at homework, all in an effort to produce higher scores on standardized tests. ...

You might think the Chinese educational leaders would be happy that their kids are scoring so high on these international competitions. But they’re not. ... At the same time that we are continuing to try to be more like them, they are trying—though without much success so far—to be more like us, or like we were before we began trying so hard to be like them. They see that their system is quashing creativity and initiative, with the result that it produces decent bureaucrats and number crunchers, but very few inventors and entrepreneurs.

The columnist is psychologist Peter Gray; his alternative reform direction is interesting, to put it mildly. I should write about that.

New York is #1

We're the top: CONVERSABLE ECONOMIST: U.S. Public Schools: Unequal Spending Across States

For the U.S. as a whole, average public school K-12 current spending per student was $10,560 in 2011, with 61% of that going to "instruction," and 35% going to "support services."
But four jurisdictions--New York, Wyoming, Alaska, and the District of Columbia--spend more than $16,000 per K-12 student, with New York leading the way at $19,076 per student. Conversely, Idaho, Utah, Arizona, Oklahoma,and Mississippi spend less than $8,000 per student, with Utah having the lowest tally at $6,212 per student. That is, New York spends on average three times as much per K-12 student as does Utah.

Of course, the money is well-spent.
Or then again, maybe not.