stimulant

Oh man! This article in the Tenessean details the growth of what sounds like an extraordinary school in the Metro area:

“Here’s how it works: A student interested in, say, cars could get an internship with a mechanic. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, the student would work in the shop helping to repair cars. Through his internship, he also would be required to show how essentials such as math, science, social studies and writing apply to mechanics. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, the student would go to school and work with an adviser meet, it’s about the language you develop in these work places, it is about exposure to other things, which is almost impossible to take place in a school.”

That’s amazing! Even more so because there are currently 40(!) so-called Big Picture Schools nationwide. Apparently, they’ve been around since 1996; however, this is the first that I’ve heard of them.

I’m completely flabbergasted by some of the comments, though:

“Again, you have administrators in the ivory tower experimenting with our young people. Sounds like another way to engineer education jobs and its entitlement culture by keeping students ‘busy’ with very questionable non-academic activities. This experiment is going to propogate the uneducated sub-culture under the guise of teaching a trade. What happens to this 15-18 yo when they turn 25 and no longer want to do the trade? Where are the other skills they need to go on to college? THEY ARE NOT THERE. Because they were not taught.

High school is NOT the time to track into a narrow job/career. This almost smacks of the socialist educational system…which in the former Soviet Union was designed by none other than Horace Mann. (Heard THAT name before, educators?)

To top that, this is linked to a commercial venture that probably has kickbacks; and (according to a previous poster’s stats quoted) has performance well below the participating districts’ averages. This has scam written all over it.”

I forget that the focus on assessment can be an enormous stumbling block to considering new ideas about education. Initiatives like this are fundamentally subversive in the questions they ask about education. Despite this, detractors (and frequently proponents) turn to the same, tired indices and indicators to justify what they’re doing.

Anyway, I’m excited to see the traditional coupling between “vocational” and “academically inferior” weakened on an institutional level. And I’m eager to read all the press on them and see where they’ve been, where they’re going, and whether there’s room for more excitement.

Why?

More teachers and better teachers are both commonn, naive (that is, obvious — not ignorant) suggestions for improving schools. Both of these suggestions highlight two issues, that are really one and the same: there aren’t enough teachers, and there aren’t enough good teachers.

These problems are manifestations of the complete absence of market pressure for [good] teachers. We don’t see this dearth in the technology sector, or in medicine, or in acting. Why not? Because these jobs are desirable careers and provide desired services. Teaching theoretically provides desired services, but any market pressure for the services is abducted by the fact that schooling is compulsory. Note that plenty of people want to be college professors, and that you never hear of private schools having prolonged, severe teacher shortages.

Many are calling for increased accountability to address these problems. Betweeen NCLB and resolutions to couple teacher pay to student performance, it seems that we’re forgetting a few, key points:

• Missionaries don’t strike
Why don’t they strike? Because they feel strongly about their mission, feel fulfilled working on it, and are willing to devote everything they have to a worthy cause. All of this, independent of material considerations. As Victor Frankl said, “He [who] knows the ‘why’ for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any ‘how.’.” To create a market for teachers, we need to make it clear not only that they are valuable (that’s code for: don’t make schooling compulsory) but make teaching an enviable, fulfilling job. Don’t get in its way.

Punitive micromanagement kills enthusiasm

Most teachers want to be good teachers. People like doing good work when the work is worth doing. So why is there so much ridiculous bureaucracy standing between students and teachers, teachers and administrators, and administrators and policymakers? A friend and I were talking about why good teachers were hard to find. Two points were immediately obvious: teachers aren’t paid well, and teaching in schools is tremendously unpleasant. Teaching enrichment and afterschool programs isn’t. Why not? Because the latter aren’t saddled with a trillion dollar albatross: the educational infrastructure. My friend said something that struck me as more important than either of those — or perhaps simply encapsulating them:

“Very little room to develop the skill is (I think) the big killer. Thinking of it like any other skill, you need room to explore in it a lot and practice it a whole bunch, and then you need a little bit of guidance. I don’t see that happening much … some teachers figure it out themselves but most don’t get guidance beyond MCAS curriculums [sic] or room to explore beyond the traditional school environment, which puts really contorted restrictions on learning.”

Moral: Happy teachers are good teachers.

Scalability is essential

This is the most obvious criticism of these strategies: producing more teachers, cutting class sizes, requiring nationwide teacher training and certification: none of these scale reasonably. At all. The solutions need to come from the bottom, not the top.

Whenever I read articles like this about standards and educational policy, I’m always taken aback by how little (read: not at all) the issue of student benefit is discussed. There’s plenty of talk about the value of standards from an administrative and governmental and fiscal and even marketing point of view. But it’s a rare piece that connects standards to actually helping students. Instead, we just proceed with the plethora of hidden assumptions that got us into this mess in the first place:

• Good test scores imply learning
• We want students to come out of school with nothing but what is indicated by good test scores
• Tests are a fair indicator [of anything!]
• Tests don’t interfere with the learning and teaching processes, good test scores are a byproduct of solid learning and good teaching.

The list goes on. But for some reason, all of these are taken for granted. The real question, apparently, is whether testing standards should be even more uniform.. A side effect of the blinders we wear is that we don’t even see the data contradicting or supporting this. All our discussion of efficacy is tempered by the fact that it’s little more than speculation. Honest, straightforward discussions founded on real data are few and far between. I say “few and far” because I’m sure there are some. But I haven’t seen them.

Pathway is a pretty neat application that attempts something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently: figuring out how people use pieces of information to learn, tracking this, and integrating this metadata constructively. The idea is to incorporate this into OKSkillsTrading [1] to help take people from knowing one thing to learning another while being aware of their background, expertise, and other people’s pedagogical choices.

Tracking is the first step. And here is someone working on it.

[1] A top secret project that I might tell you about one day. Might.

Uhh…

“Radicals on the left have long feared that foundations, for example, prop up capitalism by mitigating its worst effects. And even many conservatives, otherwise famous for championing voluntarism and the mediating institutions of civil society, are worried that the nonprofit sector may be turning out to be more vicious than virtuous. This concern is encapsulated in the law formulated by John O’Sullivan when he was editor of National Review: ‘All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.’ In this view, nonprofits gravitate through the years to agendas not only that their original donors never intended but that are unrepresentative of American society. And then they are immune to reform.”

Wait, so because nonprofits made their own money and are don’t have other people’s fingers down their throats, they’re dangerous? Not being able to control something (that’s why “immune to reform” is actually scary) evokes fear? And since when were nonprofits a political entity constrained to “represent society.” They represent the people who donate and work in nonprofits. Corporate America isn’t an evenly distributed, representative slice of American society, either. For that matter, neither is the Senate. Or the House. Or the medical profession.

And because the social service sector is geniuinely effective (that what “props up capitalism” is code for) it deserves to be regulated?

Does this strike anyone else as dangerous, irresponsible paranoia? There are a plethora of examples where companies and governments have done wrong. Where are all the stories about nonprofits? Are these fears founded on any evidence at all?

I’m so excited by the idea that non-profits are the expression of citizen’s desires to change the way our society works. I find the model of small businesses and non-profits to be fascinatingly attractive. What if a sole proprietor or non-profit starter were the default role for someone to assume, instead of corporate or government employee?

Are [students] buyers or sellers?

On one hand, we’re very literally customers in the sense that we pay for college to “receive” an education. But anyone who has gone through the college application process knows that the economics involved is more complex than that.

In a pretty neat essay I ran across recently, Paul Graham explores the idea that judgment can take two forms:

• Judgment of intrinsic value
• Judgment of utility

Graham suggests that schooling trains us to see all judgment as being of the first form. In reality, he says that a great deal of judgment we encounter is actually judgment exercised by an organization to achieve specific purposes, and that the error tolerances for these judgments are often much wider than we lead our egos to believe when we miscategorize judgments we encounter.

For example, Graham suggests that, in this scheme colleges are actually consumers of students’ talent. Colleges are attempting to create a student body with specific characteristics. They are not trying to catalogue the worth of students.

Graham closes by suggesting that this distinction leads naturally to severing the connection between self-image and college acceptance:

“One good place to apply this principle is in college applications. Most high school students applying to college do it with the usual child’s mix of inferiority and self-centeredness: inferiority in that they assume that admissions committees must be all-seeing; self-centeredness in that they assume admissions committees care enough about them to dig down into their application and figure out whether they’re good or not. These combine to make applicants passive in applying and hurt when they’re rejected. If college applicants realized how quick and impersonal most selection processes are, they’d make more effort to sell themselves, and take the outcome less personally.”

If students are providers, what power to they have to influence the buyers?

This post on Newsvine brings up a couple funny points. The author suggests that the sciences are easier than the humanities, and should be, contrary to students’ perceptions of the subjects.

While it is true that the problems and questions that the humanities confronts are thornier (given that the existence, uniqueness, and veracity of an answer or idea are rarely directly falsifiable), I thought that the following comment was particularly obnoxious and indicative:

“Consider any of the following: He is lighter then Au. @!$%# falls when you drop it. An [sic] java class cannot override member functions which are declared as final in the superclass. 2 * 23 = 46. (Recognize any of these from endless multiple choice exams?) These are the sort of things students are asked to verify in the Sciences.”

Now, when I say that comment is obnoxious, I don’t mean that the author is obnoxious. What I do mean is that this description is what education in “the Sciences” entails. But that’s not what the sciences are! It’s not surprising that so many people leave school, hating [math/physics/chemistry/…]: it’s made boring for students. Whenever I tell an adult I’m majoring in math or going to MIT, the typical response is, “Oh really? I was always terrible at math and science; I really hated it.” Why doesn’t this happen for humanities majors? I never hear people say, “Oh wow — a literature major? I was always terrible at reading; I hate books.” The answer: school gets in the way of math and science more and worse than it gets in the way of enjoying books (which isn’t to say both aren’t frequently botched tragically).

The other aspect of this article that I found particularly interesting was its confusion of the ideas of rigor and quality. The belief that for learning or knowledge to be valuable or well-learned it must be hard to obtain is ingrained in us from an early age: working hard in school is good, and leads to being “smart.”

But this is absolutely false. Learning can and should be easy, carefree, but passionately driven by curiosity. I was once taking a seminar in complex analysis, using Tristan Needham’s extraordinary Visual Complex Analysis as a text. A classmate dropped out of the seminar, complaining that the problems weren’t hard enough. Sure, he admitted that he was learning all of the concepts easily, and was having fun. But he didn’t feel like it was worth his time, because it wasn’t hard enough.

To quote liberally from another essay of Paul Graham’s,

“One of the most dangerous illusions you get from school is the idea that doing great things requires a lot of discipline. Most subjects are taught in such a boring way that it’s only by discipline that you can flog yourself through them. So I was surprised when, early in college, I read a quote by Wittgenstein saying that he had no self-discipline and had never been able to deny himself anything, not even a cup of coffee.

Now I know a number of people who do great work, and it’s the same with all of them. They have little discipline. They’re all terrible procrastinators and find it almost impossible to make themselves do anything they’re not interested in. One still hasn’t sent out his half of the thank-you notes from his wedding, four years ago. Another has 26,000 emails in her inbox.

I’m not saying you can get away with zero self-discipline. You probably need about the amount you need to go running. I’m often reluctant to go running, but once I do, I enjoy it. And if I don’t run for several days, I feel ill. It’s the same with people who do great things. They know they’ll feel bad if they don’t work, and they have enough discipline to get themselves to their desks to start working. But once they get started, interest takes over, and discipline is no longer necessary.

Do you think Shakespeare was gritting his teeth and diligently trying to write Great Literature? Of course not. He was having fun. That’s why he’s so good.”

So why can’t schoolchildren be in the business of having fun?

I hesitated to use this title, because inexplicable confusion is rampant when it comes to issues that seem blatantly obvious. And repeating post titles seems lame.

Apparently, the rights you relinquish when you enter school reattach when you leave it.

Now if only everyone could support Constituional rights for students. Man — considering censorship of a column promoting tolerance of homosexuals? Legislation to that effect is on the books, and a student catches flak for suggesting that’s what people who aren’t bigots we should do?

“School officials in this community of 1,600 residents, 10 miles east of Fort Wayne, say the issue isn’t First Amendment rights but a teacher’s failure to live up to her responsibilities. They contend Sorrell should have alerted Principal Ed Yoder to the article because of the sensitivity of the material.”

Prior review isn’t Constitutionally protected. It is censorship. Apparently, people are confused about the difference between the power government has and the power people have:

“We all have rules that we have to abide by and it appears that she hasn’t chosen to abide by the rules,” Bridge said. “I own my own business and anybody that did that to me would be fired on the spot. She knew it had to be controversial.”

Schools are not businesses. Government is not an individual. The capacity to fire a worker is different than the capacity to restrict free speech.

This post on Education Wonk last week tipped me off to a pretty ridiculous flurry of articles that came out around President Bush’s so-called “defense” of NCLB.

Congress is working on renewing the law, which remains unpopular in many districts nationwide. […] President Bush, acknowledging public frustration over his No Child Left Behind Act, said Thursday the point of the law is not to punish schools that fall short, but to help them. […] “It is important for all of us to make it clear that accountability is not a way to punish anybody,” Bush told supporters of the law in a meeting at the White House.” […] “It’s an essential component to making sure that our system, our education system, frankly is not discriminatory.”

What a crock of shit. If you find yourself apologizing for a policy that is widely unpopular [1] and perceived as punitive by those it is intended to help, then the policy is crap.

I’m flabbergasted by the article’s headline: “Bush defends No Child Left Behind Act”

Defends? Indicts!

[1] - Prompted by this obvious confusion between “intentions” and “facts”, I got curious. How many people actually think NCLB is effective, or even worthwhile? A quick search turned up this 2006 poll revealing that

“Seven out of 10 Americans who say they are familiar with the No Child Left Behind Act believe that the law is either hurting public schools or making no difference.”

How does this makes sense in a representative democracy? How do politicians listen to educators, then decide they’re wrong? And instead make flagrantly uninformed decisions, apologize for their consequences, and then assure the injured parties that it’s for their own good?

Oh man. Things are screwed up.

This doesn’t make any sense.