RSS Feed
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Something worth fighting for
So, in New York the incoming mayor, Bill de Blasio, is promising to start charging the city's charter schools rent. more At present, most of the city's charter schools are located in unused or underused public school buildings. But charter school critics say that the fact that charter schools don't have to pay rent gives them an unfair advantage over conventional public schools (which don't, of course, pay rent either). Go figure. Mr. de Blasio's proposed policy is particular puzzling in that he positions himself as being on the side of the little guy.
Anyway, the point is that the city's charter school supporters are so attached to their charter schools that 17,000 of them were willing to march against the proposed policy of charging rent. Charter schools must be doing something right! So surely the city should be doing everything in its power to support them.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
The $4 Million Teacher
I'm currently reading The Smartest Kids in the World: And how they got that way by Amanda Ripley, In this book, the author follows three American teenagers who spend a year in a foreign high school in three countries that have drastically improved their education systems - Finland, Korea, and Poland. In today's excerpt (pp 169-171), she wonders "what would happen in a true free market in which parents had real insight into the rigor of a school and the quality of the teachers....As far as I could tell, there was really only one place in the world with a true free market for education, where supply and demand determined prices, and customers had closer-to-perfect information." That one place, according to Ms Ripley, is the Korean hagwons (private tutoring academies). To illustrate how the hagwons work, she profiles Andrew Kim - a "$4 million teacher".
In Korea, Andrew Kim is a rock-star teacher who earned $4 million in 2010 - because "he was paid according to the demand for his skills, unlike most teachers world-wide. And he was in high demand....Kim explained that he worked about sixty hours per week, although he only taught three in-person lectures. The Internet had turned his classes into commodities. Each lecture he did went online, where kids could purchase his teaching services at the rate of $3.50 per hour. The rest of the time, he responded to students' online requests for help, developed lesson plans, and wrote textbooks and workbooks. He's written about two hundred books. 'The harder I work, the more I make,' he said."
"To call this tutoring was to wildly underestimate its scale and sophistication. Megastudy, the online hagwon that Kim worked for, was listed on the Korean stock exchange. Three of every four Korean kids participated in the private market. In 2011, their parents spent almost $18 billion on cram schools, which was more than the federal government spent fighting the drug war in the United States. The so-called tutoring business was so profitable that it attracted investments from places like Goldman Sachs, the Carlyle Group, and A,I,G."
At hagwons, students are the customers. "To recruit students, hagwons held open houses, sent out mass mailings, and posted their graduates' test scores and university acceptance figures outside their entrances. In the Korean marketplace, results mattered more than anything else. Once students enrolled, the hagwon employees did not wait for parents to get involved, then complain if they didn't; the hagwon embedded itself in their lives. Parents got text messages when their children arrived at the hagwon; then they got another message relaying students' progress. Two to three times a month, the teachers called home with feedback. If parents were not engaged, that was considered a failure of the hagwon, not the family....The most radical difference was that students signed up for specific teachers, not just hagwons, so the most respected teachers got the most students....It was about as close to a pure meritocracy as it could be, and just as ruthless. In hagwons, teachers were free agents. They did not need to be certified. They didn't have benefits or even a guaranteed base salary; their pay was determined by how many students signed up for their classes, by their students' test-score growth, and, in many hagwons, by the results of satisfaction surveys given to students and parents."
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Skilled for Life?
On Saturday, I blogged about the new OECD survey of adult literacy and numeracy (here), promising to tell more about it once I had had a chance to go over it in detail. Well, now I have done this, and there doesn't seem to be anything very significant for me to report about the performance of Canadians. Typically, we fade into the woodwork, scoring almost exactly on the average no matter what analysis is being made. Eh?
In fact, Canada is singled out only twice. The first is on page 17 where the discussion is about low-skilled adults "getting trapped in a situation in which they rarely benefit from adult learning....This presents a formidable policy challenge for countries such as Canada, England/Northern Ireland (UK), Ireland, Italty, Spain and the United States, where significant shares of adults are at or below Level 1 on the literacy and numeracy scales".
The second reference is on page 22 where the discussion is about the degree to which wages vary according to the workers' proficiency. "In the Czech Republic, Estonia, Poland, the Slovak Republic and Sweden, differences in wages are much narrower than those in Canada, Germany, Ireland, Korea and the United States."
I'll close with the OECD's most important conclusions. "If there is one central message emerging from this new Survey of Adult Skills, it is that what people know and what they can do with what they know has a major impact on their life chances. For example, the median hourly wage of workers scoring at Level 4 or 5 in literacy - those who can make complex inferences and evaluate subtle truth claims or arguments in written texts - is more than 60% higher than for workers scoring at Level 1 or below - those who can, at best, read relatively short texts to locate a single piece of information that is identical to the information given in the question or directive or to understand basic vocabulary.....Low-skilled individuals are increasinly likely to be left behind....and countries with lower skill levels risk losing in competitiveness as the world economy becomes more dependent on skills....Inequality in skills is associated with inequality in income....Those with lower skills proficiency also tend to report poorer health, lower civic engagement and less trust."
"All countries can shape their own skills profile....Finland and Japan both have large shares of top-performers....while in other countries, large proportions of adults struggle with the most basic skills."
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Sunday at the Movies (IQ, Higher-Order Thinking, and Knowledge of History)
Although on the long side at 18+ minutes, this is a very interesting talk about the general rise in IQ over time and its implications.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Child-Centred Learning’s Long Tail of Left-Behind Students
The OECD recently released a survey of adult literacy and numeracy here. There is a lot of important information in this document, and I plan to go over it in more detail when I have some time. But for right now, I direct you to the CBC's analysis here. According to the CBC, Canadians score in the middle of the pack in terms of literacy and slightly below average for numeracy, but Canada's middling score masks a polarization between highly-literate problem-solvers and those who lack even basic skills.
Of course, we have been saying all along that this is what happens with child-centred learning - it's like the little girl with the curl in the middle of her forehead. When she was good, she was very very good, but when she was bad she was horrid. More on this later.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
No more Mr. Nice Guy!
Most of us had a teacher who changed our lives for the better. For me, it was my great-aunt Victoria Malkin, and she definitely fit the model outlined in this column praising "tough" teachers. For sure, this style of teaching has gone out of fashion, and these days the only reason a teacher like this wouldn't be fired is that it's just about impossible to fire teachers. Of course, if teachers could be fired, this teacher would be first in line. But that's not today's rant.
Today's rant is that all teachers should be like the one in the column - demanding, strict, and tough. It's worth pointing out that the 419 comments to the column are almost uniformly in agreement.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
A Win Win Win Proposition
Click here for an interesting op-ed by a Democrat and former chairman of the education committee of the District of Columbia City Council. Kevin P. Chavous draws on his own experience in DC where the council both saved money and also brought about improved educational outcomes for their students. How? School vouchers!
Furthermore, as Mr. Chavous points out, other state governments are starting to catch on to the multiple benefits of school choice - for example, Louisiana, where the state's school choice program is saving taxpayers an estimated $16 million a year while racking up a 93% satisfaction rating from the parents in the program.
In these cash-strapped times, it seems likely that politicians in other jurisdictions will grasp that school choice is a way to save money, earn votes, and improve educational outcomes.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Chickens and Eggs
One of the arguments used by charter school critics is that charter schools bolster their results by serving fewer special education students - the difference being about 3%. This new study on the gap suggests that "a significant portion of the special education gap occurs when children enter kindergarten. For whatever reason, students with identified disabilities (particularly students with autism and those with a speech or language impairment) are less likely to enroll in charter schools....Once a student enrolls in a charter school, the primary driver of the special education gap occurs because charter school students are significantly less likely to be newly classified as having a disability and are far more likely to have their IEP declassified than is the case in the traditional public school sector."
In other words, the reason charter schools have fewer special education students, apart from the fact that fewer parents of students with identified disabilities choose charter schools for their kindergarten-age children, is that the charter schools are less likely to classify students as having special needs - especially when it comes to the very grey and subjective area of "learning disabilities". Far from avoiding special education students, this study suggests that charter schools are doing a better job than traditional schools of overcoming the students' learning difficulties.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
An Apple a day keeps the learning away
A while back, the Los Angeles Board of Education voted to provide iPads to every student and teacher in the system at a cost of approximately $1 billion (which of course doesn't include ongoing costs around upgrades and repairs and software and so forth). Already, the project is running into problems - security breaches, losses/damages to iPads, ambiguity over the need for mechanical keypads, and the software. more
Furthermore, I'm not aware of any research suggesting that students with iPads will learn more. If anything, the evidence seems to be the other way - including issues of students doing their own thing with their iPads in class at the expense of what is being taught.
Even furthermore, one billion dollars is a lot of money. Even if it could be shown that the iPads will enhance student learning, I would still have to be convinced that it wouldn't make more sense to use the billion dollars on other reforms with potentially bigger pay-offs - for example, better teacher training, better teaching materials, better testing and feedback, and so forth.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
It’s best to know what you’re talking about
Greetings from Solvang, California which, in case you didn't know, is a Danish community in the heart of the Santa Ynez Valley. This is just for your general edification.
Today, I wish to write about a recent op-ed piece by Diane Ravitch in the LA Times. Dr. Ravitch, you may recall, experienced a conversion on the road to Damascus a few years back and now she is a bitter opponent of school choice. Her op-ed piece takes on charter schools, but the fact that it contains a serious factual error calls into question everything else she has to say.
The error concerns Korean schools, the success of whose students Dr. Ravitch attributes to the country's "strong public school programs with well-prepared, experienced teachers and administrators". While it seems to be true that the Korean elementary panel is exemplary, this is not at all the case for the secondary panel. Here are a few excerpts from Amanda Ripley's book The Smartest Kids in the World.
"The teacher walked into the room and stood at the front of the class. She was tall compared to most Korean women, and wore glasses. She carried a delicate microphone in one hand and a stick with a stuffed frog on the end of it in the other hand. It looked like a backscratcher, something you might find in a gift shop at he mall. Eric stopped talking and sat up straight at his desk, wondering what to make of the frog.
"Strangely, no one else seemed to react. The kids kept chatting with one another while the teacher stood there, waiting. It was painful to watch. Finally, the teacher tapped her frog stick on a desk to get everyone's attention, and the students slowly took their seats. As she lectured, a few of the kids talked over her in the back. Eric was surprised. He had seen worse behavior back in the States, but for some reason, he had expected Korean kids to be more deferential.
"A few minutes later, he glanced backwards at the rows of students behind him. Then he looked again, eyes wide. A third of the class was asleep. Not nodding off, but flat-out, no-apology sleeping, with their heads down on the desks. One girl actually had her head on a special pillow that slipped over her forearm. This was pre-meditated napping."
It turned out that the kids slept because they hadn't got enough sleep the night before. Although school ended at 4 pm, the students then went on to clean the school, take test prep classes, have dinner in the school cafeteria, and attend a mandatory two-hour study hall. Around nine o'clock, the students were allowed to leave school and..... then they went to private tutoring academies known as "hagwons" where they did most of their real learning.
"Eric listened to this epic regimen with a mounting feeling of dread. How could teenagers do nothing - literally nothing - but study? Suddenly, he understood what he had seen in class that day. The kids had acted like they lived in the classroom because they essentially did. They spent more than twelve hours there every weekday - and they already went to school almost two months longer than kids back in Minnesota. His classmates slept in their classes for one primary reason: because they were exhausted."
So when I read Dr. Ravitch claim that Korean students' strong academic learning is due to the country's strong schools, when it is in fact down to the hagwons (and the parents and culture who send the students to them), it feels to me as if Dr. Ravitch is indiscriminately grabbing for any evidence that she can find to bolster her pre-determined belief system - as opposed to carefully weighing all the evidence and then coming to a well-considered conclusion.
By the way, the teacher's frog stick was to tap kids on the head when they fell asleep or talked in class. The kids called it a 'love stick'.