'Virtual reality' learning to debut in Baltimore Co.

Virtual education is around the corner.  In many situations this will be a good thing.  However, a balance between real world experiences and simulation would be the best path.  This program sounds like it is a step in the right direction.

The initiative, for which nearly $1 million is requested in the next fiscal year, is part of the school system's effort to equip students with 21st-century skills. Teachers can use simulations of real-life situations and problems to help students apply what they learn. The planned classroom of computer work stations and a wall of large screens for group lessons is believed to be a first in the area. 

We need to be able distinguish between the tool of technology and its practical use.  In a shop class, for instance, actually working on a motor IRL (in real life) would teach far more than a simulation of a motor.  Likewise, using technology to teach bridge building might be beneficial. (Although building bridges with toothpicks or straws might also teach some of the same skills!)

Paul D. Coverstone, who teaches at McDaniel College and specializes in instructional design for online learning, said virtual instruction will eventually become commonplace, particularly as bandwidth capability grows.

"There is no doubt that technology can be a strong adjunct to the learning process," said Coverstone, who is acting chief information officer for the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission. Still, he said, using such tools should not be about technology for its own sake, but tied to specific objectives.

I completely agree.  Technology in education should be used to compliment and enhance practical experience.

Full article:  The Baltimore Sun

Irving ISD uses online textbooks, so unused copies state must buy sit in a warehouse

The Irving school district in Dallas has been switching to on-line versions of their textbooks.  Unfortunately, they are compelled to buy hard copies  of the books in order to have access to the on-line versions.  These books, then, are warehoused and sit unused until the next edition is purchased by the district.

"Irving ISD officials say the problem stems from two major factors: the increased use of computer-based instructional materials and the reluctance to issue textbooks to each student for fear they might lose or damage them."

Hmmm.  Wasteful.   Irving is apparently an affluent district since each student gets issued a laptop.  I would assume that there are districts, without  laptops, that could use the hard copies of these books.  It is likely that the school beaurocracy and funding laws prohibit such sharing.  The article mentions this as a possibility, but does not expound.

"So many books are stacking up in Irving's Ratteree Career Development Center–which also houses cosmetology and auto tech programs– that construction workers are expanding the warehouse.

Fire inspectors repeatedly warned district officials that it was unsafe to stack boxes of books in the warehouse aisles. Therefore, the district commissioned the $118,000 building expansion."

So, not only are thousands of dollars worth of new books sitting unused, but more money was spent in order to store them!

This article is a bit confusing with contradicting statements and ideas that need to be explained.  For example, early on the author mentions that no one knows how many books are in storage.  Later it mentions that a computerized inventory system allows the state to transfer books to districts that need them. 

 If they can do this  then why are there so many books still in storage?  This should have been asked and answered.

My Homeschooler's Perspective:  

I am all for saving trees and money by moving to electronic teaching alternatives.  However, there will be many, many districts that couldn't possible afford to issue laptops to all their students.  According to this article, districts prefer not to give the students their own books.  So what exactly do they do?  

Full article: Dallas News

Grades Fixed: An Allegation Shocks No One

The headline says it all.  A competitive high school in NJ has been altering the books for years.  They have been changing grades  for seniors (without their knowledge) to get them into better colleges and universities.  This is not a new phenomena:

"After all, the banks and brokerages have had to restate their earnings. Baseball statistics have to be retrofitted either with or without steroids. What’s the surprise in a high school having to figure out how many transcripts sent to colleges were given a happy tweak to remove a nasty C or turn a B into an A?"

What is this all about? Are they doing it for the kids?  Nope, its all about reputation and money...

"Which, of course, is the name of the game. Dr. Bandlow indicated that part of the reason for the false reports wasn’t to help the students — it was to enhance the school’s reputation. And why not? In many hypercompetitive school districts (and you know who you are), the real final report card is how seniors fare in getting into top colleges."

Full article: The New York Times

Will Obama Stand Up for These Kids?

The District of Columbia's school voucher program is under assault.   Sen. Dick Durban has created a provision that will remove the voucher program unless Congress takes action.  Thus, no one has to actually stand up and declare that they do not like vouchers, they can just let it fade away.

"And it points to perhaps the most odious of double standards in American life today: the way some of our loudest champions of public education vote to keep other people's children -- mostly inner-city blacks and Latinos -- trapped in schools where they'd never let their own kids set foot.

This double standard is largely unchallenged by either the teachers' unions or the press corps. For the teachers' unions, it's a fairly cold-blooded calculation. They're willing to look the other way at lawmakers who chose private or parochial schools for their own kids -- so long as these lawmakers vote in ways that keep the union grip on the public schools intact and an escape hatch like vouchers bolted."

The article also quotes Obama (but doesn't give the specific citation):

"The biggest source of resistance [to reform]," he said, "was rarely talked about . . . namely, the uncomfortable fact that every one of our churches was filled with teachers, principals, and district superintendents. Few of these educators sent their own children to public schools; they knew too much for that. But they would defend the status quo with the same skill and vigor as their white counterparts of two decades before."

When I first began to research homeschooling I joined a very large and eclectic homeschooling group.  Early on I realized that well over half the homeschoolers had been or still were teachers.  They had chosen to homeschool their own kids based on personal experiences in the classroom.  This observation was crucial to my own decision to teach my children at home.

Full article: The Wall Street Journal

Obama puts spotlight on education deficit

Obama set an aggressive goal for education in his speech to the joint session of Congress.  He wants the US to be producing the most college graduates in the world  by 2020.

This is going to be a challenge:

"By one measure used by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, in 2005 the U.S. had a 76% high school graduation rate, putting it behind Hungary, Greece, Ireland and the Slovak Republic. 

Before we can get everyone in to college, we need to get them out of high school.

Full article: The LA Times

Is a 4-day week in Florida public schools' future?

The idea of longer days with a shorter school week has been proposed in many districts across the country.  This is primarily a budget solution - it has nothing to do with actual education.

"School districts are unsure how much money they might save by going to four days, but the prospect of spending a fifth less on bus fuel alone is attractive. There would be savings on utilities, too, if schools could be shut down for long weekends, and certain other costs tied to each day of school, such as meal preparation, might be trimmed as well."

This leads to many questions.  Is education a matter of time spent in school?  Who will watch the children? What will the older kids (teens) DO all day?   

As a homeschooler, I think learning is mostly a matter of quality over quantity of time spent. Often students can cover as much or more material in a few hours at home as they can in a full day at school, but it takes discipline and a willingness to learn 

Full article: The Orlando Sentinel

I’ll spell it out: if children can’t read, lives are ruined

This article comes out of Britain, but fits our system as well.  Here is the very frank opening paragraph:

"This country’s education system is a betrayal of this country’s children. It blunts their intelligence, narrows their perspectives and blasts their future prospects. How often does that need to be said? Of course it is not universally true; many children defy the system, one way or another. But the point is that the system is bad. If the word “institutionally” means anything, this country’s education system is institutionally unfit for purpose."

The schools have been focussed on testing with the result that the broader curriculum has been neglected.  The children have been denied a wide and deep  education in favor of teaching-to-the-test minimalism.  Unfortunately, this hyper attention to testing is not working. 

 In yet another attempt to plug the holes, some argue that arts and humanities need to be re-invigorated.  

"However, there is no point in proposing a wide and imaginative course of study for children who cannot read well. A child who cannot read well cannot learn. He or she cannot possibly share the riches of a wide education or the freedom of the literate mind to teach and enrich itself when others can’t or won’t. And the reason our schools fail so badly, the reason teachers teach narrowly to the dubious “literacy” tests, is that they have failed to teach little children to read properly in the first place."

This is a fundamental issue in American schools as well.  A good education MUST be broad, but it is pointless to introduce art and philosophy if the 3 Rs are weak.  Children need a strong foundation to build on.

For those who are tempted to think that problems in the UK's system really are not comparable to ours, know that the US ranks lower than the UK in international comparison testing.  This is true for math & science comparisons and literacy comparisons.

Full article: The Sunday Times

Student Expectations Seen as Causing Grade Disputes

Apparently college students no longer feel that they should have to work to receive good grades.  

A recent study by researchers at the University of California, Irvine, found that a third of students surveyed said that they expected B’s just for attending lectures, and 40 percent said they deserved a B for completing the required reading.

There is a sense of entitlement here that they have absorbed throughout their early schooling. Everybody wins, nobody should lose, as long as they try real hard.   Here is a quote from a senior at the University of Maryland:

“I think putting in a lot of effort should merit a high grade,” Mr. Greenwood said. “What else is there really than the effort that you put in?”

“If you put in all the effort you have and get a C, what is the point?” he added. “If someone goes to every class and reads every chapter in the book and does everything the teacher asks of them and more, then they should be getting an A like their effort deserves. If your maximum effort can only be average in a teacher’s mind, then something is wrong.”

What about actually learning the material?  Where is the actual education?  

Professor Brower said professors at Wisconsin emphasized that students must “read for knowledge and write with the goal of exploring ideas.”

This informal mission statement, along with special seminars for freshmen, is intended to help “re-teach students about what education is.”

College should not be an extension of high school.  Any student interested in "higher" education should already know what education is. 

  

Full article: New York Times

Industry Makes Pitch That Smartphones Belong in Classroom

Money for education will be a huge part of the new stimulus plan.  For those with something to market, this might be one of the few lucrative venues left.

At a conference this week in Washington called Mobile Learning 09, CTIA, a wireless industry trade group, plans to start making its case for the educational value of cellphones. It will present research — paid for by Qualcomm, a maker of chips for cellphones — that shows so-called smartphones can make students smarter.

Teachers, however, are not so sure that technology will save the day.

“Texting, ringing, vibrating,” said Janet Bass, a spokeswoman for the American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second largest teachers’ union. “Cellphones so far haven’t been an educational tool. They’ve been a distraction.” Ms. Bass says it is “almost laughable that the cellphone industry is pushing a study showing that cellphones will make kids smarter,” particularly during a recession that is crushing the budgets of many school districts.

Do we really need to spend what little money the schools have on more stuff?  What makes for a good education?  Technical prowess is of no use to a mind that is limited and undisciplined.

Full article: New York Times

Higher learning: More middle-schoolers leapfrog into advanced classes -- but are minorities being left behind?

Some middle schools are allowing advanced students to take high school classes for credit.  This has set off alarm bells for many...

But the nation's foremost scholars in middle-school education are worried the fast-growing trend is leaving minority children behind. They also question whether the practice is legal because, nationwide, it has tended to result in students being segregated by race.

Basically, the argument is that this shouldn't be allowed because somehow its not fair.  Those students who have the desire and ability to accelerate their education shouldn't be given this option.  

In the current educational system self esteem and fairness are the rule.  No one should be allowed to excel (too much) and no one should be allowed to fail.  If you excel you make others look bad,  if you fail you make the system look bad.  

 

This is not meritocracy, it is mediocrity.

Full article:  Orlando Sentinel

The Great College Hoax

We have all been taught to believe that a college education was worth the debt burden in exchange for rewards (read $$$) later.  It is time to rethink that assumption.  

All the while students have been lulled into thinking of the extra $1 million that will be theirs, they have been forced to disgorge an ever larger fraction of it in pursuit of the degree. While the premium that college grads earn over high schoolers has remained relatively constant over the past five years, the cost of acquiring a degree has risen at twice the rate of inflation, dramatically undermining any value a sheepskin adds.

According to this Forbes article in some cases the trade-off is little more than an outright scam.

"I call it the million-dollar misunderstanding," says Mark Schneider, vice president of the American Institutes for Research, of the prevailing propaganda.

"There are a lot of aspects of selling education that are tinged with consumer fraud," Sander says. "There is a definite conspiracy to lead students down a primrose path."

Full article: Forbes

Knowledge Is Power Program shown as urban triumph

Started by two young teachers, the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) is proving that anyone, no matter the setting can learn.

Eventually, Levin and Feinberg cobble together a college-prep program that boasts longer hours, days, weeks and years — kids stay in school until 5 p.m. most days, attend class every other Saturday and spend weeks in summer school; it demands 24/7 dedication from parents, students and teachers but gets good, replicable results.

Hard work, high expectations, and dedicated parents; thats what it takes to achieve.

Full article: USA Today

Head Start Falls Further Behind

The new stimulus package includes more money for Head Start but requires little change or improvement.  

Head Start and similar prekindergarten programs could truly help disadvantaged children, but many studies have shown that Head Start, as it is now managed, is failing them.

In 1998, Congress required the Department of Health and Human Services to conduct the first rigorous national evaluation of the program. The Clinton administration took this mandate seriously and initiated a 383-site randomized experiment involving about 4,600 children. Confirming previous research, the study found that the current program had little meaningful impact.

A complete reorganization seems called for, not more money.

Lack of money is not the problem: to keep a child in Head Start full-time, year-round, costs about $22,600, as opposed to an average cost of $9,500 in a day care center. And that’s the big failing of the stimulus bill. In area after area, it does not require any real change in return for vast piles of money.

Full article: New York Times

UK schools have 20,000 unqualified teachers

This is an interesting article considering the tone and outcry reflected in  this recent post about creating youth apprenticeships in the classrooms. 

The number of unqualified staff, who include those currently in training on a "fast track" into the profession, and foreign teachers whose qualifications are not recognised in the UK, has mushroomed from just 3,000 when Labour came to power in 1997 to more than 20,000 last year, government figures have revealed.

 

How, then, can the call to allow only certified teachers/parents to homeschool be justified?

Here is a cryptic line... with no analysis to explain it.  Why is this so?

Last year, research found that pupils from poor homes are more likely to be taught by unqualified teachers than those in well-off areas.

Full article: The Independent

Test Scores Provide Valuable Measure Of Success in D.C.

Good News!

Some DC schools are beginning show improvements on test scores.  After much upheaval throughout the district brought on by Michelle Rhee, it looks like things are getting better.  Rhee is the tough new Chancellor of the DC school system.  Her methods have been harshly criticized by many teachers across the country.  

Testing is a controversial issue.  Teaching-to-the-test is a natural outcome of score focussed schools.  The schools and teachers can not help but hone in on weaker areas to prep for the next round of exams.  The tests, however, should reflect only minimum knowledge needed to progress.  Ultimately, the test itself becomes the goal and not education beyond the minimum.

This, though, is a valid point:

Parents and educators who decry the rise of testing will cringe. Why, they ask, does everything have to revolve around multiple-choice assessments? (The BAS, which takes about eight hours over two days, has some essay questions, as does the DC-CAS, but is mostly multiple choice.) What happened, these skeptics ask, to helping students explore literature, mathematics, history and science and letting their conversations and writing reveal how much they learned?

There are two problems with this critique. First, for the vast majority of students, particularly in the Shaw neighborhood, that golden age of deep learning never existed. Schooling in America, with bright exceptions, has been shallow, unimaginative and easy for students to avoid by not showing up to class. Second, in an age of data-driven teamwork in business, science and politics, education could not avoid the 21st-century impulse to measure results and galvanize groups of experts to improve performance. 

So far the only options seem to be no bar or low bar.

Full article: Washington Post

Technology not the panacea for education

A very interesting article on the value of technology in the classroom. 

Educators have been trying to improve schools with every technology we've ever invented, beginning with Thomas Edison's promise, in 1912, to create "100 percent efficiency" in the classroom through the medium of "the motion picture." Since personal computers and the Internet first arrived in classrooms, in the early 1990s, schools have spent approximately $100 billion on technology. Throughout this campaign, educators and the technology industry have been searching madly for solid evidence of whether the computers were boosting achievement. So little has been found that this data has become education's WMD.

It seems that many educators and lawmakers feel that cutting edge technology will save our school system.  The future employers, however, are looking for something much more basic.

First, the wiser captains of industry have never asked schools to emphasize "technology skills." What they prefer, and are in fact dying for to better compete in a global economy, are graduates with skills in areas that increasingly get neglected: writing and reasoning; reliable work habits; the capacity for concentration and face-to-face communication; a sense of history, cultural anthropology, and - for jobs in the technology sector in particular - higher math and science. "Want to get a job using information technology to solve problems?," a report from the Information Technology Association of America, once asked. "Know something about the problems that need to be solved."

Technology is just a tool.  It cannot completely replace a rigorous, well rounded education.

Full article: San Francisco Chronicle

Children: Recess Found to Improve Behavior

This is news?  Any parent knows  that kids need a break to get the wiggles out!

Children who had at least 15 minutes of recess scored better than the others on teachers’ behavioral ratings. Dr. Romina M. Barros, a pediatrician and assistant professor at Albert Einstein, said the data were important because many new schools were being built without adequate outdoor space for students.

“We need to understand that kids need a break,” Dr. Barros said. “Our brains can concentrate and pay attention for 45 to 60 minutes, and in kids it’s even less. For them to be able to acquire all the academic skills we want them to learn, they need a break to go out and release the energy and play and be social.”

For most homeschoolers this is not an issue.  If the kids are squirrelly... out they go!  If they are spacey... out they go!  If they are completely lost and frustrated... out they go!   They return refreshed and ready to learn (MOST of the time).

Full article: New York Times

Committee Urges Schools to “Recruit” Homeschoolers to Fix Budget

This is something of a thorn in many homescholing communities. Many see these public school programs as simply luring homeaaschoolers back onto the books for the state's financial gain. After all, they get the same amount of money per student whether they are teaching them or the parent is teaching them....

A committee of the Rapid City School Board wants to fix the system’s broken budget by recruiting homeschoolers.

The Rapid City School Board created a committee last summer to examine budget issues for the school system. On January 22, their recommendations were made public. The report suggested that the school system could find additional revenue sources by “recruiting more homeschooled students into the district.” Other recommendations were made, as well.

Homeschoolers already feel somewhat taken advantage of. Not only do they pay for an expensive public education for the children of others, but they pay the full cost of educating their own children at home. Of the thousands of dollars of tax money they send to the school system to educate other people’s children, they do not even get back one dollar. The idea of homeschooled children being recruited to repair a school system’s broken budget is unacceptable. If the school system built too many buildings and hired too many staff, the solution is to reduce the use of buildings and reduce staff—not lure homeschool families to give their children back to the public schools.

Article from: HSDLA

School Reform That Works

Bill Gates reflects on the state of his research and experiments in improving education.

Nine years ago, the foundation decided to invest in helping to create better high schools, and we have made over $2 billion in grants. The goal was to give schools extra money for a period of time to make changes in the way they were organized (including reducing their size), in how the teachers worked, and in the curriculum. The hope was that after a few years they would operate at the same cost per student as before, but they would have become much more effective.

He was forthright in admitting that some of these schools did not improve, but from this the Gates Foundation gained valuable insights into the changes necessary to improve our system.

One of the key things these schools have done is help their teachers be more effective in the classroom. It is amazing how big a difference a great teacher makes versus an ineffective one. Research shows that there is only half as much variation in student achievement between schools as there is among classrooms in the same school. If you want your child to get the best education possible, it is actually more important to get him assigned to a great teacher than to a great school.

This was particularly striking considering the report discussed previously concerning the evaluation and retention of effective teachers.


Full article: Washington Post

Houston area has boost in those wishing relief duty in schools

An interesting result of economic meltdown...

School administrators say the unusually high caliber of the applicants — some with MBAs and other prestigious advanced degrees — allows them to be choosier when assigning substitutes to classrooms. For schools, it’s at least one upside to the sour economy.

Full article: Houston Chronicle