AssortedStuff

Patrick Welsh, who teaches at a large high school just up the road from here (and not in the overly-large school district for which I work), asks that very good question in a piece for USA Today.

More precisely, he wonders whether it’s the right choice for every student.

But how much students with low skills, little motivation and lousy study habits are going to profit from going to college is not so clear. Over the past five years, I have seen students who didn’t have the skills one would expect of a ninth-grader going off to four-year colleges where fewer than 30% of entering freshman graduate.

That means that 70% of the freshman class is likely to end up not with a diploma but a pile of debt. In these days of tight budgets at every level of government, it’s also hard to ignore that these schools are heavily subsidized by the federal government.

Welsh’s school claims that about 80% of their graduates go to college while our district says 92.6% of our graduates go on to “some form of postsecondary education”.

I’ve never seen anywhere in our promotional literature statistics about how many of our graduates actually go on to earn some kind of degree from that “postsecondary education”, or even if the district bothers to ask the question.

However, Welsh asks an even more important question than how many finish: how many needed to go in the first place?

And yet we educators — and most parents — keep giving all kids the impression that without a college degree, they will be on a slippery slope to oblivion and poverty. In fact, for the majority of jobs, what will be needed even more than the subject matter we teachers think is so essential will be what Packer [Arnold Packer, co-director of the landmark study "Workforce 2000: Work and Workers for the 21st Century"] calls soft skills.

The report “Are They Really Ready to Work,” put out by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills and the Society for Human Resource Management, found that the four skills most prized by employers were a work ethic, an ability to collaborate with others, facility in oral communication and social responsibility. “Other than writing and reading English, no academic courses (including mathematics) make the top 10,” says Packer.

Ok, so no one, including Welsh, is saying that high schools shouldn’t prepare kids to attend college after they graduate.

We just shouldn’t automatically choose going to college as their only goal.

And, as it is in most high schools, their only option.

Update 7/11: In this short excerpt from an interview with Seth Godin, he talks about how our schools were organized (he calls it a “conspiracy”) for the now-departed industrial age and how college for many students today is a fraud.

Thanks to Will for the link to the video and for his thoughts on the subject at a very personal level, relating this idea to his two kids who are in the middle of that “college prep” process.

college, high school, students

It could be this year’s graduation time meme, or simply that many outlets are reproducing a single AP article, but there currently seems to be much discussion of whether sending every high school graduate off to college is really worth it.

Is a four-year degree required to learn the skills necessary for success in one of the professions most likely to have openings?

Professor Lerman, the American University economist, said some high school graduates would be better served by being taught how to behave and communicate in the workplace.

Such skills are ranked among the most desired — even ahead of educational attainment — in many surveys of employers. In one 2008 survey of more than 2,000 businesses in Washington State, employers said entry-level workers appeared to be most deficient in being able to “solve problems and make decisions,” “resolve conflict and negotiate,” “cooperate with others” and “listen actively.”

Yet despite the need, vocational programs, which might teach such skills, have been one casualty in the push for national education standards, which has been focused on preparing students for college.

However, as the Times article points out, suggesting that some students might be better served with a post-high school education that doesn’t involve greeks bearing drinks doesn’t go over well in this country.

Politicians and education “experts” repeatedly drill home to parents in the US that their kids will be failures without a college degree.  And in many schools here in Lake Wobegon East, discussing vocational programs is almost grounds for dismissal.

Maybe instead we should provide some clear options for high school students and then help them understand their alternatives so they can make realistic choices.

But Ms. Williams [a counselor at a high school in suburban New York City with a student body that is mostly black or Hispanic] said she would be more willing to counsel some students away from the precollege track if her school, Mount Vernon High School, had a better vocational education alternative. Over the last decade, she said, courses in culinary arts, nursing, dentistry and heating and ventilation system repair were eliminated. Perhaps 1 percent of this year’s graduates will complete a concentration in vocational courses, she said, compared with 40 percent a decade ago.

Of course automatically advising any student away from considering college is serving them just as poorly as making college their only post-secondary option.

We need to return to offering kids some middle ground.

21st century skills, advice, college, high school, ny times

When Amazon released the Kindle a couple of years ago, it generated lots of talk about it (or something like it) being the future of educational printed materials.

Since then, some colleges have been testing the use of the Kindle DX, the larger, more book-sized version, to replace analog textbooks for some of their classes.

One of those schools, Princeton, just released some data about their pilot and most of those participating found the results to be somewhat disappointing.

But in spite of the cost savings, some students and professors said they found the technology limiting.

The Kindle, a handheld, electronic device manufactured by amazon.com, allows users to store, read, highlight and annotate books and other documents using its display screen.

Notice what’s missing from that list? There’s no way for students and faculty to edit or add to the content on their devices so that other members of the community can see it.

In other words, there’s nothing new about these textbooks other than the format by which the information is delivered. Same old material, still controlled by the publisher, with no options for students to interact with it.

Of course, based on the comments of some of the teachers involved, interactivity really wasn’t an issue anyway.

Wilson School professor Stan Katz, who taught WWS 325 this fall, said he also found the device ill-suited for his course.

“I found it disappointing for use in class because I emphasize close work with the text, and that ideally requires students to mark up the text quite a bit,” Katz said. “Though it doesn’t prevent highlighting, the annotation function is difficult to use, and the keyboard is very small,” he added.

But Wilson School professor Daniel Kurtzer, who taught WWS 555A, said he found the Kindle conducive to the format of his class because it consisted of “very traditional reading.”

And likely, very traditional teaching.

However, to me the how digital books are being used at Princeton wasn’t the worst part of this story.

Students in WWS 325: Civil Society and Public Policy, who were given Kindles, printed an average of 762 pages, compared to the roughly 1,373 pages printed in past years, a 55 percent difference in paper use.

Kindle owners in WWS 555A: U.S. Policy and Diplomacy in the Middle East printed an average of 962 pages, while those without the e-readers printed an average of 1,826 pages, a 53 percent difference.

Why is anyone with an electronic book printing pages from their digital materials at all?

Maybe a few sheets, but 962 pages is likely very close to the size of the original analog college textbook those students used to pay a small fortune for (and are probably still paying for the Kindle version).

So anyway, the bottom line in all this is that teachers and students at Princeton are using a portable, connected digital device in almost exactly the same way they used the also-portable, unconnected analog versions it replaced.

Why bother?

college, kindle, media, textbooks

In their current issue, Washington Monthly has an interesting article about one vision of the future of a college education.

The article profiles a company called StraighterLine that is using a Netflix model to offer all-you-can-handle online courses for only $99 a month.

According to the writer, this is just part of the overall trend in our society.

In recent years, Americans have grown accustomed to living amid the smoking wreckage of various once-proud industries—automakers bankrupt, brand-name Wall Street banks in ruins, newspapers dying by the dozen. It’s tempting in such circumstances to take comfort in the seeming permanency of our colleges and universities, in the notion that our world-beating higher education system will reliably produce research and knowledge workers for decades to come. But this is an illusion. Colleges are caught in the same kind of debt-fueled price spiral that just blew up the real estate market. They’re also in the information business in a time when technology is driving down the cost of selling information to record, destabilizing lows.

However, at the same time college expenses are rising at far more than the rate of inflation, the institutions often short change students taking lower level courses, the primary target of StraighterLine.

But the biggest cash cow is lower-division undergraduate education. Because introductory courses are cheap to offer, they’re enormously profitable. The math is simple: Add standard tuition rates and any government subsidies, and multiply that by several hundred freshmen in a big lecture hall. Subtract the cost of paying a beleaguered adjunct lecturer or graduate student to teach the course. There’s a lot left over. That money is used to subsidize everything else.

This should all sound very familiar if you’ve read Disrupting Class.

In that book, the authors start with the theory that industries are disrupted when small, upstart companies find innovative ways to offer their core business faster, easier, cheaper.

They predict that companies like StraighterLine will do the same thing for (to?) American education, especially higher education but eventually including parts of K12.

However, since I learned more outside of classes during my undergraduate years than I did in them, I’m not buying everything in either the article or the book.

Of course, it all depends on what you’re looking for from a college education.

If all a person needs is the information and credits, $99 a month and working entirely online is certainly a good way to go.

college, disruption, education

In the Room for Debate section of the New York Times’ web site, they recently posed that question and invited a variety of people to write a short post to address it.

Most of the writers are involved with the universities that market the degrees, so let’s look at the two writers who are actually involved with K12 education.

From Patrick Welsh, an English teacher at a high school just up the road from here.

Nothing shows how downright phony the game is than the Ed.D.s — the Doctors of Education. I have seen administrators who have had trouble writing clear letters home to parents and who murdered the English language in public go about brandishing their degrees and insisting on being called “Doctor.” On the other hand, the two best principals in my high school — T.C. Williams in Alexandria, Va. — never bothered to get “doctorate” degrees; in fact, one did not even have a master’s when he was first hired. Both were appointed by wise superintendents who knew natural leaders when they saw them.

The credentialing game is even worse when it comes to teachers, because bureaucrats, obsessed with rules and numbers, would rather hire a mediocre but “fully certified” prospect than the brightest, most promising applicant who lacked the “education” courses.

And from a principal at an elementary charter school in California.

A liberal arts education, offered by America’s best institutions of higher learning, is immensely practical as a resource for life-long learning, for responding to technological and social change, and for passing on the value of a well-rounded learning experience.

The art and skill of effective pedagogy is arguably equally critical to effective classroom instruction. While most aspiring teachers hope to develop these skills through university coursework, in reality the most effective training is acquired through an apprenticeship at a high-performing school with a highly effective classroom teacher. As with most trades, the craft of effective pedagogy is one that is best developed in the context of the “workplace.”

Certainly a teacher should have a Bachelor’s degree in some academic area; there needs to be some kind of minimum standard and that’s probably the best we have right now.

After that, the process of finding and training good teachers is very hard to pin down, although I’m pretty sure that just attaching MA or PhD to your name does not by itself improve your teaching skills.

And I won’t defend education method classes since I learned much more from my first year of teaching than I ever did from those required credits.

Anyway, all of the essays are worth reading, as are the comments.

college, degree, education, ny times, teachers

Yesterday at the Building Learning Communities conference, one of the speakers offered up an interesting statistic.

75% of college graduates never read another book in their lifetime.

Wow!

That’s an incredible statement, although it must be true since he put it on a slide projected on a big screen in front of nearly a thousand people.

Anyway, it’s also the kind of number that just didn’t sit well with my crap detector.

A little bit of Googling turned up similar statements (like the one in this collection of book stats) with different (smaller) numbers.

And the speaker did qualify his statement with something about that 75% including people who started reading books but never completed them.

Still, three quarters of the college educated population not reading even one book after graduation strikes me as awfully high.

Did the researchers include audio books? Books parents read to their kids? Graphic novels?*

As with the results of so many polls, surveys, and studies, you really can’t understand the results without knowing the source and the method used to assemble the numbers.

However, we have a large part of the population in the US (and possibly elsewhere in the world) who often accept the statistical numbers handed to them almost daily as fact.

Unless, of course, they come into major conflict with their own beliefs. And even then, they don’t question the numbers as much as they outright reject them.

Wherever the 75% number came from (and I have no doubt some pollster somewhere did get it), it’s just one more example of why we need to do a better job of teaching students to understand probability and statistics before they become adults.

After all, they need to know that 67% percent of all statistics are simply made up. Right? :-)

[The picture is of some books from my bookshelf. And yes I've read them all since college. Well... except for Harry Potter #7.]

*Don’t laugh, some of them have very complex stories!

blc09, books, college, conferences, reading, statistics

A good article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine takes a long look at the world of work and finds value in (and a growing need for) people trained to do something with their hands.

But there are also systemic changes in the economy, arising from information technology, that have the surprising effect of making the manual trades — plumbing, electrical work, car repair — more attractive as careers. The Princeton economist Alan Blinder argues that the crucial distinction in the emerging labor market is not between those with more or less education, but between those whose services can be delivered over a wire and those who must do their work in person or on site. The latter will find their livelihoods more secure against outsourcing to distant countries. As Blinder puts it, “You can’t hammer a nail over the Internet.” Nor can the Indians fix your car. Because they are in India.

He also speculates that we may be doing our kids a disservice by preplanning their future.

If the goal is to earn a living, then, maybe it isn’t really true that 18-year-olds need to be imparted with a sense of panic about getting into college (though they certainly need to learn). Some people are hustled off to college, then to the cubicle, against their own inclinations and natural bents, when they would rather be learning to build things or fix things.

A gifted young person who chooses to become a mechanic rather than to accumulate academic credentials is viewed as eccentric, if not self-destructive. There is a pervasive anxiety among parents that there is only one track to success for their children. It runs through a series of gates controlled by prestigious institutions.

As the writer of the article makes clear, the process of repairing a motorcycle or working in other “vocational” trades (to use a discredited term from my past) can often require thinking skills that go beyond what is required by some in “information” jobs.

The whole article is worth the time to read, especially if you are someone who subscribes to the idea that every student should be trained for college admission.

Even if it’s not the path that fits their interests and talents.

college, education, work

A community college in New Mexico is experimenting with “microlectures”, a format that takes a full length college lecture and boils it down to the key concepts and themes running one to three minutes.

Microlectures, which are being used for undergraduate online courses, have been very popular with students and a number of colleges are considering expanding their use.

But does the format improve student learning?

The format encourages active learning, says David Penrose, a course designer for SunGard Higher Education and online-services manager for San Juan College. He developed the microlectures for San Juan. While the quantity of information that a 60-second microlecture can convey is limited, he said, it primes the student to learn from completing the assignments that follow the microlecture.

“It’s a framework for knowledge excavation,” Mr. Penrose said. “We’re going to show you where to dig, we’re going to tell you what you need to be looking for, and we’re going to oversee that process.”

Maybe I’m wrong (always possible, if not likely), but these colleges seem to be abandoning any idea of asking students to construct their own knowledge and instead will be leading them by the nose to the “right” answers.

Which, I guess, is pretty much what we do in many schools anyway.

However, I also have one question for the Professor at the podium in the front of the hall…

If the concepts and themes contained in your lecture can be compressed down to only three minutes, was there any value in the original full-length presentation to begin with?

Just asking.

[Thanks to Sean for the link.]

college, lecture, online course

When I took introductory physics in college, it was in a large lecture hall with 300 or so other students and some guy lecturing down front.

It wasn’t much different at other universities, or in other freshman-level classes for that matter.

Now some institutions, including MIT, are rethinking that mass-produced approach to learning.

The physics department has replaced the traditional large introductory lecture with smaller classes that emphasize hands-on, interactive, collaborative learning. Last fall, after years of experimentation and debate and resistance from students, who initially petitioned against it, the department made the change permanent. Already, attendance is up and the failure rate has dropped by more than 50 percent.

M.I.T. is not alone. Other universities are changing their ways, among them Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, North Carolina State University, the University of Maryland, the University of Colorado at Boulder and Harvard. In these institutions, physicists have been pioneering teaching methods drawn from research showing that most students learn fundamental concepts more successfully, and are better able to apply them, through interactive, collaborative, student-centered learning.

Of course, such an approach couldn’t possible work in K12 classrooms.

Students will just have to wait until they get to college to have “hands-on, interactive, collaborative learning”.

college, physics, teaching

In the current issue of Washington Monthly, Kevin Carey looks at why the price of higher education is rising much faster than inflation despite the fact that many schools are using technology to reduce costs, sometimes dramatically.

Colleges are perfectly capable of becoming more efficient and productive, in the same way that countless other industries have: through technology. And increasingly, they are. One of the untold stories in higher education is that the cost of teaching is starting to decline, but virtually none of those savings are being passed along to students and parents in the form of lower prices. Instead, colleges are pocketing the difference, even as they continue to jack up tuition bills.

It’s tempting to see the automation of college teaching as educational malpractice, a ploy to water down instruction and put professors out of work just to save a few bucks. But there’s persuasive evidence that the opposite is true—properly used, technology can make higher education better, not worse.

So, at the K12 level, we’ve also been pouring large amounts of money into technology over the past decade or more.

Is the “cost of teaching” also dropping for us? Is technology making teaching and learning in our classrooms better.

No.

The reason is that we buy lots of equipment and software, put it in the classroom, connect it all together, and then don’t use it.

At least we don’t use it in any transformative way. Certainly nothing like the Math Emporium project featured in this story.

We still approach teaching as a process that almost exclusively involves the transmission of knowledge from one expert to a group of non-experts massed together in a single room, with the assumption that those non-experts have little or no capability to learn on their own.

Let’s face it. In almost any class we teach, college or not, there is an “information delivery” component and an interactive component, the one that helps students understand and use the data they’ve acquired.

For many students (I’d argue most at the high school level) the information delivery part doesn’t need to be done in a formal class setting or even in a building we call “school”. It’s one job at which technology excels.

On the other hand, that interactivity, which adds context and meaning to learning and is the most important part of the education process, requires human beings connected, communicating, and exchanging thoughts.

Some of that could also be done online, of course, but it depends largely on the needs and abilities of the students.

Which leads to another way we’ve failed to use technology to make education better.

Over the years, one selling point for using computers in the classroom was their ability to help personalize the learning process for each student. We would use the devices to “differentiate instruction”.

That largely doesn’t happen. Even with all the technology, we still expect, actually demand, that most students process at the same pace as all their peers at the same chronological age.

In fact, come the spring, the greatest use of computers in most of the high schools in our overly-large district will be for the standardized testing of all those peer groups.

The bottom line to this rant is that the huge amounts of money we’ve spent on K12 instructional technology over the years has resulted in little or no change to the process of educating kids.

And that’s a pretty poor investment.

college, edtech, teaching, technology