Thanks to Tim Lauer for adding this image to his Delicious feed so I could “discover” it.
May 31, 2012 Leave a Comment
Good for Nothing
In his Class Struggle blog this week, Jay Mathews explains why Romney and Obama are “education twins”, noting that the “two major parties mostly agree on education policy”, something that goes back at least a generation.
Then he claims “this is good for schools”.
Both presidential candidates believe in bleeding off public money for less accountable charter schools of wildly uneven quality.
Both want to swamp students with even more standardized testing schemes and then tie those inaccurate assessments directly to teacher evaluation plans.
Each endorses the concept of merit pay for teachers (which even most businesses have found doesn’t work outside of their sales staff) instead of funding real professional improvement programs.
Neither seems to understand that we need fundamental changes to a basic classroom structure that’s been in place for more than a half century, along with an even more ancient curriculum.
And all that is “good for schools”.
It’s this kind of policy, based on a simplistic, nostalgic view of school and uniformly supported by most candidates, and then accepted with little or no analysis or questioning by most media outlets, that’s not good for anything, much less improving American education.
May 30, 2012 Leave a Comment
Missing the Revolution
In a post this morning Will pointed me to a USA Today article that claims Khan Academy is sparking a “global tech revolution in education”. This rant is probably only an amplification of one of the great points he makes but it’s worth repeating.
Actually, there is so much wrong in this breathless, fawning collection of misguided claims that it’s hard to know where to start. But this statement (one that Will also quotes) is an excellent summation of everything the USA Today writer gets wrong.
“Technology is doing to education what it’s done to countless other industries: disrupting it,” Hu says. “Where education once was static, bound to a textbook, now it’s moving to a global, interdisciplinary model.”
The speaker is the head of head of education technology and services for Goldman Sachs so naturally he sees school as just another “industry”.
However, what Hu totally misses is that, while the education business is certainly working hard to automate the dispensing of knowledge (or at least academic credentials), understanding and using that knowledge is a much more difficult, more personal and hands-on process.
Having students watch a video explaining some bit of information or how to execute a specific process is still static and very much bound to a textbook. Except that instead of the book carrying only text and still pictures to be read and viewed, it now has audio and video. The effect is the same, a one-way transfer of material with no opportunity for a student to interact.
There’s absolutely nothing revolutionary about the Khan Academy materials. There’s nothing revolutionary in using technology to deliver the same old classroom lectures in “bite-size and conversational” pieces with no faces.
Finally, Hu goes on to say that Khan’s success is the “best thing that can happen to this space” (another business investment term) and that the space “needs more smart people who care”.
Will is also exactly correct to call that last part total BS.
May 16, 2012 Leave a Comment
The Revolution Will Be Crowded
According to Thomas Friedman, there’s a revolution coming in post K12 education and he uses this “rather charming” explanation from Andrew Ng, associate professor of computer science at Stanford and cofounder of the online course delivery company Coursera, to illustrate his point.
“I normally teach 400 students,” Ng explained, but last semester he taught 100,000 in an online course on machine learning. “To reach that many students before,” he said, “I would have had to teach my normal Stanford class for 250 years.”
Friedman raves about this approach, saying that it would give more students access to “quality higher education” at a cost that’s much lower than the fast-rising price of attending in person.
He also marvels that this would “enable budget-strained community colleges in America to “flip” their classrooms” by having students watch recordings of “the world’s best lecturers on any subject”.
However, is that what people want from a college education? Can you call what Ng does “teaching”, or is it more about managing a large group of self-directed learners? For someone who isn’t self-directed, is the only alternative then accumulating a pile of student loans?
As someone who wasn’t thrilled by most of my undergraduate classes in college and actually likes self-directed learning, this is not judgement, just questions.
I also wonder, just as college-level classes were pushed down into high school in the form of the AP program, when will this type of massive approach to instruction arrive for us here in K12?
A district accountant somewhere is probably already thinking that one teacher working with only 150 kids per year sounds awfully expensive.
April 26, 2012 Leave a Comment
Changing Education? Not Likely
The breathless headline promises to explain How the iPad is Changing Education.
Just the latest in a growing collection of hundreds (maybe thousands) of similar declarations made in publications large and small over the two years since the iPad was released, trying to make a cast for how revolutionary the device (and tablets in general) is/will be to “education”.
Certainly Apple has sold a bunch of them (something like 67 million world wide), include many that are part of well-publicized projects in some K12 schools and colleges. There are even a few studies suggesting students benefit instructionally from the interactivity the device provides.
But changing education? Not likely.
Just in my lifetime we’ve had a long parade of technologies for which claims of “changing education” were made and still very little about what we call school is different from when I sat in a classroom as a student. The institution of what we call school is extremely resistant to meaningful modification, including from the pressure of new tech.
What’s different with the iPad is the way that some of us, still a relatively small minority, are increasingly using it in new ways for our personal learning.
However, that’s more about a networked device becoming more portable and easier to use than anything else. Not much different from the way that lighter, more capable laptops made personal learning easier than it was when the computer was too big to move from a desk.
The iPad, and other interconnected mobile devices yet to come, does have the potential to make major changes to the way kids communicate, collaborate, and learn. Potential that could be used by schools and teachers that are willing modify their traditional approaches by sharing control over the learning process with students.
But iPads changing education just by existing? Not likely.
April 23, 2012 Leave a Comment
Change for the Better?
From the front page of today’s Washington Post, is this is what parents think of as an undergraduate college education when they write the big checks to send their kids to Tech?
In the Math Emporium, the computer is king, and instructors are reduced to roving guides. Lessons are self-paced, and help is delivered “on demand” in a vast, windowless lab that is open 24 hours a day because computers never tire. A student in need of human aid plants a red cup atop a monitor.
The Emporium is the Wal-Mart of higher education, a triumph in economy of scale and a glimpse at a possible future of computer-led learning. Eight thousand students a year take introductory math in a space that once housed a discount department store. Four math instructors, none of them professors, lead seven courses with enrollments of 200 to 2,000.
As to those red cups, I remember seeing them sitting next to Apple IIGS machines in more than a few elementary school labs over the years. In those days, students would be asking for help with Math Blaster or Kid Pix.
Anyway, the lab (you need to see the picture) is both cheaper to run than “regular” classes and the students have a higher pass rate for the same introductory math courses than when they opened The Emporium fifteen years ago. Of course, as you might expect, the assessments are multiple choice to make grading faster and easier.
It’s an interesting approach but I have to wonder about this from the math department chair.
“How could computers not change mathematics?” said Peter Haskell, math department chairman at Virginia Tech. “How could they not change higher education? They’ve changed everything else.”
It’s certainly a change from what I remember of my college math classes (none of which had 200 students), but is it a positive change for the students?
April 18, 2012 1 Comment
Crisis in Context
Today, as I watched the Twitter commentary about speeches on our education “crisis” at the Education Innovation Summit*, I was also cleaning some crap out of my cube, a long delayed task.
Just by coincidence, I ran across a folder of magazine and newspaper stories about the education crisis buried deep in a drawer, carrying headlines like “Saving Our Schools” and “What’s Wrong with Our Teachers”.
They were dated 1983 and were reporting on the Nation at Risk report released in May of that year. “A scathing report demands better teachers and tougher standards”, according to Newsweek.
Also in the mix was material from three or four years earlier, including an issue of Time declaring “Help! Teacher Can’t Teach” (subheaded “The multifaceted crisis of America’s public schools”) and a package of articles from our local newspaper under the banner “Our High Schools: Is Education Secondary?” with more stories of bad teaching.
However, after more than three decades of “crisis”, what’s changed? Out in the real world, most everything about the way people work, communicate, and learn has shifted radically. The same publications reporting in the early 1980s are now gone or floundering around to find a new business model.
In the classroom, however, not much is different. Some computers, a big expensive whiteboard you can touch instead of a chalk board, emailing parents, and lots and lots of standardized tests.
The fundamental structure of schools remains the same. Instruction is still firmly rooted in the model of teachers delivering information to students and expecting them to recall a certain percentage of it at some point.
We still ask kids to write for an audience of one, and construct filters blocking the outside world from leaking in and preventing students from communicating with any part of it.
The goals of K12 schools certainly haven’t changed, most still being focused on preparing every student to be passed on to college, whether or not that is the best path for their skills and interests.
Oh, and whatever problems we have, it’s the teachers’ fault.
Ok, nothing new here. Same old ranting, although this time with a little bit of context for the current, continuing education crisis.
* It you take a look at the cast of characters at that meeting, you’ll notice no real educators in the speaker list and the major players in the profiting-from-public-education industry as sponsors. Innovation? What innovation?
I also love the “Sold Out” banner. Pretty much describes American education policy.
