February 15, 2013 1 Comment

Interpreting the Data

This past week the owner of the Tesla electric car company got into a fight with a reporter for the New York Times over a somewhat negative article about his road test of the vehicle. To prove his point that the reporter had not conducted a fair test, the owner released all the telemetry data the car had collected during the trip.

Which might have been the end of things except that a writer for the Atlantic looked at the same data and came up with a different interpretation. And the Times own public editor weighed in with analysis looking at both sides and not necessarily supporting either of them.

Although I saw a little of this story pass by in my info stream, the larger point of all this didn’t really register until reading David Weinberger’s post yesterday.

But the data are not going to settle the hash. In fact, we already have the relevant numbers (er, probably) and yet we’re still arguing. Musk [Tesla owner] produced the numbers thinking that they’d bring us to accept his account. Greenfield [the Atlantic reporter] went through those numbers and gave us a different account. The commenters on Greenfield’s post are arguing yet more, sometimes casting new light on what the data mean. We’re not even close to done with this, because it turns out that facts mean less than we’d thought and do a far worse job of settling matters than we’d hoped.

Electronic data tracking on a car – where it went, how fast it got there – yields very straightforward numbers and, in this case, still produces different interpretations of the meaning of that information.

Now I’m sure the Tesla is a very complex piece of technology. But it’s not nearly as complicated as understanding and managing the growth and learning processes of a human being, especially kids in K12 schools.

However, using much less precise measuring systems than those in the car, we collect far fewer data points on each student here in the overly-large school district during each year.

We then accept those numbers as a complete and accurate representation of what a student has learned and where they need to go. That very narrow information stream also leads to even more narrow judgements on schools (success/failure) and now we’re starting to use the same flawed data to assess the quality of teachers.

In his post, Weinberger is celebrating the open and public way in which the dispute between Tesla and the Times is being played out, with many different parties lending their voice to the discussion of how to interpret the data.

How often do we ask even the subjects of our testing to analyze the data we’ve gathered from them? Why are then not included in the development of the assessment instruments? When do we include at least a few of the thousands of other factors that affect student learning in our interpretations?

I’ve ranted before in this space about the increasing amount of resources being poured into data collection and analysis here in the overly-large school district (and elsewhere). But it’s the absolutist approach to the analysis of those numbers that may be an even larger disservice to our students than wasting their time.

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May 10, 2012 1 Comment

Recovering From Failure

The New York Times Learning Network blog has an interesting lesson on the topic of failure, with some good examples from sports, business, the arts and other fields.

It also asks students to consider some interesting questions about failure in their own lives and those of people they know.

Can failure be useful? Can you think of examples, from your own life or someone else’s, when it has led to something positive?

How is failure defined and dealt with in your family, your school, the activities you do outside of school, among your friends and in your community? Which of those definitions and responses to failure seem fairest or best to you? Why?

What can be done to avoid failure? Should people try to avoid it?

What is “failure” and what is “success”? Who decides?

Missing, however, is any real consideration of failure as it applies to school. What happens if you fail the midterm in English 7? What recovery options do you have for getting a bad score on the SOLs?* Suppose you get a 1 on an AP test?

We really don’t deal well with the concept of failure in school, especially in helping students learn from it and discovering options for recovery. Maybe in sports, possibly the arts or other “non-academic” contests. But for most kids, failing a class or a grade means they will repeat it.

But the most likely scenario is that they get to cover the same content, often using the same materials and teaching techniques, often in the compressed time frame of summer school. And usually with only slightly better results, not anything we might call “success”.

Doing the same thing in the same way hoping for different results.

Is that how people recover from failure in real life?

*For those outside of Virginia, that’s the acronym for our spring standardized tests.

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August 21, 2011 1 Comment

We Need Something More Than “Heroes”

As we approach yet another national holiday that the media will imbue with a military undertone, an “essayist and critic” writing in the New York Times asks if “heroes” in various styles of uniforms are really what the country needs at this point in our history.

“America needs heroes,” it is sometimes said, a phrase that’s often uttered in a wistful tone, almost cooingly, as if we were talking about a lonely child. But do we really “need heroes”? We need leaders, who marshal us to the muddle. We need role models, who show us how to deal with it. But what we really need are citizens, who refuse to infantilize themselves with talk of heroes and put their shoulders to the public wheel instead. The political scientist Jonathan Weiler sees the cult of the uniform as a kind of citizenship-by-proxy. Soldiers and cops and firefighters, he argues, embody a notion of public service to which the rest of us are now no more than spectators. What we really need, in other words, is a swift kick in the pants.

That’s the last paragraph. The whole piece is well worth your time to read.

This is all part of our national tendency to spend far more time and effort memorializing the past than we do in planning for and constructing the future.

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November 29, 2010 1 Comment

A Little Homework Wouldn’t Hurt

In her Answer Sheet education blog at the Washington Post site, Valerie Strauss* tells Tom Friedman a few of the things he got wrong in a recent column about the importance of education.

Starting with Arne Duncan’s big money game show, praised as energizing reform by Friedman.

First of all, Race to the Top funding didn’t go to states with the most innovative reforms to achieve the highest standards. It went to the states that promised to make the reforms that the Education Department liked most. A comprehensive analysis of who won the money concluded that winners in the first round (and the same process was used in the second) were chosen through “arbitrary criteria” rather than through a scientific process.

Besides, the “reforms” aren’t exactly innovative. Education historian Diane Ravitch has written that merit pay schemes have been tried repeatedly since the 1920s but never worked very well.

And then there’s the matter of Finland and Denmark, the countries whose teachers and education systems Friedman (and others) write so glowingly about as a point of comparison with the US.

But on that topic, he also manages to miss one glaring point of disparity.

Friedman never mentions the issue of poverty, which today’s education “reformers” see as an excuse for poor teaching even though the research on what living in poverty does to children and their ability to learn is overwhelming.

Finland, it should be noted, has a poverty rate among children of under 3 percent; the United States, 21 percent.

Anybody who doesn’t think that doesn’t affect student academic performance in a big way is deluding themselves, as is anybody who thinks teachers alone can make up for the effects of hunger and violence and sleep deprivation and little early exposure to literacy.

So, does anything Friedman says, right or wrong, in his column or on his appearances on the talking heads channels, really matter?

Yes.  Because many readers of the so-called “paper of record” take him seriously, and have the right to expect opinion/analysis based on research.

In this case, Friedman didn’t do his homework.

*Why doesn’t the Post retire Jay Mathews as their lead education writer and put Strauss in that position?

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October 9, 2010 Leave a Comment

Lack of Vision

From Paul Krugman, writing in the New York Times, comes this sad but far too accurate observation.

We are no longer the nation that used to amaze the world with its visionary projects. We have become, instead, a nation whose politicians seem to compete over who can show the least vision, the least concern about the future and the greatest willingness to pander to short-term, narrow-minded selfishness.

That same lack of vision is also on glaring display in most proposals for improving American education.

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May 15, 2010 2 Comments

School Choice

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.

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August 20, 2009 Leave a Comment

Do Teachers Need Education Degrees?

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.

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