Update, Part 2

Yesterday's post garnered some interest from friends and former colleagues, so I'll write a bit more. In the past 24 hours, my beloved wife and I have received some photos from our daughter who is now vacationing in Curacao, off the coast of South America (the only continent, other than Antarctica, that I've never been to). Joyce works hard, and I'm glad she's getting the chance for a break.

In addition, yesterday afternoon I was leaving for the dry cleaners when I noticed a package left by our back gate: my son Matthew has bought me a new laptop to replace the one we have been unable to fix. This might sound innocuous, but at a time when too many 26-year-olds are still living with their parents who continue to support them, to have the support flowing in the other direction in our family (at least until I can increase the income coming from my new business) is a welcome, if uncomfortable and a bit guilt-inducing, relief.

Third, Facebook today prompted me to befriend Linghao Kong, a former student of mine who has now started at Columbia. This brings me back to the subject of my tutoring Ryan's classmates for the last few years. To the best of my knowledge, they have done uniformly well. Lucy was kind enough to pay for our dinner when we visited her dorm at Berkeley last month; she has started well there. Janice, now at UCLA, studied with me a bit longer than either of the two above, so I count her scores with those of Seong Su Park (UC Irvine -- and all of these students were accepted into their preferred majors, and are starting with sophomore status) and Ryan among my first graduating class, whose average ACT score, 34, was higher than that of the highest scoring institution in the United States, Hunter College High School, whose average is 32.6. I write this in spite of the fact that I don't give much attention to either the ACT or the SAT, instead focusing my instruction on the Advanced Placement level that actually qualifies students for the free college for all that Senator Sanders is promoting based on the Scandinavian model, without seeming to understand the much higher standards that students in Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and similar northern European nations must meet in order to qualify for public funding of higher education through the master's degree level. I want to bring that system to the United States, and am still trying to find leaders willing to listen in case they actually want to learn how such results are being achieved with American students.

Update

Readers may be interested to know of some updates in my life and that of my family, so here goes, after three years:

My son Ryan having "graduated" (I don't like using that term for completing secondary schooling, but that's the usage in the United States, so let's move on) from Woodbridge High School in June and having successfully started, on his 18th birthday, as a sophomore at UC Riverside (a disappointing outcome for us, but nonetheless he seems happy),  I have given up any immediate plans to start a school; but given the success my former students are having, with many more currently on the way to similar outcomes, I decided that any new business I start should build on current successes. Therefore my new plan is to begin One World Education Centre here in Irvine, with the possibility of its growing into One World College and One World School later, if we continue to attract more like the many promising gymnasiasts who have recently requested my teaching.

My daughter Joyce graduated from Drexel Medical School in 2017, and is a doctor in residency in Newark, Deleware.

My son Matthew has graduated from UC San Diego with a double major in Computer Science and Psychology, and is a software developer with Intuit (and already making more money than I ever have!).

Ryan, 18, is a sophomore in Mechanical Engineering at UC Riverside. I was very proud of him when he passed his Cambridge Admissions test in San Luis Obispo, and was invited to interview at Robinson College in Cambridge, England last December; but because Irvine, California could not come up with the advanced calculus-based physics tutoring he needed in either its much-ballyhooed unified school district or its community college or its university, in spite of his having achieved a 5 in Calculus BC during the 11th grade, Cambridge's in-person written exam proved too tough for him; and combined with my poor income from the past several years, rendered his application for its admission unsuccessful, and therefore he is now at what we only intended to be his safety school, from which he may wish to transfer to Berkeley engineering in a couple of years.

The School Choice Families Should be Making

The internet is a marvellous invention for educators, since it empowers readers linked to it to compare practices and structures established around the world with those available in their local communities. In the case of American educators and families, the results can be humbling. Those who read comparative education, as I have done, arguably obsessively, quickly come to realize what poor value the American people have been receiving from the traditional system established in this country, in particular from its almost indefensible high schools.

I just read a story in today's Sacramento Bee about parents in the western area of that city wanting alternatives to their established local district alternatives. Such a desire is justified. Even in Irvine, better reputed in education than most communities in California, I have found our local high schools wanting. The alternative I advocate is a lyceum, a generally European model of upper secondary school that should be adapted to fit our American context. My current vision for an international lyceum model (which has been long evolving) to be introduced to the United States would have private secondary school pupils accelerate, after six years of state-governed primary education, in middle schools (which should be chartered, as true alternatives to the state middle schools that are already similarly obsessed with all those children who have fallen behind) managed like those in east Asia so as to prepare for private lyceum admission exams: such practices give teens real incentives to study, unlike the customs in the United States, which are to give children so many chances that the opportunities on offer are generally spurned by young people grown overly comfortable in their inherited prosperity. Those succeeding on such admission exams (likely the top half or so of scorers, which is the proportion accepted in the high achieving Finnish system, which includes such lyceum admission conditions) will have a plausible likelihood of preparing, in the three years of the lyceum's upper secondary education, to matriculate into university colleges with three-year bachelor's degree programmes, thus netting families investing in a top lyceum's education approximately $130,000, which accounts for both the approximately $50,000 price a fourth year of top university college education would have cost the families of such "seniors" and the approximately $80,000 such graduates can expect to make in that 22nd year of their lives. 

Next Steps for a New Education Policy

The most important news in the education world today is not the U.S. team winning the International Mathematics Olympiad, in spite of its headline status in Real Clear Education, a continually useful website where, along with Alexander Russo's likewise invaluable (to me) This Week in Education, I start my weekdays by reading the morning news; it's the continued progress of the opt-out movement, which started in the managerial east of this country, in New York and New Jersey, with largely middle class European-American (I hate the word "white" because of its racist history -- more on that, perhaps, another time) mothers objecting to what their local schools had become under the influence of education reformers like Secretary Duncan and then-New York state schools commissioner John King, but which has now spread across the country to blue states like Washington and Oregon, along with purple states in between like Colorado and New Mexico.

Politico has a new article out today, which I accessed through Real Clear Education, that aptly summarizes the state of education policy play in the United States; for in spite of isolated glimmers of hope such as our young mathematicians' triumph, the trend lines in U.S. education have been discouraging for about eight years now, approximately dateable from the time (see Class Warfare 178 -- "Money Meets Data") when Bill Gates finished reading Tom Kane's Hamilton Project policy paper and decided that rotating out bad teachers -- Jack Welch's personnel policy on steroids, applied to the entire U.S. teaching corps -- was what was needed to accelerate educational reform in the United States. That approach is now in flames, headed for a crash landing, as a conference committee begins attempting to reconcile two competing bills, the Student Success Act and the Every Child Achieves Act, passed by the House and the Senate respectively this month, in sincere though misguided attempts to "fix" No Child Left Behind", that law that has failed to prevent millions of American children from falling behind their peers, and that has led the United States as a whole to fall further behind the world's educational leaders during the seven years the Obama administration has been in office. So the time for a new education policy for the United States, and in particular for Democrats, has clearly arrived.

The opt-out movement presents Democrats with a choice: either stick with the failed social policy of George W. Bush, which depended upon nationalizing the fake "Texas miracle" as a cheap means of equalizing opportunity in America by reforming public schools only; or see the expiring future of the path erroneously (although the error wasn't obvious at the time) chosen by President-Elect Obama in late 2008 to back what is now status quo education reform and choose another path, one that presents freedom of educational choice to all families, not just rich ones -- the path of education reform that was gaining momentum, before Bill Gates read Tom Kane's paper.  

Common Core Mathematics Will Damage the Competitive Position of the United States

I was an early supporter of the Common Core, and signed a public statement of support for the standards on behalf of One World Secondary School some time in 2010, if I recall correctly. The basic concept is right: we live in an increasingly mobile society, and my international experience (I taught overseas for seven years, and have visited 23 countries) has made me keenly aware of the differences in educational attainment between Americans and other people. This has motivated my long struggle to start an international secondary school for my son and for as many students who want to be educated like him as I can find.

A consequence of this long (and still ongoing) attempt to start an international school for everyone has been extensive study of the world's educational systems, including their mathematical standards. Really top level standards can be easily accessed through the website of APEC, the awkwardly named Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation, and its human resource development group wiki.

I am sorry to say that I have withdrawn support for the Common Core, largely because of the lack of international competitiveness of its mathematical standards. Common Core mathematics will leave American students roughly three years behind their Chinese, and two years behind the other leading Asian mathematics students, who are increasingly arriving on American shores to take the SAT, a test whose mathematics are laughably easy (they really laugh at them; I have tutored many such students over the years) compared with what they have studied during their secondary school careers. And the problem is getting worse, as an article I've just read today from the Pioneer Institute makes clear; and it will likely lead to the dumbing down of the SAT, a test already terribly inferior to the university entrance examinations most of the rest of the developed world's students study for, with malignant consequences for the future of the U.S. voting public and its engineers, in particular.

A parent I work with who is concerned about her son's future prompted me to write something on this topic. I wish I had something more encouraging to say to her. My only message to her, and to other parents like her who are worried about their children's future, is to find a way, if at all possible, to withdraw your children from their state schools, enter private education to the extent you can afford to (but check out their mathematics curriculum, which may be no better), and press for vouchers to help you afford this better alternative (like One World Secondary College!), at least until the Common Core mathematics standards are withdrawn for revision; and don't listen to any reactionary siren songs favouring a return to some imaginary good old days: those have never existed, in American secondary education, and our children need to be prepared for a competitive future, not for some fantasyland of the past, nor for an unreachable No Child Left Behind national state that at present is cut off from the realities of the other 95 percent of the people who inhabit our planet.

In Today's World, Geography is More Important than History

This is the follow-up post I promised to write in my last, a review of Diane Ravitch's Reign of Error.

I like history. I read history books (occasionally) in my free time, and I include the subject in my (mostly English) teaching. But in The New History of the World, which I rely upon as one source for a general overview, author J. M. Roberts argues that the pace of change has increased since the Neolithic era and that that increase continues, and this is something we can feel almost daily, rendering the lessons of history steadily more remote.

Last year two important new education books appeared at almost the same time, Amanda Ripley's the smartest kids in the world and Professor Ravitch's Reign of Error. I wanted to read both, have now completed both, am glad I read both, since they both make valuable points -- but at the time I was unsure of which to read first. I ultimately chose to read Ms. Ripley's book first, largely because my career in international and domestic education has led me to conclude that, in today's world, geography is more important than history -- that is, knowing more about the way the world is today is more important than knowing how one's country was yesterday; and a corollary of this is that being able to see where today's American education stands in relation to that overseas is more important than understanding how it compares today with what it was in the past. Finishing both books has confirmed me in that opinion. Professor Ravitch does not ignore international educational data, but the value of Ms. Ripley's work continues to shine, for example in a new Slate article published today.

I agree with Professor Ravitch's opinion that American K-12 education has gotten worse in recent decades, especially because of the unintended consequences of No Child Left Behind. I also agree with those who believe the Common Core standards are better than those state standards that were taught to in the previous decade. But unless American educators know that, for all the ballyhoo accompanying the Common Core, once implemented their students will still be 2-3 years behind their peers in east Asia in mathematics, or understand that pursuing the strategy of Wendy Kopp's followers to prepare all children for college in spite of the enormous financial and opportunity costs involved, which Marc Tucker's commendable blog post in Education Week yesterday, which highlights vocational education in Switzerland, which like Singapore, which has a still better education system, only prepares 20-30% of any cohort for tertiary education but ends up with a better educated, more employable population -- until Americans get out of their limited domestic box and are aware of these real options that are being successfully implemented overseas now, our nation will continue to blunder down fruitless reform paths while other countries leave our young in the dust, an outcome surely no one in America's education debates wants.

Diane Ravitch's Most Important Point in "Reign of Error"

This post should be read as a companion to one I wrote in review of Amanda Ripley's the smartest kids in the world: both books appeared at almost the same time last year, and I was torn as to which to read first. I believe I read them in the right order, a point I will return to in my next post.

I believe Professor Ravitch's most important point in Reign of Error, which I think a better book than its predecessor, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, since this offers positive solutions rather than merely the insightful criticisms of her previous book, is found on page 310, where she discusses out-of-state contributions to school board races across the country:

"It is a troubling pattern that raises questions about who is bundling the money and why it is sent to certain races. It is not illegal to give campaign contributions to races in other districts and states, but local and state school board races should be determined by those who live in those districts and states, not by the organized power of big donors.
     "The issue for the future is whether a small number of very wealthy entrepreneurs, corporations, and individuals will be able to purchase education policy in this nation".

This is precisely on point. A fascinating expose last weekend in The Washington Post revealed how Bill Gates apparently purchased education policy in the form of support for a common core of standards throughout the majority of the states in this country in just two years, in at least one case before they had even been written. Not that this was some evil plot to get rich, an absurd charge, or was otherwise ill-intended; but the extra political access available to the world's richest man, a genuine philanthropist but also one without a record of solid returns on his educational investments made so far (although I continue to be thankful for his support in our attempt to turn around Locke High School in 2007) -- a man able to convene 80 senators to hear a speech on education he gave in March -- should trouble anyone who reveres America's democratic traditions, including Professor Ravitch.

Barack Obama was the first candidate to turn down public financing of a presidential campaign, and the Citizens United decision of the Supreme Court has made a bad trend worse. American democracy has morphed into plutocracy. This should trouble all who care about America's civic traditions, and in this respect Diane Ravitch speaks clearly and forcefully for a dwindling breed of Americans who (adapting the words of President Kennedy) ask not what their country can do for them, but what they can do for their country.

Student Outcomes Success for One World Lyceum

At breakfast this morning, I read an Epoch Times article depicting a former teacher at one of Eva Moskowitz's Success Academy Charter Schools. In the article we are treated to an account of how hard the teachers and pupils work, the Success Academy system's potential for teacher burnout (which is true of the systems of many charter management organizations), and the striking success of the Academy's pupils on New York's state tests. One is left asking oneself if all the time and effort are worth the results, and this leads inevitably to the question of what "success" means in relation to a school.

I believe that defining school success must begin with student outcomes. In the case of primary schools like the Success Academy, scores on state tests are a reasonable proxy, since they have predictive value for how well Success pupils will perform in middle school, whether in other Success schools or outside the network. In the case of an upper secondary school like One World Lyceum, a model my trustees and I are proposing to start, success will be defined as the families of the students I am teaching define it: by college admissions, in particular admissions to top colleges.

The Wall Street Journal, Worth, and other publications have produced rankings based on how successful North America's college-preparatory high schools are in gaining access for their graduates to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, and Stanford, the most common answers to requests for defining "top colleges" on this continent. But One World, as the name makes apparent, is envisioned as an international school, with global outreach (and an educational programme that prepares its graduates for success anywhere in the world); so what is our answer to defining the schools we are targeting for our students?

Our school model calls for graduating classes of 180 students, which we consider to be an ideal size, neither too large nor too small. In reality, college matching decisions will be made between the colleges and our students and their families; but insofar as we play (as I am currently playing in guiding students towards colleges likeliest to help them fulfill their aspirations) a role in this match-making, it is in our lyceum's interest to establish ongoing relationships with the top 180 university colleges in the world; and I have devoted considerable effort to defining what these are, I share this information with the students I am charged with overseeing, and I am also willing to share my results privately with those who are interested.  

Singapore Has the World's Best School System, According to Current Data

A reader who is also a teacher wrote to me last month about a post I wrote in 2011 that claimed Norway had the world's best school system. I let him know that I have since updated my methods, and Norway is nowhere near the top, largely because employers claim that it's difficult to find an appropriate labour supply there, and one of my criteria is the system's ability to supply a modern economy's labour needs. I also wrote him that my updated rankings put Singapore on top, and that I would write something soon to explain why, which I am now doing.

As I have explained in earlier posts, the five criteria I use to assess education systems have been (1) average attainment (years of schooling successfully completed by the average student in the system); (2) average achievement (formerly indicated primarily by PISA scores, but more recently by PIAAC -- more on that below); (3) the employment rate of the disabled, as a proxy for outcomes for a society's least advantaged; (4) top university rankings, as a proxy for the services provided to a society's most educationally gifted; and (5) the ability of the system to supply a modern economy's labour needs, as reported by the International Institute of Management Development (IMD).

The most important recent innovation related to this activity of mine (which supports my general activity in education advocacy, and supplies me with useful intellectual capital for the development of One World Lyceum, potentially the flagship of a One World system of schools) was last year's release of PIAAC data, and specifically that for the competences of young adults, released by the OECD. This helped me to combine points 1 and 2 above, since PIAAC measures, better than any other currently available assessment, the knowledge and skills (competences) the young people of various developed countries have at the end of their formal educations. While 21st century life definitely rewards lifelong learners, many people don't progress much in their competences once they leave formal schooling, so PIAAC is a crucial source of data for how education systems are doing.

On these bases, my assessment of the available data indicate that Singapore has the world's best education system. While precise rankings are calculable based on my formula, I think they would suggest a spurious precision which I do not claim, and therefore I will merely suggest, on the basis of the above evidence, that, in alphabetical order on the next tier down below Singapore, I would rank the education systems of Canada, Denmark, Sweden, and Switzerland; and below these, still quite respectable, I find (also in alphabetical order) those of Australia, England, Finland, Germany, (South) Korea, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Scotland, and the United States.

Amanda Ripley's Most Important Point in "the smartest kids in the world"

As someone who studies comparative education continuously, I have no end of things I could write about Amanda Ripley's interesting book, including criticisms;  but I prefer to stay positive, and focus on what we can learn from the book, and I learned much.

The subtitle of "the smartest kids in the world" is "and how they got that way", and most readers of the book most want that last bit, the secret formula that can make their own kids, and those throughout the U.S. school system, be similarly smart. I will focus on her best answer to that question.

Ms. Ripley follows American high school students to Finland, South Korea (where I taught for seven years; my wife is a former Korean high school science teacher), and Poland, and does some extra research in attempting to find out what the students in the "highest performing systems" do. She defines, conventionally, a "high performing system" as one with high PISA scores. Since her book's publication, new PISA scores have appeared, and a more important set of data from PIAAC, the OECD's Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, has also been released; and despite the information available at the time of her writing, she never considers attainment, which can be roughly defined as the number of years of schooling successfully completed (important because education doesn't end at 15), nor outcomes (such as employment) for society's least fortunate (such as those with disabilities), nor outcomes (such as the discovery of new knowledge) for society's most gifted, nor the ability of an educational system to fill the needs of a modern economy, which in addition to achievement, are the five factors I include in calculating my own assessment of educational system performance; therefore our definitions of "highest performing systems" differ.

My latest calculations put Singapore on top, as having the best educational system in the world; below it I establish a tier of other leading systems, which, in alphabetical order, are Canada, Denmark, Sweden, and Switzerland; and below these I have established a third tier of systems still at least above average, if lower performing than those above: in alphabetical order these are Australia, England, Finland, Germany, (South) Korea, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Scotland, and the United States. And as I went through the many iterations of "the best schools and school systems do x" in the book, the point she makes that is most consistent with what these real best systems do is on page 212, in appendix I, "how to spot a world-class education":

"In the world's education superpowers, parents agreed that a rigorous education was critical to their kids' life chances.
     "Wherever you live, if you can find a community or school where parents and educators share this baseline belief, then you have found something more valuable to more children than the best football program on earth."

Or, as I prefer to put it in the note I made at the end of the book, "Empirically optimized rigour --> the best school(s)"

WYSIATI and the Assessment of School Systems

For me, it seems like Amanda Ripley is everyplace right now. This morning, when I went out for breakfast, I carried a copy of The Atlantic with me into Panera and consumed her cover story "The Case Against High-School Sports" along with a pastry and a latte. In the afternoon, I listened to a radio interview she recorded with Bloomberg Radio. And tonight I finished chapter 3 of her book The Smartest Kids in the World. I'm finding this increased exposure of comparative education, a passion of mine, stimulating, and in spite of some critical remarks I have been making here and there (most notably in a review that was published in August by Whitney Tilson, in one of his periodical newsletters and on his blog, of her Wall Street Journal article "The $4 Million Teacher"), I am enjoying all this Ripley, believe it or not.

Nonetheless, her dismissive evaluation of Switzerland's education system, which I think the best in the world, in the Bloomberg interview and her valorizing of the Korean and Polish school systems on account of their improvement shown in the results of PISA (the Programme for International Student Assessment, the best known international tests that allow for comparison between different countries' educational systems) is indicative of an especially problematic instance of WYSIATI, a cognitive malady diagnosed by Daniel Kahneman and especially prevalent in educational evaluation, to the great harm of us all.   

A couple of years ago I read Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, emeritus professor of psychology at Princeton and, most unusual for a psychologist, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics. Among the fascinating chapters in that book is chapter 7, "A Machine for Jumping to Conclusions", which introduces readers to WYSIATI, which stands for "What You See Is All There Is", the cognitive fallacy that is the "machine" referred to in the chapter title. The fallacy is well illustrated by a cartoon I saw once, which shows a man searching desperately under a streetlight at night for his glasses, which have fallen off. When asked why he has been searching in the same place for so long rather than looking elsewhere, the man responds, "Because under the light is the only place I can see." Similarly, when asked, "What's the best education system?" even well-informed researchers in comparative education often engage in question-substitution, another habit of our inherently lazy minds, and convert that question into the much more easily answered "Which country [or school, or teacher, or student] has the best test scores?" and then provide the answer to that in substitution for the answer to the original question, whose answer would necessarily require the human use of qualitative judgement in addition to the machine-like use of memory for relevant quantitative data.

Too many pundits convert the hard question, "Which countries, and which aspects of their systems, might serve as useful models for the United States [or another country] in improving our educational [or health care, or other] system?" into the more easily answered, "Which countries [or states, districts, schools, teachers, students] have better scores than ours?" Those of us with first-hand experience in such jurisdictions are well aware of the tradeoffs required for higher test scores, and avoid publishing such simplistic evaluations, even if experts with power, influence, and overconfidence (most prominently the PISA datameister at the OECD, Andreas Schleicher) are regularly provided with audiences for broadcasts of similar spurious claims and arguments.

Why Families Should Be Attracted to a Lyceum in the United States

Culture. In a word, that's why families should prefer lyceums to high schools. In two words, school culture.

I have criticized American high school culture in several other posts, including yesterday's. By contrast, the culture of a lyceum is serious, and is focused on academic success, to the near exclusion of everything else. This is the atmosphere one finds on the campuses of secondary schools of nations around the world that are leading in student attainment and student achievement, an atmosphere missing even from some of America's most elite high schools, and clearly missing from the environments of relatively successful high school campuses in privileged suburban communities like Irvine, California, where I live.

Many Asian immigrant families flock to Irvine and to similar communities around the United States, repeating in their residential choices the patterns established in their home countries. Many of these families lack the English and the cultural knowledge necessary to properly evaluate the schooling their children are receiving. If they had the wherewithal necessary to make these evaluations, they would know how overrated the schools their children are attending are, and might well feel cheated. And the American residents of these communities, who see high scores on the easy tests given to our children, also rest in an unwarranted cocoon of comfort. Wait till their children apply for college, or until they experience their freshmen years once inside, if they have to face real international competition, especially in mathematics or a science: a rude awakening from that comfort is coming.

A lyceum exists only to prepare students for the baccalaureate examination that looms at the end of its three-year term (the best French lycees also offer post-baccalaureate instruction for which they are particularly famous, but I think our top students would be better off on our best university campuses than they would be inside any dungeon-like prepas institutions). In France this is the baccalaureat, in Germany the Abitur, in Switzerland the Matura: these examinations go by different names, but in all cases they coordinate secondary school leaving and tertiary entrance standards, minimize disjunctions, and maximize the likelihood of student success once these young people leave their secondary schools and enter adulthood, something we are doing a poor job of. But the serious school culture that makes this higher standard of learning achievable is unlikely to flourish in America unless it pays off in a qualification that justifies all the hard work spent with a clear advantage over those unwilling to work as hard; and our current college admissions policies do not reward hard work so much as they favour a compact between established legacy privilege and the alleviation of inherited upper class guilt via charity towards youthful members of groups historically discriminated against. But the easing of the guilty consciences of the historically advantaged is no sound basis for a social policy, whereas establishing a lyceum like One World Lyceum could fundamentally change the culture of American secondary schooling.

Why a Lyceum is Preferable to a High School

The recently released data from the 2012 NAEP Long-Term Trend Assessments show no progress among America's 17-year-olds over four decades, in spite of substantial increases in our rate of public investment in our schools and of improvements in the testing data of our 9- and 13-year-olds. This implies that progress in high school has actually decreased, compared to that made during the 1970s, in spite of our spending over twice as much, in real terms, per student!

The traditional American comprehensive high school model is outdated and needs replacing, wherever possible (most rural communities may be too stretched to afford to build more than a single high school and so will have to limit themselves to providing choices for students within their comprehensive settings).

I have been advocating, and am trying to open, an alternative institution, which I call a lyceum, an anglicization of the French lycee, the model nearest what I am trying to introduce to the United States; although more precisely that model might be termed, or envisioned as, in succession, a general lycee (lycee general), a private lycee (lycee prive), a lycee international school, a  French-German lycee, a French-German Matura school, or a French-German Matura school in the Netherlands, which also uses the term lyceum in a similar way. I use it to denote "an upper secondary school offering a general education preparatory only for tertiary education, for students inclined towards and likely to succeed in such studies." By "upper secondary" I designate the last three years of secondary school, for students roughly between the ages of 15 and 18, in keeping with the world's most common grade configuration for students of this age, according to UN data.

Now we come to the important issue of justification of the model, referred to in the title to this post. The American high school lacks focus: it tries to be all things for all young people, and succeeds at many things badly. It has also developed a trickle-down college culture inappropriate for youth of this age, one that distracts them with features like proms, marching bands, drill teams, and football homecoming, features meant, according to the principles of the original high school movement, to increase the popularity of staying in school, but now wholly out of date, since the work alternatives to staying in school are presently almost non-existent: like their counterparts in our overpopulated third world, American youth today have to stay in some kind of school, like it or not.

But what kind of school? Why a lyceum? I'll tackle that issue tomorrow, in my next post.

Admissions to Higher Education in the United States (and elsewhere)

The Supreme Court's recent ruling with respect to the University of Texas's affirmative action programme raises the general question of how the limited public resource of access to our most attractive university placements ought to be allocated. The plaintiff in the Texas case, as in previous cases (for example Bakke in 1978), felt wronged by her own state's preference for another candidate more to the liking of the university's race-aware admissions committee, and sued for redress of grievance. The Court has sent the Texas case back to the appeals court with instructions to investigate the possibility of using race-based (and, by logical extension, perhaps other) discriminatory preferences more narrowly, while still pursuing the goal of campus diversity.

As in the Bakke decision, the court appears to continue to fail to distinguish between public and private universities, and to be willing to grant public university admissions committees the same degree of discretion that private universities enjoy. But public universities are taxpayer-funded, and taxpayers have a reasonable expectation from legally established state institutions of equal protection under the law; while by contrast, individual applicants and their families have paid essentially nothing into establishing the private universities they may be applying to, and can expect less from them since they are owed less.

Therefore our public universities need a new system on the basis of which they might practice race-based (and income-based, culturally based, and perhaps other forms of) discrimination in favour of some of their citizens at the expense of others, in pursuit of the goal of campus diversity. In America, the proper basis for such tie-breaking discrimination is the American Baccalaureate Certificate I have been advocating. This certificate, which would establish a legal right to a free, three-year bachelor's degree at public expense, would resemble the European Baccalaureate that is itself a synthesis and compromise from the similar certificates that are commonly used for university entrance in many parts of Europe, and would be further modified in the direction of the International Baccalaureate, which has been making rapid progress in gaining its popularity throughout the United States in recent years. In fact, under the Ameribac proposal developed for One World Lyceum, the final mark would be arrived at by a formula multiplying the rough equivalent of IB points accumulated by the EB percentage achieved; then, in the case of any ties, race-based and other forms of discrimination favouring candidates with a history of overcoming unequal odds might be properly applied, as they are sometimes being improperly and unjustly applied at the present time.

21st Century Schools

"Why our kids need them, what they look like, how we create them."

A friend of a friend has just today posted an entry on a local Venice-Mar Vista blog, and asked, "Who wants to be the first to post?" I'm not that shy, and so am taking up the gauntlet.

A fine book is Marc Tucker's Surpassing Shanghai, published by Harvard Education Press. Chapter 4's "Singapore: A Journey to the Top, Step by Step", written by Vivien Stewart, asks, "What can be learned from Singapore", and answers, finally,

"Eagerness to learn from other countries and an orientation toward the future matter.  The design of Singapore's education system owes a lot to lessons from other parts of the world. Focused and universal use of educational benchmarking and, more recently, significant funds for research have enabled Singapore to move up the value chain and foster a culture of never standing still. This is a system that recognizes the rapidity of change around the world and that has the capacity and inclination to learn and adapt. Singapore fosters a global outlook for everyone -- teachers, principals, and students, who are expected to have 'global awareness and cross-cultural skills' and to be 'future-ready'" (135).

Leading educational organizations such as the International Baccalaureate and APEC (the ill-named "Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation") have oriented themselves towards our global future, and the ideal 21st century school would serve as the flagship to found a system of schools similarly oriented. I have been working on such a school for years now, and while it has developed through various versions, its essential vision and purpose have remained the same: 

“By synthesizing best practices from around the world and throughout time, and without depending upon selective admissions or extraordinary resources, One World Secondary School’s purpose is to demonstrate a world-class model of education so that diverse students succeed in colleges of their own choosing.”

Learning for the 21st Century

As promised, here is my synthesis of some of the best thinking on 21st century education, as prepared for envisioning the products of the school my trustees and I have been trying to start:

The competences of One World learners

One World learners (OWLs) will prioritize learning to know and learning to do so as to facilitate the innovative, interactive use of tools such as information technology via communication in the English language, thus enabling our students to act autonomously, with a sense of initiative and entrepreneurship, in their 21^st century world, while also gaining the social and civic competences to live together in increasingly heterogeneous groups. Their competences will be demonstrated through superior achievements in the priority academic content areas of English, mathematics, science, and additional languages, as well as in the overarching competence of learning to learn, which will be vitally assisted by the students’ digital competence. Such highly competent individuals should go on to succeed in colleges and careers of their own choosing, and eventually finding good work will be a natural outcome of all that our students will have learned to do; and their competence in cultural awareness and expression should durably support their ability to live together successfully in heterogeneous groups while also supporting their most crucial final outcome, their having learned to be One World learners, with the attributes in the ideal profile that follows.

Since One World Secondary School is interested in becoming an IB school, it is appropriate here also to quote from the “IB learner profile”: “The aim of all IB programmes is to develop internationally minded people who, recognizing their common humanity and shared guardianship of the planet, help to create a better and more peaceful world.”

One World Learners (OWLs) will become

• Disciplined enquirers who have begun mastering the critical thinking- and problem-solving skills and the knowledge necessary to continue to learn within a discipline through enquiry and research. One World students will actively enjoy learning, and their love of learning will be sustained throughout their lives.
• Balanced learners who understand the importance of intellectual, emotional, and physical balance to achieve a good life for themselves and others. In addition, they will study a broad, balanced curriculum, and will analyze, synthesize, and evaluate various ideas derived from the disciplines in a fair, balanced way.
• Caring communicators who convey empathy, compassion, and respect for the needs and feelings of others. One World students will commit themselves to service, and will be able to clearly communicate, orally, in writing, and through modern media, their principled determination to make an ethical contribution to the lives of other people and to the planet as a whole.
• Open-minded initiators who understand their own cultures and histories and are open to those of others. One World students will actively seek out other points of view and, like risk-taking entrepreneurs, will watch for and seize new opportunities, ideas, and strategies for improvement.
• Reflective innovators who develop “right-brain” traits such as curiosity, imagination, and creativity to go with their “left-brain” skills in communication and traditional disciplinary learning. In addition, our students will learn to become reflective on their experience, understanding their own strengths and limitations as they strive towards wisdom.
• Knowledgeable, collaborating leaders who explore great issues, ideas, and concepts, thereby acquiring in-depth knowledge across a broad range of disciplines. They will often acquire necessary information through digital, collaborative enquiry, thereby gaining the computing, ICT, and social skills to responsibly work in teams with networks of people who may come from vastly different cultures and also to use reasoning and persuasion to lead and to learn. 
• Flexible adapters who are ready to change with a changing economy and a changing world. Because they will have become life-long learners, One World graduates will have the self-reliant career skills, productivity, and sense of accountability to deal with our planet’s increasingly complex problems in the 21^st century.

I hereby acknowledge intellectual indebtedness to the works of Bernie Trilling and Charles Fadel (21st Century Skills), Howard Gardner (Five Minds for the Future), and Tony Wagner (The Global Achievement Gap) in synthesizing the above profile.

 

Some of the Best Thinking on 21st Century Education

International efforts to define the educational needs of the 21^st century have been proceeding for nearly two decades now. As early as 1996, the UNESCO International Commission on Education for the Twenty-first Century, chaired by former European Commission President Jacques Delors, proposed in Learning: The Treasure Within that, building on the four pillars that are the foundations of education – learning to know, learning to do, learning to live together,  and learning to be – all societies should aim to move towards a necessary Utopia in which none of the talents hidden like buried treasure in every person be left untapped. 

The next year, the OECD’s education ministers recombined the knowledge, skills, and values implicit in the Delors pillars into the concept of competencies, and the OECD has done much work to define and select the competencies “for a successful life and a well-functioning society”, and has used them in designing its PISA (Programme in International Student Assessment) assessments. It has concluded that three categories of competencies are key in the 21^st century: acting autonomously, using tools interactively, and interacting in socially heterogeneous groups. 

The APEC (Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation) economies have developed a 21^st century competency framework encompassing APEC’s priority academic content areas: English and other languages, mathematics, science, information and communication technologies, and technical education. 

Finally, the European Union has legislatively defined eight key competences for lifelong learning: communication in the mother tongue, communication in foreign languages, mathematical competence and competences in science and technology, digital competence, learning to learn, social and civic competences, a sense of initiative and entrepreneurship, and cultural awareness and expression.   

I have synthesized these efforts into a description of One World learners’ competences, which I will publish tomorrow.