Hermione is a character in the Harry Potter series. She is such an eager student that in The Prisoner of Azkaban, she pulls off the very clever trick of attending (at least) two sets of classes at the same time, with the assistance of some magic procured from Dumbledore, the school's headmaster.
The school systems of the world are multifarious, and feature a variety of virtues, some of them mutually inconsistent, but many potentially coordinable. Some of us would like to be able to help students like Hermione, by making as many of these attractive school features as possible available on a single campus. This summarizes what we have been trying to do at One World Secondary School.
The school has been in development for over four years now, originally as a kind of dream, almost fantastic school, but soon thereafter in total seriousness. It has evolved over that time, principally in response to my discovery of an ever increasing number of world class features. I have put together the best plan I can, and thank my friends for their assistance. But if the school is ever going to open to all classes of the general public, starting with a comprehensive seventh grade, now is the time for public officials in our school district and municipality to show their support; otherwise we may be just another addition to the ranks of independent schools serving those who can afford tuition, with the poorer families shut out ultimately by irresponsible charter office officials who insist on maintaining monopolistic control over the types of schools that can open in the communities they are entrusted to serve, and whose trust they have violated.
Saturday, October 29, 2011
Thursday, October 27, 2011
Our Achievement Gap Stems, in Part, From Our Fixation on the Achievement Gap
I just today read an excellent article in The Washington Post on Kosen, Japan's special polytechnical schools that accept students as early as 15, give them five years of vocationally oriented technical training during what would be our high school and junior college years, and then watch them leave with an average of 20 job offers per new graduate; if they stay an extra two years and earn a diploma roughly equivalent to a master's degree, the ratio goes up to 30 job offers per graduate.
I also read today that the percentage of young Americans aged 20 to 24 who are employed has shrunk from 74 percent in 2000 to just 62 percent now, the lowest since the 1930s.
Our obsession with having our young people correctly fill in bubble sheets is severely underserving our youth. Some of them, like my own children, do pretty well on such tests, and generally still turn out all right; others, like the many I taught at Locke High School in Watts, have almost no good options available to them; and well-meaning educational leaders who moved to end (rather than modernize) their vocational programs because "each and every student is expected to go to college" have unwittingly promoted a disaster.
I also read today that the percentage of young Americans aged 20 to 24 who are employed has shrunk from 74 percent in 2000 to just 62 percent now, the lowest since the 1930s.
Our obsession with having our young people correctly fill in bubble sheets is severely underserving our youth. Some of them, like my own children, do pretty well on such tests, and generally still turn out all right; others, like the many I taught at Locke High School in Watts, have almost no good options available to them; and well-meaning educational leaders who moved to end (rather than modernize) their vocational programs because "each and every student is expected to go to college" have unwittingly promoted a disaster.
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
On the Perils of Those Assailed by the Carnegie Unit
Okay, so a measure of time is not some hairy green monster calculated to frighten children. But the Carnegie unit should frighten the American public, if the latter realized how it, though well intended and once possibly useful, is a prime player in condemning our secondary schools to second-class productivity.
Once upon a time, secondary schooling was rare; fewer than ten percent of an American cohort went to high school in 1900. But between then and 1950, high schools popped up all over the country, and attending and completing education through them became more and more normal. The Carnegie Foundation wanted to encourage high school graduation, as well as college attendance for promising pupils, and spent millions pursuing these ends; but newly expanding colleges found themselves troubled when trying to evaluate applications from students whose schools and districts used every variety of transcript summarizing the most heterogeneous high school programs. The Carnegie Foundation, trying to impose order, establish standards, and assist comparability amid this chaos, decided that a good strategy would be to mandate a set minimum of time for high school students to be in class with a teacher in order to receive credit for their labors, and they bought assent to their proposal by funding retirement benefits to teachers who would back the standard. Thus the American system of "credits" for seat time, unknown in other parts of the world, was born; the Carnegie unit was the foundation of our system of credits. (An interesting parallel is that the European Union, confronting diversity in its higher education systems similar to what Americans had in secondary schools a hundred years earlier, has recently resorted to the same solution through its European Credit Transfer System.)
But how is this monstrous, you might ask? It forces our schools to offer a few subjects (English, mathematics, science, social studies, and to a lesser extent foreign languages) in roughly equal proportions in all four years of high school, in a dull, monotonous routine: "Period one I have algebra, period two science, period three English", and so on, an American student might say, regardless of the day of the week. By contrast, if you asked European or Asian students for their schedules, they would have to ask which day you were referring to, since it would change depending upon the day of the week; and particularly favored subjects, or those particularly necessary for a student's future, get more time than others, which appear in the schedule largely to ensure breadth, and at least a minimum attainment of some essentials in subjects which are likely undeserving of all the time necessary to earn a Carnegie unit (typically around 50 minutes five times a week for a school year): information technology is a good example of the latter.
Another problem is that our system grants credit for class attendance and teacher satisfaction (reflected in what we call "grades"), rather than for verifiable, public demonstrations of learning, such as external examinations.
Therefore a European or Asian student may well be studying ten or eleven subjects while our best are studying six; and their future mathematicians may be studying as many as 400 hours of mathematics, or fewer than 100, depending upon student desire and aptitude, in a year when our most and least enthusiastic, and everyone in between, will be studying (except at One World Secondary School) around 150, in all five or six subjects, unvaryingly, thanks to an innovation a bit over a hundred years old and a long way out of date.
Once upon a time, secondary schooling was rare; fewer than ten percent of an American cohort went to high school in 1900. But between then and 1950, high schools popped up all over the country, and attending and completing education through them became more and more normal. The Carnegie Foundation wanted to encourage high school graduation, as well as college attendance for promising pupils, and spent millions pursuing these ends; but newly expanding colleges found themselves troubled when trying to evaluate applications from students whose schools and districts used every variety of transcript summarizing the most heterogeneous high school programs. The Carnegie Foundation, trying to impose order, establish standards, and assist comparability amid this chaos, decided that a good strategy would be to mandate a set minimum of time for high school students to be in class with a teacher in order to receive credit for their labors, and they bought assent to their proposal by funding retirement benefits to teachers who would back the standard. Thus the American system of "credits" for seat time, unknown in other parts of the world, was born; the Carnegie unit was the foundation of our system of credits. (An interesting parallel is that the European Union, confronting diversity in its higher education systems similar to what Americans had in secondary schools a hundred years earlier, has recently resorted to the same solution through its European Credit Transfer System.)
But how is this monstrous, you might ask? It forces our schools to offer a few subjects (English, mathematics, science, social studies, and to a lesser extent foreign languages) in roughly equal proportions in all four years of high school, in a dull, monotonous routine: "Period one I have algebra, period two science, period three English", and so on, an American student might say, regardless of the day of the week. By contrast, if you asked European or Asian students for their schedules, they would have to ask which day you were referring to, since it would change depending upon the day of the week; and particularly favored subjects, or those particularly necessary for a student's future, get more time than others, which appear in the schedule largely to ensure breadth, and at least a minimum attainment of some essentials in subjects which are likely undeserving of all the time necessary to earn a Carnegie unit (typically around 50 minutes five times a week for a school year): information technology is a good example of the latter.
Another problem is that our system grants credit for class attendance and teacher satisfaction (reflected in what we call "grades"), rather than for verifiable, public demonstrations of learning, such as external examinations.
Therefore a European or Asian student may well be studying ten or eleven subjects while our best are studying six; and their future mathematicians may be studying as many as 400 hours of mathematics, or fewer than 100, depending upon student desire and aptitude, in a year when our most and least enthusiastic, and everyone in between, will be studying (except at One World Secondary School) around 150, in all five or six subjects, unvaryingly, thanks to an innovation a bit over a hundred years old and a long way out of date.
Sunday, October 23, 2011
A New Contract for Teachers
Bill and Melinda Gates yesterday had one of their editorials published in the Wall Street Journal. In it they call for a personnel system for teachers that would resemble those found in private industry, including that which was implemented at Microsoft. While raising the professional status of teachers is clearly an advisable goal, whether pursuing the business analogy in public education will prove productive can certainly be called into question. One reason is that private corporations do not have to evince the social consciences that public institutions are called on to have; they can cast off outdated equipment without complaint from many aside from environmentalists, and they cast off unsatisfactory employees with similar disregard, although the backlash against practices that regard human beings as disposable is clearly growing.
But wise educators of all persuasions know that any improvement in teachers' status is likely to require a new contract for teachers. What should the main features of such contracts be?
One main feature would surely be to define professional qualifications for the teachers. In this regard, recent moves to promote alternative certification, including especially those that only include a few weeks of summer training such as that offered by Teach For America (TFA), are clearly moves in the wrong direction. While I recruited and trained TFA teachers at Locke High School, and became and remain friends with several of them and admire them, that was in keeping with the exigencies originally envisioned for the programme, which was a stopgap for urban and rural schools desperate to recruit full-time teachers, even from TFA, in preference to the succession of even shorter term substitutes then inhabiting many of our neediest classrooms. In short, it was a desperation move, and the graduates from such pitifully inadequate programmes should never replace fully licenced teachers, particularly under circumstances where thousands of the latter have been laid off due to reduced government resources.
A second main feature I advocate is pay for performance, rather than just for credentials plus seniority. While all teachers employed ought to be licenced professionals, it does not follow that they are all equally effective. Those that do the best job ought, in general, to be the best paid. While there are legitimate debates ongoing about how to decide who is doing the best job, the Gateses, who I should add do not call in their Journal editorial for reduced licencing standards, are correct in their desire to link better pay with better performance.
There are many more features to an ideal teachers' contract like that we have proposed at One World Secondary School, but let us hope that at least these, regarding the qualifications, performance, and compensation to be expected for professional teachers, will be remembered by those making tough decisions in the coming months.
But wise educators of all persuasions know that any improvement in teachers' status is likely to require a new contract for teachers. What should the main features of such contracts be?
One main feature would surely be to define professional qualifications for the teachers. In this regard, recent moves to promote alternative certification, including especially those that only include a few weeks of summer training such as that offered by Teach For America (TFA), are clearly moves in the wrong direction. While I recruited and trained TFA teachers at Locke High School, and became and remain friends with several of them and admire them, that was in keeping with the exigencies originally envisioned for the programme, which was a stopgap for urban and rural schools desperate to recruit full-time teachers, even from TFA, in preference to the succession of even shorter term substitutes then inhabiting many of our neediest classrooms. In short, it was a desperation move, and the graduates from such pitifully inadequate programmes should never replace fully licenced teachers, particularly under circumstances where thousands of the latter have been laid off due to reduced government resources.
A second main feature I advocate is pay for performance, rather than just for credentials plus seniority. While all teachers employed ought to be licenced professionals, it does not follow that they are all equally effective. Those that do the best job ought, in general, to be the best paid. While there are legitimate debates ongoing about how to decide who is doing the best job, the Gateses, who I should add do not call in their Journal editorial for reduced licencing standards, are correct in their desire to link better pay with better performance.
There are many more features to an ideal teachers' contract like that we have proposed at One World Secondary School, but let us hope that at least these, regarding the qualifications, performance, and compensation to be expected for professional teachers, will be remembered by those making tough decisions in the coming months.
Thursday, October 20, 2011
How Congress Could Help All Children Get Ahead
Continuing this debate from where it left off yesterday, what we don't need is to remain fixated on the stale debate between the (mostly Democratic) backers of relatively recent initiatives that have produced some improvements but seem unlikely to help us reach President Obama's goal of a world-class education for all our children (enunciated at the MLK memorial opening ceremony last weekend) and those (mostly Republican) reactionaries who want to take us back to the states-rights policies of administrations in the 1990s and earlier, which identified a Nation At Risk but failed to do anything useful about it.
Instead, we should remember that ours is a federal (not a unitary national) system of government, look at what other successful federal systems of education are doing, and apply intelligent lessons to our own situation.
I have previously championed Norway's as perhaps the world's best educational system, but Norway's is a unitary national government ruling a country the size of one of our states. Instead I would direct Congress to look at the example of Australia, which has a federal system of government like ours and rules over a comparable extent of territory (though not of population).
The most important lesson we can learn from Australia's (limited) federal assistance to education, the lesson I'd most like Congress to copy, is its provision of federal funding for most of the 85-90% of the operating budget that privately managed schools, which in America would include chartered, free, and independent schools, receive from the government (Australian states kick in the rest of the government funding, while parents also contribute to private school tuition fees, the amount depending upon the families' socioeconomic status). This option has proved increasingly popular in Australia, where steadily more and more families (above one-third) choose private education for their children's secondary education, where the expected national educational attainment (that is, the number of years of schooling successfully completed) for today's generation of students leads the world, and where they host the fastest-rising, most serious competitor among tertiary education sectors to our dominance of the international universities market.
Instead, we should remember that ours is a federal (not a unitary national) system of government, look at what other successful federal systems of education are doing, and apply intelligent lessons to our own situation.
I have previously championed Norway's as perhaps the world's best educational system, but Norway's is a unitary national government ruling a country the size of one of our states. Instead I would direct Congress to look at the example of Australia, which has a federal system of government like ours and rules over a comparable extent of territory (though not of population).
The most important lesson we can learn from Australia's (limited) federal assistance to education, the lesson I'd most like Congress to copy, is its provision of federal funding for most of the 85-90% of the operating budget that privately managed schools, which in America would include chartered, free, and independent schools, receive from the government (Australian states kick in the rest of the government funding, while parents also contribute to private school tuition fees, the amount depending upon the families' socioeconomic status). This option has proved increasingly popular in Australia, where steadily more and more families (above one-third) choose private education for their children's secondary education, where the expected national educational attainment (that is, the number of years of schooling successfully completed) for today's generation of students leads the world, and where they host the fastest-rising, most serious competitor among tertiary education sectors to our dominance of the international universities market.
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
NCLB --> ACGA
This is a follow-up to my previous posts NCLB=NCGA, YCLB and on the world's best school systems.
Senator Harkin's draft for the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (which was renamed No Child Left Behind after Mr. Bush's comprehensive transformation of the legislation in 2001) has reawakened debate over federal policy with regard to our schools, and that is to the good. Alexander Russo has recently warned that reformers had better weigh in on this issue or be left to rue the consequences of staying on the sidelines, and so I thought I might address the matter.
No Child Left Behind did not prevent millions of children from being left behind, and reduced and demeaned our public education system. Since this legislation represents our best opportunity for establishing a world-class education system in our country, we should have honest, fruitful discussions about it, and get the final product right.
I want my child to get ahead, and I am confident other parents feel the same way, so I almost titled this post "NCLB --> YCGA", the latter meaning "Your Child Gets Ahead". But this is public policy, and cannot restrict itself to private motivations; it has to provide for all children, including those whose parents do not participate in their children's educations, and it has to recognize that we all have to care for the young generation, whether we are parents or not (for surely adults will tend to be differently motivated towards education depending upon whether they are parents of current students, future students, former students who have left school, or are not parents at all).
Therefore No Child Left Behind (NCLB), a failure, needs to be transformed into a plan most likely to help All Children Get Ahead (ACGA). And I'll present a few founding principles for such a plan tomorrow.
Senator Harkin's draft for the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (which was renamed No Child Left Behind after Mr. Bush's comprehensive transformation of the legislation in 2001) has reawakened debate over federal policy with regard to our schools, and that is to the good. Alexander Russo has recently warned that reformers had better weigh in on this issue or be left to rue the consequences of staying on the sidelines, and so I thought I might address the matter.
No Child Left Behind did not prevent millions of children from being left behind, and reduced and demeaned our public education system. Since this legislation represents our best opportunity for establishing a world-class education system in our country, we should have honest, fruitful discussions about it, and get the final product right.
I want my child to get ahead, and I am confident other parents feel the same way, so I almost titled this post "NCLB --> YCGA", the latter meaning "Your Child Gets Ahead". But this is public policy, and cannot restrict itself to private motivations; it has to provide for all children, including those whose parents do not participate in their children's educations, and it has to recognize that we all have to care for the young generation, whether we are parents or not (for surely adults will tend to be differently motivated towards education depending upon whether they are parents of current students, future students, former students who have left school, or are not parents at all).
Therefore No Child Left Behind (NCLB), a failure, needs to be transformed into a plan most likely to help All Children Get Ahead (ACGA). And I'll present a few founding principles for such a plan tomorrow.
Monday, October 17, 2011
On the Freedom to Advance in One's Studies
Joe Nathan seems like a good guy. Yesterday I got into a kind of spontaneous debate with him on Alexander Russo's Facebook page. The topic was selection in (chartered and magnet) school admissions. I recommended to him a paper I read about a year ago that was published by two professors working with the Sutton Trust in the United Kingdom.
The Sutton Trust has an overall social and educational agenda similar to WestEd and myriad similar groups in the United States, so when it published a report advocating selective admissions in secondary schools, I was intrigued. Crucially, the report, "Choice and Selection in School Admissions", demonstrates that, contrary to Andreas Schleicher's preferred narrative coming out of the OECD, countries that practice selective admissions have a larger achievement gap, but also produce more total knowledge throughout their student populations, than do countries like ours that generally (our exceptions are mostly in our eminent private sector) maintain open, non-competitive admissions all the way through secondary school.
Put baldly but briefly, our country faces a choice: we can have a narrow achievement gap among a generation of generally ignorant young people, or we can raise a generation of happy young people, much more fully and fulfillingly employed as well as more knowledgeable overall, who, not worried about being "left behind" in a single "race" to a single "top", have given up being measured by a single standard, that of the highly educated ruling class whose self-love impels them towards the mass reproduction of their own self-image.
The Sutton Trust has an overall social and educational agenda similar to WestEd and myriad similar groups in the United States, so when it published a report advocating selective admissions in secondary schools, I was intrigued. Crucially, the report, "Choice and Selection in School Admissions", demonstrates that, contrary to Andreas Schleicher's preferred narrative coming out of the OECD, countries that practice selective admissions have a larger achievement gap, but also produce more total knowledge throughout their student populations, than do countries like ours that generally (our exceptions are mostly in our eminent private sector) maintain open, non-competitive admissions all the way through secondary school.
Put baldly but briefly, our country faces a choice: we can have a narrow achievement gap among a generation of generally ignorant young people, or we can raise a generation of happy young people, much more fully and fulfillingly employed as well as more knowledgeable overall, who, not worried about being "left behind" in a single "race" to a single "top", have given up being measured by a single standard, that of the highly educated ruling class whose self-love impels them towards the mass reproduction of their own self-image.
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