The same old sticking point: educating other people’s children

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Posted on 30th April 2010 by Judy Breck in Equality | Findability | Obamaschool

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The Father of Public Education Horace Mann wrote in 1846: “The man who has reared and educated a family of children denounces it as a double tax, when he is called upon to assist in educating the children of others also; or, if he has reared his own children without educating them, he thinks it peculiarly oppressive to be obliged to do for others, what he refrained from doing even for himself. . .” (The Republic and the School: Horace Mann on the Education of Free Men)

Today blogger Gus Van Horn writes in an essay at PajamasMedia: “In Texas, where I lived for twenty years, schoolchildren commonly cross the border from Mexico to attend public schools. Many Americans there are justifiably upset about being taxed to educate non-citizens. I sympathize, but see this as a symptom of an even larger problem: I have no children at all, and yet I have been taxed to finance the educations of other people’s children for decades.”

Whether or not you send your children to public schools — or even have children — as an American taxpayer you are forced to pay to educate other people’s children. This sticking point has meant that an awful lot of people ignore and/or rationalize the “Savage Inequalities,” as Jonathan Kozol calls them, between the education their own children get and what they let suffice for other people’s children. How else would terrible schools that pepper public education be allowed to exist? And yet how is it wrong to want the best for your own kids?

Horace Mann did not have a solution. Certainly the extension of socialism of education to a federal level by Obama can only exacerbate the problem: rich taxpayers must cough up more for other people’s children. As Gus Van Horn writes today, the welfare state (which public education really is) is the problem.

Handschooling causes other people’s children to become unique visitors to online knowledge: Whose child it is connecting to learn is unknown. For example, when the Mary Lyon webpages are visited by you if you click this link, the makers of those webpages will have no idea who is learning from them. They will not know who you are. They made the Mary Lyon pages at their cost, and offer them to you for free — no matter whose child you are. They will be glad you came and eager to let you learn what they are teaching about the American education pioneer and her challenges in educating women.

Mary Lyon and her contemporary Horace Mann would have loved it!

Napsterize Education

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Posted on 27th April 2010 by Judy Breck in Next

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A BigGovernment post today titled Napsterize Education by Morgan Warstler describes what we can do to transform education. The transformation would be similar to what happened to the music industry: it was changed from top to bottom. Warstler is an internet tech and biz pro who knows the online learning business. What follows is the second half of his Napterize Education post. His conclusion is “demand it!”:

Imagine online colleges where you only pay a couple of bucks when you have a question or need to have a test graded. Imagine college that comes free when you buy a new $500.00 55? LCD TV at Wal-Mart. Imagine being able to test similar lectures from hundreds of professors to see which one is best at conveying information to visual learners, kids from the ghetto, or you when you are sixty. Imagine needing only a fifth/tenth/twentieth of the college professors to teach three times as many students.

The truly talented faculty who survive will be high paid rock-stars with staffs. Like Paul Krugman without a beard or inflation fetish.

Sure, if your kid needs to have the good old college experience and put himself (and you) $150K+ in debt, then by all means you can send the lad off to the glories of keggers and Marxist re-education.

But if he’s an over-achiever, he can start taking college courses about whatever interests him when he’s in ninth grade, or working as a convenience store clerk at night, or sitting in jail, or if he just doesn’t understand the shitty professor you are PAYING for him to sit in class with right now.

Why, in a copyable economy like public education, doesn’t every child deserve the lessons of the world’s premiere teacher in every subject?

This information wants to be free. And the best way to make that happen is to make it legal to copy and profit from the improvement of it. Moreover, it is a public good. Our tax dollars pay for it. It is ours. We want it hocked for pennies on every street corner. There is no better example of Schumpeter’s Creative Destruction.

National and state Republicans, get cracking. Promise to make in-class recordings in every public university legal and distributable under a Creative Commons license that allows commercial application.

In ten years time, every state budget will be in balance. The very best video lectures will improve daily, educate millions online, and thousands of liberal academics will have to go get real jobs.

I kid you not.

A small change to your state’s rules about recording in the classroom, can save your family thousands in taxes and hundreds of thousands in tuition.

Demand it.

Stand and Deliver: How Jaime Escalante did it

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Posted on 23rd April 2010 by Judy Breck in Equality | Mobiles | Testing and assessment

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We are reminded in an essay today by Ruben Navarrette, Jr. that Jamie Escalante “became, in the words of Jay Matthews, education reporter for the Washington Post, ‘the most famous and influential American public school teacher of his generation.’”. Navarrette explains:

Escalante — who made East Los Angeles’ Garfield High School famous when his story was immortalized in the 1988 film Stand and Deliver – earned that title by teaching calculus to students who the school system had decreed couldn’t handle anything harder than general math.

I have had three experiences with high school classes populated by teenagers who have been judged to be limited learners. For 10 years I coordinated a New York City public schools mentor program. For two years I personally coached a debate group of about 20 student at a problem high school. For nearly thirty years I have judged citywide public high school debates. I have witnessed bountiful excellence from these kids.

The bottom line is that only individual students succeed in learning. School spirit “rah, rah,” affection for the teacher and mentor, and other teenage foibles are at the surface. When it comes to learning calculus or debate, individual students learn and master the subject one at a time.

Obviously believing in students is necessary to teach them something. Otherwise why would a teacher bother. The notion, however, that setting group standards will somehow teach classes of kids — elite or deprived — is false to the core. Having the confidence that one can teach almost any individual youngster to understand calculus or debate is valid. Escalante proved the point about calculus and I have seen it happen repeatedly in debate.

I realize that the educators, pedagogues, and politicians have elaborate theories about these issues. They claim expertise and spin their ideas at great cost in both money and generations lost to a failing school system.

Handschooling is a stunning new way individual youngsters can learn without being part of a crowd that identifies them as elite or deprived. A kid with a mobile can ride in a BMW or a bus, learning calculus or the rules of debate on his/her own. I feel certain that Jaime Escalante — as with all great teachers — found a way to teach each of his students as individually as handschooling does now virtually. May he rest in peace.

And of course the mobile is not human. It is a machine that teaches individuals the way a flight simulator or flashcards do. One advantage the mobile knowledge delivery does have over human teachers is that the online source is incapable of prejudging students because it does not know who they are: the elite/deprived factor is removed from the knowledge delivery mix.

The need for nurture is universal

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Posted on 21st April 2010 by Judy Breck in Nurture

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In the future as knowledge to learn is delivered into young hands wirelessly, the need for nurturing individual students does not disappear. Nurture and grasping ideas and facts are different aspects of raising the young. This video from the Stockholm Zoo shows the importance of keeping an eye out for the little ones. The background is explained at ZooBorns.

One Web has won and that makes all the difference

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Posted on 21st April 2010 by Judy Breck in Findability | Mobiles | Next | Schools we now have

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One Web has won out over proprietary content, content in walled gardens, and other efforts to partition off content to sell it or control it. That victory was not won by copyright dismantling, the generosity of those who would share, or any other human intervention. One Web has won because network laws are far more powerful than any of these human machinations.

In simple terms, here is what network laws do: When you put a node of human knowledge into the internet, that node will link up with cognitively related nodes, forming a pattern from which whole ideas emerge that are more than the sum of the parts. Nothing locked away from this ability to interconnect will stay as authentic and fresh as the sum of the parts emerging by obeying network laws. This is, of course, the concept at the core of Google where, to understate the obvious, the results are huge.

Back in the old days of wired computers, when educators went down the road of school control of the internet, it was highly questionable whether One Web would win. A student had to go to a brick-and-wired place, in a building to a computer lab or school library, to connect online. For profit companies captured and created digital resources and sold them to schools which, in turn, doled them out to students following curricula a standards outlines. As an example, ProQuest today continues to sell the contents of its walled garden over and over, to 35,000 K-12 schools and hundreds of colleges and universities. Networking of ideas in the content and users is blocked in proprietary content of this sort — letting the content lose its freshness, precluding patterns, and not allowing interaction among users at different schools. The controlling choice by educators was made instead of engaging network knowledge, and that is this making all the difference.

A few years ago it was a close call. One Web for learning could have stayed lost in the pretenses that online learning managed by the education and publishing priesthoods were taking advantage of the learning opportunities of the internet. As money runs out for public education, another factor will speed One Web — the fact that it is almost free. Not so proprietary resources that cost education huge amounts of money every year.

DEFINITION OF ONE WEB – Here is what they say about One Web at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the Web standards group headed by the inventor of the Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee:

The social value of the Web is that it enables human communication, commerce, and opportunities to share knowledge. One of W3C’s primary goals is to make these benefits available to all people, whatever their hardware, software, network infrastructure, native language, culture, geographical location, or physical or mental ability. One Web means making, as far as is reasonable, the same information and services available to users irrespective of the device they are using.

WHY ONE WEB IS WINNING – The short answer is because handschooling is now possible: the One Web can be delivered on mobile devices which are, by definition, individual and in control of the learner. The control by schools is gone; individuals can connect to the internet directly. And the proof of the winning of One Web is in the provider pudding: mobile providers are putting internet browsing on essentially all of their devices.

Little has been written and said regarding the fact that with laptops, smartphones, iPhone and iPod Touch, and now iPads and other tablets, “the same information and services [are] available to users” because they ALL browse the internet. Sure, there are apps that are in walled gardens for some mobiles. Even the fusty vendor of education resources ProQuest is working to get a system set up selling its products on mobile.

The bottom line, however, is that the demand and efficacy of networking is obvious in the fact that browsing the internet is included across the board for mobiles.

ONE WEB CONNECTS ALL INDIVIDUALS TO THE SAME LEARNING RESOURCES FORMED BY NETWORK LAWS – No matter how hard the education establishment tries to look down its very long nose at Wikipedia, that remarkable free encyclopedia proves the power of the open network to gather, evaluate, and present knowledge. But there are now thousands of knowledge abundant websites that no educator could demean and remain credible. A couple of examples of what the winning One Web offers — and what make it obvious why One Web was the right road to take. The PoetryFoundation.org is a network interrelating poets and poetry, where this morning I listened to the voice of Robert Frost reading five of his poems in 1959. Precise, super-authentic science that is up-to-the-moment is found, for example, at ScienceBlogs like the very topical one today on volcanoes called Eruptions.

Public four-day schools will deepen learning divides

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Posted on 18th April 2010 by Judy Breck in Equality | Obamaschool

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A Rasmussen Report today reports 65% Oppose Four-Day School Week. The poll was taken, reports Rasmussen, because: “Many school systems across the country are facing strict budget cuts, and one option on the table is going to four-day school weeks to save money.” The article describes several aspects of current opinion on the issue.

Public schooling is a decades-old entitlement. Until the late 20th century it was a state entitlement, but it is now increasingly dependent on federal tax dollars. The Obama administration has spent a high percentage of the “stimulus” money helping states meet teacher payrolls and other education expenses. Without the stimulus, many states will be faced with cutting back education. With the huge new health care costs and other entitlements going broke, including the massive Social Security and Medicare monies being spent, it has turned out that the first major failure of American socialism may turn out to be the schools.

Looking ahead a very few years — perhaps just months — some or many public schools may cut back to four-day weeks. The inequity of this is profound. Children who parents can afford to put their youngsters into private or religious schools, or who are schooled at home, will not be affected by the cutback to four-days.

Cutting from five days to four days is a hefty 20% less education time. It is impossible not to wonder if the nannies in Washington will not demand that non-public education be cut back to make things fair.

The unraveling of public (socialized) schooling is speeding up because the Obama administration is pushing entitlements (socialism) over the cliff into bankruptcy. For education, this may turn out to be the best thing that ever happened. Individualized handschooling and the re-professionalization of teaching will not cost much at all. Handschooling is totally equal, and a marvelous replacement for the schools that are failing a growing underclass nurtured by community organizers and the gushing money that is about to be the undoing of the fiscal lunacy in the White House.

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