More than 3 clicks builds competence

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Posted on 25th August 2010 by Judy Breck in Obamaschool | Schools we now have | Testing and assessment

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Peter Cochrane makes some very interesting points in a blog post about possible paradoxes that are keeping kids from achieving in school. He makes a point I have never heard before, which he couches in terms of the persistence required in pursuing the complexity in playing video games as compared to the 1, 2, 3 sorts of steps it takes to score well on standard tests students are drilled for in today’s education. As I read what is quoted below from Cochrane, it seemed to me that his observation applies to the richer experience of following your curiosity through a knowledge-filled website compared to just learning a few steps to prove you have understood a page or two in a textbook, which characteristically requires nor offers many if any links to related knowledge or context .

You can check my theory by seeing if you can resist making more than 10 clicks into this section of the CERN site about their Large Hadron Collider. Naw, you don’t need to know what the Super Proton Synchrotron is. [Hint: CERN calls it "The first lord of the rings."] But when our kids get a chance to do more of this sort of complex curiosity satisfying as routine in their schooling, it seems likely they will develop more competence as well as master more knowledge and ideas.

You may be thinking: And why would kids persist in clicking around in a website to learn more if there is no incentive like a good text score or winning video game? Well, to engage knowledge is exciting. Ask any six-year-old whose response to every answer is “why?”. What happens in school in our times seems to be not exciting. Interacting with online knowledge like the CERN site is a way to bring some intellectual juice and fun into learning.

From Cochrane’s observation

In my dealings with youngsters I find them as bright as ever but often without any predisposition for a life of discovery, creativity and problem solving. Why?

There are many factors of course, but here, I think, is a major one: in the old education system it was not unusual for problems to require five, 10, 15, 20, or more steps to get to the solution.

Successive watering down of the curriculum for political purposes has produced tick-box formats with a solution in one, two or three steps. Should a problem involve five steps, the reaction is that it is too difficult or too much like hard work.

Now here is the paradox. Those same minds play computer games where tenacity is essential and the steps to achieve success might number 30 or more. But the players trained themselves, were unfettered, and free to develop their own strategy.

In contrast, the education system put them into a straitjacket and told them what and how to do everything.

Now here is another paradox. In the computer world the players expect tough competition and failure. To succeed they assume that they will have to work hard and persist, which appears not to be the case in education.

Public (socialist) school shame is on front page, again

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Posted on 16th August 2010 by Judy Breck in Equality | Obamaschool | Schools we now have | Testing and assessment

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For six years now, billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg has thrown everything he can at New York’s public schools to try to equalize student achievement. In an front page New York Times article today, titled Triumph Fades on Racial Gap in New York City Schools, we learn that:

. . . When results from the 2010 tests, which state officials said presented a more accurate portrayal of students’ abilities, were released last month, they came as a blow to the legacy of the mayor and the chancellor, as passing rates dropped  by more than 25 percentage points on most tests. But the most painful part might well have been the evaporation of one of their signature accomplishments: the closing of the racial achievement gap.

Among the students in the city’s third through eighth grades, 40 percent of black students and 46 percent of Hispanic students met state standards in math, compared with 75 percent of white students and 82 percent of Asian students. In English, 33 percent of black students and 34 percent of Hispanic students are now proficient, compared with 64 percent among whites and Asians. . . .

One has to suppose that their low numbers underrepresent the lost black and Hispanic students who drop out of public schooling. Many of them are the brightest boys, bored at school and lured into the streets for the excitement and profit of crime.

The New York City public school system is the largest school system in the world. Mayor Bloomberg’s inability to improve how well this system works for its students is a dramatic demonstration of the systematic failure of public education. The numbers above show failure for students: 60% of the blacks (who make up a large majority of the system’s students), 54% of the Hispanics, 25% of the whites, and 18% of the Asians.

The socialist notion that public education is an entitlement is being pushed hard by the Obamaists. In the real world example of the New York City public schools, that entitlement leads most of the students to failure. Shame on us for putting up with what happens to kids in public schools. How can we possibly think Obama will make public education better when Bloomberg hit the wall? When will we look beyond the public school model to 21st century learning methods.

No wonder they are taking their education into their own hands.

Standardized education is a leveling tool of the liberal left

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Posted on 30th June 2010 by Judy Breck in Equality | Obamaschool | Politics | Testing and assessment

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The setting of the same median goal for all students levels individuals into masses. Sure, you can say you hope many students will do more than pass the minimum standard. Will they? Do they?

Their is an illuminating bit of trivia about all this in an obituary today in the New York Times. The quote that follows begins with the obit’s headline and lede, then a sample of the deceased’s liberal stripes, and concludes with a paragraph (in red) noting the fact that he supported George W. Bush’s education initiative.

William Taylor, Vigorous Rights Defender, Dies at 78

William L. Taylor, who as a lawyer, lobbyist and government official for more than a half century had significant roles in pressing important civil rights cases and in drafting and defending civil rights legislation, died Monday in Bethesda, Md. He was 78 and lived in Washington.

Mr. Taylor is also credited with helping to devise a strategy by liberals to defeat President Ronald Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987, partly by recruiting well-known law professors to criticize him.

Mr. Taylor could sometimes be unpredictable, as when he openly supported President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law to overhaul education. Liberal critics called the measure punitive, poorly financed and too oriented toward standardized tests.

Yet Taylor was not convinced. As he probably foresaw, standardized educational tests do not lift all students to an equal and meaningful level of excellence. Instead the forced sameness of learning to the tests tends to settled more and more kids into the same level of mediocrity. Senator Ted Kennedy, who was a visceral and relentless liberal and leveler, is another example, like Taylor, who pushed the Bush vision called No Child Left Behind.

Showing his deep leftist core, Obama has not abandoned No Child Left Behind. Instead he is spending billions of dollars on what he calls Race to the Top. The name of that program belies its actual structure and goal. This, Obama’s major education initiative so far, is trying only to boost “failing schools.” He is building a welfare state of public education where youngsters are promoted with low grades, while billions are spent to push children’ scores a bit higher at the worst schools. The effect is not only to lock in a median mass — but to almost ignore education policy that would reward individual achievement. Assessment is made equal for all, while opportunity to learn settles into a media that gets lower and lower.

Beware of the educator with a level in his hand.

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.

Global grading would truly level the playing field

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Posted on 2nd April 2010 by Judy Breck in Equality | Schools we now have | Testing and assessment

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As recently as ten years ago, global grading would have been Star Trek stuff: pure fiction about the distant future.

Here is how Star Trek global grading might go: When a student decides she has learned the basics of calculus, she punches a few keys in her Communicator that connects to the internet assessosphere [a network within the internet -- like a blogosphere except emerged for testing]. She selects a basic calculus test. She then inputs her answers to its questions, attempts to solve problems the test presents, and when finished, clicks the “complete” button. In about 3 seconds she sees her grade on her mobile screen: 90% = A. Her grade is stored in the test’s database, where she keeps it private with a password. She has the option to open the grade on her online academic transcript or to learn some more calculus and repeat the test to attempt to earn an A+.

In this Star Trek imagined story, every student around the world can compete for equal assessment of what that individual student knows about a specific subject. That is certainly not what happens now.

The Chronicle of Higher Education ran this headline yesterday: “A California Law School Will Raise All Students’ Grades.” Here is why they are doing that, as the article explains:

Current students and recent graduates of Loyola Law School Los Angeles will soon see their grade-point averages climb by one-third of a point.

The school is modifying its grading system, its dean, Victor J. Gold, said on Thursday, to help students remain competitive with graduates of other California law schools, which it believes already grade on a higher curve. Each of the current letter-based grades at Loyola will be raised one step, bringing an A- to an A, and an A to an A+, for example.

Mr. Gold said the new curve would better represent the academic quality of the law school’s graduates, compared with those of other schools.

“We concluded that the grading curve was sending incorrect information about our students, and, frankly, it was putting them at an unfair competitive disadvantage in a pretty tough job market,” he said.

Cheat-proof online testing will allow equal and uniform testing

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Posted on 30th March 2010 by Judy Breck in Equality | Mobiles | Testing and assessment

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The most equal opportunity for a student to be tested would be for that student to take the same test as everyone else, under equal conditions. Handschooling can accomplish exactly that by allowing each student in literally the whole world to take a specific test when it is convenient for that student using his or her individual device connected to the internet. Test-takers would be in different locations and circumstances, but they would be treated absolutely equally by the test as they interact with it online. A preppy in London, a student attending a “failing school” in Chicago, a slum kid in Mumbai, and a herder in Peru would be able to pass or fail the identical calculus test.

They will cheat! That is the knee jerk reaction to a global testing taken individually. Yet what is dismissed by the jerking knee is the kind of testing that would remove the quality of schools from the equation and allow universal uniform assessment of individual students. Because it is now assumed that cheating will happen unless there is human oversight, generally testing is done in person in a variety of locales, with hovering human monitors. The expense is huge, kids are tested by groups and classes, and equality is damaged. Cheating still happens in testing locations that are not perfectly monitored.

But it turns out that cheat-proof online testing might be very practical and far more foolproof than human live monitoring. Take the example of Professor Pritchard’s work in identifying homework cheaters. The use of computer algorithm monitoring and similar programed detection systems should/could naturally follow from the approach he has used, as described here from the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Enter David E. Pritchard, a physics professor who teaches introductory courses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (when he’s not in his laboratory devising new ways to use lasers to reveal the curious behavior of supercooled atoms) [as shown in the photo at left].

Mr. Pritchard did detective work on his students worthy of a CSI episode. Because he uses an online homework system in his courses, he realized he could add a detection system to look for unusual behavior patterns. If a student took less than a minute to answer each of several complex questions and got them all right, for instance, the system flagged that as likely cheating. “Since one minute is insufficient time to read the problem and enter the several answers typically required, we infer that the quick-solver group is copying the answer from somewhere,” he wrote in a paper last month in the free online journal Physical Review Special Topics—Physics Education Research. . . .

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