Largest school system could be the vanguard of future learning

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Posted on 11th November 2010 by Judy Breck in Mobiles | Next | Testing and assessment

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If I were Cathleen P. Black, new Chancellor of the New York City public schools, these are some steps I would take:

  • Provide wireless connectivity at every New York City public school.
  • See to it that every student has a mobile device with an internet browser and paid-for 24/7 internet access.
  • Load each student’s mobile device with device apps and an index of online tutorials for 3R subjects and for the spectrum of introductory materials for math, sciences, literature, humanities, and other basic school subjects.
  • Set in motion a project to switch to online textbooks with all deliberate speed.
  • Provide online testing by subject that is not grade-level oriented. Allow NYC students to be certified by this testing if they choose to do so. The online certification would override (and eventually replace) classroom testing, allowing students to advance individually instead of by the curve of a particular group of classmates.

How wonderful it would be if Chancellor Black would place the world’s largest school system at the vanguard of future learning!!

Please do not think the kids in the school system she heads cannot lead their generation. I know them. They can.

Nanny standards creep

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Posted on 13th October 2010 by Judy Breck in Findability | Nurture | Testing and assessment

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Two articles featured this morning in The Chronicle of Higher Education are about the creeping of government nanny standards into colleges.

The first article is not open to general readers, but you can get the general idea from its title: “In Return for Federal Dollars, Obama Demands Results From Colleges.”

The second article is open to all readers. Here is some flavor:

Responding to what they call unfair scrutiny from state and federal regulators, representatives from online colleges discussed a self-imposed quality-assurance framework at today’s Presidents’ Forum in Washington, convened by Excelsior College.

But state officials said they are still concerned that self-imposed standards are not good enough and that online programs are not consistent in providing students with high-quality education. . . .

As the internet rapidly matures in coming months and years, these nanny standards form yet more schooling firewalls for the delivery of open learning from the internet. These nanny-creep-firewalls will undermine educational effectiveness for both the colleges who get stuck with them and the governments that demand them.

The most recent post on this blog describes how the new HTML.5 will facilitate delivery of study materials conforming to what a student is ready to learn. This individual assessment of what to learn next is based on at what level of the subject the student has already engaged in previous websites. This fundamental new way to set a standard for what to study next is totally separate from the perceived lockstep standards of either the college or the government. The assessment HTML.5 will generate totally accommodates the learner.

The day is coming when standard setting nannies will need to prove their relevance in the new venue of online response to a student’s level of inquiry. It seems sort of silly for a nanny standard to test a student on algebra in her first college year, when the internet is sending her more basic math knowledge based on her past visits online. Or really silly to give the same algebra test to a student in her class who is exploring calculus and trigonometry based on HTML.5 selected resources where he is spending time.

Serving a pupil what to learn next

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Posted on 11th October 2010 by Judy Breck in Findability | Testing and assessment

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Although couched in negative context that spook privacy fears, kudos to the New York Times for putting a HUGE new step toward open learning (though learning is not mentioned) on its front page today. Here from the article is the gist of what the new HTML.5 that is the subject of the article does:

The new Web language and its additional features present more tracking opportunities because the technology uses a process in which large amounts of data can be collected and stored on the user’s hard drive while online. Because of that process, advertisers and others could, experts say, see weeks or even months of personal data. That could include a user’s location, time zone, photographs, text from blogs, shopping cart contents, e-mails and a history of the Web pages visited.

Let’s change the the above quoted paragraph to get a look at what the new Web language can mean for a student when she goes online to learn some more about a subject, say Egyptian history:

The new Web language and its additional features present more tracking opportunities because the technology uses a process in which large amounts of data can be collected and stored on the user’s hard drive while online. Because of that process, history expert websites and Egyptology museums could, experts say, see weeks or even months of study data for the student visiting their webpage. That could include a user’s previous pages visited about Egypt, time spent on such pages and whether the student had clicked there on simple or challenging links, blogs on Egypt she has bookmarked, tests and her scores for previous online assessment, other related e-mails and a history of the Web pages visited.

For education, this can mean that very different webpages about Egyptian history will respond to individual students — based on what they have looked at in the past. A second-grader’s data would tell the search process that her recent visit was to a childlike tutorial on pyramids. A high school student’s data would include a previous visit to the Metropolitan and British museums’ collections on Egyptology. Today, a Google search for “Egyptian history” would return the same list of recommended websites, in the same order, to both students. With HTML.5, a Google search will return a list of simpler websites to the second-grader and more enriched and advanced Egyptology online material for the high school student.

Quoting again from today’s New York Times article:

“It’s going to change everything about the Internet and the way we use it today,” said James Cox, 27, a freelance consultant and software developer at Smokeclouds, a New York City start-up company. “It’s not just HTML 5. It’s the new Web.”

For education, HTML.5 means serving a pupil what to learn next. This very powerful individualization of dynamic knowledge cannot be experienced without online access. A mobile internet browser will put the new HTML.5 Web into a student’s hands.

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.

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