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.
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.
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.
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. . . .
As described here in an earlier post, young African Americans are accessing the web 1.5 hours a day on mobile, compared to .5 for white youths. The potential here is to send failing government schools into meltdown. I know, for example, a black New York City teenager who is qualifying for a software engineering entry job online, having dropped out of an awful high school uptown.
A Napster-like knowledge network is emerging out there. Testing is arriving online too. This individual web access to learning subjects and certification is in principle no different from how kids a decade ago accessed their music.
Do you suppose that while the Obama/Duncan government take over pays off all the top down school people, that the kids will do education Napster-like and empty schools? Why not? Surely Wikipedia is a Napster of learning, as Wired Campus reported last week.
For the same reason the music industry experienced in the Napster meltdown, students are approaching a threshold beyond which they can walk out of school and learn whatever they want from the schooling in their hand. This description from Wikipedia of Napster may outline the meltdown that lies ahead for government education:
Napster was an online music file sharing service created by Shawn Fanning while he was attending Northeastern University in Boston. The service operated between June 1999 and July 2001. Its technology allowed people to easily share their MP3 files with other participants, bypassing the established market for such songs and thus leading to the music industry’s accusations of massive copyright violations. Although the original service was shut down by court order, it paved the way for decentralized peer-to-peer file-distribution programs, which have been much harder to control.
You are thinking kids just use their mobiles to play games and text. We will see . . .
In this five-minute interview Ken Robinson discusses with Bonnie Hunt why standardized testing is harmful to the individual development of children. He includes a key thought that is part of network theory, though he does not talk of it in network terms: configuring a pattern around a center. Of course standardized testing does the opposite of letting a child center learning around an individual talent.
Robinson explains near the end of the video that “kids give you messages” about what they are drawn to, which in a network environment is a potential center around which their education could be shaped. Robinson says that “when you find your talent, your whole life changes. . . . If education is not about finding the life that’s purpose is meaningful fulfillment, then what is it about?”
The strong echo continues in schools and across the world of what Jonathan Kozol indelibly named savage inequalities. The mobile window opens a global commons that is the same for each and oblivious to who is visiting it to learn.
