Ken Nelson

Bergeson said he’s a firm believer in AYP, but just doesn’t think it’s an accurate measure.

The quotation is from The Spectrum newspaper, quoting Larry Bergeson Principal, Dixie High School on why his school was identified as failing on the Annual Year Progress test of the No Child Left Behind Act.

I’m not sure who to question more on this quotation. The principal who “firmly believes” in an in-accurate measure, or the reporter who didn’t feel the need to question further such an oxymoronic statement by someone entrusted with thousands of kids education.

11 schools in Washington County failed the AYP goals.

I disagree with the NCLB, mainly because I don’t think the Feds ought to be sending money to local schools. Secondarily because I think it squelches what little teacher initiative is left in our overly bureaucratic and large school systems.

Online physics

Bill Gates and his son use the Khan Academy – and you should too!

"This guy is amazing," he wrote. "It is awesome how much he has done with very little in the way of resources." Gates and his 11-year-old son, Rory, began soaking up videos, from algebra to biology. Then, several weeks ago, at the Aspen Ideas Festival in front of 2,000 people, Gates gave the 33-year-old Khan a shout-out that any entrepreneur would kill for. Ruminating on what he called the "mind-blowing misallocation" of resources away from education, Gates touted the "unbelievable" 10- to 15-minute Khan Academy tutorials "I’ve been using with my kids."

I’m not exactly a fan of Bill Gates’ allocation of Microsoft investments or his own personal philanthropy.  Tens of billions of dollars wasted.  But I do think he is correct here about the Khan Academy.

I’m going threw Physics now so I can be refreshed to address topics with my kids, who are enrolled in a high school physics class online.    I was just going to re-read Asimov’s “Understanding Physics” but I’m not sure where it is after the Nelson flood of 2010.

We cannot simultaneously claim, however, that teachers are vitally important for the future of our children and also that their effectiveness should not be measured.  As systems like this become more common students will benefit enormously and so will teachers.

Alex Tabarrok
MarginalRevolution.com

Imagine… after years of toiling away at a school you finally get your picture in the paper! Yippee… but then you read the caption:

Over seven years, John Smith’s fifth-graders have started out slightly ahead of those just down the hall but by year’s end have been far behind.

Ouch!  It sucks for John Smith, but it could be a revolution for education. Maybe. The LA Times, using data that the school district also has ready access to, has merely proven something everybody else knows – some teachers are good, some are bad.

The statistical analysis the Times used seems fair. They don’t judge on an absolute scale, but instead measure improvement or decline in the same kids as they move from teacher to teacher.  The theory… if your students improve on standard tests, you are effective.  And the differences can be substantial:

Highly effective teachers routinely propel students from below grade level to advanced in a single year.

Oh… and was it a poor school/rich school thing?  Nope. That was one of the other myths this study shot down.

Teachers had three times as much influence on students’ academic development as the school they attend.

and

The quality of instruction typically varied far more within a school than between schools.

Other myths?  Higher paid teachers are more effective. Nope. More trained teachers are more effective. Nope. And more educated teachers are more effective. Nope.

Mostly, it seems, effective teachers engage students. Ineffective ones don’t.

Simple. And something I learned 28 years ago when I learned how to train other soldiers in the Army. I learned that facilities (how about under a tree), equipment (how about we use Smith as a CPR dummy), and how many times I’d actually done it mattered little to getting these soldiers to learn it. What mattered was how interesting and engaging I made it.

I’ll read this LA Times series with interest as they come out. And post on them too. I’m dubious it will help education, whose problems lie mostly in the teachers unions stifling of the educational experience, and at home where many parents are dolts.

But given the trillions being currently wasted, even a little bit of help, could be a big improvement.

Update… I like Mr. Smith’s attitude and wish him the best on making instructional changes:

"Obviously what I need to do is to look at what I’m doing and take some steps to make sure something changes," he said.

You read that right… LA Times gets major kudos from moi. Why?  Their investigative series on teacher effectiveness in the LA School District.  This is EXACTLY what newspapers should do – and exactly the kind of target they should aim at.

I’ll be writing more on the series of articles as they come out.  But I figured, first, congratulations and kudos on a job well done by a paper I’ve been very critical of in the past.

We are a big nation – geographically and economically. But there are limits and even a giant must pay the piper for bad investments that do not provide good returns.

Take public schooling…  please.  Check this chart out:

Spending explodes, achievement declines. 

Or this chart:

Enrollment up slightly, spending up immensely.

We, the nation, states, and citizens are getting a REALLY bad return on trillions of dollars in wasteful spending.  Spending taken from taxpayers,  and the future economy, that will not return enough to recoup the investment.

You can buy babysitters cheaper than this people. Get smart, governmental bad investments are killing our economy, our future, and even our future’s future.

Full details at Big Government.  Read it and weep.

A line only a union could love

How about roll back public school employment to match enrollment?

Over the past forty years, public school employment has risen 10 times faster than enrollment (see chart). There are only 9 percent more students today, but nearly twice as many public school employees. To prove that rolling back this relentless hiring spree by a few years would hurt student achievement, you’d have to show that all those new employees raised achievement in the first place. That would be hard to do… because it never happened.

I’d eliminate the Dept of Education, and ax ALL Federal spending on education.

Salman Khan may be the future of education. He has developed over 800 videos explaining everything from the banking crisis to calculus.

Here he explains an alternate approach to the banking bailout (one I like quite a bit):

He covers lots of stuff… here he explains “Standard Deviation” in statistics…

Is this the “future” of education?  Yes – this or something like it.

All his videos can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/user/khanacademy#p

Was ist Amerika?

Tyler Cowen has a question:

I’ll be teaching a class at the Freie Universität this summer on this topic, in the North American Studies department.  I am wondering what I should have them read.

My first answer suggested this was a hard question to answer without knowing what he wants to get across about America, “his view of America”.

In a later comment, I explain what the syllabus would be with my view of America:

I. What we were

a) Constitution
b) Declaration of Independence
c) Federalist Papers

Assigned reading: Above documents

II. Transformation

a) 1913 Constitutional Amendments (16 and 17)
b) TR, Wilson,  FDR and Progressives

Assigned Reading: William Manchester’s Glory and the Dream

III Progressive/Redistributive Endgame

a) entitlements
b) demographic shifts
c) governmental corruption

Assigned reading – PJ O’Rourke’s Parliament of Whores

In many ways this represents my American timeline. In my youth and 20’s I read the founding documents and our core history. In my late 20’s / 30’s I read more detailed things, like the Glory and the Dream (among others). And then I read Parliament of Whores and realized the jig was up, we were walking dead and just didn’t know it yet.

A program gave poor people vouchers to buy computers.

What happened to their kids grades?

They dropped of course. Here’s why:

Computer game playing went WAY up. Computer homework, flat.

Spending more money on education just isn’t the answer. Spending less, smarter,would help everybody.

H/T Marginal Revolution

National Education Standards, authored by Obama’s people,:

The whole idea of imposing a single set of age-based standards on all students rests on a false premise: that children are identical widgets capable of being dragged along an instructional conveyor belt at the same pace, benefiting equally from the experience.

But kids are different — not only from one another, but when it comes to their own varying facility across subjects as well. Any single set of age-based standards, no matter how thoughtfully conceived, will necessarily be too slow or too fast for most children.

Kids are different. My two are.  Both are super smart, but in different ways and areas.

I can think of few things worse than national centralization of education standards and funding.  That would doom us.

 
Aerial shot of Kansas City schools

Between 1985 and 2003 Federal Judges took over Kansas City, Missouri and channeled 2 billion dollars to the school district. 

Not only did they double property taxes to pay this huge bill, but they imposed an income tax surcharge on everyone who lived or worked in the city.

…

Despite this massive effort, litigation failed either to improve the quality of education or to reduce racial isolation. Test scores continued to drop, and the percentage of minority students continued to rise. Eventually, black parents—who had long opposed the court’s heavy emphasis on "magnet schools" designed to draw whites into the school system—insisted upon a return to neighborhood schools.

Yesterday, the district voted a plan to shut down half their schools and fire 700 of their 3000 employees.

Why, exactly, do we think the Feds can run our health care any better?

This is another in the “What I’d do if I were Governor” posts…

My preferred way to handle schooling is to have parents pay for it and require children attend til age 18 or until they pass an adult competency test.

Pretty simple plan isn’t it?  I like it. And guess what… I’m living by it now! I pay for my two kids private and home schooled education. And… so you know, I also pay directly for about 8 other kids education that aren’t even mine. And… so you know, I also pay indirectly for a few million other kid that I never even heard of.

I like my plan so far, except for the part where I pay for a bureaucracy to mishandle millions of other people’s kids. What I buy directly I value more and monitor more.

Below I’ll answer your inane questions…

But Ken… I’ve got 8 kids and can’t afford it. 

Not my problem.  Find a scholarship. Take a loan. Adopt out some of them.

But Ken… my property taxes are just $800, it’s cheaper. 

You pay taxes your whole life. Your kids only go to school 12 years. Distribute your 12 years of schooling over your adult life and it beats property taxes. If you have a cash flow problem, choose a cheaper school or borrow and spread out the payments. And since it isn’t a government bureaucracy it will be cheaper than per pupil spending is now.

But Ken… it benefits everybody, so everybody should pay

Under my scheme everybody does pay. Very few people don’t have children, and I’d be glad to hit childless adults for a scholarship fund if it makes you happy.

But Ken… I value varsity sports.

Good. Pay for it yourself.

But Ken…. question interrupted

Look shut up, I don’t care what you say you value.  You clearly don’t value schooling if you want somebody else to decide how it is given to your kids. This is OBVIOUS. So shut up, or go back to school and learn to think.  They are YOUR kids, you should DECIDE what their schooling is.  Do you let somebody else dress them? Feed them? Discipline them?  Get real, schooling need be assisted by experts in certain areas (algebra, so forth), but you need to be in charge.

Apparently, men, are the hot commodity at colleges these days:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/07/fashion/07campus.html?pagewanted=all

Jayne Dallas, a senior studying advertising who was seated across the table, grumbled that the population of male undergraduates was even smaller when you looked at it as a dating pool. “Out of that 40 percent, there are maybe 20 percent that we would consider, and out of those 20, 10 have girlfriends, so all the girls are fighting over that other 10 percent,” she said.

Related… the marriage super market.

You see this in LDS culture here in Utah. The number of observant LDS women is more than observant LDS young men. Young men, who are active and return from successful missions,  date and marry much higher quality mates than you would otherwise expect for them.  To paraphrase Joe Jackson, Yes… she really is going out with him.

Kudos to Sen Buttars

Chris Buttars, a state Senator from West Jordan, UT has proposed controversial things before, largely related to social issues. But today, he really impressed me with his thoughts on education reform to save money.

He wants to get rid of the 12th grade:

Buttars argued before the Public Education Appropriations Subcommittee on Monday that 12th grade is essentially a wasted year, with high school seniors either already taking college courses, or just playing around. The students who are ready would move on, while some type of remedial system would be available for those who aren’t.

I don’t know the merits of the proposal. I instinctively like it because graduation would be based on skill, not time in the system.  But I’m happy to have it studied, honestly, before implementation.

But what I really like is his no sacred cows approach.  Naturally the education establishment hates the idea – which is a plus in its favor in my book.