Ken Nelson

Finland’s students are the best in the world. Yet their students are in school the LEAST of any developed country.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/world_news_america/8601207.stm

My favorite quotation… “This is my school, not the politician’s school“.  By the principal of the school they visited.

What also helps… no immigrants. But if they did have more immigrants, I suspect they would do just fine.

The structure reminds me of a Montessori school my kids attended. They were in the same class/teacher for 3 year chunks.

We could, and should, structure our schools like this but we won’t because our schools are about two things… teachers benefits and getting kids out of parents hair so they can go off and work to pay taxes and buy crap.

Ultimately, Finland’s schools work because their culture wants them to work. Ours doesn’t.

Not for most students. 

With many colleges simply not worth the investment, we need to find ways to collect and publish ROI data so students can make better decisions about what college or university to attend.

Of course there are other things – like delaying adulthood and access to higher quality mates, that are not necessarily economically measurable but are very desirable.

I’ve split the middle. Any fancy college that will sponsor my kids is welcome to them.  Lacking that a decent state school that can be funded out of pocket will be where we send them. No loans. And although we can’t control it, we will encourage them to major in something tough and universally applicable.

 
Hey kid… avoid bird poop – don’t have a summer vacation!

Our ever so lame President, not having thrown a bone (or billions) to the Teachers unions for a bit, tossed them one over the weekend.

Obama repeated his support for a longer school year. He did not specify how long that school year should be, however he noted that U.S. students attend classes, on average, about a month less than children in most other advanced countries.

Given this President you always have to figure out how anything he wants to do will help big donors. So I read this as “teachers could get paid for another month of work”. See it’s simple!

But…  based on what I see from public schools, and the inefficient way they teach and allocate time, they could teach all year and it wouldn’t help.  We’ve wasted trillions on them with no improvements to show for it.

And gosh…. my generation went to school a lot shorter than modern kids, and we had less teachers, and a LOT less money and doggone it… our TEST SCORES WERE THE SAME!

Nope, the school year isn’t the problem. The problem is THE SCHOOLS and the amazingly bad way they are run.

A President not in the hip pocket of the unions might be willing to do something about it. This President, however, isn’t the man for that job, or any job, other than perhaps writing his memoirs (the only thing he has lots of experience at).

Even Christie doesn’t go near far enough. We have too many teachers, earning too much, and with too large a lifetime benefits package.  How much has it gotten out of hand?

From 1970 to 2008, the student population increased 8 percent and the number of teachers 61 percent. The student-teacher ratio has fallen sharply, from 27-to-1 in 1955 to 15-to-1 in 2007.

End result…. test scores are IDENTICAL!

All of this is just guilt over other people taking your brats off your hands. Well, feel guilty, but I’d APPRECIATE IT if you would soothe your guilty pangs with YOUR OWN MONEY.

I think college is a good idea mainly because there are pretty girls for my son to meet, and handsome, responsible, boys for my daughter to meet.  Not all are. Or even not many. But enough.

Oh… and they might learn something.

Yea, sure, I do value the educational part of college. But not to the extent of decades, or even years of debt. DO NOT expect me or them to go into debt for college. Nope. And not a time debt, like the Army, either. Nope. No way! College for my kids will be pay as they go baby.

Of course they are brilliant, above average, kids and I expect merit based scholarships.  If Harvard wants them, it can pay. Otherwise, the University of Utah, or Dixie College will do just fine. The girls are pretty, and the boys earnest. And the education solid. What more could a father ask for?

Infographic by College Scholarships.org

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