Technology: "Social Robots" In The Classroom

Social robots are already being used to work with autistic kids, stroke victims, and the elderly. Poor kids and more kinds of students with disabilities can't be far behind.  

This article (The Love Bot) from Pacific Standard (formerly Miller-McCune) asks if the benefits -- the patience, adaptability, etc -- outweighs the cost, effectiveness, and morality of serving populations with machines that may motivate them rather than addressing their needs through services and programs provided by human beings.

This August article from Slate (Robots may become elementary school teachers in the future) shares research showing that people learn more from physical robots than they do from onscreen avatars.

Classrooms: Here Comes "Universal Design"

My latest article from the Harvard Education Letter, Bringing UDL into the Mainstream, is now up online (subscription required).

It describes how an approach called UDL (universal design for learning) has been spreading from individual classrooms, to schools, to districts, and now even to states (or at least a few of them) -- despite the lack of clear effectiveness research and the confusion between it and other popular reforms such as differentiated instruction and buying iPads.

Thanks to everybody who helped me get up to speed on this fascinating issue.  Any experiences or insights into UDL that you want to add, please do so in comments or on Twitter.

My Spring 2012 Harvard Ed Letter article (no subscription required) looked at the impact of NCLB waivers on special education programs and students (With the Rise of “Super Subgroups,” Concerns for Disabled Students Mount).

Bruno: Beware Of Researchers Brandishing Brain Scans

Based on Vaughan Bell's recommendation, I finally finished watching an excellent lecture by Dorothy Bishop on the dangers of using neuroimaging in educational research. It's long - almost an hour - but very accessible and speaks directly to a number of education research "findings" that have received attention in the press.

Bishop wants to make two big points: The first is that a lot of neuroscience - especially neuroimaging - doesn't tell us very much about human thinking and learning. For example, changes in the way different parts of the brain "light up" over the course of an experiment might have as much to do with the passage of time as they do with the experiment itself.

The second big point is that both scientists and laypeople are more likely to accept scientific claims if they are accompanied by neuroscience-y visuals - like images of brain scans - even if the claims themselves would be obviously bogus if presented alone. In other words, neuroimaging often provides little support for scientific claims about learning, but nevertheless makes us much more likely to believe such claims. That's a dangerous combination for anyone trying to interpret the latest educational research finding.

If you don't have the time to watch the whole thing, a summary of the lecture can be found here. And next time you read about an educational study with descriptions of "brain activity" ask yourself, "What would I think about these results if the researchers hadn't done any brain scanning?" - PB (@MrPABruno) (image source)

Charts: Your Students/Kids Probably Can't Read This Chart

Just as charts (er, infographics) are getting more complicated (er, misleading), kids' abilities to interpret them is falling behind, notes this Atlantic blog post by John Tierney (Can Your Kid Read Graphs and Charts?)

Morning Video: Trade School Is The New College

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Young people head to trade school NBC Nightly News

People: College-Skipping Nuclear Scientist

Meet Taylor Wilson, 18, one of Atlantic Magazine's latest "Brave Thinkers," who at 14 built a nuclear fusion reactor and is taking one of those $100K Thiel Fellowships instead of going to college.

"I was about 10 when I got into nuclear science. That was when that spark hit me. It took a few years of research, but when I was 14, I produced my first nuclear-fusion reaction...

"When people have dedicated their lives to something—and spent eight years in college—they just expect that a kid wouldn’t be up to doing it. But kids have a certain predisposition to do things differently and see the world differently—and that’s helpful.

"I don’t mean to offend anybody, but I think that we get a lot of scientists now who are bent into a system, and we lose some of their boldness by that. Obviously, you have to learn the ropes, but I think it’s important to do that without hammering out the radicalness that makes innovation happen."

Thompson: Using Technology to Empower Great Teachers

If I had a magic wand, I would gladly implement the vision presented by Bryan and Emily Hassel in Teaching in the Age of Digital Instruction. I would not work that magic until after granting other requests for more important educational miracles, such as creating high-quality early education and restoring the power of unions.  After all, Hassel and Hassel virtually ignore poverty and their theories will have no chance in urban districts until we institute an even more complicated set of aligned socio-emotional supports.  And, the Hassels seem to realize that their grand agenda will be stillborn unless teachers unions are empowered along the lines of the motion picture industry's unions. 

I also suspect that America's best districts, serving our most privileged students, will adopt many of their ideals and that progress will occur fairly rapidly.  After all, I suspect that affluent districts will soon free themselves from the retrograde test-driven accountability movement that the Hassels acknowledge is undermining the quest for better instructional systems. In districts that do not feel impelled to defeat teachers, technology will allow charismatic teachers to have greater influence.  Others should be allowed to teach to their strengths, whether it means they are tutoring, lecturing, modeling, mentoring or teaching basic skills.  Technology will also create more lower-paid positions, and eventually savings will accrue. 

Morning Video: A Pointless Shame

This is the video that Canadian high school student Amanda Todd made shortly before committing suicide last week, in large part over the consequences of a middle school webcam mistake that followed her on Facebook for the next several years and at different schools. (Pointless Shame)

Bruno: The Limits of Game-Based Learning

As a player and fan I've always wanted to believe that video games are poised to revolutionize education. Contrary to years (decades?) of breathless commentary, though, that revolution has conspicuously failed to materialize.

Kris Wheaton at Mercyhurst College has been working on a great series of posts that explain exactly why game-based learning hasn't lived up to the hype. He identifies a large number of challenges, including the massive costs of developing most video games and the virtual impossibility of making a learning game that will appeal to a broad-enough audience. He also points out that educational games have actually been with us for a very long time, so video games per se don't have the revolutionary potential we might assume.

I had been waiting to post a link until Wheaton's series was completed, but it's been over a month since the last update. Here's hoping we can nudge him to lay out the rest of his thoughts. - PB (@MrPABruno) (image source)

Morning Video: Tracking Chips Added To Student ID Cards

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

They're a little thicker than the plastic ID badges that have become standard, and they have an RFID tag inside them.  NBC News covers the San Antonio controversy. Wired covered this earlier in the fall.

Afternoon Video: "Meducation"

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The Word - Meducation
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog Video Archive

"Since America can't afford all the teachers it would take to give children personal attention, doctors recommend psychostimulants to improve kids' grades." (Colbert Report)

Pictures: Nobel Prize Winner's Report Card Describes Ambitions As "Ridiculous"

"On Monday, John Gurdon won the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine. This is an excerpt from his 1949 high school report card." (via Wonkblog, via BoingBoing)

Reform: Hey, Let's Use Klout Scores

There's a UNC professor who's grading kids in part (20 percent!) on their Klout scores, a flawed but popular measure of social media popularity.  

It's not the first time this has been tried -- and not necessarily worked (No One Is Getting an A in This Klout College Class, Atlantic).  

I think that elementary and secondary teachers should do this -- maybe with Twitter followers or Facebook friends.  But only with a portion of students' grades.  And then maybe administrators should use Klout or other social measures as part of a teacher's evaluation or for merit pay.  What do you think?

All this is just an excuse to run this October 1 New Yorker cartoon: "I'm sorry, Paige, but grades are based on the quality of the writing, not on your Klout score."

Afternoon Video: Kahn Describes Response To His Approach

A three-part interview via Slate.

Five Best Blogs: Online Charters Dinged For Quality & Cost

Up 30 pct since last year, online charters face quality & cost backlash ME NJ NC PA TN FL http://ow.ly/ebDyU  @SSimonReuters

US Chamber and National PTA coalition urge Duncan to me more careful with NCLB waivers, notes SI&A Cabinet Report ow.ly/ec0o8

Reform-backed CT candidate wins recount primary thanks to late $$ from reform group http://Courant.com  http://ow.ly/ebWhB  

Wilingham & Ferlazzo debate whether online nastiness is a function of psychology or strategy (or, probably, both) http://ow.ly/ebEHA 

When Curious Parents See Math Grades in Real Time - WSJ.com ow.ly/eco90 

Teach Plus: Charter or District? Whatever Works ow.ly/ecb9h

How Teachers Can Avoid "SHOCKTOBER" NPR http://ow.ly/ebKWO @roxannaelden 

Afternoon Video: Duncan Talks Textbooks, Teachers, Election

Bruno: Don't Be Misled By Toxic Online Education Exchanges

It was nearly a month ago that John Thompson linked to John Merrow's piece about hyperpolarization in education reform debates, but I only just got around to reading it. It's just as well, because Merrow's points about "rants and negativity" were nicely illustrated by the recent Chicago teachers' strike.

Over the course of the CTU work stoppage I was struck by the nastiness of the online discourse. Supporters of the strike casually claimed that Rahm Emanuel & Co. were dishonest "privatizers", and CTU's critics routinely claimed to have demonstrated that Chicago's striking teachers - and Karen Lewis in particular - did not care about the district's children. And, of course, while each side was horrified and offended by the groundless personal attacks made against them, neither side seemed to appreciate the irony of their hypocrisy. Sadly, it was only a somewhat exaggerated version of the sort of polarized discourse Merrow criticized pre-strike.

And yet what strikes me every time I step away from the computer is that the discourse around education in my offline life is not nearly so polarized. I read the phrase "war on teachers" online nearly every day, but have never heard it in person from a teacher. My coworkers use standardized test results some times and complain about their limitations other times, but they rarely use terms like "mania" or "meaningless" that you commonly see online. I don't think I've ever heard a teacher either deny that poverty "matters" or use poverty as an "excuse."

In other words, while much of the education conversation in this country is overly polarized, it is not uniformly polarized and focusing on the most-polarized contexts -e.g., social media or the districts with the most adversarial labor/management relationships - can give a misleading impression of the temperature of the debate nationwide. The case for optimism may therefore be slightly stronger than John Merrow allows. - PB (@MrPABruno) (image source)

Weekend Reading: Three Don't-Miss Things To Read

Three of the dozen or so stories I pointed folks to over the weekend:

We've already seen some pushback against the Tough book from the right, and here's some from the left: Paul Tough Is Way Off-Base. And Stop Saying “Grit”. « Katie Osgood @ the chalk face ow.ly/e6JZb

The Chicago Reader takes a look at a charter school teachers' firing:  Fighting for the right to fire bad teachers—and good ones too - Chicago Reader ow.ly/e6IgA

Ed tech enthusiasts were hoping that access to kids would be eased, but apparently that's not going to happen just yet:  F.T.C. Moves to Tighten Online Privacy Protections for Children -http://ow.ly/e4TRf  

Looking for things to read over the weekend?  Follow me on Twitter -- I post articles and commentary you might not otherwise see, from magazines and blogs outside the usual education list.

Media: Another Cash Infusion For EdTech Cheerleader

I still haven't seen anything critical (or even skeptical) coming out of EdSurge, the 18 month-old newsletter/website out of Silicon Valley, but that hasn't stopped the Washington Post, NSVF, and a few others from kicking in $400,000 to go with whatever startup money the Gates Foundation provided to fund EdSurge's expansion.

In its press release, EdSurge is described as being independent and journalistic, which -- yikes (Washington Post, NewSchools Venture Fund Back EdSurge).  While generally positive, TechCrunch's blog post talks about how educators need to "sift through the BS" and warns that "being a cheerlader only goes so far." (A Resource For All Things EdTech). 

No doubt about the need, but I'm still not sure about whether EdSurge is going to be that vehicle.  Will EdSurge link to stories like "Five Reasons Why School Tablet Rollouts Can Stumble – Or Fail" (Mindshift) much less write their own? The folks behind EdSurge keep saying that they're going to be independent and skeptical, but ... when?

 Previous Posts: Wanting A Little More From EdSurge, Not Another EdTech Cheerleader, New Blog To Hype Blended Learning Bubble.

Morning Video: Crunching Text Messages To Find Hotspots

"Nancy Lublin, CEO of Do Something, gives a five-minute TED talk on the potential in analyzing text messages." (Analyzing text messages to save lives Flowing Data)

Morning Video: Life As A Video Game, Complete With Display Info

 

Some teachers already have video cameras watching their every move, and coaches whispering instructions to them through Bluetooth earbuds. What's next? How about Google glasses flashing information at them while they're delivering a lesson (or going through a parent teacher conference)? Or skip the glasses -- contact lenses, or ocular implants.  Watch this video and you'll get a sense of what I'm imagining.

Magazines: If Doctors Can Do It, So Can Teachers

Last week I tweeted out the arrival of Atul Gawande's recent New Yorker article about what the medical industry could learn from the restaurant chain called the Cheesecake Factory, suggesting that maybe there were things that the education industry could learn from the article as well: 

"In medicine, too, we are trying to deliver a range of services to millions of people at a reasonable cost and with a consistent level of quality. Unlike the Cheesecake Factory, we haven’t figured out how. Our costs are soaring, the service is typically mediocre, and the quality is unreliable. Every clinician has his or her own way of doing things, and the rates of failure and complication (not to mention the costs) for a given service routinely vary by a factor of two or three, even within the same hospital."

My goal is to make you see education everywhere, like I do, and to learn to ignore the events and coverage that are ostensibly about education but really offer little new or helpful. However, knowing that you are perhaps as lazy or even lazier than I am, I thought I'd lay out just what I learned from the article now that I finally had a chance to read through it.  If you're anything like me you'll experience recognition, rage, and some sense of what the education debate is missing.

“Customization should be five per cent, not ninety-five per cent, of what we do,” says one of the characters in Gawande's story. 

Afternoon Video: Teenage Inventors At Learning Summit

"The 2012 Summit, held in Kansas City expanded its seminar topics to include everything from grant resources and funding to incorporating hands-on learning in the classroom." (Lego Education Learning Summit via Wired)

Charts: Growth In Online Education Master's Degrees

 
Sure, the online Master's programs that have been proliferating are as good or better than the traditional ones.  USA Today

Magazines: The Computer Delusion

One of the most memorable, if not influential, magazine articles of the 1990s was Todd Oppenheimer's The Computer Delusion, published in The Atlantic magazine in 1997: 

"There is no good evidence that most uses of computers significantly improve teaching and learning, yet school districts are cutting programs -- music, art, physical education -- that enrich children's lives to make room for this dubious nostrum, and the Clinton Administration has embraced the goal of "computers in every classroom" with credulous and costly enthusiasm."

It's tablets, mobile, and 4G connectivity now, rather than desktops and broadband.  But the arguments for -- and the skepticism against -- haven't changed that much.  

Technology: Back To School Drones

One of the new things you may see during the upcoming school year are drones -- the unmanned aerial vehicles that have long been used overseas and by the military.

 Some of the uses that are being tried in schools around the nation: *Dropoff and pickup supervision *Lunch / recess supervision *Menu announcements *Truancy sweeps *Test proctoring *Patrolling the senior parking lot *Finding lost kids and schoolbuses off school grounds *Field trip supervision

For more on domestic uses of drones, check out this NPR story from Larry Abramson.

Morning Video: Inside Students' [And Policymakers'] Brains

Perhaps, using MRI technology like this, researchers will eventually be able to understand student learning -- and policymakers' thinking (Map of connections in the human brain)

Thompson: Gates Is Right On Common Core & Student Engagement

Bill Gates' speech to the Education Commission of the States includes an ebullient endorsement of Common Core that I read as "not wrong," and an endorsement of peer review that I see as a step in the right direction. Some of Gates' vision for technology, I believe, merits full-throated praise: 

"Imagine if kids poured their time and passion into a video game that taught them math concepts while they barely noticed because it was so enjoyable... The goal of the game is to rescue animals whose ships are stuck in outer space. The ships require different amounts of fuel, powered by lasers. So the players have to manipulate fractions to split the lasers into the right amount of fuel." (see full text here).

Of course, there are a couple of things missing from the Gates vision.  I would remind Gates that teachers have a lot of other ways of assessing student mastery.  The best way is conversing with the student. And I would remind him that the optimal way to make his vision a reality is to recruit adults, with all types of skills (including, but not limited to computers), to pioneer "win win" innovations, as opposed to using technology for command and control. Rather that focusing on our schools' and our governance systems' weaknesses, why not build on the creativity that invented those digital miracles?- JT(@drjohnthompson) via.  

Thompson: Reformers, Virtual Schools, & Duncan

The NEPC's "Understanding and Improving Full-Time Virtual Schools" could have been titled, "Everything You Want to Know About Cyber-Schools, but Were Afraid to Ask." Its author, Gary Miron, lets the facts speak for themselves. Even without much commentary, those facts tell a story that is truly frightening -- and raise some key questions for reformers and the Obama administration.

Much of the appeal of K12 is that they expend about $3,000 less than the $10,000 per student that the United States invests in education. It is to the shame of this country that we only spend $1,021 per student on support services.  K12 spends $230 per student.  K12 spends at least $500 per student less on special education, and it also spends $1,250 less per pupil on benefits for staff. K12 has fewer special education students, fewer lower income students and students of color, and far fewer English Language Learners. Miron estimates that K12 has a $4,000 to $5,000 per student cost advantage over regular schools, but its student performance outcomes are deeply troubling. While 52% of American schools met AYP, the percentage of K12 schools meeting NCLB's metric is only 28%.  K12's on-time graduation rate is 49%, in comparison to the nation's rate of 79%.

Miron is too polite to ask about the silence of the accountability hawks.  Data-driven "reformers" continually preach about instruction, instruction, instruction, so why do they ignore the obvious instructional problems in virtual schools? To his credit, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has challenged online schooling in higher education.  When will he look into schools like K12, and the even more worrisome can of worms which is virtual schools operated by charter school chains?- JT(@drjohnthompson) 

Thompson: The Credit Recovery Wars Heat Up In NYC

Eric Nadelstern, in his recent SchoolBook editorial, reports that one-third of New York City students fail three or more subjects, often because they were absent, cut too many classes, and/or failed to complete their assignments.

Done properly credit recovery can be beneficial but my students correctly dubbed it as "exercising the right click finger."  Typically, credit recovery teaches the lesson that learning is unimportant and just getting "passed on" is the purpose of schooling. In response to these criticisms, however, Nadelstern reacts as if the state shot his puppy: "The response among opponents of this administration to credit recovery is about politics, not about students. To be sure, there were some principals and teachers who, unable to promote student achievement through other means, corrupted credit recovery efforts in their schools by lowering standards. These individuals need to be identified and held accountable for their malpractice, including by loss of employment."

From what I read, Nadelstern used to be a toughtful and caring educator.  In this post, as in his venomous attack on dissenters in his recent Center on Reinventing Public Education report, "The Evolution of School Support Networks in New York City," Nadelstern sounds like an embittered casuality of the accountability wars.- JT(@drjohnthompson) image via.

Morning Video: New Apps Help Disabled Kids Engage

This segment from last weekend's 60 Minutes highlights voice recognition and other software that can help austistic and other disabled children communicates with parents and teachers.

Quotes: "Big, Drastic, [Unproven] Things"

Politicians and parents and children and venture capitalists... tend to want to do big, drastic things which could have immediate results... Most of these ideas have been tested on a relatively small scale; almost none of them have shown lasting results at a large scale. -- euters' columnist Felix Salmon

Video: "Frontline" Features Philly Kids Competing For Auto X Prize

Preview of Frontline segment coming next week.

Charts: Previous Chart Overstated Online Teacher Prep

As you can see there's not a ton of overlap in terms of either the institutions or the numbers when you look at my list of teacher prep programs and the one that the folks at NCTQ have come up with:

The explanation, in a post called New teacher production numbers... it's a long tail, is that my list (from USDE, in 2010, riffing off a Hechinger Report article about the growth of online teacher prep programs) is a look at the raw number of students who completed a degree -- including folks getting masters' or preparing to become counselors -- while their list reflects "numbers of graduates who took a certification test upon graduation" (ie, anticipated classroom teachers).  It's not just an issue of accuracy.  Their list also contains less online programs, which suggests that maybe it's the folks getting master's and sneaky counselors who are going online, not so much the new classroom teachers.  (That's my guess, not theirs.) Their post notes that that for all the attention on the biggest schools in the top ten list, the vast majority of teacher candidates come through smaller programs.  

Quotes: Not Impressed By Scientology -- Or Other Vendors

Are we excited or are we impressed about the type of contribution [Applied Scholastics] make to our students’ performance? No. But do we feel the same way about 95 percent of the providers? Yes. - LAUSD tutoring coordinator Luis Mora in The Daily

Spreadsheets: Largest Teacher Prep Programs (2010)

These are the schools that graduated at least a thousand new teachers a year, circa 2010, according to the USDE's Total ed degrees offered in 2010:  

Many of the top schools (numerically) are partially or even completely online.  Via @hechingerreport

Bruno: It's OK When Online Courses Are Traditional

Via Andy Rotherham, Dan Butin has a piece in eLearn Magazine that is rightly critical of the idea that "massive open online courses" (MOOCs) represent a real paradigm shift in higher education.

As he points out, MOOCs mostly just offer the potential for a more efficient and egalitarian distribution of the same higher education resources currently offered at elite universities. That's potentially very important, but it distinctly does not involve reconceptualizing teaching in higher education. Butin thinks this fundamental traditionalism is a problem, arguing that MOOC projects like MITx "have replicated all of the problems of the traditional industrial-age model of lecture-based teaching and testing that has minimal linkage to student outcomes."

This fundamental traditionalism in MOOCs doesn't really worry me, however.

Technology: Facebook's Second Try At Legal Access To Kids

Can we talk for a minute about the big education story that nobody seems to be paying much attention to:  Facebook's long-anticipated effort to expand its (and other online companies') limited access to kids younger than 13?  

As you may recall, Facebook head Mark Zuckerberg floated the idea of being able to "reach" younger kids last year at NSVF -- an idea with obvious appeal to the company, online learning endeavors, and entertainment outfits like Disney.

Zuckerberg even admitted that his $100M Newark commitment had come from his desire to get outside the bounds of the current COPPA law.

The company quickly walked the idea back during the ensuing uproar over privacy, bullying, and Internet predators. But it didn't go away entirely, bubbling along all fall and winter (see an update here), and it's re-emerged now -- cheered on by ed tech types and uber-pragmatists who note that 5.6M younger kids already join sites like Facebook. An early June WSJ story described it as "a step that could help the company tap a new pool of users for revenue but also inflame privacy concerns." Competitors like Apple might not excited, either, given their current dominance in the learning game space. 

Some advocates oppose the move -- a Facebook-affiliated application I've never heard of called Skout has been associated with recent child sexual assaults (Atlantic Wire).  Others just want younger kids' access to be much safer and more private than the teen and adult Facebook experience has been thus far.  USA Today's Greg Toppo had a cover story this week about states' efforts to criminalize online bullying.  But this is not just a technology, parent, or privacy issue, it's an education issue.  One of the main justifications for opening access to younger kids will be educational.  Meantime, Facebook has spent an unknown portion of its $650K in lobbying to get COPPA "reviewed" favorably.

Quotes: What If Technology Makes Things Worse?

While many argue that technology will help close the Achievement Gap, I think the opposite — it may well widen the Achievement Gap, as top kids rise farther, faster. - Michael Goldstein

Update: The Politics Of Ending LIFO

Thanks to Whitney Tilson for the below response to my post criticizing the reform focus on ending LIFO, in which he argues:

"Ending LIFO is a critical first step to getting to what’s really necessary: that every principal has the full power to hire and fire every adult (not just teachers) in the school and he/she sees fit, just as managers in 99% of all businesses/organizations in America do (of course with protections for age, race, gender, etc. discrimination), including KIPP and most other successful schools I’ve seen."

I'd argue that tenure reform is a much broader and more appealing thing to do than the narrow focus on ending LIFO. Then again, the Nichols case isn't actually about seniority based layoffs but rather tenure -- I was hijacking the story to talk about the sympathetic senior stories that ending LIFO would certainly generate, complete with pictures of dignified veteran teachers like Nichols.

Though he seems to be in full Romney mode (describing how he can fire people), at least Tilson seems to agree with me about the politics that are involved.  That's all I am really getting at, but it's not a small matter and Tilson doesn't name any real solutions to the political problem. Read the full Tilson response below.

Media: The Best School Report Card Of Them All?

The Chicago Tribune's school report card has been named one of the winners of the international Data Journalism Award and a glowing comment from New York Times judge Aron Pilhofer:

"For parents wanting to know how their school stacks up, this is exactly what you want. The Tribune handled a complex dataset just right: Instead of throwing a bunch of numbers at readers, in a sort of "you figure it out" way, they add context along with depth so the reader knows what they are looking at, and why it is important."

I'm not sure I'm all that impressed -- are you?  Perhaps there's a contest for online school reports (or should be).  Via @sethlavin.  Other winners here.

Thompson: Florida Test Controversy Previews Common Core Crises

In "FCAT Debacle: Why Public Awareness Matters," EdSector's Susan Headden recounts what she describes as "the latest fiasco in standardized testing." 

An emergency session of the Florida Board of Education dropped cut scores on the state's new writing test as 4th grade proficiency rates fell from 81% to 27%.  Headden predicts that "districts are going to have to get used to these rude surprises." The 46 states that have adopted the Common Core State Standards will have just two years to get ready for their far tougher challenge. The tests will not just assess basic skills, but deeper learning, critical thinking, analysis and high quality writing. 

Follow the links that Headden provided and the enormity of the task becomes clearer.  And it becomes much more obvious that accountability hawks, including Headden, still do not understand the mess that contradictory "reform" messages have created.

Quotes: DC Superintendent Against Published Ratings

"Our professional responsibility to our employees is developmental in nature and is not about putting a label on who they are at one moment in time." 

-- Kaya Henderson on VAM, Rocketship, cheating, and being superintendent in the new Scholastic Administrator

Thompson: Solving Education's Accountability Problem

Bill Tucker's "Grand Test Auto" is the best contribution to the Washington Monthly's special series on new tests, and it's not just because he gives the best explanation of the failure of test-driven reform that I have ever read. Grocery stores used to close for weeks so they could count their inventory, writes Tucker. The contemporary accountability movement forces schools to do the same, squandering 1/4th of the year. "Every year at a given time, regular instruction stops. Teachers enter something called 'test prep' mode; it lasts for weeks leading up to the big assessment. ... Learning stops, evaluation begins." 

In this and many other areas, Tucker gets it right.  There are just a few spots where I would disagree with him.  

Thompson: The Common Core & The US Railway System

Robert Rotham's "Transcontinental Education" in the Washington Monthly's  special issue on the new wave of reforms, reached back to the 1860s for a metaphorical explanation of the potential of new Standards to accomplish what the equally good, old Standards failed to do. He claimed that setting a standard guage for railroad tracks "led to an explosion of railroad building." Rothman thus presented a history of the American West that left out steel, coal, political corruption, the Indian Wars and, yes, the workers who built the railroads.  Rothman devoted far fewer words to educational issues than he did the railroads, so it is hard to know what he meant with his brief reference to schools, "By setting common expectations, states have made it possible for students everywhere to graduate from high school similarly prepared for post-secondary education and work."  In other words, set a guage for measuring educational attainment and, magically, student achievement will take off. Gosh, I thought that improved teaching and learning might also be necessary.  By the way, the federal government that set the common guage also subsidized the building of the railroads without regulating them.  The result was the Indian Wars and an environmental catastrophe. Common Core could also backfire, but Rothman was silent about ways to prevent the unintended damage that his technological fix could unleash.- JT (@drjohnthompson) image via.

Technology: Classroom Drones, Playground Drones

What could an educator do with a small, easily controlled, programmable drone?  You could teach with it -- kids would love programming it or exploring the neighborhood via videocam from above.  You could keep watch over the campus with it.  No more lunch duty for bored teachers.  Just launch it and watch from above on your laptop.  Parents could use one to make sure their kids aren't getting bullied during recess.  

Drones are already being used here in the US, and their use is likely to spread quickly.  This New Yorker article explores their possible domestic uses, amazing and frightening.  They are increasingly small and able to perform complex tasks without being directly controlled by a human controller. 

Excited? Scared?  Me, too.  

Thompson: Online Learning Won't Take The High Road By Magic

I loved David Brooks' The Social Animal, which used social and cognitive science to explain why online tutorials can't replace loving relationships with teachers.  But then he also endorses Republican "reformers" who attack the heart of the teaching profession.  Brooks' New York Times Op Ed, "The Campus Tsunami," is another example of his ability to believe both sides of any education argument, while assuming that every tsunami will raise all boats, damaging none.  

On one hand, he fears that market-driven reform will replace deep reading with fast online browsing. He understands, "how much communication is lost — gesture, mood, eye contact — when you are not actually in a room with a passionate teacher and students." Brooks argues that online tehcnology has turned knowledge into "a commodity that is cheap and globally available," but it still allows great colleges to "focus on the rest of the learning process, which is where the real value lies."

But then Brooks writes that online technology compels colleges to take the high road and preserve real learning, "which is a complex social and emotional process." But, Brooks does not identify the force that compels universities to go the extra mile.  Why does he believe that higher education will not follow public schools in taking the quick and easy route?  Brooks seems clueless about the market-driven school "reform" tsunami that put a price on everything but values little or nothing.  It is precisely at times like these that we need sea walls to protect universities (and public schools) from the latest gimmicks for making a quick buck or jacking up performance metrics.- JT (@drjohnthompson)

Reform: It's Not Dead Yet -- Far From It

School reform isn't dead, according to The Washington Monthly's The Next Big Test.  It's just revving up for a whole new push: 

The Next Wave of School Reform By Paul Glastris

Transcontinental Education By Robert Rothman

A Test Worth Teaching To By Susan Headden

Grand Test Auto By Bill Tucker

Funded by Hewletter with reporting by my Columbia classmate Laura Colarusso.

 

Bullying: Gay Indianapolis Teen Expelled For Brandishing Taser

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Video Interlude: It's Like "Spellbound" - But With Ballet