Some folks are bringing in palm scans to prevent cheating at the graduate school level (Try Palm Scans To Finger Cheats Wall Street Journal).
It won't be long before they trickle down to K-12, I'm imagining.
First, for SATs, right?
What to do with research that shows people who "sound" black make less money than other people with the same education, etc. -- lament the discrimination that implies, or make accommodations for cultural stereotypes?
The folks at Freakonomics seem to endorse the latter approach, suggesting the obvious economic benefits and even going so far as to suggest that job candidates with unusual names use more standard names in order to get work (How Much Does It Cost You in Wages if You "Sound Black"?).
Sounds pragmatic to me. But not everyone's OK with that. How about you? What would you tell a student to do? What DO you tell students to do?
What if someone took one of the most commonplace objects in education -- pencils, say, or reams of paper -- and found a way to produce and distribute them at much greater cost and energy use? That's what's apparently just happened in the grocery store industry, where a new kind of squared-off gallon milk jug (pictured) is saving production, storage, and distribution costs -- even if it's not so easy to use at first (NYT). The closest thing I can think of in education might be open-source software, which lowers purchase and licensing costs for basic software. Whiteboards seem like they're not much less expensive than blackboards. Ditto for newfangled artificial turf. But maybe I'm missing something. Ideas?
Research and consulting for K12 education entrepreneurs always seemed like a fascinating idea to me -- especially back in the 90s when there wasn't so much of that going on -- and so I was happy to meet Eduventures star Adam Newman a couple of years ago through Todd Kern. (For a little background on how Eduventures evolved, check out this post from edbizzbuzz: The End of an Era.) After nine years, Newman is joining Berkery Noyes,
"the leading investment bank serving businesses across the K-12, postsecondary,
and corporate learning markets." I guess that means we should all dust off our business plans and send them to Adam. Congrats, condolences, per usual.
All of you who feel overwhelmed and under-impressed by the big philanthropy money pouring into education these days will be happy to hear that, according to a recent article by Daniel Gross in Slate Magazine, charities are next in line to feel the economic crunch (The coming crisis in American philanthropy).
It's just going to be a little bit delayed, compared to other parts of the economy.
Gross also notes that smaller donors provide the bulk of philanthropic resources, despite the big press given to the big givers.
Not that Gates et al are going away anytime soon. Just that they'll be watching their pennies or something.
For withholding promised money over a publicity argument, these Toyota Scion dealer is a good candidate for Keith Olbermann's "worst person in the world" segment:
"I'll never, ever, ever give money again. This is it. I'll never have another Christmas party for these kids. It doesn't pay."
Firm reneges on scholarships Baltimore Sun
Some districts are hiring private eyes to verify student addresses, according to this WSJ blog story -- in response to their own rising costs and diminishing revenue, as well as in response to the increase in foreclosures that forces parents to move to other locations.
There's a fascinating little review of kids magazine Highlights in The New York Review of Magazines, a mag put out by the folks at the Columbia Journalism School. You've probably seen the magazine -- its circulation is listed at 2 million and it's been around since 1946.
"Now a staple of elementary schools and doctors’ offices across the nation, the magazine aims to “help children develop creativity, sensitivity, literacy and the ability to think and reason” by presenting games and stories for children ages 6 to 12....The overwhelming majority of subscriptions go directly to families. It’s mostly parents or grandparents giving subscriptions to children.”
I wonder if it's giving Scholastic a run for its money. Must remember to ask.
Ed law professor Justin Bathon writes on his blog, Edjurist, that his former employer ECS has to update its web offerings with a blog and RSS feeds if it wants people to read its generally high-quality products (ECS and Web 2.0).
Much the same could be said of many other education organizations (and media outlets), which are being left behind by upstart operations and even by the mainstream media.
"No one is thinking about the larger implications, let alone the
morality, of admitting so many students to classes they cannot possibly
pass," writes Professor X in this month's Atlantic magazine article entitled In The Basement Of the Ivory Tower. "The colleges and the students and I are bobbing up and down in a
great wave of societal forces—social optimism on a large scale, the
sense of college as both a universal right and a need, financial
necessity on the part of the colleges and the students alike, the
desire to maintain high academic standards while admitting marginal
students—that have coalesced into a mini-tsunami of difficulty."
From Fritz Edelstein's Fritzwire: "Effective today, April 21, 2008, the
education policy team from Holland & Knight LLP is moving to establish a
new education law and policy center with former U.S. Secretary of Education
Richard W. Riley [pictured left]. This center will be affiliated with his law firm,
Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough. It will continue to provide a
full array of legal, policy, strategic counseling and advocacy services in this
new endeavor. Some the individuals making the move are Art Coleman, Scott Palmer, Steve
Winnick, Amy Starzynski, Elliot Regenstein, Reg Leichty, Robin Gelinas and the
others."
Author and columnist Kevin Kosar has these recommendations for the NSLP (History News Network):
"First, make the National School Lunch Program free to all children...Second, decouple the program from the surplus commodity program entirely...Third, require the federal government to pay the full cost of the meals served and forbid schools from having vending machines and ala carte dining... Fourth, have the federal government deliver the federal school lunch dollars directly to each child in the form of a meal debit card, good for one school lunch per day.
None of this will happen, of course, given the lobbies and interests that are involved, but it's nice to think about how things should work in a simpler world.
It's easy to glamorize school reform work -- the "higher" calling, the chance of making the world a better place, the ability to work with -- but not in -- real live schools. But nonprofit work is not all that it's made out to be, if you read this recent NYT article carefully (Your True Calling Could Suit a Nonprofit). Less money, longer hours, slow-moving and bureaucratic organizations, tyrannical bosses. There are some doozies out there.
There is apparently a battle going on in the world of wine lovers, between those who prefer numerical pseudo-scientific systems that boil everything down into a simple rating and those who prefer a more nuanced, languaged-based system of descriptions.
The descriptive ratings are potentially much more useful, except that they quickly begin to use words and ideas that most regular people don't understand or relate to ("grainy" taste, for example).
"The words and the references are really useful only to people who have had the same experiences and use the same vocabulary." And of course, making comparisons becomes more difficult.
Sound familiar yet?
For much more on all this: Scents and Sensibility
I didn't make it over there yesterday, but I'm girding myself for the trip today. Did I miss anything? As in the past, USA Today's Greg Toppo has already filed an AERA-based story. (See big stories of the day below.) One year, I think he filed 15 stories in two days. OK, maybe just 5. No one's made fun of the names of panels or papers being presented yet- that usually happens somewhere along the line. As always, I feel like I'm missing more things than I'm hearing about -- there are surely VIP-only events going on behind the scenes that I'm not invited to. I'm not above crashing, though. Just tell me where to go.
I'll be up to my usual shenanigans at AERA this week and hope to run into some of you there. But I have no real idea what to go to that might be media- or policy- and politics- related. My rough and ragged itinerary so far is posted below. Can you help me out? I promise not to take the last seat.
Continue reading "My Ragged AERA Schedule Needs Your Help" »
I never got any response from New Leaders about their attrition rates (Nagging Questions About New Leaders Survival Rates) but that won't stop the New Leaders self-congratulation juggernaut. They have a new report out about "the patterns and techniques evident in low-income, urban public schools making dramatic gains in student achievement." Big surprise -- these things are all found in New Leaders schools. The full report is available here (PDF).
I was feeling excited but a little overwhelmed at first by my BlogNetNews RSS feed. It was drowning me in new education posts -- so much stuff that I couldn't keep up. Plus, there was some stuff I didn't want (but you may) -- higher ed, for example. Who care about that?
But then I found out from Dave the BNN guy that you can customize your feed so that only the stories you want get sent to you (or your RSS reader). Just click the "sort by" button right under the top ad and choose the feed that you find there.
Or, if you're really a control freak, go here, click on the "life" tab, then "education" and there you'll see directions on how to customize a feed further -- by key words, particular author within a multi-person blog and/or by various measures of popularity. You can then choose to have it delivered by rss, mobile, hourly or daily email etc.
Of course, there's nothing better than the hand-crafted snarky roundup that I do every day.
The business of education isn't new to anyone who's been reading this blog, but if you want some new news to chew on about how the education world works behind the scenes, there's a nice new set of articles about the business side of things that's been posted on PBS's Nightly Business Report. This includes segments like: Standardized Testing, Tutoring Services, Charter Schools, Educational Technology, Investment Opportunities.
Check them out. Let me know if you make any money.
Over at EdWeek, Dean Millot continues his analysis of the ideas market in education with the conclusion that it is management firms like The Parthenon Group, Alvarez and Marsal, Boston Consulting Group, and The Bridgespan Group deserve much more of our attention and respect (The Real Education “Think Tanks”).
As Millot explains, these organizations are big, getting bigger, and actually have had their ideas adopted and implemented. "Management consulting is becoming the new think tank in education
policy, and for those interested an emerging school improvement market,
learning more about their work is probably more important than
following the education policy marketing shops."
Hoping to lure schools back into the field trip business, museums and other outfits have revamped their offerings to make them seem more learning-focused. That's according to this Newsweek article (No Child Outside the Classroom), which notes "The
Chicago Children's Museum sends teachers a checklist that highlights
how the museum can help them meet state standards, while representatives from the New England Aquarium visit schools to explain how its programs can give kids a boost. Many museums have
also started giving their young visitors clipboards, worksheets,
science journals and the chance to quiz a resident historian or
scientist."
Once considered an irresponsible player, now Wal-Mart is leading the way on global warming (energy conservation, cheap fluorescents) and health care (cheap generics, cheap insurance) and has a higher approval rating than Congress, according to this article (Wal-Mart: The New Washington).
The results have been impressive: "Since Wal-Mart began heavily marketing [compact fluorescents] two years ago, it has sold 145 million bulbs, saving enough electricity, it says, to forestall the need for three coal-fired power plants in the United States.
I hate to think of what a Wal-Mart solution to education would be, but maybe the company can help fix schools, too? At least they could get something done. They, or maybe Iron-Man.
Over the last few days, Dean Millot has been taking on my questions from late last week about the recent surge of education think tanks. However, today's installment on this topic is where Millot really gets going. Wow. In one long post, the cantankerous but thoughtful Millot transforms the notion of education "think tanks" -- with all the prestige and intellectual history that is associated with the term -- into nothing more than well-dressed sales assistants who are, on behalf of their funders, selling fancy-sounding ideas in tiny little high-priced shops just like the ones you can find in Georgetown.
This is a great little story from Rosalind Rossi at the Chicago Sun Times. From a starting point of lots of rumors and an annual report from the Board's inspector general, Rossi dug up the story of how prospective parents at at least one Chicago magnet school were pretending their children had siblings already in the school -- with the school clerk's help -- in order to increase their chances of getting into the school. There's fascinating school-level detail (the community turned on the young principal who uncovered the fraud) and big-picture implications (no one's checking to see if it's being done in other places). Go, Roz: Whistleblower found fake 'siblings'.
It's a little heavy-handed, but here's the grand prize winner from a homeschool video contest about what makes homeschooling so cool, sent to me by some homeschool people:
Link: YouTube Video Contest - Homeschool is Cool! - Cash Prize for Education Video Contest.
You don't really have to have read this NYT article (Research Groups Boom in Washington) to know that think tanks and "research" organizations have proliferated over the past few years: Just think about the Center On Education Policy. The Alliance. Achieve. The New America Foundation. The Ed Sector. The Center On American Progress. Meanwhile the old warhorses -- Brookings, AEI, have gotten bigger and bigger.
The money keeps pouring in. It's a cheap way to go for funders, notes the article -- reports and panels compared to direct services -- and an easy source of policy ideas for lawmakers and candidates. [It's also, I would add, a welcome haven for wonks detoxing from government service and academics who didn't get that tenure track position they thought they were going to get.]
But what about influence, not to speak of value? The article claims that it was AEI that "invented" the surge in Iraq as an example of think tanks' impact. But nothing that I can recall has happened like that on the education front perhaps since the Ed Trust practically wrote the achievement gap language NCLB in 2000.
Maybe I'm forgetting something good, or am too self-loathing to see the value, but I can't think of many new or original ideas coming out of the education shops (many of which I've done research or writing for), much less real-world impact. New America sometimes comes up with timely ideas and good notions for where to get money to pay for things. [National testing wasn't one of them.] You could argue that Achieve has been at least a very good incubator for higher state standards and common assessments. CEP has become one of the primary sources of information on NCLB implementation. The Ed Sector has put out one or two very helpful reports on the testing industry. The Trust on the achievement gap. Fordham on state standards and WSF.
Rather than being about the hard work of making change, however, I feel like some of the education tanks and shops serve as platforms for ideas and resume-building. I mean, Fordham and the Ed Sector and AEI, some of the most prominent, don't push legislation or do real legislative work to get things done. They never support legislation, so they never win -- or lose (though they're quick to take credit). It seems they measure their impact by media hits and publications more than anything else.
Mo0st of all, think tanks like these are much more intellectual and ideological than they are political, in the sense of building coalitions and relationships to get real things done. In that vacuum, the really big ideas (and big influences) are coming from other places -- Matthew Miller proposes getting rid of local school boards in a recent issue of The Atlantic, for example. Jonathan Kozol fasts and pesters Ted Kennedy to break NCLB's back. Steve Barr in LA creates a charter school model that includes a union contract. The President proposes Pell Grants for kids.
What do you think? Am I totally wrong (as usual)? Got any favorite think tanks, or think tank contributions to share? I'd be happy to hear them, and am sure that others would as well.
Previous Posts:
Think Tank Hires Republican Education Staffer With Cool Glasses
Needed: Better NCLB Politics -- Not More Policy
All Of Bush's Worst Ideas (Except Perhaps NCLB) Came From AEI
The embarrassingly small list of elite private universities that are partnering with school districts to improve education is getting slightly larger, thanks to Washington University's decision to partner with KIPP and start five charter schools in the St. Louis area (here). Along similar lines, Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles is going to partner with a large, troubled high school that has recently been given autonomy from the district -- but not charter status -- to revamp its offerings (here).
You hear this all the time from folks inside the reform machine, but rarely ever see it said out loud:
"No one knows if turnarounds work," said Andrew Calkins of the Mass Insight Education and Research Institute [which studied turnarounds with a grant from the Gates Foundation]. "We spent two years looking at turnarounds and could not find a single example of turnaround work that was successful and sustained and done on scale, not just one school."
From the Chicago Tribune: Brave new world for Chicago schools
Not quite as good as the Garrison Keillor line from yesterday, but it will do.
It's been a big week for economic concerns and possible responses. Commentator Gerry Bracey says that the subrpime mortgage meltdown and everything else aren't educators' faults, and that other countries with better test scores don't necessarily have better economies. Check it out below.
Continue reading "It's Not Educators' Faults, Says Bracey" »
Here's a great way to waste the rest of the morning -- check out the Forbes Special Report on education, which includes solutions from maybe 20 folks including Michelle Rhee and Bill Gates (Educating Our Children). Obviously, there's a business focus. My favorite choice for someone to give solutions? Colonel Dean M. Esserman, Chief of Police, City of Providence, RI.
No one cares about education research. Still, a few more thoughts from me about what some researchers I asked about the post I wrote from last week (Do Funders Sink Education Research, Too?) had to say -- including the notion that maybe statistical significance is the problem.
Responses from my small and nonrandom sample ranged from those who doubt it ever really happens that way to those who think, well, of course it does. All the time. I'm inclined to think it does.
The argument that negative research doesn't get shelved in education
like in medical R&D is essentially that the education context is so different. The research sponsors are agencies and foundations, not for profit companies. It's not done as randomized trials, most of the time. The fixed costs for labs etc. are much less (grad students are cheap!).
But many of the interests and dynamics are the same in education research as in any other field -- and that's the overwhelming response I got from researchers I asked to comment on the situation. They talked about the
"file drawer effect, which makes average findings look more positive because the zero or negative findings are thrown into a file drawer and forgotten." Zero or null findings seem like just as much a problem as out and out negative findings.
Solving these problems includes focusing on larger studies, including dissertations and tech reports regardless of findings, and not just focus on actual published reports, I'm told. Another idea I hadn't considered is getting away from the whole notion of statistical significance that's been drummed into us, which apparently isn't the gold standard we think it is. See attached report: The_case_against_statistical_significance_testing.pdf
Check out this free Wall Street Journal article about just how misleading and self-interested drug research has been (Antidepressants Under Scrutiny). I know there are an awful lot of rose-colored results out there in education research, but apparently drug companies routinely conduct but don't report studies that come out with "negative" results (ie, don't show benefits for their drugs), and the FDA doesn't track these disappearing studies, meaning that drugs are a lot less effective than your doctor knows or the ads say. It's hard to believe, but neither the companies nor the researchers are under any legal obligation to report the results of these negative studies. Does this happen in education research, too, or are the studies set up so broadly that the results are going to come out positive no matter what?
Interested in working in DC, or looking for a change of venue? Check out the slew of education policy and PR jobs that are open in DC, courtesy of The Fritzwire.
No, not exactly. But the early childhood industry in LA alone generates more than $1.9 billion to the local economy and employs 65,00 people, according to a new report from the California Endowment that's being released today. It will over the next few years be the sixth largest growth industry in the area.
People "don’t traditionally consider ECE from an economic standpoint or recognize it as a $2 billion per year industry," according to an email from the report authors. Indeed, they don't. But maybe they should. UPK -- it's a jobs program!
The Wall Street Journal recently told us about how private sector titles have been getting fancier and fancier (What's in a Title?), largely due to vanity and trendiness and "title creep."
Now the New York Daily News notes that the same is happening in Mayor Bloomberg's Department of Education, where there are lots of "chiefs" and "officers." Specifically: Chief accountability officer, chief knowledge officer, chief equality officer, chief talent officer, and chief portfolio officer, to be specific.
Also there are chief executive officers for several divisions, a product manager, a demand research manager, and -- perhaps my favorite -- "dozens of senior achievement facilitators."
Via Insideschools.org.
While the housing bust is not yet a major
education story, it may soon be. A recent New York Times story points
out that foreclosures and vacant homes are already affecting school
district building plans (here). One district in FLA had to scrap its plans to build several more schools. Others will see their enrollment levels decline. Via the Columbia Journalism Review.
You don't have to give a hoot about the DC public school system to find today's Washington Post education story (A $2.9 Million Payout, With a Few Shortcuts) worthwhile reading.
Full of juicy details, it describes how a former DC principal started and grew a professional development program that, for all its potential effectiveness, seems to have lacked any real oversight or structure.
The district gave out big money without a contract, the approved program didn't mesh with other district efforts, the program founders fought internally and one ended up dropping a dime on the founder, and -- my favorite part -- current and former district officials are denying that approval signatures found on various documents are actually theirs.
On Wednesday, former Teachers College president Arthur Levine is going to announce some sort of new fellowship program to promote better teaching, long a concern of his. Levine is now at the Woodrow Wilson Foundation and has issued a series of reports critical of ed school programs in recent years. The state effort will start off in Indiana, and the national program will include four nationally known ed schools.
The folks at Bloomberg seem to think that local and state school budgets could be affected by the whole mortgage market catastrophe, especially those that have put their funds into pooled accounts that have invested in risky financial instruments like SIVs: "State- run pools have parked taxpayers' money in some of the most confusing, opaque and illiquid debt investments ever devised," according to the article (Bloomberg Markets Magazine). Or, watch the video below.
Think money's been falling off the trees for test prep companies during the NCLB era? Not all of them. According to this Forbes article (Boost Your Score), the 26 year-old Princeton Review faltered mightily during what could have been a golden time. "It proved much tougher to make money putting
together multiple-choice assessments specifically tailored to a
locality's curriculum, as opposed to staging one-size-fits-all prep
courses," according to Forbes.
Looking for a new communications job? Ever heard of ASCD? Well they're looking for someone like you, and they're willing to pay $100K or so for your services. Sounds like a lot to me, but DC has gotten really expensive I hear, and I'm sure you're worth it. "Requires a minimum of five years experience in writing/communications/media relations. Three years experience working with education and association issues is also required.
CONTACT:
Elizabeth Humphrey
The McCormick Group
703-841-1700 ext 223
ehumphrey@tmg-dc.com"
It seems like there are two different conversations going on around entrepreneurship in education. The first kind is probably best illustrated by the recent AEI event (The Future Of Education Entrepreneurship), and focuses mostly on public- and foundation-funded efforts. The second, much less sexy kind, is best illustrated by publications like industry analyst Trace Urdan's monthly report on the education sector (Education Signals). This conversation is about real-live private sector folks who are already in the education space, either as part of large publicly traded companies or smaller ventures. Do these conversations ever overlap, or are they as separate as it seems?
Jade Floyd (pictured), communications maven for AACTE and a big friend of this blog, is moving on to a fancy
new gig for the public affairs firm Chlopak, Leonard, Schechter and Associates, where she will be a senior associate. No word on who's going to be the new communications manager. Congrats, condolences to Jade, and remember everyone to send in news of any education folks changing jobs. Cent'Anni!
This week's Greg Toppo article on open-source reading software that is being considered by Florida education officials reminded me that I wrote a short piece about schools turning to open source programs in Scholastic Administrator last year. Toppo's piece focuses on reading software. Mine profiles a school district in Texas that has used Open Office (free versions of Word, Excel) and GIMP (Photoshop)
to provide copies of programs for students to take home. There's also some open-source stuff that teachers like -- lesson-planning software like
Moodle or assignment-sharing programs like QUIA are examples. I'm sure there are others. Check it out (Radical Ideas at Work).
So Tom Cruise showed his new film to a bunch of fancy folks the other day, according to this item sent in by a friend ( see second item here). Included among the guests were Rod Paige and John Danielson, Paige's former chief of staff, who are both now at Chartwell. According to the story, Danielson "tried to push Applied Scholastics, a Scientology education program, in the St. Louis public school system." Read more about that here.
It's not clear from the story whether Paige and Danielson are Scientologists themselves.
There are apparently two million minutes of instruction during high school, and -- no surprise -- we're not using ours very wisely. Here's the trailer for a new, as yet unreleased documentary about the problem:
Conceived and exec produced by venture capitalist Bob Compton, and directed by two TFA alums, the doc follows six students in three countries. Check it out.
