Readings(Education): the Single Most Important Domestic Policy Issue
Over the last two weeks there have been a bunch of interesting stories and announcements on major new findings and recommendations in the Education arena. Unfortunately Education hasn't recieved the attention it deserves in this election - which is, in turn, a fair and accurate reflection of the voter's interests. But not of their INTERESTS, using the word in the older sense of being "what's in your best interest". In our humble opinion Education is the single most important domestic policy issue facing us in this election and for the next several decades. Why ? Because it is the secret sauce without which we cannot continue to grow our economy - not the only one of course, there are several. But Education is the sine qua non - that without which there is no other. Without an educated work force our businesses cannot continue to grow and innovate because the supply of people qualified for new and more demanding jobs won't be sufficient.
Americans have always known this just as we've also always sneered at intellectuals - odd paradox that. In the early rise of civilization writing was the technology that allowed for the coordination and management of complex societies and was as important as agriculture, the wheel or fire. Scribes who spent decades learning complex, difficult and arcane scripts and languages were a special, priveleged class in all early societies because without them the whole thing tumbled down. Well these days without a huge increase in the skill levels and a broadening that base we'll face similar challenges.
When the British Parliament sent special delegations to learn the secrets of Am. manufacturing in the early 19thC they found an emerging set of capabilities that exceeded those of England and would revolutionize the world. But what they found even more astounding was free public education i New England and the independence of thought, educational levels and skills and inventiveness of the workers. So unlike their own class bound societies. When the US transitioned from an agricultural society to an industrial one a key enabler was the widespread growth of good Am. high-schools.
In those days we took education seriously and knew that standards, efforts, innovation and inventiveness were to all our benefits. It's time to take Education as seriously again. And that means you not some vauge they. We need to get it as a central issue in this election, we need to make a concerted national effort, of the right kind of course, but most importantly good education follows from good and local community support.
EDUCATION READINGS
School Choice Isn't Enough From City Journal: Instructional reform, not just markets, is the key to better schools. Looking back from today's vantage point, it is clear that the school choice movement has been very good for the disadvantaged. Public and privately funded voucher programs have liberated hundreds of thousands of poor minority children from failing public schools. The movement has also reshaped the education debate. Not only vouchers, but also charter schools, tuition tax credits, mayoral control and other reforms are now on the table as alternatives to bureaucratic, special-interest-choked big-city school systems. Yet social-change movements need to be attentive to the facts on the ground. Recent developments in both public and Catholic schools suggest that markets in education may not be a panacea--and that we should re-examine the direction of school reform. But sadly--and this is a second development that reformers must face up to--the evidence is pretty meager that competition from vouchers is making public schools better. What should we do about these new realities? Obviously, private scholarship programs ought to keep helping poor families find alternatives to failing public schools. And we can still hope that some legislature, somewhere in America, will vote for another voucher plan, or generous tuition tax credits, before more Catholic schools close. But does the school choice movement have a realistic Plan B for the millions of urban students who will remain stuck in terrible public schools? According to Ms. Hoxby and Mr. Peterson, perhaps the two most respected school choice scholars in the country, no such plan is necessary. In their view, the best hope for education improvement continues to be a maximum degree of parental choice--vouchers if possible, but also charter schools and tuition tax credits--plus merit-pay schemes for teachers and accountability systems that distinguish productive from unproductive school principals. That "incentivist" outlook remains dominant within school reform circles. But a challenge from what one could call "instructionists"--those who believe that curriculum change and good teaching are essential to improving schools--is growing, as a unique public debate sponsored by the Koret Task Force on K-12 Education revealed.
Is China Model Right for U.S. Kids? Chinese students like Jack are examples of why Microsoft's Bill Gates asked Congress today to spend more to improve American education in math and science. Unless more students can be attracted to those subjects, Mr. Gates warned, the U.S.'s competitive advantage will erode and its ability to create high-paying jobs will suffer. I know many Americans don't believe him. They argue that American kids may not be as good at math and science as Chinese and Indian kids, but they're more well-rounded. But that's increasingly untrue. For example, Jack isn't your stereotypical Chinese nerd. He's the captain of IMSA's sophomore basketball team and tried out for the tennis team today. Bob Compton, a Memphis-based venture capitalist, ran into many kids like Jack when he was traveling in China and India. They were two and three years ahead of his two teenage daughters -- not just in math and science, but in almost every other subject, too. That discovery prompted him to make a documentary called "2 Million Minutes," which followed students in the U.S., India and China to show how they spent their four years of high school -- which works out to about two million minutes. The film's conclusion: Chinese high-school students spend almost twice as much time on schoolwork as their American peers. (Indian kids spend half again as much time as Americans.) In Beijing, Jack used to average three or four hours of homework a day. In his Peoria high school, he spent less than an hour a day. At IMSA, homework demands around two hours a day, and Jack still has two hours to play basketball. He told me he's learning and happy.
Calculating a New Approach This week, after two years of deliberation, the National Mathematics Advisory Panel released their report aimed at improving math education in this country. And you could almost hear the sound of textbooks--that heavy one in your kid's backpack, and a stack of high-stakes math tests, the kind your kid take every year--landing in the garbage can with a thud. The advisory panel, made up of 24 educators and mathematicians, is all for textbooks and testing. In fact, the report specifically endorses regular math assessment. But after months of hearings, the panel was unequivocal that we need to change the way math is being taught--and the way we test it. Right now, it's simply too broad, too unfocused, repetitious and, in the end, treated too superficially. The findings of the panel come when international assessments show U.S. students rapidly falling behind other developing countries. A 2007 assessment found that 15-year-olds in the U.S. ranked 25th out of 30 developed nations in computation, problem solving and math literacy. The panel was convened in 2006 by President Bush to address concerns about the lack of homegrown mathematicians, engineers and scientists. At the same time, the report will provide momentum to the small but increasingly influential group of math researchers and educators who see the curriculum used in Singapore, often called Singapore Math, as the gold standard. Singapore math is very lean, says Charles Patton, a software developer at SRI International and math-education researcher who is working with Singapore's National Institute of Education. The Singapore curriculum flows coherently from one subject to another, culminating in algebra.
Let's talk about figures More than most other sorts of knowledge, mathematics has always transcended the limits of time and space. The genius of ancient Greek geometry not only stands the test of time (Pythagoras's theorem is as valid now as when it was first proved); its discoveries can suddenly find new applications in the 21st century. Admittedly, there is less of a distinction these days between pure maths and the applied sort; that is one of the consequences of a world where all sorts of knowledge seem to spread and fuse in unpredictable ways. For example, the kind of theoretical maths that would terrify a layman has become an indispensable key to understanding the way that living things behave. Anything that grows and disseminates—from single-celled organisms to malignant tumours, from rainforests to the pigments that form stripes or spots in the animal kingdom—can be modelled with the latest computational tools. America has long masked its difficulty in educating enough mathematicians by importing lots of ready-made talent, especially from East Asia and the former Soviet Union. But the problems are real enough. http://www.heymath.com/
Idaho Turns to Chess as Education Strategy Idaho officials plan to make their state the first to offer a statewide chess curriculum as part of a pilot program for second and third graders. Tom Luna, the state’s superintendent of education, said participation by teachers would be voluntary, but if reaction to the pilot program is any measure, interest will be great. There are no studies showing that teaching chess has benefits for children, but there is anecdotal evidence, Mr. Luna said. “One of the things that we hear is that too much of what we do is based on rote memorization,” Mr. Luna said. “The part I really like about this program is that kids are thinking ahead.”
Principal Sees Injustice, and Picks a Fight With It At the behest of a new state law she detested, she looked for which ones listed a Social Security number and which did not. Without a number, it was virtually certain that a child was in America illegally. Ms. Watterson wound up with 38 names, many of them of boys and girls she had personally recruited to the school. Under the statute popularly known as Proposition 300, illegal immigrants could not receive in-state tuition at public colleges and universities in Arizona. Nor could school administrators like Ms. Watterson use state money to pay it. GateWay’s students, while still in high school, are able to take courses at a community college in the same building, with in-state tuition paid by the high school. Ms. Watterson knew her students could not afford to pay the out-of-state rate, generally $280 a credit. And without the college classes, there would be less reason to stay in school. So she made the list and sent letters home and began to call in the affected students one by one to tell them that their tuition was no longer subsidized. A girl named Karla crumpled to her knees in the principal’s office, and said, “But I’m a good person.” A few weeks later, Ms. Watterson heard, Karla was riding a bus back to Mexico. Yvonne Watterson vowed to do something so she would not lose any more of her students. She made the vow because of what happened every July 12 back in Antrim, Northern Ireland, her hometown. On that night, the local Protestants celebrated their forebears’ victory over a Catholic army three centuries earlier in the Battle of the Boyne. Even in the Arizona desert, Ms. Watterson remembered the sound of Loyalist anthems and the smell of burning tires and the sight of the pope being burned in effigy. Though she was a Protestant, even as a child she had always cringed imagining how July 12 felt to her Roman Catholic playmates up the block. “I thought, ‘Here we go again, segregating kids, putting kids on a list,’ ” Ms. Watterson, 44, said recently in her office at GateWay. “It’s that hatred. It’s that separation. Not having to look someone in the eye. It’s a horrible, cowardly — I don’t know what to call it. I wouldn’t have believed I was in America.”