this isn’t really about politics. It’s about human decency. And when I read the word “apartheid” to describe our schools, it makes me livid…and I can’t say I disagree with the characterization

so many more employers have so much more access to so much more above average cheap foreign labor, cheap robotics, cheap software, cheap automation and cheap genius. Therefore, everyone needs to find their extra — their unique value contribution that makes them stand out in whatever is their field of employment. Average is over.

Yes, new technology has been eating jobs forever, and always will. As they say, if horses could have voted, there never would have been cars. But there’s been an acceleration. As Davidson notes, “In the 10 years ending in 2009, [U.S.] factories shed workers so fast that they erased almost all the gains of the previous 70 years; roughly one out of every three manufacturing jobs — about 6 million in total — disappeared.”

Higher education prices increased 440% over the last 25 years – four times the rate of inflation, and twice as bad as health care. Elementary and secondary ed prices have skyrocketed, too, with not even adequate outcomes.

On the other side of the ledger is the Moore’s law ecosystem, the most ruthless force in technology and the world economy. Last quarter Netflix streamed two billion hours worth of video – or 228,000 years worth in three months. In just the last week of December, smartphone and tablet owners gobbled up 1.2 billion apps – 43% by Americans. Twenty years ago, a terabyte hard drive, if such a thing had existed, might have cost $5 million. Today, you can pick one up for $69.

The price of information plummets. Yet the price of education soars. These two trends cannot both continue. Guess which will crack first.

I am usually not a conspiracy theorist. But my scorecard shows 11 members of the [Georgia] English/Language Arts Standards writing team had ties to companies with a financial interest in the committee’s decision.

Adding insult to injury, no members of the Work Group were K-12 teachers and no teachers were mentioned in the Gates/Pearson curriculum announcement.

Education “reformers” have a common playbook. First, assert without evidence that regular public schools are “failing” and that large numbers of regular (unionized) public school teachers are incompetent. Provide no documentation for this claim other than that the test score gap between minority and white children remains large. Then propose so-called reforms to address the unproven problem — charter schools to escape teacher unionization and the mechanistic use of student scores on low-quality and corrupted tests to identify teachers who should be fired.

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New York State’s black children made enormous gains in the 1990s, and much slower gains once the federal No Child Left Behind, and Mayor Bloomberg’s and Chancellor Klein’s test-based reforms kicked in. From 1992 to 2003, for example, black fourth graders’ math performance jumped 22 scale points (about two-thirds of a standard deviation). From 2003 to 2011, the gain was only 5 scale points.

The andragogical model as conceived by Knowles is predicated on four basic assumptions about learners, all of which have some relationship to our notions about a learner's ability, need, and desire to take responsibility for learning:

1. Their self-concept moves from dependency to independency or self-directedness.
2. They accumulate a reservoir of experiences that can be used as a basis on which to build learning.
3. Their readiness to learn becomes increasingly associated with the developmental tasks of social roles.
4. Their time and curricular perspectives change from postponed to immediacy of application and from subject-centeredness to performance-centeredness.

A grown-up man won't sit still in a classroom while a teacher drones on about subjects that don't interest him. Andragogy recognizes that adults demand to learn things that are relevant to them, and that leverage their own life experiences rather than assuming they know nothing. Adults don't want sweeping coverage of a topic; they want to learn the parts that are interesting or relevant to them now, so they tend to prefer problem-based learning that shows the immediate applicability of what they're learning.

If adults won't stand for sitting for hours, learning about things they don't find interesting or relevant, why is it that children do? And why should they? The common response to the second question is that children don't know what they need to learn, so they need educators to decide for them. To some degree this is true; however there's overwhelming evidence that all people learn better when they're interested in the topics, and there's similar evidence that there are correlations between what we enjoy doing, what we're good at, and what we'll end up doing professionally. Typically, though, we don't teach children what fits their interests, motivations or natural talents. We simply use a one-size-fits-nobody technique that enables us to teach each student in a class of 25 almost equally poorly.

China provided engineers at a scale the United States could not match. Apple’s executives had estimated that about 8,700 industrial engineers were needed to oversee and guide the 200,000 assembly-line workers eventually involved in manufacturing iPhones. The company’s analysts had forecast it would take as long as nine months to find that many qualified engineers in the United States.

In China, it took 15 days.

"The most deadly misconception about American youth has been the sexual predator panic,” [boyd] said. “The model we have of the online sexual predator is this lurking man who reaches out on the Internet and grabs a kid. And there is no data that support that. The vast majority of sex crimes against kids involve someone that kid trusts, and it’s overwhelmingly family members."

The internet seems to ignore legislation until somebody tries to take something away from us... then we carefully defend that one thing and never counter-attack. Then the other side says, "OK, compromise," and gets half of what they want. That's not the way to win... that's the way to see a steady and continuous erosion of rights online.

The solution is to start lobbying for our own laws. It's time to go on the offensive if we want to preserve what we've got. Let's force the RIAA and MPAA to use up all their political clout just protecting what they have.

If their legal arm gets out of control? This is an industry that demands payment from summer camps if the kids sing Happy Birthday or God Bless America, an industry that issues takedown notices for a 29-second home movie of a toddler dancing to Prince. Traditional American media firms are implacably opposed to any increase in citizens’ ability to create, copy, save, alter, or share media on our own. They fought against cassette audio tapes, and photocopiers. They swore the VCR would destroy Hollywood. They tried to kill Tivo. They tried to kill MiniDisc. They tried to kill player pianos. They do this whenever a technology increases user freedom over media. Every time. Every single time.

to paraphrase: By using [Apple's new iBooks Author] software, you agree that anything you make with it is in part ours. But if it can say that and have legal force, can’t it say anything? Isn’t this the equivalent of a car dealer trying to bind you to additional terms by sticking a contract in the glove compartment? By driving this car, you agree to get all your oil changes from Honda of Cupertino?

Apple, in this EULA, is claiming a right not just to its software, but to its software’s output. It’s akin to Microsoft trying to restrict what people can do with Word documents, or Adobe declaring that if you use Photoshop to export a JPEG, you can’t freely sell it to Getty. As far as I know, in the consumer software industry, this practice is unprecedented. I’m sure it’s commonplace with enterprise software, but the difference is that those contracts are negotiated by corporate legal departments and signed the old-fashioned way, with pen and ink and penalties and termination clauses. A by-using-you-agree-to license that oh by the way asserts rights over a file format? Unheard of, in my experience.

When I make something myself, no matter what software I use to make it, then — assuming it doesn’t infringe any copyrights — it’s my right to distribute it however I want, in whatever format I choose, for free or not. I don’t lose the right to publish my novel if Microsoft determines that I wrote it using a pirated copy of Word. Would I lose that right if I tried to sell my iBook outside of the iBookstore and Apple got wind of it? I don’t know; we’re in uncharted waters here. Or how about this: for a moment I’ll stipulate that Apple’s EULA is valid and I’ve agreed to it implicitly by using the software. Now suppose I create an iBook and give it to someone else who has never downloaded iBooks Author and is not party to the EULA, and that person sells it on their own website. What happens now?

Also:

"Just as bothersome is the provision: '
(b) Apple may determine for any reason and in its sole discretion not to select your Work for distribution.'

Even if you want to sell it, and agree to sell it only through iBooks, if Apple doesn't like it they don't have to put it up for sale. And since you can't sell it anywhere else...."

http://venomousporridge.com/post/16126436616/ibooks-author-eula-audacity#comm...

We could vote for people with the guts to run and pay for our schools properly. But we don't. We vote for people who cut a billion dollars from education, then blame the victims.

Those politicians should be ashamed of themselves.

But so should we.

[Just] 64 metro areas. . . . collectively contribute about 62 percent of the combined GDP of Canada and the U.S. Between 2010 and 2011 they represented 83 percent of the growth in the combined GDP.

More evidence for Richard Florida's assertion that the world is spiky, not flat...

http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic30774.files/2-2_Florida.pdf

[Those opposed to teaching about climate change and evolution] are making a pedagogical argument, that it is somehow good pedagogy, good critical thinking, for students to learn both. That it is somehow a good pedagogy for students to learn good science and bad science.

It's painful, expensive, time-consuming, stressful and ultimately pointless to work overtime to preserve your dying business model.

...

The history of media and technology is an endless series of failed rearguard actions as industry leaders attempt to solidify their positions on a bed of quicksand.

Schools need to end their rearguard actions too...

Piracy is not going to be solved by the heavy hand of the law. As far as businesses should be concerned, it can only ultimately be "solved" by new business models, just as radios, record players, tape recorders, and video recorders all required media companies to figure out new ways of making money. We are not about to jump in a time machine to return to the 60s and give up the internet just because some companies can't compete.

Since the rise of Napster, the media industry has been in a furor over media piracy. Not only do they get pissed when people rip and distribute media content on the internet, they throw a fit whenever teenagers make their own music videos based on their favorite song. Even though every child in America is asked to engage in remix in schools for educational purposes (“Write a 5-paragraph essay as though you were dropped into Lord of the Flies”), doing so for fun and sharing your output on the internet has been deemed criminal. Media piracy is messy, because access to content is access to social status and power in a networked era. Some people are simply “stealing” but others are actually just trying to participate in culture. It’s complicated.

Upon hearing someone castigate students for being insufficiently motivated, a noneconomist might be inclined to ask two questions.  The first is:  “Motivated to do what, exactly”?  Anything they’re told, no matter how unengaging, inappropriate, or, well, demotivating?  Whenever I see students made to cram facts into their short-term memories for a test, practice a series of decontextualized skills on yet another worksheet, listen passively to a lecture, or inch their way through the insipid prose of a corporate-produced textbook, I find myself thinking of a comment made by Frederick Herzberg, a critic of traditional workplace management:  “Idleness, indifference, and irresponsibility,” he said, “are healthy responses to absurd work.”

Supremely confident about all the positives of this policy (e.g., teachers and students working harder, scores rising), top decision-makers have not done due diligence on what experts in testing have said repeatedly about using test scores to evaluate individual teachers (see here and here) and the history of previous efforts to reward teachers on student performance. Had they done so, they might have heeded the record of perverse outcomes that have accrued to such policies. On this issue, then, smart people do dumb things.

Summarizing his study’s findings for The New York Times, Friedman said: “The message is to fire people sooner rather than later.”

Friedman was speaking specifically about value-added ratings of teachers—which use student scores on standardized tests to determine a teacher’s relative effectiveness—and whether they are sufficiently accurate and reliable to guide personnel decisions. His answer? An unambiguous “yes.”

...

The problem with the approach that Friedman and others advocate is that it assumes we have all these wonderful, high-quality teachers just waiting in the wings to take over the jobs of the bad teachers we fire. In reality, there is no such supply, even in a bad economy with high unemployment. We have a shortage, not a surplus, of great teachers—and so it’s naïve or shortsighted (or both) to think we can somehow fire our way to a great educational system.

There are almost four million K-12 teachers in the United States, which is more than twice the number of lawyers and doctors combined. Teaching is America’s largest profession. And so we need teaching to be a job that an average person can do reasonably well, which means we probably need to rethink how the job is structured.

A starting point would be to look at—and reconsider—the number of hours U.S. teachers spend at the front of the classroom each week compared to the time they spend planning lessons and collaborating with colleagues. It’s no secret that American teachers spend many more hours teaching than their colleagues do in higher-performing nations. Elsewhere, teachers often teach fewer lessons each week than U.S. teachers, but they spend significantly more time on planning and collaboration.

the traditional publishing industry has set out to break digital technologies in order to preserve their traditional business models

Understanding is based not simply on what is present, but also on how the spaces between what is given are seen, named, unnamed, ignored.  All are important.   The five statements that Iowa Commissioner Jason Glass is quoted as saying are overpopulated with intention and as such are more gate, than solid door.

To situate this as otherwise will not serve us (or children) well.  I tend to agree with Scott that the devil is in the detail and want to suggest it is a devil we need to know. Nonetheless, we are deep in pretense.  It makes me wonder why we continue to only privilege what is situated as obvious.  We need to look at the spaces not named.  For example, what would happen if we substituted school or school district for educator/teaching in Mr. Glass's five statements?  What would be the difference if we believed that the relative health of a system was critical as opposed to only measuring the relative "effectiveness" of each teacher? Would this dual view make a difference?

This'll keep me thinking for quite a while...

Clintondale (MI) High School applied the flipped model gradually, beginning with just a couple of classes in the 2009-2010 school year. In the fall of 2010, all freshmen classes were taught using this model. After seeing an increase in student achievement and a decrease in the failure rate, administrators decided to flip the entire school this year.

I’ve come to realize that very few people in charge of most schools and most departments of education know little about how people actually learn. We are required to post our lesson objectives on the board. Mine always reads: Students will set their own goals and work toward achieving them.

even as the sales of e-books doubled from 10% of the overall market to 20% in 2011, print books still account for about 80% of the market

This USA Today article says that 'print books still account for about 80% of the market.' Wrong emphasis! The emphasis should be on 'ebooks already are 20% of the market and their market share doubled in just the past year alone.' Favor the momentum, not the decline...

The article also states that in the week after Christmas, for 42 of the top 50 titles the e-book editions were the most popular format.

The most instructive part, however, is when my students struggle with a philosophical idea. It is a big change for a student to go from being asked “how do we solve for ‘x’?” to just plain “how do we solve?” There is nothing concrete for their minds to chew on. It requires aiming their thinking at nothing in particular. This is the single most difficult jump for students. Their minds are strung out on a diet of television, music and standardized exams. They are used to having an easy answer expressible in a simple image, whether their favorite pop star or a choice on a test.

Let us assume for now that their contention is true, that you can assess a “good” teacher by their students’ test scores and that bad teachers adversely impact the futures of their students. Why, then, is “the message …to fire people sooner rather than later”? There is nothing in their research that proves firing bad teachers sooner rather than later is a benefit. First, with whom do you replace those bad teachers? First year teachers would be unknown quantities since they cannot be judged by student exam scores. Would it be beneficial to use them over bad teachers? Why fire anyone at all? The message of their research could just as easily be to mentor or support bad teachers so they can become good teachers. Or maybe the message is we need to do another study on what makes the “good” teachers so good and teach that to all the bad ones. There are literally hundreds of conclusions that can be drawn from this research. Out of all of those conclusions, it is curious that Friedman would choose to spout this one. Logically speaking, it does not necessarily follow from his research.

Dogma influences research interpretation?