I've been writing for years that the voucher advocates had moved on from school vouchers, after they realized that they weren't politically viable, and moved onto promote online education.
Online education is great for home schoolers and rural schools, and the former voucher advocates are glad to help out these groups. Also, these former voucher advocates like the idea of setting up schools with computers at every seat, because it would mean fewer teachers, a weaker teachers' union, and lower costs. (All that talk about choice and freedom is nonsense. Most voucher advocates really want lower costs and weaker unions.)
The New York Times finally noticed.
Apt. 11d 
“All that talk about choice and freedom is nonsense. Most voucher advocates really want lower costs and weaker unions.”
How about discussing the ideas based on the merits, rather than immediately reaching for mind-reading ad hominem?
Here are a few thoughts:
1. It is nice to see a reporter doing a thorough analysis of what students are doing in class, but the plagiarism and abuse of Cliff Notes-type material NYT mentioned are not unique to the online classroom.
2. I think that some written back-and-forth with an online teacher could be disproportionately valuable for a low-achieving student, because it gives better opportunity for the teacher to point out spelling and grammar issues. When you get a sea of red ink on a 5-page paper, your eyes may glaze over, but if you got a quick mini-lesson by email on “its” vs. “it’s” or “their” vs. “they’re,” it has a better chance of sinking in. Not reading Jack London is not going to wreck your life, but spelling and writing like an illiterate will.
3. Speaking as a language person and a former ESL teacher, you can get away with a lot of mistakes in oral speech that become painfully obvious in writing. It’s hard to write literately in a foreign language, and even hard to write literately in a dialect of English that is not your own.
4. That said, there are definitely issues with any self-paced learning. My dad is currently teaching some community college math classes that used to be self-paced with a lab for help, but they eventually moved back to a regular classroom, with everybody covering the same material at the same pace. I’m not saying that there isn’t a place for self-paced learning, but it has to be done very carefully to make sure that students actually progress.
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I am actually in class now with students taking an exam, but more later. My question first is: how many commenters here have taught online?
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One of my relatives has started teaching community college English online. I haven’t heard a lot about it, but my impression is that it is if anything, more work, rather than less.
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how many commenters here have taught online?
I once started a pun war that must have taught plenty of people about making puns.
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“All that talk about choice and freedom is nonsense. Most voucher advocates really want lower costs and weaker unions.”
Have to agree with Amy P, the automatic ad hominem doesn’t lead to respect.
Our local, affluent, suburban public school offers students the chance to take courses through Virtual High School. The program allows students to take courses the school can’t or won’t offer. It expands the courses available to students.
The high school doesn’t offer honors or AP courses in the humanities. Access to honors and AP courses in math and science is limited by gatekeeping. A friend’s daughter took an AP class online, and had nothing but praise for it.
If eight high schools each had three students interested in taking AP Economics, none of them would offer it, as the expense can’t be justified. Through VHS, though, the students could be a class of 24, taught by an employed, state-certified high school teacher. (To participate a full member, schools must donate a teacher-taught class to the pool.)
Virtual High School’s costs are reasonable, and it is not designed to replace high schools. It allows schools to offer more sophisticated courses, and a wider array of choices to their students. Some of the students would otherwise dual-enroll in community colleges, but spots at ccs are getting scarce here, as community colleges become more popular.
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In Massachusetts at least, virtual education is not causing budget cuts. Budget cuts come first, they are still coming, and it’s hitting towns previously thought immune to large cuts: http://masscommongroundnews.com/issue/Budget%2BCuts.
Some towns’ school committees are publicly talking of class sizes of 35. Newton’s school committee is speaking of class sizes of 50. http://tinyurl.com/3r4dgbo (links to Boston Globe article)
I don’t like or trust k-12. Too much of the online mentions I can find are positive, which to me reeks of marketing. If real people are reviewing something, they will always find something wrong. On Amazon, even satisfied reviewers usually give 4, not 5 stars.
In this state, parents can choose to enroll their children in K-12, through the Greenfield Virtual School District. It’s called MAVA @ Greenfield on the Massachusetts DOE’s website. The original school district pays the tuition. There is not yet much data available on the DOE’s website. http://profiles.doe.mass.edu/profiles/general.aspx?topNavId=1&orgcode=01140900&orgtypecode=6&
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“If real people are reviewing something, they will always find something wrong. On Amazon, even satisfied reviewers usually give 4, not 5 stars.”
Very true.
Grace Nunez of Education Quick Takes pulled a quote out of a Stephen Moore piece from the WSJ that is relevant to our discussion:
“Where are the productivity gains in government? Consider a core function of state and local governments: schools. Over the period 1970-2005, school spending per pupil, adjusted for inflation, doubled, while standardized achievement test scores were flat. Over roughly that same time period, public-school employment doubled per student, according to a study by researchers at the University of Washington. That is what economists call negative productivity. But education is an industry where we measure performance backwards: We gauge school performance not by outputs, but by inputs. If quality falls, we say we didn’t pay teachers enough or we need smaller class sizes or newer schools. If education had undergone the same productivity revolution that manufacturing has, we would have half as many educators, smaller school budgets, and higher graduation rates and test scores.”
http://educationquicktakes.blogspot.com/2011/04/public-schools-have-experienced.html
It may turn out that some education stuff can be readily computerized and automated (math drills, foreign language grammar, spelling, English grammar exercises, science vocabulary, etc.), but other important areas (like writing instruction) may continue to be very labor-intensive. That’s somewhat different, but related to the issue of online courses.
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I have taught online courses, although at the college level. My experience is that to do well, one must be a very capable reader and writer. So many of undergraduates today do not read well and thus do not write well. Online education will only offer mediocre results to those sorts of students.
I’m not sure that I buy Amy P.’s assertion that student paper feedback will be better in an online format. Class sizes per instructor are much higher online b/c one is free of brick and mortar constraints. Online classes are therefore cash cows, but the instructor is more limited in time. I find that online feedback is quite difficult because the need to type out a contextualization rather than do it verbally — which takes much less time.
Finally, clearly one advantage to class instruction is that the instructor gives information to a group of people at once. If I had to give grammatical feedback on an individual basis in long-winded emails for all the students who commit such errors, I would spend 5 hours doing what it would take me 5 minutes in the classroom. There is a loss of efficiency in online education. Frankly, most of my online students were online because they did not want attention at all.
Finally, although plagiarism happens in the regular classroom, one major problem with online education is testing. I can give exams more easily in a physical classroom. There is a distance in online education that makes it harder to build warmth and nurturing into the classroom experience. The problem is that many of the online students are the once that would benefit most from having an actual professor interact with them directly.
My husband taught an online course where he videotaped his classroom lectures and edited them down (cutting out the class discussion) to about 30 minutes per lecture. In his evaluation, he actually got complaints from students who said they didn’t sign on to online classes to experience the lectures — they just wanted to read the book and take tests. That’s clearly self-selection, but it does demonstrate some of the self-selection of the students. (Not all clearly — I’m contemplating signing up for an online language class to brush up on the esoteric language I should know better.)
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“I’m not sure that I buy Amy P.’s assertion that student paper feedback will be better in an online format.”
Not paper feedback–that’s more or less the same in either format. I was talking about the written back-and-forth that you have instead of oral communication. A lot of people would benefit from more writing, even just writing short emails asking for clarification.
“Finally, clearly one advantage to class instruction is that the instructor gives information to a group of people at once.”
I suspect that’s a lot of what makes teaching an online class more time consuming (and undoubtedly tedious), but it may be very beneficial to the students, particularly low-achieving students who could qualify for entry-level clerical if they had just a bit more polish.
“Finally, although plagiarism happens in the regular classroom, one major problem with online education is testing.”
But if it’s an online course offered via a high school, the high school will be able to offer proctors. I did some correspondence course Russian (surprisingly successfully, with all my time management issues) in high school and I believe the librarian proctored my exam at least once.
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A lot of people would benefit from more writing, even just writing short emails asking for clarification.
That, at least, is a good skill for holding a job.
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My experience is that to do well, one must be a very capable reader and writer. So many of undergraduates today do not read well and thus do not write well. Online education will only offer mediocre results to those sorts of students
I would say that to do well after third grade, one must be a very capable reader and writer. I think the point of education is to teach students to read, write, and do math. Is there any guarantee that the students who don’t read well and don’t write well do better in a normal classroom? Or do they do not-so-well wherever they are? The online medium makes it impossible to hide deficiencies which exist in a normal classroom.
I don’t consider online education to be a replacement for typical (have to think of a better word) classrooms. I would love to see state or federal governments pass laws requiring all public schools to offer online education only through partnerships with non-profit providers. If there are any cost savings to be made through online education, those cost savings should be returned to the public purse, rather than awarded to for-profit outfits. (By the way, K-12 is for profit; VHS is non-profit.)
Many districts place students into honors courses on the basis of behavior. That means that some students, particularly those who have Asperger’s, or Tourette’s, may not be placed into classes which they could handle. Online, your physical behavior doesn’t matter.
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I taught developmental English (i.e., grammar) online, and it is exceedingly difficult. Part of it is that I thought it would be simple to just move from one aspect of online to another (hey, I’m commenting on 11D, and 10 seconds later, I’m teaching online! woohoo!) but it didn’t work that way for me. I find that I didn’t like work infringing on my online time. But that was separate from the other issues of teaching online.
Students who choose to take online courses are not always the best judges of whether they have the skills to take online courses. Case in point: the dyslexic student who signed up for my online course. *headdesk*
You have to have self-discipline, and you have to have the reading and writing skills necessary. I cannot tell you how much time I wasted reiterating instructions that were right on the CMS. You could say “Oh, just let them fail, or be graded lower if they mess up,” but it just doesn’t look good when 2/3 of the enrollees are failed. I’m not kidding–I’d start with enrollments of 17 or 18 and end with 5 students because I did drop them (long story–we used to have an attendance policy).
Grading was long and involved. As you can imagine, I had to comment in great detail on their weekly essays. For the most part, it seemed the students ignored my comments. I write the same comments on paper copies, and those students ignore them, too. IOW, an online course doesn’t make students more likely to pay attention.
Some courses are content-based. Just memorize and regurgitate. I see no reason why those courses couldn’t/shouldn’t be online. Some people learn better with visual/written language and being left alone to read and absorb it. I see no reason why those people shouldn’t have online courses as an option.
But as a significant part of the education system? No.
I no longer teach online, though I am still involved with online course development. I might try to teach intro to literature online in the future. But if you ask the students at my university–and we did–whether they’d take online courses, most of them say no. They prefer the face-to-face communication of the classroom.
I have no idea if this is a liberal or conservative view. All I know is that I’m in the trenches, so to speak.
Oh, by the way, when we started developing online courses a few years ago, we were told that there was federal legislation requiring online course providers to come up with anti-cheating technologies. Not sure what happened with that.
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“I find that I didn’t like work infringing on my online time.”
There’s a bestselling t-shirt idea right there.
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Or a coffee mug. I don’t really care for it on a thong–it sends the wrong message, I think.
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I don’t think it’s a conservative or liberal idea. I think it depends upon how firmly you believe Technology Will Transform Education for the Better. I don’t believe it, personally. Given a choice, I’d rather students were in the classroom of the 19th century than the 21st century.
A former member of our town’s school committee was a retired engineer in his 80s. (Very liberal, even for Massachusetts.) He would treat the meeting to predictions of the wonders of the Classroom of the Future, in which each student would work efficiently at his own pace, independently of all the other students, at a much lower cost. I found (and find) this vision of education abhorrent, because I believe that an educated person should be able to speak with other people. There is a point beyond which individualization and specialization are not productive.
Years ago, in The Atlantic, I read the prediction of a Forbes technology editor (I think), that in the future, the rich would have teachers and the poor would have computers. I agree that that’s the way things are heading, and I don’t think that’s a positive change for education.
I’ll admit that there are students who aren’t learning using either method, perhaps some who can’t learn using any method. Given the collapse of the housing market, and the stagnation of the economy, school districts have to make cuts. Online learning isn’t a perfect solution, but it has to be better than study halls, or classes of 50.
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Isn’t the real issue defining what education is supposed to do? If the sole purpose of school is to teach facts for regurgitation by all means bring on the computers. They remember many more facts than I ever will (I was a classroom teacher for many years in a variety of settings). They can access the data faster and for multiple choice and true/false testing they do a very competent job.
If, however, the point of education is teaching people how to turn information into knowledge (and hopefully ultimately to combine knowledge and experience and get wisdom) computers will fail every time. They cannot interact in a way to teach students to recognize what they know, what they don’t know and how to take what they know and use it to decrease the area of unknowns. It takes dialogue to do that.
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ძალიან კარგიაა, ჯული!
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My next door neighbors “teach” their ten year old daughter online. I think it’s awful. At noon she is still in her PJs. She is overweight and doesn’t seem to have many friends. I think it is a terrible disservice to do to a child. How will she get on in the real world?
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You’ve never seen a public school child who is fat and has no friends?
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Google translate still doesn’t do well with that.
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გმადლობ! Doug — how on earth to you spell your name? დუგი? დოგი?
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Tayna, that sounds as if it’s caused by parenting, not online learning. Presumably, the mother is home schooling. I’m not clear where the choice of computer-assisted instruction leads to PJs, overweight, and no friends. I’d think all those things would be possible if the mother were using printed textbooks to teach her daughter at home.
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I’m not clear where the choice of computer-assisted instruction leads to PJs, overweight, and no friends.
4chan?
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Perhaps online education fits the illusion that education is just about knowledge of facts instead of a larger experience that also includes social skills and experience. So someone who believes that is all education is would jump to online education as a solution instead of realizing, as teachers and most parents do, that education is more than just being able to regurgitate facts.
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დუგლასი. Like მაიქლ დუგლასი.
The long version leads to less confusion. Same is true in Germany, where a final “g” is pronounced as a “k”. Rather than adjusting to life as waterfowl, I went with the long form.
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“…education is more than just being able to regurgitate facts.”
It’s awfully handy, though. I bet bj can reel off a whole bunch of biology without reaching for a reference, Doug probably knows words in half a dozen different languages, and a lot of people here could easily draft an article on the peculiarities of the autism spectrum without breaking a sweat. I think we use the term “regurgitate facts” as a pejorative for information we regard as useless. For the information that we need, knowing it by heart is as essential as breathing.
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I should mention, though, that the NYT article isn’t talking about students who are learning to (choose one) regurgitate information or learn it by heart. The opening paragraphs describe an online student who is cribbing answers from the internet and turning in light paraphrases of other people’s work. He’s probably getting some academic benefit from the rewriting process, but that’s about it. If you asked him about the book that he hasn’t read in a few weeks, it’s unlikely that it is going to leave much of a mark on him. (Although, to be fair, I wouldn’t want to take a test on the Grapes of Wrath or How Green Was My Valley right now.)
A lit class is probably the worst possible candidate for the online treatment. I think it would be more interesting if the NYT had shown students in other subjects, because I suspect that the online courses might be much more productive for students who in a traditional classroom would be deep back in the rear rows playing with their phones.
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I repeat, education is about more than regurgitating facts. If that weren’t the case, so many kids with Asperger’s wouldn’t hit the educational wall in 4th/5th grade, as Dr. L has warned me they often do, which is why I pushed so hard for an IEP last year.
I thought Kyndra’s reply was very good.
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A lit class is probably the worst possible candidate for the online treatment.
I would have loved online lit classes for all the wrong reasons. Hello Cliff Notes.
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“I repeat, education is about more than regurgitating facts.” Agreed; perhaps you could explain that to the Department of Education? It isn’t a simple dichotomy of online education: facts, offline education: Socratic dialogue. Classroom teaching does not always lead to a dialogue, nor to learning. My daughter participated in an online, monitored writing community over several summers. The feedback from the online teachers was much better than the lack of feedback she received from her public school language arts teachers. “Great imagery!” or “super!” scrawled at the top of a creative writing assignment does not improve student writing. “Your opening paragraph should bear a relation to the remainder of the piece; look at these essays (linked) for pointers,” followed by correction of grammar mistakes, in comparison, was much better.
Cliff Notes, Spark Notes, and copying from Wikipedia are found in offline classrooms as well. It seems all teachers must be vigilant in detecting plagiarism of the laziest kind, whether they teach students in a classroom or online.
I think motivated, literate students, who care about their studies, can educate themselves in classrooms or in online classes. I don’t think that online classes are a magic bullet which can improve the education of students who don’t want to learn, or who can’t read. The “Click for Credit” program is at most, a cheap way to claim the system has provided students the opportunity to finish high school.
Requiring students to sign up for online classes is ridiculous. How many campaign donations has that politician received from people who profit from online education companies? (Googles.) Oh. http://prepdog.com/wordpress/?p=63 and http://tinyurl.com/3mxn98y .
Once more, it would be a good idea to require public education funds to be used to hire only non-profit companies.
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“Requiring students to sign up for online classes is ridiculous.”
It might make sense if you want to give students a sort of simulation of post-high school learning. Of course, if that’s what you wanted, a community college course, a university summer course or an AP course would do as well. I think that sort of thing could be particularly beneficial for rural kids, poor city kids, or any student who is unfamiliar with college learning culture. It’s a big cultural jump from high school to college–as a student, you suddenly have so much more responsibility for managing your time and your work.
As I mentioned earlier, I did some (2 or 3?) quarters of University of Washington distance Russian by mail as a high schooler. I got an extra study hall in the library to do it. I had my textbook and some cassette tapes and I would mail or fax in written assignments and cassettes with me reading grammar exercises. I won’t say that I spent 100% (or even 50%) of my study hall time doing the Russian assignments, but I did somehow plug through the work and I eventually tested into getting a semester’s worth of credit for my work and I was definitely not in any worse shape than anybody else I studied with later who had started in a traditional classroom. It would have been beneficial to have somebody at school to tap my shoulder and tell me to get back on task, and it would also have been helpful to have current technology to work with, because there was a lot of lost time while I waited for graded assignments to be mailed back to me. Interestingly, this fairly successful experience with distance learning happened after I bombed out of a traditional summer intensive Russian program at the UW when I was 14. I quit after about 4 days and transferred to an English lit course because I just couldn’t keep up with all the new material in the intensive Russian course. It’s true that I might have done better in a non-intensive traditional classroom course, but the distance learning course offered me a sort of slower on-ramp that eventually made me much more successful. An online Russian course with some computerized exercises would have been fantastic for me back then, and (if properly set up) might have helped with my time management issues.
While I’m at it, I should mention my experiences with French in high school, which are somewhat related. I had a traditional 1st year of French and I did fine. Unfortunately, for the next two years, the 2nd and 3rd year French were scheduled in the same room at the same time as the 1st year class. Theoretically, the French teacher was supposed to be teaching multiple levels at the same time, but it didn’t really work out that way. For the 2nd and especially by the 3rd year, I was essentially learning French as if it were a dead language. I was studying the book as best as I could “at my own pace” and then taking tests at intervals, but I never learned to speak French properly and my interest in the language eventually fizzled. However, it wasn’t a total waste–I think I got through my MA exam in French translation much more comfortably because of those years of high school French.
Anyway, my point is that a good distance learning course can be more effective than a poorly executed or inappropriate traditional class.
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Also, “at your own pace!” is a red flag for me.
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Also, “at your own pace!” is a red flag for me.
Apparently, my high school had a system where you worked at your own pace to complete units. This was have stopped before the 1980s. Parents with a greater focus getting their kids into college complained. Plus, it was stupid.
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It was much better to go to high school in the 70s. The teachers couldn’t tell you were smoking unless they actually saw it in your hand because they never quit smoking, most of the senior class was old enough to drink, and pedagogical theories were at their most lazy-friendly ever.
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Looking back, I would have been better served taking an online physics course, rather than the one my high school offered. The teacher was a nice lady but 1) wasn’t qualified to teach science at any level and 2) was absorbed in managing a political campaign. We did a bunch of stuff with mousetrap cars and springs and some book exercises, but I’m kind of embarrassed that I have physics (and probably an A, too) on my high school transcript. I would have learned so much more from taking home ec or shop, but the colleges wouldn’t have understood that. An online class with videos would have been a godsend.
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Amy P, I rather think you were a motivated, literate student. There’s a world of difference between allowing a bright student to take an online correspondence course in Russian, and declaring that 8 of 46 mandated high school courses be taken online. Allowing advanced students to begin specialized studies, which a school can’t afford to offer? (Russian, multivariable calculus, Law & Ethics) Great!
“Let’s outsource the English and Math departments to online providers, and fire the English and Math faculty!” Not so Great! It might be tempting to turn over biology classes to Christian online education providers, but as a taxpayer, I’d be mighty peeved if our school did that.
Before one objects that a school board wouldn’t do that, for a time I subscribed to the Skeptical Inquirer. A number of science teachers in the Bible belt wrote very moving letters about trying to teach evolution in certain towns in our country.
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Not sure where to start. I teach literature online at a community college. This semester I have an honors section which means 16 very motivated adult students reading, discussing, taking quizzes and writing essays. Most take the class very seriously; some don’t, just like in regular f2f sections. Usually, for me, online is more work, but I prefer it. Students can’t sit in the back of the room since discussion is part of the grade. I’ve written the reading quizzes and usually Cliff notes just won’t help. They work at their own pace, but with two weekly deadlines. I think I reach a group of students who might not otherwise complete an AA degree.
On the other hand, students who sign up for a comp class and think it will be easier online, usually drop out fairly quickly. It’s pretty much the same work but with the daily motivation left up to the individual (some work well in pajamas and some don’t).
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Also, “at your own pace!” is a red flag for me.
And that’s a red flag for me. 🙂 I was in a mostly self-paced program in grades 4-6. Haven’t I sung the praises of this program before? Loved. It. If you look at the top 10 students of my HS graduating class, 5 of us were former students from this program, though that could have been a selection bias issue.
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“…declaring that 8 of 46 mandated high school courses be taken online…”
Yeah, that doesn’t sound like just filling in the high school’s weak spots, especially when you consider how many of the 38 courses will be things like PE, music, art, home ec and shop (if they still have those these days) where you absolutely must have a teacher on site.
“They work at their own pace, but with two weekly deadlines.”
That sounds very good. A weekly deadline wouldn’t be often enough.
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“And that’s a red flag for me. 🙂 I was in a mostly self-paced program in grades 4-6.”
I’m not saying that “self-paced” is wrong for everybody, but it definitely doesn’t work for everybody. I definitely wouldn’t use it as the default mode. It’s just like self-employment. A handful of people are brilliant at self-employment. Far more people find the idea of self-employment appealing but don’t have the self-discipline or organizational skills to be their own boss.
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Also, ironically, the more appealing one finds “self-pacing” or “self-employment,” the less likely one is to be the sort of person who can actually do it successfully.
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Just like counting ballots.
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Just to clarify… I’m not arguing that online education is an inferior experience to a classroom experience. In the higher ed setting, it is an excellent way to bring in students who would ordinarily not be able to get a college degree, because they have to work full time. In the lower ed setting, it can be excellent way for non-traditional learners to get access to material. I believe that my youngest son learns very well using online learning tools.
This post was just about the politics of online education.
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“If education had undergone the same productivity revolution that manufacturing has, we would have half as many educators, smaller school budgets, and higher graduation rates and test scores.”
Perhaps this woman would like to send her kid to China, and replace all of the kid’s expensive parts with plastic?
It seems like one can’t make a blanket statement about online classes. It sounds like some can work well, some work poorly, just like some teachers in class are good, and some are bad.
In terms of self-pacing, I think if it involves sitting in a classroom setting, being monitored by a teacher, taking regular tests, and having homework, than it is no more an opportunity to screw off than any other type of learning. As I posted below, I went to low-income, anti-tracking schools which were also very excellent. We did lots of self paced things and independent projects in a classroom environment. It allowed some students, e.g., to work on adding fractions while others were still doing multiplication tables. The teacher and the aid would teach small groups of students based on level, and the other students would keep working on their assigned tasks. In 40 minutes, the teacher and aid could teach about 4 different math mini-classes while keeping a whole room productive. Since each group had between 4-7 people, the material could be covered more quickly and the teacher could notice if kids got it or not. For tests, once we completed a certain number of worksheets or lessons, we could ask to be tested. If we could do the test in a certain time period and get fewer than x number wrong, we were allowed to progress. Otherwise we stayed at the same level. In upper grades, independent projects and self-pacing allowed me to write a long research papers on topics that interested me (like paleoanthropology) that I would have never learned about in a normal classroom setting.
Also, with mixed levels, it was expected that the quicker kids would help the slower kids. You might object that your child is being used at times as a de facto tutor, but having to teach something is a great way to learn something yourself, and often times you might think you know something, but not until you have to put it clearly in words can you really know how well you got the concept. By 8th grade, I had enough teaching experience that when I worked in public school classrooms with struggling kids during summers college, many people assumed that I was an ed major or had teaching and classroom training.
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B.I,
You’ve got to tell us where this school is. Do you have any idea how unusual what you are describing is? As I understand it, in current practice, skill level groups are just as verboten as old-style tracking. The new buzz word is “differentiation” and in practice, it means something rather different than what you got at your school.
“Also, with mixed levels, it was expected that the quicker kids would help the slower kids.”
That was the selling point that my high school administration used when strong-arming the French teacher into combining the 1st year and the 2nd year classes into a single time slot. I think there was still some separate instruction for the 2nd year students, but by the time my 3rd year arrived, I don’t think there was any specifically 3rd year instruction at all. Especially that last year, I was totally adrift, with no guidance. I just made up the course for myself and took tests. I did do quite a bit of in-class tutoring, I think, but my spoken French never took off. (The instructor was a tiny South American woman who got pushed around a lot by the high schoolers.)
I suppose there’s a good way and a bad way to do just about everything.
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“All that talk about choice and freedom is nonsense. Most voucher advocates really want lower costs and weaker unions.”
On reflection, I’ll take another go at this one, particularly since you are more interested in the politics of it than the pedagogical issue. As your conservative blog liaison, I’d like to point out that the people that you are describing would not see any contradiction between embracing all four of those goals at the same time. They’d undoubtedly also add a major social justice component, too. If your demographic is very likely to get so-so or worse teachers, good prepackaged materials can be very helpful. Some of the most educational time I spent in school science classes (aside from the incredible Mr. S’s chemistry class) was spent watching videos.
A lot of struggling kids need a lot more practice at the areas where they are weak. Teachers face classrooms with enormous disparities in ability (I think that’s screwed up, but that’s where we are.) Given those two facts, good educational software could provide practice and reinforcement to struggling students. Note how well the set-up that B.I. describes would work with software.
On the other hand, I’m not sure how much good educational software there is right now, even 30 years into the computer age. A lot of the stuff we’ve gotten for our kids has been crude and disappointing (i.e. Jumpstart. On the other hand, there are things here and there like Crayon Physics. I also like the Wii game where the child is trying to add up to a certain number, so they move their hips to “hit” the right combination. There is a need for better educational software. If a reclusive philanthropist is reading this, that would be an excellent thing to fund: a contest to develop better educational software. Heck, I’m usually the very last person to ask the Feds to do something, but this would be a very good use of federal education money.
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Hi Amy P
Yeah, language sounds like a terrible thing not to group by level. It’s one of those things where it is so collaborative, and your learning depends so much on your peers, I can’t imagine how anyone thought a third year french student could learn with a first year student.
The schools were in Portland, OR (which until recently at least was the best urban school district in the country). Unfortunately, after the principle at my elementary school left in the mid 90s, the school went downhill. Lots more teach-to-the-test rote learning, middle class parents stopped sending their kids. Now the neighborhood has gentrified like crazy (yoga studio where the local crack house used to be), and the new residents don’t want to send their kids to a mediocre-ish school with majority black children.
The principle who got the whole thing going (she combined two failing schools, with huge problems, school shootings, you name it) was pretty spectacular, she won lots of awards, and had a building named after her. She did it by hiring the best teachers she could and by giving them total control of their classrooms. She also did her best to hire minority teachers and minority aids (For example, my 1st grade teacher had a PhD in multiracial education.) The school was decently funded since it was before huge cuts in education came about. There were also lots of aides-many of them retired teachers, who would come in and teach small groups. I remember in 3rd grade we had a speech pathologist come to the class every week to teach Standard English, and the students who already spoke it would go in the hallway with another teacher for an advanced reading group, etc.
There was a free daycare in the building that offered during and after school daycare to younger siblings. The dental school used to set up a clinic once a year in the school and provide free cleanings, sealants, and fillings. There was also a scholarship fund, offering college scholarships to any in-state place of higher learning for all students who graduated high school with at least a C average, no children, and drug and alcohol free. In the evenings, the school offered parenting and literacy classes for the parents of the students.
The school was extremely popular with middle class white people (and middle class black people, who wanted their kids to be educated at a school where African-American culture and history was highlighted), there was a long waiting list for acceptance to the school for those outside the neighborhood.
My middle school was less exceptional, except that across the board the teachers were really excellent (many of them ended up winning teaching awards.)
Anyways, I fully recognize my school experiences were out of the ordinary, and perhaps not easily replicable, but I guess I just wanted to point out that creating a socio-economically and racially diverse excellent school is possible.
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“I can’t imagine how anyone thought a third year french student could learn with a first year student.”
That wasn’t a huge priority at my high school, although looking back, I did actually have several rather good high school teachers (one of the history teachers, one of the English teachers, and the one chemistry/math teacher). Everybody else, I would happily have replaced with software, although I guess that wouldn’t work with PE. OK, the typing class was helpful, too, although I believe there is software for that nowadays.
I left for college after 3 years of high school. Except for maybe one course in humanities and maybe a little bit more math, the school had nothing more to offer in college prep.
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Amy P, the BBC has a website with interactive learning games on the human anatomy. If you search for “BBC body and mind” you should find it.
We like Aleks.com for online math, but it’s best used as a complement to f2f math instruction. The internet itself is a fun tool for education. With an adult’s guidance, kids can learn about the world, and explore concepts in greater depth than a textbook. There are a number of good websites with interesting information–the Library of Congress, Bartleby, NASA etc. MIT is a standout for materials available online, including Open Courseware. The ability to read newspapers from around the world at one’s kitchen table without traveling to a specialized library is precious.
It’s still hit-or-miss, and its use would depend upon an educated adult to steer the kid away from spending all day on Youtube and gossip sites. On the other hand, the riches the internet offers doesn’t necessarily translate to a good online curriculum from online companies. Requiring schools to offer 8 of 46 courses online at this point is too close to requiring them to buy product from the few, newly created companies. It’s not like saying, “you must use online resources in 8 of 46 courses,” or “You must use books in 8 of 46 courses.”
After all the effort to require schools to hire and train good teachers, why the push to online education? How can a principal at a high school determine the qualifications of the teachers hired by the online company? How do you know that the person who logs on as “Mary Smith, certified history teacher” is truly Mary Smith, history teacher?
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http://tinyurl.com/4xq5ryj
(links to a Boston Globe article)
It’s coming to a conflict between teachers and technology in Watertown, which is not a bastion of conservatism.
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(links to a Boston Globe article)
Nice try, but I’d bet it links to a Rick Astley video.
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“Grace Nunez of Education Quick Takes pulled a quote out of a Stephen Moore piece from the WSJ that is relevant to our discussion:”
Stephen Moore really doesn’t understand economics.
“If quality falls, we say we didn’t pay teachers enough or we need smaller class sizes or newer schools. ”
Last I heard, poverty rates account for the majority of variation in outcomes between schools. We’re trying to use schools to make up for society, which is an expensive way to do this.
“If education had undergone the same productivity revolution that manufacturing has, we would have half as many educators, smaller school budgets, and higher graduation rates and test scores.”
This statement could apply to the majority of things involving human minds and knowledge. Our ability to teach a whole host of skills hasn’t kept up with our ability to shape physical materials.
In psychology, the major progress (IMHO) has come from recognizing the physical roots of many mental illnesses, and treating them more as physical ailments.
And in economics, the field has had drastic failures, with no evidence of learning from them, or of practitioners being willing to oust quacks.
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“If education had undergone the same productivity revolution that manufacturing has, we would have half as many educators, smaller school budgets, and higher graduation rates and test scores.”
Maybe a child is not a widget. Maybe humans haven’t evolved in the last century. Maybe adding technology to education doesn’t improve education.
Technology has made it easier to edit essays. It is easier to contact teachers. It is easier to complete paperwork (then again, the amount of paperwork has increased.)
None of that has transformed the average 8 year old child into a super-scholar. For teens, adding technology has increased distractions, and decreased sleep, which doesn’t improve their education.
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“None of that has transformed the average 8 year old child into a super-scholar. ”
Not to mention that we seem to be demanding more of some of them (though I can’t say what we’re demanding of all of them).
I vividly remember being tested to skip Kindergarten (in the middle of the year, in which I also learned English) by reciting my ABC’s. That was apparently enough to put me 1st grade for the rest of the year.
My current first grader is reading Harry Potter, and he’s not unusual among his peers.
Really, there can’t be a productivity revolution in developing humans, in school, or in the home. For one thing, if there were a productivity revolution (i.e. we could teach kids with x% less labor), we’d immediately demand that they learn more. There’s no reason to assume that we will (or can or should) set our educational goals as anything less than the achievable maximum. And, as of yet, there’s no known limit to the potential of the human mind.
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And, as of yet, there’s no known limit to the potential of the human mind.
Not knowing how limited that potential is is a known limit to the human mind.
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