It’s a nearly perfect day. I’m cleaning up the garden this morning. With mulch smell on my hands, let me jot out one quick blog post with links about urban education.
Andy Kessler in the WSJ thinks that MOOCs are the answer to the problems in urban education. I absolutely can’t imagine that a kid who barely shows up to school and has a third grade reading level is going to have the discipline or the background to take advantage of online learning. The article is worthless, except for some interesting numbers.
I began by pointing out that in 2011 only 7.9% of 11th graders in Chicago public schools tested “college ready.” That’s failure, and it’s worse when you realize how much money is wasted on these abysmal results. Chicago’s 23,290 teachers—who make an average salary of $74,839, triple U.S. per capita income and 50% more than median U.S. household income—cost Chicago taxpayers $1.75 billion out of the city’s $5.11 billion budget.
Why not forget the teachers and issue all 404,151 students an iPad or Android tablet? At a cost of $161 million, that’s less than 10% of the expense of paying teachers’ salaries. Add online software, tutors and a $2,000 graduation bonus, and you still don’t come close to the cost of teachers. You can’t possibly do worse than a 7.9% college readiness level.
For a more informed debate, check out Deborah Meier and Michael Petrili in Education Week.
Apt. 11d 
Someone with money should pay for that experiment. It wouldn’t be well controlled. My guess is that even with parents/children choosing the iPad, what you’d get is equivalent college readiness, but a lot more instagram photos from the girls (some of which would be highly inappropriate) and porn-watching by the boys.
You can clearly do a lot worse than 7.9% college readiness.
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I agree. It’s always possible to do worse.
Where does the 7.9% figure come from? Is it the ACT? On the ACT report for Illinois, only 23% of high school seniors met standards in all four categories. http://www.act.org/readinessreality/13/pdf/Illinois-RCR-2013.pdf
Nationally, only 25% of high school seniors are “college ready.” http://media.act.org/documents/CCCR12-NationalReadinessRpt.pdf
I will be provocative and say Chicago’s not doing badly, when you consider its enrollment is 87% low income. Given the demographic make up of the student body, if they met national rates for each ethnic group, you might expect…10% to be “college ready” by the ACT’s standards.
None of this means the same students would do better. I found a survey online which establishes 92% of Chicago Public School students have access to the internet at home. http://ccsr.uchicago.edu/publications/use-technology-chicago-public-schools-2011-perspectives-students-teachers-and
I am unclear on how handing tablets to students who already have access to the internet would improve college readiness. Especially interesting to note is that students’ use of technology varies depending upon the teachers’ lesson plans. Also, public exam schools and higher scoring students use more technology.
On its own, technology is just a tool. All sorts of aphorisms spring to mind. “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink” would be apropos, but doing away with teachers would also do away with the “leading” part.
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Also, a lot of kids who are not “college ready” in one way or another are now admitted to college, and some do fine eventually. About a third or more of my state university’s entering class requires remedial work in math or English, and this is work for which they do not receive college credit. (Yes, it’s terrible, but not at all uncommon.) However, from what I hear, they are often able to catch up in a year or so and some – I don’t know the numbers – do graduate. Probably their high school teacher brought them to a 10th or 11th grade level; without a teacher they could be 3-4 years, or more, behind grade level.
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I think firing all the teachers and just putting a bunch of unsupervised children in classrooms with ipads would be a stellar idea. For safety, you could hire one classroom monitor at $8/hour. That’s what Walmart pays to collect shopping carts, I don’t see the need for most jobs to pay more than that, especially not on the taxpayers’ dime. Better yet, close all the schools, eliminate facility maintenance fees, and just issue an ipad to every 6 year old and let them know about MOOCs. Then 12 years later, check up, and see if they’re ready for college.
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Laura, your prejudices are showing. At least link to the WSJ article you think is “worthless”. You are disingenuous when you say that “Andy Kessler in the WSJ thinks that MOOCs are the answer to the problems in urban education.” For Christ’s sake, the subtitle of the article is “Georgia Tech’s new Internet master’s degree in computer science is the future”. Read the entire article and use critical thinking instead of automatically siding with the “poor teachers”. The primary focus of the article is college. The part you quote is obviously for effect.
You can’t “clearly do a lot worse than 7.9% college readiness”, (bj’s comment), you can only do 7.9% worse, which is not a lot. If poverty is the cause of only “7.9% readiness” (cranberry’s comment), then just fire all the union teachers and hire the poor parents as teachers/supervisors, and try the Ipads and MOOCs. Give this experiment 5-10 years and see what happens. The “poverty” parents now become middle class wage earners and the students have at least an equal chance for success as when they are taught by unionized Education School Graduates more interested in their pensions than teaching.
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B.J. , what’s not being stated in many of these “let’s give little kids more online learning” articles is that essentially it’s a way of offloading even more of the teaching to the parents. My kids got homework in kindergarten that was basically homework for me — and lately my SIL has begun posting an awful lot of her kid’s school class projects on facebook, which suggests to me that she’s REALLY proud of them — because she did them!
My son is taking a couple of online high school classes and the expectation is that parents will be heavily involved in talking to the teacher, supervising the kid, troubleshooting tech issues and often explaining content that is unclear, proofing homework, etc. I have a PhD and I’m finding it challenging — I can’t help but think that it’s expecting an awful lot of parents, especially parents with other kids, jobs, etc. The kids might all be given an ipad at the age of six, but the difference between who instagrams and who learns calculus will ultimately come down to questions like “well, who had the dad who was a physicist?”
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I’m happy to include the link to the Kessler article. It was inadvertantly left out.
i did read the whole article. I didn’t discuss his discussion of MOOCs in higher ed, because we’ve already talked about it quite a bit. In fact, I wrote an article about the pros and cons of MOOCs in higher ed a year ago in the Atlantic. I spent an hour talking with one of the founders of the MOOC program at Stanford. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/05/the-big-idea-that-can-revolutionize-higher-education-mooc/256926/
One of the biggest problems in urban schools is low attendance. Kids aren’t showing up to the schools for a variety of reasons — demoralized by schools, family pressures, transportation issues. In NYC, they don’t even bother taking attendance until later in the day, because nobody is showing up for the first period classes. I can’t imagine that kids who aren’t motivated or are too overwhelmed to go to school are going to be able to teach themselves with an iPad.
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You can’t “clearly do a lot worse than 7.9% college readiness”, (bj’s comment), you can only do 7.9% worse, which is not a lot.
Depends on your reference point. ACT’s college readiness marker is a high bar; only 25% of students meet that standard nationally. In the Chicago Public Schools, you can do 100% worse than the current state of affairs–0% college readiness would be a decline of 100% of the set of college ready kids.
My comment was not only concerned with poverty. If you take the percent of high school juniors in each category who score college ready on the ACT, and factor in the demographic breakdown in Chicago, youend up with:
CPS x national ACT % = national standard
41% black x .05 = 2%
44% hispanic x .13 = 6%
9% white x .32 = 3%
3% asian x .42 = 1%
Total college ready, if Chicago matched national patterns: 10%
This does not look to me as if the local teachers are doing a bad job, considering 87% of the system’s children come from low-income families. On a national scale, only 21% of children live in poverty: http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cce.asp. Thus, CPS has more than four times the proportion of children in poverty than the average, yet manages to achieve 79% of the success rate.
As Chicago is 31.7 “white persons not Hispanic,” according to the US Census fast facts, I must assume there are many middle class families who send their children to private or parochial schools. Thus, the middle-class self-selects out of the system.
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Also, we shouldn’t assume that every high school graduate is capable of going to college or can benefit from college. For many students, high school is not preparation for college. This doesn’t mean that they don’t deserve the best possible education, but “not college-ready” is not equivalent to “shouldn’t have been able to graduate from high school.”
Again, on the “you can only do 7.9% worse” point: no, you can have students who are all reading at an 11th grade level, or students who are all reading at an 8th grade level, or students who never learned to read at all because the Ipad and the untrained parent/supervisors didn’t figure out how to teach them.
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“I must assume there are many middle class families who send their children to private or parochial schools.”
Like the Lab School, where the Obama children (and my mother, and Professor William McNeill, and many other famous people) went.
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Most folks would consider Obama to have been bitten by the Ed Reform bug, so his experience in largely private schools fits with the general impression of ed reformers. It’s not that I don’t think their hearts are not in the right place (though I am suspicious of some, who I think are developing a business model based on privatization of public school), but that I think they are naive and misguided about the problems faced in a system vastly different than the one they are familiar with. The same problem, incidentally, that I think would be faced by the MIT CS major who heads off to save African children.
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I was sincere about the experiment. With just the iPads replacing teachers I thought it was highly likely to be a failure, but adding the parents (replace teachers with parents and resources, including pay & iPads) makes it a risky experiment. Not one, I think, that ed reformers are likely to support because an underlying theme in ed reform is making education more efficient by decreasing labor demand and concentrating resources in the purveyors of the efficient systems (software, curricula, education plans, testing).
But, if Gates or Broad would fund it, I’d like to see the experiment of replacing teachers with iPads and parent supervision. I think it would fail for the subgroups we’re considering, because I think we’re making the mistake of assuming that the methods that work for us would work for everyone.
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I don’t think ed reformers, as a whole, are focused on decreasing labor demand. I think the purveyors of (so-called) efficient systems have gone to great lengths to capture their voices, though.
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bj,
I’m not sure how that would work. Would the idea be that one parent monitors many students? In which case, how is the parent’s role different from a teacher, besides lack of training? Would it be that each parent monitors their own child? Given the backgrounds of many of these kids, that seems counterproductive, impossible, or too costly even assuming the parents or grandparents are stable and interested in helping their kids, I don’t see how the logistics would work. Most poor or working class parents work several jobs and don’t have the time to homeschool their kids, which is what this would amount to. Compensation would have to be more than token, i.e., it would have to be equivalent to the low-wage job the parent would have to give up to homeschool, so at least about $15,000/year. Multiply $15,000 x 30 kids (average classroom size), and we’re looking paying out sums far larger than $75,000/year for a senior teacher, except you’re eliminating the trained professional who is skilled in both teaching and the material. Now, factor in that many poor parents in Southside Chicago probably don’t have the math and literacy skills to get their kids through 5th grade content material, much less high school, and the very high probability that some adult in the child’s life would take the ipad and sell it, I don’t see how adding parents would in anyway help. I used to attend and work in low income schools and with disadvantaged groups in Portland OR, a place not known for its ghettos, and for most kids school was the most, or only, stable part of their life, and the only place they received any nutritious food. Take out the school setting, and these kids didn’t have a prayer of learning anything.
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Yes, BI’s list is the reason why I’d expect to see the experiment do worse than 7.8% college readiness. But, maybe self analyst can flesh out the idea so we can critique the grant application.
I did envision it as one parent/child (or maybe 2 or 3, if they are in one family) & 15K or so per child. So, on first glance, this project would be a lot more expensive (450K, v even 150K, including benefits and other costs for the trained teacher).
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