Parents ‘n Schools

“In school redesign, we are constantly battling the gravitational pull of school as usual.” (Billie Donegan, Colorado educational consultant, ASCD’s Educational Leadership, p. 56, May 2008)

Government schooling in Alberta is a nearly $6 billion per year business. In Canada, nearly $60 billion per year. In North America, nearly $600 billion per year.

How do you constructively and meaningfully change something THAT big?

Slowly. Very slowly.

But individual kids can’t wait that long. Individual families won’t wait that long.

Mountains can be climbed… or walked around. The mountain of government schooling is increasingly being walked around. Increasing alternatives and feasible, sustainable options are presenting themselves to individual students and families that allow them to simply walk around government school mountains.

Don’t try to move them. Don’t wait for them to change. Just walk on around.

I think that’s a good thing. I think it is an inevitable thing. And I think it is the only certain way to change something that big. Go around it to something demonstrably better suited to your family, and upon viewing that demonstration the mountain will move itself to provide that same solution.

It is a perfectly legitimate solution to stop trying to change government schooling and to choose alternatives instead.

That’s sometimes how mountains learn.

That’s sometimes how to make them move.

GLO

gordotto@parentsnschools.com

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Robert Fulford in his National Post commentary recently described a newly published book by Barbara Demick providing insight into personal lives within the now 65 year old totalitarian regime in North Korea:

“She leads us carefully and thoughtfully through desperate lives. A kindergarten teacher reports that the hardest part of her job was watching her pupils die of starvation.”

GLO

gordotto@parentsnschools.com

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(GLO — July 2010 — From about 2 years ago… I recently returned to work full-time, after 10 years as a stay-at-home-parent to our now middle-school-aged children. I’ll likely now be better able to relate to working parents and the challenges of involvement in their children’s schooling. A recent “Entourage” episode on HBO captured some of that where the character talent agent Ari Gold, unable to make his children’s parent-teacher conference, suggested that his wife tell the school that if they’re going to insist on holding conferences mid-afternoon mid-week, “say goodbye to Daddy”.)

Imagine what parent involvement would be like if children went to school with only a single teacher… and nobody else. Not a one-room schoolhouse, a one-teacher schoolhouse.

Imagine the delegation among teacher and parents. Imagine the genuine partnership. Imagine all the families getting to know — by working with them in turns — all the children. Imagine all the children getting to know all the families. Imagine what the teacher would learn, too.

Would accountability go up? Would there be anywhere to pass the buck?

What pressures (subtle and less-so) would be changed on the student in their work and their achievement? What on the families?

How much of the challenges and problems children face in today’s government schools comes from how they have built themselves… into their large castles, insulated from the outside world, most of what goes on churning inside them without anyone really answering to the outside? What if all of that was stripped away, and it was the educator, the children and their families? All the same resources for them all to draw upon (online or in-class). But nobody else to turn to except families.

What would that be like?

GLO

P.S.    There’s a lot to be said for collegiality among professional educators, I’m sure. But what if collegiality with unpaid educators was given equal importance? What if that collaboration was given priority and resources? What if educators’ “learning community” actually and genuinely embraced,… the community?

Might as well wish upon the stars, I suppose.

Peter Drucker, in his “The Practice of Management” wrote this about management:

“Performance: The Test of Management”

The ultimate test of management is performance. Management, in other words, is a practice, rather than a science or profession, although containing elements of both. No greater damage could be done to our economy or to our society than to attempt to professionalize management by licensing manager, for instance, or by limiting access to management positions to people with a special academic degree. On the contrary, the test of good management is whether it enables the successful performer to do her work. And any serious attempt to make management “scientific” or a “profession” is bound to lead to the attempt to eliminate those “disturbing nuisances,” the unpredictabilities of business life — its risks, its ups and downs, its “wasteful competition,” the “irrational choices” of the consumer — and in the process, the economy’s freedom and its ability to grow.”

Now… let’s read it again… only this time substituting “schooling” (which is a form of management)… and let’s contemplate the “greater damage”…

“Performance: The Test of Schooling”

The ultimate test of schooling is performance. Schooling, in other words, is a practice, rather than a science or profession, although containing elements of both. No greater damage could be done to our economy or to our society than to attempt to professionalize schooling by licensing schooler, for instance, or by limiting access to schooling positions to people with a special academic degree. On the contrary, the test of good schooling is whether it enables the successful schooler (or, perhaps, student) to do her work. And any serious attempt to make schooling “scientific” or a “profession” is bound to lead to the attempt to eliminate those “disturbing nuisances,” the unpredictabilities of educational life — its risks, its ups and downs, its “wasteful competition,” the “irrational choices” of the consumer — and in the process, the economy’s (and schooling’s) freedom and its ability to grow.”

Spooky, eh?

GLO

gordotto@parentsnschools.com

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People worry about “kids today”.

I don’t, so much.

I’m concerned more about the parents.

Kids have it good. When I was a kid, we’d be handed lawn darts and told “go play”. In hindsight, that does not seem wise.

Bike helmets hadn’t been invented yet that we were made aware of. Seatbelts were tucked away under the cushions (kids rode lying in the back window, looking up at the stars… unconcerned about their potential as projectiles). Airbags?… Are you kidding me? Drunk driving, tragically, was an every-summer-weekend experience.

Technology-wise, I carried around a slide rule. Hard to reach the internet, or your “five faves”, on a slide rule. (Log tables were even less helpful.)

Nawww… kids got it good today. And, for the most part, they’ll turn out good… if their upbringing doesn’t get in the way.

Those parents worry me. And the other adults that are placed in positions of “in loco parentis” over other people’s kids.

I worry about the ones coaching my kids in hockey or baseball, or modelling behaviour from the other bench. I worry about their driving (with my kids in their car… or in their way). I worry about the examples they are setting, that my kids or other kids might stumble upon. I wonder what they’re thinking. I conclude that often they’re not, overmuch.

And I look at government school budgets, that share only about one penny of every 10,000 pennies (a penny out of every $100.00… what financial folk refer to as “a single basis point”, or, in other words, the very smallest iota of measurement in finance… slice things any smaller and you’re moving into the realm of atomic-level physics…) toward helping parents improve themselves as educators, as role models and as teachers of their children… and that worries me most. K-12 schooling is a 13-year marathon relay between home and school… and home gets little of the coaching, little of the training, little of the “constant improvement” and lifelong learning.

If “kids’ schooling” was looked at as a 24/7 enterprise, instead of an “8 to 3 government job”, how might those resources be divvied up? What impact might that have on the parents’ side of the relay? And what might be the impact, just accidentally, on the kids?

GLO

gordotto@parentsnschools.com

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From Whitney Tilson’s blog recently, a piece that educates on the “race” in the world of academia to combat cheating via technology with proctoring via technology. Children can be led to cheat in school in the same fashion as they are led to steal copyrighted material. Because it is easy, and others get away with it.

Another thing to watch out for as parents. Another thing that ain’t like it was when we were in school.

GLO

gordotto@parentsnschools.com

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To stop cheats, colleges learn their trickery

By TRIP GABRIEL

www.nytimes.com/2010/07/06/education/06cheat.html

ORLANDO, Fla. — The frontier in the battle to defeat student cheating may be here at the testing center of the University of Central Florida.

No gum is allowed during an exam: chewing could disguise a student’s speaking into a hands-free cellphone to an accomplice outside.

The 228 computers that students use are recessed into desk tops so that anyone trying to photograph the screen — using, say, a pen with a hidden camera, in order to help a friend who will take the test later — is easy to spot.

Scratch paper is allowed — but it is stamped with the date and must be turned in later.

When a proctor sees something suspicious, he records the student’s real-time work at the computer and directs an overhead camera to zoom in, and both sets of images are burned onto a CD for evidence.

Taylor Ellis, the associate dean who runs the testing center within the business school at Central Florida, the nation’s third-largest campus by enrollment, said that cheating had dropped significantly, to 14 suspected incidents out of 64,000 exams administered during the spring semester.

“I will never stop it completely, but I’ll find out about it,” Mr. Ellis said.

As the eternal temptation of students to cheat has gone high-tech — not just on exams, but also by cutting and pasting from the Internet and sharing of homework online like music files — educators have responded with their own efforts to crack down.

This summer, as incoming freshmen fill out forms to select roommates and courses, some colleges — Duke and Bowdoin among them — are also requiring them to complete online tutorials about plagiarism before they can enroll.

Anti-plagiarism services requiring students to submit papers to be vetted for copying is a booming business. Fifty-five percent of colleges and universities now use such a service, according to the Campus Computing Survey.

The best-known service, Turnitin.com, is engaged in an endless cat-and-mouse game with technologically savvy students who try to outsmart it. “The Turnitin algorithms are updated on an on-going basis,” the company warned last month in a blog post titled “Can Students ‘Trick’ Turnitin?”

The extent of student cheating, difficult to measure precisely, appears widespread at colleges. In surveys of 14,000 undergraduates over the last four years, an average of 61 percent admitted to cheating on assignments and exams.

The figure declined somewhat from 65 percent earlier in the decade, but the researcher who conducted the surveys, Donald L. McCabe, a business professor at Rutgers, doubts there is less of it. Instead, he suspects students no longer regard certain acts as cheating at all, for instance, cutting and pasting a few sentences at a time from the Internet.

Andrew Daines, who graduated in May from Cornell, where he served on a board in the College of Arts and Sciences that hears cheating cases, said Internet plagiarism was so common that professors told him they had replaced written assignments with tests and in-class writing.

Mr. Daines, a philosophy major, contributed to pages that Cornell added last month to its student Web site to bring attention to academic integrity. They include a link to a voluntary tutorial on avoiding plagiarism and a strongly worded admonition that “other generations may not have had as many temptations to cheat or plagiarize as yours,” and urging students to view this as a character test.

Mr. Daines said he was especially disturbed by an epidemic of students’ copying homework. “The term ‘collaborative work’ has been taken to this unbelievable extreme where it means, because of the ease of e-mailing, one person looking at someone else who’s done the assignment,” he said.

At M.I.T., David E. Pritchard, a physics professor, was able to accurately measure homework copying with software he had developed for another purpose — to allow students to complete sets of physics problems online. Some answered the questions so fast, “at first I thought we had some geniuses here at M.I.T.,” Dr. Pritchard said. Then he realized they were completing problems in less time than it took to read them and were copying the answers — mostly, it turned out, from e-mail from friends who had already done the assignment.

About 20 percent copied one-third or more of their homework, according to a study Dr. Pritchard and colleagues published this year. Students who copy homework find answers at sites like Course Hero, which is a kind of Napster of homework sharing, where students from more than 3,500 institutions upload papers, class notes and past exams.

Another site, Cramster, specializes in solutions to textbook questions in science and engineering. It boasts answers from 77 physics textbooks — but not Dr. Pritchard’s popular “Mastering Physics,” an online tutorial, because his publisher, Pearson, searches the Web for solutions and requests they be taken down to protect its copyright.

“You can use technology as well for detecting as for committing” cheating, Dr. Pritchard said.

The most popular anti-cheating technology, Turnitin.com, says it is now used by 9,500 high schools and colleges. Students submit written assignments to be compared with billions of archived Web pages and millions of other student papers, before they are sent to instructors. The company says that schools using the service for several years experience a decline in plagiarism.

Cheaters trying to outfox Turnitin have tried many tricks, some described in blogs and videos. One is to replace every “e” in plagiarized text with a foreign letter that looks like it, such as a Cyrillic “e,” meant to fool Turnitin’s scanners. Another is to use the Macros tool in Microsoft Word to hide copied text. Turnitin says neither scheme works.

Some educators have rejected the service and other anti-cheating technologies on the grounds that they presume students are guilty, undermining the trust that instructors seek with students.

Washington & Lee University, for example, concluded several years ago that Turnitin was inconsistent with the school’s honor code, “which starts from a basis of trusting our students,” said Dawn Watkins, vice president for student affairs. “Services like Turnitin.com give the implication that we are anticipating our students will cheat.”

For similar reasons, some students at the University of Central Florida objected to the business school’s testing center with its eye-in-the-sky video in its early days, Dr. Ellis said.

But recently during final exams after a summer semester, almost no students voiced such concerns. Rose Calixte, a senior, was told during an exam to turn her cap backward, a rule meant to prevent students from writing notes under the brim. Ms. Calixte disapproved of the fashion statement but didn’t knock the reason: “This is college. There is the possibility for people to cheat.”

A first-year M.B.A. student, Ashley Haumann, said that when she was an undergraduate at the University of Florida, “everyone cheated” in her accounting class of 300 by comparing answers during quizzes. She preferred the highly monitored testing center because it “encourages you to be ready for the test because you can’t turn and ask, ‘What’d you get?’ ”

For educators uncomfortable in the role of anti-cheating enforcer, an online tutorial in plagiarism may prove an elegantly simple technological fix.

That was the finding of a study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in January. Students at an unnamed selective college who completed a Web tutorial were shown to plagiarize two-thirds less than students who did not. (The study also found that plagiarism was concentrated among students with lower SAT scores.)

The tutorial “had an outsize impact,” said Thomas S. Dee, a co-author, who is now an economist at the University of Virginia.

“Many instructors don’t want to create this kind of adversarial environment with their students where there is a presumption of guilt,” Dr. Dee said. “Our results suggest a tutorial worked by educating students rather than by frightening them.”

Only a handful of colleges currently require students to complete such a tutorial, which typically illustrates how to cite a source or even someone else’s ideas, followed by a quiz.

The tutorial that Bowdoin uses was developed with its neighbor colleges Bates and Colby several years ago. Part of the reason it is required for enrollment, said Suzanne B. Lovett, a Bowdoin psychology professor whose specialty is cognitive development, is that Internet-age students see so many examples of text, music and images copied online without credit that they may not fully understand the idea of plagiarism.

As for Central Florida’s testing center, one of its most recent cheating cases had nothing to do with the Internet, cellphones or anything tech. A heavily tattooed student was found with notes written on his arm. He had blended them into his body art.

(GLO — July 2010 — From 2 years ago. The tilting continues, in its extreme. Change the way the dollars move, and the system changes automatically. The bulk of the work of status quo schooling advocacy is maintaining the financial status quo. Almost blindly. As if it is a given that what is “best” for a child’s schooling is maintaining the schooler in their fully securely financed condition. If Wal-Mart operated the same way, their would be “Roll Ups”, not Roll Backs.)

“What I concluded following my 16 months as ambassador — and based on my work in the U.N. system dating back to my earliest service in the Reagan administration — was that efforts at marginal or incremental reform of the U.N. are doomed to failure. Instead, I believe that we should focus on one issue: changing the arrangement by which financing of the U.N. is mandatory.” — John Bolton, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations (from a speech delivered at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar on February 11, 2008)

After my years of intense involvement with government schooling, I concluded much the same thing about it. The only way to truly reform schooling it is to change the way it is financed.

In Alberta, at present, for every $1 of government funding that a child in a government school receives, a child in a non-government school receives 60 cents (on its way up to 70 cents, I believe, under upcoming changes). And this is just operating dollars… capital investment in building schools is a separate thing.

Reverse those ratios, and appreciate that for every dollar of public funding that a child in a non-government school receives to support their learning, a child in a government school receives $1.67 (on its way down to $1.43). I would not be overly troubled by this if I firmly believed that the extra 67 cents went directly to the benefit of the child. But over the years I have come to believe that the inequity serves more to preserve the status quo of government school monopoly (or near monopoly) over schooling delivery services.

It is a seriously tilted playing field, economically, that effectively prevents entry of competitors or choices into the market (in addition to other barriers to entry such as the previously mentioned capital funding). With high school completion rates averaging only 70% across Alberta, the justification for such preferred status financially seems even harder to accept. Receiving funding over 50% greater, while graduating only 2 of every 3… huh?

From the point of view of the child I struggle even more to understand the differential in funding. Two children… side by side… could be neighbours… one goes to a government school… one does not… one benefits from $1.67 in public funding for their schooling… the other only a dollar. Does this happen in the child’s health care support? How is such discrimination justifiable… from the point of view of the child?

Change the way public dollars are shared in support of schooling of children, I believe, and a good deal of the rest of what needs changing in schooling will happen all by itself.

GLO

gordotto@parentsnschools.com

P.S. Advancement of schooling technology and distance learning technology will facilitate greater choice in schooling alternatives… whether funding formulae change or not. In the 80%+ labour-cost schooling industry, technology that can dramatically reduce that cost can make schooling alternatives that are presently uneconomic under preferential funding regimes sustainable, affordable and competitive.

It costs upwards of $2,000 per year to deliver mathematics via government schools and “live learning”. By some estimates, reasonable facsimile’s can be delivered online at less than $1 per student to operate. Economic differences like that can be powerful forces. Just ask any encyclopedia salesmen…

The most recent Fast Company magazine features a long look at Apple and its success, and includes this excerpt:

Steve Jobs has often cited this quote from Henry Ford: “If I’d have asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!’ “

This is Jobs’s defense of Apple’s reluctance to listen to even its most passionate customers, and the line is a good one to remember the next time you’re considering a new round of focus groups. “The whole approach of the company is that people can’t really envision what they want,” says Reid. “They’ll tell you a bunch of stuff they want. Then if you build it, it turns out that’s not right. It’s hard to visualize things that don’t exist.”

Last year the Alberta Government’s education department initiated a look into education’s future that they titled “Inspiring Education”. It consisted of many months of community conversations and then a weekend gathering with a mind-broadening array of speakers. Inspiring Education’s Steering Committee recently published its initial summary of results to date.

But in a world of government schooling, where entrepreneurial forces exist only on a tiny level with minimal radiation, asking people what they want in future schooling results in… mostly… a call for “a faster horse”. And that’s what Inspiring Education runs the risk of being.

The future of schooling will require liberty. Freedom. Room to run. Room to try things. Room to fail. Room to succeed.

We don’t really know what we want in schooling. But we will know it when we see it.

Will we ever be free to see it?

GLO

gordotto@parentsnschools.com

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Pedagogy is one of those ten-dollar-words that get tossed around in the world of schooling which help to make it hard to follow without a glossary at hand. What I think it means is “theory”… as in a certain pedagogy is a certain theory of schooling… a certain way of schooling… a certain approach. They are not, I believe, as individual as fingerprints, snowflakes or schoolers. Rather there are certain “accepted” ones, or “tried and true” approaches, which are generally understood, agreed upon and applied in the schooling industry (akin, perhaps, to application of approaches to financial planning or personal training).

Theories of schooling are ways of approaching the business to optimally apply the things you believe together with your resources at hand toward your desired end goal — applied in bulk to the children delivered up to you for teaching, be it a classroom, a school or a jurisdiction. Pedagogy, in large part, is a way of organizing and deploying the teachers. Not necessarily the learners. At least, not necessarily every single one of the learners.

Theories are helpful when you are managing the job of deploying broad resources to expansive challenges. Five billion dollar provincial government schooling to 600,000 Alberta schoolchildren, for example. When you don’t have encyclopedic and instant recall or availability of every resource at hand, and you similarly don’t have detailed, in-depth understanding of every nuance, preference and inclination of the learner. Application of theory helps bridge that gap.

It’s like painting a fence versus painting a portrait… the brushes are different… and the area you’re attempting to cover is different, too.

But what if you did have encyclopedic recall and instant availability of every resource at hand, and detailed analysis, understanding and appreciation for the individual learner? What if there was no gap in understanding/application?

You wouldn’t have to think about it. You could just do it.

That is the prospect raised in this month’s WIRED magazine, in an article titled “The End of Theory” (Chris Anderson, Editor in Chief, July 2008, p. 108). It speculates on how things will be different in this present (and future) age of massive… and we’re talking MASSIVE… data processing. Why guess at or analyse why people do what they do, when you can just track it and do AS they do. Just watch it, then accomodate it.

This is how Google works. Google’s servers process, about every 30 minutes, data equivalent to all the digital weather data compiled by the U.S. national climatic data centre (or about all the videos on YouTube). “Google didn’t pretend to know anything about the culture and conventions of advertising — it just assumed that better data, with better analytical tools, would win the day. And Google was right.”

The author suggests we can stop looking for models — that “correlation is enough”.

“This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to bear. Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.”

And schooling… “Moneyball” schooling, as I’ve described it before… is mountains of data. Past and present. It’s just that in a 90% labour-cost industry, the data mostly piles up, unprocessed and untapped (and not a little bit disrespected).

Government schooling may never tap it. But with a Google This, and a Google That, how long before a “Google School” evolves (or a competitor equivalent) applying the tools of massive data processing to do away with theories and simply provide the learning that is best for THAT child the way he or she has been OBSERVED and MEASURED to learn best (in correlation with data on millions of other children in its massive databanks).

Insert child. Measure child “with unprecedented fidelity”. Apply schooling.

Why theorize how kids may or may not learn best (individually or in large groups)? Just measure each individual child, using a spectrum of methods of teaching and learning, tracking and recording the results, then deliver them their curricula in the “optimum” method — for THAT child. Every one. Individually. All at the same time.

Technology can do that sort of thing.

Insert child. Run a few tests. Try a few different things. Observe and measure. Apply learning. Continue to observe. Continue to try a few different things. Continue to measure. Continue to apply (somewhat altered) learning. Continue to fine tune.

How long until you’re focussed right in? Pinned right down? Got it pegged?

By the third grade? Fourth grade? Sixth?

By the six-hundredth child? Six-thousandth? Six-millionth?

Massive data. Correlating like crazy. In the blink of an eye.

Goodbye pedagogy. Hello Google School.

GLO

gordotto@parentsnschools.com

P.S.    Early on in my involvement with government schooling, I asked the question (of myself and those around me at the time) “If education was available in pill form, what would schooling look like?” Substitute any variety of possible delivery mechanisms for “pill”, and think about what changes. Or what may stay the same.

My daughter advises that next year, at her middle school, the students will be allowed/encouraged to bring their own computers to school. Because they don’t have enough… never have enough… and they aren’t very good.

So now the problem will be solved. By parents. And peer pressure.

How many parents will know that their child’s “portable” computer is likely not insured outside their home? (Home insurance policies generally do not cover laptops removed from the home…)

How many will find out the hard way?

If memory serves, the not-so-long-ago Alberta Commission on Learning was supported in its call for computers for each child. Guess they should have been more specific about who should pay for them.

This could be very interesting.

GLO

gordotto@parentsnschools.com

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