Education – Page 29 – artdiamondblog.com

Testing Incentives

When W. became president, he had two major education initiatives: vouchers, and "no child left behind." It is unfortunate that in the face of formidable Democratic opposition, he abandoned vouchers, and stuck with "no child left behind." The latter policy’s intent is noble, but some of its unintended consequences are perverse.

Mandatory testing results in educational inefficiency: teachers teach to the tests, and as the commentary quoted below reports, tests get jiggered to show good results.

The main harm though, is that some of the most important results of good education, like resilience, self-discipline, and creativity, are not readily measured in standardized multiple choice tests. So programs, such as Montessori, that encourage such results, end up under-appreciated and under-rewarded.

What we most need is for parents to be free to choose in education. That would result in far greater innovation and improvement in education than the current "no child left behind" standardized testing.

(p. A31) If teachers, administrators, politicians and others have a stake in raising the test scores of students — as opposed to improving student learning, which is not the same thing — there are all kinds of incentives to raise those scores by any means necessary.

. . .

A study released last week by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the Northwest Evaluation Association found that “improvements in passing rates on state tests can largely be explained by declines in the difficulty of those tests.”

The people in charge of most school districts would rather jump from the roof of a tall building than allow an unfettered study of their test practices. But that kind of analysis is exactly what’s needed if we’re to get any real sense of how well students are doing.

For the full commentary, see:

BOB HERBERT. " High-Stakes Flimflam." The New York Times (Tues., October 9, 2007): A31.

Columnist Bob Herbert. Source of photo: online version of the NYT column quoted and cited above.

UNO Protects Students from Cupcakes (Whether They Want to Be Protected, or Not)

Many years ago, I went along with a group of Exec MBA students to Germany. Among them was Bill Swanson. Bill had a sense of humor.

At some point in the trip, I spilled ketchup on my tie. Bill’s response was that normally a ruined tie would be sad, but given my tie, the ketchup was an improvement.

Yes, Bill has a sense of humor; so I’m hoping the story below is a joke.

That’s what I hope, but what I fear is that the story below is one more example of the inefficient, sometimes painful (like when an 8th grader can’t take aspirin to middle school), and sometimes funny, things that we are driven to do to protect ourselves from being sued, in an economy where congress has empowered personal injury lawyers to frequently sue for huge and unpredictable compensatory and punitive damages. (When Joe Ricketts, Ameritrade founder, spoke to my Exec MBA class a few years ago, he said that the biggest threat facing the U.S. economy was the proliferation of tort law suits.)

So it’s either a bad joke; or (most likely) it’s UNO protecting itself against every potential law suit; or it’s a third, and worse, alternative—which would be if the story below is to be taken at face value.

In that case we would have to conclude that some UNO staff have nothing better to do with their time than to paternalistically ‘protect’ young adults from a minuscule risk of illness from freely choosing to purchase and eat cupcakes being sold by fellow students to raise money for good causes.

Here is an excerpt from the page one, lead story, of the Sat., Oct. 6, 2007, Omaha World-Herald:

(p. 1A) Guns. Drugs. Bake sales.

What do these things have in common?

All have been banned at the University of Nebraska at Omaha campus.

Citing safety and health concerns, UNO last week prohibited selling homemade food items at campus fundraisers.

Officials said the prevalence of serious food allergies and the potential for contaminated food — either by accident or deliberately — led UNO to adopt the policy, which then drew complaints from student groups.

"The primary issue is the health of the students and the safety of the students," said Bill Swanson, assistant to the vice chancellor in the Career Exploration and Outreach Office.

No one on the UNO campus has reported problems with contaminated food purchased at a bake sale, Swanson said.

But there have been incidents around the country, he said, and those were enough to prompt a discussion among officials.

The decision has come under fire from students who say the restriction cuts off small student (p. 2A) groups from their primary fundraising source.

The Public Relations Student Society of America traditionally held bake sales once a month to raise money for national conferences, local business luncheons and volunteer work, said the group’s president, Katie Dowd.

The group raised about $1,500 a year hawking homemade baked goods donated by members.

"It’s a big blow to us," said Dowd, who called the potential for food contamination from her group’s offerings "very unlikely."

For the full story, see:

ELIZABETH AHLIN. "Goodies ban half-baked, UNO students say." Omaha World-Herald (Saturday, October 6, 2007): 1A & 2A.

Let There Be Light

One of Mark Bent’s solar flashlights stuck in a wall to illuminate a classroom in Africa. Source of the photo: http://bogolight.com/images/success6.jpg

What Africa most needs, to grow and prosper, is to eject kleptocratic war-lord governments, and to embrace property rights and the free market. But in the meantime, maybe handing out some solar powered flashlights can make some modest improvements in how some people live.

The story excerpted below is an example of private, entrepreneur-donor-involved, give-while-you-live philanthropy that holds a greater promise of actually doing some good in the world, than other sorts of philanthropy, or than government foreign aid.

FUGNIDO, Ethiopia — At 10 p.m. in a sweltering refugee camp here in western Ethiopia, a group of foreigners was making its way past thatch-roofed huts when a tall, rail-thin man approached a silver-haired American and took hold of his hands.

The man, a Sudanese refugee, announced that his wife had just given birth, and the boy would be honored with the visitor’s name. After several awkward translation attempts of “Mark Bent,” it was settled. “Mar,” he said, will grow up hearing stories of his namesake, the man who handed out flashlights powered by the sun.

Since August 2005, when visits to an Eritrean village prompted him to research global access to artificial light, Mr. Bent, 49, a former foreign service officer and Houston oilman, has spent $250,000 to develop and manufacture a solar-powered flashlight.

His invention gives up to seven hours of light on a daily solar recharge and can last nearly three years between replacements of three AA batteries costing 80 cents.

Over the last year, he said, he and corporate benefactors like Exxon Mobil have donated 10,500 flashlights to United Nations refugee camps and African aid charities.

Another 10,000 have been provided through a sales program, and 10,000 more have just arrived in Houston awaiting distribution by his company, SunNight Solar.

“I find it hard sometimes to explain the scope of the problems in these camps with no light,” Mr. Bent said. “If you’re an environmentalist you think about it in terms of discarded batteries and coal and wood burning and kerosene smoke; if you’re a feminist you think of it in terms of security for women and preventing sexual abuse and violence; if you’re an educator you think about it in terms of helping children and adults study at night.”

Here at Fugnido, at one of six camps housing more than 21,000 refugees 550 miles west of Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, Peter Gatkuoth, a Sudanese refugee, wrote on “the importance of Solor.”

“In case of thief, we open our solor and the thief ran away,” he wrote. “If there is a sick person at night we will took him with the solor to health center.”

A shurta, or guard, who called himself just John, said, “I used the light to scare away wild animals.” Others said lights were hung above school desks for children and adults to study after the day’s work.

For the full story, see:

Will Connors and Ralph Blumenthal. "Letting Africa’s Sun Deliver the Luxury of Light to the Poor." The New York Times, Section 1 (Sun., May 20, 2007): 8.

(Note: the title of the article on line was: "Solar Flashlight Lets Africa’s Sun Deliver the Luxury of Light to the Poorest Villages.")

Source of map: online version of the NYT article cited above.

The Liberal Attack on Free Speech at Antioch

THIS is an obituary for a great American institution whose death was announced this week. After 155 years, Antioch College is closing.

. . .

With a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, the college increased African-American enrollment to 25 percent in 1968, from virtually nil in previous years. The new students were recruited from the inner city. At around the same time, Antioch created coeducational residence halls, with no adult supervision. Sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll became the rule, as you might imagine, and there was enormous peer pressure to be involved in all of them. No member of the faculty or administration, and certainly none of the students, could guess what these sudden changes would mean. They were simply embraced in the spirit of the time.

I moved into this sociological petri dish from a well-to-do suburb. Within my first week I twice had guns drawn on me, once in fun and once in a state of drunken for real by a couple of ex-cons whom one of my classmates, in the interest of breaking down class barriers, had invited to live with her.

My roommate began the tortured process of coming out of the closet, first by pursuing women relentlessly and then accepting the truth and allowing himself to be pursued by men. He needed to talk all this out with himself when he came in each morning at 4 a.m., and in the face of his personal crisis, there was little I could do to assert my right to sleep.

. . .

Antioch College became a rump where the most illiberal trends in education became entrenched. Since it is always easier to impose a conformist ethos on a small group than a large one, as the student body dwindled, free expression and freedom of thought were crushed under the weight of ultraliberal orthodoxy. By the 1990s the breadth of challenging ideas a student might encounter at Antioch had narrowed, and the college became a place not for education, but for indoctrination. Everyone was on the same page, a little to the left of The Nation in worldview.

For the full commentary, see:

Michael Goldfarb. "Where the Arts Were Too Liberal." The New York Times, Section 4 (Sun., June 17, 2007): 13.

(Note: ellipses added.)

Professors Have Lost the Skills to Write Lively Prose and Choose Interesting Topics

The excerpt below is from a WSJ summary of an article by Maureen Ogle in the March-April 2007 issue of HISTORICALLY SPEAKING.

History professors, writes Ms. Ogle in the History Society’s bimonthly bulletin, don’t make enough effort to connect with students who view the world through a lens shaped by iPods and instant messaging. Worse, professors have lost the skills needed to engage a general audience like writing lively prose or choosing interesting topics. Their careers depend on getting articles into tiny journals on abstruse topics, not conveying the importance of that research to the public. . . .

. . .

She resigned from her university post in 1999 and began a mission to provide nonacademic readers with "well-researched, well-documented, well-reasoned history." On the way, she discovered the perils, and pleasures, of writing for an audience "larger than six."

For the full summary, see:

"Informed Reader; ACADEMIA; Historians Belong on the Street, Not in the Tower." The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., May 31, 2007): B6.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

Even France Recognizes English as the Language of Business

The story below provides further evidence that those who are working hard to make English the mandatory language of the United States, should find themselves a real problem to worry about.

PARIS, April 7 — When economics students returned this winter to the elite École Normale Supérieure here, copies of a simple one-page petition were posted in the corridors demanding an unlikely privilege: French as a teaching language.

“We understand that economics is a discipline, like most scientific fields, where the research is published in English,” the petition read, in apologetic tones. But it declared that it was unacceptable for a native French professor to teach standard courses to French-speaking students in the adopted tongue of English.

In the shifting universe of global academia, English is becoming as commonplace as creeping ivy and mortarboards. In the last five years, the world’s top business schools and universities have been pushing to make English the teaching tongue in a calculated strategy to raise revenues by attracting more international students and as a way to respond to globalization.

Business universities are driving the trend, partly because changes in international accreditation standards in the late 1990s required them to include English-language components. But English is also spreading to the undergraduate level, with some South Korean universities offering up to 30 percent of their courses in the language. The former president of Korea University in Seoul sought to raise that share to 60 percent, but ultimately was not re-elected to his post in December.

In Madrid, business students can take their admissions test in English for the elite Instituto de Empresa and enroll in core courses for a master’s degree in business administration in the same language. The Lille School of Management in France stopped considering English a foreign language in 1999, and now half the postgraduate programs are taught in English to accommodate a rising number of international students.

Over the last three years, the number of master’s programs offered in English at universities with another host language has more than doubled, to 3,300 programs at 1,700 universities, according to David A. Wilson, chief executive of the Graduate Management Admission Council, an international organization of leading business schools that is based in McLean, Va.

“We are shifting to English. Why?” said Laurent Bibard, the dean of M.B.A. programs at Essec, a top French business school in a suburb of Paris that is a fertile breeding ground for chief executives.

“It’s the language for international teaching,” he said. “English allows students to be able to come from anyplace in the world and for our students — the French ones — to go everywhere.”

For the full story, see:

DOREEN CARVAJAL. "English as Language of Global Education." The New York Times (Weds., April 11, 2007): A21.

Google Co-Founder Sergey Brin “Really Enjoyed the Montessori Method”

Source for the image of the Moment issue cover, on left: http://www.momentmag.com/issue/index.html Source for the image of the first page of the article, on right: online version of the Moment article cited below.

Sergey, who turned six that summer, remembers what followed as simply “unsettling”—literally so. “We were in different places from day to day,” he says. The journey was a blur. First Vienna, where the family was met by representatives of HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which helped thousands of Eastern European Jews establish new lives in the free world. Then, on to the suburbs of Paris, where Michael’s “unofficial” Jewish Ph.D. advisor, Anatole Katok, had arranged a temporary research position for him at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques. Katok, who had emigrated the year before with his family, looked after the Brins and paved the way for Michael to teach at Maryland.

When the family finally landed in America on October 25, they were met at New York’s Kennedy Airport by friends from Moscow. Sergey’s first memory of the United States was of sitting in the backseat of the car, amazed at all the giant automobiles on the highway as their hosts drove them home to Long Island.

The Brins found a house to rent in Maryland—a simple, cinder-block structure in a lower-middle-class neighborhood not far from the university campus. With a $2,000 loan from the Jewish community, they bought a 1973 Ford Maverick. And, at Katok’s suggestion, they enrolled Sergey in Paint Branch Montessori School in Adelphi, Maryland.

He struggled to adjust. Bright-eyed and bashful, with only a rudimentary knowledge of English, Sergey spoke with a heavy accent when he started school. “It was a difficult year for him, the first year,” recalls Genia. “We were constantly discussing the fact we had been told that children are like sponges, that they immediately grasp the language and have no problem, and that wasn’t the case.”

Patty Barshay, the school’s director, became a friend and mentor to Sergey and his parents. She invited them to a party at her house that first December (“a bunch of Jewish people with nothing to do on Christmas Day”) and wound up teaching Genia how to drive. Everywhere they turned, there was so much to take in. “I remember them inviting me over for dinner one day,” Barshay says, “and I asked Genia, ‘What kind of meat is this?’ She had no idea. They had never seen so much meat” as American supermarkets offer.

When I ask about her former pupil, Barshay lights up, obviously proud of Sergey’s achievements. “Sergey wasn’t a particularly outgoing child,” she says, “but he always had the self-confidence to pursue what he had his mind set on.”

He gravitated toward puzzles, maps and math games that taught multiplication. “I really enjoyed the Montessori method,” he tells me. “I could grow at my own pace.” He adds that the Montessori environment—which gives students the freedom to choose activities that suit their interests—helped foster his creativity.

“He was interested in everything,” Barshay says, but adds, “I never thought he was any brighter than anyone else.”

For the full story, see:

Mark Malseed. "The Story of Sergey Brin; How the Moscow-born entrepreneur cofounded and changed the way the world searches." Moment Magazine (February 2007).

“The Odor of Stagnation”

(p. 244) Whenever I walk into a public school, I stagger a bit at the entrance. The moment I step across the threshold, I’m nearly toppled by a wave of nostalgia. Most schools I’ve visited in the twenty-first century look and feel exactly like the central Ohio, public schools I attended in the 1970s. The classrooms are the same size. The desks stand in those same rows. Bulletin boards preview the next national holiday. The hallways even smell the same. Sure, some classrooms might have a computer or two. But in most respects, the schools American children attend today seem indistinguishable from the ones their parents and grandparents attended generations earlier.

At first such deja vu warmed my soul. But then I thought about it. How many other places look and feel exactly as they did twenty, thirty, or forty years ago? Banks don’t. Hospitals don’t. Grocery stores don’t. Maybe the sweet nostalgia I sniffed on those classroom visits was really the odor of stagnation.

Source:

Pink, Daniel H. Free Agent Nation: How America’s New Independent Workers Are Transforming the Way We Live. New York: Warner Business Books, 2001.

(Note: italics in original.)

Aaron Brown Asks UNL Tough Questions on Students’ Right to Defend Themselves

Source of image is screen capture from KETV web page: http://www.ketv.com/news/13120432/detail.html

Aaron Brown was an excellent student in my micro-principles course several years ago, and now he is a law student at UNL. You may also remember him as a frequent contributor of comments to entries on this blog.

He’s gotten some attention today (4/26/07) by speaking out for the right of college students to defend themselves by bearing arms.

For the KETV (Omaha ABC channel 7) story, see: http://www.ketv.com/news/13120432/detail.html

For the KOLN (Omaha Fox channel 10) story, see: http://www.kolnkgin.com/news/headlines/7209236.html

Obama Should Support School Vouchers Experiment

There’s something about our nation’s capital that converts many leading Democrats to school choice. Perhaps it’s the glimpse that Washington, D.C. affords into inner-city public schools.

But in most cases this appreciation of school choice extends only to their own children — and not to the millions of children in failing public schools. Indeed, a nearly perfect correlation exists among Democratic presidential candidates who have exercised school choice for their own children and those who would deny such choices to the parents of other children.

. . .

The mystery man is Sen. Barack Obama, who sends his child to a private school in Chicago yet once referred to school vouchers as "social Darwinism." Still, he says that on education reform, "I think a good place to start would be for both Democrats and Republicans to say . . . we are willing to experiment and invest in anything that works."

Well, school choice works. Every study that compares children who applied for school choice scholarships and received them with those who applied but did not shows improved academic performance. More important, every study that has examined the effect of school choice competition has found significantly improved performance by public schools.

Given their track records it is doubtful how many candidates will agree with Sen. Obama’s professed openness to experiment. But as he might say, we can always have the audacity to hope.

For the full commentary, see:

CLINT BOLICK. "Selective School Choice." The Wall Street Journal (Fri., March 2, 2007): A11.

(Note: ellipsis between paragraphs was added; ellipsis within Obama quote was in the original.)