Waiting For Superman

I finally saw Davis Guggenheim's (also behind "An Inconvenient Truth") documentary "Waiting for Superman" on Netflix. The documentary follows the poignant stories of a few earnest kids trying (their luck) to get into successful charter schools, because of failing neighborhood public schools. To its credit, the documentary is highly entertaining, takes on a subject which is hard to talk about without attracting enemy fire, and passes the test of good story-telling - it makes us share the hope and disappointment of the kids before and after the lottery. No wonder it has a 89% rating on rottentomatoes.

Weaving fact and argument into the human story, Guggenheim tries to educate us about what is wrong with public education - the distorted incentive structure, teachers unions and tenure, the bureaucratic maze of education administration etc. It is probably fair to say that by the end of the movie, the typical audience is led to believe that more charter schools are an important part of any attempt to resolve the crisis.

Which may or may not be true.

The most cogent counter-argument was Diane Ravitch's article "The Myth of Charter Schools" in the New York Review of Books (and not this insipid rebuttal, IMHO). I like her factual tone, as she carefully destroys most of the intellectual basis of the film.

For example:

... it evaluated student progress on math tests in half the nation’s five thousand charter schools and concluded that 17 percent were superior to a matched traditional public school; 37 percent were worse than the public school; and the remaining 46 percent had academic gains no different from that of a similar public school.
...
The movie asserts a central thesis in today’s school reform discussion: the idea that teachers are the most important factor determining student achievement. But this proposition is false. Hanushek has released studies showing that teacher quality accounts for about 7.5–10 percent of student test score gains. Several other high-quality analyses echo this finding, and while estimates vary a bit, there is a relative consensus: teachers statistically account for around 10–20 percent of achievement outcomes.

You should really read the article in entirety, as I find myself wanting to excerpt the whole thing.

Education and Finland

Here's an interesting take on the success of the Finnish education model: What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success.

Compared with the stereotype of the East Asian model -- long hours of exhaustive cramming and rote memorization -- Finland's success is especially intriguing because Finnish schools assign less homework and engage children in more creative play.

... Americans are consistently obsessed with certain questions: How can you keep track of students' performance if you don't test them constantly? How can you improve teaching if you have no accountability for bad teachers or merit pay for good teachers? How do you foster competition and engage the private sector? How do you provide school choice?

The answers Finland provides seem to run counter to just about everything America's school reformers are trying to do.

 Worth a read.

Untrained minds

I recently came across this interesting xkcd comic:

It reminded of me of an instructive personal incident from a long time ago, which serves to keep me humble as a teacher, to this day.

When I was in middle school, my school had this tradition of letting seniors teach juniors, a single class on Teacher's Day (September 5, in India). I distinctly remember that day, when I was teaching a bunch of second graders the difference between living and non-living things.

I neatly divided the board into two columns, and put "living things" on one side, and "non-living things" on the other, and proceeded to list their differences.

Living things move, non-livings things don't.
Living things grow, non-livings things don't.
Living things reproduce, non-livings things don't.
Living things die, non-livings things don't.

And so on.

Pretty vanilla, huh.

After I had smugly transcribed the contents of my memory, I turned around to see if there were any questions. I wasn't expecting any, really, so I was surprised when an eager hand shot up.

This kid asked me if a smart robot (like Giant Robot, from Johnny Sokko and his flying robot which aired on National TV) was living or non-living. Clearly, it could move, it could add stuff to itself, create new stuff, and be destroyed.

My response was something along one of the lines, in the comic above.

Of course, I now know the right answer should have started with "I really don't know."

PS: As a teacher now, I find the ability of untrained minds to ask penetrating questions extremely refreshing. They keep the fire alive.

Eric Drexler and Science Education in India

Eric Drexler (a nanotechnologist) wrote an interesting article on his blog about how the subset of visitors to his site from India, chose to visit the more technically meaty topics.

A comment on his post, which I sympathize with, provoked a second article, which sought to understand the previous post in a more nuanced manner.

During the course of reading these articles, I also stumbled upon this interesting YouTube presentation.

I have my own thoughts on this matter, having been a student and educator in both the US and in India, but I will save those for a separate post, later.