Gag Me with a Freeconomics

Vander Ark:

So, who pays for all of this free stuff? Education has the benefit of substantial philanthropic support—both non-profit and for-profit organizations have and will benefit from foundation grants. But the innovations likely to achieve scale and impact will have a business model behind them. In this regard, Wireless Generation is showing the way; they launched FreeReading.net, an open primary reading curriculum supported by fee-based assessment and training.

Here's an alternate vision: philanthropy and government grantmaking shifts it conceptual frame from funding non-profit and for-profit organizations to create proprietary information, to funding the growth and maintenance of an information commons. Why can't I access the planning, training, learning materials developed by KIPP, Big Picture Company, New Teacher Project, TFA, Green Dot, Harlem Success, etc? They're all non-profits, as far as I know none of them are dependent on licensing their IP to fund their operations, and they all get or have gotten a substantial amount of philanthropic and/or government funding. What if sharing their work had been a condition of their funding all along? What if leaders in philanthropy and government chose to switch to this path?

Institutions the size of our major grantmaking foundations, states, and the federal government can and should (and will, eventually) pay people to write freely licensed content for schools.

We don't need people taking a platform approach in the "Hey, I've got a website where you can park your textbooks or lesson plans or learning objects." It's nice to have, but that's not the problem. It isn't hard or expensive to host files.

You don't create sustainability around "free" and "open" resources by significantly limiting their use to eek out a few nickles to keep your webservers running. This is the Internet! You let people make copies, download the source, study it, reuse it, redistruibute it, and build their own businesses around the resources. That's what makes an information commons robust and sustained.

As Oligopolists...

Dana Goldstein talks some sense:

As oligopolists, it makes total sense for the College Board and ACT to be eyeing, together, expansion into the immense K-12 assessment market. But given these testing companies' track records, it is worth asking if this is a wise idea. A number of studies have found SAT scores are far less effective than high school grades in predicting how well students will perform in college, and professors say standardized-test prep does little to teach students the research and critical thinking skills they will need at the college level. Because of these shortcomings, an increasing number of colleges--led by the giant University of California system--have made standardized test scores optional for admission.

There is no reason to assume that the overdue move toward federal standards must lead to national standardized tests administered by the college-admissions giants. In Finland, whose schools are ranked best in the world, there are detailed national curriculum guidelines but no mandated testing regime to go along with them. If past American efforts are any guideline, what we're likely to come up with is the exact opposite: vague standards and high-stakes tests. For example, 35 states participate in the Achieve-led American Diploma Project, in which states agreed to roughly align their education standards. Under that system, high school students are required to write a six- to 10-page research paper. In Finland, though, the national curriculum calls for research papers to be part of every subject course, from the life sciences to history and philosophy.

A major disadvantage of the states and testing giants leading the push toward national standards is that without Washington's involvement, the issue is less likely to register on the mainstream media's radar. But the public ought to be paying close attention. It would be a shame if national education reform further cemented a system in which passing standardized tests is the goal of learning. That would discourage creative teaching and push affluent families looking for more flexibility into the private system. And that simply isn't in the public's common interest.

To me, the subtext of our current debate is this: of which things we've consistently done wrong in the past, do you think we can suddenly, and quickly, get right? I suppose that's what "reform" is always about. But perhaps it is unusual for the Left and the Right to decide that they both want to reform the same thing at the same time, so more than normal it is simply a question of what does your ideology lead you to believe can and should be fixed? Our lousy... standards? tests? teachers? schools of education? contracts? inequality? school boards? technology? etc...

Only in EVE

Ombey:

I was relaxing in one of the bars in Curse Watchtower station (F4), when I heard laughter and loud exclamations from a group of U’K pilots just entering. I recognised them all, but the source of the amusement appeared to be BHaddow, and a story he was telling by the looks of it. I waited till they got a drink, then waved them over and asked them what was so amusing.

BHaddow took a long swig from his drink, and grinned. He then told me a tale which was quite amazing.

[... snip amazing tale ...]

So, due to Sylph’s inattention, BHaddow’s sneakiness, an -A- Rapier and a bit of luck, three Bombers and a Rapier caused 5 billion isk in damage and almost made off with a carrier. The insurance from the carrier was 337m ISK, which was split between the participating pilots.

I shook my head in amazement when I heard this story, and had to shake him by the hand. For the rest of the night, his drinks were on me and everyone else in U’K who heard the story.

5 billion ISK = almost $300 in real money. Hilarious. Only in EVE does the insurance payment for a stolen ship go to the thief. This is all part of the ongoing payback for Sylph's betrayal of Ushra'Khan in the second battle of Unity Station two years ago.

When You're Serving Less Than 10

Short-Rib Pastrami.

A regular kettle grill and some wood chips should suffice for smoking. You just need the pink salt.

I need to start some sauerkraut...

USAspending.gov

Yglesias:

The basic reality of the matter is that we already live in a society where the voters are almost completely ignorant of everything they need to know to be functioning members of a democratic public. People can’t name the elected officials who represent them, and in general seem to have very little interest in politics. The good news, I think, is that thanks to the internet you can at least look this stuff up. If you’re curious, you can use Google and figure out who represents you in the State Senate and find out a thing or two about what he’s up to. Dutifully receiving your daily gigantic bundle of newsprint and then ignoring the stories about state government might make the guy who writes the stories about state government feel better, but it doesn’t actually provide you with information.

Meanwhile, I'm just starting to dig into USAspending.gov. Some tips: search for a company name to get all the federal purchase orders for the company from the past decade or so. Search by place name to get related federal grants, contracts, etc. Or search for a type of item like "screwdriver" or "toilet seat." Unfortunately, you can't link to the results yet (no unique URL). Also this graph is a good argument for more spending on data systems in the Department of Education, simply in comparison to the amount spent in other cabinet level departments.

The Inside of Tom Vander Ark's Head is a Weird Place

Vander Ark:

David Brooks is, at least for me, the great explainer of our times. Fareed Zakaria helps me understand the world. Brooks helps me understand America.

Wow. Really? That would explain a lot I guess. But Brooks, really? You've been a leading figure in national school reform, particularly urban school reform, for a decade, and you look to an expert on the tastes of yuppies and suburbanites to explain America? OK, dude. Weird.

Meanwhile:

Do the right thing locally. All education is local--at least in America. Perhaps the most important thing each of us can do is to support aggressive gap-closing school improvement efforts in our own neighborhood. Support a charter school or a mentoring program. Get involved in a school board race.

Who is this addressed at exactly? Apparently bobo me, since I actually live in a mixed(mostly low)-income urban neighborhood, but I doubt a very high percentage of HuffPost readers fit that profile. Even so, the charter school in my neighborhood is doing fine, but it isn't really my neighborhood's charter school, and any time spent helping out there is likely to be offset by the bitter taste of my daughters' eventual loss in the great kindergarten lottery. And with Providence's system of mayoral control over the schools, and imported autocratic superintendent and rubber-stamp board, there isn't much to be done for our neighborhood's small public high schools, created with help from Vander Ark's Gates money, now slipping away...

Those Jerks At the Vegan Restaurant Wouldn't Serve Me a Simple Egg Cream!

Posts like this one, elucidating the inconveniences of the GPL, are like listening to someone gripe about not being able to get eggs at a vegan restaurant, and/or helpfully pointing out that limiting yourself to vegan ingredients is not the best way to make money running a restaurant.

The GPL is a radical political statement, and as radical political statements go, a damned successful one. If you didn't figure that out immediately, you need to work on your reading comprehension. If you want to eat eggs, go eat eggs, griping at the hippies shouldn't impress anyone.

Ask Not What Standards Can Do For You, Ask What You Can Do for Standards

Mark Guzdial:

I was critiqued at the meeting for not doing enough work in computing education, or maybe, not doing the right work. One of the state officials asked us how computer science classes in high school correlate to national standards in technology education, since such standards exist. What technology skills would one develop in taking a computer science course? I responded with information about ACM’s Education Policy Committee and said that they were looking at those kinds of questions. She asked why I wasn’t doing that. I pointed out that I have other things that I’m doing, that also need to be done. She got really annoyed that I didn’t see this question as critically important, and I overheard her telling others that they have to “make me” develop these matches to technology standards. (What does that mean?) I do understand that establishing a match to standards is very important, and I understand that there are many policy issues that are critically important for the advancement of computing education. It’s also important to figure out how to teaching computing better and to understand what’s going on when someone learns computing. Not everybody has to do everything.

I can so totally picture that scene.

The Native Web Video Stalemate

Ian Hickson:

Apple refuses to implement Ogg Theora in Quicktime by default (as used by Safari), citing lack of hardware support and an uncertain patent landscape.

Google has implemented H.264 and Ogg Theora in Chrome, but cannot provide the H.264 codec license to third-party distributors of Chromium, and have indicated a belief that Ogg Theora's quality-per-bit is not yet suitable for the volume handled by YouTube.

Opera refuses to implement H.264, citing the obscene cost of the relevant patent licenses.

Mozilla refuses to implement H.264, as they would not be able to obtain a license that covers their downstream distributors.

Microsoft has not commented on their intent to support

What this is about is making it as easy to embed a video in a web page as it is to add a still image.

Alan Kay on Real Science

Alan Kay on the IAEP list:

It's possible that the Physics Activity could get students interested in Physics, but the deepest and most important parts of real science cannot be learned from a book or a computer or from just doing mathematics no matter how wonderful.

The notion that they can has been a major misconception for thousands of years, and is shockingly widespread in the US educational system. This is because all representation systems we use, including the ones inside our heads, are ultimately hermetic, and thus in the end are only about themselves.

Science is a kind of negotiation between our representation systems and "what's out there?". And the negotiation is always there. As Richard Feynmann liked to say "Science means you don't have to trust the experts".

This is why books, computers, math, etc., don't work. Because natural languages and math have negation, we can write just anything in a book. Because math depends on premises taken as given (called definitions in modern math) we can make a perfect logical system that has nothing to do with "what's out there?" (and many people have over the ages).

Because we can make detailed maps of places which have never existed (e.g. Middle Earth) and can make perfect deductions from them (Gondor is North of Far Harad, and the Shire is North of Gondor, therefore the Shire is North of Far Harad, etc.) we have no way at all of knowing whether this map represents any thing "out there" or not unless we actually exhaustively look for it.

Telling children to learn what is in a book or computer model is absolutely no different from telling them to learn this catechism or that one. They have to be grounded in learning to deal with the actual world in ways that get around what's wrong with our perceptual systems and the minds attached to them.

Because scientific knowledge is now large, it is not possible to learn all of science from doing personal experiments. The major point here is that the "outlook" (simple name for "epistemological stance") of science has to be internalized before one can understand just how to garner scientific knowledge from writings rather from the real world.

Scientists (not just science teachers) have trouble with this, because our brains/minds are set up to believe not to understand or doubt. For example, in spite of the fact that the Victorian Brits considered Maxwell their best scientist (he was) they could not find it possible to get into Maxwell's Equations, in large part because they were non-Newtonian, and Newton had been made into a god that exemplified the "master race" that all such cultures love to think they are. And they were not going to go against their god. As a result, it was left to several prominent Germans, including Heinrich Hertz, to experiment with the ideas in the equations and to invent and build the first radio transmitter.

The fact that this happens doesn't make it excusable, but it does illustrate how hard real science is to really do -- and how difficult it is to teach and learn.

Disruptive Innovation != The Inevitable March of Progress

I have been following my friends' tweets from NECC -- it is pretty much the only thing I use Twitter for -- which led me to Scott McLeod's talk on Educational Leadership in an Era of Disruptive Innovation, although I watched the K-12 Online conference version, which is apparently similar.

I'm not very impressed with Scott's presentation. Here's what I think he's doing:

• Conflating "disruptive innovation" with progress in general.
• Overstating the extent to which disruptive innovation destroys incumbent companies and organizations.
• Presenting centuries long differences in educational philosophy as a singular line of progress from traditional to innovative.
• Concluding that because progress is inevitable and destructive, and the things he likes are progress, you'd better get on board the train.

Conflating "disruptive innovation" with progress in general.

Listening to Scott's talk, it isn't clear what kind of technological innovation is not "disruptive." He asserts, for example, that the progression of LP -> cassette -> CD -> mp3 is a series of disruptive innovations. The cassette was somewhat disruptive, in that it opened up a new low-end market segment, but it certainly didn't displace the LP, and the CD wasn't disruptive to the market, it was a textbook sustaining innovation of the industry built around the LP. The CD was an improved LP which boosted that economic model (major labels, record stores, radio, etc.) for almost twenty years. The disruptive innovation was mp3 -- a low-quality, low-cost, margin-destroying innovation that wrecked the existing market.

But in Scott's examples, it all just seems like the march of progress: something new is invented, and it isn't very good at first, and then it gets better, and "disrupts" the market and takes over. That's pretty much it in his telling, but that's pretty banal. In Christensen's books, "disruptive" innovations are of a certain type. One excellent contemporary example is netbooks. Just a few years ago, nobody wanted to make a laptop under about $900, because they didn't think there was a market for a laptop with obviously "worse" performance than the then standard $900+ models, and they didn't want to ruin their profit margins. They wanted to make $400 a pop off $900 laptops, not $50 each on $200 netbooks. So finally, Asus, formerly just a motherboard and component vendor said "screw it" and put out a cheap netbook and it took off like a shot. It disrupted the market and forced everyone else to put out cheap netbooks or let Asus eat their lunch. But it is not "better" technology. It is not innovation in the traditional sense. That's the whole idea. That's why they started writing these damn books in the first place. It is innovation that is not "innovative."

Overstating the extent to which disruptive innovation destroys incumbent companies and organizations.

Scott's longest example is the disruption of wired telephony by wireless. Hm... let's see, if I want to get a cell phone who am I likely to call... Verizon? Sprint? Deutch Telekom? AT&FrackingT? Disruptive innovation doesn't necessarily knock out the incumbent players. Linux disrupts Windows, but Microsoft is still doing fine. MySQL disrupts Oracle and Oracle bought MySQL (and Sun). And Christensen cites numerous examples of companies that respond to disruptive innovation by moving successfully upmarket, ceding the low-end and competing on quality. If market disruption was an inevitable force of nature, Apple wouldn't have made it out of the 1980's, and we'd all drive Hyundais by now.

Presenting centuries long differences in educational philosophy as a singular line of progress from traditional to innovative.

It is convenient to present education as a factory model monolith, because it allows you to present individualized, student-focused, or just progressive education as "innovative" but it isn't historically accurate, any more than it would be accurate to present, say, socialism as a new innovation. The US isn't very socialist right now, and while folding in some more socialism would be a good idea, it wouldn't be a new, innovative, "disruptive" idea. It would be a change in philosophy, from one well-established, competing approach toward another well-established, competing approach. Same with standardized, traditional education (writ large) vs. individual, progressive approaches (in general). Argue on the merits, not novelty.

Concluding that because progress is inevitable and destructive, and the things he likes are progress, you'd better get on board the train.

I'm critical of this kind of approach not because I think Scott and I have very different ideas of what good schools look like. I just think he's making a very sloppy argument, and I'd like my side to do better. At the K-12 level, I don't think that most things that are being presented as "disruptive" are actually so (post-secondary is a completely different ballgame). I see no reason to think that, say, online learning is not a sustaining innovation for current institutions, and to the extent it is disruptive, I don't think it will inevitably destroy our current system. It may simply drive it upmarket (online strip-mall holding pens for the plebes, good schools for the 'burbs, etc).

Important Changes I Don't Understand

Greater City: Providence:

Though it is vitally important to the city, we haven’t been doing a very good job (or any job really) of following the Libraries story here at GC:PVD. Frankly, I’m utterly confused by the whole thing and every time I try to understand it my brain explodes a little. A private board with public funding, that the government seemingly can’t control, running the system into the ground… I think it is one of those only in Rhode Island things that hurts my head, like navigating by where things used to be.

Well tomorrow is the day that the Providence Community Library takes over the 9 branches of the Providence Public Library (not including the main Library on Washington Street downtown (that is a whole other brain exploding situation)). To mark the occassion, the PCL is having a celebration tomorrow at all branch locations (including the newly re-opened Washington Park branch).

Massively Multiplayer Online Games? Not That Much Fun

Hardcore Casual:

Tourist jokes aside (not that the tourist problem is a joke, mind you), I’ve come to this brilliant conclusion: MMOs are just not that fun for most people.

I like EVE, but WoW notwithstanding, this is a niche hobby.

Pastrami

If you're like me, you may find yourself wondering "If I've got a smoker and some pink salt, should I go ahead and try to make Pastrami myself? Is it worth the bother? Can I have a 'cookout' with pastrami smoked the day before? And will eight pounds of brisket feed two baseball teams?"

The answers turn out to be "Yes, yes, yes, and nearly."

And this is pretty much the perfect cole slaw to accompany it.

I Miss Pittsburgh

John Doran & Len:

Len & Daphne:

Photos by Sallyann on Facebook, from the Cystic Fibrosis Punk Rock Benefit.

Also, I took a look at the flow of news on my Facebook page for the first time. It is unbearably, unreadably weird.

Start Your Week Right

On the RI Charter Funding Brouhaha

I feel like I should make some comment on the recent brouhaha over funding an expansion of RI charters. In short, the general assembly was going to leave out funding for two new approved charters, including one new "mayoral academy" which will have the honor of offering less than prevailing wages and no pensions to teachers, among a few other distinctions. You actually might have heard about this, since Arne Duncan got dragged into the dispute and the national charter lobby wound up its Mighty Wurlitzer. In the end, the new schools were funded.

To me, the most noteworthy thing about the whole affair is that two programs affecting a total of 140 students next year, that is, about one thousandth of the students in RI, managed to trigger threats from the EdSec. I have no real understandings of the layers of intrigue that take place in our crazy State House, and how that interacts with our national congressional delegation, and for the sake of my sanity, have no desire to start digging into it. The whole sequence of events did feel to me like the assembly just "yanking the chain" of the charter advocates. Holding out just to see how loudly they'd scream.

I do have to wonder how long it will be before the US Congress gets sick of this routine from Duncan, however. If I were Whitehouse, Reed, Kennedy or Langevin, regardless of what I thought about charter schools in general, I wouldn't be too excited about the EdSec vaguely threatening to withhold "billions," as Angus Davis would put it, of dollars in funding to a loyally Democratic state based on whether or not our screwed-up General Assembly pays to open a non-union kindergarten next year.

On the other hand, it seems like all you have to do to be enrolled in the "pro-reform state" column is open a non-union kindergarten or two, so your state might want to try that to hedge your bets. Best to stage as much of a screaming fight about it beforehand though, for maximum publicity effect.

Contacts, Reporting, and a Lack Thereof

I reported yesterday that a tentative agreement had been reached between the City of Providence and its teachers' union. Oddly, this news still does not appear on the ProJo or WRNI web sites, or in a Google News search. Perhaps neither the city or union wants to put out a press release or make a formal announcement prior to the union's vote tomorrow, but this is hardly a secret -- the proposed changes to the contract were sent out to 2000 teachers yesterday. Do none of the reporters in this city know any teachers at all?

Do You Know What WiMAX Is, Miguel?

So I'm taking advantage of a quiet evening in the house and in Catch to move some ships up from Utopia, which has become lousy with pirates since we moved to a more forward base, and anyhow, this is kind of boring (unless or until it becomes terrifying) so I cruise over to mguhlin.org for the first time in a while, and of course his current post is on the subject of our last argument, and he's even more wrong than before.

In this case, he (and his source) misinterpret the significance of Nokia apparently discontinuing the Nokia 810 WiMAX version, because nobody uses WiMAX. But WiMAX is just a wireless technology, a competitor to wifi. You can still get regular Nokia 810's with wifi, which is what any school would have wanted in the first place. Jeez!

KIPP and Sudbury Schools Find Common Ground

Whether you're sweating the small stuff of just hanging out, experts agree, elementary math class is largely irrelevant.

Bruce Smith:

It's legendary in the Sudbury literature: the five-month math class. As Sudbury Valley co-founder Daniel Greenberg reports in the above article, it took twenty weeks—a mere twenty contact hours—for a group of twelve kids ages 9 to 12 to cover all six years of elementary-school math. A miracle? Hardly.

KIPP Academy Lynn:

2.7: Average grade level improvement of fifth-grade students in math and reading after just one year at KIPP Academy Lynn.

I'll start taking people seriously about "disruptive innovation" in K-12 when I start hearing about elementary schools that don't assess in math until fifth grade.

Ensuring the Future of the Comics Industry

It's Teacher Contract Day in America

Like NYC, Providence apparently has a new contract agreement between the city and union leadership (pending a rank and file vote). It doesn't seem very different than the current contract, a little more money, a little bigger co-pay, etc. Given that the RI education commissioner can apparently override parts of the contract now by fiat, I wouldn't expect much reform to come through the formal contract negotiation process.

The good news is you can now start the timer on Brady getting out of here. He'll have a signed contract, new middle school and a new core curriculum ostensibly implemented next fall. He should try get a new job before next year's test scores come out. The only problem with getting rid of him is that overall capacity on Westminster Street is lower than ever.

Two Years of Hard Lessons For US Schools' Agent of Change, circa 2011

I would put my money on Arne Duncan's lessons in 2011 being exactly the same as Michelle Rhee's this year in the WaPo:

1. Fame Can Backfire
2. Money Doesn't Always Talk
3. Politics Matters
4. Beware Unintended Consequences

Children of the Business Model

NY Times:

The culture is also more competitive. These days, teenagers seem more interested in getting into Harvard than in flunking out of Pencey Prep. Young people, with their compulsive text-messaging and hyperactive pop culture metabolism, are more enchanted by wide-eyed, quidditch-playing Harry Potter of Hogwarts than by the smirking manager of Pencey’s fencing team (who was lame enough to lose the team’s equipment on the subway, after all). Today’s pop culture heroes, it seems, are the nerds who conquer the world — like Harry — not the beautiful losers who reject it.

It is hard to put your finger on how much of the gap between the current crop of young school reformers and their predecessors is due to the change described above, but it feels like a lot to me. I mean, I've even got a copy of Beautiful Losers. Ultimately, a world where all 12 year olds are told that the most important thing in their lives is to get a bachelor's degree in exactly nine years is not the one I want to live in.

The Primacy of Text

Tim Bray:

Thus, the fact that plain ol’ blogging and shiny new Twitter are still pretty well at the center of the value proposition of the serious part of the Net. Blogging has mostly seen off podcasting, and Twitter sailed smoothly away from its richer multimedia-enriched competitors.

What matters is getting the right words, undiluted, in front of the right people. That’s what the Internet is for. Everything else is (at best) the icing on the cake.

In an Alternate Universe, I'm Very Excited

NY Times:

In a move that could put the College Board in a good position to influence the national debate on standards and testing, the board has announced a project that it says could redefine what high school students need to know.

The program, called "Pacesetter," would use the latest consensus by educators on what secondary students should know in English, mathematics, science, world history and foreign languages to develop a curriculum and test for high school students, said Donald M. Stewart, president of the College Board, who announced plans for the program on Wednesday. The College Board also administers the Scholastic Aptitude Test to college-bound high school students.

The program would be similar to the board's Advanced Placement Program, which, for a fee, offers high school teachers college-level curriculums in a variety of subjects. Students who do well on a test given at the end of the course can receive advanced placement or credit when they enter college.

The Bush Administration has called for national tests and standards for public school students, and Federal education officials were in the audience for Mr. Stewart's announcement. Some business leaders have been lobbying for some kind of national standard tests that high school students would have to pass to indicate their readiness to enter the workforce.

Mr. Stewart said the Pacesetter project reflected the College Board's commitment to raising the "learning and achievement of all students."

"Any system of curriculum and examinations must be based on the expectation that all children can learn," Mr. Stewart said. "This is especially true at a time in our nation's history when cultural, racial and ethnic diversity has never been greater.'

Mr. Stewart said the Pacesetter project would reflect the consensus of educators on "what all students should know in certain subjects before they graduate from secondary school."

"Pacesetter will allow participating schools and districts to raise the expectations of all students, to confront the seemingly disparate issues of equity and standards, and to prepare students for productive lives after high school -- on the job or in college," Mr. Stewart said at the news conference.

Working to develop the curriculums for project is a group of high school and college teachers and curriculum experts in partnership with such national education organizations as the American Council of Learned Societies, Mathematical Association of America, and the National Council of Teachers of English.

That's from 1992, and oddly enough, I'm a big fan of the resulting Pacesetter English 12th grade curriculum. And, The College Board is one of the three organizations working on our new national English standards (I don't know anything about Pacesetter Math Pacesetter). And they were publishing research about it at least as late as 2001 and running the tests at least as recently as 2005. On the whole, though, it seems to have been swamped by a resurgence of AP, a competitor within the same company. And at this point I would be surprised if the Pacesetter work was even consulted by the people at The College Board working on new national standards. I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't even know it exists.

In some alternative universe, however, my favorite high school English curriculum is completing its decade long rise to the commanding heights as the federally mandated capstone for all 12th graders. Unfortunately, I think that's also the universe where Captain Picard as Locutus leads the Borg to the complete destruction of Earth and the Federation of Planets, so in the long term, it doesn't work out so well.

Can You Imagine How Upset People Would Be If the Poor Didn't Have Access to High Quality Health Care?

MaryEllen McGuire:

Imagine for a moment that you are driving your child to the hospital. She has a high fever and is suffering from severe abdominal pain. It's unclear what's wrong but she is in definite need of medical attention.

Now imagine that the only doctor on call is a recently graduated medical student. It's her first day on the job and there is no experienced physician or surgeon available for consultation. Are you satisfied with this level of care for your child? I wouldn't be. I'd want to benefit from the knowledge of a more experienced physician. Wouldn't you?

Unfortunately, a similar scenario is playing out in America's urban classrooms with shocking regularity. Teachers with the least experience are educating the most disadvantaged students in the highest poverty, most challenging schools. Low-income kids are being "triaged" not by experienced teachers, but by those with fewer than three years of teaching to go on.

If you're poor, uninsured, an immigrant, perhaps a member of a minority group, you're going to be happy to (have a car and) have any doctor look at your kid.

Its not like American society is equitable everywhere except education.

Rob a Virtual Bank, Save Your Real House?

NY Times:

Uh-oh! Another big bank is the subject of a depositor run amid charges its chairman has run off with customers’ money. Thankfully, this scandal is taking place in Eve Online, a space-age virtual reality created by CCP, a games developer and Iceland’s coolest company. But these troubles in the ether may offer some valuable lessons for earthly banking and regulation.

Eve is one of the more successful multiplayer online games. Some 300,000 people — as it happens, nearly equal to the population of Iceland — pay $15 a month to navigate characters that pilot intergalactic spaceships, manufacture and trade goods, mine resources and enter into big alliances, or bloody battles, with one another...

Enter Ebank, this virtual universe’s online bank. Because players often do not have the interstellar credits — abbreviated to ISK, also the official abbreviation of the Icelandic kroner — they need to expand their fleets, an enterprising player created a bank that would accept deposits and lend to players who would pledge assets, like their spacecraft, as collateral.

The bank was a success. According to its Web site (yes, it has one), Ebank accumulated about 8.9 trillion ISK in deposits in 13,000 accounts belonging to 6,000 users. That was far more than it was able to lend out — there were around 1 trillion ISK of loans.

Somewhere along the way Ebank’s top executive, who went by the online handle Ricdic, apparently got greedy. According to CCP, he made off with deposits, which he then sold for real cash to gamers on a sort of black-market exchange separate from Eve.

CCP kicked Ricdic out of the game. And Ebank has temporarily shut down while its board of directors (yes, it had one of those too) tries to sort out the mess. Depositors, meanwhile, appear to have pulled 5.5 trillion ISK of deposits.

Given the lawlessness of Eve, this was entirely inevitable. Reportedly, this amounts to about $5,000 in real money, which the thief claims to have used to prevent losing his real-world house:

Basically it was a bunch of morons bagging me out, showing just how much respect or how much people cared. So as a result I was in the mindset that most people don't give a damn about ones achievements in a spaceship game so why bother? Our financial situation occurred resulting in my having to decide whether we lose our new home (40,000 AUD deposit lost) or I lose whatever dignity I have left in a video game.

Ideology and Rhetoric on Teacher Workload

Teachers at many high-performing charter schools work long hours -- specifically they're "on the clock" more hours than most other teachers. But all engaged new teachers work long hours, if they're trying, especially if they're in a small, new school.

This passage leaped out at me from Inside Urban Charter Schools, on the Academy of the Pacific Rim:

Teachers in the middle school typically focus on one subject for one grade level--for example, eighth-grade science. With three classes of students in the middle school grades, most of their teachers teach three periods a day and tutor for an additional period. This leaves them with two periods for academic planning, fulfilling advisory duties, meeting with learning specialists, and grading and tracking student work.

So at this school, teachers are required to be there 7:30 to 5:00, but only teach regular classes for three hours in that time. That frames things a little differently, doesn't it? How common this kind of schedule is I don't know -- the actual number of time spent teaching class doesn't come up as often as other measures of school day.

The most interesting thing about this to me is what it illuminates about the ideology of the discourse on these charters. The long hours and difficulty of the work are emphasized in descriptions, and may in some cases even be consciously or unconsciously maximized in practice, to focus on a perceived distinction between "regular" public schools and charters, between union teachers and non-union.

One can imagine in a different ideological context, pitching a schedule like Pacific Rim's as an advantage compared to traditional schools: one prep! three classes a day! tutor your own students! low total student load! excellent support staff! Hard work yes, but a great collaborative environment and you can focus on the kids in front of you instead of bureaucracy!

A Modest Proposal

Require charter schools to set a level of full enrollment per grade level and maintain it. We hear a lot about the number of kids who can't get into charters, but less about the fact that many charters do not replace withdrawn students past the initial year of the school. It's understandable, because it makes their job a lot easier. It also provides no disincentive to letting kids leave the school. If withdrawing students had to be replaced, it would both maximize access to charters, and encourage schools to meet the needs of the students they've got, rather than risk picking a maladjusted seventh grader out of the hat.

If charter schools can't pull this off, it doesn't say much for their model's capacity to expand beyond boutique status. You can't have a city full of schools that span seven or eight (or 13) years with different starting and ending points and which refuse to accept transfers.

Inside Urban Charter Schools

Over the weekend plowed through Inside Urban Charter Schools: Promising Practices and Strategies in Five High-Performing Schools. If you happen to already have a background in school reform (and perhaps if you don't), the qualitative and quantitative analyses in the cases studies of five high performing Massachusetts charters is vastly more informative and satisfying than accounts by journalists. It is a very even-handed analysis. I'll try to spawn several short posts from this, but here are two points from the introduction which jumped out at me.

On page 1 we learn that:

In 2006-07, MATCH Charter School notched its the (sic) fourth consecutive school year in which every graduating senior received an acceptance letter to a four-year college.

And, "MATCH reported a dropout rate of just under 2 percent," along with impressive percentages of students meeting the minimum cut scores on the MCAS. And, "60 percent of MATCH students who enroll as ninth graders graduate from the school in four years." Throughout the rest of the book, what happened to the other 40% who don't graduate in four years is not analyzed in any detail. When all the major measurements of a school's success are expressed in percentages of students who do "x," having 20, 30, 40? percent of the students who entered the school being kept "off the books" is not a trivial detail. It is amazing that after eight years under a regime called "No Child Left Behind" the school models gaining the most attention and momentum unabashedly leave behind large chunks of their incoming students.

This quote from The Oliver Wyman Group is central to the book's analysis:

The organization's performance rests upon the alignment of each of the components--the work, people, structure, and culture--with all of the others. The tighter the fit--or put another way, the greater the congruence--the higher the performance. (italics added)

But you have to remember that there are many schools for whom the mandated measures of performance are not congruent with the mission of the organization. Schools that start every hour with a timed, silent "do now" assignment are more closely aligned with the performance on a silent, timed exam, than schools whose culture emphasizes presentation and exhibition of projects.

Conspiracy

Watched Conspiracy last week, which depicts the Wannsee Conference, where the Nazis planned the Holocaust. Like many geeks, I've read more than my share of books about the Third Reich, and this film nails the internal politics of Hitler's Germany. You can understand more about the Nazis from watching this movie than you would by reading a short stack of books. It is that good.

Also, you'll pick up good tips on running an effective meeting.

Should Houston Follow Oakland? (Or Make the Road By Walking?)

Houston:

The Houston Independent School District (HISD) has avoided becoming just another urban system in perpetual crisis. Its leaders have encouraged racial and political moderation and incremental reforms. The district pioneered magnet programs, and continues to offer families a host of specialized, high-quality choices, particularly at the high-school level. Its students outperform school districts which have opted for radical reform in most categories of the recently published National Assessment of Educational Progress comparisons.

Now some members of HISD's nine-member elected school board want to change course and adopt drastic measures. They want Houston to follow in the footsteps of school districts like Philadelphia, Washington D. C., New Orleans and New York City by choosing a new superintendent in the mold of Michelle Rhee or Joel Klein [chancellors of D.C. and New York City schools, respectively].

Oakland:

The candidates were discouragingly inadequate, both in number and in scope of experience. Despite months of lead time that this position would need to be filled; the district had only been able to scrounge up three people for us to interview, two had been held for a few weeks and one was slipped in at the very last minute that very same day. These three are the only ones who had supposedly passed downtown's screening test and who would be willing to work at a 2000-student, comprehensive high school, a school which holds nearly 16% of OUSD’s high school student body.

Of these three candidates, only one had substantial high school administrative experience. One had a few years of administrative experience at a 260-student charter middle school. The other was just slightly more experienced than that, and was the only one who had ever worked in OUSD.

The district rep confessed to us that OUSD is in a crisis because it can’t get people to apply as principals for its schools. The district can’t attract people to apply for other types of administrative positions either, according to a teacher-now-working-in-a management-position friend. Apparently, they are quite passive headhunters.

When an already weak school district has been heavily destabilized for six straight years by the manipulations and mismanagement conducted by a sequence of Broad-trained, disruptive-force minded state administrators, what would be the appeal to working in that district, especially when the pay is less than in neighboring places?

Sadly for Providence, the best map for where we're headed is The Perimeter Primate.