Free Curriculum Resources

At Tuesday's Board of Education meeting, Bob Kremer handed me a flyer about Scott McNealy's Curriki open source k-12 curriculum wiki.

Now this is an idea everyone seems to love. That is eliminating the expensive textbooks and operating off of a common curriculum backbone that teachers can customize to suit their students. Wow. I've been advocating thi skind of thing for a while now and it looks like McNealy may make it happen.

In District Administration Magazine McNealy had this to say;

My point is that we'd be better off giving teachers the electronic building blocks to assemble a curriculum that works for the students in their classrooms. That's what they're good at. That's what we pay them for. In fact, when we move curriculum online, we should take the money we're spending on updating books, and pay the teachers more.

In the technology business, we understand the importance of standards. They give everyone the opportunity to participate equally. We also understand the importance of innovating around those standards. That's how things get better.

So we must give teachers the flexibility to innovate around our educational standards, so education can get better.

That's the idea behind the nonprofit Global Education and Learning Community, or GELC-provide teachers around the world with free, "open source" content that they can add to and localize. What this community is about, basically, is opening up a new way to develop, distribute, and evaluate curriculum (based on achievement) at low or no cost.

Free access to open content will allow teachers to address more styles of learning-visual, auditory, hands on, project based, whatever works best. If you look at material prepared against a standard set by a state, it assumes a linear path of learning as opposed to the zigzag path or dynamic path that most students like to take.

Of course it's more difficult to evaluate nonlinear media, more challenging to assess a model that's designed to be constructed and explored, but that's where the network comes into play. With the global reach of the Internet and a growing online community of teachers sharing content and best practices, we could be approaching a real change in education-a change ensuring that no teacher is held back.

Amen!

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The Fourth Dimension

This article talks about something that gets lost in America's crazed desire to work kids 16 hours a day. It has to do with a developmental aspect of memory called change blindness.

From the article, Kids need more time than adults give them, study finds (Emphasis by bolding is mine):

"Children are increasingly being expected to provide an adult-level of detail and information," says David Shore, associate professor in McMaster University's Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour. "Adults have had years to hone their perceptual skills; children - even 10 year olds - are just starting out."

The study is the first to probe so-called change blindness in children, a hot topic in psychology circles especially when it pertains to gauging the veracity of children who are called upon to give eyewitness testimony in court.

<-snip->

"We expect children to be adult-like, because of their proficiency on computers or because they display adult-like speech," he says, "so we give them instructions and get impatient when they can't understand what we tell them the first time. Children learn through repetition, at a pace suitable to the child, not to the curriculum. Once upon a time, kids controlled their own pace; now that pace is controlled by adults."

Source: by Jane Christmas, McMaster University

On Dropping Out

In a new four part series, the LA Times is investigating High School education. While much of the dialogue is provincial to LA, many of the roots stretch into problems in our own backyards.

At EO, Bruce, Lou, and the Board of Education are all wrestling with lowering dropouts and the potential for droputs. The price the school pays will likely be lower standardized test scores. In other words, by NCLB "accountability" standards we will likely be lowering our chances of looking good statistically.

Here's why it's worth it.

Back to Basics: Why Does High School Fail So Many?
Shockingly high dropout rates portend a bleak future for youths who fall by the wayside and for society. For many, the traditional U.S. education system is a dead end.
by Mitchell Landsberg, Times Staff Writer.

There was a time, not so long ago, when it was possible for a dropout to get a job that could eventually lift him into the middle class. Those days are pretty much over. In 1964, a typical high school dropout earned 64 cents for every dollar earned by someone with a diploma. By 2004, it was 37 cents and dropping.

At a conference last fall at Columbia University's Teachers College in New York, some top educational researchers released their findings about the consequences of dropping out.

The researchers calculated that dropouts will cost the country hundreds of billions of dollars a year in lost income taxes and increased welfare and healthcare costs.

Dropouts will die, on average, nine years earlier than high school graduates.

Dropouts will commit far more crimes than high school graduates.

Economist Enrico Moretti of UC Berkeley estimated that if high school graduation rates were just 1% higher, there would be 100,000 fewer crimes in the United States annually, including 400 fewer murders, and that the savings would be $1.4 billion a year.

In an economy that increasingly relies on educated workers, "those who are not properly educated are going to fall by the wayside," said Michael Rebell, director of the Campaign for Educational Equity at Teachers College.

The perversity of NCLB is that in order to avoid being labeled and punished as a failing school there is a reverse incentive to discard the students most likely to bring down these scores. The article describes the dubious practices:

Statistics Versus Reality

The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, in conjunction with UCLA, produced a controversial report last spring saying that official dropout statistics in California's largest school districts were shockingly out of sync with reality. The researchers found that only 48% of the L.A. Unified students who started ninth grade in 1999 graduated four years later. The district claims a graduation rate of 66%.

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who wants to take over the school district, jumped on the study to assert that half of the students in L.A. Unified were dropping out.

School district officials said that was wrong, since the UCLA numbers included as dropouts students who had left to continue their education elsewhere. They put the dropout rate for 2003-04 at 33%.

One of the problems with trying to understand the dropout problem is that experts can't even agree on the definition of a dropout: Should it include, for instance, a student who quits school but continues in home study that is unlikely to lead to graduation?

The debate can be seen in microcosm at Birmingham High. UCLA calculated the graduation rate at Birmingham at 50%. L.A. Unified, using federal formulas, puts it at nearly 80%, with just 3.5% classified as dropouts.

furthermore...

Debate has long raged in education circles over who's to blame for students failing high school. Is it the school or the student? The educational system or the society? The parents or the culture?

Teachers, the adults with the closest view of this slow-motion disaster, tend to have the most nuanced view. Even the best of them often express frustration and disappointment in their inability to reach failing students.

Paula Sargent teaches senior English composition at Birmingham and takes pains to stimulate her students.

Students adore Sargent, a former professional singer who appeared on the front page of this newspaper in 1968, when her singing troupe was ambushed in Vietnam en route to a performance for U.S. troops; two musicians died, and Sargent suffered back and leg wounds that afflict her still.

"Best teacher in the world," one boy said as he shuffled into her class. "I love you, Ms. Sargent," another exclaimed.

But Sargent, a wisecracking combination of mother hen and free-spirited aunt, is discouraged.

"There's no love of learning," she said. "If that's not there from the get-go" — she scanned the students slouching at their desks, the ones who had come to class on time — "then we have what we have."

Teachers complain that students come to school with a sense of entitlement — "seat time" alone, they believe, should be enough for a passing grade. Teachers also say they believe that popular culture demeans education.

But teachers also are among the first to admit that, for many students, the traditional American high school is broken. They can't handle its academic rigor and they chafe at its restrictions.

Rethinking Curriculum

In today's Courant, a commentary by Wick Sloane addresses many issues having to do with higher education yet touches on a number of issues that apply to high school policy and organization as well.

From: Higher Education Needs Cash, Vision - January 22, 2006 By WICK SLOANE

"...the very basic cost driver of higher education is the unexamined assumption that a degree must be four years worth of credits, which many students cannot complete even in five years.

This four-year model was developed in the 14th century at the University of Bologna. Part of the reason the curriculum took four years to impart was a shortage of books. That is no longer a problem, yet we still abide by this ancient model. Would we send an injured child today to a 14th-century hospital? Is that what we are doing in higher education?

What about innovation? The past 50 years have produced what scientists and educators call the cognitive revolution. What are the opportunities to use modern tools for learning?

Our daughter carries her language lab for Arabic with her in an iPod. Look at the new short books: "No-Nonsense Guides" or "A Very Short Introduction" to dozens of topics, from A - Ancient Philosophy to W - Wittgenstein, with stops at Darwin, Descartes, Shakespeare and Socrates. What about the Quick Study Bar Charts? At least the new dean of my Yale School of Management ought to be alarmed at how good that $4.95 "Management" guide is.

These tools are not a substitute for a great teacher. They are excellent sources on topics once available by the semester only. Can't they be used, under the direction of skilled teachers, to impart a high-quality education in less than four years?

Other than some intermittent efforts at online learning, I don't see any movement for change."

We are examining this very issue about our high school. That is, is the current organization and learning model the best way to educate our young citizens? The High-stakes Testing paradigm has long ago drowned out any real concern for the education of our young people in favor of magic metrics "accountability" games.

All policy makers these days are under great pressure to fix the educational crisis of the fleeting moment. So, every news article crying that a high school graduate can't balance a checkbook becomes an Arnold Swartznegger moment - TIME TO GET TOUGHER! (And tougher is never, ever tough enough - talk show afficiados can't press the "Inflict Pain" button often or hard enough).

So school boards have easy choices;

MORE Math! (or whatever)

MORE Accelerated Math taught by educational-NO-Nonsense, knock-you-out, serious-math-gorillas! (and, BTW, why aren't fetuses listening to banking tapes instead of Bach?)

EVER HIGHER EXPECTATIONS of students, over-worked parents, anybody willing to be the fall guy for the students perceived academic foibles (Expectations are the latest magic fix - all you have to do is say you're raising expectations and miracles happen - Jesus would be envious at how effective this is in educational rhetoric).

If we now require three years, why not four? five?

Or maybe we just invent a course that puts out the educational outrage of the moment - a checkbook course, a contract reading course, a manage your money course, and so on for every co-incidental minutia.

This is how it goes for the most part. Society confronts educators to show more muscle. But none of these solutions really address the fact that our kids aren't learning to learn and don't know how to think. Balancing checkbooks is addition and subtraction not the absence of more Calculus. And testing for addition and subtraction shows kids can add and subtract all right, or memorize vocabulary words, or whatever. But they're all unrelated test factoids. We have to get better at this.

We need to change the way we do education and we will. NCLB must be the first piece of loose, worthless baggage to get jettisoned.

More from the commentary...

"Also, if there are any Gallup-type surveys on what students want in education, I haven't seen them. Why do we know more about how much caffeine students want in what form each day than we do about learning preferences?"

Are we afraid that they're thinking despite school? Asking students is called respect. What a concept.