The New York Times magazine has a long article by Carlo Rotella about the first trial of the Amplify tablet in the schools of Guilford County, North Carolina. Amplify is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation and run by Joel Klein, the former chancellor of the NewYork City public schools.
Klein is certain that public education in America is a disaster and the only things that can save it are disruptive technology and the Common Core. Those are the same recommendations made by the task force Klein co-chaired for the Council on Foreign Relations last year.
Happily for Murdoch, Klein, and other apostles of saving the schools by selling technology to them, they have a friend in Arne Duncan. He is quoted as follows:
“To keep doing the same thing we’ve been doing for the past hundred years — everybody working on the same thing at the same time, not based on competency. . . .” He sighed and let the thought trail off, then added his standard reminder that we must equip our students to compete with counterparts in India and China. He did acknowledge, though, that the fear of falling behind puts added pressure on school systems to do something, anything, which then makes them more vulnerable to rushed decisions and to peddlers of magic bullets. “There are a lot of hucksters out there,” he said.
“Duncan, whose longtime allies include Joel Klein, Bill Gates and other apostles of disruption, has a record of supporting reforms that increase the role of market forces — choice, competition, the profit motive — in education. He wants private enterprises vying to make money by providing innovative educational products and services, and sees his role as “taking to scale the best practices” that emerge from this contest.”
One of the trainers of teachers uses a phrase that we have now heard about a million times , meaning that we are experimenting on you and don’t know how things will turn out: “Another PLEF, Wenalyn Bell, told her group, “It’s like building a plane while it’s flying.”
Rotella retains a healthy skepticism. He knows that Los Angeles laid off teachers while it spent big bucks to buy iPads.
He ends with these observations from his last interview with Klein.
“Take Finland,” Klein continued, citing everyone’s favorite example of a country that puts its money on excellent teachers, not technology, and routinely finishes at the top in international assessments. “There’s a high barrier for entry into the teaching profession,” the kind that lets in the Robin Britts and keeps out weaker aspirants. Teachers there are also well paid, held in high esteem and trusted to get results without being forced to teach to the test. But America’s educational system is a lot bigger, messier, less centralized and more focused on market-based solutions than Finland’s. Also, our greater income inequality and thinner social safety net make for much wider variation in student performance, and a toxic political climate has encouraged our traditional low regard for teachers to flower into outright contempt.
“Still, if everyone agrees that good teachers make all the difference, wouldn’t it make more sense to devote our resources to strengthening the teaching profession with better recruitment, training, support and pay? It seems misguided to try to improve the process of learning by putting an expensive tool in the hands of teachers we otherwise treat like the poor relations of the high-tech whiz kids who design the tool.
“Are our overwhelmed, besieged, haphazardly recruited, variably trained, underpaid, not-so-elite teachers, in fact, the potential weak link in Amplify’s bid to disrupt American schooling? Klein said that we have 3.5 million elementary- and middle-school teachers. “We have to put the work of the most brilliant people in their hands,” he said. “If we don’t empower them, it won’t work.” Behind the talking points and buzz words, what I heard him saying was Yes.”
“The work of the most brilliant people” meaning those that designed Creepify….is that what he means?
The most brilliant people can’t be the teachers already in the classroom working directly with children? Staring at a tablet will make them smarter?
We are all a bunch of dolts waiting for leeches like Klein and Murdoch to save us from ourselves.
So he insults us and then he wants districts to buy his educrap? Really, Joel?
Linda: there’s an old adage in Spanish, no pedir peras al olmo (don’t ask for pears from an elm tree).
You asking too much of the TabletMeister. Joel Klein pays no more attention to the logic or appropriateness of the word salad he creates than Arne (pro-test/anti-test/maybe-test) Duncan.
From the posting above: “Take Finland,” Klein continued, citing everyone’s favorite example of a country that puts its money on excellent teachers, not technology, and routinely finishes at the top in international assessments. “There’s a high barrier for entry into the teaching profession,” etc.
He literally cites an excellent example that cuts to ribbons his whole argument.
But I don’t question his cagebusting sincerity:
“A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true.” [Demosthenes]
🙂
love the Demosthenes quotation, Krazy!
Finland doesn’t even begin testing until the Junior year of high school. At that point the tests become very intensive. Students who want to continue along the path of academics can choose to do so. Those who do not can move into other fields. There is no stigma to a decision of this sort. It’s what makes for a well rounded, functioning society.
The business world needs statistics to make sense of situations so that decisions can be made. The business world is seizing (or has already) control of our public education system. They see educators as employees who should be towing the line in a top down management system. Data, data, data.
I have nothing against the iPad or tablet. It’s an excellent educational tool. I’ve used it with great effect in my classes. But it’s ONE tool. I don’t believe it’s in the best interests of students or teachers to make it the centerpiece of the classroom throughout the entire school day.
So Klein is basically saying that teachers are a bunch of “morons” so we’d all be better off giving “morons” the latest and greatest technology and this will produce amazing results. Hmmm… Klein is the one who sounds like a moron to me. And no… teachers are not morons … they just are forced to “act like morons” when they are mandated to follow a lot of top-down nonsense being promoted by the likes of Klein and other corporate profiteers.
I like the Core Knowledge curriculum. I think that it’s really rich and engaging for kids. But ANY CURRICULUM should have to COMPETE for the hearts and minds of educators in site-managed schools who can make their own decisions about standards, curricula, assessment instruments, and pedagogical practices AT THE BUILDING LEVEL. Take the best curriculum in the world and have it be MANDATED by the Common Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth and what you will end up with, over time, is mediocrity–what you got in the old Soviet Union in which nothing worked.
I posted this as a comment on the NY Times over a year ago. Just in case Joel checks in, this is for you and Rupert:
In a New York Times article, Klein stated in reference to Amplify:
“I’m candid that if this isn’t embraced by teachers in America, it won’t work.”
Dear Mr. Klein:
I am an educator and a parent and I don’t embrace anything being promoted and sold by you or Murdoch. You do not care about children, teaching and learning. You care about profits, profits, profits.
Stay away from our children. I don’t trust anyone associated with a company that hacked into the cell phone of a missing, murdered 13 year old.
I will collect and track student results the old fashioned way. I will get to know each of my students as individuals with dreams, strengths, goals and opinions. We will create individual portfolios with writing samples and journal entries. We will read fiction, non fiction, memoirs, news articles, essays, short stories, poems. We will share ideas, opinions and create long term projects: research, book trailers, original plays, book blogs, etc.
As a teacher it is my responsibility to be data informed NOT data driven. I promise you I will not waste time staring at a computer, tablet or wireless device.
Instead I will look at my students and see and hear them. So, I will tell you now I take a pass on your “digital learning tools” and instead I will use my brain, my instincts and my 27 years of teaching experience to guide me, something the faux reformers (you, Rhee, Bloomberg, Murdoch) know nothing about.
One more comment…a visual for you.
Who needs teachers…..We’ll WATCH your children:
Warning: do NOT click to enlarge:
That’s good Linda!
Do click to enlarge!
You’re reverse psychology worked on me!
Reblogged this on Blog of an e-marketer by Main Uddin.
“his standard reminder that we must equip our students to compete with counterparts in India and China.”
The best and brightest students of India and China have limited if any technology in the classroom, parents who are 150% invested in their children’s education, and a culture that highly respects teachers.
I wonder where the Amplify tablet is made? A certain communist authoritarian police state with predatory capitalism plugged into its economic system.
“Hire smart, empathic teachers with depth and vision, and watch our children grow into a harvest of creative, thoughtful, articulate intellects and citizens.” (Diane Ravitch)
Mr. Klein: Put that in your tablet and smoke it instead of whatever you had in there the night you conceived of USA Free Public Schools as “ripe for disruption” courtesy of a tech-wreck.
The issue is not whether we should spend money on technology. We should. A U.S. Census Bureau report put out this year says that a third of kids in the country don’t have computers at home and that a somewhat larger number do not have home internet access. But there are deeper problems. Here are two of them:
1. It is poverty, not lousy teachers, that is holding back kids with the lowest performance. We are not going to get improvements in those children’s responses to schooling unless we fix that.
2. Technology per se is neither good nor bad. The same train can be used to carry food to the hungry or people to Chelmo. Using technology as a gateway whereby only one set of curricula can move stifles innovation. The new technologies can be a freedom-bestowing “pull” mechanism, whereby users are empowered, or they can be a freedom-killing “push” mechanism used by the Centralized Curricula Corporation and Ministry of Truth.
The Cost of War project estimates the committed expenditures for the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan at 6 trillion. Well over a hundred thousand dollars for every schoolkid in the United States. And what did we purchase for all that?
Yes, give every kid a tablet. But have them use those tablets for exploration and research, not to complete some set of mind-numbing curriculum pushed upon schools by the Centralized Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth.
Me, too, Louisiana! I can’t get enough of learning about the Holocaust. There is a picture that haunts me, all the time, of toddlers from the Lodz Ghetto being loaded onto a train to Chelmno. It’s the most moving thing I have ever seen. It’s here:
The faces of these children loom large in my imagination and in my concerns. This picture breaks my heart into a billion pieces every time I think of it. Those little faces!!!! We must never forget them.
And if there are any elementary school teachers reading this blog who do not know Jennifer Roy’s kids’ novel Yellow Star, please go find it and read it and share it with your students. It’s on my list of the five best kids’ books ever written. Powerful.
I meant Chelmno, of course.
Thanks! I was just about to mention the spelling. Sorry–Holocaust educator here!
I’ve read Yellow Star, Robert. It’s great. For adults, Ordinary Men continues to haunt me. May I share MY picture of the Holocaust that haunts me? They are waiting for the gas chamber at Auschwitz. I don’t know what it is about the woman on the left with glasses, but she stares into my soul: http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/album_auschwitz/photo_28.asp
Thank you, Louisiana. I haven’t read Ordinary Men, but I certainly shall. I just saw Agnieszka Holland’s great film In Darkness. And thank you for being one of those who continues to tell this story.
“There’s a high barrier for entry into the teaching profession.” This is one of those phrases that perpetuates the false impression that just anyone can walk into a university and get a degree in education. I just graduated with a Master’s degree from Indiana State University in Education. To stay in this program I had to maintain a B+ average. The Education undergrads at ISU have to maintain a B average in Education classes and have to retake a class if their grade is not up to standards. Last time I checked, Indiana State, like most state universities across the U.S., is accredited, has full professors with terminal degrees teaching classes, and bases their program on accepted pedagogical practices. I don’t allow people to get away with dropping that false assumption about teacher education in any conversation; I demand references, proof that teacher education in the US is lax. I could only wish to have that conversation with Mr. Klein, I am sure his educational background would not allow him to engage with me in an intelligent manner.
The whole reform narrative rests on the notions that a) our schools have failed and b) our teachers are inept. A system the size of ours, serving so diverse a student population, will inevitably offer up examples of terrible schools and terrible teachers. I have been into schools that looked a lot like the common recreation areas in Peruvian prisons. I’ve personally known teachers who were complete idiots with no knowledge of the subjects they were supposed to be teaching. But that’s not where we are GENERALLY, not by a LONG SHOT. The deformers always point to results on international test scores, but the fact is that if one corrects those scores for the socioeconomic level of the students taking them, our schools perform as well as the best in the world. Yes, we can improve. And the way to do that is
to return to site-based management,
empower our teachers by giving them the autonomy to choose their curricula and standards and pedagogical practices AT THE BUILDING LEVEL and adopt and adapt those as they deem necessary in response to SELF-directed Lesson Study,
give teachers the time and resources to do that self-directed continuous improvement, and
yes, increase BOTH pay and requirements for demonstrated subject-area competence (with lots of alternative tracks for that).
Top-down, authoritarian solutions will not work. And no one died and made Arne Duncan, Michelle Rhee, Bill Gates, Joel Klein, or David Coleman king.
Bravo and we never will make them the boss of us.
They can control the message right now, but they do not control our minds, our classrooms, our passion, our children and our dedication.
They don’t know my kids. I know my kids. Shoo fly!
And those complete idiots were rare. I’ve also known, personally, many hundreds of teachers who were deeply learned in their subjects, who were, themselves, continually learning, who went into the profession BECAUSE they loved learning. The disrespect shown to teachers by the reform crowd is breathtaking. For example, they thought it should go without question that they should choose a small group of people to develop “standards” that basically overrule every teachers, every curriculum coordinator, every curriculum developer in the country; standards that bsically say, “We have decided for you what the learning ladder should be. What you think about this–well, no one gives a —- what you feel or think.”
I agree, Teresa.
I wonder where the “fact” that we are all dolts came from?
In order to qualify for a teaching certificate in GA, had to have at least a B avg., a large number of credit hours in the subject I was to be certified in ( as I recall, about equal to a minor), and pass a rather long and wide ranging subject test.
Can we really all be from the ” bottom third”?
Grading philosophies differ in different schools. In the engineering school at my university the average grade in a class is a B-. At the education school, the average grade is an A-. The B bar does not seem too difficult for an education student to reach.
I majored in biology, thank you.
Most of my colleagues also majored in the subject they teach.
Even if they had not, they still would have been required quite a few hours in classes OUTSIDE the college of Ed. So even if the Ed dept is giving away As and Bs like prizes at the bottom of Cracker Jack boxes ( which BTW, was NOT My experience when I later took education classes required for my certification), teachers would still have been required to do pretty well in other departments.
Also, surly you know that there are WAY too many variables involved to simply assume from your little anecdote anything about the quality of the departments or the students.
I agree that knowing some thing like the average grade tells one very little about the academic performance of any individual. Much more context is required. For grades in education schools, for example, there is this study:http://economics.missouri.edu/working-papers/2010/WP1002_koedel.pdf
A lot of us have to major in our subject matter, though, so grades from the education college wouldn’t really be indicative of the grades of teachers in general–just their education classes. I had the equivalent of a triple major in history, geography and political science when I graduated, and probably 5 education classes plus student teaching.
When you say you have the equivalent of a history, political science, and geography majors do you mean that you satisfied the major requirement for all three departments? At my university each major is around 30 credit hours, though some limited double counting is allowed.
Yep. It wasn’t quite 30 hours in geography, but it was close.
Impressive, 90 credit hours is 3/4 of the total hours required for a degree at my university. Did you actually get these three majors? I only ask because you suggested you did not.
TE,
“I agree that knowing some thing like the average grade tells one very little about the academic performance of any individual. Much more context is required. ”
So you threw out that “statistic ” about averages in various departments why?
Data gives some context. The BOTTOM 10% of grades in the education school at the University of Missouri average 3.5, at Miami of Ohio it is 3.28, and the University of Indiana comes in with a 3.27, all on a 4.0 scale. It puts the requirement of a 3.0 GPA for teachers in some context.
Still awaiting your consideration of that much more context that you say is required.
Over 100,000 grades in over 2,900 classes seems like some context. What do you require to shift your prior?
Ang: Typically when teachers in this country are derided as “underachievers,” the measure being used to make that claim is either the SAT or ACT (or both). The thing they measure best is family income. So, in essence, the real claim ought to be that higher-income students do not aspire to be teachers.
This tablet solution to education just shows how clueless Klein and company are about students.
First, it is really worth watching the video on their website to see how the tablet will work and how they don’t take any variables about children into effect (or teachers, for that matter). http://www.amplify.com/tablet
1. They assume that Jayden will work on a multimedia homework project in his house. Many of my students do not have internet access in their home and others do, but do not have wireless access. Is Amplify going to provide internet access to all the students in a school (complete with wireless access)? If not, how will a teacher handle the students who cannot complete assignments due to having no internet access?
2. What if Jayden forgets to bring his tablet to school? Will there be a spare one for him? How will the teacher handle this? Also, what if Jayden loses the tablet? (Will he get a replacement?
3. Electronics equipment always end up having problems (I have had problems with iPads, cell phones and have had multiple pc crash for various reasons–and screens do crack, also). If most of the class is going to be conducted via tablet (as it seems in the video), how do you deal with that?
4. If a teacher is absent, will the substitute be provided with a tablet and will that sub have adequate training?
5. Why did it seem that all the assessments shown in the video seem to be multiple choice. Oh, never mind….
So Ms. Costa, teacher referred to in the video, takes attendance based on who logs into their tablet. She doesn’t look at them to see if they are in the room. So if you’re in the room, but you don’t log on to Creepify, then you are absent.
Yes, this assumes students take their tablet home, have a wireless connection, use it correctly and the teacher is evidently on duty 24/7.
What’s the point of coming to school if you just teach yourself?
Silly me….that is the point…personalized learning is a euphemism for reducing the labor costs of public education for other people’s children.
No thank you, Joel and Rupert.
Linda,
If you read this story in the New York Times, written in 2009, you will understand that Joel Klein decided long ago that technology would make it possible to reduce the teaching force by 30% and increase their pay by 30%: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/22/nyregion/22bigcity.html
Thank you for linking. I will check it out.
Can’t wait for your book…it is coming Tuesday from amazon and I ordered one via NPE with my donation. 🙂
I suspect the assessments were multiple choice because most of the software is written to use flash currently. The folks that I talk to are in the process of changing everything to HTML 5.
I think your other concerns a valid, but many also apply to textbooks as well.
As a teacher, I always have a few extra textbooks in class and students can share a textbook if a student forgets it at home. HTML5 will not solve the problem of assessments as they are “instant” assessments so that if a student takes it at home and it is not multiple choice (or true/false), then someone must grade it.
These tablets are a terrible idea on more levels than I can imagine.
Take a look at the economics software out there. There are many questions where students need to shift curves or color in areas in graphs. Aplia would be a good place to look, but don’t do it on an ipad because they are still using flash (I think)
Superintendents who advocate for the use of Amplify products should be lambasted in public and viewed as “enemies of public education”.
“Saving the schools by selling technology to them.” That is hilarious. What kind of business model is that?
We ALL (teachers, principals, superintendents, school board members, ANYONE involved in education) must say NO! to Klein and the likes of Klein.
I wanted to say that there is a really beautiful, really important idea at the heart of what was done in the Core Knowledge elementary school reading curriculum. This is it: In order for kids, later on, to comprehend what they are reading, they need to build knowledge in commonly referenced knowledge domains, and since listening comprehension far outpaces reading comprehension in the early years, active listening is a really good way to build that background knowledge. It also happens to be a good way to build essential syntactic fluency, but the Core Knowledge people never addressed that. They have a restricted focus on the knowledge base/comprehension issue.
These ideas about knowledge and comprehension are extraordinarily well presented in a an excellent but not widely read little book by the former Director of Reading at the Core Knowledge Foundation, Matt Davis. His book is called Reading Instruction: The Two Keys. And E.D. Hirsch, Jr., also addressed this pedagogical issue very well, I think, in his book The Knowledge Deficit.
Unfortunately, these insights into early language arts pedagogy, insights that have lots of empirical support, have been LOST IN LOTS OF OTHER DEBATES–ones pitting defenders of a normative curriculum against multiculturalists, for example, and ones pitting defenders of purchasing tablets against those who think that schools have more important things to spend money on. Those are discussions that we should be having, but the pedagogical issues having to do with what we know about how kids acquire language abilities ALWAYS get pushed to the background because people don’t recognize that they are there.
Totalitarian mandates by the Central Curriculum Commissar and Ministry of Truth are not a way to get real engagement on on those pedagogical issues. They are ways to ensure that the message will get lost and not receive buy-in.
My oldest son works in tech (although he attended Our Failed and Failing Public Schools so should be all but unemployable according to Arne Duncan) and I’m enormously grateful he’s not on the “sell gadgets and gimmicks to 2nd graders” bandwagon.
He’s been a computer enthusiast since he was 9 years old and he thinks this is a mistake for little kids. He thinks kids spend enough time in front of a screen.
Would he be willing to start promoting his thoughts to the people making decisions in education today?
I don’t think so. He votes, but other than that he’s not politically involved. This came to his attention because he attends tech conferences. He and a co-worker left a Chicago tech event early because the entire focus became ed tech. He’s a wary and careful person by nature, and he says his industry is casting about for new markets so he has a healthy suspicion of tech products marketed to children.
He’s 25 and he’s become more and more convinced of the value of real life experiences, as opposed to “screen time.” When he and his sister were small, we would periodically put the television in the garage if we thought they were watching too much and we had to constantly tell them to turn it off. He remembers that.
It’s amusing to me that parents have put so much time and energy into limiting screen time over the last 20 years, and now “national education experts” and the Sec of the DOE are pushing screen time. I think it’s a mistake. The trick is to get kids up and out from in front of screen, not to turn one of the few non-commercial public spaces (public schools) they encounter into another sales opportunity. I feel sorry for them. Adults should act more responsibly.
Where is the data that shows Amplify works? Who will hold the hucksters accountable for defrauding our kids and schools? What does Arne Duncan have to say about the harmful impact snake oil “solutions” are having on our schools? Or is it only teachers who really harm schools and need to be held accountable?
It works because Rupert Murdoch and Joel Klein say it will…or to paraphrase Tevya from “Fiddler on the Roof”–“When you’re rich, they think you really know….”
There is one metric in which the US consistently excels, show studies by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, an international consortium of 400 researchers: entrepreneurship. Scholars have noticed an inverse correlation between GEM rankings and PISA scores. This has worried some Singaporeans, for example, who fear that rote memorization and intensely focused studies might account for their nation’s high PISA scores but bode ill for innovation-driven growth.
A company like Apple would not emerge in a structured country like Singapore, the company’s cofounder Steve Wozniak told the BBC in 2011, because that would require a society with great artists, musicians, and writers. “Where are the creative people?” he asked.
This is a question Singapore’s leaders had already picked up on when they made the arts a cornerstone of the city-state’s effort to boost creativity and innovation. Already, Singapore is pointing to correlations some researchers have documented between arts study and academic success, even as tighter budgets and teaching to standardized tests have forced US schools to cut arts curriculum.
“We’re the only country in the world that tests every child every year,” says Linda Darling-Hammond, founder of the Stanford (University) Center for Opportunity Policy in Education and the School Redesign Network. “We attached high stakes [to these tests] so people thought they could only pay attention to that,” to the detriment of science, social studies, art, music, or physical education.
Yep…we are doing some seriously stupid stuff.
Chinese Educators Look to American Classrooms
By DAN LEVIN
September 2, 2013
BEIJING — To prepare for an endless barrage of secondary-school exams, Zhang Ruifan learned to memorize entire science textbooks. So when his family sent him to high school in the United States, he was so far ahead of his fellow freshmen in math and science that he usually knew the correct answer even before the teacher had finished speaking.
“I’d just blurt it out,” he said in an interview while back home here this summer.
But Ruifan, 15, who goes by Derek in the United States, soon discovered that science was more than just facts and formulas meant to be regurgitated on tests.
At school in West Des Moines, Iowa, where he lived with a host family, his science teacher donned protective goggles and used a long-reach lighter to ignite a hydrogen balloon, just so students could get a firsthand look at the element’s explosive properties.
Then there was the day he and his classmates went up to the roof to learn about gravity by dropping basketballs, tennis balls and other objects over the edge. “Back in China I learned about gravity from a PowerPoint slide,” he said. “That’s it.”
The United States State Department does not break down its data on visas by age and school type, but anecdotal evidence here suggests that increasing numbers of middle-class families are looking for a way out of China’s test-taking gantlet.
“I didn’t want my son to become a book-cramming robot,” said Ruifan’s mother, Wang Pin, explaining why she sent him to live and learn halfway across the world. American educators and politicians have been warning for years that rising powers like China and India are poised to overtake the United States in science achievement. On a 2009 standardized test that drew worldwide attention, students in Shanghai finished first in the sciences among peers from more than 70 countries, while the United States came in 23rd (right behind Hungary).
But even many Chinese educators are dismayed by the country’s obsession with stellar test results. Last fall they convened a conference on the topic in Shanghai.
“When American high school students are discussing the latest models of airplanes, satellites and submarines, China’s smartest students are buried in homework and examination papers,” said Ni Minjing a physics teacher who is the director of the Shanghai Education Commission’s basic education department, according to Shanghai Daily, an English-language newspaper. “Students also have few chances to do scientific experiments and exercise independent thinking.”
That message appears to be getting through to Chinese education officials, who are moving toward the American model of hands-on science learning. This summer, the Ministry of Education launched the latest in a series of campaigns aimed at shifting the focus away from standardized testing.
The ministry said the systemic fixation with testing “severely hampers student development as a whole person, stunts their healthy growth, and limits opportunities to cultivate social responsibilities, creative spirit, and practical abilities in students.”
But as with so many orders from the central government, it remains to be seen whether these guidelines, aimed at provincial education departments, will be adopted or ignored.
Meanwhile, preparation for China’s national university entrance exam continues to dominate the lives of secondary students. Known as the gaokao, or high test, the exam takes nine hours over two days, and some say it makes the SAT look like a pop quiz. Compounding the pressure, gaokao results are the sole factor used to determine university admissions.
This ironclad criterion, combined with the fact that most families have only one child, gives Chinese parents little incentive to encourage extracurricular activities, lest it divert their children from the slog of gaokao memorization. Critics say it also produces poorly socialized adolescents who are ill-prepared to face the challenges of the real world. Students have their own term for describing the way their teachers impart knowledge: “feeding the ducks.”
As a science teacher in the northwestern region of Ningxia, Wei Jinbao has seen firsthand how China’s education system transforms children into hardworking students with an impressive capacity for processing factual information. “Give them a problem and they will find the answer,” he said. “However, they can’t ask a good question.”
Like many Chinese science professionals, Mr. Wei is keenly aware that the country has yet to produce a Nobel Prize winner in the sciences whose research is homegrown. Over the years, he has tried to spark innovative thinking among his students, but he is missing a critical element: lab equipment, which most Chinese schools see as an unnecessary expense.
Asked why, he sighed in exasperation. “The entrance exam doesn’t test experiments,” he said
What if Finland’s great teachers taught in U.S. schools? – The Washington Post
Politics Opinions Local More
THE ANSWER SHEET
What if Finland’s great teachers taught in U.S. schools?
By Valerie Strauss, Published: MAY 15, 6:00 AM ET
Aa
Finland’s education expert Pasi Sahlberg
Finland’s Pasi Sahlberg is one of the world’s leading experts on school reform and the author of the best-selling “Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn About Educational Change in Finland?” In this piece he writes about whether the emphasis that American school reformers put on “teacher effectiveness” is really the best approach to improving student achievement.
He is director general of Finland’s Centre for International Mobility and Cooperation and has served the Finnish government in various positions and worked for the World Bank in Washington D.C. He has also been an adviser for numerous governments internationally about education policies and reforms, and is an adjunct professor of education at the University of Helsinki and University of Oulu. He can be reached at pasi.sahlberg@cimo.fi.
By Pasi Sahlberg
Many governments are under political and economic pressure to turn around their school systems for higher rankings in the international league tables. Education reforms often promise quick fixes within one political term. Canada, South Korea, Singapore and Finland are commonly used models for the nations that hope to improve teaching and learning in their schools. In search of a silver bullet, reformers now turn their eyes on teachers, believing that if only they could attract “the best and the brightest” into the teaching profession, the quality of education would improve.
“Teacher effectiveness” is a commonly used term that refers to how much student performance on standardized tests is determined by the teacher. This concept hence applies only to those teachers who teach subjects on which students are tested. Teacher effectiveness plays a particular role in education policies of nations where alternative pathways exist to the teaching profession.
Thanks for these superb posts, Mr. Twain!
Here’s how to ENSURE that you will NOT ATTRACT (continue to attract) and keep the “best and the brightest”:
TAKE AWAY THEIR AUTONOMY.
Give them mandated standards, mandated curricula on the tablet and from the vendors approved by the Common Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth;
subject them to VAM;
tell them what pedagogical practices they will have to implement and send goons to their rooms to make sure that these and only these are implemented;
hand them boilerplate lesson plan formats from which they are not to deviate under penalty of death;
measure everything that moves–their success, their students’ success, their school’s success–by means of a horrifically flawed, unscientific, curriculum narrowing and distorting high stakes testing system;
treat vastly differing kids like parts to be identically milled;
make them use “standards” prepared by amateurs;
tell them “no one gives a —- what you think or feel”;
subject them to endless rounds of “trainings” in which they are treated like the non-educable but trainable: sit up, fetch, roll over, good boy.
This is the method GUARANTEED to create a situation in which only those who can’t find an escape route remain in the job.
And this is exactly what we are doing. Every decent teacher I know, just about, is sick to death of it and ready to tell the educrats pushing on them these totalitarian “reforms” that he or she is sick of being complicit in the destruction of U.S. education.
The best and the brightest do not simply want autonomy; they demand it. And every sort of creative innovation flows from their exercise of autonomy.
But perhaps that is not what is wanted for the system of prole training. Perhaps what’s needed for that is people who will ensure that the next generation of proles will dutifully spend their lifetimes doing the equivalent of bubbling in whatever bubbles their overlords tell them to.
This sounds exactly what we do to students in the classroom. The (factory) bell still rings. Teachers are still focused on student discipline. It is still a teacher-directed model. While I agree that treating teachers as we treat students (cogs in a machine) isn’t good – I do think changes are required in how we educate. Children should have a voice. They should feel that their efforts in school matter. They should have the ability to explore and develop their interests. Technology *can* be a catalyst to make some of this happen. With tech, student’s voices can be heard outside of the confines of the school. Their words and actions can make a difference in the world. Tech increases their access to content – allowing them more flexibility in exploring and developing their interests.
Taking the tablets home for assignments and projects will present a big problem in some neighborhoods. Especially the inner city areas where the playing field is supposed to be leveled. We can’t even let our kids bring their work or textbooks home, knowing that there’s a very good chance we’ll never see them again.