hacking education

This is an old article (2007) that I stubledupon’ed but think the concept is a fantastic idea:

Enter a typical high school, and the first thing you see is the front office. It's the "belly button" of the school, the place where the principal dwells, where grades are stored and where visitors must sign in.

The front office also reinforces familiar hierarchy: principal at the top, teachers in the middle, kids on the bottom, sitting with hands folded at their desks.

Now, imagine a school where the organizational structure is completely flat. At the New Country School in Henderson, Minn., there is no front office. Visitors are immediately embraced by an airy atrium that is the centerpiece of this one-room schoolhouse.

And all around the room, New Country's 124 students sit at desks — real office desks — working at their own personal computers.

The feeling is comfortable. There is a hum of constant conversation, none of the screaming and yelling heard in a traditional school. Kids are free to move about the school, so there's no need for hall passes or for teachers to patrol the hall. And there's no need to send kids to the office.

New Country, a charter school, is the biggest institution in the small town of Henderson (pop. 910), about an hour southwest of Minneapolis. It's not the kind of place you expect to see radical experiments.

(download)

Click here to download:

School_Gets_Rid_of_Classes_Tea.zip (720 KB)

New Country Principles:

• No classes. Students work on projects they select themselves. Projects are tailored to fulfill state curriculum requirements.
• No teachers. Students consult with "advisers" who are available through the day to guide their work. Advisers do not "teach" in the traditional sense. They guide students' work.
• No hierarchy. The school is run like an agricultural cooperative. Advisers are owners, rather than employees. There is no principal.
• No bells, no firm schedule. Time is set aside for lunch and for quiet reading. Other than that, students choose how to spend their time. If they fall behind, advisers help them get back on track.
• No walls. Students work in an open environment and can confer with other students and advisers as needed. There's no central office.
• And no janitors. Students clean the bathrooms and the rest of the school themselves.

What would Bill Gates fund? That's the question many in higher education want to know and his annual letter about his interests for his foundation offers some guidance. This year, one of his areas of interest is online learning. "So far technology has hardly changed formal education at all. But a lot of people, including me, think this is the next place where the Internet will surprise people in how it can improve things — especially in combination with face-to-face learning. With the escalating costs of education, an advance here would be very timely," he writes. He praises colleges and universities for putting lectures online, but argues that online learning also needs to include interactivity. He also expresses interest in identifying the best educational materials online and better organizing them.

Via InsideHigherEd

<p>Rethink Scholarship at Langara 2010 Call for Entries from Rory O'Sullivan and Simon Bruyn on Vimeo.</p>

When I posted my Harvard HGSE application essays on this blog I had a few people ask me if I worry about what Harvard may think about posting my essays online.

In my Harvard Application #2 I talked about a system that would allow students to be grouped by the teacher’s specialty—a system flexible enough to accommodate multiage grouping as well as teacher’s ability to continue with students for longer than a year.

The Arizona Republic just published an article about Mingus Springs Charter School that groups students by four ability groups—not traditionally by age and grade—and reports improvements for both teachers and students:

“‘By grouping students by ability rather than age, we're better able to respond to the student's needs,’ Principal Dawn Gonzales said. ‘Research shows that multiage classrooms can be beneficial to academic achievement.’

“This structure promotes collaboration and friendships across age groups that create a unique community. Older students have an opportunity to become role models and to reinforce their own understanding through teaching. Younger students get to preview concepts they'll study later. Each student can move ahead at his or her own pace.

“At Mingus Springs, younger students spend two years with the same teacher, allowing the teacher to have a greater understanding of the students' learning style.

“‘I enjoy the creativity that this type of curriculum offers,’ said Susan Romney, a Level 2 teacher. ‘The instruction is much more meaningful for students as well as teachers.’”

eCampus News published an opinion piece that in its entirety felt like a little remedial but makes a nice opening differentiation between sustaining and disruptive technologies.  Though an outsider looking in, I feel that the education world is largely slow to adopt either.  I think the slow adoption of sustaining technologies, examples of which would be SMART boards and netbooks, may be mostly to blame on budgets and the edu business model.  Disruptive technologies, in contrast, I believe edu still fears.

The article cites Florida’s marked departure from this fear in mandating that every district must have a virtual school. I think mandating something like that may prove a baby step in the right direction but in my opinion you can never mandate a truly disruptive technology. Disruptive technologies, or technologies that fundamentally change the we live, cannot be mandated.  You cannot force innovation. Rather than mandating change Florida, and others, should be as accommodating as possible to the edu entrepreneurs, charter schools, and other reformers and get out of the way.

From the opinion piece:

“Technological innovations might be categorized along a continuum from sustaining to disruptive. In education, a sustaining technology might be a SMART Board, which in most applications is a way to present information dynamically and efficiently—a sustaining upgrade to the chalkboard and overhead projector—while a disruptive technology would be a virtual school.

“As a matter of fact, most attempts to integrate instructional technology into the traditional classroom are examples of sustaining technologies: data projectors, DVD players, eBooks—all which improve the performance of established products.

“Most integrated technologies sustain, and do not disrupt.

“On the other hand, distance education and virtual schools are probably not sustaining technologies. Rather, distance education, virtual schooling, and eLearning are disruptive.

“For example, distance education is aimed at students (often older, working, remotely located learners) who are ignored by established companies (traditional schools).

“Distance education presents a different package of performance attributes that are not valued by existing customers. Distance education might come to dominate by filling a role that the older technology could not fill.”

via eCampus News.

“College applicants are facing one of the toughest years ever to gain admission to the nation's public colleges and universities as schools grapple with deep budget cuts and record numbers of applications.

“The increased competition means more students will be turned away, forced to attend pricier private institutions or shut out of college altogether.”

Via USAToday

The Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) recently announced the creation of a new degree: Doctor of Educational Leadership.

This program is interdisciplinary, with coursework coming from HGSE, the Harvard Business School, and the Kennedy School. The program is three years—the first two spent in course work and the third year spent in residency with a partner program. There are some pieces with great explanations and quotes regarding the program. Here are a few:

•  AP on MSNBC
• Harvard Gazette
• NYTimes

I first heard about the new programs in September and decided that I wasn’t going to let the grass grow on this opportunity. From a cold start I began busting the GRE skills and got signed up for a Nov 24 test date.

Man. Nothing will reinforce a conviction in reforming education that having to take another high stakes standardized test. In the end I scored 570 (80 percentile) on the Verbal, 770 (87 percentile) on the Quant and a 5.5 (92 percentile) on the Analytical Writing.  The score was a mixed surprise—I had been scoring just shy of 700 on the Verbal in pretests and low 600s on the Quant in pretests.  Ha. Brings back my memories of the ACT, which I took 4 times, never scoring higher that a 31 cumulatively, though over the course of the four times taking the test, managed to score a 35 on every section of the test—just never consistently.

I had the thought, though, that I would like to share my two short (400 word) essays that I submitted as part of the application.   They are below, with the prompts.

Describe a situation in which you changed your opinion/view on a particular topic or issue.

I am the primary administrator of Zinch.com’s scholarship programs.  To date, I have awarded over $200,000 in scholarships to students. 

I used to love it. 

I used to love creating the programs. I used to love reading applications. And I used to especially love making the phone call to students to let them know they’d won.

I used to…

But my outlook has changed in recent months. I used to believe I was helping do my part in overcoming the rising cost of higher education.

I was wrong. I have come to understand that while scholarships are a blessing to the recipient they have an inflationary affect on the cost of education for others.

The consequences of the rising costs of higher education are monstrous and private scholarships feed the monster. It is Econ 101; supply vs. demand.  Varying prices determine the level of supply and demand for any product and education is no different. Assuming price elasticity, when the price is high, supply is high. When the price is low, demand is high. The actual amount of education produced is where the equilibrium of supply equals demand.

Third party scholarships are a form of subsidy. Subsidies increase demand at the equilibrium price. In a market that can quickly scale, an increase in demand is met with an increase in production and an increase in price, until equilibrium is again met. Traditional education does not easily scale. Physicality constrains it—the number of chairs in buildings, buildings on campuses, total number of campuses. Therefore, the increase in demand cannot be met with the usual increase in supply. This leaves unmet demand. Unmet demand results in diminished need for efficiencies and innovation as well as the ability to artificially inflate tuition rates.

Believing that they are allaying the problem of rising tuition, scholarship providers only help inflate the problem. They feed the monster.

Scholarships enable tuition hikes. Even so, higher education still yields a positive return on investment for the majority of its graduates. However, tuition hikes do not affect all equally. There are those who, while knowing education’s positive return, don't have the capital to start, or to finish, the process of a four-year degree. It is not that the economics don't work; it is that they don't work for everyone. With each hike in tuition, someone gets left behind.

And so… for those deserving students we create another scholarship…