(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
If you missed Juan Williams’ news special Fixing Our Schools last night on Fox News (shame on you!) you can catch some of it on the web here. Great feature on Carpe Diem, School of One, digital learning and interviews with Jeb Bush and Joel Klein.
13 Comments | 
Digital Learning | Tagged: Carpe Diem, Jeb Bush, Joel Klein, Juam Williams, Rick Ogston, School of One | 
Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
Virginia Governor Bob McDonald is holding a great education reform summit in Richmond Virginia. Last night featured a discussion between two current Republican governors (McDonnell and Bobby Jindal) and two former Democrat governors (Bob Wise of West Virginia and Doug Wilder of Virginia) with a great deal of consensus on a number of big issues.
My favorite part is that the Richmond Times Dispatch has upgraded me to a “former Florida official” from the reality of “former paper-boy and burger flipper in Nederland Texas.” I will happily take the promotion-I hope to get an induction ceremony involving warpaint and a flaming spear!
5 Comments | Uncategorized | Tagged: Bob Wise, Bobby Jindal, Doug Wilder, Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
I’m still thinking through the implications of this:
and
So Pop Quiz Hotshot! True or False?
1. Clayton Christensen’s “moment of clarity” when the public recognizes the technology based learning as superior is indeed in the pipeline.
2. This digital stuff is all over-hyped and will fade like previous education fads. Public school staffing will not be much different 20 years from now than it is today.
3. Most parents will desire to send their children to a physical school, but parental demand for the superior methods and the ability to earn college-level certificates will require a substantial update to the standard school model.
4. Fewer in-person staff will be required and their role will change to a “guide on the side” model focusing on applied learning, group projects and individualized coaching/instruction.
5. Universities that want people to pay for these services had better be able to demonstrate that they add value pronto because Massive Online Open Courses collect data on a rolling thunder basis. If institutions fail at adding value to MOOCs it will be known very quickly. Transparency comes to higher education at last in a form that few could have imagined a few years ago.
6. The “super universities” with huge endowments will use technology to substitute for the TAs they had been using to teach classes and will rejoice in their ability to ignore undergraduates to an even greater extent than in the past. Universities with weak cultures and which are heavily depedent on tuition to finance their operations will be in for a rough ride.
7. Hedge funds are dreaming up ways to invest in a long short of online for-profit online university stocks as you read this.
Please provide your answers/rationales in the comments.
9 Comments | Digital Learning | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
Watch this video from start to finish from Coursera co-founder Daphne Koller as in right now:
I’m calling it- I think that we’ve passed Clayton Christensen’s inflection point where the disruptive technology (online learning) is better than the dominant technology (traditional universities). The required mastery element that Koller describes in the video seals the deal by itself. I’m willing to bet that it is simply a matter of performing high quality evaluations and getting the results for documentation.
Second while most of the commentary on these developments naturally focuses on higher education, which is in for a major disruption, we need to start thinking about the implications of these developments for K-12. Coursera courses are available for free to anyone. K-12 students can take these courses, and other courses suited to various educational levels will certainly be developed.
What will schools look like in the future? I’m not sure but this is suddenly looking less like science fiction:
For a variety of reasons, I think that home-schooling will ultimately level off, albeit at a higher level than where it is today but well short of a dominant educational paradigm. Maybe at a much, much higher level depending upon how fast schools respond. The ability to collect credentials (which Koller mentions some higher education institutions already accepting for credit btw) seems likely to heavily nudge high-schools into allowing students to take Coursera/Udacity type courses.
Otherwise they seem likely to lose many students completely. Taking a high-school course in American government may be good, but successfully completing an American Government course from a Princeton or Stanford professor employing the techniques described by Koller above is going to be perceived as better- much, much better. Schools that want to keep their students are going to adapt to allow students to earn these credentials.
Savvy parents will lead the charge, but disadvantaged children potentially have the most to gain from these practices. Remember the problem Steven Brill put his finger on in Class Warfare in trying to scale up charter schools with a limited pool of TFA kids? Well, here you go-blended learning schools successfully substituting technology for labor will step into the breach. Big breakthoughs happen when what is suddenly possible meets what is desperately necessary, indeed.
Clayton Christensen and Michael Horn predicted half of all high-school classes would be taken online by 2019. It seemed like an incredibly bold prediction in 2008, but now an air of inevitability hangs around the substance of the prediction: online learning is taking off in a big way. Buckle your seat belts, this is going to be amazing.
11 Comments | Uncategorized | Tagged: clayton christensen, Coursera, Daphne Koller, Michael B. Horn, TED | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
Great article about John White’s plans for public forums to discuss Louisiana’s education reforms. In so doing, White is following in the footsteps of Indiana’s Tony Bennett, who faced the public and his critics in public forums repeatedly. Dr. Bennett let Indiana’s reform critics take their best shot at him over and over again, all the while explaining the rationale for the bold package of reforms.
After explaining his reasoning and providing his evidence, Dr. Bennett often said “This is what we believe and this is our plan. What do you believe and what is your plan?”
I don’t know whether Dr. Bennett changed the minds of the uber-reactionaries in his audiences or not, but he earned respect by giving his opponents the chance to take him on. This is the type of leadership the reform movement needs, and I commend John White for providing it in Louisiana. The Advocate seems to agree:
So we hope that White keeps up his efforts to communicate with the local systems that educate the vast majority of Louisiana students. The local boards may not become believers in the entire Jindal catechism, but the changes are coming — and those that can’t be avoided must be implemented with the interests of students in mind, once the political slogans have faded from the headlines.
2 Comments | Uncategorized | Tagged: John White, Tony Bennett | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
Today marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Milton Friedman. Thomas Sowell, a former student, has a column in the Investor’s Business Daily marking the event, as does Steven Moore in the WSJ.
I’ll never forget the single chance I had to meet the Friedmans. Dr. Friedman came to testify in favor of a school voucher bill in Austin in 2003. Out of respect to Dr. Friedman’s advanced age, the legislative committee allowed him to sit at the table with them.
The barriers to entry in the Texas legislature are fairly high, and some of the members are accomplished attorneys and businessmen-quite bright. Some members made the mistake of making ineffectual attempts to cross swords with the great man on the subject of vouchers, only to find themselves quickly dispatched. A large crowd of Hispanic parents cheered the aged intellectual gladiator on as he easily disposed of his foes.
A few years ago I had the chance to author a paper on Dr. Friedman’s influence on education policy, and then to attend a symposium with five other authors who focused on different policy areas. I did not fully appreciate Milton Friedman’s greatness until I participated in that symposium. Doug Bandow’s paper on Friedman’s role in ending the draft literally made me laugh out loud on my flight to San Fransisco.
Friedman was a determined opponent of the draft, and served on a commission appointed by President Nixon to study the transition to an all volunteer force. General Westmoreland took time out of his busy schedule of mishandling the war effort in Vietnam to vocally oppose an all-volunteer military. He made the mistake of asserting that he did not want to lead “an army of mercenaries” in a public forum. Dr. Friedman unloaded on him. Friedman described the scene in Two Lucky People:
In the course of his [General Westmoreland’s] testimony, he made the statement that he did not want to command an army of mercenaries. I [Milton Friedman] stopped him and said, ‘General, would you rather command an army of slaves?’ He drew himself up and said, ‘I don’t like to hear our patriotic draftees referred to as slaves.’
I replied, ‘I don’t like to hear our patriotic volunteers referred to as mercenaries.’ But I went on to say, ‘If they are mercenaries, then I, sir, am a mercenary professor, and you, sir, are a mercenary general; we are served by mercenary physicians, we use a mercenary lawyer, and we get our meat from a mercenary butcher.’ That was the last that we heard from the general about mercenaries.
Dr. Friedman showed us all how to go about our tasks-calm, rational and fearless devotion to logic and evidence. Happy Birthday Milton- we still need you, but will have to do our best on our own. We are in your debt.
10 Comments | tributes | Tagged: Milton Friedman | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
Some new interesting nuggets from the online learning revolution: Bill Bennett’s feature of Udacity’s Sebastian Thrun notes that when you rank the 20,000 + graduates of Thrun’s massive online open graduate seminar on artificial intelligence that the first in-person Stanford student ranked 411th. In addition, Thrun notes that he has 20 companies lined up to hire Udacity certificate holders.
Today comes word the UC Berkley will be joining forces with Harvard and MIT in the EdX project, and that:
Though it won’t offer college credits, the edX website is expected to give certificates to people who complete courses and to charge for some of those certificates in the future. Birgeneau said that some California community colleges later may use UC Berkeley’s edX courses as part of their regular campus classes that would earn students credits to transfer to a UC.
Higher education inches ever closer to disruption. Institutions must sort through security and other issues, but institutions will have to grant credit for high quality courses that address them. If they don’t, then the monopoly on credentialing people currently held by universities may crumble faster. The media is likely to focus on the chaos of it, but let’s not take our eyes off the ball: free university training holds the potential to provide opportunities for advancement for billions of people.
It’s difficult to wrap your head around the implications of all of this for higher education and, for that matter, K-12. My feeling is similar to that expressed after second 53 in this clip:
2 Comments | Digital Learning | Tagged: Bill Bennett, christopher andersen, edX, Online learning, Sebastian Thrun, UC Berkley | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
1 Comment | charter schools | Tagged: Mike Petrilli, suburban school choice | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
The Economist ran a fantastic article on charter schools recently, marred only by a bit by a bit of overconfidence from Mackie Raymond on charter school authorizing:
Credo thinks that the variation in quality can be traced to the governing legislation behind the schools. Margaret Raymond, director of Credo, points to Arizona’s terrible results in 2009, which were the result of lax screening of those who were allowed to set up charter schools, and no serious reviews thereafter. Ohio, where most charters are worse than the traditional schools, gained a reputation as the “Wild West” of charter schools because it exercised almost no oversight.
Credo did report finding lower rates of academic growth in Arizona charter schools, but also some bright spots. A previous analysis of growth by UCLA’s Lew Solomon found higher rates of academic growth, and an analysis more recent that either of these found similar rates of growth between charter and district schools. Moreover, Paul Peterson noted that the Credo study may have been unduly influenced by a large number of students spending their first year in a charter school, and charter schools that were in their first year of operation. Students take an academic hit during the period of acclimation to a new school, and schools are not generally at their best during their shakedown period.
No one has performed a random assignment study on charter schools in Arizona, but the random assignment studies that have been performed are quite positive for charter schools. The weight of the available evidence leads me to believe that the same would be true in Arizona. After all, if Arizona charter schools had persistently lower rates of academic growth, it would be hard to explain why general education low-income students consistently outperformed their district peers on all 5 2011 NAEP exams:
The desirability of very cautious authorizing discussed in The Economist has sadly become conventional wisdom. Personally, I am not a fan.
First, let’s recognize that the idea of hyper-cautious authorizing fits some states better than others. It’s always bad in my view, but it would have been flat-out insane in Arizona. Before the bust, the Arizona state government had been shelling out hundreds of millions of dollars per year to build new district schools to cope with enrollment growth. Those schools are **ahem** in the red columns in the above figure.
In the absence of the hundreds of charter schools that have opened in Arizona, without state facility funding mind you, since the charter school law passed in 1994, the financial burden on Arizona taxpayers to build new school space would have been even greater. No one in Arizona had a strong reason to be terrified by the possibility of ineffective charter schools opening when we were bearing a terrible financial burden to build lots of ineffective district schools.
Now obviously this is no justification to allow convicted felons or random ya-hoos who can’t put a credible business plan together the chance to open a charter school. Bad for kids, bad for taxpayers, no doubt. It is far from clear to me however that authorizing boards are especially adept at predicting in advance who will be a success, and who will fail. In fact, it seems likely to me that the elitist authorizing processes of some other states might have declined Rick Ogston the opportunity to open Carpe Diem.
Use this hat to improve your powers of prediction..
Rather than having well-meaning bureaucrats trying to do the impossible divine the future regarding who will succeed and fail- it is a better approach to have a relatively quick hook on the back-end. Despite Arizona’s reputation as the “Wild West” a large number of charter schools have closed over the years. I am hopeful that the A-F grading system will lead Arizona parents to close even more poorly performing charter schools, as decentralized solutions work best.
3 Comments | charter schools | Tagged: Arizona charter schools. Credo charter school study | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
I authored a column in response to anti-testing extremists in Florida. Here is a sample:
A recent problem with the FCAT writing test drew a great deal of attention from FCAT opponents. We should take care not to miss the forest for the trees. NAEP gave a writing exam in 1998 (just before Florida’s reforms) and again in 2007. Florida students achieved the largest gain of any state and more than three times larger than the national average during this period.
Sadly, leading the nation in writing gains on the highly respected NAEP exam seems to mean little to Florida’s testing opponents. One of the anti-testing groups seized upon the FCAT writing dispute to proclaim: “These abysmal FCAT Writes scores are proof that Tallahassee’s ‘education reforms’ are an unmitigated disaster.”
Against the highly credible NAEP score gains, testing opponents offer up a grab-bag of complaints and recently even a publicity stunt. A college-educated testing opponent recently claimed to have taken and failed a test similar to the 10th-grade FCAT. Whether this person actually took anything like the FCAT, or actually made any effort, is unknown but of little consequence. The vast majority of Florida 10th-graders did pass the FCAT on their first try last year.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan once stated that while everyone is entitled to their own opinion, no one is entitled to their own facts. Here are some facts: Since the advent of testing and reform, the nation’s most highly respected measure of academic achievement shows strong gains in Florida. Standardized test scores and graduation rates have both improved substantially since the late 1990s, which means Florida’s residents and students are getting more of what they want, need and deserve from the public education system today.
5 Comments | school accountability | Tagged: FCAT | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
Jay P. Greene's Blog 