Have You Heard About the Latest Thing in Education? Fads!

July 2, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

In a number of recent discussions, we’ve tangentially touched on the subject of educational fads: some new idea will quickly gather a huge following, tons of money will pour in to support it, and then a few years later everyone will forget about it – not because anyone actually bothered to measure whether the hot idea worked, but because a new fad will come along, and the cycle will start over. As a result, the demand for improvement that ought to be producing political capital for real reforms instead gets dissipated in the mad rush for fad after fad. Meanwhile, as educators see fads come and go, they become less receptive to all proposed ideas – even ideas that would accomplish real reform and/or have solid science showing they work. It seems to be pretty widely agreed upon that this has been one of the major problems in education over the past century.

I’m tempted to say that complaining about the problem of fads has become a hot fad among reformers. But fads are things that don’t last! Complaints about the fad problem, by contrast, are perennial. Recently I’ve noticed a couple more contributions to the genre: Roger Frank Bass of Carthage College provided a sharp-edged overview of the educational fad phenomenon in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Sunday. Meanwhile, last Monday America’s last education labor reporter noted the juxtoposition of two headlines – “The Next Big Thing: Small Schools” in Baltimore, and “Small School Experiment Doesn’t Live Up to Hopes” in Seattle. “Maybe they were just on the wrong coast,” quips Antonucci. (Come to think of it, I was shocked back in May to see Newsweek pimping small schools on the front cover – this, not months but years after the failure of the Gates Foundation’s extraordinary investment in small schools had become clear even to the Gates Foundation. There’s nothing sadder than people who desperately want to be cool but are always wearing last year’s outfit.)

What I don’t see very often, though, is reformers asking why we have this problem. There are no other socially urgent functions (from law and emergency services to the production and sale of consumer goods) that have remained basically unchanged and unimproved for a century because they’re crippled by an inability to 1) stick with one idea long enough to 2) objectively measure whether it works and 3) make a deliberate decision on whether to keep it. Only education spins its wheels this way; everywhere else in society, “fads” are either the province of children and adolescents (for whom they are probably beneficial, since they harmlessly dissipate dangerous youthful energies) or else are shunted off into the realm of “fashions,” which are not supposed to accomplish anything serious and thus do nobody any harm if they constantly change.

So what’s different about education? Well, if you’ve read your homework assignment, or if you’ve spent any time here on Jay P. Greene’s Blog (or “JPGB,” as all the kids are calling it when they text each other about it), you already know the answer: accountability for results. Educational decisionmaking exists in an “outcome vaccuum” to a greater extent than decisionmaking in just about any other field.

Of course the vast majority of people in the system are well-intentioned, but we all know where the road paved with good intentions leads. Flitting from one promising idea to the next promising idea is precisely the kind of thing well intentioned people can end up doing when they lack the disciplining force imposed by firm outcome-based incentives.

“Incentives again? What, are you proposing a unified field theorem of educational problems, where everything that’s wrong with our schools traces back to this single cause?” Well, maybe not – but if there’s an alternative explanation for the unique prevalence of the fad problem in education, I’d be open to hearing it.

2 Comments | instructional reform, politics | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Taking the Public out of Public Schools

July 1, 2008

One of the arguments regularly trotted out against school choice is that public schools, whatever their academic defects, are at least accountable to the public in what they teach and how they operate.  And while private schools may be accountable to the parents of students who attend, they are not broadly accountable to the public in what they teach and how they operate.  Vouchers are bad, the argument goes, because public money goes to schools that are not really accountable to the public.

In light of yesterday’s post on wide-spread non-compliance by Georgia public schools with the state’s social promotion law, people who like to make this argument might want to reconsider. 

In general, I am struck by how little public accountability there can be in public schools.  As mentioned yesterday and in past postings on this blog, getting public schools to implement policies that the public adopts, through their elected representatives, is an enormous challenge.  If public school officials or educators prefer not to implement a policy they have remarkable latitude not to do it or to do it in a way that severely undermines or negates the purpose of the policy. 

Monitoring what schools actually do is extremely difficult because what happens in schools and classrooms behind closed doors is rarely seen by anyone other than the staff and students.  And even when non-compliance is observed, imposing sanctions is next to impossible.  I’ll wager that no teacher, principal, or superintendent in Georgia will lose his or her job or suffer in any other way for disobeying the law that they retain certain students.

Even in the age of NCLB, with wide-spread testing, obtaining meaningful school data can be a nightmare.  If researchers want to assess school policies or approaches they need access to individual student test and demographic data stripped of identifying information.  Requests for individual student data (with no identifying information) are regularly rejected on the false grounds that student privacy prevents releasing those data.  If there is no identifying information, then there is no threat to student privacy.  States and districts should post identity-stripped individual student data on the web for anyone to analyze.  Instead, they require proposals, inquire about purposes, assess whether the research could be embarrassing, drag their feet, and regularly turn those proposals down.

I was once even refused aggregate data for schools in a district in Massachusetts.  They claimed that they would only release the average test scores for schools if I could prove that I was a resident of their district.  What if I wanted to move there?  Too bad.

On another occasion a school official in Arizona refused to provide information on how many student were enrolled in each grade broken out by race and ethnicity.  I just wanted a count of students.  When asked why he wouldn’t provide the data, the official said that it sounded like we were trying to estimate graduation rates and he wouldn’t help us do that because we might report grad rates that were different from those reported by the state.  He actually said that out loud.

If the public isn’t allowed to know information as basic as how many students are enrolled in school, how public are those schools really?  The Arizona official acted as if they were his schools, not public schools because he could decide whether to share information based on whether it would be flattering to him or not.  Really, it should be none of his business why I want public information.  They’re my schools, too.

4 Comments | politics | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Anti-Social Promotion

June 30, 2008

Georgia joined several other major school systems, including Florida, Texas, New York City, and Chicago, when its legislature mandated that student promotion to the next grade be linked to performance on standardized tests.  All failing students in certain grades must re-take the test, according to state law.  Students failing twice can be promoted anyway if the parents, principal, and teachers review the student’s other work and agree that promotion would be beneficial, but it is clear that this should be the exception, not the rule. 

But according to a report in yesterday’s Atlanta Journal Constitution, “school districts are promoting the vast majority of [failing] students anyway… In 2007, for instance, 92 percent of the nearly 9,500 eighth-graders who couldn’t pass the math CRCT were promoted.”    In Clayton County 97 percent of students who failed the re-test to get promoted or simply didn’t take the re-test were promoted to the next grade.  When asked about why these students were promoted, the District issued a statement that said, “the philosophy of prior administrators was to promote students who failed and provide them remediation.”

Oh.  I see.  The law says that students unable to pass the state’s test ought to be retained but Clayton County school officials had a different philosophy.  Their philosophy was that they don’t have to follow the law. 

Districts weren’t simply exploiting the loophole of promoting students by consent of parents, teachers, and principals.  Districts were directly violating the law by promoting students who did not even take the re-test, which is clearly mandated for all students before promotion by alternative means can be considered.  As the AJC writes, “About one in five students missed the retest after failing a high-stakes CRCT in 2006 and 2007.  Eighty percent were promoted anyway.”

Non-compliance by public school officials with legal mandates is an enormous obstacle to education reform.  Even if one thinks that this particular mandate on social promotion is mis-guided, the frequency with which school officials feel free to flout legally mandated attempts at reform undermines the potential for any reform strategy.

In an earlier study I led on NCLB’s choice provisions, I found that the requirement that chronically failing schools inform parents that they had the option to transfer to other schools was undermined by the failure of schools to inform parents of that option.  (The study was published in the Georgetown Journal of Law and Public Policy, but an earlier free version of it can be found here.)

Problems with implementation have also been central themes in the discussions on this blog on Response to Intervention, Reading First, more Reading First, and more Reading First. Until we develop the political will to actually enforce the reforms we do adopt, we shouldn’t expect much from them.

In addition, the evidence from Florida suggests that limiting social promotion by linking testing to retention is actually a very beneficial reform.  In a study I did with Marcus Winters that was published in Education Finance and Policy, we found that retained students significantly outperformed their comparable peers over the next two years.  In another study we published in the Economics of Education Review, we found that schools were not effective at identifying which students should be exempted from this test-based promotion policy and appeared to discriminate in applying these exemptions.  That is, white students were more likely to be exempted by school officials in Florida from being retained, but those students suffered academically by being exempted.

But the more important point is that each school district, school, or teacher cannot decide whether to comply with the law or not.  These are public schools and the public, through their elected representatives, is entitled to set policies that govern how those schools will operate.

11 Comments | social promotion | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Pass the Popcorn: Pixar as Art and Commerce

June 27, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

With Wall-E conquoring the movie universe today, how could we do anything else for this week’s Pass the Popcorn but a retrospective on Pixar?

Yet how much is there left to say, really? A retrospective of Pixar along the lines of the previous retrospectives I’ve done here would read like this: they made a really amazing movie, then they made another one, then they made another one . . .

I could tell you all about how great Toy Story and Finding Nemo are. But you already know. So I’ll skip the movie-by-movie retrospective and just look around for things to say about Pixar that everybody doesn’t already know.

“Hey, Marlin! Didja know Pixar made a whole bunch of really great movies?”

“Yes, Dory, I knew.”

“Oh. Okay, then. . . . Hey, Marlin! Didja know Pixar made a whole bunch of really great movies?”

If I shared the view that Pixar’s more recent offerings (Cars, Ratatouille) represent a step down from its earlier accomplishments, I might write my third consecutive retrospective of a great filmmaker who succeeds both artistically and commercially, then lets fame go to his head and produces substandard work. However, I don’t think Pixar’s quality has declined. Yes, Cars is not Toy Story. But you know what? A Bug’s Life ain’t Toy Story either. Between the two, I’m not sure which I’d take – they’re both quite good for what they are, definitely well above the average “family movie” (not that that’s saying much), but they’re not great filmmaking. Same goes for Monsters Inc.

Believe it or not, this was a Pixar movie. Remember?

And I don’t care what anybody else thinks, I think Ratatouille is a very impressive accomplishment. It not only has sharp dialogue (consider, for example, the duel of wits between Linguini and Anton Ego in the press conference scene) and great humor (in its context, the moment where Ego is transported back to childhood by his first bite of Remy’s ratatouille is every bit as funny as the “I am your father” line in Toy Story 2), but also philosophical depth (the whole movie is basically Plato’s Ion in cartoon form, with cooking as a proxy for art and creativity generally – as Ego’s climactic monologue makes clear).

“Not by craft does the poet sing, but by power divine.”

So Pixar movies have always ranged from good family movies (A Bug’s Life, Monsters Inc., Cars) to exceptionally good family movies (The Incredibles, Ratatouille) to landmark artistic achievements (Toy Story, Toy Story 2, Finding Nemo).

But other things about Pixar have changed over time. It’s hard to remember this now, but there was a time when the name “Pixar” primarily meant “digital animation.” Of course everyone acknowledged that Toy Story was also a great story, and would have been noteworthy even without the technological breakthrough. But it was the digital filmmaking technology everybody really noticed when Toy Story hit the theaters.

Once upon a time, this wasn’t the adventures of good old Woody and Buzz. It was a revolutionary breakthrough in digital filmmaking that was going to change the role of technology in movies – which happened to come in the form of a story about a bunch of toys.

Of course, today nobody cares about Pixar as a technological innovator – and that fact is as great a testament as anything to its accomplishments as a producer of art. “Pixar” now just means “great movies.”

Pixar as fine art (at MOMA; HT www.rationalistic.com)

And, technology aside, Pixar’s accomplishments are breathtaking not only as art but also as commerce – in fact, I think what’s really most noteworthy about Pixar is that it appears to have developed a working business model for consistently producing good-to-great movies.

The idea of a business model for producing good art will strike some as misguided or even offensive, but it is really nothing more than the reappearance of what was the normal mode of producing art in almost all times and places. All great art before the advent of Rousseau’s philosophy – from Aeschylus and Euripides to Dante and Hieronymus Bosch to Shakespeare and Rembrandt – was produced in the context of a economic system designed to systematize financial support for artists (in the form of community festivals, household patronage, guilds, etc.) who were in turn expected to produce good work in response to something approximating market demand. The supposed antinomy between art and commerce is a prejudice of our own time. As C.S. Lewis once remarked, before the Romantic movement with its idolization of the artist and the creative process, the idea that artists should not be expected to produce good work “to order” would have been considered as absurd as the idea of a captain who could only steer the ship when the fit took him. Socrates’ remarks to Ion notwithstanding, in addition to divine power there is indeed a “craft” to the production of good art, and the divine power responds to the craft as much as the craft responds to the divine power.

Their greatest challenge: Reconcile art and commerce!

By now everyone knows the formula: Pixar collects a small stable of very talented filmmakers and gives them a long production cycle (four to five years for each project) during which they work collaboratively, each member of the team contributing actively to the other members’ projects. Everyone draws on everyone else’s talent and ideas, and the long cycle ensures that nothing has to go out the door before it’s ready.

Presumably it’s the presence of so many great artists in such a collegial and collaborative atmosphere that explains the remarkable phenomenon of Pixar shorts – the company has taken a defunct genre, the animated short, and produced enough great work in it to support a separate release on its own DVD even though they’re all already out there as bonus features on the DVDs of Pixar movies (which everybody who bought the shorts DVD probably already owns). The short Knick Knack was by itself worth the price of admission to Finding Nemo. No doubt what we’re seeing is the ideas generated during artistic bull sessions at Pixar that couldn’t support a full-length movie, but were too good to throw away.

If you look at him and say, “Hey, that’s the guy who cleaned and fixed Woody in Toy Story 2!” you’re missing some of Pixar’s best work.

The Pixar formula looks very much like art-colony stuff, which is not what people expect from an intersection of art and commerce. But my point is that the Pixar formula is a formula – Pixar didn’t happen by accident, and it didn’t happen without investors who evaluated the business plan and judged (correctly, as it turns out) that the Pixar formula would produce reliable returns in the form of consistently good movies. In other words, while all the non-commercialized, anti-commercial art colonies seem to have stopped producing art worth seeing, in this case commerce produced an art colony that works. And it’s not fundamentally all that different from the household patronage system of Renaissance Italy, with Steve Jobs standing in for Lorenzo de’ Medici; capitalism just allows the patrons to draw resources from a broader base.

There’s no reason the Pixar model couldn’t be reproduced by other movie companies, by TV production houses, by music labels, etc. Even “high” art, for which there is a much more limited audience, could be produced this way. You would just have to finance it through contributions from, and sales to, the wealthy (and, presumably, through government subsidies) rather than by selling stock – which is pretty much how high art is financed now.

Of course, it takes a certain kind of person to create and sustain a collegial atmosphere among a bunch of top-flight artists – a class of personality not known for playing well with others. This is John Lasseter’s most important accomplishment, and recognizing the value of what Lasseter was doing is Steve Jobs’s most important accomplishment (at Pixar, anyway). For this, Lasseter can be forgiven even the egomaniacal introductory sgements he plastered onto the American DVD releases of the works of Hayao Miyazaki – but that’s a rant I’d better stop before it starts.

There are other Steve Jobses out there in the entertainment industry. There’s no reason they can’t find other John Lasseters and hire them to create new Pixars.

Pixar has a “formula” on the creative side as well as on the institutional side. Around the time of Toy Story 2 or so, I remember Jay remarking that Pixar movies succeed because all of them are about something, and specifically they’re about something that kids understand and adults still care about. In the early movies this was always pretty clear – Toy Story is about the anxiety of being replaced (Buzz is to Woody as a newborn baby is to the older sibling), A Bug’s Life is about standing up to bullies, Toy Story 2 is about death. In some of the later movies the subject isn’t as clear – you can make out a case that Monsters Inc. is about fear of the unknown, but you have to stretch a lot further. Nonetheless, the formula is still there for the most part, and it’s still pretty clear in most of the movies.

How will Wall-E fit in? The director (Andrew Stanton, he of Finding Nemo) has confirmed what seemed likely from the previews – namely that the movie has an environmental theme. That would of course be a disaster, since the last thing Pixar needs is to start making preachy movies. But Stanton swears the movie isn’t preachy. And I’ve long since given up judging Pixar movies by the previews, which always seem to promise disappointment, and thankfully have always proven wrong. The previews for Finding Nemo struck me as awful.

So I guess I’ll see you all at the theater tonight, and we’ll all find out together.

4 Comments | Pass the Popcorn | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

On Immigration and the Catwalk

June 27, 2008

(Guest post by Jonathan Butcher)

George Will had an incisive oped yesterday on immigration issues in the U.S.  Not the issue of whether or not to build a giant wall from L.A. to Houston, but an actual immigration policy that is being enforced and routinely wedges our collective finger up our collective nose: kicking well-educated international students out of the country once they have their advanced degrees.

Our elected officials have thought it prudent to restrict the residency of international students who study in the States so that the students can only reside long enough to earn a diploma.  To stay longer and get a visa they would have to get a job, but to get a job they have to have a visa first.  And if they ask not to fly more missions they can’t be crazy and so will have to fly more missions but if they don’t ask they will still have to fly more missions and…ad infinitum.

After being trained at American colleges and universities, often subsidized by taxpayers, we make them leave.  Clearly residency is a touchy concept to policymakers.  If you sneak into America, you can get a job and stay until Congress decides on a way to a) find you and make you leave, b) give up and let you stay or c) move everybody north and take over Canada.  

Will makes the following observation about what this policy accomplishes: “Suppose a foreign government had a policy of sending workers to America to be trained in a sophisticated and highly remunerative skill at American taxpayers’ expense, and then forced these workers to go home and compete against American companies. That is what we are doing…”  This sounds to me like we are committing an act of corporate warfare upon ourselves.  Wouldn’t be the first time we’ve done something like this: 25 years ago in A Nation at Risk the authors wrote, “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”

So to review: 25 years ago America was committing an act of war on itself by imposing mediocre performance on our students, and since national math and reading scores have held pretty much the same since, we decided to up the ante on future generations and engage in corporate warfare with ourselves by sending well-educated international students who came to the U.S. to study—whose educations taxpayers subsidize—somewhere else to be snatched up by companies competing with American businesses.  This residency issue is case-in-point why we shouldn’t trust the government with anything important, like running the country.  

I’ll admit there is actually an ingenious plan being proposed by Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) to remedy the situation.  Earlier this month he introduced a bill that would allow more runway models (1,000, to be exact) into the country.  I am not making this up.  While this may spell trouble for congressmen who vote for the bill and their wives (yet spell opportunity for Weiner, a bachelor), it will actually free up 1,000 spots for technical workers to get visas.  A bill that would bring more beautiful women and international computer geniuses into the country all at once?  I take back my statement about not trusting the government to run the country.

 

 

Leave a Comment » | higher education | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by JButcher

What Are They Smoking?

June 27, 2008

On July 1 the University of Arkansas will become one of the first major universities to ban the use of all tobacco products on campus property.  This is not a smoking ban, it is a ban on all tobacco, including chewing tobacco.  And this is not just a ban on smoking inside buildings or within 25 feet of entrance-ways, which is already prohibited, it is a ban on using tobacco anywhere on campus by anyone.

The University has not specified the exact reason for the ban, but it cannot be to prevent second-hand smoking problems.  By including chewing tobacco, from which there can be no second-hand harm, it is clear that the motivation for the ban is to benefit the health of the users of tobacco themselves by pushing them to quit.

Forcing students, staff, and visitors to our campus to improve their health seems beyond the reasonable authority of the University.  What’s next?  How about banning people from bringing fast food on campus?  How about intentionally scheduling classes on opposite sides of campus to force people to walk more?

I see no problem with the University banning smoking inside or near buildings that may harm or seriously bother others.  And I see no problem with educating students and staff about the health hazards of smoking.  But the University also has a responsibility to respect and instill within students an appreciation for liberty.  To do that they have to allow people to make life choices for themselves, especially when those choices pose no direct harm to others.

There is a University web forum in which these issues have started to be discussed.

On July 1 it will be the University of Arkansas, but soon it may be at a campus near you.  As the University press release says, “people from several colleges across the nation have called university officials to get information about how they might create a similar policy on their campuses, and to find out what kinds of issues could arise when making this kind of policy decision.”

6 Comments | higher education, politics | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

DFP to Michigan: Where is the Outrage?

June 26, 2008

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Detroit Free Press Columnist Rochelle Riley is as mad as hell, and she’s not going to take it anymore regarding the Detroit Public Schools. Money quote:

My question — where is the outrage? — wasn’t meant to ask literally why people aren’t outraged, dear readers. It was meant to spur outrage. It was meant to say: Get up! Stand up! These are children, for God’s sake! How can anyone who is an advocate for children in Michigan just watch? If these children were puppies, there would be lines of cars and trucks from across the state to take them to safety.

10 Comments | journalism | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

How Well Aligned Is Kazakhstan to NAEP Standards?

June 25, 2008

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Recently I appeared on the Horizon public affairs program together with Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne, to discuss the No Child Left Behind law and our state AIMS test. Superintendent Horne and I have a public disagreement about the relative reliability of NAEP compared to that of the state’s own version of the Terra Nova exam. NAEP finds Arizona consistently below the national average in all subjects and grade levels, while the state’s Terra Nova finds us above the national average in all subjects tested and grade levels. One of these sets of finds is much more consistent with the socio-economic profile of the K-12 population than the other, given that Arizona ranked second to the bottom on Jay and Greg’s Teachability Index study.

During the discussion, Superintendent Horne said the main reason Arizona students perform poorly on the national NAEP test, also known as the Nation’s Report Card, is due to a non-alignment of standards. If, for example, Arizona does not teach the math concepts in fourth grade that appear on the fourth grade math NAEP, one could expect lower average grades.

The explanation seems quite plausible, and doubtlessly there are some states that have better aligned their standards to NAEP than others. But how big a deal is this, in terms of Arizona’s performance? A study by the American Institute of Research shows probably not much.

The study compared international science scores for eighth graders to eighth grade NAEP science scores through an equating proceedure. Singapore came in first, with 55 percent of students ranked as “proficient” or above. Massachusetts was the highest-performing U.S. state, with 41 percent proficient. Just 20 percent of Arizona eighth grades ranked proficient.

Alignment error ought to be much greater between nations than between American states. Perhaps, for example, Norway chooses not to teach science until 9th grade. One would be hard pressed to buy into the notion that countries such as Singapore, Korea, Estonia, Hungary, and Slovakia simply have national standards more closely aligned to the American NAEP test than Arizona.

When we get clobbered in science proficiency by countries like Estonia, we have problems that go much deeper than standards alignment. I could start looking up GDP per capita in Estonia, but that would be cruel. We need to be willing to think outside the box and figure out what other countries are doing right.

Nation (or State) 8th Grade Science Scores

Percent Scoring “Proficient” or Above

Nation (or State) 8th Grade Science Scores

Percent Scoring “Proficient” or Above

Singapore

55

Lithuania

25

Taipei

52

Slovenia

24

South Korea

45

Russia

24

Hong Kong

44

Scotland

24

Japan

42

Belgium

22

Estonia

41

Latvia

21

Massachusetts

41

Malaysia

20

England

38

Arizona

20

Hungary

38

Israel

18

Netherlands

31

Bulgaria

17

Australia

30

Italy

17

Sweden

28

Norway

15

New Zealand

26

Romania

14

Slovakia

26

Serbia

12

1 Comment | instructional reform, NCLB | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Weekend PJM Column

June 25, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

I was out of town earlier this week and didn’t get a chance to post a link to my Pajamas Media column on the D.C. voucher evaluation, which ran over the weekend. It’s here.

Leave a Comment » | research reports, vouchers | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Baked Alaska

June 25, 2008

I just returned from vacation in sunny Alaska to see how well the blog has been doing in my absence.  Thanks to Jonathan Butcher for being my substitute blogger and to Greg Forster and Matthew Ladner for keeping everything running smoothly.  Thanks also to Reid Lyon, Dan Lips, and Larry Bernstein for their guest posts.  Looks like I missed a lot of interesting discussions.

The most striking thing about Alaska, other than the amazing natural beauty, is how remote living there must be.  The state capital, Juneau, can only be reached by boat or plane.  There are communities sprinkled throughout the state whose link to the outside world is regularly cut by snow, rain, fog, rock-slides, or high winds. 

I kept wondering, how in the world do they offer kids in all of these communities a public education?  By necessity, they don’t restrict their vision of public schools to students riding in yellow school buses to government built and operated school buildings.  In Alaska a significant portion of public education is provided by distance learning technology, just as Matt Ladner has suggested in his post The Shape of Things to Come. 

The Alyeska Central School is a statewide virtual school than began operating in 1939, when distance learning technology was the mail service.  Until recently it was run by the state department of education but has recently shifted to being a charter school.  In addition, about one-fifth of the districts offer their own distance-learning programs.  In total, more than 10,000 students out of a public school enrollment of 133,000 receive their public education in their own homes via distance education technology. Many more are home-schooled with the assistance of distance learning technology but are not enrolled as public school students.  Another 4,800 students are enrolled in charter schools, many of which rely heavily on distance learning.  In total, well more than 10% of all students in Alaska are educated in their own homes with distance learning.

It’s hard to judge the quality of these distance learning programs without a carefully designed evaluation, but it is clear that distance learning makes it possible to offer public education to all Alaskan children at a reasonable cost.  Keep in mind that almost everything has to be brought into Alaska since they grow almost no crop, have virtually no farm animals, and manufacture very little.  The cost of shipping in difficult to reach environments has to be factored into almost everything.  Their schools are more expensive to build, their teachers and staff have to be (and in fact are) paid more given the higher cost of living, and transportation of students is much more expensive. 

Distance learning certainly helps Alaska control costs.  With distance learning there is less need to build schools, lower cost for transportation, and the pupil-teacher ratios can be much higher.  In the Alyeska Central School the ratio is 50 students for each teacher.

To be sure, distance learning isn’t for everybody, but if states want to offer make courses available to more students at lower costs, they should pursue distance learning.  The student living in Manhattan or suburban Chicago may not be as remote as those in Haines, Alaska, but both may benefit from options other than taking a yellow bus to a brick and mortar school.

Leave a Comment » | instructional reform | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

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