This latest education piece from The Economist uses world learning performance improvements as a basis for evaluating state reforms to education.  Decentralization seems, to the author, to be a significant factor in some recent success stories (Ontario, Poland, Saxony).  Whether decentralization is the answer for every state, and for the United States in particular, remains an open question.

The Economist / 17 September 2011 (from the print edition)

FROM Toronto to Wroclaw, London to Rome, pupils and teachers have been returning to the classroom after their summer break. But this September schools themselves are caught up in a global battle of ideas. In many countries education is at the forefront of political debate, and reformers desperate to improve their national performance are drawing examples of good practice from all over the world.

Why now? One answer is the sheer amount of data available on performance, not just within countries but between them. In 2000 the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) at the OECD, a rich-country club, began tracking academic attainment by the age of 15 in 32 countries. Many were shocked by where they came in the rankings. (PISA’s latest figures appear in table 1.) Other outfits, too, have been measuring how good or bad schools are. McKinsey, a consultancy, has monitored which education systems have improved most in recent years.

To read more…

Image Source: article

Mark Richtel’s NYT piece is critical of what he believes is a lack of the proof behind the hype of learning technologies.  It’s been called “well reported” by EdSurge insiders.

Insider Tom Vander Ark levies thoughtful criticism, however, in “Richtel’s Rear View Mirror Missed the Mark” — focusing on the inevitability of a digital world, the expanded access to learning materials, and the potential for getting the right teachers to students even as ratios can go up.  See also Bror Saxberg’s (Chief Learning Officer at Kaplan) response, which I applaud for this statement:

The problem is that, at scale, our educational systems is still mostly not getting it the right way around [...] We’re not thinking about how to improve learning based on what’s known about learning, and then applying technology to make it faster, cheaper, easier, and data-rich.  Instead, as described in the article, we tend to buy first, and wonder why no change in results. [...] The key is not to just add screens and silicon and hope for the best. We have to do (and expand) the hard work of understanding what activities by a mind with a particular background optimize its learning. From this we can see how to apply technology to take a better method and make it simpler, cheaper, easier to access, more reliable, data-rich.

In Classroom of Future, Stagnant Scores

by Mark Richtel / New York Times / 3 September 2011

CHANDLER, Ariz. — Amy Furman, a seventh-grade English teacher here, roams among 31 students sitting at their desks or in clumps on the floor. They’re studying Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” — but not in any traditional way.

In this technology-centric classroom, students are bent over laptops, some blogging or building Facebook pages from the perspective of Shakespeare’s characters. One student compiles a song list from the Internet, picking a tune by the rapper Kanye West to express the emotions of Shakespeare’s lovelorn Silvius.

The class, and the Kyrene School District as a whole, offer what some see as a utopian vision of education’s future. Classrooms are decked out with laptops, big interactive screens and software that drills students on every basic subject. Under a ballot initiative approved in 2005, the district has invested roughly $33 million in such technologies.

To read more…

Other Responses to Richtel:

Cathy Davidson

Katrina Stevens

Image Source: article (photographer: Jim Wilson)

Suggesting the continuing value of cursive as an expressive form, Kanye West raps in his and Jay-Z’s recent megahit “Otis”:

I made “Jesus Walks” I’m never going to hell
Couture level flow, it’s never going on sale
Luxury rap, the Hermes of verses
Sophisticated ignorance, write my curses in cursive

For West cursive’s value is rareified, couture (its high-end associations having to do perhaps with designer graphics that have popularized hand lettering of late)–rather than its practical purpose or popular use.  Whether any value for cursive will persist with future generations is far from certain.  In this piece exploring the loss of cursive, Beck usefully surveys the spectrum of present concern over the “fall of cursive” in favor of keyboarding and places the debate within its historical context.

Writing on the Wall

by Graham T. Beck / The Morning News /September 2011

Don’t be fooled by the hand-lettering trend in movie posters and book covers—cursive is dead. Who cares? A million angry commenters around the web who extol the virtues of loops and curls. But the traditional form has a history that’s less than precious.

Third grade was the year cursive didn’t matter. That’s not to say it definitely matters now, or that it didn’t actually matter then, but that’s what I most vividly remember repeating for the nine months that school was in session: “Cursive doesn’t matter.” It was my name, rank, and serial number. Handwriting was my enemy. Those who championed its cause: my captors. “Cursive doesn’t matter,” I’d tell them. “It can’t matter,” I’d say to myself. It couldn’t.

No matter how hard I tried, I was incapable of making my hand shape those precious loops.  [...] Forty-four states¾most recently Hawaii (Aloha) and Indiana (Go Hoosiers!)—have tacitly affirmed what I insisted all those years ago, with their adoption of an education platform called the Common Core State Standards, which replaces decades-old handwriting requirements with a “keyboarding” mandate.

To read more…

Image Source:  article (Katie Turner Illustration)