Education, Economics, and the American Dream

From: detroit.cbslocal.com

Education like so many other things, is evolving and so it seems is the American Dream. This past weekend, both were featured in opinion pieces in The Wall Street Journal - and together prompted my addled brain to come up with this post.

The American Dream was discussed by Peggy Noonan (more below) as she related it to Dan Balz's book Collision 2012 about the thinking processes behind the 2012 campaigns. There was also the Weekend Interview with Ben Nelson, founder of the Minerva Project "e-lite" college.  Minerva hopes to give Harvard a run for its money - literally and morph the "college experience" into the 21st century. The Minerva Project describes itself as "a reinvented university experience for the brightest, most motivated students in the world" with the hope of their first class entering in 2015.

Nelson's Minerva seems to encompass both the subtle and not-so-sublte changes in education and of the American Dream (for better and worse). So let's first take a quick look at Minerva, before looking at the more general trends in education and the changing American Dream. 

Courtesy: Ken Fallin, Wall Street Journal

First, under the Minerva Project:

• There will still be majors and semesters, and admissions requirements will be "extraordinarily high;"
• The college 'experience' will be abridged to six semesters;
• Residences and classrooms will be "high-tech;"
• To reduce costs (estimated at $20.000/year versus Harvard's $50,000+/year) there will be no campus, no student center, no sports center or sports programs.  Students will live and learn in a residence hall in selected cities (San Francisco the first year, with successive years - hopefully- in San Paulo, London and/or Singapore "details to come"). Students can borrow books from the city's public library and can mingle at local coffee shops.
• To reduce the experience to three years (further reducing costs), there will be no introductory courses. Students will be responsible for taking them as AP's in high school or through MOOCS (Massive Open Online Courses) on the Web;
• As noted in the Wall Street Journal Interview, "all incoming students take the same four yearlong courses. His common core wont' make students read the Great Books. "We want to teach  you how to think," Mr. Nelson says. A course on "ultimodal communications" woks on practical writing and debating skills. A "formal systems class" goes over "everything from logic to advanced stats, Big Data, to formal reasoning, to behavioral econ."

Minerva, however, is still in the planning stages, and while I am glad my kids took the more traditional college route (see below), Nelson and his colleagues give us food for thought.

Below I link Minerva and it's approach to life and education with Noonan's changing American Dream, but first let's look at ...

From: interacc.typepad.com

How your kids' classrooms might  be changing this school year:

• Students have a choice of traditional and/or on-line classrooms. Many public schools, for example, to help meet student needs are offering the K12 online teaching program in conjunction with their own classes or instead of them.  This arrangement has lowered their overhead costs.
•  MOOCS are making a college education more accessible to students.
• New Common Core State Standards hope to raise educational - standards -  focusing a lot more on kids' critical thinking and general knowledge while raising test scores and our schools' and students' international rankings. While their classroom applications are controversial in some cities and states, they are being implemented either this year or next year in schools across the country. Some changes:



From: syracuse.com

• Teachers across content areas and grades must integrate multi-media, multiple-literacy content  - incorporating fiction and non-fiction, poetry, prose, digital and graphic texts throughout content areas in an effort to make learning more accessible to all kinds of learners as well as more meaningful.
• So, you'll be seeing more non-fiction reading; more diverse reading; more high tech in the classrooms; diverse student projects.

Feel free to share new changes you and your kids will be having this year in the comments below.

Now let's move to the American Dream.  But before you look at what Peggy Noonan writes and thinks, take a second, pause...what is the American Dream to you?


The American Dream?

Courtesy: Martin Kozlowski and the WSJ

Peggy Noonan (8/10-11/13) discusses Dan Balz's Collision 2012" a book chronicling the thought processes and research done for the 2012 campaign. At one point she relates findings from the Obama 2012 focus groups:

"...in which members, according to an aide, "shared a strong sense that America was changing in a way that was out of their control." They felt the old rules of the economy no longer applied. They didn't know how to get ahead anymore, and they feared sliding behind.

"...There is pervasive confusion about what the American dream is. We seem to have redefined it to mean the acquisition of material things—a car, a house and a pool. That was not the meaning of the American dream a few generations ago. The definition then was that in this [was] a wonderful place...  you can start out from nothing and become anything. It was aspirational...

"...When we turned the American dream into a dream about materialism, we disheartened our young, who now are forced to achieve what we've defined as success in a straitened economy."

The intersection of Education and the American Dream:
 
In my opinion, this 'modern' version of the American Dream is influencing where we're taking education, and I think the Minerva Project is one example.  To help young adults and their parents, many advocate cutting the classics -who needs them. They believe our kids need jobs so why waste a year or even a course choice? Why have student centers, sports complexes and programs? Just teach them what they need and let them go out and fly.

This perspective saddens me from three perspectives. 

1. Childhood is too short, so why are we trying to shorten if further (IF we can financially avoid it)? Why shouldn't there be sports, and a social center - where kids of all different backgrounds, cultures, shapes and sizes can meet and explore their expanding (and contracting) worlds. Also, I like the option of choosing from a list of courses and not having all coursed within 'higher education' dictated by a committee. Adulthood is all about making choices and college course options provides an important hands-on experience with all sorts of choices.
2. While teaching "practical writing" and "debating skills" is critically important to all adults, the option of  a more liberal arts approach offers our young adults an opportunity to grow and explore beyond their expectations.  Who knows where they'll end up in 10, 20, 30 years. They may need to change careers, goals and expectations and providing them with a broad knowledge base and extensive skill set empowers them with options for more flexible life choices.
3. Nelson fails to understand the role studying "The Classics" or Great Books plays. He is, in a sense, setting up an "e-lite" vocational experience. We study "Classics" not to "teach us how to think." That should be done in every course kids take from Kindergarten on up (granted on different developmental levels). We study classics, like The Federalist Papers, to better understand where we've come from -  and what the underlying and founding thoughts, expectations, and cultural dreams were in past cultures and societies - as we continue to shape our culture and communities as we move forward.  The Classics are the roots of our cultural thought and history, and we need to understand them as we hope to grow.  Not everyone, however, needs or wants this. And that's the good news.  But, don't compare Minerva to the Columbias and Universities of Chicago.  They are more like the Wharton BA programs, tech and vocational schools.

Personally, I worry about the more subtle trends I see in higher education as we move more towards vocational education and away from the classic 'higher' education. The good news is we need both, because not everyone needs to study classics and not everyone needs or wants to just focus on vocational training. I just hope these two approaches can live cooperatively together where one offers options the other does not - that instead of competing with each other they offer the opportunity of CHOICE. We need both.

From: CartoonStock.com

What do you think?

Please let us know what the American Dream is to you and what you think of some of the changes I've discussed above in the comments.

Thank you as always for your visit.

R is for "Remodeling" and for "Rethinking Education"

I tend to like change... when it's on my terms (which is not always easy to navigate).  I like shaking things up just a bit as I get bored of the same routine easily.  Hence the changes you see here.

From: remodel.net

I wanted to remodel this blog for some time and, while I had hoped for more significant changes, I could not figure out (yet) how to do what I wanted and so have resolved to keep the change cosmetic (at least for now).

That said, I think remodeling is important.  After all, it's about 'improvement' (or the hope of improvement). It feeds creativity and helps us see our worlds differently.  It adds perspective.  It also, in some way teaches us  how to negotiate change.

With my personal remodeling out of the way, I came across an article about a more drastic remodeling - in The Wall Street Journal's Review section (Saturday/Sunday, November 12-13, 2011) "My Teacher is an App:  More kids than ever before are attending school from their living rooms, bedrooms and kitchens. The result: A radical rethinking of how education works" (by S. Banchero & S. Simon).

According to Banchero and Simon:

From: unplggd.com

"In a radical rethinking of what it means to go to school, states and districts nationwide are launching online public schools that let students from kindergarten to 12th grade take some or all of their classes [online]... Thirty states now let students take all of their courses online...

Advocates say that online schooling can save states money, offer curricula customized to each student and give parents more choice in education. A few states, however, have found that students enrolled full-time in virtual schools score significantly lower on standardized tests, and make less academic progress from year to year than their peers. Critics worry that kids in online classes don't learn how to get along with others or participate in group discussions.

The amount of teacher interaction varies.  At online-only schools, instructors answer questions by email, phone or the occasional video conference...Teachers give short lectures and offer one-on-one help, but most learning is self-directed and online."

From: gadgetrivia.com

Note that the authors reported primarily about two companies, K12 and Connections Academy which currently dominate the public cyberschool market. They note that some schools offer part classroom-part cyberschool options as well, although the article focuses on cyberschool alone. They further detail that while reading scores of online students match traditionally taught peer scores in reading, they fall short in math and writing.

I was disappointed that this 'radical rethinking' of education merely addressed funding and and did not adequately discuss education per se. And, while not to diminish the importance of financial issues, I believe there are larger concerns such as providing meaningful and effective education for all. Making learning meaningful requires a personal element, as does addressing diverse student needs and skills.  


Furthermore (from what I understood from the article), it is the delivery that has changed but not the content, the curriculum, the goals or the philosophy.  As our culture and times change, so too must education.  And, meeting and addressing diverse student needs should not only deal with allowing vertical movement in reading and math levels  - it must address learning skills (such as attention, memory, visual and verbal literacy, sequencing skills, critical thinking) while incorporating various learning profiles and affinities of diverse student bodies and cultures.

Radical rethinking of education should address issues of our multi-media world and promote classrooms that:

From: martyrobertsblog.com

• Incorporate real life issues (making the curriculum meaningful) - this demands knowing your students and tweaking discussions and projects to embrace their affinities, diverse skills, and cultures.
• Demand original critical thinking - also requiring a personal touch - one where teachers help push comparisons, expose gaps in reasoning, and encourage creative perspectives.
• Present materials via multi-modal methods involving visual and verbal literacies - so that various student strengths and weaknesses are met in lessons.
• Focus on writing and communication skills through essays, letters, poetry, creative writing, critical analyses involving peer and educator feedback.
• Motivates students - with online courses motivation must come from the students.  The programs rarely inject enthusiasm.  And, while many classrooms also fail to inject enthusiasm,  dynamic teacher - class discussions frequently spark the'fire'.
• We must stop teaching to the 'average' student.  Who is that student, anyway?  Educators must push students to reach lofty goals, and goals must vary according to skills and affinities.  Sometimes this means smaller homogeneous groups (when teaching specific content that is dependent on previous knowledge and abilities), and sometimes larger heterogeneous groups (when discussing broad issues where divergent opinions help develop critical thinking). 

The critics' worries that "kids in online classes don't learn how to get along with others" - is a bogus criticism (especially when there are so many better ones).  Having worked as a teacher and a consultant in private and city schools, I know that there are many students attending traditional classrooms who do not get along well with others.  The reverse is also true - most homeschooled students do not have social issues. I taught a summer course for Johns Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth summer program, and before the course began I was informed that I had a homeschooled student in my class and I should look out for social issues that may arise. That homeschooled student turned out to be one of the best socially adjusted students in my class - a true leader socially and academically, and was one of the most popular kids on campus.  

Sitting in a classroom with other students does require greater social skills, but that does not mean these skills aren't also learned through church groups, sports teams, book clubs (to name a few) that require both working and at times competing with others. These options can provide similar 'socialization' process that classrooms serve.

From: sghealthyliving.wordpress.com

While I am not familiar with K12 or Connections Academy, I do teach a critical reading course for Johns Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth Online Division (for 4th-6th graders).  I have 8-12 students per ten-week session.  There is a set curriculum requiring students read three books and respond weekly with a creative writing piece and two discussion essays related to that week's reading.  I give detailed feedback of their writing mechanics, critical thinking and creative content, and am available via email or phone.This is a program that is both in schools and available on an individual basis.  


There are good online learning programs.  The trick is finding them and, at this point, integrating them with other forms of learning.  Teacher input and feedback must be personal.  Like all other educational programs and fads, it must be balanced.

What do you think?  Especially my homeschooling followers/readers. I'd love to hear from you. 


[And please comment on my 'remodeling' along with suggestions if you have any.]

The World's Gone Graphic! Gaining a Graphic IQ

 I realize that while my world of novels and books will always be there to entertain and enlighten, we are on riding the wave of a graphic revolution.

We have, we use, and we are bombarded with images everywhere.  And we increasingly need these images to better communicate and convince.

We see and seek  images everywhere.  From product identification and safety directions, to illustrations / art in blogs and in books.  When we communicate via email in short verbal bursts and often include icons to better express ourselves :-)

While this 'revolution' has been around for a while it has only recently hit me how extensive it is.  I now LOVE graphic novels, instructions are graphic, and road signs use more and more images to convey information.


GRAPHICS AND LITERACY:

Since reading my first graphic novel last year (Joe Kelly's I Kill Giants), I have read numerous outstanding educational graphic novels for kids - chalk full of extensive vocabulary, well-written dialogue, exquisitely inviting art, and exciting stories of fiction and nonfiction, science and technology, history, social conflict and the search of identities.

I have also learned that graphic novels are the fastest selling format of kids' books, and find myself the author of a book on how to integrate graphic novels into middle school curriculum.  Major publishers have now set up graphic novel divisions and while Barnes & Nobles don't quite know how to shelve them yet, they're out there!

Furthermore, librarians have realized that graphic novels bring kids and young adults back into libraries, and that graphic novels are bringing kids back to books and reading!  Graphic novels literally illustrate the art of story-telling.

GRAPHICS IN THE REAL WORLD:

We use graphic images in everything thing we do.  We have visual icons that relay safety messages and product information.  We use them to cross the street.  We use them to advertise.  We use them in presentations.  We use them to convince.

When was the last time you went to a presentation or workshop and just sat and listened?  To sell an idea or product we use Power Point, we teach with handouts, advertisers agonize over the most striking and memorable images.  We sell everything with images.

Look at your favorite blogs.  I don't know about you, but I favor some visual support when reading them.  The images are inviting, they help break up the screen, and they add a dimension to the message.



AS PRODUCTS GO GLOBAL - INSTRUCTIONS GO GRAPHIC:

Because so many of our products come from other countries or are sold world wide, instructions must be universally understood.  While some companies will provide written instructions / warnings in multiple languages, many are instead simply going graphic!

It's this last point that really got me to this graphic revolution point!

My daughter just moved to Boston where she started work on Monday.  We went to Ikea to furnish her apartment and found ALL the directions were purely graphic!

The thing is that as bright as we both are (she graduated with honors from Williams College, I have a PhD and graduated from an ivy league school)...the directions were really hard to follow.  There were times we just didn't quite "get" what went where.  Here's just one page:



THE BOTTOM LINE:

• Communicating with images is here to stay! 
• We as concerned parents and educators must teach our kids to "read" images
• The International Reading Association (IRA) and the National Council of Teachers of English (NTCE) have included in their standards that "Students read a wide range of print and non-print texts"

EDUCATION MUST include and address this graphic revolution. 

We should never abandon our classics.  I love teaching Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Andrew Clemen's Frindle, but we also have to teach kids how to use Power Point, how to read graphic instructions/directions, and how to tell stories with graphic images, even how to "read" faces.  Hence, enter graphic novels - a wonderful bridge for both worlds.



SOME SUGGESTIONS FOR TEACHING GRAPHIC INTELLIGENCE:

• Include graphic novels in your reading repertoire and in your read aloud repertoire with your kids.
• Focus on learning to read the details in illustrations.
• Talk about advertising icons - why do you thing a company / advertisers chose a particular image?  Was it effective?
• Talk about art, the use of color, the use of particular shapes...what these images portray...what emotions they evoke.
• Discuss design choices for school projects, for homemade cards, for household products...
• Turn commercial time into a cognitive puzzle: Talk about your favorite/least favorite commercials.  What do you like about them?  What do you hate about them? (Here are two of my favorites - one serious [and notice - no words], one that made me laugh)

I am curious - how much have graphic images invaded your worlds?  How do you help teach your kids to cope with the images they're bombarded with?  How do you cope? Please let me know in your comments!