How an Obscure Regulatory Process Could Spark an Education Revolution

Full article needs to be read for understanding of yet more fedgov reach into the live of children. Think aptitudes, attitudes, life experience - of both the students and also their families.

After being on FB all day, every day for several weeks, reading posts of the Zimmerman trial, my eyes are killing me. Has anyone given any thought to the effect using computers all day in school will have on young children’s eyes?

“effect using computers all day in school will have on young children’s eyes?”

Forget the eyes.

As a teacher I already know that today’s student is totally visual, and they HEAR NOTHING UNLESS YOU SCREAM AT THEM.

Kids can’t read, write or speak understandably?

Throw more borrowed money at the problem and give them more electronic gizmos to distract them.

That’ll fix it.

Washington is involved? Schools are a state issue, and it should stay that way! If the sate’s people vote it in, then it’s their poison.

The last line of the article reads: “But to propel schools into the Information Age, government intervention looks like the indispensable first step toward unlocking private innovation.”

I guess we could argue about that a bit, but since nearly every kid over 7 now has a smartphone, I think private innovation has outrun the government, as usual.

The real problem is getting public schools organized in a way to let them productively use those smartphones, instead of using them to goof off while the teacher is trying to teach (scream at?) them.

There’s a new paradigm developing in education called “Flip the Classroom” in which a student watches the initial lecture on a computer as “homework” either in study hall or at home, and then class time is used for the traditional homework phase, where problems are tackled after the lecture.

This has two huge advantages (three actually, but I’ll get to the third later).

First, if a student is confused by a point in the lecture, or just too tired to watch it, he can back up and view what he didn’t understand, or wait until later to view it. In the same vein, if the lecture is unclear, he can search for additional clarifying info on the net, usually freely available.

Second, during the homework phase, the teacher (who didn’t have to give the lecture in class) can devote his time to following along with the students’ thought processes as they go through the “homework” problems. This is real teaching, helping students understand something when they are stuck, or fleshing out a concept that they don’t fully grasp.

In math classes taught this way, it’s been observed that all students tend to get stuck at various places, and because math learning is so sequential (what you learned yesterday is needed as foundation for what you’re supposed to learn today) kids rarely get “unstuck.” With the Flip the Classroom model, the teacher is available to get them unstuck, and it’s turning out that nearly every student then makes it to the end of the course, understanding the material. They’ve also found out that students each get “stuck” at different places, but once unstuck they continue to learn.

These are the two main advantages, the ability to take on the lecture at your own pace, and the availability of the teacher during class time to clarify the points not fully understood in the lecture.

The third impact, however, is more long term in nature. It will change both the structure of the public school, and the content taught.

Regarding the structure of the school itself, someone reading this has probably wondered how you’ll get kids watching all those lectures at night or on the weekends? But that isn’t how it will work. Instead, kids will sit in study halls, or libraries, and watch the lectures (probably with earbuds or headphones). Since a lecture only needs to be recorded once (and most already are freely available on the web already), those rooms could be overseen by volunteers or aides being paid relatively low wages. All they have to be doing is ensuring that students are watching lectures.

This frees up massive amounts of teacher time, cutting the cost of public schooling significantly. Essentially, one teacher could do the job of at least two, just by not having to repeatedly give lectures. Instead, he could be overseeing the “homework” (in-class, actually) sessions of two or three times the number of kids he normally teaches in a year.

In time (quite soon, actually, given budget pressures), schools will realize that the students don’t need to be in school at all to view the lectures. They can do it at home, or in a “day-care” setting. This will cut the number of classrooms required almost in half. Hint: Any school administrator considering building more big boxes anytime soon might want to wait two or three years because you could have a ton of empty rooms by then.

However, the really, really big change will be in content taught. There is no reason that a student has to be in a school to view the lecture, and there are all kinds of people out in the real world with talents and knowledge that students want to learn (think computer programming or music or art for the easy examples). The “day care” I mentioned above, which you probably thought were meant just for very young children, could actually be learning centers run by highly talented individuals who would guide the students through the appropriate lectures on a topic, thus ensuring that the lectures were being viewed each week.

When the student returned to school (for 2 or 3 days per week) he’d do the homework phase under the guidance of a professional teacher (who might or might not know as much as the “day-care” provider about the subject.)

At first, the teachers will know more, but in time if this model develops, parents will learn of tremendous “day-care” teachers who specialize in various subjects, and will possibly even prefer to have those providers conduct the homework phase as well.

Only one thing stands in the way of all of this, the cost of the “day-care.” As soon as a state government sets up a statewide voucher program that allows state aid to follow the child (so that parents can spend as much of that aid on “day-care”- and a computer tablet, if needed - as they choose), this model will take off. Virtually everything is in place for it to happen today.

Why do you even have to attend a school? You can do this stuff at home and not deal with all the indoctrination and interference in students’ private lives.

Probably going to go this way anyhow. A lot of people are fed up with public schools.

Yes, a lot of people are fed up with public schools. The problem is that the vast majority aren’t though, and that makes it tough to implement changes that would chip away at the public school monopoly.

The change that’s needed, and would do the most good, is a statewide voucher program where all state aid follows the child so that the parents can hire anyone they want to school their child.

I think the best way to accomplish that would be to get homeschoolers to head to a state capitol en masse (all of them, and all who would like to, along with anyone who wants to get their kids taught outside the public schools, at least partially.)

The homeschoolers have a strong “fairness” argument, in that they really pay double for their kids’ educations, first in property taxes to support the public schools they’re not using, and again in homeschool materials and foregone parental wages. This should make it easy to pass a law that lets homeschoolers tap into the state aid payments.

Unfortunately, they’d be up against the public school bureaucracy, including the powerful teachers union in any state. Plus, the bureaucracy would be united at that point, with administrators and board members mostly supporting the teachers (to protect everyone’s personal turf.)

Still, in a weak union state with a heavily GOP legislature and a GOP governor, I think the time is drawing close where a concerted effort by homeschoolers, arguing basic fairness, might be able to get such a law passed. That would open the doors wide open to the sort of experimentation needed in education, and would almost immediately improve the outlook for our kids’ educations.

It would also significantly weaken the public unions in that state, which is why they would fight such a law aggressively, and would get plenty of help from out of state.

The GOP has been chipping away in this direction for years, enabling kids to choose between public schools in some states, and establishing limited voucher programs in others, but the real key is to let the state aid follow the child and trust the parents to make good choices for their own kids’ educations.

Virtually everything is in place for it to happen today.

That is an interesting scenario. And if all the educational industry was dedicated to was actual imparting of knowledge, I would have no worries.

It's the various other agendas that concern me.

I need not go into specifics of the intrusions and indoctrination to which public education systems are committed. Supercharge that with whiz-bang electronic imagery and data collection of all sorts and we have possibilities that George Orwell could not even consider in his day. He had the part about outright denunciation by children of their parents. That alone was considered shocking.

In Tomorrow World, nothing so overt will even be needed. As the attitudes are molded in the children, the failings of the parents can be noted and dealt with as needed.

I could be nuts. I kinda hope I am.

In my state, we can’t even get a simple scholarship program up and running which would have involved companies who would have gotten a tax break if they contributed to it. That would take money away from the public schools doncha know, however.

We have horrible inner-city schools which go nowhere no matter how much money is thrown at them. I don’t know why parents can’t get their churches to set up private schools for their kids — all those classrooms going to waste Monday through Friday.