Weekend blogging: before the man with no name, there was...

My first thought on first seeing Yojimbo years ago was that Kurosawa had been watching a lot of spaghetti westerns. Then I remember which came first...

This time it's different

Adriene Hill had a strangely schizophrenic story yesterday (CLASSROOM TECH: A HISTORY OF HYPE AND DISAPPOINTMENT). It came with the ominous title Classroom Tech: a History of Hype and Disappointment and the first half lived up to the claim:

That’s been the story of technology in the classroom, pretty much from the start. Great hope, ambition, and expense. Followed by disappointment.

Back in 1922, for instance, Thomas Edison thought he'd figured out the future of education.

“I believe that the motion picture is destined to revolutionize our education system,” he said, according to Larry Cuban's  Teachers and Machines: The Classroom Use of Technology Since 1920, “and that in a few years it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks.”

“Edison was a better inventor than prognosticator,” said Robert Reiser, Associate Dean for Research in the College of Education at Florida State University.

Films fizzled out. They were expensive. Projectors were unreliable. It was hard to find the right film for the right class.

Enter radio.

School boards and universities, even commercial networks like CBS and NBC, poured money into creating classroom broadcasts,  or  “textbooks of the air.” Then, said Reiser, “the enthusiasm died out.”

Next up were “teaching machines” with names like Cyclo Teacher, Instructocard, and the Edumator.

One of the best known was created by psychologist BF Skinner, in 1954. Here he is explaining the devices.

According to the 1962 book Teaching Machines and Programmed Learning, there were dozens of companies that made these devices in the early 60s.

Turns out buttons and levers weren’t a great way to learn.

Which brings us to television.

TV combined sight and sound, and could bring live events — like space missions — right into the classroom. It was also seen as one answer to the teacher shortage. The money poured in. The Ford Foundation invested millions into programming, according to Cuban's book. The federal government also pitched in cash. By 1971 more than $100 million had been poured into educational TV.

Again, the same story. “We see one medium after another coming along, a lot of enthusiasm for that medium, followed by disappointment in the extent to which that medium changed the nature of the instruction taking place in classrooms,” said Reiser.

So, when computers exploded into classrooms  in the early 80s, with basic video games like Oregon Trail.

And when, as Todd Oppenheimer writes in The Flickering Mind, the numbers of computers tripled between 1980 and 1982, and tripled again by 1984.

And when Time magazine ran a cover story called “Here Come the Microkids,” in 1982. Educators were skeptical.

At this point, for no apparent reason, the tone shifts radically.

But now, some are reconsidering. Maybe this time is different.

and

“We’re on the cusp now of that big revolution,” said Themistocles Sparangis, chief technology director at Los Angeles Unified School District. LA Unified has bet big on tech--a billion dollars big-- to give every student an iPad.

It turns out that Los Angeles schools Supt. John Deasy, who has a rather cozy relationship with Apple, paid more than he had to for those iPads and way more than he would have if other tablet makers had been allowed to bid. Furthermore, they didn't work as promised (particularly not the firewall) and -- here's the part that jumps out for me -- the team that put together the proposal didn't check the specs closely enough and later discovered the district had to come up with an additional $38 million for keyboards.

In past, I've used the term ddulites to describe people who are irrationally enamored with technology but who don't get the subtleties of thinking in terms of functionality. The LAUSD's iPad misadventure is a perfect example of the damage this approach can cause.

I firmly believe that educational technology can do great things, but the first step in achieving that potential requires keeping people like Deasy and Sparangis out of the process.

Bookable, readily bookable, semi-bookable, ebookable

While we're on the subject, Jeremy Kilpatrick of the University of Georgia has an interesting eye-witness take on the math reforms of the post Sputnik era. Check out the whole thing if you get a chance, but for now I'd like to focus on one section:

Lesson Two: Mathematical thinking is not bookable.

"Bookable" is a term used by publishers to describe the capability of a concept or mental process to be captured in print in a form that teachers will accept and can use. Many of the new math projects concentrated on bringing about reform primarily through the production of innovative materials. In particular, by providing sample textbooks for mathematics courses, the SMSG attempted to influence the commercial textbook publishing process, which would presumably then change how mathematics was taught. The SMSG author teams, by providing fewer problems for students to work, expected that those problems would be treated by teachers in greater depth and detail. The problem-solving process, however, proved not to be bookable. Books are not good at handling tentative hypotheses, erroneous formulations, blind alleys, or partial solutions. Teachers misunderstood what they were to do and called for more problems instead.

Max Beberman, in the new math materials he designed for the University of Illinois Committee on School Mathematics, attempted to incorporate into many lessons what he called guided discovery. Students would be led to see patterns in mathematical expressions and thus to arrive at generalizations that would not need to be made explicit in the materials (until a later lesson). The materials apparently worked well when restricted to teachers who had been trained in their use. When they were later published in the form of commercial textbooks, however, the guided discovery feature was greatly attenuated in order to capture a larger market.

Several recent curriculum projects have run into the same phenomenon. When efforts are made to encourage students to think about mathematical ideas rather than having them enshrined in a text, teachers who are not familiar with how those ideas might be handled criticize the books as incomplete and unsatisfactory. Textbooks are expected to contain authoritative rules, definitions, theorems, and solutions. Consequently, asking students to think about and formulate their own versions of these things rather than providing them ready-made can make a textbook unusable for many teachers.

There's an important point here but I don't think Kilpatrick quite nails it. For starters, speaking as someone who has recently been working with a number of students coming of different courses, grades and schools, I can attest that being familiar with the ideas doesn't always help and sometimes hurts (see Feynman for details). Until you've done it, you have no idea how distracting it can be to teach out of a text where the authors don't really understand the material.

In order to get get the concept into more usable form, let's introduce a couple of subcategories:

Semi-bookable.  These are concepts or mental processes that can be partly but not entirely captured in print in a form that teachers will accept and can use. For example, lots of people teach themselves a foreign language from a book, but the process is almost always supplemented by conversing and by listening to live or recorded speakers;

Readily bookable. Some ideas and processes are difficult to convey in print, either because they can be hard to express or because most textbook authors have a weak grasp of them and miss the subtleties. Feynman's critique hit this point heavily;

Ebookable. An idea or process that becomes much more readily or completely bookable with the introduction of other media.

I'll come back to this later, particularly with regard to why attempts to incorporate Pólya into math textbooks often go so badly.

What exactly are the stakes?

I want to be careful how I frame this, partly because it's a big, complicated question and partly because it would be easy to imply an extreme position that I do not hold.

All that said, there's a thought that's been nagging at me for years, particularly since I've been digging into the education reform debate. Over the Twentieth Century, America has swung from one pedagogical and curricular extreme to another. The data from these initiatives are confusing and inconclusive when we look at the various metrics we use to capture educational performance, but when we pull back and look at two of the big objectives we want the policies to accomplish, economic growth.and technological progress, it's difficult to see a clear relationship between how and what we teach kids and how well they do.

This table (from A Brief History of American K-12 Mathematics Education in the 20th Century by David Klein) really brought this home for me. One of the big and not entirely unreasonable drivers of the reaction to Sputnik was the belief that we had been neglecting math and science.

Percentages of U.S. High School Students Enrolled in Various Courses

School Year	Algebra	Geometry	Trigonometry
1909 to 1910	56.9%	30.9%	1.9%
1914 to 1915	48.8%	26.5%	1.5%
1921 to 1922	40.2%	22.7%	1.5%
1927 to 1928	35.2%	19.8%	1.3%
1933 to 1934	30.4%	17.1%	1.3%
1948 to 1949	26.8%	12.8%	2.0%
1952 to 1953	24.6%	11.6%	1.7%
1954 to 1955	24.8%	11.4%	2.6%

It has become fairly standard to use the number of and enrollment in advanced course as a measure of a school's quality. By this standard, American schools weren't just bad, they were horrible and they had been in steady decline for half a century. Looking at the numbers for the Thirties and Forties, this generation would appear to be woefully ill-prepared to deal with the STEM-heavy world of the late Twentieth Century, but of course they weren't. The students who graduated high school in the quarter century preceding Sputnik were responsible for an incredible period of across-the-board advances.

From  Dewey Progressivism to New Math to Back-to-Basics to the modern reform movement, we have applied all sorts of theories to our kids' education. I'm sure that, if we thought through the problem, sharpened our analytic tools and devoted adequate resources to the question,  we could definitively say that for a given student and a given goal a certain approach is best.

I just wondering how big the magnitude of those differences will be compared to the impact of other public policy developments.

Adding in base 8, counting by ten, and other reform fixations

With all of the usual caveats about small samples, I've been reading up on education reform movements past and present recently and I've noticed something. There seems to be a tendency to latch onto some interesting but non-essential concept and impose upon it considerable, even central importance. Mastering these concepts is often seen as necessary conditions for truly understanding the material, despite the generations of students who had managed to get by without them.

Counting by certain intervals and ELA concepts like close reading, and the distinction between perspective and point of view are a couple of examples associated with Common Core, but the richest stake might well belong to the New Math movement of the post-Sputnik era. Some of the concepts were extremely important in higher level math courses (such as set theory). Others (such as performing operations in bases other than ten or two) seldom came up  even for mathematicians.

It's worth noting that both Richard Feynman and Tom Lehrer singled out working in other bases when criticizing New Math, Lehrer in song and Feynman in memorably scornful prose:

I understood what they were trying to do. Many [Americans] thought we were behind the Russians after Sputnik, and some mathematicians were asked to give advice on how to teach math by using some of the rather interesting modern concepts of mathematics. The purpose was to enhance mathematics for the children who found it dull.

I'll give you an example: They would talk about different bases of numbers -- five, six, and so on -- to show the possibilities. That would be interesting for a kid who could understand base ten -- something to entertain his mind. But what they turned it into, in these books, was that every child had to learn another base! And then the usual horror would come: "Translate these numbers, which are written in base seven, to base five." Translating from one base to another is an utterly useless thing. If you can do it, maybe it's entertaining; if you can't do it, forget it. There's no point to it.

Part of the standard narrative about New Math was that the new concepts being introduced were too advanced and unfamiliar for teachers to handle or parents to accept, but in many cases, the greater tension was between authors of the reforms and the people who actually understood the math.

A good day for a recommendation

There is, of course, no such thing as the military perspective -- no single person can speak for all the men and women who have served in the military -- but if you are looking for a military perspective, my first choice would be Lt. Col. Robert Bateman who writes eloquently and intelligently on the subject for Esquire. Here are Bateman's recent thoughts on Memorial Day.

When the guns fell silent in the Spring of 1865, they all went home. They scattered across the country, back across the devastated south and the invigorated north. Then they made love to their wives, played with their children, found new jobs or stepped back into their old ones, and in general they tried to get on with their lives. These men were no longer soldiers; they were now veterans of the Civil War, never to wear the uniform again. But before long they started noticing that things were not as they had been before.

Now, they had memories of things that they could not erase. There were the friends who were no longer there, or who were hobbling through town on one or two pegs, or who had a sleeve pinned up on their chest. There were the nights that they could not shake the feeling that something really bad was about to happen. And, aside from those who had seen what they had seen and lived that life, they came to realize that they did not have a lot of people to talk to about these things. Those who had been at home, men and women, just did not "get it." A basic tale about life in camp would need a lot of explanation, so it was frustrating even to talk. Terminology like "what is a picket line" and "what do you mean oblique order?" and a million other elements, got in the way. These were the details of a life they had lived for years but which was now suddenly so complex that they never could get the story across to those who had not been there. Many felt they just could not explain about what had happened, to them, to their friends, to the nation.

So they started to congregate. First in little groups, then in statewide assemblies, and finally in national organizations that themselves took on a life of their own.

The Mid-1860s are a key period in American history not just because of the War of Rebellion, but also because this period saw the rise of "social organizations." Fraternities, for example, exploded in the post-war period. My own, Pi Kappa Alpha, was formed partially by veterans of the Confederacy, Lee's men (yes, I know, irony alert). Many other non-academic "fraternal" organizations got their start around the same time. By the late 1860s in the north and south there was a desire to commemorate. Not to celebrate, gloat or pine, but to remember.

Individually, at different times and in different ways, these nascent veterans groups started to create days to stop and reflect. These days were not set aside to mull on a cause -- though that did happen -- but their primary purpose was to think on the sacrifices and remember those lost. Over time, as different states incorporated these ideas into statewide holidays, a sort of critical legislative mass was achieved. "Decoration Day" was born, and for a long time that was enough. The date selected was, quite deliberately, a day upon which absolutely nothing of major significance had occurred during the entire war. Nobody in the north or south could try to change it to make it a victory day. It was a day for remembering the dead through decorating their graves, and the memorials started sprouting up in every small town in the nation. You still see them today, north and south, in small towns and villages like my own home of Chagrin Falls -- granite placed there so that the nation, and their homes, should not forget the sacrifices of the men who went away on behalf of the country and never came back.

Here's one for the Unqualified Offerings crowd...

I'm taking this with a small grain of salt (there are a couple of things in the Georgetown report that concern me a bit), but with those caveats I think we can call this a point for Thoreau and company.

High Unemployment Major #1:
Information Systems
Unemployment rate for recent grads: 14.7 percent*
In the digital age, it may seem as though all bachelor's degrees in the computer science field would be a safe bet. But numbers from the Georgetown Report suggest that this is not the case. In fact, the report found that recent grads in this major faced an unemployment rate of nearly 15 percent.
Why the depressing job prospects? The simple answer: Too many job applicants, not enough spots. "The market is saturated for this industry," says Hallie Crawford, a job search expert and certified career coach.
With the rise of technology, many people have opted to pursue information technology paths, says Crawford. And the influx of new candidates for positions within this field has made the job market very competitive, she says.

Here's what I'm taking away from most of these stories and from what I'm hearing from people in the STEM job market:

The world of the STEM job hunter is brighter than that of the non-STEM crowd, but much dimmer than you've been told;

Because many of these specialties are fairly narrow, a small increase in supply or decrease in demand can gut the market (see above);

Even in hot, high-demand fields, fewer people are making big bucks than you might think. "Only 4 percent of software developers in the burgeoning app economy have made over a million dollars. Three-quarters of them made less than $30,000."*;

You hear stories about companies willing to do anything to acquire talented people and keep them happy. At best these examples are unrepresentative. At worst, they're fraudulent.

I would certainly encourage people with any interest in the field to go into one of the STEM fields. The subjects are interesting and you can probably get a pretty good job, but keep your expectations reasonable, your debt low and, whatever you do, don't believe the hype.


* I'm willing to bet you dinner that most of that 4% got a significant portion of that million through their talents as entrepreneurs, investors or managers.

Weekend blogging -- Memorial Day Roger Corman Marathon

I was having a cup of coffee and a cookie this evening at a place on Beverly I frequent a lot. The bakery's first rate, the coffee's good and I have no trouble picking up the wifi from the Starbucks next do. I happened to look at the theater across the street and the marquee read "Roger Corman and Joe Dante in Person." That sort of thing happens to you when you live in LA.

Unfortunately, none of the Poe films appear to be available for streaming but Hulu does have a few worth checking out. Roger Corman never made a bad film under the circumstances, and even when the circumstances were particularly dire, he always did something interesting.

A Bucket Of Blood (1959)

Though Little Shop (also included here) gets more attention, I think this is the better movie, largely due to the rare lead by beloved character actor Dick Miller.




The Little Shop of Horrors (1960)

Still, you do have to give this one its props, shot in a couple of days for $30K. A pretty good little film in absolute terms but amazing when you realize what he had to work with.








The Terror (1963)

In some ways an even more impressive example of high speed, low cost movie making. Though there are differing accounts, most go something like this: when he realized that the film The Raven was going to wrap up three days early so he had Leo Gordon* write a script over the weekend. They started shooting that Monday, scheduling shots based on which part of the set was supposed to be torn down next.





* Gordon is more familiar to movie and TV fans as a menacing character actor in countless shows like Andy Griffith and Maverick, but he was also a highly successful self-taught writer. He had learned the craft while reading most of the books in the San Quentin library while serving time for armed robbery.

Can nobody work out the incentives?

I hate to do the both sides are out to lunch meme, but this response to the Levitt/Dubner/Noah Smith health care plan missed the main point: 

The L/D plan would, in its majestic equality, allow the affluent person with a well-stuffed savings account and the low wager-earner drowning in debt alike to set aside $1,000 for health care expenses and to take the risk of incurring 4 grand of debt through events they have little or no control over. Indeed, their always-smarmy tone (“if they are being prudent”) suggests that the point of the plan is not so much health care provision as setting up a cheap moral lesson in thrift, a lesson that not coincidentally will be much easier for people similarly situated to Levitt than for the ordinary working person in 2014 to pass.

But let’s assume arguendo that we should ignore questions of equity, and also assume that the only relevant question is trying to determine how to collectively spend health care dollars in the most efficient manner. Even on its own terms, the plan doesn’t make sense. The L/D wouldn’t disincentivize health care spending per se; it would massively disincentivize seeking cheap preventive care. If you get regular check-ups, it costs you money; if you save money by skipping checkups and get an illness that could have prevented, the costs are largely paid collectively. In other words, the L/D plan discourages the most cont-effective forms of care while doing little to discourage the least cost-effective. Even on its on terms, I don’t see how this plan makes any sense.

Cheap preventative care isn't where this system is going to go wrong.  Nor is it in the poor equality properties of the law, as some young people might end up ahead on total revenue (while others get crushed).  behind the veil of ignorance it isn't clear how it will all work out.

Now let's look at this plan:

On January 1 of each year, the British government would mail a check for 1,000 pounds to every British resident. They can do whatever they want with that money, but if they are being prudent, they might want to set it aside to cover out-of-pocket health care costs. In my system, individuals are now required to pay out-of-pocket for 100 percent of their health care costs up to 2,000 pounds, and 50 percent of the costs between 2,000 pounds and 8,000 pounds. The government pays for all expenses over 8,000 pounds in a year. 

So you have two efficiency problems here.  One is that you now have a whole bunch of extra paperwork and IT to track where people are on the cost spectrum.  Do we mail people bills after we determine if they have not hit the cap?  What about people will marginal addresses and living situations.  You are replacing a cheap system with average outcomes with one that is immediately more complicated to administer. 

But where this will go terribly wrong is for those people who go over 8,000 pounds per year.  Did you notice that piece where the government pays for all expenses over 8,000 pounds.  How do we know that these costs are acceptable?  After all, every single hip replacement might exceed 8,000 pounds in expenses.  How do we know if we are getting ripped off? 

So you end up needing to do the same schedule of acceptable costs as any socialized medical system has.  This rather removes the benefit of the free market in setting prices, as you have a single payer for all expensive conditions.  Will hospitals not offer free parking to get people to have a procedure at their (more expensive) hospital?  Why would the patient say no?  Altruism?

Even worse, this makes outcomes worse for patients with chronic conditions, at least until they hit the 8,000 pound ceiling in any year (and note the billing issues here -- if people have to pay and be reimbursed there can be a liquidity issue).  Now these people pay 4,500 pounds with a 1,000 pound subsidy.  Hopefully nobody will have trouble paying the 3,500 pounds per year?  That is around $450 a month -- what if the worker gets $5 an hour? 

And this gets back to the most important issue -- these people completely misunderstand the whole idea of insurance.  We insure against risks that exceed our ability to pay.  Is 3,5000 pounds a sum that every British person could pay without hardship?  A cost of zero would make it possible for everyone to be able to afford health care, regardless of financial circumstance.

Now, what I want to make exceedingly clear is that the nation with the highest private sector portion of payments also has the highest public sector as well, as even libertarian Megan McArdle notes:

A lot of people seem to think that "per-capita government spending" means "spending per person covered by government insurance." That's understandable, but wrong. "Per-capita government spending" means "government spending on health care per U.S. citizen." In other words, we spend as much to cover a fraction of our population as other governments spend to cover everyone. So pointing out that Medicare beneficiaries cost more on average than younger people is true but irrelevant. We spend more covering old people, poor people and veterans than many other governments spend to cover all those people, plus the rest of the population.

 So if you are advising the English on health care reform, why would you suggest the politically unpopular move of putting more "skin in the game" when the country that does the most of this ends up paying more money (out of government revenues) to cover fewer people?  And England allows private health care, so the benefits of a more private system (over and above current options) isn't absolutely clear. 

Finally, there is the issue of prioritization.  Is the NHS really the biggest policy challenge that the UK faces?  Is it in the top 10?  Now it is possible that innovation is under-supported by this approach.  Of course, they could simply increase research grants, if this was thought to be the most important issue.

But wouldn't issues like persistent unemployment and industrial decline be better places to focus efforts?  And how would increasing the government's expenditure on health care (likely financed by higher taxes) work to improve these issues?  Or is it expending political capital on an experiment that might well not work out to reduce costs? 

A pretty good one-page intro to New Math

Not what you'd call 'in  depth,' of course, but this primer by Calley Connelly of MSU Bozeman does a pretty good job hitting the major points and players.

Update: For something more in depth, try this and of course this.

Good grief! -- Sally Brown on New Math [Updated]

I have been working on a long piece on the parallels between the New Math of the Sixties and the Common Core math of today. As part of my research, I came across an amusing quote from a Peanuts strip of the time.

From Wikipedia:

In 1965, cartoonist Charles Schulz authored a series of Peanuts strips which detailed kindergartener Sally's frustrations with New Math. In the first strip, she is depicted puzzling over "sets, one to one matching, equivalent sets, non-equivalent sets, sets of one, sets of two, renaming two, subsets, joining sets, number sentences, placeholders." Eventually she bursts into tears and exclaims, "All I want to know is, how much is two and two?"

What surprised me was how well Schulz captured the terminology. The part about one to one matching was particularly apt.

[Found it]

The Aphorisms of Success

I've blogged a bit on corporate culture (and there are far more on the topic waiting to be written or rewritten). One of the aspects I should focus more on is the emphasis and, in some cases, the outright enforcement of aspirational language.

It is easy to satirize the steady stream of phrases like "achieving excellence," "amazing customers." and "maximizing impactfulness." A friend of mine, who was dean of business at a small college at the time, actually created an award called "the margins of excellence" (excellence apparently being a thing you don't want to hit dead on).

But there are bigger concerns than just looking silly. It is true that most of the time if properly applied, the combination of hard work and a reasonably positive attitude will often achieve impressive results, but it's not a deterministic relationship. When you ignore the caveats and the limits and completely commit yourself to the anything-is-possible rhetoric, the results can be disastrous.

I was recently reading some particularly embarrassing example on an education blog, I was reminded of the This American Life segment on Duke Fightmaster.

Duke Fightmaster is not a man of half measures, and he believed in the aphorisms of success, that if he wanted something badly enough, he would have it. He was going to replace Conan O'Brien. Not by doing all the normal things like getting a production job at a local talk show, learning the business, working his way up. Instead, he would make himself into a talk show sensation from his own bedroom.

As you might guess, this did not go well.

Duke Fightmaster
I guess somewhere in my mind I just thought, you know, no matter how bad things get, I'll just kind of put my head down and keep going. And I knew that it was ridiculous, starting a talk show. I mean, I knew that, outwardly, people think I'm ridiculous.

And I remember just driving around like, "The show isn't going anywhere, I'm not going anywhere, I've wasted these last years." And I remember just driving around so depressed. And I just felt like I had broken-- and I had a breakdown where I just started crying in my car. And I just felt like I hit the core of my being and it was, "you're a loser." And I think that was part of my rock bottom.

Sarah Koenig
Did you quit after that?

Duke Fightmaster
No. No, I think I still went for another year after that.

You know, anyone who makes it in this life at anything, you always hear, has to go through hell. So I figured, "I'll just go through hell." I remember my friend who worked in real estate worked for one of those cheesy real estate motivators that used to yell out, "You have to have a break down to have a break through." So I was thinking, "OK, I've had my break down, so now I'm going to actually break through to some new level."

You really should listen to the whole thing

France and jobs

Sometimes the data just screams at you:

Since the late 1990s we have completely traded places: prime-age French adults are now much more likely than their US counterparts to have jobs.

This is for adults 25 to 54.  So maybe the USA might have some advantages above or below that age range.  But France has a world class medical system, high taxes, and a great deal of worker protection.  Enough protections that I can actually remember meeting French people in Quebec who moved there because their business model required too much worker churn to be viable in France. 

So we shouldn't necessarily say "they have it right".  There are good and bad things about the French model, and it hasn't always been a good thing to be a participant in the French economy.  However, what this does do is highlight how challenging it is to link US-style markets to general population employment. 

That has some real policy implications as it does remove a key trump card in the balance between business interests and social programs. 

When "best practices" aren't -- sometimes imitating the successful is a really bad idea

We started the week with a post on the much touted Relay Graduate School of Education. Yesterday we had a piece discussing the assumptions underlying the notion of "best practices." Here's where those two topics come together.

As I mentioned before, Relay GSE and its role in the reform movement is a complicated story. Not only are there a lot of moving parts; the moving parts have moving parts, so in this thread, I'm trying to open with a cursory bits for context then zoom in on one main aspect per post.

The cursory part: The following is a very good lesson intro but not a particularly good math lesson intro. The good part is is that the kids are having fun, they're ready to learn and they are associating positive emotions with the class. All of these things important and the instructor is managing them exceedingly well. The math part is considerably weaker. The opening is knowledge-, not process-based (no problem-solving or higher-order thinking) and the knowledge covered -- a mediocre mnemonic (since these are made-up words, they are easy to scramble or to forget entirely) for a formula most kids don't have that much trouble remembering -- is fairly trivial. Even the question around the 2:00 mark that got the dean so excited didn't show any significant connection with the material. (Questions you'd rather hear at that point include: "Why do they have to be right triangles?"; "What do we do with other shapes like rectangles?"; "Does this have anything to do with similar triangles?"; "If they give us both angles, how do we know which side is opposite?")

But I don't want to get too caught up in the criticisms. Though I have concerns, it is still clear that Corcoran is an extraordinarily talented teacher with a tremendous gift for entertaining and engaging students.



KIPP Academy's Frank Corcoran: Captain Hook from KIPP NYC on Vimeo.

He is also a potentially disastrous role model.

As I said in the last post:

In order for a best practices approach to make any sense whatsoever, the optimal level of the factors in question must remain basically the same from person to person, location to location, and sometimes even job to job. Those are extremely strong and in some cases wildly counterintuitive assumptions and yet they go unquestioned all the time.

For a young teacher, there is tremendous appeal to the idea of winning kids over with the big show. Today, they're ignoring your lessons, rolling their eyes at your advice and occasionally nodding off while you're talking; tomorrow, they're hanging on your every word. It hardly  ever works that way. One lesson almost never makes you anyone's favorite teacher.

On top of the question of effectiveness, there's often a real risk associated with the 'fun' lesson or hook. Not only does it break the normal structure and routine; it gives the students a relatively legitimate argument for non-cooperation ("if this is supposed to be fun and I'm not having fun, why can't I do something else?"). With time, teachers generally learn how to read classes and situations and discover ways of framing and executing these activities, but for an inexperienced teacher with a problem class, things can go badly.

Check out this passage from Michael Winerip's 2010 NYT article on Teach for America and keep in mind that there is an extremely high degree of overlap between the pedagogical methods taught by TFA and those taught by Relay.

The 774 new recruits who are training here are housed in Rice University dorms. Many are up past midnight doing lesson plans and by 6:30 a.m. are on a bus to teach summer school to students making up failed classes. It’s a tough lesson for those who’ve come to do battle with the achievement gap. 

Lilianna Nguyen, a recent Stanford graduate, dressed formally in high heels, was trying to teach a sixth-grade math class about negative numbers. She’d prepared definitions to be copied down, but the projector was broken. 

She’d also created a fun math game, giving every student an index card with a number. They were supposed to silently line themselves up from lowest negative to highest positive, but one boy kept disrupting the class, blurting out, twirling his pen, complaining he wanted to play a fun game, not a math game. 

“Why is there talking?” Ms. Nguyen said. “There should be no talking.” 

“Do I have to play?” asked the boy. 

“Do you want to pass summer school?” Ms. Nguyen answered. 

The boy asked if it was O.K. to push people to get them in the right order. 

“This is your third warning,” Ms. Nguyen said. “Do not speak out in my class.”

This is really bad. The lesson was not great to begin with -- there are better ways to get the concept across and the fun potential of lining up silently is limited -- but with the disruptions the time was almost entirely wasted (and wasting students' time is one of the worst things a teacher or administrator can do). And the damage almost certainly wasn't be limited to that one day. The teacher had her authority challenged, made empty threats, lost control of her classroom.

But it could have been worse. Kids have a natural tendency to push boundaries and the boundaries here were relatively tight. Now think about an activity that requires shouting and striking martial arts poses. In the video clip, we had an experienced and charismatic teacher with a medium sized class of well-behaved students in a school with strict discipline and a student body self-selected to be compliant and cooperative. Imagine what might have happened if someone like Ms. Nguyen had tried this in a tough school with thirty or forty students.

At the risk of oversimplifying, you can basically break this Relay clip down into two parts:

The dull content-driven part -- making concepts understandable, intriguing them with a challenging problems, getting them to make connections and engage in higher-order thinking -- plays an insignificant role in this clip. Corcoran may have done all of these things later in the lesson, he may even have done them very well, but in this clip there is simply nothing along these lines worth noting, let alone imitating;

Then there's the exciting performance-driven part. Corcoran is remarkably talented and he puts on an exceptional show, but like a lot of other impressive acts, you probably shouldn't try this on your own.

The two big assumptions behind 'best practices'

[Homonym alert -- another smart phone composition]

There is no notion better loved by scientific management types than 'best practices.' It has become one of the truly obligatory PowerPoint phrases and it is rare to hear a high-level executive lay out plans for fixing a large organization without promising to promote them. These days those executives often have titles like 'superintendent.' Scientific management is now extraordinarily popular in education circles, particularly in the education reform movement. This confluence of two of the major interests of this blog means there are some major threads starting that will allude to this topic quite a bit.

'Best practices' are often treated as a self-evidently good thing  – Who wouldn't want to be best? – – but the idea of finding optimal methods and strategies and applying them across an organization is based on two very big and difficult-to-justify assumptions.

The first is that you have or even can identify these behaviors. Determining "best" status usually requires a high degree of faith in your metrics and metrics almost never perfectly align with the properties they are supposed to measure. Even when handled by the most competent of people, things can go badly wrong.

And, as anyone who has worked for large corporations can tell you, the executives overseeing these programs often are not up to the job. Between various biases, office politics, and a widespread misunderstanding of how statistics works, the results are often far from "best."

Most corporate cultures strongly discourage employees from questioning whether or not a "best practice" is actually best, but at least the question does sometimes come up. The very idea of the next assumption often escapes people entirely.

In order for a best practices approach to make any sense whatsoever, the optimal level of the factors in question must remain basically the same from person to person, location to location, and sometimes even job to job. Those are extremely strong and in some cases wildly counterintuitive assumptions and yet they go unquestioned all the time.

Later in the week, we'll discuss how violating these assumptions can lead to trouble (and connect this topic with an earlier post).