Should Education Be a For-Profit Business?

Throughout the past few years, K-12 schools around the country have been slashing budgets as state and national education funding has dropped.  At the same time, however, legislation in many states (including my home state, Michigan) has loosened the restrictions on charter schools.  In some places, this is creating a rush to begin schools run by for-profit organizations.  While some people laud the notion of for-profit schools, saying competition will help foster innovation and make all schools better, many people are concerned about the fact that any profits being taken by corporations running schools takes away from the total number of dollars available to actually educate students, thereby reducing the quality of education for everyone.

Count me in the latter category.

Here in Michigan, we have a massive problem with teacher pensions.  Right now, for every dollar paid to a current teacher in salary, a Michigan public school district must also pay 24.46 cents as a retirement contribution to support retired teachers from this state.  Next year that is expected to jump to 27.37 cents on the dollar.  Just two years ago, the rate was “just” 16.94 cents on the dollar.  This is unsustainable.

This is also why I’m against for-profit charter schools here in Michigan.  For-profit charters are not required to pay into this retirement fund.  (Force them to pay into the fund, and I’m no longer against these schools.) As a result, every new charter that begins here in Michigan diverts students (and therefore teachers) away from the public school system.  Thus there are even fewer current teachers paying into the system, and the retirement rate will soar further.

In this climate, of course charter schools can turn a profit.  Next year, they could simply do everything a public school would do and pocket 27.37% of their combined teachers’ salaries as profit.  But in doing so, they are also worsening the unsustainable retirement contribution rate for the public schools throughout the state.  Until this is changed, for-profit education should not be permitted here in Michigan.

Process vs. Product

When it comes to student work, I love a well-crafted, polished finished product as much as anyone.  From a beautifully crafted, well-edited story to a creative science fair project, I certainly enjoy seeing my students’ handiwork.

Some of the time, I’m convinced, that enjoyment is fine.  Students do need to work through the writing process, sometimes publishing their most exemplary pieces.  Students should sweat the small stuff on rare occasion to ensure that they have created a beautiful brochure, map, model of Jupiter, or whatever it is that they’re working on.

Much of the time, however, what really matters should not be the finished product, but the process of thinking by which the student could arrive at that finished product.  It’s creating the hypothesis, deciding on the perfect word choice in a persuasive paragraph, or understanding why long division works that really matters.  Sometimes in our zeal for a perfect finished product we assign far too many math problems instead of having students deeply understand the process behind solving just two sample problems.  We ask students to spend an hour illustrating something when a two-minute sketch would suffice.  We force students to plow through a sea of reading comprehension questions instead of simply having a conversation with them asking for their thoughts about what they just read.

The solution to this, in my opinion, is for teachers to ask themselves not what finished product they wish to assign when teaching a particular standard, but rather what key understandings and thought processes they want the students to gain from having learned about that standard.  Viewing the final goal as a thinking/understanding goal can free us up to dramatically shift the product we expect, allowing a much larger percentage of class time to be spent having students actually think.

Help Less

In my last post, I talked about the possible benefits of having a classroom teacher talk less.  Along that same line of thinking, today I want to focus on the need for teachers to help students less.

We elementary teachers tend to be a caring, compassionate bunch.  As a result, it’s easy for us to want to jump in and immediately rescue a child who is struggling to understand subject matter material being presented.  As we do, we fail to notice the opportunity costs in doing so:

• When we help students too quickly, we take away their opportunity to independently problem-solve and reason out a solution to the problem at hand.
• When we help students too quickly, we take away the opportunity for students to form great questions about what they don’t understand.
• When we help students too quickly, we take away the opportunity for other students to be leaders and help the student who is struggling.
• When we help students too quickly, we create a classroom where the teacher is seen as the one and only resource upon which students can call when they need help.  Since the teacher won’t always be with the struggling student, it’s far better that the student would learn to turn to internal problem-solving strategies or even tech tools to help them instead.

It isn’t just teachers that have this problem; Dan Meyer has often lamented the fact that math textbooks can be far too helpful as well.  (His blog subtitle, “less helpful,” is a phenomenal reminder to all of us.)

Perhaps Maria Montessori said it best: “Beyond a certain point every help given to a child is an obstacle to its development.”

I’ll say it this way:  To ensure that our students don’t become helpless, we as teachers must help less.

 

Talk Less

One thing is becoming clearer and clearer to me with each day I teach: the days in which the students learn the most are the days in which I lecture the least.

When I talk less, there is more time for the students to discuss the topic they’re learning.

When I talk less, there is more time for students to think deeply about the topic they’re learning.

When I talk less, there is more time for students to actually do work related to the topic they’re learning.

When I am talking to the whole class, no matter what the topic is, some students already know the material and are bored, other students are not cognitively ready for the material and are lost, and even some of the students for whom the material is at the correct difficulty level are too distracted to learn in that format.  (One caveat: this only applies to the times when I am talking to the entire class.  The time I spend talking with students one-on-one or in small groups is extremely valuable.)

I suspect the same is true in your classroom, so along with me, consider this challenge: how might you be able to drastically reduce the amount time that you spend talking to your entire class?

Musicshake: Helping Students Compose Music

When a student is creating a video, podcast, or presentation of any sort, sometimes a bit of background music is just what is needed to make the student’s piece shine.  Trying to avoid copyright issues, many teachers direct their students to websites that contain existing samples of copyright-free music.

Musicshake (http://edu.musicshake.com) takes this to the next level by allowing students to create their own copyright-free music.  Even students who don’t have a musical background will find Musicshake’s user-friendly interface fun and easy to understand.  Students of all ages will enjoy the creative freedom offered by this innovative, new music-making tool.  (My own son, a fourth grader, intuitively picked up on how to use it right away.)

A school-wide membership for one year costs just $499, and this allows students to create an unlimited amount of music.  Musicshake also offers a free two-week trial, so before you start your next big multimedia project, I’d suggest giving it a try!

For more about Musicshake, check out the video below:

The American Math Challenge

This year’s American Math Challenge is set for this coming Wednesday and Thursday, October 12th and 13th, 2011.  Open to students in kindergarten through 12th grade, this fun contest allows students to test out the very-popular Mathletics website, which usually costs money, for free.  Prizes are awarded to the top individuals and teams.  Last year my third grade students were the 6th place class in the country, and we’re hoping for similar success again this year!  Highly recommended for teachers and parents alike (as you can sign up an individual student as well as entire classes or schools) — check out www.americanmathchallenge.com for more information.

I Have Seen the Future of Education… and I Weep for the Children

Financial cuts to schools have been severe here in Michigan, and now that any fat has been long since cut from school budgets, school districts are turning to more and more drastic measures to survive.  Today’s example: three elementary schools in Kentwood, Michigan, have begun filming “lead teachers” and streaming these live videos into multiple classrooms.  In each of the additional classrooms, an “interventionist” being paid $91/day circulates around the room to answer questions and make sure the video is working.  The district is saving $400,000 this year as a result of this setup.

I feel like I have seen the future of education… and I weep for the children.

Someone might object, saying, hey — if this saves money, why not streamline our educational processes?  Why not take this further, actually, and get a world-class teacher and presenter to teach 5th grade math to every 5th grader in the country, with a $91 interventionist in every single 5th grade room in the U.S.?  Imagine the money we could save!

My answer is this: children learn best when they have a meaningful relationship with their teacher.  They also learn most successfully when their teacher can differentiate the material to meet their needs.  As we move toward a mass production model of schooling, we abandon both of these things: student/teacher relationships and content differentiation.

Teaching Computer Programming to Elementary Students: Scratch, CodeAcademy

Looking for a way to get your elementary and middle-school students interested in programming at an early age?  You might try introducing them to Scratch, then taking your more advanced learners over to CodeAcademy.

Scratch, developed at MIT, is a user-friendly introduction to programming that allows students to program in pre-written blocks of code called scripts that help new programmers avoid the frustration of one missing semicolon messing up a whole chunk of code.  Completed projects can be uploaded to the Scratch website where they can be viewed, commented upon, and even improved upon by others.

Code Academy teaches students (or anyone) to program in JavaScript.  It uses quick exercises that build upon each other and slowly increase in complexity, and in a manner similar to other online tools such as Khan Academy and IXL, awards badges and points for the successful completion of these tasks.

Although it might be tough to justify devoting major chunks of class time to this with your entire class, either of both of these sites would be outstanding for use in an elementary or middle-school tech club format.

Michigan MEAP Cut Scores Raised

It’s official: after months of haggling over whether or not to increase the cut scores on its state assessments, the Michigan State Board of Education decided today to raise cut scores across the board on Michigan’s MEAP tests.  The new cut score of approximately 65% in all subjects seems reasonable, but if students perform as they did last year throughout the state, massive percentages of children won’t pass.  Check out this graph about the MEAP math test:

Can you imagine the outcry when the scores change from 95% of third-graders passing the math section of the MEAP test plummets to just 35%?  The reason 95% of Michigan’s third-graders passed the math MEAP last year is because the cut score was set at just 34%… on a multiple choice test… with just three answer choices per question!  So clearly the new 65% cut score is a step in the right direction in terms of accurately depicting student progress.  (Especially considering that with a 65% cut score, a student who knows 48% of the material and guesses randomly with average luck on the other 52% will pass.)

How will the state suddenly explain to the public that 65% of third-graders around the state, when tested in the middle of October of their third-grade year, know less than 48% of what they were supposed to learn in second grade?  We know we have a financial crisis on our hands here in Michigan; now the public is going to be much more keenly aware of our achievement crisis as well.

BradsDeals.com

Teachers are some of the most important people we know. Unfortunately, they’re also some of the most chronically underpaid. And yet our nation’s teachers spend an average of $462 of their own money on classroom supplies at back to school time.

That’s why BradsDeals.com has assembled this incredible list of stores offering teacher discounts. Teachers can save money not just on school supplies, but also on restaurants, tablet computers, well-deserved vacations and more.

The list continues to grow and evolve, so be sure to add it to your bookmarks or pass it along to your teacher friends. Teachers who saved the bucks earning an online teaching degree will still find this site useful!

BradsDeals has assembled a lot of information about back-to-school shopping. The statistic I quoted at the beginning of this post comes from Back-to-School by the Numbers, an eye-opening infographic all about how teachers, students and their families spend their money during the back-to-school season.

“Back-to-School by the Numbers” originally posted on BradsDeals.com