Daniel makes stuff, and, in his spare time, writes about things like movies, kid culture, and geek stuff.
Finland's Education Success

A short BBC video report about Finland’s educational success: the country’s schools score consistently at the top of international ratings, despite the fact that their pupils study the fewest number of class in the developed world. The video is succinct, but captures well what makes Finland’s education system work.

That success really all comes down to a few things: a strong sense of trust – both in students and in teachers and schools; a pedagogy based on deep, meaningful, long-term relationships between students and teachers; and a relaxed, non-competitive culture of education, where learning is seen as natural and is valued and encouraged by everyone in society.

Those sound like simple solutions, but believe me, that kind of culture takes a lot of hard work to establish – especially when you’re up against the status quo. That may be one reason why private or chartered alternative education settings – like Montessori, Reggio-inspired and Waldorf schools, and democratic schools like Summerhill and Sudbury, as well as Unschooling – often do so well; they start out with a blank slate when creating that culture, and the people who get involved with them are either open to or have already bought into the new culture they’re inspiring. That’s not the case with regular public schools, where you’re often working against entrenched values and thinking.

Apr 14, 2010 :: Tagged under: , , , :: #

Charter Schools and Student Performance

Paul E. Peterson gives a long, relatively boring lecture about education markets, charter schools, and a few other things I didn’t bother to pay attention to for the Wall Street Journal.

I’m cranky today, and even under the best of circumstances I don’t tend to like it when people talk about education as if it were an economic good – and simply opening up schools to the market would improve their “performance.” (Note for future rant: What the blazes is school “performance”, anyway? Who decides what it is, and how is it decided? What measures is it based on? Does the decision process give due weight to the ever-emerging importance of creativity in education and society? And semantically, are “performance” and “competition” – both quantitative concepts – really the best way and measure to characterize the complex, holistic process of learning?)

So take of Peterson’s essay what you will. I’m personally sick of the macro-politics of education. That said, I do like how he describes the real charter schools play in education systems:

What makes charters important today is less their current performance than their potential to innovate. Educational opportunity is about to be revolutionized by powerful notebook computers, broadband and the open-source development of curricular materials (a la Wikipedia). Curriculum can be tailored to the level of accomplishment each student has reached, an enormous step forward.

If American education remains stagnant, such innovations will spread slowly, if at all. If the charter world continues to expand, the competition between them and district schools could prove to be transformative.

I think he’s fundamentally right, there. The mechanism of charter schools is all about providing opportunity for breeding innovation in our pedagogy.

EDIT: The New York Times has a roundtable debate about the same topic of charter schools. Interesting perspectives all around.

Mar 16, 2010 :: Tagged under: , , :: #

A Quick Fix for America's Worst Schools

By Gilbert Cruz for TIME Magazine.

Alright, a few quick thoughts here:

  1. There is no “Quick Fix” for education. If there was, we would’ve found it long ago.
  2. While I’ve been generally supportive of charter schools as a mechanism that would allow for a broader spectrum of educational philosophies and more focused school leadership – I don’t see how turning the charter school idea into, in essence, a corporate takeover of schools is at all a good idea. If the Duncan education department is serious about making charter schools work, they’ll have to lay out some pretty clear guidelines for parties who are interested in setting up charters (including the requirement that they be a nonprofit and articulate a clear educational vision and philosophy).
  3. We’re relying on the same criteria for measuring school performance as before when establishing charter schools, but not stopping to consider whether the measurement tool itself is faulty? Depending on your own purposes for education, there’s a valid argument to be made that you just can’t simply quantify the true benefits of education into testing and congregate school scores. Something more’s gotta go.

Mostly, though, I think if we’re to be serious about education reform, the number one question that has to dominate our efforts has to be: What is education really about?

The actual mechanism or mechanisms for how we enact education reform matter far less than the philosophy that drives our efforts. Education in Sweden and the Netherlands, for instance, operates on a voucher-based but seems to consistently fulfill their cultural expectations for education (as well as rank consistently high in global education ratings). Sure, I think there’s zero chance that a voucher system would be (immediately) a good thing in the states – but the point is, in Sweden and the Netherlands it seems to work fine as a mechanism, given their cultures and philosophic expectations of education.

I’m not providing much of a fleshed-out answer here, but I will say this: My instinct is that the real key to “fixing” education doesn’t at all lie in the mechanical elements of structure – but rather, in the cultural arena, with how we approach education altogether.

Feb 15, 2010 :: Tagged under: , , :: #

California's Charter School Revolution

By Daniel Bigler :: Sunday January 10, 2010

Alan Bonsteel, president of California Parents for Educational Choice, comments for the San Francisco Chronicle about what he sees as the coming impact of the Los Angeles school system’s recent mandate to convert almost a third of its schools to either charter or magnet schools:

This is public education’s fall of the Berlin Wall. The old model of the compulsory, one-size-fits-all, factory-style public school is being tossed on the scrap heap of history, to be replaced by upholding the U.N. Charter of Universal Human Rights, which guarantees the right of parents to direct the education of their children.

Someday soon, all of our children will be enrolled in schools that their families have freely chosen and that give them the sense of community, even of family, that will keep them in school and get them safely to graduation day.

Some bold hopes, and I do want to believe a “fall of the Berlin Wall” moment is close at hand for education.

As always, though, the capacity for positive change is up to the overriding philosophy of education behind such efforts. The Charter School Movement may or may not provide such a breath of fresh thinking; it is, in a sense, philosophy-less – at its core simply a mechanism to hand over control from a centralised structure to local bodies. If you were an optimist, you could say that charter schools are an attempt to tear down bureaucracy, empowering local schools, their administrations and finally their teachers to do what they think is best given their own unique context. Theoretically this could indeed allow for a broader diversity of educational approaches and philosophies, like the use of emergent curriculum and project-based learning methods – teaching philosophies that are far more child-centred and process-minded, and I believe the key to real innovation and reformation in America’s Education.

That said, there’s a certain wariness toward charter schools that comes when folks such as Bonsteel portray them not as laboratories to experiment with innovative educational approaches, but as bastions of parental choice in education.

In order for them to be successful, there needs to be some differentiation for society-at-large between the Charter School Movement (as a mechanism to allow for broader philosophic diversity in education) and an educational system based on vouchers (which allow for parents to theoretically “choose” what they see as their child’s best education). Vouchers turn education into an economic good and encourage parents and communities to treat it as a commodity, whose value is derived from test results and academic achievement; charter schools allow school administration and faculty a relative degree of autonomy, and a sense of permission to experiment with educational structures and approaches to see what best fits the community of kids they serve.

Really, it comes down to this question: Who is education about?

If it’s about society and the desire to maintain the status quo, then the standardized one-size-fits-all public education model we have now is the way to go.

If it’s about parents and what they want, then implementing a voucher system will do the trick in delivering the goods there.

But if education is going to be about the children themselves, then we need to come up with a system where their voices are heard and incorporated into the process, and where teaching practices and school structures are immediately responsive to their needs. And that’s no easy thing to pull off, even if you have the charter school mechanism helping you out.

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A Tale of Two Charter Schools

The Washington Post examines two major new studies on charter schools and their effectiveness, compared to public schools.

The bottom line? With contradictory findings from each study, it’s a wash.

“The people who said [the charter school movement] was going to be the greatest thing since sliced bread were wrong,” said Robert Maranto, a University of Arkansas professor of education reform, who counts himself in that group. “The people who said it would be a calamity were equally wrong.”

The rest of the article is spent weighing and dissecting the two studies and their methods and findings – bickering, I suppose, about the technicalities. Fundamentally, though, I think we’re asking the wrong question; instead of comparing charter school results to public school results (typically by means of standardized test scores), we should see how the two structures can work together on a macro level.

As a means of educational reform, charter schools have to be more than just a change of administration: charter schools have to be vividly distinct, fundamentally different in core philosophy and approach. That’s when the charter school funding mechanism works best – when it gets needed, adequate funding to alternative approaches, schools that will re-consider the core fundaments of education. That studies like Hoxby’s and Raymond’s can even examine the same standardized results of charter schools worries me; it means we’re not making the most of the charter school opportunity.

Nov 30, 2009 :: Tagged under: , , :: #

A Battle of Words Over Charter Schools

Following up from the thoughtful look by Jessica Luallen Horton at Obama’s and Duncan’s recent “Race to the Top” educational initiative, teaching veteran Nancy Flanagan considers more specifically the role of charter schools in public education:

Ideologically, I’m with Dewey on this one: I want the best possible education for all children, the kind of carefully chosen options my own children had.

One more thing: I think that positioning charter schools as the opposite of public schools, rather than a necessary supplement to public education, has poisoned the discourse. And—it goes both ways. It’s not just public schools and public school teachers being skeptical (or downright nasty) in their remarks about charter schools. Public school academies—charters—seem to be bent on repeating the worst sound bites about public schools, whether they’re strictly true or not, thereby displaying the aphorism that your mother repeated when you were seven years old: you don’t make yourself look better by tearing someone else down.

The many charter schools I’ve visited have been just cutting edge in their practice – there’s no other way to put it. They’re innovative in ways that just aren’t fathomable in a typical public school structure, because they’re allowed to do things differently. They’re allowed to question. And as Flanagan mentions, they also have “potential resources that public schools do not, beginning with positive public assumptions and PR” – which go a long way in building up a supportive culture for the school and children.

Despite the assumed structural problems associated with allowing them recourse to public resources and funding, charter schools play a crucial role in contributing to the “Broader Dialogue” about Education. At a time when we need more than ever to be asking those big questions of what education is really all about, charter schools seem to be the ones doing just that.

Nov 13, 2009 :: Tagged under: , , :: #