Startups may be able to help: http://imaginek12.com
While I'd like to believe that startups could help, I find it fairly unlikely. Most entrepreneurs I see in the education space don't seem to be experts in education theory/research, so most of the time their products seem to be only making things worse. And if the general public were well-educated enough to tell the difference, there wouldn't be nearly as much of a problem to begin with.
John Hattie in his book Visible Learning: A Synthesis of Over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement
http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Learning-Synthesis-Meta-Analys...
reviews a lot of research studies from a lot of countries and suggests that that view, although it is conventional wisdom, grossly underestimates the importance of schools. I agree with you, because the data agree with you, that the most stark differences in school performance are among different teachers in the same school rather than between one school and another, but throughout the Western world, students with tough home conditions tend to get the lousiest teachers and the most underperforming curricula.
Other writers who have important points to make about how to help learners with the worst home environments by improving schools include the collaborators from Teach for America who have put together the book and website Teaching as Leadership
http://www.teachingasleadership.org/
and Eric Hanushek at Stanford with his research on the effects of variance in teacher quality.
http://edpro.stanford.edu/hanushek/content.asp?contentId=60
There is a lot yet to be done that is very feasible (well, except for politically feasible in most states of the United States) to improve the education of the most disadvantaged learners and to help them reach significantly higher levels of academic achievement.
"reviews a lot of research studies from a lot of countries and suggests that that view, although it is conventional wisdom, grossly underestimates the importance of schools. "
I do think it's important to note though that you can believe that the achievement gap is mostly coming from home factors, while also not underestimating the importance of school. That is, you can believe that all kids are basically receiving an equally crappy education. You're certainly right though about the kids from the worst home conditions getting stuck with the worst teachers within schools.
In terms of data, here is the graph showing how SES effects achievement for school kids:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1655696/SES_and_school.jpg
It's a little difficult to read, but basically what you can see is that poor kids and rich kids learn roughly the same amount in school. The reason there is such a big gap is because A) there is a large gap that already exists when they get to Kindergarten and B) while rich kids are learn over the summer and get smarter, the poor kids are actually forgetting what they've learned the previous year.
If you want to learn about why there is already a 2 year gap before the kids get to kindergarten, you should read the book Meaningful Differences In The Everyday Experience of Young American Children.
The finding about within school differences vs. between school differences comes from the Coleman report, which is one of the largest social surveys ever conducted, and still one of the most important to date. I also have a blog post here explaining a bit about why within school differences are important:
http://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2009/02/the-most-im...
If I remember correctly efficacy of preschool is mixed, and it depends a lot on the type of preschool. However, even the best preschools can never be as effective as good parenting at imparting language schools, for reasons that the Meaningful Difference book explains. (However, preschools may be good for other reasons.)
"The disadvantages that poverty imposes on children aren't primarily about material goods. True, every poor child would benefit from having more books in his home and more nutritious food to eat (and money certainly makes it easier to carry out a program of concerted cultivation). But the real advantages that middle-class children gain come from more elusive processes: the language that their parents use, the attitudes toward life that they convey. However you measure child-rearing, middle-class parents tend to do it differently than poor parents; and the path they follow in turn tends to give their children an array of advantages. As Lareau points out, kids from poor families might be nicer, they might be happier, they might be more polite; but in countless ways, the manner in which they are raised puts them at a disadvantage in the measures that count in contemporary American society."
Undoubtedly?
> The issue is not so much, I believe, in the "goodness" of the parenting, rather, it is in the richness of the environment.
In the US at least, there are free yet rich environments. If you're poor, you do have to get out of the house and seek them out.
So, what definition of "better parenting" are you using?
I would argue that pre-school attendance could be a very strong indicator of parenting quality, if we can even try to quantify such a thing.
On the other hand, lack of pre-school could indicate a parent taking the pre-schooling responsibility upon themselves and providing a rather spectacular "home pre-school" environment.
I think Khan Academy is honestly about education more so than schooling.
The general public can tell the difference which is why choice in education is a no-go, and the compulsory system remains in place.
That's the problem I have with Khan academy. That is, the lessons are factually correct, but they have no soul, and at the end of the day I think that's bad pedagogy.
I.e., if we "reconceptualize education" to connect it to hinduism's 4 life stages [1], what outcomes will change? How can we measure the "soul" of a lesson, and what happens when a lesson lacks "soul"?
[1] As far as I know this is only a meaningful concept for Brahmin and Kshatriya men. But I guess since they are the highest castes, they are the ones who's mysticism we should adopt.
A good proxy would be just looking at whether something was made by an artist, or a committee. E.g. Feynman's lectures were those of an artist, whereas most textbooks are created by a committee. (And then they get someone with a PhD to add their name as the author after the fact.) It's clear to me that Kahn's lessons are more in the style of the typical textbook, rather than in the style of someone like Feynman. You can't measure it, that's the point. If you could measure it then that's the first sign that something is wrong.
"But I guess since they are the highest castes, they are the ones who's mysticism we should adopt."
I'm not advocating the hindu model per se, only using them as an example of a society where schooling is framed in terms of a larger model... In their case one that includes work, marriage, wisdom seeking, preparation for death, etc. It's not clear to me that this is the right approach for western society, but I do think it's worth looking at for inspiration.
In that case, I can tell you that you are very wrong. Khan's lessons have lots of soul. Not only soul, but also invisible dragons that breath the fire of knowledge!
I'm sure this isn't universally true, but just like many other fields, expertise in technology should let new people disrupt the field. Education, being highly regulated, lacking real feedback mechanisms, government funded, etc., is perfect to disrupt.
My state has had a state law that finances districts equally by enrollment since the 1970s.
http://www.house.leg.state.mn.us/hrd/pubs/mnschfin.pdf
Actually, the districts with the highest concentration of low-income families have long received extra funding per pupil compared to the majority of school districts in the state. For more than twenty years now, all public schools anywhere in the state offer open enrollment to all students anywhere in the state, up to the limits of the capacity of each school district to receive students.
http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/Academic_Excellence/School_...
So if students don't like what is on offer in their local school district, they can shop around, and take their state funding with them, by trying out another school district's offerings of courses and teachers (and classmates). More students enrolled means more state funding, so school districts make efforts to provide attractive programs that will bring students across district lines. This competition among school districts has promoted innovation in programs and resulted in a fair amount of interchange among students who live in different neighborhoods. School districts compete with one another by offeringprograms for fine-arts-inclined students, or students who desire language immersion programs (Spanish immersion and Chinese immersion programs are both hot programs in Minnesota), and students with many other characteristics. Some school districts gain almost half of their enrollment from open enrollment, and correspondingly some of the historically worst school districts in Minnesota have lost large percentages of enrollment to families crossing district boundaries to look for better schools. (Minnesota also has a huge number of charter schools, which is a distinct form of competition for publicly subsidized students, but they cannot offer some of the programs that public school districts can.) This competition keeps all districts accountable for providing a good learning environment, and helps change the psychology of teachers and principals dealing with families from one of treating learners as a burden to one of treating learners as an opportunity to be grateful for.
Any other state in the United States could do the same, and a few already have.
http://educateiowa.gov/index.php?option=com_content&task...
http://www.ecs.org/html/offsite.asp?document=http%3A%2F%2Fww...
abolishing private schools
Abolishing private schools is a distinctly bad idea (as shown by the example of the Netherlands, where multiple kinds of schools receive public funding on a per-capita basis) and anyway is unconstitutional in the United States. The last major effort to abolish private schools in a whole state was sponsored by the Ku Klux Klan (which didn't like Catholic schools) and was overturned by the United States Supreme Court.
http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=6094501649208458...
Furthermore, the game may be rigged against poor students, but it isn't rigged by the rich. It's rigged by the teachers unions. Some schools that serve poor children have the highest per-student budgets in the nation (see: DC). But they still perform abysmally. Rich parents have the free time to browbeat administrators of low-performing schools until things change. Poor parents are too busy trying to make ends meet. Their children are stuck with whatever the bureaucracy gives them.
This is why school choice programs have displayed promising performance in many low-income areas. They allow students to escape quagmires of union-driven mediocrity. It's interesting that you would want to get rid of the best chance for poor children to get a good education! The DC opportunity scholarship fund increased high school graduation rates by 20% by sending poor kids to private schools. That's a big deal - having a high school diploma substantially increases lifetime earnings.
True to form, the unions killed the DC Opportunity Scholarship fund after only a few years of operation. It's hard to make change for the benefit of the poor! But fortunately, the house Republicans brought the program back with their electoral sweep in 2010, so we will get to continue to monitor its results.
I was explicitly told in school that it was. Sure, getting an education is important; but the race aspect - specifically, against repeating a year - was hammered home.
[1] http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-11-06/disadvantaged-students...
The rich can run for office much easier than the middle and lower classes.
The rich can monopolize new markets by simply undercutting new entrants.
I'm sure there's many more examples than this of how by concentrating vast wealth to a few people you cut out opportunities for everyone else.
Indeed, much of this is predicted by public choice theory,
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PublicChoice.html
http://perspicuity.net/sd/pub-choice.html
http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/publicchoice.htm
which predicts that interest groups who have money to gain from a particular policy will fight harder to get their way on that policy than will voters in general who might gain more from a different policy.
In education policy, there is HUGE access to the legislative process (especially at the state level, where most education policy is made) for the schoolteacher labor unions. The general public doesn't get the same kind of place at the table, by far. But politicians are not embarrassed by that. They call special access for special interest groups "taking care to consider the point of view of stakeholders," and don't think about policy in terms of what's right in the abstract, but rather in terms of what's expedient for staying out of political trouble. A quiet majority of inadequately educated Americans struggling to find time for political participation while making ends meet has less voice in the process than a vocal minority of wealthy people whining about "class warfare," and also less voice than a minority of people employed by publicly funded schools who are not held accountable for results.
Most of our productivity comes from what we learn at our jobs, especially when our jobs (as you say) include a good portion of "school". Helping your children land good jobs is a very good way of passing on skills.
...As measured by standardized testing, on a good day, and when you analyze the data the right way. And who knows what sorts of longterm problems KIPP could be causing in these kids and within their communities.
The fact that the 'best' idea in educational reform is basically just taking kids away from their parents for virtually all of their waking hours shows that America is on its last legs. We no longer have the cognitive infrastructure necessary to transmit learning from parents to children, so I think KIPP is really just a hail mary attempt to try to buy some time before the whole system collapses.
This is an exaggeration. At most, programs like KIPP show that our lowest performing households no longer have the cognitive infrastructure necessary to transmit learning from parents to children.
EDIT: just read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Is_Power_Program#Crit..., which is certainly interesting.
There's very little data, which is the main problem. In terms of books about KIPP, the one I've read is Whatever It Takes, which is about Geoffrey Canada, who founded the Harlem Children's Zone. I'm not sure if this school is technically affiliated with KIPP proper, but it used the KIPP model.
It's very difficult to explain the problems with KIPP. Basically you need to take a really good look at how the kids are actually spending their days, and then compare it with what we know about child development, educational research, best practices in various fields, research data on student achievement, etc. I don't think there is any way to understand it without having a solid background in education theory, education research, cognitive development, psychology, early childhood education, history, and even things like organization behavior and management theory, etc. The problem of what makes a good school and a good classroom is insanely complicated, which is why we've been using basically the same model since WWI.
Forget the theory. The theory might tell me why some measurable effect occurs and generate a complicated model of how it occurs. But without delving into theory, you can certainly tell me what the measurable effect will be. E.g., "KIPP students will have 10% lower math scores in year 2-4 of college," or something like that.
There isn't enough data to say.
"But without delving into theory, you can certainly tell me what the measurable effect will be."
Cognitively, I'd be most concerned about whether the program would be harming their executive function and their intrinsic motivation. I don't see any value of trying to predict specific metrics though, beyond identifying specific metrics to look at once more data exists.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Is_Power_Program#Crit...
Basically: they have prerequisites for parental involvement (i.e. your parents have to be willing to work at your schooling too), and a high attrition rate (i.e. they throw out the underperformers). That's not a random sample, it's self-selected for people who do well in it.
This doesn't mean that it's a bad idea, or that it doesn't work. But it means you have to be very careful about pronouncing it "working well."