AltSchool, an Experiment in Education, Raises $100M
wired.com
wired.com
I wish more people would grok the basic principles of Montessori and just focus on doing those right - because when it's done well its perfect and really doesn't take much structure. My wife runs a Montessori school from our home and has been a teacher for almost 12 years now. She has found that the more hands on she is (and other teachers are) with the students, the worse the outcomes are. As practitioners we see a lot of junk that claims to be "Montessori" but doesn't really stick to the principles. These are primarily: self directed learning and building a community for exploration and creativity.
The best Montessori schools have agreements with local warehouses/mills/shops etc... where children can do internships and apprenticeships. Having "curricula" like the article states is generally antithetical to that and kills a large portion of what makes Montessori so successful - which is pupils taking prepared "vocational" paths which are liberal in educational scope. It's simpler in the long run but takes much more up-front work and I think the technology is there to make that up-front work much easier.
The real challenge is fitting these types of schools into the larger "schooling" world of standardized tests etc... One thing we found was that many students leave Montessori because the clearest path into college is through the testing system and Monetssori doesn't play well with that. That is what needs real reform.
Also, as an fyi, one of the better montessoris in our area (montessori academy of chicago) has taken a big bite of the standardization area by aligning common core with the classic montessori didactic system.
I agree in theory, but have yet to see another system as flexible or robust with any actual, measurable history of good outcomes at scale. All other systems seem to be on either extreme - either too much "freedom" and the kids never learn, like Summerhill, or are too focused around some oddly specific dogma, like Waldorf.
Our trust in standardized testing is dependent on the expectation that teachers cannot accurately assess the skills and competencies of their students during regular lessons. To free schools to approach education however they want we just need to find a way to reliably assess students without the need for a centralized gatekeeper.
If the process of developing/proctoring/critiquing assessments was partially standardized (to allow for distribution and certification of assessment elements) and linked to student performance data then we could both reliably integrate this kind of assessment into regular lessons while also mitigating the need for expensive standardized tests.
There are some hints of this in the article; as a HS teacher I'd love to see assessment overhauled in this direction.
The most positive thing I've heard about Common Core is that a federal standard will mean out-of-state transfer students will be more likely to be on the same page as current students.
Private schools tend to pick and choose the best kids and have significantly higher suspension and expulsion rates eliminating the "problem" children. Public schools on the other hand, have to accept everyone from the hyperactive to those with learning disabilities.
When we try to control for these effects, often there is little to no difference between these custom approaches and standard ones. Montessori for instance does customization and outcomes are effectively the same as public schools.
I suppose though even if the end result is a cheaper and highly replicable education system, it could become quite successful as a company.
Here's a study that found the opposite: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/students-prosper-w...
Indeed, in our data, previous authors’ specifications rarely explain a substantial portion of the selection into the relevant privateschool sector, raising the possibility that the weak-instrument critique may hold for this literature. This point is corroborated in work by Ludwig (1997), who also finds compelling evidence that prior authors’ instruments are weak.
The meta analysis you cite makes no mention of Montessori. It's talking exclusively of public vs. private. There are public Montessori schools, and (obviously) non-Montessori private schools.
Every math teacher I've ever met has said the key to mastery of math concepts is practice and repetition.
So, if we go back to our 5th grader, and algebra comes up for him/her in the customized lesson plan, does that mean for the next year, algebra cards are going to appear, with a set of problems to solve, and links to... what, wikipedia pages that explain how to solve them?
What happens when the kid decides he/she doesn't want to "explore" math anymore? Does that kid just not get a math education, at that time? Are we going to have 16 yr olds who never figured out that "exploring math" is going to be a key to being a competent adult?
I'm sure what I wrote is quite commonly brought up and an answer exists, but I do wonder what that answer is -- to sum: what do you do when a kid doesn't want to "explore" an area of knowledge that we as adults know is going to be critical to functioning as one of us in the world?
At least, that's what I got out of the explanation. It's chaotic in that every student needs to be guided differently, and AltSchool is using technology to make that guidance easier for the teachers to apply across individuals. The idea is not to lose students in the crowd, but also not to let them lose themselves in the chaos.
If this is where private/public school is headed, I'll stick to homeschooling/unschooling my kids, thanks.
There is the problem where motivated and largely well-off parents find that the public education system doesn't suit the unique interests and learning styles of their children. This sort of school seems like a wonderful experiment to address this sort of problem.
A second, largely unrelated problem is the under-funding (in CA for sure, perhaps elsewhere) of public schools, given the expectation that these school systems rectify the serious motivational and educational disabilities students develop in communities with high concentrations of poverty and violence.
I'd argue that the latter problem is the one that has serious societal consequences if we don't get it fixed, sooner than later.
I hear this often. I'm curious, do you have a dollar figure in mind that would be appropriate?
http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/2015/01/29/how-st...
What the 'right' value is subject to debate, but as a parent in SF having negotiated the tragicomic SFUSD system for my own children, I'd wager it's a lot closer to New York's 19K per student than CA's $9K.
This is pure speculation, but my subjective experience is that CA funds schools at close to the minimum possible level, and that there is a lot of headroom in which every dollar extra spend causes an immediate improvement in service and richness of experience.
I say this because one of the differentiating factors of the most-desired schools in the SFUSD is the large amount of extra money parents bring in via fundraising.
Yet even the most successful schools, which raise on the order of half a million dollars, are only adding something like ~$1K per student.
Yet what they offer above and beyond comparable schools without that funding bump is very evident: all the 'enriching' staples my own generation took for granted as par of public education: art classes, PE, green space, staff with expertise in supporting kids with differing needs (at both ends of the performance/ability spectrum)... etc etc etc.
I have also observed that affluent parents who privilege education also both prioritize and have the luxury of donating their time -- no small thing in a city in which a single-income household is mostly unthinkable.
So that extra $1K may be multiplied by donated time, as well.
But any way you slice it, a few extra K per student, judiciously spent, would make a hell of a difference in my parts.
That said, a dollar raised and allocated by the parents, in accord with parents' priorities, and subject to their audit, is probably much better spent than one squeezed through the SFUSD.
QED non-profit charters (of which there are several) are currently a very strong bet in SFUSD...
The school had two copiers on the entire campus: one for the teachers that was always broken, another for the administration that was magically in great repair. I had a french teacher who finally flipped and stormed the admin copy room, refusing to leave until he'd made the copies he needed to teach his class. They put him on leave pending a psychiatric review.
Buildings falling apart, bus service discontinued. Violence and an attempted shooting that was only thwarted through sheer dumb luck.
I was fortunate that my family moved to Texas between my sophomore and junior years so I was spared the worst of it. Just after I left, the school ended all advanced classes and extracurriculars. AP classes gone. The band only survived due to a strong booster organization.
A complete disaster in what was once the heart of America's dream. I was practically in shock when I started at my new school in Texas where the district seemed to have unlimited funds: I was in the first graduating class of the most expensive school ever built ($77 million).
I told a teacher there that copier story and he couldn't believe it.
Is New York a baseline for efficient spending and "best-outcome-for-the-buck", so to speak?
Also, in California, a good portion of education spending goes towards retired teachers' pensions http://www.mercurynews.com/news/ci_28061244/how-does-an-educ... so seems calculating the "per-student" spending should involve subtracting those fixed obligations.
As a first order approximation around 15k/student in major metro areas and at least 75% on direct classroom spending which is less than NY, but well above CA costs. (AKA band, sports, standardized tests, and super attendant salary’s not in that 75%.)
PS: The highschool graduation rates are rising which is a good sign. But, a lot of students still drop out. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/02/u-s-high-sch...
For areas where children often have serious problems associated with poverty and violence, I'd argue for even higher state funding.
If you really want to make a difference you need to address the broader audience and do something like charter schools.
> “It’s not hard to model language acquisition if you can listen to every word a person is saying,”
This is patently false big data hubris, which I’m afraid bodes poorly for the rest of the rest of their approach. I study early language acquisition and have worked on some very large datasets (e.g. Speechome, http://www.ted.com/talks/deb_roy_the_birth_of_a_word), and there’s a lot you don’t know about the language system of a child even with a complete record of utterances and videos of everything that happens. Higher density/quality data is fantastic, but to understand language acquisition or to understand the progress of a single child you have to work out a complex system of latent variables. Education is similar— the biggest thing is that there is s different mixture of explicit pedagogy vs. observation.
I’m all for school reform that leverages technology but this misunderstanding of data, in conjunction with the for-profit aspect, leaves me pretty convinced that this isn’t the right direction.
The other thing that caught me off guard was:
> “and wearable devices that help keep track of students off campus”
I did a double-take. Why does this school track the kids off campus?
The complete lack of criticism eliminated the last shred of credibility Wired had in my mind. I don’t care if you think this is a good idea or not, tell me who doesn’t think it’s a good idea and why.
So they don't get lost on field trips?