Category Archives: research

To Would-be Education Reformers

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I really, really want to encourage you to take this suggestion.

Reading what you have written all over the internet, and listening to you at public hearings, it appears that you have a crystal clear idea of what should happen in schools to make them places that best support student learning and growth. In all seriousness and sincerity, I want to invite you to start a charter school that fully implements your instructional approaches and other philosophies. I encourage you to do this because you can only gain so much credibility from the sidelines. If you really want to drive ed reform in this state, start your own school and demonstrate how much more effective your way of doing things is. People are much more likely to listen to results than rhetoric. It’s easy for policy makers to ignore an armchair quarterback / critic with no academic credentials in education, but when your school’s CRT results top every other public school in the state, no one can ignore you any longer. And if charter schools aren’t your cup of tea, then start a private school. That process is even simpler.

Either way, replace your argumentation with results. Replace it with your own results from your own school where you’ve implemented your own model. Show everyone how to do it rather than just telling them how they should do it. This will move your agenda along SIGNIFICANTLY further / faster. Heaven knows you’re currently spending more time on other education reform-related “activities” than it would take you to actually open a school and start making things better for Utah’s children.

Highlights from Aspen Institute Education Congressional Senior Staffers Meeting

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Here are the things that stood out to me most during the three day meeting. Sorry for the brain dump format.

Moorseville, NC moved graduation rates 68% to 90% since the move to devices and all digital content
Two professional development release days PER MONTH for faculty to skill up on digital and using data
Small group differentiated instruction, almost no whole-class instruction
Superintendent visits every classroom in the district multiple times each year, primarily to say thank you to the teachers.
Funding model – $1 / day / student ($200/year) pays for devices and content. Average cost for online content was $35/student across all subjects.

We have to avoid the “Kabuki” version of education reform, a kind of innovation theater in which everything changes except adult behavior.

429M in 2011 in pure VC is triple the amount spent in 2002. About 128 education companies received about $1B of VC money in the last 5 years.

When devices have battery life lasting 4 hours, but school lasts 6 hours, power infrastructure in “first world” schools is suddenly insufficient.

Pearson can scale its content and services, but has no accountability for student learning outcomes. A charter has accountability for outcomes but can’t scale. We need organizations that can scale and share accountability for outcomes.

We have learning scientists, but where are the learning engineers? The people who leverage and apply what we know from the science of learning to help learning happen? Political skills are equally important for these folks. (Why isn’t this instructional designers?)

Scaling in education involves adapting, not adopting.

Genetically modeified food as a model for revise/remix. How can we produce “hybrids” that can succeed under local conditions? Super high yield corn may grow well in Iowa, but die completely in Africa. A lower yield hybrid that can at least live and produce in Africa is required.

“Research should be defined as doing something where half of the people think that’s impossible. And half of them think …eehhhh, maybe that will work. Whenever there’s a breakthrough, a true breakthrough, you can go back and find a time period when the consensus was, well that’s nonsense. So what that means is that a true creative researcher must have confidence in nonsense.” – Burt Rutan

Open Textbooks, Saving Over 50%, and Learning the Same Amount of Science

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Our new article is out in IRRODL! Abstract below; read the whole article here: A Preliminary Examination of the Cost Savings and Learning Impacts of Using Open Textbooks in Middle and High School Science Classes.

Proponents of open educational resources claim that significant cost savings are possible when open textbooks displace traditional textbooks in the classroom. Over a period of two years, we worked with 20 middle and high school science teachers (collectively teaching approximately 3,900 students) who adopted open textbooks to understand the process and determine the overall cost of such an adoption. The teachers deployed open textbooks in multiple ways. Some of these methods cost more than traditional textbooks; however, we did identify and implement a successful model of open textbook adoption that reduces costs by over 50% compared to the cost of adopting traditional textbooks. In addition, we examined the standardized test scores of students using the open textbooks and found no apparent differences in the results of students who used open textbooks compared with previous years when the same teachers’ students used traditional textbooks. However, given the limited sample of participating teachers, further investigation is needed.