Archive for 'Education Crisis'
Surveillance in the Classroom
Posted on 06. Sep, 2008 by reg.
Read this article today over on the Global Scholar blog and I just could not keep from commenting:
Surveillance Cameras in the Classroom
When students know that their misdeeds are being captured on a video surveillance camera, I believe that it can help enforce discipline with those at risk children. It also can clearly document to their parents or guardians their misdeeds in the classroom.
If this is what we have come to as a society then something is seriously, seriously wrong. Leaving all the Big Brother elements aside, a lot of this rings true to much of the Gatto reading I’ve been doing lately. For instance, here’s something by him I read a couple of days ago:
In the training ground of the classroom, everything is reduced to bits under close management control. This allows progress to be quantified into precise rankings to track students throughout their careers — the great irony being that it’s not intellectual growth that grades and reports really measure, but obedience to authority.
I have a host of problems with the thought of children being filmed in the classroom as a means to curtail bad behavior but here’s the biggest issue I took with the blog post:
It was written by a guy who does public relations for security companies.
As someone who works in public relations for a security companies, I had asked my wife why her school hadn’t placed security cameras into her classroom.
What business does Global Scholar, a company whose tagline reads “Empowering the world to learn”, have allowing someone who is paid by security companies to write a blog post about why we should feel good about videotaping children in classrooms for the express purpose of monitoring bad behavior?
Is this a bit unsettling to anyone else?
(Note: Click on the image in this post for the definition of irony. :))
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One Laptop for You, One Laptop for a Child in the Third World
Posted on 17. Nov, 2007 by kareem.
The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project has a special deal over the next two weeks. It’s simple:
Buy an OLPC laptop for a child in the developing world, and you get to buy one for yourself. It costs $400 total, but $200 of that is a charitable donation for the laptop you donate.
You can buy them at LaptopGiving.org, but only for the next 10 days. After that, no laptop for you!
Bill Clementson has a great description of the OLPC laptop. For me, I’m excited about it because it runs Linux, weighs less than four pounds, has a battery life greater than 10 hours, and I’m sure will be hackable to high heaven. I’m excited about the possibility of developing on such a portable, rugged machine.
So if you’re a geek, or want to buy a cheap laptop for your child while buying one for a kid in the third world, head on over to LaptopGiving.orgin the next 10 days and do some good.
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College Will Kill Your Entrepreneurial Spirit…
Posted on 12. Aug, 2007 by jon.
Interesting perspective.
College Will Kill Your Entrepreneurial Spirit While Simultaneously Turning You into a Worker Bee
Not sure I agree 100% but the fact is that our current educational system doesn’t incredibly bad job of preparing people for the world that we live in. That’s in large part because the current education system was developed in a period in time where the skills required of people coming out of college were much different than the skills that are required today. Today most of the most successful and fulfilled people today are entrepreneurs living out their dreams and following their bliss. However, schools don’t really teach that. In fact, they pretty much teach the opposite of that.
I’m excited to help “be the change” on this one. I encourage you to do likewise. :)
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Why Learning isn’t a Means to an End
Posted on 06. Aug, 2007 by kareem.
It’s actually an end in itself, which is something this testing-focused culture of ours seems to miss.
This short animated video was commissioned by the guys who did South Park, and illustrates this beautifully. (thanks Eric)
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Let’s Build a New System
Posted on 11. Jun, 2007 by kareem.
Educational consultant Barbara Brier writes about how the current educational system can’t be saved, and references a phenomenal post by Tom Haskins.
After reading smart people like Dan Pink and Sir Ken Robinson, understanding how technology is changing our lives, and speaking to several teachers recently who all echoed similar sentiments, I think she’s right.
Most attempts to fix the system are incremental. Things like “stronger, more consistent curriculum standards nationwide; lengthening the school day and year; and improving teacher quality through merit pay and other measures.”
How about re-imagining what learning could be like, and then going to build that?
We have the luxury of not being the incumbent, but we have the challenge of trying to institute change from the outside.
Either way, something needs to be done.
So, off to write some more code…
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Turning Teachers Into Rockstars
Posted on 30. Apr, 2007 by kareem.
From the NYTimes last week on hedge fund manager salaries:
To make Alpha’s list, a manager needed to earn at least $240 million last year, nearly double the amount in 2005. That is up from a minimum of $30 million in 2001 and 2002. Combined, the top 25 hedge fund managers last year earned $14 billion — enough to pay New York City’s 80,000 public school teachers for nearly three years.
Doing the math means that each NYC public school teacher makes, on average, $58k per year.
Now, last year a report on education in the US found that this country is on the brink of an educational crisis:
The Teaching Commission notes that “our schools are only as good as their teachers,” yet this “occupation that makes all others possible is eroding at its foundations.” Top students are far less likely to go into teaching today; salaries are stagnant; nearly 50 percent of new teachers leave within five years. To remedy this, the commission calls for raising teachers’ base pay, finding ways to reward the best teachers, raising standards for acquiring a teaching degree and testing would-be teachers, on the basis of national standards, to be certain they have mastered the subjects they will teach.
People don’t work for money, they work for meaning. But when the disparity between the upside of working at a teacher (avg 58k to maybe 80-90k after a lifetime of service) versus working in another white-collar job (6 figures after a few years, up to $1.7B if you’re the hotshot hedge fund manager) is too large to ignore for many of the most talented folks.
The question then becomes, how to close the upside gap between being a teacher, and working in another, more lucrative job?
There are incremental solutions, like the findings in this report released by the Center for Teaching Quality in North Carolina. It calls for pay based on performance, and not seniority… rewards should go to teachers with better-performing students, and to teachers that do more work outside of the classroom. We fully endorse that idea, but there are more dramatic ways to close the upside gap.
The way we’re approaching it here it to help teachers scale their expertise by enabling teachers to reach more students. The best teachers in the world shouldn’t be constrained by physical walls that enable them to reach a few thousand students a year at most. Those best of the best should be rock stars, and should make more money than crappy teachers whose lectures you have to struggle to stay awake in.
Helping education scale effectively is a problem we’re working to solve at Education Revolution. It excites me that by achieving this, we’ll not only be incentivizing super smart people who might otherwise go into I-banking to help the world become a smarter place, but also help drive change in an industry that badly needs it.
