A plan!

For about 9 months now (how symbolic...) I have been looking at the state of education, trying to figure out what is wrong with it and how to bring the education system up to speed with life outside the system. From the very beginning, some people around me expected me to know what I plan to do. But I was only in the beginning of learning the current status, and I was careful not to have a plan too early.

A few months later, I already felt I have some initial level of understanding about what's going on, and even a few opinions about directions for improvement. It was clear that some form of central regulation will be necessary: Probably different than what we have in most countries, but it still has to be there. It was also clear that ongoing systematic research is part of any picture if the system is to keep up with a rapidly changing society. I also started thinking about the need for freedom of choice regarding the types of school we wend our kids to, going towards more of a market economy in education. To the disappointment of some people around me, I still had no plan regarding how to get from the current state of affairs to a more desirable one.

In the past few months, even I started to expect myself to generate a plan - a roadmap - for getting from here to there. The current state is clear enough, and is very far from any desired state I can think of. The desired state seems to have three main pillars: A market economy of school options, a central regulation system which is minimal and strict, and ongoing research supported by all players. Building such a tripod so it's accepted and self sustaining is a very-long-term project: Decades. I don't know how to make a plan for 20-30 years, and so far I haven't found anyone who does know. Still looking.

But one can make definite progress even without a specific plan specifying every step. Anyway such grand plans tend to change considerably through months and years of friction between the plan and reality. Creating a market economy of schools would take a serious change in the attitude of the political system in almost every country - way too difficult without a good plan. Creating an alternative education system may be less difficult, since it's more technical. But there is still much political involvement and social beliefs issues here. The public relations challenge makes it a tough target. So regulation is not a great first target. Research is the third main pillar, and it may be the best candidate.

Research is not a new idea. Universities all over the world conduct educational research. Research journals publish educational research. Education establishments make incremental changes according to research. Frustration about the limitations of such research is being expressed and discussed. Doing something about research would not be like entering a completely new field, and should not generate nearly as much opposition as the other issues discussed above. Another advantage of working to improve research is that doing this doesn't commit anyone to being a revolutionary, which is not in everybody's comfort zone. Research is well within the consensus.

So Research it is.

The plan for the next 2 years is to create FIRE: Facilitation Institute for Research in Education (temporary name; suggestions are welcome), along the lines described in the previous entry. As can be understood from the name, this institute is not in itself a research institute, but it concentrates on facilitating research done by others - those already inclined to conduct research. The aim is to remove obstacles and make it easier to conduct research.

Resources put into the institute will be leveraged several times so they are going to have a great bang/buck ratio: A dollar (Euro? RMB? ounce of gold?) and a work-hour put into the FIRE can help, for example, to validate a questionnaire. This validated questionnaire can help a student convince a professor that a certain worthy line of research is feasible, thereby attracting several dollars and many work-hours for the research itself. If this worthy research, together with others that follow it, has actionable results, it may attract may more dollars from the state in pushing a change in even a small aspect of how education is pursued. If successful, the effect on society is difficult to break down into dollars and hours, but after the several levels of leverage, the potential effect for every unit of investment in FIRE is gratifyingly significant.

FIRE in itself should steer clear of any agenda or opinion regarding education. But we should accept the fact that many of those who want research to be done, do have their agenda. This is fine, as long as FIRE can make sure the research and the results are not bent towards the preconceived interests. To allow parties with inherent interest to support and enjoy the facility, FIRE should provide a mechanism for donors to donate money towards specific research or specific lines of research. The mechanism should include careful accounting to make sure the donation goes in the specified direction, and that the donors get their due recognition for their donation, together with transparent traceability between interests and research supported by the interests.

Creating FIRE as a one-stop-shop for supporting educational research: All of the above under the same roof, or at least in a group of affiliated organizations, sharing information among them. This is the work plan for 2010-2011.

This can also be the subject of the next book.

Education Research - Facilitation

We know that research in education is done in a very different way from research in exact sciences, and practical engineering. I don't expect education to become an exact science any time soon. But it would be nice to allow education research to become a bit closer to the more rigorous disciplines, and to become a bit more practical - potentially leading to action. I propose that it is possible to create an institution that will systematically address most of the problems plaguing education research. The institution will provide such services and infrastructure to researchers, that will enable them to concentrate on their actual research subject, and not on the logistics around it.

An initial set of such services and infrastructure may contain the following:

Pooling of research-related materials, for easy access

• Pooling research questions
• Pooling existing validated research
• Pooling research requiring validation
• Pooling already-validated questionnaires
• Pooling annotated qualitative research, as a basis for proposing more research

Providing common resources

• Access to lab
• Video recording and transliteration equipment and services
• Translation services, to and from foreign languages

Academic support

• Questionnaire validation service
• Peer review service
• Support in designing the research
• Support in publication
• Matching academic mentors

Logistic support

• Financial support for research deemed “interesting” or useful
• Manpower support - e.g., students or school-kids as research assistants

Matching service

• Match researches with industry players for possible cooperation. For example, if a commercial company is looking into methods of teaching using a certain type of computer software, and a student is interested in research in the same area, a cooperation could be beneficial for both the student and the company, as well as for society in general
• Match researchers with relevant respected figures that will facilitate access to research subjects. For example, an anonymous student may have a hard time convincing a school-master to allow time-consuming interviews of pupils at the school regarding their physics studies. But if the anonymous student came hand-in-hand with a Nobel laureate in physics who is genuinely interested in the research... One might expect a more enthusiastic response from the school-master

Raw data collection

A previous blog entry mentioned difficulties in obtaining data about pupils and their environment: Grades, socioeconomic status, etc. The institute can solve much of that problem by maintaining a database with information about students along many years, to facilitate both longitudinal and cross-sectional studies, saving the researchers the bother of collecting the data and the normally prohibitive problem of legal/privacy/ethics issues. These issues will not just go away as soon as the institute addresses them, but the institute will have the focus and resources to resolve each of these problems even before collecting the sensitive information, so by the time a researcher needs such information, it will already be available.

General Public Relations

• Creating an atmosphere among schools, parents, and the media, that is conducive to such research. To maximize the tendency to cooperate
• Encouraging the academia to promote actionable educational research as an important part of an academic career
• Creating an atmosphere where it is ok - and worthy - to research anything, without fear of political incorrectness issues
• Encourage the public to develop an expectation from the education system to function based on research. Brand education as a scientific endeavor

An institution providing such services and infrastructure can be created and supported by many players in society, each with its own advantages and limitations.

The state is a natural source of support for such an initiative, and indeed the US government initiated a body named What Works Clearinghouse, which aims at being "A central and trusted source of scientific evidence for what works in education." That's a very good start and a good source for learning about what works in creating an Education Research Facilitation Institute.

Academia is best positioned to provide an understanding of what difficulties stand in the way of education research. But academia is not very sensitive to how actionable a social-sciences study is. It would take an uncommon cooperation between academics from social sciences and from exact sciences to take a hard look at how education research can be moved towards a more exact culture.

Commercial companies know best the difference between actionable information and merely interesting information. They also have an interest in conducting research and proving their product or service to be great. This, of course can be an incentive for companies to put money into the institute. But it also puts another agenda on the table in addition to finding the scientific truth, which is a disadvantage from the point of view of the institute.

Philanthropists are great potential contributors, since their agenda is more general than that of other players. One can find philanthropic donors who would be interested in advancing a research cause without worrying too much about political implications, academic prestige, or financial implications of the results of a research.

One more, semi-related thought: An interesting effect of involving commercial companies in such an institution, is that these companies work with a different type of time-concept than academia and the state. Commercial companies need results pretty soon after they decided they need them, not next school year, not after a certain publication, and not just before the next elections. This could lead the institute to become more quickly responsive, which can provide an opening for a sense of pedagogic urgency. A very happy side effect.

Education Research Impracticalities

Pure research is aimed at having something to say. Practical research is aimed at knowing what to do. It leads to action.

The hi-tech industry’s research labs generate the type of practical knowledge that can be translated into hardware and software: For example, IBM’s labs kept generating knowledge that enabled IBM to produce a faster, more reliable, less expensive computer hard-disks. Similarly, pharmacological research labs generate the practical knowledge necessary to produce medications with higher impact, lower side-effects, and longer shelf-life.

In social sciences in general, and in education in particular, research is something else. One of its aims is to generate a better understanding of how people behave, learn, etc. Often, though, we settle for just feeling better about our understanding, and don’t necessarily generate real knowledge: The type that can makes predictions that are verifiable and refutable. The type on which we can base action with some confidence. What if we try to cause a larger portion of education research to be of a nature similar to the research described above, used in different disciplines of engineering? We might get more actionable knowledge which will enable us to create educational environments and methods that will lead to better results, in a somewhat predictable manner. What a concept.

One main difference between engineering research and social-science research is that much of social-science research is qualitative, while in exact sciences and engineering, any research that is not quantitative wouldn't be considered research at all.

There are many good reasons for the use of qualitative research in education, and for avoiding much quantitative research:

One reason is that to measure anything, and to make a clear statement about the measurement, one requirement is the isolation of a single variable, or a very small set of variables. In social sciences such as education, this is prohibitively difficult. For example, trying to research a common question of interest to many: What effect does class-size have on the quality of education? There are many aspects of “quality of education”, so we would have to concentrate on a subset so small that it may be meaningless. A tempting, maybe even reasonable, focus may be the grades pupils receive. A quantitative research may analyze the statistical correlation between class size and grades. But how do we make sure other facts (variables) don’t get in the way? Whole classes of variables such as socioeconomic background, quality of teachers, the school infrastructure, pupils’ expectations of themselves and of the school, the social environment outside school, other schools in the vicinity, the characteristics – such as size – of the classes in previous years, the temperature, lighting and air quality in the class, the amount of ambient noise inside and outside the class, etc. It is truly difficult to isolate the interesting variables from all the others, when conducting research in the field.

A controlled lab experiment can do a much better job in isolating variables, but it has its own problems: Putting a small number of children in a lab for a short time experiment will not tell us much. Also, it is quite difficult to get around some legal and ethical issues, and your garden variety doctoral student doesn't want to concentrate on that. If we try to put a meaningful number of pupils (how about 2000?) in a lab, we run into major logistical problems. Then there is the timeframe issue: To make a meaningful statement, we may want to run an experiment for days, months or years. This exacerbates the logistic and ethical problems to a point that makes the notion ridiculous.

One might try to escape to just sending questionnaires and having people – pupils and former-pupils – answer them. Then surely it would be possible to hammer the raw questionnaires with statistical tools and get useful knowledge. Except one would have to first formally validate the questionnaires. This turns out to be such a significant undertaking, requiring expert attention, time, manpower and money, that “one” tends to be rather discouraged from doing it.

Ok, then. How about collecting masses of raw data about people, schools, etc, and analyzing that? Pupils' grades over time; pupils attendance information, pupils families' socioeconomic data, graduates' employment data, etc. Good luck getting the raw data. There are legal problems, privacy issues (some real and some used as a convenient obstruction technique), and the fact that the data is often not collected and stored systematically. It is next to impossible to obtain significant amounts of continuous data. Very few researches succeed in doing that.

Then there is the difficulty and academic disinterest in conducting follow-up research. There is the same problem with research aiming to verify or refute a previous research. There are potential political problems with generating knowledge about issues with social significance: The knowledge may contradict someone's beliefs, and we don't like our beliefs to be challenged. These days it is not such a big problem when researching physics, for example, it used to be - just asks medieval scientists. But it is always a problem with social sciences, which directly relate to our political, moral and religious views.

So, education researchers often fall back on the relatively safe field of qualitative research. And instead of using qualitative research as a starting point that leads to a more quantitative, accountable and actionable research, we are left with this qualitative exploration as the final product.

Assuming that we want to encourage more educational research that will conform to similar guidelines as those used in exact sciences, we would need to deal with many of the above issues. We don't need to make the problems go away completely; it's enough if we make it easier for researchers.

Learning & Knitting

I read a book, and I don’t talk to anyone about it. It goes in through my eyes, and out the same ear that discarded most of what I ever studied at school. The (truly fascinating) material in the book remains captured in its own context, and doesn’t interact much with what I already know, feel and believe. It doesn’t create many associations. The line of thought explained in the book is just hanging there below the plain of my existing state of mind. The slightest damage to that line – such as an idea I don’t understand – and the whole line falls down and disappears.

One remedy for that, is talking about what I read in the book with anyone. It makes me think about the text and paraphrase it – already creating another thread in the line of thought, which makes it more durable. The person talking to me about the book may have a related idea, adding more associations and context. I may have to explain to myself and my companion/adversary why I agree or disagree with something in the book, thereby creating ties between the line of the book and the plain of my own state of mind. In conversation, feelings can come up, creating more ties. The very fact that I hear myself speaking creates extra ties through my brain’s speech center and hearing center. The line of thought offered in the book gets knitted into my own ecology of thoughts. It is not quite as susceptible to being cut off.

This “talking about it” can take many forms: The book-reader may talk to friends in a group, and possibly read together – either by everyone reading the same text and then talking about it, or by each member reading different parts and then talking about it. Another form is that of teaching others, which has similar effects, especially if we allow the pupils to ask many questions and don’t let the teaching degenerate into declaiming.

Even talking to oneself – having an “internal conversation” – can do much of the job. Internal conversation may be done by stopping the reading occasionally and thinking about how the material relates to one’s life, knowledge, feelings, beliefs etc. Writing a blog or a book is another form of “internal conversation”. Even the ancient custom of annotating a book one reads (Yes, writing inside the book), is a useful way to maintain that internal conversation, thereby knitting a new line of thought into one’s existing mesh of thought-lines. For example, if I were to annotate the book on motivation I am reading (Motivation In Education: Theory, Research and Applications – an excellent book), I would have written a note where the book talks about self-efficacy (pardon the jargon), and I would have connected it to Churchill’s definition of success as “the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.” Where enthusiasm is connected in my mind to the self efficacy. It doesn’t matter very much if the connection is scientifically valid. What matters is that this connection helps me remember and relate to the new information about self efficacy.

This also gives an opportunity to illustrate the ability of conversation to knit new information not only to other academic knowledge, but also to emotional state: I find this quote from Churchill quite inspiring and exciting. Connecting the new idea to an exciting feeling gives the new knowledge an extra dimension. I now like the idea (an emotional statement) of keeping my self-perception and that of others a bit higher than what’s warranted by real capability. I am more likely to do it – act on the new information and make it part of my life.

A major problem with frontal teaching/lecturing, is this same problem of lack of conversation. The teacher’s speech is a long thread of thoughts, which hangs detached from the pupils’ life. Even if the teacher develops the ideas beautifully, they can remain detached from the students and easily forgotten. The more chance the pupils get to associate the new material with existing context, the better they are likely to incorporate the new knowledge into their lives. For this to occur, the conversation – either external or internal – should be quite lively for each student. This may be done best in small groups – 2-3-4 students talking things over. In a classroom, whether it has 40 or 20 or 200 students in it, many individual students will naturally stay out of the conversation, and the studied material will stay out of their mind.

An inner conversation is possible when there are pauses in the speech of the lecturer or when the book-reader pauses often. Otherwise there is no time to make any extra knitting connections, other than those explicitly presented by the lecturer, which are often disconnected from the listener’s state. One way to create such pauses is to allow for questions. An often retold story is that of Isidor Rabi, winner of a Nobel Prize for physics, who was once asked why he became a scientist. He replied: "My mother made me a scientist without ever knowing it. Every other child would come back from school and be asked, 'What did you learn today?' But my mother used to say, 'Izzy, did you ask a good question today?' That made the difference. Asking good questions made me into a scientist." Asking questions does not only create conversation, but the asking in itself indicates an internal conversation is already going on.

One more method for creating an internal conversation, and associatively knot new information into the existing mesh, is to browse the Internet. The individual browsing the Internet leans-forward and naturally skips from one issue to an associatively related issue. An extra benefit of that activity is that it is under the control of the individual, which means they can pause whenever they want, go back and forth, retrace their own thinking (thereby making it more explicit), etc. Internet browsing as a useful learning tool is not yet well understood.

To better understand conversations in general and Internet-internal conversations in particular, and in line with one of the main themes emerging from this blog, here are a few research questions:

• “Does learning using the Internet have different qualities related to the internal conversation?”
• “Does conversation improve learning?"
• Studying without intermissions
• ... With a few intermissions (short/long)
• ... With many intermissions (short/long)
• ... With/Without conversation among pupils
• ... Different types of conversations
• Pupils teaching each other
• Arguing points
• ...
• “Does conversation have a short/long term effect?”

Questions for Research

There are many open questions that are worthy of being studied in formal research. Below, a few very basic questions are asked, each with a simple description of the research. Details about how the research is to be done are outside the scope of this text.

1. What knowledge and skills do we retain from what we study at school? Test for knowledge and skills we got at school, at different ages and professional groups
6-year-old version: Do we remember what we study?

Age-groups:

• 60 years old
• 40 years old
• University graduates in their 20s
• University applicants

Professional groups:

• Hi-Tech
• Administrative / clerical
• School Teachers
• …

Knowledge subjects:

• Algebra - Basic concepts: quadratic equations
• Trigonometry - Basic concepts: Sine, Cosine, Tangent
• History - facts learned in school
• Literature - facts about pieces studied at school
• …

Skills subjects:

• Arithmetic - addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, percentage
• Algebra - linear equations, quadratic equations
• Trigonometry - Basic concepts: Sine, Cosine, Tangent
• Reading
• Writing
• Foreign language studied at school
• Dealing with a historical / current affairs text

Type of questions:

• What is this ? (Sine, quadratic equation, Marshall Plan, …)
• Did you study this ?
• Solve this (arithmetical problem, algebraic problem, trigonometric problem)
• Write a paragraph or two (writing)
• Read and comment on a paragraph in a foreign language
• Listen and comment on a spoken text in a foreign language

Nice to have:

• Correlate with past grades
• Correlate with measurements/indicators of success is life

============================================

2. What knowledge and skills that we studied at school are useful to us outside school setting?
6-year-old version: Why do we need to study this?

The research is similar to number 1 above (and could be conducted concurrently), but the main question type is:

• Did you ever use this skill or knowledge outside school settings?

============================================

3. What skills do we acquire indirectly by studying at school, to what extent do we retain them, and to what extent are they useful to us?
6-year-old version: If I don't need this, why do I still have to study it?

When considering the study of subjects and skills that are of no direct interest to the whole population of students, we hear that by studying X, we learn to do Y, as an indirect side effect, or "collateral learning." It would be very useful to test the validity of this assertion.

Based on the answers to research questions 1 and 2 above, we can ask questions about the types of school study that did not leave a direct impression. A simple approach would be to guess the indirectly acquired skill and try to detect indications for it, based on the directly taught subject. A slightly more sophisticated approach would be to test for many skills, and try to correlate the results with subjects and skills studied.

Some examples of possible indirect learning to check for:

• Check for reasoning skills that may have stemmed from studying algebra or calculus
• Check for space perception that may be linked with studying geometry
• Check for studying skills (dealing with an unfamiliar text) that may have been improved by studying history
• Check for self expression ability in writing or speech that may be improved with studying literature and art
• Check for critical thinking skills that may be developed studying any standard school subject
• Check for scientific thinking habits based on studying physics, chemistry or biology

================================================

There are probably hundreds of good research questions even without drilling down much. The questions above are just a few examples of the most simple questions. I bet the results would be somewhere between fascinating and shocking.

Scalability

When developing the architecture of a technological project, a major consideration is that of scalability: The architecture's ability to increase in size without falling apart, keeping its usefulness across the increased volume or scope. Designing a piece of software to handle 10 users is often very different from designing such software to handle 10,000,000 users. Just ask anyone who created a web application and was unlucky enough for it to be too successful too quickly - It tends to crash miserably.

The same issue comes up when considering a business idea or business process. How few customers and how many customers can the same business mechanism support, and keep fulfilling its duty - making a tidy profit?

The discussion about scalability is not special to any type of human endeavor. But in the context of this blog, we can note that the same issue of scalability is paramount when considering the architecture of an education system. Building a new school, based on great pedagogic ideas, is wonderful. It is done often, but its direct impact is limited to the people who come into contact with that school: Pupils, teachers, parents, families. Building a network of schools will impact many more people. It is done much less often. Building an education system for a whole society, such as a nation, impacts everybody. Many nations do it just once, close to the creation of the state, in great haste.

To illustrate the issue of scalability, let's take a single aspect of building schools: That of finding and training teachers. Scaling from a single instance to a network to a comprehensive system presents not only different orders of magnitude of the quantity of work, but also different quality of the task. When creating a single school, one can call up a dozen or two of the best teacher one knows, and enlist them in the project. When creating a network, one needs hundreds of great teachers. That's probably more than any single school founder knows. This requires a process of finding and screening teachers. Already a very different task than for the single school. When creating a national schooling establishment, finding the right teachers is not enough - there aren't enough of them. It is necessary to get prospective teachers to apply, screen them, then train them, and probably re-screen. Again, very different tasks than for the single school or network of schools.

Beyond the issue of staffing the teachers positions, there is a host of other tasks that are done very differently for a single school, a network, and a national system. For example - at no particular order: Financing, locating buildings, addressing the community, obtaining learning materials, establishing a curriculum, finding students, administration, public health, providing care for special needs, dealing with students at the low end of achievements, dealing with students at the high end of achievements, discipline, legal liabilities, teaching methods and certainly quite a few other issues of which I am blissfully ignorant. This type of scalability issue may be called "Administrative Scalability". (The reader is welcome to suggest a better name)

Founding a school, a network and a system is one aspect of the scalability issue in education. Another aspect is that of introducing a project or any change into an existing environment. Managing change in a classroom, school, network or national education establishment calls for very different type of work, not just amount of work. Promoting enthusiastic involvement in a project to be implemented in a single school, can be done by the leadership of a single person - maybe the principal. For simplicity's sake, assume the project involves only teachers, and none of the other stakeholders. Bringing teachers into such emotional involvement in larger scales requires first the involvement of all the principals to such an extent that the principals themselves will not only follow the lead of the initiator (say - the minister of Education), but they should be so fired up about the project that they can be the effective leaders in their own schools. In a national education system, there are too many principals for a single initiator to appeal to. Replicating the enthusiasm may require one or more extra layers. The transfer of enthusiasm, of emotional involvement, of the belief in "the way", should be complete, otherwise the project will lose sight of its original meaning, which is sadly the normal case. This type of issue may be called "Scalability of Leadership."

There is another issue of scalability which appears in a whole different dimension: The dimension of time. A school is founded, based on great ideals and the great capability of its founder. Great teachers join the school, all full of enthusiasm and competence. What happens after a few years? The founder-leader doesn't stay forever. Some leading teachers may go their own way. The teachers may have new ideas and may not agree with each other. The same goes for parents of pupils. New pressures appear from the ever-changing society around the school. All too often, a great new school loses much of its greatness within a decade or two. We need to maintain the spirit of an educational environment - of any scale - for the long run, maintaining the momentum and transmitting the spark from one stakeholder to another, so it remains alive regardless of the particular persons who leave or remain within that establishment. To do that we need something we can call "Scalability into the Future." Or we can call it a better name if we find one.

When venturing to create an education system, it is imperative to keep in mind the various aspects of scalability. This way the dream stands a slightly better chance to be realized, and to be comprehensive and long lasting.

Arguing About Schools

The intention of this blog entry is to organize my own thoughts so I have a reasonable refuting response to some standard claims. No hard feelings.

The standard curriculum in the standard school of your standard education system contains many subjects and sub-subjects: In Math, it usually goes from arithmetic, through algebra, to calculus. In history, it usually selects a few periods in the history of (white) Europe. In language and literature, it selects certain writers and periods. And so on, in several fields.

One may ask questions about the necessity of teaching everybody all these different bits and pieces of human knowledge, bearing in mind that most of us studied all these subjects until we got tested, then effectively forgot everything. Moreover, most of us never regret having forgotten how to solve quadratic equations - we never needed it. Most of us never need algebra - the last time we needed to find X was when a teacher threatened us with a bad grade. The huge majority of us never thought about the cosine of an angle after the last math test. Just to make sure this text is not a private vendetta: I personally have used algebra and calculus a lot after school, and I often enjoy it. It’s just that I recognize that I am in a small minority in that respect, and would like to alleviate the pain of my fellow humans, who suffered needlessly. Below are a few standard replies to this statement, together with refutations.

Disclaimer: This is not a valid study, but a collection of anecdotes that gives clear impressions. I am not aware of a serious study into these matters.

"School exposes kids to different options, so they can make a more informed decision about what’s interesting to them". It is the answer we got as primary school kids, and many of us still believe in it. I will try to address this claim.

• Person A finished studying the standard curriculum plus electronics and computers (which he chose). Then he worked for a few years in electronics, after having to go through a post-school course with a great teacher, so electronics would make some sense, which 3 years of school couldn't do. Still, the basis taught at school was indeed useful. Then he moved into computer programming. Having studied about computers at school was not very relevant to working: Whatever relevant knowledge acquired during the school time was acquired outside the curriculum. Then he moved into management. Nothing taught at school prepared him to motivating people, teaching, accounting, legal thinking, marketing, etc. Then he moved on to issues even more remote than anything taught at school. So, what he got from school, that served him, was: Literacy, English as second language, Arithmetic, algebra (calculus had to be relearned), and basic Electronics. The rest: Literature, History, Civics, Physical Education, Physics, Geography, etc. were irrelevant at best, and damaging at worst. The issues taught in K12 school which did expose Person A to something relevant to his life were actually chosen by Person A after not having been exposed to them in the standard school
• Person B finished standard school, and went on studying mostly education. Then she started working in the education establishment, working with people, teaching, researching - none of which had much to do with what’s taught in school. Then she moved into alternative medicine - again, irrelevant to school… K12 school contribution: Literacy, English, Arithmetic
• Person C finished standard school, and went on studying occupational therapy. Then she went on working in various paramedical jobs having nothing to do with what she was exposed to at K12. K12 school contribution: Literacy, English, Arithmetic
• Person D finished standard school and worked at a variety of jobs, mostly working with his hands, and occasionally studying what he needed to go to the next level. K12 school contribution: Literacy, English, Arithmetic

… You get the picture. It doesn't seem that school exposed these people to relevant options, though it did spend much time exposing them, to theoretical options which were irrelevant. A serious study would be interesting, but the reader is hereby challenged to conduct an informal review of people around them. I bet the picture remains generally the same.

"School teaches kids to how to study", so it doesn't matter much exactly what is being taught
That’s a great goal. Let’s see how our designated persons did:

• Person A never really learned how to study
• Person B remembers a single high-school teacher who had a positive influence on her ability to study, but she clearly remembers that going into university, learning to study was a shocking experience
• Person C never really learned how to study, even having earned a Masters’ degree
• Person D did learn how to study at school: At high-school he had such a bad teacher for a certain subject, that he had to teach himself to study
• Person E once said that his high-school did teach how to study (terrible statistical practice, introducing a new sample because it is “interesting”)

… This non-study humbly suggests that most K12 schools do not teach how to study.

"Young kids can’t be expected to know, and shouldn't be forced to decide what their future direction in life is"
True. The same is true for not-so-young kids, like 40-year-olds.
This should be used as a reasoning for letting kids follow their interests, giving them truly general skills that are likely to serve them in the future, whatever choices they make.
This should not be used as a reasoning for forcing the kids to learn a specific subset of the vast human knowledge, which will be soon forgotten and not likely to ever be missed.

"Different subjects taught at school are meant to practice general skills, rather than just the specific subject"
For example: Geometry teaches spatial perception; History teaches how to study, and how humanity works; Algebra teaches.... something.

First: Show me. There must be serious research showing such benefit, to justify spending most of the K12 years (13? 14?) studying material which is admitted by this indirect-benefit claim to be irrelevant in its own right.

Second: Spending so much time requires a serious discussion about which general skills need to be practiced indirectly. What about social skills, emotional resilience, the habits of learning, critical thinking, the ability to entertain ideas without committing to them or against them, teaching, non verbal communication, leadership, etc etc?

Without proof that useful skills are being effectively practiced, and without consideration which skills are even necessary, this indirect benefit claim doesn't have much substance.

“School teaches social skills”
In school, recesses are short, and teachers normally don’t take it to be their job to look for opportunities to improve children’s social skills. If we are lucky, the kindergarten teachers do. Looking around, including in the mirror, we don’t seem to be very good at conflict resolution, dealing with frustration, sharing, anger management, listening, being assertive, etc.

Unfortunately, school does not do a very good job promoting social skills.

“School provides general knowledge needed to be a valuable member of society. To converse”
This one may be true. We do want to create a cohesive society, with a common language, background and narrative.
Persons A-D know each other and occasionally meet. They talk about the state of education, about cars, politics, alcohol, raising children, security, money, social justice, management, astronomy and a host of other issues they didn't learn at school. They occasionally do talk about issues that resemble school material: They talk about history, but usually what they found out after graduating from school. They talk about books, but never in the terms taught at school. K12 school does provide a common subject to grumble about, but that’s hardly enough reason to maintain it as it is. Still, it needs to be acknowledged that much of the "commonness" - the indoctrination into society - is not very readily visible to us, and it may be that school provides a lot of it.

Rays of light:

• The “K” of K12 - Kindergarten - often does provide gentle exposure to options, teaching basic patience necessary for studying, practicing social skills and telling stories for the common narrative
• The first few years of school provide an essential basis of literacy: Reading, a bit of writing, Arithmetic, second language
• We can do so much better

Leadership

This is the stuff poems are made of. I will try to remain a bit more practical than a poem.

Leadership is a charged term. Everybody wants to read something into it. Two types of leadership are interesting in the context of education: they can be called Everyday Leadership and Great Leadership.

Everyday leadership is what's necessary in order to motivate pupils to go into class, to listen to the teacher and others, to participate in the lesson, to make an effort. Day in and day out. It requires - or at least can use - the ability to know each student's state of mind, and what stimuli would benefit the student in terms of keeping them on track or bringing them back to the right track. It would be good if every teacher were a good everyday leader. The good news is that there are quite a few teachers who are. The even better news is that this seems to be a somewhat learnable skill, so teachers can improve their everyday leadership, for the benefit of the pupils, and for their own benefit.

Everyday leadership in a school principal can motivate the teachers to do perform their grinding work, to deal with unmotivated pupils, unruly parents, insulting pay check, inflexible "system", uninterested politicians, etc. Again, happily, this ability can occasionally be detected in the wild.

Great leadership is necessary to inspire people to achieve great things. More than they would have thought is available to them. A great leader who is a teacher, can inspire the students to aim towards academic achievement, and not just to get by. A great leader who is a principal, can inspire teachers to become great teachers - to have a profoundly positive formative influence on their students. A great leader who is visible by the whole education system can inspire all the pedagogues and administrator to become great. This may also work the other way around: A great student can inspire teachers and others and bring some sparkle into their eyes.

The discussion of Great Leadership this is largely theoretical, though. There is a severe dearth of great leadership, in the education system as well as everywhere else. And it doesn't seem to be a learnable trait. In the absence of leadership, an establishment often uses substitutes: Scaring people into submission, bribing them into cooperation, turning a blind eye or two. A sad way to live. And it doesn't work too well.

What does work?

It is essential for the leader to lead by example. If the supposed leader doesn't lives up to the goals they profess, people may follow for a while, but not for long. Living according to one's convictions should have been very easy and natural, but the flesh is weak, and a surprising majority of us do not live according to our own ideals. Somehow this one aspect of the leader's behavior is especially important, since it shows others how to be leaders themselves. Having more leaders in an organization, who are active and pulling in the same direction, makes it more likely that the organization will move in that direction. To a large extent, people learn by mimicking what they perceive. Oh Leader! Give us something to mimic!

It is also essential that the leader is able to communicate effectively, so those around him or her keep working together in some sense, and not in random directions. In almost all cases, this communication should go both ways: The teacher should be able to receive: To listen and hear the students, and understand - better than the students - what they need, whet they think they need, what they want, etc. Then the teacher needs to be able to transmit: To let the students know themselves better, to let them know what their options are, and to encourage them to work towards the desired goals, whatever they may be. Communication skills are learnable to some extent, and thoroughly neglected by most schooling systems.

Yet another essential is perseverance. Without perseverance, with only occasional and semi-random actions, there may be at most occasional and semi-random success, with much sliding backwards in between. This also beings back the issue of leadership by example: If the principal gives up on getting old teachers to do a new trick (like email), why would the teachers persevere in getting the students to do a new trick, such as taking personal interest in their own studies?

The sense of being too busy and the dissipation and fading of motivation to do something beyond the minimum have much to do with leadership. People’s genuine interest often dissipates over time, and they need to be “remotivated”. Someone needs to blow air into our sails. This is one of the leader’s roles. This is what makes self-motivated / self-propelled people so valuable.

Great Leadership is related to inspiration. The great leader inspires us to be more, and as a side effect, to do more. It would be great if the education system always has someone - at least one - in the role of providing inspiration. Centrally provided inspiration and centrally provided regulation are two poles of a framework: Inspiration doesn't say anything about what needs to be done, but gives us the strength to be great. Regulation doesn't ensure we do anything valuable, but keeps us from doing much damage. In between, there is a wide space for every one of us to do good in our own way.

So, how was the poem about leadership ?

Wild Ideas - Send Them to Work

Let's start with "Spring Fever" in the context of school: Teachers know that when spring arrives, the pupils tend to become restless, and lose whatever tendency they had to learn. Probably the teachers themselves are affected by the light, sounds and scents of spring, and by their knowledge that the school-year is coming to an end. Sometimes schools use stricter methods of coercion. Sometimes they give up and start preparing for the end-of-year shows and ceremonies. For 3 months. Some educators try to change the way of teaching a bit, to get the kids' attention.

Here's a great idea that sadly is not originally mine: Send the kids to work in the real world. Outside the school. This will provide a good relief from that restlessness. It won't do much damage to the academic learning - which doesn't get far in the spring anyway. And best of all, working in the real world has some educational value that we usually skip throughout the school age:

• Perspective and context for what is being taught at schools, where and how it is being used by people outside the school. How it might eventually be used by the kids themselves

• Familiarity with the idea of working, together with ideas of real life responsibility, necessity, achievement and earning

• Familiarity with being in the the position of giving real contribution to society. How is that going to work for building self esteem on a real, rather than artificial foundation?

• Familiarity with different real vocations, as a basis for future choices

• Tapping into an almost forgotten educational method - apprenticeship, with all the advantages we lost when we moved to industrialized education

We regularly underestimate the ability of children to contribute, and undermine their own sense of such capability. Then we expect them to suddenly, upon graduation, become responsible contributors to society, to build a life. It's quite amazing any of them (us) eventually does take responsibility, and it is not surprising that it takes a long time.

Some practicalities:

Examples for school children's work in the first tier of include gardening, agriculture, postal work, cleaning and maintenance, ushering, restaurant work (ok, not as chef), etc. In the next tier, we can put more specialized work, such as clerical work, helping professionals such as plumbers, electricians, etc. Giving private lessons to children and adults, etc. The goal is to be able to include as many types of jobs as possible in the list of venues available to school children. One type of job - possibly compulsory, but not the only job for any kid, is to do teaching-related work for school: Teach smaller kids, teach peers with difficulties, prepare teaching materials, be a teacher’s assistant, administrative work, and more.

How to select the work for every kid? Give the kids a choice of work to do – not just a single job, but more than one. If the kid can only select one, they will almost always try to select something fun. But if they can select 3, they can be motivated to select 2 fun things, and one difficult choice. This is true for any learning choice, but also specifically for work choice. There will probably be more popular jobs (e.g., helping your local rocket scientist) and less popular jobs (e.g., cleaning the soot after launching a rocket). This difference can be offset by using incentives - more money, less hours, special favors, projects, extra studies - a bit like the method described in Walden Two for addressing the same issue.

One can expect many objections from parents. Below are a few that need to be addressed carefully and at length, but to keep some cohesion of this article, they are addressed here very briefly.

• “Waste of time” - Actually, it's salvaging time

• “Dishonorable work” - No such thing, as long as the job needs to be done

• “It’s too much effort for the kids” - Being overprotective. Effort is ok

• “The kids will fail” - The jobs need to suit the kids' abilities, so they don't fail too often. Sometimes they will fail. Failing is ok

• “The system is trying to make money off the kids” - Oversight is necessary to relieve this concern

• Legalities - Isn't that nice? These issues will need to be addressed

• Safety - This will have to be addressed on a job-by-job basis

All of the above is not totally new. Sometimes schools send kids to perform various tasks as volunteers (forced volunteering). Some - usually older - kids go and do some work to earn pocket money. Some kids need to help in supporting their families. But I am not aware of any education system that created a comprehensive framework to reap all the possible educational benefits from an organized experience of work. This article started with spring fever, but sending school-kids to work in the real world is so useful to them, that it should be thought of not as a last-ditch solution to a problem, but as an opportunity not to be missed.

The Impossible walking around as Possible

"The impossible walking around as possible" is a rough translation of a comment made by the writer S. Izhar. This phenomenon - of the impossible masquerading as possible - can be seen everywhere in human existence. Here are a few examples in the field of education:

• Not using kids’ tendency to teach

• Squandering kids tendency to learn

• Being a teacher being considered a low type of work

• Maintaining an education system that serves various interests other than the children and society

• No offense meant to the education system's personnel. It is natural for any organization to be committed to its own continuity and growth

• No offense meant to trade unions. It is natural for people of a trade to form a trade union to look after their interests. The problems begin when the trade union has more success than what's necessary to prevent victimization of the members. When the union is too successful, it just keeps taking care of the members' interests regardless of the damage it does to other interests. An organization can't just stop doing what it is designed to do

• Following what's natural to organizations can lead to impossible realities for individuals and society

• We are still doing early-stage studies about teaching methods

• After hundreds of thousands of years of of being human, and thousands of years of large scale civilization, we still don’t know how to do it

• Some people would object to this statement and say that we do know how to do it. They will have many different and contradicting views of what it is we know. Humanity does know how to grow wheat, and there isn't much controversy about the methods. The fact that we are not close to an agreement about teaching methods that work, shows that there is no unambiguous knowledge in this field

• Teaching kids in homogeneous age groups

• It can only work when there are dozens of kids of the same age in the same geographical area. This can happen only in a city - a of human dwelling type invented only a few thousand years ago. Theoretically thinking, it is highly unlikely that this matches the natural way for learning, designed into our brains for a very long time before cities were invented. Looking at differently aged siblings, or at kids in small communities, it is clear that teaching and learning takes place naturally when those kids who know more teach those who know less - either by example or by explaining

• Trying to teach kids by putting dozens of them in front of a lecturer

• Similar issue as with the homogeneous age groups - it fits massive groups, not natural to the types of smaller groups in which humans developed

• This may sounds like trying to be funny, but it is not the intention: Frontal teaching of a group makes sense for swarms, such as ants and bees; not for tribes

• Most of us got used to this state of affairs

Push, Pull, Design

As soon as anyone gets involved in education, they are exposed to the origin of the word “education”. It doesn't really matter much what the origin is, but it is a nice conversation (or blog-entry) starter. The origin of the word education is said to be the Latin educere, made of - ex- and ducere. “lead out”. This origin is often used to remind us that education has to do with bringing out what’s already there in the child. Yet the average schooling system works hard on pushing things from the outside into the student’s mind. In a time prescribed by the education system, a teacher prescribed by the system speaks the prescribed words about the prescribed issue, and the students must accept the lesson pushed at them. This can sometimes work, depending on the charisma of the teacher. But charisma is hard to come by, in any profession.

Alternatively, one can think of the origin as pointing to the idea of leading the student out of ignorance. Our school systems often try to yank the student out of ignorance, at a pace and content set by the system. And what does a normal human do when yanked? Same as a donkey - Resist! The system then tries to do what the average donkey-master would do: Beat the beast into compliance with either a stick or calling the parents; Bribe the beast into compliance by either giving it some hay or permission to go and play a ballgame.

A worthy goal in some schools of education is that of letting each kid set the pace and content of learning. The kids can pull information from various sources: Their environment, books, Internet, experiments. They can even ask the teachers for assistance. One of the questions here is whether enough kids will pull information and construct knowledge, skills and habits in domains that will serve them throughout their life. Many kids like to play ballgames. If we let them pull information and practice time, they may become good soccer or basketball players. Most of us will be uncomfortable with the idea that a student graduates a school being very good at basketball, but not quite being able to read. We talk about the freedom to pull anything, but we do have a hidden agenda of things we think would be good for the student to learn. There is a real benefit in having the student learn what is personally relevant to them and what they asked to be taught. There is also a definite benefit in developing certain specific skills. How do we get to enjoy both?

One way sometimes being attempted is to pull from the other end. The teacher pulls the pupil’s interest by asking questions. For example, the kid who likes soccer may be aware that many exceptional players come from South America. A teacher might want to use this to get that kid interested in Brazil and its history. Maybe by asking the kid what he thinks makes Brazil a place where great soccer players grow. In some cases, and with a skillful teacher, this can work well. But one danger with this method, is that the kid may not be readily pulled from playing a game to anthropological query. This may quickly deteriorate back into yanking the pupil around.

The question remains: How to reconcile what the kid wants (play soccer) with what the parents want (that the kid learns certain skills relevant for civilized life)? It would be nice if we can gently lead the students from ignorance towards worthy knowledge, skills and habits. This doesn't need to invoke the need for great Capital-L "Leadership", which is scarce. It does have to do with encouraging the desired interests in the kids.

Looking at ways to lead the kids so that their genuine interests are better aligned with those of the parents and society, we can start with extreme methods, and work our way back to where we feel more comfortable. The extreme can be represented by tricks such as those used by Derren Brown, who is able to manipulate a victim into wanting something, or into inventing something - exactly as Brown wanted them to. Hairy stuff, and by the way, this is not the worst of it. Using this sort of manipulation in the context of education would make most of us unhappy, and anyway it requires uncommon abilities that are not easily teachable. But it does point in a certain direction:

Designing the environment in which students play and study, can have an effect on what they are inclined to do and feel about learning. This is not a new idea. In many classrooms, one sees "targeted decoration themes" relating to the studied materials, such as the ABC, numbers, etc. These decorations sometimes include motivational messages, morality issues, materials that may enhance self esteem, and whatever the decorator thought conducive to a learning environment. Unfortunately, in most cases this design work is done as an afterthought based on overly simple guidelines, and not as part of a systematic methodology. And of course there is no feedback - there is no systematic checking of the actual effect of one design choice or another. This state of affairs can be improved: Persuasion design is currently mostly concerned with the effect of Internet web design on the tendency of a surfer to continue using the web-site. The same principals can be adapted to classroom, lesson and study-material design. The knowledge and method behind Derren Brown's work mentioned above, can be softened and used to encourage the kids in the desired directions.

There are pitfalls inherent in discussing a "desired" attitude: Desired by whom? By the powers that be? By the politician temporarily in control of the Ministry of Education? The immediate answer is "Desired by the parents." Since the system of education that emerges from this text gives parents the choice of where and how to educate their children, this should be an important part of that choice. Of course there should be some careful control here, like the control over the materials being taught. A question of regulation, which we need to address anyway.

For those who feel terrible about brainwashing, do bear in mind that what the kids want (and let’s reluctantly admit that - what we want) is immensely affected by the standard brainwashing by media - mostly TV, politics, market, … Suggestions are already there in abundance. What we may do here is add some suggestions that will hopefully benefit the kid rather than the commercial or political interest of someone.

One final thought: Imagine being able to get kids to have an attitude of curiosity rather than fear with regards to mathematics.

Premises... Premises...

A discussion about any topic is meaningful only if the participants in the discussion are in agreement regarding some basic premises. Otherwise, we get a normal political discussion - a mess of misunderstanding and anger.

There are a few such assumptions in the base of all the entries in this blog, and it would be good to make them explicit, so if some readers disagree with any of these assumptions, they can just leave this text alone, since it is irrelevant to their beliefs. No hard feelings.

Premises:

1. Learning is important

• Learning is important for the genius rocket scientist, brain surgeon or rocket surgeon, to learn the basics of their profession, and then to keep up with the new knowledge being accumulated by their peers and by experts in fields adjacent to theirs. This is what will make it possible for them to make the most of their genius

• Learning is important for the mentally retarded. If they can learn to talk well, to read or even to perform a job, this can enable a great improvement in the way they are treated by society and their quality of life

2. Kids' happiness is important

• There is a discussion about whether kids’ happiness is paramount, in the context of education. Some say it we should let the kids be kids totally, and let them learn only when and what they want to learn. Some say we shouldn't bow to a child’s every whim.
  The "happiness is important" premise doesn't get into this discussion. It just states that part of our responsibility is for the children’s happiness

3. Learning comes naturally

• Not only to humans - also to just about any other animal, but that’s beside the point

If the reader feels that these assumptions are true, then the rest of the blog should make some sense.

Knowledgebase Access Methods

It is not enough to collect a lot of data and organize it nicely. We need to be able to look at the data in a useful way. Security issues issues were discussed earlier, so now we are free to concentrate on the happier aspects of a database - useful access methods.

The database must be easily searchable. A good starting point of comparison for organized knowledge is an Internet search engine such as Google, but it's not enough for complex and statistical searches. We need the database to be easily computable. An initial anchor for comparison to computable knowledge is Wolfram Alpha. The Semantic Web is not there yet, and the tools we have so far are not enough. Internet search often fails to find and identify meaningful information. Computation inquiries often fail to be computed themselves. But we can dream, and this type of dreams does tend to come true soon enough. In the mean time, we can get ready.

Visualization tools for query results must be available. From simple interactive tools such as TinkerPlots, to complex tools such as Matlab. Since the former is specializes in schools, and the latter is a specialized tool for scientists and engineers, there is a lot of room for more tools suitable for the uninitiated public. Graphs, tables, statistical analysis - all interactive and intuitive, oh my. Gapminder has some interesting data nicely visualized with Google Motion Chart. It makes one optimistic about the near future visualization capabilities.

Another requirement of the knowlwdgebase is that it will be amendable by the public. Anyone with an insight will be able to add it - wiki-style. This means that notes, comments and tags can be added to any item in the database, and immediately become a searchable and computable part of the knowledge base. Naturally, an anonymous tagging will have to be marked as less dependable - part of the Knowledgebase Data. There can also be room for opinions to be entered into the knowledgebase. Some practices may be designated as suggested "Best Practices". As long as these are clearly marked as opinions, they can sit there without interfering with the consensus.

In addition to comments and tags, any ad-hoc analysis made by a knowledgebase user (the public) may be fed back into the knowledgebase. For example, if a lay researcher (any member of the public) discovers a meaningful rise in the test scores of a certain age group in a certain school district, this fact may be recorded in the knowledgebase, so it can become a building block for subsequent queries by others - like looking into the possibility that the school district superintendent might be doing something right.

With a powerful tool of any kind, comes the danger of abuse or misuse. In the case of a tool for managing information, this danger translates into disinformation, misinformation and misinterpretation. Disinformation and misinformation are quite successfully minimized in wikipedia, so there is room for optimism. Misinterpretation is a much tougher problem, since it leaves no mark on the knowledgebase, and therefore can't be corrected by those who know better. In a computable knowledgebase, this problem is even more severe than in a merely searchable knowledgebase, such as wikipedia. The only thing the knowledgebase can do to minimize misinterpretation of information , is to discourage simplistic analysis.

The most complete way to discourage simplistic analysis is to educate the masses to such a great extent, that everybody knows very well how to perform valid analysis. Forget it. Not even when the new and improved education system is in place. The human drive towards misunderstanding and simplistic views is too great, and this isn't going to change any time soon.

A less complete way is to nurture a healthy sense of scientific doubt: To encourage people to look at any result with a critical eye, bearing in mind the fallibility of data and of opinions that can be derived from it. This should be easier, since the late 20^th century and early 21^st century did a good job shaking our belief in any authority. Some see this as part of post-modernism. There is no need - or easy way - to educate the masses in general towards this tendency. The access venues to the knowledgebase can keep reminding the user of the limitation of the analysis. The access venues can also use some of their own background analysis to emphasize the doubt when appropriate: When much of the data at the basis of the analysis is tagged as not very dependable; when the analysis is based on a small amount of data; when there is extrapolation involved; when the system has detected similar analyses producing dissimilar results; when the system detects an iterative activity that may be an effort to fine-tune the analysis results according to a preconceived target, etc.

As usual, the problems and solutions described here are just a part of what reality is. It's the part that can be seen from the outside of the Research-Based Education project, and much more will become apparent the more we go into that project.

What was unthinkable a few decades ago - freely available statistics about huge piles of information - is now a mundane fact, with computers and the Internet being widely available. We need just a bit more than that in order to achieve real research-based education.

Knowledgebase Data

The Education Research Knowledgebase is the almost-physical embodiment research-based education system. It is one of the main benefits a school gets from “the system” in a semi-anarchic education system. The knowledgebase has two main attributes: Data organized and accumulated in a database, discussed here. And methods to access the data, discussed elsewhere.

The more detailed information exists in a database, the more information can be analyzed by the public, and the more informed the public can be. The Internet is a fine example of that. Or going to be some day. On the other hand, giving information to irresponsible people, is harmful to the system, to the schools and teachers, and ultimately to the very people who get that information. A trivial example is that of giving a violent parent the name and address of the teacher who failed his kid at a test. This problem is wider than the violent fringes: Giving raw information to the ignorant, gives the unscrupulous a good opportunity to shape that information in any way useful to them. See any hatemonger for examples. Worse yet, “the ignorant” is a pretty large group. It may even include people we meet in the mirror. For example, in the past few months we got a lot of raw information about Swine Flu. Bottom line: Should I worry about it? Is it dangerous for me and my loved ones? It is not all that clear to me. I am too ignorant.

The Education Research Knowledgebase should be widely accessible, in order to maximize its usefulness. The more people work with the knowledgebase, the more diverse ideas and thinking can go into it and come out of it. How wide? All qualified researchers and educators? All researchers and educators? All? Let’s go with All, as a working assumption, and we’ll see if we need to scale it back a bit. If we manage to stay with “All”, it will be a good step towards taking education seriously as everybody’s business.

In the current thinking about privacy, we must minimize the public’s access to the identity of individual students. On the other hand, the less details are available, the less information can be analyzed. A database open for everybody needs to be carefully anonymized.
Let’s consider a few types of details:

Individual student names must and can be kept out of reach.

Individual teacher names: In the current climate, they will have to be unreachable, though a culture can be created where the teachers don’t mind, and parents considering a school demand the information.

School-names: This item suffers a lot from the information-to-the-ignorant problem. One needs to have very keen critical thinking, coupled with considerable familiarity with statistics to avoid pitfalls in comparing between schools. For example, suppose School A has a 90% success rate in SAT, and school B has a 70% success rate. Most people will conclude (and nearly all people will feel) that School A must be better than school B. But maybe School A just pre-tests students, and prevents the less successful from even trying the SAT? Maybe School B takes those students dumped by School A, and manages to get an amazing success rate of 70%? Simplistic analysis is a danger, but instead of giving up and keeping information away from “All”, we can try to meet this danger head on, and remove it - See discussion of access methods. The school name is also a problematic piece of information because it is partially identifying: It can be used to identify individual students, especially in small schools. But this would take an effort of a data-savvy person, and such people are known to find all kinds of information, such as medical information, credit information, etc. even without a publicly accessible database. Let’s go ahead with “All” a few more steps and see how far we get.

Researcher details: Name, current activities, past activities, etc. Freely accessible. If a researcher wants to remain anonymous, it may be possible, but then the research has to be marked as suspicious…

Individual parameters: Date of Birth; Ethnicity; Address of residence; Medical history; Family circumstances, etc. These suffer from being partially identifying, and should be partially anonymized one way or another. For example, the date of birth can be rounded to the Month of Birth, and the Address can be replaced with a few measurements along lines such as affluence, altitude, air quality, noise level, etc. Alternatively, the types of analysis can be limited so that such partially identifying information will not be visible for groups smaller than 100 people.

Test scores: Individual (anonymized); Association with school; Association with teacher (anonymized for now); Association with individual parameters etc. All can be freely accessible.

Individual choices, such as courses taken, associated with dates and correlated with any other information in the database. These are also partially identifying and can be partially anonymized, and then be made accessible.

Research dependability quotient: Calculated from details such as the number of times the research was repeated by different teams, the number of pupils participating in the research, scores of formal reviews, dependability of researchers, etc. Freely accessible.

Formal research details: Ah, there's the rub. Formalized, quantifiable details are essential. But the more formalized the data is, the more it loses the “juice” - those details that were not expected by, the designers of the research or the designers of the database. And this is where most of the meaning of the research may be. I have been dancing around this issue for a while now, and there are no answers yet. Generally, one can guess that there will be semantic markings on such details, creating a semantic web. Some people are working on such projects.

Raw research details: Until we got the Formal Research Details engine right, and I don’t expect it in the 21st century, we will need to keep the raw details available. This again brings up real privacy issues, discussed earlier in the blog. It may be that here access will be restricted and recorded: Restriction can be to generally qualified personnel, further restricted to preapproved people, or discussed on a per-request basis, to minimize the possibility of recognition of specific students by anyone accessing the raw data. Also, there could be different levels of rawness of the data: For example, a video footage with blurred-out faces may be more freely accessible than the same video in the raw.

These are examples of items in the database. The full database design would take more time than that required to write a blog entry.

Research in Context

So, we have some excellent research. We checked it twice, and we know something. Maybe we know that a certain teaching method, works better than another for a certain age group. Or maybe that a certain teacher-training method produces more teachers who produce more students with better retention of … something. Now what?

The fact that a researcher found some truth, doesn’t easily translate to a real world result. We need a bidirectional effect here. One direction is field-to-research: The effect of the lessons from the field on the research. Formal research should be made about what is interesting and necessary for the teachers in the trenches, and not about purely theoretical issues. The other direction is research-to-field: Beyond the need to perform research that is applicable in its nature, there is a need to create the framework that will encourage the application of that research - that will make the research actionable. Without these two bridges, we remain with an unbridged gap between research and teaching. For both bridge-directions to be open, the teachers should be aware of the research activity and potential, and the researchers should be aware of the teaching activity and considerations. Much of it is about communication, and we should create the mechanisms and culture to support this communication. Much of it is about discipline, and again there can be mechanisms and culture to support such a discipline.

Some successful commercial companies have in place a set of such mechanisms, policies and cultural dynamics to support such cooperation between research and the field. The field (Marketing, Sales, Engineering, …) informs the researchers (Economics, Psychology, Physics, …) what is necessary. The researchers produce results and inform the field what can be done. In the best organizations, the communication between researchers and field-people is so good, that when research turns out an unexpected opportunity for the field, the field people become aware of it and can act on it. This strong bridge is not easy to achieve and maintain, since the researchers and the field-people are two separate groups, with separate background, jargon and even values. It is quite a feat to bring them together to a common ground that will enable cooperation - both in terms of leadership and in terms of administration.

In the world of education, the first tier of field people includes teachers, principals, school administrators, pupils, parents, ... Not necessarily in that order. There is also a second tier, but I don’t want to start talking about religion, philosophy and politics at the moment. The first tier of researchers includes psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, organizational experts, economists, designers, engineers, … A very wide range of skills can be used here.

Enough theory. Now for some more practical thinking. And I will start with technical mechanisms and policies, since they are more straightforward than a discussion of culture and leadership.

Complete financing of research: This issue was visited in a previous blog entry. Research funding needs to take into account the need for additional investment to make the research useful. A few activities that need to be financed, and need to be budgeted in advance:

1a. Plan

• Both the research and its scheduled follow-up

• Initiation led by the field

• Details of research led by researchers

1b. Do the research - experiments and all

• Led by researchers

1c. Review results

• Led by the field: Look for opportunities in the field that may have been unearthed by the current research, and suggest action plans

• Led by the field: Look for potential spin-off research that may be suggested by the current research

• Led by the field: Decide whether to perform the scheduled follow-up

1d. Assimilate into the Education Research Knowledgebase

• Not a trivial task. Will be discussed in a future post

2a. Revisit the plan for scheduled follow-up research

• The decision to perform the follow-up has already been made. This stage may only make some modifications to the research plan

• Led by researchers

2b. Do the scheduled follow-up research

2c. Review results

2d. Assimilate into the Education Research Knowledgebase

Notes:

• All activities should be multidisciplinary: Have involvement of different types of researchers, as well as field people

• The “led by ...” notes are not to be interpreted as “forcefully controlled by ...”. In general, the field people are the customers, and they should lead the “what to do” part. The researchers are the experts in their specific fields, and should lead the “how to do” part

• Then there can be any number of iterations of: Re-plan --> Follow-Up Research --> Review --> Assimilate. Since these future iterations may not be scheduled in advance, budgeting doesn’t need to be done in advance. The first 4 steps - the initial research - must always be budgeted and planned for, even if the experiment was a complete failure. The next 4 steps - the scheduled follow-up - must be budgeted and planned for, though in case of a total failure of the initial research, the follow-up may be dropped

• The research itself may need to be very formal. All other activities are more open for unexpected activities and consequences – innovation

Wrapping up with the theoretical thinking above: The field-to-research bridge is taken care of by the fact that field people participate in all research-related activity, and are the leaders of the initiation and review (or evaluation) of the results. The research-to-field bridge direction is hiding behind the “action plan” part of the results review. This heavy challenge of causing change in behavior as a result of the research will be discussed in a future post, if I manage to wrap my mind around it.

Price of Freedom

Freedom is good. The freedom to create schools with very different goals, and very different curricula is one of the necessary foundations for an adaptable education system. But freedom has its price.

One general problem with freedom is that it clearly puts the weight of responsibility on the free person. In this case, freedom to choose means that we - the individual parents - have the responsibility for our children’s education. We can’t sooth ourselves by saying that the powers that be know what’s right. We can’t blame the government for bad choices. This is the type of price we already pay in higher education, where we choose much of what we do. In many countries there is also such freedom of choice with medicine, associated with the same side-effect of shouldering the responsibility. Barry Schwartz wrote a whole book about the problem - The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less and gave a great TED talk about the matter.

What can we do about it? First of all, control expectations: Even with 100 choices for a school, the best one will not be perfect for the discerning parent. It will “only” be much better than the no-choice school assigned to a kid because of the address where they live. Secondly, learn to forgive ourselves for errors: We cannot correctly compute all the differences between those 100 schools (or 10,000 if we are willing to relocate), especially when we don’t know what the world will look like in 10-15 years, after the kids graduate. We could also give up on the project, and settle for the 18^th-19^th century mode of education. This is a real option and not a mockery, since it’s the familiar way of doing things, and that has its comforting effect. The effect is so strong, that I expect that creating the 21^st-22^nd century mode of education will be an uphill struggle. Anyway, keeping things as they are is not the scope of this blog, so let’s move along.

But there is also a technical problem that needs to be addressed. What happens if a kids enters a technology oriented school, and after 5 years decides that an art oriented school is a better choice? Or - just to emphasize that there are more than just these two choices – if the kid wants to move from a social-responsibility oriented school to a science-oriented school? The social-responsibility curriculum possibly emphasizes sociology, psychology, politics, etc., but probably very little science-related material. How would the kid pick up 5 years of calculus and theoretical physics? This problem must be addressed effectively to allow freedom of choice without lifelong commitment at the age of 6 (or even 3).

One answer is to allow for catch-up time. On the extreme end, we can allow 5 full years to catch up. This will enable the kid to catch up completely, but a “penalty” of 5 years is more than what most pupils will consider. On the other extreme, the kid can just move from 6th grade of school A to 6th grade of school B, but the student will just be lost in a world of unfamiliar concepts and missing skills. Even if the school tries to help the new student by attaching tutors, the gap will be too large to work well. A possible middle-ground is one year of intensive catching-up with the main issues taught in the new school. We have some good experience with children moving from a relaxed democratic school to a stricter school, and picking up missing material and skills during the summer vacation. We also have good experience with preparatory courses to university, enabling students who took a relaxed approach to school, to achieve university-entry capabilities. Some choice may be offered here, too, regarding the length and intensity of the preparatory phase - maybe allocating Two years instead of one year will enable deeper catching-up. More choice may be given to parents in employing special catching-up teachers - paid either by the parents or by the state.

This catching-up time is a straightforward solution, but it may encounter some opposition. One source of such opposition is the state: The state likes people to start being economically active (read: paying taxes) sooner than later. This opposition should be dealt with on the political level. Many states also like to conscript young people at 18 or so, but most of them also allow delays in the military service for extended studies, so the framework is already there. Another possible source of opposition is parents who are unhappy about delaying their child’s entry into real life. But this concern will have to be weighed in the light of the importance of the change in the child’s interests: Another year at school, vs. continuing in the wrong direction for years. Something like “throwing good time after bad”. Also, if we do a good job, being at school will be considered as a pretty good way to use time.

Grand Plan vs. Specific School Ideas

Over the past 6 months, I have been writing down thoughts about education and schooling. Since there was no outline prepared before writing, the blog entries took their own direction. Or, so it seems - two distinct directions: One group of entries has to do with specific ideas of how to teach a kid, or a class, or how to run a school. The other group has to do with a grad plan for an education/schooling system, that should be useful for any type of school. There is a bit of a contradiction between discussing the Grand Plan and discussing Specific School Ideas, since one of the premises of the grand plan is that there are many sets of specific school ideas, which are equally valid. From the point of view of the grand plan, specific school ideas have very limited value. Still, they are my ideas, so like them.

I will now put some order into the previous entries by categorizing them as either Grand-Plan-related or Specific-School-Idea… Or somewhere in between.

1. April 11, 2009 - About K12 Education - Grand Plan introduction
2. April 14, 2009 - Bare Necessities: Goals - Grand Plan basics
3. April 15, 2009 - Scope: Education for whom? - Grand Plan scope
4. April 18, 2009 - Bare Necessities: Measurement - Grand Plan basics
5. April 19, 2009 - Bare Necessities?? Research - Grand Plan basics
6. April 20, 2009 - Bare Necessities - A summary - Grand Plan basics
7. April 20, 2009 - The State Of The Art of Education - 2009 - Both Grand Plan and Specific School Ideas - context
8. April 22, 2009 - The roots of the problem - Grand Plan context
9. April 23, 2009 - "It can't be helped" - Grand Plan context
10. April 25, 2009 - I don't have a plan - personal
11. April 26, 2009 - Some old ideas - Specific School Ideas - context
12. April 27, 2009 - Goals - Foundation Layer - Grand Plan foundation
13. April 28, 2009 - Measurement - In Practice - Grand Plan practicalities
14. April 30, 2009 - Finland - How to form a reform - Specific School Ideas - context
15. May 1, 2009 - Primum non nocere - First, do no harm - Grand Plan basics
16. May 5, 2009 - Learning and Meaning - Grand Plan basics
17. May 7, 2009 - Critical Mass of Learning - Specific School Ideas - basics
18. May 8, 2009 - Pedagogic Urgency - Grand Plan basics
19. May 9, 2009 - Teaching and Salesmanship - Grand Plan basics
20. May 10, 2009 - What we can take home from school - Grand Plan basics
21. May 14, 2009 - Hear, See, Do - Grand Plan basics
22. May 15, 2009 - Education and The State - Grand Plan basics
23. May 16, 2009 - Emotional Involvement in Learning - Grand Plan basics
24. May 17, 2009 - Explaining to a six-year-old - Specific School Ideas
25. May 18, 2009 - Customers - Grand Plan practicalities
26. May 21, 2009 - Long Term Results - Grand Plan practicalities
27. May 24, 2009 - Wild Ideas - Student Teachers - Specific School Ideas
28. May 25, 2009 - Experiments? NIMBY! - Grand Plan practicalities
29. May 26, 2009 - Tests and Announcements - Specific School Ideas
30. May 27, 2009 - Learning to Err - Specific School Ideas
31. May 28, 2009 - The Ultimate Knowledge Work - Grand Plan philosophizing
32. May 30, 2009 - The Main Course: Feedback - Grand Plan practicalities
33. May 31, 2009 - For Whom the Test Tolls - Specific School Ideas
34. June 1, 2009 - Wild Ideas - Anarchy - Grand Plan wilderness
35. June 2, 2009 - Mind the Gap - Grand Plan practicalities
36. June 6, 2009 - If We Build It, Will They Come? - Specific School Ideas
37. June 7, 2009 - Research Based - Grand Plan practicalities
38. June 9, 2009 - Teaching Teachers - Grand Plan details
39. June 10, 2009 - Paid Volunteers - Grand Plan practicalities
40. June 17, 2009 - Defining a system - Both Grand Plan and Specific School Ideas - practicalities
41. June 18, 2009 - Ask Around - Grand Plan practicalities
42. June 20, 2009 - Dumbing Down - Grand Plan context
43. June 24, 2009 - Let Kids be Kids - Specific School Ideas
44. July 2, 2009 - Administration Remystified - Grand Plan practicalities
45. July 3, 2009 - Communicate^3 - Grand Plan practicalities
46. July 4, 2009 - Wild Ideas - Distributed Establishment - Grand Plan practicalities
47. July 4, 2009 - Education Market Analysis - Grand Plan practicalities
48. July 5, 2009 - What... Is Your Mission? - Grand Plan mission
49. July 8, 2009 - Mission - The Easy Part - Grand Plan mission
50. July 8, 2009 - Mission - Complicating Factors - Specific School mission
51. July 9, 2009 - Regulation - Grand Plan practicalities
52. July 11, 2009 - KIPP, SIPP and HIPP - Both Grand Plan and Specific School Ideas
53. July 11, 2009 - Example: Technology Oriented Schooling - Grand Plan specific examples
54. July 14, 2009 - Interim Summary - Both Grand Plan and Specific School Ideas
55. July 15, 2009 - The Essence of Time - Grand Plan philosophizing
56. July 18, 2009 - Still No Plan - Both Grand Plan and Specific School Ideas practicalities
57. July 19, 2009 - Example: Art Oriented Schooling - Grand Plan specific examples
58. July 20, 2009 - Centuries 21 and 22 - Grand Plan context
59. July 21, 2009 - Australia - Specific School Ideas - context
60. July 23, 2009 - The Graduate - Grand Plan basics
61. July 24, 2009 - Education System Architecture - Grand Plan basics
62. July 25, 2009 - Information Exposure - Grand Plan context
63. July 27, 2009 - Data Crunching - Specific School Ideas - practicalities
64. July 29, 2009 - Limitations of Data - Specific School Ideas - practicalities
65. July 30, 2009 - Evolution vs. Revolution - Grand Plan basics
66. August 22, 2009 - Creativity - Specific School Ideas
67. September 20, 2009 - Too busy - Grand Plan practical philosophizing
68. September 23, 2009 - Unspecial Education - Grand Plan basics
69. September 23, 2009 - Quotes - Both Grand Plan and Specific School Ideas philosophizing
70. October 7, 2009 - Research and Student Privacy - Grand Plan practicalities
71. October 8, 2009 - Research - Technical Issues - Grand Plan practicalities

The classifications above - Grand Plan or Specific School Ideas - are open to debate. Often the grand ideas stray away from the consensus, and should be demoted to specific-school-ideas. Sometimes specific ideas are actually general enough to qualify as part of the grand plan. Still, the above list gives a good idea of the content of the posts.