Does technology help education? Economist debate

October 19, 2007

 

The Economist’s on-line site launched a debate feature. First topic up in this Oxford-style debate: “Effectiveness of Technology – Does new technology add to the quality of education?”Discussions are open — you can play, too! — October 15th-23rd, 2007.In his opening statement defending the resolution, Sir John Daniel, president and CEO of The Commonwealth of Learning, provokes thought and discussion from the start:

Technology is replacing scarcity by abundance in other aspects of life: why not in education?It is not for lack of prophets. Ever since the invention of the blackboard each new communications medium has been hailed as an educational revolution. Rosy forecasts about the impact of radio, film, television, programmed learning, computers and the Internet succeeded each other through the 20th century although, revealingly, each prophet compared the revolutionary potential of the newest medium to the printing press, not to the previous technological white hope!Why hasn’t it worked? Why has the continuing introduction of new technologies and new media added little to the quality of most education? What can we learn from those few applications of communications media that are acknowledged successes?Technology is the application of scientific and other organized knowledge to practical tasks by organizations consisting of people and machines. In The Wealth of Nations Adam Smith described how applying knowledge to the practical task of making pins led to a factory that produced them with consistent quality in higher volume and at lower cost than artisans making each pin by hand. The technological bases of Adam Smith’s pin factory were the principles of specialisation, division of labour and economies of scale.Most applications of technology in education disappoint because they ignore these principles and so fail to use technology’s intrinsic strengths to tackle real problems.

SRI International’s Robert Kozma bases his case to reject the resolution on research that shows the effectiveness of computers in learning, especially a study by James Kulik at the University of Michigan:

As a group, these studies looked at several types of educational technology applications (such as tutorials, simulations, and word processors), in a variety of subjects (such as mathematics, natural science, social science, reading and writing), and a range of grade levels (from vary young to high school). His findings across studies can be summarized as follows:

• Students who used computer tutorials in mathematics, natural science, or social science scored significantly higher in these subjects compared to traditional approaches, equivalent to an increase from 50th to 72nd percentile in test scores. Students who used simulation software in science also scored higher, equivalent to a jump from 50th to 66th percentile.

• Very young students who used computers to write their own stories scored significantly higher on measures of reading skill, equivalent to a boost from 50th to 80th percentile for kindergarteners and from 50th to 66th percentile for first graders. However, the use of tutorials in reading did not make a difference.

• Students who used word processors or otherwise used the computer for writing scored higher on measures of writing skill, equivalent to a rise from 50th to 62nd percentile.

What do you think, Dear Reader? Technology working or not? Meander over to the Economist site and weigh in with your opinions.

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Posted by Ed Darrell

Economics Nobels: Three Americans

October 15, 2007

Simple press release:

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2007 jointly to

Leonid Hurwicz
University of Minnesota, MN, USA,

Eric S. Maskin
Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ, USA

and

Roger B. Myerson
University of Chicago, IL, USA

“for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory”.

Say again? “Mechanism design theory?” Sounds like a class for patent lawyers who want to work for watch makers and wind-up toy manufacturers.

Nobel publicists were grand.  They provided an explanation for what the theory does, without describing in any detail what the theory is:

The design of economic institutions

Adam Smith’s classical metaphor of the invisible hand refers to how the market, under ideal conditions, ensures an efficient allocation of scarce resources. But in practice conditions are usually not ideal; for example, competition is not completely free, consumers are not perfectly informed and privately desirable production and consumption may generate social costs and benefits. Furthermore, many transactions do not take place in open markets but within firms, in bargaining between individuals or interest groups and under a host of other institutional arrangements. How well do different such institutions, or allocation mechanisms, perform? What is the optimal mechanism to reach a certain goal, such as social welfare or private profit? Is government regulation called for, and if so, how is it best designed?

These questions are difficult, particularly since information about individual preferences and available production technologies is usually dispersed among many actors who may use their private information to further their own interests. Mechanism design theory, initiated by Leonid Hurwicz and further developed by Eric Maskin and Roger Myerson, has greatly enhanced our understanding of the properties of optimal allocation mechanisms in such situations, accounting for individuals’ incentives and private information. The theory allows us to distinguish situations in which markets work well from those in which they do not. It has helped economists identify efficient trading mechanisms, regulation schemes and voting procedures. Today, mechanism design theory plays a central role in many areas of economics and parts of political science.

If you want understanding, you can start at the Nobel site with “Information for the Public,” and if you want to impress the finance department at your business, or scare the heck out of your principal, check out “Scientific Background.”

The important analysis:  Are they products of, and testament to the quality of, U.S. public schools?  Alas, the Economics Prize Committee didn’t provide biographical data.

Leo Hurwicz, now at the University of Minnesota, was born in Moscow, and took an LL.M. from Warsaw University in 1938.  It’s unlikely he ever saw a U.S. public school.

Eric Maskin’s earliest education I can find was his 1972 degree from Harvard, in Mathematics.  He’s now at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.  He was born in New York.  I’m still looking for elementary and high school data.

And the same goes for Roger B. Myerson, now at Chicago.  He was born in Boston.  Public schools?  Don’t know yet.

Leave a Comment » | Economics, Education success, History | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Peace Nobel: Al Gore and IPCC

October 12, 2007

2007’s Nobel Prize for Peace sailed out to Al Gore and the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.”

Observations:

First, this is a big win for science. The IPCC has been victim of political knee-capping as virulent as any we’ve seen in the last 25 years. Science wins out with the Nobel.

Second, if, in October 2000, we had been able to see a headline, “Al Gore wins Nobel Peace Prize,” what would we have thought that meant about the results of the 2000 election? It’s an indictment of the inaction of the Bush regime that in 6 years Al Gore has done enough to win a Nobel for his efforts, while the Bush administration has not.

Third, while Gore is U.S. citizen, he’s a graduate of St. Alban’s School in Washington, D.C., a good private school. I’m 0-4 on public school grads winning Nobels this year. So much for my predictions. Of course, P. Z. Myers argues Nobels are at best a lagging indicator (how’s that for zipping in an economic term, social studies teachers?). But he’s talking about science, not education in general. P. Z. says the real disaster for U.S. awards is ahead, when our failure to support science in research and graduate study starts to “pay off.”

Al Gore is a good guy, in my experience. He’s knowledgeable about a lot of things, he has foresight (we’d not have this internet but for Gore’s work to save it in its infancy), and he’s a mensch. Ah, for the things that could have been.

Sources:

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4 Comments | Accuracy, Climate change, Education success, Science | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Too much communication: e-mail

October 12, 2007

What’s one big difference between education and business? Communication, especially electronic communication. Businesses have too much of it, many if not most educational organizations are a decade behind that curve, not yet having enough.

e-mail gif from South Alabama University

Free content at the Wall Street Journal includes this column by Sue Shellenbarger in Work and Family, “A day without e-mail is like . . .” She tells the story of U.S. Cellular’s chief operating officer banning e-mail on Fridays to improve work. He was striving for more face-to-face communication among employees, and he got it.

My first experience with e-mail was at the U.S. Department of Education — good heavens! — two decades ago. We were experimenting with electronic communication with the old, slow systems that linked dumb terminals through telephone connections (1200 BAUD, anyone?). Our formerly technophobic boss, Checker Finn, was at home recuperating from some physical ailment, and we made the delightful mistake of showing him he could send and receive messages by computer. Within a few weeks it took at least an hour a day to keep up with the messages. But our operations were split, with administration across town at the main ED building, and most of the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) closer to the Capitol, at New Jersey Avenue, NE. Basic communications that had taken three days by inside mail, courier, and the limousine between the two buildings, were shortened to exchanges over 15 or 20 minutes. Computer messaging was a huge boost to productivity on most things. E-mail, such as it was, had to be printed out to be read. Saving it was a manual filing process.

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3 Comments | Best practices, Business, Classroom management, Classroom technology, Education, Education success, Organizational communication, Teaching, Technology in the classroom | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Chemistry Nobel: Reactions on solid surfaces

October 10, 2007

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry, awarded this morning, went to Gerhard Ertl of the Fritz-Haber-Institut der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (Max Planck Institute, in English), Berlin, Germany, “for his studies of chemical processes on solid surfaces.”

One more win for Europeans this year — another guy not the product of U.S. public schools. So much for my predictions, so far.

These awards for 2007 seem to be very practically oriented. The press release puts the Chemistry award in focus quickly:

Modern surface chemistry – fuel cells, artificial fertilizers and clean exhaust

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2007 is awarded for groundbreaking studies in surface chemistry. This science is important for the chemical industry and can help us to understand such varied processes as why iron rusts, how fuel cells function and how the catalysts in our cars work. Chemical reactions on catalytic surfaces play a vital role in many industrial operations, such as the production of artificial fertilizers. Surface chemistry can even explain the destruction of the ozone layer, as vital steps in the reaction actually take place on the surfaces of small crystals of ice in the stratosphere. The semiconductor industry is yet another area that depends on knowledge of surface chemistry.

Even the technical, scientific explanation seems easy to follow:

The Nobel Prize in chemistry for 2007 is awarded to Gerhard Ertl for his thorough studies of fundamental molecular processes at the gas-solid interface. When a small molecule hits a solid surface from a gas phase there are a number of possible outcomes. The molecule may simply either bounce back or be adsorbed. It is the latter case that carries the most interesting possibilities. The interaction with the atoms of the surface can be so strong that the molecule dissociates into constituent groups or atoms. The molecule can also react directly with surface groups and change the chemical properties of the surface. A third possibility is that the adsorbed molecule encounters another previously adsorbed one and there is a binary chemical reaction on the surface.

There are very important practical situations where these scenarios are the key chemical events. Heterogeneous catalysis has been a central process in the chemical industry for a century. The agriculture of the world has been supplied with fertilizers rich in nitrogen since 1913 due to the Haber-Bosch process, where the nitrogen of the air is converted to ammonia using an iron-based catalyst. Today every car produced has a catalyst system that converts carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons to carbon dioxide in the exhaust gases. Also the content of nitrous gases is reduced through the action of the catalyst. Thin semiconductor layers are produced by chemical vapor deposition (CVD) in large quantities in the microelectronics industry. Currently large resources are devoted to the development of efficient fuel cells that would enable the use of hydrogen as a standard vehicle fuel. Corrosion, which is caused by chemical reactions at surfaces, is a major problem both in everyday life and in more sophisticated industrial contexts such as in nuclear power plants and airplanes. Damage by corrosion may be reduced by adjusting the composition of the surface so that it is protected by an oxide layer formed in air. It is clear that chemical processes at surfaces play a central role in wide span of economically highly significant applications of chemical knowledge to the solution of practical problems.

Has globalization already hit so hard, and has U.S. education fallen so far, that the U.S. dominance of Nobels is already at an end? One year does not make a trend. We can hope.

More:

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Posted by Ed Darrell

2007 Nobel Prizes in Physics – Giant magnetoresistance

October 9, 2007

The Nobel Committees are working overtime to frustrate my predictions this year.

Two Europeans won the Nobel Prize in Physics. Albert Fert, Unité Mixte de Physique CNRS/THALES, Université Paris-Sud, Orsay, France, and Peter Grünberg, Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany, won for the discovery of “giant magnetoresistance.”

It’s called one of the first real applications of nanotechnology. Here’s an explanation from IBM’s website, of how the discovery affects new hard drive technologies. This is the basic technology for the working of your hard drive.

Go see the press release from the Nobel Foundation. Video of the announcement ceremony should be available here, later today.

Score so far this year: Five awards, one person schooled in the U.S, by Quaker schools, not public schools. My predictions that the awards go to U.S. citizens schooled in the public schools are not doing well, so far this year. Is the trend over already?

1 Comment | Education success, Heroes, Physics, Science, Technology | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Nobels: Medicine prize for gene knockout tools

October 8, 2007

My general predictions about Nobel Prizes are way off after the first announcement today.

The London Telegraph announced it:

The Nobel prize for medicine is shared today by Mario Capecchi, Martin Evans and Oliver Smithies for their work on stem cells and genetic manipulation that has had a profound impact, from basic medical research to the development of new treatments.

Although stem cells are one of the hottest fields in science today for their potential for growing replacement cells and tissue for a wide range of diseases, the prestigious 10 million Swedish crown (£750,000) prize recognised the international team’s work for genetically manipulating stem cells to find out what genes do in the body and to provide animal versions of human disease to help hone understanding and test new treatments.

Capecchi was born in Italy and is a US citizen. Both Evans and Smithies are British-born. Sir Martin is known for his pioneering work on stem cells in mice, while Capecci and Smithies showed how genes could be modified.

The Nobel Committee press release gives their formal identification and affiliations:

Mario R. Capecchi, born 1937 in Italy, US citizen, PhD in Biophysics 1967, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA. Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and Distinguished Professor of Human Genetics and Biology at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA.

Sir Martin J. Evans, born 1941 in Great Britain, British citizen, PhD in Anatomy and Embryology 1969, University College, London, UK. Director of the School of Biosciences and Professor of Mammalian Genetics, Cardiff University, UK.

Oliver Smithies, born 1925 in Great Britain, US citizen, PhD in Biochemistry 1951, Oxford University, UK. Excellence Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC, USA.

My usual (and still standing) prediction is that most Nobel winners will be Americans, and educated in America’s public schools. Of the three announced today, one is Italian born (but a U.S. citizen now), and the other two are British.

Update: Turns out that Dr. Capecchi moved to the U.S. from Italy at the age of 9. Does anyone know where he went to elementary, junior high and high school?

Capecchi’s success belies his very difficult upbringing in war-torn Italy during World War II. At the age of four, he was separated from his mother, who was taken by the Gestapo to the Dachau concentration camp. For the next four-and-a half years, he lived on the streets, fending for himself by begging and stealing. The two reunited when Capecchi was nine, and they soon moved to the United States, where he began elementary school without knowing how to read or write or how to speak English.

More prizes to come.

Sources:

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Posted by Ed Darrell

There once was a Union Maid

October 8, 2007

Labor Day blew away too quickly. We didn’t honor labor as we should have — nor do we ever, in my estimation. Summer, especially in a teacher’s life, is a parenthetical expression between two holidays that fail to honor the designated honorees, Memorial Day and Labor Day. Perhaps that is fitting and proper, but of what, I do not know.

Nor do I wish to live where such dishonoring is proper, or fits.

The United Auto Workers called a strike against General Motors, but a contract agreement arrived in just a couple of days. Today UAW announced a strike deadline for Chrysler, in their “pattern” bargaining, whereby the union strikes a deal with one of the Big 3, then takes that as the starting point for negotiations with the others, who usually have to keep up with the Sloans, Fords, Chryslers and Ketterings (used to be a Romney in there, remember, not to mention Kaiser and Packard and Willys).

NPR’s interviews at the GM strike featured one autoworker who remembered the last GM strike, when 400,000 workers left the assembly lines to man the picket lines. This time? He said he realized the stakes when they announced 74,000 workers would strike. What happened to the other 326,000 people? Gone to competition, mechanization, globalization, and general political wind changes.

Mrs. Cornelius wrote at A Shrewdness of Apes about the labor dream, the union dream, that some of us still remember (not enough of us). I won’t say the dream is shattered. It is not a dream shared by as many people any more.

When you read her essay, note a key part of it, a piece of almost every story about a working, union family in the U.S.: Mrs. Cornelius was the first in her family to graduate from college. Once upon a time a good, basic union job offered the opportunity to raise a family, buy a house to make a home, and send the kids to school and to college, in the hope and expectation that the children would have a better life than the parents as a result of those educational opportunities.

That shared belief is gone. America suffers for its loss.

I wonder whether there is a correlation between the loss of those two shared value planks that once formed the platform of our national morality, the respect for unions and the hope that hard work would help the next generation, and the understanding that educational opportunities would and should be available.

When did we lose those dreams? I first became aware when I left the Senate Labor Committee; while we generally had a few sourpusses complaining about education as a monolithic institution at every education policy hearing, they were vastly in the minority, and their views were not views that generally pushed discussion. Touring the nation with the President‘s Commission on Americans Outdoors (PCAO), we kept running into people who, though not rich by any standards, had adopted the turtle-with-head-in-shell stance of the hereditary rich and other nobles, resisting change in an effort to cling to what property and privilege they had. It was in Lamar Alexander’s Tennessee that fellow driving a decade-old car phrased it succinctly: “I didn’t graduate high school, and I get along pretty well. I don’t want my kids learning stuff they don’t need.” (Lamar was chairman of PCAO.)

Then a few months later, after I moved to the U.S. Department of Education, at a speech talking about changing the ERIC Library System to increase accessibility especially for parents, the usually-angry-at-ED cluster of teachers afterward had a guy who said, “You just don’t get it — the parents don’t care. The parents don’t want their kids to get a good education if it means they can read books and see movies the parents don’t approve of.”

Pete Seeger segués Woody Guthrie’s story of the “Union Maid” into the chorus, “You can’t scare me: I’m stickin’ to the union/I’m stickin’ to the union . . . ’til the day I die.”

When did that become, “I’ve got mine, get your own?” When did the hope of Woody Guthrie give way to the experienced, cynical blues of Billie Holiday?

When did we move from communities that made schools a first priority, as in the Northwest Ordinances of 1785-1789, as in the first things pioneers did once they settled west of the Mississippi, as in the creation of the Land Grant Colleges, to communities where plucking out the bricks of the foundation of education is acceptable government policy? Utah’s pioneers prided themselves on establishing schools as a first order of business once they got to the Salt Lake Valley, in 1847. This year the Utah legislature, no longer dominated by the kids of those pioneers, voted to start unraveling that system despite it’s being a model in many ways, and successful by almost any measure, by using vouchers to take money from public schools.

And how do we make those not sticking to the union, nor sticking to any communities of shared values that emphasize building for the future, get back to the hope that we can make a better future, if we work together?

Announcements for Nobel winners started today (it’s October, after all). I’ll wager, again, that most Nobel winners will be American, and that most of the winners will be products of America’s public schools. How long can we keep that up, if we don’t dream it any more?

Mrs. Cornelius said:

There is no such thing as a job Americans won’t do. There is such a thing as a job Americans can’t afford to do on the salary offered.

God bless the working man and woman. They deserve much more than a day off from work. They deserve our respect. They are the backbone of our country.

People are so scared they won’t stick to the union, to any union. That’s not because the unions are too powerful, certainly, or it would be the other way around.

Now, excuse me, but I have to go listen to Taylor Mali again.

8 Comments | Economics, Education, Education blogs, Education quality, Education reform, Education success, History, Labor and unions | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Former Arkansas teacher remembers, long before 1957

September 27, 2007

Poignant story from the Associated Press, via Teacher magazine, about the Emancipation Proclamation, picking cotton, Brown v. Board of Education, and education.

1 Comment | 1957, Bill of Rights, Brown v. Board, Civil Rights, DBQ sources, Desegregation, Education, Education success, History, Human Rights | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Killer lesson plans: Teachers as superheroes

September 27, 2007

Reader Bernarda noted this site in comments, and it’s good enough to promote more formally: Teachers as the alter egos of superheroes.

Teachers ARE superheroes, a lot of them. More than in other professions, certainly.

Which reminds me of this video. Teachers, you need to watch this sometime here in the first month of school. What do you say when someone rudely asks, “What do you make?” Wholly apart from the Ann Landers-style answer, “Whatever would possess anyone to ask such a personal question?” there is an answer to give, as explained by slam poet Taylor Mali; surely you’ve seen this before, but watch it again — to remember what teachers should be doing, as well as how to talk about it. See below.

You can support Mr. Mali. Just purchase a pen that includes that little poem.

You can support Mr. Mali and his campaign for good teachers in another way, too. Make sure that whenever you talk about this poem of his, you credit it to him. I think we as teachers owe that to artists, and other teachers, as part of our continuing struggles against plagiarism.

But we also owe it to ourselves to get credit to Mr. Mali. Odds are he has some other good things to say. When you properly attribute his work, you increase the chances that someone else will find the rest of his work. You increase the chances that some superintendent will hire Mr. Mali to speak to the teachers in his district. You increase the chances that someone will understand that Mr. Mali is a real human being who loves teaching — he is, in short, one of those superheroes we call “teachers,” even without a cape.

Uncaped crusaders need compliments, too.

7 Comments | Accuracy, Education, Education quality, Education success, Teacher Pay, Teaching | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Progress? Latest education assessment scores

September 26, 2007

Scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) were released officially yesterday.

Education Week said:

Fourth grade math scores on NAEP, called “the nation’s report card,” rose from 238 to 240 from 2005 to 2007, while 8th grade performance climbed from 279 to 281, both on a 500-point scale. The 2007 NAEP results were released today.

Those gains continued an overall upward trend in NAEP math scores in both grades that dates to the early 1990s, while reading scores have been more stagnant over that time. While the gains in math were smaller than in some previous testing cycles, they were still statistically significant, as were the increases in reading.

“It shows that the public attention to math instruction and professional development of teachers is having a positive impact,” said James Rubillo, the executive director of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, in Reston, Va. The movement for stronger standards that dates to the 1980s “has brought math and reading to the forefront of attention,” he said.

In reading, the subject that has seen the greatest investment of federal and state education spending over the past several years, 4th graders’ scores have risen from 219 to 221, also on a 500-point scale, since 2005. Eighth graders’ average mark increased from 262 to 263, which was a statistically significant gain, though that test score dipped slightly from the NAEP reading test given five years ago.

Two point gains on a 500 point scale sound measly to me. That’s less than 1%, after five years of a program that should have produced much more significant gains.

Is the No Child Left Behind Act badly misnamed?

Perhaps, instead of spending money on testing and forcing teachers to teach to the test or else, we should try putting some money into getting the best teachers, by providing significant pay raises, and put more money into providing the resources teachers need to make their classrooms successful — books, projectors, software, film, video, grading machines, classroom tools, classroom supplies (paper and pencils), preparation time, and parental involvement.

Other resources:

1 Comment | Education assessment, Education quality, Education reform, Education success, No Child Left Behind Act, State school boards | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Public education entrenched in Utah

September 25, 2007

From the Utah History Encyclopedia on-line, we get a solid if brief description of the highlights of public education in Utah.

Here are the roots of the deep opposition to vouchers in Utah.  Several times Utah communities started their own private schools, only to turn them over to public entities, especially after 1890.  Utahns regard public schools as their own.  Voucher advocates seem unable to notice that an assault on the public schools is an assault on Utah communities, for that reason.

Plus, as The Deseret Morning News reported Sunday, Utah’s schools often achieve excellence.  Utah parents don’t like the idea of taking money away from successful schools their kids attend to fund untested, unregulated private schools.

2 Comments | Education, Education quality, Education success, History, Politics, School vouchers | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Neuroscience, culture, and practical application

September 23, 2007

The oak tree at Jena's high school -- now cut down

My hypothesis is that a normal person may not peruse this site, The Situationist, without finding something of use for the person’s work or homelife — or at a minimum, something extremely intrigueing about a problem the person has in an organization to which the person belongs.

For example, check out these discussions:

  1. On the Jena 6
  2. On l’affaire Chemerinsky at UC-Irvine
  3. On college debt
  4. On confronting mistakes — especially one’s own

It’s a project at Harvard, interdisciplinary so far as I can tell.  Here’s the explanation:

There is a dominant conception of the human animal as a rational, or at least reasonable, preference-driven chooser, whose behavior reflects preferences, moderated by information processing and will, but little else. Laws, policies, and the most influential legal theories are premised on that same conception. Social psychology and related fields have discovered countless ways in which that conception is wrong. “The situation” refers to causally significant features around us and within us that we do not notice or believe are irrelevant in explaining human behavior. “Situationism” is an approach that is deliberately attentive to the situation. It is informed by social science—particularly social psychology, social cognition, and related fields—and the discoveries of market actors devoted to influencing consumer behavior—marketers, public relations experts, and the like. The Situationist is a forum for scholars, students, lawyers, policymakers, and interested citizens to examine, discuss, and debate the effect of situational forces – that is, non-salient factors around and within us – on law, policy, politics, policy theory, and our social, political, and economic institutions. The Situationist is associated with The Project on Law and Mind Sciences at Harvard Law School. To visit the Project’s website, click here.

Go see, and report back, if you don’t mind.

Leave a Comment » | Brain development, Brain learning, Classroom management, Education, Education success, History, Pedagogy, Teaching | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Soon to be famous rejection: Harvard to Warren Buffett

September 19, 2007

A California woman donated $128 million to a Quaker boarding school.  Her fortune is the result of her father’s wise investment with one of his former students, Warren Buffett.

Barbara Dodd Anderson made the gift to the George School in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.  She is the daughter of Buffett’s former professor at Columbia University’s graduate business program, David L. Dodd.  Dodd invested with Buffett, having been impressed with Buffett’s acumen as a student.

But Buffett owed Dodd a lot, too.  It was Dodd who got Buffett into Columbia, after Harvard rejected him.  Here’s the gist of that part of the story, from the New York Times:

In an interview, Mr. Buffett said Professor Dodd had turned his life around in 1950, when he graduated from the University of Nebraska and was applying to business school. Harvard rejected his application, and that August, well after Columbia’s application deadline, Mr. Buffett wrote to Professor Dodd, whom he admired as the author of a respected financial text.

“Dear Professor Dodd, I thought you were dead, but now that I know that you’re alive, I’d like to come study with you,” Mr. Buffett said he wrote in his letter.

“And he admitted me to Columbia!” Mr. Buffett said. “I would not be who I am today without David Dodd. If in response to my letter he’d said, ‘Sorry, its too late,’ I’d never be where I am.”

“Harvard did me a big favor by turning me down,” he said. “But I haven’t made any contributions to them in thanks for that.”

Leave a Comment » | Economics, Education success, Famous quotes, History, Humor | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Create panic, herd the stampede

September 6, 2007

In old western movies, the bad guys would try to get their way by stampeding the cattle herd of the good guys, knowing that the least that would happen is a lot of destruction, even if they couldn’t exactly control the stampede. Destruction, even mindless destruction, is good for bad guys — in the movies.

I’m not sure why that image popped into my mind this morning. I was reading about the vouchers election campaign in Utah, and then I was looking around the Strong American Schools (SAS) website  (“ED in ’08”).

Strong American Schools is a project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, two of the largest philanthropic organizations in the world, have provided grant funding for Strong American Schools.
Roy Romer, the former governor of Colorado and most recently superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, is our chairman and lead spokesman.

At the SAS site I found an interactive map of the U.S., you can roll your cursor on a state and see that state’s graduation rate. ED in '08, campaign from Rockefeller and Gates Foundations

What’s the most-often stated reason for vouchers in Utah? Somehow, the schools are failing.

Which state in the U.S. has the highest graduation rates? At 84% of students graduating from high school, Utah leads the nation in that category. New Jersey is #2 at 80%, and most other states lag 10 to 20 points behind.

What are the Utah voucher advocates using to show “failing schools” when the state leads the nation in graduation?

If Utah leads the nation in graduation, with per capita spending on students in schools ranking near the bottom of the states over the last decade or three, what factor is pulling students from least spending to best graduation? It’s probably the teachers.

Excuse me while I wonder: Why are Utah voters (and the rest of us) in this hand basket, and where are we going in such a damned hurry?

5 Comments | Education quality, Education reform, Education spending, Education success, School vouchers, Teaching | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

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