Hello everyone so as Kamila said my name is Patrick Atwater and I'd just like
to share a little story with you all about education reform today and our
story begins with a bold proclamation that if an unfriendly foreign power had
tried to impose the mediocre quality of our nation's public schools on the US
then we might well have viewed it as an act of war. Now ponder that for a second
an act of war that's a pretty visceral statement the idea that this is that our
public schools are so problematic that this would be an act of war and this
statement is important not only for the words that says but also when it was
written this was written in 1983 in a report called a nation at risk and since
then we've had all manners of blue ribbon panels all manners of policy reforms all
manners of education reform efforts to improve the inequality of outcomes both
in terms of people within the US and across nations and in many ways these
still words and similar words are still repeated today so what I would like to
do is drill down into a specific case study that illustrates some of the the
foundational problems with reform thinking and of those last few decades
and offer talk about a little bit about how we might do a little bit better.
So how many of you were like me and you went to California public schools anyone
yeah so if you grew up in California public schools the nineties one of the
biggest things was this was class size reduction and this originated with was
kind of the gold standard empirical social science research a random field
trial where they randomly assign students to different sized classrooms
in Tennessee and you know it was good research because it wasn't just you know
not just talked about an educational literature if you read any
econometric textbook they usually refer to this as sort of a very cool
example the way research ought to be done and so what happened is they
decided that smaller class sizes are essentially
better and as a result of this the California Legislature said that well we
ought to do this we got you know if smaller classes are better we want what's
better for our kids we have some money so they but the fact the problem was there
was an urgency that did not correlate with the fact that you know school
facilities can't get built overnight so they built a lot of bungalows all over
school playgrounds and they also did so K-3 you had classes with
under 20 students and then once you get to fourth grade you have a class with
like 36 37 I think they're like 38 students and
beyond those kind of management issues the deeper problem is that even if
you ask answer a question with all the right social science and all the best
methodology all the best fancy math you can still it was really the wrong
question this idea that we can optimize a classroom and if there's some optimal
there's some optimal size for a classroom that's true in Tennessee in
California that's true anywhere that's true anywhere for every student who's in
public education that's just foundationally problematic I mean
students are and really all humans are pretty unique creatures we learn in
different ways not you know who what regression should you run to figure out
whether students gonna learn best every student's gonna learn best Institute
classroom of 20 students of 30 students you know online with a hundred thousand
peers you know self studying like you know going out and exploring in the world
on their own and perhaps like an internship or just going to a National
History Museum or maybe there's you know students might learn better and one you
know in math and in small group so they might learn better in a big lecturer and
in writing and this whole in the entire way that we structure schools and this
isn't my idea but this is Ken Robinson talks rather eloquently about how
schools suffer from what he calls a factory like paradigm that we taught we
just think about how we talk about public education we talk about we talk
about processing students and it's like you know you go through and you go
you're up to grade and then you go on to the next grade and then you go on to the
next grade and on the next grade we batch them by age it's almost like the raw
materials going through a factory and we talk about the whether or not they're up
to standard and there's all these the same tests for all the students to
figure out and a lot of this thinking when you go
when you look at the history and you look at how this originated it comes
about from when we kind of had you know universal public education hasn't been
true for all of the United States or human history it's coming about in the
kind of late 19th early 20th century when there are a lot of ideas about
scientific management mass production things kind of the influences of think
of like someone like Henry Ford of the assembly line and that's really kind of
foundationally affected how we think about schools and a lot of the things
that we don't even think about that we just take for granted and so what I like
to do is just talk a bit about well what's obviously changed and that is
that when we structured this we didn't have things like to put simply like the
Internet and the web and pose a few questions about what that means might
mean for what constitutes the school and how we think about our education system
and one and this is a screenshot of Kahn Academy which is if you talk about new
models in education is sort of ground zero and what Kahn Saul Khan does is
it's not just idea that you can have all these unique videos and he's kind of an
engaging guy he's fun makes math fun but that he this platform offers the ability
so that if your student you know they have some aspiration like a lot of young
people do and they are curious about something you know maybe they grew up by
JPL and they're really passionate about Mars exploration so what this could do
is say well what skills and what content and what areas of knowledge
should you be learning in order to reach that goal and what makes sense for you
like what makes for sense for that student in that particular student and
what how can they learn best and how can they get to where they want to go and
the other cool thing about the web is it's not just that you know there's
access to all this information and there's all this content and we're not
we can't just like you know give students a bunch of iPads and the idea
is and that that'll kind of solve the problems but that we also can connect to
each other and organize communities in new to different ways that you know if
you're curious about education technology that there'll be a meet-up
about this and you can go and talk to them or more classical things if you go
on meetup.com there's all sorts of people that are passionate about little
all sorts of little nooks and crannies you can find a lot of funny things like
so everything from Star Wars geeks geeking out
people talking about philosophy and people talk about these things and two
really valuable professional development where you can learn about other finance
professionals or other consultants or other things that where you can network
and learn a lot of the skills that you can't learn in a classroom that you have
to learn by doing and so you might wonder so well how do we make this
rigorous how do we sure like if we know if people are learning their own paths
and learning their own directions how do we know whether they're actually
learning not just kind of you know screwing around and going and hanging
out with their friends and that calling that a meet-up and one one thing that
offers a lot of potential and it's still kind of into not necessarily fully
fleshed out is this idea of using online badges which is something that kind of
happens a lot in the web development community to say whether to show
that you know something like HTML or JavaScript or something like that you
can get Mozilla to certify it which is meaningful because they're the ones that
developed Firefox and they understand something like this they hire and employ
people but that you could also do things like all manner of skills and
skills that you know if you want to learn something about astronomy that you
can have that certified by someone like JPL and then that will
be meaningful not just because you know your teacher says oh you should learn
this because you should learn it but this is meaningful because if you want
to actually do what you want to do this is the skills that you need to know and
the knowledge that you need to know to do that and so I'll end with just a
couple of kind of thoughts and provocations about you know what does
this mean for us as members of the Claremont McKenna community and what is
it so I'd ask you all like who here is just you know we graduated college most
of us and like who here is done learning I got anyone is anyone just kind of they
got it all figured out she is smart person a lot to talk after but I asked
that somewhat whimsically but it's also I mean all the trends that you see about
in terms of careers and things that people they shift stay you know they
don't just climb a ladder they like you know this is a defining little cartoon
from some MBA types but like you go down and you go up you switch ladders
and side-to-side there's a lot of there's a lot of change a lot of
opportunities you off to constantly be learning in today's knowledge and
professional economy and that's something that we haven't really fully
absorbed in terms of the consequences that is about you know just the
basic question of like how do you educate the next generation and then the
other thing is I'd say is you know when we talk about public schools there's
often there's kind of these dominant narratives between various groups of
adults that are vying for power you know you either pro charter or you're pro
Union you're either in favor of accountability or you want to support
teachers and these sorts of things have dominated
the last few decades and it's really not been all that productive in terms of
improving our actual schools so what I would encourage you all to do is just to
remember as you know as leaders in the whatever community that you are a part
of when you talk about public schools to remember what it's like to be a kid and
think deeply about what what sort of opportunities there are to learn today
and how to be different and to remember that as trite as this may sound that
educating the next generation it's not some abstract thing it's not just the
responsibility of our governments it's the responsibility of all of us and I found
that you know being able to volunteer in like local schools usually I end up
learning more from the kids then then they learn from me mostly so with that
and with my favorite Calvin and Hobbes cartoon on the thing I'll take any
questions that you might have.
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