Changing the Game

Typically video games are associated with violence and turning kids into couch potatoes. But a report released by the Sesame Workshop this week challenges this stereotype. The report, titled "Game Changer," discusses the potential benefits digital learning has on educating children and motivating them to make healthier choices.

Panelists commenting on the report at The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars believe video games can serve an integral role for changing how students are evaluated on what they can do. David Rejeski who directs the Serious Games Initiative at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, said that games in classrooms today are limited to drilling students on facts. Rejeski heralded "serious games" as a way to cause students to become problem solvers.

Take for example the game Budget Hero. Players are placed in the shoes of Barack Obama and are presented with 160 real policy options of how to balance the nation’s budget. The applet does an effective job of taking a generally boring topic and turning it into an interactive learning experience. In fact, one teacher has written a two-day lesson plan around the game.

Budget Hero may be fun to play, but it is unknown how well the game can assess student learning across different student populations. Education and technology experts at the Woodrow Wilson event agreed that many small applets should be introduced to determine what works best as opposed to developing a few large-scale assessments that are more likely to fail. One benefit to testing digital assessments in classrooms is that video game developers can receive valuable feedback from teachers. Also, introducing teachers to interactive games will help them to become comfortable with using technology and the possibility of using high-stakes digital assessments in the future. A lot of work needs to be done to improve assessments, but it is refreshing to see that experts in the technology and education sectors are beginning to agree on the starting point: developing lots of applets for classroom evaluation.

-- Tim Harwood

Beyond Gender Equity in Education

Earlier this week, a panel at the Academy for Educational Development’s Center for Gender Equity on “Adolescent Girls and the Workforce” offered strong arguments for working towards gender equity jointly in education and the labor force worldwide. May Rihani, Director of AED’s Global Learning Group, opened the discussion by calling for secondary education to step up and become more relevant for all youth to pursue a diversity of fields in the workforce.

The UN defines gender parity as a combination of equitable ratios of girls to boys in primary, secondary, and tertiary education levels of education, average shares of women in wage employment, and proportions of national government seats held by women. While two thirds of all countries theoretically achieved gender equity by 2005 (according to the UN Millennium Development Goals), girls still do not have equal access to primary and secondary education in some regions of the world.

Sub-Saharan Africa, Oceania and Western Asia have the largest gender disparities in school enrollment. Furthermore, the disparity between educational equity and workforce equity remains vast. In South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, 40 to 80 percent of young women are neither in schooling nor in the workforce. Of those that are in the workforce, two thirds work in vulnerable jobs including unpaid family employment or self-employment. These statistics are even more troubling given the current global economic crisis since hard-pressed households often cut costs by taking adolescents out of school and avoiding health check-ups.

Dr. Andrew Morrison of the World Bank recommended expansions of conditional cash transfer programs as one key to alleviating education and workforce inequities. Mexico’s Oportunidades conditional cash transfer (CCT) program, for example, pays poor mothers to send their children to school and get regular health check-ups. CCTs are spreading rapidly across the developing world, now existing in almost every South American country: Brazil (Bolsa Familia), Chile (Chile Solidario), and Panama (Red de Oportunidades) are just a few examples.

In regions where creating such large social safety nets are difficult to develop (or difficult to hold accountable given corrupt government systems), smaller initiatives like school feeding programs or in-school health clinics may suffice to dramatically improve children’s health and keep more kids in school as well as increase opportunities to reduce intergenerational replication of poverty.

--Parvathi "Parv" Santhosh-Kumar, Education Sector Intern

Tale of Three Turnarounds

Turning around a low performing high school may be the most difficult task in K-12 education. This week Sec. Duncan has suggested that charter schools should play a critical role in the effort to turn around low performing schools. Perhaps this comparison will start to suggest why. There is a lot to learn about two attempts started this year in Los Angeles Unified both of which have been backed with a lot of foundation funding. The first, Mayor Villaraigosa took control of Roosevelt High school and all of its feeder elementary and middle schools as part of compromise to the mayor failed attempt to take control of the entire district. It seems that the school take over business has not turned out to be a feather in his cap to help him in a run for the governor’s office that many speculated when he first proposed mayoral control. Villaraigosa gave up aspirations of the Governor’s office earlier this week, and we can only hope that this will give him more time to address the problems facing LA and investing energy in really turn around these schools. The first year of the mayors reform appears to be a disaster although the test results to confirm this will not be available for several month (here). Teachers have given the mayor a sound vote of no confidence the worst of which was a vote of 184 (no confidence) to 15 at Roosevelt. Much of the complaints seems to result from the ambiguity of the governance of the schools being both LAUSD schools and mayor schools with a lot of finger pointing between the two.

And the future for the mayor’s schools does not look very bright either. The mayor’s take over is not really much of a takeover because all of the teachers at his school are still a part of the school district staff and the teachers union and are part of the districts budget. I can only imagine how the fiscal relationship is going. The mayor’s staff did have some authority in choosing staff for the schools from the district’s existing staff. And, generally the schools have staff that are much younger than the district average. From a budget perspective this can be a good thing because the schools in theory should be able to provide more services for the same funding level. But, as LASUD implements budget cuts this year cutting thousands of employees based solely on seniority, a disproportionate number of those staff cuts will come from the mayor’s schools including many of his principals and an estimated 20 percent of the schools staff. This is not likely to add to the morale. The budget just adopted in LA appears to be a patch job that will set up the need for a whole round of additional cuts next year and the year after that. Details on budget just adopted. And if you look at the districts $10 billion in unfunded retiree health benefit obligations their budget pains may be longer than two or three years especially as broke as the state is.

Combine the general confusion of governance between the mayor’s office and the district with the lack of teacher support and a bleak budget future, and the path to success for Roosevelt seems unlikely.

In contrast, Locke High school, another of LA high schools that were among the lowest performing in the state, has been part of a hostile take over by Green Dot charter schools. There has been a lot of press about Steve Barr and Green Dot the last month including an entertaining article in the New Yorker. While there is a lot of work to do to turn this school around, it sounds like the process is on track as summarized in a LA Times article a couple days ago (here). It is clear that the campus is safer and less chaotic which is a first step for education happening. The governance of the school is clear, and it seems like systems to run the school with the effective Green Dot model are being put in place. Traditionally these type of charter schools start with a ninth grade cohort and then grow as that cohort moves through the system. Thus it may take 4 years to find out if this experiment is really working. But still I will be looking to see how Locke and Roosevelt do later this summer when the state test results are released.

For comparison purposes these two schools need to also be compared to a low performing high school run by the school district. Such comparison high schools are not hard to find in LA because there are so many of them. I chose Fremont Senior High. This school has been in school improvement under NCLB since 1997-98. In theory, the district has been required to implement reforms in this school for the last 11 years, and it has been in major governance restructuring under NCLB for the last 5 years. In addition, the school participates in a state turnaround program called the High Priority schools program.


Here are the test scores for 2007-08 for 10th graders for these three schools.
Percent of 10th graders proficient on state test in 2007-08
Roosevelt High (Mayoral takeover)
English 21% Algebra 3%

Locke High (Green Dot)
English 13% Algebra 5%

Fremont High (LAUSD - control)
English 12% Algebra 2%

Will update in August when the new test results are public. My money is on Steve Barr and Green Dot, how about you?

Dirty Laundry

The New York Times recently published a full-length article chronicling all the ways colleges and universities are cutting back in these recessionary times. The piece's intent was surely to show how bad things are, but these are the examples it gave:

• The University of Washington communications department is saving $1,000 a month by cutting land lines from its offices.
• Dickinson College saved $900 by making a swim meet with Bryn Mawr College "virtual." Each team swam in their own pools and then they compared the times. The college saved $150,000 by cutting free laundry service for students and $75,000 by eliminating ESPN and HBO in the dorms.
• UNC-Chapel Hill cut a bus tour that introduces new faculty members around the state.
• Oberlin saved $22,300 by reducing window washing. It's also reducing the hours at its cafe.
• Pitzer College is power washing its sidewalks only once this year instead of twice.
• Carleton College is reducing trash pickup from daily to weekly.
• Whitman College imposed limits on free printing in computer labs. It's $60 per semester this year and will be lowered to $50 next year.
• Whittier College will save $30,000 this year by eliminating cafeteria trays.
• Washington and Jefferson will no longer serve breakfast at Trustee's meetings; they'll have free passes to the cafeteria instead.
• Davidson College will save $10,000 by switching from bottled water to tap.
• Cornell College will not replace old voicemail equipment in order to save $40,000.

Cutting free laundry service, HBO, unlimited printing, and bottled water, these are the best the Times could come up with? See anything in the list about revamping the curriculum, developing online content, re-thinking the deployment of professors, re-establishing teaching as dominant over research, or anything more substantive than cafeteria trays?

It could just be sloppy journalism. The Chronicle of Higher Education has two slightly more meaty pieces in its latest issue. One chronicles the mismanagement of Greensboro College ($) that's leading to a 20 percent reduction for salaried employees. The other ($) found departmental cuts at Washington State University (theater, dance, German, and community and rural sociology), Florida Atlantic (Master's program in women's studies), Wisconsin Lutheran (political science), and Louisiana State (philosophy). These are important developments to the students and faculty studying or working in these particular departments, but as the articles describe, many were selected for the ax precisely because of faculty and student disinterest.

It could be there's just not that much to report. Like a lot of other industries, the higher education job market is dry and many current employees have taken pay cuts. But so far journalists covering these issues have yet to write about any sweeping, dynamic change that a higher education institution has pursued to cut costs or dramatically change the way they do business as a result of budget constraints.

Colleges Are Responsible for Everything, or Nothing, Depending

George Leef, vice president for research at the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, takes issue with a recent report I co-authored about college graduation rates. We criticized colleges with unusually low graduation rates compared to peer institutions with similar admissions selectivity. Leef is having none of it:

Even at schools with very low graduation rates, some students do graduate. They discipline themselves and work hard enough to earn the credits they need to graduate. It’s not that those who graduate were the “lucky” ones. Each student is in control of his destiny; either he does what is required, or he doesn’t. We’re not talking about dice here. We’re talking about human beings with free will.

That’s why I find it troubling that the authors repeatedly talk about schools “failing to graduate their students.” Colorado Christian College doesn’t “fail to graduate” 92 percent of the students who enroll there. Rather, only 8 percent do what is required of them to graduate.

Let’s place responsibility where it belongs.

(Note: Colorado Christian College contacted us after the report was published to say that they mis-entered their graduation rate data into the IPEDS system and that it's actually 39 percent.)

So Leef thinks what happens to students in college is solely dependant on what students put into the experience. Unless, of course, when he doesn't think that at all. Here's Leef writing last year at the National Review:

Here is an important article that explains how far France and Germany have gone in proselytizing against capitalism in their schools. They seem to be succeeding where the Soviet Union failed — in creating "the new soviet man." Young Frenchmen and Germans are taught about economics in a way that would make Karl Marx smile.

The indoctrination is worse there than here, but many American students also get a misleading, socialistic version of capitalism and business in their classes. Young Americans would subscribe to most of the ideas popular among the French and Germans — such as that welfare and government employment are rights.

The left has always understood that the way to wreck a society based on individualism and liberty is by reshaping the thinking of the young people. France and Germany are destined to become poorer, more regimented countries. There are lots of professors here who would say, "Right on!"

In other words, colleges have so little influence over the academic lives of their students that a 92 percent drop out rate is perfectly acceptable because degree completion is totally a function of whether students have the gumption and will to succeed. Yet colleges have so much influence over the academic lives of their students that the Marxist professoriate may very well "wreck" our entire society by indoctrinating students who are powerless to resist their professors' devious collectivist spell.

As I've said before, people have a remarkably fluid view of the efficacy of higher education. Leef subscribes to the Charles Murray IQ-determinist view of education and thinks we need to reduce access to college. So it's convenient to argue that colleges with low graduation rates are doing nothing wrong. But he also believes that leftist professors are conspiring to convert our youth to socialism, so it's convenient to blame colleges for the fact that young people tend to support an active role for the government in various aspects of the economy.

Assessing the Common Core

I'm at the Council of Chief State School Officers' (CCSSO) assessment conference, so naturally there was a big plenary session focused on the common core standards work (led in part by CCSSO). But, even though the session was held before hundreds of assessment experts -- and despite Secretary of Education Duncan's commitment of $350 million in stimulus funding to support assessment work based on the common core -- the panel delved only lightly into how the assessment part will come together.

The quota for standards movement skeptics is way oversubscribed and developing core standards for K-12 by the end of the year is already quite an endeavor. But, at the same time, it won't work if we're hoping that the thinking behind the assessment piece will just kind of come together at the end. If there's one thing that my assessment friends have taught me, it's about the co-dependencies and linkages between the two.

Here are a few initial thoughts on how to think about the assessment side of the equation and spend the Secretary's money wisely:

1. Use Assessment to Drive Support for "Fewer, Clearer, and Higher" Standards: Integrating the assessment conversation can strengthen both educator and political support for the common core. There is widespread agreement on the need to improve assessment, so the connection between improving assessment and "fewer, clearer, higher" should be explicit. If you want to assess more deeply and at a higher level of cognitive challenge, you'll likely need more extended performance-like tasks (like NAEP Science 2009 or PISA). These take more time to assess and can be expensive -- in other words, you need fewer. Clearer is also critical -- if the standards cannot be clearly defined within the curriculum, then we end up with generic tests and weaker instruments.


2. Don't Lock in Current Practice: My greatest fear is that we'll get these shiny new standards and then race to develop RFPs for a national common assessment. Any plan that invests heavily based on the current deeply embedded assessment tools and practices will show no more than very modest improvements.


3. Enable Both Sustaining and Disruptive Improvements: We need a 5-7 year plan to significantly improve student assessment, with investments all along the pipeline from crazy new idea to modest, low risk improvements. And, we need an intentional plan to evaluate and scale these up along the way. This implies a series of pilots at various scales, along with incentives to build demand so that successful ideas progress along the pipeline. (Read more about potential new ideas in Beyond the Bubble.)


4. Open Platforms and Shared Infrastructure: These are essential to drive down costs, enable scaling, and allow new ideas to penetrate from the edges. (See more in my previous post about standards.)


5. Be Smart About Where You Start: The earlier stage the idea, the more it needs to be tried in a low-risk, but still consequential, environment. If we hold every new idea to the current lowest common technology denominator or strictest technical and process constraints -- especially high-stakes testing constraints -- the ideas will not be very innovative. That said, every pilot needs to take a universal design approach and contemplate how it could work for all students (the open platforms will help here).

College Consumerism Run Amok?

The two dirtiest words in higher education these days are "climbing" and "wall."

Seriously, if you spend enough time attending conferences, reading op-eds, etc., you come to realize that that climbing walls have somehow come to symbolize all that ails post-secondary education in America today. People are constantly denouncing their proliferation, or loudly noting that their institution refuses to install one, or otherwise employing them as a symbol of consumerism run amok. Students today demand all manner of creature comforts, the thinking goes, forcing colleges to kow-tow to their every whim, which is why college is so expensive and academic standards are in decline and the academy in general is a pale shadow of its former, greater self, back when students were students and professors were professors and higher learning happened how and where it was meant to happen, that is, in unheated, dimly-lit buildings constructed entirely of large granite blocks quarried no later than the 16th century.

This puzzles me.

First, because of all the things to be upset about, climbing walls don't seem that bad. Are they really that expensive? At least students are getting some exercise. How about dorms that cost nearly $400,000 per unit? That's extravagance.

Second, because colleges act as if they have no influence over the consumer preferences of students. Which is ridiculous. For example, some time in the near future I'm going to drive to the Best Buy on Route 1 in Alexandria, Virginia, and buy a flat-screen television, The store offers something like a hundred different models to choose from. In making my selection, I'll be asking a number of questions. How big is it, measured diagonally, in inches? How many HDMI inputs? Ethernet connection? Plasma, LCD, or LED? Are there 1080 lines of resolution? 120 Hz or the more powerful 240hz? And so on.

How do I know to ask these questions? And why is every similar customer, regardless of where they live and where they're shopping, asking the same questions? Because that's how flat-screen televisions are advertised. I also consulted independent reports like this article in the New York Times, which advises that LEDs are really just backlit LCDs and I only need 240hz if I'm going to spend a lot time watching fast-motion programming like pro football. (I won't be; I'm more of an HBO and Showtime guy.) So there's some marketing b.s. to wade through. But it's safe to say that there are no crucial elements of flat-screen televisions that aren't readily available for me to understand.

By contrast, let's say I was trying to choose the right college for my (non-existent) 17-year old daughter. And let's say I'm the perfect higher education consumer from the academy's perspective--I don't care at all about climbing walls or fitness centers or luxury dorms or any of that stuff. I care about all the truly important things I'm supposed to care about: the quality of the teaching, scholarship, and academic environment, how the school will help my daughter become an enlightened, ethical, fair-minded public citizen.

How would I choose? Where would I get that information, in a way that would allow me to decide among hundreds of alternatives? Answer: nowhere, because it doesn't exist. Colleges may complain about having to market themselves based on dorm-based pilates studios and whatnot, but it's not like they have some other secret brochure in a filing cabinet somewhere, filled with all the real information about the true meaning of higher education, materials that they would gladly distribute far and wide if only students weren't so coddled by their helicopter parents and addled by the rap music and the video games.

In fact most colleges don't systematically gather this kind of information, or if they do--via the National Survey of Student Engagement or something similar--they don't release it to the public. Yes, yes, colleges are lot more complicated than televisions. But nobody can say with a straight face that colleges are doing nearly as much as they could to provide consumers with information about teaching and learning that's useful for making consumer choices--that is, presented in a way that allows for institutional comparisons.

Even the data that colleges do gather, like graduation rates, are usually buried on the IR department Web page somewhere. Why? Because graduation rate are frequently terrible. And that's the real climbing wall scandal: they're cheap, compared to the cost of improving the quality of instruction that many undergraduates receive. If colleges want consumers to make choices differently, then colleges have take the lead in creating, promoting and standing behind different terms of consumer choice.

More Standards, Please

Why is a highly promising, successfully piloted technology that can help resolve a number of important issues around testing students with special needs -- and save money -- still sitting on the shelf?

In this case, the barrier is getting the tools to integrate into current testing processes and software platforms. Sounds complex and geeky, but here's a helpful analogy: One of the powerful aspects of the Internet is that standards enable Web site creators' work to be accessible to anybody with a browser. And, the browsers are built to accommodate a variety of add-ins or helper applications to build new functionality and tools into the standard browser. But, imagine if each state had a different browser. And, for states to choose your new tool, they had to abandon their current browser (and all of the Web sites built to work with that browser).

Bubble sheets, scanners, and a variety of psychometric principles are part of a deep set of standard, shared tools that enable the current methods of assessment. If we want a much better system of assessment, it's not just content standards that policymakers need to think about. A variety of open standards and infrastructure for student data, growth modeling, and assessment software platforms also need to be implemented. Just as in content, a lack of open standards and shared infrastructure in these areas is a critical barrier to comparability. Perhaps more importantly, it's a costly, tangible barrier to the incorporation of new ideas and technologies.

Take read-aloud and other accommodations on a math test, for instance. (In order to ensure that the test assesses math and not reading, instructors read the questions and other information aloud.) While some states may have scripts to follow, it's almost impossible to ensure any type of consistency across thousands of readers providing accommodations in thousands of schools. Simple differences in the way a reader chooses to describe (or not describe) charts, graphs, and other information can skew the results. In this case, some common protocols across states would greatly enhance current practice.

Moreover, these common protocols would also enable us to develop a next generation of solutions to the problem of accommodations. States are already successfully piloting software tools, based on universal design principles, that can automate read-aloud and a wide variety of other accommodations. Not only do these tools ensure consistency, but they also eliminate the real costs to local schools of providing accommodations. Perhaps most importantly, the accommodations paradigm changes, providing students an element of control over pace and a variety of factors that can optimize the test-taking environment.

Investments in shared infrastructure to set the stage for long term growth and development -- can we get this shovel ready?

Scaling Innovation in Assessment (in China)

While the rest of the policy world is at the national charter school love fest conference, I'm in Los Angeles at the national student assessment conference.

I had one of my more disturbing, but unfortunately, not surprising, conversations yesterday after a session where I learned more about an innovative, NSF-funded science assessment project. "What's next?" I asked the presenter. "How are you going to scale this up into more classrooms across the country?"

"I don't know," he replied. He told me that the commercial publishers weren't really interested. And, despite the relevance of the project, which uses advanced simulations and has shown promising results in improving students’ understanding of both science content and the process of scientific investigation, neither were districts and states.

He did not know how to bring this innovation to scale -- at least in the United States. "But they are really interested in China," he told me, and went on to explain Chinese educators' plans to implement the NSF funded initiative (which is probably funded under the guise of helping America's students to compete).

IDEA Stimulus Money...Gone?

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (commonly known as the stimulus bill) provided $12.2 billion in new funding for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). Could one Supreme Court decision eat it all up?

Turnaround Jumper

Michael Jordan was a great, great basketball player, both for his God-given abilities and his drive to succeed. He could float above the rim in awe-inspiring ways, and it was his determination that led him from being cut as a high schooler to the world's best all-time player. These things are well known. What's less appreciated about Jordan is his development from a physical player reliant on slam dunks, quickness, and leaping ability to a wily veteran who perfected a difficult move later in his career.

That shot, the fade away turnaround jumper, is known as one of the more difficult in basketball. The offensive player stands with his back to the hoop, pivots quickly to face the basket, and jumps backwards and away from the defender. It is difficult to contest, because the defender must jump across the offensive player's body, time the jump perfectly, and get to the ball all without touching the shooter's body. But, because the shooter is falling away from the basket, he must shoot against his momentum, which requires strength and grace uncommon in an ordinary player. In other words, a player like Jordan, a guy who wants to prolong his career by mastering a high-risk, high-reward shot.

School turnarounds are equally difficult and important, because they seek to halt the inertia of our country's worst schools and push them towards a high goal. Our basketball-playing Secretary of Education gave an excellent speech on the topic today at the National Charter Schools Conference. It was a symbolic venue for a speech in which Secretary Duncan called for an expanded role for charters in school turnarounds. While acknowledging the need to maintain tight quality controls, Duncan made clear his intention to focus on turning around the fortunes of the bottom five percent of schools.

It's a smart move to call on charters for this work. Charters have the capacity to innovate in ways that traditional public schools do not--by expanding the school day or year, modifying the curriculum, and giving flexibility to school leadership in budgetary, personnel, and other decisions. With this flexibility must come high accountability demands from charter authorizers. And, because unsuccessful charters are more easily shuttered than traditional public schools, charters make sense as instruments of change. If they are not successful, they can be closed and something new can be tried.

If this sounds like a losing proposition for the charter school movement (they get the toughest assignments and might get blamed for failure), it could also be seen as opportunity. Charter schools continue to have an identification problem. The general public doesn't always understand what they are, and they are occasionally misrepresented as a stalking horse for the privatization of education. Taking on an expanded role in turning around the worst schools in the country could give charters the opportunity to show their value. Improving the educational attainment of the kids attending perennially dismal schools would be hard to dismiss or ignore.

One could argue charters are doing this already. Many are explicitly designed for low-income and minority students trapped in failing traditional public schools. But they continue to be seen, fairly or not, as skimming the students who have a desire for improvement. That image would fade if the charter sector answers Duncan's call.

This process will not be clean, and Duncan may have overreached with the five percent figure (why not start with the five worst schools in each state, or some other definable, achievable number?), but he's set the right goals. His speech today was a very good start; now it's time for the nation to work on their turnarounds.