This is in response to two recent stories here on Daily Kos. I can't possibly address all of the excellent points they make, so go read the originals and think about how you can help with their recommendations. I'll wait until you get back to add my two cents.
Yes, we can improve public education, by Renie
66th Anniversary of the Second Bill of Rights!, by Vikingkingq
In order to improve education in the US and around the world, and with it our various political processes, and at the same time to attack poverty, racism, and oppression, I am advocating the adoption of the One Laptop Per Child program around the world and throughout the United States. Let me tell you why.
I have been posting on some of this in other Diary Entries.
The idea is that we can give every schoolchild a laptop computer that costs less than textbooks, and replace textbooks with something much better--Free Software and learning materials. We will also have to provide electricity and Internet to even the poorest and most remote villages in developing countries, the deepest, darkest inner city slums, Native American reservations, and everywhere else. It means that we have to spur local job creation for the graduates of these schools, using microfinance and other tools. We have costed this program at about $50 billion annually for a generation, with the result of creating trillions of dollars of new economic activity.
Of course, we also have to deal with basic necessities of life for the poor, including security, food, shelter, and health care. I don't believe in arguing which should come first, since in my view we should be doing all of them at the same time. I'm doing my part on issues that I know about, and I'm pleased at anybody else doing theirs on the rest of the critical issues. We also need to educate children about the critical issues, and give them the tools to organize around them, so it isn't only aid programs imposed from outside.
On education, Renie quotes this list of five verified characteristics of US schools that are beating the odds, from Karen Chenoweth's book, How it’s Being Done: Urgent Lessons from Unexpected Schools.
- Personal relationship building
- Data-driven instruction
- Teacher collaboration
- A laser-like focus on what students need to learn
- Formative assessments
Let's take a quick look at how the OLPC XO laptop, its Sugar education software, deployment teams, and other elements of the program meet those requirements.
Personal relationships: We have specific cases of improved relationships between students (locally and globally), between student and teacher, and between teachers. Also between family, student, and all the rest of the world, as in children looking up agricultural information on the Internet, or helping family or friends get into e-commerce on Overstock.com, eBay, or other such sites.
Data-driven instruction: Basing teaching methods on experience, as in proposals for evidence-based healthcare. This does not mean just test scores, but all appropriate measures. In particular, portfolio-based learning provides motivation for students to learn much better, and provides the basis for a much more rounded evaluation of student progress. The Sugar software for XOs includes tools specifically for building portfolios.
Teacher collaboration: As mentioned above, under personal relationships.
Focus on what students need to learn: In the best OLPC deployments, the teams investigate what learning deficiencies have been seen, and develop software to overcome those deficiencies. An example is the counting program developed at OLE (Open Learning Exchange) Nepal.
Formative assessments: This assumes two-way communication between students and teachers being used as a base for changing educational practice. Not the typical No Child Left Behind flow of test results to bureaucrats who decide how to punish failing schools. See the OLE Nepal example cited above for the right way to assess school systems.
In discussing FDR's Second Bill of Rights from 66 years ago, Vikingkingq points out that we have done a lot on farm security and on Social Security and Medicare for retirees and their dependents. Help for the disabled, which was not on FDR's list, has come a fair way. Health care is looking good since both House and Senate bills have passed, although the fuss against it continues, and the job is by no means finished. That leaves jobs (including adequate unemployment coverage), housing, unfair competition (really, lack of competition) in markets, and education, all areas where Republican obstructionism has been the principal obstacle for 66 years, and is even more strident today.
The cure for the Mad Tea Party of No is twofold: birth and death on one hand, and education on the other. The far Right is losing both of the demographic and education battles. The children of the True Believers have been steadily falling away on every measured issue from gay marriage to the Cuban embargo, at about 2% annually while the old and most hidebound die off at about the same rate. If we take a simple extrapolation of the statistics over the last decade and more, we can conjecture that we will reach the tipping points on the various issues, state by state (and thus Senator by Senator) over the next 15 years or so, with the balance in the Senate tipping in 2014 or 2016. At that point, the obstinacy of the rump Confederacy will cease to be a factor in national politics.
So we have to keep up the effort at education and at communicating progressive ideas to anyone who will listen. Most of all, the new revolution in education promises just that and a step further: creating the tools for children to communicate with each other and to organize politically for the first time in history. Children are the final frontier of human rights. When we have taken care of their needs for safety, shelter, nutrition, health, and education for jobs and social institutions in the Information Age, we and they together will be able to take care of the rest of the Second Bill of Rights. Then we can tackle the hard problems like restoring the environment and ending war.