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Matthew Lynch published in list, Matthew Lynch, Policy & Reform

3 Reasons K-12 Education Still Needs Federal Oversight

Educating American children has always been a responsibility that has fallen heavily on the states. As the public k-12 education matured in the 20th century, however, it became increasingly apparent that states left to their own educational devices meant dangerous consequences for many children—especially students with disabilities and those living in poverty, for example. Historically, the federal government has always been the one to pick up the slack in k-12 education when states have fallen short.

In his piece for The Daily Beast, Jonah Edelman of Stand for Children warns that members of the newly-seated Congress have already voiced intentions to reduce accountability and transparency over states’ educational systems, while providing additional flexibility with federal funding.

I have my reservations about this. Contrary to what some states-rights activists claim, states do not always act in the best interests of their residents, especially when it comes to education. Left to their own devices, states tend to enact discriminatory practices. Allow me to share a few reasons I think education still needs the support of the federal government:

  1. Some states will run wild once given control.

My home state of Mississippi is an example of state control gone awry. If its schools were wholly reliant on the state to outline learning benchmarks and divvy up funding (based on a state population with 24 percent in poverty and over 70 percent of its students eligible for free-and-reduced-price lunch), the inequalities would compound exponentially.

And those inequalities are already startling. For example, while 83 percent of high schools in New Hampshire offer calculus, only 41 percent of those in Mississippi do.

Mississippi has never quite been able to recover from its rampant poverty that began after the Civil War. Even when freedom was granted to slaves in the state and nearby, the African-American population was not able to elevate its quality of life due to the barriers erected by segregation and Jim Crow laws. Less-overt inequalities still exist that keep each new generation of African-American students in the state from breaking the cycle of poverty at home and underachievement in the classroom.

  1. Federal intervention can give students rights when states refuse to.

Edelman mentions issues like desegregation as wins for the federal government when states refused to do the right thing for all students. Without federal intervention, for instance, we wouldn’t have programs like the DREAM Act, which encourages continued education for students who might otherwise have been eligible for deportation. Instead, because of this federal program, they can contribute positively to their communities and to our country.

  1. The federal government can help raise the standard of education so that all states have something to aspire to.

Federal guidance is needed to measure how much students are learning from one state to the next. Establishing a common high bar for academic performance that includes rigorous college-prep expectations can only be brought forth through federal involvement in schools.

It will be interesting to see what twists and turns the NCLB rewrites take and certainly no group will ever be completely satisfied. But the basic principle that guaranteeing every student in every state equal access to education is one worth fighting for.

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Matthew Lynch published in Education Leadership

Educational leadership: Tips for inspiring students and making a difference

**The Edvocate is pleased to publish guest posts as way to fuel important conversations surrounding P-20 education in America. The opinions contained within guest posts are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official opinion of The Edvocate or Dr. Matthew Lynch.**

A guest column by Anita Ginsburg

As a teacher, you do your best to plan every lesson and prepare every lecture several days in advance. You follow the curriculum to the letter, and you only use the best textbooks when planning your assignments. But as a teacher, you want to do more than just hand out grades and percentages. You want to inspire, encourage and motivate students. You recognize that a complete education doesn’t always come from a textbook or essay. If you truly want to make a difference in the classroom, you’ll need to implement the following steps:

  1. Set High Expectations

At the beginning of each school year, you probably establish a few ground rules for expected behavior. You let students know that you want their homework in on time, and you tell them to turn off their phones when they enter the room. But your expectations should go beyond basic classroom guidelines. You need to communicate that you expect them to not just listen but to absorb, and that you want them to not just pass a test but to remember what they’ve learned. At every opportunity, let your students know when you see an improvement in their progress. Give your students examples of what a successful assignment, paper, or test looks like, so they can work toward that goal.

  1. Show Your Enthusiasm

You likely spent several years studying specific courses to earn your degree, so clearly you have a passion for certain areas of education. When you share your enthusiasm for your favorite subjects, you can spread that energetic spark to the rest of your students. Even if students don’t seem initially engaged in science, math, or social studies, your own excitement can often pique their curiosity. They’ll feel intrigued about your enthusiasm, and they just might want to do a little research of their own to find out more. To develop better teaching techniques and leadership skills to keep students engaged and excited, consider getting a master’s degree in education. The experience and knowledge you can pass on to your students can be very beneficial.

  1. Let Your Students Take Control

While you shouldn’t let your students push you around, you can give them a degree of choice about what they do in your classroom. Rather than reigning supreme and assigning what you think best, let your students choose their own topics for papers and projects, so long as they relate to the course content.

For example, if you teach history, you could let a student write about his or her family’s historical immigration experience, rather than restricting an essay to the immigration act of 1924. Or if you teach physics, you could let an athletic student compare the spin and rotation of a soccer ball versus a football. When you let your students connect their assignments to their own personal interests, you give them the opportunity to engage in and explore their work more deeply.

Of course, these are just a few ways you can make a difference in the classroom. It’s important to keep learning yourself to continue inspiring your students. From small seminars to higher education, every step counts to making a difference in the lives of your students.

 

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Matthew Lynch published in EdTech & Innovation, list, Matthew Lynch

3 Critical Questions We Must Ask about the K-12 Online Learning Trend

Online learning is more than a fad. The facts are staggering: According to the International Association for K-12 Online Learning, there are nearly 1.9 million K-12 enrollments in online courses every school year, up from under 50,000 in 2000. The current number does not even include students enrolled in primarily online schools. Thirty-one states have full-time online schools that serve on a statewide basis.

But is this trend, quickly becoming a permanent feature of our education, a positive one? Here are three questions to ask to determine whether online learning is changing the quality of education for the better or for the worse.

  1. Do online courses really adequately prepare you for college? The top reason that districts give for offering online options is for credit recovery, with 81 percent of urban schools citing this reason. Are online courses really equal to ones in the classroom though? It really depends who you ask. Recent news reports out of California show that high school graduation rates are at an all-time high of 78 percent, with even higher numbers in areas like San Francisco and San Jose. While some educators use these numbers to point to student success, critics say the rise in graduation numbers does not necessarily mean that students are college ready. The rise of online courses as a means to “make up” failed or incomplete classes are part of the reason more kids graduate – but do they know what they should?
  2. How rigorous are online courses? This is likely a cloudy area for those of us who grew up before the Internet forever changed the face of distance education. On a basic level, if a student reads the material, and is able to give correct answers on a test, that means he or she has “learned” the content. When an educator takes into account other influential factors like learning style, intelligence and work ethic, that basic definition becomes murky. The general consensus in the education community seems to be that even though online courses have merit, they are less rigorous than classroom settings.
  3. Is making online learning mandatory in high school a good thing? Then there is the issue of online learning as an overarching ideology. Embracing the inevitability that online learning is a very real part of the average college education, the state of Florida began requiring in 2011 that high school students in the 24-credit graduation option to take at least one online course. The public, Internet-based Florida Virtual School leads the way in this innovation and is considered a national leader in the e-Learning model. So in this example, Florida is not simply offering online courses as a backup; the state mandates that students on a college prep path get early exposure to the type of learning they are likely to see in college.

Simply put, there are two very different ways to look at online courses in K-12 education. On one hand, there is educational merit, though that education is debatable as to the actual extent of its effectiveness. On the other hand, there is the practicality aspect of exposing students to online learning long before the college years. The second point paints online learning as a life skill of sorts – something for kids to understand before entering the real world as adults, much like balancing a bank account or learning how to create a resume.

Regardless of the limitations of online learning, those who oppose K-12 online courses are just wasting their breath. The momentum of online learning is gaining speed. Educators can best spend their time looking for ways to enhance the content of what is offered in virtual courses and making the most of what classroom time is available.

Read all of our posts about EdTech and Innovation by clicking here. 

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Matthew Lynch published in International Education

Innovation vs. memorization: What kind of educational system should we strive for?

**The Edvocate is pleased to publish guest posts as way to fuel important conversations surrounding P-20 education in America. The opinions contained within guest posts are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official opinion of The Edvocate or Dr. Matthew Lynch.**

A guest post by Taylor Schaefer

Asian countries have topped the list of global school rankings in math and science out of 76 countries in a recent report released by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). ‘Universal Basic Skills: What Countries Stand to Gain’ ranks countries by averaged math and science test scores. Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea, Japan and Chinese Taipei took the top five spots while the United States falls behind at 29th.

Using this study, OECD seeks to show the link between education and economic growth. OECD’s education director Andrea Schleicher stated, “The idea is to give more countries, rich and poor, access to comparing themselves against the world’s education leaders, to discover their relative strengths and weaknesses, and to see what the long-term economic gains from improved quality in schooling could be for them.”

While a high standard of education is often used as an indicator for economic growth of a country, the OECD report does not accurately reflect these numbers. Norway and Qatar have two of the highest GDP per capita in the world yet Norway ranks fairly average on the OECD scale (25th) and Qatar ranks near the bottom (68th).  How can we explain this phenomenon? While education plays an important role in the overall development of a country and individual growth, there are clearly other factors influencing economic development.

What should we take away from the OECD report? Should the world begin to conform their educational systems to meet the standards of the Asian countries? Are mathematics and science the only subjects that can measure a nations ability to achieve greater educational attainment? Just like there are other variables to consider in measuring economic development there are other important aspects to consider when measuring educational progress.

China is known for its rigorous educational system and is recognized globally for its dominance of standardized testing and educational strength. However, most of these test scores reflect the students ability to memorize and master a narrow amount of information A large amount of time and effort is used to attain these goals, for example, Chinese students often average around 14 hours of homework a week while US students average six hours a week. While this style of learning may be useful for achieving higher test scores, it often has short-term outcomes.

A United Kingdom teacher, Anthony Seldon, recently criticized the OECD tables stating, “They are skewing schools and national education systems away from real learning towards repetitive rote learning.” Many other scholars also question the direction in which global education systems are headed. Systems centered around testing are argued to severely diminish creativity and innovation. Chinese author Yong Zhao discusses the problems involving the Chinese educational system and its inability to encourage creativity and diverse talent. Statistician Howard Steven Freidman also stated that China will need to integrate teaching styles that support creative problem solving rather than memorization.

The United States’ increased focus on standardized testing has shown they are already taking steps towards adopting similar education methods to Asian countries. However, heavy backlash has come from teachers and parents across the country against the new “common core” approach and heavy testing for students. This response seems appropriate when examining some of the most prominent thinkers in history. It is important to acknowledge the great innovators of the past and the present who helped improve the lives of others and contributed to all aspects of development. Intelligence is diverse; moving towards an educational system that forces student’s minds to work in one way not only hinders student’s capabilities but will also have negative repercussions on future development.

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Taylor Schaefer is a current graduate student at University of Central Florida studying Political Science. After traveling to more than a dozen countries, Taylor seeks to use her interests in global affairs and human rights to contribute to developmental efforts around the world.

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Matthew Lynch published in Policy & Reform

Study: Smoking less dangerous than no education

Studies are a dime a dozen these days, but there are still plenty that force you to pay attention.

Take a Washington Post story that talks about a new study published in PLOS ONE, a journal from the Public Library of Science.

According to the Post’s review of the study, “more than 145,000 deaths could have been prevented in 2010 if adults who did not finish high school had earned a GED or high school diploma – comparable to the mortality rates of smoking.”

That’s staggering considering smoking and education aren’t necessarily congruent.

For decades Americans have been warned about the horrors of smoking because of the adverse effects that it has on one’s health. While having an education has always been synonymous with success, not sure if anyone, or any study for that matter, has ever gone this far to connect poor health, or death related to poor health, to lacking a proper education.

The study, according to the Post, doesn’t directly correlate poor education with death. Rather it counts death as “an estimate of education’s impact on mortality, and do not indicate direct causality.”

While this study doesn’t directly state that failure to attain an education will result in death, it does portend that death is a consequence of one’s failure to gain an education. Make sense?

This type of information is multi-faceted because of how far it stretches. Personal responsibility plays a role; the government has an act in this play; the private sector and many other areas are also complicit.

How we move along with the information posted from this story will be interesting as well. Because, maybe more than anything, this shows just how stark the consequences are for our society if we fail to properly educate our children.

The results may be death.

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Matthew Lynch published in International Education

Are Scandinavian schools really better than American ones?

There is a fascinating interview by eSchoolnews.com with Hans Renman, the CEO of Scandinavian Education, a think tank that has the aim of using pointed strategy to properly manage development “to help the school take the next step.”

In the talk, Renman speaks of trouble with the testing culture in the United States, problems with technology and teaching, and how equality has aided the growth of education in Noridic countries.

“In every single class you can find students from any social background. How people live in Finland is not as extreme as in other countries, like England or the United States. You can see research on the effectiveness of school systems that says that if the education system is equal and democratic, it’s a good thing for every student, not just the top five percent, like say in Singapore or China.”

An interesting distinction to the argument for equality are the living conditions of some Americans. In Finland, schools are publicly funded, so there is no discrepancy on which schools receive more money. There are also “no rankings, no comparisons or competition between students, schools or regions.”

That leads to equality as every student may be measured on the same level, sort of, and each individual will receive the same quality education.

Obviously America’s approach is a little different. We thrive on competition, think that comparisons are healthy, and use rankings as a way to show what’s good and bad. Doing away with these footnotes would likely remove a level of stress from educators and students here but there is no way to tell if it would make a significant difference in how students learn. Our economy isn’t necessarily based on equality either, so to insert fairness into how we educate students would mean that America has changed its capitalistic philosophy.

Outside of equality, we can probably learn from the Finnish on why testing may hinder a student’s ability succeed. Students in Finland are given just one exam prior to graduating high school. According to Renman, it is a key difference in how students are education in America versus say Finland or Sweden.

“In Scandinavia, the results of the national tests are more the business of the school officials. For a single student, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t affect your grade.”

The research surrounding the success of schools in Scandinavia and Finland is worth continued exploration. America may surely cherry pick certain policies from the education model in Northern Europe to improve the education system here. But there are also certain practices that wouldn’t fit and would fail if implemented.

Still–copying the steps success will usually yield good results.

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Matthew Lynch published in Policy & Reform

Automaticity: How can it be sometimes bad, sometimes good?

**The Edvocate is pleased to publish guest posts as way to fuel important conversations surrounding P-20 education in America. The opinions contained within guest posts are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official opinion of The Edvocate or Dr. Matthew Lynch.**

A guest post by Bruce Deitrick Price

Automaticity means that you recognize something instantly. You see a neighbor’s dog and in a split-second you say, “Bucky!” That’s automaticity.

Curiously enough, the Education Establishment thinks that automaticity is sometimes evil, sometimes ideal. This strange paradox reveals a great deal about the intellectual chaos and corruption in our K-12 system.

This paradox is even more extreme and perverse than you may at first imagine. When automaticity is helpful, our experts say it’s bad. When automaticity is destructive, our experts say it’s good. That’s what ideology and secret agenda have done to the field of education.

Historically, children were expected to learn simple addition problems and the multiplication tables. You knew automatically that 7 times 8 is 56. You knew that 7+12 is 19. With just a small amount of such information, a person can readily solve the common math that we  encounter in everyday situations. Remarkably, all the so-called “reform” programs of the last 60 years specifically crusaded against this capability. New Math, circa 1965, emphasized all sorts of high-falutin activities (Boolean algebra, statistics, algebraic matrices) but denigrated any tendency toward memorizing arithmetic facts so you would have them as standard intellectual equipment.

Reform Math circa 1985, specifically forbade children to learn basic math facts. An early reliance on calculators was encouraged! Then we come to Common Core Math, which  brags that children will engage in higher-level thinking and creative problem-solving but doesn’t want them to know the multiplication tables. The pattern is relentless. Automaticity, with regard to numbers and doing arithmetic, is constantly denigrated.

Clearly, everything that was ordinary and desirable in all cultures for thousands of years has been deemed unacceptable by our Education Establishment. If you look at only this part of the story, you know that these people have a perverse love for whatever is inefficient. Why? Most likely, they are addicted to collectivist thinking. The worst possible outcome for these people (people like Bill Ayers) is that some children master math quickly and sprint ahead of their classmates. So our progressives use any trick to block that possibility. Leveling is the goal. Ergo, no automaticity in math classrooms.

Now let’s look at a situation where automaticity can be destructive.  That’s the process of learning to read. Public schools for 80 years have ordered children to seek automaticity in the memorization of sight-words. The essence of Whole Word reading instruction is that children are told to memorize entire words as graphic units. This  fundamentally absurd approach has a dozen different names (sight-words, high frequency words, Dolch words, look-say; don’t be confused by the interchangeable aliases). The basic idea is that children look at a word (for example xgfh) and they memorize it as a design. You might object that xgfhis not a real word. But a first-grade child would not know that or guess that. All the designs look the same to children (that is, they look bizarre and unfriendly just as xgfh now looks to you).

Children DO need to memorize the smallest units with automaticity, that is, the individual letters. Then they need to memorize the sounds represented by these letters with automaticity. That is the correct way to proceed (it’s known as phonics). But this approach is precisely forbidden in our elementary schools. Instead the children are told to memorize larger, more complex units than the brain can easily handle, i.e., whole words such as xgfh.

Please note, for the brain any memorization is essentially the same task. You look at an airplane in the sky and you say that’s a 757. You look at a  coin and you know it’s a nickel. No big deal, especially in the case of arithmetic  where there are only so many scores of helpful facts. On the other hand, memorizing many hundreds of sight-words is extremely difficult.

The more objects there are and the more similar they are,  the more quickly the project becomes hopeless. Imagine somebody put together a collection of 100 coins from around the world, all of them more or less silvery and all of them the size of our nickel and dime. Naming these coins with automaticity would be very similar to naming English sight-words with automaticity. Now imagine the teacher says you have to move up to 300, and then 500. That’s what learning to read with sight-words is like for  kids in elementary school. A nightmare. Not only is automaticity virtually impossible to achieve, but trying to do so is destructive to the child’s mind. The brain is asked to switch back and forth from phonetic reading to sight-word reading—two completely different mental operations.

The bottom line here is that  our elite educators are social engineers with ideological goals. They want an undifferentiated society. They don’t want educational excellence. So they pick the worst ways to do everything.

If  a child needs automaticity to be good at arithmetic, our commissars will forbid automaticity.

If automaticity with sight-words is the worst thing that could happen to a child,  the same commissars will demand automaticity.

Anybody even a bit fond of common sense has to be appalled by this. Anyone who has a heart has to be appalled by this.

We have millions of high school graduates arriving in college who’ve never been asked to memorize much of anything— arithmetic, science, history, geography, dates, presidents—because memorization is bad. The Education Establishment will tell you that there’s nothing more evil than rote memorization. They will tell you that again and again.

Meanwhile, these same students starting in K will be required to memorize sight-words. So we have a wonderfully screwed up society now where many people don’t know much of anything, and one main thing they don’t know is how to read.

With regard to Common Core, there is a lot of new verbiage and jargon, but this massive retooling of American public schools seems to have accommodated all the worst things from the past. The Education Establishment insists that this is a wonderful new reform. That’s what they always say.

 

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Bruce Deitrick Price explains education theories and methods on his site Improve-Education.org

 

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