In the wake of the massacre that killed 27 students and 5 professors at Virginia Tech, I remain haunted by the anguished appeal of a mother to the students her now-dead son once called classmates. “If they see a friend who’s going through turmoil, if they see a friend who is in some pain, and they don’t want to talk about it – make them talk about it,” Susan Kayton told the Boston Globe. “If they don’t want counseling, drag them to counseling.”
Kayton’s son, Daniel Barclay, was not killed at Virginia Tech. He was a student at MIT whose dead body floated to a Cape Cod beach this week, the victim of an apparent suicide by drowning. The news of his death is not mentioned on MIT’s homepage. That same website, though, features a prominent link to a story entitled, “MIT community shares sorrow, support for Virginia Tech.”
The week before Seung-Hui Cho’s mental illness unleashed the most horrific bloodbath in US history, a sophomore at Stanford University committed suicide by hanging himself. To this day, no announcement of Mo Morsette’s death has been sent to other students on campus. Yet news of a memorial service held at Stanford in memory of those slain at Virginia Tech was also featured centrally on Stanford's website.
In no way do I mean to minimize the terror at Virginia Tech. The memories of those fallen students, the mysteries of their final moments, and the murderous evil with which Cho slaughtered them deserve all the attention they have received. But across the country this week, too many college campuses unified in sorrow over the deaths at Virginia Tech while ignoring the depression that threatens to destroy their own communities. If anything positive emerges from this horrible incident, let us at least commit to combating the tragic ignorance of the hopelessness of so many other college students before they kill others or themselves.
This won’t happen overnight. For one thing, colleges don’t even seem to want to face the issue. They hide behind claims of privacy and hopeful theories of student development to keep the depression of individual students from sending ripples through the apparent stability of the campus. To admit imperfection might make the university itself look bad, might decrease enrollment, might fracture the impression of unity that emerges at football games and commencements.
Details of treatment should not be released publicly. But the fact that depression exists in dorms can no longer be a private concern shared only between troubled students and counselors. By choosing silence, the colleges themselves suffer from the same avoidance of reality that cripples the victims – yes, the victims – of mental illness.
These are not issues that have only impacted one isolated student at Virginia Tech. All that was unique to that campus last Monday was the extent of the effect. What is universal at far too many – if not all – college campuses is the breadth of the cause and the unwillingness to intervene.
Imagine what would have happened at Virginia Tech this week if the rampage occurred at a different campus -- if, say, it tore apart the University of Virginia rather than its in-state rival. I have no doubt that administrators and students at Tech would have reacted in outward displays of sadness while avoiding inward analyses of their own community’s fragility. Perhaps there would have been a memorial vigil held on the now-infamous Drill Field. Seung-Hui Cho probably would not have attended. There would be pictures in the school newspaper of the students who did attend. There should be. But there would be no mention of the student who sat quietly, eerily, helplessly – and alone – in his dark room during the candlelight tribute across campus.
There must be.
To continue to ignore that troubled boy would be to ignore all we have learned this week. A truly collegial environment would make his plight a source of communal concern before his illness destroyed that community.
In such a place, the campus would hope together if he were to disappear into the ocean. And if he were to hang himself, the campus would know.
As we have seen across the country during the past few days, it takes communities united in grief and humbled by death to mourn. What we must also realize is that it will take unified and strong communities to prevent such an event from taking place again.
Let us never forget the 32 innocent people who needlessly died at Virginia Tech this week. Let us also never forget the mental anguish of the hopeless killer who savagely murdered them.
And let us never forget Daniel Barclay or Mo Morsette.
Saturday, April 21, 2007
Sunday, April 15, 2007
The Case for Radical Change
Most people agree that the American education system needs reforming, but the reforms that are usually recommended are either water-downed plans that don't address the core problems or so outrageous that the educational establishment would never accept it. So, we keep going in the same direction with few changes. Schools today, in many ways, look very similar to those of 50 years ago.
On Wednesday, Tom Payzant, Former Boston Superintendent and part of the commision that produced the Tough Choices or Tough Times report, came to speak to a class at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. This commission included many establishment educators and policymakers including Superintendents, Secretaries of Education, Senators, Union Leaders, and Business Executives. Given the fact that many of these commissioners had decades as members of the educational establishment, it is shocking that their report represents the most radical education reform suggestions that I have ever read. If these people are recommending the dismantling of the school district as we know it, the concept of social promotion, and the standardized pay scale, then we may finally be moving in the right direction.
While Payzant cited a lot of statistics to set the mood for the commission's recommendations, there is one that stuck with me. Of all 9th graders nation-wide, only 18% graduate with an Associates degree within 3 years of high school or a Bachelors degree within 6 years of high school. Assuming that one needs a college degree to achieve some measure of educational success, then we are failing 82% of our students. I knew it was bad, but that is ridiculous. How can we compete in business, international relations, science and technology with the rest of the world when only a small minority of our populace is reaching even low levels of academic success? It is a threat to our economy, our democracy, and our standing as the sole superpower.
With that in mind, the commission looked at what was being done successfully in other countries. Taking suggestions from our neighbors, the commission developed 10 steps to improve our standing. Some are relatively uncontroversial such as free and universal preschool for all 4 years olds and all low income 3 year olds. They also recommended a tax-protected account given to each newborn with some money for their education (to which they and their families could add even more). These are exactly the kinds of recommendations that I have come to expect from such commissions. They are nice, but really aren't going to get to the heart of the problem.
This commission was different. They suggested doing away with our social promotion procedures where students move from one grade to the next just because they happen to get a year older. Instead they recommend moving students through the system based on their progress with no set timetable. They also recommend raising teacher pay significantly in order to attract candidates from the top 1/3 of their college classes (with a new average salary hovering around $100,000). That's my favorite provision, by the way! Districts would basically be stripped of all their power since schools would be run independently by 3rd parties and get their funding directly from the state. And the federal government would get a lot more power to set national standards and assessments.
Regardless of whether you agree with these specific recommendations, we all have to agree that this is the kind of radical change that our system needs. However, before I get too excited I have to keep reminding myself that it is unlikely that these reforms will ever be instituted. Teachers unions will never let them get rid of the salary schedule. Local officials will never allow the federal government to take any power away from them. Conservatives will scream about tax increases and so called liberals would rather see minorities in failing schools than institute anything that resembles school choice. The members of this commission, who represented every constituency group and every political stripe, put aside their partisan differences and looked abroad to find the solutions that worked best. I hope that in the future we can do the same.
On Wednesday, Tom Payzant, Former Boston Superintendent and part of the commision that produced the Tough Choices or Tough Times report, came to speak to a class at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. This commission included many establishment educators and policymakers including Superintendents, Secretaries of Education, Senators, Union Leaders, and Business Executives. Given the fact that many of these commissioners had decades as members of the educational establishment, it is shocking that their report represents the most radical education reform suggestions that I have ever read. If these people are recommending the dismantling of the school district as we know it, the concept of social promotion, and the standardized pay scale, then we may finally be moving in the right direction.
While Payzant cited a lot of statistics to set the mood for the commission's recommendations, there is one that stuck with me. Of all 9th graders nation-wide, only 18% graduate with an Associates degree within 3 years of high school or a Bachelors degree within 6 years of high school. Assuming that one needs a college degree to achieve some measure of educational success, then we are failing 82% of our students. I knew it was bad, but that is ridiculous. How can we compete in business, international relations, science and technology with the rest of the world when only a small minority of our populace is reaching even low levels of academic success? It is a threat to our economy, our democracy, and our standing as the sole superpower.
With that in mind, the commission looked at what was being done successfully in other countries. Taking suggestions from our neighbors, the commission developed 10 steps to improve our standing. Some are relatively uncontroversial such as free and universal preschool for all 4 years olds and all low income 3 year olds. They also recommended a tax-protected account given to each newborn with some money for their education (to which they and their families could add even more). These are exactly the kinds of recommendations that I have come to expect from such commissions. They are nice, but really aren't going to get to the heart of the problem.
This commission was different. They suggested doing away with our social promotion procedures where students move from one grade to the next just because they happen to get a year older. Instead they recommend moving students through the system based on their progress with no set timetable. They also recommend raising teacher pay significantly in order to attract candidates from the top 1/3 of their college classes (with a new average salary hovering around $100,000). That's my favorite provision, by the way! Districts would basically be stripped of all their power since schools would be run independently by 3rd parties and get their funding directly from the state. And the federal government would get a lot more power to set national standards and assessments.
Regardless of whether you agree with these specific recommendations, we all have to agree that this is the kind of radical change that our system needs. However, before I get too excited I have to keep reminding myself that it is unlikely that these reforms will ever be instituted. Teachers unions will never let them get rid of the salary schedule. Local officials will never allow the federal government to take any power away from them. Conservatives will scream about tax increases and so called liberals would rather see minorities in failing schools than institute anything that resembles school choice. The members of this commission, who represented every constituency group and every political stripe, put aside their partisan differences and looked abroad to find the solutions that worked best. I hope that in the future we can do the same.
America and the Big Questions
I have any number of comments to make about education in
Most of my own concerns regarding American institutions can be boiled down to
Unfortunately, it seems that lately every news story I read about American education makes me question the very idea of a public education system. A piece in Education Week by Robert Epstein (www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2007/04/04/31epstein.h26.html) about compulsory attendance in high school made me wonder how something intended as a public good could be required and how much of our resources go into making sure that people who do not want to be educated are “educated” anyway (I think a number of questions could be asked about how beneficial such practices are to those individuals and to society at large). This is a question I dealt with in detail in my previous post, but is one that continues to bother me. Likewise a story about the recently proposed use of plastic hand-cuffs to restrain out of control students in
Some readers may be wondering how I can on the one hand call for a more individualized education for each child and on the other hand question the existence of the public education system. But this is exactly the point I’m trying to make. If we are unwilling to ask those big questions, even when they challenge our own values, we are doing a disservice to our community and our children. Certainly the idea of public education is something that Americans hold very dear, but sometimes the best thing we can do for ourselves is to question our most closely held ideals and offer them up for critical examination. While I like many Americans am dedicated to the ideals behind the public education system, I am also afraid that we have come to associate an attack on the public school system as an attack on those ideals and therefore refuse to ask those potentially dangerous but also potentially rewarding questions. America why are we so scared of the big questions?
Saturday, April 7, 2007
What should we do on educational inequality?
What should we do on educational inequality? To answer this question, let us make an analysis on factors of educational inequality. School appears to be the first factors of educational inequality, --we always discuss segregation and desegregation of our colorful children. However, it is not the main factors. We cannot ignore affects of family and community on a child’s development. To some extent, these factors are even more important than school. Just as professor Gary Orfield, who recently does researches on the integration of children from working-class families with those of middle-class and higher incomes in a public elementary school in Florida, says, "The middle-class family is basically the strongest educational institution in this country by far. Their destiny is less determined by their school than their family and their network...The kinds are getting a log of education at home".
Therefore, even some day we arrive on finally desegregation, we realize "multiple intelligences"(Howard Gardner), it is still important for us to treat our children individually. To treat our children individually means, we teach them in school, according to their different background, which may related to their home and living community. We must treat them individually, because the highest level of civilization is respect, and the greatest respect to our children is to admit that they are unequal. Educational equality does not mean our children reach the same achievement, that is what NCLB want and is also why it fails, but mean our children can realize their colorful achievement. We want to build a garden with all kinds of plants, rather than only roses. Take the case of "Pre-K Education", there are many rich children with an extra 3 or 4 preparation for schools that poor children do not have, giving some former children an advantage on the very first day of school. In that case, it is actually unfair to desegregate and to set the same assessment for those poor children.
So what should we do on educational inequality? My answer is, to know what our children actually need in their individual development and then to satisfy them.Koreans Gone Wild: Spring Break In Seoul
It’s Easter weekend, a perfect time for a confession: I spent half of last week traveling through Korea as a private college admission consultant. (I spent the other half flying to and from Korea, but I’ll save the story of that disaster for a different time.)
Having spent several years as a college admission officer at Stanford, I’m well aware of the stigma folks in our profession attach to such for-profit consulting enterprises. It was not uncommon at conferences or meetings to hear virulent condemnations against those charged with “selling our knowledge” or “prostituting your experience” or, my favorite, “crossing to the dark side.”
Bless me, father, for I have sinned.
But I’m happy I went. Not because I particularly liked being whisked around the country the way celebrities usually are – and the way educators usually are not. And not because I successfully convinced the hundreds of people who came to my presentations that the very generic pieces of information I shared were the “inside secrets from a former Stanford admission officer” that the PR department had promised.
I’m happy I went because I learned more in 2 ½ days than I ever could have elsewhere about the threats to schooling when markets trump morals, when entrepreneurs invade education, and when competition outpaces counseling.
It was clear early in my trip that I was expected to tell parents every possible advantage, every trick, and every loophole that would give their students a better chance. It was a brilliant ploy by the consulting company using my presence to recruit customers: prey on the fears of parents, convince them that access and influence matter, show them that strategy is key to success, and then offer the “Deluxe Ivy Guarantee Package.” Education, they suggested, was purely a marketplace maneuver.
The nervous parents and shell-shocked students ate it up. During my trip, I never once had a conversation with a parent or student who asked about a college’s commitment to educational excellence or how to find the campus that would be the best social or academic fit. To the future college applicants and their families, concerns about educational success, intellectual growth, and personal development paled in comparison to concerns about the business of just getting in.
While that disturbed me, I still left Asia with a great respect for the exceptional business savvy of my Korean colleagues. They have found a niche field and have turned the fears and frenzy so many have about the college admission process into a thriving scene for capitalist forces. They’ve performed their jobs and maximized their market influence perfectly. And that’s the problem.
On the long flight home, I crossed the International Date Line again and watched Sunday become Saturday. Literally and symbolically, in that moment I wondered if I had seen the future in Korea: is the obscenely chaotic pre-college landscape a warning of the perfect storm that will occur when education and the marketplace intersect?
To a certain extent, I understand the appeal of the market-based strategies for school reform that we often discuss in class. But I’m now even more skeptical about where they might lead.
I still agree that maybe we should offer more choice to students and parents and promote more competition among schools if doing so will spark necessary changes. That’s the bright promise of capitalism. But are we ready, to quote my old colleagues, to "cross over to the dark side?” Can we find a way to have market-inspired educational practices without also having the dog-eat-dog corporate mentality of Wall Street raiders? How can we encourage the most entrepreneurial and innovative reformers to focus less on business models and more on inspiring the intellectual imaginations and creative freedoms of students? And, perhaps most importantly, will competition among schools have to breed competition among students?
I’m not ready for board rooms to overtake school houses. If that happens, we’ll all need more than one weekend for confession. Bless us, father.
Having spent several years as a college admission officer at Stanford, I’m well aware of the stigma folks in our profession attach to such for-profit consulting enterprises. It was not uncommon at conferences or meetings to hear virulent condemnations against those charged with “selling our knowledge” or “prostituting your experience” or, my favorite, “crossing to the dark side.”
Bless me, father, for I have sinned.
But I’m happy I went. Not because I particularly liked being whisked around the country the way celebrities usually are – and the way educators usually are not. And not because I successfully convinced the hundreds of people who came to my presentations that the very generic pieces of information I shared were the “inside secrets from a former Stanford admission officer” that the PR department had promised.
I’m happy I went because I learned more in 2 ½ days than I ever could have elsewhere about the threats to schooling when markets trump morals, when entrepreneurs invade education, and when competition outpaces counseling.
It was clear early in my trip that I was expected to tell parents every possible advantage, every trick, and every loophole that would give their students a better chance. It was a brilliant ploy by the consulting company using my presence to recruit customers: prey on the fears of parents, convince them that access and influence matter, show them that strategy is key to success, and then offer the “Deluxe Ivy Guarantee Package.” Education, they suggested, was purely a marketplace maneuver.
The nervous parents and shell-shocked students ate it up. During my trip, I never once had a conversation with a parent or student who asked about a college’s commitment to educational excellence or how to find the campus that would be the best social or academic fit. To the future college applicants and their families, concerns about educational success, intellectual growth, and personal development paled in comparison to concerns about the business of just getting in.
While that disturbed me, I still left Asia with a great respect for the exceptional business savvy of my Korean colleagues. They have found a niche field and have turned the fears and frenzy so many have about the college admission process into a thriving scene for capitalist forces. They’ve performed their jobs and maximized their market influence perfectly. And that’s the problem.
On the long flight home, I crossed the International Date Line again and watched Sunday become Saturday. Literally and symbolically, in that moment I wondered if I had seen the future in Korea: is the obscenely chaotic pre-college landscape a warning of the perfect storm that will occur when education and the marketplace intersect?
To a certain extent, I understand the appeal of the market-based strategies for school reform that we often discuss in class. But I’m now even more skeptical about where they might lead.
I still agree that maybe we should offer more choice to students and parents and promote more competition among schools if doing so will spark necessary changes. That’s the bright promise of capitalism. But are we ready, to quote my old colleagues, to "cross over to the dark side?” Can we find a way to have market-inspired educational practices without also having the dog-eat-dog corporate mentality of Wall Street raiders? How can we encourage the most entrepreneurial and innovative reformers to focus less on business models and more on inspiring the intellectual imaginations and creative freedoms of students? And, perhaps most importantly, will competition among schools have to breed competition among students?
I’m not ready for board rooms to overtake school houses. If that happens, we’ll all need more than one weekend for confession. Bless us, father.
Friday, April 6, 2007
The Impossibility of Getting Into An Ivy League College and School Choice
In some ways, last week's excitement about the increasing difficulty of getting into Ivy Leagues reflects a popular criticism of school choice. (Harvard's admit rate has plummeted to 9.0%! From 9.3%!) The admit rates of Ivy League colleges (and other colleges of similar quality) captured the headlines because candidates of (seemingly) high caliber were being rejected. The NYTimes article linked begins with:
In a similar vein, some critics argue that school choice doesn't get to the crux of the key education problem dominating the current US education landscape: the insufficient number of good schools. Giving students (and their parents) the option to choose their schools, regardless of race, class, or income, merely tinkers with the distribution of students across the small subset of existing good schools in the entire population of schools, rather than actually improving schools. To use the metaphor of college admissions: instead of splitting hairs trying to differentiate between excellent and outstanding candidates, shouldn’t we be working toward increasing the number of places in the ‘best’ colleges by increasing the number of good universities?
This line of criticism essentially stems from a failure to understand school choice's theory of change: by tying educational funding to students and allowing students (or their parents) to pick their own schools, school choice would result in the survival of a school being dependent on how well it caters to the people who matter most: its students. Schools that do well will be ‘rewarded’ with a long waiting list of students and can then consider scaling up. Schools that chronically under-perform will eventually be ‘punished’ with an exodus of students and hence be forced to buck up or close. Through this mechanism of incentives that encourages the proliferation of good schools and hastens the demises of bad schools, school choice will increase the quality of schools across the board.
It’s precisely because school choice is dependent on students (or their parents) being able to exercise their option to exit that judging the efficacy of school choice based on the success of charter schools in raising the achievement levels of other public schools in their district is disingenuous (Hess & McGuinn, 2002, makes a similar argument about the efficacy of Cleveland's voucher experiment). Firstly, charter schools do not really provide (serious) competition since their numbers are arbitrarily restricted to a tiny fraction of public schools in a district. Thus, despite long waiting lists for most charter schools indicating high demand for them, most existing systems do not allow enough new charter schools to spring up and meet this demand. Consequently, students cannot exercise their option to exit since they have no alternative to exit to (unless their parents are Catholic or are willing to cough out a ridiculous amount of money for private schools, or take a huge pay cut and home-school their children). In this way, 'school choice' via charter schools is robbed of its key mechanism through which to drive improvement in currently under-performing schools. Most public schools know that their students don't have many other tenable options and, like all monopolists, tend to become fat cats without the pressure of competition to keep them lean.
Furthermore, critics of charter schools who claim they do not work because on average, their students' grades on standardized tests aren't much higher than public school students in the same district, are falling prey to a weakness that allegedly market-based reformers are especially prone to: the tendency to judge schools according to their student's test scores. Research has indicated that parents often prefer charter schools because of a host of other issues, like school safety. Not focusing solely on test scores is congruent with the philosophy underlying school choice. When proponents of school choice claim it gives parents the chance to choose the best school for their students, they aren’t necessarily referring only to 'the best school for raising their students' test scores' (one can be test scores-satisficing without being test scores-maximizing). Parents could prefer a school that focuses more on a student's holistic development or a student's particular passion (e.g. music, arts, theater, technology) instead of merely emphasizing how their students perform on multiple-choice questions. Thus, school choice doesn't force an ideal of 'student achievement' on the entire population of students. A voucher system would allow students to choose schools that best fit their diverse and unique individual talents, interests, and learning needs. Such a diversity of schools will better cater to the development of students than an arbitrary one-size-fits-all model that attempts to fit the 'average' student but ends up chafing most students.
School choice has lots of problems (what happens if parents' don't exercise their right to choose? how can we get past the seemingly insurmountable problems of getting rich parents to subsidize poorer students in order to implement the progressive voucher system necessary for achieving true equality of opportunity?), but putting up straw man arguments does nothing to help the case of anti-school choice opponents.
Harvard turned down 1,100 student applicants with perfect 800 scores on the SAT math exam. Yale rejected several applicants with perfect 2400 scores on the three-part SAT, and Princeton turned away thousands of high school applicants with 4.0 grade point averages.This is the result of the demand for these ‘best’ universities far surpassing the supply of places at these institutions.
In a similar vein, some critics argue that school choice doesn't get to the crux of the key education problem dominating the current US education landscape: the insufficient number of good schools. Giving students (and their parents) the option to choose their schools, regardless of race, class, or income, merely tinkers with the distribution of students across the small subset of existing good schools in the entire population of schools, rather than actually improving schools. To use the metaphor of college admissions: instead of splitting hairs trying to differentiate between excellent and outstanding candidates, shouldn’t we be working toward increasing the number of places in the ‘best’ colleges by increasing the number of good universities?
This line of criticism essentially stems from a failure to understand school choice's theory of change: by tying educational funding to students and allowing students (or their parents) to pick their own schools, school choice would result in the survival of a school being dependent on how well it caters to the people who matter most: its students. Schools that do well will be ‘rewarded’ with a long waiting list of students and can then consider scaling up. Schools that chronically under-perform will eventually be ‘punished’ with an exodus of students and hence be forced to buck up or close. Through this mechanism of incentives that encourages the proliferation of good schools and hastens the demises of bad schools, school choice will increase the quality of schools across the board.
It’s precisely because school choice is dependent on students (or their parents) being able to exercise their option to exit that judging the efficacy of school choice based on the success of charter schools in raising the achievement levels of other public schools in their district is disingenuous (Hess & McGuinn, 2002, makes a similar argument about the efficacy of Cleveland's voucher experiment). Firstly, charter schools do not really provide (serious) competition since their numbers are arbitrarily restricted to a tiny fraction of public schools in a district. Thus, despite long waiting lists for most charter schools indicating high demand for them, most existing systems do not allow enough new charter schools to spring up and meet this demand. Consequently, students cannot exercise their option to exit since they have no alternative to exit to (unless their parents are Catholic or are willing to cough out a ridiculous amount of money for private schools, or take a huge pay cut and home-school their children). In this way, 'school choice' via charter schools is robbed of its key mechanism through which to drive improvement in currently under-performing schools. Most public schools know that their students don't have many other tenable options and, like all monopolists, tend to become fat cats without the pressure of competition to keep them lean.
Furthermore, critics of charter schools who claim they do not work because on average, their students' grades on standardized tests aren't much higher than public school students in the same district, are falling prey to a weakness that allegedly market-based reformers are especially prone to: the tendency to judge schools according to their student's test scores. Research has indicated that parents often prefer charter schools because of a host of other issues, like school safety. Not focusing solely on test scores is congruent with the philosophy underlying school choice. When proponents of school choice claim it gives parents the chance to choose the best school for their students, they aren’t necessarily referring only to 'the best school for raising their students' test scores' (one can be test scores-satisficing without being test scores-maximizing). Parents could prefer a school that focuses more on a student's holistic development or a student's particular passion (e.g. music, arts, theater, technology) instead of merely emphasizing how their students perform on multiple-choice questions. Thus, school choice doesn't force an ideal of 'student achievement' on the entire population of students. A voucher system would allow students to choose schools that best fit their diverse and unique individual talents, interests, and learning needs. Such a diversity of schools will better cater to the development of students than an arbitrary one-size-fits-all model that attempts to fit the 'average' student but ends up chafing most students.
School choice has lots of problems (what happens if parents' don't exercise their right to choose? how can we get past the seemingly insurmountable problems of getting rich parents to subsidize poorer students in order to implement the progressive voucher system necessary for achieving true equality of opportunity?), but putting up straw man arguments does nothing to help the case of anti-school choice opponents.
Thursday, April 5, 2007
What We Don't Know
Since first joining a Ph.D. program in Sociology and Social Policy 7 years ago, I have been consistently surprised by what even the foremost experts in their fields don't know about solving major social problems. Don't get me wrong, they know more than most, but on the really difficult questions (such as how to improve the quality of instruction at scale) there are lots of conflicting perspectives, each with some support from data, but no clear cut answers.
With this in mind, a group of us here at the GSE have come together to create a seminar explicitly centered on what we don't know, a place to explore hypotheses and think about directions for the future. We had our first full meeting three weeks ago, and have a second one today, featuring former Boston superintendent Tom Payzant. I'm blogging about what we're learning here -- check it out.
With this in mind, a group of us here at the GSE have come together to create a seminar explicitly centered on what we don't know, a place to explore hypotheses and think about directions for the future. We had our first full meeting three weeks ago, and have a second one today, featuring former Boston superintendent Tom Payzant. I'm blogging about what we're learning here -- check it out.
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