June 2010 Archives

Tuesday our faculty celebrated the retirement of two teachers. Together they represent 75 years of teaching. They worked their way through two buildings, three principals, and five superintendents. It was bittersweet for them and for the rest of us who have learned from and with them over the years.

In The Washington Post, I read the story of Mrs. Chapman's retirement. Former students
.

..marched past her like Olympic athletes, holding up signs. Each sign showed the year that Mrs. Chapman taught them and, for many, became their "one" -- you know, that one teacher who stands out, who made that tectonic difference in your life, whose grammar school mantras still echo in your head.

What made Mrs. Chapman so special?

For 22 years, pre-kindergartners and kindergartners in Mrs. Chapman's urban Washington class have been raising finches, dissecting pellets of owl vomit filled with bones of rodents (she buys these online), hatching chicken eggs, camping in the woods, and writing, illustrating, narrating and then acting out books and stories.

But Mrs. Chapman won't be doing that any more and my colleagues won't be firmly but gently "herding cats" as we say in middle school. Our schools are facing the loss of many Mrs. Chapmans because a lot of us are getting older. Schools face a deluge of retirements in the next five years. But the problem is exacerbated by a growing sense that many teachers find their work less rewarding. In the last year, for the first time, I am hearing a new kind of conversation among good teachers. They are talking about how many years left until retirement. And too often, they are looking for an exit plan long before many of them expected to retire because as Diane Ratvich explains

Teachers -- not just union leaders -- are unhappy, frustrated, and demoralized. So are parents, because they don't like the high-stakes testing regime either. They don't like that their children are losing time for the arts, science, history, geography, physical education, foreign languages, and everything that is not tested. They may not be well-informed, yet they know that their children are missing out on a good education.

But here's the thing--- many teachers are extremely well informed. They are the keepers of the institutional knowledge of teaching. The business term for that is knowledge capital and I found this very MBA definition.

Knowledge capital: Know-how that results from the experience, information, knowledge, learning, and skills of the employees of an organization. Of all the factors of production, knowledge capital creates the longest lasting competitive advantage. It may consist entirely of technical information (as in chemical and electronics industries) or may reside in the actual experience or skills acquired by the individuals (as in construction and steel industries). Knowledge capital is an essential component of human capital.

Malcolm Galdwell popularized Anders Ericsson's 10,000 Hour Rule in his book, Outliers. The rule, in simple terms, says it takes 10,000 hours of of committed, sustained practice to become an expert at anything. So, if a teacher works seven hours a day for 200 days a year, it would take about seven years to become a true expert. Unfortunately, we lose over half of our teachers before they hit the five year mark. This is what I don't understand: If economist-education policymakers say they are serious about using business management skills to improve our public schools, why is there so little emphasis on accessing the treasure of expertise of that teachers like Mrs. Chapman possess.

When she's with the kids, she is like a patient gardener who senses that golden moment when a child is about to blossom. She is the master of the vastly overlooked power of restraint.

Maybe patience and restraint are a big part of what Mrs. Chapman knows that education policymakers haven't figured out yet. It could be that while they are experts in data collection and disaggregation,they haven't spent enough time at school to master how learning is actually produced. Their intentions are good, but they've lost sight of the objective of school. Seduced by the data that was intended to be an indicator in the process of learning, they have forgotten that it's a just a production tool, not the product. Data can't produce learning because learning is something that must be nurtured child by child. Mrs. Chapman models her expertise when

Mrs. Chapman listens.
Mrs. Chapman waits.
Mrs. Chapmam is more interested in the children than the grownups.

As a teacher, I can't help but wonder how much more progress we'd make if policymakers spent more time doing what Mrs. Chapman has done quietly and effectively for all these years. We have some brilliant people engaged in education policy. But when it came to education their own child, I'll bet most parents would trust Mrs. Chapman's ground level knowledge over the theories of an education theorist. They must know what researchers have discovered; it doesn't take genius to be a great teacher, it takes 10,000 hours with children.

Not all teachers are masters of their craft, but there are thousands of us out here who have put in the concerted practice and work to become expert teachers. Within the next five years, a great many of those teacher experts, who are now in their 50s or 60s, will be walking away and taking a fortune of human capital with us---not because we are unwilling to share it, but because policymakers seem uninterested or unwilling to utilize the knowledge, skills, and dispositions we have invested our whole careers in acquiring.

Mrs. Chapman is "still attending workshops for teachers this summer because she can't let go." What a loss that no one has bothered to ask her to stay and advise. If they asked her nicely, I'll bet she'd share what she learned and how she has field tested that learning. You'd think a bunch of economists would know better than to let that kind of knowledge capital just walk away.

Image: Courtesy of Thekidds@flickr

Posted by Susan Graham at 2:07 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

It's hot! About 92 degrees. But as any Southerner would explain: it's not the heat; it's the humidity.The heat index is 103 degrees. (It's cooled down a little since this afternoon.) You can cut the air with a knife. And did I mention that my air conditioning is broken?

Now you think that this is a personal problem, and it is. It is a long sad tale of a 60ish year old house and its 60ish year old residents. It features AC Repairman #1, The Electrician, and AC Repairman #2. The plot boils (an unfortunate, but appropriate choice of words) down to this: It's hot. It's been hot. And it's going to be hot until Thursday, June 25 when AC Repairman #2 and his crew come to install a whole new system. The denouement closes with me writing an incredibly large check to AC Repairman #2 and being grateful for the opportunity to do so... Because then it won't be hot!

Let me qualify this by saying I've been much hotter. I live on a hilltop in Central Virginia in a house shaded by huge oak trees. There are big windows and ceiling fans in every room and as long as we move slowly and do nothing it's not too unpleasant. Unpleasant is the kind of hot I grew up with in East Texas. Temperatures hovered around 100 degrees for months at a time, 80% humidity was no big thing, and only rich people had air conditioning. We had an attic fan and a big heavy black oscillating table fan that always reminded me of a giant bug of some kind. In the heat of summer, Mother told us that we had to lie down for an hour in the heat of the day so that we wouldn't get polio. I would lie across the bed with a wet washcloth on my forehead, reading, dozing or just watching the big black fan go back and forth and thinking about how, if I stuck my finger there, it would slice it right off. We had to continue the afternoon quiet time even after we lined up in the school cafeteria to eat a sugar cube with the Salk vaccine. I'm not sure that the real goal of rest time was saving us from polio, but it did contribute to my love of reading and it probably saved my mother's sanity because with four kids and no AC it was too hot.

Okay, that was way back in the day, but 14 years ago, I was still teaching in an un-air-conditioned school. Each classroom had a fan and when it got really hot we cooled down by taking off our shoes and going barefoot on the terrazzo floor. If the heat index went over 105 degrees by noon, we got to go home. If it hit the 105 after twelve, it was too late to change the buses, so we just sat there barefoot in front of the fan until it was time to go home. At least the kids didn't misbehave much. They didn't have the energy. It was too hot!

In a 1999 survey by the National Center for Education Statistics it was reported that

Air conditioning was not available but needed by roughly a quarter of the schools for their classrooms (24 percent).

The NCES 2003 guidelines for school maintenance indicate that, to provide a safe environment , schools buildings should :

• Maintain indoor air relative humidity below 70 percent.*

• Maintain indoor air temperature at comfortable levels (68-72°F when the room is being heated and 70-78°F when the room is being cooled).

In 2007 NCES asked public school principals to describe the extent to which various environmental factors interfered with classroom instruction. This is what they found out.

In permanent buildings, heating and air conditioning were the most frequently reported interferences, with less than half of schools reporting that air conditioning did not interfere at all with instruction. Air conditioning interfered to a moderate or major extent in permanent buildings in 16 percent of schools; heating interfered to a moderate or major extent in 13 percent of schools. Schools reported less severe interference from heating and air conditioning in portable buildings, with 11 percent of schools reporting moderate to major interference from air conditioning, and 9 percent reporting the same from heating.

And what does all of this have to do with the state of public education policy? Well, one of the silver bullets for school improvement is year-round school. The argument is made, sometimes rather snidely by city folk, that we are no longer an agrarian society and there is absolutely no reason to close schools for the summer. This is true to a point, but that's not really the whole picture. Please consider the following:

• There are still many schools that do not have air conditioning.
• Air conditioning is the single biggest consumer of electricity in most buildings.
• Year-round school would increase energy consumption while school budgets shrink.
• Most kids ride school buses to school and school buses are not air conditioned and at 3:30 p.m. in August ( or even late June), it's too hot!

Pundits like to point fingers and use the "agrarian culture" argument to validate their claim that schools are resistant to adapting for 21st century learning needs. I would argue that those individuals either don't know or refuse to acknowledge that many of our schools are unprepared to provide a "21st century learning experience" because their plants are still functioning as post WWII facilities with insufficient HVAC systems.

Furthermore, even if they did have adequate systems, they would probably have insufficient funding to maintain and operate them. And please don't tell me about how kids learned without AC back in the day or how they are learning without being coddled in third world countries today unless you are promoting early 20th century or third world education standards for America's youth.

That will just make me cranky, and it's too hot!

Image: Accuweather.com

Posted by Susan Graham at 10:18 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Yesterday all the education news in The Washington Post was in the business section. I read about enrollment management which explains how colleges rate students and determine financial aid packages. It seems the noble idea of merit alone must be balanced with the ability to pay. One admissions director at a small private university acknowledged

The college was enrolling a lower percentage of low-need students and a high percentage of high-need students. It was laudable, but not sustainable over the long haul. We were making the college commitment really lopsided.

"Well," you may be thinking, "that sort of thing happens with privates. They have to control their college commitment based on their endowments. That's why we have state schools." Don't bet your cap and gown on it. At the University of Virginia, out-of-state students pay double what in-state students pay. Admissions management logic results in one third of UVA acceptance letters going to out of state students. A Nebraskan may have better odds of getting into UVA than a Virginian. To Virginia taxpayers, the Dean of Admissions explains it this way

We love the in-state students, don't get me wrong, they are the heart of this school. Economically the in-state students are really subsidized by the out-of-state students. If you look at our out of state numbers, about 69-70% overall are Virginians.

"Well," you're probably thinking, "Those Virginians should have been willing to pay more taxes so that higher ed didn't have to keep getting more 'creative' with their funding." And that's true, but whether private, public, out of state, in state, or downright for-profit, post secondary education is not cheap. And that's why there was also a business/economic article on "no-loan pledges " cost containment. Student loans are a huge industry, and a huge problem. It's an issue that is being looked at closely by the federal government (the primary lender). As public opinion and supply and demand are beginning to fray enrollment figures, more schools are using no-loan pledges (promises of aid from other sources) as a marketing tool. But a financial aid observer told the Post the practice isn't keeping students out of future hock:

The wave of no-loan pledges hasn't halted the steady rise in student loan debt nationally. Mark Kantrowitz [financial aid expert] estimated that the share of four-year students graduating with debt rose to 66 percent in 2008 from 46 percent in 1993, and that average debt rose in that span to $23,186 from $9,297, based on an analysis of federal data. He recommends a one-third rule, where one-third of projected costs will be paid from past income [savings], one-third from current income and financial aid and one-third from future income [loans]

Unfortunately, the estimated family contribution is often equal to a fourth of that family's total income; so they borrow the money. It's easy---some would say too easy. And that leads to the third business section article on student loan debt management, which includes a review of a new CliffsNotes book -- Graduation Debt: How to Manage Student Loans and Live Your Life,. Author Reyna Gobel reports

More than 1 million people have at least $40,000 in student loan debt, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics. "In order to work toward paying off your student loan debt, you need to be aware of the existence and the amounts of each loan," writes Gobel, a freelance financial journalist who amassed $63,000 in student loans obtaining her bachelor's and then two master's degrees.

"Well," you may be thinking, "Maybe the answer is to find a job that will help pay for higher education." Sometimes that does happen in the workplace, in the form of subsidized tuition or loan forgiveness. Sometimes employers see partnering with employees to work toward high education as a win-win.This strategy sounds good when referred to as associate opportunity :

Wal-Mart announced a program Thursday. Workers can receive college credit from the online American Public University [a for profit university] and receive a tuition discount from the school. The company also said it will commit $50 million over three years to help workers pay for books and tuition above the reduced tuition rate...Wal-Mart workers receive job training in areas ranging from ethics to retail inventory management, for which they can receive credit......Students won't have to pay for credits awarded based on their training.....The credit for training can be applied mainly to business- and retail-related courses...Wal-Mart executives said the link with the school will help workers attain better jobs both inside and outside the company.....if 10 percent of Wal-Mart's U.S. workers get degrees, "that would be like adding three Ohio State's worth of graduates."

Would an APU degree really improve those employees' chances for upward mobility? We are living through an economic cycle where two incomes will barely keep a family afloat, where recent college graduates are living in their parents' basements and waiting tables, where wages are stagnant, and where too often people are told, "Be grateful you have a job."

With the backing of Wal-Mart and at $255 per credit hour, a masters degree of 30 hours would cost close to $10,000 through APU. But the first rule of economics is that of supply and demand. If thousands of employees earn an MBA on-line, then the job market will be flooded with highly educated workers. When the supply of highly educated employees meets and exceeds the demand for management positions, the value of that advanced education goes down.

And that's why it's important to read the Post's front page article about some other opportunities that didn't work out quite like a storybook.

Chris Cummings knew a "reduction in force" was coming at Walgreens. But with a marketing degree from a prestigious university, he thought he was insulated. But instead of a promotion, the company for which Cummings had been an assistant manager three and a half years cut his hours so drastically that he had to take a second job. In March, he was laid off, and his part-time second job became full-time. And so that is how a 40-year-old father of four with a master's in business administration from the University of Notre Dame finds himself bagging groceries at Sprouts, a local health-food store. "I never thought I'd be here with the education that I have and that I'd worked hard on," Cummings said before a recent shift in the checkout lane at the Sprouts in nearby Frisco.

We say, as a society, that we value education. But too often its value is misunderstood. Education is not a magic ticket to a higher income or an insurance policy in a tough job market. Quality post-secondary education can be obtained at a prestigious private school, a state university, at community college, a trade school or through an on-line program or at the workplace. We need to be open to innovation. But a recent PBS Frontline report warns that when education becomes a commodity, the buyer must beware. Last month Steven Eisman, the Wall Street trader who predicted the subprime mortgage meltdown, had this to say about the commercialization of higher education

Until recently, I thought that there would never again be an opportunity to be involved with an industry as socially destructive and morally bankrupt as the subprime mortgage industry. I was wrong. The For-Profit Education Industry has proven equal to the task.

"College for All" sometimes sounds more like marketing than guidance. Before committing time, energy, and money, here's a free lesson in economics. Ask what any money manager would ask, "What is the return on my investment?"

Posted by Susan Graham at 12:29 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend