A Response to David Denby's Profile of Diane Ravitch

            A friend asked for my reaction to the recent New Yorker profile on Diane Ravitch.  In a sentence, my reaction is, Diane Ravitch is one of the most sensible people working in ed policy today and people should listen to her.  There are a lot of reasons that people spend more time poking and undermining Ravitch than debating her on her actual points, mostly having to do with her evolving views and corresponding shifts in allegiance.  Denby’s article seems to try to simultaneously tell the story of this intellectual journey and provide clarity about the important debates in ed policy.  I think Denby had good intentions (he titled the piece “Public Defender”), and I am glad more people will learn about Ravitch’s clear-headed crusade.  However, many of the attacks on Ravitch are politically motivated and because the article does an inadequate job teasing out the ideological and political strands of these debates, it is likely to confuse many people. 

            The most oft-cited critique of Ravitch is her “flip-flopping.”  I find this criticism stupid and dangerous.  The challenge of educating the public in a democracy HAS NEVER BEEN MET SUCCESSFULLY.  If you were trying to build a self-propelled car and over a century had never succeeded, why in God’s name would you choose to support those thinkers who wanted to keep trying the same idea?  My support would be behind those people who still felt passionately about reaching the goal, and were willing to admit defeat when an idea did not work.  The goal, as I see it, is to continue to increase the likelihood that any child born anywhere in this country can become an independent-minded critical thinker who approaches the world with a useful skill set and a sense of efficacy about their lives.  Ravitch has believed in this vision of education throughout her career and her critiques of the reform movement’s ability to get there are cogent.  In the words of Abraham Lincoln, “I do not think much a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.”  The inability of collective political consciousness to accept that smart people change their mind may be inevitable, but there is no reason that Denby needs to add to this collective failure in thinking with phrases such as: “Yet irony abounded in what she said.  Less than a decade ago, she was one of the ‘they’ she denounced in her speech.”  David Denby, I used to like clam chowder and now I don’t.  When I refuse clam chowder these days, that is not irony, and neither is Ravitch’s speech to the AFT.

            While I believe Ravitch has been upfront about the reasons for her changing behaviors, the reform movement has been much less willing to explore and critique its own ties to privatization.  I believe that most reformers have good intentions, and even that many of them do not see their movement as opening the door of public education to private companies.  Nevertheless, they are.  For just one example, read this letter from top Michigan educators about federal money being awarded to the nefarious EAA in their state.  Denby gives voice to Ravitch’s denial that education is at the historical nadir that reformers insist on, but seems to undermine her point about privatization.  Near the beginning of the article, he writes that Ravitch is “barnstorming” the reform movement “which she calls a ‘privitization’ movement.”   It’s not an egregious misreprentation, but by omitting any evidence supporting this quite reasonable view, Denby’s article seems more eager to characterize Ravitch as a firebrand than an important voice in this crucial debate. 

            But maybe I protest too much.  It’s true that Ravitch has always liked to be out on one limb or another, and her enthusiasm for the union is a bit discomforting given the real problem with “dead weight” in our teaching corps.  And here I think Ravitch’s political manuveuring sets her up for caricaturist portrayals.  Again, however, I sense that she has a more laudable keel than the Rhees and the Kleins.  Assuming, as I do, that Ravitch’s goal for education is that talented, experienced educators hold the helm, the union is a necessary liability.  Too many times, politicians have turned to quick fixes that move the control panels of instruction further and further from the hands of the only qualified technicians, experienced teachers.  While I am often embarrassed by the teachers in my union (e.g. squawking over coming in a day before students arrived back from Sandy, etc.), if I have to choose I’m going to give teachers and not private industry a seat at the decision-making table.  If Denby wanted to talk about irony, he could have chosen “parent-trigger” initiatives that give parents the “power” to give control of the schools to private companies, thereby further disenfranchising themselves. 

            Aside from privatization, Ravitch’s other major critique of the reform movement is its insistence on standardized tests for evaluating students and Value-Added Measures for evaluating teachers.  Here is where it might have been better for the New Yorker to assign an education journalist to this story.  Among educators, there is a robust conversation happening about the ways in which we might assess students outside of standardized tests.  Here in New York City, Shael Polokow-Suransky has spearheaded a very exciting new assessment system that fairly quantifies a student’s ability based on “performance-based” projects such as researched essays.  When assessments are skill-based and embedded in a rich curriculum, the distinction between “teaching” and “testing” begins to fade.  A student learns as they are assessed.  This new model of gauging the success of our schools is already off to a promising start and if it can gain traction I believe it will completely reframe the testing/teaching debate.  Of course, it will require experienced educators to succeed, and so we need policies whose goal is to keep our most talented teachers in control of curriculum.    

            My final critique of the article is Denby’s very misleading treatment of the Common Core.  He writes, “The standards, … require that all students read, for example, ‘Macbeth,’ and ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ by the end of tenth grade…”  This is a dangerous mischaracterization.  First of all, teachers are not mandated to teach specific texts.  The purpose of the suggested texts is to maintain rigor for all students, but any good teacher would scaffold or build to this goal and not just drop Steinbeck’s tome on a fourteen-year-old’s desk as the quote seems to suggest.  Secondly, the Common Core standards are most notable for requiring ELA teachers to include more nonfiction.  This quote seems designed to ruffle the feathers of those who think education should provide “useful information,” i.e. not fiction, and that change is well underway thanks to the Common Core.  Lastly, Denby does not mention the CCSS as they relate to the union but it’s worth noting that the unions are not by and large opposed to the standards.  On his blog Eduwonk, Andrew Rotherham writes, The past few weeks I’ve heard on numerous occasions about the teachers unions ‘opposition’ to Common Core as if it’s just an obvious fact.  I’m not sure where this is coming from, but overall they’re not opposed, they’re on board with the new standards and in some places/ways trying to help on the implementation…”  The challenge of how to effectively implement the new standards and how they will impact the system is complicated and very interesting, but Denby’s one throwaway comment about the CCSS is misleading and offers no context for this significant aspect of the conversation.

Using Serious Gaming Techniques for Long-Form Writing: A Thought Experiment

In my last post, I enumerated several advantages for serious gaming in the classroom.  I like the ways that serious gaming taps into the social and competitive instincts of students, and I‘m excited about the rich data that can be mined from a well-designed serious game.

I get stuck, however, when I try to think about how to capitalize on these benefits as a writing teacher.  Here is my best idea (so far) for how to set up an online game that would maintain the standards I expect in my students’ writing, but take advantage of the perks of serious gaming.  WARNING:  This does not cut down on teacher grading, but that is not the point.

THE GAME: 

Students are in charge of a real online blog, and choose the topics they would like to cover.  Every student chooses a professional handle to protect anonymity.  Each news cycle, students are grouped into three or four groups, and given a writing assignment aligned to their ability levels.  Two students in each group are assigned as editors.

Students write a piece, using a clear rubric to guide them.  Tasks maybe informative, argumentative, investigative or creative.  Then, after a mini-lesson on a particular writing skill, they edit their piece.  While they are writing, editors should be learning proof-reading skills and practicing on sample texts.   Again, these lessons are geared toward a certain targeted skill. After students finish, the editors need to submit their edits, which are graded.  Students then have a second chance to revise their pieces.  The editors choose one piece to run “above the fold.”

At this point, the teacher grades the pieces and assesses the editors’ edits.  Any piece receiving above a certain grade is published, although the editor’s picks get special attention.  Students who fail to reach this grade must revise, and if they meet the grade subsequently, their piece is also published.  An important aspect of gaming is the ability to immediately address failure.

The cycle begins again.

AUTHENTIC ASSESSMENT:  At certain points throughout the year, after students are familiar with this process, the students should use the process for even more authentic assignments.  For example, a local non-profit might ask for a piece to be published on their page, or the school may use the students’ writing in a brochure for parents.

TROUBLESHOOTING:  Of course, a kid may drop to the bottom of the proverbial pond here, and wallow in the weeds.  In that case, I would give that student an individual assignment that needed to go to press and could not go until he or she had got it to a certain standard.  Repeat until the student is properly engaged.

Any programmers out there want to design this?  Does it already exist?  Beyond a blog, I need an interface where students see their progress and receive immediate feedback.

Serious Games in Education

             Let me start with this: the best educational environment I ever experienced was outdoors.  Four friends and I once started a kingdom on a half-acre beside a stream.  Each of the citizens had a political position and an economic enterprise.  There were four shops in town: Spears for Sale, Sword Fighting Gym, Dance Studio, and my own venture, Advice Hut.  We quickly realized we needed a better balance between concrete and abstract industries and turned cooperatively toward making houses.  I remember an entire day spent reconstructing and repairing roofs until they could withstand our rain test (a Mason jar of stream water poured over the roof).  My nostalgia for this type of self-guided exploration into basic human challenges has made me a latecomer to the world of virtual efforts in education, but here’s the thing:  that project was so engaging because it was a game.

            Serious gaming is a pretty quiet idea at the moment, and it’s easy to see why educators are wary of embracing games wholeheartedly.  Designing a truly educational game is very difficult, and misguided attempts are legion.  Consider Bronchie the Brontosaurus, who needs to save a city from dust while protecting his own health by answering questions about asthma.  This, and so many other games, show that adding a fun character and absurd plotline to regular old multiple-choice questions is an expensive waste of everyone’s time.

            But, the Wright brother’s first airplane did not fly either.  These beta-duds should not cloud a very exciting vision of games in the classroom.  According to Jane McGonical, the same students who may feel that they are “not good at life” are going home to solve complex tasks when playing World of Warcraft. She says in her 2010 TED Talk, “I believe when we’re in game world we become the best versions of ourselves: the most likely to help at a moment’s notice, the most likely to stick with a problem as long as it takes, to get up after failure and try again.”  Each of these points would change the culture of our classrooms for the better.

            Firstly, our students should be transparently competing and cooperating with one another because this is how we develop personal potential.  To achieve what he did, Julius Caesar needed to ally himself with Pompey and also to undo Pompey.  As a teacher in a large school, my likelihood of being promoted instead of other teachers depends on my ability to collaborate with those very teachers.  The same tension exists in a multiplayer game. For example, in Civ IV your country’s safety depends on your finesse at foreign policy, which is a balancing act of flattery and intimidation.  As students create a record of success or failure, they should be able to see their performance compared to some of their peers.  An authentically competitive and social environment spurs our brain into action, and there is no reason to be scared of this.  With strategic grouping and a reasonable regard for everyone’s feelings, making games social will tap into a natural human desire to compete and develop personal strengths, and teach students that to succeed in a competitive environment requires the ability to collaborate strategically.

            Secondly, games inspire a level of resilience and determination that the traditional classroom so often enervates.  Every teacher knows a student’s typical reaction to failure and works hard to create multiple systems designed to fight discouragement.  The simple fact that games let you try again immediately after receiving feedback changes the culture of the classroom and requires much less effort on the part of the teacher.  Games create a failure-based model of learning; students learn by immediately addressing the sources of their own failure, something very difficult to achieve when trials of tasks are separated by even 24 hours.

            Furthermore, games inspire interest in topics currently removed from a teenager's daily life.  There is a strong strain of pedagogical thinking that puts the student's interest at the center of the curriculum, but there are serious limitations to this approach: namely, it is not an efficient way to expand the student's often quite provincial picture of the world.  Games create a reason to care about problems outside of a student's experience.  Once a student in invested in a context, they are more interested in learning facts that will help them master that environment.  When I began to read the debates surrounding Brooklyn’s new basketball stadium, my mind cast back to decisions I had made as a twelve-year-old about whether to build a new stadium while playing SimCity.  While SimCity 1994 was probably a grossly underdeveloped system by today’s standards, I understood some basics:  stadiums are costly up front, but bring new energy to the city.  By being given the chance to think like Bloomberg, I developed the critical skills of an informed citizen.  For this reason, the problems introduced through games should introduce students to the world’s biggest, most important problems.  McGonical says, “Gamers are willing to work hard if they are given the right work…Gamers love to be attached to awe-inspiring missions, to human, planetary scale stories.”  Games about nuclear escalation, global warming vs. international development, or big-scale financial struggles can all provide a contextual backdrop that creates urgency and can facilitate further learning.

            And now, my favorite argument for games in the classroom.  Data bonanza!  We have the ability to track every decision, written response, and answered question a student makes while playing a game.  Imagine a game in which a student needed to balance the needs of elephant and human populations in an African village.  They were required to explore the physical landscape as a scientist, observing and testing hypotheses, and also interview residents and experts.  At the end, they needed to construct written solutions using the evidence that had found.  If each successive task is tracked, I can see where each student excelled or failed, and also look at my class in aggregate:  where did most students’ understanding break down?  I can adjust the complexity level of texts in the game and determine a student’s reading level.  I can also sort the tasks by standard and gauge which standards I need to focus on in my lessons.  Games can group without moving the desks.  Once skill levels are established, World of Warcraft matches your mission with similarly skilled players[1]; new games could use the same strategy in the classroom.  Finally, I am building an electronic portfolio of student work.  I do not leave my classroom with a foot-high stack of papers, one of which will inevitably be misplaced, and which will require hours of data entry in order to become a flexible resource.  Instead, I walk out with a single portable file full of qualitative and quantitative data that I can sort through online or at home as I plan my next lesson.

            Of course, we should not get carried away.  Compared to nature, man-made virtual contexts will always be limited in scope.  Regardless of how realistic a virtual environment becomes, there is always a point where our own brain limns the inner logic of this constructed world, and good gamers take advantage of this knowledge.  One friend I have has discovered that in the world of Civ IV, as long as his military power is even marginally above the computer players, he will never be attacked.  But here too is a learning opportunity.  Anytime a game is used in a classroom, students should be expected to critique the logic of the game.  Where did the game mirror their understanding of the world?  Where did it create an artificial and misleading logical system?  Is it true, for example, that a strong military always prevents attacks?  These meta-conversations require high-level critical thinking, and happen quite naturally as students become frustrated or master a good game.

            To be sure, there are dangers to over-gaming, and we don’t want to raise a generation of computer addicts.  At some point, students should take their eyes off the monitor and begin to engage with the messier real world.  Indeed, if I could take all my students on backcountry camping trips, I would.  As someone originally inspired by genuine problem-solving challenges such as community organizing and growing a garden, I strongly believe that technology should never determine our goals.  But, the benefits of serious games in the classroom address goals we already have as teachers.  Ever since Dewey, we have been trying to create authentic buy-in by immersing students in realistic contexts instead of teaching them disembodied facts. Everyone now recognizes that data is integral to instructional planning, and schools and teachers are expected to collect and use lots of it.  While we should be careful not to put the carriage before the horse, we should not turn down an opportunity to drive our carriage much, much faster.

Recommended Link on Games and Education:  

NYTimes Video on the Potential to Make Gaming the Core of a MS Curriculuum

Jane McGonical's TED Talk Page

Using Games to Teach Students Financial Literacy

 Next Post:  Could gaming be used to teach long-form writing?  How might we create a virtual world that created an urgent desire in students to improve writing strategies and rhetoric, and truly revise their own writing?

---

[1] http://www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_better_world.html

Education and Gaming

My brain abhors a vacuum.  Sometimes I feel like my own Tamagotchi...so needy!  Like a good guardian, I try to provide my hungry brain monster with wholesome foods and activities.  Like this blog.  Preparing my Rousseau post kept me occupied, and felt "productive."  That was good.  But when I finished, a cavern of time opened up, and my inner Tamagotchi was flailing.  Its entertainment meter was way down, and food and sleep were futilely trying to make up the difference.

It was in this condition that I discovered Sid Meier's Civilization IV.  It's a video game, which does use some thinking power, but may cause social suicide.  I immediately became addicted.   Forty-eight hours later, I emerged from a trance-like state in which the Tamagotchi tables had turned: my brain was entirely absorbed, and food, sleep, and socializing were paying the price.

The experience has led me to my next topic:  games and education.  It's clear to me that our brains crave games, and that games can potentially be educational.  But, school is for learning, so we have to ask: to what extent do games helpfully mimic the logic of life and to what extent does it matter?  I'm working on a longer post about this, but in the meantime, here are three links that support an argument in favor of games in school.

Students Design Video Games in West Virginia

Daniel T. Willingham on Why Kids Don't Like School

Interview with Sue Bohle, Executive Director of the Serious Games Association

A Tribute to Rebellious Rousseau

            

“You will never succeed in making wise men if you do not first make little imps of mischief.”

            It is the 300^th anniversary of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s birth, and his home city of Geneva has decided to bury the hatchet.  Well, mostly.  Exhibits around the city honor his legacy, but I did notice one video series titled “Blame It On Rousseau.”  Curious to know more about this object of admiration and scorn, I decided to revisit his treatise on education, Emile.  After reading it, I too have mixed feelings about the hometown hero. 

            He’s an easy target.  First off, the hypocrite argument.  Rousseau wrote a 500-page book about how to bring up an ideal child, but he dropped all five of his actual offspring off at an orphanage.  No way of sugar-coating that.  Then, the idealist argument.  His teacher-student ratio of 1:1 extending all the way to Emile’s marriage has been called impractical to the point of insane. Rousseau is defiant in the face of this criticism.  He knows some will say, “This is not so much a treatise on education as the visions of a dreamer with regard to education,” and replies, “What can I do?...Why should I profess to suggest as doubtful that which is not a matter of doubt to myself?  I say just what I think.”  While this self-confidence is inspiring, unfortunately, much of what he thinks is downright embarrassing, which brings us to argument three: just plain wrong.  His opinion on reading – “the curse of childhood” – is unlikely to be revived today, and in the spirit of his own willful denial, I will ignore every mention of women in the book. 

            But, enough Rousseau-bashing.  What I mean to say in this post in that fully enmeshed with the most ridiculous aspects of this text are powerful pedagogical ideas that undergird our best educational practices today. And it was Rousseau’s naïve, stubbornly idealistic vision that made this so.  Revisiting them was, for me, invigorating, and a reminder of why it is good, sometimes, to step outside the realm of the probable, and think about the remotely possible.  Below, I’ve chosen four ways in which Rousseau was right then, and is right now.

1.     The purpose of education is to prepare people to live good lives.

            Not to prepare workers, or thinkers, but to develop happy, engaged people.  Well, okay, he would say men.  He writes, “There is only one science for children to learn – the duties of man.”  And what does this mean?  Rousseau would have the first several years of school be phys ed (“What!  Is it nothing to run and jump all day?  He will never be so busy again all his life long.”) and science experiments.  As the child becomes a teenager, he could take on a trade that helped him to feel engaged.  Learning a trade is not a way of avoiding higher thinking, but of creating a healthy balance.  He writes of Emile at this stage, “While he fancies himself a workman he is becoming a philosopher.”  The purpose of this slow and student-led introduction to the world is that the student may discover her own talents and interests, and then pursue them. 

            There is never, in Emile, a mention of any specific curriculum that completes an education.  And god forbid the student becomes “cultured”!  For Rousseau, many pleasantries and customs of the elite are superficial masks, hiding a lack of virtue or learning.  (#unemployedandovereducated).  So what’s Rousseau’s “actionable objective”?  His fundamental maxim is: “That man is truly free who desires what he is able to perform, and does what he desires.”  That man is…wait for it…happy!  What would a school look like that made this its fundamental goal? 

2.     Children should be anxious to learn.

            Teachers like to say they want to instill a “love of learning.”  That sounds really nice, but Rousseau has a better idea.  He wants children to feel anxious when they don’t understand something.  Here’s a lovely example.  He imagines being on a morning walk with Emile, and letting the child chatter freely about the sunrise.

“Keep quiet for a few minutes as if lost in thought and then say ‘I think the sun set over there last night, it rose here this morning.  How can that be?’  Say no more; if he asks questions, do not answer him…Let him alone, and be sure he will think about it.  To train a child to be really attentive so that he may be really impressed by any truth of experience, he must spend anxious days before he discovers the truth.”

The idea here is to situate a child within a problem that they want to solve – a sort of mental foe that annoys them until they have conquered it.  He would not, for example, have Emile practice geometry inside, but rather asks Emile how he might reach peaches growing on a tree, and then leaves his student to mull it over.  He is not hoping to instill a love of the problem, but a desire to escape from ignorance.  This is why Emile is allowed to say “I don’t know,” but only if it inspires an investigation.  Rousseau understands that “I don’t know” when given as an answer is a convenient means of avoidance, and the dulling of the anxious desire to understand.

            What does it take to foster this “need to know”?  Rousseau says knowledge.  “It is knowledge,” he says, “that makes us curious.”  Completely ignorant people are not anxious to know more, because they do not know there is more to know.  These are the type of people who can blithely say “I don’t know,” and move on with their days. 

            But, importantly, we cannot care about things that do not concern us.  That is why, introduced too early, an onslaught of information can leave a child disinterested in education.  However, if information is portioned so as to provide a balance of challenge and success, Rousseau is confident any student will want to move forward.  He asks, “Is there a mind so dead that…has never said in his pride, ‘How much have I already done, how much more may I achieve?’” 

             

3.     Lesson-planning is all about timing, and then letting go.

            Rousseau, in all probability, would have been a terrible teacher.  He was petulant, overly sensitive, and had a weakness for long-winded tangents.  But he would have been a remarkably savvy lesson planner. 

            His first rule was to limit the information on the table in a given lesson.  Vocabulary should be limited to what the child can actually understand and therefore use functionally.  He writes, “Let the child’s vocabulary…be limited; it is very undesirable that he should have more words than ideas, that he should be able to say more than he thinks.”  When the material is not within the student’s ability to actually use, the challenge becomes to memorize and parrot, rather than synthesize and create.

            The next step is to try and bridge the link between images and ideas, which is to take the raw material of information and to begin to form judgments with it.  He writes:

“Before the age of reason the child receives images, not ideas; and there is this difference between them: images are merely the pictures of external objects, while ideas are notions about those objects determined by their relations.  An image when it is recalled may exist by itself in the mind, but every idea implies other ideas.  When we image we merely perceive, when we reason we compare.  Our sensations are merely passive, our notions or ideas spring from an active principle which judges…In the sensation the judgment is purely passive; it affirms that I feel what I feel.  In the percept or idea the judgment is active; it connects, compares, it discriminates between relations not perceived by the senses.”

Three hundred years later, someone put this in a chart: http://dese.mo.gov/divimprove/sia/msip/DOK_Chart.pdf. 

            And, finally, crucially, before students make the leap between images and ideas, Rousseau pleads with teachers to stop talking.  He writes:

“If you talk much you will say little, for at last no one will listen to you…I do not like verbal explanations.  Young people pay little heed to them, nor do they remember them.  Things! Things!  I cannot repeat it too often.  We lay too much stress upon words; we teachers babble, and our scholars follow our example.”

Rousseau unfortunately never learned to follow his own advice, but it is good advice nonetheless.  The learning happens in that silent space, because if your student is anxious to learn she will begin to ask questions.  And that is when you have her in pedagogical checkmate.  Here’s Rousseau:  “Your questions should be few and well-chosen, and as he will always have more questions to put to you than you to him, you will always have the advantage and will be able to ask all the oftener, ‘What is the use of that question?’”  Beauty.

4.     To prevent bias, teach facts.

            Rousseau spent his last years on the run largely because of the religious ideas in Book IV of Emile, in which he proposes that no good God would reveal Himself to some and not others, and so students should not be culturally indoctrinated with the nearest local religion, but allowed to discover spirituality at their own pace and decide for themselves (#secretUUs).  This idea extends beyond religion.  He seemed to know any generation is wrong about some things, and was concerned to avoid passing along the mistaken opinions of any given age.

            Therefore, Rousseau shunned teaching opinions, and promoted teaching only facts.  He writes, “Facts! Facts! And let him decide for himself; this is how he will come to know mankind.  If he is always directed by the opinion of the author, he is only seeing through the eyes of another person, and when those eyes are no longer at his disposal he can see nothing.”  Rousseau took this idea pretty far.  In another section, he writes, “As a general rule – never substitute the symbol for the thing signified, unless it is impossible to show the thing itself.”  I like this idea – give the child the raw materials and let her build understanding, and inevitably, her own judgments.  Indeed, that is how Rousseau views the student’s primary task: “No man is free from a man’s first duty; no one has a right to depend on another’s judgment.” 

            In this, at least, Rousseau had a rare moment of personal integrity.  For all his faults, Rousseau was a man who gathered his own facts, and trusted in his own judgments.  In his lifetime, this did not win him popularity.  He was ostracized and publicly heckled.  In Geneva, his books were burned.  Yet today, his statue stands in the middle of the city, and guidebooks boast of the connection.  Here, perhaps, is the most important lesson Rousseau has for our students:  Observe the world carefully, and then trust yourself.

Hong Kong Protestors Fight for Critical Curriculum

I really admire the thousands of concerned citizens in Hong Kong who marched this week in protest of a nationalistic, "brainwashing" curriculum.    Soon, I will be posting my thoughts on Rousseau's Emile.  For all his faults, Rousseau strongly believed that the a curriculum should be designed with the student's interest in mind.  Sadly, that is still a radical notion.

Thousands Protest China's Curriculum Plans For Hong Kong Schools

What Happens After High School?

I am trying to stay away from policy talk, but I have long been interested in studying the real effect of a high school education on students.  There is remarkably paltry data on this subject, and I'd appreciate any leads here.  I have recently come across two reports.

Here, Anne Hyslop of Education Sector lays out the problem, and its impact on teachers:

Data That Matters: Giving High Schools Useful Feedback On Grads' Outcomes

And here is the most in-depth report I've found on the subject and its impact nationally:

Promoting Economic Mobility By Increasing Post-Secondary Education

My one idea on this subject is that high schools need to be working much more closely with colleges, rather than "passing the buck" in both directions.  Perhaps more on this later.