Tuesday, July 26, 2011

How Khan Academy Is Changing the Rules of Education

Some people think memorization is worthless.  We have all this information in calculators, computers, and the Internet, why should we memorize?  In my career, memorization is vital in order to make connections, develop new ideas, and achieve a higher understanding.  The following is an article from Wired Magazine.  Perhaps Kahn's website is a valuable tool.  We already use Raz-Kids in our classrooms and at home, why not this?


How Khan Academy Is Changing the Rules of Education

By Clive Thompson Email Author
July 15, 2011  | 
9:17 pm  | 
Matthew Carpenter, age 10, has completed 642 inverse trigonometry problems at KhanAcademy.org.
Photo: Joe Pugliese
“This,” says Matthew Carpenter, “is my favorite exercise.” I peer over his shoulder at his laptop screen to see the math problem the fifth grader is pondering. It’s an inverse trigonometric function: cos-1(1) = ?
Carpenter, a serious-faced 10-year-old wearing a gray T-shirt and an impressive black digital watch, pauses for a second, fidgets, then clicks on “0 degrees.” Presto: The computer tells him that he’s correct. The software then generates another problem, followed by another, and yet another, until he’s nailed 10 in a row in just a few minutes. All told, he’s done an insane 642 inverse trig problems. “It took a while for me to get it,” he admits sheepishly.
Carpenter, who attends Santa Rita Elementary, a public school in Los Altos, California, shouldn’t be doing work anywhere near this advanced. In fact, when I visited his class this spring—in a sun-drenched room festooned with a papercraft X-wing fighter and student paintings of trees—the kids were supposed to be learning basic fractions, decimals, and percentages. As his teacher, Kami Thordarson, explains, students don’t normally tackle inverse trig until high school, and sometimes not even then.
But last November, Thordarson began using Khan Academy in her class. Khan Academy is an educational website that, as its tagline puts it, aims to let anyone “learn almost anything—for free.” Students, or anyone interested enough to surf by, can watch some 2,400 videos in which the site’s founder, Salman Khan, chattily discusses principles of math, science, and economics (with a smattering of social science topics thrown in). The videos are decidedly lo-fi, even crude: Generally seven to 14 minutes long, they consist of a voice-over by Khan describing a mathematical concept or explaining how to solve a problem while his hand-scribbled formulas and diagrams appear onscreen. Like the Wizard of Oz, Khan never steps from behind the curtain to appear in a video himself; it’s just Khan’s voice and some scrawly equations. In addition to these videos, the website offers software that generates practice problems and rewards good performance with videogame-like badges—for answering a “streak” of questions correctly, say, or mastering a series of algebra levels. (Carpenter has acquired 52 Earth badges in math, which require hours of toil to attain and at which his classmates gaze with envy and awe.)
Initially, Thordarson thought Khan Academy would merely be a helpful supplement to her normal instruction. But it quickly become far more than that. She’s now on her way to “flipping” the way her class works. This involves replacing some of her lectures with Khan’s videos, which students can watch at home. Then, in class, they focus on working problem sets. The idea is to invert the normal rhythms of school, so that lectures are viewed on the kids’ own time and homework is done at school. It sounds weird, Thordarson admits, but this flipping makes sense when you think about it. It’s when they’re doing homework that students are really grappling with a subject and are most likely to need someone to talk to. And now Thordarson can tell just when this grappling occurs: Khan Academy provides teachers with a dashboard application that lets her see the instant a student gets stuck.
“I’m able to give specific, pinpointed help when needed,” she says.
The result is that Thordarson’s students move at their own pace. Those who are struggling get surgically targeted guidance, while advanced kids like Carpenter rocket far ahead; once they’re answering questions without making mistakes, Khan’s site automatically recommends new topics to move on to. Over half the class is now tackling subjects like algebra and geometric formulas. And even the less precocious kids are improving: Only 3 percent of her students were classified as average or lower in end-of-year tests, down from 13 percent at midyear.
For years, teachers like Thordarson have complained about the frustrations of teaching to the “middle” of the class. They stand at the whiteboard, trying to get 25 or more students to learn the same stuff at the same pace. And, of course, it never really works: Advanced kids get bored and tune out, lagging ones get lost and tune out, and pretty soon half the class isn’t paying attention. Since the rise of personal computers in the early ’80s, educators have hoped that technology could solve this problem by offering lessons tailored to each kid. Schools have blown millions, maybe billions, of dollars on sophisticated classroom technology, but the effort has been in vain.
Khan’s videos are anything but sophisticated. He recorded many of them in a closet at home, his voice sounding muffled on his $25 Logitech headset. But some of his fans believe that Khan has stumbled onto the secret to solving education’s middle-of-the-class mediocrity. Most notable among them is Bill Gates, whose foundation has invested $1.5 million in Khan’s site. “I’d been looking for something like this—it’s so important,” Gates says. Khan’s approach, he argues, shows that education can truly be customized, with each student getting individualized help when needed.
Not everyone agrees. Critics argue that Khan’s videos and software encourage uncreative, repetitive drilling—and leave kids staring at screens instead of interacting with real live teachers. Even Khan will acknowledge that he’s not an educational professional; he’s just a nerd who improvised a cool way to teach people things. And for better or worse, this means that he doesn’t have a consistent, comprehensive plan for overhauling school curricula.
Whatever Khan’s limits, his site has become extremely popular. More than 2 million users watch his videos every month, and all told they answer about 15 questions per second. Khan is clearly helping students master difficult and vital subjects. And he’s not alone: From TED talks to iTunes U to Bill Hammack the Engineer Guy, new online educational tools are bringing the ethos of Silicon Valley to education. The role these sites can (or should) play in our nation’s schools is unclear. But classes like Thordarson’s are starting to find out.

Read more atWired August 2011

Was the $5 Billion Worth It?

Wall Street Journal Editorial/Article on Bill Gates' efforts in philanthropy in public education.

A decade into his record-breaking education philanthropy, Bill Gates talks teachers, charters—and regrets.

 

Seattle
'It's hard to improve public education—that's clear. As Warren Buffett would say, if you're picking stocks, you wouldn't pick this one." Ten years into his record-breaking philanthropic push for school reform, Bill Gates is sober—and willing to admit some missteps.
"It's been about a decade of learning," says the Microsoft co-founder whose Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is now the nation's richest charity. Its $34 billion in assets is more than the next three largest foundations (Ford, Getty and Robert Wood Johnson) combined, and in 2009 it handed out $3 billion, or $2 billion more than any other donor. Since 2000, the foundation has poured some $5 billion into education grants and scholarships.
Seated in his office at the new Gates Foundation headquarters located hard by the Emerald City's iconic Space Needle, Mr. Gates says that education isn't only a civil-rights issue but also "an equity issue and an economic issue. . . . It's so primary. In inner-city, low-income communities of color, there's such a high correlation in terms of educational quality and success."
One of the foundation's main initial interests was schools with fewer students. In 2004 it announced that it would spend $100 million to open 20 small high schools in San Diego, Denver, New York City and elsewhere. Such schools, says Mr. Gates, were designed to—and did—promote less acting up in the classroom, better attendance and closer interaction with adults.
"But the overall impact of the intervention, particularly the measure we care most about—whether you go to college—it didn't move the needle much," he says. "Maybe 10% more kids, but it wasn't dramatic. . . . We didn't see a path to having a big impact, so we did a mea culpa on that." Still, he adds, "we think small schools were a better deal for the kids who went to them."
The reality is that the Gates Foundation met the same resistance that other sizeable philanthropic efforts have encountered while trying to transform dysfunctional urban school systems run by powerful labor unions and a top-down government monopoly provider.
In the 1970s, the Ford, Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations, among others, pushed education "equity" lawsuits in California, New Jersey, Texas and elsewhere that led to enormous increases in state expenditures for low-income students. In 1993, the publishing mogul Walter Annenberg, hoping to "startle" educators and policy makers into action, gave a record $500 million to nine large city school systems. Such efforts made headlines but not much of a difference in closing the achievement gap.
Asked to critique these endeavors, Mr. Gates demurs: "I applaud people for coming into this space, but unfortunately it hasn't led to significant improvements." He also warns against overestimating the potential power of philanthropy. "It's worth remembering that $600 billion a year is spent by various government entities on education, and all the philanthropy that's ever been spent on this space is not going to add up to $10 billion. So it's truly a rounding error."
This understanding of just how little influence seemingly large donations can have has led the foundation to rethink its focus in recent years. Instead of trying to buy systemic reform with school-level investments, a new goal is to leverage private money in a way that redirects how public education dollars are spent.
"I bring a bias to this," says Mr. Gates. "I believe in innovation and that the way you get innovation is you fund research and you learn the basic facts." Compared with R&D spending in the pharmaceutical or information-technology sectors, he says, next to nothing is spent on education research. "That's partly because of the problem of who would do it. Who thinks of it as their business? The 50 states don't think of it that way, and schools of education are not about research. So we come into this thinking that we should fund the research."
Of late, the foundation has been working on a personnel system that can reliably measure teacher effectiveness. Teachers have long been shown to influence students' education more than any other school factor, including class size and per-pupil spending. So the objective is to determine scientifically what a good instructor does.
"We all know that there are these exemplars who can take the toughest students, and they'll teach them two-and-a-half years of math in a single year," he says. "Well, I'm enough of a scientist to want to say, 'What is it about a great teacher? Is it their ability to calm down the classroom or to make the subject interesting? Do they give good problems and understand confusion? Are they good with kids who are behind? Are they good with kids who are ahead?'
"I watched the movies. I saw 'To Sir, With Love,'" he chuckles, recounting the 1967 classic in which Sidney Poitier plays an idealistic teacher who wins over students at a roughhouse London school. "But they didn't really explain what he was doing right. I can't create a personnel system where I say, 'Go watch this movie and be like him.'"
Instead, the Gates Foundation's five-year, $335-million project examines whether aspects of effective teaching—classroom management, clear objectives, diagnosing and correcting common student errors—can be systematically measured. The effort involves collecting and studying videos of more than 13,000 lessons taught by 3,000 elementary school teachers in seven urban school districts.
"We're taking these tapes and we're looking at how quickly a class gets focused on the subject, how engaged the kids are, who's wiggling their feet, who's looking away," says Mr. Gates. The researchers are also asking students what works in the classroom and trying to determine the usefulness of their feedback.
Mr. Gates hopes that the project earns buy-in from teachers, which he describes as key to long-term reform. "Our dream is that in the sample districts, a high percentage of the teachers determine that this made them better at their jobs." He's aware, though, that he'll have a tough sell with teachers unions, which give lip service to more-stringent teacher evaluations but prefer existing pay and promotion schemes based on seniority—even though they often end up matching the least experienced teachers with the most challenging students.
Teachers unions can be counted on "to stick up for the status quo," he says, but he believes they can be nudged in the right direction. "It's kind of scary for them because what we're saying is that some of these people shouldn't be teachers. So, does the club stand for sticking up for its least capable member or does it stand for excellence in education? We'll, it kind of stands for both."
Asked if the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers have any incentive to back school reforms that help kids but also diminish union power, Mr. Gates responds by questioning the scope of that power. "We have heavy union states and heavy right-to-work states, and the educational achievement of K-12 students is not at all predicted by how strong the union rules are," he says. "If I saw that [right-to-work states like] Texas and Florida were running a great K-12 system, but [heavy union states like] New York and Massachusetts have really messed this up, then I could draw a correlation and say it's either got to be the union—or the weather."
Mr. Gates's foundation strongly supports a uniform core curriculum for schools. "It's ludicrous to think that multiplication in Alabama and multiplication in New York are really different," he says. He also sees common standards as a money-saver at a time when many states are facing budget shortfalls. "In terms of mathematics textbooks, why can't you have the scale of a national market? Right now, we have a Texas textbook that's different from a California textbook that's different from a Massachusetts textbook. That's very expensive."
A national core curriculum, detractors say, could force states with superior standards, like Massachusetts, to dumb down their systems. And even if good common standards could be established, how would they improve going forward if our 50-state laboratory is no longer in operation?
Mr. Gates responds to that by saying there's no need to sacrifice excellence for equity. "Behind this core curriculum are some very deep insights. American textbooks were twice as thick as Asian textbooks. In American math classes, we teach a lot of concepts poorly over many years. In the Asian systems they teach you very few concepts very well over a few years." Nor does he see the need for competition among state standards. "This is like having a common electrical system. It just makes sense to me."
On the fraught issue of school choice, his foundation has been a strong advocate of charter schools, and Mr. Gates is particularly fond of the KIPP charter network and its focus on serving inner-city neighborhoods. "Whenever you get depressed about giving money in this area," he volunteers, "you can spend a day in a KIPP school and know that they are spending less money than the dropout factory down the road."
Mr. Gates is less enamored of school vouchers. "Some in the Walton family"—of Wal-Mart fame—"have been very big on vouchers," he begins. "And honestly, if we thought there would be broad acceptance in some locales and long-term commitment to do them, they have some very positive characteristics."
He praises the private school model for its efficiency vis-à-vis traditional public schools, noting that the "parochial school system, per dollar spent, is an excellent school system." But the politics, he says, are just too tough right now. "We haven't chosen to get behind [vouchers] in a big way, as we have with personnel systems or charters, because the negativity about them is very, very high."
It's a response that in some ways encapsulates the Gates Foundation's approach to education reform—more evolution, less disruption. It attempts to do as much good as possible without upsetting too many players. You can quibble with Mr. Gates about that strategy. You can second-guess him. You can even offer free advice. Or you can shake his hand, thank him for his time and remember that it's his money.
Mr. Riley is a member of the Journal's editorial board.

 

Friday, July 22, 2011

Helping Weakest Students Could Cost This School

This is a strange cautionary tale of how an effort to get funding for struggling schools seems to have gone astray. Federal and State scrutiny for this SDUSD site have now made it difficult for the school. Read and consider how this may affect the MB Cluster if outside auditors came and scrutinized our sites' practices.


Helping Weakest Students Could Cost This School

Posted: Wednesday, July 20, 2011 11:15 am | Updated: 12:20 pm, Fri Jul 22, 2011.

The last bell had rung at Burbank Elementary. But the math problem still sat stubbornly on the screen before the handful of third graders who lingered with teacher Fred Montes on a hot afternoon.
The children stared up at the numbers under a whirring ceiling fan. Montes coaxed them through long division, step by step. Then the kids tried the next problem alone, scribbling on little white boards on their laps.
"Ready?" Montes asked before they went over the problem.
"To go home?" one boy asked.
"It's 3:03. We're not going home yet!" Montes exclaimed.
This is one way that Burbank is trying to turn around years of sagging test scores: Montes and other teachers choose to stick around and tutor kids who faltered on state tests. The Logan Heights school pays for the extra hours with a windfall of federal money meant to overhaul the very worst schools. It is slated to get $4 million over three years and already was awarded more than $1.1 million this year.
Now that treasured money could be in jeopardy — and all because Burbank focused on its weakest students. To extend the day, the school tutored struggling students after school. It also served up extra lessons for them during breaks. Teachers could volunteer to work more hours for more money.
But the feds say schools were supposed to add more school time for all children, not just some of them. Giving students more time to absorb lessons is a big push for the Obama administration, which has touted longer school days and a longer school year to help youngsters in the United States compete with China and India. California has warned schools like Burbank they must change their ways or lose the money.
That is stirring up confusion across California and at Burbank here in San Diego. The most obvious way to make sure all students get more time is to lengthen the school day and make all teachers stay there longer. Public schools cannot do that unless they square off with their teachers union over work rules.
That clashes with the gentler take on school reform that San Diego Unified has put to the test at Burbank, one that has steered clear of showdowns with the teachers union. And teachers aren't even sure that a longer day would be better for all kids, instead of just the ones who need the most help.

Last year California branded Burbank as a persistently failing school, one of only six called out in San Diego County. Year after year its test scores have ranked in the bottom tenth percentile in the state, even when Burbank is compared to similar schools where almost all students are poor and many are learning English.
Burbank bristled at the label. But it also got a chance to turn itself around. To snag millions of dollars for reforms, schools had a short list of seemingly severe choices laid out by the Obama administration. Faltering schools could boot the principal and at least half of their teachers. They could secede from their school districts and convert into charters. They could take the nuclear option and shut down.
But schools could also make a fourth choice. They could revamp instruction, extend school time devoted to learning and replace their principal, changes less likely to anger teachers and parents. Nearly three out of four schools that sought the turnaround money chose that kinder, gentler option.
Burbank was one of them. Going the softer route made sense for San Diego Unified, which has veered away from the Obama administration when it comes to school reforms that rankle unions, such as using test scores to evaluate teachers. The federal push is grounded in the idea that teachers are the biggest factors that schools can control in student achievement and that schools should measure and judge them based on how students do.
Other turnaround schools have become reform battlegrounds; Burbank has been a quiet test of the San Diego Unified brand of reform, which is rooted in getting teachers to collaborate.
"It doesn't do any good to throw teachers out," said Sandra Sincek, one of four new coaches hired to help Burbank teachers. "So you build the teachers that you have."
So besides tutoring, Burbank is using its millions in turnaround money to pay for coaches to help teachers work together to improve their lessons. Teachers come together every week to share ideas and analyze what works and what doesn't. The grant also pays for another crop of educators who teach children about art, science and technology while their everyday teachers huddle and talk.
Last Thursday, fifth grade teachers dove into questions that stumped their students on a math test. One teacher pointed out children could calculate the volume of a box when it looked like a cube, but got confused if it were shown as if it were flattened, multiplying the wrong measurements together.
"I wonder if we made it too complicated," fifth grade teacher Laura Lopez-Hudson murmured to the others, looking at the problem.
But Sincek pointed out that kids needed to learn to tune out irrelevant information. Lessons like these help teachers hone lessons of their own.
The money also means that every day, Burbank has a school nurse and a counselor on hand. It paid for more teachers to shrink classes and prevent fifth and sixth graders from sharing one class. It bought a new computer program to help children read. It even got planters and mulch for a school garden.
"It was like winning the lottery," Principal Carolina Flores Wittman said of her new school. Teachers feel the same way, praising the extra attention for kids who are behind, added supplies and new training.
The trouble began when federal monitors stopped into some California schools.
They found some weren't carrying out the reforms they had promised, including jettisoning teachers or replacing principals. They also argued schools had to offer extra time for all children, not just some. It faulted the California Department of Education for not checking on how schools used the money. Superintendents and school principals complained that the rules were confusing and unclear.
"This wasn't like finding a few tax cheats. It was extremely widespread," said Michael Kirst, president of the state Board of Education. "It's out of control and we have to fix it as soon as possible."
The board warned turnaround schools that they had to fix problems to get their next dose of funding.
Schools assumed that their plans were fine when California awarded them the federal grants last year. Burbank, for instance, said the extra time would go to "those students identified by their teachers" when it applied for the money. But the California Department of Education said it had little money to monitor the plans.
San Diego Unified officials are still working out what Burbank needs to do to keep the money flowing. It must act before school begins this fall. Principal Flores Wittman is lukewarm about a longer day for everyone, fearing advanced students will get bored. And nobody has even brought up the idea with the union. The existing teachers contract sets out a 40-hour-week.
"We don't know exactly what the rules are. If we can solve it somehow without changing the teachers contract," said Area Superintendent Gil Gutierrez, "that is always best."
Please contact Emily Alpert directly at emily.alpert@voiceofsandiego.org or 619.550.5665 and follow her on Twitter: twitter.com/emilyschoolsyou.

Friday, July 8, 2011

Cluster Leadership Conference - Agenda/World Cafe

The Cluster Leadership Conference held in the spring of 2011 was attended by Board of Education members (trustees), Nellie Meyer (Deputy Superintendent of Deputy Superintendent of Academics, Area Superintendents, and representatives of each of the clusters in SDUSD.

Representing the MB Cluster were: Diana Carberry (Area Superintendent), Leslie Catanzaro (parent), Julie Martel (lead principal), and Jennifer Tandy (parent).

The event was primarily a roundtable discussion (World Cafe - see instructions and notes below). The BoE members spoke, but their speeches did not clarify their direction for the clusters nor did they clarify the power that they intended for the clusters to exercise.

Cluster Leaders Conference Agenda 5-31-11

World Cafe Instructions

World Cafe Passport

Official By-Laws Approved

The draft by-laws were slightly modified and approved as of June 29. They were passed unanimously.

Elections for officers is planned for the fall. Committee Members (per the by-laws) will be selected based on each individual sites' preferences. This may be by election, appointment, or any other process.

110608 Mission Bay Cluster by-Laws

Friday, July 1, 2011

Cluster Facts Booklet

This document includes facts about each Cluster. The data was collected by SDUSD and contributed by each Cluster leader in preparation for the Cluster Leadership Conference hosted by SDUSD.

Cluster Facts Booklet Color 5-31-11