Education and why we all may be teachers...and students

In full disclosure I am not a education expert, a teacher, or even a school board member. Heck, I wasn't even much of a student, even though I managed to scrape together an engineering degree.

That was 35 years ago and it has served me well, although being more of a manager and business owner for the last 20 years has taken the hard edge off of my technical training years ago. What became more interesting to me than the hardware or software was the "wetware" , in other words, me and you.

So I became a consultant for technology start ups, building business models that incorporate behavioral characteristics of both company personnel and customers, much of it based on the work of Kahneman/Tversky.

It was with some surprise that I found myself working with a company that was applying technology to the educational field, an area of business that was typically not interesting due to the tight, old boy supplier networks (see upcoming post on text book publishers) and myriad layers of red tape along with a dash of corruption for good measure.

Great potential for the company was apparent from the beginning, the founder was a smart person that spent two years tutoring to gain insight into the learning process, the technology was the outcome of 14 years of investment into a military training system that focused on the best ways to teach math so that it can be retained and applied. They had developed a product that was excellent on all counts.

All good things until you looked at the market, and since they were paying me to do just that I found myself reading story after story, post after post, about No Child Left Behind, the schism in the opinion of the believers and nay sayers were of Grand Canyon proportions with both sides trying to make points with statements deeper in ideology than in fact.

Having some time to read into the subject over the holidays there were several things that became clear, the first was that the school systems have had a continually increasing mandate to provide more than education, while the schools themselves were spending more time on financial management issues than educational issues.

In addition to education schools must provide racial equality, economic compensation (e.g. free lunches), social exposure and discipline. Some school personnel would add to this list but you get the idea.

The second point is apparent to any of us that listen to politicians, starting in California home owners have rebelled against paying more for schools at the same time that teachers unions have increased their demands for higher pay. As a result teachers have gone from being the "lowest paid professional" to being near the top of the scale when actual hours worked is factored in, and do pretty well even when it isn't.

Teachers continually resist performance pay, the weeding out of bad teachers and other aspects of the work place that are the norm for most.

What has emerged from the research is amazing in some sense, but for those of us that always look for the counter intuitive "Truths" that don't hold up under scrutiny, is getting to be expected.

Most surprising was the small correlation between a teacher's credentials and the classroom performance, there seems to be no advantage to the extra bonus we pay teachers to get Master's and other certifications as measured by the only way we know how to measure school performance in the near term, testing.

This explains the some of the rapid increase in the cost of public schooling with no detectable improvement, from a business perspective schools should actually discourage many teachers from getting a graduate degree so that salaries can be tied to student performance instead of teacher scholastic performance as prescribed by parts of NCLB.

The facts show that almost anyone with a college degree and many without, know enough to teach elementary or middle school material. It is also becoming clear that the ability to effectively teach is not known until someone actually teaches, add to that the differences in classroom teaching and tutoring and you see a profession that has become unsure how to measure quality.

The Home School results were reinforcing to this "credentials are the answer" myth that has driven increasing costs in early education, there is very low correlation between the home school "teacher's" education and qualifications and their students outcomes. On an average the home schooled student will out perform public or private schooled kids by 15-30% on a wide variety of tests regardless of the parents education.

There is enough history now to see that Home Schoolers do better in college and on the job, debunking the common complaints of lacking social skills. The socialization aspect of school has always been a farce to those of us who spent more time in school trying not to get picked on that socializing.

So what do we do with this information?

We take a shot at thinking the main thing to teaching is the connection between teacher and learner, and that it is not a one size fits all solution.

We teach our kids, everyone should take a shot at teaching somewhere along the line. I've tutored on Saturdays for the last 5 years, there are online sites that need tutors and will pay a little money for doing it, we all have a little to teach and some have a natural talent that could make them life long teachers.

But the number of life long teachers is going to go down, while the number of life long learners is going to go way up, almost all of us will be in that group to keep skills relevant and sharp.

The disruption that has changed every field of work, computers, many of them mobile, the Internet and massive online data storage, is about to hit education. Just in time in my view, we need smart people with access to education regardless of where their parents went and what football team they like, at prices less than half of their lives salaries.

As for the materials for teaching, companies like Apangea Learning that I'm working with, and others are developing something we call a Student Centric, Adaptive Learning System (SCALS). This is a hybrid teaching solution that combines, problem tutors, concepts teachers and interactive Avatars to deliver a learning experience that outperforms classroom teaching on nearly every dimension.

Anyone, anywhere, anytime is where education is going, so we can life long learn and intermittently teach, from a simple computer. We pay to learn and teach to earn, compounding knowledge and shortening the path to a smarter, higher skilled society.

So the next time you are wonder what a teacher thinks, listen to your self and if you want to hear from a student head to the mirror. We are in a global economy and the next 100 years will be all about learning how to create true equality and 100% utilization of resources, Human resources in this century, not minerals or materials.

Education Take II - Bringing Everyone Inside the Society

The last post that was on Global Gleanings was written in disgust of the way that school children of a certain social status were being continually deprived of their civil rights that guaranteed them an equal education. While this problem is not new, these times are, and without an education in today's world life gets tough pretty damn quick.

Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short is how Hobbes described the outcome of empowering the common man back in the 1600's, it turns out that history proved him to be perfectly wrong, that is exactly the fate of an uneducated man in the age of Capitalism. We know now because of Jefferson for one, who knew that for any Democracy to survive and thrive the population had to be literate. The US, with policy based on those principles became the best place on earth to be average.

It holds forth then that for Democracy to be fair, every citizen must be provided the opportunity to become equally literate. Despite the 3rd President's best efforts we still have children being sentenced to a life of mediocrity for no other crime than being born in a bad school system, not having a parent that can pay for better schools or provide an alumni advantage into an Ivy.

Imagine the world of the future where nutritional advantages are gone, education is as free as broadcast television and the lessons that are to be learned fit each child like a well made glove. The benefit to all of mankind would make the middle class, or even the rich of the last century appear deprived, there would be few limits to what can be accomplished with an entire globe of educated people. Education won't solve every problem, but it will allow everyone to participate in the effort to solve every problem. It will bring about the real decline in exploitation of populations and it will bring everyone into society.

Bringing people into society sounds like a odd goal, what does that do for an individual, does it feed people, cure people, end bigotry and bias? The answer to all of those questions, somewhat surprisingly, is yes. History has shown that the initial ingredient of empathy is inclusion, newspapers in the 1700's never covered poor people's problems, they didn't cover slaves deaths, or the problems of people that were deemed to be exotic or foreign.

We still do this today, we call people aliens when they live 50 miles south of San Diego, because the Hutus and Tutsi's have funny names and live in Africa we ignore their slaughters while we make movies and build museums about the Holocaust, a slaughter of people that were "outside of society". We don't enslaves people of color in the US anymore because we work, serve in the Army and now even elect them President.

Education has always been an exclusionary device, and still is today. We need to end it soon so we can become the world that we should be, breaking down all barriers for all individuals, lineage, economics, geography and ethnicity is what we must do.

Until we do this the US and the world will be less than it should be, and in the future be looked at as "the dark ages" are today.