Gather round, the "economists" are going to teach us how to teach

I've always been a fan of the authors of Freakonomics, and probably still will be a fan after reading this article. In this case, they're really just the messengers and we can't blame them for what the wealthy education reformers are probably going to do with this information. In the meantime, though, let's read a summary of one of their recent studies and look at how the editors of The Atlantic are already interpreting things.

Since it's a subject of economics (or freakonomics, whatever the difference is) and it involves education, I'm sure you can guess that it involves incentive-based learning. The latest study repeats what we already know is true - when you give students rewards, they perform a task better - but it's the Atlantic editor's conclusion that really tears me up. Just look at the headline:

 

Look at the cute little kids! Don't they just look like the kinds of children eager to wake up every morning to go to school and... wait a second, what's that tagline?

"The case for putting $20 bills on the desk of every standardized test taker."

Can I stop here? Can we all stop here, please?

Incentives work. We know this. It's human nature. We also know that in many cases, it works insofar as you get a certain behavior to exhibit itself but no long-lasting habit is formed. Think about your current jobs, with their paychecks and perks. It's great, right? If I told you that in two weeks, the paychecks would stop coming and you'd have to pay for your own dental insurance, but still keep working for me, would you keep that job? Maybe for a day or two, but then it'd eat away at you that you're volunteering to do a job that you got paid handsomely for just days before.

So tell me, Derek Thompson, business editor for The Atlantic... If my goal as a 2nd or 3rd grade teacher is to take a bright young child and build a lifetime love for learning, do you really think I should give them all $80/hour to try to do better on a test?

My (least) favorite part is when Derek points out one of public education's really troubling issues. Hold on tight, everyone, it's a doozie:

The trouble for many schools is that the incentive structure is set up so that teachers focus more than their students on standardized tests.

Don't bother checking to see that you read it correctly. The problem with our schools and their current incentive-based learning structures (which isn't even as awful as it could be) are that they focus too much on the students, not on the tests.

Derek, I thought you were kidding. I really, really, REALLY wanted this to be a joke. But I got all the way to the end of your article and this was all that I found:

... it's here, in under-served school districts, where the lessons of attention might be the most lucrative for the country. If we can buy their attention today, we'll all be richer for it.

I don't know about all of the readers of this blog, but I can assure you, Derek Thompson, that I did not choose to become a teacher so that I could hand out dollar bills to 3rd graders, beg them to score high on a standardized-test, and then wait patiently for the results to come back so that we can prove to the rest of the world that we've succeeded at educating the future generations of America.

Stick to real economics, and let us find innovative ways to raise student achievement without your filthy dollar bills.

Parents "Duped" by "Progressive" School Ran by Celebrities

I'm not going to say much about this article. Primarily because everyone involved got exactly what was coming to them (with the slight exception of the children who were too young to have a say in the decision) and also because the last thing this story needs is to be blown out of proportion and attached to the progressive movement in education.

The main lesson to be taken from this story is as follows: if you're paying $32,000 a year to send your child to a school created by members of a Vegas entertainment group known for the ground-breaking idea to cover themselves from head to toe in blue paint... you shouldn't be surprised when your child fails to gain anything from their time spent there.

If you're paying all that money and your children's principals are trained in anything but education, and those school administrators don't believe in the importance of books and structured classroom time (don't jump to any conclusions, I'm simply stating that 6-7 hours of "play time!" is not good for anyone)... you shouldn't be surprised when they can't read.

As with everything in life these days, there exists a wide spectrum of ways to solve every problem. Just try to avoid the extremes. No one expects you to send your child to a school where they will spend 7 hours circling answers on a multiple-choice test. But don't associate the Blue School or any of its like to a progressive education. We believe in books... that should say enough for itself, right?

Like It Or Not, Your 10-Year Olds Will Be Using Facebook

Photograph by Christopher Meder/iStockphoto.I've tried to stay out of the brouhaha regarding Facebook's proposal to allow children younger than 13 to begin joining the site. Anyone who knows me can probably guess that I'm going to side with the children's ability to learn and adapt to this new technology, rather than just assuming that their primary activity of choice will be to connect with pedophiles and terrorists and wreak havoc across the world. But then I fell for this link-bait from Slate and had to respond in some way.

This is the long and short of it: with or without systems in place, kids are going to join Facebook long before they are legally allowed to.

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Enhanced eBooks and Their Role in Early Reading

The Joan Ganz Cooney Center, a leading organization studying the ways in which 21st-century technology can help (and potentially harm) early learning, recently released the findings of a study on the divide between print books, ebooks, and "enhanced" ebooks, their flashy, attention-grabbing counterparts. Ignoring the misleading headline (the problem isn't whether or not children benefit more from print books rather than ebooks) the study is a great look at how we have to be careful when we add glitz and glamor to the materials we use in pre-K and elementary classrooms.

To sum up the results, the ebooks containing animations, video clips, sound, etc. were less beneficial to adults and children reading together. As you can imagine, reading these ebooks is fun and if your goal is to get a child to become interested in the process of reading, they're great! I've seen a few of the classic childrens books ported over to iPads and other tablets and they look and sound awesome... in many cases, they are the physical representations of the details I would add to a story as I was reading it. My imagination at work, brought to life on the screen. But that's part of the problem... the study found that content-related actions between the child and their reading partner decreased, and the focus quickly became the moving parts themselves.

This shouldn't be surprising to anyone, but I don't think the alarms need to be raised just yet. For one reason, any book in the hands of children is better than no book at all. Two, teachers and parents just need to think about their objectives when choosing between print and ebooks. If you're having a tough time dragging a child away from the television, it's quite possible that your "boring" childrens book isn't going to get any attention. But when that book becomes somewhat similar to what they are looking for in television and video games, you're pulling children closer to the ultimate goal of getting them to read something.

The study looks to move on to identifying what elements of enhanced ebooks are the most distracting, as well as which elements actually are beneficial to both engagement AND comprehension.

Don't Bother Reading the Instruction Manual

This is the actual manual that came with a copy of one of my all-time favorite video games, Earthbound. Coming in at approximately 100 pages, the book itself was bigger than the cartridge and the box that it came in, which was a rarity at the time. But as I was reminiscing with friends this past weekend, I started thinking about those manuals that came with video games and computer games in the late 80s and all the way through the 90s. They were treasures, almost as fun to read and pore through as the games themselves. I remember fondly sitting in the car on the way back from Blockbuster, flipping through those booklets to figure out how I was going to spend the next few days enjoying the game I was bringing home.

And then, for a variety of reasons, those manuals started shrinking. It wasn't that video games became less complex - a casual gamer in the 90s might argue that a manual the size of the one that came with Earthbound is necessary for most of the video games they see "hardcore" gamers playing nowadays - but the information contained within them became integrated into the games themselves. When processing power was limited and you could only pack so many hours of gameplay into a cartridge, publishers didn't want to spend the first half hour of a video game explaining the premise and the controls. You were usually thrown headfirst into the game.

In fact, players of the original Super Mario Bros. game are usually shocked to find out, years later, the true backstory of the game.

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