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Nicholas Kristof, a columnist for the New York Times had a column this week that gave us a graphic picture of the price that our nation is paying for the current foreign policy. It is summarized in the sentence, "For the cost of an additional soldier stationed in Afghanistan for a year, nearly 20 schools could be built." Kristof recognizes that education is not a panacea. But he cites the example of Greg Mortenson, author of “Three Cups of Tea,” who has built 39 schools in Afghanistan and 92 in Pakistan. Not one has been burned down or closed. The aid organization CARE has 295 schools educating 50,000 girls in Afghanistan, and not a single one has been closed or burned by the Taliban. The Afghan Institute of Learning, another aid group, has 32 schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan, with none closed by the Taliban (although local communities have temporarily suspended three for security reasons).
It's uplifting to see productive alternatives to the years of war in which we have been engaged. If you would like to read more on this, go to http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/29/opinion/29kristof.html?_r=1
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, a major publisher, is unveiling the biggest deal in its history. It is a $40 million, multiyear contract with Detroit public schools. But they are not going to be selling many textbooks. Instead, the company will be providing a computer-based teaching system it developed with Microsoft Corp. that connects teachers, students, and administrators. It’s a radical shift away from the classic textbook publishing model and represents an industry transformation, as technology supplants books.
Although they will be selling some textbooks, most of the contract is for software such as Learning Village - a customized, interactive classroom network. The switch to electronic teaching tools is driven in part by school systems that want to prepare students for a digital world, In no small measure, it is also due to the availability of federal stimulus money for such programs.
As one administrator was quoted as saying “We are now in a transformational period. Everything we have has to be two worlds: print and digital. The future of learning is going to be high-quality online material and, to a lesser extent, textbooks.’’
The digital transformation is much more than just e-book versions of textbooks. It’s companion videos, interactive games, assessment, curriculum planning tools, and on and on and on. It’s also changing the relationship between schools and publishers. It’s one thing to discard a paper text; it’s more difficult for a school district to walk away from a computer system on which teachers and students depend.
The New York Times announced today that the Walt Disney Company is offering refunds for all those “Baby Einstein” videos that did not make children into geniuses. As the paper reports, the videos "may have been a great electronic baby sitter, but the unusual refunds appear to be a tacit admission that they did not increase infant intellect."
Susan Linn, director of Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, which has been pushing the issue for years was understandably pleased, seeing it "as an acknowledgment by the leading baby video company that baby videos are not educational." In 2006, Ms. Linn’s group went to the Federal Trade Commission to complain about the educational claims made by Disney and another company, Brainy Baby. As a result, the companies dropped the word “educational” from their marketing. But the group didn’t think that was enough.
Last year, lawyers threatened a class-action lawsuit for unfair and deceptive practices unless Disney agreed to refund the full purchase price to all who bought the videos since 2004. Their attorneys argued that “The Walt Disney Company’s entire Baby Einstein marketing regime is based on express and implied claims that their videos are educational and beneficial for early childhood development.” In addition, they stated that those claims were “false because research shows that television viewing is potentially harmful for very young children.” The letter also described studies showing that television exposure at ages 1 through 3 is associated with attention problems at age 7.
Baby Einstein, founded in 1997, was one of the earliest players in what became a huge electronic media market for babies and toddlers. Acquired by Disney in 2001, the company expanded to a full line of books, toys, flashcards and apparel, along with DVDs including “Baby Mozart,” “Baby Shakespeare” and “Baby Galileo.” The videos — simple productions featuring music, puppets, bright colors, and not many words — became a staple of baby life: According to a 2003 study, a third of all American babies from 6 months to 2 years old had at least one “Baby Einstein” video.
The sad fact is that the problems and limitations were predictable. Despite the ingenious name, the products represented a repackaging of materials that, despite their popularity, do little or nothing for enhancing any range of meaningful skills. The emphasis on relatively valueless skills, and the lack of attention to meaningful ones is a key factor in the astronomical 40% reading failure rate that haunts our children and our nation. Lots of productive actions can be taken--but they can only happen if parents are given the information they need to get past the glib, seductive advertising that drains our efforts and finances away from pathways that can yield real benefits.
When I was a kid, American history was presented in very clear --albeit unrealistic -- terms. There were the good guys and the bad guys. Columbus, at that time, was invariably in the camp of the good guys--though no one bothered to ask any native Americans if they agreed with that interpretation.
Now, things have changed considerably as many teachers aim to present a more balanced perspective of what happened. Not unexpectedly, this has led to a whole new vocabulary for describing what occurred. For example, the word "discovery" often no longer appears in connection with Columbus. The native Americans--who are believed to come across from Asia clearly "discovered" our lands well before Columbus. And, then of course, there are the Vikings who also did some amazing things in the way of exploration long before Columbus was born.
So in some places, students start learning about the "Columbian Exchange" — which consisted not only of gold, crops and goods shipped back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean, but diseases carried by settlers that decimated native populations.
And in some places, even the word "holiday" does not appear in connection with this day. Understandably, the idea does sit well in places with large native American populations.
It's great that the oversimplifications and distortions that pervaded my school years are being corrected. On the other hand, Columbus did leave a major mark in our history and in the history of the world. Changes of the sort he brought about can rarely, if ever, be categorized as good or bad. Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, the author of several books related to Columbus, including "1492: The Year the World Began" captured the complexities when he stated that, "Every hero is somebody else's villain. Heroism and villainy are just two sides of the same coin." It may be far more challenging to set up the teaching to reflect this constellation, but it would be far more accurate.
Julia Steiny, a former member of the Providence School Board, recently wrote a piece entitled: Good luck trying to succeed as a kid in America. In it, she covers a report from the ODEC, a Paris-based organization that collects and monitors statistics on 30 industrialized countries.
ODEC often reports test score. But this time, in a report titled “Doing Better for Children” it examines child well-being with the focus on poverty, teen-parenting, environmental quality, and telling measures like whether kids have desks, calculators and other basic tools to do schoolwork at home.
To give you a hint of what is to come, forty-eight percent of U.S. children do not have the basic tools to do their homework. (The ODEC average is 35.) Overall, the statistics are appalling.
Here is a sampling of ODEC’s numbers: Even though we are a rich nation (only Luxembourg has families with a higher disposable income than the families in the U.S) the U.S. has a sky-high rate of childhood poverty, topped only by Poland, Mexico and Turkey.
Roughly 21 percent of America’s kids are born and raised under the poverty level set by the federal government, when the unrealistic threshold of $22,000 for a family of four. Do the math. You can’t live on that here. A more realistic measure would greatly raise the percentage of children in poverty. The average childhood-poverty rate among the ODEC countries was 12 percent. Unlikely countries like Hungary and the Czech Republic beat the pants off us.
The U.S. has high infant mortality rates, and high numbers of babies born underweight. Particularly alarming is our high rate of teen births, the second worst rate after Mexico. Our rate is 50 births per 1,000; the ODEC average is 15.5. Our babies are having babies, forming new families very likely to be incompetent, and very likely to keep the cycle going.
And education? The educational achievement of our 15-year-olds is the seventh worst among the countries studied. In short, by ODEC’s measures, the U.S. does a wretched job of caring for its children. Of course, not all of its children. If you’re a privileged American kid, you’re on track for a promising future. But for lots of kids, that's not the case. Many children fend for themselves, with poor family support, on track for truly dismal futures. Our burgeoning prisons are only one image of where that track sometimes leads.
The ODEC report shows that we are in crisis. It's vital that we take meaningful steps to support families and children. Other countries have been able to succeed. It is not an impossible or unrealistic goal. But we must be willing and able to put in place family support programs that form the basis for a healthy society and a productive future.
When we were children, exhortations to do our work were regularly accompanied by the adage "practice makes perfect." Today, I in a radio interview with Daniel Coyle, author of The Talent Code, I heard a new and fascinating twist on this idea. Coyle's thesis is that through reinforcement - 'deep practice' as he calls it - particularly when it is accompanied by the opportunity to make mistakes that we can learn from - our brain develops pathways that become more efficient.
This has been talked about for a long time in terms of the brain being a system where the more we use particularly pathways, the more bandwidth they carry. The myelin sheath around the neurons actual 'thicken' allowing information to flow faster and more efficiently.
Coyle combines this information with observations of how practice--carried out under supervision (i.e., via teachers or coaches) can 'ignite' breakthroughs in the learner. He makes clear that good coaching is not, as is commonly thought, based primarily on strong leadership and charisma. it's much more about micro manipulation on the edge of an individual's or team's capabilities.
Coyle came to his ideas by studying small, very effective centers that have had extraordinary success in training athletes, musicians and other talented professionals. So it is not simply that practice makes perfect, but that perfection also requires the right training techniques. For anyone who believes, as I do, in the extraordinary power of effective teaching, his message is an exciting one--offering a world of possibilities.
You can learn a lot more about this intriguing topic by going to Coyle's book http://thetalentcode.com/author/ or even faster, by seeing a clip of him speaking on utube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dY7QNxXbziA
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