Chain of Needs for Student Success

As I have been sharing, the debate about school effectiveness and student success so often centers around standardized tests and the teachers who teach, yet we ignore the box that the teacher is placed in, and the future life of the student after leaving the school system.

To have true student success, deductive logic tells us, that there must be at least four critical components:

1. Content is Relevant to Students’ Ultimate Needs and Goals
2. Content is Taught at an Appropriate Time
3. Teachers are Knowledgeable about the Content
4. Teachers have Activities that are Efficient at Helping Students Learn

In our public system, the first 2 links of the chain is being defined by the standards, while the last links are clearly in the privy of the teacher.  Although, I will argue that often the best teachers are the bold ones who also bring in new content that is important to their students, beyond what standards currently define.  In either case, each of these 4 components must be at a sufficient level so that students truly succeed.  If any one of these links is not sufficiently well done, then there will not be success for the student, unless the student finds the components outside of traditional schooling.

We spend the majority of our resources on improving our teachers, but  the amount spent on improving the first two links of the chain within the realm of standards is minute in comparison.  There are of course major reform movements that have occurred, but I think evidence would bare out that most of these have been more about political popularity than research of need, and the resources used to create them and improve them were still small in comparison to the resources used to implement them.

So I am trying to start this research, and find others who recognize the need of improving our standards if we are to truly have student success, such that no link will be broken.

Unsolicited Interdisciplinary NSF Funding Query for Scientific Research of STEM Educational Content Standards

I just sent the following email to several contacts at the National Science Foundation:

Hello,

I am looking to fund research that is vital to the future of the U.S. but whose value has not yet been recognized.  From the NSF website, it suggested that I “develop a one-to-two paragraph description that can be sent by email” and thus I’m sending this message (although I hope you will forgive the fact that it has 5 small paragraphs instead of 2 big ones.)  And I am also sending this to all the points of contact that seemed most relevant, due to the interdisciplinary nature of my desired research.

It is clear that the educational content standards set in the fields of STEM will have wide-ranging consequences on the future of the United States.  But how are these content standards being developed?  The answer is, that the development is generally occurring through committees that are not given an objective framework of understanding in which to build their standards.   I have first hand experience with this problem as a member of the committee in California to revise the K-12 Information and Communications Technologies standards for K-12 schools.  Further, I have done research, that is as yet unpublished, which shows that not one state in the U.S. requires students to know what a “trillion” is before they graduate high school.  From economics of our national debt, to computer storage space, understanding a trillion is a critical concept for all citizens to understand.   If sufficient research had been done before-hand that would have created a fairly comprehensive framework in which to place the standards, then this type of huge hole would not have occurred.

I believe the solution to the problem is to use recognized models of needs, such as Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, combined with automated qualitative research of materials, such as job postings, newspapers, etc to build a model that can bring our standards up to the needs of society today, and lend credible evidence to what should be taught for our future needs.  It further can distinguish what content of STEM is critical for all citizens to know, and what content is specialized and should be taught to those who decide to go into a specific field.

STEM is earning a reputation of being “Science and Engineering only”, as I heard from a speaker at the California Statewide Career Technical Review.  Evidence of this is further borne out by the fact that the while States’ Career Clusters Initiative has a STEM pathway of “Engineering and Technology,” the pathway only mention “engineering” in many specific pathway standards.  And Information Technology is a separate cluster, not even being considered part of STEM.  Yet, Information Technology has been the major economic force in the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math thus far in the 21st century.  It is only with objective interdisciplinary research could a more balanced curriculum that accurately reflects the needs of our nation be created.

I hope you will consider this idea, and that we can start dialog about how to improve the methodologies of developing standards, and the possibility of gaining funding to assist in doing the necessary research to be part of this methodological improvement.

The Freedom to Fail, and the Opportunity to Succeed

This weekend I followed a principle that I believe is important for parents and teachers alike.  My daughter was doing the 4th Grade Project of building a model of a California Mission.   When we started it, I had suggested to use pegboard as the bottom, and then to print out an old surveyors map to use as the foundation.  She thought my ideas were “kooky” but still went along with them.

Then came the disagreement about construction.  She really wanted to use play-dough or clay.  I wanted to use cardboard boxes, and put photos on the sides to make it look very real.

She again thought my idea was kooky.  And she said that it was important for the project to look like a kid did it.  Well, I knew that it was important to give her this freedom of decision, even though I knew that her sculpting skills were new, and likely it wouldn’t turn out too good.  But, I believe in the freedom to fail, because without that you don’t have true success.

She tried the play-dough, and it didn’t work, then we got modeling clay, and she spent several hours doing her best to get the mission buildings all right.  But she is just learning, and honestly her mission looks really bad, despite all the work she put in.  (I want to make sure no one thinks I’m dissing on my daughter, she just won a coloring contest at a craft store this weekend, and has been chosen as one of the most creative people at her school.  It is just a sculpting skill set issue at this point.)

So today, I helped her bring her mission to class.  And seeing all the other missions, hers looks really bad in comparison.  And if the story was to end here, I think the lesson she would learn is “I suck”.  And that isn’t true, she is just unskilled, and she chose a strategy that wasn’t optimal given her skill set.

So, I am going to work with her more this week and she will build another mission.  Part of her problem of time wasn’t her fault, but the fault of the lack of parental time, given how much myself and my wife have had to dedicate to our studies and work recently.  But, I want to see if she will go with my idea.  I think she will be more receptive, now that she will have seen how her mission turned out.  We may even go with using clay again, but she is going to have to spend more time and practice with it.

I believe in mastery learning, and that requires us to let students have the freedom to fail, but the difference is then we must continue to give them the opportunity to succeed.

Quick Case Study: Truck Driving and California CTE Standards / Pathways

While at the CTE Review, I tried to have a valid career recognized, and a “pathway” built.  The outcome demonstrates why a method of creating standards that use an objective accurate framework is important, and how our individual perspectives with a lack of systems thinking can cause issues, and also why purpose needs to be shared, and utilized.

At Twin Rivers Adult School we have a Truck Driving program, and many of our students get jobs, that have a good wage.  There seems to be no doubt in any of the minds of people I have talked with that Truck Driving and other commercial driving/piloting (Ships, Trains, Planes, etc) are a valid pathway for a career.  But, currently and probably into the future, California CTE standards don’t/won’t recognize it as an official Pathway.  The reason is because the committee that recommends official Pathways is composed of K-12 instructors, and in a high school, a truck driving program could never be taught because of the age requirement (21+) for driving a truck.

The committee has a valid view, in that most of the CTE standards of California are for traditional secondary education.  But, it leaves out California Adult Schools, which also use these standards.  Also, when the standards first got passed, part of funding in the form of Carl D. Perkins grants, was and is still tied to the limited number of pathways that California recognizes.  So in essence, when Twin Rivers Adult School applies for this grant, and we say we have an automotive repair program (because some maintenance and repair is in our program) when we mostly have a truck driving program, we are being required to lie to get legitimate career training funded.

This also shows why objective frameworks are important.  There did not seem to me to be enough debate and clarification about what scale (vantage point by Gilbert’s theory) that a pathway should be written.  In IT we decided to keep it broad when there are many distinct paths that could be followed, and we reduced our pathways.  I’m not sure in the end that was a good choice, but that will be for a different posting.

Revising California’s CTE Standards

The last 2 months have had so much work, that I have not had a chance to post.  But amongst all the craziness, I had the honor to be invited to be a member of the California Statewide Career Technical Review Team, which was tasked with helping to change the California Standards for Career and Technical Education.

And while I feel very honored to be a part of the committee, and I think we did the best we could within the framework and time we had, the event was much as I had expected, with a lot of decisions by compromise, with a lack of framework to build comprehensive thinking.

The problem is that we don’t have enough comprehensive research about what we need.  We have some studies by O*Net and other others,  but for the most part, research is done through the non-randomized groups of experts being given only a short period of time to come up with ideas.   And I was one of those, but even though I try to have a broad view, I don’t believe that I have or possibly can have, a broad enough view from personal experience to be sure that my input is even broad enough.

So if personal experience can not give us a broad enough view, and it often leads to conflicting viewpoints, because of definitions and understanding of mental models, how is is it even possible to understand the “big picture” sufficiently to hope that education is teaching to what is relevant?

I believe in CTE, the first research that must be done is qualitative.  We have better methods now to take vast sums of words, like in job want ad postings, and to have an algorithm help place them in bins of things that are somewhat distinct.

After using these qualitative methods to help build the categorizations, then they can be filled in by using more word analysis, combined with surveying.  And from this, a good broad framework can be built which then the expert committees can take and hone it further.   I think it is this methodology that we need if we really want to have standards that are the best that they can be.

Although, until I or someone else can do the research, I’ll keep trying to get on committees that affect the standards, because I think at least I have a few more things I know that are important that are missing.

Lack of Ethics with YourBabyCanRead.com

I was checking out YourBabyCanRead.com and just as I was about to look them up on Wikipedia, I got a chat screen with an “agent”.  So I thought I’d ask some questions.  From the responses I got in the following chat transcript, to me it is clear that they are misleading people into thinking that you are talking with a person, and in fact it is a bot.  Or potentially someone forced to only copy and paste answers, but I think the  bot hypothesis is more likely correct.

Here is the transcript:

Security of Federal Student Aid Systems?

As previously posted, Twin Rivers Adult School is now certified to administer Federal Student Aid in the form of Pell Grants.  And as the Chief Financial Aid Director and Primary Destination Point Administrator, I am tasked with securing our data.

Of course, some security by obscurity is important, so I will not share in any postings anything that couldn’t be found out publicly or easily by a hacker.  But I will share some of the concerns I have about how the federal government treats security.

First, in some areas the U.S. Federal Government is seems to overly emphasize certain security policies that may not be as important to true security.  Specifically, nearly any new task requires signed copies of contracts to be sent to them via postal mail (they won’t even accept fax), and most of their sites and software force password changes very regularly.   I believe that while it is important to change a password on a yearly basis, that often changing passwords sooner than this leads to forgetting passwords, and also encourages writing down of the new password, and thus is not always a good policy.

But, in other areas, FSA doesn’t seem to have good security practices in place.  Specifically, many of their applications and sites only allow an 8 character password.   This is ridiculous because it is clear that every additional character exponentially improves the security of a password, and in many ways is more important than the choice of characters.

Further, several of the certificates on their secure websites are inaccurate, and will flag your web browser, and in fact our school’s firewall at first didn’t let us connect because of this problem.

So can the federal government be hypocritical?  I think this points to a “yes”.

Practical Epistemology, Ethics, and Validity of Research

Recently I realized that I do have more to learn when it comes to conducting research.  It seems that research with people is often like trying to win a game of poker while at the same time always showing everyone your cards.   Ethics seems to say that experiments should have full disclosure to those participating, and epistemology says that once someone knows something it will inherently alter how they respond to something.   And so if I’m trying to get accurate opinions from people, I must be the most careful of not interjecting my own opinion, yet full disclosure would require me to be transparent on this point.   Obviously psychology experiments have come up with a solution to this to the satisfaction of many IRB’s (Institutional Review Board) but I need to learn more about this part of things.

Recently I sent a survey out to the deans to the top graduate schools of education (as ranked by U.S. News and World Report) asking them some  basic questions about the Common Core State Standards.  In response several deans asked me for further disclosure, and about whether my research was approved by an IRB (I will be writing more about IRB’s soon, as I am convinced that they are often denying the human right of free speech.)

So, I then sent out a FAQ that gave full disclosure to my original mailing list.  But now I’m concerned that I have tainted my data, at least when it comes to opinions, and that maybe I should have just given the details to those who asked, or given a different type of disclosure.

Oh well, I am sure this will be a learning experience for me, and maybe spurn me to do more research about IRB’s.   Here are the 2 emails I sent to the deans:

Trends of Conformity vs. Diversity in Education

It seems interesting to me that often 2 fairly mutually exclusive trends can happen.  Educational Content Standards promote conformity of what is learned, while Charter Schools tend to lead to diversity of what is learned.  What is even more interesting, is often politicians promote both simultaneously, despite the differing effects that they have.

Although, maybe they do not need to be as contradictory as they seem, if the standards are truly the things that everyone should know, and not just a wish list of what a whole bunch of teachers think should be known.  But, as it is, the number of standards is increasing in the name of “rigor” which means that they are now the antithesis of the idea of charter schools.

Twin Rivers Adult School Just Got Approved to Administer Pell Grants

For the last 2 years, I’ve been working on helping Twin Rivers Adult School to get the ability to administer Pell Grants for our Career and Technical classes.  This has been a huge undertaking, as some of my past entries have documented.  But today, the 2-years of setbacks, sweat, and tears seems to be paying off, as our program has received its provisional approval, and we now need to simply sign and send back the program participation agreement, and we will be in.

There is still much to do this coming year, and these coming weeks.  We need to fill our classes, work out any glitches in our policies and procedures, and get full accrediation with the Council on Occupational Education, but I feel confident we are on a good foundation for these with the work that I’ve done (and we’ve done, but honestly I’m pretty proud of my work at this moment.)

So if you or someone you know wants to become a Certified Nurse Assistant; Licensed Vocational Nurse, Medical Billing & Coding Specialist; Licensed Pharmacy Technician; Office Technician; Green Construction Worker; HVAC Technician; Electrician; Custodial Supervisor or Custodian; Truck Driver or Bus Driver, then send them our way!  www.tras.edu