BABSONKNOWLEDGE.ORG: March 2006 Archives

Compare innovation in public schooling with innovation in other areas such as business. How much innovation by public schools is apparent in these categories?



While in business, "product innovation is certainly important, and in some ways it offers the clearest economic payoff for innovation,"does the fact that innovation not only has no economic payoff for public schools but it is more likely to be punished than rewarded have anything to do with their inability to either reform themselves or to be reformed from the outside? Is it even possible to have any significant product innovation from public schools who are all controlled in the product they must produce by by a single, mandated set of curriculum standards and testing?

Greg Mankiw's Blog: How to Write Well

Here's some of the good tips from a list on writing well passed on by Greg Mankiw's Blog: How to Write Well

• Stay focused. Remember the take-away points you want the reader to remember. If some material is irrelevant to these points, it should probably be cut.
• Keep sentences short. Short words are better than long words. Monosyllabic words are best.
• The passive voice is avoided by good writers.
• Positive statements are more persuasive than normative statements.
• Use adverbs sparingly.
• Avoid jargon. Any word you don’t read regularly in a newspaper is suspect.

And of course, the last rule: keep it simple.

Is There More to Knowledge Than Just Learning?

Even if students take in and retain the information from teaching, is there something more involved in understanding or making meaning out of the material? Is there something involving creativity or problem solving that students must be able to do either with the material or as a separate skill that goes beyond simply retaining the material? Jay Mathews in
The Latest Doomed Pedagogical Fad: 21st-Century Skills - washingtonpost.com seems to accept there is something deeper but rejects trying to teach it, at least before the basics are learned.

I am not so impressed. I have been writing cranky columns about 21st-century skills on washingtonpost.com calling the movement a pipe dream whose literature should be tossed in the trash.

Here's another typical response to the "something deeper" or different that goes beyond simple learning from a Direct Instruction advocate. Rob Kremer states,

Starting with the front page, where there's a big article on the controversy over math instruction. For years, the educrats have been trying to shove down the throats of parents and children their ridiculous theories on how kids learn math. When parents see the stupid stuff their kids are doing (group projects, math journals, spending hours on trivial problems) they go crazy. The educrats hem and haw, try to run out the clock. The persistent parents win.

Well, the article today tried to put the best face on it for the education establishment. The real story is that parents resent their kids being used as guinea pigs as the educrats try once again to pretend they have this new approach to learning (which is nothing more than the same old bullshit John Dewey 'constructivism' packaged in some other shiny box) but the parents know better.

Johnny can't multiply 9 times 5 in the fourth grade, but the educrats yammer on about 'conceptual understanding.'"

Terms such as "understanding" are much too vague and open to misuse so we should not rush to judgment. It is possible writers who decry constructivism see bad teaching rather than actual constructivism in the scientific sense.

Nice Economic Thinking by a 7th Grader

David Boaz :shares the insightful question of his daughter, Mary, in response to a speaker from Fannie Mae who recently visited Mary’s 7th-grade class at a Maryland Catholic school to discuss poverty. The speaker said, “I love my job because I make money helping people.” And Mary raised her hand and said, “What job doesn’t help people?”