Lifelong Learners

As any parent knows, there’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to education. Even within the same family, children can be remarkably different. But that’s not the way the public school system sees it.

In general, the public school system is designed in such a way that all students must complete the same classes, in roughly the same order, to pass the same tests, leading through them through same rigid system of grades and graduations. There are two exceptions, two special cases in which differences are acknowledged: students who are identified as gifted, and students who are identified as learning-disabled. Only these students are allowed by the system to receive individualized attention to their unique learning profile — their strengths, challenges, interests, and goals. This myopic view of human differences would likely appall and astonish us if it weren’t for the fact that most of us have grown up within this system.

But of course, it doesn’t have to be this way. Hear Ted Robinson comment on student differences and how our education system could be different (below).

The rallying cry of “education reform” is being sounded throughout the world. And major reform is beginning to take place — in small pockets and regions throughout the U.S. Listen to this clever animated presentation of Sir Ken Robinson describing some of the ways in which our system is broken, how we got here, and a few promising pointers for finding our way out.

Someone once said that the problem with today’s public schools is that they teach to the test instead of to the student. There’s plenty of truth in that. For our public schools, test scores are plummeting, and the stakes just keep getting higher. School funding depends on student test scores, and of course those funds trickle down into salaries. As a result, motivated administrators and teachers are focusing harder and harder on prepping their students for the annual standardized tests.

But test prep is not education. Learning to correctly answer multiple choice questions is a poor substitute for rich learning experiences that build curiosity and a passion for learning. If anything, our test-prep focused classrooms are stifling creativity, dumbing down curricula, and numbing both students and teachers alike.

Of course, there are a few schools, administrators, and teachers willing to buck these trends because they know that students need more – much more – than test prep. Call it child-led learning, differentiated instruction, or scaffolding; at the core, what these teachers are doing is re-engaging students. And that makes all the difference!

Sugatra Mitra is a man who is out to change the world — and he may just do it.

In 1999, Mitra and his research colleagues dug a hole in a bordering an urban India slum, installed an Internet-connected PC, and simply left it there, with a hidden camera filming. What his camera captured were kids from the slum playing with the computer, quickly learning how to use it, finding their way around online, and proceeding to teach each other. What was so amazing about this learning process is that it all happened without a teacher in sight.

From this and other experiments, Mitra concluded that education is “a system in which the structure appears without explicit intervention from outside the system.”  He has concluded that teachers are not necessary for learning to happen, that “children will learn to do what they want to learn to do.”

Mitra has developed an approach that he calls “minimally invasive education.” His goal is to bring empowering child-driven educational opportunities to the children of the world, including the most remote and poverty-stricken communities – places where, by his own admission, “no good teachers will go.”

Intrigued? See Mitra’s now-famous Ted Talk below.

People often use the words “education” and “learning” to mean the same thing. But, of course, these two words are not synonymous. “Education” implies a teacher. In fact, it places emphasis on the process of one person (or system) in charge of the process of imparting knowledge and skills to another. For me, it conjures up an image of opening up a head, and pouring in new information. The learner is a passive participant. “Learning,” on the other hand, conjures up the images of activity: it is the learner himself (or herself) who is setting out on a quest for information, memorizing facts, or busily practicing a new skill.

This distinction is more important than ever. Our traditional public schools have increasingly made students passive participants in their own education. In fact, as Sir Ken Robinson frequently points out, our schools have been built around a factory model. One by one, students are put through the assembly-line-like process of successive grades. They are evaluated by standardized processes to determine how well they do, or do not, measure up to the criteria of product perfection and factory-generated sameness. This standardization has been carried to such ridiculous extremes that in some places, students in the same grade must be provided with the exact same information on the same day, throughout the school district, and throughout the state.

Compare this to a model of natural, student-led learning. The student develops an interest, and pursues it, taking his/her own inquires to their natural conclusions. Teachers may take the form of books, web sites, parents, peers, siblings, neighbors, and more. This natural learning process could hardly be more different than our current education system’s rigid structures of state-adopted curricula, tiers of administrators, and teacher-clerks. And I strongly believe that there are serious consequences to this.

Our traditional education system can create artificial barriers for the brightest, most eager students. These students want to be active learners. They want to follow the trails of new information and concepts. They often want to dig deeper into the subjects that interest them, but they are prevented from doing so. Instead, they must passively wait for direction from the teacher, school, district and state.

If we fail to attend to the interests, goals, challenges, desires, and unique development of each learner – especially our most eager and brightest, we will reap the consequences.

Consider how natural learning takes place. As the student’s body of knowledge grows, passion builds. And the more passion builds, the more rapidly the learning progresses. This is the way Einstein progressed. And Mozart. This is the way children learn before they enter school. It is, in fact, the path to the most fulfilling learning experiences for us all.

Do we really want to stamp out greatness? Self-direction? Personal fulfillment? No? Well, then, we may still have some time.

Questions we hear from parents who are considering homeschooling: Can this really work? Will my child still learn what s/he needs to learn? Is it possible for her/him to keep pace with students in traditional public schools?

We’re happy to be able to be able report that the answer to all of these questions is a resounding YES. Not only can your child keep up, but all things being equal, it’s very possible for your child to surpass the mastery levels of peers in traditional public school settings.

In one 1997 study of 5,402 homeschool students from 1,657 families, homeschoolers out-performed their counterparts in the public schools by 30 to 37 percentile points in all subjects. Homeschoolers who were homeschooled two or more years scored substantially higher than students who were homeschooled one year or less. New homeschoolers scored, on average, in the 59th percentile while students who had been homeschooled the last two or more years scored, on average, between 86th and 92nd percentile.

Another study of 20,760 homeschooled students, conducted by Dr. Lawrence Rudner in 1998, found that students who had spent all their school years in homeschool had the highest achievement levels of all – especially in the upper grades.

Another important finding of the 1997 study was that there was no significant difference between minority and white homeschooled students. In grades K-12, both white and minority students scored, on the average, in the 87th percentile. Averages were higher, and disparities far less pronounced, among homeschoolers. In math, whites scored in the 82nd percentile while minorities scored in the 77th percentile. In the public schools, however, not only were scores much lower, but there was a sharp contrast. White public school eighth grade students nationally scored the 58th percentile in math while black eighth grade student math scores averaged at the 24th percentile and Hispanics at the 29th percentile.

What’s even more impressive is that these homeschooling results were produced with much smaller per-student spending. In the 1997 study, Dr. Brian Ray found the average cost per homeschool student is $546. This is only a fraction of the average cost per public school student, which was at that time, $5,325. Parents who spent over $600 per student had a positive effect on results: among these students, averages were even higher.

Put together the financial comparison and achievement comparison and the success of homeschooling becomes clear. Homeschooling students averaged in 85th percentile with budgets of $546 per student while public school students averaged in the 50th percentile with per-student spending of almost ten times as much.

Further studies are confirming. In 2009, these studies were repeated in greater detail with 11,739 homeschooled students from all 50 states, utilizing three well-known tests— the California Achievement Test, Iowa Tests of Basic Skills, and Stanford Achievement Test for the 2007–08 academic year. The results corroborated the findings of the 1997 and 1998 studies. In the new study, homeschooled students’ averages ranged from the 84th to 89th percentile across all subjects (in comparison to public school students’ scores of 50% across all subjects).
Household income had little impact on the scores of homeschooled students.

• $34,999 or less—85th percentile
• $35,000–$49,999—86th percentile
• $50,000–$69,999—86th percentile
• $70,000 or more—89th percentile

The education level of the parents made a noticeable difference, but the homeschooled children of non-college educated parents still scored in the 83rd percentile, which is well above the national average.

• Neither parent has a college degree—83rd percentile
• One parent has a college degree—86th percentile
• Both parents have a college degree—90th percentile
• Parental spending on home education made a little difference.
• Spent $600 or more on the student—89th percentile
• Spent under $600 on the student—86th percentile
• These studies were rigorous, utilizing 15 independent testing services.

So, does homeschooling work? Study after study has demonstrated that it can, and does. We hope the information produced by these studies will be useful to parents considering homeschooling and/or independent learning charter school, an increasingly popular option that provides a way for students to learn at home while receiving funding and other benefits from the public school system.

For more information on homeschooling, take a look at http://www.homeschool.com, http://www.home-school.com and http://thehomeschoolmom.com. For more information on independent learning charter schools, see http://www.uscharterschools.org and http://www.ieminc.org.

Does the prospect of getting good (or poor) grades help our children succeed? Maybe not as much as we might think.

To better understand the effectiveness of rewards, Princeton professor Sam Glucksberg carried out a much-replicated research study called the Candle Problem. He gave his participants a problem (involving a candle, a match, and some thumb tacks in a match box) to solve, and asked them to solve the it as quickly as possible. To one group he said, “I’m going to time you in order to find out the average time it takes someone to solve this sort of problem.” To the second group, he offered rewards for rapid completion: $5 for the top 25% and for the fastest person, $20.

What affect do you think these incentives had on the participants in the second group? Do you think were a little faster? Maybe much faster? As it turns out, it took the second group — this group that was offered rewards for rapid problem solving — an average of three and a half minutes longer to solve the problem.

Surprised. Many scientists were too — and yet, it’s a strong study that has been reproduced many times with the same results. So, what’s going on here? Don’t incentives help people perform better? We assume that they do, don’t we? We hold out the rewards of higher paychecks for employee success, and the rewards of higher grades for student success. But, as psychology researchers have demonstrated in hundreds of studies like the Candle Problem over a period of 40 years, incentives do not always work.

Author Dan Pink explains, “You’ve got an incentive designed to sharpen thinking and accelerate creativity. And it does just the opposite. It dulls thinking and blocks creativity. These contingent motivators… work in some circumstances. But for a lot of tasks, they actually either don’t work or, often, they do harm. This is one of the most robust findings in social science. And also one of the most ignored.”

As it turns out, incentives only work for simple, rote tasks. They do not work for complex problems, the kinds of problems regularly faced by today’s employees and today’s students.

Learning about this line of research was eye-opening for me. It explains why my university students seem reduced to the same question after every lecture: “is this going to be on the test?” In fact, that’s often the only question they ask! I have often wondered why this is the case. But now, I can see just how natural this is. Since they were five years old, we led our students to believe that perfect products – from printing the alphabet to multiplication worksheets – was of utmost importance. Their perfection became their teacher’s and school’s validation via standardized test scores. And we made these grades absolutely critical to their future success. Why should we be surprised, then, when they turn around and fixate on grades? What question could possibly be more relevant for them than “is this going to be on the test?”

Students may be much better served by a system that is not focused on grades. Their everyday learning experiences would be transformed by removing artificial rewards, and rewarding them instead for tackling the harder problems and following their innate curiosity. Some schools are already moving in this direction, replacing grades with portfolios or products to demonstrate mastery.

Dan Pink offers this paradigm shift to the business world, which may just as well be applied to academia: “to my mind, a new operating system for our businesses revolves around three elements: autonomy, mastery and purpose. Autonomy, the urge to direct our own lives. Mastery, the desire to get better and better at something that matters. Purpose, the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.”  How might these three elements replace the focus on grades and reform education?

Ted.com is one of the most exciting sites devoted to ideas capable of changing the world. And one of the most highly-rated of the 450+ talks on the site comes from Sir Ken Robinson, whose talk focuses on nurturing the individual talents of students.

Robinson challenges the way we’re educating our children and champions a radical rethink of our school systems, focusing on cultivating creativity and acknowledging multiple types of intelligence. Robinson argues that our education system has created a hierarchy that fails to nurture the skills and talents of many of our most gifted students.

Robinson contends that students with restless minds and bodies — far from being cultivated for their energy and curiosity — are ignored or even stigmatized, with terrible consequences. “We are educating people out of their creativity,” he says.

Robinson led the British government’s 1998 advisory committee on creative and cultural education, a massive inquiry into the significance of creativity in the educational system and the economy, and was knighted in 2003 for his achievements. His latest book, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, was published in January 2009.

In today’s public schools, standardized tests are given annually. All of the children in the same grade are expected to perform well. To make sure they do, teachers are focusing more and more on teaching to those tests. The goal is to spend the most time possible focused on the topics that are addressed in these tests.

Increasingly, brain research is showing that this approach is misguided. Take, for example, the National Institutes of Health study published in Neuroimage in 2007. This study found that boys’ and girls’ brain structures develop in different sequences. Specifically, these researchers found that while areas of the brain involved in language mature about six years earlier in girls, areas involved in spatial memory mature about four years earlier in boys. Could this be why we hear teen-aged girls (by and large) complain about math being so hard? And teen-aged boys (by and large)complaining that poetry is girls’ stuff?

We are not likely to see public schools separate students into classes by gender. Then again, there are many kinds of learning differences in any given classroom — not just gender. We have many children who have been identified as having learning disabilities, and more who seem to be significantly challenged, although we’re not sure why. Even in the same child, we may find giftedness in regard to math and difficulty keeping up with reading. We have children who do well as long as everything is presented in an auditory fashion, or with opportunity for hands-on exploration. Children who seem to need to move, and children who need quiet to think. Children who want to be left alone and children who need to talk it through. The variety of unique needs to be met in each classroom is fairly astounding.

It’s a shame that our public schools are so bent on standardized testing, and tailoring everything to those measures. We can only imagine what heights our children might reach if, rather than teaching to the test, we presented our lessons, classrooms, methods, and content in the ways that are best suited each child’s unique profile of interests, strengths and challenges.

Just a couple of months ago, my daughter, Annie opted out of traditional high school to attend a charter school. It’s a great local charter school through which students learn at home: a sort of public school and homeschooling hybrid. Today she and I both have far more control over what, how, when and where she learns.

Annie’s advanced algebra class is based on a rigorous online system. She accesses it by sitting on her futon, keyboard in lap, facing the large-screen television that we have adapted for use as an oversized computer monitor. She can read her English assignments in book form or on her new e-reading device. She keeps up with her Spanish by reading the AP (Advanced Placement) recommended Spanish reading list, and she takes courses in history, anthropology, and PE.

Annie is considering a local college course in biology next semester. And she’ll take some classes at the local art center as well. But for most of her work, her classroom is now anywhere and everywhere: the local Starbucks, public library, living room couch, a nearby park. She is reading more and learning more than she was when she was attending the local, traditional high school, and yet she has more free time now. (Annie enjoys playing club waterpolo, volunteering, cooking, playing flute, and knitting.)

At first glance, it doesn’t add up. How can Annie be getting more learning done in less time? The biggest change seems to be the reduction in time spent on testing. We don’t focus on getting her ready for the next state-mandated standardized test. Instead, we follow her interests as much as the state standards. And this makes her a very happy student – happier than I have seen her since elementary school.

Annie has always been a straight-A student, and she was paying an increasingly large price. The higher grades seemed to be increasingly focused on testing, to the point that Annie spent most of her time getting ready for the next one. She was constantly “studying,” constantly anxious about multiple upcoming tests. And with college rapidly approaching, she felt the pressure of needing to get an A on every single test.

We’re done with all that now. Now, Annie is focused on learning. She has become excited about anthropology, and loved reading To Kill a Mockingbird and Lord of the Flies. She is looking forward to more courses in the sciences, and she excels at math. She is fluent in Spanish and will soon be starting to learn German.

Her goal is Columbia University’s pre-med program, with Berkeley and Harvard as possible back-up plans.

I have no doubt that Annie will reach her goals because, in addition to learning all the subjects I’ve mentioned, she is learning to take control of her own education. Gone are the stresses of trying to guess what will be on tomorrow’s test. Instead, she has time to read more widely, write more frequently, and think more deeply. What’s more, she has a head start on choosing a college major because she’s already in the practice of asking herself what she’s interested in. She is becoming increasingly self-directed.  She sits in on lectures at a local college and listens to Harvard and UC Berkeley lectures online.

While Annie’s new school is extraordinary, the situation that led us here is common. Today’s college-bound students are experiencing unparalleled pressures as the emphasis on testing in traditional public schools continues to grow. This pattern has been so gradual that I think most parents haven’t noticed. However, the radical change that Annie has experienced these last few months has made it crystal clear to me: too much testing gets in the way of learning. It takes up our students’ time – not just the time it takes to actually take the tests, but all the time that students spend preparing for the next one.

Too much testing does not serve anyone. In addition to the direct effect this has on students, it forces teachers to focus on test prep, administering tests, and grading, instead of actually teaching. Teachers are increasingly pushed to narrow their instruction – reaching the most extreme position possible when test preparation becomes the instruction, with instructional materials mimicking the formats and exercises that appear on the tests.  This isn’t teaching. It isn’t learning. It’s madness!

I don’t know exactly how much of my own daughter’s time had previously been taken over by tests. But I can tell you that removing those artificial pressures, and replacing them with a program focused on her learning experience, has been nothing short of life-changing.