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I was intrigued by two stories in the December 13 issue of Newsweek on the subject of public school reform in the United States: the cover story, an essay authored by Michelle Rhee, former chancellor of the District of Columbia Public Schools whose picture and quote “I’m not done fighting” graced the cover (as a former English Language Arts teacher, I would have hoped for a more elegant word choice, but then I suppose space was an issue); and a second story, buried in the middle of the magazine entitled “Give Peace a Chance”, featuring a full page photograph of the president of the Hillsborough County, FL teacher’s union and chronicling the successful school improvement efforts in that school district, the result of collaboration among all the professionals in the system, including the teachers’ union. As a career educator, I think the more provocative magazine cover would have featured photographs of both women juxtaposed with the question: What will it REALLY take to improve all our schools?? ...
"When we make decisions we think we’re in control, making rational choices. But are we?"
In his best-selling book Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, behavioral economist Dan Ariely challenges the basic assumptions of our economic system, exploring the powerful tricks that our minds play on us and showing that actually, we humans are far from rational.
Of course, irrationality is not always bad. His follow-up, The Upside of Irrationality, offers another look at the irrational decisions that influence our lives, as well as some of the positive effects that such irrationality can have.
Ariely recently spoke with us about his work and its implications for education reforms involving teacher compensation and school choice.
Public School Insights: You are a behavioral economist. What does that mean?
Ariely: My Ph.D.s are actually not in economics. I have a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology, and I have a Ph.D. in business administration. But what I do lies between psychology and economics.
I ask questions that economists would ask, but instead of assuming straightaway that people behave rationally, I just observe how people behave. So think of it as something that has no assumption; it's just observational in its nature. That's the basic story.
Public School Insights: You've written a couple of books, Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality. Could you briefly describe them?
Ariely: Yes. In Predictably Irrational, I talk about how people think, mostly about financial decisions. The things that we buy. One chapter asks the question, "How do we decide how much something is worth?" Economic theory has a very simple assumption about this. But I ask the question, "How do we really do it?"
Or I ask the question, "What happens when the price of something drops to zero?" People get overly excited about it, usually. But is it just because ...
Yesterday’s release of a major report on teacher pay dwarfed much else in the education news. I may write on that soon, if I feel I have anything to add to the conversation. But today I wanted to talk about my favorite book, Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.
It has been my favorite book since the 5th grade. I haven’t read it in years, in part because I am afraid of what would happen if I read it again and thought, “Well, it’s okay.” But up through college I read it multiple times each year. I read it so many times that the cover of my first copy fell off when I was in high school, and my parents bought me a replacement copy.
I’m not exactly sure why this book touched me so. Likely because I got the book as a very young adolescent, about to go through many of the things that Francie went through in the book. She was relatable.
This isn’t the only book to have touched me over the years. But it was the first. And it helped cement the love of reading, and of books themselves (I'm not sure I'll ever get a Kindle), that I have today.
I thought of this book after seeing Sarah D. Sparks’ EdWeek blog yesterday. She posted about a meta-analysis of book-distribution programs. The study, commissioned by the book distribution group Reading Is Fundamental (RIF), found that students from low-income homes who had access to print materials through book ownership or lending programs like theirs had improved reading performance. Such programs were correlated with children better knowing the ...
In an op-ed in yesterday’s Washington Post, Robert Samuelson claimed that school reform efforts have disappointed for two reasons. One, no one has discovered transformative changes that are scalable. And two, shrunken student motivation.
Students, after all, have to do the work. If they aren't motivated, even capable teachers may fail.
Samuelson may be on to something here. Student motivation is rarely mentioned in education reform discussions--except, of course, as part of carrot and stick conversations about how incentives can help students do better (an idea that research both within education and in other sectors has shed doubt on). Perhaps if reform discussions focused more on getting students invested in their learning, they would be more fruitful.
But then he takes it a bit far for me:
The unstated assumption of much school "reform" is that if students aren't motivated, it's mainly the fault of schools and teachers. The reality is that, as high schools have become more inclusive (in 1950, 40 percent of 17-year-olds had dropped out, compared with ...
Kalamazoo Central High School in Kalamazoo, Michigan made news when it beat out thousands of other schools for the honor of hosting President Obama as its commencement speaker. The President will speak before the school's 2010 graduates today.
His audience will include scores of students whose lives have been transformed by a stunning promise: free tuition at any public university in the state. At a time when many towns in Michigan are losing people, the "Kalamazoo Promise" has drawn a flood of new families into the city and the school system.
We recently spoke with Von Washington, the principal of the high school, about the President's visit and what it means for the school. Buoyed by the Promise, students have been streaming into AP classes and graduating in higher numbers.
Their passion, academic focus and hope for the future come through loud and clear in a video they created to make their case to the President. It clearly hit home.
Public School Insights: Kalamazoo Central High School recently received a big honor. You won the Race to the Commencement. As a result, President Obama is going to give your commencement address. What do you think set Kalamazoo Central apart from all of the other schools that tried to get the same honor?
Washington: It is really tough to tell. We are not entirely sure. But there are a couple of things that are distinct about us. One is that in the video presentation we really believe the students, through their words and their passion, gave a good idea to those viewing the video of what it means to go to school at Kalamazoo Central High School and what it means to be serious about your education.
Second, we are not a school that, by any means, has arrived. But we are a school, and a school district, definitely on an incline. We are reaching towards the sky, and we are moving towards our goals. And because it can appear that education is kind of in the doldrums financially and/or in achievement, I think that people recognize that if you are ...
Can the mere presence of books in a child's home make that child a better reader? If we're to believe recent research, that might just be the case. If so, a small investment in books for poor children might pay off.
That idea still meets with a great deal of resistance, even (or perhaps especially) among those who prize reading. Maybe we believe we cheapen books if we objectify them in that way.
But a trio of recent studies offers food for thought. First, there was the study Roland Fryer released a few months ago. He found that young children improved their reading ability when they were paid for every book they read. The children in his study even maintained their reading habits after the payments stopped. I'll admit that I recoiled a bit at this finding, because I hate to see reading become such a mercantile enterprise.
A more recent study out of the University of Nevada suggested that the number of books in a child's home has a greater bearing on that child's academic prospects than does the parents' education level. The study's author speculates that ...
[First published April 22, 2008]
In a few days, a new and expanded edition of Richard Louv’sLast Child in the Woods, will hit bookstores around the country. Louv’s book has fueled an international movement to combat what he calls “nature deficit disorder,” children’s growing alienation from the natural world. (Louv’s term for the disorder is quickly catching on, turning up in major newspapers, on television, and even in a February cartoon by Bloom County creator Berke Breathed.)
A quotation from our recent telephone interview with Louv elegantly captures the thrust of his argument: “[T]he message we’re sending kids is that nature is in the past and probably doesn’t count anymore, the future’s in electronics, the boogeyman lives in the woods, and playing outdoors is probably illicit and possibly illegal.”
Development is choking off access to nature, kids are succumbing to the attractions of television
and computers, and—yes—time for school recess has dwindled dramatically in the past decade. To make matters worse, Louv argues, parents, educators, and even environmentalists have been complicit in erecting barriers to the natural world. We keep our children indoors to protect them from real or (very often) imagined dangers, we regulate and confine their play, and we tell them to not to disturb delicate flowers, quiet streams or pristine undergrowth.
Louv does find encouraging signs of change in the rapid growth of “Leave No Child Indoors” movements around the country. (Many movement leaders credit Louv’s book for greatly accelerating that growth.) Nature is far too elemental a human need, he argues, for Nature Deficit Disorder to grow unchecked. For an overview of "No Child Left Inside" initiatives around the country, see the Children and Nature Network.
Hear a recording of highlights from the interview (5 minutes):
Or check out the transcript below:
PUBLIC SCHOOL INSIGHTS: What, in a nutshell, is the central argument of Last Child in the Woods?
LOUV: The central argument is that you have an increasing pace in the last three decades, approximately, of a rapid disengagement between children and direct experiences in nature. And that this has profound implications, not only for the health of future generations but for the health of ...
Incentives are all the rage. If we can just find the right carrots, we can move people to do marvelous things. We see this thinking in teacher merit pay proposals, of course, but it's also a regular feature in discussions of student motivation.
Unfortunately it's becoming harder and harder to find the right incentives for our students. Here's why:
We're swimming against strong cultural currents. The worst sides of youth culture aren't doing us any favors. For example, reality TV serves up a grotesque parody of a lesson we all want to teach our children: Work hard, and you'll reap rewards. What are they learning from reality TV? Distinguish yourself through vanity, venality, selfishness, boastfulness and intrigue, and you'll win the prize. Fame, however ill-gotten, is its own reward.
Perverse notions of self esteem weaken the drive to work hard. Recent polls suggest that American students on the whole think very highly of themselves. Jean Twenge, who has studied these polls, worries that “self-esteem without basis ...
David Kelley is a legend in technology and design circles. Decades ago, he founded a design firm that dreamed up the computer mouse as we know it today. That firm has since evolved into IDEO, a global design company that has left its unique stamp on everything from consumer goods to social innovation. IDEO's work has probably touched your life in ways you don't even know.
For years, Kelley has brought his passion for design into the classroom as a professor at Stanford's famed Institute of Design (or D.School, for those in the know). More recently, Kelley has set his sights on the K-12 classroom. He and his Stanford graduate students are working with schools to help teachers and students master "design thinking." He recently told us what that means.
Public School Insights: Let's start with a big question. What is "design thinking?"
Kelley: To me, design thinking is basically a methodology that allows people to have confidence in their creative ability. Normally many people don't think of themselves as creative, or they think that creativity comes from somewhere that they don't know—like an angel appears and tells them the answer or gives them a new idea.
So design thinking is hopefully a framework that people can hang their creative confidence on. We give people a step-by-step method on how to more routinely be creative or more routinely innovate.
Public School Insights: So you are not talking about something that only artists or engineers would use.
Kelley: No. I struggled with what to call it when we first started out. The reason that we put the word design in it is that this really is the way that designers naturally think. It's not necessarily the way that doctors, lawyers or teachers think, ...
The blogs are buzzing with thoughts on student motivation. That's not all bad, given that policy wonks by nature spend most of their time talking about compulsion. But we should be wary of motivation's evil twin: pandering.
Author Dan Pink makes a strong case for "motivation 3.0" in schools. That is, he believes carrots and sticks alone won't make people behave the way we want them to. Instead, we need to rouse people's inner drive to do meaningful work. I couldn't agree more.
But I do worry about what happens when we confuse true motivation with a kind of wish fulfillment: students doing what they want to do when they want to do it. Without a doubt, students should do hands-on work. They should use technology that makes learning vivid and exciting. They should see the relevance of their studies to their own lives and aspirations.
What happens, though, if we condition our students to believe that every moment in school or life should be sublime, or at least entertaining? The truth is that just about any work worth its salt includes peaks and valleys. You'll have to slog ...
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