Some colleges beginning to admit students only if they attend another college their freshman year

The New York Times reports:

For as long as there have been selective colleges, the spring ritual has been the same: Some applicants get a warm note of acceptance, and the rest get a curt rejection.

Now, as colleges are increasingly swamped with applications, a small but growing number are offering a third option: guaranteed admission if the student attends another institution for a year or two and earns a prescribed grade-point average…

But while the practice, known as deferred admission or a guaranteed transfer option, offers applicants another shot at their dream school, it can also place them in limbo, as they start college life on a campus they plan to abandon. And it can create problems for that institution, which is not usually told about the deal the student has struck with a competitor.

Classic article: Malcolm Gladwell on teachers — and quarterbacks

This is another in an occasional series of posts here on The Education Blog where I highlight an article or paper that examines some fundamental issue (broadly defined) in education (also broadly defined). I don’t claim these papers or articles represent Truth with a capital “T,” only that they discuss salient education issues.

In this post, I refer you to a New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell (best-selling author of The Tipping Point and Blink) entitled Most Likely to Succeed. In this 2008 piece, Gladwell develops an analogy about football quarterbacks.

Gladwell argues that at present teacher recruitment, training, and retention, are highly structured and dependent upon developing credentials and reaching sometimes arbitrary milestones (completing a teacher training program, earning tenure after a certain number of years of employment). Despite all the training and credentials, however, many teachers do not really have an opportunity to find out if they will be successful (and happy) as educators until they are actually in a classroom on their own, despite the barriers they had to overcome to get there. In contrast, Gladwell points out that football quarters in professional leagues are recruited out of college, but college success does not correlate strongly with professional success – many quarterbacks who were stars in college fail in the pro league, while some mediocre college players shine as professionals.

Gladwell writes:

We shouldn’t be raising standards [people must meet to become teachers]. We should be lowering them, because there is no point in raising standards if standards don’t track with what we care about.

Teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree—and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before….It needs an apprenticeship system that allows candidates to be rigorously evaluated.

Kane and Staiger have calculated that, given the enormous differences between the top and the bottom of the profession, you’d probably have to try out four candidates to find one good teacher. That means tenure can’t be routinely awarded, the way it is now.

Currently, the salary structure of the teaching profession is highly rigid, and that would also have to change in a world where we want to rate teachers on their actual performance. An apprentice should get apprentice wages. But if we find eighty-fifth-percentile teachers who can teach a year and a half’s material in one year, we’re going to have to pay them a lot—both because we want them to stay and because the only way to get people to try out for what will suddenly be a high-risk profession is to offer those who survive the winnowing a healthy reward.

James Gee on video games and learning

The Hechinger Report recently profiled research into video games and learning by James Gee of Arizona State.

Looking for a new model of education that could eliminate the need for traditional testing while also encouraging problem-solving and guaranteeing that students will be fluent by the time they finish their lessons?

Most kids are already very familiar with this very system—while playing video games…

James Gee argues that video games differ from traditional schooling in two major ways:

• Players receive needed information about the game “just in time.” “In school, information is given to you whether you want it or not and never just in time,” Gee said.
• Games also allow players to start playing before learning any of the concepts, Gee noted. “Games are based on performance before competence,” he said.

Salman Khan attempts to “reinvent education”

During the course of tutoring his young cousins in math, former hedge fund analyst Salman Khan began posting instructional videos on YouTube in 2004. He has subsequently created an online repository of thousands of videos. In this TED Conference presentation:

Salman Khan talks about how and why he created the remarkable Khan Academy, a carefully structured series of educational videos offering complete curricula in math and, now, other subjects. He shows the power of interactive exercises, and calls for teachers to consider flipping the traditional classroom script — give students video lectures to watch at home, and do “homework” in the classroom with the teacher available to help.

The death of cursive

The Huffington Post, drawing on reporting from The Denver Post, ABC News, and other news organizations, reports on the death of cursive handwriting:

Cursive handwriting instruction is disappearing.

Students and teachers alike have swapped pencils for keyboards, baselines for blinking cursors, and have all but written off the traditional route of writing.

Although standardized tests may not pick up the flourish of a cursive capital “T” or grade against floaters and sinkers, proponents of cursive handwriting maintain that there is value in teaching the craft and hope to save it from being erased from educational relevancy.

California state legislature seeks to require teaching of gay history

The New York Times reports:

In California public schools, students are required to learn about black history and women’s history. And if a bill approved by the State Senate this week becomes law, the state will become the first in the country to mandate that schools also teach gay history.

While the bill does not set specific requirements about what should be taught to students, it does say that contributions of gays and lesbians in the state and country must be included in social science instruction.

Paul Krugman on “degrees and dollars”

In a recent column in the New York Times, economist Paul Krugman sought to refute the conventional wisdom that more education automatically leads to increased economic opportunity:

The belief that education is becoming ever more important [to individuals' economic success] rests on the plausible-sounding notion that advances in technology increase job opportunities for those who work with information — loosely speaking, that computers help those who work with their minds, while hurting those who work with their hands.

Some years ago, however, the economists David Autor, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane argued that this was the wrong way to think about it. Computers, they pointed out, excel at routine tasks, “cognitive and manual tasks that can be accomplished by following explicit rules.” Therefore, any routine task — a category that includes many white-collar, nonmanual jobs — is in the firing line. Conversely, jobs that can’t be carried out by following explicit rules — a category that includes many kinds of manual labor, from truck drivers to janitors — will tend to grow even in the face of technological progress.

And here’s the thing: Most of the manual labor still being done in our economy seems to be of the kind that’s hard to automate…

Krugman argues that the kinds of jobs that fueled the rise of the American middle class during the 20th Century are decreasing while relatively few new high-skill and low-skill jobs replace them.