Close the Gap

Article: Obama Calls for Overhaul of Education System

Well, first of all I think it’s a great thing Obama is addressing this now. I was beginning to get a bit worried that education might take the back burner for a while — I believe our new president is truly committed to it and wants to make real change.

A couple of thoughts. First, it’s interesting that he didn’t say much about NCLB — seems to indicate the debate may be shifting away from that.

Some specifics in the speech:

Spend more on early childhood — a great idea, supported by research, and no big surprise — exactly what he said in the campaign

Standards — interesting that he went for state standards over national standards. Why, I wonder? How is a redevelopment of standards now going to be an improvement over what happened in the 1980s and 1990s? What, in other words, is going to make these standards better than the ones that are already out there?

Charter schools — good idea, though in terms of the achievement gap, is this really much of a change? Most urban, high-poverty areas already have lots of charter penetration.

Merit pay for teachers — a good idea, but should be a part of a larger vision of treating teachers like professionals. Merit pay is just one part of it — so is improved training, recruitment, scholarship, and creating professional environments at schools. Obama also mentioned that he’s asking teachers to “accept more responsibilities.” What does that mean? We already have a lot of responsibilities! Taking more “responsibility” in and of itself, however, isn’t a bad thing.

Hmm…curious to study this speech more…

Just learned about a new project underway at Harvard called EdLabs. The Education Innovation Laboratory, as it’s officially named, is run by Roland Fryer and is part of his effort to apply rigorous quantitative methods to education research. And it has a $44 million budget.

How cool! This is exactly the kind of research we need to close the achievement gap, and which the federal government should be funding. I do have a few questions, though:

What kinds of interventions/strategies will be studied? Much of Fryer’s recent research has been around the use of secondary reinforcers (incentives like money and cell phone minutes) to address the motivation problem (recent article about this in the NY Times). These may have their place (or they may not — that’s the whole point of the research), but they’re only one piece of the puzzle.

From the little I know about Fryer, I’m optimistic that he’ll look at other things, too. Last summer he was quoted as saying, “If incentives aren’t the answer, I guarantee you I will drop them like a bad habit.”

Is this separate from Harvard’s Ed School? It looks like it might be, which would be sad. This sounds like the kind of rigorous approach to thinking about learning that should be at the center of the teaching profession. I would imagine that cross-disciplinary work like this would be beneficial to everyone involved; I could also imagine that institutional politics might make it difficult. Curious to learn more about this.