

Oakland Charter School: Spitting in the Eye of Mainstream Education - cwan
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-charter31-2009may31,0,7064053.story

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smanek
I like a lot of their ideas. They promote teachers on merit, they don't
emphasize political correctness, failing students don't advance to the next
grade, and so on.

But, it seems like their teachers don't know how to teach science:

"Zika switches to science. With no lab equipment and an emphasis on textbook
learning, it is hard to imagine that American Indian will turn out the next
Darwin or Edison. The students have brought in paper towel tubes and, after a
discussion of the American space program, Zika leads the class outside, where
they have about five minutes for a rare experiment: making rockets. It doesn't
go well. With so little time, the experiment more or less fizzles, and then
it's lunch."

The most important thing about science is learning how to design and run an
experiment to prove something.

And they severely punished a student who stayed home, with his parents'
permission, to watch Obama's inauguration. I've got to say that's a kind of
short sighted stance. In two decades, what do you think will be more important
to the kid - what he learned at school that day or watching the inauguration
with his extended family?

~~~
cwan
I think a counter point (which I don't agree with) might be a question of
slippery slopes - and a problem of many rules based systems. They deliberately
avoid allowing for exceptions in an attempt at sending a message to everyone /
meeting the needs of the aggregate thinking that it's a true trade off in
allowing for individualized approaches/exceptions.

I don't know what the environment is like in Oakland - never been, don't have
any reason to think I will, but let's say that it's a very difficult
environment, while some of their measures may seem extreme, it's sort of like
the broken windows/fences approach to teaching. The thinking would be that by
clamping down on the small offences, no one even thinks to commit to the big
ones. Personally however, I don't think that that should have been considered
an infraction or that it should be considered a broken window.

~~~
smanek
I don't think it's a school's place to decide what constitutes a legitimate
reason to miss school - it should be the parent's prerogative. If the parent
says it's alright for a kid to miss a day of school - I really don't think the
school should be questioning it.

~~~
jonsen
I don't think it's a parent's place to decide what constitutes a legitimate
reason to attend school - it should be the school's prerogative. If the school
says it's imperative for a kid not to miss a day of school - I really don't
think the parents should be questioning it.

~~~
smanek
Heh, I see what you did there.

I don't think that holds because society (and the law) hold the parents to be
responsible for a child's well being - not the school. With that
responsibility also comes the right to make decisions affecting the child's
well being.

That's why the state (which a public school is an instrument of) doesn't
question how a parent raises their child (unless the parent's conduct rises
level of abuse, of course).

~~~
jonsen
;-) Neither point holds.

Of course parents are ultimate responsible. But the school parent relationship
is better off building on mutual professional respect and a certain division
of power.

Edit: and a sound amount of questioning from both sides of course.

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biotech
It seems to me, the point of the charter school system is to try new ideas in
education. This school seems to have certain ideals:

\- teach to the test

\- observe all rules, to the letter, no exceptions

I'm sure there are better ways of doing education than this, but, there are
also certainly worse ways of doing it. And those _worse_ ways are occuring all
over the USA in public schools.

These charter schools take many different philosophies of education. Some do
better than others (although it's tough to do worse than many of our public
schools...) At its best, there's a type of evolution occuring, where the best
ideas survive, and the others are left behind.

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krakensden
The real question is, as always with small school success stories, can it
scale?

It's well enough to hold students to high standards of attendance,
performance, etc., but what do you do when you can't just send them off to
``normal'' schools?

Plus, there's a /reason/ most administrators try to be nice to the parents,
you don't want them messing with their kids' lives over things that could be
avoided.

I do like the fact that they can fire teachers and staff easily, but I have to
admit to some trepidation. My experience in California's public schools
suggests that the teachers most likely to get fired are the better ones, and
that the administrators making those decisions are obscenely incompetent.

~~~
anamax
> My experience in California's public schools suggests that the teachers most
> likely to get fired are the better ones, and that the administrators making
> those decisions are obscenely incompetent.

I've no doubt that that's true, but it need not be a problem.

What if we let parents move their kids to a different school and found that,
on average, parents move their kinds to better schools?

If we did, we'd find that schools that made bad decisions, regardless of
reason, would tend to lose students to schools that make better decisions,
improving the herd so to speak.

When kids can't move, bad decisions can survive more easily.

I want folks to try to implement better decision procedures. My point is that
granting monopolies and freezing things is almost always a mistake because
mistakes will be made. There are very good few things that work only in a
monopoly.

Or, to put it another way, independent error recovery matters.

~~~
krakensden
That's nice, except you're ignoring the economics of schooling. It's expensive
to pay teachers, to make schools work they need to be nearly at capacity (per-
pupil funding, student to teacher ratios, finite amount of space, etc). If you
have two schools, one competently run, one incompetently run, you wind up with
a good school that's impossible to get into and a school where you're screwed.

In other words, there is never an incentive to to do better because your
competitors can't take your customers.

This could be solved by having lots and lots of mostly empty schools, but...
no one is going to pay for that.

It's a lot like the last mile- it's a natural monopoly.

~~~
anamax
Not at all. In most urban and suburban regions, there are already several
schools that are "close enough", and they typically have several classes for
each grade.

> If you have two schools, one competently run, one incompetently run, you
> wind up with a good school that's impossible to get into and a school where
> you're screwed.

Nope. Someone says, "hey demand, here's some supply" and opens a new school.
They start small, a couple of classes is "big enough", and the crappy school
starts losing students. When they lose enough, the space that they were
occupying becomes empty at exactly the same time as a new school needs more
space. (No, you don't need all of the standard "big school" facilities to
start a school.)

Yes, someone goes out of biz. That's a feature.

Drive by "Downtown Prep" on San Fernando, almost under the overpass on the
Alameda side in San Jose. It looks like a boring office building on the
outside.

------
kragen
Feynman wrote an interesting piece about schools that teach strictly to the
test: <http://www.feep.org/articles/feynman.html>

It seems to me that every student that graduates from this school is going to
make the US a worse place to live. How are you going to fix anything that's
broken if your colleagues have been trained from early childhood to strict
obedience and unquestioning acceptance of authority?

~~~
dkarl
Acceptance of authority and teaching to the test are two entirely different
issues, and these guys are teaching to modern American standardized tests, not
the recitation-style tests described in the Feynman excerpt. On the
standarized physics tests I took, you typically got a somewhat simplified
physical situation and were asked a question about it. You had to decide what
physical principles were involved, what kind of reasoning to apply, and how to
set up the equations (if math was involved.) Sometimes the problems were quite
concrete. Sometimes they were abstract. Sometimes they only required simple
application of an equation (but _you_ had to figure out which equation to
apply!) and sometimes they required deep reasoning. Very often the situations
described resembled laboratory experiments, and solving the problem correctly
required recognizing factors that the problem description intentionally failed
to call your attention to -- like the inertial component of the ball-rolling
exercise described by Feynman.

The school in the article is being compared to other schools on the basis of
standardized tests that reflect decades of agonizing over how to design
standardized tests so that they _can't_ be gamed through regurgitation.
Besides cultural bias (which I think is a real, valid problem, but which
doesn't materially affect science tests) the primary criticism you hear of
standardized tests these days is that tests are _too holistic_ and can't
separate out all the variables that affect a kid's ability to choose the right
answer. For instance, a kid might have a wonderful abstract understanding of
chemistry but not be able to balance a chemical reaction, read an electron dot
diagram, find "Cl" on the periodic table, recognize the word "titration," add
two numbers, or figure out which end of the pencil to use on the Scantron.
Modern testing techniques have not yet developed to the point where they can
tease out that magic variable of "conceptual understanding" from the
background noise of "functional incompetence."

Sarcasm aside, and acknowledging that lab skills are much too expensive to
test and can safely be neglected by test-obsessed teachers, teaching to modern
multiple-choice tests isn't such a bad way to teach science.

------
mjgoins
These kids are essentially the victims of a crime. When they get to college
and/or the workforce they will have two skills: being quiet and taking tests.

~~~
dkarl
I think these guys are jerks with a simplistic approach to success, but
they're a good foil to current educational orthodoxy. Loopy liberal fuzzy-
mindedness really does dominate in the public schools. In fact, as a liberal,
I would say that public schoolteachers bear a lot of responsibility for the
worst stereotypes of liberals in the US. Teachers have no appreciation for
practice and the value of rote learning. If basketball were taught the way
most public school subjects are taught, the kids would sit on the sidelines
all day discussing "issues" like zone versus man-to-man defense. They'd spend
ten minutes on the court every week, and nobody would have to touch the ball
unless they volunteered, because you wouldn't want to embarrass anybody.

Best case scenario: the keepers of orthodoxy are so embarrassed at getting
whipped by conservative troglodytes that they adopt a few practices from them.
More likely scenario: they just stigmatize the effective practices as
intrinsically immoral and demand that they be banned.

~~~
kragen
_If basketball were taught the way most public school subjects are taught, the
kids would sit on the sidelines all day discussing "issues" like zone versus
man-to-man defense. They'd spend ten minutes on the court every week, and
nobody would have to touch the ball unless they volunteered, because you
wouldn't want to embarrass anybody._

That sounds like the science class discussed in this article, not like the
public schools. More generally, it sounds like "teaching to the test".

~~~
dkarl
The equivalent of the science class in the article would be a team that
relentlessly trained basic skills -- doing movement drills, layup drills,
passing drills, shooting drills, and free-throw drills all day -- without ever
talking about teamwork or doing 5-on-5 scrimmages. (Kids trained that way
would beat the hell out of kids who had a well-rounded theoretical background
in Xs and Os but who never spent hours in the gym shooting baskets.)

In other words, the science class in the article taught basic mechanical
skills but didn't teach the higher-order thinking required to apply them. The
dippy liberal (i.e., orthodox) approach is to try to teach kids the higher-
order thinking needed to apply the basic skills without actually teaching them
the basic skills.

Between the two, I prefer erring on the side of basic mechanical skills.
Shallow, mechanical understanding is easier and comes first. You can't do
higher-order thinking on concepts that you never understood in the first
place. Plus, I'm pretty sure that higher-order thinking is best developed by
application to lower-level problems. Higher-order thinking is thinking _about_
lower-level problems -- abstracting ideas _from_ them and applying abstract
ideas _to_ them. Without any lower-level problems or skills, you can't
actually practice higher-level thinking. You can only talk about it, which
isn't the same thing. And actually, when I said the science class in the
article didn't teach the higher-order thinking required to apply the basic
skills, I wasn't being fair. Standardized tests have come a long way, and they
_do_ require kids to analyze problems, decide what physical principles and
equations to apply, and apply them successfully. Teaching to the test isn't
nearly as bad as it used to be. The tests are designed to make "teaching to
the test" as similar as possible to ideal teaching, without allowing slick-
talking idiots to BS their way through.

The conservative approach (I hate to call it that, but credit where credit is
due) may produce overconfident kids with narrow skills, but the liberal
approach gives you kids who are demoralized by their inability to solve simple
test problems and who don't really believe (or worse, do believe) their
teachers' reassurances that they have a deep, ineffable, unmeasurable
understanding of subjects that they can't pass basic tests in.

------
danw
High test scores and blind following of rules may not lead to people who are
happy, creative, entrepreneurial, etc later in life.

~~~
jonsen
Coerced rule following does not imply blindness.

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pchristensen
I wouldn't be surprised if the strong politics are part of the reason for
their success. Since the Bay Area is such a Democratic/liberal area, parents
who value politics over education won't apply, while those who value education
over politics will seek it out. Perhaps you could have similar success with a
"liberal school" in Kansas?

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cwan
On one hand, it's funny how draconian their policies are but on the other,
they get results. If education is meant to be the great equalizer then they
are providing a strong foundation of knowledge... now as for wisdom... I'm not
sure such an environment breeds sufficient amounts of creativity/innovation
which is what will be required for countries in the West like the US to
compete.

But then again, I'm not sure that this article gives enough detail to make
that determination. I do think it's possible to have a structured environment
but still allow for flexibility that allows for creativity without er, (for
lack of a better word) chaos? It's interesting to think about whether we
should manage kids the same way we manage creative people.

~~~
gscott
Plus anyone who can't make it just drops out and attends a regular school.
That would help keep the API scores high.

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noaharc
You get what you measure. As PG says, high school is best thought of as a day
job.

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mkinsella
Just a note: Although this is in the LA Times, the schools mentioned are
located in Oakland, not Los Angeles, as the title incorrectly states.

~~~
cwan
Thanks for that. My mistake.

