Joanne Jacobs

Cramming for the AP exam ruined his U.S. history course, writes AP drop-out Tom Stanley-Becker in the Los Angeles Times.

The problem with the AP program is that we don’t have time to really learn U.S. history because we’re preparing for the exam. We race through the textbook, cramming in the facts, a day on the Great Awakening, a week on the Civil War and Reconstruction, a week on World War II, a week on the era from FDR to JFK, a day on the civil rights movement—with nothing on transcendentalism, or the Harlem Renaissance, or Albert Einstein. There is no time to write a paper.

Without the pressure of the AP course, Stanley-Becker is doing independent research, he writes, “reading the words of George Kennan, Lillian Hellman, Harry Truman and Paul Robeson for a paper I’m writing on the Cold War.” How many AP drop-outs have the opportunity and motivation to do that, as opposed to taking an easier, textbook-zipping U.S. history class?

When I took U.S. history in eighth grade, there was, of course, less U.S. history. But we still ran out of time at the Depression. World War II was a day, not a week. The Cold War shared a day with the review for the final. I took AP history in high school and remember it very fondly. We had time to discuss ideas — though we ran out of time at the Depression, just like in eighth grade. All we knew about World War II was who won. Us!

AP (and IB) courses “dazzle” when compared to the usual alternatives, writes Liam Julian on Flypaper. But they don’t satisfy students who want to think deeply about what they’re studying. Eric Osberg counters that his AP U.S. history class featured discussions and essays — because they’d taken a survey class the year before.

I wonder if there’s more fact cramming now because AP students start with less basic knowledge. Or maybe there are more questions on 20th-century history.

Teachers don’t think much of the way they’re evaluated, concludes an Education Sector survey. From AP:

More than half of teachers believe it’s too difficult to weed out ineffective teachers who have tenure, and nearly half say they personally know such a teacher, according to a survey released Tuesday evening by the Education Sector, a nonpartisan think tank.

. . . Most teachers think the evaluation process for new teachers should be strengthened, so that weak teachers don’t become entrenched.

About 70 percent of teachers in the Education Sector survey said receiving tenure was just a formality that has little to do with teacher quality.

Only a quarter said their own most recent evaluation was “useful and effective.”

Compared to 2003, more teachers — especially those with less than five years’ experience — says unions are essential, the report finds. Teachers want their union to “take an active role in improving teacher evaluation, supporting and mentoring teachers, guiding ineffective teachers out of the profession, and negotiating new/differentiated roles/responsibilities for teachers.”

Support for linking pay to test scores has dropped since 2003; only half of teachers want their effectiveness judged based on their students’ progress.

Students in Chicago charter schools are more likely to graduate and go on to college than similar students in district-run schools, concludes a RAND-Mathematica survey. They also earn slightly higher ACT scores. The effect was strongest in schools serving students in grades 7-12, 6-12 or K-12; apparently it’s harder to make a difference starting in ninth grade. (That’s an issue for the San Jose charter high school in my book, Our School.)

For the average eighth-grade charter student in Chicago, continuing in a charter high school is estimated to lead to:

* an advantage of approximately half a point in composite ACT score (for which the median score for the students included in the analysis is 16)
* an advantage of 7 percentage points in the probability of graduating from high school
* an advantage of 11 percentage points in the likelihood of enrolling in college.

The survey found Chicago charters aren’t “skimming” the best students: Charter students are similar in previous achievement, race and ethnicity to students who attend district-run schools.

Technology is on the brink of transforming education, argue Clayton M. Christensen of Harvard Business School and Michael B. Horn of Innosight Institute, authors of Disrupting Class, in Education Next. So far, the $60 billion investment in education technology has been used to support the status quo, they write.

Computers do not deliver instruction. The teacher is still at the center of the classroom. And research shows that students who have access to computers in school don’t necessarily perform better on standardized exams.

. . . An organization’s natural instinct is to cram the innovation into its existing operating model to sustain what it already does.

Instead, they advocate “disruptive innovation,” creating products for non-consumers that eventually will change the whole market. In this case, that means computer-based learning for students who can’t get the courses they want in school or aren’t in school.

Students who want AP classes not offered by their schools are turning to online classes. So are failing students who need remedial coursework and “credit recovery” to earn a diploma. Students in rural schools want more choices than their small schools can offer. Home-schooled and homebound students also are turning to computer-based learning. More than twenty-five states now offer web-based courses, they write. Demand is expanding rapidly.

. . . the data suggest that in about six years 10 percent of all courses will be computer-based, and by 2019 about 50 percent of courses will be delivered online.

Computer-based learning is cheaper than traditional classroom teaching. It can be customized to meet different students’ needs.

Pitting computer-based learning directly against teachers or continuing to cram it into schools will not work.

Technology will provide value in out-of-school settings before it develops the strength and sophistication to “disrupt” traditional classroom teaching, they argue.