[PassedOut]

RichMor, on Apr 23 2009, 10:50 AM, said:

Friedman seems to assume or imply that all we need to do is ramp up our educational system, stand back, and watch the economy soar.

IMO, this assumption should be examined.

Would you accept "necessary but not sufficient?"

[kenberg]

helene_t, on Apr 23 2009, 07:47 AM, said:

Gerben42, on Apr 23 2009, 01:29 PM, said:

If I want to hire someone with an MBA, what good properties does this person have compared to, say, someone with a degree in Maths?

They'll be better dressed.

I did a GDBA in finance. The undergratuate part (first two years) was very easy. I felt I had to read some previous years exam questions in business law and work out the answers to those to prepare myself, but the rest of the subjects I passed without ever opening a book or attending a lecture.

At the graduate level, I attended some lectures and did a couple of projects. A lot of specialized jargon but zip substance. One student wrote a project about risk management. His example was the insurance premium one has to pay for a window that has 10% chance of breaking in one year. He modeled this as a binomial distribution. I was in the panel of discussants so I asked why he didn't model it with the simpler and also more correct Poisson distribution. Neither he nor any other students understood that. Even the teacher, who had written a book about risk management which was used at graduate level courses, didn't understand why the number of window breaks in ten years time is Poisson (1) rather than binomial (10,0.1) !

For a more technical subject we had a teacher from the real university because nobody at the business school could get the differentiation of a second degree polynomial right. My fellow students didn't grasp anything of what he said but many had comments on the fact that he was wearing an Icelandic sweater.

I love it!


Some years ago there was a program on public television that examined various educational strategies. At one high school the students had to learn about the application of mathematics in a significant undertaking and present it to a panel of a half dozen or so teachers from various disciplines. A student gave a presentation on the design and construction of pyramids. The program recorded the discussion by the evaluating panel. There was great enthusiasm for the student's speech, his posture, his dress, his eye contact. The representative from mathematics pointed out that the mathematics that the student had presented was totally wrong. The student passed with flying colors. After all, only one of the panel had anything critical to say.

We did stupid things when I was in high school also. But we didn't spend nearly so much time and money doing them.

[mike777]

When I hear about these studies I do wonder who and who is not being tested in these countries and if the studies are biased at all. As someone who never took the SAT I cannot speak to it. My local HS had a deal where we all got admitted to the local Univ regardless.


If around 15K per student in grammer school does not help what will.
In any event more money so far does not seem to be the answer. But then it seems we cannot agree on what the problem is so....


It just seems to lead to tuition/education inflation.

As a sidenote I read a very interesting paper, forget where, that talked about how rice farmers as children are taught to count. It might be in Gladwell's new book.

[onoway]

MORE school is unlikely to be the answer, esp if it appears that the longer the kids stay in school the further behind they get:) Also, it is amusing in a macabre sort of way that even when kids are out of school because of prolonged teacher strikes or whatever, they seem to manage to do quite well on standardised tests even with the shorter school time. So it begs the question as to how much of school time is already just fluff which nevertheless has even primary school kids lugging home homework every day.
The longer school terms would also likely see a leap in dropouts, especially by the kids who are: extremely bright and already bored out of their skulls by school, the kids who have no interest in/aptitude for university, and the very creative, who often are made to feel there is something wrong with them, and that they definitely don't belong unless they shape up and fit in. Indeed, many truly creative teachers are forced out of the school systems by a beaurocratic distrust and interference. So what chance has a student who naturally thinks "outside the box"?
Also, these kids have an abundance of physical energy ( or should, if healthy) and that needs to be given some recognition/outlet beyond gym class, (which in and of itself is a horror to a lot of kids.) It likely wouldn't hurt to have them all out on farms heaving around hay bales and clearing fencelines and learning what's involved in feeding the world, for example. But sitting in a classroom over the summer just because? School already seems to feel too much like jail for many kids, and they didn't have to get caught doing anything wrong to be sentenced to 12 years. (Comment made by a kid)
Seems to me a lot of teachers are in a holding pattern, just trying to get through the day and too often so are the kids. Unless that changes the results of more of it wouldn't be any different from what is happening now.

[awm]

cherdanno, on Apr 22 2009, 08:58 PM, said:

Adam, do you have references for what you wrote, or are you just speculating? I would find it unlikely that PISA excluded students at private schools - but of course I could be wrong.

I did not read the 300 pages of notes on this exam.

My observations are just:

(1) I see a lot of these test-based comparative claims about education in different countries, and the claims frequently contradict each other.

(2) I went to public school in the US, and was never given any of these comparative exams, even though many results of such exams were published from the period when I was in high school. Similarly, none of my classmates ever participated in such exams.

(3) My girlfriend teaches at a private school in Los Angeles. Her students are not given these exams.

(4) While it is quite possible (even likely) that the test results are based upon some form of random sampling rather than trying to test a significant percentage of students, sampling is also frequently suspect (how do you generate a truly random sample from the population).

In fact it's not even clear to me how such a test can be given; language differences can easily make a question easier or harder (even a math question can be easier or harder based on phrasing). So I find the whole endeavor somewhat dubious.

[mike777]

I have been wondering about longer school years. In this case summer school.
I always went to summer school at all levels including grad work.

I have heard of studies that suggest those students most at risk lose/forgot alot over the summer. I think it helped me.

[RichMor]

PassedOut, on Apr 23 2009, 11:35 AM, said:

RichMor, on Apr 23 2009, 10:50 AM, said:

Friedman seems to assume or imply that all we need to do is ramp up our educational system, stand back, and watch the economy soar.

IMO, this assumption should be examined.

Would you accept "necessary but not sufficient?"

Absolutely !

In 'flat world 2.0', learning is a continuous necessity. Even IT geezers like me have to keep up with the technology.

But as you say, it's not sufficient.

RichM

[pigpenz]

I think the article was inspired by a column by Paul Krugman a week earlier inthe times. In that article Warren Buffet said when the tide goes out you see who are swimming with out suits, referring to when the recession kicks in.....in the article he was talking about how Banking needed to become a boring job again. the Wall Street and Banking sectors were talking away all of the brightest students because of the easy money there.

So if you go back and read this article then Friedmans makes a little more sense, but dont really know for sure where he got his stats from.

[PassedOut]

David Leonhardt's interview with Barack Obama gave the president an opening to discuss education in the US: After the Great Recession

Quote

Staying on the Great Depression, it led to a surge in high-school graduation. A high-school diploma during that decade or two went from being elite to the norm, and it became a ticket to the middle class. I’m curious what you think today’s ticket to the middle class is. Do you want everybody aspiring to a four-year-college degree? Is a two-year or vocational degree enough? Or is simply attending college, whether or not you graduate, sufficient to reach the middle class?

THE PRESIDENT: We set out a goal in my speech to the joint session that said everybody should have at least one year of post-high-school training. And I think it would be too rigid to say everybody needs a four-year-college degree. I think everybody needs enough post-high-school training that they are competent in fields that require technical expertise, because it’s very hard to imagine getting a job that pays a living wage without that — or it’s very hard at least to envision a steady job in the absence of that.

And so to the extent that we can upgrade not only our high schools but also our community colleges to provide a sound technical basis for being able to perform complicated tasks in a 21st-century economy, then I think that not only is that good for the individuals, but that’s going to be critical for the economy as a whole.

I want to emphasize, though, that part of the challenge is making sure that folks are getting in high school what they need as well. You know, I use my grandmother as an example for a lot of things, but I think this is telling. My grandmother never got a college degree. She went to high school. Unlike my grandfather, she didn’t benefit from the G.I. Bill, even though she worked on a bomber assembly line. She went to work as a secretary. But she was able to become a vice president at a bank partly because her high-school education was rigorous enough that she could communicate and analyze information in a way that, frankly, a bunch of college kids in many parts of the country can’t. She could write —

Today, you mean?

THE PRESIDENT: Today. She could write a better letter than many of my — I won’t say “many,” but a number of my former students at the University of Chicago Law School. So part of the function of a high-school degree or a community-college degree is credentialing, right? It allows employers in a quick way to sort through who’s got the skills and who doesn’t. But part of the problem that we’ve got right now is that what it means to have graduated from high school, what it means to have graduated from a two-year college or a four-year college is not always as clear as it was several years ago.

And that means that we’ve got to — in our education-reform agenda — we’ve got to focus not just on increasing graduation rates, but we’ve also got to make what’s learned in the high-school and college experience more robust and more effective.

Obama also extolls the value of a liberal arts degree that doesn't relate specifically to job skills.

I found the entire interview worth reading. Obama strikes me as very bright, and imbued with a lot of common sense.