But it seems to me that he's flailing around for a way to deal with the concrete and absolute cruelty of the shift away from funding of HIV/AIDs treatment. N'cest pas?
]]>On the grounds of Uganda’s biggest AIDS clinic, Dinavance Kamukama sits under a tree and weeps.
Her disease is probably quite advanced: her kidneys are failing and she is so weak she can barely walk. Leaving her young daughter with family, she rode a bus four hours to the hospital where her cousin Allen Bamurekye, born infected, both works and gets the drugs that keep her alive.
But there are no drugs for Ms. Kamukama. As is happening in other clinics in Kampala, all new patients go on a waiting list. A slot opens when a patient dies.
The cause of course is the drop in donor funding for anti-retrovirals and for treatment programs in developing countries. Everyone from BMGF to the US government is reducing, or limiting increases, in their funding for HIV/AIDS programs. Meanwhile, in Uganda....
500,000 need treatment, 200,000 are getting it, but each year, an additional 110,000 are infected.
“You cannot mop the floor when the tap is still running on it,” said Dr. David Kihumuro Apuuli, director-general of the Uganda AIDS Commission.
Believe me, I understand the benefits of adjusting policy and priorities, especially when each AIDS patient treated with anti-retrovirals costs US $11,000. There are a lot of simpler, cheaper and more effective healthcare efforts that can be funded with some of that money.
And I don't want to harsh on the people who are pushing for more informed decision making, and particular for decision making informed by randomized field trials. However, I do think that _at this point_ groundbreakers such as Esther Duflo could present more balances and realistic pictures of the cost and benefits of development decisions driven by data:
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Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have intensively studied the New York Times list of most-e-mailed articles, checking it every 15 minutes for more than six months, analyzing the content of thousands of articles and controlling for factors like the placement in the paper or on the Web home page.
(snip)
Perhaps most of all, readers wanted to share articles that inspired awe, an emotion that the researchers investigated after noticing how many science articles made the list. In general, they found, 20 percent of articles that appeared on the Times home page made the list, but the rate rose to 30 percent for science articles, including ones with headlines like “The Promise and Power of RNA.”
Of course there are implications for education: If students have an emotional response to what they're asked to learn, they'll be more likely to share their learning with others -- and in the process summarize it, analyze it, (re)produce the information that they've learned, touching some of the milestones along the path to mastery.
The possibilities can be found across the curriculum--literature is designed to tug at your core, and historic events, the creation of Borobudur or the emergence of women's suffrage, and certainly discoveries in math that fuel our drive to understand the cosmos have emotional potential--but the researchers finding that science articles are more likely to be shared signals that educators are failing to use a powerful tool:
“Emotion in general leads to transmission, and awe is quite a strong emotion,” he said. “If I’ve just read this story that changes the way I understand the world and myself, I want to talk to others about what it means. I want to proselytize and share the feeling of awe. If you read the article and feel the same emotion, it will bring us closer together.”
But where's the curriculum that seeks to inspire awe? And what are the consequences of curriculum that doesn't attempt to get students even a little excited about what they're learning?
(Is there a topic more potent than natural selection, if you seek out and present speciated adaptations to available niches? Warm, fuzzy salamanders migrating perilously along ancient vernal waterways, now paved. Or obsessive squirrels able to remember 30,000 or more places where they've stored acorns? [I'm not kidding about that last one. Squirrels might not have much reasoning power, but apparently their memories for spatial referents are unsurpassed.)
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“Our algorithms are primed and ready to give you the answer you are looking for, but the pipeline of information just isn’t there,” said Gabriel Stricker, Google’s spokesman on search issues. “The challenge for searches in many languages for us no longer is search quality. Our ability to get the right answer is hindered by the lack of quality and lack of quantity of material on the Internet.”
The "right answer," just to be clear, might be accurate and true, but it must be in a language that's appropriate for the searcher. Students quoted in the article have posted the same information to both the English and the Kiswahili Wikipediae, but at least one English version has been earmarked for removal if citations aren't added.
But the question unanswered by the Times reporter, Noam Cohen, is how creating a specific page on the World Wide Web confers advantage on Google and not on Bing. Aren't they both crawling the same Internet? Is Bing less poly-lingual? I dunno.
]]>(The following is cross-posted as a comment to EduTechDebates.)
While "netbook fever" has certainly passed in commercial markets, it's difficult to tell in education if it's passed or yet to hit. Netbooks have been on market for too little time to have penetrated the project-planning and funding cycles of national governments: XO-1 was announced in 2005; eeePC was introduced in late 2007; developing-country commercial markets received netbooks somewhat later than those of OECD countries. And OLPC is the only netbook OEM, more or less, to market to ministries of education.
Netbooks present an array of features that could be really important in developing-country education systems: most netbooks don't have hard drives, so they're possibly more durable and power consumption is low. And they're cheap. The importance of these features is magnified in large-scale projects, in education systems in which personnel lack ICT training or familiarity, and in infrastructure-poor environments. Netbooks (as do notebooks) support many different configurations--several netbooks in a few different classrooms, one netbook in every classroom (and a projector, perhaps? An LED projector?), or a bunch of netbooks in one classroom.
This flexibility means that netbooks (and notebooks, with higher cost, higher power consumption, and reduced durability) can support the teacher-led pedagogies that are what most teachers use: "I have the laptop, I have the projector, I show you stuff. At least it's stuff that's more interesting than the textbook stuff we had before. Now, if I also had a digital whiteboard..."
One netbook or a few netbooks in a classroom can support station-based learning or collaborative learning. A bunch of netbooks in a classroom can support computer-lab-style learning, say with students using educational software or productivity software independently.
Netbooks can enable all of these activities AND they can support computer-lab-based ICT instruction. While it might be preferable to eliminate ICT classes and instead contextualize the development of ICT skills in other subjects, a lot of developing-country school systems (all of the OECS countries in the Caribbean, for example) already have ICT curricula and exams plus teachers to administer these. And in a lot of cases (but not all) they've invested in technology. It's unrealistic to think that "basic ICT" instruction will go away without a kind of glacial resistance. At the same time, it's a waste of money to launch province-wide or nationwide programs to invest in computers in schools if those computers are going to be dedicated to learning technology-as-subject.
Netbook fever might not be out of the picture just yet. It's probably too soon too tell.
]]>"It looks like the programme is not having enough financing that can lead to its realisation like the EDPRS had projected," [Mineduc OLPC coordinator] Niyonkuru said.
(EDPRS is the Economic Development Poverty Reduction Strategy.)
In 2006, Jon Camfield (probably equal in energy to Wayan, altho I don't know for sure) pegged Total Cost of Ownership of an XO laptop in a school environment as US ~$1,000 over five years. (I think, but am not sure, that this does not include replacement of the machine at the end of its five-year service life.) However Mr Camfield's initial estimate is very heavy on 5-year Internet connectivity ($541) with much lower costs for amortized training ($128). He also includes a one-time set-up fee of $108 per laptop, which seems completely reasonable.
These projections might be generic (cost of Internet connectivity in East Africa will presumably fall over the next 5 years), but they are at least responsibly made. The question, then, is:
Why are the smart, committed, and experienced Rwandese failing to accurately budget for and finance this high-profile laptop deployment?
There are of course a thousand suspects, although failure as we know obscures patrimony.
One strong possibility is "ministry overreach." The OLPC initiative is split between the President's office, the newly created Ministry of Science & Technology (MOST) and the Ministry of Education.
The government of Rwanda has established itself precisely as a visionary among African governments in relation to the uses of technology for development. However in several instances--ranging from the Terracom fiasco to early projects involving laptops in primary schools and computer labs in secondary schools--implementation has not come close to matching plans.
It's very likely that the more powerful MOST has provided the MOE with a laundry list of "unfunded requirements" in relation to OLPC deployment. (You'll observe that the quote regarding financing is from a person in the Mineduc staff, not at MOST.)
But it's important to observe in all of this that the $20 million spent on laptops and however much is budgeted for deployment results from strong donor support for education in Rwanda. (DFID provides the bulk of support for education in Rwanda, but other sponsors include AfDB and WB.) $20 million in hardware procurement over 5 years ain't chump change in a total annual education budget of about US $100 million. So why aren't donor agencies more visibly excited about this?
Could it be because Rwanda is more or less on track to reach its Millennium Development Goal targets, including its targets in education? Does that buy MOST and Mineduc the opportunity to make a $20 million boo-boo?
Perhaps this is a job for AidWatch? (Wm Easterly never mentions OLPC. Of course he rarely discusses education in relation to development.)
]]>Only 33 percent of the freshmen who enter the University of Massachusetts, Boston, graduate within six years. Less than 41 percent graduate from the University of Montana, and 44 percent from the University of New Mexico. The economist Mark Schneider refers to colleges with such dropout rates as “failure factories,” and they are the norm.
Gilpin and Katz describe in exhausting (!) detail the impact of college completion on both an individual's wages over the course of a lifetime and on macro-scale increases in productivity (as GDP, basically).
Leonhardt goes a step further and suggests that: 1) Costs (tuition, etc) are key determinants of where kids go to school, with many students outside of the upper-income bracket ending up "under-matched," attending schools that aren't the best for which they are qualified; 2) state colleges and universities, which serve those students in families with non-elite wealth, are the worst offenders in terms of completion percentage.
(A first-hand example from the excellent Education Trust website: the California State University at Monterey Bay, an affordable school relatively near me, a graduation rate of 36% over the last 6 years. WTF?)
What's this mean?
It means that disparities in university education in the US contribute greatly to the growth of inequality. Or, to put it another way: the non-rich--by virtue of the inadequacy of institutions that are designed to serve them--are getting even less rich, which is to say, eventually they will be poor.
]]>Goldin and Katz, as I've discussed, attempt to quantify the advantages of an open, forgiving, evolving educational system in relation to economic growth. Their primary findings are that additional education returns higher incomes, a condition that increases demand for education; secondarily, this supply of highly skilled labor at its best evolves to meet the needs of the economy for a more technically skilled, analytically competent workforce.
But is any of this true? (And is it more true or less true of non-OECD countries?)
To counter the statements of Gilpin and Katz, Hacker cites the US government's Occupational Outlook Handbook, produced by the Bureau of Labor & Statistics, which projects growth of 1,400 occupations "from aerobics instructors to zoologists":
In view of Goldin and Katz's concerns, it is relevant to ask if there is actually a demand for more people with technology-linked degrees.... I was surprised to learn that in 2006 the nation altogether had only 17,000 paid positions for physicists, apart from teachers, and that only 1,000 more openings are envisaged for 2016. The number of employed mathematicians is expected to rise from 3,000 to 3,300.... Employment for engineers is slated to grow from 1,512,000 to 1,671,000, about the same percentage of growth as for the workforce as a whole. Indeed, at current rates, 650,000 new engineers will have received degrees by 2016, four times the predicted number of openings. (Emphasis added - Ed)
At a minimum, these figures should give us pause in relation to the rush to promote STEM curricula (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics--which occupies a core part of the conventional wisdom around education reform in the U.S.).
I checked in the Handbook on the 10-year outlook for computer programmers: a 4% drop from 435,000 programmers employed in 2006 to 417,000 employed in 2016.
So what gives? Is the United States going to be offshoring jobs for professionals at such a high rate in 2016 that, well, its best and brightest will be emigrating to find employment? (Possibly....)
But as Hacker opines, there are other significant opportunities for employment. The Handbook:
...lists hundreds of jobs involved with high-tech instruments, including installing, repairing, and debugging them. These workers outnumber college-trained scientists, and even engineers. Here are some of the things they do: gynecologic sonography, geodetic surveying, avionic equipment mechanics, semiconductor processing, air traffic controlling, laboratory phlebotomy, blood bank clinical work, cryptanalysis keying. Yet these technicians are most often only high school graduates, sometimes with community college credits. Moreover, the knowledge they need is acquired mainly on the job, because that's where the equipment is.
Not all high-tech employers look for workers with degrees. By now, we can agree that European and Asian car-makers have taken the lead in using computer chips for ignition timing, fuel injection, and cylinder control. These devices must be expertly installed. And they are, by hourly workers on the assembly line.
Hacker goes on to cite four foreign carmakers who located plants in the U.S., and he provides the high-school drop-out rates for the counties where the plants landed: Nissan went for Tennesse (26.3%), BMW for South Carolina (26.9%), Honda for Alabama (28.7%), and Toyota for Mississippi (31.5%). And Hacker notes:
...[T]hey look for states that offer tax waivers, are unwelcoming toward unions, and have pay rates below the national norm. But it apparently hasn't bothered BMW and Toyota that the countries they chose offer less-than-stellar schooling. Rather, they've found that even workers who were indifferent students can learn what's needed technically in the factory, as happens in the companies' home countries.
All of this makes sense -- even while it discounts any other possible advantages that might accrue to individuals as a result of increased education. Per Gilpin and Katz, those advantages include higher wages; per boatloads of health-related studies, those advantages include improved health and longevity. But of course sorting out causation, as Gilpin and Katz purport to do, is much trickier than proving association.
In any event, Gilpin and Katz in their book skip over compelling evidence as to the value of non-academic skills and knowledge in relation to economic performance and, to a lesser extent, individual wealth.
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The question is, what's the programmers' game?
"Some researchers think Conficker is an empty shell, or that the authors of the program were scared away in the spring. Others argue that they are simply biding their time."
But of course the answer is not recondite. What's the safest way to realize value from such ingenious coding? Sell it. The Conficker programmers are perhaps now contacting judicious governmental and commercial buyers. OR perhaps they are themselves being contacted.
[One hesitates to make light of the situation, given that school and clinic computers in OECD and developing countries are likely to be massively affected if the virus is used destructively.)
The confluence of these initiatives, of course, is that they squeeze the teachers unions to be much more accommodating to the ideas and proposals of Dept of Edu Sect'y Arne Duncan.
Charter schools can operate with more freedom from regulation than public schools can. As a result, many have non-traditional aspects--they might offer special support to learning through technology, or through arts, public service, one-on-one instruction or any of a panoply of innovations.
(Some, like the network of Aspire Public Schools, focus on preparing disadvantaged and urban kids for national tests through the address of social, psychological and academic barriers.)
Charter schools in many instances ask teachers to work longer hours and/or receive lower pay or benefits than public schools do.
Race to the Top will make $4 billion available to states, but the 10 states that don't allow charter schools have been told that it's likely they'll get... nothing. In some instances, such as Washington state, charter-school initiatives have been beaten back repeatedly by teachers unions. In others, such as California (which allows Charters under some conditions) policymakers are already conferring on ways to ensure qualifying for funding. The Race to the Top funding restrictions will put teachers unions under a lot of pressure to back easing of regulations on charter schools.
And at virtually the same moment, they're being "asked" to put aside long-standing positions regarding merit pay and specifically merit pay tied to student test performances.
No one's asked me, and I don't have a particular ax to grind re charters, but...
First, teachers in the US are already underpaid, under-respected and under-professionalized (conditions that they share with colleagues in many other countries!). I would rather see funding to _increase_ their pay and professionalism over time (i.e., without skewing existing payscales), attract higher-quality candidates, retain them, and develop their skills over the span of their careers than I would funding to support "creative" schooling models that rely on squeezing more out of teachers while paying them less.
Second, tying teachers' pay to student test scores risks--no, it WILL--warp teaching and learning completely. Test scores are already known to be poor gauges of competency and extremely poor predictors of later success; increasing their direct importance to teachers will further abstract learning in schools from effective, knowledge-building real-world behaviors.