In the 1830's, Dr. Pierre-Charles-Alexandre Louis, a pioneer in the medical application of statistics studied the effect of bloodletting, or bleeding — the standard treatment of the time — on pneumonia. The data showed that bleeding didn't work; Dr. Louis rejected this as “terrifying and absurd."  So, he made a recommendation: “bleed earlier and bleed harder.”   Sound familiar? *

So much for a pioneer of medical statistics. Who says science is objective? In the last few weeks a series of articles in New York newspapers were written about a recently released Harvard study showing that test scores for students in grades three to eight were inflated when compared with the scores they receive on New York’s high school Regents Exams and on the gold standard of testing, the NAEP. New York State Commissioner of Education, Steiner is asking that the Board of Regents adopt a tougher scoring strategy. At the same time, “Steiner is also calling for longer tests with more rigorous questions.”(http://www.silive.com/news/index.ssf/2010/07/study_hits_grade_inflation_in.html). Sounds to me like “bleed earlier and harder.” If I have this right, the students aren’t passing the easy test, how are they going to pass the harder one? I guess everyone thinks that a harder test will produce better treatments and measures but journalist and critic, Sol Stern in his article in The City Journal points to the Campbell Effect - “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”

So here we go again. This happens every time. You think the politicians and commissioner would learn from the past but they are condemned to repeat it. They keep thinking they are the ones doing something different than their predecessors when they are actually doing way too much the same and after going through many contortions they will get the same results as well. This is why we all need to innovate. First different, then better!

“There is a difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive."

                                                                                                    Billy Crystal, The Princess Bride

There are lots of reasons for conjuring up a quote from The Princess Bride this week. The AHSI network that we’ve convened for 7 years is leaving us in a few weeks. It’s been a great experience to grow a group into a non-profit organization that has held together for all these years. The funding for AHSI is developing and in a few months they should be on their way to living the good life. For now that makes them moving from slightly alive to alive. At Big Picture we are in the final year of our network funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. It’s hard to believe but this is our ninth annual Big Bang. Our network of schools has achieved some incredible results. Our students continue to be role models to other students and do well at college, in the workplace and as citizens. At this Big Bang, we decided not to have adult keynote speakers. Instead, we are having alumni from schools come in and be those keynotes. They will talk about their lives and how they have never forgotten the education they received at our schools because it is the kind of education you use everyday. As it turns out because of all the travelling I do, I know all of the students. The school choice they made when they were young is how the difference made all the difference for them.

When I was 19 years old I met Dennis for the first time. He was 26. I can still remember our first conversation because I had no real interest in ever going into education. The only reason I interviewed for this program was because my girlfriend got in and she thought I would like it. Upon meeting Dennis I said something like, I’m not interested in schools and I’m majoring in biology or anthropology. He said, “So, get two degrees.” I did and the difference made all the difference.

Please feel free to send me your thoughts, comments, reactions, or suggestions. I would love to hear from you!

During the last week in April, Big Picture Learning  conducted two symposiums on out-of-school youth—the first in Seattle, WA, the second in Newark, NJ-- assembling a broad cross-section of individuals from the education, foundation, business, and community sectors. CEOs dialogued with teachers. Principals interviewed leaders of non-profit organizations. Students questioned school district leaders.  We invited several young people, most of them school leavers, to tell their stories and describe their encounters with the system. We learned a lot from the participants, so we tried to capture the essence of our conversation and the outcomes of our work with them in the attached paper.

Click here to download the full article as a PDF.

One result of our learning from the symposiums is that we believe the Big Picture Learning design can be successfully modified to create programs that address the special needs and circumstances of these young people. We have already begun developing detailed program designs.  We welcome your feedback on the paper. We will be blogging about the topic on www.tinkingandthinking.org and in the near future will develop prototypes based on our program ideas.

Please feel free to send me your thoughts, comments, reactions, or suggestions. I would love to hear from you!

 “I wondered if all I had ever really needed was the equivalent of a warm hug from a cold algorithm.” Ta-Nehisi Coates

This quote sounds like the new version of all that’s needed is a warm hug from a tough parent. But wait, this time there is no one to do the kicking but an algorithm. Thank God. Now everyone is off the hook. We can blame the machine. This quote comes from a story written by Ta-Nehisi Coates. It’s called "The Littlest Schoolhouse" and was published in The Atlantic in July. Its really a nice article with some very good points about growing up, but the centerpiece of the story is the latest technological craze that let’s students and staff see results on student achievement right before your eyes. Like video games, students are in front of a computer screen and learning math from lessons that will supposedly take them past test anxiety, increase their motivation and deem them ready to enter into the world of college and work. Can a warm hug really be built into a cold algorithm? I’m not sure, and I’m skeptical of the notion and the software they are promoting. I don’t think that machines read emotions very well and they really can’t tell if you really understand something. Remember, even in classrooms where teachers can sense student’s level of engagement, we are asking teachers to teach to the test so a student will look good to an algorithm. We are taking out the human factor. Our eyes no longer matter because only the instruments that measure matter. This type of schooling is not about thinking and/or tinkering or understanding. This is about testing to a measure and going on to the next measure with the assumption being the measures measure whether we really can use knowledge and not just repeat words back the way they came to us.

In Is Google Making Us Stupid, Nicholas Carr states, “We have to remember that the Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as ‘knowledge work...What Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind.”

Shades of Chaplin’s Modern Times; where is Charlie when we need him more than ever?

Carr ends his article with a reference to HAL, the computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey: “Their thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they’re following the steps of an algorithm. In the world of 2001, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.”

So perhaps Ta-Neshi Coates is correct and this is where we are heading. HAL may be the most likely candidate to give our children a warm hug from a cold algorithm and we become the machines.

In Mathew Crawford’s book from Shopcraft to Soulcraft, he states, "The mechanic’s proper response to the situation cannot be anticipated by a set of rules or algorithms." Ahh! I’m feeling a bit better now. Crawford takes us to the other side.

In two weeks Big Picture Learning will be running its second symposium of the year at the Maker’s Faire in Dearborn, Michigan. Aptly named by Charlie Mojo, Make Their Way In the World will bring together the BPL symposium team to facilitate, assimilate,and create new ways to make in and out of school. It sometimes seems like only a few of us know that tinkering and thinking happen at the same time. They play with one anther even though at times they act separately. There is no one-way and as Mark Mitton told me in our weekly phone call, “the dirty little secret is that thinking and tinking are both inaccurate and you need both.” Leave it to Mark to mystify us with language and reality. All you have to do is watch the cap being put on the well in the Gulf this week and you’ll see tinking and thinking in action. The problem in schools is that there is a complete lack of balance between tinking and thinking. How we correct this is part of our BPL mission but the solution could also help us resolve the gaming dilemma when the games allow you to both “think and tink.”

Please feel free to send me your thoughts, comments, reactions, or suggestions. I would love to hear from you!

“Everything becomes a movement these days that has any.” Ralph Caplan

Leave it to Ralph to give me a very subtle email tickle when I need one. It’s the right kind of message when you realize so many groups use a word loaded with so much history. In the past, you could see a women’s movement, a civil rights movement, and a peace movement. Now you see movements comprised of data comprised of zero’s and one’s. What’s moving? The movements are more on screen and out of body and in mind. There is some good to all of these new movements but there is also a lack of touch with the world and what it really means if anything, to be part of a movement or to understand the consequences of one

The Out Of School Youth paper, "The Final Score is Not the Final Score" finally went out. It took longer than I thought it would take and I’m not sure why. It was vetted by quite a few people. Thank you Sam, Talmira, Ron and Leslie for taking a good look at the piece. I hope it resonates with people out there and helps change practice and policy. If feedback comes back that informs and shakes up our work in some significant ways that would be great.

My east coast swing took me to Newark where I met up with Carlos at a meeting at the Prudential Foundation. We had a real good introductory meeting and left hopeful that Prudential will support our work in Newark. Next I went across a few rivers to my first and long overdo visit to Francis Perkins Academy in Brooklyn. The school is on Bedford Ave, the street I grew up on. Its also down the block from my grandfather’s apartment I had a real nice meeting with the new principal, Jocelyn Santana. She is taking over for Javier Guzman who is now at New Village in Los Angeles. Jocelyn has been involved in alternative education in New York City for 20 years. She knows this ever-changing system well and will be able to lead the school through this complicated place called NYC.  

On Thursday, I was in Camden where Tim and I met with Deputy Superintendent Reuben Mills. Camden is getting ready to have a BPL middle school as well as expand MetEast. MetEast is going into its 6th year of school. We are going into our 8th year in Camden. It is hard to believe that Tim started with us when he was 26. Through real difficulties he has created a school and a presence in Camden where the work is rooted in the community and is growing. 

Please feel free to send me your thoughts, comments, reactions, or suggestions. I would love to hear from you!

“The certainty that you will succeed when even you yourself are not even sure...” Jose Tavares, Graduate of MetEast

June 30th, the last day of the month and the last graduation for our schools this school year. MetEast’s graduation was a memorable one. Keinan delivered a speech from the heart about how much more he learned from his students than he taught. His students would argue differently. What was not arguable was how much more he learned about learning and teaching from being an advisor rather than a math teacher which is where he started out with Teach For America.

This was a graduating class that was questioned about what they do. They had to constantly defend what they were learning. The scrutiny of our schools because we are different is part of what makes us better. It makes our students strong individuals. They learn early what it means to fight for something worth fighting for as they stand up against an establishment and the scrutiny of naysayers. Their graduation speeches made lots of references to their defense of how and what they learned. And because of this scrutiny, they are able to speak and write and perform. These 19 students have beaten the odds of a nation that has low expectations for youth coming from this city. They are off to Rutgers, Temple, Morehouse, City University of New York, state and community colleges. Their projects have received national and local recognition and this little school has become a beacon in New Jersey. It is a little big school.

Tim and his staff and the families of our students deserve lots of credit for their perseverance. Now we have an opportunity to grow in Camden. Funny thing is that our growth all over does not mimic our growth in Providence. As circumstance may have it, the growth pattern may just be the opposite. At the Met in Providence, from the start, it was assumed the school would grow to 6 small schools. The funds were there to build a school. In Sacramento, Oakland, San Diego and MetEast, there are building projects but only after they really proved for years they were sustainable and could deliver a quality program year after year. There’s something to this method that stalls growth but at the same time creates a tremendous amount of accountability. Some of this growth was planned by us. Years ago, we would talk to districts about slow growth, and getting the first school right then, adding more schools. Starting with one school happened in Providence only because we had no buildings to grow into. As we move forward and know more about how to start schools, our strategy may change and we may start moving faster.

Because of Camden there is Newark. I spent time with Charly and Carlos this week doing planning for next year and meeting with the Dodge Foundation in Morristown. We have the opportunity to start the planning for a STEM/green school in Newark. This would be an exciting new project that would take us into the realm of everything green theme. At times there are lapses in our innovative work. We have a design that needs constant tweaking to stay current but the tendency is to stop and believe that ‘what is’ is the way it should be going forward. This type of mission is hard to combat. New projects add value and push everyone’s thinking. The STEM/green school is one such project.

Please feel free to send me your thoughts, comments, reactions, or suggestions. I would love to hear from you!