The Future of Education

May 1 was decision day, the day by which high school seniors need to have selected which college they are going to attend.  Sarah has just been through the whole college application-admission-decision process and it was exhausting and stressful for everyone involved, especially her.  And we've talked a lot about "what's worth it," at our house -- which schools might be worth accumulating student debt for, and which ones aren't.  The cautionary tales in the newspaper, about young adults whose hopes for the future are on hold year after year, because of student loans that are outsized compared to their salaries, who feel like they can't get married, they can't buy a home.  The kids who borrowed money and got degrees and now can't find work in their field, and work as bartenders.  The kids who didn't even get the degree but still have the loans, and the parents who co-signed them.  The discussions in Washington about how much expensive student loans should be.

The major reason I have been absent from this blog for so long was Philip Zelikow's world history course on Coursera.  The course started in mid-January and ended in late April.  I was one of the almost 5000 on line students who completed the course and earned my Statement of Accomplishment.  I printed it out and put it in the folder with the certificates for all those courses I am required to do at work, even though no one cares that I did this and no one will ever ask me for it.  Registration was easy (a click of the mouse) and the course was free, although I bought the textbook and most of books that were on the additional reading list.  I didn't do all the reading but I did a lot of it and I watched every lecture, with frequent pauses for the note-taking that was required to do well on the weekly quizzes.  I printed out the maps and graphs that were the course's visual aids and they are with my notes in a binder that is now on the shelf with my textbook.

Of course a free online course -- even an excellent one like this -- is not the same as being in a small seminar with an excellent professor.  You don't have the real-time, in person discussion that helps solidify learning, and I didn't have to write anything at all, which certainly would have been required in Professor Zelikow's in-person, for-credit class at the University of Virginia.  But most university classes -- especially the introductory classes that I have been required to take along with my classmates at every institution of higher education that I have ever been enrolled in -- are not small seminars with excellent professors.  If you're lucky, the introduction to art history or political science or psychology class that you are required to take is taught by someone who has mastered the art of conveying information in a sufficiently engaging way to keep the attention of the hundreds of students in the class (a task that is probably far more difficult now because there are so many more things available to distract students than there were when I was in school).

Predictably the pushback at universities has started, the fear that professors will be replaced, that universities will be dismantled.  I would have more sympathy for this position if the courses that were at risk were seminars-with-excellent-professors, but they aren't -- they are (for now anyway) those huge classes that are required to get a degree, and at many schools are not available to all the students who need them.  Already in California there is discussion about giving credit for on line courses if the on campus version is not available (I don't know if the proposed legislation passed or not).  But it's too late.  The current model -- young people taking on huge debt to attend universities where they can't get the classes they need and when they can they are in huge classes that are no more personal than my video lectures by Professor Zelikow -- is broken.  It's going to change, and it needs to.  There are new models already, and there will be more.

Coffee with the Principal

Tom and I went to the coffee with the principal at Morningside Elementary this morning. The big news is that Becky is expecting the new school zones to be posted on the Atlanta Public Schools (APS) website today -- or if not today, no later than Tuesday. Because of growth in enrollment at Morningside and other nearby elementary schools, a new school is being built on Ponce de Leon, where the Morningside kindergarten campus currently is. She said that she expects that APS will convene a Community Meeting about three weeks after the new school zones are released, and then after getting that public input APS will develop a final proposal that will go to the school board for a vote.

She also said that a new assistant principal has been selected, but is awaiting final approval by the school board. The new person is expected to start September 9.

Lots of discussion about air conditioning (an ongoing problem in a few classrooms), strep (should announcements go out if there are strep cases at school?), but the big topic was head lice.

I never had any experience with head lice until I had kids in elementary school. I will never forget that first time I washed the girls heads with RID® and as I rinsed their hair, the dead bugs came streaming out. It was one of those unforgettable moments as a parent, when you realize that your beloved children have been infested with bloodsucking insects for God knows how long and you didn't even know it. And at that point you don't even realize that you don't just do this once. Head lice is truly a gift that keeps on giving.

Contrary to popular belief, there are actually six stages that parents go through, when they learn that their child has head lice. The first five - denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance - are well-known. The sixth one - humor - is highly recommended. Tom thinks that part of the reason they like him so much at the pediatrician's office is that the message he left on the Nurse's Hotline when the girls got head lice that first time included that we were all seriously considering becoming Hare Krishnas and shaving our heads. I have to say that at least based on this meeting this morning very few Morningside Elementary parents have reached this higher, transcental level.

Here's the deal. Head lice are not a health problem. They are a nuisance, but nobody gets rheumatic heart disease as a consequence of head lice infestation. In contrast, that can happen (although it is not common) following strep infections of the throat, so a little perspective is in order here. In a 2002 clinical practice article in the New England Journal of Medicine, Richard Roberts wrote, "In 1998, half the school nurses in the United States would not allow a child with nits back into school. Excluding children from school because of head lice results in anxiety, fear, social stigma, overtreatment, loss of education, and economic loss if parents miss work -- a classic case of the cure being worse than the disease. Management should not harm the patient more than the pest."

I did volunteer for the head lice committee (why, I don't know. Maybe I thought I would run out of things to write about otherwise.) So more to follow, I am sure.

ADDENDUM: As of August 30 no information on the new school zones on the APS website that I could find, but according to yesterday's Digital Dolphin it should be available at http://www.atlanta.k12.ga.us/content/apsrezoning.aspx by no later than September 2. No doubt more to follow on this story as well. It is at least as important as head lice, but maybe not as important as streptococcal infection (at least not the kind that is associated with rheumatic fever).