My sister has another amazing post up.  The whole thing is so good, it’s hard for me to pick one section to quote, so I randomly chose this rumination on prayer:

I do consider myself a religious person. I know the prayers and the traditions, and I’ve never questioned the existence of G-d.

Last year was without a doubt the most difficult time of my life. I asked for a lot of help, but never from G-d.

When I was lonely or upset, I turned to my friends. When my classroom was a disaster, I turned to other teachers. When I was broke, I turned to my dad.

I like results. G-d might answer prayers eventually, but he rarely offers the immediate gratification I desire. So I don’t ask G-d, I ask people.

Maybe if I were in an airplane that was crashing to the ground, it would be a different story.

Categories: Education, Jewishness
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There’s a point shortly after smart, idealistic, motivated young people graduate college that they realize that, in fact, what the world is missing is not their particular great ideas and passion for driving change, but in fact it’s a  complicated place where the ability of one person to make a difference is, for the most part, fairly limited.  My sister has just hit that point in her career:

Somewhere in the last four months, my framework for teaching changed. I’m no longer teaching within the context of ending educational inequality. I don’t think about the achievement gap. “Our nation’s greatest injustice,” is not what keeps me going. I know that half of the elementary school students growing up in low-income communities won’t graduate from high school, but I don’t think about them anymore. I think about the 22 second graders sitting in front of me waiting to hear what happens to Pinduli.

When this happens, the best ones narrow their focus, retrench, and try again.  The jaded quit and spend time finding themselves, maybe in Africa or graduate school.  The least fortunate make the terrible decision to go to law school.

Categories: Careers, Education
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Isn’t that amazing? The institution of a way to monitor and quantify information ended up leading to the saving of millions (over the years) of lives. Develop a metric that truly measures what you need and then follow its advice.

Digging around in her archives, I found the Evil HR Lady discussing the Apgar score for infants, and why we don’t have something similar for students, despite the fact that most of them have quantifiable and comparable performance metrics.

Categories: Education, Managing, Metrics
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When asked to review some E-Learning software, Ryan Healy tells it like it is:

Eventually, I replied and told her that I hate all e-learning.

She said that most millennials she works with dislike e-learning. So, she only designs e-learning tools that are coupled with personal teaching and discussion.

After mentioning my desire to write a post about doing away with e-learning, J.T gave me some great insight. She told me, “It helps save companies thousands in training costs.”

E-learning doesn’t help companies save money, it helps them lower costs. There’s a difference, because e-learning is effectively wasted dollars. It lets HR and corporate training departments fill their checkbox requirements (“Look, so-and-so should know that, they took the e-learning). Most e-learning programs are just a booklet divided up into sections that they make you click through, followed by an inanely simple and irrelevant quiz. Better to just make a web page and let people read it how they want and when they want. The most effective e-learning I’ve ever seen wasn’t even traditional e-learning. It was just a group of links that said “Want to know more about ____? Click here.” For people who needed more information, it gave it to them, and for everyone else, it didn’t waste their time.

Ryan is right, it’s not just Millennials who hate e-learning, everyone does. It’s a waste of time. Putting a generational qualifier there is a cop-out, and it sounds like the consultant peddling it is using it as an excuse. “Yes, some people hate e-learning, but those are Millenials and we don’t understand them anyways.”

Note: After writing this, I realized I used on-line tutorials for computer programming, like those at http://www.w3schools.com, fairly extensively, but I don’t think they fall into what people think of when they hear ‘e-learning’.

Categories: Education, Generations
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Joanne Jacobs offers this as a reason why teachers quit:

Smart, motivated people — the sort we want teaching — won’t stay in jobs if they can’t make a difference.

Except it isn’t just teachers. Everyone wants to make a difference in their job, and millennials twice as much so. Your employees will be successful if you let them and empower them, and they’ll leave if you don’t.

Categories: Careers, Education, Employee Engagement
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“There was not anybody that I can remember that was black,” she said. “The white people have theirs, and the black people have theirs. It’s nothing racial at all.”

Not a joke, a school in rural Georgia is holding their first integrated prom this year, and that quote above is from a real live student.

Via the Volokh Conspiracy.

Categories: America, Education
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Joanna Jacobs passes along Barry Schwartz’s recommendation that elite universities use a lottery for admissions (I couldn’t find the whole article):

There is probably a right answer to the questions “Whom should we admit?” or “Which college should I select?” But we won’t know until after the fact. Chance factors (roommate assignment, romantic successes or failures, or which English professor evaluates your first papers) might have a bigger effect on success and satisfaction than the tiny differences among applicants (or schools) within the range of acceptability. So once a set of “good enough” students or “good enough” schools has been identified, it probably doesn’t matter much which one you choose; or if it does matter, there is no way to know in advance what the right choice is.

College admissions is a crap shoot, and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. Let colleges admit the all-stars, reject the losers, and show the people in the middle just how much randomness is involved. As long as students are using the Common Application to apply to multiple schools, though, the application becomes even more like a lotto ticket. Is this applicant applying to Cornell to hedge in case they don’t get into Columbia, or do they really want to go there?

The solution? Use a bidding market. Give each student who fills out the common application 1000 points and allow them to allocate them among schools they apply to. Weight students in the lottery based on the number of points they bid, so that students who bid more get more of a chance. People will still get into college – being in the “middle” group of Harvard applicants still makes you in the top group of many other great schools.

Bidding systems solve another problem as well. A friend of mine used to work in an admissions office, and she said they would look at other schools a candidate applied to and reject those who seemed highly qualified and applied to top tier schools because the office thought they weren’t likely to accept the admissions offer in the first place. Restricting the number of bidding points lets universities measure not only a student’s binary desire to attend signaled by applying (yes/no), but also the strength of their desire to attend the school (number of points bid).

Most people overestimate the role of going to a good college on life outcomes. They also overestimate how good admissions offices are at picking which people get in and which don’t. Exposing just how random it is, as Schwartz notes, will expose just how much “luck” is involved. Does that mean that a Harvard student and a Community College student are on the same intellectual level? Doubtful, but it will show the Princeton student that they could just as easily be at Duke, if only the lottery had been different.

Categories: Education, Incentive Centered Design, Information Economics, Information Markets, Matching Mechanisms, The Academy
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The one thing each donor had in common? Recognition of KIPP’s past performance. Like it or not, this is what donors are after: an assurance that their donation will produce results. And school choice critics can bash KIPP until they’re blue in the face, but KIPP has produced results that are not merely outstanding and quantifiable, but predictable. These donors clearly believe that KIPP can expand and retain its same high standards. Could they be wrong? Sure. But it’s a calculated risk they’re willing to take.

Donors are funding the Knowledge is Power Program because they measure and deliver results.

via Joanne Jacobs

Categories: Education, Governance, Metrics, Philanthropy
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Also, if faculty governance actually means something, then faculty unionization makes no sense. You’re either management or labor; not both. If you really run the place, then you’re management. If you claim to run the place and you unionize to negotiate against it, I’d call that ’self-dealing.’ It’s a flagrant ethical violation, and of dubious legality. You can’t have it both ways.

From this blog that I just discovered, featuring the musings of an Anonymous Community College Dean

Categories: Careers, Education, Governance, Law, The Academy
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When I interviewed 1,000 people for What Should I Do With My Life?, it was plainly apparent that so many of our smartest college students from our best schools are actually very risk averse. Coming out of college, they took jobs where the “track to success” was spelled out and clear. Wall Street, law school, corporate America – there was no imagination or creativity in these choices. And nothing daring about it. Ten years later, many of them were unhappy and unfulfilled. But quitting – even though they had lots of money in the bank – was absolutely terrifying to them. The loss of status scared them; the idea of jumping off a track and freestyling their career was frightening. They didn’t want to look not smart. They were afraid of taking a job that didn’t broadcast to the world how smart they must be to have that job.

Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman’s blog has some great posts about self esteem (start with that one, then look more recent) and the insane science and practice around promoting it.

I’m also shocked with the risk aversion among my peers, but it gets worse than Po sees. So many people graduate college and skip the job search because they fear getting rejected, or don’t apply to graduate school because they think they need more experience. The worst thing that happens – they say no and you try again in a few years. What I worry about the most, though, is the tendency for people not to pursue a career because they might not like it, so instead they languish in jobs they already know they don’t like. The best way to find out if you like a job? Try it! It’s OK to quit and try something else, but they are so afraid of success, or of leaving, they don’t even give real employment a chance.

Categories: Careers, Education, Graduate School, Matching Mechanisms
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BusinessWeek.com looks at unmet expectations in summer internships:

The largest areas of disappointment for “decliners” were related to job content and manager behavior, Scott says. The study’s conclusion is that interns’ assignment managers are the “deal makers/breakers” in whether a student will accept a full-time job, “because they themselves model ‘what’s it’s really like’ to work for the company.”

Conversations with recent student interns reinforce the idea that they come into interships with high expectations. “I want to feel worthy, that I’m not just an intern. I want to show what I can do, what I’ve learned over the past four years,” says Chelsea Culver, a senior at the University of Washington Business School and an intern at H2 Marketing in Seattle. (For more students’ views of internship expectations and reality, see the slide show.)

Categories: Business and Economics, Careers, Education, Matching Mechanisms
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But half the 247 pupils at the 40-year-old local authority-supported school are Muslim, and apparently the Muslim parents go through all sorts of hoops, including moving into the school’s catchment area, to get their children into King David to learn Hebrew, wave Israeli flags on independence day and hang out with the people some would have us believe that they hate more than anyone in the world.

The Muslim parents, mostly devout and many of the women wearing the hijab, say they love the ethos of the school, and even the kosher school lunches, which are suitable because halal and kosher dietary rules are virtually identical. The school is also respectful to Islam, setting aside a prayer room for the children and supplying Muslim teachers during Ramadan. At Eid, the Muslim children are wished Eid Mubarak in assembly, and all year round, if they wish, can wear a kufi (hat). Amazingly, dozens of the Muslim children choose instead to wear the Jewish kipah.

About a Jewish school in England with a majority Muslim student body.

Categories: Community, Education, Israel, Jewishness, Politics
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Newly elected New York governor Elliot Spitzer is going to tie school funding to performance metrics:

Schools that do not perform well, he said, would be shut down. Educators who do not meet performance goals would be dismissed. A new accountability system would monitor how schools are performing academically and whether they are making the best use of their money, he said. Also, the schools will be judged on whether their academic programming is helping students perform better.

Categories: Education, Governance, Incentive Centered Design, Metrics, Politics
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In the WaPo, a librarian laments that books are a hard sell, and futility tries to save them:

But as I moved along in my library science program, I found that books weren’t really our focus. Information management, database networking and research tools claimed the largest share of the curriculum. In other words, literacy today is defined less by how English departments or a librarian might teach Wordsworth or Faulkner than by how we find our way through the digital forest of information overload.

As I mentioned in my earlier post about libraries, information searches are usually for more specific information than a book offers.  Finding that specific information is tough, and a book surrounds it with hundreds of pages of noise that are difficult to search through.  Successful librarians, or information specialists, are the ones who are recognizing this and adapting.  They see their profession holistically.  Unfortunately, too many nostalgic Luddites are still wandering around library science programs trying to prolong and accentuate their love affair with the physical book.

Categories: Books, Education, Information Economics, Libraries, Marketing
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BusinessWeek has an interview with Bruce Bickel of PNC Financial Services group about how to get kids started in philanthropy. An exerpt:

What happens with older kids?
At age 17 or 18, the teens become family foundation “interns.” They come to the board meetings, they listen, and they can participate. They have no authority, and they don’t vote. By the time they turn 19 or 21 or 30, they have sat through all of this, they understand their beliefs and values, they understand the hearts of their mom and dad and what they want to represent.

I had a long post with my take, but I realize that it might be flawed on its assumptions, so I’m still thinking about it. The interview comes from a much larger BusinessWeek section on philanthropy that I just discovered.

Categories: Business and Economics, Education, Philanthropy
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