Friday, October 15, 2004

HOMEWORK REDISCOVERED

In this month's Atlantic, Jonathan Rauch poses the question: "Suppose I told you that I knew of an education reform guaranteed to raise the achievement levels of American students; that this reform would cost next to nothing and would require no political body's approval; and that it could be implemented overnight by anybody of a mind of undertake it. You would jump at it, right?" As it turns out, no. Educators, school administrators, and parents increasingly discourage the one education reform that has proven results at no cost (other than students' time): homework. This despite the evidence that, on average, American students do very little homework. Yes, we know the stories of the Ivy-bound elite who spend hours slaving over homework each night, but they are decidedly the exception. According to the National Assessment of Education Progress, "two-thirds of seventeen year olds did less than an hour of homework on a typical night . . . [and] forty percent did no homework at all." What's more, American students spend barely six hours a day in school-much of which Rauch argues "is taken up by nonacademic matters." And, according to educational psychologist Harris Cooper, "relative to other instructional techniques and the costs involved in doing it, homework can produce a substantial, positive effect on adolescents' performance in schools." So why do we hear no chorus demanding more of our students-of both their time and effort? According to Rauch, one reason is that parents and teachers do not believe that students do little work either in school or at home, even when the kids freely admit it. According to a 2001 survey, 71 percent of high school and middle school students agreed with the proposition that most students in their school did "the bare minimum to get by." As Rauch puts it, "you will know that Americans are finally serious about education reform when they begin to talk not just about how the schools are failing our children, but also about how our children are failing their schools."

From The Gadfly




THE REAL-LIFE MAGIC OF HARRY POTTER

If the government had asked me to devise a programme to promote literacy by getting children to read, I suppose I might have come up with some practical ideas. They do ask all kinds of stuff. I might have worked out a system of incentives and prizes, perhaps accompanied by an advertising campaign which made it clear that not only was reading good for success in later life, it was also pretty cool and a heap of fun, too. Costing a few hundred million pounds, it would not have been among the more expensive public projects. The Millennium Dome cost far more.

One thing I would never have thought of was the idea of getting a single mother in Edinburgh to write stories about a private school reached by invisible steam trains, where mail was delivered by owls, and where the national curriculum was replaced by lessons in various sorts of magic. Yet the Harry Potter books got children reading. They queued up outside the bookshops on the eve of publication of each new story. They disappeared into bedrooms to read them through so they would be able to join in conversations at school. They went on to read other children's books. Reading became cool.

This cost a few million pounds, none of it public money. The author, J K Rowling, is today worth more than $1bn, but the phenomenon was in full flood by the time she had made the first few million pounds. To get children reading, the Harry Potter books provided a far more elegant solution than any amount of head-scratching and midnight oil might have produced. Reality often turns out stranger than anything we can dream up.

From the Adam Smith blog.


***************************

For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

***************************

No comments: