Is Bigger Really Better?

By Sean Scarpiello

Currently in New Jersey, there has been a huge cut in education funding. This has left school districts with the job of finding cheaper ways to educate students. One of the main ways districts have reduced costs is by laying off teachers. This then causes class sizes to increase. What effects does this have on the quality of education being given to students? Perhaps larger classes may benefit students, or maybe not.

In the field of education, experts are always arguing that smaller is better. Students get more individualized attention and can get the help they need. It also gives teachers the ability to focus on individuals in class and get them where they need to be. The idea of smaller classes being better holds true for only two groups, students in grades 1 to 8 and special education students. Younger students will definitely benefit from having more one on one contact with teachers, as well as students who can’t learn in a regular classroom and need extra help in learning the basics.

Other than that, there hits a point when you are around 15 years old and you have to become more independent. In actuality, a classroom with 30 to 35 students is not going to affect your learning. If anything, it will be a good transition for junior high and high school students as they prepare for college. Many will argue that teachers in English and Math will overlook struggling students because of this large number of students. That is not a valid argument. Starting in 6^th grade, teachers have always made themselves available for extra help at lunch or after school. There is a point in high school where students need to sink or swim on their own. If students cannot be somewhat self-sufficient and independent by this time of their lives, then they aren’t ready to be accepted into colleges and universities. Each of these characteristics is vital as most college students are attending larger colleges and universities with even larger classes.

Within the past few years, parents have caused their children to become more dependent of teachers’ authority. There have even been cases where schools have banned playing tag at recess and avoided contact sports in gym class due to their argumentative nature. This sort of authoritative voice which accompanies smaller class sizes is ruining students’ independence in school. In the real world, everyone has to settle arguments and learn to deal with different sorts of people; it would make sense that children learn to compromise in school. Smaller classes in high schools are not helping students as much as experts tend to believe. This example is just the start of how smaller classes are turning teachers into replacement mommies and daddies, which only hinder independence and intelligence for students.

There is also the argument that teachers will assign fewer papers and make easier tests so they lessen their increased workload. It is pretty rare that this would be the case because most junior high and high schools have very rigorous curriculums which are highly monitored by the school’s administration. In schools where this is a problem, there is an easy fix. It’s called unemployment. If high school teachers were getting laid off because they needed less teachers to teach larger classes, teachers would be working harder than ever to avoid getting laid off or fired and placed into a sector of unemployment where there is a low demand for teachers and a large supply of them.

Although I preach the bigger is better theory, some students are more comfortable in a smaller setting for high school and college classes, and there is nothing wrong with that. The point is that to provide a cheaper, yet equal quality education, an increase in high school class sizes will not hurt the students in the long run.

Source: http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2010/11/nj_schools_struggle_with_incre.html

The National Center for Academic Transformation

By Sean Scarpiello

The National Center for Academic Transformation (NCAT) is one of today’s leaders in reducing costs in education. NCAT is a nonprofit organization that works with colleges to redesign course structures and learning environments in the most efficient manner. Therefore, students excel in learning while the college saves masses of money.

With programs for both 2 year colleges and 4 year colleges, NCAT, led by Dr. Carol A. Twigg, uses its experience and information technology to create the Program in Course Design (PCD). To date, there has been over 150 course redesign projects which have been a huge success. Here are some of the staggering statistics as described by Dr. Carol A. Twigg:

"The National Center for Academic Transformation (NCAT) has worked with more than 150 institutions to redesign a set of core courses since 1999. NCAT works with institutions to break down their instructional model­-mapping who is involved in doing which activities­-to identify how to most efficiently leverage technology, faculty, graduate students, peer interactions and other learning resources, to improve quality and efficiency. NCAT has found that on average, costs were reduced by 37 percent in redesigned courses with a range of 9–77 percent. Meanwhile, learning outcomes improved in 72 percent of the redesigns with the remaining 28 percent producing learning equivalent to traditional formats. Based on a review of the participating institutions, NCAT has identified six redesign models that vary in format, student experience, and use of technology."

Currently, NCAT has proved to be a leader in the fight to reduce higher education costs, without reducing the quality of education and its enjoyment among colleges. There are workshops all across America run by NCAT in order to spread their knowledge about their ideas to reduce education costs.

Source: http://www.thencat.org/whoweare.html

Advertising in Schools for Lower Education Costs

By Sean Scarpiello

These days, schools are run like businesses and just as other businesses struggle in a poor economy, so do schools. Unlike other companies, public schools cannot file for bankruptcy and escape with the little money it still has. On the other hand, schools do have hundreds of customers that are required by law to show up every day. Administrators should take advantage of this by reaching out to large corporations for advertising. Advertising in schools should definitely be utilized in order to give your child a higher quality education at a lower price.

When the extremists hear about advertising in schools, they scare parents into believing their 2^nd grader is going to be exposed to Guinness and Marlboro advertisements in their cafeteria. That will never happen because the target market for those companies are not people who still need to hold someone’s hand to cross the street. Other disparagers of the idea complain that schools will become the battlefield of Pepsi and Coca Cola. My question for them is….So? These same little kids are going to go home, turn on Sponge Bob and be bombarded with the same ads from Pepsi and Coca Cola. If your fear is that little Johnny will get fat because he drinks soda at school every day, just give him the 45 cents for milk or juice instead of the $1.50 for the Coke. Also, it is argued that parents will lose the ability to control their children’s lessons and values, because at school they will go out the door with ads everywhere. This goes back to the fear parents have that their children will develop poor eating habits because of school advertisements. How is this going to happen? Parents have 16 other meals per the week teach their children healthy eating habits. Also, the only way to hide advertisements from your child is to lock them in a closet. Everyone has been the target of advertising from every imaginable form of media. This includes everything from the State Farm Insurance billboards that line highways to James Bond’s Aston Martin.

The point of my argument is that not all school advertising is bad. For the most part, the same ads kids are seeing on their favorite TV shows will be the ones popping up in schools. Some are even being clever in their advertising. For example, companies like Disney are incorporating Mickey Mouse and company into word problems in math class (1). Everyone knows these characters already so what’s the big deal about reiterating these characters to students in order to decrease the price of education? Even if local businesses paid to put up posters on schools’ walls. Small businesses like play zones or birthday party entertainers can build reputations as schools use their money for new computers.

Companies will pay big bucks to have their advertisement posted below the school’s scoreboard. In fact, a good contract with a major soda company can get a school district $100,000 to $300,000 (1). At this point, the extremists need to back off so this country’s education system can benefit from large corporations. Then we will be able to bring higher quality education at lower prices.

1) http://www.educationworld.com/a_admin/admin/admin083.shtml

The Point of Technology in Education

By Sean Scarpiello

A typical Monday morning in General Psychology class begins with each student dragging into the lecture hall and grabbing a small clicker the size of a playing card. Today’s topic is “Gender Differences.” The first slide on the power point asks the question, “Do women talk more than men? Using your clicker, answer A for true, B for false.” After about 30 seconds the class results are in. The professor goes on to the next slide and there is a pie chart showing the results of the answers, showing percentages of true verses false. Now the class can have a discussion on the results and their opinions.

This technology is called TurningPoint. It is software that is available for both PCs and Macs which works with power point to poll students on their opinions. This kind of technology makes learning more interactive and thus more interesting. Students are allowed to add their opinion on a subject without having to elaborate in front of a large class, unless they want to. Also, it helps teachers by opening debate that otherwise may be ignored. These debates allow for the spreading of ideas among peers, which allows students to get a better grasp on interesting and even boring topics.

The clickers work over a high tech radio frequency so answer choices are completely anonymous to other students in the classroom answering the questions. This technology allows teachers to play review games before tests with TurningPoint. It then gives instant feedback with the graphs to tell the students and the professor what items students know, and the things they have to study. This software is so versatile; some teachers will give tests through a power point presentation. Since each clicker is numbered, teachers can assign a clicker number to each particular student and then have them take the interactive test. Later, the teacher can pull up the answer choices of each clicker and match it with the students and their grades. Since each clicker is completely personal and silent, it is virtually impossible to cheat on tests. Plus, if students change their minds on answers, they simply have to push the letter of their new answer choice and it is automatically changed. There is also a count on the top of the screen to show how many people answered the question, so the teacher knows if someone hasn’t answered and when to move on or not.

The software works great in all types of classes, but the price can make or break the success of the technology. After searching for 5 minutes, I found websites that would let you download the software for free. However, the software is useless unless you buy the radio frequency sensor and clickers, which cost about $42 each, but the company that produces them has special deals if schools buy them in large quantities. So overall they are expensive, but they are very versatile tools which can be easily transferred between classrooms.

How to Diagnose Inner City Schools’ Problems

By Sean Scarpiello

It is 2:30 on a Saturday morning when my roommate and I fall onto the couch in our dorm room after a night of how all pre-med and pre-law students spend their Friday nights...studying. My roommate clicks on the TV and after ten seconds of surfing the channels, finds a show called “Teach: Tony Danza.” We are both intrigued. The basic premise of the show has Tony Danza, the actor/boxer, teaching a 10^th grade English Class at an inner city school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. From my research for writing previous blog articles, I have discovered data that reflects that it is the inner city schools’ students who are pulling down the rest of the country’s test scores, which are ranked internationally. I figured that this was an opportunity to see just what was going wrong with the inner city schools system, and maybe see a TV actor/boxer flip out at some kids.

I was wrong. On Tony’s first week teaching the 10^th grade English Class, he was brought to tears by the class. He had all different types of antagonists working against him the entire time. One student, who probably reads the Oxford English Dictionary for kicks, was constantly complaining how the class isn’t challenging enough. Another student who is considered gifted, behaves like others in the class; which either don’t do assignments or claim they have a learning disorder.

First off, I don’t want to criticize or come across as saying that students with learning disorders are lazy, but I feel as if students who don’t want to do the work use the excuse as a crutch. Overall, I was shocked to see how most of these students had a cavalier attitude towards schooling and would simply not do the work or the assigned reading. Half of the class failed Tony’s first test, which I later found posted online. The test didn’t seem too difficult as I went through answering questions from the book “Of Mice and Men” from my rusty memory of the piece.

Ultimately, I found myself thinking up ways to fix this problem. Students could be clinically tested for learning disorders every few years. That will help the teachers to be aware of the students who have a legitimate reason for not understanding the text, and to be wary of those who were just playing the new Halo videogame all night, instead of reading.

The school’s resource center was made specifically for the learning disabled students. The busy resource center was often full of lazy students, along with some students with learning disabilities. At one point in the show, Tony Danza was disciplined by the school’s principal because he denied students who requested access to the resource center. It seemed like the entire school’s administration was oblivious to the fact that some students will lie so they can get away with not doing homework. If schools could implement this idea of having recorded clinical diagnosis, then a lot more students would have to do the work until they’re able to drop out or worse…a call to mommy and daddy, as well as attend summer school.

This also brings up the question of allowing students to drop out of school. In South Korea, it is extremely rare for any students to drop out and they rank high in the international test scores. Perhaps it should be illegal to drop out of school. Or maybe we should raise the age of eligibility to drop out of high school. In my opinion, either method would work.

I feel that “Teach: Tony Danza” is a good representation of the typical inner city school and is raising the awareness of inner city school life. The show may help America diagnose the problems of its inner city students and help us see what needs to be improved. If America can fix their inner city schools, there will be a drastic improvement in this country’s test scores and ranking amongst the rest of the world. It would also keep the US among the world’s superpowers. At the moment, India has more honor roll students than America has students. This means that the US needs to maximize their human resources and make every student count in this ever-changing world. This especially includes inner city students, because according to US census, 80% of the US population lives in urban areas (cited below).

http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/planning/census/cps2k.htm

A Spanish Class that Saves Money

By Sean Scarpiello

Lately in the state of New Jersey, there have been major budget cuts in the field of education. In order to continue instruction, New Jersey schools were forced to find ways to save money and be more efficient. In Randolph, New Jersey, the Ironia Elementary School has found a way to save a little under $100,000 each year. They have decided to replace language teachers with the software Rosetta Stone. Many students have found their new language classes more interesting, but will the program be successful in the long run?

Rosetta Stone is a great way to teach someone a new language quickly and efficiently. The software isn’t expensive for use on large amounts of students and it is formulated to work with the capabilities of the human brain so students can learn quickly and efficiently. When you ask an American person, who’s first language is English, to think of a dog, the first thing that pops into their head is an image of a dog. When you ask the same person who has a typical knowledge of Spanish as a second language to think of a “perro,” they think of the word “perro” and translate it quickly to “dog”, then the image of a dog pops up into their head. Rosetta stone is aiming to completely eliminate the behavior of quick translation that occurs in just about every person with a mediocre education of a second language. By associating new words with pictures, Rosetta Stone helps students learn faster with better understanding of the new language. The software also allows students to hear and speak the language into a microphone, allowing the software to cover a full understanding of the language through writing, listening, and speaking.

Ironia Elementary School made a good choice picking Rosetta Stone as a replacement for a teacher, but my question - why are they teaching elementary school students a second language? In reality, it is important to teach students new languages, especially in this constantly changing world, but elementary school is not the time to start. Physiologically, elementary school students have a high aptitude for learning languages, but it is tough to teach children a new language when they don’t yet completely understand the English language. Elementary school is teaching the elements of English, and it’s tough to teach a third grader the preterite or imperfect tense in Spanish when they don’t yet fully understand the past tense in English. It is similar to teaching a medical school student to take out a kidney, but without teaching him where to find it and what it does. When I was in elementary school, I had five years of instruction in Spanish and I escaped it with nothing more than a knowledge of colors, the ability to count to 30, and a perplexing attitude towards second languages.

The best idea would be to begin second language education in middle school, when students have a decent knowledge of their first language and use Rosetta Stone up until eighth grade. Upon entering high school, placement tests should be given to see how students progressed, and place them in high school language classes where it is easier and more efficient to teach large amounts of students languages efficiently and with the use of a teacher.

Regardless of the fact that teaching elementary school students languages is just plain inefficient, I think it is fantastic that the education field is finding new ways to stretch their dollars when the government funds them less money for instruction. Schools in New Jersey should be applauded for their resourcefulness in such a difficult time during the state’s transformation.

Source: http://liveshots.blogs.foxnews.com/2010/09/28/replacing-teachers-with-technology/?test=latestnews

Promethean Board: Hot or Not?

By Sean Scarpiello

Recently, it has been tough to Google “education” and avoid getting some sort of link that raves on the achievements of the Promethean Board. But is this amazing tool so amazing? Or are the owners and CEOs of the Promethean Boards just well-connected and know how to market their product?

The idea of a Promethean Board sounds great on paper. An interactive computer screen projected onto a touch screen which allows students to edit, highlight and write on documents with the use of a magical little pen. As a recent high school graduate, I have had hours of experience with the “Chalk Board of the Future.” The first time I used the board, it was amazing; however, that may have been the only time it was amazing. It seemed to lose its sashay after the first ten minutes. One of the flaws I found right away was that the pen doesn’t have an erase function directly on it, causing you to reach across to the onscreen tool box to get the eraser style pen, then erase, the go back to the tool box, to get the pen tool you were using before so you can continue writing. The pen itself is also faulty. When writing, there is a stall before the computer recognizes something has been written. Therefore, writers will over compensate different shapes and sizes of their letters due to the lack of visual feedback. This results in the most legible kindergarten teacher to have the handwriting of a raging alcoholic.

Another flaw is that the image is projected onto the board from a ceiling mounted projector. This means every time the teacher turns on the screen it must be recalibrated because a stray paper airplane might have set the projector off by a centimeter, causing the entire smart board to be altered. This recalibration only takes a minute, but a minute at the beginning of each lesson gets old fast. Plus it is inefficient when you consider all the other forms of technology in the market that practically finish your sentences. Also, since the image is projected, if a writer steps in front of the board while writing, the image will be projected onto their back and the writer will continue to copy notes blindly onto their shadow. At first it doesn’t bother anyone, but when you get up to the board it feels like you are bending over backwards to copy your algebra homework onto the board. The projector also limits the surface area of the board to a specific size. This is problematic when you are taking a lot of notes and you have to wait for everybody in the class to finish the notes, then erase it all, then continue on the same small space. With a typical whiteboard, you can just walk down to the other wall of blank chalkboard and leave the old material up for the slower note takers to finish copying. The price of this smart board is about $1,200 each, which isn’t bad for what you get, yet four walls covered in whiteboards will sell for about half of that. With the white boards, you can increase the total writing area ten-fold and still have $600 in markers to use for the decade

A real smart board should be similar to a giant iPad on the wall. It would be completely touch screen so you can write with your finger, then brush away any mistake with the back of your hand. Plus, it wouldn’t project. This allows schools to fit each board to the dimensions in their rooms, whether it is 3 feet by 4 feet or 3 feet by 10 feet. This kind of board would be much more expensive than the Promethean Board, mostly because a few square inches of Apple’s touch screen goes for $200 and a whole board would cost a lot more. The best idea would be to wait until technology improves before putting down any large sum of money to improve your school’s blackboard or whiteboard.