Dollars and Sense: R & D in Education

So, my cohorts and I have finished our Learning Strategies graduate course recently and today is the first day of spring break. I enjoyed learning about a variety of learning theories and paradigms and exploring how they dovetail and interweave in my teaching. Indeed, I have gained a retrospective view of how I have been teaching and gained insights on how and why certain approaches I use are successful. Such has afforded me a "rear-view mirror" of where my teaching was and where it has led to over my fourteen-year career. More importantly, my knowledge and understanding of learning theory has made me more cognizant of fine-tuning my lessons to make them even more powerful, impacting, and effective. With that said, it's a sunny and beautiful day on this first day of spring vacation. And I need it.
Recently I watched a speech by Professor Roland Fryer, an economist professor at Harvard University and found a number of the points he made in his speech compelling. So, why have I included Fryer in this post? Simple. It's because Professor Fryer is endeavoring to use his understanding of economics and statistics to improve education. As the youngest black professor to earn tenure at Harvard University, Professor Fryer is trying to give back and make an impact on improving education. As Fryer says, "Facts are our friends. We need more facts and less politics if we're ever going to really change educational reform." Fryer is trying to gather educational data and statistics to discover effective teaching strategies. One of the ideas he mentions in one speech includes paying students in poor performing schools to take the tests and increasing the payments based upon their performance on the test. This simple idea, it seems, is showing evidence of being not only effective but also cost effective. That is, the money required to pay students for their effort and achievement works out to be less than the thousands spent with little or no effect. So where did this idea come from? Again, simply enough, from Fryer spending a summer talking with the kids themselves. From those conversations, Fryer discovered that the students found no reason for education, and when Fryer told them that they could make a ten percent return on their education, this idea had no meaning for these kids. They couldn't see that far down the road. However, paying these students gave them a tangible incentive to read and to learn. And the program seems to be working.
Several years ago, I attended a seminar on improving students' reading skills, and one of the ideas offered was the Drop Everything And Read (DEAR)program, where time is allotted each school day for EVERYONE to read. And by that, it means EVERYONE -- teachers, students, secretaries, even janitors. I brought my idea back to my school with the suggestion of trimming away two minutes from each of our eight periods to create the block of time to implement DEAR in our school. Unfortunately, teachers decided against the idea, citing their need for the instructional time in class. So I approached my team's teachers, and we created the time within our team's core content classes. After implementing the program within our team, our students showed marked improvement on their Gates reading tests and on the GEPA state testing, so much so that the administration decided to change Study Hall to Literacy. Now students use a twenty minute block of time simply to read, and reading skills have improved as a result. The lesson and point: we need to keep an open mind to new ideas and approaches to improving education.
In closing, Fryer remarks how companies invest far more capital in research and development than we do in education. As our country and the State of New Jersey looks to make dramatic changes to curriculum, testing, tenure, and more, perhaps we need to take a more serious look at what works and what may not. The age-old wisdom of the adage, "Don't throw the baby out with the bath water!" seems all too fitting here.
It's nice out. I've gotta go now.