This make sense to me, not because laptop programs are a bad idea (says the guy who is rolling one out at his school), but because these programs have been sold as a way to raise student achievement as measured by SATs and other standardized tests.  It’s fairly easy to show that laptop programs don’t raise scores. In fact, it’s pretty easy to show that almost anything schools try don’t raise scores (the main exception being studying to the test — that has been shown to make a difference).

The best way to raise "student achievement" (other than studying for the test) is to admit better test takers.

In general:

1. People who advocate for laptop programs should be more careful about what they claim.
2. In general, schools engage in a lot of magical and/or sloppy thinking.   They are embarrassingly susceptible to snake oil peddlers.  
3. Laptop programs are expensive. It’s good that they are receiving scrutiny. It’s also good to hold people who make claims accountable.

So what are my claims?  I think young people (and most especially girls) would benefit from learning to comfortably use (and take care of) a portable computer.   I believe it’ll foster the confidence they’ll need to explore future technologies, some of which will be different than anything we can now imagine. 

I would like to measure the benefit I claim, but it isn’t easy.  Assessment that misses the mark is worse than no assessment at all.

Didn’t affect me much.  Been up to my armpits in alligators with the usual start-of-the-year school stuff.  Now I hope to have more time to read and write….

The Risk Pool: In a recent New Yorker article, my main man Malcolm has written well (per usual) and provocatively (per usual) about how the ratio of those who work to those who don’t is a very good predictor of economic success, whether you’re looking a country’s economy or looking at General Motors.   A country can be burdened with too many children to care for or with too many elderly to support.  A company can be burdened by its obligations to retirees, generally in the form of pensions or health insurance.  As an example, Gladwell attributes Ireland’s recent success to the fact that Irish women are having fewer children:

This relation between the number of people who aren’t of working age and the number of people who are is captured in the dependency ratio. In Ireland during the sixties, when contraception was illegal, there were ten people who were too old or too young to work for every fourteen people in a position to earn a paycheck. That meant that the country was spending a large percentage of its resources on caring for the young and the old. Last year, Ireland’s dependency ratio hit an all-time low: for every ten dependents, it had twenty-two people of working age. That change coincides precisely with the country’s extraordinary economic surge.

He also shows how the big auto companies in the U.S. are heavily burdened by their retirees — so much so, that it is nearly impossible for them to succeed.

In 1962, G.M. had four hundred and sixty-four thousand U.S. employees and was paying benefits to forty thousand retirees and their spouses, for a dependency ratio of one pensioner to 11.6 employees. Last year, it had a hundred and forty-one thousand workers and paid benefits to four hundred and fifty-three thousand retirees, for a dependency ratio of 3.2 to 1.

From an article titled "Leadership Philadelphia about to connect with ‘connectors’" in the Philadelphia Business Journal –

This sounds good:

Leadership Philadelphia wants to talk to connectors to learn how they manage to be so effective in bringing people together to work toward a goal.

But this sounds a little silly:

The organization, which puts on programs to help educate leaders about the region and inspire community action, plans to have connector skills taught to public school students and Leadership Philadelphia members.

Maybe I’m being cynical.

Powered by Qumana