A Four Layer Framework for Data Standards

Recently I've been getting involved in a number of education data efforts. It's an alphabet soup of standards and specifications including CEDS, LRMI, SIF, PESC, Ed-Fi and more. As we've discussed these specs and how they fit together we developed a four-layer framework for how different data standards fit together. Our one-page outline of the framework has been used in ways we didn't foresee. I recently updated it with feedback from the CEDS team. Click here for the latest version. It's released under a CC0 license which pretty much means do what you want with it but don't blame me if something goes wrong. And see below for a graphic version.

Breaking the Tyranny of the Bell Curve

If you take a random set of students, teach them all the same way and then give them all the same standardized assessment the results will follow a normal distribution or "bell curve" with a few excelling, the majority performing near average and a few failing. This is the tyranny of the bell curve.

There are all kinds of problems with this: Standardized tests result in normal distributions of scores because they are designed to do so. Not necessarily because human ability really follows a normal distribution. Indeed, human intelligence is malleable.

But let's set that aside for a moment and just go crazy theoretical. Suppose you had a large population of identical students. Then you put them in classrooms where instruction was delivered in identical ways. Then you gave them an identical assessment. The results would approximate a normal (or bell) curve. Why? Because a normal curve is what results when you average out a bunch of random errors. Instruction is naturally error prone. Students don't always pay attention. Even when they do, they don't always understand. Teachers make mistakes. People get sick or have bad days.

My colleague, Josh Jarrett, is fond of saying that high school graduates' knowledge is kind of like Swiss cheese with random holes in their understanding.

When looking at children, my natural inclination is to celebrate their differences. When they are dressed the same, in sports uniforms for example, I gravitate to the differences the color of their hair and their eyes, how they smile, who they cluster around, what grabs their interest.

Despite this diversity, our society needs all children to reach a certain standard of competency in core subjects of literacy and mathematics. Likewise, they need to have a basic understanding of the social and civic institutions and norms that are essential to prosperous society.
So, the challenge is achieving consistent results (academic achievement) while prizing the inconsistency of the inputs (our children). The obvious answer is that we adapt the education to the needs of each student. As a friend put it, "Every student should have an IEP."

But IEPs or Personalized Learning, as we prefer to call it, is prohibitively expensive, right? I believe that the principles of mass customization so successfully applied in other industries can also be applied to education. I'll be writing more on this in coming weeks.


Posts in this series:
Breaking the Tyranny of the Bell Curve
Tackling Bloom's Two Sigma Problem
The Personalized Learning Model

Windows in Time

Last January we had to buy a new car for my wife. About five years ago I installed a bluetooth handsfree phone box in her previous car. We liked it so well that now we have them in all of our cars. Yes, I know that even handsfree phone conversations still distract drivers. But it still helps.

So, I had to decide what to put in the new car. These days car stereos often include phone capabilities so I thought that maybe we would upgrade the stereo too. And, wouldn’t it be nice if the stereo could play MP3s. Maybe GPS/nav capabilities would be good. One thing led to another and the unit we chose supports acronym city: MP3, WMA, CD, DVD, MP3, SD, USB, GPS, HD Radio. We’re in geek heaven. (Not a paid endorsement.)

Being new to Seattle, we’ve found the navigation feature to be really valuable. And, in case you’re wondering, It’s much more convenient to have it built-in than to stick a portable to the windshield. So, in the last six months I’ve done a lot of driving in which I followed the instructions of a computer voice.

It’s really a strange window in time. The car is smart enough to tell me where to turn, but not smart enough to make the turn itself. In his book, Evil Plans, Hugh MacLeod suggests that Television occupies another window in time, “a historical accident of the old factory-worker age meeting the modern mass-media age.” That people would willingly spend so much time with “passive, non-interactive media” is a temporary artifact.

What other "time windows" might we be in?

How to Identify a Secure Payment System

Recently my debit card number was stolen. Three unauthorized charges totaling more than $500 were made in quick succession. Luckily I caught them almost immediately and contacted my bank which "launched an investigation" and credited the money back.

I presume nearly everyone with a card has had a similar experience. The credit card system is so abysmally insecure that there's no way it would get approved if introduced today. There are dozens of ways my card number could have been stolen. A waitress might have copied it down while away from the table at the register. An insider at a payment processing company could have taken it. I could have been part of one of the recent online retailer hacks. I don't think I was the victim of a card skimmer or a fake ATM because I'm pretty careful about such things. But it's still possible.

The "Chip and Pin" systems used in the UK are better. They are based on smart card technology which has an embedded processor chip on the card. To pay for something you insert a card into the payment device, enter your PIN number and approve the amount of the transaction. It's nearly the same as using an ATM card in the US except that you insert the card so that the chip can be accessed instead of swiping the magnetic strip. However, there's a big difference in how the transaction is handled. When you swipe a card, it simply reads the card number from the magnetic strip. There are even devices that can clone the magnetic strip. A smart card, on the other hand, uses a secret encryption key to digitally sign the transaction. The payment device never has the actual key so once the card is removed, no additional transaction can be made.

While better, Chip and Pin still has a fundamental weakness: You have to trust the payment device. A fraudulent device might ask you to authorize a charge of $25 but actually submit a charge of $250. Or, you might authorize one charge but while the card is still in the device it might process a dozen more.

A mostly secure system would have to have a display and keypad on the card itself. Or you might use a cell phone for payment as they do in Japan since the phone already has a keypad and display. Then the worry is that your smartphone might get a virus that steals all of your money.

I predict that before too long you will have some universal access device that unlocks your house, enables your car and manages secure payments both for online shopping and in person. But if that device is also your smart phone, they'll have to install some kind of hardware security to protect the security system from malware.

Update: The Cost of Solar Energy

Nearly a year ago I wrote a three-part series on energy. At the time, I calculated a cost of $83.33 per gigajoule for solar power. That compares to $1.42 per gigajoule from nuclear power.

Google is investing $168 million in the Ivanpah Solar Farm in the California Desert. As far as I can tell, the total investment will be approximately $2.068 billion. It will be capable of generating 392 gross megawatts of electricity and should last at least 25 years.

In order to convert these numbers to a cost per gigajoule, we have to make some assumptions. I'll use some very generous ones. The solar array cannot generate energy at night and will only generate peak output for part of the day. Not surprisingly, the California desert location chosen for the Ivanpah project happens to be the most favorable in the entire United States. The approach used with solarvoltaics is to multiply peak output by 6 hours per day in that region. Lower numbers are used in other regions. I'll assume that the Ivanpah project is engineered to collect excess solar energy compared to its peak output and so I'm using an 8 hour multiplier instead of 6. Since a net megawatt figure isn't offered, I'll use assume 100% delivery efficiency and use the gross figure. These, of course, are unrealistically favorable assumptions.

It works out to 392 megawatts * 8 hours * 365 days *  3,600 joules/watt-hour = 4,120,704,000 megajoules/year or 4,120,704 gigajoules per year.

Assuming a lifetime of 25 years, construction cost of $2.068 billion and no maintenance costs we get $2.068 billion / (25 years * 4,120,704 gigajoules / year)  = $20.07 per gigajoule. That's an improvement of four times over my previous calculation for solar power. It starts to approach the $13.89 per gigajoule cost of wind power.

It's a huge improvement over solar panels but this still remains the most expensive way in the world to generate electricity. It's an order of magnitude more expensive than conventional energy sources which have the added advantage of delivering power 24 hours a day regardless of the weather.

I'm glad to see this happening but it won't spark a revolution in energy production.

Do I Trust the New Airport Scanners? No.

I recently decided that I will refuse to step into the new backscatter and millimeter wave scanners that the TSA has deployed at US airports. So far, this hasn't cost me much. Despite flying six times in the last two weeks I haven't yet provoked the infamous pat-down. So far, I've been able to survey the scene and pick the line that uses the old-school metal detector. That won't work forever, they still pick people randomly from the alternative lines and send them through the megadetector. But it should work for a while because the new scanners are too slow to handle full passenger volume.

According to the TSA, one scan by a backscatter x-ray machine exposes an indivdual to a radiation dose of 0.005 millirem which is equivalent to 0.05 microsievert (µSv). Meanwhile, this extremely helpful chart indicates that the dose is equivalent sleeping one night next to someone, it's 1/20 the dose of eating a banana and it's 1/800 the cosmic ray dose of a cross-country airline flight. Millimeter wave scanners, which are also being deployed, use non-ionizing radiation and should pose even less of a threat.

I'm a fairly scientifically-minded individual. So, why am I taking this seemingly unscientific position? The main answer is because I don't trust the information we've been given. I even have some indicators for this lack of trust. For example, in this blog post, the TSA states, "Backscatter X-ray technology uses X-rays that penetrate clothing, but not skin, to create an image." This is language they've used in other places and it's technically true but it's also misleading. The X-rays that make the image penetrate clothing and bounce off the skin and other materials to reach the detector. But the rest of the X-rays, those that didn't make the image, are absorbed by the body. So, my spontaneous lack of trust is reinforced by the TSA's use of misleading language.

I'm not alone in distrusting government assurances. A recent survey conducted by Xavier University indicates that 78% of Americans have less trust in government than they had 10 years ago. A CNN poll shows that only one in four Americans trusts government to do the right thing most of the time.

But for me to distrust the TSA's explanations, I have to either distrust their intentions or their judgement. The fact is, I distrust both. It turns out that the benefits of the scanners weren't sufficiently convincing until the manufacturers spent millions of dollars lobbying congress and federal agencies for their adoption. And security expert Bruce Schneier says it's all just security theater with no real benefit.

So, I guess my opt out represents a concern that the scientific tests are incomplete combined with a relatively inexpensive form of civil disobedience. But my real hope is that someday government officials will quit trying to convince us they're right and start earning back our trust.

Added 2011-04-13:
My son just sent me a link to a letter written by concerned UCSF scientists. After a little more research I found this response from the FDA. Both parties agree that the absorption by the skin of low-intensity X-Rays results in a disproportionally high dose compared to medical X-Ray systems. In fact, the FDA estimates the effective dose to be 0.56 µSv which is more than 10 times the number reported by the TSA that I used above. That's still a small dose. Where they disagree is on whether sufficient research has been done to establish the safety of these scanners. So, it remains an issue of trust and with all of the misinformation in the TSA statements they just aren't behaving in a trustworthy way.

Bidirectional Links: They're Here!

I attended the third annual ACM Hypertext Conference held in Pittsburgh in 1989. Three years prior I had co-founded Folio Corporation, a developer of electronic publishing software. I wouldn't earn my BS for another six months.

A fundamental question in the early days of hypertext was whether links should be one-way or bidirectional. Theorists were adamant that links should work both ways. They claimed that it's equally relevant to learn what refers to an item as to know what it refers to. Of course, that's hard to accomplish because an author may not have the permissions necessary to install a matching link. For example, if I link to a story on an arbitrary site, I probably don't have permission to install a back-link on that site.

A survey of some of the abstracts from the '89 conference reminds me of the many proposals on how to make bidirectional links work. Some used a sort of cooperative exchange protocol. Other approaches centered on a third-party link registry. Besides being unwieldy, these methods have other problems. If bi-directional links require cooperation, I might deny you the privilege of linking to my content. I might even report that my page had been deleted just to clear your link.

Tim Berners-Lee (who didn't present at Hypertext '89) launched the HTML/HTTP combo we know as the World-Wide Web one year after that conference. His aspirations were for a global, open web and so he took the practical approach of unidirectional links. His decision was strongly criticized by visionaries like Ted Nelson but today you're reading this on the web while Xanadu remains a dream.

Still, wouldn't it be nice to have back-links even if only occasionally?

Some blogging systems (not including blogger) have a "trackback" system in which blogs notify each other when someone from one blog links to a post in another.

Better yet, we do have backward links! I don't think even Berners-Lee expected a world-wide index with the capacity of Google. And one of the things it indexes are links. Google has a special syntax for it. If you search for "link:freakonomics.com" you'll find all of the websites that link to Freakonomics. A clever browser add-in (or built-in) would be to create a button that performs that query automatically when you're on a page. Maybe I'll write that someday.

This could be really useful. For example, the Common Core State Standards for education are organized on the website so that there's a unique URL for each of the standards. Here's an example related to the Pythagorean theorem: http://corestandards.org/Math/Content/8/G/B/6.

So, suppose Salman Khan (of Khan Academy) posts a video about the Pythagorean theorem. In that page he could include a link back to the corresponding standard. Then, I could post the following query to Google: link:corestandards.org/Math/Content/8/G

If this practice became common, the result would be content from all over the web that teaches the Pythagorean theorem. As of this writing, it only returns some cross references from within the standards themselves.

Of course, I couldn't resist the vanity search. A query for "link:ofthat.com" results in... one link from an old site of my own. Maybe someday.

The Next Personal Computing Wave

We are partway into the next wave in personal computing. Google's Chrome OS is an excellent example but others abound.

The PC/Laptop/Tablet/Phone/PDA of the near future will work like this:

• All local storage will simply be a cache of permanent storage in the cloud. Therefore, if a device is lost/stolen/destroyed/crashed there is little or no data loss. The individual simply picks up a new device, enters their credentials and all information gets re-cached from the cloud.
• Applications will be cached right along with personal data. The record of your purchase (or adoption of free apps) is kept in the cloud so a new device automatically loads your apps along with your data.
• Applications will be hosted in a runtime sandbox. Binary compatibility with the CPU or operating system will not be required.
• Connectivity will be near-universal but not completely. Therefore applications will be designed to be “occasionally connected.” Existing examples are email and podcast readers that download information when there's connectivity but let you manipulate messages while disconnected.
• Peripheral devices such as printers, scanners, TV tuners, heart-rate monitors, etc. will connect directly to the network, not to your individual PC.

While elements of this framework appear in the iPhone/iPad, in the Android OS and in Windows Phone 7, Google's Chrome OS is a better example. In true disruptive innovation fashion, Google is starting with a device with a lower cost, lower complexity and lower capability but superiority in one area. The superiority is fundamentally superior management and ease-of-use. This is accomplished by reducing the OS to just the services necessary to run a the web browser. In one particular area Chrome-based devices are superior to all others: They are almost entirely immune to data loss due to loss, damage, hardware failure and so forth and the dramatically simplified OS is easy to understand and use.

And even though the OS is little more than a browser, you can still load up applications. The application runtime is simply ECMAScript (Javascript) and the web environment. Notably, Google Gears and the recently released HTML5 features (both of which are in Chrome) allow browser-based applications to cache local data and continue to operate when disconnected. Google even has a special compiler that will compile Java applications into ECMAScript instead of JVM code so that they run in a browser context. And Google has also addressed the mobile device printing problem.

Of course, Chrome isn't the only example of this wave. Much of it started with Netbooks. With the Eee PC Asus pioneered the idea that a simple device that doesn't run a mainstream OS can be easier to understand and adopt.

For all of it's pioneering work, Apple hasn't fully adopted the new paradigm. And the anchor they are still dragging was introduced with the Palm Pilot introduced 10 years before the iPhone. Palm's innovation was to create a small, handheld device that was an extension of your home computer. You "cradled" your palm once a day to charge it and synchronize your calendar, contacts and so forth. Apple still maintains this framework. You can't get full utility from your iPhone or iPad without having a PC back at home. The rather horrible iTunes app (maybe it's better on a Mac) is required to backup your phone, to manage your music library, to subscribe to podcasts, to upgrade the OS and for a host of other reasons. There's no justification for this. The iPhone/iPad is a networked device and all of these services would be better in the cloud.

Microsoft has done a perfect job of imitation with its Windows Phone 7/Zune Desktop pairing. The imitation is so perfect that in both cases you can't even give a name to your device without first connecting it to your PC/Mac.

Some will point out that you don't really have to tether your iPhone to subscribe to podcasts. There's an app for that. But my point is that Apple should have done that. In fact, opportunities abound to build apps to untether these devices. Just consider the reasons for connecting to a computer and find an alternative.

• Cloud backup. Think "Carbonite for mobiles." (Yes, Carbonite has an iPhone app but it's for getting to your PC backup using your iPhone. It should be for backing up your iPhone.)
• Music store management (organization, tagging, purchase, backup, etc.)
• Device management (name, iTunes account, memory management etc.)
• OS Upgrade (in conjunction with backup).

In true disruptive innovation fashion, the first devices of this wave are specialized and have limitations but they will continue to improve until there's no reason left to keep a desktop or laptop.

Quote: Education Reform Fault Line - Conor Williams

"Here's the basic fault line dividing the education reform trenches: One side believes that the best way to improve the education system is to focus on improving instruction. The other believes that the best way to improve the education system is to focus on addressing the ways that poverty affects schools with high percentages of low-income students."
   -- Conor Williams - (source)

Balancing the Budget

With record-level deficits, balancing the federal budget is once again being debated in Washington. There seems to be a consensus that balancing the budget would be a good thing but how to go about it is such a contentious issue that I have little hope of progress this year.

The seeming consensus on this issue is curious to me. After all, John Maynard Keynes advocated deficit spending especially in recession times and Keynsian economics seems to be the philosophy of the day. But I'll save the reasons for balancing the budget for another post. Today, I'm writing about some of the unexpected side effects of balancing the budget.

Last April I wrote about a lecture by my former Business Finance professor where he explained some of the unprecedented features of the current recession. Among other things, he pointed out the unusual nature of our trade deficit with China. Normally, when a large trade deficit occurs, the currency of the importer nation (the US in this case) weakens relative to the currency of the exporter nation. That's because the exporter nation has an excess of the other nation's currency. That weakening of the currency causes imported goods to increase in price until domestic manufacturing becomes competitive or exports balance out he imports.

However, much of the fuel in China's current economic growth comes from exports and the Chinese government wants to keep feeding that fire. Therefore, the Chinese government buys dollars from exporters in exchange for Yuan. But to balance the trade deficit, they have to get those dollars back into the US. They do so by buying US Treasuries. In other words, we export debt to balance our importing of goods.

So, what would happen if, by some miracle, we balanced the federal budget in 2011? Chinese institutions wouldn't have a place to put their dollars, the trade deficit would weaken the dollar relative to the Yuan, imports would become more expensive to us just as our exports became less expensive to Chinese consumers. Domestic manufacturing would increase, unemployment would decrease.

Of course, domestic economic stability would occur at the expense of reduced growth in the Chinese economy. Whether they would accept that without taking some action we may never know..

Quote of the Day: Paul Brooks

Written text is a primitive but powerful form of virtual reality.
  - Paul Brooks

How Much Daylight Do You Save?

Shortcut: Click Here for the Daylight Saving Calculator

Tonight most of us in North America get to sleep an extra hour as we go off of Daylight Saving Time. Before 2007 the shift would already happened. The US Energy Policy Act of 2005 added four weeks to Daylight Saving time. The end of daylight savings was delayed by one week in the fall (possibly to keep it lighter for trick or treaters) and it now starts three weeks earlier in the spring. These changes took effect in 2007.

I've always been skeptical of the value of Daylight Saving Time. Though I'm not great at it, I still subscribe to Benjamin Franklin's admonishment, "Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise. Having the sun rise and set later reduces the incentive to rise and retire early. Ironically, Franklin is widely credited with inventing daylight savings time. In fact, his writings on the subject were satirical.

Three years ago, when the new daylight rules took effect, I decided to find out how much daylight is really saved. The theory of Daylight Saving is that any daylight before you rise from bed is daylight "lost." Therefore, the amount of daylight you "save" will depend on three things: your latitude, your longitude and the time you wake up in the morning. Here's why:

• Latitude: The higher your latitude -- the further you are from the equator -- the more dramatically the length of the day changes between winter and summer. Above the arctic circle, the sun says up for days or weeks in the summer and sets for the same amount if time in midwinter.
• Longitude: If you are at the Eastern edge of your timezone the sun will rise approximately an hour earlier than on the Western edge.
• Rise Time: If you rise before the sun and retire after it sets then there is no daylight to be saved. Any daylight to be saved is between sunrise and "you rise."

With that in mind, I put on my programmer hat and wrote my Daylight Savings Calculator. This calculator takes the city you live in and your rise time and calculates how much daylight is saved under the old and new US rules. If your city isn't listed, you can choose one nearby or enter your latitude, longitude and timezone. It has a few limitations: If you enter a latitude above the Arctic Circle it does strange things. Also, it follows US rules for daylight saving regardless of your location. So, if you enter a latitude in the Southern hemisphere it will accurately plot the length of the days but the calculations of daylight to be saved will be really wrong.

Click here to try it out!

With my recent move to Seattle it's interesting to see how much more dramatic the lay-length shifts are. Using a rise time of 6:30am, I saved 149 hours of daylight in Provo and save 181 hours of daylight in Seattle.

Despite these savings of daylight, I'm still skeptical about whether the savings result in a net benefit or liability. The Wikipedia article on the subject discusses energy use, economic effects, public safety and health. Overall, there's more controversy than conclusion. 

Coercing the Vote

Its election day again. This one has potential to be the most memorable in my lifetime. But my subject is is the security of the vote.

Last year I wrote about the insecurity of DRE voting machines. Those systems have not improved in the last year though there is growing awareness of their vulnerabilities.

This year we are voting for the first time in the State of Washington. In this state 38 of 39 counties use a vote by mail system. Eighteen days before the election, the county auditor mails ballots to all registered voters. Voters mark their ballots in the privacy of their homes. Ballots go into an inner "security" envelope and an outer mailing envelope. They sign an oath on the outer envelope and mail it in via US Mail or drop it in a specially marked, secure drop box on or before election day.

Vote by mail has some useful advantages:

• Voters can take their time marking their ballot -- researching the candidates and issues that they might not have been aware of before looking at the ballot.
• The cost of running an election is substantially reduced.
• People who will be out of town on election day can cast their ballots early without figuring out special early voting provisions.
• Paper ballots offer a physical record of voter intention that can be manually counted to verify that electronic scanners are working properly. Of course, manual counts aren't necessarily accurate either.

The system has some important safeguards:

• The voter's name and voter ID number appear on the outer envelope ensuring that no voter votes more than once.
• The ballot is inserted into an inner security envelope thereby allowing the ballot and the voter's name to be separated before the vote is visible.
• The public is invited to observe the vote counting process to make sure that counting is done properly and confidentiality is maintained. Since counting is concentrated at a relatively few places, fewer observers are required to cover all locations.

However, there remain vulnerabilities:

• Since ballots are marked away from the polling place, it is possible for someone to coerce another's vote and verify that the ballot is cast according to their mandate. Votes can literally be bought.
• Individuals can steal ballots from mailboxes, mark them, forge the signature and send them in.
• Unscrupulous mail workers could intercept and destroy ballots before they reach the counting place. Since the voter's name appears on the outer envelope, it is easy to do so selectively.
• Sophisticated criminals could intercept the mail -- steam open the envelope and substitute a different ballot. Or simply replace with a forged outer envelope.
• A bright-light scanner with digital image processing could penetrate the envelope and paper to detect how a particular ballot has been cast.

There's a big difference between these manipulations and hacking electronic voting machines. As I wrote last year, electronic voting machines can be hacked and the vote manipulated in such a way that no evidence is left behind. With the exception of coercion, the manipulations I've listed leave physical evidence.

Here are some additional safeguards that would help:

• Move the voter ID number and the signature to the inside of a cleverly-designed envelope. This would keep casual manipulators from knowing which ballots to intercept.
• Encourage voters to use drop boxes instead of mail as much as possible. Invite public observation of the drop box collection process.
• Ensure voters know that coercion is a crime that should be reported.
• Notify voters of when to expect their ballots in the mail and encourage reports of missing ballots.

Overall, I'm happier with Washington's vote by mail system than I am with Utah's Direct Entry machines. I just hope that people are on the lookout for manipulation.

The Following added on 4 November 2010 at 9:15am:


Since writing the original post I've learned two things. First, King County offers a website where I can track the processing of my ballot (you can too if you know my birthdate). As of this writing, they've received the ballot but it's awaiting verification of my signature before they process the vote. So, despite submitting my vote a week ago, it has yet to be counted. That's not too strange as there is still 30% of the statewide vote yet to count and a large fraction are in King County.

Second, this article from the freakonomics blog says that vote by mail actually reduces voter turnout -- at least in Switzerland.

How Confused We Are!

When I was in MBA school in the early '90s our Economics class was divided into teams each of which was to propose a new US federal budget. As my team dug into the existing budget we quickly noticed the rapid growth of mandatory spending would soon outstrip discretionary spending. Therefore, it didn't matter what was done about the budget (which only addresses discretionary spending) if the mandatory spending wasn't brought under control. Our projections had mandatory spending accounting for more than 70% of the federal budget by the year 2004.

Welfare reform delayed things a bit but we're still approaching the point at which mandatory spending will be unsustainable. In fiscal 2009, $2.1 Billion or 61% of the federal budget was mandatory spending including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and interest on the national debt.

This isn't really a surprise. A recent USA Today/Gallup poll indicates that three out of four Americans "predict that the costs of entitlement programs will create major economic problems." At first, this seems hopeful. With a majority of people concerned, perhaps there's the political will necessary to make reforms. However, only 44% are in favor of raising taxes and only 34% are in favor of cutting benefits. A mere 12% say both remedies are required. That means that for any proposed solution, a majority of Americans are against it.

How confused we are!

Waiting for Superman

We went to see Waiting for Superman on Friday. Many critics are claiming that the movie oversimplifies the education problem by vilifying unions and promoting charter schools. While both arguments are made, the information is far more nuanced than that and there is a lot more to learn. You must see this film!

I just want to highlight and juxtapose two facts from the movie:

First: In the next 20 years our education system will not produce enough college graduates to fill US needs. By 2018 the shortfall will be 3 million and it will grow from there. These vacancies need to be filled either by increasing the performance of our education system or by immigration.

Second: While most of our schools (public, private and charter) preserve the "achievement gap" between lower and middle-class students. A growing set of innovative schools including KIPP charter schools and the Harlem Children's Zone have not only closed the gap but have elevated children of poverty-stricken areas to perform better than their middle-class competitors. Their models have been followed more than 100 schools with repeatable results.

These two facts combined mean that it's within our power to fill the need for a well-educated workforce from our most poverty-stricken neighborhoods.

Updated 26 Oct 2010: Added correct employment shortfall number with link.

Meridian School Legacy

The message on Meridian School's website is simple and to the point: "It is with deep regret ... that after 21 years, the Board of Trustees has decided to close the school."


Only last fall we celebrated the school's 20th anniversary with a Gala celebration and an expectation of many more years to come. Unfortunately, Meridian is another victim of the recession.


Many Meridian students have transferred to charter schools, others to the regular public schools. Most are happy and I expect that all will do well.

This post is to celebrate some of the things that made Meridian unique. The legacy remains in the hearts of hundreds of students, parents, teachers, staff and friends of the school.

Emotional Security
One year I served as chaperon when Meridian competed in the Utah Shakespearean Festival. Unlike larger schools that selected their best drama students, Meridian closed classes and took nearly the entire upper and middle schools. As I watched the kids perform monologues, dialogs, a dance number and two ensembles I was struck by their confidence on the stage and how much they were enjoying themselves.

Another parent and I pondered what might be the source of such stage confidence. We agreed that it was the safety these students felt among their peers. At an age when most kids are exposed to ridicule and bullying and struggle to find a place to belong, Meridian students welcomed new friends, encouraged each other to try new things and celebrated a variety of backgrounds, religions, languages and races. This welcome culture permeated the student body, faculty and staff.

Individualized Learning
Much of my work in education technology has been finding ways to customize the learning experience to meet individual needs. Meridian managed to do this with small classes and teachers who cared enough to adapt classes and offer individual assistance. Students would immerse themselves in subjects with language plays, historical banquets, period dance and may other fantastic activities.

Diverse Cultural Experiences
Meridian reached well beyond Utah Vally to expose students to other cultures. Full-time international students came from Korea, Japan, Europe and South America. Sister schools were chosen in Germany and Japan with biannual exchange trips in both directions. Students and faculty demonstrated understanding and respect for different religions, political beliefs and national background. International week and the language fair furthered this respect and students grew up knowing that their best friends could have very different beliefs from their own.

Breadth of Experience
At Meridian you didn't have to choose between sports, drama, music and language. Everyone did it all. The sports teams were open to anyone committed to making practice. The spring musical had to be scheduled around the basketball schedule because most of the cast was also on the team. When the seniors on the 2010 basketball team were honored it was disclosed that all were also taking AP Calculus! At Meridian we believed that high school was too soon to specialize.

Other things I'll miss:

• Writing Rally
• Broadway Rocks
• Fear Factor
• Extreme Theatre
• Language Skits
• Christmas Vespers
• Medieval Banquet
• German Exchange
• Kindergarten Buddies
• Mongoose Mornings (with Minton)
• Quantum Leap and the Black Hole Cafe
• Random students running up to me and saying, "I won the game!"
• At the game: "Presenting... the Meridian Mongoo.. Mongeese... Mongooses... whatevertheyare!"

Goodbye Meridian. Farewell my friends!