I saw a recent report that teenage unemployment was edging over 27%. First, I am wondering with US High School graduation rates nationally at under 70% (http://www.higheredinfo.org/dbrowser/index.php?measure=23) why parents or schools are encouraging students to work. I believe wholeheartedly in experience, but not at the expense of education. Current BLS data (http://www.bls.gov/emp/emptab7.htm) indicates that unemployment is related to educational attainment.

So here’s an idea. Let’s pay kids to stay in school. Give them a bonus for graduation. For children, learning is their job. I see how stressed my kids are with school and the balancing act they do to incorporate work, even part-time. So if the government wants to stimulate the economy, rather than pushing green jobs or housing starts, why don’t they just pays kids to stay in school. Estimates suggest teens spend about $178 billion of their own money and influence about a quarter of that number of their parent’s money. So in this down economy, as we are attempting new ways to stimulate spending, let’s stimulate minds as well. Most teens won’t save, they will spend, and they will buy the kinds of things that help retail and services. Paying the nearly 3M (see 233) seniors this year for graduating would be a great start to their college and vocational careers, whatever those careers may be, and it would be but a rounding error on the money spent that has offered poor traction, and certainly less traceability.

As the economist reported in their August 22nd edition (Hugo Chavez seeks to catch them young), Hugo Chavez is reforming education in Venezuela to deepen the ideological hold he is asserting on his nation. American needs to combat Chavez’s ideology, not just through rhetoric, clandestine activities and economic pressures, but through a concerted effort to combat ideas with ideas. This lack of engagement on the ground with viable, culturally sensitive ideas that are not just written on paper, but can be seen through action will be required if we are to present an alternative, not only in the eyes of the world, but in the eyes of the Venezuelan people. Our national education plan should not be limited to the communication of ideas in the United States, but should have clear goals for at least distributing the ideas of democracy abroad. It seems we so often use words that have been disarmed by over use and under definition. We need to ensure that what we stand for gets translated in a way that it can be understood and absorbed by those who question us. Venezuela and Ecuador offer places to learn, in cultures we claim to understand and in a language in which many of these ideals already exist. Unfortunately any claim to understanding the Latin American psyche is on shaky grounds these days. We dare not make the mistake we made in the Middle East, least we turn from words to weapons to assert ourselves. Words and ideas are much more lasting means to the ends we seek.

The Economist

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The US push toward improved education needs to be careful. As I read simultaneously about the $4.35 billion Race to the Top fund and the rise of evidence-based management, I see a discontinuity. The top bullet in the Department of Education’s release says: “Adopting internationally benchmarked standards and assessments that prepare students for success in college and the workplace.” From what I am reading about evidence-based management from my friend Bob Sutton and his college Jeff Pfeiffer, is, and I agree, the need for scientifically valid experiments that prove what is right and wrong. The idea of benchmarks that stand on shaky scientific footings, as most do, will lead to the perception of improvements in our schools, not necessarily real improvements, because we don’t have objective facts that define what good is.

I have similar issues and questions with the other bullets in the release:

• Recruiting, developing, rewarding, and retaining effective teachers and principals;  (as I have blogged before, we don’t have a good model for teacher performance, because we don’t have a good model for knowledge work. Until we create an effective model for teaching, we are guided by personal experience, anecdote and myth, not by the measurement of results that are consistent across educators and institutions).
• Building data systems that measure student success and inform teachers and principals how they can improve their practices; and (same point as above. If we don’t have good models, we will build tools that measure the wrong things. We need to be extremely cautious here because measurement will drive behavior, and the President’s heart may be in the right place, but at this point, the collective brain for government won’t know how to measure success. A couple of simple questions: what is success in education? Is it people prepared for work? People prepared to be engaged citizens of the country? People prepared to be engaged citizens of the world? Something more, something less? Until we define the desired outcome, we can’t start to hypothesis about how to reach it, let alone consistently measure our progress.)
• Turning around our lowest-performing schools (again, how is performance measured? What is the goal?)

This work to improve education should include funding for understanding performance, at the broadest level. We need to develop a scientifically valid understanding of education performance and we need to craft a strategic definition of education goals for the nation. Only then can this level of funding be applied in a way that is meaningful. If we have truly elected a government that wants to have its decisions governed by facts, it needs to equally acknowledge when frameworks for facts don’t exist, where theories of measurement are lacking, and fund that work while it remediates issues in the short-term.

President Obama is scheduled to reveal his plans for the Nation’s community college system this afternoon. What he doesn’t address is the perception issues related to two-year institutions. Many organizations still value 4-year degrees over 2-year degrees. If we look at the rapid change in knowledge, with many science and technology majors facing obsolesce of knowledge within the timeframe of a single 4-year degree program, the entire education system should see an innovative opening: life-long learning. Many discuss life-long learning, but only the community colleges are setup to manage students who drop in and out of education to hone skills or reskill. Rather than being the home to Associate Degrees and preparation for transfer to 4-year universities, community colleges should carve out their unique strategic message as the home to life-long learning. Research approaches, learning how to learn, internalizing curiosity and intellectual rigor are not unique to 4-year institutions. Businesses will soon be crying out for people who can rapidly assimilate new skills and extend existing ones. Tough innovative positioning and the dissolution of campus-centric learning the community college system can become the facilitator of life-long learning, and by doing that, transform our Nation’s readiness to engage with the future.

More on today’s speech here: White House releases details of Obama community college plan.

Next year I will be working with Bellevue College as a Liberal Arts Fellow. I look forward to learning with and through you as well as the students at the college.  Read more here.

With one daughter in college and another on the way, I thought it was important to write to our legislators in support of education. The following is the brief note that I sent to our legislators last night.

Dear Representatives,

I am disappointed that when balancing the budget, we are choosing to balance that budget to the detriment of our future. Our young people represent the single most important investment we can make in the future. Education is not budget item through which we should draw our red pens. Granted, there may be opportunities for efficiencies and cost savings, even innovation across campuses and new business models, but the core  funding for students to attend classes and the salaries of their educators should not be subject to budget reductions, nor should the basic opportunity for students to attend an institution that is functional rather than academically and administratively constrained.

As the author of a book about the future of business, and as an active member of the Bellevue College advisory community, I know how important it is for young people to not only be educated, but to be educated with a positive experience. We need to think deeply and creatively about how we envision our state, the continuity of our education system and the role that our young people play in that future. I was disheartened the other day when I heard the Asparagus growers on NPR say that they looked forward to out of work drywallers and framers coming to work for them this growing season. That the economic downturn was a good thing for the shortage of agricultural workers. Although I can sympathize with the issues of our agriculture sector, we should not be having a discussion about returning to our agrarian roots during this economic down turn. We should be talking about innovation and reinvention. As the past as demonstrated, much of our economy stems from the ideas that occur to young people while at university, and that often the relationships they build their form the initial infrastructure of talent that transforms ideas into innovation into market realities. If we limit education we limit our future. That is not a choice I am willing to make, and it is not one our state should be willing to make either. If our future is to be a sustainable one, if we are to make the leap from the industrial age to the knowledge economy, we can only do that by fostering the growth of knowledge and nurturing the core capability for solving complex problems. That will not happen by forcing young people to acquire low wage jobs and balance their education against meager incomes, it will only come through a support system that helps those young people achieve their highest aspirations, not settle for the next best.

I encourage you to think long and hard about where we invest and where we divest, where we balance and where we create dissonance. I know you all believe education is important. As you struggle with the budget, you need to make sure that you act on your beliefs and support Washington’s future, not through rhetoric and good intentions, but through active support of the institutions whose students will be caring for our future, and governing this state long after we retire—and I hope, as I know you do, that we have educated them, and mentored them, and set a good example for them so that they value learning as much as I know we all do.

Please pick up your pen or use your keyboard to support continuing the strong tradition of education in Washington and other states facing these hard choices. Our economic future depends on the leadership we provide now, and that our children learn to take on as they learn.

A student with no interest in biotechnology, flying in space or materials science finds it difficult to connect to science, but in this world, and even more so in the future, science needs to be a fundamental part of our language and our reasoning. From the technology we use to communicate, to the chemistry experiments we perform on ourselves, either by prescription or illicit choice, science is everywhere. I was very disheartened by two recent, and related pieces, in Science News that illustrate this point.

First, the publication of biased or incomplete information about drug studies (Many Drug Trials Never See Publication) which reports the lack of transparency in the drug development process. Those are for drugs that are developed by drug manufacturers.

And then, in the same issue, a study is published that says Ginkgo biloba fails to stave off mental decline in the elderly (Ginkgo Biloba Fails Drug Test). I found this interesting because of what the sutdy didn’t say, not what it said. What it said was that a large trail (3,000 individuals) with the average age of 79 found no difference in their mental state decline when Ginkgo was compared with placebo-based treatment. The quote says that the study “adds to the substantial body of evidence that G. biloba extract as it is generally used does not prevent dementia.”

What the study doesn’t report is the effect of G. biloba on the elderly for those who have taken it for a large number of years, well before their 70s.

The G. biloba report is an example where the headline is brandished around and the supplement deemed unredeeming when in fact the study creates a clear context which should not be extended beyond the its direct conclusions.

My bias, I take Ginkgo everyday. I have for years. If its properties help stave off dementia for days or years I don’t know. I don’t know because I don’t know of a study that says people taking it from their 20s did or did not experience dementia at above or below average rates. That is a study that needs to be done. Until it is, the conclusions will remain inconclusive.

We all need to understand science. We need to encourage our children to understand science, because it is through systematic questioning that we advance knowledge. There are many questions that need to be asked, and if the citizens of the world don’t ask them, it is highly likely that corporations and governments will only ask those questions that are convenient or self-serving. And if we continue to let that happen, we will choose the quality of our lives through our ignorance rather than our intelligence.

Medicinal Plants of the Northeast, Brandeis