It's Action Time

2011-02-21T22:38:00.000-08:00

"Watson, come here! I need you" - These were reportedly the first words spoken by Alexander Graham Bell to his assistant Thomas Watson on his "electrical speech machine", which would later be called the telephone. With this one sentence, Bell broke a seemingly insurmountable barrier of enabling live conversations over long distances. Until that time in 1876, the telegraph was the only thing that allowed long distance communications, that too only one way at a time. His new technology allowed the same infrastructure of installed telegraph wires to send live conversations. To the 19th century America, it probably sounded like magic. In a sense, he had broken the figurative "sound barrier".

Fast forward to last week. My entire family was watching the show "Jeopardy". Everyone was glued to the set for three days, since it was the new "Watson", a computer built by IBM, going up against two of the best human Jeopardy players ever. At the end of the first day, the computer was tied with one of the players. By the end of the second day, it was no contest. The computer pulled away rapidly and finished first. By the end of the two round tournament, Watson had won more money than the two remaining contestants combined. One of the other contestants, Ken Jennings, wrote a humorous remark in his Final Jeopardy answer welcoming the "new overlords", i.e., the computers.

So, what is so special about Watson? To get the answer, needs to go back to some history of computing. During my years at Intel, I had the opportunity to discuss speech recognition with leading edge researchers at IBM's TJ Watson Research Center in New York. They were heady times as Moore's Law routinely brought twice the computing power into the field every two years. By 2008, there were more than a billion transistors produced for every man, woman and child on this earth. And yet, the "sound barrier", so to speak, was not broken. What I mean is the ability of computers to understand natural language. The kind that movie goers watched in "2001 A Space Odyssey" as the astronaut commands computer HAL to "open the pod bay door, HAL", HAL rebuts him by saying "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that". To the human brain, this skill is learned by age two or three. And yet, training a computer to understand natural language has eluded scientists for a long time, until now. Watson's accomplishments are even more significant, in that the computer had to understand the quirks of the game, unusual contexts, and go up against two of the best players ever to play on TV. On the minus side, Watson only had to decipher the text, not the spoken words. But I am guessing integrating it is not that far off either, since many commercial programs like Dragon Naturally Speaking already convert spoken words to text.

What does this mean for the future? For now, at least, Watson is a supercomputer in IBM research lab that fills an entire room, and was programmed by some leading research scientists. However, the same can be said for the Eniac, the first computer ever built, circa 1950. The four function pocket calculators that had more processing power than the Eniac followed less than two decades later, using the newly invented transistor technology. Since then, the pace of innovation in computer hardware has accelerated to the point where we may have Watson like technology in our palms less than a decade from now. Elements of such technology are already in use and ubiquitous today. These can already be put to good use to help our students learn new skills and concepts much faster than traditional methods, especially in fields like mathematics.

These are exciting times to be consumers of technology, and the future looks even better.

One Million Engineers A Year - And Counting

2010-11-04T10:17:00.000-07:00

I recently returned from a trip to India, my second one this year. As I was getting on the return flight to Mumbai, I could see hundreds of armed guards being deployed throughout Mumbai - in anticipation of President Obama's first official visit. Even though his trip was a few days away, it was evident that the Indian government was not going to take any chances. Security would be air tight in a city that, like New York, experienced the "26/11" terrorist attack. Obama will then proceed to New Delhi, the capital city, to meet with the government officials, and address the Indian Parliament, among other things.

Buried in all the hubbub was what was NOT included in his agenda. Despite several recommendations in both countries, Obama will not be visiting Bangalore, a city that he has often tried to put down in his speeches. Bangalore, after all, is the high tech capital of India, home of several internationally renown IT companies like Wipro and Infosys. In his speeches, Obama often points to Bangalore as the place where the American corporations ship jobs to, supposedly creating unemployment here in the US. But let us step back a bit from the rhetoric and look at the facts, which in my opinion point to a totally different source for the current woes in this country.

First, let us review some axioms that I will use for this blog. Simply put, every economy needs people with different skills. Some, like scientists, engineers, technicians, researchers, create new intellectual property (such as patents) which can be turned into new and unique products (such as iPods, iPhones etc.), which can be sold for a profit in the marketplace. Some others, such as doctors, nurses, accountants, etc. help keep people and corporations healthy and humming. But by themselves, they can only reach a peak of 100%, and no more. Then there are others that, suffice to say, redistribute the wealth that is created by other professions. Currently, hedge fund managers come to mind as the favorite villains, but the entire government machinery, which taxes some to send benefit checks to others, while taking a cut to maintain its bureaucracy, falls in this category. The entire legal system also falls in this category, although austensibly it exists to maintain "fairness" in society. But it needs to be perfectly clear that the wealth creating part of every economy MUST create and sustain enough wealth so the other parts can function as designed. When the wealth creation engine starts dying, the others start dying as well.

When we look at the current state of our economy, it is amply evident that we have too many people in the latter two categories, and too few in the first. It is a forgone conclusion that our manufacturing base has been systematically dismantled and shipped to other countries, mostly China. But even more dismaying is the fact that our engineering schools have been graduating an ever smaller crop of future wealth builders. The number of bachelors' degrees in this country has slowly eroded from about 85,000 per year at the end of the '70s to about 70,000 in 2010. By itself, this does not mean much unless you compare it to emerging countries. China is said to have a capacity of around 600,000 to 700,000 engineering graduates per year, which explains why everything worth manufacturing is done in China. The come-from-behind story is India, where five short years ago, the capacity was around 500,000. By 2010, it has shot up to a million. Five southern states of Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka (where Bangalore is situated), Tamil Nadu, and Kerala account for nearly 70% of this capacity, mostly initiated by the state governments by allowing private foundations to start schools. Just to understand how mind boggling this number is, it will take only two years for India to produce as many engineers as the US did in the last 30 years! And what will these engineers be doing in India? Anything that IBM, Cisco, Microsoft, Intel, Boeing, GE, and hundreds of other Fortune 500 companies want them to do. And let us not forget local companies like Tata Group, Reliance Group, Infosys, Wipro, HCL, and hundreds of government owned enterprises (including the space agency which recently sent a probe to the moon), and small enterprises. Even if the Obama administration ends tax breaks for companies that hire people in other countries, the genie is out of the bottle. Companies in the US simply have more choice and lower costs when it comes to hiring in India. If the US companies do not have a presence where the talent is, they lose to other European, Asian and Indian companies which hire profusely in India. A side benefit for the Indian economy is the 10 million or so high school seniors who study several years of physics, chemistry, math and computer science, aspiring to be engineers, doctors or scientists, but end up in other jobs such as technicians, accountants, and bureaucrats, with a much higher cognitive base compared to their foreign couterparts. This reality is unlikely to change any time soon.

So, what can the US do to counter this tsunami of engineering talent? First of all, turning off the tap of foreign talent alone will not jump start the economy here. We need to gear the education system to produce more wealth builders, a task that is easier said than done. Capacity to educate engineers is hard to come by, with fewer qualified professors and expensive facilities. Also, with around 90% of our children being educated in public schools, fewer and fewer students come to college with the knowledge and skills, let alone enthusiasm, to study engineering. With public schools coming up with a million reasons why they cannot change, the only way out appears to be to create a parallel system of schools that is more nimble and responsive to the economic realities. To their credit, both president Obama and his education secretary Arne Duncan have been promoting charter schools, which when done right, can accomplish what is needed. But even if someone were to wave a magic wand today, and made every school in this country a charter school, I think it will take at least a decade or longer to see measurable change in wealth creation. Add to this the gentrification of population, we have a long and bumpy ride ahead.

Welcome to the 21st century!

How To Kill The Golden Goose

2010-10-18T12:29:00.000-07:00

While watching the recent economic blight that has struck America, I am often reminded of the Aesop's fable about the goose that laid golden eggs. There was a farmer who had a goose that laid a golden egg each day, the story goes, which the farmer sold to support his modest living. Until one day, the farmer got greedy and killed the golden goose thinking he will find a stash of eggs inside, only to end up with no golden eggs, and no goose that would have laid them either.

While there may be a lot of morals and interpretations of the tale, the one that appeals to me in the current context is that we have a lot of people around who would like to make a quick killing (no pun intended) rather than find a sustainable way to build wealth. And I don't mean "sustainable" from an ecological perspective, but an economic one. To get into a sustainable, long term growth mode needs long term thinking. And I see the long term thinking being continuously sacrificed for quick, short term gains. That is where, I think, countries like China outdo us consistently. Let me elaborate.

A reporter once asked former Chinese premier Chou En-Lai (Zhou Enlai) what he thought was the effect of the French Revolution, of 1789, on the rest of the world. He is said to have replied (sic) "It is too soon to say", meaning it was too early to tell. It was nearly two centuries after the incident that he made the comment! In my view, what he was exhibiting was a perspective that only someone whose feet are firmly entrenched in thousands of years of Chinese history could show. Also implicit in his response, in my opinion, was that the leadership of China took a much longer term view of the future when it came to decision making. They would, for example, forgo today's return if it meant much better returns ten years, or even fifty years. They focused on educating their young in the most rigorous math and science classes, even though their families could barely afford a decent living. They created a pseudo capitalistic system where individuals can create small businesses focused on export. They backed bright ideas with capital to take to market, even if it did not produce quick gains. Using these and many other longer term strategies, China went from being the begging bowl of the world, to the industrial giant that now has the world's largest automobile market, makes almost ten times the steel compared to the US, exports everything from toothbrushes to air conditioners to practically every country in the world, and has the world's largest standing army. The US owes a Trillion dollars (that is 1 followed by 12 zeroes) to the Chinese government, and there is very little we make that the Chinese want to buy. It is said that 600 of 800 suppliers for Wal Mart, an "American" retailer, are from China.

Going back, it has been nearly half a century since Premier Enlai said those famous words, and he is long gone. But thinking like his, I contend, has shaped China into a giant that every nation has to take seriously, including the United States. The funny thing is, it is not just China that has used this trick. Many nations that rose out of the ashes of WWII used the same recipe to race past us economically, in less than two generations. Germany and Japan were the earliest, followed by the Asian Tigers Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. If this strategy has worked for them, it should work here as well, right? Perhaps - if we thought like they did. The big question is, how to get such thinking ingrained into the psyche of the American people so that we too can dig out of this hole?

One possible way is to look to our so called leaders, and see how they think. Maybe there is some hope that a group of them will suddenly snap to a new grid called "long term thinking", and start role modeling it. Then the followers will follow, and the rest will be written in the annals of history. Right? Right. So which one of multiple breeds of leaders are thinking this way? Let us do a quick status check:

Political Leaders: The behavior of political leaders, I am led to understand, is shaped by the election cycles. Deny as they may, getting elected has become so dependent on money that the moment someone gets elected, they get busy raising funds for the next election. Out with the long term focus, and in with reelection tactics. When the focus goes to fund raising, unfortunately, special interests with deep pockets move in to garner influence - often to make quick gains. After all, there is no guarantee the politician will get reelected anyway. Legislation often ends up in short term window dressing, and a lot of pork to keep the deep pockets happy. So, there does not appear to be any cheese at the end of this tunnel.

Business Leaders: Ostensibly, businesses are supposed to be in there to create value by inventing new things and making lives more convenient. They are also supposed to compete in an open market and make manufacturing efficient. But once a business grows large enough to edge out competitors, it behaves more like a monopoly. The leaders, at least in my observation, tend to look towards the next quarterly profits. Often, a long term investment gets shoved under the rug while making the next quater's results look better. Efficiency comes via finding cheaper places to make things (China!) while cutting labor in the US. It has taken retired executives like Bill Gates and Craig Barrett to see the light, but they are quite in the minority, and don't wield the same influence as they did when they were at the helm of their respective companies. Most of the time, I see there is no cheese to be found here either.

Union Leaders: Unions started out with a noble mission of protecting the exploited workers and giving them a steady wage and protection from "the greedy capitalist". In the last half century, however, the collective bargaining agreements have had the contrary effect, of "killing the goose". One example - GM and Chrysler had to declare bankruptcy because they could not afford the $70 an hour total compensation, and pensions, guaranteed by the union contracts. All this while, the transplants like Toyota, Honda, Hyundai etc. employed non union labor at $40 per hour and sold quality cars at competitive prices. In another example, recent movies like "Waiting for Superman" (see my previous blog) have hammered on the teacher's unions for being inflexible when it comes to allowing meaningful reform that actually benefits students. But the actions, as depicted by votes in union elections, have not budged from time worn, ineffective practices. Even though there are a small number of excellent teachers, it seems nearly impossible in the current system to have every teacher be excellent (deny as they may). Hmm, the cheese is getting pretty elusive.

Community Leaders: I have been involved in volunteering in schools and the community for several years now, and most of the time, the so called community leaders are forced into the role of the safety net. When everything else fails, community volunteers tutor minority kids, keep them busy and out of danger after school, mentor at-risk students, and so on. This is one group that probably sees what needs to be done, but is stretched too thin cleaning out today's mess to do anything for tomorrow. After all, there is already a flood of unemployed and underemployed people with families to feed TODAY. Who has time for TOMORROW? Sorry, no cheese here.

So who is left now? That's right, you and I. We have numbers on our side, but no organization. Because the organizations that we created to look out for us have morphed into what I consider unrecognizable entities. It is up to the average person to get into the long term thinking mode. To value education in schools (duh!) and de-emphasize sports. To get real academic competition into our schools, not the fuzzy "cooperation" that has failed to produce results. To goad our politicians to create venture funds to bring good ideas to market instead of sprinkling printed money indiscriminately. To build more science and technology schools, and pay a differential to teachers with scarce skills. To ask our political candidates what their long term goals are for their constituency, instead of spending millions on TV ads telling us how rotten their opponent is. Perhaps then it will start something that will produce results, maybe a little slower than in the past.

Hey, it only takes a couple of generations!

Superman meets Rip Van Winkle

2010-10-01T17:48:00.000-07:00

After several months of taking time off blogging, I am starting again. I see that this election season has served up some "once in a lifetime" issues worth blogging about. Especially in focus is my pet subject, the K-12 education system.

In the recent weeks, there has been a lot of buzz about the movie Waiting For Superman. It has had rousing premieres in New York and Los Angeles on September 24, and will see wider release in the coming weeks (October 1st in Seattle and October 8th in Portland). Directed by Davis Guggenheim of "An Inconvenient Truth" fame, and promoted by high powered leaders like Bill Gates and President Obama himself, this movie promises to raise the awareness of another inconvenient truth - that our public education system has failed, and presents some ideas that have actually worked. This problem has arguably existed for at least the last 30 years, or at least since the "Nation At Risk" report came out in 1983. And I think the public has been asleep for that period of time, blissfully ignoring the problem and wishing it would go away. Well, Einstein was right in saying that doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is the definition of insanity. I choose a much milder state of mind, i.e,. sleep, to compare the public's reaction during this time. Many people have tried heroically to change things, but it is reasonable to believe that since nothing has changed with their effort, a lot more is needed to bring about structural change.

Let us pretend that all the voting public in this country fell asleep (at least as far as public education is concerned) in 1990, and woke up in 2010 and looked at the education statistics. In those 20 years, they would have missed several national studies done on the lack of focus in Science and Math, the "Math Wars", and the recent developments such as the Race To The Top. They would miss the fact that billions were poured to reduce class sizes and teacher development, with no measurable impact on student achievement. They would miss the excitement of watching our top students slide down lower and lower in academic competitions compared to their global peers. "But wait a minute!" you say. "They were not asleep during this time!!" Did it make a difference? I think not. Perhaps because they were caught up in the excitement of the gulf war, the internet revolution, the stock market boom, the 9-11 attacks, gulf war #2, the real estate boom, and so on. Whatever the reason, the most important structural problem plaguing our economy went unnoticed like termites in the basement.

Enter a rotten economy stuck in the greatest downturn since the great depression. "A Nation at Risk" has now become a nation almost completely consumed by risk. Unemployment is stuck near double digits, those who are employed are overworked and stressed out fearing they may be next, and homelessness and poverty are at depression levels. During no other time since the depression have so many people have so much fire in their bellies and so much time on their hands. Add "Waiting For Superman", and now you have added fuel to the fire.

Will the movie finally get the general public angry enough to take control of their children's education? After all, it is our tax money entrusted to the public employees (teachers, administrators, and others) to make sure they stay competitive in this dog eat dog global competition. If the system has failed us, isn't it our civic duty to find out why and demand that it be fixed? I sincerely hope, for the final time, that this is what ends up happening, and not another 20 years of sleep!

Who is Racing To The Top? Apparently not the US

2010-02-16T11:17:00.000-08:00

After a long hiatus in blogging, I finally found something to blog about.

I have been following the drama surrounding the first round of awards for the Federal government Department of Education "Race-To-The-Top" funding. Apparently, there is a $4.3 billion slush fund that Arne Duncan has been given by President Obama to dole out to states that sign up to reform education, with measures like implementing world class standards, taking limits off the number of charter schools, merit pay for teachers, shutting down poor performing schools, etc. Those states that have laws that are already close to meeting these requirements (Massachusetts and Indiana come to mind), will probably be shoo-ins for the first round of awards. Then there are nine states, including the state of Washington, that have chosen not to apply for the first round of financing. Why? My guess is because the states are so far behind in implementing any of the reforms, that they don't feel they have a shot at all. Then there are the "far right" states, like Alaska and Texas, that have predictably thumbed their noses at any hint of a Federally imposed measure. At this rate, it will proabably take years to see a set of common, world class standards, and a system that graduates world class students. This, some people argue, is the hallmark of American Democracy, where local control of schools is paramount, and any Federally imposed program needs to be looked at with skepticism, with lots of debate before each state or district takes action.

To this, I say, "Well, maybe if we lived in a cocoon, isolated from the rest of the world." But the 21st century came with it "3 Billion New Capitalists" according to Clyde Prestowitz's popular book by the same title. About a third of them are from China, and we are all being reminded daily, when we buy stuff at Wal Mart or hear about the trillions they own in our Treasury bills. Their education system, which cranks out more than half million engineers a year, has been labeled autocratic, dictatorial, and draconian in its ways, even though one can seldom argue with the results in the marketplace. OK, it may not be fair to compare China to the US, but how about the largest democracy in the world, which has more students in its K-12 system than China?

I am talking about India, of course. For a brief background, China has about 195 million students in its K-12 system, India has over 210 million. For comparison, the US has about 54 million. Almost all students in China attend public schools, about 88% do so in the US, and perhaps less than 50% in India (stats are unreliable, but most experts say this is a good guess). Urban Indian students from the booming middle class attend private schools (ironically, the moniker "Pubilc School" is commonly used in the titles of private schools). The private schools are reasonably affordable to the newly affluent middle class, they provide a lot more choice in the rigor and breadth of education given to students, and they are stubbornly insistant on high standards. This is a natural evolution of having competition in the education sector, because schools openly advertise their pass rates in state sponsored exit exams and acceptance rates in prestigeous technical and medical colleges. But recently, the choice became a problem because states had varied standards, especially in math and science. When it came to passing entrance exams for prestigeous national universities, the state of residence became a prominent factor. This problem was highlighted in 2009. Within months, all state boards of education came to a consensus that the curriculum should be standardized for math and science in all the states, and in within a span of two years, the new standards and curriculum will be implemented in all the states. In all likelihood, these standards will be as stringent as , if nor more than, the most stringent of state standards. Not a watered down "lowest common denominator" that most committees have been churning out in the US during the last couple of decades.

Here is the link to a newspaper article:

Some relevant quotes:

"Today is a historic day for all students. There will be a core curriculum in the science stream (both science and mathematics) for all school boards across India. This will be implemented in 2011," "It's a milestone that all school boards are one on this and want a core curriculum.. We hope it augurs well." - Kapil Sibal, Mister of Human Resource Development, Govt. of India

"In science, all students are competing at the national level. So the science course should be similar across the country. We are fine with this move and hope that students will benefit the most," - C.L. Gupta, chairman of the School Board of Education, Himachal Pradesh state.

"With this move, all students will have similar opportunity in facing competitive examinations in streams like medicine and engineering." Principal, Ahlcon International School, New Delhi

Evidently, different democracies look at the same issue differently, when it comes to the time it takes to come to a consensus. The more time the governments spend on making key reform decisions, the more handicapped our graduates become when they apply for college of get into the workforce. Maybe the government bureaucrats and elected officials in India have a better grasp of where their education priorities lie, and how to really "race to the top".

VSD Board Candidates - A review

2009-10-25T14:34:00.000-07:00

Most of the articles on this blog so far have been on global, national or state level issues. But since the local schools are where my kids get educated, I decided to drill down to my own district in Vancouver, and talk to some of the candidates. In this highly unscientific interview, I asked each one some standard questions. But mostly, it was an opportunity for me to get to know them as people. After all, they have come forward to volunteer their time and energy as the representatives of the parents, and by proxy the students, of the district. At times like these when money is scarce and student performance is lagging, I thought my blog can add some value to the decision making process of the voters.

Now, for the candidates themselves. For Position 2, we have Mark Stoker(Incumbent) and Chris Peppers, and for Position 3, two newcomers Nelson Holmberg and Kathy Gillespie. In general, the candidates all came across as passionate about something, which I think is good. All of them had a long history with Vancouver. Each one has a website that gives their detailed positions on issues they care about. I have attached URLs for each under the summary.

First, let me articulate what I consider to be my priorities, and then compare them to the candidates'. I believe the top priority and the prime directive of any board member should be student achievement. The data from the district screams lagging math and science scores, widening achievement gap, and huge dropout rates. If our schools are the only public institutions chartered with providing education, and if they are not meeting the charter, it automatically becomes the #1 issue in my mind. Everything else sort of falls out of this prime directive. Secondly, I wanted to see if anyone cared about STEM - Science, Math, Engineering and Mathematics. This has been clearly articulated as a priority by Arne Duncan, the national education secretary, and international competitive data on our school kid's STEM ability is now near the bottom of the list. Third, I wanted our candidates to demand more transparency and accountability in the dealings of the district. As one of the candidates pointed out, VSD meetings happen too early in the day for most parents to attend, they are not televised or archived on line for everyone to see, and the written minutes are not available for public viewing. What's up with that? Then there are issues that I do not consider as priorities. First is the fixation that more money will fix everything, in spite of data that show it does not. I would like the new board to address unnecessary spending first.

So moving right along, my review here is going to go after what they thought were their top three priorities, and my general impression of them as a candidate.

Position 2 - Mark Stoker (incumbent) - Top 3 issues 1. The Levy 2. Achievement Gap 3. Graduation Rate. On the whole, I found Mark to be pleasant and approachable. I was happy to see achievement related issues make it to the top three - both achievement gap as well as graduation rate made it. The levy is something that would have been an appropriate issue during good times, but I believe these are the times to figure out how to do more with less. I thought his second and third priorities were right on the money. Also on the plus side, he is the more experienced candidate for the race.

http://www.markstoker.net/faq

Position 2 - Chris Peppers (challenger) - Top 3 issues 1. Transparency of board operations 2. Community engagement 3. Accountability. Chris was probably the most curious of the four, asking for inputs and data where he felt he did not understand something. I think this is a good trait. However, studnet achievement was only mentioned as a part of transparency. While I agree that the line items on his priority list are important, I think they will automatically fall out of making student achievement the prime directive.

http://www.chrispeppers.net/

Position 3 - Kathy Gillespie - Top 3 issues 1. Academic achievement 2. A budget that is aligned to academic acheivement 3. Connect academics with career goals - esp. high schoolers. I think Kathy's first two priorities were right along mine. She also mentioned STEM as part of her first priority, which I consider a plus for her. She has a lot of volunteer experience in schools, and as a former newspaper editor, she can be an effective communicator.

http://electkathygillespie.com/

Position 4 - Nelson Holmberg - Top 3 issues 1. Funding 2. Safety and Security in Schools 3. Realistic Learning Standards. The only priority that somewhat aligned with student achievement was the last one. Although Nelson was very passionate about transparency and accountability in his conversation, somehow it did not make his top 3. He also believed in bringing new "out of the box" thinking into the board, which I thought was refreshing.

http://www.nelsonholmberg.com/

So, in summary, if I look at alignment to my own set of priotities, the edge goes to Mark Stoker and Kathy Gillespie. However, with that comes the challege of what is not on their list - Accountabily and Transparency in board operations. I hope they put this on their list to address, as we will need the entire community to pull us through the education crisis. But no matter who wins, I don't expect the school board to perform dramatically better than the last one. I would love to be proven wrong, though.

Finally, I would urge the voters to make their own priority lists, and compare them to those of the candidates', and also study the candidate's web sites.

How To Reach A Market Of 3 Billion Poor

2009-10-23T20:57:00.000-07:00

Poor and market? Isn't that an oxymoron? Aren't the poor just supposed to live on the charity of others? And isn't the business of selling to them considered suicide?

Well, this blog is a slight diversion before my planned review of Vancouver School District Board candidates. Sort of like an appetizer. But to see the connection, it takes careful connecting of the dots.

I will start with a short story I used to hear from my best friend in college. There was once a private school for the rich, where only the country club crowd sent their kids. But the teachers wanted to show that these children understood the plight of the poor. So they asked them to write an essay to describe a poor family. One little girl wrote "Once upon a time, there was a very poor family. The father was poor, the mother was poor, the children were poor, the butler was poor, the chauffeur was poor, the gardner was poor, the maids were poor....". Well, you get the idea. The "poor" girl, and many like her, had absolutely no concept of poverty.

One of the popular images of the poor is that they are always looking for a handout, living by the good graces of the wealthy. One person from Bangladesh proved them wrong. He is Mohammad Yunus, the winner of the Nobel Peace prize. Now, if you think our President's preemptive award was a long shot, consider this - Mr. Yunus was not a peacenik. He did not broker any agreements between warring nations or religions. He did not take care of sick and dying lepers in the streets of Calcutta. He is a banker and an economist by profession. Why did he not get his Nobel Prize for Economics instead? Was the Nobel committee bonkers to give him the award? I think not. If I recall their rationale correctly, they gave it to him because his actions of empowering the poor to be financially independent and self sufficient were a greater contributor to world peace than someone brokering a peace agreement between two warring factions, only to see it flare up a few years later.

So, now the question comes up - what exactly did he do? First, he started with one of the poorest economies of the world - Bangladesh. Their per capita GDP is about $500 per year, a pittance compared to the US at about $47,000 per year. Second, most of the economy of Bangladesh is still rural and agrarian. The urban employment model has still not reached the masses. Third, the people who run the agrarian economy were self employed farmers and their families. The men do most of the manual labor, the women do the housework and sometimes weave baskets for extra cash. Unfortunately, the people who lent them money to buy the raw materials were unscrupulous loan sharks, which left them with very little after they sold their wares. Enter Mr. Yunus. He set up a new private banking institution called "Grameen Bank" (translates to "Rural Bank" from Bengali). His bankers did not sit in posh, air conditioned buildings waiting for business to come to them. They rode their bicycles from town to town, squatting on raw dirt to do business with housewives who wanted to borrow money, as little as $10 at a time. Yunus somehow must have intuitively felt that the empowered women would return his capital with the above market interest he charged. After all, he was not doing this for charity. He was a businessman. He did not have any market research, because there was none. Even if he paid someone to do it, they would have walked away, thinking he was nuts.

But no one could argue with the results. His on-time capital recovery rate is over 98%, and over 90% of its customers are women. The bank has grown to almost $100 million in revenue, an astonishing sum for a poor country. His model is now being emulated in other Asian nations and in Africa. At the bottom of all this is the faith that everyone has the ability to earn a dignified living, if only the system would allow it. And only someone who lived in that environment could see value in such an enterprise.

Now, you must be wondering - what is the point of all this? Well, I believe that the "New World Order" and the new buzz phrase "21st Century Economy" is going be defined by those who see gold in dirt. There are a lot more people below the poverty level in this world than there are rich. And the traditionally rich, developed economies are aging fast. Even China is aging faster than the other nations in Asia, sans Japan and Korea. And the products that have received a lot of attention lately for sheer value (the Tata Nano, the $2500 "real" car, for example), have come from industrialists and entrepreneurs who saw something no other conventional businessman did. The opportunity that lay behind empowering the poor. And there are products following from other established as well as smaller companies, like a $70 battery powered refrigerator for remote locations. And there are more on the way. Is this profitable? You betcha! Does it improve the standard of living of the dirt poor? Undoubtedly. This is the only scenario I have seen that would make both Adam Smith and Carl Marx happy. Is this a "win-win" scenario or what?

The challenge lies in how we train our young. Not only will they need sharp minds, great math and science skills, prodigious knowledge of history and literature, they will need to learn to empathize with those who need the most support - not by giving them a handout, but by offering a holding hand. To teach them how to fish, not just give them fish. Let them feel that they do have the power to control their own destinies. I read the other day that Princeton university is now offering all their freshmen a chance to live abroad for a year before coming back to their sophomore year. Bravo! We need more universities like that. Then we won't have sheltered, rich school kids writing absurd essays about the poor.

"The meek shall inherit the earth" - J. Christ

Peace!

DVD Review - 2 Million Minutes - The 21st Century Solution

2009-09-26T09:43:00.000-07:00

When the DVD 2 Million Minutes first came out, I was late to the party in writing a review on this blog. It was a ground breaking portrayal of the contrast in some of the largest economies of the world. But the blog did have an impact - I was surprised to see how many people had not heard about until they read my blog. This time, I was determined not to be late. So here it is.

First of all, this DVD is not a direct sequel to the first 2 MM DVD. It is the fourth in a series, the second and third were a more in-depth look at the Indian and the Chinese education systems respectively. But the latest one is a drastic change in its focus. After telling us how well the Chinese and the Indians are being educated, Bob has now found an oasis of excellence in the US. And to help make the point, he has interviewed Craig Barrett, the recently retired Chairman of Intel Corp., the largest semiconductor company in the world.

To help find his success story, Bob went to the Newsweek rankings of high school, and picked the top school - Basis Charter school, which started in Tucson, AZ, and now has a second campus in Scottsdale, AZ. For those who are not familiar with Newsweek rankings, it picks its candidates from schools that have the highest AP test takers. Its challenge index, which divides the number of AP tests taken by the number of graduating seniors, is the primary benchmark. The Basis Charter school topped their 2008 survey, with a challenge index score of 17.167 - which means their graduating seniors had taken an average of 17 AP classes (equivalent to about 2 years in a regular college). One other unique feature of this school is that it is not a school for gifted and/or talented students, nor is it a magnet school. Anyone who applies get in, provided they can stand the rigor. One other big difference I found was that they start with 6th grade. This gives those students who are behind a chance to catch up to the rigors of its high school program. They do this in spite of the fact their charter schools get about $1000 per student less than other public schools.

How rigorous is the program? Let us take math, for example, which is the Achilles heel of most public schools. The expectation in Basis Charter Schools is that ALL STUDENTS take AP Calculus exam by 10th grade. This forms the basis for their calculus based science classes in 11th and 12th grades. So, in order to take AP Calculus, they have to take Pre-Calculus in 9th grade, Algebra II in 8th grade, Geometry in 7th grade, and Algebra I in 6th grade. Impossible, you say? Data show that this is not much different from top performing nations in Asia and Europe, and some developing countries in the world. Our best high school is about as good as an average or slightly above average school in those nations. But I digress. Once the gatekeeper requirement of Math is behind them, the students are ready to take other higher level science courses in their junior and senior years.

The result? The school has 100% college placement rate. Their students enter college better prepared than most other high school graduates. All this at a cost about 10% lower than sending an average student to school.

The main video could have been a bit shorter, in my mind. Or including a piece on K-5 school with similar attributes would have rounded it out more. These are minor quibbles. I thought that its main goal, of pointing out that excellence can be achieved within the public school system, at a lower cost, by those who had the fortitude to go against the entrenched monopoly of our public institutions, was achieved.

The one gem in this DVD is the extended interview with Craig Barrett. Although the DVD has snippets of the interview spread throughout the main feature, what really stands out is the added bonus feature. I think it is worth the entire cost ($25) of the DVD. In that interview, Craig answers a few personal questions, along with other questions on his view of the state of public education in the US. The one observation that he makes stuck in my mind as very astute. We have a dichotomy in this country. We have arguably the best post-secondary university system, both public and private, and arguably one of the most mediocre public K-12 education systems by international standards. He pins the underlying difference to the basic structure of these institutions. Our universities, both public and private, have to compete for the best students, the best faculty, and the best learning environment. When institutions compete, the customers, in this case, the students and their parents, win. The public K-12 system is devoid of any competition. Absence of competition, or a monopoly system, according to economists, leads to the lowest quality at the highest possible cost. So, the natural conclusion is - how do we introduce competition in our public education system? I will make this the topic of my next blog.

In the meantime, get your copy of the DVD, sit back, enjoy! Highly recommended.

Here is the publisher's site: www.2mminutes.com

The Real Tragedy at Yale

2009-09-19T15:42:00.000-07:00

I just got back from a college tour of Harvard, Yale and MIT, as part of a ritual, or rite of passage if you will, for one of my kids. Being back on a college campus brought back memories buried deep within. The intellectual freedom, world class student body, fantastic faculty, and then...some tragedy.

It happened when we visited Yale campus in New Haven, CT. The local populace was reeling from the news of the murder of a graduate student. On the day of the visit, the campus newspaper had large headlines "Suspect Arrested", followed by all the gory details of how the body was discovered, and probable cause of death. The admissions seminar, usually an upbeat session, had a somber mood, with a lot of parents asking how safe the campus was.

This was the overwhelming story that drowned out what I thought was another tragedy. The admissions officer mentioned that the directors of Yale had decided to make STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) fields their top priority because "we are not producing enough scientists and engineers, and we are importing them from other countries". Well duh! This has been going on for over three decades, and it has taken so long for it to filter down to one of our elite schools. But wait! There's more. He also mentioned that Yale just spent over $1 billion to build a brand new engineering building, they have a student to faculty ratio of almost 1:1, and they would love to have their students take advantage of it. He said the biggest problem was students enrolling into the school as prospective engineering students, and then switching to some other field during their stay at Yale. Now let's see - you have an ABET accredited engineering program, you are spending over $10 million per engineering student to build a brand new building, and arguably the best student-faculty ratio anywhere, why would anyone want to leave the program?

I asked the gentleman from admissions if he had any solution to the problem. He said he had no idea. But I have a few thoughts as to why students getting into Yale may want to switch fields. Let me count the ways.

1. When one thinks of Yale, one conjures up law, business, and liberal arts. Engineering does not compute.

2. Those who enroll as engieering students have to take a much more rigorous course load compared to their peers in other fields, which makes them feel left out.

3. The Yale dorms, or "colleges" as they are called, are deliberately mixed in more ways than one. The main intent appears to be to cross pollinate different thoughts and ideas, but it also makes the engineering students feel like they are being punished - having to study long hours or do experiments in labs while their dorm mates may be having group discussions on world hunger.

4. On top of all this, a Yale graduate in a liberal arts degree will probably end up with as good a job as a Yale engineer today, although this point is arguable.

No wonder students who enter wanting to be engineers switch to other fields. As if to prove my point, the next admissions officer we met was an engineering graduate from Yale, who chose to work as an admissions officer after graduation. When asked, he said his future plans did not include an engineering career, although I hope he changes his mind.

The reader may be wondering - why is this such a tragedy? After all, students must be free to choose whatever they want. If they want to be doctors or lawyers, it is their choice. I agree to some extent. However, when taken in the larger context of how bad a shape our economy is in, and how we got here, I see a different imperative. We do not have enough professionals working in wealth creating STEM fields. As a corollary, we don't have enough graduates coming out of our colleges with STEM degrees. The new developing economies churn out several times the number of engineers and scientists compared to the US. If we want the economic recovery to have some legs, we need more people working to invent new things that create new wealth. Doctors, lawyers, and liberal arts majors rely on an economy that creates new wealth, and they suffer equally when the economy is in the tank. This implies that if we have a few precious students with talent and motivation in the STEM fields, we should be doing everything we can to nurture them, so they achieve their fullest potential. It is hard enough to keep a student motivated through high school so that he/she takes the most rigorous math and science classes. Do we want to waste the effort by having them switch to another field just because of the college environment?

Fortunately, I found the answer to Yale's problem was only 120 miles away - at MIT. It is a place where talent and achievement in STEM is not only nurtured, but celebrated. Not only do the incoming freshmen feel like they belong there, they go on to achieve at a stunning rate in scientific and engineering fields. Their peers, professors, the entire support system exists to promote technical excellence. They are not alone. There are others like Harvey Mudd, Cal Tech, Rensselaer, RIT, Olin College, and Rose-Hulman, just to name a few, that cater to excellent technical minds. All Yale needs to do is compare how their engineering students are treated versus those in the other tech schools, and they will get their answer.

Want a Harvard degree cheap? Go to India!

2009-09-12T21:38:00.000-07:00

Well maybe in a couple of years, if all goes well in the Indian parliament.

You see, the newly elected UPA (United Progressive Alliance party) government, which has its roots in Mahatma Gandhi's Indian National Congress party, has taken it upon itself to make higher education more international and more competitive. In a recent article on the Times of India (URL below)

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/news/city/mumbai/Foreign-univ-education-in-India-to-be-cheaper/articleshow/5001384.cms

Excerpt: "University presidential delegations from Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon and Purdue have come to India in the past few years to learn more about and from the country. Last week, a team from Imperial College met Sibal and also visited Maharashtra. Several foreign universities keen on coming to India have already moved beyond the spadework—Georgia Tech has bought land in Hyderabad and the Schulich School of Business at York University is “committed’’ to setting up a campus in Mumbai. To mark its presence in the financial capital, this Canada-based management school is offering MBA programmes by partnering with the S P Jain Institute of Management and Research. If all goes as planned, the world will be in the classroom called India by 2010. "

Why would these ivy league colleges look to India to expand their campuses even if it means discounting their normal $50,000 a year in education expenses? Here are my educated guesses:

1. Economics: Most of these universities are research institutions, which charge a fee to do research on various subjects. Most of the research is done by what we grad students used to call "slave labor". Fully qualified graduates who could be earning a living with their bachelor's degrees, but choose to do research in a university at near minimum wage, because it is part of their degree requirement. Well, these bachelor's graduates are plentiful in India, and the minimum wage is about a dollar an hour. This year alone, India graduated over 400,000 engineers, and 300,000 are still looking for work. What better way to get them to do research on the cheap than to entice them with a Masters degree from Harvard?

2. Demographics: India is young, and its baby boomers are still in their teens. Which means more and more qualified people will be graduating from high schools and colleges looking for better opportunities. The US is aging, and the declining incomes of families is unlikely to keep students from attending expensive private schools.

3. Survival: Let's face it. The 21st century will be shaped by growing economies in Asia. Universities like Harvard and Imperial College need to maintain a global footprint, or they will be considered perochial and irrelevant. It would not be out of the realm of possibility for these institutions to have their largest campuses outside their countries of origin in a couple of decades. It has already happened to high tech companies like Hewlett Packard.

It is not like India does not have Internationally recognized private universities. There is the Birla Institute of Science and Technology in Pilani, and the Manipal University in Manipal, which have international reputations already. And hundreds of other private colleges have sprung up to educate the workforce for a booming software industry. But there is a cachet to the presence of institutions that one reads about only in newspapers, and whose alumni are often in international limelight. The new twist is having these universities charge competitive tuitions with local private universities, sort of like selling Cadillacs for the price of a Tata Nano. But, if all goes according to plan, sure as sunrise in the morning, it will happen.

So maybe the next Harvard graduate you meet will proabably sport a Malayali or Gujarati accent. It will be interesting to see how they will compete with the already "world class" graduates from the Indian Institutes of Technology or the Indian Institutes of Management.

My Conversation with Education Secretary Arne Duncan

2009-09-08T06:16:00.000-07:00

We interrupt our regularly scheduled summer vacation to bring you this blog.

What am I saying? Summer officially got over on Labor Day. And what better way to end it than a chat with Arne Duncan?

Frankly, it didn't "just happen". Back in May, Secretary Duncan held an electronic town hall asking for inputs from people all over the country on his proposal to raise the education standards. I wrote a response (see below), along with hundreds of others. I did not expect much to happen as a result, and promptly forgot about it. A couple of months later, I got an email from his press office saying that Secretary Duncan read my comment, and would like to follow up with a phone call. The call was scheduled for this morning, and happened right on schedule - at 5:30 am Pacific Time. In the call, Secretary Duncan asked me when I sensed something was amiss with our public education, and how I got involved in the issues. I summarized what I had found (already in my previous blogs, I think), what some business leaders have said already, and finally, what is happening locally. He also mentioned he believed in more focus on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics), and that he believed math and science teachers need to be paid more. I gave him a brief summary of the local non profit nConnect, and what they are trying to do to promote STEM in local schools. He mentioned that more funding is going to be made available to help achieve his goals, and finally encouraged me to "keep pushing, and don't stop". I thought it was a nice, personal touch. Everything he mentioned resonated with what we are trying to accomplish in our schools, but somehow never get to. Even though it lasted only a few minutes, I felt a lot was communicated by both.

Coincidentally, today also happens to be the day that President Obama speaks to the K-12 students of the nation. His address got some flak from some even before it was given. I read the text of the speech, and could not figure out what the controversy was about. All I saw was emphasis on good old fashioned American values, and encouragement to study more, try harder, and stay in school. I encourage all students to watch the address.

My comment on Secretary Duncan's electronic town hall is attached below:
----------------------

Dear Secretary Duncan:

Thank you for soliciting inputs on what I consider one of the most important issues that this administration faces. Most of the inputs so far appear to be from those close to the education system. I am a first generation immigrant, worked briefly as a university faculty, and spent my entire career as a high tech researcher/manager for a high tech company, before retiring early. Having spent equal time in India and the US, I believe I can bring a fresh perspective to this thread, starting with the following three reasons:

First, I think the US stands in the most critical point in its history, when decisions made can affect the future generations for decades. From what I gather, the total debt (public+private+individual) currently stands at above $50 trillion. Projected unfunded obligations in social security and medicare, plus growth in federal debt, also are projected to be over $50 trillion. These are both over three times our GDP. Never before in our history have we faced such a challenge, not even during the great depression. But it is our children who will be stuck paying the bill for this decades long party. It is our solemn duty to equip them with the best education on earth before they face a life vastly more perilous than what their parents and grandparents did.

Secondly, we are no longer the leading nation when it comes to getting children ready for what lies ahead in the 21st century. Those in the education establishment may argue otherwise, but I have had to hire, train and supervise multi national employees for over two decades. I have seen how other nations prepare their workers better in science and technology. Many multi national high tech companies have already moved their R&D centers off shore, where most of the intellectual property is developed, and all the high paying R&D jobs with them. As far as I am concerned, we have a lot of catching up to do here.

Third, I think we are on the wrong end of demographics when it comes to training young graduates into high paying jobs. We are an aging nation. Growth through immigration is coming from the bottom end of the pay range. So, in my assessment, each student in the pipeline now will have to carry a larger burden compared to the previous generation.

So, do I think we need to improve our standards? You bet. In my mind, it is not a matter of choice any more. In my humble opinion, here are some things I would do:

1. I would start with the most stringent worldwide standards to be our national standards to begin with, and then challenge the states to match them. I feel this is a necessary first step.

2. High standards will be meaningless if the same system of training, evaluating and rewarding our teachers continues. The best performing nations choose their best to go into teaching, and then give them rigorous training to do their jobs. The same cannot be said about us.

3. Parents and community leaders need to espouse academic achievement as a priority over extra curricular activities. Too many dollars today get spent on things that have no effect on student achievement, and the popular culture seems to encourage it. You and your boss have done an admirable job of elevating this issue and bringing it to the public limelight. Please continue to hammer the message in.

4. We need the equivalent of a national emergency action to pull out all stops on STEM education. Math and science have suffered greatly in what you refer to as “the race to the bottom”. What passes for some math curricula today will be considered trash in just about any other nation today. Many teachers who teach elementary or middle schools do not have degrees in math and science. Our ability to generate new intellectual property will continue to be hammered due to lack of proper math and science education, especially in early grades.

Once again, thanks for soliciting our collective inputs.

"Bill Gates of India" to endow first education university

2009-06-18T18:26:00.000-07:00

Whoever has heard of Azim Premji?

For starters, he was listed as the richest man in India several times on the Forbe's list. He is the founder/chairman of Wipro, one of the largest software companies in the world, employing about 100,000 techies. And he is a minority Muslim in a predominantly Hindu India. He made his fortune with owner's stock in one of the world's largest software companies. I guess he could have taken his billions and retired comfortably. He is a very international person, with a fluent command of the english language. One of his interviews with Charlie Rose can be seen here:

http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/10328

Instead, Mr. Premji has decided to invest a good part of his fortune to start the first private university dedicated to train K-12 teachers. This seems like overkill in a country obsessed with education, where the movie "2 Million Minutes" chronicled high school kids studying up to 50% longer than their American counterparts. Wonder why he has taken this step?

For starters, my guess is that it is because the Indian education system, in spite of its tremendous accomplishments of turning out millions of college graduates a year, is comparatively low tech. Very few classrooms have computers, and teachers are not very comfortable using technology. Use of technology can make the Indian youth more at home working in the highly competitive 21st century business environment. More important, the teachers themselves need to be comfortable with technology in order to be effective. If the teachers cannot teach, student's won't learn. There is always this "guru", the "master who knows everything", image of a teacher so ingrained in Indian minds, that not knowing technology is a surefire way for a teacher to lose credibility with and respect of their students. Enter Mr. Premji with his education university idea.

This idea is by no means a done deal, it is awaiting an expected legislative approval from the state government. But it is akin to Bill Gates saying that he will build a $1 Billion university just to train K-12 teachers. All classrooms would be equipped with the latest Microsoft technology, and the teachers who graduate will be knowledgeable in their field, productive in their classrooms, and will turn out world class minds out of their schools. They would all get high paying jobs and pay down our national debt, and still have money left over to pay into social security and medicare. But.but....hey, who woke me up?! I was having a heck of a daydream!!

Check out the whole article here:

http://www.mangalorean.com/news.php?newstype=broadcast&broadcastid=130610

Book Review: Why Don't Students Like School?

2009-06-02T12:31:00.000-07:00

Rarely do I use my blog for a book review. As a matter of fact, this is the first time. But once in a while, a rare gem comes along that just screams "please tell others about it - it may save them in the future". This book is one of them.

It is authored not by a teacher or principal or a district official, although the title kind of implies it. It is written by Daniel Willingham, who has a doctorate from Harvard University in cognitive psychology. Why is this relevant? Simply because cognitive psychologists are true scientists, and their work is peer reviewed by other scientists before it gets published. Education schools are notorious for their lack of respect by the scientific community. Indeed, the recently published National Math Advisory Panel report observed that out of 17,000 education publications, less than 1% met the criteria for scientific validity. Enough said.

The book has a simple format. First, it is easily understood by an average reader. Each chapter introduces an assertion, followed by simple explanations and experimental evidence, followed by a Q&A section that has FAQs for teachers to modify their teaching techniques based on the assertion. What is novel here is that most of the assertions are exactly opposite of what the popular education school literature claims. I have listed a few nuggets below:

1. People are naturally curious, but they are not good thinkers: Why is this relevant? Because schools of education have focused on building "critical thinking" as one of their missions. However, if the brain is not designed well for thinking, it is good information to know. One needs to go to the following chapters to understand what is the secret of good critical thinkers.

2. Factual knowledge MUST precede skill: This is a corollary to the first assertion. Critical thinking needs factual knowledge first. Mathematical skills require mastery of multiplication facts. Throwing facts out just to concentrate on critical thinking is just not possible, because critical thinking is dependent on preceding factual knowledge. Indeed, critical thinkers tend to be only good in their narrow field of expertise (read - where they possess a lot of factual knowledge), and take a long time to gain the proficiency in a brand new field.

3. Memory is the residue of thought: This is a "duh" observation for me. What the mind dwells on the most, it tends to remember. This explains a lot, for example, why a few days after the test, those who cram for a test tend not to remember much of what they crammed. It may work to get a good grade on a test, but does not help retain what was learned.

4. New things are understood in the context of what we already know: This is the knowledge equivalent of "the rich getting richer". I had a boss once, a very smart fellow, who used to say "the brain is a difference engine". What he meant was that the brain internalizes what it knows with almost no effort, and leaves room to think about and interpret only the new information. So, those students who have been exposed to rich knowledge content early in their life tend to peel away from the rest of the pack very early. The author correlates this to the higher academic performance by those who come from families with educated parents, or higher socioeconomic background.

5. Proficiency requires practice: Another "duh" assertion. The author emphasizes that "It is virtually impossible to become proficient at a mental task without extended practice". Even experts need practice in basic skills sometimes, he says. I have observed that some mathematics curricula do not require extended practice, which is probably why they fail to produce results.

6. Cognition is fundamentally different in early and late training: Probably a corollary to assertion #4, although the author does not present it that way. A novice perceives new information in fundamentally different way than someone who is an expert. So, for example, emulating how scientists or mathematicians perform their jobs and trying to implement it in a classroom is bound to fail.

7. Children are more alike than different in terms of learning: This assertion completely refutes one of the axioms used by curriculum designers, based on the theory of multiple intelligences, and multiple learning styles. The author does not deny that there are multiple abilities, but "intelligence" is a term he reserves for how quickly the brain can process information. This fundamental difference between the author and many of the theories based on which our schools are designed, is tremendously significant. The author has one big thing going for him - results. Math curricula designed for direct instruction (a certain type of pedagogy) have consistently outperformed curricula designed around the theory of multiple intelligences and multiple learning styles.

8. Intelligence can be changed with sustained hard work: And you thought heavy lifting was only good for building six-pack abs. This assertion refutes another assumption prevalent in education schools - that intelligence is static. One is either born to be good in math or not. This has a huge implication of how students get rewarded. In a simple experiment, students who were praised for how hard they worked performed better in the long run than students who were praised for being "smart".

9. Teaching is a complex cognitive skill, and can be improved: In other words, follow the first eight rules, and one can be a good teacher. This assertion leaves a glimmer of hope for those who had subject knowledge in math, science or another area of specialty, but convinced themselves that they "just ain't got it" when it comes to teaching.

All in all, the book, at a short 165 pages, was very much worth the read. Highly recommended. Five stars! (out of five)

When you are being chased by a bear...

2009-05-09T12:38:00.000-07:00

When I look at the nationwide education scene, I often get reminded of this old joke:

Two buddies were hiking bare feet on a hiking trail, when a huge bear spotted them and started running towards them.

One of the buddies quickly grabbed his backpack, took his sneakers out and started putting them on.

The other one, now panicking, was puzzled. He said "Are you crazy? You can't outrun the bear in those sneakers!"

The first one replied "I don't HAVE to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun YOU!"

Unlike many developed or developing countries, the US has a decentralized education system. Almost all decisions were made at a local level at one time, until the state governments started funding schools. That has led to some interesting developments. Some states have realized, like the smart one in the story, that they just have to outrun the rest of the states in education in order to attract new businesses and promote economic growth. In these tough economic times, that rings true more than ever. Here are just a few examples of what different states have done, or are in the process of doing.

* Massachusetts, Indiana and California were some of the early pioneers in toughening up their math standards so that everyone gets college ready by graduation. They have realized that just because there are jobs for high school dropouts today, they will soon vanish. The future belongs to those who have the fundamentals in reading, writing, and math honed enough to switch to another field mid career. Career changes will be a necessity, not a luxury according to experts. So, let's say in 2020, when RoboX corporation wants to convert the old GM assembly plant in Fremont and build robots instead, they will be looking for technicians and programmers, not a high school dropout who puts bolts on nuts.

* Texas has made four years of Math and Science mandatory for all their high school graduates. When one thinks of high tech, Texas is unlikely to pop first into anyone's head, but I think they too realize that the days of big oil are limited, and the future belongs to those who understand technology. This makes their economy virtually future proof, because their graduates will most likely be CREATING the future we will all live in.

* Massachusetts and Minnesota have now asked to be separated out of the national pack in the TIMSS international study, which measures achievement in Math and Science over several grades. In the latest study, Massachusetts came in favorably compared to the top achieving nations in the world, such as Hong Kong and Finland. This pretty much validated their decision to set very high standards for all their students.

* New Hampshire, the tiny state which goes back into hibernation after the presidential primaries, has eliminated the 11th and 12th grades from their schools. Instead, the students go directly into community colleges, either to learn a trade or as freshmen in a 2 or 4 year college track. This has pretty much compressed what is taught in 12 years in 13 years of a typical K-12 curriculum into 11 years. Given that most curricula used in schools these days are thoroughly unchallenging even for an average student, this move is a bold but sensible one.

When I look at these examples, I pity the rest of the states that are scrambling to catch up. Many other states are now scrambling to catch up, and there is even talk of national standards. However, in my opinion, these attempts are only one small part of what is needed to compete. Obama and his education secretary Arne Duncan have been very eloquent in their support of education reform. However, they do not have direct control over what happens in schools. Each state, each district, each school, and each classroom has challenges that will need to be identified and worked out. In my home state of Washington, when I look at what is being done, it is clear to me that we will lag the rest of the states by a long shot. The big bear of international economic competition is merciless and relentless. Even when the US economy recovers, it appears that other states will have a jump on it before us, in terms of a well trained workforce.

Something better get done quickly before the kids in Washington state become (economic) bear fodder.

Obama - The Captain of the Economic Ship

2009-04-30T08:37:00.000-07:00

Obama survived the first 100 days. And with record approval ratings to boot.

Hooray! Who'd have thunk, right?

Bank defaults, no problem. Obama the CEO to the rescue. GM and Chrysler going under? No sweat, Obama the Chairman of the Board is there to fire the CEO of GM, and order Chrysler to go bankrupt. Millions in the nation needing health care? No problem. Obama the healer is there to help. Bring peace and prosperity to the world? Obama the conciliator is there to bring long lost respect to the US in international arena. So, Obama the miracle worker should be able to get Americans healthy, wealthy and wise once more, and bring the good old days back, right?

I think "not so fast".

This economic ship called the US of A, captained by our own Barak H Obama, has at least three boat anchors that need to be dealt with before it can be turned around, and set sail into clear waters.

Let me elaborate.

The first boat anchor is the demographics. America is aging. There are more and more people reaching retirement age, with fewer and fewer people feeding into the social security system. If it was not for immigration, we would have gone into negative population growth. But a large portion of the immigrants barely make minimum wage. And therein lies the rub. No matter how hard we try, the math of getting more taxpayers paying into the social security trust fund is not going to work, unless they increase the retirement age, cut benefits, or both. So there goes the historical standard of living. Both the young and the old, rich or poor, will have to pay more to keep even bare bones benefits alive. This is a structural issue - which means there are no feasible solutions in sight under the current legal and economic structure, without burning a huge hole into people's wallets.

The second boat anchor is the total debt in the system. I have blogged about his before, but I strongly feel it needs to be stated again. The total debt, which is the combined debt of local, state and federal governments, individuals, and businesses, is now over 50 trillion dollars. Even with 1 trillion dollar government bailout, which is a drop in the bucket, the debt is about 3.5 times the GDP. In comparison, the total debt was about 2.5 times GDP during the height of the great depression. A healthy, self sustaining economy can handle a debt load of 1.5 times GDP. So, we have about 2.0 times GDP's worth of debt to work out. That is like saying a person's maximum tolerable weight is 220 pounds, but the current weight is 500 pounds, and he needs to lose 280 pounds pronto! Those who have lost weight know, this ain't gonna happen overnight. Maybe over years, if we are lucky. And the agony will come when the governments will tax us more just to service debt, companies will charge more for their products and services, and individuals will cut down spending just to survive.

The third boat anchor is our public education system, especially the K-12. Much has been said, correctly I might add, by Obama and his ed sec Arne Duncan, on how dire the issue is. After all, it has been proven beyond doubt that a well educated workforce is more productive, and a more productive workforce can outproduce the competition and bring prosperity and wealth back to this country. But by many accounts, the system is so stuck in its own little world, blissfully oblivious of the raging storm, that any meaningful change will take more than an act of Congress to occur. I have heard archived speeches of every president of the United States, starting in the 1960's that the US will be #1 in education in the world. I have yet to see objective data that show that the goal has been achieved. If anything, in many ways, we have fallen behind more nations in the rest of the world. The worst indictment, I think, is that we are yet to officially convert to the metric system. We are not the only one, we have a banana republic (Myanmar) and a ship licensing republic (Liberia) to keep us company. The rest of the world has moved on...

I wish President Obama the best of luck as he navigates through his next 100 days!

Friedman Nails It - Again

2009-04-22T20:57:00.000-07:00

Thomas Friedman is one of my favorite columnists. His columns continue to shed new light on the issues he brought up in his groundbreaking book "The World Is Flat". (It is now one of the required reading books for students of International Economics course at local Clark College.) In his most recent op-ed article, published in the New York Times, he sheds new light on how the lack of progress in K-12 education has hurt the US economy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/22/opinion/22friedman.html

Headlined "Swimming Without a Suit", it has some shocking numbers. One of the estimates of the cost of poor showing in our K-12 system is summed up here: "If America had closed the international achievement gap between 1983 and 1998 and had raised its performance to the level of such nations as Finland and South Korea, United States G.D.P. in 2008 would have been between $1.3 trillion and $2.3 trillion higher." In percentage terms, the GDP would have been roughly 10 to 18 percent higher. Which in turn would have meant we did not have to have the recession we are going through now, because the economy would still be growing, instead of shrinking.

If there is a bright spot, the article mentions that more and more top Ivy league graduates are signing up for "Teach For America", an organization that provides college scholarships in exchange for two years of teaching in inner city schools. It has produced produced such distinguished alumni as Michelle Rhee, the chancellor of Washington DC schools. For many years, they have attracted top graduates from various fields, with an average college GPA above 3.5. Apparently their applications are up 40 percent this year, and most of them are graduates of top schools such as Yale, Princeton, and Harvard.

One small problem for those living in the Pacific Northwest. Teach For America does not operate here. Wonder why?

Thanks to Charles Hoff for sending me the link.

College Freshmen Still Struggle with Basic Algebra

2009-04-20T21:25:00.000-07:00

I found this on another web group on math. It quotes an article from the campus newspaper at Oregon State University, the premier state "tech", known for its strong engineering department. Now, you need to realize that this is a student run paper, with a staff made up entirely of students. Even they are now sensing that something is fishy. Maybe they are not so naive as we think. Another thing to note is that Math 111 is college algebra, which is a remedial math course, about the same level as a rigorous high school Algebra 2 course, for those who do not pass the college math placement test. Here is the headline:

"Math 111 continues to be slippery slope for OSU students
Problems with Math 111 are believed to stem from students' inadequate grade school teaching in math"

The article goes on to say "Math 111 has been rumored throughout campus to be one of the most failed classes at Oregon State. Many students go into class with that expectation."
and an observation from a freshman math professor "After 10 years of teaching the course, Argyres said he felt that many students go into the course feeling they can just memorize things, but he said it's really all about understanding concepts. He said he feels that this issue originates in elementary school." "When students never learned the basic information appropriately in high school, or earlier, it is significantly more difficult for them to succeed when they get to college algebra."

I was aware that the school district that my kids attended in Oregon used "Mathland" for elementary schools in the early 2000's, and switched to "Investigations" around 2005. Now they are moving to "Everyday Math". In other words, they have hopped from one reform curriculum to another, without really making a substantial move towards what I consider real math. Here is a quote from the OSU professor which pretty much sums it up:

"Mathematics is densely a foreign language with a foreign spelling routine with all these different symbols," Argyres said. "Part of [understanding the language] is understanding what we mean by the symbols."

Read the full article here:

http://media.barometer.orst.edu/media/storage/paper854/news/2009/04/20/News/Math-111.Continues.To.Be.Slippery.Slope.For.Osu.Students-3717089.shtml

Boeing Opens R&D Center in Bangalore

2009-03-31T15:52:00.000-07:00

Here is a new article that came over the newswires. The link below is for a local on line newspaper in India.

http://www.mangalorean.com/news.php?newstype=broadcast&broadcastid=118670#

Here are some exerpts that caught my eye:

Bangalore, March 31 (IANS) Global aerospace major Boeing has set up a research and technology lab here to develop advanced aerospace technologies and solutions for its next-generation products and services, a senior official said Tuesday.

The India lab, Boeing's third of its kind outside the US, will initially have 30 aerospace engineers working on multiple projects that include advanced aircraft and spacecraft designs and new structure and materials technologies.

"Another 100 engineers will collaborate with our various projects being carried out with Indian academia, research and development (R&D) institutions and private and public enterprises," Boeing chief technology officer John J. Tracy told reporters at the unveiling of the lab here.

"The investments are in millions of dollars from our global R&D budget, which runs into billions of dollars per annum," Tracy added.

Boeing has six advanced R&D labs across the US, and one overseas lab each in Australia and Spain - which together employ about 4,100 engineers.

Clarifying that Boeing was not downsizing its operations in the recession-hit US or shipping projects to this country, Tracy said India's exceptional talent pool with high math quotient and analysis skill was the prime reason for locating its third overseas R&D lab in Bangalore.

"Core technologies are vital for global aerospace eco-system comprising R&D, engineering and IT (software). The criteria is to develop cutting-edge technologies to ensure affordability, breakthrough performance, sustainability and eco-friendly products and services to our customers worldwide," Tracy affirmed.

It is interesting to note that Boeing has specifically called out the "high math quotient and analysis skill" of Engineers trained in India.

The question in my mind - why go halfway across the world just to hire 130 engineers? Can't we get them here in Seattle? Don't our engineers have high math quotients and analysis skills?

What am I missing?

Brother, can you please spare a Nano?

2009-03-25T20:52:00.000-07:00

Say what?

No, I did not mean to imply the cute little portable music machines the fruit company puts out. They are now very ubiquitous, and a fashion statement to boot. I was pointing to the equally cute, and soon to be ubiquitous mode of transportation for the masses - in the developing world.

You see, it appears that history is about to repeat itself. Back in the 1920's, Henry Ford, the great capitalist, thought it would be a great idea to use mass production techniques to build a car that even his employees could afford to buy. Back then, the assembly workers' wages weren't much to write home about, let alone buy a car with. Anyhow, the story goes that Ford designed and built the model T and mass produced it by the millions, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Well, fast forward to 2009, and a capitalist called Ratan Tata has done it again. This time, his objective is a little different. He wants to sell a car to some 50 million motorcycle riders in India. But Ratan Tata is a different breed of capitalist. His self proclaimed objective is to "go to bed every night knowing I have not harmed anyone". Refreshing? Considering most Harvard trained executives live to "maximize shareholder equity", or "optimize workflow", you bet his objective is quite refreshing. And if you look at the picture of this poor Indian chap with his whole family on a motorbike (no helmets or seatbelts, mind you), you see exactly why he feels that way. The miracle is, I think, he feels, while most others figure, calculate, strategize, optimize.......

Well, Mr. Tata put 500 of his best engineers and marketers to work on figuring out what will make a typical motorcycle owner to trade up to a car. The biggest barrier was price. A lot of motorcycle owners who shell out 50,000 to 75,000 Rupees (about $1000 to $1500) for a motorcycle, they found, would rather have something safer that would shield them and their families from the elements. But they could not afford the 200,000 rupees ($4000) for an entry level car. But they would seriously consider something that cost around 100,000 rupees (around $2000). So, the engineers went to work on designing a car that would be profitably sold for around that price. Mr. Tata made it clear that he wanted it to look visually appealing, while taking liberties on cost where it did not matter. Gone were all power accessories, fancy seats, and rear hatch. So were two engine cylinders. Even the tiny 12 inch tires are fastened with only three lug nuts instead of four or five. But it had to have four doors (anything less is not a car in India). Not only did it have to seat four in comfort, it should get around 50 mpg gas mileage. The result has been nothing short of impressive (see pic). On March 23, the Tata Nano was launched in India with much fanfare. Advanced bookings for the initial production lots were oversubscribed several times over, so Tata Motors, the manufacturer, had to resort to drawing lots to pick the first 100,000 lucky owners. Production is expected to ramp to around 250,000 next year, and a million a year thereafter, but given the instant success, this will be gone as well.

None of this has escaped the attention of the world press. Last year in the Detroit Auto Show, it was dubbed "the most popular car" and it was not even shown! This year, in Geneva, a new version was shown (see below), which will have a larger engine, all safety and power features expected in Europe, and still cost around 5000 Euros. Tata did not plan on marketing one in the US, but considering the economic situation we are in here, he has changed his mind. So, in spite of all the reengineering and redesign it is going to take to meet the US specifications, he is planning on bringing one here around 2012 or 2013. That will bring affordable transportation (again) to a lot of people who cannot afford it now. I bet a lot of them cannot wait till they get their hands on one.

My kids can't either.

Businessweek - Innovation and Math, Science Achievement Linked

2009-03-16T20:58:00.000-07:00

Here is a recent article (March 16) on the ranking of different nations based on their record of innovation. Innovation as in creating new products, new wealth, and therefore greater standard of living for their citizens.

http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/mar2009/gb20090316_004837.htm?campaign_id=yhoo

The top of the list is Singapore, followed by South Korea.

We have seen Singapore and South Korea top international math and science tests year after year. It has also resulted in a better quality of life for their people. 25% of the Singaporeans were millionaires last year. That percentage is expected to cross 40% in 2014. The "global slowdown" is not expected to change this appreciably. Why Singapore? One reason given below:

"Government commitment to education is one reason many large drugmakers have made Singapore a base for their manufacturing and research. In January, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) announced plans to invest $65 million to expand its Singapore operations. Schering-Plough (SGP) is opening a center to conduct research and clinical trials in the country, and Novartis has made Singapore the center for company researchers investigating treatments for malaria, tuberculosis, and dengue fever. "Science education is very good here," says Thierry Draganc, project manager for Novartis' malaria research team. "There's a nice constant flow of young graduates." "

Where is the US in all this? Well, we came in 8th. One of the biggest reasons given here:

James P. Andrew, the leader of BCG's global innovation practice and co-author of the report, says "the quality of the workforce" in the U.S. is the biggest problem that many respondents had. As part of the survey, BCG questioned some 800 high-level executives at U.S. companies, and many put concerns about human resources at the top of the list of concerns. "Are we developing the skills at the high school level?" asks Andrew, explaining the responses researchers often encountered. "Are we making it easy for the best and brightest to study and stay in the U.S.?"

Outsource Creativity? Surely You Jest.

2009-03-12T14:35:00.000-07:00

I admit. I have been hearing a lot about Slumdog millionaire, mostly from word-of-mouth. Everyone seems to be humming Jai Ho (not knowing what it means is OK), and like an unemployment check, everyone has seen it or knows someone who has. Don’t have $10 for a movie ticket? Take heart. It will be out on video on March 31, and you can rent it from your favorite video store or on-line rental firm.

But that is not what caught my attention. What caught my attention was the low key coverage from the media before and after the Oscars. It was as if someone behind the scenes was pulling the strings for the movie to its Oscar glory. Could it be.. I thought. Nah… it couldn’t be. But let me tell you what went through my mind.

Back in the late ‘90s, story goes that the large cosmetics and fashion apparel companies were worried that the West was saturated with their products, profits were thin, and wanted to create new markets in the developing countries. But these countries had thousands of years old tradition of using natural herbs like turmeric, saffron and sandalwood for their cosmetics, and floral aroma for perfume. Something had to be done to get them interested in laboratory born, patent protected $500 an ounce perfumes and $100 a stick lip gloss. Their solution was….to crown Indian contestants in the beauty pageants like Miss World. A string of new Miss World winners, like the now movie star Aishwarya Rai (Pink Panther 2, The Last Legion…) came out of the mill and started peddling beauty products, and Presto! – a new cosmetics and perfume market was born.

So, why do I think something like that may be happening here?

Simple. Follow-the-money.

Let us first look at the cost. Slumdog millionaire cost $15 million to make. It may sound like a lot of money, but if you compare to big name actors like Branjalina, the Cruisemeister , Reese Witherspoon, all command around $20 million per movie, or sometimes a percentage of the take, this is cheap. An average Hollywood “A” movie costs around $100 mil. A high budget blockbuster costs around $200 mil. The other Oscar contender starring Brad Pitt, “….Benjamin Button”, cost $150 mil to make.

That is only half the story. Now, putting my MBA hat on, I looked at the returns, because every movie producer is looking to make a profit at the end of the day. Slumdog is on its way to grossing $300 mil worldwide, “Benjamin” crossed that mark and may end up with $400 mil. Let us do some quick math – for every dollar spent, Slumdog will have grossed $20, and Benjamin would have grossed $2.66. Even the biggest blockbuster of the year, the Dark Knight, made about a Billion dollars, and cost $185 million to make. That is a little over $5 gross per dollar spent. But Slumdog with $20 for every dollar spent? Even after deducting distribution costs and other expenses, this is an insane rate of return by any standards. It is an eye popping difference that will make even a dead Hollywood executive turn in his grave. So, despite all the political rhetoric about supporting “Made in America” things, I expect more Hollywood movies to be made outside the US.

But what about American creativity? Don’t our schools jealously guard our kid’s ability to be creative? What about all the music lessons, orchestra and band concerts? Don’t we have the most creative people in the world?

Well, we have been told we do. And I see the emphasis placed on it by the schools I deal with. But the giant sucking action of insane profits will lead creativity to be outsourced as well. Consider the fact that Danny Boyle, who some consider an eccentric British director who gave us the “Full Monty” and “Trainspotting”, picked up a few slum kids and paid them pittance and got Oscar worthy performance out of them. AR Rahman, who was totally unknown to the world outside India, composed the Oscar winning score in two weeks, for a fraction of the time and money that Hans Zimmer took for “Gladiator”.

So, yes, creativity can be outsourced – and I am betting that if business has its way, it will continue to be.

And please, stop calling me Surely.

US Education Secretary Arne Duncan on Public Broadcasting

2009-03-11T22:18:00.000-07:00

I just finished watching Arne Duncan on the Charlie Rose show. (March 16 - Added the link to the podcast in case you want to watch)

http://www.charlierose.com/guest/view/6585

I had to pinch myself several times during the show, just to make sure I was not dreaming. Here is the nation's highest education official, saying things that I wished every education official had said. Many of these things have been expressed right here in the blog. But there he was, on national TV, saying the right things, popular or not. If a fraction of what he said became reality, we would be in fat city. Here are some highlights of what he articulated:

1. School facilities to be kept open for 12 hours a day or longer.

2. High quality pre school for all

3. Teacher merit pay, and much tougher tenure requirements

4. Removal of ineffective teachers, based on student achievement

5. Higher pay for STEM teachers

6. Start/expand charter schools

7. National standards for core subjects

There is tons more stuff because it is a 1 hour interview with no commercial breaks, but it was a riveting interview. Charlie Rose, the interviewer, is no slouch. He asks very pointed questions, until the guest cries uncle. In other words, you know exactly where the guest stands on every issue. But first, something about Arne Duncan's past, as articulated in the interview, caught my attention. The first thing he has going for him is that he is not an education insider. He was not trained in the education circles to think like a teacher or an administrator. So, he does not have the baggage that comes with someone who is predisposed to defend the status quo. This was quite evident when he unequivocally said the system needs to shed poor teachers, based on student achievement. Second, he said he grew up in a neighborhood where getting to adulthood alive was considered a great accomplishment. His mother ran a tutoring program for disadvantaged kids, and those who stuck with education not only got to live, but some went on to achieve much greater things. Third, he and the president appear to be in lockstep with all the proposals. Lastly, there is an unprecedented amount of money being doled out, $112 billion to be exact, to help implement the ideas. This is the largest spending of our future tax dollars since the GI bill. This is the first instance of such synergy that I have seen, that makes me optimistic.

Do I see pitfalls? Sure. Through the grapevine, I heard the money will be fast-tracked to the state governors, with no rules or accountability clauses spelled out, yet. If the past is any indication, the moment the money hits the states, it gets caught up in local politics, and rarely meets its intended goal. But it is a start. I hope the local citizens will hold their elected representatives accountable for spending that money so it accomplishes its intent.

Are we at the throes of losing our brainpower bailout?

2009-03-02T10:05:00.000-08:00

Here is a news story that came over the wires today (text of one of the stories below):

http://www.mangalorean.com/news.php?newstype=broadcast&broadcastid=114874

"America's loss is India and China's gain: US study

Washington, March 2 (IANS) Loss of tens of thousands of skilled immigrants to countries like India and China "is an economic catastrophe that will hurt US competitiveness for decades to come", says Vivek Wadhwa, lead author of a new study done at leading American universities.

Wadhwa and his team at Duke, Harvard and Berkeley universities uncovered several trends in their study on the plight of 1,203 skilled immigrants who came to the US from India and China to work or study and returned home:

* Most returnees originally came to the United States for career and educational opportunities. The majority of returnees cited career and quality of life as primary reasons to return to their home countries.

* The most common professional factor (86.8 percent of Chinese and 79.0 percent of Indians) motivating workers to return home was the growing demand for their skills in their home countries.

* Returnees also believed that their home countries provided better career opportunities than they could find in America.

* Most respondents (53.5 percent of Indian and 60.7 percent of Chinese) said opportunities to start their own businesses were better in their home countries.

* Most respondents (56.6 percent of Indians and 50.2 percent of Chinese) indicated that they would be likely to start a business in the next five years.

* Being close to family and friends was a significant consideration in the decision to return home, with many returnees considering their opportunities to care for ageing parents to be much better in their home countries (89.4 percent of Indians and 78.8 percent of Chinese).

* Most of the Indian and Chinese immigrant subjects who returned to their home countries were relatively young (in their low-30s) and were very well educated. Nearly 90 percent held master's and PhD degrees, primarily in management, technology or science.

* Immigrants historically have provided one of America's greatest competitive advantages. Between 1990 and 2007, the proportion of immigrants in the US labour force increased from 9.3 percent to 15.7 percent, and a large and growing proportion of immigrants bring high levels of education and skill to the US.

* Immigrants have contributed disproportionately in the most dynamic part of the US economy - the high-tech sector - co-founding firms such as Google, Intel, eBay and Yahoo.

* In addition, immigrant inventors contributed to more than a quarter of US global patent applications. Immigrant-founded US-based companies employed 450,000 workers and generated $52 billion in revenue in 2006."

The story pretty much sums it up. We have been getting a brainpower bailout for the last few decades, and now the trend is reversing. Voluntarily (because the living conditions are improving elsewhere), or involuntarily (because the government is clamping down on H-1 visas), the brain drain appears to be in full force, with no end in sight.

Let us take a minute and think about why this reverse brain drain is taking place at all. For decades now, the vast majority of graduate students in the graduate schools in Science and Engineering have been foreign born. The distribution by nationality pretty much imitates world demographics, with China and India leading the numbers. When the rest of the US educated students were aspiring to be doctors, lawyers, businessmen and investment bankers, these immigrants were getting their masters and PhDs in science and engineering, and starting up companies in Silicon Valley that fueled most of the high tech boom in the 1990s, and continue to do so to this date (albeit at a much slower pace).

What does this mean for our efforts to "rebuild" as Obama would like to? Plenty. But first, I think we need to connect the dots, and understand how a nation becomes prosperous enough to support the standard of living that we have all come to love. Here is my attempt at laying out the process:

1. Any economy that aspires to dominate the markets needs some way to continuously come up with better products and services (and no, financial derivates do not fit the description of an "innovative product or service").

2. Not only that, it needs to quickly find a way to mass produce it faster, better, and cheaper than anyone else.

3. Then go back to #1 and do it over and over again.

Sounds simple, but the US economy has stumbled at every step in every endeavor it has undertaken. We used to have a lock on step #1 and step #2 in early 20th century. Then later on we lost the lead in step #2 to Japan, Taiwan and Korea, and lately, to China. Now we are at the threshold of losing step #1 to Japan, Korea, Finland, Singapore, and most recently, India and China. If we do lose, then we are forever second best, a position that no American will relish. So, I think it is important to understand how we became economic leaders, and what we can do to remedy the situation.

Here is how I connect the dots. In order to come up with more innovative products which will be successful in the marketplace, one needs to have a large pool of Research and Development from which to draw, and create new patents for new products. Unfortunately, using Google to find answers for "innovation" does not fit this criterion. We need more science and engineering graduates willing to go into research and development, and the R&D funding from public and corporate sources to help finance them. But we need to create those science and engineering graduates first. Which means we need more high school graduates excited about science and engineering. Which means we need more middle school graduates excited about science and math, and are willing and able to take challenging math and science courses in high school. Which means we need more elementary school graduates who know their math facts cold, are well versed in algebraic fundamentals like manipulating fractions and long division, and are excited to get into math competitions in middle schools. It means we need more middle school teachers who are math and science graduates themselves, and are excited about the prospect of educating a whole new cadre of nation builders. It means we need more elementary school teachers who have enough real math and science education in college to be able to teach elementary school kids real math, rather than the watered down version being pushed in school districts all over the nation. We need all the materials, the support structures, and most of all, the leadership to make it all happen.

I continue to be disappointed with the standard of material that is considered "acceptable" in today's education system. In my recent trip to India, I saw that a typical 10th grade graduate there is more likely to have a better education than a typical 12th grader in the US. Then I hear that "but our kids catch up in college" from some parents and teachers. I beg to disagree. Once a student graduates 12th grade with today's version of "reform" math, the doors will be forever shut for them in science and engineering. They most probably lost the battle in elementary school if they were not taught the basics well, and never realized it.

Recovery from a hole that we have dug so deep has to start somewhere. One of my friends often says "when you are in such deep doo doo, you better stop digging". I think it is a great place to start.

What the heck are "Tuitions?"

2009-02-26T13:38:00.000-08:00

No, they are not related to college fees or fees one pays to a private school to educate someone. If you are in India, the context in which the word "tuition" is used is probably much different. It usually refers to private tutoring. And it is big business in India, just like the juukuu in Japan. And Indian parents are just as obsessed with keeping their kids busy with their studies as their Japanese counterparts. The difference is that there are a lot more of them in India than in Japan. These nations are not alone - there are similar concepts in almost every developed or developing nation in Asia.

So, why is this phenomenon so prevalent in India (and Asia in general)? I think it has to do with the university admissions system. You see, in most Asian countries, universities were built at enormous cost with government help, but they can only educate a small percentage of the population. Although this is changing rapidly with new public and private universities coming on line, the best ones still have limited enrollment. And admission into the best schools almost guarantees that the student has a good career and a good life. So, parents try to get their kids into the best elementary and secondary schools, and supplement with "tuitions" on top of that. That brings me to Mr. Vagh Prakash Shenoy, the owner and principal of a small tutoring school in Karnataka, India.

Mr. Shenoy is a unique individual, to say the least. Thirty years ago, he graduated with a mechanical engineering degree from a prestigious engineering college. If he had followed the traditional path, he probably would be holding a high position in a multinational company by now. But he had a different idea. He figured that if so many students are trying to get into so few slots in universities, then there must always be a demand for tutoring to help them succeed, especially in the "difficult" subjects such as Math, Physics and Chemistry. His idea was dead on. His school started small, grew quickly to 200 students in 1975. Then he decided to focus on only the "serious" students. Today his school has about 60 students, all 11th and 12th graders (they call them "junior college" students), and all of them getting tutored in Math, Physics and Chemistry. They pay the equivalent of about $200 per year, a tidy sum for a middle class family. They come in like clockwork, after their regular school hours. They spend two hours per day minimum in his school. Mr. Shenoy employs four part time lecturers from a nearby college - all highly qualified to teach their subjects (which means at least a masters' degree). Mr. Shenoy himself teaches only mathematics - "that is my passion" he said with a smile.

Just down the road is another school, called Expert Pre-University College. It is a new generation of college prep schools, which will probably be the shape of things to come. I did not get a chance to visit, but I could get enough information from a relative who is a student. Their method is even more radical than the tuitions offered by Mr. Shenoy. They offer a 2 year syllabus that contains not only the regular state mandated 11th and 12th grade curricula, but also includes coaching for one or more of the university entrance exams. The school is year round - the kids get only three holidays. As is the fashion these days, they only offer science tracks - don't bother with business, or liberal arts, thank you. Classes start at 7 am and end at 7 pm, with few "breaks" in between, complete with yoga, breathing exercises, and meditation. Sounds pretty tough, and one may wonder if there are any takers for such a demanding regimen. I learned that just the opposite is true. They have a waiting list, and they now have their own exams for entrance.

More info at: http://www.expertclasses.org/pucollege/index.php?content_option=COMPONENT&ref_id=1

When one goes back 60 years, when the British left India with just enough educated people to manage their bureaucracy, one often wonders what vision the leaders had at that time for their nation 60 years ahead. I don't know if they could have imagined the strides made by their future generations, but they had the right idea about how to get there. It was to set high expectations for their young ones, and help them achieve those expectations. The results don't have to be luck or chance, or "written" as in Slumdog Millionaire. For every slum kid, there are scores of middle class kids who are competing fiercely to meet their destiny, and in turn shaping the destiny of their nation.

Educating Middle India

2009-02-10T20:17:00.000-08:00

"So, what do you think of Mr. Obama?" said the middle aged frail lady with a visibly tan skin dressed in a green sari. "I watched his entire inaugural ceremony. He is a very impressive fellow. We have high hopes that he will bring peace to the world". She was Mrs. Damayanti, the Headmistress(Principal) of the Canara High School, Urwa Branch in Mangalore, India (yes, there is a place called Mangalore - or more recently, Mangaluru). "By the way" she continued with the curiosity of a little child "what is that tall building that looks like a needle in Washington? I asked a few people, and they could not tell me." When, I said it was called the Washington monument, she thanked me and said she will tell that to everyone in her 10th grade social studies class.

I mentioned I was there to learn more about how the Indian education system is working these days. Her school is more typical than most. It is neither a public nor a private school, but somewhere in between. It falls under the category of a "government aided" school, where part of the funding comes from the state government, and the rest comes from a private foundation. "The state funding has been going down, so we have had to raise our fees", she said. "We used to charge less than Rs.1000 (about $20) a year a couple of years ago, but now we have to charge Rs.4000 (about $80) a year tuition. With activity fees, it comes to about Rs.4200 (about $84)". This school is typical of where middle class India gets educated. Probably a good third of Indian students (about 70 million of them, larger than the entire US K-12 student population) gets educated in such schools.

Other points to note in such schools:

1. Curricula are controlled by a state or national "board", consisting of scientists and education leaders. There is no free for all when it comes to choosing materials for math, for example. Nor is there any argument over what content should be taught, and how it should be taught. Text books are purchased by students, not the school. Anyone is free to write a text book, as long as it has the minimum content set by the board. (I bought the K-5 and 9-12 math text books at a local bookstore. Total bill came to less than $12).

2. No social promotions. Semester final exams are routine, and if someone flunks two semesters, then they repeat the year. At the end of 10th grade, everyone takes an exit exam, which also doubles as a placement tool for college prep school, which are separate from K-10 schools. Our school had an 85% pass rate, better than the state average of just under 80%.

3. Teachers' job descriptions, just as curricula, are controlled by the state board of education. After 6th grade, it is mandatory that a teacher have a degree in the field they teach. In addition, they are required to have a 1 year teaching certificate. However, there appears to be an oversupply of graduates willing to teach, so it is common to see specialized math and science teachers at grade 3.

4. Most students are taught all their subjects in English in this school. This has been a growing trend, opposite of what was in vogue about 10 years ago. This school had about 60% of the students being taught all their subjects in English. The rest must take English as a second language, starting in grade 2. The 10th grade exit exam has three languages (two native languages and English), and the students must pass all three to exit 10th grade. All 10th grade graduates are expected to by trilingual.

5. More and more students opt for Science tracks once they pass 10th grade. In our case, well over 50% of the graduates went on to take two years of Physics, Chemistry, Math, and a science elective (Electronics, Computer Languages or Biology), plus two languages (English and a native language). These courses are not offered "cafeteria" style, but somewhat like a "combo meal" style. The main choices are science, business (commerce), and arts. Depending on the staff and the size of the school, they may offer two or three varieties of science combos, one or two commerce combos, and one arts combo. Science:Business:Arts enrollments are currently running at the ratio of 4:2:1.

Mrs. Damayanti was especially proud of her computer lab, where she says most kids are "smart enough to teach the teachers". They learn basic programming, in addition to the usual applications such as Microsoft office.

After the visit, I was impressed how much the school could accomplish with so little. The fact that it is a typical school (not a high end private school), makes it all the more significant.

In the next blog, I will write about "tuitions" - the Indian version of cram schools.

Documentary Review: 2 Million Minutes in India and China

2009-01-04T11:46:00.000-08:00

I do not write documentary reviews very often, but I decided to make an exception for these two DVDs that were released in December. The two DVDs, as their titles mention, are in-depth reviews on the educational systems of India and China, the two countries that have been absent in the traditional international comparisons of educational achievement, such as TIMSS and PISA. However, these countries are becoming hard to ignore, since they have taken much larger global share of the manufacturing and intellectual capital in the last decade. The conventional wisdom in the US is that the labor costs are the sole drivers for this shift. The documentary sheds a totally different light on the issue. It suggests that the quality of graduates coming out of schools and colleges is fundamentally better suited for the 21st century knowledge economy. Putting two and two together, the shift in manufacturing and software may have initially happened because of cost (which continues to be an advantage for both nations), but the growth in those countries is happening because of the fundamental difference in the quality of human resources. Putting it bluntly, “those jobs ain’t comin’ back”. Another hard-to-ignore fact is that put together, these countries have roughly eight times the number of students in their K-12 system as the US. Historically speaking, this is unprecedented. The US high school graduate now has to compete in a tremendously larger pool of qualified job seekers or college applicants.

For those who are just getting introduced to 2 Million Minutes, it was a DVD released earlier in 2008. The producer of the DVD, Bob Compton, is a venture capitalist and an angel investor in several technology companies worldwide. His venture funding includes several companies in India and China. Bob mentions that when he visited these companies and met their employees, their “well roundedness” and the depth of general knowledge impressed him. He then proceeded to look into the K-12 education system, and was impressed even more. His passion for the topic of education led to the first documentary “2 Million Minutes”, which depicted the time a typical high school student spends in the four years (which add up to roughly 2 million minutes) in the US, China and India. Although a bit light on the statistical aspects, the videos highlight the important difference between the US and the emerging nations – amount of time spent in gaining knowledge and skills. The DVD puts the Chinese students first, Indian students next, and the US students last, in the rough proportions of 3:2:1. The first DVD was screened at several high power conferences, to education leaders and governors of several states, and even to Barak Obama. This was one powerful documentary in its own right.

In the new DVDs, probably produced in response to questions raised after the first one, Bob Compton delves deeper into the time spent on each subject, the high level curriculum in the last four years, and interviews with the principals of two schools, one in Shanghai, China, and another in Bangalore, India. Again, the focus here is on main differences between the US system and the systems in the other two. I particularly liked the interviews with the principals. The Chinese gentleman was particularly impressive, with his vast knowledge of the school system, curricula, and the command of English language. (I cannot imagine a typical principal in the US doing an interview for a Chinese documentary in Mandarin, unless he/she is of Chinese descent). The lady who was the principal of the Indian school was equally impressive because she had a master’s degree in Physics, and other than a slight accent, her command of the English language was comparable. This boiled down to their students as well. They felt comfortable enough with English to crack jokes, use slang, and debate their American counterparts. There is enough meat in the hour or longer in each video to whet the appetites of people wanting to get an introduction to high school education in both countries, and I recommend them highly.

But that is not what I want to spend my time on in this blog. Having been born and educated in India, and raised three kids in the US education system, I can highlight a few important differences between the two based on my personal experience. A few comments I will make on the Chinese system are based on research, not first hand experience. For example, China hardly has any private schools, and segregates their top performers early so that they can get advanced education, and go on to college. The US has about 12% of the students attending private schools, the rest attend public schools. A small but growing number of students are home schooled. India has roughly a third attending for-profit private schools, another third attending schools built with public-private partnerships, and the last third attending government run schools. I have categorized my comments in “myth busters” format. Please read on.

1. Myth - Kids educated in India and China are not “well rounded”. Reality – “Well roundedness” has different definition in different countries, and it is very subjective. In the US, someone who is active in athletics, and maintains a decent GPA may be considered “well rounded”. The emphasis tends to be decidedly tilted towards sports in the US, and towards academics in both India and China. It does not mean the kids grow up with no exposure to the arts or athletics. The kids from both countries in the videos play sports, musical instruments, and engage in social activities with their friends. I think this is fairly typical of India, from my personal observation.

2. Myth – Kids in 3rd world countries have poor English language skills – Reality - While this may be true for immigrants from some nations, India has had a long tradition of dealing with the British, and continues to mandate English as a second language in all schools. China has started doing that as well. The top one third of the students (more than twice the total number of students in the US) get top notch English education – including penmanship, spelling, grammar, essay writing, modern literature, and the classics. Recently, more and more schools have started offering English as the only language of instruction for all classes. Ironic, because they end up taking their native language as a second language! And because of large populations, both China and India, by some accounts, each have more English speakers than the US.

3. Myth – Countries like India and China do not educate their entire population – Reality: Both China and India have mandatory primary education, and will soon have mandatory secondary education. Coverage is poor in the rural areas of India, which is comparable to the high school dropout rate in the US. What gets lost in these claims is that both India and China have been able to produce enormous growth rates with what they have already accomplished in education. When they eventually get to 100% secondary schooling, it will only serve to increase the contrast between themselves and the US.

4. Myth – Students are stressed out in the Asian countries. Reality - Stress can come from various sources. In Asian countries, the sources of stress are few and are academically oriented. In the US, the stress sources include divorce, relocation, drugs, sports, peer pressure, jobs, and physical relationships, on top of academics. Those who ignore academics in school get a double whammy in college – high cost of education, and high failure rates. The suicide rate for college students in the US is much higher compared to Asian countries that maintain similar data.

5. Myth – Schools in India and China only teach to the tests. Reality - Testing, or more accurately assessment, is the only measurement tool that systems have for making sure students have retained the skills and knowledge they are expected to have. Without ascertaining a minimum competency at each grade, the students are not allowed to proceed (no social promotions). Over time, this system ensures more students graduate from the system well prepared for college or life. Actually, I contend the vilification of “teaching to the test” is more an indictment of poorly designed tests, than the concept of testing itself. Once a student goes on to college, or gets a typical private sector job, there are tests and assessments galore. Having a competency based promotion system just reinforces this reality much sooner in life.

6. Myth – Our top students can beat their top students. Reality – Maybe a decade or two ago, but no longer. The sheer numbers of students from China getting awards in ISEF (Intel Science and Engineering Fair), an international competition for high school students, is staggering. One study estimates the number of students in the gifted programs in China outnumbers the total number of students in the US. Even when American kids do well, a large proportion of our top students who compete in math, science, chess, spelling bees, geography bees, science fairs and so on, are children of first generation immigrants from China, India and other countries. Apparently, these students do well in spite of our public education system, and not because of it.

All in all, the whole 2 MM trilogy has a lot going for it in terms of raising the awareness of the emphasis placed on education in the two emerging giants. Kudos to Bob Compton for taking time out of his busy schedule to champion this cause.

Copies of the videos may be ordered from the 2 Million Minutes website, www.2mminutes.com

The Recession - What's Different This Time?

2008-12-07T10:59:00.000-08:00

OK, so President-elect Obama lowered our expectations by declaring that the recession we are in will be worse before it gets better. Now it is official.

So, we tighten our belts for the next twelve months or so, and then everything will be better, like in the previous recessions in the past 50 years, right? Not so fast. This downturn already has swallowed entire industries, with more lining up for government bailout so they won't disappear. Half million jobs disappeared in a month, the most in modern history. Did this happen overnight? Hardly. This witch's brew has been brewing for a couple of decades, and it has several other firsts to its credit, some that are not so obvious.

1. Highest total debt/GDP ratio in history. During the great depression, the total debt/GDP hit 260%. Now it stands at 350%. A healthy ratio is 150% or lower. Which means we have 200% of GDP's worth of debt to pay off (that is about $29 trillions, with a "T". Boils down to about $100,000 per capita, or $400,000 per family of 4).

2. Hollowed out industrial base: Almost every consumer item besides food, drugs and shelter is made somewhere else. Even in rare occasions something is made here, it is designed and engineered somewhere else. During the last depression, the US industrial base was one of the tops in the world.

3. Not enough brainpower left to build the 21st century economy: Jobs of the future need more college graduates, and yet we are going to graduate fewer students out of college. College is out of reach for many middle class families, and is only getting more unaffordable. More striking is the number of engineers coming out of our universities, which has steadily dwindled in the last three decades. The social scientists have defined what "math" and "science" our kids should learn (or not) in our K-12 system. So, many come out of high school unprepared for a technical career.

4. Global competition: The US was pretty much isolated with few other global competitors during the last depression. Trade was a fraction of what it is today, given the lack of jet, container, and surface transportation infrastructure. But since the internet took hold, competition in services became reality, adding salt to the wound, since competition in manufacturing has been lost already.

What about the solutions being talked about? I have heard the new administration proposing a massive public works program like the New Deal of the FDR days. I think the building of highways worked in the 1930s because it was one of the big bottleneck to internal trade. But today's infrastructure, especially in the area of communications, has figuratively flattened the world. That is why I think the traditional '30s style rebuilding won't work this time. Yes, we need to fix our roads, bridges and school buildings. Will it help the rest of the nation to be competitive when the recession ends? I think not. What is sorely needed is focus on unique value added technologies like clean, renewable energy, cleaner transportation technologies, and better wireless communication infrastructure. This will give us something of value that we can trade with the rest of the world in exchange for consumer goods, instead of piling up trade deficits.

But to do this, we need more unique technologies we can all our own, and which have a ready global market. Which means we need more patents. Which means we need more PhDs in Science and Technology, who can invent these technologies and file for those patents. Which means we need more K-12 student candidates who want to be PhD Scientists and Technologists. That will be the house that Jack built. We are missing the bricks for this house that are needed for the first layer of this house, so any talk about building the superstructure is likely to provide only superficial results.

I have not heard talk yet from the administration as to how we will accomplish this.

On 21st Century Jobs

2008-12-01T11:09:00.000-08:00

In K-12 education circles, has been fashionable in the past few years to talk about 21st century jobs. Every school district official I met had something to say about how his/her district was preparing students for “21st century jobs”. When I probe a little deeper, however, I get the feeling that the depth of understanding as to the nature of these jobs is very superficial. When asked, I get what sounds like a canned response “jobs involving creativity, critical thinking skills, learning how to learn”, and so on. That got me thinking about how our education system can deliver on the promise of true 21st century jobs.

Let me set the context. Our universities seem to be doing a great job of creating graduates that can compete globally. Others are catching up, but we seem to be still on top. Never mind that we have mostly foreign born science and engineering professors teaching in these universities, to mostly foreign born graduate students. For the moment, we can bask in the glory that we are #1. So, the problem of turning out college graduates for 21st century jobs does not appear to be with our institutes of higher education.

Now let us go a little deeper into the rabbit hole. What about our high school graduates? I have already written a piece about “How To Turn Out World Class High School Graduates” from the perspective of a customer. Clearly, there is a broken link between our K-12 system and its view of 21st century jobs, and our university system and its view of 21st century jobs. I will continue to assert that this is one broken link that we cannot afford to have. If it is not obvious now, it will be obvious a few more years into the greatest economic downturn since the last great depression. To peel this onion, we have to start with what we have been historically good at, and what we have left to chance.

Let us start with all the great ideas that we came up with. In no particular order, I can rattle off at least a dozen history-altering 20th century inventions credited to the US: the transistor, atomic power (for energy generation), a dozen or more computer languages, statistical process control, genetically engineered drugs, wireless technologies, the photocopy machine, the SLR camera, the TV, the VCR, ,the integrated circuit, the computer and the list goes on and on. One funny thing I noticed is that each one of these inventions is keeping hundreds of millions of people gainfully employed in well paying jobs IN OTHER COUNTRIES – in the 21st century. Let me elaborate some that I have listed:

The Transistor: Invented by William Shockley and Pearson in AT&T Bell Labs, (later confirmed by Brattain and Bardeen from the same labs) one of the premier private research labs, in the 1940s, for which they won a Nobel Prize. Attempts to commercialize the transistor in the US were unsuccessful, until Sony of Japan licensed it and perfected large-scale manufacture. Other Japanese companies followed suit, and the rest, as they say, is history. Today, there is no large-scale consumer electronics industry in the US to speak of. AT&T Bell Lab itself is no more, having been broken up into parts and sold off to foreign companies.

Nuclear Power for Energy: Peaceful uses of nuclear energy have been a good byproduct of the technology that literally started with a bang. But after 3-Mile Island and Chernobyl, the perception of this as a source of energy has declined. In the meantime, France, Japan, and developing countries like India have accelerated deployment to reduce dependence on foreign oil. The cure for bad technology, according to them, was better technology. Our answer: no technology. Now new nuclear plants have been built here in the last 30 years.

Computer Languages & the Internet Browser: This has been the single largest generator of high paying jobs worldwide. Universities and corporate research labs in the US led the development of almost all the ideas behind the connected world we have today. And yet the job growth in this field has fled this country. Most of the programmers are in other countries. No country has benefited from this than India, where one private university, the National Institute of Information Technology, turns out more programmers per year than the entire nation of the United States. Back in this country, I have not seen any recent math text books with Basic algorithms to solve problems. Instead, there are screen shots of calculators where students just punch buttons. Nor have I met many math teachers who can teach true programming. I wonder whatever happened to critical thinking we talk so much about? If the K-12 system does not create excitement in this field, who will supply the graduates to our university system?

Statistical Process Control: This is a concept that was lost on the US industry for a long time. Championed by US thinkers like Deming and Juran, these ideas never caught on, until Japan Inc. decided to use these techniques to improve their cheap, and shoddy product image. And improve they did. And the Koreans followed suit. Based on a deep understanding of mathematics and statistics, these techniques propelled Japanese car brands to the top of the quality charts. The US auto industry has always trailed in this aspect, and had to rely on laws and truck subsidies to survive. Part of why the “Big Three” are at the verge of bankruptcy is the failure to follow these concepts in the early stages. Waiting in the wings is Tata motors of India, with a car that sells in India for $2500, and gets 50 miles per gallon. They promise plenty of 21st century high paying jobs – in India.

Genetically Engineered Drugs: One other field that was pioneered in the US, and treated with suspicion by the public. While companies like Genentech seem to be doing quite well, the growth has come from other countries. Ranbaxy labs in India grew tremendously in the last few years, and is on the verge of passing global giants in this field. Recently, a Japanese company acquired a large stake in this company, probably since Japan’s aging population will needs a reliable supply of quality drugs.

Wireless Technologies: Spearheaded by the meteoric rise of the cell phone, this field is just getting started. Once the undisputed territory of US companies like Motorola, this industry is now dominated by Finnish and Korean companies. This is one industry that is forecasted to grow, in double digit percentages, well into the 21st century, providing high paying, high tech jobs for their employees. Meanwhile Motorola just announced that they were exiting the cell phone business. The only other US company that makes cell phones, Apple Computer, has only a few percent global market share. Interestingly, Korean and Finnish high school students routinely come in first or second in math and science in worldwide comparisons. Coincidence? I do not think so.

Do we see a trend here? Can we connect the dots? Needless to say the remaining industries such as cameras, the TV, the VCR (or DVD player), computers, and so on, are creating high paying 21st century jobs elsewhere in the world, while our domestic industries are turning into hollow sales and marketing organizations. One common thread in the places where such industries flourish is a razor sharp focus on creating the best mathematical and scientific talent in the world. I will assert that if our focus, especially in the K-12 education system, changes to match or better theirs, we will also create the same high pay, high growth environment in this country. The downside of not doing so will be an economy that we have today. Other than food and shelter, we are forced to buy what other countries make, with money borrowed from them. There will be jobs here too, but with subsistence wages and no benefits to speak of. Our system has been turning out high school graduates, 50% of who cannot pass an 8th grade math test. I will assert that it is a big part of what led to the mess we are in. The time to act was in 1983, when the “Nation at Risk” study came out. We failed to produce results then. The result I think has led to economic bondage of sorts, for our kids and grandkids, and no amount of apologizing is going to make their lives any better. I will maintain that only if we act like our lives depend on rectifying the current sorry state of math and science education can we redeem ourselves. One thing that we appear to be good at, is to come together at a time of crisis and commit to a solution that leads to common good. My hope is that most people who read this can make this connection, and drive changes in their schools and communities.

How to Turn Out World Class High School Graduates - A Customer's Perspective

2008-10-28T23:34:00.000-07:00

As I ponder the big question of how to improve the sorry state of education in the State of Washington, my mind conjures up images of the familiar ancient story about five blind men and an elephant. Every person has an opinion about what the problems are, and how to solve them. If you are an educator, you get one version of the problem and proposed solutions. Administrators have their own view, so do the superintendents and the school board members. But all the people above are part of the system. Their view often reflects the immediate problems they see in connection with their jobs. What about the “customer”? We rarely read or hear about the people who are paying for the education that their kids are getting, namely, the taxpayer. In most cases, this person also doubles as the parent of a public school kid. I am a long standing tax payer with hundreds of hours of volunteer hours in public schools, and I have a few views of my own. As a customer of a system that spends $7500 per child on K-12 education (which, by the way, is higher than the per capita GDP of about 65% of this world’s nations), in this election year, I want my voice to be heard too. So, here goes.

As a customer, I want the schools to turn out quality graduates. What I mean by quality is that the graduates meet all the skill and knowledge requirements expected out of a world class graduate. One measure of the quality of graduates, at least in case of those who go on to college, is remediation rates. The goal, of course, is zero remediation rates. Another measure of quality is for graduates to enter a trade or occupation of their choice with very little on-the-job training. Unfortunately, this is not the case today. Remediation rates in our community colleges, especially in the gatekeeper skills like math, are running over 50%. Even our most selective college, University of Washington, has over 10% remediation rate, and the math, science and engineering faculty have come out with an open letter saying they have seen a decline in core math skills. The WASL scores bear out an even sadder fact – 65% of our graduates cannot pass an 8th grade level science test either. This is not what I expect out of a quality organization that charges the taxpayer $7500 per student.

Quality of graduates is a direct measure of how well a school system does. There are some indirect measures, ones that lead up to the final goal of turning out quality graduates. These are by no means new - they have been talked about for decades. But I feel, as a customer, it is my job to keep repeating the message until action is taken to remedy the defects in the system. After researching what works worldwide, I have discounted the familiar arguments about more money and smaller class sizes. There are many more zero cost (or, sometimes, cost saving) alternatives we can explore before we blow more money on something that is not working well. But good teachers DO make a difference, so do well designed curricula. So I have decided to focus on these three problem areas – Quality graduates, Good Teachers, Good Curricula. Below each, I have listed several possible solutions, with my take on what the cost would be – both monetary and political.

Problem #1: How to increase the quality of our K-12 graduates

o Solution: Increase the content and rigor of state standards for every subject matter at every grade level, starting with math and science. Today's standards for math, even the revised ones, trail the world class by a year or two. Since math is the language of science, the science standards and performance suffer accordingly. The standards should be made devoid of pedagogical methods, and focused on performance expected out of students. This is the job of OSPI, and they have failed miserably in their primary mission. The legislature must drive OSPI to make Washington standards the unquestioned leader in the world. The opponents of this have been, and will be, the entire establishment, because they are afraid they won't be able to deliver. This is nonsense, because setting standards should not have anything to do with whether we can deliver, and everything to do with setting world class expectations of our graduates. This is a low investment, high return area. The legislature has already done some expectation setting to OSPI on this, but OSPI has been an unwilling participant so far.

o Solution: Measure our graduates with the same ruler as the rest of the nation. WASL test is a custom made test that only OSPI loves and understands. It has wasted over a billion dollars, while providing little information to teachers on how to improve their instruction, and students on how to improve their learning. Lower grade WASL must be replaced with a nationally normed and standardized test such as SAT10 (Stanford Achievement Test, v.10) and the high school exit exams replaced with ACT. The overall cost may be a wash, compared to the cost of administering the WASL. But the students and teachers will gain immensely because of the feedback.

o Solution: Hold schools accountable for competency by raising the bar at every grade level, and do away with social promotions. Social promotions are a product of the self esteem movement which has permeated all aspects of our teaching establishment. But it has taken all accountability away from students, parents, and teachers. If students do not meet minimum grade level performance requirements, they should spend time in summer school until they do. If not, they should repeat the grade, since they were probably not prepared to take it anyway. This will take some investment, and political will to implement, but will pay off handsomely in high school and college, when students actually come in prepared to take higher level classes.

o Solution: Fund full day kindergarten and head start. This will make sure that both low income and high income kids have the same baseline when they enter first grade. Study after study has shown that head start funding and prison funding are inversely correlated. With the US having the highest incarceration rate, at over $25,000 per annum per inmate, we can spend a fraction of that on headstart and avoid most of it. The return justifies the investment.

o Solution: Cut back on big sports expenditures, and fund intellectual curricular and co-curricular activities in math, science, geography, spelling, chess, and lego robotics. Our schools, especially at the high school level, have become like sports camps. Curricular achievement often takes a back seat to sports achievement. There is nothing wrong with pursuing sports, as many of us were involved in them ourselves. But having the two funded from the same bucket of money tends to confound the funding issues. I propose dividing educational districts into two categories - academic districts and athletic districts. This allows the funding to be distributed according to availability, and have the schools focus on what they should - academics. This could actually be a money saver, since it will make obvious the eye popping amount of money we spend on athletics in the name of academics.

Problem #2 - How to get good teachers into classrooms:

o Solution: Pass an emergency teacher certification bill that grants full teaching certificates to retired and unemployed engineers and technicians. This is very low cost, high return area, but you will have to fight the teacher's unions to get it through. But it takes advantage of a large number of retired professionals or those being laid off, and are eager to teach.

o Solution: Mandate that the schools of education raise their admissions standards to at least those earning a basic arts/science degree, increase credit hours required to graduate, increase the credit hours and rigor of advanced math courses for teachers, and tighten the graduation criteria. In the short term, it will decrease the number of graduating teachers, but if you act on the previous solution first, it should compensate for the shortfall. Again, this is a low cost, high return proposal, but you will have to fight the bureaucracy in colleges.

o Solution: Mandate that every teacher get evaluated on the increase in standardized test scores in their classes, and on a 360 degree evaluation by students/parents, peers, and the principal. The good ones should get higher raises, the really bad ones put on probation. If no improvement is seen after probationary period, they need to be let go. Tenure has blurred the difference between stellar performers and poor performers, and has provided a reason for good teachers to leave the profession. Without a periodic review system of review, over time, the entire system degenerates into mediocrity. As we speak, Michelle Rhee is overhauling the Washington DC school system, partly by challenging the teachers to step up or leave. I think this change is one of the most significant we can implement. This is a medium cost area (takes yearly testing to track progress), but can be automated with technology. This is how all professionals get evaluated in most of the world. I expect strong resistance from the unions, but they will be fighting a losing battle in the face of increasing job losses in the economy. This is also a low dollar item, since you are giving the total money you would have normally given for salary increases, and distributing it by performance.

Problem #3 - How to get good curricula into schools

o Solution: Seek out what works worldwide, and implement it in schools. The public schools in the US in general, and in the state of Washington in particular, have been victims of faddish trends in education. Without going into gory details, my research has uncovered that a large portion of poor student performance can be traced to poor curricular choice based on faddish philosophies promoted by the schools of education. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the area of math education. The K-8 public school math curricula based on these philosophies has dumbed down an entire generation of school kids. Increasing expectations is only part of the story. Without rigorous teaching materials, the goal of turning out world class graduates will still be a dream. My recommendation is to follow the list published by What Works Clearinghouse, and implement only those that have proven to produce results (as in higher test scores). Math keeps coming up as a subject that needs particular attention. Saxon Math and Singapore Math have been proven to work in the K-8 curricula, and I feel they are a great choice for any school district as primary math curricula.

The Trouble With Ideology And The Dawn Of The Age Of Reason

2008-10-23T22:02:00.000-07:00

There have been countless articles in the papers and op-ed pieces on radio and TV recently on why the country got into such an economic mess almost overnight. Some of them have been suggesting that the free market ideology, or the lax regulation policies on banks and mortgage lenders got us into this mess. Some other articles on educational ideologies that believe in constructivist learning suggest that they could be part of the reason why our schools turn out such poor performers. Then there is the all consuming presidential race which keeps bringing racial and religious ideologies into the forefront, whether they are relevant or not. That got me to think about the fundamental concept of ideology. If a certain ideologies got us into this mess that we are in, then is the solution an opposing ideology? What is the guarantee that an opposing ideology will not get us into another mess sometime later? Could the problem be the fact that we cling to various ideologies to save us at different situations, without really questioning the validity of believing in any ideology at all?

I am of the opinion that all ideologies were conceived to simplify life. Ideologies provide simple explanations and prescribe relatively easy to understand prescriptions in certain situations. Religious ideologies belonging to various religions lay down how life should be led, and the consequences of good or bad deeds in this world or an afterlife. Various political ideologies favor control of the society by a certain class of people, assuming that what is good for the ruling class is good for humanity. But to believe in an ideology, an individual must see value in what it has to offer. It could be positive value in terms of direct rewards for following its prescribed practices, or lack of punishment for doing so. The net result is that if the ideology fails to show value, it fails to appeal to the individual. So, what are the characteristics of a successful ideology which shows value? I have come up with some ideas below:

1. First and foremost, a successful ideology must be simple to understand. Even a flawed ideology sometimes succeeds because it appears to be easy to understand. For example, when Communism was first introduced in Europe, it seemed so simple that it appealed to almost half the population of this planet, and caused the masses to take up arms and overthrow their governments. The flaw in the ideology is painfully obvious now. At best, it took away all the incentives for one to excel, and at worst, it spawned party dictatorships or individual dictatorships because the one party system made it too easy to do so. Even though the success of communism was fleeting, in historical terms, its impact, good or bad, has been so powerful that it will be hard to ignore.

2. Second, a successful ideology provides some reasonable and immediate solutions to a pressing problem . For example, when Buddhism was first introduced in India in 6th century BC, it provided a way out for millions of masses who found the existing religion and the social structure it created to be too oppressive.

3. Third, a successful ideology is self-reinforcing. Its followers create a system that rewards the believers and punishes the non-believers, therefore perpetuating its existence. This can be said about any religion currently in existence, but it can also be extended to social and political beliefs. Ideology, by definition, creates exclusive cliques or groups. The followers of an ideology may think this is great, because of the rewards they receive for being part of a larger group.

So, what then is the trouble with the concept of ideology? Other than some obvious ones that failed, we should be fine with the remaining ones, right?

I beg to disagree. Let me attempt to explain:

The greatest strength of ideologies, their simplicity, is also their greatest weakness. Let us take the example of Communism. The earliest treatise, written by Carl Marx, was during the early stages of the industrial revolution. Big money built huge industrial infrastructure with one sole end in mind – maximum output. Working conditions were abysmal, and the wages were just enough for subsistence living in slums. All the profits went to the capitalists, who hired and fired employees at will , at a time when there was no safety net. What the laborer saw was that the bosses hardly broke a sweat and lived a plush life, while they had to constantly toil without even the guarantee of being able to make the same subsistence wages the next day. The workers were not literate, and were not capable of understanding a deep treatise on economic theory of supply and demand. Communism was just the tonic for many of them. Revolution provided a vent for their pent up rage, and the idea of everyone being equal appealed to them. Heck, everyone they knew was in the same boat. It was not hard to imagine life being a little better for everyone.

But it turned out everything was not hunky dory after the first revolution. Russia quickly industrialized after its bloody revolution, only to find Stalin rise to power and establish a long and painful dictatorship until his demise. China followed suit with Mao Zedong. Other Asian and Latin American countries quickly followed. But then, a funny thing happened. The same ideology that led the rise of these nations also threatened their very solvency. Since there was no incentive to work hard and excel, the entire economy eventually became filled with workers who got by with the bare minimum effort. “Everyone being equal” turned into “everyone being equally mediocre”. This, combined with the zeal of the leaders to build big militaries, drained their already weak economies. When the only choice left was to face bankruptcy, the leadership of Russia invented “glasnost” , a thinly veiled attempt at allowing freedom of expression. This was quickly followed by the collapse of the Soviet empire itself. China was on a different path, but came to the same conclusion after the demise of Mao. Still ruling with an iron fist, the leadership allowed private enterprises, and opened its markets. So, the ideology where “everyone was created equal” did not quite hold water. The conditions that made it a sensible ideology did not exist any more. The ideology had helped create an entirely new condition, wherein a completely opposite ideology started making more sense.

So, in short, the simplicity that successful ideologies deliver also is their greatest liability. The simplicity is analogous to that of a stopped clock. It is exactly right twice in a 24 hour period. But it keeps deviating until it is exactly opposite of the correct time. I assert that every ideology suffers from the same limitation. Why? Because simplicity lulls people to believe in certain simple axioms, regardless of the situation. The world has become a lot more complex and intertwined in the 21st century for any ideology to be correct for everyone 100% of the time. Believers of ideologies make their own lives simpler by shutting down the brain circuits that would have otherwise be open to examining new situations in their own light. I have seen the quip “my mind is made up, don’t confuse me with facts”, which is probably a jab at such mentality. And yet, the world needs more and more people who can look at each situation intelligently, and draw their own conclusions. Ideologies create extreme conditions that a counter ideology will destroy, thereby starting the whole cycle all over. The fact that ideologies help create extreme conditions are illustrated even more clearly by the economic chaos in the US today. We have had the opposite ideology to communism operating in this country since its inception, at least in the private sector. It has been forty years since we landed a man on the moon, which was a symbolic pinnacle of capitalist achievement. And yet, today the wealth disparity in the US is the highest in 40 years, so is poverty rate, illiteracy rate, high school dropout rate, unemployment rate, foreclosure rate, bankruptcy rate…the list goes on and on. Does this mean the citizens of the US need a counter ideology, something of the likes of Socialism?

Hardly. I assert that every society deserves to be freed from the endless cycles of ideologies and counter ideologies butting heads every so many decades. The only way to do that is to wean the public from the idea that there is a simple ideological solution to everything. Problems today are complex. To be solved, they need all the knowledge, and processing ability that every individual can bring to the table. Reason must replace blind belief. Every problem must be identified early in its cycle, and must deserve the best people we can throw at it. But it has to start with creating minds that are predisposed to reason, rather than belief in an ideology. Hence my oxymoronic statement – believe that one should not believe.

The 21st century will create many new winners and losers. My hope is that more enlightened societies will see the wisdom behind not following an ideology blindly. Instead, they will focus on creating more objective thinkers. They will have mastered all the relevant facts and skills that humankind has learned so far, and use that knowledge to build a better tomorrow. That will be the dawn of the age of reason.

Colossal Crises Part 2 - Economics

2008-10-05T23:10:00.000-07:00

In the last blog, I was leading up to the topic of how I think economics functions in a democracy. I am not an economist by training, but I have taken enough classes and read enough books on economics to at least understand the basics. The basic tenet that any economics text book teaches is that supply and demand are in balance at a price called the “market price”. When there are many producers of “goods” and “services”, and many buyers for these goods and services, it creates an ideal situation where producers compete for market share, and buyers get the best deals. Free and fair competitive markets ensure that goods and services are delivered at the maximum possible productivity. It The key word here is “productivity”. As producers compete, they figure out how to make more things in less time, and productivity increases with time. Higher productivity should theoretically translate into higher wages. After all, the definition of productivity is how much work gets done in a given amount of time. Let us look at how these ideals have become distorted in some areas.

Let me start with two of the key words I introduced, “goods” and “services”. “Goods” are tangible things produced by workers, often in factories. (The kind that have been disappearing from this land.) Apparently, many Asian countries have managed to produce goods at a lower price and higher quality. The American ideal of free and fair competition has been realized in other countries, which produce low cost, high quality items at a much higher productivity. So, we are used to paying the lowest price for an imported car, sometimes lower than it is sold in its home country. But why are so few car makers left here? Why are more American workers not benefiting from the largest free market for automobiles in the world? Why is Toyota today worth 20 times more than Ford and GM COMBINED? Why are Honda, Toyota, and countless other foreign automakers able to make top quality cars in this country, and provide competitive wages to their workers in American factories, when GM and Ford can not?

I could not find any simple answers, but one thing jumped out at me. Decision making in the management of large corporations were decidedly short sighted and speculative. When there was ample evidence that fuel prices would go up in the long run, Detroit was building large SUV factories to cash in on the short term demand. When oil prices jumped, Detroit got caught with large factories that were useless. Now they are asking for a $50 billion bailout from the government (read – taxpayers). Now, it is not the government’s role to tell GM or Ford to build a certain type of vehicle. But it is also true that our representatives buckled under the automobile lobby and did not enforce fuel efficiency standards despite mounting evidence of global warming, and now, increasing fuel prices.

Similarly, in the stock market of the 90’s, when Greenspan made his “irrational exuberance” speech, stocks were valued much higher than their underlying value. But nothing was done by the regulators to check the speculative options trading, or day trading. In the early 2000’s, when there was ample evidence that home prices were going up at a faster rate than wages, mortgage lenders were making sub prime loans at an ever increasing rate. Speculation started controlling the prices of homes, rather than the true underlying demand. The fundamental economic principle where demand and supply were in balance was distorted by speculation, which by definition is not true demand. It is an aberration in demand, anticipating more demand. Again, the government regulators did nothing to curb the lax lending practices.

On the other hand, “services” are not tangible. An accountant preparing your taxes, a doctor prescribing a medicine, a secretary answering phones, are all services which we cannot touch or feel. But there is a common thread between goods and services. Where services are delivered in a competitive market, there has been improvement in productivity, just as in the production of goods. However, when the competitive aspect is taken away, it becomes non ideal, and mediocrity sets in over time. The best example of non ideal conditions I could find was unions. In principle, unions make worker’s life easier by providing a single body to negotiate with management on work hours, working conditions, wages, etc. But this also means the unions are creating a monopoly over how services are delivered. A monopoly is by itself a non ideal condition for the economic principles to operate. With no competition over how services are delivered, productivity remains stagnant. Over time, the loss of productivity starts to strangle the company, and the company loses competitiveness. The unions are slowly killing the goose that lays the golden eggs, so to speak. There are many industries with non-union labor (semiconductors and software, to name a couple), and there are world leading companies still thriving in the US. The difference is that most of these successful companies have dealt with their employees in good faith, at least as much as the circumstances will allow them. I am convinced that the concept of the traditional union, invented during the industrial age, is as obsolete as buggy whips. We need a new paradigm where the distinction between management and labor blurs, and the government needs to be a champion of this change. There are plenty of examples of how this has been done in high tech companies, which evolved in the post industrial era. All that needs to be done is to copy the best practices, and implement them in areas that needs them.

I infer the following common threads from these observations:

1. The economic principles of demand and supply, free and fair markets, are fundamentally sound. Where they have been allowed to operate, these forces have produced the maximum increases in productivity, and higher wages for the workers. Conversely, where they did not exist, the result was market bubbles followed by crashes.

2. The role of the government should be to make sure that the environment within which all goods and services are made adhere to these fundamental principles.

The big question now is, how many of our elected representatives believe in and champion these ideas. I am willing to support all who show me evidence that they do. But from what I have seen, most are happy to be one of the sheep, and line up behind a few manipulative leaders who scare them into action.

Next up - The Environment

The Unified Field Theory Of The Colossal Crises

2008-10-05T15:54:00.000-07:00

It has been a while since I posted on this blog. In a previous blog, dated July 25, titled “Instant versus Delayed Gratification”, I had concluded with the sentence “It is going to be a long and bumpy ride....hold on tight!”

What a ride it has been. I was pinned to my computer as bank after bank, institution after institution, fell with breathtaking speed. And I am afraid it is just the beginning. Why was this happening with such rapidity all at once? Those who could not find a few million dollars to save headstart were all of a sudden begging the public to shell out $700 billion dollars to save our financial institutions. Why? How could this happen out of the blue, and catch everyone by surprise? I was struggling for answers. This prompted me to look beyond how I got started with blogging – math education in my school district. I looked into how public education is delivered to kids, how government regulates banks and brokerages, how micro and macro economics works, and finally, how democracy is supposed to work, and why we as a nation have been so ineffective in preventing such large crises. I have also been pondering if there is a common thread behind the reason for all these catastrophes. What I discovered was pretty obvious, yet hard to find these days. It is also too much material to fit on one blog, so I have split it into series of blogs.

I liken this quest to that of a Physicist who started with lessons on the theory of gravity, and along the way picked up the collective knowledge and wisdom on various forces that dictate the properties stars, planets, atoms, quarks, energy are all interrelated. Then they almost all seem to “lap dissolve” into one. This is the Physicist’s holy grail, called the “Unified Field Theory”. It remains unproven, but it has not stopped them from building giant particle accelerators to prove it.

Similarly, what started as a blog on education has now lap dissolved into economics, domestic and international politics, technology, and environment…. They all appear to be part of the same continuum. Have these crises just popped up out of nowhere? Evidence has been all over the place, sometimes for decades, that things have been seriously wrong. Yet, all the actions that were taken were ineffective in preventing the ultimate spectacular crashes – in the stock market of the late ‘90s, the 9-11 attacks of 2001, now the housing crash and the resulting credit crisis. It appears to me that the unifying force behind all these is defined by how uninformed, unskilled and apathetic we collectively are as a democracy. Let me expand on this a bit.

Democracy is neither new, nor is it a novel idea. We can brag America is the oldest democracy, but strictly speaking, it is neither. The oldest democracy in recorded history I could find was the city state of Athens, circa 100 BC. Every citizen with voting rights had the right to vote on any issue that the public considered important. It did not last very long. Democracy is a very fragile and unstable way to maintain order in any nation. But we are not a true democracy either. Even though we do not have a true democracy as the ancient Athenians had, we have a republic, started by ancient Romans, which is a close approximation. Theory goes that the elected “re”presentatives of the “public” are a close enough approximation of the real thing, because the representatives are beholden to the public that elects them. Well, like any theory, when put to practice, it becomes something else. Therein lies the rub. Whenever power concentrates in the hands of a few, other centers of power, like large corporations, unions, think tanks, religious and civic groups, government agencies, etc. try and influence their decision making. When all the time of a politician is taken up by the “sky is falling” message coming from these power centers, precious little is left to cater to the cries of the voters that got them there. When the voters do respond, their voices are often ignored. Take the banking bailout, for example. The vast majority of the emails from citizens have been against the bailout, but our leaders went ahead with it anyway! Did they act because they knew something the public did not? Like they did when “WMDs” were discovered in Bagdad? What happened to the idea of a representative being the spokesperson for the public, and not of another branch of the government? What constitutional remedy is left for a voter to have their voice heard, other than try to vote these people out of office? Only to find the new person falls victim to the same old game?

To be fair, this nation has performed better than the vast majority of the world, when it comes to creating a great place to live. The infrastructure, the universities, the business environment, and the ability to communicate freely are the envy of the world. But underneath it all, I sense there is something very insidious. I see that the public is content when they have a well paying job, a clean and secure living environment, good education for their kids, and some hope for a comfortable retirement. For several decades, these benefits have been taken for granted. They have counted on our elected reps to do what is in the public’s best interest, and maintain these benefits we enjoy. Now, one by one, these seem to be disappearing, often at a breathtaking pace, without a chance for us to respond. Is there a pattern behind each area that has gone or is going wrong? I contend there is. Read my the next blog on “Economics” for more food for thought.

An Olympic Sized Diversion

2008-08-27T11:05:00.000-07:00

The summer Olympics ended with a bang last weekend. US won the most medals, while China won the most golds. By this time the people in the US olympic committee are probably strategizing as to how to win the most golds in London in 2012. It is natural in a culture that prides itself of athletic prowess. But while the eyes of the world were fixated on the grandest ever Olympic closing ceremony, two seemingly disconnected articles appeared in two separate corners of the world this weekend. One was in the Boston Globe, the other on the Yahoo! India website. Here are the links to both:

First, the Boston Globe editorial by Derrick Jackson, titled Going for Gold in India, an editorial describing the first ever olympic individual gold medal won by an Indian athlete.

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/08/23/going_for_gold_in_india/

The second, titled "India to have fourth of global workforce by 2020: PM", is a report on the announcement by the Prime Minister of India to Quintuple the investment in Education, and create a world class workforce of 500 million people by year 2020.

http://in.news.yahoo.com/43/20080826/836/tbs-india-to-have-fourth-of-global-workf.html

The Boston Globe editorial chronicles the story of Abhinav Bhindra, a 25 year old from Delhi. The first individual medal won by an Indian was a big deal, and Bhindra became an instant national hero. However, Derrick had a different slant on this victory - "But as every American who ever needed computer support knows, India is the 100-pound weakling laughing all the way to the global awards stand. As China and the United States produce athletes in very different, yet equally obsessive ways - and as we treat college and pro athletes as demigods and allow our children to become enslaved to high school coaches and suburban soccer programs - India is producing brainpower." I could not have said it better myself. As if to rub salt in the wound, the article goes on to say "But it is also interesting that the nation's first individual gold medalist also happens to be the 25-year-old chief executive of a company that makes controllers for computer games. While many half-educated American athletes retire into a fog to find meaning in the rest of their lives, Bindra wins the gold, then mints more gold as our children become zombies playing with his products."

As if by coincidence, the Indian prime minister's speech appeared on the newswires. Here is the first line "India is expected to account for a fourth of the world's total skilled workforce by 2020 and the central government is according top priority to higher education, allocating Rs.275,000 crore (Rs.2.75 trillion) to the sector, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said here Tuesday." and it continues further "'We have significantly increased allocation to the education sector with a five fold increase to an unprecedented Rs.275,000 crore,(Rs.2.75 trillion)' he said while addressing faculty and students at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Guwahati." Five fold increase? A country that already produces 6 times the number of engineers and 10 times the number of computer programmers as the US to increase the investment in education by 500%? The investment will also be more broad based "Approval had already been granted for eight new IITs, seven Indian Institutes of Management, 16 central universities, 14 world class universities, five Indian Institutes of Science, 10 new National Institutes of Technologie, 20 Information Technology Institutes, and 1,000 polytechnics, he added." Admittedly, much of this newly educated workforce will be needed to support a projected population of 1.5 billion by 2020. At this rate, the proportion of the population engaged in high paying occupations will be way out of proportion compared to the US. Finally, Mr. Singh declared "This big and unique opportunity for India will come from an education revolution that we must undertake as our most important national endeavour.'" Now, we have heard just about every US president declare the same thing for the last 30 years. Billions were spent to rectify the problems found in the 1983 study "A Nation At Risk". The result? Education achievement has been flat to down. Even fewer students graduating with technical degrees. At the same time, the India has gone from a third world apology for an economy, to the second largest technical workforce by 2008, and in the next decade, is poised to be the largest.

How will we deal with this new reality? A country that is already committed to producing $20 computers and $2500 cars that get 50 mpg will be hard to ignore by anyone's standards, especially by the beaten down middle class teetering at the edge of poverty.

In the meantime, will we still continue to focus on winning more Olympic gold medals in 2012? Will parents push their kids harder on the parallel bars, or win more golds in swimming than Michael Phelps? Will the youth of the country focus all their energies on the next olympics? Or will we be mature enough to treat the situation for what it really is - an Olympic sized diversion.

Sudhakar

Wealth - Create or distribute? You make the call.

2008-08-19T16:52:00.000-07:00

I wrote the following as a response to a mail thread from Wheresthemath group. The discussion started out on a commentary on the complacency that is apparent in the public education establishment.

"As a person who has spent over 25 years in high tech private sector, I can vouch with personal experience that there is a dire need for both the industry and education to inform each other. I got involved when a group of administrators toured the Intel facility in the late 1980s, and asked managers like me what they would like to see improved. I recall telling them “build teamwork skills”. I had no idea that they would throw everything else out in the process, or at least it seemed like it. It was not until I started volunteering in class rooms that I really started seeing the difference in mind sets. After watching this unfold over a decade, here is the pattern I see emerging.

If one looks at the economy as a whole, where goods and services are provided and consumed, one can broadly classify them as wealth producing and wealth redistribution. In this economy, most of the wealth producing activities like R&D, Engineering, Science, Technology, are in the private sector. The public sector has the lock on wealth redistribution, with programs like social security, medicare, etc. Public education seems to be in a no man’s land in between. Its charter should be enabling wealth creation, by providing skilled and knowledgeable labor pool to the private sector. Yet, because they are funded from the wealth redistribution side of the economy, that is all it seems to appreciate. Layers upon layers of educrats in the system and the colleges of education seem to reinforce the “mission” that instilling a sense of social justice in the students more important than providing them with world class skills to compete in an increasingly global economy.

I think the only way people will appreciate what is going on is for reality to continuously reinforce that they are on the wrong thought process. A prolonged recession, a depression, unemployed kids moving back in with their fixed income parents, all will go up with time. I just wonder how much worse it has to get before the tide turns."

Sudhakar

Doing the Right Thing

2008-08-07T15:45:00.000-07:00

Niki Hayes, a former Washington state elementary principal wrote recently about parents who defend the "conceptual math" that is all the rage in Washington and Oregon schools. They, like the education establishment, are clueless when it comes to why kids learn math at all. If they learn what they need to learn, they would find it easy to get into any college in any field, right? Wrong!! Millions of parents in California found the hard way that the UC system, still regarded as world class, does not care much for the conceptual math. The students simply did not have the skills to pass a rudimentary math placement test. But Washington parents, even some who are close to the school establishment, defend it. How can they realize that it is not what it seems to be? That their kids are headed for a life that they may not have envisioned?

Niki wrote - "Usually the only way to change a person's opinion, even passion, is for reality to hit them hard personally." Here is some equivalent political humor, this being an election year and all, - "A Conservative is a Liberal who has been mugged."

In our case, it did hit home early. But the fun part (if you can call it that) was to watch other parents go through their own "Ouch!" moments, when reality finally bit them in the butt.

The occasion was freshman orientation for my son at Oregon State U, year 2004. I went to the 2 day event to relive my own college days. Hundreds of freshmen came to attend the event, one of a dozen or so orientations scheduled throughout the summer. The first thing everyone was asked to do was to take a math placement test. The exceptions were those who had already passed the AP Calculus exam (my son had, so he did not have to take the test). Anyway, the next day, the chief freshman counselor had a big meeting in a large auditorium, and announced that about 60% of those who took the test had placed in the beginning Algebra class, and could expect their "4 year" college diploma to take anywhere from 5 and a half to 6 years. Many placed even below that. Only a few placed into Trig and Calculus. Some parents who sat in my vicinity were visibly shell shocked. They kept repeating that something must be wrong - their son/daughter was a star math student in their school, and got all A's and B's throughout high school. A large crowd gathered around the chief counselor to complain, who was probably jaded after years of such repeated scenes. He basically said "tough luck - welcome to college". Many decided to skip majors requiring higher math altogether, and decided to go into "softer" fields such as English or Psych.

Now, my younger son did some math on a couple of scenarios. Let us take the example of a student who is brave enough to go through the 5.5 to 6 years of college. The extra cost with in-state tuition, in the most optimistic scenario, is as follows:

Direct cost: 1.5 years x $20,000 (in-state tuition plus expenses) = $30,000
Opportunity cost: 1.5 years x $60,000 (what he could have earned if graduated earlier) = $90,000
Total Cost of not placing into Freshman Calculus: $120,000 (low side)

If we take the example of those who chose the softer fields, it gets even worse. Recent data show that those with non technical degrees earn on an average $30,000 less per year. Over their life times, this adds up to over a million dollars. Now, a million dollars would at least buy a few more gallons of gas to fill up those Suburbans, wouldn't they?

When I meet people who have not had these "ouch!" moments, I recall a Winston Churchill quip - "Americans always try to do the right thing - after they have tried everything else".

I think we have tried everything else. Now, it is time to do the right thing.

Instant Versus Delayed Gratification

2008-07-25T13:36:00.000-07:00

I just read a news item on Yahoo! worldwide news on the economic outlook in Britain. According to a British research report, "Over a third of the people would run out of money in less than a fortnight (2 weeks) if they were unable to work, according to a new research." Here is the link to the story:

http://in.news.yahoo.com/139/20080725/882/twl-1-3rd-of-brit-population-could-run-o.html

Now, isn't it funny that we are also reading similar stories about families in the US? Can there be a common thread to this? Besides speaking the same language, can we also be sharing a common behavior pattern that leads us both to the same predicament?

Remarkably, at about the same time, another story appeared on Yahoo! Finance. It was titled "Instant Gratification Nation: Can We Still Sacrifice for the Future?" Here is the link for this story:

http://finance.yahoo.com/expert/article/economist/94722

The latter story starts with a study conducted at Stanford University on young children. Here is the first part in quotes: "In the late 1960s and early 1970s, researchers at Stanford University conducted a now-famous experiment using young children enrolled at Stanford's preschool facility. Experimenters sat the students at a table set with assorted objects that children of that age would find desirable (marshmallows, colored plastic poker chips, stick pretzels, and the like). The students were asked which of the objects they preferred.

Once that was determined, each student was offered an explicit choice that tested his or her ability to defer gratification: Get a reward now or a bigger reward later. The experimenter left the room, leaving a bell on the table in front of the student. If the student rang the bell before the experimenter returned, he or she would get a reward, albeit a less preferred one (a single marshmallow instead of two). However, if the student resisted ringing the bell until the experimenter returned (typically after 15 or 20 minutes), he or she would get something even better -- two marshmallows.

The remarkable thing about the study is that a student's ability at age four to defer gratification is correlated with better outcomes much later in life, such as academic and social competence. For example, one follow-up paper found a statistically significant relationship between how long a student waited to ring the bell and -- more than a decade later -- their "ability to cope with frustration and stress in adolescence.""

I have not found a follow up study yet on whether the four year olds got their tendencies through their upbringing or genetics. But once they get it, it appears to stay with them through their lives. Now, it is important to note that these kids are of pre school age. So, schooling apparently did not have anything to do with the outcome.

Now, what could those in each population do that affects our collective behavior? Those who preferred instant gratification, as the study implies, take a path that leads them to shoot for easier goals, spend more, save less, and make more impulsive decisions. Those who defer gratification are likely to sacrifice short term pleasures to shoot for more long term, challenging goals. For example, they may decide to defer social life to take more challenging courses in school. They may decide to work to pay their way through college instead of borrowing. They may spend a little extra time in college to get that graduate degree. And they are more likely to inculcate the same habits in their children at a very young age. A majority of people with the delayed gratification mentality will mean a nation of smart savers, and judicious spenders. When time comes to making a decision, whether in their profession or their personal lives, they will first look towards the long term viability of that decision, rather than the all too often "quick buck" decision making we see in businesses and personal lives of many people.

Contrast this to some other developed countries like Japan. During the 1970s oil crisis, the US Congress passed tough mileage requirements. The story goes that the Japanese auto industry hired 1000 more engineers to implement the change, whereas the Detroit automakers hired 1000 lawyers to fight the change. Today, Ford announced its biggest quarterly loss in History. Both Ford and General Motors today are worth about $17 billion, whereas Toyota is worth $144 billion, more than 8 times the total of both Ford and GM. This is only one case where delayed gratification has paid off. There are countless other examples of such decisions. Japan is not the only country with such practices. Korea, China, India, Singapore, Taiwan and other eastern countries have long observed such practices. India is investing in doubling its technical workforce by a factor of two in the next decade, while a third of its population lives on below subsistence wages. In 2004, there were 200,000 engineering graduates. In 2009, there will be 450,000. In 2014, there will be close to a million. The US numbers for the same professions have been shrinking, and are currently around 60,000 per year. There are no published programs or plans to increase this number significantly, despite all the noise about increasing the focus on math and science in schools. The culture we have in this country treats technical professions with disdain. Unless the culture changes, the outcomes are not likely to change.

So, is this some ethnic/national trait? History would say no. Both Britons and Americans deferred gratification during the two World Wars and the Great Depression. One can argue that there was no choice. There is some merit to this argument, because when times got better, the old behaviors returned. But it also means that if the same Depression era circumstances were to return, the behavior will also return. However, it is a case of the medicine being worse than the disease.

That only leaves the collective wills of people to change voluntarily, before circumstances force the inevitable. I am not betting on it, because in a democracy, the evidence needs to precede the need to change. But when convincing evidence appears, it may take a generation or longer to turn this ship around.

It is going to be a long and bumpy ride....hold on tight!

Sudhakar

What Goes Around, Comes Around

2008-07-19T15:10:00.000-07:00

Boy, isn't this a year full of ironies!

What triggered the above reaction is an innocent looking email from a job recruiter, to my newly graduated, college educated son with an MIS degree. In addition to the usual boilerplate, the email mentioned that the employer was a "large Indian corporation" and the chosen candidates were going to be sent to an "8 week intensive training camp in Bangalore, India, before they would be posted to their jobs in various US locations."

Come again?

Wasn't this supposed to be backwards? Like recruiters in Mumbai or Bangalore calling up fresh grads, and selling them a junket to Europe or the US before they got posted to their jobs in India? Whatever happened to the "World Class University System" that cranks out graduates with desirable degrees and enviable skills? Apparently, this company does not think a fresh US graduate from the most prestigious state university is good enough for their entry level job.

So, here I sit, having gone through several years of fighting the public K-12 system. I should have known that the pig will eventually make its way through the python some day. Just to be sure, I had my son go have a chat with a friend who is a software pro, just to see what kind of training he received as an MIS (management information systems) degree holder. His assessment was that the training was bare minimum needed in today's job environment, and he will need a lot of remedial training to make himself an attractive candidate in today's job market.

OK, now it started to make sense. A college diploma is just a necessary evil to get one's foot in the door, but not a guarantee to obtain even an entry level job. I guess the Indian companies have realized this and have their own internal training programs to make up for the deficiencies. I recalled that during the rise of the Japanese auto industry, they too had the same philosophy. All growth came organically (without acquisitions), and all new hires were hired as trainees. The best ones got the plum entry level assignments in the most prestigious divisions.

My opinion is that the Japanese and Indian companies take a longer term view of their business, building a solid technical foundation first, which then allowed them to build solid, high quality products. The US corporations are notoriously short sighted, relying on on-the-job training most of the time. Because the Wall Street ensures that the short sightedness remains as a permanent feature of the US corporation, their decisions come back to haunt them decades later. When Intel lays off 20,000 workers to go from 100,000+ employees to 80,000 employees, Wall Street cheers. At the same time, companies like Infosys in Bangalore quietly hire 10,000 more employees to go from 90,000 to over 100,000 this year. And they have plans to continue to grow organically, well into the future, while companies like Intel will be under pressure to reduce their workforce.

This is in stark contrast to what was happening just 30 years ago, when all the technology jobs were being created in the US, and a fresh graduate from an Indian university had to fly halfway around the world to find a good graduate school, and maybe employment.

So, I guess what goes around, comes around.

Cheers,

Sudhakar

Intellectual sports - why don't we hear about them in the press any more?

2008-07-05T12:41:00.000-07:00

Hope you had a happy July 4th.

Here is another example of intellectual accomplishments not being part of the mainstream news in this country. The Philadelphia International Chess Tournament just concluded last weekend. This event gets more press internationally than within the US, since it is one of the most prestigious international chess events held in this country.

Here is a story that appeared on the OnLine edition of the Indian Express, but lost in obscurity in American press. The event was won by a 15 year old Indian chess player from New Delhi, the first time an Indian player has won the event. By comparison, Bobby Fischer had only won his first US title at this age, and had never won an international event. The world championship in chess was claimed by an Indian, Vishwanathan Anand, for the first time ever, last year. He is still the top rated player in the world, according to the World Chess Federation (called with its French acronym FIDE').

http://ratings.fide.com/top.phtml?list=men

Link to the tournament results attached:

http://www.expressindia.com/latest-news/Negi-wins-as-Indian-GMs-rule-in-Philadelphia/329886/

But the mainstream media has never picked up on chess as a sport on which to report.

Leave it to the Indian press to pick up what we do not do here.

FYI - I was so disillusioned with the lack of emphasis on intellectual activities in the state I lived in (Oregon), I helped start the non profit Oregon Scholastic Chess Federation ( www.oscf.org ) , which sponsors chess clubs in schools, and to date has signed up more than 2000 competing members, and has held three state championships. My younger two have been chess players all their academic lives, and routinely participate in state and national tournaments. The Indian culture, which gave birth to the game of chess, still considers this the ultimate mental challenge. When I visit my hometown of Mangalore, I take my kids to the local chess club, where the top kids are rated internationally. My kids are usually humbled by competition that is several years younger.

Cheers!

Sudhakar

My remarks on Ed Week Commentary on "Education Myths" by Iris Rotberg

2008-07-04T14:41:00.000-07:00

These are my attempted remarks on an article "Myths That Continue to Confound Us" By Iris C. Rotberg , which appeared on Ed Week on line on June 9, 2008.

My overall assessment of this article is that it is attempting to play down the consistently poor scoring by our students in international tests, and pinning the blame on poverty. Nice try, but I was not swayed by the arguments given. Please read on.

First off, I want to mention some ground rules that I follow when I examine articles like this. I tend to overreact to anything that makes sweeping statements like "myth". It is usually an attempt by the author to summarily dismiss something, so that no further discussion is apparently warranted on that topic. I tend to go a little deeper, and more often than not, you find some hidden truths under the "myths". I also look at comments made by authors in areas that are apparently out of their comfort zones. Fortunately, this author has left most of those in the form of questions, with no answers given. Here are my comments, myth by myth, followed by my attempted answers to some of the questions.

1. Myth - "we can “fix” our schools without addressing the problems of poverty"

I believe this to be partially true. If nothing else changed in our system that delivers education to students, then the only variable that appears to help is resources from well off parents, trying to make up for the deficiencies in the system. What gets swept under the rug with this myth, in my opinion, is that if the system can change, then fixing the schools will take surprisingly little extra money. For example, what if a school district decided to cut their high school football programs to fund headstart? What if every high risk school switched to Saxon math from Everyday Math? What if the extra coaches and TOSAs were assigned to after school homework or help clubs so their parents can work a full day? What if the elementary teachers were allowed to specialize in math and reading? Apparently, all these solutions do not get brought up for discussion. Instead, the author seems to be asking the poor parents to get rich fast (which, as one can see, is a convenient "out of the system" problem that the system is not responsible for). A hard nosed taxpayer should demand that every solution be on the table. Having the discretion to be rich or poor in this economy is pretty much out of an average taxpayer's hands. But let me take a counterexample. The Dominican Republic is by many measures one of the poorest countries in the world. But they produce, per capita, the highest number of major league baseball players in the US. How did they achieve this without fixing the problem of poverty? That is a question that I would like to see answered.

2. Myth - "international test-score comparisons are valid measures of the quality of education"

I am baffled by this statement. At a minimum, the international test scores are the only thing we have to make a comparison. Why shoot the messenger? Again, I think it is symptomatic of a system that is self congratulatory on what it thinks is right, the results be damned. If, as most people in our education establishment would like to believe, we have the best education system in the world, should it matter who gets tested, or which socioeconomic group they come from?

3. Myth - " that international test-score comparisons are valid measures of a country’s ability to compete in the global economy. "

Now, here is something that is showing the author's naivete' on the subject. Quality of education, as measured by the test scores, is widely believed to be a NECESSARY condition, but not a SUFFICIENT condition to compete in the global economy. The two emerging economies, China and India, had excellent education systems for decades. They are only now starting to appear on the global radar. Why? Because it takes a free and competitive marketplace, and favorable conditions for risk taking (like intellectual property protection, bankruptcy protection, easy availability of venture capital etc.). Without these conditions, you would have what we used to call in India "rickshaw drivers who could recite Shakespeare". Well, guess what? Both China and India have gradually incorporated these favorable conditions in their economies over the last couple of decades. And because test scores tend to be some of the leading indicators of what is in store for an economy a few decades down the road, I think we have not even seen the full impact of what is in store for this country as a result of these changes.

The last part where the author starts asking questions - I pretty much agree with the questions. They are being asked by almost every person familiar with the issues. The questions are in quotes and italics, and my attempted answers below each question in normal font:

"I would like to pose a few questions, which I will leave to the reader to answer. Did the United States lose the leather, textile, and steel industries because of its ranking on test-score comparisons? Did General Motors lose sales to Toyota in the U.S. market because of American students’ math performance? And, at a more sophisticated level, are we losing out in high-tech innovation and information technology at Microsoft and Apple because the iPod is manufactured in China?
Even if some of our software and innovation come from other countries, is it because our education system has produced insufficient numbers of high-quality scientists, mathematicians, and engineers? Is there a shortage of U.S. scientists, as some firms have reported, or is there a shortage at the wages the firms would prefer to pay? Are companies outsourcing jobs to China and India because Americans are not qualified for them, or because the firms can pay much lower wages to workers in these countries? Did Italy outsource the production of designer shoes to China because there are no skilled craftsmen left in Italy?
Did the United States lose the leather, textile, and steel industries because of its ranking on test-score comparisons? "

The author has stated the questions in such a way that hey imply a cause-and-effect relationship between test scores and the continuing trend of de-industrialization of the US. Whereas if you look in my response to myth #3, it is likely to be only ONE of the causes. The typical US corporation makes decisions based on a lot of factors, the quality and productivity of labor being only one of them. Typically, however, the typical US public corporation tends to be swayed more by Wall Street than any other single entity. Since Wall Street does not have a very long horizon (typically less than a year) for its vision, the US firm tends to be short sighted as well. Bottom line decisions are made primarily to cut costs. Most of the de-industrialization was brought about due to cheaper labor outside the US. The fact that the labor was also of higher quality came as a bonus, historically speaking. The saving grace, we were told, was that we keep the high paying R&D jobs in this country, and export the low paying manufacturing jobs. But that implies we train enough PhDs in technical fields to keep those R&D jobs. But most technical PhDs are being granted to foreign nationals, who are forced to go back to their home countries due to visa restrictions. The US corporation follows the talent, so they are setting up R&D centers in places like Bangalore and Beijing. So, now, even the high paying R&D jobs are starting to be exported. R&D and the intellectual property it creates is the root of most if not all historic wealth in this country. The net effect is that the entire wealth creating machine is starting to be dismantled and moved off shore. I have no idea what will happen if you drain a country of the very fuel that got it this far.

"Is the underrepresentation of native-born U.S. students in some science, mathematics, and engineering Ph.D. programs the result of a failure of our education system, or of personal decisions made by students to select other fields—perhaps more-lucrative fields like investment banking, law, or business? "

I hope this is a rhetorical question. Because the answer is in the question itself. I do not know how to separate a person making a decision from the prior education he or she has had. If a person received inadequate preparation for scientific and technical fields from the school system, of course the decision will be made to go to the other fields. For example, if someone were told that Everyday Math/CMP/ IMP sequence prepares one to take calculus just as well as traditional math, Algebra, Geometry, and Trigonometry, and the student believed the system, he or she would be very unlikely to succeed in a technical profession. So, in this case, did the student decide to choose something other than a technical field, or did the system leave the student with no other choice? This scenario has been played out over and over again in many states over the last two decades. This is just unethical, to say the least. Also, the sweeping conclusion on the alternative professions as "more lucrative" is uncalled for. It sounds like a preconceived notion by the author, and I do not believe them to be more lucrative. Investment banking is a notoriously fickle industry, which hires and fires at will. Business is inherently risky. As far as law goes, well, I saw a statistic that said we have 50 lawyers for every PhD scientist in the US. So, by not opting to go into technical fields, the students are putting their future careers at a greater risk, albeit the rewards are higher for a small percentage of the players. If we take this mentality to an extreme, we will be buying lottery tickets to finance our futures.

"Now to my question: Given the complexity of that global context, do you believe that our problems in economic competitiveness would be solved, or even alleviated, if U.S. students answered a few more questions correctly on international assessments?"

The answer from me is a definite yes, and more. I firmly believe in getting what I pay for. The US education spending per student comes within the top 10 nations in the world. So, I expect that the international ranking should be consistently in the top 10 as well. More than that, I would like to see the US appear in the top 5 "bang for the buck" category (which may be measured by something like = test score/$ spent per student). Currently, both these categories are dominated by countries like Singapore, Finland, and S. Korea. Test scores are a leading indicator of what is in store for the economy in a decade to two decades. So, we can still be comfortable today while our students do poorly in these tests. But by the time our students become part of the workforce, it would be too late. What is different this time compared to what the author cites from history? Every time we felt some competition in the past, be it from Japan, Korea, Germany, Russia etc., it was from economies and populations either equal to or smaller than ours. But the workforce in just two of the emerging economies, namely China and India, is roughly 8 times that of the US. To complicate matters, the world has suddenly gone flat, according to Thomas Friedman, due to a sudden explosion in global connectivity. In this flat world, the forces arrayed in competition with our graduates have no precedent in history, so historical comparisons have lost most of their relevance, in my mind. I think our graduates will have a much harder time making a living compared to the current workers, and the only way it can be changed is for them to strive to be the most competitive in the world in a wealth building field. I firmly believe that the education system should reform itself before it is found irrelevant by this global economy, and a large percentage of its products (future graduates) are relegated to the ranks of a permanent underclass, with little relevant knowledge, and few marketable skills.
More on the social ills in a future discourse.
Sudhakar

Stone Soup Math

2008-06-23T00:34:00.000-07:00

I have been baffled by the recent avalanche of reform math materials making their way through public schools lately. I knew about the concept when my oldest son was in elementary school in California, and I went through California "Math Wars" until in ended in 1999, with a set of standards most scholars agreed were world class. I thought it was the same story in other states. Wrong, my dear Watson! Reform math resurfaced as Connected Math Project(CMP) in Oregon, and then again, in Washington, where I live.

My first introduction to CMP/CMP2 was about 2 years ago, when my daughter was taking it in the International School of Beaverton. I was already alerted to it by others in the Beaverton Math group, but nothing got me like dealing with it on a daily basis. After a few months, I was convinced that it was the modern equivalent of the Aesop's fable about the "stone soup". Let me explain:

* I would start with a chapter on CMP, which was supposed to be strong on explaining concepts, but irony of ironies - I could not find many good explanations of concepts that made sense to my "cursed" logical mind. So I decided to start with the base of Heymath! and had my daughter go through the many excellent animations of concepts. Voila! She would come out with a great intuitive grasp of the concepts. This was especially true for geometric concepts.

* I would look for examples of solved problems in CMP books, so that she can learn standard ways to solve them. Again, no go. So, I added a dash of examples from my old Glencoe California text books, that had worked out examples on the concepts. She had no trouble figuring out how to solve the problems after that. That took care of the examples issue.

* Then I noticed CMP was weak on skill building, since there were too few exercises that honed in a specific concept. So we added a healthy serving of Kumon exercises, and that took care of her skill building.

Pretty soon, we were sold on the concept of discovery based learning. We "discovered" that we could build an excellent math program with right proportions of Heymath, Glencoe, and Kumon, and did not need the CMP2 books at all. So we threw it out of the "stone soup".

We still keep our "recipe" handy for home schooling :-)

Of Social and Economic justice

2008-06-10T09:10:00.000-07:00

Social justice keeps coming up as a topic whenever I hear about ed schools. My son's middle school English teacher kept bringing it up as a topic whenever I talked to her. At that time, I was quite naive to what was behind her assertions. Since then, I have read up enough to understand what the ideological underpinnings are. As I understand them, they go all the way back to the early 1900's. A lot has happened since then, and I think those ideas may be as outdated as buggywhips. Let me attempt to explain why I think so:

Social justice cannot exist in a vacuum. For lasting social justice, economic justice must come first. When I was a kid growing up in India, the prime minister, Nehru, was impressed by the quick rise of the Soviet Union, and decided that India should be socialist too. But with a majority of the population under poverty line, there wasn't much that could be done with meagre resources. The running joke at that time was that India could not afford a socialistic system, because the only thing we had plenty enough to share, was poverty. But the government went ahead anyway. Three decades later, rampant corruption and incompetence accelerated the "redistribution of poverty", had only succeeded in making more people poor while the rich got richer. It wasn't until 1991 that government owned enterprises were sold, and free market reforms allowed competition in all areas (including education).

Now the question comes - how does one achieve economic justice? What is economic justice, anyway? Very simply put, economic justice links income to productivity. In other words, if someone works more efficiently, they should earn more. In the US, since the 1970's, this has been going in reverse. All the improvements in technology have made the American worker more productive than ever, but the compensation has gone down in real terms. Why is that? One big component has been the relatively stagnant number of people working in wealth creating professions like engineering, science and mathematics. The only new job creating branch of mathematics to come out in the last century, computer programming, has employed millions in high paying jobs worldwide, but still is viewed as a profession of social outcasts in this country. So, I will assert that there can be no social justice, while the culture actively banishes the professions that create economic justice. If you take this to an extreme, you will see why Prof. Yunus, an Economics Professor from Bangladesh, received his Nobel Peace Prize (and not the Nobel prize for Economics). Yunus, it turns out, created the concept of microfinance. He created a bank that would loan as little as $10 to women who worked at home weaving rugs and baskets. Who in turn would sell their wares at the local market, and pay back the loan. There was no collateral required, just trust. The concept became so wildly successful that other countries in Asia nad Africa are implementing it. In their recognition letter to Dr. Yunus, the Nobel Committee noted :"Lasting peace can not be achieved unless large population groups find ways in which to break out of poverty." In other words, social injustice (leading to conflicts around the globe) cannot be rooted out without removing economic injustice i.e., eradication of poverty.

2008-06-09T09:39:00.000-07:00

I received an email from a friend about a kid in Canada, who is writing a play about a company trying to capture all the kid's calculating ability in their calculators, and then sell it back to them for profit. My reaction to that was, "Hey, where have you been? It has been happening in the US for the last two decades, under the name of reform math curricula." A calculator could pretty much automate anything anyone could do mentally since the 1970s, and it did not take very long for them to be sold as a substitute for human's ability to figure, rather than an aid or a tool.

But we have come a long way since then.

Consider this:

When I joined Intel in 1982:
They had just announced the IBM PC with 4.77MHz processor with less than 30,000 transistors
The typical DRAM memory chip density was 64 kbit
No hard disk, but 256 kB floppy drives
Large enough to fit on an average sized desk

When I left Intel in 2006:
A high end laptop had 2 cores running at 2.2 GHz - Almost 1000x (100,000%) of the throughput
The DRAM memory chip was 1Gbit, which is 13,000x (1,300,000%) in density
Typical hard disk size was 100 GB, which is 4,000x (400,000%) in size
All this in a size and weight that was low enough to fit in a backpack.

Never in the history of humankind has there been such an exponential increase in any capability in such a short time. All this started in a small area called the Silicon Valley right here in the US of A.

Now comes the shocker. The ability to take economic advantage of this explosion in the number of transistors has fled this country. What discipline takes advantage of such an exponential rise in the number of transistors? It is the newest branch of mathematics - computer programming. The graduates of computer science make $60,000 right out of school, and easily double their income within a decade. And if we look around and ask if we are preparing enough kids to be excited about these high paying careers in computer programming, the answer comes back negative. The number of computer science graduates has remained flat at around 60,000 per year, or gone down slightly in the last two decades. India now produces 10 times the number of programmers per year, and the number is expected to double in the next decade. Just one institute in India, the NIIT (National Institute of Information Technology) trains 500,000 programmers per year. I am happy that this is helping a lot of Indian people escape poverty, but this is way lopsided in one direction. We could have done better training our kids to take the high paying jobs. But with the jock culture that is pervasive, I get the feeling we are just training our kids to be used car salespeople (like we need more of them).

Next time you go to your friendly neighborhood public school, ask them what computer science courses they offer. If you get blank stares, don't be surprised. I already warned you.

Of soccer, baseball, and chess parents

2008-06-01T14:02:00.000-07:00

My family moved to Oregon in the year 2002. My wife and I had 3 kids in tow, one in high school, and two in elementary school. Education and extra curricular activities, of course, were high on our list. We had done our homework, calling the school districts, having phone meetings, from California, the whole works. We even made the decision to buy our home based on the schools, as most parents do. Besides academics, our kids were active in soccer and chess, so we found a school with a chess club close by. The club had many parents who were very involved. As a matter of fact, all chess lessons were taught by parents in the evening. Many parents attended the classes along with their kids, so they could learn. I had not paid much attention to the demographics of the club, but it appeared to me that more and more members were coming from immigrant families. As time went by, one thing led to another, and I led the start up of a new statewide organization in Oregon to promote chess competitions, called the Oregon Scholastic Chess Federation. And again, in our first two state championships, I saw more and more immigrant families bringing their children to the state championships.

In parallel, my wife and I did our duty as soccer parents also. My wife and I signed up as volunteer coaches, and did our duty as soccer parents. Again, there were a disproportionate number of immigrant's kids in our soccer teams, albeit not as lopsided in chess. Then my son, then a fifth grader, expressed an interest in joining a baseball team. I had no clue about baseball, but I had played enough cricket in my life to understand his interest. We signed him up for a team. I had not paid attention earlier in the season, but as time went on, I saw hardly any immigrant's children on the team.

Fast forward to yesterday, when I was at the Portland Chess Club, where my kids were playing in their monthly tournament. I bumped into a professor from U of O, who had driven his son all the way from Eugene to play. He and I were killing time, talking about our common experiences. It turns out he was an immigrant from Scandinavia. He brought up the observation that in all the chess events he has been to in Oregon, he sees more and more kids of immigrants. To a lesser extent, in Soccer. In Europe, of course, he was just used to seeing Europeans in both events. He wondered, where all the native born kids were. Surely, there are enough of them in the same economic brackets and similar leisure times. What do they do on the weekends?

His last remark took me back to my son's baseball years, where most kids came from middle to upper middle class families. The coach called his son "A-Rod", and drilled the team like an army drill master. He yelled and screamed at kids who did not perform up to his expectations, but I did not see any parents complain. When I thought he was being a little over the top, I would quietly bring it up with other parents, and they would say something like "oh, the kids need to know it is rough out there. He means well. Besides, it builds character." I thought, all this to make sure someone knows how to handle a fastball? Wouldn't it make more sense for his kid to take up an activity, like chess, that has been proven to build intelligence? After all, it has some immediate benefits like helping them do well in school. In many conversations I would strike with the parents about chess, they would either change the subject, or dismiss it summarily. I felt as though academic and intellectual achievement was either not valued, or was just plain taken for granted.

Back to the present, the professor and I parted with a shared understanding that there are some deep cultural divides that separate first generation immigrants from the rest of the population. When I came home, I saw the day's newspaper. I saw that the top two National Spelling Bee contestants were children of Indian immigrants. I said to myself - yes, the cultural divide is alive and well.

A Gift from our Fathers

2008-05-20T09:39:00.001-07:00

This is a reprint from a message I sent out to Where'sthemath group. There is a lot being said about the rise of China and India as emerging economic superpowers, but most articles I read appear to me as the modern equivalents of "Five Blind Men and an Elephant" story. I think I can relate to at least the US and Indian cultures, having spent roughly half of my life in each. Here are my observations about the cultural differences.
----------------------------------
I recently got a copy of the video "Two Million Minutes" and watched it. I have eight nieces and nephews who go to school in India, and I can get a real time comparison of what they do in school as well. It is funny how often when I call my relatives in India, the "hot news" is what the latest report card is of each one of them. Then they quickly switch to how hard their kids are studying to get into the best colleges. They are not well off, and are strictly middle class. All save one are studying to be engineers. The one who is not is in Accounting and Finance. All require top notch math skills.

Having observed two of the three cultures discussed in this video most of my life, I have arrived at some theories as to why this is the case. Both China and India started with a clean slate almost at the same time. Mao Zedong's communist party came to power in the mid 1940's, about the same time as India became independent. As if by coincidence, about the same time, the US became the sole industrial power left standing after 6 years of WWII. This country received its greatest gift almost by a process of elimination.

Then a funny thing happened. Those who were completely wiped out, namely Germany and Japan, overcame hurdles never before considered conquerable to build the most efficient economies of the world. Several others such as Taiwan, Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, followed suit. The underlying culture was of saving and sacrifice. Families lived on a pittance just so they could make goods that would sell in the rich countries. They saved for everything. Nothing was bought on credit. Even homes. Foreign currency was jealously shielded from consumption oriented goods, and was only used to purchase capital goods. See a pattern here? The same underlying culture prevailed in China and India, but two key elements were lacking - capital creation, and open markets. Finally, when the Berlin wall and the Soviet Union collapsed, the two large economies capitulated and allowed open markets, and the ascent of the Chinese and Indian economies began. The key elements of savings (which leads to internal capital formation) and sacrifice (which allows the next generation to be better than the current one), are both paying off handsomely.

Did the US get to where it is without these values? Look hard enough, and you will find them buried in the economic history of this country. During the great depression, there was so much disenchantment with everything borrowed, that the savings rate soared. The values of thrift, which were forgotten during the roarin' 20's, again came into fashion. However, the real test came when WWII broke out when people were asked to sacrifice a lot more. This time it included human lives. Both men and women joined to build the largest industrial capacity of any nation in the world. I think this great act of sacrifice by this country's elders was a gift that kept on giving. The post war generations have lived better than their forefathers, and the rest of the world, but this gift is now close to being exhausted. If I were to draw an analogy, the depression and the war were like stocking of a pond with so much fish that future generations had to just reel them in. But when the fish are dangerously close to being exhausted, there is hardly anyone left with the perspective and skills needed to restock the pond. It is as if people are wishing it was a bad dream and it would just go away if you waited long enough.

Now my question is (and for which I have not found an answer), how in the heck would this country get notions of savings and sacrifice into peoples psyches again? Will we need another depression? Another global conflict? Or are we collectively smart and wise enough to change without such drastic events? I think there are enough people who can see what is going on, and a need for this change in psyche. When JFK sad "ask not...." he was tapping into this notion. Maybe that is why Obama is so popular, because his message is about "bringing out the best one can give", rather than the current prevailing sentiment of "taking the most one can take".

Sudhakar