That Really Is Incredible Skydiving

Here's something for your Saturday Halloween afternoon.

Productive Day, or Non-Productive Day

Here's a way you can be totally unproductive today: if you live in New York City, let's try to estimate which subway lines bring the most Halloween costumes into Manhattan. Right now, the D Line is losing, big time. I didn't see one costume the entire ride.

A friend in the office marked one: a man in a corporate suit, with a cardboard box shaped like a robot head on his head. Stunning. 5 Train wins!

Now, here's a way you can be very productive this morning. The director of the journalism school at my alma mater, University of Hong Kong, chatted with me last night and alerted me to the fact that George Soros is giving a series of lectures on his thinking about economics.

She said he is refashioning the way he thinks about even his own economics. George Soros lectures sponsored by the FT can be found at the link.

From the link:

George Soros explores the conflict between capitalism and open society, market values and social values. Focusing on the principal-agent problem, he will use contemporary economic and political examples to challenge market fundamentalism while presenting ideas for protecting the public good more effectively

He also gave a lecture that should be up on that site now at the University of Hong Kong about China. I have not seen it. But I want to. Have to get to it later in the day.

George Soros on the future of China.

Chalkboard Blog

NYC Teacher's Union Holding Out for 4% Raise?

The story in the New York Times says that the contract for New York City's unionized teachers runs out this week.

This contract, which delineates the pay and perks for New York City teachers, expires on Saturday.

Motivated but Directionless Indian Students !!

This post was written by Surabhi Dewra, founder of
Mera Career Guide.

It is a known fact that the most successful people in the world are those who listened to their heart. Yes, Steve Jobs dropped out of college and went ahead with what he wanted to do. Amitabh Bachchan risked his career by abandoning a reputed job to pursue his calling of shining out in the glamor world. This is the power of following your dream career !

You may wonder why I am talking so vehemently about this, but isn't your career the most important element of your life? Lets do some Math.

In total, the average Indian student spends 17-18 years of her life preparing for a career, and the rest of her life living that career.

Today most students in India make career choices unassisted. They are not sure how to make good career decisions, and are not clear, even just prior to graduation, what they want to do when they enter the workforce. Too many youth do not have the good fortune of enjoying ready access to good mentors in their home situations.

It would not be wrong to call Indian Youths more than ever "motivated but directionless".

Before starting the concept of career portal Mera Career Guide, I did some research on the Indian Education System and came across the fact that in the early days of nation building the focus of education policy was on educating the masses and raising the standard of literacy. This not too far off from the impulses of the early United States government.

Thus, much effort was spent on emphasizing technical education to support economic growth because the urgent task was to create jobs to support the economy and train workers to fill these posts.

Today India needs to understand its age of knowledge-based economy which demands a new approach to career development to meet the skills and labor force demands of the coming decades.

Eliminating the Non-Compete Clause

There's an effort afoot to eliminate non-compete clauses because they are unfair and because they limit competition instead of preserve the domain of competition.

The other thing that companies can do to help their employees become more productive is to actually lower the firewalls around social networking and other online sites. There is actually tons of information out there that a productive, progressive and innovative employee can use. For some reason, many companies try to enforce this mentality that all work happens within the walls of the organization and that anything outside of those walls is a distraction.

I don't agree with this mentality, because it assumes that points of contact outside of a company don't accentuate the company's mission.

In a web 2.0 world, your business is not just here, it's also over there.

We should be communicating in more ways and more often with others.

Aviary Gets US$7 Million for Artist Web Start-Up

Spark Capital and other investors, including a Jeff Bezo-linked firm, have given Avi Muchnick, Aviary’s founder and chief executive, about US$7 million to get the online start-up running.

The top-up of capital is meant to help the company, which provides a service for online art creation, break into two roaring themes in online:

Aviary taps into two big trends. The first is virtual goods, which some have estimated could be a $1 billion industry this year. Facebook and Ning recently announced new virtual gift shops that let more people create and sell virtual goods. Aviary lets other Web sites plug its technology into their sites for users to create virtual goods.

The second trend is the way the Internet has transformed its users into creators. People come online not just to read or look or listen or buy, but also to create their own written material or music or virtual goods.

Cantonese Loses Ground to Putonghua in Chinatown

This article about the new dominance of Mandarin learning in New York City's China Town took me back briefly to a previous life.

I don't exactly agree with its premise, that Cantonese is being "swept away". Hong Kong has for it entire history has dealt with the seemingly always looming threat that the Cantonese culture and language is going to be eradicated by mainland Chinese influence, or some other global trend.

Three years ago, I moved into my first solo apartment in Hong Kong, and it was right across the school. I absorbed A LOT of Cantonese because in Hong Kong the teaching method is basically call and response learning -- you yell Cantonese words into a megaphone and wait for the children to shout them back to you.

Cute. But not at 8.15 am, long before I want to roll out of bed and go to work.

Having lived in Hong Kong, I can tell you that Hong Kong is a neighborhood language, spoken by a HUGE diaspora of Chinese immigrants who fled China or moved to the United States, Canada or other "western" countries in order to find a new life. No matter how many years these people will live away from Hong Kong or Guangzhou, it's my understanding that speaking Cantonese is a way of life.

So is the debate about the dialect's sustainability. Hong Kongers come from a place that is always rapidly changing -- the dialect itself is immensely fluid and flexible. There are young speakers of Cantonese today who speak a version of Cantonese that their grandparents don't even understand, and vice versa.

I think that the speakers of Cantonese in New York must be behaving pragmatically. It makes total sense to know Mandarin if you do business with China. And every country on earth does business with China.

Here's the link again: Learning Chinese in New York

Cantonese, a dialect from southern China that has dominated the Chinatowns of North America for decades, is being rapidly swept aside by Mandarin, the national language of China and the lingua franca of most of the latest Chinese immigrants.

The change can be heard in the neighborhood’s lively restaurants and solemn church services, in parks, street markets and language schools. It has been accelerated by Chinese-American parents, including many who speak Cantonese at home, as they press their children to learn Mandarin for the advantages it may bring as China’s influence grows in the world.

When I was in China Town, I also heard Shanghaiese, Yunnan dialects, Taiwanese mandarin. But you also hear this in China, and in Hong Kong.

Beauty Schools in Florida To Receive Funding Makeover

Can someone with an informed opinion about cosmetology schools and the Pell Grant system explain to me the importance of the stimulus package directing about US$2.3 million to beauty schools in Florida?

There is this bit in the article I link to:

The stimulus money is being paid to beauty schools in the form of Pell Grants, which are awarded to low-income students. The grants don't have to be repaid.

The government doesn't allocate the money based on an assessment of what kinds of job skills are in demand. Rather, students apply to the government for the grants and if eligible can put the money toward the vocational school, college or university to which they've been accepted.

The government sends the grant money directly to schools.

The stimulus bill includes $17 billion to boost the Pell Grant program and raise the maximum annual award from $4,731 to $5,350.

Does this rise in Pell Grant allocation occur all over the country, or is it happening only in select states, like Florida?

Harvard University's Interest Rate Bet Ends in Loss

Harvard University hedged that interest rates would rise. When they didn't, the financial team at Harvard had to pay US$500million to get out of US$1.1 billion in derivatives contracts.

Responsibility and Teachers

This post comes from Myra Sawyers, a former teacher and founding member of the Epic Project:

There are people who want to help build better education systems in America. In order to do that, you have to really know what is going on, and it's not pretty. It's actually kind of revolting.

Fewer and fewer qualified talented people are going to leave the profession, because the pay is sometimes not very good, and there are intractable problems.

Teachers take a lot of hits. I know, I have taken a few myself. We endure quite a bit in and out of the classroom. Most people know all about the challenges teachers face and talk about it but that is usually as far as it gets. This indifference has had its impact. Good or bad? The latter, I would argue.

I know there are teachers who are not doing a great job; just like there are doctors, lawyers, corporate executives (did I mention corporate executives?! phew, just checking...) who aren't and need to be fired. BUT (and I must emphasize this), there are far more great teachers then there are bad ones! (I will save that discussion for another time..)

In my many years of teaching in the classroom and on the college level, I have only come across one person who I would consider a "bad" teacher. However, bad publicity is having an impact on attitudes and perceptions. No one I know would disagree that teaching is not a respected profession; which it should be. Many parents and students have done very terrible things to teachers, and teachers have paid dearly(public humiliation, job loss, financial ruin, etc.).

I attached a link to a documentary film that a friend of mine is working on that is exposing "holding centers" for teachers in New York City. These centers are for teachers who have had allegations (true or false) made against them. Someone once called this place "Teachers Git-Mo". Funny? Not really...



Does this shock you? Why is this happening? Should these rooms exist? If a teacher is guilty, shouldn't they be fired? If a teacher is innocent, shouldn't they be put back in the classroom?

If we are going to change the school system and develop models that are really going to have an impact, then we have to pay attention and know what we are dealing with. There are monumental forces that are having a severe (and it's not all good!) impact on our children's lives. If we do not meet these forces head-on and challenge them, they will continue to maintain the status quo and our children and nation will pay the high price.

Oh, and did I mention the drop-out rate in New York is 52%...

What do you think happens to these kids?

For-profit education: US Trends and Lessons for India

This post is from Rahul Choudaha, who writes for Dr. Education.com.

I have posted an entry on the trends in the US for-profit higher education and its implications for the Indian higher education market at my other blog.

The biggest constraint for India remains the regulatory environment, even though there is significant interest and energy from investors and entrepreneurs. Apart from changes required in the investment and regulatory environment, one key lesson for investors and entrepreneurs interested in the Indian higher education market is the ability to create a sustainable and competitive business model. Prof. Vance H. Fried in his recent article on the future of for-profit higher education comes to this conclusion: "Higher education is a large, mature industry that is being reshaped by innovation. While some of the innovation is in technology, the primary innovation is in business models."


Detailed posting is available at DrEducation.

Rahul Choudaha, PhD
New York

Michelle Obama: "Teachers Important to Strength of Economy"

This morning, I realized that Michelle Obama wrote a column yesterday about the role that teachers play in improving the economy. From a business perspective, there's not much in here that's new. We all know that better education in the form of training students to contribute to global needs is important.

I think this article is important because it shows that the Obamas, as a family, seem to be heading this push to fund education as much as they can. So, here's basically the "nut graf," as they say in the news business. The rest is kind of purple prose. Here you go:

We need universities to double down on their efforts to prepare teachers and to improve and expand effective alternative routes to certify teachers. We need to encourage more experienced professionals to consider teaching as the next chapter in their careers. And we need to treat teachers like the professionals they are by providing good salaries and high-quality professional development opportunities. We need parents to do their part as well to match that leadership in the classroom with leadership at home. We need to set limits and turn off the TV. We need to put away those video games and make sure that homework gets done. We need to reinforce the example that's being set and the lessons being taught at school and make sure that learning continues at home.

And we need government to support significant efforts to recruit and retain teachers and to reward high-performing teachers. Along those lines, President Obama is already investing more than $3 billion to turn around struggling schools. And he has proposed a nationwide Teacher Recruitment Program to attract more people to the profession, especially in high-need schools. I look forward to being involved with this program and encouraging people across America to put their leadership skills to work in our nation's schools.

Michelle Obama writes about the importance of teachers in economics

These Kids Want to Meet Obama

These kids in Los Angeles want to meet the President of the United States.

Teachers and the Future: Why Won't We Pay Them More?

I am excited to participate in this blog and be part of a unique exchange of ideas that are expanding beyond the traditional channels of education reform; moving from academics to the world of social entrepreneurs. I hope my input will bring greater focus to the teaching profession and the need to elevate its status. Now, more than ever, we need to recognize and value teachers and reward them for the significant role they play in our nation’s economic future.

While a classroom teacher, I became deeply aware of the deterioration of the teaching profession. As the need for better education grew, the respect, and power of teachers became significantly less. Teachers became the problem and the scapegoats; we were being held responsible for everything wrong with the system and not having any power to influence the decisions that directly affected our ability to be effective. Then, adding insult to injury, trying to live on an annual salary of $32,000.

In 2004 I started a non-profit for teachers. It is called EPIC (because that is the kind of reform we need). Real and meaningful change to the education system will happen when we start paying greater attention to the teaching profession and its status.

Who in a young person’s life is most directly responsible for their academic success? Studies have shown teachers.

If we are as concerned as we say we are with our nation’s economic future, shouldn’t we be doing all we can to make sure our children receive the best education possible? So many have answered "yes", but it stops there.

EPIC is currently working on developing a pilot project that aims to solve the recruitment and retention crisis in the teaching profession through higher pay. One is already happening in New York, The Equity Project (TEP) Charter. They are paying their teachers $125,000 a year. The EPIC Project consists of individuals who want to expand those efforts into the Public School System.

Isn’t it time teachers made $125,000 a year? Currently, the average salary of a teacher is $31,000. When you look at the amount of education teachers receive, the level of responsibility expected and their value to society and then compare it to other professions, one could argue teachers should be paid much more.

As the only non-profit focusing on this issue, we believe that targeting recruitment and retention through higher pay will significantly transform the profession and the system. In exchange for paying teachers more, teachers will be expected to do more. They will construct curriculum (which is dominated by curriculum companies---curriculum is expensive!), direct school policies, handle administrative duties and be expected to work all year. Most teachers I know want this control especially if they are going to be compensated for it.

To make it possible to pay teachers more, would require a major shift in attitudes and perceptions. It will also challenge us to re-examine priorites and the current role of administration and other forces that have dictated much of what goes on in our school systems. Do they help or hurt education? Are prinicpals necessary? What other forces have caused our schools to suffer?

If the priority is, and always must be, student achievement, then we have to honestly ask ourselves hard questions about what are REAL needs in education. I know that if your give a great teacher a cardboard box, they will build a castle.

Simply put, if we want to give our children the best education to strengthen our nation’s economic future, we must attract the most talented individuals to the profession and keep them. Pay them!