Brian Moore explains how the president’s remarks to students about personal responsibility call attention to the public school system’s shortcomings:

But the problem is […] education is not just about how hard you work, or how responsible you are, or how responsible your parents are. Well, to be fair, right now it is — because the educational system is doing such a bad job, the only variables left are how hard you self-educate, and to what extent your parents can teach you, or purchase extra teaching for you. Which is why life success is so correlated to those things. But this is not how it should be.

The entire point of a public education system is to give those who don’t have those pre-conditions for success a chance — and ours is failing precisely those people.

No one could object to a message of “Work hard.” Still, it’s disconcerting how singularly student outcomes depend on heroic individual effort, when we’re all paying taxes for schools that are supposed to give disadvantaged students opportunities they wouldn’t find on their own.

The case still awaits a full court hearing, but, meanwhile, the boy with autism can bring his service dog to school. The district has been fighting tooth and nail to bar the dog, and had hoped for a reversal of a judge’s order to accommodate it.

This is a dramatic instance of a school and a student not being a good match. Months of legal action have not resolved the conflict, and the boy will have to go to a school that is admitting him and his service dog against its will.

If several schools competed for each student, chances are that one of them would agree to make arrangements for the service dog. Then the question of where this boy goes to school would be decided through peaceful discussions rather than by a contentious court case.

The next Two Million Minutes documentary will be released in one week. You can watch the trailer here.

For background reading, here are some previous posts about Two Million Minutes.

By way of Freakonomics, I found this Economist article about a new charter school that includes video games in the curriculum. The thinking behind this is that students are immersed in digital media outside of school and unengaged in traditional classrooms, so bringing games into their schoolwork is the best way to grab their attention.

I love charter schools, but I’m fond of books and paper, too. Here are some reasons I’m wary of the video game school concept:

• Video games are fascinating and mysterious to adults; kids think they’re normal. Contrary to what tech-phobic adults imagine, kids are not drawn to all video games by an inexorable pull. Kids choose to play the games that are the most fun. To hold students’ interest, it’s not enough to translate a science curriculum into video game format. You have to make it as good as the best video games — a formidable challenge for a video game producer, let alone a school.
• The rest of the world is not a video game. The charter school’s stated goal is to prepare students for college; its future graduates may be in for a rude awakening, however, when they discover colleges rely on textbooks and lectures. I’m not one to say students should study note-taking for the sake of note-taking, but I wonder whether the graduates would be able to pay attention when professors teach in traditional ways.
• An emphasis on gaming may keep kids happy at the expense of developing academic skills. How do you learn to read Shakespeare from a game?

And here are some reasons the school looks promising:

• It’s not the same as every other school. Charters should experiment, and that includes trying things that are radical or outrageous (as long as they’re legal). Unsuccessful programs won’t last.
• It defies stereotypes about charters. The most visible charters are the ones with extended school days and math drills. Occasionally, a charter receives news coverage for its environmental theme or language-immersion program. When people hear about the game-based charter, they may revise what they think about charter schools.
• It leaves little of the learning experience to chance. The typical school buys textbooks, writes a list of main topics students are supposed to study, and then turns responsibility for students’ learning over to the teachers. It’s no wonder that studies find teacher quality to be so important! A charter school that designs classroom activities ahead of time, in the form of digital games and projects, can fine-tune students’ educations without firing anyone.