Schools, data mining and statistics

Many policy makers, school administrators and sometimes the general public attribute the problem of America's poor and increasingly failing education on the lack of financial resources and most of the time poor teachers. I believe they're only ten percent correct. 

As an analyst I am charged with deriving all of the possible reasons for an observed behavior, and then crunch the data down to a few variables that can be used to predict behavior.  One of the problems that I usually encounter with modern analytics software, is that most of them were designed for crunching numbers. In studying social phenomena, I believe that we should be crunching words, or at least we should work on software that can help us crunch words.

If we deconstruct the word education, the following key concepts are at play: learning, knowledge, imparting, acquiring, and evaluation.  Simplistically speaking, educators have to optimize the ability of teachers for imparting, and evaluation, while students have to optimize their ability for acquiring and learning the curriculum.  In the public discorse and the literature, we have extensively studied  the "imparting" and "evaluating" aspects of education, and  often marginalized the "acquiring" and "learning" aspects.  Very often policy makers rangle over hiring better teachers, or building better schools, while paying little focus on creating environments for learning or improving the students ability to acquire knowledge.

Knowledge, which I will loosely define as understanding, perception and reasoning of concepts, is a skill that has to be taught. Knowledge, like any other skill has to be imparted in environments that are conducive for retention.  For example, if a person wants to become a home builder, they need to learn facts about the trade, apprentice, and gradually become professional.  In the same way if our students have to learn the schools curriculum, they have to learn the skills necessary for acquiring random and perceptively useless information.  Next students have to apprentice, that is do homework, and gradually become proficient in learning.

For the homebuilder in training the motivation is internal.  If you ask many elementary students why they attend school you could imagine answers like "To play with my friends," "Because my mom says I need to learn" and so on.  In many cases the motivation for attending school is external at best. The question then becomes, How can we change the students perceptions of education, and, who is responsible for making students want to learn?