The Education Prize Advisory Meeting brains r us 2 Paula Tallal

So, this last summer, I wrote a review paper that appeared in Science with the pretentious title Foundations for a New Science of Learning. And in some ways, this was a, an attempt by my co-authors and I to be able to, you know, explicate the hope that we had as directors of Science of Learning Centers and I should say that the – my co-authors were Andy Meltzoff and Pat Cole who are at University of Washington who study child development and Pat studies development of language and Javier Movellon who you actually saw yesterday in the video, he was the one who has developed Ruby the Robot, brought it into a preschool, and has figured out how to get the robot, the children to interact with the robot in a productive way. To get their attention and to be able to help them, guide them toward learning at that level, including new languages, by the way. But, in the process of putting together this review, it became clear that – and, you know, some of the new things that we’re bringing to the table, it’s not just neuroscience, but machine learning. A big, a really big development has taken place in the last 10 years is the fact that we now have huge databases through the Internet and we can exploit that with machine learning. So this is taking computer algorithms and use them to sort through all the data and figure out, you know, what are the underlying structure in the data that allow us to, for example, pick out trends. Google is exploiting this. All of the major companies, um, I’m the president of the Neural Formation Processing Systems Foundation that runs a meeting in Vancouver once a year in December. A thousand people show up for that and it’s – a thousand researchers, industrial researchers from Google and Yahoo and all the major companies and I think this is something that can also be applied to education. In other words, tremendous amount of data that’s flowing in now. We have computer databases, Science of Learning Corp. has figured out how to do that. I think we ought to be able to exploit that in helping individual kids in a lot of other areas.

Now, in thinking about – I did take my own homework last night and I did think about it, um, and it seems to me that the really tough nut here, I think the most important thing we can accomplish today is to, is to – this issue of evaluation because I think without that, you really aren’t, it’s a non-starter. And we have to be creative about it. I think it’s just, you know, taking tests is the traditional way of doing it, but there has to be some other way of doing it and it’s clear that if you have the right evaluation, way of evaluating, if we, if you know what it is you want to – I’ve forgotten who said this, but we may not even know yet what the right thing is that we want to evaluate. So, I mean, that’s really why we’re here is to figure out, you know, what’s really the important, um, not necessarily being able to perform on standardized tests, but to – learning how to learn. How do you, how do you assess the ability to learn how to learn? I don’t even know how to express that, but I think we should, we should approach that.

But I think the most difficult part of it is going to be the scaling part, because there are tremendous number of dedicated teachers out there and dedicated educators who have come up with things that work in their own classroom, in their own school districts. But, for some reason, we can’t scale that up. There’s something wrong with the system. Either it’s not possible or we’re not doing it right. What’s wrong? What’s – we have to break this barrier and, and that’s why I think this prize competition may be so important because I think it really is the scientific method. And what is the scientific method? First of all, come up with a good question. And that’s what Francis was telling us yesterday. We have to come up with a good way – a good description of what it is we want to accomplish. It has to be specific. It has to be do-able. And that’s exactly what a scientific question is. And then we have to search for good solutions. And the beauty is that in science, it’s not top down. There isn’t anybody legislating the solution, every scientist gets to have their own crack at it and the solutions compete with each other and they bubble up and, and they – it’s selected. It’s sorted out and from one generation to the next, the best solutions are passed onto the next generation. We need to start that process somehow in education. Instead of having, you know, a lot of fads flowing through the system, we need to find out which of them actually have some benefit and which can be scaled up and, and that’s why I’m here.

We, um, I saw on one of the slides here, the um, I guess the report cover, Rising Above the Gathering Storm. That report, I guess now, three or four years ago, was a bit of a focusing event for us. I mean, it did somewhat galvanize our efforts much more. We extended and expanded the work that we were doing. We work with Sally on a program to help encourage more girls to be interested in math and science. We work with a number of people, Dr. Bernard Harris, who is criss-crossing the country trying to excite and motivate middle school kids about math and science. And I can say that in my, as I call it, my final stages of my business career, that, uh, that I’ve really gotten focused on the issue of the achievement gap. And, particularly the math achievement gap because I think it’s important to try to focus your efforts because the problem is so large. The tyranny of the numbers here in the U.S. were increasingly a majority minority country. Black and Latino students, by, certainly by 2030, if not earlier, the two groups together will be the majority in this country. We are generally failing to educate these students and this is an area where we need a significant change or, you know, we, we – the country will simply go down. In Texas where I live, more than 50% of the new births this year were Latino births. The dropout rate among Latinos is generously estimated at slightly above 50%. Among African-Americans, it’s generously estimated at slightly below 50%. The two groups together are roughly two-thirds of the Texas population. By mid century, we’re looking at a work force where more than half of the popu – and by the way, about 25% of the white kids are also dropping out. So we’re looking at a work force where more than half of the population will lack even the skills that we typically ascribe to that of a high school graduate. So it’s, it’s our collective problem. It’s not the problem of the Black community or the Latino community or the white community. It is a broad problem.