The Education Blizzard

If you are a typical busy person, you are bombarded with a blizzard of data on how our schools and especially the ones in your own neighborhood are performing. Occasionally you will see information on how our students do compared to their global peers, how well they are prepared for college, how our state compares to other states on the national achievement tests (NAEP), how certain curricula are “the answer” because they are “research-based” and on and on. This virtual blizzard of data makes it difficult to see the reality of our education performance unless you have the time and disposition to spend considerable effort working to boil down the mountain of data to information useful for understanding the reality of our education performance. I have been digging for over 5 years in great depth and believe I have a good “feel” for the reality of our education situation. Here are some truths I have uncovered:

• Education insiders virtually always put a positive slant on any information they provide on their performance and a negative slant on anything they use to justify less than stellar performance (their mantra is “we confess it is everyone else’s fault”). The “reports” from the educators contain errors of both commission and omission. That is, positive data are shown with a magnifying glass and negative data are ignored or suppressed.

• The education schools started with a bias emphasizing process or method and basically show very little concern for preparing their graduates to have a competent grasp of the subject matter to be taught. Any subject courses within education schools are so weak that they have little or no value. This has been going on for decades and won’t change as long as teacher certification is predicated on ed school training as the main requirement.

• School districts espouse fancy mission statements, long laundry lists of what they call goals but aren’t because they set no timeline or tight metrics to measure success or failure. These are often posted prominently in board meeting venues and on district websites but are ignored when it comes to acting to bring them about. For example, one local district with lots of “excellent” rated schools in the State Accountability Reports says, “The mission of . . . School District . . . , dedicated to national and international standards of excellence, is to educate every student through a comprehensive and academically challenging curriculum taught in a safe and nurturing environment. We challenge students to pursue dreams, succeed with integrity, and contribute meaningfully to a diverse society.” Being the best in Colorado is not good enough. Does being “among the best of the poor” in international terms fulfill the stated mission? Hardly.

• Colorado CSAP standards are very weak compared to the achievement test standards of many other states. Thus, we use a very short yardstick to measure performance. If you download The Proficiency Illusion, from the Fordham Institute and Assessing the Role of K-12 Academic Standards in States: Workshop Summary from the National Academies Press Online you will get access to information on how poorly Colorado ranks as to the rigor of our state achievement testing.

• Nationally our kids, as mentioned in the previous blog post, Walking in Place, do poorly versus their global competitors. When you couple that with the CSAP low standard you have a huge gap between what Colorado kids need in their education and what they are being provided.

• The State Accountability Reports give Excellent ratings to many schools. This is a “graded on the curve” approach which only says they are in the top tier of schools in Colorado. This says nothing about how they do compared to the “real” global standard our kids face today because that report would not be pleasant to behold and would generate pressure to improve greatly.

• The research-based assertion has to be treated with suspicion. As I mentioned in an earlier blog, the What Works Clearinghouse at the US Dept of Education reports on all sorts of problems with education research. The two main categories in their findings are slanted studies to the benefit of the research sponsor (provider of book, curricula, etc.) and poorly done from a statistical rigor point of view. But the biggest problem I see (and one that I have seen no one else talk about) is that most education research starts with a poorly conceived research question which is the foundation upon which any research rests. For example, the constructivist math curricula I wrote about earlier does pass the test of the research question asked, “Do constructivist math curricula for elementary level students train students to be able to do simple math operations (with the help of a calculator) such as addition, subtraction, multiplication and division?” The answer is yes, however, the research question that wasn’t asked but should have been is, “Do the constructivist math curricula train students in doing the simple math operations while providing a strong foundation for the further study of higher levels of math, starting with algebra? In other words is the new curriculum an improvement over the one that has been optimized over hundreds of years to provide a seamless transition to higher and higher levels of math study? The answer there is a resounding NO! One thing the constructivist math curricula do though is to mask the lack of math subject knowledge present in too many teachers which makes it a popular choice among the “education professional experts” because it is less demanding of them. Thus, my assertion is that the slant in education research is worst in slanting the research question.

Okay, we have some problems that if not addressed mean our kids will not be able to compete well in the global economy. If it were up to me there are several things I would change immediately. However, it isn’t up to me, but it is up to us. I recommend as a first step that we demand that Colorado set the CSAP standards to the level of the state doing the best on the NAEP tests immediately. We don’t need another time wasting task force to determine what to do. Of course, the whining from the education establishment would be very loud. However, not taking the action because it might inconvenience some educators for the benefit of the kids is not acceptable to me and shouldn’t be to you.

Many other steps should be taken but the above is a good first step and by itself would cause lots of other problems to be faced objectively for the first time.
Copyright ©Paul Richardson 2008