Veering off into the ditch and liking it fine

First, I recommend you go to www.booktv.org and search on E.D. Hirsch. That will bring you to the December 13, 2009 broadcast of his presentation speaking about his new book, The Making of Americans.

Hirsch’s thesis is a good one: That American education went off the rails almost 6 decades ago when the graduates of the education schools anti-curriculum (child-centered) movement began to teach. They had been brainwashed that skills would suffice and save the kids from being forced to memorize facts and drill to increase real knowledge. The big plus for the ed schools was that subject knowledge courses taught by them could be “watered down, everyone gets an A” affairs. The results of this detour to ridiculousness began “biting” into our education performance in a negative way in the late 60s as the victims of the new scientifically unsound approach began graduating from high school. These graduates had the full “benefit” of being subject to the depredations for their entire school career. Hirsch showed a slide of SAT verbal scores going back to the late sixties. Scores plummeted and have stayed at the lower level. He used the Sat because it has more history than the NAEP. However, he did show a NAEP slide back to its inception to show that the “achievement gap” has been constant or getting worse over that whole time.
Hirsch makes the point, a good one, that language skills are the “skill of skills and key to success in citizenship, learning, and earning. He cites research that says if you take language proficiency into account, the earnings gap between minorities and the poor disappears.

That emphasizes one key point. The gap kids are the ones harmed the most by the anti-curriculum approach. Hirsch points out that the common excuses the education school types (and hence everyone else in the education fiefdom; delusional, defensive, insular, inbred) are all bogus and intended to deflect attention away from the real culprits; content free curricula. He relates research he did that shows that the scores of white, middle class kids plummeted along with the rest. He used Iowa as an example where 98% are white middle class and yet the scores have gone down there as well. When core curricula are installed, the performance gaps between rich and poor students narrow. The bottom line is that the current educational methods yield the results favored by `progressive' and `liberal' educators, while their methods drive everyone down, particularly the poor. Hirsch says, “It is hard to conceive of a greater social evil.”

Other comments he makes in the video also ring true.
• On the Governor’s effort to establish a national curriculum standard: “a politically craven and content free approach.”
• Our schools need to teach the founding principles of the Enlightenment and the blessings of liberty, not an intellectual tyranny.
• The last 50+ years have been characterized by; technically wrong ideas, fragmented courses, watered down texts.
• Critical thinking skills are powerfully knowledge dependent, meaning that the current goal of teaching critical thinking skills in a content free environment is a waste of time.
• The “how to” approach has always failed and always must fail.

How did we get into this mess? We delegated the education of our kids to educators without building in a closed loop, quality control function. We assumed “wrongly” that the education experts with the great sounding education bachelors, masters and doctorate degrees were competent to do the job. No matter how much they argue, their results prove the fact that they don’t know much about the realities of what works in education. We have ignored the multitudinous research that concludes that the education schools are little more than diploma mills extracting largess from a failed education process. Is it the educators fault for getting away with huge salaries based on worthless degrees and the poor performance? Is it the educators’ fault that the achievement gap has gone unimproved for decades in spite of the billions thrown at the problem? Or is it our fault for being too unengaged to demand that the whole craven process be fixed or ditched. In its current form our education system is essentially a very expensive baby-sitting/childcare operation.

What do I mean by fixed? Lots of things are required, but as a start, require content rich curricula as Hirsch recommends, stop paying for advanced ed degrees, install merit pay for educators (pay for true performance, not seat time in an ed school weak program or getting a year older), make teachers pass subject competency tests before being awarded certification. Require subject competency tests be passed every other year for current teachers to maintain certification. Decouple all certifications for teachers and leaders from ed school training. Only this will incentivize the ed schools to abandon their wrong-headed ideas that don’t stand scientific muster.

If you have learned about the trench warfare of World War I, you know that millions of men “lived” in trenches in all sorts of foul conditions. They got diseases like “trench foot” that could cause such severe infection that the limb would have to be amputated. Yet, the troops would much rather stay in the foul trenches than face the machine guns, mines and barbed wire of the battlefield. For them the “norm” of the trench while a terrible place to be was in their minds superior and much less scary than the world outside the trench.

While you would be hard pressed to equate the current situation for the adults who work in education to trench warfare, it wouldn’t be too hard to relate the analogy to the kids (victims) who see their future prospects greatly damaged by the current system. They don’t have amputated limbs but amputated future prospects. There exists a universal reluctance among the adults working in education to face the reality of the harm they are doing to the kids with the anti-curriculum approach. While our education schools do a very poor job of educating teachers and administrators they are world-class at brainwashing their graduates to believe in harmful, unscientific clap-trap. When I have confronted ed school professors with the scientific evidence of their failure they say, “Well, if it isn’t true, it ought to be.” Some say, “That’s my job you’re talking about.” Neither response is ethical when kids are continuing to be harmed by their intransigence.

While most effort to reform the system has been aimed at convincing the educators to face the scientific truth and replace the current approach with one that works, it has been ineffective. It is easy to see why the current rut is comfortable to educators. Change is not something most people volunteer for. And in a world where the adults in education prioritize their own comfort ahead of the futures of the kids no change will be occurring from within. It can only happen if forced from outside the education fiefdom.

Am I saying that educators have nothing to fear if a knowledge curriculum is implemented. No I am not. You see, that would cause the educators’ lack of rigorous subject knowledge to be exposed to the light of day. This problem is especially large in the elementary grades. This would mean redirecting all teacher “professional” development away from more methods classes toward subject knowledge classes. Since the school districts have time and money for the professional development in their budgets it wouldn’t be a fiscal problem for them. The problem would be finding knowledgeable people to teach the subject knowledge courses. The education schools don’t have such people so they would have to be found elsewhere.

The only example of real reform taking place in America has been in Massachusetts (termed the Massachusetts Miracle). It was caused by political leadership willing to disappoint ed power groups who contributed to their campaigns. They imposed the change to content rich curricula on the educators. The kids in Massachusetts have benefited greatly. It should be obvious that working with educators in our school districts to improve things for the kids is a fool’s errand. They haven’t changed on their own and they “ain’t” about to start now.

I Admit It. I Was Wrong

I have been convinced for years that the use of the constructivist math curricula (often called NSF First Generation because the NSF sent many millions for their development to ed school professors and researchers) were the biggest problem in low math achievement results among American students. Recent events now cause me to demote the poor curricula problem, while still needing urgent attention, to second place. What has displaced curriculum as the most important problem to solve if we desire to stop spinning our wheels and really improve math achievement among American students?

First, let me describe some interactions with a large local school district over the math achievement problem. Studying the district’s achievement results for grades 3 through 10 on the state achievement tests, shows the scope of the problem. At third grade the majority of students score proficient or better. At tenth grade the majority of students score below proficient. This indicates that on average students progress less than a year in achievement for every year spent in school. In fact the 10th grade proficient or better percentage for 2009 testing for this district was in the low thirty percent range. This correlates well with the high college (both 2-year and 4-year) remediation rates which are in ranges from just under 22% to 52% across the district’s large high schools. The data show clearly that the students from this district are not being adequately prepared in math for the increasingly global competition for well-paying “knowledge jobs.”

Another concerned person and I met twice with the district’s central office staff in charge of curricula and math specialists tasked to support the math teaching process for elementary and middle/high schools. We reached an impasse when we stated that the curricula being used (Everyday Math being the prime example) were the cause of the problem and the central office folk said the curricula had no effect. We were amazed. Since then I have met a couple of more times with central office staff and have been pushing the idea that the math subject knowledge of teachers (especially elementary level) needed to be improved through additional training for the teachers.
Soon after that the “math team” made a presentation to the board of education for the district. One slide they showed compared annual growth rates in achievement among the 30-plus elementary schools in the district versus 6 different curricula being used. Their study concluded that there was no statistically significant difference which supported the assertion of the people in our first meeting telling us that the curriculum made no difference in achievement. Thus, it became time to face that something besides curriculum was masking the deficiency of curricula which is so apparent to those who understand math and what foundational skills must be learned in elementary grades to prepare students for success in middle and high school.

After more research, I have concluded that the poor level of math knowledge among teachers is far and away the biggest contributor to poor math achievement of their students. In retrospect this should have been no surprise to me. I had read Rita Kramer’s “Ed School Follies” which emphasized the fact that education schools focus on process (pedagogy) training to the effective exclusion of teaching subject knowledge with even minimal rigor. David Klein’s “A Brief History of American K-12 Mathematics Education in the 20th Century” which also makes the point that education schools are infected with the progressive attitudes emphasizing process, socializing students to be “good (pliable) citizens” and de-emphasizing content. E.D. Hirsch Jr. in his “The Knowledge Deficit” again points out that the ed schools de-emphasize knowledge (content) in favor of constructivist (ex. Whole Language & Everyday Math) approaches which have proven to be scientifically ineffective, a fact he labels as of little importance among ed school faculties who won’t change even in the face of contrary research findings.

While I had read some summary representations of Liping Ma’s research on the subject knowledge of elementary math teachers, I did not read her book describing her research, “Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics,” until recently. She created a comparison study of teachers from China and from the U.S. The Chinese teachers had much less formal education than their American counterparts. The Chinese system for elementary teachers is to take those with a ninth grade education and give them 2 to 3 years of “normal school” training beyond ninth grade to qualify to become teachers. The U.S. participants in her study had from 4 to 6 years beyond their high school graduation.

Yet, in spite of that, U.S. students consistently score significantly lower on international math achievement comparisons. Ma used Deborah Ball’s TELT model (Teacher Education and Learning to Teach Study) to assess the math knowledge of each teacher in the study. She found;

• “Even expert [U.S.] teachers, experienced teachers who were mathematically confident, and teachers who actively participated in current mathematics teaching reform did not seem to have a thorough knowledge of the mathematics taught in elementary school.”

• Teachers’ subject knowledge correlated very well with their student’s achievement.

• Number of math courses taken in college did not.

What are we to conclude from this review of the research and the international achievement testing results?

• Seat time in education school classes does not result in adequate subject knowledge for the teachers.

• If we desire to improve math achievement, we must provide subject knowledge training for the existing cadre of teachers. This will need to take the place of the ubiquitous teaching of more pedagogy processes which are already overdone in education schools. Only by teaching subject knowledge can balance be brought to the teachers’ skill sets.

• Starting with elementary teachers is where the most leverage exists. This is because if children don’t get a rigorous foundation in elementary grades they are too far behind to catch up in the middle and high school class work.

“Cultures that are open and willing to change have a huge advantage in the world,” said Jerry Rao, the MphasiS CEO who heads the Indian high-tech trade association. “You have to have a strong culture, but also the openness to adapt and adopt from others. The cultural exclusivists have a real disadvantage. Exclusivity is a dangerous thing. Openness is critical because you start tending to respect people for their talent and abilities. You are dealing with people on the basis of talent—not race or ethnicity—and that changes, subtly over time your whole view of human beings, if you are in this talent-based and performance-based world rather than the background-based world.” From The World is Flat by Tom Friedman.

You may ask what does the quote above have to do with our education problems? Our education fiefdom is the most exclusive of exclusive cultures. It is a world in which “background is king.” That is, people are paid more for degrees, getting a year older and classes, not their performance level. A multitude of researchers have found in study after study that the education school degrees from undergraduate to doctoral level are essentially worthless for the task at hand. The above quote makes the point that the world is becoming more and more a meritocracy where we will be valued for the quality of our output not our backgrounds; degrees, good-old-boy connections, pedigrees, etc.

Our educators’ refusal to change from a background supreme culture to a results supreme culture will continue harming out kids until the public becomes more knowledgeable and motivated to require that it change. For now, it looks as if when that time of realization comes we will likely be in a lower and lower standard of living “death spiral” which will be very difficult to overcome because the root cause was ignored for decades. Reality can be a scary thing but facing it is foundational to transforming performance in a positive way.

Polishing a Rotten Apple

Did you ever think about how the “reforms” in bureaucratic organizations (education, governmental regulatory agencies, etc.) always start with the assumption that the status quo has value as a starting point? That is, the approach is to try to “polish a rotten apple.”

It is easy to understand why this is so. The bureaucrats are deathly afraid that if any needed changes were looked at objectively, their own jobs and “cast in concrete” habits would be in jeopardy. This is why, for example, the Colorado Closing the Achievement Gap Commission Final Report of 11/05 states that while billions of dollars have been spent attempting to close the gap that the current situation is worse than when Robert Kennedy, a third of a century ago, called the gap a stain on our national honor. The efforts always start and end in the same place, the status quo, wasting huge amounts of money and limiting our kids’ futures because they are not educated to their full potential.

Here is a look at current assumptions common in education that I believe are roadblocks in the way of serving our kids as they deserve to be served.

1. Big school districts with a strong central office, top down structure are more efficient and more effective. The centralized structures have been done away with in large organizations outside of government funded bureaucratic operations because they found that competition forced them to admit that a decentralized structure performed much better. The fact that the same is true of education settings when it has been tried is discussed in William Ouchi’s new book, “The Secret of TSL.”

2. Education school training is required to be able to teach or lead effectively in education. The education schools are basically “diploma mills” milking the public trough for all the money they can garner. The preparedness of their graduates when compared to the requirements to do an effective job is weak at best. The education schools’ graduate programs have no rigor and are in what Arthur Levine called “A Race to the Bottom” reducing admission and graduation requirements while shortening program length in an effort to attract more and more people interested in the paper not the education that would allow them to do an effective job.

3. The research in education is rigorous and can be relied upon to make important decisions on curriculum and methods, etc. In fact, the research in education is generally of poor quality because it is slanted to favor products or services of the researchers or poorly done from a statistical rigor point of view. See the What Works Clearinghouse at the US Dept of Ed website.

4. The education oversight bureaucracies at the Federal and State levels are doing a good job of setting standards, achievement testing regimens, certification requirements, etc. Because the denizens of these bureaucracies have been trained in the education schools’ graduate programs they don’t have the knowledge or objectivity to break the cycle of low standards and support for education processes that don’t stand scientific scrutiny as pointed out by E.D. Hirsch in The Knowledge Deficit. Would you think it strange that someone with an education doctorate that Levine found in his research to be of no value in any public school administration job, would fail to criticize the very degrees that many of them have? Right.

5. Educators are expert in the subjects they teach. This is one of the biggest problems that goes unaddressed. Oh, there have been efforts like the highly qualified requirements in the NCLB law but they have failed to make a difference. This is because the “remedial” classes required are populated with educators so that they are taught down to that level of competence. This is just another example of going through the motions to satisfy a legal requirement but not the intent. Thus, the intent of the law is short-circuited. Rita Kramer describes the problem well in Ed School Follies, “The people who become ‘educators’ and who run our school systems usually have degrees in education, psychology, social sciences, public administration; they are not people who have studied, know, and love literature, history, science, or philosophy. Our ‘educators’ are not educated. They do not love learning. Naturally enough, they think of the past as dead because it has never been alive to them. And they will not bring it alive for their pupils.”

So, what is to be done? It seems we have two choices. First, we can give up and cut the money spent on “improving education” to zero (which would require dramatic cuts in admin staffs in school districts) by admitting that it hasn’t happened and won’t happen under the current modus operandi. Or, we can dismantle the assumptions listed above and cause a “reset to first principles” to determine what is the right way to proceed. As part of this we would need to set very high expectations to prevent the re-establishment of the same processes with different names. Inevitably lots of toes would have to be stepped on and some of the worst actors sacrificed as an object lesson for the rest that reform was not a talking exercise but a walking exercise with real and positive results required. You might blanch at the thought of sacrificing some of the educators to make the point. I have absolutely no problem with that as millions of kids are continually sacrificed at the “status quo; let’s make it cushy for the adult educators” alter. It is time to start behaving as though the kids have some priority in our education system.

Management Thoughts for Educators

Needed—a data driven, closed loop, short cycle management process to effect positive change in the organization.

Data—Attitude Change Required
• The data approach of educators is conditioned through decades to always look for a way to put the best face on bad performance
• The data approach of managers who face the need to improve continually is to put the worst face on the data to identify the biggest problems and fix them quickly.

Large Organizations Don’t Function Well With Centralized Management Structures
• Top-down, one-size-fits-all precludes addressing any unique problems or opportunities for improvement
• Communication is very difficult because of the multitudinous paths created by the top heavy structure (can of worms)
• Change is extremely difficult because of the structured decision making process that involve specialists, committees, months of study, the board of education, etc. The war will be over and we will have lost because we couldn’t address the problems effectively in real time.
• “Customers” (parents especially) lose patience with the lack of real progress and vote with their feet leaving the district with their kids.
• The centralized structure provides “cover” for weak managers who don’t have the training and experience required for a more streamlined, participative structure that would be much higher performing.

Several Big Urban Districts Are Decentralizing Their Management Structures to Give Autonomy to the School Principals—Big Performance Gains Have Resulted

Five Pillars of School Empowerment (from The Secret of TSL by Wm. Ouchi)
o Real Choices for Families (we have this in Colorado)
o Empowering schools with the Four Freedoms
o Effective principals (trained and coached in leadership academies, 15 month cycle but on the job)
o A system of accountability
o Weighted Student Formula budgeting

The Four Freedoms of School Empowerment—Control of:
o Budget
o Staffing Pattern
o Curriculum
o Schedule

Action Steps required to get to “there from here”

Retool leaders with leadership academy approach—all leaders including superintendent and board (especially performance standards and management theories)

Assess current leaders
o Knowledge and skills in basic management areas including psychology of motivation, behavior prediction & modification, theories of management, esp. relating to change management, communication, performance standards
o Evaluate current principals’ ability to “jump” to the new more rigorous principal model. That is, from the current “follower of central office edicts” to “independent manager of a school” with control over budget, staffing, curriculum, schedule.

Begin planning for transition
o Ex. Pilot group of schools (elementary, middle and high)?

Evaluate current central office admin staff for fit to the new structure. Plug-in to new jobs consistent with the new structure as openings occur (only if a good fit).

Wind down no longer needed central office functions to free up budget and transform to new central office support model. That is, recognize the bad habits that do not contribute to the core mission of educating the children well.

This outline is brief but provides a road map for those willing to face the reality of our current mired in place education performance.

Pros at Being First in Line at the Public Trough

Like sharks getting the scent of new education standards blood, the suppliers of services to the education “industry” are volunteering to “help” the schools spend their taxpayer money on their own products and offerings. A recent article in Education Week "Conflict of Interest Arises as Concern in Standards Push," explores the problem.

Kathleen A. Hinchman, the president of the Oak Creek, Wis.-based professional association and the author of a letter pointing out the concern of standards writers acting in their own self interest, said the National Governors Association and the Council of the Chief State School Officers, the two organizations in charge of the common-standards endeavor, should provide a public document that identifies ties that the writers have to companies or organizations that might benefit financially from products aligned with the standards.

“Ms. Hinchman, a literacy professor at Syracuse University, in New York, said her organization wants to ensure that the creation and use of common standards is not plagued with the kinds of conflict-of-interest problems that arose with the federal Reading First program, which was funded with $1 billion per year at its peak.

At least one federal official made a significant financial profit from a reading program that he wrote and promoted while he was an adviser to states about the federal program, according to a 2007 Senate report. Another Reading First contractor and researcher received a large boost in income during the program’s tenure when she was also advising states on which assessments and texts to select to meet its requirements, that same report said. ("Senate Report Cites ‘Reading First’ Conflicts," May 16, 2007.)

Some of those who made money off the venture were affiliated with universities rather than businesses and wrote curriculum materials, developed tests, or consulted.
In the common-standards effort, Ms. Hinchman said a writer might favor one standard over another because it could more easily be turned into an instructional material or an assessment tool that he or she, or those they are connected with, could profit by.

‘It makes a lot of sense to indicate the relationships between people who are designing education policy and their various roles in government and business,’ said Patricia H. Hinchey, an associate professor of education at Pennsylvania State University.

With the connections spelled out, she explained, someone could say, ‘You supported X rather than Y, and oddly, X lends itself to a business agenda. Why is that?’ Ms. Hinchey is also a research fellow with the Education and Public Interest Center at the University of Colorado."

Concern is also expressed that Apple’s Karen Cator, who chaired the Partnership for 21st Century Skills Board, will become head of the U. S. Department of Education’s Office of Education Technology. A question being asked is will Cator use her new office to promote P21’s discredited ideas? I’d say you could bet on it. You can also bet that Apple will be the recommended choice for education applications.

Sunshine is the ultimate antiseptic. Insiders are already pushing back hard against more disclosure of potential conflicts of interest which confirms the problem as well as anything could. Let the sunshine in.

Blinded by Optimism

Barbara Ehrenreich’s book, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, is a cogent argument about problems that could be solved if faced directly are being instead suppressed and ignored. This is not to say that positive thinking is bad, it isn’t. However, when the popular culture has the pendulum hard-wired to the positive side, real problems that are harming people get ignored. Ehrenreich says that this preoccupation with positivity has resulted in a “mass delusion” and a “tyranny and ideology” that have resulted in disastrous decisions in our culture.

I contend that there is no place in our society where this disease is more entrenched and more harmful than in our schools. Attend any school board meeting and you will see the structured offering of “plusses” that are being recognized. That is as is should be but where is the discussion of what to do about the abysmal performance of the schools in closing the achievement gap, improving overall test scores, of failed curriculum choices that are ignored rather than faced? They are never discussed.

One of the local large and “top performing” districts even has a board policy that board members cannot criticize the school district in any way. In fact a member of that board was removed from the board for violating that policy. Thus, the message goes forth, “The preservation of the school bureaucracy is more important than serving the mission to educate the kids well.” While I am not aware of other districts with this type of policy, they all act as if there is one anyway.

So who is there to support the message that the kids are not being served at an acceptable level? It certainly won’t come from within the education fiefdom. While the information is readily available for those who are willing to dig for it, it is certainly not something that you will find in the media reports. The media play a complicit role in making sure they only report favorable things about the schools. Thus, it is up to each of us to put in the time and effort to bring the message to everyone we can by writing to our legislators, speaking at school board meetings and any other way we can to demand that reality of school performance is faced and fixed.

They Speak Process, We Speak Results

Did you ever try to communicate with someone who spoke a different language than you do? It is pretty difficult especially if hand waving won’t suffice due to the complexity of the subject matter. This is exactly the problem we face when trying to communicate with educators about the schooling our kids are getting.

Educators are taught pedagogy (teaching process) in education school. In fact process is so emphasized that subject knowledge sees little emphasis and is generally of poor quality when it is taught to future teachers. Thus, educators emphasize process above all else and this spills over into the way decisions are made and attempts at change implemented.

Parents and the public in general are results-oriented and don’t care what process is used as long as legal, effective, etc. Thus, when parents and the public talk to educators both sides are “speaking different languages.” This leads to dissatisfaction, frustration and poor communication on real issues.

So what needs to be done? Since the parents and the public are the “customers” for the service provided by the education establishment, it is incumbent on them to learn to speak “results.” This is critical if educators are to begin providing the positive improvement in performance that is long overdue. While educators always try to put a positive spin on each year’s CSAP results, any improvements are illusory at best. Basically nothing has changed for the better in mainline large school districts for decades. And nothing will until the ineffective processes used to manage the education system and the classrooms can be eliminated and replaced with a more results-oriented approach.

Following are some data to make the point that the performance is poor and the rate of improvement is nil.

• % Proficient or Higher, examples, from American Institutes for Research, NAEP versus TIMSS, 8th grade math; Singapore at 73%, U.S. at 27%. 17 countries scored above the US.

• Both The Proficiency Illusion, Fordham Inst. with NWEA and Assessing the Role of K-12 Academic Standards in States: Workshop Summary, Nat’l Academies Press, 2007 conclude that Colorado standards for reading and math are at the bottom of the pack compared to other states. The gap is big between Colorado and the states with the highest standards like S. Carolina, Massachusetts, California. Also in The Proficiency Illusion report they comment that the Colorado cut scores were reduced for both math and reading making the “expected improvement if things remained the same just due to the cut score reductions to be significant, as much as 9%.” I have looked at CSAP results for those years for districts and the state. The “improvements” didn’t even indicate that the performance had stayed the same but that it had declined in real terms against the lower standards.

• The Colorado Closing the Achievement Gap Commission Final Report from 11/05 stated that in spite of spending billions on closing the gap that it was “demonstrably worse” than it had been “a third of a century” earlier when Robert Kennedy said the gap was a “stain on our national honor.”

• A regression analysis for one of the larger school districts in Colorado of reading prof or better vs. free or reduced percentage showed a very high correlation of over 95% with very high significance. I have looked at other districts as well and it holds for them too. So the value added by the ed process is of virtually no importance since the demographic variable appears to be far more important as a predictor of results. My belief is that this is a direct result of educators being told in ed schools (and supported by the core beliefs after getting into the workplace) that schools have little leverage and the student background is the telling factor in achievement. This was the finding of the 1966 Coleman Report. That report has been proven wrong by hundreds of studies since but is still quoted by people who want to use its findings as an excuse for the lack of progress on closing the gap. Isn’t it time to face that the current approach isn’t working and the steady increase in minority students (esp. Hispanic) makes it imperative that we finally add value and fix the problem.

• The process slanted curricula, e. g. Whole Language including its renamed derivatives and EveryDay Math which are content weak have been found in study after study to be very harmful to minority and poor students. The kids that come from more privileged backgrounds have parents who will fill the knowledge gap and make sure their kids get what they need to supplement the content poor offerings in the schools. The gap kids don’t often have that support.

Therefore the current results are not acceptable. The process straightjacket present in large school districts must be removed and replaced with a results ethic if performance is to happen for the benefit of our kids.

Do Charters Perform Better Because They Cherry Pick Students?

Do charter schools perform better because as the education establishment asserts they “cherry pick” the best students leaving the “normal” schools with the dregs. This is further evidence that there is a deeply ingrained belief (taught in education schools) that demographics are the determining factor in student achievement and that the schools and teachers have a very small impact on that achievement. E.D. Hirsch Jr. states it well in his book “The Knowledge Deficit.” “Determinism—the belief that demographics determine ability to learn. “Determinism is nonetheless a flawed and dismal theory, which, while conveniently exculpating the schools, undermines the founding principles of democratic education.” Hundreds (perhaps even thousands by now) of studies have shown that the schools and teachers do have the dominant effect on student achievement. Mortimore and Sammons (September 1987). New Evidence on Effective Elementary Schools. Educational Leadership, 45. found that in math the teacher had up to 10 times the impact of student background (demographics) in math and up to 6 times in reading. Of course if the schools are working with a strong self-fulfilling prophecy in place then the teacher impact is low.

New research on charter school performance versus the mainline schools has been done by Caroline Hoxby, a Stanford economist found a new way to examine the alleged cherry picking bias claim. The results come out in favor of charter school performance being real and not a cherry picking phenomenon. This was reported in the Wall Street Journal of Sept. 24, 2009. “Hoxby’s study ‘How New York City's Charter Schools Affect Achievement,’ shows that charter students, typically from more disadvantaged families in places like Harlem, perform almost as well as students in affluent suburbs like Scarsdale.” The technique she used took advantage of the fact that more kids apply than there is room for in the charter schools. The students are selected by a lottery so that no pre-selection bias is present. Thus comparing achievement between the charter schools and the population of students who applied but didn’t win the lottery is a valid way to see the impact of the charter schools on the achievement of that population.

“According to the study, the most comprehensive of its kind to date, New York charter applicants are more likely than the average New York family to be black, poor and living in homes with adults who possess fewer education credentials. But positive results already begin to emerge by the third grade: The average charter student is scoring 5.8 points higher than his lotteried-out peers in math and 5.3 points higher in English. In grades four through eight, the charter student jumps ahead by 5 more points each year in math and 3.6 points each year in English.”

Charter students are also shrinking the learning gap between low-income minorities and more affluent whites. "On average," the report concludes, "a student who attended a charter school for all of the grades kindergarten through eight would close about 86% of the 'Scarsdale-Harlem achievement gap' in math and 66% of the achievement gap in English."

Hoxby used the same approach to study Chicago charters and found they performed even better than those in NY. Other researchers using the same approach have seen similar results in Boston.

Thus, another bogus reason needs to removed from those used by the mainline schools to make excuses for inexcusable performance.

The Music Man

I love the musical, The Music Man, especially the songs—Gary, Indiana, Til There Was You, 76 Trombones. . . And the story has a nice fairytale sort of basis. You remember I am sure the part at the beginning where the anvil salesman says, “But he doesn’t know the territory.” He is talking about “Professor Harold Hill” the boys’ band salesman who goes from town to town selling instruments, uniforms and lessons for a nice price and then skips town before the lessons can be given. Why? Professor Hill knows nothing about music. When he is backed into a corner in River City, he comes up with the “think system” of learning music. And gee, it works for him in a magical fairytale sort of way to give the play a nice happy ending. You know, “and they all lived happily ever after.”

I haven’t seen band teachers in elementary schools using the think method. Or high school music teachers using the think system. Come to think of it, I haven’t heard of any music teacher using the think system. Wonder why? Could it be that it wouldn’t work and that is the reason they don’t use it? You see, music teachers are pretty unique people in the world of American education. They actually have to know something about music. They can’t fake it. You might ask, “Why is that unusual?” Good, I will tell you. Teachers who teach math, especially in elementary schools, don’t need to know math because the curricula used stress discovery instead of teaching. That is good for the teachers because they have very little math knowledge. Math teachers in middle and high school who have some math knowledge but most not a lot, are left to cope with trying to “catch kids up” who didn’t get the foundation they should have from their elementary schools. This is basically a hopeless task.

When you look at the tenth grade CSAP results for math you see that the results are poor to awful. That is, at the last testing point where we can see the culmination of all of the effort to teach math up to tenth grade we see that the schools have failed miserably. That is further confirmed by the high remediation rates for college freshmen in math. Oh, some schools get rated “excellent” on their state accountability reports because they are “graded on the curve” but they have numbers of proficient and advanced that are far less than the NCLB requirement of 100% by 2014. If you extrapolate the trend of math scores you will see that no one apparently takes the NCLB goal seriously. One district I looked at recently would need 95 years at the current rate of “improvement” to get tenth grade proficient and advanced to the 100% level. Is anyone that patient? I am not.

It is obvious that a massive change in how math is taught is required if we are serious about preparing our kids to compete in the global meritocracy. But, gee, that might be hard and educators have no interest in doing that. It might require too much work to really learn math and how to teach it. Perhaps the hardest task of all would be to work to be really competent in math so it could be taught by people who know it, not by people who emulate Professor Hill’s “Think System.”

Another question to ask? If you need to fly to Europe, would you want a pilot who was taught by the “discovery” system and graduated because it was the school's policy to let no one fail? Or would you rather have one taught by a hard-nosed instructor who had years of experience as a pilot and really high expectations? Yes, I agree.

Lest you think this is only a math problem, it isn’t. While the CSAP results look better for reading than they do for math, on their own they are also unacceptable. It is time to realize that the status quo is not working and won’t work, no matter how much taxpayer money is thrown at the problem. We have to face reality and restructure how we teach our kids and it needs to happen now. Otherwise, our kids will be in such a deep hole competitively that they will face bleak futures compared to what they should be able to achieve if reality were able to penetrate the education fiefdom.

The Kernel

At a time when Colorado is in the process of updating academic standards on several subjects; math, literature, etc. and the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers have both undertaken an effort to propose national standards it is important for the public to be concerned and involved. The national groups have deemed their deliberations to date as confidential so that there is no transparency to the process.

Why, you might ask, feeling that the educators are the experts and should be left to do the right thing. The crux of the matter is that the education insiders are not the experts and have failed miserably over and over to produce high quality standards. How could that happen? There are many reasons but most of all the educators are strongly opposed to any change in the status quo that might require real change on their parts or threaten their cushy status. While the problem that our nation’s children are being poorly prepared for the massive global competition that has arisen due to the proliferation of cheap and easy communication via the worldwide web is widely recognized (and has been for decades), the educators have refused to allow the needed change to happen.

The kernel referred to in the title is a hollow one in education for the most part. That is, the subject knowledge competence of the educators is “hollow.” You could call it a knowledge vacuum. They just don’t get the subject knowledge in their education school training that is required to successfully teach the children at the high level that our best foreign competitors are providing their kids. Every time that initiatives are proposed to fix this problem such as testing of teachers in subjects taught periodically during their career, the ed power groups especially the teachers unions have successfully bought enough political clout to block the changes. This is particularly a problem in math and science but also in grammar, social studies and other subjects.

These efforts to “upgrade” standards occur infrequently and since they never really improve things it is imperative that the public join together to demand a quality effort this time. What sorts of “tricks” are used to foist the poor “rewrites” off on the children?

• Prevent any substantive input from any outside education sources, but pretend to solicit input. This is similar to the schools universal assertion that they want parents’ involvement in their children’s education which really means “only if you are compliant and supportive of the educators.” They go through the motions, meeting with business people, etc. taking input which is conveniently ignored.

• Structure their communications to address public concerns positively even though there is no substance behind their assertions. This includes, for example, including reviews (always positive) by consultants who are presented as subject experts (math, science, etc.) but are only ed school degreed people with a paucity of subject knowledge.

• The standards, because the educators don’t understand the subject matter, are all designed to support processes they have been taught “catechism style” as E.D. Hirsch says in “The Knowledge Deficit.” Hirsch also points out that much of the process mantra taught in the ed schools doesn’t stand scientific scrutiny.

• Use target implementation dates for the “new” standards to shorten the time for public input after the proposed standards are written. This rush to the wrong answer is not acceptable. Doing nothing is preferable to putting in place a new set of standards that are poor but succeed in casting things in concrete until the next cycle (years) for updating standards. Delaying new standards until they are truly a substantial improvement is the only sensible thing to do.

This list is not meant to be complete but to give a sense of the game being played with our kids’ futures. Without strong public involvement there is no hope of overcoming the anti-change inertia so strongly in place. So, please, learn what is going on and demand real change this time from our political and bureaucratic representatives.

Solutions are the Problem in Education

This is the title of an online commentary for Teacher Magazine written by Mary Kennedy, education professor at Michigan State University. Her point is that educators are bombarded by a plethora of “improvement reforms” and that they cause teachers, especially, to lose focus on the overarching mission of educating children well.

One of the examples she uses is of a National Geographic science initiative that was presented as an opportunity to do “real science” in the field. The project involved having the students take samples from local waterways and contribute them to a national database. The teacher readily participated with his class but found when his students returned to the classroom they had “lost their place” in the curriculum and had to start over for the unit in question, causing less to be taught in the time allowed. She also mentions “inside” influences like “pullout” programs and changes in structure like hourly to block and then back to hourly that cause far too much time to be spent on tangential efforts orthogonal to the primary mission of teaching kids.

Ms. Kennedy, therefore concludes that the problem is too many distractions caused by the “reform mantra” that is bombarding educators constantly. My conclusion is that she couldn’t be further off the mark. It is not the avalanche of new initiatives that is the problem at all. It is the lack of a working environment where focus and discipline are reinforced continuously. Distractions such as she points out in education are common in all endeavors. Such is the way of the world where change is the only constant. A good leader will filter out the vast majority of the distractions allowing through only the very few that actually apply positively to fixing the top priority drag on performance that the team is currently working on. The leader must provide inertia dedicated to focus on the real mission that prevents bouncing about like a ping pong ball as every distraction is acted on. Leadership competence requires not only knowing what to do but what not to do.

A very common problem is that poor leaders say they are working on a long list of goals to improve their performance. In reality just as a ship’s captain can travel to only one port of call at a time, a leader who wants to travel to better performance is advised to work on one goal at a time. Ship’s captains have another trait that could be advantageously adopted by education leaders. That is, no matter how the winds direction or the currents change, they adjust their efforts to stay on the course needed to reach their desired port of call. Goals need to be worked in priority order starting with “killing” the biggest drag on your group’s performance first. I am not talking here about “maintenance goals” which are trying to preserve the current level of operating. The education folks are perhaps the world’s experts at preserving the status quo. Just look at their mired in a rut performance no matter how much talk or money is expended. I am talking about “breakthrough” goals that will take the organization’s performance to a significantly higher level.

The problem she talks about is a direct result of the lack of performance leadership in education. I have pointed out many times that education leaders do not have the proper training or skill to effectively lead to create a performance environment.
In my experience in industry I used the continuous improvement process to maintain focus everyday on improving my team’s performance. To be effective the leader needs a lot of skills and knowledge but most of all needs coaching during the initial implementation of the concepts. Sadly, because the leaders in education don’t have these skills there are no role models to learn from.

Yes, the education school leadership programs claim to fill this need by having graduate students “shadow” an administrator in the field. What good does it do to shadow someone who isn’t doing it well or at all? Also the class work in the ed school leadership programs does not convey the knowledge or skills needed to be a performance leader.

Retooling the education leadership is not the only priority in fixing education but it gets my vote for being the one with the biggest positive leverage on improved performance. It will have to be done by outside trainers who can also coach the leaders through the initial implementation phase when applying the new techniques. The ed schools do not have this skill set in their inventory and could not be effective. I strongly believe that the training should be given to leadership teams at each district on site with the coaching to follow. This allows a robust knowledge base among the team [what one forgets another will remember], works well for team building and for tailoring the training to the priorities of the district’s problems. Sending leaders off to classes at varying ed schools to get exposed to more incoherent drivel is not going to work any better than the current “Race to the Bottom” approach Levine pointed out in his “Educating School Leaders” report (March 2005).

Competent leadership would overcome so many problems that go unaddressed today because leaders have no clue how to solve them. It would be like putting a rudder on the education ship so that progress could finally be “steered toward.” Having leaders who know how to raise the anchor would also help. The sad thing is that working in a well led performance environment is fun and very good for group morale which is missing in today’s education setting.

While it is very clear what must be done, don’t hold your breath until it happens. Only public pressure for real performance improvements will force action in addressing real problems as opposed to the current approach of talking about things with no intent of really changing anything. If you believe the propaganda touting “excellent” performance by local school districts when in fact they are doing very poorly compared to the world’s best performers, you will not be motivated to demand real change. That is the comparison that counts. Anyone can look good if they use a short enough ruler to measure results.

Considering the impact of the new “Race to the Top” Initiative

Late last week, Obama and Duncan announced a new $4.35 billion education initiative to encourage states to improve their K-12 schools. While $4 billion is certainly a lot of money it isn’t big compared to the total spending on education in America. A Wall Street Journal article on the new initiative provides data needed to put it into context. “The Department of Education estimates that the U.S. as a whole spent $667 billion on K-12 education in the 2008-09 school year alone, up from $553 billion in 2006-07 [a 21% increase in only 2 years]. The stimulus bill from earlier this year includes some $100 billion more in federal education spending—an unprecedented amount. The tragedy is that nearly all of this $100 billion is being dispensed to the states by formula, which allows school districts to continue resisting reform while risking very little in overall federal funding.”

The Journal goes on to comment, “It’s also worth noting that the U.S. has been trying without much success to spend its way to education excellence for decades. Between 1970 and 2004, per-pupil outlays more than doubled in real terms, and the federal portion of that spending nearly tripled. Yet reading scores on national standardized tests have remained relatively flat. Black and Hispanic students are doing better, but they continue to lag far behind white students in both test scores and graduation rates.”

The states would be evaluated on 19 criteria from how friendly they are to charter schools to whether they cut k-12 funding this year. Education Week noted the new program included must provisions that any state hoping to land a grant must allow student test scores to be used in decisions about teacher and principal compensation and evaluation and that the state had been approved for stabilization funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (most already have been).

This whiff of merit pay is in opposition to the unions [NEA and AFT] longstanding stance that teacher pay be based only on years of service and credentials. So lots of promises will be made but the unions will effectively make any compliance of the “show” type only. Note too that the wording is that the state must not have any laws in place that prohibit using student achievement data in the evaluation of teachers and principals. This is a far cry from a law that requires the data to be actually used in teacher and principal pay and evaluation decisions.

So what is the result of this likely to be? It is definitely another “stir the pot” to look like you are doing something positive education initiative. If spending more money alone would solve anything the problem would have been solved long ago.

Why isn’t the system getting better? Because . . .

• Education leaders don’t know how to lead. They are trained for a fantasy job, not one that needs to be done or even exists.

• The adults in the education system believe they deserve more and are more important than the kids.

• The legislators and bureaucrats specify process when they should specify results with rewards for making it happen and penalties for not making the required improvements.

• The education system is infected with a high level of truth suppression. That is, political correctness and group think are ubiquitous in their effect of preventing the required intellectual honesty to face shortcomings squarely and deal with them.

• Educators believe they don’t need to change. After all they have avoided it for decades by using techniques such as wheel spinning exercises that “look” like action when they aren’t. They believe that “we tried” is an acceptable excuse. As Yoda told Luke Skywalker in Empire Strikes Back, “Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.”

• Educators believe that they should be paid based on years experience and diplomas they have. Performance organizations pay based on results not background or age and they actually perform. Funny how that works.

This list is not meant to be exhaustive but to show examples of problems that could and should be fixed. One key that is part of the “talk” is that educators need to manage the education process with data. I say they need a closed loop, short cycle, data driven, participative management style. Education entities I have studied who have tried to implement the continuous quality improvement process have failed miserably. Why? Because they do everything that counts wrong. They hire a bunch of consultants, facilitators, data clerks, trainers, etc. and the “leaders” take a hands-off approach to the process. Because they don’t do their jobs, i.e. lead, the process turns into a “go through the motions” exercise that is seen as a distasteful burden to the teachers and others expected to do the process. Leaders need to facilitate, involve themselves in the data and actively expect the best participation of the group in problem solving based on priorities developed from analyzing the data. That is, they can’t delegate the leadership responsibility.

The Race to the Top initiative has a very high probability of being another “throw money at the problem and hope something good happens.” Doing the same thing over and expecting a different result should result in a realization after it doesn’t work for a hundred or more times in a row that this is the wrong approach. Of course you have to be able to look objectively at the truth to realize what is actually happening. Hard to do when the truth is so well hidden.

Between a Rock and a Soft Place

“Racial quotas and preferences are a Soft system: blacks and members of other preferred groups are not being held accountable to the same standards as others. Not being held accountable, they do not achieve as much. John McWhorter, who is black and now a linguistics professor at Berkeley, remembers that in high school he ‘quite deliberately refrained from working to my highest potential because I knew I would be accepted to top universities without doing so.’ He goes on: ‘Imagine telling a Martian who expressed an interest in American education policy: We allow whites in only if they have a GPA of 3.7 and an SAT of 1300 or above. We let blacks in with a GPA of 3.0 and an SAT of 900. Now, what we have been pondering for years is why black students continue to submit higher grades and scores than this so rarely.’ Well, mercy me—what a perplexing problem!’’ This quote is from Michael Barone’s Hard America Soft America, Competition vs. Coddling and the Battle for the Nation’s Future. It is worth reading. The point here is that people perform to the expectations. Placing low expectations on a group is essentially “killing them with kindness.” These low expectations are the worst sort of discrimination because they start with the assumption that the people from the group can’t perform to “normal” expectations so we will be kind and expect less of them.

The “Well, mercy me—what a perplexing problem” is a sarcastic way of saying that the foundational issue affecting the achievement gap which we as a society SAY we want to fix is that because educators believe in their heart of hearts that “those” people can’t perform to high levels they don’t expect them to. I believe that this self-fulfilling prophecy has been more responsible than any other factor in making the achievement gap so unaffected by the decades of work and billions of dollars thrown into the effort.

Barone’s book discusses more issues than education although he does have some interesting things to say on the subject. One point he makes is that the percentage of kids working while attending high school is much higher than it was in the 1950s when the average standard of living was lower. He cites research that found that the kids said it wasn’t the money but the structure and discipline provided by the job that they sought. They commented that the soft, low expectation environment of the education system was unfulfilling.

The sad thing is that the expectations of all students are far too low. In Colorado we have very low achievement test standards compared to most if not all other states. When you realize that American kids as a group do poorly in comparisons to their best international peers you have to accept that our Colorado kids are in a system that ranks as the poorest of the poor.

Am I advocating that we install Singapore math standards for our Colorado kids immediately. NO. I chose the Singapore example because they are the acknowledged world leader in math education. The process I envision is to base our standards on the best in the world but in a realistic way. That is, we need to realize that Singapore and the other competitors are not standing still, they are improving constantly. Being the best is a moving target.

A sensible approach would be to set a target for say 10 years out that is at a level 10 to 20% better than the performance of the best competition by subject area. Then develop “ramped standards” that increase 10% of the way to those targets each year. This would be a rigorous and demanding challenge but could be done. It would definitely require changes in many areas of the education system to accomplish.

I know our educators on a whole have become satisfied with the status quo and believe they are doing about as well as can be done. I don’t buy that at all. Our kids as a whole can learn as well as those elsewhere in the world if they are expected to in a system that supports that learning. As I have said in the past the most important element of positive change is leadership. The opportunity here is huge but the leaders need to be retooled quickly and the training of new leaders has to be retooled as well. The current ed school leadership training is inadequate and unacceptable. [See Levine, Educating School Leaders] If the current leadership cadre were race drivers they would be out of a job. You see the real world cares not what training certificate you have framed on the wall, it cares only if you perform well enough to win. The American education system isn’t winning and it is harming our kids and our country.

This is pertinent because Colorado is in the process of “updating” its standards in several subject areas. The standards will have public review in state board of education meetings in the fall. I have looked at them and can tell you that I believe the proposed standards are just a continuation of the status quo and not worth even considering. They certainly don’t facilitate better performance against the international competition. The best they could do is to improve our standing among the states which is not enough. There is little consolation in moving up to a higher place in the pack of poor performers. If we allow another round of poor standards to be put in place with a multi-year life we are further delaying the needed improvement in performance.

To become world class education performers will take facing the truth fully and working very hard to overcome the problems identified. In the current politically correct, Group Think system the truth is suppressed and the necessary changes are prevented. This is unacceptable.

BREAKING NEWS!!! High School Sports Restrictions Enacted

Today the state legislature passed and the governor signed landmark legislation aimed at upgrading the educational experience of the state’s children. In a surprising landslide vote both houses passed the measure by large majorities.

The central thrust of the legislation is to force educators to face facts that their process emphasis stance has served our children poorly for decades. The bill requires that by the start of the next school year all districts that use constructivist or discovery curricula will be forced to certify, subject to random audits by the state, that they are not using direct instruction and drill approaches in any sport program in the district. Practices would only involve general conditioning and allowing the team members to play around trying to discover the best techniques on their own without the facilitator’s direct influence. Violations would require a lost season in the sport found to be noncompliant. If the districts take swift action to replace their constructivist curricula with direct instruction curricula by the start of the upcoming school year the sports sanctions will not apply. In a move to encourage swift action by districts the law requires a two year added no-sports penalty for each year of delay. That is, for each year delay in implementing direct instruction the district will lose the right to participate in sports of any kind for two years.

The speed with which the legislature and governor moved indicates that the frustration of decades of higher and higher spending on education without commensurate improvement in results had reached a point where the legislators who have been hearing rising complaint levels from constituents were fed up with the glacial pace of change in education improvement. This was seen as especially critical due to the ineffectiveness in addressing the achievement gap between poor and minority children and the other children.

The governor who ran on a promise to dramatically improve education commented at the bill signing that he was sick of the educators’ refusal to address core issues preventing improvement while using the research-based and best-practices mantras coupled with constant whining about the need for more money. He said it seemed to him that the educators would feed arsenic to the kids if the bottle was labeled “research based. He commented that if the educators are so convinced that the constructivist curricula are the way to go in spite of evidence from the countries like Finland and Singapore that do far better at educating their kids than we do, let them apply it to sports. Then they will see when using the constructivist approach you can’t be competitive in sports as well as in global achievement testing.”

Education leaders immediately attacked the lack of understanding of the “non expert” legislators dictating to them when the educators are the true experts who should continue to make all education decisions. They said it is a travesty that the politicians are holding the sports programs of the schools hostage to their uninformed beliefs.

Senator I.M. Fedup commented that this was a warning shot across the bow of the educators that expectations were changing dramatically. The educators have used up all of their credibility in wheel-spinning that has benefited no one but the educators as the demands for more and more money have been met over and over. He further commented that they will perform better, much better, and quickly or be replaced by vouchers and other alternatives.

Coaches of high school sports were threatening to cancel the sports seasons hoping that public outrage would cause the legislators to flinch. That doesn’t seem likely as several legislators commented that it was time to get educational priorities straight and put the proper amount of concentration on curricular activities as opposed to overemphasizing extra-curricular activities.

The state administrators association in conjunction with the NEA and the AFT unions put out a joint press release condemning the meddling of the uneducated in education decisions better left to the experts.

A sampling of education experts we spoke to are saying that the legislation will cause a rethinking of education school curricula to address the lack of rigorous subject knowledge training. Also, the long held tradition of virtual brainwashing of prospective teachers in naturalism [progressivism, romanticism, transcendentalism] ideas that don’t stand scientific scrutiny will be under increasing pressure. We should begin to see a move toward balance between the pedagogy and subject knowledge aspects of education school training in the near future.

MORE TO FOLLOW . . .

To Drill or Not To Drill, That Is the Question

The traditional belief is that students must drill to learn facts they will need in the future over and over again is the only way to ensure understanding. This is especially true in areas like math where the past approach was to drill students in math facts so that they knew without thinking about it that 7 X 8 = 56.

Today teachers think that students view drill as demotivating and the opposite of fun. Of course, I have seen no school mission statements that put “having fun” ahead of learning. You see, learning is hard work. The knowledge and skill learned are the payoff. As with anything you get rewarded commensurately with the effort you put into it. It is interesting how much fun it is to look back on a difficult learning process that you successfully completed.

Daniel Willingham, cognitive scientist, in his book “Why Don’t Students Like School?” weighs in on this debate saying, “The bottleneck in our cognitive system is the extent to which we can juggle several ideas in our mind simultaneously. For example, it’s easy to multiply 19 X 6 in your head, but nearly impossible to multiply 184,930 x 34,004. The processes are the same but in the latter case you ‘run out of room’ in your head to keep track of the numbers. The mind has a few tricks for working around this problem. One of the most effective is practice, because it reduces the amount of “room” that mental work requires. The cognitive principle that guides this . . . is ‘It is virtually impossible to become proficient at a mental task without extended practice.’ “

He uses as an example that you can’t become a good soccer player if as you are dribbling, you still focus on how hard to hit the ball, which surface of your foot to use, etc. Low level processes need to become automatic so that you can focus on higher level concerns.

This relates to the often discussed brain model that sees it partitioned into long-term memory (facts and procedures) and working memory (awareness and thinking). If you wonder what I am driving at, it is just this, “the most popular (among educators) process for educating our kids is one that avoids practice (drill) because it isn’t fun. The problem is that the process results in kids who aren’t educated well and can’t compete as a group with their most competent foreign peers. Thus you have constructivist or discovery math curricula taking over the education marketplace in an effort to make it more fun for the teachers and the kids in the earlier years but resulting in the failure to lay the necessary foundational learning for the study of algebra which is now a requirement for all students virtually everywhere. One of the sad results of the lack of foundation is an emerging number of “algebra light” classes being offered to mask the failure to prepare kids for real algebra.

A friend of mine and I met recently with a group of educators to discuss the Everyday Math (constructivist) curriculum they were using in a large school district. The meeting of approximately an hour and a half was very interesting and very frustrating. I came prepared with charts showing the most recent performance on the state achievement tests among others. The district had a combined proficient and advanced percentage of 32 for 10th grade math. Thus, the other two-thirds were below proficient. As you would expect with a process that fails to lay the foundation for algebra and beyond, the results get worse by grade as the kids progress to higher grades.

The educators were interested in the graphs and I let them keep them but it really made no impact on them at all. They stated over and over that curricula didn’t matter; only the pedagogical process mattered. This is a good reminder that the education schools’ brainwashing technique for educators is alive and well. They cannot face the objective truth because they have been told over and over that it doesn’t count, only the processes they were taught in ed school count. If that were true everything would be great but it isn't true as E.D. Hirsch and others have so often pointed out.

This is a sad situation for our kids and the educator cadre who are chained to a set of beliefs that don’t and won’t work. I plan to discuss how we can work to overcome this mired in the mud situation in a future post.

Why We’re behind, What Top Nations Teach Their Students But We Don’t, Common Core (2009)

Common Core just put out the results of a year- long study of PISA test results for 15 year-olds. They looked in depth at the approaches of nine countries whose students outperformed American kids on the test. They used data on the PISA tests given in 2000, 2003 and 2006. You can download the report on the web. It is 102 pages long but worth reading. To save you time in case you just don’t have time or to entice you to read further if you do, I’ll give you the conclusion: All of these countries emphasize a broad liberal arts, content- rich approach, we emphasize “learning strategies, weak in content.” This is the old “only process is important” attitude taught by the education schools over the past century. It hasn’t worked out well. E.D. Hirsch made this point in his book The Knowledge Deficit, “The dominant ideas in American education are virtually unchallenged within the educational community. American education expertise (which is not the same as educational expertise in nations that perform better than we do) has a monolithic character in which dissent is stifled.”

The report also points out that the current preoccupation with “job skills” as in the 21st Century Skill Movement will not allow us to correct course and learn from our competitor nations. We still have the “bit in our teeth” and are determined to avoid facing the reality of the trap we have gotten into with the overemphasis on pedagogy (process) at the expense of subject knowledge. Until we bring balance to this situation we will continue to waste billions of dollars and more importantly limit our kids futures because we refuse to force the required changes to our approach.

Also, our education system which is mired in the past is not putting in the time to get the results we need even if they were focused on the approach used by the top competitor countries. Let me give you a personal experience that emphasizes the difference. When I was working in high tech, I visited Japan a few times, as VP and Division Manager of a semiconductor process equipment operation in New York. The trips always involved meeting with important customers and visiting our Japanese equipment plant in Oita Prefecture on Kyushu to assess how it was progressing. Our Oita plant was on the sea next to a hotel that specialized in weddings. That is where I stayed. On one visit I was to leave early Saturday morning to fly to Tokyo and then on home to NY Kennedy Airport. The flight was early and I had arranged for a cab to take me to the airport. It was rural area, especially compared to the hustle and bustle of Tokyo, Kyoto or Osaka. On the way to the airport at 6:30 in the morning on a two lane road, we came upon a string of about a dozen school children riding their bikes to school. The oldest led the way and the smallest was last in line. I asked about it and was told, “Oh yes, our children go to school for a half day on Saturdays.” I thought, “Wow that explains a lot.”

I was reminded of this difference when I read the Common Core report. The length of the school year in the nine countries they studied in depth ranged from 180 days (some places in Canada) to 243 days in Japan, with an average of 206 days. In Colorado we specify a minimum of 160 days. I know trying to lengthen the school year here is a bit like tilting windmills. However, we need to face reality. I know the teachers would howl to high heaven if asked to work more days, especially without a pay increase. Our teachers are already paid really well in comparison and lots of things would need to change if we were to increase that significantly. Examples include merit pay, no tenure to protect poor performance, etc. I can see the heels being dug in and the foxholes being dug deeper over the mere thought of such changes.

However, it should be apparent that the great pay, good benefits, and great retirement plans enjoyed by teachers are all in great jeopardy if we continue to turn out human capital that is uncompetitive with the best in the world. Oh sure, we have gotten away with ignoring the reality of our poor performance for decades. We have to realize our economy is like a gigantic flywheel. That has helped maintain things in spite of our poor performance. But, it also will prevent swift action on the plus side from taking immediate effect as well. We continue to ignore this problem at great peril.

Dilutivity versus Robustivity and The Platte River Syndrome

Let me define the two words dilutivity and robustivity above. I coined them to describe different ends of the effects-of-activity continuum. First, dilutivity is activity that dilutes the strength of any endeavor. Robustivity is activity that enhances the strength of an endeavor. Additionally, nonotivity is activity that tends to preserve the status quo of any endeavor. Nonotivity is the most common activity followed by dilutivity and finally robustivity. However, even though many people aim for nonotivity, it is very hard to achieve because in effect, endeavors that don’t grow actually decline even if at a slow pace. The true status quo is a very rare occurrence.

People tend to fear and hate change. Nowhere is this more evident than in the education fiefdom. Educators have widely used a fourth kind of activity, talktivity for decades. Talktivity is talking about activities to improve things that turn out to be only talk in the end. However, they do end up consuming lots of resources which are wasted. Review the Colorado Closing the Achievement Gap Commission final report to refresh your memory. “Billions spent on improving the gap but the situation is only worse than when we started decades ago.”

I know you have been waiting breathlessly wondering what The Platte River Syndrome is. Well, it relates to the description of the Platte as the pioneers trekked the wagon trail to the west as “too thick to drink and too thin to plow.” Sometimes it was called a mile wide and an inch deep. The latter is the definition I want to use. It relates perfectly to our country’s approach to education. I remember when attending “parent nights” at my children’s high school being shocked to hear their teachers talk about topics I hadn’t been exposed to until I was in college. I thought, “Wow, these folks have figured out how to teach all of this stuff faster and at an earlier age than when I was in school.” I soon learned that they hadn’t. In fact, the approach was to “talk” about a long laundry list of topics as if they would be taught effectively but not to really “teach” them at all. Oh, they tried, I suppose, but you see, there was a reason I hadn’t learned those things until college. There simply wasn’t time to learn the prerequisites and those “gee whiz” topics too.

The too common result is that the educators set out the list of skills that are too long and then proceed to cover them superficially if at all. This is what I call The Platte River Syndrome (mile wide, inch deep). This approach guarantees that the kids are not taught anything to mastery. Oh, some learn it because their parents teach them or provide tutors or they are self motivated and work hard to learn it on their own. However, most don’t learn well enough. This is confirmed by any number of measures like the international tests to assess student achievement where our kids continue to score poorly compared to their best performing peers. Another confirmation is the high remediation rate of students who go to college, currently mired in place at about 30% in Colorado.

It would be far more productive to concentrate on learning the prerequisites with mastery instead of trying to bite off more than can be chewed. Why would anyone support such a foolish endeavor as represented by The Platter River Syndrome? I’ll let you vote among some possibilities. Feel free to come up with some of your own and share.

• Because education schools don’t teach subject knowledge well, the teachers don’t have the background to teach well and the “inch deep” approach makes it less likely that the public will catch on.
• Teaching to mastery requires focus and hard work. It isn’t nearly as fun as talking about advanced concepts at a superficial level.
• An inadequate understanding of what our foreign competitors are doing differently that create their better results. I have been amazed at reading reports of comments from study groups of educators after they have visited top competitor nations like Singapore. They view things through the filters they have developed here and miss the key differences completely because they can’t believe “those things” (which we wouldn’t consider from the start) are actually responsible for the difference in performance.
• The educators’ inability to face that many of the processes they believe in don’t stand scientific scrutiny. As E.D. Hirsch says in The Knowledge Deficit, “[M]ere scientific inadequacy can be a practical irrelevance in American education.”
• Education leadership is weak and allows this lack of intellectual honesty on what really works to go unchallenged.

Please contribute your possibilities or vote for any of the ones above.

Copyright © 2009 Paul Richardson

Whole-Language, the reading equivalent of Everyday Math

As promised in the last post, here is the scoop on the problem with reading instruction.

The following information is from Louisa Moats’ report Whole-Language High Jinks, How to Tell When “Scientifically-Based Reading Instruction” Isn’t (2007)

“For more than three decades, advocates of “whole-language” instruction have argued––to the delight of many teachers and public school administrators––that learning to read is a “natural” process for children. Create reading centers in classrooms; put good, fun books in children’s hands and allow them to explore; then encourage them to “read,” even if they can’t make heads or tails of the words on the page. Eventually, they’ll get it. So say the believers.

But students aren’t “getting it.” By almost any measure, U.S. reading scores have been too low for too long. Consider the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Since 1992, its results for reading by fourth and eighth graders have been almost uniformly bleak. Among fourth graders, just 31 percent of students in 2005 rated proficient or better. That’s just two points higher than in 1992. The exact same scores were recorded by eighth graders over the same time span.

This comes as no surprise to scientists who have spent decades studying how children learn to read. They’ve established that most students will learn to read adequately (though not necessarily well) regardless of the instructional methods they’re subjected to in school. But they’ve also found that fully 40 percent of children are less fortunate. For them, explicit instruction (including phonics) is necessary if they are to ever become capable readers. These findings are true across race, socioeconomic status, and family background.”

So reading is another area where educators trained by the education schools to believe in the “natural” methods of learning that are harming kids who desperately need science based instruction to learn to read. Moats isn’t the only one to criticize the whole language approach. E.D. Hirsch in his book The Knowledge Deficit points out the same problem. Since it is important to recognize that the label describing these harmful practices has been changed from Whole Language due to the bad press given them under that title, we need to understand the “relabeling” that has taken place.

“Although the term “whole language” is rarely used today, programs based on its premises, such as Reading Recovery, Four Blocks, Guided Reading, and especially “balanced literacy,” are as popular as ever. These approaches may pay lip service to reading science, but they fail to incorporate the content and instructional methods proven to work best with students learning to read. Some districts, such as Denver, openly shun research-based practices, while others, such as Chicago, fail to provide clear, consistent leadership for principals and teachers, who are left to reinvent reading instruction, school by school.”

“[Moats] suggests ways of separating the wheat from the chaff and explains that good reading programs

• use valid screening measures to find children who are at risk and provide them with effective, early instruction in phonology and oral language; in word recognition and reading fluency; and in comprehension and writing skills;
• interweave several components of language (such as speech sounds, word structure, word meaning, and sentence structure) into the same lessons;
• build fluency in both underlying reading skills and text reading, using direct methods such as repeated readings of the same text;
• incorporate phonemic awareness into all reading instruction, rather than treating it as an isolated element;
• go beyond the notion of phonics as the simple relationship between letters and sounds to include lessons on word structure and origins;
• build vocabulary from the earliest levels by exposing students to a broad, rich curriculum; and support reading comprehension by focusing on a deep understanding of topic and theme rather than just a set of strategies and gimmicks.

Identified and taught properly using scientifically-based reading research (SBRR) programs, students at risk of reading failure actually have good prospects for success.”

“Despite the scientific evidence, despite the flat-line reading scores on NAEP (and the SAT verbal section), many teachers and school systems continue to embrace whole-language approaches. In this report, one of America’s foremost reading experts, Louisa Moats, shows how whole-language reading programs have survived, even thrived, mostly by claiming to be aligned with SBRR strategies even when they are not.”

“Few people are better qualified to make this judgment than Moats. She earned her Ed.D. in Reading and Human Development from Harvard University in 1982 after teaching in public and private elementary school settings. For 15 years, she was a licensed psychologist with extensive experience working directly with children with reading problems. In 1996-97, she served as advisor to the California Reading Initiative, and later co-directed a large, federally funded research project on reading instruction in high poverty schools. Currently she writes professional development courses for teachers and directs research projects with Sopris West Educational Services. Her list of publications is extensive, including several books. Her articles have been published in journals as diverse as Annals of Dyslexia, American Educator, the Journal of Child Neurology, Nature Neuroscience, and Reading and Writing. She has taught courses at
Harvard University, Dartmouth College, Dartmouth Medical School, and Saint Michael’s College.”

“The concept of balance,” she wrote, “implies … that worthy ideas and practices from both Whole Language and code-emphasis approaches to reading have been successfully integrated into an eclectic mix that should go down easily with teachers and kids.” But, she explained, “it is too easy for practitioners, while endorsing ‘balance,’ to continue teaching whole language.”

Parents beware. As I stated in the Spring Loaded posting earlier, the bad stuff is too often relabeled, “new and improved” and continues to be harmful to our kids’ learning process.

People only see what they are prepared to see. Ralph Waldo Emerson

The chart shows the distribution of math scores in the four bands reported for the CSAP testing in Colorado. These bands are Unsatisfactory, Partially Proficient, Proficient, and Advanced. Within the bands are shown the percentage of students by grade in each grouping. I picked this chart because it has a nice, relatively symmetrical shape. However, in looking at similar charts for most of the large districts in the state the message is the same but the distributions can be skewed somewhat to the left or right. That message is that kids being taught math in Colorado (Colorado is not unique, just at the low rigor end of the distribution of the states) are not advancing a grade level in performance for each year spent in school. Thus, the longer the kids are “exposed” to the system the worse they perform against the standards.

Under NCLB each state was given the latitude to set their own standards. This means that there is a wide variation in their rigor. However, since the distribution of the performance of the states on their own tests shows much higher proficiency than those states do on the NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) testing, you have to conclude that the states are “sandbagging” their tests to look as good as possible and avoid NCLB sanctions, some more than others. In The Proficiency Illusion (2007) done by the Fordham Institute and NWEA (Northwest Evaluation Association) where they studied 26 states’ standards for math and reading across all grades they found Colorado to have the lowest standards of those 26 states and South Carolina to have the highest standards in both subjects. In their concluding comments on Colorado’s standards they said,

“When setting its cut scores for what constitutes student proficiency in reading and mathematics for NCLB purposes, Colorado aimed low, at least compared to the other 25 states in this study. (This finding is consistent with the recent National Center for Education Statistics report, Mapping 2005 State Proficiency Standards Onto the NAEP Scales, which also found Colorado’s standards to be toward the bottom of the distribution of all states studied.) Colorado’s low cut scores have declined even further in recent years in several grades.

As a result, Colorado’s expectations are not calibrated across all grades; students who are proficient in third grade are not necessarily on track to be proficient by the eighth grade. In addition to better calibrating the state’s cut scores, Colorado policymakers might consider raising those scores across the board so that parents and educators can be assured that scoring at the NCLB proficient level means that students are truly prepared for success later in their educational careers.”

Thus, the terribly inadequate performance shown in the graph is against abysmally low standards. How could this go on year after year without some positive response to require serving the kids better? First, you have to appreciate that the education “experts” are more than happy to depend on the parents and the public not putting in the large amount of effort required to ferret out the truth. Oh, it is reported to be sure. However, you have to be willing to dig for the data you need among the infinite amount available and then be able to cast it into a form that will allow you to understand the consequences to the kids of the poor decisions being made by educators.

There are two gigantic problems in the teaching of math (will discuss at another time some similar problems in other subject areas). The first is that teachers, especially at the elementary level do not have adequate math knowledge to teach it to their students. This has been a well known problem of the education schools’ poor training of teachers for decades but no one with the power required has been willing to kick over that hornet’s nest and require the ed schools to improve their product immediately or go out of business. In an Associated Press article, Math Teachers Barely Ahead of Students,

“WASHINGTON (AP) 12/07/08 — Math can be hard enough, but imagine the difficulty when a teacher is just one chapter ahead of the students. It happens, and it happens more often to poor and minority students. Those children are about twice as likely to have math teachers who don't know their subject, according to a report by the Education Trust, a children's advocacy group. Studies show the connection between teachers' knowledge and student achievement is particularly strong in math. ‘Individual teachers matter a tremendous amount in how much students learn,’ said Ross Wiener, who oversees policy issues at the organization.”

This has been known for decades. Mortimore and Sammons in their 1987 report on research they had done on the effect of teachers on student learning found that the teacher was up to 6 times more important than student demographics in reading and up to 10 times more important in math.

Liping Ma’s book, Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics: Teachers’ understanding of fundamental mathematics in China and the United States, reports on her research of American elementary math teachers selected from the best and those who were getting their masters degrees at the end of the current school term compared to Chinese elementary teachers. She found that the Chinese teachers who were predominately the product of 2 years of training beyond high school (similar to the Normal School training America had before the blossoming of the education schools in the twentieth century) had far more math knowledge than their “better educated” American counterparts.

The second major problem is that more and more American elementary schools have switched to constructivist or discovery curricula like Everyday Math. This has been attractive to school districts because it helps to mask the lack of math skill among teachers who were having great difficulty teaching with the direct instruction method that most adults experienced. The discovery method because students work in groups flailing about to “solve” problems with the aid of calculators for even the most trivial problems takes a lot longer. That is, you can’t cover as much material in the time available with the discovery method as with the direct instruction methods. Also, the algorithms that generations of students here (and abroad) were taught are not taught in the discovery math curricula. You might say, what is the problem, if they get the right answers for the problems they are trying to solve. The answer is that the study of math is hierarchical in nature. You build the foundation starting at the beginning and continue to build on it year after year. Now, algebra requires the manipulation of polynomials with all of those algorithms that the direct instruction method teaches are necessary in algebra and higher math. They can be used on the simple problems but also on the more complex ones—hats off to the people who were dedicated enough to develop these elegant approaches to solving both arithmetic and algebraic problems. So we send the kids into a very stressful transition in middle school where they are totally unprepared for the studies at hand. Also, manipulation of fractions is virtually a lost art among products of the discovery curricula. These skills again are essential for the study of algebra. While many educators consider algebra “advanced math” it is certainly not and it is something that will benefit every student whether they intend to go to college, trade school, etc.

An argument I often hear is that I must be wrong because the constructivist curricula are “research based” and have passed muster. And that is true. But the “research question” used to foist off this trash on our kids is flawed. That is, it asks if the curriculum allows kids to solve simple arithmetic problems with the aid of a calculator when it should and must for integrity ask, does the curriculum allow kids to solve simple arithmetic problems AND PROVIDE THE NEEDED FOUNDATION FOR THE STUDY OF ALGEBRA AND HIGHER LEVEL MATH? The answer there is a resounding NO!! These curricula are not suitable for any elementary school in the nation and should be banned immediately.

In reality, the education experts, especially in the education schools do not understand math (or many other subjects) well enough to be entrusted with decisions about curricula or anything else pertaining to the educating of our kids. Rita Kramer’s assertion in her famous book “Ed School Follies” that “our educators are not educated” is succinct and true if you base your evaluation on the results of our education system.

Since the educators are not going to change without significant pressure, who will stand up for the welfare of the kids? You?