Lei yiu mut yeh low see

I will tell you later what the title means. I want to talk about the power groups in education today.

• Education Schools—These schools wield enormous power in shaping attitudes of their students in all categories; teachers, leaders/administrators, researchers. Yet as discussed in the 01/29/09 post the history of the education schools has been an unbending adherence to the progressive principles laid down by Dewey and his colleagues. Socializing students as early as possible before they are impacted negatively by their parents is the priority, not teaching content. Every time in the intervening century public pressure has caused any move away from those founding principles, as soon as public attention fades they rename the old stuff, new and improved, and foist it again on the education system. That is, the ed schools have shown themselves to be totally unwilling and unable to change even if for better service to the kids.

• Teachers Unions—The unions as much as they claim otherwise, do not advocate for the kids, they advocate for their members. No surprise there. You only need to look at the lengths they go to protect poor teachers who are harming kids to understand the truth. They will argue that they only want to ensure due process. The fact that the leadership competence in education is so poor allows them to use that to increase their power. The argument is, “do you want that idiot judging whether you are doing a good job?”

• Administration Groups—these groups at national and state level advocate for paying administrators more especially based on ed school “advanced degrees.” They hope the public never realizes that Arthur Levine in 2005 after looking at all ed school leadership programs in the country, said they confer masters on those who display anything but mastery and doctorates in name only. Yet, because the admin groups have been so effective, the key to getting a fat pay raise is to pay for some seat time in one of the ed school programs getting one of those “of no value” degrees that Levine criticizes. While you may say this can’t be true, you only have to look at the results turned in by the graduates to realize they don’t have a clue on how to lead the massive changes required if our kids are finally to be served well by the education system.

• School Board Associations—they train their members to be compliant with the administrators who are the “experts.” Don’t ask hard questions about curricula that are obviously not working. Don’t rock the boat. Be far more interested in re-election than in advocating for the kids. Always be civil. That translates to never show passion for fixing problems. Don’t dig for the truth. Let sleeping dogs lie. Be a cheerleader for the district ignoring problems you know are there. These conclusions are based on attending many, many school board meetings.

• Politicians—Of course, these people have the ultimate control. They use education as an issue for political advantage and the majority party at any point in time basically calls the shots. Because education is a complex mess to say the least, they call for expert input from, you guessed it, the education insider power groups. Is it any wonder that nothing ever changes even though the situation is steadily getting worse? When you ask people with a vested interest in protecting their place at the public trough what changes should be made to address a problem, you get answers that eliminate any changes that might threaten the current status of the power groups. Of course, the power groups are a huge source of campaign finance funds for getting compliant politicians elected. The second huge problem of the politicians is that they enact legislation that is very directive and narrowly defined. This approach has more in common with Soviet-style central planning than it does with a process that would allow creativity and efficiency in solving problems.

This all has worked together to prevent problems like the achievement gap being solved. As I mentioned in an earlier blog, the Colorado Closing the Achievement Gap Commission Final Report lamented that while we have been “working” (flailing, not working seriously) on the gap for decades the situation is demonstrably worse than it was when Robert Kennedy, over a third of a century ago, called it a stain on our nation’s honor. This, in spite of spending billions on the problem only enriching the power groups.

That is the price we pay to preserve the power group supremacy and financial rewards. Our society and especially the gap kids pay a very high price for us listening to education experts who are expert at preserving their pay and benefits but not at providing the education that our poor and minority kids desperately need. And in reality we need to do far better for all of the kids not just the minority and the poor ones.

That brings me to the title of this blog, Lei yiu mut yeh low see. I read this in an article a few years ago. It is a phonetic phrase in Chinese. It means, “How may I serve you master?” The writer was asserting that since we couldn’t bear to force the changes needed to educate our children to compete we at least should prepare them for their fate because the adults have been unable/unwilling to change for the benefit of the kids. You may think that is ridiculous because America is the super power in the world. Yes, but we have been very busy digging ourselves into a mountain of debt which will increasingly give the debt holders increasing leverage over us. Who holds a lot of that debt? Asians. Who is teaching their kids to a much higher level than we are? Asians. Who is telling their kids they must work hard to compete? Asians

The current worldwide economic problems have caused a pause in the fast growth of the Asian economies but they are still growing at a much higher rate than ours. And our response to the crisis is to throw money at it indiscriminately. Money that will have to be borrowed from the Asians predominately. They have already indicated that they are less interested in buying our government bonds (loaning us the money) than they were in the past.

Now, the real point, everyone in the education system has a power group to protect their interests but the KIDS. The electorate should have a majority who aren’t part of the power groups who can see clearly that the kids are our future and deserve to have this abysmal situation finally dealt with positively. If we fail to meet this challenge we need to prepare for steadily declining standards of living as Tom Friedman predicts in his “The World is Flat.” Following are some quotes from his book.

We don’t have any time to waste in addressing the “dirty little secrets” of our education system.

The sense of entitlement, the sense that because we once dominated global commerce and geopolitics—and Olympic basketball—we always will, the sense that delayed gratification is a punishment worse than a spanking, the sense that our kids have to be swaddled in cotton wool so that nothing bad or disappointing or stressful ever happens to them at school is quite simply, a growing cancer on American society. And if we don’t start to reverse it, our kids are going to be in for a huge and socially disruptive shock from the flat world.

But what can happen is a decline in our standard of living, if more Americans are not empowered and educated to participate in a world where all the knowledge centers are being connected. “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.”

. . . no country today can afford to be anything less than brutally honest with itself.

China does not want to get rich. It wants to get powerful.


So, do we continue to delude ourselves that the education power groups will do the right thing for the kids against their self interest or do we (the adult electorate) get up off our posteriors and demand that the kids get first priority. This is the only way we can drive the positive changes so badly needed for the benefit of the kids. We do not have time to waste. Any time to waste has already passed over the last several decades. We may already be too late but we must try. By the way, don’t fall for the assertion that more money must be spent to fix the education problems. The waste in education already is enormous. Less money will do the job very well if it is spent on productive things. Remember the gap commission’s admission that billions had been spent on “fixing” the gap problem but the performance had only gotten worse. More money to waste is not the answer.