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