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.