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.