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.