Comments on PWR (Post Secondary and Workforce Readiness)

Following is my response to the CDE request for feedback on their PWR initiative.
Some of this is repetitive of previous posts but including that info gives you the full content sent to the CDE.

After reading minutes and looking at PowerPoint presentations on the CDE website regarding new standards, assessment and how that relates to success in post secondary and career, I find that nothing ever really changes.

When you look at the responses to the public surveys sponsored by CDE you find that Business people respond very little while educators make up the vast majority of respondents. Is that because the non-education insider public is satisfied to allow the “education experts” to handle the important education decisions regarding how our kids are prepared for life after their K-12 school experience? My answer is that they don’t respond to the surveys, etc. because experience has proven to them that it is a waste of their time. That is, the educators go through the motions asking for public input but don’t really want to hear it and for sure don’t value it enough to really take it to heart.

The education establishment has a vested self-interest in maintaining control of education decisions. They want to protect the cushy status quo and avoid any real change. In every cycle of this “pseudo reform” process you see lots of effort expended but it is for the most part a waste of valuable resources and hence results in the stunting of our kids’ future prospects. This prioritization of the comfort of the adults in education at the expense of the kids is all too firmly entrenched. In my education research I spoke to many superintendents in 6 states. I heard more than once when I questioned them about how the kids were being so poorly served that, “you don’t understand, education is run to benefit the adults who work here, not the kids.”

What I would do differently?

• Examine the underlying assumptions that are not working—educators find it easy to assume that the underlying assumptions they have are valid and only refining how they implement them is needed. As the unchanging (in any major way that is required) results show the current approaches aren’t working. Our kids can’t compete with the best performers in the world let alone even the best in America. Colorado has chosen to take the low (and easy) road in standards and achievement test levels with NCLB definitions of proficient that are at the very low end of the states in that regard. This is an indication of the state education leaderships’ low opinion of the competence of Colorado educators. Setting low expectations begets low results.

• Stop wasteful deeper and deeper focus on minutiae—this has caused a total lack of perspective. This is the story of blind men and the elephant. They each conclude because they are feeling a different appendage of the elephant that it is something completely different than it really is. Stop looking through the microscopes (which might be appropriate if you knew what the whole beast looked like) and zoom out to a full perspective including how our best competitor nations do things. Go for foundational skills well understood-- Singapore doesn’t do more. They do less – less, that is, of the time-wasters that clutter the American “mile wide, inch deep” math curriculum. A world-class curriculum like Singapore’s focuses on math skills that prepare children for algebra and beyond. It builds mastery of those skills step by step, and incorporates these skills into more and more complex problems. A quote from the Singapore Ministry of Education is instructive, from their Nurturing Every Child, booklet (2006), Teach Less, Learn More—“Syllabuses will be trimmed without diluting students’ preparedness for higher education. This will free up time for our students to focus on core knowledge and skills” More topics poorly covered does not help except as something for educators to brag that they are teaching (they aren’t at least at more depth than spouting the title).

• Heed the advice of E.D. Hirsch who calls the current situation a “perfect storm” of Bad Educational Ideas. “The reason for this state of affairs – tragic for millions of students as well as for the nation – is that an army of American educators and reading experts are fundamentally wrong in their ideas about education and especially about reading comprehension. Their well-intentioned yet mistaken views are the significant reason (more than other constantly blamed factors, even poverty) that many of our children are not attaining reading proficiency, thus crippling their later schooling. The dominant ideas in American education are virtually unchallenged within the educational community. American education expertise (which is not the same as educational expertise in nations that perform better than we do) has a monolithic character in which dissent is stifled. Principles that constitute a kind of theology are drilled into prospective teachers like a catechism. The only way to improve scores in reading comprehension and to narrow the reading gap between groups is to systematically provide children with the wide-ranging, specific background knowledge they need to comprehend what they read.” Massachusetts got rid of the harmful and never effective “how-to” based approach (the Hirsch stimulated Massachusetts Miracle) and replaced it with a content rich approach and saw their achievement scores soar. Of course, in Massachusetts the educators didn’t lead the charge, it was required by the legislature.

• From David Klein’s A Brief History of American K-12 Mathematics Education in the 20th Century For example, William Heard Kilpatrick, professor at Columbia Teachers College (early twentieth century), reflecting mainstream views of progressive education, rejected the notion that the study of mathematics contributed to mental discipline. His view was that subjects should be taught to students based on their direct practical value, or if students independently wanted to learn those subjects. This point of view toward education comported well with the pedagogical methods endorsed by progressive education. Limiting education primarily to utilitarian skills sharply limited academic content, and this helped to justify the slow pace of student centered, discovery learning, the centerpiece of progressivism.

Thus, while our educators TALK about the need for critical thinking skills, they don’t provide the knowledge base required to provide context to any attempt at critical thinking.

In conclusion, until our education establishment faces the truth of what works as opposed to the false beliefs they were taught in education school by education faculty more interested in “if it isn’t true, it ought to be” approaches, the kids will continue to be poorly served. They will become less and less prepared to compete in the increasingly meritocratic, flat world.

A final quote from Norm Augustine, former CEO of Lockheed Martin and an engineering degree holder from his Is America Falling Off of the Flat Earth?

"It seems that the longer our children are exposed to our K-12 education system, the worse they do. If we wish to be average by global standards, we will need to improve a great deal. Can anyone imagine a football coach at any American high school greeting his players on the first day of fall practice by saying, 'This year let’s get out there and try to be average for the Gipper!'?

It can, of course, be argued that comparing averages and medians tells only part of the story, as indeed is often the case. But in this instance, further parsing of the data generally reveals that the United States has a disproportionately small share of the highest performers and a disproportionately large share of the lowest performers. Although this is widely overlooked, it is not simply the poorer-performing students who are falling through the gaping cracks of our educational system but also the highest performers who—much to the nation’s detriment—are frequently being forced to learn in an environment approaching the lowest common denominator.

The problem of low expectations has not been confined to California. Alabama, for example, reported that in 2005, 83% of its fourth-graders ranked as “proficient” on its state test of academic achievement. But in the most widely accepted national test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, only 22% of Alabama’s fourth-graders scored at or above the proficient level. In truth, neither of the measures matters much. What counts today is how the children of Alabama rank with the children of Singapore, Moscow, Hong Kong, Delhi, Beijing, and Berlin. There is little consolation in being first among losers."

Thus, the whole PWR endeavor coupled to new standards and new assessments is only an exercise in going along in the same rut and avoiding the obvious truth of our education failures.