The Woodcutter

Joe was a hardworking woodcutter. His father had taught him his trade. He knew the importance of keeping his tools, axe and crosscut saw sharp so that his productivity would be high. Joe would go to periodic workshops with other woodcutters to keep his knowledge of axe and crosscut saw up to date. His prices had gone up steadily over the years. He claimed it was only to keep up with the inflation rate but in fact his prices had gone up at more than twice the rate of inflation. So, his was a record of steady and dramatic decline in productivity.

While Joe worked as hard as ever he found his prices couldn’t compete with woodcutters who were employing better methods to cause improved productivity. Thus, with time his business began to decline as only those customers that he had locked in to long term contracts would buy his wood. As those multi-year contracts expired he knew his business would decline even more.

Joe formed a trade group of other woodcutters using axe and crosscut saw to lobby politicians and support those politicians for election who agreed to work to fix the price of wood products so that they didn’t have to compete. Because they were so frustrated, they even engaged in the occasional act of intimidation to make their point. They launched an advertising campaign extolling the virtue of their product and how their methods didn’t pollute the earth with chainsaw exhaust. They were careful to compare their productivity to others who used the same unproductive methods they favored. In this way they put the best face on their low performance. Their advertising theme was, “Would Paul Bunyan stoop to using a chainsaw?” They had some success over time but as more and more states enacted laws permitting free choice in the buying of wood products, the economic prospects for Joe and his fellow trade group members declined steadily.

Now to Education

Is education different than Joe and his axe and crosscut saw friends? Not at all. The educator ranks are working as hard as Joe and his fellow woodcutters to preserve unproductive processes. They fear anything that doesn’t conform to the scientifically incorrect content they learned in education school which is continually reinforced by professional development classes and faulty research.

The situation in education is worse than Joe’s though. Joe’s actions are impacting his own long term viability as a woodcutter. The educators’ actions are harming their own credibility and long term prospects but they also are harming generations of kids who are ill prepared to compete in the increasingly competitive global environment. The experienced educators are making the bet that they can outlast criticism long enough to retire before they have to change, prioritizing their own comfort over the welfare of the kids. Thus, there is a strong “preserve the status quo at all costs” ethic at work in our school districts.

E.D. Hirsch whom I consider to be the person with the most complete understanding of our education problems stated in his appearance at the Manhattan Institute last fall (available on booktv.org by searching on E.D. Hirsch and selecting view video):

• Educators will never change on their own. They will have to be forced by outside forces [the public].
• Our education performance is characterized by low student achievement, ethnic inequality of results, low levels of civic commitment by graduates.
• Since the progressives gained control of the education schools and deployed graduates trained (brainwashed) in their technically incorrect methods, Sat verbal scores have declined from a level of about 543 in the late 60s to a steady level of about 505 from 1980 to now. He points out the excuses of the educators that this change is due to an increase in minorities taking the test. Hirsch asserts that this increase cannot explain the decline in white middle class student scores. He relates research by Harvard researcher, Christopher Jencks which showed that Iowa with 98% white, middle class students saw a large decrease in SAT verbal scores as well. The researcher concluded it was due to curricula less oriented to content, i.e. watered down and weak vocabulary. Hirsch looked at the College Board stats and found a constant pool of about 1 million test takers each year where those scoring over 600 on the verbal SAT had declined 56% and the students scoring over 650 had declined by 73% since the progressive content-free approach had been implemented.
• Achievement gaps have not closed for many decades and Hirsch states they cannot decrease until a content-rich curriculum replaces the current content-free, watered down approach. He points out that the current curricula and methods harm the minority kids the most.
• Hirsch decries the “monolithic intellectual monopoly of faulty ideas” as the biggest problem in education. Trying to convince educators of the need to change is impossible. They simply have been too well brainwashed in the faulty ideas to change from within. Change can only happen if they are forced to abandon their technically incorrect ideas.
• Richard Hofstadter, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning book, Anti-intellectualism in American Life, called for more content and less process in the education of our kids. He concluded the fragmented courses and watered down texts had to go if our education performance was to be improved.

What must the public do to end the harm our education system is doing to our kids?

• Educate yourselves to understand the reality of our poor education performance. For example, in Colorado where achievement standards are low, the comparison to other districts and schools based on the Colorado testing only tells you how a school or district compares to other weak performing districts or schools. Also, national standards are weak compared to our global competitors.
• Realize that the 5 decade progressive-approach detour into the education wilderness has been a disaster for our kids and nation. See my previous blog about the Borg Education system to refresh your memory on the aims of the progressive education initiative. They are basically trying to produce a credulous (gullible) populace that will be ready to believe in “expert” leadership and “made up” crises used to motivate more expert control.
• Realize that productivity is a null word in education where costs per student have soared at about twice the rate of inflation for many decades while results have stayed mired in “unacceptable” territory.
• Realize that educators are not the experts in what works in educating kids. They are the “anti-experts.”
• Realize that education degrees and certifications only provide evidence that the person has learned the “party line,” not that they should be valued as educators.
• Expect elected representatives at all levels to put service to kids as the top priority, not protecting the jobs, pay or benefits of educators. This will be difficult because ed power groups support malleable candidates who will vote the way they want them to if they make large contributions to campaigns. That is, if educators are performing poorly and they are in results where it counts, they must show greatly improved performance to justify hanging on to their positions.
• Realize that improvement can’t be made without hardnosed and sustained battle with the education power groups. These include the education schools, the federal and state education bureaucracies, the teachers unions, the administrator state and national groups, the school board associations, in other words everyone involved in the current mainline education system. The public must take responsibility to force the needed changes. Only the public has enough clout to overcome the entrenched and harmful treatment of our kids.
• Inoculate yourself against the constant drumbeat that more money is needed to “fix” things in education and that any cut will harm the kids. This couldn’t be further from the truth. More money only continues to feed the unacceptable status quo. It doesn’t go toward helping kids at all. In fact, if a freeze of school based administration and a reduction of 10% a year in central administration salary budgets were put in place until results improved by, say 50%, the message would finally be received by the educators. We must stop feeding this monster that destroys and attenuates kids’ future prospects.

While I support charter schools and vouchers, they simply don’t have the leverage to fix the problem for enough kids. A lot of charters are started by mainline educators who want to put the em Fah sis on a different sil Ah bul. Many charters aren’t putting in content-rich curricula which are needed to fix our education problem. Some charters are doing a great job and more power to them but they alone cannot be the answer. They impact too few kids.

Thus, if you care about our kids or the future of our nation, it is urgent that you become involved. Expecting educators to do their job and begin to serve the kids at the required level is a fool’s errand without “our help” which demands they get on with it NOW.

Ruts and Ladders

Quality Control, the Vital Missing Ingredient in Education

As mentioned in the last blog post, Public Action Required, educators have demonstrated the ability over and over to ignore legal requirements thus avoiding facing up to the needed change in their performance to benefit our kids. The example given in that post of how they manage to continue using Whole Language methods in spite of the NCLB requirement that if you want federal education money you must use SBRR programs is hardly unique. They do this by asserting that Whole Language methods do comply with SBRR (even though they definitely do not) and so continue to harm our kids. How do they get away with it? They get away with it because our education system is running “open loop.” That is, there is no quality control process to close the loop. Oh, the federal and state departments of education do many audits but they are ineffective, “going through the motions” affairs done by people who have been trained in the same false doctrine as all educators. They also have been taught that conflict is bad and that suppressing the truth is ok if it creates a sense of harmony. In this sort of arrangement, there is no concern for how the kids are being served only for maintaining harmony at all cost. This can’t be argued because the results betray the truth to anyone willing to look.

This is not to say that school districts are not competent at managing their spending to be in line with their budgets. They generally are. However, the problem is that the resources are not spent wisely. That is, the inertia in the system favors the “we’ve always done it this way” status quo, instead of prioritizing the areas that would really bring about the massive improvement that is needed and possible. Oh, there is lots of spending on “new sounding” initiatives, but the underlying foundational things that need changing are not addressed. It is creating a façade of activity, but productivity measures results per unit input and the results never really change while the input costs have risen dramatically for decades. Thus, productivity of the education fiefdom has declined precipitously over that time. This entrenched “rut habit” harms kids greatly because while all, even the educators, know that improvement is called for, no one is acquiring ladders to climb out of the rut allowing better performance.

Unlike other government funded activities in which the quality function takes the form of an inspector general, education has no such entity. Part of the problem is that control over education is spread out between federal, state and local political venues. In reality this gives the school districts, education schools, curriculum providers, and so-called education researchers and curriculum developers ample room to continue avoiding accountability.

Any quality function must have independence so that they can be objective about the performance of the organization which they are tasked to evaluate. Thus, the reporting relationship at both a district and state level would require a direct reporting relationship to the appropriate board of education. Only in this way could the truth of performance be reported without fear of reprisal. In actual practice this reporting relationship would foster a cooperative effort with administrators over time to be able to “keep the board out of most issues.” This would allow much faster resolution of performance problems which are currently swept under the rug or ignored.

What would be the benefits of a properly conceived quality function in K-12 education?

• Improved accountability--this would stimulate much better performance over time. Problems are only given priority if they are highlighted within the organization. That does not happen in any productive way in education. Oh, achievement test results are there but there is no objective analysis of the causes of poor performance and their priority for solution. A quality function would facilitate for the first time in education the identification, prioritization and solving of biggest drags on performance first. There is no real discipline in education so that problems are not faced and solved. There is no penalty for poor work. There is no accountability.
• Non-compliance to legal requirements would be spotted early and corrected. This would prevent the problems as were discussed in the previous blog post where Whole Language was allowed to continue harming kids in spite of the legal requirement for SBRR reading programs. In the current state of education there is no closed loop to correct such violations or ideally prevent them from happening in the first place.
• Much better staff morale and satisfaction. No one wants to perform badly but in the current top-down management style, change is prevented even though it is desperately needed. Staff members are not allowed to participate in any meaningful way in problem identification and solutions. People have higher self-esteem and job satisfaction when they know they are doing a really good job. Today’s educator self-esteem is based on trying to believe that poor performance is really good performance. You can’t fool people and you certainly can’t lie to yourself without it negatively affecting your real self-esteem.
• It would stimulate improved leadership performance. This is because leaders would have to lead real change to solve the problems caught by the quality function. The days of ignoring problems and sweeping them under the carpet would be gone forever. Shining the light of reality on the situation would make upgrading leadership skill and knowledge unavoidable.
• Best of all, there would finally be an advocate for the kids with real power to stimulate urgency in pursuing improved performance.

Of course, now in a time of tight education budgets, the excuse will be, “We can’t afford to implement a new quality control function. I can guarantee you that a QC function well done would pay for itself many times over. Philip Crosby in his book Quality is Free points out that a quality function more than pays for itself by eliminating waste and the cost of doing things wrong. It would force districts to face the fact that they are wasting huge amounts of resources on counterproductive efforts. The people are working hard doing the wrong things. This is especially true of Central Office administration functions. When a new function is added it has a life of its own even after it is obvious that it is not providing any benefit. District leaders would rather continue doing a wrong, counterproductive and worthless function than eliminate it and the positions that go with it. That might cause stress and unpleasantness, something that the weak and overpaid leaders in education do not think they should have to deal with even though kids are being harmed.

And yet, by judiciously using hiring freezes and expecting staff to be flexible in doing a job that needs doing as opposed to one that is not worth doing, the situation could be corrected relatively quickly through attrition. If people chose to not be flexible then they would have the opportunity to seek employment elsewhere. Our kids are not served by continuing to pay a price in money and time for activities of no value.

Public Action Required

Whole Language High Jinks, How to Tell When Scientifically-based Reading Instruction Isn’t, Louisa Moats, (2007) The Thomas Fordham Institute.

“Science builds consensus among people in a way that few other disciplines can, if only because the nature of its proofs makes dissent so difficult. The path to consensus via science is rarely straight; it can take years to achieve and the battles can be bloody. But eventually, the accumulation of evidence is hard, even impossible, to ignore.” But ignore it is what is happening everyday in our school systems to the detriment of our kids, especially the “Gap children” who are most harmed by the unscientific methods favored by the “education experts” who aren’t.

“For more than three decades, advocates of “whole-language” instruction have argued—to the delight of many teachers and public school administrators—that learning to read is a “natural” process for children. Create reading centers in classrooms; put good, fun books in children’s hands and allow them to explore; then encourage them to “read,” even if they can’t make heads or tails of the words on the page. Eventually, they’ll get it. So say the believers [brainwashed by ed school training].”

“But students aren’t “getting it.” By almost any measure, U.S. reading scores have been too low for too long. Consider the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Since 1992, its results for reading by fourth and eighth graders have been almost uniformly bleak. Among fourth graders, just 31 percent of students in 2005 rated proficient or better. That’s just two points higher than in 1992. The exact same scores were recorded by eighth graders over the same time span.”

“For at least a decade and a half, in other words, despite standards-based reform, despite No Child Left Behind (NCLB), America has failed to significantly improve the percentage of its children who can read at levels that will enable them to compete in higher education and in the global economy.”

“This comes as no surprise to scientists who have spent decades studying how children learn to read. They’ve established that most students will learn to read adequately (though not necessarily well) regardless of the instructional methods they’re subjected to in school. But they’ve also found that fully 40 percent of children are less fortunate. For them, explicit instruction (including phonics) is necessary if they are to ever become capable readers.”

In 1967, Jeanne S. Chall published Learning to Read: The Great Debate which laid out the arguments against Whole Language. This, instead of settling the debate stimulated an intense dispute that consumed much of the 1980s and 1990s. This caused the formation of the National Reading Panel, charged with deciding once and for all which approach works. Its findings were not favorable for Whole Language adherents. The panel identified 5 elements children needed to master to become good readers: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. These came to be known as “scientifically-based reading research” (SBRR) programs. NCLB in 2001 required that schools receiving federal dollars had to use SBRR materials.

You might think that would finally solve the problem. Wrong!! What happened is an indictment of the ethical integrity of our education fiefdom as a whole. If SBRR is the requirement, then Presto, just rename the old Whole Language programs as SBRR and go on as before, continuing to harm children and their futures. Thus, since 2001 Whole Language is even more prevalent than before the NCLB requirement. That is, pseudo-SBRR programs have received federal money to expand their impact. It seems that the only thing you need to do is advertise you are meeting the requirements to get by. It reminds me of the three monkeys, see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil.

You might ask how supposedly “expert educators” could be fooled? Because they want to be is it in a nutshell. They have been trained [incorrectly] in their ed schools and subsequent professional development to believe in the romantic ideas [reading is a natural process; that is, teachers don’t need to do any work to help kids learn] pushed by the Progressives who control the ed schools so ubiquitously. They also would need to learn new things with real substance to be able to use the SBRR systems. One of the contradictions within education is that while they will tell you we must all be lifelong learners they don’t lead by example. That is, they just study the same failed processes over and over throughout their careers never allowing new and more valid knowledge to gain a foothold.

What must the public do to facilitate the use of reading curricula that work? First, we need to realize that it is a “forever project.” That is, the educators have shown over and over through the decades that the key to being able to prevent change is to; delay, delay, delay, finally agree to change, tell everyone the problem is solved, rename all of the old stuff labeling it as “new and improved” and go on with no tangible change into the future. You might say this is a cynical attitude but it isn’t. It is very much fact-based on what has happened over and over.

The analogy is one where you are fighting a tough and strong opponent who is out to harm your children. You are motivated and finally get the opponent down on the ground with your foot on his neck. But you must realize that the only way to protect your children is to keep your foot on his neck forever because if you don’t the harm will start up again the minute you turn your back. Saying to ourselves that it shouldn’t be our job is delusional. The ed power groups have too much power. It can only be overcome if the majority of the public works together to stop the harm being done decade after decade to our kids. If the “system” could fix it, it would have already been done. The results show that we must be involved, like it or not.

Arm yourselves with the knowledge and then let elected representatives, the educators in your schools and other members of the public know that you require much better treatment for our children.