To My Grandchildren

Dear Logan, Blake, Tori, Scot, Addison and Sam,

I want you to know when you are facing the problems of runaway government spending, hyper-inflation, a dollar not worth the paper it is printed on, and record high unemployment that I am sorry. I tried to get people motivated to fix our education system so that you could be well prepared for the rising global meritocracy I saw coming. However, I was ineffective in rallying support for you and your peers. The educators and all of their support entities were just too strong in their resolve to prevent any change in the education process that might force them to really teach you what you needed to know to compete and have a decent life.

The teachers unions were particularly effective in “buying” votes of politicians by spending heavily on their campaigns for office. With their national presence they were able to throw large sums of money into specific political races where they saw a threat to the continuation of their “we are overworked and underpaid” scam on the American public. And the Administrators were more than happy to let the unions do the heavy lifting to protect all educators’ place at the government trough.

I am sorry that I was unable to discredit the false propaganda from the educartel that gave the impression that our K-12 education system was performing well. I tried to point out the abysmal failure of our education system and the fallacy of educator beliefs taught to them like a theology, catechism style. I tried to educate people on the huge gap between what your competitors in other countries were learning and what American kids were being taught. However, the educators insistence that civility be observed at all times effectively suppressed the truth of their poor performance in preparing you for the stiff competition represented by your international peers who consistently were getting better educations.

I tried to rally your parents to get more involved but it was easier for them to be too busy, involved in work and play to take the time to help sound the alarm. I learned too late that talking rationally to the educators was doomed to failure. They had practiced for decades ways to delay any needed change. They just didn’t care about you and other kids especially if any harder work or better performance or more subject knowledge were required of them. They talked a good line but that was as far as it went. Tragically that was enough to convince most of the public that while that other city or state’s schools might be in trouble, their local ones were doing fine.

The educators were especially effective in their ability to sidetrack any board of education scrutiny by keeping their meeting agenda so full of administrivia that they were too busy to look at the truth of performance and do anything to correct it.

I realized too late that it would take marshalling enough political power to force educators to change because they were not motivated by your need for better schooling if any pain were required on their parts. Please learn from my experience as you work so hard to pull yourself and the country out of the hole your parents and grandparents allowed to be created.

You’re Not Nice

This is a comment I often hear after I post a blog on education that is critical of our education performance and especially if critical of educators. Thus, I would like to explore the reasons with you.

First, we need to face some realities:

• American education performance has been mired in unacceptable territory for many decades.

• Educators have defined the problems as being the fault of everyone but themselves. Mirrors are outlawed in education venues. Pogo cartoons are also not allowed.

• The achievement gap is not changing for the better. The Colorado Closing the Achievement Gap Commission Final Report of 11/05 concluded that over the last third of a century the gap had gotten “demonstrably worse” in spite of spending billions to find solutions. Robert Kennedy called the gap a stain on our national honor but that hasn’t motivated educators to take the known steps required to fix it. They won’t allow themselves to admit they are wrong in their beliefs about what works in education.

• American students are not being prepared for the global competition for knowledge based jobs.

• The remediation rate for those who go to 2 or 4 year colleges is very high and not being reduced.

• Education schools overemphasize pedagogy to the virtual exclusion of subject knowledge. And the pedagogy they teach is technically wrong in important ways.

• 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 . . . E.D. Hirsch, The Knowledge Deficit

The list could be a lot longer but I hope you get the point. The problems in education are not being addressed effectively and kids and their futures are being irreparably harmed. Thus, if we assume that we must play by the educators’ rules the status quo will continue ad infinitum:

• Civility and harmony at all times—that is, suppress the truth because it might lead to stressful situations.

• Swear fealty to educators as the education experts and agree that no education outsider has any grounds to identify problems or offer constructive criticism.

• Parrot the educator line that they are underpaid and overworked. Which considering their performance is totally false.

• Agree to leave all education decisions to the educators because they are the experts.

• Agree to the status quo preserving process educators use to maintain control and ensure no change occurs that might require them to perform better or renounce their false educational beliefs.

After 7 years working on understanding the education situation, interviewing numerous educators over 6 states and associated people like school board members, state education department denizens and members of the public, I realized that being civil and trying to reason with people in the education establishment was futile. They have simply decided that their vested interest is more important than serving the kids’ needs at the level they deserve.

Therefore, the question comes down to a simple one. Are you on the side of the poorly performing education bureaucracy or are you on the side of the kids and their future. That is an easy decision for me and hopefully for you. E.D. Hirsch has been working on this problem for decades longer than I have. He has concluded that educators will not change on their own. They will have to be forced by public and political pressure. I write the things I do on education in an attempt to inform the public on the reality in education. I am attempting to get people to go beyond the pseudo “good news” propaganda that is ubiquitously offered by the education establishment. Being nice when kids are being continually harmed has a very low priority for me.

The above applies to the mainline schools. There are charter schools (not all by any means) that perform much better than the mainline schools. This is especially true if they have strong leadership and a balanced philosophy where subject knowledge is valued. However, these schools affect a tiny minority of students. We must reform the mainline schools to make a difference for millions of kids.

Do Our Schools Prepare Kids for Factory Work or Knowledge Work?

While there is much posturing and TALK about preparing kids for knowledge jobs (21st Century Skills, etc.), there has been virtually no change in the substance of what is taught and how it is taught since the system was designed a century ago to prepare the masses for production line work in factories. Change is required, not talk if our kids are to be prepared to compete in a very different world than existed in the early twentieth century. Experts like Diane Ravitch have pointed out that the 21st Century Skills movement is an excuse to bring back failed old ideas with new and improved labels. This is not progress. It is criminal fraud and it hurts our kids.

During my education research over the last 7 years I have run into one comment more than any other from teachers about subjects they are tasked to teach. It could be paraphrased as, “I didn’t do well in math. I don’t like math, but I have to try to teach it to my kids.” Let me ask you, do you think the kids will learn well from someone who has a poor understanding of math and such a strong distaste for it?

Why worry about it, you might say. We must concern ourselves because math skill and knowledge are becoming increasingly more important now with the intensified trend toward knowledge work and the high level of global competition to get those good, well-paying jobs. Why is math important? Because--

• Math is the language we use to understand and model the world we live in. Rigorous math is used in most fields of endeavor. We all know that it is vital for scientists, engineers and applied mathematicians. However, math is used in research in many fields as they attempt to better understand their area of interest. It is used in medicine, psychology, education, and businesses of all types.

• Studying and working with math is good exercise for our reasoning powers. It is the best area of study to teach problem formulation and definition. In the real world problems are not presented as in dumbed down math texts where the data in the problem is the only data you need to solve it. In the real world there is an abundance of data that is meaningless to solving most problems. The key is to formulate the problem so that the important data is captured giving understanding to the causes and solutions for the problem at hand.

• Math is fun. Math is beautiful in its elegant structure.

Now the question to ask is do we keep preparing K-12 students for “do as you are told, factory work” as the whole process was designed to do or do we change to a system that facilitates and encourages all students to learn to their full potential. Factory work is continuing to decline as a career opportunity in today’s age of outsourcing and automation. To change for the better we will need to break some stereotypes. The first one and most hateful of all is. “Girls aren’t good at math and if they are there is something wrong with them.” This belief held by too many teachers, parents and others is a harmful self-fulfilling prophecy that dooms too many girls to poor performance in math. Perhaps its mirror image for boys is that they can’t do as well as girls in literacy areas. Both boys and girls have the ability to excel in both areas, especially with the low expectation curricula being used in our K-12 mainline schools.

For girls in elementary classes where most teachers are women, seeing their teachers distaste for math that always shows through, no matter how positive they try to be creates poor role models. “Gee, if Miss MacGuilicudy can’t do math, how could I ever do it?” As in any psychologically corrupt environment, students who violate the expected norms are subtly punished to get them into line with the expectation.

To change will require teaching teachers to learn to love math instead of fear it. The education schools can’t do this as they are populated with pseudo math staff who also fear and dislike math. The exception is when the government gives them a multimillion dollar grant to “invent” a math curriculum that will work to conceal the teachers’ lack of math skill. Even though they don’t understand math well at all they come up with a discovery curriculum that transforms the teacher into a facilitator of group discussions as kids “discover” how to solve problems. The problems “solved” are trivial. They have to be because the kids can’t solve them with the discovery method unless they are. This curriculum has spread across the nation like wildfire because educators want to be freed from the responsibility to really teach math as a hierarchy that builds on foundations learned in the previous year. The whole premise is like preparing to cross a great wilderness with a guide or without one. Wandering in the wilderness is not what we should be after in education. We need guides (teachers) who know the way through the wilderness. You only need to look at the discovery process and how it might apply to say, The Calculus, to realize the approach is ridiculous. While Newton developed The Calculus at age 19 to help him analyze physical phenomena, I defy you to assert that the discovery method would be an efficient way to train future scientists, engineers and mathematicians in The Calculus. You see that is the real problem. The constructivist/discovery methods take much longer than direct instruction to teach the material. That is why kids early in their K-12 careers do better than they do in the middle and high school grades. In the discovery process it is too easy for students to “discover the wrong principle” which undermines the foundation they need in the future.

The result? Kids who are exposed to this fraud reach middle and high school totally unprepared for algebra and beyond. Then the middle and high school teachers have to try to make up years of lost time and teach the new material too. No wonder the math performance of high school students is so poor. Oh, there are exceptions who do get it because their parents taught them or provided tutors to fill the void. Most students however, don’t have that advantage and end up turned off and incompetent in math. This limits their future possibilities greatly and since it affects so many students it affects the whole nation’s competitiveness.

The first thing you must realize is that the vast majority of educators do not understand subject matter. You pick the subject and they haven’t been exposed to it in more than a highly diffuse and superficial way. Yet, they have no problem posturing as experts to enable them to ignore the truth that is offered by those who do understand subject matter. Rita Kramer described the problem well in her bestselling book, Ed School Follies. “The people who become ‘educators’ and who run our school systems usually have degrees in education, psychology, social sciences, public administration; they are not people who have studied, know, and love literature, history, science, or philosophy. Our ‘educators’ are not educated. They do not love learning. Naturally enough, they think of the past as dead because it has never been alive to them. And they will not bring it alive for their pupils.”

In math this has led to “holding the fort” against all appeals for objective review of the harm being done by the ridiculous approach to teaching math. The same argument can apply to literacy and other curriculum areas. The way the educators have been able to turn away the constructive criticism is to employ “outside” experts to approve their approach. Thus, they hire outside, education school educated consultants to review their program and offer ideas on making it better.

Of course, the public who hears of what sounds a reasonable approach do not understand that the “outside experts” come from the same weak, diffuse and superficial training as the school officials who hire them for the review. Do not be fooled, if a person has a doctorate or masters in education they are not educated. Arthur Levine in his research into education schools concluded that they “confer masters on those who display anything but mastery and doctorates in name only.” While some educators have learned subjects in other studies or on their own, most have not. In general, while well meaning, these people have nothing of value to add to improving our kids’ education and it is time that the public became aware of it. We must demand positive action to face the reality of the poor educator performance and poor understanding of what works that is hurting our kids.