Teachers Overpaid

Reference - “Study: Teachers Make Too Much Money”  from Education Week. 

In the article Francesca Duffy reports on a Washington meeting this week where Biggs and Richwine (researchers at the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation ) reported on their findings that on average teachers make 52% more than workers with equivalent skills make in the private sector considering pay, benefits and job security.  They totally demolished Arne Duncan, Education Secretary’s assertion that teachers are “desperately underpaid.”  I am really surprised that the researchers made it out of town without suffering harm.

The researchers reckon that the overpayment nationwide amounts to $120 Billion a year.  This puts it in the same ballpark as the savings the “super committee” is tasked to find in the federal spending over ten years.  Yes, it is hard to take away something that people are used to getting but in this case it is both unfair and unaffordable.  This is why a focus of the discussion was to promote the idea that states facing budget shortfalls should consider teacher compensation as a viable area for spending cuts. 

While this could be a fruitful area and could start addressing the unfairness to society of the current situation, we know from the states (Wisconsin et al) where even small changes in what teachers pay for healthcare or retirement plan contributions are attempted that it will require a lot guts on the part of state lawmakers with majority public support to make it happen.

Richwine contended that the standard regression method, which compares teachers to workers with equivalent education and finds that teachers are underpaid, is flawed because it doesn't consider "unobservable ability." People going into teaching have lower SAT and GRE scores than people who pursue other fields, he said. Thus, in the case of teachers, "years of education could be an overestimate of cognitive skills." In addition, the education major itself is not as rigorous as other fields of study.  Thus, this adds to the recognition of education outsiders over decades that an education degree is of extremely low value compared to other degree paths.  It is essentially a “seat time” certificate.  For decades those who fail in other college majors switch to education and become “A” students easily and those who can’t get admitted to more rigorous studies start out in education from day one. 

This doesn’t mean that all educators are uneducated but the majority certainly are.  They set the tone for the whole endeavor making any improvement virtually impossible as has been proven over decades.  An example of critiques of the education schools and their graduates is Gary Lyons article in Texas Magazine, Sept. 1979.  Lyons reported that half of the teacher applicants to the Houston Independent School District scored lower in math and a third of them lower in English than the average high school junior and he blamed the state’s sixty-three accredited teacher-training institutions for turning out “teachers who cannot read as well as the average sixteen-year old, write notes free of barbarisms to parents, or handle arithmetic well enough to keep track of the field-trip money.”  He accused the teacher colleges of coddling ignorance and, “backed by hometown legislators,” of turning out “hordes of certified ignoramuses whose incompetence in turn becomes evidence that the teacher colleges and the educators need yet more money and more power.”

Arthur Levine, then president of Columbia Teachers College (when he wrote his reports) in his three part critique of education schools starting with Educating School Leaders in 2005 reinforced Lyons’ criticisms of 26 years earlier.  He pointed out the low SAT and GRE scores but also that administrators as a group had lower SAT and GRE scores than the teachers they were “leading.”  He also bemoaned the lack of rigor as being related to universities, even those with good reputations, using education schools as a low quality diploma mill with lowering standards and admission requirements to support the levels of income needed to fund more important career majors at the universities. 

Back to the new research: They found that when teachers and other workers are compared by cognitive ability, Richwine added, "the wage penalty has essentially disappeared."  Also, their research showed that when teachers left teaching to take private sector jobs their pay declined by 3%.  Of course, the party line of the teachers unions is that teachers are constantly tempted by higher pay in the private sector, which is perhaps true for some teachers but not for the average teacher.

It should be no surprise that the biggest component of the overpaid reality lies with the extremely generous benefits that teachers receive which are not available in the private sector.  Fully funded retirement plans with defined benefit amounts unattainable without taxpayer subsidies because the market return assumptions are unrealistic are typically fully funded by the public.  Also, healthcare costs are extremely low and the retirement healthcare benefits are also very expensive to the public but virtually free for the teachers.

I believe that this “free ride” on the taxpayer’s dime is unsustainable and unproductive.  It contributes to a view of things within education circles that is totally unrealistic.  It results in false sense of entitlement related to believing the conventional wisdoms of educators.  That is, “we are doing a great job and are working incredibly hard.”  Norman Augustine in his “Is America Falling Off the Flat Earth?” points out that if American educators adopted a goal to be “average” in the global education panacea they would need to improve a lot.  The reality is that our education system is performing abysmally and the amount we spend on it is not helping at all.  The payback on investment is atrocious.  Worse though is that millions of kids are given “amputated” futures year after year because educators live in a dream world with no sense of reality or responsibility while their enablers the education schools and too many politicians find benefit in continuing the scam.

Steve Jobs

The death of Steve Jobs is on everyone’s mind this week.  The accolades for his leadership and creative genius at Apple are everywhere in the media.  The accolades are appropriate because of the results he turned in over his career.  I think it is very worthwhile to look at the “whole person” who was so successful and learn from it.  

Steve’s reputation was that he was a very smart and driven person.  That was characterized by his extremely high expectations for himself and the organization he led coupled with a passion for excellence.  From what you can piece together from comments now but especially over the years when people were discussing a living and not a dead man paint a picture of a difficult person to have as a boss.   More than one person who worked with him has said he did not suffer fools at all.  He also did not suffer in silence when confronted with what he saw as work that did not meet his standard.  His feedback in such circumstances was swift and biting.  He created a work environment where political correctness had no place.  Perhaps above all he understood the technology and what it could and couldn’t do at the current time or the short term future.  This objective and realistic but stretching view of what was possible led Apple to success after success.

So let’s compare the Job’s approach to management with that employed by our education “leaders.” 

1. ·         Results - our education system is turning in results as abysmal as Job’s results were positive.
2. ·         Expectations – educators do not have high expectations of themselves or of their students.
3. ·         Objectivity – educators continue to use education approaches which are technically wrong in spite of the results they aren’t able to achieve.  This is compared to competitor nations who use technically sound approaches and teach their kids much more effectively as is shown by the international testing.   The approach in our education system is to try to do the wrong thing better when they should stop doing the wrong things and start doing the right things.
4. ·         Work environment – in education political correctness and group think run amok.  This creates a workplace where constructive feedback (that is, you are not getting the right results, shape up or ship out) simply does not occur.  Kids and our increasingly uncompetitive society globally continue to pay the price.
5. ·         Mental Toughness – Job’s created an environment of mental toughness where robust dialog was encouraged as a way to perfect the quality of the work teams.  The education environment is one of people walking on eggshells because conflict is not allowed and thus creates a bunch of wimps.
6. ·         Passion – in education passion is not allowed because it might lead to conflicts.  Conflict is required if you want to really perform well.  It results in much better decisions.  Oh, people “say” they are passionate about things but it is all a charade.  If passion for doing the education mission in an excellent way were ever allowed to break through the educations fiefdom’s fortress walls it would have a remarkably positive impact.

Therefore, we must conclude that there are good reasons why Steve Jobs and Apple were successful and equally valid reasons why our education system is a miserable failure compared to the money spent and the quality of the kids who have far more potential than they are given credit for. 

Courageous Education Leaders = Oxymoron

The history of American mainstream education for nearly the last five decades has been characterized by lots of changes but no significant improvement in our performance versus the best global competition. In fact they are improving steadily at a pace that even if we improve will leave us further behind year after year. The changes we have pursued have been;
 • Greatly increased costs
 o Admin increases have been huge in both numbers of people and the pay they receive.
 o Advanced ‘education school’ graduate degrees have become ubiquitous. This is because districts have policies in place that give people who get the advanced degree an automatic pay increase. For example; Arthur Levine (former president of Columbia Teachers College) wrote in his 2005 Educating School Leaders that the education doctorate “had no value for any public school administration job.”
 o The ancillary “trappings” that used to be very rare are now “necessary” so that schools are more and more expensive to build and maintain. The husk is beautiful but the core is rotten.
 o Massive amounts of money are spent on “doing the wrong things better” which is much more expensive and only preserves the unacceptable status quo of poor performance. Terms such as best practice, special education, response to intervention, etc. all fit the “do the wrong thing better” approach.

 • States generally set low proficiency standards and the national level NAEP testing which has a more rigorous standard than the states also is set below the global best competition by 2-3 grades and sometimes more.

 • The best performing global competitors use a rigorous, direct instruction process taught by teachers who have robust subject knowledge. Our education philosophy is to use the discovery/constructivist approach championed by Dewey et al about a century ago. Our performance cannot improve significantly unless we discard the dumbed-down constructivist approach and replace it with the direct instruction process. This will require ‘retreading’ teachers in both subject knowledge which is currently weak but also in pedagogy which is currently tailored to the constructivist process that E.D. Hirsch says “hasn’t worked and can’t work” because it is technically flawed.

 • The political climate has increasingly moved toward more state and federal control and less local control over the education process. This added bureaucracy only serves to increase costs and cast the current technically flawed process in concrete so that needed change is extremely difficult.

 • Education entities have essentially transformed themselves into propaganda operations whose main objective is to ‘con’ the public into believing that they are doing as well as can be expected but more money to spend would always help the kids.

 With all of that it is easy to see why educators take the comfortable and easy road of ignoring (masking) their performance in the core mission to educate children to their potential. However, just suppose for the thought of it that some brave district leadership team decided to work on the real issues impeding education performance. It isn’t likely but just suppose it did happen. What process might they use to travel the road to self-respect and satisfaction in tackling a difficult task and succeeding?

 A good first step would be to put out a press release and parent, patron, and staff letter to inform everyone of the truth of the district’s poor performance and also that they were committed to fixing the problems as soon as possible. This could be considered analogous to Cortez’ burning of ships to prevent his men from feeling that retreat to Cuba was an option. Their only option was to go forward or die. That brave district would inform everyone that the ways of operating would be very different than they had been in the past.

The days of milling around trying to avoid making a decision that might cause painful but productive change would be past. The focus would be on implementation of “technically correct” education processes. There is absolutely no need to discuss, experiment or go slow, what needs to be done is well known. The other countries whose kids get much better educations than ours do have proven what works, we only need to implement their good practice.

 A specific outline of actions to take immediately no matter what part of the school year you are in;
 • Immediately start rigorous subject matter training for teachers. Start with elementary teachers who as a group have the most to learn. Concentrate on math and reading first. This training cannot come from education school faculty. They don’t have the knowledge required as is shown by the poor subject knowledge of education school graduates.

 • Immediately discontinue all constructivist curricula. Replace all texts currently in use with more rigorous material. For example, the Singapore math texts are cheap and much better than the commonly used EveryDay Math which does not provide the foundation required for success in middle and high school math studies.

 • Immediately train district leaders to be competent change leaders. Education school training and the leadership role models all work to create maintainers not “change masters” as Rosabeth Kanter called them in her book The Change Masters.

 • Eliminate political correctness and Group Think as they stand in the way of robust dialogue, a primary requirement for performance organizations.

 • Value honesty in identifying problems. Do not allow a “kill the messenger” approach. You must face the bald-faced truth of your performance no matter how uncomfortable if you hope to make real progress.

 • Report often to stakeholders about progress being made.

 • Stop paying more for advanced degrees. If the advanced degree results in better performance then pay more for that performance, if not, do not pay more. This was recommended by Arthur Levine in Educating School Leaders.

 • Use a short-cycle, data driven, prioritized management process.

 Is there just one district out there that has the integrity and honesty to face and fix the problems so that all kids can actually have the opportunity to learn to their potential?

The Dirty Little Secret

Our education system has a dirty little secret that it keeps well hidden. The secret is that our system was designed to not educate our children rigorously. You may think I am full of “it.” However, consider the following facts:

1. Our kids compare unfavorably to their best foreign peers on the international standardized tests. Why? Is it because our kids are less bright and unable to learn at a high level? Not at all, it is because we use the technically wrong constructivist/discovery methods in our schools that not one of the competitor nations whose kids are scoring better than ours use. One would think that IF our educators cared about their mission they would notice that fact and move to correct that problem. Don’t hold your breath.

2. Our education system is basically a fraudulent scheme to extract ever larger amounts of money from the public to enrich educators and their “suppliers.” You see, once a lie starts being told it is very difficult for those telling it to admit it when their livelihood is based on the lies.

3. If we changed to the system of direct instruction by teachers who have a highly competent understanding of the subject(s) they are teaching we could solve this problem and serve our kids and country much better. A much higher percentage of our kids could actually compete successfully for the better paying jobs in the rising global meritocracy.

4. Sadly, the large majority of our teacher cadre does not have the robust understanding of subject matter that is required by the systems our competitor nations use and we used to use before the progressives replaced it with their dumbed-down version currently in use. This is most critical at the elementary levels where the foundation for learning at the middle school and high school level should be provided but is not. This is confirmed by the fact that the longer our kids are exposed to our system the worse they do as a group compared to their foreign peers.

5. Education schools do not provide acceptable levels of either pedagogy or subject knowledge in their curricula. Their bachelor and graduate degrees only confirm that the person has spent money and “seat time” in the diploma mill, not that they learned anything pertinent to the rigorous teaching of our kids. This problem is ubiquitous and the exceptions among education schools are very, very few. The bottom line is that if we wanted to change to a system that works (and we must, immediately) the challenge would be to retrain teachers willing and able to grasp the required knowledge and bring in people with “honest degrees” in real subjects to replace those teachers who cannot or chose not to meet the more rigorous standard required.

6. Textbooks are selected that “look good” with color glossy format and are incredibly expensive. However, they are very much dumbed-down from where they need to be if our kids are to actually learn anything worthwhile.

7. Politicians from the school board level all the way through state legislators to national legislators are loath to call for real reform because many political campaigns are “nudged” toward the candidate committed to continuing the educators place at the government trough. This happens through campaign contributions but perhaps more importantly by educators walking the precincts going door to door to convince the uninformed public that the kids will suffer if the candidate they don’t favor is elected. Of course they never admit that the kids are being harmed currently and will continue to be if the candidate they support is elected.

8. All of the costly reforms are ineffective in actually improving things for the kids. They can be accurately described as attempts to “do the wrong thing better” and spend a lot more money in the process. The educators get more money to spend on their salaries/benefits and the enrichment of their friends who support their efforts from vendors to ed schools and politicians.

9. Educators are addicted to “research” and “studies” because they carry with them large grants from government entities or foundations. This has been a huge source of the enrichment of the education fiefdom. It is also tragic because much of the research is of very low quality or slanted to make the desired point. Realistically, we already know what must be done very accurately. The educators use further research as a delaying tactic asserting that we don’t know what needs to be done. This very big lie harms our kids and wastes huge sums of valuable resources in the process. It preserves the status quo.

There is an old saying that the exception proves the rule. There are two exceptions to the constructivist/discovery approach in our schools. They are music instruction and sports coaches. You might ask why those areas use a direct instruction and drill process. Why are they allowed to do it right while the rest of the teachers use the consistently harmful approach?

I believe it is simply because both music and sports result in a data driven, short cycle, closed loop assessment of both activities. That is, when the music teachers schedule multiple programs or concerts a year for parents and the public they don’t want to depend on Professor Harold Hill’s “Think System” to avoid embarrassment. Similarly, sports coaches don’t want to consistently lose games to opponents, which is disliked by parents and the public. So they actually teach kids the skills they need to perform acceptably. Not every music teacher is Bach and not every coach is Lombardi but they still know their subjects far better than other teachers know theirs.

In academic subjects achievement tests are given once a year and the results usually come out very close to the start of the new school year when parents especially are very busy getting ready for the new school year. Educators might say that report cards are given quarterly but with the tendency of teachers and administrators to avoid angry parents, the report card grades have inflated away from reality for decades now.

Thus, educators are careful to provide respectable performance in areas like music and sports where the results of their efforts are immediate or “short cycle” but they are very good at distracting attention from their performance in preparing our kids for the globally competitive situation they will face when they leave school.

State report cards for schools only compare a school or district’s performance to others in the same state. States set their own definitions of proficiency and design their own tests. That alone is an incentive to make them easier than they should be. While national data exist it is difficult to access and the international data is slow to be reported at best and not very easy to access unless you are highly motivated to do so.

Again, the dirty little secret is that our schools are working as designed to enrich educators and harm kids. We know how to fix it, so why aren’t we demanding that it happen?

Koreans Shudder at No School on Saturday

The title of the article in Bloomburg Business Week’s July 11 – July 17, 2001 issue shines a spotlight on the education ethic in the East Asian countries versus those prevalent in America. First, understand that the Koreans currently send their kids to two half day Saturday sessions a month and the government is proposing to do away with those sessions. Why? It seems they feel that more family time and play time for the children will result in more consumption which they want to promote.

As the title indicates Koreans, especially mothers per the article, don’t support the change. And the children they interviewed for the article don’t either. One mother said she was spending $1700 per month on tutoring classes. Another mother spends $2800 per month on math classes for her son. The conclusion of the article after interviewing a cross section of parents seemed to be that if the public schools weren’t open on Saturday they would sign the kids up for more private tutoring classes to take their place. One example was Charlie Lee an eleven year old who takes 15 hours of cram classes a week in English and math.

The East Asian countries dominate the top five places in the OECD assessments of reading, math and science. American students are ranked 30th of 34 OECD countries in math, 23rd in science, and 17th in reading. This, in spite of American spending on education being at the very top of all nations except for two small country exceptions.

Korean attitudes are sharpened by seeing what happened in Japan where they cut Saturday classes in 2002 only to reinstate them in 2009 after seeing their results in international testing steadily decline. From 2000 to 2006 Japan students went from first in math to tenth, 2nd to 6th in science and 8th to 15th in reading comprehension.

The mother who was spending $2800 per month on tutoring for her 13 year old son said, “I will make sure he gets whatever he needs.” Apparently the long honored Confucian reverence for education is being reinforced by the competition parents see from other nations who also see education as the best way to prepare their children for the increasingly stern global meritocracy.

This article was a reminder of how delusional we have been on education here. Our educators and politicians continue to work to maintain the status quo while touting all sorts of “polish the rotten apple” reforms they tell us will improve things but never do. How many decades do we need to continue harming kids before we listen to people like E.D. Hirsch who point out based on decades of study of our education system that, “the current system (different than that used by all of the world leaders doing better than we are) hasn’t worked and can’t work" (because it is based on technically wrong beliefs that are ubiquitous in our education cadre)? Too many cynically believe it is only the gap kids who are being harmed and “everyone knows they can’t learn anyway.” They can learn and the kids who do relatively well by comparison in the current system could learn far more if they were given the kind of rigorous experience with teachers who actually understand the subjects they are teaching.

History NAEP—On the Progressive Path

The new results for the history section of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) are out. Proficiency rates of 12% for 12th grade, 17% for 8th grade, and 20% for 4th grade. If you are of the belief that our children must understand history well as a foundation to good citizenship, you are likely greatly distressed by this result which except for minor improvement at 8th grade level is statistically the same result as in the past.

A few years ago I read Michael Barone’s book Hard America, Soft America. I highly recommend it to you. One part of the book related to how some parents, especially the liberal upper middle class were so committed to providing a good education for their children but were unconcerned with the education being received by the masses. This puzzled me at the time as I thought that if they cared about education for their own they should care about quality education for all children.

Since then I have come to realize that the progressives are getting just the results they wanted when they planned the takeover of the education system starting in the early years of the twentieth century. John Dewey and his accomplices tirelessly pushed for elimination of the old American Common School approach as too rigorous and inappropriate for the industrial jobs that were transforming America from a rural agrarian, entrepreneurial society to an urban/suburban existence working for “the boss.”

The Progressives had a clear view of the future they wanted. They desired a country where expertise ruled, their expertise, because they knew better how we should live our lives. Thus, they wanted the general populace to be minimally educated so that they would be easier to sway to what their “betters” had determined was the correct path for society to take. Thus, their education approach was to dumb-down curricula and use slow and ineffective discovery methods to ensure that the masses didn’t learn enough to question their political leaders.

The progressives are inwardly smiling because the results reported by NAEP confirm that their “grand plan” is working very successfully. If you are surprised by my assertion it is because the education establishment “intellectual leaders” have been successful in packaging their travesty in a camouflage that looks very much like what society would deem appropriate for their education system. They have successfully brainwashed the teachers and administrators in their education school training to believe that they are doing the right things and as well as can be expected with the resources they are given and the quality of the kids they have to teach.

They are masters of propaganda. They repeat a mantra that sounds good at first and unless someone takes the time to peek behind the camouflage to view the reality it is assumed that the assertion of education doing as well as it can is true. Besides we are so busy doing important things of our own that we have to depend on the schools to do their job well. We need that time for golf, fantasy football, shopping at the mall for the latest electronic gadget or a new wardrobe, or working two jobs to make ends meet because our own “great progressive education” didn’t prepare us to compete for well paying jobs.

As I have pointed out in previous posts, the education establishment is a well-oiled machine whose purpose is to enrich its workers while maintaining the status quo, poor performing system that hasn’t worked for kids and can’t work. When I started on my education research mission I had assumed that the current system needed to be reformed, I was wrong; it must be replaced from the foundation up. Polishing this rotten apple only delays the day when our kids are educated to be able to compete with their best educated global peers.

A last word; remember that the system is doing exactly what the progressives who designed it wanted it to do. They want a credulous populace subject to their expertise who aren’t prepared by their weak education to question what is happening. That is not in line with our founding principles. Our founding principles may not be perfect but they are better than any other system so far tried and need to be preserved. To do that our education system needs to be rebuilt from the ground up.

Independence Day Thoughts

Bill Clinton was interviewed on CNBC’s Squawk Box earlier in the week. Two areas of the discussion are worth mentioning; both important to our understanding of the reality of our education system. First, he stated that to get our economy going we needed to graduate a lot more scientists and engineers from American universities. His solution—bring in more foreign students and allow them to stay after graduation by granting more visas. The conclusion you have to draw is that he knows that our K-12 education system is incapable of providing more graduates prepared to successfully study science and engineering in our universities. Sadly, he is absolutely right. This seems a sad parallel to the Romans who declined steadily starting with the use of foreigners to staff their legions as their own citizens were too inured to the “good life” of ease and wealth at home.

More than that, however, I believe he knows that the larger progressive goals for education are inconsistent with providing the rigorous education required to increase the supply of sufficiently well-educated students to send to science and engineering programs. The progressive practice of using the K-12 school system to create a credulous populace, the majority of which are educated at best to a mediocre level and at worst to a minimum brainwashed state is inconsistent with rigor in education.

The second aspect of the interview was related to his understanding of the “Boil the frog” process. You know the story; if you put a frog in boiling water it will reflexively jump out but if you put a frog in room temp water and slowly increase the heat it will ultimately be cooked. In responding to a comment that the interviewer talks to lots of business leaders who express concern over the level of change from the health care bill and the Dodd-Frank regulatory bill being too confusing and massive to deal with Clinton’s response was that the bills should be implemented more slowly (frog example) so the business owners would have time to get used to it.

Unsaid but the obvious conclusion was that the goal was the same to end up with “cooked” businesses in the end. This was the second point pertaining to our education system. This approach squares well with that the progressives took to acquiring total control of our education system. Their approach was so radical and antithetical to the rigorous content-rich approach they wanted to replace that they knew it would have to be done over decades slowly so that the “frogs” didn’t notice the change from a system supporting the principles of our founding to the one they wanted that prepared most of us for a system of “expert control” and nanny state incentives to compliance with little personal freedom or responsibility. Their approach was wildly successful. Clinton was reminding his partners that they should remember that radical “step function” changes as recently passed by the “bit in their teeth” last congress would raise the ire of the populace to oppose them.

This is why the current education system cannot be reformed but must be replaced. And like the frog boiler-progressives we need to remember that it can’t be done overnight but that foundational changes need to be put in place immediately that will get us on the road to the future our nation deserves and for which our founders sacrificed so much to give to us.

Wake Up, Rip, Going Through The Motions—A Disastrous Sham

The new report, Standing on the Shoulders of Giants—An Agenda for American Education Reform, is the latest indictment of American education practices. It is perhaps the most comprehensive look at the differences between our approach and that of our best foreign competitor nations. That we have a problem should be no surprise. The surprise is that we have been so loathe to face the truth of the ridiculously poorly designed education system whose foundation was laid over a hundred years ago. That effort by progressive forces replaced the “envy of the world” American Common School of Mann, Webster and others with a dumbed-down, going through the motions affair designed to prepare students to work in industrial factories as essentially human robots on assembly lines. As the global economy has changed other nations have worked hard to make their education systems meet the challenge of preparing students to have the tools to compete in a knowledge value world. We haven’t.

We have been worse than Rip Van Winkle in our slumber while the realities of our poor education performance go ignored. In 1957 the Russian Sputnik launch triggered a desire to add more rigor to our schools. Gary Lyon’s article in Texas Monthly magazine, Sept. 1979 “Why Teachers Can’t Teach” decried Ed school training as a farce and a fraud. In the 1983 A Nation at Risk report we were clearly told that our education system was affected by a rising tide of mediocrity and that if a foreign nation had imposed our education system on us we would consider it an act of war. Listing the reports and initiatives since A Nation at Risk would be a long task. The point is that we have had plenty of warning but have approached the needed reform by applying bandaid after bandaid to a zombie that has to have radical surgery if it is to be truly “fixed.”

My guess is that the parties whose vested interest (read huge amounts of money and power) will be threatened by the required change to reform our education system to one that is truly worthy of us is doomed to fail. Of course, that is betting on an extension of the current trend and that is an easy bet. Inflection points are caused by a big shift in ancillary forces from outside the system and they do not exist now because Rip has not awakened yet. By the time he awakes it will likely be too late and our children and grandchildren will have to live through much tougher times caused by our increasing lack of competitiveness in the global economy.

Listing some of the biggest anchors preventing the needed reforms –

• Education schools—compared to the best competition our training of teachers (and administrators) is weak to the point of ridicule. The low admission standards result in entrants to our schools of education scoring in the lower third of all SAT test takers. The course offerings of the schools of education are a total sham. Lyons described the courses as, “the intellectual equivalent of puffed wheat: one kernel of knowledge inflated by means of hot air, divided into pieces and puffed again.” The new report points out that the competitor nations require absolute subject mastery and pedagogy that is far more rigorous than the waste of time approach we take to pedagogy training. The admission requirements for our Ed school grad programs are similarly low. Thus our education schools are “diploma mills” skimming huge amounts of money from their farcical educator training programs. If you think that the universities that have schools of education will give up that low overhead, gravy train without a fight, well good luck.

• Current educators—these folk, to support the needed change would need to be retrained with rigor in both subject matter and pedagogy. That is, the current cadre of education “professionals” is totally inadequate to what we desperately need. During the study that resulted in “Standing on the Shoulder . . .” an American representative suggested adding a question about what percent of teachers were teaching subjects they weren’t trained in. The representatives from other countries thought he was kidding and then were aghast that it would even be considered to allow a teacher to “teach” a subject they didn’t know and know very well. Yet in America the Taylor management philosophy supports the philosophy that teachers (line workers) are interchangeable without being concerned about such trivial matters as subject knowledge. The joke is on us. The other countries have it right and we have it wrong.

• Poor management philosophy and structure—our schools are based on management principles of Frederick Taylor, Gantt and others who were involved in designing the systems used to manage production line factories in the early twentieth century. This management style has been long ago replaced by more humanistic and participatory models in many organizations outside of education although it is more prevalent than it should be even now. This top down, repressive style is NOT the way to manage professionals. Hence as in industry a perceived need for unions to protect against the long outdated management philosophy adds even more anti-change reality into the system. It also gives rise to pay for time in service instead of results achieved (merit) and emphasis on work rules that prevent effective performance of the mission. If the “step pay” plan weren’t in place, starting pay for new teachers who were of the training, competence and intellect required could be implemented.

• Unions—these have acquired huge levels of power and if the choice is to give up their power or continue the status quo which ensures their power stays in place, it is easy to predict their stance.

• Legislators—the unions wield great power in supporting the election of “compliant” politicians to office. They support candidates who will support their status quo agenda. This is another tough impediment to positive change.

• An army of researchers, education vendors, government bureaucracies—these people also see threat of less power or remuneration or both if the needed reform were to happen.

It is and has been clear for decades what needs to be done. But who will step up to the plate and get it done. It will require lots of guts, determination, and passion from those who understand the consequences for our progeny and country if we don’t force it to happen. One thing that must be crystal clear, change will not occur from within. Our educators are working to protect their self-interest at the expense of our children and our country. It is time to wake up and face the truth.

The Standing on the Shoulders. . . report is available at
http://www.ncee.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Standing-on-the-Shoulders-of-Giants-An-American-Agenda-for-Education-Reform.pdf

S O S D D

I read yesterday a commentary in Education Week trying to motivate school boards to balance their resource allocations to be fair to the “Gap” children. He bemoaned the fact that all of these years after the Brown vs Board of Education Supreme Court decision the gap in learning of our disadvantaged children has not improved. And he is right but as always in education it is an excuse to remind us that it is an external problem (school board in this case) to the sacrosanct and perfect education system they want us to believe exists. So the problem is defined by education insiders as school boards not doing the right thing, the people and legislators not providing the proper level of funding, parents not sending the kids to school already knowing how to read, write, do math and perfectly behaved. This is not an exhaustive list as the education establishment is very adept at deflecting the blame for their poor performance to any mildly plausible target.

Is anyone else bothered that our education problems rotate among the current year’s “cause célèbre?” The gap problem is certainly on the rotation and gets “undivided attention” (talk and more money thrown around to no effect) for a period of time periodically. You may remember that I have written before about the Colorado Closing the Achievement Gap Commission Final Report of November 2005. In the report they do a fine job of defining the problem and admitting that the problem was only worse than when Robert Kennedy said a “third of a Century” ago that the problem was a stain on our national honor. However, the proposed solutions to the problem amounted to redoubling the effort to do the things that have failed so miserably in the past, better this time. UGH!! We could be excused for asking, “When will they ever learn?”

In reality the education fiefdom (defensive, delusional, insular, inbred and uneducated), doesn’t ever learn anything new. That might cause them to realize that the status quo is unacceptable, which it certainly is. If you remember my original four attributes of the education Fiefdom you will notice I added uneducated this time. Oh, there is an oversupply of worthless degrees from bachelors to masters to doctorates. Rita Kramer in her book, Ed School Follies asserts our educators are uneducated. She means by that they only study process in education schools and therefore do not have any subject knowledge worth mentioning. She says wisely that anyone who doesn’t know and love the subject they are teaching is not going to be effective.

Is this a problem? Yes, it is central to the choice of content free (discovery, constructivist) curricula because the knowledge to teach kids subject knowledge is missing. We are the only nation that uses this uncompetitive approach. All the nations whose kids are learning so much more than ours, use a content rich approach and have teachers who know the subject so they can teach effectively. Tragically, America with the Common School movement of Horace Mann, Noah Webster and others used the same method that our competitors use today. We listened to the Siren Songs of John Dewey, Fitzpatrick (Columbia Teachers College “million dollar” professor) who denigrated the great system we had at the time to install their progressive system designed to prepare people to work as “tell us what to do” workers in “big box” entities like industrial factories. The idea was to allow students to “explore and discover” the subject knowledge on their own. Of course this process is much slower because reinventing the wheel is slow and unpredictable. Thus, we discarded a system that worked and replaced it with the one that hasn’t worked and can’t work. This is why spending one more day or dollar and doing the wrong thing better which is the current approach is idiocy to the max. So why don’t we change? Good question and there is a good answer.

The Fiefdom has had time to develop a very effective strategy to prevent any real change from happening. They have time to do this because they are not spending time learning to understand subjects or improve anything. They are playing defense and we need to remember that. The central tenet of their approach is to use their pseudo professionalism to convince those interested in making productive change that the education expert process must be followed when considering any change. Thus, they demand that all changes being considered are studied by a committee of educators and community members. The administrators carefully select members of the committee to prevent any meaningful representation from truly motivated change champions. They may allow a token or two but make sure they are a distinct minority. This committee usually takes more than a year to reach its recommendations. If they recommend a change, the educators demand research by education experts to validate the recommendations. Of course, this is a rigged game because the “experts” are all part of the ”status quo at all costs” conspiracy. This process takes years typically and allows perhaps the biggest problem in making productive change in education to rear its ugly head. That is turnover in administration (especially the superintendent), school board members, or even key advocates of change who may move to a different job or become discouraged. This turnover provides an excuse to “restart” the process with new membership. Thus nothing positive ever happens.

This process is very effective at preserving the status quo and very, very effective at harming generation after generation of students. This is especially true for the gap students. However, we must remember that all of our students are being shortchanged by our mainline schools. While we always hear of all the exceptional kids who are stars in terms of scholarships, SAT and ACT scores, etc., they are the exception and in most cases I have seen they have a large component of parent provided support in the form of parent teaching, tutors, attendance of charter or private schools, or home school episodes to address problem areas. The overall performance of our kids versus their best foreign competition is mediocre (literacy) to poor (science and math). Perhaps most interesting is that the change process is based on the same premises of the “wandering in the wilderness” learning process employed by our schools. It is like taking a trek in the wilderness without a guide or a map. You can wander a long time. If you have a guide who knows the territory (or a teacher who knows the subject) you can get where you want to go much more quickly and safely. The educators depend on the discovery process to slow any change effort to ineffectiveness.

Facts you need to know to counteract the false doctrine of the education Fiefdom
• We don’t need to figure out what works or spend time on committees, hiring education expert consultants or long winded harangues at board meetings. It is well known what needs to be done. We must demand that the changes be implemented immediately.
• Education research is of poor quality. It is often slanted to reach the desired conclusion or poorly done from a statistical rigor point of view. Also, the researchers are careful to avoid telling comparisons between the status quo activities and those that are much better at teaching kids.
• The current education system was designed to create that population of worker bees good at taking direction in the industrial big box settings. It was also designed to create an easily convinced, credulous populace subject to “expert” top-down control.
• You cannot work with educators to bring about improvement. You must TELL them what they must do if they want to continue working in education. No other approach has worked or will work. If you aren’t prepared to go to war to get better education for our kids then you need to accept the poor performance and/or take responsibility for teaching your kids yourself.
• The current system is not preparing our kids to compete for high paying knowledge work jobs of the future. How many burger flippers do we need?
• Politicians (local school board, state legislators, national legislators) are all overly prone to cater to the education power groups because they are more effective than the heterogeneous public who only become unified when something big motivates them. Perhaps the most powerful of these power groups is the teachers union which can give large campaign contributions to sway targeted elections and can marshal their members to walk the areas to convince voters who to vote for their candidate with very slanted messages designed to protect their selfish agenda.
• The current content free approach is harmful to all kids but is far more harmful to the gap kids. They typically don‘t have the support system that their peers do to somewhat attenuate the impact of the poor current approach.

I have some questions for you. Is educating our kids to be competitive in the global economy worthwhile or will the tooth fairy make sure everything works out ok for them? Do you really think that anything will change under the current system unless the public revolts and wrests control from the education experts who aren’t? If you are objective you realize that we are on a long trek toward the future destroying cliff. Is the Thelma and Louise approach a good choice because that is certainly where we are headed. It is tragic that we spend the most per student of all the countries in the world with the exception of a couple of small countries and yet our performance is poor. You must know in your gut that something is drastically wrong with this picture.

Patton said that fixed fortifications were a monument to the stupidity of man. The current Fiefdom defenses are nothing if not fixed defenses. Sadly, we have no Patton type leaders to bypass the education fixed fortifications and rescue the kids, especially the gap kids from the poor performance of our schools. RFK was right, this is a stain on our national honor.

For those who haven’t already realized it the SOSDD, stands for Same Old “Stuff” Different Day which acknowledges that the education performance has been mired in a huge unproductive rut. It doesn’t matter what day it is, nothing ever changes.

Key Markers to Organizational Health

Just as an explorer needs markers to find their way, so do organizations. If you have studied the Lewis and Clark expedition you will know that Clark was able to chart their course extremely accurately considering the instruments he had to work with. I want to share some markers with respect to organizations and how you can “translate” them into a better understanding of what they indicate about the organization.

We can’t hire you because you are overqualified—this statement has become ubiquitous in many organizations and industry groups. So what does this really mean? Possibilities include;
• We know that we are a “status quo” organization and you would become quickly bored or frustrated by the lack of organizational and personal growth potential.
• People want to be part of a winning team and this team is not one.
• An organization that espouses this “you are overqualified” statement is in a slow (or fast) decline in performance and competitiveness.
• If you are a high powered applicant, be thankful when they tell you that you are overqualified. That allows you to conclude that their leadership is weak and you wouldn’t want to work there anyway.

If only we could eliminate the unfair competition or lack of support from . . . –this tells you that they are more interested in confessing that their poor performance is someone else’s fault than in facing the reality of their own performance problems. You can only use that argument with a straight face after you are sure you have perfected your own performance to its fullest and have no room to improve without removing the impediment you want to complain about.

We’ve been in business for decades and see no need to change our process now—this is a sure indication that this organization is doomed. There is only one constant in the world and that is change. You either face it taking it as an opportunity or you are victimized by it.

We are the best so now we can relax—oops! - This reminds me of a story about Mack Trucks back in the first half of the twentieth century. They had designed a product line that was the current state of the art and considerably ahead of that of any competitor. They were so confident that they shut down their design function because they thought no one would ever be able to do better than they had done. They were wrong and squandered their lead causing much pain as they tried to restart development, something they should have kept all along.

We have a nice work environment because we do not allow arguments or disagreements—oh, my goodness, this is political correctness run amok. Bossidy and Charan in their best selling management book Execution, the discipline of getting things done discuss the need for “robust dialog” if you aspire to creating a “performance” organization. What they are saying is that you must allow and encourage people to disagree vigorously so that the “truth” needed for good decisions, is exposed. Organizations that suppress the truth through political correctness and its brother Group Think are doomed to poor performance because their “be nice” ethic suppresses the lifeblood (truth) they need to succeed.

As a successful manager of high performing teams I can say that the first one; we can’t hire you because you are overqualified is the most ridiculous to me. When I had an opening I looked for the best qualified person I could find, even someone who could compete with me and perhaps beat me out. You need strong people to perform well and hiring the best gives you the opportunity to grow the organization quickly to the point where even the “overqualified” need to grow with it. A good definition of the duty of a leader is, “A leader is responsible to provide a work climate in which everyone has a chance to grow and mature as individuals, as members of a group by satisfying their own needs, while working for the success of the organization.”

Too, the truth suppression of political correctness and Group Think guarantee an organization will not be able to perform well. Kill them both; RIP. Is the goal to be nice or to perform the mission at an excellent level? You can’t have both all of the time. You can be nice much of the time but there are times when you can’t if you want to perform. I remember stories of Jimmy David the defensive back for the Detroit Lions championship teams of the 1950s. His teammates told of hating him in practice because he was so hardnosed in his tackling. But they also said they loved him in the games when he made great plays regularly. If you don’t practice with passion you can’t perform with passion.

Keep these markers in mind when assessing an organization to work for, invest in or buy a product or service from.

Paul Richardson

Execution—The Discipline of Getting Things Done

Larry Bossidy and Raum Charan wrote a best selling management book a few years ago with the above title. It was recommended to me by a superintendent friend of mine. I read it and found most of it to be very standard management fare. That is, the standard disciplines of Plan, Organize, Lead (Motivate) and Control. The need to employ feedback based on objective data relating the results obtained to the results desired.

I was impressed however by one section of the book realizing that it applied really well to the greatest impediment to improving our education performance. This was the assertion that if you wanted to create a “performance organization” you needed to create an environment that valued and indeed expected what the authors called “robust dialogue.” In education there is no robust dialogue worth mentioning. Political correctness and Group Think work exceedingly well to suppress the truth and also the synergy that truly robust dialogue could facilitate. Due to this “soft” environment opportunities to do better are regularly missed. This sort of environment is one where people wear their “feelings on their sleeves” and develop no mental toughness that an environment valuing intellectual honesty (being able to look objectively at our own shortcomings and resolve to do better) and robust dialogue.

If you honestly think about it you know that people often know the truth but have learned to suppress it and “be nice.” This creates far more stress than a good argument in the name of better understanding of different attitudes about problems. Synergy by definition requires constructive interaction in a group setting. This is especially true in continuous quality improvement (CQI) activities. The robust dialog that is required to make CQI really work is vital to the process. Since there is no robust dialogue in education worth noting, CQI cannot work. Yet, huge amounts of money are spent on “going through the motions” CQI programs so that school organizations can claim they are using CQI to improve their performance. Another area impacted by the be-nice ethic is the lack of constructive criticism in performance reviews. You may say, “What’s the use, with tenure it makes no difference.” But people will react to scrupulously objective feedback especially if it relates to activities that support the organization’s mission.

While examples of truth suppression are ubiquitous in education one of the worst examples is the case of the school board member who was told on visiting a high school in a large district that 150 9th graders were reading between the 1st and 6th grade levels. That amounted to about a third of the 9th grade class in that school. He expressed his concern about it at the next board meeting. There was no response from any of the administrators or other board members. The board president deftly moved on to the next agenda item. There was a response however, the next day the “assistant superintendent of instruction” sent an email to the entire staff and board with The Blueberry Story attached. This is a “story” whose moral is basically that improvement is required but until society and parents send better students to school the educators can’t do anything. The other action taken was to tell the principal who told the board member the truth that their contract would not be renewed (hence they were fired). So the message to the entire organization was that poor performance was OK but telling the truth was a hanging offense.

Oh, when I discussed the book with the superintendent who recommended it I highlighted the robust dialogue and intellectual honesty section. The superintendent said that there was nothing in the book on that topic. I had to fax copies of those pages as proof to make the point. This experience proved to me once again that educators have such a strong filter preventing any information that conflicts with their education school and on the job training that new beneficial insights and knowledge are not allowed into their consciousness. Thus, until education leaders are retrained by outsiders who are strong enough to break through that filter the massive improvement so desperately needed cannot happen.

What Would George Do?

We have a huge and shameful problem in education. The achievement gap between “advantaged” students and “disadvantaged” students is unacceptable. Closing this gap has been allocated first place among education goals for decades. Yet, despite billions being thrown at the problem it has only gotten worse.

As an example the Colorado Closing the Achievement Gap Commission Final Report of 11/2005 provides some important information on both the problem and the continuing misguided approaches to solving the problem. Since there is amazing consistency in education approaches and attitudes across the nation this is valid everywhere to a first order approximation.

"That a nation of unparalleled wealth, matchless military strength, undreamed of progress in science and medicine and home to history’s greatest democracy can tolerate this failure is shocking. Yes, individual schools sometimes defy the odds, but whole systems almost never do. Why? What are the reasons for this failure? It has to do with both will and skill and the reasons illuminate the fact that minority and poor youth are often seen as not worthy of our finest efforts. This needs to be said. The conditions of educational desolation that this Commission decries are to be largely found on streets that the movers and shakers of our society rarely walk; and in schools where their children cannot be found. However, perhaps the greater shame is that such conditions are also found in the schools that serve our society’s privileged children. Pouring billions of dollars into a search for solutions has eased the conscience of the fortunate but has not succeeded in saving those children who continue to be victimized by our abject failures.

Not surprisingly, we have found a fairly benign phrase to describe this catastrophe: “the achievement gap.” It is more comfortable than another phrase: 'the soft bigotry of low expectations.'”

The commission goes on to name its strategy for finally fixing the problem.

Data & Assessment
Closing the gap begins by understanding data and assessment. Colorado must develop a comprehensive, centralized, user-friendly and easily accessible data and assessment system that identifies gaps and deficiencies at the student, school and district level. This data and assessment system should gather available data and centralize it in a consistent and understandable format that can be applied with best practices to address gaps and deficiencies by informing instruction by classroom teachers. Data should be accessible to parents and the community to further understanding of achievement gaps. Data from the higher education system should be linked with K-12 to promote partnerships between the two systems as well as informing public policy makers, parents, teachers and the community at large about the efficacy of strategies that have been implemented to close the gap.
High Expectations
The achievement gap cannot be addressed without a commitment to high expectations. From the business community, students, parents, teachers, administrators and board members at the local level to the Department of Education, State Board of Education, General Assembly and Governor’s Office at the state level, must develop high expectations of success for all students and accept no excuses. The foundation of high expectations is by establishing and maintaining academic rigor in all grade levels from kindergarten through higher education and across school district boundaries. Cultural sensitivity and the impacts of cultural biases on expectations must also be addressed.
Higher Education
Higher Education is an essential participant in eliminating the gap. We must develop and infuse a strong connection between higher education and K-12 by emphasizing shared responsibilities, success indicators, rigorous and connected curriculum and a systemic, proactive support systems that encourages and enables all students to access and succeed in college. This would consist of establishing a rigorous and aligned P-16 curriculum that is the default for all students that begins with the destination in mind, preparing students for life and continuing education. P-16 must provide continuous support that enables all students (especially under-represented groups) to access and succeed in college by providing early counseling, “can-do” values and clear financial options. We must ensure that the P-16 system is seamless and includes elementary and middle schools as part of the solution. The committee recommends that access and affordability to higher education by under-represented groups be ensured.
Administrator/Teacher Qualifications and Professional-Development
The classroom teacher and the school administrator are the front line in ending the gap. We must develop administrator and teacher cultural competencies and sensitivity so that they can effectively embrace high expectations for all students. We must embed the same cultural competencies in local and state leadership. The state should require that administrator and teacher preparation programs are data-driven. As a state we should increase the number of minority teachers and administrators. Teachers should be involved in the choice of professional development opportunities. We must establish incentives that would place the most capable administrators and teachers to work in the most challenged and impacted schools.
Parent & Community Involvement
Schools alone cannot close the achievement gap without the involvement of parents and the broader community. We must build connections with parents, guardians, families, business and non-traditional leaders that will require more culturally sensitive behavior. We must make certain that we understand the strengths as well as the weaknesses of individual students and understand the circumstances that may affect their ability to learn. We must also effectively articulate why parents, guardians, families, business and non-traditional leaders are so important to creating an environment of high expectations.
Best Practices
Embracing and implementing strategies based upon research-based best practices at the classroom; school, district and state levels are the only means of effectively addressing the gap. We must collect, share and fund strategies that have demonstrated success in addressing the gap. This will involve not only the school districts, Colorado Department of Education and the State Board of Education, but must include the Colorado Education Association, Colorado Association of School Executives, Colorado Association of School Boards, the General Assembly and the Governor’s Office. The P-16 systems must reward best practices by linking them to funding and incentives.
Leadership
Leadership by superintendents at a district level, principals and teachers at the school level and other staff and administrators is critical to the effort to establish and maintain high expectations. Administrators and instructors have to both identify the problems and have good relationships with other faculty to implement solutions. Education specialists point to the importance of principal leadership that is passionate and competent in fulfilling the district mission and reaching achievement goals. Teachers also have opportunities to demonstrate leadership in the classroom on a daily basis. Achievement gap reduction efforts by both the Cherry Creek and Fountain/Fort Carson school districts included leadership success. Fountain/Fort Carson closed gaps in test scores, graduation rates and attendance rates by raising expectations for administrators. This effort entailed “principal academies” that include training, assessment and monitoring of principals. The district also emphasized an instructional leadership role of principals, in addition to their management role. Cherry Creek’s North Area achievement program required the addition of an executive director to ensure success.

How to summarize the above prescription. It is doomed from the beginning because it does not recognize that the current content-free approach does not work, especially for the “gap” kids. What does work for “ALL” kids is the content-rich approach used by our international competitors. We used that approach in the American Common School days but that was before Dewey and his henchmen took over education and began the damaging “dumbing down” process. THUS, THIS “DOING THE WRONG THING BETTER” APPROACH IS NOT GOING TO WORK BUT WILL CONTINUE TO ENRICH THE HUGE ARMY SUPPORTING THE STATUS QUO.

Since there is such a leadership vacuum in education, at least with the intestinal fortitude to call a spade a spade and force the system to face its reality, I wondered what George would do? That is, George Patton. Patton was famous for getting results. He was not famous for political correctness or being nice in the face of a challenge. I looked up some of his quotes to give a feel for what he might do to address this problem that our weak educators have been unable or unwilling to fix.

“If everybody is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking.” This is particularly fitting to the education situation. The whole education fiefdom is very homogeneous in its core beliefs and approaches. This is reinforced by a strong wall and moat that keeps out corrupting outsider ideas and information. Hence, the kids continue to get bottom priority and the adults snooze in status quo, won’t work mode.

“May God have mercy upon my enemies, because I won't.” If our leaders both political and across all areas in and out of education really cared about our kids, especially the very abysmally served poor and minority (Gap) kids they would not continue using the “be nice” approach that allows the status quo to be perpetuated.

“Moral courage is the most valuable and usually the most absent characteristic in men.” I would call this integrity, that is, a commitment to doing the right thing not the expedient or easy thing. There is very little integrity in education circles. This is coped with by fiefdom citizens with a delusional approach that embraces the “we confess it is their fault” attitude. It couldn’t be our fault, it must be the fault of the parents, the society, the voters who don’t approve our every request for more money to improve things.

“No good decision was ever made in a swivel chair.” William Oncken in his Performance Standards training would make the point, “Control—‘Only he who is where it is happening can control what is happening while it is happening.’ This is called “During-the-Fact” control and without it everything is OUT OF CONTROL.” The point is that sitting in your office does not work; you have to be out on the front lines to lead an organization to success.

“Say what you mean and mean what you say.” This problem is legion in education. Every year the administration gets their goals approved by the school board. Every year they fail to fulfill the goal achievement especially if it is any other than preserving the status quo. What is the consequence of failing to meet the goals they signed up for a year earlier? Nothing, in fact the board often hands out bonuses for good performance. This does not reinforce the need to perform, it reinforces sloth.

“Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.” This is particularly appropriate to the education fiefdom. Top down management is ubiquitous. Just do as you are told, initiative will be punished. This starts with the legislators who always specify process very tightly and the autocratic cascade continues down to all levels. Legislators should specify desired results with rewards for meeting them and penalties for not meeting them. But instead we continue along with the “one size fits all” prescriptions that ignore any uniqueness across school districts.

“Many soldiers are led to faulty ideas of war by knowing too much about too little.” Here is another massive problem in education. The vast majority of educators are trained by our education schools. This training inculcates the process catechism that was installed by Dewey et al in the early twentieth century. Subject knowledge is not taught with any rigor at all. Thus, our educators know too much about too little. E.D. Hirsch describes the problem in The Knowledge Deficit. “[P]rinciples that constitute a kind of theology that is drilled into prospective teachers like a catechism.

Conclusion

Our kids would be much better off if a “Patton” type approach would be used in education than they are with the “take care of the adults who work here, who cares about the kids” approach currently in use.

Yes, most educators I have talked to are well meaning but they are also ineffective in serving their mission. They need our help to face reality. They are doing an unacceptable job and we must not tolerate it because it harms kids.

Team USA

The Most Important Race—We’re Losing

Imagine that many of the world’s developed and emerging nations agreed to compete in a yearlong auto race. The race will cover all sorts of terrain and climates in widely separated global venues. Our team would be selected by political leaders in the nation’s capital from people nominated by every state. Imagine that Team USA would be the first team to settle on an all purpose vehicle for the race.

All of the competitors but Team USA chose all purpose and reliable late-model SUVs for their vehicle based on the varying course conditions where normal over-the-road cars could not be as successful. Team USA chose a modified version of the Ford Model T. While their choice was scorned by their competition, Team USA said that they were the real experts and they would win the race easily.

They decided on the Model T based on its reputation for being easy to work on and repair. They added a bunch of features which they deemed necessary for the race. These included an air-conditioned cockpit, a complete set of the latest instruments to measure every aspect of vehicle performance, a state of the art GPS system plus additional crew members to monitor the gauges and computer readouts. Team USA was very positive about having the best vehicle in the race and couldn’t wait for the competition to begin.

The race is to cover 25,000 miles over one year. Only the first 5 teams would be awarded prizes. At the end of the first week the leading teams were Finland, Singapore, China, India and Russia. Team USA was far back because their 50,000 pound modified Model T experienced 100 tire blowouts and the top speed on level ground was 10 miles an hour due to the immense weight dragging on the relatively tiny Ford engine.

Day after day Team USA fell further and further behind. They took to announcing progress against lower and lower targets to make their failing performance look better than it was. This was successful in fooling most of the people. The race ended when the first five teams had finished. Team USA was about 200 days behind the leaders based on their average speed to date.

The Point

The race story is an analog to the performance of American K-12 education versus our global competition. The modified Model T was chosen because it is a hundred year old design just as the progressive philosophy of our education system is a century old. While there have been lots of added changes in curricula; program names, advanced education degrees, best practices, response to intervention, etc. they all are consistent with the constructivist, discovery beliefs of the progressive ideology. As in the race story, the performance of the constructivist/discovery methods is such that the education of students is much slower and never reaches the robust levels of the competition that are using higher performance methods and curricula (faster, better performing cars).
Also, as in the race story, educators set lower and lower standards to make their performance look much better than it really is (short yardstick). Our schools are simply not close to being competitive with those of our most capable competitors. Their children, not ours, are being prepared to seize the best job opportunities of the future. This has massive import to our future standard of living and our very survival as a nation.

How long will we grant huge amounts of money to the failed education process? The waste in the current system is akin to the thousands of pounds of modifications the race team made to the basic model. Attaching fancy gadgets to a failed underlying “vehicle” or education philosophy is a fool's approach. Yet it is we who are fools to allow it to continue when it is wasting huge amounts of money AND harming our kids. It shouldn’t be hard to demand changes once we face reality. That is difficult because we feel foolish for not realizing the truth sooner. But the truth must be faced if our kids are to be saved from hobbled futures. Results don’t lie. The educators have proven they can’t improve no matter how much money we give them. They can’t be trusted with something so important as the futures of our kids. Clemenceau famously said, “War is too important to be left to the generals.” Similarly, “Education is too important to be left to politicians and professional educators.”

Sirens' Song; There be danger here Will Robinson

You probably remember the Sirens of Greek mythology. Homer’s Odyssey is one of the more famous versions of the tale, but there were many others. The basic kernel of the story was that the creatures (Homer said 2, but other sources vary from 2 to 5) would sing their song to lure mariners to shipwreck on the rocky shore of their island. Odysseus in Homer’s version knows the legend and has himself lashed to the mast tightly and tells his crew to plug their ears with beeswax and not to free his bonds no matter how much he demands or pleads for them to do so. As they travel within range of the songs Odysseus demands and pleads for them to release him from his bonds and is not at peace until they pass far enough away to be out of earshot of the Sirens’ songs. Because the myths said that the Sirens would die if anyone escaped their trap, the Sirens were no more.

In education the Sirens’ part is played by the schools of education. There are a very few exceptions but their graduates do not make a dent in the message carried in the Sirens’ songs of “process is all that matters, learning is natural it doesn’t need to be taught, just make the kids feel good about themselves and that is enough.” This romantic view of learning is de rigueur in our society because the vast majority of educators have been trained in education schools which were designed in the 1930s to teach the Progressive principles of education. This anti-content approach results in teachers (especially elementary level) who don’t understand the subject matter well at all. This is in direct contrast to the philosophy of nations where their children are getting a much better education than ours as their achievement results prove year after year and decade after decade.

So let’s consider a couple of examples:

• Music education—this field has escaped the “they will learn it on their own naturally” approach. Why? Because you can’t teach students to play a school band concert in front of the parents each year without them understanding the notes, how to play them and so forth. And the teachers have to know music reasonably well or their students would give an embarrassing performance that would surely leave the school and its music program subject to severe criticism. The romantic approach is akin to that of Professor Hill in The Music Man. Oh, it worked for him because it made a nice story but his “think” system doesn’t work in the real world no matter how strong the wishes that it would or should.

• Sports—this is another area where physical education teachers and coaches know the skills required in the sports and how to teach them to the kids. That dreaded “drill and kill” so criticized in “normal, mainstream” subjects, you know the most important stuff, works and is used widely by sports coaches. Why are they granted a “waiver” from the Progressive party line? Dewey likened the education system that really works as fascist because it was structured to really teach subject knowledge. You could ask yourself why the Progressives didn’t want kids to learn to their potential. Perhaps because if they were well educated they would see through the Progressives’ desire to have government experts make the important decisions for us.

In sports as in music the obvious proof of whether the students learned the skills and knowledge required to really perform is in the games with their competitors and the public music performances. The question for us then is how much longer will we see our students shipwrecked on the future-reducing rocks because their educators couldn’t resist the Siren Song of the technically wrong and “abysmal failure to work” education school training.

Could You Pass?

Following is the British Columbia high school exit exam: literary section. There is an equally rigorous section for history. This information is taken from the Common Core report, Why We’re Behind, What Top Nations Teach Their Students That We Don’t (2009).
A real example helps to illuminate the difference between our educational approach and that of the competitor nations whose students consistently score better, much better, than ours on international tests. This provides more information on the topic started in A Sick Patient and Human Nature.
Please take a look at the exam and ponder the question, “Can we continue to ignore our dumbed down approach in K-12 education?”
 
British Columbia High School Exit Exam

Literary Selections

1. In Beowulf, which Anglo-Saxon value is represented by Herot?
A. power
B. heroism
C. boasting
D. community

2. In “The Prologue” to The Canterbury Tales, how is the Parson described?
A. “a very festive fellow”
B. “a fat and personable priest”
C. “rich in holy thought and work”
D. “an easy man in penance-giving”

3. In Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 (“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun”), why does the speaker state that his mistress “treads on the ground”?
A. She is a sensible woman.
B. She is beautiful and attainable.
C. He is praising her as a real woman.
D. He is disappointed by her plainness.

4. Which quotation contains personification?
A. “Noli me tangere, for Caesar’s I am”
B. “No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move”
C. “Nor what the potent Victor in his rage / Can else inflict”
D. “and wanton fields / To wayward Winter reckoning yields”

5. In “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” on what does “dull sublunary" love depend?
A. spiritual union
B. physical presence
C. common attitudes
D. shared experience

6. In “On His Blindness,” which metaphor does Milton use to represent his literary powers?
A. a talent
B. a yoke
C. a kingly state
D. the dark world

7. In The Rape of the Lock, when Pope writes “So ladies in romance assist their knight, / Present the spear, and arm him for the fight,” what has just happened?
A. Belinda has just pulled out a “deadly bodkin.”
B. Chloe and Sir Plume have just confronted each other.
C. Clarissa has just offered a “two-edged weapon” to the Baron.
D. The Baron’s queen of spades defeats Belinda’s king of clubs.

8. Which characteristic of “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” can be seen as Romantic?
A. It celebrates the supernatural.
B. It is written in iambic pentameter.
C. It emphasizes reason over emotion.
D. It deals with the lives of common people.

9. “The guests are met, the feast is set”
Which literary technique is used in the above quotation?
A. aside
B. caesura
C. apostrophe
D. cacophony

10. In “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” how do the sailors feel when the albatross first appears?
A. joyful
B. fearful
C. enraged
D. indifferent

11. According to the speaker in “Apostrophe to the Ocean,” with what attitude does the ocean
treat humanity?
A. anger
B. respect
C. disdain
D. generosity

12. In Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnet 43 (“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways”), what does the speaker reveal about herself?
A. her desire to be loved
B. her love for her beloved
C. her love for her dying father
D. her need to be with her beloved

13. “And this gray spirit yearning in desire To follow knowledge like a sinking star” In “Ulysses,” to whom does “this gray spirit” refer?
A. Achilles
B. Ulysses
C. Tennyson
D. Telemachus

14. What does Arnold lament in “Dover Beach”?
A. the loss of religious faith
B. the loss of romantic love
C. the loss of military strength
D. the loss of respect for nature

15. In “The Hollow Men,” how does the speaker suggest that the world will end?
A. violently
B. gloriously
C. ominously
D. anticlimactically

16. In “Disembarking at Quebec,” which article suggests the speaker’s alienation from her surroundings?
A. her pink shawl
B. her fine bonnet
C. her coral brooch
D. her red stockings

Recognition of Authors and Titles

INSTRUCTIONS: Select the author of the quotation or the title of the selection from which the quotation is taken.

17. “For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings That then I scorn to change my state with kings”
A. Wyatt
B. Donne
C. Chaucer
D. Shakespeare

18. “And through the drifts the snowy clifts Did send a dismal sheen:
Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken —The ice was all between”
A. “Ulysses”
B. “The Hollow Men”
C. “Disembarking at Quebec”
D. “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

19. “Dim, through the misty green panes and thick green light, As under a green sea, I saw him drowning”
A. “Dover Beach”
B. “Ode to the West Wind”
C. “Dulce et Decorum Est”
D. “Apostrophe to the Ocean”

20. “So be it when I shall grow old, Or let me die!”
A. Keats
B. Shelley
C. Browning
D. Wordsworth

21. “Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men”
A. Pope
B. Donne
C. Milton
D. Raleigh

22. “The land’s sharp features seemed to be
The Century’s corpse outleant”
A. “The Hollow Men”
B. “The Darkling Thrush”
C. “The Second Coming”
D. “Because I Could Not Stop for Death”

23. “He wore a fustian tunic stained and dark
With smudges where his armor had left mark”
A. Beowulf
B. The Rape of the Lock
C. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
D. “The Prologue” to The Canterbury Tales

PART C: SHAKESPEAREAN DRAMA

1 written-response question

Value: 20% Suggested Time: 25 minutes

INSTRUCTIONS: Choose one of the three passages on pages 14 to 17 in the Examination Booklet.

With specific reference to the drama, respond to one of the following statements in at least 200 words in paragraph form. Write your answer in ink in the Response Booklet. Place a checkmark in Instruction 4 on the front cover of the Response Booklet.

Hamlet (See passage on page 14.)

2. Show the significance of this exchange between Hamlet and Gertrude.
Refer both to this passage and to elsewhere in the play.

OR

The Tempest (See passage on page 15.)

3. With reference both to this passage and to elsewhere in the play, show that this passage contributes to theme.

OR

King Lear (See passage on page 17.)

4. Discuss the parallels between the father–child relationship found both in these passages and elsewhere in the play.

2. Hamlet (1600 –1601)
Hamlet: Now, Mother, what’s the matter?
Queen: Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended.
Hamlet: Mother, you have my father much offended.
Queen: Come, come, you answer with an idle tongue.
Hamlet: Go, go, you question with a wicked tongue.
Queen: Why, how now, Hamlet?
Hamlet: What’s the matter now?
Queen: Have you forgot me?
Hamlet: No, by the rood,1 not so!
You are the Queen, your husband’s brother’s wife,
And, would it were not so, you are my mother.
Queen: Nay, then I’ll set those to you that can speak.
Hamlet: Come, come, and sit you down. You shall not budge.
You go not till I set you up a glass2
Where you may see the inmost part of you!
1 rood: cross
2 glass: mirror

OR

3. The Tempest (1611)
Gonzalo: I have inly wept,
Or should have spoke ere this. Look down, you gods,
And on this couple drop a blessèd crown!
For it is you that have chalked forth the way
Which brought us hither.
Alonso: I say amen, Gonzalo.
Gonzalo: Was Milan thrust from Milan that his issue
Should become kings of Naples? O, rejoice
Beyond a common joy, and set it down
With gold on lasting pillars. In one voyage
Did Claribel her husband find at Tunis,
And Ferdinand her brother found a wife
Where he himself was lost; Prospero his dukedom
In a poor isle; and all of us ourselves
When no man was his own.
Alonso: [To Ferdinand and Miranda] Give me your hands.
Let grief and sorrow still embrace his heart
That doth not wish you joy.
Gonzalo: Be it so! Amen!

OR

4. King Lear (1603)
In her response to Lear’s question as to how much she loves him,
Cordelia answers truthfully.
Lear: But goes thy heart with this?
Cordelia: Ay, my good lord.
Lear: So young, and so untender?
Cordelia: So young, my lord, and true.
Lear: Let it be so, thy truth then be thy dower!
For, by the sacred radiance of the sun,
The mysteries of Hecate and the night,
By all the operation of the orbs
From whom we do exist and cease to be,
Here I disclaim all my paternal care,
Propinquity and property of blood,
And as a stranger to my heart and me
Hold thee from this for ever. The barbarous Scythian,
Or he that makes his generation messes
To gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom
Be as well neighbored, pitied, and relieved,
As thou my sometime daughter.

AND

4. King Lear (1603)
Gloucester has just read a letter forged by Edmund.
Gloucester: You know the character to be your brother’s?
Edmund: If the matter were good, my lord, I durst
swear it were his; but in respect of that, I would
fain think it were not.
Gloucester: It is his.
Edmund: It is his hand, my lord; but I hope his heart is
not in the contents.
Gloucester: Has he never before sounded you in this
business?
Edmund: Never, my lord. But I have heard him
oft maintain it to be fit that, sons at perfect age,
and fathers declined, the father should be as ward
to the son, and the son manage his revenue.
Gloucester: O villain, villain! His very opinion in the
letter. Abhorred villain, unnatural, detested,
brutish villain; worse than brutish! Go, sirrah, seek
him. I’ll apprehend him. Abominable villain!
Where is he?

1 written-response question

Value: 30% Suggested Time: 40 minutes

INSTRUCTIONS: Choose one of the following topics. Write a multi-paragraph essay (at least three paragraphs) of approximately 400 words. Develop a concise, focused answer to show your knowledge and understanding of the topic. Include specific references to the works you discuss. You may not need all the space provided for your answer. You must refer to at least one work from the Specified Readings List (see page 20 in the Examination Booklet). The only translated works you may use are those from Anglo-Saxon and Medieval English. Write your answer in ink in the Response Booklet. Place a checkmark 􀀁in Instruction 4 on the front cover of the Response Booklet.

Topic 5 The presence or absence of loyalty is often a theme in literature.
Support this statement with reference to at least three literary works.

OR

Topic 6 A journey of some kind is important to many works of literature.
Support this statement with reference to at least three literary works.

OR

Topic 7 The meaning of a literary work may be enhanced by its reference to another work of art or literature. Support this statement with reference to at least three literary works.

Note: On the following page is the reading list from which students must select one work to reference.

Specified Readings List

Anglo-Saxon and Medieval
• from Beowulf
• Geoffrey Chaucer, from The Canterbury Tales, “The Prologue”
• “Bonny Barbara Allan”
• from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Renaissance and 17th Century
• Sir Thomas Wyatt, “Whoso List to Hunt”
• Christopher Marlowe, “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”
• Sir Walter Raleigh, “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd”
• William Shakespeare,
Sonnet 29 (“When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes”)
Sonnet 116 (“Let me not to the marriage of true minds”)
Sonnet 130 (“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun”)
Hamlet, King Lear or The Tempest
• John Donne,
“A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”;
“Death, Be Not Proud”
• Robert Herrick, “To the Virgins”
• John Milton, “On His Blindness”; from Paradise Lost
• from The Diary of Samuel Pepys

18th Century and Romantic
• Lady Mary Chudleigh, “To the Ladies”
• Alexander Pope, from The Rape of the Lock
• Jonathan Swift, “A Modest Proposal”
• Robert Burns, “To a Mouse”
• William Blake, “The Tiger”; “The Lamb”
• Thomas Gray, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”
• William Wordsworth, “My Heart Leaps Up”; “The World Is
Too Much with Us”
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
• George Gordon, Lord Byron, “Apostrophe to the Ocean”
• Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ode to the West Wind”
• John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale”; “When I Have Fears That I May
Cease to Be”

Victorian and 20th Century
• Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Ulysses”
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnet 43
(“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways”)
• Robert Browning,
“My Last Duchess”
• Emily Brontë, “Song”
• Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach”
• Thomas Hardy, “The Darkling Thrush”
• Emily Dickinson, “Because I Could Not Stop for Death”
• Wilfred Owen, “Dulce et Decorum Est ”
• William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”
• T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”
• Dylan Thomas, “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night”
• Stevie Smith, “Pretty”
• Margaret Atwood, “Disembarking at Quebec”