A Sick Patient and Human Nature

How many of us react with positive energy to face problems with an obvious solution if it requires changes of long standing habits of our foundational lifestyle. Too few, whether it is to lose weight or quit smoking because the doctor tells us we are risking a significant reduction in our lifespan as examples.

Perhaps this is why it is so difficult to bring about positive changes in how we educate our kids. We have known for many decades that we are on the wrong course. When Russia launched Sputnik there was a knee-jerk raising of standards but in only a few years we went back to the old “easy does it, higher standards are hard work” attitudes. Then in the mid-sixties we became concerned with plummeting SAT scores which took a step-function down at that time and have not recovered after decades of throwing money and words at the problem. Robert Kennedy said over a third of a century ago that the achievement gap was a stain our nation’s honor. The 1983 “A Nation at Risk” report decried the rising tide of mediocrity in our education system. There is a whole industry in place to highlight the problems of our education system. Lots of people even read their reports but positive action to break the disastrously bad habits of a system built on a faulty foundation of false underlying beliefs is not taken. The attitude seems to be, “who cares about the future, changing our beliefs is just too hard. The kids can change it if they want to when they take over.”

Have all of these warnings resulted in the patient taking the actions required to change our education system for the better? NO!! Big, expensive and misdirected efforts have wasted decades to no benefit for our kids or our competitiveness as a nation. Because of that our economic competitive situation has been weakened to the point where it will take a herculean effort to restore the margin of safety we have thrown away in our high activity, no benefit response to the challenges of the last five-plus decades.

For this report I will use two reports found on the Common Core website. The first is Why We’re Behind, What Top Nations Teach Their Students That We Don’t, the second is, Still at Risk, What Students Don’t Know, Even Now. First some direct quotes to provide background.

Why We’re Behind—Nations; Finland, Hong Kong, S. Korea, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, Australia, Netherlands, Switzerland

• Each of the nations that consistently outranks the United States on the PISA exam provides their students with a comprehensive, content-rich education in the liberal arts and sciences.
• We must join our desire to compete with other nations with a willingness to learn from them.
• While American students are spending endless hours preparing to take tests of their basic reading and math skills, their peers in high-performing nations are reading poetry and novels, conducting experiments in chemistry and physics, making music, and studying important historical issues. We are the only leading industrialized nation that considers the mastery of basic skills to be the goal of K-12 education. [emphasis added]
• We at Common Core believe that national standards will not improve education unless they acknowledge that content matters.
• . . .[T]he amount of time actually devoted to reading instruction in U.S. elementary schools is more than four times that devoted to science and social studies.
• Our students lagged behind their peers in top-scoring Finland by roughly two full grade levels in both [math and science].
• These very diverse nations ensure that their students receive a deep education in a broad range of subjects. Why is this important? Because America is on the opposite track. [emphasis added]
• High-performing countries have very specific content standards in a wide range of liberal arts subjects.
• . . . [T]he countries reviewed here also appear to share a belief that requiring students to master basic literacy and math skill is not sufficient for defining a well-rounded curriculum.
• The most recent comprehensive review of state standards from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute (2006) finds that states “still produce vague platitudes instead of clear expectations. Knowledge is still subordinated to skills.” [emphasis added]

Still at Risk

This report offers a good definition of the primary mission of public schools. “The first mission of public schooling in a democratic nation is to equip every young person for the responsibilities and privileges of citizenship.” How are we doing on that mission? Not well!

The basis for this report is a 1200 person survey of randomly selected 17-year olds. The questions concentrated on history and literature knowledge of the respondents. Their assessment was:

It is easy to make light of such ignorance. In reality, however, a deep lack of knowledge is neither humorous nor trivial. What we know helps to determine how successful we are likely to be in life, and how many career paths we can choose from. It also affects our contribution as democratic citizens. Unfortunately, too many young Americans do not possess the kind of basic knowledge they need. When asked fundamental questions about U.S. history and culture, they score a D and exhibit stunning knowledge gaps:

• Nearly a quarter of those surveyed could not identify Adolf Hitler; 10 percent think he was a munitions manufacturer
• Fewer than half can place the Civil War in the correct half-century
• Only 45 percent can identify Oedipus
• A third do not know that the Bill of Rights guarantees the freedom of speech and religion
• 44 percent think that The Scarlet Letter was either about a witch trial or a piece of correspondence

Our education system is like a computer programmed with “how to” skills. The problem is that no one thinks it is important to upload the data (background knowledge) to process with that computer. Also, far too much time is wasted by the “discovery/constructivist” methods for writing each student’s interface software. This method results in agonizingly slow, simplistic, start-from-scratch approaches to each new problem while our competitors provide robust background information across a wide spectrum of subjects to provide important foundational context to any intellectual study. Thus, our graduates don’t have the background knowledge or the higher level thinking processes they need to be effective in the world against their foreign peers.

Our educators faced with high-stakes tests that concentrate most on reading and math have carved out ever larger parts of the total school day to have time for teaching to the test. They use ineffective “how to” approaches that are void of content knowledge. This creates students who at best can only regurgitate the examples they have studied in their classes.

Missing is the breadth and depth of knowledge (and practice in reading and literacy and grammar) that traditionally was provided by studying an increasingly challenging group of great writings by some of the best authors of our cultural background. Missing too, is the in-depth study of history which also provides the chance to practice literacy and thinking skills.

The same things are true of math and the related study of science. So much time is spent teaching to the test that the foundational facts and optimized over centuries computational algorithms are not taught with any rigor. The party line is that you don’t need to know how to compute anymore because we have calculators. That is as wrong-headed as it can be because, for example, those algorithms like long division provide the tool needed to divide polynomials in algebra. With the current dumbed down approach in elementary schools, students “hit the wall” in middle and high school math studies and most do not attain a competent basis of algebra and higher math limiting their future college and career choices.

We focus on methods of teaching reading and math that are much slower than the methods of our competitor nations (at least the ones teaching their kids much more than we teach ours) which are based on a direct instruction technique taught by subject-competent teachers who build the foundation over the grades. Our slower process is ironic considering that our competitor nations tend to have significantly more days in their school years as well.

Therefore, no amount of money can fix this problem until we are willing to throw out the current content-free approach and replace it with a content-rich curriculum. That is why in spite of wasting billions of dollars trying to improve our education performance it doesn’t happen because the foundational approaches we take are contrary to every other country that is successful in beating us.

Sadly, the method our competitors are using is exactly that used by our American Common School movement starting in the 19th century and replaced slowly by the progressive methods starting at the turn of the Twentieth century, first in the education schools and then in full implementation across the land by the mid 1960s. By then students graduating from high school had been taught by the acolytes of the new system for their whole school career.

The question is, “Can we break this unhealthy education habit which harms our kids and our nation, or do we react like most do when the doctor tells them to lose weight or quit smoking, etc to be able to live a higher quality and longer life?”