Veering off into the ditch and liking it fine

First, I recommend you go to www.booktv.org and search on E.D. Hirsch. That will bring you to the December 13, 2009 broadcast of his presentation speaking about his new book, The Making of Americans.

Hirsch’s thesis is a good one: That American education went off the rails almost 6 decades ago when the graduates of the education schools anti-curriculum (child-centered) movement began to teach. They had been brainwashed that skills would suffice and save the kids from being forced to memorize facts and drill to increase real knowledge. The big plus for the ed schools was that subject knowledge courses taught by them could be “watered down, everyone gets an A” affairs. The results of this detour to ridiculousness began “biting” into our education performance in a negative way in the late 60s as the victims of the new scientifically unsound approach began graduating from high school. These graduates had the full “benefit” of being subject to the depredations for their entire school career. Hirsch showed a slide of SAT verbal scores going back to the late sixties. Scores plummeted and have stayed at the lower level. He used the Sat because it has more history than the NAEP. However, he did show a NAEP slide back to its inception to show that the “achievement gap” has been constant or getting worse over that whole time.
Hirsch makes the point, a good one, that language skills are the “skill of skills and key to success in citizenship, learning, and earning. He cites research that says if you take language proficiency into account, the earnings gap between minorities and the poor disappears.

That emphasizes one key point. The gap kids are the ones harmed the most by the anti-curriculum approach. Hirsch points out that the common excuses the education school types (and hence everyone else in the education fiefdom; delusional, defensive, insular, inbred) are all bogus and intended to deflect attention away from the real culprits; content free curricula. He relates research he did that shows that the scores of white, middle class kids plummeted along with the rest. He used Iowa as an example where 98% are white middle class and yet the scores have gone down there as well. When core curricula are installed, the performance gaps between rich and poor students narrow. The bottom line is that the current educational methods yield the results favored by `progressive' and `liberal' educators, while their methods drive everyone down, particularly the poor. Hirsch says, “It is hard to conceive of a greater social evil.”

Other comments he makes in the video also ring true.
• On the Governor’s effort to establish a national curriculum standard: “a politically craven and content free approach.”
• Our schools need to teach the founding principles of the Enlightenment and the blessings of liberty, not an intellectual tyranny.
• The last 50+ years have been characterized by; technically wrong ideas, fragmented courses, watered down texts.
• Critical thinking skills are powerfully knowledge dependent, meaning that the current goal of teaching critical thinking skills in a content free environment is a waste of time.
• The “how to” approach has always failed and always must fail.

How did we get into this mess? We delegated the education of our kids to educators without building in a closed loop, quality control function. We assumed “wrongly” that the education experts with the great sounding education bachelors, masters and doctorate degrees were competent to do the job. No matter how much they argue, their results prove the fact that they don’t know much about the realities of what works in education. We have ignored the multitudinous research that concludes that the education schools are little more than diploma mills extracting largess from a failed education process. Is it the educators fault for getting away with huge salaries based on worthless degrees and the poor performance? Is it the educators’ fault that the achievement gap has gone unimproved for decades in spite of the billions thrown at the problem? Or is it our fault for being too unengaged to demand that the whole craven process be fixed or ditched. In its current form our education system is essentially a very expensive baby-sitting/childcare operation.

What do I mean by fixed? Lots of things are required, but as a start, require content rich curricula as Hirsch recommends, stop paying for advanced ed degrees, install merit pay for educators (pay for true performance, not seat time in an ed school weak program or getting a year older), make teachers pass subject competency tests before being awarded certification. Require subject competency tests be passed every other year for current teachers to maintain certification. Decouple all certifications for teachers and leaders from ed school training. Only this will incentivize the ed schools to abandon their wrong-headed ideas that don’t stand scientific muster.

If you have learned about the trench warfare of World War I, you know that millions of men “lived” in trenches in all sorts of foul conditions. They got diseases like “trench foot” that could cause such severe infection that the limb would have to be amputated. Yet, the troops would much rather stay in the foul trenches than face the machine guns, mines and barbed wire of the battlefield. For them the “norm” of the trench while a terrible place to be was in their minds superior and much less scary than the world outside the trench.

While you would be hard pressed to equate the current situation for the adults who work in education to trench warfare, it wouldn’t be too hard to relate the analogy to the kids (victims) who see their future prospects greatly damaged by the current system. They don’t have amputated limbs but amputated future prospects. There exists a universal reluctance among the adults working in education to face the reality of the harm they are doing to the kids with the anti-curriculum approach. While our education schools do a very poor job of educating teachers and administrators they are world-class at brainwashing their graduates to believe in harmful, unscientific clap-trap. When I have confronted ed school professors with the scientific evidence of their failure they say, “Well, if it isn’t true, it ought to be.” Some say, “That’s my job you’re talking about.” Neither response is ethical when kids are continuing to be harmed by their intransigence.

While most effort to reform the system has been aimed at convincing the educators to face the scientific truth and replace the current approach with one that works, it has been ineffective. It is easy to see why the current rut is comfortable to educators. Change is not something most people volunteer for. And in a world where the adults in education prioritize their own comfort ahead of the futures of the kids no change will be occurring from within. It can only happen if forced from outside the education fiefdom.

Am I saying that educators have nothing to fear if a knowledge curriculum is implemented. No I am not. You see, that would cause the educators’ lack of rigorous subject knowledge to be exposed to the light of day. This problem is especially large in the elementary grades. This would mean redirecting all teacher “professional” development away from more methods classes toward subject knowledge classes. Since the school districts have time and money for the professional development in their budgets it wouldn’t be a fiscal problem for them. The problem would be finding knowledgeable people to teach the subject knowledge courses. The education schools don’t have such people so they would have to be found elsewhere.

The only example of real reform taking place in America has been in Massachusetts (termed the Massachusetts Miracle). It was caused by political leadership willing to disappoint ed power groups who contributed to their campaigns. They imposed the change to content rich curricula on the educators. The kids in Massachusetts have benefited greatly. It should be obvious that working with educators in our school districts to improve things for the kids is a fool’s errand. They haven’t changed on their own and they “ain’t” about to start now.

I Admit It. I Was Wrong

I have been convinced for years that the use of the constructivist math curricula (often called NSF First Generation because the NSF sent many millions for their development to ed school professors and researchers) were the biggest problem in low math achievement results among American students. Recent events now cause me to demote the poor curricula problem, while still needing urgent attention, to second place. What has displaced curriculum as the most important problem to solve if we desire to stop spinning our wheels and really improve math achievement among American students?

First, let me describe some interactions with a large local school district over the math achievement problem. Studying the district’s achievement results for grades 3 through 10 on the state achievement tests, shows the scope of the problem. At third grade the majority of students score proficient or better. At tenth grade the majority of students score below proficient. This indicates that on average students progress less than a year in achievement for every year spent in school. In fact the 10th grade proficient or better percentage for 2009 testing for this district was in the low thirty percent range. This correlates well with the high college (both 2-year and 4-year) remediation rates which are in ranges from just under 22% to 52% across the district’s large high schools. The data show clearly that the students from this district are not being adequately prepared in math for the increasingly global competition for well-paying “knowledge jobs.”

Another concerned person and I met twice with the district’s central office staff in charge of curricula and math specialists tasked to support the math teaching process for elementary and middle/high schools. We reached an impasse when we stated that the curricula being used (Everyday Math being the prime example) were the cause of the problem and the central office folk said the curricula had no effect. We were amazed. Since then I have met a couple of more times with central office staff and have been pushing the idea that the math subject knowledge of teachers (especially elementary level) needed to be improved through additional training for the teachers.
Soon after that the “math team” made a presentation to the board of education for the district. One slide they showed compared annual growth rates in achievement among the 30-plus elementary schools in the district versus 6 different curricula being used. Their study concluded that there was no statistically significant difference which supported the assertion of the people in our first meeting telling us that the curriculum made no difference in achievement. Thus, it became time to face that something besides curriculum was masking the deficiency of curricula which is so apparent to those who understand math and what foundational skills must be learned in elementary grades to prepare students for success in middle and high school.

After more research, I have concluded that the poor level of math knowledge among teachers is far and away the biggest contributor to poor math achievement of their students. In retrospect this should have been no surprise to me. I had read Rita Kramer’s “Ed School Follies” which emphasized the fact that education schools focus on process (pedagogy) training to the effective exclusion of teaching subject knowledge with even minimal rigor. David Klein’s “A Brief History of American K-12 Mathematics Education in the 20th Century” which also makes the point that education schools are infected with the progressive attitudes emphasizing process, socializing students to be “good (pliable) citizens” and de-emphasizing content. E.D. Hirsch Jr. in his “The Knowledge Deficit” again points out that the ed schools de-emphasize knowledge (content) in favor of constructivist (ex. Whole Language & Everyday Math) approaches which have proven to be scientifically ineffective, a fact he labels as of little importance among ed school faculties who won’t change even in the face of contrary research findings.

While I had read some summary representations of Liping Ma’s research on the subject knowledge of elementary math teachers, I did not read her book describing her research, “Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics,” until recently. She created a comparison study of teachers from China and from the U.S. The Chinese teachers had much less formal education than their American counterparts. The Chinese system for elementary teachers is to take those with a ninth grade education and give them 2 to 3 years of “normal school” training beyond ninth grade to qualify to become teachers. The U.S. participants in her study had from 4 to 6 years beyond their high school graduation.

Yet, in spite of that, U.S. students consistently score significantly lower on international math achievement comparisons. Ma used Deborah Ball’s TELT model (Teacher Education and Learning to Teach Study) to assess the math knowledge of each teacher in the study. She found;

• “Even expert [U.S.] teachers, experienced teachers who were mathematically confident, and teachers who actively participated in current mathematics teaching reform did not seem to have a thorough knowledge of the mathematics taught in elementary school.”

• Teachers’ subject knowledge correlated very well with their student’s achievement.

• Number of math courses taken in college did not.

What are we to conclude from this review of the research and the international achievement testing results?

• Seat time in education school classes does not result in adequate subject knowledge for the teachers.

• If we desire to improve math achievement, we must provide subject knowledge training for the existing cadre of teachers. This will need to take the place of the ubiquitous teaching of more pedagogy processes which are already overdone in education schools. Only by teaching subject knowledge can balance be brought to the teachers’ skill sets.

• Starting with elementary teachers is where the most leverage exists. This is because if children don’t get a rigorous foundation in elementary grades they are too far behind to catch up in the middle and high school class work.

“Cultures that are open and willing to change have a huge advantage in the world,” said Jerry Rao, the MphasiS CEO who heads the Indian high-tech trade association. “You have to have a strong culture, but also the openness to adapt and adopt from others. The cultural exclusivists have a real disadvantage. Exclusivity is a dangerous thing. Openness is critical because you start tending to respect people for their talent and abilities. You are dealing with people on the basis of talent—not race or ethnicity—and that changes, subtly over time your whole view of human beings, if you are in this talent-based and performance-based world rather than the background-based world.” From The World is Flat by Tom Friedman.

You may ask what does the quote above have to do with our education problems? Our education fiefdom is the most exclusive of exclusive cultures. It is a world in which “background is king.” That is, people are paid more for degrees, getting a year older and classes, not their performance level. A multitude of researchers have found in study after study that the education school degrees from undergraduate to doctoral level are essentially worthless for the task at hand. The above quote makes the point that the world is becoming more and more a meritocracy where we will be valued for the quality of our output not our backgrounds; degrees, good-old-boy connections, pedigrees, etc.

Our educators’ refusal to change from a background supreme culture to a results supreme culture will continue harming out kids until the public becomes more knowledgeable and motivated to require that it change. For now, it looks as if when that time of realization comes we will likely be in a lower and lower standard of living “death spiral” which will be very difficult to overcome because the root cause was ignored for decades. Reality can be a scary thing but facing it is foundational to transforming performance in a positive way.

Polishing a Rotten Apple

Did you ever think about how the “reforms” in bureaucratic organizations (education, governmental regulatory agencies, etc.) always start with the assumption that the status quo has value as a starting point? That is, the approach is to try to “polish a rotten apple.”

It is easy to understand why this is so. The bureaucrats are deathly afraid that if any needed changes were looked at objectively, their own jobs and “cast in concrete” habits would be in jeopardy. This is why, for example, the Colorado Closing the Achievement Gap Commission Final Report of 11/05 states that while billions of dollars have been spent attempting to close the gap that the current situation is worse than when Robert Kennedy, a third of a century ago, called the gap a stain on our national honor. The efforts always start and end in the same place, the status quo, wasting huge amounts of money and limiting our kids’ futures because they are not educated to their full potential.

Here is a look at current assumptions common in education that I believe are roadblocks in the way of serving our kids as they deserve to be served.

1. Big school districts with a strong central office, top down structure are more efficient and more effective. The centralized structures have been done away with in large organizations outside of government funded bureaucratic operations because they found that competition forced them to admit that a decentralized structure performed much better. The fact that the same is true of education settings when it has been tried is discussed in William Ouchi’s new book, “The Secret of TSL.”

2. Education school training is required to be able to teach or lead effectively in education. The education schools are basically “diploma mills” milking the public trough for all the money they can garner. The preparedness of their graduates when compared to the requirements to do an effective job is weak at best. The education schools’ graduate programs have no rigor and are in what Arthur Levine called “A Race to the Bottom” reducing admission and graduation requirements while shortening program length in an effort to attract more and more people interested in the paper not the education that would allow them to do an effective job.

3. The research in education is rigorous and can be relied upon to make important decisions on curriculum and methods, etc. In fact, the research in education is generally of poor quality because it is slanted to favor products or services of the researchers or poorly done from a statistical rigor point of view. See the What Works Clearinghouse at the US Dept of Ed website.

4. The education oversight bureaucracies at the Federal and State levels are doing a good job of setting standards, achievement testing regimens, certification requirements, etc. Because the denizens of these bureaucracies have been trained in the education schools’ graduate programs they don’t have the knowledge or objectivity to break the cycle of low standards and support for education processes that don’t stand scientific scrutiny as pointed out by E.D. Hirsch in The Knowledge Deficit. Would you think it strange that someone with an education doctorate that Levine found in his research to be of no value in any public school administration job, would fail to criticize the very degrees that many of them have? Right.

5. Educators are expert in the subjects they teach. This is one of the biggest problems that goes unaddressed. Oh, there have been efforts like the highly qualified requirements in the NCLB law but they have failed to make a difference. This is because the “remedial” classes required are populated with educators so that they are taught down to that level of competence. This is just another example of going through the motions to satisfy a legal requirement but not the intent. Thus, the intent of the law is short-circuited. Rita Kramer describes the problem well in Ed School Follies, “The people who become ‘educators’ and who run our school systems usually have degrees in education, psychology, social sciences, public administration; they are not people who have studied, know, and love literature, history, science, or philosophy. Our ‘educators’ are not educated. They do not love learning. Naturally enough, they think of the past as dead because it has never been alive to them. And they will not bring it alive for their pupils.”

So, what is to be done? It seems we have two choices. First, we can give up and cut the money spent on “improving education” to zero (which would require dramatic cuts in admin staffs in school districts) by admitting that it hasn’t happened and won’t happen under the current modus operandi. Or, we can dismantle the assumptions listed above and cause a “reset to first principles” to determine what is the right way to proceed. As part of this we would need to set very high expectations to prevent the re-establishment of the same processes with different names. Inevitably lots of toes would have to be stepped on and some of the worst actors sacrificed as an object lesson for the rest that reform was not a talking exercise but a walking exercise with real and positive results required. You might blanch at the thought of sacrificing some of the educators to make the point. I have absolutely no problem with that as millions of kids are continually sacrificed at the “status quo; let’s make it cushy for the adult educators” alter. It is time to start behaving as though the kids have some priority in our education system.

Management Thoughts for Educators

Needed—a data driven, closed loop, short cycle management process to effect positive change in the organization.

Data—Attitude Change Required
• The data approach of educators is conditioned through decades to always look for a way to put the best face on bad performance
• The data approach of managers who face the need to improve continually is to put the worst face on the data to identify the biggest problems and fix them quickly.

Large Organizations Don’t Function Well With Centralized Management Structures
• Top-down, one-size-fits-all precludes addressing any unique problems or opportunities for improvement
• Communication is very difficult because of the multitudinous paths created by the top heavy structure (can of worms)
• Change is extremely difficult because of the structured decision making process that involve specialists, committees, months of study, the board of education, etc. The war will be over and we will have lost because we couldn’t address the problems effectively in real time.
• “Customers” (parents especially) lose patience with the lack of real progress and vote with their feet leaving the district with their kids.
• The centralized structure provides “cover” for weak managers who don’t have the training and experience required for a more streamlined, participative structure that would be much higher performing.

Several Big Urban Districts Are Decentralizing Their Management Structures to Give Autonomy to the School Principals—Big Performance Gains Have Resulted

Five Pillars of School Empowerment (from The Secret of TSL by Wm. Ouchi)
o Real Choices for Families (we have this in Colorado)
o Empowering schools with the Four Freedoms
o Effective principals (trained and coached in leadership academies, 15 month cycle but on the job)
o A system of accountability
o Weighted Student Formula budgeting

The Four Freedoms of School Empowerment—Control of:
o Budget
o Staffing Pattern
o Curriculum
o Schedule

Action Steps required to get to “there from here”

Retool leaders with leadership academy approach—all leaders including superintendent and board (especially performance standards and management theories)

Assess current leaders
o Knowledge and skills in basic management areas including psychology of motivation, behavior prediction & modification, theories of management, esp. relating to change management, communication, performance standards
o Evaluate current principals’ ability to “jump” to the new more rigorous principal model. That is, from the current “follower of central office edicts” to “independent manager of a school” with control over budget, staffing, curriculum, schedule.

Begin planning for transition
o Ex. Pilot group of schools (elementary, middle and high)?

Evaluate current central office admin staff for fit to the new structure. Plug-in to new jobs consistent with the new structure as openings occur (only if a good fit).

Wind down no longer needed central office functions to free up budget and transform to new central office support model. That is, recognize the bad habits that do not contribute to the core mission of educating the children well.

This outline is brief but provides a road map for those willing to face the reality of our current mired in place education performance.

Pros at Being First in Line at the Public Trough

Like sharks getting the scent of new education standards blood, the suppliers of services to the education “industry” are volunteering to “help” the schools spend their taxpayer money on their own products and offerings. A recent article in Education Week "Conflict of Interest Arises as Concern in Standards Push," explores the problem.

Kathleen A. Hinchman, the president of the Oak Creek, Wis.-based professional association and the author of a letter pointing out the concern of standards writers acting in their own self interest, said the National Governors Association and the Council of the Chief State School Officers, the two organizations in charge of the common-standards endeavor, should provide a public document that identifies ties that the writers have to companies or organizations that might benefit financially from products aligned with the standards.

“Ms. Hinchman, a literacy professor at Syracuse University, in New York, said her organization wants to ensure that the creation and use of common standards is not plagued with the kinds of conflict-of-interest problems that arose with the federal Reading First program, which was funded with $1 billion per year at its peak.

At least one federal official made a significant financial profit from a reading program that he wrote and promoted while he was an adviser to states about the federal program, according to a 2007 Senate report. Another Reading First contractor and researcher received a large boost in income during the program’s tenure when she was also advising states on which assessments and texts to select to meet its requirements, that same report said. ("Senate Report Cites ‘Reading First’ Conflicts," May 16, 2007.)

Some of those who made money off the venture were affiliated with universities rather than businesses and wrote curriculum materials, developed tests, or consulted.
In the common-standards effort, Ms. Hinchman said a writer might favor one standard over another because it could more easily be turned into an instructional material or an assessment tool that he or she, or those they are connected with, could profit by.

‘It makes a lot of sense to indicate the relationships between people who are designing education policy and their various roles in government and business,’ said Patricia H. Hinchey, an associate professor of education at Pennsylvania State University.

With the connections spelled out, she explained, someone could say, ‘You supported X rather than Y, and oddly, X lends itself to a business agenda. Why is that?’ Ms. Hinchey is also a research fellow with the Education and Public Interest Center at the University of Colorado."

Concern is also expressed that Apple’s Karen Cator, who chaired the Partnership for 21st Century Skills Board, will become head of the U. S. Department of Education’s Office of Education Technology. A question being asked is will Cator use her new office to promote P21’s discredited ideas? I’d say you could bet on it. You can also bet that Apple will be the recommended choice for education applications.

Sunshine is the ultimate antiseptic. Insiders are already pushing back hard against more disclosure of potential conflicts of interest which confirms the problem as well as anything could. Let the sunshine in.

Blinded by Optimism

Barbara Ehrenreich’s book, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, is a cogent argument about problems that could be solved if faced directly are being instead suppressed and ignored. This is not to say that positive thinking is bad, it isn’t. However, when the popular culture has the pendulum hard-wired to the positive side, real problems that are harming people get ignored. Ehrenreich says that this preoccupation with positivity has resulted in a “mass delusion” and a “tyranny and ideology” that have resulted in disastrous decisions in our culture.

I contend that there is no place in our society where this disease is more entrenched and more harmful than in our schools. Attend any school board meeting and you will see the structured offering of “plusses” that are being recognized. That is as is should be but where is the discussion of what to do about the abysmal performance of the schools in closing the achievement gap, improving overall test scores, of failed curriculum choices that are ignored rather than faced? They are never discussed.

One of the local large and “top performing” districts even has a board policy that board members cannot criticize the school district in any way. In fact a member of that board was removed from the board for violating that policy. Thus, the message goes forth, “The preservation of the school bureaucracy is more important than serving the mission to educate the kids well.” While I am not aware of other districts with this type of policy, they all act as if there is one anyway.

So who is there to support the message that the kids are not being served at an acceptable level? It certainly won’t come from within the education fiefdom. While the information is readily available for those who are willing to dig for it, it is certainly not something that you will find in the media reports. The media play a complicit role in making sure they only report favorable things about the schools. Thus, it is up to each of us to put in the time and effort to bring the message to everyone we can by writing to our legislators, speaking at school board meetings and any other way we can to demand that reality of school performance is faced and fixed.

They Speak Process, We Speak Results

Did you ever try to communicate with someone who spoke a different language than you do? It is pretty difficult especially if hand waving won’t suffice due to the complexity of the subject matter. This is exactly the problem we face when trying to communicate with educators about the schooling our kids are getting.

Educators are taught pedagogy (teaching process) in education school. In fact process is so emphasized that subject knowledge sees little emphasis and is generally of poor quality when it is taught to future teachers. Thus, educators emphasize process above all else and this spills over into the way decisions are made and attempts at change implemented.

Parents and the public in general are results-oriented and don’t care what process is used as long as legal, effective, etc. Thus, when parents and the public talk to educators both sides are “speaking different languages.” This leads to dissatisfaction, frustration and poor communication on real issues.

So what needs to be done? Since the parents and the public are the “customers” for the service provided by the education establishment, it is incumbent on them to learn to speak “results.” This is critical if educators are to begin providing the positive improvement in performance that is long overdue. While educators always try to put a positive spin on each year’s CSAP results, any improvements are illusory at best. Basically nothing has changed for the better in mainline large school districts for decades. And nothing will until the ineffective processes used to manage the education system and the classrooms can be eliminated and replaced with a more results-oriented approach.

Following are some data to make the point that the performance is poor and the rate of improvement is nil.

• % Proficient or Higher, examples, from American Institutes for Research, NAEP versus TIMSS, 8th grade math; Singapore at 73%, U.S. at 27%. 17 countries scored above the US.

• Both The Proficiency Illusion, Fordham Inst. with NWEA and Assessing the Role of K-12 Academic Standards in States: Workshop Summary, Nat’l Academies Press, 2007 conclude that Colorado standards for reading and math are at the bottom of the pack compared to other states. The gap is big between Colorado and the states with the highest standards like S. Carolina, Massachusetts, California. Also in The Proficiency Illusion report they comment that the Colorado cut scores were reduced for both math and reading making the “expected improvement if things remained the same just due to the cut score reductions to be significant, as much as 9%.” I have looked at CSAP results for those years for districts and the state. The “improvements” didn’t even indicate that the performance had stayed the same but that it had declined in real terms against the lower standards.

• The Colorado Closing the Achievement Gap Commission Final Report from 11/05 stated that in spite of spending billions on closing the gap that it was “demonstrably worse” than it had been “a third of a century” earlier when Robert Kennedy said the gap was a “stain on our national honor.”

• A regression analysis for one of the larger school districts in Colorado of reading prof or better vs. free or reduced percentage showed a very high correlation of over 95% with very high significance. I have looked at other districts as well and it holds for them too. So the value added by the ed process is of virtually no importance since the demographic variable appears to be far more important as a predictor of results. My belief is that this is a direct result of educators being told in ed schools (and supported by the core beliefs after getting into the workplace) that schools have little leverage and the student background is the telling factor in achievement. This was the finding of the 1966 Coleman Report. That report has been proven wrong by hundreds of studies since but is still quoted by people who want to use its findings as an excuse for the lack of progress on closing the gap. Isn’t it time to face that the current approach isn’t working and the steady increase in minority students (esp. Hispanic) makes it imperative that we finally add value and fix the problem.

• The process slanted curricula, e. g. Whole Language including its renamed derivatives and EveryDay Math which are content weak have been found in study after study to be very harmful to minority and poor students. The kids that come from more privileged backgrounds have parents who will fill the knowledge gap and make sure their kids get what they need to supplement the content poor offerings in the schools. The gap kids don’t often have that support.

Therefore the current results are not acceptable. The process straightjacket present in large school districts must be removed and replaced with a results ethic if performance is to happen for the benefit of our kids.