I found a quote recently from an article in Bloomberg Business Week by Andy Grove. He was the founder of Intel and an engineer. He said, “. . . engineers are a peculiar breed. They are eager to solve whatever problems they encounter.” As a trained and experienced engineer I can tell you it is true. The whole rigorous program we go through in our training is based on providing the tools and importantly the mindset to objectively define and solve problems. We learn in no uncertain terms that you can’t solve a problem that you refuse to face objectively. If the truth is you made a mistake, even a whopper, the shortest road to fixing it is acknowledging your mistake, correcting it and moving on vowing to not make that mistake again. I mention that because I have been analyzing our education system and its poor performance for over 7 years now. I have come at it from the engineering perspective. That is, what is the truth of the problems and what solutions make sense? This intellectually honest approach is nowhere to be seen in education.
I am sure you have heard all of the hysteria about emergency legislation considered and passed to save our education system from cuts. You know the type, this $10 billion to save 17 teacher jobs and so forth. I believe it is time to look objectively at what we are getting for the torrent of money going to public schools. My answer is not nearly enough. We have proven over the last decades that increasing education funding does not improve performance at least as measured objectively. I say objectively because the vast majority of “good news” stories that come out of the education fiefdom are grossly slanted, reported out of important context or just plain untrue.
If you look at the performance that matters such as how our kids compare competitively with their most competent peers you will have to admit our performance is not improving at all but declining. And it is against the competition that our performance matters not as measured in a vacuum and touted by our educators as if we live in an insular society on a different planet where competition doesn’t matter. Thus, the tiny improvements in state or federal achievement test results that are cherished so much as a positive sign of improvement are really saying if you provide context, we are becoming less competitive globally each year. You see, our best competitors are improving at a faster rate than we are and that is an important fact.
The achievement gap performance is abysmal and inexcusable. Yet, when I attended a meeting where a superintendent of a large district was speaking to a minority coalition group of Black and Hispanic community leaders when an audience member who was a college admissions counselor asked why so many kids were coming to college unprepared to do college level work the response from the superintendent was lame in the extreme. He asked (as if it were a surprise) if the counselor could get a specific example or two so that the district could look at the detail history and try to troubleshoot the problem. Oh, how school administrators have learned to tap dance to distract our attention from the obvious problems. The remediation rate (percent of college students who have to take a year or more remedial classes to become fully admitted to their desired area of study) is high at about 30% in Colorado. It has not improved materially in years.
The question to ask is why has the greatly increased spending over the past decades not improved things for our kids. Short answer, “The education process being used is wrong.” It is the process developed by Dewey and his progressive friends that replaced the much more effective “American Common School” movement that Horace Mann and others developed in the nineteenth century. The progressives desired an education system that educated students minimally so that they would be good fits for work in regimented settings like automotive factories. And to progressive ideologues who believed that their expert control of our lives was necessary, the low education levels resulting made for a more easily swayed and credulous populace.
Thus, the constructivist methods of the progressives became the norm in education schools virtually universally starting in the 1930s. The progressives’ technique amounts to emphasizing experiential learning without a basis of knowledge to allow understanding of the lessons supposedly learned. A perfect example of the current system’s faulty approach is that every district in the land brags about teaching students to be critical thinkers. Yes, they teach a process but they provide no content knowledge of any rigor which is a necessary condition to being able to be a critical thinker. This penchant for saying they are preparing students to be good citizens and productive members of our society is all a lie. The proof is in fact that the progressive approach has resulted in dumbed down curricula with no content rigor.
The education school training spends the vast majority of its time on process with no real subject knowledge rigor at all. By the time newly minted and brainwashed in the progressive catechism teachers were turned loose on the school systems with only process in their toolkits and no subject knowledge, the progressive program could kick into high gear. When kids began graduating from high school in the mid to late sixties with full 12 year exposure to the progressive system, achievement plummeted. The SAT verbal scores are a good example and the data stream goes back far enough to see the “step function” down in performance among all classes of students. That is a point to remember. The education fiefdom members all blame the drop on more minority students in the mix. However, that doesn’t explain at all the universal drop in white verbal skills as well.
Our best performing competitor nations are using an education philosophy much closer to the common school approach and that is why they are beating us so handily. You see, they are far more interested in serving the kids with a quality education than in fighting a political power motivated philosophical battle. In other words they are tending to their knitting while our schools are consuming huge levels of valuable resources refusing to admit that the brainwashing they received in their worthless education school training is harmful to kids. The most damning indictment is that the progressive system harms the minority and economically challenged students the most.
While most educators are well meaning individuals they are also stubbornly committed to political correctness and not rocking the boat. This is the three monkeys story writ large; see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil, especially if you are mired in evil that harms kids. You can’t identify problems and solve them in that environment. You notice I call the American education system, the Fiefdom. I term it delusional, defensive, insular and inbred. I could also add effective at continuing to harm kids. That is, they have developed remarkably effective techniques to maintain the status quo especially including the increase of money flow into the system. I have no problem with spending money on education, but I do want to get what we pay for. Sadly, the only people benefiting from the huge amount of money being thrown at the system are the adults who work there, the teachers, administrators, the ed school faculties, the ed insider researchers, the textbook publishers, the state and federal bureaucrats and the politicians who gain funding for their campaigns by pandering to ed power groups aiming to maintain the status quo.
Thus, continuing to feed the beast does not benefit the kids or our society. My thesis is that the only way to truly reform the system is to cut the money flow dramatically. Only in this way will educators get the message that productivity is vital and required. The result per dollar spent is the ultimate measure of their success. One huge tragedy is that billions and billions are spent on pseudo research to “learn how to improve our education performance.” What a travesty. We know how to fix the problem. Stop using the constructivist curricula and replace them with content-rich curricula. Start training teachers to understand the subject matter. Train education leaders to lead versus maintain. I am not saying it will be easy but let’s show some sanity and quit throwing money down esoteric rat holes and start working on the real problems.
I estimate that the amount of money being expended on the total education fiefdom could pretty easily be cut by 25% or more and that huge benefits would accrue to the kids. After all, we are supposedly doing this for the kids, aren’t we? Thus some major initial steps in my recommended program include-
• The poison being injected into the education system by the ed schools must stop now. Decertify every education school in the land except those who require content knowledge rigor BEFORE they grant one more teacher or graduate degree. A couple of positive examples I am familiar with are U. of Virginia and Hillsdale College. However, they are exceptions.
• Cut federal and state ed bureaucracy funding for staff in half immediately and maintain with no increases even for inflation for at least 10 years.
• Require each school district in the land to cut central administration salary and benefits budgets by ten percent a year until the achievement gap, measured objectively, is cut in half. Preserve school related overhead at current levels. Do not allow districts to transfer central office admin personnel to the schools to avoid cuts. Also do not allow cuts in school based admin to compensate for the required central office budget cuts. For any year where the gap is not reduced by at least 10% begin the 10% per year reduction in central office admin salaries again.
• Retrain education leaders with site-based training including coaching to transform the leadership from ineffective to real change leaders. That is, teach them what they should have learned in their education school masters and doctorates but did not.
• Replace professional development activities that currently focus exclusively on more harmful pedagogy theory based on the false foundation of the progressive mantra with subject knowledge courses.
• Require teachers to pass rigorous subject tests within two years to maintain certification. Repeat every two years.
All of this and more could be done for less money and much more benefit to the kids. The question we must ask is, “Do we continue abusing the kids because we are too timid to face the reality that the current system and many of its employees are not worth their funding levels?” That is tough medicine but can we in good conscience continue to allow our kids to be subjected to attenuated future prospects? I say no. The bottom line is that when the system is doing the wrong things and is harming kids, reducing their resource levels can only reduce the harm being done. Oh, I know there will be loud moaning and complaining at first as educators are forced to face reality. That will be painful for them but ultimately positive for the kids and our country. In the long run it will also free educators from the false doctrine they were taught in ed school and on the job allowing them to contribute to their full ability.
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Dumbing Down America—Do We Care?
I first learned about ACTA, American Council of Trustees and Alumni when I heard Anne Neal, president of the organization speak. Anne is a very articulate person with an obvious passion for improving our higher education status. The approach ACTA takes is to first provide objective data on the status of our most important colleges and universities. They work with college trustees, alumni and the media to advocate improvements, that is, corrections to the problems that turn up in their research.
While any of you who have read any of my K-12 education writings, either on my blog, The Education Onion or on Scribd.com know that I have focused on the K-12 area. ACTA’s findings mesh well with what I have found. It seems that the colleges including the most elite, have been acting to dumb down the education that college graduates receive. That is especially true in the traditional sense.
That is exactly what has happened in K-12 as well. In K-12 the dumbing down process started with the replacing of the American Common School approaches pioneered by Horace Mann and others with the Progressive approaches of John Dewey et al. The basic change was from the content rich (knowledge based) approach of the Common Schools to the content poor (process based) approach of the Progressives.
There are several problems with the Progressive approach. In a nutshell, it works much more poorly than the content rich approach it replaced. This is proven by the results of our best competitor nations who use the content rich approach to teach their kids much more successfully than we teach ours. As might be expected, this virtual monopoly of the Progressive method in K-12 schools (some charter schools are exceptions but a majority are not) has caused the input to our colleges and universities to be of reduced quality. A direct result is the trend to dumb down the curricula in college because making up for the lost time in K-12 just would require too much work from the faculty. Also, the colleges have an overhead problem. The administrative portion of their budgets has grown to epic proportions causing the schools to be much more interested in the level of student enrollment (tuition money rolling in to school coffers) than in providing a quality education.
When you are out of control you can do the right thing; cut budgets and bring the overhead in line with the ethic of providing a quality education. Or, you can say to hell with quality and lower standards allowing enrollment to grow to support the overhead. Is there widespread integrity among the faculties of our colleges today? It doesn’t appear so. That is why the trend to dumb down curricula requirements is virtually unstoppable without public outrage to stem the tide.
How bad is it? Here is some data from the ACTA 2009 report, What Will They Learn, A Report on General Education Requirements at 100 of the Nation’s Leading Colleges and Universities. This 55 page report is available on the goacta.org website in the publications area.
ACTA considers that a core college curriculum is challenging, content-rich, and coherent—and it is something that is not necessarily gained in simply amassing 120 credit hours over eight semesters. The ACTA method is to evaluate the general education requirements of each school in the study in seven areas; Composition, Literature, Foreign Language, U.S. Government or History, Economics, Mathematics and Natural or Physical Science. They describe what each requirement means in terms of rigor. Their scoring of the 100 institutions studied involves how many of the core requirements are present in each school. Those with 6 or 7 rate an A grade, 4 or 5 a B, 3 a C, 2 a D, 0 or 1 an F.
ACTA looked at the top 20 National Universities and the top 20 Liberal Arts Colleges as reported in the 2009 US News and World Report America’s Best College Rankings. They also studied the major public universities from all 50 states. Out of the 100 studied, 25 received a grade of F, 17 got D’s and 20 got C’s. Only 33 of the 100 received a B and only 5 achieved an A.
Based on the study ACTA concluded colleges are not delivering on their promises. Of the top 20 national universities, not one earned an A, 4 earned a B, 5 a C, 2 a D and fully 9 earned an F. For the top 20 liberal arts colleges the record is especially depressing. One received an A, 3 received Bs, 2 Cs, 1 D, and 13 received Fs. Of the 60 state Flagships, 4 earned As, 26 earned Bs, 13 earned Cs, 14 received Ds and 3 received Fs.
It is interesting to note that when it comes to education bang for the buck, it is hard to beat the state flagship schools. I won’t argue that the “good old boy” connections you develop in one of the other schools are not of value. However, the primary mission of the schools is to provide a quality education and that should be the priority. Resting on the laurels of your past glory should not.
ACTA is currently arguing against the University of Arkansas which received an A rating but is planning to implement the dumb down approach. ACTA’s argument is that the current high quality requirements should be kept in place. You can read about this fight on their website and access detail on the weak courses that will fill the requirements for graduation at many of the schools studied by accessing the full report on the ACTA website.
This trend is cutting the heart out of our civilization. If you care you need to support the ACTA effort and also the needed reform of our K-12 schools.
While any of you who have read any of my K-12 education writings, either on my blog, The Education Onion or on Scribd.com know that I have focused on the K-12 area. ACTA’s findings mesh well with what I have found. It seems that the colleges including the most elite, have been acting to dumb down the education that college graduates receive. That is especially true in the traditional sense.
That is exactly what has happened in K-12 as well. In K-12 the dumbing down process started with the replacing of the American Common School approaches pioneered by Horace Mann and others with the Progressive approaches of John Dewey et al. The basic change was from the content rich (knowledge based) approach of the Common Schools to the content poor (process based) approach of the Progressives.
There are several problems with the Progressive approach. In a nutshell, it works much more poorly than the content rich approach it replaced. This is proven by the results of our best competitor nations who use the content rich approach to teach their kids much more successfully than we teach ours. As might be expected, this virtual monopoly of the Progressive method in K-12 schools (some charter schools are exceptions but a majority are not) has caused the input to our colleges and universities to be of reduced quality. A direct result is the trend to dumb down the curricula in college because making up for the lost time in K-12 just would require too much work from the faculty. Also, the colleges have an overhead problem. The administrative portion of their budgets has grown to epic proportions causing the schools to be much more interested in the level of student enrollment (tuition money rolling in to school coffers) than in providing a quality education.
When you are out of control you can do the right thing; cut budgets and bring the overhead in line with the ethic of providing a quality education. Or, you can say to hell with quality and lower standards allowing enrollment to grow to support the overhead. Is there widespread integrity among the faculties of our colleges today? It doesn’t appear so. That is why the trend to dumb down curricula requirements is virtually unstoppable without public outrage to stem the tide.
How bad is it? Here is some data from the ACTA 2009 report, What Will They Learn, A Report on General Education Requirements at 100 of the Nation’s Leading Colleges and Universities. This 55 page report is available on the goacta.org website in the publications area.
ACTA considers that a core college curriculum is challenging, content-rich, and coherent—and it is something that is not necessarily gained in simply amassing 120 credit hours over eight semesters. The ACTA method is to evaluate the general education requirements of each school in the study in seven areas; Composition, Literature, Foreign Language, U.S. Government or History, Economics, Mathematics and Natural or Physical Science. They describe what each requirement means in terms of rigor. Their scoring of the 100 institutions studied involves how many of the core requirements are present in each school. Those with 6 or 7 rate an A grade, 4 or 5 a B, 3 a C, 2 a D, 0 or 1 an F.
ACTA looked at the top 20 National Universities and the top 20 Liberal Arts Colleges as reported in the 2009 US News and World Report America’s Best College Rankings. They also studied the major public universities from all 50 states. Out of the 100 studied, 25 received a grade of F, 17 got D’s and 20 got C’s. Only 33 of the 100 received a B and only 5 achieved an A.
Based on the study ACTA concluded colleges are not delivering on their promises. Of the top 20 national universities, not one earned an A, 4 earned a B, 5 a C, 2 a D and fully 9 earned an F. For the top 20 liberal arts colleges the record is especially depressing. One received an A, 3 received Bs, 2 Cs, 1 D, and 13 received Fs. Of the 60 state Flagships, 4 earned As, 26 earned Bs, 13 earned Cs, 14 received Ds and 3 received Fs.
It is interesting to note that when it comes to education bang for the buck, it is hard to beat the state flagship schools. I won’t argue that the “good old boy” connections you develop in one of the other schools are not of value. However, the primary mission of the schools is to provide a quality education and that should be the priority. Resting on the laurels of your past glory should not.
ACTA is currently arguing against the University of Arkansas which received an A rating but is planning to implement the dumb down approach. ACTA’s argument is that the current high quality requirements should be kept in place. You can read about this fight on their website and access detail on the weak courses that will fill the requirements for graduation at many of the schools studied by accessing the full report on the ACTA website.
This trend is cutting the heart out of our civilization. If you care you need to support the ACTA effort and also the needed reform of our K-12 schools.
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
To My Grandchildren
Dear Logan, Blake, Tori, Scot, Addison and Sam,
I want you to know when you are facing the problems of runaway government spending, hyper-inflation, a dollar not worth the paper it is printed on, and record high unemployment that I am sorry. I tried to get people motivated to fix our education system so that you could be well prepared for the rising global meritocracy I saw coming. However, I was ineffective in rallying support for you and your peers. The educators and all of their support entities were just too strong in their resolve to prevent any change in the education process that might force them to really teach you what you needed to know to compete and have a decent life.
The teachers unions were particularly effective in “buying” votes of politicians by spending heavily on their campaigns for office. With their national presence they were able to throw large sums of money into specific political races where they saw a threat to the continuation of their “we are overworked and underpaid” scam on the American public. And the Administrators were more than happy to let the unions do the heavy lifting to protect all educators’ place at the government trough.
I am sorry that I was unable to discredit the false propaganda from the educartel that gave the impression that our K-12 education system was performing well. I tried to point out the abysmal failure of our education system and the fallacy of educator beliefs taught to them like a theology, catechism style. I tried to educate people on the huge gap between what your competitors in other countries were learning and what American kids were being taught. However, the educators insistence that civility be observed at all times effectively suppressed the truth of their poor performance in preparing you for the stiff competition represented by your international peers who consistently were getting better educations.
I tried to rally your parents to get more involved but it was easier for them to be too busy, involved in work and play to take the time to help sound the alarm. I learned too late that talking rationally to the educators was doomed to failure. They had practiced for decades ways to delay any needed change. They just didn’t care about you and other kids especially if any harder work or better performance or more subject knowledge were required of them. They talked a good line but that was as far as it went. Tragically that was enough to convince most of the public that while that other city or state’s schools might be in trouble, their local ones were doing fine.
The educators were especially effective in their ability to sidetrack any board of education scrutiny by keeping their meeting agenda so full of administrivia that they were too busy to look at the truth of performance and do anything to correct it.
I realized too late that it would take marshalling enough political power to force educators to change because they were not motivated by your need for better schooling if any pain were required on their parts. Please learn from my experience as you work so hard to pull yourself and the country out of the hole your parents and grandparents allowed to be created.
I want you to know when you are facing the problems of runaway government spending, hyper-inflation, a dollar not worth the paper it is printed on, and record high unemployment that I am sorry. I tried to get people motivated to fix our education system so that you could be well prepared for the rising global meritocracy I saw coming. However, I was ineffective in rallying support for you and your peers. The educators and all of their support entities were just too strong in their resolve to prevent any change in the education process that might force them to really teach you what you needed to know to compete and have a decent life.
The teachers unions were particularly effective in “buying” votes of politicians by spending heavily on their campaigns for office. With their national presence they were able to throw large sums of money into specific political races where they saw a threat to the continuation of their “we are overworked and underpaid” scam on the American public. And the Administrators were more than happy to let the unions do the heavy lifting to protect all educators’ place at the government trough.
I am sorry that I was unable to discredit the false propaganda from the educartel that gave the impression that our K-12 education system was performing well. I tried to point out the abysmal failure of our education system and the fallacy of educator beliefs taught to them like a theology, catechism style. I tried to educate people on the huge gap between what your competitors in other countries were learning and what American kids were being taught. However, the educators insistence that civility be observed at all times effectively suppressed the truth of their poor performance in preparing you for the stiff competition represented by your international peers who consistently were getting better educations.
I tried to rally your parents to get more involved but it was easier for them to be too busy, involved in work and play to take the time to help sound the alarm. I learned too late that talking rationally to the educators was doomed to failure. They had practiced for decades ways to delay any needed change. They just didn’t care about you and other kids especially if any harder work or better performance or more subject knowledge were required of them. They talked a good line but that was as far as it went. Tragically that was enough to convince most of the public that while that other city or state’s schools might be in trouble, their local ones were doing fine.
The educators were especially effective in their ability to sidetrack any board of education scrutiny by keeping their meeting agenda so full of administrivia that they were too busy to look at the truth of performance and do anything to correct it.
I realized too late that it would take marshalling enough political power to force educators to change because they were not motivated by your need for better schooling if any pain were required on their parts. Please learn from my experience as you work so hard to pull yourself and the country out of the hole your parents and grandparents allowed to be created.
Monday, June 14, 2010
You’re Not Nice
This is a comment I often hear after I post a blog on education that is critical of our education performance and especially if critical of educators. Thus, I would like to explore the reasons with you.
First, we need to face some realities:
• American education performance has been mired in unacceptable territory for many decades.
• Educators have defined the problems as being the fault of everyone but themselves. Mirrors are outlawed in education venues. Pogo cartoons are also not allowed.
• The achievement gap is not changing for the better. The Colorado Closing the Achievement Gap Commission Final Report of 11/05 concluded that over the last third of a century the gap had gotten “demonstrably worse” in spite of spending billions to find solutions. Robert Kennedy called the gap a stain on our national honor but that hasn’t motivated educators to take the known steps required to fix it. They won’t allow themselves to admit they are wrong in their beliefs about what works in education.
• American students are not being prepared for the global competition for knowledge based jobs.
• The remediation rate for those who go to 2 or 4 year colleges is very high and not being reduced.
• Education schools overemphasize pedagogy to the virtual exclusion of subject knowledge. And the pedagogy they teach is technically wrong in important ways.
• The reason for this state of affairs – tragic for millions of students as well as for the nation – is that an army of American educators and reading experts are fundamentally wrong in their ideas about education . . . E.D. Hirsch, The Knowledge Deficit
The list could be a lot longer but I hope you get the point. The problems in education are not being addressed effectively and kids and their futures are being irreparably harmed. Thus, if we assume that we must play by the educators’ rules the status quo will continue ad infinitum:
• Civility and harmony at all times—that is, suppress the truth because it might lead to stressful situations.
• Swear fealty to educators as the education experts and agree that no education outsider has any grounds to identify problems or offer constructive criticism.
• Parrot the educator line that they are underpaid and overworked. Which considering their performance is totally false.
• Agree to leave all education decisions to the educators because they are the experts.
• Agree to the status quo preserving process educators use to maintain control and ensure no change occurs that might require them to perform better or renounce their false educational beliefs.
After 7 years working on understanding the education situation, interviewing numerous educators over 6 states and associated people like school board members, state education department denizens and members of the public, I realized that being civil and trying to reason with people in the education establishment was futile. They have simply decided that their vested interest is more important than serving the kids’ needs at the level they deserve.
Therefore, the question comes down to a simple one. Are you on the side of the poorly performing education bureaucracy or are you on the side of the kids and their future. That is an easy decision for me and hopefully for you. E.D. Hirsch has been working on this problem for decades longer than I have. He has concluded that educators will not change on their own. They will have to be forced by public and political pressure. I write the things I do on education in an attempt to inform the public on the reality in education. I am attempting to get people to go beyond the pseudo “good news” propaganda that is ubiquitously offered by the education establishment. Being nice when kids are being continually harmed has a very low priority for me.
The above applies to the mainline schools. There are charter schools (not all by any means) that perform much better than the mainline schools. This is especially true if they have strong leadership and a balanced philosophy where subject knowledge is valued. However, these schools affect a tiny minority of students. We must reform the mainline schools to make a difference for millions of kids.
First, we need to face some realities:
• American education performance has been mired in unacceptable territory for many decades.
• Educators have defined the problems as being the fault of everyone but themselves. Mirrors are outlawed in education venues. Pogo cartoons are also not allowed.
• The achievement gap is not changing for the better. The Colorado Closing the Achievement Gap Commission Final Report of 11/05 concluded that over the last third of a century the gap had gotten “demonstrably worse” in spite of spending billions to find solutions. Robert Kennedy called the gap a stain on our national honor but that hasn’t motivated educators to take the known steps required to fix it. They won’t allow themselves to admit they are wrong in their beliefs about what works in education.
• American students are not being prepared for the global competition for knowledge based jobs.
• The remediation rate for those who go to 2 or 4 year colleges is very high and not being reduced.
• Education schools overemphasize pedagogy to the virtual exclusion of subject knowledge. And the pedagogy they teach is technically wrong in important ways.
• The reason for this state of affairs – tragic for millions of students as well as for the nation – is that an army of American educators and reading experts are fundamentally wrong in their ideas about education . . . E.D. Hirsch, The Knowledge Deficit
The list could be a lot longer but I hope you get the point. The problems in education are not being addressed effectively and kids and their futures are being irreparably harmed. Thus, if we assume that we must play by the educators’ rules the status quo will continue ad infinitum:
• Civility and harmony at all times—that is, suppress the truth because it might lead to stressful situations.
• Swear fealty to educators as the education experts and agree that no education outsider has any grounds to identify problems or offer constructive criticism.
• Parrot the educator line that they are underpaid and overworked. Which considering their performance is totally false.
• Agree to leave all education decisions to the educators because they are the experts.
• Agree to the status quo preserving process educators use to maintain control and ensure no change occurs that might require them to perform better or renounce their false educational beliefs.
After 7 years working on understanding the education situation, interviewing numerous educators over 6 states and associated people like school board members, state education department denizens and members of the public, I realized that being civil and trying to reason with people in the education establishment was futile. They have simply decided that their vested interest is more important than serving the kids’ needs at the level they deserve.
Therefore, the question comes down to a simple one. Are you on the side of the poorly performing education bureaucracy or are you on the side of the kids and their future. That is an easy decision for me and hopefully for you. E.D. Hirsch has been working on this problem for decades longer than I have. He has concluded that educators will not change on their own. They will have to be forced by public and political pressure. I write the things I do on education in an attempt to inform the public on the reality in education. I am attempting to get people to go beyond the pseudo “good news” propaganda that is ubiquitously offered by the education establishment. Being nice when kids are being continually harmed has a very low priority for me.
The above applies to the mainline schools. There are charter schools (not all by any means) that perform much better than the mainline schools. This is especially true if they have strong leadership and a balanced philosophy where subject knowledge is valued. However, these schools affect a tiny minority of students. We must reform the mainline schools to make a difference for millions of kids.
Thursday, June 3, 2010
Do Our Schools Prepare Kids for Factory Work or Knowledge Work?
While there is much posturing and TALK about preparing kids for knowledge jobs (21st Century Skills, etc.), there has been virtually no change in the substance of what is taught and how it is taught since the system was designed a century ago to prepare the masses for production line work in factories. Change is required, not talk if our kids are to be prepared to compete in a very different world than existed in the early twentieth century. Experts like Diane Ravitch have pointed out that the 21st Century Skills movement is an excuse to bring back failed old ideas with new and improved labels. This is not progress. It is criminal fraud and it hurts our kids.
During my education research over the last 7 years I have run into one comment more than any other from teachers about subjects they are tasked to teach. It could be paraphrased as, “I didn’t do well in math. I don’t like math, but I have to try to teach it to my kids.” Let me ask you, do you think the kids will learn well from someone who has a poor understanding of math and such a strong distaste for it?
Why worry about it, you might say. We must concern ourselves because math skill and knowledge are becoming increasingly more important now with the intensified trend toward knowledge work and the high level of global competition to get those good, well-paying jobs. Why is math important? Because--
• Math is the language we use to understand and model the world we live in. Rigorous math is used in most fields of endeavor. We all know that it is vital for scientists, engineers and applied mathematicians. However, math is used in research in many fields as they attempt to better understand their area of interest. It is used in medicine, psychology, education, and businesses of all types.
• Studying and working with math is good exercise for our reasoning powers. It is the best area of study to teach problem formulation and definition. In the real world problems are not presented as in dumbed down math texts where the data in the problem is the only data you need to solve it. In the real world there is an abundance of data that is meaningless to solving most problems. The key is to formulate the problem so that the important data is captured giving understanding to the causes and solutions for the problem at hand.
• Math is fun. Math is beautiful in its elegant structure.
Now the question to ask is do we keep preparing K-12 students for “do as you are told, factory work” as the whole process was designed to do or do we change to a system that facilitates and encourages all students to learn to their full potential. Factory work is continuing to decline as a career opportunity in today’s age of outsourcing and automation. To change for the better we will need to break some stereotypes. The first one and most hateful of all is. “Girls aren’t good at math and if they are there is something wrong with them.” This belief held by too many teachers, parents and others is a harmful self-fulfilling prophecy that dooms too many girls to poor performance in math. Perhaps its mirror image for boys is that they can’t do as well as girls in literacy areas. Both boys and girls have the ability to excel in both areas, especially with the low expectation curricula being used in our K-12 mainline schools.
For girls in elementary classes where most teachers are women, seeing their teachers distaste for math that always shows through, no matter how positive they try to be creates poor role models. “Gee, if Miss MacGuilicudy can’t do math, how could I ever do it?” As in any psychologically corrupt environment, students who violate the expected norms are subtly punished to get them into line with the expectation.
To change will require teaching teachers to learn to love math instead of fear it. The education schools can’t do this as they are populated with pseudo math staff who also fear and dislike math. The exception is when the government gives them a multimillion dollar grant to “invent” a math curriculum that will work to conceal the teachers’ lack of math skill. Even though they don’t understand math well at all they come up with a discovery curriculum that transforms the teacher into a facilitator of group discussions as kids “discover” how to solve problems. The problems “solved” are trivial. They have to be because the kids can’t solve them with the discovery method unless they are. This curriculum has spread across the nation like wildfire because educators want to be freed from the responsibility to really teach math as a hierarchy that builds on foundations learned in the previous year. The whole premise is like preparing to cross a great wilderness with a guide or without one. Wandering in the wilderness is not what we should be after in education. We need guides (teachers) who know the way through the wilderness. You only need to look at the discovery process and how it might apply to say, The Calculus, to realize the approach is ridiculous. While Newton developed The Calculus at age 19 to help him analyze physical phenomena, I defy you to assert that the discovery method would be an efficient way to train future scientists, engineers and mathematicians in The Calculus. You see that is the real problem. The constructivist/discovery methods take much longer than direct instruction to teach the material. That is why kids early in their K-12 careers do better than they do in the middle and high school grades. In the discovery process it is too easy for students to “discover the wrong principle” which undermines the foundation they need in the future.
The result? Kids who are exposed to this fraud reach middle and high school totally unprepared for algebra and beyond. Then the middle and high school teachers have to try to make up years of lost time and teach the new material too. No wonder the math performance of high school students is so poor. Oh, there are exceptions who do get it because their parents taught them or provided tutors to fill the void. Most students however, don’t have that advantage and end up turned off and incompetent in math. This limits their future possibilities greatly and since it affects so many students it affects the whole nation’s competitiveness.
The first thing you must realize is that the vast majority of educators do not understand subject matter. You pick the subject and they haven’t been exposed to it in more than a highly diffuse and superficial way. Yet, they have no problem posturing as experts to enable them to ignore the truth that is offered by those who do understand subject matter. Rita Kramer described the problem well in her bestselling book, Ed School Follies. “The people who become ‘educators’ and who run our school systems usually have degrees in education, psychology, social sciences, public administration; they are not people who have studied, know, and love literature, history, science, or philosophy. Our ‘educators’ are not educated. They do not love learning. Naturally enough, they think of the past as dead because it has never been alive to them. And they will not bring it alive for their pupils.”
In math this has led to “holding the fort” against all appeals for objective review of the harm being done by the ridiculous approach to teaching math. The same argument can apply to literacy and other curriculum areas. The way the educators have been able to turn away the constructive criticism is to employ “outside” experts to approve their approach. Thus, they hire outside, education school educated consultants to review their program and offer ideas on making it better.
Of course, the public who hears of what sounds a reasonable approach do not understand that the “outside experts” come from the same weak, diffuse and superficial training as the school officials who hire them for the review. Do not be fooled, if a person has a doctorate or masters in education they are not educated. Arthur Levine in his research into education schools concluded that they “confer masters on those who display anything but mastery and doctorates in name only.” While some educators have learned subjects in other studies or on their own, most have not. In general, while well meaning, these people have nothing of value to add to improving our kids’ education and it is time that the public became aware of it. We must demand positive action to face the reality of the poor educator performance and poor understanding of what works that is hurting our kids.
During my education research over the last 7 years I have run into one comment more than any other from teachers about subjects they are tasked to teach. It could be paraphrased as, “I didn’t do well in math. I don’t like math, but I have to try to teach it to my kids.” Let me ask you, do you think the kids will learn well from someone who has a poor understanding of math and such a strong distaste for it?
Why worry about it, you might say. We must concern ourselves because math skill and knowledge are becoming increasingly more important now with the intensified trend toward knowledge work and the high level of global competition to get those good, well-paying jobs. Why is math important? Because--
• Math is the language we use to understand and model the world we live in. Rigorous math is used in most fields of endeavor. We all know that it is vital for scientists, engineers and applied mathematicians. However, math is used in research in many fields as they attempt to better understand their area of interest. It is used in medicine, psychology, education, and businesses of all types.
• Studying and working with math is good exercise for our reasoning powers. It is the best area of study to teach problem formulation and definition. In the real world problems are not presented as in dumbed down math texts where the data in the problem is the only data you need to solve it. In the real world there is an abundance of data that is meaningless to solving most problems. The key is to formulate the problem so that the important data is captured giving understanding to the causes and solutions for the problem at hand.
• Math is fun. Math is beautiful in its elegant structure.
Now the question to ask is do we keep preparing K-12 students for “do as you are told, factory work” as the whole process was designed to do or do we change to a system that facilitates and encourages all students to learn to their full potential. Factory work is continuing to decline as a career opportunity in today’s age of outsourcing and automation. To change for the better we will need to break some stereotypes. The first one and most hateful of all is. “Girls aren’t good at math and if they are there is something wrong with them.” This belief held by too many teachers, parents and others is a harmful self-fulfilling prophecy that dooms too many girls to poor performance in math. Perhaps its mirror image for boys is that they can’t do as well as girls in literacy areas. Both boys and girls have the ability to excel in both areas, especially with the low expectation curricula being used in our K-12 mainline schools.
For girls in elementary classes where most teachers are women, seeing their teachers distaste for math that always shows through, no matter how positive they try to be creates poor role models. “Gee, if Miss MacGuilicudy can’t do math, how could I ever do it?” As in any psychologically corrupt environment, students who violate the expected norms are subtly punished to get them into line with the expectation.
To change will require teaching teachers to learn to love math instead of fear it. The education schools can’t do this as they are populated with pseudo math staff who also fear and dislike math. The exception is when the government gives them a multimillion dollar grant to “invent” a math curriculum that will work to conceal the teachers’ lack of math skill. Even though they don’t understand math well at all they come up with a discovery curriculum that transforms the teacher into a facilitator of group discussions as kids “discover” how to solve problems. The problems “solved” are trivial. They have to be because the kids can’t solve them with the discovery method unless they are. This curriculum has spread across the nation like wildfire because educators want to be freed from the responsibility to really teach math as a hierarchy that builds on foundations learned in the previous year. The whole premise is like preparing to cross a great wilderness with a guide or without one. Wandering in the wilderness is not what we should be after in education. We need guides (teachers) who know the way through the wilderness. You only need to look at the discovery process and how it might apply to say, The Calculus, to realize the approach is ridiculous. While Newton developed The Calculus at age 19 to help him analyze physical phenomena, I defy you to assert that the discovery method would be an efficient way to train future scientists, engineers and mathematicians in The Calculus. You see that is the real problem. The constructivist/discovery methods take much longer than direct instruction to teach the material. That is why kids early in their K-12 careers do better than they do in the middle and high school grades. In the discovery process it is too easy for students to “discover the wrong principle” which undermines the foundation they need in the future.
The result? Kids who are exposed to this fraud reach middle and high school totally unprepared for algebra and beyond. Then the middle and high school teachers have to try to make up years of lost time and teach the new material too. No wonder the math performance of high school students is so poor. Oh, there are exceptions who do get it because their parents taught them or provided tutors to fill the void. Most students however, don’t have that advantage and end up turned off and incompetent in math. This limits their future possibilities greatly and since it affects so many students it affects the whole nation’s competitiveness.
The first thing you must realize is that the vast majority of educators do not understand subject matter. You pick the subject and they haven’t been exposed to it in more than a highly diffuse and superficial way. Yet, they have no problem posturing as experts to enable them to ignore the truth that is offered by those who do understand subject matter. Rita Kramer described the problem well in her bestselling book, Ed School Follies. “The people who become ‘educators’ and who run our school systems usually have degrees in education, psychology, social sciences, public administration; they are not people who have studied, know, and love literature, history, science, or philosophy. Our ‘educators’ are not educated. They do not love learning. Naturally enough, they think of the past as dead because it has never been alive to them. And they will not bring it alive for their pupils.”
In math this has led to “holding the fort” against all appeals for objective review of the harm being done by the ridiculous approach to teaching math. The same argument can apply to literacy and other curriculum areas. The way the educators have been able to turn away the constructive criticism is to employ “outside” experts to approve their approach. Thus, they hire outside, education school educated consultants to review their program and offer ideas on making it better.
Of course, the public who hears of what sounds a reasonable approach do not understand that the “outside experts” come from the same weak, diffuse and superficial training as the school officials who hire them for the review. Do not be fooled, if a person has a doctorate or masters in education they are not educated. Arthur Levine in his research into education schools concluded that they “confer masters on those who display anything but mastery and doctorates in name only.” While some educators have learned subjects in other studies or on their own, most have not. In general, while well meaning, these people have nothing of value to add to improving our kids’ education and it is time that the public became aware of it. We must demand positive action to face the reality of the poor educator performance and poor understanding of what works that is hurting our kids.
Thursday, May 20, 2010
NAEP vs. TIMSS, 8th grade Math
Translating NAEP to TIMSS % Proficient or better
Singapore 73
S. Korea 65
Hong Kong 64
Japan & Chinese Taipei 61
Belgium (Flemish) 51
Netherlands 41
Hungary, Slovak Rep., Slovenia, Canada,
Russia, Australia 39 to 35
Czech Rep., Malaysia, Bulgaria, Finland 32 to 29
United States 27
Data taken from Linking NAEP Achievement Levels to TIMSS, American Institutes for Research (2007)
NAEP is our National Assessment of Educational Progress, i.e. our national test. In general the NAEP standards are consistently higher than those of the individual states who chose to reduce their standards to make complying with the No Child Left Behind requirement that all students be proficient or better by 2014 easier. That is, the states took the low road. If you want your performance to look better than it is, choose a short ruler to measure it.
TIMSS is The International Math and Science Study. The chart above lists only the countries whose kids scored better than ours in math for 8th graders. I chose the 8th grade level because it is a pivot point. That is, at fourth grade we do a little better and at high school level we do worse.
Most American mainline schools’ approach to teaching math is to use constructivist or discovery methods as embodied in EveryDay Math, for example. This approach does not build the foundational math skills during the elementary years required for success in algebra and higher math. Thus, as our kids progress through the grades they do worse and worse which is reinforced by TIMSS and other testing. This approach is definitely not preparing our kids to compete in the rising global meritocracy for the well paying knowledge-based jobs. This approach does make it easier for the elementary teachers who do not have adequate math knowledge to teach the foundational math skills required to be successful.It casts them in a facilitator role instead of a teacher role.
Research such as that of Liping Ma which compared American and Chinese elementary math teachers found the American teachers although “more educated” than their Chinese counterparts did not have the math understanding needed. This is no surprise since education schools prioritize pedagogy to the virtual exclusion of content training in their programs.
Our educators approach to math is what I call the Platte River Syndrome. That is the curriculum is a mile wide and an inch deep. This diffuse approach wastes lots of time that could and should be spent on building a strong foundation of hierarchical skills which is how math works.
A quote from the Singapore Ministry of Education is instructive, from their Nurturing Every Child, booklet (2006), “Teach Less, Learn More--Syllabuses will be trimmed without diluting students’ preparedness for higher education. This will free up time for our students to focus on core knowledge and skills.” You see in the chart above the validity of the Singapore approach and the failure of our approach.
One last comment, E.D. Hirsch, the stimulus for the Massachusetts Miracle (legislature required the ditching of constructivist curricula and achievement soared), says that educators are so brainwashed in their technically wrong beliefs that they will only change if forced to from the outside. That is, parents need to demand change and expect their political representatives to force it to happen. This is an area where negotiation with educators only delays the lifeline the kids so desperately need. Oh, the final nail in the coffin is that the constructivist curricula hurt the gap kids (minority and economically disadvantaged) the most.
Singapore 73
S. Korea 65
Hong Kong 64
Japan & Chinese Taipei 61
Belgium (Flemish) 51
Netherlands 41
Hungary, Slovak Rep., Slovenia, Canada,
Russia, Australia 39 to 35
Czech Rep., Malaysia, Bulgaria, Finland 32 to 29
United States 27
Data taken from Linking NAEP Achievement Levels to TIMSS, American Institutes for Research (2007)
NAEP is our National Assessment of Educational Progress, i.e. our national test. In general the NAEP standards are consistently higher than those of the individual states who chose to reduce their standards to make complying with the No Child Left Behind requirement that all students be proficient or better by 2014 easier. That is, the states took the low road. If you want your performance to look better than it is, choose a short ruler to measure it.
TIMSS is The International Math and Science Study. The chart above lists only the countries whose kids scored better than ours in math for 8th graders. I chose the 8th grade level because it is a pivot point. That is, at fourth grade we do a little better and at high school level we do worse.
Most American mainline schools’ approach to teaching math is to use constructivist or discovery methods as embodied in EveryDay Math, for example. This approach does not build the foundational math skills during the elementary years required for success in algebra and higher math. Thus, as our kids progress through the grades they do worse and worse which is reinforced by TIMSS and other testing. This approach is definitely not preparing our kids to compete in the rising global meritocracy for the well paying knowledge-based jobs. This approach does make it easier for the elementary teachers who do not have adequate math knowledge to teach the foundational math skills required to be successful.It casts them in a facilitator role instead of a teacher role.
Research such as that of Liping Ma which compared American and Chinese elementary math teachers found the American teachers although “more educated” than their Chinese counterparts did not have the math understanding needed. This is no surprise since education schools prioritize pedagogy to the virtual exclusion of content training in their programs.
Our educators approach to math is what I call the Platte River Syndrome. That is the curriculum is a mile wide and an inch deep. This diffuse approach wastes lots of time that could and should be spent on building a strong foundation of hierarchical skills which is how math works.
A quote from the Singapore Ministry of Education is instructive, from their Nurturing Every Child, booklet (2006), “Teach Less, Learn More--Syllabuses will be trimmed without diluting students’ preparedness for higher education. This will free up time for our students to focus on core knowledge and skills.” You see in the chart above the validity of the Singapore approach and the failure of our approach.
One last comment, E.D. Hirsch, the stimulus for the Massachusetts Miracle (legislature required the ditching of constructivist curricula and achievement soared), says that educators are so brainwashed in their technically wrong beliefs that they will only change if forced to from the outside. That is, parents need to demand change and expect their political representatives to force it to happen. This is an area where negotiation with educators only delays the lifeline the kids so desperately need. Oh, the final nail in the coffin is that the constructivist curricula hurt the gap kids (minority and economically disadvantaged) the most.
Friday, May 14, 2010
What I want to be when I grow up.
I want to grow up to be a robot.
Educators and parents please train me to be compliant to the will of the experts who run our country. Please train me to be gullible so that I will believe anything they say even if untrue. Please train me to be ignorant of the lessons of history. Please train me to be unable to think, analyze and decide on my own. Please make sure that my literacy, math, science and history knowledge are low enough that I don’t question what leaders say. Please train me to be happy with less and less personal responsibility and freedom.
Please say you care about me even though you don’t. Please take care of my health until my usefulness diminishes to the point where further maintenance is in your expert opinion too expensive. Please feed me and protect me from the truth because I am not able to handle it. Please make sure my schools do not train me in the subject knowledge required to be able to understand what is going on. I don’t want to know, it gives me a headache. Please keep the bad news from me for as long as possible, I don’t want to hear it.
And most of all please take care of me always.
I want to grow up to be an American
Educators and parents please reinstate the education philosophy that culminated in the American Common School movement that made American education the envy of the world from the 1830s through the 1950s. Please eliminate the “how to” approach which has been a miserable failure and re-establish the rigorous content-rich curricula, taught by subject knowledgeable teachers approach, of the American Common Schools.
Please teach me through competitive practice that I can build on my failures to perform better over time. Help me gain the mental toughness and “can do” spirit needed to effectively meet the growing global competition for good, well paid jobs. Please expect me to fully appreciate America’s history objectively. Help me to appreciate the struggles and the profound luck we had as a people to be led at our founding by incredibly clear-thinking and committed leaders.
Please help me to embrace high standards of personal performance in all things. Help me to realize that there is no free lunch and if it is to be, it is up to me. Help me to appreciate personal responsibility and personal freedom as guaranteed in the U. S. Constitution.
Most of all teach me to continually question and analyze the pronouncements of our leaders to discern the underlying truth. Teach me enough that I can make my own assessments regarding the latest claim of those who want to take more control of our lives by creating a pseudo-crisis.
Adults please lead by example modeling the ability to set high standards for yourselves.
Teach me to be an American.
Educators and parents please train me to be compliant to the will of the experts who run our country. Please train me to be gullible so that I will believe anything they say even if untrue. Please train me to be ignorant of the lessons of history. Please train me to be unable to think, analyze and decide on my own. Please make sure that my literacy, math, science and history knowledge are low enough that I don’t question what leaders say. Please train me to be happy with less and less personal responsibility and freedom.
Please say you care about me even though you don’t. Please take care of my health until my usefulness diminishes to the point where further maintenance is in your expert opinion too expensive. Please feed me and protect me from the truth because I am not able to handle it. Please make sure my schools do not train me in the subject knowledge required to be able to understand what is going on. I don’t want to know, it gives me a headache. Please keep the bad news from me for as long as possible, I don’t want to hear it.
And most of all please take care of me always.
I want to grow up to be an American
Educators and parents please reinstate the education philosophy that culminated in the American Common School movement that made American education the envy of the world from the 1830s through the 1950s. Please eliminate the “how to” approach which has been a miserable failure and re-establish the rigorous content-rich curricula, taught by subject knowledgeable teachers approach, of the American Common Schools.
Please teach me through competitive practice that I can build on my failures to perform better over time. Help me gain the mental toughness and “can do” spirit needed to effectively meet the growing global competition for good, well paid jobs. Please expect me to fully appreciate America’s history objectively. Help me to appreciate the struggles and the profound luck we had as a people to be led at our founding by incredibly clear-thinking and committed leaders.
Please help me to embrace high standards of personal performance in all things. Help me to realize that there is no free lunch and if it is to be, it is up to me. Help me to appreciate personal responsibility and personal freedom as guaranteed in the U. S. Constitution.
Most of all teach me to continually question and analyze the pronouncements of our leaders to discern the underlying truth. Teach me enough that I can make my own assessments regarding the latest claim of those who want to take more control of our lives by creating a pseudo-crisis.
Adults please lead by example modeling the ability to set high standards for yourselves.
Teach me to be an American.
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