Steve Jobs

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

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

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

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

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

Courageous Education Leaders = Oxymoron

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 • Report often to stakeholders about progress being made.

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

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

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

The Dirty Little Secret

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Koreans Shudder at No School on Saturday

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

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

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

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

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

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

History NAEP—On the Progressive Path

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Independence Day Thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Listing some of the biggest anchors preventing the needed reforms –

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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