You are probably at least a bit familiar with the conflict between Galileo and the Roman Church over the earth-centered (geocentric) view then believed and Galileo’s sun-centered (heliocentric) theory based on his scientific observations. This story is one of an entrenched power structure that defends its beliefs in spite of scientific proof of their inadequacy. In fact, it is the story of trying to destroy those who held opposing views.
The first attack on Galileo came when clerics denounced him to the Roman Inquisition early in 1615. Although he was cleared of any offence at that time, the Catholic Church nevertheless condemned heliocentrism as "false and contrary to Scripture." Galileo was warned to abandon his support for it—which he promised to do. [This could be termed a “live to fight another day” approach] When he later defended his views in his most famous work, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, published in 1632, he was tried by the Inquisition, found "vehemently suspect of heresy," forced to recant, and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. Also, the publication of any of his writings past or future was forbidden. Although he tried to remain loyal to the Catholic Church, his adherence to scientific experimental results, and their objective interpretation, led to a rejection of assertions contrary to observation, in matters of science.
You might well think that you are glad you live in a world where such things can no longer occur. You would be wrong. Oh, certainly things are not so openly biased but going against an entrenched and fixed in their beliefs monolith is not easier or safer today than it was in Galileo’s time. Instead of Inquisitions new methods are now employed to prevent the truth from being recognized and acted upon.
• The first set of techniques is to go on their way reinforcing their false beliefs while actively ignoring the truth as presented by “outsiders.”
• The second technique is to create a façade of expertise. This false (in the face of the evidence) posturing as the experts is very effective especially if they are careful to not react defensively which might give the outsiders’ arguments credibility.
• To reinforce their expert reputations they give themselves false trappings; including certificates of expertise (diplomas) and continuing education in the false doctrine from other “departments” of the monolith.
• Any problems with performance related to using the false but mainline approaches are blamed on other factors and people that the insiders do not control. This, “We confess it is their fault” approach is incredibly effective to the majority of the credulous populace.
• They are also adept at using their leverage on politicians to preserve their power to prevent concerns over their false beliefs.
Yes, I am building an analogue to our education system. The similarities are robust.
Acting on Reality in Times of Tight Education Budgets, An Opportunity and a Responsibility
Tight budgets are a perfect opportunity to assess the validity of underlying assumptions within our education system. The board deliberations of a large local district are instructive as to the logical traps that tend to prevent facing reality and taking appropriate actions. To date in their deliberations the board has followed the guidance of the “status quo at all costs” administration recommendations. One example will make the point. Two well meaning and kid advocate board members voted against cutting literacy and math programs for K-8. That is akin to voting to preserve the dosage of intellectual arsenic to those kids. You see, they made the assumption that the programs were worthwhile and having a positive impact. But foundationally both the literacy and math curricula are based on scientifically unsound beliefs. While our competitor nations and even the best states (ex. Massachusetts) have embraced curricula that work and pass scientific scrutiny. They feel no need at all to worship false education beliefs especially when it would harm their kids. Thus the answer is not preserving the added time and effort to inflict the harmful curricula on the kids. The answer is to install curricula that actually work and make sure they are well taught.
This tight budget period is a perfect opportunity to put on your netting and “kick the hornet’s nest” to excise the false educational beliefs from our education organizations. Administrators who cannot admit the error of their ways are perfect candidates for not having their contracts renewed. Don’t feel sorry for them. The choice is eliminating their false beliefs or ignoring the harm they are doing year after year to the kids. That is an easy decision to make. That would reduce the negative drag on performance more than any of the current alternatives that are based on a false foundation of wrong beliefs.
This is an opportunity that must be taken. It will mean taking positions on performance and substance of the education process that are different, but much more effective, than those held by the governmental education bureaucracies, the education schools, the administrators, etc. That is, there is no rule against having higher standards than the very weak standards at the state and national level. There is also no rule against using curricula that are scientifically sound and work. If we care about the kids let our actions show it. Words and platitudes are not enough.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Comments on PWR (Post Secondary and Workforce Readiness)
Following is my response to the CDE request for feedback on their PWR initiative.
Some of this is repetitive of previous posts but including that info gives you the full content sent to the CDE.
After reading minutes and looking at PowerPoint presentations on the CDE website regarding new standards, assessment and how that relates to success in post secondary and career, I find that nothing ever really changes.
When you look at the responses to the public surveys sponsored by CDE you find that Business people respond very little while educators make up the vast majority of respondents. Is that because the non-education insider public is satisfied to allow the “education experts” to handle the important education decisions regarding how our kids are prepared for life after their K-12 school experience? My answer is that they don’t respond to the surveys, etc. because experience has proven to them that it is a waste of their time. That is, the educators go through the motions asking for public input but don’t really want to hear it and for sure don’t value it enough to really take it to heart.
The education establishment has a vested self-interest in maintaining control of education decisions. They want to protect the cushy status quo and avoid any real change. In every cycle of this “pseudo reform” process you see lots of effort expended but it is for the most part a waste of valuable resources and hence results in the stunting of our kids’ future prospects. This prioritization of the comfort of the adults in education at the expense of the kids is all too firmly entrenched. In my education research I spoke to many superintendents in 6 states. I heard more than once when I questioned them about how the kids were being so poorly served that, “you don’t understand, education is run to benefit the adults who work here, not the kids.”
What I would do differently?
• Examine the underlying assumptions that are not working—educators find it easy to assume that the underlying assumptions they have are valid and only refining how they implement them is needed. As the unchanging (in any major way that is required) results show the current approaches aren’t working. Our kids can’t compete with the best performers in the world let alone even the best in America. Colorado has chosen to take the low (and easy) road in standards and achievement test levels with NCLB definitions of proficient that are at the very low end of the states in that regard. This is an indication of the state education leaderships’ low opinion of the competence of Colorado educators. Setting low expectations begets low results.
• Stop wasteful deeper and deeper focus on minutiae—this has caused a total lack of perspective. This is the story of blind men and the elephant. They each conclude because they are feeling a different appendage of the elephant that it is something completely different than it really is. Stop looking through the microscopes (which might be appropriate if you knew what the whole beast looked like) and zoom out to a full perspective including how our best competitor nations do things. Go for foundational skills well understood-- Singapore doesn’t do more. They do less – less, that is, of the time-wasters that clutter the American “mile wide, inch deep” math curriculum. A world-class curriculum like Singapore’s focuses on math skills that prepare children for algebra and beyond. It builds mastery of those skills step by step, and incorporates these skills into more and more complex problems. 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” More topics poorly covered does not help except as something for educators to brag that they are teaching (they aren’t at least at more depth than spouting the title).
• Heed the advice of E.D. Hirsch who calls the current situation a “perfect storm” of Bad Educational Ideas. “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 and especially about reading comprehension. Their well-intentioned yet mistaken views are the significant reason (more than other constantly blamed factors, even poverty) that many of our children are not attaining reading proficiency, thus crippling their later schooling. The dominant ideas in American education are virtually unchallenged within the educational community. American education expertise (which is not the same as educational expertise in nations that perform better than we do) has a monolithic character in which dissent is stifled. Principles that constitute a kind of theology are drilled into prospective teachers like a catechism. The only way to improve scores in reading comprehension and to narrow the reading gap between groups is to systematically provide children with the wide-ranging, specific background knowledge they need to comprehend what they read.” Massachusetts got rid of the harmful and never effective “how-to” based approach (the Hirsch stimulated Massachusetts Miracle) and replaced it with a content rich approach and saw their achievement scores soar. Of course, in Massachusetts the educators didn’t lead the charge, it was required by the legislature.
• From David Klein’s A Brief History of American K-12 Mathematics Education in the 20th Century For example, William Heard Kilpatrick, professor at Columbia Teachers College (early twentieth century), reflecting mainstream views of progressive education, rejected the notion that the study of mathematics contributed to mental discipline. His view was that subjects should be taught to students based on their direct practical value, or if students independently wanted to learn those subjects. This point of view toward education comported well with the pedagogical methods endorsed by progressive education. Limiting education primarily to utilitarian skills sharply limited academic content, and this helped to justify the slow pace of student centered, discovery learning, the centerpiece of progressivism.
Thus, while our educators TALK about the need for critical thinking skills, they don’t provide the knowledge base required to provide context to any attempt at critical thinking.
In conclusion, until our education establishment faces the truth of what works as opposed to the false beliefs they were taught in education school by education faculty more interested in “if it isn’t true, it ought to be” approaches, the kids will continue to be poorly served. They will become less and less prepared to compete in the increasingly meritocratic, flat world.
A final quote from Norm Augustine, former CEO of Lockheed Martin and an engineering degree holder from his Is America Falling Off of the Flat Earth?
"It seems that the longer our children are exposed to our K-12 education system, the worse they do. If we wish to be average by global standards, we will need to improve a great deal. Can anyone imagine a football coach at any American high school greeting his players on the first day of fall practice by saying, 'This year let’s get out there and try to be average for the Gipper!'?
It can, of course, be argued that comparing averages and medians tells only part of the story, as indeed is often the case. But in this instance, further parsing of the data generally reveals that the United States has a disproportionately small share of the highest performers and a disproportionately large share of the lowest performers. Although this is widely overlooked, it is not simply the poorer-performing students who are falling through the gaping cracks of our educational system but also the highest performers who—much to the nation’s detriment—are frequently being forced to learn in an environment approaching the lowest common denominator.
The problem of low expectations has not been confined to California. Alabama, for example, reported that in 2005, 83% of its fourth-graders ranked as “proficient” on its state test of academic achievement. But in the most widely accepted national test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, only 22% of Alabama’s fourth-graders scored at or above the proficient level. In truth, neither of the measures matters much. What counts today is how the children of Alabama rank with the children of Singapore, Moscow, Hong Kong, Delhi, Beijing, and Berlin. There is little consolation in being first among losers."
Thus, the whole PWR endeavor coupled to new standards and new assessments is only an exercise in going along in the same rut and avoiding the obvious truth of our education failures.
Some of this is repetitive of previous posts but including that info gives you the full content sent to the CDE.
After reading minutes and looking at PowerPoint presentations on the CDE website regarding new standards, assessment and how that relates to success in post secondary and career, I find that nothing ever really changes.
When you look at the responses to the public surveys sponsored by CDE you find that Business people respond very little while educators make up the vast majority of respondents. Is that because the non-education insider public is satisfied to allow the “education experts” to handle the important education decisions regarding how our kids are prepared for life after their K-12 school experience? My answer is that they don’t respond to the surveys, etc. because experience has proven to them that it is a waste of their time. That is, the educators go through the motions asking for public input but don’t really want to hear it and for sure don’t value it enough to really take it to heart.
The education establishment has a vested self-interest in maintaining control of education decisions. They want to protect the cushy status quo and avoid any real change. In every cycle of this “pseudo reform” process you see lots of effort expended but it is for the most part a waste of valuable resources and hence results in the stunting of our kids’ future prospects. This prioritization of the comfort of the adults in education at the expense of the kids is all too firmly entrenched. In my education research I spoke to many superintendents in 6 states. I heard more than once when I questioned them about how the kids were being so poorly served that, “you don’t understand, education is run to benefit the adults who work here, not the kids.”
What I would do differently?
• Examine the underlying assumptions that are not working—educators find it easy to assume that the underlying assumptions they have are valid and only refining how they implement them is needed. As the unchanging (in any major way that is required) results show the current approaches aren’t working. Our kids can’t compete with the best performers in the world let alone even the best in America. Colorado has chosen to take the low (and easy) road in standards and achievement test levels with NCLB definitions of proficient that are at the very low end of the states in that regard. This is an indication of the state education leaderships’ low opinion of the competence of Colorado educators. Setting low expectations begets low results.
• Stop wasteful deeper and deeper focus on minutiae—this has caused a total lack of perspective. This is the story of blind men and the elephant. They each conclude because they are feeling a different appendage of the elephant that it is something completely different than it really is. Stop looking through the microscopes (which might be appropriate if you knew what the whole beast looked like) and zoom out to a full perspective including how our best competitor nations do things. Go for foundational skills well understood-- Singapore doesn’t do more. They do less – less, that is, of the time-wasters that clutter the American “mile wide, inch deep” math curriculum. A world-class curriculum like Singapore’s focuses on math skills that prepare children for algebra and beyond. It builds mastery of those skills step by step, and incorporates these skills into more and more complex problems. 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” More topics poorly covered does not help except as something for educators to brag that they are teaching (they aren’t at least at more depth than spouting the title).
• Heed the advice of E.D. Hirsch who calls the current situation a “perfect storm” of Bad Educational Ideas. “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 and especially about reading comprehension. Their well-intentioned yet mistaken views are the significant reason (more than other constantly blamed factors, even poverty) that many of our children are not attaining reading proficiency, thus crippling their later schooling. The dominant ideas in American education are virtually unchallenged within the educational community. American education expertise (which is not the same as educational expertise in nations that perform better than we do) has a monolithic character in which dissent is stifled. Principles that constitute a kind of theology are drilled into prospective teachers like a catechism. The only way to improve scores in reading comprehension and to narrow the reading gap between groups is to systematically provide children with the wide-ranging, specific background knowledge they need to comprehend what they read.” Massachusetts got rid of the harmful and never effective “how-to” based approach (the Hirsch stimulated Massachusetts Miracle) and replaced it with a content rich approach and saw their achievement scores soar. Of course, in Massachusetts the educators didn’t lead the charge, it was required by the legislature.
• From David Klein’s A Brief History of American K-12 Mathematics Education in the 20th Century For example, William Heard Kilpatrick, professor at Columbia Teachers College (early twentieth century), reflecting mainstream views of progressive education, rejected the notion that the study of mathematics contributed to mental discipline. His view was that subjects should be taught to students based on their direct practical value, or if students independently wanted to learn those subjects. This point of view toward education comported well with the pedagogical methods endorsed by progressive education. Limiting education primarily to utilitarian skills sharply limited academic content, and this helped to justify the slow pace of student centered, discovery learning, the centerpiece of progressivism.
Thus, while our educators TALK about the need for critical thinking skills, they don’t provide the knowledge base required to provide context to any attempt at critical thinking.
In conclusion, until our education establishment faces the truth of what works as opposed to the false beliefs they were taught in education school by education faculty more interested in “if it isn’t true, it ought to be” approaches, the kids will continue to be poorly served. They will become less and less prepared to compete in the increasingly meritocratic, flat world.
A final quote from Norm Augustine, former CEO of Lockheed Martin and an engineering degree holder from his Is America Falling Off of the Flat Earth?
"It seems that the longer our children are exposed to our K-12 education system, the worse they do. If we wish to be average by global standards, we will need to improve a great deal. Can anyone imagine a football coach at any American high school greeting his players on the first day of fall practice by saying, 'This year let’s get out there and try to be average for the Gipper!'?
It can, of course, be argued that comparing averages and medians tells only part of the story, as indeed is often the case. But in this instance, further parsing of the data generally reveals that the United States has a disproportionately small share of the highest performers and a disproportionately large share of the lowest performers. Although this is widely overlooked, it is not simply the poorer-performing students who are falling through the gaping cracks of our educational system but also the highest performers who—much to the nation’s detriment—are frequently being forced to learn in an environment approaching the lowest common denominator.
The problem of low expectations has not been confined to California. Alabama, for example, reported that in 2005, 83% of its fourth-graders ranked as “proficient” on its state test of academic achievement. But in the most widely accepted national test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, only 22% of Alabama’s fourth-graders scored at or above the proficient level. In truth, neither of the measures matters much. What counts today is how the children of Alabama rank with the children of Singapore, Moscow, Hong Kong, Delhi, Beijing, and Berlin. There is little consolation in being first among losers."
Thus, the whole PWR endeavor coupled to new standards and new assessments is only an exercise in going along in the same rut and avoiding the obvious truth of our education failures.
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Why Do We Have a Borg Education System
Most of you are familiar with the Borg from Star Trek. Their goal is to assimilate everyone into the Collective or destroy them. They are all directed by a central hive. In many ways our education system is modeled on the same principles. To understand what has happened to education in America you need to look at some history.
The French Revolution, the first fascist revolution, was characterized by an effort based on Rousseau’s assertion that they should turn politics into a religion and that the people needed to be led by experts who told them what to do based on the experts view of the common good. Rousseau’s concept was that “the people” is sublime whereas “the person” is weak or at any rate, expendable. Rousseau said that individuals who live in accordance with the general will are virtuous. If an individual could not be forced to conform, they would be eliminated.
The philosophies of Jean Jacques Rousseau are foundational to many of the beliefs of the progressive movement in America that started in the early twentieth century. John Dewey used Rousseau’s philosophies in forming his progressive education initiatives. Rousseau wanted to take children away from parents and raise them in state-owned boarding schools. Note today that the liberal government believes it is vital to get children into government controlled pre-school. This is a stark contrast to Finland (a top performer on international achievement tests where kids start school at age 7). Dewey embraced the idea of getting children into school as early as possible before they could learn “harmful,” individualistic views from their parents.
The Progressive’s goal with education was and is to “socialize” the children (brainwash them) to be credulous “followers” of the liberal elite experts who would “guide the society to the collectivist good.” There’s is definitely not an “all men created equal with individual liberty and responsibility” approach.
For example, William Heard Kilpatrick, professor at Columbia Teachers College (early twentieth century), reflecting mainstream views of progressive education, rejected the notion that the study of mathematics contributed to mental discipline. His view was that subjects should be taught to students based on their direct practical value, or if students independently wanted to learn those subjects. This point of view toward education comported well with the pedagogical methods endorsed by progressive education. Limiting education primarily to utilitarian skills sharply limited academic content, and this helped to justify the slow pace of student centered, discovery learning, the centerpiece of progressivism. Kilpatrick proposed that the study of algebra and geometry in high school be discontinued “except as an intellectual luxury.” According to Kilpatrick, mathematics is “harmful rather than helpful to the kind of thinking necessary for ordinary living.” In an address before the student body at the University of Florida, Kilpatrick lectured, "We have in the past taught algebra and geometry to too many, not too few. Thus, while our educators TALK about the need for critical thinking skills, they don’t provide the knowledge base required to provide context to any attempt at critical thinking.
The Progressives are nothing if not tenacious. They have remained true to these principles to this day and by the mid-1950s they had attained effective total control of education school training of our educators. This has allowed the replacement of content-based curricula with content-free, how-to, skills-based curricula that are of the slow paced, student centered, discovery learning type. The education schools have brainwashed their graduates so successfully that even though the how-to curricula do not stand scientific scrutiny, they will not acknowledge it. E.D. Hirsh in his book “The Knowledge Deficit” calls scientific inadequacy a minor inconvenience to educators today. The ed schools have, also because their training essentially does not include any rigorous training in the subjects to be taught, made it very difficult to go back to the content rich curricula that worked well, because to do so would require “retreading” the current teacher force with subject knowledge. Our best global competitors all emphasize subject knowledge and their kids are scoring much better than ours on international achievement testing. We are at or near the top of the list in the amount spent per child for education but that is only enriching educators. It doesn’t result in better outcomes for our children.
The main question at hand is can we break out of this lack of competitiveness driven death spiral to lower and lower standards of living by “retooling” our education system to provide competitive skills to our children? Or will we keep ignoring the problem until we are past the point of no salvage and eventually have to start over from a much lower base of economic activity? Yes, it is that serious.
The French Revolution, the first fascist revolution, was characterized by an effort based on Rousseau’s assertion that they should turn politics into a religion and that the people needed to be led by experts who told them what to do based on the experts view of the common good. Rousseau’s concept was that “the people” is sublime whereas “the person” is weak or at any rate, expendable. Rousseau said that individuals who live in accordance with the general will are virtuous. If an individual could not be forced to conform, they would be eliminated.
The philosophies of Jean Jacques Rousseau are foundational to many of the beliefs of the progressive movement in America that started in the early twentieth century. John Dewey used Rousseau’s philosophies in forming his progressive education initiatives. Rousseau wanted to take children away from parents and raise them in state-owned boarding schools. Note today that the liberal government believes it is vital to get children into government controlled pre-school. This is a stark contrast to Finland (a top performer on international achievement tests where kids start school at age 7). Dewey embraced the idea of getting children into school as early as possible before they could learn “harmful,” individualistic views from their parents.
The Progressive’s goal with education was and is to “socialize” the children (brainwash them) to be credulous “followers” of the liberal elite experts who would “guide the society to the collectivist good.” There’s is definitely not an “all men created equal with individual liberty and responsibility” approach.
For example, William Heard Kilpatrick, professor at Columbia Teachers College (early twentieth century), reflecting mainstream views of progressive education, rejected the notion that the study of mathematics contributed to mental discipline. His view was that subjects should be taught to students based on their direct practical value, or if students independently wanted to learn those subjects. This point of view toward education comported well with the pedagogical methods endorsed by progressive education. Limiting education primarily to utilitarian skills sharply limited academic content, and this helped to justify the slow pace of student centered, discovery learning, the centerpiece of progressivism. Kilpatrick proposed that the study of algebra and geometry in high school be discontinued “except as an intellectual luxury.” According to Kilpatrick, mathematics is “harmful rather than helpful to the kind of thinking necessary for ordinary living.” In an address before the student body at the University of Florida, Kilpatrick lectured, "We have in the past taught algebra and geometry to too many, not too few. Thus, while our educators TALK about the need for critical thinking skills, they don’t provide the knowledge base required to provide context to any attempt at critical thinking.
The Progressives are nothing if not tenacious. They have remained true to these principles to this day and by the mid-1950s they had attained effective total control of education school training of our educators. This has allowed the replacement of content-based curricula with content-free, how-to, skills-based curricula that are of the slow paced, student centered, discovery learning type. The education schools have brainwashed their graduates so successfully that even though the how-to curricula do not stand scientific scrutiny, they will not acknowledge it. E.D. Hirsh in his book “The Knowledge Deficit” calls scientific inadequacy a minor inconvenience to educators today. The ed schools have, also because their training essentially does not include any rigorous training in the subjects to be taught, made it very difficult to go back to the content rich curricula that worked well, because to do so would require “retreading” the current teacher force with subject knowledge. Our best global competitors all emphasize subject knowledge and their kids are scoring much better than ours on international achievement testing. We are at or near the top of the list in the amount spent per child for education but that is only enriching educators. It doesn’t result in better outcomes for our children.
The main question at hand is can we break out of this lack of competitiveness driven death spiral to lower and lower standards of living by “retooling” our education system to provide competitive skills to our children? Or will we keep ignoring the problem until we are past the point of no salvage and eventually have to start over from a much lower base of economic activity? Yes, it is that serious.
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Ignore the Slowing Flywheel at Your Peril
Reported in a Financial Newsletter, January 28, 2010
“Less often discussed is China’s rapidly growing middle class. Estimates are that as many as 25% of Chinese -- more people than the entire U.S. population -- fall into this category now, with a doubling possible within the next decade. While most dramatic in China, it is also under way in India, Brazil and elsewhere…
In only 10 years, China has gone from being the world’s 20th largest oil consumer to No. 2, behind the United States, as a result of its accelerating shift from the bicycle to the car.
Quotes from The World is Flat by Tom Friedman
It is this triple convergence—of new players, on a new playing field, developing new processes and habits for horizontal collaboration—that I believe is the most important force shaping global economics and politics in the early twenty-first century. Giving so many people access to all these tools of collaboration, along with the ability through search engines and the Web to access billions of pages of raw information, ensures that the scale of the global community that is soon going to be able to participate in all sorts of discovery and innovation is something the world had simply never seen before.
Said Barrett [Intel CEO], “You don’t bring three billion people into the world economy overnight without huge consequences, especially from three societies [like India, China, and Russia] with rich educational heritages.”
…once the world has been flattened and new forms of collaboration made available to more and more people, the winners will be those who learn the habits, processes, and skills most quickly—and there is simply nothing that guarantees it will be Americans or Western Europeans permanently leading the way.
[W]e Americans, individually and collectively, have not been doing all these things that we should be doing and [ignoring] what will happen down the road if we don’t change course.
The assumption that because America’s economy has dominated the world for more than a century, it will and must always be that way is as dangerous an illusion today as the illusion that America would always dominate in science and technology was back in 1950. But this is not going to be easy. Getting our society up to speed for a flat world is going to be extremely pain[ful]. We are going to have to start doing a lot of things differently.
The sense of entitlement, the sense that because we once dominated global commerce and geopolitics—and Olympic basketball—we always will, the sense that delayed gratification is a punishment worse than a spanking, the sense that our kids have to be swaddled in cotton wool so that nothing bad or disappointing or stressful ever happens to them at school is quite simply, a growing cancer on American society. And if we don’t start to reverse it, our kids are going to be in for a huge and socially disruptive shock from the flat world.
I would simply add: The crisis is already here. It is just playing out in slow motion. The flattening world is moving ahead apace, and barring war or some catastrophic terrorist event, nothing is going to stop it. But what can happen is a decline in our standard of living, if more Americans are not empowered and educated to participate in a world where all the knowledge centers are being connected. “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.”
...the first thing they need to do is engage in some brutally honest introspection. With China and the other nine flatteners coming on strong, no country today can afford to be anything less than brutally honest with itself.
The Point
America is becoming less and less competitive. There are many reasons but as Friedman in “The World is Flat” concludes, our poorly performing education system is the biggest problem we face. He makes the point well that our standard of living is in danger of a permanent reduction if we don’t start embracing the truth and begin immediately to change the way we educate our kids.
This shouldn’t be a surprise as the warnings have been coming for many decades now.
Just to revisit a few along the way.
• Over a third of a century ago, Robert Kennedy called the achievement gap between minority and disadvantaged kids a stain on our national honor. In the meantime we have spent billions on finding a solution but the problem is demonstrably worse now than when RFK made his observation.
• In 1983, the A Nation at Risk report bemoaned a rising tide of mediocrity and said that if a foreign power had imposed our education system on us we would consider it an act of war.
• In the 2007 report Tough Choices or Tough Times they point out, “While our international counterparts are increasingly getting more education, their young people are getting a better education as well. And “American students and young adults place anywhere from the middle to the bottom of the pack in all three continuing comparative studies of achievement in mathematics, science, and general literacy in the advanced industrial nations.”
Thus, the flywheel that represents our economy is inexorably slowing. This has masked the problem because the changes have been slow and difficult to become concerned about in any one year but cumulatively they have already taken us from the largest creditor nation (they owe us money) to the largest debtor nation (we owe them money) in the space of only about 4 decades. We have maintained our lifestyle basically by borrowing as individuals and as a nation.
Can we continue to count on increased borrowing to make up for our lack of competitiveness? For a while it seems, but we are closer to the ultimate breakdown than to the past healthy state of our economy. Remember though if we fixed education tomorrow, that it would take 13 years to begin to see the result of students through the whole system. China has already been openly questioning our increasing deficits and ability to pay back the bond holders of whom China is one of the largest. When they and other fast growing economies reach the tipping point where they don’t need us to buy their stuff because their own populations are far larger and growing in wealth while we are shrinking, they will stop buying our government debt which will make interest rates go up dramatically. This will make the cost of financing the huge debt we have incurred unaffordable and drastic reductions in lifestyle are very likely. As Freidman and many others point out, we must face the crisis and take action. It won’t be easy and it will be harder than if we had heeded the earlier warnings over the decades but it must be done if we hope to hand our kids and grandkids a better or equal future to ours.
I have mentioned before that our public education system is a fiefdom. That is, it is characterized as defensive, delusional, insular and inbred. But most of all it is anti-change. The system has been perfected over the last 5 to 6 decades to resist change of any kind. All of the education power groups work in cooperation to maintain the status quo. In the meantime our kids are more and more often facing the fate mentioned by Friedman,
“I know a high-paying job requires one be able to produce something of high value. The economy is producing the jobs both at the high end and low end, but increasingly the high-end jobs are out of reach of many. Low education means low-paying jobs, plain and simple, and this is where more and more Americans are finding themselves. Many Americans can’t believe they aren’t qualified for high-paying jobs. I call this the ‘American Idol problem.’ If you’ve ever seen the reaction of contestants when Simon Cowell tells them they have no talent, they look at him in total disbelief. I’m just hoping someday I’m not given such a rude awakening.”
People tend to dislike change especially if it requires them to learn and do new things as a common practice in their jobs. However, we can’t ignore the problem. We must be able to start to improve our performance versus the competition or our country will fail to be a great place to live in time.
Thus, it is time for the public to become very impatient and demand positive change. Those politicians who stand in the way need to be voted out. We must search out and face the too often hidden or ignored truth of our education failures. If we do, it will be natural to be motivated to express dissatisfaction with the status quo and demand that the kids and the country be served at a much higher level by our educators.
It is past time to wake up and take action. Only the public can force the necessary reforms.
“Less often discussed is China’s rapidly growing middle class. Estimates are that as many as 25% of Chinese -- more people than the entire U.S. population -- fall into this category now, with a doubling possible within the next decade. While most dramatic in China, it is also under way in India, Brazil and elsewhere…
In only 10 years, China has gone from being the world’s 20th largest oil consumer to No. 2, behind the United States, as a result of its accelerating shift from the bicycle to the car.
Quotes from The World is Flat by Tom Friedman
It is this triple convergence—of new players, on a new playing field, developing new processes and habits for horizontal collaboration—that I believe is the most important force shaping global economics and politics in the early twenty-first century. Giving so many people access to all these tools of collaboration, along with the ability through search engines and the Web to access billions of pages of raw information, ensures that the scale of the global community that is soon going to be able to participate in all sorts of discovery and innovation is something the world had simply never seen before.
Said Barrett [Intel CEO], “You don’t bring three billion people into the world economy overnight without huge consequences, especially from three societies [like India, China, and Russia] with rich educational heritages.”
…once the world has been flattened and new forms of collaboration made available to more and more people, the winners will be those who learn the habits, processes, and skills most quickly—and there is simply nothing that guarantees it will be Americans or Western Europeans permanently leading the way.
[W]e Americans, individually and collectively, have not been doing all these things that we should be doing and [ignoring] what will happen down the road if we don’t change course.
The assumption that because America’s economy has dominated the world for more than a century, it will and must always be that way is as dangerous an illusion today as the illusion that America would always dominate in science and technology was back in 1950. But this is not going to be easy. Getting our society up to speed for a flat world is going to be extremely pain[ful]. We are going to have to start doing a lot of things differently.
The sense of entitlement, the sense that because we once dominated global commerce and geopolitics—and Olympic basketball—we always will, the sense that delayed gratification is a punishment worse than a spanking, the sense that our kids have to be swaddled in cotton wool so that nothing bad or disappointing or stressful ever happens to them at school is quite simply, a growing cancer on American society. And if we don’t start to reverse it, our kids are going to be in for a huge and socially disruptive shock from the flat world.
I would simply add: The crisis is already here. It is just playing out in slow motion. The flattening world is moving ahead apace, and barring war or some catastrophic terrorist event, nothing is going to stop it. But what can happen is a decline in our standard of living, if more Americans are not empowered and educated to participate in a world where all the knowledge centers are being connected. “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.”
...the first thing they need to do is engage in some brutally honest introspection. With China and the other nine flatteners coming on strong, no country today can afford to be anything less than brutally honest with itself.
The Point
America is becoming less and less competitive. There are many reasons but as Friedman in “The World is Flat” concludes, our poorly performing education system is the biggest problem we face. He makes the point well that our standard of living is in danger of a permanent reduction if we don’t start embracing the truth and begin immediately to change the way we educate our kids.
This shouldn’t be a surprise as the warnings have been coming for many decades now.
Just to revisit a few along the way.
• Over a third of a century ago, Robert Kennedy called the achievement gap between minority and disadvantaged kids a stain on our national honor. In the meantime we have spent billions on finding a solution but the problem is demonstrably worse now than when RFK made his observation.
• In 1983, the A Nation at Risk report bemoaned a rising tide of mediocrity and said that if a foreign power had imposed our education system on us we would consider it an act of war.
• In the 2007 report Tough Choices or Tough Times they point out, “While our international counterparts are increasingly getting more education, their young people are getting a better education as well. And “American students and young adults place anywhere from the middle to the bottom of the pack in all three continuing comparative studies of achievement in mathematics, science, and general literacy in the advanced industrial nations.”
Thus, the flywheel that represents our economy is inexorably slowing. This has masked the problem because the changes have been slow and difficult to become concerned about in any one year but cumulatively they have already taken us from the largest creditor nation (they owe us money) to the largest debtor nation (we owe them money) in the space of only about 4 decades. We have maintained our lifestyle basically by borrowing as individuals and as a nation.
Can we continue to count on increased borrowing to make up for our lack of competitiveness? For a while it seems, but we are closer to the ultimate breakdown than to the past healthy state of our economy. Remember though if we fixed education tomorrow, that it would take 13 years to begin to see the result of students through the whole system. China has already been openly questioning our increasing deficits and ability to pay back the bond holders of whom China is one of the largest. When they and other fast growing economies reach the tipping point where they don’t need us to buy their stuff because their own populations are far larger and growing in wealth while we are shrinking, they will stop buying our government debt which will make interest rates go up dramatically. This will make the cost of financing the huge debt we have incurred unaffordable and drastic reductions in lifestyle are very likely. As Freidman and many others point out, we must face the crisis and take action. It won’t be easy and it will be harder than if we had heeded the earlier warnings over the decades but it must be done if we hope to hand our kids and grandkids a better or equal future to ours.
I have mentioned before that our public education system is a fiefdom. That is, it is characterized as defensive, delusional, insular and inbred. But most of all it is anti-change. The system has been perfected over the last 5 to 6 decades to resist change of any kind. All of the education power groups work in cooperation to maintain the status quo. In the meantime our kids are more and more often facing the fate mentioned by Friedman,
“I know a high-paying job requires one be able to produce something of high value. The economy is producing the jobs both at the high end and low end, but increasingly the high-end jobs are out of reach of many. Low education means low-paying jobs, plain and simple, and this is where more and more Americans are finding themselves. Many Americans can’t believe they aren’t qualified for high-paying jobs. I call this the ‘American Idol problem.’ If you’ve ever seen the reaction of contestants when Simon Cowell tells them they have no talent, they look at him in total disbelief. I’m just hoping someday I’m not given such a rude awakening.”
People tend to dislike change especially if it requires them to learn and do new things as a common practice in their jobs. However, we can’t ignore the problem. We must be able to start to improve our performance versus the competition or our country will fail to be a great place to live in time.
Thus, it is time for the public to become very impatient and demand positive change. Those politicians who stand in the way need to be voted out. We must search out and face the too often hidden or ignored truth of our education failures. If we do, it will be natural to be motivated to express dissatisfaction with the status quo and demand that the kids and the country be served at a much higher level by our educators.
It is past time to wake up and take action. Only the public can force the necessary reforms.
Friday, January 22, 2010
Educators Irrational Fears are Harming Kids
I just completed a decades long look at the history of one of our largest school districts locally by accessing an online archive of the local paper’s articles about the district. Very interesting but sad too. The current “urgent goals” have been brought up over and over in the past but no real change in performance has occurred, at least not the “step function” improvement needed if our kids are to be served as they deserve. The clear message from the history lesson is that educators who are not expert at the foundational aspects of teaching our kids well are very expert in maintaining the status quo. E.D. Hirsch, Rita Kramer and many others have pointed out the catechism style brainwashing in education theories by the education schools that don’t stand scientific scrutiny.
Slow response and delay tactics are at the core of this change prevention strategy. If a problem gets enough attention to begin to gain some traction with outside stakeholders [board, parents, business interests, etc] the response is to acknowledge the problem to lull the complainer into a false belief something will be done to fix the problem. If the complainer maintains pressure long enough the educators appoint committees including educators and community members [carefully selected to be prone to agree with the ed party line] to study the situation. This puts a big delay into the educator response which is exactly what they are counting on. Very few complainers have the staying power to maintain pressure for long enough to get past this phase. If they do maintain pressure, the next tactic is to hire outside consultants to do an audit. These outside consultants are only outside the district but are full members of the brainwashed educator cadre. They can be counted on to bless the current operating mode as the best practice available even though they do usually mention some “throw away” things that the district should do to make things better. These bandaids never address the underlying cause, so the real problem is never solved. The board may be invoked by the complainer but since the history shows a very consistent record of the board being rubber stamp robots for the administration, esp. the superintendent, they can’t be relied on to force productive change.
The question we have to ask is “why are educators so afraid of change?” Are they afraid that they don’t have the ability to learn to do things differently? Are they afraid of the unknown? Do they care about the kids or is their own comfort a higher priority? Is their real self-esteem so low that they can’t process any input that points to poor performance on their parts? Or is the brainwashing they received from their ed school training and reinforced by all of their in service and professional activities just too hard to overcome voluntarily? I believe they do care about the kids but do not connect the dots or even question their own beliefs as the reason the kids are being harmed.
Confrontation is the only thing that can break through brainwashed mentalities. Here too, the education environment has built in defensive mechanisms. The ubiquitous use of political correctness and GroupThink prevent the sort of intellectual honesty and robust dialog required to be able to face and fix real problems. Thus, anyone pointing out the truth of the poor performance in education is by definition, “not nice” and out of line. This prevents many from complaining even though kids are being harmed badly on an ongoing basis. This also prevents the board members from expressing concerns with enough force to get through the defenses. Now, if the board members were living up to their responsibilities they would be forceful and demand real fixes to real problems. But the history I read did not indicate any examples of a majority of board members having the moxie to do the right things. Oh, there is a record of firing superintendents a few times when pressure built high enough. However, the replacements were always selected from the pool of brainwashed educators so no change was forthcoming in the future either. Thus, the status quo continues. The kids become less and less competitive in the global marketplace. The country’s economy becomes less competitive as well with the attendant unemployment problems, too much debt, etc.
Finally, the educators would say that hurting the feelings of educators is never justified. I say hurting their feelings is well justified if it is required to cause service to kids to be raised to an adequate level. That is, kids futures trump educator feelings every time.
Slow response and delay tactics are at the core of this change prevention strategy. If a problem gets enough attention to begin to gain some traction with outside stakeholders [board, parents, business interests, etc] the response is to acknowledge the problem to lull the complainer into a false belief something will be done to fix the problem. If the complainer maintains pressure long enough the educators appoint committees including educators and community members [carefully selected to be prone to agree with the ed party line] to study the situation. This puts a big delay into the educator response which is exactly what they are counting on. Very few complainers have the staying power to maintain pressure for long enough to get past this phase. If they do maintain pressure, the next tactic is to hire outside consultants to do an audit. These outside consultants are only outside the district but are full members of the brainwashed educator cadre. They can be counted on to bless the current operating mode as the best practice available even though they do usually mention some “throw away” things that the district should do to make things better. These bandaids never address the underlying cause, so the real problem is never solved. The board may be invoked by the complainer but since the history shows a very consistent record of the board being rubber stamp robots for the administration, esp. the superintendent, they can’t be relied on to force productive change.
The question we have to ask is “why are educators so afraid of change?” Are they afraid that they don’t have the ability to learn to do things differently? Are they afraid of the unknown? Do they care about the kids or is their own comfort a higher priority? Is their real self-esteem so low that they can’t process any input that points to poor performance on their parts? Or is the brainwashing they received from their ed school training and reinforced by all of their in service and professional activities just too hard to overcome voluntarily? I believe they do care about the kids but do not connect the dots or even question their own beliefs as the reason the kids are being harmed.
Confrontation is the only thing that can break through brainwashed mentalities. Here too, the education environment has built in defensive mechanisms. The ubiquitous use of political correctness and GroupThink prevent the sort of intellectual honesty and robust dialog required to be able to face and fix real problems. Thus, anyone pointing out the truth of the poor performance in education is by definition, “not nice” and out of line. This prevents many from complaining even though kids are being harmed badly on an ongoing basis. This also prevents the board members from expressing concerns with enough force to get through the defenses. Now, if the board members were living up to their responsibilities they would be forceful and demand real fixes to real problems. But the history I read did not indicate any examples of a majority of board members having the moxie to do the right things. Oh, there is a record of firing superintendents a few times when pressure built high enough. However, the replacements were always selected from the pool of brainwashed educators so no change was forthcoming in the future either. Thus, the status quo continues. The kids become less and less competitive in the global marketplace. The country’s economy becomes less competitive as well with the attendant unemployment problems, too much debt, etc.
Finally, the educators would say that hurting the feelings of educators is never justified. I say hurting their feelings is well justified if it is required to cause service to kids to be raised to an adequate level. That is, kids futures trump educator feelings every time.
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Veering off into the ditch and liking it fine
First, I recommend you go to www.booktv.org and search on E.D. Hirsch. That will bring you to the December 13, 2009 broadcast of his presentation speaking about his new book, The Making of Americans.
Hirsch’s thesis is a good one: That American education went off the rails almost 6 decades ago when the graduates of the education schools anti-curriculum (child-centered) movement began to teach. They had been brainwashed that skills would suffice and save the kids from being forced to memorize facts and drill to increase real knowledge. The big plus for the ed schools was that subject knowledge courses taught by them could be “watered down, everyone gets an A” affairs. The results of this detour to ridiculousness began “biting” into our education performance in a negative way in the late 60s as the victims of the new scientifically unsound approach began graduating from high school. These graduates had the full “benefit” of being subject to the depredations for their entire school career. Hirsch showed a slide of SAT verbal scores going back to the late sixties. Scores plummeted and have stayed at the lower level. He used the Sat because it has more history than the NAEP. However, he did show a NAEP slide back to its inception to show that the “achievement gap” has been constant or getting worse over that whole time.
Hirsch makes the point, a good one, that language skills are the “skill of skills and key to success in citizenship, learning, and earning. He cites research that says if you take language proficiency into account, the earnings gap between minorities and the poor disappears.
That emphasizes one key point. The gap kids are the ones harmed the most by the anti-curriculum approach. Hirsch points out that the common excuses the education school types (and hence everyone else in the education fiefdom; delusional, defensive, insular, inbred) are all bogus and intended to deflect attention away from the real culprits; content free curricula. He relates research he did that shows that the scores of white, middle class kids plummeted along with the rest. He used Iowa as an example where 98% are white middle class and yet the scores have gone down there as well. When core curricula are installed, the performance gaps between rich and poor students narrow. The bottom line is that the current educational methods yield the results favored by `progressive' and `liberal' educators, while their methods drive everyone down, particularly the poor. Hirsch says, “It is hard to conceive of a greater social evil.”
Other comments he makes in the video also ring true.
• On the Governor’s effort to establish a national curriculum standard: “a politically craven and content free approach.”
• Our schools need to teach the founding principles of the Enlightenment and the blessings of liberty, not an intellectual tyranny.
• The last 50+ years have been characterized by; technically wrong ideas, fragmented courses, watered down texts.
• Critical thinking skills are powerfully knowledge dependent, meaning that the current goal of teaching critical thinking skills in a content free environment is a waste of time.
• The “how to” approach has always failed and always must fail.
How did we get into this mess? We delegated the education of our kids to educators without building in a closed loop, quality control function. We assumed “wrongly” that the education experts with the great sounding education bachelors, masters and doctorate degrees were competent to do the job. No matter how much they argue, their results prove the fact that they don’t know much about the realities of what works in education. We have ignored the multitudinous research that concludes that the education schools are little more than diploma mills extracting largess from a failed education process. Is it the educators fault for getting away with huge salaries based on worthless degrees and the poor performance? Is it the educators’ fault that the achievement gap has gone unimproved for decades in spite of the billions thrown at the problem? Or is it our fault for being too unengaged to demand that the whole craven process be fixed or ditched. In its current form our education system is essentially a very expensive baby-sitting/childcare operation.
What do I mean by fixed? Lots of things are required, but as a start, require content rich curricula as Hirsch recommends, stop paying for advanced ed degrees, install merit pay for educators (pay for true performance, not seat time in an ed school weak program or getting a year older), make teachers pass subject competency tests before being awarded certification. Require subject competency tests be passed every other year for current teachers to maintain certification. Decouple all certifications for teachers and leaders from ed school training. Only this will incentivize the ed schools to abandon their wrong-headed ideas that don’t stand scientific muster.
If you have learned about the trench warfare of World War I, you know that millions of men “lived” in trenches in all sorts of foul conditions. They got diseases like “trench foot” that could cause such severe infection that the limb would have to be amputated. Yet, the troops would much rather stay in the foul trenches than face the machine guns, mines and barbed wire of the battlefield. For them the “norm” of the trench while a terrible place to be was in their minds superior and much less scary than the world outside the trench.
While you would be hard pressed to equate the current situation for the adults who work in education to trench warfare, it wouldn’t be too hard to relate the analogy to the kids (victims) who see their future prospects greatly damaged by the current system. They don’t have amputated limbs but amputated future prospects. There exists a universal reluctance among the adults working in education to face the reality of the harm they are doing to the kids with the anti-curriculum approach. While our education schools do a very poor job of educating teachers and administrators they are world-class at brainwashing their graduates to believe in harmful, unscientific clap-trap. When I have confronted ed school professors with the scientific evidence of their failure they say, “Well, if it isn’t true, it ought to be.” Some say, “That’s my job you’re talking about.” Neither response is ethical when kids are continuing to be harmed by their intransigence.
While most effort to reform the system has been aimed at convincing the educators to face the scientific truth and replace the current approach with one that works, it has been ineffective. It is easy to see why the current rut is comfortable to educators. Change is not something most people volunteer for. And in a world where the adults in education prioritize their own comfort ahead of the futures of the kids no change will be occurring from within. It can only happen if forced from outside the education fiefdom.
Am I saying that educators have nothing to fear if a knowledge curriculum is implemented. No I am not. You see, that would cause the educators’ lack of rigorous subject knowledge to be exposed to the light of day. This problem is especially large in the elementary grades. This would mean redirecting all teacher “professional” development away from more methods classes toward subject knowledge classes. Since the school districts have time and money for the professional development in their budgets it wouldn’t be a fiscal problem for them. The problem would be finding knowledgeable people to teach the subject knowledge courses. The education schools don’t have such people so they would have to be found elsewhere.
The only example of real reform taking place in America has been in Massachusetts (termed the Massachusetts Miracle). It was caused by political leadership willing to disappoint ed power groups who contributed to their campaigns. They imposed the change to content rich curricula on the educators. The kids in Massachusetts have benefited greatly. It should be obvious that working with educators in our school districts to improve things for the kids is a fool’s errand. They haven’t changed on their own and they “ain’t” about to start now.
Hirsch’s thesis is a good one: That American education went off the rails almost 6 decades ago when the graduates of the education schools anti-curriculum (child-centered) movement began to teach. They had been brainwashed that skills would suffice and save the kids from being forced to memorize facts and drill to increase real knowledge. The big plus for the ed schools was that subject knowledge courses taught by them could be “watered down, everyone gets an A” affairs. The results of this detour to ridiculousness began “biting” into our education performance in a negative way in the late 60s as the victims of the new scientifically unsound approach began graduating from high school. These graduates had the full “benefit” of being subject to the depredations for their entire school career. Hirsch showed a slide of SAT verbal scores going back to the late sixties. Scores plummeted and have stayed at the lower level. He used the Sat because it has more history than the NAEP. However, he did show a NAEP slide back to its inception to show that the “achievement gap” has been constant or getting worse over that whole time.
Hirsch makes the point, a good one, that language skills are the “skill of skills and key to success in citizenship, learning, and earning. He cites research that says if you take language proficiency into account, the earnings gap between minorities and the poor disappears.
That emphasizes one key point. The gap kids are the ones harmed the most by the anti-curriculum approach. Hirsch points out that the common excuses the education school types (and hence everyone else in the education fiefdom; delusional, defensive, insular, inbred) are all bogus and intended to deflect attention away from the real culprits; content free curricula. He relates research he did that shows that the scores of white, middle class kids plummeted along with the rest. He used Iowa as an example where 98% are white middle class and yet the scores have gone down there as well. When core curricula are installed, the performance gaps between rich and poor students narrow. The bottom line is that the current educational methods yield the results favored by `progressive' and `liberal' educators, while their methods drive everyone down, particularly the poor. Hirsch says, “It is hard to conceive of a greater social evil.”
Other comments he makes in the video also ring true.
• On the Governor’s effort to establish a national curriculum standard: “a politically craven and content free approach.”
• Our schools need to teach the founding principles of the Enlightenment and the blessings of liberty, not an intellectual tyranny.
• The last 50+ years have been characterized by; technically wrong ideas, fragmented courses, watered down texts.
• Critical thinking skills are powerfully knowledge dependent, meaning that the current goal of teaching critical thinking skills in a content free environment is a waste of time.
• The “how to” approach has always failed and always must fail.
How did we get into this mess? We delegated the education of our kids to educators without building in a closed loop, quality control function. We assumed “wrongly” that the education experts with the great sounding education bachelors, masters and doctorate degrees were competent to do the job. No matter how much they argue, their results prove the fact that they don’t know much about the realities of what works in education. We have ignored the multitudinous research that concludes that the education schools are little more than diploma mills extracting largess from a failed education process. Is it the educators fault for getting away with huge salaries based on worthless degrees and the poor performance? Is it the educators’ fault that the achievement gap has gone unimproved for decades in spite of the billions thrown at the problem? Or is it our fault for being too unengaged to demand that the whole craven process be fixed or ditched. In its current form our education system is essentially a very expensive baby-sitting/childcare operation.
What do I mean by fixed? Lots of things are required, but as a start, require content rich curricula as Hirsch recommends, stop paying for advanced ed degrees, install merit pay for educators (pay for true performance, not seat time in an ed school weak program or getting a year older), make teachers pass subject competency tests before being awarded certification. Require subject competency tests be passed every other year for current teachers to maintain certification. Decouple all certifications for teachers and leaders from ed school training. Only this will incentivize the ed schools to abandon their wrong-headed ideas that don’t stand scientific muster.
If you have learned about the trench warfare of World War I, you know that millions of men “lived” in trenches in all sorts of foul conditions. They got diseases like “trench foot” that could cause such severe infection that the limb would have to be amputated. Yet, the troops would much rather stay in the foul trenches than face the machine guns, mines and barbed wire of the battlefield. For them the “norm” of the trench while a terrible place to be was in their minds superior and much less scary than the world outside the trench.
While you would be hard pressed to equate the current situation for the adults who work in education to trench warfare, it wouldn’t be too hard to relate the analogy to the kids (victims) who see their future prospects greatly damaged by the current system. They don’t have amputated limbs but amputated future prospects. There exists a universal reluctance among the adults working in education to face the reality of the harm they are doing to the kids with the anti-curriculum approach. While our education schools do a very poor job of educating teachers and administrators they are world-class at brainwashing their graduates to believe in harmful, unscientific clap-trap. When I have confronted ed school professors with the scientific evidence of their failure they say, “Well, if it isn’t true, it ought to be.” Some say, “That’s my job you’re talking about.” Neither response is ethical when kids are continuing to be harmed by their intransigence.
While most effort to reform the system has been aimed at convincing the educators to face the scientific truth and replace the current approach with one that works, it has been ineffective. It is easy to see why the current rut is comfortable to educators. Change is not something most people volunteer for. And in a world where the adults in education prioritize their own comfort ahead of the futures of the kids no change will be occurring from within. It can only happen if forced from outside the education fiefdom.
Am I saying that educators have nothing to fear if a knowledge curriculum is implemented. No I am not. You see, that would cause the educators’ lack of rigorous subject knowledge to be exposed to the light of day. This problem is especially large in the elementary grades. This would mean redirecting all teacher “professional” development away from more methods classes toward subject knowledge classes. Since the school districts have time and money for the professional development in their budgets it wouldn’t be a fiscal problem for them. The problem would be finding knowledgeable people to teach the subject knowledge courses. The education schools don’t have such people so they would have to be found elsewhere.
The only example of real reform taking place in America has been in Massachusetts (termed the Massachusetts Miracle). It was caused by political leadership willing to disappoint ed power groups who contributed to their campaigns. They imposed the change to content rich curricula on the educators. The kids in Massachusetts have benefited greatly. It should be obvious that working with educators in our school districts to improve things for the kids is a fool’s errand. They haven’t changed on their own and they “ain’t” about to start now.
Saturday, December 12, 2009
I Admit It. I Was Wrong
I have been convinced for years that the use of the constructivist math curricula (often called NSF First Generation because the NSF sent many millions for their development to ed school professors and researchers) were the biggest problem in low math achievement results among American students. Recent events now cause me to demote the poor curricula problem, while still needing urgent attention, to second place. What has displaced curriculum as the most important problem to solve if we desire to stop spinning our wheels and really improve math achievement among American students?
First, let me describe some interactions with a large local school district over the math achievement problem. Studying the district’s achievement results for grades 3 through 10 on the state achievement tests, shows the scope of the problem. At third grade the majority of students score proficient or better. At tenth grade the majority of students score below proficient. This indicates that on average students progress less than a year in achievement for every year spent in school. In fact the 10th grade proficient or better percentage for 2009 testing for this district was in the low thirty percent range. This correlates well with the high college (both 2-year and 4-year) remediation rates which are in ranges from just under 22% to 52% across the district’s large high schools. The data show clearly that the students from this district are not being adequately prepared in math for the increasingly global competition for well-paying “knowledge jobs.”
Another concerned person and I met twice with the district’s central office staff in charge of curricula and math specialists tasked to support the math teaching process for elementary and middle/high schools. We reached an impasse when we stated that the curricula being used (Everyday Math being the prime example) were the cause of the problem and the central office folk said the curricula had no effect. We were amazed. Since then I have met a couple of more times with central office staff and have been pushing the idea that the math subject knowledge of teachers (especially elementary level) needed to be improved through additional training for the teachers.
Soon after that the “math team” made a presentation to the board of education for the district. One slide they showed compared annual growth rates in achievement among the 30-plus elementary schools in the district versus 6 different curricula being used. Their study concluded that there was no statistically significant difference which supported the assertion of the people in our first meeting telling us that the curriculum made no difference in achievement. Thus, it became time to face that something besides curriculum was masking the deficiency of curricula which is so apparent to those who understand math and what foundational skills must be learned in elementary grades to prepare students for success in middle and high school.
After more research, I have concluded that the poor level of math knowledge among teachers is far and away the biggest contributor to poor math achievement of their students. In retrospect this should have been no surprise to me. I had read Rita Kramer’s “Ed School Follies” which emphasized the fact that education schools focus on process (pedagogy) training to the effective exclusion of teaching subject knowledge with even minimal rigor. David Klein’s “A Brief History of American K-12 Mathematics Education in the 20th Century” which also makes the point that education schools are infected with the progressive attitudes emphasizing process, socializing students to be “good (pliable) citizens” and de-emphasizing content. E.D. Hirsch Jr. in his “The Knowledge Deficit” again points out that the ed schools de-emphasize knowledge (content) in favor of constructivist (ex. Whole Language & Everyday Math) approaches which have proven to be scientifically ineffective, a fact he labels as of little importance among ed school faculties who won’t change even in the face of contrary research findings.
While I had read some summary representations of Liping Ma’s research on the subject knowledge of elementary math teachers, I did not read her book describing her research, “Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics,” until recently. She created a comparison study of teachers from China and from the U.S. The Chinese teachers had much less formal education than their American counterparts. The Chinese system for elementary teachers is to take those with a ninth grade education and give them 2 to 3 years of “normal school” training beyond ninth grade to qualify to become teachers. The U.S. participants in her study had from 4 to 6 years beyond their high school graduation.
Yet, in spite of that, U.S. students consistently score significantly lower on international math achievement comparisons. Ma used Deborah Ball’s TELT model (Teacher Education and Learning to Teach Study) to assess the math knowledge of each teacher in the study. She found;
• “Even expert [U.S.] teachers, experienced teachers who were mathematically confident, and teachers who actively participated in current mathematics teaching reform did not seem to have a thorough knowledge of the mathematics taught in elementary school.”
• Teachers’ subject knowledge correlated very well with their student’s achievement.
• Number of math courses taken in college did not.
What are we to conclude from this review of the research and the international achievement testing results?
• Seat time in education school classes does not result in adequate subject knowledge for the teachers.
• If we desire to improve math achievement, we must provide subject knowledge training for the existing cadre of teachers. This will need to take the place of the ubiquitous teaching of more pedagogy processes which are already overdone in education schools. Only by teaching subject knowledge can balance be brought to the teachers’ skill sets.
• Starting with elementary teachers is where the most leverage exists. This is because if children don’t get a rigorous foundation in elementary grades they are too far behind to catch up in the middle and high school class work.
“Cultures that are open and willing to change have a huge advantage in the world,” said Jerry Rao, the MphasiS CEO who heads the Indian high-tech trade association. “You have to have a strong culture, but also the openness to adapt and adopt from others. The cultural exclusivists have a real disadvantage. Exclusivity is a dangerous thing. Openness is critical because you start tending to respect people for their talent and abilities. You are dealing with people on the basis of talent—not race or ethnicity—and that changes, subtly over time your whole view of human beings, if you are in this talent-based and performance-based world rather than the background-based world.” From The World is Flat by Tom Friedman.
You may ask what does the quote above have to do with our education problems? Our education fiefdom is the most exclusive of exclusive cultures. It is a world in which “background is king.” That is, people are paid more for degrees, getting a year older and classes, not their performance level. A multitude of researchers have found in study after study that the education school degrees from undergraduate to doctoral level are essentially worthless for the task at hand. The above quote makes the point that the world is becoming more and more a meritocracy where we will be valued for the quality of our output not our backgrounds; degrees, good-old-boy connections, pedigrees, etc.
Our educators’ refusal to change from a background supreme culture to a results supreme culture will continue harming out kids until the public becomes more knowledgeable and motivated to require that it change. For now, it looks as if when that time of realization comes we will likely be in a lower and lower standard of living “death spiral” which will be very difficult to overcome because the root cause was ignored for decades. Reality can be a scary thing but facing it is foundational to transforming performance in a positive way.
First, let me describe some interactions with a large local school district over the math achievement problem. Studying the district’s achievement results for grades 3 through 10 on the state achievement tests, shows the scope of the problem. At third grade the majority of students score proficient or better. At tenth grade the majority of students score below proficient. This indicates that on average students progress less than a year in achievement for every year spent in school. In fact the 10th grade proficient or better percentage for 2009 testing for this district was in the low thirty percent range. This correlates well with the high college (both 2-year and 4-year) remediation rates which are in ranges from just under 22% to 52% across the district’s large high schools. The data show clearly that the students from this district are not being adequately prepared in math for the increasingly global competition for well-paying “knowledge jobs.”
Another concerned person and I met twice with the district’s central office staff in charge of curricula and math specialists tasked to support the math teaching process for elementary and middle/high schools. We reached an impasse when we stated that the curricula being used (Everyday Math being the prime example) were the cause of the problem and the central office folk said the curricula had no effect. We were amazed. Since then I have met a couple of more times with central office staff and have been pushing the idea that the math subject knowledge of teachers (especially elementary level) needed to be improved through additional training for the teachers.
Soon after that the “math team” made a presentation to the board of education for the district. One slide they showed compared annual growth rates in achievement among the 30-plus elementary schools in the district versus 6 different curricula being used. Their study concluded that there was no statistically significant difference which supported the assertion of the people in our first meeting telling us that the curriculum made no difference in achievement. Thus, it became time to face that something besides curriculum was masking the deficiency of curricula which is so apparent to those who understand math and what foundational skills must be learned in elementary grades to prepare students for success in middle and high school.
After more research, I have concluded that the poor level of math knowledge among teachers is far and away the biggest contributor to poor math achievement of their students. In retrospect this should have been no surprise to me. I had read Rita Kramer’s “Ed School Follies” which emphasized the fact that education schools focus on process (pedagogy) training to the effective exclusion of teaching subject knowledge with even minimal rigor. David Klein’s “A Brief History of American K-12 Mathematics Education in the 20th Century” which also makes the point that education schools are infected with the progressive attitudes emphasizing process, socializing students to be “good (pliable) citizens” and de-emphasizing content. E.D. Hirsch Jr. in his “The Knowledge Deficit” again points out that the ed schools de-emphasize knowledge (content) in favor of constructivist (ex. Whole Language & Everyday Math) approaches which have proven to be scientifically ineffective, a fact he labels as of little importance among ed school faculties who won’t change even in the face of contrary research findings.
While I had read some summary representations of Liping Ma’s research on the subject knowledge of elementary math teachers, I did not read her book describing her research, “Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics,” until recently. She created a comparison study of teachers from China and from the U.S. The Chinese teachers had much less formal education than their American counterparts. The Chinese system for elementary teachers is to take those with a ninth grade education and give them 2 to 3 years of “normal school” training beyond ninth grade to qualify to become teachers. The U.S. participants in her study had from 4 to 6 years beyond their high school graduation.
Yet, in spite of that, U.S. students consistently score significantly lower on international math achievement comparisons. Ma used Deborah Ball’s TELT model (Teacher Education and Learning to Teach Study) to assess the math knowledge of each teacher in the study. She found;
• “Even expert [U.S.] teachers, experienced teachers who were mathematically confident, and teachers who actively participated in current mathematics teaching reform did not seem to have a thorough knowledge of the mathematics taught in elementary school.”
• Teachers’ subject knowledge correlated very well with their student’s achievement.
• Number of math courses taken in college did not.
What are we to conclude from this review of the research and the international achievement testing results?
• Seat time in education school classes does not result in adequate subject knowledge for the teachers.
• If we desire to improve math achievement, we must provide subject knowledge training for the existing cadre of teachers. This will need to take the place of the ubiquitous teaching of more pedagogy processes which are already overdone in education schools. Only by teaching subject knowledge can balance be brought to the teachers’ skill sets.
• Starting with elementary teachers is where the most leverage exists. This is because if children don’t get a rigorous foundation in elementary grades they are too far behind to catch up in the middle and high school class work.
“Cultures that are open and willing to change have a huge advantage in the world,” said Jerry Rao, the MphasiS CEO who heads the Indian high-tech trade association. “You have to have a strong culture, but also the openness to adapt and adopt from others. The cultural exclusivists have a real disadvantage. Exclusivity is a dangerous thing. Openness is critical because you start tending to respect people for their talent and abilities. You are dealing with people on the basis of talent—not race or ethnicity—and that changes, subtly over time your whole view of human beings, if you are in this talent-based and performance-based world rather than the background-based world.” From The World is Flat by Tom Friedman.
You may ask what does the quote above have to do with our education problems? Our education fiefdom is the most exclusive of exclusive cultures. It is a world in which “background is king.” That is, people are paid more for degrees, getting a year older and classes, not their performance level. A multitude of researchers have found in study after study that the education school degrees from undergraduate to doctoral level are essentially worthless for the task at hand. The above quote makes the point that the world is becoming more and more a meritocracy where we will be valued for the quality of our output not our backgrounds; degrees, good-old-boy connections, pedigrees, etc.
Our educators’ refusal to change from a background supreme culture to a results supreme culture will continue harming out kids until the public becomes more knowledgeable and motivated to require that it change. For now, it looks as if when that time of realization comes we will likely be in a lower and lower standard of living “death spiral” which will be very difficult to overcome because the root cause was ignored for decades. Reality can be a scary thing but facing it is foundational to transforming performance in a positive way.
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