Barbara Ehrenreich’s book, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, is a cogent argument about problems that could be solved if faced directly are being instead suppressed and ignored. This is not to say that positive thinking is bad, it isn’t. However, when the popular culture has the pendulum hard-wired to the positive side, real problems that are harming people get ignored. Ehrenreich says that this preoccupation with positivity has resulted in a “mass delusion” and a “tyranny and ideology” that have resulted in disastrous decisions in our culture.
I contend that there is no place in our society where this disease is more entrenched and more harmful than in our schools. Attend any school board meeting and you will see the structured offering of “plusses” that are being recognized. That is as is should be but where is the discussion of what to do about the abysmal performance of the schools in closing the achievement gap, improving overall test scores, of failed curriculum choices that are ignored rather than faced? They are never discussed.
One of the local large and “top performing” districts even has a board policy that board members cannot criticize the school district in any way. In fact a member of that board was removed from the board for violating that policy. Thus, the message goes forth, “The preservation of the school bureaucracy is more important than serving the mission to educate the kids well.” While I am not aware of other districts with this type of policy, they all act as if there is one anyway.
So who is there to support the message that the kids are not being served at an acceptable level? It certainly won’t come from within the education fiefdom. While the information is readily available for those who are willing to dig for it, it is certainly not something that you will find in the media reports. The media play a complicit role in making sure they only report favorable things about the schools. Thus, it is up to each of us to put in the time and effort to bring the message to everyone we can by writing to our legislators, speaking at school board meetings and any other way we can to demand that reality of school performance is faced and fixed.
Friday, October 30, 2009
Monday, October 19, 2009
They Speak Process, We Speak Results
Did you ever try to communicate with someone who spoke a different language than you do? It is pretty difficult especially if hand waving won’t suffice due to the complexity of the subject matter. This is exactly the problem we face when trying to communicate with educators about the schooling our kids are getting.
Educators are taught pedagogy (teaching process) in education school. In fact process is so emphasized that subject knowledge sees little emphasis and is generally of poor quality when it is taught to future teachers. Thus, educators emphasize process above all else and this spills over into the way decisions are made and attempts at change implemented.
Parents and the public in general are results-oriented and don’t care what process is used as long as legal, effective, etc. Thus, when parents and the public talk to educators both sides are “speaking different languages.” This leads to dissatisfaction, frustration and poor communication on real issues.
So what needs to be done? Since the parents and the public are the “customers” for the service provided by the education establishment, it is incumbent on them to learn to speak “results.” This is critical if educators are to begin providing the positive improvement in performance that is long overdue. While educators always try to put a positive spin on each year’s CSAP results, any improvements are illusory at best. Basically nothing has changed for the better in mainline large school districts for decades. And nothing will until the ineffective processes used to manage the education system and the classrooms can be eliminated and replaced with a more results-oriented approach.
Following are some data to make the point that the performance is poor and the rate of improvement is nil.
• % Proficient or Higher, examples, from American Institutes for Research, NAEP versus TIMSS, 8th grade math; Singapore at 73%, U.S. at 27%. 17 countries scored above the US.
• Both The Proficiency Illusion, Fordham Inst. with NWEA and Assessing the Role of K-12 Academic Standards in States: Workshop Summary, Nat’l Academies Press, 2007 conclude that Colorado standards for reading and math are at the bottom of the pack compared to other states. The gap is big between Colorado and the states with the highest standards like S. Carolina, Massachusetts, California. Also in The Proficiency Illusion report they comment that the Colorado cut scores were reduced for both math and reading making the “expected improvement if things remained the same just due to the cut score reductions to be significant, as much as 9%.” I have looked at CSAP results for those years for districts and the state. The “improvements” didn’t even indicate that the performance had stayed the same but that it had declined in real terms against the lower standards.
• The Colorado Closing the Achievement Gap Commission Final Report from 11/05 stated that in spite of spending billions on closing the gap that it was “demonstrably worse” than it had been “a third of a century” earlier when Robert Kennedy said the gap was a “stain on our national honor.”
• A regression analysis for one of the larger school districts in Colorado of reading prof or better vs. free or reduced percentage showed a very high correlation of over 95% with very high significance. I have looked at other districts as well and it holds for them too. So the value added by the ed process is of virtually no importance since the demographic variable appears to be far more important as a predictor of results. My belief is that this is a direct result of educators being told in ed schools (and supported by the core beliefs after getting into the workplace) that schools have little leverage and the student background is the telling factor in achievement. This was the finding of the 1966 Coleman Report. That report has been proven wrong by hundreds of studies since but is still quoted by people who want to use its findings as an excuse for the lack of progress on closing the gap. Isn’t it time to face that the current approach isn’t working and the steady increase in minority students (esp. Hispanic) makes it imperative that we finally add value and fix the problem.
• The process slanted curricula, e. g. Whole Language including its renamed derivatives and EveryDay Math which are content weak have been found in study after study to be very harmful to minority and poor students. The kids that come from more privileged backgrounds have parents who will fill the knowledge gap and make sure their kids get what they need to supplement the content poor offerings in the schools. The gap kids don’t often have that support.
Therefore the current results are not acceptable. The process straightjacket present in large school districts must be removed and replaced with a results ethic if performance is to happen for the benefit of our kids.
Educators are taught pedagogy (teaching process) in education school. In fact process is so emphasized that subject knowledge sees little emphasis and is generally of poor quality when it is taught to future teachers. Thus, educators emphasize process above all else and this spills over into the way decisions are made and attempts at change implemented.
Parents and the public in general are results-oriented and don’t care what process is used as long as legal, effective, etc. Thus, when parents and the public talk to educators both sides are “speaking different languages.” This leads to dissatisfaction, frustration and poor communication on real issues.
So what needs to be done? Since the parents and the public are the “customers” for the service provided by the education establishment, it is incumbent on them to learn to speak “results.” This is critical if educators are to begin providing the positive improvement in performance that is long overdue. While educators always try to put a positive spin on each year’s CSAP results, any improvements are illusory at best. Basically nothing has changed for the better in mainline large school districts for decades. And nothing will until the ineffective processes used to manage the education system and the classrooms can be eliminated and replaced with a more results-oriented approach.
Following are some data to make the point that the performance is poor and the rate of improvement is nil.
• % Proficient or Higher, examples, from American Institutes for Research, NAEP versus TIMSS, 8th grade math; Singapore at 73%, U.S. at 27%. 17 countries scored above the US.
• Both The Proficiency Illusion, Fordham Inst. with NWEA and Assessing the Role of K-12 Academic Standards in States: Workshop Summary, Nat’l Academies Press, 2007 conclude that Colorado standards for reading and math are at the bottom of the pack compared to other states. The gap is big between Colorado and the states with the highest standards like S. Carolina, Massachusetts, California. Also in The Proficiency Illusion report they comment that the Colorado cut scores were reduced for both math and reading making the “expected improvement if things remained the same just due to the cut score reductions to be significant, as much as 9%.” I have looked at CSAP results for those years for districts and the state. The “improvements” didn’t even indicate that the performance had stayed the same but that it had declined in real terms against the lower standards.
• The Colorado Closing the Achievement Gap Commission Final Report from 11/05 stated that in spite of spending billions on closing the gap that it was “demonstrably worse” than it had been “a third of a century” earlier when Robert Kennedy said the gap was a “stain on our national honor.”
• A regression analysis for one of the larger school districts in Colorado of reading prof or better vs. free or reduced percentage showed a very high correlation of over 95% with very high significance. I have looked at other districts as well and it holds for them too. So the value added by the ed process is of virtually no importance since the demographic variable appears to be far more important as a predictor of results. My belief is that this is a direct result of educators being told in ed schools (and supported by the core beliefs after getting into the workplace) that schools have little leverage and the student background is the telling factor in achievement. This was the finding of the 1966 Coleman Report. That report has been proven wrong by hundreds of studies since but is still quoted by people who want to use its findings as an excuse for the lack of progress on closing the gap. Isn’t it time to face that the current approach isn’t working and the steady increase in minority students (esp. Hispanic) makes it imperative that we finally add value and fix the problem.
• The process slanted curricula, e. g. Whole Language including its renamed derivatives and EveryDay Math which are content weak have been found in study after study to be very harmful to minority and poor students. The kids that come from more privileged backgrounds have parents who will fill the knowledge gap and make sure their kids get what they need to supplement the content poor offerings in the schools. The gap kids don’t often have that support.
Therefore the current results are not acceptable. The process straightjacket present in large school districts must be removed and replaced with a results ethic if performance is to happen for the benefit of our kids.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Do Charters Perform Better Because They Cherry Pick Students?
Do charter schools perform better because as the education establishment asserts they “cherry pick” the best students leaving the “normal” schools with the dregs. This is further evidence that there is a deeply ingrained belief (taught in education schools) that demographics are the determining factor in student achievement and that the schools and teachers have a very small impact on that achievement. E.D. Hirsch Jr. states it well in his book “The Knowledge Deficit.” “Determinism—the belief that demographics determine ability to learn. “Determinism is nonetheless a flawed and dismal theory, which, while conveniently exculpating the schools, undermines the founding principles of democratic education.” Hundreds (perhaps even thousands by now) of studies have shown that the schools and teachers do have the dominant effect on student achievement. Mortimore and Sammons (September 1987). New Evidence on Effective Elementary Schools. Educational Leadership, 45. found that in math the teacher had up to 10 times the impact of student background (demographics) in math and up to 6 times in reading. Of course if the schools are working with a strong self-fulfilling prophecy in place then the teacher impact is low.
New research on charter school performance versus the mainline schools has been done by Caroline Hoxby, a Stanford economist found a new way to examine the alleged cherry picking bias claim. The results come out in favor of charter school performance being real and not a cherry picking phenomenon. This was reported in the Wall Street Journal of Sept. 24, 2009. “Hoxby’s study ‘How New York City's Charter Schools Affect Achievement,’ shows that charter students, typically from more disadvantaged families in places like Harlem, perform almost as well as students in affluent suburbs like Scarsdale.” The technique she used took advantage of the fact that more kids apply than there is room for in the charter schools. The students are selected by a lottery so that no pre-selection bias is present. Thus comparing achievement between the charter schools and the population of students who applied but didn’t win the lottery is a valid way to see the impact of the charter schools on the achievement of that population.
“According to the study, the most comprehensive of its kind to date, New York charter applicants are more likely than the average New York family to be black, poor and living in homes with adults who possess fewer education credentials. But positive results already begin to emerge by the third grade: The average charter student is scoring 5.8 points higher than his lotteried-out peers in math and 5.3 points higher in English. In grades four through eight, the charter student jumps ahead by 5 more points each year in math and 3.6 points each year in English.”
Charter students are also shrinking the learning gap between low-income minorities and more affluent whites. "On average," the report concludes, "a student who attended a charter school for all of the grades kindergarten through eight would close about 86% of the 'Scarsdale-Harlem achievement gap' in math and 66% of the achievement gap in English."
Hoxby used the same approach to study Chicago charters and found they performed even better than those in NY. Other researchers using the same approach have seen similar results in Boston.
Thus, another bogus reason needs to removed from those used by the mainline schools to make excuses for inexcusable performance.
New research on charter school performance versus the mainline schools has been done by Caroline Hoxby, a Stanford economist found a new way to examine the alleged cherry picking bias claim. The results come out in favor of charter school performance being real and not a cherry picking phenomenon. This was reported in the Wall Street Journal of Sept. 24, 2009. “Hoxby’s study ‘How New York City's Charter Schools Affect Achievement,’ shows that charter students, typically from more disadvantaged families in places like Harlem, perform almost as well as students in affluent suburbs like Scarsdale.” The technique she used took advantage of the fact that more kids apply than there is room for in the charter schools. The students are selected by a lottery so that no pre-selection bias is present. Thus comparing achievement between the charter schools and the population of students who applied but didn’t win the lottery is a valid way to see the impact of the charter schools on the achievement of that population.
“According to the study, the most comprehensive of its kind to date, New York charter applicants are more likely than the average New York family to be black, poor and living in homes with adults who possess fewer education credentials. But positive results already begin to emerge by the third grade: The average charter student is scoring 5.8 points higher than his lotteried-out peers in math and 5.3 points higher in English. In grades four through eight, the charter student jumps ahead by 5 more points each year in math and 3.6 points each year in English.”
Charter students are also shrinking the learning gap between low-income minorities and more affluent whites. "On average," the report concludes, "a student who attended a charter school for all of the grades kindergarten through eight would close about 86% of the 'Scarsdale-Harlem achievement gap' in math and 66% of the achievement gap in English."
Hoxby used the same approach to study Chicago charters and found they performed even better than those in NY. Other researchers using the same approach have seen similar results in Boston.
Thus, another bogus reason needs to removed from those used by the mainline schools to make excuses for inexcusable performance.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
The Music Man
I love the musical, The Music Man, especially the songs—Gary, Indiana, Til There Was You, 76 Trombones. . . And the story has a nice fairytale sort of basis. You remember I am sure the part at the beginning where the anvil salesman says, “But he doesn’t know the territory.” He is talking about “Professor Harold Hill” the boys’ band salesman who goes from town to town selling instruments, uniforms and lessons for a nice price and then skips town before the lessons can be given. Why? Professor Hill knows nothing about music. When he is backed into a corner in River City, he comes up with the “think system” of learning music. And gee, it works for him in a magical fairytale sort of way to give the play a nice happy ending. You know, “and they all lived happily ever after.”
I haven’t seen band teachers in elementary schools using the think method. Or high school music teachers using the think system. Come to think of it, I haven’t heard of any music teacher using the think system. Wonder why? Could it be that it wouldn’t work and that is the reason they don’t use it? You see, music teachers are pretty unique people in the world of American education. They actually have to know something about music. They can’t fake it. You might ask, “Why is that unusual?” Good, I will tell you. Teachers who teach math, especially in elementary schools, don’t need to know math because the curricula used stress discovery instead of teaching. That is good for the teachers because they have very little math knowledge. Math teachers in middle and high school who have some math knowledge but most not a lot, are left to cope with trying to “catch kids up” who didn’t get the foundation they should have from their elementary schools. This is basically a hopeless task.
When you look at the tenth grade CSAP results for math you see that the results are poor to awful. That is, at the last testing point where we can see the culmination of all of the effort to teach math up to tenth grade we see that the schools have failed miserably. That is further confirmed by the high remediation rates for college freshmen in math. Oh, some schools get rated “excellent” on their state accountability reports because they are “graded on the curve” but they have numbers of proficient and advanced that are far less than the NCLB requirement of 100% by 2014. If you extrapolate the trend of math scores you will see that no one apparently takes the NCLB goal seriously. One district I looked at recently would need 95 years at the current rate of “improvement” to get tenth grade proficient and advanced to the 100% level. Is anyone that patient? I am not.
It is obvious that a massive change in how math is taught is required if we are serious about preparing our kids to compete in the global meritocracy. But, gee, that might be hard and educators have no interest in doing that. It might require too much work to really learn math and how to teach it. Perhaps the hardest task of all would be to work to be really competent in math so it could be taught by people who know it, not by people who emulate Professor Hill’s “Think System.”
Another question to ask? If you need to fly to Europe, would you want a pilot who was taught by the “discovery” system and graduated because it was the school's policy to let no one fail? Or would you rather have one taught by a hard-nosed instructor who had years of experience as a pilot and really high expectations? Yes, I agree.
Lest you think this is only a math problem, it isn’t. While the CSAP results look better for reading than they do for math, on their own they are also unacceptable. It is time to realize that the status quo is not working and won’t work, no matter how much taxpayer money is thrown at the problem. We have to face reality and restructure how we teach our kids and it needs to happen now. Otherwise, our kids will be in such a deep hole competitively that they will face bleak futures compared to what they should be able to achieve if reality were able to penetrate the education fiefdom.
I haven’t seen band teachers in elementary schools using the think method. Or high school music teachers using the think system. Come to think of it, I haven’t heard of any music teacher using the think system. Wonder why? Could it be that it wouldn’t work and that is the reason they don’t use it? You see, music teachers are pretty unique people in the world of American education. They actually have to know something about music. They can’t fake it. You might ask, “Why is that unusual?” Good, I will tell you. Teachers who teach math, especially in elementary schools, don’t need to know math because the curricula used stress discovery instead of teaching. That is good for the teachers because they have very little math knowledge. Math teachers in middle and high school who have some math knowledge but most not a lot, are left to cope with trying to “catch kids up” who didn’t get the foundation they should have from their elementary schools. This is basically a hopeless task.
When you look at the tenth grade CSAP results for math you see that the results are poor to awful. That is, at the last testing point where we can see the culmination of all of the effort to teach math up to tenth grade we see that the schools have failed miserably. That is further confirmed by the high remediation rates for college freshmen in math. Oh, some schools get rated “excellent” on their state accountability reports because they are “graded on the curve” but they have numbers of proficient and advanced that are far less than the NCLB requirement of 100% by 2014. If you extrapolate the trend of math scores you will see that no one apparently takes the NCLB goal seriously. One district I looked at recently would need 95 years at the current rate of “improvement” to get tenth grade proficient and advanced to the 100% level. Is anyone that patient? I am not.
It is obvious that a massive change in how math is taught is required if we are serious about preparing our kids to compete in the global meritocracy. But, gee, that might be hard and educators have no interest in doing that. It might require too much work to really learn math and how to teach it. Perhaps the hardest task of all would be to work to be really competent in math so it could be taught by people who know it, not by people who emulate Professor Hill’s “Think System.”
Another question to ask? If you need to fly to Europe, would you want a pilot who was taught by the “discovery” system and graduated because it was the school's policy to let no one fail? Or would you rather have one taught by a hard-nosed instructor who had years of experience as a pilot and really high expectations? Yes, I agree.
Lest you think this is only a math problem, it isn’t. While the CSAP results look better for reading than they do for math, on their own they are also unacceptable. It is time to realize that the status quo is not working and won’t work, no matter how much taxpayer money is thrown at the problem. We have to face reality and restructure how we teach our kids and it needs to happen now. Otherwise, our kids will be in such a deep hole competitively that they will face bleak futures compared to what they should be able to achieve if reality were able to penetrate the education fiefdom.
Monday, August 17, 2009
The Kernel
At a time when Colorado is in the process of updating academic standards on several subjects; math, literature, etc. and the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers have both undertaken an effort to propose national standards it is important for the public to be concerned and involved. The national groups have deemed their deliberations to date as confidential so that there is no transparency to the process.
Why, you might ask, feeling that the educators are the experts and should be left to do the right thing. The crux of the matter is that the education insiders are not the experts and have failed miserably over and over to produce high quality standards. How could that happen? There are many reasons but most of all the educators are strongly opposed to any change in the status quo that might require real change on their parts or threaten their cushy status. While the problem that our nation’s children are being poorly prepared for the massive global competition that has arisen due to the proliferation of cheap and easy communication via the worldwide web is widely recognized (and has been for decades), the educators have refused to allow the needed change to happen.
The kernel referred to in the title is a hollow one in education for the most part. That is, the subject knowledge competence of the educators is “hollow.” You could call it a knowledge vacuum. They just don’t get the subject knowledge in their education school training that is required to successfully teach the children at the high level that our best foreign competitors are providing their kids. Every time that initiatives are proposed to fix this problem such as testing of teachers in subjects taught periodically during their career, the ed power groups especially the teachers unions have successfully bought enough political clout to block the changes. This is particularly a problem in math and science but also in grammar, social studies and other subjects.
These efforts to “upgrade” standards occur infrequently and since they never really improve things it is imperative that the public join together to demand a quality effort this time. What sorts of “tricks” are used to foist the poor “rewrites” off on the children?
• Prevent any substantive input from any outside education sources, but pretend to solicit input. This is similar to the schools universal assertion that they want parents’ involvement in their children’s education which really means “only if you are compliant and supportive of the educators.” They go through the motions, meeting with business people, etc. taking input which is conveniently ignored.
• Structure their communications to address public concerns positively even though there is no substance behind their assertions. This includes, for example, including reviews (always positive) by consultants who are presented as subject experts (math, science, etc.) but are only ed school degreed people with a paucity of subject knowledge.
• The standards, because the educators don’t understand the subject matter, are all designed to support processes they have been taught “catechism style” as E.D. Hirsch says in “The Knowledge Deficit.” Hirsch also points out that much of the process mantra taught in the ed schools doesn’t stand scientific scrutiny.
• Use target implementation dates for the “new” standards to shorten the time for public input after the proposed standards are written. This rush to the wrong answer is not acceptable. Doing nothing is preferable to putting in place a new set of standards that are poor but succeed in casting things in concrete until the next cycle (years) for updating standards. Delaying new standards until they are truly a substantial improvement is the only sensible thing to do.
This list is not meant to be complete but to give a sense of the game being played with our kids’ futures. Without strong public involvement there is no hope of overcoming the anti-change inertia so strongly in place. So, please, learn what is going on and demand real change this time from our political and bureaucratic representatives.
Why, you might ask, feeling that the educators are the experts and should be left to do the right thing. The crux of the matter is that the education insiders are not the experts and have failed miserably over and over to produce high quality standards. How could that happen? There are many reasons but most of all the educators are strongly opposed to any change in the status quo that might require real change on their parts or threaten their cushy status. While the problem that our nation’s children are being poorly prepared for the massive global competition that has arisen due to the proliferation of cheap and easy communication via the worldwide web is widely recognized (and has been for decades), the educators have refused to allow the needed change to happen.
The kernel referred to in the title is a hollow one in education for the most part. That is, the subject knowledge competence of the educators is “hollow.” You could call it a knowledge vacuum. They just don’t get the subject knowledge in their education school training that is required to successfully teach the children at the high level that our best foreign competitors are providing their kids. Every time that initiatives are proposed to fix this problem such as testing of teachers in subjects taught periodically during their career, the ed power groups especially the teachers unions have successfully bought enough political clout to block the changes. This is particularly a problem in math and science but also in grammar, social studies and other subjects.
These efforts to “upgrade” standards occur infrequently and since they never really improve things it is imperative that the public join together to demand a quality effort this time. What sorts of “tricks” are used to foist the poor “rewrites” off on the children?
• Prevent any substantive input from any outside education sources, but pretend to solicit input. This is similar to the schools universal assertion that they want parents’ involvement in their children’s education which really means “only if you are compliant and supportive of the educators.” They go through the motions, meeting with business people, etc. taking input which is conveniently ignored.
• Structure their communications to address public concerns positively even though there is no substance behind their assertions. This includes, for example, including reviews (always positive) by consultants who are presented as subject experts (math, science, etc.) but are only ed school degreed people with a paucity of subject knowledge.
• The standards, because the educators don’t understand the subject matter, are all designed to support processes they have been taught “catechism style” as E.D. Hirsch says in “The Knowledge Deficit.” Hirsch also points out that much of the process mantra taught in the ed schools doesn’t stand scientific scrutiny.
• Use target implementation dates for the “new” standards to shorten the time for public input after the proposed standards are written. This rush to the wrong answer is not acceptable. Doing nothing is preferable to putting in place a new set of standards that are poor but succeed in casting things in concrete until the next cycle (years) for updating standards. Delaying new standards until they are truly a substantial improvement is the only sensible thing to do.
This list is not meant to be complete but to give a sense of the game being played with our kids’ futures. Without strong public involvement there is no hope of overcoming the anti-change inertia so strongly in place. So, please, learn what is going on and demand real change this time from our political and bureaucratic representatives.
Sunday, August 2, 2009
Solutions are the Problem in Education
This is the title of an online commentary for Teacher Magazine written by Mary Kennedy, education professor at Michigan State University. Her point is that educators are bombarded by a plethora of “improvement reforms” and that they cause teachers, especially, to lose focus on the overarching mission of educating children well.
One of the examples she uses is of a National Geographic science initiative that was presented as an opportunity to do “real science” in the field. The project involved having the students take samples from local waterways and contribute them to a national database. The teacher readily participated with his class but found when his students returned to the classroom they had “lost their place” in the curriculum and had to start over for the unit in question, causing less to be taught in the time allowed. She also mentions “inside” influences like “pullout” programs and changes in structure like hourly to block and then back to hourly that cause far too much time to be spent on tangential efforts orthogonal to the primary mission of teaching kids.
Ms. Kennedy, therefore concludes that the problem is too many distractions caused by the “reform mantra” that is bombarding educators constantly. My conclusion is that she couldn’t be further off the mark. It is not the avalanche of new initiatives that is the problem at all. It is the lack of a working environment where focus and discipline are reinforced continuously. Distractions such as she points out in education are common in all endeavors. Such is the way of the world where change is the only constant. A good leader will filter out the vast majority of the distractions allowing through only the very few that actually apply positively to fixing the top priority drag on performance that the team is currently working on. The leader must provide inertia dedicated to focus on the real mission that prevents bouncing about like a ping pong ball as every distraction is acted on. Leadership competence requires not only knowing what to do but what not to do.
A very common problem is that poor leaders say they are working on a long list of goals to improve their performance. In reality just as a ship’s captain can travel to only one port of call at a time, a leader who wants to travel to better performance is advised to work on one goal at a time. Ship’s captains have another trait that could be advantageously adopted by education leaders. That is, no matter how the winds direction or the currents change, they adjust their efforts to stay on the course needed to reach their desired port of call. Goals need to be worked in priority order starting with “killing” the biggest drag on your group’s performance first. I am not talking here about “maintenance goals” which are trying to preserve the current level of operating. The education folks are perhaps the world’s experts at preserving the status quo. Just look at their mired in a rut performance no matter how much talk or money is expended. I am talking about “breakthrough” goals that will take the organization’s performance to a significantly higher level.
The problem she talks about is a direct result of the lack of performance leadership in education. I have pointed out many times that education leaders do not have the proper training or skill to effectively lead to create a performance environment.
In my experience in industry I used the continuous improvement process to maintain focus everyday on improving my team’s performance. To be effective the leader needs a lot of skills and knowledge but most of all needs coaching during the initial implementation of the concepts. Sadly, because the leaders in education don’t have these skills there are no role models to learn from.
Yes, the education school leadership programs claim to fill this need by having graduate students “shadow” an administrator in the field. What good does it do to shadow someone who isn’t doing it well or at all? Also the class work in the ed school leadership programs does not convey the knowledge or skills needed to be a performance leader.
Retooling the education leadership is not the only priority in fixing education but it gets my vote for being the one with the biggest positive leverage on improved performance. It will have to be done by outside trainers who can also coach the leaders through the initial implementation phase when applying the new techniques. The ed schools do not have this skill set in their inventory and could not be effective. I strongly believe that the training should be given to leadership teams at each district on site with the coaching to follow. This allows a robust knowledge base among the team [what one forgets another will remember], works well for team building and for tailoring the training to the priorities of the district’s problems. Sending leaders off to classes at varying ed schools to get exposed to more incoherent drivel is not going to work any better than the current “Race to the Bottom” approach Levine pointed out in his “Educating School Leaders” report (March 2005).
Competent leadership would overcome so many problems that go unaddressed today because leaders have no clue how to solve them. It would be like putting a rudder on the education ship so that progress could finally be “steered toward.” Having leaders who know how to raise the anchor would also help. The sad thing is that working in a well led performance environment is fun and very good for group morale which is missing in today’s education setting.
While it is very clear what must be done, don’t hold your breath until it happens. Only public pressure for real performance improvements will force action in addressing real problems as opposed to the current approach of talking about things with no intent of really changing anything. If you believe the propaganda touting “excellent” performance by local school districts when in fact they are doing very poorly compared to the world’s best performers, you will not be motivated to demand real change. That is the comparison that counts. Anyone can look good if they use a short enough ruler to measure results.
One of the examples she uses is of a National Geographic science initiative that was presented as an opportunity to do “real science” in the field. The project involved having the students take samples from local waterways and contribute them to a national database. The teacher readily participated with his class but found when his students returned to the classroom they had “lost their place” in the curriculum and had to start over for the unit in question, causing less to be taught in the time allowed. She also mentions “inside” influences like “pullout” programs and changes in structure like hourly to block and then back to hourly that cause far too much time to be spent on tangential efforts orthogonal to the primary mission of teaching kids.
Ms. Kennedy, therefore concludes that the problem is too many distractions caused by the “reform mantra” that is bombarding educators constantly. My conclusion is that she couldn’t be further off the mark. It is not the avalanche of new initiatives that is the problem at all. It is the lack of a working environment where focus and discipline are reinforced continuously. Distractions such as she points out in education are common in all endeavors. Such is the way of the world where change is the only constant. A good leader will filter out the vast majority of the distractions allowing through only the very few that actually apply positively to fixing the top priority drag on performance that the team is currently working on. The leader must provide inertia dedicated to focus on the real mission that prevents bouncing about like a ping pong ball as every distraction is acted on. Leadership competence requires not only knowing what to do but what not to do.
A very common problem is that poor leaders say they are working on a long list of goals to improve their performance. In reality just as a ship’s captain can travel to only one port of call at a time, a leader who wants to travel to better performance is advised to work on one goal at a time. Ship’s captains have another trait that could be advantageously adopted by education leaders. That is, no matter how the winds direction or the currents change, they adjust their efforts to stay on the course needed to reach their desired port of call. Goals need to be worked in priority order starting with “killing” the biggest drag on your group’s performance first. I am not talking here about “maintenance goals” which are trying to preserve the current level of operating. The education folks are perhaps the world’s experts at preserving the status quo. Just look at their mired in a rut performance no matter how much talk or money is expended. I am talking about “breakthrough” goals that will take the organization’s performance to a significantly higher level.
The problem she talks about is a direct result of the lack of performance leadership in education. I have pointed out many times that education leaders do not have the proper training or skill to effectively lead to create a performance environment.
In my experience in industry I used the continuous improvement process to maintain focus everyday on improving my team’s performance. To be effective the leader needs a lot of skills and knowledge but most of all needs coaching during the initial implementation of the concepts. Sadly, because the leaders in education don’t have these skills there are no role models to learn from.
Yes, the education school leadership programs claim to fill this need by having graduate students “shadow” an administrator in the field. What good does it do to shadow someone who isn’t doing it well or at all? Also the class work in the ed school leadership programs does not convey the knowledge or skills needed to be a performance leader.
Retooling the education leadership is not the only priority in fixing education but it gets my vote for being the one with the biggest positive leverage on improved performance. It will have to be done by outside trainers who can also coach the leaders through the initial implementation phase when applying the new techniques. The ed schools do not have this skill set in their inventory and could not be effective. I strongly believe that the training should be given to leadership teams at each district on site with the coaching to follow. This allows a robust knowledge base among the team [what one forgets another will remember], works well for team building and for tailoring the training to the priorities of the district’s problems. Sending leaders off to classes at varying ed schools to get exposed to more incoherent drivel is not going to work any better than the current “Race to the Bottom” approach Levine pointed out in his “Educating School Leaders” report (March 2005).
Competent leadership would overcome so many problems that go unaddressed today because leaders have no clue how to solve them. It would be like putting a rudder on the education ship so that progress could finally be “steered toward.” Having leaders who know how to raise the anchor would also help. The sad thing is that working in a well led performance environment is fun and very good for group morale which is missing in today’s education setting.
While it is very clear what must be done, don’t hold your breath until it happens. Only public pressure for real performance improvements will force action in addressing real problems as opposed to the current approach of talking about things with no intent of really changing anything. If you believe the propaganda touting “excellent” performance by local school districts when in fact they are doing very poorly compared to the world’s best performers, you will not be motivated to demand real change. That is the comparison that counts. Anyone can look good if they use a short enough ruler to measure results.
Friday, July 31, 2009
Considering the impact of the new “Race to the Top” Initiative
Late last week, Obama and Duncan announced a new $4.35 billion education initiative to encourage states to improve their K-12 schools. While $4 billion is certainly a lot of money it isn’t big compared to the total spending on education in America. A Wall Street Journal article on the new initiative provides data needed to put it into context. “The Department of Education estimates that the U.S. as a whole spent $667 billion on K-12 education in the 2008-09 school year alone, up from $553 billion in 2006-07 [a 21% increase in only 2 years]. The stimulus bill from earlier this year includes some $100 billion more in federal education spending—an unprecedented amount. The tragedy is that nearly all of this $100 billion is being dispensed to the states by formula, which allows school districts to continue resisting reform while risking very little in overall federal funding.”
The Journal goes on to comment, “It’s also worth noting that the U.S. has been trying without much success to spend its way to education excellence for decades. Between 1970 and 2004, per-pupil outlays more than doubled in real terms, and the federal portion of that spending nearly tripled. Yet reading scores on national standardized tests have remained relatively flat. Black and Hispanic students are doing better, but they continue to lag far behind white students in both test scores and graduation rates.”
The states would be evaluated on 19 criteria from how friendly they are to charter schools to whether they cut k-12 funding this year. Education Week noted the new program included must provisions that any state hoping to land a grant must allow student test scores to be used in decisions about teacher and principal compensation and evaluation and that the state had been approved for stabilization funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (most already have been).
This whiff of merit pay is in opposition to the unions [NEA and AFT] longstanding stance that teacher pay be based only on years of service and credentials. So lots of promises will be made but the unions will effectively make any compliance of the “show” type only. Note too that the wording is that the state must not have any laws in place that prohibit using student achievement data in the evaluation of teachers and principals. This is a far cry from a law that requires the data to be actually used in teacher and principal pay and evaluation decisions.
So what is the result of this likely to be? It is definitely another “stir the pot” to look like you are doing something positive education initiative. If spending more money alone would solve anything the problem would have been solved long ago.
Why isn’t the system getting better? Because . . .
• Education leaders don’t know how to lead. They are trained for a fantasy job, not one that needs to be done or even exists.
• The adults in the education system believe they deserve more and are more important than the kids.
• The legislators and bureaucrats specify process when they should specify results with rewards for making it happen and penalties for not making the required improvements.
• The education system is infected with a high level of truth suppression. That is, political correctness and group think are ubiquitous in their effect of preventing the required intellectual honesty to face shortcomings squarely and deal with them.
• Educators believe they don’t need to change. After all they have avoided it for decades by using techniques such as wheel spinning exercises that “look” like action when they aren’t. They believe that “we tried” is an acceptable excuse. As Yoda told Luke Skywalker in Empire Strikes Back, “Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.”
• Educators believe that they should be paid based on years experience and diplomas they have. Performance organizations pay based on results not background or age and they actually perform. Funny how that works.
This list is not meant to be exhaustive but to show examples of problems that could and should be fixed. One key that is part of the “talk” is that educators need to manage the education process with data. I say they need a closed loop, short cycle, data driven, participative management style. Education entities I have studied who have tried to implement the continuous quality improvement process have failed miserably. Why? Because they do everything that counts wrong. They hire a bunch of consultants, facilitators, data clerks, trainers, etc. and the “leaders” take a hands-off approach to the process. Because they don’t do their jobs, i.e. lead, the process turns into a “go through the motions” exercise that is seen as a distasteful burden to the teachers and others expected to do the process. Leaders need to facilitate, involve themselves in the data and actively expect the best participation of the group in problem solving based on priorities developed from analyzing the data. That is, they can’t delegate the leadership responsibility.
The Race to the Top initiative has a very high probability of being another “throw money at the problem and hope something good happens.” Doing the same thing over and expecting a different result should result in a realization after it doesn’t work for a hundred or more times in a row that this is the wrong approach. Of course you have to be able to look objectively at the truth to realize what is actually happening. Hard to do when the truth is so well hidden.
The Journal goes on to comment, “It’s also worth noting that the U.S. has been trying without much success to spend its way to education excellence for decades. Between 1970 and 2004, per-pupil outlays more than doubled in real terms, and the federal portion of that spending nearly tripled. Yet reading scores on national standardized tests have remained relatively flat. Black and Hispanic students are doing better, but they continue to lag far behind white students in both test scores and graduation rates.”
The states would be evaluated on 19 criteria from how friendly they are to charter schools to whether they cut k-12 funding this year. Education Week noted the new program included must provisions that any state hoping to land a grant must allow student test scores to be used in decisions about teacher and principal compensation and evaluation and that the state had been approved for stabilization funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (most already have been).
This whiff of merit pay is in opposition to the unions [NEA and AFT] longstanding stance that teacher pay be based only on years of service and credentials. So lots of promises will be made but the unions will effectively make any compliance of the “show” type only. Note too that the wording is that the state must not have any laws in place that prohibit using student achievement data in the evaluation of teachers and principals. This is a far cry from a law that requires the data to be actually used in teacher and principal pay and evaluation decisions.
So what is the result of this likely to be? It is definitely another “stir the pot” to look like you are doing something positive education initiative. If spending more money alone would solve anything the problem would have been solved long ago.
Why isn’t the system getting better? Because . . .
• Education leaders don’t know how to lead. They are trained for a fantasy job, not one that needs to be done or even exists.
• The adults in the education system believe they deserve more and are more important than the kids.
• The legislators and bureaucrats specify process when they should specify results with rewards for making it happen and penalties for not making the required improvements.
• The education system is infected with a high level of truth suppression. That is, political correctness and group think are ubiquitous in their effect of preventing the required intellectual honesty to face shortcomings squarely and deal with them.
• Educators believe they don’t need to change. After all they have avoided it for decades by using techniques such as wheel spinning exercises that “look” like action when they aren’t. They believe that “we tried” is an acceptable excuse. As Yoda told Luke Skywalker in Empire Strikes Back, “Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.”
• Educators believe that they should be paid based on years experience and diplomas they have. Performance organizations pay based on results not background or age and they actually perform. Funny how that works.
This list is not meant to be exhaustive but to show examples of problems that could and should be fixed. One key that is part of the “talk” is that educators need to manage the education process with data. I say they need a closed loop, short cycle, data driven, participative management style. Education entities I have studied who have tried to implement the continuous quality improvement process have failed miserably. Why? Because they do everything that counts wrong. They hire a bunch of consultants, facilitators, data clerks, trainers, etc. and the “leaders” take a hands-off approach to the process. Because they don’t do their jobs, i.e. lead, the process turns into a “go through the motions” exercise that is seen as a distasteful burden to the teachers and others expected to do the process. Leaders need to facilitate, involve themselves in the data and actively expect the best participation of the group in problem solving based on priorities developed from analyzing the data. That is, they can’t delegate the leadership responsibility.
The Race to the Top initiative has a very high probability of being another “throw money at the problem and hope something good happens.” Doing the same thing over and expecting a different result should result in a realization after it doesn’t work for a hundred or more times in a row that this is the wrong approach. Of course you have to be able to look objectively at the truth to realize what is actually happening. Hard to do when the truth is so well hidden.
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