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.
Saturday, January 30, 2010
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.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Polishing a Rotten Apple
Did you ever think about how the “reforms” in bureaucratic organizations (education, governmental regulatory agencies, etc.) always start with the assumption that the status quo has value as a starting point? That is, the approach is to try to “polish a rotten apple.”
It is easy to understand why this is so. The bureaucrats are deathly afraid that if any needed changes were looked at objectively, their own jobs and “cast in concrete” habits would be in jeopardy. This is why, for example, the Colorado Closing the Achievement Gap Commission Final Report of 11/05 states that while billions of dollars have been spent attempting to close the gap that the current situation is worse than when Robert Kennedy, a third of a century ago, called the gap a stain on our national honor. The efforts always start and end in the same place, the status quo, wasting huge amounts of money and limiting our kids’ futures because they are not educated to their full potential.
Here is a look at current assumptions common in education that I believe are roadblocks in the way of serving our kids as they deserve to be served.
1. Big school districts with a strong central office, top down structure are more efficient and more effective. The centralized structures have been done away with in large organizations outside of government funded bureaucratic operations because they found that competition forced them to admit that a decentralized structure performed much better. The fact that the same is true of education settings when it has been tried is discussed in William Ouchi’s new book, “The Secret of TSL.”
2. Education school training is required to be able to teach or lead effectively in education. The education schools are basically “diploma mills” milking the public trough for all the money they can garner. The preparedness of their graduates when compared to the requirements to do an effective job is weak at best. The education schools’ graduate programs have no rigor and are in what Arthur Levine called “A Race to the Bottom” reducing admission and graduation requirements while shortening program length in an effort to attract more and more people interested in the paper not the education that would allow them to do an effective job.
3. The research in education is rigorous and can be relied upon to make important decisions on curriculum and methods, etc. In fact, the research in education is generally of poor quality because it is slanted to favor products or services of the researchers or poorly done from a statistical rigor point of view. See the What Works Clearinghouse at the US Dept of Ed website.
4. The education oversight bureaucracies at the Federal and State levels are doing a good job of setting standards, achievement testing regimens, certification requirements, etc. Because the denizens of these bureaucracies have been trained in the education schools’ graduate programs they don’t have the knowledge or objectivity to break the cycle of low standards and support for education processes that don’t stand scientific scrutiny as pointed out by E.D. Hirsch in The Knowledge Deficit. Would you think it strange that someone with an education doctorate that Levine found in his research to be of no value in any public school administration job, would fail to criticize the very degrees that many of them have? Right.
5. Educators are expert in the subjects they teach. This is one of the biggest problems that goes unaddressed. Oh, there have been efforts like the highly qualified requirements in the NCLB law but they have failed to make a difference. This is because the “remedial” classes required are populated with educators so that they are taught down to that level of competence. This is just another example of going through the motions to satisfy a legal requirement but not the intent. Thus, the intent of the law is short-circuited. Rita Kramer describes the problem well in Ed School Follies, “The people who become ‘educators’ and who run our school systems usually have degrees in education, psychology, social sciences, public administration; they are not people who have studied, know, and love literature, history, science, or philosophy. Our ‘educators’ are not educated. They do not love learning. Naturally enough, they think of the past as dead because it has never been alive to them. And they will not bring it alive for their pupils.”
So, what is to be done? It seems we have two choices. First, we can give up and cut the money spent on “improving education” to zero (which would require dramatic cuts in admin staffs in school districts) by admitting that it hasn’t happened and won’t happen under the current modus operandi. Or, we can dismantle the assumptions listed above and cause a “reset to first principles” to determine what is the right way to proceed. As part of this we would need to set very high expectations to prevent the re-establishment of the same processes with different names. Inevitably lots of toes would have to be stepped on and some of the worst actors sacrificed as an object lesson for the rest that reform was not a talking exercise but a walking exercise with real and positive results required. You might blanch at the thought of sacrificing some of the educators to make the point. I have absolutely no problem with that as millions of kids are continually sacrificed at the “status quo; let’s make it cushy for the adult educators” alter. It is time to start behaving as though the kids have some priority in our education system.
It is easy to understand why this is so. The bureaucrats are deathly afraid that if any needed changes were looked at objectively, their own jobs and “cast in concrete” habits would be in jeopardy. This is why, for example, the Colorado Closing the Achievement Gap Commission Final Report of 11/05 states that while billions of dollars have been spent attempting to close the gap that the current situation is worse than when Robert Kennedy, a third of a century ago, called the gap a stain on our national honor. The efforts always start and end in the same place, the status quo, wasting huge amounts of money and limiting our kids’ futures because they are not educated to their full potential.
Here is a look at current assumptions common in education that I believe are roadblocks in the way of serving our kids as they deserve to be served.
1. Big school districts with a strong central office, top down structure are more efficient and more effective. The centralized structures have been done away with in large organizations outside of government funded bureaucratic operations because they found that competition forced them to admit that a decentralized structure performed much better. The fact that the same is true of education settings when it has been tried is discussed in William Ouchi’s new book, “The Secret of TSL.”
2. Education school training is required to be able to teach or lead effectively in education. The education schools are basically “diploma mills” milking the public trough for all the money they can garner. The preparedness of their graduates when compared to the requirements to do an effective job is weak at best. The education schools’ graduate programs have no rigor and are in what Arthur Levine called “A Race to the Bottom” reducing admission and graduation requirements while shortening program length in an effort to attract more and more people interested in the paper not the education that would allow them to do an effective job.
3. The research in education is rigorous and can be relied upon to make important decisions on curriculum and methods, etc. In fact, the research in education is generally of poor quality because it is slanted to favor products or services of the researchers or poorly done from a statistical rigor point of view. See the What Works Clearinghouse at the US Dept of Ed website.
4. The education oversight bureaucracies at the Federal and State levels are doing a good job of setting standards, achievement testing regimens, certification requirements, etc. Because the denizens of these bureaucracies have been trained in the education schools’ graduate programs they don’t have the knowledge or objectivity to break the cycle of low standards and support for education processes that don’t stand scientific scrutiny as pointed out by E.D. Hirsch in The Knowledge Deficit. Would you think it strange that someone with an education doctorate that Levine found in his research to be of no value in any public school administration job, would fail to criticize the very degrees that many of them have? Right.
5. Educators are expert in the subjects they teach. This is one of the biggest problems that goes unaddressed. Oh, there have been efforts like the highly qualified requirements in the NCLB law but they have failed to make a difference. This is because the “remedial” classes required are populated with educators so that they are taught down to that level of competence. This is just another example of going through the motions to satisfy a legal requirement but not the intent. Thus, the intent of the law is short-circuited. Rita Kramer describes the problem well in Ed School Follies, “The people who become ‘educators’ and who run our school systems usually have degrees in education, psychology, social sciences, public administration; they are not people who have studied, know, and love literature, history, science, or philosophy. Our ‘educators’ are not educated. They do not love learning. Naturally enough, they think of the past as dead because it has never been alive to them. And they will not bring it alive for their pupils.”
So, what is to be done? It seems we have two choices. First, we can give up and cut the money spent on “improving education” to zero (which would require dramatic cuts in admin staffs in school districts) by admitting that it hasn’t happened and won’t happen under the current modus operandi. Or, we can dismantle the assumptions listed above and cause a “reset to first principles” to determine what is the right way to proceed. As part of this we would need to set very high expectations to prevent the re-establishment of the same processes with different names. Inevitably lots of toes would have to be stepped on and some of the worst actors sacrificed as an object lesson for the rest that reform was not a talking exercise but a walking exercise with real and positive results required. You might blanch at the thought of sacrificing some of the educators to make the point. I have absolutely no problem with that as millions of kids are continually sacrificed at the “status quo; let’s make it cushy for the adult educators” alter. It is time to start behaving as though the kids have some priority in our education system.
Monday, November 16, 2009
Management Thoughts for Educators
Needed—a data driven, closed loop, short cycle management process to effect positive change in the organization.
Data—Attitude Change Required
• The data approach of educators is conditioned through decades to always look for a way to put the best face on bad performance
• The data approach of managers who face the need to improve continually is to put the worst face on the data to identify the biggest problems and fix them quickly.
Large Organizations Don’t Function Well With Centralized Management Structures
• Top-down, one-size-fits-all precludes addressing any unique problems or opportunities for improvement
• Communication is very difficult because of the multitudinous paths created by the top heavy structure (can of worms)
• Change is extremely difficult because of the structured decision making process that involve specialists, committees, months of study, the board of education, etc. The war will be over and we will have lost because we couldn’t address the problems effectively in real time.
• “Customers” (parents especially) lose patience with the lack of real progress and vote with their feet leaving the district with their kids.
• The centralized structure provides “cover” for weak managers who don’t have the training and experience required for a more streamlined, participative structure that would be much higher performing.
Several Big Urban Districts Are Decentralizing Their Management Structures to Give Autonomy to the School Principals—Big Performance Gains Have Resulted
Five Pillars of School Empowerment (from The Secret of TSL by Wm. Ouchi)
o Real Choices for Families (we have this in Colorado)
o Empowering schools with the Four Freedoms
o Effective principals (trained and coached in leadership academies, 15 month cycle but on the job)
o A system of accountability
o Weighted Student Formula budgeting
The Four Freedoms of School Empowerment—Control of:
o Budget
o Staffing Pattern
o Curriculum
o Schedule
Action Steps required to get to “there from here”
Retool leaders with leadership academy approach—all leaders including superintendent and board (especially performance standards and management theories)
Assess current leaders
o Knowledge and skills in basic management areas including psychology of motivation, behavior prediction & modification, theories of management, esp. relating to change management, communication, performance standards
o Evaluate current principals’ ability to “jump” to the new more rigorous principal model. That is, from the current “follower of central office edicts” to “independent manager of a school” with control over budget, staffing, curriculum, schedule.
Begin planning for transition
o Ex. Pilot group of schools (elementary, middle and high)?
Evaluate current central office admin staff for fit to the new structure. Plug-in to new jobs consistent with the new structure as openings occur (only if a good fit).
Wind down no longer needed central office functions to free up budget and transform to new central office support model. That is, recognize the bad habits that do not contribute to the core mission of educating the children well.
This outline is brief but provides a road map for those willing to face the reality of our current mired in place education performance.
Data—Attitude Change Required
• The data approach of educators is conditioned through decades to always look for a way to put the best face on bad performance
• The data approach of managers who face the need to improve continually is to put the worst face on the data to identify the biggest problems and fix them quickly.
Large Organizations Don’t Function Well With Centralized Management Structures
• Top-down, one-size-fits-all precludes addressing any unique problems or opportunities for improvement
• Communication is very difficult because of the multitudinous paths created by the top heavy structure (can of worms)
• Change is extremely difficult because of the structured decision making process that involve specialists, committees, months of study, the board of education, etc. The war will be over and we will have lost because we couldn’t address the problems effectively in real time.
• “Customers” (parents especially) lose patience with the lack of real progress and vote with their feet leaving the district with their kids.
• The centralized structure provides “cover” for weak managers who don’t have the training and experience required for a more streamlined, participative structure that would be much higher performing.
Several Big Urban Districts Are Decentralizing Their Management Structures to Give Autonomy to the School Principals—Big Performance Gains Have Resulted
Five Pillars of School Empowerment (from The Secret of TSL by Wm. Ouchi)
o Real Choices for Families (we have this in Colorado)
o Empowering schools with the Four Freedoms
o Effective principals (trained and coached in leadership academies, 15 month cycle but on the job)
o A system of accountability
o Weighted Student Formula budgeting
The Four Freedoms of School Empowerment—Control of:
o Budget
o Staffing Pattern
o Curriculum
o Schedule
Action Steps required to get to “there from here”
Retool leaders with leadership academy approach—all leaders including superintendent and board (especially performance standards and management theories)
Assess current leaders
o Knowledge and skills in basic management areas including psychology of motivation, behavior prediction & modification, theories of management, esp. relating to change management, communication, performance standards
o Evaluate current principals’ ability to “jump” to the new more rigorous principal model. That is, from the current “follower of central office edicts” to “independent manager of a school” with control over budget, staffing, curriculum, schedule.
Begin planning for transition
o Ex. Pilot group of schools (elementary, middle and high)?
Evaluate current central office admin staff for fit to the new structure. Plug-in to new jobs consistent with the new structure as openings occur (only if a good fit).
Wind down no longer needed central office functions to free up budget and transform to new central office support model. That is, recognize the bad habits that do not contribute to the core mission of educating the children well.
This outline is brief but provides a road map for those willing to face the reality of our current mired in place education performance.
Friday, November 6, 2009
Pros at Being First in Line at the Public Trough
Like sharks getting the scent of new education standards blood, the suppliers of services to the education “industry” are volunteering to “help” the schools spend their taxpayer money on their own products and offerings. A recent article in Education Week "Conflict of Interest Arises as Concern in Standards Push," explores the problem.
Kathleen A. Hinchman, the president of the Oak Creek, Wis.-based professional association and the author of a letter pointing out the concern of standards writers acting in their own self interest, said the National Governors Association and the Council of the Chief State School Officers, the two organizations in charge of the common-standards endeavor, should provide a public document that identifies ties that the writers have to companies or organizations that might benefit financially from products aligned with the standards.
“Ms. Hinchman, a literacy professor at Syracuse University, in New York, said her organization wants to ensure that the creation and use of common standards is not plagued with the kinds of conflict-of-interest problems that arose with the federal Reading First program, which was funded with $1 billion per year at its peak.
At least one federal official made a significant financial profit from a reading program that he wrote and promoted while he was an adviser to states about the federal program, according to a 2007 Senate report. Another Reading First contractor and researcher received a large boost in income during the program’s tenure when she was also advising states on which assessments and texts to select to meet its requirements, that same report said. ("Senate Report Cites ‘Reading First’ Conflicts," May 16, 2007.)
Some of those who made money off the venture were affiliated with universities rather than businesses and wrote curriculum materials, developed tests, or consulted.
In the common-standards effort, Ms. Hinchman said a writer might favor one standard over another because it could more easily be turned into an instructional material or an assessment tool that he or she, or those they are connected with, could profit by.
‘It makes a lot of sense to indicate the relationships between people who are designing education policy and their various roles in government and business,’ said Patricia H. Hinchey, an associate professor of education at Pennsylvania State University.
With the connections spelled out, she explained, someone could say, ‘You supported X rather than Y, and oddly, X lends itself to a business agenda. Why is that?’ Ms. Hinchey is also a research fellow with the Education and Public Interest Center at the University of Colorado."
Concern is also expressed that Apple’s Karen Cator, who chaired the Partnership for 21st Century Skills Board, will become head of the U. S. Department of Education’s Office of Education Technology. A question being asked is will Cator use her new office to promote P21’s discredited ideas? I’d say you could bet on it. You can also bet that Apple will be the recommended choice for education applications.
Sunshine is the ultimate antiseptic. Insiders are already pushing back hard against more disclosure of potential conflicts of interest which confirms the problem as well as anything could. Let the sunshine in.
Kathleen A. Hinchman, the president of the Oak Creek, Wis.-based professional association and the author of a letter pointing out the concern of standards writers acting in their own self interest, said the National Governors Association and the Council of the Chief State School Officers, the two organizations in charge of the common-standards endeavor, should provide a public document that identifies ties that the writers have to companies or organizations that might benefit financially from products aligned with the standards.
“Ms. Hinchman, a literacy professor at Syracuse University, in New York, said her organization wants to ensure that the creation and use of common standards is not plagued with the kinds of conflict-of-interest problems that arose with the federal Reading First program, which was funded with $1 billion per year at its peak.
At least one federal official made a significant financial profit from a reading program that he wrote and promoted while he was an adviser to states about the federal program, according to a 2007 Senate report. Another Reading First contractor and researcher received a large boost in income during the program’s tenure when she was also advising states on which assessments and texts to select to meet its requirements, that same report said. ("Senate Report Cites ‘Reading First’ Conflicts," May 16, 2007.)
Some of those who made money off the venture were affiliated with universities rather than businesses and wrote curriculum materials, developed tests, or consulted.
In the common-standards effort, Ms. Hinchman said a writer might favor one standard over another because it could more easily be turned into an instructional material or an assessment tool that he or she, or those they are connected with, could profit by.
‘It makes a lot of sense to indicate the relationships between people who are designing education policy and their various roles in government and business,’ said Patricia H. Hinchey, an associate professor of education at Pennsylvania State University.
With the connections spelled out, she explained, someone could say, ‘You supported X rather than Y, and oddly, X lends itself to a business agenda. Why is that?’ Ms. Hinchey is also a research fellow with the Education and Public Interest Center at the University of Colorado."
Concern is also expressed that Apple’s Karen Cator, who chaired the Partnership for 21st Century Skills Board, will become head of the U. S. Department of Education’s Office of Education Technology. A question being asked is will Cator use her new office to promote P21’s discredited ideas? I’d say you could bet on it. You can also bet that Apple will be the recommended choice for education applications.
Sunshine is the ultimate antiseptic. Insiders are already pushing back hard against more disclosure of potential conflicts of interest which confirms the problem as well as anything could. Let the sunshine in.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
