Gentlemen, we have run out of money. It is time to start thinking.
Sir Ernest Rutherford, Nobel Laureate—physics
Key messages from Rising Above the Gathering Storm—Revisited : Approaching Category 5, National Academies Press available at WWW.nap.edu
The original report sponsored by members of congress of both parties painted a bleak picture of our situation competitively. There were two glaring problems where recommendations were made. One was to increase government support for basic scientific research. The second and the biggest single cause of the problem was the poor performance of American K-12 schools. The initial report came out in 2005. The committee that prepared this new report unanimously agreed that our nation’s outlook has worsened.
“Further, . . . our overall public school system, or more accurately 14,000 school systems—has shown little sign of improvement especially in math and science. Finally, many other nations have been markedly progressing, thereby affecting America’s relative ability to compete for new factories, research laboratories, administrative centers—and jobs.” Thus, we are falling behind the competition because they are improving rapidly and we are plodding in a comfortable circle getting nowhere.
Thus, if Americans wish to continue our lifestyle we have to be competitive.
A sampling of factoids listed in the report:
• The World Economic Forum ranks the United States 48th in quality of math and science education.
• In 2009, 51% of United States patents were awarded to non-U.S. companies.
• Of Wal-Mart’s 6000 suppliers, 5000 are in China.
• United States consumers spend considerably more on potato chips than the US Government spends on Energy R&D.
• In 2000 the number of foreign students studying physical science and engineering in United States graduate schools surpassed the number of United States students.
• GE has now located the majority of its R&D personnel outside the United States.
• In the 2009 rankings of the Information technology and Innovation Foundation the U.S. was in sixth place in global innovation-based competitiveness, but ranked fortieth in rate of change over the past decade.
• Sixty-nine percent of United States public school students in 5th through 8th grade are taught mathematics by a teacher without a degree or certificate in mathematics.
• Ninety-three percent of United States public school students in 5th through 8th grade are taught physical science by a teacher without a degree or certificate in physical science.
• The United States ranks 27th among developed nations in the proportion of college students receiving undergraduate degrees in science or engineering.
• The United States ranks 20th in high school completion rate among industrialized nations and 16th in college completion rate.
• According to the ACT College Readiness report, 78% of high school graduates did not meet the readiness benchmark levels for one or more entry-level college courses in mathematics, science, reading, and English.
The Gathering Storm (2005) concluded that the best measure of competitiveness is Quality Jobs. Jobs to a large degree define the quality of life of individual citizens. The evidence is that good jobs are created as a direct or indirect of advances in science and technology. A variety of studies over the last decades indicate that over 50% of quality jobs are a direct result of technological innovation. Advancement in communication speeds and travel and shipping speeds has meant that we now have to compete with those who are half a world away. Delhi, Beijing, and Denver are next door neighbors now.
“[T]he committee . . . expressed its commitment to help America to be among those nations whom it hopes will enjoy a truly global prosperity. In [that] regard, the committee concluded that the United States appears to be on a course that will lead to a declining, not increasing standard of living for our children and grandchildren.”
Recommendations, I am only listing the first one because without it all the rest will be futile.
• Move the United States K-12 education system in mathematics and science to a leading position by global standards.
Friday, September 24, 2010
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Congratulations Status Quo-ers
If you look at the 2009 and 2010 Math CSAP (state achievement tests) for one of the larger school districts in Colorado you will see that the status quo has been preserved although with a slight downward bias.
2009 Math CSAP
2010 Math CSAP
This performance is typical of large districts in Colorado. Since the methods used in Colorado are basically the same throughout the nation with a few exceptions it is highly likely that the national picture is essentially the same. In the most important metric, that of tenth grade proficient or better the result is down.
I am very familiar with the district whose charts are shown. There has been much talk of improving math instruction for a decade or more. It has been a war between the “expert” educators and the parents and outside math experts. It comes down to this. The outside experts know that the curricula used especially in elementary schools will not provide the foundational math knowledge required to be successful in middle school and beyond.
The educators have chosen to use an approach that converts the elementary teacher into a “facilitator” for the constructivist/discovery processes that are the predominant approach. While there are several curricula of this type the district has chosen EveryDay Math as the standard approach and is “rolling it out” as fast as they can to all of the schools in the district. This choice is made to try to “cover up” the fact that a large percentage of elementary teachers do not have the requisite math knowledge to teach math in a way that would provide the foundation the students require. If you doubt this and have a strong stomach you can read Liping Ma’s book Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics, Teachers' Understanding of Fundamental Mathematics in China and the United States.
The methods the administrators use to protect the status quo are very effective. The first arrow in their quiver is to listen attentively to the outside input, pretending to value it. The next step when it is obvious that the outside input is serious and has staying power is to hire “expert” consultants to evaluate the math curriculum and alignment for the district. This, of course, takes lots of time and money. It also is worthless because the “experts” who do the analysis are education insiders who don’t understand math either. This is because the education schools do not teach subjects with rigor. They concentrate only on process.
A third arrow in the quiver is to set goals that on the surface appear to be stretching in nature and to the benefit of the students. However, in years of observing this process it is obvious that there is no intention to actually do anything to meet the goals. They are only there to mollify the critics until they lose interest.
There is no closed loop process in place in education. There is no quality control in education. No one is tasked to close the loop and point out with vigor that goals aren’t being met. No one is tasked to point out that the kids are not being served nearly well enough. While the board of education could provide this function, they don’t have the moxie or skill. They have been trained by the “expert” educators to be rubber stampers of the administrator proposals, and most of all to “be nice.”
Thus, the children continue to be ill served but the educators are happy because they were able to avoid change which might require them to work harder and learn more. So, congratulations educators on successfully protecting your ability to continue to harm kids.
2009 Math CSAP
2010 Math CSAP
This performance is typical of large districts in Colorado. Since the methods used in Colorado are basically the same throughout the nation with a few exceptions it is highly likely that the national picture is essentially the same. In the most important metric, that of tenth grade proficient or better the result is down.
I am very familiar with the district whose charts are shown. There has been much talk of improving math instruction for a decade or more. It has been a war between the “expert” educators and the parents and outside math experts. It comes down to this. The outside experts know that the curricula used especially in elementary schools will not provide the foundational math knowledge required to be successful in middle school and beyond.
The educators have chosen to use an approach that converts the elementary teacher into a “facilitator” for the constructivist/discovery processes that are the predominant approach. While there are several curricula of this type the district has chosen EveryDay Math as the standard approach and is “rolling it out” as fast as they can to all of the schools in the district. This choice is made to try to “cover up” the fact that a large percentage of elementary teachers do not have the requisite math knowledge to teach math in a way that would provide the foundation the students require. If you doubt this and have a strong stomach you can read Liping Ma’s book Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics, Teachers' Understanding of Fundamental Mathematics in China and the United States.
The methods the administrators use to protect the status quo are very effective. The first arrow in their quiver is to listen attentively to the outside input, pretending to value it. The next step when it is obvious that the outside input is serious and has staying power is to hire “expert” consultants to evaluate the math curriculum and alignment for the district. This, of course, takes lots of time and money. It also is worthless because the “experts” who do the analysis are education insiders who don’t understand math either. This is because the education schools do not teach subjects with rigor. They concentrate only on process.
A third arrow in the quiver is to set goals that on the surface appear to be stretching in nature and to the benefit of the students. However, in years of observing this process it is obvious that there is no intention to actually do anything to meet the goals. They are only there to mollify the critics until they lose interest.
There is no closed loop process in place in education. There is no quality control in education. No one is tasked to close the loop and point out with vigor that goals aren’t being met. No one is tasked to point out that the kids are not being served nearly well enough. While the board of education could provide this function, they don’t have the moxie or skill. They have been trained by the “expert” educators to be rubber stampers of the administrator proposals, and most of all to “be nice.”
Thus, the children continue to be ill served but the educators are happy because they were able to avoid change which might require them to work harder and learn more. So, congratulations educators on successfully protecting your ability to continue to harm kids.
Friday, September 3, 2010
How do you get the pigs to move? Move the feed trough.
The analog question is “How do you get the education fiefdom to move?” Move the government money so that they have to move away from their erroneous beliefs to continue getting paid. First, we need to realize that the national and state departments of education are card-carrying fiefdom members. They have been brainwashed to believe incorrect dogma as all the other educators and hence are blind to the real problems and their solutions. Any efforts to improve (reform) our failed education system must acknowledge that fact. Unless the continuing supply of money is threatened, beneficial reforms will simply not be carried out effectively. That is, if the fox is guarding the hen house the chickens are going to continue being eaten.
In the story The Three Little Pigs, the moral is that if you build a shoddy house you have no protection against the wolf. In education if you build your whole endeavor on a false foundation too many kids will not learn what they need to learn to compete in the global meritocracy. Some kids will learn no matter the system because their support system outside of school enables them to overcome the negative effect of the schools. Those who are not as fortunate need competent schools to teach them and they exist now only as exceptions.
The Fallacies
Curricula—the current approach was fostered by John Dewey and other Progressives. It goes by many names; process, content free, discovery, constructivist, and “how-to” chief among them. The problem is that this content-free approach does not allow our children to gain the factual knowledge required to understand what the process approach tells them. One more important aspect of the current approach is that any knowledge learned takes a lot longer than with the more traditional, proven content-rich, direct instruction methods we used to use before the Progressives drove us into a ditch. It is also the method used by our best global competitors whose kids learn so much more than ours.
E.D. Hirsch, in his book The Making of Americans, relates why content knowledge is critical. “To understand a piece of writing (including that on the Internet and in job-retraining manuals), you already have to know something about its subject matter. . . My research had led me to understand that reading and writing require unspoken background knowledge, silently assumed. I realized that if we want students to read and write well, we cannot take a laissez-faire attitude to the content of early schooling. In order to make competent readers and writers who possess the knowledge needed for communication, we would have to specify much of that content. Moreover, because much of the assumed knowledge required for reading and writing tends to be long lasting and intergenerational, much of that content would have to be traditional.”
According to ACT, the biggest college readiness problem in reading is, precisely, inability to comprehend “complex texts.” The point is that reading comprehension doesn’t improve simply by practicing the “skill” again and again. Readers need to build domain knowledge in order to handle texts at the higher levels. The current “how-to” skills approach that is used in the vast majority of our schools does not provide the knowledge level required for anything approaching complexity.
The situation for math is much the same. Instead of building the required foundational knowledge the emphasis is on discovery methods and calculators. This does not prepare children for algebra and higher math studies they are exposed to in middle and high school work. By the time that realization comes, too many students are so far behind that they give up on math and turn off.
Teacher Subject Knowledge—A huge problem in elementary school is that the teachers generally do not have nearly enough subject knowledge to teach the content required during what should be foundation building for future success in middle school, high school and post secondary education endeavors. Liping Ma’s study of elementary math teachers in America and China (Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics) showed a huge gulf in the math knowledge of the two groups. The comparison was not favorable for American teachers who all had much more college level education than their Chinese counterparts. It is the quality of the post secondary training that counts not the quantity. Our education schools emphasize quantity. The Chinese emphasize quality.
Elementary teachers are brainwashed in the how-to skills approach for reading as well. They have not really studied in their education school training the structure of our language, its rules and usage with any rigor. Thus, they do not provide their students with basic knowledge which would be foundational to ever increasing reading (and writing) ability.
The Education Schools—for the most part these are “all the little puffer bellies all in a row” in their approach. And sadly it is the wrong approach of content-free methods at the expense of rigorous subject knowledge. There are a few exceptions (U of Virginia, Hillsdale College, etc) that are requiring subject knowledge rigor but the vast majority of new teachers whose certification is mostly based on their ed school training are not prepared to do the job that needs to be done. As long as the ed school degree is tantamount to certification there is no incentive for these “diploma mills” squeezing government money from the system and tuition from the students to clean up their acts.
To conclude, if we really care about improving the schools our kids attend, we need to get busy forcing the required changes on the educators. I say force because the educators have proven over the last many decades that they are incapable of leading the required change themselves. They aren’t expert in education even though they believe they are. Their results are the incontrovertible truth. The education leadership is “go along, get along” at best based on their worthless education school leadership degrees especially the doctorates which Arthur Levine in his Educating School Leaders said were of no value (worthless) in any public school administration job. Thus, they don’t know what to do, don’t want to change because they know they are overpaid and underworked now, and they don’t have the insider leadership moxie to change even if they wanted to. That is why they will have to be forced to change. That means that we will have to move the “pig” trough to a place that is better for our kids. The pigs will have to move to the new trough or starve. They will move. Not quietly but they will move. Each of the points above; content rich curricula, teachers who know the subjects to be certified, education schools who require subject knowledge rigor or risk being decertified, and education leaders who are paid for results not their position are all required.
We need to stop going off on tangents with other “improvement” initiatives until these problems are addressed. This is where the leverage is. Until the foundation is repaired all of the other cosmetic changes that cost so much money and time are a waste of valuable resources and our kids futures.
In the story The Three Little Pigs, the moral is that if you build a shoddy house you have no protection against the wolf. In education if you build your whole endeavor on a false foundation too many kids will not learn what they need to learn to compete in the global meritocracy. Some kids will learn no matter the system because their support system outside of school enables them to overcome the negative effect of the schools. Those who are not as fortunate need competent schools to teach them and they exist now only as exceptions.
The Fallacies
Curricula—the current approach was fostered by John Dewey and other Progressives. It goes by many names; process, content free, discovery, constructivist, and “how-to” chief among them. The problem is that this content-free approach does not allow our children to gain the factual knowledge required to understand what the process approach tells them. One more important aspect of the current approach is that any knowledge learned takes a lot longer than with the more traditional, proven content-rich, direct instruction methods we used to use before the Progressives drove us into a ditch. It is also the method used by our best global competitors whose kids learn so much more than ours.
E.D. Hirsch, in his book The Making of Americans, relates why content knowledge is critical. “To understand a piece of writing (including that on the Internet and in job-retraining manuals), you already have to know something about its subject matter. . . My research had led me to understand that reading and writing require unspoken background knowledge, silently assumed. I realized that if we want students to read and write well, we cannot take a laissez-faire attitude to the content of early schooling. In order to make competent readers and writers who possess the knowledge needed for communication, we would have to specify much of that content. Moreover, because much of the assumed knowledge required for reading and writing tends to be long lasting and intergenerational, much of that content would have to be traditional.”
According to ACT, the biggest college readiness problem in reading is, precisely, inability to comprehend “complex texts.” The point is that reading comprehension doesn’t improve simply by practicing the “skill” again and again. Readers need to build domain knowledge in order to handle texts at the higher levels. The current “how-to” skills approach that is used in the vast majority of our schools does not provide the knowledge level required for anything approaching complexity.
The situation for math is much the same. Instead of building the required foundational knowledge the emphasis is on discovery methods and calculators. This does not prepare children for algebra and higher math studies they are exposed to in middle and high school work. By the time that realization comes, too many students are so far behind that they give up on math and turn off.
Teacher Subject Knowledge—A huge problem in elementary school is that the teachers generally do not have nearly enough subject knowledge to teach the content required during what should be foundation building for future success in middle school, high school and post secondary education endeavors. Liping Ma’s study of elementary math teachers in America and China (Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics) showed a huge gulf in the math knowledge of the two groups. The comparison was not favorable for American teachers who all had much more college level education than their Chinese counterparts. It is the quality of the post secondary training that counts not the quantity. Our education schools emphasize quantity. The Chinese emphasize quality.
Elementary teachers are brainwashed in the how-to skills approach for reading as well. They have not really studied in their education school training the structure of our language, its rules and usage with any rigor. Thus, they do not provide their students with basic knowledge which would be foundational to ever increasing reading (and writing) ability.
The Education Schools—for the most part these are “all the little puffer bellies all in a row” in their approach. And sadly it is the wrong approach of content-free methods at the expense of rigorous subject knowledge. There are a few exceptions (U of Virginia, Hillsdale College, etc) that are requiring subject knowledge rigor but the vast majority of new teachers whose certification is mostly based on their ed school training are not prepared to do the job that needs to be done. As long as the ed school degree is tantamount to certification there is no incentive for these “diploma mills” squeezing government money from the system and tuition from the students to clean up their acts.
To conclude, if we really care about improving the schools our kids attend, we need to get busy forcing the required changes on the educators. I say force because the educators have proven over the last many decades that they are incapable of leading the required change themselves. They aren’t expert in education even though they believe they are. Their results are the incontrovertible truth. The education leadership is “go along, get along” at best based on their worthless education school leadership degrees especially the doctorates which Arthur Levine in his Educating School Leaders said were of no value (worthless) in any public school administration job. Thus, they don’t know what to do, don’t want to change because they know they are overpaid and underworked now, and they don’t have the insider leadership moxie to change even if they wanted to. That is why they will have to be forced to change. That means that we will have to move the “pig” trough to a place that is better for our kids. The pigs will have to move to the new trough or starve. They will move. Not quietly but they will move. Each of the points above; content rich curricula, teachers who know the subjects to be certified, education schools who require subject knowledge rigor or risk being decertified, and education leaders who are paid for results not their position are all required.
We need to stop going off on tangents with other “improvement” initiatives until these problems are addressed. This is where the leverage is. Until the foundation is repaired all of the other cosmetic changes that cost so much money and time are a waste of valuable resources and our kids futures.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Race to Nowhere
On August 24 the national department of education announced the winning states for their “Race to the Top” awards. The purpose of the process was to hold out money carrots as incentive for states to enact changes in their laws and ways of managing their education process in the hope of accessing a several billion dollar pot of money to be divided among “winning states.” After the first round of the competition, Colorado became a finalist and had been considered very likely to be a winner in yesterday’s awards. The following quotes from the Wall Street Journal’s coverage tell the story.
"Colorado, which finished 17th among 19 finalists, had been widely viewed as the top contender in the competition, and Mr. Duncan said Tuesday that he wished he could have funded the state. Dwight Jones, Colorado Commissioner of Education, said he was "shell-shocked" that his state didn't win and he pointed to the lack of teacher union support as one reason."
"There is a real disconnect for me because we did exactly what the administration urged us to do—adopt significant reforms," Mr. Jones said. "So we adopt the ambitious reforms and create the conditions to make dramatic changes, but we don't win because not everyone signed on. That worries me."
"Deborah Fallin, a spokeswoman for the Colorado Education Association, said the union supported Colorado's application in an earlier Race to the Top round, but the state didn't win then, either. The union withdrew support in the second round after lawmakers passed a teacher evaluation law that make it easier to get rid of low-performing teachers. "They want to blame us no matter what," she said."
This whole process is indicative of how money is the cocaine in education circles. More money for education is the primary goal of everyone in education from the public schools to the education schools to the consultants and book publishers, and to the politicians whose campaigns are financed by education power groups. The above quotes from Mr. Jones and Ms Fallin are great examples of the ubiquitous attitude among educators. “It is their fault, it couldn’t be mine.” Thus, Jones blames the unions and the unions blame “they” which is inclusive to those who made it easier to fire bad teachers.
Yet, no one talked about doing a better job of educating our kids. Oh, they would argue that getting rid of a few bad teachers would improve things. That is true as far as it goes. And it doesn’t go far compared to the “whopper” problems that the educators cleverly ignore or hide hoping the public doesn’t figure out what they are doing.
Some obvious questions come to mind
• How could Colorado consider entering a “Race to the Top” competition when Colorado standards as represented by the CSAP achievement tests are among the lowest in the nation? Did they really think they should be rewarded for such poor performance? Perhaps in the “Alice in Wonderland” world of public education that was a reasonable expectation since there are no real penalties for poor performance.
• When it comes to improving things for our kids, throwing out the content-free curricula and replacing them with content-rich curricula tied to much more rigorous standards and achievement tests would have immensely bigger positive impact than firing some bad teachers. Am I saying that the bad teachers should be ignored? Of course not, but I am saying that the priorities of actions do not in any way match the power of the potential improvements to be gained. Fixing the curricula is the only thing that will substantially impact the achievement gap favorably.
This list could go on and on but hopefully you get the point. The current education management process in America and especially in Colorado is built on a faulty foundation. Spending huge amounts of money on remodels that don’t address the foundational issues is a recipe for continued high costs and abysmal performance. It is not good stewardship of our vital resources.
We must expect our politicians and educators to stop the obfuscation of the truth and face facts. The current pet projects that only enrich educators without benefiting the students must be trashed and replaced by real and effective changes. Yes, some pain for the adults in education will be required. But the pain for children would be reduced greatly and that is as it should be. It is time to leave the dream world that is American education today and transition to the real world where continuous improvement and competitive performance are not only nice but required.
"Colorado, which finished 17th among 19 finalists, had been widely viewed as the top contender in the competition, and Mr. Duncan said Tuesday that he wished he could have funded the state. Dwight Jones, Colorado Commissioner of Education, said he was "shell-shocked" that his state didn't win and he pointed to the lack of teacher union support as one reason."
"There is a real disconnect for me because we did exactly what the administration urged us to do—adopt significant reforms," Mr. Jones said. "So we adopt the ambitious reforms and create the conditions to make dramatic changes, but we don't win because not everyone signed on. That worries me."
"Deborah Fallin, a spokeswoman for the Colorado Education Association, said the union supported Colorado's application in an earlier Race to the Top round, but the state didn't win then, either. The union withdrew support in the second round after lawmakers passed a teacher evaluation law that make it easier to get rid of low-performing teachers. "They want to blame us no matter what," she said."
This whole process is indicative of how money is the cocaine in education circles. More money for education is the primary goal of everyone in education from the public schools to the education schools to the consultants and book publishers, and to the politicians whose campaigns are financed by education power groups. The above quotes from Mr. Jones and Ms Fallin are great examples of the ubiquitous attitude among educators. “It is their fault, it couldn’t be mine.” Thus, Jones blames the unions and the unions blame “they” which is inclusive to those who made it easier to fire bad teachers.
Yet, no one talked about doing a better job of educating our kids. Oh, they would argue that getting rid of a few bad teachers would improve things. That is true as far as it goes. And it doesn’t go far compared to the “whopper” problems that the educators cleverly ignore or hide hoping the public doesn’t figure out what they are doing.
Some obvious questions come to mind
• How could Colorado consider entering a “Race to the Top” competition when Colorado standards as represented by the CSAP achievement tests are among the lowest in the nation? Did they really think they should be rewarded for such poor performance? Perhaps in the “Alice in Wonderland” world of public education that was a reasonable expectation since there are no real penalties for poor performance.
• When it comes to improving things for our kids, throwing out the content-free curricula and replacing them with content-rich curricula tied to much more rigorous standards and achievement tests would have immensely bigger positive impact than firing some bad teachers. Am I saying that the bad teachers should be ignored? Of course not, but I am saying that the priorities of actions do not in any way match the power of the potential improvements to be gained. Fixing the curricula is the only thing that will substantially impact the achievement gap favorably.
This list could go on and on but hopefully you get the point. The current education management process in America and especially in Colorado is built on a faulty foundation. Spending huge amounts of money on remodels that don’t address the foundational issues is a recipe for continued high costs and abysmal performance. It is not good stewardship of our vital resources.
We must expect our politicians and educators to stop the obfuscation of the truth and face facts. The current pet projects that only enrich educators without benefiting the students must be trashed and replaced by real and effective changes. Yes, some pain for the adults in education will be required. But the pain for children would be reduced greatly and that is as it should be. It is time to leave the dream world that is American education today and transition to the real world where continuous improvement and competitive performance are not only nice but required.
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Local Control—Blessing or Curse
The A Nation at Risk report of over 25 years ago bemoaned the rising tide of mediocrity and observed that if a foreign power had imposed our education system on us we would consider it an act of war. They couldn’t have been more wrong. Where are the legions fighting for better service to our kids? Taking a nap, watching a sporting event, playing a stupid game on Facebook, watching some mindless reality TV program, taking a nice trip, whatever. The pro-kids legions are missing in action, taking the low and easy road of believing the false assertions that the education system is doing as well as can be expected. It is like the Alamo where kids’ futures are massacred. But in this case no one remembers this “Alamo” because it might cause them to have to get up off of their behinds and actually demand better for the kids.
Let’s look at the issue of government control of our schools. Education has controlling entities locally, at the state level and at the federal level. But local control is a large and popular piece of the total education pie. Should it be?
Local control has been waning for decades as the federal and state influences have increased. Now there is an effort to institute national standards which is causing lots of controversy and angst because the fans of local control see it as a battle that if lost will de facto do away with local control. It is the typical carrot and stick approach. States are told if they implement the new national model they will get more federal dollars, if not they will get less dollars.
It seems logical (not an oft used skill in political debate) that it would make sense to assess whether local control has proven a positive or negative force for our education performance. That is, has local control been an aid to doing the right things in education or a roadblock preventing education performance improvements? First, let’s look at some facts so that we can determine if local control is providing support for making the situation better. Or is the love of local control simply analogous to an infant throwing a tantrum if his environment doesn’t conform to his wishes. The infant doesn’t really know what is best for his development only what “feels good” now, the lack of parental control.
Facts—See references below
1. Our education performance is unacceptable, even in our best performing districts.
2. The education process that has been employed for the last six or more decades is based on technically wrong ideas about education.
3. While real spending (after adjusting for inflation) has increased dramatically, performance against our global competition has declined.
4. The achievement gap is here to stay unless major underlying changes in education philosophy to embrace ideas that are technically correct can be implemented.
5. Educators have been successfully brainwashed in false doctrines during their education school training preventing the truth being faced and corrective action from being taken.
Considering the facts above, what changes are required to move to an acceptable educational performance?
The biggest problem is to remove the current anti-curriculum approach and replace it with a content rich and coherent curriculum. Notice I am not saying replace the flawed local curricula with flawed national curricula. This is especially important in grades K-6. See Why the Absence of a Content-Rich Curriculum Core Hurts Poor Children Most. (reference follows) It makes the point with data that poor children also face a higher move incidence than those from higher income families. One conclusion is that children who change schools frequently are more likely to be low achievers. This reinforces the need for a nationally consistent content-rich core curriculum so that these children don’t have to start over from way behind in every new school they attend. A chart in the reference shows that based on General Accounting Office data the percentage of third grade low-income children who have attended three or more different schools since the beginning of first grade at 30%! Can a patchwork quilt of local control anti-curriculum approaches that vary from district to district make sense in such an environment? No! Well that isn’t exactly true but the conditions for sensible local control have been long ago abandoned. First, the consolidation of small districts into “more efficient” larger districts has made the local school boards servants of the political powers in their community not the parents and taxpayers in the heterogeneous districts as a whole. These political powers are centered on the education power groups who contribute heavily to school board candidate election campaigns making boards malleable to their agendas.
The contrast to the American Common School experience of the nineteenth century is stark. In that time, there were many smaller districts and an attitude that serving the kids well was the requirement. There wasn’t so much money sloshing around in the system to cause self-serving behavior. Thus, the boards of these smaller districts ended up with a de facto content rich curriculum because they knew it was the right thing to do. Today we have pseudo education experts who tell everyone on the local levels what they need to do. And that conforms to the “how to” approach with virtually no content which does not prepare our kids to compete well in the global economy. The current system is run to benefit the adults in education not the kids who attend school.
The anti-curriculum, content-poor approach hurts poor kids most because they need the structure of a knowledge based approach that builds sensibly from year to year through at least grade 6. The current discovery, child-centered approach is particularly harmful to children who do not get exposed naturally in their outside school environment to the background knowledge required to understand what they read or compute.
E.D. Hirsch in his book The Knowledge Deficit, comments on localism and its impact on education. "Along with the terrible trinity of naturalism, formalism, and determinism, localism deserves a dishonored place in American education. Among the wider public it may be the most powerful educational idea of all. On the surface it just implies that our state or our town will decide what should be taught in our schools. It says nothing about what those things should be, so localism is another content-free idea, and as a practical matter it powerfully reinforces an approach that is short on content. It brings liberals and conservatives together to collaborate in support of anti-content, process oriented ideas about education.
This suspicion fed collaboration between liberals and conservatives helps explain why the process point of view has persisted despite its inability to raise achievement or attain fairness. Educationist, process ideas thrive on the liberal-conservative standoff, and our schools and school boards operate under a gentleman's agreement that unites these groups behind the process-oriented creed."
The current patchwork local control facilitated approach works against a critical mass of educators realizing that the ed school catechism they are taught is fallacious and needs to be discarded. Until the “light bulb” turns on, our kids will continue to lag behind their best global competition in the knowledge required to compete. The light bulb will not be turned on by educators. They have proven incapable of facing the truth which the environment they work in so effectively suppresses. We have to turn on the light or better, multiple spotlights and point to the obvious fallacies of the education fiefdom.
To conclude, all three of the controlling entities in the education mess are complicit in its abysmal performance. It matters little what the control function is as long as it supports the status quo of dysfunctional theories that harm kids, especially the gap kids. Only when the control function is set up to perform by serving the kids’ and country’s needs will education be “reformed.” Otherwise “reform” is a null word in the education context. Billions of dollars and decades in the service of pseudo reform have not done anything positive for the kids, but have greatly enriched the adults working in education.
Let’s look at the issue of government control of our schools. Education has controlling entities locally, at the state level and at the federal level. But local control is a large and popular piece of the total education pie. Should it be?
Local control has been waning for decades as the federal and state influences have increased. Now there is an effort to institute national standards which is causing lots of controversy and angst because the fans of local control see it as a battle that if lost will de facto do away with local control. It is the typical carrot and stick approach. States are told if they implement the new national model they will get more federal dollars, if not they will get less dollars.
It seems logical (not an oft used skill in political debate) that it would make sense to assess whether local control has proven a positive or negative force for our education performance. That is, has local control been an aid to doing the right things in education or a roadblock preventing education performance improvements? First, let’s look at some facts so that we can determine if local control is providing support for making the situation better. Or is the love of local control simply analogous to an infant throwing a tantrum if his environment doesn’t conform to his wishes. The infant doesn’t really know what is best for his development only what “feels good” now, the lack of parental control.
Facts—See references below
1. Our education performance is unacceptable, even in our best performing districts.
2. The education process that has been employed for the last six or more decades is based on technically wrong ideas about education.
3. While real spending (after adjusting for inflation) has increased dramatically, performance against our global competition has declined.
4. The achievement gap is here to stay unless major underlying changes in education philosophy to embrace ideas that are technically correct can be implemented.
5. Educators have been successfully brainwashed in false doctrines during their education school training preventing the truth being faced and corrective action from being taken.
Considering the facts above, what changes are required to move to an acceptable educational performance?
The biggest problem is to remove the current anti-curriculum approach and replace it with a content rich and coherent curriculum. Notice I am not saying replace the flawed local curricula with flawed national curricula. This is especially important in grades K-6. See Why the Absence of a Content-Rich Curriculum Core Hurts Poor Children Most. (reference follows) It makes the point with data that poor children also face a higher move incidence than those from higher income families. One conclusion is that children who change schools frequently are more likely to be low achievers. This reinforces the need for a nationally consistent content-rich core curriculum so that these children don’t have to start over from way behind in every new school they attend. A chart in the reference shows that based on General Accounting Office data the percentage of third grade low-income children who have attended three or more different schools since the beginning of first grade at 30%! Can a patchwork quilt of local control anti-curriculum approaches that vary from district to district make sense in such an environment? No! Well that isn’t exactly true but the conditions for sensible local control have been long ago abandoned. First, the consolidation of small districts into “more efficient” larger districts has made the local school boards servants of the political powers in their community not the parents and taxpayers in the heterogeneous districts as a whole. These political powers are centered on the education power groups who contribute heavily to school board candidate election campaigns making boards malleable to their agendas.
The contrast to the American Common School experience of the nineteenth century is stark. In that time, there were many smaller districts and an attitude that serving the kids well was the requirement. There wasn’t so much money sloshing around in the system to cause self-serving behavior. Thus, the boards of these smaller districts ended up with a de facto content rich curriculum because they knew it was the right thing to do. Today we have pseudo education experts who tell everyone on the local levels what they need to do. And that conforms to the “how to” approach with virtually no content which does not prepare our kids to compete well in the global economy. The current system is run to benefit the adults in education not the kids who attend school.
The anti-curriculum, content-poor approach hurts poor kids most because they need the structure of a knowledge based approach that builds sensibly from year to year through at least grade 6. The current discovery, child-centered approach is particularly harmful to children who do not get exposed naturally in their outside school environment to the background knowledge required to understand what they read or compute.
E.D. Hirsch in his book The Knowledge Deficit, comments on localism and its impact on education. "Along with the terrible trinity of naturalism, formalism, and determinism, localism deserves a dishonored place in American education. Among the wider public it may be the most powerful educational idea of all. On the surface it just implies that our state or our town will decide what should be taught in our schools. It says nothing about what those things should be, so localism is another content-free idea, and as a practical matter it powerfully reinforces an approach that is short on content. It brings liberals and conservatives together to collaborate in support of anti-content, process oriented ideas about education.
This suspicion fed collaboration between liberals and conservatives helps explain why the process point of view has persisted despite its inability to raise achievement or attain fairness. Educationist, process ideas thrive on the liberal-conservative standoff, and our schools and school boards operate under a gentleman's agreement that unites these groups behind the process-oriented creed."
The current patchwork local control facilitated approach works against a critical mass of educators realizing that the ed school catechism they are taught is fallacious and needs to be discarded. Until the “light bulb” turns on, our kids will continue to lag behind their best global competition in the knowledge required to compete. The light bulb will not be turned on by educators. They have proven incapable of facing the truth which the environment they work in so effectively suppresses. We have to turn on the light or better, multiple spotlights and point to the obvious fallacies of the education fiefdom.
To conclude, all three of the controlling entities in the education mess are complicit in its abysmal performance. It matters little what the control function is as long as it supports the status quo of dysfunctional theories that harm kids, especially the gap kids. Only when the control function is set up to perform by serving the kids’ and country’s needs will education be “reformed.” Otherwise “reform” is a null word in the education context. Billions of dollars and decades in the service of pseudo reform have not done anything positive for the kids, but have greatly enriched the adults working in education.
Monday, August 16, 2010
The True Sad Story
The special school board meeting was set for 7:30AM to discuss the performance of the Superintendent of Schools. She had asked for the public forum believing erroneously that it would dampen the criticism and let her skate past the rising tide of board sentiment seemingly bent on removing her. She had had problems of both style and substance during her relatively short time on the job. In one of her original talks to the staff via closed-circuit TV she had said she was a 4-eyed, titty banger, which was not considered of an adequate professional standard. Also, the performance of the district had shown no real improvement in the areas she had signed up to “fix.”
As the discussions progressed that morning I was sitting next to the local paper’s education reporter. Not many people in attendance other than district administrators, the board and a very few of the public. During the board’s discussion, one board member told that he had visited one of the five larger high schools in the district the previous week. He had been told that 150 9th grade students were reading between the 1st and 6th grade level. This out of a total freshman class of about 450 students.
What was the response to this bombshell? Nada, Zip, Zero. Rather than discussing the issue which pointed to a very poor performance of the district and a very poor future for the students, the board president deftly moved the discussion on to another point. There was no response from the superintendent, the deputy or assistant superintendents (Doctors of Education, all). Did the newspaper reporter include the revelation in her report? She did not.
The fact that there was no response is strong evidence that “professional educators” believe the deterministic view that “those kids” (the gap children who are primarily poor and minority) cannot learn to high standards. This is not true, but because it provides a ready excuse for not really trying to improve the lot of the gap kids it is continuing to have negative effects. And the kids that the board member was talking about were gap kids. The 150 kids mentioned had to be a representative sample of many other kids in other high schools in the same predicament.
While there was no response at the meeting, there was a prompt response afterward. The next day the assistant superintendent of instruction emailed a copy of The Blueberry Story to all of the thousands of staff in the district. This was written as an apologist piece at the behest of the NEA. Its basic message is that, yes improvement is needed but we poor educators can’t do anything until society starts sending us high quality students ready to learn.
An even stronger response followed shortly. The person, who had displayed such poor judgment by telling the board member the truth, was fired. That is, in education your contract for the coming school year is not renewed. This sent a chilling message to the staff. Poor performance is OK, but telling the truth is a hanging offence. Thus, the status quo was strongly reinforced and those kids and the others following in their footsteps have continued to be harmed because educators couldn’t be bothered to do their jobs correctly.
This is a perfect example of the problem E.D. Hirsch so aptly describes in The Knowledge Deficit.
"The reason for this state of affairs – tragic for millions of students as well as for the nation – is that an army of American educators and reading experts are fundamentally wrong in their ideas about education and especially about reading comprehension. Their well-intentioned yet mistaken views are the significant reason (more than other constantly blamed factors, even poverty) that many of our children are not attaining reading proficiency, thus crippling their later schooling."
While it is true that most educators will tell you they have good intentions, their brainwashing and the iron bound rules regarding conduct in their work places, effectively prevent the truth seeing the light of day. When political correctness rules the communication you can’t discuss the reality of the organization’s performance and brainstorm actions which would solve the problems identified. Because of that the ongoing harm to kids goes unaddressed. We must stop giving educators the benefit of the doubt because of “good intentions” that aren’t good at all.
The educators have shown no ability to correct their problems. We must demand it and provide enough incentive to force the change. Otherwise the kids will continue to be harmed.
As the discussions progressed that morning I was sitting next to the local paper’s education reporter. Not many people in attendance other than district administrators, the board and a very few of the public. During the board’s discussion, one board member told that he had visited one of the five larger high schools in the district the previous week. He had been told that 150 9th grade students were reading between the 1st and 6th grade level. This out of a total freshman class of about 450 students.
What was the response to this bombshell? Nada, Zip, Zero. Rather than discussing the issue which pointed to a very poor performance of the district and a very poor future for the students, the board president deftly moved the discussion on to another point. There was no response from the superintendent, the deputy or assistant superintendents (Doctors of Education, all). Did the newspaper reporter include the revelation in her report? She did not.
The fact that there was no response is strong evidence that “professional educators” believe the deterministic view that “those kids” (the gap children who are primarily poor and minority) cannot learn to high standards. This is not true, but because it provides a ready excuse for not really trying to improve the lot of the gap kids it is continuing to have negative effects. And the kids that the board member was talking about were gap kids. The 150 kids mentioned had to be a representative sample of many other kids in other high schools in the same predicament.
While there was no response at the meeting, there was a prompt response afterward. The next day the assistant superintendent of instruction emailed a copy of The Blueberry Story to all of the thousands of staff in the district. This was written as an apologist piece at the behest of the NEA. Its basic message is that, yes improvement is needed but we poor educators can’t do anything until society starts sending us high quality students ready to learn.
An even stronger response followed shortly. The person, who had displayed such poor judgment by telling the board member the truth, was fired. That is, in education your contract for the coming school year is not renewed. This sent a chilling message to the staff. Poor performance is OK, but telling the truth is a hanging offence. Thus, the status quo was strongly reinforced and those kids and the others following in their footsteps have continued to be harmed because educators couldn’t be bothered to do their jobs correctly.
This is a perfect example of the problem E.D. Hirsch so aptly describes in The Knowledge Deficit.
"The reason for this state of affairs – tragic for millions of students as well as for the nation – is that an army of American educators and reading experts are fundamentally wrong in their ideas about education and especially about reading comprehension. Their well-intentioned yet mistaken views are the significant reason (more than other constantly blamed factors, even poverty) that many of our children are not attaining reading proficiency, thus crippling their later schooling."
While it is true that most educators will tell you they have good intentions, their brainwashing and the iron bound rules regarding conduct in their work places, effectively prevent the truth seeing the light of day. When political correctness rules the communication you can’t discuss the reality of the organization’s performance and brainstorm actions which would solve the problems identified. Because of that the ongoing harm to kids goes unaddressed. We must stop giving educators the benefit of the doubt because of “good intentions” that aren’t good at all.
The educators have shown no ability to correct their problems. We must demand it and provide enough incentive to force the change. Otherwise the kids will continue to be harmed.
Monday, August 9, 2010
Attempting to Lock-in the Dumbing Down Approach Common Core National Standards Push to Codify the Content-Free Approach
It could be argued that a common core curriculum which was the de facto case if not nationally codified, in the days of the American Common School movement would be a positive development. Perhaps the biggest benefit of a content-rich common core would be in grades K-6 where today’s patchwork quilt of local content-free standards is particularly harmful to students who change schools frequently and the economically disadvantaged. Thus currently, in the early grades students have no coherent process to build and enhance the foundational knowledge they will need to be successful in their higher level schooling.
When you look objectively at the newly proposed standards, it is obvious that the current effort is anything but positive. As is common practice in our education system this new initiative is an effort to justify throwing more good money after bad into the schools and the greedy support activities that depend on them. The process is to initiate a “new” program and wrap it with positive marketing and media to a credulous and/or distracted public. The standards are not new in their approach at all but an effort to cast in concrete the current extremely harmful, content-free approach which has not worked and as E.D. Hirsch states cannot work. It is just another of a long line of efforts to increasingly reward the adults associated with education at the expense of serving the kids well. This comes at taxpayer expense and starved out alternative priorities.
I think a couple of comments on the new standards from knowledgeable and involved people in the process would help to clarify the reality here. Jim Milgram, math professor at Stanford comments on the standards related to math at http://concernedabouteducation.posterous.com/review-of-common-core-math-standards
Professor Milgram states in his final remarks, “Overall, only the very best of current state standards, those of California, Massachusetts, Indiana and Minnesota are as strong or stronger than these standards. Most states would be far better off adopting the Core Math Standards than keeping their current standards. However, California and the other states with top standards would be almost certainly better off keeping their current standards. …[M]any of my objections were not addressed … before the final version was publically released.”
Another reviewer of the proposed standards, Bert Fristedt, a mathematician at the University of Minnesota, has critiqued the math portion of the CCSSI proposed standards. He is troubled by their diffuseness. He says the standards include way too many particular items and often scramble them in illogical ways. Seventh graders, for example, are asked to examine cubed numbers but aren’t taught integer exponents until high school. The standards also contain much vague language about having young students “understand” mathematical concepts before they have any practical grasp of them. Learning math is like learning to ride a bicycle. You have to be able to do it before you can theorize it. Fristedt sees problems with the progression from grade to grade in these standards and takes that as an indication that they are not “well-thought-out.”
Sandra Stotsky was appointed to the validation committee that reviewed the Common Core State Standards, a new set of K-12 standards produced by the National Governors Association's Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI).
As she examined the standards for English and Language Arts, Stotsky found that they were “culture-free and content-empty.” One of Stotsky’s strongest criticisms is that standards such as these don’t progress in difficulty from year to year. She was outspoken and meticulous in her objections, and when the validation committee approved the standards in June, she declined to endorse them. That same month, her term of service on the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education expired - and Governor Deval Patrick did not reappoint her to her position (he also did not reappoint Thomas Fortmann, another critic of the new standards).
Susan Wolfson, Professor of English at Princeton in written testimony to the New Jersey Board of Education commented, “We cannot endorse the absence of content-rich literary standards in “college readiness” any more than we can endorse just a sporadic and infrequent inclusion in the grade-level standards. This absence in this public-comment draft reflects what seems to us to have been a nearly systematic exclusion of those with expertise in literary study in the development of the standards. No one with expertise in the study of literature as a subject in itself was appointed to the standards development committees, and those who attended the open forum last December, and then again in February, reported that they were given no way to argue a case that had seemed to have been pre-decided. [emphasis added] We are surprised and concerned that the media have failed to note the exclusion of literary study from what are deemed “college readiness” standards. Without graduated, substantive content, adequate preparation for college study in any subject would be seriously compromised.
Do you smell the political taint that underlies this new standards effort? You should have your nose checked if you don’t. In short, these standards do not address the problems that are causing our education performance to be so poor when compared to the best global competitors. They do further solidify the harmful stranglehold that the education establishment’s status-quo-at-all-costs adults who continue to sacrifice our kids’ futures use so effectively to gain material benefit for themselves.
Thus, while common core standards could seemingly, based on the history or the American Common School experience be beneficial, these new standards are beneficial in name only and if adopted will prevent new quality efforts from being pursued anytime soon. The “we just updated standards to the best possible” excuse will prevail, continuing to harm kids and their futures.
Paul Richardson 2010
When you look objectively at the newly proposed standards, it is obvious that the current effort is anything but positive. As is common practice in our education system this new initiative is an effort to justify throwing more good money after bad into the schools and the greedy support activities that depend on them. The process is to initiate a “new” program and wrap it with positive marketing and media to a credulous and/or distracted public. The standards are not new in their approach at all but an effort to cast in concrete the current extremely harmful, content-free approach which has not worked and as E.D. Hirsch states cannot work. It is just another of a long line of efforts to increasingly reward the adults associated with education at the expense of serving the kids well. This comes at taxpayer expense and starved out alternative priorities.
I think a couple of comments on the new standards from knowledgeable and involved people in the process would help to clarify the reality here. Jim Milgram, math professor at Stanford comments on the standards related to math at http://concernedabouteducation.posterous.com/review-of-common-core-math-standards
Professor Milgram states in his final remarks, “Overall, only the very best of current state standards, those of California, Massachusetts, Indiana and Minnesota are as strong or stronger than these standards. Most states would be far better off adopting the Core Math Standards than keeping their current standards. However, California and the other states with top standards would be almost certainly better off keeping their current standards. …[M]any of my objections were not addressed … before the final version was publically released.”
Another reviewer of the proposed standards, Bert Fristedt, a mathematician at the University of Minnesota, has critiqued the math portion of the CCSSI proposed standards. He is troubled by their diffuseness. He says the standards include way too many particular items and often scramble them in illogical ways. Seventh graders, for example, are asked to examine cubed numbers but aren’t taught integer exponents until high school. The standards also contain much vague language about having young students “understand” mathematical concepts before they have any practical grasp of them. Learning math is like learning to ride a bicycle. You have to be able to do it before you can theorize it. Fristedt sees problems with the progression from grade to grade in these standards and takes that as an indication that they are not “well-thought-out.”
Sandra Stotsky was appointed to the validation committee that reviewed the Common Core State Standards, a new set of K-12 standards produced by the National Governors Association's Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI).
As she examined the standards for English and Language Arts, Stotsky found that they were “culture-free and content-empty.” One of Stotsky’s strongest criticisms is that standards such as these don’t progress in difficulty from year to year. She was outspoken and meticulous in her objections, and when the validation committee approved the standards in June, she declined to endorse them. That same month, her term of service on the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education expired - and Governor Deval Patrick did not reappoint her to her position (he also did not reappoint Thomas Fortmann, another critic of the new standards).
Susan Wolfson, Professor of English at Princeton in written testimony to the New Jersey Board of Education commented, “We cannot endorse the absence of content-rich literary standards in “college readiness” any more than we can endorse just a sporadic and infrequent inclusion in the grade-level standards. This absence in this public-comment draft reflects what seems to us to have been a nearly systematic exclusion of those with expertise in literary study in the development of the standards. No one with expertise in the study of literature as a subject in itself was appointed to the standards development committees, and those who attended the open forum last December, and then again in February, reported that they were given no way to argue a case that had seemed to have been pre-decided. [emphasis added] We are surprised and concerned that the media have failed to note the exclusion of literary study from what are deemed “college readiness” standards. Without graduated, substantive content, adequate preparation for college study in any subject would be seriously compromised.
Do you smell the political taint that underlies this new standards effort? You should have your nose checked if you don’t. In short, these standards do not address the problems that are causing our education performance to be so poor when compared to the best global competitors. They do further solidify the harmful stranglehold that the education establishment’s status-quo-at-all-costs adults who continue to sacrifice our kids’ futures use so effectively to gain material benefit for themselves.
Thus, while common core standards could seemingly, based on the history or the American Common School experience be beneficial, these new standards are beneficial in name only and if adopted will prevent new quality efforts from being pursued anytime soon. The “we just updated standards to the best possible” excuse will prevail, continuing to harm kids and their futures.
Paul Richardson 2010
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