The Past Is Prologue...To Failure

Here’s something from the Who Could Have Predicted Department:

“Children are getting the message at a very young age that if you pick the right choice between several options you can be successful. That’s not the way to learn, especially creatively. That’s not experimenting or exploring or creating. We’re telling kids that that life is a series of hoops and that they need to start jumping through them very early.”

Gee, it’s almost like if you ramp up the pressure on schools to make their students perform on tests; if you threaten to withdraw funding from schools if their students don’t do well on tests; if you tell teachers and administrators their careers ride on how well their students do on tests, you get schools that make tests the most important thing they do.

This is just an example of something that’s going on all over the country: eviscerating the curriculum to make more room for test prep.

Optimists in the crowd will probably say if you’re going to over emphasize something math and reading are good choices, but I would argue that’s just whistling past the graveyard.

See, students aren’t being taught more math to deepen their understanding of mathematical concepts. They aren’t having reading emphasized to increase their comprehension skills, or to develop an appreciation for reading. They are being prepared for tests, standardized tests that value a certain kind of thought: shallow. As the quote indicates, the kind of thinking that focuses on the “correct” answer rather than using reason, or critical thinking skills to develop deep understanding, or what we in the field like to refer to as “learning.” The National Assessment of Educational Progress (the Nation’s Report Card people) figured that out years ago, back when the nation was “at risk”:

As the National Assessment of Educational Progress found: Only 5 to 10 percent of (high school) students can move beyond initial readings of a test; most seem genuinely puzzled at requests to explain or defend their points of view. The NAEP assessors explained that current methods of teaching and testing reading require short responses and lower level cognitive thinking, resulting in an emphasis on shallow and superficial opinions at the expense of reasoned and disciplined thought..., (thus) it is not surprising that students fail to develop more comprehensive thinking and analytic skills (NAEP, 1981). (qtd in Darling Hammond 1993. 77:18)

What this means essentially is that students mentioned in the article, and to a lesser degree students all over the country aren’t being educated as much as they’re being trained. Trained to perform on the test.

This is a “reform” technique that has more in common with 19^th century definitions of literacy than those of the 21^st. At the beginning of World War I the mark of basic literacy was the ability to sign your own name. By the start of the Second World War, the military needed soldiers who could read and understand sophisticated manuals in order to be able to operate and maintain more complex weapons systems, and thus the measure of basic literacy became connected to reading level.

When Sputnik set off the space race the call went out to schools to produce students who could solve complex technical and scientific problems and the definition of a literate person took another leap. Today the Internet brings the world to our fingertips and with it a new phrase has entered the lexicon: Information overload. Experts at the Cisco company estimate that shortly there will be 667 exabytes annually flowing around the Internet. An exabyte is one billion billion bytes. Every minute 35 hours of video is uploaded to the web. Every minute 460 new users come on to the Internet and every day almost 58,000 new websites go active.

Yet, into this maelstrom of information, this chaos of competing, conflicting and contradictory ideas, we are sending students whose school experience has more in common with an age when education was more about memorizing and reciting Bible verses than surviving the digital deluge.

Art and Music are usually the first victims of a test prep driven curriculum, but by removing them we may be giving up far more than we get. A study in the Boston area found that art classes develop:

[V]isual-spatial abilities, reflection, self-criticism, and the willingness to experiment and learn from mistakes. All are important to numerous careers, but are widely ignored by today's standardized tests.

And music, it turns out, may be even more valuable, even to test prep driven schools because studies show:

[M]usic training - specifically piano instruction - can dramatically enhance children’s spatial-temporal reasoning skills, the skills crucial for greater success in subjects like math and science.

It seems all our “reforms” have moved us back to where schools were when John Dewey wrote:

Education means the creation of a discerning mind, a mind that prefers not to dupe itself, or to be the dupe of others…[It means] the habit of suspended judgment, of skepticism, of desire for evidence, of appeal to observation rather than sentiment, discussion rather than bias, inquiry rather than conventionalized idealizations. (Education As Politics, 334)

Would someone please direct me to the section of the Common Core Standards that covers that—especially that part about inquiry rather than conventionalized idealizations.

This Is The Result Of "Relentless Positive Action"

So Rick Snyder, "One tough nerd" was elected governor of Michigan in 2010 and one of the top items on his agenda was a "reinvention" of the public educational system. OK, so with a republican legislature he's pretty much in position to get what he wants in terms of this "reinvention." Three years in, let's see how he's doing:

 Buena Vista Schools close early

Last week, the Buena Vista School District fired all of its teachers and closed its schools because it had run out of money. Because the district accepted money from the state for a program it was no longer providing, the state is withholding the district's school aid for at least three months.

Budget deficit forcing school officials to close Albion High School

The Albion School Board voted last night to close the district’s high school.
Beginning this fall, the mid-Michigan district will only serve students in grades K through eight.

Ann Arbor schools to cut high school busing, charge kids for 7th hour

Parents of Ann Arbor high school children will have to find another way for their ninth- through 12th-graders to get to school come fall, and students interested in taking a seventh-hour course could have to pay up to $500 per semester...

 There are two things you need to realize about this situation, one: These schools are canaries in the educational coal mine. Districts all over the state are struggling. There will be more stories like this.

Two: From Snyder's perspective, this is not a bug, it's a feature. The whole direction of his plan from the beginning was to deemphasize brick and mortar public schools and replace them with privately run online schools. Privately run, but funded with public money that is. In fact, Buena Vista, Albion and Ann Arbor are indications that his plan if anything, is working too well. The public schools are disintegrating before the privately run infrastructure is fully in place.

Of course Governor Snyder isn't totally to blame for this--or perhaps from his perspective we should say he doesn't deserve all the credit. Bad decisions and incompetence are rampant from the school board level on up, but his spineless leadership coupled with the Republican legislature's animus toward public schools, or more specifically public school teachers, has created an environment in which all of the destructive forces, whether they be economic, or ideological can flourish while support for and commitment to the ideal of public education in a democratic society withers.

And while the slowly--or in some cases not so slowly--carcass of public education in Michigan is picked clean by the greedy and the opportunistic, children are having their future stolen from them. In a truly enlightened society this would be a crime of the first order. Instead it's just another group of entrepreneurs taking advantage of a business opportunity.

The shame is on all of us.

Simple Solutions To Complex Problems

I just got done watching Bill Gates' TED Talk on improving education titled "Teachers Need Real Feedback" and my first question was why do we assume that because a person is rich they are also smart? OK, maybe Mr. Gates is smart when it comes to computer operating systems, well if you don't count Windows ME, but that doesn't make him any more knowledgeable than anyone else when it comes to other fields of endeavor like, say education.

But lack of expertise never stopped anyone with the wherewithal to buy access  from inflicting their opinions on the rest of us, so here comes Mr. Gates who starts his talk by inferring that the feedback teachers get from their students isn't "real," that the only feedback that counts as "real" is apparently that which they get from their administrators which consists solely of the word "satisfactory," which he, correctly, believes is unsatisfactory.

Now, anyone who has been within a couple of parsecs of an operating American school these days will probably instantly recognize a couple of problems with Mr. Gates' premise, as the one thing teachers are not suffering from is a shortage of feedback. Books, materials, institutional support, sure, but feedback, no way.

I noticed another problem with Mr. Gates' argument as well and that is his use of PISA test results as a basis of comparison. He points out, rightly, that American students placed 15th in reading, 23rd in science and 31st in math. The inference here is that American students don't achieve levels of competence as advanced as their international peers, but when you ask educators of high placing countries how they do it, their answer generally has little to do with a concern about achievement. For example, Finland consistently ranks at or near the top of PISA results, and when asked for an explanation, Dr Pasi Sahlberg, General Director of the Centre for International Mobility and Cooperation, Finland and previously Senior Education Specialist with the World Bank as well as the Director of the Centre for School Development, Helsinki, said, “We have systematically focused on equity and equality in our education system, and not so much on excellence and achievement like many other countries have done.”

In fact, analysis of the PISA results in 2006 found that "less than 10% of the variation in student performance was explained by student background in five of the seven countries with the highest mean science scores of above 530 points. PISA demonstrates that equity and performance are highly related."

Well, these little tidbits appear lost on Mr. Gates who goes on to explain the teacher feedback system in Shanghai, the highest performer on the latest tests. He talked about how new teachers there are exposed to experienced teachers on an almost daily basis through observation, weekly study groups, and a network of shared exchanges, conversations and interdepartmental communication. Admittedly, that sounds to me like a good deal. New teachers are immediately and completely submerged in the conversation of their profession and constantly and consistently exposed to a range of techniques, expertise and support. So how does Mr. Gates propose to transfer this system to America? Let's make a video!

Next we are whisked off to a secondary classroom in what appears to be a racially monochromatic suburb somewhere in the wilds of Iowa where we meet English teacher Sarah Brown Wessling who video tapes herself in class, then uses the tapes to self critique. Not bad as far as it goes, but it seems to be missing that whole sharing thing the teachers in Shanghai are getting.

Mr. Gates' solution to the collaboration problem is to put a camera in every teacher's classroom across the county, although he does admit that some teachers may find this a bit disconcerting. No matter because, as he says,  if you need to improve the way you teach fractions, "you should be able to watch a video of the best person in the world teaching fractions."

Well, yes and no, Mr. Gates. If I'm teaching in south Chicago, where I'm worried about if the heat will work through the winter, or if my students will make it home safely--that is if they have a home to go to--watching Ms. Wessling walk her kids through a peer editing exercise on their iPads isn't likely to teach me the lesson you seem to think it will.

To put it another way, when I was younger I wanted to be a professional baseball player. Al Kaline was my hero and every time there was a game on TV there I was, glued to the set watching his every move. Long story short, it didn't make me a better fielder, or a better hitter. Actually, it occurred to me later, after it became obvious I wasn't going to be a professional baseball player, that all of those hours I spent sitting in front of the television watching games might have been better spent out practicing. Further, I would suspect that one of the reasons the program in Shanghai is successful is that those teachers have built a community through collaboration, interaction and trust and that is more fundamental to their success than their ability to watch each other.

See, Mr. Gates, improving educational outcomes is a challenge that requires solutions, not a solution. While technology can play a part in those solutions, it cannot create the diverse communities of committed teachers who must take their students where they are and attempt to move them forward.