Education's Diseased Culture; the American Toady Farm

The perversion of education in America is so pervasive and complete that we are in the golden age of reform-speak blather. The Bush administration has managed to destroy public education by simply subverting the mission of the federal Department of Education from serving the best interest of children to performing the unholy act of subjugating the best interest of children to moneyed special interests.

Yesterday I was having a discussion with an old acquaintance about the Department of Education at UConn. She made the startling assertion that UConn's Department of Education was one of the best in the country! This came as quite a surprise to me since I have yet to meet a UConn teaching graduate who is advocating changing the curriculum and metrics applied to public education. In fact, I've had the opposite conversation with teacher union representatives who question why Universities are not better preparing teachers for the 21st century.

I don't mean to pick on UConn's education department because I think that Education Departments across the country are wholesale frauds. In major educational issue after issue, you can search google till you turn blue and not find significant research on homework best practice, classroom technology, student learning best practice, and so on. What are Education Departments in Universities doing? What?

The answer is obvious. The federal funding that has traditionally streamed to states and universities is now coupled to a government extortion scheme that eliminates all scientific research into what is best for children. Some of the funds have been diverted to the war, others are misdirected toward ever more testing propaganda, and Universities have happily floated downstream for over forty years.

A recent education forum in California hosted by the Silicon Valley Education Foundation pondered the utter failure of educational reforms to impact the reform-sanitized public schools.

last month, the Silicon Valley Education Foundation sponsored a forum on education reform featuring Marshall "Mike" Smith, the program director for education at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Smith has been the dean of the school of education at Stanford University as well as acting deputy secretary of education in the Clinton administration. Panelists for the discussion that followed were Ken Wilcox, president and CEO of SVB Financial Group, parent company of the Silicon Valley Bank; Manny Barbara, superintendent of the Oak Grove School District; and Kilian Betlach, a seventh-grade teacher at Mathson Middle School in the Alum Rock school district. Mercury News editorial writer John Fensterwald moderated. Excerpts of Smith's opening remarks follow:

The title of my talk, "More Than Just A Firefly Blink: Creating Reform That Lasts" comes from experiences I had growing up in the East. In the spring, you'd see a yard full of fireflies. They'd be blinking on and off. After a while, they were gone.

Researchers studied districts that had carried out interventions and showed gains over three years. Two years later, they found that almost none of those districts and schools had retained their effects. They were like fireflies; they blinked on, they blinked off and they left.

The metaphor reflects something important about public school systems: They are not small businesses. They can't fail at the rate of 70 or 80 percent. They have to be stable. But stability does come at a cost: Most reforms have to fit within the system, acceptable to unions, school boards, superintendents. By and large, those reforms have small effects. They may change achievement a little bit for a little while, but they don't change it very much.

The Gates Foundation spent an absolute fortune on something that has small effects. That is, changing the size of schools without changing what's going on inside of the schools. Reducing class sizes and most curriculum changes produce very small results. Most spending on professional development doesn't jar things much at all.

Small effects don't travel. If you move reforms from one school to another, sometimes they don't seem to work at all. The teaching force is different, the students are different, there was a different curriculum that it's being laid on top of.

We'd like to get bigger effects. We know a lot about learning and about motivation. And, yet, our schools aren't changing very much.

We've got strong evidence now that we can accelerate learning using good technology. With technology in high school courses, community college courses and other settings, kids can learn what they typically learn in a semester from a teacher in half the semester and learn it better. We don't do that because it begins to jar the system.

Standards were introduced into California in the late '90s. Gains were considerable until about 2003-2004, particularly in math, some in reading. And, then came No Child Left Behind in 2002. It's a great irony that NCLB, the Bush administration's modification to the largest education programs, is a command-and-control legislation in a Web 2.0 era. The gains did slow after 2002 - not necessarily due to NCLB, but they have slowed. In California, every subgroup is behind national subgroups. We have an equal-opportunity society. We don't do well by anybody.

While many of the issues that forum addressed were specific to California, the questions raised are heroic.

Public schools must change radically to keep pace with an ever-impatient future of technological, biological, and medical transformation. If we do not begin to address the best interests of the child, we risk the extinction of our country and culture. The words "change" and "reform" have become the refuge of reactionary scoundrels.

It is time for Universities to return to their mission to explore and illuminate the richness of learning and unconditionally reject the Bush administration's misology as unacceptable and for state Department of Education to stand up for the best interests of children against the forces of self-serving corporate misopedists.

No Wonder Education In America is Failing

Connecticut's Big Lie, Mr. Education himself, Joe Lieberman disingenuously hosted a forum on Friday concerned with the No Child Left Behind Act. For those of us who care about education, we would have preferred an open-minded and intelligent moderator but this is Connecticut's disgraceful contribution to the U.S. Senate and the Senate probably was paying back Connecticut for us sending this guy to Washington in the first place.

As an aside, the next time the Senate volunteers Joe for education duty please drop this guy in the middle of Baghdad with the Department of Education to study the improvements there. You'll be doing America and the cause of education a favor.

Now, let's face it, these events are just photo-ops for guys like Lieberman. His mind is made up. This is what he campaigned on in 2006;

September 20, 2006

WEST HAVEN -- U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman yesterday pledged if re-elected to hold hearings next year with school administrators, teachers and parents to improve the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

The three-term Democrat, who is running as a petitioning candidate after losing the primary to Ned Lamont, wants "the practical experience of the people on the ground" to play a significant role in reauthorizing the act in 2007.

"It's an important opportunity next year to get it right, not to abandon it,"

So this event was just another circle jerk of a politician who has no intention of listening to what's being said except for the comments that reinforce his own remedy which is:

"Tests are not perfect, but they're one standard for judging progress," Lieberman said. "We may want to find others."

That's right. More, louder NCLB and... you guessed it... more tests.

And as these people all sat around in a circle and jerked, this report was released on a Friday afternoon in the hopes that its results would also get buried in the weekend news doldrums.

U.S. high school students are taking tougher classes, receiving better grades and, apparently, learning less than their counterparts of 15 years ago.

Those were the discouraging implications of two reports issued Thursday by the federal Department of Education, assessing the performance of students in both public and private schools. Together, the reports raised sobering questions about the past two decades of educational reform, including whether the movement to raise school standards has amounted to much more than window dressing.

“I think we're sleeping through a crisis,” said David Driscoll, the Massachusetts commissioner of education, during a Washington news conference convened by the Department of Education. He called the study results “stunning.” ...

and

The transcript study showed that, compared to students in similar studies going back to 1990, the 2005 graduates had racked up more high school credits, had taken more college preparatory classes and had strikingly higher grade point averages. The average GPA rose from 2.68 in 1990 to 2.98 — close to a solid B — in 2005.

That was the good news — or so it seemed. But the standardized test results showed that 12th grade reading scores have generally been dropping since 1992, casting doubt on what students are learning in those college prep classes.

Math scores posed a different sort of mystery, because the Department of Education switched to a new test in 2005 that wasn't directly comparable to those used before. Still, the results of the new test didn't inspire confidence: Fewer than one-quarter of the 12th graders tested scored in the “proficient” range.

The reports also showed that the gap separating white and black, and white and Hispanic students, has barely budged since the early 1990s. And while the results were not broken down by state, a broad regional breakdown showed that the West and Southeast lagged well behind the Midwest and, to a lesser extent, the Northeast.

David Gordon, the Sacramento County, Calif., superintendent of schools and a participant in the Department of Education news conference Thursday, said he found it especially disturbing that the studies focused on “our best students,” those who had made it to 12th grade or who had graduated.

“It's clear to me from these data that for all of our talk of the achievement gap among subgroups of students, a larger problem may be an instructional gap or a rigor gap, which effects not just some but most of our students,” Gordon said.

The reading and math test was given to 21,000 high school seniors at 900 U.S. schools, including 200 private schools. The transcript study was based on 26,000 transcripts from 720 schools, 80 of them private. The reports did not give separate results for public vs. private schools.

and

Among other things, Hall said the transcript study provided clear evidence of grade inflation, as well as “course inflation” — offering high-level courses that have “the right names” but a dumbed-down curriculum.

“What it suggests is that we are telling students that they're being successful in these courses when, in fact, we're not teaching them any more than they were learning in the past,” she said. “So we are, in effect, lying to these students.”

Although the reports came out five years after passage of President Bush's signature education reform initiative, No Child Left Behind, Hall and others said it would be unfair to blame that program for the students' poor showing. They were already in high school when No Child Left Behind was enacted, and it is primarily aimed at elementary and middle schools.

Driscoll recalled an earlier president's contribution to education reform — the Nation at Risk report that seemed to galvanize the educational establishment when it was issued by President Reagan in 1983.

“That was a shocker,” said Driscoll. “But here we are, 25 years later (and) ... we've just been ignoring what it's going to take to really change the system.”

Well, No Child Left Behind may not be the blame but it has nothing to do with a solution. Today, our schools have been homogenized into test taking factories and innovation, creativity, the celebration of unique individuality, and the incentive to learn have all been long bleached out of the system. You will notice that the corresponding drop in learning almost precisely parallels Joe Lieberman's ignoble tenure in the Senate.

Co-incidence?

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Rethinking Curriculum

In today's Courant, a commentary by Wick Sloane addresses many issues having to do with higher education yet touches on a number of issues that apply to high school policy and organization as well.

From: Higher Education Needs Cash, Vision - January 22, 2006 By WICK SLOANE

"...the very basic cost driver of higher education is the unexamined assumption that a degree must be four years worth of credits, which many students cannot complete even in five years.

This four-year model was developed in the 14th century at the University of Bologna. Part of the reason the curriculum took four years to impart was a shortage of books. That is no longer a problem, yet we still abide by this ancient model. Would we send an injured child today to a 14th-century hospital? Is that what we are doing in higher education?

What about innovation? The past 50 years have produced what scientists and educators call the cognitive revolution. What are the opportunities to use modern tools for learning?

Our daughter carries her language lab for Arabic with her in an iPod. Look at the new short books: "No-Nonsense Guides" or "A Very Short Introduction" to dozens of topics, from A - Ancient Philosophy to W - Wittgenstein, with stops at Darwin, Descartes, Shakespeare and Socrates. What about the Quick Study Bar Charts? At least the new dean of my Yale School of Management ought to be alarmed at how good that $4.95 "Management" guide is.

These tools are not a substitute for a great teacher. They are excellent sources on topics once available by the semester only. Can't they be used, under the direction of skilled teachers, to impart a high-quality education in less than four years?

Other than some intermittent efforts at online learning, I don't see any movement for change."

We are examining this very issue about our high school. That is, is the current organization and learning model the best way to educate our young citizens? The High-stakes Testing paradigm has long ago drowned out any real concern for the education of our young people in favor of magic metrics "accountability" games.

All policy makers these days are under great pressure to fix the educational crisis of the fleeting moment. So, every news article crying that a high school graduate can't balance a checkbook becomes an Arnold Swartznegger moment - TIME TO GET TOUGHER! (And tougher is never, ever tough enough - talk show afficiados can't press the "Inflict Pain" button often or hard enough).

So school boards have easy choices;

MORE Math! (or whatever)

MORE Accelerated Math taught by educational-NO-Nonsense, knock-you-out, serious-math-gorillas! (and, BTW, why aren't fetuses listening to banking tapes instead of Bach?)

EVER HIGHER EXPECTATIONS of students, over-worked parents, anybody willing to be the fall guy for the students perceived academic foibles (Expectations are the latest magic fix - all you have to do is say you're raising expectations and miracles happen - Jesus would be envious at how effective this is in educational rhetoric).

If we now require three years, why not four? five?

Or maybe we just invent a course that puts out the educational outrage of the moment - a checkbook course, a contract reading course, a manage your money course, and so on for every co-incidental minutia.

This is how it goes for the most part. Society confronts educators to show more muscle. But none of these solutions really address the fact that our kids aren't learning to learn and don't know how to think. Balancing checkbooks is addition and subtraction not the absence of more Calculus. And testing for addition and subtraction shows kids can add and subtract all right, or memorize vocabulary words, or whatever. But they're all unrelated test factoids. We have to get better at this.

We need to change the way we do education and we will. NCLB must be the first piece of loose, worthless baggage to get jettisoned.

More from the commentary...

"Also, if there are any Gallup-type surveys on what students want in education, I haven't seen them. Why do we know more about how much caffeine students want in what form each day than we do about learning preferences?"

Are we afraid that they're thinking despite school? Asking students is called respect. What a concept.