The False Learning

I have repeatedly blogged about the wholesale failure of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) to address the needs of children and society. NCLB is little more than a thinly disguised national policy to destroy public school education that has succeeded.

The ubiquitously accepted and promoted meme that high-stress, high-stakes testing of memorized (and largely worthless) factoids is a pseudo-religion among the educated and uneducated alike. Chances are this policy will not change under Obama ensuring the intellectual collapse of our nation along side its economic bankruptcy.

A better policy would be to promote learning for learnings sake. This is not as altruistic a venture as might be assumed.

In a Telegraph article called, Learning by heart is 'pointless for Google generation' by Murray Wardrop, he summarizes the revaluation of meorization.

...for today's youngsters, tedious rote learning is pointless because such basic facts are only a mouse click away via Google, Wikipedia and online libraries, according to writer and businessman Don Tapscott.

Tapscott, author of the best-selling book Wikinomics and a champion of the "net generation", suggests a better approach would be to teach children to think creatively so they could learn to interpret and apply the knowledge available online.

The Canadian business executive said: "Teachers are no longer the fountain of knowledge; the internet is.

"Kids should learn about history to understand the world and why things are the way they are. But they don't need to know all the dates.

"It is enough that they know about the Battle of Hastings, without having to memorise that it was in 1066. They can look that up and position it in history with a click on Google."

Tapscott dismissed the idea that his approach is anti-learning, instead arguing that the ability to learn new things is more important than ever "in a world where you have to process new information at lightning speed".

And he believes that the old-fashioned model of education still prevalent in today's schools, involving remembering facts 'off pat', was designed for the industrial age.

He said: "This might have been good for the mass production economy, but it doesn't deliver for the challenges of the digital economy, or for the 'net gen' mind.

"Children are going to have to reinvent their knowledge base multiple times. So for them memorising facts and figures is a waste of time."

Tapscott added the brains of today's youngsters work differently to their parents', and that multi tasking with digital devices, such as using the internet while listening to their MP3 players, can help them to develop critical thinking skills.

Ofsted has reported that pupils' knowledge and understanding of key historical facts is not good enough to enable them to "form overviews and demonstrate strong conceptual understanding".

Shadow Schools Secretary, Michael Gove, has recently attacked "the move away from fact-based learning", arguing that "knowledge, intellectual capital, is what makes educational progress possible".

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.

Unfixing Mind Sets

A new article about learning research in Scientific American called The Secret to Raising Smart Kids is on noteworthy interest to all of us.

It illustrates a problem we have at EO Smith. Many of our students are children of educators and a subset of those students thanks to parental inertia believe they are not only smart but entitled to more than other students. we are not unique in this regard but we certainly have a greater volume due to our proximity to UConn.

The authors of this article provide empirical evidence that such attitudes may be intellectually self-immolating for the students in later life.

The other group that this work pertains to are teachers and administrators who in their own work habits may be playing out the same failures to adapt to change, to learn something they're deficient in, and so on.

Here's a snippet, it's all good.

I wondered: Why do some students give up when they encounter difficulty, whereas others who are no more skilled continue to strive and learn? One answer, I soon discovered, lay in people’s beliefs about why they had failed.

In particular, attributing poor performance to a lack of ability depresses motivation more than does the belief that lack of effort is to blame. In 1972, when I taught a group of elementary and middle school children who displayed helpless behavior in school that a lack of effort (rather than lack of ability) led to their mistakes on math problems, the kids learned to keep trying when the problems got tough. They also solved many of the problems even in the face of difficulty. Another group of helpless children who were simply rewarded for their success on easy problems did not improve their ability to solve hard math problems. These experiments were an early indication that a focus on effort can help resolve helplessness and engender success.

Subsequent studies revealed that the most persistent students do not ruminate about their own failure much at all but instead think of mistakes as problems to be solved. At the University of Illinois in the 1970s I, along with my then graduate student Carol Diener, asked 60 fifth graders to think out loud while they solved very difficult pattern-recognition problems. Some students reacted defensively to mistakes, denigrating their skills with comments such as “I never did have a good rememory,” and their problem-solving strategies deteriorated.

Others, meanwhile, focused on fixing errors and honing their skills. One advised himself: “I should slow down and try to figure this out.” Two schoolchildren were particularly inspiring. One, in the wake of difficulty, pulled up his chair, rubbed his hands together, smacked his lips and said, “I love a challenge!” The other, also confronting the hard problems, looked up at the experimenter and approvingly declared, “I was hoping this would be informative!” Predictably, the students with this attitude outperformed their cohorts in these studies.

Two Views of Intelligence
Several years later I developed a broader theory of what separates the two general classes of learners—helpless versus mastery-oriented. I realized that these different types of students not only explain their failures differently, but they also hold different “theories” of intelligence. The helpless ones believe that intelligence is a fixed trait: you have only a certain amount, and that’s that. I call this a “fixed mind-set.” Mistakes crack their self-confidence because they attribute errors to a lack of ability, which they feel powerless to change. They avoid challenges because challenges make mistakes more likely and looking smart less so. Like Jonathan, such children shun effort in the belief that having to work hard means they are dumb.

The mastery-oriented children, on the other hand, think intelligence is malleable and can be developed through education and hard work. They want to learn above all else. After all, if you believe that you can expand your intellectual skills, you want to do just that. Because slipups stem from a lack of effort, not ability, they can be remedied by more effort. Challenges are energizing rather than intimidating; they offer opportunities to learn. Students with such a growth mind-set, we predicted, were destined for greater academic success and were quite likely to outperform their counterparts.

We validated these expectations in a study published in early 2007. Psychologists Lisa Blackwell of Columbia University and Kali H. Trzes­niewski of Stanford University and I monitored 373 students for two years during the transition to junior high school, when the work gets more difficult and the grading more stringent, to determine how their mind-sets might affect their math grades. At the beginning of seventh grade, we assessed the students’ mind-sets by asking them to agree or disagree with statements such as “Your intelligence is something very basic about you that you can’t really change.” We then assessed their beliefs about other aspects of learning and looked to see what happened to their grades.

As we had predicted, the students with a growth mind-set felt that learning was a more important goal in school than getting good grades. In addition, they held hard work in high regard, believing that the more you labored at something, the better you would become at it. They understood that even geniuses have to work hard for their great accomplishments. Confronted by a setback such as a disappointing test grade, students with a growth mind-set said they would study harder or try a different strategy for mastering the material.

The students who held a fixed mind-set, however, were concerned about looking smart with little regard for learning. They had negative views of effort, believing that having to work hard at something was a sign of low ability. They thought that a person with talent or intelligence did not need to work hard to do well. Attributing a bad grade to their own lack of ability, those with a fixed mind-set said that they would study less in the future, try never to take that subject again and consider cheating on future tests.

Such divergent outlooks had a dramatic impact on performance. At the start of junior high, the math achievement test scores of the students with a growth mind-set were comparable to those of students who displayed a fixed mind-set. But as the work became more difficult, the students with a growth mind-set showed greater persistence. As a result, their math grades overtook those of the other students by the end of the first semester—and the gap between the two groups continued to widen during the two years we followed them.

Along with Columbia psychologist Heidi Grant, I found a similar relation between mind-set and achievement in a 2003 study of 128 Columbia freshman premed students who were enrolled in a challenging general chemistry course. Although all the students cared about grades, the ones who earned the best grades were those who placed a high premium on learning rather than on showing that they were smart in chemistry. The focus on learning strategies, effort and persistence paid off for these students.

Studies such as these convince me that the Federal, State , and conservative mantras of relentlessly raising the expectations on children is LOUD wrong. It is a misinterpretation of learning studies.

It is not the expectations on students that must constantly be ratcheted up to intolerable levels of pressure and pain.

What these studies suggest is that grading should emphasize the process of learning material rather than the memorization of fact. And rather than emphasis on knowing ever-larger volumes of fact, an emphasis on encouraging students to investigate, formalize, and interrogate uncertain material can disrupt the notion that one who knows all the facts is "smart". The concept of "smartness" migrates from easily memorized material to exploring unknown material that invites more effort and curiosity.

Learning Means... um...

An interesting essay by Alex Krupp is worth a read.

Merriam-Webster defines learning as "gaining knowledge or understanding of or skill in by study, instruction, or experience."

Unfortunately, this definition is non-actionable. As such, I'd like to propose a new working definition

You've learned something if you can answer a question that you could not have answered previously.

Before we proceed, a couple of caveats. First, this model only works for cognitive learning. That means things like muscle memory are out. Second, this model treats actions as implicit questions. For example, if we learn how to drive a nail then we've answered the implicit question "How do I use a hammer?"

I've challenged several people to find an example that breaks my model. So far no one has succeeded. Even if there is some corner case that breaks the model, I think it's pretty safe to say that it holds for 99 and 44/100% of cases.

The implications here are huge. I'll start with books and blogging, and then I'll tackle school and entrepreneurship.

The Wussification of the West

The evidence continues to mount from all quarters of the western world that our children are being dumbed down, becoming socially sterile, and biologically stripped of natural and interpersonal immunities.

The Guardian, in Bullying is exaggerated, says childhood expert by Anushka Asthana, Tom Gill argues,

'Children are not always nice to each other, but people are not always nice to each other. The world is not like that. One of the things in danger of being lost is children spending time with other children out of sight of adults; growing a sense of consequence for their actions without someone leaping in,' he told The Observer

Gill related an incident in which his own daughter complained that she was being bullied after three boys teased her about a game she was playing in the park. 'What struck me was the use of the word bullying to describe that,' he said. 'Bullying is where the victimisation is sustained and there is a power imbalance. I do not mean we should allow unbridled cruelty, just that one option is asking, "Can you sort it out yourself?" '

In No Fear: Growing up in a Risk-averse Society, which will be published tomorrow, Gill argues that society is 'bubble-wrapping' children. Parents, teachers, police, the government and wider society are all to blame, he said, for overreacting to risks such as 'stranger danger', injury and abuse.

Children were too quickly branded antisocial. He cited a case where three 12-year-olds were arrested and DNA-tested for climbing a tree.

Similarly, the Daily Mail carried an article called Let your children injure themselves, says ROSPA.

Parents must allow their children to play outdoors - even if it means they get hurt, a safety campaigner has said.

Research published last week by the Children's Society suggested that too many parents are refusing to let their children play by themselves outside in case they are injured.

It found 43 per cent of adults think children should not be allowed out with their friends until they are 14 or over.

But Peter Cornall, from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, argues that when children scrape their knees or bump their heads, they learn how to avoid hurting themselves again in future.

The New York Times recently carried an article called, Lobes of Steel by Gretchen Reynolds that reiterated the importance of aerobic exercise, even as schools steal exercise time to cram for yet another test.

University of Illinois scientists have studied school-age children and found that those who have a higher level of aerobic fitness processed information more efficiently; they were quicker on a battery of computerized flashcard tests. The researchers also found that higher levels of aerobic fitness corresponded to better standardized test scores among a set of Illinois public school students. The scientists next plan to study how students’ scores change as their fitness improves.

The SF Gate reports in, Warning: Fun ahead - Safety first, yes, but today's overprotected kids need to live a little by Peter Hartlaub, coming full circle, reminds us,

The wussification of American children is a relatively recent phenomenon, but a very real one. We pamper our kids, over-schedule them, overemphasize fairness in competition (the score ends in a tie ... again!) and keep them indoors too much, to the point that we're doing them a huge disservice. Kids aren't learning how to get hurt, lose, fend for themselves, find their balance and discover minor dangers on their own - all important parts of growing up.

-Gasp- Learning Counts Somewhere!

In my queue of unfinished business is a Psychology Today article that talks about schools whose graduates are better prepared for their future than NCLB saddled public school graduates are. Kids aren't considered ADD and they have a lot to say about their education.

From Education: Class Dismissed
It's every modern parent's worst nightmare—a school where kids can play all day. But no one takes the easy way out, and graduates seem to have a head start on the information age. Welcome to Sudbury Valley by:Hara Estroff Marano

So ingrained is the belief that kids learn only when confined to their seats and explicitly taught that most adults overlook obvious evidence to the contrary—the young struggle persistently against even their own clumsiness to master such formidable tasks as crawling, walking and talking on their own. "Learning and teaching have nothing to do with each other," declares Dan Greenberg, who, with his wife Hanna, is a founder of Sudbury Valley. In traditional schools, he says, teaching is driven by coercion, which breeds resistance. "Learning is driven internally by curiosity. Teaching can be effective only if the person you're teaching has sought you out to teach her." A physicist by training, Greenberg abandoned an Ivy League tenure track career in academia to start SVS.

Outsiders commonly choke upon hearing that no one even teaches reading. Sometimes insiders get a bit antsy, too. When Ben was in the second or third grade, anxiety temporarily overtook his well-read father, who offered the boy a dime for every 15 minutes he'd spend reading at home. Ben accepted the bribe long enough to prove he could do it.

But true to the Sudbury spirit, his reading proficiency took a huge leap forward only after he began playing with airplanes and then an electronic flight simulator—because that led him to read the flight manual. And that led to discovery of flight simulator communities on the Internet, which led to mock airplane battles, which led to communicating with squadron leaders, which led to spelling and writing, which ultimately got Ben into Swarthmore, where he is now finishing his freshman year.


Journey from Smoking Rock

Given the lack of formal demands, Sudbury attracts its share of sullen and shy teens short on motivation. Stephanie was sinking in her SAT-pressured public high school when she decamped in junior year for Sudbury (her friends derisively called it "day care") for "the sole purpose of avoiding college." For several months, she puffed and sunned her days away on Smoking Rock. In time, she drifted over to the music barn. There she picked up a flute again and began playing purely for pleasure. Two years later she selected a college specifically for its new arts center.

Jessica was severely depressed in her community's high school. Numerous friends "shared my indifference, but they were content with their apathy. I was tortured by it." Her parents agreed to a change, but adapting to Sudbury was difficult. Jessica was shy. She brooded. She sat at the edge of the sewing room, pretty much the crossroads of the school, a large space on the first floor of the mansion where there's always animated debate or a raucous card game around a huge table. For a long time she just listened. Eventually she began contributing to political arguments, discussions of personal beliefs "and philosophies of education and just about everything else." Conversation and debate, she insists, were the source of her education.

Current educational theory corroborates her assertion. Increasingly across all the sciences, there is an awareness of social capital. Researchers in a variety of disciplines believe that human interaction is critical for learning and the best learning comes about as a result of social participation. Relationships provide both the deep motivation and context for acquiring information; people are driven by the desire to understand the perspective of others. Studies have shown that peer engagement, for example, clicks on both intellectual engagement and learning persistence amongst students.

The Political Spin on the Boy/Girl "Crisis"

A college professor [identified as amike] of 34 years experience wrote the following observations. I cite them because in reading the literature there is a weary, predictable redundancy in complaints about what entering freshmen know and don't know.

The pretention of academics is simply overbearing when it comes to pointing out their perceived deficiencies of youth. These observations are more interesting because of the gender context.

Unspoken in any of these discussions is a factoid about college that a guidance counselor tipped me off to. Today's college graduates are taking longer to graduate by two years. These days a typical graduate will spend six years getting what used to be a four-year degree. This comes as a shock to me and other parents as well.

But here's the gender divide observations. See what you think.

I've been in the ed biz for 34 years now, and I am really curious to see how this chain develops. Those of on the faculty side of the desk are stuck (this is not a complaint) with what comes in the door on the first day of class. I haven't tried to tally the changes over the last 30 years, save the students of the millennium generation (is that what we're supposed to call them?) are a tad more docile than the students I first taught during the tail end of the Viet Nam war. Here's a couple of observations, and I'm wondering if they tally with any other faculty who may drop by to comment here. First...let me say that I teach undergraduates exclusively, in History and American Studies, and about 60/40 per cent general education requirement students (the havetas) and 40 per cent majors (the wantas)

Observations without proof:

* Men do less well in the required courses than women do. They're less willing to devote time to things they're made to study, and more vocally resentful of the idea of required courses.

* Women do better on collaborative work then men do. They're more group oriented in the ways they interact. They're more willing to assist each other and more subtle about making sure the members of the group pull their weight.

* Women are more willing to make use of academic resources available to them: tutors, the learning center, and faculty office hours. Men, especially men who have diagnosed learning disorders (such as dyslexia) are far less likely to avail themselves of the assistance available to them by law. They feel, somehow, that asking for help is a sign of weakness, and they'll take a lower grade rather than show that particular sign.

* Among the average students (we get those, and I rather like working with those) men are more likely to ask questions related to technical issues (how long, does it have to be typed) and women are more likely to ask clarification questions...what do you mean by. . .

* Neither sex handles the written language well. They handle it worse, if anything, than students did thirty years ago. Neither seems to think that grammar matters, or that clothing what they think in powerful language is important.

* Women are more vocal than they were twenty years ago. Neither sex is as vocal as it was thirty years ago. Neither sex is as willing to contradict faculty positions or risk being wrong as the best students were when I began my career. Some of my colleagues breathe a sigh of relief about this. I rather miss the fracases into which some class sessions developed.

All in all, I wish my students worried less about what I thought and more about what they thought. I can see why Americans have been so passive regarding power structures in general and government in particular. Perhaps the one thing good which might develop out of the current national situation is the reawakening of youthful anger.

Mike