A thought on education

When you treat students as widgets, you get more intellectual midgets.

Legislators must prove they have read the books

I have had on my to-do list for awhile to write a blog entry about a standardized test for legislators.  After all, if a standardized test is good enough to judge school children's abilities, a standardized test should be good enough to judge legislators' abilities.

I was prodded to act on this to-do item on seeing "Teachers must prove they can do the math", Rachel E. Stassen-Berger and Kim McGuire, Star Tribune, 2012-02-23.  Gov. Mark Dayton signed a law that "requires would-be teachers to pass a college-level basic skills test before they can lead a classroom."

So, again sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.  Shouldn't we have a requirement that legislators pass a political history test before they can serve in a legislature?

Here are a few questions:

What did Adam Smith state was the basis of a nation's economy?

Was Adam Smith concerned with special interests?

Was Adam Smith more sympathetic to workers or to employers?

Did Adam Smith think that banks should be regulated?

Were the writers of the Constitution concerned with the common good and virtue?  Please define these terms and give examples of their use in the Federalist Papers.

To what degree did the writers of the Constitution think that commerce should be regulated?

What was the intent of the writers of the Constitution when they used the words "people", "person", and "citizen".  Please define each term.

Did Thomas Jefferson think that "limited government" applied to financial institutions and other corporate interests?

Please feel free to send these questions to your legislatures at the state and federal level.

No car left behind

Some people have recent model cars that have been well-maintained.  They regularly take their cars to dealers for oil changes and check-ups.  Many problems are caught early, and some problems are fixed at no charge to the owners.

Some people have older model cars that are worn-out, badly-maintained, or both.  When problems happen, they often can't afford the repair costs at a dealer.  They just drive with the problem, fix it themselves, have a friend fix it, or take it to a local garage.  If a local garage attempts to fix the problem, it may be able to a great job, an adequate job, or an improper job, the last causing even more problems.

Taking a page from No Child Left Behind, we should fire any mechanic that does not show yearly improvement in successfully repairing cars.  It doesn't matter if he or she is reasonably successful with a majority of the "basket cases" brought in, if he or she doesn't improve from year to year…

Grading teachers, there you go again!

See "Method to Grade Teachers Provokes Battles", Sam Dillon, New York Times, 2010-08-31.

Supposedly somebody's come up with a way to accurately grade teacher performance, but others find many flaws in applying the measures.

However, the major flaw is that teacher performance can be measured on how students perform on standardized tests.  Passing tests is not what made this country great; it was learning to be creative.

Furthermore, if you look back at your own education, which teachers do you think were most effective.  Those who prepared you for tests or those who put a dream in your head?  Who do you remember best?  Miss Grumpy who made you an expert on parsing sentences?  Or Frank McCourt who taught you how to tell your own story?

Do, teach, or legislate?

Today the Duluth News Tribune published a short letter of mine involving the three words in the title.  Since I promised, according to the DNT guidelines, that I have not had it published elsewhere, I'll give you a hint: the core of my letter begins, "Those who can, do."

You have until next weekend to look at it free.  After that, it will cost you $2.95.  When are newspapers going to learn Apple's 99 cents model.

"We all know that schools can be more efficient…"

Arne Duncan, U.S. Education Secretary, sent an op-ed piece to newspapers across the country about the financial crisis of the schools.  The Star Tribune published it
2010-06-09, others as early as 2010-06-06.  I tried finding a master at ed.gov but couldn't.  He wrote that help may be on the way in the form of $23 billion dollars in emergency funding.

In the midst of all his exhortations on the importance of schools he wrote, "We all know that schools can be more efficient…"  Oh! We all know?  For a contrary view on that see "Arne Duncan's History Lesson to the American Federation of Teachers (AFT)".  It is a radical voice on how schools were designed to turn out factory workers.  There is some truth in this diatribe.  It does give some insight in this call for "efficiencies" in schools and government and where the call is coming from.

Efficiency means doing more with less resources.  An efficient engine uses less gas. An efficient widget factory uses less material and energy to produce more widgets.

But you can't move a busload of people in a Prius; that many people would make a Prius very inefficient.

And you can't treat a classroom of children like widgets. Especially if your only measure of success is standardized tests.  Children are individuals with varying levels of preparation and interest.  Some will sit quietly and absorb knowledge like a sponge; others will fidget, disrupt, fall asleep, and get very little knowledge.  It takes a lot of skill and a a lot of teachers to deal with such variety.

Using standardized tests for judging students and schools is like expecting a blue-grass musician to pass a written test on playing Beethoven.  Let's put it another way.  One student passes an English test of spelling and grammar, but writes very dully.  Another student struggles through the same test, but writes prose that draws the reader in.  Whose book would you rather read?  Or manual?  Or business plan?

Maybe the best means to efficient schools is to require parents to have a degree in early childhood development before they have any children.

Those who can…

Most of us know the saying, "Those who can do; those who can't teach."

Given all the legislation being written to micromanage education, I would like to add to the saying, "Those who can't teach, enter politics."

If you think teacher's should be paid for performance…

I have a little exercise for you.

Take 30 critics of education and give them each 30 1/4-inch diameter bolts with 20 threads per inch.  From a mixed assortment of 1/4-inch nuts with 20 threads per inch and 28 threads per inch, give each critic 30 randomly-drawn nuts.  Give them, say, 10-minutes each to put the nuts on the bolts.  They will each be paid according to the number of bolt-nut pairs they can successfully assemble.

Knowledge is not bolts and students are not nuts.  In fact, we tend to treat either the students who have difficulty absorbing the knowledge or the teachers who cannot match the knowledge to the students as dolts.

On a more practical level, consider a history teacher's task and a chemistry teacher's environment.  If the school requires all students to take history but only a self-selected few students are going to take chemistry, which teacher do you think is more likely to have the better performance?

Little things can save our empire

I saved a few articles about education that take a different tack from all the grandiose schemes that are current and was going to write a summary. Then today's Star Tribune had several op-ed pieces that stressed some of the same old, same old ideology: blame the teacher's unions or put the schools under control of mayors.

As usual, I keep reading new stuff that takes time from writing about old stuff I had read. As I went through the list of articles for today's Yahoo! Finance, I was struck by the title "Collapse of the American Empire: Swift, Silent, Certain".

I think our national arrogance ("leader of the free world"), military overreach, and short-term ideological thinking do contribute to the possibility of our soon being surpassed by the likes of China, India, and Brazil.

One thing that can keep us going for a long time is our history of innovation, innovation that is often falling victim to ideology. As long as we run our schools on ideological principles like "No Child Left Behind" and control from larger and more remote political entities, innovation may be stifled.

To get more innovation, we have to educate children for creativity, not passing tests.

I finally finished Eric Booth's "The Music Teaching Artist's Bible: Becoming a Virtuoso Educator". The more I read, the more I understood he was talking about education in general. If we don't engage students in creativity, all the rote learning in the world will only turn out automatons. See "Teaching: putting in or drawing out?"

Then I read three revolutionary articles on education: "Scholar's School Reform U-Turn", "Building a Better Teacher", and "Why you should read Diane Ravitch's new book".

The first is how Diane Ravitch, a respected education historian who was in the first Bush's Department of Education, has changed her mind on some of the conservative standard views on education, including No Child Left Behind. If you want to get some idea of her independence, read her "The Language Police".

The second is a long New York Times Magazine article centered on a charter school founder who learned that teachers aren't being trained in the little things that really matter. The most striking paragraph was:

"When Doug Lemov conducted his own search for those magical ingredients, he noticed something about most successful teachers that he hadn’t expected to find: what looked like natural-born genius was often deliberate technique in disguise. “Stand still when you’re giving directions,” a teacher at a Boston school told him. In other words, don’t do two things at once. Lemov tried it, and suddenly, he had to ask students to take out their homework only once."

The third is a short review of Diane Ravitch's "The Death and Life of the Great American School System". The review gives a good summary of the ferment that is going on in education circles, a ferment that could give us a truly Great American School System.

Teaching: putting in or drawing out?

"A teaching artist is an artist who actively engages learners in consciously developing the aesthetics of their own processes of learning."

- Arnold Aprill, Chicago Arts Participation in Education (CAPE)

Quoted in "The Music Teaching Artist's Bible: Becoming a Virtuoso Educator", Eric Booth, p. 16.

See the same section for other incisive quotes on what a teaching artist is.

When I read the above to my wife, she said that's what most teachers strive for. I replied that that's not what politicians want. She replied, "Unfortunately!"

One of the other quotes mentioned education as drawing out rather than putting in. It was this idea that led me to make the remark about politicians. "No child left behind" rewards schools for "putting in" and makes no provision for drawing out.

Misuse of statistics?

Stephen J. Schroeder-Davis wrote a generally good article about "gifted students" being "left behind", "Federal rules leave gifted kids behind", but I have a few bones to pick.

He wrote:

"There are no provisions in NCLB to support gifted students, and these student receive less than 3 cents of every $100 in federal education dollars."

First, are federal dollars the only available money for education? I hope not.

Second, does every student need the same amount of resources to get a good education? For example, advanced students can often be given an assignment and go off by themselves to do it. I would hope that teachers would still be available to answer questions. On the other hand, "average" students would need more attention and help. "Slow" students might need one-on-one assistance.

Third, he assumes that all students should make the same amount of progress throughout their education. He cites a study that low achieving students "were progressing in reading at five times the rate of high-achieving students". Is progress in reading unlimited? If the low-achieving students move from 100 words per minute to 500 wpm, does it follow that the high-achieving students should move from 800 wpm to more than 4000 wpm? Few schools have ever been equipped to teach the techniques to read at that rate.

Fourth, we overuse the word "gifted". Advanced students may have very supportive parents who encourage them to learn. OK, good parents are a "gift". These advanced students may have worked harder earlier and have a good base to learn at faster rates later. Sort of the more you learn, the easier it is to learn more.

I do agree with the author that advanced students could be given many more opportunities to learn as much as they can. It is no fun to sit in a high-school class with people who stumble over book reports. We have cut off many classes that not only would give advanced students more opportunities for learning, but that would give many other students opportunities to expand their interests and abilities. In the interest of low taxes we have considered libraries, foreign languages, music, arts, and other creative subjects as frills. These have been touted by many as keeping young minds more active and receptive to other learning experiences.

Oh, well! I guess we get what we pay for.

Nerd is not a dirty word at these schools

After I wrote "Nerdy words that aren't dirty" and "Blaming the schools for what they can't control" I found out that I had an article on my coffee table that sort of tied the two blog entries together and went even further.

Wired 17.09 contains "Making Geeks Cool Could Reform Education" by Daniel Roth. Several schools have found that by breaking the kid culture, by plenty of adult supervision and by having students work in teams, that kids will do much better academically and more likely to go on to college. This can even happen in schools with mostly lower-income families.

I would say that good education is going to come from the bottom up with many experiments and not from the top down with one size fits all.

If anything is going to come from the top down, it should be the President highlighting a school or a group of schools every month. No money, no laws, just a little bit of publicity.

Blaming the schools for what they can't control

Laura Rowley wrote that self-control is a better predictor of grades or other successes than IQ. See “Why I Canned the Cable”.

College students who multitask heavily fare worse than those who multitask less. See "Multitasking Muddles Brains, Even When the Computer Is Off", Brandon Keim, Wired, 2009-08-24.

If a kid lives in a two-room apartment where the TV is always on and there is at least one conversation going, will he or she do as well in school as someone who has his or her own bedroom in a reasonably quiet house?

Only the most dedicated and clever teachers can work successfully with children with little self-control living in a "busy" home. Especially when there are 30 or more kids in the same room.

The mismeasurement of education

In last Saturday's Budgeteer News, Pete Langr disputed an earlier column on education by another Budgeteer columnist, Virgil Swing. See "Test scores aren't a reliable indicator of quality", Pete Langr, Duluth Budgeteer News, 2009-08-15. Swing used test results to compare the quality of various schools, locally and internationally. Langr wrote that test scores are only part of the picture.

As an example, Langr use a remark by his sister that her school was better than a neighboring school. Her school kicked out its two worst students who went to the other school. That those two students increased the score of one school and decreased the score on another school says nothing about how well the rest of the students are doing. Without the scores of those two students both schools may have done equally well, as measured by standardized tests.

Langr and I exchanged a few emails on his column, and with his permission, here is some of what we wrote.

Magree: Thanks for another good column.

I don’t think many want to make the effort to measure the true success of schools: how happy are graduates with what they do with their lives and how much have they made the lives of others better?

You could measure how much graduates earn, but that doesn’t measure how much better they have made the world.

You could measure how many go on to college but NCLB doesn’t wait that long. For example, if Central High is failing because it didn’t meet AYP standards, is anybody counting how many graduates go on to college? I would bet that there are more Central graduates who go on to college than there are Central students who don’t make Annual Yearly Progress.

I think NCLB and the whole school quality “debate” are hidden ploys to decimate the public school system, ignoring that public schools have helped build a robust economy by producing a huge number of skilled people.

However, an unrestrained “free market” does not lead to a better education system. See “School Politics and the Wealth of Nations”.

Keep writing.

Langr: Your statement "how happy are graduates with what they do with their lives and how much have they made the lives of others better" is well beyond what I was thinking. I think you have a good perspective. I hadn't even got nearly that far. I was accepting the tests, but of course criticizing how they were used. You go way beyond that. Eventually, I will write more about what I think we should do.

I agree with you that much of NCLB actually seems designed to hurt schools, rather than help. We'll see how that plays out.

Thanks for the comment.

Magree: I just got back from choir practice and read your message. I got better music education in public schools than many people seem to have, but not enough to be a good musician. I know how to read music though not how to match it well. But one remark made by a high school music teacher has had a more profound impression on me than all the remembering of FACE and Every Good Boy Does Fine. [For those of you who "can't read music", FACE are the names of the notes between the lines of the usual staff and EGBDF are the names of the notes on the lines.]

In tenth grade music class, the male teacher said, “Anyone with intelligence can sing.” I don’t remember a single other thing he said or taught and only have a vague memory of the class room, but I’ve never forgotten that remark. Do you think any teacher would get performance pay for that kind of remark?

Creative fallacies

I'm reading George Soros' The Age of Fallibility, and I recently read columns by Diane Ravitch on No Child Left Behind (1) and David Brooks on the co-opting of classical conservatism by the Republican Party (2). Or should I say, the co-opting of the Republican Party by people who are certain they hold the truth.

No Child Left Behind and the "war on terrorism" have created more problems than they have solved and diverted resources away from possibly better solutions. We have looked for the quick fixes, the Father knows best solutions, rather than engage in a sober discussion of what the real problems are. We deal with solving problems with the certainty we know the solutions rather than deal with the uncertainty that we won't have a perfect solution.

For example, peace demonstrations are not the answer to extricating our country from the Iraq war. Demonstrations are more mob rule than governance. A better strategy would be to write columns, blogs, letters to the editor, letters to representatives showing the fallacies of the current course. This strategy would have to also suggest ideas to deal with the problems. For example, what do you do for all the Iraqis that have helped the U.S. forces?

The "war on terror" like the "war on drugs" before it is a misleading choice of words. The "war on terror" has reinforced the view that a military solution will adequately deal with criminals who are certain that their view of the world will prevail. We can't bomb Hamburg because terrorists are living and plotting there.

We need to counter terrorism more with ideas than bullets. The U.S. has blown many chances to show that the bin Laden version of Muslim is contrary to many teachings of the Qu'ran. We need to show that an ideology will not bring about a heaven on earth, but that an open society will give us more opportunities to get closer to a just world. We need to counter certainty with possibilities.

(1) "Get Congress Out of the Classroom", Diane Ravitch, New York Times, Oct. 3, 2007

(2) "The Republican Collapse", David Brooks, New York Times, Oct. 5, 2007

Libraries in schools, frill or necessity

As I rode up the chair lift with an 8-year-old ski student, I asked her what books she's been reading. She said Judy B Jones. I asked her what the books were about. "She does things." "Does she solve problems or get in trouble?" "Gets in trouble." "Does she figure out how to fix things up?" "Generally."

I asked her if she gets Judy B Jones books at the public library or the school library. "School library". "Which do you prefer, the library or the classroom?" "The library." "Why?" "There are so many books."

There is a whole kid world out there that many adults are unaware of. First, I never heard of Judy B Jones until I talked to this girl about her interests. Second, my own expectation of what names sound like led me to assume the wrong name. The heroine of the books is Junie B Jones!

I found this out by a search of the web. Check http://www.randomhouse.com/kids/junieb/books/books.html
For another series that is exciting kids, see Captain Underpants.

Maybe we have schools organized all wrong. Instead of classrooms where children sit in rows or circles, maybe we should have libraries, labs, workshops, and other activity centers. They would be staffed with teachers who would make suggestions and answer questions. On certain days children would move from one activity center to another. On other days they would choose which they wanted to use and when.

Yes, there should be benchmark tests, but they should be written or oral presentations or they should be demonstrations of skills. The demonstrations could be musical or theatrical performances, an art work, or construction of an object.

In other words, schools should be places where kids imaginations and creativity are allowed to soar. Tests should be something that take advantage of kids' desire to show off.

There is no standardized kid; why should they take standardized tests?