D-Ed Reckoning

The Instructional Black Box

2010-11-10T17:26:00.001-05:00

I'm in the process of wading through the 100 or so comments generated in my five part Economics for Edupundits to address the issues raised. But, in the meantime I wanted to address the following issue raised by Dick.

Who is examining the nuts and bolts of instruction—which are the determinants of formal instructional accomplishments—or the lack thereof? No one. Well, almost no one. But that’s a whole nother story.

By and large in the US, instruction remains a black box [scratch black, make it a white box] between Standards and Standardized Test.

Dick is, of course, right. Instruction largely remains a black box. But why does it remain a block box?

The answer is that there is little incentive or reward in our present system for cracking open the black box. And, here's why.

Students can be divided into the easily educable and the difficult to educate. Let's deal with the former group first.

For the easily educable, there's no real need to crack open the instructional box. These students are going to learn regardless of the instruction being delivered. There's no need to understand why your instruction seems to be working with this group. Just accept that whatever you do, provided it's not too loony, will work pretty good and pick something and a style you find personally enjoyable. If you're likable and organized, the students will like you and life will be good. Sit back and collect your paycheck and enjoy your summers off content with the knowledge that the measuring stick used to determine what the students have learned is a glorified IQ test, the SAT or ACT.

If you run a private school, charter school, magnet school, or any other school with selective admissions, the situation is largely the same. Your main goal is to weed out all the difficult to educate students and only admit the easily educable students, preferably the easiest to educate and hence the ones most likely to perform well on the SAT/ACT. The better you can separate the wheat from the chaff will largely determine your reputation and therefore the tuition you can charge. If you need to differentiate yourself from your competitors, there are many non-instructional areas that can be attacked much more easily than the instructional areas.

There is so little competition in the current system, schools have largely adopted the carve up the market approach, establishing their little minimal competition, non-profit fiefdoms and enabling them to leased a comfortable existence.

Don't expect innovation to come from this segment of the market.

Now for the difficult to educate students, this is where cracking the instructional black box would bring the most benefits. But where is the incentive to actually do so?

There is no incentive at the political level. Political careers are too short. Long-term accomplishments (like instructional reform) don't matter. The game is to appear to care, enact some nebulous reform, throw some money at the problem, and hope you are out of office (or have moved onto a better office) when the chickens come home to roost.

And the reforms aren't going to come at a lower level because below the political level everyone is a wage slave. The wage slave's only incentive is to collect the next paycheck.

Instructional reform requires entrepreneurship. But what incentive does a Vanderbilt have to enter the market to compete with all Fulton and Livingston monopolies?

Reform won't happen at the curriculum level because there is no incentive for schools to adopt a better curriculum or for schools to not subvert the better curriculum if forced to adopt it. Many good curriculums are languishing in obscurity due to this very reason.

So, tell me all you Kenysian market steering types, I'm looking at you Dick, how do you propose steering the educational ship to not only unlock the secrets of the instructional black box, but also to assure that schools follow the revealed secrets instead of, you know, sticking with the status quo?

New Great Schools study doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know

2010-11-09T10:38:00.001-05:00

The oxymoronically titled Council of the Great City Schools, an advocacy group for urban public schools, turns up the rhetoric to 11 on the new “study” it will release later today (Press Release):

New Report on Black Male Achievement Reveals Jaw-Dropping Data
The stark statistics reveal what a new report calls a "national catastrophe" in the academic attainment and future career prospects of too many of the country’s African American male youth.

Jaw dropping?

Really?

“Jaw dropping” implies surprise and I can’t imagine the Council of the Great City schools can possibly be surprised by the performance of black males on NAEP.

Only 12 percent of fourth grade black male students nationally and 11 percent of those living in large central cities performed at or above proficient levels in reading on the 2009 National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP), compared with 38 percent of white males nationwide. In eighth grade, only 12 percent of black males across the country and 10 percent living in large cities performed at or above proficient in math, compared with 44 percent of white males nationwide.

It shouldn’t be surprising that NAEP scores are this low. They’ve been this low for quite some time. The relatively low scores are merely an indication that the NAEP is a more difficult or has lower cut scores (or both) than most assessments

And the achievement gap hovers at about a standard deviation between whites and blacks. That too is about where it always seems to be.

So, again, why the surprise?

In fact, the average African American fourth and eighth grade male who is neither poor nor disabled does no better in reading and math on NAEP than white males who are poor or disabled.

That’s not a surprising result either if you read this blog. (What? You think this is an economics blog or something?)

Although since this study is getting mainstream attention, I am curious to see how this fact will be reported.

The Times gets a talking head to spin it for them.

“There’s accumulating evidence that there are racial differences in what kids experience before the first day of kindergarten,” said Ronald Ferguson, director of the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard. “They have to do with a lot of sociological and historical forces. In order to address those, we have to be able to have conversations that people are unwilling to have.”
Those include “conversations about early childhood parenting practices,” Dr. Ferguson said. “The activities that parents conduct with their 2-, 3- and 4-year-olds. How much we talk to them, the ways we talk to them, the ways we enforce discipline, the ways we encourage them to think and develop a sense of autonomy.”

Apparently, those conversations won’t include any possible genetic effects. I suppose we’re still unwilling to have that that conversation.

Dr. Ferguson seems to be relying on the famous Hart & Risley study and fails to mention studies like the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study which showed that black adoptees failed to benefit from the language rich environment found in high-SES white homes.

The last seven paragraphs in the Times article are comedy gold if you know anything about economics. and incentives.

Economics for EduPundits: Bonus Video

2010-11-04T09:55:00.001-04:00

Clearly, I side with Hayek. And, apparently, so did the economy.

Economics for Edu-pundits: Part V

2010-10-26T08:26:00.001-04:00

(Continued from Part IV)

Before I address the many fine issues raised in the battle raging over in the comment section of Part IV, I want to address the currently preferred organization for education entities, including universities, most private schools, and most charter schools –the dreaded non-profit organization.

We have seen that the role of profit-seeking businesses is better understood when they are recognized as profit-and-loss businesses, with all the pressures and incentives created by these dual potentialities. By the same token, what are called "non-profit organizations" can be better understood when they are seen as non-profit and non-loss institutions—that is, institutions which operate free of the constraints of a bottom line.

That freedom from turning a profit has resulted in the same kind of stagnation we see in our public schools which are basically organized along non-profit lines as well.

Freedom from the bottom line does not mean that non-profit organizations have unlimited money. It just means that, with whatever money they do have, non-profit organizations are under very little pressure to achieve their institutional goals to the maximum extent possible with the resources at their disposal. Those who supply those resources include the general public, who cannot closely monitor what happens to their donations or their taxes, and those whose money provided the endowments that help finance non-profit institutions Much or most of these endowments were left by people who are now dead, who cannot monitor at all.

What would be called "losses" in other kinds of enterprises are called "deficits" in non-profit organizations and serve as reasons given when seeking donations or government subsidies to cover shortfalls. Non-profit organizations have additional sources of income, including fees from those who use their services, such as visitors to museums, audiences for symphony orchestras, and tuition from students. These fees are in fact the main source of the more than half a trillion dollars in revenue received annually by non-profit organizations in America. However, these fees do not cover the full costs of their operation—which is to say, the recipients are receiving goods and services that cost more than these recipients are paying and some are receiving them free. Such subsidized beneficiaries cannot impose the same kind of economic discipline as the customers of a profit-and-loss business who are paying the full cost of everything they get.

Adam Smith noted how academics running universities financed by endowments can run them in self-serving ways, being “very indulgent to one another,” so that each academic would “consent that his neighbor might neglect his duty, provided he himself is allowed to neglect his own.” Tenure granting lifetime appointments are common in non-profit colleges, but practically unknown in businesses that must meet the competition of the marketplace.

The fact that some organizations’ income is called profit and other organization’s income is not does not change anything economically, however much it may suggest to the unwary that one institution is greedy and the other is not.

It is the non-profit organizational nature of private schools and charter schools that has contributive to the less than ideal competitive state affairs. Charter schools are most newly entities, run by activists (not businessmen), and typically thinly capitalized. Moreover, they operate in a somewhat hostile highly regulatory environment with many regulations that tend to coerce these new entities into conforming to the current practices of public schools. We are still a long way from a competitive market in education even with the presence of charter schools.

Economics for Edu-pundits IV: The Steamship Industry

2010-10-22T11:09:00.001-04:00

(continued from Part III)

Let’s take a brief break from the economics lessons (at least one student needs a recess break) and see how all this “ideological” theory plays out in the real world. (As we know, novices learn best by seeing examples.)

The steamship Industry was one of America’s first large-scale businesses. It was mechanized in the early 1800s and was an the vanguard of technological change.

As in education, government played a key and active role right from the start in America. Once government shows a willingness to intervene in an industry, you will invariably see business, who will attempt to succeed primarily by seeking subsidies, aid, and pools (monopolies) from government. These are the political entrepreneurs. And, if we are lucky, we will also find market entrepreneurs who try to succeed primarily by offering a superior product at a low cost. These are the market entrepreneurs. (In education, we only have political entrepreneurs: the teacher’s unions and the administrators.)

We’ve all heard of Robert Fulton and his steamboat, the Clermont, one of the first commercially successful steamboats. What we often don’t hear about is that Fulton’s company obtained a monopoly from New York state giving him the privilege of carrying all steamboat traffic in New York for thirty years. Fulton is your classic political entrepreneur. He used the New York government to reduce his competition to zero and merrily collected his monopoly profits. Who’s at fault here? Fulton? the New York government? of both? I’m going with both.

In 1817, steamboat man Thomas Gibbons hired Cornelius Vanderbilt to crack Fulton’s monopoly by carrying passengers between New Jersey and New York for below the monopoly rate Fulton was charging. This was, of course, illegal, but Vanderbilt managed to elude the law and cut fares up until the landmark case of Gibbons v. Ogden struck down the Fulton monopoly.

Following the decision, steamboat traffic along the Ohio river doubled in the first year and then quadrupled after the second year. By magic? Hardly.

Freed from the Fulton-Livingston monopoly, the market entrepreneurs quickly improved technology in steamboating. These new ideas were encouraged by the influx of capital which began soon after the monopoly was struck down. (This would be the all important capital part of capitalism.) (Note to Dick: this is how most productive research gets financed and why research and the adoption of research is reduced in monopolistic systems like our school system.)

The new ideas included tubular boilers which replaced Fulton’s heavy, expensive copper boilers (he had no incentive to replace them as a monopolist). Also, anthracite coal soon replaced the cordwood fuel used by Fulton, leading to expenses being cut in half. Fulton had no incentive to switch to a more efficient fuel as long as he could charge monopoly prices as granted to him by the New York government. Again, this should all sound eerily familiar to anyone who views the antiquated and stagnant ways of our education system.

With the removal of the Fulton monopoly, prices immediately dropped – from seven to three dollars from New York City to Albany, for example. Nonetheless, with the adoption of new technology by Gibbons and Vanderbilt, lowered their costs enough so that they managed to earn a $40,000 profit each year during the late 1820’s. Gibbons and Vanderbilt made these profits which are thought to be so troublesome and dirty to people like Downes regardless of how much customers actually benefit. they want to have their cake (a profitless system) and eat it too (the customer benefits). Except in the fantasy world of Marxist theory – it doesn’t work that way.

At this point Vanderbilt left Gibbons, bought two steamboats, and went into business for himself. He soon established trade routes all over the northeast, becoming known for his fast and reliable service and low rates. he cut the “standard” $3 fare between New York City and Philadelphia from $3 to $1. For the New Brunswick to New York City Vanderbilt charged 6 cents and provided free meals.

Vanderbilt then moved into the New York City to Albany run on the Hudson River, competing against the Hudson River Steamboat Association, the largest line in America, which was trying to informally fix prices at the then prevailing $3 rate (down from $7 under the Fulton monopoly) to guarantee them a regular profit by eliminating competition on prices. Normally, this would be a good opportunity for government to step in and eliminate such restraints of trade between businessmen. But, in this case they didn’t need to.

Vanderbilt didn’t become the richest man in America by being complacent. First he used two of his boats on the Albany/New York City and cut the fare from $3 to $1, then to 10 cents, and finally to free. Vanderbilt figured it cost him $200 per day to operate his boats, so if he could fill them with 100 passengers, he would break even if they would each eat and drink $2 worth of food during the trip. Vanderbilt later helped to invent the potato chip.

This put pressure on the Steamboat Association who dealt with Vanderbilt by buying him out for $100,000 plus $5,000 a year for the next ten years as long as he promised to leave the Hudson River. Vanderbilt agreed and the Association tried raising the prices back up to $3 for the Albany/NYC route.

This bribery had little practical effect. With no barriers to entry, other steamboaters came along and quickly cut fares. Vanderbilt had shown them that it could be done for less and they saw how Vanderbilt had benefited by being paid off. Almost immediately, other steamboaters entered the market, cut fares, and were bought off by the Association. All the while passengers enjoyed the reduced fares.

Meanwhile Vanderbilt took his payoff money and bought bigger and faster ships, entered the New England market, and began doing to them what he has done to the Hudson River Association.

Business is almost never pretty, and these buyouts are little more than naked bribery in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act, but the primary beneficiaries of all this unseemly business were the customers.

Here’s how Harper’s Weekly summed it up:

[Vanderbilt’s actions] must be judged by the results; and the results, in every case, of the establishment of opposition lines by Vanderbilt, has been the permanent reduction of fares… Wherever {Vanderbilt] ‘laid on’ an opposition line, the fares were instantly reduced; and however the contest terminated, whether he bought out his opponents, as he often did, or they bought him out, the fares were never again raised to the old standards.

Vanderbilt is your classic market entrepreneur: he fought monopolies, he improved steamship technology, and he cut costs.

Education needs someone like Vanderbilt. Superman might come to education’s rescue for altruistic reasons. That’s why we’re still waiting for him to come; he doesn’t exist. A Vanderbilt, however, will come if there is a profit motive. And, I would bet that we wouldn’t have to wait very long.

See The Myth of the Robber Barons for a more detailed account of Vanderbilt and other businessmen.

Economics for Edu-pundits Part III

2010-10-21T10:20:00.001-04:00

(Part II is here)

Fixing the problems we see in the present public education system is easy, but in the short term highly disruptive. But, that’s only because the present system is so screwed up and the interests within the system have gotten so comfortably entrenched and skilled at gaming the political forces by which the system is controlled.

The solution is simple – the system needs an injection of both profits AND losses. The losses part is the critical component.

Businesses are only interested only in the profit half. If they can avoid losses by getting government subsidies, tariffs and other restrictions against imports, or domestic laws that stifle competition, they will do so. Losses, however, are essential to the process that shifts resources to those who are providing what consumers want at the lowest prices—and away from those who are not.

Here’s a good example of profits and losses in action in the airline industry from Thomas Sowell’s Basic Ecomonics from which I’m stealing a large part of this discussion. (I’m not providing proper quotations for readability purposes; just assume the well-written parts are his and the poorly written ones are mine)

Between the last year of federal regulation in 1977 and twenty years later in 1997, the average air fare dropped by 40 percent and the average percentage of seats filled on planes rose from 56 percent to 69 percent, while more passengers than ever were carried more safely than ever. Meanwhile, many airlines went bankrupt. That was the cost of greater efficiency. It has been estimated that, during the era of federal regulation, government intervention in the market had caused costs and fares to be 50 percent higher than they would have been in a free market. When the protection of federal regulation was removed, those airlines which could not survive with lower fares and rising fuel costs went out of business.

In 2010, the inefficiencies are still being sucked out of the system and it remains a painful process, especially for inefficient airlines. we haven’t reached airline travel mecca yet, but consumers have it better than ever. Bad airlines still remain and you fly with them at your peril. The situation is the same with bad charter schools. But, the system as a whole is far better off.

People often have a knee-jerk reaction to “profits.” They think it is a valid criticism that business are “just in business to make profits.” Schools shouldn’t be in it for profit, but for more altruistic reasons. By this kind of reasoning, it could be argued that teachers are just working to earn their pay. What matters is not the motivation but the results.

To understand why profits and losses are so important, we need to examine what is needed for a business, such as a school, to turn a profit.

One precondition is that profit-seeking businesses cannot squander scarce resources like schools currently do. Businesses operating in a market economy have to pay for all their inputs—whether labor, raw materials, or electricity—and they have to pay as much as others are willing to bid for them. Then they have to sell their own end product or service at a price as low as their competitors are charging. If they fail to do both, they fail to make a profit. And if they keep on failing to make a profit, either the management will be replaced or the whole business will be replaced by some competitor who is more efficient.

In this case failure is a good thing. if you don’t want children attending bad schools, you have to let them fail and allow the resources to shift to better schools.

Some people, like Downes, charge is made that profits are short-run gains, with implication that they come at the expense of longer-term considerations. Sowell deals with this argument handily:

But future values are reflected in the present value of a business' assets. A factory that runs full blast to make a profit today, while neglecting the maintenance and repair of its machinery will immediately see a decline in the value of property and of its stockholders' stock. It is in the absence of a profit-and-loss economy that there are few incentives to maintain the long-run productivity of an industrial enterprise or a collective farm, as in the Soviet Union. What happens to the enterprise after the current management's tenure is over is of little concern in a system where there are no profits and no present values to influence decisions.

Ever notice how decrepit inner city schools are. This explains why. It certainly isn’t for lack of funding.

Couldn’t we achieve the same results by running schools as non-profits? We’ll see the problems of non-profits in the next post.

Economics for Edu-Pundits II

2010-10-20T11:18:00.001-04:00

(Part I is here.)

Most people don’t understand the distinction between capitalism and capitalists (i.e., businessmen). The former is almost always good when there is a high degree of free competition; the latter are usually bad and often attempt to stifle competition.

Being pro-capitalism is not the same thing as being pro-business, yet this is often how those who favor government intervention in markets tend to paint those who favor capitalism. Free-market economists like Adam Smith, David Ricardo,and Milton Friedman have been harshly critical of businessmen. Smith wrote against “the clamour and sophistry of merchants and manufacturers.” Any suggestions about laws and policies coming from such people, he said, ought to be “carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with most suspicious attention.” Skepticism about the business community has remained part of the tradition of free-market economists.

Businessmen seek to reduce or eliminate competition because it is in their self-interest to do so. By reducing competition, they are able to squander scarce resources and increase their own profits. It is competition that forces the efficient use of resources by businessmen, lowering prices and thereby competing down profits.

Today, the preferred method businessmen use to stifle competition is through the political process by lobbying the government to intervene on their behalf through subsidies, by keeping out foreign and domestic competition, through favorable regulations, by bailing out failing companies, and the like. The reality is that businessmen don’t like free-markets and competition any more than Marx did. And government, both parties, is often all too willing to comply with these lobbying requests. Business leaders are not wedded to a free market philosophy or any other philosophy. They promote their own self-interest any way they can, like other special interest groups. Economists and others who are in fact supporters of free markets have known this for at least two centuries.

Often only businessmen receive the scorn for their anti-competitive, self-interested behavior. But their willing partner in this malfeasance, government, is just as much to blame. Behind every market scandal there is inevitably a bad regulation which played a significant part.

So what does all this have to do with public education? Plenty.

In public education, government has intervened to replace the businessmen with government officials (the school board). public schools are basically run as non-profit organizations. This presents a special problem which I’ll discuss in a subsequent post. For now, it’s only important to recognize are being run along traditional corporate lines with government officials serving as businessmen. And, if government has been all to willing to intervene on behalf of private businessmen to stifle competition, it’s not difficult to recognize their willingness to do the same when they are the businessmen.

Since government officials are political actors they act in their self-interest not to seek profits (there aren’t any), but to seek political favors from school officals and employees and other related third parties. Let’s go down the list.

Management. The administrators who run the schools. Always highly compensated, as in most industries. But these guys have extracted a special advantage from their government overlords – zero responsibility to perform well. when schools fail, like they are in the inner cities, these guys should be the first against the wall. Are they? Almost never. What typically happens is that they get reassigned or voluntarily move to another school to burden themselves with. They have also been successful in shifting responsibility down to the next tier – teachers.

Teachers. The employees, unfortunately not professionals, who in theory should be merely following orders from on high. So when schools fail, it’s technically should not be their fault. But, these are no white knights either. they’ve formed themselves in unskilled labor-like unions and have successfully eliminated all competition in the labor market which might have served to keep their compensation in check and to make them somewhat responsible for performing with some degree of competence. Their unions have been highly successfully in lobbying government for favors that are in their self-interest. Teachers and administrators have in effect stepped into the shoes of the businessman who would normally be running schools. They are now the loathed businessmen, as the public is starting to recognize. And they are certainly acting like capitalists by converting what would normally be excess monopoly profits into increase compensation and job security for themselves.

Third party contractors. All the people who provide services to schools – builders/contractors, publishers, schools of education, and anyone else who provides any service to schools. These people benefit by being awarded contracts through the political process and by having administrators who aren't too concerned about the bottom line. This is why we see Taj Mahal like buildings and overly-produced and priced textbooks.

Only two groups are being screwed in our present system –students and taxpayers (i.e., the public). The groups that the schools are supposed to be serving. Bear that in mind the next time you read some lofty rhetoric about “public institutions.” “public good,” “society does to advance its own objectives,” “education being too important to be left to private enterprise,” and “the social harm that would be caused outweighing the profits.”

Forget about the public-good and private-enterprise labels. That is a difference without a distinction. We could easily have the same awful system under private enterprise.Private businessmen have also been successful in lobbying for the same kinds of reduced competition benefits.

The trick is to avoid the kinds of problems we see in the present public education system. The next post will discuss how that can be accomplished.

Basic economics for Edu-Pundits

2010-10-19T11:42:00.001-04:00

Those who favor government running the education system often seem to think that government is somehow immune form economic and political forces. They often believe that by having the government run the education system, we’ve somehow managed to avoid the common problems of free enterprise. For example here’s Downes:

I think the point being made is that education is not something that is simply bought and sold, as a commodity, but rather something a society does to advance its own objectives. That it is, therefore, something too important to be left to the whims of the marketplace. And that the content of an education cannot be determined merely by economic pressures, but by the wider set of values of a society as a whole.

…

Most societies have decided that the management of education is too important to be left to private enterprise, that there would be too many poison pills to swallow, and that society would be irreparably damaged as a result. That even if private enterprise were to be able to manage education more efficiently, the product offered would be harmful to society.

…

The fostering of an educational resources regime where publishers and academics produce, and everyone else consumes, at once promotes their business objectives and undermines our social objectives and disempowers learners as a whole.

Implicit in this argument is the belief that government acting as both regulator and service provider is somehow immune from market forces, political forces, and self-interest such that it will inherently use education resources more effectively, provide education services more effectively, and serve society’s objectives better than free enterprise would.

More specifically, does eliminating profits and the risk of losses improve outcomes? Does eliminating competition improve outcomes?

It’s basic economics. Once you strip away the lofty rhetoric, it’s easy to see that our education system suffers from common maladies that plague other areas of the economy and for the same reasons.

There’s nothing inherently different because government is providing the education services. If a private company was offering education services under the same conditions, the services provided would be equally bad and the the prices equally steep. And, most importantly, the outcomes would be equally abysmal for the same students being under-served in the present system.

Unlike Downes and others of like mind, I am not willing to sweep the bad outcomes under the rug by blaming the failures on outside forces like poverty. The majority of people who favor the present system, like Dick , recognize that reform is needed. But, they are mistaken in believing that the present system can be reformed in a way that improves outcomes.

To understand why requires a brief overview of basic economics which I’ll provide in the next post.

In the meantime, feel free to present your arguments, pro and con, on the wonders and failures of the present system and why you think I’m wrong or right. I’ll address them.

I win Open Left’s Dunce Hat Award of the Week

2010-10-18T10:21:00.001-04:00

Woo Hoo! I win.

I’d like to thank all my readers and, especially, all my commenters who make all of this possible. Without you I wouldn’t have the will to persevere to do daily battle with the mighty intellects at blogs like Open Left. It’s very difficult to display your ineptitude in the face of Open Left’s withering criticism without support. And, it’s not just ordinary everyday ineptitude; it’s dunce hat award level ineptitude. That must be especially difficult to read. I also want to thank Open Left for offering such a prestigious award to us dunces. So, again, thank you, thanks to all of you.

Apparently it was my post on poverty and student achievement that set me apart from lesser dunces. Let’s go through Open Left’s analysis.

His claim, in a nutshell, is that the fact that Asian students, despite their poverty levels, have higher achievement than any other racial or ethnic group of students proves that there has to be another more important variable than poverty influencing student achievement.

Actually, that’s not my claim in or out of a nutshell. What I said, in response to Parry’s comment, was:

SES and student achievement are correlated. (You can't tell the tightness of the fit with this graph.) But, as you indicate SES can clearly not be the only independent causal variable.

SInce we’re in the realm of correlational studies, the data isn’t capable of proving any hypothesis. The data can only disprove a hypothesis. In this case the data disproves the hypothesis that poverty is the sole independent causal variable.

"Asian children with parents having only a high school diploma performed better than black children with parents having graduate degrees," he points out.
However, instead of rejecting outright that there is a consistent positive relationship between parental income or parental levels of education and student achievement (a correlation that is undeniable), he instead insists that there is an "invisible variable" at work.

I don’t reject the correlation outright. The correlation exists. What I reject is the drawing of the causal inference that poverty causes low student achievement. The correlational data is incapable of proving causation regardless of how consistent or positive the correlation may be. (In actuality, the correlation is rather low, as I pointed out here. Less than 20% of the variance in student performance is accounted for in the variance of socio-economic status, at best.)

And, I didn’t insist there was an invisible variable, I merely indicated there might be a third variable in play.

In fact, SES doesn't have to be an independent variable at all; there could be a third variable(s) that drives both SES and student performance.

And, that’s only because when drawing causal inferences from correlational studies, there is always the possibility that there is a third variable in play or that or that the causality is backwards (the wet streets causes rain problem).

Open Left goes on to conjecture:

And what is that invisible factor? he only hints at.

A few days later and many times previous I explicitly indicated what researchers conjecture those third variables might be:

But maybe, it’s that affluent kids possess traits like self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, and cognitive ability that will allow them to stay out of poverty and do well in school.

Open Left also conjectures:

But even if he is right - that there is something about what happens in Asian households (parenting habits, for instance, or nutrition) that matters more than poverty - that only proves that the determining factor is still outside the control of schools. Unless of course he wants schools telling parents how to raise children.

Open Left is so blinded by their own ideology, they can’t even draw fair inferences from what I wrote. There is no implication in my post that Asian performance is attributable to what goes on in Asian households. It could be that Asian students possess traits like self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, and cognitive ability that allow them to access the education being offered in their schools better. And as far as Asian parenting styles go I pointed out Stanley Sue and Sumie Okazaki’s paper, "Asian-American educational achievements: A phenomenon in search of an explanation" that noted

the parenting styles and values found in East Asian-American homes tend to correlate with lower test scores when they are found in white homes.

So much for that correlation as well.

Open Left concludes:

The difference between school-based factors that influence achievement and factors outside of schools' control is a distinction that in no way does the ed reform movement want to discuss. And they'll go to any lengths to avoid that discussion.

I’m not the one handing out dunce hat awards in an effort to “avoid discussion” now am I? I’m not the one with only correlational data and a bunch of failed out-of-school interventions. And, I certainly have enough humility to know what isn’t known about what affects student achievement and not to hand out dunce hat award on dubious (and fairly debatable) premises.

Out of school factors certainly exist, we’re just still waiting for someone to accurately identify what they are and to establish an intervention that consistently works to ameliorate their effects before we shift resources away from school-based interventions which have been shown to increase student performance.

Is that really too much to ask?

And, now we see the violence inherent in the system

2010-10-15T08:49:00.002-04:00

It was very sweet to see Dick Schutz defend Nancy Flanagan in the comments of this post.

Though normally ideological foes, they’ve found some common ground: they’re both statists when it comes to how our public schools should be run. Schools should be run by the state with schools operating as monopolies in geographic based districts. Competition. None.

They both claim not to like the status quo and that reform is needed. Specifically, they both believe that instructional reform is needed. However, their views on education reform are diametrically opposed.
Dick is a a code lovin’ instructivist. Nancy is a whole language lovin’ constructivist.

And, unfortunately, in their preferred statist system only one of them gets to run the show. The other gets to complain from the sidelines.

It makes for a good illustration why our present system is incompatible with real reform. They both want reform, but want to maintain the present system. This means one of them will have to gain central control of the system and then impose their will on the other. Things would stop being lovey-dovey real quick.

It would make for a great reality show.

Our local school is wonderful; everyone else’s sucks

2010-10-14T11:02:00.001-04:00

Bad apple pundit Jerry Bracey is no longer with us. And if ours is a just and vengeful God, he is right now accounting for his edu-pundit sins by being required to perform the Sisyphean task of teaching kids how to read and do math in an inner city public school using whole language and discovery math ~~for eternity~~ until they reach proficiency.

In any event since we don’t have Jerry to kick around anymore, someone ought to look at this year’s Phi Delta Kappan/Gallup poll of Americans' attitudes towards their public schools sans Jerry’s spin.

Parents grade their own school well (77% A or B, split evenly). I’d call it a about a B+.

They grade their local schools less well (49% A or B, skewed heavily toward Bs). Call it a B-/C+.

And, they grade public schools nationally in the dog house (18%). Call it a gentleman’s C.

Parents were also asked what was needed to raise the schools to a grade of A. Overwhelmingly, they think that instruction needs to be improved.

So what’s the explanation for these results?

Jerry would inevitably spin the data and blame media demagoguery for the for the “my school is fine, everyone else’s sucks” results. But that’s way too simplistic.

First, you have to recognize that with questions like this that ask for people to access their own choices/abilities, i.e., “how do you access the school you chose to send your beloved children to,” people are generally either loathe to admit they made a bad choice and/or have an inflated opinion of their abilities/choices. You see this most clearly when people are asked to assess their own driving performance: “I drive great, everyone else drives like a jackass.” So, you have to factor that in.

Also, media demagoguery notwithstanding (which goes both ways, of course), people just don’t get their information on the quality of public schools from news sources. They see on a daily basis the products of the public schools – other people and their children. That’s plenty of data to form a coherent opinion. And, the polling data shows that people start having their doubts about public schools pretty quickly—the schools in their own community, not just with some amorphous notion of distant schools somewhere in the nation.

But why else might people be most satisfied with their own schools and less happy with everyone else’s schools?

When people think of public schools generally, they think of education services, the primary service offered by schools. Some might say the primary reason for their existence in the first place. You can see by question 12 above,people generally believe that schools have plenty of room for improvement in the area of educational services.

However, when parents think of their own public schools, they also think of the educational services, but they also think about day care services, the sports teams, the band, and all the other ancillary non-educational services being offered.

To be fair, public schools generally do a good job providing these non-educational services. Keeping kids safe, fed, and occupied while mom and dad work isn’t exactly rocket science after all. And, who cares if the price tag for these services is through the roof; someone else is picking up most of the tab.

When it comes to the education being provided in their own schools, parent’s expectations of their children’s performance will generally meet predictions. My kid doesn’t do as well as the surgeon’s kids, but does better than the janitor’s kids. This generally holds regardless of the teacher’s ability or the curriculum. What basis do parent’s have to judge the absolute educational capabilities of their children? Exposure to a great curriculum delivered by a super teacher, year in and year out, is not something that most people have ever seen. Nonetheless, as question 12 indicates, people have their doubts when it comes the instruction be delivered in public schools.

I think all of these factors go into inflating people’s opinion of their own schools and that their lower opinion of other people’s schools is the more honest and accurate assessment. Confirming this explanation is Nancy Flanagan unwittingly tells us in today’s Answer Sheet post.

A friend who teaches in Kansas confessed recently that she feels a little guilty as bitter education reform battles rage in New York, Los Angeles and Washington D.C. Things aren't perfect in her school--they're not perfect anywhere, including the exceptionally rare charter academies that hold lotteries for admission--but she and her colleagues believe they're doing a good job for kids.

When given a choice people vote with their feet. What is the percentage of charter schools that have to hold a lottery because too many parents are choosing them over their local public school? I’m pretty certain it’s not the exceptionally rare charter.

All I know is that if I were running a business and my new competitor had to hold a lottery because he couldn’t service all his customers desiring purchase services from him and those customers were my former customers, I’d be a little worried. Because that’s the best indication that people aren’t happy with me and the services I’m providing.

Setting the bar low, really low

2010-10-14T07:52:00.002-04:00

Over at Aunt Crazy’s, Nancy Flanagan tells us why public schools don’t need to be reformed.

Here's a radical idea: Public schools in America are not a catastrophic mess.

That sure is a radical idea.

Imagine if you just purchased a high-priced good or service and the best thing you could say about it was that “well, it wasn’t a catastrophic mess.” You think you’d purchase that good or service again if you had a choice?

Congratulations, Nancy Flanagan, you’ve set the bar as low as it could possibly go.

Expecting Too Much From Walt Gardner

2010-10-13T11:46:00.002-04:00

Here’s how Walt starts off a recent blog post:

It's an article of faith among reformers that recruiting teachers from the top tier of their class will assure top performing schools.

Article of faith? Or deduction from research? You be the judge.
It’s not like Walt has his own article of faith.

There's only one problem with their case. They say absolutely nothing about the role that poverty plays in performance…
I don't believe that even the best teachers can completely overcome the huge deficits in socialization, motivation and intellectual development that poor students bring to class through no fault of their own. They can help narrow the gap between these students and those from advantaged backgrounds, but they can't eliminate it. That's a vital distinction given short shrift in today's debate. It's one thing to improve academic performance in absolute terms, but it's quite another to improve performance in relative terms.

Walt’s conceit (and others) is that they simply “know” that poverty CAUSES “huge deficits in socialization, motivation and intellectual development.” But maybe, it’s that affluent kids possess traits like self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, and cognitive ability that will allow them to stay out of poverty and do well in school. Maybe Walt has the causation backwards.
If Walt were right, then we’d be able to ameliorate these deficits by reducing the influence by poverty. But, there’s ample evidence, such as all the failed programs aimed at remedying these deficits rattled off in this post, that suggest that reducing poverty doesn’t ameliorate these deficits. Further, no one has been able to accomplish the things Walt thinks need the be accomplished to eliminate the gap. And, it’s not for lack of trying.
I assure you that Walt Gardner is well acquainted with articles of faith.

The charlatans are already in charge

2010-10-13T09:07:00.001-04:00

The usually sensible Karin Chenoweth is worried that the education charlatans might take over education.

I have some bad news for you Karin. The charlatans are already in charge.

Because the vast engine of education research has not, for the most part, concerned itself with answering those kinds of practical, everyday problems, teachers and principals cannot rely on a solid base of evidence such as the one that establishes the "standard of care" informing the field of medicine.

That leaves a vacuum of knowledge. Two possibilities exist for filling that vacuum: the carefully built-up craft knowledge that successful educators have developed; and the nostrums of charlatans.

First of all, the vast engine of education research mostly generates non-research opinion-like studies intended to provide research-like support for the kind of things educators already like and wish to practice. The kind of stuff that Karin wants isn’t being generated because there is no demand for it by education practitioners. When genuine research is developed, it is often ignored or misapplied. There’s no real need to achieve results in education, so there is no need to generate research directed at achieving results. There is no vacuum, the vacuum has already been filled by charlatans.

And as far as the craft knowledge of educators goes, it isn’t. Educators aren’t professionals or craftsman and certainly don’t act like it. VIcki Snider has written directly on this point.

Teachers aspire to be professionals, but without a shared scientific body of knowledge they remain bricoleur, a term borrowed from French by anthropologist Levi-Strauss (1966). There is no precise translation for bricoleur in English, but according to the translator's note, they are a “jack of all trades.” Not a handyman exactly, but a professional do-it-yourselfer. They cannot be called craftsmen because they work with whatever tools are at hand to solve whatever problems exist, nor do they have a specialized niche like craftsmen. They must be very intelligent and may, at times, achieve good results, but they are still constrained by their limited and finite assortment of tools and by the extent of their experiences. Contrast the bricoleur to engineers. Engineers have access to a range of tools designed for the specific job that needs to be done. They rely on the cumulative evidence for theoretical and technical knowledge, and use what is known to expand the boundaries of their professional knowledge. They rely on other professionals and specialists to help them do their job and to solve new problems. Engineers specialize--electrical, mechanical, biomedical, chemical, aerospace, naval, civil--and one type of engineer may assist the other, but would never be expected to do his or her job. An engineer is a member of a profession, but a bricoleur is just a clever person. Without a common body of knowledge about best practice, every new bricoleur teacher invents the wheel.

A profession that is guided by myths rather than empirically validated principles and practices maintains its bricoleur status. The teaching occupation will become a profession only when educators replace myth with science and raise their expectations for the success of all students.

This is why educators are so susceptible to various bromides and tonics being peddled by charlatans.

Even if we were to follow Karin’s suggestion

That's why it's so important for the field as a whole to step up and recognize that as complicated as it is to educate children, some people have figured out how to do it. Recognizing those experts' hard-won knowledge and learning from them may be our only real hope.

it won’t transform educators into the professionals we need them to be. We need them to be empirical and mere recognition is not the same as empiricism.

Diane Ravitch really hates the free market

2010-10-12T11:52:00.002-04:00

Wildly successful author of books sold in the free market, Diane Ravitch, really, really hates the free market—so much so that she attacked free-market fast-food restaurants in her post today.

Our political leaders are pushing an agenda that is wrong. The research is clear that fast-food restaurants vary dramatically in their quality. Some are excellent, some are awful, some are run by terrific leaders, some are run by incompetents, some use their resources wisely, some are wasteful and/or greedy.

Those promoting the privatization of government cafeterias are blinded by free-market ideology. They refuse to pay attention to evidence, whether it be research or the accumulating anecdotal evidence of misbehavior, incompetence, fraud, greed, and chicanery that the free market facilitates.

She has a point. Poorly performing fast food chains never go out of business. They keep raising their prices in the teeth of a recession. They offer an inferior product to the standards-based government cafeterias which only sell healthy and nutritious foods. And if it weren’t for stringent government standards, fast-food restaurants would have you eating pet food. The one thing is noticed on my recent trip to Massachusetts is how much better the food was in the government run or single-contractor rest stop restaurants. Thankfully, government cafeterias are public institutions, so they’ll never go away.

Of course, that was a bizarro world post from Ravitch. She was really railing against the semi-free market charter schools.

Update: There is no anecdotal evidence of misbehavior, incompetence, fraud, greed, and chicanery on the part of non-charter public schools, so we're safe for the time being at least.

What Should Students Know and be Able to do?

2010-10-12T10:25:00.001-04:00

Karl Fisch asks and then unsatisfactorily answers one of education’s most important question.

What should students know and be able to do?

It gets back to an old argument in education, the argument about which is more important -- content or skills. Like most teachers I've talked with, I think that's a false dichotomy. I want both. I want students to know some content and have the skills to be able to use their knowledge. I don't want them to just "cover" the material, I want them to uncover their own understanding, and to think critically about the content.

That’s a pretty good start. But then comes the “but.” There’s always a “but” in education in which the pundit reverses what he just said and lets slip his real opinion.

My bias, however, is that too often in schools we err too much on the side of content.

The tell. Fisch is confusing what he thinks he’s teaching with what his students are actually learning. I’ll tell you that what they’re not learning is too much content.

Fisch is also confused as to what a skill is. Skills are mostly procedural knowledge, i.e., more content relating to the performance of a series of actions. Decoding text is a skill. Solving a quadratic equation is a skill. Balancing a chemical equation is a skill. Critically reading a text passage is a skill.

What Fisch really means is that he wants his students to know both content and skills and be able to apply the right content and skills to novel situations. In short, he wants them to be able to be able to solve problems like an expert. A noble goal.

Let’s look at what we know about expert problem solving. In particular, let’s look at:

Nokes T J, Schunn C D and Chi M T H (2010), Problem Solving and Human Expertise. In the International Encyclopedia of Education. volume 5, pp. 265-272.

The first thing we’d like to know is what do we do when we solve problems. The article provides a helpful breakdown of the process.

Most theories of human problem solving consist of some
formulation of the following seven stages:

problem categorization,

construction of a mental representation of the problem,

search for the appropriate problem-solving operators (e.g., strategies or procedures),

retrieval and application of those operators to the problem,

evaluation of problem-solving progress and solution,

iterating stages 1–4 if not satisfied with progress/solution, and finally

storage of the solution (e.g., Newell and Simon, 1972).

These stages may not be strictly sequential, but may be
iterative.

And, for you visual learners. (That’s an education joke. Har har.)

Today, let’s focus on the most critical step – categorization of the problem.

Problem categorization is the most critical step because it impacts all subsequent steps, such as determining what knowledge is relevant to solving the problem and what strategies are needed.

For example, after a statistician categorizes a statistics problem as a permutations problem, she or he can proceed by retrieving and applying the appropriate formula to solve it.

So, what do we know about how experts categorize problems. Quite a bit actually.

Much research has shown that experts’ domain knowledge actually influences problem perception. When experts are presented a problem or task relevant to their domain of expertise, they see the problem in terms of prior meaningful patterns of information.

I highlighted the important bits.

Let me translate. In order to properly categorize a problem, you need to already know and have meaningfully thought about the relevant underlying content knowledge.

For example, novice chess players have about the same memory recall ability as expert chess players when recalling random placements of chess pieces. However, expert chess players could recall about four times as many chess piece positions from real chess games. The difference is that the experts were matching the patterns of the chess pieces from their prior knowledge of chess piece patterns; novices have no such prior knowledge.

These results are found across many different domains: architecture
(Akin, 1980), mathematics (Silver, 1979), and naturalistic decision-making (NDM) tasks such as a fireman determining the safety of a room in a burning building (Klein, 1998). Expert doctors are more capable of identifying the correct size and shape of abnormalities from the same lung x-rays than novices.

Experts perceive the problem very differently than novices when presented with the same stimulus.

This was most famously demonstrated in Chi et al.(1981) when it was found that expert physicists were more likely than novice physicists to categorize problems at a deep level of abstraction (or function), whereas novices are more likely to categorize problems based on the surface features.

Experts sorted them according to their underlying physics principles, such as Newton’s second law, whereas novices sorted them based on their surface features such as inclined planes or pulleys.

Similar results have been shown in mathematics

where novices categorized algebra problems on the basis of the problem content (e.g., river problems), whereas more experienced students categorized them based on the underlying equation or principle (Silver, 1979).

and other fields. Here’s the explanation given by the authors.

These results have typically been explained by the hypothesis that experts’ problem schemas are organized differently than novices. Schemas are hierarchical knowledge structures that include prototypical information about the type of problem, including declarative knowledge of objects, facts, strategies, and constraints, and may also include the procedural operators for solving the problem (Marshall, 1995). Expert schemas are hypothesized to include many principle or structural features of the problem type, whereas novice schemas include few structural features and shallower, surface features.

So when Fisch says he wants his students to “uncover their own understanding, and to think critically about the content,” the research suggests that his students won’t be able to do this very well until they know a lot of content knowledge, and know it well, or they won’t be very good at initially categorizing their problems well—the first step in finding the solution.

In contrast, Fisch, a professional educator, admits his bias is that schools already teach too much content. Where do you suppose he got a notion like that? Of course, if Fisch knew the first thing about knowledge and learning, he’d know that the problem isn’t that his students know too much content knowledge, but that they don’t know what they think they know well enough.

Fisch goes on to justify his bias against teaching content knowledge by claiming that we live in “exponential time” with too much knowledge to learn and that it’s already “easily accessible” via the internet. Why learn it, when you can Google it seems to be Fisch’s mantra. Unfortunately, human cognition doesn’t work that way. If it were the case, you’d be able to easily Google the following simple physics problem:

A ball is kicked from a point X m away from the crossbar, where X is a number between 38 and 39 that you select. The top of the crossbar is 3.05 m high. If the ball leaves the ground with a speed of 20.4 m/s at an angle of 52.2º to the horizontal? (The usual assumptions apply: uniform earth gravity, no drag or wind, the ball is a point)

a. By how much does the ball clear or fall short of clearing the crossbar?

b. What is the vertical velocity of the ball at the time it reaches the crossbar?

Bet you can’t unless you already possess quite a bit of physics and algebra knowledge and skills.

Replication, but no Verification

2010-10-11T10:11:00.001-04:00

Geoffrey Canada's Harlem Children's Zone is going to be replicated in 21 communities with the help of $200 million in federal dollars.

The philosophy of the HCZ is simple: it takes more than a good school to educate poor black kids. To this end the HCZ steps in loco parenti to offer a panoply of the kind of social services many people believe to have an effect on education outcomes,such as:

early childhood programs with parenting classes;
academic advisors and afterschool programs for students attending regular public schools;
a support system for former HCZ students who have enrolled in college;
a fitness program;
asthma management;
a nutrition program;
organizing tenant associations;
one-on-one counseling to families;
foster care prevention programs;
community centers;
an employment and technology center that teaches job-related skills to teens and adults.

In a nutshell, the HCZ is an implementation of the Broader Bolder Approach to Education. Basically, they believe that the link between poverty and student achievement is more than merely correlation; they believe it's causal and fundamental:

More than a half century of research has documented a powerful association between social and economic disadvantage and low student achievement. Weakening that association is the fundamental challenge facing America's education policymakers.

...

Evidence demonstrates, however, that achievement gaps based on socioeconomic status are present before children even begin formal schooling. Despite impressive academic gains registered by some schools serving disadvantaged students, there is no evidence that school improvement strategies by themselves can substantially, consistently, and sustainably close these gaps.

Bold words from a bold movement. Let's see if those words survive some scrutiny.

Roland Fryer first looked at the HCA and found:

Students attending the HCZ charter school outperformed students who lost the lottery to attend the HCZ charter. That's promising, at least for the school part of the reform.
HCZ students who only attended the charter school performed as well as the children who attended the charter school who received the full panoply of social services.

One could readily conclude from the Fryer study that the HCZ charter school does a good job in raising student achievement, but that the social component of the HCZ isn't having much effect.

Oddly, but not surprisingly, Fryer's conclusion was more ambiguous:

We conclude . . . that high-quality schools or high-quality schools coupled with community investments generate the achievement gains. Community investments alone cannot explain the results.

And a $200 million federal funding stream was born.

Brookings also looked at the HCZ data and found that the HCZ charter school performs about as well as the average charter school in New York City.

None of the charters that perform better than HCZ provide "or depend on community and social services to achieve their academic mission." Brookings concludes:

These findings create a large question mark for the theory of action of the HCZ. If other charter schools generate outcomes that are superior to those of the HCZ and those charter schools are not embedded in broad neighborhood improvement programs, why should we think that a neighborhood approach is superior to a schools-only approach?

There is no compelling evidence that investments in parenting classes, health services, nutritional programs, and community improvement in general have appreciable effects on student achievement in schools in the U.S. Indeed there is considerable evidence in addition to the results from the present study that questions the return on such investments for academic achievement. For example, the Moving to Opportunity study, a large scale randomized trial that compared the school outcomes of students from poor families who did or did not receive a voucher to move to a better neighborhood, found no impact of better neighborhoods on student academic achievement.[x] The Nurse-Family Partnership, a highly regarded program in which experienced nurses visit low-income expectant mothers during their first pregnancy and the first two years of their children’s lives to teach parenting and life skills, does not have an impact on children’s reading and mathematics test scores.[xi] Head Start, the federal early childhood program, differs from other preschool programs in its inclusion of health, nutrition, and family supports. Children from families enrolled in Head Start do no better academically in early elementary school than similar children whose parents enroll them in preschool programs that do not include these broader services.[xii] Even Start, a federal program that combines early childhood education with educational services for parents on the theory that better educated parents produce better educated kids, generates no measureable impact on the academic achievement of children.[xiii]

The HCZ, and programs like it, are based on the alluring but mistaken hypothesis that you can get middle-class academic performance from "poor" kids by giving them the things that middle-class families have that the Broader Bolder people think are the cause of middle-class student achievement -- things like what the HCZ is providing: health care, prenatal care, better nutrition, better parenting skills, community centers and the like. But these things are merely the status markers of the middle class. They are merely markers for the traits the middle class possess, like self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, cognitive ability that let you enter and stay in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn't increase student achievement because the markers don't produce (or cause) student achievement; the underlying traits do. If anything, subsidizing the the markers serves to undermine the traits.

We see this most clearly with respect to the generous benefits provided to the poor in our welfare state. we've alleviated many of the hardships associated with poverty, but the alleviation of those hardships isn't turning the poor into the middle-class and the poor still don't act like the middle class even though they are far more wealthy than the poor of 100 years ago.

The Poverty Meme Elephant in the Room

2010-10-05T12:44:00.001-04:00

The biggest distraction in education policy is the poverty meme (or, more accurately – the low socio-economic status meme). It goes something like this: Being poor prevents poor kids from succeeding in school; therefore reforming schools is largely a waste of time.

Here’s the queen of the poverty meme:

Then, there it was, the moment when Lauer raised the issue of poverty and the new Census Bureau figures showing that one in seven Americans live at or below the poverty line, defined as an annual income for a family of four of $22,000. That’s one in seven -- and that figure doesn’t include families of four with a $23,000 annual income.

I thought Lauer would make the obvious connection between poverty and student achievement. After all, the most consistent link in education and social science research is between family income and standardized test scores.

Today’s breed of school reformers, however, have ignored this link and adopted a “no excuses” policy, which essentially claims that good teachers can overcome anything, including medical, sociological and psychological problems that children who live in poverty bring into the classroom.

There is an oft-stated claim that three (or four, or five, depending on the source) “effective” teachers in a row can wipe out the effects of poverty. In fact, Education Secretary Arne Duncan made this claim today in an interview with Tom Brokaw as part of the network's Education Nation Summit.
There is no valid research to show this…
So the most important issue in school reform was ignored again…
That their discussion ignored the elephant in the room tells you everything you need to know about what is missing from today’s school “reform” efforts and why they are doomed to fail.

She even cites the King, David Berliner, who has teased out the most important poverty-induced physical, sociological and psychological problems that poor children bring to school and which doom all education reform to failure.

These are six out-of-school factors Berliner has identified that are common among the poor and that affect how children learn, but that reformers effectively say can be overcome without attacking them directly: (1) low birth weight and nongenetic prenatal influences; (2) inadequate medical, dental and vision care, often a result of inadequate or no medical insurance; (3) food insecurity; (4) environmental pollutants; (5) family relations and family stress; and (6) neighborhood characteristics.

The conclusion. Fix poverty and you’ll fix education. Or will you?

Let’s test the hypothesis by looking at how family income and parental education (the main components of socioeconomic status) are “linked” to student educational performance.

Let’s compare how the children of over-educated plutocrats

compared to the children of poverty-stricken, oppressed wage-slaves.

But, before we look at the data, let’s test your knowledge of poverty’s pernicious effects on children.

Which kids do you think had better prenatal care?
Which kids do you think had better medical, dental and vision care?
Which kids do you think were more likely to have medical insurance?
Which kids do you think had more food insecurity?
Which kids do you think grew up around more environmental pollutants?
Which kids do you think had more family stress and worse family relations?
Which kids do you think grew up in better neighborhoods?

Now see if you can predict which kids did better on the SATs.

First, let’s look at how rich black families compare to poor Asian families

Poor Asian children from families making between $10k and $20k performed better than rich privileged black children from families making at least $70k.

Now, let’s look at parental education.

Asian children with parents having only a high school diploma performed better than black children with parents having graduate degrees.

If poverty is such a brutal predictor of academic success, why do the children of educated,privileged blacks and Hispanics perform worse than poor, uneducated whites and Asians?

Can’t be white racism, Asians disprove that hypothesis.

And bear in mind, this data (which holds for almost all measures of student achievement) is no worse than the data the poverty elephants rely on for their poverty hypothesis.

Run this by your favorite poverty edu-pundit. You’ll hear lots of excuses. None will be coherent.

And, that’s why its pointless to debate these people on matters of education policy.

HuffPost Education: Condemned to Repeat History One Blog Post at a Time

2010-10-05T10:24:00.004-04:00

There’s a new education site in town.

HuffPost Education is designed to be a hub for education news and trends -- and will be home to a spirited, ongoing conversation about what's gone wrong with America's schools, and what needs to be done to fix them. We'll have topical takes from an eclectic mix of stakeholders in the education debate. Among those already lined up to weigh in: Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Davis Guggenheim, Bill and Melinda Gates, John Legend, New York City School Chancellor Joel Klein, Newark Mayor Cory Booker, and Geoffrey Canada, whose inspiring work at the Harlem Children Zone is featured in Waiting for "Superman".

Finally. A one-stop outlet for every dopey opinion on education. In the immortal words of Flounder: This is going to be great.
Arianna’s inaugural letter sets the tone: wall-to-wall nitwittery.

Education has always been the great equalizer in America. The path to success. The springboard to the middle class -- and beyond.

No it hasn’t. Up until the ‘50s, most students exited the education system after a few years and found gainful employment. That was the springboard to the middle-class.

It was a promise we made to our people. A birthright we bestowed on each generation: the chance to learn, to improve their minds, and, as a result, their lives.

An unfulfilled promise. One meme you are sure to read over and over at HuffPo Education is how poverty and minority status prevent kids from learning. Nothing wrong with the schools, the problem lies within in the kids. This provides a nice segue to the next meme.

But something has gone terribly wrong with our education system, and this failure has profound consequences for our nation's future -- both at home and as we look to compete with the rest of the world in the global economy.

To claim that something has gone terribly wrong implies that something was right at some point—that there was some golden era of education. Let’s play a game. Spot when things went “terribly wrong” in education based on reading scores in the past 40 years (and covering 50 years of education).

Don’t worry about raising your hand; just shout it out.

That’s right. There was never a golden era in education.

The only thing that has gone terribly wrong in education was for taxpayers.

Back to Arianna.

Decade after decade, as predictably as a school bell, every election season candidates promise to transform our schools -- and, just as predictably, they fail to do so. And this failure cuts across party lines. Instead of fundamental reform, we get grandstanding and broken promises and reform in name only.

Perhaps it’s time to take control back from the politicians. It’s not like they were always in control of education.

As a nation, we've slowly grown accustomed to our educational system's persistent failures, content to point out the occasional jewel spotted amid the dung: a marvelous charter school here, a high-performing inner-city academy there. We've allowed that old Washington motto to carry the day: "If it's broke, don't fix it."

What? I dare anyone to jibe this paragraph with the last. How can we have slowly grown accustom to persistent failure when every election season politicians feel compelled to promise to transform our schools?
It’s reform after dopey reform. It’s not that improvement isn’t needed; it’s that the reformers have been educationally naïve. And what does that say about the status quo lovers?

And when it comes to saving our children -- and our future -- there is not a moment to waste. Our nation's education crisis demands "the fierce urgency of now."
That urgency, and the opportunity presented by America's Education Moment, are what animate HuffPost Education.

Wait a second. Isn’t this how we go in the mess in the first place. Isn’t this how the Progressives sold government-run education to us 100 years? No proven ideas; just the urgency of now. Right out of the fascist’s playbook. And, look where that got us.

As philosopher George Santayana put it:

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Sadly, it takes a good education to know such things.

The Tale of Blockbuster: An Important Lesson for Education

2010-10-03T10:19:00.001-04:00

(Update: Revised post to fix an unconscionable number of grammar mistakes.)

Blockbuster video declared bankruptcy earlier this month. It didn't come as a surprise to anyone.

Back in the 80's Blockbuster emerged as the dominant player in the new videotape rental market. Blockbuster successfully drove much of the independent rental shops out of business despite the fact that the independent shops held a big advantage -- they rented porn. But, Blockbuster had more capital and were able to stock more recent releases, which were in high demand by most consumers. By 1994 Blockbuster was worth $8.4 billion and blockbuster brick and mortar stores dotted the landscape. Blockbuster had achieved monopoly power in their industry.

The problem with having monopoly power is that companies often begin acting like a monopolists,begin rent seeking, and offering the product they want to sell as opposed to the product the customer wants to buy. Blockbuster fell right into this trap by, among other things, adopting strict and onerous late fees policies, skewing their movie selecting to new releases, and drastically limiting the available selection of older movies (the long tail). They also became content in their position of dominance and sluggish in adopting new technology, such as switching over to dvds and taking advantage of the Internet.

Our public schools are stuck in a Blockbuster world. Public schools exist to serve themselves, not their customers -- the students, parents, and the public. I have profoundly different views than some edu-pundits, but the one thing we tend to agree on is that the students, parents, and the the public are not being well served by the public schools, though we disagree on the means and ends of the needed improvement. Almost no one believes that public schools are using technology effectively, for example.

Blockbuster had settled into a mode of business that was good for Blockbuster and not so good for consumers. Public Schools have done the same. The only real difference is that public schools are immune to market forces and can only be dislodged from their heavily entrenched position via political forces. Good luck with that.

Blockbuster, in contrast, was not so insulated from market forces. It didn't take long for other providers to enter the market and begin providing the products and services consumers wanted. Look at what happened.

Netflix and other providers ate Blockbuster's lunch in less than ten years. Netflix won for the simple reason that they offered a better service. No late fees. No trudging out to the local store with it's limited selection to return movies. No limited time period for watching the movie you just rented.

That must have been incredibly disruptive to Blockbuster's "stakeholders." But, did you read any tearful op-eds about how the institution of Blockbuster must be saved to protect the public good of readily available video rentals? Either did I.

Loser: Blockbuster

Winner(s): Consumers and Netflix (as long as they stay ahead of the competition)

Today, Blockbuster is a husk of its former self while Netflix thrives. And, Netflix can't rest on it's laurels because it is already attracting fierce competition.

Winner (again): Consumers.

Do you think this drastic change (which benefited consumers greatly) would have occurred if a) the government ran Blockbuster or b) Blockbuster was able to get regulations passed granting a monopoly to itself (think phone company) or otherwise limiting competition?

Today’s Challenge

2010-10-01T11:10:00.001-04:00

Today’s challenge is for all you standards-lovin’ folks who think that standards are capable of effecting an improvement in instruction.

Pennsylvania recently adopted the Common Core Standards.

Now take a look at Pennsylvania’s Early Learning Standards.

I defy anyone to:

1. read these standards without throwing up a little in their mouth, and

2. point why 95% of these standards can’t be retained without change when they are harmonized with the Common Core standards.

(And for the love of God, if you think that Universal Preschool is the educational panacea we’ve all been waiting for, please do not look at the recently revised Pre-K standards.)

Added Bonus: Here goes the helpful curriculum alignment guide for educators wishing to keep using their favorite curriculum. Now you can say “Yeah, our curriculum is aligned with the Common core standards.”

Added Extra Bonus: Pennsylvania’s standards are already infecting private schools. Pennsylvania’s accreditation organization, Keystone Stars, requires the use of the Pennsylvania standards for private schools, pre-schools, and day care centers desiring to be accredited.

Note to JPG Blog: Don’t uncork the champagne yet. Charter schools and other free market reforms don’t work all that well in a toxic regulatory environment. In fact, this one of the best ways to discredit such reforms. See the recent financial crisis for ample evidence for this phenomenon.

Take a Little Ownership Will Ya

2010-10-01T08:40:00.001-04:00

Jonah Goldberg asks a good question my well-meaning slightly-left-of-center and far-left-of center edu-pundits/edu-reformers friends never seem to ask themselves:

And yet when you listen to these endless seminars and interviews on NBC and its various platforms, I never seem to hear Matt Lauer or David Gregory ask “Isn’t the education crisis a failure of liberalism?” After all, liberals insist all social problems can be reduced to root causes. Well, they’ve been in charge of the roots for generations and look at the mess they’ve made. Look at it.

My only quibble is that I think that lefties are calling themselves progressives again after tarnishing the liberalism brand-name. All the more appropriate anyway since the progressives got us in this mess in the first place. They might as well be taking the blame today.

Instead of recognizing that they we have a stinky turd on our hands and scooping it up; they keep trying to polish it-up.

I’m still waiting for someone to present a coherent defense for keeping the present system, rather than blowing it up. It’s like removing a Band-Aid; sometimes it’s best just to rip it off and deal with the short-term pain.

(H/T: JPG Blog)

Today's Question

2010-09-28T10:45:00.000-04:00

Today's question is for all you National Standards folks.

Mississippi, despite being the poorest state in the U.S., is nearly as affluent as Finland. Why is Finland capable of setting its own educational standards while Mississipi requires guidance from the Feds?

Waiting for Petrelli's Kids

2010-09-28T09:54:00.002-04:00

Fordham's Mike Petrelli wants all you affluent people to send your kids to inner city public schools to improve them "overnight."

More recent, and more sophisticated, “peer effects” research (by the likes of Carolyn Hoxby and Eric Hanushek) finds much the same. Rick Kahlenberg has been shouting from the rooftops that poor kids do better in “middle class” schools–which is why, in Gerald Grant’s words, there are no bad schools in Raleigh

I've heard of Spike Lee's "Magical Negro," but I've never heard of Petrelli's "Magical Rich Kid."

Now Hoxby's paper is under lock and key (Five dollars for an electronic download? Really?) and Kahlenberg and and Grant are merely spouting opinion. But Hanushek's paper is readily available. Here's the conclusion:

On average the black share of school enrollment in Texas is almost 30 percentage points higher for black students than for white students. Elimination of this gap would reduce the proportion black from roughly 0.39 to 0.16 for black students and raise the proportion black from 0.09 to 0.16 for whites. Using the coefﬁcient for blacks of 0.20 and the coefﬁcient for whites of 0.10, such a redistribution of students would reduce the racial achievement gap by 0.050 standard deviations in a single year. The cumulative effect of such a reduction for grades 5–7 (the sample period) depends upon the rate at which knowledge depreciates over time. If the rate of depreciation were equal to one minus the coefﬁcient on lagged achievement (roughly 0.4 for blacks and whites), the 3-year cumulative effect of racial composition equalization would reduce the race achievement gap by roughly 14%, moving it from 0.70 to 0.60 standard deviations.

These estimates represent extremes in the possible changes in racial compositions because they would require signiﬁcant changes in residences across districts and regions for blacks. More modest, and perhaps more achievable, changes still imply substantial closing in the test score gap.

So, at best we might possibly at the extreme see an 0.10 standard deviation increase in black student performance by sending your kid to an inner city public school.

Notwithstanding Hanushek's assertions to the contrary, a 0.10 standard deviation increase is student performance falls far short of an educationally significant result (0.25 standard deviation). Moreover, this kind of result, meager though it is, is only obtainable in the fantasy world of a data-mined economics study. In the real world, we're not going to see anywhere near such a large effect. Typically, educationally insignificant effect sizes don't show up at all in the real world. That's why we have the concept of educationally significant.

About the only thing you can be sure of by enrolling your pampered suburbanite children in an inner city school is that they will quickly learn how to catch a beating.

(Note: Even Checker laughs at this one.)

Obama: Old Text Books Are the Problem

2010-09-27T15:06:00.000-04:00

Really? Did he really just say that?

"Obviously, in some schools money plays a big factor ... ," Obama said, pointing out that schools in the poorest areas often don't have up-to-date textbooks.

I guess so.

I taught my kids how to read with a 20 year old classroom textbook. They didn't seem to notice the difference. I did this because I knew the 20 year old textbook worked. I didn't have the same confidence in their school's much newer textbook. Apparently, their school thought the same; they just switched to a different book. I don't like gambling with my child's future. Schools don't seem to mind so much whose future they're gambling with. That's because they aren't gambling with their own futures.

My son is using a 30 year old textbook to learn algebra. He's teaching himself. He's in fifth grade. The book was intended for high school students. He can do it because he learned elementary math well. And, that's all you need to understand algebra.

How about history? The most recent history we covered in school was decades old.

Science? Lots has changed in science and our understanding thereof. But not much of that new stuff is taught in school either.

A Fool and His Money ...

2010-09-27T14:09:00.005-04:00

Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, just unfriended $100 million by giving it away to the Newark School District ($23,000 per pupil) with no strings attached.

Isn't it great the way capitalism has a way of voluntarily divesting rich idiots from their money?

Free advice to wealthy edu-philantropists: Your educational consultants know as much about education as you do: Almost nothing. Therefore, you can't trust the "means" they are advocating. Have they ever run a successful school or school district getting successful results with the demographic group you are targeting? I didn't think so. So, if you can't trust the "means," you can only trust the "ends" - does the reform actually work? Where does this leave you? With a contest of course. take your $100 million, find a cooperating city, and hold a contest. A tenth of the prize goes to the first group that can achieve the results you desire. The remaining 90% is awarded when the reform can be successfully scaled. Now go cruise around on your yacht.

Why do we still talk about the Black-White gap in education?

2010-09-27T13:02:00.000-04:00

When it's pretty clear we should be more concerned with the Black-Asian gap. (And, the Hispanic-Asian gap , the Native American - Asian gap, and, what the hell, the white-Asian gap for that matter)

For one thing it would allow us to look at why Asians succeed better than all other groups.

It would also get us past the silly discrimination/oppression excuse when we use whites as the comparison group. Last I checked Asians suffered discrimination and yet that didn't seem to hold them back.

Lastly, if you're going to talk about gaps between groups, do it the right way -- express the gap in standard deviations not percentage difference. Using standard deviations eliminates much of the mischief caused when percentile gaps are used to compared (more or less) normally distributed groups.

And, if you don't understand what I wrote in that last paragraph you don't have an informed opinion yet on education policy.

Obama: D.C. schools don't measure up to Sidwell Friends

2010-09-27T12:24:00.000-04:00

The president, in a television appearance Monday morning on NBC's "Today" show, was asked by a woman from an audience whether a public school in his home city could measure up to the standards of his children's private school.

"I'll be blunt with you: The answer is no right now," the president replied. Obama said the D.C. schools are "struggling." There are "terrific individual schools" in the city, he said, and because he is president he could "probably maneuver" to get his daughters into one of them.

Nonsense, I say.

Take all the Sidwell Friends students and put them into a random DC public school. Then take all the students from that DC public school and put them in Sidwell Friends.

(Don't forget the control group.)

Then cook for whatever period of time you think is needed for there to be observable results.

The result shouldn't be surprising to anyone who follows education.

The Sidwell Friends educated students will still perform as miserably as they did in their DC public school. The Sidwell teachers aren't trained to and don't know how to educate the difficult-to-educate students found in the typical DC school. Also, the curriculum at Sidwell Friends, is most certainly not accessible to the typical DC student. Never has been.

On the other hand, the DC public school educated Sidwell students will perform about the same as they did back at Sidwell. The quality of the teachers and the curriculum won't matter much. It doesn't take a fabulous super-teacher to educate the kind of kids who go to Sidwell. And, as far as the curriculum goes, what's being peddled at Sidwell is only superficially different (from an instructional basis at least) than the curriculum used in every other school.

Tuition-wise the DC public schools have about $26,000 per pupil to squander far more than it takes to teach students how to read, write, do basic math, and learn some content. Sidwell is only about 20% higher and no one believes that money is needed to educate the students at Sidwell. Everyone knows that tuition is high at Sidwell in order to keep out the kind of kids that typically go to the DC Public schools.

As far as the "terrific individual schools" in the city line goes, these are mostly magnet schools, i.e., schools that use the admissions process also keep out the the kind of kids that typically go to the DC Public schools. Might as well call them Sidwell-lite schools.

The Problem with Most Edu-Commentary

2010-09-19T15:17:00.001-04:00

In a simple picture ...

Still Overselling Play

2010-09-17T10:41:00.000-04:00

I understand the allure of using play and games as a means of making learning more enjoyable for children.

I get it. I do.

These breathless stories never fail to flush out the educationally naive. As if wishful thinking alone will improve the instructional value of children's play time activities.

This kind of child-centered learning has been tried for a very long time and the improved learning has yet to materialize. The technology is certainly there. But no one seems to understand instruction well enough to use all that technology productively.

Even I find this surprising.

And yet a thirty year old critique of child-centered education techniques still remains valid today.

[C]hild-centered approaches have evolved sophisticated ways of managing informal educational activities but they have remained at a primitive level in the design of means to achieve learning objectives.

...

Child-centered approaches rely almost exclusively on a form of instruction that instructionally-oriented approaches use only when nothing better can be found.

...

This primitive form of instruction may be called relevant activity. Relevant activity is what teachers must resort to when there is no available way to teach children how to do something, no set of learning activities that clearly converge on an objective. This is the case, for instance, with reading comprehension. Although there are some promising beginnings, there is as yet no adequate "how-to-do-it" scheme for reading comprehension. Accordingly, the best that can be done is to engage students in activities relevant to reading comprehension-for instance, reading selections and answering questions about the selections. Such activities are relevant in that they entail reading comprehension, but they cannot be said to teach reading comprehension.

...

The contrast of sophistication in management and naiveté in instruction is visible in any well-run open classroom. The behavior that meets the eye is instantly appealing-children quietly absorbed in planning, studying, experimenting, making things-and one has to marvel at the skill and planning that have achieved such a blend of freedom and order. But look at the learning activities themselves and one sees a hodge-podge of the promising and the pointless, of the excessively repetitious and the excessively varied, of tasks that require more thinking than the children are capable of and tasks that have been cleverly designed to require no mental effort at all (like exercise sheets in which all the problems on the page have the same answer). The scatteredness is often appalling. There is a little bit of phonics here and a little bit of phonics there, but never a sufficiently coherent sequence to enable a kid to learn bow to use this valuable tool. Materials have been chosen for sensorial appeal or suitability to the system of management. There is a predilection for cute ideas. The conceptual analysis of learning problems tends to be vague and irrelevant, big on name-dropping and low on incisiveness.

...

Unless thinkers and experimenters committed to child-centered education become more sophisticated about instruction and start devoting more attention to designing learning activities that actually converge on objectives, they are in danger of becoming completely discredited. That would be too bad. Child-centered educators have evolved a style of school life that has much in its favor. Until they develop an effective pedagogy to go with it, however, it does not appear to be an acceptable way of teaching disadvantaged children.

The tools at educators' disposal have improved dramatically. And yet educators don't seem to know how to use these tools to improve instruction. It must be the pedagogy, the instructional know-how, that is lacking. I can't think of any thing else.

Teaching beginning skills to children is often a mindless and dull endeavor. Effective practice requires lots of repetition. And, repetition is boring (at least for the adults teaching the skills). You know what are good at mind-numbing repetitive tasks? Computers. It doesn't take a genius to see the potential.

The Continuing Irony of Alfie Kohn

2010-09-10T17:14:00.001-04:00

In a long post criticizing value-added teacher evaluation, Alfie Kohn unwittingly hits us with this ironic gem.

I don't expect the founder of a computer empire like Bill Gates, or a lawyer like Joel Klein, or a newspaper editor to understand the art of helping children to understand ideas, or of constructing tasks to assess that process. I just expect them to have the humility, the simple decency, not to impose their ignorance on the rest of us with the force of law.

The irony of this statement is so dense it threatens to collapse upon itself into a sort-of black hole of irony.

I'm guessing Alfie favors his own ignorance based reforms instead of the current crop of ignorance based reforms. But since the underlying purpose of government-run public education is to impose the will (or ignorance if you will) of those in charge politically, by definition politicians, on the rest of us with the force of law, only those politicians in charge get to pick the brand of ignorance being imposed. Those not in charge get to lament their fate and beg for humility and forbearance from those in charge.

It's the Progressive way of running things. And, Alfie is a Progressive. But, so is the current Administration. Which should give you an idea of how long Alfie's brand of progressive education will be out of favor.

And, by the way, Alfie is right about the current crop of reforms being no good. He just gets the reasons why (mostly) wrong.

The Half Billion Dollar Educational Buggy Whip

2010-08-23T15:50:00.000-04:00

Behold.

File this one under misallocation of precious resources.

Or alternatively, under yet another reason why government should not run schools.

There's never a shortage of political reasons to justify building Taj Mahals like this. But is there a valid educational reason? So consider what trumped what in this case.

Stay Classy Now

2010-08-23T14:40:00.000-04:00

Edublogger, Jim Horn, leaves the following comment on this three year old post:

Go fuck yourself.

A cogent and persuasive argument indeed.

Apparently Horn didn't like his mention in the last paragraph of the post:

P.S. Be sure not to miss the obsequious edu-blogger, Jim Horn, sucking up at the foot of the hungry master in the comments. "Thank you for your eloquent commitment to what's right for so many years ... A trusted lieutenant, should you need one. Jim Horn" What a jackass.

I'm guessing it was the jackass line at the end.

The Other Problem with Standards

2010-05-25T08:03:00.003-04:00

"We took our licks, we got outvoted," [Republican Texas Board of Education member David Bradley] said of the last time the [Texas] standards were debated and approved in 1999. ... "Now it's 10-5 in the other direction. ... We're an elected body, this is a political process. Outside that, go find yourself a benevolent dictator."

I love the benevolent dictator part.

Standards, especially national ones, are a political beast. They will be politicized. And, about half the time your political party will be out of power. Politics are a zero-sum game. Deal with it.

Induction is not Constructivism

2010-05-24T08:12:00.002-04:00

(Update: cleaned up a bunch of typos and reworded the post to clarify.)

Brian Rude asks a good question,

The induction model certainly makes some sense. But isn't it another name for constructivism?

I see how Brian got confused due to my oversimplified model, which conflates inductive reasoning with the inductive-like process of the learning metaphor I proposed. And, since constructivism relies heavily on inductive reasoning, Brian's conclusion is a fair take-away.

So, let me clarify. Take a look at this less over-simplified schematic.

The diagram shows how a learner converts an observation of some stimulus into a thought/memory. i.e., how the learner learns. I've re-labeled the induction process I was explaining in the previous post to a a sub-induction process and added on three primary super-processes of learning: direct memory, deductive reasoning, and inductive reasoning. (Bear in mind that this is merely a hypothetical conceptual model, what is actually happening in the brain is still largely unknown.)

The point I'm trying to get across in the model is that the observed stimulus ALWAYS gets transformed as it becomes knowledge. I could have used an alternate model and placed the sub-induction directly under the "direct memory" process and indicated that the "sub-inductive" process was subsumed in the "deductive" and "inductive" reasoning processes to get the same point across. Something like this.

I think the first diagram is conceptually clearer. The main take-away for either model is that there is no direct access into the brain.

The learning flow would go something like this: 1. learner observes stimulus, 2. learner processes stimulus via one of the super learning process, 3. learner then the sub-learning process, and 4. then the extracted "knowledge" goes into the learner's memory.

How the observation is made or how the stimulus is presented to the learner determines what super-process the learner will use. Let's look at some examples (now would be a good time to review these three posts on the nature of knowledge).

The teacher tells the learner the following fact (i.e., a verbal association): "The U.S. Constitution was written in Philadelphia." The learner learns this fact via direct memory (I couldn't think of a better name, sorry). However, the verbal statement does not merely get imprinted in the learner's memory verbatim (not that anybody seriously believes this in any event). The fact gets abstracted by the sub-induction process into the learners existing knowledge, something like this:

The knowledge is the connection.

This knowledge could have been learned other ways as well. Let's say the learner has been exposed to the following two facts: that "the U.S. Constitution was written at the constitutional convention" and that "the constitutional convention was held in Philadelphia." From these two facts, the learner can use deductive reasoning to deduce that "The U.S. Constitution was written in Philadelphia."

How about another one: learning a rule relationship. Here's the rule: "the steeper the inclined plane, the less time it takes the ball to roll down the inclined plane." This rule can be learned deductively or inductively.

In the deductive method, the teacher might start off with: “The question is, Is there a connection between how steep an inclined plane is and how long it takes a ball to roll down it?”

The teacher then tells the student the rule-relationship (the steeper the inclined plane, the less time it takes the ball to roll down the inclined plane) and then show examples using inclined planes of different angles. These examples would confirm the rule. The knowledge of the rule is processed by the learner through the deductive reasoning process and then stored via the sub-induction process. (Sorry, no fancy connection map this time.)

In the inductive method, the teacher has the learner do an experiment by rolling balls down inclined planes of different angles, measuring how long it takes each ball to roll down, and then has the learner draw a conclusion.

This way requires more skills. (In the deductive method, the learner merely compares examples with the rule. “Yup, the ball takes less time when the angle is steeper.”) For example, the learner has to change the angles, measure the times, write the measurements, compare and contrast the instances, and figure out the connection. This means the teacher would have to teach these pre-skills before learners do the experiment.

The knowledge of the rule is processed by the learner through the inductive reasoning process and then stored via the sub-induction process. However, the learner takeaway is the same, that is, the connection mapping in the learner's memory is the same.

Which finally brings us 'round to constructivism.

Stripping away all the pedagogical blather, constructivism is merely a teaching pedagogy that favors learning through inductive reasoning as the preferred pathway. Constructivists favor learning by experience or by doing. This means that the learner will be observing stimuli (examples and non-examples of something) and generating general ideas revealed by the examples and non-examples. Hey, that sounds suspiciously like inductive reasoning.

Here's what I wrote about the inductive reasoning process that learners go through when they observe a stimulus during the learning process.

Knowledge is not directly transferred into a learner, but rather knowledge is acquired indirectly through an inductive process. Specifically, knowlege is typically acquired through an "inductive reasoning" process.

That is, the learner observes stimuli (examples and non-examples); (2) performs a series of logical operations on what it observes; and (3) arrives at (induces, figures out, discovers, “gets”) a general idea revealed by the examples and nonexamples.

In contrast, direct instruction relies more heavily on deductive reasoning pathway for teaching certain forms of knowledge, such as rule relationships. Using deductive reasoning, the learner goes from general (rule) to specific (examples). In the deductive method the teacher teaches the rule statement first. Then examples and nonexamples are then presented. Then the teacher tests all examples and nonexamples to see if the learner has learned the rule.

Constructivism can be faulted for many things, but its reliance on the inductive reasoning pathway of learning is not one of them. That is a perfectly valid pathway which proponents of direct instruction use (such as for teaching sensory/basic concepts). Constructivism's faults lie elsewhere -- over-reliance on the induction method of teaching and generally a failure to attend to the important minutiae of teaching for determining whether the learner has learned the intended knowledge and is retaining it. The latter is a self-imposed error based on ideology because constructivism makes it more difficult to get the minutiae right.

Common Core Standards Released

2010-05-19T17:12:00.001-04:00

Here they go. Ta Da.

I remain unimpressed. Frankly, I don't see how these standards are going to be the impetus to improve any aspect of education.

As a lawyer I occasionally draft contracts and, let me tell you, you have to use much more precise language than this to actually get someone to reliably do what you want (and are paying) them to do.

I'd bet that all fifty states could adopt these standards, not change a single thing they are doing, and claim compliance.

Some of these standards are incredibly silly.

Take for example this one under print concepts for kindergarten (p. 16)

Demonstrate understanding of the organization and basic features of print. ... Follow words from left to right, top to bottom, and page-by-page.

This looked familiar to me and sure enough Minnesota had (has) a similar standard.

Follow print (words and text) from left to right and top to bottom.

Bob Dixon lampooned Minnesota's standard as being ridiculous and I'm thinking the same criticism applies to the Core standard.

Students should certainly do this when learning to read. My question is this: Before Minnesota developed this standard, was anyone there not teaching kids to read English from left to right and top to bottom? Apparently. The people who sat on that committee and collectively decided to write this out as a standard for the children of Minnesota—did they feel literate and scholarly and innovative when the final vote was tallied? I hope this standard makes a significant contribution toward correcting the problem with the way people used to teach reading in Minnesota.

This sentiment applies to pretty much all of the Core standards, even the less ridiculous ones.

In fact Dixon's criticism of the Standards movement is one of the best I've seen and applies to Core's standards.

These standards are harmful because they are, for the most part, meaningless verbal detritus on the one hand, but textbook publishers live and die off them, on the other. Even with respect to clearly incomprehensible standards, publishers have to come up with something to stick in a textbook that helps create the illusion that the textbook is aligned with some set of standards. I am empathetic with the publishers … to a point. The standards are a major incentive for the publishers to produce crap. Over the years, I’ve worked with several major publishers, and none of them has aspired to produce crap. They do it, though, because the market demands that they do it.

And standards and state tests, taken together, are very harmful. First, because the standards are so bad, it is nearly impossible to assess them. In short, the standards and the state tests don’t align, except in the most meaningless and specious ways. But here is the biggest problem of them all, and the reason the tests and standards are so damaging. IF the standards were really “good” according to some criteria that would make sense to the average educated person on the street, and if they were precise enough to be aligned with assessment tools that were actually technically sound, widespread failure would continue, unabated. Figure 1 shows Doug Carnine’s illustration of the problem.

The black box in the middle is the magic by which teachers start out with goals for students and end up with students performing brilliantly on tests that are valid and reliable. The black box is the instruction, and the states and just about everyone else are so clueless about instruction that they give it very little attention. With the best standards and the best assessments, the system is doomed to failure if, at the center of it all, we don’t have the best instruction. As it stands now, the standards are, for the most part, ridiculous, and few if any of the state assessments have been certified as valid and reliable.

So using the inductive learning model to judge the effectiveness of Standards reform, let's evaluate standards as an education reform.

Standards aren't going to affect teacher or student effectiveness. The theory is that standards will improve curriculum effects. But, I don't see that happening. Standards, like the Core standards, that are easily subvertible will be subverted and educators will continue to do what they are presently doing -- because that's what they want to do. And if NCLB 1.0 taught us anything, its that standardized assessments, even the high stakes variety, are simply not capable of improving student outcomes. At best, improved standards and perfect assessments, might have a very indirect effect on curriculum and instruction. Just because you write the perfect standard does not mean that educators will be able to teach it to the kids who they are currently unable to teach it to today without the standards.

Induction/Inferential Model of Learning

2010-05-19T11:31:00.000-04:00

I've revised Downes' Induction Model of Learning schematic to incorporate my clarifications.

Specifically, I added the labeling for Teacher Effects (the top coil), Student Effects (the bottom coil), and Curriculum/Presentation Effects (the distance between the coils).

In the real world electronic circuit, current flowing through the top coil creates a magnetic field. The magnetic field affects the bottom coil (depending upon the distance between the coils and the strength of the coils) which induces a current in the bottom circuit.

The model is not without its flaws; however, I think it is useful for conveying the simple notion that knowledge is not simply pumped directly into the student's head by the teacher. Instead, the student observes the stimulus/data being presented by the teacher and induces "knowledge." Hopefully, that "knowledge" is the general idea revealed by the example(s) presented by the teacher. Often it is not.

Anyway, the important take-away revealed by this model is that teacher effects, student effects, and curriculum/presentation effects are all interrelated and affect what the student learns, doesn't learn, or imperfectly learns.

A strong teacher and an average curriculum might only be able to induce the intended knowledge in a strong student. Improving the curriculum will likely reach weaker students. Improving the student, say by fixing his tooth ache which was causing a distraction, might also improve what the student learns.

Similarly, a strong teacher and a strong student might be hampered with a very weak curriculum.

Let me make three general statements regarding teacher effects, student effects, and curriculum/presentation effects based on my observations of our education system.

Teacher Effects: We don't really know what makes a good teacher better than a bad teacher and we certainly cannot train a random teacher to be a good teacher outside the parameters of a specific curriculum. teacher unions and tenure resist changes from the status quo.

Student Effects: Have a hereditary/genetic and an environmental component, each contributing about 50%. it is politically incorrect to even discuss the hereditary/genetic component so everyone pretends that there is only an environmental component. Then everyone is surprised when environmental interventions directed to the student fail to achieve the expected benefits.

Curriculum/Presentation Effects: To a naive observer there appear to be very many different curricula out there. In actuality, most curricula are only superficially different and have little to no effect on what a student learns. The few commercially-available curricula that have large effects are generally disfavored by educators for a variety of reasons (usually unrelated to student learning)

What do you think/

Next post will discuss education reforms and how they are explainable with the above model and why it is evident that most do not stand a chance of improving student outcomes

Why It's So Difficult to Improve Educational Outcomes

2010-05-18T09:18:00.000-04:00

To understand the problems of K-12 education, that is getting students to learn what we think is important for them to learn, and the great historical difficulty we've had improving education outcomes, you need to look at ground zero of the learning process.

I like Stephen Downes' metaphorical induction model of knowledge of learning (with my clarifications). If you haven't already, go read it and don't come back until you understand it. I'll reproduce the diagram below.

There are three important factors in this model.

The top inductor representing teacher (or resource) effects. Following the electronics metaphor, a teacher (or resource, such as a book) with more windings is more capable of transferring data to the student than a teacher with less windings. The inductor windings represent teacher effectiveness.
The bottom inductor which represents student effects. A student with more windings will be more capable of inducing a transfer of data from the teacher/resource than a student with less windings. The student windings represent cognitive ability and other student factors.
The distance between the two inductors represents the presentation of the data from the teacher/resource to the learner/student. I've termed the distance the "inductive gap." The teacher presentation represents what actually takes place in the classroom that effects learning. It is the curriculum, the classroom management, and pedagogy. A poor presentation makes learning more difficult by increasing the distance between the teacher and student inductors. A good presentation reduces the distance, making learning more likely.

The benefit of the above model is that not only does it capture most of the important variables, but it also illustrates that what the teacher intends to teach (the data) is not necessarily what the student has actually learned (knowledge). This is because it it is difficult for the teacher to ascertain what exactly the student has learned. Such feedback can only be ascertained indirectly with imperfect testing instruments. This feedback must also be properly interpreted by the teacher. (The drawback of the model is that it relies on the reader's knowledge of the operation of a rather esoteric electronics circuit.)

Complicating matters even further is that the model is different for each piece of data that the teacher wants transferred to (i.e., learned by) the student. Thousands of these transferences must take place during the K-12 cycle.

Moreover, the model ignores student retention effects. Just because the student has actually induced the intended knowledge from the teacher presentation does not mean that the knowledge will be retained by the student. The ravages of forgetfulness are brutal and must be contended with by the teacher. Often retention is ignore or, worse yet, derided by educators ("drill and kill").

As Stephen Downes puts it, what teachers are really doing is training a neural net in each student's brain. That training does not happen instantaneously. It happens over time and is imperfect. See Willingham's article on inflexible knowledge. This makes the teacher's interpretation of the learner's feedback even more difficult as the neural network is being trained.

To help understand how the model plays out in the real world and it's implications for instructional design and how the "inductive gaps" affect the learning process, I'm going to provide a lengthy quote from Zig Engelmann's upcoming book. In the passage Zig calls the inductive gaps "inferential gaps."

[We] have learned from extensive applications that nothing may be assumed to be taught to at-risk children unless it appears on at least three consecutive lessons...When we apply this formula to the first draft of the material, we presume that when the program is field-tested, our estimates will be confirmed. However, we remain perfectly aware that in some cases the practice estimates are wrong. They may vary in either direction—providing too much practice, or providing too little. More frequently the error is in the direction of too little practice.

An important issue that we must address in creating a sequence of activities is how large the inferential gaps are between one exercise type and the next type in the sequence…

… If we were to unintentionally design a program with enormous gaps for teaching reading, we might first teach letter names, teach the short sounds for the vowels, and then require learners to sound out regularly spelled words like run and hat. Obviously, the gap between the exercise types is large because students haven’t been taught the sounds for the consonants, or how to blend the sounds together to identify words.

Although some bright students may be able to formulate workable inferences about how to derive the sounds from the names of some consonants, most students will fail the instruction because of the large gap between what they know and what they are expected to do. Discovery learning assumes that students are able to fill large inferential gaps between what they know and what they are expected to learn. Proponents of structured instruction believe that only small sequence-related inferences are appropriate.

Note that there will always be inferential gaps between exercise types. The only issue is how large they are. This is an empirical issue. If we believe that students should be successful, we would design instruction so the inferential gaps are small enough for students to succeed. If students do not succeed, their failure suggests that the inferential gaps are too large, which means that the sequence should be redesigned to make the gaps smaller. Direct observation of how students respond to a sequence is necessary because that is often the only way these gaps are identified. Typically students are progressing through a sequence well and then encounter an exercise type that is too difficult for them. If the exercise seems clear and apparently provides adequate practice, the problem is not with this exercise type, but with the sequence of activities. In other words, student performance implies that there is a gap in the sequence that is too large for the students.

As suggested above, the size of reasonable gaps is not the same for all students. The children we have worked with have ranged from those who could not take even the smallest imaginable steps without considerable practice, to children who drew correct inferences that were far in advance of what they had been taught.

At the extreme low end was a pair of twins who had spent the first four years of their lives with virtually no human contact and who could identify some real objects, like a shoe, a ball, and a cup, but could not identify any two-dimensional representations. Even when the teacher prompted the relationship by holding a red ball next to a picture of a red ball, the children could not identify the object in the picture. After many trials, they could identify pictures of balls, shoes, and cups without the corresponding three-dimensional object next to it; however, these children had to practice identifying more than 10 illustrated objects before they could generalize and identify an illustrated object that had not been taught.

At the other extreme are the highly talented students who make a mockery out of the three-lesson rule. They learn names of new things in only a couple of trials and are able to take great leaps from what they know to remotely related inferences they are scheduled to learn much later.

If the designer assumes that every minor variation in what is to be taught requires explicit instruction, the instructional sequence may be many times more laborious than it needs to be for the average learner who goes through the program. On the other hand, if the designer makes elitist assumptions that characterize analyses of Dewey and Bruner, the inferential leaps required by the program are so large that they may be made by fewer than one fourth of the students. For example, a math program that presents a single example of each problem type assumes that students will formulate an algorithm for solving the problem presented that will generalize to the full set of related problems that are not taught. In fact, possibly only one fourth of the average students will solve the problems or benefit from the experience of struggling with them. The percentage of low performers making this leap is virtually zero percent.

The only way to determine whether the program is highly effective with the intended student population is to provide an empirical test of the sequence. This test will not only identify the missing inferences but will reveal both their character and size. In other words, they provide the designer with precise information about how to address the missing inference.

I'm going to highlight one observation from Zig's passage:

The children we have worked with have ranged from those who could not take even the smallest imaginable steps without considerable practice, to children who drew correct inferences that were far in advance of what they had been taught.

This is the one that does quite a bit of educational mischief. Educators draw all sorts of bad conclusions from the students who can draw "correct inferences that [are] far in advance of what they had been taught" and apply those conclusions to the students who cannot "take even the smallest imaginable steps without considerable practice."

But I don't want to get too ahead of myself just yet.

In my next post I'll discuss how the various ed reforms are doomed to failure since their real world effects often fail to address or have limited effect on the real educational variables as illustrated in the above model.

A Bridge Too Far

2010-05-14T07:53:00.001-04:00

Over at Bridging Differences, Deb Meiers writes:

That was an amazing and surprising find re. Milwaukee charters. I thought that at the very least they'd get the advantage of being in a more diverse (integrated) setting with more middle-class kids and that being chosen (even by lottery) would produce a kind of halo effect. Why it didn't is what should baffle the media. But it doesn't.

I comment:

Or perhaps, your implicit assumption that diverse (integrated) settings with more middle class kids confers an educational advantage which leads to improved student performance is invalid.

The assumption rests on shaky empirical support in the first place. So, one would think that this additional piece of potentially-negative evidence might lead an un-biased thinker to question her underlying assumptions. Why it doesn't baffles me.

PS: This might be one of the best examples of irony I've ever seen in an education blog.

PPS: It's also a good example of why we never make any progress in education. Policy thinkers become so wedded to their pet assumptions and will bend over backwards to discount contrary evidence. Classic Confirmation Bias.

Today's Cartoon

2010-05-13T08:00:00.001-04:00

Same as it ever was -- continued

2010-05-10T14:37:00.000-04:00

The Obama administration has posted "a series of documents outlining the research that supports the proposals in its blueprint for revising the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA)."

Here is the document for Career- and College-ready students analyzed in my last post.

Embarrassingly, the document doesn't appear to cite any actual research. More embarrassingly, what the document sets out as research clearly isn't research.

I wonder if these documents were submitted to the What Works Clearinghouse for review?

From the Department of Huh?

2010-05-10T11:56:00.001-04:00

Some cognitive dissonance from Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan.

The No Child law, passed in 2001 by bipartisan majorities, focused the nation’s attention on closing achievement gaps between minorities and whites, but it included many provisions that created what Education Secretary Arne Duncan on Friday called “perverse incentives.”

In an effort to meet the law’s requirements for passing grades, many states began dumbing down standards, and teachers began focusing on test preparation rather than on engaging class work.

“We’ve got to get accountability right this time,” Mr. Duncan told reporters Friday. “For the mass of schools, we want to get rid of prescriptive interventions. We’ll leave it up to them to figure out how to make progress.”

So, let me get this straight. Under NCLB 1.0. states were permitted to set their own standards and assessments. In other words, the Feds "[left] it up to[the states] to figure out how to make progress." And, many states chose to create "dumbed down standards" due to "perverse incentives."

Fair enough. This time DoE wants to pressure the states into adopting national standards. Clearly, the Feds with their long history of educational success know much better how to educate than the states.

But now when it comes to meeting those tough new federal standards, Arne wants to again "leave it up to [the states] to figure out how to make progress." Even though they weren't doing such a good job of making progress towards their own dumbed-down standards.

Reading First failed, not because it was too prescriptive, but because it wasn't prescriptive enough. States got to figure it out for themselves how to select/develop interventions as long as they made it appear to to be based on evidence.

The game for states, in case anyone hasn't figured it out yet, is to appear as though they are doing something important, pretend to care an awful lot for the children, appear to follow the scientific evidence, let the chips fall where they may, wait for someone to come up with a new politically correct narrative to explain why some external factor caused them to fail, and agitate for a kinder,gentlerNCLB 3.0

NCLB 2.0: Reading First but with even less oversight and compliance.

Now that's what I call smart regulation and failing to heed history's lessons.

The Blueprint for Failure

2010-05-10T09:50:00.000-04:00

The Obama Administration's plan to fix NCLB and American education is long on lofty rhetoric and short on humility and specifics.

The plans lays out five giggle inducing "key priorities"

Let's look at point one in today's post: College and Career Ready Students.

Every student should graduate from high school ready for college and a career. Every student should have meaningful opportunities to choose from upon graduation from high school. ... Four of every 10 new college students, including half of those at 2-year institutions, take remedial courses, and many employers comment on the inadequate preparation of high school graduates. And while states have developed assessments aligned with their standards, in many cases these assessments do not adequately measure student growth or the knowledge and skills that students need, nor do they provide timely, useful information to teachers. We must follow the lead of the nation's governors and challenge students with state-developed, college- and career-ready standards, and more accurately measure what they are learning with better assessments. We must reward the success of schools that are making significant progress, ask for dramatic change in the lowest-performing schools, and address persistent gaps in student academic achievement and graduation rates.

What we have here is a change in nomenclature for pulling the old bait-and-switch.

NCLB 1.0 calls for four levels of performance "advanced" (which it does nothing with), "proficient" (the student has learned what the state wants), "basic" (the studentent hasn't learned all of what the state wants), "below basic" (the student is in deep trouble). Most states have set the bar for "proficient" at a really low level and despite this have been unable to get many students to attain this low level.

The Obama administration wants to either add a new level or rename one of the existing levels, creating a dummy or "career-ready" ghetto.

The NAEP "proficient" level is set at about the level that a college-ready student can attain (based on the comparable percentage of students that graduate college and are "proficient or above," about a third of all students). Most states have set their "proficient" level well below the NAEP "proficient" level, so we are likely to see this standard raised, which is what the blueprint implies.

So what will be the level of the "career ready" track? I'll ignore the lofty, yet empty rhetoric of the blueprint, and guess that it'll be at the NAEP "basic" level which is somewhat below where most states have set their "proficient" level. That's the level that is used for the Urban studies and is gradually becoming the accepted norm.

Of course at such levels we get olitically unacceptable results. Using the 2009 NAEP results for 8th grade reading, we see that about 43% of white and asian students will be in the college-ready track (proficient plus advanced) while only about 16% of blacks and Hispanics will be in the college-ready track. Even worse than that, while 71% of white and asian career-ready students (ratio of "basic" to "below basic" plus "basic") will meet the standard, only 51% of black and Hispanic students will meet the standard. That seesm lose- lose to me. 84% of black and Hispanic studenst will be relegated to the career-ready track, which is political suicide, and only half will meet that low standard.

Clearly the Obama Administartion hasn't thought this one through or hasn't hired anyone who knows the first thing about basic statistics. This new plan will basically legislate a "separate but not-equal" education system which is exactly the reason the Department of Education was created to eliminate.

At least the 100% proficiency rate made statistical sense if the goal is to eliminate achievement level gaps, if only it were obtainable.

And that was only the first paragraph of the first point of the blueprint. It gets worse.

How Not to Save the Schools (Necessarily)

2010-05-05T17:05:00.001-04:00

During my hiatus, the one issue I wanted to comment on was Diane Ravitch's new book which is sadly filled with much soft-headed thinking. Apparently, Ravitch has been hanging around our education Siren too long.

Stuart Buck has all ready done the heavy lifting analyzing the flaws in Ravitch's book, so there's no need for me to pile on.

I would like to address, however, Ravitch's proposed solution to our education woes -- a national core curriculum which many other education pundits also endorse. I'm going to use Don hirsch's review of Ravitch's book as my stepping stone. Hirsch's review should be read in conjunction with Buck's analysis becasue they approach the flaws in Ravitch's book from different angles and are comlementary.

... Ravitch argues that the recent nostrums of “choice” and “accountability” have not worked very well. What new ideas will?

She makes strong arguments in favor of a widely shared core curriculum. This reform, she asserts, would carry multiple benefits. It would assure the cumulative organization of knowledge by all students, and would help overcome the notorious achievement gaps between racial and ethnic groups. It would make the creation of an effective teaching force much more feasible, because it would become possible to educate American teachers in the well-defined, wide-ranging subjects they would be expected to teach—thus educating students and teachers simultaneously.

It would also foster the creation of much better teaching materials, with more substance; and it would solve the neglected problem of students (mostly low-income ones) who move from one school to another, often in the middle of the school year. It would, in short, offer American education the advantages enjoyed by high-performing school systems in the rest of the world, which far outshine us in the quality and fairness of their results.

There are a few flaws in this line of argument.

The first flaw is that there is no actual field-tested commercially available "shared core" curriculum having a research base in a public school (without selection-bias effects) which shows that the benefits that Ravitch and Hirsch think will flow have actually or will necessarily flowed. There is some cognitive science research that suggests that some of these benefits might accrue, but there is a large gap between that research and a real-world curriculum that achieves actual results. And mind you, I'm as sympathetic as the next guy that a (voluntary) common core curriculum is better than the alernatives.

The second flaw is the failure to see the elephant in the room -- the current education system -- which will do its darnedest to thwart, subvert, and otherwise screw-up any reform that upsets the status quo (which they very much like) as they've done in the past with every other "reform."

Under the current system, educators are not responsible for educating anyone. If the student fails to learn, its the student's fault, not the schools. Educators have a host of excuses (poverty, lack of parental support, etc.) and labels (learning disabled) they can use to excuse their failure to teach. Under the current system, they get to largely teach how they want and at the end of the year will point to the kids that learned something (the easily educable) and say "I taught them." They do what they want to do and the kids that have the cognitive ability to make the inductive leaps needed to learn the material are the ones that benefit. The others not so much. And, since most of the "reforms" are mostly directed to the other kids, the plan tends to be to do as little as possible to implement the reform, complain as loudly as possible, and wait until the next reform comes down the pike.

Good luck overcoming that.

Ravitch recognizes that consensus on a core curriculum would not be automatic and that “any national curriculum must be both nonfederal and voluntary, winning the support of districts and states because of its excellence.” She continues:

If it is impossible to reach consensus about a national curriculum, then every state should make sure that every child receives an education that includes history, geography, literature, the arts, the sciences, civics, foreign languages, health, and physical education. These subjects should not be discretionary or left to chance. Every state should have a curriculum that is rich in knowledge, issues, and ideas, while leaving teachers free to use their own methods, with enough time to introduce topics and activities of their own choosing.

Really? Haven't educators been using "their own methods" to teach the stuff they've been trying to teach without much success? Those methods simply don't work for a large demographic slice. How can changing what is taught fare any better if those methods are deficient? The problem of education today is not only what is taught, but how it is taught.

Another improvement over existing state standards is the recognition by the authors of the “Common Core” of its own limits—they devote a section to “What is not covered by the Standards.” The omissions turn out to be major, among them both teaching methods and the curriculum itself. Such acknowledgment of limits is very important. The new multistate document is unique in conceding that it is neither a curriculum nor a curriculum guide, and insisting at the same time that proficiency in reading and writing can be achieved only through a highly specific curriculum—still to be developed—that is “coherently structured to develop rich content knowledge within and across grades.” If these admonitions are taken seriously by the states, Ravitch will have powerful allies in advocating a core curriculum.

Agreed as to the reading and writing. Now throw in math, science and all the rest of the "content" that is desired to be taught. That is the main problem -- how to teach everything such that is actually learned and retained by the students. Somthing heretofore that has remained largely unaccomplished.

To teach that curriculum Ravitch evokes a vision of good neighborhood schools (often destined for closure by the new reformers

I don't remember these good neighborhood schools being able to actually educate the demographic that we want to educate today. Those kids used to drop out long before high school and often even middle school. The demographic that gets educated today is the same demographic that used to get educated back in the "good old days." That's not good enough any more.

Yet if Ravitch’s proposals for a coherent, cumulative national—or at least widely shared—curriculum are to carry the day, she needs to put forward a more effective critique of the intellectual and scientific inadequacies of the anticurricular, child-centered movement. Her vision can hardly be put into effect while an army of experts in schools of education and a much bigger army of teachers and administrators, indoctrinated over nearly a century, are fiercely resisting a set curriculum of any kind. Ravitch has roundly attacked the entrepreneurs’ invisible-hand business model as not corresponding with the reality or the fundamental purposes of education. She needs to expose in greater analytic detail the inadequacies of the invisible-hand theory of child-centered schooling.

See Don gets it.

Except for the "Ravitch has roundly attacked the entrepreneurs’ invisible-hand business model as not corresponding with the reality or the fundamental purposes of education." comment. To quote the great Adam Smith once again: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages." The main problemof education is that the incentives of educators are not aligned with their providing a quality education to everyone. They get paid no matter how poorly the services are provided with little risk of their losing their tenured sinecures. They don't have to provide a good service and so they don't, because it is much easier not to.

Hell freezes over

2010-05-04T16:38:00.002-04:00

I know I'm going to regret this.

I think Stephen Downes is mostly right in his proposed induction model of knowledge and learning.

What we have here is a model where the input data induces the creation of knowledge. There is no direct flow from input to output; rather, the input acts on the pre-existing system, and it is the pre-existing system that produces the output.

In electricity, this is known as induction, and is a common phenomenon. We use induction to build step-up or step-down transformers, to power electric motors, and more. Basically, the way induction works is that, first, an electric current produces a magnetic field, and second, a magnetic field creates an electric current.

Why is this significant? Because the inductive model (not the greatest name in the world, but a good alternative to the transmission model) depends on the existing structure of the receiving circuit, what it means is that the knowledge output may vary from system to system (person to person) depending on the pre-existing configuration of that circuit.

Stephen is proposing a mutual induction circuit theory of knowledge transference. As Stephen says, the magnetic flux due to the current of the top circuit is inducing a current in the bottom circuit.

Knowledge is not directly transferred into a learner, but rather knowledge is acquired indirectly through an inductive process. Specifically, knowlege is typically acquired through an "inductive reasoning" process.

That is, the learner observes stimuli (examples and non-examples); (2) performs a series of logical operations on what it observes; and (3) arrives at (induces, figures out, discovers, “gets”) a general idea revealed by the examples and nonexamples.

For example, let's say a teacher is trying to teach a student the concept of "over" in the sense that when an object is "over" another object it is directly vertically above that object. The teacher may tell or the student may look up the definition of the word "over" and arrive at the verbal definition "directly vertically over." But, this verbal definition isn't necessarily directly stored in the student's memory verbatim, if at all. And, even if it is, it doesn't necessarily follow that the learner retrieves this verbal defnition when deciding if something is "over" something else, i.e., when determining the metes and bounds of the concept "over." Which is not to say that knowing the verbal definition is not typically useful in learning a new concept. It often is.

Concepts, such as "over," are typically learned by the learner observing various examples and non-examples of the concept and then inductively reasoning to the general concept revealed by the examples and non-examples.

Take a look at the following teacher presentation:

The student is presented with two examples (1 and 2) followed by two non-examples (3 and 4) from which the student must inductively reason the general concept revealed thereby. Then the student is tested to determine if the he or she has learned the concept.

This is about a clear and unambiguous of a presentation as it gets. Some students might have induced the general concept with only these four examples/non-examples. Some might have induced it with less. Some will require many more. Moreover, the concept itself is fairly simple. And, the result is that the "inductive gap" that the student has to traverse in order to induce the general concept is likely small.

In contrast, for more difficult concepts, such as "democracy" or "mammal," or if the presentation of examples/nonexamples is ambiguous or otherwise more difficult to traverse, such as if the student's exposure to the concept "over" comes solely through reading isolated uses of the word "over" in connected text spaced over a period of time and readings, the "inductive gap" is larger.

As a result, inducing the general concept would be more difficult. Fewer students would be capable of traversing this gap without assistance.

Let's look at another example. Some students learn how to read with little, no, or poor/ambiguous instruction and are able to to traverse the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of large inductive gaps needed to learn how to make sense out of connected text. Other students won't be able to induce the ability to read unless the inductive gaps are made smaller. One way to make these gaps smaller is to explicitly teach the various letter-sound correspondences, often referred to as "phonics." In fact, the gaps can be (unintentionally) made wider by misteaching. For example, many "whole language" pedagogical methods actually increase the difficulty many students have learning to read by inadvetently teaching unproductive strategies.

One goal of formal education is to present the material to the student in such a way that the student is able to manage and traverse the inductive gaps inherent in learning the general concepts underlying the material.

However, what does not necessarily follow is Stephen's next assertion.

What it means is that you can't just apply some sort of standard recipe and get the same output. Whatever combination of filtering, validation, synthesis and all the rest you use, the resulting knowledge will be different for each person. Or alternatively, if you want the same knowledge to be output for each person (were that even possible), you would have to use a different combination of filtering, validation, synthesis for each person.

Certainly some "recipes" are more effective than others for getting the same output, i.e., learning the material. Some "recipes" may be successful in getting, say, 95% of the students to learn the desired output. Others might only be successful in getting 50% to the same output. It simply doesn't follow that a different recipe is needed for each student.

Nobody really knows what's going on in a students brain while they are inductively reasoning (or as Stephen puts it "[selecting of the right] combination of filtering, validation, synthesis") their way to learning a particular concept. All an educator can really do is to determine whether the student is able to accurately communicate the general concept by verbalizing, demonstrating, or otherwise applying the general concept correctly to new examples which correlate highly with those responses or applications of those people/experts who understand the general concept.

That's why educators test.

But when Stephen concludes:

Even when you are explicitly teaching content, and when what appears to be learned is content, since the content itself never persists from the initial presentation of that content to the ultimate reproduction of that content, what you are teaching is not the content. Rather, what you are trying to induce is a neural state such that, when presented with similar phenomena in the future, will present similar output. Understanding that you are train a neural net, rather than store content for reproduction, is key.

He is essentially right.

We apply or generalize knowledge through deductive reasoning.

The learner has/knows/can say a general idea (concept, rule/proposition, routine); (2) can use the general idea (definition of a concept, or statement of a rule, or features of the things handled by the routine; e.g., math problems, words) to examine a possible new example using the information in #2; (3) and can “decide” whether the new thing FITS (is an example of) the definition, rule, or routine (“Can you solve this with FOIL?”); and (4) is able to “treat” the example accordingly -- name it (concept), explain it (with the rule), solve it (with the routine).

Whether this can be characterized as "teaching content" is irrelevent. Having the proper "neural state" means that the "content" has been learned regardless of how directly or indirectly it was taught.

[Update: cleaned up numerous typos]

The State of Education: Same as It Ever Was

2010-05-04T09:20:00.000-04:00

I'm glad to discover that an education blogger can take a five month sanity break and come back to find out that things really haven't changed at all. Good news for me for sure; not so good for education though.

I skimmed through about 5000 posts in my news reader and didn't feel particularly compelled to comment, not because some weren't particularly good (or bad), but that I'd just be repeating the same observation I'd made previously. That gets boring.

And, that, in a nutshell, is the problem in education: despite the sad state of our education system, there are no significant improvements on the horizon. At least none that haven't been tried in the past, usually under a diferent name, and haven't already failed.

I'm still in favor of blowing up the entire system and starting over. But, that's not going to happen. So, in the meantime we are forced to make fun of the dopey, ineffective proposals being floated around and wait for some unexpected groundbreaking change to surface somewhere else that has the effect of blowing up the existing education system. Kind of how the internet is in the process of blowing up print journalism, brick and mortar retail, cable tv, and the like.

We lack the political will to boot out the entrenched interests in education, so an external force needs to get the ball rolling for us. We shall see.

In the meantime, we're stuck making the same obseervations on the same old repackaged reforms that don't go to the root of the problem: the perverse incentives of the existing command and control system.

In other news, I have about 1000 spam comments in my moderation queue. Apparently, the spammers have found me. So, I've made some changes to the comment policy. No more anonymous comments, Comments are only open for 14 days. And you have to deal with the captcha nonsense. Hopefully, that will keep the spammers at bay while letting through the legitimate comments.

So, I think I'm back from hiatus for now. As long as I stay motivated. The problem is that doing real abalysis is very much like work. Certainly too much to do it for free day in and day out. So we shall see how long it lasts.

Getting Yet Another Thing Wrong

2009-12-09T10:42:00.001-05:00

It's no secret that The Feds have done little to improve student achievement through their heavy-handed meddling, but you may be surprised to learn that's not the only thing they're screwing up at your local public school:

In the past three years, the government has provided the nation's schools with millions of pounds of beef and chicken that wouldn't meet the quality or safety standards of many fast-food restaurants, from Jack in the Box and other burger places to chicken chains such as KFC, a USA TODAY investigation found.

No doubt that's because if Jack in the Box starts making their customers sick, they tend to start losing customers. The public schools often can't lose their customers unless those customers sell their house and move or pay twice for education.

For chicken, the USDA has supplied schools with thousands of tons of meat from old birds that might otherwise go to compost or pet food.

That certainly inspires confidence when the only other uses for the food the Feds are serving to children are pet food and compost.

But don't you worry Congressman Miller is on the job. Er, will be one the job. Someday.

"If there are higher quality and safety standards, the government should set them," says Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., chairman of the House Committee on Education and Labor. "Ensuring the safety of food in schools is something we'll look at closely."

I guess he was too busy grandstanding at Reading First hearings for political gain instead of worry whether poor children were being fed pet food for their free and reduced price lunches. (And whatever happened to all those Reading First indictments we were promised?)

Even McDonald's has enough sense to not feed their patrons pet food. And, they manage to serve you a hamburger for only a dollar. A non-pet food grade hamburger I may add that has been voluntarily tested for safety at a ten times greater rate that the Miller burgers.

McDonald's, Burger King and Costco, for instance, are far more rigorous in checking for bacteria and dangerous pathogens. They test the ground beef they buy five to 10 times more often than the USDA tests beef made for schools during a typical production day.

I simply can't wait until the Feds are in charge of my health care decisions too.

Why You Can't Trust the New York Times on Education (or anything scientific for that matter)

2009-12-07T08:11:00.000-05:00

Erica Goode, the NYT environment editor, admits the NYT doesn't understand science:

“We here at The Times are not scientists. We don’t collect the data or analyze it, and so the best we can do is to give our readers a sense of what the prevailing scientific view is, based on interviews with scientists” and the expertise of reporters...

Yikes.

That comment came in response to the recent Climategate scandal which the Times has not unexpectedly underreported. But. it also explains why the Times gets so many education stories wrong too.

Things we don't know

2009-11-19T10:46:00.002-05:00

There is lots of stuff we don't know. Lots of stuff without firm scientific support. Yet in many areas without firm scientific support, we often encounter zealous advocates who either believe we know much more than we do or are confused as to what we actually know.

The Big Bang Theory doesn't explain what caused the universe to come into being.

How did the universe come into being? There is plenty of good observational evidence for the Big Bang theory. But that doesn't explain how the universe came into being in the first place. What happened before the big bang? Science is unable to describe the universe before the Planck Epoch (when the force of gravity separated from the elctronuclear force). Currently, we don't know what caused the big bang or how the universe came into being.

The Theory of Evolution doesn't explain how life originated.

How did life start? There is plenty of observation evidence for the theory of biological evolution. But that doesn't explain how life came into being in the first place. What happened before there were organisms? Science is unable to explain how organisms came into being in the first place. There is no scientific consensus on how life began. Currently we don't know how life began.

(FYI: Intelligent Design is one argument for how the universe and life began. It has about the same scientific support as any other argument for how the universe and life began. That is, none. Of course, Intelligent Design isn't exactly scientific. But then again science hasn't provided any answers yet either.)

The Theory of Global Warming is infected with politics for the time being.

In a few decades we might know whether the current scientific consensus and environmental hysteria comports with the data. To the extent there is a consensus, the science remains shaky--far shakier than what we know about the origins of the universe and of life. Far shakier than the consensus scientists would like you to believe. (I think many of them don't even understand why "consensus science" isn't actually science.)

(Long Version)
We don't know how to reliably educate low-IQ/low-SES children

The science is very thin on improving student achievement outside of the elementary school years. Most theories aren't even based on actual testing of an intervention. Most theories are based on observations of correlational data on broad proxies for variables believed to affect education (poverty, teacher efficacy, availability of free lunch, availability of health insurance, and the like). not so much on actual interventions designed to improve or ameliorate these variables.

So what is government policy, like Race to the Top, based on?

Sunshine and lollipops mostly.

Your tax dollars hard at work

2009-11-18T17:58:00.000-05:00

Virginia is going to analyze why there is a disproportionately low representation of minority students in gifted education.

"Virginia is proud of both the high standards of our educational system and the wealth of diversity in our communities," Governor Kaine said. "As we continue to improve on our gifted education programs in particular, it's critical we assess any disproportionate barriers to enrollment so we can ensure students of all backgrounds have the opportunity to participate."

Data reported by school divisions to VDOE show that while African-Americans make up 26 percent of the statewide student population, only 12 percent of students identified as gifted are black. Hispanics make up nine percent of the student population and five percent of students identified as gifted.

Gee, what could possibly be the reason behind this disparity?

Well, let's see. Giftedness is largely determined by performance on IQ tests. So, let's take a look at the relative performance between whites and blacks on IQ tests. Better yet, let's break performance out by socio-economic status.

The chart shows a 10 to 16 point gap between white and black performance for IQ (that's about a standard deviation) across the SES spectrum. Blacks in the highest SES decile perform about as well as the 50th percentile White (5th decile). Even raising the SES of Blacks wouldn't close the IQ gap even if there were a causal connection.

Mightn't this explain all or most of the discrepancy? It took about ten seconds of googling. Virginia needs about a year and a half to find a more politically correct explanation.

The study - which is being conducted with technical assistance from the Regional Educational Laboratory Appalachia - will be completed by Spring 2010.

There is a similar IQ gap between the performance of Asians and Whites which also explains why Asians are disproportionately represented in gifted classes. Hopefully, the study will address that problem as well.

Must be discrimination. Some virulent form of discrimination that's only present in the nasty U.S. And Toronto too. In fact I can't find a single country in which these same IQ gaps aren't present and don't manifest themselves on achievement tests (which are actually IQ tests. Shhhh don't tell anybody). So maybe that theory doesn't hold up.

In any event Erin Dillon from The Quick and the Ed is looking for a solution.

Racial disparities in gifted vs. regular education classes seemed obvious enough to me when I attended public schools in Virginia. One can only hope that this study will put some momentum behind addressing those disparities.

How exactly does one address those disparities?

Pot. Kettle. Bracey.

2009-11-13T12:26:00.002-05:00

The last and thankfully final Bracey Report attempts to analyze the research support underlying the following three assumptions about how to reform education.

1. High-quality schools can eliminate the achievement gap between whites and minorities.

2. Mayoral control of public schools is an improvement over the more common elected board governance systems.

3. Higher standards will improve the performance of public schools.

As worded, the answer to all these questions is that the research is insufficient. But notice for questions 2 and 3 how any amount of improvement will do, while for question 1 only improvement that will "eliminate the achievement gap." Such improvement would have to be on the order of about a standard deviation increase in non-Asian minority performance with no increase in white performance. A tall order indeed. In fact such a tall order, that no in-school or out-of-school intervention has ever achieved such results for the general population-- even the ones that Bracey supported and touted in this very report.

This is Bracey at his most dishonest--glaringly dishonest. Bracey had an agenda and he didn't mind bending the facts to fit his preferred outcome. He wasn't an honest researcher and this will be his lasting legacy.

A more honest researcher might adopt a more neutral standard of achievement such as "an increase in the performance of all students by an educationally significant amount (0.25 standard deviation)." That would be a laudable goal and also would serve to reduce the achievement gap. It's also the generally accepted standard in education research.

Under such a standard, Bracey would still get to criticize mayorial control and higher (national) standards as not having a sufficient research base; however, he'd have to acknowledge that there is a sufficient research base for higher-quality schools under this standard at least in the elementary school years.

Another problem with Bracey's reports is that they are peppered with his own assumptions about how to reform education that don't have sufficient research base or are contradicted by the data. Here are a few.

Students attending American schools run the gamut from excellent to poor. Well-resourced schools serving wealthy neighborhoods are showing excellent results. Poorly-resourced schools serving low-income communities of color do far worse. (p. 2)

Schools serving low-income communities of color tend to have resources above the median school.

I said above that if there are to be more high-quality schools (or at least, “high-quality” schools in terms of high or rising test scores), they will have to be developed in low-income neighborhoods. (p. 3)

Bracey is implies that schools in higher income neighborhoods are doing a fine job educating low-income students. They aren't.

Before taking up the question of whether schools alone can remedy the achievement gap for poor children, we have to ask what is known about the effect of poverty on children. What are some of the out-of-school factors that contribute to poor children’s lower performance? (p. 4)

None of the studies Bracey, especially Berliner's, directs us to are capable of determining the causal link that Bracey implies. Bracey then proceeds to give us a few pages of various ailments and problems associated with poverty and attempts to draw a bleak picture of poverty's causal effect on student achievement. He has to resort to anecdote because the data a much less bleak picture. Poverty, or more accurately low socio-economic status (SES), is correlated with low student performance. But the amount of variance in student performance attributable to variations in SES is only about 18%. That means that 82% of the variance is attributable to non-SES factors. Bracey knows or should have known this, but misrepresents the data anyway.

These disadvantages all operate to attenuate achievement in schools. The question is, can “high-quality” schools alone offset them? (p. 7)

Bracey then looks at one ham-fisted study, Harlem Promise Academy, as a refutation. He ignores the other studies which have shown results larger than the 0.18 standard deviation gap attributable to poverty effects.

Bracey does a better job with the mayoral control and high standards issues. But the problem is that on the poverty/SES issue Bracey's non-research-based views are no better than those of the proponents of mayoral control and high standards.

Pot and Kettle meet Bracey.

Today's Quote

2009-11-05T23:12:00.000-05:00

The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does not ensure that a reasonable answer can be extracted from a given body of data.

-- John Tukey (1986)

Another Defense of SLA?

2009-11-05T10:56:00.001-05:00

Joe Bires of Ed Tech Leadership offers a defense of the SLA position paper assignment:

Your post should be titled “Why you should never publish anything on the Internet (or anywhere for that matter)”. The minute you publish something you open yourself up for attack, not just feedback.

I have no problem with your critique of Chris’s assignment as Chris is a professional putting his work out there for you to critique. I don’t agree with most of your comments, but I do feel the assignment wasn’t as clear as it could have been.

However, the lack of a rubric being posted with this assignment with clear standards makes critiquing the students writing as you do unfair. Look at your post again and code every time you put down students directly or indirectly. Clearly while you may not have wished to put down students, that is exactly what you are doing.

I believe the overarching purpose of posting these essays was to solicit feedback on the students’ ideas and not the written form those ideas took. When you look at student work and give feedback it is different than looking at the work of adult professionals and you must confine your feedback about students and their work to the scope of the assignment’s parameters (no matter your opinion of those parameters).

Your post reminds me of the quote:

“The turtle only makes progress when he sticks his neck out”

- James Bryant, educator

To conclude, if turtles took your advice on producing first drafts they would make zeroth progress because the feedback they would receive would discourage their further effort.

Downesian nemesis TracyW provides a good rebuttal to Joe's "open yourself up to attack" and "the value of feedback" arguments which all censor advocates should read. I'll move on to the remainder of Joe's argument.

As a preliminary matter I note that Joe offers no defense to the students' writings and the deficiencies I noted. Is there a valid defense? I don't think there is one, but I'm happy to entertain that argument should some brave soul desire to make it.

Also, what is the point of this:

I don’t agree with most of your comments, but I do feel the assignment wasn’t as clear as it could have been.

Allow me to offer a similar rebuttal: I disagree with Joe's comments. And, now we've entered the surreal realm of a Monty Python skit.

What is the point of offering an opinion without substantiating it. This is exactly what the SLA students did. So, I'm guessing that when Joe says the assignment wasn't clear his implicit premise is that the assignment was so vague that it was acceptable for the students to just offer up a series of unsubstantiated opinions. Joe then moves the goalposts again when he next argues that since the "overarching purpose" of the assignment was to solicit feedback, the written form of the students' work should not be judged.

This is the Tom Hoffman diminished expectations counter-argument. Here is Joe's argument made explicit.

Joe, like Tom before him, is claiming that Chris' assignment was "vague," and that the words Chris used in his instruction meant something other than their ordinary and customary meaning as I claimed. The actual assignment should be understood to be commensurate with the scope of the resulting work product of the students. The students didn't support their opinions; therefore, the assignment did not require them to provide such support. The students' work was riddled with grammatical and usage errors and did not conform to the standard essay format; therefore, Chris' rubric could not have been concerned with this aspect of the students' work. Moreover, my standard is an adult professional standard, not a high school grade standard.

Let's recast Chris' assignment to make it both crystal clear and in accordance with Joe's suggested rubric.

You are to write a two page opinion paper creating your vision of what school should be. The main purpose of the paper is to solicit feedback from your fellow students. You are not required to provide support and substantiation for your opinions, even though this will hinder the reader's ability to understand the basis of your opinion (to understand why you think the way you do) and will diminish the quality of the feedback. Following the standard essay format of introduction, body, and conclusion is also optional. In fact, presenting your opinion in a logical order is not required, nor do you have to separate your ideas into traditional paragraph format. Also, although the goal of the assignment is to solicit feedback, it is not important for you to communicate your opinions coherently to the reader at all so they are readily understood. Therefore, standard grammar, usage, and spelling rules need not be adhered to. Lastly, you may keep your papers real by peppering then with colloquialisms and other informalities typically associated with spoken language.

Your paper should consider the following points:

...

According to Joe, this was really Chris' assignment and the students' papers should be critiqued accordingly. As a result, the students' papers are in compliance with the assignment and my critique is off-base.

It should also be clear why Chris chose to use the term "position paper" instead of all this clarified verbiage.

Nevermind that the term "position paper" is not only not vague, but also has an established meaning, And that the interpretative rule of Contra proferentem (against the one bringing forth ) dictates that we should use this established meaning.

Let me also suggest that this is an argument that progressive educators are better off not making in a public forum if they wish to achieve any credibility with the public.

D-ed Reckoning Enters Edu-blogger Hall of Fame

2009-11-04T09:47:00.001-05:00

Beloved Uncle Jay and crazy Aunt Jay are picking the best education blogs of 2009. But that's not important right now, what is important is:

Valerie will select ten and I will select a different ten for our 2009 list of 20 best blogs, which we hope to post by December. You will note a list of eleven blogs on the left side column of this blog [Ed. -- including your truly]. They are previous winners of this incredible honor, and so will remain posted there forever and are not eligible for the new list. I plan to add my ten selections to that left hand column, and make each annual contest a search for blogs we have not celebrated before.

I read that "posted forever" and "not eligible for the new list" as being the equivalent of being inducted into the edu-blogger hall of fame. Woo hoo. And, I haven't even retired yet. Although, I think I can safely ~~continue~~ start coasting now.

Here are my fellow inductees with my brief commentary.

1. EdTech Assorted Stuff -- Redundant. There are better education technology and progressive education blogs (odd that those two always seem to go together).

2. Board Buzz -- Not interesting. Doesn't hold my attention. The fatal flaw of many blogs run by large organizations looking to avoid controversy.

3. The Core Knowledge Blog -- Always interesting. Avoids hackery (See Edwise below). Pondiscio is a real blogger and Core Knowledge is smart enough to allow him to express his opinions.

4. Eduwonk -- Andy has good insider stuff. Sometimes too elliptic and insider to us outsiders. Doesn't blog often enough.

5. EdWize -- Often borders on hackery, no doubt due to union affiliation. Otherwise, not enough non-hack stuff to keep me interested.

6. Gotham Schools -- Good reporting on New York City stuff. Skoolboy was a good blogger at the now defunct eduwonkette. But, for some reason this blog hasn't made the cut to be a regular read. Maybe it's a signal to noise problem.

7. Joanne Jacobs -- Still going stronger than ever after all these years. The only real journalist of the lot. Has mastered the blog format.

8. Schools Matter -- The Bill Maher of edubloggers, if Maher were humorless and cut and pasted most of his material. The commentary is entirely predictable, conclusory, and never supported.

9. Susan Ohanian -- Is this even a blog? Redundant with School Matters. The opinions are identical. Pick either. Or better yet pick neither.

10. This Week in Education -- Best all around education policy blog. Russo rounds-up the news, is interesting, includes actual reporting, offers opinion, gets insider scoop, and consistently gets my first name wrong. Would be improved by jettisoning the dull Thompson.

Now that I've pulled a Michael Jordan-like acceptance speech, allow me to redeem myself by commenting on all the things I do wrong. My posts are sporadic, I take long breaks when I don't feel like writing (the problem of doing it for free and bereft of an academic sinecure), posts are far too long, lack of editing and proofreading, too lazy to spellcheck regularly, and often too abrasive.

I'm sure there are lots more which my critics should merrily point out in the comments.

A defense of SLA?

2009-11-03T16:35:00.000-05:00

Marcie Hull, SLA's tech coordinator, commented on my posts on SLA. It's a serious comment and deserves a serious answer. (I've taken the liberty to clean up Marcie's lengthy comment which which was typed on an iPhone.)

Numbers... Seems to me a silly tradition to measure a persons abilities. Why not watch them or give them excellent mentors, while listening to them and being sincerely interested in what they are saying.

In this case the numbers are percentile scores for the number of students who fall into each of the four proficiency categories on Pennsylvania's simplistic state assessment. So, in this case the numbers represent objective data on student performance. What's wrong with objective data? (Dick Shutz's objections notwithstanding which I acknowledge.)

The purpose of my post was to show the problem with the numbers which showed that all SLA 11^th graders were proficient or above in writing. The actual student writing samples told a very different story. I also notice that you did not defend the quality of the students' writing. That is telling.

Numbers also seem to be a way to keep out students with many different learning styles, therefore keeping the old elite system in a safe place, far away from creativity.

Actually, I think that SLA's selective admission system does the bulk of the work of keeping out "students with many different learning styles" and keeping the elite system in place. Not that there's anything wrong with providing appropriate opportunities for the academically meritorious students.

Knowing the rules to break the rules is an old idea. We need more rule breakers if we want to see quick change.

If we want more rule breakers, then it follows that we want more people who know the rules in the first place according to your own argument. Did the SLA student writers know the rules of grammar, usage, and argumentation? Are they in a position to break the rules even though they haven't learned them yet? It appears that SLA isn't providing the world with more rule breakers, juts people who don't know the rules.

You are right schools need to change. We are attempting that change, 3 years is a very short time to be judged upon. Come see us in 5.

Schools don't need just change; schools need effective change. And, caring is overrated. What these kids really need is effective teaching. So, is the teaching at SLA effective? Not based on the examples of student learning that I've seen so far. We'll see in two more years.

Better yet come to the school and see what caring for a student can do for their academic success.

That's such a 20^th century mindset. I made a 21^st century visit. Isn't that what it's supposed to be all about?

And isn't that the way s brain works if your needs are met you are able to intellectualize? Look at Maslow, that is what I follow.

Yes, let's look at Maslow the man; the pyramid, not so much.

Sir, don't you see enough negativity in this world of education why would you pick out our community that strives for rigor and happiness?

Because Chris posted (and good for him for doing so) these examples of student work and asked for constructive criticism. Transparency is a 21^st century virtue. Although, quite honesty I don't think SLA is quite ready yet for 21^st century transparency.

What is it that you are expecting from a brand new school?

At a minimum to live up to the things it claims to be doing in its family Handbook. Is it OK to expect less?

What was your school like? Did it compare to your standards or did you make your own?

My high school was a traditional high school with all the faults and problems of traditional education. Sadly, I do not believe that SLA has improved on the failings of the traditional model. The "changes" SLA has made are superficial with respect to student learning, like many reform models that have preceded it.

I came out of one of the best high schools in the country in 1991. What scares me, even with all the money in that district not all learners were given equal opportunities to learn. They were tracked low and forgotten about and all the concentration was put on the students that could score high in math & science. Some of them are still living in their parents basements.

Agreed. This is a problem. But is the problem the high school's for not being able to deal with under-prepared students or the elementary and middle schools that under-prepared them? And, let's just limit the discussion to the mountain of kids at the margin who came to school on a regular basis and who do not possess a cognitive impairment.

So, I ask you what do these numbers mean? What do they mean to parents? What do they mean in higher education?

The numbers mean that Pennsylvania has set the bar way too low. Proficient students under Pennsylvania's standard apparently lack many skills foundational to writing ability.

Parents should be aware of this problem.

The numbers are also not reliable indicators that these students are ready for the workload inherent in most institutions of higher education. Higher education has been foreclosed to many of these students. Sadly, they don't know this yet.

Also, what kind of conversation or dialog do you want to get into with the staff at SLA? What is your purpose for reporting this? Anyone can cause a conflict.

The real conversation you need to be having is with your students, not with me. I'm just shining the light on the problem. No one from SLA or elsewhere has defended SLA on the merits yet. I have heard some excuse making. Your arguments seems to be that good intentions are good enough. I reject that opinion out of hand.

I would rather talk about solutions, kids & alternative types of instruction so that all student can feel success.

There isn't a single solution listed in your comment.

And what good is feeling success? Isn't it more important to be a success?

We are an easy target, seems to me you are upset about something and you are hiding behind this blog post instead of just writing your beef. Where's the beef?

Chris asked for comments. I provided comments. You don't seem to agree with my comments, but you aren't exactly defending the students' work either. Take a position and defend it with supporting evidence. Making vague excuses and offering unsupported opinion is not a position.

hmmm...

I think I finally figured out why SLA students weren't able to write a position paper?

A Tale of Two Cities

2009-11-03T10:05:00.001-05:00

Now that Canada's largest school district, Toronto, has taken the bold step of reporting its testing data for racial and economic subgroups, we are able to compare its achievement gaps with the achievement gaps of other large cities that also report achievement data for subgroups.

Let's compare Toronto to Philadelphia and see who has the larger achievement gaps. Let's see how Toronto with it's compassionate and generous Canadian-style social policies compares to Philadelphia with it's backward and stingy U.S.-style social policies.

Better yet, I'm not going to tell you which city is which, see if you can guess from the achievement gaps which I've given as a fraction of a standard deviation.* Negative numbers indicate that the subgroup performed worse than whites; positive numbers indicate that the subgroup performed better than whites.

City #1
Black-White Achievement Gap: -0.85
Hispanic-White Achievement Gap: -0.73
Asian-White Achievement Gap: +0.28

City #2
Black-White Achievement Gap: -0.73
Hispanic-White Achievement Gap: -0.70
Asian-White Achievement Gap: +0.14

Which city is Philadelphia and which is Toronto?

Bonus Question: What does this analysis suggest for improving results and policies drawn on international comparisons between diverse countries like the U.S. and more racially homogeneous countries like those in Europe and Northeast Asia.

*What I did was to convert the percentile scores reported into z-scores (which is a more accurate way of analyzing normally distributed data) for each subgroup for math and reading combined (sixth grade for Toronto and fifth grade for Philadelphia). Then I calculated the difference between the z-scores of Asian (East), Black, and Hispanic (Latin) subgroup and the white subgroup. A difference of 0.25 is considered to be educationally significant. A difference of 0.75 is considered to be a large difference in the social sciences; most interventions are not capable of remedying an effect size of this magnitude.

Canada: not the educational mecca we've been led to believe

2009-11-02T16:02:00.001-05:00

Canadian edu-pundits have been leading us to believe that Canada's lefty social policy programs have nearly eradicated both income and racial inequality and have lead to an educational mecca in which achievement gaps are no more.

The data indicates otherwise.

The Toronto District School Board commissioned a nice little study breaking down student achievement by race, parental education, and income. Before the study you would have been hard pressed to find student achievement data broken down this way. You'd think they were trying to hide something.

Guess what? They were. They were hiding giant achievement gaps.

Here's a nice little table showing student performance broken for third and sixth grades broken down by race.

Holy Moly! Look at them gaps. I'd like to say something snarky like "What is this Mississippi?" but that would be an insult to Mississippi. I know Canada has a shameful history of slavery they don't like to advertise, but I didn't realize it was this bad.

Notice how (East) Asians perform above whites, who perform above Hispanics (Latin American), who perform above blacks. What a coincidence. That's how it plays out in the US too. Who would have thunk? Also, notice how the gaps grow as the students go from third to sixth grade. Another coincidence?

Now let's look at the break down by income.

First of all I find this entire table shocking. I thought Canada was some sort of Marxist paradise, but look at that staggering income inequality. And would you believe that the kids of the people that have higher incomes (before it gets redistributed away) have student achievement as well. Makes me want to rethink that whole correlation vs. causation thing I always rail against.

Let's look at another shocking table. Parental education vs. student achievement.

Would you believe that kids who have parents who went to college outperform the kids whose parents only completed elementary school. Shocking. I thought "free" health care and school lunches solved this problem in Canada.

I simply can't wait until Stephen Downes tries to spin this data away.

The man can't keep them down

2009-11-02T11:20:00.000-05:00

While reviewing the 2008-2209 Pennsylvania state assessments used for NCLB I noticed something that shouldn't surprise regular readers of this blog

Asians utterly dominate at the top of the performance distribution in reading and math.

There are 43 data points for racial subgroup performance for the 11th grade with ninety percent of students scoring proficient or above. This represents roughly the top 2% for school-level break downs.

28 were Asian (65.1%)
11 were white (25.6%)
2 were Hispanic (4.7%)
2 were black (4.7%)

And bear in mind that in many schools there is not sufficient Asian students to trigger NCLB's reporting requirements. Same for Hispanics.

Let's remove the subgroups that come from selective schools, such as magnet schools and other public schools that have admission requirements. This should leave us with only general admissions schools.

We are left with 28 data points.

24 were Asian (85.7%)
3 were white (10.7%)
1 was Hispanic (3.6%)
0 were black (0%)

I don't understand why the man isn't able to keep the Asians down, like he continues to do with blacks and Hispanics. Even more disturbingly, he's keeping whites down as well. But, I thought the man was white. What gives?

If we drop down to the 80% level we have 138 data points. This represents about the top 6% of performance. Here's what we have.

64 were white (46.4%)
59 were Asian (42.8%)
4 were Hispanic (2.9%)
11 were black (8.0%)

By my count there were at least 25 schools in which a white subgroup was reported, but no Asian subgroup. In most, if not all, of those schools Asians would have at least equaled the performance of whites. Hispanics suffer from the same effect due to their low numbers, as do blacks to a lesser extent. Taking all this into account, it's easy to see that Asians once again dominate.

This little exercise is hardly scientific, but it does show how ridiculous the whole racial discrimination as an excuse for poor black and Hispanic subgroup performance really is.

School of the Future Crashes and Burns

2009-11-02T08:50:00.000-05:00

As I predicted three year's ago, Philadelphia's ultra-expensive, ultra-high-tech, and ulta-ironically-named School of the Future (SOF) would crash and burn. Educators and edu-journalists believed otherwise. they thought that SOF would revolutionize education by teaching 21^st century skills.

What could possibly go wrong? There was lots of technology. Great facilities. Community involvement. Lots of money being thrown around. There would be discovery learning and lots of inquiry. In short there was a naïve over-reliance on all the accoutrement's of education that are irrelevant to student outcomes. In fact, some of them are downright toxic.

But things have gone horribly wrong. Take a look at last Spring's PSSA scores (Pennsylvania's easy state assessment) for 11th grade students at the School of the Future.

Percent scoring proficient or above in Math (state average)

All students: 7.5% (55.6%)
Black Students: 6.8% (28.3%)
Poor Students: 7.8% (35.3%)
Special Ed Students: 0% (14.6%)

Percent scoring proficient or above in Reading (state average)

All students: 23.4% (65.2%)
Black Students: 24.5% (38.5%)
Poor Students: 23.5% (44.4%)
Special Ed Students: 0% (20.2%)

What is even more horrifying is the percentage of students performing at the below basic level. Bear in mind that getting to Basic level in Pennsylvania requires performing only slightly better than chance.

Math

All students: 74.1% (24.9%)
Black Students: 73.8% (50.2%)
Poor Students: 74.5% (42.1%)
Special Ed Students: 100% (69.5%)

Reading

All students: 49.5% (18.8%)
Black Students: 48.0% (39.6%)
Poor Students: 58.8% (34.3%)
Special Ed Students: 91.7% (61.5%)

95% of the students at the School of the Future are Black and 47.2% get free or reduced lunches, a proxy for poverty. The school is a general admission school that was paid for, staffed, and operated by the Philadelphia public school system. The project organizers aimed to create a model that could be replicated easily in other districts.

So what went wrong, besides the obvious?

Pretty much everything according to this June article in eSchool News.

1. The curriculum planning committee was staffed by naive fools.

"We naively thought, I guess, that by providing a beautiful building and great resources, these things would automatically yield change. They didn't," said Jan Biros, associate vice president for instructional technology support and campus outreach at Drexel University and a former member of the SOF Curriculum Planning Committee.

2. The school got the equivalent of Microsoft Bob, instead of Windows 7

Microsoft made it clear at the SOF's inception that it would not be overseeing the school's operation; instead, it would lend its initial expertise, provide basic professional development, and then leave the success of the school up to its leaders.

Although the technology itself was not supposed to trump basic classroom practices, Microsoft and the school's planners had decided not to allow the use of textbooks or printed materials; instead, all resources were located online through a portal designed by Microsoft.

Yet educators frequently encountered problems accessing the internet, because the school's wireless connection often would not work.

"This vital part of the school's technology was never stable and robust enough to make it dependable," said Biros. "There was no safety net, and it seemed like a great leap of faith--faith that these teachers, amidst so many new circumstances, would be able to develop curriculum almost on the fly and store and distribute it electronically."

3. The Philadelphia public school system doesn't know how to run a modern IT department.

The district's IT staff had responsibility for the network, but according to Biros, there was not an IT employee on site, and when problems occurred they were not fixed promptly. There also was no dedicated technical support.

"I don't think the district was ready to handle the development of Microsoft's technology and portal. The district is also Mac-based and not PC-based, which caused a lot of technical issues ...," said Patrick McGuinn, assistant professor of political science at Drew University.

4. Just handing out laptops turns out not to be an educational panacea.

Another problem was that the students--most of whom came from poorer families and neighborhoods--could not use or maintain their laptops properly. Students were either afraid to take their laptops home for fear of theft, or they didn't know how to access all the programs on the machines.

5. The realities of project based education bit them in the ass.

"The lack of standardized grades made it hard to relate student progress to parents.... There is no clear definition of what project-based learning exactly is and how that can be step-by-step implemented in the classroom. Student remediation also didn't fit with the project-based collaboration model."

At one point during the discussion, an audience member asked: "All of your resources are online, and educators have to access [them] through this portal. However, your educators don't know how to work the technology. So, exactly what did the teachers teach in class? What were the students learning?"

"Well, honestly, I'm not exactly sure," replied Biros.

In the absence of real leadership, and because no community partnerships had formed, the SOF started to adopt more traditional district assessments and classroom practices. [Ed. -- isn't this always how it turns out]

6. Students didn't like going to the school.

"Truancy picked up, and we were not prepared to handle it."

Perhaps an increase in truancy wouldn't have been such a large problem, except many of the educators hired were not well-versed in dealing with at-risk students who were required to participate in project-based learning.

7. The teacher's union proved to be a menace.

Although Microsoft and the SOF based hiring decisions on Microsoft's Education Competency Wheel, which, according to the company, is "a set of guideposts for achieving educational excellence that centers on identifying and nurturing the right talents in a district's employees, partners, and learners," the SOF had to go through the Philadelphia's Teachers' Union to hire its educators.

The process, said Biros, "was intended to facilitate hiring the best faculty possible with objective consideration; [but] the reality of the union constraints within the district effectively eliminated that outcome. Because of the district's human resources policies and union regulations, most of the applications received were from current district teachers looking for new assignments. We were not recruiting from a pool of any and all teachers interested in applying to SOF."

******

In short pretty much everything went wrong and everyone blamed everyone but themselves for the problems.

But, the real problem is that you can bet that no one will learn from the failure of SOF. You can bet that all those education technology bloggers won't address the problems of SOF that reveal to gaping holes in their vision of the wonders of education technology. You can bet that all the poverty racers won't confront the failure of a mass infusion of money on student outcomes. Will the union apologists address the real problems caused at SOF by their beloved unions? And what about the progressive educators whose project-based curricula never live up to expectations in urban schools?

SOF is a microcosm of every dopey education reform that has come down the pike. Oversell the expectations; ignore the predictable outcomes.

Here's how Philadelphia's Mayor Street sold SOF:

"You won't be able to say, 'I didn't have the computers. I didn't have the technology. I didn't have the teachers. I didn't have mentors,' because the young people who go to this school will be in the premier educational environment in the entire country, maybe even in the entire world," Street said. "So the bar for you is raised."

Now you know the outcome. Half the students are performing at the below basic level in reading, three-quarters are doing the same in math.

Some Perspective

2009-11-01T11:48:00.001-05:00

Two posts ago we looked at the writing of some students (mostly seniors) at Philadelphia's Science Leadership Academy magnet school. I was none too impressed to put it mildly. And no one has stepped up so far to defend the actual writing ability of the students. Time will tell.

Now pretend you are setting proficiency standards. Where would these students fall out on an advanced, proficient, basic, and below basic scale for this assignment (the subject matter of which admittedly was overly-difficult, although, the task of writing a position paper was not.)

Have you determined your standards yet and the approximate percentage of students falling within each category? Don't read on until you have.

Now where would you predict the commonwealth of Pennsylvania would set their standards? What percentage of students would be advanced? What percentage would be proficient? Basic? Below basic.

Last April, 11th graders took Pennsylvania's writing exam. Here is how the SLA students fared:

Advanced: 28.4%
Proficient: 71.6%
Basic: 0%
Below Basic: 0%

The 2009 PSSA Writing School Level Proficiency Results, p. 266.

Your eyesight isn't failing you. 100% of SLA 11th graders were proficient or above in Pennsylvania's writing assessment.

Bear in mind that Pennsylvania falls out somewhere in the middle of the states as far as where the PSSA exam falls out relative to the NAEP in Reading and Math. See Figures 2 and 3. Sadly, 11th graders don't take the NAEP writing exam. Only 8th graders do. 36% of 8th graders were proficient on the NAEP writing assessment.

Sherman Dorn is right to point out that the NAEP cut scores have been arbitrarily set. However, whenever I look at actual test NAEP questions or how students perform on state tests which relative to NAEP are low, it's hard to come to a conclusion that arbitrary necessarily means too high. If anyuthing it's just the opposite.

Update: Some more perspective. Here's the breakdown of SLA's 11th graders based on the writing test statistics: 36.2% are white, 49.1% are black, 15.3% are Asian or Hispanic, and 30.1% are economically disadvantaged. Also, students need to apply and be accepted to SLA. Here is the admission criteria:

Criteria: Admission to SLA is based on a combination of a student interview at the school with a presentation of completed work, strong PSSA scores, As and Bs with the possible exception of one C, teacher or counselor recommendation and good attendance and punctuality. Interested families must contact the school to set up an appointment for an interview. SLA will not initiate the interview process with families.

Just in case you thought SLA was teeming with abjectly-impoverished inner city kids with abusive parents and poor language skills who really don't want to be in school anyway.

How to teach a student to write a point that is supported by evidence

2009-10-30T21:56:00.000-04:00

The following is one way to teach a student how to write one form of a simple paragraph in which the student agrees with one of a pair of arguments presented to him in a fact pattern based on a comparison of the arguments with a source of evidence. The lesson comes from SRA's Reasoning and Writing, Level D (Lesson 82, exercise 1). The lesson is suitable for a student who can copy words at a rate of 15 words per minute and possesses basic paragraph writing skills as determined by a placement test.

The student reads the following passage:

Fran Dent wanted a raise. She told her boss why she deserved a raise. She told the boss that she worked hard, that she worked fast and accurately, and that she was always on time.

Her boss said that he didn't think she should get more money because she wasn't always on time. He said, "You're late most of the time."

She said, "I'm never late to work."

Teacher: The place where Fran worked had a time clock that showed the time everybody came in each morning. Fran and her boss decided to get the records to show how often Fran was late.

(Below the box is the student's prompt.)

Teacher:

Fran indicated that she was never late. The boss said that she was late most of the time. You'll write a paragraph that tells whose claim agrees with the time clock record. The equal box prompt show what your paragraph will say. You'll start by saying what the person who was right indicated. Then you'll tell that the time clock record supports that person's claim. Then you'll give enough facts to make it clear that one of the persons is right and the other is wrong.

The time clock record shows some of the employees. The first column shows their names. The next column shows the time they are supposed to be at work. They're all supposed to be at work at 8 a.m. If they come later than 8 a.m., they're late. The next column shows the number of days they were absent during the whole year. The last column shows the latest time they arrived during the whole year.

Some of the information in the table is relevant to the disagreement between Fran and her boss. Look over the table carefully.

Write your paragraph. Tell when she's supposed to arrive. Then give any fact that's relevant.

Here's what the student (a nine year old fourth grade student) actually wrote:

Fran indicated that she was never late for work. The time clock record supports this claim. The time clock record indicates that Fran's latest time for work was 7:56 a.m., four minutes before work.

The student would receive feedback to correct the vague wording of the last sentence. Then a good example paragraph would be read to the student:

Fran indicated that she was never late for work. The time clock record supports this claim. The record indicates that she was supposed to get to work by 8 a.m. and she was never later than 7:56 a.m.

In subsequent lessons the prompts would be faded until the student could construct a suitable paragraph for a similar type of problem.

Position Papers from SLA

2009-10-30T12:06:00.004-04:00

A position paper is a classic, basic form of argument that every high school student should know how to write well--even the 21^st century variety. Here's how a tech savvy 21^st Century student might learn how to write a position paper.

It's not rocket science, but it does take lots of practice to do well. Sadly, many high school students never learn how to write basic position papers well, if at all.

Chris Lehmann, principal of Science leadership Academy (SLA) of Philadelphia, has asked his students, mostly seniors, in his Modern Educational Theory class to draft a position paper. Chris has posted the assignment on his blog, Practical Theory, and wants you to take look at the student's position papers and to comment.

We've visited SLA before. SLA is a magnet high school which proudly sets itself out as an "inquiry-driven, project-based 21^st Century school with a 1:1 laptop program." Last time we looked at one example of a student's writing assignment, probably one of the better examples since it was picked for the Family Handbook. This time we have the writings of an entire class of (mostly) seniors.

Let me state at the outset, I'm sure Chris and SLA mean well and care about their students.

Here's the assignment.

We, at this point, looked at several different views of education, from Deborah Meier's vision of democratic education, to Robert Pirsig's "Church of Reason," to Diane Ravitch and E. D. Hirsch's views of core knowledge, to Nel Nodding's ethic of care, to President Obama's speech on the first day of school.

Now, it is your time to take your stand.

You are to write a two page position paper creating your vision of what school should be.

Your paper should consider the following points:

Clearly define your vision of school:
What is its purpose?
Why is it good for the individual?
Why is it good for socie[t]y?
What does your vision of school value? Prioritize?
Given this vision of school -- what differences would you see in the structure of school when compared to a "traditional" school?

Readers of this blog should be sufficiently familiar with the differing views on education to be able to evaluate the students' work on the merits and to determine if well supported positions have been taken on their views of what school should be.

Here is Chris' take on the student's position papers:

I'm really thrilled with much of the thoughtfulness that the kids display in the essays. It is, obviously, clear that the kids have been at SLA for years, but I don't think that's their only vision of what school can be -- which is important to me. The kids have their own thoughts, and I'm really interested to see how these visions continue to evolve.

I'm not sure I understand the purpose of this assignment. It is coming at the beginning of the course before the students should have learned much about modern educational theory. Is the important thing to actually learn and understand modern educational theory or how to write a position paper? I'm going to assume the object was to accomplish both.

According to my view of education and learning, I would not expect most students to have acquired a deep understanding of modern education theory after just a few weeks of exposure. I would expect only a superficial understanding that is closely tied to the examples (i.e., the specific pundits' opinions) the students were exposed to. And, that is exactly what we see in the students' work. This isn't meant to be a criticism of the students' work.

I made this same observation in the last SLA assignment that I reviewed. Then, my criticism was directed at SLA because SLA was overselling (and continues to oversell) these projects that supposedly "can only be completed by showing both the skills and knowledge that are deemed to be critical to master the subject and demonstrate that deep level of understanding." (2009 Family Handbook, p. 4) And, the primary assessment of student knowledge continues to be these projects:

At SLA, there may be multiple assessments – including quizzes and tests – along the way, but the primary assessment of student learning is through their projects. Id.

Last time I got pushback from Chris and Tom Hoffman. Both of their arguments basically attempted to redefine deep understanding downwardly to mean the ability to express an opinion. No doubt they'll try the same gambit again. Chris thinks the papers were thoughtful and that the kids had their own thoughts. That's not exactly a challenging standard. But, we don't need to go there this time because I would not expect most students to have a deep understanding of the subject matter yet. Time will tell if this situation improves by June.

So, let's turn to the position paper part of the assignment. A well written position paper at the high school level should follow the traditional format of introduction, body, and conclusion. At a minimum, the body should contain an explanation of why the position has been taken and should contain supporting evidence for the position. A good position paper will have a thesis and a concluding summary of the main points. The body would include the counter arguments and their rebuttals.

Chris' prompt seems at odds with the standard definition of a position paper. Chris apparently is just looking for the students' opinions (or vision) of what school should be, provided that those opinions state a purpose, the benefits to the student and to society, the values and priorities, and the difference with respect to the structure of traditional schools. And, that's largely what Chris got -- mostly opinion. As far as support for the opinion, most students provided more of their opinion and occasionally a tie-in to one of the pundit's opinions. Most of the essays go off point, some stray far off point. All the essays could use a good editor, at least one rewrite, and should be tighten-ed up considerably.

Chris calls these essays a first draft. A first draft of the students' opinions maybe, but more like a zeroth draft of a properly written academic standard position paper. I call Chris a brave man because publishing these very raw essays on the internet and then calling attention to them in your blog takes quite a bit of professional bravery since these essays are a reflection on SLA's teaching ability.

I am assuming that no teacher has reviewed and made editorial comments on these essays prior to their being publishing. The essays are full of language usage problems, grammatical mistakes, informalities, and colloquialisms. Does SLA really want the world to see the essays in this form?

Apparently so.

I must be missing something. Most of the students have formed an opinion that school should be just like SLA; but, their very own essays demonstrate that school should not be just like SLA if basic writing skills are one of the goals.

This is not an indictment of the kids or their abilities. Clearly, these kids want to learn. They have stuck it out this long, overcoming whatever adversity was in their way. No, it's an indictment of their schooling, only a part of which SLA is responsible for. If these kids are college bound, remediation is in their future.

But, what I really don't understand is that based on the demonstrated abilities of these students why are they wasting their time learning Modern Educational Theory when they should be learning basic writing and language skills? They're already getting a painful lesson of the pitfalls of some of elements of Modern Educational Theory the hard way (ironically enough, the ones they largely favor), they just won't realize it until next year.

Murray on Curriculum

2009-10-28T10:54:00.000-04:00

[I]t’s time for me to get in touch with my inner optimist. We can’t make our kids much smarter than they are naturally, but we can do a hugely better job of teaching them stuff. If you get away from the worst schools in the big cities, I think the central problem with the public schools is not poor teachers, but the curriculum teachers are given to teach, especially in elementary and middle school.

- Charles Murray

Murray goes on to tout the Core Knowledge sequence, as he did in his last book, Real Education.

I'd say the second biggest obstacle is teacher preparation and training. Teachers largely do not have the necessary skills to effectively teach the most effective curricula. They have difficulty teaching from a scripted curriculum in the absence of a considerable amount of training. Needless to say, they aren't getting this training in Ed school.

Some Clarity on NCLB

2009-10-28T09:16:00.001-04:00

Below is a lengthy quote of Judge Sutton from the recently decided School District of the City of Pontiac, et al. v. Secretary of the United States Dep’t of Educ (back-story). The opinions in the case, which deadlocked, are long and mostly concern boring legal issues of statutory construction and other procedural issues which no one, apart from lawyers, care much about. The excerpted quote, however, is a clearly written analysis of NCLB and the basic bargain it made with the states: federal funds for achieveing progress along with substantial flexibility for achiving and defining that progress. Read the whole thing, it is worth your time. (The quote starts at about page 48. I've redacted some non-relevant sections and bolded the important bits.):

[T]he No Child Left Behind Act clearly requires the States (and school districts) to comply with its requirements, whether doing so requires the expenditure of state and local funds or not. A contrary interpretation is implausible and fails to account for, and effectively eviscerates, numerous components of the Act.

The basic bargain underlying the Act works like this. On the federal side, Congress offers to allocate substantial funds to the States on an annual basis—nearly $14 billion in 2008 for Title I, Part A, a 60% increase in relevant federal funding since 2001—exercising relatively little oversight over how the funds are spent. On the State side, the States agree to test all of their students on a variety of subjects and to hold themselves and their schools responsible for making adequate yearly progress in the test scores of all students. In broad brush strokes, the Act thus allocates substantial federal funds to the States and school districts and gives them substantial flexibility in deciding how and where to spend the money on various educational “inputs,” but in return the schools must achieve progress in meeting certain educational “outputs” as measured by the Act’s testing benchmarks. As the Supreme Court recently explained:

NCLB marked a dramatic shift in federal educational policy. It reflects Congress’ judgment that the best way to raise the level of education nationwide is by granting state and local officials flexibility to develop and implement educational programs that address local needs, while holding them accountable for the results. NCLB implements this approach by requiring States receiving federal funds to define performance standards and to make regular assessments of progress toward the attainment of those standards. 20 U.S.C. § 6311(b)(2). NCLB conditions the continued receipt of funds on demonstrations of “adequate yearly progress.” Ibid.

Horne v. Flores, __ U. S. __, 129 S. Ct. 2579, 2601 (2009). The school districts’ position—that they can accept the federal dollars, spend them largely as they wish, yet exempt themselves from the Act’s requirements if compliance would require any local money—undoes this bargain by nullifying some provisions of the Act and undermining several others.
Accountability. Accountability is the centerpiece of the Act, and a plausible interpretation of the legislation cannot ignore that reality. Instead of focusing on how much money school districts spend on each child or “dictating funding levels,” the Act “focuses on the demonstrated progress of students through accountability reforms.” Id. at 2603. The Act begins with a “Statement of Purpose” that drives home Congress’s interest in establishing accountable public schools: “ensuring . . . high-quality academic assessments [and] accountability systems”; “holding schools, local education agencies, and States accountable for improving the academic achievement of all students”; “improving and strengthening accountability”; and “providing . . . greater responsibility for student performance.” 20 U.S.C. §§ 6301(1), (4), (6), (7).

Flexibility. The school districts’ interpretation is inconsistent not only with the Act’s accountability requirements but also with the flexibility the Act gives States and school districts in return for increased responsibility for student achievement. As the Act’s Statement of Purpose makes clear, that is the central tradeoff of the Act: “providing greater decisionmaking authority and flexibility to schools and teachers in exchange for greater responsibility for student performance.” id. § 6301(7) (emphasis added); see also Horne, 129 S. Ct. at 2601 (the Act “reflects Congress’ judgment that the best way to raise the level of education nationwide is by granting state and local officials flexibility to develop and implement educational programs that address local needs, while holding them accountable for the results”). Unlike most spending programs, this one comes with few strings telling the States how they should comply with its conditions. Under the Act, States develop their own curricula and standards, 20 U.S.C. § 6311(b)(1), their own tests to assess whether students are meeting those standards, id. § 6311(b)(3), and their own definitions of progress under those standards, id. § 6311(b)(2)(B), so long as the progress culminates in near-universal proficiency by 2014, id. § 6311(b)(2)(F).

This flexibility extends to spending as well. As the school districts rightly acknowledge, the Act “provide[s] school districts with unprecedented new flexibility in their allocation of Title I funds.” Final Reply Br. of Pontiac Sch. Dist. at 3 (internal quotation marks omitted). Some federal funds, to be sure, must be spent in certain ways. See, e.g., 20 U.S.C. § 6303 (reserving some Title I, Part A funds for school improvement); id. § 6317(c)(1) (same); id. § 6318(a)(3)(A) (reserving some funds for parental involvement programs); id. § 6319(1) (reserving some funds for professional development). And the Act strictly confines the use of Title I funds to geographic areas with heavy concentrations of low-income students. See id. § 6313(a). But within these areas and with respect to these priority students, the Act gives States and school districts substantial flexibility in choosing how to spend the money. For instance: Section 6314 gives school districts wide discretion to consolidate funds from various sources and to focus them on certain schools in whatever ways will improve student performance there; § 6313(b) gives school districts discretion to transfer funds between schools within certain guidelines; and § 7305b allows States and school districts to transfer up to 50% of the funds allotted to other education programs to supplement their funds under Title I, Part A.

The substantial flexibility the Act gives recipients over federal funds is surpassed by the near-complete flexibility they retain over their own funds. The only limitation is that participating States cannot reduce their own spending and offset it with federal funding but must use the Act’s federal dollars to supplement, not supplant, their own. 20 U.S.C. §§ 6321, 7901. Beyond that basic requirement—a prohibition on fiscal cheating, really—the States can use their dollars however they see fit, whether for teachers or for computers or for facilities or for whatever else they think will help their students the most.

The express and unprecedented flexibility the Act gives to the States in prioritizing the spending of federal dollars—especially in Title I, Part A—cannot coexist with an interpretation of the statute that allows school districts to exempt themselves from the accountability side of the bargain whenever their spending choices do not generate the requisite achievement. Were the school districts correct, a State could use this flexibility to focus its federal and local resources almost exclusively on improving, say, teacher quality—a legitimate goal no doubt, but one that would allow the State to sidestep the Act’s mandatory assessment requirements by contending that it lacked the funds to administer them or to make progress under them. Sch. Dist. of City of Pontiac v. Sec’y of United States Dep’t of Educ., 512 F.3d 252, 284 (6th Cir. 2008) (McKeague, J. dissenting). That is not what Congress had in mind. It gave the States a clear and consequential choice: between taking the bitter (accountability) with the sweet (unprecedented flexibility in spending federal and state dollars) or leaving the money on the table.

Costs of Compliance. Not surprisingly, in view of the expansive flexibility that the Act gives States in spending federal and local funds, the Act says nothing about the bill of particulars at the heart of the school districts’ complaint: the costs of complying with the Act’s requirements. How could it be otherwise? The Acts’ spending flexibility necessarily makes it impossible to calculate or even define the costs of complying with the Act’s requirements.

The primary formula for allocating Title I, Part A grant money does not say a word about costs of compliance. See 20 U.S.C. §§ 6313(c), 6333(a), 6334(a), 6335(a)–(c), 6337. While the Act asks States to submit plans to the Secretary, id. § 6311, and asks school districts to submit plans to the States, id. § 6312, it does not require either entity to estimate the cost of compliance. Nor, in fulfilling their various reporting responsibilities under the Act, must the States or school districts estimate the costs of compliance. See, e.g., id. §§ 6311(h), 6316(a)(1)(C). If, as the Supreme Court recently explained, the Act “expressly refrains from dictating funding levels,” Horne, 129 S. Ct. at 2603, why would Congress exempt failing school districts from the accountability requirements based on inadequate “funding levels”? The school districts have no answer.

But even if Congress wished to make costs of compliance a legitimate excuse for, say, inadequate yearly progress, how would it do so? Once Congress decided to measure accountability by educational outputs (gauged by tests scores), as opposed to educational inputs (gauged by dollars), it made objective measurements of compliance costs virtually impossible. Any effort to measure these costs surely would vary from school to school, if not from student to student, and they surely would vary from year to year. The phrase “costs of compliance” has no discernible meaning in this context, as the Act leaves it to the States, no matter how little or how much funding Congress provides, to make discretionary cost choices about how to make meaningful achievement-related progress.

Take a cost estimate for adding an extra hour to the school day, for lengthening the school year or for hiring more math or reading teachers—all plausible ways to improve a school’s achievement scores. Each innovation has an estimable cost, to be sure. But that does not establish that the estimate would lead to the requisite progress. And if it did not, then what? Perhaps extending the school day by one more hour, extending the school year by one more week or hiring one more math or reading teacher would do the trick. But maybe not. What works for one school district might not work for another. What, indeed, works for one classroom might not work for the classroom next door, given the correlation between great teachers and great teaching—and the occasional operation of that principle in reverse. Even more discrete costs like developing and administering tests cannot be accounted for in advance given the considerable flexibility States have under the Act in implementing those requirements. Within certain general limits, a State may develop whatever curricular standards and tests it wants. 20 U.S.C. § 6311(b). The State may use pre-existing standards that meet the Act’s requirements, id. § 6311(b)(1)(F), or it may create new ones.

In their complaint, to use one example, the school districts say that Brandon Town School District “estimates that . . . it needed to spend $390,000 more than it received in NCLB Title I funding to ensure that the school makes [adequate yearly progress].” Compl. ¶ 65. The school district may be right, and we have no license to say that it is not at this Rule 12(b)(6) stage of the case. The issue, however, is not whether the school districts can fairly say that compliance with “adequate yearly progress” requires more federal dollars than the Secretary has allocated to them. It is whether a State could tenably think that the Act excuses non-compliance whenever a school district maintains that it has insufficient resources to make the required progress. Surely every school district could do more with more money. And if that is the case, every failing school district could do more with more federal money—and maybe enough to make adequate yearly progress. It is hard to imagine when—or, for that matter, why—a failing school would ever concede that it was getting sufficient federal funds to make such progress.

“Reflecting a growing consensus in education research that increased funding alone does not improve student achievement,” the Act moves from a dollars-and-cents approach to education policy to a results-based approach that allows local schools to use substantial additional federal dollars as they see fit in tackling local educational challenges in return for meeting improvement benchmarks. Horne, 129 S. Ct. at 2603 & n.17. The Act, in short, rejects a money-over-all approach to education policy, making it implausible that the heartland accountability measures of the law could be excused whenever schools, exercising their flexibility over how to spend federal and local dollars, decided they cost too much.

* * * * *

Depending on whom you ask, the No Left Child Behind Act might be described in many ways: bold, ground-breaking, noble, naïve, oppressive, all of the above and more. But one thing it is not is ambiguous, at least when it comes to the central tradeoff presented to the States: accepting flexibility to spend significant federal funds in return for (largely) unforgiving responsibility to make progress in using them. The theme appears in one way or another in virtually every one of the Statements of Purpose of the Act, and it comes across loud and clear in the remaining 674 pages of legislation.

That said, I have considerable sympathy for the school districts, many of whom may well be unable to satisfy the Act’s requirements in the absence of more funding and thus may face the risk of receiving still less funding in the future. Yet two Presidents of different parties have embraced the objectives of the Act and committed themselves to making it work. So have a remarkably diverse group of legislators. If adjustments should be made, there is good reason to think they will be. But, for now, it is hard to say that the judiciary will advance matters by taking the teeth out of the hallmark features of the Act. It is the political branches, not the judiciary, that must make any changes, because the Act’s requirements are clear, making them enforceable upon participating States and their school districts.

Today's Quote

2009-10-25T16:38:00.000-04:00

Why the belief that SES is causal is so deep and wide is perplexing and astounding. The only explanation I can come up with is that it lets publishers, professors and other "authorities", who ARE causally responsible, off the hook.

- Dick Schutz

A Good Example of Why Education Professors Shouldn't Blog

2009-10-25T11:32:00.000-04:00

Education Optimist, Sara Goldrick-Rab, must not get embarrassed very easily judging by this post criticizing a mostly dopey Kristof column on education and poverty:

Social science researchers across the nation are scratching their heads. Where in the world did Kristof get this one? For decades, solid analyses have demonstrated that while aspects of schooling can be important in improving student outcomes and alleviating the effects of poverty, the effects of factors schools cannot and do not control are much greater (for a place to start, read Doug Downey's work). Kristof emphasizes teachers and improving teacher quality by taking on the teachers' unions because he reads the data to mean that "research has underscored that what matters most in education - more than class size or spending or anything - is access to good teachers." Simply put, wrong. Access to good teachers is the most important factor affecting student achievement that is under schools' control (or as many put it, the most important school-level factor). What matters most in educational outcomes is the poverty felt by students' families. And to my knowledge, no study has ever rigorously compared the effectiveness of interventions based on cash transfers, housing subsidies, and teacher quality improvement-- what's needed to reach the kind of conclusion with which Kristof drives his argument. At the same time, a simple glance at the relative effects of programs like Moving to Opportunity, New Hope, etc which target poverty itself rather than how adults interact with children from poverty (the aim of improving teacher quality), should convince anyone than his target is misplaced.

(emphasis added)

That is one densely packed paragraph of bad reasoning. One more poorly reasoned sentence and it might have collapsed upon itself into a educational black hole, if you will. Fortunately the following hasty call for censorship, another Goldrick-Rab staple, was placed in the next paragraph.

Experts who think daily (Ed -- how about the ones that only think fortnightly?) about how to end poverty could, and undoubtedly will, inform the next steps taken by Democrats. Dems should listen to them, and not to Kristof.

First of all, there are few if any solid analyses of the effects of poverty on educational outcomes. I don't think there is any scientifically sound research upon which anyone could draw the causal conclusion that alleviating poverty has educationally significant effects on student outcomes. But why don't we take a quick glance at the two pseudo-research studies Goldrick-Rab cites:

The Moving to Opportunity (MTO) for Fair Housing Demonstration Program interim report found:

MTO had no detectable effects on the math and reading achievement of children.

OK. Let's move on to the New Hope Project:

One of the most striking findings from the earlier evaluation reports was New Hope’s positive effects on children’s academic achievement at the two-year mark, in the form of increased teacher-rated academic skills, and at the five-year mark, in the form of higher standardized reading test scores (these tests were not administered at Year 2) and higher parent-reported grades in reading. However, these effects did not persist to Year 8, at least for the full child sample, although there were continued small effects on reading test performance for boys. No effects on math test performance were found. Overall, there was a tendency for impacts to be greater for boys than for girls. (emphasis added)

(See p. 29 and Table 5)

Do you remember the scene in the movie My Cousin Vinny where Vinny's girlfriend is looking at all the bad pictures his girlfriend has taken to help him win the lawsuit against his cousin and his friend that he's trying to win?

Okay, you're helping. We'll use your pictures. Ah! These *are* gonna be - you know, I'm sorry, these are going to be a help. I should have looked at these pictures before. I like this, uh, this is our first hotel room, right? That'll intimidate Trotter. Here's one of me from behind. And I didn't think I could feel worse than I did a couple of seconds ago. Thank you. Ah, here's a good one of the tire marks. Could we get any farther away? Where'd you shoot this, from up in a tree? What's this over here? It's dog shit. Dog shit! That's great! Dog shit, what a clue! Why didn't I think of that? Here's one of me reading. Terrific. I should've asked you along time ago for these pictures. Holy shit, you got it, honey! You did it! The case cracker, me in the shower! Ha ha! I love this! That's it!

The MTO and New Hope studies are the case crackers of poverty interventions on education outcomes.

Both studies show what most studies typically show for poverty interventions on education outcomes: small or undetectable effects that tend not to persist past adolescence.

And, here we have Goldrick-Rab citing them as conclusive proof of just the opposite. Simply amazing. The woman has no shame. Where's Bracey's rotten apple award when you need it most?

Good Night, Sweet Hack

2009-10-25T09:34:00.000-04:00

Education Gadlfy, Grald Bracey, died this week. He had a sharp analytic ability. It is sad that he only applied it to refute some of the shoddy evidence, like international testing comparisons, against the things he believed in. For all the other shoddy evidence supporting the things he believed in, like poverty/school outcome research and whole language research, he consistently failed to use his sharp analytic abilities. This curious dichotomy and his penchant for cherry picking evidence permitted him to be an apologist for America's public school system. It takes quite a bit of cognitive dissonance to be one of those and Jerry was a full-throated one. He deserved but never received one of his own bad apple awards.

Actually, That's Not What the "Research" Shows Either

2009-10-22T12:11:00.001-04:00

In her third post of her new blog, The Educated Reporter, Linda Perlstein makes an (all-too-common) error that reporters should not be making, especially reporters claiming to be educated.

Perlstein starts off well by criticizing the inane trope President Obama repeated about "teacher effectiveness" in a recent speech.

In his education speech to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in March, President Obama said, “From the moment students enter a school, the most important factor in their success is not the color of their skin or the income of their parents. It’s the person standing at the front of the classroom.”

To put it bluntly: “He’s wrong.”

Indeed. First of all, the research on this issue isn't really research in the conventional sense that there are properly conducted controlled studies on point. There aren't. The "research" is merely correlational studies which does not rise to the level of real scientific research. At best, these studies might suggest profitable future avenues to pursue for conducting real scientific research.

Furthermore, these correlational studies are on teacher effectiveness, not "the person standing at the front of the classroom." There are a lot of variables tied up in the term "teacher effectiveness": the teacher, the pedagogy, the curriculum, the classroom environment, and the like. Only some of these variables are under the control of the person standing in front of the classroom, that is, the teacher. Moreover, the correlational studies are incapable of teasing out which variable(s) is responsible for correlation with student outcomes, in any event.

Nonetheless, this trope gets trotted out all the time in the dopier quarters of the edusphere. And, Perslstein is right to jump on it.

Perlstein, however, steps in it when she tries to state what the research actually shows:

Of the various factors inside school, teacher quality has had more effect on student scores than any other that has been measured. (emphasis in original)

To put it bluntly: “She’s wrong.”

First, to the extent that the studies are correlational in nature, they are incapable of showing that a variable, in this case teacher effectiveness, had "more of an effect" on anything, including student scores. The studies only show that "teacher effectiveness" (however the study attempted to define the variable) is correlated with student scores by some small amount. Correlation is not causation.

Second, "teacher effectiveness" is not the most effective factor inside school. See here and here. I don't know how this particular trope got started, but it is amazing how often it gets uncritically trotted out by education reporters and bloggers. Look at Perlstein's conclusion:

But for now, just remember: When you read that teachers are the most important school factor, you can’t drop the “school” and pass it on.

Regardless of whether you drop the "school" caveat or not, you should not be passing it on-- because it's not accurate.

Any educated reporter commenting on education should know this.

Welcome to the edusphere, Linda.

Insurance

2009-10-14T09:43:00.000-04:00

Your spouse asks you "Will you wash the dishes tonight"?

You respond, "Sure"

Knowing you're a slacker, your spouse asks, "Promise"?

You respond, "Yes."

Is your affirmative response an example of insurance or its equivalent? Why or why not?

You certainly need to know something to determine an answer and provide a correct explanation. I don't care how finely honed your reasoning skills are, you aren't reasoning your way to an answer unless you understand that something. (Although I'm happy to entertain a counterexample, Stephen.) That something is content knowledge.

One thing you need is receptive language to understand all the words I used in the example. You also need enough expressive language to articulate an answer. That language makes up part of the content knowledge needed for a successful answer. But let's take language out of the equation and assume that humans have evolved direct mind reading abilities and are now able to directly access the thought processes of others. We are now free of the burdens of language. Language will therefore form no further part of this example. (Though, sadly, in the real world I must continue to use language to explain things to you, hopefully you won't be confused.)

Your knowledge of "insurance" (the concept, not the word) probably comes from your experiences and observations with examples (and possibly non-examples) of insurance--auto insurance, life insurance, health insurance, home and property insurance, disability insurance, insurance in the game of blackjack, an "insurance" run in baseball, and the like. Those are all imperfect examples of insurance, but you may have been able to tease out the defining features of insurance. Then you could use those defining features to determine if the above example is an example of insurance.

Your thought process is basically pattern recognition. Do you recognize the common pattern inherent in all the examples of insurance you've experienced or observed in your life? Does this new form of insurance fit the pattern?

This is a difficult problem because the defining features of insurance, assuming you can even identify them, are rather nebulous and complicated themselves. In fact, the defining features of insurance are all higher-order concepts, just like insurance is. Let me give you a hint: Insurance has four main defining features. Now, you have four patterns to wrestle with. Yikes.

The four defining features of insurance are concept knowledge. Notice how I haven't used the word "definition" so far. Knowing the definition of insurance or its four defining features, isn't going to help much. So go ahead and close down that tab your're using to google the word insurance.  And for those of you who I didn't catch in time, did the definition you located help much? Probably not. You're probably already googling one of the words in the definition that you also aren't quite sure of. So stop right there.

I don't need google to tell you the definition of insurance. But, mine is a sad story and I will make a brief digression in the hope that it serves as a cautionary tale for you.

The year was 1979. Jimmy Carter was president (shudder). Margaret Thatcher had just been elected prime minister. Rocky II was in the theaters.  A little gadget called the Walkman had just entered the market. I was in seventh grade and had just learned the definition of insurance.

And by learned I mean I was forced to memorize the definition. My seventh grade teacher (whose name I can't remember ironically) made us memorize the definition of only one word. That word was insurance.

Why insurance? I have no idea. We didn't do anything with the definition afterward. Perhaps we were being punished for something we had done. To this day I don't know. But here's one thing that has stuck with me ever since: the definition of the word insurance.

Insurance is a contract which guarantees against risk or loss.

It's seared into my brain much like Senator John Kerry's trip to Cambodia.
But, I still didn't understand what insurance was. You can probably figure out why.

In fact, I can give you four reasons why I didn't understand what insurance was: 1. contract, 2. guarantee, 3. risk, and 4. loss. To understand the concept of insurance I needed to understand the concept of contract, the concept of guarantee, the concept of risk, and the concept of loss. These are all higher order concepts. Insurance itself is a higher order concept -- a higher order concept whose four defining features are all higher order concepts. Yikes. Oh wait I already said that.

And as you premature googlers probably found out, even looking up the definitions for the four defining features probably makes matters worse.

So, what's the problem? The problem is that knowing all those definitions does not constitute concept knowledge. Which is not to say that these definitions aren't useful to read or learn, at least initially. But concept knowledge requires something more or something else. Think about it.

And we'll get to the that  something else in the next post. So take off the disco albums and platform shoes because we're returning to 2009.

(And, Dick, I promise we're almost at the dinosaurs.)

On Content Knowledge and Stephen Downes

2009-10-12T12:53:00.005-04:00

(Update: I've edited this post (twice) to correct some typos and clarify my argument. The substance has not changed. 3:28 pm EST)

Tracy Won't Get Her Answer.

At least not from Stephen.

Stephen has taken his ball and gone home.

Dick was right. I shouldn't have bothered.

Sad.

Here's the problem as I see it. (And if you are familiar with the problem or simply don't care to read my explanation, just skip to the warning at the end of the post.)

Stephen fancies himself as an expert in this area and has a strong desire to maintain that status. This means that he can't be viewed as being wrong or mistaken, or heaven forfend admitting such, in a disagreement with a non-expert. I've understood this for quite some time. So, to the extent you get any information from Stephen it will be in the form of a disagreement. You take what you can get.

Stephen apparently takes the position that "kontent knowledge" (I've used a variant spelling because Stephen's definition of that term remains unknown) is not needed for critical reasoning, reading, learning, or whatever the issue happens to be when someone states that "content knowledge" is needed for something or other. Stephen has become a bit of a gadfly or contrarian in this regard. Stephen, apparently, also values this gadfly status.

I and many others, on the other hand, do not see how "content knowledge" (my definition isn't necessarily the same as Stephen's definition) can be foregone. To think you need something to think about. However, we also recognize that learning "content knowledge" is a long laborious process, instructional time is a scarce resource, and, to the extent "content knowledge" need not be learned, then this would provide a good opportunity to re-focus instruction elsewhere to address other student deficiencies. Thus, the issue of what constitutes content knowledge and whether it is important to teach is an important consideration.

This is why I chose to jump into the thickets with Stephen--not to prove him wrong, but to see if he was right or at least to determine if there was a misunderstanding.  (Hey, who wouldn't want to forgo the tedious learning of content knowledge. That's win-win as far as I'm concerned.) And, to the extent he was right, I would have been happy to adopt his view. And, to the extent there was a misunderstanding, I would be happy to determine where there was agreement and disagreement. And to the extent the disagreements were irrelevant to instruction and learning, then they could be safely ignored.

I tried. I failed. I tried to be nice, but it didn't matter. I bent over backwards to be clear; it didn't matter. I tried to concede any point I could to get a straight answer; it didn't matter.  I pulled in a neutral third party (Tracy) to eliminate me as the source of any contention; it didn't work. So what went wrong?

I can't be sure. But, it appears that Stephen has gotten himself very far down a path based on a mistake or a misunderstanding (I'm being charitable here because other less charitable alternatives exist) and cannot rectify the situation. Because rectifying the situation might seem to indicate that Stephen has made a mistake or has misunderstood and by golly Stephen Downes does not make mistakes or misunderstands anything ever. (Stephen, if it'll make you feel better, just blame it on me and my poor communication skills.)

In a nutshell, Stephen has built an elaborate house of cards on a bad foundation. For whatever the reason, Stephen believes that when anyone (other than he) discusses "content knowledge" the term must include:

1) a fact, a verbal association, or language (For example, "content knowledge" of the concept of the color red must include a verbal association to the word "red" (and perhaps a formal definition of the word "red")) along with

2) an association to the concept (i.e., color the eye perceives) whose boundaries are defined by the many examples (of the color red) that a person has observed or experienced.

That is the functional definition he has proceeded under (as best I can tell). That is the foundation of his argument. It's also wrong. I should know what my own view is and it is not how Stephen characterizes it. And, I'm sure if you polled almost everyone he's ever disagreed with on this issue, they'd tell you the same thing. His foundation is bad (for whatever reason) and I think he knows it.

Stephen will be glad to engage and argue with you as long you let him mischaracterize your definition of "content knowledge" (must be (1) and (2)). However, as soon as you correct him and clarify that "content knowledge" can mean only (2) he will immediately disengage (occasionally with an excuse). You can see this clearly in my last series of post when I clarified my definition at the outset as not necessarily including (1), Stephen failed to engage at all with me (except on some minor tangential point where he could express a disagreement). Instead, he engaged only with Tracy whose view he could misrepresent in his customary fashion with a very uncharitable reading of Tracy's clarification. As soon as, Tracy attempted to correct him, he disengaged. (The pretext of "contradiction" that he gave was bogus; when engaging in a productive argument you read your opponent's argument so as to maintain consistency when possible. In this case a consistent reading is possible, in fact, it is relies upon the standard usage of the words.)

This leads me to believe that Stephen does not want to explicitly agree that there is a definition of "content knowledge" that is a prerequisite to reasoning, reading, and the like (in the domain of that knowledge) upon which we might all agree. (For example, if you want to read or reason about the color red, then you need some understanding of the abstract concept of redness, not necessarily the word "red.") I suspect this is because, he believes that by agreeing to a common understanding, he'll be on a slippery slope that might undermine other arguments he favors. All I know there is a severe reluctance to engage in a serious discussion using the arguments that others make, rather than the argument Stephen wishes they made.

I have seen no indication that this condition is going to improve any time soon. And, as such, it is fruitless to to engage further with Stephen on this issue.

Warning

So, let this post be a warning to all those that come across any writing of Stephen Downes on the issue of content knowledge. His opinions are based on a mischaracterization of the arguments of his opponents. No serious person holds the views that Stephen is arguing against. He has erected the classic straw man but has disguised the nature of that straw man so it is not readily apparent to the casual reader. It is, however, apparent to the rest of us. You are wasting your time.

And, to those fellow-travellers of Stephen's who he views as a friend. I implore you to show Stephen the errors in his way. He last lost credibility on this issue and his reputation is suffering as a consequence. I have tried to engage with him productively. I have failed.  I couldn't care less about Stephen's reputation and the fact that many will view his behavior as buffoonish. But you probably do. Help him.

Tracy Hasn't Gotten a Straight Answer Yet

2009-10-10T21:18:00.000-04:00

Tracy asks:

How could we learn language without content knowledge? For example, how could a small child ask their mother for a biscuit without some awareness of what a biscuit is?

When Tracy writes "some awareness of what a biscuit is," I read this as meaning an "awareness of the concept of biscuit," rather than an "awareness of the word biscuit."

If Tracy meant the latter, I'm close to certain she would have written "without knowing the word biscuit." Moreover, does anyone seriously disagree that a small child could "ask their mother for a biscuit without knowing the word biscuit."

Also, when Tracy writes "ask their mother," I read this as expecting the child to use expressive language to put a question to his mother, rather than expressing a desire to their mother which includes expressive language and non-verbal communication.

Stephen, on the other hand, interprets the sentence to mean "how could a small child express a desire to their mother for a biscuit without knowing the word biscuit"? Yeah, that's quite the burning question we've been waiting with bated breath to have answered. It "asked" this question to my six year old daughter, she immediately responded with "you could point to it." Stephen, in contrast, broke through Google's 4000 character limit explaining his answer. An answer to a question no one really asked for or cares about.

So let's get back to Tracy's real and far more interesting question: "how could a small child ask their mother for a biscuit without some awareness of the concept of biscuit." Or, why don't we go back to an even broader question "how could a small child express the desire to their mother for a biscuit without some awareness of the concept of biscuit." This eliminates the need for facts and receptive/expressive language altogether which seems to be confusing Stephen or at least is serving as an excuse for avoiding the direct answering of Tracy's question.

Of course, I anticipated all of this which is why I clarified the issue in my post which Stephen has studiously avoided addressing.

And, while we're at it, the term "concept of biscuit" does not require an knowledge of language. Concepts are a form of domain or content knowledge.

And let's also exclude the rare situation in which a person could express a desire as the result of a habitual response or the like.

Lastly, I'm sure Tracy would still like to know the answer to her original question, if we want to stick with the same concrete example. How does one read about or think critically about biscuits without understanding the concept of biscuit.

Back to you Stephen.

(Prediction: I will regret not defining (for yet another time) what a concept is and how a concept is known.)

Tracy would like a straight answer

2009-10-08T13:25:00.003-04:00

Lightning Update: I already provided a potential answer in the comments and dredged up a similar one by Stephen.

Tracy asks:

Stephen Downes, I asked you before in a comment on one of Ken's posts if there is any evidence that could convince you that content knowledge is necessary for thinking. I suppose I was too late and you were no longer reading the thread, I'll try again here, running the risk of course that you might no longer be following the thread.

Is there any evidence that could convince you that content knowledge might be necessary for reading and critical thinking?

I pulled Tracy's comment up front because I'd also like to hear a straight answer from Stephen for this question and the best way to attract an answer from him is to write a blog post which he'll see in his feed reader. Typically, he'll be the first to comment.

Of course, Tracy is trying to thread the needle by expecting a concise, clear, and (fully) supported answer from Stephen that answers the precise question asked. Tracy expects this type of answer because that's how she would answer (I know this based on the numerous comments Tracy has left on many blogs). Though there is a slight chance will provide such an answer (just to prove me wrong), it is far more likely that he will respond in one of two ways.

He will either provide a concise answer based on at least one re-defined term of the question. In this case he'll re-define the term "content knowledge" to mean "only facts taught by rote." And, he'll provide an answer along the lines of "Facts are almost never necessary for critical reading and thinking skills." Technically, his answer is accurate based on his re-definition. The problem is that he often doesn't tell you the redefinition, leaving it implicit. It took me two years to determine that he was operating under this particular re-definition of "content knowledge."

Or, he'll provide the classic shaggy dog answer. I often get to the end of one of Stephen's lengthy blog posts only to find the conclusion doesn't necessarily follow from what's preceded it. this doesn't mean that he's necessarily wrong; all it means is that I cannot follow his argument as written. That's a failure of advocacy.(My day job entails the ability to quickly understand and analyze arguments based on technical descriptions written by experts for other experts in domains in which I am not necessarily an expert, so if anyone should be make sense of Stephen's arguments it's me.)

We actually don't need to reinvent the wheel on this issue. Stephen has already provided partial answers.

Let's start with this one.

[Y]es, you need domain knowledge to answer requests for facts within that domain.

That answer came in response to four specific questions whose answers depended on domain knowledge.

But notice the qualification: "requests for facts within that domain." It's superfluous. The questions did request a factual answer because that's the easiest and most common way of demonstrating one's knowledge. That knowledge could have been demonstrated without the use of facts. This is readily apparent in the last two questions.

1. Jones sacrificed and knocked in a run. Where are Jones and the runner?

2. When John walked out onto the street, he nictitated rapidly. Where might John have just come from?

Now imagine that the reader has been presented with four pictures or diagrams for each question. One of the pictures/diagrams is a depiction of a correct answer. The other three do not depict the correct answer. The reader is instructed to select the correct picture/diagram.

The reader can now demonstrate his knowledge without knowing any facts. However, in both cases (the fact-based answer and the picture/diagram-based answer) the reader must still be able to successfully discriminate between an example of the higher order concept "sacrificed and knocked in a run" and "nictitate" and non-examples of those domain-specific concepts. The reader doesn't even have to be able to articulate an accurate definition of those domain-specific concepts to perform a successful discrimination. (And, to make sure we're clear, I'm using the term concept to mean something that has a defining feature.)

There was no need for Stephen's qualification. The form of the answer is irrelevant to the need for the reader to possess domain-specific content knowledge when the reader is requested to discriminate between examples and non-examples (or to identify an example) of a particular piece of domain specific-knowledge. That is the underlying salient point to the argument I presented to Stephen.

I made this same point (though less elegantly) in my response to Stephen.

That these answers can be provided in the form of declarative knowledge does not detract from the premise that the [reader] must understand the underlying knowledge to activate the declarative knowledge needed to answer the question.

Stephen responded:

But what happens is not that the person had the fact, but rather, that the person created the fact out of the complex mass of previous observations and experiences, and presented it to you.

I don't disagree, although it is possible that the answerer also knew the definition or fact associated with the concept needed to perform the discrimination/identification which underlies the answer. And as far as that "complex mass of previous observations and experiences" goes, that's domain or content knowledge. The reader, to use Stephen's words, must be able to use that "complex mass of previous observations and experiences" to perform the underlying discrimination/identification needed to answer the questions presented. Of course, you might not have caught that since it was buried in a comment trying to refute my argument. Compounding the confusion is that these accurate statements are tangled up with inaccurate ones, like this one:

I've said on numerous oc[c]asions, simply responding to a demand for some fact does not constitute reasoning. These questions may resemble high school tests - but they do not resemble inference or reasoning.

As I explained above, responding to a request for a fact (such as in a high school test) often does require reasoning. Specifically, it requires simple deductive reasoning, something all preschoolers possess. For example, in the reader's "complex mass of previous observations and experiences" he knows a general idea (concept, rule/proposition, routine), he uses the general idea to examine an unknown potential example using the information contained within the general idea, “decides” whether the new example fits within the boundaries defined by the "complex mass of previous observations and experiences," and “treats” the example accordingly by indicating an answer.

That seems to resemble reasoning to me even when the end-product of the process results in a bubbled in (c). But, apparently, not to Stephen, so I provide a clearer example that required both content knowledge and reasoning. Stephen responded by chiding me for repeating myself and then gets all cryptic on me.

When you represent 'knowledge' as 'answering questions' you get a trivial, stunted version of knowledge.

He leaves this unexplained. It might be profound. Or simplistic. But, certainly it demands an explanation.

So, like Tracy, I'm interested in getting a straight answer to Tracy's question, or better yet, a more precise question:

When is domain-specific content knowledge (i.e., "complex mass of previous observations and experiences") not needed for evaluating a proposition made in that domain once the proposition has been filtered for trustworthiness (i.e., derived from evidence not opinion; author/speaker is qualified, trustworthy, and not biased bereft of logical fallacies and faulty arguments)?

Then perhaps we can get on to the more interesting questions related to learning and teaching.

(Commenters feel free to further clarify my question for Stephen.)

What would you like it to say?

2009-10-07T18:11:00.001-04:00

My first grade daughter, whose class is learning how to read this year, brought home a "helpful" faq sheet for parents to help guide their child along the path to literacy.

One of the faqs asked "what should you do when your child, while reading, stops and says 'what's this word'?"

According to the faq I'm supposed to say "What would you like it to say?"

I thought to myself how fortunate my school was to be primarily educating the children of academics and professionals and, as such, able to afford to be dispensing such bad advice. Worse still, the dispensation of this bad advice comes after a year of kindergarten in which the school squandered the opportunity to begin formal reading instruction.

It's a guideline like this that confirms the suspicion that many educators charged with the teaching of reading do not understand the nature of reading. Despite ample evidence to the contrary, many educators continue to believe that reading is just a matter of making sense of text. The decoding of text is just a matter of guessing a word's meaning based on contextual clues.

This is also the primary reason why I taught my children how to read well in advance of when formal reading instruction would begin in their school.

Reading these guidelines is like going to the doctor's office with the flu and the doctor exclaiming that what you need is a good bleeding to get your humors back in balance. They do not inspire confidence in the profession.

My daughter is still learning how to read, but is reading well enough that she can tackle children's books whose text is not so carefully controlled for decodability. As a result, she now occasionally comes to a word that she cannot read and that she has not necessarily been taught how to decode.

Many of these words are in her oral vocabulary. She knows the word. She knows what the word means. Sometimes she even has an idea of the type of word that fits in the sentence based on the context. Yet she cannot decode the word. Decoding is the impediment to making meaning of the text, not the other way around.

My fourth grade son who is a skilled decoder will also occasionally come to a word that he cannot read. but, his problem is the opposite of my daughter's. He often can decode the unknown word correctly, but the word is not yet in his oral vocabulary. He doesn't know the meaning of the word yet. Sometimes he is able to infer the word's meaning from the context. Other times not and he has to resort to the dictionary.

Inferring the meaning of words from context is what skilled readers do. (I believe that eye tracking research bears this out, Dick must know.) And, I have no doubt that words can be identified by unskilled decoders based on context clues, but this is a more cognitively demanding task--one with no commensurate benefits for doing it the hard way. Yet educators seem hell bent on teaching reading the hard way practically ensuring that more kids will struggle learning how to decode and causing them to read less and fail to acquire all the knowledge that is primarily learned by reading.

I'm not overly fond of characterizing children as customers of education, but I'll tell you as customers they are getting the short end of the stick. Reading is not taught this way because it benefits the children, it's taught this way because that's how many educators want to teach. Their interests are paramount, not the students'.

I gauge the seriousness of any education reform by how well the reform addresses this issue. Often it does not which is why most educational reforms fail.

Acquiring Knowledge

2009-10-05T15:27:00.001-04:00

The Great Pondiscio has a good example of how your general reasoning ability gets short-circuited when you lack needed content knowledge (knowledge not merely facts (see the comments)).

“After failing to move a runner past first base for the entire game, the Giants sent Davis to the plate with the potential tying and winning runs in scoring position. Unfortunately, he hit into a 6-4-3 double play to end the game.”
How many outs were there when Davis came to bat?
To whom did he hit the ball?
Describe the kind ball he hit (pop up? Line drive? etc.)?
What was the final score of the game?
How many runners were on base?

Being able to answer each of these questions requires a few things.  You need to be able to decode English text. You need to have some basic general reasoning ability (mostly deductive reasoning). You need to know the relevant baseball content knowledge. And, you need know some declarative facts about baseball to answer some of the questions. (There's probably lots of other basic stuff (like basic math skills) you need to know as well, but I'm going to ignore those for simplicity sake.)

Notice how there isn't any baseball-specific reasoning ability needed to answer these questions. There's a good reason for this: there is no such thing as baseball-specific reasoning ability.  Rather, the kind of general reasoning ability needed to solve these questions, as well as the vast majority of questions most people will encounter in their lifetimes, is well within the ken of a preschooler.

Now, don't get me wrong, sometimes more advanced forms of reasoning (such as formal logic reasoning) are required to analyze a problem and those more advanced forms of reasoning should be learned because they are occasionally needed. However, those advanced forms of reasoning are hardly 21st Century variety as some would have you believe.

So where do the 21st Century skills come into play?

They answer is simple. They mostly come into play when you lack the requisite baseball background knowledge because the first place you are likely to turn to in your quest to acquire missing knowledge is the Internet. You'll google, twitter, blog, and facebook your way to an answer. And, when those sources are lacking, you'll fall back on your pre-21st Century knowledge acquisition tools.

But, let's step back a second and discuss how knowledge is acquired generally.
First, go read my eponymous post on this topic from back in April so you'll know what I'm talking about.

Now, think about how you acquired your baseball knowledge. If you're like me, you probably acquired your baseball knowledge using most, if not all, of the ways I set forth in the post. For example, I played little league and softball (and many other baseball-like sports (wiffleball, stick ball, handball, halfball, baseball videogames)) which predominantly involves learning many rule relations, procedures and underlying facts inherent in the game.   I also watched many baseball games (and listened to the announcer commentary) and read many articles about baseball and baseball games. This tends to be fact-heavy learning and involves inductive learning.

For example, I learned the meaning of the unknown concept of "in scoring position" by observing runners and listening to the announcer say the fact "in scoring position." Eventually, I induced that this term means a runner on second or third base, but didn't include a runner on first base or at home plate. I could have learned the concept much easier by being told the relevant fact up front.

It's hard to say I inured any benefit from learning this concept the long and laborious way through induction and lots of examples, instead of the simple way of being told the fact directly and memorizing it. In both cases there would have been at least one, and most likely many other, connection stored somehow in my brain linking fact/concept "scoring position (baseball)" and the fact/concept "runner(s) on second and/or third base." (Similarly, I just selected and used the word "inure" in this paragraph without being able to verbalize the precise definition of the word (before I Googled it to confirm), but being sufficiently familiar with the word and knowing it was appropriate in the context of the sentence with imperfect knowledge. Who knows how I learned the connection of the word "inure" and the connection with the vague concept "to gain an advantage from"?) There are many ways to skin a cat. However some ways are more efficient than others. Efficiency is the main difference between constructivist and instructivist pedagogies.

In contrast I had to Google my way to an answer for the "6-4-3 doubleplay" question, mainly because I never learned the position numbering scheme for baseball. I knew such a scheme existed, I just didn't know how exactly the positions were numbered. With this critical fact missing from my knowledge baseball I was unable to answer the question, until I acquired the knowledge by looking it up. Now I know -- at least temporarily, and can use the connection. I could have easily learned that knowledge by being more observant and thinking while watching televised baseball games. But, of course, that's more cognitively demanding, and, I choose not to engage in such a cognitively demanding task and, as a result, failed to learn the connection.

There are a few take aways from this post.

There are many ways to acquire the same bit of knowledge.

The ability to reason generally is a trivial skill that most people know how to do.

Not knowing relevant knowledge (or not knowing it sufficiently) will often inhibit (or diminish) your ability to use your general reasoning skills.

Improving your general reasoning skills often won't compensate for a lack of knowledge when that knowledge is needed.

Many 21st Century skills are generally relevant only when you lack knowledge in the first place.

I don't know why I bother ...

2009-09-30T14:19:00.001-04:00

Stephen Downes has another good post on knowledge and expertise. And, by good I mean that it serves as a good springboard to demonstrate why his understanding is off. In any event it is relevant to our ongoing discussion of the topic (and in which Stephen has shown up in the comments to serve as the foil once again).

Stephen attacks Willingham for the following statement: "Prior knowledge is vital to comprehension because writers omit information." The accuracy of this statement depends on whether the reader can fill in the missing "knowledge" (not facts). Stephen pounces on an offhand example in which he is able to fill in the missing knowledge with a logical deduction. Fair enough, but this doesn't prove the general case.

In the comments, I pose the following test to show the importance of content knowledge.

Here are four questions that are domain specific. Each is readily answerable with minimal knowledge in the specific domain and some general reasoning skills. However, let's assume you lack the required content knowledge and a means for acquiring that knowledge. Use your (superior) general reasoning skills to derive the same answer an expert would give for each.

The total enthalpy of any non-isolated thermodynamic system tends to decrease over time, approaching a minimum value. Why?
As the location of the subatomic particle becomes more precise, what would you infer about its momentum?
Jones sacrificed and knocked in a run. Where is Jones and the runner?
When John walked out onto the street, he nictitated rapidly. Where might John have just come from?

Stephen, responds with the folowing admission: "yes, you need domain knowledge to answer requests for facts within that domain. So what?"

Notice the crafty substitution of "facts" for "knowledge" -- A lovely misleading rhetorical flourish which I coincidently just noted:

Arguments for much more reasoning and less content (a necessary tradeoff, given the time constraints) in K-12 science begain decades ago. Eventually, the idea became a catch phrase. "Content" was redefined to function as a synonym for "facts" (or "mere facts") independent of reasoning. But defining content that way is nothing more than a rhetorical move. No honest study of science textbooks and lessons nationwide, not even from the benighted decades preceding the launch of sputnik, could conclude that just memorizable facts were required, with no reasoning. Facts were (and are) taught, and facts must be learned if any discipline is to be understoood and practiced. The rhetorical flourishes of those arguing for more scientific reasoning have affected some people's perceptions, but they have not changed the reality that, in general, science curricula have never been exclusively lists of facts to be memorized, devoid of the means by which those facts are discovered and gain acceptance in the scientific community.

And then the back and forth begins in the comments which I think is the important and relevant bit.

My argument is simple. In those domains (pretty much every subject taught in school) in which a prior knowledge of content is required for understanding and using a person's general reasoning ability within that domain, shouldn't that prior knowledge be learned/acquired in school since not learning the content precludes understanding?

The only difference between scientific reasoning and other kinds of reasoning is the content

2009-09-29T16:07:00.000-04:00

From Professor Gross' article, which I discussed in the previous post, comes another gem on the nature of scientific reasoning. What's so special about it? In short nothing but the content.

What differentiates scientific from, say, historical reasoning? Other than the content being reasoned about, I can't think of anything, so, I turn to the distinguished philosopher of science and epistemologist Susan Haack to discover that the notion of species of reasoning unique to science is unfounded. Haack writes.

Scientific inquiry is continuous with the most ordinary of everyday inquiry. There is no mode of inference, no "scientific method," exclusive to science and guaranteed to produce true, more nearly true, or more empirically adequate results ... And, as far as [science] is a method, it is what historians or detectives or investigative journalists or the rest of us do when we really want to find something out: make an informed conjecture about the possible explanationsof a puzzling phenomenon, check how it stands upto the best evidence we can get, and then use our judgment whether to accept it, more or less tentatively, or modify, refine, or replace it.
The practices of good science are distinguished by that "informed conjecture"--by a special dependence upon technology (e.g., instruments that broaden the human range of perception), and by especially strong and well-enforced rules having to do with scrutiny and testing of claims and reproducibility of results. But they are not distinguished by an array of clearly identifiable, cognitively unique forms of reasoning.

What then, is to be understood by scientific reasoning? The answer cannot be very deep because the question isn't. Scientific reasoning is using, within a framework of scientific content, certain general cognitive abilities that develop over time or can be encouraged in most learners. So, there is not much that is exclusively scientific about such reasoning other than the fact that one is thinking about scientific content. Scientific reasoning is a sibling to, if not perfectly congruent with, historical reasoning, which is the use of similar cognitive basics in the context of records and commentary on the past. Scientific reasoning is deployed with hypotheses and observations about nature. It has other siblings as well: social, artistic, and literary reasoning for example.

The Bao et al. study showed that the Chinese and American cohorts had about the same level of general reasoning ability. Yet, the American students access this ability when attempting to reasonwhithin the Physics domain because they lacked the Phsyics content knowledge.

Also, if you want to believe that the typical Chinese education is painful rote and the typical American education is overly constructivist, then you're also led to the conclusion that a rote learning is every bit as capable of developing general reasoning skills as a constructivist education (or every bit as incapable depending on whether you think the skills demonstrated were sufficient). I, however, think it's more a matter of degree between the more traditional education that the Chinese cohort received (which isn't rote, but mostly problem-solving) and the typical education of the American cohort which is a hodge podge of content-lite traditional education with an emphasis on constructivist learning activities.

So, to the extent that the Chinese cohort received more content instruction it aided their understanding within the confines of the content domain (i.e., physics) and it did not diminish their general reasoning abilities. In contrast, the increased instructional time devoted to constructivist activities not only failed to improve general reasoning abilities (as the theory goes), but also hinered their ability to reason within a particular domain (physics) because the content of that domain was not learned. And, whatever benefits that supposedly come from constructivist learning failed to compensate for teh lack of content analysis that was forfeited by reducing the amount of content knowledge taught while pursuing those constructivist activities.

There are opportunity costs in education, as there are in every other human endeavor.

Learning Science and Everything Else

2009-09-29T11:34:00.000-04:00

Last April, Science Magazine, published a study in which researchers administered a pair of physics tests and a test of general scientific reasoning to new freshman engineering and science majors in America and China. Not unsurprisingly, the Chinese students performed very well on the physics tests (forces and mechanics:86% and electromagnetism: 66%) since they had received many hours of physics instruction in high school. The American students performed not so well (forces and mechanics: 49% and electromagnetism: 27%) because only about a third of American students take physics in high school, the rest learn physics concepts from general and other science courses. In contrast, both groups peformed identically on the test of general science reasoning (74%). From this the researchers concluded:

[This] finding defies conventional wisdom, which holds that teaching science facts will improve students’ reasoning ability.

Our study shows that, contrary to what many people would expect, even when students are rigorously taught the facts, they don’t necessarily develop the reasoning skills they need to succeed,” Bao said. “Because students need both knowledge and reasoning, we need to explore teaching methods that target both.”

As I indicated in this post, this is not a fair conclusion from the study:

What? This isn't the conventional wisdom. The conventional wisdom is that that learning facts in a domain will improve the ability to reason in that domain. This wasn't tested in the study. What was tested in the study, via the FCI and the BEMA, was the students' understanding in the domain (physics) which was significantly higher for the Chinese students compared to the American students. Not surprisingly, the American students didn't understand much physics since they didn't learn many physics facts and their "scientific methods" instruction failed to fill the void. Constructivists take heed.

Naturally, I got some pushback from the usual sources.

When your long commentary concludes that the investigators misinterpreted the results of their own study, I know something amiss - with your commentary.

Perhaps there was something wrong with my analysis. But if there were, there's also something wrong with biologist Paul Gross' more-detailed analysis in this month's American Educator which essentially concludes the same as I did. (HT Education Next blog)

Here, then, is an alternate view of the Bao et al. results. The Chinese students know physics. The American students don't. Now both groups face a different challenge--different enough from the standard physics problems so that the Chinese students' superior conceptual and problem-solving skills in physics provide no immediate advantage. The new challenge is to think about problems of a very simple scientific character, but in forms and subject-matter domains that neither group has encountered before. As the authors explain in their online supplementary materials, the LCSTR "measures fundamental reasoning components with simple context scenarios that do not require complex content understanding. This test design can improve the measurement of the basic reasoning abilities by reducing the possible interference from understandings of content knowledge." But if so, both cohorts will handle most of the questions on the LCSTR (or any challenge like it) the same way. The will need to think through each question from scratch--to find the best answer starting from elementary principles. That kind of thinking is slower and more error-prone (Ed: see this post for why) than the thinking available to a physics-savvy Chinese student taking the FCI or BEMA.

It's a very good article and analysis (and not just because Gross agrees with me) so you should read the whole thing.

The article is also relevant to our ongoing discussion on expertise and knowledge. Gross gets right to the heart of the current debate.

Arguments for much more reasoning and less content (a necessary tradeoff, given the time constraints) in K-12 science begain decades ago. Eventually, the idea became a catch phrase. "Content" was redefined to function as a synonym for "facts" (or "mere facts") independent of reasoning. But defining content that way is nothing more than a rhetorical move. No honest study of science textbooks and lessons nationwide, not even from the benighted decades preceding the launch of sputnik, could conclude that just memorizable facts were required, with no reasoning. Facts were (and are) taught, and facts must be learned if any discipline is to be understoood and practiced. The rhetorical flourishes of those arguing for more scientific reasoning have affected some people's perceptions, but they have not changed the reality that, in general, science curricula have never been exclusively lists of facts to be memorized, devoid of the means by which those facts are discovered and gain acceptance in the scientific community. (emphasis added)

Exactly.

Proponents of inquiry/discovery learning, 21st Century skills, more scientific reasoning are basically arguing against a strawman they've created to push their "agenda." No one is arguing for the mere memorization of facts. Simialrly, no one is arguing for the merely learning how to reason generally independent of any facts.

Everyone wants students to increase their ability to reason generally.

One side believes that this can be accomplished directly in an environment in which the learning of content is downplayed or minimized in favor of various learning activities centering around learning the scientific method, data collection techniques, formal logic, critical reasoning/reading, performing scientific experiments, and the like. Since time is limited in K-12 education, so devoting time to all these activities cuts into learning content.

The other side believes that this general reasoning ability is not something that can be taught directly but is the result of learning how to reason within a wide variety of different domains which entails learning the content inherent in each domain. Sadly, there is no shortcut to learning, no mtter how badly you'd like there to be. And, yes, some areas of the areas of learning pointed out by the 21st century learners do need to be improved; however, they need to learned independently for each domain. For example, if you want students to know about how to conduct an experiment, you're going to have to teach in in physical science, then again in biology, and again in chemistry, and yet again in physics. Yes, there will be some transference between domains, but the research tells us that the transference with be minimal. each domain has its own special considerations which are doman specific. I tried to illustrate this point in the context of critical reading in this post.

The debate is really about where the line should be drawn between how much content should be taught and what (often ignored) skills should be emphasized given the time constraints of K-12 education such that the student will be able to best build on their acquired knowledge base as they continue their learning after K-12.

That's the debate we should be having, but sadly aren't.

Knowledge

2009-09-24T18:16:00.000-04:00

In my last post on expertise and experts I indicated that an expert (one who has expertise) is broadly defined as someone who has acquired lots of knowledge in a particular domain.

So what is knowledge?

First a few preliminaries:

1. Stephen Downes has a post addressing this issue from a different angle, so you might want to check that out to see where we agree and disagree.

2. I addressed this same issue back in April so it will look familiar to some of you.

3. I've adapted this explanation from Martin Kozloff's Making Sense of What You Read and Hear, and Making Sense When You Teach.

Knowledge

Each form of knowledge represents a connection. To understand the knowledge is to understand the connection. To use the knowledge (to apply it to possible examples of it) is to apply the connection.

The forms of knowledge are:

verbal associations - facts and lists: (this one thing goes with that one thing);
concepts - sensory and higher-order: (all these things have some features in common);
rule relationships: (this set of things goes with that set of things); and
cognitive routines: (to read all of these words, or to solve all of these math problems, or to write these kinds of essays, do steps 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6)

These forms of knowledge are defined by the logical structure of the knowledge itself. The logical structure is the connections inherent in the knowledge. Learning one of the forms of knowledge means learning the inherent connection.

Let's now look at each form of knowledge. I'll provide some examples, a definition, and one way to teach the form.

1. Verbal Associations: Facts

Ex: “The U.S. Constitution was written in Philadelphia.”

For purposes of instruction a fact is a true and verifiable statement that connects one specific thing (Constitution) and another specific thing (Philadelphia).

Teach the connection.

2. Verbal Associations: Lists

Ex. 1: “The elements of sugar are carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen.”

Ex. 2: “Here is a list of facts about the U.S. Constitution. Written in Philadelphia between May and September, 1787; the draft was sent to the various states for ratification; the Constitution plus the Bill or Rights is a compromise between advocates of strong central government (Federalists) and advocates of strong state governments with a limited central government (anti-federalists); the Constitution was finally ratified in 1789.

Like with facts, these statements connect one specific thing (elements of sugar, Constitution) and a list (of other specific things).

Teach the connection(s).

3. Sensory concepts

Exs: blue, on.

The specific things (examples) of the concepts differ in many ways (size, shape), but they are connected by a common feature, such as color or position.

All of the defining features of the concept are in any example. Therefore, the concept can be shown by one example. However, a range of examples is needed for the learner to see what the common feature is and to cover the range of variations (e.g., from light to dark red).

Teach the range of examples needed for the learner to determine the common feature and the range of variations.

4. Higher-order concepts.

Exs: Democracy, society, mammal.

The specific things (examples) of the concepts are connected by a common feature or features; e.g., making societal decisions through elected representatives (representative democracy).

The defining features of higher-order concepts, however, are spread out. Therefore, you can’t simply show examples to teach a higher-order concept. You have to give a definition (that states the common, defining features) and then give examples and nonexamples to substantiate the definition.

Teach the definition of the common features and then substantiate the definition through suitable examples and non-examples.

5. Rule Relationships

These are statements that connect not specific things but whole groups of things (concepts or categories).

Categorical Propositions. Some rules or propositions state (assert, propose) how one kind of thing (concept or category) is part of or is not part of another kind of thing (concept of category). These are called categorical propositions. For example, all dogs (one kind of thing) are canines (another kind of thing). Or, No birds (one kind of thing) are reptiles (another kind of thing). or, Some bugs are delicious.

Teach the rule or proposition.
Causal or hypothetical propositions. Other rules or propositions state, assert, or propose how one kind of thing (concept or category) changes with another kind of thing (concept or category). These are called causal or hypothetical propositions. You can tell that a statement asserts a causal or hypothetical proposition because it states (or suggests) the following signals: if, if and only if, whenever, the more, the less. If one thing happens then another thing (happens, comes into being, changes, increases, happens more often, decreases).

The “thing” (variable, condition, antecedent event) that is the alleged cause of something else can work (have an effect) in different ways. For example, the alleged cause might be considered a necessary condition for something else to happen or change. (“If X does not happen, then Y will not happen.” Or, “If and only if X happens will Y happen.”) Or, the alleged cause might be considered a sufficient condition for something else to happen. (“Whenever X happens, Y will happen.”)

For instance, Whenever temperature increases (one kind of thing), pressure increases (another kind of thing). [This proposition suggests that a rise in temperature is a sufficient condition (by itself) to cause an increase in pressure.] Or, If and only if there is sufficient oxygen, fuel, and heat (one category of thing) will there be ignition (another category of thing. [This proposition suggests that sufficient oxygen, fuel, and heat are a necessary condition for ignition.]

Note: When you have identified all of the necessary conditions, you now have a set of variables that are a sufficient condition. Think of a causal model of fire, a cold, and a revolution.

Teach the rule or proposition.

6. Cognitive Routines

Routines are sequences of steps that usually must be done in a certain order. Solving math problems, sounding out words, and stating a theory or making a logical argument (each proposition in the theory or argument is like a step that leads to a conclusion).

Teach the routine.

Routines are often thought of as "skills."

NB: A routine is a connection of a number of events, such as steps in solving a problem or a listing of events leading up to a war. There are different arrangements of steps or events in routines. You want students to see what these arrangements are.

Sequence in one direction. A leads to B leads to C leads to D. Ex.: sounding out words, solving math problems.
Sequence with feedback loops. A leads to B and the change in B produces a (reciprocal) change in A which produces more change in B until some limit is reached. Exs.: Outbreak of war, onset of illness, falling in love, divorce, getting porky and out of shape.
Stages or phrases. A sequence of events or steps can be seen as a process divided into stages in a process.

Ex1: Load rifle: steps a—b—c--d; Fire rifle: steps e—f—g; Clear rifle: steps h—i; Clean rifle: steps j—k, etc.

Ex2: In history: If you examine enough (examples of) genocidal movements, you notice that one group has some features (e.g., property, social status) that produces envy in another group, or does something that threatens another group (e.g., resists power). This might be seen as the background (first) phase. Then (phase 2) the genocidal group demonizes the first group with racial slurs and propaganda. Then (phase 3) the genocidal group begins to mistreat the victim group; e.g., attacks, job loss, confiscating weapons, special (degrading) clothing. If (phase 4, escalation) the victim group fights back, this provokes worse treatment. If the victim group submits, it furthers the genocidal group’s perception of the victim as degraded. The genocidal group then (phase 5) creates an organization for killing or transporting. Then the killing begins (phase 6).
Logical argument. A text might be arranged as a logical argument. There are two sorts of logical arguments:

a. Inductive. Facts are presented. Then the facts are shown to lead to a general idea, such as a conclusion. For example, examine five examples of genocide and induce (figure out) the common phases and the activities in each phase.

b. Deductive. Or, text may be arranged so that it presents a deductive argument. It begins with a general idea, such as a rule--first premise.

“If X happens, then Y must happen.”

It then presents facts relevant to the first premise—evidence or second premise.

“X happened.”

It then draws a conclusion.

“Therefore, Y must happen.”

So having knowledge means more than merely knowing lots of facts or having certain skills, 21st centurey ones or otherwise. There is much more to it than that.

But, certainly, if you want students to have expertise in certain domains to gain the advantages that expertise conveys then these students will possess knowledge in these domains. I don't think there's any way around that. But, if you think there is, be sure to let me know.

Next we'll discuss Dinosaurs.