This Is Your Brain

As promised, I'm going to summarize Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching. I'll pull in other sources of cognitive science and focus on how it all relates to education.

In order to do, I'll break it down into at least three parts: our brain, how we learn and store information, and, finally, why constructivism doesn't work.

In this first installment we'll discuss how the human memory process works.

Human memory has three areas:

1. Sensory memory
2. working or short term memory
3. long term memory

For purposes of education, we are concerned with working memory and long term memory. Sensory memory is basically just a temporary buffer for receiving sensory stimulus. Here's a pretty picture to get us started.

Long Term Memory (LTM)

Your long term memory is the relatively permanent memory store in which you hold information even when you are no longer attending to it. For computer geeks, think of LTM as your computer hard drive--a virtually unlimited hard drive that is central to all our cognitive processes. Information stored in LTM can be stored up to a life time in duration depending on how well the information is learned.

This brings us to an important point: The object of instruction is to alter LTM. If nothing has been altered in LTM, then nothing has been learned.

Experts are skillful in an area (domain) because their LTM contains a huge knowledge base of information concerning the area (domain). This knowledge base permits experts to quickly recognize the characteristics of a given situation and serves as a basis for them to determine what to do and when to do it. For example, expert problem solvers derive their skill by drawing on the extensive experience stored in their LTM and then quickly selecting and applying the best procedures for solving problems.

LTM is the central dominant structure of human cognition. Everything we see, hear, and think about is critically dependent and influenced by our LTM.

A common idea is that everything we have ever experienced is stored in LTM, but this is unlikely to be so. Much of what we experience is never attended to, or not attended to beyond a few brief moments, and probably does not result in activation of the LTM storage process.

This brings us to our next important area of memory.

Working Memory (WM)

Working memory is the area or space where cognitive processing occurs. We are only conscious of the information currently being processed in WM and we are oblivious to all the information stored in LTM. WM is the part of your mind where thought happens. Think of WM as your computer's RAM.

When processing new information, information not stored in LTM, WM is extremely limited in both capacity and duration.

Almost all information stored in WM and not practiced (or rehearsed) is lost within 18-30 seconds.

The capacity of WM is likewise limited to only a very small number of elements (or "chunks") of information. On average, the capacity of WM is limited to 7 plus or minus 2 chunks of information.

For example:

The string of random characters "eah ct tn ihe ttha" might represent 14 chunks of information and is probably beyond the capacity of the average person to retain in working memory without first memorizing it (placing it in LTM).

The string of random words comprising those characters "cat hat the the in" might represent 5 chunks of information to the average English speaking person and could most likely be retained in working memory, though we are starting to approach full capacity.

However, rearranging the same words into "the cat in the hat" might represent a single chunk of information to a person familiar with the Dr. Seuss canon. Such a person might be able to retain seven Seuss titles in WM greatly increasing his ability to process information over the previous two persons.

The limitations on WM only apply to new information that hasn't been stored in LTM. Information can be brought back and forth between LTM to WM as needed, so the time limits of WM become irrelevant. Another way of saying this is that information or processes that are automatic (well learned information stored in LTM) take up very little space in WM.

Information that enters WM fades away, or decays as soon as it is no longer attended to. (The duration of 18-30 seconds assumes that the information is not being actively rehearsed.) Information that is being actively attended to is represented by a pattern of neural activity in the brain. With sufficient rehearsal or practice, the information may eventually become stored in LTM. But information that is not more permanently stored is simply lost shortly after attention is directed elsewhere.

Because WM presents severe limits on the amount of information that can be held in mind simultaneously and on the duration for which it lasts once attention is withdrawn from it, WM is often described as the bottleneck of the human information processing system.

That's all we need to know about our brain for purposes of understanding education. In my next installment we'll discuss how we get information into LTM, how information is stored in LTM, the stages of knowledge, and burdens placed on WM when engaging in problem solving activities. Then, we'll be able to discuss why constructivism and other forms of discovery learning not only ignore how the brain works and how we learn, but completely goes against our knowledge of the brain and how it works.

Go to Part II.

Former Staffer Rips Washington Post's Coverage of Reading First Coverage

Robert W. Sweet, Jr, former congressional staff member for the Reading First law, rips the Washington Post a new a-hole for their coverage of the Reading First "scandal."

Here's a letter to the Washington Post's ombudsman pointing out fifteen errors in the WP article. A more detailed analysis of each point is provided here.

This is just as much an indictment of the flimsy OIG report as it is of the WP's shoddy reporting. The OIG report just does not stand up to close scrutiny. For example, the OIG report implied that DoE showed favoritism to the publisher of DI programs, SRA McGraw-Hill, yet the initial complaint filed by Success For All, indicated that both SfA and DI were being unfairly excluded from Reading First funding:

The IG report also referred to what might be called favoritism toward Reading Mastery. Reading Mastery has a strong experimental peer-reviewed research base demonstrating its efficacy, as described below, with wording taken from the complaint from the Success for All Foundation to the IG that triggered the IG investigation:

"“In particular, two programs have suffered under Reading First: Our own non-profit Success for All program and Direct Instruction."… These are by far the most extensively and successfully evaluated of all reading programs"…. A 2003 article in the Review of Educational Research by Borman, Hewes, Overman, & Brown identified 40 experimental-control studies of Direct Instruction, of which 38 were third party (also see Adams & Engelmann, 1996). Many of these studies of both programs were published in the most selective journals in education. Published reviews by Herman (1999), Traub (1999), and others have also concluded that Success for All and Direct Instruction have solid, replicated evidence of effectiveness."

And here's the funny part (not funny "ha ha" either). The OIG report also alleges that DoE improperly discriminated against a whole language program from Wright Group, but Wright Group is also owned by SRA McGraw-Hill:

However, the same vendor, SRA/McGraw Hill, publishes Reading Mastery (a program with a high rating on sbrr) and The Wright Group program (the program with a low rating on sbrr). If SRA/McGraw Hill were a favored vendor, The Wright Group program would have been approved.

A textbook example of trying to have your cake and eat it too.

The OIG report is replete with this kind of internal logical inconsistencies. At best, the OIG conducted a superficial investigation and proceeded to cobble together its report with little regard to the underlying Reading First law. It performed a very superficial analysis on a very complex situation and managed to get most of it wrong. Not unsurprisingly, our dopey journalists, like those at the Washington Post, failed to get the story right too.

As they say, read the whole thing.

The Folly of Constructivism Unmasked

Update (10/17): I've begun summarizing the article here so you don't have to slog through it. I'm also adding what we know about cog sci as it pertrains to how we learn that wasn't explained in the article. That's double bang for the buck.

This is great stuff:

Evidence for the superiority of guided instruction is explained in the context of our knowledge of human cognitive architecture, expert–novice differences, and cognitive load. Although unguided or minimally guided instructional approaches are very popular and intuitively appealing, the point is made that these approaches ignore both the structures that constitute human cognitive architecture and evidence from empirical studies over the past half-century that consistently indicate that minimally guided instruction is less effective and less efficient than instructional approaches that place a strong emphasis on guidance of the student learning process. The advantage of guidance begins to recede only when learners have sufficiently high prior knowledge to provide “internal” guidance. Recent developments in instructional research and instructional designmodels that support guidance during instruction are briefly described.

Wait there is more:

None of the preceding arguments and theorizing would be important if there was a clear body of research using controlled experiments indicating that unguided or minimally guided instruction was more effective than guided instruction. In fact, precisely as one might expect from our knowledge of human cognition and the distinctions between learning and practicing a discipline, the reverse is true. Controlled experiments almost uniformly indicate that when dealing with novel information, learners should be explicitly shown what to do and how to do it.

Anumber of reviews of empirical studies have established a solid research-based case against the use of instruction with minimal guidance. Although an extensive review of those studies is outside the scope of this article, Mayer (2004) recently reviewed evidence from studies conducted from 1950 to the late 1980s comparing pure discovery learning, defined as unguided, problem-based instruction, with guided forms of instruction. He suggested that in each decade since the mid-1950s, when empirical studies provided solid evidence that the then popular unguided approach did notwork, a similar approach popped up under a different name with the cycle then repeating itself. Each new set of advocates for unguided approaches seemed either unaware of or uninterested in previous evidence that unguided approaches had not been validated. This pattern produced discovery learning, which gave way to experiential learning, which gave way to problem based and inquiry learning, which now gives way to constructivist instructional techniques. Mayer (2004) concluded that the “debate about discovery has been replayed many times in education but each time, the evidence has favored a guided approach to learning” (p. 18).

From the recently puiblished Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching from EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGIST, 41(2), 75-86

I'm going to put this on the top of the list for summarizing, but in the meantime I encourage everyone to read the whole thing in raw form and see how wrong our constructivist friends really are. And to our constructivist friends, I'd like to see an honest rebuttal of the research-backed points made in this article.

My take-away so far is that constructivism isn't just a little wrong, it's a horribly misguided theory riddled with errors pertaining to how people think and learn and how our brain works. In any event, all the brutal details are laid out very clearly and concisely in this paper.

Alternate Assessments

Nary a day goes by that I am not subjected to the wringing of hands, the gnashing of teeth, and the adult tantrums of our educators over the 100% proficiency standard of NCLB.

Nevermind that we're eight years away from that threshold, the moaning has already begun in earnest. Educators are quick to throw lots of kids they don't think will be capable of ever becoming proficient under the bus. That nasty ol' NCLB is so unfair. It's an impossible standard.

Of course, what educators fail to tell you is that that 100% proficiency standard excludes up to 1% of students with significant cognitive disabilities who are permitted to take an alternate assessment under NCLB as Edweek reports ($):

Under federal rules for testing under the No Child Left Behind law, up to 1 percent of a district's or school's testing population can take alternate assessments and have their "“proficient"” or "“advanced"” scores count in the district'’s or school's calculation for showing adequate yearly progress'— the law'’s key accountability measure. According to the federal government, those assessments must meet the same technical standards as other tests given by a state under the 4 ½-year-old law.

So where did the Feds come up with this paltry 1% exclusion? Did they just make it up? No, not exactly.

The department does say that research suggests no more than 1 percent of the student population "—about 10 percent of all students with disabilities" should fall into that category.

I'm willing to bet that 1% doesn't include any kids with the bogus "learning disabilities" tag which school districts have used to throw kids they've mis-educated into the special-ed ghetto enabling them to collect government booty while simultaneously shirking their responsibility to educate.

The altenate assessment rule pre-dates NCLB. Of course, before NCLB it was routinely being ignored like many of the Fed's requirements for the money they were doling out:

First mandated with the 1997 reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, alternate assessments were, in some states, tied to the individualized education program, or IEP, of the particular student. The fact that such students were being tested at all was considered more important than the quality of the tests, and the tests were not included in accountability measures.

Now things have changed:

The No Child Left Behind law changed that, by requiring that all tests be included in accountability determinations and meet high technical standards. In December 2003, the Education Department issued regulations on the technical qualities such tests must meet in order for the results to count under the federal law.

It is bitter medicine indeed for our educators who've grown accustomed to the institutionalized failure their faddish education techniques have caused.

Today's Quote

I did it for a textbook house and they sent me a word list. That was due to the Dewey revolt in the twenties, in which they threw out phonics reading and went to a word recognition as if you’re reading a Chinese pictograph instead of blending sounds or different letters. I think killing phonics was one of the greatest causes of illiteracy in the country. Anyway they had it all worked out that a healthy child at the age of four can only learn so many words in a week. So there were two hundred and twenty-three words to use in this book. I read the list three times and I almost went out of my head. I said, "I’ll read it once more and if I can find two words that rhyme, that’ll be the title of my book." I found "cat" and "hat" and said, the title of my book will be The Cat in the Hat.

Dr. Seuss, 1981 Interview

Dissent Crushed

Doug Loon of Borderlands (first google link) has censored my criticisms of his post-modern constructivist ramblings. Apparently, I offended his delicate sensibilities by pointing out all the flaws in his thinking and the thinking of his like-minded commenters (first google link).

Instead of providing a coherent rebuttal, Doug first appeals to non-existent authority:

I think that's a good idea. Get a job in an elementary school classroom. Be the teacher for 1 year. Report back when you know something based on real classroom experience. You don'’t know what you'’re talking about, and you have no valid claim to know.

Then he goes all post-modern on me and denies the existence of truth (and I suppose beauty as well):

The difficulty here is a reality vs. perception dispute. Truth claims about objective reality can be challenged on the basis of either perceptual error or definitional disagreement. We'll get nowhere trying to resolve such questions. Any further attempts to argue or prove anything should be taken to a judge.

Then he displays his lack of understanding of what an argument really is by claiming not to have made an argument when, in fact, he has:

My post was not an argument, so much as an observation about the effects of recommendations for practice that come from outside a local context.

Then he proceeds to make another argument, and a not too well thought out one at that:

Flexibility, and responsiveness to student needs is necessary for teachers to teach students. Best practices emerge from practice, they are not imposed as a matter of policy.

Huh? Here Doug is using the word "teach" to mean something other than activity that results in students actually learning. This is his "best practice" and he's upset that taxpayers are telling him to stop doing it as a "matter of policy." Then he tries to shoot the test data messenger of his failed "best practice," but his aim is off:

The use of testing data to support an argument, and insistance on empirical proof for everything we know while simultaneously denying the validity of personal knowledge, is absurd.

See, Doug's personal knowledge trumps empirical data because Doug's personal knowledge permits him to ignore the fact that he hasn't adequately taught many students in his charge. Doug doesn't understand that the reason why we have standardizrd tests in the first place is to guard against these little disconnects from reality.

Lastly, Doug attempts to censor me:

If I have the blog settings adjusted correctly, any further comments from you will be moderated for content. I don'’t want this thread to become a didactic exercise in futility, which it has already tended to be. You've disrespected me and my colleagues - calling us idiotic educators - in a mean spirited, and personally disagreeable manner. I owe you no respect. Your opinion is a blight, an obfuscation, a parade of ignorance. As a conversationalist, you rate with telemarketers, who I dismiss as soon as I hear their voice.

I ain'’t buying any.

Boo Hoo.

A cowardly reaction if ever there was one especially considering that his Derrida-esque viewpoint effectively precludes him from actually losing the argument. Though I suspect Doug realizes that his silly justifications won't play well in the court of public opinion, at least among those who haven't drunk the constructivist Kool-aid already.

Do you like the way Doug strung together a bunch of of unsupported conclusory statements into the form of an argument (or is it an observation?) demonstrating that he really might not know what an argument is.

It is one thing to think you are right. It is quite another to continue to think you are right in light of the overwhelming empirical evidence that you are not, to the point that you are afraid to even entertain that you are wrong by censoring the opposing view.

I am constantly amazed that these free thinking educators are so afraid to be challenged by opposing viewpoints. I'll be sure to take out the hand puppets the next time I argue with Doug.

Update: Mr. Loon has upped the ante on his cowardly censoring ways by redirecting links away from his site that originate here. Just use google and click on the first link. What a cowardly jackass.

Are You Jealous Yet?

All you teachers who don't work in an affluent suburban school district are missing all the fun.

How would you like to have a class where half the students are already above grade level? Your teaching method could consist of an intricate combination of farting and tap dancing and at least half the kids are guaranteed to be above grade level by the end of the year.

Such is the situation in my son's first grade class. Out of the 20 kids in the class, about 10 are above, at, or close to reading on a second grade level. Not surprisingly, most of the kids in this group are girls.

Another two or three understand the reading game as well and will definitely be there by the end of the year.

The remaining seven or eight kids, mostly boys, need to be taught. And, even then, most of these kids understand the alphabetic principle already, so they aren't starting at ground zero.

Phonics isn't taught in a systematic or explicit way in my son's school like it is supposed to be. This won't affect the 13 or so kids who already know more than enough phonics and are already reading well. It will, however, greatly affect the 7 or so kids who don't and are being "taught" using the same method.

Based on our current 11th grade test scores, about 4 of these kids will be poor readers and won't be proficient on the state tests. If you want to use NAEP scores as a rough guide, all the kids who aren't readers yet will never be proficient readers.

This is the classic sorting machine that typifies U.S. schools. The kids who are smart and capable of learning with little assistance will learn. Those that need to be taught, won't learn.

I suspect that it's always been like this when it comes to reading. A certain percentage of kids will pick up what is taught no matter how well or poorly it is taught. The remainder who struggle and for which reading skills must be induced have never done well and will continue not to do well. The quality of the reading instruction affects a few kids at the margin, but generally speaking it takes very good reading instruction to reach most of these kids which is in very short supply.

Rich School, Poor School

Super teacher TMAO left the following comment in my post about schools not being able to spend their way to academic achievement:

No, you can't spend your way to academic success, but neither can you reasonably assert that funding inequities play no role in the perpetuating low-performance, or in limiting the efforts of those who seek to reverse the tide. My school has lengthened the day to provide increased instructional opportunities. This costs money. We used a High Priority school grant for two years, quadrupled the number of proficient students, and lost the money because we're no longer High Priority. Does this make sense? In areas where kids have more needs, longer days and after school programs are more critical, ADA is relatively less and funding scarce. Does this make sense?

These are all good arguments that deserve closer scrutiny. Let's take each one in order.

You can't reasonably assert that funding inequalities play no role in perpetuating low-performance.

That depends on the schools' actual funding levels. There's a good argument to be made that we live in a time of super-funding of schools. First, you need to know how much money it actually takes to education a student. The estimates I've seen are in the neighborhood of $8,000 per student for a typical public school. Most schools are funded well above this level. If poor school only has $9,000 per pupil, that's enough to educate. If rich school has $16,000 that's way more than enough and will likely buy lots of window dressings. What it doesn't buy is a better education; once you account for SES effects rich schools perform about the same as poor schools.

Urban schools are the worst offenders. Typically they are funded up with the richest schools in the state and yet their facilities are decrepit and crumbling and supplies are scarce. This is pure fiscal mismanagement.

I don't buy into the argument that it's more expensive to educate low SES kids either. Good teaching is no more expensive than poor teaching. However, the result of poor teaching is vastly more expensive since the underperforming kids will be shuffled off to the uber-expensive special ed. Just because a kid starts off well behind his middle class peers does not mean that he can't learn at a sufficient clip to keep-up. That requires good teaching, a commodity in short supply in most schools no matter how well they are funded.

You can't reasonably assert that funding inequalities don't limit remediation efforts

TMAO gives the example of lengthening the school day, which is labor intensive and expensive, to significantly raise student performance.

Certainly this is one way to increase student achievement (output) -- teach for more hours at the same rate (input). The efficiency (input/output) remains the same with this reform, so it is much more expensive. Another, more preferred way to raise student achievement is to increase the efficiency of the school -- teach more in the same time. To this you need an accelerated curriculum and effective teachers. Accelerated curricula are in short supply, but they tend to be no more expensive that other curricula. In the private sector, companies pursuing path one would quickly be put out of business by the companies pursuing path two.

Let's put the argument in layman's terms by analogizing education to a rally race. TMAO is saying that he has to start the race far behind the rich school district's race car but he can catch up to the rich race car by driving the car for longer hours. The rich race car has lots of extra money which it uses to pimp out the car. Instead of using the money on bling, he can use the money on paying the drivers and for extra supplies needed drive the car longer. My argument is that all you need is better drivers to drive the car faster so you can catch up to the rich race car by the end of the race.

Extra money and being in the noncompetitive public sector affords the rich school districts the luxury of inefficiency. So in a sense, TMAO's options are being limited because his school can't be as extravagantly wasteful as the rich school district. But, this is a race to the bottom and is financial impractical. Given more funds, most schools will merely piss them away rather than improve their product. Witness every big city school. Witness the tripling of school funding in inflation adjusted dollars since the 70s.

There's also another argument that all schools, including the poor schools, could be spending their existing money more efficiently and initiate their expensive reforms on their own There's nothing to say that there is not sufficient funding in existing budgets to achieve this. Poor schools, however, want the freedom to continue to operate as inefficiently as they've always done.

Achievement Gap Idiocy

Today's profiles in educrat idiocy comes courtesy of Carlos Garcia, former school district superintendent and current vice president of urban markets for McGraw-Hill Education, who when asked if the achievement gap was due to I.Q. differences responded:

The achievement gap generally occurs between students from differing socioeconomic backgrounds. We must not forget that every minority group and every socioeconomic classification has children from the full range of IQ levels. Yet, far too many students from minorities or poor homes perform at lower levels so I believe I.Q. has little to do with the gap.Further, I believe that nearly every child can learn to read and to perform math skills.

Data analysis illiteracy in all its glory. If Carlos actually checked the means of the IQs of the low-SES kids and the high-SES kids he would have seen that the low SES had IQs considerably lower than the high-SES kids. For example, kids coming from low SES families (a standard deviation below the mean) tend to have IQs 12 points lower than kids from high SES families (a standard deviation above the mean). Who do you think is easier to teach?

And while it's true that "nearly every child can learn to read and to perform math skills" some kids need very good teaching to get there while others will reach that point with little difficulty and regardless of the teaching. Few schools are able to teach with sufficient effectiveness to reach the former group. That's why the achievement gap persists.

Another Positive Editorial on the Reading First Scandal

Edward Moscovitch, evaluator for the Alabama Reading Initiative and co-founder of the Bay State Reading Institute, has a good editorial on the Reading First non-scandal (so far at least):

Under RF, actual purchase decisions are made by school districts, subject to rules set by state RF administrators. State programs, in turn, were funded based on evaluations performed by federal panels. The IG suggested that the composition of these federal review panels was not quite proper, but to argue that these panels improperly impacted selection of texts at the local level is a stretch. Indeed, the IG complained that some of the federal reviewers had improper ties to one program, but failed to note that few districts chose that program.

The IG report contains a bunch or different threads that never quite comes together. For example much is made of the RF director's connection to DI and the six panelists' connection to DI, but as Moscovitch points out "few districts chose DI."

Few districts chose SfA as well, that's why Slavin's pissed. (Slavin is the creator of SfA.) Then there's a few small players who didn't do their own research and got passed over.

Then there's the part of the story that has gotten short shrift:

Traditionally, DoE - and most state education departments - do not get involved in telling local districts which textbooks to buy or how to improve instruction. As one superintendent put it, the pattern is to tell the department what it wants to hear, take its money and then proceed to do what the district would have done in any case.

The bad guys. School districts and state DoE's that still want to use rebadged whole language programs no matter how many kids continue to fail to learn to read.

The Textbook

A related issue in high school curricula is the "textbook," which is probably a misnomer. For many subjects, the "textbook" is not designed to teach a student in a progressive and systematic way. It is a reference book, with the earlier chapters written with no concern about the fact that kids have not yet read the later chapters. The average high-school text in biology, for example, introduces about three times the number of new unfamiliar words that would be recommended for the first year of learning a foreign language. What makes this figure even more astonishing is that the concepts behind those words are new (unlike the foreign language that presents new words for familiar ideas).

For instance, on page 106 of Holt's Biology text, the following words are introduced for the first time:

Chromatin network, nucleoli, centrosome, centroiols, DNA, mitosis, prophase, nucleoli, astral rays, aster, chromosomes, chomatids, centromere, spindle, pole, metaphase, anaphase, and telophase.

A reasonable topic for discussion of secondary-school curricula would be whether these texts are reasonable, whether they are consistent with new theories about the ways kids learn, or whether they are designed to promote the use of pain killers and other forms of escape. Similar problems exist in math and English.

Zig Engelman, 1992

What Your First Grader Should Know About Reading

My son just completed his first grade reading program -- Reading Mastery I/II Fast Cycle. The program is an accelerated reading program for average and above-average students. It condenses the first two years of reading instruction into a single year comprising 170 lessons.

The curriculum is designed for classroom use and is scripted. Since I was only teaching one student, I ignored much of the program that dealt with controlling and teaching small groups of kids. He also picked up the subject matter quickly , making few errors, so I was able cut out much of the scaffolding that's built into the program. For example, each lesson contains a story to be read, after the story is read, you are supposed to re-read the story and ask comprehension questions. I just asked the questions as we read since he sufficient cognitive capacity to attend to the mening of what he was reading while decoding the text for the first time. Typically, his decoding errors were less than 5% (5 errors per 100 words.) and all I usually had to do to remedy the errors was to point out that he made an error and he would focus a little closer and usually decode correctly. Teaching is easy with a good curriculum and a good student.

Here's what he learned:

• 53 sounds
• 932 regular words
• 193 irregular words
  

By the end of the program his fluency was at least 90 words/minute with 97% accuracy.

Here is a paragraph from the last story he read and on which his fluency was tested:

Jean had found out fifteen rules. The last rule she found out told about making the wizard disappear. She needed only one more rule. So she sat down and began to think. Suddenly, she jumped up. She said, "I've got it. Every time I needed help, the wizard appeared. I think that's the rule. I'll find out." She stood up and yelled, "I need help."

In addition he learned how to make simple deductions. Her's a sample question from his last mastery test:

Here's another deduction question:

All lerms have green hair.
Oscar is a lerm.
So what do we know about Oscar?

• His hair has lerms.
• He has green hair.
• His hair is gray.

One more rule-based deduction question:

Here's a rule: Every short boy has red hair. Which person has red hair?

• A short girl named Jan.
• A short boy named Sid.
• A tall boy named Tim.

Here's an example of the type of reading questions he was able to answer based on the following paragraph from a longer passage:

There once was a boy who had to watch a flock of sheep. But the boy didn't like his job. One day, he said to himself, "I am tired of watching sheep. I think I'll run into town and play a good joke on the people. I will tell them that a big wolf has come to eat the sheep."

How did the boy feel about his job?

• He liked it a lot
• He didn't like it.
• He was scared of it.
  

Why did the boy run into town and yell "Wolf, wolf"?

• He wanted to play a joke
• A wolf was eating the sheep
• He wanted to see his father.

All in all, I'd say it was a smooth process. Few tears. And, it took less than an hour a day.

So where would this put him on a standardized reading test? I don't know for sure; however, I do know that one inner city school using the same curriculum had CTBS scores at the 99% percentile once the implementation had stabilized.

It boggles the mind how many kids struggle to reach even this level of proficiency by the third grade. Although judging by what passes for reading instruction in his regular first grade classroom, it's easy to see why.

Hanushek Smacks Down Kozol

In his new book, Eric Hanushek delivers the smack down on Johnathan Kozol who has been insisting these many years that the funding gap between middle class and inner city schools was the cause of the achievement gap between white and minority kids. Thus, to erase the achievement gap all we had to do was eliminate the funding gap:

In both Savage Inequalities and its 1995 successor, Amazing Grace, Kozol described the once beautiful and successful Morris High School in the Bronx as “one of the most beleaguered, segregated and decrepit secondary schools in the United States. Barrels were filling up with rain in several rooms. . . . Green fungus molds were growing in the corners” of some rooms, and the toilets were unusable. Kozol wrote that it would take at least $50 million to restore Morris’s decaying physical plant and suggested that the white political establishment would never spend that much money on a ghetto school. The city actually did spend more than $50 million to restore Morris High School after the publication of Savage Inequalities, though Kozol had not a word to say about it when discussing Morris in the second book. Of course the newly gleaming building had no perceptible effect on the academic performance of the students.

Yeah, that didn't work out so well now did it?

You can't spend your way to academic success.

Why the Silence on Reading

Sandra Stotsky, Former Senior Associate Commissioner Massachusetts Department of Education, has a good article that clarifies the Reading First scandal a bit:

Nowhere does the Inspector General's report provide evidence that Doherty or the publishers of a research-based program called Direct Instruction made money from the USDE's implementation of Reading First. The vast majority of Reading First schools in Massachusetts use the comprehensive programs published by three mainline publishers (Harcourt, Houghton Mifflin, and Scott Foresman), all of which were approved by the USED.None uses the supposedly favored DI program.

Nor does the Inspector General's report provide evidence that Reading Recovery, a major complainant behind the investigation, lost money.In Massachusetts, at least 13 Reading First schools use the non-scientifically based Reading Recovery intervention program, while other Title I, non-Reading First schools also use Reading Recovery. Moreover, like many other state legislatures, the Massachusetts legislature again voted for a separate line item in the state budget for Reading Recovery; increasing its allotment to 2.9 million dollars this past year. South Carolina's legislature targeted over $3,000,000 for Reading Recovery this past year. And neither legislature has yet to ask for or undertake an independent evaluation of this program's long-term efficacy in the state. It's unlikely that other state legislatures require independent evaluations.

In case you wanted to know why the Feds have their nose in education, this would be it. But for the Feds, many states would have the unscientific Reading Recovery program as their main remedial reading program. And, no one seems to care that it doesn't work very well.

Report from the First Grade Trenches

The first month of school is now over for my son who is in first grade. Let me summarize what has transpired in the first 1/9 of the school year so far. Bear in mind that most of my information comes from a six year old with the attention span of a flea.

My son attends school in a district that most people would consider to be an excellent school district. One that consistently ranks in the top 10-20 of Pennsylvania's 501 school districts. Standardized test scores are high. Yet in any given year about 20% to 35% of 11th grade students are below proficient in Pennsylvania's state exam. Not surprisingly, the sub-proficient students are disproportionately comprised of low SES and minority students. Clearly, something is wrong.

The district adopted a new math curriculum this year, Everyday Math. The district also uses a combination of Kid Writing and a home-brewed program for reading.

So far, as best as I can tell, there is little going on in the way of academics. Not only is the academic content low, but the pace is slow.

Math

In math, for example, they've only taken home about three homework assignments. One assignment asked them to draw pictures of things having numbers, like a clock or calendar. Another asked them to find a picture that told a math story--there are three dogs and two cats in this picture, how many are there all together.

He's learning about math, instead of learning math. Clearly, the focus is on "understanding," and not on developing proficiency in basic math skills. There are opportunity costs associated with this high constructivism approach as well. Time spent on these contrived exercises is time lost in which basic math skills, like addition, could have been taught and practiced. Another problem is that these homework exercises make it much more difficult for parents without math skills to help with homework. It's not merely a matter of monitoring practice; parents have to actually understand the lesson and teach the math, if not actually do the homework.

This is a triple whammy for low performing kids. First, they need more guidance to complete the homework. Second, their patents likely have lower math skills and are less likely to give effective guidance. Third, they need more practice to master the topics--practice they aren't getting because they are wasting time doing these silly exercises.

As a point of reference, in the same one month period, I got my son through half a year of level B of Connecting Math Concepts (technically a 2nd grade curriculum, but really a 1st grade one) in about a half hour a night. He is now able to set-up addition and subtraction word problems, do multi-digit addition with carrying, tell time, measure, add and subtract distances, skip count by 2, 5, 10, and 25, add and subtract U.S coins, read data from a table, read and manipulate a calendar, and knows place value manipulation up to a hundred. During that time he's probably worked at least a thousand actual math problems and is starting to develop some real procedural fluency with simple addition and subtraction facts. All of this took very little actual teaching on my part.

Reading

I hesitate to call what's going on reading since there is so little actual reading going on. The kids were given a DIBELS test and broken up into reading groups. Whether they were broken up by ability, I do not know. Teaching consists mostly of letting kids pick out books they like and letting them "read" them independently. If the kids can't read yet, they can look at the pictures. That's nice.

Again, we see a pedagogy that favors higher performers. Kids who can read already, practice their reading skills. Kids who can't read, practice their picture viewing skills. Which kids do you suppose will make more progress learning to read this year?

Occasionally, each group is called up to the teacher and each kid gets a turn reading. When a kid comes to a word he or she doesn't know, the teacher writes it on the board and teaches the word. I suppose if the word is phonetically regular, the teacher gives a little mini-phonics lesson. If the word is phonetically irregular, I believe the kids will soon get "word rings" that they'll use to memorize these irregular words. This is about as close to rote learning as you can get. And, as far as the phonics goes, this is the wrong way to teach phonics. It is neither systematic nor explicit. It is haphazard, implicit, and on an as-needed based on whatever particular book the kids happen to be reading that day.

Again, this is fine for the kids who know how to read and know many of the phonics rules. It's only a matter of filling in the few gaps that remain. But what about the low performers? This is just not an appropriate way to teach them. Moreover, the teaching burden gets shifted to the parents (who are also likely low performers themselves) who are supposed to be reading with the kids every night. What do you think is actually happening during those reading sessions? The parent is most likely reading to the kid as opposed to the kid doing the reading. Reading to a child has its uses, but it is of limited value when it comes to teaching the mechanics of reading.

Contrast this with what we do with my son every night. During his reading time, we do a lesson in Reading Mastery (He's about to start level 3--third grade). In each lesson he has to read a 300-400 word story that is selected to be right at the edge of his ability and is carefully scaffolded to always include new words he's just been taught. Then he does an independent worksheet in which he has to answer comprehension questions, answer deduction questions, and has another 100 or so word story to read and answer questions.

Then we do a fifteen minute spelling lesson in which I try to undo the damage that's being done every day in Kid Writing where he is permitted, encouraged actually, to guess the spelling of words he's never been taught to spell. The less I say about Kid Writing the better.

Add in recess, lunch, gym, music, art, and a smattering of science and social studies and that is his typical day at school. It's all very child centered and fashionable. I am almost grateful that it is because it makes the real teaching I have to do each night less painful for him.

Fortunately for my district , I am compelled to pay for this education via taxation because if I had a choice in the matter I wouldn't pay for it on my own.

Moving the Goal Posts

Here's a good example of what I was talking about in this post when I wrote that "it's a lot of hard work educating children when you actually care about what those children are learning. Better to focus on stuff that can't be measured like the process of education and other nonsense." Many educators seem to care more about the process of educating, rather than the end result of that process. These process-oriented educators inevitably have common characteristics. One common characteristic is that they aren't getting good results so they want to ignore or downplay them. Another characteristic is that they practice educational methods that are known not to produce good results--constructivism, child-centered education, discovery learning, and the like. Instead of jettisoning these failed methods that are producing low student achievement, they want to redefine education.

Today's example comes from Borderland's Doug Noon (Ed: the link is to a google search since cowardly Doug has redirected any links from this site to his):

My classroom doesn’t work the way I want it to. In the Age of Accountability, I focus on process, and see product as a secondary concern. I’m an ill-fitting peg, uneasy about participating in what, for me, amounts to a charade - emulating archaic practices designed for kids from bygone eras.

Yeah, those basic reading and math skills are as obsolete as the buggy whip in today's high tech world. Nowadays, we all have calculating and decoding robots that follow us around to perform basic math calculations for us and decode written text so we can focus on higher-order thinking.

Do you know any skilled reader whose decoding skills aren't automatic? Do you know anyon skilled in solving mathematics whose basic math facts aren't automatic? Of course not. These skills are as important today as they were 200 years ago and probably always will be. The only dispute is how best to teach those skills, not whether they are necessary. It is unfortunate for our new-fangled educators that those "archaic practices designed for kids from bygone eras" continue to work best, but wishing your new processes work better isn't the same as them actually working better.

Looking at the group I’m with now, thinking about them, and not the generic, bloodless beings called Students, statistical incarnations of demographically catalogued learners, I feel more strongly than ever that I owe each of them more than mere delivery of the curriculum, and concern for where they stand relative to a standard that I don’t endorse.

First of all, we don't just expect "mere delivery of the curricilum," we expect students to actually learn the curriculum. Students don't need a tour guide through the curriculum, they need someone to teach it to them. It's all well and good if you think they need more, but don't shirk your fundamental obligation to make certain they've learned the curricular requirements.

And what's this busines about a standard that you don't endorse? Whether you endorse it or not is irrelevant, your job is to assure that your students meet the standard.

Being a teacher means too many things for me to say that I know how to do it well. I surely don’t know how to move a group of kids to universal competence when their needs span the curricula for 4 different grade levels, and when they come with varying interests, talents, and beliefs about themselves and about school.

I don't think it's the four different grade level span that's causing the problem. I'm sure, if three of those levels were above grade level, we wouldn't have this gnashing of teeth. No, the problem is that your class has low performers that have not and are not learning the material which is being presented. So, maybe focusing on the process is the solution; so long as the focus results in disgarding the failed process.

Discussions about teaching and professionalism on both The Education Wonks’ and Jenny D’s recent posts illustrate the difficulty we have in making headway on the question of what we Should be doing, because a critical perspective is altogether overlooked in discussions about How we should measure teacher effectiveness.

This one is easy. Teacher effectiveness should be measured by how effective you were in getting the students to learn at least the minimal material required by that standard that you don't endorse. Otherwise you wind up in the odd situation unwittingly highlighted by this parent whose school which isn't making AYP:

Grand Ledge parent Shari Burg approves of the new teaching techniques. Her third-grade son, John, can easily identify Van Gogh and Monet paintings because of Willow Ridge Elementary School's teachers.

Growing up, Burg never received that kind of learning.

That's great, a tiny art connoisseur who can't read or do basic math. Who endorsed that standard?

Constructivism

Brad, at HunBlog has a lengthy post on the "research" underlying constructivism. I tried to leave an attaboy comment, but for some strange reason HunBlog wasn't accepting my comment, so I'll post it here.

Nice summary of the theory underlying constructivism and its history, Brad, but where's the actual research validating all these theories and proving that it works?

Software glitch or suppression of knowledge which might enable individuals to build their own knowledge and understanding by assimilating their prior knowledge with the new experience with which they are confronted. You be the judge.

Today's Quote

The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) may hold the title of promoting the most paradoxical anti-scientific and anti-intellectual practices. The NCTM formally rejected empirical studies that showed the effects of different teaching methods. Its basis for this rejection: "The results were disappointing." Imagine an organization that is supposed to understand math, which includes statistics, asserts in effect that mathematical truth is falsity.

The NCTM has supported a long list of failed practices. At the top of the list is "discovery learning." It doesn't seem to matter how many times or how thoroughly empirical evidence shows that this practice is ineffective.

-- Zig Engelmann

The Lack of Professionalism in Education

I want to follow-up on Mark's (of Textbook Evaluator) post on how the publishers of the typical textbook program are rarely concerned with the actual effectiveness of their programs in transmitting knowledge to students since their programs are rarely field tested and Mr. Person's (of Text Savvy) post on how educators aren't too concerned about the "presentation and organization of content" of the subject matter they are charged with teaching anyway.

These conditions have combined to form the perfect storm in education in which actual student learning is seen as unimportant. Publishers just want to sell books and educators only care about process, not outcomes. Educators are more interested in picking and choosing among various sources to create home-brewed curricula that is fun and interesting to students, but often ignore whether this Frankstein's monster they've created is actually effective in teaching their students. The resultant disdain for standardized testing which shines the spotlight of failure on their creation is the inevitable result.

This also dovetails nicely with the edusphere's discussion on teacher professionalism prompted by JennyD and with Mr. Person's post on Direct Instruction (DI) which is also generally disdained by educators.

You see, in DI they care very much about what the student is actually learning. As a result, DI is very successful in that regard. DI is the professional version of education. Education 2.0, if you will. A concerted effort between curriculum creators and the educators who use the curriculum to teach children. As it turns out, neither the commercial curriculum publishers nor our educators want any part of it. That's because it's a lot of hard work educating children when you actually care about what those children are learning. Better to focus on stuff that can't be measured like the process of education and other nonsense.

Zig Engelmann identified the lack of professionalism in our textbook publishers and educators back in 1992 when he described how a professional would approach the creation of a hypothetical curriculum for elementary school children and how it would be accepted by educators based on his experience developing DI:

In developing a curriculum, first you need to layout a sequence of activities for the teacher to follow. After you lay out this series for teaching the subject, you have a choice. You can either say, “We’re done. The program is completed, and it will work,” or you can try out your rough-draft product in the classroom. You’ll choose the latter alternative because you have some concern for the kids, and you’re not so arrogant enough to assume that the sequence you created in the sterile confines of your office will automatically translate into lively, effective instruction in the classroom.

So you arrange for a couple of teachers to try out your program. Being cautious, you observe what actually takes place in the classroom, rather that just letting the teachers do their thing and report back to you. After all, the teacher is going to have her hands full working with the kids. Your criteria for success will be that all the kids who have the skill levels high enough to be placed in the program should perform well—which means learn everything the teacher teaches. You realize that they may miss occasional items, but you do not want them to miss bunches of items.

Undoubtedly, you will discover errors in the program. The errors are information. If errors occur in a pattern, the pattern shows you exactly what you did that was wrong. If there are large numbers of errors on an item, you know that the “teaching” you specified that preceded the item was inadequate. In other words, the precise identification of the problem implies the solution. You correct the errors and revise the program.

Once again you select a couple of new classrooms and observe your revised program. The performance of the teacher and the kids should look a lot better. Any errors that still exist should stand out prominently. Since you're right there in the classroom watching the teacher, you’re able to give the teacher revisions the next day to take care of most of the problems you observe.

However, there are still “lumps” in your program, rough places where the teacher talks too much, where kids go off task and get confused, and where the presentation seems labored or too easy for the kids. When you finally work these lumps out, you have a good program, one that you can say with confidence will work in classrooms that have kids like the ones you’ve been working with.

In addition to having a good program, youe have a great deal of knowledge about how kids learn and how to teach well. You know how much practice it takes for the kids to master the various details of your sequence. Oddly enough, the amount of practice that you’ve had to provide to meet your goal is possibly five times the amount provided in other published programs that teach the same subject. You also learned that kids tend to “lose” information if you don’t keep it “alive” in the program. This observation had led you to activities that require kids to continually use all the important skills and concepts they’ve been taught. You’ve learned that teachers do a better job of presenting material when they move faster, and that long explanations are anathema. You’ve found out that the best way to assure that teachers don’t blow the presentation completely is to script it—write down the exact words the teacher is to say. And the pattern of interactions that work best is a short explanation followed by a series of questions that kids answer out loud. Their responses provide a good test whether they have adequately received the intended information.

Possibly the most important lesson that you’ve learned from this experience is that kids’ mistakes are just about always reasonable. The pattern of mistakes the kids make provide you with overwhelming evidence that when kids “mislearn” something, their misinterpretation is consistent with what the teacher did or said.

Although your initial goal was simply to develop an excellent program, the field-tryout process has taught you a great deal about motivation, “psychology of learning,” “communication ambiguity,” and about the subject you thought you knew. The mistakes the kids made forced you to sharpen your knowledge of the subject, look at the details far more closely, and look at the subject from the standpoint of the naïve learner.

If you developed a program in this manner, the chances are excellent that it would be received by traditional educational community not with open arms but with open mouths that delivered slanderous rhetoric. Educators would actually have the audacity to suggest that your program was “not consistent with the way kids learn.” They would say that it stifles creativity, that it was too structured, and that it was not based on understanding of the subject. Of course, the traditionalists wouldn’t have first-hand knowledge of how the program works and what it does because “educators” do not deal with the concrete. For them, issues are general; issues of specific details do not exist.

For the traditionalist, the boundaries between good and bad are marked by large categories, and therefore, by half truths. Phonics works better than sight reading. But that doesn’t imply that all phonics programs are good. It all depends on the details of the program. Traditional educators express opinions through metaphysical arguments that revolve around the categories they understand; but the real issues—those that make the difference between a program that works and one that founders—are very picky, precise, technical details. The difference between the first field-test program and the finished product you developed is simply gritty detail, not global goop.

Most commercial programs, in contrast, are not developed in the way you developed yours. You had to make decisions following your desk-top first draft. You could have said, “I’m done. The program is completed and it will work.” Although you were neither arrogant nor stupid enough to suppose that it would be done at this point, the commercial publisher (almost without exception) is. Most commercial programs used by schools for teaching reading, language, arithmetic, science, and social studies are not field-tested before publication. They are not shaped by learner and teacher problems. They are simply made up by people who typically know no more about excellent instruction than the typical copywriter or graphics designer.

The typical basal program is an experiment, and not a very noble one. The chances are just about zero percent that programs developed in this manner will work well, even if those involved in the creation are very knowledgeable about the subject matter.

I seriously believe that the reason basal publishers do not shape their products through field tryouts is that they don’t know how to do it and they don’t really care. They are in the business of making money. If school districts are naïve enough to buy a particular basal in sufficient numbers to make the product profitable, publishers feel they are successful. They don’t have to answer to any consumer-advocacy group. They are not inspected by the Feds. Their programs are not reviewed and graded. Instead, they are placed on the open market.

Adapted from War Against The Schools' Academic Child Abuse (1992), chapter 2.

I'd say we're nowhere near this level of professionalism in curricular development by the big publishers. And, even if they started to build a better moustrap, there's no evidence that our educators would be interested in buying it.

If "Mainstream" Educators Trained Olympic Athletes (A Peek Into the Future)

This is hysterical.

Richard P. Phelps

[Summer, 2002] After the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, the U.S. Olympic Committee met for its annual retreat to learn the latest findings from advanced research in education, and to determine if some of the new, groundbreaking ideas, developed in the country's most prestigious education schools, might be appropriate to their own training needs.

The retreat agenda was developed by the leadership of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), with input from leading education researchers and theorists in the faculties of the country's leading universities. As a group, they had published hundreds of books, thousands of articles in peer-reviewed scholarly journals, and given thousands of paper presentations at research conferences all over the world. The retreat team also included most of the staff from the prestigious, federally-funded Center for Research on Essential Skiing and Skating Techniques (CRESST), based at UCLA, and the National Research Council's Board on Athletics and Measurement.

The particular theme chosen for the retreat was speed skating performance management and measurement. The AERA instructors argued that traditional methods amounted to an artificial training of speed skaters, one distanced from the experience of the skaters and the knowledge base of the trainers. Natural, genuine training had been supplanted by activities whose sole purpose was to reduce the times of speed skaters in particular races. That led to "drill and kill" training techniques, not appropriate to the development of the "whole athlete." Scarce training dollars had been diverted away from such high quality training needs as better skates, higher pay for trainers, and nicer ice rinks in favor of skating drills of limited training value. Skaters were even being made to skate in conditions strikingly similar to actual races, which was far removed from a natural and authentic way of skating.

These endless, mind-numbing practices only served to narrow the training, take time away from genuine, authentic training in real skating, and reduce race times at the expense of deep, long-term skating understanding. In traditional training, too much time was spent focused on a narrow set of activities, such as leg strokes, rounding curves, arm movements, and endurance training. Not enough time was devoted to more substantive training, with a focus on rich and creative training techniques that allow the whole skater to emerge with critical skating skills responsive to a wide variety of challenges that may face them in the future. If skating skills are to endure, they must flower naturally from each skater's own well of experience and understanding. Each skater must construct his or her own, unique skating skills.

The CRESST researchers conducted a study in which they attempted to determine if traditional speed skating training did anything other than reduce speed skating times. In other words, they wanted to see if the results of traditional speed skating training were "generalizable" outside the narrow field of speed skating to other, related fields, such as figure skating. They found that after a year of traditional speed skating training, which substantially reduced speed skating times, the same skaters had become no better at figure skating. They attributed this lack of generalizability to the phenomena of "teaching to the race" and "narrowing the training."

Moreover, the AERA team argued that an over-reliance on improving race times caused a severe decline in training quality particularly for those skaters with the greatest training needs. The one-size-fits-all training approach was alien to these skaters, and far removed from their experience and culture.

The Olympic Committee already felt extremely sensitive to problems of fairness and equity in skating. The popular, independent watchdog group, the National Center for Fair and Open Skating (FairSkate), had issued a scathing report, quoted widely in the press and given full-feature treatment in "skating's newspaper of record," Skating Week, showing the U.S. Olympic Committee to be biased in favor of skaters from the Upper Midwest and New England.

At the end, the Olympic Committee left very impressed with the ideas of the education researchers, their focus on a rich and creative training program, and their incorporation of newly emerging research findings and innovative training techniques in their proposals for a new speed skating training program. After receiving a $50 million dollar grant from the federal government and a matching amount from the Ford Foundation, the Committee decided to award a contract to the AERA to train the U.S. Olympic Speed Skating team for the 2006 Winter Olympics.

The AERA team made several innovations to the training program, including:

Instituting a 2-year classroom-based accreditation program for skaters in training methodology at several education schools, where potential team members would learn the higher-order, critical thinking skills that would help them to more profoundly understand the process of skating itself. The goal was to free them from the straightjacket of unthinking automatons, who skate without a conceptual construct of the nature of skating itself.

Ending participation in most competitive speed skating events, because competition sucked away the natural enjoyment available only from a reliance on intrinsic motivators alone.

Diversifying the membership of the team so that it would look more like the real America. More members from the southern half and the western half of the United States, and the outlying territories, were included.

To many sports fans, these moves seemed unorthodox. The U.S. Olympic Committee, however, stood steadfast in its support. It argued that "all the research" in education journals supported the AERA approach. Moreover, the AERA Team's ongoing program evaluations of the innovations showed them to be hugely successful. Those evaluations found that the education-professor instructors were very satisfied with the program.

[Winter 2006] It was, then, a more creative and diverse U.S. Olympic Speed Skating team that arrived at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy. Full of self-confidence about their skating abilities, they eschewed skating practice in favor of more natural and creative inquiry and discourse, getting to know the many diverse peoples and cultures in the Olympic Village, and participating in field trips to the surrounding Italian countryside and to the poor communities of factory workers in the inner suburbs of Turin. There, they participated in a protest march for higher welfare payments and more social services for illegal immigrants.

It came as something of a surprise, later, and not least of all to the team members themselves, when the U.S. speed skating team placed 15^th in the final country standings, tied with Portugal and Uruguay, but below all the other participating countries which have frozen lakes during winter time. The average times for the U.S. speed skaters were below the international averages, and rank in the country standings was the worst in the history of U.S. Olympic participation.

Only three U.S. speed skaters' times were good enough to win medals - two bronzes and one silver. All three had grown up in other countries and emigrated to the United States as teens. The Silver medalist - who placed second in the women's 1000 meter race -- caused a bit of controversy by refusing to attend the medal ceremony. In a press release, she criticized the medal concept as "part of the marketization" of athletes. She described her silver medal as an "insult" to her natural, intrinsic desire to skate well:

"This medal suggests to the world that I am not capable of skating well unless I am bribed. And, I want the world to know, I'm better than that."

In response to criticism of the poor ranking of the U.S. speed skating team, the AERA training team attacked the ranking process as misleading and the structure of the events as narrow and "not authentic." A spokesperson for the training team asserted:

"The use of a single indicator-race time--to assess speed skating skill and to make decisions about participation and medals violates the ethics of the skating profession. Race times loom so large that they overshadow consideration of other, more telling indicators of the quality of speed skating."

The AERA issued a press release supporting that assessment, and added:

"One shouldn't submit to the tyranny of averages. The U.S. speed skating team was diverse, reflecting the heterogeneous character of our society. Other countries have more homogeneous speed skating cultures. If you compare the performance of the top ten percent of our speed skaters to the average performance from some of these other countries, we actually do better. It proves that we can compete with the best in the world. Indeed, Dutch-American skaters tend to do better even than Dutch skaters, on average, and Norwegian-American skaters do just as well as Norwegian skaters."