Our local school is wonderful; everyone else’s sucks

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

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

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

 

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

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?

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:

1. problem categorization,
2. construction of a mental representation of the problem,
3. search for the appropriate problem-solving operators (e.g., strategies or procedures),
4. retrieval and application of those operators to the problem,
5. evaluation of problem-solving progress and solution,
6. iterating stages 1–4 if not satisfied with progress/solution, and finally
7. 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

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

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

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

(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

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

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

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

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

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 ...

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?

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

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

In a simple picture ...

Still Overselling Play

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.