The School Failure Mythology

edited 10/11/20

And so these men of Indostan
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,

Though each was partly in the right,

And all were in the wrong!. -- The Blind Men and the Elephant
John Godfrey Saxe (1816 - 1887)

Philadelphia’s new (2012) Superintendent of Public Schools has declared a substantial number of schools to be “failing schools” and has announced that they will be closed down. The newsmedia, which fanfares almost every new superintendent as an educational savior -- and remains strangely quiet when said saviors leave to escape the mess they have enhanced -- is again bubb-bubb-bubbling with delight.

The parents of the children who attend the “failing” schools are vociferously NOT delighted. They want the schools to remain open. The idea of having to pry kids out of bed earlier to be bussed through hostile gang territories to schools out of the neighborhood is clearly not a welcome prospect. And how, many ask, is destroying relationships with teachers and administrators the kids know supposed to help them avoid “failure.”

Also weighing in on (or dodging) the issue are teachers, administrators, and university people. For not too obscure reasons the teachers side with the parents, the administrators have determined silence to be the better part of valor, and the university professors of education tend to side with the superintendent, although there are nay-sayers.

Three basic facts are persistently disregarded:

1. Without a substantial, persistent consensus on what schools should be about, there are no practical standards to determine what counts as success or as failure, no matter what litanies of directives fall from the lips of funding agencies.

2. Just because one party (or a few parties) to the controversy presumes to impose a set of standards, does not automatically bring every interested party into agreement.

3. Ignoring or denying 1 and 2 above does not change their reality.

Many a state legislature in its profound unwisdom has put some phrase into their school code about providing each child with a “thorough and efficient education.” New Jersey did this back in the early 1970s. I was in a Temple University group asked by a New Jersey legislator in 1973 to help define "thorough and efficient education" after the legislation codifying the language had already been passed. Despite our best efforts, he did not manage to get the definition we produced, as “accommodating” (read here, “vague”) as it was, widely accepted when he took it home.

Through the early 2000’s I would ask administrators from New Jersey what had been decided about the meaning of the phrase “thorough and efficient education.” How was it put into practice? The general response was “inconsistently” or “haphazardly,” adding that it was a “mess of a criterion.”

The underlying situation is that our citizens have long entertained a variety of conceptions as to what schools should be doing and what should count as school success. The fact that there are, besides public schools, parochial and private schools in great variety is one proof of this.

Another proof is that, by and large, parents -- and students themselves -- do not see academic knowledge and intellectual skills to be school goals anywhere near as important as those aiming at the students’ emotional and physical well-being.

This was shown years ago in an intensive study reported in John Goodlad’s 1984 book, A Place Called School. In general, he found that intellectual goals in schools far exceed parental preferences; whereas, social goals do not meet levels preferred by students and parents. (Goodlad, pp. 62-69)

Little has changed, except for the increasingly strident hyperbole about “common standards,” and the attempts by governmental and professional educational organizations to impose their own conceptions of educational success on parents too poor or unknowledgeable to escape or resist.


For references and to examine these issues further, see School Image: Expectations & Controversies


Cordially
--- EGR

The Ideal School: What should it be like?

The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.
-- Abraham Lincoln

In the United States people have been disagreeing for over 150 years what public schools should be, what they should teach, and how they should teach it. These controversies have persisted in the face of concerted effort by intelligent people to address them. People disagree as to what public schools should be because they have different expectations of them.

These expectations can be understood in terms of people's having three different images of the school, the Temple, the Factory and the Town Meeting. Conflicting images generate conflicting expectations. They imply different costs and benefits. These conflicting expectations maintain school controversies.

-- EGR
For more on this and a link to a survey with which you can evaluate your own expectations, see School Image: Expectations & Controversies.

Giving Students an Education That Meets Their Needs. Who’s to say what they Need?

edited 1206218

A state arises, as I conceive, out of the needs of mankind; no one is self-sufficing, but all of us have many wants. -- Plato

What do students need? Do they all need the same thing? Who determines who needs what? What if what some students need costs very much more than what others need? Is fairness an issue here?

Surely some students need what they don’t want; others want what they don’t need. Who decides this?

Such questions seldom get intelligent, honest answers. Instead schools and the adults involved with them give the same monotonous response -- but not in so many words:

“The kids 'need' what we are ready and willing to give them. Period. Do not waste our time with wishful thinking!”

Some educational planners claim to have a scientific approach, called “needs assessment” which tries to answer the questions above. Is this just more wishful thinking?

To continue this discussion see Needs Assessment: a fraud?
-- EGR

Avoiding Controversy: a survival necessity?

What’s the connection?

1. Students, particularly (shockingly,) college students, do not learn, or learn well, critical thinking skills; (NYT)
2. High school teachers do not teach, or teach well, Evolution; (NYT)
3. College students are seldom invited to examine the assumptions on which their professor’s course material is based; particularly, not graduate students.

Exceptions are more likely found in religious colleges than in public ones. Why is this?

Here are some possible answers:

a. the teachers or professors don’t know their subject matter.
b. Students, who don’t know how to handle controversy, evaluate their professors for promotion and tenure.
c. Professors have not studied formal logic.
d. Neither students nor professors know how to reason well on their feet.

Let’s dismiss a and c as unlikely. This is not a matter of knowing something, but of being able to teach it, especially, if it provokes debate. Merely studying formal logic does not help here.

Option b is close to the matter. Evolution and other controversial items are perceived by students to threaten their “sacred values.” They strongly dislike the apparent threat. They get their revenge by giving their instructors low ratings. (I have noticed during my 17+ years as a college professor that the same person, teaching a basically “technical” course would get higher ratings from his or her students than in a course where controversial material was dealt with.)

Option d is crucial. Teaching, if it is a face-to-face encounter requires either suppressing questioning, or having argumentative (or debate) skills to use. Except in religious environments where boundaries are clear – you still risk skating on thin ice --, secular, pluralistic schools and universities have disregarded argumentative and debate skills so long that few now command them to the degree they can be used for teaching purposes.

More than once have I heard professors at professional conferences declare that “There are, without exception, no absolute truths.” When asked about the truth of that very statement, which if true, is false, they shrugged it off with the retort, “You’re just playing word games.”

To examine these issues further, and avoid intellectual lobotomy, see An Introduction to Models of Reasoning


Cordially
--- EGR

Dealing with Controversy: dodging the bullets, if there are any

We live in a culture of controversy, the media shout out at us: Obamacare, School Reform, Global Warming. But are they real controversies, or just ploys to keep us focussed on advertising?

Three things make for a controversy:

1. Those who control resources, powerholders, perceive what they take to be a threat;
2. The powerholders disagree what to do about it; and
3. Publicity

The obvious way to “handle” a controversy is to squelch the publicity, hush things up. This doesn’t handle the threat but it keeps those who “have nothing to contribute” from putting in their two cents.

It also prevents non-powerholders, who may also be threatened, from realizing it and getting involved. (After all, there is always TV for distraction!) This is why hushing things up – in this Home of the Brave and Land of the Free – is so common a practice. Just think of the fuss raised by WikiLeaks – Do you really believe that everything a government agency marks as “classified” deals with a threat to national security?

A second method for dealing with controversy is to convince power-holders that what they perceive as a threat, is not “really” a threat to them or their interests. This explains why many of our legislators show less interest in promoting legislation dealing with unemployment than opposing legislation raising taxes to extend unemployment benefits.

Then, of course, there is actually dealing with the threat. But this takes skill, time, energy and money. It upsets people. So many of them go back to alternative one and practice it on themselves: they hush up their own misgivings and hope for the best.

To examine these issues further, see Controversy Analysis Worksheet


Cordially
--- EGR

The Treadmill. Why Not Just Forget About The Public Schools?

A lot of people can’t just forget about them. Why not? There are three obvious answers:

1. Parents are compelled by their State – not by the Federal Government -- to provide some kind of education for their kids.
2. So, parents worry because they have kids in those schools.
3. Different people, who may or not be the parents of public school kids, have different expectations about what schools should be doing and what they should cost.

School people make an effort to deal with the different expectations people have of them. These expectations often conflict with one another. This conflict is a major source of school controversies. It motivates most of the school reform efforts that break out every fifteen years or so in the United States.

To examine these issues further, see School Image: Expectations & Controversies


Cordially
--- EGR