More School Reform Follies

Well, it has happened again. Would-be “reformers” have just made public schooling even more reliant on high stakes testing. Pennsylvania policy makers have decided that before granting high schoolers a diploma, they must pass a quota of standardized tests supposedly measuring, “the skills crucial for the work force and college”.

A total of 10 state-designed exams will be administered as students complete corresponding high school courses in: algebra I, biology, literature, composition, algebra II, geometry, U.S. history, chemistry, civics and world history. To receive a diploma, students must pass at least 6. (Pennsylvania officials decided not to wait until graduation to do the testing. Perhaps they fear students will forget the “vital” skills they are supposed to have “learned”?)

One wonders why knowledge of these particular subjects is so “crucial for the work force and college.” Why, for instance, is chemistry more crucial than physics, geometry more crucial than statistics or world history more crucial than world geography? All three of these options are included in the standard high school core curriculum required for college. Perhaps state officials just resorted to eenie meenie miney moe.

Then there is the matter of goal priorities. Why do “work force and college related skills” trump everything else? Other goals might be more worthy. For instance, they could have emphasized strengthening democracy. It sure could use a shot in the arm. How about skills related to being a happier person, fostering greater compassion, aiding self-fulfillment, encouraging clearer thought, making better decisions, or even learning how to detect insincerity false piety and general bull shit? These goals seem far more worthy than fulfilling the imagined needs of some overpaid corporate executive or taking courses that college officials have decided you must take because of status concerns and faculty politics.

Of course, when school “reformers” glibly emphasize making “America” more competitive, they studiously avoid specifying which Americans will actually benefit and which will pay the costs. All boats will just float higher.

There is another difficulty that troubles all school “reform.” Often, one reform goals cannot be realized without relinquishing another. In fact, the pursuit of one goal can actually undermine another. Pursuing international competitiveness, for instance could actually undermine democracy, sabotage compassion and/or chip away at individual self-fulfillment. Yet “reformers” never address these, or any other, possible goal conflicts. Perhaps they actually believe we can have it all. Perhaps they just want us to believe that.

The truth is this high stakes test based “reform” business — and it truly is a multi-billion dollar business — has gotten completely out of hand. It is distorting instruction, intimidating and demoralizing teachers, disempowering school administrators, placing ridiculous burdens on special needs youngsters, demanding miracles from kids who are just learning English, putting private corporations in charge of public policy, boring bright kids and both dehumanizing and devitalizing the entire educational process. Despite all these negatives, though, it still is growing like crabgrass.

Elite schooling is exempt from all of this. One wonders why? Perhaps what suits future sheep is not thought appropriate for future shepherds.

To examine these issues further, see Power Failure: 
Why U.S. School Reform Persistently Misses the Mark

Cordially
--- Gary K. Clabaugh, Ed. D.

How "School Reform" Maintains the Status Quo

3 random definitions for status quo:

1. Heaven on Earth achieved;
2. the trade-off optima we have so far managed to achieve;
3. Hell on Earth accepted. -- Mephistopheles(?)

Faith in God's revelation has nothing to do with an ideology which glorifies the status quo.
-- Karl Barth

An economist from another solar system, non-partisan, let us assume, on most issues that concern our peoples, might report on American Education in the following manner:

There are three major market interests supporting schools: Values, Skills and Social Control. Although there is no persistent agreement as to which is most important, most schools try to respond in some way to all of them, since one well-established constituency or another promotes them.

Values, also known, occasionally more specifically, as “Cultivation,” “Snobbery,” “Scholarship,” “Academics” or “Fine Arts” involves convincing most people that things that bore them should be honored, at least, for preserving (someone’s) important traditions.

Important means “allowing tax monies to be spent on them” or “showing the proper respect” – see “Social Control” below -- when one’s social betters demand it.

This “Values” product is often promoted as “Rounding Out the Individual,” or “High Quality Education” or “Developing the Mind.” Cascades of diplomas representing no specific achievement, as well as profusions of higher degrees, are the deliverables generated to support this interest.

Skills involves training people how to make money (for someone) by acquiring the narrowest possible knowledge about and dexterity in producing whatever geegaws, jimcracks or whizbangs are selling at the moment or predicted to sell in the near future. High levels of skill development skills may be tolerated, even praised; but, seldom seen as cost-effective. For example, economic institutions, i.e. the Stock Market, are run by perfunctorily skilled persons who rely mainly on consumer faith to support their deliverables – which often fail to materialize.

Social Control involves teaching the great masses of people how to obey. Even in the United States, which imagines itself a multicultural Land of the Free, “obedience” means learning that procrastinating, bad-mouthing, objecting, moaning and groaning are all OK so long as one conforms in the long run to what “society” – read,“values controllers” -- expect of you.

Schools of all kinds do a pretty good job in satisfying all three markets. (This often involves some sacrificing of one market, usually Skills, to maintaining the others.)

School Reform concerns involve the pretense that Academics, a superficial hodgepodge of often unmarketable skills, is the primary, if not the sole, point of schooling. This, market strategem enables the promoters of school reform materials and processes to plausibly hawk their wares in the face of much opinion that real follow-through, which might damage other educational markets, is unlikely.

To examine these issues further, see How much can school reform enhance a student's occupational fitness?

Cordially
EGR

Higher Academic Education: a Road to Servitude?

The farm laborer and the artisan are in a state of servitude, and have to do what they are told, but that is where it ends.

But the courtiers of a tyrant ingratiate themselves with him and beg favors of him, and the tyrant, seeing this, requires them not just to do what he says but to think the way he wants them to and, often, to anticipate his desires.

It is not enough that these people obey him, they must also please him in every way, they must endure hardship, torment themselves and drive themselves to the grave in carrying out his business; his pleasure must be their pleasure, his taste must be theirs, they must distort and cast off their natural disposition, they must hang on his every word, his tone of voice, his gestures, his expression; their every faculty must be alert to catch his wishes and to discern his thoughts.

Is that a happy existence? Can that be called living? Is there anything in the world less tolerable than that? And I do not mean less tolerable to a man of valor, a man of natural goodness, but simply endowed to a man with common sense, or just someone who has the appearance of a man? What way of life is more abject than one bereft of possessions, in which one's comfort, liberty, body and life depend on someone else?

– E. De La Boetie (circa1548) A Discourse on Voluntary Servitude

Technical and Skills Education, known also as Vocational Education, has long been a dumping ground for students whose benighted teachers and school counselors have thought them to be “not suited” for higher “academic” studies, when, in many cases, what they lacked was maturity, docility, or refined manners.

The great irony of this 21st Century is that along with an ever increasing ardor for college life, high school graduates do not, in increasing numbers, come to the university with what many consider the requisite level of preparation to succeed at their studies.

Parents and students have been oversold on the idea that finishing college with a high G.P.A. is automatically the road to a good life, a future in the Seat of Command and Respect. But unless students acquire needed economic skills along the way, the likelihood is that they will end up, at best, in a large organizational environment, perhaps, even with a comfortable salary. And they will spend their lives “playing office politics,” catering to the whims of higher-ups, rather than producing desired goods or services. (Think of the cartoon, Dilbert -- it is not, by any means, based on pure imagination!)

This is what has happened in public education where politicians, courts and other distantly situated "tyrants" endeavor to remove the last vestiges of professional decision-making from those most closely connected to schoolkids.

To examine these issues further, see "Tracking" in Public Education: preparation for the world of work?


Cordially
--- EGR

Raising Test Averages: is this good?

Put down six and carry two. ... Gee, but this is hard to do.
You can think and think and think, till your brains are numb.
I don't care what teacher says,I can't do that sum.
-- Victor Herbert & Kenny Baker

Suppose we find that over time more and more kids in a school have test scores above average. Is this good? Not necessarily, even though most people would jump to the conclusion that achievement was going up.

Suppose we find find that over time more and more kids in a school have test scores below average. Is this bad? Not necessarily, even though most people would jump to the conclusion that achievement was going down.

Find out how a common misunderstanding (even by so-called “authorities”) makes schools look bad. -- EGR

To see the details go to Every Child Above Average
Cordially,
-- EGR

What Can Be Learned? By Whom? Under What Circumstances?

“Insanity is doing the same things over and over again and expecting different results” -- Albert Einstein

Is the push for academic achievement in American schools a pursuit of useable knowledge? Or is it little more than an ego-gratification activity? Will having more “college-educated” people make us, as a nation, wealthier, stronger, wiser? Or will it merely contribute to the pointless, evanescent conflicts generated by simpering celebrity spokespersons.

We Americans have long rushed to solve problems without considering what exactly the problems were. Americans in the Armed Services have, through many a battle, suffered mightily from hastily under-planned, under-resourced military campaigns based on false, or outmoded assumptions. (Watch the Military Channel on TV for many an example forthrightly described as such.)

American public schools have been being “reformed” for over a hundred years. Each “reform” has been much the impetus for the next. But who wants to be bothered with “philosophical questions” such as those given above in the title of this blog entry?

The danger of such inquiry, I suppose, is that if we were to examine those questions carefully, we might come to conclusions that bring us to reject proposals and programs dear to the hearts of many an ideologue, or “entrepreneur.”

 For references and to examine these issues further, see Models of Learning

Cordially

--- EGR

What? No More Brownie Points! It’s … It’s UnAmerican!

The Sunday November 28th, 2010 New York Times, Week In Review p. 3 reports that because some kids with B+ and A averages cannot pass standardized tests, and because other students with F, E, and D averages do pass them, that awarding grade points for homework done (and other not directly academic activity) will be tightly curtailed in certain school districts.

This is dangerously revolutionary! It threatens to invert the pyramid of scholastic honors by giving top rank to hard-scrabble, lower-class NERDS, (and too many Asian students)! Such a policy fails to appreciate the social graces hard-won by students from Middle Class and Elite families who know how to show appreciation for the (often, very subtle) humor, insights and wisdoms of whoever is in charge. A “Yes, sir!” or an “Of course, ma’am!” is worth a hundred solved quadratic equations.

Mere technical skills are not what move a person up in the corporate world. Technicians, accountants and engineers are just hired help. A head full of facts is not necessary, or even desirable to achieve even the highest political office! Schools that serve the fetish of skills and facts are schools that will graduate workers destined to suffer resizing!

To examine these issues further, see Productivity, Politics and Hypocrisy in American Public Education


Cordially
--- EGR

What Does a Diploma Mean? Just Another Sheep Skinned?

Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple. --Barry Switzer, US football coach (1937 - )

We’re very proud of ourselves when we, or those we love, earn an educational certificate or degree. It’s just so coooool, great, wonderful, awe-inspiring, etc, to parade up onto a stage to be handed a diploma – or reasonable facsimile thereof – whilst wearing a medieval gown with accompanying mortarboard or tam and multicolored hood. Even kindergartners do it.

The diploma is supposed to represent skills achieved, attitudes inculcated and knowledge acquired – or some reasonable facsimile thereof. We don’t really look too hard.

But would you choose to go to, or take your loved ones to, a licensed physician who got through school by cheating, sleeping through classes, copying other’s notes, and memorizing test preparation booklets the way that a large minority – I am being optimistic here about numbers – of students in higher education do? (In ancient times when I went to high school we read Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis: a source, no doubt, of my worries.)

Everyone “knows” that where you go to college gives you a status advantage in the competition for jobs. But do you really get more from third-base universities? Does status indicate anything more in the practitioner in skills achieved, attitudes inculcated and knowledge acquired?

To examine these issues further, see Educational Assessment: 
confusing status with achievement.


Cordially
--- EGR

Student Teaching: Just Another Hoop to Jump Through?

The student teaching experience is a real mixed bag. If you are lucky, your supervising teacher will be a real mentor, who not only passes on skills, but gives you insights into the crucial social and political factors in your school building that can impact on your ability to be a good teacher.

If you are unlucky, it is a different story. You can tell if you’re one of the misfortunate ones if your supervising teacher disappears after your first meeting. That teacher will tell you something along the lines that the best way to approach teaching is by the “sink or swim method” which you can only “work out for yourself.”

Actually, the sink or swim approach is good for people who already have the skills and enough strength of character to deal with a classroom full of kids. Few do.

Student teaching, like mentoring, are two ideas which sound good in theory. However, in practice they are easily subverted into something else. Student teaching becomes, for example, free time for the "supervising" teachers. Mentoring becomes ingratiating oneself with the principal who “needed” to find “someone” to take on student teachers.

Principals often take as many student teachers as they can get because they themselves are taking courses for the superintendency and the student teachers come out of the same department the administrator’s professors are in. Getting student teachers placed has higher priority than making a good student-mentor match.

To examine these issues further, see Mentoring: Are We Serious?


Cordially
--- EGR

Can Excellence in Education Be Achieved in a Democracy?

It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. – Baudelaire

Suppose money were no problem. Then what could we do? Could we fulfill the aspiration expressed in the education codes of many states: “… to provide each child with a thorough and efficient education”?

Certainly we could have schools, seminars, and (in the language of Ed Biz), “information delivery systems,” that bring some children to be adults with high degrees of skill, or who have stored within them piles of facts which they know how to make use of. If people would be satisfied with this much – and even this is a lot – we could very likely approach some reasonable standard of excellence in education.

But some children are still not all children. And, more importantly, what about nurturance and values? Aren’t these crucial elements in what we understand to be “education” as opposed to “training” and “indoctrination”? We might want our daughter to grow up to be an architect, but not at the cost of her sanity or health. Our son we might envision as a medical doctor, but not at the cost of his religion or morality.

And how much agreement do you think Americans from all walks of life, from all religions or none, from all kinds of commitments to conflicting philosophies and values, will be able to find when it comes to supporting a common school in the hope of promoting a common education?

But isn’t there already a lot of consensus on basic values? Or is it just the sloganeering of those oblivious to their mutual misunderstanding?

To examine these issues further, see Trading-Off "Sacred" Values:
Why Public Schools Should Not Try to "Educate"

Cordially
--- EGR