Monthly Archives: December 2006

Isn’t it obvious that the production techniques that give us millions of i-Pods all exactly the same should not be used in our schools? Yet haven’t we adopted such techniques in the education of our children? Children are different, every one of them from every other one. Yet we go on grouping them together most often by age in our schools. This does keep the cost of education low, but also keeps even lower the learning of our children. (If you don’t believe this try using your Spanish on the typical fourth year Spanish language student in our highschools.)

The wolf pack is all about rearing its young. The wolf wouldn’t have it any other way. Going off to work for the wolf means keeping its young well fed. Staying home means being sure the cubs play and thereby learn. The salmon is different depositing its thousands of eggs in the river bottom to be then fertilized by the male and subsequently abandoned to fend for themselves when only the fittest few will survive to lay thousands of eggs in their turn.

Both methods are best in their particular circumstances. No one would have the wolf or the salmon reform its practices. Our method? Who would ever say it’s the best we can do? Who is satisfied?  Who hasn’t tried, so far without great success, to improve our educational system? Perhaps in the past, when we were hunter gatherers, we knew how to educate our young. Who would ever say that we know how now?

We blindly and stubbornly keep our young of the same chronological age together, trying to work with whatever abilities and interests they may share, rather than with what makes them special and unique. In fact, we pretty much neglect the individual traits that will one day, in one way or another, come into their own, making most of what we have done in our schools come to nothing.

Again, only because our children have extraordinary survival capabilities does our race continue. Think how much more significant humanity’s story on this earth would be if we allowed each child to realize his or her own unique potential. Isn’t it obvious that what we have been doing is all wrong?

Now educators have for a long time had glimpses of this truth. But they haven’t yet by and large drawn the obvious conclusions. (The educator John Holt is an exception, and there are others.)

Take for example, these remarks of Ted Sizer. Isn’t he on to something?

"School curricula are a mile wide and an inch deep. For example, what
could be absolutely more insane than the world history course,
Cleopatra to Clinton in 180 days? What could be abolutely more insane
than an English teacher with 130 kids, five classes a day, expected to
edit childish writing into prose of quality and grace and clarity?"

and, "Push [only] on a mass basis three standards: resourceful reading, clear
writing and speaking, and computational mathematics. These are subjects
upon which most can agree and without which no school can begin to be
effective…. keep central authority out of the other elements of
school, matters over which there can and should be ‘no one best
standard."

Or Joe Gauld who in an email to James Traub writes: "The emphasis
on academic achievement is basically elitist, since roughly 10
percent naturally respond to classroom instruction, while the other 90
percent either give up or seek recognition elsewhere."
(Here is the link to James Traub’s article about Joe Gauld and the Hyde Schools in Education Next in which this comment appears.)

I would agree with Joe. So why indeed do we keep the other 90 percent in the same classroom? Haven’t we learned that it doesn’t work? And unbelievably we’ve been doing this since the founding of the common school some 150 years ago. Once again this is great testimony to the extraordinary survival qualities of our race, and in particular of our children.

I’m still thinking about Harold Howe’s statement that "most educators are aware that any group of children of a particular age or grade will vary widely in their learning for a whole host of reasons."* Is there any truer statement that one can make about education than this? That kids of the same age are different and that they learn differently? And yet don’t we go on in the way we structure our schools and classrooms pretending that this isn’t so?

That kids differ widely among themselves is what makes teaching an art, and not a science. If kids were all the same we could have them adding fractions, writing paragraphs, answering questions about the same texts in the same room at the same time, and have robots replacing teachers. But they’re not, and we can’t, unless as is too often the case, we have the entire class go on at the pace of the slowest learners among them.

The art of the teacher is to somehow enable all of her students to learn in spite of the fact that what they learn and the rate at which they learn are hardly the same for any two of them, let alone the entire class of 20 – 25 individuals. Only the extraordinary teacher will bring it about that most of her students in the class are learning. But not even the extraordinary teacher will bring it about that all are. The more ordinary situation, when only a few are learning, is the rule.

This situation has been with us for as long as we’ve had schools and is the reason for our repeated attempts at school reform. At times we have faced up to it directly and tracked the students, into slow and fast learners, into college bound and vocation bound, creating other, perhaps even worse problems by so doing. At times, such as now, we have religiously avoided tracking the students, and have invented one stratagem after another in order to keep all those of the same age together in the same classroom. The children of course have resisted our liberal and egalitarian solution with the result that many have fallen way behind their peers, and many of them have dropped out of school entirely.

But in fact tracking has always been with us in one form or another. Because in some terrible sense it does correspond to the ways things are. We’re perhaps not as guilty of this device as was the former Soviet Union where the schools were either magnet schools serving only the best and the brightest, or holding stations for the worst and the dullest youth who only upon reaching the proper age were released to join the working classes, usually for life.

Not as guilty, but guilty we are. For don’t we also have, not perhaps in the same building, but in different buildings, and very often far apart, in different corners of the city, or state, programs for our intellectually and artistically gifted and talented? Art and music academies, math and science regional schools, exam schools, and technical high schools? Not to mention the private, independent schools, serving more and more our political and economic elite. Not to mention the growing number of so called “no excuses” schools although not selected by the kids, selected by the parents? Not to mention the growing number of religious schools, not to mention the growing army of home schoolers. Haven’t we in these other learning situations placed those with similar interests and abilities together in the same learning environment? And haven’t we become in spite of our profession of egalitarianism a meritocracy?

So we have partially solved the problem of students of varying abilities in the same classroom by permitting selected students to attend more specialized schools. Now there are those, proponents of school choice, who would increase this movement away from the traditional public school and have all schools become schools of choice. And there are those, representing the entrenched interests of our public schools, who would resist this movement, seeing in school choice a slightly veiled attempt to dismember and eventually destroy our 150 year old system of public schools open to all.

There have always been efforts to reform our public schools. And time and time again we see reformers repeating the efforts of past reformers. I believe that this is so because schools have as a rule, from the beginning 150 years ago, put children all together in one building separating them only by age. This was certainly the least costly solution to educating all of our children. It was never, however, the most effective solution. Once again, this system has never really worked for the reason that, as Harold Howe reminds us, “any group of children of a particular age or grade will vary widely in their learning for a whole host of reasons.”*

*"Those of us who recently supported the new legislation (the NAEP) and its funding had no intention of creating a new authority to tell all American schools what to teach in each grade or even that schools should be organized by grades. More importantly, most educators are aware that any group of children of a particular age or grade will vary wide­ly in their learning for a whole host of reasons. To suggest that there are particular learnings or skill lev­els that should be developed to certain defined points by a particular age or grade is like saying all 9th graders should score at or above the 9th grade level on a standardized test. It defies reality."
(Vinovskis, Maris. 1998. Overseeing the Nation’s Report Card. The
Creation and Evolution of the National Assessment Governing Board
(NAGB). National Assessment Governing Board, U.S. Department of
Education. p. 43)

Gerald Bracey may be the best friend that the public schools have ever had. Anyone who would be critical of the schools, and in particular, anyone who would make the schools any less "public," by returning to the people, say, the power to choose their children’s schools, public or private, well this person or group will find itself the object of Jerry’s verbal onslaught. The most recent target of Jerry’s wrath are the recommendations of the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce calling for the biggest changes in American public education in a century.

Click here to read Bracey’s onslaught.

Here is my reply to Bracey:

You know, Jerry, I find that I agree with your put-down of Tough Choices or Tough Times. And in particular your put-down of those who would lay the principal responsibility for the future success of our country on the schools. At the same time I’m sure you would agree with me that neither the schools, nor anyone of us, lives up to being all that we could be. Imperfection is very much with the schools and with us. And therefore, you’re right, not to single out the schools for special blame, the schools being just one of a host of imperfect institutions that make up our country.

Where I think you’re wrong is that you seem to believe in the existence of a conspiracy out there to destroy the public schools, supported in particular by ‘research’ emanating from the bad guys, the Hoover Institution, the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan and Heartland Institutes, the Mackinac Center, the Center for Education Reform, the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Paul Peterson group at Harvard, et. al.

I think you give these think tanks and their thinkers too much credit. There is no conspiracy. They’re not hiding anything. I believe that they believe in the rightness of what they are doing. Education in this country has always been saddled by those who would reform it, and reform is what they are all about. Reforms are what drive them. They’re not out to destroy our present system of education, just make it more effective. I’m sure you would admit that the present system could be improved.

I too might criticize the reformists, these and others. They believe a bit too much in the rightness of what they are doing. They are yet one more group of true believers in this world, of which there are already too many. What we really need are a few more skeptics, reformers yes, but reformers who would proceed more cautiously, more humbly, more tolerant of the views of others while going about proposing their reforms. As it is too many people believe in too many different and opposing things, and would impose their partially correct solutions on everyone, with the result that all of us coming together for the common good, in this case for the benefit of kids, seems to happen less and less.

Education is an enormously complicated process to get right, even for just one child, say my grandson, but when it concerns, how many, 50 million kids in our nation’s schools? well then we approach the degree of complexity that places other familiar phenomena, such as the weather and currency evaluations, beyond our ken. Isn’t the nature of the best education for all in important respects also beyond our ken? So far it seems to have eluded all our attempts to put it in a box.

Finally, I agree with you that our country, compared to other countries, is doing quite well in many if not most important respects, and that our present system of education with all its faults compares well with the systems in place in the other developed countries. And I also agree that our country’s failings probably stem more from the failure of our leaders than that of our schools. It’s interesting that our leaders are often the products of our best schools, sometimes even the same one, Yale for example. I haven’t yet heard anyone blaming Yale.

Comments of the Commision Members:

“Anyone who hopes to hold a job in the next several decades should read—if not memorize—this extraordinary report.” —Norman R. Augustine, Retired Chairman and CEO, Lockheed Martin Corporation

“This penetrating, scary analysis and these astute,
far-reaching recommendations amount to A Nation at Risk for the next
generation.”—Chester E. Finn Jr., President, Thomas B. Fordham Foundation

 “Bold, inventive, analytic, and piercing.”—Sharon
Lynn Kagan, Virginia & Leonard Marx Professor of Early Childhood
and Family Policy, Teachers College, Columbia University

“This
proposal is radical? Yes. Hard to achieve? Of course. Essential?
Absolutely. Our nation’s schools are failing to educate our children,
and that has to stop—else we condemn our own kids to ever lower
incomes. We must act—now!”—William E. Brock, Former Secretary of Labor, Reagan Administration
   

“Fascinating and thought-provoking read that is sure to get the American educational establishment talking.”—Charles B. Reed, Chancellor, California State University System

“This
report lays out the kind of drastic change to the system that is
crucial if we are to remain a viable economic and political leader in
the world.”—David P. Driscoll, Commissioner of Education, Massachusetts

For More responses to Tough Choices or Tough Times, click here, and then here to read Jay Mathews’ piece from the Washington Post.

We have not yet figured out how to educate our children, all of our children, and it’s not as if we haven’t been trying. As evidence for this statement, two observations.  One, the nearly 50% dropout rate from our inner city schools (25% nation wide) and two (this an example of anecdotal evidence so overwhelming that it becomes statistically meaningful), that large numbers of those who stay in school through highschool still cannot read, write, or figure well enough to either go on to college and finish college in a reasonable length of time, or obtain anything but menial work following a job search.

At the present time there is only one proposed “fix” for this situation, and that is the standards movement, meaning that all children be required to meet and master standards in math and language arts by the time they graduate from highschool, or, in other words, that all students be judged “proficient” in these two areas. On the face of it the fix, the standards movement, seems not unreasonable. Richard Riley, President Clinton’s Secretary of Education, in 1989, wondered why we shouldn’t first
determine what a child should know and then develop tests to
determine further if that child is learning what they should know.” Highly reasonable.

But our leaders were not always so reasonable. In September of 1989 President Bush and the nation’s governors called an Education Summit in Charlottesville, Virginia. As a follow-up to the Summit came the National Education Goals Panel of 1991 and a number of the goals were closely allied to the standards movement. For example, "By the year 2000, American students will leave grades 4, 8, and 12 having demonstrated competency in challenging subject matter including English, mathematics, science, history, and geography; and every school in America will ensure that all students learn to use their minds well, so they may be prepared for responsible citizenship, further learning, and productive employment in our modern economy." A bit extravagant, that, but others even more so, for example, Goal 4:  "By the year 2000, U.S. students will be first in the world in science and mathematics achievement." What does being first in the world in math and science have to do with the education of all of our children?

In her book, National Standards in American
Education: A Citizen’s Guide, 1995, former Secretary of Education Diane Ravitz, had this to say, among much else regarding standards: “Standards can improve achievement by clearly defining what is to be taught and what kind of performance is expected.” One needs to be far away from the classroom to make a statement like that. Faced with 25 to 30 children right there in the room with us how many of us have ever been able to "clearly define what is to be taught and what kind of performance is expected" from all of them. It can’t be done, I don’t think. That’s perhaps why we have, up until now, failed to improve things for kids in the classroom.

In the new century with the new Bush presidency came the No Child Left Behind Act of Congress, a further and much more substantial step in applying the "standards fix" to our children’s schooling, but stirring up with its passage, and even more with its initial applications, more substantial opposition to the standards movement than ever before.

Perhaps the most convincing argument in favor of national standards is the fact that so many other countries, liberal developed democracies no less than we, have them. In France, for example: “a French math text for 16-year-olds begins by spelling out the national curriculum for the year so that all 16-year-olds know what they are expected to  study…. the text makes frequent references to math  exams the regional school districts have given in the past. Students practice on these exams to help them prepare for the exam they will face; they know where to concentrate to meet the standard.” We certainly ought to look more closely at the French experience.

What is the source of the growing opposition to the standards and testing? Are the opponents being unreasonable? Why is it that the full scale adoption of national performance levels in our country is still today, after all these years, very much a long shot?

I don’t think it’s primarily because we don’t want to lose local control of education to the Federal government. In my experience local educators do not shut themselves off from the outside world, but have always easily adopted and benefitted from best practices from elsewhere. Rather, I believe, it’s because we sense that national standards will inevitably create what some have called an educational apartheid. For under any system that applies the same achievement benchmarks to all there will always be a good number of children who will not reach those achievement goals, and will be even more left behind, separate from their more successful peers, than they are now. It’s ironic that those who created NCLB would have most of all prevented this from happening. It was in their plan to bring up those now at the bottom of the educational ladder, not leave them further behind.

What is it about our children that the standards movement with its performance levels is overlooking? Harold Howe, a former U.S. Commissioner of Education while addressing the reauthorization of the NAEP in 1988, gave what is for me the best reason to oppose the same performance levels for all:

"The NAEP was created to be a service to tell  Americans what young people know and can do in  certain important areas of learning and how it is changing. The main objective of the new legislation  was to extend that purpose to encourage state level use of NAEP. Those of us who recently supported the  new legislation and its funding had no intention of creating a new authority to tell all  American schools what to teach in each grade or even that schools should be organized by grades. More importantly, most educators are aware that any group of children of a particular age or grade will vary widely in their learning for a whole host of reasons. To suggest that there are particular learnings or skill levels that should be developed to certain defined points by a particular age or grade is like saying all 9th  graders should score at or above the 9th grade level on a standardized test. It defies reality."

What I take away with me is this: "…any group of children of a particular age or grade will vary widely in their learning for a whole host of reasons."  Why isn’t this bit of wisdom, or common sense, in the forefront of our thinking about how children learn, and about how best we may evaluate that learning, and for their benefit, not for ours?

The history of education has seen a struggle between those who would grow children en masse, the way one raises pigs in Denmark, or tulips in Holland, and those who would begin with each individual child, and the education that best suits that child.

At this moment in history the former seem to have the upper hand, be it those of the NCLB, or narrow standards movement concentrated on the 3 R’s, or be it the reformers, such as Richard Rothstein and many others, who would make the standards movement as broad as possible by including a much larger gamut of school subjects, music, art, sports, citizenship et al., as well as a diminished emphasis on testing and accountability. Unfortunately the best of those who would take us a third way and have us look closely at each individual child, Jean Jacques Rousseau, John Holt, Milton Friedman, and a few others, are no longer with us, and no one is loudly defending their position in the current debate over standards, accountability, and the goals of education.

Does it make sense to speak in general of the goals of education, other than what is best for the individual child? I don’t think so, yet what a lot of books have been written thereupn. Shouldn’t there be almost as many goals as there are learners, with these goals becoming more and more distinct from one another as the learner matures? How many college seniors have you ever met with the same goals? So we know that this is what is to come. In the elementary grades shouldn’t we begin the process by helping each individual learner to find his or her own way?

To speak of shared goals for an entire population may very well be appropriate for populations of pigs and tulip bulbs, and other such species of life totally subjugated to our interests. In all such instances we choose not unreasonably to disregard individual characteristics (except when we would improve the strain) and apply the most profitable pig production techniques to all pigs, and similarly the most profitable tulip productive techniques to all tulips. The result is that the pigs from Denmark, all 13 million of them, are all success stories, as are the hundreds of millions of tulip bulbs from Holland. We made them exactly what we wanted them to be.

When it comes to children, however, failure is common and successes are exceptional. At best there are a relatively small number of individuals at the top, who have turned out to be just what we wanted, those who have gone on to higher education and become themselves entrepreneurs holding important roles in the growing knowledge economy. Then there are those, many more of them, in the middle who read, write, and figure well enough to become knowledge workers, and who, if there are remnants remaining of their individualities, may even indulge themselves in being what they are in moments away from the job. Finally, there are the large numbers of those who have dropped out of school and at best get back in on the fringes of society, in the shops and the trades and the service industries, and at worst find themselves without a job, or home, or stable family situation, often turning to destructive behavior, to lives of crime and/or drugs.

I readily recognize that things are much easier in regard to the rearing of pigs and the cultivation of tulip bulbs. For those that don’t correctly respond to our production schedules are simply cut from the stock, eliminated, and we hear no more about them. Of couse there are always maniacs, such as Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao et al., who would do the same for men as for pigs and tulips, eliminate those that resist taking on the form intended for them. But happily up until now the maniacs have either been defeated or have died without true followers.

Today in the developed world the rulers respect individual lives enough to allow them to go on living. But, of course, just staying alive, in ghettos, bidonvilles, squatter cities, shelters, Parisian suburbs, jails etc. is nowhere near enough, and although we know all that well enough we seem unable to do more. We are constantly waging wars against poverty, illiteracy, sickness, homelessness, joblessness etc. because even we, living in the richest country ever, are beset with these scourges. But who would ever say we are winning these wars, that what we are doing is at all effective? We’re not, and it isn’t.

I believe that in important respects our problems stem from our insistence on raising our children in regard to what’s best for us, or at least what we think is best for us, by placing them, mostly separated by age in classrooms in schools. The latter can never be right for all, and are probably most often wrong for most.  Somehow we have to spring the individual child loose from the school environment, allow it to become what ever lies within its power to become, because all children have within them the potential of becoming real people with their own important contributions to make to their fellows.

How can this be done? I like what Milton Friedman proposes. Give the full per capita cost of public schooling to the parents ("universal vouchers"), and allow the parents, until the child is old enough to do so for himself, to seek out the learning environment that is best for the child. Let a million different flowers bloom (to employ one of the bits of wisdom from one of the maniacs referred to above). This is what we should be writing and talking about. It ought to be evident by now that reforming the schools is not going to do the trick. Haven’t centuries of failed school reforms demonstrated this? And please, no more endless chatter about the goals of education. Talk rather about the goals for each individual child.