Category Archives: Education / Youth

We Can Do Something About This

Sometimes, real life is so ironic.

There is probably no issue more discussed–in Indianapolis and elsewhere–than education. All kinds of grand reforms are being proposed, all manner of expensive “fixes” and pet theories advanced. And meanwhile, we are failing to support proven programs and experiences for the kids who most need those experiences.

Yesterday, our daughter forwarded an email to me from a social studies teacher at Arsenal Technical High School. After 16 years of sponsoring Model UN participation, Tech no longer has the funding to cover transportation and other costs to participate in Chicago in February, and the school board is refusing to authorize the field trip until the teacher can prove he has the cash in hand.

Anyone who has ever taught high school–and that includes me, back in the day–can confirm the importance of programs like Model UN, We the People, Boys and Girls State and the like. Anyone whose children have participated in one of these experiences knows how educationally valuable they are, especially for kids who come from families that don’t have the means to provide travel and similar “extracurricular” enrichment.

Part of the problem facing Tech is evidently that the state has not yet released Title One funds–something that should have happened months ago. These kids will lose a valuable learning opportunity through no fault of their own, because our public “servants” aren’t performing competently.

The teacher, Troy Hammon, feels so strongly about the merits of Model UN that he is offering to use two personal days to pay for his substitute teacher, and covering his own meals and bus ticket. (Shades of those greedy public sector workers people keep complaining about…)

The per student cost of participation is 450. for each of the eight students going. That covers registration, hotel, bus and meals for four days. Extra dollars would pay for a meeting room for research and preparation, and would reimburse the teacher. The kids–honor students with limited time to work– have been asking their parents and grandparents for help. They can get by with 1500 (with the teacher’s contribution), but ideally would have 4,500.

We’re sending $100, and I’m doing something I’ve never done on this blog–I’m asking those of you who can do so to chip in a few bucks so these kids who’ve been working their hearts out to prepare can go to an event with demonstrable educational benefit.

If you are willing to help, contact Troy Hammon. His email is HammonT@ips.k12.in.us. I believe he is setting up a website through which contributions can be made, or you can just send a check to Model UN, 1500 E. Michigan Street, Indianapolis, 46201. [Update: make check payable to Arsenal Technical High School and put Model UN on the memo line]

Grandiose reform efforts are well and good–and needed, obviously–but shame on us if these kids are denied a valuable experience now because we’re all too busy pontificating about policy to do the job that is currently at hand.

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The Devil and the Details

I see where applications for Indiana’s private school vouchers have doubled, in the wake of the legislature’s action last session relaxing the criteria.

School Choice Indiana’s president was quoted as ecstatic, and noted that participation in the program has quadrupled since it was first introduced.

Happy days. Public schools not up to snuff? Don’t bother fixing them–privatize! (We all know that government can’t do anything right, and the private sector can’t do anything wrong.)

I’m sure it doesn’t mean anything that in Madison, Wisconsin, private schools that are currently participating in that state’s voucher program are vigorously resisting proposed new requirements that they make public their students’ achievement data.

Accountability is evidently only for public schools.

The sponsor of the Wisconsin measure, Senator Luther Olsen, is the Republican chair of the state legislature’s Education Committee. He wants the Legislature to be a “careful steward of taxpayer dollars.” As he put it, “No matter if you’re a public school, a charter school or a choice school, if you get a check, you should get a check up.”

That seems eminently reasonable. If tax dollars are going to private schools, the very least we should expect is information about the effectiveness of the programs those dollars are supporting. Furthermore, if parents are going to make informed choices about where to send their children to school, it seems only fair that they should have access to basic information about the performance of the schools they are considering.

According to news reports, however, Wisconsin’s non-public schools are adamantly opposed to making their results public, and the legislature is unlikely to pass the measure.

Interesting, isn’t it? The most vocal critics of public schools–the advocates and beneficiaries of voucher programs that bleed resources from the public system to support their own institutions, the people who insist upon testing and accountability for public schools–aren’t so enthusiastic about performance reviews when they are the ones being evaluated.

I guess sauce for the goose gets kind of bitter when it’s poured on the gander.

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It’s Only a Theory! Or Texas Idiocy Strikes Again….

Well, I see that the crackpot members of the Texas Board of Education are at it again.

Gee, it seems like only yesterday that a previous panel removed Thomas Jefferson from several of the state history standards, and substituted Thomas Aquinas. (Because Aquinas was so integral to development of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution…)

Of course the real target of these doofuses has been and continues to be science, especially evolution. In 2007, Rick Perry appointed a young earth creationist to chair the Texas Board, and in 2009, science standards were considerably weakened. Efforts to substitute fundamentalist biblical beliefs for science have continued, with some setbacks (in 2011, creationists tried to get religious “supplemental materials” offered in Texas science classes, but were unsuccessful.)

But of course, they’re back. This time, the Board has asked “experts” (i.e. creationists) to weigh in on the merits of high school biology textbooks. My favorite response:

“I understand the National Academy of Science’s strong support of the theory of evolution. At the same time, this is just a theory. As an educator, parent and grandparent, I feel very firmly that ‘creation science’ based upon biblical principles should be incorporated into every Biology book that is up for adoption.”

Ignore, for the moment, the fact that every court that has considered the issue has ruled that ‘creation science’ isn’t science; it’s religion, and religion cannot constitutionally be taught in public school science classes.

No, what drives me bonkers is the incredible ignorance shown by the repeated accusation that evolution is “just a theory.”

In normal conversation, we use the term theory to mean “an educated guess.” But in science, the word has a very different meaning; a scientific theory is anything but a guess. The scientific method involves summarizing a group of hypotheses that have been successfully and repeatedly tested. Once enough empirical evidence accumulates to support those hypotheses, a theory is developed that can explain that particular phenomenon. Scientific theories begin with and are based on careful examination of observed–and observable– facts.

Furthermore–unlike religious dogma–scientific theories are always open to revision based upon new observations or newly discovered facts. That process is called falsification.

Falsification is an essential characteristic of a scientific hypothesis or theory. Basically, a falsifiable assertion is one that can be empirically refuted or disproved. Falsifiability means that the hypothesis or theory is testable by empirical experiment. Merely because something is “falsifiable” does not mean it is false; rather it means that if it is false, then observation or experiment will at some point demonstrate its falsity.  Many things may be true, or generally accepted as true, without being falsifiable. Observing that a woman or a sunset is beautiful, asserting that you feel sad, declaring that you are in love and similar statements may be true or not, but they aren’t science, because they can be neither empirically proved nor disproved. Similarly, God may exist, but that existence is not falsifiable—God cannot be dragged into a laboratory and tested. One either believes in His (or Her) existence or not. That’s why religious belief is called faith.

If something isn’t falsifiable, it isn’t science.

Appointing people who don’t even know what science is to review science textbooks is a foolproof way to tell the rest of the world that yours is a state of fools–and a guarantee that your educational system will be hard pressed to maintain its current (abysmal) rank of 45th among the states.

Do you suppose Mexico would take these yahoos back?

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It’s All Connected….

One of the difficulties in crafting reasonable public policies is that the world isn’t nice and neat, so perfectly logical approaches to problem A often fail because the chosen solution doesn’t  take cause B into account.

This is especially true of efforts to improve public education. Those efforts are already fraught, because a substantial number of those arguing over reforms are acting on the basis of analyses based on political ideology rather than on evidence, and because there is no real agreement on either the nature of the education we’re trying to improve or the accuracy of efforts to measure it.

A persistent bone of contention in these debates has been the effect of poverty. Educators have insisted that poor children bring substantial barriers to learning into the classroom with them; their argument has been dismissed by reformers who respond that the “barriers” are just excuses for poor teaching.

If poverty makes it more difficult for children to learn, reform becomes considerably more difficult–so it is understandable that well-meaning people who want to do something now about low performance would be reluctant to consider how it fits into the mix. (One huge social problem at a time, folks!)

As long as this discussion was largely theoretical, reformers could focus on what happened in the classroom to the exclusion of the rest of poor kids’ lives. Aside from occasional acknowledgments of the role played by urban asthma and lead poisoning, there has been little recognition of the effects of poverty on IQ.

That may change.

Last month, the journal Science published a major study by researchers at Princeton, Harvard and the University of Warwick. (Science is a pre-eminent peer-reviewed journal.) The researchers concluded that “the condition of poverty imposed a mental burden akin to losing 13 IQ points.”

It’s important to clarify what that meant. Poor people don’t really “lose” those IQ points–mental capacities return when the stresses and preoccupations attendant to being poor lessen. The research compared human cognition to bandwidth–there’s only a finite amount of it, and poverty imposes a “mental load” that is the equivalent of losing a night’s sleep, or being a chronic alcoholic. As Princeton’s Eldar Shafir explained,

“When your bandwidth is loaded, in the case of the poor, you’re just more likely to not notice things, you’re more likely to not resist things you ought to resist, you’re more likely to forget things, you’re going to have less patience, less attention to devote to your children when they come back from school.”

This researchers studied adults, but obviously, the deficits they identified would affect the children of poor families in a number of ways.

The question is: what do we do to ameliorate the problem? Can we ever hope to “fix” public education without addressing poverty?

And why are our lawmakers so intent on shredding–rather than mending–the social safety net?

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Testing….1,2,3…Testing

I’ve been watching school reform efforts for several years now, and I’m depressed.

Most of the organizations that have formed to improve our public schools are populated by wonderful, well-meaning people, and most of the men and women who have chosen to teach in those schools are caring, dedicated professionals. So you’d think they would all be talking to each other and working together to identify and eliminate the barriers to better schools.

Instead, they seem to be at war with each other.

Now, I understand that focusing on common goals has been made more difficult by  the “take no prisoners” attitudes of ideologues like the departed-but-certainly-not-missed Tony Bennett, whose arrogance and autocratic tactics created a backlash of resentment among the teachers he regularly and unfairly bashed. (It shouldn’t surprise us when people who’ve been told they are overpaid and underperforming nitwits are unenthusiastic about collaborating with those who leveled the accusations.) But Bennett and his equally tone-deaf boss are gone, and the folks on the front lines–the teachers–need to help the real reformers understand what they need.

I haven’t been a high school teacher for nearly 50 years; neither do I have mastery of the reform literature. I’m just an interested observer who believes that public education is an immensely important public good, so you should take the following observations with the appropriate amount of salt.

Reformers are absolutely right to want teacher accountability. But teachers are absolutely right that high-stakes testing is not accountability.

Testing to figure out what kids know is a time-honored necessity; testing as a way to evaluate teacher performance is deeply problematic. For one thing, poor people move so frequently that turnover in many inner-city schools exceeds 100% during the school year, and the kids being tested at the end of the year aren’t the same kids who were tested at the beginning. Tests in such classrooms are meaningless.

Even in more stable environments, the current testing regime does significant damage–to students, who are being taught that there is always a “right” answer, and to teachers who are forced to focus their efforts on the subjects being tested and neglect other, equally important lessons. Furthermore, years of research demonstrate that more affluent kids test better for lots of reasons unrelated to the quality of classroom performance. If teachers are going to be evaluated and paid based upon test results, a lot of good teachers are going to leave the poorer schools that need them most and head for precincts where the students are better off and easier to teach.  (And yes, I know the theory is that we are testing for improvement, not absolute knowledge, but that theory is too often just that–theoretical.)

Here’s a heretical thought: before we engage in programs to assess accountability, let’s see if we can achieve agreement on what we mean by “education” and “quality instruction.” In other words, let’s be sure we know what instructors are supposed to be accountable for.

Too many of the self-styled “reformers” (not all, but too many) equate education with job training and quality instruction with (easy to test) rote learning.  For that matter, too many teachers agree with those definitions.

The people who genuinely want to improve public education–and there are a lot of them in both reform organizations and classrooms–  start by tackling the hard questions: what do kids really, really need to know in order to function in 21st Century America? What skills are essential? What are the barriers to imparting that information and those skills?  What additional resources do poorer kids need?  How much money does it take to provide a  good education, and how much does ignorance cost us?

Here’s how you can separate out the genuine education reformers from the ideologues and shills: real reformers understand the importance of public education’s civic mission. Because they understand the constitutive function of the public schools–because they understand that education is more than just another consumer good–they want to fix public education by working with teachers and parents and policymakers to make our public school systems work.

The genuine reformers aren’t the ones insisting that we  privatize or abandon those schools.

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