Education

David Brooks is as dumb as a box of rocks. You cannot improve students' ability to read and write while simultaneously refusing to fund the humanities. It, after all, the humanities that require reading and writing. No test replaces semester long projects and no neoliberal university gives a good god damn about reading and writing.

Ye Gods

In one of the poorer parts of PA a school system has no money to pay its teachers. The teachers vote to continue working until such time as they can't. The state has recently offered tax breaks to corporations. And yet I betcha it's those same damn teachers who are responsible for the low achievers among their students.

As I Was Saying

Over to the NYT, we learn that

[e]lementary- and middle-school teachers who help raise their students’ standardized-test scores seem to have a wide-ranging, lasting positive effect on those students’ lives beyond academics, including lower teenage-pregnancy rates and greater college matriculation and adult earnings, according to a new study that tracked 2.5 million students over 20 years.

The study is, to be sure, by economists but don't let that put you off. 

Education, Isolation, and Critical Thinking

As Karl notes in the comments, one big drawback of the "virtual" school model is that all the socialization and socializing normally associated with high school disappears in online classrooms.  As is clear in these NYT articles online schools do a crappy job of educating kiddies.

As I mentioned, when discussing Idaho's aggressive and unpopular decision to force more kids into online and virtual learning, most of the proponents of virtual schools haven't got a clue about education. Let's, as an example, consider again the gov C.L. Otter's, one wonders if he has a jug band, claim about critical thinking. He thinks that exposure to information, true, false, or other, fosters critical thinking. How does that work?

Critical think requires at least two people engaged in a constant testing of both the sources of information and its synthesis, analyst, interpretation etc. In most cases, one of the interlocutors has to understand the issue or whathaveyou under consideration and be better able to make an argument. How does that work in an online environment? I was talking to a former student about his experience taking an online class and he pointed out that for the "discussion" part of the course if he or another student made some kind of a conceptual or factual error it could take hours before it was corrected. Even then all students might not become aware of the error for some time. Furthermore, the consistent denigration of teachers, no longer really teachers in the Idaho model but rather "guides," means that correcting errors becomes ever harder to do.

Why is it that neoliberals and conservatives have embraced this pointless endeavor? Because by transforming education in such a radical manner it no longer creates citizens with ties of affection or, really, the means of creating them by insisting on isolating and further atomizing them. In addition, by avoiding actual critical thinking and moving education in the direction that culminates in classrooms that look like the comments sections on you tube, i.e. subliterate and argumentative, they ensure that the few, the proud, the Plutocrats continue to rule without having to govern.

Education is Not a Commodity

According to this post by Dana Goldstein the neoliberal, market-based, teacher-union-basing reforms embraced by Michelle Rhee and her successor have done nothing or made things worse for minorities and the poor. A quick point, from the perspective of the right-wing of the neoliberal movement this is a success. From the perspective of the left-wing this is a sources of puzzlement, even though all the evidence suggests that the neoliberal, market-based, teacher-union-basing reforms don't work.

Education Not Automation

There is an article in the NYT about Idaho's attempt to foist "technology," by which they mean computers and online education, on its public schools.  As the story makes clear, the move resulted from intense lobbying from tech firms, goes against the wishes of most teachers, students, and parents, and is of dubious effectiveness but will begin the long slow march of automating teaching.

 The Idaho's govenor had this to say about the advantages of the new system of

putting technology into students’ hands was the only way to prepare them for the work force. Giving them easy access to a wealth of facts and resources online allows them to develop critical thinking skills, he said, which is what employers want the most. 

When asked about the quantity of unreliable information on the Internet, he said this also worked in favor of better learning. “There may be a lot of misinformation,” he said, “but that information, whether right or wrong, will generate critical thinking for them as they find the truth.”

He has, it seems to me, given the game away. Conservatives ought properly endorse education as the first step to seeing being able to understand the necessity of keeping elites in charge; if, that is, the idea of keeping current elites in charge made anything like sense. It doesn't. So education, effective education, is something conservatives have to oppose. Plus, public education here and elsewhere has been one of the many examples of the state using its powers well. There are, obviously, problems with content and outcomes in any educational system. Nothing is perfect and nothing is eternally complete.


Think about it. In the process of destroying factory jobs and gutting unions, one of the first steps was increasing machine power, which created the conditions necessary for "right sizing" our workforce, and then creating the political conditions necessary for outsourcing jobs. In Idaho, they  now go after teaching in the same manner. In ten years will one teacher "guide" 400 students to find possible true or false information on the internet and the think critically about it. The idea is laughable but it will serve the short-term interests of some corporation or another and the long-term interests of the 1% of nihilistic thugs.

One other point, if you or that person standing to your right thinks that Bill Gates' or any of the Walton's, Kochs', or Buffets' kiddiewinks will be attending a "virtual" academy with a student teacher ration of 400-1, think again. Already the wealthy  are rejecting the notion of virtual learning for face-to-face education. Why? Because face-to-face works better than an isolated kid spending 2 minutes looking at wikipedia and then spending ten mins playing some idiotic game or another.[1]

The model these louts are pushing are going to have the same long-term effects that neoliberalism wrought on the economy. It's going to suck and the vast majority of us are going to get screwed. By the rest of us, I mean 99% of the humanity. 

[1] Think I'm kidding? I've seen it. Actual homework assignments marked with an I for internet. No suggestion of which page to use, nope. A quick trip to wiki for the answer, which was half right and then a longer turn on some "educational" game. The mind boggled.

End College Athletics Now

The Historiann finds out that her university, Colorado, is giving its new football coach 1.5 million per year because that's the market and is outraged. She's right. Higher Education is supposed to be about education and yet some how or another the professional administrators and those who are assimilated to their bizarro world view "successful" athletics, climbing walls, CETLs, and other "learner" success crap means excellence in education.

We are going the wrong way. It's time to end technocratisme and end the notion that teachers and other educators don't know how to educate.

Bright Young Things Are so Often Wrong

Matthew Yglesias and Dana Goldstein are two of the bright young things of our new media. Each in their own way fail to understand what the 99% versus the 1% means. It isn't about income as such. 

Yglesias' claim that NBA players are rich and therefore members of the 1% misses the point that your average NBA player isn't trying to create an oligarchical system. The Kochs, Bloomburg, and the Republican party's war on voting are. These folks are less interested in money then  they are in power. For them money is a means to an end and that end is creating a world in which the few dominate the many.  The 99% movement isn't some attempt to simply redistribute wealth but rather to end the creation of a market state in which the wealthy oppress the poor through a combination of the laws of supply and demand, which insists that markets follow the money, and the manipulation of the political system through the creation of a system in which the state functions solely as enforcers.

Goldstein makes a similar mistake in pooh poohing the linkage between the 1% and neoliberal educational reform when she concludes that

[t]The trouble with this narrative comes in comparing education reformers with greedy bankers. The dominant ethos of the school choice/Bloomberg/Obama reform movement is one borrowed not from Wall Street, with its desperate lust for profit, but from Silicon Valley, with its commitment to meritocratic innovation that—yes, of course—earns money, but also serves the public.

One suspects that she knows this as in a later post, she links to an article on the danger of the 1%ers drive to privatize and virtualize k-12. Privatizing education, much like the privatization of prisons, takes one of societies most important functions out its hands and gives it to corporations, whose ability to do anything right is of limited. The creation of public, as opposed to religious, education is one of the hallmarks of modernity; granting corporations and rich folks the right to "reform" and run our educational systems spell the end of critical thought and beginning of education as vocational training or, even worse, no education and no vocational training for the mass of humanity.

When people talk about a market state what they really mean is democracy's demise at the hands of technocrats.

Administrative Bloat and Incompetence

This post on the role of administrative bloat as a destructive force in higher education is right on target; I would add that, in my experience howsoever good at gaming the system administrators are they are not smart. Small minded and vindictive, more like.

Not Ready for Prime Time

 According to  Dana Goldstein DC school's are suffering a loss of competent, effective teachers because of the Rhee-based teacher harassment policies. Matthew Yglesias responds by pointing out that teachers get more money, or at least some of them do. This is, of course, not the point. DC and, in fact, any school district that decides to go the harass the teacher mode of "school reform" is going to suffer the same loss of good teachers. Why? People don't teach to make money. Teachers teach because they like to teach. Change the workplace rules, turn teaching into exam prep for the for-profit test making industry, and pay more: you'll get people who want to make money but don't care so much about teaching. Use the current system and pay more and you'll get more of the same, which is too say lots of good teachers working to help their students be all they can be.

 That's right, 85% of the teachers are good to excellent obviously the key to making the schools better is harassing them and the students with testing regimes. Not, say, alleviating poverty because that would be hard work.

In a Nutshell: Education

Why is education "reform" in America so dismal and anti-human, compare it with Finland:

In the United States, which has muddled along in the middle for the past decade, government officials have attempted to introduce marketplace competition into public schools. In recent years, a group of Wall Street financiers and philanthropists such as Bill Gates have put money behind private-sector ideas, such as vouchers, data-driven curriculum and charter schools, which have doubled in number in the past decade. President Obama, too, has apparently bet on compe­tition. His Race to the Top initiative invites states to compete for federal dollars using tests and other methods to measure teachers, a philosophy that would not fly in Finland. “I think, in fact, teachers would tear off their shirts,” said Timo Heikkinen, a Helsinki principal with 24 years of teaching experience. “If you only measure the statistics, you miss the human aspect.”

There are no mandated standardized tests in Finland, apart from one exam at the end of students’ senior year in high school. There are no rankings, no comparisons or competition between students, schools or regions. Finland’s schools are publicly funded. The people in the government agencies running them, from national officials to local authorities, are educators, not business people, military leaders or career politicians. Every school has the same national goals and draws from the same pool of university-trained educators. The result is that a Finnish child has a good shot at getting the same quality education no matter whether he or she lives in a rural village or a university town. The differences between weakest and strongest students are the smallest in the world, according to the most recent survey by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). “Equality is the most important word in Finnish education. All political parties on the right and left agree on this,” said Olli Luukkainen, president of Finland’s powerful teachers union.

I'm sure Yglesias et al can explain who the powerful teachers union is really the problem  and that the absence of market-based solutions is really not evidence for the needlessness of market-based solutions.

Bah

Adjunctivitis in spades. Posting will be light

Matt Damon Says Glibbertarians Don't Understand Reality

On Occupation as Calling:



He dropped the ball on the 10% figure. Says who? Measured how? Percentages in other  professions, etc.

Schooling Superman

Diana Ravitch dismantles, yet again, the Charter School Myth.

Crises Management

When I think about a crisis, I think of a discrete moment during which the normal means of dealing with one or another of life's problems fails and the problem metastasizes and fundamentally alters the problems scale threatening lives, homes, and etc. During a crisis those actually dedicating to solving it pursue multiple paths, attacking immediate and underlying causes, and jettison those methods that fail. The same, it seems to me, is true of forest fires, floods, and the Berlin Air Lift. There is an underlying intractable problem that grows into a life threatening something or another, previous measures fail and therefore something new and dramatic must be done.

So, for example, contagious disease is a recurring problem for humanity in a social state, the flu pandemic of 1918-1920 was a crisis. The state operating through a variety of humanitarian and other organizations, sought to deal effectively with the dead, provide palliative care for the ill, inhibit its spread, and find a cure. San Francisco order everyone to wear a mask as means of stopping the dread disease's spread. When they figured out that the gauze masks were of little use, the stop enforcing the rule.

Lots of ideologically driven nimrods are insisting that the American educational system is in crisis. How can this be? Educating children, young adults, and adults, has always been a difficult task. But no one is going to die, lots of homes are being built, books written, and so on. The evidence is that the choice and accountablility don't work and, in fact, that whole dealio is a scam. Rather than abandoning choice and accountablity the people are pursuing it with greater vigor or moving the goalposts and generally denying that improvement has anything to do with it.

This isn't a crisis, it's an opportunity for people who hate people trying to rob us of yet another social good in favor of market fundamentalism, which is just another way of saying let's let the rich rule.

Crises

Let's say you're on a boat and the boat springs a leak. You face a crisis: too much water and the boat will sink. One group wants to plug the leak another wants to start the bilge pumps and a third wants to do both. Suddenly a dim bulb shows up and says: No, let's fire the deck hands. If you decide that the dim bulb is correct, you really have no place talking about this crisis and it's solutions.

As we all know, Detroit is a failed city and its school system reflects that. The "learning outcomes" of its students are reflection of the corruption, poverty, and so on. Yet Matthew Yglesias views this particular engine room slowing filling with water and insists that the deck hands did it. Moron.

Edumacation

Yesterday, the NYT had to op-eds on education. One, written by DAve Eggers and Ninive Clements Calegari,argued from improving teachers conditions of work, wages, and status as a necessary, but not sufficient, step in the process of improving education. It was nice to see somebody discussing educational reform without relying on the tired and sloppy habit of blaming teachers. But still the focus in teachers.

The other was another in a series of one of those here is the necessary and sufficient step that solves for all time any problems in education. Its author, R Baker Bausell, bashed teachers and made the argument for

measuring the amount of time a teacher spends delivering relevant instruction — in other words, how much teaching a teacher actually gets done in a school day.

Adminstrators

could simply videotape a few minutes of instruction a day, then evaluate the results to see how much time teachers spent on their assigned material and the extent to which they were able to engage students.

 And

the very process of recording classroom instruction would probably push some underperforming teachers to become more efficient.

See what he did there? Identified a problem: teachers need to spend more time teaching. Then identified a villian: lazy teachers. Offered solution: increased administrative interference in the classroom.

The first point is that teaching, particularly in the primary and secondary level, has to components: teaching and classroom management. Classroom management means, fundamentally, making the little darlings behave. Classroom management becomes more difficult if students don't, for example, respect their teachers, see much point in education and, consequently, aren't sufficiently motivated to do much of anything.

Size matters. Image that you have to teach as 7 year old reading, writing, maths, geology, history, civics, etc five days a week for 180 days between 6 and 7 hrs a day. How many would you want to confront at any given moment? 5? 10? 15? 20? 25? 30? 35? 40? When people start discussing education and insist that classroom size is really not that important. Imagine this nightmare situation: a class of 40 7 year olds in the spring, the first nice day of spring -- in fact, and you're about teach them about the formation of igneous rocks. A walk in the park, no doubt. 

Teachers in America faced that reality everyday, not in the sense that everyday is the first nice day in spring, and in many cases do so little to no community or administrative support with students whose parents struggle to earn enough to make live. Teachers play perhaps the most important role in creating education; however, they don't do it in a vacuum and pretending that they do is consistently and persistently put the cart before the horse. If we fail or refuse to work on diminishing and, ultimately, extirpating inequality all the reform proposals in the world aren't going to make enough of difference.

Arne Duncan or Size Matters

Dana Goldstein reports on her confab with the current Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, who said:

"I don't know the specific numbers, what's real and what's just positioning on both sides. But class size has been a sacred cow and we need to take it on."


Echoing Bill Gates, Duncan suggested paying highly-effective teachers $20,000 to $25,000 more for teaching up to five additional students, and giving parents the choice as to whether their kids are placed in such classrooms. He acknowledged that small classes are currently very popular among parents. "These conversation's haven't been had," he said. "I don't think parents have been given the choice. It's provocative...but we're talking about selectively raising class sizes amongst your greatest talent."

Do you remember when firing people in the pursuit of increased profits went from firing people to downsizing the corporation to rightsizing the corporation to outsourcing and so on?  Remember how it was hard-headed MBAs trained in how "business" operates best that stripped away the business socially useful function of job creation acted as "consultants" destroyed various business and then retired rich. Sort of like Mitt Romney. Neither Arne Duncan nor Bill Gates have ever taught a course; neither has any in-depth experience with matters educational both are or were successful in the world of business who have used either basketball networks or personal wealth to elbow their way into a discussion. 


A big point in Ravitch's admission of error and her recent attempt to expose the nonsense of the Conservative and Neoliberal model of education reform is that people like Duncan and Gates, who -- to repeat -- have no real understanding of teaching, bully and ignore teachers in the interests of their pet, if not quack, theories of educational improvements. It would have be nice, in other words, if Goldstein or any other educational reporter would ask Duncan or Gates how closely they are consulting with working teachers? What role do they see for teachers in the "conversation" about class size? How do they plan on including teachers' voices? And so on.  Who cares what Duncan and Gates thinks about education?

Oh, For Dumb

Matthew Yglesias on class size:

I don’t really think there’s a ton to be said about the class size issue—an effective teacher could be more effective at the margin on a per capita basis if she has fewer students, but an effective teacher could also teach more kids at the margin if she had more students.

Yes, she could unless, of course, at certain number of students the aforesaid teacher can no longer intereact with her students effectively and, go figure, the class becomes unruly or even worse, she loses sight of the fact that a student is lost in space. Had there been fewer she catches and teaching continues.

Unlike Yglesias and most educational reformers, like much saner Dana Goldstein who still gets the class size issue wrong, I've taught, talked to actual teachers, and read stuff by other teachers about teaching, as opposed to reading things by reformers about teaching, and practical experts agree size matters and smaller is better.

He really needs to stop talking about teaching.

What's a School

I was talking with a Teach for America teacher and he told me an anecdote about how the "worst" teacher in his school was indispensable because she had an amazing ability to resolve any and all disciplinary problems. It's not clear to me how someone gifted at maintaining order and, consequently, helping other teachers teach more effectively doesn't raise someone out of the category of worst. teacher. ever. into the category of necessary for the school's smooth running. Figuring out why complex institutions fulfill their socially beneficial functions requires thinking about, you know, the various roles and skill sets necessary for making complex institutions run smoothly, albeit inefficiently.

I take, in other words, exception to Matthew Yglesias' claim that,

there’s plenty of room around the margin for people to disagree about the best way to conduct these kind of evaluations. But as I’ve been saying, it’s only within the context of believing that teacher quality is important and measurable that it’s possible to coherently make the case for the importance of teachers and investing in them. Weingarten has the right instincts on this,

 because of the clear notion that "teacher quality" is something "measurable" in a straight forward kind of way and that this dispute is "around the margin," whatever that might mean in plain English. I also take issue because it's not clear he read the article with sufficient care. To wit:

Critics say that removing teachers is nearly impossible because of the obstructions that unions have put up. Administrators also bear some blame. Most evaluations are perfunctory — a drive-by classroom observation by a vice principal — and hearings to prove incompetence can be long and costly.

One reason it's hard to fire teachers, one could argue if given to overstatement, is that administrators, who are not members of the union, are lazy and incompetent and fail to fulfill their important role even as they get more money than teachers and have more say over how schools function. Another way to think about it is that figuring out who is a good, bad, or indifferent teacher is a complicated undertaking and that we should be working with administrators to see to it that they have the time and resources necessary to monitor and judge teachers' quality instead of blathering on about measurement and quality.

And

In Ms. Weingarten’s proposal, which she presented at a meeting of union leaders and researchers in Washington on Thursday night, teachers would be evaluated using multiple yardsticks, including classroom visits, appraisal of lesson plans and student improvement on tests.

All of which is another way of saying that the evaluation will be much more than "testing" those things that are "measurable."  As I read this, Weingarten is willing to work with administrators to see to it that they do their jobs because, after all, union members, which is to say teachers, want students to succeed and, oddly enough, they also want a decent salary and protection for from irrational supervisors. She is not falling into line with the simplistic notion that the non-crisis in our educational systems can be fixed if we would just measure little Johnny and Janey and then fire the teacher if the measurement isn't what Yglesias thinks it ought to be.