It’s time to completely rethink America’s effort to help
children from low-income and disadvantaged communities succeed in education.
A key first step would be to eliminate the preeminent role
of education school faculty – “educationists.” Some are capable and should stay
involved, but viewed as a group, they’ve failed badly.
Their most recent disaster is the collapse of the Common
Core. The fundamental ideas behind this effort were very good (and still are),
but the project’s calamitous execution reveals deeply flawed thinking.
Education schools have attempted to deflect concerns about
their history of faddishness by focusing on observable results: i.e. “data.”
Unfortunately, the educationist emphasis on statistics has itself
become a new fad, where simply getting numbers becomes the goal. This isn’t
surprising, because education as a discipline has always wanted to be thought
of as a “hard” science – more physics than sociology.
In the case of the Common Core, educationists pushed to test students on the
new curriculum before teachers and students had a reasonable chance to master
the material. Why? They wanted “baseline data” to more effectively compare
before and after.
Only an educationist would be surprised when a wave of “failing”
scores resulted in parental and school outrage. Educationists worship at the
Temple of Excel and can’t see the people for the statistics.
The educationists’ principal, long-term disaster also stems
from a failure to understand people. Ever since 1983’s A Nation at Risk report, educationists have focused on “fixing the
schools.” Fixing has primarily meant
better curriculum, organization and technology, and thanks to this management mentality,
we’ve seen one poorly thought out idea after another wash through school
systems. But thank heavens for the data:
that’s how we document the educationists’ failure to drive major
improvement.
“Fixing schools” doesn’t work well because the evidence
clearly shows that disadvantaged young people, principally those from
low-income communities, arrive in formal education with significant challenges
that aren’t shared at a comparable level by their better-off peers.
A key difference between the groups is “mindset” about
education.
Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck describes a “limited
mindset” (I can’t do well no matter how hard I work) as a huge barrier to
learning. By contrast, a “growth mindset” is one which posits that nearly
everyone can learn if they make the effort.
Mindset matters and it’s connected to income. A research
team that included Dweck recently reported from work
in Chile that “students from the lowest income families were twice as likely to
endorse a fixed mindset as students from the top-income families and schools,” while
those from the lower-income group who did have a growth mindset had “comparable
test scores with fixed mindset students whose families earned 13 times more.”
In other words, how you think about your ability to learn matters a lot more
than your parents’ income.
Community-based international research shows that there
are areas where educational mindset, including an appreciation of the
importance of learning, has offset low-income and led to significant success.
On the other side, clusters of low-achieving, low-income whites in
post-industrial communities are the
despair of Britain. Even Singapore, famed for its rigorous curriculum and
high test scores, acknowledges that rural low-income culture is a real barrier
to success.
Children get their attitudes from other people, not from
genes, and early research shows that even
modest interventions can help offset limited mindsets. Schools can certainly have
a role in this, and wonderful community-based groups like Boys and Girls Clubs have
great potential.
But parents and other caregivers are the foundational influencers
and must be the primary focus.
Peer interactions, as brilliant researcher-writer Tina
Rosenberg has
shown, are key to changing mindsets in a range of areas. But this is
challenging for education, because potential peer leaders usually leave low-income
communities when they get degrees.
American universities can help meet the challenge of
assisting low-income communities in educational mindset by replacing the
educationist monopoly with new alliances of scholars that include social
science and humanities departments. Education is closer to philosophy and history
than it is to physics.
Once universities are refocused, we’ll need a new national
leadership.
My reform dream team would have experts like Dweck and
Rosenberg, but its core would be people with deep experience in teaching
low-income students. The single best explanation for our failure in education
reform is that the leading voices in this area, both in K-12 and higher
education, are educationist-consultants with zero actual teaching experience.
To compensate for their ignorance, they’ve learned to dazzle legislators and
business people with an endless stream of polysyllabic puffery – and lots of
statistics.
For overall leader, I’d pick Oprah Winfrey, a very successful
business leader who knows how to use numbers and truly understands people. Her recent
investment in Weight Watchers shows an appreciation for the importance of peer
effects.
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It’s time to put a new team on the field of education reform.
Oprah, are you ready?
