School Reform -- Oprah in, Education Colleges Out

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.

Education’s Magic Algorithm Scam

Hey Gov! Want to dramatically improve the educational success of low-income students? You know, solve the problem that’s been baffling the US for three decades?

It’s simple! Just test the students and connect the tests to their specific teachers. Teachers whose students do very badly will be fired and those who only do OK will be forced to improve. Simple, straightforward, and you can see it here on this spreadsheet. I’ve created an algorithm that shows how it works! It’s like magic!

Magic is much easier than a lot of  hard work, so New York’s Governor Cuomo and nearly all of America’s governors have signed on for the Magic Algorithm ride.  

The idea of the Magic Algorithm has been spread by a new class of education pseudo-experts, people with little or no teaching experience, especially not with low-income students. But they know for sure exactly how to solve education’s problems, because you don’t find truth in classrooms and communities, you find it in Excel.  (Bill Gates could really help education by asking Microsoft to have Excel open with a disclaimer:  “Beware! Numbers alone aren’t knowledge!”)

Actually, the idea of locking test scores to teacher ability isn’t simple. And simplistic is far too weak a descriptor.

“Moronic” would be the best way to categorize the idea of improving education by robotically chaining teacher quality to student tests.

It’s Time to Change History

The new movie, Steve Jobs, contains scenes describing events that didn’t happen, such as a meeting Jobs had with John Sculley, the man who fired him from Apple. This imagined encounter occurs years after the firing, and allows Jobs, who has now made it big with his new company, to achieve what every audience insists on:  closure.  

The film’s writer, Aaron Sorkin, defends this and other purely imagined scenes by saying the movie is “a painting instead of a photograph.”

Unapologetic tinkering with history is something of a recent trend in film. For example, Selma director Ava Duvernay and Zero Dark Thirty director Kathryn Bigelow recast the past in order to create more emotionally satisfying cinema.  

The folks in Hollywood know what they’re doing. The fact that Jobs never got to personally thumb his nose at Sculley is frustrating, a circle left unclosed. Audiences hate that.

By inventing a meeting, Sorkin certainly makes a better story. And he asserts it’s actually a good thing if a film about the past isn’t accurate.

This is the difference between...journalism and art," Sorkin said. Journalists "have an obligation to be objective. I have an obligation to be subjective. There are stories there that should be written about.

In passing, I’ll observe that one event Mr. Sorkin will want to creatively reimagine is how Jobs would have reacted to his film.

Kevin Carey: Evangelical Polemicist

by Garrison Walters

Introduction:  A Story, Not an Analysis

It was a chilly spring day when I turned on my iPad and started to read The End of College.

Actually, I'm not sure why that's relevant since I was on a Boeing 777 surfing the North Atlantic jet stream. But Carey likes to open sections in his ostensibly serious analysis of higher education with mood-setting weather and place observations, so I can too.

Another reason to begin a review in this fashion is to draw attention to the nature of Carey’s book.

The End of College includes lots of statistics and comments about data, and even has pages of footnotes. Given all this scholarly skin, you might conclude that it is a serious, objective analysis. If so, you would be wrong.

In fact, The End of College isn’t in any way objective, nor is it true analysis. Instead, this book is a story. Indeed, it’s a story told exclusively from one point of view. Typically, writing that presents a single perspective is called a polemic.

Carey approaches higher education the same way as anti-vaccination activist Jenny McCarthy does medical science:  find information you like and ignore everything else. Kevin and Jenny can both present things prettily, and when they do, the impact can be huge.

But are the results positive? Let’s discuss.  

California Dreaming in Texas

Even during the worst budget years California’s citizens and leaders have always recognized the value of higher education. People across the state, including in both political parties, know that excellence in the flagship University of California system has been a key factor in the state’s comparatively prosperous and high tech economy.

The state has now restored fiscal stability and, though many problems remain, is looking toward a vibrant future.

Given better times, we should expect UC to amp up efforts to recruit outstanding researchers, especially in the sciences.

It Must Be Very Sad When Children Start School

“It must be very sad when your children start school.”

I stared blankly. A moment ago I’d been asleep on the couch, then the doorbell rang and here was this tall, blond man, blathering about school. Odd, but I had to respond…

No Child Left Behind is a Sideshow

The New York Times editorial of February 21, 2015 (“Don’t Give up the Gains in Education” http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/opinion/sunday/dont-give-up-the-gains-in-education.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&_r=0 ) makes reasonable arguments if you are willing to accept its very traditional premise:  the school is the locus of educational improvement.

But recent research challenges that premise.

Martial Arts, Grit, and Education Reform

After decades of failing to change education by “fixing schools,” some in the U.S. are beginning to look beyond the closed loop of the classroom and consider the attitudes students bring both directly to school as well as to the whole concept of education and learning.

Flipped Out Over Flipping

I’ve finally had it. I can’t stand it any more. I just saw another serious academic article touting the benefits of the “flipped classroom.”

This last one was one too many. I flipped out.

Measuring The Inexpertise of Experts

A recent story quoted two professors at the University of Illinois as saying that many self-described education experts weren’t actually experts. The professors determined this by first looking at people quoted in the media on education reform, then looking to see how many had Ph.D.s and then running their names against databases containing research citations. It seems that lots of published and popularly cited experts were under-credentialed.

I’m not impressed with the study.

Don’t Give In to Poverty

James Harvey of the National Superintendents Roundtable has provided some valuable insights into the international education rankings that are so often used to bash the U.S.

And Thus Spake Google

The humanities are under attack. Enrollments are plummeting, tax cutting zombies in state legislatures are looking for more reasons to cut higher education funding and, most worrisome, a national panel of distinguished persons has published a report.

As an historian and former lesser deanlet in a college with the word “humanities” in its official title, I find the attacks discouraging. And, as someone who writes about technology, I can see further dangers. Specifically, is computer technology in general, and Google in particular, going to destroy the role of the humanities in studying foreign countries and cultures? Even foreign languages themselves? Is French writer Fabien Cazenave right to suggest Google’s Translate software as a solution to the EU’s multiplicity of languages?[i]

Culturally Transmitted Educational Fatalism FAQ

Note:  The views expressed here are those of the author, Garrison Walters, and do not necessarily reflect the policies of the South Carolina Higher Education Foundation, for which Walters is a volunteer staff member.

Culturally Transmitted Educational Fatalism is a belief about educational success that individuals get from the society that surrounds them. People with CTEF lack “self efficacy” about education, believing that fate, either in the form of genes or in the decisions of others (or both), determines whether education can have an important role in their own economic success and quality of life.  

>Isn’t talking about CTEF just a way of helping the schools avoid responsibility?

Given our long history of assuming that the only way to improve educational outcomes is through “fixing schools,” I can see why someone would think this way.

If I Learn, You Get Paid

And, Frankly, I’m Not Interested In Your Topic

Today’s national discussion on improving education is dominated by self-described experts.

“I Am Going to Prison…I Don’t Want To. That’s Just What’s Going to Happen.”

Young people, ages 8-13, who grow up in the most deprived neighborhoods in Britain are seven times less likely to think they are “clever and good at school work” when compared to those in the least deprived areas.[i]

He Lifts Weights But Not Books

JJ Jones is an outstanding high school linebacker. What sets him apart, according to his coach, is not talent but work ethic. JJ is a leader in film study, weight training, and all the other things that go into making a great football player.

Why a DQP?

Introduction To The DQP

 Leaders across American higher education are calling on colleges and universities to adopt a new strategy for ensuring and reporting student success—the Degree Qualifications Profile (DQP).