THE BLENDED CLASSROOM
Dec 22nd
by Colette & Nicholas Gilroy
The blended classroom is one of the many comforting notions pervading American education that only serves to make it weaker. Putting first and second graders, third and fourth graders, etc. into a single class is presnted to the public an an amalgm of virtue and academic enlightenment.
The younger students are expected to be pulled along in social development through the example of their older classmates, as well as learn more of the course content from them since the older kids learned it a year ago. In turn, the older students themselves can advance further in social maturity through being examples to the younger kids, and the older ones can solidify their previous learning through the process of helping others understand it.
These good things really do happen, but at what cost? American public education is far more expensive and far less effective than it should be, with the precious resource of time being so foolishly squandered. All students need to be in targeted educational contexts so that their time in school is targeted towards their needs, abilities, and interests. They should be in classes with students of similar needs, abilities and interests so that their teachers can devise meaningful lessons both to reach them where they are and stretch them to reach beyond their limitations.
The teacher of a blended class is forced to divide her/his efforts between two age/maturity levels, obviously not able to concentrate fully on either one. This basic problem means that neither age group gets the full attention of the teacher in class nor the teacher’s intellectual efforts outside of class in lesson planning and preparation.
The problem of watered-down education in the blended classroom is compounded by additional minutes wasted, mounting up on a regular basis into hours, days, even weeks of lost time switching gears back and forth in conducting two classes at once. The term “blended” is used to create the illusion of a harmonious, fully functioning entity when the reality is two separate groups in the same room, with neither receiving the full benefit of the education each group needs. An additional negative consequence of the blended classroom is potential boredom for the older group from repetition of material covered in the previous year.
The contemporary American education establishment deplores the concept of tracking students because tracking has resulted—or been deliberately used as a tool—to ghettoize kids in schools or set up academic (success oriented) and non-academic (dead-end oriented) tracks. Transforming the notion of tracking to targeted education aims to provide a stimulating, challenging education for each child.
Kids in two separate age groups in a blended classroom are further removed from the possibility for targeted education in specific groups that will meet their needs, abilities and interests. The concept of the blended classroom was born out of nostalgia for the one-room schoolhouse. The one-room schoolhouse was—and in some places still is—a necessity growing out of geographical isolation, a shortage of professional staff, and a very small number of students with a wide range of ages. Although a talented teacher can make a one-room schoolhouse work well, it’s a solution born of necessity, not a genuine choice. In the modern world, one-room schoolhouses have been augmented first by classes conducted by two-way radio and now by a range of other modern technologies. Choosing blended classrooms when there is no actual necessity for them is to deny kids the best education they can be given.
[Click on our blog to order "Fixing America's Broken Public Education."]
CHOICE: VOUCHERS & ENTITLEMENTS
Nov 18th
by Colette and Nicholas Gilroy
A level playing field is an American ideal. Our immigrant nation has drawn people from the world over to these shores for three and more centuries as a land of freedom and opportunity. America has held itself out as a place where people are free to be all they can be.
In the America we proclaim, it’s not our pedigree–our family background, our religion, our race—but what we ourselves do that matters—and our educational opportunities are a vital part of getting us where we want to go.
Everyone knows this America of our dreams with its benign level playing field doesn’t necessarily leap from those dreams into reality. Blatant barriers of race and religion as well as the more subtle walls of family background have thwarted too many people from moving forward in their lives.
Education reform is the pathway to the level playing field Americans idealize and deserve. A level playing field in education means a national curriculum with high standards that can’t be evaded. With all states and jurisdictions required to be on board, students in some states couldn’t be shortchanged anymore, and within states the ghettoization of education would no longer be tolerated for various minority student populations.
The idea of a national curriculum and national standards is anathema to a highly vocal, committed segment of the population which sees anything “national” as an assault on their freedom. The charter/magnet school movement is the practical beginning for change. It’s true that the independence of charters holds the distinct possibility of educational fragmentation, with individual schools moving in their own highly divergent directions.
However, the freedom to change offers the opportunity to coalesce around similar goals and standards. An important value in the free education marketplace is freedom of choice, and the vehicle for freedom of choice is education vouchers. Our position is that vouchers should be full vouchers, which really turns them into an entitlement. We don’t construe this as an expensive new entitlement, but, rather, as a reconstitution of existing funds—providing a way to reduce expenditures through education reform. The final product: a national system liberated from the endless duplication of effort 50 times plus at state levels, and 14,000 times plus at school district levels, over the current crazy quilt of American system of public education. America will no longer be condemned to reinventing the wheel over and over again.
This freedom of choice in education would include being able to choose religious schools and home schooling. How we choose to educate our children is a religious decision for everyone. For some it involves a conscious doctrinal choice, but even resolutely choosing a totally secular education is a value choice, and if we widen the definition of religion to “a concept of ultimate reality,” then religion encompasses everyone: atheists, agnostics, secularists, in addition to adherents of a clearly defined denomination, as well as spiritually inclined individuals who don’t want to be part of any organized religion.
Traditional secular schools that have dominated American public education in recent decades have always been subsidized by parents who have chosen to send their children to a religious school. Those parents pay tuition to the religious schools and they also have to pay school taxes for schools they don’t use, providing an unstated but very real subsidy for secular schools they don’t agree with.
In an open education marketplace, all children, going beyond the idea of limited vouchers, would be entitled to a full education voucher to be used at the school of their family’s choice. This would necessarily require important, strict safeguards through demanding high academic standards for all schools so that students would be well- prepared to be knowledgeable citizens of an advancing nation in a highly competitive world.
Children, for example, growing up in homes that don’t accept the theory of evolution as real, should understand why educated people throughout the world do. They should understand that the word “theory” in science isn’t about something tenuous or unproven, that every science does its work with an operative theory to evaluate the results of their scientific work. When scientists in that field realize their theory no longer fits reality, a new theory is needed to keep their field of science moving forward, although changing a scientific theory is no easy process—it’s really a scientific revolution.
The strong, dynamic education that serves the needs, interests and desires of all its citizens requires an open education marketplace with high standards for everyone.
[Click on our blog to order "Fixing America's Broken Public Education."]
CHARTER SCHOOLS & THE EDUCATION MARKETPLACE
Nov 16th
by Colette and Nicholas Gilroy
Charter schools are a key step towards education reform, not a silver bullet, but the most practical opening wedge. The exhilarating transformations shown in “Waiting for Superman” that Geoffrey Canada and others have wrought in once failing schools demonstrate the unquestioned value of charter schools.
Resistance to education reform runs deep in America for a variety of reasons. Change of any kind, no matter how potentially beneficial, will automatically call up opposition, but opposition to education reform isn’t monolithic. It can easily come from several conflicting viewpoints since there are always a variety of notions about what education ought to be.
The concept of charter schools has been gaining increasing acceptance throughout the US, giving would-be reformers a means to establish and run schools outside of most if not all the conventional bureaucratic restraints placed on schools.
This freedom to establish and operate a school of one’s own choosing can circumvent all sorts of opposition, especially since opponents have their own opportunity to support or establish a school embodying what they think education ought to be. The prospect of letting a thousand flowers bloom is allowing a free education marketplace to develop.
Ultimately, an open education marketplace enforces educational discipline on schools through the requirements of colleges and universities, licensing and accrediting agencies. It’s not realistic, however, to ignore the reality that the freedom to establish and run charter schools opens the way for schools that won’t prepare their graduates to fulfill licensing requirements, pass entrance exams or be able to succeed in post-high school education.
So, charter schools are a key part of education reform because they allow individuals and groups to do new things. The potential downside of that freedom is that the new things may not be very good, even harmful, or that they may produce a burst of enthusiasm at the start that isn’t sustainable. Assessing the long-term effects of charter schools is obviously essential. Many a proposal looks good in a presentation or even in its early stages but doesn’t live up to its promise over the course of several years, which, of course, education has to do in the life of a child.
Maintaing standards is integral for the long-term viability of a charter school or any school. Determining standards is part of a never-ending debate about education: standards that are rigorous, fair, measurable, affordable and reasonable—all at the same time—and, ideally, for the entire country. A tall order, but essential for America to be strong and competitive.
[Click on our blog to order "Fixing America's Broken Public Education."]
TRACKING AND TARGETING IN EDUCATION
Nov 9th
by Colette and Nicholas Gilroy
Tracking, one of the aspects of education criticized in “Waiting for Superman,” has gotten short shrift in American public education in recent decades. One reason is that tracking can lead to racially segregated classrooms in an otherwise integrated school and the segregation can deteriorate into warehousing kids who fall outside what a school or community considers the “right” kind of education for the “right” kind of kid.
A second reason tracking is held in low esteem is that in the past it divided kids into academic/college bound programs and vocational/non-college programs. Today the heavy emphasis–often over emphasis–in American education that a worthwhile career means graduating from a four-year college pushes students towards four-year college programs.
The explosive and continuing growth of the community college movement that began in the second half of the 20th century washes away those old divisions. Community colleges are a powerful force in American society and education, providing programs of every length, name and nature, to serve the interests and needs of all the people and businesses in the wide community each college serves.
American public education prides itself on being truly democratic, not tracking kids according to their abilities, putting them all into the same class so that the academically weakest can learn from the brightest and the brightest learn compassion through being in class with the weakest. This high-minded, overboard compassion–what we term “compassionism”– is a grave weakness that hobbles and drags down public education in America.
One of the nostrums of the American educational establishment is that any good teacher plans lessons that take into account all the kids in the classroom, differentiating the material according to the varying needs of all the kids and calling on the brightest for support in helping the weakest.
There’s a simple human reality in education that the establishment blithely chooses to ignore. Teachers teach down the middle–wherever the middle happens to be–because that’s where most of the kids are. When classes are set up with homogeneous grouping–when they’re grouped by similar ability–the distance between the lowest and the highest is small. As the teacher teaches down the middle, it’s much easier to reach the whole class because the differences between the high and the low end are small.
Because in heterogeneous groups the differences between the high and low ends are much greater, as the teacher teaches down the middle, the kids at the low end have less or maybe no grasp of the lesson and the high end students are likely to be bored out of their minds.
Tracking is obviously a far more efficient approach to learning, but it is in truth also a far more compassionate approach. Weaker students who need more attention and support in school can get it much more readily in homogeneous rather than heterogeneous groups.
Rather than merely focusing on the term “tracking” in education, we need to move to the concept of “targeted education,” in which we ascertain the specific needs, as well as the specific interests, of students so that they can be placed in classes that are genuinely geared precisely to them as individual human beings. This simply can’t happen in the inefficient, one-size-fits-all heterogeneous groups that rule the roost in contemporary American public education.
America needs to wake up to basic human realities and target education to each student so that all students can rise to fulfill their real potential. The rest of the developed world, and now, most particularly, our powerful new competitors, China and India, are not fiddling around like the US about rigorous, targeted education. A nation’s future depends on the quality of its educational system and ours is falling steadily behind. While many earnest individuals and groups are trying to reform American education, almost none of them are dealing with a fundamental transformation of how we educate our children. The need is urgent.
[Click on our blog to order "Fixing America's Broken Public Education."]
“WAITING FOR SUPERMAN” AND SOME INCONVENIENT TRUTHS
Nov 1st
by Colette and Nicholas Gilroy
“Waiting for Superman” as a heartfelt plea for education reform in America is highly effective depicting the plight of black children and parents caught in the web of failed schools in failed communities. They yearn for a way out, and their only hope for escaping to a school with the dedicated teachers and staff that can provide them with quality education is through a lottery that only a few can win.
Unfortunately, “Waiting for Superman” really is waiting for Superman, but the producers won’t be able to find him. The Superman the film wants is a hero, an educational “leader” who can break the teacher unions and eliminate teacher tenure. As presented in the film these are two main evils that have dragged American public education down to its present low estate. The all too rare islands of hope in the film have gone beyond those identified forces of evil, as well as another target: tracking.
The ultimate answer the film looks for to lift up America public education is clearly the right one: dedicated teachers working together in a positive, supportive school environment. The problem with the film is that it doesn’t actually reach down to find the causes for America’s weak public education, looking only at some effects.
The key villain focused on in the film is the foot-dragging, confrontational, industrial-style teacher unions. The problem is obvious, but what gave rise to the unions never comes up. Unions don’t just happen – they’re created by management. The worse the union, the worse the management that brought it into being.
We have industrial-style teacher unionism because American public education hews to a false industrial model of education. An industrial model, with a CEO (in schools, the superintendant) at the top of a pyramid, with descending levels of administrators, and finally the teachers at the bottom of the pyramid, as the lowest level workers, is upside-down, utterly false for education. Effective education requires not only that teachers be at the top of the system, but also recognizes that the only essential element in education is the teacher.
Teachers should choose their own “principal teacher,” the original term for a school principal, and work out their own administrative arrangements, with a vastly reduced administrative group and many of the routine administrative functions outsourced.
An emphasis should be put on subject matter competence through eliminating degrees in education, with schools and departments of education at colleges and universities changed into educational research institutes. Teacher certification should be changed from the current system, with its empty sham of fully “certified” teachers who may not even be barely qualified in their subject. Genuine certification should be gained through a prospective teacher first having at least a bachelor’s degree with a major in the subject to be taught, and then working full time for an entire school year as a teacher apprentice under the tutelage of a master teacher in that subject, followed by an evaluation by a panel of veteran teachers in that subject.
Elimination of degrees in education would turn American teacher education away from its unending focus on methodology, which ultimately becomes a parade of educational fads. Useful methodologies grow out of the love and understanding teachers have for the content, the subject matter they teach, and want to make it more alive for their students.
American public education must become knowledge-based and not methodology-based. The course work, the academic degrees, teachers pursue must in the subjects they teach, in the WHAT of education. The HOW, the methodologies, grow both out of their own experience with their students and through their sharing with their colleagues. This is a normal outgrowth of working together, heightened in the context of a teacher-centered and controled school.
“Waiting for Superman”, with its top-down point of view, depicts the abuses of tenure. Unfortunately it totally ignores the reality that tenure actually also serves to protect the best teachers in a school. Teachers who have higher academic qualifications than their administrative “superiors”; who have an ardent dedication to lifting up the achievement of their own students; who want to raise the academic standards of their schools; who deplore the hypocrisy and empty rhetoric of administrative pronouncements; who call into question the policies and procedures of the administration in their school or system — in short, exactly the kind of teacher that is most valuable to a school, is exactly the kind of teacher an administration does not want to have around and would fire if they could. Such teachers are what tenure was designed to protect.
In a very real sense, “Waiting for Superman” is too conventional — It doesn’t face inconvenient truths. It accepts without questioning virtually all of the weak, flawed, upside-down, top-down, anti-intellectual ways American sets up and runs public education. Like so many other earnest efforts at educational reform, it gets bogged down into merely tweaking the system and doesn’t even begin to approach the fundamental educational reforms America needs.
To its credit, “Waiting for Superman” graphically depicts a great failure of American society, the disgraceful way America has allowed the perpetuation of ghettoes and ghetto education for African Americans.
To illustrate that the problems in American public education are widespread throughout the entire country, including affluent white suburbs, a segment shows a white student’s effort to win entrance into a magnet school in Redwood City, California, that eschews tracking [an issue we'll take up in an upcoming post].
The two areas where “Waiting for Superman” is most successful is first in stressing the importance of having high expectations for kids. High expectations can wake kids up and pull them far beyond what they ever could have imagined for themselves. We have only to think of Jaime Escalante who astounded — and confounded — elite institutions as a mathematical miracle worker with disadvantaged Hispanic-American students. The companion area to high expectations is having the opportunity to establish charter/magnet schools that aren’t bound by established rules and regulations and can therefore be free to innovate.
[Click on our blog to order "Fixing America's Broken Public Education."]
FROM A FEDERAL SYSTEM TO A NATIONAL CURRICULUM
Oct 25th
by Colette & Nicholas Gilroy
A viable national curriculum, a key concept in education, has to be understood as both multi-faceted and multi-layered. It ought to be perfectly clear that since people have highly varied interests, needs and abilities, a successful system of education must be sharply targeted to those interests, needs and abilities.
Opponents of a national curriculum recoil in horror at the very notion, let alone any move towards the implementation, of a national curriculum. To the opponents, any actions taken to introduce a national curriculum constitute a fatal blow at American spontaneity and creativity and, ultimately, at American freedom.
Spontaneity and creativity come from the classroom teacher. Teachers are not going to be stymied by any thorough, well-developed curriculum. People who regard a unified national curriculum as the opening step to a totalitarian America should ponder some simple realities of learning. Scores of subjects in a wide range of fields–taking just mathematics and foreign languages, for instance, as a couple of obvious examples–have to follow a sequential curriculum for a considerable time. Students who don’t get a strong grasp of the basics in those and a great array of other subjects can’t ever really hope to learn them.
Although many subjects in the social sciences and humanities hold out the possibilities of greater choice and flexibility in curriculum design, there is great value in recognizing and encouraging a structured core curriculum that forms the base of a national curriculum. This is important for national cohesion in any country. It is absolutely essential for such a large society as the United States. The US is truly a nation of immigrants. formed from the world’s widest diversity of countries and cultures, and needs to merge them into a coherent, unified whole.
The passionate, intense political opponents to the idea of a national curriculum envision a Washington-controlled curriculum with federal bureaucrats managing every minute of every day in neighborhood classrooms throughout America. That kind of anxiety can be considerably mitigated through establishing non-profit, public-private consortiums and strengthening existing organizations. We already have a wide variety of non-governmental academic and professional accrediting bodies, as well as testing organizations and foundations deeply involved in education. All of these can be both coordinated and expanded without vast new government bureaucracies–and even allow for the contraction of some direct government involvement.
Eliminating the crazy quilt of 50 nonuniform central authorities, and the additional 14,00 plus sub-authorities in the nation’s school districts, will produce cost savings in the billions. Of even greater importance than the enormous cost savings, would be a unified educational system with a much higher quality of education throughout America. Not only would standards be raised for all students, wherever they lived, but accountability could no longer be avoided.
[Click on our blog to order "Fixing America's Broken Public Education."]
TEACHER APPRENTICE VS HOLLOW CERTIFICATION & THE DUMBING DOWN OF AMERICAN PUBLIC EDUCATION
Oct 18th
by Colette & Nicholas Gilroy
Teacher certification is standard throughout America as the basic requirement to be allowed to teach in public schools. Each state or jurisdiction determines its own standards, but there’s a fair degree of similarity. Certification is supposed to tell the world that the certified person is qualified to teach a particular subject to a particular age level of children.
Here’s the rub: “Certified” doesn’t mean “qualified.” An individual may have gone through all the hoops to be fully certified and yet not be qualified to get through even the entire first month of a course. Education majors aim to go into classroom teaching through taking a battery of courses in the subject to be taught and a battery of education courses leading to certification.
A common supplemental requirement is additional course work beyond the bachelors degree level, usually with a focus on attaining a masters degree. The emphasis today is on an MAT–Masters of Art in teaching (or MST, Masters of Science in Teaching). This seems to have a noble sound to it: Teachers studying teaching more deeply so that they become more truly expert in the classroom.
But it’s all hollow, a key factor in why American public education is so weak and unlikely to get much better if we don’t climb out of this rut we can’t seem to escape. The undergraduate courses in education taken by education majors, followed by more and more of them on the graduate level, compromise America’s knowledge base because teachers are steeped in methodologies–how to teach–rather than content–what to teach, and those methodologies are often little more than fads with a short shelf life.
Schools and departments of education enfeeble rather than strengthen education. Time future teachers spend in institutions for teacher training should rather be devoted to content courses, enabling teachers to bring to their classrooms a far greater depth of knowledge about their subjects so that they can advance the knowledge base of their students and thus the entire nation. We don’t need a bloated college and university educational establishment churning out legions of teachers steeped in methodologies and deficient in content.
Instead of the vast conglomeration of colleges and departments of education as fountainheads of unsatisfactory education, they should be slimmed down to be useful purveyors of educational statistics. Certification and training of teachers should be through teacher apprenticeship programs. Prospective teachers should have at least a bachelors degree in the subject to be taught and work full time for at least an entire school year under the tutelage of a master teacher.
There are innumerable advantages to this kind of practical program. Typical apprentice teachers would begin with fuller knowledge of their subject than typical education school graduates. They would have the advantage of real on-the-job training under the wing of a seasoned professional. They would experience every single day the realities of the classroom as well as all the attendant external issues impacting on that classroom.
In addition to these multi-faceted advantages, they would have a special further blessing: their day-to-day classroom learning experiences would come to them free of the empty rhetoric and mind-numbing educationese that pervades American pubic education.
A teacher apprentice program would be a great leap forward in stopping the dumbing down of American public education and would give the nation a vastly sturdier source of teachers than we now have. People going through a teacher apprentice program would be readier to be successful teachers, having truly lived through the realities of the job first. In addition, a teacher apprentice program offers an excellent self-screening process. Individuals who discovered that classroom teaching isn’t really their cup of tea would be able to withdraw, free from the potential trauma of launching into a career and then having to drop it with an unnecessary sense of failure.
An additional advantage of teacher apprentices at half pay is that this program would offer highly qualified teacher assistants at substantial cost savings to school districts. At the same time, school districts would have a superb opportunity to gauge potential new teachers over a period of time, ensuring a far more reliable recruitment tool than anything that currently exists.
[Click on our blog to order "Fixing America's Broken Public Education."]
EVERYBODY LOVES SMALL CLASSES–BUT SHOULD THEY?
Oct 13th
by Colette & Nicholas Gilroy
Everybody loves small classes.
Parents and kids love them because they have the opportunity to know their teachers and fellow students better. Teachers love them for the similar reason of being able to know the students and parents better, providing an opportunity for the teacher to design more effective lessons. Teachers also love them because small classes reduce their work load.
Administrators love small classes because smaller class sizes increase the number of teachers needed, leading directly to an expansion of their administrative empire to supervise the larger number of teachers. Teacher unions love them because the greatly increased number of teachers would swell the union ranks and coffers, and ultimately their political clout.
And, of course, politicians love small classes because everyone else does.
The commonly accepted wisdom is that small class size virtually guarantees measurably better academic results. However, research doesn’t bear out that easy assumption.
There are a number of very important reasons small classes are necessary in particular situations. The younger children are, the smaller the class size should be. In kindergarten and pre-kindergarten one or more teacher assistants need to be present to work with the teacher in the classroom.
Students with particular physical or emotional problems may need to be in small classes, although some students with these problems are able to function very well in larger classes.
Students who are weak academically need to be in small classes. When education is targeted more precisely to the specific needs of students, students who are weak in a particular subject or subjects should be placed in small classes for such subjects and in larger classes for subjects they’re competent in.
American public education is irrational in many ways, and class size is one of them. When students are particularly bright– termed “talented and gifted”–schools often reward them for their academic abilities by setting up college-style seminars for them. While the brighter students in the seminars are certainly able to benefit from them, the seminars actually result in weakening the education of the total school population. The funds appropriated for academically superior students, who have less need for small seminars, would be more effectively spent on weaker students who require the greater attention small seminars would afford them.
The brighter students are, the more successfully they function in large classes, and the weaker students are academically, the greater their need for small classes so that the full attention of the teacher can be directed to those weaker students and their specific needs be more fully addressed.
[Click on our blog to order "Fixing America's Broken Public Education."]
WHO CREATED TEACHER UNIONS?
Oct 11th
by Colette & Nicholas Gilroy
Unions don’t just happen. They’re created by bad managements. In an ideal world there wouldn’t be any need for workers to organize themselves into unions because everyone involved in an enterprise would work together cooperatively under fair and humane conditions and be justly compensated.
Every adult knows we don’t live in an ideal world, but many people feel they really do work in a cooperative, intelligently and humanely run enterprise–the kind that doesn’t call for a union. Where a union is a necessary part of an employment situation, the worse the union, the worse the management that brought it into being.
The false industrial model that prevails in education, discussed in a previous post, has led to the birth and inexorable growth of industrial style teacher unions throughout the country, so that today they’re on the A-list of powerful lobbies on both the state and national levels. Like other lobbies, they work assiduously to introduce and support legislation that advances their agenda. The obvious focus of teacher unions is the range of issues directly impacting education, as well as a wide range of tangential economic, social and other issues that touch education to varying degrees.
Teacher unions exist to promote the professional and economic well being of their members, using the dues collected from the members to do just that. Understanding this ultimate reality aids in interpreting positions taken by the two main teacher unions, the NEA and the AFT, and also to see how their positions can easily impede education reform.
The larger of the unions, the National Education Association (note that this union doesn’t choose to sully itself with the proletarian-sounding term “union”) has the goal of a universal class size of 15. This ideal is great public relations because Americans, almost without exception, love the idea of small classes. However, it’s bad economics. Adapting a mandated small class size would drive up the already high cost of American public education precipitously, since the major cost of education is personnel costs.
Mandating small classes is also bad pedagogy. A snap, superficial judgment leads to the simple deduction that fewer kids in a class leads to more direct teacher-student contact and thus more effective education. Research doesn’t bear this out.
Small classes are certainly important to meet specific educational needs (more on this in the next post). Mandated small classes aren’t a silver bullet leading to more effective education, but the unions lobby to achieve them because they’d mean a greatly increased teacher union membership.
The late Albert Shanker, an instrumental figure in the growth and development of the American Federation of Teachers, part of the AFL-CIO, was an indefatigable champion of more rigorous public education in America. A pet program of his was a National Board for Professional Teaching Standards as a higher level of teacher certification above the certification each state requires individuals to have to be licensed to teach in that state.
Certification on the state level (and, proponents hope, also on a “higher” national level) is a union gate-keeping position to allow people to officially enter the teaching profession and, equally important to the unions, to bar others from teaching in public schools–no matter how highly qualified they may be–if they don’t jump the certification bar the unions insist upon.
Teacher unions, whatever issues they support, are really focused on maximizing the economic well-being of their members. As a result, they’re widely perceived as selfish roadblocks to any efforts at education reform which might impact negatively on teacher union positions.
Unfortunately, the conventional approach to dealing with these problems is the same old heavy-handed, top-down approach that created teacher unions in the first place. As long as the nation persists with the false industrial model of education, we’ll never achieve the world-class education we say we want. The true way out of the dilemma of weak American public education is teacher run schools, with scholar teachers, not products of schools of education.
[Click on our blog to order "Fixing America's Broken Public Education."]
THE FEDERAL SYSTEM: FRIEND OF FREEDOM, ENEMY OF EDUCATION
Oct 7th
by Colette & Nicholas Gilroy
Even small countries can benefit from a federal system, but large countries can’t readily function without one. A built in difficulty with a federal system is sorting out whether to handle problems nationally or regionally.
Despite Americans conflicting claims of ideological purity about states rights vs federal authority, virtually all Americans, without a twinge of conscience, will switch back and forth from supporting states rights to supporting federal authority when it comes to achieving cherished goals.
America’s passionate embrace of local control of education has led the country to make each of the fifty states the central authority in public education rather than the national government. The diffused power of those 50 central authorities gets diminished on a day to day basis through the welter of county and city educational authorities, and still further diminished through the operations of individual schools in each district, which, of course, are the actual places where education happens.
“Local control” of education as American holy writ is understandable–it’s America’s way–and virtually the only way–Americans feel they have a palpable means to get their hands on the levers of government and really exert any control over what government does. This local control fractures American public education into myriad little pieces.
The obvious weaknesses of American public education, engendered largely by the doctrine of local control, gave rise to Bush’s well-intentioned but heavy-handed No Child Left Behind law, followed by Obama’s more ambitious, comprehensive Race to the Top. The push towards national standards and a core curriculum is an important step in the right direction, but too much of the drive for education reform in America isn’t much more than tweaking–even when the tweaking is done on a grand scale.
Serious education reform requires standing back to look at ourselves. With 50 different state governments (plus Washington DC and a few other entities) setting up their own educational standards, what’s required of students varies widely, and the thousands of school districts within the different states often go their own ways in the kind of education they provide for kids in their care.
The US has evolved an academic crazy quilt, with different standards, requirements and educational opportunities wherever you look. The ultimate outcomes of local control are a weakened American society in a variety of ways. The most basic one is perpetuating the scattershot of content and methodologies that leaves America with a disturbingly fragile educational fabric that has ominous portents for this nation’s future in an increasingly competitive world.
All this national educational disorganization is a facet of the incredible wastefulness arising from the endless duplication that characterizes public education in America. American public education is constantly reinventing the wheel. Instead of a single syllabus for the subjects America’s kids study, we have thousands, not merely from the thousands of school districts in the US but from the many more thousands of individual schools in those districts.
Moves to establish single national curriculums can be counted upon to stir storms of opposition from many segments of the political spectrum: opposition to the “loss of local control” (which is pretty much of an illusion); opposition from professional groups worried about their jobs or prerogatives; opposition from cohorts of interested groups who try to have an impact on curriculum.
Programs like Core Knowledge, Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate, with their unified curriculums, offer a promising basis for pointing the way towards unified curriculums. Another established path towards a national curriculum is through the charter school movement. Charter schools may be all over the map in every aspect of education, but the large degree of freedom given to charter schools opens the gates for those who want to establish a national curriculum.
The strongest potential force towards a vigorous, demanding national curriculum is business, which requires an educated work force. Business has had rising difficulty in recent years in finding adequately trained workers. The difficulty has reached the point that many businesses have become actively involved in education, not only to provide the technical training to operate their business, but now also to provide the basic education students haven’t received during their school days.
[Click on our blog to order "Fixing America's Broken Public Education."]
TAJ MAHALS AND RESPONSIBLE SCHOOL BUILDINGS
Sep 1st
by Colette & Nicholas Gilroy
Los Angeles’ educational Taj Mahal, the $578 million Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools, may have been conceived in a headier economic climate, but there’s no excuse for such an eye-popping school construction expenditure at any time.
With today’s difficult economic situation in California, the cost of the RFK Community Schools is off the charts, an obscene waste of public money. The funds could have been spread over a wide swath of public needs while still providing a fully satisfactory learning environment for the kids RFK will be serving.
RFK isn’t an isolated boondoggle. Two other recent LA school projects have cost a total of over $600 million–more than $1.1 billion for just three schools! Nationwide dozens of schools have come in with price tags north of $100 million.
Lavishing money on luxurious educational surroundings sends some bad messages to children. They don’t need to be in an educational Ritz-Carlton to learn. A good learning environment grows directly from knowledgeable, dedicated teachers, working in a clean, well-maintained building.
School architects should be focused on modular construction, designing components that can be assembled quickly, and configured and reconfigured into a wide variety of arrangements according to particular needs. Focusing on modular construction offers the dual benefits of developing creative ways to individualize the resulting designs and at the same time reduce design and construction costs.
Visual dynamism in an educational environment doesn’t hinge on the superficial design of the structure but on the posters, designs, charts, etc. put up by the teachers. In every subject area, at every grade level, there is an enormous supply of excellent commercially available material. Much of this is free, readily supplied by private businesses and associations, federal agencies, and local, state and foreign governments.
Students themselves are often the most important source of lively visual material through their work in various courses, with art classes being a prime outlet for visual enhancement of a school.
We pay considerably more for education and health care than other first world countries and yet receive poorer results in each vital area. The US needs to come to grips with the fact that good education doesn’t need pretty buildings. Greg Mortensen builds satisfactory structures for effective education in Afghanistan and Pakistan for $13,000. While everything would obviously be substantially more in America, we need to reorient our thinking away from high-priced buildings and equipment and towards the content of education we provide for our children.
[Click on our blog to order "Fixing America's Broken Public Education."]
SCHOOL BOARDS & HOW ADMINISTRATORS CONTROL THEM
Aug 27th
by Colette & Nicholas Gilroy
One of America’s most cherished traditions is local control of public schools. It’s direct democracy–the only chance citizens have to exert real control over something important by electing friends and neighbors to be in charge of their schools.
But American public education is a control game, and the noble theory of citizen control of public education gets ground up in the shredder of school administrations.
As part-timers, the members of the board have to look to their administrators to run the system. The complexity of school law on the local, state and national levels, with their restrictions and mandates, push school board members into heavy reliance on school administrators to navigate the public education maze. The complications are intensified by contractual obligations with unions and private businesses. The part-time job of school board member can easily escalate into the equivalent of a highly demanding full time job.
In addition to their top-down control of teachers, administrators strive for control of school board members, who are theoretically above them. When it’s legally possible to reduce the number of board members, the administration works hard to bring that about. There’s an obvious practical appeal to a small board. The smaller the board, the easier it is to schedule meetings and get a majority vote. Larger boards are more difficult to control, not only in the number of votes for any given proposal, but also because different factions may develop, complicating control. Whenever critics of the administration are elected to the board, every effort is made either to co-opt or to isolate them, preferably the former since a critic won over is a trophy that validates the worth of the administration, strengthens its position and avoids potshots from a lone ranger.
A sly control tactic is through school board meetings–a form of theatre of the absurd–which affords administrators the opportunity to grind down board members. Board meetings can be very long and tiring, but the administration can make them stretch longer, even far past midnight, through beginning with a dog and pony show. These diversionary presentations of the accomplishments and talents of students and staff members serve a dual purpose for administrations because they are excellent public relations opportunities as well as meeting-extenders. Extended meetings cause board members to lean even more heavily on their administrators to get things done, increasing control by administrators.
Term limits are crucial for the potential independence of school boards. Since school board members tend to become de facto functionaries of the administration, they become so thoroughly co-opted that the longer they serve, all traces of independent thinking on education are driven out of them, making them little more than pawns of the administration rather than guardians of the public interest. Sadly, the board members are unaware they’ve lost their independence. On the contrary, they believe their service and their allegiance to the administration have brought them a profound understanding of how education works!
Administrators and board members don’t want to hear information that runs counter to their own notions about anything concerning the conduct of “their” school system. This resistance is reinforced through the chain of command structure that effectively isolates the board from the teachers, relegated as they are to the bottom rank in the prevailing industrial model of education. Board members are also isolated from the citizenry itself at school board meetings where direct comments or questions from the public are generally allowed only during a short period at the tail end of the meeting, even well beyond midnight. The brief comments permitted often treated as unwelcome, unworthy intrusions on the board’s deliberations.
[Click on our blog to order "Fixing America's Broken Public Education."]
EDUCATION’S WEAKEST LINK: ADMINISTRATORS
Aug 26th
by Colette & Nicholas Gilroy
Virtually all proposals for reforming, improving or advancing education in any way urgently call for “educational leaders”–read “administrators”–to lead the charge to develop solutions. Genuine improvements are so very hard to achieve because the group called upon to bring about change are themselves at the center of the difficulties. Administration–often termed the “blob”–is simply superfluous to education or, worse, a millstone around the neck of education, choking it.
In our post–The False Industrial Model of Education–we dealt with a stark and hidden reality: that American public education is perpetually hobbled through being structured along industrial lines, with a pyramid of administrators atop the workers at the bottom of the pile–the teachers who do the real work of educating children.
Looking at the topsy-turvey, upside down world of education, who are these people at the top? How did they get there? Do they contribute anything of value to education? The three basic paths to educational administration are:
1. Exceptional teachers who are rewarded by being promoted into administration
2. Failed teachers who can’t hack it in the classroom and take their state’s required
courses to be deemed certified administrators
3. Successful athletic coaches.
Nothing about these three paths offers a hint about possible success in educational administration.
There’s an additional fourth path to educational administration. When established administrators want to bring a favorite buddy on board, they write a very precise job description, placing ads as required by law, in appropriate media. While awaiting responses to their ad, they choose their buddy to temporarily fill the position as the various applicants are considered. Alas, no candidate fills the bill but, miraculously, their buddy turns out to be the single individual who truly matches all the specifics in the ad, and so he/she gets the job!
Another little known secret is that individuals at the top of the administrative heap, the superintendents, are often passed from failure in one district to another district–and sometimes more than twice. The practice of passing educational failure from district to district goes on because school boards don’t want to admit they’ve been stung. A second reason is that boards usually don’t have an appetite for the expense and hassle of legal charges and countercharges over damaged reputations. Besides, a golden parachute and a “fare-thee-well” letter are likely to be cheaper than a legal struggle–and a lot better for propping up real estate values.
Administrators by and large don’t truly impart value to an educational environment. Teachers aren’t factory workers who need what others create and design for them to assemble. In education it’s the teachers who have the knowledge and supply the creative force and dedication to make education happen.
Because teachers are more competent at their jobs than administrators are at theirs–and yet administrators are the bosses of the teachers–an inherent negative tension commonly pervades education.
From a rational perspective, administrators need to be understood as service personnel working for teachers. These service personnel should be chosen by teachers, be under their direction and control and pared down to the essentials teachers actually need. Teachers know quite well–better than those who currently make the choices–who would be best suited to carry out necessary administrative assignments in their schools.
A large portion of mundane administrative functions could be farmed out to private contractors. Heavy duty social service functions dumped on schools by legislative fiat would be accomplished better through social service agencies outside the formal structure of the schools, but housed in separate attached buildings or in a separate section of a school building.
Schools today face enormous social responsibilities that become ever more burdensome because of a welter of state and federal statutes schools are mandated to follow. We need to free schools to concentrate on education and have social service agencies deal with students’ other problems, providing each group with greater opportunities for success in their respective spheres.
An inherent problem with administrations is that administration begets administration, with administrators finding more and more ways to parse administrative functions and reorder a perpetually expanding administrative empire. Thus, the “natural” tendency of administrations is to absorb more of the available funds for education, which ultimately draws funds away from teaching–which is, after all, what education is about.
[Click on our blog to order "Fixing America's Broken Public Education."]
THE EDUCATION-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
Aug 25th
by Colette & Nicholas Gilroy
The idea of an “education-industrial complex” doesn’t carry the scary overtones about America’s future Dwight Eisenhower conveyed to the nation in his last presidential address when he spoke of the dangers of a powerful new “military-industrial complex.” The education-industrial complex is a growing problem that threatens to subvert American education in favor of corporate profits as well as push education costs way up in the process, but notions of an education-industrial complex have to seem odd for folks who dream of bygone days of the l’ll ole red schoolhouse.
The explosive growth of computers in education has formed the basis of the education-industrial complex. Before computers, and the first hand-helds–calculators–the availability of electric and electronic devices in schools–from radios, phonographs, slide, film and other projectors, and TV’s were simply normal additions of modern technology to the everyday life of education. They were new educational tools used with varying degrees of effectiveness.
The first electronic tool with power to be genuinely transformative was the tape recorder, used most widely in language labs, where students could practice both foreign languages as well as deal with speech problems in English, discovering objectively how they actually sounded to other people and at the same time enabling their teacher at a central console to work with them one-on-one while managing an entire class. Tape recorders are a stable technology, can be relatively inexpensive in the form of a language lab and extremely inexpensive with individual tape recorders and tapes.
The digital age has opened the floodgates to a tsunami of rapidly changing and leapfrogging technologies in hardware and software whose effects on the abstraction called education, and the flesh and blood human beings swimming upstream in that abstraction, are increasingly difficult to assess. The one incontestable reality of the digital tsunami in contemporary education is that it’s very expensive and draws an endless parade of competing vendors to the educational marketplace to convince the educational world that their wares are indispensable for effective education.
Other heavy hitters in the education-industrial complex are giant food corporations, stuffing their glitzy vending machines in schools with a wide variety of junk food and drinks along with whatever more nutritious fare their markets might demand from them.
A growing presence in the education-industrial complex is big pharma. For a number of years teachers in elementary and middle schools have been given the duty to dispense psychotropic drugs to children, particularly as a means of controlling boys. A burgeoning market at the college and university level already looks to advances in neuropharmaceuticals for enhancing memory storage and retrieval, blocking or impeding memory formation, enhancing cognition and mood to bring students academic and ultimately professional success.
The future looks boundless for the pharmaceutical industry to create newer and ever more specific drugs to satisfy the needs and desires of students and their parents at every educational level, reaching down to the youngest students, creating a virtually infinite, insatiable educational-pharmaceutical market–with results now impossible to comprehend.
The old-line textbook publishers haven’t faded away. They’ve morphed into large media corporations with their own wide array of books, software and other attractive media to pull in a fat slice of America’s education dollars. Traditional manufacturers of once mundane school supplies, athletic and other equipment have gone high tech with expensive, alluring offerings.
For eye-popping price tags, the architectural/construction industry has brought excess to a new level. School building costs are now coming in north of $100 million, with the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools in Los Angeles topping half a billion dollars!
America needs better public education, but the education-industrial complex is focused on making big bucks, not on providing better education. We really can have better results in education and for far less money than the nation now pours into the corporate coffers of the education-industrial complex.
[Click on our blog to order "Fixing America's Broken Public Education."]
OBAMA’S HUNDRED BILLION DOLLAR EDUCATION BANDAID AND THE FALSE INDUSTRIAL MODEL OF EDUCATION
Aug 24th
by Colette & Nicholas Gilroy
It’s no secret that Obama’s thrust at education reform is part of a national yearning stretching back across the decades. The last try, G.W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind, is still with us. NCLB is widely criticized for its narrow purview and its often irrational focus on punishing schools. Obama’s ambitious approach, aiming to stimulate local reforms, raise standards throughout the nation, and establish a core curriculum, among other things, may possibly be better than the efforts of previous administrations.
Unhappily, neither President Obama, nor scores of other reform-minded individuals, come face to face with the structural and cultural realities that frustrate, impede and ultimately doom genuine, lasting education reform in America.
Probably the most insidious impediment to effective reform is the prevailing false industrial model of education. In a topdown industrial pyramid a CEO sits at the top. Various levels of executives exist below the CEO in wider descending levels. Finally, at the widest, bottom level we reach the least significant group, the laborers on the factory floor who put together the final product that the bosses on the higher levels above them have financed, created and designed for the workers to put together and deliver.
Applying this industrial model to education, we have the superintendent at the top, followed by assistant superintendents, then principals, assistant principals, department heads, counselors and finally–at last– the lowliest toilers in the education enterprise, the teachers.
The industrial model is so pervasive that people accept it as “natural,” an utterly normal part of the education scene. This virtually universal acceptance of a false model isn’t just sad, it’s sick.
Teachers are the heart of education. Nothing else is truly needed–not buildings, not equipment, not anything else–and certainly not administrators. Educational administrators–far less competent at doing their jobs than teachers are at theirs–by and large detract from education.
In a truly rational situation, teachers would choose/elect a very limited number of individuals to perform or hire out whatever administrative functions the teachers found necessary to assist them in carrying out their real work of teaching.
Not only would shucking the false industrial model of education vastly improve the quality of American public education, it would also cost a lot less.
[Click on our blog to order "Fixing America's Broken Public Education."]