Secretary of Education Discussion: What Questions Were Not Asked?

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Permalink Reply by Joel Josephson on January 9, 2009 at 9:59pm

Congratulations Carol, on your selection.

I am from Europe and I believe the most important attainment in education in Europe is what was the Socrates programme and is now the Life-long learning programme (LLP) (see http://eacea.ec.europa.eu/index.htm and then http://eacea.ec.europa.eu/llp/index_en.htm . I would be very happy to discuss this programme directly with you to speed your understanding.

These programmes, with all there faults, have managed to bring together educators from every European country, to use their collective intelligence to face and solve problems within European education. I strongly believe that education is not only a national objective but a global priority that goes beyond the competitive landscape of a national policy.

Many of the questions you have been asked, are also being asked within Europe, and the priorities of the LLP request projects by educators across Europe, to address them.

In my opinion, one of the questions that should be asked within the "What questions might have been asked that were not?" is: Should we, and how, can we reach out to the collective intelligence of educators across the world to solve our problems? - Other education authorities often have the same problems, maybe their educators have already found solutions, or we can work with them to find solutions.

Joel
Kindersite Project

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Permalink Reply by Bret Willhoit on January 10, 2009 at 7:55am

A question that I would like to see addressed by Arnie Duncan and the rest of the Department of Education is "What steps need to be taken to increase financial literacy in this country." Everyone is aware of the current economic crisis the US and the world is facing. The reasons why we find ourselves in this mess are plentiful and varied. But one main reasons is that there were a ton of people who bought houses they couldn't afford with mortgages that they didn't understand and lived a lifestyle that they couldn't afford with a negative savings rate. What can be done in the future so that average consumers are able to make more sound economic decisions for themselves? Thank you.

P.S. I love the fact that this type of action of harnessing the power of Web 2.0 and crowd-sourcing is being taken to address these gravely important issues.

Bret Willhoit

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Permalink Reply by Marion Brady on January 11, 2009 at 1:24pm

Questions flow out of particular perspectives---"big picture" views about education, about the trends of the era, the state of the institution, the "players" currently being listened to, and so on. Feeling strongly that today's most influential education policymakers are failing to grasp that big picture, a few days ago, at the suggestion of Susan Ohanian, I started pulling some thoughts together with an audience like the readers of the AARP Journal in mind. Below is this evening's draft. I'm tentatively titling it "Back To The Future? Big Mistake".

Marion Brady,
_____________________


The Rockland Café bumps up against the sid...

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Permalink Reply by Ian Carmichael on January 11, 2009 at 3:06pm

Hi Marion,
The link doesn't land on "Back to the Future...", just your home page, and I couldn't pick it up from there either.

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Permalink Reply by Marion Brady on February 4, 2009 at 3:24am

Sorry. Here it is:
__________________________
Back To The Future?

The Rockland Café bumps up against the sidewalk on the east side of Main Street in Rockland, Maine. It's a down-home, family sort of place, not much like most of the restaurants just up the road in the tourist-packed town of Camden. It opens for business at 5:30 AM, seven days a week, every week of the year. For a reasonable price it offers, "All you can eat seafood."

Hanging on the north wall of the restaurant is an enormous enlargement of a photograph taken in 1907. It shows the under-construction schooner Mertie B. Crowley being launched just south of town. A crowd watches as she slides down the ways into the waters of Penobscott Bay.

What catches your eye about the Mertie B. Crowley—and may explain why the picture is on the wall—is that she has six masts rather than the usual three.

What were Rockland's shipwrights thinking? It's 1907, for crying out loud! Just 44 miles down US Route 1 from Rockland is the Bath Iron Works, a company that, by 1907, had been building steam powered ships for years. Did those Rockland shipbuilders think that by souping up the old design-adding more masts and sails-they could compete?

Think of the Mertie B. Crowley as a metaphor for the education your children and grandchildren are getting. In education, that "old design" is called the "core curriculum," the mix of math, science, language arts, and social studies courses taught in America's schools.

In 1983 the National Commission on Excellence In Education published a report called "A Nation At Risk." Several CEOs of American businesses read the report and concluded that our schools were so bad Russia or some other foreign power was about to eat our lunch. What was needed, they said, was"rigor"—schools that were as tough and demanding as those they thought they'd attended when they were young. What had happened, they believed, was that America's teachers, once first-rate, were no longer getting the job done, had gradually slacked off, probably suffering from "the soft bigotry of low expectations." So, bypassing educators and working directly with state governors and other politicians, the CEOs built an educational counterpart
to the Mertie B. Crowley. They demanded and got a souped up core curriculum—more math, more science, new standards, more standardized tests, more drills, less social studies, art, music, and other "frills." The politicians named it No Child Left Behind, the CEOs joined them on board, and they set sail toward a "world class" education.

Educators still did the grunt work—wrote the standards, administered the tests, posted the scores—but only CEO's and politicians were allowed in the pilot house to steer the education reform ship.

Staying on course, those in the pilot house believed, was simple. Educating well wasn't complicated, was just a matter of transferring information from those who knew to those who don't
know. If information wasn't getting transferred, it was either because (a) teachers didn't know what information to transfer, or (b) they weren't trying hard enough.
Those were easily solved problems, said the CEOs and the politicians. If teachers didn't know what information to transfer, ever-more-detailed "standards" would tell them. And if they weren't trying hard enough, market forces-competition, merit pay, choice, vouchers, charters, publicity, fear of job loss, labeling and grading of schools, and so on-would pressure them to shape up. Competition, of course, required precise score-keeping, so a lot more standardized testing was necessary.

Has it worked? Not according to Louis V. Gerstner, ex-CEO of American Express, RJR Nabisco, IBM, and the Carlyle Group, and winner of many awards for his efforts to reform American education. In a November 2008 Wall Street Journal op-ed, he said, "We must start with the recognition that, despite decade after decade of reform efforts, our public K-12 schools have not
improved."

But he has an explanation for the failure. He thinks the standards and accountability procedures Congress pressured the fifty states to put in place are lousy—too local, too political, too varied to allow direct performance comparisons. What's needed are national standards, and national
tests.

As you'd expect, the CEOs think nationalizing businesses and industries is a really bad idea, and they strongly disapprove of the kind of centralized, top-down decision-making that contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union, but educating kids, they're sure, is easier than making widgets or moving money around. Gerstner wants Congress to become America's school board, and thinks the first thing it should do when it takes over is install national standards and tests. Yes, it's true the Constitution says education is a state responsibility, and it's true that a 35-year-old law says the feds can't mess around with the curriculum, but that's no obstacle. The national standards can be "voluntary." If federal dollars are funneled to the "volunteers," the locals, always short of school operating funds, will quickly knuckle under.

Most educators, particularly younger ones, serve aboard the No Child Left Behind willingly, but the old hands think the ship is headed for the rocks. They keep asking questions, cupping their hands and yelling warnings up to the pilot house, but neither the CEOs nor members of Congress are paying attention:

• Hey, up there! The "core curriculum" you want to lock even more rigidly in place with national standards and tests was adopted in 1892. It had major problems even then, and with each passing year becomes more inappropriate and dysfunctional. For starters, it denies the seamless, mutually supportive nature of knowledge. It has no agreed-upon aim. No criteria say which new knowledge to teach or which old knowledge to dump. No built-in mechanisms force it to adapt to social change. It pushes information at learners at fire-hose velocity, and even the smartest kids can't cope. It doesn't move smoothly through ever-increasing levels of difficulty. It assumes reading is the main way kids learn. It disregards the brain's need for order and organization. It fails to address complex, critically important moral and ethical issues. It stuffs abstract ideas unrelated to their experience into kids' short-term memories, from which it disappears as soon as the test is over. It routinely neglects every thought process except recall. We could go on. Why in the world, when knowledge is exploding, would you think it's a good idea to freeze this 19th Century relic in bureaucratic place forever?
• Hey, up there! You're blaming us for things over which we have no control. Common sense says that if kids are hungry, or sick, don't see well, get moved every time the rent comes due, have serious family problems, are being knocked around or subjected to who knows what other kinds of abuse at home, it's going to affect how well they learn. Why, when we try to tell you this, do you always say, "No excuses!"? Are you scapegoating, afraid someone might point out that your decisions about off-shoring manufacturing or manipulating money might have something to do with why America's kids face so many problems?

• Hey, up there! Your single-minded preoccupation with corporately produced, machine-scored "measures of accountability" is killing real education. Those crude tests costing us billions of dollars are tails wagging the education dog. They can't measure those "higher order thinking skills" you keep claiming you want your employees to have; can't measure personal qualities
like tenacity, trustworthiness, and the ability to work with others; can't measure creativity, resourcefulness, or ingenuity; can't measure what kids can actually do with what the tests say they know. But notwithstanding all that, you're using the numbers they produce (numbers everybody knows politicians manipulate for political purposes) to shame us, fire us, close
us down, or to convince the public that public schools should be handed over to Edison or some other corporate chain.

• Oh, hey! Another thing about those tests! Every kid's head is wired differently. Shouldn't we rejoice in that fact and capitalize on it instead of pretending that there's such a thing as a standard kid? After all, it's different abilities and interests that make civilization possible. Why are you hell-bent on making every kid jump through the same hoops?

• Hey! Where's your evidence that Milton Friedman was right, that bringing market forces to bear would cure educational ills? Hasn't it occurred to you that most of us aren't in it for the money, that if we stick with it past the first couple of years it's because what turns us on are the looks on
kids' faces when they make sense of something they didn't understand? Sure, we'd like to make enough to live decently, but that's only reasonable. What do you think merit pay does to the cohesiveness of faculties and teacher teams that need to share insights and skills and work together in the interest of the young?

• Can you hear me? Thoughtful educators have always known that our 1892 curriculum was deeply flawed, and were on their way to setting up pilot programs to test alternatives when you took over. Sadly, while you've been busy making irrelevant anything other than guessing what was probably in the head of some moonlighting graduate student test-item writer, many of our insightful thinkers—Neil Postman, David Ausubel, John Holt, and others—have died.

The CEOs and politicians now steering American education, and experienced, professional educators, are so far apart in their assumptions about educating that communicating is all but impossible. At the root of that disconnect is the refusal of the non-educators to accept that educating is anything more than that a simple process of moving information from one head to
another. This Conventional Wisdom assumption, no doubt reinforced by their own mis-education, guts real education—makes human relationships irrelevant, emotion irrelevant, eye contact and body language irrelevant, individual interests and abilities irrelevant, class size irrelevant, caring and concern for kids' welfare outside the classroom, irrelevant, the real world
to which information relates, irrelevant.

Educating, really educating, is easily the most complex process in which humans engage. If it were simple, the world would almost certainly be a much lovelier place, free of war, poverty, and oppression. Far from being merely a matter of transferring information, educating requires the discerning of the models of reality in others' minds, and devising strategies for altering them. That's hard. Really hard.

No other profession equals teaching in inherent complexity and intellectual challenge. The longer thoughtful teachers teach, the more aware are they of the difficulty of the task, and the more modest they become in their claims of success. Teachers, good teachers, the kind of teachers America should want teaching the young, are still learning how to teach when they retire, forever wishing they had another chance to work with those they know they short-changed when they'd only had ten or fifteen years of experience. To assume that anybody who knows a subject can teach it, to assume that a kid fresh out of college can donate a couple of years to teaching as a sort of civic duty and do right by kids, to assume that a retired admiral or general, or mayor, or a successful CEO, can step into the classroom and do the job that needs doing, is utterly ridiculous.

America's schools—even those considered models to be emulated—aren't preparing the young for a future more complicated and dangerous than we can even imagine. It isn't just naive to think that today's educational problems can be solved by doing with greater determination and rigor what brought us to our present state, perverse.

If education policy continues to be shaped, as it presently is, by those who haven't spent tousands of hours working eye-to-eye with learners and thinking about what they’re doing, America doesn't have the proverbial snowball's chance in hell of arriving at the 22nd Century in a form we'd recognize and approve.

The Mertie B. Crowley hauled ice to cities along America's East Coast for three years. Unable to hold course during a storm, she ran aground and disintegrated in 1910.

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Permalink Reply by Albert Blevins on April 6, 2009 at 5:46am

Just as a matter of information, my great uncle Will Haskell was captain of the six-masted schooner Mertie B. Crowley when she went aground on Wasque Shoals, Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts on January 10th, 1910. His wife, my great aunt Ida Blevins Haskell, endured thirteen hours tied in the upper rigging before being rescued by a local fisherman and his crew. There was no loss of life amog the crew of fifteen, but the ship was a toal loss. A few years ago Bert Snow, the retired police chief of Rockland, gave me a tour of the area where the ship was built and we ended up sitting in a booth of the Rockland Cafe under the picture of the Crowley.

Albert C. Blevins

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Permalink Reply by Herbert R. Ward on January 29, 2010 at 5:19am

Mr. Blevins:

I had the pleasure of talking to you over ten years ago. My great-grandfather was Levi Jackson. I thought your model of the Mertie B. Crowley was the highlight of the shipwrecks display at the historical society here.

This being the 100th anniversary of the wreck, I have taken a renewed interest in collecting information and photos to update my family history project. I was wondering if you had photos of your great aunt and uncle, or old newspaper articles which we would not have seen here on the Vineyard, that you would be willing to share with me.

There is a possibility that we can have a small display at the MV Museum this year (although I do not know why they didn't plan one). If I can arrange such a display, would there be any possibility of arranging for your model to be in the display?

I would love to hear from you again, and hope you are well.

Sincerely,

Herb Ward
herbsverbs370@msn.com
508-693-7683

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Permalink Reply by Jane Peschel on February 14, 2010 at 4:35am

I completely agree with this..."The longer thoughtful teachers teach, the more aware are they of the difficulty of the task, and the more modest they become in their claims of success. Teachers, good teachers, the kind of teachers America should want teaching the young, are still learning how to teach when they retire, forever wishing they had another chance to work with those they know they short-changed when they'd only had ten or fifteen years of experience."

As a self proclaimed continuous learner, I have reached the level of humble in my career! What makes me sad though is watching those within the field proclaim to teach but rarely reach out to learn themselves. The field right now needs deeply engaged professionals. This may mean an open-mindedness to different delivery systems which may include dismantling the traditional classroom and school day. I believe that we don't have a snowballs chance in hell of arriving at the 22nd Century by continuing to try to deliver the same curriculum in the same way that was developed for the industrial age.

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Permalink Reply by Lynette Guastaferro on January 27, 2009 at 6:31pm

How do we improve the efficiency of education so that our resources are better spent. We have a completely fragmented education system that makes private sector or non profit sector innovation very challenging. For example, do we really need 50 sets of standards and 50 assessments, so that everyone has to create 50 versions of everything?

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Permalink Reply by Ralph Parker on February 3, 2009 at 12:40pm

Why don't we fund the "fix" at the beginning instead of the end of school. All the federally funded programs focus on remediation. We have at least 4 teams of teachers trying to teach our population to read. We need to fix the beginning. What is broken is our alphabet, 1,120 spelling exceptions with 26 letters. The result afterward is an ongoing disaster. We can easily "fix" our letters by changing the "names" for each letter to the best sound. Then we distribute materials that just address reading and writing using ONLY these sounds. I call this idea "teaching by ear". An analogy could be the Suzuki method of teaching a musical instrument. The neural pathways are auditory. All we need to do is shift the very beginning so lessons are focused in a highly structured auditory environment, much more than phonics. The window to address this is very small, but also very powerful. In my experience 100% of the students can easily learn to read and write in kindergarten. Then use whatever reading materials are available in the school for the next grade levels. In my experience, all these children will pass the exit exam in 12th grade. The key is to "fix" the effect of our alphabet on the process language skills in the very beginning, Kindergarten. This type of focus will put the remedial program out of business, completely!! Ralph Parker

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Permalink Reply by Jeffrey Fuller on February 1, 2010 at 9:34am

In what ways is the Department of Education addressing efforts to custom tailor education for students, especially those of low socioeconomic status?

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