Abraham Who?

June 21, 2011

(Guest post by Brian Kisida)

Last week the Feds released the latest NAEP assessment of students’ understanding of U.S. history.  It contained a mostly negative assessment of history knowledge, including some tidbits like only nine percent of fourth-graders could identify a photograph of Abraham Lincoln and give two reasons why he is an important historical figure.  You know the drill: First act shocked that our students did so poorly, wring your hands a bit, blame your favorite thing/organization/political movement for creating this travesty, and then finish by lamenting the eventual end of democracy and civilized society as we know it (and plenty of people will also tell you the end of civilization can be avoided, of course, if we give schools additional resources or adopt national standards).  Everyone’s doing it, from the folks over at Fordham to Diane Ravitch.  Diane says she’s worried because when it comes to our high school seniors, “all of these students will be voters in a year.”  Well, not if 200+ years of voter-turnout data has anything to say about it.

Another annoying thing about all of the hand-wringing coverage generated by these types of reports is the way people discuss NAEP’s outcome measures, such as “Basic,” “Proficient,” or “Advanced” as if they’re entirely objective.  Here’s an excerpt from Ravitch’s statement on the issue:

“It’s worth noting that of the seven school subjects tested by NAEP, history has the smallest proportion of students who score Proficient or above in the most recent results available. Among twelfth graders, for example, only 12 percent reach Proficient in U.S. history, compared to 21 percent in science, 24 percent in both civics and writing, 25 percent in geography, 26 percent in mathematics, and 38 percent in reading.”

Or take, for example, the Boston Globe, which concluded from the same data that:

 “In fact, American kids are weaker in history than in any of the other subjects tested by the NAEP — math, reading, science, writing, civics, geography, and economics.”

It’s as if they think NAEP’s outcome categories were set by the International Committee on Weights and Measures using specific gravity and atomic clocks.  They aren’t.  They are arbitrary categories determined by “experts,” and they certainly aren’t comparable across subjects.  We can’t conclude that students are doing worse in history than they are in math or english simply by looking at proficiency rates.

The results are, however, comparable across time.  When viewed longitudinally, there are a few positives in this latest report.  Scores for eighth-graders were up across the board, and scores for Black and Hispanic eighth-graders were especially positive, significantly narrowing the White-Black test score gap. 

However, like we’ve seen time and time again with NAEP results, twelfth-graders aren’t budging.  And at the end of the day, if twelfth graders are stagnating then gains for eighth-graders are largely irrelevant.

To be honest, I think it’s difficult to guage the state of history education based upon NAEP’s measures, or based upon shoddy attempts by others to interpret them.  I really don’t know, for example, exactly how many fourth graders should be able to tell me the importance of Abraham Lincoln.  What I do know, and what I find disturbing, is that we have continued to allocate more resources for high school history over this same time period that high school scores have remained flat.  As the NAEP report points out, the number of schools offering A.P. U.S. history courses has risen from 51 percent in 1990 to 80 percent in 2009.  And the percentage of students who have taken an A.P. history class has more than doubled since 1990.  You would think that would lead to some observable gains for high-schoolers.

Leave a Comment » | civic values, school funding | Permalink
Posted by Brian Kisida

Neal’s Eternal Platonic Beauty Queens

June 21, 2011

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

In a provocative (as in thought-provocative) post, Neal reviews what the Miss America USA [oops] contestants have to say about teaching creation and evolution in schools:

I didn’t tally their responses, but just listening to the contenders it seems their consensus answer represents America in microcosm: Most seem to have serious doubts about evolution, but support teaching it along with other viewpoints. It reflects both the overall split within the American public—40 to 50 percent of Americans are creationists, and roughly the same segment evolutionists—as well as the consensus view on teaching human origins: About 60 percent of Americans support teaching both evolution and creationism in public schools…

The extent of the evidence is that government schooling generally can’t handle controversy, but that is almost never even mentioned in the seemingly endless war between creationists and evolutionists. And the same is true for the aspiring Miss USAs. While a few appeared to conclude that the nation is too diverse for public schools to deal with this topic—see Miss Kentucky at the 5:07 mark, and Miss Utah at 12:36—the majority made no mention of the problem.

One contestant said “I think we should leave that up to the government.” Maybe she could get a job teaching in this school:

Reading Neal’s insightful post brought me back to a subject that I promised him a few months ago I would treat when I had the chance. Neal and I agree that a government school monopoly can’t handle controversial issues and harms the national culture by undermining pluralism – real pluralism, not the phony kind you get by indoctrinating everyone’s children in a uniform (and politicized) ideology of what pluralism means.

Back during the late unpleasantness over national standards, I wrote that government monopolization of schooling is one of the root causes of the culture war, but (I said) “that’s an argument for another day.” Neal objected:

Here’s where I think Greg is incorrect: Choice is not an argument for another day. It is the argument for this day.

Until all parents have real, full choice they will have no option but to demand that higher levels of government force intractable lower levels to provide good education. It won’t work — thanks to concentrated benefits and diffuse costs all levels of government are dominated by teachers’ unions and administrators’ associations that will never let tough accountability and high standards rein – but it is all that parents can do absent the ability to take their children, and tax dollars, somewhere else. That means choice is essential right now, because it is the only way to take power away from special-interest dominated government and give it to the people the schools are supposed to serve. In other words, it is the only option that will actually work, obliterating the special-interest hammerlock, imposing accountability to customers, and when coupled with freedom for educators unleashing competition, specialization, innovation, and constant upward pressure on standards. In other words, it will do all those things that national standardizers emptily and illogically promise that their reform will do, and much, much more.

I promised him a response and never got around to it. This looks like the time.

Time is actually the basis of my response. I’m more or less with Neal on all the substance here. But getting the reforms we want requires us to participate in a social process that takes place within institutions and relationships, and which therefore has to unfold over time.

It seems to me that some people in the school choice movement (Cateaux!) have fallen into the trap of thinking that a successful movement for reform looks like this:

  1. Map out the entire architecture of how the reform looks across all issues, institutions and areas.
  2. Distill this architecture into a single integrated blueprint that fits everything together.
  3. Fight to implement your blueprint. Treat anyone who doesn’t subscribe to your blueprint as an opponent.

This reflects, I think, too much emphasis on the cognitive – as though there were a Platonic Form of Education Policy and our job is to contemplate it until we grasp its unchanging eternal nature, then subdue the world of time and change until it matches the eternal unchanging Form. In this Platonic dualism, the changeless and eternal (in  this case, the perfect education policy blueprint) is the only thing we value for its own sake, and the world of time and change is valued only as raw material for constructing tangible manifestations of the intangible Forms.

Neal’s insistence that all issues must be settled right now reminds me of a scene from C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce, which is a book that really reflects the Platonic view (especially as channeled through Augustine, who took Plato mainstream). In the book, Lewis describes a dream in which he sees people’s entire lives distilled down to a single moment of choice between good and evil.

In one scene, a Bright Spirit offers a man eternal bliss if he will turn away from his evil desires. He keeps making excuses. The Bright Spirit offers to kill his evil desires and he says: “There’s time to discuss that later.” The Bright Spirit replies: “There is no time.” A little later he says, “Some other day, perhaps” and the Bright Spirit replies: “There is no other day. All days are present now.” He demurrs but offers to return later: “I’ll come again the first moment I can.” The Bright Spirit replies: “This moment contains all moments.” This is essentially the Platonic/Augustinian approach to life, death and the afterlife – your life “down below” in the world of time and change was really just the ephemeral expression of a single, trans-temporal choice between good and evil. This view feels transcendent and liberating to people who have a certain highly cognitive bent of mind, but it’s actually reductive and limiting.

Neal’s insistence that we can’t talk about national standards without also talking about school choice feels the same way. We’ll never make progress on any issues if we can’t discuss one issue without simultaneously discussing all the others. Or, to put it another way, we can’t win any battles if we think that they’re all really the same eternal trans-temporal battle, with little manifestations of it fought over and over again within time. Because that way of thinking forces you to isolate yourself from potential allies who may not be interested in your entire blueprint (ahem) but who may be useful coalition partners.

8 Comments | civic values | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Gerard Robinson: New Head of Ed for the Sunshine State

June 21, 2011

(Guest post by Brian Kisida)

Florida has a new Commissioner of Education.  They just announced that Virginia’s Secretary of Education, Gerard Robinson, will be taking over down in the sunshine state.  Congrats to Gerard.  As a former president of the Black Alliance for Education Options (BAEO) and a strong history of advocating for parental choice, education reform in Florida should continue to move forward and serve as an example for most other states.

1 Comment | politics | Permalink
Posted by Brian Kisida

Wisconsin Expands MPCP and Creates Choice for Racine

June 17, 2011

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Is there a mercy rule for wonk bets?

Greg continues to pound away on Jay Mathews even though JM is already lying on the canvas comotose. I’ve lost count, and we aren’t finished yet. Yesterday the Wisconsin legislature sent a budget to Governor Scott Walker that expands the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program in three important ways: removing the participation cap, lifting the income cap to include some middle income families, and allowing students to attend suburban private schools.

In addition, a new voucher program for Racine will come online next school year. Here are the details from the American Federation for Children.

1 Comment | vouchers | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Greg Continues to Run Up the Score on Jay Mathews

June 16, 2011

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Another day, another couple of style points for Greg. North Carolina’s legislature passed a tax credit for special needs students with an overwhelming bipartisan majority in each chamber. Down in Louisiana, lawmakers expanded the tax deduction for private school students, also by an overwhelming bipartisan margin.

Jay’s suffering is not done yet. Wisconsin is very near to expanding the size and scope of the Milwaukee program, and creating a new program in Racine, and there is more game to be played in Big-10 country.

3 Comments | tax-credit scholarships | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Louisiana Board: 46% of Schools earned D or F grades

June 16, 2011

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

The Baton Rouge Advocate reports that the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education discussed an analysis showing that the A-F grading system adopted in that state would find 46% of schools either D or F rated. The story makes clear that it could be higher next year. If the system had been used this year, the grade distribution would have looked like:

  • A — 75 schools.
  • B — 236 schools.
  • C — 375 schools.
  • D — 513 schools.
  • F — 81 schools.

Louisiana had the lowest 4th grade reading scores in the nation of any state in 2009, and has been either near or at the bottom for a long time. A majority, 51% of Louisiana 4th graders scored “Below Basic” on 4th grade reading- making them functionally illiterate. Twice as many Ds as Bs sounds about right, maybe a little low.

The details of the Louisiana grading system differ from Florida. Schools will earn + and/or – along with their letter grades depending upon whether growth targets are met, and factors such as attendance influence the letter grades.  With that noted, the chart that Louisianans should tatoo on to their foreheads until the gales of controversy blow over is below:

In the first year of the Florida grading system, 677 schools graded out D or F while only 515 schools earned A or B grades. The year before, in 1998, Florida’s 4th Grade NAEP reading scores were 5th from the bottom, so this was truth in advertising. On four separate occasions, policymakers raised the standards to receive an A or B grade, but you can see the trend for yourself: now there are more than 10 times the number of A/B grades as D/F.

Sidebar: I often get asked on the road why the total number of schools goes up so much in this chart. The number of charter schools took off, Florida experienced a good deal of population growth, but probably the biggest factor is the shrinkage of the C category, which is offstage in this chart.

NAEP serves as a source of external validation for this progress, and the rigor of the FCAT exam has remained steady against NAEP.

Arizona, Indiana, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Utah have all adopted A-F school grades in the last two years, following the lead of Florida and New York City. Additional states have been/are still considering adopting the policy.

School grading is a tough love policy. It’s a lot easier to throw extra money at schools, call yourself the “education governor” and kick the can down the road. School grading  can work, and in fact has worked in Florida and New York City, but it could also easily fail if policymakers lose their nerve in the face of opposition. It requires an attitude similar to Churchill’s, who in his first Cabinet meeting as Prime Minister pronounced that he had nothing to offer but “blood, toil, sweat and tears.”

There is nothing magical about the Florida policies: they require moral courage, hard work, perseverance and patience to show results. Floridians rallied around their underperforming schools, ignored the howls of the reactionaries, rolled up their sleeves to get the job done.

Louisana spends $10,082 per year per child in the public school system, but fails to teach half their students how to read. Lock and load, Louisiana- it’s time to rise to the challenge.

7 Comments | school accountability | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Salman Khan on Colbert

June 14, 2011

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Sal Khan appeared on the Colbert Report- I can’t embed the video, so watch it here.

Rick Hess takes to his blog to declare Khan the most over-hyped edu-entrepreneur. Rick’s post however makes a stronger case against his point that for it, and Bryan and Emily Hassel very helpfully finish the job.

Leave a Comment » | Digital Learning | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Ravitch on the RI Tape: My Goons Won’t Release It

June 14, 2011

Are we on Skull or Rhode Island?

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Diane Ravitch did an interview with the St. Pete Times last week in which reporters raised the subject of the Rhode Island tape. This came up after Ravitch made a series of falsifiable claims about trends in Florida education, the most egregious of which is to either assert that we have state level longitudinal NAEP data for 12th graders (we don’t) or to ignore all the 12th grade data we do have (FCAT, AP, graduation rates, college attendance rates) which are positive.

Here’s the RI part of the conversation:

You probably wouldn’t be surprised to hear that the education commissioner in Rhode Island is someone that the education powers-that-be in Florida would have liked to have seen as our new education commissioner. She’s on the same page with them and she has roots in Tampa, I think. You and her were recently embroiled in a back-and-forth where after meeting with her, you said she was pretty condescending and kind of nasty. Apparently, there is a video of that meeting. And I was wondering, can you go ahead and agree to a release of that video so we can see it?

It’s not my video; I can’t release it.

From what I understand, if you gave the okay, it could be released.

No, that’s not true. Every person in the room had to give their permission and three of the people did not. It wasn’t me.

So you’re okay with it being released?

Yeah, it’s not a problem for me. The filmmaker said she wasn’t going to release it anyway because she’s going to make a movie and she’s not in a habit of releasing her raw footage. The context of that meeting was that I came with the promise of a one hour private, a one on one meeting with the Governor and 20 minutes before the meeting that Debra would be part of the meeting. And we spend the meeting vying to get a word in. And I had the feeling, what is she doing in my one on one meeting and she must of thought, you’re here to hear what I’m doing, I’m not here to hear what you are doing. I felt very dissed, I got an apology from her. And then her PR guy saw the tape and he put it out to all the right wing bloggers that I was rude to her and I began to get all of this National Review, Jay Greene stuff, release the tape. I don’t have the tape, I don’t have permission to release the tape, it’s not mine and what it would show is we are both vying for time and it was supposed to be my meeting.

Translated into English: Gee shucks, I’d be fine with releasing the tape but my union goons won’t agree to it. Three of them are from a primitive culture that has an aversion to photography. They believe that it steals a piece of their soul upon viewing, that sort of thing. You would be surprised at how many people hold these beliefs in Rhode Island!

I must respect their customs and beliefs, regardless of how quaint they may seem to us.  I’ll let you know if all three of them adopt more modern attitudes at some point…

1 Comment | politics | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Sell Outs

June 13, 2011

(Guest Post by Brian Kisida)

It’s truly a sad situation when once respectable organizations become so intertwined with the corrupting influence of party politics and the ulterior motives of other interest groups that they abandon their core principles.  Last week Matt referenced the newly invigorated war against charter schools in New York undertaken by the NAACP.  Also last week in Milwaukee the ACLU filed yet another lawsuit against a school choice program.

On the surface, the NAACP’s ongoing opposition to school choice just seems bizarre.  The overwhelming majority of school choice programs in the U.S., whether it be in the form of urban charter schools or means-tested voucher programs like those found in Milwaukee and D.C., serve distinctly minority and disadvantaged populations by design.  If there’s a rational argument out there that can explain why the NAACP, according to its own principles, should stand in opposition to school choice, I haven’t heard it.  And I’ve done plenty of searching.

But the NAACP supported rally that was held down in Harlem last week does provide the necessary connect-able dots to at least consider their motives.  Who was there?  Well, New York City Council member Robert Jackson spoke out against charter schools, and he invoked the long hard plight of the NAACP’s battle against discrimination in the process:

“NAACP has stood for over 100 years to fight discrimination. And we stand united, right here on 125th Street and Lenox Avenue and Malcolm X Boulevard to say we will fight all people, all people, that want to discriminate against us or our children.”

Of course, he failed to mention that before he became a council member in 2001, he was a Director of Field Services for the New York State Public Employees Federation.  And, while it may be unfair for me to insinuate that his close ties to public employee unions motivate his opposition to school choice, it isn’t unfair to say that his claims are fundamentally false.  Charter schools are open to all students, regardless of residential location.  By definition, freely chosen charter schools are less discriminatory than residentially-assigned schools.  Unless, somehow, you think a randomly chosen lottery ball is capable of discriminating.

Also in attendance was United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew.  He also played the equity card:

“The children from the charter school will get the science labs, and not the children from the public school…the children from the charter school will get the playground, and not the children from the public school.”

Of course, charter schools are public schools, and they are open to all students who apply.  Moreover, if Mulgrew really thinks that charter schools are so superior to “public” schools, then wouldn’t the proper thing to do–if one really cared about giving every child the best education possible–be to make every school a charter school?  Then they’d all get the science labs and new playgrounds, right?

I imagine this is how organizations like the NAACP will inevitably die.  They become so resistant to change and so corrupted by bad influences that eventually they become irrelevant.  The NAACP is squandering what little credibility it has left by opposing policies that are near and dear to the hearts of the people who should be their core constituents.  So it goes.

Up in Milwaukee, the ACLU is also doing its best to betray its own principles by fighting the expansion of Milwaukee’s Parental Choice Program (MPCP).  Like the NAACP, the American Civil Liberties Union is no friend of school choice.  Their own director, way back in 1994, agreed that school vouchers, if properly administered, were no more a violation of the First Amendment than were Pell Grants (which means they aren’t a violation at all).  But in the ensuing years, the ACLU has become one of the most vocal opponents of expanding individual liberty through school choice.  And it’s not exactly clear why.  At the very least, it’s worth noting that the word “liberty” doesn’t regularly appear in any of the ACLU’s public statements against school choice.

Last week, the ACLU filed a lawsuit claiming that the MPCP discriminates against children with disabilities and asked the Department of Justice to delay Governor Walker’s planned expansion of the program.  To make their case, they cite flawed statistics generated by the politically minded state Department of Public Instruction (DPI) that claim that nearly 20% of students in Milwaukee’s public schools have a disability, but only 1.6% of the students in the MPCP have the same condition.

Of course, the claim is misguided in multiple ways.  Independent research by Patrick Wolf from the University of Arkansas and John Witte from the University of Wisconsin does confirm an asymmetry with regard to disabled students, but not nearly as high as the one claimed by DPI and the ACLU.  In their analysis, they concluded that:

“Public schools have both strong incentives to classify students as requiring exceptional education, because they receive extra funding to teach such students and well-established protocols for doing so. Private schools have neither. A student with the same educational needs often will be classified as exceptional education in MPS but not so classified in the choice program.”

“Nine percent of choice parents said their child has a learning disability, compared to 18% of the parents of the carefully matched public school students in our sample. The proportion of students with learning disabilities in the choice program is about half that of MPS, but it is certainly not less than 1%, as the state Department of Public Instruction recently reported.”

In addition, the lawsuit brought by the ACLU completely ignores the funding disparity that exists between Milwaukee public schools and the voucher program.  Currently, students in Milwaukee’s public schools receive more than $15,000 in per-pupil funding, while students in the choice program receive $6,442.  If the ACLU were truly concerned about the liberties of disabled students and their families, wouldn’t it make the most sense to argue for an increase in the voucher amount for disabled students?  Wouldn’t that be the most liberty-maximizing course of action?

Like the NAACP, the ACLU has veered far from its own principles as an organization whose stated purpose is to “defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to all people in this country.”  And, like the NAACP, it’s largely because they’ve sold out.  They’ve gone from being an organization founded on certain principles to being simply another political hack-unit heavily influenced by party politics and the agendas of other interest groups.  Unless they can find a way to change, they’ll continue to slide towards complete and total irrelevance.

36 Comments | charter schools, residential school choice, school funding, teacher union, vouchers | Permalink
Posted by Brian Kisida

One of the Best Education Books I’ve Read

June 13, 2011

(Guest Post by Stuart Buck)
And I’ve read quite a few. The book is Barker Bausell’s “Too Simple to Fail: A Case for Educational Change”, which just came out from Oxford University Press. Bausell was a biostatistician and professor for many years at the University of Maryland, but he started out in graduate school doing some fascinating educational experiments that showed the irrelevance of teacher training. He brings the perspective of a brilliant outsider.

His main thesis: that the only thing that improves education is spending more time on instruction at a given child’s level. In his words:

All school learning is explained in terms of the amount of relevant instructional time provided to a student.

That’s it: more time + suitability for a child’s level.

This may seem too simplistic at first glance, but Bausell marshalls evidence that his theory explains, well, a lot. Possibly even the achievement gap. Studies of home behavior have shown that middle-class families spend much more time talking and reading to their children at a high level. This is the most elegant explanation for why those children do better in school — they have had much more time devoted to their learning.

Consider too the success of KIPP. This is almost surely because KIPP has kids spend much more time in class. And reducing class size works for many kids (all else being equal), because teachers are able to 1) keep classroom discipline better, and/or 2) give more personal attention, both of which boil down to kids having more time being instructed at their own level.

Bausell also looks at historical studies on teacher quality. From a NY Times op-ed based on the book:

Thirty years ago two studies measured the amount of time teachers spent presenting instruction that matched the prescribed curriculum, at a level students could understand based on previous instruction. The studies found that some teachers were able to deliver as much as 14 more weeks a year of relevant instruction than their less efficient peers.

There was no secret to their success: the efficient teachers hewed closely to the curriculum, maintained strict discipline and minimized non-instructional activities, like conducting unessential classroom business when they should have been focused on the curriculum.

And both studies found that the teachers who taught more were also the teachers who produced students who performed well on standardized tests.

In the book, he describes a fascinating study he did early in his career: designing an elementary math lesson based on a few number theory topics and a test based on the lesson, and then having 15 accredited teachers and 15 undergraduates teach the same lessons for a week to children. It turned out that “there was absolutely no difference . . . between the amount the children learned in the 15 classrooms taught by experienced elementary school teachers and the amount the children learned in the 15 classrooms taught by inexperienced untrained undergraduates” (p. 29). As long as kids were taught the material for the same amount of time, it didn’t matter who was doing the teaching.

Bausell also has a provocative chapter ripping apart the entire industry of standardized tests. He contends that there should be no such thing as tests that aren’t matched perfectly to the curriculum. That is, if time is being spent teaching a certain curriculum, then any test should be based on that curriculum and nothing else. Whenever tests include anything outside of the curriculum (let’s say, a reading passage about snowboarding), they end up measuring something other than what was learned in school — such as one’s experience with snowboarding.

Bausell is scathing in his assessment of what standardized tests tell us:

This would be comparable to receiving a bank statement that tells you only that you have more money in your account than 52% of all U.S. citizens who have a checking account. Although perhaps an interesting piece of trivia, you might want to know a few more details. So, let’s pretend that you decided to call your local bank, which resulted in the following conversation with a help-center employee:
You: I’m glad to know that I have more money than the average person in the country, but what I’d like to know is what my balance is. You see, I have a more pressing concern. What I need to know is how much money I have in my account because I want to buy a mattress.

Help Center: I’m sorry, but we don’t keep records in that manner. We can provide you with an age-equivalent financial score, and we can predict what that score will be upon your retirement. We can even predict what your percentile rank is in terms of property and stocks, based upon your account. If I may be allowed to put you on hold for 45 seconds, I will provide you with all this information.

You: But I need to know how much money I have in my account. I don’t need to know all of this other information. . . .

Now as absurd as this conversation may sound, this is the only type of information that a standardized test is capable of providing. And what does it profit you (or a teacher for that matter) to know how well your child stacked up against other third-graders from Washington State or Florida . . . ?

For one thing, even this odd level of information can be quite misleading if our public schools as a whole are drastically underperforming — which they are. Wouldn’t it make more sense to you and your daughter’s teacher to know what percentage of the curriculum she had mastered? Even better, to inform the two of you exactly what your daughter hadn’t yet learned and how much additional instructional time would be required for her to correct this deficit? (pp. 133-34).

What are his policy prescriptions? Here are most of them; they’re all geared towards increasing the amount of relevant instructional time delivered to each child.

1. Pre-K, using direct instruction rather than constructivist principles (for which Bausell has contempt).

2. Increase the length of the school day, and devote the entire day to relevant instruction (not ‘candy sales, worthless school assemblies, loudspeaker announcements, sports activities, ad nauseam”).

3. Increase the length of the school year.

4. No tolerance for any behavior that prevents or distracts students from learning. (“If this means that we have to leave certain children behind because they can’t meet behavioral expectations (or we don’t know how to enable them to conform), so be it. . . . Schools exist to teach, not to be law enforcement agencies.”).

5. The entire curriculum should be exhaustive and detailed, and computerized tests should be based exclusively on the curriculum.

6. Grades and classrooms should be largely irrelevant, because students should each be learning material at their own level, whatever that happens to be.

7. Teacher behavior should be “monitored constantly to ensure the delivery of sufficient instruction, as well as satisfactory coverage of (and minimal departures from) the established curriculum.”

Bausell adds that the view of the teacher as an autonomous professional is “woefully outdated. Professions such as medicine have largely abandoned this intuition-laced mode of operation for a more evidence-based approach accompanied by practice guidelines. Thoracic surgeons, for example, perform the vast majority of their professional tasks according to rigidly prescribed protocols. Of course, they also don’t have tenure, and they can be sued if their outcomes are substandard, following divergence from these protocols.”

8. Use efficient instructional methods. Bausell points to an example of inefficiency: “my son once had a teacher who had an elaborate class project involving building a medieval castle out of popsicle sticks that stretched over a period of several months. Regardless of what the teacher thought she was accomplishing, this is valuable time wasted . . . unless there is an instructional objective in the curriculum mandating the ‘construction of medieval structures out of popsicle sticks.'”

9. Find lots of free tutors from parents, older students, retired persons, or welfare recipients. A high school diploma “isn’t required to give children (a) practice reading sight words or (b) learning simple mathematical operations via a set of flash cards.”

* * *

All in all, a great and thought-provoking read. Highly recommended.

3 Comments | instructional reform | Permalink
Posted by Stuart Buck

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