How should K-12 education resources be distributed in a democracy?

We thought our readers might want to see this Forum over at Stanford University:

Thinking Twice is a newspaper column that appears monthly in the Stanford Report. Each month Stanford scholars take a multi-disciplinary look at the same issue from their uniquely informed points of view.

FORUM QUESTION: How should K-12 education resources be distributed in a democracy?

Equality and Educational Policy, by Debra Satz

American schools are funded by a complex formula of national, state and local dollars and there are significant differences in the funding of the K-12 schools that students attend. If some schools are so ill equipped that children lack textbooks, trained teachers, and basic supplies, how can we say that these children have equal opportunities with their wealthier peers? How should K-12 education resources be distributed in a democracy?

This is a complex question because it involves difficult empirical issues [such as the efficacy of different resources] and disputed questions of values. While most Americans are committed to the ideal of equality of opportunity, there are very different understandings of what it means.....[click here to read more]

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Funding Special Education by Eamonn Callan

Public funding for special education in America has long been controversial. Many different questions are entangled in that controversy. My question is a particularly thorny one. Is it just for society to invest substantial resources in the education of those who can learn very little? The question has more than academic meaning for me.

When my son was three he was diagnosed with autism. We were told he was a �classic� case, which was a delicate way of saying his symptoms were severe. But we had hope. He performed very well on non-verbal cognitive tasks. The psychologist who tested him said his intelligence seemed to be at least average. He might grow up to be an adult who could take care of himself. Attending college was not out of the question....[click here to read more]

Memory Recorded on DNA? The Ground Level of Learning

Interestingly enough, it may be that memory is stabilized by alterations in the DNA of particular neurons. This article argues that the DNA in neurons involved in a particular memory are altered through a process of "methylation," which basically means that a tiny CH2 molecule is "snapped" on to nucleotides of particular genes to get the neuron to "remember." (Sorry, I was a bio chem major undergrad for a long time.)

Florence Nightingale, Statistics, and Reform

I thought this article was fascinating, about how some of our key approaches to representing statistics were created by Florence Nightingale as part of her social reform effort.

As impressive as her statistics were, Nightingale worried that Queen Victoria�s eyes would glaze over as she scanned the tables. So Nightingale devised clever ways of presenting the information in charts. Statistics had been presented using graphics only a few times previously, and perhaps never to persuade people of the need for social change. In doing so, she ignored the express advice of her mentor, Farr. �You complain that your report would be dry,� he wrote to her. �The dryer [sic] the better. Statistics should be the dryest [sic] of all reading.�

The Next Nation At Risk Report

also posted at Daily Kos
The original A Nation At Risk came out in 1983. It began:

Our Nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world. . .(snip) . . the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people. What was unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur--others are matching and surpassing our educational attainments.

The scary language continued. Note just the very next sentence:

If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.

What you will read below is reproduced with permission. And I will explain about the author and the organization after you read.

The Latest Nation At Risk Report: The Education Roundtable to Tell Corporate America How to Stop Ruining America.

We feel compelled to report to the American people that the business and financial foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people. What was unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur� companies that extolled themselves as models of excellent practices have deceived the American people with sloppy, undisciplined, and greedy practices that are driving Americans out of their homes, threatening their retirements, and dashing their hopes of a financially secure future. Indeed, if an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre corporate financial performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.

As it stands, our businesses have allowed this to happen, with greedy CEOs and upper management taking enormous benefits for themselves while preaching and dictating to our schools the need to adopt their �sound� business practices of unbridled free markets, privatization strategies, and the notion of competition as the force for change. Taxpayers are now providing an initial $700 billon bailout of some of these companies, whose CEO�s have been actively involved in dictating to policy-makers that America�s schools should model the management style of the private sector.

God forbid that our schools become more like these kinds of businesses! Our business and financial communities have, in effect, been committing rash, thoughtless acts of unilateral financial disarmament, dragging our citizens and their children into economic insecurity while having many of these same citizens pay the bill. By making their terminology, practices and transactions incomprehensible to the lay audience, these business leaders enjoyed a decade-long end run around the public and our alleged watchdog agencies. The hubris of high rollers on the top floors of America�s giant companies permitting unfettered profit-taking at the expense of others has no limit. To be blunt, the business community has become an industry at risk of implosion.

To help our colleagues in the business community, we educators hereby recommend a new guiding and monitoring organization for business and financial institutions. The Education Roundtable will gather a team of the country�s top educators, whose charge will be to set business standards, goals, and accountability structures for all corporations and financial institutions. To promote a greater culture of accountability, the Roundtable will also require each entity to publish a report card every year, based on a series of standardized assessments.

Our final word, perhaps better characterized as a plea, is that all segments of our population will give close attention to the implementation of our recommendations. Our present plight did not appear overnight, and the responsibility for our current situation is widespread. Reform of our corporate and financial system will take time and unwavering commitment. For no one can doubt that the United States is under challenge from many quarters.

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Epilogue

There will be some angry readers out there who will bristle as I have lifted some of the exact wording of the Nation at Risk Report of 1983 and changed the word �schools� and �public education� to �business and financial institutions.� And yes, I have taken plenty of liberties to extend and add sentences to define all business and financial leaders and stock market manipulators as untrustworthy, immoral, dangerous people who have let our country down; crushing the day to day lives and long term hopes of the large majority of Americans who can not afford to lose their jobs, their homes, and their savings. And my business friends -- if there still are a few left -- will bristle at the idea that educators and lay people, with no experiences in business or finance, should be taking charge of what they need to do. If so, the point has been made and hopefully, sincerely taken before further policy making.

The above appeared as The Latest Nation at Risk Report, a blog post at The Forum for Education and Democracy, an organization about which I have written before. The author, Carl Glickman (click on his name for his bio), is one of the conveners of the Forum, and a notable figure in education circles. You will note other important names among that group, including Linda Darling-Hammond, currently cochairing the policy review of the Department of Education on behalf of the Obama transition effort.

And yes, to those of us fighting the battles about the future of education, this piece is something that raises our spirits.

Let me repeat part of Glickman's epilogue with some added emphasis of my own:

And yes, I have taken plenty of liberties to extend and add sentences to define all business and financial leaders and stock market manipulators as untrustworthy, immoral, dangerous people who have let our country down; crushing the day to day lives and long term hopes of the large majority of Americans who can not afford to lose their jobs, their homes, and their savings. And my business friends -- if there still are a few left -- will bristle at the idea that educators and lay people, with no experiences in business or finance, should be taking charge of what they need to do. If so, the point has been made and hopefully, sincerely taken before further policy making.

At some point, the voices of professional and committed educators need to become prominent, if not dominant, in the discussions about our national educational policy, as well as at lower levels. To date we have largely been excluded from the discussion.

In that context, let me repeat part of the first face to face conversation I had with then Governor Tom Vilsack. I noted that the Governors had just had a conference on education and each governor had brought a business leader. Tom acknowledged that was true. I asked why each governor had not instead brought a teacher, a principal or even a student? He was genuinely surprised at the idea.

And yet, unless you view our students in the demeaning manner of considering them as products and/or raw materials, and thus the teachers and schools merely as mechanical means of rendering or re-forming that material into a desired end, might it not make sense to include the voices of those who will be expected to implement whatever policy politicians and businessmen seek to impose? Perhaps we educators might be able to save you a lot of time and money, as well as the learning of our students, by explaining to you the reality of education. As Jamie Vollmer, keynote speaker for the education panel at the first Yearlykos so right concludes in his famous Blueberry story,

I have learned that a school is not a business. Schools are unable to control the quality of their raw material, they are dependent upon the vagaries of politics for a reliable revenue stream, and they are constantly mauled by a howling horde of disparate, competing customer groups that would send the best CEO screaming into the night.

None of this negates the need for change. We must change what, when, and how we teach to give all children maximum opportunity to thrive in a post-industrial society. But educators cannot do this alone; these changes can occur only with the understanding, trust, permission and active support of the surrounding community. For the most important thing I have learned is that schools reflect the attitudes, beliefs and health of the communities they serve, and therefore, to improve public education means more than changing our schools, it means changing America.

That change will include VALUING our public schools, not seeking to defund them through vouchers and charters. It will include educating the whole child, not merely preparing compliant workers for ever decreasing wages without union protections against employers who don't give a damn for either workers or the communities in which they operate, only the maximum profit that can be made under the least amount of regulation and taxation. It will value civic education as highly as math and science, because absent civic responsibility, science and technology can be destructive and dehumanizing.

I am a proud educator. I am a teacher. My subject happens to be Social Studies. What I teach is students. They are neither my raw materials nor my finished product, not even my my customers. They are my fellow human beings for whom I have a greater responsibility than do most businessmen. I am responsible for their minds, their spirits, to a large degree for their futures. I must empower them to be able to learn on their own, to be able to think critically, to express themselves clearly.

Perhaps if businessmen would tend to the realities of their own sphere, our economy might not be so much of a mess.

As for "A Nation At Risk"??? It was the first of a series of jeremiads against public schools, blaming them for the reflected ills of the larger society. And each cycle we have seen changes imposed, and then a few years later we are told yet again how horrible our schools are. Chew on that repetitive cycle if you will. . .

Educators have not been running school policy - politicians and businessmen have. And what is their record? How about on the economy, for starters? Except since we are educators and not businessmen we are not supposed to criticize? Even when you bankrupt your corporations and then desperately beg for the taxpayers (the rest of us who are NOT businessmen) to bail you out?

And government? Hell, you the politicians charge me with teaching about government - and my kids do quite well on the external tests you impose on them, probably better than you might do - and then you do not abide by the rules and procedures of the government you want me to teach to them. Remember things like the rule of law, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights???

Perhaps Glickman's piece did not have for you the same force it did for me, although if you are now or were in the 1980s an educator, it surely will strike at least the occasional internal chord.

If it does not, follow the link with which I started. Or better, go directly to the passage Glickman is modifying, part of which I have already quoted. You can read that here

And whether like me you find yourself with at least a sardonic smile if not bitter laughter, please consider this: we have a new administration, but that is not a guarantee that the corporatization of American education will cease. Stay vigilant. Speak out.

But for now, I hope Carl Glickman's words offered at least a little humor with which to start your work week.


Peace.

Beauty Is Truth In Mathematical Intuition: First Empirical Evidence

Okay, this is just too cool.

[Scientists] have reported first empirical evidence for the use of beauty as truth and they have provided an explanation for this phenomenon, based on the processing fluency theory of beauty.

The Ethics of the Pedagogy / Social Policy Split

Is it ethical for national education organizations to focus on improving pedagogy and not on basic social and material inequalities that impact on learning?

For an example, I've looked to the The International Reading Association (IRA), but almost any education association would do.

From their website:

The International Reading Association (IRA) is a professional membership organization that promotes high levels of literacy for all by improving the quality of reading instruction, disseminating research and information about reading, and encouraging a lifetime reading habit.

If my earlier post about the vision difficulties of children is correct, then it would seem impossible to improve literacy for many kids without first dealing systematically with that pre-pedagogical challenge. In other words, the IRA's "mission" cannot be achieved unless we look beyond pedagogy. But they have explicitly limited their mission to efforts focused on pedagogy.

Some other examples from its website which I do not have time to look at more systematically.

See this brochure: The Role of Reading Instruction in Addressing the Overrepresentation of Minority Children in Special Education in the United States. As the title indicates, the brochure focuses only on instruction. There is no mention of any other issues. And none of the recommendations in the brochure point to anything other than pedagogy.

That brochure at least limits itself to pedagogy in its title. This one, Supporting Young Adolescents� Literacy Learning, does not. Yet it looks only at instruction and says nothing about something as basic as vision care while at least seeming to give an overview of what is necessary to support "literacy learning" in general.

In this case, especially, is there a danger that people reading the brochure will assume that the problem really is all about pedagogy? Is there a danger that a brochure like this might actually have negative impacts on fights to improve literacy by pointing us away from basic issues like vision?

So, back to my question.

Is it ethical for national organizations like this that have at least some influence to limit themselves to pedagogy when, in many cases, there is substantial evidence that pedagogy may not be the core problem for many students?

And if there are at least legitimate questions about whether this stance is ethical, where can we draw a reasonable line where their responsibility to raise issues stops? Vision care seems obvious (that's why I picked it) but supporting an increased Earned Income Tax Credit for poor families (which might make a real difference) seems to go way too far afield, at least to me. (Or does it?)

This may seem like a pretty abstract "academic" question, but I think it's actually quite important. To the extent that there is movement towards an acknowledgement that schooling mostly can't be solved by dealing with schooling, where does that leave groups whose focus has only been on schools?

(Feel free to correct me about my understanding of the IRA's position--it's just an example.)

(oops--IRA not NRA. Fixed.)

On schools, there are no quick fixes

crossposted from Daily Kos

Whether a school is small or large, the essential questions in education cannot be ignored: What should students learn? How should they be taught? Are classes too large, especially for struggling students? Are teachers well-prepared in the subjects they teach? Do teachers have the resources they need? Do students arrive in school ready to learn? Until we answer these questions, the size of schools is not a relevant issue.

Forbes Magazine may not be on the regular reading list of most people here. It is certainly not on mine. And it is not where I would expect to find an insightful piece on education. And yet, the quote I have just offered, which contains the essential questions we should be asking about education, appeared there, in a piece entitled Bill Gates and His Silver Bullet. In it, Diane Ravitch explores the results of the Gates-funded initiative on small schools and finds it wanting. Because, as the piece is subtitled, On schools, there are no quick fixes.

Ravitch begins by reminding us that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation started its endeavor back in 2000. It wanted to take our large high schools and break them up into small learning communities of 400 or fewer, in the belief that

its new small high schools would lift graduation rates and student achievement, especially among minority students, because of the close relationships between students and teachers.

Gates argued to the National Governors Association that our high schools were obsolete and at the World Economic Forum in Davos that

the key to the success of the small schools created by his foundation was that they made everything "relevant," through hands-on activities and familiar topics.

The foundation poured several billion into the effort, and superintendents jumped on the bandwagon for the money, with new small schools being formed in cities across the country.

But the results have not been as Gates predicted. There are several thousand Gates-sponsored small high schools, more than 200 in New York City alone, many focused on particular themes: "leadership, the sports professions, technology, health professions, the media, diversity, peace and social justice. " And yet,

On Nov. 11, the Gates Foundation convened a meeting of leading figures in American education to admit candidly that the new small high schools had not fulfilled their promise. The foundation acknowledged that "we have not seen dramatic improvements in the number of students who leave high school adequately prepared to enroll in and complete a two- or four-year postsecondary degree or credential."

Ravitch describes research funded by the Gates foundation which in 2005 reported that students in traditional schools were better learning mathematics than in the Gates small schools, and additional research the following year that showed students in the Gates funded small learning communities

had "higher attendance rates but lower test scores" than other high schools within the same school districts in both reading and mathematics.

She credits the foundation for its honest self-scrutiny, noting that many advocates of educational reform unfortunately

defend their ideas against all critics, regardless of what evaluations show.

And yet Gates is still making claims for his efforts that are not supported by the data. He claims that in New York, at least his schools have improved graduation rates to 70% as compared to the city wide average of 50%. Before going on, I would note that even 70%, were it a true improvement, is still nothing about which to brag. Unfortunately that figures is deceptive, because as Ravitch notes

hat the small schools in New York City were permitted to restrict the admission of English-language learners and disabled students, meaning that the large schools got a disproportionate share of students with high needs.

Further, some of the small schools funded by Gates were playing games through "credit recovery" which allowed students to get full credit for classes they may not have fully attended and/or by doing projects out of school. And even Bill Gates had to acknowledge that less than 40% of the graduates of his small schools were ready for classes at the City University of New York.

Perhaps it is unfair to heavily criticize the Gates-funded effort. Except some schools and districts are so desperate for additional funds that they will willingly jump on board any educational bandwagon for the additional funds, even for endeavors such as those supported by Gates that lack any demonstrable evidence that they will achieve their purported goals. I will return to some thought on this in a bit.

Ravitch is not opposed to small schools in every case, and offers examples of where they might be useful, especially for students who need intense remediation and lots of extra attention, although the smallness can come at a cost of the variety of electives and course offerings that many students associate with high school. And historically, one of the disadvantages of small schools was seen in rural areas which could not offer the same educational opportunities as big-city high schools. And, as Ravitch notes,

The press for small schools, now taken up by almost every big-city district, has diverted our attention from the need to strengthen curriculum and instruction, beginning in elementary schools.

There are many problems in how we have attempted to do educational reform in this country. We seem to want to find universal solutions. By now, we should be able to realize that our children are not all the same, which means we cannot attempt to educate them in one, standardized fashion, even within a single community. And certainly the needs of our communities can vary: our ethnic makeups, the socioeconomic status of the families, the relationships between school and community (which can be very different between rural and urban schools for example), the supportive structures in the community outside of the school, the percentage of English Language Learners, and so on.

On schools, there are no qick fixes. There is no one size fits all, in school models, in methods of instruction, in selection of curricular materils, in courses that should be required. Somehow many people in their eagerness to address the failings of our public schools - and I will acknowledge that there are many such failings - seem to be willing to totally ignore anything that might raise cautions about the approaches they wish to impose upon those of us attempting to make a difference in our public schools.

I applaud the willingness of people like Bill and Melinda Gates to put money into finding alternatives that can make difference. Here I largely agree with Ravitch, who concludes her piece as follows:

The good news is that the Gates Foundation, with its vast resources, has pledged to devote its attention to what happens in the classroom. The first thing it will learn is that there are no quick fixes. If it targets its dollars wisely, exercises a measure of humility, and continues to evaluate its efforts rigorously, it can make a positive difference.

There is an additional caution I would offer, both to those who would offer their funds and their support, and those inclined to accept such offerings. Be careful that you do not so narrow your focus to that which you passionately support and blind yourself to the realities of our schools and our students. For far too long our schools and students have suffered because of our insistence in imposing yet another vision of a magical solution. Even when we see something that is successful in one context does not mean it is replicable in another - too often we look only at part of the broad picture in which that success occurs, that is, if we are not so narrowly focused on what we consider success that we ignore the weaknesses of the model we wish to replicate.

Ultimately teaching is about relationships - between faculty and students, among the students (whose cooperation with one another should be encouraged since ultimately our learning should be applicable to the broader social context in which they should be applying what we teach them), and all with the curricular material. We may well need to try multiple approaches, and then be brutally honest in examining the results, which will not all be as salutary as we might hope for those approaches about which we feel positively passionate.

Our schools ARE in crisis in many ways. And here we might remember that the last time our nation faced a truly monumental economic crisis, in the 1930s, the administration of FDR tried many things in the hope that some would work. Perhaps we should acknowledge a similar need for addressing our current series of crises in our public schools - we will need to try many things to see what works, where, how, and why, and not be in too much of a hurry to declare that we have found the one magic solution that will solve all our problems.

So let me end as I began. Ravitch, who is an acquaintance and whom I consider a thoughtful critic and observer of education even when we disagree, has in the paragraph with which I began offered many critical questions we need to consider in any attempts we make at educational reform.

But in all we do, we need to remember what was the subtitle of her piece, and which I chose for the title of this:

On schools, there are no quick fixes.


Peace.