An Educational Debate

I find myself spending part of my day today reading a book for which I am scheduled to lead a colloquium in two days, which has my brain turned toward education this week. The book is called, Thomas Jefferson Education for Teens by Oliver DeMille and Shannon Brooks. And I misspoke (miswrote?) back there, since I am actually going to lead two colloquia: once in the afternoon with a group of teenagers, and then again in the evening with all their parents.

Educational philosophies seem to be a hot topic of debate for many, myself included, as you will see in a bit. However, the debate itself is also an opportunity to educate oneself. I recently got involved in such a debate on Facebook (ain’t technology wonderful?) which I would like to share here. I have to admit, by keeping things relatively civil and debating the issues rather than the personalities, I think everyone gained new insights.

I know I did.

I did not ask anyone’s permission to post this, so I have abbreviated names to initials to maintain anonymity. The initials “ME” stand for me.

Original post:
Just googled "Proficiency grading" and can't learn enough about it to form an opinion, however, this quote: "State education officials have said they hope this shift in teaching will help the state receive a slice of the $4 billion in Race to the Top competitive federal grants which will be awarded next year." intrigues me. Oregon schools fail so they change the grading so they can win next year?

MCM: It seems like it's just more "teaching to the test" so that the kids can pass the tests better.

JV: They say they want to spend less time testing and more time teaching. How can these people say these things with a straight face without us laughing at them. How have we gotten so numb to gibberish like this? What exactly are they getting the money for and how are we to verify they used it effectively? When the SATs drop, they will claim they need more money for smaller classes, better paid teachers, blah blah blah...

JV: They hate "No Child Left Behind" because it worked. What they really hated was having to be accountable and that there were consequences. They argue that they did not get money to pay for it. That is a stone cold lie. They got $25 billion. Then they say they did not get extra money for all the reporting they had to do. Nonsense. Nation wide reporting costs was a mere 100 million of the 25 billion. These whiners never stop. It gets harder to take them seriously. Shame on us for putting up with this nonsense from the school districts and the teacher unions. Shame on us for letting them indoctrinate our kids with liberal nonsense. They still show that Al Gore disaster.

ME: All part of the national attitude.

"I know the country has been mired in deficit spending and it's been a terrible burden on the country in terms of interest payments. Good news today out of Washington. They have raised the limit of debt we can go to to $9 trillion. It sends a great message to the kids: Hey, are you getting an F? Don't study harder, make the grading curve go out to K. Then your F looks like a C." - Jon Stewart

MD: When I was in college, one professor I had gave you 3 chances to show proficiency in 5 difficult areas. It was a great way to grade. He wasn't concerned with a curve. What he wanted was for you to really learn the material. A curve ended up there anyways, but those that really worked were able to get A's.

I'm not sure that this is the same, but if it is, then it would be a good thing.

JV: I want my surgeon to have gotten an 'A' in anatomy, not Sociology.

ME: The great fallacy of modern education is that the teacher is responsible for educating the student. In truth, it is the student who is responsible for educating the student, and artificially placing the responsibility where it does not belong creates a system which must inexorably fail.

JV: That is feel good gibberish. Of course the student plays a significant role in the education process but if the process is open like the popular book of the 60s "Summerhill"...you simply do not train Drs this way, engineers this way, accountants this way, businessmen this way. It takes disciplined teachers encouraging discipline in students. One of my engineering profs randomly called on students. It heightened our preparation for the class. No unstructured feel good nonsense.

ME: I don't see that you've made any points that contradict mine, so I fail to see why you think this is gibberish. Perhaps you could explain to me how doctors and engineers are trained. Perhaps I should point out the wide gap in how people are educated in K-12 schools and how they are educated at universities.

I have degrees in both Accounting and Engineering, and when I went to college, professors were available to answer questions when you could catch them, verbally presented information in class, and measured my proficiency in absorbing and applying that information. If I chose not to study, though, and failed a test or a class, what effect would that have on my professor? None at all. Clearly, the responsibility for my education was 100% my own.

Now contrast that with the K-12 system. In most public schools, the teacher's job is evaluated solely on the results of standardized testing. But there are students who are not motivated to learn, and only attend because it is required. Such students will not put in the time and effort required for their own education, and it is unfair to the teacher to hold them responsible for that. The way the system is designed now, it encourages teachers to force feed kids only those things that are covered on the standardized tests. There is no time left over to allow kids to explore other areas of interest. If Mozart were born today, would he ever have a chance to discover his musical genius? Or would he get so sick of sitting through memorizing dates in history and rules of language and how to multiply polynomials that he would grow to hate school and refuse to participate in anything? It's impossible to tell, but the latter description is all too likely.

JV: I have a son, Soph in HS. He had Art last year, is taking Guitar this year, and takes PE every chance his schedule allows. His History class is based on issues, not dates (who does that anymore). His teachers post his progress on the net so I can better help motivate him at home.

Standardized tests represent the baseline of knowledge we expect of a literate populace. I heard Obama pose a false question, "Standardized tests versus more education". Those are not categorical tradeoffs! Reading/Writing, Math, History, and Science are only 4 subject areas. We don't have a category for Standardized Tests. With 7 periods a day there is ample room now for optional classes in the students’ schedules.

We hold k-12 teachers to a higher standard than University teachers in regard to motivation precisely because there is a significant number of students who need motivation. That is just how it is. It is the job. It has always been the job. Name me one great K-12 teacher who was not recognized for being a great motivator?
You don't like the job, get another job. Don't ask us to change the job description because you don't like it. And don't ask us to stop evaluating you. How else are we to judge teachers? By attendance?

ME: I reject your premises as fallacious. An educator's job should not be to motivate kids, and that's my point. An educator's job should be to inspire his or her students so that the motivation to study/learn is internal, not imposed from without.

" Don't ask us to change the job description because you don't like it." How about if I ask you to change the job description because the current one does not work? A carrot and stick approach to motivation no more produces great thinkers and doers than a pellet dispenser creates great rats.

Why do you think so many kids hate going to school? It's because someone else tells them what to do, what to study, how to behave, and what to think. Of course there are a significant number of students who need motivation! All of their natural motivation to learn, and everyone is born with a hunger for knowledge, is ground out of them by the educational system we have created.

“The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards.” - Anatole France

JV: You did not answer my question. Name me one great K-12 teacher who was not recognized for being a great motivator?

And you avoided my other point, the purpose of education.

Saying the current system does not work is great campaign rhetoric. Fact is, it has worked better than any other system for mass education. Social experiments like "Summerhill" make for interesting counter culture stories but are not sustainable beyond the founders or in the broad culture. Montessori was great when my son was pre-school. I cannot now afford private school for my son nor can the larger community provide private school like services.

Kids hate school? That is a news flash. There are as many reasons why kids hate school as there are kids. I hunger for knowledge, thus the reason I debate, but that is me, nothing that the schools did that I can think of.
It is still the vital need for a culture to inculcate it's basic knowledge and values in it's youth.

Your quote speaks to my point, the need for teachers to motivate and all too often for the district to motivate teachers.

If they don't want to motivate, let them leave. I once had a marketing job I loved. A new guy complained he hated marketing. I asked him why he wanted the job. He said it was just a job.

Teachers won't leave once they get the job, you can't fire them. According to you we are not suppose to evaluate them based on performance. What sort of train wreck are you advocating?

ME: "Name me one great K-12 teacher who was not recognized for being a great motivator?" Good point, and I agree that a great teacher has always been one who creates motivated students. Without being motivated, a student will not do the work necessary to learn. I simply disagree that the teacher can be the motivator. External motivation is transitory. Internal motivation is not. The truly great teacher is one who inspires the student, who causes the student to be motivated for his or her own sake, who then sees the reward for the output of effort as the education received, rather than the grade, or the recognition, or whatever other carrot is waved.

"And you avoided my other point, the purpose of education." I don't see where you made this point, but I'll gladly address it now. In my opinion, the purpose of education is to create a mind that can reason; that can distinguish between right and wrong, true and false, good and better, that can see the world as it is and hypothesize the likely future results of current actions, that exhibits public virtue, that inspires greatness in others, and, most importantly, can tell when to use its and when to use it's.

Okay, that last dig was both unnecessary and irrelevant. You have made excellent points in defense of your position. Unfortunately, you and I see the same situation differently, and project different outcomes from staying on the current course.

"Teachers won't leave once they get the job, you can't fire them. According to you we are not suppose to evaluate them based on performance. What sort of train wreck are you advocating?"

I do not advocate causing collisions of railed transport vehicles. Never have.

Here, though, you put your finger on the root of our difference. I do not advocate evaluating a teacher based on HIS STUDENTS' performance, but on his own. That such performance is not so quantifiable as a printout summarizing his students' test scores is not sufficient reason to say it cannot be done. That is what I am advocating. Stop inducing teachers to give passing grades to students who do not deserve them. When was the last time a teacher was allowed to fail a student? Failure can be very educational. Stop inducing teachers to only teach what the tests are going to cover.

I also advocate allowing parents to be the final authority on whether or not their child's needs are being met. If it is still "the vital need for a culture to inculcate it's [sic] basic knowledge and values in it's [sic] youth," why should we assume that government employees are better suited to that task than parents? Which of the two has the greater internal motivation? Why should public money set aside to educate the youth of America only be used for one system? Why can't parents choose between several options? Would this not produce more efficient systems, and systems that produced the results that parents value?

MCM: I believe it is a similar concept, but I also think there are a lot more areas. Plus the question of how do you continue to teach the kids who haven't shown proficiency in one or more areas vs. The ones who have. And that there may be a bunch of kids in a class who haven't shown proficiency in one or more areas but it might be a different area for each one of them.

JV: My apologies for sounding snarky. Motivate/inspire to me is an example of a distinction without a difference unless you assume the negative meanings of motivate and the positive meanings of inspire they very nearly mean the same thing. So tell me, apart from personal talents of a particular teacher how does one inspire a whole class to learn the transitive property in Algebra?

Solutions for the small do not necessarily scale to the large. How is it after thousands of years of education that we have not only gotten it so wrong but continue to do it wrong? My answer "Human Nature". People like matter tend to move to low energy levels, some more than others. Where are the grand examples that apply to mass education that there is a better way beyond a few "feel good" notions?

The "feel good" self-esteem fad has been a disaster. Created expectations in our kids that self-esteem has nothing to do with actual accomplishment.
There are literally hundreds of "great" education ideas funded by billions in education grants and how many of these ever fundamentally change education? What has proven to work? Repetition, repetition, repetition, boring repetition. That is never going to be fun but no one yet has found a better way that works more efficiently for the general society. But this never stops the schools from asking for more and more money to do the same thing. Even when they get the money, and they almost always do. What do these smart educated people who attend all the conferences and read all the journals do with the money? The same old thing...

ME: No easy question there! I think that the way to inspire students to put in the work is to give them a vision of what they are working toward. You're never going to convince a teenager that it's worth learning the transitive property if your only reason is that it will help him get a good grade on his SATs. But if he sees that gaining an understanding of mathematical law will help him design and build bridges, or run a restaurant, or become a fighter pilot, or whatever it is that he WANTS to become, that is the key to inspiring.

You are also right that we do not have an example of any kind of "mass education engine" to point to besides the one we have now. I think that is part of the reason it is so difficult to propose any real change. Our current system is like a giant conveyor belt. The belt moves the student from second to third grade, pours all the third grade items into his head, and rolls onto fourth grade.

Unfortunately, it's the same system we've all used, and that very fact makes it difficult to imagine doing it any other way. Any proposal of an alternate system is met with responses of "That will never work," or "That's just feel good gibberish." There are other methods of teaching that espouse a fundamental shift in philosophy, but none of them are allowed access to the same support in terms of funding. That is why I think the government, if it is allowed to intrude into education at all, should allow any qualified school to receive the same funds per student from the public monies collected for that purpose. Then parents and families can "vote with their feet" and participate in the school that best fits their needs. If, in the opinion of the student and parents, a teacher or a school is not adequately performing, punish them for it by removing part of their income.

As you pointed out, the current education system is stagnant. Human nature not only tends toward a low-energy state, but also has an innate inertia of ideas. Change is difficult, and often painful, even when ultimately beneficial, and therefore is often avoided.

JV: I do appreciate your humor, logic, and manners.
It is my impression that your desires are more of the Utopian kind. Wouldn't it be great if parents cared enough to teach their kids about values, manners (mine failed), and fundamental knowledge so that they are contributing citizens and that there are no throw away kids, drug addicts, and...

I too am suspect of a single source education system. Where is the politically acceptable substitute? Home schooling works well for some. Private schools (cath) are an option for some and specialty schools are an option for very few. Vouchers are going to remain a heated battle ground dominated by the unions who support progressive candidates to sustain the status quo. What what?

We both appear to suffer from hard questions at the limits of our fundamental beliefs.

ME: Thanks.

Yes, I do tend to be a bit utopian in my outlook. That's not likely to change too soon (I hope), but my kids are working on it...

8^)