In Part 1 of this blog on education, I stated that, “I am going to dive into the major reasons that are leading to the death of public-school education.” In this part, we will look at
- Why our present educational model is obsolete
Our present educational model is obsolete because it is based on several faulty principles or assumptions. Perhaps at one time some of these reasons had some validity but that is no longer true. We are not living in a 19th century agricultural or a 20th century industrial economy. We are now in a digital economy that is moving faster than anything the world has ever known. The following are the most important issues that one must understand to realize why our present educational system is useless.
- Outdated concepts of how education should be conducted
The teaching in the early part of America was based on two principles. First, that every child needed a broad liberal arts education to be qualified as a good citizen. Second, that education curriculums would follow a set of orderly progression starting from simple concepts to more complex concepts. Thus, you would learn simple arithmetic before taking complex subjects like calculus or trigonometry.
The above principles treated every student as though they were the same. There was no customization. There were no exceptions to the grading progressions that developed in most schools. If you were an advanced student, you would need to wait for the less advanced to catch up. If you were not as advanced, then you looked like the dummy in class and were often ridiculed. If you were somewhere in-between, you kept your mouth shut and dreamed of the end of the school year.
These principles may have been useful in a society that was information poor. Marshal McLuhan said that schools made sense when they could bring information to a central point. Prospective students from information poor societies could come together and feast on the abundance of knowledge that was now centralized in one location. Over time, the reverse has taken place. Societies and cultures have become much denser and richer in information than any school could possibly hope to capture. Students today can access more knowledge on their smart phones than probably exists in the entire Library of Congress.
“Today in our cities, most learning occurs outside the classroom. The sheer quantity of information conveyed by press-magazines-film-TV-radio far exceeds the quantity of information conveyed by school instruction and texts. This challenge has destroyed the monopoly of the book as a teaching aid and cracked the very walls of the classroom so suddenly that we’re confused, baffled.” — Marshall McLuhan, excerpt from “Classroom Without Walls,” Explorations in Communication (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960)
Treating students as though they are all the same ignores fundamental elements of human skills and abilities. Some students may have better social skills. Some have better musical, artistic, and athletic skills than others. Even in the domain of cognitive knowledge some students excel at math and others excel at English and language.
Just imagine if music was the dominant purpose of education rather than liberal arts. Children might enroll in schools where the curriculum included violins, drums, harps, guitars, pianos, trumpets, and harmonicas. Each student would have to learn all of these instruments and get a passing grade in each to graduate school. It would not matter if a child received an A in violin if they did not pass drums. If this sounds ridiculous, it should not since it mirrors the way curriculum is handled today.
Furthermore, the system of education assumes that all children would need to progress systematically through learning each instrument. You would have violin 1 before you had violin 2. It would not matter if you could do violin 1 when you came to school, you would still be required to take violin 1 before you could take violin 2. True, in some schools you can test out of a subject but that is still rare in most public high schools.
The idea of holistic learning is totally ignored by the rigid lock step progression that is built into curriculums in both public and private schools. Fifty years ago I argued with math teachers about the use of calculators in a classroom. Most felt that students would not learn the proper concepts behind the calculations if they were allowed to use calculators. Ten years later, the Mathematical Association of America approved the use of calculators in high school classrooms.
The fear of technology is still prevalent in schools as most schools do not allow their students to make use of a smart phone’s capabilities. In many high school classrooms, students are prohibited from having their cell phones out. (There is a constant game today between teachers and students to prohibit students from “misusing” their cell phones.) It is rather funny since some teachers do not restrict cell phone usage and others do. A few students told me a while ago that they wished their teachers could agree on a “cellphone policy.” True, many schools give students laptops and tablets, but their usage of these tools are limited to such programs as Blackboard, Desire to Learn and other instructional interfaces. Students are not taught how to use the power of their cell phones to think. Teachers often seem afraid of new technology perhaps fearing that it will replace them. In truth, the times have changed in respect to what a teacher’s role should be. Looking at the results in the Virginia Governor Race this year, where the pundits believed that parental dissatisfaction played a major role in the election results, I found the following comment. It was made by one of the consultants that the Loudoun County School District in Virginia hired to incorporate equity and inclusion in their curriculum.
“I think the thing that public education offers… because I certainly don’t think we offer learning… are relationships. What historically high schools were for was the dissemination of information very quickly…Well, actually, the internet is better than the high school is…Truthfully, the teacher in relation to the dissemination of information is obsolete.” —Equity Collaborative Leader Jamie Almanza.
- The concept that more money for educators and educational institutions will result in better student outcomes
During the 15 or so years that I was a management consultant, I often encountered the argument that employees would be more productive if they were paid more. Now, I am a great believer in paying employees as much as the organization can afford and well beyond a simple livable wage. I am well aware of the battle between employers and employees over wages and have myself often had to fight to get a salary that I felt was fair. Nevertheless, I see little or even no correlation between productivity and wages and I have told this to many a manager and employee. I have frequently asked people if they thought they would be “twice” as productive if I doubled their salaries tomorrow. No honest person ever told me yes.
Teachers are no different. Teachers who are paid more will not have more students getting higher test scores. There will not be more students graduating or more students learning more because their teachers are higher paid. Yes, I believe teachers are underpaid based on their abilities and goals but that does not mean that I think schools will be more effective with higher paid teachers or with more capital outlays per pupil.
I looked at the rankings for Arizona High Schools a few days ago. (Arizona High School Rankings) The top-rated school in the state was BASIS Scottsdale. Their average student expenditure was $7, 231. Their “Average Standard Score” was 99.9. I then looked at Vista Grande High School where I have been substitute teaching this year. They were ranked 205th out of 226 public high schools. The average dollar spent per capita for students was $9,153 dollars. Their “Average Standard Score” was 14.1. I briefly looked at the student expenditures for all 226 high schools in Arizona. I did not calculate a Standard Deviation for the 226 but if I did, my guess would be that all 226 schools would fall within 3 standard deviations of the mean. I think the mean for “per capital student expenditures” would be about $7,500.
What do the above figures tell me? First of all that per capita spending is not related to school or student performance. Second, that there is a correlation between the wealth or affluency of a community and high school student performance. Put simply, students from poorer families do worse in school than students from more affluent families. The bad news is that no amount of money poured into any school system in the country is going to change these outcomes. The World Development Report 2018 shows a similarly weak correlation between spending and learning outcomes.
- The belief that what can be measured is what is important to teach and that standardized tests and curriculums are essential to a quality education
This is another fallacy that I often encountered in my years as a management consultant. There is some kind of a foolish business quote that says, “What gets measured, gets managed.” What is more accurate is that “What gets measured, gets gamed.” My mentor, Dr. W.E. Deming taught his students that a system is more important to performance than the individual. A favorite saying of Dr. Deming’s was that “A bad system will beat a good performer any time.” Dr. Deming taught how to measure the performance of a system and then to use those measures to improve the system, not to work on exhorting individuals or individual testing to improve the system. Two of Dr. Deming’s 14 Points for Management were:
11 a. Eliminate work standards (quotas) on the factory floor. Substitute leadership.
11 b. Eliminate management by objective. Eliminate management by numbers, numerical goals. Substitute leadership.
12 a. Remove barriers that rob the hourly worker of his right to pride of workmanship. The responsibility of supervisors must be changed from sheer numbers to quality.
12 b. Remove barriers that rob people in management and in engineering of their right to pride of workmanship. This means, inter alia, abolishment of the annual or merit rating and of management by objective.
The standardized tests that are given to students all over America are no help in increasing school performance. The ranking of schools and the ranking of students has no statistical validity in terms of improving the educational system in America. In fact, not only are these measures useless, but they are a major impediment to improving any school system. There are several reasons for this:
- They force teachers to focus on memorization and not learning
- They penalize students that are not good test takers
- They destroy student morale
- They stop educators from making the real reforms that are needed in education
- They have no scientific validity in terms of measuring student performance
The following comments are from a blog titled, “Here’s the Real Reason Why Public Education Will Never Get Better” by Shelly Sangrey
- Schooling and education are two different things.
- Education is about exploration and learning how to think.
- Schooling (which is what our public schools are a part of) is about training and teaching children what to think.
- Someone who is being educated will be told, “Do some research on this topic. Study the evidence, weigh both sides, and make an informed conclusion.”
- Someone who is being schooled is told, “This is how it is because scientists, historians, and other people who are smarter than you have already figured it out. There’s no need to look into it further.”
You cannot measure education. You can measure training. But even measures of training are more likely to reflect the ability of the system rather than the ability of the students in the system.
Where has this emphasis come from in terms of measurement and metrics? The first is from politicians who have little or no knowledge of education. They also lack knowledge of data analysis or statistics. These so-called leaders are more than ready to jump on bandwagons that sound good to their constituents but actually have little value in increasing educational outcomes.
The second is from educators themselves. Believing that if they show good rankings they can justify the money needed for higher salaries and more resources, many teachers support the idea of “pay for performance” or “measuring educational outcomes.” These teachers know little about business concepts but are more than ready to accept that business principles can work in a school system. Unfortunately, many business principles lack any kind of validity either for education or for business. All over America today, we have accountants running businesses and schools. Our systems are driven by short-term numbers and bottom-line thinking. These are major contributors to the death of public-school education.
In Part 3, we will look in more depth at the role that our political leaders play in murdering public school education in America.
I was an above average student until high school. After starting high school, I spent the next four years being bored and getting into trouble. I probably spent more time in detention than I did in the classroom. Many teachers despised and loathed me. My father kept thinking I would go to college which was some sort of a fantasy on his part. With no money and my poor grades, there was not a single college in the country that I could have been accepted to.
Despite efforts by my first wife Julia and myself, our marriage soon unraveled again. We agreed to separate. I moved out and wanting to change careers, I made the decision to go back to school and focus on training in industry. I was accepted into a Ph.D. Program at the University of Minnesota in the Department of Vocational Education. My major would be Training and Organization Development with a supporting field in Adult Education. By this time, my GI Bill had run out and I was now living alone and paying child support. I applied for and was accepted as a research assistant with the Minnesota Research and Development Center in Vocational Education on the St. Paul Campus. This job together with several summer internships and a very frugal lifestyle enabled me to pay my bills, my child support, and my tuition.
I completed my Ph.D. degree in four years and graduated in 1986. My dissertation was on “Conflict in Organizations.” I was hired by a management consulting firm in Bloomington, Minnesota. I worked the next thirteen years as a trainer and consultant in both for-profit and not-for-profit organizations. In 1999, I joined the faculty of Globe University as a business instructor. I had also been working part-time as an adjunct instructor at Metropolitan State University where I was employed for 16 years. In 2015, I retired from Metropolitan State University. I left Globe University when they closed their doors in 2017.
Integrity is everything to lose and nothing to gain, except your self-respect. Integrity is standing up for what you believe is right even when everyone is against you. Integrity is the ability to put compassion and kindness ahead of self-interest. Integrity cannot co-exist with greed. It cannot co-exist with lust. It cannot co-exist with a thirst for power. It cannot co-exist with a drive for money, fame, or fortune. All of these elements are like Kryptonite to Integrity. Kryptonite was the one thing that could rob Superman of his powers. Lust, greed, money, fame, and power all have the ability to rob one of his/her integrity.
Politics is a sham in America today. We have men and women who are elected for life and spend more time campaigning then they do in serving their constituents. Public servants who start collecting money to run their next campaigns within days of winning their present office. We have a system of government where money is the most important factor in who gets elected and who gets reelected. Our politicians are more worried about losing votes than they are in the constitution or in protecting our democracy. What Integrity is there in supporting a riot to overthrow a fair election that every court and every state in America found was fairly conducted? The media seized on the outrageousness of the Big Lie to sell news. The losing party seized on the credibility of millions of gullible supporters to buy the Big Lie and try to maintain their power.
The media in America has become another hallowed institution gutted by greed and a desire for more and more money. Reporters, writers, and journalists in America today are more interested in selling advertising than they are in balanced objective reporting. You can divide the news up by whether they lean Right or Left, Liberal or Conservative, Democrat or Republican. Each side has a mirror image on the other side of the political spectrum. CNN is opposed by Fox News. The New York Times is opposed by The New York Post and the Washington Post is opposed by the Washington Times. One side supports the Right and the other side supports the left. This is not balanced reporting, and no truth comes out of the dynamic between the two sides. What both sides have in common are reporters who will report the most useless, tasteless, uninformative stories if they perceive that these stories will sell advertising or if they can figure out a clickbait title that will attract readers and thereby expose them to paid commercials.
f you want more of a description of each scale you can follow the hyperlink above. The USA ties for 10th place with Great Britain on this index. I can see some correlation with Integrity, but I can see many differences. I think honesty is one component of Integrity, but Integrity is more complex than being simply honest. An honest person can still lack integrity if they are unwilling to stand up for what they believe. Cowardice and Integrity are incompatible.
Two days ago, I heard a story that is worth being repeated. The story brought tears to my eyes. If you have already heard it, I hope you will not mind hearing it again. I personally would like to hear it being told from every church pulpit, every congressional building, and every auditorium in America. I would like to hear it being told every day until every person in America could empathize with what this young girl went through. I would like to hear it being told until every person in this country would finally speak out and say “enough.”
the issues of Meaning and Purpose that I addressed above relate to a certain position in life. Namely, those of us who are secure enough in our environment that we no longer have to worry about food, shelter, and safety. This is a luxury that does not pertain to all people. In particular it did not pertain to Izzy. She was a girl who because of her skin color and health had to face every day with a battle. A battle designed by others to destroy her peace and serenity. A war waged to undermine her very being by belittling, insulting, and abusing her. Izzy did not have the time to think about the meaning and purpose of her life because she was too busy trying to deal with the very bottom levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy.
Theory (CRT) comes into this match sporting a record of 25 wins and 25 losses. Both opponents have lost matches to Trickle Down Theory and the Birther Theory. The winner of this match will face the reigning champion, The Theory of the Big Steal.
The testability of the theory’s major tenets
A theory may propose various tenets. That is the theory will assert specific things that belong with the theory. For instance Q’Anon Theory proposes that a group of Democratic politicians who are pedophiles meet regularly in the basement of a pizza parlor in D.C. to plot nefarious schemes for taking over the world. One of the major tenets of CRT is the notion that racism is ordinary and not aberrational. To measure the Q’Anon Theory all we would have to do is find a pizza parlor in D.C. where a number of pedophiliac Democratic politicians meet. This would be an easy tenet to test since the number of good pizza parlors in D.C. can be counted on one hand.
Eliminate all communists
I look out and see lawyers with Magna and Summa Cum Laude degrees from Yale, Harvard, Cornell, Brown, and other Ivy League Universities who can fashion legal arguments designed to circumvent and pervert any sane person’s idea of justice. They have corrupted our Criminal Justice System into a Criminal Injustice System. The winner in a court room is the one with the most money who can hire the best and brightest lawyers. An argument by one defense attorney claims that a self-styled vigilante shooting three unarmed people is a tragic case of self-defense. Another defense lawyer for three murdering racists suggests that the victim in the case was shot because he had come to Satilla Shores “in his khaki shorts with no socks to cover his long, dirty toenails.”
I look out and see corporate executives who will ignore the danger posed to the environment and climate because they can make more money today than by creating a sustainable system. I see too many people willing to “shop till they drop.” A materialistic mentality that supports the greed endemic in Corporate America. A focus on short-term thinking that drains the earth of the resources it needs for sustainability in order to reap mega-profits today. The “hell with the future” is the motto of Corporate America.
Is there any meaning to what I am seeing? Am I just getting too old? Is my brain incapable of understanding things anymore? Journalists are murdered because they report the truth. Innocent people are slaughtered while they watch a Christmas parade. A pregnant woman is shot eleven times on her doorstep. Fifty or more people rob a series of stores in what the news calls “mass grab fests.” A six-year-old child is killed in a car seat by some maniac with road rage. There is no bottom to the bizarre. No one can imagine what the next day will bring. All attempts to discover what is causing these problems or how they can be stopped seem futile. They are meaningless crimes without rhyme or reason in a world that George Orwell would never have imagined possible. Up is down, right is wrong, facts and truth do not exist, everything is fake. There is no sanity.
This morning while doing a 4-mile run in the Casa Grande Mountains, I thought a lot about his advice. I realize that much of what I have said above could be considered a rant. I would like to think it was somewhat of a catharsis. Another friend told me yesterday that I sounded like a man in despair. I resonated with the word despair. I regard optimism as ideologically unsound given our present world. Many people have advised me to stay hopeful. There is a fine line between hopeful and optimism. I am not sure I can manage the divide. Despair on the other hand fits my mood just fine. Despair is defined as: “The complete loss or absence of hope.”
We have elected people that will support an insurrection against free and fair elections. The most important element of Democracy. People that prefer to ignore that on January 6th, we almost had a coup against democracy in America. On November 17th, we had these same people vote to ignore the censuring of one of their comrades who parodied the killing of an opposition opponent.
I look out my window and see a public school system that is being dismantled by racists, bigots, elitists, and sexists who do not want the schools to actually teach anything that might be construed as controversial. Two thousand five hundred years ago, Socrates was executed for trying to teach the children of the Athenian elite to think for themselves. Schools and educators are still being attacked for trying to teach children to think. How can our future generations create a better world when they are besieged with information that keeps them in a past that never existed and feeds them myths about the way the world works?
Will the USA survive? All great empires have eventually declined. It took 300 years for the Roman Empire to fall after it began its decline. We are witnessing the decline of the American Empire. How long will it take to fall is well beyond my ability to foresee. If history is any indication, it will take many years and the decline will be gradual but punctuated by episodes of tragedy and elation. The tragedies will far outnumber the elations. Study any system in decline and you can see the gradual disintegration that accompanies all declines. It is already clear that our Public Education, Political Systems and Legal Systems are in decline. Trying to stop the declines is futile. You cannot stop the decline of an old bridge or an old building. You must rebuild from the ground up. Sadly, I see neither the drive nor the desire to do the work that needs to be done to help restore democracy in America.
Aging Capriciously 