Education: some "reforms" aren't
By Robert Harrington
School uniforms won't fix the discipline problem
State math standards vs. Morgan Hill's program
Math standards best, but not for Morgan Hill
Even Proposition 227 may not be a big enough hammer
Anti-Intellectualism in education
School Books
Computers in schools: overhyped?
The new new math: reform or snake oil? -I
The new new math: reform or snake oil? -II
School uniforms won't fix the discipline problem
July 23, 1998
President Clinton pointed to a serious issue when he announced an offensive to restore discipline in schools in a speech before the American Federation of Teachers' national convention on July 21. Whether his proposals will be effective is another question. Even more important is the question of whether our society as a whole and the Clinton administration itself are not infected with the disorder that underlies the issue.
Anyone having the least contact with public schools knows how serious it is. The president cited statistics that three of four students say they have trouble with disruptive classmates and that 81 percent of teachers say undisciplined students take up the majority of their time. It's a tribute to teachers that schools are doing as well as they are.
Clinton's solution? School uniforms, tough curfews and anti-gun policies. These may be worthwhile, but will they make a dent in the discipline problem? Not even close.
What Clinton's proposals ignore is that the lack of discipline in schools is due to a failure of authority. School administrators don't enforce the rules, don't impose enough sanctions, don't back up teachers. Why this is so is the question we should be asking.
The simple answer is that schools are reflecting certain destructive ideas that afflict much of the intellectual class. Unfortunately, schools, and school administrators especially, seem to be particularly infected with this ideology.
Historian and social critic Jacques Barzun provided a particularly insightful view of what troubles us in an elegant essay called "Toward the Twentieth Century." Although he touches only peripherally on schools, the extent to which his indictment applies to schools and school administrators is striking.
Most depressing in the current scene is loss of faith and outright disbelief in the liberal ideal, the outlook of a century ago when the "constitution, the campaign, the jury, and the vote ruled the imaginations of men." This optimism contrasts with today when "these same ideas and words bring forth only derision. 'Law-abiding' and 'law-and-order' are terms vaguely synonymous with 'reactionary.'" "These changes," he says, "mark the end of the liberal ideal."
The depth and extent of the loss of faith and hope in the liberal ideal is far greater than most realize, even among those who feel it. There is a passion to dismember the system but a disheartening lack of new ideas. The final irony is that those leading the charge are known in today's parlance as "liberals."
Symptoms of the loss of faith in the classic liberalism that fueled the founding and growth of Western democracy are:
These are the underpinnings of the policies that are nearest and dearest to those who run our schools, the ideas that lead to affirmative action, bilingual education, "multiculturalism," doubt about if not outright antipathy to Western tradition, and, finally, the pervasive lack of resolution to use authority.
School uniforms will not fix this problem. It is going to require school administrators with the backbone to mete out punishment where needed, to make sure that order is maintained so that the students who want to learn can. Nothing less will do, and all our handwringing about test scores and academic standards will be irrelevant until we get those who run our schools to do their job.
Gilroy Dispatch, 7/27/98, Morgan Hill Times, 8/18/98
State math standard vs. Morgan Hill's program
July 1, 1998
In my comments of June 25, I asserted that the Morgan Hill (California) school district's math program "runs counter" to all six philosophical points for a good standard extracted from a Fordham report that evaluated state standards. I gather from speaking to one official of the district that there may be some dispute about that; i.e., whether in fact Morgan Hill's program is consistent with the state standard, and, by inference, at least some of the six items I cited.
The District's math program uses Addison-Wesley's Quest 2000 for the elementary grades and CPM (College Preparatory Math) for secondary. Both are based on principles of "reform math," which was endorsed by the math framework adopted by the state in 1992. That framework, due to be revisited in 1999 (scheduled every seven years), was preempted by the standard adopted by the state Board last December. The unusual action of adopting a new standard out of order was prompted by widespread dissatisfaction with the 1992 framework.
Quest 2000 and CPM are full-strength reform math programs that feature the constructivist approach (coaxing students to figure things out for themselves), working in groups as opposed to lecturing, problem-based "real-world" learning, de-emphasis of drill in arithmetic, emphasis on use of calculators beginning in the very lowest grades, fuzzy answers, and emphasis on exposition of solutions.
The six items
The six items I cited are listed below (some shortened for brevity) with the reasons why I contend they are not subscribed to by the district.
Morgan Hill Times, 7/10/98
Math standards best, but not for Morgan Hill
June 25, 1998
New standards for mathematics for K through 12 were adopted by the California State Board of Education last December after an intense battle involving a special commission, several drafts, public comments, and uncountable meetings. Despite the messiness of the process, the result seems to be quite good. According to a recent Fordham Foundation report that evaluated K-12 math standards for 46 states and the District of Columbia, the new California standards are the best in the nation.
Unfortunately, that won't do Morgan Hill students any good because, speaking for the District, Superintendent Carolyn McKennan said, "we don't agree with the state standards." What she meant is that the Morgan Hill Union School District is wedded to the concepts of what District people call "reform math," known by others variously as "fuzzy math," or "new-new math." (The last is designed to distinguish between this latest version of "reform math" and the previous one, which was called "new math"; hence "new-new math.")
It was an unpleasant surprise to many of us who welcomed the new standards to discover that the battle at the state level was only the beginning, and it has to be fought again district by district.
A minor skirmish has broken out, sparked by a group of parents with children at Paradise Valley Elementary. Whether it will amount to anything remains to be seen. Two meetings were held with Superintendent McKennan, and she promised to provide an answer to their concerns by the end of June, later changing that to the end of July. (The meetings covered many other topics, but math was the main issue concerning curriculum.)
The Fordham report (see at www.edexcellence.net/standards/, also available by calling 1-888-TBF-7474, single copies free) makes interesting reading. Standards were evaluated for all but four states that declined to provide them. For comparison purposes, the standard used in Japan was evaluated by the same criteria.
The most striking result is the dismal showing on the whole. The average score was 6.5 of a possible 16.0. The median was 5.5, meaning that 23 states were below that. California was at the top with a perfect 16.0, besting even Japan at 15.0.
The report spells out the evaluation criteria in detail and indicates a thorough job. A key question, of course, is what the authors consider a good standard to be, especially content. Their viewpoints are spelled out clearly in four sections that explain their evaluation criteria. A few examples may suffice to convey the sense of their views:
"It should be recognized that the foundation of mathematics is reasoning. While science verifies through observation, mathematics verifies through logical reasoning. Thus the essence of mathematics lies in proofs, and the distinction among illustrations, conjectures and proofs should be emphasized..."
These examples provide a good explanation for Dr. McKennan's dislike of the state standards: the way math is taught in Morgan Hill runs counter to all of them.
Morgan Hill Times, 6/26/98
Even Proposition 227 may not be a big enough hammer
May 16, 1998
The question voters should ask about California Proposition 227, designed to do away with bilingual education, is: Will my local school district abandon bilingual education or at least drastically revise it without being forced to by this proposition? It's not an easy question to answer, but I suspect the truth for many is that they won't.
In its argument for voting against it, the editors of the Gilroy Dispatch disparage the approach required by the proposition as a "gamble" and "a risky experiment." Those characterizations are arguable, but the nature of bilingual education is not: it was an experiment on which the data is in and it is a failure.
The only argument on that is a question of degree: whether it has merely "largely failed," as the Dispatch said, or is an unmitigated disaster, as the proponents of the proposition contend. In either case, the victims sacrificed on the altar of bilingual education have suffered a tragedy for which there is no restitution and no excuse.
The education establishment still pushes the fraud of bilingual ed in the face of damning facts that have been known at least since publication "Forked Tongue" by Rosalie Pedalino Porter in 1990. After years of being in a stupor on the subject, the state legislature and the state Board of Education have acted in recent days to move away from bilingual ed, but can there be any doubt that it was only as a response to the proposition? Is it not likely that the educrats will take a defeat of Prop. 227 as an endorsement and keep on doing what they're doing now?
In his column of May 15, Paul Gigot of the Wall Street Journal pointed to the nub of the problem: "Public school governance has become the preserve of unions and administrators who are impervious to parental pressure." An admittedly extreme example of that is San Francisco Superintendent Bill Rojas, who told the San Francisco Chronicle that he won't give up even if it passes: "I will fight this as far and as fully as we can, as we did with 187."
The miserable test results for California students compared to those of other states and nations is no accident: It is the result of policies promoted by those who run our schools. Those policies include not only bilingual ed, but also whole language and new-new math. The educrats' stubborn determination to continue those policies in the face of overwhelming evidence of their failure can only be overcome with a big hammer, such as this proposition. If Bill Rojas' attitude is shared by many other school administrators, it's not clear that even 227 is big enough.
Anti-Intellectualism in education
March 13, 1998
I plan to vote for the upcoming city school bonds for Morgan Hill where I live, but that does not mean that I am satisfied with our schools.
U.S. students have consistently underperformed those of other nations, and the latest results from TIMSS give no reason for optimism. Our students were near the bottom in math and science, and two factors were particularly depressing: (a) our kids' ranking was lower the higher the grade level and (b) our higher-achieving students ranked next to last in advanced math and dead last in advanced physics. The first means that our kids do worse the longer they are exposed to our schools, and the second that even our best cannot compete. It is no wonder that one of the contentious debates in our technology companies has to do with importing technical talent from abroad.
The last time I looked, Morgan Hill students were in a middling range in the county and state, which means the TIMSS results would be typical for our local young people.
One reason for the sad state of education is the rampant anti-intellectualism of our education colleges, a condition of very long standing. At our premier education institution, Teachers College at Columbia, the education department is separated from the rest of the campus by a street sometimes derisively called "the widest street in the world."
Bruce E. Buxton, Headmaster of Falmouth Academy, Falmouth, Mass., recently said: "The anti-intellectualism so deeply imbedded in American life has long been acknowledged by social historians." One such social historian was Jacques Barzun, who identified education among "enemies of intellect" in his devastating critique of education and mores in the United States in the Book-Of-The-Month selection in 1959, House of Intellect.
Buxton went on to say, "In my 32 years of teaching, leading, and consulting, none of the teachers who I have considered to be possessed of impressive skill in math, science or literature owe any credit to a formal degree in education. Indeed, if we made degrees in education disqualifiers for a teaching or administrative position in American schools, the intellectual quality of our schools would go up. For too long the poor quality and weak standards of our nation's schools of education have been an open secret. Our indifference to that open secret is damning evidence of the profound anti-intellectualism we are so reluctant to address."
One result of the anti-intellectualism which grips our educationist establishment is the rampant fads which constantly roil our schools. A good example is new-new math, which has taken on the character of a cult among its adherents. The particular variant that has taken over Morgan Hill schools is called CPM.
Two kinds of reform that offer some hope are charter schools and an end to mandatory bilingual ed. These are subjects of statewide propositions likely to be on the ballot in California in the near future, and I support both. While these are "sledge hammers," as some have said, they are necessary palliatives to the woolly thinking of educationists and the stupor of the state legislature on these subjects.
Despite it all, I intend to vote for the school bonds; to do otherwise would be giving up, and we must never do that.
Jacques Barzun wrote in 1959 that "there is, there can be, no such thing as a good school." His point was that since schools are a product of our culture, they inevitably reflect its frailties and defects, and we will never be entirely satisfied. That is not to say that they cannot be improved or that we should stop trying.
A number of defects are certainly apparent in South County schools. The dropout rate in Gilroy, reported to be three in ten, is a particularly uncheerful statistic. Gilroy fourth-graders did worse than the state average in the CLAS tests given in 1994 (the last time it was given), and Morgan Hill kids did just slightly better. The state average was nothing to write home about itself.
SAT scores are commonly used to evaluate high schools, but there are many problems with that method. One is that the SAT measures aptitude, not knowledge or accomplishment. Questionnaires, though often unscientific, usually reveal very disappointing ignorance among students of civics and other matters we consider important.
For a perspective on how schools came to be where they are, take a look at The Troubled Crusade, American Education 1945-1980 (1983) and National Standards in American Education (1995), both by Diane Ravitch. What's surprising is how little the philosophy of education changed since the twenties and thirties. Many things we hear today represented as new sound amazingly like things said 30 or even 60 years ago, dressed up in the jargon of the day. (Oakland's "Ebonics" was plain old "black English" back in the 1960's.)
Ravitch actually goes back to the teens to identify the origin of progressive education. Although she says progressive education as a movement died ("of old age," as she put it) about 1955, many changes it wrought - such as downgrading of academics - are still with us to a large extent.
The federal courts did not comport themselves well. The long-overdue Brown decision of 1954 to end segregation was wishy-washy and left vital decisions up to the school districts and lower courts. This vagueness led to many mistakes, such as the 20-year experiment with busing. The courts continued to fail to enunciate principles that could be understood, even by themselves, and resorted in many cases simply to taking over. In the process, they showed themselves to be as susceptible to the educational fetishes of the day as anyone and bear no small part of the responsibility for where we are today.
That is not good according to Prof. E. D. Hirsch, author of The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them (1996). Hirsch is the founder of the Core Knowledge approach, which consists of a very specific knowledge-based curriculum with standards and tests at each grade. Stated that way, it doesn't sound revolutionary, but according to Hirsch, his approach is considered "not developmentally appropriate" by the education establishment.
One of the claims Hirsch makes is that his technique addresses what is perhaps the central problem in education today: improving achievement among the disadvantaged. I will try to summarize his argument.
One of main results of the Coleman Report (chartered by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and published in 1966) was that educational achievement is related more to a student's family background than any other factor. This disparity has diminished little after thirty years of Herculean effort and expenditures of billions to overcome it. Hirsch argues that our schools' focus on process instead of knowledge increases dependence on families: children with parents willing and able to make up for the school's inattention to subject matter leave others behind. Another point Hirsch makes is that children who change schools - and families in the lower income range do so much more often - fall behind because of differences in learning from school to school. If standards such as those in his Core Knowledge approach were widely applied, students could transfer and not lose out.
Schools have moved in the direction Hirsch is promoting over the past fifteen years, and that probably accounts for the stabilization and modest increases in test scores in that period. Hirsch thinks we should move a lot faster. I think he's got a good point.
Gilroy Dispatch, May 2, 1997
Computers in schools: overhyped?
The first time I went out to buy a personal computer in the early 1980s, I had the rare good fortune to come across a computer salesman who offered some genuine wisdom in addition to the usual technobabble. He asked me what I intended to use the computer for. I sputtered a bit and wandered off because I hadn't really thought about it. I just thought it would be neat to have a computer.
The schools are making the same mistake. It's neat to have computers, everybody's doing the Internet these days, so let's get on the bandwagon. They've installed wires, got the computers, and only now are trying to figure out what to do with them. Like the teachers who were given computers several months ago but "haven't had time" to take them out of their boxes. Chances are they're doing just what they should: teaching instead of getting distracted with the computer craze.
This situation should not be a surprise. It was forecast a couple of years ago by Clifford Stoll in his book, Silicon Snake Oil, Second Thoughts on the Information Highway.
Stoll, astronomer and computer buff at Berkeley, contended that computers and the Internet were wildly over-hyped and questioned whether they were worth the cost for many proposed purposes, including schools.
Installing computers and wiring the schools for the Internet has been over-hyped as Stoll said. I'm not saying don't do it; it's just not the Nirvana it's been made out to be. Those who think it's going to turn the younger generation into savvy informed citizens are sadly mistaken. For most educational purposes, especially in lower grades, it's more likely to be a distraction than a benefit.
A wag said the Internet is like a giant library where everyone is invited to bring anything they like and put it on a shelf, any shelf. That's not a bad description. The Internet is a vast array of stuff, completely disorganized, much obsolete, most useless, a great deal obnoxious.
The things that computers and the Internet do well are to store information and (with luck) make it readily available. Those are useful for teaching, but conventional ways of doing the same things are often more efficient and more effective.
The president has some good points in his education program. This one (the tenth) calls for a healthy dose of skepticism.
A study done for the California Department of Education found that teachers don't use computers as much as expected. While that can be attributed to lack of equipment, there's more to it than that. Finding the right software and teacher preparation required to make computers effective are much bigger problems than anyone (except Stoll and a few others) imagined.
If I was a teacher, I'd be very nervous about turning children loose on the Internet. In doing a search, you can easily get five or ten million matches to a query. What will children do with that? Probably look at the first one or two, which means they might as well be picking something at random. A great deal of precious teacher time is required to avoid this.
I am not a Luddite. I think the Internet is a technological marvel of vast significance, and I use it for many things. It is great for research, especially of current topics. When the Ninth Court of Appeals handed down its decision on Proposition 209 on April 7, I was able to get the complete text of the judge's opinion the next day. If you want to read the President's State of the Union message, it's easy to find. When I see a company or product name on television, or the name of an interesting-sounding organization, I often jot it down and look it up later on the World Wide Web. More often than not, I find it. I'm following the Garry Kasparov vs. IBM computer chess match via the Internet (rooting for Garry, of course). I communicate with many friends via email.
Among these things, plus what I can imagine that children might do with the Internet, I do not see much which contributes to the serious business of schooling. Before anyone undertakes to use a computer or the Internet in school, they should ask whether books, or a field trip, or just chalk and a blackboard can do the job better.
There's a mystique about computers which has made them an end in themselves. In too many cases, they've become a solution looking for a problem, and a very expensive one at that.
Gilroy Dispatch, May 7, 1997
The new new math: reform or snake oil? - I
The first item of President Clinton's education "program" (something it isn't, but that's another story), is national standards and tests for English and math for 4th and 8th grades, respectively. The president deserves due credit for promoting this idea, especially considering that he has been consistent on this issue for many years.
Like so many other issues of the day, however, "the devil's in the details," and it appears that defining the standards will be as contentious as ever.
Lynn Cheney, former chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, recently criticized the president's choices for the committee that will oversee his national eighth-grade math exam. Ms. Cheney contends that people dedicated to the "whole math" approach dominate the committee and that the project is therefore doomed before they begin.
There have been several attempts to implement standards. The current one in California is by the 21-member Academic Standards Commission, which recently released its initial drafts for math and reading standards for K-12.
The main contention in the math standards effort is between those who favor teaching children "how to think" as opposed to the traditional approach. The latter is criticized as "rote memorization," the prime example being drill in arithmetic, such as the multiplication table.
The "how to think" school of thought is variously called the new-new math, whole math, fuzzy math, or the constructivist approach. It is supported by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NTCM) and was adopted in large part by the California Department of Education as a "reform" in 1985 and more determinedly in 1992.
The Morgan Hill School District adopted a form of the new-new math called CPM, which stands for College Preparatory Mathematics. At Live Oak, it replaces Algebra I, Geometry, and Advanced Algebra. It is full-strength constructivist math, with primary emphasis on self-discovery and group effort.
The constructivist approach favors the idea of coaxing students to discover mathematical realities for themselves. It is based on the theory that things which students figure out for themselves are learned better and are more useful than things simply told to them. This idea leads to less lecturing by teachers and more group effort and practical "real-world" examples.
CPM was created by a group of teachers in 1989 and has been in fairly wide use in California since around 1993. Lecturing is strongly discouraged, and most of the work, including even some exams, is carried out in groups of four students. The courses consist almost entirely of problem solving, from which the mathematical principles are supposed to be extracted by example. Formal structure and drill are essentially eliminated.
A number of parents' groups have formed to oppose new-new math, claiming that it is drastically watered down and ineffective. One of the more prominent of these is HOLD (Honest Open Logical Debate) in Palo Alto, one of whose members was appointed to the Academic Standards Commission's subcommittee on mathematics. The battles are incredibly intense, even within the Commission itself.
The main objection of these parents is the de-emphasis - they say complete absence - of drill and structure. The pedagogy is also criticized because of its group approach: thinking that you can put teenagers in lightly-supervised groups, encourage them to talk, and expect them to stay "on task" is, well, ridiculous.
Many teachers chafe under CPM because it dictates not only content but pedagogy. Traditionally, teachers had considerable discretion in how they taught. Under CPM, everything is specified, practically down to the teacher's script.
Paradoxically, CPM places greater dependence for its success on the teacher's ability in math. This is so because the mathematical principles are substantially extracted from the problem-examples and escape less qualified teachers. They get by, however, by simply following the script. This is no small matter, because 51 percent of math teachers in California have neither a major nor a minor degree in math. In fact, this may have more to do with our problems with math teaching than anything else.
It is well known that parental interest determines educational success more than any other factor, and that's no doubt the reason students in Palo Alto do the best in the county. The fact that parents in Palo Alto are also the most vocal in their dissatsifaction with the new-new math should give pause to parents elsewhere.
Morgan Hill Times, August 26, 1997
The new new math: reform or snake oil? - II
I attended the lecture by education consultant Dr. Ruth Parker Aug. 26 at Live Oak called "Mathematics for the Future." I'd seen a paper she'd written, so I knew she was a supporter of the new-new math, or, as she and her colleagues prefer to call it, reform math.
I had already formed an opinion about it - I don't like it - but I resolved to listen and try to understand what she had to say. She didn't convince me.
Dr. Parker acknowledged that there is considerable controversy about reform math and had nothing good to say about its opponents, targeting especially newspaper columnists "who turn out to never have taught math to children." She has the zeal of a missionary and asked her audience to spread the word for the good of the cause.
New new math is based on the idea that children should learn by figuring things out for themselves. Parker gave many examples of what she considers brilliant insights which children have come up with. These were indeed interesting, but one wonders how many children can't figure it out for themselves and just sink into a fog.
Much of the time was spent on alternate methods of doing arithmetic, mainly adding and multiplying. She spoke disparagingly of "the American algorithms" for these and showed how one can do just as well working left to right as the standard right to left. This method has the advantage that one gets a better feel for the magnitudes of numbers - what she calls "number sense" - and can avoid blunders by keeping perspective along the way.
I can see that point and might agree except that she is not saying that we should teach adding and multiplying this other way. The enemy in her mind is any set recipe: kids should be stimulated to come up with their own ideas.
Her favorite example is what she calls "the turkey problem," which she has been using for many years. It is a "word problem" involving proportion and fractions. It can be solved any number of ways, but the traditional approach is to equate two fractions, one containing an unknown, and to solve for the unknown by "cross-multiplying." Dr. Parker is proud of the many imaginative ways students have solved it, most using graphical techniques. She has nothing good to say about the traditional approach, and one gets the feeling that a student who did it that way would be sent to the corner.
Again, these are interesting demonstrations of resourcefulness and ingenuity, but is it mathematics or just parlor games? She spoke reverently of mathematics, but she and I don't have the same thing in mind. To her mathematics is a way of thinking. To me it is a logical structure. A discussion about how to teach it is pointless because we're not talking about the same subject.
The "way of thinking" philosophy discounts the importance of the basics. Learning rote algorithms is a waste of time because it contributes nothing to the ability of the students to reason for themselves; to what the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics calls mathematical power: "the ability to explore, conjecture, and reason logically."
Those skills are valuable, even indispensable, but mathematics is not just a way of thinking; it is the magnificent set of truths bequeathed to us by the great mathematicians of the ages, and no amount of coaxing will allow children to reconstruct those truths out of their own heads.
The trouble with the cute methods that students devised for solving the turkey problem is that they don't work for all cases. The cross-multiplying method which Dr. Parker so sarcastically maligns does. Mathematics is a science, and one of the central issues in science is: Does it apply in the general case? Cross-multiplying does; the others don't. QED.
Education is especially prone to fads that roll through every few years, each promising to solve all the problems. Mostly, they turn out to be only new brands of snake oil, and I predict that new new math will be submerged in a few years by yet another approach "based on the latest research," regaled by education consultants, and destined to meet the same fate a few years later. It is a tribute to the human mind that the country survives in spite of it.
Morgan Hill Times, August 29, 1997