Education Reform

This post is about Kindergarten through High School education, generally referred to as K-12.  The U.S. has a reputation for providing more elite post-secondary (e.g. college and grad school) institutions than any other country in the world.  It also has a very good reputation for its non-elite schools in this category.  So the general consensus is that this category doesn't need fixing.  K-12, however, is a different matter.  This category has been argued over for generations and has been a political punching bag for at least a generation.  I have no special expertise in this area.  But that's not going to stop me from pitching my two cents in anyhow.

I am, of course, a consumer of this product.  I received my K-12 education in the U.S.  There are probably few people whose trajectory through this system is exactly typical.  Mine isn't completely typical but it's not very different and it is a common trajectory.  I was educated in a Parochial School run by the Roman Catholic parish where my parents attended church for my first 8 years.  Then I attended public schools for the last four years.  In my opinion I got a good education.  And I am in a position to personally compare the Parochial School experience with the Public School experience.  The comparison is very enlightening.

Parochial School was a "stick to basics", "no frills" experience.  The curriculum was completely standard except for the addition of a one hour religion class each day.  When I hit Public School I found I was well prepared.  I could read well.  My mathematics was up to snuff.  My social studies abilities and skills were up to snuff.  I can't say what kind of shape I would have been in had I attended Public School for those eight years but I see no reason to believe that it would have been much different.

But physically the experience was different from what I would have experienced in a Public School.  There were no shop classes.  There was no PE (Physical Education) classes.  There were no music classes.  I remember that one day a teacher brought in a Chemistry Set.  It was the kind a parent would buy for a child.  No particular use was made of this.  All of these types of amenities cost money.  You need a Gym and showers for PE.  My school had an auditorium but no showers.  You need musical instruments to do music.  My school had no musical instruments.  The school had no lab space suitable for biology or chemistry.  The physical plant of the school consisted of the aforementioned auditorium, class rooms, and a playground with a couple of basketball hoops and a few tether ball poles.  No other athletic equipment was provided.

But wait, there's more.  I do not remember attending a class with less than thirty other students.  One teacher was supposed to maintain discipline, teach all the classes, and provide whatever one-on-one attention students needed.  In short this school did a number of things that are supposed to be exactly the wrong way to educate students.  There were too many students in the class room.  There was little or no "enrichment" (e.g. music, shop, athletics).  But I got an excellent education anyhow.  And I was not an anomaly.  Many of my fellow students followed my same path.  They did a number of years in Parochial School, transitioned to Public School, and did just fine.  I was a typical exemplar of students turned out by Parochial School, not an outlier.

And this is generally true.  Parochial Schools have a very good reputation in the US.  It is so good that many Parochial Schools have a large percentage of their students coming from non-Catholic families.  Parochial Schools are the only alternative to a Public School option that is financially possible for many families.  Parochial Schools have a reputation for providing a high quality low cost option to the standard Public School option.  And they prove that a lot of the conventional wisdom about how to fix the public school system is bunk.

I certainly enjoyed my time in Public School and felt I got a good education there too.  But it is important to remember that this school district was in a well off suburban area.  The school system had and still has a very good reputation but it also has more money and a more stable social environment than many public school systems.

So if many of the standard nostrums for fixing the public school system are wrong then what's right?  Here I am very disappointed with what the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have come up with so far.  You can read a position paper from them here:  http://www.gatesfoundation.org/postsecondaryeducation/Documents/nextgenlearning.pdf.  I didn't think much of it.  It is  mishmash of jargon almost completely devoid of clear thinking and any kind of data driven foundation for what little it contains.

One of the ideas that the Gates Foundation and others push is Charter Schools.  Charter Schools have been around long enough so that if they did a substantially better job of educating kids we should see some clear data to support this.  But what little data I have seen indicates that Charter Schools perform about on a par with Public Schools.  Another is reducing class size.  This too has been tried a lot.  I have seen no strong evidence that this works particularly well either.  Another idea is technology in the classroom.  As a computer guy I should be all for this.  But again there is no strong evidence supporting the idea that this makes a big difference.

Parochial Schools are not much different than Charter Schools.  My Parochial School experience argues against expecting much from reduced class sizes or introducing a lot of technology.  It also argues against the great benefit of a richer experience (e.g. sports, music, labs,. etc.).  Now some of you may be about to argue that I have just contradicted myself.  If Charter Schools are a lot like Parochial Schools then they should be working well.  And they should.  But the data says they don't.  And I remember seeing a "60 Minutes" (I think it was 60 Minutes) episode where they talked to a Parochial School Principal.  She said she would not be able to do even as well (her school was rated noticeably better than the surrounding Public Schools) if she had to follow the same rules and regulations as the Public School administrators did.  So what do I think works?

One of the problems with most of the analysis of what's wrong stems from looking in the wrong places.  If you are not looking in the right places the answer to your question contains a high percentage of noise and little or no pattern will emerge.  I think the wrong things are being measured to try to find the success factors.  Here's my list of success factors:

1.  The most important thing is whether a kid comes to school willing and able to learn.  Key to this is whether the kid thinks it is important to learn.  And key to this is whether the parent(s) think education is important.
2.  If we have met the first criteria, the second criteria is a good teacher who is allowed to do her job the way she thinks it should be done.
3.  The school environment must be safe from violence and from bullying and other activities that discourage a kid that wants to learn from learning.
These are the keys.  Of lesser importance are:
*  A good and safe physical plant (e.g. no pealing paint, broken windows, lights that work, etc.)
*  Smaller classes.
*  A richer experience.
And so on.

Someone somewhere has succeeded in teaching whatever "unteachable" group you can think of.  It's not the native intelligence of the kid.  In most cases parents seek out these experiences once a program attains a good reputation.  And that is important.  Because if a kid has parents (or parent) that care how well the kid does in school then they keep on top of how the kid is doing.  This results in the kid being expected to learn.  If the kid fails the parent(s) get on him or her to improve.  In this environment most kids most of the time end up willing to learn.  And almost all kids are able to learn.  These "success story" situations also usually involve good teachers and a safe environment.  I think you can find successes that lack one or more of the remaining criteria.

How about this for an idea?  As far as I know it has never been tried.  Evaluate kids and pick out the under performing ones.  Then look at the home environment.  Look for kids with parents that are uninvolved or have low expectations.  Try to educate the parents to be better at motivating and monitoring their kids.  Then there are homes where the parents would like to do the right thing educationally by their kids.  But they can't due to poverty, language skills, violence, etc.  Here it would be nice to provide help.  But except in the language situation this should be a job for social services, not schools.  As far as I can tell low or non-existent educational attainment of parents (e.g. parental illiteracy) is not a factor. Kids of illiterate parents do very well even if the parents never learn to read.

With this as a foundation it is instructive to look at efforts to improve education.  Little or no effort is devoted to my most important item.  There have been many efforts devoted to item number two but they usually involve more not less interference with the teacher doing things the way she would prefer.  In fact there is a large industry dedicated to standards, tests, evaluations, etc., all of which have the effect of telling the teacher how to teach.  Efforts to address item number three are sporadic and not up to the task.  Instead most effort is devoted to the lower priority items or to items I didn't even list.

It is also important to pay attention to what ought not to be done.  One idea usually associated with liberals is to pass students whose work does not merit it.  I think this is a mistake.  If a kid is not doing fourth grade work or eighth grade work he should be flunked until he can demonstrate the proper proficiency.  Unqualified students provide a distraction to both teachers and other students.  In the long run they don't even do the kid any good.  For a short period of time his self esteem is left undamaged.  But society and the kid eventually figure out that the kid is not a high school graduate in terms of what he is capable of and things go rapidly down hill from there.

And there is the issue of focus.  The more things you try to do the less likely you are to do a good job of all of them.  I think schools and school districts should be focused completely on education.  In the same way that they should provide an honest evaluation of how educated a student is by not passing him along, they should not be responsible for public safety or caring for the needs of people with physical or mental problems.  If a kid is misbehaving then he should be kicked out of school and turned over to the juvenile justice or police system.  Let schools teach and let public safety organizations provide for the public safety.  Similarly, I am sympathetic to the plight of people with physical or mental handicaps.  But at some point they should become social service problems not problems to be solved by our educational systems.

Years ago the standard was to keep people with physical or mental handicaps out of sight.  This was wrong, particularly for people with mild handicaps.  The standard flipped over to "mainstreaming" everyone.  I believe this is an over reaction.  I think it is good to mainstream people with mild handicaps.  It's good for the individuals themselves.  It is also good for the other students and staff.  It broadens their experience base and makes them more tolerant, which is good.  But it is not the job of school systems to deal with all of these people, particularly with those with severe problems.  This means a line needs to be drawn.  How do you decide who is mild and who is severe?  I am not confident I have the right answer.  But I do have an answer.  How much does it cost to place and maintain a particular individual in a Public School environment.

I think you set a financial threshold.  My suggestion is six times.  This is a completely arbitrary line and it may be that some other cut off would work better.  But it is the one I have come up with.  If the additional cost is six or less times the cost of a normal student then the handicapped individual should be placed in school and become the responsibility of the school district.  If the expense will be higher then the responsibility should rest with social services.  If social services can come to an agreement with the school district and pay the school district whatever the additional cost over that of a normal student then it may be a good idea to place the individual in school.

And this is the usual "bright line" rule.  This may result in the school people and the social service people (or others) trying to game the system to get the individual over or under the threshold.  Bright line rules always result in these kinds of issues.  I am perfectly willing to entertain a "sliding degree of responsibility" where there is a sliding scale of financial and other responsibility for the individual.  But I think my idea is a good place to start the discussion from.

There is also an elephant in the room that I have not brought up yet.  That's politics.  Educational policy is a bigger political football than it has ever been before.  This is very bad for education.  It draws energy and money away from the current system.  In almost all cases more resources are better than fewer resources.  So whatever resources are eaten by the squabbling end up being taken away from where they are needed.  And if the fight gets hot enough a consensus may develop to starve the beast.  Certainly the time and effort that a good teacher spends dealing with paperwork, bureaucracy, and politics is time and efforts that can not be applied to teaching.  And good people don't like working in a politically charged atmosphere.  It's just not worth the aggravation.

Now let's look at Teach for America.  Teach for America is good intentioned.  It is designed to help solve a very real problem.  Our society depends heavily on what is generally called STEM, Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.  So our educational system needs to do STEM well.  But there is a large shortage of STEM qualified teachers.  And, as I said, this is a real problem.  Teach for America attempts to address this problem by finding STEM qualified individuals, running them through a fast "teaching boot camp" and putting them into the classroom.

It is better than nothing.  But it is a "paper it over" solution rather than an effort to address the problem directly.  The direct way to address the problem is to have teachers who are STEM qualified.  How do we do this?  Money!  If we paid teachers with STEM skills more money then we would find teachers getting STEM training and we would find STEM trained people getting teaching degrees.  But that would cost too much money.  So we have Teach for America.  The way you know that Teach for America is not the right solution is by looking at retention.  Do people who get in the program stay in teaching?  No!  Large numbers of them are gone after two years or less.  And remember the job market currently sucks.

I just don't believe that finding the right solutions to the education problem is that hard a problem.  So why aren't we well on the way to solving it?  Because the fundamental problem is money.  We need to spend more money and we need to spend it more effectively.  No one wants to spend what it would take to solve the problem so it becomes a big political football.  And in a highly politicized environment what money gets spent where becomes all the more important.  And those with the most political power, not those with the best ideas, tend to win the fights.  The overall result is that more and more money and effort is invested in making and enforcing rules, and in the kind of bureaucracy that grows up in a highly politicized environment.  This leaves less and less money to actually do what works.  And so things get worse and we start another round of political fighting that eventually makes things even worse.

Let me make a final observation on unions.  There is a large group of people invested in the idea that unions are evil and wasting lots of money and standing in the way of education reform.  In the current environment what are teachers supposed to do?  They are buffeted by every "trend du jour" and generally speaking no one cares what they think about anything.  In that environment a strong union with a mission to make teachers impossible to fire makes a lot of sense.  I think teachers unions have stood in the way of a lot of educational reform.  But it is hard to get angry at them.  There are a lot of others trying to mess up the educational system and harass teachers.  Perhaps if teachers didn't feel so much like the football in a Superbowl game they would be willing to be more flexible.

One thing Bill Gates has come to believe is that you can tell if a teacher is going to be a good teacher by seeing how they do in their first three years on the job.  If this is true then all you need to do is put in a "three year probation" rule.  If the teacher makes it through the first three years (assuming the evaluation procedure is a good one - not the teacher's responsibility) then it makes no sense to worry very much about how to get rid of teachers that have more than three years on the job.  They should be good teachers in almost all cases.  It is probably cheaper to carry the few "dead wood" teachers that make it past three years than it does to put in a lot of effort into a procedure for terminating experienced teachers.  And this would have a great benefit.  The many good teachers who made it past their three year probation could relax and focus on teaching for the rest of their carrier.  The morale boost would more than compensate for whatever it cost to keep the dead wood.