Suppose America had two sets of problems that threatened national security. Also suppose they took two different approaches to dealing with those problems.
The first approach is to bring in experts, assign them as leaders and make them personally responsible for the overall results. Then task them to select the very best personnel, reward them well for taking the job, give them the best training at government expense and provide them with all the tools required to do the job in an outstanding manner. Measure the accomplishment of the job carefully. Carefully provide social support to the employees for the work they are doing and tell them repeatedly that the job they are doing is of great importance and that the nation is proud to have the services of such employees. Then, when the job is not being done adequately change the managers because they were made responsible. The leaders are considered ultimately responsible for the results.
The second approach is to Elect whoever promises the best results if you make the radical changes in the way the job is done that they demand. Offer low pay to the workers even when there are many alternative professions that are more rewarding, less work and pay much better. Then provide as little in the way of tools as can be afforded and demand that the employees get their own training at their own expense. Then carefully measure the jobs they do and castigate them repeatedly for every failure especially when the tools they have and the raw materials they are working with are substandard. Micromanage the employees efforts. Blame the employees for the overall results even though they are working long hours and skimp on financial support while not penalizing the leaders they work for. The employees are considered ultimately responsible for the results.
Which approach do you think is more likely to get world class success?
It should be no surprise that the first approach is the way America operates its military and the second approach is the way America operates its public schools.
Dave Eggers and Ninive Clements Calegari have written an excellent OP-Ed in the New York Times which makes exactly this point with pointed information to back it up.I strongly recommend reading the OP-ED.
Both military and education functions are essential to society and both are mission driven and require a large contingent of well-trained and motivated professionals to succeed. That is, they do not fit into the money economy in any self-supporting manner. Instead both functions are required for the money economy to function well. The military quit trying to fight wars profitably after the repeated failures of mercenary armies (and the government that hired them) during the Thirty Years War. When do Americans realize that public education is as essential to the nation as military and policing and similarly cannot be operated by educational mercenaries?
Showing posts with label Education. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Education. Show all posts
Sunday, May 01, 2011
Sunday, November 14, 2010
The so-called reformers want to destroy the public education system.
Is the problem with public education really that older teachers are incompetent but are protected by tenure? Should elementary school and grammar school teachers not be paid extra to get masters' degrees? Or are both arguments simply efforts to lower the cost of public education by practicing age discrimination, firing older teachers and hiring younger, cheaper teacher?
Michael in Chicago has a really good blog post on these and other questions about public education that the media does not seem to want to bother the public with.
I strongly recommend reading his blog and the intelligent comments. Then ask yourself why this information is not part of the so-called dialog on the education system?
Michael in Chicago has a really good blog post on these and other questions about public education that the media does not seem to want to bother the public with.
I strongly recommend reading his blog and the intelligent comments. Then ask yourself why this information is not part of the so-called dialog on the education system?
Sunday, July 27, 2008
What if public schools were divided between schools for jocks and schools for nerds?
Why do the urban public school students who want to learn about science, math, history and literature have to go to school with jocks and cheerleaders? What to the nerds get besides being put down for being "unpopular"?
What would happen if public schools were separated by those who wanted to actually learn and those who wanted to play sports and be popular? One thing hat would happen is that the nerd schools could pay for computers and math and history instructors instead of high-priced football coaches (who in Texas get paid more than the Principle) and the money wasted on football stadiums and equipment would instead be spent on computers and math, history and literature instructors.
Not that physical ed instruction should be not given to nerds. Instead, the Phys ed instructors at nerd schools would focus on actually training nerds in how to deal with their physical needs instead of being forced to compete with sports enthusiasts. I was a nerd, and found the coaches ignored me because I was not going to win the next sports prize. I lucked out because I also threw newspapers from a bicycle, morning and evening, on a route that was over seven miles long. But we had no bicycle competitions so the coaches didn't give a damn about my physical condition. What if the physical ed department was focused on training intellectuals about how to deal with their physical needs?
How many minority families would send their children to schools focused on sports instead of academics?
Students who failed in the schools for nerds could be transferred to the schools for jocks. Then given a chance to switch back the next semester.
This would focus the physical ed departments on training students how to deal with their bodies, instead of how to compete in games. It would also, more importantly, give parents a chance to express to their children what really matters ion life - education or sports.
But would this make the sports oriented schools into second rate schools for losers?
I should hope so. When was the last time the American schools systems were castigated for turning out too few world class athletes and too many math, science and history nerds? While sports are important, they are secondary to academics!
A similar approach could be taken to arts and music.
Have high schools specialize in either sports, math science history and literature, or arts and music. Each school would have to offer all subjects, of course, but specialize in one of the three. Students and their parents would be given their choice regarding which the students would attend, and support for transportation would be provided.
Most important, each school would focus the majority of their awards on their preferred students. Students in each school would know what they were there to do. The students themselves would be coopted into supporting each other to achieve success.
Rural and smaller community schools don't have the resources available to specialize entire schools in this manner, but they could set up specific tracks in each school to match the specialized urban schools.
That would be an approach to getting the best education possible from public schools. The drawback is that the schools in high concentrations of poverty and racial minority districts would still have problems offering high quality education to students unable to accept it. But this approach would isolate those schools and make it clear what their essential problems were, so that those key problems could be addressed - assuming that public school boards would permit the diversion of funds needed by the lowest performing schools, something they currently prevent.
Religious schools, of course, would continue to offer their religious education without government subsidy.
The sports pages of local newspapers might become confused, as they find themselves relegated to reporting on less than a third of the high schools since the rest would be either sharing stadiums or closing them down as funds were redirected to more important educational goals. But maybe the newspapers would start reporting on academics and the arts and music.
God only knows what the local TV news people would do. Report on Nerds? Could retired jocks actually be induced to do that? And how much time could they actually be forced to give to the local math, history, literature or chess champion? They only have at most about 12 minutes every night anyway. And what kind of visually interesting videos can you get - every night at 5:15 PM or 10:15 PM - from a math, history, Literature or science wonks?
But who really matters in the next generation? The nerds, artists or the jocks?
In my opinion, the ranking by importance is nerds, artists, and a long way below them, the jocks.
So why don't our public schools recognize and encourage this ranking? Probably because of elected school boards. Educator professionalism is something that simply is ignored. That seems to be a very typical and widespread American attitude.
But that's a subject for a later post.
What would happen if public schools were separated by those who wanted to actually learn and those who wanted to play sports and be popular? One thing hat would happen is that the nerd schools could pay for computers and math and history instructors instead of high-priced football coaches (who in Texas get paid more than the Principle) and the money wasted on football stadiums and equipment would instead be spent on computers and math, history and literature instructors.
Not that physical ed instruction should be not given to nerds. Instead, the Phys ed instructors at nerd schools would focus on actually training nerds in how to deal with their physical needs instead of being forced to compete with sports enthusiasts. I was a nerd, and found the coaches ignored me because I was not going to win the next sports prize. I lucked out because I also threw newspapers from a bicycle, morning and evening, on a route that was over seven miles long. But we had no bicycle competitions so the coaches didn't give a damn about my physical condition. What if the physical ed department was focused on training intellectuals about how to deal with their physical needs?
How many minority families would send their children to schools focused on sports instead of academics?
Students who failed in the schools for nerds could be transferred to the schools for jocks. Then given a chance to switch back the next semester.
This would focus the physical ed departments on training students how to deal with their bodies, instead of how to compete in games. It would also, more importantly, give parents a chance to express to their children what really matters ion life - education or sports.
But would this make the sports oriented schools into second rate schools for losers?
I should hope so. When was the last time the American schools systems were castigated for turning out too few world class athletes and too many math, science and history nerds? While sports are important, they are secondary to academics!
A similar approach could be taken to arts and music.
Have high schools specialize in either sports, math science history and literature, or arts and music. Each school would have to offer all subjects, of course, but specialize in one of the three. Students and their parents would be given their choice regarding which the students would attend, and support for transportation would be provided.
Most important, each school would focus the majority of their awards on their preferred students. Students in each school would know what they were there to do. The students themselves would be coopted into supporting each other to achieve success.
Rural and smaller community schools don't have the resources available to specialize entire schools in this manner, but they could set up specific tracks in each school to match the specialized urban schools.
That would be an approach to getting the best education possible from public schools. The drawback is that the schools in high concentrations of poverty and racial minority districts would still have problems offering high quality education to students unable to accept it. But this approach would isolate those schools and make it clear what their essential problems were, so that those key problems could be addressed - assuming that public school boards would permit the diversion of funds needed by the lowest performing schools, something they currently prevent.
Religious schools, of course, would continue to offer their religious education without government subsidy.
The sports pages of local newspapers might become confused, as they find themselves relegated to reporting on less than a third of the high schools since the rest would be either sharing stadiums or closing them down as funds were redirected to more important educational goals. But maybe the newspapers would start reporting on academics and the arts and music.
God only knows what the local TV news people would do. Report on Nerds? Could retired jocks actually be induced to do that? And how much time could they actually be forced to give to the local math, history, literature or chess champion? They only have at most about 12 minutes every night anyway. And what kind of visually interesting videos can you get - every night at 5:15 PM or 10:15 PM - from a math, history, Literature or science wonks?
But who really matters in the next generation? The nerds, artists or the jocks?
In my opinion, the ranking by importance is nerds, artists, and a long way below them, the jocks.
So why don't our public schools recognize and encourage this ranking? Probably because of elected school boards. Educator professionalism is something that simply is ignored. That seems to be a very typical and widespread American attitude.
But that's a subject for a later post.
Tuesday, October 09, 2007
NCLB - improve test scores, not learnnig
Bob Herbert explains how holding school administrators responsible for student test scores improves test scores but not student learning.
Actual teaching is a lot harder than game playing with the scores. Make getting a high score into a high-risk game, and the tests will pass the finest game-players who can most easily manipulate the scores.
If teachers, administrators, politicians and others have a stake in raising the test scores of students — as opposed to improving student learning, which is not the same thing — there are all kinds of incentives to raise those scores by any means necessary.Yep. I told you so. Ask anyone who has watched the many iterations of the Army Officer Evaluation System as they tried to remove the game playing and get real evaluations that gave a reliable and honest score that can compare the effectiveness of different officers. Talk about your unachievable fantasies! Just like No Child Left Behind (NCLB.)
“We’ve now had four or five different waves of educational reform,” said Dr. Koretz, “that were based on the idea that if we can just get a good test in place and beat people up to raise scores, kids will learn more. That’s really what No Child Left Behind is.”
The problem is that you can raise scores the hard way by teaching more effectively and getting the students to work harder, or you can take shortcuts and start figuring out ways, as Dr. Koretz put it, to “game” the system.
Guess what’s been happening?
Actual teaching is a lot harder than game playing with the scores. Make getting a high score into a high-risk game, and the tests will pass the finest game-players who can most easily manipulate the scores.
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Teacher's merit pay - a bad idea bought by Obama
Today the Washington Post presents an article about Barack Obama's tentative, almost under the table, discussion of applying merit pay to school teachers. As bad ideas go, this one needs to be exposed - again.
What does a politician know about what makes a good teacher different from an adequate teacher? (Bad ones can be identified, and should be generally removed from teaching quickly.) But to apply merit pay, it is necessary to understand the processes that lead to successful outcomes, measure those outcomes along with the inputs and the application of the processes, then link improved outcomes to the level of better application of the process that achieved those outcomes. This requires effective and reliable measurements of the inputs to the process, measures of how well the process is applied, and effective measures of what parts of the outcomes were successful as a result of better inputs and application of the process. Education does NOT fit this model. Such effective and reliable measures which can be applied in any given year do not exist.
How do you measure a process when you do not have good measures of where students start from and what the problems students (and their teachers) have to surmount in order for students to learn successfully? Then how do you measure all of the important outcomes of the teaching/learning process and separate those outcomes that were a result of better teaching, let alone identify which teacher or teachers actually did the better teaching? Only after these measurements are made and linked to each other can the rate of pay for individual teachers be effectively linked to teaching outcomes.
In addition, is success in teaching is an individual or a group process? If it is even substantially a group process, who belongs in the group? If successful outcomes result in more pay, how much of the increased pay is a result of group effort and how much of the efforts of individual teachers. Student outcomes are not widgets, to be measured by the quality control committee as each of thousands of identical widgets flow off the end of an assembly line. Sales and economic processes can be measured to some degree of success because the economic transaction of buying and selling goods and services creates a (roughly) measurable dollar value that be used to compare outcomes. There is no such value-measuring set of transactions that can be used to compare educational outcomes.
None of the teaching/learning processes are really understood nor at this time can they be effectively measured. Yet somehow politicians want to reward good teachers and punish failed ones by tying pay rates to these poorly understood processes and their outcomes. Teachers need to make the job of educating students their first priority. When they make increasing their paychecks their first priority, they are shortchanging the students. Teachers need to focus on teaching students, not satisfying some committee or supervisor to get a bigger check. The shift in focus from the students invariably short-changes the students. There are too many ways to game the system to increase paycheck. The teaching energies and efforts should not be misdirected into increasing paychecks over actual education efforts.
I'll buy measuring schools to determine which provide effective teaching to the students and which provide patronage jobs to the lackey's of politicians. That can and must be measured. I can even buy tying a part of the pay for top administrators to the performance of the students in their schools. But when you get down into the actual teaching/learning process in most schools, even the people who are working there rarely understand what is happening well enough to tie the amounts paid to outcomes or who is responsible for successes and who is responsible for failures. Attempts to measure these things invariably result in administrators who game the measurement process because no one really knows what to do to really change the outcomes. This has been the source of much of the failure of "No Child Left Behind." NCLB has collapsed on the issue of paying for testing students and teaching-to-the-test rather than educating them.
Not that there isn't some value in paying different rates to different teachers sometimes. More should be paid for teaching difficult subjects and for teaching in difficult circumstances, but tying paychecks to student educational outcomes is in fact a fool's errand, even for professionals. Not enough is really known about what education really is. Politicians need to butt out.
What does a politician know about what makes a good teacher different from an adequate teacher? (Bad ones can be identified, and should be generally removed from teaching quickly.) But to apply merit pay, it is necessary to understand the processes that lead to successful outcomes, measure those outcomes along with the inputs and the application of the processes, then link improved outcomes to the level of better application of the process that achieved those outcomes. This requires effective and reliable measurements of the inputs to the process, measures of how well the process is applied, and effective measures of what parts of the outcomes were successful as a result of better inputs and application of the process. Education does NOT fit this model. Such effective and reliable measures which can be applied in any given year do not exist.
How do you measure a process when you do not have good measures of where students start from and what the problems students (and their teachers) have to surmount in order for students to learn successfully? Then how do you measure all of the important outcomes of the teaching/learning process and separate those outcomes that were a result of better teaching, let alone identify which teacher or teachers actually did the better teaching? Only after these measurements are made and linked to each other can the rate of pay for individual teachers be effectively linked to teaching outcomes.
In addition, is success in teaching is an individual or a group process? If it is even substantially a group process, who belongs in the group? If successful outcomes result in more pay, how much of the increased pay is a result of group effort and how much of the efforts of individual teachers. Student outcomes are not widgets, to be measured by the quality control committee as each of thousands of identical widgets flow off the end of an assembly line. Sales and economic processes can be measured to some degree of success because the economic transaction of buying and selling goods and services creates a (roughly) measurable dollar value that be used to compare outcomes. There is no such value-measuring set of transactions that can be used to compare educational outcomes.
None of the teaching/learning processes are really understood nor at this time can they be effectively measured. Yet somehow politicians want to reward good teachers and punish failed ones by tying pay rates to these poorly understood processes and their outcomes. Teachers need to make the job of educating students their first priority. When they make increasing their paychecks their first priority, they are shortchanging the students. Teachers need to focus on teaching students, not satisfying some committee or supervisor to get a bigger check. The shift in focus from the students invariably short-changes the students. There are too many ways to game the system to increase paycheck. The teaching energies and efforts should not be misdirected into increasing paychecks over actual education efforts.
I'll buy measuring schools to determine which provide effective teaching to the students and which provide patronage jobs to the lackey's of politicians. That can and must be measured. I can even buy tying a part of the pay for top administrators to the performance of the students in their schools. But when you get down into the actual teaching/learning process in most schools, even the people who are working there rarely understand what is happening well enough to tie the amounts paid to outcomes or who is responsible for successes and who is responsible for failures. Attempts to measure these things invariably result in administrators who game the measurement process because no one really knows what to do to really change the outcomes. This has been the source of much of the failure of "No Child Left Behind." NCLB has collapsed on the issue of paying for testing students and teaching-to-the-test rather than educating them.
Not that there isn't some value in paying different rates to different teachers sometimes. More should be paid for teaching difficult subjects and for teaching in difficult circumstances, but tying paychecks to student educational outcomes is in fact a fool's errand, even for professionals. Not enough is really known about what education really is. Politicians need to butt out.
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Republicans want to return to segregation
Imagine Roberts, Alito, Scalia, Thomas, and Kennedy sitting at a discussion table in the Supreme Court building discussing and justifying their vote to each other. They realize that this is their chance to reverse Brown vs. Board of Education, the case every Republican knows was mistakenly decided case in 1954. These are five Justices who live in gated communities, after all. Money has already bought them their segregation, but their Party wants it everywhere. That is why they are on the Supreme Court, after all.
I can just hear the discussions going on in the Supreme Court with the five Catholic Justices as sitting there saying "We don't want those 'Nigras' sending their children to schools with ours. That's why we live in gated communities in the first place. (Thomas is nodding his head, remembering his White wife, and working very hard not to look at the color of his own skin. He is just like his rich friends, not like those low-class 'nigras.')
Someone speaks "Hey! We can resegregate as long as no one is allowed to measure the level of segregation! We can always claim that our schools aren't segregated if we have one or two 'Nigras' attending, and there are a few [sotto voice, so Thomas won't hear - 'Good house Nigras' ]we can depend on. And look! We don't even have to say "Separate but Equal." This way we have 'separate.' Who needs 'Equal?'
Then they all nod in agreement, finish their coffee, stand up and go to vote against desegregation.
Fantasy? Go look at Scotus Blog.
Now they can turn their energies to destroying Social Security, kicking the brown-skinned Mexican immigrants out of our White nation and finishing the overturning of Roe Vs. Wade.
Oh, and there may still be opportunities to make the President completely independent of the Congress using Executive Privilege. The Republicans may not need to keep stealing elections and suppressing the votes of African-American voters. A monarch is appointed by God to Rule the lesser beings, and is not to be interfered with by the peons and legislatures. Conservatives want to return to the proper order of things before all the pesky revolutionaries got loose. Remember the Divine Right of Kings? That's got a new name now. It's called "Executive Privilege."
Goes well with segregation, doesn't it? Divine Right of Republican Kings to stick with their own and exclude all others except as temporaryservants 'guest' workers. The Germans have been trying to make this work since they invited Turkish guest workers in during the 60's and 70's. No citizenship, even for the children, and they were supposed to go home too. They're dark-skinned, too. Not at all hard to exclude from "better society." It hasn't worked for the Germans. Now our Confederate States-based Republican Party wants to try the same (failed) strategy since the option of slavery is clearly a non-starter. For now.
Segregation is the next step to the future of American internal conflict, and the Republicans are happily embracing it.
I can just hear the discussions going on in the Supreme Court with the five Catholic Justices as sitting there saying "We don't want those 'Nigras' sending their children to schools with ours. That's why we live in gated communities in the first place. (Thomas is nodding his head, remembering his White wife, and working very hard not to look at the color of his own skin. He is just like his rich friends, not like those low-class 'nigras.')
Someone speaks "Hey! We can resegregate as long as no one is allowed to measure the level of segregation! We can always claim that our schools aren't segregated if we have one or two 'Nigras' attending, and there are a few [sotto voice, so Thomas won't hear - 'Good house Nigras' ]we can depend on. And look! We don't even have to say "Separate but Equal." This way we have 'separate.' Who needs 'Equal?'
Then they all nod in agreement, finish their coffee, stand up and go to vote against desegregation.
Fantasy? Go look at Scotus Blog.
Now they can turn their energies to destroying Social Security, kicking the brown-skinned Mexican immigrants out of our White nation and finishing the overturning of Roe Vs. Wade.
Oh, and there may still be opportunities to make the President completely independent of the Congress using Executive Privilege. The Republicans may not need to keep stealing elections and suppressing the votes of African-American voters. A monarch is appointed by God to Rule the lesser beings, and is not to be interfered with by the peons and legislatures. Conservatives want to return to the proper order of things before all the pesky revolutionaries got loose. Remember the Divine Right of Kings? That's got a new name now. It's called "Executive Privilege."
Goes well with segregation, doesn't it? Divine Right of Republican Kings to stick with their own and exclude all others except as temporary
Segregation is the next step to the future of American internal conflict, and the Republicans are happily embracing it.
Sunday, March 04, 2007
An agenda for recovery from Bush.
Talkleft extracted the elements from the NY Times article entitled "The Must-Do List." Here is the list of things that have to be done to recover from the Bush/Cheney/NeoCon administration.
- Restore Habeas Corpus
- Stop Illegal Spying
- Ban Torture, Really
- Close secret prisons,
- Account for the ghost prisoners,
- Ban extraordinary rendition,
- Tighten the definition of enemy combatant,
- Fairly screen prisoners,
- Ban secret and tainted evidence,
- Better define "classified evidence" and
- Respect the right to counsel.
- Get us out of Iraq and quit wasting American lives there.
- Get serious about the world-wide Counter-Terrorism effort ASAP.
- Start cleaning the NeoCon moles out of the Federal Government.
- Reinstate the "Fairness Doctrine" for all broadcast media.
- Get serious about taking care of the disabled military veterans, physically, mentally, and financially. Their families also.
- Audit and investigate the contractors who have had contracts with the military or the Intelligence Agencies active since 1994.
- Ensure that the systems of taking voting results and tabulating them are as close to tamper-proof as possible.
- Provide more serious support for training in college and work training for life.
- Implement a health-system that includes government guaranteed 100% coverage. Base this on community pricing instead of exclusions for prior health conditions so that along with 100% coverage, everyone pays the same premiums.
- Standardize the systems for applying for health care services so that clerks have to learn only one system to get reimbursement.
- Develop a general nationwide system that provides medical information on everyone similar to the one used by the VA system.
- Reestablish corporate income taxes, progressive individual taxes for the high income and the estate tax to pay for these programs.
- Follow the above up with getting control of spending and approach balancing the budget. [Note - the above healthcare reforms are expected to throw off extra funds that can be used to pay for them after the initial costs.]
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