Mailbag: National Standards and Merit Pay

Moataz asked:

What are your thoughts about national standards in education and performance pay of teachers ? Do you think that these are viable options ?

@M,

Re: National Standards, I have only seen this asserted as an arbitrary without any evidence from reality to support it as a policy solution; therefore, I dismiss it out of hand. If I come across any effort to support that policy with evidence from reality, then I think I could make short work of any such effort based upon evidence and objective principle.

Re: performance pay for teachers, I take the critics at their word; the public school system is not capable of measuring performance and giving rewards based upon merit. Given the educrats' confession that they can not do so for themselves, is it any wonder that they fail to do so objectively with our students?

Re: viability of these options, in the current context of public and progressive education, these will not work. It amounts to moving the deck chairs while the Titanic is sinking. The current public debate amounts to "Given that we can't do what should be done, will tweaking these other non-critical issues resolve the problem?" Such non sequiturs are the reason why public education, and other forms of non-objective law, continuously requires "reform".

Tancredo on Education

Ari Armstrong has posted an interview with Colorado's Tom Tancredo on the subject of education and parental choice.

Two interesting aspect of the interview: (1) his description of parents who are willing to evade responsibility for their kids' education by letting the government decide for them, and (2) the fear amongst professional that parental choice would mean a flight from the public schools.

Unfortunately, I think that Tancredo is correct about some parents on the first point. On the second point, as long as the government has significant regulatory oversight of private schools through entangling public programs, then a private education alternative does not really exist.

Philosophy of Education

Dr. Stephen Hicks, Professor of Philosophy at Rockford College and CEE's Executive Director, presents a series of lectures on YouTube about the philosophy of education, which were recorded during the 2009-2010 academic year. This introductory course presupposes no formal knowledge of philosophy or education.

Unfortunately, the naming convention of his YT playlists obscures the proper ordering of the course; therefore, I have listed with links the correct order below, so that I can consume the material more methodically.

Course Playlists

1) Introduction to the Course: Philosophy of Education
2) Metaphysics: Philosophy of Education
3) Epistemology: Philosophy of Education
4) Human Nature: Philosophy of Education
5) Ethics: Philosophy of Education
6) Transition: Philosophy of Education
7) Idealism: Philosophy of Education
8) Realism: Philosophy of Education
9) Pragmatism: Philosophy of Education
10) Behaviorism: Philosophy of Education
11) Existentialism: Philosophy of Education

13) Marxism: Philosophy of Education
14) Postmodernism: Philosophy of Education
15) Conclusion: The Importance of Philosophy of Education

Wordle of The Prometheus Inquiry

Seeing how Wordles were being used by Fast Company to highlight key words in speeches by tech leaders at AllThingsD D8 conference, I decided to run this blog through to get a flavor.



If you would like to try creating Wordles for assigned reading, your own writing, or lesson plans, then go to Wordle.

Venture Capital in Education

Berkery Noyes' 2010 Venture Capital in Education Summit will be held June 8-9 in NYC. According to the events website, “This year’s Summit will examine the key drivers behind these emerging trends and showcase some of the leading-edge entrepreneurs and investors whose ideas harken the changes to come.”

Fast Company’s Anya Kamenetz described last year’s summit as “where VCs and private equity firms talked about the enormous potential in disrupting one of the world's biggest industries, one that still remains tantalizingly locked up by bureaucracies within bureaucracies.”

Today, Kamenetz described 10 early stage start ups that will be part of the summit’s showcase, and recommend 3 additional education start ups.

Muzzy Lane Software creates 3D games through its Sandstone Platform. Middle school education projects include: ClearLab and Cell Saver (games for science), and Past/Present (social history).

Launchpad Toys recently unveiled their first digital toy called Toontastic, which is a storytelling and animation tool for the iPad. At their website, they also claim to be “…building an online community for all you parents, educators, kids, and kids-at-heart to share your thoughts and experiences on Digital Play and Creative Education.” Related to social media, one interesting recent post on their site says that they have been thinking about how to build a better community for kids to share their creations.

Along those later lines, Everloop is in beta for a social networking platform targeting 8-13 year olds with profile customization, real-time communications (email, IM, chat and voice chat), real-time posts and video uploading, and groups of common interest; plus original video content, games, and a virtual store.

Notehall targets college students with an on-line marketplace for buying and selling class notes. Recently, I had suggested the creation of study materials for sale as an enriching supplement to the parent of a bored and unchallenged college student. This service could serve as distribution for such an individual effort.

Watermelon Express created iPhone and Desktop apps to aid students in preparing for the GRE, SAT, GMAT, LSAT, and MCAT.

Irynsoft offers a distance learning platform, including peer networks, delivered through an iPhone.

CCKF promotes an adaptive learning framework that focuses on the individual learner within the context of defined course objectives.

PresenceTeleCare offers web-based speech therapy. While targeted in its product offering, the framework could apparently offer additional services targeted to scaling up limited specialist resources.

FairChoice Systems offers cost reducing health compliance solutions for colleges which integrate with students’ smart phones.

Kamenetz correctly laments that these solutions piggyback on existing education infrastructure without really changing the system as they target schools and universities as their clients. In addition, some of these solutions are focused on reducing regulatory compliance costs in such a way that they are dependent upon the status quo.

In contrast, Kamenetz recommends three start up companies that offer the potential for transformation: Einztein, NaMaYa, and Udemy.

Einztein is a nonprofit online campus offering free course content using a variety of available media from various colleges and universities around the world. This could be an excellent resource for high school students seeking enrichment, or an opportunity to survey potential majors for interest; however, adult supervision/guidance may be needed to control for potential weird-Ivory-Tower-disconnected-from-reality profs.

NaMaYa and Udemy are both interesting to me in that they offer platforms for publishing online course content. NaMaYa seems more oriented to primary and secondary teachers and schools. Udemy seems to have more postsecondary offerings. Another online content publisher that I have been looking at is Soomo Publishing.

From this sample, where is the VC money going? Companies that are offering to leverage technology to address niche, supplemental, and infrastructure services. Missing are the capital intensive private school infrastructure build outs to replace our failing public schools. Further, where are the offers to parents to aid in advancing their kid as had the encyclopedia and computer in the past?

Overall, I see some interesting opportunities in the platforms, frameworks, and technology integrations at the foundation of these products which can be brought together to advance education beyond our failed public school system.

To a Public School Apologist

My post “Ravitch Admits Errors, Then Repeats” received the following comment on YouTube from cxa011550:

“Government is force? By that simplistic logic you should support anarchy. By the same token, the ultimate goal of private business is profit, not reason, and not even the benefit of students. As Ravitch pointed out in another lecture, when private organizations are put in charge of schools they often exclude ‘undesirable’ students whose low performance would take away from their bottom line. Public education DOES work for many students, just not enough.”

That comment specifically relates to the following paragraph in the original post:

“In embracing a renewed drive to fix public schools, Ravitch fails to correct one of her fundamentally flawed premises: that schools should be public. She criticizes hybrid efforts to bring business principles to school reform, while missing that the public nature of schools is one of education’s key problems. Government is force, which puts force—and not Reason—as the fundamental driver in public education.”

Let’s break the comment out and evaluate it.

1) “Government is force? By that simplistic logic you should support anarchy.”

Actually, I do NOT support anarchy as I judge that government plays an essential role in subordinating the retaliatory use of force to objective law. However, government should be utilized to achieve its proper purpose and within its distinctive competence instead of being a catch all for any collective action at the expense of freedom of association and civil society.

The comment demonstrates the process of taking a statement out of context and applying logic independent of reality, which is the Rationalism that I criticized in Ravitch’s approach and more generally is the common approach taught by public education.

In context, by saying that government is force, I refer to how government action is different from cooperative projects.

Tying this back to reality, how do we see force in government education? Compulsory education laws. Laws against home schooling. Statutory and regulatory restrictions and mandates over educational content. Expropriation of funding. Court rulings that parents do not have a fundamental right to direct their child education. I could go on, but I think that I have validated that public education applies force against children, parents, and other members of the community.

In government’s proper function, the use of force is retaliatory to protect individual rights. In the case of American public education, government initiates force against anyone who would dissent from the majority who holds power at that moment.

2) “By the same token, the ultimate goal of private business is profit, not reason, and not even the benefit of students.”

Actually, Eliyahu Goldratt put it best when he said that the goal of a business is to make money now and in the future.

The incentives for politicians are short term, until the next election or the next step up in power. In doing so, they do not need to provide excellent service to the parents and students, but only the plurality needed to grant them power.

In contrast, effective business people think in terms of their life time and even thereafter. One can point to business people that create enormous short term wealth only to have it waste into nothingness, which demonstrates the distinction between the effective and the ephemeral.

To be effective, in business, one must produce and exchange value in a fair trade of value (money) for value (service or product). What value are parents looking for in education? Reason, or at least that is what they should aspire to for their children; in an environment of free association, other parents could choose mysticism, skepticism, or other flavors of the irrational.

Instead of a private market making great, good, mediocre, and awful choices available to parents, they are now assigned by American public education only mediocre or awful alternatives with penalties to any that attempt better for their children.

3) “As Ravitch pointed out in another lecture, when private organizations are put in charge of schools they often exclude ‘undesirable’ students whose low performance would take away from their bottom line.”

This is a consequence of mixing the private and the public, which can not be used to condemn the wholly private. The same criticism could be applied to any government contracting, which can be horrific despite vital private enterprises thriving without government interference.

How is it that low performing students take away from the bottom line? By the terms of the public contracts as set by the public authority.

In contrast, in a private school, low performing students offer an opportunity to delight their customer (the parents) with excellent service by improving the capacity of those students.

For a concrete example of this in reality, I point to the private Deseret Academy (see Mr Cropper’s channel on YouTube), which took unmotivated and poorly performing public school students, and transformed them into motivated and successful private school students. Also, for excellence in private education, I cite the Van Damme Academy.

4) “Public education DOES work for many students, just not enough.”

This comment reminds me of a statement by Ralph Ketcham in his biography of James Madison:

“A student of Madison’s endowments can sometimes overcome a series of poor teachers; that he was blessed with good ones at almost every step of his education undoubtedly contributed importantly to the characteristic discipline, keenness, and polish of his intellect.”

I have dealt with the essential aspects of this comment’s issue previously in my posts “Our Students’ Potential Gap” and “Who are Parents to Decide About their Child?”

Who are Parents to Decide About Their Child?

Last month, William C. Mims was appointed to Virginia’s Supreme Court after a public career that included service in the House of Delegates, the state Senate, and as the state’s Attorney General. I remember when he was first running for Delegate and knocked upon my door to ask for my vote.

He asked whether I had any concerns that he could act upon as a legislator, and I did. Under the law, my daughter was born a month and a half too young to start public kindergarten, when we as parents thought was appropriate and would have been consistent with the law when I was young. He expressed his sympathy, because his own daughter had suffered under the same legal limitation. However, he said that as a legislator that he would be in no position to change that law.

As a parent, he knew that the law was inconsistent with the educational requirements of specific children. Despite his concern for his own daughter, he did nothing to advance her educational interests. Given his influence, an opportunity, and the power to right a wrong for future individuals, he refused to act. He suspended his own independent judgment and deferred to the opinions of others.

In contrast, I paid for private kindergarten so that my daughter would advance her education. However, the next year, the public school refused to recognize her achievement and wanted her to repeat kindergarten; despite her ability to read, write, and compute. As parents, we pushed to get her tested and put into 1st grade over the objections of her teacher and the school’s principal.

As a result of our continuing to exercise our independent judgment, our daughter started taking AP courses in her sophomore year and graduated high school with nearly enough credits to start college as a sophomore. She graduated summa cum laude with two degrees from a great college, where she engaged in numerous leadership opportunities. Now, she is about to start on a five year master’s-doctoral program.

While my daughter did all the work to achieve her own goals, as parents, we acted to make those opportunities available to her; however, the experts administering the public schools, attempted to obstruct her advancement by failing to treat her as an individual.

Parents have a choice to make; either defer to the opinions of the public educrats who fail to account for individual variances, or use independent judgment to focus decisions upon the requirements of your own child.

Our Students' Potential Gap

This weekend my niece, a first-grader, picked up Ralph Ketcham’s biography of James Madison from my shelf, and began correctly and unaided to read it aloud. As she is early in her education, she is not yet corrupted by public school and eagerly competes with her older siblings to demonstrate her own individual capacity.

Within that book, I recently found an interesting observation by the author about Madison’s pre-collegiate education:

A student of Madison’s endowments can sometimes overcome a series of poor teachers; that he was blessed with good ones at almost every step of his education undoubtedly contributed importantly to the characteristic discipline, keenness, and polish of his intellect.

In today’s era of egalitarian public schools with reportedly poor teachers, are our current students overcoming these limitations to achieve their own individual potential to develop their capacity for applying their own mind to the fulfillment of their lives? Despite these limitations, some students excel either without competent teachers, or with the benefit of a rare competent educator.

Primarily, this potential gap ignored by ineffective publicly hired specialists is bridge by the parents; thus, those professionals frequently fault their clients for failing to perform the job for which the educrats are paid.

Given limited time resources, expertise, and private secular alternatives, how can loving parents assist the educational development of their children? At this point, I conclude that hiring a mature and professional tutor focused upon your individual child’s development and personal goals is needed to supplement the time and money wasted in public schools.

Coulson on Replicating Success

In a recent WSJ opinion piece, Andrew J. Coulson--Director of CATO’s Center for Educational Freedom—identifies a key defect in American education: its inability to replicate successful results. [HT: Thrutch]

The persistence of this problem is not for lack of effort or high level commitment. Coulson notes that the goal of identifying and propagating the best methods and materials drove Horace Mann’s effort in establishing centralized state direction of public education in the early 19th century. Yet more than 150 years later, President Clinton observed, about those who have devoted themselves to education reform, they “…are constantly plagued by the fact that nearly every problem has been solved by somebody somewhere, and yet we can't seem to replicate it everywhere else."

The recent death of one of America’s best known teachers provided Coulson with a concrete example of his point. Jaime Escalante, made famous in the movie “Stand and Deliver,” created a program to successfully teach calculus to poor inner city kids. Despite his success, the teachers union contested his large class sizes, which gave access to all willing students. He experienced conflicts with other teachers and the administration, plus he received threats of violence. Eventually, he was pushed out of his position as head of the math department, which precipitated not only his resignation but also the demise of his successful program.

In contrast, Coulson points to two recent examples of success: the KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) network of 82 charter schools, and the Kumon tutoring centers, which help 4 million students in 42 countries.

However, I would note two criticisms of these examples, which get to points that I have made previously about “public” education and proper instructional methodology. First, Diana Ravitch had noted that charter schools as a whole do not foster better student performance than regular public schools; which further supports Coulson’s overall point that publicly financed and regulated schools fail to replicate innovation, thus the overall charter school results return to the same miserably ineffective level. Second, as Coulson acknowledges, the rote drill methods of instruction typical of Japanese education, such as Kumon, do not promote the conceptual thinking necessary for a student’s later success in life.

Extrapolating from Coulson’s essay, I find three additional important points about education reform, which provide a substantial challenge.

The first relates to the lack of properly trained teachers. Escalante’s efforts were hampered because he had more motivated students than qualified teachers. This relates to Ravitch’s proposal for stricter certification of teachers, which would require a demonstration of subject matter expertise. However, raising the standards does not create suddenly qualified teachers; instead, it identifies what we already know: students require better teachers than those created by our teacher colleges. If all schools were privatized tomorrow, we would still have the problem of poorly trained and poor performing teachers.

As I mentioned earlier in the week to a prospective teacher, I view the lack of properly trained (according to my own standards) teachers as the largest constraint in establishing and scaling up my own educational institutions, thus I have to plan to retrain the teachers myself before I can begin with students.

Second, the process of replicating best practices in private industry leverage two relevant tools: franchising and independent auditing. Within Coulson’s context, I refer to the aspect of franchising that documents procedures and practices, and provides supporting training to implement uniform and optimized standards across a distributed enterprise. Ravitch recommends external auditing of troubled schools as a lever to identify and target resources for improvement. However, the critical aspect of auditing is “what standards shall be used for measurement?” Applying the wrong standards re-enforces negative outcomes; as the Escalante case demonstrates, public school values are incompatible with actual education. In fact, school reform efforts have been frustrated over issues of what to audit and how to do so.

Third, teachers unions have proven to be an impediment to actually teaching students. While Ravitch objects to the wholesale firing of all teachers in failed schools, an alternative that should be considered is terminating the union from that school. This is not an anti-union reflex, but focused upon the question of “What is the purpose of teachers unions within education?” If one of their key purposes is not facilitating the delivery of excellent education or they have failed to do so, then they should be excluded.

In summary, related to Coulson’s observation about American education’s inability to replicate successful results, such efforts are incompatible with public management, regulation, and financing of schools. Further, even with privatization, significant improvements must be made in labor relations, teacher training, and the establishment of objective standards for measuring and implementing best education practices.

Ravitch Admits Errors, Then Repeats

Education historian Diana Ravitch has been getting press lately over her new book The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, especially played up in such accounts is her repudiating the policies of No Child Left Behind--the Bush Administration’s education reform initiative. However, it is presumptuous to cite this as a significant change in her positions or that the new specific policies that she advocates are any more palatable to the critics of NCLB.

In her prior book Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms, Ravitch begins her conclusion by writing:

“If there is a lesson to be learned from the river of ink that was spilled in the education disputes of the twentieth century, it is that anything in education that is labeled a ‘movement’ should be avoided like the plague. What American education most needs is not more nostrums and enthusiasms but more attention to fundamental, time-tested truths. It is a fundamental truth that children need well-educated teachers who are eclectic in their methods and willing to use different strategies depending on what works best for which children. It is another fundamental truth that adults must take responsibility for children and help them develop as good persons with worthy ideals.

“Massive changes in curricula and pedagogy should be based on solid research and careful field-tested demonstration before they are imposed on entire school districts and states. There has been no shortage of innovation in American education; what is needed before broad implementation of any innovation is clear evidence of its effectiveness. Schools must be flexible enough to try new instructional methods and organizational patterns, and intelligent enough to gauge their success over time in accomplishing their primary mission: educating children.”

In a new Washington Post op-ed, Ravitch outlines her new agenda for school reform. Why new? As she previously stated, data should drive decisions; she cites the lack of significant improvement in reading and math test scores as evidence that the current policy has failed. She states that idealistic goals of 100% proficiency have corrupted education by dumbing down standards as a means of defrauding the process. Further, she states that parental choice through charter school programs has failed to create improvement in public schools, while these alternatives do not outperform them.

The focus of her new agenda is fixing failed public school management. First, she advocates enhanced standards for teacher certification, including rigorously testing teachers for competence in their core subject, literacy, and numeracy. Second, she advocates a shift in the expertise of principals and superintendents from administration to experience as excellent teachers. Third, she calls for more effective and substantial tools for assessing student knowledge. Finally, she repudiates the practice of identifying and closing schools that fail to improve, and instead calls for additional investments in solutions tailored to those schools' specific demographic challenges.

Ravitch is consistent; she uses data to identify that prior school reform efforts have failed and then pragmatically asserts a new program of reforms. She attributes her prior erroneous advocacy to a foundation in belief and faith; hardly, the data driven rigor she aspires to. As she did in the conclusion to her prior book, she explains her new agenda Rationalistically, by starting with an asserted truism disconnect from its context that should link it back to reality.

Ravitch remains in the tradition of John Dewey’s Pragmatism, which has dominated the failed century of school reform criticized by Ravitch. As Tara Smith explained in her article “The Menace of Pragmatism”, William James wrote that pragmatism does not stand for any results or specific substantive doctrines; rather, it is distinguished by its method of ‘clarifying ideas’ in practical terms by tracing the practical consequences of accepting one idea or another. Abandoning a conceptual framework of integrated principles tied to Reality, the fundamental causes of failure are not examined; instead, the cycle restarts with new and different action proposals based upon consensus derived truisms.

In embracing a renewed drive to fix public schools, Ravitch fails to correct one of her fundamentally flawed premises: that schools should be public. She criticizes hybrid efforts to bring business principles to school reform, while missing that the public nature of schools is one of the education’s key problems. Government is force, which puts force—and not Reason—as the fundamental driver in public education.

In addition, the teaching methodology used in our schools, and re-enforced by Ravitch’s proposals, share the flaws exhibited by Ravitch’s processes: Rationalism and Pragmatism. Currently, instruction lacks conceptual integration and fails to tie the material back to reality; which causes students to repeatedly wonder what the lessons have to do with their lives. Meanwhile, our schools foster unprincipled actions focused upon ephemeral outcomes without regard to enduring values.

While a famed historian of education, Ravitch admits to recently promoting failed school reform, and advocates a new action agenda. However, she has not learned the lessons from the history that she has studied and lived. By evading the need for principles as a guide to action, she advocates marginal improvements instead of identifying the transforming changes required by our schools and students.

What is The Prometheus Inquiry?

The Prometheus Inquiry is a open think tank, in which educators and parents can participate in discovering enhanced methodologies for increasing educational productivity and achievement.

In doing so, we have a definitive orientation and set of values. Actual Reality exists and is knowable to us through our human faculty of Reason, which informs the process by which moral choices are made in order to realize the value of providing educational opportunities that will be meaningful to our students' capacity to be successful in their own lives.

The Prometheus Inquiry is an incubator for the implementation of innovation aimed at increasing the productivity of educational institutions, teachers, and students.

At this time, through our website, our principle offering is the selective collection, publication, and integration of data related to reform, innovation, and trends in education.

Additional product developments are at the brainstorming phase. Potential future projects include:

* An anonymous on-line discussion forum to facilitate an open and frank dialogue about the challenges facing our schools, classrooms, teachers, and students.

* An implementation plan for offering remedial education at post-secondary institutions at lower cost by leveraging technology and non-tradition pools of instructors.

* A franchise model for a tutoring service focused upon individualized educational goal planning, and supplementing existing public and home school offering.

However, at this moment, we are primarily watching, listening, and learning about problems and opportunities related to enabling educational excellence and student success. Please feel free to share your ideas and feedback.

What products and services do you wish were accessible to your students?