This is a continuation of Skip’s post, addressing Kevin Verville’s original email comments on my post and other comments made by people (whose identities will be kept private) who joined in on that thread. Thanks to everyone who did!
I apologize in advance for the length. But it was an interesting discussion that covered a lot of ground.
We start with Kevin:
There are two things that are difficult to reconcile: Desire, and reality. We desire that all students perform at some common minimum level by age.
Is that really what we desire? I think what we desire is that they perform at some minimum level before we declare them ‘educated’. I don’t see what age really has to do with it. There are people who graduate from college at 13, from medical school at 17. Would anyone consider that ‘undesirable’? If one kid gets to a 12th grade reading level by age 10, and another takes until age 23, do I really care, as long as they get the job done?
We do not specify the age anywhere, except that we refer to it as grade level, which is also inaccurate, as we “socially promote” almost all students every year, so grade more often than not, refers to number of years attending school.
It seems to me that ‘grade level’ makes more sense if it means something like ‘prerequisite level’. In other contexts, we use the word ‘grade’ as a way of talking about quality, or state of completion. When we want to talk about the passage of time, we use words like ‘year’.
So it would probably be a step in the right direction to start talking about ‘First year’ instead of ‘First grade’, ‘Second year’ instead of ’Second grade’, and so on, if the passage of time, rather then the accumulation of knowledge, is what we’re trying to denote.
So I just stated the quiet part out loud, and revealed the decoder ring. We socially promote students based on age, not based upon academic ability. Why? Because we do not want to commingle students across broad age ranges…such as having 10 year olds in the same class as 16 year olds. OK, fair enough.
The value of using age as a shortcut for assigning grade level appears to be convenience — which is why we use it as a shortcut for determining whether someone can vote, enter into a contract, get married, buy a gun, and so on.
The alternative is to have to treat people as individuals, and evaluate their capabilities on an individual basis. It’s so much easier to just treat people as statistics… which is more or less the idea behind social justice, right? We know about the groups to which you belong, so we don’t need to consider you as an individual.
But convenience is its only value. And that convenience comes at a tremendous cost.
The joke about the lamppost is relevant here, where age (and not money) is now the lamppost. If we focus on age, then we’ll never actually consider what factors should control who gets grouped together in a class.
Is it better to have a bunch of 10-year-olds, some of whom are predisposed to violent or disruptive behavior; or a bunch of kids of ages 8 through 16, who have demonstrated the ability to interact with each other politely, and exhibit self-control?
Is it better to have a bunch of 10-year-olds who are at wildly different levels of preparation for what is going to be taught; or a bunch of kids of ages 8 through 16, who are at the same level of preparation, and ready to be exposed to the same material as a group?
Age isn’t a reasonable way to group people for anything. It’s an excuse for not doing the work to find reasonable ways to group them, or to get along without the need for such groupings.
We used to segregate school kids by race. Then we decided that was a stupid idea. Eventually, we’re going to come to the same conclusion about age. One can only hope that it happens sooner, rather than later.
Except that when we promote on age, then we need to instruct at many different levels in each grade.
Which is okay, if you’re just going to have individualized education. But if you’re going to try to teach the same thing to a bunch of kids at once, it’s completely inappropriate, possibly worse than just doing nothing:
https://granitegrok.com/blog/2019/10/in-praise-of-assembly-line-schools
We used to “track,” group students by academic ability by grade. We, far and large, no longer do that. Now we “mainstream” students. That is to say we work to ensure that this is a mixture of academic ability in each classroom, in each grade…almost always with one teacher per classroom. If your gut tells you that this is a recipe for disaster in the traditional American public school, then you have good instincts. The reality is that this “mainstreaming” system results, more often than not, in a race to the bottom.
We use the idea of ‘least restrictive environment’ for some to create what would more accurately be called a ‘most disruptive environment’ for everyone else.
The other elephant in the room is how American public schools deal (actually fail to deal) with discipline. This is a topic for another day.
Actually, I think it’s a topic for right now, since the capacity for self-discipline is one of the metrics that we ought to be using instead of age when deciding who should share a room.
Unless we are willing to return to tracking, providing classrooms for students of particular academic abilities by grade, then we cannot improve the system.
Think about how you would run any other kind of school, like a martial arts school, or a music school, or a gymnastics school — you know, the kind of school where the teachers only get paid if the students actually learn.
Students would progress at their own rates, and be grouped — if at all — by what they’re working on, rather than by ‘age’, or ‘academic ability’, or any other vague assessment. You work on what you’re ready to work on. And how would a teacher decide what a student is ready to work on? You give him some tests.
Why do public schools ignore this incredibly obvious idea?
I don’t see why it’s so hard for people to wrap their heads around… except for the sheer convenience of being able to use age to label and segregate students. And the fact that the easiest thing to do next year is whatever we did this year, and last year.
(Another joke: A guy walks into his kitchen just in time to see his wife cut the end off a roast and throw it away. He asks why she did that. She says, that’s just how you cook a roast. It’s the way my mom always did it. They call up the mom, and she says the same thing. They call up the grandmother, and she says: I always threw away the end of the roast because my roaster was too small. That’s our education system in a nutshell.)
Assessments were demanded as a vehicle for academic accountability. We got the assessments, but not the accountability. There are no easy answers… Well, there is one “easy” answer. That is expanded school choice.
As long as schools are run in the same basic way — and the state will make sure that this is the case — school choice isn’t an answer at all. It’s a distraction from having to address fundamental questions like: Why do we organize the education of children in a way that is optimized for sharing the kinds of resources that existed in 1780, or 1880, or even 1980? Why don’t we educate children using the kinds of resources we have now?
If we were starting from scratch, we wouldn’t have anything that even remotely resembles ‘schools’, whether public or private. Schools are to education what arcades are to gaming. Except that arcades didn’t offer subsidized daycare.
One participant chimed in with a question:
This is an interesting discussion. However, what is the standard you want the children to achieve? Does anyone have a definition for proficiency?
Actually, I do. You have a written and oral exam in which people try to mislead you, and you have to identify the means — logical, emotional, rhetorical, statistical — by which they’re doing it. To pass this test, you would have to be literate, numerate, and rational enough to participate intelligently in public policy discussions as a citizen, and capable enough to learn any trade or profession that you want to go into.
Someone else responded to Kevin’s remarks about discipline:
I have no faith in the ability of administrators or teachers to adequately discipline students.
I don’t see why this should be their job. If what you are trained to do is teach, then you should be working in an environment in which students are ready and equipped to learn. Students who aren’t ready or equipped to learn, or who simply don’t want to learn, should be somewhere other than in your classroom.
There used to be something called a ‘finishing school’, where students would go to learn, not academic subjects, but how to behave socially in certain situations in society. How to dress, how to dine, how to converse politely, how to put other people at ease, and so on.
Perhaps we need to have ‘beginning schools’, where students would learn, not academic subjects, but how to behave socially in schools — or more generally, in society. Until you get through beginning school, you don’t get to attend regular school.
I suppose ‘pre-school’ and kindergarten are supposed to deal with this. But they are age-based. And kindergarten has become more like other grades. You get out when enough time has passed, and not when you’ve learned what you needed to learn.
These 6-7-8 year old children are now 8-9-10 and have no idea how to socialize, how to problem solve on the playground how to share a swing, they don’t understand how to take turns on the slide or how to play throw to the crowd at recess. They have no idea how to engage in a conversation where they disagree.
And they should learn these things, not in school, but before attending school. To put these kids into an academic environment is… I don’t think insane is too strong a word. Telling teachers that they have to try to teach such students is like telling surgeons that they have to try to operate without anesthesia.
If we tried that, the surgeons would quit. Teachers should do the same.
Someone else jumped in:
Yes we need change in our public education. I had a Mom tell me that she pulled her son out of school for home schooling.
This is becoming increasingly common.
She discovered her son did not know how to read and really did not know the alphabet. She took responsibility for not picking up on this. He was either in 4th or 5th grade. I was disgusted that he had just got pushed through from one grade to another. Many of the children get pushed through school from one grade to another not knowing how to do the basics like reading or math. This is nothing new and has been going on for years.
I’m often reminded a lot of a cartoon that I saw years ago. (Please excuse the nudity, but it’s the only cartoon I’ve ever seen that makes this particular point.) The guy on the sidewalk is like a lot of parents before COVID:
No idea what was going on in school, and just assuming that everything was as they expected… Then, with so-called ‘remote learning’, they got to peek behind the wall. Many of those who realized what was happening pulled their kids out. Others are trying to ‘reform the system’. That’s been going on for a long time, with entirely predictable results:
She continues:
How do we change it and expect more from our teachers?
I suppose the first thing to do would be to stop paying teachers regardless of whether they are successful at teaching.
Would we run any business where we actually cared about the results in the same way that we run public schools? Would a restaurant hire cooks who don’t actually know how to cook? Would a garage hire mechanics who don’t actually know how to fix engines?
The teachers themselves, perhaps unwittingly, often tell us that they want to be ‘treated like professionals’.
I say, let’s take them at their word: Professionals have to go out and find clients, and keep them happy, if they want to stay in business. Which means they have to provide results people want, at a cost people are willing to pay. And if they’re not up to it, they have to go find other ways to support themselves.
But in the end, it’s probably less about what we ‘expect from teachers’, and more about what we expect from students, and parents, and society in general. In particular, as long as we think of education as an entitlement, instead of as a responsibility, nothing is going to change:
https://granitegrok.com/blog/2020/03/amendment-2-and-article-83
Someone else turned the conversation to the topic of standards:
The standards are supposed to measure the students abilities for each grade before moving on. Unfortunately they still allow students to the next grade stating he/she will learn more in the next grade with extra help. That is why they are promoted. That’s why the students are always behind. Some teachers claim that if they have progressed throughout the year they can move on. We are currently rewriting our standards in the district. Wakefield never adopted Common Core, a bonus. During the past couple years getting rid of administrators who were not helpful, it has been challenging. Hopefully everyone will stick to the standards and what is best for the students’ learning. Behavior can be its own thread!
Even if you ‘stick to standards’, it doesn’t help if you’ve standardized the wrong things. Standards that focus on content that needs to be ‘delivered’ by teachers, rather than on the ability of students to learn independently, miss the point:
https://granitegrok.com/blog/2019/04/a-standard-for-school-standards
Of course, the aim of such standards would be to make teachers progressively less necessary over the course of a student’s education. Which is why you’ll never see them adopted.
They changed the definitions too. Now our curriculum policies don’t match up. They have kept them simple up to now. The board is reviewing them as they move along. It has been working so far. Our biggest issue is when a subject is added to the curriculum. Teachers say it’s not curriculum, it’s a program. Parents want to know what materials, course work and programs they are using. Not hard to list it or as a parent, ask the teacher.
If the kids can read the curriculum (or program) materials, then it should be up to the kids (and their parents) to decide whether to read them or not.
If the kids can’t read the curriculum materials, then they should be working on whatever skills they lack that prevent them from being able to — whether those skills involve literacy, numeracy, or rationality.
How’s that for simple? :^D
For example, if you want to ‘teach CRT’, first teach the kids to read and understand explanations that are based on logical or statistical reasoning; and teach them to be able to detect the rhetorical and emotional tricks that people use to mislead each other; and then give them the same materials that you’d give to the teachers. (This would have the added advantage of letting the kids see how the authors of the materials are assisting the teachers in jerking the kids around.)
The same is true for teaching history, civics, economics, sciences, literature… pretty much everything.
How much better would this be for the kids? How much less would it cost the taxpayers? How much power would it take away from politicians and bureaucrats?
Someone new jumped in to support Kevin’s idea that school choice is the answer:
supporting and propping up the School Choice movement is the proverbial “poke in the eye” to Public Education.
But ‘school choice’ still uses taxes to pay for education. Using taxes makes something inherently political. So control over the schools that parents are allowed to ‘choose’ will become political — or more precisely, more political than it is already. School choice is a feint, a delay tactic, not a solution.
The ‘solution’, if there is one, is to minimize — ideally, eliminate — the use of taxes for education. To use education funding as a last resort (like food stamps, or heating oil subsidies), rather than as a first resort.
In other words, to start treating being educated — like being armed — as a responsibility, rather than as an entitlement.
Absent that, school choice just changes the particular arena in which the political battles take place. And the thing about political battles is, they are ultimately won by the side with the least scruples. The problem with poking Argus in the eye is that he still has 99 of them left. It’s not a winning strategy.
Hit them in the pocketbook. Demand accountability of the huge amounts of money spent providing a less than adequate education.
Great idea. How can we do that? We could elect officials to collect the money, and to oversee how it’s spent. Oh… isn’t that what we have already? Why isn’t it working out?
Maybe we could pass a law to require schools to get all students to proficiency! Oh, wait… we already have one, RSA 193-H:2. (There was a bill — sponsored by State Senator Ruth Ward, chair of the Senate Education Committee — to repeal it this year, which thankfully got tabled.) Why aren’t the schools doing that?
The main thing we need from graduates is for them to be literate, numerate, and rational enough to be able to guard their freedom from politicians and bureaucrats who want to manipulate them into giving it up. The probability of creating a tax-funded, government-controlled system to produce this result is the same as the probability of creating a perpetual-motion machine.
If accountability is going to work, it has to be in the hands of the people most directly affected: the students. Without mandatory attendance laws, kids who are not being well-served by a school would be free to leave. It would then fall to the parents to convince the kids of the value of getting an education, which would force them to consider the question of whether public schools — or just schools — are the right places to get one.
Those laws won’t be repealed, because a guaranteed captive audience is one of the things that keeps the whole enterprise afloat. But if accountability is really what we’re after, that’s what it would look like.
A new participant backed me up on school choice:
If you watch a lot of the national trends and conversations surrounding school choice, many of the bills at the various state levels that support or enhance school choice simply make the alternate education choices beholden to the same standards that the public education system can’t manage to meet or uphold now. They then use tax dollars as a carrot and stick to enforce compliance and make the alternate education solution look exactly like the failed government model that it was supposed to replace.
Exactly.
I say failed government model because too many people say failing. They say our schools are failing. This is not a present tense matter. Our school system as Americans has failed. That is past tense. (Although really, in terms of producing Marxist education camps, progressives could say they are a great success) We are now on the other side scratching our heads looking at ourselves and asking the hard questions of “what can we do about it?”
My children are not grown; these issues are not theoretical political or social; they are very real! I appreciate each and every one of you and your contributions to this discussion; I can personally testify that this generation of parents needs us asking these questions more than ever.
I couldn’t agree more. And the distinction between failing and failed is one that we need to keep front and center.
I would just suggest that one of the first questions for any parent to consider is:
Is my goal to get my own kids an education? Or to reform an entire system, so that my kids can use that system to get an education?
Or to put that differently:
To avoid stepping on sharp objects, should I try to cover the world in leather? Or just wear shoes?
He answered my question this way:
As a parent, the goals are separate for me. My goal is apparent is to get my children a quality education, which public education is not going to provide.
Separate from that, as a veteran, citizen, taxpayer, My goal would be to reform the system so that our children can be sufficiently educated to safeguard our Constitutional freedoms and participate competitively on the world market.
I would suggest that the first (being able to safeguard our freedoms) implies the second (being able to compete economically), but not vice versa.
I only have a few short years to provide goal number one and I do not believe we will accomplish goal number two in that time frame. I do believe that what occurred in Croydon and what has occurred since COVID has sown seeds. However, We have been going in the wrong direction for a generation or more, and we will not rebuild Rome in a day.
I think that if enough parents who are clear on these priorities (first, educate my kids; second, fix the system) find ways to educate their kids outside the system, what will happen is that we’ll eventually realize, as a nation, that one of the biggest problems with ‘the system’ is that we think of it as a system:
https://granitegrok.com/blog/2020/03/the-education-system
https://granitegrok.com/blog/2020/06/unfit-for-liberty-part-2-education
Someone added:
God help us all but I say we keep trying to protect the children. Not just ours but all.
Sure, but do you know of any situations in which children have been protected by placing them in the hands of government employees? Where — even if it has succeeded in a handful of cases — it hasn’t ended up doing more harm than good as a whole?
There’s a game I like to play with my progressive friends. I tell them I’m thinking of a government project, which we’ll call X. We’re not going to say what X is, but we’re going to set aside a pile of money — billions of dollars, say. Maybe hundreds of billions.
Then I ask: How much of that money is actually going to end up being applied towards the goals of the project, and how much of it is going to end up being siphoned off to people with political influence? How much of it might even end up being used to work against the goals of the project?
When they don’t know what X is, they can see right away how things will go, how things have to go, based on both experience and common sense. Almost none of the money will be used for its intended purpose. Almost all of it will go to people with connections. A significant portion of it may be used to undermine the goals of the project.
But then when I reveal that X is something that they like — ‘improved education’, or ‘affordable housing for the poor’ — they lose that clarity and think that in this case, things could be different.
It’s almost like someone who understands that the Second Law of Thermodynamics makes it impossible to build any perpetual motion machine; but who then sees a clever design for a particular one, and starts wondering whether it can work.
I think something like that happens with schools. If you just think abstractly, and ask yourself: Under what conditions, and for what purposes, should we be putting children in the hands of government employees, especially during the most vulnerable and formative years of their lives? You see that the answer is: Never.
But as soon as you start thinking concretely about ‘schools’ and ‘education’ and ‘bright futures’, clarity vanishes, and you think: Maybe if we could just spend the right amount of money, or get the right curriculum, or make sure the right people are in charge, it can work out.
Samuel Johnson once said that remarriage represented ‘the triumph of hope over experience’. I think the same can be said of efforts to reform the public schools.