The following is an open letter to Frank Edelblut, Commissioner of Education, and Drew Cline, Chairman of the Board of Education, regarding a document that is making the rounds offering the public a chance to comment on proposed changes to the Ed Rules that govern public schools in New Hampshire.
Dear Commissioner Edelblut and Chairman Cline,
I’ve been reading — or trying to read — the 139-page document that is currently out for public review, which identifies proposed changes to the rules promulgated by the state Department of Education.
I believe that the goal of the document is to improve the performance of students in public schools. However, the form, structure, and content of the document more or less guarantee that this goal will not be met.
The first major problem with the document is its length: It’s 139 pages. There is a well-known technique in civil lawsuits for foiling the normal discovery process by providing so many documents that the ones that will be useful to the opposing side will probably never be found. That seems to be what’s happening here. There are so many changes — and so many rules that might be changed — that there’s no way to know which ones are important and which ones are trivial without plowing through the whole thing, which almost no one will have the time, motivation, or stamina to do.
The second major problem with the document is its level of detail. It is common knowledge among software engineers that every time you try to fix a bug in a system, you end up creating at least two more. The same is true in statutes and regulations. The solution isn’t to keep patching things but to go back to the original design, the architecture, so that fewer bugs can arise in the first place. The solution is to reduce the need for particular complications by reducing overall complexity.
In the case of public schools, the underlying source of complexity is that the system is time-based instead of results-based. In any other industry, the goal would be to get students to the finish line as quickly as possible for as little money as possible. (Of course, this would require knowing where the finish line is, something that requires a shared agreement among students, parents, schools, and taxpayers about where it is. As far as I’ve been able to tell, no such agreement exists, and no steps have been taken toward reaching one.)
But in the industry of education — or more precisely, the industry of schooling — kids are kept in school for an arbitrary number of years, whether they want to be there or not, and whether they need to be there or not. Once they are there, it becomes necessary to find something for them to do, some way to fill their time and some way to keep them pacified.
If this were to change — if there were a clear and adequate definition of an adequate education that focused on the desired end state rather than on particular paths to reach it — then many of the problems that the document seeks to address would simply not exist, and the document itself could be reduced to perhaps five to ten pages, and written in clear English rather than in legalese.
Note that in technical fields, a ‘standard’ says what needs to happen, not how it needs to happen. If you’re supposed to produce USB cables, there are some behaviors that the cables have to exhibit and some tests that they have to pass in order to meet the standard. How you set up your factory, what manufacturing processes you use to make the cables, and how long you take to make them are your business.
Imagine a USB standard that says: The people making your cables have to spend a certain number of hours in training, and your factory has to run for a certain number of hours per day, a certain number of days per year. And we’ll certify whatever you produce as a USB cable.
That’s the kind of standard we have now for graduating from the public school system, as embodied by documents like this one.
A reasonable standard for graduation would say: This is what we mean by an adequately educated student. Here are the tests he can pass, the skills he can demonstrate, and the kinds of problems he can solve.
A reasonable standard would be precise. It wouldn’t include pseudo-competencies like ‘Use digital tools to develop cognitive proficiency in literacy, numeracy, problem-solving, decision making, and spatial/visual literacy.’
A reasonable standard would be consistent. If a certain kind of thinking or problem-solving ability is necessary, it would be spelled out, and every student would need to be able to demonstrate it in order to graduate.
If every graduate needs to be able to do things like ‘appreciate art,’ or ‘use technology,’ or whatever, then have tests that let students demonstrate those things and make everyone pass those tests.
To the extent that the state has a job here — and the written state constitution, as opposed to the oral one, suggests that it does not — that job is to say what product is acceptable, not what process must be followed to produce it. Micro-management guarantees macro-failure, which is what we have now. Focusing on process creates the situation that allows (and, to some extent, even encourages) administrators and teachers to ignore (and in some cases, undermine) the product.
I suspect that both of you are familiar with the book The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt, but if you aren’t, I would ask you to read it since it perfectly captures the situation in which our public school system finds itself and suggests a way to deal with that situation. Briefly, Goldratt points out that when running any kind of enterprise, every possible action that might be taken needs to be evaluated, not in terms of what invented internal benchmarks it might meet, but in terms of the primary goal of the enterprise. In the case of a business, that goal is to make money. In the case of a public school system, that goal is to produce educated citizens.
Finally, unlike a manufacturing standard, an educational standard needs to be centered on two fundamental concepts: priority and autonomy.
By priority, I just mean that some things are more fundamental than others and must be dealt with first. If you’re in a course on American history, but your reading skills are below proficiency, then you should be working on reading instead of listening to someone explain history to you. If you’re not rock solid on your arithmetic skills, you certainly shouldn’t be taking algebra… but you also shouldn’t be taking courses in, say, fashion merchandising.
By independence, I just mean that the single most important thing that you should be learning is how to direct your own learning, how to become your own teacher so that you can learn whatever you want to later on. Nothing else even approaches this in importance.
Any educational standard that isn’t just a wish list must require students to develop foundational skills first and then require them to leverage those skills to learn to teach themselves. By the time a student is ready to graduate, his teachers should be acting mostly in an advisory role.
To put that a different way: No matter how much a student knows at a given moment if he’s still depending on his teachers to learn new material, then he’s not ready to graduate.
The third major problem with the document is, in fact, its complete lack of any priority among its requirements. It’s like a building code that goes into detail about how to choose the finishes on bathroom fixtures while ignoring how to tell if the foundation is solid.
Two egregious and illustrative examples of this are requiring schools to ‘teach financial literacy’ and ‘teach digital literacy.’ It’s worth asking how these affect the teaching of actual literacy.
First, when you require that schools ‘teach x,’ you’re implicitly saying that it’s okay if the kids can’t read about x on their own because you’ll provide a teacher to do that reading for them and provide oral explanations.
Education professionals call this meeting students where they are, but psychologists would call it enabling illiteracy. If you ever find yourself wondering how, in a district like Newport, 90 percent of kids can graduate while only about 10 percent of them can read, this is how.
Second, there is an old saying that if you chase two rabbits, you won’t catch either of them. By requiring so much content to be taught while not actually requiring any of it to be learned — and by establishing no priorities — you’re providing school administrators and teachers with a built-in excuse to ignore fundamentals in favor of incidentals. If ‘learning about the Holocaust’ and ‘developing an awareness of and involvement with the natural world’ are on the same level of importance as learning to read, you can guess how that’s going to work out.
If you really have an opportunity to overhaul the Ed Rules, I implore you: Please use that opportunity to create rules that (1) focus on product rather than process, (2) are results-based rather than time-based, (3) prioritize goals, (4) recognize that producing autonomous learners is the goal of the enterprise, and (5) eliminate everything that can’t be tied directly to the achievement of that goal.
In closing, I would ask that when creating those rules, you consider two crucial questions that almost never get serious consideration in discussions about education: First, if a kid wants to learn something, who can stop him? (And how much money do we need to spend to support that?) Second, if a kid doesn’t want to learn something, who can make him? (And how much money do we waste by trying?)
I would also ask that you consider these questions in the context of the world of 2023, where high-quality, low-cost pedagogy is literally falling from the sky, 24 hours a day, seven days a week — a world where a student in a school classroom has access to fewer resources, of lower quality, and vastly higher cost, than the ones available to him everywhere else.
Thank you for your consideration,
Ian Underwood
Croydon, NH
This letter was originally published at Bare Minimum Books.
