“It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.”

New Jersey’s new core curriculum is still without definite shape, that is, we don’t know yet exactly what it looks like. What we do know is what Education Commissioner Lucille Davy has told us a couple of weeks ago, that it is being shaped, largely, from the top down. The new curriculum should be more rigorous, it should deploy more STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) subjects, and it should be administered in a way that eases the shift for students in the entire K-12 span. I am not certain how many more students will be left behind as the curriculum gets more difficult for them—especially in areas where they are having the most trouble. Rather than a hard-line approach, forcing math and science into our children until they give up and learn, why don’t we create legitimate alternatives for different kinds of thinkers? Alternative course areas, not alternative graduations routes, cater to different thinkers and allow students to exercise their capacity for decision. This latter aspect of the approach, the exercise of decision, can cause an increase in planning skills and critical thinking. Arguably, federal curriculum standards prevent curriculum crafters from deep or fundamental overhaul of K-12 education, but there are approaches that can be applied that would embrace more students in the curriculum and in successful educational outcomes. Commissioner Davy has proposed math and science, I propose philosophy. Though less likely to be integrated into a curriculum than a more rigorous approach to math and science, there are benefits to philosophy.

Our national math and science fetish began during the cold war. It really is an educational program of national defense, though it has definitely been instrumental in the greater frequency of many non-military scientific breakthroughs in the U.S.. Early in a founding document of this doctrine, the often cited “A Nation At Risk,” a 1982 Gallup Poll is cited to support a more vigorous approach to education:

the Public’s Attitudes Toward the Public Schools strongly supported a theme heard during our hearings: People are steadfast in their belief that education is the major foundation for the future strength of this country. They even considered education more important than developing the best industrial system or the strongest military force, perhaps because they understood education as the cornerstone of both.

I would argue that since the early 80s we may have changed our late cold war attitudes significantly and perhaps someone ought to take the public’s temperature again. There is nothing inherently wrong with the union of education and national defense—though the education-defense approach does not always serve education as much as it serves defense. We every year hear about the decline of literacy in this country, though we only seem concerned about how our TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) scores measure up to those is Asia. Though not really original, augmenting the areas where students are already having the most difficulty is daring—and apparently close to the Commissioner’s heart. Though a lawyer by training, Commissioner Davy owes her own educational foundation to her mathematics degree from Seton Hall. She has said as much. Math, she touts, is the foundation of critical thinking.

For those from the more liberal arts, reforms like this give us chills. I, for one, spent most of my time in the education avoiding mathematics. When Commissioner Davy must have spent most of her time on a Cartesian plane, I was hiding in literature courses and avoiding my mathematics requirements. I did this successfully until my very last year in college. I did not, however, go without critical thinking. As a philosophy major I was required to take symbolic logic, a course which makes most undergraduates queasy. I, on the other hand, gladly took symbolic logic in as much as the proofs and propositional calculations looked like the formulae of mathematics without the toil of counting. Despite my very deep terror for mathematics, I really absorbed symbolic logic and I wanted to master it. I thought that learning symbolic logic might make me sharper; mastery might grant me omniscient. In the end, it really turned out to be a bunch of tricks or devices, pigeonholes, really. Logical formulae, like numerical formulae, are nothing but elaborate versions of that thing people do when they make it look like they’ve pulled off their own finger or pulled a quarter from a child’s ear. Logic is a formulaic study of the distortions of language and most of the distortions have been cataloged since the Middle Ages. In this way, it has some noticeable symmetry with the study of mathematics. But different from mathematics, logic is necessary, but not sufficient, for rational thinking. I would say that mathematics, per se, is not necessary.

In my opinion students at the K-12 level should be given an option. Some schools around the country have proven that it is possible to teach symbolic logic on the K-12 level. Why not let the many students with mathematics terror (perhaps 12 percent of New Jersey’s high school graduates) chose their own path and throw themselves into an alternate discipline like propositional logic. In the long view, the aims and application of logic are almost the same as those of mathematics, critical thinking. Symbolic logic just shortens the circuit a bit as it is less esoterically, or perversely, engaged with the development of critical thinking.

Commissioner Davy’s background has produced for her an impressive career and thinking life. However, everyone can agree that one size does not fit all. As we try to move beyond teaching students to recite items on a test, we should include more students in our teaching. We ought to look to philosophy in general as an alternative and a compliment to math and science in our schools. Instead of chemistry, some may take the philosophy of science which is really the history of scientific thought. Also, an alternative to mathematics might be propositional logic.

The philosophy approach is one proposed by Montclair State University’s Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children (IAPC). From their website:

As reading and writing are taught to children through the discipline of literature, why not make reasoning and judgment available to them through the discipline of philosophy? However, these benefits don’t come from learning about the history of philosophy or philosophers. Rather, as with reading, writing and arithmetic, the benefits of philosophy come through the doing-through active engagement in rigorous philosophical inquiry.

As we move further away from the emphasis on literacy and verbal skills, there is a danger that new generations will lose the ability to clearly transmit complex ideas in speech and writing. I do not agree with the disjunction between reading and writing, and reasoning and judgement, or literature and philosophy. As early as Sophocles, literature and philosophy have been joined at the hip. Historically, philosophers have frequently borrowed anecdotes from literature to articulate and even formulate difficult philosophical points. And some the greatest observations ever made about political theory and social science can be traced to literary antecedents. Much of the work and career of Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), in fact, represents an important union of mathematics and literature, in a sense, logic.

In this vein, students might read more Lewis Carroll in high school. We all know that, for the most part, only a few students are reading anything at all. Why not let them closely study the semantic nonsense of Carroll. Also, an extremely important figure in modern propositional logic is Bertrand Russell who wrote one of the most accessible and textbook-sized philosophical histories ever written, A History of Western Philosophy. A high school curriculum could easily grow around this book.

Commissioner Davy is correct in emphasizing the role that mathematics can play in the development of critical thinking, though, for the same reason, similar if not better results can be had with the addition of philosophy to K-12 curriculums. Philosophy college majors score the third highest out of 22 other majors on the LSAT—though math majors and econ majors score higher. Philosophy students score second highest to math majors on the GMAT and are the highest scorers on the GRE. For those who get indigestion over TIMSS scores, IAPC boasts that its materials have been translated into 40 languages and are taught in more than 60 countries. Math makes sense, but it is illogical to exclude philosophy which may:

• As an alternative, may promote critical thinking by simply promoting decision among students.
• May compliment other disciplines such as mathematics.
• May improve literacy.
• May raise critical thinking and test scores.
• May legitimately produce more high school graduates.
• May increase the number of college bound high school graduates.

FYI: Charter School Performance in 16 States

Study Methodology

Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) has released new findings about American choice schools in 16 states. The first of three reports scheduled to be released in 2009, “Multiple Choice: charter School Performance in 16 States” searches for measures of charter school “effectiveness.” CREDO chooses student outcomes or standardized test scores as an indicator of effectiveness. Specifically, the approach is a value added approach which takes initial student scores as a base which can be removed from latter scores in order to measure the charter school’s effect on score growth. The data in the report, a project undertaken with the use of a data collection methodology pioneered by RAND corp., is an advance over previous studies as it utilized standardized data from a good number of charter schools nationally, about “1.7 million records from more than 2400 charter schools.” Standard data allows for a reading of charter school characteristics between individual states that are comparable. Also, taken as a whole, the data is representative of all charter schools on the national level. CREDO notes: “the states included in this study enroll more than half the charter school students in the United States, so the consolidated results begin, for the first time, to tell the story of the policy of charter schooling at a macro level.” In order to mitigate the effects of selection bias, the CREDO researchers employ a Virtual Control Record (VCR) methodology by which a virtual twin for each student in the study is created to be sure that both charter students and the traditional public school (TPS) students are comparable. Basically, by taking both charter and TPS students from the same origin, the students are considered characteristically similar.  CREDO explains thus:

We identify all the TPS that have students who transfer to a given charter school; we call each of these schools “feeder schools.” Once a school qualifies as a feeder school, all the students in the school become potential matches for a student in a particular charter school. All the student records from all the feeder schools are pooled – this becomes the source of records for creating the virtual match. Using the records of the students in those schools in the year prior to the test year of interest, CREDO selects all of the available records that match each charter school student.

Study Findings

To begin, CREDO’s major findings do not do much to champion the cause of charter schools. Their reports finds the following: on average, charter students experience a decrease in math and reading when compared to students in traditional public schools. But these aren’t the most interesting findings in the report. The most interesting conclusion, in fact, is probably that the students performing best in choice schools happen to be English Language Learners (ELL) and students in poverty. Also, despite there being a significant demographic overlap between students in poverty and many American minority groups, CREDO finds that Black and Hispanic charter school student performance is “significantly worse” when compared to the performance of demographically comparable students (data twins) enrolled in traditional public schools. The two conclusions together are interesting in as much as charter schools are often viewed, specifically, as a positive alternative to TPS education for low income students which, as mentioned, tend to overlap demographically with minority groups. This is troubling information, though the report mentions that the statistics do not yet reveal any specific causes to account for the data.

According to the report, race and economic status are not the only determinants of educational outcomes. Time and education level are also factors. In regard to time, CREDO researchers find:

Students do better in charter schools over time. First year charter students on average experience a decline in learning, which may reflect a combination of mobility effects and the experience of a charter school in its early years. Second and third years in charter schools see a significant reversal to positive gains.

Regarding education level, charter school students at the elementary and middle school level were found to have learned at “higher rates” than their peers in TPSs and at lower rates on the high school level. From another vantage, a charter that serves only high school level students may be predictably worse. The proper niche for charters, therefore, may be in serving the lower grades, a conclusion that must be considered by policy makers as perhaps now more than 48 percent of all charters, according to Center for Education Reform data in 2005, serve students on the high school level. Further, in regard to CREDO’s prior conclusions, the National Charter School Research Project also concluded in 2005 that “nation¬ally, charter schools serve a larger proportion of minority and low-income students than is found in traditional public schools, a characteristic due largely to the disproportionate number of charter schools located in urban areas.” Often, the mission of charter school education reform is to offer to minority and underserved communities a positive alternative to their local TPSs which are by many reformers considered to be the root cause of unsatisfactory educational outcomes. This thought, presumably, is what has motivated the CREDO researchers to undertake the comparison. However, CREDO’s data may run contrary to the intuitions of many reformers. And, there is a danger that, if policy makers are not informed, certain communities will be harmed by the same act of reform that was intended to serve them and their children better. Indeed, if the data allows us to do so, taking all the report’s conclusions together produces the image of the ideal charter: the ideal is a charter that serves only non-Hispanic and non-Black students in grades K-8. Of what use, we might then ask, is such a school?

These questions aside, once they are reproduced and thus confirmed in other studies these conclusions should have a significant impact on the way policy makers view charter schools in their own states. Knowing how and for whom charter schools work best might cause education officials to pause before closing an underperforming school as, for instance, the number of first year students enrolled at a charter may bear significantly on educational outcomes reported for a certain year. In this way, for officials, the “first year effect” might be actively treated with some new policy, or acknowledged as more an enrollment phenomenon rather than a determinant of charter failure. Rather than contributing to keeping charters open, however, researchers understand that their efforts may have the opposite effect as keeping charters open is not the greatest challenge facing charter school reform, currently in an “authorizing crisis.” CREDO describes that “Evidence of financial insolvency or corrupt governance structure, less easy to dispute or defend, is much more likely to lead to school closures than poor academic performance.” As poor performing schools do more harm than good to the charter reform movement by corrupting the data gleaned from successful charters, from the perspective of statistical research, CREDO suggests that their work should add imperative to the difficult task of closing underperforming schools. Unfortunately, according to their research, many of these underperforming schools may serve the majority of at risk students.

Policy Environment

Perhaps more interesting than the forgoing conclusions, the effect of policy environment on charter school effectiveness will be particularly useful to officials and those who study governance and education administration. Studying the following: “the use of a cap on the supply of charters”; “the availability of multiple authorizers”; and “the availability of an appeals process to review authorizer decisions.” Caps, presumably, limit the total number or charters and thus the overall number of low performing charters by increasing the pressure to close old and to grant entry to new charters. More authorizers may add more knowledge to support judgments about closing or authorization—and it may also permit poor performing schools to pick sympathetic judges. Lastly, the opportunity to appeal the decision of an authorizer may “increase the proportion of marginal schools, dragging down the overall performance of the sector” or it may add a higher level of scrutiny to authorizer judgments, the CREDO researchers suggest. Briefly, CREDO found that the existence of charter caps lowers student performance in a state; multiple authorizers has “a significant negative impact on student academic growth”; the opportunity for appeal seemed to have a growth effect for student academic outcomes, though the conclusions are tentative because none of the states changed their policies during the study period.

In the report, there is also included the breakdown into math and reading performance for several kinds of students and the analysis of outcomes with both charter and TPS understood in a market framework. At large, much of the research really draws attention to how subtle the differences are between charter and TPS environments. The subtlety of the differences almost lends support to less recent studies that conclude no significant difference between charter and TPS. However, though these differences are subtle, they are still important given the size and demography of the student population enrolled in charter schools.

Is it the case that the perfect charter school student looks something like this?: in grades K-8, in poverty, an ELL of non-Hispanic or non-Black heritage. Similarly, is the ideal school one which operates in states that: shun caps, have a single authorizing entity and favors appeals?  Perhaps these characteristics are only determinants of success when they are each by themselves.  By lumping them together we supposes that all these factors are inclusive.  Further, making up ideal schools and districts based on the data is interesting but not very productive.  If this kind of idealization accomplishes anything it begs us to investigate more – into the why and the how of the CREDO’s findings.

New Jersey

Though New Jersey is not part of the CREDO’s analysis, a simple inventory of the identified indicators would be interesting. Unfortunately, no data exists for some of the indicators such as race and at-risk which might be why New Jersey was not included among the other states in the charter school study. We do have some information, however. According to the New Jersey Department of education, over 18,000 New Jersey students attended 62 charter schools as of May 2009. About 13 of those 62 charters serve over 4,413 students, roughly 24.5 percent of all students. Further, regarding state policy, New Jersey, joined by 14 other states, Arizona, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Maryland, Minnesota, Nevada, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Virginia, and Wyoming, has no charter school cap. However, the rigorous process of application and accountability to the state’s sole authorizer adds a significant amount of a barrier to charter school entry.

1. Though there is no cap and no leveraged pressure to eliminate low performers, school performance assessment is administered every two years. Upon entry, charters are all granted a four year term, at the end of which they must apply for renewal to the education commissioner.

2. New Jersey is the only state to invest in one person, the commissioner of education, the responsibility of authorization. As most other states charge single or multiple boards with that responsibility, the effects of New Jersey’s unique charter policy and that of other states are not comparable in studies such as the foregoing.

3. New Jersey’s appeal process is open to the affected school district as well as the charter operator as a means of reconsidering an authorizer’s decision. Appeals are directed to State Board of Education. Whether this has an effect on growth in New Jersey charters is uncertain. By 2005, New Jersey had authorized 91 charter school applications and had received 237 in total. Despite the availability of appeal, the number of charters in New Jersey has never grown over 67, the number reached in 2005. No great augmentation of the charter school count has occurred since the beginning of charter schools in New Jersey.

Though the performance of New Jersey’s charters cannot be directly understood in reference to the CREDO findings, it would still be interesting to add to this study the relative effects that New Jersey’s policy environment has on student performance. Policy makers should pay attention to this and the following two reports from CREDO as, even if they do not support them as a solution to the education of underserved student populations, there is much to be learned about the education environment of traditional public schools in the laboratory environment of the charters.

Still Searching For Indicators of Success

I recently posted an article about New Jersey’s graduation rates though it is based upon dubious calculations which misrepresent education in New Jersey.  To be clear, the article was extremely concerned about the use of alternative tests without guaranteeing sufficient skills. I am concerned not just about the number of students going to college but about New Jersey’s high school graduates fitting into their future occupations in a job market that is increasingly more difficult to navigate.

In my article, I was too focused on college going rates and not sufficiently on the latter question. The percentage of change in enrollment is not a strong indicator of competency and may simply reflect student choice or the effects of immigration. If enrollment is indicative of anything, it is probably the health of the economy. In fact, in 2008 the Bloustein School at Rutgers suggested that enrollment rates, relatively stable since 1965, may decline as students in a poor economy choose jobs over higher education. Based upon my research, I am concerned that only half of our students go on to college in USA and, of that half, half of them drop out. Out of that remaining 50 percent, 30-50 percent of them may need remedial education.

Despite the large amounts of money spent as a result of the Abbot decisions, dropout rates in urban high schools are abysmally high. We need a strong core curriculum, national common standards, and effective faculty development. As New Jersey’s Education Commissioner Davy and the Department of Education are currently working to develop a new core curriculum for our K-12 students, these questions demand even more of our attention. The determinants of curriculum success are still vague and they need to be discussed as much as possible. If we have learned anything from the recession of 2008 it is that a trained workforce is almost as important as an educated citizenry: http://www.nj.com/opinion/times/letters/index.ssf?/base/news-2/1246075513209250.xml&coll=5

Diploma Counts: SRA, Not Going Away?

In 2003, the New Jersey Department of Education released a white paper, “New Jersey Special Review Assessment,” which called for among other things, an end to Special Review Assessment (SRA) alternate graduation routes. The Department summarized all of its objective thus:

The elimination of the SRA; the creation of expanded remedial opportunities for students failing the High School Proficiency Assessment (HSPA); the development of an appeal procedure; and the award of a differentiated diploma for students who fail to achieve proficiency on the HSPA, but who do meet other graduation and attendance criteria.

As a consequence of this effort to be rid of the SRA, there are now two instruments of alternate assessment, the HSPA is the first level, considered by some to be a “middle school” level exam, and the SRA, which never went away.

The Installment of the HSPA has had little effect as 60 percent of those who take it are unable to meet the standard and therefore must take the SRA. When the NJDOE’s report was released in 2003, the graduation rate, according to Education Week’s annual Diplomas Count report, was 84.8 percent. New Jersey’s has since continued to top graduation rates, 82.5 in 2004, 83.3 in 2005, 82.1 in 2006. The current year’s Diploma’s Count report is based on 2006 data.

Sharing the top of the list with New Jersey, in ranked order: New Jersey (82.1), Wisconsin (81.7), Iowa (80.7), and Minnesota (79.2). The change in graduation rates for each state from 2000 to 2006 were: Wisconsin (+3.5), Iowa (+2.0), Minnesota (+0.3), and New Jersey (-1.3). New Jersey, despite being ranked first in high school graduation, actually enjoyed a higher rate of graduation in 2005.

Though New Jersey’s graduation rates over this period reflect a decline of -1.3, the rate has been relatively constant, hovering around 80 percentage points for six years, despite the external strain of policy mandates like No Child Left Behind (NCLB) which makes graduation more difficult for both students and teachers. The change in the other three states for this period can be described in each case as a modest increase, very modest in Minnesota.

New Jersey for six years has been producing more high school graduates than the three other states. According to Census Bureau data, higher education enrollment, which was estimated to be around 470,302 in 2000, has increased by 85,761 students to 556,063 in 2007. That’s a 15% increase in higher education enrollment. Comparing New Jersey’s higher education enrollment data to that of the other three states reveals the following ranking: MN (+18%) WI (+17%) NJ (+15%) IA (+14%) . Though New Jersey has the highest high school graduation rate among the three other states, New Jersey’s is only third highest increase in college enrollment during the period in question. Third highest is nothing to scoff at but why not first?

We would like the data to suggest that New Jersey’s alternate assessment is churning out high school graduates who lack the skills to move on to higher education. However, New Jersey does not seem to be doing so bad – though enrollment in New Jersey colleges is growing at a lower rate than it is in two of the other three states. Should New Jerseyans continue to ask questions about the SRA and what alternate graduation routes are doing to New Jersey’s future workforce? Perhaps.

According to some, more New Jerseyans are going out of state for college. Also, there are a greater number of special needs students like immigrants since 2000. This is something like an account proposed in the fall of last year by the New Jersey Association of State Colleges and Universities (NJASC). NJASC at that time placed the blame for the supposed “brain drain” on the State of New Jersey for underfunding higher education and playing a part in making our higher education institutions unattractive for in-state students. But what about the effect of alternate routes on New Jersey’s future workforce? The immigration account holds a bit of weight, though when we examine the increase in the approximate number of high-school enrolled students during the period in question there has been very little, about 37, 437.

The other three states have enjoyed steady, though modest, increases in the high school graduation rates since the reinvention of The Elementary and Secondary Education Act, NCLB. Yet, we cannot be certain that just because New Jersey’s college enrollment is 1-3% lower, students in those states are performing better than students in New Jersey. For instance, all four states, due to the testing mandates of NCLB, require students to take a kind of exit exam. And all four states now have alternate assessments in place. Two of the four states, Wisconsin and Minnesota, make explicit on their education department websites that alternate assessments are in place for students with disabilities. Though each of the other states now have alternate assessments in place, until recently New Jersey was alone in the practice of alternate assessment. Indeed, as recent as 2002, many states were without exit exams much less alternate exit exams. And in the rush to comply, many states have erected both with relative simultaneity. The institution of these standards occurred during the time span from which the enrollment data was gathered. Consequently, the effect of alternate routes on college enrollment in the three other states discussed may not yet be reflected in the survey data. For New Jersey, however, the effect would show in the data.

In all of this, a few questions persist. To what degree have Minnesota’s and New Jersey’s enrollment percentages been affected by the lack alternate routes? And how would New Jersey’s enrollment percentages look if alternate routes were not available. How high school is a function of higher education in New Jersey requires deeper investigation.

New Jersey Graduation Rate Tables:

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	2001	2002	2003	2004	2005	2006	Change
WI	78.1	78.9	80.6	77.3	80.5	81.7	3.5
IA	78.7	79.1	82.7	81.1	82.8	80.7	2.0
MN	78.9	78.7	78.6	78.7	78.1	79.2	0.3
NJ	83.4	84.9	84.8	82.5	83.3	82.1	-1.3

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3-Year Averages	New Jersey’s Higher Education Enrollment
2000	470,302
2004-07	556,063
Change	85,761 (+15%)

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State	Change in College Enrollment
MN	+18%
WI	+17%
NJ	+15%
IA	+14%

Trying To Remember What Causes Brain Damage: This is Your Brain on Poverty

If we suppose that intellectual aptitude is the result of teaching, we may be partially wrong. Likewise, if we believe that economics and socio-environmental conditions are responsible for quantifiable intellect then we might only be somewhat right. Such are the implications of various bits of research that, over the past decade, has suggested that socioeconomic status (SES) bears considerably on the ability of children growing up in low (LSES) or high (HSES) socioeconomic environments. Although cognitive science and public fiscal policy may seem to have only tentative links at times, in education they dovetail splendidly.

You may prefer, for instance, that former account of aptitude, “aptitude is the result of teaching,” you might understand “reform” to be a function of staffing or certification. It would follow then that the dysfunction in our American schools can be solved by either reforming the process of certification for teachers, devising ways of ferreting out poor educators in our school system with a system of performance-based pay incentives and deprivations, or the reallocation of good teachers who tend to migrate to suburban middleclass schools.

On the other hand, if you, a social critic, prefer the idea “that economics and socio- environmental conditions are responsible for quantifiable intellect” then one favors reforms like after school programs, Head Start, welfare assistance, and environmental improvement i.e., school construction and community rehabilitation.

On both accounts, according to a growing population of researchers in various fields, we may be wrong. Not completely wrong, but wrong nonetheless. And being incorrect in our assumptions, in this case, would mean spending on facets of education reform which bear little effect on the real education problems of LSES children. Correct spending suggests targeting areas in the sphere of education that are usually understood to be outliers or ancillary elements.

Researchers from Cornell University, Gary Evans and Michelle Shamberg, and in another study Mark Kishiyama and associates from the University of California, Berkeley, have suggested that it is not simply poverty but the consequent stress indicative of poverty that diminishes the aptitude of LSES children. They suggest that the education problems of LSES children are neurological as much as they are environmental. Both the Berkeley and Cornell studies build upon the work of Martha J. Farah and associates at the University of Pennsylvania who seem to have been the first to transpose SES onto neurophysiology to make this argument. In 2005, Dr. Farah, joined by Kimberly G. Noble and Hallam Hurt produced a study, one of several authored by Farah, that seeks to change the way we think about the performance of students and the solutions on which we are willing to spend money.

The first stage of the University of Pennsylvania study was an attempt to describe and account for lower neurocognitive performance between 30 LSES and 30 middle SES (MSES) public school kindergarteners. Designed to “assess the functioning of five key neurocognitive systems” such as spatial and visual cognition, cognitive control, language, and memory, the Berkeley researchers found that MSES children scored a standard deviation higher than LSES children in language tests and two-thirds of a standard deviation higher for “executive function” mentioned before as “cognitive control.” In most of the tests, spatial and visual results became irrelevant.

It is interesting that test scores are interpreted neurophysiologically, i.e., a test of “Language” becomes a test of the “left perisylvian cortical region” just as a test of working memory becomes a test of the “prefrontal cortex.”[1] On this note, the original test of memory was a test of the medial temporal cortical region, a region where the hippocampus is located, the hippocampus being responsible for the creation of long term memories.

To support the assumption about the socioenvironmental effect of stress hormones on brain anatomy and function, the researchers cite a laboratory experiment in which rat pups are separated from their rat mothers. The separation, it seems, adds rodent sized emphasis to the theory that stress can cause brain damage. The separation of rat pups from their mothers, according to researchers Meany, Diorno, and Francis, was found to have altered both anatomy and function in their rat brains and had a particular effect on “the medial temporal area needed for memory, although prefrontal systems involved in the regulation of the stress response are also impacted.”[2] Farah, Noble, and Hurt suppose that, similarly, living in low socioeconomic environments produces the kind of stress which, as did the stress of separation experienced by rats in the experiment above mentioned, damages human brains. Such stressful stimuli, according to the researchers, might include: “concern about providing for basic family needs, dangerous neighborhoods, and little control over one’s work life.”[3]

The research leads us to adopt a theory that high stress in LSES environments produces greater amounts of stress hormones like cortisol, a secretion from the adrenal gland that affects blood pressure and insulin levels, and catecholamine, also an adrenal secretion responsible for preparing the body for the “fight-or-flight” response. Stress hormones in large amounts are thought to cause a deregulation of blood pressure and the immune system but also to the prefrontal cortex and the medial cortex which contains hippocampus, the organ responsible for the creation of long term memories. The University of Pennsylvania researchers suppose that the cognitive disparities they found between LSES and MSES children in all three experiments can be accounted for in this way.

Because they preferred this particular interpretive model, one which posits that stress hormones cause brain damage, researchers find evidence of both medial temporal as well as prefrontal damage in their LSES subjects. Having found such evidence, it would have followed—or it would have at least been very suggestive—that something in a LSES subject’s background causes brain damage. However, at the experiment’s conclusion researchers did not find the evidence they anticipated. Instead, they found that LSES subjects differed little from MSES subjects in all but two categories, language (left perisylvian cortical region), and executive function or cognitive control, (prefrontal cortex).

Having found no memory deficiency with regard to the medial temporal region, researchers seem to have decided instead to mine memory from the prefrontal cortex whereon LSES subjects scored one-third lower than MSES subjects—not quite as low as LSES scored in language. Prefrontal or executive function was thus split into 3 different categories, cognitive control, reward processing, and most important, working memory. Not surprising, researchers also tried to induce a memory response in the medial temporal lobe (memory) by placing a delay between the stimulus and the response portion of the experiment with the hope that such a delay would give LSES subjects ample time to forget.

Hoping to replicate their findings in the prefrontal and left perisylvian region, researchers conducted two more experiments, one on 150 first graders “of varying ethnicities” and SES backgrounds, and one on of 60 middle school students divided, as were the subjects of the first study, into equal parts LSES and MSES. In both of the latter studies, LSES subject’s scores were similar to those in the first round. Researchers thus concluded that it is that stress affects working memory and that, perhaps, is the cause of lowered ability in larger numbers of LSES subjects.

In their account of the correlation of LSES and low achievement, Evans and Schamberg lean heavily on a model developed by researcher Bruce S. McEwen who supposes that stress hormones like cortisol, which may help the body respond and adapt to various environmental stimuli, may also build up under prolonged strain causing long term physical damage in conditions of perpetual stress, just like the rats in the study described by the University of Pennsylvania study.[4] McEwen calls the effects of perpetual or “chronic stress,” “allostatic load” which can be described as a weakening of health marked by a prolonged secretion of survival hormones. Hormones or “physiological mediators,” like emergency switches or rocket packs for movie heroes, allow humans to adapt to new conditions and rise to challenges that are taxing to our bodies and minds. Cortisol, for instance, can provide a burst of energy in a dangerous moment or make you intellectually sharper when you are confronted with an emergent problem. In high doses, cortisol can overtax the body and cause effects like cognitive impairment and obesity. Wrote McEwan in 2000, “Both cortisol and catecholamines are mediators of the adaptation of many systems of the body to acute challenges, while, at the same time, these mediators also participate in pathological changes over long periods of time ranging from immunosuppression to obesity, hypertension, and atherosclerosis.”

Based upon McEwan’s account, Evans and Schamberg suppose that the frequency of accumulated stress varies by the duration of childhood poverty which in turn can be correlated positively with lowered working memory capacity in adult life. This thesis, combined with an examination of longitudinal data derived from a study of 195 white young adults, led the researchers to suggest that the working memory of an adult from a LSES background is quantifiably affected by stress. Evans and Schamberg conclude that, “on average, poor adults raised in middle-income families could hold in working memory a sequence of 9.44 items, whereas poor adults who grew up in poverty had a working memory capacity of 8.50 items.”[5]

The researchers do entertain the possibility that their findings might be indicative of a reversed situation wherein decreased memory ability is what causes the prolonged stress or allostatic load “poverty–>working memory–>allostatic load,” rather than poverty–>allostatic load–>working memory. They entertain this idea, but not for long as they insist that the inferential links between allostatic load and working memory are very suggestive of the former causal chain, that the stress of poverty causes lowered working memory. Further, the researchers add, “the relationship between duration of childhood poverty and allostatic load was not attenuated when working memory was partialed from the equation.” Said simply, if lowered working memory, rather than poverty, was indeed the cause of stress observed in the data, then the elimination of working memory, in particular places of the sample, should have removed instances of allostatic load. It did not.

Mark Kishiyama and his research associates from the University of California, Berkeley, have produced a behavioral experiment for which 26 children from LSES and HSES backgrounds were fitted with electrodes and asked to perform various cognitive feats. Taking also the University of Pennsylvania study as a research benchmark, the Berkeley researchers used Electroencephalography (EEG) equipment in an attempt to find behavioral data to support the poverty-neurocognition correlation and to confine the problem, as did the prior pair of researchers, to the prefrontal cortex.[6] Though researchers admit the limitations of a largely behavioral test, the study is an advance over prior studies because it uses brain imaging to show more concretely what other experimenters only supposed by projecting onto human brains, the theories of other researchers derived from the brains of rats. That is, imaging actually showed on video monitors, the degree of prefrontal activity of each subject.

On the 5 tests issued, HSES subjects scored significantly higher than LSES subjects who, for the most part, scored within the predetermined mean. LSES subjects, in other words, performed many of the tasks with average or near average aptitude. For instance, on a test which required subjects to count forward and then in reverse as means of testing their working memory, “digit span,” HSES children scored higher than 1 standard deviation over the predetermined mean. LSES subjects achieved mean scores on the low end. Another test of working memory included a verbal component, “semantic fluency,” a test in which subjects were required produce all the words they could conjure in order to satisfy a cue from proctors, i.e., the names of animals, food, or words that begin with “sh.” HSES subjects excelled in the semantic fluency test, but seem to glow brightest in the area of language overall. In a general “language” test, subjects were asked simply to define words. HSES children scored as high as 2 standard deviations above the mean; LSES children scored 1 standard deviation below.

The tests may have shown HSES children to be semi-savants when it comes to counting backwards and forwards, though in regard to the poverty-neurocognition correlation, the experiment failed to prove that LSES subjects had their prefrontal cortices wounded by their SES. Their scores were average but not indicative of brain damage and the only thing that seems to wound them was the comparison to HSES children.

Of course the researchers insist that their experiment on 26 children drawn only from the Bay Area confirms that SES bears neurophysiologically on the prefrontal function in the brains of children. However, these researchers do not seem to have transcended a theory built upon observations of rat pups. They note themselves that behavioral tests can only prove so much about the neurological operations as “they provide only indirect measures of brain function.” And, as the authors also note, they have not completely isolated the observed effects to “prefrontal dysfunction.” In a sense, they are no closer to proving the poverty-neurocognition correlation than the University of Pennsylvania researchers who preceded them.

If the Berkeley study demonstrated anything convincingly it was that HSES children excel in language, an ability attributed to the left perisylvian cortical region which Farah, Noble, and Hurt in their earlier work found to be predicted by “cognitive stimulation,” otherwise known as conversation. The latter note that their research suggests cognitive stimulation “was the sole factor identified as predicting language ability […] along with the child’s gender and the mother’s I.Q..” Not really so different from the contrasting account of medial temporal, or memory ability which was attributed to “average social/emotional nurturance,” otherwise known as a lack of stress. However, we must doubt that a lack of conversation causes neurophysiological brain damage in the way that researchers assume stress hormones cause a deformation of the prefrontal cortex and the medial temporal lobe. Evidence that HSES children excel in language ability is not surprising. What is surprising is that the Berkeley researchers would use their test of “semantic fluency” which pairs working memory with language in order to demonstrate something about working memory.

Various studies, including the first study conducted by the University of Pennsylvania researchers and that just mentioned, bear out the idea that HSES children have greater language ability than LSES. The second study conducted by Evans and Schamberg did not test subjects for language aptitude but did seem to suggest that, as did the Berkeley researchers, working memory/the prefrontal cortex is somehow morphologically bound up with language/the left perisylvian cortical region: “working memory is essential to language comprehension, reading, and problem solving, and it is a critical prerequisite for long-term storage of information.” In all of the studies beginning with the first conducted by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, an attempt has been made to prove the existence of both prefrontal and medial temporal impairment in a sample of LSES subjects. The existence of both would justify the use of the stress hormone interpretive model discussed in the first study and called allostatic load in the second. Rather than justifying the use of the stress hormone model, however, each study has tried to attach working memory in some way to language aptitude which was found in two of the three studies to be consistently high in HSES and comparatively low in LSES subjects. Contrary to the hopeful conclusions of each study, it would seem that language aptitude is the only thing damaged by poverty.

In the past couple of years, the Educational Testing Service has released a report called “The Family: America’s Smallest School.” In the 2007 report, authors note that by the age of four, “the average child in a professional family hears about 20 million more words than children in working-class families hear, and about 35 million more than the children in welfare families hear.”[7] Also, similar to the findings of the researchers mentioned above, ETS reports that “at the highest SES quartile, 62 percent of parents reported reading to their children every day, compared to only 36 percent of parents at the lowest SES quartile.” ETS reports the findings of Child Trends, an organization that, according to ETS, gathered information from 7 research papers, reports, and books spanning the work of 19 researchers to conclude that “by the age of two, children who are read to regularly display greater language comprehension, larger vocabularies and higher cognitive skills than their peers […] In addition, being read to aids in the socioemotional development of young children.”

The famous 17th century political thinker Thomas Hobbes once supposed, unscientifically, that the function of language was the conversion of our mental discourse into verbal discourse. Having no language, he inferred, we would have no way of indexing our thoughts and therefore no capacity for memory. We can say this in another way: memory is a function of verbal ability. Perhaps there’s something to this 400-year-old conjecture. In order to raise language ability or, in the idiom of the neurophysiologists, to decrease brain damage to the left perisylvian cortical region, ETS suggests that parents equip homes with reading material and a quiet place to study such as a desk. They also recommend reading to children which, as it is said to aid the “socioemotional development” of children, may also reduce some of the damage to the prefrontal cortex that was found to be typical of the LSES subjects in all three studies.

The social critics were right after all. If a LSES environment/family is poor in substance then we must give these children substitute environments and caretakers. In the absence of parents who are not willing or able to read to their own children, Head Start type intervention and after school counselor surrogates may do a lot of good for LSES children. Some other solutions such as diverting pay and benefits from teachers and administrators toward the improvement of urban essential infrastructure such as convenience stores, libraries, police departments, and transportation, raising minimum wage, and creating more jobs for LSES families may also decrease some of the neurophysiological strain of poverty. That, perhaps, is a no brainer.

NOTES

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[1] Farah, M. J., Noble, K. G. & Hurt, H. Poverty, privilege and brain development: Empirical findings and

ethical implications. In J. Illes (Ed.),. (2005). Neuroethics in the 21st Century. New York: Oxford University Press.

[2] Meaney, M. J., Diorio, J., Francis, D., & al, e. Early environmental regulation of forebrain glucocoricoid receptor gene expression: implications for adrenocortical responses to stress. Developmental Neuroscience. (1996). 18, 49-72: in Farah, Martha, Poverty, Privilege, And Brain…

[3] iBid of 1

[4] McEwen BS. Allostasis and allostatic load: Implications for neuropsychopharmacology. Neuropsychopharmacology. (2000). 22: 108–124: “altered states of brain chemistry and function make the afflicted individual more susceptible to the physiological impact of life events and, in turn, more vulnerable to the impact of the stress hormones themselves. Furthermore, these considerations of stress and health are becoming useful in understanding gradients of health across the full range of education and income, referred to as “socioeconomic status” or SES” (2).

[5] Gary W. Evans, G. W. & Schamberg, M. A. Childhood poverty, chronic stress, and adult working memory. PNAS (2009) 106: 6545-6549.

[6] Kishiyama, M. M. et al. Socioeconomic disparities affect prefrontal function in children. J. Cogn. Neurosci. ( 2009). 21, 6: 1106-111.

[7] Barton, P., & Coley, R. America’s smallest school: The family. Policy Information Report, Policy Information Center, Educational Testing Services. (2007).

How to Think About our Public Education or Holding Ourselves Accountable

Released today, a Thomas Fordham Institute report, “The Accountability Illusion” selects, in the Institute’s own words, “36 real schools from around the nation (half elementary, half middle)— schools that vary by size, achievement, diversity, and so on—and determin[es] which of them would or would not make AYP [average yearly progress] when evaluated under each state’s accountability rules. In other words, if a particular school that made AYP in Washington were relocated to North Dakota, or Ohio, or Texas, would that same school also make AYP there?” The smart little report found that, “Although schools are being told that they need to improve student achievement in order to make AYP under the law, the truth is that many would fare better if they were just allowed to move across state lines.” The AP in, “Study: No Child Standards Vary Widely from State to State” quotes new EdSec Arne Duncan who said, “the notion that we have 50 different goal posts doesn’t make sense, […] A high school diploma needs to mean something, no matter where it’s from.” AP goes on to mention that the way to make one “goal post” for all 50 states is open: “in the newly enacted economic stimulus bill, there is a $5 billion incentive fund for Duncan to reward states for, among other things, boosting the quality of standards and state tests.” “Quality” and “uniformity” in 50 states is tough. How will they do it? Well, AP adds, states are starting non-profits devoted to the task of developing these common measures of achievement. Ok, that’s fine. But no one is talking about what that should be. The only common attribute of the way this accountability system works is the absurd approach. Let’s set common standards for a really good education and just assume that we’ve already cracked the $5 billion question: what is an education?

Some of history’s greatest thinkers have spent their lives scratching their heads about that one. Those like Plato, Aristotle, John Dewey, and Robert Maynard Hutchins were most adamant about the ultimate propose of education or education as a means to some final societal or governmental end. In all of this talk about standards, parents seem to be the only ones scratching their heads.

It doesn’t seem like many people are taking the time to ponder the purpose of education but instead, and Dewey warned about this, they proceed with progress as a headless concept, toward some newer progressive education without considering the true end of progress. Math is good, let’s have more of that. Science is good, let’s give it more money. For quite a while, the object of education has been to increase our TIMSS or raise SAT scores nationally. No one has considered the actual effects of rigorously tuning millions of children to a collection of multiple choice questions.

In the spirit of thinkers like Dewey who supposed a lack of stimulus was the education best suited dictatorship, I would like here to wonder: is there some bizarre societal effect or organization produced by training kids to think only through the negative prism of elimination? There have been studies that suggest that multiple choice exams in high frequencies inhibit critical thinking by conditioning testers to confine their thoughts to a finite number of answers. The underlying idea is that there is one answer an one answer only.  There are no rewards for coining unknown answers because, for one thing, how would you quantify a suitable reward on a standardized test for an answer that not unknown to the test makers? Children who coin things experience immediate  negative stimulus, shame from their higher achieving peers and teachers and, in their adult lives, lowered earnings and social status.

The important question, the one that those important education thinkers of the past might ask is: what does standardized testing in high frequencies do to the character of our government? Well, Mr. Hutchins, for example, once suggested that, should people lose the capacity to think for themselves, they would become poor deciders. Invoking the tradition of Thomas Jefferson, a tradition much older than Jefferson himself, Mr. Hutchins declared that if we are incapable, or too incompetent to rule ourselves we ought then to end the relatively young project of our universal suffrage and appoint a king. He famously said that Democracy, in this way, tends toward dictatorship.

Mr. Dewey once argued that a democratic and progressive society is one with fewer boundaries in which the greatest diversity of experience exists. He noted that democracy moves toward progress as part of its intrinsic nature and in a society of heavy class division, for instance, the rich will experience no pain and their culture, said Dewey, will be sterile, turning back in upon itself and generating nothing new as they become detached. They soon know nothing of physical reality. The poor, by contrast, will experience nothing but negative pleasure and pain in such a society. The experience of this latter group will be entirely a function of pain, a kind of experience which usually admits only sensory pleasures. Both kinds of experience, for Mr. Dewey, are incomplete and represent a kind of learning disability. Experience, for progress to happen, must be diverse and dialectical.

What then will our society look like when the effects of widespread standardized testing catch up in full force? As I have noted, standardized testing tends to restrict the creative imagination and to produce the illusion that either there are a finite number of answers or there is only one answer to every question: a, b, c; T or F. Further, citizens of, let’s call it bubble land, tend to believe that knowledge is a game of chance. If one does not know the answer at first, it can be obtained “analytically,” that is, by process of elimination. It is a dark day for thinking and for philosophy when analytic thinking becomes lopsided and synonymous with “process of elimination.” Most interesting about the citizens of bubble land is the fact that “analytic thinking” only occurs when some proctor has first bound some problem in 4 or 5 choices for them. Unfortunately for the bubble people, real problems, those of both mediocre existence and of higher order spheres, are not often shaped that way. Problems are rarely ever composed of perfect squares and circles. Instead, problems are most often pear shaped—as goes the expression.

Bubble people cannot formulate questions themselves; they can only answer questions that have been posited beforehand. Indeed, this makes Kant’s conjectures about knowledge look even grimmer for future human understanding. When Kant talked about the irritating limits of human reason, “reason” encompassed all things knowable in the universe and excluded only those things unknowable or outside our perception or fundamental set of premises. This situation is depressing enough when we consider the likely existence of things in the universe for which humans are not perceptually equipped to know. However, in a society wherein knowledge has been reduced to a small multiple of choices, the inventory of all things knowable will, unfortunately, all fit into the proctor’s handbook.

We can avoid the genesis of a race of bubble people. The standard of standardized testing was premised on the idea of equity, an equal education for all. We test this way because there are so many children, rather, there are so many parents, and each of them wants to know that each child is being taught equally—or that theirs is learning better than the others. Parents check pools of standardized testing scores on the same screen where they count their blog hits. The bubbling method is only really a matter of expedience for parents and educators.

We do not teach great books because, as Dewey told us, great books are filled with stuffy old ideas and the study of dusty old ideas only perpetuates the same stuffy old ideas. It’s is one of those vicious cycles. It’s Kantian, really. There is no room for growth or for new tradition, quoth the education god: we need diversity of experience. And anyway, said Dewey, children are too immature to learn about Aristotle’s categorical notion of friendship or, to decode the nuances of Swift’s sociological description of the Big Enders. I think he might be right.

The progress approach didn’t work and for quite a number of years children ran amok as their experience degraded inevitably into hedonism and mischief. The progressive education was traded for a moderate approach. If we skip ahead to the present we find that the curriculum has changed, though the children are still running amok. Rather than the great books, we now teach the shadows of great books based on bullet points extracted by experts who have actually learned the material—usually in private schools. Experts reduce the knowledge into pill form and children are asked to find it in a labyrinth of dubious turns. Indeed, it looks as if it was not Mr. Dewey or Mr. Hutchins, but Mr. Skinner who finally won the education battle.

Many people, including parents and policy makers, seem to believe that is that there is such thing as a best education, an education of perennial truths. This is not the case. What we have is an education system without a tenable education mission. Our educational goals have been notoriously lofty and inarticulate. We believe that education should prepare children for the 21st century; prepare children for the labor force; prepare children to compete in the global community. Then we find the subjects that do these things and throw money at them. Some of us see this and think that throwing money will not teach children. Tsk, these people say, that’s not how children are educated. They are not wrong to say so. Then, moronically, these people declare that individual spending like vouchers rather than pooled spending, throwing the money, is what educates children. Taken alone, that’s a very simple and negligent strategy. What is wrong with our current ideas of education is that education is not always a vertical category. It is, however, always a horizontal category. That is, education is political, but never perennial.

Education cannot be used to compete with other nations in an attempt to measure whose children are more capable of knowing and transmitting eternal truths. If that were possible, then we would be at the final stages of what has been called globalization. We are not, that is to say, we do not yet share one political reality with the rest of the world. We do not yet share a consensus view of which truths are eternal and which are contingent. Education always has an agenda. When educators do not choose an agenda, the agenda is chaos. Chaos is, in a sense, a patchwork of things.

In New Jersey, the Fordham Institute study found the following:

• New Jersey schools were apparently more rigorous as “15 of 18 elementary schools in [the] sample failed to make AYP in 2008 under New Jersey’s accountability system.”

• Elementary schools in 15 states that satisfied AYP requirements beat elementary schools in New Jersey that also met AYP requirements: “New Jersey ties with 4 other states that each have 3 elementary schools making AYP.”

• “The performance of individual subgroups” of New Jersey’s students with disabilities cause scores to lower in schools that might otherwise meet AYP requirements. Most interesting, “as is the case in other states, schools with fewer subgroups attain AYP more easily in New Jersey than schools with more subgroups, even when their average student performance is lower. In other words, schools with greater diversity and size face greater challenges in making AYP.”

• “Every single elementary school with limited English proficient and SWD subgroups failed to make AYP, in part because these students did not meet the state’s targets in reading.”

• “New Jersey falls near the middle of the state distribution in terms of the number of schools that make AYP. One particularly interesting thing about New Jersey is that a large group of Hispanic/Latino, African American, and low-income students met their targets in math. […]However, New Jersey’s definitions of proficiency generally ranked below average compared with the standards set by the other states, especially in grades 3-5 math. This likely accounts for the higher pass rate for traditionally disadvantaged groups.”

Most interesting was that “schools with greater diversity and size face greater challenges in making AYP” and also the last point about pass rates in New Jersey. Some people in New Jersey have suspected that our tendency to pass kids through the system by lowering our standards is responsible for our high graduation rates and, consequently, creates very soft graduation numbers. This may look good on the annual Quality Counts report, but it essentially leaves kids with less than an even substandard education. Lowering our standards is just another way of ejecting low scoring children from the system.

The worst thing about having no educational agenda is that ejected low scorers are being ejected merely because they cannot figure out the game and for no other reason. If they are not ejected and they matriculate through the system for several years, it is for the same reason. It’s actually pretty perverse. They are not being ejected because they have failed the test of citizenship—though for many children in our education system, citizenship is what, essentially, is at stake. When they are ejected, they are really being catapulted into a substandard citizenship to live as substandard citizens. Though education has forgotten the purpose of education, but the streets of our country have not.

The report admits that New Jersey is not the only guilty party when it comes to the way some groups of children are processed:

Even if actual participation guidelines for English language learners and students with disabilities are more generous under the current state assessment system, doesn’t the massive failure of these students to meet New Jersey’s targets indicate that a new approach is needed for holding schools accountable for the performance of these students? Yes, schools should redouble their efforts to boost achievement for ELL students and students with disabilities, as for other students, but when almost no school is able to meet the goal, perhaps that indicates that the goal is unrealistic. These will be critical considerations for Congress as it takes up NCLB re-authorization in the future.

Here’s On Voting’s opinion: Teaching math and science are good. Let’s teach them and leave it at that. We’ll audit or test our teachers to make sure they are teaching math and science—add civics and English, though, at equal or greater weights. Teaching is where we should be most rigorous.

I echo the words of Mr. Hutchins of the 1930s when he said that America still lacks a teaching profession. If becoming a teacher were more like becoming a doctor a lawyer or president of the United States, we might then be more inclined to trust what goes on in America’s classrooms. After all, we don’t rate or close hospitals based simply on how many patients are murdered each year by mistreatment—though sadly, as the medical profession becomes more revenue driven and more easily gamed, some people are considering such measures.

If ever we take seriously the original ends of our education system, public opinion would be the best place to begin our search for an ideal curriculum—and the curriculum is where all of our standards should begin, rather than end. If the public, you say, is far too ignorant to decide what its children ought to be learning, consider that to be a very telling fact about the present rulers of this country. Public hearings and a frequent public referendum for curriculum in each state would not only ensure that children are learning what they ought to but it would garner the direct involvement of parents in ensuring the educational outcomes. Also, parents are less likely to say that they dislike how their children are being taught. It’s just an idea. If you don’t like it, then let us reconsider the monarchy.

Perhaps there’s another option. As the end has always been western education, we might consider resuming our system of traditional education as Mr. Hutchins nearly did. Mr. Hutchins called this perennialism because the great books of western civilization–as he saw it–were perennially important and chock full of eternal truths. I disagree about their eternality, though not about the idea that they successfully transmit truths about western culture. If your end is western tradition—AND IT HAS NOT EVER NOT BEEN—then the great books would be a great curriculum. Kind of a tautology isn’t it. Perhaps it is time to realize the political, rather than the perennial, import of great books.

Holding Higher Education Accountable

Today, as the Senate Education Committee met over Senate bill no. 1609 (Lesniak, Whelan) The New Jersey Business and Industry Association petitioned that although it didn’t disagree with the project set out in the bill which seeks to reform New Jersey’s Higher Education Act, or to the installation of a new secretary of higher education, it wanted to ensure that “flexibility” was available to New Jersey’s state universities. I believe the sentiment was that “business believes in flexibility.” This was followed by, I think it was: “business also believes in affordability.” Ok, well, there comes a time when we have to stop thinking about what this business chump “believes.” Have you seen what he’s done to Rutgers, no, even better, to the country? So what if business believes in flexibility, the pope believes a lot of fine things but people still give that guy a hard time.

Proposed legislation, among other things, does the following:

• Installs a Secretary of Higher Education at the head of the New Jersey Commission on Higher Education.

• Forms the membership and stations of the new New Jersey Commission on Higher Education.

• Requires that the boards of state colleges and universities create an audit committee of financially experienced voting members of the board, an internal audit staff, and an external auditor.

• Compels the New Jersey Commission on Higher Education to prepare a “comprehensive master plan” for state higher education.

• Requires that the boards of state colleges and universities create a nominations and governance committee to revise policy and oversee the internal governance of the board itself.

• Requires that the boards of state colleges and universities develop fund raising strategies.

• Places tighter restrictions on campus expansion and new construction.

• Requires that outside grants and funds received be for the purpose of higher education.

• Redirects all incoming revenue through the Office of Management and Budget and to the discretion of OMB’s director.

Given the recent and varied controversy at our research schools these reforms are good things. Especially striking are the audits, and other reports required from the commission which could add a much needed layer of transparency and community involvement to New Jersey higher education. Also, the redirection of funds through OMB is a great idea. These are good steps toward creating oversight so state universities can do what they are supposed to—teach New Jersey kids. Though the bureaucracy and process described in the bill is enormous, perhaps the rigorous oversight will gain more revenue for higher education in the long run, capturing it from the various projects which have had nothing but tentative connections to higher education, and from the scandals that have not only injured our public higher education funds but the general morale of students, alumni, and taxpayers.

Regarding “flexibility,” we have to ask ourselves whether our state universities have actually earned their autonomy since passage of The State College Autonomy Laws (SCAL) of 1986. Have these institutions budgeted with student affordability in mind? When they accepted money from outside sources, did they do so for reasons that would ultimately increase the likelihood that kids would graduate on time and pay less out of their own pockets? In 2008, the New Jersey Association of State Colleges and Universities claimed that tuitions increased because states cut back their funding and because their capital projects must be financed independently. This latter, independent financing, means that the debt falls back on students. I remember that representatives of a certain college were going on about how hotel room-like accommodations were absolutely necessary if they were to enhance their enrollments. They complained that not only was there less funding but that more regulation/oversight would cramp their style and that they would not be able to find the most competitive bidder for this project. They blamed other state schools for dirtying the bath water and bringing this regulation down on them. They blamed the state for insufficiently funding their “campus modernization” processes and forcing them to raise tuition. Under the SCAL of 1994, the college or university is allowed to invest college funds, to put their income to work. Also, our state colleges under the SCAL, fix tuition. There is simply too much incentive to raise tuition in order to use state money to offset the costs of capital projects.

As SCAL increased the powers of colleges and universities to self govern, the Education Restructuring Act (ERA) of 1994 in turn removed the then unnecessary State Department of Higher Education. There since has been no balance between taxpayer money and the receiving institutions. A new Secretary of higher education would be a great thing, or, at least, not a bad thing. Flexibility and business is out of place in a state funded school. Also, what’s the use of funding an institution that admits the majority of its student population from out of state? These kinds of state institutions exist among those included in the bill. Leave that out-of-state diversity to someone else, to Seton Hall, state schools. There’s plenty of diversity here in New Jersey, and disparity, too.

Do state colleges and universities think that this new layer of bureaucracy is paralyzing and unfair? You bet they do. But to many in the public, accountability is what is needed here. For many,New Jersey’s colleges and universities have blown their chances at autonomy. If some of our state colleges or universities think that they are being punished for wrongs that they haven’t committed, then perhaps these people shouldn’t have been so complicit when others in the system were abusing their autonomy. Being innovative with finance, “flexible,” can certainly help during a recession, but great business ideas are just bad bets when they go wrong. New Jersey cannot let its state higher education schools gamble with public money.

Here’s Michael Riccards talking about his experience working for the previous higher education agency in New Jersey listen>

Externalities Count: Drop T&E and Give Everyone a Sufficient Education

Today a Court review School Reform Act of 2008, the most recent mutation of the Robinson v. Cahill or Abbot v. Burke strain began today at 9AM at the office of Superior Court Judge Peter E. Doyne, appointed Special Master for the review of the current formula last year, in Hackensack New Jersey. Speakers at Princeton’s education conference last Friday spoke cynically about the outcome. There’s reason for this. New Jersey’s Abbott v. Burke cases and similar cases in the litigation wave driven education reforms in other states have represented the nexus of policy and philosophy in education. Abbott v. Burke represents the consternating project of defining education once and for all, and more ambitious, as a quantifiable thus monetary figure. The quandary is this: how do we make our education system both thorough and efficient without favoring one or the other? It is philosophically interesting or, perhaps, easier to suppose that we have traveled too far in the direction of T, shunning the boring frugality implied by E. I would ask if it is ever actually possible to provide an education that is just thorough and not efficient? Or how about just efficient and not thorough? I think it is possible to be too thorough and not efficient in some process. For instance, you could drop a nuclear weapon on a desert island to kill one rattle snake. Or you could just use a stick. It is not possible to be efficient, however, if it is not possible to be thorough. Could that be what’s happening in New Jersey? Are we dropping atom bombs on a snake that is impervious to atom bombs?

Is SFRA a wise formula? Will the funding-follows-students approach satisfy the equity issues of the past, will it educate kids? Or will SFRA just solve the issue of dubious pupil counts?

Here, by the way, is the typical distribution of funds for a high school in New Jersey. I’ve chosen not to list the school’s name. It’s a typical enough figure, you should not have any problem finding another just like it.

It is not whether we’ve pursued thorough or efficient but whether we’ve come to understand that one side of that conjunction is impossible without the other. Said differently, T implies E, they are symbiotic components in our mandated New Jersey education benchmark. You can never have an efficient education unless you know that you can have a thorough education. Is there a thorough education for all of New Jersey’s children? Are we sure that what kids learn or don’t learn in schools can be called “education”? Our graduation rates are very impressive, but the quality of alternate graduation requirements in this state, the high school proficiency assessment (HSPA), have been recently questioned. What happens when we subtract those alternate graduations from our reported graduation rate. A much less attractive rate? The question is how do we channel more graduates through primary graduation paths? And how could we ever make a system of such soft graduation numbers efficient? An efficient what? Efficiency is the “effective operation as measured by a comparison of production with cost.” Efficiency, confined within the cost-function model, supposes that something finite and therefore quantifiable is produced at a reasonable cost to profit (“education”) ratio. Tell me, how many finite units of education can you buy with $30? Is that like .17 percent of an education? Is it possible to say something like that? Why can’t our teachers teach a core curriculum for the same price and at the same level of benefits that teachers receive in other states?

For thorough write universal, for efficient write sufficient. Then, let us look at the character and quality of life among HSPA graduates. Do the effects of poverty spill over into the classroom? You bet. Leave the schools alone, let us fix the family.

The Last Honest Broker In New York City?

The New York Times reports today on the closing of P.S. 090 George Meany in the Bronx, a closure that NYC DOE justifies with the school’s low performance in its last grading cycle. PS 090 scored an F in New York City’s school report card accountability system. The NYC DOE has received plenty of flack for its use of letter grades to reduce overall school performance to a familiar character on a report card and there is good reason for this. The use of grades as a metric for overall school performance is reduced from a relatively nebulous performance assessment. Really, the grades function in two ways: as a means of consumer-friendly valuation that is essential to the marketplace of New York City’s school choice program; likewise, as a political means of exerting the force of business style accountability on the marketplace of New York City schools. The latter use of letter grading really defeats all the value of the former.

Presumably, schools receive their letter grades based on a series of dubiously weighted performance indicators such as school attendance, suspensions, English as a Second Language and other standardized assessment test scores. The choice to close a school, The Times describes, “based on a mishmash of factors like performance on standardized tests, situations of violence, student demand for the school and whether the school seems capable of turning around.” Importantly, in the 2007-08 cycle, P.S. 090 was 56 percent Hispanic or Latino, 37 percent black, and about 6 percent Asian. More importantly, P.S. 090 serves only 1197 children from K-4, a large though small in scope and very young group. Many of the children in this school experience a home life that is not culturally and often not linguistically conducive to high English proficiency and European American cultural knowledge—both of which are essential standardized testing. Yet, slating a school for termination based on a rigorous assessment of 4 graders from exclusively from minority homes seems a bit perverse, but maybe there is something in it. P.S. 090 represents a concentration of risk, a necessary product of the choice-grading system wherein students inevitably sediment because of some cultural, physical, or environmental handicap, or because their parents are unable to understand the education marketplace. Perhaps the correct action to take is not closure but identification and positive intervention from the state. Undoubtedly, the little kids of P.S. 090 represent a concentration of special needs. Moving them around to other schools is no guarantee that they will be successful but more a guarantee that they will become lost in the system as their risk becomes crowded out by the performance of children with significantly more cultural capital. Looking at P.S. 090’s vitals, I see the obvious impossibility for high scoring and an obvious opportunity to install a pre-kindergarten-like program and to collect linear student data. There must be some way to teach these kids. Why don’t we look for it rather than shifting them around.

The political facet of letter grading is incompatible with the more innovative aims of New York City’s education market place. Schools should not be closed down unless they no longer serve the community—unless all the students in the community it serves have moved on to other schools. P.S. 090 does not have below average enrollment numbers—there are still consumers here. What is needed here is consumer protection, not recall. Why are enrollment and attendance high at P.S. 090 while its other scores are so low? Let us keep New York’s education marketplace free. No one is cooking the books here. There’s no reason to let honest schools fail.

Taxing Our Tomorrow

It is a pity that that first stimulus package was given to the architects of our crisis and received by no one in particular with less than nominal oversight. It looks now as if Democrat officials have begun to think hard about round two of troubled asset relief funding as spending proposals are released this week. The National Association of Budget Officers (NASBO) counts that $141.6 billion is to be applied to the project of education, and $79 billion of that number is for the purpose of paying for education within the states:

The state directed funding is made up of $39 billion to local school districts and public colleges and universities distributed through existing state and federal formulas; $15 billion to states as grants for meeting key performance measures; and $25 billion to states for other high priority needs such as public safety and other critical services, which may include education. Additional funds include $15.6 billion to increase Pell grants by $500 and $6 billion for higher education modernization.

For one, as New Jersey’s school funding formula is difficult enough to understand without the confusion of exterior formulas and legislation, it will be important for New Jerseyans to keep an eye on this money—school funds disappear inexplicably in this state. Also, whether New Jersey even qualifies for this kind of assistance isn’t clear. It would be unfortunate if the money marked for education was absorbed somehow into the pet issue of lowering the property taxes of suburban New Jersey while poor schools and poor students in our various blighted areas continue to decline.

Whether every state should qualify for stimulus or not, the new plan should be much better appreciated by Americans than the prior plan, if you can call it a plan. The initiative shown by legislators to enrich all tiers of our nation’s schools is refreshing and long overdue. And if we think about it, the stimulus infusion gives educators and administrators the space and time to work out all of the un- or under-funded school reform programs of the past eight years. For instance, one often wielded bone of contention, the lack of funding for after school programs has been the most blaring of the nation’s school reform issues. Here is a program that gets kids off the street and makes constructive the time that might otherwise be spent in a troubled or empty home. Organizations like New Jersey after 3 are probably the best suited for this type of assistance. Specifically speaking, somewhere in the modest $39 billion, we may be able to find the resources to keep school facilities like libraries and study areas in low income areas open and supervised long after school is out. We could expand counseling programs, sports and leadership programs. We should add to, extend the duration of, and fundamentally amend the title 1 program in order to make it more like a grant or fellowship based on excellence and experience rather than willingness and need. Let us network with organizations like vista and sweeten stipends, pay new teachers to shadow, intern, and build or maintain urban habitats rather than paying them to cut their teeth on disadvantaged kids who, really, have enough on their plates without the added aggravation of inexperienced and mercenary teachers. Enriching after school and reforming title 1 are two of the most important priorities for any sincere education reformer.

Let us make these changes while reforming the way we test and spend. This isn’t an economic buffet but a buffer that may allow reformers to set in place what works and swiftly remove what doesn’t. Obama once said that he wants teachers to have a buy-in to accountability. Let’s sell them accountability while we have time to pay for it. Before we grade and discourage future adults with our accountability complex, why can’t we turn accountability on educators. I do not mean to say that we should be over harsh when we hold people accountable, but that it should be common sense that we hold educators accountable before we discourage, alienate, and experiment on students in an effort to make test scores and coffers balance. There are better ways to make education work. These children are assets who must be prepared to enter the labor market and perpetuate that business cycle that we are all so concerned about. Let us give educators SAT and GRE exams regularly and let us leverage their scores with promotions. Our $141 billion should be used as breathing room and it should encourage administrators to air out the unsatisfactory teachers and reward the excellent ones. Educators should base their decisions on a number of factors including competency and student performance. If educators are “teaching to the test” in order to keep their jobs then people should begin to wonder why there is such a divide between “the test” and “the teaching.” What is it, exactly, that children should learn and is that in some way different from what we expect them as adults to know? There are fundamental and philosophical problems that precede any attempt to induce the education of children with a 100 percent chance of success. Education is more subtle than this.

The “subtlety” of education describes a notion held by former New Jersey governor Brendan Byrne’s education commissioner Fred Burke who during the national shift to quantified educational outcomes in the 1970s and 1980s, emphasized “process” measures rather than the logic of input-output that reigns over our education system today.

Presumably, “process” describes a method of funding only the sufficient means of education, i.e. facilities, books, teachers, rather than the educational means to some predicted end. Process holds education to be variable, something experienced differently by everyone. The notion that educational success is subtle rather than predictable supports the notion of genius, originality, and novelty. Further, a process approach assumes that educational outcomes are, essentially, unpredictable. This does not mean that there are no conditions for adequate education but that deep and lasting educational experiences come only through a delicate process that cannot be reproduced in a lab with a 100 percent rate of success. Simply put, let us at least put a sufficient amount of money into providing programs and facilities that tend to produce better educational outcomes and better students. Let us raise the quality of life for students in poor districts.

In the higher education sphere, we must get realistic about the meanings of words like “modernization” and “education.” Schools that consider the erection of temples to Ditka, i.e. stadiums and massage rooms for coaches and athletes should be excluded from stimulus as long as their priorities are not the higher education of their students. It’s a shame but no one should ever have to insist that higher education be the first priority of our institutions of higher education. I know that people like sports, it’s great for families and alumni, for morale and all that. However, just like any school spending gimmick, there ought to be some measurement of tangible return to the school for each dollar spent. If even the money is not being redirected from the original purpose of education, parents and students must still wonder what kind of people would allow New Jersey’s future labor force to drop out or bankrupt themselves at so young an age so that wealthy football fans can have a cushy new sky box and a cute little tapas bar to enjoy once a year. At least use the room for classes in the off season. The skybox idea was absurd. College graduates know that building a school requires that a school be built. Building a stadium requires that…well, you get it. Trading a new stadium with a sky box for books and educational opportunity is not how I would define the modernization of higher education. Rather, I would call that instead the noticeable decline of civilization. Three years ago when students at Rutgers University were being turned away at the financial aid line or asked to take on significantly more debt and a part time job, these private sport-funding people didn’t move a finger. School funding whiners—look there and only there before you ask the state and random alumni for more money. Don’t hound your graduates for donations when several millions are flowing into the college without a dime devoted to relieving the real and rising debt of students. Call some “helicopter company” somewhere and ask them to foot the bill for 25 or 50 deserving undergraduates. You’ll impress everyone. Regarding the definition of education, the University of Chicago since the 1930s has had a pretty good definition of higher education that other schools may want to emulate. It’s called a strong core curriculum. Not only does it make teaching a profession, it also adds worth to the degrees of graduates. It should be nurtured and strengthened because, for employers, it represents the quality of the graduates that it tempers. Likewise, it earns graduates real jobs and thereby earns departments real endowments. That’s real return. There is your god, educators. It’s not the skybox, it’s the curriculum.

Spending our money wisely is absolutely necessary because there will most likely be no third chance to get things right. This $141 billion dollars does not exist, this is money borrowed from the next generation that the federal government is investing in the American people. The stakes are high. Will we settle on a definition of “education modernization” and play football with old pads and without the skybox or will we destroy the next generation of students and tax them into oblivion simultaneously?