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.

The Persistent Conflict In Education

Today, the AP reports that while it still falls short of Harvard in selectivity (and endowment) Princeton ranks #1 in alumni giving. The story features the enthusiasm of Princeton alumni and the pride they have for their top ranked Alma mater. We might be led here to assume that rankings merely increase prestige of alumni who are then more than willing to give back. AP quotes a retired physician and Princeton Alumni: “Being the No. 1 school and having attended it and/or graduated from it, you naturally retain that for the rest of your life.” So it’s the ranking (published and not) rather than the afterglow of an exceptional educational experience that keeps them giving. I prefer to think that there are more complex forces which influence our compulsion to give as I am forced to hang up on the Rutgers telethon kids 2-3 days a week. You might say that because of where I went to college, I hold a unique perspective of charity. I am not ashamed to say that I have refused to give as little as $20 because I know it will do nothing to increase the library’s resources, lower tuition or further the pursuit of academic progress in any shape or form. I once tried to procure an oath from one of these student telemarketers in exchange for $100 if only they could tell me a pleasant lie, create a brief account of how my contribution would improve the academic environment for students. No answer came and I was forced to imagine that my $100 would do no more than help buy McCormick a new pair of Jordans… Disappointed, I kept my $100. Call it civil disobedience, I feel moral. Rutgers might meditate on this.

Anyhow, AP continues onto the line that these rankings, while increasing the giving zeal of alumni, might be destroying today’s education. I think there’s something there. Rankings surely promote a kind of instrumentalism in schools that packages education as a mere institution of licensing, what Robert Maynard Hutchins described in his development of the doctrine of the ad hoc in his 1953 The Conflict In Education. To this end, AP reports the sentiments of education reform heavy-hitter Loyd Thacker who is the executive director of The Education Conservancy, a site dedicated to the purpose of reforming the admissions angle of the higher education question. Thacker sees rankings like those of U.S. News and World Report as harmful to education which ought, in his opinion, be about learning. AP reports:

To Thacker, rankings add to the stress and pressure kids are under, and make them more concerned about grades and SAT scores than learning.

“This process makes kids sneaky, game-playing conformists,” he says. “The high-end kids are over-processed, over-packaged, disengaged with learning. The poor kids, the disadvantaged kids, see this process as so complex and so convoluted and so costly that they’re not even engaging in it.”

Certainly, the “high-end kids” are disengaged but I don’t think it’s solely because of rankings, I think rankings really do work for these types of kids. Their opposite numbers, the “poor kids” of course, are stuck with degrees that suit their lot in life. Dewey once saw a complimentary learning disability between the very rich, whose experience of pleasure without pain has caused them to become disengaged from reality, and the very poor whose experience is dominated by pain which in turn causes them to learn only negative pleasure and take every stimulus as a mere means of lessening their suffering. Practically speaking, if any of these lower-end kids can transcend their environments and come to understand the value of an education (which alone is actually screenplay-worthy)they will most likely be forced to attend community college, to work in the meantime, incur debt, and finally draw lower wages. In a sorting system where higher education has become nothing but a licensing program, there is almost as much financial incentive for poor kids to attend community college for education’s sake as there is to use it as a gateway to material prosperity. Unfortunately, productivity rather than process is the aim of the community college – and rightly so. On its face, there is no incentive to go to community college. But that’s neither here nor there.

What is most interesting is the idea that there is some conflict, as yet unresolved, in education. Namely, this conflict between the need to package education up like an ipod or a suit and the need to learn. Education has become nothing but a means to some professional end. This, as I’ve mentioned, might be called the doctrine of needs or of the ad hoc. Robert Hutchins warned that American Universities are susceptible to the efforts of occupational groups who are able to create professional schools as a benchmark test for new professionals. The aim of this, says Hutchins, is to raise the quality of professionals but also to limit competition. We, right now, are no strangers to professional schools though when Hutchins wrote about the conflict in education, professional schools were still a slightly foreign fact of the university campus.

American universities, because of the influence that these groups may have upon legislatures that support the state institutions or because of the role that they may be expected to play as donors or fee payers to the private universities, have been unable to resist the claims of these occupational groups.

And as time drags on, higher education becomes a purely vocational institution. Well done. Not only does admission exclusivity now represent the sole determinant of your professional potential, but education everywhere is nothing more than the mouth of a channel that takes kids, “high-end” and the others, to some narrowly defined educational destination. Hutchins thought this was a problem but you might say: so what?

If you say so what, then we can no longer take Jefferson’s stated intentions for an institution of general education to be the obvious aim of our current education system. Universal suffrage, it would seem, is no longer the aim of general education. Preparation for the graduated professionalism of higher education is the curriculum of our primary and secondary schools. Further, enfranchisement is a pallid illusion for Americans without at least an associate’s degree in something.

That brilliant president of the University of Chicago, Robert Maynard Hutchins, was one of those high-end kids having inherited a great intellectual legacy from his parents. Having served as the Editor in Chief of the Encyclopedia Britannica’s great books collection we can safely assume that he knew much about his culture’s greatest thinkers from every discipline but mathematics, an exclusion for which we should not blame him. If a wide range of experience is a key ingredient of competent citizenship, and John Dewey thought it was, then John Maynard Hutchins was also a great citizen. His solution: leave the Universities alone to their escalating specialization and create another institution, perhaps one that closely matches in aims and means the traditional University, or better, Academy. He does not provide many details about this new institution, like whether it will be compulsory, selective or 1 or 5 years, though he calls this new institution the light and hope of “the nations now wandering in darkness” and seems to suggests that the benefit of its very human curriculum will somehow reach round the world. He suggested that these new institutions “might fashion the mind of the 20th century and make it equal to the dreadful obligations that Providence has laid upon it.” Though a bit inarticulate with his solution he makes it clear that the pace and purpose of education have outstripped our capacity to learn as an end in itself rather than as a means to some end like the MCAT, LSAT or GRE Subject Test – to learn for the love and novelty of learning new things. That’s a very human sort of thing to sacrifice, in my opinion.