The Today Show on NBC is missing an important story that they constantly fail to see. This happened 3 times in the 7-8 am slot yesterday and then again today.
Yesterday they discussed kid's texting behavior, the killing of a school principal, and 2 kids being burned or otherwise badly harmed in Florida by kids at their school. Today they reported on a teen suicide caused by bullying at a school in Massachusetts.
The real story here is that the school experience is getting worse all the time and that the government wants to fix it by more testing rather than by realizing that school itself is a failed idea. Kids have no business being shut up in a world of hundreds of other kids whom they don't know. They don't learn much because they are way more concerned with the social standards that have been set by other kids, and they spend most of their time worrying about being accepted, liked, or being in with the "in crowd."
It is time to understand that school is a very bad idea. We are smart enough to be able to figure out a replacement for school that does not endanger children and actually helps them learn skills that will matter to them later in life.
Let's start that dialogue. Let's stop allowing others to torture our children.
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Measuring Student Achievement: Ten questions
Governor Crist of Florida (where I live) last week vetoed a piece of nonsense that linked teacher's salaries to "student achievement." I imagine his veto of his own party's bill was about politics and not about education, but let me ask some education questions that are never asked:
1. Why do we need to measure student achievement?
2. What would happen if students were not measured or graded at all?
3. Can we imagine an educational system in which students were seen as consumers and they could consume what they wanted to consume -- letting them learn what they'd like to learn?
4. Why do legislatures think they understand what children need to learn?
5. How well would these legislators do on the very FCATs they mandate?
6. Do legislators regularly take multiple choice tests?
7. Why don't we measure legislators with multiple choice tests?
8. If adult achievement involves actual acts of labor (i.e. doing things) why not measure students in the same way?
9. Why is it so hard to re-think the idea of student achievement, and imagine it as having students actually achieve real things, real abilities, that can be seen and demonstrated and judged in the same way that the actions of adults are judged?
10. Can we imagine school as a place where students pursue their interests and demonstrate real achievements, and not have t o work at improving meaningless test scores masquerading as achievements?
I just thought I'd ask.
1. Why do we need to measure student achievement?
2. What would happen if students were not measured or graded at all?
3. Can we imagine an educational system in which students were seen as consumers and they could consume what they wanted to consume -- letting them learn what they'd like to learn?
4. Why do legislatures think they understand what children need to learn?
5. How well would these legislators do on the very FCATs they mandate?
6. Do legislators regularly take multiple choice tests?
7. Why don't we measure legislators with multiple choice tests?
8. If adult achievement involves actual acts of labor (i.e. doing things) why not measure students in the same way?
9. Why is it so hard to re-think the idea of student achievement, and imagine it as having students actually achieve real things, real abilities, that can be seen and demonstrated and judged in the same way that the actions of adults are judged?
10. Can we imagine school as a place where students pursue their interests and demonstrate real achievements, and not have t o work at improving meaningless test scores masquerading as achievements?
I just thought I'd ask.
Friday, April 2, 2010
Wrong National Standards, Governor Wise, and Casino Management
I saw this statement from Governor Wise, who is the head of the Alliance for Education. He is a nice guy who I like, but he is very much in favor of national standards:
Gov Wise: “Zip codes are no way to educate America’s future workforce.”
I found this statement so odd that I wrote to the man who sent it out who responded with:
wouldn’t you agree that current standards in far too many states are too low to prepare students to succeed after high school?
What a weird take on the problem. The standards are absurd and students know that. States differ on how effectively they force kids to attend schools that they hate. And, while we are at it, zip codes are indeed a way to manage education.
How do we find out what there is to be in life? School should tell us but it does not. I have come to realize that this is a serious issue in our society. We teach people literature and mathematics and then throw them out into the world figuring they will know what to do when they get there independent of that fact that knowledge of literature and mathematics is almost certainly not going it be helpful. We also fail to ask what we want of our students.
I realized this in a deep way one day when I went to the Santa Fe Indian School in New Mexico. I was trying to get the legislature to give me money for building an on line school which is part of my larger effort to build many new kinds of curricula for high school students.
I went to the Indian School as part of the kind of politicking one does when one wants a bill to be passed. But once there I had a realization. Telling these people that we could build a technology oriented curriculum was not going to be all that exciting for them. I imagined myself to be an Indian in Santa Fe and I figured that I wouldn’t want my kid on going off to MIT never to return.
Of course, that is exactly what happens in the segment of society I live in. My children were sent to college and were not expected to return. I am not sure where they would have retuned to since I was always moving around myself. But, in hindsight, I am not thrilled that my kids do not live near me and I imagine, if I were an Indian I would be very concerned that they stay around so that my culture does not die.
So I asked them questions about curricula that were meant to get them to think about what their kids could learn that would help their culture survive.
Their answer was: Casino Management. This both surprised me, and then, in retrospect, didn’t surprise me at all. Of course that is what they need their children to learn to be good at doing.
We never got to build that curriculum courtesy of Governor Richardson who simply had lied to me about his forthcoming approval of the bill. But it did make me understand something about what is wrong with the national standards movement (apart from its canonization of the 1892 curriculum.)
People really are different in different places and have different educational needs. In Wichita they have an airplane manufacturing industry and no one to teach students how to work in it. In parts of the country there are hotels in the middle of nowhere that can't find anyone nearby who might know how to manage one.
Education needs to be local at just the time when the country is trying to make it into one size fits all.
Gov Wise: “Zip codes are no way to educate America’s future workforce.”
I found this statement so odd that I wrote to the man who sent it out who responded with:
wouldn’t you agree that current standards in far too many states are too low to prepare students to succeed after high school?
What a weird take on the problem. The standards are absurd and students know that. States differ on how effectively they force kids to attend schools that they hate. And, while we are at it, zip codes are indeed a way to manage education.
How do we find out what there is to be in life? School should tell us but it does not. I have come to realize that this is a serious issue in our society. We teach people literature and mathematics and then throw them out into the world figuring they will know what to do when they get there independent of that fact that knowledge of literature and mathematics is almost certainly not going it be helpful. We also fail to ask what we want of our students.
I realized this in a deep way one day when I went to the Santa Fe Indian School in New Mexico. I was trying to get the legislature to give me money for building an on line school which is part of my larger effort to build many new kinds of curricula for high school students.
I went to the Indian School as part of the kind of politicking one does when one wants a bill to be passed. But once there I had a realization. Telling these people that we could build a technology oriented curriculum was not going to be all that exciting for them. I imagined myself to be an Indian in Santa Fe and I figured that I wouldn’t want my kid on going off to MIT never to return.
Of course, that is exactly what happens in the segment of society I live in. My children were sent to college and were not expected to return. I am not sure where they would have retuned to since I was always moving around myself. But, in hindsight, I am not thrilled that my kids do not live near me and I imagine, if I were an Indian I would be very concerned that they stay around so that my culture does not die.
So I asked them questions about curricula that were meant to get them to think about what their kids could learn that would help their culture survive.
Their answer was: Casino Management. This both surprised me, and then, in retrospect, didn’t surprise me at all. Of course that is what they need their children to learn to be good at doing.
We never got to build that curriculum courtesy of Governor Richardson who simply had lied to me about his forthcoming approval of the bill. But it did make me understand something about what is wrong with the national standards movement (apart from its canonization of the 1892 curriculum.)
People really are different in different places and have different educational needs. In Wichita they have an airplane manufacturing industry and no one to teach students how to work in it. In parts of the country there are hotels in the middle of nowhere that can't find anyone nearby who might know how to manage one.
Education needs to be local at just the time when the country is trying to make it into one size fits all.
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
What should I major in?
A column in the Columbia University newspaper caught my eye. A woman was try to explain to her father why she had chosen the major she chose.
http://www.columbiaspectator.com/2010/03/04/i-m-majoring-x-don-t-ask-me-why
She, like most college students, thinks she is making an important life choice here. She is, but she is confused about which choice she is making.
Why do college have majors? If you understand that, then the decision will become clear. All universities in the United States, even those that don’t claim to be, are modeled after the concept of the research university. This means that the professors at the school are primarily interested in research. Not only that, research dominates their lives so much that teaching is very low on their priority list. More importantly, when they teach, they are teaching what are basically research subjects.
So, when a psychology major wants to learn about people’s minds he or she winds up learning how to run experiments and how to do statistics because that is what researchers in psychology do.. When a computer science major wants to learn to become a proficient programmer they wind up learning mathematical theories connected with programming because that is what their professors research.
The major exists as a way of routing students on one track of becoming researchers. There are, of course, a few problems with this model. For one, most students do not want to become researchers. For another, those that do want to pursue PhDs soon realize that they could have majored in most anything and been accepted into a PhD program of their choice if they did well enough in college.
Students major in biology or chemistry because they want to became doctors (a field that actually requires next to none of the biology or chemistry that one learns in college.) They major in economies when they want to became business people because, at schools like Colombia, there is no business major but there are plenty of economists who do research.
In fact the concept of major is meant to move students into advanced courses in a department, namely the research seminars, which are really all the faculty actually want to teach anyhow.
When my son asked me what he should major in (he was also at Columbia) I told him “subways.” I did that because he loved subways. Now of course there is no subway major at Columbia, or anywhere else. I told him to pick and choose courses that related to his main interest and that the major he wound up in would not matter at all to anyone.
And this is my advice to students in all colleges. The major requirement is not there to serve your needs, so serve your own. Pick any courses that interests you as you attempt to determine a plan for your life. It really doesn’t matter. If your college offers real training in areas that lead to jobs and you think you might want one of those jobs, by all means major in that. But most people change their plans in life many times, so the answer to “what should I major in?” is simple enough.
It doesn’t make a damn bit of difference. What matter are the choices that you make later. If you pick a major that narrows your choices then you made a bad selection.
http://www.columbiaspectator.com/2010/03/04/i-m-majoring-x-don-t-ask-me-why
She, like most college students, thinks she is making an important life choice here. She is, but she is confused about which choice she is making.
Why do college have majors? If you understand that, then the decision will become clear. All universities in the United States, even those that don’t claim to be, are modeled after the concept of the research university. This means that the professors at the school are primarily interested in research. Not only that, research dominates their lives so much that teaching is very low on their priority list. More importantly, when they teach, they are teaching what are basically research subjects.
So, when a psychology major wants to learn about people’s minds he or she winds up learning how to run experiments and how to do statistics because that is what researchers in psychology do.. When a computer science major wants to learn to become a proficient programmer they wind up learning mathematical theories connected with programming because that is what their professors research.
The major exists as a way of routing students on one track of becoming researchers. There are, of course, a few problems with this model. For one, most students do not want to become researchers. For another, those that do want to pursue PhDs soon realize that they could have majored in most anything and been accepted into a PhD program of their choice if they did well enough in college.
Students major in biology or chemistry because they want to became doctors (a field that actually requires next to none of the biology or chemistry that one learns in college.) They major in economies when they want to became business people because, at schools like Colombia, there is no business major but there are plenty of economists who do research.
In fact the concept of major is meant to move students into advanced courses in a department, namely the research seminars, which are really all the faculty actually want to teach anyhow.
When my son asked me what he should major in (he was also at Columbia) I told him “subways.” I did that because he loved subways. Now of course there is no subway major at Columbia, or anywhere else. I told him to pick and choose courses that related to his main interest and that the major he wound up in would not matter at all to anyone.
And this is my advice to students in all colleges. The major requirement is not there to serve your needs, so serve your own. Pick any courses that interests you as you attempt to determine a plan for your life. It really doesn’t matter. If your college offers real training in areas that lead to jobs and you think you might want one of those jobs, by all means major in that. But most people change their plans in life many times, so the answer to “what should I major in?” is simple enough.
It doesn’t make a damn bit of difference. What matter are the choices that you make later. If you pick a major that narrows your choices then you made a bad selection.
Friday, March 12, 2010
National Standards: how crazy is our government?
I have been mulling about writing a scathing commentary on the new idiotic national standards for education that have just been proposed. They are, more or less, the same standards that were rammed down the throats of Americans in 1892 by the President of Harvard. The government just seems to be want to make sure that no innovation or real change ever takes place in education in this century. They think our failed schools can be fixed by firing teachers and by having more tests. The idea that we might want to re-think a seriously broken system doesn't enter their minds.
I was going to say that, but why bother? I have said it many times before.
Instead, I want to point readers to an article recently posted in a congressional on line magazine that was written by my son. He is writing about transportation policy but really it is all the same. A dysfunctional government that can't get its head out of its lower regions.
http://thehill.com/special-reports/transportation-a-infrastructure-march-2010/86313-no-unified-visio-leaves-lawmakers-with-a-grab-what-you-can-approach
And I might add, after you read it: that's my boy!
I was going to say that, but why bother? I have said it many times before.
Instead, I want to point readers to an article recently posted in a congressional on line magazine that was written by my son. He is writing about transportation policy but really it is all the same. A dysfunctional government that can't get its head out of its lower regions.
http://thehill.com/special-reports/transportation-a-infrastructure-march-2010/86313-no-unified-visio-leaves-lawmakers-with-a-grab-what-you-can-approach
And I might add, after you read it: that's my boy!
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
What Really Goes on at College: the humanities are overrated
Here is a part of an article from The Chronicle of Higher Education that came out today:
“The results of an important new cross-disciplinary survey of humanities departments make it clear that the humanities remain popular with students and central to the core mission of many institutions . The bad news: The survey found less-than-rosy job prospects for the rising generation of scholars. The good news: the great majority of the humanities departments surveyed—87 percent—said that their discipline was included in the core requirements at their college or university.”
I would find this article hilarious if it weren’t so sad. But it is a very good example of what is wrong with our university system. There are no jobs for English and History majors and no faculty openings for PhDs in those fields, but nevertheless the humanities survive at universities. How do they survive? By making the humanities offer required courses that every student must take.
There is nothing wrong with the humanities in principle. We imagine that people might learn more about life, to be better people, to understand issues that have plagued mankind, and be able to think well what it means to be human. So the humanities must be good stuff right? Here are some courses picked at random from the Yale catalogue:
ENGL 265b, The Victorian Novel
ENGL 158b, Readings in Middle English: Language and Symbolic Power
ENGL 305b, Austen & Brontë in the World
ENGL 336b, The Opera Libretto
HIST 166Ja, Asian American Women and Gender, 1830 to the Present.
HIST 168Ja, Quebec and Canada from 1791 to the Present.
HIST 201Ja, The Spartan Hegemony, 404-362 B.C.
HIST 202Ja, Numismatics.
I am sure that these are fine courses taught by serious scholars. But that is exactly my point. When people glorify the study of the humanities they fail to mention that these are scholarly subjects of very little use to the average college student. Universities require that students take them because universities don’t want to fire the professors they already have and they need to teach something. But, with a few exceptions, they are not teaching students to think better about life, they are teaching students about a narrow part of the scholarly domain in which they do research.
Here again we have the clash between the research university and what students expect to learn when they go to college.
The Chronicle of Higher Education represents professors and they think its great news that students are being required to take the courses that professors want to teach. I think this is awful news. Students need to learn to live in the real world. There are very few scholarly jobs so there is no practical reason to teach such courses. If these course teach human skills, as we all assume, that would be great, but they don’t.
Scholars need to stop running universities.
As I have said many times I don’t think Yale has to change. We need to produce some scholars after all. But there are 3000 colleges in the United States all copying Yale’s model.
“The results of an important new cross-disciplinary survey of humanities departments make it clear that the humanities remain popular with students and central to the core mission of many institutions . The bad news: The survey found less-than-rosy job prospects for the rising generation of scholars. The good news: the great majority of the humanities departments surveyed—87 percent—said that their discipline was included in the core requirements at their college or university.”
I would find this article hilarious if it weren’t so sad. But it is a very good example of what is wrong with our university system. There are no jobs for English and History majors and no faculty openings for PhDs in those fields, but nevertheless the humanities survive at universities. How do they survive? By making the humanities offer required courses that every student must take.
There is nothing wrong with the humanities in principle. We imagine that people might learn more about life, to be better people, to understand issues that have plagued mankind, and be able to think well what it means to be human. So the humanities must be good stuff right? Here are some courses picked at random from the Yale catalogue:
ENGL 265b, The Victorian Novel
ENGL 158b, Readings in Middle English: Language and Symbolic Power
ENGL 305b, Austen & Brontë in the World
ENGL 336b, The Opera Libretto
HIST 166Ja, Asian American Women and Gender, 1830 to the Present.
HIST 168Ja, Quebec and Canada from 1791 to the Present.
HIST 201Ja, The Spartan Hegemony, 404-362 B.C.
HIST 202Ja, Numismatics.
I am sure that these are fine courses taught by serious scholars. But that is exactly my point. When people glorify the study of the humanities they fail to mention that these are scholarly subjects of very little use to the average college student. Universities require that students take them because universities don’t want to fire the professors they already have and they need to teach something. But, with a few exceptions, they are not teaching students to think better about life, they are teaching students about a narrow part of the scholarly domain in which they do research.
Here again we have the clash between the research university and what students expect to learn when they go to college.
The Chronicle of Higher Education represents professors and they think its great news that students are being required to take the courses that professors want to teach. I think this is awful news. Students need to learn to live in the real world. There are very few scholarly jobs so there is no practical reason to teach such courses. If these course teach human skills, as we all assume, that would be great, but they don’t.
Scholars need to stop running universities.
As I have said many times I don’t think Yale has to change. We need to produce some scholars after all. But there are 3000 colleges in the United States all copying Yale’s model.
Thursday, February 25, 2010
How can you tell if it is a school or a prison?
I read a blog (http://essentialemmes.blogspot.com/2010/02/genius-on-education-roger-schank.html) that pointed out that schools and prisons look alike, but there is much more in common between school and prisons than their looks:
1. Students/prisoners (s/p) must stay in the place they have been assigned unless given specific permission by the guards/teachers (g/t)
2. s/p may eat only with permission of g/t
3. s/p may go to the bathroom only with permission of g/t
4. assigned tasks must be completed by s/p
5. questioning the task you have been assigned is not allowed
6. expressing a point of view contrary to the g/t about rules is not allowed
7. the g/t may humiliate an s/p at any time
8. the s/p may intimidate and terrorize other s/p s
9. all recreation is supervised by g/t at specified times
10. reading material is deemed suitable or not by g/t
11. all visitors must be vetted prior to visitation
12. failure to follow the rules will result in punishment
13. failure to behave properly may add extra time onto one’s sentence
14. approval by g/t is determined by extremely arbitrary standards
15. freedom of expression is strictly controlled
16. dress codes are strictly enforced
17. getting the g/t to like you will make your time go more easily
18. resting is not allowed
19. pursuing one’s own interests is not allowed
20. deciding you have better things to do than be in prison or school is definitely not allowed
I realize that not all prisons and school are exactly the same in all this, but you get the idea.
1. Students/prisoners (s/p) must stay in the place they have been assigned unless given specific permission by the guards/teachers (g/t)
2. s/p may eat only with permission of g/t
3. s/p may go to the bathroom only with permission of g/t
4. assigned tasks must be completed by s/p
5. questioning the task you have been assigned is not allowed
6. expressing a point of view contrary to the g/t about rules is not allowed
7. the g/t may humiliate an s/p at any time
8. the s/p may intimidate and terrorize other s/p s
9. all recreation is supervised by g/t at specified times
10. reading material is deemed suitable or not by g/t
11. all visitors must be vetted prior to visitation
12. failure to follow the rules will result in punishment
13. failure to behave properly may add extra time onto one’s sentence
14. approval by g/t is determined by extremely arbitrary standards
15. freedom of expression is strictly controlled
16. dress codes are strictly enforced
17. getting the g/t to like you will make your time go more easily
18. resting is not allowed
19. pursuing one’s own interests is not allowed
20. deciding you have better things to do than be in prison or school is definitely not allowed
I realize that not all prisons and school are exactly the same in all this, but you get the idea.
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