Obama, Kristof, Duncan and the NY Times all agree

I had some hopes for education when Obama was elected. Gone now. Here is what happened:

Nicholas Kristof, an otherwise seemingly intrepid journalist, wrote a column in the NY Times about how he now realizes that education is our most important priority, and that the solution is higher teacher salaries and memorizing math songs like they do at the KIPP schools. This column was so wrong-headed that I decided to try and contact him so that I could help him understand the issues in education better. I asked a friend who could help me do that. This is what he told me:

Both the New York Times and the Obama administration are very concerned with keeping education exactly as it has been. They are afraid that if radical changes occurred they would be criticized by poor people because they will be seen as having kept the kind of education that made them successful away from the poor. The people who run Washington and New York went to the best academic schools, so any attempt to transform high schools into places where learning is fun and where real world skills are taught, has to be stopped because it would be received badly by poor people and this be politically damaging to the folks in power.

In other words, no job training, no life training, but more algebra and Dickens and Chemistry formulas. Despite the fact that those things were put into the curriculum originally by elitists in a very different world who cared not at all for the poorer classes learning these things is perceived by them as on the road to success and that idea will not be fought.

I have always said that everything evil in education starts with P. Politicians and the Press have always been my two favorites. They don't want to fix education, they want to make it look like it has been fixed.

Thank God for Educational Research!

In today's New York Times:

Children who misbehave at school are often punished by being kept inside at recess. But new research shows that recess helps solve behavioral problems in class.

This is how our Department of Education and all those brilliant Education researchers spend our money. What next? 20 years of research to prove that algebra is boring and irrelevant to all of those who drop out of school? How about a research program to determine why children find school stressful?

I went to school ten times one year to suggest to my son's teacher that she stop banning him from recess as a way of punishing his inability to not act up in class. "He can't sit still that long and making him sit still longer will not help," said I. If only I had known the relevant research!

Some quick comments addressed to those who wrote Obama’s K-12 reform plan on whitehouse.gov

The first phrase in each paragraph is the stated Obama-Biden goal:


Reform No Child Left Behind: you used the wrong word; surely you meant “get rid of” and not reform; not a good start

Support High-Quality Schools and Close Low-Performing Charter Schools: what will your measure be for assessing low performance? I hope it is not test scores

Make Math and Science Education a National Priority: why? Is our current economic situation due to too few people knowing algebra and physics?

Address the Dropout Crisis: by making school interesting and relevant for job skills? Nah, not what you suggest at all.

Expand High-Quality Afterschool Opportunities: why? Because what goes on in school is useless? Why not try making it less useless?

Support College Outreach Programs: more people going to college is really not the problem for anyone except college administrators; why is this your issue?

Support College Credit Initiatives: more effort on getting people into college; was your college experience so magical?

Support English Language Learners: teaching English is a good idea; too bad schools don’t do this too well; what are your ideas on improving the situation?

Recruit Teachers: as the economic situation deteriorates there will be plenty of people wanting to be teachers; next?

Prepare Teachers: look, the problem isn’t teachers; it is the nonsense that teachers must teach and the obsession with testing that nonsense


Retain Teachers: make teaching a better experience; that might help

Reward Teachers: not for raising test scores I hope

It would be nice, if those who are in charge of our education policy understood that the issue is not test scores, teacher salaries, or getting into college. High school is an awful and useless experience. Has anyone in your education department noticed that? Stop teaching the 1892 curriculum. No adult knows most of what is taught in high school. Teach stuff that actually matters and see what happens.

"We will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age."

President Obama, I have bad news for you. You will not be able to do that. Here is who will stop you:

1. The testing industry does not want change.

2. The teacher's unions do not want change.

3. The textbook publishers do not want change.

4. University professors do not want change.

What they all want, and they are very powerful, is continue to make money and have lives unencumbered by notions that we are teaching the wrong stuff in the wrong way. It is only the students who want and need change. They need meaningful, enjoyable, experiences that prepare them for employment. The school system has never been about employment. They will not get the change they need because those in charge of the system would have to give up on what they now do and do something completely different. Really- how often does that happen?

The experts in education and e-learning have no idea what they are talking about.

Usually in this space, I gripe about school and the continuing nonsense that presents itself as reform and change in education. The “changes” accomplish nothing because they fails to address the real issues of the problems with what we teach and how we teach it. But today, I find myself irritated by the corporate training world instead which, of course, misperceives education in exactly the same ways as the school reformers do.

My irritation comes from this e-mail sent to the president of Socratic Arts the other day from an executive responsible for e-learning in a big company.


Good to hear from you again. Hope all is well with you, Roger and the company. Can you please provide me with an update about the work you currently do? Do you do have Web 2.0/3.0, Serious Gaming or any new and innovative learning approaches?

Why is this question irritating? Entailed within it is the assumption that the problem with the training that this man’s company provides is that it isn’t fun enough or high tech enough. His company’s employees are not learning to do their jobs because they just don’t have video games that will teach them their jobs.

On the surface this doesn’t sound all that unreasonable. A cool video game that looked exactly like an employee’s job would be a good way to teach him or her that job. Right?

People who believe that probably also believe that you could learn to be an NFL coach by playing Madden’s NFL 09 or learn to be a criminal by playing Grand Theft Auto.

So maybe this guy just doesn’t know much about learning. Uh. Well. Sorry. The “experts” agree with him.

I was asked to make predictions for 2009 for two on line e-learning magazines this month. Here are the links.

http://www.elearnmag.org/

http://www.trainingzone.co.uk/


In the former one, I saw these three predictions:

Alternative interfaces will be big this year: more Wii toys hooked up to computers, orientation-sensitive interfaces, gesture-based presentation software, even brain-wave and body feedback games.


2009 is the year when the cell phone and the laptop emerge as the learning infrastructure for the developing world. Initially, those educational applications linked most closely to local economic development will predominate. Also parents will have high interest in ways these devices can foster their children's literacy.

I see the emergence of several new corporate-focused Virtual Learning Worlds (VLWs) or Massively Multi-Learner Online Learning Environments (MMOLEs) nudge out interest in consumer-oriented versions of 3-D worlds that haven't made the adaptation to corporate needs.


These predictions may well come true. But, let me ask a simple question. How will any of this make anyone learn better? Is the reason that people fail to do their jobs well the lack of Wii body feedback games? If education were available on a cell phone would that make it good education?

This stuff all makes the assumption that the real issue in education is accessibility and fun. Those are issues to be sure, but they aren’t even in the top ten of the issues that I care about for education in school or in corporations.

What are in the top ten? Here is my list:

1. Moving away from a system that assumes that conscious factual knowledge is at the heart of what needs to be learned.
2. Moving away from a system that thinks that the teacher’s role is to know the answers and tell them to you.
3. Moving away from a system that does not allow enough time for practice.
4. Moving away from a system that thinks failure is a bad thing (while learning.)
5. Getting expert knowledge delivered just in time to those who need that knowledge not years before because they “might need it.”
6. Understanding that a learning environment means one where people are always learning and that one shouldn’t have to go to school or go to training.
7. Getting rid of classrooms in all forms.
8. Getting rid of courses.
9. Getting rid of certification that is more important to the students than the learning itself.
10. Getting the reward system right.

I could go a long time making this list before I started worrying about Wii, cell phones, or 3-D worlds. Let’s try fixing what is broken and use technology only if it helps us do that.

Why textbooks suck

I take as my starting point LIFE: The Science of Biology, since it is certainly the best textbook ever written.

LIFE has chapters that start with a question. This is very good. Here are some examples subchapter headings:

1.1 What is Biology?
1.2 How do biologists investigate life?
2.2 How do atoms bond to form molecules?
3.2 What are the chemical structures and functions of proteins?
4.5 How did eukaryotic cells originate?
7.1 How does glucose oxidation release chemical energy?
10.2 How do alleles interact?
12.4 How is RNA translated into proteins?
19.2 Is cell differentiation reversible?
26.6 How do prokaryotes affect their environment?
32.2 What is a protostome?
39.3 How do plants deal with climate extremes?
45.3 How do sensory systems detect mechanical forces?
51.5 How does the mammalian kidney produce concentrated urine?


The textbook contains very pretty pictures and diagrams and lots of self-quizzes. It does not however give me a reason to want to know the answers to any of the questions posed by the subchapters. It presumes that the simple fact that a student has signed up for a biology course is sufficient grounds to decide that the students have these questions. Or, possibly, it assumes that the professors in giving a lecture, have raised these questions in the student’s minds.

In my experience as a student, my main question was usually how much more of this stuff I had to read (the book is over 1200 pages), and maybe I could just skip it and get by.

My experience as a professor was that the most prevalent student question was what exactly they would be responsible for on the test.

My experience as a department chair was that lazy professors answered that last question by copying the self-study questions in the textbook.

We would all agree that a good course motivates the students to have the questions that the textbook answers in their minds so they can consult the textbook for the answer at their moment of need. There are two assumptions that need to be made here:

1. That professors know how to raise these question in student’s minds in a natural way
2. That the book is well enough organized that finding the answer when needed is trivial

I always wondered, as a student why professors didn’t just hand out the textbook and say “read it” and there will be a test in 3 months, since their lectures were usually irrelevant. Sometimes it was the textbook that was irrelevant. The students needed to quickly figure out which one wasn’t going to be on the test.

But if real learning is not a conscious process, as some (i.e. me) insist, then textbooks could only be ancillary to what a student was doing. But what are students doing? They are sitting and listening, which is a conscious process.

Now let’s imagine a world in which students are doing something. And, let’s assume that they want to do what they are doing and are excited by it. And let’s assume that they know what success at doing something looks like. Then the textbook in that case, would look exactly the same as it had before, except that chapters would be indexed to the goals of the students and the tasks that they were pursuing.

In other words, a textbook is like a mass of answers to questions that no one ever has. Making sure that students really are asking the questions that one might want them to ask would mean making sure that they were pursuing tasks that naturally raised those questions.

This is the role of on-line education. It can create the environment for an answer to be relevant to the pursuit of a goal by creating scenarios in which those questions naturally arise. This scheme however, eliminates an important part of the school experience.

It eliminates the instructor. No more lectures in the world I am envisioning, just mentors who help students when they are stuck.

Instructors will object. Students would not.

Sex, Math, and Videotape

Its that time of year again, where I rant about the absurd math score competition issue. This quote is from USA Today:


If there were a math-and-science Olympics for elementary and middle schoolers, USA students could hold their heads high — they're consistently better than average. In math, it turns out, they're improving substantially, even as a few powerhouse nations see their scores drop.

At the same time that I was reading this, I also saw this item (from Information Week):

One in five teen girls has sent a revealing photograph of themselves via cell phone or e-mail or posted nude or partially nude images of themselves online, according to a survey released this week. Eleven percent of them are 16 or younger.

How are these items connected?

What do we give school children to think about all day? We want them to think about the Quadratic Equation, and logarithms even though hardy any adult that they know knows what those are. They try to do math, but they don’t do that well at it. They know they are in a competition but that can’t figure out why it matters. (I assure you that no adult knows why it matters either, we are just sure that it does, kind of like who wins the discus throw matters.)

At the same time we give them lots of time to think about how people don’t like them, whether or not they are attractive, and what they can do to become attractive. Adults are horrified that they are doing this while they make sure that they all have the equipment to do it.

What is the problem? The problem is school. School enables children to set the standards for other children because children live in a world of children where the losers feel really bad about losing no matter what the game is. Children also learn to pretend that they care about the standards set by adults, like math scores, when all they really care about is getting into college.

We must stop this. Stop teaching children that math matters when it does not. Math in these tests means algebra, trigonometry and such, which almost never come up in anyone’s life. And stop teaching children that getting other children to like them matters. This only results in stupid behavior by which they try to impress and gain favor. We must stop grouping adolescents in schools and pretending to teach them math that no adult knows or needs to know so they can instead engage in dangerous behavior that no adult condones.