Sponsors:   Articles The much-argued about Washington State Assessment of Learning test (WASL) is now official, and the first scores are in. 10th grade students now have their first indication of whether they will be able to graduate from high school. The reading and writing skills portions of the test look pretty good. But as for math - only 54% passed the test. Washington State's WASL Scores Up WASL Math Results Disappoint Latinos, African Americans Back WASL Graduation Requirement Do the Math: Support a Teaching Standard They still have plenty of time to study, take summer school classes, and hire tutors before they re-take the test. But the results say a lot about the current state of math and science education today. Remember that this is not a test to pass 12th grade math class. This is a test to ensure that high-school graduates can do 10th grade math. In short, adding, subtracting, multiplication, division, plus a little bit of basic algebra, geometry, and fractions. You know, the stuff that Korean and Japanese kids learn by 7th grade. The complaints against the WASL have been many. Some object to teachers being forced to "teach to the test", instead of more creative learning processes. Some argue that not all students "test well", although they may do well in the subject in a less stressful environment. Some argue that it is unfair to those with disabilities. Some argue that it will unfairly stigmatize schools, administrators, and faculty of disadvantaged neighborhoods, who were expected to do poorly in the tests. Some argue that it holds back minority students for whom English is not their native language, depriving them of that essential ticket to future economic success - the high school diploma. Some parents just want their kids to graduate, regardless of the results of the WASL test, or any other test. But overriding all of those concerns is the fact that public education standards in Washington state - and the U.S. generally, have been declining steadily. Students are graduating with high school diplomas who can barely add, subtract, read, or write. But a lot of educators have been in denial over this fact. They argue that there is no evidence to prove such a decline, or that the statistics which tend to do so are flawed. A real standardized test, which is what WASL attempts to be, will show such denials to be a lie. Human scientific and economic progress over the past some 150 years (since the dawn of the industrial age) has shown that the best way to progress in any endeavor is to first create an accurate measure of measurement. After that, any invention, program, or business can be tested to show if it is an improvement, or not. Education's failure to accept this reality for many years has been its own undoing. But we must first identify a problem and accept it's existence before we can take the steps of resolving the problem. Posted by RHP6033   15 Ideas to Change America (June 8, 2006) 15 Ideas to Change America Okay, I don't agree with the knee-jerk reaction to open charter schools, but at least some Americans realize that we have a problem, that we need to agree on a solution soon, and are discussing the options. (Newsweek, June 12, 2006 Edition).   North Carolina Moves Out On Its Own (June 8, 2006) North Carolina Moves Out On Its Own North Carolina, facing massive job losses to overseas competitors in its textile and furniture industries, has started an ambitious investment in education to train a new generation of workers. The situation they faced before they began reform is akin to the situation we face nationally: "But to North Carolina Gov. Michael Easley, students like Lewis are on the front lines of the state's aggressive efforts to combat years of disastrous job losses as key industries moved overseas. "What we're trying to provide is the best work force in the world," Easley says. "Not just in the country—in the world." That means a dramatic overhaul of the state's public schools. For much of the past decade, North Carolina has focused on preschool through eighth grade, encouraging better teacher training, setting standards and making the curriculum more rigorous. But the most radical change could be the next step, transforming high schools from a model created in the industrial age to a system that makes sense in the 21st century. Easley says the old model, which prepared a few students for college and let others drop out or graduate with minimal skills, doesn't work in an economy where almost any job with decent pay requires some advanced training." "In the past decade, virtually every county in North Carolina has felt the impact of global competition. 'Our economy was based on a three-legged stool of textiles, furniture and agriculture,' Easley says, 'and now textiles and furniture are largely gone and the market can't accommodate no-skill or low-skill jobs. Those jobs have gone to China or Malaysia and they're not coming back.... Where we will always win,' Easley says, 'is with a high-skilled work force, especially in industries where innovation and creativity are involved.'" (Newsweek, June 12th 2006 Issue) Posted by RHP6033   How Long Will America Continue to Lead the World? (June 6, 2006) "How Long Will America Continue to Lead the World?" A chorus of writers are beginning to acnowledge that America needs immediate reform if it is not to lose its place in the world as an economic powerhouse. This Newsweek article, says that the U.S. more or less has its head stuck in the sand while other nations, especially those from Asia, are catching up rapidly in every catagory. Just a few quotes: "Intel's Andy Grove is more blunt. "America ... [is going] down the tubes," he says, "and the worst part is nobody knows it. They're all in denial, patting themselves on the back, as the Titanic heads for the iceberg full speed ahead." "Much of the concern centers on the erosion of science and technology in the U.S., particularly in education. Eight months ago, the national academies of sciences, engineering and medicine came together to put out a report that argued that the "scientific and technical building blocks of our economic leadership are eroding at a time when many nations are gathering strength." (Posted by rhp6033)   The Trouble in Europe (June 6, 2006) Where the Future is a Dead End This article is about the sad state of Europe's educational system, and it is worth reading. But we should consider it a warning for the U.S. as well. Although the U.S. system doesn't have the tracking/segregated educational systems of the Europeans, their system does pose a warning about what could easily happen to the U.S. public school system if "charter schools" or "educational vouchers" end up creating a segregated dual educational system in the U.S. Are we seeing a foretaste of the articles which might be written about the U.S. ten or twenty years from now? Also, a number of quotes within the article do seem equally applicable to the U.S., even currently: Regarding education success generally: "Despite 4.5 million registered unemployed, companies complain that they can't find skilled workers — not just engineers and specialists but plain-vanilla graduates with the social and learning skills to start simple on-the-job training. "The education system is sending us people who aren't even ready to be trained," says Labor Office chief Frank Weise. In contrast, countries like South Korea that have invested in education and raised the number of university graduates have enjoyed both higher growth and declining unemployment. Each additional year of education returns 8 percent in higher pay and productivity, says Jürgen Wössmann, education economist at Munich's IFO Institute. Germany's education troubles, according to estimates, cut the country's growth rate by 0.9 percent." Regarding reform efforts: "You would think better investment in education, along with wholesale reform, would therefore be a no-brainer. Instead, change has long been blocked by a combination of ideology and a desire to stick one's head in the sand." Regarding standardized testing: "Indeed, education authorities often go out of their way to evade such problems. France, for example, ordered data struck from the OECD report that show achievement gaps between rich-neighborhood schools and poorer (mostly immigrant) ones to be 60 percent higher than in the United States, citing "flaws" in the study's methods. French ideals of égalité make it illegal to identify students by race or ethnic background—making it virtually impossible to monitor educational integration. Italy is one of several countries that have no system of testing and assessment at all, so there's no way for any school to tell how it's doing. For 25 years, German Education ministers blocked schools from participating in international tests after a 1970 study showed German students doing worse than expected. Even today, bureaucrats won't allow researchers access to the newest data for fear they'd name and shame nonperforming schools." (posted by RHP6033)   World History According to College Students (June 4, 2006) World History According to College Students Just a little reminder for those who think "Our public school system is the finest in the world, thank you" (Curtesy of CarTalk). Posted by rhp6033   Getting it Right or Just Getting Going (May 16, 2006) I know it’s important that we make the best decisions we can about educating our children. I know we need to do it right. But at what point do we need to quit worrying about how to do it right, and instead just get going and DO SOMETHING? It has been a quarter-century since the national news magazines carried the front cover headline “Why Johnnie Can’t Read”, which was the first step to addressing the issue that our school systems were graduating students who lacked basic skills. Ever since then, as a concerned citizen and a parent, I have watched continuous arguments over education reform in one form or another. Do we teach reading using phonics or not? Do we teach math using “new math” or “old math”. Do we use voucher systems to allow parents to use their tax money to send their students to private schools, or not? Do we use standardized testing of students, or do we not? I’ve certainly got my own opinions on each of these issues. But I have to ask: at what point do we stop arguing, and just pick a path and go with it? I’m not exactly sure when we started arguing over standardized testing in Washington, but I remember my son participated in one of the first practice tests in middle school. Now that he is in college it is the first year in which passing the test has become a requirement for graduation. Of course, there continue to be plenty of arguments about the test, including calls that the test be scrapped entirely. But surely we should be able to design, test, and implement a standardized testing program that is reasonably satisfactory in less than six years, even if it needs to be improved in subsequent years? In the meantime, India, China, and Korea are moving forward at a rapid pace. They have realized that an investment in education pays off huge economic dividends, regardless of limits placed upon the country by geography, history, politics, or natural resources. Parents of children there are intimately involved in the education process, and an emphasis on science and math translates into technological power. American companies are increasingly looking to those countries to provide the highly skilled labor they need. We are in a race, but the race has already started, and we are still in the starting block. In a way I feel a bit like Winston Churchill, when he was out of office in the 1930’s but saw the threat posed by the rise of Nazi Germany. He wrote articles, gave speeches, held meetings, and otherwise attempted to cajole a reluctant parliament to increase military expenditures, especially for airplane development and production. He saw that the available time was passing by rapidly, yet it was being frittered away by those who saw no need for haste. Posted by RHP6033   Textbook Problems (May 16, 2006) A Textbook Case of Failure Alex Johnson writes a nice article about how little attention is paid to textbooks when discussing education reform. He points out how textbook content is politically driven, controlled by two states (Texas and California, which combined control one-third of the textbook market), and how little attention is paid to whether they are really effective. (MSNBC, May 16, 2006). What he does not address is that in many schools textbooks have largly been abandoned by the teachers. Some classrooms require children to share textbooks (which requires them to be kept at the school), others substitute movies, TV, or the internet for textbook instruction.   On Teaching History (May 10, 2006) About 35 years ago those who decide the prevailing educational theory in American Education decided that the reason student's didn't like history (or math, or science, etc.) was because memorization of facts was boring. Instead, they decided that the key to learning was to make school fun, and teach students how they could later learn the facts for themselves, once they decided they had a need to do so. This theory has been identified by several labels, including "lifelong learning". At the same time, individual and creative thinking was valued more than the learning of collective knowledge accumulated over the past couple of millennium. This doctrine was passed to the current crop of teachers through the college courses they were required to take in order to be certified, and further through the evaluation processes they must undergo in order to keep their jobs. Teachers who don't agree with these theories are labeled as "not proficient in modern educational theories", a label which can de-rail a teaching career. This "lifelong learning" process, however, without more, is analogous to building a computer and not giving it any data to process. The problem is that once the student begins to receive data, he/she doesn't have enough information available to judge the validity of that data, or to put it into the proper context. The result is one familiar to computer operators and programmers: garbage in = garbage out. Add to that the emphasis in schools on creativity and individualism, and you have students who believe that whatever opinion they have is valid (despite evidence to the contrary). Further, opinions which are contrary to "conventional wisdom" are more valid and valuable than those held by the majority of those who may have actually studied the issue in considerable depth. The result: too many student's minds are fertile ground for crackpot "histories", many of which are designed to support a political objective. I would add also a persistent belief among many teachers that today's students are too "visually oriented" to read or memorize facts, and therefore incapable of learning by those methods. Instead, films or computerized displays are the preferred method of teaching. (One teacher who insisted this was true was a bit embarrassed when I asked one of her students, at random, how many "cheat codes" he could recite from his favorite video games. His answer was impressive). Don't forget the tendency to have high school football teachers assigned to teach history classes. Some are quite good, but others are clearly only doing it to fill a slot. Nothing inspires a history student quite so much as a teacher who is impassioned by the subject. Personally, I think the learning of history at an early level requires the student to master several skills, in the following order: 1. Ability to read well in their native language. 2. The ability to acquire and learn basic "facts" (or events), and place them in the proper chronological order and general geographical location. 3. The ability to connect the facts, and to see and explain their relevance to one another. 4. Finally, the ability to ask "why" or "how", and to find the answers themselves to those questions. My problem with the way history is taught in American schools today is that it seeks to skip steps 1 and 2, and tries to move directly on to steps 3 and 4. Throw in Hollywood films as the major teaching tool, and you have a toxic stew of mis-information. Posted by RHP6033   Lottery & Education: Sleeping with the Devil (March, 2006) About twenty years ago or so there was a “funding crisis” in the State of Washington. This happened shortly after I moved here, so I thought it must be a significant and unusual occurence. I have learned since then that every legislative session there is a “funding crisis”, especially with regard to the education budget. A state lottery was proposed to remedy the situation. A lottery commission was established, and the profits were to go to pay for education in the state. It was pointed out that lotteries were being established in adjoining states, and it was argued that quite a bit of money was leaving our state’s economy and going to the other states. It was also argued that gamblers would spend money on illegal gambling anyway, so we might as well bring it out into the open and profit from it a bit as well. Of course, one problem with gambling is that it is subject to the law of negative reinforcement. That is, since the “house” (or state) always wins, eventually the gambler gives up, or at least diminishes the amount or frequency of his or her gambling (unless they are a compulsive gambler). This means that the state must continually try to market their product in such a way as to bring in new customers and to keep existing customers coming back for more. Thus we see trends toward larger jackpots (to keep the lottery in the news), publicity about the lucky winners and how their lives are changed, and television advertising encouraging the public to gamble in the state lottery. The law of negative reinforcement requires that this marketing campaign increase each year in order to return the same amount of money (in constant dollars) into the lottery. As time passes, the Law of Diminishing Returns also sets in – more money spent on marketing the lottery results in progressively smaller amounts of money into the program. Now we see some really interesting side effects of this gambling strategy, some of which were easily predictable, some of which were not. The first is that, as someone else once said, the lottery is a tax on the mathematically challenged. The odds against winning are enormous. Lottery tickets should have warnings on the back of them which are at least as onerous as the ones on the back of a cigarette package, such as “Playing the lottery is evidence that you are a complete dolt”, or “playing the lottery is more certain to harm you financially than cigarretts are certain to give you cancer”. The second problem is that the lottery is primarily a tax on the poor and lower middle class. The upper classes invests in stocks, bonds, businesses and real estate. The upper middle class invests in mutual funds, 401(k) plans, their own homes, and education. The lower middle class and the poor invest in the lottery, hoping to make the big payoff. A third problem is very subtle. It changes the way we perceive financial success. The rewards we get from working hard, saving and investing, financing our children’s college education, and having a comfortable retirement are no longer deemed sufficient. "Too slow, too little" many believe. Now, to be successful, we think we must be a millionare by the time we are in our thirties. How can this be accomplished? Not by saving a few dollars a week! So why not gamble it on the lottery instead? The fourth problem was entirely predicatble, and predicted. There are some problem gamblers, an occasional person that will mortgage their home to buy tickets because they dreamed they were going to hit it big. But few real problem gamblers play the lottery, with its low odds. They go for other forms of gambling which give them a bigger thrill when they win, even if they eventually lose more than they win. But as we will see below, the lottery actually encourages and supports other forms of gambling as well, even as it competes with them for the same dollars. This leads us to the fifth problem – the expansion of gambling overall. In Washington State this occurred because (a) the native Americans needed money and economic development, and (b) the lottery opened the door for them to do so. Now Native American tribes are sovereign in their own right, but it is a peculiar form of sovereignty. Court decisions have held that Native Americans cannot establish gambling casinos on their own territory if gambling is against the public policy of the state. But if the state engages in gambling itself (the lottery), then the Native American tribes may engage in it also. This led to the development of a number of large vegas-style casinos on Native American lands, some run by outside gambling interests, others by the tribes themselves. Those who were within a short drive of the major cities have done very well for the tribes. Those which were further away from major cities did very poorly, and were a waste of the tribe’s money. Few really complained, because it was generally felt that it was an economic opportunity which somewhat compensated for the generally bad deal the Native Americans suffered over the past 300 years. Also, the reservations were usually far enough away from population centers that it was "out of sight, and out of mind." This changed to some extent when Native American tribes began to broker "land exchanges" which gave them visable and easily accessible properties near major population centers or interstate highways. Soon there was political pressure from non-native gambling interests, arguing that the small neighborhood pub, tavern, and card room was in danger of closing due to the “unfair advantage” being granted to the Native American Casinos, who held a monopoly on casino-style gambling in the state. Fueled by enormous contributions from gambling interests, the rules were subtly changed, and “Mini-Casinos” began popping up in every strip mall – to the surprise of many in the state. As more and more money leaves the state lottery in search of the more frequent winnings offered in the Casinos, the state lottery commission is compelled to spend more money on advertising to draw gamblers back to the lottery, and to encourage new gamblers to pick up the habit of buying lottery tickets with their groceries. Accompanying those ads is the disclaimer that “players should know their limits – call our Problem Gambling Help Line...." So the State of Washington is paying advertising agencies to increase gambling revenues, and also to encourage those customers to call a state-sponsored program to discourage gambling. It's a bit like the arms merchant who arms both sides in a civil war. Of course, we could reverse course and abolish the Lottery, and go back to where we were twenty years ago. But now the defenders of the lottery will point out that our education system is now dependent upon the lottery, and to abandon the lottery would result in school closures, increased class sizes, cancellation of music/art/sport programs, etc. The political muscle of the teacher’s unions would be thrown into the fray, as well as the substantial money interests of the Native American tribes and the non-native gambling interests running the mini-casinos throughout the state. We have lain down with the devil, and now we are married to him. Posted by RHP6033   India's Education Boom (Feb. 28, 2006) India's Education Boom Gurcharan Das reports on the rise of private schools in India, which are no longer just for the rich, but also increasingly for the middle-class and even the poor (Newsweek, Feb. 28, 2006).   Is High School Too Hard or Too Easy? (August 19, 2005) High school is just too easy, students say Alec Johnson reports on a study which says that many students think American high schools are actually too easy, rather than to hard. "By overwhelming majorities, students said they would work harder at their studies if more was expected from them — 65 percent in the governors’ poll and 88 percent in the Alger poll." (MSNBC, August 19, 2005).   Sponsors:        Copyright 2006-2007 - Brookridge Associates Inc. All rights reserved.