Hey, teacher, leave that kid alone -- unless you have a college degree

Update: From the Education Policy Analysis Archives (Darling-Hammond, 2000):

"Subject matter knowledge is another variable that one might think could be related to teacher effectiveness. While there is some support for this assumption, the findings are not as strong and consistent as one might suppose. Studies of teachers' scores on the subject matter tests of the National Teacher Examinations (NTE) have found no consistent relationship between this measure of subject matter knowledge and teacher performance as measured by student outcomes or supervisory ratings. Most studies show small, statistically insignificant relationships, both positive and negative (Andrews, Blackmon & Mackey, 1980; Ayers & Qualls, 1979; Haney, Madaus, & Kreitzer, 1986; Quirk, Witten, & Weinberg, 1973; Summers & Wolfe, 1975)... Studies have found a somewhat stronger and more consistently positive influence of education coursework on teachers' effectiveness."

A recent study released by the National Council on Teacher Quality argues that many states are woefully underprepared to meet the 2006 requirement of a "highly qualified teacher" in every classroom as defined by No Child Left Behind. In this case, the NCTQ suggests modifying the NCLB language to mandate:

-The U.S. Department of Education needs to spell out the coursework that represents a college major as being no fewer than 30 credit hours and a college minor as being no fewer than 15 credit hours.

-All high school teachers should have a major in the primary subject they teach and a minor in any additional related subjects they teach. In a sorry nod to political reality, high school teachers who began teaching before 2001 should be considered highly qualified with only a college minor (15 credit hours). While some might argue this sets the bar too low, it may produce better results than the current mix of high standards and abundant loopholes.

On the surface, this sounds great. Everyone knows teacher quality is low; a recent Miami Herald-Tribune series found that as many as 1/3 of Florida's teachers have not passed the state's basic certification exam. So, if you make sure every teacher has a good grounding in the subject they are teaching, that should markedly improve the quality.

But let's dig deeper. The underlying premise here is that having a major (or 30 credit hours) in a subject makes you "highly qualified" to teach it. Setting aside for a moment the arbitrariness of that designation (are you not qualified if you only have 27 hours? Are you more qualified with 36?) is that really true? Teaching -- especially when you're teaching how to think instead of stuffing kids' heads full of facts -- is about way more than content knowledge. The truly exceptional teachers in today's system are the ones who through their command of the classroom and grasp of the craft of education inspire students to want to learn.

Taking 30 credits in biology does not mean you are highly qualified to teach freshman biology. It means you are highly qualified to tell freshman about biology. That's a key difference.

There's another nuance here, because surely it is a problem that 1/3 of Florida's teachers can't pass a basic competency test. The problem, properly articulated, is that many teachers who don't have a major or minor in their content area are unqualified because they aren't adequately educated themselves. Teachers who haven't gone through college at all and who never learned to do anything aside from act as a conduit of rote knowledge are indeed not highly qualified to be in our schools. However, the rough, correlative case between lack of a major/minor and incompetence clouds the real issue, which is that we aren't getting enough highly-educated (in any subject) people to become teachers.

There doesn't need to be much question why. The average starting salary for a teacher is a little below $30,000. Average starting salary for a liberal arts college graduate is a bit more than $40,000. The disparity grows as the years of experience do. College graduates actually have disincentives to become teachers. This also feeds the flawed assumption that you need a major/minor in your content area to be qualified to teach it, since those without the major/minor tend to be those without any solid higher education experience.

Put simply, a good teacher can teach any subject, within reason. Someone who has taught 11th grade math for a decade with excellent results can likely with brief training turn around and teach freshman biology. Moreover, that teacher would probably be superior in the task to a wet-behind-the-ears graduate toting his or her biology degree. This doesn't necessarily hold for quantum mechanics and the like, but those are exceptions rather than the rule. Going down into elementary school and it becomes even more apparent that teacher quality is not necessarily linked to academic achievement in that field, but rather overall intellectual maturity.

All of this is well and good, but surely the NCTQ has numbers to back up their claims, right? Expert studies relating college majors to better student achievement? "As for the requirement that all teachers earn a major in the subject(s) they teach, there is almost no research below the high school level that supports this provision of the law. Specifically, it is not known if middle school teachers with a major are any more effective than middle school teachers with only a minor."

(As for the research at the H.S. level, it would be interesting to see the comparison between teachers with majors/minors in their content area and college degrees generally. I'll try to scrounge up the data and report on that. --ED: See update at top)

Teacher quality is important. There is no denying that. Every study -- every study -- has shown that the singlemost important factor in a child's learning is the teacher. But it's as if the NCTQ (and many folks in education) correctly identified the problem and then solved it in a fairly nonsensical way. It's like realizing you're hungry and ripping out your stomach in response. Having a college major is not the main determinant for teaching quality (do you need that many high-level biology courses to teach photosynthesis, really?), being able to teach is. If we want high quality teachers in the schools, we should figure out a way to actually identify and attract them. Slapping on these kind of requirements, well-intentioned as they assuredly are, will only end up being counter-productive.

-Elliot

Related Link - posted by Elliot H. @ 1:38 AM 2 comments

 
A post of comments

I thought this exchange in the comment section of my last post warranted a full post, because "anonymous" presents a very valid and common critique, and one I wanted to make sure my position on was clear. Plus I liked my response :)

-Elliot

Comments: All right, lots to respond to in that short comment!

First off, I'm not sure what a "lefty" perspective is -- if a "lefty" perspective is not simply assuming the underlying paradigms of education are necessarily sound, yes. If a "lefty" perspective is working toward an educational system which produces thoughtful individuals -- ones which have high-level critical thinking skills, skills which have been shown by every study (left and right) to reduce poverty, drugs, crime and unemployment -- yes. If a "lefty" perspective is offering a solution to an educational system which has dropped the U.S. into the bottom one-third of industrialized nations, yes.

What we're proposing isn't shockingly new, either. In fact, there are many isolated school districts and schools (public, private and charter) which engage in education much in the way we envision. Almost without fail, these case studies perform better on every imaginable metric than "traditional" schools. If you want an example close to my home, check out Arlington County's H-B Woodlawn program.

Now, to your specific critique on the utility of testing: I agree. The public demands it right now, and we're NOT proposing doing away with it. This is why I opened my post on evaluations by saying "Pragmatically, schools need some system of evaluation...we live in a world of supply and demand, and colleges and employers only have so many slots to fill and need some way to discriminate among applicants. Moreover, it would be nice to have an occasional method of check progress in elementary, middle and high schools, if for no other reason than to prove that our proposed paradigm works."

But my point is this: What is the ultimate goal of testing? If it's just to determine aptitude or, as a friend of mine suggested, determine how much has been learnED among a set of students, it does a mind-bogglingly poor job of it. Talk to any teacher and she or he can tell you about tests which indicate nothing except how well that student is guessing on a given day or how well they're regurgitating what's been drilled into their head (If you've been following along, refer to my "geographical glossary" story).

Yes, outcomes do matter. I'm not saying they don't, I'm not saying they shouldn't, and I'm not saying our proposed reforms won't have them. Even soccer leagues have ways of breaking ties come the playoffs. But when we give SUCH extreme prejudice to outcome over process, the process aspect gets lost in the shuffle. It constantly reinforces the paradigm of learning what to think instead of how to think, because as tests are currently designed, knowing how to think is less of an advantage than the rote knowledge.

"People fail, and that's the point," is only an appropriate sentiment IF the evaluation is fair. If person A is a better critical thinker than person B, but person B has memorized more than person A, it's entirely possible person B does better on the SOL (and recieves all the benefits that goes along with that). The utility of testing is predicated on -- should be, at least -- tests which truly evaluate. It's very hard to argue our current testing regime does that.

Thanks for the comment! We really do encourage dissent -- we want to be forced to refine our ideas, defend them.

- posted by Elliot H. @ 1:42 PM 0 comments

 
Results, results, results

[A brief addendum to part three ("Evaluating Evaluations") of a series on educational reform]

America is a society built around outcomes instead of process. If you need examples of this, just consider sports -- a favorite indicator of mine, since they are a total microcosm of society. What sports do Americans like? Football, baseball, basketball, NASCAR. Four sports where you cannot have a tie (well, you can in football, but it happens about once every three years). In baseball, the American Pasttime, they will play 27 innings on Opening Day to crown a winner. Similarly, what sports aren't very popular here? Hockey and soccer, two sports in which you have ties all the time.

In a related vein, consider this: You hit a poor tennis serve, but by luck it goes in the box. The next time, you hit a beautiful serve form-wise, but it goes a little long. Which one do we consider better? The former, of course; it went in! It doesn't matter if the second shot was a little long or a lot long; it was long -- it was not-in. Outcomes over process. Results above all else. I'm not entirely sure if this is a facet of American exceptionalism or if it exists in equal strength all over the world, but I'm pretty sure we take the cake.

It should not surprise you that this ties into education. I'm not making a profound point, but adding on to my evaluation post. We care so, so, so much about test results, but we give barely any privilege to process. How many times in school did you make one mistake in a math problem and end up losing all the credit? It doesn't matter if you had solid command of the material -- you got the answer wrong. We assume that getting a good score on the SOL test implies command of core knowledge; I tend to think it just as much implies command of rote memorization. A good result doesn't always indicate comprehension.

I'm not saying that results, especially well-designed metrics over a long period of time, aren't useful. Indeed, by the end of a 6-set tennis game it will be pretty clear whether or not you can serve. But more broadly, if we continue to give primacy to results instead of process, we risk losing a great deal of educational integrity; the worst imaginable scenario is a child scared to take intellectual chances and potentially be wrong.

Wrong is not a monolithically bad thing. Wrong is a necessary step along the path to comprehensive understanding -- which leads in the holistic picture to a lot more right. If you want to become a good tennis player, you need to hit a lot of slightly-long serves before you start hitting them all in nicely; you don't want to be always trying for that lucky bounce.

Moreover, there is a difference between the slightly-long serve and the one that's going consistently over the fence. Getting a problem slightly wrong but demonstrating good progress towards comprehension shouldn't be treated the same as not even having a clue of how to start. Yet, current standardized tests declare both scenarios the same: WRONG.

They say it's not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game. That's how it largely should be. But watch Game 7 of the World Series and tell me that the team that comes up short or the team hoisting the trophy cares a whit about how they played the game. Tell me that their fans care. Tell me that standardized tests care.

Batter up.

- posted by Elliot H. @ 4:46 PM 2 comments

 
Evaluating evaluations

[Part three in a series on educational reform. See below for parts one and two.]

Update: If you want a good summary of the standardized tests vs. portfolio debate, read this article by Jay Mathews of the Washingon Post. Read it, however, in the context of everything I've been saying so far regarding the underlying goals of education and questioning the oft-unquestioned logic of evaluation.

Let's talk about subjectivity, and let's talk about evaluation -- which is a roundabout way of saying, let's talk about testing.

Pragmatically, schools need some system of evaluation. Ideologically, that's not as clear-cut; any system whose external logic includes a measure on which students will be ranked offers an incentive to do only what it takes to achieve that self-interest rather than just learning because learning makes you a productive, intelligent person. However, we live in a world of supply and demand, and colleges and employers only have so many slots to fill and need some way to discriminate among applicants. Moreover, it would be nice to have an occasional method of check progress in elementary, middle and high schools, if for no other reason than to prove that our proposed paradigm works.

So there's the set-up of the problem: We need some system of evaluation, but it can't be one which detracts from the goal of learning how to think rather than learning things to think.

Option 1: Standardized multiple-choice tests. The bulk of current evaluation is done through this method. Prominent examples include the Virginia SOLs and the SAT (though it's adding an essay section -- more on that later). The supposed advantage of this system is twofold: universality and objectivity. Children in Topeka and San Diego are answering the same questions, and there's only one right answer.

The problem with this, of course, is that standardized multiple-choice tests offer neither universality nor objectivity, and worse yet they encourage teaching rote facts rather than comprehensive understanding. Demographics play a role, much as many people would rather they not; a dilapidated school with 75% of its children on free or reduced lunch and full of refugees or illegal immigrants is not on the same playing field as an affluent counterpart. Results from the two schools are not reflective of the actual learning going on inside.

Then we get to objectivity, and I want to digress for a moment to talk about this in depth. Setting aside for a moment the fact that multiple choice questions rarely have a truly objective answer (If you asked "What is the fastest way to get to the store?" with pictures of a horse, a boat, a car and a person walking, the answer to a kid who came out of a Kenyan refugee camp might be walking -- they don't have roads! Of course, that would be the "wrong" answer), let's talk about whether objectivity is necessarily superior.

Objectivity, of course, stands in contrast to subjectivity. But we often indict subjectivity without thinking about why. Consider the analogy of a judge. Here we have a person who has gone through extensive training, moved up through a highly competitive profession and has a wealth of experience. Each case before our judge has different merits, different circumstances, different people. The entire point of a judge is to be able to do just that -- judge. Yet, over recent years we have seen a huge push for mandatory minimums, a matrix box which pre-determines sentences for certain drug offenses and strips the judge of his discretionary power. So, the 18-year old kid with no criminal record headed for Stanford whose dad just died of a heart attack and is caught with the tiniest amount of crack HAS to be thrown away for 5 years. The judge might speak out passionately against the sentence at the same time he's delivering it, saying that the kid clearly posed no danger to society and that the penalty was brutally excessive -- but his hands are tied. Discretion, and subjectivity, are not necessarily vices. Especially when you're dealing in a realm where every situation, every schoolchild is intrinsically different, how can we reduce their achievement to a matrix box, to a bubble sheet?

Obviously, teachers right now are not vetted to the extent of a judge, but under our reforms the average quality of the profession would skyrocket (that's for a later post). Assuming for a moment that teachers are as qualified as judges, and it seems equally ridiculous to slap mandatory minimums on them; yet, that is precisely what standardized multiple-choice tests are. Both are "objective," both are "consistent," and both are "fair." Neither, of course, is any of those things.

So, what are some other options?

Option 2: Portfolios. A portfolio evaluation is exactly what it sounds like; the student compiles all of his or her work from throughout the year and presents it to a panel usually consisting of his or her teacher, one school administrator, and another teacher from the same grade. There is an emphasis in this system on oral presentation and in-depth reports. Tests are sometimes taken completely out of the equation.

The costs and benefits of portfolios should be obvious; they provide a far more comprehensive review of a student's true understanding, but the results are hard to compare across the board and the panel has an incentive to evaluate highly if that's the metric that will be used to review the school. Also, it is much easier for a parent to cry foul if her or his kid doesn't pass muster. So while this is an ideologically superior method to standardized MC tests, it provides a host of logistical challenges which some proponents have found prohibitive.

Option 3: Hybrid (My proposal). If you can't get rid of standardized tests altogether, at least set them up so that the more you learn how to think, the better you will do. This means an emphasis on short answer and essay questions -- no multiple choice. Moreover, they have to be well-designed questions that truly test understanding.

For instance, one of the best essay questions I've ever had in college was in my history of the Middle East class when I was asked, "Explain why the 1906 Persian revolution failed while the 1979 revolution succeeded." Here was a question which you could take in any of a thousand different angles; it was interesting; it was a topic that there is no consensus on whatsoever; it wasn't something I could bulls*** around -- I had to know my stuff. However, a bad question, and one you're more likely to see on essay questions in high school, would have been "What was the cause of the 1979 Iranian revolution?" That doesn't necessarily demand insight or higher-level understanding, just paying attention in class/to the readings.

If you can line up what tests demand and what you should be learning (i.e. methodologies of thought), then you can circumvent the problem of teaching to the test while maintaining the integrity of a universal testing regime which society demands. Oh, and take demographics into account.

Now, the primary problem with my system is the same as with portfolios -- grading of essays is subjective, and teachers might have incentive to not grade accurately. This is where the SAT is encouraging. There is obviously enough of an understanding that MC is not holistic enough, because they're adding an essay section (which will be subjectively graded!) to the one test that nearly every college-bound high school student in America takes. That hurdle might not be so insurmountable as originally thought.

This post is incredibly long, but I want to make one last point about evaluation: My junior year H.S. physics teacher used a 4-point scale for grading instead of the standard 100-point scale. Why? He explained simply, "I don't know the difference between a 87 problem set and an 88 problem set. I do know the difference between a 3.5 and a 3." One way to dampen the subjectivity "flaw" is to establish broad categories of evaluation that guide -- but don't constrain -- the teacher's opinions.

Evaluation is a fundamental part of modern American education, and it can't be ignored in the midst of reforms because it influences so heavily the direction of classes. It can't be taken away altogether, so it has to be made to work for us.

Find me a bubble sheet that can express all that.

- posted by Elliot H. @ 1:03 PM 4 comments

 
Separation of churchgoers and state?

While reading one of my friend's sociology papers, he made a point which seemed to have deep implications. Citing a well-known sociologist, he said that many of the seeming inconsistencies in American jurisprudence (as compared to other Western nations, e.g.) can be chalked up to a public with religious views creating policy in a state that doesn't allow religion to be a determinant. In other words, and this is moving onto my own arguments, if the bulk of policymakers -- and the people who vote for them -- have a set of religiously-based principles and you're then asking them to operate in a religion-less vacuum, you're going to have clashes.

Separation of church and state is a misnomer, because it assumes that religion and all of its vestments are contained in the institutions of religion. It assumes that by saying "Congress shall make no act respecting the establishment of religion," we are taking religion out of the "secular" realm altogether. Upon reflection, however, this is clearly not the case.

If the secular arena is populated by persons of faith, it's not so very secular, now is it? Put another way, is it so unbelievable that many Americans support the death penalty considering how infused most are with Puritan/Protestant values? No one is arguing that we should have a death penalty because the offenders are sinners and the Old Testament preaches an eye for an eye, but that does seem to underline the frameworks of thought. We are the product of our values and ideals, and they infuse every position we take. We cannot simply leave our ideological underpinnings at the door marked by a placard of "Secularism." Nor, necessarily, should we.

I'm certainly not advocating a breakdown of the wall between church and state -- instead, I'm arguing that the supposed wall is largely an illusion. In search of a truly secular nation, you would need to impose a separation of churchgoers and state, which would involve alienating about 90% of the population. Instead, I think it's very important that we realize the true nature of affairs, because it elucidates so many contemporary debates.

The most obvious example of this (not to harp on the Christians, for no doubt equivalent comments hold true for other religions) is the absolutist worldview put forth by most church dogma. Much of that worldview -- and I'm about to make gross generalizations -- is couched in dualistic terms; sinners and non-sinners, heaven and hell, holy and unholy. Bringing such a black-and-white perspective to the "secular" policy arena certainly helps explain how such seemingly draconian measures as mandatory minimums or the juvenile death penalty have persisted into the 21st century. The justice system is the simplest place to see this at work, but similar influences informs every aspect of public policy.

My liberal friends (and I'm guilty of this too) often wring their hands and shout in exasperation, "how can they believe that?" But while it's simple to winnow out the religion-arguments on an issue like gay marriage, there isn't widespread acknowledgement of how deeply religious principles swirl in every eddy of our national debates.

This isn't one of those posts which is putting forth a call for action, but rather one which is thinking out loud. We might understand each other a lot better if we didn't make pretenses about what we're bringing to the table.

-Elliot

- posted by Elliot H. @ 7:24 PM 3 comments

 
In case you were wondering how we're doing

U.S. Students Behind Foreign Peers in Math
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: December 7, 2004

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Compared with their peers in Europe, Asia and elsewhere, U.S. 15-year-olds are below average when it comes to applying math skills to real-life tasks, new test scores show.

The U.S. students were behind most other countries in overall math literacy and in every specific area tested in 2003, from geometry and algebra to statistics and computation.

The latest scores from the Program for International Student Assessment also show that white U.S. students scored above average, while blacks and Hispanics scored below it. That achievement gap has become the focus of federal education policy.

Education Secretary Rod Paige called the new scores a ``blinking warning light'' as the Bush administration seeks to raise expectations and expand testing in high school.

The international test is not a measure of grade-level curriculum, but rather a gauge of the skills of 15-year-olds and how well students can apply them to problems they may face in life. It also aims to give the United States an external reality check about how it is doing.

One expert who reviewed the scores, Jack Jennings of the independent Center on Education Policy, said the test is more a measure of how math is taught than what students know. Many U.S. math classes teach analytical or theoretical thinking, not everyday math application.

``You could have American kids knowing more math, it's just that they may test lower than other countries because their learning is not geared toward practical application,'' he said.

By comparison, scale scores on the United States' own math test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, have risen sharply for fourth-graders and eighth-graders since 1990. That test, however, differs in its content and in that it is geared by grade, not by age.

The international assessment measures math, reading and science literacy among 15-year-olds every three years. This time, the main focus was math.

Among 29 industrialized countries, the United States scored below 20 nations and above five in math. The U.S. performance was about the same as Poland, Hungary and Spain.

When compared with all 39 nations that produced scores, the United States was below 23 countries, above 11 and about the same as four others, with Latvia joining the middle group.

``We cannot afford to let the skills of our students fall behind the skills of students in other nations,'' said Joseph Tucci, chairman of the education task force of the Business Roundtable, an association of chief executive officers from major U.S. corporations. The business group is calling for a renewed national commitment to science and math education.

The test is run by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a Paris-based intergovernmental group of industrialized countries. The top math performers included Finland, Korea, the Netherlands, Japan, Canada, Belgium, Switzerland and New Zealand.

Compared with peers from the OECD countries, even the highest U.S. achievers -- those in the top percent of U.S. students -- were outperformed.

U.S. scores held steady from 2000 to 2003 in the two math subject areas tested in both years. But both times, about two-thirds of the major industrialized countries did better.

Less clear is why, officials acknowledged.

Deputy Education Secretary Eugene Hickok said at a news conference Monday that contributing factors included too few qualified math teachers and not enough effort to engage students in math at an early age.

Private researchers and the federal government will help reveal some underlying lessons for the United States by doing more analysis of the numbers, said Robert Lerner, commissioner of the Education Department's National Center for Education Statistics.

Compared to 2000, there was no measurable change in the reading performance of U.S. students, or in the nation's average standing when compared to other OECD countries.

There was no change in science, either, in terms of the performance of U.S. students. But the U.S. score in science has now fallen below the international average.
Related Link - posted by Elliot H. @ 1:29 AM 0 comments

 
A schooling or an education?

[Part two in a series on educational reform. See below for part one.]

First off, let me say that we are actively seeking comments on these education policy posts. Please feel free to leave comments or email me at ehaspel@virginia.edu.

When I spoke last time about the underlying assumptions of modern American education (that we all need calculus, for example), I didn't even get at the assumption overarching that assumption. This brief essay will address the topic of education vis a vis fact versus education vis a vis methodologies.

As things stand, our education privileges knowledge above all else. Fact is the pinnacle of the system; In his fascinating tome The Underground History of Education, former New York City and State teacher of the year John Taylor Gatto comments that many Western ideas of education are drawn from the Eastern tradition. In Chinese, he says, the symbol for education is a teacher pouring knowledge into the head of a passive child.

Teacher -> Knowledge -> Student.

In the tradition of challenging everything: Why should it be that way? In fact, evidence and logic suggest that that model is a terrible way to achieve true learning. [True learning, crudely defined, encompasses the ability to think creatively, critically, judgementally.]

I heard a story the other week about a teacher who had just completed a long unit on Virginia history with her 4th graders (a class of average achievers). A special reading teacher was working with them on parts of a book, and she asked them what a geographical glossary was. Silence. Well, what's a glossary? That they knew. So what information are we going to find in a geographical glossary? Silence. Ok, what does geographical sound like? After a moment, someone figures it out -- it sounds like geography! Right! So what's in a geographical glossary? Silence.

The kids knew Virginia geography down pat. They knew the five regions, and the rivers, everything. But they had no capacity to think, to deduce, to reason, to infer, to analyze.

We are teaching our kids things to think, not how to think.

Facts in and of themselves do little good. I know quite a bit about history -- I could tell you all about the Battle of the Hydaspes or Anglo-Saxon England or the Civil Rights Movement. But what is far more important is that I know how to think historically; I know the methodologies through which to approach a problem historically. When trying to deduce the reasons behind the Democrats losing power in 1994, my first instinct was to analyze the trends leading up to it, the context in which it happened, etc. I can apply these skills to any problem. My father has so internalized problem-solving techniques that he can handle with equal grace climate change and Native Americans. The kids in my story can tell you the five regions of Virginia and define a glossary, but they can't tell you what a geographical glossary is.

What I've been saying thus far probably sounds very reasonable, but it actually takes a bit of effort to wrap your mind around, because it's not the system we were brought up through. One of my friends put forth a valid criticism of my comments in the last post about biology class: "For those who are going on to college, even if you don't want to be a biologist, or even to be involved in sciences at all, you need that basic fundamental grounding in the sciences, and that comes from surveying the four major branches."

Here's the rub, though: Why? If I didn't know a damn thing about Chemistry, would I -- a History and American Politics double-major -- be any worse off? I can tell you with reasonable certainty that my high school chemistry class has provided marginal benefit to my life. On the other hand, if chemistry was taught towards the objective of letting me think like a chemist (in terms of formulas and balancing equations and breaking things down to their constituent parts, e.g.) that would have been extremely useful. Instead, I had to memorize the periodic table of elements. This is the pathological idiocy of American education: The system isn't designed for teachers to get away with not teaching the periodic table.

Similarly, and this could occupy a whole extra post but I'll mention it here, the system isn't designed for the students to direct their own learning. My friend tells the tale of his one 8th grade class which consisted every day of the teacher putting up an overhead and the students copying it down. Think back to your own experiences: How many (largely incorrect) history lectures on the American Revolution did you have? How many times were you asked to do research and tell the teacher all about the American Revolution, focusing on whatever parts happened to pique your interests? Gatto points out that we've had a paradigm shift over the past century and a half from student-led learning (usually with one teacher per 300+ students while the students taught one another and themselves) to a system where 95% of the "learning" is teacher-fed.

At the core of our educational reform arguments is this truism: Teaching how to think is superior to teaching what to think. The status quo is designed in the exact opposite fashion.

Teacher -> knowledge -> student.

How about if the teacher oversaw the student and gave her or him the basic tools to enrich her or his own mind? How about if we taught paradigms and methodologies and let the students dive into the details? (Hey, I know some people who find the periodic table fascinating). How about:

Teacher -> student -> knowledge.

Challenge everything.

-Elliot

- posted by Elliot H. @ 1:54 AM 0 comments

 
Challenge Everything

The time: mid-4th Century BCE
The place: Macedonia

Alexander the Great, newly ascended King of Macedonia, begins his unprecedented campaign of conquering. Within 15 years, he will subjugate the Greeks, annihilate the Persians and drive into India -- all without losing a single battle.

Why was Alexander so successful? Simply put, he refused to follow conventional wisdom. Conventional wisdom said that you deployed your infantry, projectile troops and cavalry separately. Alexander coordinated them, using missiles to cover for phalanx charging up hills, and cavalry to charge across rivers and hold the opposing forces at bay while the rest of his army made the vulnerable crossing.

One and a half millennium later, Mahatma Gandhi would innovate a new form of resistance to colonial rule: non-violence. Throwing aside the mantra that the only two options were strife or supplication, Gandhi managed a program which helped win independence for both South Africa and India.

History is littered with great men and women who invoked change by challenging the assumptions of the world around them. What we need now is an equivalent examination of our surroundings. Though America in 2004 is not faced with issues so outwardly dire as massive oppression or conquering the world (don't say anything...), our task is perhaps more incisive: Just as racism was easier to fight when it came in the form of segregation and Jim Crow, so too is refining America now a campaign of tough, inglorious changes.

Education reform is the linchpin of this program, but I'll get to that in a moment. First, I want to make clear what I mean by challenging assumptions. Consider this simple sentence: "Each student in the class should turn in his or her paper." Now read this: "Each student in the class should turn in her or his paper." The second one doesn't read correctly, it doesn't seem grammatically accurate.

But ask yourself: Why does it matter? His or her, her or his, they mean the exact same thing. Except, of course, that one leads with the masculine pronoun and one with the feminine pronoun. I'm not one of those who thinks all language should be gender neutral -- clearly, either 'her' or 'his' has to go in front of the other -- but is it possible that a combination of all these little reinforcements add up to a large block of social inertia?

The next time you're watching a football game, really watch. All the coaches, referees, mascots, players and most of the announcers are men (manly men!), and the only women in the entire scene are cheerleaders, showing skin. Sports, they say, is the truest reflection of a society's values. "I love rockin' football towns, refs who shout 'first down!', playoff atmospheres...and TWINS!" Anyone think that women aren't still objectified in 2004?

None of this is to say that we should abolish football. I love football. Rather, I use it as an illustration of a point: No one challenges underlying assumptions. No one asks if maybe women should be playing a larger role, or if her could go before his, or if it's bad that we still are so hypocritical as to get up in arms about a Monday Night Football skit that's 'smutty' while beer and sex-appeal commercials pepper the entire broadcast.

No one challenges anything. [For another example, see my post two before this one, "Putting the course back in discourse"] Challenging assumptions doesn't necessarily mean changing anything; it might be that the current system is working fine. But at least then you'll know why the system is working, rather then taking it for granted.

Which brings us to education. Let me ask you a simple question: Have you ever used high school calculus in the real world? Have you ever been standing in line at a supermarket and thought to yourself, 'damn, it's a good thing I remember how to differentiate!' But no one questions that perhaps we shouldn't be teaching calculus in high school except to those people planning to be engineers or mathematicians. No one questions whether, perhaps, high school math should be devoted to applicability -- how to balance a checkbook, what a mortgage rate means, how the stock market works. Economics, not calculus. It's not that revolutionary of an idea, yet it comes across as one because no one ever stops to think that calculus is a relative waste of time.

I'm fairly convinced the reason suburban teenagers are angsty doesn't have much to do with hormones, but rather, as Paul Graham argues, because they're bored. They're bored by classes which they can't see the usefulness of, usually because there is no usefulness. Why do I need to know about the Calvin Cycle and that ADP becomes ATP during photosynthesis? It's certainly important that I know the basics -- that I emit carbon dioxide, that plants via photosynthesis makes energy, etc, -- but the Calvin Cycle and ADP/ATP should be available for me to explore on my own, not part of the standard and testable curriculum. Instead, in the time we're learning about the Calvin Cycle, let's learn about global warming, or deforestation. Apply the knowledge, and students will not only gain more, but they'll be more interested in learning.

This goes for everything: there is not a high school subject you can name that can't use this doctrine (heck, if math can, anything can). There are many, many other reforms the educational system needs; a de-emphasis on teacher-fed learning and a push for student-led learning, a paradigm in which we teach students HOW to think, not things to think, not to even mention the issues of getting good techers armed with good books into good buildings that have good technology. This is a project I've been working on with two close friends, and we're engaged in a broad attempt to seep up information on the subject; we're reading books by educators, researching the history of education to figure out how things have come to be as they are, and talking it out every chance we get to refine our ideas. This post is largely an introduction to that project, and a sampling of the direction we're pursuing.

Education is everything. Education is poverty, drugs, crime, tolerance, unemployment (which is the economy), civic participation -- which leads to better government and thereby affects literally every aspect of life. There are few silver bullets in public policy, but if there is one, it's education. There is nothing more important, no one arena which influences so many others.

I don't believe in standing idly by while problems persist. I don't believe in shutting my eyes so I don't see those problems to begin with.

Assume nothing. Challenge everything.

-Elliot

- posted by Elliot H. @ 2:56 PM 0 comments

 
Ignorance is amiss

I have to reprint what is honestly my favorite (read: most frightening) response to one of my columns. The person's email is first, followed by my response. All in all, I think i went pretty easy on him. Grar.

From: [Name removed] Subject: A question about your column in the 17 Nov edition of the Cav Daily Date: Tue, 30 Nov 2004 15:13:00 -0500 To: ehaspel@cavalierdaily.com

As an UVA engineering grad student, I spend a lot of time thinking
about statistics and misuse of statistics for "spin." Just as the
folks who "spin" stats about world events, it appears that this
university has a particular affinity for a yet-to-be-proven statistic,
One-in-Four. You have this organization (run by a bunch of guys,
even) preaching sensitivity, blah, blah... but I'm pretty forgiving of
the idealist undergraduate who searches for "issues" to fight. It's a
big part of growing up, so have fun.

My problem is with the continuing statements like yours,
"Statistically, it's true: one in four college women have been subject
to completed or attempted rape."

Is it statistically true? Please cite your source. Professors of
mine have said they have queried the founders for a source to no
avail.

If your response is "well, there's a grey area about the definition of
rape," etc, then a statistical argument is probably not the best
supporting evidence.

To those of us who look at statistics as something other than numbers
to be bent to make a point to the unknowing populace, this whole
One-in-Four things seems like a cheesy way for some over-sensitive
guys to get chicks.

Give me some ammo to counteract the argument that One-in-Four is
unsubstantiated, or at least admit in the same public forum that the
concept of "One-in-Four" is propaganda, not statistical evidence.

Your thoughts?

-----------------------------

-----Original Message-----
From: Elliot Haspel [mailto:emh9k@virginia.edu]
Sent: Saturday, December 04, 2004 12:31 PM
To: [name removed]
Subject: RE: A question about your column in the 17 Nov edition of the Cav Daily

[Name removed],

I appreciate this opportunity to educate you about the issue of sexual assault. To answer your immediate question, sir, One in Four is a statistic born not out of thin air but rather from a 2000 Department of Justice Study commissioned through the National Institute of Justice entitled The Sexual Victimization of College Women. This study, done by expert researchers in the field, found that “Over the course of a college career—which now lasts an average of 5 years—the percentage of completed or attempted rape victimization among women in higher educational institutions might climb to between one-fifth and one-quarter.”

That statistic has been used and confirmed by such propaganda organizations as the Center for Disease Control, which also noted that “Of all crimes, rape is one of the most underreported, making it difficult to count (Bachar and Koss 2001). The National Women’s Study found that 84% of women did not report their rapes to police (Kilpatrick, Edmunds, and Seymour 1992).”

If you wish to scrutinize the sources with your own eyes, the NCWVS is available here: www.ncjrs.org/pdffiles1/nij/182369.pdf

And the CDC fact sheet here:
http://www.cdc.gov/ncipc/factsheets/svfacts.htm

This is not an “issue” for idealistic undergrads to fight, [name removed]. Sexual assault is a plague which affects hundreds of students on this campus every year (UVA Police tend to have ~25 rapes reported annually, which if you use the 84% non-report rate -- or even 74% -- is enormously high). You insult the survivors and everyone trying to make a difference on this issue by marginalizing the threat of rape.

One last point: You have a particularly craven view of humanity if you think that males only get involved in this issue to assuage liberal guilt or “get chicks.” Just as the Civil Rights Movement needed white allies to succeed, so too must women AND men band together in fighting sexual assault. It affects men too – a Department of Justice brief found that “3% of college men report surviving rape or attempted rape as a child or adult.” Beyond that, women are our sisters, mothers, friends; is it inconceivable that some men understand the gravity of the problem and are more willing to do something about it than quibble over percentage points?

You wanted facts, sir, so there they are. I’m glad you’ve taken the time to contact me, and I hope you walk away from this message more educated and conscientious of the world around you. Sexual assault isn’t going away as long as people don’t think it’s a problem.

Let me know if you have any more questions.

Regards,
Elliot Haspel

Related Link - posted by Elliot H. @ 1:32 PM 0 comments