Lecture 6: “Barriers to Effective Education III”
Preview Question What would be the advantage to having standardized parts for automobiles than to having parts exclusive to only certain makes and models?
Today we will talk about mobility as a barrier to effective education. Why is mobility a barrier to education? Well one of the problems is that 20 percent of students in the U.S. move each year. Now this is not really a statistic in the sense of how a move is defined. Moving could be moving from one house to another house in the same school district. So when we talk about 20 percent of the people moving, the reason that is not a real statistic is because it all depends on what you mean by moving. If you move to another house in the same school district, the move is irrelevant, and part of that 20 percent includes those types of moves. If you move within the same school district but to a different school, it usually doesn't have a lot of impact, but it could. It is the mobility between school districts and most particularly between states that makes a big difference and that is still a large part of the traffic. Now, five or six students out of a class of thirty each year are likely to be new students. This is what a 20 percent mobility rate means. In Tidewater, our mobility rate in some schools heavily populated by military children is even higher than five or six new kids a year. In some schools, it is, of course, more stable, but one of the reasons mobility kicks you is that even if you have one or two students that are new and that you are a conscientious teacher you are kind of left with the choice you ignore these kids that just moved in or you review for everybody. Most teachers opt to review for everybody and that is probably a good decision. The average teacher in American schools will spend up to six weeks reviewing at the beginning of the year. Up to 15 percent of curriculum time is used just to review, just to get everybody on the same wavelength. That is a horrendous price to pay for mobility. Just think of all the time being wasted and think of all the boredom that is on the other side of that for the kids that didn't need the review. It really wrecks the system of education to have kids appearing from nowhere with uncertain knowledge. It is interesting to notice that all socioeconomic levels move. In some parts of the country this is skewed in one direction or another. If we were in the Midwest or the South or in the far west, most of the mobility would come from migrant workers. This mobility problem is at its worst because migrant workers will appear and disappear in four to six week cycles. They come to town when they are harvesting the wheat or whatever crop, and then they move on to the next harvest. It is kind of a rotation that they follow and their kids just sort of randomly appear and disappear at schools. Can you imagine if you were in a school district with high migrant populations? This would just be absolutely mind boggling in terms of dealing with that in some sort of substantial way.
In a place like this where we have the military the socioeconomic levels are much more predictable. It becomes lower-middle class for the young enlisted people to senior professionals in terms of the senior officers’ corp. So the mobility cuts across all sorts of socioeconomic levels. In the private sector you have senior corporate executives moving around at the high end of the spectrum and you have sales people and people who just get bored with living some place. Unfortunately some of the mobility historically has come from deadbeat dads who know that if they cross the state line they would not have to pay child support although that loophole is being closed more effectively now. There are all sorts of reasons why the problem of mobility exists, but the problem is growing, and it cuts across all socioeconomic levels. Now, the bottom line of this is that bad education in any state or community will affect the entire nation. That is the bottom line of mobility. If you have bad education in Mississippi and then the kids move to Virginia. Virginia then must deal with the bad education of Mississippi. Or Virginians move to New York and New York has to deal with the bad education of Virginia. So you see there is this tremendous interdependence of places and locations and not only geography, but also socioeconomic influence, I mean mobility just cuts across everything and really throws a joker in the deck. Does any community have the right to a bad education? Think of the consequences. If someone's education is bad then someone else has the right to come in. The answer to the problem is a national curriculum. We already have a hidden national curriculum with all of the disadvantages of a national curriculum and none of the advantages. The bottom line is that we have a curriculum that is out of control. Nobody can change the curriculum and that is the real problem. As a theoretical idea proposing a national curriculum is popular, but when it comes time when we say who is going to decide what goes in and what goes out, then you have disagreement. It goes back to trust and who do you trust to make these decisions. I was a strong proponent of having the national goals that came out of the Charlottesville conference that President Bush had in 1989 and I really thought it was a great thing that for, the first time in history, we had people talking about national goals, and that was really a big step forward and to have all the governor's coming in and ratifying the idea that we should have national goals. The goals that they came up with were horrible. I will hold my nose and vote for those national goals simply because those are not going to be the last national goals, those are a way of starting the conversation. If we can get into place national goals and a way of modifying the national goals, then we are ahead.
Hitches to a National Curriculum
All of the issues of mobility that we are talking about in terms of the U.S. are issues of mobility in terms of the world. That comes back to the issues of a standardized curriculum and it also comes back to the issues we mentioned before in terms of other kinds of standards. Mundane things such as electrical current, units of measurement, and language all change according to political and geographical boundaries. Such changes present problems of mobility that are troubling. The mobility in terms of education is a problem that is not likely to go away. Nobody is predicting that we are just going to settle down and stay in Norfolk. Mobility will stay at the same rate and probably become more complex and there will probably be more diverse populations to deal with and probably there will be more diverse standards to deal with. Therefore there is a need for some kind of standardization. Now granted that once we have agreed to have that standardization, we are only at the beginning of the process and not at the end of the process. The odds of coming up with the ideal goals our first attempt is not very high, look at how awful they were in Charlotte. The idea of coming up with the ideal curriculum is not likely to ever happen. We will probably always have all sorts of problems in terms of a curriculum. The efforts at having a national history curriculum got absolutely torpedoed because some people got angry at the omission of Thomas Edison. When we put Thomas Edison in the curriculum we tell kids lies about him. We never talk about how Thomas Edison took the credit for things he didn't invent. We don't ever talk about what a nasty man he was in a whole lot of ways. Yes he was a very bright brilliant man and he invented many things and those inventions were significant and I have nothing against studying Thomas Edison but I have something against sort of making people seem mythical and distorting things almost deliberately in terms of creating this kind of national myth that everything we did was right. Then the very same people who think that the national math curriculum is great in terms of the NCTM's, the only reason they think that curriculum is great is because they never read it. Most of the people who favor the national math standards don't realize that one of those standards is that there should be no ability grouping at all in math through grade eight. While it is true that heterogeneous classes can be beneficial, if you have a marginal teacher, that marginal teacher just collapses in a heterogeneous class. However in a homogeneous class, teaching kids of narrow ability levels is a lot easier. So the results are less beneficial but they're more predictable. So most of the people who are saying how wonderful these national standards of math are just haven't read them. They would be appalled to know that in the math curriculum they say you can use a calculator any time. If you would rather learn to use your calculator rather than your math tables, you are allowed to do that. Many people who are endorsing the National Council's math standards do so without knowing what the standards are. So an ideal national curriculum that everyone can agree on is something we should always strive for, but that is impossible to achieve.
Why does the topic of mobility lead so naturally into a discussion of national standards or any kind of standards? It is because mobility becomes the scapegoat for our lack of standards. The important part is to take note of the real consequences that are there if you don't have national standards. Those real consequences are there and they kick us. Doesn't society have the right to expect certain levels of knowledge? Of course, if you don't have certain level of knowledge you are going to be a burden to the society. You are going to have to be supported by the society. Just because you are miseducated in Mississippi, Missouri, or Virginia doesn't change the fact that if you move to New York you are going to be on the welfare roles of New York and New York is going to have to pay the price of welfare. So the society I think has the right to expect certain levels of knowledge and that is a problem when you have a mobile society. Should schools be designed for those who stay or for those who move? Here we are in a rural community in Virginia and the people want to have an education that is good for their hometown community, is that their right or do they have some obligation to the kids who move out of town? Conventional wisdom, and the way social studies are often taught is that we start our education with the home in first grade, and then we go in concentric circles to the family, to the block, to the city, to the state, to the nation, and the grand finale in the sixth grade is our friends around the world. Unfortunately, that is not really the world we live in. The world we really live in is that some of the kids in our classes will have fathers who right now are in Bosnia or who just got back from the Gulf War or they themselves lived in another country or another state and so their world is not this nice little world of expanding realms of consciences, their world is the reality of the 21st century and is a random order of mixed elements. We have to make sure that education is realistic and not just unrealistically rooted in a mythic notion of what the world should be like. You could move around the country so that every year you would study U.S. history and have no other social studies, every year from grade one to twelve. You could also move so you would go all the way through grade twelve and graduate high school and never study U.S. history. I think that is crazy.
National Curriculum Example: History
As a matter of fact I think it is equally crazy that Columbus sails typically in the fifth grade, he sails again in the eighth grade, he sails again in the eleventh grade and never seems to get anywhere. I would like to have a two-year sequence in U.S. history anywhere along the line that would be more powerful than this grade’s five, eight, and eleven stuff that we now typically have. The way we arrived at U.S. history in grades five, eight, and eleven is the fact that we used to have U.S. history in the eighth grade when kids would go out into the world of work after they graduated from elementary school. That is when we put history and civics in the eighth grade. Now they don't go out into the world of work after the eighth grade, but the curriculum is still there. It is conventional; it is historical. Right now we have state examinations that are built on the fact that the eighth grade examination is going to have history in it. There is no reason for it but it is just there. I don't care whether you have a combination of eight and nine or nine and ten or ten and eleven or eleven and twelve, but a two year solid combination of U.S. history next to each other would be much more powerful than grades five, eight, and eleven. Save a year, compact the curriculum, and be more effective. One of the reasons we don't get there is because there is no one in charge of deciding when and where it should be taught. Since there is no one in charge, no one can change it. Mobility makes the agenda more powerful and it makes it more difficult for us to monitor achievement because we never know whom to hold accountable. If I am an eighth grade teacher and some of my kids just came into the eighth grade how can you hold me accountable for what my eighth grade kids have or have not learned? Obviously as an eighth grade teacher I have to rely on what has been taught to them before in terms of being able to do my job. If the kids weren't up to speed before then I am not going to be able to do my job. It is not just mobility that defeats our ability to monitor things, it is also the fact that we really haven't figured out how to deal with kids of special needs, not even the ones that stay at home. School curricula should not be one hundred percent national. I would like to have half to two-thirds of the curriculum be national and then you would have a more local curriculum. That's the paradox. If you have the kind of school that I want to have, you'd have more local control than you have now because the local community would have the confidence to do things their own way. They would know they'd be meeting the national criteria that they'd be held accountable for. There would be more accountability and more local control. We'll talk more later about how we can do that and whom we can trust and how we decide who to trust. The final thing is that James Conan, the president of Harvard University in the 1950's, forty years ago said, "The only reason U.S. education hasn't failed given the high rate of mobility is it's been so watered down." The rate of mobility has become even greater since the 1950's, the curriculum is even more watered down and so I hope you have become convinced that mobility is one of the barriers to effective education.
Preview Question: How does new knowledge get from research laboratories and universities to textbooks and classrooms?
The fourth in our series of barriers to effective education is obsolescence.
The first barrier, as you recall, was equity or the lack of equity and, remember, that the main point of that lecture was that equality is not desirable let alone possible, but equity and fairness are. We need to make them more equitable, but we are not trying to make them more equal because that is virtually impossible. We want to make schools appropriate to the populations they serve. The second of the four barriers was accountability, and how, unfortunately, we don't have a lot of accountability because we don't have people who are paying attention to the results of our schools and rewarding or penalizing those results accordingly. This is true for students, for teachers, and for schools. The third barrier was mobility. The fact that we move around a lot without having much agreement as to a national curriculum causes some tremendous problems in terms of having people be able to review and catch up and spend as much as fifteen to 20 percent of the curricular time just reviewing because of the mobility of students.
Now we are going to talk about the fourth barrier, obsolescence. I would start by showing you that the New England Primer went for one hundred years without revision since its first edition in 1690. So, from 1690 to 1790 the New England Primer went without revision. I think that stands in really stark contrast to the world in which we live now when a textbook is three or four years old is viewed out of date. So the world really is different, but the educational practices we have are pretty much the same as the ones in 1690 and 1790. The format of education and the presumptions of education remain the same. The New England Primer is kind of a benchmark that suggests that the world has changed and education has not, this is what obsolescence is all about.
I want to talk about the concept of the half-life of knowledge. What do we mean by the half-life of knowledge? This is a concept that was stolen from the natural sciences, where they talk about the half-life of radioactive elements. The half-life of radioactive elements refers to how long it takes a radioactive element half of the quantity to decay from one form of the element to another form of the element. In natural elements the half-life is widely variable from a few milliseconds to thousands of years, so you have vast changes in terms of the elemental transformation from that of the original element. I apply this to knowledge by saying that the half-life of knowledge is how long it is before half of the knowledge is obsolete. How long is it before half the knowledge is obsolete? For example, we can look at the knowledge of the brain and how our knowledge of the brain has changed. If we take as our baseline 1970, in 1970 how much did we know about the brain? How much have we learned since the beginning of time? How much knowledge had accumulated about the brain? That is our baseline. Ninety percent of what we knew about the brain in 1980 we had learned since 1970. In other words not half of what you knew about the brain was out of date, but 90 percent of what was known about the brain was new since 1970. That is an enormous change in ten years. Now it gets worse because in 1985 ninety-five percent of the knowledge of the brain had been discovered since 1980. Remember that what we knew in 1980, ninety percent of that was new from 1970. You take all of that which we knew in 1980 and all that knowledge became five percent of what we knew in 1985. In the 1970's we had learned new ways to study the brain. Until 1970 the brain was kind of a glob up there that was too esoteric to understand and then we developed new technologies to study the brain. We learned that women think in different parts of their brains than men do.
In the 1970's, the things that we learned which still have, by and large, to be applied in school is something called left brain right brain research. That was really primitive, which was kind of the first wave of knowledge about the brain and it turns out that we have two hemispheres in our brain and they are primarily used for different kinds of things. The left-brain is the really organized part of the brain, and the right brain is sort of the touchy-feely visual part of the brain that is much more ideologically creative. When we learned about left brain/right brain research, not only was it interesting that different parts of our brains are used for different things, which were just half if what we know now. Now we use very sophisticated CAT scans and we can go in and find specific places in the brain that help us understand specific kinds of things. Basically you put your head in this oven and they show you different kinds of pictures and depending on the types of emotions those pictures evoke, different parts of the brain fire. Different parts of the brain are used for different parts of the thinking process. We are getting very sophisticated in terms of what we know. But in the 1970's we learned, for example, that there is a real relationship between the left-brain and the right brain. There is a real energy that is transformed if you learn things precisely. This helps you learn things in terms of artistic and emotional pursuits. If you learn things emotionally and artistically it helps you with scientific and rational reasoning and your verbal skills, so there is synergism. Now take what we learned in the 70's about that synergism, which means that if you really want to train top-notch scientists, then you need to give them more art and music and drama. Have we done that? No, we've gone the other way. We still think of the arts in general as frills because the public has never been effectively instructed about the synergism between the left and right side of the brain. So there we sit with this knowledge that has been there for a long time but it certainly hasn't gotten into the schools. I would guess that since 1985 what we now know about the brain is probably 99 percent of what we have learned since 1985, but the point is that it escalates. The rate at which we are discovering information is getting faster and faster. Equally important, little has changed in what we teach concerning the brain. You wouldn't know that we have had all this new information about the brain given what goes on in school. One of my favorites, which I keep mentioning, is the fact that brain research says that happy brains learn better than sad brains or angry brains, but schools don't pay all that much attention to creating happy brains, they just don't give that a high priority. This is in spite of the fact that we know better; we know that the school would be more effective.
Let's go back to some of things we talked about in terms of the philosophy of education. I would argue that your philosophical position would have a real impact on the way that you would treat the knowledge about the brain. For example, if you were a progressivist you would think that we, as educators, have the responsibility of helping kids learn and, if we know that happy brains learn better than sad brains or angry brains, then we as progressivists would accept the responsibility to help kids have happy brains. Now if you were an essentialist, you would think that kids are on their own. It's their problem. It is our problem to present the information; it is their problem in terms of what they do with it. So you see the facts: there are happy brains out there to be had, which is an interesting thing to know, but that and fifty cents will buy you a cup of coffee. The school doesn't have any obligation to worry about happy brains; the kids are on their own for that. Again just reminding you that your philosophy of education is going to influence the way you deal with the information that becomes available.
Now, I would like to give a case study. Given that knowledge everywhere is changing, let's look at how schools deal with all this change in knowledge. First of all, knowledge becomes known. That sounds like an obvious thing but you know it isn't obvious when knowledge becomes known because, for example, in December of 1903 an absolutely momentous event occurred which nobody noticed, the Wright brothers' first flight. We now know that it was a very momentous event but at the time nobody noticed, nobody really understood that it was a momentous beginning of some very important new things. Knowledge does not necessarily become known with the tag: "Momentous Knowledge Here" applied to it. As a matter of fact often new knowledge is controversial.
New knowledge is not immediately accepted. There is a long process from the time something becomes known until something is agreed upon and until the knowledge becomes agreed upon. After it is known, it is agreed upon, and then we go to the third level that it is disseminated. After knowledge is disseminated, we have yet another process. We have to accept it for the schools because not all knowledge is acceptable for schools. As a matter of fact it is very controversial what kind of knowledge should be accepted for schools. How are we going to decide what knowledge we are going to teach? What can we agree upon? First of all, there is the idea as to what knowledge is there and then secondly is that knowledge's importance. Every year that passes that our schools and our children don't learn about China, we are putting our society at risk. China is one of the most powerful nations on earth and is going to get more powerful and with one quarter of the world's entire population, we better know about China. Is there any urgency about this anywhere? Not that I can see, I worry about that because there isn't any agreement yet about what we should to know about China in schools. The knowledge is there, it has been agreed upon, accepted and we know a lot about China. Yet we have chosen not to teach this.
The process of accepting knowledge in the schools, the process of agreeing on what should be taught is a really difficult process and that process slows us down. Right now the problem is we don't have a process. There is no way to decide whether something is acceptable for the schools or not, it just sort of happens. There is no one who tells the textbook publishers what to put in textbooks. They give it their best shot and if they guess right they sell textbooks and if they guess wrong they don't sell textbooks. Isn't that a good system? You have to generate a public interest and enthusiasm in something before something can be added and often the public is very fickle. Well anyway, we have finally accepted the knowledge for the schools and our next step is to write textbooks. After we write the textbooks, we have to adopt them. Writing textbooks is a long process, and incidentally the textbook publishers got tired of waiting for all those foolish professors like me to write a whole textbook. The publishers now write textbooks by committee. They have a professor to sponsor the process, but now they get a whole bunch of worker bees too. This way, if someone misses their deadline, they get someone else to do it and it is no big deal. By and large textbooks these days are written by committees, and there are long debates in terms of what to put in and what not to put in and how many pictures have to show women and how many paintings have to be by minority painters and all this political correctness. It is a huge process. But anyway, the textbooks are written finally and then the textbooks are adopted. They arrive at the school and say okay here are eight new textbooks in this subject, and you say we'll take that one and the textbooks are adopted. Now of course after the textbooks are adopted they have to be put in the classrooms. But then teachers must be trained to use these new textbooks, and after teachers are trained, then eventually the schools are on line. This whole process takes ten to twenty-five years and sometimes longer than that. It is rarely less than ten, but mostly between ten and twenty-five years.
The system of writing textbooks is flawed considering the fact that the half-life of knowledge depending on the subject is somewhere between six months and five years. So what does that mean? The result is that schools are required to be obsolete. As it is, the curriculum development process requires that schools be obsolete. It takes twenty-five years to get something into the schools, and by then the time has come and gone for that information and we know have new information. We still have textbooks in schools that show the Soviet Union as if it were something that was currently on the face of the earth. The Soviet Union disappeared from the face of the earth five years ago. What should a teacher do about that? I would argue that a whole new curriculum process is needed. This whole new process of dissemination and implementation, the whole thing has to be examined. We have to have a new definition of what should be taught and what should be learned. The old definition of what should be taught and what should be learned was pretty much you teach the textbook and you amplify the textbook, but the textbook is the body of knowledge you are supposed to deal with. Now the new model is very different from that. The new one says that you, as a teacher, have to be much more active in the process of identifying what should be taught and what should be learned. You have a responsibility to go beyond the textbook. Right now, teachers are at risk when they teach something new, because they are never sure if the community, the school board, or administrators will back them up. We must find ways to add or revise or discard curriculum elements with ease. Now we have no ways of adding, revising, or discarding curriculum elements, they are just there. Let's say we are going to have this new curriculum development process, and we may use computers or videotapes or the Internet or a weekly reader. For example if you have a weekly or monthly fifteen or thirty-minute television program in each subject like "What's new in Math," "What's new in Science," etc. As a result such tapes could be collected and the school would have a library of all these tapes. Then if some teacher wanted to know something about some subject that had come up in the last several years they could go to the library and there would be the material and it would all be nicely supported.
So we could develop different systems. They would be costly: we couldn't do it for free, and we would have to have an agreement that we don't have now for the society would pay for it. But let's say we have this agreement. Right now teachers are still faced with all sorts of interesting little sidebar problems. Here is a theoretical question. What would you do if you had a fifth grade student who brought a laptop computer into your classroom? Would you allow that student to use that computer all the time, part of the time, or would you send that laptop computer home and why? Would you let the student use a spell checker on their spelling test? Where I come down on this is that, at this moment, I would not allow elementary kids to have laptops at school for a variety of reasons. I would allow high school students to have laptops and to use them for all circumstances, even tests, and even if they had onboard things like encyclopedias because all that does is make more obvious the inequity that already exists. It just brings it up-front. As far as I am concerned if we can make the inequities that currently exist in education more obvious then we stand a better chance as a profession of getting the resources to overcome those inequities. Right now, the inequities are all there, but they are very cleverly hidden so that we don't see them and a lot of kids are put at risk by these inequities. In the example of the laptop computer sidebar problems become evident. Ten years ago spell checkers were suspect for college classes and there were many English professors specifically who prohibited students from using spell checkers for English papers. That has long since died but it took awhile for that foolishness to become obvious. It will take awhile before we understand that it is foolish to ban laptop computers from high school and college classrooms. They will be there and they will be used and they will give unreasonable advantages to those who have access to them. I would bolster against that by having as many computers available in the school building. Right now, here at O.D.U., I think it is very unfortunate that we don't have double the computer laboratory space that we have, because again the fact that you’re in this class allowed to take your quiz at home on your own home computer if you have a modem is a real advantage, and it is an unfair advantage, but it is part of the real world in which we live. It is hard for me to justify perpetuating an obsolete system simply because we can't bring everybody along simultaneously.
We were talking about laptop computers in English. I am here to tell you that there are math programs in the middle schools that require students to have graphing calculators. It isn't even optional anymore whether you use a calculator or not for certain kinds of applications. As I have mentioned before it is a recommendation by the NCTM that students at all grade levels should be allowed to use calculators if and when they choose for any purposes including tests. So there is a substantial body of evidence that shows that a lot of these things are going to be changing but the issue of obsolescence is not an easy issue because it is not easy to decide when the knowledge has sufficient credibility that should be accepted or when that knowledge should be taught in schools or what should be required and most importantly what should teachers and schools be held accountable for in the larger society. I would argue that we could do a lot better if we just had an overt national curriculum, and developed the mechanisms of agreement so we would all know what we are being held responsible for. That hasn't happened, and my guess is that it will probably be another twenty years before we get there, because the illusion and myth of the local control of schools dies so hard. It is my belief that we would have more local control of schools, more teacher involvement, and more teacher empowerment if teachers knew the curriculum they had to teach, the new the concepts of the Revolutionary War or whatever it is that their students are going to be required to know and that body curriculum was about half or two-thirds of the time available so it would be built in that the teachers would be encouraged to add to that new, interesting and anecdotal materials so that they would feel that they had a role to enrich the curriculum and the classroom life of their students. This would be the way in which they would create a more intensive and joyful learning classroom.