Teachers’ unions and evaluations, Common Core, SAT reform, charter schools…education has been making the news lately.  In a week-ago Sunday’s NY Times magazine, there’s an article about Common Core champion and SAT reformer Dave Coleman.  He calls for data-based reform, a strange clarion call from a non-scientist who admittedly studied things generally considered impractical.  For the needed overhaul of our educational system, what works?  What doesn’t?  Not only here, but outside the U.S.  Coleman basically ignores the latter, by the way, committing the usual Ptolemaic sin of thinking that the U.S. is the center of the educational universe and looking for the epicycles to fix it within the same system.

The balance for the U.S. is negative, of course; the balance for everywhere else isn’t.  Our graduates rank far below many countries we compete with.  Is this a bad thing?  Is it possible that we’re right and the rest of the world is wrong?  Maybe the rest of the world is producing unthinking students who can’t really create new ideas or risk losing their positive human qualities.  In fact, is it even possible to compete in a cutthroat capitalistic world and still maintain our humanity?  These are the big questions the Times article ignores.  Maybe dumbing down the SAT is just what’s required to make our students happier and more human.

In a recent interview questionnaire, I was asked about my favorite books.  There are many, but I led off with Feynman’s Lectures in Physics.  Highly personal, terribly disorganized, mathematically imprecise, and often amusing, they still represent a good outline of things to know for that general part of a PhD qualifying exam, the one you take before embarking on a research path.  The great physicist quote Edward Gibbon: “But the power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy, except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous.”  I’m not sure words like efficacy, disposition, and superfluous will make it into the dumbed-down version of the SAT (version 3.0?), but is Gibbon right?  How do you teach motivation and positive attitude?  How do you replace “I don’t care” with “That’s exciting” or “Jeez, that’s strange”?  These are the important questions to answer if we’re going to improve education in America.

Educational reforms are complex because they are invariably intertwined with other necessary reforms in society.  The issue of charter schools is a case in point.  The very name implies some students will be privileged, others not.  Their very existence is unfair.  But the problem is not that they exist, but that every public school can’t enjoy their positive qualities.  In other words, it’s a question of money, which leads to the issue of taxation.  When public schools are financed with regressive taxes—for example, property taxes and sales taxes—people balk at spending more on education.  Let’s assume that all those teachers and administrators actually earn their pay and we just need more of them, along with better infrastructure, lab equipment, and textbooks.  America was once known as a country where everyone gladly paid to educate the next generation.  We’re questioning that now and, again, Europe is doing a better job of answering the question—we must educate the next generation!

People would be a lot happier if public education were paid for by progressive taxes.  Each municipality or county would set a budget for education, along with other expenses (education is generally the biggest expense), and assess a local, progressive income tax to foot the bill.  The owner of a townhouse complex would not have to bear all the tax burden—his renters would have to chip in too.  Moreover, the poor and the elderly, those who add to the diversity in a township, wouldn’t be forced to move somewhere else that has fewer property taxes.   Combined with zoning restrictions, efficiency measures in both hiring and infrastructure, and reasonable urban planning, this has to be much better than the present system, which is a complete disaster.

Other social problems have to be solved in order to reform education.  Knowledge is exciting, but not to a student who is hungry, without proper clothes, or feels bullied or threatened.  We must turn around this tendency to widen the gap between the rich elites and the rest of us.  And we should eliminate all government aid to private institutions—federal, state, and local—including to private colleges and universities.  Why is tax money used to support these institutions?  Again, Europe is so much more logical in this case.  Of course, there are private institutions in Europe and the rich elites can pay dearly to send their darlings to them.  And, remember, Mr. Coleman, Europe and the Far East are beating the pants off our students.  I claim this will never change without socializing education—there, I said it, the big S-word.  Let the Catholic school nuns slap my hands with their rosaries and Rand Paul, Paul Ryan, and the rest of their Ayn Rand disciples beat me with copies of Atlas Shrugged.

At the level of the students, we must focus on rewarding academics, not athletics.  Now that we know most athletics are dangerous, even at the level of the pros, why don’t we at least ban them at the primary and secondary school levels where young bodies are forming?  For academics, special cases are outliers—think of Gibbon’s quote again.  We have to tend to the outliers, to be sure—making courses more interesting for bright students is just as important as tending to special needs students.  Instruction might be superfluous for the brightest students, but we should allow all students to rise to their potential.  Moreover, we should hire teachers who can move them in that direction and not repeat, year after year, tired old lesson plans that only increase student ennui and boredom at all levels.  In short, teachers need rewards and motivation too—and probably fewer administrators hovering over them who think they know about education.

So, what right do I have to make this spiel?  I spent twenty-three years as a student in public education (all my colleges were public, but, as everyone knows, you have to pay for that too, which needs to be changed, to be more like in Europe).  I’ve tutored my own kids and some others (my most rewarding was a legally blind Vietnam vet who needed to pass Spanish in order to receive his degree in psychology—he wanted to help vets home from the war with psych problems, which they didn’t call PTSD back then).  I taught at all college levels in math and physics, and worked in diverse cultural settings in both science and technology.  Do I know what should be kept and what should be discarded in our educational system?  No, I have no idea!  Not in detail anyway.  I just know that what we’re presently doing has tremendous flaws.  Maybe some of these ideas will have some resonance.  I think America deserves better.  We need graduates with specialized skills and general knowledge but also need to maintain their nexus with their humanity.

Coleman is right in trying to be a one-man band.  You know what they say about committees: the IQ of a committee is the lowest IQ of the group divided by the number of people in the group.  In other words, committees rarely get anything done.  Moreover, the bigger they are, the worse it gets.  Just look at Congress, that committee of committees where the lowest IQ is hardly a measurable number.  Some members mean well, of course, but their voices get lost in the noise of the bickering hordes.  But educational reform can be accomplished by committees of like-minded individuals.  Spurred on by Sputnik and Cold War fears, we saw reform in math and science teaching in the 20^th century.  Feynman’s Lectures were part of that—pretty much a local Cal Tech phenomenon, because the real physics teaching reform occurred in PSC at the high school level and the Berkeley Physics Course at the college level.  Math reform took place at the high school level with the results of SMSG—college mathematics remained esoteric, dividing into math for poets (there are physics classes for them too), math for scientists and engineers, and math for mathematicians.  Oh, and we can’t forget math for high school teachers.  Math teaching is the prime example where the committee solution is a disaster because the solution generally is to include everyone’s idea and opinion.  (Feynman was disgusted with the whole textbook selection process in California, for example.)

Coleman is also right that our decisions for reform should be data-driven.  We also need large doses of cold, hard logic applied to analyze and synthesize the data, with pros in the fields (count Coleman out there) without extreme emotions and passions who are unwilling to bow to the pressure of school boards like those in Texas and Kansas.  All reforms are scary to some bloc of people.  Tough.  America, our country, needs them.  So, the one final point is that we need to elect officials at all levels who are willing to make the hard decisions.  We’ve had enough pandering to special interests and political ideologies.  Reforming education must rise above all that.  Our future depends on it.

And so it goes….

 

 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 18th, 2014 at 4:20 am and is filed under Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.